Staunton, March 23 — “The Russian occupation regime” in Crimea is “worse than the Soviet one,” according to Mustafa Cemilev, the leader of the Crimean Tatars, in large part because Vladimir Putin couldn’t find a Ramzan Kadyrov-type leader among them and thus has chosen the path of direct rather than indirect repression instead. Speaking before […]
Staunton, March 12 — Yesterday, Nikolay Patrushev, secretary of Putin’s Security Council, warned that Russia will face a serious terrorist threat if and when militants from Russia who have been fighting with various Islamist groups in the Middle East return home. But he said nothing about what may be a more immediate and serious threat: […]
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 6 – The alliance of reformers in the CPSU nomenklatura and Soviet liberals who were prepared for various reasons to cooperate with them led to the defeat of the dissidents who rejected the system as a whole and condemned Russia again to suffer once again a return “to the ideology of Russian imperialism […]
Staunton, February 22 — As elsewhere in the Russian Federation, people are leaving rural areas in the North Caucasus and adjoining areas, leaving villages deserted or half-deserted, undercutting prospects for agricultural growth, and changing the security situation in many places. Indeed, in many of these places, the only things that remain are cemeteries. In an […]
Staunton, December 31 – If as some are suggesting 2015 is going to be the year of Aleksey Navalny just as the past years have been those of Vladimir Putin, then it is extremely important that the opposition leader clearly state his positions lest Russians find in his case that they have given the power […]
Welcome to our new 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, and see also our Russia This Week. Russia has expelled four Polish and one German diplomat in tit-for-tat action against the EU countries’ expulsion of […]
Staunton, October 8 – Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Cheboksary, the capital of Chuvashia, October 9. In advance of his arrival, local officials linguistically “cleansed” the streets along which he passed, removing those which were in Chuvash and leaving only those in Russian. This violation of both the Russian law on languages and the Chuvash […]
Staunton, September 27 – Russia does not face any prospect of disintegrating in the way that the Soviet Union did – Moscow has changed the situation too much for that to happen – but it needs to form a new relationship among it regions and between them and the center if it is to avoid […]
Staunton, September 17 – Russian President Vladimir Putin’s suggestion at the end of August that the people of Tatarstan should have the right to decide the title of their republic leader has opened a Pandora’s box with some in other republics now demanding the retention of the title “president” for themselves. Yesterday, Murtaza Rakhimov, the […]
