“We must accept finite disappointment, but must never lose infinite hope.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
Clearly, for Russia, it was a chronicle of an announced debacle. They invaded the largest country in Europe with barely 150,000 soldiers, while the USSR mobilized nearly a million men in 1968 to occupy a country (Czechoslovakia) that represented only one-fifth of Ukraine’s territory and a quarter of its population at that time. Stalin would…
They were all grossly wrong, those who predicted a collapse in Russian oil production. Putin effectively defied all forecasts because, with 10.8 million barrels/day (mb/d) pumped last July, Russian oil production is almost at the level of 11 mb/d last January, i.e. before the war. In fact, it has been three months since this…
It is reluctantly that the West is setting out measures to punish Lukashenko’s Belarus for his recent misdeeds. The current regime in Minsk, being in survival mode, obviously hadn’t foreseen such an international backlash, since it has been wholly preoccupied, obsessed even, with trying to neutralise its adversaries. It is also true that Lukashenko…