Just because President Trump withdrew American forces from north-east Syria, it did not mean he looked with favour on the invasion and occupation carried out by President Erdogan of Turkey. His only purpose was to localise the conflict; to give back to those in the region the responsibility for what occurs there. So it should … Continue reading Israeli Aid to the Kurds?

The latest in the new series of intelligence documentaries on Zvezda tv, broadcast yesterday, gives us the life and work of the notorious spy Kim Philby. It was, as were the others, put together from the archives at Russian foreign intelligence (SVR) and the attentive viewer will see that the editor-in-chief, also one of the … Continue reading Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five

Today Zvezda TV followed up with a new documentary in its serial on legends of secret intelligence with a piece on William Fisher, the Russian who grew up in the North-West of Britain while his parents were in exile from the Russian empire. It is a fascinating story of how he became a key radio … Continue reading Documentary on William Fisher

The above is the title of an article in Vzglyad.ru that appeared yesterday. If true, those in Moscow who had pinned their hopes on drawing Turkey out of NATO, thereby breaking its southern flank, are seeing their hopes dashed, as are those Americans who believed that by giving Turkey a free hand in northern Syria … Continue reading Erdogan is Playing with Moscow and Washington

A fascinating article has just appeared today in Komsomolskaya pravda by Dmitrii Smirnov of the Kremlin press corps on the importance of sport for the current generation of political leaders in Russia; in particular, those sports with practical application for self-defence. Vladimir Putin is the obvious example of a skinny young man on the streets … Continue reading Putin as a Fighter among Fighters

The fundamental problem of the Russian economy is that, having abandoned central planning, Russia has yet to stand on its own feet as a free market system. The corrupt liberalisation of the economy's commanding heights in the mid-1990s under President Boris Yeltsin, whose family had fingers in the pie, discredited a very necessary process and … Continue reading Entrepreneurs Won’t Play Ball

It was Nikita Khrushchev who boldly exposed Stalin's crimes at the 20th Party Congress in 1956, opening Pandora's Box and unchaining the Soviet Union from the evils of the recent past. But a reaction set in with his ouster and the emergence of Leonid Brezhnev as Party Secretary in October 1964. The Central Committee began … Continue reading The Reluctance to Condemn Stalin