xzar_monty

I believe the Russians might well destroy the Nordstream pipe simply to annoy their perceived enemies. Just to be spiteful. Now, whether they did it or not, I don't know, and I don't know enough to have a proper opinion. Btw, I think it would great to know which percentage of Russian commanders and important people in the Kremlin thought right from the start that the war was moronic. We won't know, of course, but we do know that it was only one man's opinion that actually counted.

I am not making a comment on who hit Nordstream. However, I am very firmly of the opinion that it was completely moronic and counterproductive for them to attack Ukraine. I also believe that an awful lot of experts share this view, including Russian experts.

To paraphrase the historian Timothy Snyder: Russia does not have the capacity to make itself stronger, so it is committed to weakening everyone else as much as it can. Heartbreaking to think of the human waste in all of this: with its population, size and natural resources, Russia could be a leading light it technology, engineering, what have you -- it could produce superb machines, computers and all the rest of it. It chooses not to[*], even if education levels have at least been quite good -- I'm pretty sure they're going to plummet now. (Lovely trivia: during the Cold War period, the Soviet Union was unable to produce even a decent car, but one thing that it was in fact able to build well was nuclear fallout bunkers underneath major cities. Zelenskyi and his staff took shelter in one during the first weeks of the war.) As for the damage, my understanding is that the gas pipe will take months to fix. It has taken a big hit. Not sure about the information cable and its condition. [*] A former Finnish prime minister went (very dubiously) to work for the Russians in order to build better trade networks with them. He subsequently told that all the plans had to be abandoned, nothing became of any of them. Russians simply couldn't get their heads around a trade arrangement that wasn't build on exploitation and cheating. They just couldn't co-operate, they wanted to steal. So the whole idea was scrapped.

It will be interesting to see how this one develops. The responsible party is quite obviously Russia; they are the only ones who would want to destroy this kind of infrastructure between Finland and Estonia. But the really interesting part will be the Russia apologists. Will they ignore this, as if it never happened? Will they point to Finland and Estonia's nasty Nato behaviour as a justification? Will they point to how awful a country the US is, so Russia is effectively guilt-free and actually rather nice? I'm pretty sure we will see all of this, but the exact phrasings will be interesting to see.

@Gorth: Now that we got into talking about good neighbours, you may be interested to know that both a gas pipeline and a communications cable between Finland and Estonia (underwater, that is) have been damaged. The Finnish government will hold a press conference about this in two hours. This is not taken to be accidental in any way whatsoever. Given the neighbours that we've got, I'm pretty certain, as I'm sure you are as well, that the culprit has to be Sweden.

And so we've covered the two main things! Just like all governments, where everybody is either a pr*ck or a c*nt.

I don't know how any of this is going to end, but it is very interesting to note how open Russia has been about its plans. For instance, shortly after the start of the war, Peskov pointed out that if Viktor Medvedchuk's policies had been allowed to foster in Ukraine, there would have been no special operation. Well, Medvedchuk received an awful lot of money from the Kremlin for his project of providing Ukraine with full-on Russian propaganda with the intention of keeping Ukraine very firmly in Russia's grasp, Belarus-style. This was what Russia was prepared to accept as Ukraine's position. When the project failed, thanks to some rather drastic decisions from Ukraine's leaders, Russia went to war. So, in effect, Russia was and is not prepared to accept the existence of Ukraine as a sovereign country who makes its own decisions. It's either subservience or destruction for Ukraine, as far as Russia is concerned. And Russia was and is very open about this. All talk about diplomacy as a tool to prevent this war is essentially nonsense, given the perimeters of what Russia was prepared to accept. The war in Ukraine is manifestly not a failure of diplomacy. (Heck, that's the tragic truth of why you need an army in the first place: if your opponent is not prepared to talk about things rationally and simply attacks you, diplomacy is a worthless tool and what you need to do is bring the opponent down, physically. Taking this to an individual level, this is the same reason why it's probably a good idea to be able to hurt someone very badly, as unpleasant as that is, because you may need to, one day.) And yes, the recent developments in Slovakia: man, oh man, that's depressing.

@Gorth: Seen this?

In some sense, yes, probably no better. But in terms of dependability and lack of arbitrary cruelty, such as rape and slaughter of parents / children in front of their children / parents, Sweden was an awful lot better. So, even two subjugating powers can be wildly different, culturally. And once the powers have become other than subjugating powers: well, just make a guess as to which neighbour has been more dependable in everything in the past 70 years. Russia is a terrible, terrible country. (Also, in the 1980s, the mighty Soviet Union was just a pitiful country. Oh the Finnish youths who went there as hockey players and got some rubles and were extremely happy about it and then found out to their utter astonishment that in the mighty Moscow there was nothing worthwhile they could buy with their money. Seriously, nothing. What that aroused, more than anything, was pity.)

Yeah, pretty much this. There is no "NATO expansion", there's just "countries close to Russia trying to get as much safety as possible by desperately wanting to join NATO". (Finland was an exception for a long time, and Finland's policy can be criticized, even in very strong terms. And has been, lemmetellya.)

Eternal problem with fast and furious revolutions: people who can get them done are not the people who can form better governments.

I am somewhat puzzled by the word "solely" here. Where does such certainty come from? Where have you gathered the information needed for statements like this?

I don't know, reading on those improvements made me think that "assassination" here means that an ass is turned into even more of an ass than it already was. I.e. it's not interesting.

I'm sorry but that's just utter nonsense. How is it not a military operation if territories are being fought over with armies using weapons? How would you define a military operation, then, if this is not one? The fact that it has political overtones does not mean that it is not a military operation, too. (The following is not a comment intended directly at you, but I find it very curious that the internet has appeared to significantly increase the kind of discussion culture where things have to be either one or the other and where multiplicity and simultaneity are not possible, even conceptually. It's both fascinating and quite disheartening.)

Ha, seeing this critical tone and the name Giles, my instant thought was: "Has to be Keir Giles." Sure enough, it was. Not a particularly trustworthy writer, that one. England continues to produce some highly eccentric characters (like, to be fair, does everyone else). Here's another, knock yourself out: https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2023/09/the-postmodern-theatre-of-the-ukrainian-counter-offensive

Green Chartreuse is what I'd go for. I don't know where you'd be able to buy the Elixir Vegetal, but I don't think it's worth it, anyway. I once bought a couple of bottles in Nice, France, and while it's nice to have tried it, I'd just go for the Green any day.

Mary V. Dearborn's newish biography of Ernest Hemingway. An endlessly fascinating, horribly troubled charcter whose family tree is a sorry picture of bipolar disorder, depression, tormented sexuality and suicide. I agree with Dearborn that the work most likely to survive are the short stories and The Sun Also Rises, with some minor additions to that. Dearborn's focus is on how such a talented person started to have his life go so wrong so early and why he died so young. Good stuff with wonderful photos I hadn't seen before; the one with Marlene Dietrich is particularly charming.

This song just hasn't got old, I have to say. You may be interested to know that there's a wonderful tradition in Finland, started by just one man in the mid-to-late 1990s. No matter which band is playing and what kind of music is played, as long as the venue is small enough (i.e. club or smallish concert hall), you're almost guaranteed to hear someone shout "Play Paranoid!" at some point of the show. It's a joke that everybody's on, and it continues to be funny.

Hmm. I think that sad music generally comforts, as long as it's good, so the comfort comes from the artistic quality (which, to be somewhat high-flying, reaffirms one's belief in humanity and the fact that all sorts of wonderful things have been created and are being created), making the emotional content somewhat secondary. I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on this primal strangeness, though. I do agree that music is somewhat strange, as an art form: it is entirely abstract (as long as it's instrumental), yet it's quite universal and tends to evoke emotions in just about anyone who's not completely numb. Apparently the fifth, as an interval, is something that the human ear finds very pleasing no matter which culture you happen to live in. Which probably goes some way to explaining why the diminished fifth is so often used in heavy metal and other assorted genres to evoke evil or nasty or whatever: that particular dissonance, being so close to the perfect fifth, is the best vehicle for signaling something malicious. Here's an extremely good example of a sad song that comforts -- at least in my view. This is one of Peter Gabriel's best achievements. The instrumentation is really quite peculiar, but it works wonderfully well.

It's not really certain whether this was a Wagner plane, but a Russian plane in any case and in Mali. Watching this landing really does make you wonder: what level of incompetence does it take to land your plane that far up the runway and not recognize there's no way there's enough of it left?

Viktor Sokolov appears to be turning into another "is he or isn't he dead", with Peskov not saying anything and video evidence being inconclusive. The strike in Crimea seems like an effective one in any case.

Reading the Lord of the Rings in Spanish, just to improve my skills. Every reference to Anduin as "El Río Grande" feels so wrong, even though the translation from English ("The Great River") is accurate. The translator should surely have used an adjective other than "Grande".

Zakharova is keen to comment on Finnish matters, I can tell you that! (Peskov much less so, at least since the war began.)

I wonder if his recent gaffe has something to do with it. He did let it slip that Russia's presidential elections are "not really democracy", after which he vanished from public view for three weeks or something. It's also possible that the two were coincidental, of course, and that the gaffe was only in the eyes of the West.

Indeed, there's plenty of stuff that Ukraine seriously needs to improve upon in order to be regarded as a more, shall we say, westernized country. Also, once the war is over, there's going to be an awful lot of problems to solve and questions to deal with; Zelenskyi knows this perfectly well and it appears that the work is in progress already. But it's going to be really tough, and it's going to take a long time. (One thing, by the way, that heads may well roll for, is the utterly failed early defense of Mariupol. It had been prepared, but nothing happened in the event, and someone's got to take the blame for that.) As for Donetsk, Luhansk and (in particular) Crimea, I don't think anyone knows what's going to happen even if the war ends tomorrow.