Tag: Moscow

Alexey Navalny has been arrested outside his home today. Perhaps more than one thousand others will join him.

Staunton, May 21 — Many in Russia and elsewhere have been horrified by the personal tragedy of the forced marriage of a young girl to a 57-year-old Chechen that Ramzan Kadyrov and some Russians have defended, but they should be more concerned about how this event sets the stage for a new Chechen war in […]

Staunton, May 21 — No nation more skillfully used an international event than did the Circassians during the Sochi Olympiad to call attention to the Russian-orchestrated genocide of their people 150 years earlier. Despite Moscow’s best efforts, few independent reporters talked about Sochi without talking about the continuing crimes against the Circassians. In the past […]

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 21 — Since Vladimir Putin called for the creation of a new Agency for Nationalities Affairs, many have speculated that this decision will mark a turning point in Moscow’s approach to the increasingly numerous non-Russian portion of his country’s population. But a true measure of its meaning — which like so much Putin […]

Staunton, April 16 — For the last three months, the Russian population has been declining, and Moscow has coped with this by not publishing its usual monthly data collections or calling attention to the data in any way. But the regime is not capable of functioning without at least some officials having data, accurate or […]

Staunton, April 9 — Russian internal troops are currently conducting exercises in six of the countries federal districts — the North-West, Central, Volga, North Caucasus, South, and Crimean — to prepare them to counter any appearance of Maidan-like protests, according to an interior ministry press officer. The exercises which began on April 2 and will […]

Staunton, April 8 — During the first years of Soviet power, a Moscow newspaper published an article telling its readers how easy and potentially profitable it would be for them to form a national republic. According to the paper, they didn’t need a nation or anything like a set of institutions: they needed only paper […]

Staunton, April 9 — In what appears to be a response to Alexander Lukashenko’s recent declaration that Belarus will never become the northwestern part of the Russian Federation, a Moscow journalist says Belarusians must vote this year to become just that or face “the liquidation” of their country and “the fate of Ukraine.” In the […]

Staunton, April 6 — Tajikistan is being pressured to shut down the Islamic Rebirth Party, something that will drive its members into the underground and make the Islamist threat there greater; and Dagestani leaders want to adopt an earlier Tajik policy and call home those from that republic now studying in Muslim schools abroad, something […]