Disrupt and escalate
It was a black Friday for the oil market: OPEC and non-OPEC allies failed on Friday to agree on how much oil production to cut amid the coronavirus outbreak, with Russia reportedly refusing to give the green light to the…
Winterings in Trans-Scythia
Fragments of a blog
Winterings in Trans-Scythia
Fragments of a blog
Category Russia
The ostrich approach to the epidemic: could it work?
A Chinese college student living with his family in Wuhan was unwell on January 17, became seriously ill by Jan. 21 and started feeling better after a life-threatening crisis on Jan. 26. He had been treated by doctors from a…
Russia as a political zombieland
One more thought about Putin’s hasty edits to the constitution. Let’s say under the current constitution the president may do A but not B. (Either B strictly belongs in the legislative domain, or it is out of reach of any…
Putin’s “constitutional coup”
This is how some Russian commenters have called Putin’s plan to change the constitution. I’m not claiming I understand the strategy behind the changes or their intended consequences. I would guess that, if Putin remains politically active, the new setup…
Doomsday thoughts for the new year
Two weeks ago, Steve Rosenberg at the BBC quoted the Russian political scientist (and historian) Valery Solovei: “Yeltsin believed he had a mission, and so does Putin… Yeltsin saw himself as Moses: he wanted to lead his country out of…
Contamination 3
Reuters sheds a new light on the Druzhba contamination case: The substance that brought one of Russia’s longest oil pipelines to a halt in April was carbon tetrachloride, a lethal chemical meant to be tightly controlled by an international agreement,…
“A stunning deception”
Last week week, The Guardian reported this predictable development: Russia has been handed a four-year ban from international sporting competition for a doping cover-up… An emergency meeting of the World Anti-Doping Agency on Monday unanimously voted to exclude Russia and…
Speaking as a free man
Meduza reported from Moscow yesterday: Prosecutors have asked for a four-year prison sentence in the case of 21-year-old Egor Zhukov [or Yegor; the name is a folk version of George], a student at the Higher School of Economics… Zhukov has…
Bitter fruit
La Fontaine’s fox, the connoisseur of grapes, was all-French, as it were – “Gascon, some say Norman” – and in keeping with his roots, he preferred wisecracking to whining, which his creator appreciated. American shale oil, sweet as a rule,…
It’s only barbaric when Americans do it
A few more comments on Putin’s latest foray through tight formations. But first, a look back at his remarks in April 2013: Furthermore, extracting shale gas and shale oil, which is also possible, is tied to enormous – I want…
Denial works. In a way.
During a televised Q&A session in April 2013, Vladimir Putin responded to a journalist’s claim that Gazprom had mistakenly written off the shale gas revolution as a short-term fluke: So it’s hard to say whether Gazprom missed the ‘shale-gas revolution’…
Carvalho and Dugin
There’s more in the Guardian piece on Brazilian flat earthers that I quoted in the previous post: …Olavo de Carvalho – a former astrologer who is considered the intellectual guru of Bolsonaro and his inner circle – prompted outrage and…