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Russia Back then, in the 1990s, people like [Irina] Frige [a leader of the Leningrad Memorial Society that preserves facts, images and objects related to the Gulag and its victims] were talking about "de-Communization,” which they imagined  would be like de-Nazification [in Germany]. But twenty years later, she was telling me that I was wrong to talk about forgetting because forgetting presupposes  remembering — and remembering had not happened, or had not happened yet. Masha Gessen, Never Remember  [2018] © 2022 Kwiple.com
Russia The borders of Russia never end. Vladimir Putin, in his role as chairman of the Russian Geographic Society, telling young geographers being honored at a ceremony in 2016, two years before invading Ukraine, the correct answer to the question, Where do Russia's borders end? © 2022 Kwiple.com
Russia Half the bricks would get stolen. Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin, responding to a question about what would happen if Russia were to build a wall to seal itself off from the west, as he imagined in his novel, Oprichnik  © 2022 Kwiple.com
Russia  In Soviet days most of us were really quite  happy with a  dacha, a colour TV and access  to special shops with some western goods, and holidays in Sochi. We were perfectly comfortable, and we only compared ourselves with the rest of  the population, not with the western elites. … It used to be that official rank gave you top status. Now you have to have huge amounts of money too. That is what the 1990s did to Russian society. A “senior former Soviet official” quoted by Anatol Lieven, Financial Times, Nov. 30, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Russia Land is the only thing we've got too much of. An old woman quoted by Colin Thubron in The Amur River: Between Russia and China © 2021 Kwiple.com
Russia The memo … which did not surface publiicly with the others … is based on one source described as “a senior Russian official.” The official said that he was merely relaying talk circulating in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but what he'd heard was astonishing: people were saying that the Kremlin had inter- vened to block Trump's initial choice for Secretary of State, Mitt Romney. … The memo said that the Kremlin, through un- specified channels, had asked Trump to appoint someone who would be prepared to lift Ukraine-related sanctions, and who would cooperate on security issues of inter- est to Russia, such as the conflict in Syria. Jane Mayer, New Yorker, March 12, 2018, on a Nov. 2016 memo by Christopher Steele © 2018 Kwiple.com
Russia Now, with the Kremlin once more bleeding men and resources in a foreign war, and again sagging under a torpid economy, western policymakers risk being caught out a second time.  Just as a failure of imagination blinded the  west to the Soviet Union's imminent demise, so the same failure — and an inability or reluctance to understand Russia as the colonial empire it remains — is blinding western policymakers to the potential for the Russian Federation’s dissolution. Casey Michel, Financial Times, Januaryt 10, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Russia The Russian democrat ends where the Ukrainian question begins. Volodymyr Vynnychenko, first Prime Minister of Ukraine, 1917-1918 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Russia Russia's problem was ultimately not just about its military weakness. Its problem was, and remains, its weakness in all relevant forms of power, including the power of attraction. At least during the Cold War a communist Soviet Union could claim to offer the path to paradise on earth. Yet afterward, Moscow could provide  neither ideology, nor security, nor prosperity, nor independence to it neighbors. It could offer only Russian nationalism and ambition, and eastern Europeans understandably had no interest in sacrificing themselves on that altar. Robert Kagan, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Russia There is very little that Russia can do to the US, say, that the US doesn't do to itself. Even the most ingenious outside force can only ignite the kindling that a country leaves lying around. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, November 30, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Russia The Ukraine war is, Lebedev says: “The defeat of Russian culture. And it is probably the final defeat.  Because if Russia is to have any future at all, it will have to become another country. Another Russia.” Financial Times, April 10, 2023, quoting Sergei Lebedev, the exiled Russian writer © 2023 Kwiple.com
 
The Russia thing  But regardless of the recommendation, I was going to fire Comey, knowing there was no good time to do it! And in fact when I decided to just do it I said to myself, I said, “You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it's an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should've won.” Donald Trump on firing James Comey © 2018 Kwiple.com