russia

Originally posted on the Fediverse “Ukrainians and Russians as ‘One People’: An Ideologeme and its Genesis”, by Pål Kolstø, has been published open access last week. It offers some context on the use of related concepts applied to Russians and Ukrainians (and Belarusians): “triune nation” (mostly Tsarist), “brotherly peoples” (mostly Soviet), and “one people” (both pre-Soviet and present). Putin himself used all of them, but eventually seems to prefer the “one people” line: Russians and Ukrainians are just one people, i.

Paper presented at the European ASN in Cluj-Napoca

Originally posted on the Fediverse “Wagner group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin has launched another diatribe against the Russian army. Is he a loose cannon, or a Kremlin puppet?” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/09/russian-armed-forces-infighting-yevgeny-prigozhin I’m still all in the “Kremlin puppet” camp; he still has no power that is independent of the tutelage he receives from the Kremlin. Fundamentally, Prigozhin has no power base that would allow him to run a half-decent coup. He is no alternative to the Kremlin.

A comment posted in response to Sam Greene’s 11 February 2023 newsletter. I feel there is good reason why Simonyan would want her audiences to believe that those goals were so fuzzy as to have no actual meaning, and hence part of a genius strategy that leaves adversaries clueless. These goals may have been “purposefully vague”, but they still had a discernible meaning, and it’s now convenient to pretend they didn’t for obvious reasons.

[Originally posted to the Fediverse - Source] I have looked at a full broadcast live yesterday night on (nationalist) Tsargrad TV, and rather than the outrageous quotes that inevitably emerge - and are inevitably picked up by the BBC’s great Francis Scarr - what I found more interesting was the framing, i.e. let’s talk about the issues that the authorities don’t want to talk about, as what they say does not make sense.

Originally posted to the Fediverse - Source] One of the “big decisions” that looks puzzling in relation to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is why did Putin decide to declare Russian sovereignty over more parts of Ukraine (Kherson and Zaporizhzhia) not when he could still hope to actually conquer them, but at a point in time when it was already evident that the Russian army could not plausibly cling to what it had, much less gain new ground.

N.B. For a better formatted version of this post, consider following this link References to ‘anti-Russian sentiments’ or ‘Russophobia’ - have a long history that dates back to the 19th century (Feklyunina 2012; Darczewska and Żochowski 2015). However, in recent years references to the alleged spread of ‘Russophobia’ in the West have apparently become more common and more politically consequential, in particular after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbas (Darczewska and Żochowski 2015).

A corpus in tabular format with all posts published on the official website of the president of the Russian Federation between 31 …

A swirl of new acts and strategies has been announced in the last couple of weeks by the European Commission, including the European Democracy Action Plan, the Digital Markets Act, and the EU’s Cybersecurity Strategy. If we ask the right questions about foreign interference, these are all part of the answer

What do we even mean when expressing concern about “Russia”? As it turns out, Russia can be both a symbol and an external actor able to influence domestic processes. It is important to resist the temptation to conflate different preoccupations