Author: Paul Goble / Eurasia Daily Monitor

The disproportionate use of soldiers from the primarily non-ethnic Russian republics in the North Caucasus, Middle Volga and Far Eastern regions in President Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine has attracted widespread attention since the beginning of Russia’s campaign a year ago. Whether this reflects poverty, ethnic discrimination or a desire by Moscow to avoid losses...

Moscow is increasingly concerned about Kyiv’s increased attention not only to the non-Russian republics and regions within the current borders of the Russian Federation but also, and particularly, to parts of the country that have, or at least had, significant ethnic Ukrainian populations (see Eurasia Daily Monitor, July 28, 2022). The last of these regions...

In the months since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his expanded invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, fires and explosions have occurred at a minimum of 72 military facilities within Russia – including 44 draft offices and 28 bases. A vast number of other fires and explosions have broken out at shopping centers – at...

Russian officials and international media have given prominent coverage to Moscow’s plans for a transcontinental trade corridor southward to Iran via the Caucasus. These efforts aim to end-run Western sanctions and expand Russian trade in the Indian Ocean basin and beyond. But Russian experts concede that the opening of such a route is months or...

After some initial caution, the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (ROC MP) has become a slavish propaganda tool for President Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine. Overall, this shift has done nothing to stem the decline in the church’s influence in Russian society and has exacerbated its demise in the post-Soviet...

Guns from President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine are crossing into Russia at a rapid rate and leading to a surge in armed crimes there, according to recent data released by the Russian Interior Ministry (MVD) (The Moscow Times, November 23). For Russia as a whole, the MVD says, the number of such crimes is...

Moscow has long been upset by Kyiv’s efforts to reach out to non-Russian nations inside the Russian Federation and enlist them as allies in its fight against the Kremlin. But steps taken by Ukrainian leaders in the past few weeks, a time of heightened concern in Moscow due to the setbacks suffered by the Russian...

No policy Russian President Vladimir Putin has ever announced, including his increasing of the pension age in 2018, has caused more public anger and protest than the partial mobilization he declared on September 21 to fill the depleted ranks of his invasion force in Ukraine. In response, more than 700,000 men have fled Russia, demonstrators...

In the USSR’s final years, Soviet propagandists and analysts routinely attacked the works of Western writers as being those of “bourgeois falsifiers,” arguing that their books and articles were fictitious because the ideas presented were at odds with Marxism-Leninism and Moscow’s position on most subjects. But these attacks backfired in a double sense. On the...

Faced with mounting combat losses in Ukraine and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threat to expand the size of Russian forces there, the absence of a general mobilization plan undermines the Kremlin leader’s claims and could trigger more domestic opposition (Meduza, May 5). As such, Moscow is now turning to the regions and republics to procure...

Ukraine experienced sharp demographic decline even before Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale reinvasion earlier this year. The Ukrainian population fell from 52 million in 1993 to just over 41 million by the start of 2022. For that matter, it would have been declining even if the Soviet Union had not disintegrated and Ukraine...

The most compelling reason why the international community is opposed to any border change is the capacity of changes in one border to spark consideration of changes in others, creating or at least exacerbating problems in the relations between existing countries. Until Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014 and his moves...