Richard Beeston and Edward Lucas both know what they’re talking about on Georgia. Both wonder if Georgian impulsiveness is not going to backfire. Lucas: It seems Russia is ready to hit back hard, in the hope of squashing the West’s pestilential protégé. In short, it looks more and more as […]
President Medvedev said Russia’s military aim was to force the Georgians to stop fighting: "Our peacekeepers and the units attached to them are currently carrying out an operation to force the Georgian side to [agree to] peace".
I swung by the FCO the other day to have a chat about Bosnia. The snappy desk officer dealing with this problem now is 24 or thereabouts. Let’s say she is 24. She was born in the year I was British Olympic Attache at the Sarajevo Winter Olympic Games. She was […]
Back to Craig Murray’s Murder in Samarkand – off with his family to Tashkent (Chapter 3). Uzbekistan was one of the fifteen Soviet republics to become independent in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. Craig offers a few paragraphs on the history of ‘Uzbek independence’, without saying anything about what […]
One version is here. Some speeches are good for what they say. Others for how they make people feel. This speech said more or less nothing, but reads nicely now and no doubt sounded good on the day. Or maybe not? This paragraph caught my eye: This is the moment […]
Chapter two of Craig Murray’s book describes his pre-posting briefing rounds. He heads for Eastern Department, effectively his ‘line management’ people. He finds it hard work: The atmosphere in the department seemed to be unpleasant – heavy, pompous and serious. A pall of misery appeared to have settled. I have […]
Round at the Bruges Group last night to hear a thought-provoking Very Big Picture talk. The argument went like this: not too long ago when Communism ended in Europe there were books about the triumph of democracy, the ‘end of history’ and so on now the emphasis is on Islamic […]
The fantastic hopelessness of Craig Murray’s Uzbek local staff colleague as described in the previous posting (she did not know whether guests were coming to the Ambassador’s key dinner party, so she just guessed!) made me recall an episode back in Sarajevo. I was down to meet a senior Russian […]
An elegant analysis of some of the existential ‘national’ questions for Moscow’s policy-makers. How to play up Russian-ness while making non-Russian citizens of the Russian Federation feel welcome? Thus: “it is impossible to demand from a Chechen that he recognize himself as a citizen of the empire and at the […]
Serving as HM Ambassador in Belgrade from 2001-2003 I had the task of advising London on how best to handle the aspirations of demands in Montenegro for independence from Serbia. At the time European capitals were just getting over the NATO bombing campaign aimed at ending Milosevic’s appalling rule over Kosovo. So […]
