It is a historical law that each state in the world changes with time. However, only a few states experienced dramatic change during the short period of time as Russia did over the last 33 years. Russia has changed as a state, nation, and military power followed by her fluctuating position in global politics and international relations. Since 1991 up today Russia[Read More…]
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Wednesday the geopolitical climate had changed completely since the United Nations imposed sanctions on North Korea, and he accused the West of breaking pledges on humanitarian support for Pyongyang. A Reuters report said: Lavrov was speaking to a Russian TV reporter as Russian President Vladimir Putin hosted North Korean leader Kim Jong Un[Read More…]
Moscow and Beijing should “lead the correct direction of global governance reform,” said Chinese President Xi Jinping. Xi underlined that the development of the bilateral ties between China and Russia has become “a strategic choice made by both countries based on their own national and people’s fundamental interests.” Xi added that the importance of developing ties within such multinational groups[Read More…]
![Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin [centre] poses with two Wagner Group fighters, Bakhmut in Donetsk region, Ukraine, May 25, 2023](https://cdn.countercurrents.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Yevgeny-Prigozhin-200x150.webp "The Bizarre Episode of Yevgeny Prigozhin 6")
More complete information is now available and reports of the event still do not “add up.” What we are told cannot be what exactly occurred. Coup is not thr correct word. More complete information is now available and reports of the bizarre episode of Yevgeny Prigozhin still do not “add up.” What we are told cannot be what exactly occurred.[Read More…]
On Monday night, Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed the nation for the second time with the intention to bring the curtain down on the coup attempt by Wagner “founder” Yevgeny Prigozhin on June 23-24. It was quintessentially a self-congratulatory speech — well-deserved, perhaps. The speech had four principal elements. First, Putin took note right at the outset the “restraint, cohesion and patriotism” that[Read More…]
A lot of nonsense is being spouted by a bevy of spontaneous “Russian experts” in light of the Prigozhin spray, a mutiny (no one quite knows what to call it), stillborn in the Russian Federation. It all fell to the theatrical sponsor, promoter and rabble rouser Yevgeny Prigozhin, a convict who rose through the ranks of the deceased Soviet state[Read More…]
Yevgeny Prigozhin may not have succeeded in realizing his ambitions, but his revolt had the unintended impact of focusing worldwide attention on the wider and serious problems involved in increasing dependence in many countries on mercenary fighting forces. Russia had used the soldiers of the Wagner PMC (private military company) in several military campaigns in recent times. While this may[Read More…]
The Kremlin leadership has acted decisively to meet the threat of an armed insurrection by the Russian oligarch and self-styled ‘founder’ of Wagner Group of military contractors, Yevgeny Prigozhin. In a series of videos released on Friday, Prigozhin alleged that the Russian government’s justifications for military intervention in Ukraine were based on lies. He accused the Russian Defence Ministry under minister[Read More…]
After the Cold War 1.0 (1949−1989) emerged many new problems in the international arena of global politics as the circumstances concerning international relations drastically have been changed. One of the many problematic issues that have been facing both the USA and Europe (in fact, NATO and the EU) after 1989 was to find a new way of their relations with[Read More…]
Western economic punishments on Russia continue to severely limit its economic prospects. But they also risk hastening the development of sanctions evasion techniques and rival economic mechanisms outside the control of Brussels and Washington. Immediately after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the U.S., the UK, and the EU placed major sanctions on Russia to constrict its economy and restrain[Read More…]
The Biden administration will soon release its National Security Strategy, which is being revised in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The document will no doubt trigger a renewed debate about how the United States should gear up for a new Cold War against Russia and China. But before we plunge into a global great-power competition, it’s worth recalling President Biden’s[Read More…]
Though Washington insists that it is not interested in a direct military conflict with Moscow, the latter claims that the US is, in fact, directly involved. But who is telling the truth? On September 8, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, appeared in Kyiv on an unannounced visit. He carried with him pledges of yet another military and financial package[Read More…]
While Ukraine has received enormous aid from around the world since the Russian invasion began in February, open support for Russia should not be dismissed. On August 24, Ukraine’s independence day, the U.S. provided a $3 billion military aid package to the country. The additional assistance adds to more than $80 billion worth of support that Kyiv has already received between January[Read More…]
Starting on May 31, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov embarked on a tour to Gulf Cooperation Council countries, where he visited Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, among others. Lavrov’s main objective of these visits is to strengthen ties between Russia and GCC nations amid a global race for geopolitical dominance. The Middle East, especially the Gulf region, is vital[Read More…]
There is a persistent belief in both Europe and the United States that the “Western” economies are the most developed around, just as the “Western” culture and democracy, with its culture of abolition and total tolerance, is the only correct and advanced system. Russia, which is a bridge connecting Europe with Asia since Tsar Peter, has apparently chosen the European[Read More…]
A key factor that explains Vladimir Putin’s military invasion of Ukraine is traditional Russian imperialism. Throughout the world’s long and bloody history, other powerful territories (and, later, nations) expanded their lands through imperial conquest, including Rome, China, Spain, France, Britain, Germany, Japan, and the United States. Russia was no exception. Beginning with the small principality of Moscow in 1300, Russia[Read More…]
Extreme religious or anti-religious engagement of the ruling political forces in modern times would have serious negative consequences for the society as whole and the state apparatus. The Russian experience shows this very clearly. The communist phase of Russia was completely anti-religion. Now Putin’s Russia is deeply associated with the Orthodox Church that suffered a lot during the communist regime. Vladimir[Read More…]
As soon as Moscow received an American response to its security demands in Ukraine, it answered indirectly by announcing greater military integration between it and three South American countries, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba. Washington’s response, on January 26, to Russia’s demands of withdrawing NATO forces from Eastern Europe and ending talks about a possible Kyiv membership in the US-led alliance,[Read More…]
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken warns of imminent Russian assault on Ukraine, scrambling to get allies to rally. (File photo) A special press briefing in unseemly hurry by the US state department to warn an imminent Russian assault on Ukraine; a surprise call by state secretary Blinken to his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov to be followed by an unscheduled meeting[Read More…]
Like the bilateral negotiations between the US and Russia on Monday, the meeting of the NATO-Russia Council on Wednesday also ended with no tangible result. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg called it a “positive sign” that the 30 NATO countries and Russia were “sitting at the same table again for the first time in two and a half years and[Read More…]
With Russian troops massing on Ukraine’s borders, it’s not only Ukrainians who worry about what President Vladimir Putin may have in store for them. It’s Kazakhs too. For now, Kazakhs don’t have to be immediately concerned about Russian troop movements. What unsettles them is years of Russian rhetoric, spearheaded by Mr. Putin’s repeated comments, stressing the ideological rather than the[Read More…]
On Friday, Mali’s transitional government has clarified that it is engaged with Russian military trainers even as French troops are drawing down. So, it is official that Russian security personnel are deployed to Mali. Mali, a landlocked country in the Sahel region in West Africa, is the latest theatre of the great contestation involving the big powers playing out in[Read More…]
A fateful week is ending today for international security with the Russian Foreign Ministry releasing the two documents on security guarantees that Moscow had proposed to Washington as the basis for discussions to ease the tensions over NATO’s eastward expansion and to cease the alliance’s deployments close to Russia’s borders, including in Ukraine. Out of the two documents, one is a[Read More…]
Russia President Vladimir Putin has lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union three decades ago as the demise of what he called “historical Russia” and said the economic crisis that followed was so bad he was forced to moonlight as a taxi driver. A Reuters report from Moscow said: Putin’s comments, released by state TV on Sunday, are likely to[Read More…]
Moscow has butted the grand old transatlantic alliance in the chest on Monday with the foreign ministry announcing that it will suspend the NATO military liaison mission with effect from November 1 and recall the accreditation of its staff in response to the NATO decision to withdraw the accreditation of eight Russian diplomats. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov curtly added, “if NATO has[Read More…]
On no subject is the bipartisan consensus more unshakable than on the Russian threat. In his latest book, The Stupidity of War: American Foreign Policy and the Case for Complacency, American political scientist John Mueller demonstrates that since the end of World War II, American policymakers have developed a kind of addiction to threat inflation by “routinely elevating the problematic to[Read More…]
Russia and Europe share strong historical and cultural ties from time immemorial. But these ties did not translate into amicable trade relations between the two. The Russian Federation and the European Union both came into existence in the early 1990’s. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russia we all know today came into being. During the[Read More…]
But the bottom line is that the German-French initiative has caused a divide within the EU, with East European and Baltic countries that are closer geographically to Russia being wary of any loosening of the EU’s approach to Moscow. Equally, the German-French initiative will alarm Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova in Russia’s ‘near abroad’. *** A thoughtful, far-sighted proposal by German[Read More…]
The strange policy, pursued by the present occupant of the White House during the past few weeks is fairly surprising. Moreover, Joe Biden’s actions vis-à-vis Russia are downright contradictory, to say the least. Or maybe his strange initiatives are sending some ulterior message to the team around him and those who supported last fall’s very dirty elections? On the morning[Read More…]
The future isn’t what it used to be. As a teenager in the 1970s, I watched a lot of TV science fiction shows, notably Space: 1999 and UFO, that imagined a near future of major moon bases and alien attacks on Earth. Movies of that era like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey envisioned colossal spaceships and space stations featuring international crews on mind-blowing missions[Read More…]
It is almost certain that Vladimir Putin will continue to be in office as elections in Russia are about to be held. Things have changed for Russia after the collapse of the USSR. Still, there are a lot of things which seems to be the same as they were. An article by Anders Åslund (Anders, A (2001). Russia. Foreign Policy,[Read More…]
From the number of deceased Russian dissidents, complicity in their demise seems plausible. From evidence, thought, and logic, complicity seems unlikely: (1) Only circumstantial links to Putin’s office have been established in the cases. (2) Because political opposition is weak, and no obvious threat to the ruling United Russia Party, what would the government gain in assassination of opposition figures? (3) Because Putin’s approval rating[Read More…]
This is the first part (of 5 ) of a paragraph by paragraph commentary on a recent article posing as journalism in the March 6, 2017 issue of The New Yorker. I hope to demonstrate that this article is basically a totally mendacious concoction of cold war US propaganda constructed out of unsubstantiated opinions expressed by US government officials and[Read More…]
Zerohedge’s “Tyler Durden” headlined on February 21st, “Bannon Breaks With Pence, Delivers Warning To Europe” and noted that before U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis reassured European leaders this past weekend that the U.S. is as anti-Russian now as it was under Barack Obama, U.S. President Donald Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, had[Read More…]
Eisenhower’s warning In his famous farwell address, US President Dwight Eisenhower eloquently described the terrible effects of an overgrown military-industrial complex. Here are his words: “We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions…. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence, economic,[Read More…]
There is a great deal of continuity in Russian history from the reign of Peter the Great until the present. There was clear discontinuity during the Bolshevik Revolution and the brief period when V. I. Lenin was in power, but then the USSR reverted to some very traditional practices in domestic and especially foreign affairs. Just as Tsars Peter the[Read More…]
The Russian ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, was shot in the back and killed Monday (12/19) by a sacked police officer who shouted “Don’t forget Aleppo” and “Allahu Akbar” as he opened fire. The ambassador was giving a speech at an Ankara art gallery. Reuters news agency reported: “A video showed the attacker shouting: “Don’t forget Aleppo, don’t forget Syria!”[Read More…]
The film The Battle of Russia, produced in 1943 by the US War Department (which was renamed the Defense Department in 1949), illustrates a respectful and favorable US elite view of Russian history, the Soviet/Russian people, and Stalin for defeating Hitler in World War II and proving that the German reich (empire) was not invincible. The film was originally intended[Read More…]
On December 7th, was posed the biggest test so far of the mettle of America’s President-Elect, Donald Trump. He had said several times during his campaign, that if elected as President, he would seek a new, less-hostile, relationship between the U.S. and Russia. Now the moment has come when he must either make his first move forward with that historic commitment,[Read More…]
On October 9, I was in the Nevada desert with Catholic Workers from around the world for an action of prayer and nonviolent resistance at what is now called the Nevada National Security Site, the test site where between 1951 and 1992, nine hundred and twenty-eight documented atmospheric and underground nuclear tests occurred. Since the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty and[Read More…]
In the midst of rising tensions between the U.S. and Russia, a small delegation of peace activists travels to Moscow and St. Petersburg to learn from Russian people about their perspective on war and international relations. The hardships suffered by ordinary Russians as a result of U.S.-imposed economic sanctions, and the failure of U.S. media to report on this,[Read More…]
In the historic port city of Yalta, located on the Crimean Peninsula, we visited the site where Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, in February of 1945, concluded negotiations ending World War II. These leaders and their top advisors were also present at the creation of the United Nations and other instruments of international negotiation and non-military cooperation. Tragically, the creation of[Read More…]
The NATO Founding Act was agreed to between the U.S. and Russia in 1997 in order to provide to Russia’s leader Boris Yeltsin some modicum of assurance that America wouldn’t invade his country. When his predecessor Mikhail Gorbachev had ended the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact military alliance in 1991, the representatives of U.S. President GHW Bush told him[Read More…]
There are dangerous provocations along Russia’s western border that have received little or incredibly one-sided coverage by the U.S. media. Thus the U.S. public is not aware of the possibility of a major conflict between two nuclear-armed powers occurring due to an accident or misinterpretation. The genesis of this current situation goes back in ancient history to 1989 and[Read More…]
I wasn’t at first going to listen to Rosemary Barton’s interview (CBC) with NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg considering I would probably not learn anything new. But I did and I didn’t – I did listen and I didn’t learn anything new, the interview only reinforced previously held ideas. In general that falls into two parts. First it reminded me[Read More…]
This news-report consists of a compilation of accounts that Crimeans have given to human rights groups or directly posted to the internet, regarding their experiences when the freely elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, who had received 75% of the votes of Crimeans, was violently overthrown during January and February of 2014. On 20 February 2014, eight busloads of people[Read More…]
When the democratically elected President of Ukraine was violently overthrown in February 2014 and replaced by a rabidly anti-Russian regime, not only the residents in the areas of Ukraine that had voted heavily for him (Crimea having voted 75% for him, and Donbass having voted 90% for him) were terrified by what they viewed to be a bloodthirsty new regime,[Read More…]
NATO is supposed to be a defensive alliance, whose purpose is to “protect Europe from aggression”; but today it is aggressive tool of the United States. Today NATO is threatening to drive Europe into an all-destroying thermonuclear war with Russia. In recent years, participation in NATO has made European countries accomplices in US efforts to achieve global hegemony by means[Read More…]
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is sending 4,000 additional troops to Eastern Europe in the name of reassuring Poland and the Baltic states, the alliance’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg confirmed on Monday. “We will agree to deploy by rotation four robust multi-national battalions in the Baltic states and Poland,” Stoltenberg told NATO officials. The US, Germany and Britain will[Read More…]
Since 1983, Sharon Tennison has worked to develop ordinary citizens’ capacities to avert international crises, focusing on relations between the U.S. and Russia. Now, amid a rising crisis in relations between the U.S. and Russia, she has organized a delegation which assembled in Moscow yesterday for a two week visit. I joined the group yesterday, and happened to finish reading[Read More…]
On Tuesday, June 14th, NATO announced that if a NATO member country becomes the victim of a cyber attack by persons in a non-NATO country such as Russia or China, then NATO’s Article V “collective defense” provision requires each NATO member country to join that NATO member country if it decides to strike back against the attacking country. The preliminary[Read More…]
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While Searching Worldwide for Terrorists, Uncle Sam Should Also Look in a Mirror 
American Abrams tanks roll into Ukraine 
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Speak Truth to Power and Pay the Price! 
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Place of Minorities as Allotted by Savarkar, Golwalkar and Upadhyaya 
What is in the name? Attempt to stop the usage of ‘India’ by the Government 
Poona Pact: A Reappraisal 
Hate Speech Inside Parliament: Reaching a New Low 
Criminal Justice And Freedom of Speech 
75,000 Climate Protesters Marched In New York With Demand To End Fossil Fuels 
On the Dark Side of the Moon.. 
Avoiding the War on Terror would have saved over 10 million lives at home and abroad 
My Amma (Malayalam word for Mother) passed away on August 22, 2023 at 3.10 AM. It is always difficult to deal with the passing of a parent, that too one’s mother. I thought the grief would go away. No it didn’t. All those bitter sweet memories won’t go away. At night I lie awake for hours. My friend, guide and[Read More…]
