Paul A. Goble

Russian public opinion “is being prepared for a change in Kremlin policy” toward Ukraine, Moscow commentators say, with central government media now downplaying the need for and utility of force and playing up the ways in which Vladimir Putin can serve as “peacemaker.”

With the occupation of Crimea and with the encouragement of the Kremlin, many Russians believe they are on their way to becoming a super power once again, but the most thoughtful among them recognize that Russia lacks two if not three of the elements a super power must have.

In 1991, with the end of the Cold War, the disappearance of the Soviet bloc, and the disintegration of the USSR, many Americans-policymakers among them-believed that we had reached the end of history.

Moscow commentators have been denouncing the West for launching “a new cold war” against Russia, and a large share of Western commentators have assumed that this is because the Russian leadership doesn’t want one. In fact, Moscow is desperate to have that the new-old paradigm be restored at least at the level of rhetoric for…

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his supporters in Moscow and the West are explaining and justifying his invasion of Ukraine’s Crimea in various ways and celebrating the divisions and weaknesses of the West that it has highlighted, but in every case, they are treating it as a geopolitical victory for the Kremlin. They could not…

Even before he was chosen to lead the CPSU and hence the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev in December 1984 said he opposed the kind of megaprojects Soviet leaders had used up to then and favored instead more balanced development, a shift in attitude that informed his subsequent decision to block Siberian river diversion.

Few issues are more explosive than the question of how many ethnic Russians are Muslims, because such converts are often thought to be especially inclined to and useful for terrorist activities and because such conversions challenge assumptions about links between Russianness and Orthodoxy and highlight weaknesses in Russian national identity.

Recent statements by leaders of right-wing parties in European Union countries in support of Moscow’s position on Ukraine highlight a disturbing new reality: the rapprochement between these parties and Russian politicians and the possibility that the Kremlin is actively supporting them as allies against the West, according to a Russian blogger.

President Vladimir Putin talks a lot about the risks of the disintegration of the Russian Federation, but if he were really interested in integrating the country, he would talk less and build better roads and highways, something that the new Global Competitiveness Report of the World Economic Forum shows he has not done.

Developments in Tatarstan and the way they are being reported in the Russian media raise the most troubling of questions: Who is trying to destabilize that Middle Volga republic and toward what ends?  None of the answers that have been suggested so far are reassuring.