The Dilettante abides
The Dilettante abides
Bellingcat has published the results of yet another investigation into the Kremlin’s poison brigade. Three more deaths – previously regarded as suspicious – can now be assigned to the actions of that hit squad with a likelihood high enough for…
For a long time I could not wrap my mind around the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko. Later I had trouble believing that Sergei Skripal had been poisoned by the Kremlin, until the evidence became incontrovertible. I could not explain to…
Sergei Dovlatov once remarked: “In Soviet newspapers, only misprints are truthful.” His first example was gavnokomanduyushchiy instead of glavnokomanduyushchiy — “Commander-in-Shit” for “Commander-in-Chief,” roughly speaking. Dovlatov did not live to witness the spread of spell checkers and autocorrectors. We’re all…
CNN has published a summary of its joint investigation with Bellingcat into the poisoning of Alexei Navalny in August 2020. By examining thousands of phone records along with flight manifests and other documents obtained by Bellingcat, this joint months-long investigation…
When Trump visited Moscow in 1987, he did some preliminary probing for a possible real estate deal but came back disappointed: the USSR had no private ownership of land at all and the dispute resolution procedure his Soviet counterparts proposed…
From a conversation with Edward Luttwak published by the Wall Street Journal in March 2020: Ranching has been more than an investment. It has helped him understand the fundamental weakness of post-Soviet Russia. “Between Vladivostok and the North Korean border,…
At the Vereshchagin retrospective in 2018, I spent some time staring at a painting of a ruined Chinese theater somewhere in Central Asia. After posting these notes on Altishar and Kashgaria, I wondered if had Vereshchagin found his theatrical ruins…
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…
The latest from Armenia: Russian peacekeepers have departed for Nagorno-Karabakh after Moscow brokered a peace deal that sparked celebrations in Azerbaijan and protests in Armenia, where demonstrators briefly occupied government buildings. The truce, announced late on Monday night, calls for…
This is a low-resolution view of Moscow from the Yauzsky boulevard, less than half a mile from the building I discussed in these two posts. I’m partial to this shot because it reveals (I hope) so much about the city…
More pictures of the Dankman-Rusanova-Simakin campus building on the Ivanovskaya Hill in Moscow – from the well-preserved northern section on the left, rightwards to the dorm sections extending south, to the burned-out southern section. Someone tried to rebuild it but…
Putin told Macron that Alexei Navalny might have poisoned himself, according to this report by Le Monde. It’s a leak from the telephone conversation between Macron and Putin on September 14, 2020. Here are some juicy bits in my translation:…