Word: russian
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...know this: the anger fueling Russia's behavior now is very real, and I know exactly where it comes from. Just a couple of months ago, in Moscow, I sat in the office of Vladimir Yakunin, whose official public role is chairman of the state-owned Russian Railroad company. That sounds like a pretty innocuous job, but it's misleading in this sense: Yakunin is an old St. Petersburg crony of Putin's and, like the Prime Minister, is widely believed to have been a career KGB field officer, including serving as resident at the Soviet U.N. mission...
...what else Russia is prepared to do to make up for those 17 years of humiliation. One thing we should pretty much count on is that Moscow right now is casting an eye toward Iran, the most direct route to restoring its influence in the Middle East. An Iranian-Russian alliance, Moscow knows, would be an Israeli-American nightmare, not to mention a major headache for the global economy. Russia sitting on Eurasian oil exports and Iran on the Strait of Hormuz would put 22 million bbl. a day under the control of a very unfriendly alliance. Will Moscow...
...thing about nightmare scenarios is that they rarely come true. Still, it bears watching. There are half a dozen pending arms deals between Russia and Iran on the table, including the Russian S-300, an air-defense system that would make an aerial attack on Iran very costly. If Russia, emboldened by a victory in Georgia, were to go ahead with the deal now, it would be a sign that imperial Russia is truly back on the move...
...until he drops. The only question in the intervening years was, What kind of Russia will that be? And though that's been, in the eyes of many, increasingly obvious, we now have the definitive answer: authoritarian at home, brooking no consequential political opposition, and increasingly aggressive abroad. The Russian war against the small, Caucasus state of Georgia had been frozen in time for the past 16 years (Russian troops last fought in Tbilisi, Georgia's capital, in 1992) until Putin began it in earnest again this past weekend, sending in air strikes far beyond the disputed territory of South...
...standing in a farmer's field, smoke rising from a huge fire started by a Russian incendiary bomb that had drilled into the ground 15 minutes earlier, when the first report came that Russian President Dmitri Medvedev had announced a pullback of Russian forces and an end to the bombing. It was news to the villagers, who had just watched their wheat crop engulfed in flames a few minutes earlier and who had spent the night before sheltering in the forest from Russian attacks. But a visitor from a nearby town insisted it was true...