Section: The Economist (The United Kingdom)
Power struggle
UKRAINIAN nationalist saboteurs blew up transformers and cut power lines to Crimea on November 21st in an attempt to punish Russia for annexing the peninsula last year. Crimea relies on Ukraine for nearly all its electricity, and most of its 2m residents have been plunged into darkness, dependent on emergency generators and candles. The blackout...
Master of emergencies
ON VLADIMIR PUTIN’S birthday in October, his defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, brought him a gift: the latest briefing on Russia’s military campaign in Syria. It included news that cruise missiles fired from the Caspian Sea had struck targets nearly 1,500km away. “We know how complicated such operations are,” Mr Putin replied...
Muddling through
In Crimea, Russia has mucked it up SOME find it relaxing to be covered head to toe in black, smelly mud. Others become a bit gloomy, particularly when the spa is half-empty and is in disputed territory. The job of Lieutenant Doctor Igor Aleksandrovich Dovgan, director of the gracelessly named Saki Military Clinical Sanatorium N.I. Pirogov, is to...
The TTIP of the spear
IT IS becoming hard to remember a time when Europe was not in crisis. The European Union doused the Greek fire (though the embers still glow) only to be confronted with flows of refugees it could not manage. Relations with Russia, already gravely wounded by the invasion of Ukraine, are now further complicated by the Kremlin’s deployment in...
Crash course
ELSEMIEK DE BORST was 17, about to enter her final year of secondary school. She enjoyed playing the piano and worked part-time at a pancake house near her father’s home outside The Hague; she dreamt of one day becoming an architect. But first came the summer holidays. On July 17th 2014 she packed her suitcase (purple, with red flowers) and...
An odd way to make friends
Jolly bombing weather RUSSIA’S behaviour in Syria resembles the fable of the scorpion who promises not to sting the frog that carries him across the river, but does so anyway—because it is his nature. The list of foreign powers stung by Russia continues to grow. This week Turkey protested after Russian fighters intruded into its airspace,...
Europe’s last dictator
THE crisis in Ukraine has been painful for nearly everyone involved. Russia finds itself under sanctions and at loggerheads abroad. NATO faces as grave a challenge as any since the cold war ended. And Ukraine itself, dismembered and drained by war, struggles to recover even as the fighting in the east of the country grinds to a halt. Yet one...
Mr Saakashvili goes to Odessa
IN THE spring of 2014, as the war in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region was breaking out, deadly clashes wracked the elegant port city of Odessa. On May 2nd pro-Russian separatists shot at pro-Ukrainian demonstrators from behind police lines. The riot ended in a fire that killed 46 separatists. The city has been largely quiet ever since. Yet...
The Kremlin’s new show trials
THE latest episode in Russia’s long history of judicial travesties played out this week in a stuffy courtroom in Rostov-on-Don, a provincial city near the Ukrainian border. As two defendants sat in a cage behind their lawyers, a prosecutor in dark glasses described them as bloodthirsty Ukrainian radicals who ran a terrorist cell in Crimea...
The bonfire of the vans of cheese
Russian raclette SOVIET news programmes were often recently filled with cheerful reports of ever-greater harvests, even as store shelves remained stubbornly empty. Modern Russia’s shops are full, but its news broadcasts recently have been dominated by ugly images of the destruction of food smuggled into Russia from behind the lines of “the...
