The Big Picture Archives - Page 21 of 34

July 28, 2014

Let the Past Collapse on Time! by Vladimir Sorokin | The New York Review of Books

From Vladimir Sorokin:

Yeltsin, who was tired after climbing to the top of the pyramid, left the structure completely undisturbed, but brought an heir along with him: Putin, who immediately informed the population that he viewed the collapse of the USSR as a geopolitical catastrophe. He also quoted the conservative Alexander III, who believed that Russia had only two allies: the army and the navy. The machine of the Russian state moved backward, into the past, becoming more and more Soviet every year.

In my view, this fifteen-year journey back to the USSR under the leadership of a former KGB lieutenant colonel has shown the world the vicious nature and archaic underpinnings of the Russian state’s “vertical power” structure, more than any “great and terrible” Putin….A country such as this cannot have a predictable, stable future….

Unpredictability has always been Russia’s calling card, but since the Ukrainian events, it has grown to unprecedented levels: no one knows what will happen to our country in a month, in a week, or the day after tomorrow. I think that even Putin doesn’t know; he is now hostage to his own strategy of playing “bad guy” to the West…..If you compare the post-Soviet bear to the Soviet one, the only thing they have in common is the imperial roar. However, the post-Soviet bear is teeming with corrupt parasites that infected it during the 1990s, and have multiplied exponentially in the last decade. They are consuming the bear from within. Some might mistake their fevered movement under the bear’s hide for the working of powerful muscles. But in truth, it’s an illusion.

Translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell.

July 26, 2014

It started with a Super Bowl ring, now Putin is taking whole countries

Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, says Vladimir Putin stole his prize Super Bowl ring in 2005:

“I took out the ring and showed it to [Putin], and he put it on and he goes, ‘I can kill someone with this ring.’ I put my hand out and he put it in his pocket, and three KGB guys got around him and walked out.”

Kraft revealed that he hadn’t intended to part with his prize from the Patriots’ win over the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl XXXIX. He claims that a call from the White House kept him from attempting to recover it. The official overcame Kraft’s objections, repeatedly saying:

It would really be in the best interest of US-Soviet relations if you meant to give the ring as a present.

This may have been a mistake by the Bush administration, considering that Vladimir Putin has graduated to seizing parts of Georgia, the Crimea and now has his eyes on Eastern Ukraine. As Winston Churchill would have said:

An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last.

July 18, 2014

Flight MH17: The smoking gun

The following tweet and video purportedly show a BUK surface-to-air missile system being moved by UKR rebels from the area near the MH17 crash site — with two empty missile tubes.

Video of UKR rebels moving BUK system away from area where plane was downed; it only has 2 of 4 missiles left http://t.co/1RnjKwtkEG

— grasswire (@grasswire) July 18, 2014

Hat tip to The Interpreter

July 18, 2014

MH17 is the third plane this week shot down over Ukraine under mysterious circumstances – Vox

From Max Fisher:

…at first, people were wondering if rebels even had the capability to shoot down a high-flying commercial airliner like MH17. But there was another incident just on Monday, July 14, that did not get very much attention at the time. That day, over eastern Ukraine, an Antonov AN-26 Ukrainian military transport plane was hit by a missile while flying over eastern Ukraine — at 21,000 feet altitude. That’s far beyond the range of a shoulder-fired system like the MANPADS.

July 16, 2014

Netherlands Held Liable for 300 Deaths in Srebrenica Massacre – NYTimes.com

From DAN BILEFSKY and MARLISE SIMONS at the New York Times:

The Dutch Supreme Court, which was upholding a 2011 decision by an appellate court, said that even though United Nations commanders were in charge of the peace mission at Srebrenica, in the days after the Bosnian Serb takeover, Dutch authorities had “effective control” over the troops and therefore shared liability.

Srecko Latal, a political analyst who until recently worked with the nonprofit International Crisis Group in Sarajevo, Bosnia, said by phone that the verdict was important for showing that peacekeepers had both a moral and a legal responsibility to protect civilians….

The Srebrenica tragedy highlights two important issues:

Why are lightly armed UN peace-keeping forces being sent into conflict areas where they are incapable of offering effective protection from heavily-armed protagonists? You don’t have a strong negotiating position when your opponent has tanks and artillery.
Who is responsible if troops under UN command obey orders?

July 6, 2014

238 Years After The First Revolution, Is It Time For A Second?

From Jerry Bowyer:

To determine whether the framers [of the Declaration of Independence] and their principles would cause us once again to break from a central political authority one must first get into the head space of the founders. Their way of thinking, though alien to modern political philosophy and so much the worse for modern political philosophy, is clear and cogent:

There are certain ideas which are self-evidently true. One of those ideas is that we are created without legal primacy or inferiority with regard to one another. Another idea, which is just obviously true to people whose rational faculties are operating properly, is that the rights to life and liberty and the pursuit of a prosperous life which is what the word ‘happiness’ meant in 1776 are not alienable, that is they cannot have a lien placed on them by any other persons, not even representatives of the state.

Not only is government denied the authority to put a lien on and repossess those rights, but it is further required to protect those rights. And in fact, the protecting of those rights is the only reason that government should exist in the first place! And not only is it necessary for government to protect these rights, but its use of power to do so is still only just if it also involves the consent of the people whose freedom and property are being protected. Further and this is shocking, even to modern ears, when governments move from protecting those rights to injuring those rights, the people are allowed to erase the authority of the government.

….No amount of banning or inciting can change the facts. 238 years ago the principles of the Declaration found that the central government had lost the right to rule and called on the people to withdraw allegiance to it. Is that the case now?

July 2, 2014

America’s Ukraine-Policy Disaster | The National Interest

From James W. Carden:

….A second unintended consequence of our involvement with Ukraine is the emergence of Russian hypernationalism. Little attention seems to be given to the effects that our facilitating an anti-Russian regime in Kiev has had on the political landscape in Russia; Russians now, more so than at any other point in the last quarter century, are under the spell of one man. According to the widely respected Levada Center, Vladimir Putin’s approval ratings stand at 80 percent. While respected analysts like the Carnegie Endowment’s Lilia Shevtsova seem to believe that this level of support is unsustainable, the numbers may point to a new and troubling phenomenon: that a rather prosaic Russian nationalism is in the process of transmogrifying into Russian hypernationalism. If this is so, a war in East-Central Europe becomes all the more likely, because as the University of Chicago’s John J. Mearsheimer has noted, “hypernationalism …is the belief that other nations are not just inferior, but dangerous as well, and must be dealt with harshly, if not brutally…[it] creates powerful incentives to use violence to eliminate the threat.”

July 1, 2014

Ukraine should sell its gas pipeline to stabilize the region

From OilPrice.com

Gas supply, and the threat to that supply for Europe, is what has forced Russia to move aggressively on multiple fronts to defeat Ukraine in its efforts to modernize and westernize its economy, its future, and its way of life.

So, how to start the liberalization process? Ukraine has argued that its gas transportation system is a strategic asset. Business-minded people take issue with this interpretation, which ignores the commercial potential of the pipeline system. Now that we have come full circle in a long-brewing Ukraine-Russia gas war, perhaps the pipeline should be considered “strategic” — if not in the way the Ukrainian authorities have long understood. The pipeline system, worth $20 to $30 billion, can indeed play a strategic and tactical role in resolving Ukraine’s crisis with Russia, but only if it’s sold off.

Ukraine should sell 50 to 75 percent of it for cash to a consortium involving the EU, U.S. and Russia and operated by a U.S. business enterprise, preferably based in Houston. This can only happen if Russia agrees to remove troops and other proxies in eastern Ukraine and then works with Ukraine to secure the border and cease all low-intensity conflict efforts, including on the ground, and in cyberspace and the trade arena….

June 28, 2014

Asymmetrical warfare: Russia’s little green men are here to stay [podcast]

It’s been called hybrid warfare, asymmetrical warfare, and ambiguous warfare. But warfare it is, and Russia appears to have perfected using it to achieve its geopolitical aims.

The Little Green Men are probably here to stay. Is there any way to counter them?

http://www.rferl.org/audio/Audio/1166373.html

June 28, 2014

Desperately seeking moderate Syrian rebels | Threat Matrix

By Lisa Lundquist:

Following the news that the Obama administration, in a sudden about-face, is asking Congress for $500 million to train and equip “vetted” members of the “moderate” Syrian opposition, The Associated Press yesterday published a list, headlined “Syrian rebels likely to receive US aid.” The list raises more questions than it answers — two of the listed groups have been designated by the US as terrorist organizations….