President Obama, in the twilight of his career, did what every US President is expected to do, give a legacy defending interview. He defended his primary foreign policy ideas including the Syrian inaction, the inability to deal with the Ukrainian crisis, the Iraq fiasco and Russian revanchism while describing himself as a Realist. Obama does […]
The Daily Vertical is an RFE/RL video primer for Russia-watchers that appears Monday through Friday. Viewers can suggest topics via Twitter @PowerVertical or on the Power Vertical Facebook page. A transcript of today’s edition of The Daily Vertical can be found here.
In the last few weeks Russia vetoed a UN resolution commemorating the anniversary of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre as an act of genocide and strongly hinted that it would veto a UN inquiry into the downing of the Malaysian Flight MH17 by pro-Moscow forces in Ukraine a year ago. Even for Moscow this is quite […]
Russian spokesmen at home and abroad regularly tell us that sanctions are a failure and that the government does not care about them. Diplomatic reports also suggest that Putin told Secretary of State Kerry in Sochi that he could take the sanctions as Russia does not care about them. Undoubtedly Moscow would like us to […]
One of my colleagues once remarked that Russia is what the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss called a frozen culture. This does not mean that Russian history merely repeats itself. But it does signify the recurrence of many patterns confirming Mark Twain’s observation that while history does not repeat itself it does rhyme. Vladimir Putin’s current […]
Staunton, April 29 – Although few want to recognize that this is the case, the personality cult surrounding Vladimir Putin far exceeds the one that surrounded Stalin “by all measures” and has become what can best be described as “the religion of a pagan empire,” according to Moscow commentator Maksim Kantor. In a post on […]
Staunton, April 9 — In what appears to be a response to Alexander Lukashenko’s recent declaration that Belarus will never become the northwestern part of the Russian Federation, a Moscow journalist says Belarusians must vote this year to become just that or face “the liquidation” of their country and “the fate of Ukraine.” In the […]
Staunton, March 20 — In the USSR, it was sometimes said, there was no sex because that subject could not be addressed directly in the media. However that might have been, a new truth is emerging, in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, there will be no suicides by those who cannot get the medicines they need to […]
Staunton, March 12 – When Vladimir Putin decided a year ago to annex Crimea, he and his supporters expected that this would be “the first event in a chain of unending victories which would show the world the dangerousness of ‘ignoring’ Moscow’s appetites and instead convert the Russian Federation into the Soviet Union of the […]
Staunton, March 9 – Vladimir Putin’s acknowledgement that he personally decided upon and conducted a special operation to seize Crimea “opens a unique and limited-time window of opportunities” for the West to bring real pressure on him, divide his regime and force Moscow to change course, according to Slava Rabinovich. The Russian economist and blogger […]
