Staunton, VA, May 16, 2016 – For obvious reasons, polls of Russian attitudes are anything but a good indicator of where Russians are heading; but there is a more reliable bellwether: the way that the Kremlin uses its pocket opposition figures such as Vladimir Zhirinovsky of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) as elections […]
Staunton, August 2 – If one considers the factors that powered the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria – political instability, a weak counter-terrorism policy, Sunni predominance, and enormous natural resources — Dzhamiliya Kochoyan says, one is driven to the conclusion that Turkmenistan is at greater risk of an ISIS attack than any other […]
Staunton, July 5 – Since the peoples of Altay learned that the elections staged to ratify the Kremlin’s choice of their governor showed that he failed to win in electoral districts dominated by the non-Russians, their leaders have been struggling to unite in order to put pressure on the government there in the name of […]
Staunton, April 10 – Faced with superior NATO forces in the larger Baltic Sea region and the threat they pose in the first instance to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, Leonid Nersisyan, military observer for the Regnum news agency, says that Moscow is prepared to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear powers which now oppose it. […]
Staunton, March 5 – Budapest has announced that it has handed out Hungarian citizenship papers to 94,000 people in Trans-Carpathia in Western Ukraine in expedited fashion. The Hungarian official responsible for nationality policy says that this is part of a broader effort to boost the size of the country’s population and points out that two-thirds […]
Staunton, February 5 — Moscow has changed the borders of its constituent regions, districts and republics many times over the last century, and Vladimir Putin for the last decade has pushed for the amalgamation of smaller non-Russian areas with larger and predominantly ethnic Russian regions. But there is one thing that Moscow does not want […]
Staunton, January 22 – Fearful that Armenian anger could lead to a break with Moscow or even spark an orange-style revolution in Yerevan, Moscow has agreed that the Russian soldier who has now confessed to killing an Armenian family in Gyurmri will be tried in Armenia but in a Russian court with Russian laws. Whether […]
Staunton, January 5 – Riga faces a dramatically expanded Russian media campaign to discredit it in the eyes of Latvians and the West and an increase in the activity of Russian special services against it, according to Maris Cepuritis, a researcher at the Riga Center for Research on the Politics of Eastern Europe. The analyst […]
Staunton, November 18 – Articles predicting in apocalyptic terms that Vladimir Putin’s deals with China will lead to Russia’s loss of Siberia and the Far East are now a regular feature on the Russian blogosphere. But more seriously and in any case more immediately, a Tajik analyst says, Moscow has already ceded its dominance in […]
