br23 blog - minsk, belarus

“The Muscovites were waxing powerful, but were still vassals. It was in that period [14-15th centuries] that the Muscovites began to call their state by the Greek name for Rus’, Rossiya (Russia), and to call themselves Russians. These Muscovite-Russians had never ruled over Kiev; but the disability did not prevent them from regarding Moscow as […]

As an ethnic group, Belarusians may be new to Americans but they are not newcomers to this country, and their first linkage with America may have been our ubiquitous soldier-adventurer Captain John Smith. Smith had traveled through Belarus in 1603 when it was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the craftsmen he brought to Virginia’s […]

After all, all those Balkan jokes about Albanian military were not totally off the mark:
Albania’s antiquated air force of Soviet-designed MiG aircraft, which killed 35 Albanian pilots but no enemies, is finally on its way to the museum and the scrapheap
A satellite of Soviet Union and China during the first decades of the Cold War, […]

On 29th of October Belarusian police arrested 70 members of an independent election monitoring group attempting to register their group with the country’s authorities. So they had a meeting at the theatre to prepare registration documents (which is perfectly legal), but police raided the building and arrested all 70 members on charges of attending “an […]