Word: sovietize
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...endorse and enforce tougher action to combat the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea and to quit bullying democratic neighbors like Ukraine and Georgia. Russia would like the U.S. to recognize that it has its own sphere of influence in the "near abroad" - the territory of the old Soviet Union - and halt NATO's expansion to the east. More generally, Moscow would like some respect. "The Russians want to belong. They want to feel big," says Finland's Foreign Minister, Alexander Stubb, who has met with both Medvedev and Putin since Obama's Inauguration. "There's a sense...
...relatives of the dead unfurled a memorial in Moscow on the second anniversary of the disaster, not a single senior government official attended. This is not surprising. The Kursk went down when one of its torpedoes blew up. Remembering this sort of self-inflicted tragedy would conflict with Soviet - and post-Soviet - myth-making about the power and glory of the Russian military. (See pictures from the mission to recover victims from the Kursk...
This is the kind of remembering the Kremlin has yet to embrace. Memorials in Soviet times were monuments to national greatness: towering monoliths like Lyosha, the 115-ft. (35 m) statue of a soldier down the road from the future Kursk memorial. These Soviet-era monuments were designed to inculcate belief in (and fear of) the regime. Like his Soviet predecessors, Putin has shown a distaste for acknowledging weakness or tragedy. "In the Russian mentality," says Anna Kireeva of the environmental group Bellona, which investigated the Kursk sinking out of concern that nuclear waste might seep from the submarine, "there...
...decades of anti-nuclear activism will have been for nothing. "Many people still protest, but Chernobyl happened 23 years ago, and since then it has been a process of forgetting," says Gillig, whose two children were toddlers when the radioactive plume drifted over Germany from what was then the Soviet Union. (See pictures of Russia celebrating Victory...
...influence" is a term of diplomatic art, which is often invoked by the Russian government and Western nations in discussing plans for a NATO expansion and the European Commission's Eastern Partnership effort. In his speech, Obama distinguished between Europe's efforts to grow its diplomatic relations with former Soviet bloc countries and Russia's efforts to keep significant influence over its neighboring nations. "America will never impose a security arrangement on another country. For any country to become a member of an organization like NATO, for example, a majority of its people must choose to [join]," Obama said...