Russia’s Wagner mercenary group has again claimed control of the contested Ukrainian city of Bakhmut — a claim yet again denied by Kyiv, which says its forces are still fighting southwest of the industrial town and advancing around its flanks. The dense fog of war makes it difficult to determine whether one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the Ukraine war has really come to an end.
The arrest of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich in March was the first time a Western journalist had been held on espionage charges in post-Soviet Russia — but it opened a floodgate of memories for Nicholas Daniloff.
Daniloff was working as a journalist in the Soviet Union in 1986 when he was snatched off the streets of Moscow and accused of spying for the United States.
On entend de plus en plus de voix occidentales suggérer que des pourparlers de paix dans l’ancienne Ukraine pourraient être une bonne idée, ce qui indique que certaines personnes ont peut-être dépassé le stade du déni (quelques sanctions et la Russie se repliera comme un parapluie) et de la colère (jetez tout votre argent et toutes vos armes sur le régime de Kiev !) et approchent le stade du marchandage (laissons la Russie garder la Crimée, mais rendre le reste). Comme pour les étapes précédentes, cette attitude repose sur une incompréhension très profonde de la situation actuelle. Ce n’est pas si difficile à expliquer – à ceux qui sont prêts à traiter de nouvelles informations – et je vais donc essayer.
Dans la première partie, nous proposions d’envisager le conflit entre la Russie et l’Ukraine, dans la perspective historique élargie d’une guerre de 100 ans opposant, depuis 1917, la Russie et l’occident. Nous suggérions aussi que le conflit idéologique entre propriété privée et collective des moyens de production ne s’était pas éteint, mais transformé en une opposition entre économie libre-échangiste complètement dégagée de toute intervention étatique, et les économies russe ou chinoise, laissant une large part à la planification par l’État.
Events in Sudan would have perhaps gone unnoticed in Russian society, including by politicians and the media, if Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had not visited Khartoum two months before fighting broke out last week between Gen. Abdel-Fattah al-Burhan’s army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti.
The Secret History and Unlearned Lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis
There aren’t enough palm trees, the Soviet general thought to himself. It was July 1962, and Igor Statsenko, the 43-year-old Ukrainian-born commander of the Red Army’s missile division, found himself inside a helicopter, flying over central and western Cuba. Below him lay a rugged landscape, with few roads and little forest. Seven weeks earlier, his superior—Sergei Biryuzov, the commander of the Soviet Strategic Missile Forces—had traveled to Cuba disguised as an agricultural expert. Biryuzov had met with the country’s prime minister, Fidel Castro, and shared with him an extraordinary proposal from the Soviet Union’s leader, Nikita Khrushchev, to station ballistic nuclear missiles on Cuban soil. Biryuzov, an artilleryman by training who knew little about missiles, returned to the Soviet Union to tell Khrushchev that the missiles could be safely hidden under the foliage of the island’s plentiful palm trees.
Ukraine Isn’t the Only Place Where America Must Counter Russia’s Mercenaries
Russia’s infamous Wagner paramilitary company may be headed for defeat in Ukraine. The group has sustained enormous losses in the last five months, and its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is embroiled in a high-stakes feud with Russia’s top military brass, who have accused him of indirectly aiding Ukraine by “sowing rifts” among Russian forces. Late last week, Prigozhin publicly castigated Russia’s senior military leadership for not supplying Wagner with enough ammunition and threatened to withdraw his forces from the city of Bakhmut. According to the British Ministry of Defense, the Kremlin may be looking to replace the Wagner contingent in Ukraine with forces from another private military company—one that it can more tightly control.
Political-geographical imagery, imagination and geopolitics.
The Eurasian Complex
Russian Eurasianism, whose centenary we celebrated in 2021, is a complex phenomenon that can only be fully understood if we carefully consider the context of its birth and development.
Russian Eurasianism as a specific philosophical and political current emerges in the specific Russian philosophical and cultural space of the Silver Age. This space was already characterized by a “turning to the East”, a reflection on the “East” and “pan-Mongolism” by Vladimir Solovyov, and a literary current of “Scythianism”, in which Solovyov’s reflections and fears were reversed into an acceptance of the “Scythian”, “Eastern” dimension of Russian identity. In the 1917 revolution, some Silver Age figures (e.g., A. Blok in “The Scythians”) saw precisely this dimension of Russian origins emerge.
Introduction
Intellectuals and writers of modern Russia with great enthusiasm take care of the search for adequate socio-political explanations of the former gigantic empire, which after the collapse of the Soviet Union was lost and disoriented. At the same time, the universal vacuum was affecting Russia’s integral environment due to the fall of the Marxist-Leninist development project. After all this, philosophers and social activist tried to make a foundation to the actual ideological goals of Russian society. However, so far, many of ideological aspirations to create new national policy was unsuccessful.
The West cannot relinquish the sense of itself at the centre of the Universe, albeit no longer in a racial sense, Alastair Crooke writes.
A strategic aim would require a unitary purpose that could be succinctly outlined. It would require additionally a compelling clarity about the means by which the aim would be achieved and a coherent vision about what a successful outcome would actually look like.