Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Pavel Felgenhauer, the veteran Russian military observer, asks: Russia’s Attack of Ukrainian Naval Ships in Black Sea: First Shots of Possible Winter War? Anything is possible. “It can’t happen because it can’t happen, ever,” the time-honored Russian appeal to the self-evident,…
The BBC reported this past Thursday: On Sunday Russian border guards fired on three Ukrainian ships and seized their crews off the Crimean Peninsula… German Chancellor Angela Merkel blamed the crisis “entirely” on Russia… Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has urged Nato…
Denys Krasnikov reports in KyivPost: Ukraine will block access to the Russian websites VKontakte, Yandex and Odnoklassniki — all hugely popular in the country — under new sanctions measures. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed a decree on May 16 blocking…
They should have done it in 2014: Lawmakers [MEPs] voted on November 23 in favor of a motion condemning Russian state media outlets like the television channel RT and the news agency Sputnik for disseminating “absolutely fake” news. They said…
Apologies for quoting from the Daily Mail. Occasionally it does render a valuable public service: The national editor of Politico’s weekly news magazine resigned his position on Tuesday after he came under fire for advocating baseball-bat attacks on a white…
They say there are three Vladimirs in Moscow now: one lying, one sitting, and one standing. That is, Vladimir Lenin’s body is in the mausoleum in Red Square in a horizontal position; Vladimir Putin “sits” in the Kremlin (as in…
Earlier this week, Tim Newman at White Sun of the Desert discussed a BBC report from Canada that looked at, among other things, Toronto’s Trump Tower from the usual angle of Trump being bad, toxic and in trouble. One thing…
After days of confusing media reports from the ground, official statements were made today in Moscow and Kiev: The FSB agency said one of its officers had been killed during a shootout with a “group of diversionaries” on Saturday night,…
Sergei Belyakov reminding the reader of the more or less obvious: Minor Russians dominated in the Kherson governorate as well. In the second half of the 1870s they made up more than 70%, followed by Moldovans (17.9%) and Greater Russians…
Sergei Belyakov, the historian and literary critic from Yekaterinburg, was the runner-up for the Russian Big Book Prize in 2013 with his biography, Gumilev, the Son of Gumilev. I have yet to read it, but the only mainstream review I have seen, by…
As far as Ukraine is concerned, the Kremlin’s propaganda has been surprisingly well-received in diverse quarters, as evidenced by comments both at the left-leaning Crooked Timber and on pro-Trump sites. The same probably applies to Moscow’s Syrian narrative, but I…
“Ukraine Declares War on Journalism, ” proclaims Ian Bateson in an NYT op-ed: “Now Ukraine has labeled me an accomplice in terrorism.” One would think that the journalist has been placed on a list of terrorists wanted by Ukraine’s law…