The repatriation of a Russian surveyor who had swum to safety after opposing the war has caused a stir in Riga. It serves as a reminder that, in the post-Soviet space, simply fleeing is not enough: one must contend with a web of mistrust, mutual contempt and control that outweighs any shared ideas.
‘There are no serious problems between our countries,’ assures Dushanbe, and in regional organisations, Tajiks are the first to support the Russians' arguments. But in the meantime, disappointment is growing over the Russian authorities' relations with migrants who have suffered outrage and violent forms of discrimination since the Krokus City Hall bombing.
In 1846 Nicholas I went privately to Rome to see Pope Gregory XVI to beg him not to give in to the liberal and republican temptations that were also taking hold in the Holy City. And the desire to ‘defend the values’ of Christian Europe led him to the Crimean War. Today, on the contrary, Pope Francis with the ‘humanitarian diplomacy’ mission of Card. Zuppi to Moscow sees the world's crisis in the light of the Gospel.
The referendum in which 71% of voters in Kazakhstan approved the construction of a new nuclear power plant is seen as a great opportunity for the Russian company Rosatom, one of the giants of the Russian economy that is resisting the weakening war phase and is currently building 20 reactors abroad.
According to ex-President of Dagestan Abdulatipov, today's nationalisms in the former Soviet Caucasus seem to nullify traditions, harking back to medieval origins of feudal disintegration, without taking into account the ‘historical, cultural and human experience of inter-ethnic and inter-religious integration’.
Russian fossil fuel producers are investing in new technologies in the conviction that at least until 2050 extractive materials will remain crucial in the world economy. Renewable energies will be used more and more, but in parallel with the oil share, as cars become increasingly popular in Africa and Latin America.
Russian economists insist on the prevalence of ‘locality’: a marketing strategy common to all sovereignisms, but one that works in a very limited way in Russia, being a country that is not exactly advantaged in its agricultural and industrial production capacities. And which - from gastronomy to so many aspects of social development - has historically always assimilated elements from abroad.
Putin is but the latest in a line of varjagi in Russian history, who tried to ‘bring civilisation’ to the lands across the border and around the world. Today, annexation is calculated not so much in square kilometres, but in sums of ‘traditional values’ such as the socialist revolution or the tsarist defence of autocracies might have been in the past.
A report in Novaja Gazeta documents the dramatic situation of the Russian and Ukrainian refugees. Governor Aleksej Smirnov stated that their number exceeds 150,000 people, abandoned by the authorities as the military defence of the area is already problematic.
The Faculty of Philosophy at Moscow’s main university held a forum on current events in Russia where speakers expressed positions that were not obvious and unambiguous. Without openly criticising the country’s power structure, philosophers show that they do not want to give up on the true dimension of the Russian soul, that of openness to all variants of the spirit.
As pressure grows from Moscow for the only ‘official and patriotic language’, Russian, Tatar intellectuals are discussing the ethnic prospects of their own and other ‘minor peoples’ within the Federation.
In response to Ukrainian raids on Russian territory with long-range missiles, Putin has repeatedly returned to conjuring up atomic weapons. The West is convinced that this is merely ‘psychological pressure’, but it is a belief based on 60-year-old theoretical models. While Karaganov, one of the Kremlin's most senior advisors, while ruling out the use of the ‘most devastating’ weapons, speaks of their use ‘in proportion to the attacks suffered’.
Today, Orthodoxy in Russia is increasingly characterised as a separate religion, which retains the formal aspect of Slavic-Eastern rite Christianity, while at the same time increasingly extending to other ‘patriotic’ confessions, to the point of also associating Islam and Buddhism in the single expression of the trinitarian homeland.
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