March 15 2009 — Contents

SUNDAY MARCH 15 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL:  Russia Twist!

(2)  EDITORIAL:   Russia Default?

(3)  EDITORIAL:  The Six Pillars of Russian Weakness

(4)  Russian Prosecutor Smeared Politkovskaya

(5)  Exposing Obama’s Russia Blindness

NOTE:  A new film about abortion in Russia has just been released, and a Youtube clip is available. Read about it and watch the clip here.

NOTE:  A new Russian-English-German web publication, The Russian Cyberspace Journal, has released its first issue.

EDITORIAL: Russia Twist

EDITORIAL

Russia Twist

“Please, sir, may I have some more?”

That is what the USA is hearing from Vladimir “Oliver Twist” Putin’s neo-Soviet Russia these days as the Putin regime comes, on its knees, begging bowl in hand, to plead for investment and expertise from America’s oil majors.

Suddenly, Russia’s cash reserves are depleted.  Unexpectedly, Russia’s ridiculous levels of corruption, its crude inefficiency and its barbaric ignorance of modern technology present massive barriers to operating the nation’s crucial oil extraction business profitably.  And Putin’s Russia has somehow found the shameless hubris to once again approach America’s experts, those whom it only recently booted out of the country after pilfering their interests in Russia’s oil industry, and ask for help.

“Trust us,” the Putin regime says. “We won’t rob you this time, we promise!”

Revenge is sweet.  But sweeter still if our oil executives have learned their lesson:  Fool me once, shame on you! Fool me twice, shame on me!  Any foreign oil company that does business with Vladimir Putin’s Russia is betraying its stockholders and simply begging once again to have its pockets picked by the KGM minions of the Putin regime.

EDITORIAL: Massive Economic Failure in Putin’s Russia

EDITORIAL

Massive Economic Failure in Putin’s Russia

On Wednesday, the world heard even more shocking news of economic woe coming out of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.  It seems as though the nation stands on the brink of national default.

EDITORIAL: The Six Pillars of Russian Weakness

EDITORIAL

The Six Pillars of Russian Weakness

A bizarre bit of analysis recently appeared on the Stratfor website, authored Peter Zeihan. It was entitled “The Financial Crisis and the Six Pillars of Russian Strength.”    Zeihan is Stratfor’s Vice President for Global Analysis and a former official in the U.S. State Department, and its purpose is very much unclear.  If Zeihan meant to point out the ways in which Russians delude themselves into imagining they are powerful, and to warn the West that Russia is in fact weak but could become dangerous if not immediately challenged, then one could not help but see the article as a bit of brilliance.  If, on the other hand, Zeihan actually believes Russia’s government rests on pillars of strength, he is a dangerously deluded madman.  Each of the “pillars,” when examined, in fact show not strength but profound weakness and danger of imminent collapse.

Russian Prosecutor Smeared Politikovskaya

Paul Goble reports:

The failure of a Moscow District military court jury last month to convict those charged with involvement in the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya may have had less to do with the skill of defense attorneys than with materials the government offered that appear designed to discredit her, according to a Moscow commentator.

Exposing Obama’s Benighted and Dangerous Russia Policy

International lawyer Carlos Ramos-Mrosovsky, writing in the National Review:

President Obama’s secret letter to Russian president Dmitri Medvedev has, as promised, “pressed the reset button” on U.S.–Russian relations. The president has offered to abandon America’s planned deployment of an anti-missile shield in Eastern Europe in exchange for Russia’s help against Iran’s nuclear-weapons program. This is an enormous diplomatic blunder that will encourage the very worst sort of conduct from Russia — and Iran.

The president’s proposal has superficial appeal. If, as the United States has repeatedly assured Russia, the shield is directed at Iranian, not Russian, missiles, the deal might seem to make sense: better to keep nuclear weapons out of Iran’s hands in the first place than to erect a shield against them. Yet this is to ignore both Russia’s backing of Iran’s nuclear program and the missile shield’s place in the strategic relationship between the U.S., Russia, and the still-newly-free states of Eastern Europe.