Word: russian
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...with their lives. Up to now, the deaths of Afghans in the fighting have done little to aid the allies and a lot to turn locals against foreign forces and the government of President Hamid Karzai, which those forces sustain. This is a place - as British and Russian armies discovered and were sent packing after their discoveries - where the waters of vengeance run deep. "If the Americans kill an Afghan father, the son will take revenge and pick up a gun and will stand against foreigners," says Abdul Qadir, 38, who runs a shoe-shine business on a Kabul street...
...Russian government has said little about the Kursk nuclear submarine since it sank in the Barents Sea on Aug. 12, 2000, leaving 118 sailors and officers dead. Then President Vladimir Putin waited five days while vacationing on the Black Sea to comment; when friends and relatives of the dead unfurled a memorial in Moscow on the second anniversary of the disaster, not a single senior government official attended. This is not surprising. The Kursk went down when one of its torpedoes blew up. Remembering this sort of self-inflicted tragedy would conflict with Soviet - and post-Soviet - myth-making about...
...building appears to conflict with Kremlin interests. Poborchiy nicely captures this incongruity. At 51, he admires Putin, who may no longer officially run the Kremlin but is assumed to orchestrate the every move of his successor, Dmitry Medvedev. Indeed, Poborchiy seems self-consciously Putinesque, sporting a tracksuit with the Russian tricolor and leading a men's team of ice swimmers who converge on a lake for morning races every winter, when Murmansk descends into darkness for nearly two months. (See pictures of Russia celebrating Victory...
...Lyosha, the 115-ft. (35 m) statue of a soldier down the road from the future Kursk memorial. These Soviet-era monuments were designed to inculcate belief in (and fear of) the regime. Like his Soviet predecessors, Putin has shown a distaste for acknowledging weakness or tragedy. "In the Russian mentality," says Anna Kireeva of the environmental group Bellona, which investigated the Kursk sinking out of concern that nuclear waste might seep from the submarine, "there is a joke: Rule 1 is the boss is always right. Rule 2 is, if the boss is wrong, see Rule...
...Sphere of influence" is a term of diplomatic art, which is often invoked by the Russian government and Western nations in discussing plans for a NATO expansion and the European Commission's Eastern Partnership effort. In his speech, Obama distinguished between Europe's efforts to grow its diplomatic relations with former Soviet bloc countries and Russia's efforts to keep significant influence over its neighboring nations. "America will never impose a security arrangement on another country. For any country to become a member of an organization like NATO, for example, a majority of its people must choose to [join]," Obama...