Filip Rudnik: In January, Ukraine began celebrating the centennial of its independence. Ceremonies commemorating the Battle of Kruty* and the announcement of state independence in 1918** were unexpectedly modest. What does this post-Maidan...
Russian leaders like Vladimir Putin routinely denounce others as Russophobes, but most of those they target do not hate or fear the Russian people, Sergey Kornyev says. In fact, the real Russophobes are those in the Kremlin itself who seek...
It is fashionable to compare the Putin regime of today with that of Leonid Brezhnev, but such comparisons are deeply mistaken because the Kremlin now “is not a rickety ideological regime but a bold and self-confident one,” Aleksandr...
Many Ukrainians now argue Russia must give Crimea back to Ukraine to have any chance of becoming a free and democratic country, and they are finding some support for that view among Russians — even though it remains the case that...
The fundamental contradiction in Russia today is that “externally Russia is trying to be an empire but internally it ever more resembles a colony” — albeit one in which the colonial rulers come from the same nationality as most...
Vladimir Putin is with remarkable success using modern political technologies to keep himself and his increasingly antiquated and decaying system in power, Lilia Shevtsova says. But he can do so only for so long, and there are signs that...
I grew up in the West, where few people know much about Ukraine. In the USA—my home country—most people grow up thinking Ukraine is a part of Russia. They call it “The Ukraine.” If they have grandparents from Kyiv or Odesa, they...
One hundred sixty-two years ago today, tsarist forces defeated the Circassians in the North Caucasus after the latter had successfully resisted the Russian advance for 101 years and then the Russian government expelled most of them to the...
Russian historian and journalist Valeriy Solovey gives a tongue-in-cheek account of what motivates Russian dislike of Ukrainians… or the epitome of Russian propaganda. Ukrainians never know who will win the election. We, Russians,...
In fact, similar propaganda really did take place at that time. Russia had been rewriting history books centuries ago, as it now rewrites Wikipedia pages about MH 17, Kyivan Rus, Crimea, and others. As the Russian Empire always had more...
The fight for its creation was not easy. President Petro Poroshenko, the author of Ukraine’s judicial reform, resisted the idea till the very last moment. The pressure of society and Ukraine’s western partners made him change his mind....
