To mark 20 years since the beginning of political changes in Poland, BBC News asked its online readers: “Do you live in a former Soviet bloc country? What have 20 years of capitalism done for you? Do you think that your country has benefited from the end of communism?” Within hours, the forum was swamped […]
Adobe Creative Suite 3 + Cakewalk Sonar 7.02 + Adobe Premiere Elements 4.0 Well, it looks like the Kyrgyz government has indeed decided to officially order the removal of American forces from the Manas air base. US officials assert that negotiations were still on going, but Kyrgyz officials stated that the deal was as good […]
In a surprise move, Kyrgyzstan President Bakiyev, during a visit to Moscow, stated that he would close the American Manas Air Base in his country. Bakiyev argued that the US mission in the region was complete and voiced concern over several issues including; financial compensation, an incident where a Kyrgyz citizen was killed on the […]
It is being reported that the US Joint Chiefs of Staff will issue a report recommending that the Obama administration lower its expectations for a democratic Afghanistan and instead concentrate on regional stability and defeating Al Qaeda and the Taliban. I have not seen the report myself, but Politico's David Cloud asserts that the report […]
Cheap bread and used cars: As Russia's economic tailspin rips away one by one the flimsy protective myths of the ruling clique – national rebirth, orthodoxy, regional hegemony, patriotism, assertiveness abroad – we now see in stark relief the true, rather more prosaic, foundations of Putin's popularity in Russia. As thousands of citizens called […]
Just as Iraq's provinces express their newly given right to participate in an election, the Afghanistan people will have to wait a little bit longer for their turn. The Independent Election Commission of Afghanistan has decided to postpone the country's presidential election until August 20th for the expressed reason of registering more voters, setting up […]
Amid all the hullabaloo around Obama's decision to shut down Gitmo within one year, is Gitmo's brother, the Bagram Air Base prison in Afghanistan. The air base is home to an important prison system that holds some of ‘worst of the worst’. The US considers the 600 or so inmates prisoners of war and holds […]
Edward Lucas, the Economist's man in Moscow, has a lot to answer for. In 2008, he wrote a provocative book called “The New Cold War: Putin's Russia and the Threat to the West” which paints a harrowing picture of the country's new assertiveness. A year on, his thesis continues to makes waves, with a […]
It was just last week that I put in a blog piece that the EU's chances of diversifying their gas supplies were extremely poor. Even though the Georgia-Russian war and even more recent Ukraine-EU gas pipeline was shut off by Moscow, seemingly bringing Europe to their energy knees once again, I pretty much agreed with […]
There is much happening in US-Afghanistan relations and policy in the last week. Former Clinton super diplomat, Richard Holbrooke, was chosen by the Obama administration to be a special envoy for Afghanistan-Pakistan, a region Obama called the ‘Central Front’ in war on terror. Just as I write, Obama's Afghan policy is literally hitting the ground […]
A gloriously nostalgic little photo collection in today's Guardian looks back on David Bowie's 1973 visit to the USSR. “We drank cheap riesling wine and beer (peeva) with a bunch of soldiers we met the night before. They were friendly and inquisitive as to what life was like in the west, when we asked them […]
Inspired by the moral profligacy of Dilbert, I’d like to shamelessly plug my recently published article in the New York Moon, the journal of ideas and flaneurism, about the history of a Russian reservoir. It is surely set to become the Doctor Zhivago of hallucinatory post-communist Russian reservoir narratives.
Popular from Press
