Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Vedomosti, the independent business paper, ran this headline today: “Savchenko’s release became Russia’s PR* defeat.” I disagree. Doing the right thing – in the simplest sense of right as good – can’t be bad PR. Even if the world thinks you are…
A jury in Grozny, Chechnya, has found the two Ukrainians I have written about (1, 2, 3) guilty of fighting against Russian troops on the side of Chechen separatists in 1994-95. One of the men seems to have literally lost…
At the Eurovision 2016 contest held last Sunday, the largest group of the Ukrainian callers who took part in the voting chose the Russian number. Azerbaijan and Poland came second and third in that Ukrainian poll. Russian callers awarded the most…
Following the 2010 presidential election in Ukraine, which saw Victor Yanukovych prevail over Yulia Tymoshenko, Anne Applebaum wrote in Slate: The only thing that has remained consistent over the past four years is the democratic process itself… Six years after the…
It may prove unfortunate if Donald Trump’s view of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict has truly been influenced, or even shaped, by people like Paul Manafort, a former adviser to Yanukovych, and Carter Page, a former Merrill Lynch banker and fund manager with ties to…
Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) was a famous German performance artist of the post-WWII era. According to his Wiki entry, From 1943 on he was deployed as rear-gunner in the Ju 87 “Stuka” dive-bomber, initially stationed in Königgrätz, later in the eastern Adriatic…
Opponents of the EU-Ukraine association agreement made up 61% of the voters who took part in the Dutch referendum. The turnout was 32%. That works out to 20% of the eligible voters opposing the agreement. Potentially, a powerful minority, but a…
This was predictable, but still disgraceful: Nadiya Savchenko was sentenced to 22 years in jail after being convicted of directing artillery fire which killed them in eastern Ukraine in June 2014. Nadiya Savchenko is a hostage: her actual guilt or…
The Russian Constitutional Court has fixed the glitch in the legislation that denied the guaranteed right to a jury trial to women accused of capital crimes: According to Russia’s Criminal Code, regional courts only hold jury trials when the accused faces…
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 fast-track trial of Alexander Malofeyev ended on September 30th. This month, the court will probably issue a “motivated ruling” raising the status of the defendant’s statements to that of a judicially established “truth.” All sorts of outlandish claims could…
As reported in its latest bulletin (PDF), the UK media regulator Ofcom has found RT (formerly Russia Today) in violation of rule 5.5 of the 2003 Communications Act, which requires “due impartiality on matters of political or industrial controversy.” The first of the…