Yury Zhigalkin is a correspondent for RFE/RL's Russian Service.
On September 30, Russian President Vladimir Putin presided over a ceremony to claim large swathes of Ukrainian territory as permanent and nonnegotiable parts of Russia. That move has recast the Ukraine war as a zero-sum competition careening toward some alarming possible outcomes.
Dmitry Gorenburg, a U.S.-based expert on the Russian Navy, says there is an incident such as a fire or systems failure aboard a Russian submarine once every five or six years, more than three times as often as aboard their U.S. counterparts.
The composer's great-great-granddaughter says one of the giants of 19th- and 20th-century classical music had turned the page on a Russia that "no longer existed," no matter what Moscow says.
