Tag: Minsk

Staunton, May 21 — Vaira Vike-Freiberga, the former president of Latvia, points to an inconvenient truth that few want to recognize: no frozen conflicts in the former Soviet space will be resolved as long as Russia retains its veto in the UN Security Council and thus is in a position to block moves toward a […]

Staunton, April 3 — Despite Alexander Lukashenko’s tilt away from Moscow and even his own use of his country’s national language on occasion, the situation of the Belarusian language is dire and is likely going to deteriorate further because of the failure of Minsk to live up to its own laws, according to the Frantsishak […]

Staunton, March 31 — The security services of Belarus are closely cooperating with their Russian counterparts against Lithuania as far as their targets are concerned, according to the annual report of the Lithuanian State Security Department, an arrangement that underscores the real relationship of Minsk and Moscow and that calls attention to a much larger […]

Staunton, March 16 — A Russian nationalist with a long track record of hatred toward Belarus says that, on the basis of the logic Moscow has used to annex Crimea, Moscow should take back the portions now within the borders of the Belarusian Republic that were once part of the RSFSR. Not only does his […]

Staunton, March 5 – The purpose of terrorism is to terrorize, to suggest that old rules and old expectations no longer apply and thereby increase uncertainty and fear. That explains why someone like Kseniya Sobchak has suggested that she is next on Putin’s list now that the Kremlin has killed Boris Nemtsov and why an […]

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Staunton, February 18 – The head of the FSB in Crimea says that “anti-Russian risings do not yet threaten” the peninsula but that Western intelligence services are creating the basis for them, a claim that the Russian security services are likely to invoke as justification for a sweeping new crackdown. And one commentator with whom […]

Staunton, February 18 – On August 22, 1939, Adolf Hitler explained to his entourage why he thought he could get away with mass murder by saying that “nobody talks about the Armenians nowadays,” despite the fact that they had been the victims of a mass murder only 24 years earlier. Hitler’s sweeping cynicism in this […]

Field journalist David Patrikarakos, frequently on the front lines of Ukraine, wrote this reflection while in Kiev on February 16, 2015. Almost a year ago today, Ukraine’s former President Viktor Yanukovych ordered snipers stationed on the upper floors of the Hotel Ukraine in Kiev to open fire on the thousands of protestors that had gathered […]

Staunton, February 16 – By his bombast and aggression, Vladimir Putin has destroyed “what was even a year ago called the post-Soviet space, an area which even then existed largely by inertia as an appendage of Russian ambitions” rather than as an expression of the desires of the countries included within that designation, according to […]