Russia
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A population with a large proportion of people dependent on welfare payments, easily cowed by forceful authority, heavily influenced by social media, insufficiently sceptical of the 24-hour news cycle and partly fuddled by alcohol and drugs will not suddenly express prudent values. Those who seek to shape and control know this
August 25, 2024
21 mins
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Ukraine's supporters in the West describe Russia's invasion as 'unprovoked'. However, testifying before the EU Parliament, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg let slip that it it was no less than promised -- the fulfillment of Putin's explicit pledge that he would not tolerate Ukraine joining the alliance.
June 22, 2024
23 mins
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The liberal democracies, contrary to their core interests, decided to be accommodating when the USSR collapsed. Instead of disarming a well-known predator, we respected Russia’s sensibilities, indulged its bruised national pride and embraced the notion that its military was monolithic and unstoppable. Now, after sitting idle while Putin invaded Georgia, snatched Crimea and marched into Ukraine, the failure of that offensive and the revolt by Wagner mercenaries testify to the West's years of delusion
June 20, 2023
11 mins
The latest
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We can see, in retrospect at least, that the likelihood of a new incarnation of the Cold War increased as Putin began to contemplate his place in the textbooks of future generations of schoolchildren. The grandiloquence of this one man, served by the lethal but compliant siloviki, casts a terrible shadow over the world
March 18, 2023
20 mins
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Fading interest in Europe—for Putin, the G7 is so yesterday—marks a return of that ineffable sense of Russian superiority, equalled in history only in England by the English, and partly against the run of play, in France by the French. But superiority complexes belie inferiority complexes, as Russian literary careers sometimes show
December 31, 2020
47 mins