... other great European empires—including the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese—was followed by large-scale armed conflicts, some of which lasted for several decades and were accompanied by hundreds of thousands, or even millions of victims. The post-Soviet space, of course, also witnessed military violence and armed conflicts in the early 1990s (Tajikistan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria, Chechnya, and Dagestan), but most of these conflicts were of a relatively modest ...
... seriously, even by their own political leaders. Only now do we see the real disintegration of the USSR. It is happening in front of our eyes. The Russian leadership seems not to be ready to pay a high price in order to maintain its influence in the post-Soviet space anymore.
Take Belarus: it seemed natural that Russia should use the moment of Lukashenko’s weakness to impose some form of deeper integration and drag him into the Russian orbit. However, if I look at current discussions between Lukashenko ...
... return to where he thinks they belong. Is there any chance that he will be successful?
One can argue that the year of COVID-19 and the subsequent global recession is an ideal opportunity for the Kremlin to reassert its grip on at least some parts of the post-Soviet space. The West is much weaker today that it was just a couple of months ago. There is apparently no appetite for confronting Russia either in Belarus, or in the South Caucasus, not to mention Central Asia.
The United States is obsessed with ...
... from the threat coming from Afghanistan. Today, the threat has not exactly subsided, but it is at least a stably predicable danger.
REUTERS/Gleb Garanich
Aleksandr Gushchin:
Ukraine: 25 Years of Missed Opportunities
Russia’s foreign policy in the post-Soviet space will be mostly aimed at looking for possible ways to tie various regional projects together, specifically the Eurasian Economic Union and China’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative. Russia will also consider the possibilities ...
By the turn of the 1970s-1980s, the Soviet model of development had lost its viability, but the course did not change. Party and government functionaries were prospering, intellectuals were quietly loathing them, those individuals who had an opportunity were leaving the country, and the masses kept silent. The Soviet ideology and identity imposed by bloodshed, millions of deaths and massive propaganda, firmed up by the victory in World War II and reinforced exclusively by continuous reference to...
