Like so many times before in the last year in Ukraine, enthusiasm has been quickly extinguished and replaced with uncertainty and fear, eradicating exuberant hope with the imposition of external interests. The prospects of signing the European Union Association Agreement were replaced by blackmail from Russia to force Ukraine not to sign, the ouster of […]
When Tsar Nicholas II abdicated his throne in 1917, he addressed neither the Russian people nor the Provisional Government, but rather the Chief of Staff of the Russian Army. This was because the Russian army was the last remaining arbiter of stability in the country which, as historian Richard Pipes noted, “…in Nicholas’s eyes the […]
Right and wrong in politics are subject to the force and ability of the powerful to impose their version or perception of such. It is malleable to the force of the victors and the glib propaganda that provides “alternate viewpoints” which massage, contort and finesse the understanding and perception of situations. The ability to obfuscate […]
The offices at VTB headquarters in Moscow’s burgeoning new financial district, which lays a short hop away from the Kremlin, were eerily quiet. No one was talking as every employee was gathered around the TV waiting for President Obama to announce the first series of sanctions against Russian and Crimean officials in response to Russia’s […]
As the world’s focus has suddenly shifted to the spiraling abyss that is the Levant in the Middle East, the situation in the Ukraine continues down its slide towards civil war, where progress by Kiev is met just as quickly with setback. Things were starting to look up for Ukraine, they had just elected a […]
The evidence that sanctions change a state’s policies is slim. Actually it’s very slim. Economic sanctions taken by themselves have rarely produced the outcomes with which they were designed to produce. The main reason is that the global economy is so diverse, so spread out, that it is almost impossible to create an overarching and […]
As the body count begins to increase in eastern Ukraine and the chaos and general dystopian anarchy that has come to infect our conscious understanding of Ukraine has spread to other cities such as Odessa, many have started to wonder over whether or not the new government in Kiev will ever be able to truly […]
When professional and well trained “little green men” invaded Crimea, they displayed the vast disparity in capabilities between Ukraine’s underfunded, poorly maintained and improperly led military, with Russia’s new-found confidence, the result of its modernizatsiia efforts. The Russian troops were well equipped, well trained and most importantly, well led–Putin in fact finally admitted that the […]
Three to five days is all the Russian military would need to overrun Ukrainian resistance in the east and south of the country if the decision was made to invade. Within 12 hours of ordering an invasion, Russian troops described as: “a very large and very capable and very ready force” could be across the […]
In 1733 Voltaire published a series of works called “The Letters of the English Nation” or “Lettres philosophiques” which were a compilation of his observation of politics and religion on the Island. He remarked on the love and high regard that monetary pursuits and commerce were held, such that they transcended all religious or ethnic […]
