(U.S. News & World Report) The top U.S. military official for Europe on Wednesday expressed concern that Russian President Vladimir Putin may attempt to spur another crisis abroad as a way to distract from the mounting political pressure at home – a fear analysts say has become all the more potent as supporters of now-imprisoned dissident Alexei Navalny set their sights on the Russian leader’s control over the levers of power. […]
“There are some worries,” Ivan Kurilla, a professor at the European University at St. Petersburg, tells U.S. News. He cites troubling rhetoric on Tuesday from Dmitry Medvedev – a close ally of the Russian leader – in which he called for “further integration with Belarus,” a former Soviet state that Russia has sharply warned against attempts to further ally itself with the West.
“That may mean nothing, but people did discuss the possibility of Russian-Belarusian ‘unification’ previously, either as a tool to keep Putin in power in the ‘new’ state or as a way to suppress Belarusian protests,” Kurilla says. […]
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The Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS Eurasia) is a network of over 125 academics, mainly from North America and post-Soviet Eurasia, advancing new approaches to research on security, politics, economics, and society in Russia and Eurasia. Its core missions are to connect scholarship to policy on and in Russia and Eurasia and to foster a community, especially of mid-career and rising scholars, committed to developing policy-relevant and collaborative research
