Staunton, May 21 — No nation more skillfully used an international event than did the Circassians during the Sochi Olympiad to call attention to the Russian-orchestrated genocide of their people 150 years earlier. Despite Moscow’s best efforts, few independent reporters talked about Sochi without talking about the continuing crimes against the Circassians. In the past […]
Staunton, May 21 — Vaira Vike-Freiberga, the former president of Latvia, points to an inconvenient truth that few want to recognize: no frozen conflicts in the former Soviet space will be resolved as long as Russia retains its veto in the UN Security Council and thus is in a position to block moves toward a […]
Staunton, April 22 — Because of the nature of the conflict in Ukraine and the kind of people who have gone to fight there, Donbas veterans suffer from a special “Donbas syndrome” and constitute a bigger threat to themselves and to society when they return to Russia than did the veterans of the Afghan and […]
Staunton, April 21 — Since Vladimir Putin called for the creation of a new Agency for Nationalities Affairs, many have speculated that this decision will mark a turning point in Moscow’s approach to the increasingly numerous non-Russian portion of his country’s population. But a true measure of its meaning — which like so much Putin […]
Staunton, April 16 — For the last three months, the Russian population has been declining, and Moscow has coped with this by not publishing its usual monthly data collections or calling attention to the data in any way. But the regime is not capable of functioning without at least some officials having data, accurate or […]
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, April 2 — Moscow now runs the federal subjects in much the same hyper-centralized way the Soviet Politburo did before Gorbachev’s perestroika, despite the name of the country now being the Russian Federation and Moscow routinely insisting that Ukraine which is less centralized than Russia, must “federalize,” according to Vadim Shtepa. After the USSR […]
Staunton, April 2 — No Crimean Tatar media outlet could ever do as much harm to Russia’s reputation and its ability to attract any members of that nation to its side as Moscow’s decision to shut down ATR and other Crimean Tatar broadcasters and publications already has, according to Anatoly Baranov, a Moscow commentator who […]
Staunton, March 31 — The security services of Belarus are closely cooperating with their Russian counterparts against Lithuania as far as their targets are concerned, according to the annual report of the Lithuanian State Security Department, an arrangement that underscores the real relationship of Minsk and Moscow and that calls attention to a much larger […]
Staunton, March 31 — “At the stroke of midnight” today, Denis Krivosheyev, Amnesty International’s deputy director for Europe and Central Asia, says, “all but one Crimean Tatar language media outlets, which have come under a sustained assault since the Russian annexation, will fall silent.” Despite the efforts all of them have made to register, the […]
