Epstein Secrets

uld entail a heavy cost, including the possibility of a shooting war in which they are obliged to defend small NATO member states like Estonia and Latvia. The 'Russian world' A favorite theme of Kremlin propaganda is the so- called Russian world, a cultural or civilizational space that extends beyon

MOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians In May 2014, Putin signed a new law that criminalized the purposeful distortion of the Soviet Union's role in World War II. It could easily be applied to historians who, for example, criticize Stalin's Great Terror and its decimation of the militar

ely to become a wider war in the Middle East. Second, think about the Baltics. Imagine a scenario in which we see a replay of Crimea or Donetsk in Latvia where one quarter of the population are ethnic Russians or Russian speakers. With or without Putin's encouragement, several hundred of them occupy

the rebel-controlled eastern Ukrainian city of Slovyansk. The week ahead will see two decisive days of reckoning: May 9, when Russians commemorate the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany, and May 11, when pro-Russian separatists occupying government buildings in a dozen cities in eastern Ukraine will hold a

he 1980 Solidarity movement, asked rhetorically at the aforementioned panel: "Will a European or an American want to go to war to defend Estonia or Latvia, both of them members of NATO and the EU, if Putin invades them 'to protect the large ethnic Russian minorities' there?" The audience responded wit

ith Soviet subsidies, and stem any risk of contagion within the Soviet bloc, which proved an immense economic burden that eventually contributed to the Soviet Union's final economic crisis. In Putin's case, as in Khrushchev's, short-term gains could boomerang into long-term disasters. CYNTHIA A. ROBERTS teaches