Posts Tagged Moscow

Condi Rice and Bob Gates on U.S., Russia Relations

From The Washington Post:

One can hear the disbelief in capitals from Washington to London to Berlin to Ankara and beyond. How can Vladimir Putin, with a sinking economy and a second-rate military, continually dictate the course of geopolitical events? Whether it’s in Ukraine or Syria, the Russian president seems always to have the upper hand.

The fact is that Putin is playing a weak hand extraordinarily well because he knows exactly what he wants to do. He is not stabilizing the situation according to our definition of stability. He is defending Russia’s interests by keeping Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in power. This is not about the Islamic State. Any insurgent group that opposes Russian interests is a terrorist organization to Moscow. We saw this behavior in Ukraine, and now we’re seeing it even more aggressively — with bombing runs and cruise missile strikes — in Syria.

 

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Viewing Russia From the Inside

Viewing Russia From the Inside is republished with permission of Stratfor.”

By George Friedman

Last week I flew into Moscow, arriving at 4:30 p.m. on Dec. 8. It gets dark in Moscow around that time, and the sun doesn’t rise until about 10 a.m. at this time of the year — the so-called Black Days versus White Nights. For anyone used to life closer to the equator, this is unsettling. It is the first sign that you are not only in a foreign country, which I am used to, but also in a foreign environment. Yet as we drove toward downtown Moscow, well over an hour away, the traffic, the road work, were all commonplace. Moscow has three airports, and we flew into the farthest one from downtown, Domodedovo — the primary international airport. There is endless renovation going on in Moscow, and while it holds up traffic, it indicates that prosperity continues, at least in the capital. Read the rest of this entry »

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Russian airport bomber visited home on eve of attack

From:  Straits Times

Moscow Airport Attack

A frame grab from a security camera shows the explosion of a suicide bomber's bomb at Domodedovo Airport in Moscow

MOSCOW – The suicide bomber who killed 36 people at a Moscow airport visited his home village shortly before the attack and may have collected the bomb there, a report said on Thursday, citing investigators.

The bomber briefly returned to his home village on Jan 19, five days before blowing himself up in Domodedovo airport’s arrivals hall, the Kommersant business daily reported, citing investigators.

Officials have named the bomber as 20-year-old Magomed Yevloyev from the North Caucasus region of Ingushetia and announced they had also arrested his brother and sister on suspicion of helping him plot the suicide strike.

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