Staunton, March 26 — Ethnic Ukrainians in the Russian Far East, the descendants of Ukrainians who moved there voluntarily in late tsarist times and forcibly in Soviet ones, are being harassed by Russians there for their support of Ukraine, even as Russians in Crimea are threatening the Crimean Tatars with deportation to that faraway region. […]
Staunton, March 13 — Most discussions about divisions in Ukraine focus either on the differences of east and west or on those between Russian speakers and Ukrainian speakers, but a deeper and more important divide, one cutting across both of the others, Sergey Koshman writes, is between those who live in the cities and those […]
Staunton, December 9 – The Chuvash, a Christian Turkic nation which has its own republic in the Middle Volga, are, by virtue of their activism on behalf of their own language and culture, becoming the bridge between the Turkic nations like the Tatars and Bashkirs and the Finno-Ugric peoples like the Mari. They have traditionally […]
Staunton, December 4 – Since Vladimir Putin became president, the Muslims of Russia have erected 7,500 mosques or slightly more one per day, a statistic in which the Islamic community of that country can take great pride but one that may disturb some of Putin’s supporters who believe that he is committed to making Russia […]
Staunton, December 3 – Increasingly frequent expressions of support for Ukraine by non-Russian peoples within the borders of the Russian Federation and similar expressions of support for these nations by Kyiv is disturbing many Russians who see this as an alliance of “Russophobes of all kinds.” In an article on Rusfed24.ru, Ufa journalist Svetlana Nurgaleyeva […]
Staunton, November 30 – The ethnonym “Tatar” has a long a complicated history, one that reflects both the understanding and confusions of investigators and officials and that highlights both real links and imaginary ones, according to Pavel Gusterin, a specialist on Central Asia and the Middle East at the Russian Institute for Strategic Research. In […]
Staunton, November 21 – Vladimir Putin rarely has been willing to retreat from any of his decisions even when they have clearly been shown to be wrong, but he has done so in the case of the office of the presidency in Tatarstan, an indication of just how important the Volga Tatars have become for […]
Staunton, October 3 – The conviction of Fauziya Bayramova, president of the Volga Tatar Milli Mejlis and a longtime activist for the Tatar nation, for her support of the Crimean Tatars as well as her suspended one-year sentence is attracting widespread attention in the Russian Federation and in Ukraine. Yesterday, a city court in Naberezhny […]
Staunton, September 24 – Like its Soviet predecessors, the Putin regime has adopted three strategies in dealing with the non-Russian quarter of the population: increasing repression, divide-and-rule efforts within these communities and among them, and suppressing the dissemination of information about their plight. But these strategies are proving less effective than they once were, the […]
Staunton, August 13 – In yet another throwback to Soviet days designed to distract attention from what it is doing to other groups, Moscow has announced that it has taken under its protection two small nations in occupied Crimea, the 850 Karaims and 350 Krymchaks, even as it continues its campaign against ethnic Ukrainians and […]
