By the time news of the Russian re-invasion of Ukraine became known in Moscow in the early morning of February 24, 2022, it was already afternoon in Siberia and the Urals. Residents of cities such as Irkutsk, Omsk and Yekaterinburg were the first to take... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. After Russia’s President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24 (Kremlin.ru, February 24), the Western economies introduce several rounds of increasingly harsh economic sanctions against the Russian Federation (Meduza, March 8). So far, Russia’s non-renewable... MORE

On February 24, without officially declaring war, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine (Dpsu.gov.ua, February 24). The aggressor attacked Ukraine by land, air and sea. But alongside those military operations, Russia continued to wage its warfare in the cyber and information domains. The Kremlin’s... MORE

Moscow has long counted on young males from the North Caucasus to ensure that each seasonal Russian military draft is filled. Men from that region typically view military service as a social lift out of the extreme poverty most find themselves in, a way of... MORE

In a store at one of Minsk’s shopping malls that sells Russian-made t-shirts decorated with a “Z,” the symbol of the Russian military offensive against Ukraine, the shop owner admitted to a journalist that she wholeheartedly backed Russia’s President Vladimir Putin but “we support the... MORE

Ethnic Russians today compose around a quarter of the population of Estonia and Latvia and about 5 percent in Lithuania. For the most part, these communities are made up of the descendants of migrants to the Baltics after the Second World War, whom the Soviet... MORE

When veterans of the Soviet war in Afghanistan—the so-called “Afgantsy”—and veterans of the two Russian campaigns in Chechnya returned to their homes, many had a difficult time fitting back into a peaceful life. Some used the military skills they had acquired to engage in various... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. *To read Part Two, please click here. Removing officials loyal to Ukraine from local administrations and replacing them with nominees of the occupation authorities is a high priority of Russia’s occupation policy in southern Ukraine (see Part Two... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. Russia’s 2022 re-invasion of Ukraine resulted, by mid-March, in the capture of Ukraine’s entire Kherson province, a considerable part of the Zaporyzhzhia province, and the littoral portion of the Donetsk province. Russia has decided to separate this latter... MORE

Russia’s full-scale war of aggression against Ukraine, which commenced on February 24 (Kremlin.ru, February 24), pushed the world’s largest advanced economies to introduce several rounds of increasing economic sanctions against the Russian Federation (Meduza, March 8). While the initial impact of those punitive measures seemed... MORE