... charge of a relatively weaker Russia taking on the most powerful nation in the world and regardless of the election’s outcome, Putin had already won: he took to heart von Clausewitz’s maxim that “War is the continuation of policy [or politics] by other means,” something that Obama seems to have missed. Putin had essentially “weaponized” WikiLeaks (and, in the process, the unwitting U.S. news media) against Clinton, the Democratic Party, the U.S. electoral process, and American democracy itself. And almost overnight, he has largely silenced ...
... 11 billion cubic meters of gas from RUE’s gas stockpiles, a quantity worth billions of dollars at the time; Timoshenko had effectively cut out the middlemen who had been hiking up prices and using those profits to poison and pollute Ukrainian politics for Putin’s plans.
Playing a longer-term game, Firtash initiated a lengthy arbitration process through Stockholm…
Unfortunately for Tymoshenko, though she had risen to be Prime Minister late in 2007, in that election and even in the prior ...
... him.
Conclusion: All Politics Is Local (Exclusion of “The Other?”)
The bottom line is that the sad identity politics of hate and division and resentment are hardly anything exceptional in America and can be found all over the world throughout ... ... on him after Russia had wrested concessions from the new Georgian leadership. Trump might be interested in such history, with Putin’s Russia today interfering in America’s election and trying to help Donald Trump get into the White House.
...
... Ukraine whose political fault lines very much ran (and still run) along the ethnic Ukrainian and ethnic Russian divide within Ukraine, with Yanukovych allying with the ethnic Russian camp that feels strongly tied to Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin in particular has a history of trying to manipulate, strong-arm, and dominate Ukrainian politics, with Yanukovych acting as key agent for advancing Russian interests in Ukraine.
Behind the scenes and unofficially, Manafort worked as a campaign consultant for Yanukovych, already surrounded by a cloud of corruption at this time, who was ...
... casualties, but among rivals, you could add objectivity and a sense of proportion to that initial casualty list.
Among certain not uncommon elements in the U.S. and the West, especially among American Republicans, there is a tendency to speak of Russia and Putin today hyperbolically in the same breath as interwar Germany and Hitler, that somehow, Putin is a monster of a potential Hitleresque quality, if not in genocidal intent then in a global ambition to dominate. The word “appeasement” is ...
