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12/01/11 | A JAIL FOR A THIEF. A THIEF FOR A JAIL. A reflection on the verdict in the Khodorkovsky & Lebedev trial

There doesn’t seem to be any common ground between critics and supporters of the guilty verdict in the trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev. (I feel obliged to at least mention Lebedev, if only once, in this piece. Hey, the man was accused of the same crimes as Khodorkovsky and got exactly the same punishment. Yet, in contrast to his superstar co-defendant, no one in the West calls this guy with a typical Russian surname a "political prisoner", nor suggests that his arrest in 2003 was a "watershed moment" in contemporary Russian history.)

07/01/11 | KHODORKOVSKY AND THE U.S. PRESS

Persons with criminal responsibility like the Russian Oligarchs, among others, would be Richard Marin, Jeffrey B. Lane, Mathew Tannin , Ralph Cioffie of Bear Stearn, Robert Rubin, Henry Paulson, Lloyd C. Blankfein and David Vinear of Goldman Sachs, Joseph Gassano, Maurice Greenberg, and Robert B. Willumstad, of AIG, Daniel Mudd of Fannie Me, Angelo Mozilo of Country Wide. Yet these people are all walking around free. They caused more pain, more unemployment, and more economic destruction than Khodorkovsky, but the U.S. press only talks about a small timer like Bernie Madoff.

18/12/10 | GEOPOLITICS FOR DUMMIES: What does the collapse of the Soviet Union really mean?

Regardless of how one would characterize the collapse of the Soviet Union — as the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century" or just its "major geopolitical disaster" — everyone appears to agree that it was one of the 20th century’s most fateful geopolitical events. Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin once called it a "genuine drama" for the Russian nation. In contrast, many in the West celebrated the disappearance of the Soviet Union as a Cold War trophy and a sign of the "end of history."

04/12/10 | WIKILEAKS AS A MIRROR ON THE WEST

A foreign «subversive» journalist, driven by fevered idealism, publishes reams of leaked internal documents from an Authority that, beneath its carefully positioned mask of civility, honor and justice, views the whole world — of both friend or foe — as its own playground, and engages in the most corrupt and underhanded wheelings and dealing to maintain its lofty pretensions to hegemony. Though the Authority is entirely comfortable with selectively using the material contained therein to legitimize its ideological-imperialist projects to the public, its minions in the Mainstream Media and even its most prominent Archons experience no cognitive dissonance in calling for that accursed fiend, the revealer, to be branded with the number of the Beast that is «terrorist», and to be henceforth sentenced to eternal imprisonment, or the death penalty, or the most apocalyptic of all, a Perunian thunderstrike from the skies. Now if this were real life as allegory, what would it it refer to?

24/11/10 | THE RUSSIA — NATO SUMMIT: The Beginning Of The Beginning

The past week was everything but boring for those watching Russia’s foreign policy. On Tuesday, word came out of Washington that the New START treaty signed by Presidents Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama last April is unlikely to be ratified during the lame duck session of U. S. Senate this year. Branded as a signature achievement of the Obama administration’s policy of "reset" with Russia, the treaty’s was expected to be quickly approved by the Senate and the Russian Duma and was supposed to lead to further arms control negotiations and to closer cooperation between the two countries in other areas. A delay in ratification of the treaty, not to mention the prospect of its eventual dying on the Senate floor, is a serious setback for the American president and his Russian counterpart as well.

01/10/10 | URGENT: COUP UNDERWAY IN ECUADOR

A coup attempt is underway against the government of President Rafael Correa. On Thursday morning, groups of police forces rebelled and took over key strategic sites in Quito, Ecuador’s capital. President Correa immediately went to the military base occupied by the police leading the protest to work out a solution to the situation. The police protesting claimed a new law passed on Wednesday regarding public officials would reduce their benefits.

12/09/10 | THE VALUES GAP

Characteristically, The Economist’s article puts the blame for the situation on "the system." In contrast, the disciples of the "values gap" show no restraint in calling names: they quickly accused directly Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in Mr. Ponomarev’s arrest. The logic of that is questionable. Why should Putin be blamed for every stupidity of the Moscow law enforcement authorities while no one is blaming President Obama for the jailing of a Florida man, Harry Bruder, who sent a Facebook "friend" request to his estranged wife?

13/08/10 | RUSSIA GAINED IN SOLITUDE THE SECOND WORLD WAR IN EUROPE

The commemoration of anniversary of the beginning of the second world war demonstrates the western disgrace again, the German invasion being compared to the Russian sacrifice and comparing the slaughter of Polish officials in Katyn (15 — 20.000 dead persons) and for political causes, with the sacrifice of million Russians, between 25 and 30 and of them nearly 20 million civil innocent persons, women and children mostly, again the propaganda acts without bearing in mind either the facts or the magnitude of the numbers.

10/08/10 | "OCCUPIED" OR "LIBERATED" TERRITORIES? The smoke and mirrors of caucasian semantics

Almost two decades of de facto independence became de iure in August 2008 with Russia’s recognition, and Russia’s military presence now provides the necessary bulwark for the freedom which the Abkhazians and South Ossetians secured at the cost of so many lives and damage inflicted on the infrastructure and economy of their countries. Nicaragua, Venezuela and Nauru have followed Russia’s lead, and the Abkhazians and South Ossetians are working hard to gain even wider diplomatic support, which they readily acknowledge will be a slow process, given the international community’s initial folly of precipitately recognising Georgia within its Soviet boundaries and that unsympathetic and largely ignorant community’s consequent perception of a need to go on mouthing support for an unsustainable territorial integrity — fine-sounding words but with absolutely no relevance to the facts on the ground.

07/08/10 | NO RUSSIAN IN THE LAND OF POTEMKIN. Russian-speakers continue to struggle with Ukraine’s language laws, despite the election of Viktor Yanukovich

A newcomer to Odessa, a city of 1 million people on the Black Sea coast of Ukraine, gets a strange feeling. Everyone in the street speaks Russian, but all the street signs, shop names and advertising are in Ukrainian. The two languages are so close that it does not require too much effort to guess the meaning of a sign, even if you only know one of the languages.