‘If the Russians Come Back Again, They Won’t Be Constrained by Communism’ 2016-12-18 17:17:05 Staunton, VA, December 13, 2016 – Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who has just completed his service as president of Estonia, once remarked that “if the Russians come back again, they won’t be constrained by communism” and the rule they would impose on non-Russians […]
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, 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 5 – The purpose of terrorism is to terrorize, to suggest that old rules and old expectations no longer apply and thereby increase uncertainty and fear. That explains why someone like Kseniya Sobchak has suggested that she is next on Putin’s list now that the Kremlin has killed Boris Nemtsov and why an […]
I have called the year 2014 an annus horribilis, as opposed to the annus mirabilis 25 years ago that gave our part of the world the chance to opt for freedom and democracy. I hate numerology but it is really odd to see that a quarter of a century after the amazing flowering of democracy […]
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 […]
The following is a speech delivered by Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves at the Europe Conference in Oslo on 2 September 2014. It is reprinted from the website of the president of Estonia. The “25 Years After” is a reference to anti-communist democratic revolutions that began in 1989 in Eastern Europe and the fall of […]
