Over a year after violent conflict began in East Ukraine, indications are emerging of its severe environmental impacts in the highly industrialised Donbas region, and the grave health risks to civilians that will endure long into the future. The area will need international assistance both to reduce the hazards, and to ‘green’ the region’s often polluting industries.
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In a country where at least 4,000 localities had a main thoroughfare named after Lenin, outlawing remnants of the Soviet era like street names and statues was bound to cause problems.
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The beautiful weather stands in sharp contrast to the desperation rising in Donetsk, a place that neither Russia nor Ukraine seem to really want anymore. And some Ukrainians, as they wait by the hundreds daily to clear the last Ukrainian checkpoint before entering separatist-controlled territory, feel unwanted.
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Recent data show the Russian economy contracted 1.9 percent in the first quarter of 2015. In this article, Sergey Aleksashenko delves into the events that led to the downturn, and what we can expect for the rest of 2015.
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Ukraine wants a nuclear missile shield, according to the country’s security chief, something that would almost certainly provoke an aggressive response from Russia.
» Read moreJohnson’s Russia List :: JRL 2015-#101 :: Friday 22 May 2015 A project sponsored through the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES) at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs The contents do not necessarily represent the views of IERES or the George Washington University. JRL homepage: russialist.org JRL on Facebook: facebook.com/russialist JRL on Twitter: twitter.com/JohnsonRussiaLi Support JRL: russialist.org/funding.php Support for JRL is provided in part by […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Ivan Nechepurenko – May 22, 2015) Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, a close ally, friend and rumored potential successor of President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin, turned 60 on Thursday. “A servant to the tsar, a father to soldiers,” political pundits say of Shoigu – one of the country’s longest-serving government officials – citing Mikhail […]
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From 400 to 700 Ukrainians captured in the Donbas conflict zone have been taken to Russia, and many sold into slavery in Chechnya, Ossetia and Adygea, according to an open letter of the relatives of prisoners to the Russian human rights defenders published on the Web site of Open Russia public organization on Wednesday, a Ukrainian news broadcaster has reported. […]
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The war in Ukraine has already created the most dangerous confrontation between Washington and Moscow since the Cuban Missile Crisis. If Obama scales up arms supplies to Ukraine in response to Minsk II’s collapse, the United States and Russia will be engaged in a military test of wills—on the latter’s doorstep. In 1962, geography favored Washi
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Subject: New Reconsidering Russia Podcast: Yuri Zhukov on the Rebellion in Donbas Date: Tue, 19 May 2015 From: Pietro Shakarian My latest Reconsidering Russia podcast is now online. It is an interview with Dr. Yuri Zhukov of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor about the conflict in Ukraine’s Donbas. The conversation includes information on coal miners, labor, rebels, etc. in […]
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It has been a week since Secretary of State John F. Kerry emerged from eight hours of meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin and his foreign minister to say that the two sides had agreed to make a new effort to cooperate in resolving conflicts in Ukraine and Syria and completing a nuclear accord with Iran. The trip represented yet another […]
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Senior ruling-party politicians are throwing their weight behind a proposal to move Russia’s next parliamentary elections up three months to September 2016, a shift that could put opposition candidates at a further disadvantage by relegating the campaign to vacation season.
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Daniela Morari, a Foreign Ministry official who has been traveling her country trying to nudge Moldovans toward the European Union, has heard it all. People are worried that “if you join the E.U., everyone becomes gay” and that Brussels bureaucrats “won’t let you keep animals around your houses,” an alarming prospect in a largely rural country.
» Read moreJohnson’s Russia List :: JRL 2015-#100 :: Thursday 21 May 2015 A project sponsored through the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES) at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs The contents do not necessarily represent the views of IERES or the George Washington University. JRL homepage: russialist.org JRL on Facebook: facebook.com/russialist JRL on Twitter: twitter.com/JohnsonRussiaLi Support JRL: russialist.org/funding.php Support for JRL is provided in part by […]
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(Business New Europe – bne.eu – bne IntelliNews – May 20, 2015) Ukraine is trying to publicise its efforts to clamp down on corruption, as a crucial deadline looms for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to review conditions for extending billions of dollars in credits. In the south-eastern city of Zaporizhia, the head of the local anti-corruption committee and a […]
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(Business New Europe – bne.eu – Ben Aris in Moscow – May 21, 2015) Several plucky countries of Emerging Europe have put their necks on the block by defying Russian bullying to join its Customs Union, turning instead to the EU and its promise of a better life. But most of these countries are likely to be disappointed, or could […]
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(Bloomberg – bloomberg.com – Leonid Bershidsky – May 19, 2015) It’s goodbye Lenin, hello Nazi collaborators in Ukraine these days. Laws signed into effect by President Petro Poroshenko require the renaming of dozens of towns and hundreds of streets throughout the country to eliminate Soviet-era names. At the same time, Ukraine will begin to honor groups that helped Hitler exterminate […]
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(Interfax – Vienna, May 18, 2015) Dozens of priests of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Moscow Patriarchate (UOC MP) are leaving Ukraine in fear of persecutions, the head of the sector for interreligious liaisons at the Russian Orthodox Church’s Synodal Department for External Church Relations Priest Dimitry Safonov told on Monday. “There are dozens of priests who had to leave […]
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(Interfax – Brussels, May 20, 2015) After the International Security Assistance Force completes its operation in Afghanistan, for which a simplified procedure of transit of freight was used, the interested countries will still be able to use the transit scheme in accordance with the general procedure, Russia’s permanent representative to NATO Aleksandr Grushko told Interfax. “I would like to note […]
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(Business New Europe – bne.eu – Ben Aris in Moscow – May 19, 2015) Two high-level delegations to Russia from the US suggest that icy relations between the two sides may have begun to thaw a little. US Secretary of State John Kerry travelled to Sochi to meet his counterpart Sergei Lavrov on May 12 in his first visit to Russia […]
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The Wall Street Journal editors address Russia’s economic crisis and the West’s apparent unwillingness to step up economic pressure. The Russian recession is expected to continue unfolding. An oddity of recent weeks has been the attempt to argue that Russia’s economy isn’t as awful as it looks. Then along comes Friday’s report that GDP fell 1.9% year-on-year in the first […]
» Read moreJohnson’s Russia List :: JRL 2015-#99 :: Tuesday 19 May 2015 A project sponsored through the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES) at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs The contents do not necessarily represent the views of IERES or the George Washington University. JRL homepage: russialist.org JRL on Facebook: facebook.com/russialist JRL on Twitter: twitter.com/JohnsonRussiaLi Support JRL: russialist.org/funding.php Support for JRL is provided in part by […]
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(Stratfor.com – George Friedman – May 19, 2015 – stratfor.com/weekly/net-assessment-world) A pretentious title requires a modest beginning. The world has increasingly destabilized and it is necessary to try to state, as clearly as possible, what has happened and why. This is not because the world is uniquely disorderly; it is that disorder takes a different form each time, though it […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Anna Dolgov – May 19, 2015) Russia’s Defense Ministry has identified two fighters captured in Ukraine as former servicemen in the Russian military – a concession that echoes rights advocates’ claims that Moscow has been discharging its soldiers from the army before sending them to fight alongside separatists in the Donbass. The fighters, Alexander Alexandrov […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – May 19, 2015) Overseas investment by Russian companies fell to $56 billion last year, a 40 percent decline from 2013, even as China led a wider boom in foreign direct investment from emerging economies, according to a report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) released Monday. The figure means that Russia […]
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(RFE/RL – rferl.org – Brian Whitmore – May 19, 2015) For more than year, there’s been a war in eastern Ukraine that nobody called a war. And for the past three months, there’s been a cease-fire there that wasn’t a cease-fire. And now that the agreement reached in Minsk in February that was supposed to end hostilities in the Donbas […]
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KYIV. May 19 (Interfax) – The Petro Poroshenko faction in the Ukrainian parliament predict that the government will not make use of the right to declare a moratorium on the repayment of the external debt to commercial companies. “The law on the Cabinet’s right to impose a moratorium on the repayment of the external debt is putting additional pressure on […]
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(Business New Europe – bne.eu – Chris Weafer in Moscow, Senior Partner at Macro Advisory, which offers bespoke Russia-CIS consulting – May 19, 2015) If you left Russia for the last New Year holiday and did not return until the recent May holidays, and did not follow the news from or about Russia in the meantime, you would certainly be […]
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(Interfax – May 18, 2015) The Russian Defence Ministry has rejected Ukrainian allegations that two men who were reportedly captured during fighting in eastern Ukraine are serving members of the Russian armed forces, privately-owned Russian news agency Interfax reported on 18 May. Ministry spokesman Maj-Gen Igor Konashenkov admitted that the two men, who were detained by the Security Service of […]
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(Oilprice.com – Colin Chilcoat – May 17, 2015) The sanctions are now in their second year; the ruble is still not quite itself; and national champions Gazprom and Rosneft are both bracing for what can generously be called a down year. Still, while Russia’s political relationship with the west continues to be redefined, the broader element of codependence remains relatively […]
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MOSCOW. May 19 (Interfax) – The leadership of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) views meetings of the Trilateral Contact Group for Ukraine as an instrument that may help launch direct dialogue between the self-proclaimed republics and Kyiv. “It will be good if this [direct] dialogue takes place. But at this point, we are speaking about our work within the […]
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Widely considered one of Russia’s most potent weapons, Gazprom’s financials show the slow erosion of its core business. (Business New Europe – bne.eu – Mark Adomanis in Philadelphia – May 19, 2015) As with almost every other major Russian company, 2014 was not a particularly good year for Gazprom. In fact, at first glance, the headline numbers were nothing short […]
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(Bloomberg – bloomberg.com – Ryan Chilcote, Yuliya Fedorinova – May 18, 2015) Russia’s richest man said international investors are coming back to the country and the impact of sanctions has peaked. “Now it’s getting clear that the situation is more politically stable or predictable,” Vladimir Potanin, who heads Russia’s biggest miner, OAO GMK Norilsk Nickel, said in an interview with […]
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(Interfax – May 18, 2015) The percentage of Russians who are positive about the law banning the propaganda of homosexuality is increasing and is now 77 percent against 67 percent in 2013, Levada Center told Interfax. Fifteen percent of the respondents do not support this law and 7 percent said they are not interested, a poll surveying 800 people conducted […]
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In the past, Russia was an empire, then a communist colossus, then a ‘defeated’ power expected to adopt Western ways. But current tensions with the West are fostering what may be the birth of a distinct Russian nationalism.
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The EU needs to remold its support for fundamental political reform in Eastern Partnership partner states—and use this as a firmer base from which to assuage tensions with Russia. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: Thomas de Waal and Richard Youngs, Reform as Resilience: An Agenda for the Eastern Partnership.
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The leaders of the Allied powers met three times during World War II, at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam. The last conference stretched over 17 days in July and August 1945, longer than the first two put together. Harry Truman had replaced Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Chur
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The ‘rationalisation’ of medical and social services in rural Russia has compelled people to acquire new skills in order to survive, but life for the weakest is very hard – and very expensive. (opendemocracy.net – Georgy Borodyansky, an Omsk-based correspondent for Novaya Gazeta – May 12, 2015) Circumstance has forced the inhabitants of Kurganka, a village in Russia’s Omsk Region, to […]
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(Interfax – May 17, 2015) U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland arrived in Moscow from Kiev on May 17, press secretary of the U.S. embassy William Stevens told Interfax. “Victoria Nuland is in Moscow already,” he said. She is expected to hold official meetings on Monday, May 18. Nuland is most likely to be […]
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(Voice of America – Daniel Schearf – May 14, 2015) Political analysts agree the four-hour meeting this week between U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian President Vladimir Putin was a step up in contact between the two countries. Despite tensions over Ukraine, the two sides hold regular discussions, including president-to-president phone calls and numerous meetings between their top diplomats. But […]
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In 2011, MIT and Russian institutions including the Skolkovo Foundation launched a multi-year collaboration to facilitate the conception of the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology—dubbed Skoltech— a private graduate research university in a suburb of Moscow that was designed to stimulate the Russian entrepreneurial ecosystem and address a number of pressing global issues. http://bostinno.streetwise.co/2015/05/16/mits-skolkovo-tech-incubator-skoltech-struggles-in-russia/
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For Russia, victory came three days after Victory Day, in the form of Secretary of State John Kerry’s visit this week to the Black Sea resort city of Sochi. It was widely interpreted here as a signal of surrender by the Americans — an olive branch from President Obama, and an acknowledgment that Russia and its leader are simply too […]
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Vladimir Putin’s Russia faces not only international sanctions due its aggression in Ukraine and low oil prices that threaten its economy, but also several underlying crises that are not frequently discussed outside of expert circles. On Thursday, nine leading Russian scholars who contributed chapters to the just-released volume “Putin’s Russia: How it rose, how it is maintained, and how it […]
» Read moreJohnson’s Russia List :: JRL 2015-#98 :: Sunday 17 May 2015 A project sponsored through the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES) at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs The contents do not necessarily represent the views of IERES or the George Washington University. JRL homepage: russialist.org JRL on Facebook: facebook.com/russialist JRL on Twitter: twitter.com/JohnsonRussiaLi Support JRL: russialist.org/funding.php Support for JRL is provided in part by […]
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In 2013, the demand for political change began to shift from Moscow to other regions. At times, other regions even surpassed Moscow in their aspirations. Thus, a political system other than liberal democracy was the preferred option for 46% of Moscow’s residents, but for only 32% nationwide. The greatest demand for democracy was in St. Petersburg (69%) and other cities […]
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Foreign creditors must agree to the “legitimate” deal offered by Ukraine in talks on restructuring around $23 billion worth of its debt, Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk said on Friday.
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One assumption since Russia started war against Ukraine last year is that Europe will be softer against the Kremlin than America, which claims to stand tough in defense of Ukraine’s freedom.
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The Russian government has for the first time said officially it will hold discussions on raising the retirement age, a step whose supporters say is vital because the country’s workforce is shrinking. http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/14/us-russia-crisis-pensions-idUSKBN0NZ27R20150514
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Russia is set to enact an amnesty on offshore assets next month, but disagreement and lack of clarity over the terms of the pardon threaten not only to render the measure impotent, but undermine the government’s very drive to lure overseas money back home.
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