Report Russia

Every few years Belorussian President Alexander Lukashenko has what seems to be an obligatory dispute with Russia, generally over energy prices. In both the 2004 and 2007 spats, the crisis was amicably solved in short order.
But during each disagreement, Lukashenko tended to purposely exaggerate the nature of the dispute in order to enhance his own personal prestige. It’s all a bit childish, as Russia and Belarus form a Union-State, making Russia and Belarus the two closest fraternal states of both the Commonwealth of Independent States and Eurasian Union.

Marine Le Pen has just proved that she is more clever than the thousands of anti-Russian politicians in the west, but also more astute than many of the western politicians who are sympathetic to Russia.
Where people like Nigel Farage, Francois Fillon and even to a lesser extent Donald Trump have often distanced themselves from or played down their lack of hatred towards Russia, Marine Le Pen has gone the opposite way, she had a public meeting with President Putin with the eyes of the world watching.

A few weeks after the Russian Central Bank indicated that it was unlikely to cut its key rate before mid year, a cluster of good economic news have caused it to shave its key rate down today from 10% to 9.75%.
To be clear, this is a token cut that will not by itself make any difference to the state of economy.  Its importance is that it clearly signals that more cuts are on the way.  That may in itself act as a spur to growth, consolidating the recovery.

What the Russian authorities have always feared and warned against finally happened today when early this morning a group of six ISIS fighters attacked a base of the Russian National Guard (‘Rosgvardiya’) in Chechnya’s Naursky district.
A report of the clash from the official Russian news agency TASS drawing on a report from Russia’s National Anti-Terrorism Committee reads as follows

Yesterday, directly after reports confirmed that Dmitry Voronenkov, the fugitive ex-Communist Russian MP, had been gunned down in Kiev, I said that speculation the Russian authorities had killed him was almost certainly wrong, and that it was a virtual certainty that Voronenkov had been killed by a Ukrainian ultra-nationalist.

Russia’s President Putin has met with French National Front leader Marine Le Pen in the Kremlin in Moscow, in what I believe is the first ever meeting between Le Pen and Putin (Le Pen has previously met with other Russian officials including Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin).
The meeting comes in the middle of an increasingly fraught French Presidential election campaign and shortly after the candidates held their first television debate.

That Ukrainian authorities’ reason for banning Yulia Samoilova, Russia’s entrant in the Eurovision Song Contest due to be held shortly in Kiev, from entering Ukraine is to prevent any Russian participation in the Contest at all, became clearer today when the Ukrainian authorities rejected a proposal from the Contest organisers that Samoilova be allowed to participate in the Contest via satellite.

Within hours of confirmation that Denis Voronenkov, a former Communist deputy in the Russian parliament, has been gunned down in central Kiev reports are already circulating in the West that hint the Russian authorities are responsible.  I anticipate that within hours or days at most that claim will be made explicit.

In 1991 at a dacha in the middle of Belavezha Forest, three men conspired to end the Soviet Union in contravention not only of Soviet law, but against the stated wishes of the majority of Soviet citizens who just months earlier, voted in a referendum in which they expressed their desire to live together in a single state, the Soviet Union.

Terrorism is a border-less problem, even Great Britain which has no land borders is not immune from homegrown and foreign terrorists.
The recent attack on civilians outside the UK Parliament is just one such example of this truth that many cannot accept.
Not only can many not accept it, but they would rather pursue meaningless fights against other nations whose citizens and infrastructure are subject to the daily reality of terrorism, rather than join them in a collective effort to fight terrorism as part of something resembling a united front.