Russia and Eurasia

As declared by Russia Today, Russian troops were deployed to Crimea ‘only to protect human rights’. The Crimean issue unfolding at present was compared to the secession of Kosovo, and daring to deny the illusory similarities between these two wildly different conflicts is described as ‘rewriting the rulebook’ on the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine.

Last Thursday I took the metro to Belorusskaya, to get the Sheremetyevo airport train out of Moscow. Perhaps not for the last time in my life but probably the last for a while, at least. During the last six months I have met, befriended and drunk too much vodka with some warm, sensible and decent Russian people.

I may have read this wrong, but I have an increasing sense of foreboding that the long-running “Euromaidan” occupation in Kyiv is not going to end well. Yes, Yanukovych has agreed to come to the negotiating table - he has even offered a prime ministerial job to one of the opposition leaders - but I suspect that this is merely playing for time. He has not offered the job to his most capable rival, Klitschko, and his word is not exactly his bond.

Moscow, I have recently discovered, has a decent daily English-language newspaper, the Moscow Times. While its attitude to the Putin government tends to be a fairly balanced criticism rather than either cosying up it or vitriol against it, neither is it afraid to criticise, unlike a seemingly increasing number of other Russian media outlets.

Since the end of the Cold War, Russia’s influence in the Middle East has been greatly undermined and its policy has changed in emphasis and intensity. While during the clash between the two superpowers – the US and the Soviet Union – the Middle East was part of its ideological battlefield