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.
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.
There are no valid arguments against a liberation of Novorossia, see the list below and contemplate.
“There will be sanctions if Russia intervenes” – well the sanctions are already there, so Russia might as well get something for the “price” she is paying anyway.
The ongoing events in South-eastern Ukraine indicate a very important phenomenon. This is not only an indicator of the front of the geopolitical fight between the West and the club of the multipolar world structure, it is also the following: the break of Ukrainian statehood, serving in recent time as a satellite and client of Washington and Brussels; the growth of the political consciousness of the citizens (in the sense of the citizens who defend their rights and freedoms with weapons in their hands, and not subjects of the weak Weber State who cannot defend them from the arbitrary rule of political opponents and continue to fulfill their social obligations); and also the emergence of a new nationalism, unique in its characteristics and goals.
Russia launched what it described as a special military operation in Ukraine on February 24, 2022, which it claimed was to defend its national security red lines there after NATO clandestinely crossed them. This included Moscow’s allegation that it was duty-bound to stop what it said was a genocide in Donbass. Kyiv, NATO, and some of their non-Western partners, however, said that this move violated international law. They subsequently imposed maximum sanctions against Russia.
Along the northern flank of Ukrainian-controlled territory on the outskirts of the eastern city of Bakhmut, tank crews from the 10th Mountain Assault Brigade are waiting for the ground to dry up so they can begin a long-anticipated counteroffensive against Russian forces.