The world is no doubt pleased to hear that the tomato war between Russia and Turkey is just about over. Russian sanctions on the importation of Turkish tomatoes began on 1 January 2016, following the Turkish shoot-down of a Su-24 fighter bomber on or within the Turkish frontier the previous November. And the shoot-down came … Continue reading The Tomato Truce with Turkey

Played to win, international relations is a very dangerous game. The Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, now back in the news with the release of top secret documents about the Kennedy assassination, reminds us of that; in particular those of us who lived through it and at the time doubted they would survive. But … Continue reading Russo-American rejection of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons

Inevitably any discussion of the Kennedy assassination leads to the Russian angle in that the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald lived in the Soviet Union for a few years before returning to the United States with a Russian wife. He also visited the Soviet embassy in Mexico City before he finally murdered the President. It is … Continue reading The Kennedy Assassination

Following partition in 1947 and even more so after the advent of the Eisenhower administration in 1952 India and Pakistan increasingly became polar opposites in world politics. Having rejected US Secretary of State Foster Dulles in search of allies in Asia against Moscow and Beijing, the Nehru dynasty, both anglophile and socialist, turned its back … Continue reading The Problem of India

In the old days Moscow had no choice if a régime took power with Communist Party backing. Moscow had to stand four square behind it; the internationalist commitment warping into overdrive, heightening tension with the United States as an unavoidable matter of course. These days, however, liberated from the trammels of Marxism-Leninism the Kremlin can … Continue reading Venezuela: Standing by Your Man

Few outlets exist in the Russian media for the open expression of political dissent. Ekho Moskvy, funded by Gazprom Media, is one of them. The radio station was subjected to unfounded smears by state television recently suggesting that the station was in receipt of foreign subidies; the kind of thing the Kremlin has never entirely … Continue reading Open Season on Journalists

All too often when tracing a government's foreign policy one gets snowed in under a blizzard of meaningless verbiage deliberately issued to obfuscate what is really going on. Mr Lavrov at the Russian Foreign Ministry is a past master at this practice. He decorates the shop window with Christmas displays of peace and goodwill while … Continue reading Follow the Money (in the Near East)

Few would seek to deny that open political dissent in Russia today is not exactly welcomed by those in power. But I think it important to point out that, side by side with the overt repression of political opposition, debates over critical areas of policy that are highly classified as top secret none the less … Continue reading Strategic Debates Within Putin’s Russia

On 29 June (see archive) we previously looked at the way in which criminal elements involved in hacking for personal gain were swept up into the operations of Russian intelligence with offers they could not refuse and ended up contaminating the service in the process of practising their nefarious arts for the state. Now with … Continue reading Russian Hackers