RUSSIA & NOVOROSSIYA

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.

ERIC ZUESSE—Though international law is generally an unenforced mess that is interpretable far more by partisanship than by any clearly applicable principles of law, the U.S. Government does quite blatantly violate it on a routine basis, by means of coups and invasions against countries that never invaded nor threatened to invade the United States. If anything at all is clear in international law, it is that Crimea’s breaking away from Ukraine and rejoining Russia in 2014 was entirely and unquestionably legitimate

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.

RAINER SHEA—The staggering selfishness that these petty tyrants showed when Stalin tried to make their resources available to a desperate populace-with many of the kulaks having burned their supplies rather than share it-is also ignored by bourgeois commentators who see the kulaks as victims. From a capitalist perspective, taking away someone’s means for exploiting the proletariat is a heinous crime, and the kulaks were only defending themselves.

NATYLIE BALDWIN—Arctic ice, receding at a record pace, revealed five new islands in the Russian far north this year that had been hidden under the ice sheets for all of recorded human history. Russian scientists aboard a research ship near the northern coast of Siberia last week were amazed to discover a massive eruption of methane bubbles from the ocean floor. The huge clouds of the super-greenhouse gas suggest that the underlying permafrost is melting faster than anyone could have anticipated.