Americans might well be evil, says Yuri Baluyevsky, Russia’s top General, but it ain’t Russia’s job to save the world!

“Today, there is no need to be afraid of the Russian Armed Forces. However, I do not believe that the Russian military is obliged to defend the world from the evil Americans”.

Probably just as well. Evil George Bush doesn’t think much of the Russian military:

I really don’t view Russia as a threat, a military threat. I don’t think — I’m pretty confident President Putin does not want to have any military conflict.

And he’s spot on in his assessment of Russia’s view of its role in the world…

Here’s a fascinating Youtube video clip of former chess champion come Presidential hopeful Garry Kasparov being interview by Bill Maher, a US political satirist.

Kasparov panders to the crowd a bit (it’s a satire show, after all, so fair play to him), but there’s some interesting stuff in there - notably his explanation of why Putin is so friendly with Iran at the moment. Common sense, but it needs to be explained from time to time.

My favourite moment though is Maher’s question about whether the ‘Russian soul’ means that Russians just want a strong leader. Kasparov’s rebuttal is a gem.

Reporter: Mr. President, following up on Vladimir Putin for a moment, he said recently that next year, when he has to step down according to the constitution, as the president, he may become prime minister; in effect keeping power and dashing any hopes for a genuine democratic transition there …

Bush: I’ve been planning that myself.

Given the dismally low quality of Republican contenders for the top job so far this election cycle, I don’t think he’d face all that much opposition.  In fact can hear the chants beginning already: “Four more years! Four more years!”

Bush, it must be said, seems to have a very clear vision. Condoleezza Rice, on the other hand, got herself into a terrible tangle trying to explain to journalists whether or not Putin’s plans for his political future would be on the agenda when they met.

First up, George Bush explains his recipe for un-mixing Putin:

There are a lot of people that are — a lot of Americans are investing in Russia because they have found there to be a decent climate for their particular industry — financial industry, for example, comes to mind. On the other hand, there are some mixed signals coming out of Russia when it comes to honoring contracts in the energy business. So we made — when those signals get mixed, I try to un-mix them with President Putin.

(Source: Wall Street Journal, Interview with President Bush)

And now, Condoleezza Rice, desperately tries to clamber out a hole:

QUESTION: You said you wouldn’t turn down an opportunity to discuss with President Putin his thoughts about being prime minister. But do you not plan to proactively raise that with him? And does it not give you pause, the notion, even if it’s constitutionally permissible in Russia, that one man would be president for two terms and then potentially take on another very powerful position?

SECRETARY RICE: I’m not going to speculate about something that is speculative, as to what President Putin will or will not do. You know I have a deep interest in Russian politics that goes back a long way, and so it’s great to have a chance to talk about those things. But in terms of speculating about what he’ll do or having a view based on that speculation, I don’t — I just don’t think that’s appropriate.

QUESTION: Are you going to ask him what he plans to do?

SECRETARY RICE: I’m not going to tell you what I’m going to ask him. (Laughter.) What we have talked about is the need for there to be vital and viable political institutions in Russia, kind of competitive political institutions. You know, we’ve made — we’ve had those kinds of conversations. But this is a political system that’s in transition, and so I — no, I’m not going to get into speculation with President Putin about what he will or will not do.

(Source: State Department - briefing en route to Moscow).

A few months ago, news broke (yet again) that Russia planned to build a tunnel under the Bering Strait from Siberia to Alaska. Well, it looks like a tunnel isn’t the only option on the drawing board. 

Engineers are also considering how they could build a bridge across the Bering Strait.  Or, to be more precise, a series of three bridges spanning the Bering Strait, via the Diomede Islands.

As with a tunnel, the challenge of buildng a bridge from Russia to Alaska would not be insignificant.  According to the Discovery Channel (via Fogonazos blog):

Ice breakup after each winter is violent and would destroy normal bridge piers, so the 55-mile-long bridge would need 220 piers, cone-shaped to resemble and function like the bow of an icebreaker ship, and weighing 50,000 tons each.

And that’s even before you consider the thousands of miles of roads and railway lines that would be needed to connect the bridge to any of the major Siberian or North American transport routes.

If you want to know more, the Discovery Channel has an excellent interactive guide, with plenty of diagrams and pictures.

Evercell. The battery that powered Reagan past four Soviet leaders - Brezhnev, Chernenko, Andropov, and Gorbachev.

I miss Spitting Image. The world needs more satirical puppets.

Does anyone recall seeing the Russian Spitting Image clone? Was it any good?

Actually, that’s a slightly misleading title.  Pretty much every country in the world has planted its flag somewhere to stake its claim to some piece of land or other.  But the Russians of old - well, they had a slightly different approach…

Professor Basil Dmytryshyn, in a letter to the Wall Street Joural, writes:

[In] June 21, 1787… Lt. Gen. Ivan V. Jakobi, the governor-general of Siberia, sent a secret instruction to two Russian merchant-explorers instructing them to bury at various points along the Alaska shore 10 iron plates proclaiming “This land belongs to the Russian Empire.” Russia did not give up her claim until she sold Alaska to the U.S. in 1867.

Following the Alaska sale, Russian explorers also planted similar iron plates along the Western coast of North America, from Washington to Northern California.

As far as I know, none of these plates have yet been discovered.  Which leads one to wonder whether the Russian Empire’s approach of putting down invisible markers was actually all that effective.

Wow - Russia really is starting to strut its military stuff on the world stage again.

Two Tu-95 bombers flew to the US island of Guam in the Pacific Ocean, paying a surprise visit to the US military base there. Shocked US pilots on the base were forced to scramble to intercept the Russian bombers.

The BBC has this quote from a beaming Russian General:

“It has always been the tradition of our long-range aviation to fly far into the ocean, to meet [US] aircraft carriers and greet [US pilots] visually. Yesterday [Wednesday] we revived this tradition, and two of our young crews paid a visit to the area of the base of Guam. I think the result was good. We met our colleagues - fighter jet pilots from [US] aircraft carriers. We exchanged smiles and returned home.”

The media are, of course, reporting it in rather sensationalist terms (”Russia sparks Cold War scramble” was the BBC’s uninspired effort), but yesterday’s “raid” shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone. Russia has been steadily raising the international profile of its military, popping up all over the place, from Scotland to the North Pole to the Pacific, reminding its old NATO adversaries that it is still around and, when grumpy enough, is still a force to be reckoned with.

What it really means is that the Russian military now has enough money in its budget to do things like actually fly its planes and to sail its maintained and more or less ship-shape navy out of port. To my mind this is infinitely preferable to having an uncared for fleet slowly rotting away and poisoning the world’s oceans with glowing nuclear waste.

Update: A US General, on the other hand, says that the Russian planes didn’t even get within 500 kilometers (300 miles) of Guam: “U.S. planes went to an orbit point in preparation for an intercept that never occurred because the Bears didn’t get close enough”.

“A New Cold War” is the latest International Affairs Forum debate. 

“With talk of a new Cold War, and Russian President Vladimir Putin floating the possibility of aiming nuclear weapons at targets in Europe, how serious do you think the deterioration in relations is between Russia and the West? How should Western governments respond?” 

Among the commenters you might recognise are bloggers Robert Amsterdam and Russia Blog’s Yuri Mamchur.

Last week Henry Kissinger led a delegation of US political big-hitters on an extremely low-profile mission to Russia. Kissinger and his team met with Vladimir Putin and an equally matched Russian delegation - led by former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov - to discuss some of the more pressing issues in US-Russia relations.

Make no mistake about it - this was a serious, high level meeting.  Just take a look at this list of delegates:

In attendence with Kissinger were: Former Secretary of State George Schultz, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, former Special Representative for Arms Control, Nonproliferation and Disarmament Ambassador Thomas Graham Jr., former Senator Sam Nunn and Chevron Chairman and Chief Executive Officer David O’Reilly.

With Primakov were: Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, former Ambassador to Washington Yuly Vorontsov, Deputy Board Chairman of UES Russia Leonid Drachevsky, UC Rusal Deputy Chief Executive Officer Alexander Livshits and former Soviet Armed Forces Chief of Staff Mikhail Moiseyev.

You’d think that a meeting like this would be widely reported, especially as it comes slap bang in the middle of an international spat between Russia and the UK which is gaining massive media attention. 

But the meeting has been virtually ignored by the world’s media. 

A quick search of Google News for “Kissinger” and “Putin” brings up a measly 45 news stories.  One in the Guardian, another in the Moscow Times, and that’s about it.

I know that the participants in the meeting didn’t necessarily want to draw attention to themselves, but in today’s media obsessed (and Russia obsessed) age - how on earth did they get away with that??

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Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has decided to pull an article from the next issue of the US-published Foreign Affairs journal.

“As a result of the excruciating and sluggish exchanges with the editors, the likes of which could only be found in diplomatic history, it was decided to give up trying to place Sergey Lavrov’s article in Foreign Affairs,” said a Foreign Ministry spokesman. 

Apparently, they were arguing over whether to include a sub-heading.  Foreign Affairs wanted to include one that implied that referred to the possibility of a new Cold War.  Lavrov didn’t. 

There’s a good overview of the spat at the New York Times (it’ll probably go behind a firewall soon, so read it quick), although Russophile rightly takes the NYT to task for some biased reporting towards the end of their ‘article’.  Foreign Affairs themselves have published their own take on the story on their website.

Anyway, following the spat, the Russian Foreign Ministry decided to publish Lavrov’s “Containing Russia: Back to the Future” article on their website.

I’ve just read it and, to be honest, it’s a bit dull.  I’d have been disappointed if I paid for Foreign Affairs only to find this bland restatement of Russia’s position on International Politics.

Essentially, it restates Russia’s belief in the Westphalians system of international sovereignty, it’s belief in a system of international rules, that the US pursuit of an ideological crusade for democracy is destabilising, that it’s only natural that a country should take advantage of its competitive advantages (ie. in Russia’s case, energy) in the international marketplace, and that if we all work together we can solve all the world’s problems.

In an interesting ruling, a Russian court has ordered Visa to process payments to Internet Audit, the owners of Allofmp3.com.  This presents something of a problem for Visa, as Allofmp3.com has been declared illegal by another Russian court and shut down.

According to Internet Audit, the court ruled in their favour because:

“the decision on whether copyright has been violated or not can only be taken by court based on a suit filed by exclusive copyright holders, but neither IFPI nor Visa own such rights”.

I don’t even pretend to understand the mechanics of Russian law that allow this, but there seem to be some pretty interesting implications. 

Firstly, Visa must process credit card payments to other Russian music download sites running on the same legal basis as Allofmp3.com, but which have not (yet) been declared illegal.  This includes mp3Sparks.com, which is a virtual clone of Allofmp3.com, and the Alltunes software, both of which are owned by Internet Audit, and both of which seem to run the exact same database and underlying software as Allofmp3.com

And, secondly, this ruling would seem to mean that Visa might well be obliged to continue processing payments to any poker websites operating out of Russia, which would put it in an interesting dilemma with regard to the recent US ban on poker. 

As well as getting itself embroiled in a diplomatic spat with the Russian government over the extradition of Andrei Lugovoi and the expulsion of four Russian diplomats, the British government is on the verge of a major diplomatic row with the United States.  The Guardian reports:

A potential diplomatic collision with the US is looming over the corruption allegations against the arms company BAE. The department of justice in Washington has formally demanded that Britain hand over all evidence of secret payments the company made to members of the Saudi royal family to secure huge arms deals.

Which presents an interesting dilemma for the British government.  Should they hand over the evidence, and hang BAE out to dry, or would they be better served by keeping their sticky mitts on the top-secret files and losing the moral high ground to Russia? 

Frankly, I’m surprised the Russian government hasn’t picked up on this problem yet - they could make tremendous mileage out of it in the international PR arena.

Remember the story I posted a couple of weeks ago, about a member of Putin’s advance party to Kennebunkport trying to buy whisky with a fake $100 bill?

Well, it’s hit the mainstream - big time. A (rather deranged, it must be said) CNN presenter, has decided that the money came right from the top:

“I have a sneaking suspicion that this counterfeiting can be traced all the way up to Putin himself. From arms and oil deals with everyone from Venezuela to Iran, this guy is in bed with evil. […] So, Putin, one way or another… could he be behind this counterfeiting?

Don’t believe me? Watch the video for yourself:

Bonkers. And, if this constitutes prime time US journalism, ever so slightly scary. I mean, I remember that US news seemed terrible when I lived over there a few years ago, but I hadn’t realised it had gotten quite this bad.

(Thanks to Robert Amsterdam for the tip).

According to Gizmodo, NASA is to buy $19 million dollars worth of space toilets from Russia:

So apparently NASA has agreed to purchase toilet technology from the Russian company RSC Energia for the tidy sum of $19 million, to be delivered to the ISS in 2008 in preparation for a crew upsizing from three to six members. The previous system required that urine tanks be transfered to cargo ships and burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere, but the new toilets operate like a waste treatment center on Earth, collecting and reconstituting urine as drinking water — an unpleasant concept for a number of our readers, but a welcome relief for thirsty astronauts.

I think I shall let this story pass without further comment.