Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
The frenzied, absurd, profligate “urban redevelopment” underway in Moscow under Mayor Sergei Sobyanin fills me with a low-grade, drone-like dread of what’s to come. Throwing money to the wind seldom if ever resolves itself into respectable austerity: abject misery is the default…
Trump commenting in 1990 on his visit to the USSR in 1983 or 84 [it was 1987: I got the date wrong in the original version of the post]: Once you got to Moscow, how did the negotiations go? I…
Putin’s principal economic adviser, former economy minister Andrei Belousov, is generally a sensible man, in stark contrast to his colleague Sergei Glazyev, an economic Chavista and a worshipper of the printing press. Speaking of the proposal to raise the retirement age…
A joke by one of the Russian crusaders against bogus doctorates: Andrei Zayakin, another Dissernet co-founder, summed it up this way: “A Russian Donald Trump would certainly have a dissertation — maybe two or three.” Not a particularly good joke – what’s…
The Guardian sums up reports from the Khovanskoye cemetery in the South-West of Moscow, a most unlikely location, one would think, for violence of this sort: At least three people were killed on Saturday when a mass brawl involving hundreds…
Not much commentary on the latest Yukos judgment. Keith Johnson writes: “The district court ruling is a small setback, not a defeat, for Yukos shareholders” in Foreign Policy. I’d like to think so but I’m not sure. Opinio Juris, a…
You bet. Not quite the way there were officially supposed to, but very much the way they were predicted to work. I’m talking about the import bans that Russia imposed in August 2014 on food produced in the EU? As…
A follow-up to Thursday’s post on Gazprom and the UK. Reuters sounded alarmist when it reported in 2015: Russia provides around 30 percent of the EU’s gas and a single supply deal signed last year by Britain’s biggest energy supplier Centrica meant…
Amber Rudd, the UK energy secretary, is expected to offer these arguments against Brexit: Relying on energy from abroad is not without risk. We have seen how countries such as Putin’s Russia use their gas supplies as a tool of…
Either someone wants real bad to grab Domodedovo from this guy, or it’s a personal vendetta waged by a powerful official, or both: The owner of Moscow’s Domodedovo airport, the biggest in Russia, has been by law enforcement officers… …[C]harges against…
It turns out that the English translation of Mededev’s Handelsblatt interview is an abridged version. The Russian text includes at least three questions excised from the English version. Among other things cut out, Medvedev claims that when he first moved to Moscow…
Is Putin Thinking About Changing His Ways? asks Anna Nemtsova (not related to the late politician, Boris Nemtsov)… no, I don’t think Putin is going to “change his ways.” What got me interested was this big of information: Elvira Nabiullina, a…