Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
The first centenary of the Kars Treaty between three Soviet Republics and Turkey is coming up in October. Its predecessor, the Treaty of Moscow between Russia and Turkey, turned 100 in March 2021. It’s probably worth repeating that 2015 marked…
Simon Saradzhyan has published a long article on the 2020 Karabakh war in The Moscow Times and uploaded an unabridged version of it to his site. I would suggest reading it after or alongside Mark Galeotti’s earlier piece while keeping…
Back in 2014, more than two years before Trump’s elevation to the presidency, Edward Luttwak summed up his thoughts on grand strategy in application to the Napoleonic wars: In retrospect the fight against Napoleon seems to have engendered a new…
Mark Galeotti in the Moscow Times: its [the Kremlin’s] inability and seeming unwillingness to control this six-week war had become increasingly problematic, especially as Armenia… was suffering attacks even on its own territory. This was all the more serious given…
Four and a half years ago, there was a brief outbreak of fighting in Nagorny Karabakh. It had been waiting to happen, I said then, as Azerbaijan had been investing its oil revenues in rearmament and was ready to strike.…
The new outbreak of armed conflict in Nagorny Karabakh this weekend was waiting to happen. Azerbaijan has used some of the boomtime oil money to rearm, and Armenia has tried to keep up although it cannot afford to match the Azeri additions plane…
Looking at the map showing the routes of the Russian bomber and its Turkish pursuers, I noticed that the Turkish planes appeared to have taken off from somewhere close to Musa Dagh, where a small group of Armenians resisted Ottoman…
Neither Edward Luttwak, in his 2015 review of They Can Live in the Desert and Nowhere Else by Ronald Grigor Suny, nor Mark Mazower, in his 2001 review of The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-16 by James…
The pending closure of Dmitry Zimin’s Dynasty Foundation is the latest episode in the Kremlin’ campaign against independent NGOs. True to the principle of rule by (as opposed to of) law, Putin has badgered them with two recent bills, on foreign agents and on undesirable organizations.…
Two images from Moscow. “We Remember 1915” written in red under an image painted in black on the wall of an underground walkway. The side panel of a bus stop. In the upper right corner: “100 years 1915-2015 // April…
Shortly after the Boston marathon bombings, the media reported that the Tsarnaev brothers were brainwashed by an Islamic preacher known as “Misha.” It turned out that Misha was neither Islamic nor a preacher nor a brainwasher. His full name is Mikhail…
Paul Cella discusses Disraeli the Nationalist, quoting David Gelernter. The latter, I have to agree with the former, is a “formidable writer” indeed (I did learn a few things from his Weekly Standard article), and Lord Beaconsfield as subject matter…