Staunton, August 23 – Despite a dramatic decline in the number of abortions in the Russian Federation since 1991 and claims that it has overcome “the culture of abortion” as the primary means of birth control, nearly one third – some 29.3 percent – of Russian pregnancies still are being aborted. In the new issue […]
Staunton, August 23 – Both Russian and Asian analysts say that Moscow’s focus on Ukraine is allowing Beijing to accelerate the process of transforming both Russia east of the Urals and Central Asia into its “near abroad,” thus undercutting in the east the very policy goals Vladimir Putin has proclaimed in the west. In Nezavisimaya […]
Staunton, August 19 – Vladimir Zhirinovsky has become notorious for saying what must not be said and doing what must not be done, but now his approach has spread to the Russian people as a whole, a development that cannot last forever but one that will end badly, according to Aleksey Levinson. In an article […]
Staunton, August 21 – Ukrainian President Petr Poroshenko has named Mustafa Cemilev to the new position of plenipotentiary representative for Crimean Tatar affairs and charged him with “securing the observation of the constitutional rights of the Crimean Tatar people as an indigenous people of Ukraine.” Poroshenko’s decision institutionalizes the Verkhovna Rada’s vote on March 20 […]
Staunton, August 21 – Photographer Aleksandr Belensky has documented what many observers feared: despite spending more than 50 billion US dollars on the Sochi Olympics, Vladimir Putin has left Sochi not the vital place he promised but a ghost town where there are almost no tourists and where much of the infrastructure is already decaying. […]
Staunton, August 17 – An instructor at the Russian foreign ministry’s training academy told participants at a government-sponsored youth camp that “Zionism is a movement for the establishment of the world rule of Jewish bankers,” that it “finances pagans to destroy Orthodoxy,” and that it has so “Judaicized” Catholicism that “almost nothing remains” of that […]
Staunton, August 17 – The pro-Russia faction of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate succeeded in electing Metropolitan Onufriy to be its new head, but that victory is likely to be a Pyrrhic one both for the UOC MP, which will now lose even more of its parishes, and for Patriarch Kirill who will […]
Staunton, August 17 – Most Western commentators focus on the absence of genuine democracy in the so-called “hybrid” regimes but fail to notice that such regimes are also characterized by a lack of genuine dictatorship, according to Yekaterina Schulman, a Moscow legal affairs commentator. “It is easy to see that the democratic façade [of such […]
Staunton, August 11 – Many observers are focusing on the impact Putin’s ban on imports from countries which have imposed sanctions on Russia will have on Russian consumers, but Vladislav Inozemtsev says that it will have more serious consequences for Russian entrepreneurs and their relationship with the Kremlin. Because the sanctions will hit the entrepreneurs’ […]
Staunton, August 12 – Russia’s misfortune lies not in that it is defending what it perceives as its interests, but that “it is doing so by attempting to realize the latest Russian utopia,” one directed not toward the future as in 1917 but toward the past, something that makes “a rational exit” from the current […]
