Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Kommersant‘s February dispatches from Donbass mentioned “Buryats,” apparently Russian servicemen from the republic of Buryatia. Yesterday, Novaya Gazeta published an interview with a young man, apparently an ethnic Buryat from Chita, wounded in a tank fight against the Ukrainian army.…
The Boris Nemtsov memorial march, which has recently ended in Moscow, was impressively attended. Despite the short notice and the bleak weather, an unbelievably large number of people took part. It’s only my feeling at this point but estimates are already being released from various quarters. Two…
Boris Nemtsov was assassinated last night in Moscow, on the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge near the Kremlin. Nemtsov was the only Russian opposition leader who had held both a major elected public office, as governor of the Nizhny Novgorod region (appointed 1991, elected 1995,…
Apart from discussions of whether the US should make use of its military potential in certain parts of the world, there is also disagreement on where it should do so, and in what order of priority. I have heard calls…
Matthew Schofield reported for McClatchy last week: A Russian newspaper claims to have an official government strategy document outlining the invasion of Ukraine that was prepared weeks before the Ukrainian government collapsed last year… …Muratov [Novaya Gazeta editor-in-chief] said that……
Actually, Russian media outlets have published interviews with Russian soldiers who have fought on the separatists’ side in Donbass. For instance, this illustrated account of a 22-year-old (ex-)marine from Sakhalin Island appeared on the site of Radio City Sakhalin in late January. More recently, the…
In their cynicism about Putin, western diplomats are making the Ukrainian crisis worse, according to Mary Dejevsky. Can one be “too cynical” in assessing Vladimir Putin? When I started this blog twelve yeas ago, I avoided too much cynicism and ended…
The popular Russian observer Stanislav Belkovsky on Lukashenko’s new role after the multilateral talks in Minsk. Belkovsky. – Alexander Grigoryevich is the principal beneficiary of these meetings. Koroleva. – Recall how he was called the principal dictator, Europe’s last dictator.…
Writing about hostages of the Russian state, I neglected to mention the number one hostage: the Ukrainian pilot Nadiya Savchenko*. She was fighting with the Ukrainian army in 2014 when she was captured or kidnapped by the separatists and/or their…
Max Seddon remarks that Novorossiya is “a Tsarist-era name for Ukraine’s Russian-speaking southeast.” Russian-speaking today but not in the “Tsarist era,” as I have explained. Russian was the language of cities all over Ukraine (except Poltava) but most Novorossiya residents were rural…
Apparently, some Europeans are scared to death of Putin (quoting from a piece in The Guardian that seems to have been taken offline): “Focusing merely on weapons could add fuel to the conflict and rather lead us away from a…
Merkel and Obama have always said the sanctions on Russia are aimed not at regime change but at ending Russia’s meddling in Ukraine. That’s a diplomatically necessary mantra, I understand, but the right regime change would achieve more than just…