Archive - November 2004

The BBC reports that the crisis in Ukraine is hitting the economy hard.  Foreign trade down $4 million per day, the country has lost $184 million in tax revenue, and the government has had to spend $400 million of...

Concerns are rising that Ukraine is about to split into two.  A lot of this is scaremongering, and actually things do look relatively calm on the streets, but the risk of conflict remains very real and I wonder if...

Reuters has an amateur video from Ukraine which seems to be showing electoral fraud: Yuschenko party officials being beaten up. People being bused from polling station to polling station in government vans. A Janitor...

Alex(ei) at Russian Dilettante points out that, whatever we may think, Russia does have legitimate interests in Ukraine: It’s bad that Putin’s team let Russia’s involvement be interpreted as...

(Note:  I’ve written more on Russia and Ukraine since this post – head to the home page for more). One of the wilder rumours flying around Ukraine right now is that Russian troops have been flown in and...

Opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko has rejected the results of the Ukrainian Presidential election and called thousands of his supporters onto the streets of Kiev to protest. I’ve only just managed to grab ten...

President Putin, earlier this week, offered to return two of the four disputed Kuril Islands to Japan, paving the way to a peace treaty that has eluded the two states since the end of WW2.  President Koizumi of...

This week a rumour surfaced that Russia was about to send a small detachment of troops to Iraq. Recent developments are beginnng to make this rumour sound almost plausible...

The Economist reports that the end is nigh for Khodorkovsky’s empire. There can be little doubt that, by the end of the year, Yukos, an oil company that has drawn the ire of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and...

The UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office has just released its Human Rights Annual Report 2004.   In their (1.4Mb!) section on Russia, they’ve chosen to focus exclusively on the situation in Chechnya...