Mr. Trump goes to Moscow
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…
Winterings in Trans-Scythia
Fragments of a blog
Winterings in Trans-Scythia
Fragments of a blog
Category business
Can a higher retirement age cause unemployment?
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 Russian Trump? What’s that?
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…
Immigration status of the dead
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…
Comments on the Yukos ruling by Hague district court
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…
Are the counter-sanctions working?
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…
Not in thrall to Gazprom (yet)
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…
Joint resistance to Gazprom not a strong argument against Brexit
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…
Domodedovo
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…
Entitled to his own facts
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…
Born in Ufa
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…
Flight 92-68
Transaero has one of the best safety records and Aeroflot has one of the youngest fleets in the world. But when a Russian family takes a vacation in Egypt, they have to turn to one of the smaller operators with…