Part I here if you are interested On the day of German reunification anniversary I bring you the sequel to the post on the new Russian history book. Only, if you read this history book, you will not find the term "reunification" - it's reserved for Crimea and Donbas -...
One of the most predictable elections is just around the corner: even Google has already proclaimed Putin the winner of the presidential race of March 18th 2018 in Russia. The only marginal hiccup...
While there is a big debate in the US about the old monuments, Russia is erecting new ones. Starting with the eye sore of a Kalashnikov statue in Moscow that had a bit of a glitch of sporting a...
After Donald Trump won the elections in the US, Twitter was abuzz with the picture of potential UN Security Council country leaders that included Theresa May, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi...
‘I want to ride around Moscow with an American flag in my car. If I find one. Join me! They have earned it'. If you were wondering who else was celebrating Trump’s win, it was the Editor-in-Chief of Russia Today Margarita Simonyan. Overnight, a deep-seated Russian Anti-Americanism and disbelief in American democracy was turned into almost unending love, although Russian Prime-Minister Medvedev still finds the name ‘Americano’ too unpatriotic for coffee and proposed to rename it into ‘Rusiano’. The US election results came as a big surprise in Russia as well. According to many sources, most...
Lots of words have been spilled on this Crimea thing, and so it is reasonable to ask whether our opposition to Crimean self-determination might be more about our feelings about Russia than about secession/irredentism. Chris Blattman asked: Bleg: Someone please explain to me why I should accept that the annexation of Crimea is a terrible thing https://t.co/Op7T0aNN7T — Chris Blattman (@cblatts) March 20, 2014 It raises a legitimate question: shouldn't people be allowed to choose their destinies? Shouldn't folks be allowed to engage in self-determination? I responded with heaps of tweets,...
I have a question for all those folks who study elections: any democracy hold an election within a week or two of being announced?
Lots of folks are speculating about what Ukraine/Crimea/Russia is like, including not Abkhazia. Right now, the analogies that come to mind for me are: coups d'etat and poker. Coup? Yes, because in a coup, the anti-incumbents (for want of a better term), move first, trying to create facts on the ground that are hard to reverse. If this fait accompli is successful, the incumbents are then put in a position where they are the ones with the pressure to use force. The onus is on them. Which is why Putin would be smart to stick to Crimea. Other deployments in Ukraine might mean trying to...
*this is a guest post by Konstantinos Travlos, currently a Visiting Assistant at Georgia Southern, who writes on international conflict and history. The arguments presented below are based on past research. Russian policy towards Ukraine is partly driven by short term political reasons such as protecting an investment in the form of Yanukovych, the Russian view of Ukraine as a “little brother”, a legitimate worry over the future of the Russian minority in Ukraine, and a very real opposition to what is seen by the Kremlin elite as the meddling of Western powers in its Near Abroad. However, I...