Tag: war

Russian military movements have spiked, and the fighting in Ukraine has intensified. Is a new outbreak of violence forthcoming?

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, February 28 — Many people in Ukraine, Russia and elsewhere have wondered why two nations so closely linked by history and culture should have descended into such a vicious war, but they shouldn’t be surprised, Boris Grozovsky says, because peoples close to each other more likely to get involved in wars and to suffer […]

Staunton, January 26 – Moscow believes that its attack on Mariupol and its envelopment of a significant Ukrainian force will put Russia in a position to force Kyiv to capitulate, Moscow commentator Boris Sokolov says; but he argues that Ukraine still has the ability to win this war despite these defeats. In a commentary on […]

Yesterday’s liveblog can be found here. An archive of our liveblogs can be found here. For an overview and analysis of this developing story see our latest podcast. Please help The Interpreter to continue providing this valuable information service by making a donation towards our costs. View Ukraine: April, 2014 in a larger map For […]

Yesterday’s liveblog can be found here. An archive of our liveblogs can be found here. For an overview and analysis of this developing story see our latest podcast. Please help The Interpreter to continue providing this valuable information service by making a donation towards our costs. View Ukraine: April, 2014 in a larger map For […]

Staunton, May 5 – Commentators have long celebrated the fact that the USSR broke up with little violence in 1991 – the conflicts in Abkhazia, Tajikistan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Transdniestria and Chechnya typically have been treated as exceptions that prove the rule. But now, many of the unresolved issues from 23 years ago are leading to violence […]

After the horror of the fire in Odessa last night, the world is nervously waiting to see both how the Ukrainian government handles this tragedy, and whether the Kremlin will use this as the provocation they’ve been waiting for. Yesterday’s liveblog can be found here. For an overview and analysis of this developing story see […]

Staunton, April 7 One of the consequences of the propaganda campaign against Kyiv that has accompanied Vladimir Putin’s Anschluss of Crimea and moves elsewhere in Ukraine is that it has displaced the anti-Caucasus theme in the Russian media that had so animated Russians until very recently, according to Ruslan Kurbanov. On the one hand, this […]

Staunton, April 3 – Many Russians and some in the West believe that the Russian military could overrun Ukraine because of its superiority over Ukrainian forces, but such views ignore both the enormous challenges that any occupier of Ukraine would face and the reality that the Ukrainian military is in fact a far more serious […]