Russian Convicts Moscow Forcing to Fight in Ukraine Often Put in Front Lines and are First to Die There, ‘Regional Dimension’ Reports

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Mar. 3 – In the first year of Putin’s expanded war in Ukraine, Moscow had little trouble getting convicts to volunteer to fight in Ukraine in exchange for a pardon; but more recently, fewer convicts have been prepared to volunteer and so Russian jailors have been exerting ever more administrative pressures.
    One reason this is so is that word has filtered back that when convicts who have agreed to serve in Ukraine arrive there, they are often immediately put in the front lines where many if not all of them are killed. Those in prison don’t see escape from prison only to face near certain death as a good option.
    The reason that Russian commanders use such troops in this way is clear as well. These are not the obedient soldiers officers want, and they are only too glad to use them as cannon fodder, especially as they know Russian officials probably aren’t displeased by such losses given how angry Russians are becoming about crimes committed by ex-cons who do manage to return.     
    This pattern is not one that Kremlin media are interested in reporting, but the Regional Dimension portal has documented it, a task made easier because the relatives of former convicts who have been killed have banded together in order to protest what is going on (regaspect.info/2025/03/03/bez-prava-na-zhizn/).

Warming of Ocean, Not Just of Atmosphere, Behind Loss of Glaciation in Article Littoral, Norwegian Scholars Conclude

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Mar. 3 – In a finding with enormous implications for Arctic littoral states, including the Russian Federation, a group of Norwegian researchers have concluded that the warming of the oceans and not just of the atmosphere is behind the declining size of glaciers emptying into the Arctic.
    The study (Foss, Ø., Maton, J., Moholdt, G. et al. Ocean warming drives immediate mass loss from calving glaciers in the high Arctic. Nature Communications 15, 10460 (2024)) focused on the situation in the Svalbard archipelago and his reported and reviewed at thebarentsobserver.com/news/surprising-discovery-about-svalbards-largest-glacier/425753.
    It suggests that the impact of Atlantification, the warming of the Arctic as the result of the influx of warmer waters from the North Atlantic, may have an eve more rapid impact on glaciers and adjoining land areas than anyone had hitherto suggested (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2025/03/atlantification-of-arctic-ocean.html).  
    That will have enormous consequences for many countries, including the Russian Federation, there first in Novaya Zemlya and Franz Joseph Land but then across the entire northern coast of that country where this component of global warming will need to be taken into consideration in all projections of global warming there.  

Russian Sociologist Says American Ruling Elite Now Following ‘Typically Soviet Traditions’

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Mar. 3 – Igor Eidman, a Russian sociologist who now lives in Berlin exile, says that under President Donald Trump, the ruling elite is restoring “typically Soviet traditions,” including a cult around the leader, servility before him, doublethink and readiness to change directions upon instructions from that leader.
    According to the sociologist, “the cult of Trump has already surpassed the glorification of ‘dear Leonid Ilich’ and approached that of Stalin: The leader is always right, period. Anyone who doubts is an enemy of the people and anyone who argues with the leader is insulting the country (t.me/igoreidman/2037 reposted at https://echofm.online/opinions/amerikanskij-sovok-i-ego-vozhd).h
    Eidman continues: “Trump’s boorish attack on Zelensky is somewhat reminiscent of the start of the conflict between Stalin and Tito. At the end of the war, Yugoslav leaders timidly complained that Soviet soldiers were raping local women.” Stalin was outraged and immediately went on the attack.
    “Interestingly,” the Russian commentator says, “Stalin accused Tito as Trump has Zelensky, of ingratitude.” “You cannot help but know that the Soviet government, despite colossal sacrifices and losses is doing everything possible and even impossible to help you  … You can’t insult the army that helps you like that,” the Soviet dictator said.
    Tito went from being viewed as a hero to an enemy overnight. “As soon as Stalin took offense, all Soviet leaders began to imitate hatred towards the leader of Yugoslavia,” Eidman says. “The same is true now: as soon as Trump and Vance attacked Zelensky, most of the Republicans who had earlier sympathized with Ukraine, servilely joined in these attacks.”
    Russians remember that in Soviet times, people “cut out the faces of friends declared to be enemies of the people” from photographs, he continues. “Many Republicans are behaving int eh same way. Senator Roger Wicker for example immediately deleted a post with a photo of himself shaking hands with Zelensky after Trump’s display of anger.”
    Such people, Eidman argues, “are themselves against Putin and in their hearts are for Ukraine, but they publicly support the anti-Ukrainian hysteria of the narcissistic boss.” That parallels what happened in the USSR: “Soviet party critics condemned ‘dissident bourgeois art,’ while at the same time secretly collecting” the paintings and poems they slandered.
    In short, “the Republican Party is becoming an American clone of the CPSU. Several party dissidents still sit in Congress, but they probably will be purged in the next round of primaries and will not be allowed to take part in elections again. The rest praise Comrade Trump, ‘the organizer and inspirer o all our victories.’ Slaves, miserable slaves.”
    And these parallels will continue after Putin leaves the scene. When the situation changes, when criticizing the leader becomes not dangerous but profitable, the party slaves will gladly take him out of the virtual Mausoleum and declare that ‘our father turned out to be not a father but a bastard,’ just as their Soviet predecessors did after 1953.

Moscow Must Tale Harsh Measures Now to Counter Islamization of Dagestan or Risk an Explosion, Russia’s Nationalities Agency Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Mar. 3 – Russia’s Federal Agency for Nationality Affairs says that Moscow must take harsh measures now against the further Islamization of Dagestan or risk an explosion in that North Caucasian republic, according to a report by Germany’s Spiegel magazine that has been picked up by Russian and Ukrainian outlets.
    The original German report, “Putin’s Fear of Dagestan,” is available at spiegel.de/ausland/internes-kreml-dokument-putins-angst-vor-dagestan-a-26847612-47d0-4897-9514-e9cfad22f608. It has been summarized and commented upon by akcent.site/eksklyuziv/39503 and dialog.ua/russia/310270_1740935841).
    The article stress that Dagestan is “on the brink of a social explosion” because of decaying infrastructure and corruption but appears likely to explode in the near future because of the continuing Islamization of the population, a development that may force Putin to turn his attention to that republic in the near future.
    The Russian nationality affairs agency calls for introducing a ban on religious leaders serving in government positions and their immediate replacement by veterans of the war in Ukraine and for prohibiting Islamic dress in the republic’s schools, actions that could easily spark a backlash in what is the most Muslim of the non-Russian republics in Russia today.
    The trigger for such a backlash could come soon: the agency is also calling for dismissing the leadership of the republic’s Muslim Spiritual Directorate (MSD) whose head Moscow has long viewed as a moderate who has helped Russia keep the lid on there but who is now pushing a tough Islamist line that threatens Moscow’s control of the republic.

‘Atlantification’ of Arctic Ocean Reducing Ice Cover All the Way to the Bering Straits, New Research Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Mar. 1 – The impact of global warming on the Arctic and its ice cover has attracted enormous attention, but one aspect of this process has not, the process known as Atlantification in which the arrival of warmer waters from the Atlantic is accelerating the melting of sea ice in the Arctic all the way to the Bering Straits.
    As part of its Eye on the Arctic series, Ellis Quinn of The Barents Observer discusses the latest research on this process, one that is having a far larger and broader impact on the Arctic Ocean than anyone had though  earlier (thebarentsobserver.com/news/atlantification-ushering-in-new-era-of-sea-ice-loss-in-the-siberian-arctic/425321).
    That groundbreaking  research about the process itself is contained in a new article by two Russian scholars working abroad, two South Koreans and one American, in the current issue of Science Advances and is available in English online at science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.adq7580.
    The more rapid melting of Arctic sea ice that Atlantification makes possible will have an impact on weather patterns as well as on the melting of permafrost in the Russian north, but its most immediate consequence will be to change the environment in which NSR trade and the navies of various countries active in the Arctic operate.
    As such, its findings need to be factored in to all discussions of the Arctic and its future.

Milovan Dzhilas’ Classic ‘The New Class’ Precisely Describes the Political and Administrative Elite of Post-Soviet Russia, Expert on Russian Regions Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Mar. 1 – After Yugoslav communist leader and theorist Milovan Dzhilas published his description of the post-Stalinist Soviet Union in his 1957 classic, The New Class, many accepted his ideas and used them to describe and analyze the Soviet system. Now, an expert on Russian regions argues that Dzhilas’ ideas apply to post-Soviet Russia as well.
    Dmitry Loboyko, the sociologist who heads Samara’s Center for Regional Research, made that argument in the Russian journal Sotsiologiya at the end of last year (https://regional.expert/science_articles/novyii%CC%86-klass-milovana-dzhilasa-kak-opisatelnaya-model-politiko-administrativnoi%CC%86-elityi.pdf) and has reposted it on his organization’s web page (regional.expert/«novyij-klass»-milovana-dzhilasa-kak-opisatelnaya-model-politiko-administrativnoj-elityi-postsovetskoj-rossii.html).
    Dzhilas argued that the rulers of the Soviet Union were best understood as a class rather than as an administrative category and behaved in much the same way that ruling classes always do, extracted resources for themselves, taking them away from others, and ultimately sparking revolutionary strivings among the latter.
    What is striking about Loboyko’s article is that he applies Dzhilas’ thinking not just to the USSR but to the Russian Federation since 1991 and that this argument is being put forward not by someone in Moscow but by a scholar in the regions  who specializes in the ways in which society and government work beyond the ring road.  

Protests against Building New Mosque in Perm Becoming Increasingly Xenophobic, ‘Novaya Gazeta’ Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Mar. 2 – Opposition to the construction of new religious facilities in Russia almost invariably has a xenophobic component if the proposed building is for members of a different faith than that of the majority of local residents, and as a result, such NIMBY protests frequently grow into xenophobic campaigns, Novaya Gazeta reports.
    That is what has happened in Perm where plans by the local Muslim community to build a mosque, plans that had enjoyed the approval of the city government, have sparked a xenophobic campaign because many local Russians believe a mosque will be a magnet of immigrants and radicals (novayagazeta.eu/articles/2025/03/02/snegoviki-v-nikabakh).
    According to that paper’s journalist Lyubov Borisenko, last month, Perm residents came out to protest the construction of a mosque. Instead of traditional slogans, they “made snowmen and dressed them in niqabs and then hung on these snowmen Islamophobic placards,” opening a new stage of ethnic conflict in Perm.  
    These actions have been organized by a local Russian woman who has run afoul of the law for her extreme nationalist and traditionalist positions, including attacks on the gay community and migrants. And they have been supported by a petition signed by almost 5,000 people against the construction of the mosque.
    Russian officials have promised to investigate what has happened, but so far, they have not released their report – and the protests against the construction of a mosque in Perm have continued.