Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
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…
Russia can’t always be at war with Turkey: at some point, it will have to patch up the relationship. One would think that the Turkish intelligentsia and students should be natural allies for any force opposed to Erdogan’s neo-Islamism and…
The UN’s latest casualty count for Ukraine: A report from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said 9,098 people including combatants and civilians have died in the conflict since April last year… More than 20,000 have been injured……
The latest, largely anticipated, turn in the story: Russian tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky says he has been formally accused in a criminal case that, according to associates, involves the 1998 killing of a Siberian mayor that President Vladimir Putin has previously suggested…
The Financial Times ran this primer to ISIS’ oil business almost two months ago. Four out of the five smuggling routes taking ISIS crude from Syria into Turkey entered the Hatay province, crossing its eastern or south-eastern border. In October-November…
Putin’s suggestions regarding the criminal justice procedure: He also proposed a change to jury service, saying jurors should judge a wider range of cases but their number be cut to between five and seven from the current 12 at each…
Putin is a demigod: his airstrikes help some Russians to live out, vicariously, their dreams of taking revenge on the mockingly cruel world. Putin’s lieutenants and footsoldiers are not octoroon-gods, however: their place is at the receiving end in the…
Predictably, Russian authorities are working hard to make life intolerable for Turkish citizens living in Russia: …there were reports of harassment and fear in the Turkish student community. In the city of Saratov, police arrived at a student dormitory on Saturday…
The more I read about the history of Hatay, Turkey’s appendage-like province disputed by Syria, the more I am convinced that its status remains a sore point for Ankara. Also, Turkey’s military is in solidarity with Erdogan on the need to…
Looking at the map showing the routes of the Russian bomber and its Turkish pursuers, I noticed that the Turkish planes appeared to have taken off from somewhere close to Musa Dagh, where a small group of Armenians resisted Ottoman…
The Russian speakers of Eastern Ukraine were not at risk of being killed by Ukrainian forces until Russia’s allies or puppets began the war in Donbass. The Turkomans of Syria have been at risk since the start of the civil…
The Russian government seems to be overreacting to the Su–24 crisis, threatening wide-scale economic sanctions against Turkey that are certain to hurt Russian consumers. (Bombing Voronezh in response, again.) Is this Putin taking personal offense – an ego contest between the…