There is clearly a policy shift underway. We're talking about a bad trend; not just a cooling but a deterioration in relations.

Polls show the attitude of Russians toward Ukraine has deteriorated lately. So, people might easily believe that Ukrainians want to do them harm.

The goal of Kremlin strategists appears to be a weak coalition government in Ukraine that will be more vulnerable to Russian economic pressure. One twin is looking to Moscow, the other to Washington. And they can't separate.

(Motherland's policies) are very, very popular with the Russian people.

He was a big-time political operator. After he was pushed out of the country, his influence has dwindled.

At the time of the October Revolution, the Russian intellectual elite had been both a part and a partner to the European conversation about God, power, and human life. After fifty years of purges, arrests, and, most damaging, unrelenting pressure on what had become an isolated thought universe, the Russian intellectual landscape was populated by barely articulated ghosts of once vibrant ideas. Even Communist ideology was a shadow of its former self, a set of ritually repeated words that had lost all meaning.