Image by Kremlin.ru The Serbian president-elect and Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic declared today that the Balkan nation has no plans to join the NATO alliance, as many of its former Yugoslavian nations have. Serbia is a long-time ally of Russia and was not expected to join the Western defense bloc….
Image by Alisher Hasanov The Ukrainian government today raided the offices of Russian internet giant Yandex in Kyiv and Odessa. The portal is very popular in the country and Ukraine had shut down access to the site earlier in the month. Kyiv accused the service of collecting personal data on…
Image by Zac allan Two North Koreans have been found dead in separate rooms in the same Moscow hotel amid reports they both suffered ‘acute heart failure’. The men had complained of severe chest pains and shortness of breath before they died on Saturday at a hotel in the west…
In 1963 I was born in Kiev, the Socialist Republic of the Ukraine, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. My identification card, issued to me at birth, noted that I was a citizen of the USSR (under citizenship) and that I was a Jew (under nationality). The former was self-evident from…
Russia And Iran Sign Oil-For-Goods Barter Deal; Escape Petrodollar.
The new Russian-designed and built, short to medium haul, narrow-body airliner made its first flight over the weekend. Designed by Irkut, part of United Aircraft Corporation, the MC-21 will compete against Boeing and Airbus for international orders. It will also replace the Russian-built Tupolev Tu-134 and Tu-154. Sources at the…
Image by © A.Savin, Wikimedia Commons EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager will ask the Russian state-owned, natural gas giant, Gazprom for more concessions to end a six year anti-trust case against the Russian firm on Monday. The meeting is seen as evidence of a thaw in tensions between the EU…
Image by Dr. Andreas Hugentobler The word donos — the act of ratting on someone to authorities — is a hallmark of Stalin’s Great Terror. In those troubling times, a single denunciation from a neighbor, colleague or relative was enough to have an innocent person interned in labor camps. Sometimes,…
Image by King of Hearts A member of the Russian parliament, while speaking at a security conference in Slovakia, declared that Russia would use nuclear weapons if NATO entered East Ukraine or the Crimean Peninsula. The comments seem to highlight Russian concern over the encroachment of NATO on its western…