Russia in the World

The Washington Post – an inveterate keystone of US foreign policy propaganda – made a surprising admission recently. The people of Crimea – allegedly “annexed” by the Russian Federation – are vastly satisfied under Moscow’s governance.

Relations between Russia and Japan are not all blue skies: the dispute over the Kuril Islands has hung over them like a dark cloud for many decades now, which is why two countries never signed a peace treaty after World War II.

Frankly and in summary: recently The United States of America has crossed several lines, committing atrocities, in many parts of the world. In the past, no country could get away with this; such situations would inevitably lead to war.

The west just doesn’t get it. Russia, that is. I feel like a failure, just to be honest. Almost a decade now my contemporaries and I have tried in vain to teach “Russia” to a curious world east of eastern Europe. And no matter what, US and UK media, academia, and thinking tanks can’t come to grips with the reality. Yes, the majority of Russians cannot think of anybody but Vladimir Putin leading them. Why, oh why, is this so hard to accept.

In a recent article published in NEO an alarming picture of United States and NATO forces encroaching ever closer to Russia’s borders was set out. The thrust of the article was that this encroachment was done for a specific purpose: to facilitate an attack upon Russia using nuclear weapons. The article raises important issues that are worth further examination.

It is a well-known fact that the global energy economy relies and will continue to rely for many years to come on energy generated by burning fossil fuels, such as natural gas, crude oil derivatives and coal. It is also common knowledge that combustion of large quantities of these energy sources leads to air pollution and other environmental problems that affect the lives of everyone and everything on planet Earth.