RUSSIA DESK

The catastrophic sinking of the Russian nuclear-powered Kursk submarine more than two decades ago was the result of a collision with a stricken NATO vessel in the Barents Sea, a former high-ranking navy chief has insisted.

The ‘Kursk’ sank on August 12, 2000 at a depth of 108 meters, claiming the lives of all 118 crew members and sparking the first major international crisis of Vladimir Putin’s presidency. An official investigation commissioned by the Russian government ruled two years later that the incident was the result of a torpedo explosion, which then triggered the detonation of ammunition on board.

DMITRY ORLOV—An array of mechanisms, from cultural exports to ad campaigns associated with popular brands to social media initiatives designed to corrupt the minds of the young, exists in order to exert US influence on other nations.

PEPE ESCOBAR—ISIS-K, which sports a global jihadi mindset, has typically viewed the Taliban as a group of dirty nationalists. Earlier jihadi members used to be recruited from the Pakistani Taliban and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). Yet now, apart from former soldiers, they are mostly young, disaffected urban Afghans, westernized by trashy pop culture.

It’s been hard for ISIS-K to establish the narrative that the Taliban are western collaborators – considering that the NATO galaxy continues to antagonize and/or dismiss the new rulers of Kabul.

MAX PARRY—Although he was considered to be of the ‘realist’ school of international relations like Kissinger, Brzezinski’s plot to engineer a Russian equivalent of Vietnam in Afghanistan increased the clout of neoconservatism in Washington, a persuasion that would later reach its peak of influence in the George W. Bush administration. In retrospect, the need for a massive military buildup to achieve Pax Americana promoted by the war hawks in Team B was a precursor to the influential “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” manifesto by the Project for the New American Century cabal preceding 9/11 and the ensuing U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Fitzgerald and Gould also historically trace the ideological roots of neoconservatism to its intellectual foundations in the American Trotskyist movement during the 1930s.

EDITOR—The Russians, always a remarkably creative and resilient civilization, have recently come up with a medical discovery, a crucial breakthrough in the management of Covid 19, that could have enormous repercussions in many other fields, including the management of immune response in cancer therapies, transplants, etc. Ahh, what a world this could be if we had peace and collaboration with Russia, China, Iran, Korea, and other important countries in the human family, instead of constant warmongering and the deliberate sowing of hatred and distrust toward them.