Staunton, September 14 – The Russian occupation of Crimea has brought with it a return to “Soviet times in their most cynical manifestations,” one without freedom but with denunciations, according to Refat Chubarov, head of the Crimean Tatar Milli Mejis. Tragically, he says, the situation after today’s elections “will become still worse.” That is why, […]
Staunton, September 12 – Konstantin Zatulin, the director of the Russian Institute for CIS Countries, has bluntly described Moscow’s war aims in Ukraine as directed toward the establishment of complete control over Ukraine’s foreign and domestic policies and a privileged position in that country for the Russian language and the Moscow Patriarchate. Speaking in Sevastopol […]
Staunton, September 11 – Despite a hard-won and well-deserved reputation for being able to outsmart Western leaders in pursuit of his goals, Vladimir Putin, as a result of his own recent actions, has left himself with only bad options for his next move in Ukraine, according to Vitaly Portnikov. In a commentary on Liga.net, the […]
Staunton, September 9 – In his latest update on Stalinism as “effective management,” Vladimir Putin has disbanded Russia’s Regional Affairs Ministry, yet another sign of his drive to further centralize the country, eliminate any serious discussion of Russia’s regions and their problems, and thus undermine any chance that Moscow will have an effective nationality policy. […]
Staunton, September 6 – This month marks the 15th anniversary of the 1999 apartment bombings in Russia that sparked the rise of Vladimir Putin to the Russian presidency and the opening of a new Russian war against Chechnya. Moscow’s failure to investigate fully what happened means that suspicions about the authorship of these terrorist acts […]
Staunton, September 5 – Some 200 refugees from Ukraine have been “disinformed” and now find themselves in Sakha “without documents, practically without money, without work and without clear prospects in advance of a severe winter,” according to Yana Lantratova, a member of the Russian Presidential Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights. […]
Staunton, September 1 – “Crimea never was pro-Russian – it did not know and could not know post-Soviet Russia,” Pavel Kazarin says. “Instead, over the course of the last quarter of a century,” the Ukrainian peninsula was “pro-Soviet,” something that is going to create problems for Moscow there in the near term. That confusion is […]
Staunton, September 1 – Even if Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko agrees to federalize Ukraine as a result of Russian military action and Western and especially German political pressure, such an agreement will not end the Ukraine crisis. Instead, Andrey Piontkovsky argues, it almost certainly will intensify. On the one hand, the Russian analyst says, Moscow […]
Staunton, August 30 – Iosif Zisels, the head of Vaad Ukrainy, the Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities of Ukraine, says that neo-Nazi organizations from Russia” are taking an active role in the pro-Moscow forces in eastern Ukraine, a reflection of the fact that “Russia is infected with the ideas of revanchism, which is very […]
Staunton, August 24 – Stalin made “an error” in annexing Galicia to the Ukrainian SSR via the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact because what Moscow needed with war on the horizon was “the establishment of buffer states on the border of the USSR and not their being pulled into the Union itself,” with all the border changes that […]
