Today the office of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko released via Twitter important details about the organization and structure of Russia’s occupying army in Southeastern Ukraine. The order of battle (ORBAT) information is clearly derived from a lot of intelligence, especially SIGINT (I say this as someone who used to do ORBAT intelligence for a living: […]
Staunton, August 19 – An increasingly common theme in many commentaries about Crimea and the Donbass is that Ukrainians should not want them back. Pro-Russian attitudes in the those regions would, if they were again included within the borders of the Ukrainian state, make them a classic “fifth column.” But that is “yet another lie […]
Staunton, August 15 – Ukrainians mark their Independence Day on August 24, and during that period, Vladimir Putin is certain to be especially aggressive in their country given the Kremlin leader’s desire to punish Ukrainians for an action that constituted the effective death of the Russian imperial project, according to Vitaly Portnikov. Putin “will do […]
Staunton, August 14 – Vladislav Zhukovsky, an economist known for predicting disasters in the Russian economy and for then turning out to be right, says that the situation is more dire than almost anyone imagines because oil is heading to US $25 dollars a barrel, the ruble to 125 to the US dollar, and inflation […]
Staunton, August 7 – Russian officials have laid off “about 90 percent” of the staff at a chemical waste dump containing about two million tons of toxic chemicals only six kilometers from St. Petersburg, thus making the “chemical Chernobyl” various outlets have warned about almost a certainty, according to Bellona.ru. Indeed, the environmental watchdog organization […]
Staunton, August 2 – If one considers the factors that powered the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria – political instability, a weak counter-terrorism policy, Sunni predominance, and enormous natural resources — Dzhamiliya Kochoyan says, one is driven to the conclusion that Turkmenistan is at greater risk of an ISIS attack than any other […]
Staunton, August 4 – Moscow’s occupation and annexation of Crimea has attracted enormous attention and much criticism, but its efforts to get the international community to declare a much larger area of the Arctic Ocean Russian coastal waters and thus an exclusion zone have not. That may be about to change. Moscow has just filed […]
Staunton, August 3 – There are all kinds of statistical measures about incomes and expenditures that show the situation Russia’s poor now find themselves as a result of Vladimir Putin’s domestic and foreign policies. But perhaps the most striking indication of how bad things really are for those at the bottom of Russia’s increasingly unequal […]
Staunton, July 29 – The Second World Congress of the Crimean Tatar People which ended August 2 in Ankara shows why the Crimean Tatars as the most consistent opponents of the Russian Anschluss are a real asset for Ukraine and why their movement, which the Kremlin has tried so hard to disrupt, represents a large […]
Staunton, July 29 – The Russian government is totally opposed to the creation of an international tribunal to investigate the downing of the Malaysian airliner a year ago and will likely veto a proposal for such a venue at a meeting of the UN Security Council today. But a recent poll shows about half of […]
