For almost three decades, Vladimir Putin has been saying and many in Russia and the West have followed him in this that the Soviet Union came apart because the Bolsheviks set up union republics and gave them the right to leave, a right...
Thirty years after the demise of the Soviet Union, it is perhaps not surprising that a number of myths have emerged about that event. Perhaps the one that is most widely believed but is demonstrably false is that the demise of the USSR was...
Ukraine’s slow-motion exit from the Commonwealth of Independent States has led some in Moscow to think it might eventually return, but the organization’s latest meeting shows that no one in the Russian capital has any such...
Moscow believes that it will be able to “completely assimilate the nationalities of Russia” in this century by forcing them to use Russian rather than their national languages and to define themselves as members of a civic...
The Church of Greece became the first after the Patriarchate of Constantinople to recognize the Ukrainian autocephaly. At first glance, this is not the most important recent news – especially against the background of what is...
On January 20 twenty-nine years ago, Soviet forces attacked the people of Baku, killing and wounding hundreds and illegally arresting many more. That date remembered in Azerbaijan to this day as Black January is less well-known to many now...
Twenty-eight years ago today, Moscow sent troops to Lithuania and killed 13 people in the vain hope of blocking that Baltic country from recovering its independence. The Soviet government even timed this operation while the West was...
Twenty-seven years ago on December 8, 1991, the presidents of the RSFSR, the Belarusian SSR and the Ukrainian SSR signed the Belavezha Accords that annulled the 1922 Soviet union treaty and thus put a de jure end to the de facto...
There are some things no one in Russia must say or even think. Perhaps the most important of these is the idea that the Russian Federation will disintegrate just as the Soviet Union and all other empires have. But the Kremlin hasn’t...
There are three reasons why the Russian Federation is unlikely to fall apart in the near future, Ukrainian political analyst Vitaly Portnikov says. First among them is that while Russia hasn’t been able to establish a contemporary...
Putin’s goals and philosophy Sławomir Sierakowski: What is Putin’s ultimate goal in this war? Timothy Snyder: That’s no big secret: to destroy Ukraine as a state and exterminate Ukrainians as a nation. I’d...
