Poor Icarus
Turning away from Auden’s Icarus, if only for a moment. What follows is my approximate prose rendering, line by line, of a poem written in Russian in 1984 or a little earlier. Its author, Dmitry Shagin, is a major figure…
Winterings in Trans-Scythia
Fragments of a blog
Winterings in Trans-Scythia
Fragments of a blog
Category Russia
Pretend it’s voluntary
News from S&P Global Platts on the upcoming OPEC+ meeting (online): Saudi Arabia and Russia… have insisted that they will only participate [in an agreement to reduce oil output] if the US also agrees to production cuts. A condition unlikely…
An orderly reduction now or panic shutdowns later?
Bloomberg ran this column by Julian Lee on Sunday: Here’s what Saudi Arabia needs to do. At the virtual meeting of oil producers… it should give its counterparts — including those who don’t show up — a clear binary choice…
“Regular blood exchanges”
Here’s Sophie Pinkham for The Nation, reviewing The Future of Immortality: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia by Anya Bernstein: Aleksandr Bogdanov, a prominent early Bolshevik and science fiction writer, investigated the rejuvenating properties of blood transfusions in the…
Nothing like slamming the door on a good deal
A fund manager running a private equity fund out of Luxembourg writes: Regarding what happened on the ground, one can assume that Saudi Arabia had prepared a plan A and a contingency plan before entering the talks. Plan A was…
Conqueror of the Coronavirus in General and Russia in Particular
The Guardian reports from Moscow: Moscow woke up to a mandatory lockdown on Monday, as the 12.5 million residents of the Russian capital were told to stay indoors in order to slow the spread of coronavirus. The restrictions are some…
Limonov
When Eduard Limonov died, five days ago, obituaries appeared the world over. The New York Times, The Los Angeles TImes, Le Monde, La Repubblica, El País, O Público. Limonov was a uniquely talented, original poet, a gifted fiction writer, and…
“At the appropriate time, I will get involved, yes.”
Excerpts from a piece in the Wall Street Journal published on Thursday: Administration and industry officials see diplomatic action as necessary to get Russia and Saudi Arabia to back down from flooding the markets with supply… The U.S. would ask…
“Provide people with the opportunity to spend 60 days at home”
There have only been 45 COVID-19 cases in Russia so far – a rather low number considering that Russia does lots of business with China and the EU. Inevitably, one suspects undertesting and/or underreporting. The true number of infected persons?…
A great military power
The BBC’s Russian service reported on Monday (the translation is my own): The prosecution in the MH17 crash case has claimed that at least two Buk missile launchers were dispatched from Russia to Ukraine in 2014 but one of them…
If timing is everything, why the hurry?
I’ll start by quoting myself (as of January 17, 2020): … if Putin remains politically active, the new setup will let him stay in charge for as long as he wants. It could even enable him to take a less…
The meltdown
Saudi Arabia has responded to Russia’s refusal to cooperate by cutting prices and threatening (credibly, it seems) to raise output: The kingdom plans to pump more than 10m [million, not thousand] barrels a day next month while announcing unprecedented discounts…