RUSSIA DESK

MoA—A curious ‘regime change’ happened in Russia today as the Prime Minister Dimitry Medvedev and his whole cabinet resigned. This morning President Vladimir Putin held his yearly speech to the Federal Assembly of Russia (English transcript). Putin spoke about Russia’s demographic situation, its weaponry and the celebration of the upcoming 75th anniversary of its second world war victory.

PATRICK ARMSTRONG—As far as I know, most Western intelligence agencies (but not the one I was involved with) would have agreed with his prediction that Russia was, inevitably, going down to “obscurity”. The fear then was of chaos – rogue generals, nuclear weapons gone missing (remember suitcase nukes, “red mercury”?): Russia’s weakness was the threat, not its strength. We appreciated how badly off Russia was but also knew that Russia in its thousand years has often been down but never out. We also knew that there was more to Putin than the absurdities that were said about him.

THE SAKER—Hypersonic and long range missiles have changed the face of naval warfare forever and they have made aircraft carriers pretty much obsolete: if even during the Cold War the top of the line U.S. carriers were “sitting ducks”, imagine what any carrier is today?  The old saying, “shooting fish in a barrel” comes to mind.

MoA—The NYT can claim that Russia’s GDP is smaller than Italy’s because it only looked at the nominal Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of those countries. But nominal GDP like nominal wages are not meaningful comparisons. The question is how much can be bought for each nominal unit.

PETER MAN—So what to do for revolutions to succeed? We need new thinking, new paradigm, new methodology, not old ideology, certainly not dogma. We need to stop using the language of the Big Lie. We also need to control the narrative, so that people will not be confused by the bullshit and try to understand what they’re supporting, what they’re fighting for. And then like Saker says, the people will have to do it themselves.