Rusia

Last week I flew to Moscow, arriving at 4:30 pm on December 8th. In Moscow, it begins to get dark at this time of day, and there will be no sun until about 10 am at this time of the year – the so-called “black days” as opposed to “white nights”. Anyone who is used to living closer to the equator is disturbing. This is the first sign that you are not only in a different country, which I am used to, but also in a different habitat. However, as we drove towards the center of Moscow, which is more than an hour, traffic on the road, road works, everything looked normal. There are three airports in Moscow, and we flew to the farthest from the center, Domodedovo, the main international airport. There is a lot of renovation work going on in Moscow, and while this is holding back traffic on the roads, it indicates that prosperity continues, at least in the capital.

In the current political system, Prigozhin can only be against the elite so long as he is for Putin. It would take the slightest sign from the president for the Wagner boss to disappear.

No one in Russia embodies the anti-elite essence of populist politics today like Yevgeny Prigozhin, formerly known as “Putin’s chef,” more recently as the boss of a vast troll network, and right now as head of the infamous Wagner mercenary army.

Huit jours après le lancement des premières tentatives d’offensive de l’armée ukrainienne contre les lignes défensives russes en région de Zaporijia et dans le sud de la République populaire de Donetsk (RPD), le moins que l’on puisse dire est que le bilan tant en matière de pertes, qu’en matière d’avancée est un désastre.

“Did US have intelligence of detailed Ukrainian plan to attack Nord Stream pipeline last June?”

The earlier recent theory on the blast was provided by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Seymour Hersh on February 8, 2023 who alleged that US Navy deep-sea divers planted high-powered C4 explosives under the gas pipelines under cover of NATO naval exercises in June 2022.The Norwegian military then activated the explosives remotely upon receiving an order from the White House.

As the Wagner Group prepares to withdraw its fighters from Bakhmut after months of brutal conflict, there is growing speculation that its founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is angling to have his forces redeployed to fragile states in the Middle East and Africa.

The Wagner chief’s furious attack on elites and the war could portend turmoil with potential to extend well beyond Moscow.

Is the post-Putin era in Russia at hand? Probably not yet, barring an unlikely collapse of Russian forces in Ukraine. But a furious public attack on Russia’s entire war effort and its elites by Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the private Russian militia group “Wagner,” is a sign that some Russian factions are beginning to position themselves for a struggle over who might succeed the Kremlin leader.

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.

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.