For many observers in the West, Putin’s invasion of the Crimea came as a complete surprise. However, it fit into a longer pattern of Putin centralizing his political control within Russia itself beginning the day he took office....
Twenty-five years ago, the RSFSR adopted a declaration of state sovereignty, an event Moscow has marked in various ways and now calls the Day of Russia. But unlike all the other Soviet republics which adopted similar declarations, Russia...
Igor Girkin, ex-minister of defense of the so-called “Donetsk People’s Republic” has once again publicly contradicted Russia’s official denials of its involvement in the war in Ukraine. Answering a...
“The Ukrainian-Russian conflict is to a significant degree a conflict between the heirs of Kyivan Rus Ukraine and the heirs of the Golden Horde” Moscow, according to Andrey Piontkovsky, and one of its key results will be...
Staunton, May 15 – The pride that people feel in their country consists of two elements: a cognitively processed one in which individuals assess the actual past and present achievements of their nation, thus grounded in reality, and...
The 150-minute film “The President” about Vladimir Putin is mostly boring and predictable in that it insists that “without Vladimir Vladimirovich nothing in the country will work,” Kseniya Kirillova notes. But...
Vladimir Putin says his decision to sell S-300 air defense missiles to Iran will stabilize the situation in the Middle East, but an analysis by Andrey Piontkovsky strongly suggests that it will have exactly the opposite effect and drive up...
Some “pearls of wisdom” from Leonid Reshetnikov, a retired SVR general, director of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (RISI), and an advisor to Vladimir Putin in a recent interview include: what is occurring in...
Moscow’s interference in the Gagauz Bashkan elections was so blatant that even a Barbie or matryoshka doll could have won, according to Ivan Burgudji, but its suggestion that anyone who didn’t vote for Moscow’s...
Whenever people are confronted by changes that call into question existing paradigms, their first reaction typically is to deny that anything has happened or that it is significant, but their second is to seek analogies and parallels in...
First stereotype: Ukrainians are very poor Some Europeans viewed Ukraine as extremely poor. Many Ukrainian refugees were surprised to learn that. “They perceived us almost like we are cave people who do not know and have not seen...
