RUSSIA & NOVOROSSIYA

DIANA JOHNSTONE-Russia was seen as a U.S. adversary on grounds of communism. The communist scare emerged as the perfect ideological pretext for the United States to maintain the dominance it gained from World War.  Western Europe had to be defended from communism. Third World countries had to be prevented from going communist. Russians themselves evidently believed that U.S. animosity was purely ideological, based on communism.  I think they really believed that the fall of Soviet communism would make the two nations into friendly partners.

Over the past few years, at the slightest deterioration in the relations between Bulgaria and Russia, the Russian-language segment of the Internet, as a rule, explodes with indignation. Moreover, this indignation is very standard: “We liberated them, and they betrayed us”, “both in the First and Second World Wars they fought against us” … All this is said without a shadow of doubt, and each of those couch experts, without noticing, drives in a wedge into the kinship of the Bulgarian and Russian peoples.

CHRISTOPHER BLACK—Once again, the NATO powers are preparing the ground for an incident involving Kaliningrad, home base of their Baltic Fleet and guardian of the approaches to St. Petersburg and what the Guardian stated is “emerging as a critical square on the east European chessboard in Vladimir Putin’s efforts to push back assertively against NATO expansion.”

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