Staunton, October 29 – Officials in Dagestan, the most linguistically diverse republic in the Russian Federation, are preparing a new language law that calls for official support of 28 languages and effectively makes the others “illegal” by depriving them of any chance for support and in some cases for survival, according to Kavkazskaya Politika. While […]
Staunton, October 6 – The editors of Moscow’s Nezavisimaya Gazeta warn in a lead article October 6 that “injustice toward [Muslim] believers could lead to violence” in Moscow and other Russian cities as well, a conclusion that new research on the state of inter-ethnic relations in Russia’s regions confirms. “Almost two million” people have viewed […]
Staunton, September 2 – Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine has “unexpectedly” allowed Tatarstan to retain its presidency and thus “again confirm its status as a special region within Russia, ‘an exception from the rules,’ as former Federal Council speaker Sergey Mironov put it, and thus, “a bastion of federalism” within Russia, according to a Muslim […]
Staunton, July 25 – Angered by the success Circassians had at the time of the Sochi Olympics in focusing international attention on the Russian genocide of their ancestors in 1864 and by the insistence of Circassians that their co-ethnics in war-torn Syria should be allowed to return to the North Caucasus, Moscow has adopted a […]
Staunton, June 22 – Two-thirds of the deputies of the Verkhovna Rada have voted for a declaration calling on the UN, the OSCE, the Council of Europe, and the European Parliament to focus on Moscow’s violation of the rights of ethnic Ukrainians living in the Russian Federation and stating that bilateral ties will depend on […]
Staunton, May 9 – A St. Petersburg activist has called for the establishment of a political party to represent the needs of the numerically smallest nations of the Russian Federation, a movement that he says should seek a quota system and other means to protect their rights and also to embrace ethnic Russians who live […]
Staunton, May 8 – Despite the declaration in the 1993 Constitution that the Russian Federation is a multi-national country, an expert at the influential Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (RISI) argues that in fact it is not that but rather a nation state of Russians with a few ethnic minorities. Ilya Anosov, the head of […]
Staunton, April 19 – Despite having achieved so many of his goals with the Geneva Accords on Ukraine, few doubt that Vladimir Putin will violate them and push even further into that country, using surrogates to allow him deniability for a time and then the Russian military openly when he decides the time is right, […]
Staunton, April 19 – In a demonstration of principled toughness, Mustafa Cemilev, the longtime leader of the Crimean Tatars and a member of Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada, has very publicly returned to his homeland after declaring that he remains a Ukrainian citizen and that some in Moscow are thinking about a new deportation of his people. […]
Staunton, April 17 – If current trends continue, half of the population of the Russian Federation in its current borders will consist of immigrants, according to a new Moscow study, a conclusion clearly intended to feed anti-immigrant feelings and, more speculatively, designed to promote a discussion of what can and should be done, including the […]
