Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Western governments implemented a suite of sanctions on Russian businesses, escalating the sanctions they implemented following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. The goal in both cases was to inflict enough pain on Russian elites that they would pressure Vladimir Putin to reverse course and end the conflict.
For centuries, Russian authorities have modified their approach to managing the country’s large, diverse population, held together by an ethnic Russian core. The war in Ukraine has again altered the Kremlin’s strategy of managing its complex domestic demographics.
Russia’s Defense Ministry announced early Monday its forces had thwarted a large Ukrainian attack in the eastern province of Donetsk, though it’s unclear if this was the start of a Ukrainian counteroffensive.
The ministry, in a rare early morning video, said its forces pushed back a “large scale” Ukrainian assault on Sunday at five points in southern Donetsk, one of four Ukrainian regions Russia illegally annexed last fall, Associated Press reported.
L’Éclaireur : Alors que la question se pose de la fin de la suprématie du dollar, vous dites que la guerre en Ukraine est non seulement la guerre du dollar américain mais qu’elle n’est pas la première…
Oleg Nesterenko : Je vois que vous faites allusion à mon analyse sur les guerres du dollar, publiée cela fait quelque temps… En effet, ce n’est pas la première, ni même la deuxième, mais la troisième guerre du dollar. La première, c’était la guerre contre l’Irak de Saddam Hussein. La deuxième, celle de la guerre contre la Libye de Kadhafi. Et la troisième, donc, contre Moscou sur le territoire de l’Ukraine, menée sur le territoire d’un État tiers tout simplement parce qu’on ne peut pas mener la guerre contre les Russes directement chez eux. Et ce n’est que la guerre hybride et par procuration qui peut avoir lieu face à la Russie.
Allow me to come clean: I worry every time Max Boot vents enthusiastically about a prospective military action. Whenever that Washington Post columnist professes optimism about some upcoming bloodletting, misfortune tends to follow. And as it happens, he’s positively bullish about the prospect of Ukraine handing Russia a decisive defeat in its upcoming, widely anticipated, sure-to-happen-any-day-now spring counteroffensive.
The war in Syria has dropped out of the news, like almost everything else, in a time when the Ukraine war seems to dominate all discourse and reporting. But the regime of Bashar al-Assad continues to strangle its own country. Even last year the Russians continued to bomb on his behalf, terrifying civilians and hospitals.
As ethnic trouble brewed and the latest confrontations erupted this week in northern Kosovo, a powerful symbol of Russian expansionism emerged alongside the Serbian flags denoting resistance to Pristina’s authority.
RFE/RL’s Balkan Service and other media shared images of the “Z,” which was used by Russian forces invading Ukraine, painted or otherwise scrawled on Kosovo police and NATO peacekeepers’ vehicles.
The Wagner Group has furthered Russia’s foreign policy objectives around the globe. The organisation remained secretive till July 2022, when the presence of the group was accepted in the Russian media. The Wagner has gained infamy for its role in the ongoing ‘Special Military Operation’ in Ukraine. There are, however, signs of growing schism between Wagner and the Russian Ministry of Defence.
Classical anarchism through the eyes of the Russian radical Mikhail Bakunin.
The history of true anarchism with a Russian aftertaste is closely connected with the personality of Mikhail Bakunin, whose contribution to the fate of the whole world turned out to be colossal. A real Russian man, brought up on European philosophy, his main goal was to create a world where all people will be equal and free, and where lives will not be measured by the thickness of a wallet or the height of a social pedestal. Bakunin’s utopian ideas ran counter to the thoughts of Marx, for whom the radical suddenly turned out to be nothing more than “that fat Russian.” So who is he, and is his philosophy alive today?
It is quite convenient for representatives of the Western community to rally around NATO narratives about the causes of the armed conflict in Ukraine and not put themselves in a position of discomfort of doubt and testing of the postulates that dominate public opinion.