The conflict between Russia and the territory of Chechnya is the backdrop for this film. In it two Russian soldiers are taken away to a Chechen village after their group is ambushed. The reason they are captured is so that a villager can use them as a trade for his son, who is being held […]
As a Russian who first came to America as a small child and later spent his university years in Cambridge, Mass., I felt particularly gripped by the ongoing Boston bomber saga. There remain so many questions about why these two brothers, to whom the U.S. had given shelter, passports, schooling and acceptance, turned so violently […]
Even Violent Drug Cartels Fear God By Damien Cave The New York Times Magazine “If the economy worked for the common good, there would be no Zetas. There would be no cartels,” says Robert Coogan, the chaplain at Cereso. Here the Zetas, Mexico’s most feared crime syndicate, run operations from the inside. And they […]
U.S. Congressman Mike Rogers chairs the House of Representatives’ panel on intelligence, which this week overwhelmingly approved a new cyber security bill designed to enhance data sharing between the government and private industry to protect computer networks and intellectual property from cyber attacks. Yet the day before it passed, Rogers had a more novel idea […]
By Sarwar Kashmeri It would be a mistake to view President Obama’s visit to Israel as just a fence-mending exercise. It is in fact part of a planned redesign of U.S. foreign policy that will change the face of American leadership around the world. The redesign began with the appointment of John Kerry as Secretary […]
Writing in 1931, Aldous Huxley used Cyprus as the setting for a social experiment gone wrong in his dystopian novel “Brave New World.” The failed experiment sent a warning to future generations regarding the perils of excessive social tampering. Fast-forward nearly a century and Cyprus is yet again the setting, but this time for a […]
Depending on whom you listen to, Central Asia could be 1) the next mass target of Islamic insurgents; 2) on the verge of a client-state battle between Moscow and Beijing; or 3) fated to authoritarian leaders for the next generation. Nestled between Russia and China, and bordering Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, a glance at the […]
The eurozone crisis is back on the international agenda with a very serious crisis unfolding in Cyprus right now. Some Wall Street investors might argue just in time to pull the rising U.S. stock market indices — the Dow Jones hit an all-time high recently — down for a better entry point in order […]
Coming on the heels of a UCLA study reporting that new trans-Arctic routes could be open to shipping by mid-century, Huigen Yang, the Director Polar Research Institute of China, met with Iceland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Össur Skarphéðinsson, on March 15 to discuss northern shipping. Both countries stand to benefit if the Northern Sea Route is developed: China, […]
They said it couldn’t be done. But at last, the Kremlin and some of its fiercest liberal critics have found themselves on the same team. The fact that the issue in question is their opposition to the proposed Cypriot bank levies says as much about the regime as the opposition. Try to guess who said […]
Today is 60 years since the death of Joseph Stalin. How do we know this? Well, it’s on the front page of the BBC, there’s an article in the Telegraph, Reuters, the Atlantic and pretty much everywhere else. Except Russia itself, that is, where the event hardly attracted any attention whatsoever. It was not on […]
Just when things are hotting up again with its neighbors in the East and South China Seas, Beijing faces new challenges from its western neighbors in Central Asia. A report released on February 27 entitled “China’s Central Asia Problem” issued by the International Crisis Group (ICG), a Brussels-based non-governmental organization tasked with reducing deadly conflict, […]
This weekend the Russian Orthodox Church held its Bishops Council at Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow. In his speech to the assembly, president Putin said that, of course, Russia is not a theocracy but: “We are a secular state of course, and cannot allow state life and church life to merge” he continued, “but at the same […]
At the Arctic Frontiers conference, attendees had the opportunity to listen to numerous government and NGO representatives from Russia speak in their own language. If my memory serves me correctly, the Russians were the only ones who spoke in their own language, as the people from the Nordic countries and Asia all spoke in English. […]
The history of Radio Liberty is the stuff of Cold War legend: dissidents huddled around a contraband radio in some dimly lit room in a cold and dreary gulag, hoping desperately to hear that the world recognized their suffering and that the promise of liberty was still within reach. Funded by the U.S. over decades, […]