Russia in the World

Anticipating the usual snide if any, report on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s April 14th public Q and A, I’d like to make the following remarks:

In less than a moth the thrid summit Russia-ASEAN will be held in the city of Sochi. It will mark the twentieth anniversary of partnership between Russia and the countries of this organization. It should be noted that in recent decades ASEAN states have shown a breathtakingly rapid and sustained economic growth.

Since strong pressure on the Bulgarian government back in 2014 caused her to stop construction of the Russian gas pipeline, South Stream, that was to have supplied Russian gas to the Balkans and on to Austria and Italy, Brussels has argued that the stop was necessary because of “regional energy security” and the risk of dependence on Russian gas.

As if it were not enough that Vladimir Putin’s Russia makes a monkey out of the US “anti-ISIS” campaign in Syria by accomplishing more in six months to damage the terrorist advance in that country than the Pentagon managed, with its suspiciously ineffective campaign in fourteen months. Now Russia delivers a huge slap in the face to US agribusiness domination of global food trade by deciding to make Russia the world’s largest exporter of healthy, non-GMO, non-industrial food.

American foreign policy pundits and their echo chamber in the press scoffed at Russia’s intervention in Syria: it would be a quagmire. When Russia brought home most of its planes after a successful campaign against ISIS, Americans pretended to be ‘surprised’. ‘Putin is bad’ was replaced by ‘You never know what this guy is going to do next’.

While the United States and Russia continue to contest the future of Syria despite some reasonable progress achieved on the subject, their bi-lateral competition hardly seems to have eased down. Nor will it as global powers continue to contest each other for strategic supremacy to out-manoeuvre each other in the game for global power.

Gold is one of the most fascinating of all rare metals. Throughout all history it has been given a special, at times sacred or spiritual value, since six thousand years ago when the Egyptian Pharoahs’ tombs were filled with it to accompany the dead on their journey. In times of world financial crisis as in the 1930’s, gold is preferred by central banks and ordinary citizens as a store of value when paper money loses value.

Russian pilots and planes flew more missions with less equipment than the US has done since the Cactus Air Force began operating out of Henderson Field on Guadalcanal in 1942. I don’t hate America and have huge respect for American pilots, the best in the world, and American combat aircraft, maybe not the best in the world but the best the corrupt Pentagon will allow the best pilots in the world to fly.

War criminal, the term loses its bite typed onto a Microsoft Word document. If you think about what it means to be a criminal in war, operating from within humanity’s ultimate inhumane situation, you will discover the devil within us all. So make no mistake about it, condemned ex-pilot Nadezhda Savchenko is not some heroine of the people of Ukraine, but a criminal in a criminal war on a people.

The second anniversary of Crimea reuniting with Russia brought memories of Charles Dicken’s famous, A Tale of Two Cities, a novel set in Paris and London about the French Revolution. Dicken’s first line is still with us today.