Most people today are focusing on bidding farewell to Lyudmila Alekseyeva, the great human rights activist that Vladimir Putin is trying to coopt as one of his own, or to the centenary of the birth of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose slogan...
With the passing of the World War II generation, few of whom now remain, Vladimir Putin appears ready to make “veterans of hybrid wars” a new symbol of the idea that Russia today is “a besieged fortress” and that it must restore...
International correspondents often cite the difficult role objectivity plays while covering terrorism, since the nature and genesis of media coverage is often prone to sensationalism. Yet, if exercised with professionalism and integrity,...
The world’s largest flag of the unrecognized republic of Ichkeria was unraveled in central Kyiv today. The republic was proclaimed in late 1991 by Dzhokhar Dudayev, the first President of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, and fought...
Even people who accept that the North Caucasus is a Russian colony often argue that the republics of that region would be incapable of living on their own. But Avraam Shmulyevich says that history shows they could and that both they and...
Three specific and even unique characteristics of the Russian Empire in the past have not disappeared in the Russian Federation of today but instead continue to drive both the foreign and domestic policies of the Kremlin, according to...
Vladimir Putin needs Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov so that “compared to him,” the Kremlin leader will appear “in the eyes of the West to be the lesser evil,” Igor Eidman says. Thus, it works to Putin’s benefit to ascribe to...
Novaya gazeta has made continuing contributions to exposing the vicious violence of Ramzan Kadyrov’s regime against its opponents, including gays and anyone whom the Chechen leader views as getting in his way. Its latest expose of mass...
Imperial nostalgia against the memory of victims In June 2017, a month after the 73d anniversary of Sürgünlik (the deportation of Crimean Tatars), the Russian occupation authorities of Crimea initiated the prosecution of activists who...
The number of ethnic Russians in what were the non-Russian republics of the former Soviet Union has fallen from 25 million in 1989 to 14 million today, but only 6.5 million of that decline consists of Russians who returned to the Russian...
“Draw your own candidate” The first striking fact is that, according to Iryna Bekeshkina, director of the Fund “Democratic Initiatives,” 37% of Zelenskyi’s electorate support Ukraine’s membership in NATO while another 37%...
