Tag: Kievan Rus

Ukrainian Conflict is between ‘Heirs of Kievan Rus’ and ‘Heirs of Golden Horde,’ Piontkovsky Says

May 26, 2015

Staunton, May 25 — “The Ukrainian-Russian conflict is to a significant degree a conflict between the heirs of Kievan Rus [Ukraine] and the heirs of the Golden Horde” [Moscow], according to Andrey Piontkovsky, and one of its key results will be “an intensification of the swallowing of Russia by China.” In the course of a […]

Putin’s ‘Holy War’ on West Lacks Content Beyond Russian Imperial Statehood, Shtepa Says

December 21, 2014

Staunton, December 21 – Putin’s opposition to Europe and the US “is acquiring the aspects of a real holy war, not at the level of metaphor as in the old Soviet song but in the completely literal religious sense,” but except for its core belief in Russian imperial statehood, the new faith on which it […]

Putin has Called Core Myth of Russians into Question, Portnikov Says

September 23, 2014

Staunton, September 20 – By his incautious remarks about the absence of a state tradition in Kazakhstan and his invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has unintentionally called attention to and cast doubt on one of the most fundamental myths of the Russian state and people, that they descended from Kyiv rather than as is in […]

Belarusians Challenge Russian National Narrative and Some Russians are Angry

July 28, 2014

Staunton, July 24 – The central Russian narrative on the emergence of the three modern nations of Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians, a narrative on which Vladimir Putin relies, is that there was a single Russian nation a millennium ago and that Ukrainians and Belarusians were byproducts of Russian ethnogenesis, the result of outside interference. That […]

Ukrainians and Belarusians are Not ‘Byproducts’ of Russian Ethno-National Developmen

April 28, 2014

Staunton, April 28 – Many Russians believe and many in the West accept the notion that Ukrainians and Belarusians are offshoots of the formation and growth of the Russian nation, a reflection of a sometimes innocent confusion between nation building and state building but often as now the result of Kremlin efforts to rewrite history […]

Three Post-Crimea Moves on the Russian Federation Nationalities Front

April 18, 2014

Staunton, April 15 – That Russia’s Anschluss of Crimea has re-ordered the international landscape is now common ground as countries around the world recalibrate their foreign policies in the face of what appears to be a fait accompli. But this annexation is also having a dizzying impact on the Russian Federation’s own nationalities. Indeed, in […]