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NO RUSSIAN IN THE LAND OF POTEMKIN. Russian-speakers continue to struggle with Ukraine’s language laws, despite the election of Viktor Yanukovich
A newcomer to Odessa, a city of 1 million people on the Black Sea coast of Ukraine, gets a strange feeling. Everyone in the street speaks Russian, but all the street signs, shop names and advertising are in Ukrainian. The two languages are so close that it does not require too much effort to guess the meaning of a sign, even if you only know one of the languages.
"OCCUPIED" OR "LIBERATED" TERRITORIES? The smoke and mirrors of caucasian semantics
Almost two decades of de facto independence became de iure in August 2008 with Russia’s recognition, and Russia’s military presence now provides the necessary bulwark for the freedom which the Abkhazians and South Ossetians secured at the cost of so many lives and damage inflicted on the infrastructure and economy of their countries. Nicaragua, Venezuela and Nauru have followed Russia’s lead, and the Abkhazians and South Ossetians are working hard to gain even wider diplomatic support, which they readily acknowledge will be a slow process, given the international community’s initial folly of precipitately recognising Georgia within its Soviet boundaries and that unsympathetic and largely ignorant community’s consequent perception of a need to go on mouthing support for an unsustainable territorial integrity - fine-sounding words but with absolutely no relevance to the facts on the ground.