Chapter 7 of Craig Murray’s book describes his first serious skirmish with the FCO, over a speech he makes about human rights. By the date of the speech he has been in Uzbekistan exactly 56 days. His nonetheless bold aim: … to fracture what I believed had become a conspiracy of silence by […]
A neat summing up of attitudes round the region as Macedonia and Montenegro recognise Kosovo. Key argument: It also helps that Montenegro supported a Serbian initiative in the UN seeking a ruling by the International Court of Justice on Kosovo’s February independence declaration. The General Assembly adopted that resolution on […]
Michael Totten has written a good piece about the Nagorno-Karabakh problem, albeit as seen from the Azerbaijan side of things. We tend to think that the Soviet Union broke up ‘peacefully’ (just as we inaccurately think that South Africa’s transition from apartheid was ‘peaceful’). This is because the vastness of the […]
Articles assessing the dire state of public health in Russia keep appearing. Here is another. Some numbers: … remember tuberculosis? In the United States, with a population of 303 million, 650 people died of the disease in 2007. In Russia, which has a total of 142 million people, an astonishing […]
Reader Willie Garvin asks (via my previous post): How many of the 47 states that have recognised Kosovo as independent have done so for reasons other that the belief it was the right thing to do for the region and international relations in general? I mean, how many Croatias are […]
Spengler gives some alarming projections: It’s also the case that by 2050, there will be fewer than 100,000 Georgian women of child-bearing years (between the ages of 18 and 35). The number of potential mothers who speak Georgian will have fallen so far that Georgian will be in danger of […]
Anders Aslund is a direct, reasonable and perceptive analyst of Russia’s economy. He lays it on the line here: Russia’s isolating itself politically and you see this, this extraordinary crudeness [with which] Putin and [Foreign Minister Sergei] Lavrov talk to everybody. And that of course means that people are less inclined […]
Russia’s PM Putin and President Medvedev have been hosting groups of Western journalists, to quite good effect from the Russian point of view. Even if some of the language used by Putin might have been a bit … overvivid. A tendency also visible these days in the robust style of Russian […]
A good piece about Stalinist persecution of a fine scientist whose views were ideologically inconvenient. And the long-term disaster this brought to Russia.
I previously linked to Christopher Hitchens and Michael Totten analysing why the Kosovo case is quite different from the cases of either S Ossetia or Abkhazia, rendering spurious/dishonest Russia’s recognition of the latter two as new states. Here for good measure is former US Ambassador to Zagreb and Belgrade, my friend Bill […]
