German Chancellor Angela Merkel, facing a possibly difficult election in Germany later this year, is travelling to Moscow on 2nd May 2017.
Merkel has been a regular visitor to Moscow, and speaks with Russian President Putin on the telephone more often than any other EU leader. However their relationship hit rock bottom when the Ukrainian crisis exploded in 2014, and has been fraught ever since.
Earlier this year reports appeared in the Russian media of a series of arrests of Russian FSB officers and cyber specialists, including one Ruslan Stoyanov, an employee of Russia’s top cyber security company, the Kaspersky Lab.
Subsequently it became known that some of them at least had been charged with treason, in a case that supposedly involved the US, with Stoyanov supposedly charged with passing on Russian state secrets to Verigin, a US company.
Moscow’s unfolding strategy towards Libya could have a lot more to do with Cairo than observers realise.
Weeks after ultra right radicals began blocking coal deliveries to Ukraine from Donbass, and after weeks of calling on the radicals to end the blockade, Ukraine’s government in the form of Ukraine’s National Defence and Security Council has legalised it, declaring all transport links with Ukraine blocked as of this afternoon.
The war in Donbass can no longer be called a civil war.
How will a future historian will define this present era of human civilisation?
Even though it is unusual to begin an article with a question, the present state of international affairs obliges it.
The case Ukraine is bringing in the International Court of Justice is attracting scant international attention and has been almost entirely ignored by Western governments and by the Western media. Having said this it is an interesting case which begs a number of obvious questions.
Ukraine’s claim is set out in an indictment which apparently runs to 45 pages. The summary of its claim, which is dated 17th January 2017, can be found here.
The last few days have witnessed a further sharp fall in oil prices after the rally in late 2016 caused by the agreement between Russia and OPEC to cut oil output.
It is generally acknowledged that the terms of the agreement have been fulfilled, and that the two biggest producers – Saudi Arabia and Russia – have indeed cut production as they promised. Nonetheless oil prices are now falling again.
As part of a wider drive to expand the media presence of the Donbass republics, The Donetsk People’s Republic has set up a phone-line as part of an effort to help unify Donbass.
Unsurprisingly, the phone-line has been receiving calls from many areas outside of the two Donbass republics including from Odessa, Kharkov and Ternopol.
Rosstat, Russia’s state statistical agency, is reporting that the annualised inflation rate in Russia has now fallen to 4.5%, with Russia recording increasingly frequently weeks of zero inflation during the winter months.
This is most unusual. Normally the inflation rate rises in Russia in the winter and falls in the summer. The fact that Russia is now regularly recording weeks of zero inflation even in winter shows that inflation in Russia is falling faster than anyone (myself included) expected.
