Time was when Britain’s mighty fleets ruled a quarter of the earth’s surface. I’ve been savoring the names of its dreadnaughts and battle cruisers like George V, Prince of Wales, Hood, Princess Royal, Iron Duke and scores of other renowned warships. Last week, the imperial British lion made a last, feeble roar by sending one... Read More

Crimea is essential to Russia strategically and economically, but speculation over Ankara helping to boost the US presence in the Black Sea is far-fetched given Turkey’s energy deals with Moscow A power struggle over the Black Sea between Russia and the US plus NATO has the potential to develop as a seminal plot of the... Read More

"We are paying very close attention to the situation in Ukraine. We hope all parties can calmly maintain restraint to prevent the situation from further escalating and worsening. Political resolution and dialogue is the only way out." This, via Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Li Baodong, is Beijing's quite measured, official interpretation of what's happening in... Read More

At US behest, Austria arrested a Ukrainian oligarch named Dmytro Firtash in Vienna on some corruption and bribery charge that appears to be involved tangentially with the United States. Apparently, Firtash was small fry, 14th on the Ukraine list, worth only $673 million. Being an oligarch is, in itself, no crime in Ukraine. Yulia Tymoshenko... Read More

[For readers who have not done so already, I urge them to take 10 minutes and 49 seconds of their time to listen to the Paet/Ashton a.k.a. “snipergate� phone call.� It is not only a useful corrective to the laboriously constructed and misleading pushback now slowly working its way through the Western press, including the... Read More

As readers may know—a necessary caveat because the story has not received wall-to-wall play as, for instance, the resignation of Liz Wray from RT has attracted—the audio of an intercepted phone call between the Foreign Minister of Estonia, one Urmas Paet, and Baron Ashton, the EU poobah in charge of foreign relations and, by extension,... Read More

The threat to Russia’s Crimean naval base looks plausible enough to provoke Putin’s intervention. 2008 Kiev Post: 2010 Guardian: Ukraine's parliament erupted when parliamentarians were asked to vote on a controversial law allowing Russia to continue to use a naval base in Crimea. Opposition MPs oppose the move by Ukraine's new pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych,... Read More

...that might have intended to evict the Russian Black Sea Fleet? The coup in Kiev was a loss for Putin, but doesn’t look like much of a win for the U.S., Europe, or Ukraine. What we see in Ukraine today is the messy consequences of a clumsily executed regime change strategy. Clumsy, because somehow it... Read More