The new specter of Finlandization
Russian President Vladimir Putin needs China to balance against the West, says Robert Kaplan, chair of geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Since it is the West, in his… Read more »
Category: Eurasia
Standemonium: Central Asia ‘crying out for better rulers’
Another week, another setback for freedom and democracy in the former Soviet Union is one way to read recent events in Kazakhstan, The Economist reports. But the good news is… Read more »
Russia ‘running rings around West’ or struggling to keep sphere of influence?
Pathetic throwback that he is, Vladimir Putin is rebuilding the Soviet Union under the nose of a feckless and distracted West, argues analyst Walter Russell Mead. Because Russia hasn’t… Read more »
Geopolitical advance in Ukraine would safeguard Putin’s rule
If #Ukraine were to become a thriving #democracy, it would stand as a rebuke to Putin’s claim that Western values are unworkable in Orthodox, Slavic Russia. https://t.co/2LlqadEYdm — Democracy Digest… Read more »
Geo-political strategy behind Russia’s attempt to control history
The coming year in Russian politics is likely to be marked by continued repression of the remnants of political opposition and independent media, experts told The Moscow Times. After a… Read more »
Memorial closure shifts Russia from autocracy to dictatorship
A Moscow court abolished the Memorial Human Rights Center on Wednesday in the second ruling in two days against Russia’s most prominent human rights group. Russia’s Supreme Court liquidated another… Read more »
Russia bans Memorial – ‘the last barrier to complete Stalinization’
Russia’s Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that the nation’s most prominent human rights organization must close, signaling President Vladimir V. Putin’s longstanding determination to control the narrative of some of… Read more »
Why the Soviet Union collapsed
Russian lawmakers want to declare the fall of the Soviet Union three decades ago “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.” The proposal submitted Monday by the right-wing nationalist Liberal Democratic… Read more »
‘Putin’s Plot Against Russia’s Future’: Kremlin’s persecution of Memorial
The Kremlin’s persecution of Memorial, Russia’s venerable human rights group, is typical of authoritarian attempts to exploit and distort the past to give legitimacy to violence, says Anne Applebaum, a… Read more »
Ukraine: Solidarity the best response to Russia’s threats
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken today warned that there’s “evidence” Russia is moving to “destabilize Ukraine from within,” according to reports. “We’ve seen this playbook before — in 2014… Read more »