I hadn’t paid much attention to this Reuters report from yesterday: it says that mobile rocket launchers are being ‘given priority’ in the queue of armor moving from Russia into South Ossetia / Georgia. These are Soviet-era weapons which are said to have a range of 35 km. There may be a propaganda angle to [...]

James Sherr writes in today’s Telegraph:
… Russia is exasperated with the West and also contemptuous of it. In the Georgian conflict, as in the more subtle variants of energy diplomacy, Russians have shown a harshly utilitarian asperity in connecting means and ends. In exchange, we appear to present an unfocused commitment to values and process. [...]

While researching the recent floods in the Ukraine, I stumbled across this wince-inducingly stupid article. It appeared a few weeks ago in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
The article is by Richard Wagner, a Transylvanian German writer. (Well, former Transylvanian. Like most T-Germans, he emigrated from Romania as soon as he could [...]

It’s sometimes hard to get solid news about Transnistria. No international news agencies report regularly from there, and it doesn’t have a good English-language site. News stories about the breakaway state tend to come out of Russia, Moldova or Ukraine, often in the local languages.
So it’s not clear what impact the recent flooding [...]

Cards shuffled in the EU’s most important eastern neighbors. The orange parties in Ukraine have reached a coalition agreement that will put Yulia Timoshenko back in the prime minister’s office. Let’s hope she lasts longer this time.
Meanwhile to the north, the party supported by Russian president Putin is expected to win a crushing victory in [...]

Jean Quatremer claims that the exit polls are showing the Civic Forum 10 points ahead of the Kaczynski Kidz; which could mean a knockout win.
More, as they say, as we get it.
Update, 2351GMT: Hell yeah. Jaroslaw Kaczynski has admitted defeat; Civic Forum coming in with a wet sail. As mentioned in comments, an unexpectedly large [...]

Various things about Transnistria that didn’t fit in the previous post. If you don’t find this sort of thing interesting, don’t hit that link.

Read more… or Read more right here… »

1) Transnistria is [...]

Adam Tooze, who (it says here) is a senior lecturer at Jesus College, Cambridge, has a book out; The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. It is getting some very good reviews, and this one will be no different. Tooze’s thesis is that the Nazi German economy was a more [...]

While everyone is focused on the French elections, the Balkans, or the contreaty relaunch (in increasing order of wonkishness), it’s not going too well in the Ukraine. Back in the winter of 2004, you couldn’t move for bloggers taking sides on the Orange Revolution, but hardly anyone has noticed the progressive disappointment since.
Well, all [...]

No, this is not a Litvinenko post…or at least not primarily. Recently, the Georgian ex-KGB said it had caught a Russian smuggling highly-enriched uranium into Georgia, who was nailed in a sting operation where Georgian agents posed as representatives of an Islamist terrorist group that wanted to buy fissile material. He handed over a sample, [...]