Okay, someweird stuff has come out of Russia. Weird stuff comes out of everywhere, no biggy.
But this is… really weird.
If any Russian readers can give some context to this, I’d be fascinated.

A recent article over at Radio Free Europe suggests that Moldova and Russia may be getting close to a solution of the Transnistria conflict. (For some background on Transnistria, here are some articles I wrote last year.)
Now, RFE tends to be pretty Russophobe, so there’s a certain amount of mouth-breathing: Moldova has turned back [...]

“Against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain.” — Schiller
So Serbia’s government has agreed to sell its oil and gas company, NIS, to Russia’s Gazprom.
By itself there’s nothing wrong with this. What’s stupid about it is the price. NIS has a market value of around $2.8 billion. The government is selling it [...]

So Kosovo continues to creep — soooo slowly — towards some sort of independence.
Serbia is having a Presidential election this weekend, with a runoff two weeks later. There’s a tacit agreement that nothing should happen before then… the assumption being that Kosovar independence might tip the balance between the incumbent President (moderate [...]

“Transition to democracy” was one of the European politics geek’s terms of art ever since 1989; there’s even an AFOE category devoted to transition and accession to the EU. According to Tim Garton Ash, one of his old dissident friends kept a large file of documents under the rubric “TD”; he suggested, wisely, that it [...]

Okay, so Kosovo is likely to declare some sort of independence in the near future.
“Some sort” covers a lot of ground, but it will be something formally unacceptable to Serbia, and thus to Russia. The negotiations have another three weeks to run, but it’s clear they’re going nowhere; the Kosovar Albanians want [...]

Spent a weekend in Nagorno-Karabakh last month.
If you don’t know what or where Nagorno-Karabakh is… well, that’s healthy and normal. Most people don’t. But it’s pretty interesting, in a depressing sort of way.
When the Soviet Union broke up, it left a number of unresolved ethnic and territorial conflicts around its old frontiers. [...]

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 [...]

PwC was auditor for what was then one of Russia’s largest oil companies, Yukos. The Russian government took a serious disliking to Yukos and its then-president Mikhail Khodorkovsky, eventually putting the company effectively out of business (with key bits sold off to state-owned or state-controlled companies) and Khodorkovsky in jail. Now the Russian government is [...]

So what exactly happened with the allegedly Russian-orchestrated DDOS attack on Estonian Internet interests? Some people have been talking about the first act of “cyberwar” against a sovereign state, others about a bizarre fuss about nothing. AFOE asked Gadi Evron, a world expert on botnets who runs Israel’s CERT and who took part in the [...]