Russia

THANKS, VLAD!:

Why Russia has come to the table (Peter Caddick-Adams, 11/28/25, Englesberg Ideas)

Russia’s economy is imploding. Largely due to sanctions caused by the Ukraine War, this year the Economics Ministry posted a record mid-year budget deficit of 3.7 trillion roubles ($45.8 billion) and the Central Bank expects the full-year deficit to reach $55 billion, or 2 per cent of GDP. This is almost certainly the reason peace proposals with Ukraine have surfaced again. […]

Traditionally, the Kremlin has leant heavily on oil and gas exports to generate cash; in 2024, earnings from these exports contributed around 30 per cent of total federal budget revenue. However, from an average price listing of $71.10 per barrel of Urals crude in November 2022, due to sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil, reliance on its aging and inefficient ‘shadow tanker’ shipping fleet, and a G7-imposed price cap, after three years, traders report the price of Russian oil has slid to $36.61 per barrel, with other OPEC producers replacing the Urals output. As key export buyers, notably China and India, were threatening to search elsewhere for suppliers, by November 2025 Russian sellers had been obliged to discount their black stuff to an average of $23.52 a barrel.

Thus, the Kremlin has turned to selling assets it cannot replace.

Ukraine needs to increase its demands, starting with regime change.

THE LINCOLN BRIGADES MAY HAVE BEEN JUST DUPES…:

Preface to the Ukrainian Edition of Animal Farm (George Orwell, March 1947)

In the early stages of the war foreigners were on the whole unaware of the inner struggles between the various political parties supporting the Government. Through a series of accidents I joined not the International Brigade like the majority of foreigners, but the POUM militia—i.e. the Spanish Trotskyists.

So in the middle of 1937, when the Communists gained control (or partial control) of the Spanish Government and began to hunt down the Trotskyists, we both found ourselves amongst the victims. We were very lucky to get out of Spain alive, and not even to have been arrested once. Many of our friends were shot, and others spent a long time in prison or simply disappeared.

These man-hunts in Spain went on at the same time as the great purges in the USSR and were a sort of supplement to them. In Spain as well as in Russia the nature of the accusations (namely, conspiracy with the Fascists) was the same and as far as Spain was concerned I had every reason to believe that the accusations were false. To experience all this was a valuable object lesson: it taught me how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic countries.

My wife and I both saw innocent people being thrown into prison merely because they were suspected of unorthodoxy. Yet on our return to England we found numerous sensible and well-informed observers believing the most fantastic accounts of conspiracy, treachery and sabotage which the press reported from the Moscow trials.

And so I understood, more clearly than ever, the negative influence of the Soviet myth upon the western Socialist movement.

…but the fact is they were serving Stalin, not the Spanish people.

THANKS, VLAD!:

The Real Meaning of Putin’s Middle East Failure (Michael McFaul and Abbas Milani, July 25, 2025, Foreign Affairs)

But over the past 20 months, Russia’s standing in the Middle East has cratered. Israel’s response to Hamas’s October 7 attacks has devastated the so-called axis of resistance, the Iranian-backed network with which Russia had forged close ties. The Assad regime in Syria, long a valuable Russian client, collapsed spectacularly. U.S. and Israeli strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities severely weakened Russia’s most important regional ally. As a result, Russia’s reputation as a patron and guarantor of security in the region lies in tatters. In the new Middle East now taking shape, Moscow is no longer needed.

Moscow’s failures will resound beyond the Middle East. Whether the result of Putin’s conscious decision not to intervene or of the Kremlin’s inability to do so, Russia’s abandonment of partners in the region should be a sobering lesson for Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party: that in times of crisis, Russia will not be a reliable ally.

There is no bear in the woods

VLAD IS THE ENEMY:

Westerners foolishly rush to defend Azerbaijan against Russia (Eldar Mamedov, Jul 09, 2025, Responsible Statecraft)

Since Azerbaijan’s 2023 reconquest of Nagorno-Karabakh, which sidelined Russian peacekeepers and exposed Moscow’s waning regional influence, President Ilham Aliyev has pursued an assertive foreign policy. Aliyev’s sharp public criticisms of Russia over the Azerbaijan Airlines plane crash in Russian airspace in December 2024 — in which he demanded accountability, compensation, and justice—signaled a newfound combativeness toward Moscow, marking a departure from Baku’s traditionally cautious diplomacy with its powerful neighbor.

Backed by Turkey and courted by the West for its energy exports, Azerbaijan aims to dominate the South Caucasus and serve as a critical energy hub for Central Asian exports to Europe that bypasses Russia.

Baku’s ambitions center on the proposed Zangezur Corridor, a transit route through Armenia connecting Azerbaijan to its Nakhchivan exclave and Turkey. This corridor, under prospective Ankara-Baku control, aligns with Western efforts to reduce reliance on Russian hydrocarbon export but is strongly opposed by both Russia and Iran, who fear it would bolster Turkish influence at their expense.

Armenia, caught in the middle, faces intense pressure, with Aliyev threatening military action if Yerevan resists.

Armenia’s own pivot complicates the situation. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s pro-Western government has distanced itself from Moscow, freezing its participation in the Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organization and signaling openness to NATO membership. Yet, this leaves Armenia isolated, as Western support remains largely rhetorical while Azerbaijan’s threats are tangible. Domestically, Pashinyan’s crackdown on opponents, labeled as “pro-Russian forces,” further destabilizes the country.

Encouraged by the growing geopolitical convergence between Armenia and Azerbaijan, some Western diplomats have rushed to back Baku, seeing an opportunity to push Russia out of the South Caucasus.

VOX CLAMANTIS…:

The masterpiece of our time: On The Gulag Archipelago at fifty. (Gary Saul Morson, June 2024, New Criterion)

Begin with numbers. Solzhenitsyn instructs: from 1876 to 1904—a period of mass strikes, peasant revolts, and terrorism claiming the lives of Tsar Alexander II and other top officials—“486 people were executed; in other words, about seventeen people per year for the whole country,” a figure that includes “ordinary, nonpolitical criminals!” During the 1905 revolution and its suppression, “executions rocketed upward, astounding Russian imaginations, calling forth tears from Tolstoy and indignation from [the writer Vladimir] Korolenko, and many, many others: from 1905 through 1908 2,200 persons were executed,” a number contemporaries described as an “epidemic of executions.”

By contrast, Soviet judicial killings—whether by shooting, forced starvation, or hard labor at forty degrees below zero—numbered in the tens of millions. Crucially, condemnation did not require individual guilt. As early as 1918, Solzhenitsyn points out, the Cheka (secret police) leader M. I. Latsis instructed revolutionary tribunals dispensing summary justice to disregard personal guilt or innocence and just ascertain the prisoner’s class origin: this “must determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning of the Red Terror.”

On this basis, over five million peasants (classed as “kulaks,” supposedly better off than their neighbors) were forcibly exiled to completely unsettled wastelands with no food or tools, where they were left to die. The same punishment later befell whole nationalities deemed potentially disloyal (such as ethnic Germans, Chechens, and Crimean Tatars) or dangerous because of the possibility of receiving subversive support from a foreign power (as in the case of Koreans and Poles). “The liquidation of the kulaks as a class” was followed by the deliberate starvation of millions of peasants. All food for a large area of what is now Ukraine was requisitioned, and even fishing in the rivers was prohibited, so that over the next few months inhabitants starved to death. Idealistic young Bolsheviks from the capital enforced the famine. In total, Stalin’s war on the countryside claimed more than ten million lives. As Solzhenitsyn makes clear, this crime is not nearly as well known among intellectuals as the Great Purges, which claimed fewer victims, because many purge victims were themselves intellectuals.

Arrests also took place by quotas assigned to local secret-police offices, which, if they knew what was good for them, petitioned to arrest still more. After World War II, captured Russian soldiers in German slave-labor camps were promptly transferred to Russian ones, as was anyone who had seen something of the Western world. Even soldiers who had fought their way out of German encirclement were arrested as traitors, simply because they had been behind German lines. Still more shocking, the Allies—who could not imagine why people would not want to return to their homeland—forcibly repatriated, often at bayonet point, over a million fugitives, some of whom committed suicide rather than face what they knew awaited them.

Of course, individuals, as well as groups, were charged with political crimes, a category including more than prohibited actions. The code also specified “Counter-Revolutionary Thought” and what Solzhenitsyn calls a “very expansive category: . . . Member of a Family (of a person convicted under one of the foregoing . . . categories).” There was even a special camp for wives of enemies of the people; their teenage children were arrested to forestall possible vengeance. As the prosecutor Nikolai Krylenko explained, “we protect ourselves not only against the past but also against the future.”

Punishments were both more numerous than in tsarist times and much harsher. The conditions Dostoevsky described in his autobiographical novel Notes from the House of the Dead (1860–62) seem like paradise compared with Soviet prisons and camps.

We choose to understate how evil Detente was.

TAMP ‘EM UP SOLID:

How to win in Ukraine: pour it on, and don’t worry about escalation: The Biden administration has been too cautious. There’s still time to change that. (ANDREW RADIN | MAY 22, 2024, Defense One)

Shifting U.S. policy in several areas would improve Ukraine’s military situation with minimal risk of Russian escalation. First, the United States could rescind its insistence that U.S.-provided munitions only be used on Ukrainian soil, and stop pressing Ukraine to refrain from attacks on Russian territory. Given that Ukraine suffers daily casualties from attacks on purely civilian targets, retaliation against Russian infrastructure is more than fair game and can help to even Ukraine’s odds by degrading Russia’s logistical capacity. Ukraine would bear the brunt of any Russian response, but Kyiv is prepared to take that risk.

Second, the United States could expand its visible U.S. military presence in Ukraine. Western advisors need to be in Ukraine to understand the status and needs of Ukraine’s forces to provide the necessary qualitative superiority. Increases in U.S. advisors or even trainers can be distinguished from any kind of combat role. If, tragically, U.S personnel were to be killed in a Russian attack, the Biden administration would have significant latitude to control its response.

Third, the United States should look to expand its operations in space and cyberspace in response Russia’s cyber attacks against U.S. space providers and jamming against NATO allies. In a recent RAND report on strategic stability in space, we argue that reversible actions like jamming are useful options for the United States because can signal to an adversary and provide an additional threat of punishment without increasing the scope of conflict. Given Russia’s use of space communications, for example, such actions also can have a temporary operational benefit. Russia could escalate with increased cyber attacks or other activities in response but would risk exposing their exploits and losing the opportunity to use such attacks in the future.

Additional U.S. action could also catalyze other allies to increase their support, as allies traditionally look to the United States for leadership. Germany would not provide Leopard tanks until the United States provided Abrams. Perhaps further U.S. support would lead to Germany to provide Taurus, its own long-range cruise missile. From a narrow U.S. perspective, greater U.S. involvement is an opportunity to test new capabilities and gain experience helping a partner facing a numerically superior foe. Such experience could be very relevant for helping Taiwan resist Chinese aggression.

To be sure, avoiding direct military conflict with Russia is of paramount interest.

No, it isn’t. That’s the mistake we made in the Cold War. Destroy the oil fields and challenge Vlad to respond. He’d last as long as Saddam.

THERE’S A REASON THESE GUYS ARE OBSESSED WITH MANHOOD:

Unilateral Illiberalism (Brian Stewart, 7 Mar 2024, Quillette)

When Ayatollah Khomeini granted Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci an interview in the holy city of Qom in 1979, the meeting was terminated when she tore off the chador she had been made to wear, calling it a “stupid medieval rag.” When Fallaci met Colonel Qaddafi in Libya, she was blunt: “I want to understand why everyone dislikes you so much, why you are so little loved.” And after an extended harangue from Yasser Arafat about the need to eradicate Israel with revolutionary violence, Fallaci drily remarked, “Conclusion: you don’t at all want the peace that everyone is hoping for.”

Bemused viewers of Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Vladimir Putin saw no evidence of the skepticism or thinly veiled contempt that La Fallaci (as she liked to refer to herself) brought to her craft. Nor were they rewarded with an informative glimpse into the Russian despot’s mind. Instead, they were treated to an unedifying display of sycophancy that permitted Putin to filibuster for more than two hours. In The Rebel, Albert Camus spoke of tyrants conducting “monologues above a million solitudes.” Thanks to Carlson’s flaccid performance, Putin’s semi-coherent and ahistorical monologue reached millions more than usual. […]

Did Carlson really expect anything less? Did he really think Putin would inveigh against the San Francisco school board or Hunter Biden? Imagine how disappointed he must have been to learn that the former KGB colonel is not a regular viewer of Fox, let alone Carlson’s show on Twitter. […]

But if Carlson thought that touting Putin’s credentials as a good Christian leader and a champion of law and order would earn him the approval of the Russian tsar he was mistaken. During the interview, Putin seemed to mock Carlson and later complained about the absence of “so-called sharp questions.” Seldom has there been such a poor return for ceremonial self-abasement before a blood-drenched ruler. Putin’s sneering hauteur could not conceal that he is not a leader to be trusted, still less to admired. And as Carlson fawned over the Russian despot, he displayed a personalized version of what the French philosopher Alain Finkelkraut calls the West’s “penitential narcissism.”