NATO troops join Russia’s victory day parade

For this years’s anniversary of Victory in Europe day, troops from France, UK, US and other NATO countries joined the traditional Russian victory day parade in Moscow. The BBC reports with video footage. Stalin’s Soviet Union suffered the greatest number of wartime losses in resisting Nazi occupation and in defeating Germany. Yet the subsequent Cold …

Ukraine’s relationship with Russia

‘Ukraine’s biggest failing is not that it is selling out to Russia but that it has repeatedly missed the chance to reform itself’ according to The Economist in this assessment of the ‘ships for gas’ decision. The true value of Sebastopol to the Russians is symbolic. A city of Russian glory built by Catherine the …

Death of a president

‘Poland was confronting the worst political disaster in its postwar history after President Lech Kaczynski, his wife, and dozens of top officials were killed when their plane crashed in thick fog on Saturday in western Russia.’ Read this report of a political disaster from The Observer. Though ‘new news’, the context is also revealing. The …