Finally, yesterday, 14 July at least one newspaper in Russia has reported on the indictment in Washington DC of 12 GRU (Russian military intelligence) officers for hacking into the computers of Hillary Clinton's campaign from March through to November 2016. Without going into too much detail, the liberal Novaya Gazeta gives this as background to … Continue reading Russian Intelligence and The Election

Presidents Trump and Putin meet on Monday 16 July in Finland. When leaders get together one on one, their advisers and the bureaucracy that answers to them become extremely nervous; tetchy, even. When the Americans and the Russians get together without the Europeans, then the anxiety levels rise even further. And President Trump uses anxiety … Continue reading The Trump-Putin Summit

The appearance of an amazing new supercomputer, Summit, put together at the National Research Laboratory in Oak Ridge by the US Department of Energy places the United States well ahead in a field where China has predominated since 2013. And it does far more than that. Interviewed today in Vzglyad' ru by Nikita Kovalenko, Russian academician … Continue reading The Gap in Super Computers

Relations between the triad dominating most of Syria - Russia, Turkey and Iran - are unstable and have become more so as ISIS succumbed to overwhelming odds against it. Having agreed on a Syrian ceasefire in Kazakhstan, now the cracks in the coalition are showing through. Last week the Russians asked that the Iranians withdraw … Continue reading Iran Alienates Russia

Today in an extraordinarily self-obsessed leading article, Vzglyad' ru declares that "Italy has chosen a man for the removal of anti-Russian sanctions." Well, that man, Giuseppe Conti, is a lawyer with no real political experience of government and a very peculiar curriculum vitae - listing one month studying in the library of Girton College, Cambridge, … Continue reading How Self-Centred Can One Get?

Now that President Putin has a new term of office, it could have been expected that this would provide a great opportunity for fundamental change to put right what has gone wrong over the past decade and a half. Yet the old guard remains - Lavrov at the Foreign Ministry and Shoigu at Defence. The … Continue reading Russian Military Capability in Doubt

Moscow does not give up easily. The President had a long bridge built to join Russia to the Crimea and then apparently drives a large lorry from one side to the other. Perhaps Britain's Prime Minister can score a second by finally building the new railway connecting north and south of England and then drive … Continue reading Is it Worth Wedge-Driving into NATO?