Russia
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US-Russian relations: Wooing the West By Eric Walberg
The past two years have witnessed a much more pliable Russia, retreating from the fiery rhetoric of Putin concerning NATO, the war in Afghanistan and America ’s targeting of Iran. Russian President Dmitri Medvedev has turned Russian foreign policy around, playing to US. He signed the new START treaty, agreed to transit war materiel to… Continue reading
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Opening Soviet Archives Providing New Insight Into Stalin’s Mind By Sherwood Ross
Historians today are only coming to understand the complex and sophisticated individual that was Joseph Stalin, who ruled Russia for nearly thirty years until his death in 1953. Much of the information shedding light on the character of the dictator is being unearthed from the archives of the Soviet Union, opened in the 1990s after… Continue reading
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Russia-US-Iran: Nuclear juggling By Eric Walberg
The Iranian government is “surprised” Russia signed on to a US proposal for a tighter embargo to punish the Islamic republic for its nuclear programme, Special Ambassador Mahmoud Reza Sajjadi told reporters in Moscow last week. Indeed, Iran’s sensational last-minute agreement to a proposal by Turkey and Brazil – virtually identical to one proposed seven… Continue reading
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Obama’s new security strategy just rhetoric
‘It’s representing a new era, not a new strategy, but rather new rhetoric,’ said Adam Kokesh, an Iraq war veteran and a candidate for Congress in New Mexico. Kokesh said the newly announced strategy is not really new. He argues that the plan continues the same approach to military conflict carried out by former US… Continue reading
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Russia Baffled by U.S. Deployment of Patriot Missiles in Poland By Ilya Arkhipov
Russia “doesn’t understand the logic” of a U.S. decision to deploy a Patriot air-defense missile battery in Poland near the Russian border, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said. Continue reading
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Russia-America: Rediscovering realpolitik By Eric Walberg
The irony in current relations between Russia and America is that the US has been far more ideological, perversely so, in the past two decades than Soviet foreign policy ever was. Russia is now expanding its economic and political relations with its former comrades both in the “near abroad” and in the Middle East without… Continue reading
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Chto Delat, "Perestroika Songspiel"
“We’ve come to tell the story of hopes that didn’t come true, of promises that weren’t made good. Here are five heroes of perestroika. . . . An idealistic democrat. A noble businessman. A heroic revolutionary. A bitter nationalist. And a woman who has found her own voice. . . . How the Democrat and… Continue reading
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US-Russian START treaty: A comprehensive flicker By Eric Walberg
Russian security experts fondly recall that Cold War-era arms control began with the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which curtailed further work on defensive weapons. The logic of the subsequent SALT and START agreements was based on the certainty that neither side could defend itself from a nuclear attack and therefore had no choice but to… Continue reading
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As Obama Talks Of Arms Control, Russians View U.S. As Global Aggressor By Rick Rozoff
It is a matter of speculation why Russia’s political leadership consistently defers to the U.S. on issues ranging from the war in Afghanistan to so-called missile shield deployments near its northwest frontier, and from the Pentagon acquiring new military bases in the Black Sea nations of Bulgaria and Romania to NATO establishing a cyber warfare… Continue reading
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Ukraine Geopolitics and the US-NATO Military Agenda: Tectonic Shift in Heartland Power Part I By F. William Engdahl
The relevant question at this juncture is what the defeat of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution signifies for the future of the Eurasian Heartland, as British geopolitician Halford Mackinder termed the region? Even more significantly, what does it imply for a two-decade long Pentagon attempt to weaken and ultimately cripple Russia as a military power in Washington’s… Continue reading
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US-NATO versus Russia: Towards a Regional War in the Caucasus? By Eric Walberg
Georgia is eager for another war, but there are other fires there which refuse to die — Russia’s battles with terrorism and separatists and Azerbaijans bleeding wound in ethnic Armenian Nagorno Karabakh. Continue reading
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Georgia vs Russia: Fanning the flames By Eric Walberg
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world expected a new era of peace and disarmament. But what happened? Instead of diminishing, US and NATO presence throughout Europe, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and Central Asia rapidly increased, and the world experienced one war after another — in the Caucasus, Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan, each… Continue reading
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Ukraine: Post-orange challenges By Hannes HOFBAUER
After ten months of tricky tactical games playing on electoral procedures and acknowledgements, the orange period of the post-communist Ukraine finally came to an end. As if the elections of 2004 were repeated, the electorate again voted for Viktor Yanukovych. This time the attempts to complain about falsifications were not successful; no tents were seen… Continue reading
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The Iskander Missiles as the Guarantee of Normal Coexistence of Russia and Europe By Anatoly ALIFEROV
Russia went public with the plan to deploy the Iskander missiles at its western frontier – in the Kaliningrad region or on the territories of neighboring countries, but the process of probing into Washington’s reaction is clearly taking too long. In politics, failure to appreciate the importance of acting quickly invariably creates problems, the above… Continue reading
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Russia, Turkey and the Great Game: Changing teams By Eric Walberg
For all intents and purposes, Turkey has given up on the European Union, recognising it as a bastion of Islamophobia and captive to US diktat. As Switzerland bans minarets and France moves to outlaw the niqab, the popular Islamist government in Istanbul moves in the opposite direction — supporting the freedom to wear headscarfs, boldly… Continue reading
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Dangerous Crossroads: U.S. Moves Missiles And Troops To Russian Border Nuclear and Conventional Arms Pacts Stalled By Rick Rozoff
For the past thirty years each successive American president has unveiled an ostensible plan to eliminate nuclear weapons, if none before now has received the Nobel Peace Prize while in office. Each in turn then escalated reckless arms buildups and armed aggression abroad in an effort to achieve global military dominance. The current U.S. commander-in-chief… Continue reading
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Book Review: When and why did the Russian Revolution go wrong? Brian Pearce, with commentary by Terry Brotherstone
Brian Pearce’s life – largely unsung beyond a substantial circle of friends, intellectual and political contacts, and aficionados of the art of scholarly translation – deserves to be studied by everyone who thinks the lessons of the political tragedies of the 20th century must inform the making of the 21st. Continue reading
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Reagan’s ghost: Starwars stops START By Eric Walberg
Russian confidence that US President Barack Obama might represent a fundamental change in the direction of US foreign policy is fast eroding. Even pro-Western analyst Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Centre reflects, “The people who see Russia as a problem are still at the Pentagon,” and he predicts that even if Obama lasts… Continue reading
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Russia, NATO and Afghanistan: High stakes Great Game By Eric Walberg
Explaining the willingness of Euro leaders to ignore their constituents, former US ambassador to NATO and RAND adviser Robert Hunter told the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR): “In terms of motivation, very few European countries believe that winning in Afghanistan — that is, dismantling, defeating, and destroying Al-Qaeda and Taliban — is necessary for their… Continue reading
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America and Russia: Has the Cold War Really Ended? By Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya
The twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall is approaching, but has the Cold War really ended and is it really a historic relic of the not too distant past? The Soviet Union may no longer exist and the Warsaw Pact may have long been dissolved, but many of the remnants of the… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 