Moscow Closes the Monetary Iron Curtain
October 26, 2025Officially, it is for financial stability. In reality, it is nothing but obedience and deprivation of freedom. The stench of the Soviet past proves pestilential. Towards a Total Ban on Foreign Currencies A battery of measures “proposed” by the Russian Minister of Finance will prohibit any transaction denominated in foreign currency for residents of the…
Champagne Shortage at the Kremlin
February 27, 2025As far as I know, I am not aware of any historical precedent, across the millennia of human adventure, where a hegemonic power has so joyfully and swiftly sabotaged itself.
The Strange Defeat
June 26, 2023Clearly, 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…
Putin and the european chaos
August 21, 2022They 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…
Putin’s choice?
June 2, 2021It 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…