Archive for the ‘Featured’ Category
Posted on October 7, 2009 - by Venik
Your Savings and the Decline of the Dollar
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 [...]
Posted on October 1, 2009 - by Venik
War in Georgia: Reviewing EU Findings
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 [...]
Posted on September 16, 2009 - by Venik
UN Finds Israeli War Crimes
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 [...]
Posted on August 22, 2009 - by Venik
Victims with Guns
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 [...]
Posted on August 7, 2009 - by Venik
Happy Anniversary, Misha
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 [...]
Posted on August 3, 2009 - by Venik
Finland Pushes Putin’s Buttons
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 son [...]
Posted on July 28, 2009 - by Venik
Loose Lips…
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 [...]
Posted on July 15, 2009 - by Venik
Talking to Taliban
Coalition losses in Afghanistan continue mounting. Most casualties are sustained when troops are at their bases or on routine patrol missions. Recent reports suggest that the coalition is short on operational helicopters. Available fleets of attack helicopters and ground attack planes are stretched thin providing cover to supply convoys and ground patrols. The overall situation [...]
Posted on June 3, 2009 - by Venik
Medvedev vs. Putin
A small scandal erupted in Russia’s Karelia region over the decision by a local newspaper to reprint the article from The Vancouver Sun critical of Medvedev. Editors of the Iskra – a small entertainment paper named after Lenin’s famed underground revolutionary newsletter and a relative newcomer to the Russian newspaper market – in a desperate [...]
Posted on May 17, 2009 - by Venik
Pipeline Business
The EU continues waging a losing battle for its energy independence from Russia. Gazprom, hit hard by the global economic recession and dropping energy demands, may be skating on thin ice, but it is still well ahead of the EU. Following the August war with Georgia, Russia moved to consolidate its gains in the region [...]
Posted on April 30, 2009 - by Venik
The Road to Afghanistan
The expedient defeat of NATO-sponsored Georgian army last August by the Russians left many hardliners in Washington and Brussels itching to respond. NATO’s decision to break formal contacts with Russia was a testament to NATO’s own political weakness. To add to the Alliance’s humiliation, the economic crisis forced the West to seek improved relations with [...]
Posted on April 24, 2009 - by Venik
Silver Lining
State Duma – the lower house of the Russian Parliament – voted over the objections of the Communist Party to adopt the redesigned red star marking for military aircraft. The new design is similar to the old one, but features a smaller red star surrounded by a thin blue border. Unexpectedly, the new legislature was [...]
Posted on April 21, 2009 - by Venik
Open-Sourcing JSF
The Wall Street Journal reports that Chinese hackers broke into the Department of Defense computer systems and stole several terabytes of information related to the $300-billion Joint Strike Fighter project. Let’s imagine that three terabytes (this would be the minimum to qualify as “several”) of data were transferred over a 10-mbps connection. This is a [...]
Posted on April 16, 2009 - by Venik
Costly NATO Ambitions
Besieged in his new glass-domed presidential palace in Tbilisi by thousands of protesters demanding his resignation, Mikheil Saakashvili is desperately searching for any opportunity to strengthen his slipping hold on power. The EU, rattled by the brief but eventful 2009 gas war between Russia and Ukraine, is almost just as anxious to help Misha keep [...]
