March 30:
Russia's weak economy is impacting the country's state natural gas giant, Bloomberg reports. Russian natural gas monopoly Gazprom has revealed that its earnings for last year fell by some 70 percent. The disclosure, made in a regulatory finding, pegs the state monopoly's 2014 revenues were 189 billion rubles - down some 70 percent from the 628 billion ruble dividend of the preceding year.
March 31:
Australia is expanding its economic pressure on Russia, The Moscow Times reports. New measures just passed by the government of Prime Minister Tony Abbott in Canberra have expanded economic penalties against Russia's arms, energy and financial sectors. According to the Australian Foreign Ministry, the new sanctions - originally announced in September of 2014 - were activated in response to "Russia's ongoing threat to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine."
Russians are waxing ever more nostalgic for the Stalin era, new poll findings show. According to The Moscow Times, the Moscow-based Levada Center has found that forty-five percent of respondents in a new poll believe that political and economic "sacrifices" during the rule of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin - including Stalin's infamous purges and a pervasive campaign of state terror - were at least somewhat justified as a catalyst for the country's development. The survey charts a notable increase in these positive sentiments; when asked the same question two years ago, only a quarter of those polled by the Levada Center believed that Stalin's brutal domestic measures were justified.
[EDITOR'S NOTE: Given the effect of Russia's increasingly authoritarian political climate on pollsters and respondents alike, the results of public opinion surveys in Russia should be viewed with some caution.]
That Russian President Vladimir Putin previously served in the KGB is an open secret. However, the rank held by the current Russian head of state is apparently not. Business Insider, citing well-known defector Oleg Kalugin, reports that Putin "was just a major" when he resigned from the intelligence service in 1991 to pursue a life in politics. Putin has previously claimed that he attained the rank of lieutenant colonel during his time with the KGB.
April 1:
Increasingly, Russia's military involvement in Ukraine is breaking into the open. VICE reports that Russian soldiers are speaking out more and more about their service in Ukraine. "Naturally, all operations, especially large-scale ones like encirclements, are directed by Russian soldiers, Russian generals," one "volunteer" who previously fought on the Ukrainian front alongside pro-Russian separatists there tells the news site. "They make plans together with our commanders. I often had to go to the headquarters to provide some information."
April 2:
Russian President Vladimir Putin is threatening NATO with massive escalation. According to the Times of London, a recent meeting of Russian and U.S. military officials included threats by the Russian side that Moscow is prepared to use "nuclear force" to defend its grip on the recently-annexed Crimean Peninsula, and a warning that the "same conditions" that prompted it to intervene in Ukraine currently exist in the Baltic states as well. Russia, moreover, appears to be prepared to escalate in response to the potential provision of Western arms to Ukraine; the minutes of the meeting, obtained by the Times, make clear that Russia would view shipments of NATO military aid to the government of Petro Poroshenko in Kyiv as "further encroachment by Nato to the Russian border," a development to which "the Russian people would demand a forceful response."
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