Tag: USSR

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 […]

Staunton, February 24 – The conflict in Ukraine is not one conflict but three: it is a conflict between the eastern and western portions of Ukraine, it is a conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and it is a conflict between Russia and the West, Vladimir Pastukhov says. And to resolve all three will require a […]

Staunton, February 24 – Both those who support Vladimir Putin and those who oppose him overestimate the Kremlin leader, Vitaly Portnikov says, with the former assuming there is nothing he cannot do and the latter explaining away their own shortcomings and failures by making the same assumption. As a result, the former assume that whatever […]

Staunton, February 4 — The exodus from Russia of Central Asian labor migrants and even the recent decline in the number of Ukrainians who fled to Russia last year after the start of the conflict there have attracted a great deal of attention, but outflow, this of people from Western countries, has attracted much less […]

Staunton, February 4 – Many in the West fear that providing military assistance to Ukraine would open the way for disasters ranging from the potential loss of an American helicopter as happened in Somalia to a possible nuclear exchange between Russia and the West as Vladimir Putin has threatened. But such arguments, as emotionally compelling […]

Staunton, January 27 – For more than 150 years, the Anglo-Saxon world has been the main competitor and threat to the Russian way of life, and today, the United States is carrying out ‘a ‘quiet’ and bloodless’ war against Russia by promoting the Americanization of its language and culture, according to a Moscow military writer. […]

Staunton, January 25 – Ninety-six years ago, the Soviet government launched what became a decade-long campaign to “de-Cossackize” Russia, a campaign that Cossacks remember as “yet another genocide” in the Caucasus and a reminder that relations between the Cossacks and the state are more complicated and conflicted than most assume. As portrayed in Hollywood movies […]

Staunton, January 25 – The Anschluss of Crimea could have become the occasion for the formation of a new nation in Russia, just as Moscow’s attacks on Ukraine have contributed to nation building in Ukraine. But Vladimir Putin has not been willing or perhaps even able to take that step, Aleksandr Morozov says. The reason, […]

Staunton, January 23 — Following the “tectonic” shifts in the world that Russia’s moves in Ukraine began, the leaders of the Baltic countries must recognize “the need to have a dialogue with Russia,” the head of the Moscow Institute for the Russian Abroad says. If they don’t, others who are ready to do so “will […]

Staunton, January 22 — “Post-Soviet Russian nationalism has been fatally flawed from the outset because it arose not from the word ‘nation’ but from the word ‘nationality,’” a reflection of the fact that a Russian “nation” in the normal of sense that term does not yet exist in Russia, according to Vadim Shtepa. In a […]