Eurasia Daily Monitor Russian combat losses in Ukraine, problems with this year’s spring draft, trouble recruiting volunteers and difficulties in forcing soldiers to fight abroad in the absence of a declaration of war are prompting ever more questions about how sustainable Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine is at its current level of manning...
Author: Paul Goble
Except for occasional references to Chechen fighters whom Ramzan Kadyrov sent to fight in Ukraine with disastrous results, most reporting on Vladimir Putin’s expanded invasion of Ukraine has referred to the Russian Armed Forces as if they were purely Russian. In fact, it is the military of the Russian Federation; and like that multi-ethnic country,...
Over the last 30 years, demographic shifts in each of the post-Soviet countries have changed power relations both within and between them. The most obvious changes are in the size of the populations of each state, with declines in nine of the 15 and increases registered only in the six former Soviet Muslim-majority countries. At...
Even though Russian officialdom continues to insist Moscow has no plans to invade Ukraine, many Russian political commentators in recent weeks have been increasingly aggressive in suggesting that their country can easily defeat and occupy its largest western neighbor and that there is nothing the Ukrainians or the West can do about it. But a...
As tensions between Russia and Ukraine continued to rise, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev flew to Kyiv on January 14 to meet with his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. After their talks, the two leaders called for expanded cooperation in all spheres, including economics, transportation and national security (President.gov.ua, Kp.ua, January 14). This Azerbaijani tilt to Ukraine...
There are two competing projects for a memorial at Babyn Yar, the site of a mass murder of Jews and others during the Nazi occupation. One of these projects, the Russian, is heavily funded by Kremlin allies and seeks to use the memorial to blame Ukrainian anti-Semitism for this crime against humanity.
The other, less well-funded and lacking even the enthusiastic backing of the current Ukrainian president, is being developed by a group of Ukrainians, Jewish and otherwise. Its purpose is not some information war with Russia, but rather a respectful memorial to the victims of this tragedy.
Russian propaganda can be classified into three broad categories, and until recently only the last contained aggressive messages, according to Kseniya Kirillova, an investigative journalist who also provides analysis for The Jamestown Foundation. But now things have changed, and Moscow has inserted aggressive notions in the other two as well, marking an effort to mobilize a population increasingly alienated from the regime.