Those celebrating or condemning the return of Churchill’s bust to the Oval Office as symbolic miss the point: President Trump may have put Churchill’s statue back in a place of honor, but his approach so far at least channels the ideas not of Britain’s greatest prime minister but rather of his discredited predecessor Neville Chamberlain.
Ukrainians and their friends and supporters have been so worried that any grand bargain between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump will be a new “Munich” in which Ukraine will be handed over in whole or in part to the Kremlin that they have not considered fully just what any “deal” might look like.
While the attention of Russians and others around the world have been diverted – and one should ask be asking what they have been diverted from and why – ten pieces of bad even disastrous economic news have come out from or about Russia in the last 24 hours alone.
Moscow analyst Yury Khristenzen says that Moscow plans to “export separatism” across the entire former Soviet space, including Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to break those countries to its will, confident that it can do so because the West will not be willing to go to war against a nuclear power
With yet another sports competition just moved out of Russia and attention to former sports minister Vitaly Mutko’s role in the doping scandal intensifying, many in Moscow now fear that Russia could be stripped of the 2018 World Cup.
Nina Khrushcheva, a scholar at the New School in New York, says that what is likely to happen with the Trump administration is likely to turn out “more unbelievable” than Hollywood films like “The Manchurian Candidate” and to end even worse.
The lengthy closure of the Kaliningrad airport as a result of a plan accident highlights the complete lack in Moscow of a plan to ensure the energy, transportation, and information security of that Russian exclave.
Vladimir Putin has no interest in the deal Thomas Graham suggests he now wants, Vitaly Portnikov says; and consequently, if Washington pursues the course the former US diplomat and current Kissinger Associate advisor proposes, it will only embarrass itself.
According to historian Leonid Mlechin, “fear of weapons of mass destruction” has disappeared and consequently it will not be as hard as it was to “push the nuclear button.”
Avraam Smulyevich, a leading Israeli specialist on ethnic issues in the former Soviet space, says that Kyiv might be forced to agree to a Trump-Putin deal on Crimea but that such a deal would “only convince the Russian dictator that he had invade other countries without being punished”
