The French commentator Natalie Nougayrède has written an extraordinary piece in The Guardian, which hints that even if Donald Trump lifts US sanctions on Russia…
Angela Merkel will try to keep EU sanctions in place:
Reports from Syria suggest that the battle for Wadi Barada, and the water crisis in Damascus it is causing, may be coming to an end.
It seems that following Syrian army advances, and after negotiations brokered by a team of Russian officers, several Jihadi groups in Wadi Barada have agreed to lay down their arms.
A week ago, following release of Grizzly Steppe, the FBI/Homeland Security report supposedly substantiating the US intelligence community’s report that Russian intelligence was behind the hacking of the DNC and of Podesta, I said that the Russian hacking scandal is starting more and more to resemble the Iraq WMD debacle, with one dodgy dossier succeeding another.
Whilst the US mainstream media continues to focus on the esoteric question of whether Vladimir Putin was behind the Clinton leaks, many Americans are probably more interested in an appalling incident of racial violence in Chicago.
I should perhaps qualify the above statement since it is not clear to me how many Americans actually know of this incident (in Britain the media is barely reporting it). The facts nonetheless seem clear enough if only because the individuals involved posted a video of what they did onto Facebook.
Whilst Russia’s carrier Admiral Kuznetsov is returning home following her operational use in the conflict in Syria, her sister ship the Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning (formerly the Varyag) is on her first cruise.
The Chinese Defence Ministry has described the purpose of Liaoning’s cruise as “scientific research, experiment and training.” In other words it is primarily a training exercise intended to familiarise the Chinese with naval carrier operations in preparation for the much bigger Chinese built carriers which are coming.
Following the Syrian army’s victory in Aleppo the Russian Defence Ministry has confirmed that the Russian fleet sent to the eastern Mediterranean earlier in the autumn, including the aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov and the nuclear powered missile battlecruiser Pyotr Veliky, are being withdrawn to Russia.
This was always the plan. There was never any suggestion that the deployment was intended to be anything other than a temporary one.
The Senate hearings into the Russian hacking scandal that took place on Thursday 5th January 2017 came across to me as something of a damp squib.
Director James Clapper provided no actual evidence to support the allegation that Russia was responsible for the Clinton leaks, and refused to go along with Senator McCain’s wildly over-the-top claim that Russia’s alleged interference in the election was an “act of war”.
Britain’s The Banker magazine has named Russian Central Bank Chair Elvira Nabiullina Europe’s Central Banker of 2016.
The award is being linked to the Russian Central Bank’s success in bringing inflation in Russia down from 12.7% in 2015 to a post-Soviet low of below 6% in 2016 (the actual final figure will probably be 5.5% or 5.6%).
At the peak of the optimism about the Russian-Turkish rapprochement in the summer rumours circulated of Turkey expelling the US from Incirlik air base in Turkey.
Incirlik is the single most important US and NATO air base in the east Mediterranean region. Built by US engineers in the 1950s with a 3,000 metre concrete runway, there are 5,000 US personnel permanently stationed there, in a base equipped with 57 hardened aircraft shelters and which stores US tactical nuclear missiles.
Anyone seeking the true cause of the disaffection of Western electorates with the Western political elite need look no further than the case of the IMF’s Director, Christine Lagarde.
