Author: Paul Goble / Eurasia Daily Monitor

Since the beginning of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s expanded invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, polls have consistently shown that Russian women are more likely to oppose the war than Russian men. Unsurprisingly, Russian women have taken more steps to oppose Putin’s war than their male counterparts (see Eurasia Daily Monitor, November 27, December 7;...

On April 12, Russian news outlet Izvestiya reported that sources in the Russian Defense Ministry (MoD) are saying that Moscow plans to build a network of drone bases along its entire Arctic coast. The goal of this endeavor is to monitor foreign activity along the Northern Sea Route (NSR) and the largely unpopulated Russian Far...

Even though Russia’s recent presidential “elections” were democratically meaningless, such an exercise is likely to have a significant impact on the behavior of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his regime in the coming months. Optimists may say that he now has a free hand to end the war against Ukraine and seek rapprochement with the...

Since at least 1945, the demand for water stemming from agriculture, industry and the peninsula’s population has outstripped Crimea’s local supplies (see Black Sea Battleground, January 21, 2022; Crimean Tatar Resource Center, July 2022). Both global warming and Russia’s occupation of the peninsula following their incursion into Ukraine in 2014 have made the situation much...

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s expanded war in Ukraine and his increasing repression at home are claiming another victim: the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (ROC-MP). This is occurring both within the Russian Federation and in the former Soviet space, where the Moscow church formerly ruled in an unchallenged way. The process within Russia...

On January 22, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed a decree calling for Kyiv to devote more attention to the fate of ethnic Ukrainians living in Russia (President of Ukraine, January 22; see Eurasia Daily Monitor, January 25). Kremlin officials and commentators view the decree as an indication of Ukrainian aggressiveness and an attack on Russia’s...

For more than a decade, Moscow has claimed that a significant portion of the people who live within Ukraine are ethnic Russians and that the Russian government is within its rights to intervene on their behalf. Many around the world have accepted these claims without close examination. Few have paid attention to the reality that...

Following repeated Ukrainian successes in the Black Sea, Russia has been shifting its vessels from the naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea to Novorossiysk and other Russian facilities further away from Ukraine. These locations hold a lower risk of attack (The Moscow Times, October 5). Ukrainian forces have continued to put pressure on the Russian...

Russians have long viewed making direct appeals to their supreme leader as their last chance to achieve justice. Today, when ordinary political representation is blocked and participation in most protests remains dangerous, Russian citizens are increasingly writing letters to President Vladimir Putin discussing their personal problems and how Moscow’s war against Ukraine has adversely affected...

Russian President Vladimir Putin called for a high-level meeting of security officials immediately following the recent anti-Israeli riots in Dagestan and elsewhere in the North Caucasus. Putin’s move is one of only a few indications that Moscow is concerned with the unrest (MR7.ru, November 5). Perhaps more notable is what appears to be a major...

Russia’s Caspian Flotilla has been dominant in the inland sea for so long that many have ignored that, over the past several years, it has ceased to be the only national navy that matters. Outside powers, due to the expansion of their navies, are moving to assume a larger role (see Eurasia Daily Monitor, June...

The Kremlin’s ongoing propaganda effort is fundamentally different than that of its Soviet predecessor, less because of the technology it has access to and more because of its different overarching goals. The Soviet effort was countered by providing information that highlighted its falsehoods, a task made easier because the Soviet population was already cynical about...