Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
The Boris Nemtsov memorial march, which has recently ended in Moscow, was impressively attended. Despite the short notice and the bleak weather, an unbelievably large number of people took part. It’s only my feeling at this point but estimates are already being released from various quarters. Two…
Boris Nemtsov was assassinated last night in Moscow, on the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge near the Kremlin. Nemtsov was the only Russian opposition leader who had held both a major elected public office, as governor of the Nizhny Novgorod region (appointed 1991, elected 1995,…
Apart from discussions of whether the US should make use of its military potential in certain parts of the world, there is also disagreement on where it should do so, and in what order of priority. I have heard calls…
Matthew Schofield reported for McClatchy last week: A Russian newspaper claims to have an official government strategy document outlining the invasion of Ukraine that was prepared weeks before the Ukrainian government collapsed last year… …Muratov [Novaya Gazeta editor-in-chief] said that……
Actually, Russian media outlets have published interviews with Russian soldiers who have fought on the separatists’ side in Donbass. For instance, this illustrated account of a 22-year-old (ex-)marine from Sakhalin Island appeared on the site of Radio City Sakhalin in late January. More recently, the…
Writing about hostages of the Russian state, I neglected to mention the number one hostage: the Ukrainian pilot Nadiya Savchenko*. She was fighting with the Ukrainian army in 2014 when she was captured or kidnapped by the separatists and/or their…
Max Seddon remarks that Novorossiya is “a Tsarist-era name for Ukraine’s Russian-speaking southeast.” Russian-speaking today but not in the “Tsarist era,” as I have explained. Russian was the language of cities all over Ukraine (except Poltava) but most Novorossiya residents were rural…
Plenty of other evidence has been submitted to the court of public opinion since the Flight MH17 disaster, but early on, there were two facts that made it clear enough to me which side was directly responsible. For now, I’m…
CNN reports: A Malaysia Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, crashed Thursday in eastern Ukraine. Now consider this: – The separatists seized a Ukrainian air defense base late in June. A Buk missile system has been photographed in a…
Victor Yanukovich is expected to speak in Rostov-on-Don today. It could be yet another asinine press conference but the alarmist in me feels otherwise. What if Yanukovich asks – “as the legitimate president, I hereby request” – Putin to “restore the…
The feisty, libertarian-leaning Ekho Moskvy commentator Yulia Latynina draws attention, once again, to Putin’s March 18 speech; to the Duma and the Senate. Putin explained how in his eyes, Nikita Khruschev’s transferring Crimea from Russia to Ukraine was “unconstitutional” –…
Hearing Putin mention “national-traitors”, natsional-predateli, in his Crimea acceptance speech, I thought the word was a calque from some German term. Nationalverräter perhaps? I’ve checked with the text and translation at archive.org and, not surprisingly, Hitler uses Nationalverräter in Mein…