Report Russia

Russian President Putin – facing accusations from Western leaders of orchestrating a ‘disinformation’ campaign intended to distort outcomes in Western politics – has now intervened in the whole discussion of how contemporary news is reported.
He has done so in the most droll way, highlighting once again his mischievous sense of humour, by sending a facetious message of congratulations to the Italian newspaper La Stampa on the occasion of its 150th anniversary.
Putin’s message reads as follows

The Russians are going into overdrive to contain the diplomatic damage from the Russian air strike that killed three Turkish soldiers and wounded eleven others near Al-Bab in Syria on Thursday.
Russian President Putin immediately telephoned Turkish President Erdogan to offer his condolences, and the Russian and Turkish Chiefs of General Staff have also spoken to each other.  Here is the Kremlin’s summary of President Putin’s conversation with President Erdogan

A reason frequently given by Western commentators for Russia’s support for President Assad is Russia’s supposed wish to protect its naval base in Tartus in Syria.  Some commentators have suggested conversely that one of the reasons for the whole Syrian war was to drive the Russians out of Syria.
In my opinion neither of these claims is true, but there is no doubt that one consequence of the war is that it has hugely increased the scale of Russia’s military presence in Syria beyond anything conceivable in 2011 when the Syrian conflict started.

Levan Dzhagaryan, Russia’s ambassador to Iran, has today suddenly floated what looks like the possibility of the Russian air force once again using Shahid Nojed airbase near Hamadan in Iran.

The fact that a Russian court has for the second time convicted the Russian liberal opposition activist Alexey Navalny of embezzlement in a case involving the Kirovles timber company represents a head-on challenge by the Russians to the European Court of Human Rights.

The Kremlin has released a summary of a telephone conversation between Russian President Putin and German Chancellor Merkel, which took place yesterday Saturday 7th February 2017.
Note that the summary does not say who initiated the call.  The content of the summary however suggests strongly that it was Putin.
The summary, which is unusually detailed, reads as follows

With Donald Trump remaining consistent in his rhetoric about his desire to have better and more cooperative relations with Russia whilst continuing his verbal attacks on Iran, many have suspected that Russia, a strategic Iranian ally, might adopt the role of mediator in the dispute.

US President Trump’s recent interview on Fox with Bill O’Reilly has provoked anger in the US, with US politicians and commentators rounding on President Trump for appearing to put the US on the same level as Russia.
To an outsider what the episode reveals is the extent to which ‘exceptionalist’ thinking in the US has become mainstream so that even President Trump’s statement of the obvious – that the US “has killers too” – is now taken as an unpardonable act of lèse-majesté.

Reports that German intelligence has been unable to find any evidence of Russian interference in German politics comes as no surprise.
It has become an article of faith on the part of establishment politicians and commentators in the West that the Russian government (always referred to as “the Kremlin”) is manipulating from behind the scenes the political processes in Western countries.

The latest fighting in and around the eastern Ukrainian town of Avdeevka is being represented as the product of a supposedly new Ukrainian ‘infiltration’ tactic whereby Ukrainian troops are said to insert surreptitiously into no-man’s land thereby gradually gaining territory and putting the eastern Ukrainian militia at a disadvantage.