This is a syndicated column originally published by RFE/RL’s Brian Whitmore. One is a republic inside Russia that is formally ruled by Moscow. One is an independent country on Russia’s western frontier that has long been Moscow’s client state. Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin is accustomed to getting its way with both of them — until recently, […]
Staunton, June 29 – Andranik Migranyan, who became infamous for his suggestion that Hitler would have been a second Bismarck if the Nazi leader had stopped before invading Poland, is going back to Moscow because his Institute for Democracy and Cooperation in New York, which Vladimir Putin created in 2007, is closing down. According to […]
Much has been written in recent weeks regarding the readiness of Western democracies to fight disinformation in the “information war” led by the Russian intelligence services. [Read our report: The Menace of Unreality: How the Kremlin Weaponizes Information, Culture and Money] While it is true that disinformation and active measures remain disciplines in which Russian […]
Staunton, September 23 – In an article bearing the title “There Was No March But the Traitors Were Found,” Anatoly Tsygankov, “the chief political observer of Karelia,” according to Politika-Karelia.ru, provided a classical example of tendentious disinformation about the protest against Moscow’s war in Ukraine that took place in Petrozavodsk on Sunday. Such articles often […]
Staunton, September 23 – Sometimes the fact that someone is asking a question at all is more important than the answer he or she offers. That is almost certainly the case with a new article by an anonymous Russian military commentator concerning whether or not Russia can avoid “losing Siberia and the Far East” to […]
Staunton, September 18 – Like Argentinians in the 1950s and 1960s, Russians are focusing on politics to the extent that they do not see the economic catastrophe for the future that Moscow’s current policies guarantee – decades of stagnation and missed opportunities for a better life, according to Konstantin Sonin. The Higher School of Economics […]
Staunton, September 18 – The Russian government is about to introduce a bill that would allow jailers to use more force, including lethal force in some cases, against prisoners and to avoid being held accountable by the courts, an action that led Russian ombudsman Ella Pamfilova to appeal to Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev to kill […]
Staunton, September 18 – The world must end its “shameful silence” about the intensifying “moral terror” Moscow and its agents are waging against the Crimean Tatars to drive them again from their homeland or to force those who do not go to accept the status of “second class” citizens on the occupied Ukrainian peninsula, according […]
Staunton, September 17 – If an ordinary Russian doesn’t know the exact population of Moscow, that is a shortcoming, but not a tragedy. However, if the Russian government “doesn’t know how many people live in a small village,” that is a tragedy because as a result, “doctors, teachers, policemen and then, the entire population itself […]
Staunton, September 17 – Many of the leaders of the radical Islamic State of Iraq and Syria come from Muslim regions of the Russian Federation, and they plan to launch attacks in its regions, coming in via Afghanistan and Central Asia rather than the more direct but more difficult route across Turkey and Iran, according […]
