Новости за 26.02.2019

With US-Russia relations deteriorating rapidly in the aftermath of the collapse of the INF nuclear arms treaty, which prompted Russia's Vladimir Putin to slam the US for "demolishing" global security, Russian state television listed U.S.

The most immense and dangerous public scandal in American history is finally cracking open like a ripe pomegranate. The broad swath of the Trump-hating media that has participated in what has amounted to an unconstitutional attempt to overthrow the government are reduced to reporting the events and revelations of the scandal in which they have been complicit, in a po-faced ho-hum manner to impart to the misinformed public that this is as routine as stock market fluctuations or the burning of an American flag in Tehran. Читать дальше...

For a variety of reasons, I have been spending a fair amount of time with A.I. Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian writer who died in 2008. I am working through a collection of his writings and have been watching videos on his life along with detailed interviews.

Russia's new Avangard (Fr. "Avant-garde") missile system is a technological wonder. Scientists and engineers managed to overcome a number of technological hurdles, like how to keep a vehicle from disintegrating while traveling at mach-20, with temperatures reaching 3000 degrees Celsius. 

Are Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Adviser John Bolton and (farcically titled) Special Envoy for Restoring Democracy to Venezuela Elliott Abrams agents of influence for Russia and China? The idea has a lot more going for it than most of the ridiculous paranoia sweeping Washington over the past years. 

Traveling with Hugo Chavez, I soon understood the threat of Venezuela.  At a farming co-operative in Lara state, people waited patiently and with good humor in the heat. Jugs of water and melon juice were passed around. A guitar was played; a woman, Katarina, stood and sang with a husky contralto.

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The author is a prominent American social critic, blogger, and podcaster, and one of our all-time favorite pessimists. We carry his articles regularly on RI. His writing on Russia-gate has been highly entertaining.

Spaniards under 30 are apparently gayer than pagan Greeks. Brits, Germans, and even Poles (!) are not far behind:

To the vast majority of Americans, including the foreign policy establishment, the question posed in the title may seem something of a joke. After all, absolute military superiority over Russia and other potential rivals for global influence has been the objective of US military policy for the last twenty-five years or more, at vast budgetary expense.

Here is a very cool dynamic map of Russian territories from 1462 to 2018, truly worth clicking: Границы России 1462-2018 гг

“Merchants of death” was a sobriquet once applied to the arms industry, notably by the journalists F.C. Hanighen and H.C. Engelbrecht in the title of a book they published in 1934. Today the real merchants of death are not the arms dealers but those who sell the idea of war within America’s policy elite, both inside and outside of government. They possess a monopoly on respectability, and politicians who thirst for respect from the real governing class need little incentive to adopt the ideas of the smart set. Читать дальше...

The author is the longest serving foreign correspondent covering Russia. He published his fascinating memoirs in December of 2018.

The Kremlin “ideologue” Vladislav Surkov has recently written an article for Nezavisimaya Gazeta called “Putin’s Lasting State.” It posits that the Putinist system’s power stems from its unique ability to “listen and understand” Russia’s “deep people” – in contradistinction to the “deep states” that control the West beneath their democratic facades.