Not a week ago Ukraine’s Prime Minister seemed determined to argue her case in court. She outlined a comprehensive legal strategy that seemed certain to tie down her archnemesis in court for months, bankrupt the government, and push the country closer to anarchy. But yesterday Timoshenko withdrew her complaint from the Supreme Administrative Court and [...]
France’s decision to sell four Mistral-class helicopter carriers to Russia was met with heavy criticism in the US, Georgia and the Baltic States. Interestingly enough, Russia’s decision to buy the four vessels for more than $2 billion was met with a lot of criticism within Russia as well. This is really the first time in [...]
The tragic death of Nodar Kumaritashvili on the luge track in Vancouver is the cause of online discussion about safety of this sport. Many criticize track designers and organizers of the Games for the track’s perceived lax safety standards. Others wonder if safety is even possible in a sport where one rides a tiny sled [...]
“Liberast” is the term coined in Russia in the 1990s that is finding its way into the English language. As you might have already guessed, this term combines the words “liberal” and “pederast”. I don’t think you will have any trouble figuring out the intended meaning of this portmanteau. Western liberasts often use Ukraine as [...]
The PAKFA (Russian abbreviation for the Prospective Frontal Aviation Complex) fighter project is currently scheduled to enter production at the end of 2014. The single-seat model is expected to enter service with the Russian AF in 2015. The dual-seat model for the Indian AF is expected to enter service two years after that. The two-seater [...]
As many of you already know, last week the Sukhoi T-50 stealth fighter prototype – Russia’s long-awaited answer to Lockheed-Martin’s F-22 – completed it’s maiden 47-minute flight from the manufacturer’s test airfield in the Russian Far East. The single-seat aircraft features low-observable geometry, two widely-separated engines with 3-D thrust-vectoring nozzles, internal weapons bays, all-movable angled [...]
Sun Microsystems – the creator of Solaris operating system and manufacturer of my favorite computers – is being acquired by Oracle – the maker of the world’s leading commercial database software that works best on Sun servers. This seems like a good deal for both Oracle and Sun. Unfortunately, this merger will be very bad [...]
About a year ago I wrote about the plans Russia and other oil-producing nations have for breaking the tie between the price of oil and the value of the dollar. For years Russia and OPEC countries have been tiptoeing around this issue until the recent massive collapse of the US banking industry forced their plans [...]
As some of you may have heard, the international fact-finding mission (IIFFMCG) organized by the EU to investigate the 2008 war between Georgia and Russia has finally released its final report. As was expected, most of the blame for starting the war went to Georgia. Russia’s “fault”, according to the investigators, for the most part [...]
The report by the UN fact finding mission on the Gaza conflict released on September 15 brings to light numerous war crimes committed by Tzahal against Palestinian civilians. A few quotes from the UN report:
The mission concluded that actions amounting to war crimes and possibly, in some respects, crimes against humanity, were committed by the [...]
Tomorrow’s seventy-year anniversary of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact is giving some historians and journalists pretending to be historians an unbearable urge to write nonsense. The Pact and, most importantly, its secret provisions are blamed by the Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians for the years of “Soviet occupation”. This was a difficult period in the history of [...]
Tweeter celebrated the one-year anniversary of the Georgian-Russian war by setting it’s Web servers on fire. (For those of you with long-term memory problem, here is a brief recap of the events.) The Unix gurus at Tweeter’s datacenter blamed the downtime on unspecified hackers unleashing a DDoS attack. According to some networking experts interviewed by [...]
As any family feud, this story has many ins and outs. Paavo Salonen from Finland married Rimma from Russia, they had a son – Anton – and they got divorced. Rimma’s older son from first marriage Nikita, who is now 19, lived with his stepfather Paavo in Finland. Rimma was living with her younger [...]
Newspapers in America and Russia are busy busting Joe Biden’s chops for taking lead from Sarah Palin and going Maverick on relations with the Kremlin. It is not that Biden said something that the Russians didn’t already know: Russia’s economy and population are both in decline and long-term prospects are not exactly rosy. Depending on [...]
The president of Georgia decided to go along with the proposal by an opposition parliament member Dmitri Lordkipanidze to test all government employees for illegal drugs. Saakashvili said that the test will require a single hair and that he will offer his shortly. In other news, Saakashvili shaved his head bald…
Lordkipanidze’s suggestion of drug-testing the [...]
As I am sitting here watching the Olympics, I am reminded of a CNN (I think it was CNN) special a few years ago. Some angry-looking activists were discussing the alarming popularity of online videos depicting street fights, schoolyard brawls and such. The gist of the discussion was that most of us share the responsibility [...]
The Register, among others, reports that the Web site of one of Russia’s leading independent newspapers – the Novaya Gazeta – came under a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack. Currently the newspaper’s site is unstable. The reason I even noticed this news item is not because I am a big fan of Novaya Gazeta. It is [...]
Recently Russian online news service Lenta.ru published a Q&A session with a well-known Georgian political and military analyst Mamuka Areshidze, who is known for his anti-Kremlin attitudes but is also somehow not a particularly big supporter of Georgian El Duce. In other words, Areshidze is supposedly a moderate, a centrist and so his take on [...]
AP’s recent “Safety of Russian planes in Afghanistan questioned” by Catrina Stewart is exactly why female journalists should stick to writing about Gucci purses, chihuahuas, and SUVs. After some, no doubt, extensive research on the subject of military transport aviation, this broad came to the conclusion that the reason NATO keeps hiring Russian cargo aircraft [...]
Entirely in line with his suspected drug abuse problem, Saakashvili is now waging war of words on the Wall Street Journal. In Georgia’s President Vows Changes (by Andrew Osborn, WSJ 2009-07-20) the following quote appeared:
“He also called the hopes of Georgia joining NATO “almost dead.” “It’s tragic,” he said. “It means the Russians fought for [...]
Bluehost.com is a large Web hosting provider based in Provo, Utah. It advertises “professional Web hosting” and claims to be “specializing in customer satisfaction”. Yesterday I learned neither of these claims is true. Originally, I selected Bluehost.com over my other top picks – Site5.com, Hostway.com, and my own old Sun E3000 server sitting in the [...]
A rather sad story on CNN tells us about a teenage girl from Washington who for many years has been suffering from an undiagnosed chronic bowel inflammation. For eight years she suffered from severe stomach pain and other serious symptoms, but her doctors were unable to identify the decease. To make the long story short, [...]
The Mid-Atlantic Air Museum (MAAM) is membership supported museum and aircraft restoration facility located at the Carl A. Spaatz Field, the regional airport serving Reading, Pennsylvania. The museum, founded by Russ Strine, the current President, collects and actively restores historic war planes and classic airliners as well as rare civilian and military aircraft. Many of [...]
The IMD – a Swiss business college situated on the shore of Lake Geneva popular among Russian nouveau riche – recently published a glossy report ranking “competitiveness” of national economies.
Reading the preamble to the report one may be very impressed by the advanced methodology used by IMD’s researchers. Everything looks very proper and scientific. It [...]
The Wall Street Journal is commenting on Russia’s new policy to counter attempts at historical revisionism (“Russia Frames New Policy on History“, by Andrew Osborne, WSJ, May 19, 2009). According to WSJ’s hand-picked collection of opinions, Russia is trying to move back to the Soviet practice of tightly managing the official, state-approved version of history [...]
WWII V-Day, traditionally celebrated in Russia on May 9, is the most significant holiday in the country, rivaled only by the New Year. The government upped the anty this year by throwing the biggest military parade since the Soviet days, with more troops, tanks, and aircraft. The next year’s parade, commemorating 65-th anniversary of history’s [...]
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