RUSSIA NEWS & INFORMATION – Johnson’s Russia List contents & links :: JRL 2021-#142 :: Thursday, 15 July 2021
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Johnson’s Russia List :: JRL 2021-#142 :: Thursday, 15 July 2021
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1. Intellinews: Ben Aris, DATACRUNCH: demographic disaster in Russia, but a catastrophe in Ukraine. Russia’s population is shrinking but not by much. The population in Ukraine has crashed to a level last seen in the 50s.
2. Intellinews: Ben Aris, Putin’s babies. Russia’s population was predicted to halve in size in 2003 but instead it grew for a decade. Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a highly successful and largely unacknowledged programme to boost birth rates, but the demographic catastrophe of the 90s was just too big.
3. Financial Times: Philip Stephens, The brittle facade of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Democracies have been bent out of shape by rising populism but autocrats are more likely to crack under pressure.
4. AP: Official: Nearly 70% of medical workers in Moscow vaccinated.
5. Moscow Times: Voting Monitor Slams Russia’s Election Livestream Restrictions.
6. TASS: Where a state’s freedom ends: Putin explains why he wrote article about Ukraine – tass.com/russia/1313745
7. Kremlin.ru: Vladimir Putin answered questions on the article “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” – en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66191
8. TASS: Kremlin emphasizes Russia not calling Ukraine’s territorial integrity into question – tass.com/politics/1314259
9. Irrussianaility: Paul Robinson, PUTIN’S FUTILE EFFORT TO WIN BACK UKRAINE – irrussianality.wordpress.com/2021/07/14/putins-futile-effort-to-win-back-ukraine/
10. rt.com: Paul Robinson, Putin’s warning to the West: Moscow sees Ukraine as part of ‘Russian world’ & this is meant to be taken seriously by outsiders – rt.com/russia/529177-putin-warning-west-ukraine/
11. The National Interest: Jacob Heilbrunn, Why Putin is Upping the Ante on Ukraine. Rather than losing his grip on power, former Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk says if anything, Putin has grown “stronger in the past five years.”
12. Meduza: ‘This isn’t an argument about the past’. We asked professional historians to weigh in on Putin’s ‘historical article’
13. Bloomberg: Leonid Bershidsky, Why Ukraine Lives Rent-Free in Putin’s Head. In a lengthy, tortured article, he just spelled out his destabilizing fixation on how “Russia was essentially robbed” of its neighbor.
14. Moscow Times: Russia Races to Build Giant Icebreakers for Arctic Dominance.
15. rt.com: Putin tells Biden’s climate change envoy that Russia & US can work together for their ‘common interests’ regarding global warming – rt.com/russia/529197-putin-climate-change-work/
16. Indian Punchline: M.K. Bhadrakumar, US-Russia ties warming up. Is it for real?
17. Carnegie Moscow Center: Dmitri Trenin, Afghanistan After the U.S. Pullout: Challenges to Russia and Central Asia. The nature of the Afghan problem for Central Asia and Russia lies in Afghanistan becoming a source of instability for the region.
https://carnegie.ru/commentary/84951
18. rt.com: Sanctions against Taliban could be lifted as part of Afghan peace process, top Russian diplomat tells RT in wake of US withdrawal – rt.com/russia/529194-lifting-sanctions-taliban-calls/
19. AP: Afghanistan’s neighbors wary as US seeks nearby staging area.
20. Asia Times: Pepe Escobar, Russia-China advance Asian roadmap for Afghanistan. Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s ‘facilitate, not mediate’ role could be the key to solving the Afghan imbroglio.
21. RFE/RL: Latest Elections Highlight Moscow’s Shifting Strategies In Moldova.
22. TASS: Nezavisimaya Gazeta: Lukashenko cracks down on Belarusian elite ahead of referendum.
23. rt.com: Tarik Cyril Amar, The Sphinx of Europe: Unpredictable & widely misunderstood in the West, what happens next in crisis-hit Belarus is anyone’s guess – rt.com/russia/529257-lukashenko-frequent-kremlin-visits/
24. strategic-culture.org: Patrick Armstrong, The News Killed Satire – strategic-culture.org/news/2021/07/13/the-news-killed-satire/
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