Earlier in the week, I had planned to write a piece on the Euro 2004 playoffs, celebrating the surprise results in Saturday’s games and wondering if this marked a new equality in European international football.
Luckily for me and my predictive reputation, I didn’t get the time to write it, so I’m not left with egg [...]

A very interesting take on the Yukos situation from the Moscow Times. And one which relates directly to some of the privatisation issues we were debating recently. Boris Kagarlitsky, director of the Institute of Globalization Studies, argues basically that given that the Russian economy is dominated by an oligarchic structure of raw materials quasi-monopolies, and [...]

EU unilaterally blocking Russia’s entry into the very very multilateral WTO.
How many poles is this multipolar thing going to have, anyway?
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Putin Doesn’t Like EU Terms for Entry
October 9, 2003
By Natalya Shurmina
YEKATERINBURG, Russia (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin sharply
criticized European Union “bureaucrats” on Thursday for pressing the
country to raise domestic energy prices as a condition [...]

By 2050 Western Europe could be an economic irrelevancy, with its four leading economies, the UK, Germany, France and Italy (note the order?) enjoying a combined output of less than half India?s and a third of China?s. Both Brazil and Russia will be twice as large as any single Western European economy.

[...]

The credible recent rumours that China is less than a week away from it’s first manned space flight appear to have stimulated some other potential space-faring nations. France and Russia have announced an accord en principle to launch manned Russian Soyuz craft from the ESA launch centre at Kourou in French Guiana. The [...]

Gregg Easterbrook of the New Republic writes:
MOSCOW LOST THE COLD WAR, BUT DREAMS OF WINNING THE GLOBAL WARMING WAR: Why won’t Russia ratify the Kyoto Treaty? It would seem very much in Moscow’s interest to do so.
The United States has dropped out of Kyoto negotiations, but most other Western nations remain in. Russia now holds [...]

This was just too perfect not to pass along:
Rosbalt
Opinion: Europe Is Too Weak to Be Russia’s Ally
MOSCOW, September 25. ‘The US and Russian presidents have an opportunity to
take a big step towards closer bilateral integration,’ Sergei Karaganov,
president of the Council for Foreign and Defence Policy, told a Rosbalt
correspondent yesterday. He suggested that they may even [...]