Staunton, August 31 – The organizing committee of the Russian Anti-War Movement says that “Russian stands at the brink of catastrophe.” Following Putin’s introduction of regular Russian army units into Ukraine, an action that threatens losses equivalent to the war in Afghanistan, a major military conflict in Europe, and a fratricidal war. Arguing that Vladimir […]
Staunton, August 30 – Vladimir Putin’s gutting of Tatarstan’s 1990 sovereignty declaration has cost every resident of that Middle Volga republic not only his or her rights and dignity but also has meant that some 70,000 US dollars earned from the sale of Tatarstan’s natural resources that should have gone to each of them has […]
Staunton, August 30 – Speaking in at the Seliger youth forum yesterday, Vladimir Putin said that today, as during World War I, there are people inside Russia who are seeking its defeat, a resuscitation of Adolf Hitler’s “stab in the back” theory about why his country lost that conflict and the basis for his attacks […]
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, August 30 – Vladimir Putin is often accused of wanting to restore the Soviet system or at least its core values, but in fact, the Kremlin leader is interested in promoting the its “imperial-militarist” element and not its “revolutionary” component, a pattern that has the effect of limiting Russia’s ability to deal with the […]
Staunton, August 26 – The leaders of major Western countries declare that they are seeking to find an answer to the crisis in Ukraine, but in order to find an answer, it is important that they begin to ask the right questions. It is all too clear that many of them are not doing so […]
Staunton, August 26 – Independent Russian experts say that there is no basis for the claim by Boris Titov, presidential plenipotentiary for the rights of entrepreneurs, that the level of corruption in the Russian Federation has fallen. Instead, they say, all measures point to corruption still being a major obstacle for the country’s economic development. […]
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 […]
Staunton, August 25 – Vladimir Putin had been remarkably, even amazingly successful in foreign affairs for the first 14 years of his rule in Russia, but his decision to set up Hamas-style regimes in southeastern Ukraine, the result of domestic imperatives, is going to condemn him to isolation and failure, according to Yevgeny Ikhlov. Indeed, […]
Staunton, August 24 – Vladimir Putin’s Crimean Anschluss which was intended among other things to highlight or promote divisions among Ukrainians about the status of their country has had exactly the opposite effect: It has boosted the share of supporters of independent statehood from 83 percent to 90 percent, the highest ever. In reporting the poll […]
