The surrealism of the Ukrainian conflict continued last week, with the 28 members of the NATO alliance meeting in a cozy golf resort in Wales, United Kingdom, to discuss all of the supposedly egregious and disconcerting Russian maneuvers against Ukraine and demanding that Russia stop inviting further sanctions and pressure against itself, as British Prime Minister David Cameron emphasized at the summit. All of this is well and good, of course, part of the pomp and circumstance of international organizations...
... showdown some of this will actually start to rub off on President Obama. For if it does, then real discussions and negotiations can begin anew and American-Russian relations can once more get serious and move beyond these lame attempts to conjure a neo-Cold War that is in the interests and objectives of no one. Well, at least, not in the interests and objectives of anyone who desires peace and tranquility between two old rivals. This playground certainly IS big enough for the two of them. Someone might ...
... starting to look and sound and feel an awful lot like 1964. If you find yourself sitting at home wondering how 50 years could go by with so much historical change and global shifting and yet still end up basically back at the starting point of a quasi-Cold War between the United States and Russia, then please allow me to offer one slightly unique explanation as to how this has all come to pass: it’s my fault.
Well, alright, it’s not exactly my personal fault, for I am a member of what ...
... West feel it was essential to launch new action? The Pentagon announced that Russian troops were ‘building up along the border.’ Of course, for those of us who have followed this conflict for the past half year, we have had heard this accusation at least half a dozen times. Sometimes there has been evidence to partially support the claim. Sometimes the claim has seemed utterly baseless. But what has been universally consistent across all of the accusations of Russian troop build-up along ...
... when it should be making the picture more clear and distinct. It is true that relevant and powerful actors in the United States sometimes seem too content with seeing Russia only as the ‘Bond villain country’ it was designated during the Cold War. How else do we account for the constant engagement by American political actors with Ukraine and the relatively limited and dismissive tone taken by those same actors with Russia? Why are the facts above not entering into the discussion when ...
Not that anyone would notice, but there is a disturbing and quite frankly depressing reality taking place in eastern Ukraine. While it is true the conflict that rages has been largely downplayed now and shoved off the media spotlight in the West, whatever coverage does emerge tends to be giving a relative free pass to Ukrainian police forces, special operation forces, and the military as they seek to reinstitute control over their national territory. At first glance this does not sound particularly...
There seems to be a strong divergence in American governmental perception behind Chinese and Russian command of cyberspace and their general cyber interaction with state authority. On the one hand, there is the assumption that this is a natural manifestation of the growing desire on the part of Russia and China to achieve global superpower status. On the other hand, there are the counter-arguments that emphasize China's and Russia’s own perception of inability to operate effectively...
... because the West and Kiev wants that question obliterated from the news doesn’t mean it is any less relevant to the actual people in the eastern half of the country.
And so here we sit. Eastern Ukraine remains unsettled. More casualties mount. Accusations fly about Russian subterfuge as authorities in Kiev violently struggle to preserve its larger territorial mass. How it will all play out, for better or for worse, is beyond anyone’s guess. But in the meantime I will wonder if this Ukrainian ...
