Vladimir Putin is the only beneficiary of the renewed fighting in Karabakh, Andrey Piontkovsky says; and to the extent that is so, Azerbaijan, Armenia and especially Georgia are likely to be the greatest victims of this policy.
Staunton, May 14 – In a step that might seem absurd given the composition of Armenia’s population but that appears likely to send shockwaves through the Caucasus and perhaps further, the Assembly of Muslims of Armenia has created the position of mufti for the republic and named Arsen Safaryan, a graduate of an Iranian seminary […]
Staunton, April 11 – Moscow can’t afford having the Donbass become a frozen conflict with an unrecognized state like Transnistria or Nagorno-Karabakh: its economy cannot exist independently and its population is far beyond the capacity of the Russian state to subsidize for very long, according to Pavel Felgengauer. The implications of the Moscow military analyst’s […]
A year ago on March 18, 2014, just two days after the annexation of Crimea, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a speech to his constituents and State Duma deputies regarding the referendum vote that made historical headlines. Despite reverberating criticism from the West and shock from Ukraine, Putin reiterated to his audience that the referendum […]
Staunton, January 19 – Twenty-five years ago today, on Mikhail Gorbachev’s order, Soviet troops invaded the Azerbaijani capital of Baku by land, sea and air, killing hundreds and enflaming ethnic hatreds, in an action the Soviet president five years after the events acknowledged was “the greatest mistake” of his political career. That event, known to […]
Staunton, November 25 – The Russian-Ukrainian war now going on could have begun in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. The fact that it didn’t says a great deal about the attitudes of Russian political leaders then and how much they have changed in the intervening period, according to Yevgeny Ikhlov. In a post on […]
Staunton, November 19 – Faced with a united front in the West, Andrey Piontkovsky says, Putin may seek “to freeze the Ukrainian conflict and then to save face as a patriot of ‘the Russian world’ decide to take certain steps in the Caucasus as he is doing now,” something that threatens all three of the […]
Staunton, August 14 – Hot weather in the Caucasus has reduced the flows of river water and increased demands for its use, hereby triggering a dispute between Azerbaijanis and Dagestanis. This local conflict appears set to involve Moscow and Baku because it is rapidly taking on an ethnic dimension. For most of its route, the […]
Staunton, July 27 – In a Facebook post that has been picked up by various Armenian outlets, Tigran Khemalyan, a noted filmmaker, sharply criticizes those ethnic Armenians who have become more Russian than the patriarch and who are promoting Russian great power attitudes of hostility and suspicion to everything non-Russian. Among these “’prophets’ of Russism,” […]
Local residents say that several dozen residents of Chechnya, who took part in the fighting in Ukraine and died in the Donetsk region, have been brought back to their homeland in the last few days, giving numbers from 35 to 40-45 dead. The Republic’s security agencies declined to comment on these reports, writes a correspondent […]
