Welcome to our column, Russia Update, where we will be closely following day-to-day developments in Russia, including the Russian government’s foreign and domestic policies. The previous issue is here. Special features: – ‘There Was No Buk in Our Field’ – With Cash and Conspiracy Theories, Russian Orthodox Philanthropist Malofeyev is Useful to the Kremlin – […]
Staunton, April 19 – Yury Dolinsky, a Russian analyst who specializes on the Baltic countries, says that most residents of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, however much they say they are worried about the Russian threat, believe that their membership in NATO will keep Moscow from invading or force Moscow to withdraw if it does invade […]
This article is the latest in our series marking the anniversary of the Maidan Revolution. See the other articles in the series here. The protesters had been in the streets for months, braving the bitter cold Ukrainian winter and multiple clashes with riot police, but refusing to leave until the Ukrainian government signed an association […]
Lilia Shevtsova writes the latest addition to our series on the one-year anniversary of the Maidan Revolution in Kiev. “Ukraine has not yet perished” is the first line of the Ukrainian national anthem used prior to 2003. – The Interpreter. The Ukrainian thunderbolt came as a shock, as all revolutions do, ending the sleepy interregnum […]
Staunton, January 28 – With each passing day, it is becoming more critical that the US and the EU increase their assistance to Ukraine not only because Russian aggression there is becoming more violent and vicious but also because what happens in Ukraine is rapidly becoming a model for the future of the post-Soviet space, […]
Staunton, December 27 – In the new Russian military doctrine Vladimir Putin signed December 26, the fourth a Kremlin leader has issued since 1991, the Russian president speaks about an increasingly threatening foreign environment that can produce problems at home but provides few specifics about the threats, their source, or how Moscow will counter them. […]
Staunton, November 20 – “September 3, 1939 – British and French commentators and officials said today that it could no longer be denied that Hitler was invading Poland and that the Nazi forces represented the most serious threat to the existence of that country, but they said that Warsaw could not reasonably expect allied assistance […]
Staunton, November 13 – “The victory of pro-Russian forces in Georgia would be a catastrophe not only for Georgia,” Gela Vasadze, the head of the Svobodnaya Zona portal, says, because that development, one actively promoted by Moscow, would also cut off Azerbaijan, Central Asia and China from a land route to Europe bypassing Russia. Vasadze’s […]
Not long after an Estonian counter-intelligence (KAPO) officer was kidnapped and paraded before Moscow TV cameras, Sweden is now playing its own version of “whack-a-mole,” with its navy hunting for phantom objects after reports suggest a Russian submarine or mini-sub is stranded in its waters. It is not clear exactly what is happening. Reports have […]
Staunton, June 6 – Many have blamed Moscow’s state-controlled television for whipping up anti-Ukrainian attitudes among Russians, but Aleksey Levinson, a Levada Center sociologist, argues that what the broadcasts have done is not to create something out of whole cloth but rather to shape and exacerbate it. In an interview with Andrey Lipsky of Novaya […]
