There is a golden thread that links Lance Armstrong, the disgraced American cyclist, to the Greenpeace climbers clambering about the Russian oil well rig in the Arctic. That thread is called accountability. In recent days, Greenpeace protesters briefly occupied Gazprom’s Prirazlomnaya platform, Russia’s first offshore exploration rig in the Arctic. Greenpeace opposes all oil exploration […]

“Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?” – Alexander Pope, 1735 This summer, Vladimir Putin tried to break three of Moscow’s butterflies on the creaking, iron wheel of Russia’s court system. On Friday, the three Pussy Riot girls were sentenced to two years in jail for singing the wrong song in church. Stalin’s show trials […]

With London’s Summer Olympics over, the spotlight and the torch now shift to Russia, host of the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics. Before the torch starts moving from London, Russians are grumbling about their showing in the summer Olympic tally. Third place, with 24 gold and a total of 82 medals was not bad. Russians naturally […]

I On a sun splashed hillside overlooking the Black Sea, the President of Ukraine and half of his cabinet gathered July 12 for a summit meeting with Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin. The site was Livadia Palace, the Czarist-era estate that was the setting for the 1945 Yalta Conference, the meeting where Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin […]