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La Russophobe 
Despite the Goldman-Sachs created marketing stunt, there is cooperation and coordination of common interests within “BRIC nations”:
China Clones, Sells Russian Fighter Jets
Is Russia going to run off to the WTO for intellectual property disputes?
As of the Chechnya horror, there is always also some (black) comedy, as usual featuring the world-famous gangsta killer-clown Ramzan K.
Leader proposes volatile Chechnya for 2018 World Cup
http://football.uk.reuters.com/leagues/world/news/2010/12/03/LDE6B21K6.php
“We are completing a sports complex in Grozny which is up to international standards … Naturally, we will offer our city for other matches,” Ramzan Kadyrov, the Moscow-backed leader said on the official site chechnya.gov.ru.
A decade after Moscow drove separatists from power in the second of two wars, peace in Muslim Chechnya is shaky at best.
Russia, which on Thursday won the rights to host the world’s biggest sporting event, is however unlikely to bring any matches to the North Caucasus, which includes Chechnya.
President Dmitry Medvedev last year said the region was Russia’s biggest domestic political problem.
Islamist insurgents stage near daily attacks across the North Caucasus, especially Chechnya, neighbouring Dagestan and Ingushetia.
(Btw, you forgot to mention the ongoing trial of Ramzan’s hitmen captured after a murder in Austria.)
Please look at this issue, maybe LR could write more about it? And Photos are great!
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=ru&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.echo.msk.ru%2Fblog%2Fvarlamov_i%2F721781-echo%2F&act=url
Washington and its western allies have for the first time since the end of the cold war drawn up classified military plans to defend the most vulnerable parts of eastern Europe against Russian threats, according to confidential US diplomatic cables.
The US state department ordered an information blackout when the decision was taken earlier this year. Since January the blueprint has been refined.
Nine Nato divisions – US, British, German, and Polish – have been identified for combat operations in the event of armed aggression against Poland or the three Baltic states. North Polish and German ports have been listed for the receipt of naval assault forces and British and US warships. The first Nato exercises under the plan are to take place in the Baltic next year, according to informed sources.
Following years of transatlantic dispute over the new policy, Nato leaders are understood to have quietly endorsed the strategy at a summit in Lisbon last month.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/06/wikileaks-cables-nato-russia-baltics
The Poles, although keen supporters of concrete Nato defence plans for the Baltic, were neverthless worried that the new policy could dilute alliance commitments to their defence, since a limited Polish contingency plan was being turned into an expanded regional blueprint for the four countries.
Poland’s late deputy defence minister, Stanislaw Komorowski, told US diplomats in Warsaw that he was “sceptical that a regional approach was the best way ahead. Komorowski said Warsaw would prefer a unique plan for Poland.”.
Komorowski, the Polish ambassador in London until 2004, was one of 98 people killed with the country’s president, Lech Kaczynski, when their plane crashed at Smolensk, Russia, in April.
The Americans argued that adding defence planning for the Baltic states would reinforce rather than dilute Polish security.
“After two years, contingency plans have been successfully prepared for Poland,” Bogdan Klich, the Polish defence minister told Warsaw newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza last month.
Leaked embassy cables show US diplomats are concerned about the growing power of Russian organized crime and believe it has contacts with the highest levels of government in Moscow.
The secret embassy reports read like descriptions of a small banana republic. The mayor of the capital city allegedly has “connections to the criminal world,” a few of his friends, including members of parliament, are said to be little more than “bandits,” with city officials supposedly “requiring bribes from businesses attempting to operate in the city.” The mayor, US diplomats allege, “oversees a system in which it appears that almost everyone at every level is involved in some form of corruption or criminal behavior.”
The US cable, dated Feb. 12, 2010, originated from one of the world’s largest capitals, Moscow. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev fired Moscow Mayor Yuriy Luzhkov at the end of September because he is no longer trusted by the government. Nevertheless, the memos documented by the American diplomats show how the mafia appears to be deeply anchored in Russian society and to have ties with the government. US diplomats believe that some criminal masterminds have the blessing of people in the Kremlin and security services.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,732345,00.html
ATYR-YURT, Russia — A Chechen woman has welcomed a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that awarded her and more than two dozen others record compensation for a deadly Russian air raid on their village, RFE/RL’s North Caucasus Service reports.
http://www.rferl.org/content/article/2238545.html
On December 2, the Strasbourg-based court ruled that Moscow should pay Marusya Abuyeva and 28 others 1.72 million euros ($2.2 million) over the deaths of 24 of the applicants’ relatives in the February 2000 raid on the village of Katyr-Yurt.
The court ruled that there had been a violation of right to life and right to an effective remedy in what it called Russia’s failure to investigate the “indiscriminate bombardment.”
Abuyeva told RFE/RL she was happy with the ruling, saying that Russian authorities had not responded properly to their demands for a full investigation.
“We understand that it’s not possible to return our [loved ones] but at least we have a just decision which proves that they were murdered,” she said.
For sheer voyeurism, it is hard to top a cable signed by William Burns, now a top State Department official, when he was ambassador to Russia. The cable reported from a lavish August 2006 wedding at the summer home of the chief of Dagestan’s oil company in the North Caucasus, a compound where the entire floor of a grotto is the glass ceiling of a massive aquarium. (No word on sharks circling underneath.)
In marrying his son to a classmate, oilman Gadzhi Makhachev presided over a bizarre affair drawing together revelers from the wilds and from the establishment — “the slick to the Jurassic,” as the cable put it. Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, who came with a small army, danced “clumsily with his gold-plated automatic stuck down in the back of his jeans,” and joined the host in showering children with $100 bills before disappearing into the night.
The unidentified U.S. diplomats in attendance inadvertently insulted a drunken security service colonel when they would not let him add cognac to their wine, despite his protestation that “it’s practically the same thing.”
“We were inclined to cut the Colonel some slack,” says the cable. “He is head of the unit to combat terrorism in Dagestan, and Gadzhi told us that extremists have sooner or later assassinated everyone who has joined that unit.”
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/leaks-detail-ex-soviet-hedonism/425907.html
The life of a diplomat is one of risk, too.
More than 200 Americans have died in diplomatic service, starting with William Palfrey, lost at sea in 1780. They have perished from disease, murder, natural disasters and from trying to save others.
Danger always lurks in the age of terrorism, just as in all times of war and calamity. But diplomats have to watch their backs everywhere.
A November 2009 cable signed by John Beyrle, now ambassador to Russia, set the scene for FBI Director Robert Mueller before his visit with law enforcement and security counterparts. It sketched a growing climate of harassment of U.S. diplomats by elements of the Federal Security Service, or FSB.
“Family members have been the victims of psychologically terrifying assertions that their USG [U.S. government] employee spouses had met accidental deaths,” the embassy reported. “Home intrusions have become far more commonplace and bold, and activity against our locally engaged Russian staff continues at a record pace.
“We have no doubt that this activity originates in the FSB. Counterintelligence challenges remain a hallmark of service at Embassy Moscow.”
Decades earlier, the cables show, U.S. diplomats in Tehran tried to comprehend the Iranian revolution in its earliest throes and explain to Washington the near impossibility of reasoning with Iranians.
Bruce Laingen, charge d’affaires, signed a biting critique of what he saw as the Iranian mindset, contending “statements of intention count for almost nothing,” “the single dominant aspect of the Persian psyche is an overriding egoism,” “cultivation of goodwill for goodwill’s sake is a waste of effort,” and the “almost total Persian preoccupation with self … leaves little room for understanding points of view other than one’s own.”
Laingen was on to something: impending trouble. A few months after, ideologues overran the embassy and diplomats lived the lives of hostages for 444 days.
I found this comment but never read the story? Is this true?
By the way, India returned millions of tonnes of russian wheat that was found to be not suitable as a animal feed….
Read more:
http://www.kyivpost.com/news/russia/detail/92431/#ixzz17dQag7Tg
dig deeper, worms! this tiny piece of of weird news about Russia is too small to feed all of you!
Gorbachev warns about Russia’s stability
Yesterday at 15:25 | Associated Press Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev says that anti-democratic trends in Russia are threatening its stability.
Read more:
http://www.kyivpost.com/news/russia/detail/92565/#ixzz17laHTf8K
News reports say many demonstrators shouted nationalist slogans such as “Russia for Russians.”
Read more:
http://www.kyivpost.com/news/russia/detail/92613/#ixzz17osDB0CB