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What Putin says are the causes & aims of Russia’s military action
Russia says it has no intentions of controlling Ukraine and its military operation is only to “demilitarize” and “de-Nazify” Ukraine in an action taken after 30 years of the U.S. pushing Russia too far, writes Joe Lauria.
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Putin hints at military options in Ukraine
The Rossiya 1 state television in Moscow broadcast today President Vladimir Putin’s annual press conference on Friday. It conveys a much fuller picture of the grave crisis brewing in the Russian-American relations than what the excerpts in the Russian media sought to convey over the weekend.
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A Sino-Russian military alliance is gratuitous (as of now)
To apply a western analogy, while the Sino-Russian partnership has great potential to model itself after the European Union, neither Moscow nor Beijing desires an Eurasian NATO to create synergy for it.
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Communists face rare crackdown in Russia, upending old balance
Boris Kagarlitsky, a veteran left-wing dissident, holds the distinction of having been a political prisoner under the regimes of Leonid Brezhnev and Boris Yeltsin. Now he can add President Vladimir Putin to that list.
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Calling Putin a ‘killer’ with ‘no soul’ is not exactly diplomatic finesse
Meanwhile, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the “killer” jab a “very bad statement by the U.S. president,” that indicated “he doesn’t want to normalize relations.”