Putinova Rusija

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Vyborg (Russian Cyrillic: Выборг [ˈvɨbɔrk],[10] Finnish: Viipuri, Estonian: Viiburi [ˈviːpuri], Swedish: Viborg [ˈviːborj], German: Wiborg [ˈviːboʁk]) is a town and the administrative center of Vyborgsky District in Leningrad Oblast, Russia, located on the Karelian Isthmus near the head of the Vyborg Bay, 130 kilometers (81 mi) to the northwest of St. Petersburg and 38 kilometers (24 mi) south of Russia's border with Finland, where the Saimaa Canal enters the Gulf of Finland. Population: 79,962 (2010 Census);[5] 79,224 (2002 Census);[11] 80,924 (1989 Census).[12]

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In the inter-war decades, the town,Viipuri, was the second biggest town in Finland and the seat of Viipuri Province. In 1939, Vyborg had some 80,000 inhabitants, including sizable minorities of Swedes, Germans, Russians, Gypsies, Tatars, and Jews. During this time, Alvar Aalto built the Vyborg Library—a masterpiece of modern architecture.

During the Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland in 1939–1940, over seventy thousand people were evacuated from Vyborg to western Finland. The Winter War was concluded by the Moscow Peace Treaty, which stipulated the transfer of Vyborg and the whole Karelian Isthmus—emptied of their residents—to Soviet control, where it was incorporated into the Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic on March 31, 1940. As the town was still held by the Finns, the remaining Finnish population, some ten thousand people, had to be evacuated in haste before the handover. Thus, practically the whole population of Finnish Vyborg was resettled elsewhere in Finland. The town became the administrative center of Vyborgsky District.

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On August 29, 1941, Vyborg was captured by Finnish troops.

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About 70% of the evacuees from Finnish Karelia returned after the re-conquest to rebuild their looted homes, but were again evacuated after the Red Army's Vyborg–Petrozavodsk Offensive, timed to coincide with the Battle of Normandy. By the time of the Soviet offensive, the town had a population of nearly 28,000. The town was evacuated by June 19 and the defense of Vyborg was entrusted to the 20th Brigade. The town fell to the Red Army on June 20, 1944, but the Finns managed to halt the Soviet offensive at the Battle of Tali-Ihantala—the largest battle fought by any of the Nordic countries—in Viipuri rural municipality which surrounded the town. The town was seriously damaged.

In the subsequent Moscow Armistice of September 19, 1944, Finland returned to the borders set by the Moscow Peace Treaty and ceded more land than the treaty originally demanded. In the 1947 Paris Peace treaties, Finland relinquished all claims to Viipuri/Vyborg.

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Time to Push Back on Russia's Nuclear Threats

At a May 3 NATO change-of-command ceremony, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter questioned the Kremlin’s tactic of nuclear saber-rattling.

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In parallel with its aggression against Ukraine, the Kremlin has sought to rattle the West, including with nuclear threats. President Vladimir Putin regularly talks about Russia as a nuclear superpower, even bizarrely suggesting that he was prepared to go on a nuclear alert when the Russian military seized Crimea in 2014. His loose talk emboldened the Russian ambassador in Denmark last year to threaten to target that country with nuclear weapons.

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Some, however, have suggested deployment of new nuclear arms in Europe or redeploying B61 bombs from their current locations to central European countries, such as Poland. Neither idea has merit.

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While the United States and NATO do not need additional nuclear weapons in Europe, they should try to steer the Russian leadership away from any idea that it might resort to nuclear arms at low or manageable risk.

Here is where the secretary of defense should come in. It is time for a major speech on nuclear deterrence to answer and rebut the loose words coming from Moscow. Carter has grappled with the issues and challenges posed by nuclear weaponry for most of his professional life. No one could better lay out the risks of any nuclear use or the perils of clumsy nuclear brinksmanship.

Carter could use his speech to stress the point that a nuclear weapon is a nuclear weapon, period. No one should think that employment of a low-yield nuclear weapon (or a few) would somehow be different. Even a small nuclear bomb would cross the nuclear threshold—a threshold that has not been breached for more than seventy years—and would open a Pandora’s box of unpredictable and potentially dire consequences.

This is a message that Putin and Moscow need to hear. NATO does not want the Kremlin to somehow convince itself that a “small” nuclear conflict would be manageable. It is time to start disabusing the Russian leadership of the notion that its nuclear saber-rattling is a safe, acceptable or successful tactic.

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NATO's unity was breached early in its history with a crisis occurring during Charles de Gaulle's presidency of France.[30] De Gaulle protested against the USA's strong role in the organization and what he perceived as a special relationship between it and the United Kingdom. In a memorandum sent to President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan on 17 September 1958, he argued for the creation of a tripartite directorate that would put France on an equal footing with the US and the UK.[31]

Considering the response to be unsatisfactory, de Gaulle began constructing an independent defence force for his country. He wanted to give France, in the event of an East German incursion into West Germany, the option of coming to a separate peace with the Eastern bloc instead of being drawn into a larger NATO–Warsaw Pact war.[32] In February 1959, France withdrew its Mediterranean Fleet from NATO command,[33] and later banned the stationing of foreign nuclear weapons on French soil. This caused the United States to transfer two hundred military aircraft out of France and return control of the air force bases that had operated in France since 1950 to the French by 1967.

Though France showed solidarity with the rest of NATO during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, de Gaulle continued his pursuit of an independent defence by removing France's Atlantic and Channel fleets from NATO command.[34] In 1966, all French armed forces were removed from NATO's integrated military command, and all non-French NATO troops were asked to leave France. US Secretary of State Dean Rusk was later quoted as asking de Gaulle whether his order included "the bodies of American soldiers in France's cemeteries?"[35] This withdrawal forced the relocation of SHAPE from Rocquencourt, near Paris, to Casteau, north of Mons, Belgium, by 16 October 1967.[36] France remained a member of the alliance, and committed to the defence of Europe from possible Warsaw Pact attack with its own forces stationed in the Federal Republic of Germany throughout the Cold War. A series of secret accords between US and French officials, the Lemnitzer–Ailleret Agreements, detailed how French forces would dovetail back into NATO's command structure should East-West hostilities break out.[37]

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Alexander Novak, Energy Minister of Russia (Russian): "Together with the Ministry of Economy and Trade we have looked at the priority directions for replacing imported machinery, which we should deal with in first place. In the middle and long-term view there are 12 main directions. The ones we consider most important until 2016 are the hydraulic fracturing and directional drilling technologies. "

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Russia, one of OPEC's arch competitors, has begun to adopt "American" fracking. At the beginning of the market share fight, the country's oil firms weren't even considered contenders because they had so many declining Soviet-era oil fields cluttering their books.

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Part of the reason is that Russia had imported lateral drilling and fracking from the US for several years (along with a timely drop in the ruble).

While vertical fracking had been used in Siberia for ages, once it was coupled with horizontal drilling, the synergies helped Russian producers recover 15 percent more crude from aging reservoirs.

Before TNK-BP was absorbed into Rosneft in 2013, it used hydraulic fracturing along with horizontal drilling in almost half the wells that year, a sixfold increase in just two years.

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Rosneft is becoming more technologically advanced,” Igor Sechin, chief executive officer of Russia’s largest producer. By 2012 the company had undertaken 215 wells, adding about 19 million barrels of production. Lukoil planned to frack 450 horizontal wells over the next three years.

“Everyone is now using horizontal wells because that’s the way to maximize returns,” said Lev Snykov, a partner at Greenwich Capital in Moscow, told Bloomberg.

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All this know-how is coming from oil services companies like Houston-based Schlumberger, the world’s largest provider, which is vying with US rivals like Weatherford, Halliburton, and Russian operators led by C.A.T. Oil. Before sanctions, Schlumberger had 12 separate fracturing fleets — machines with crews — working in Russia. Russia's C.A.T., which had a market-leading share of 31 percent, had about 15.

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While Russia clearly needs Western technology and expertise for offshore exploration, the sanctions may be less effective in stopping onshore shale development, with Russian officials arguing that most of the technology the country needs is becoming available domestically, or from non-Western sources such as China.

The head of state Gazprom Neft, Alexander Dyukov, has argued that even with sanctions, the country would be able to produce 1 million barrels per day from such formations by 2020-22.

Russian companies need an additional 250-300 heavy drilling rigs and 50-60 rigs for hydraulic fracturing, he acknowledged, but if these could not be produced domestically, they could be purchased instead from Asia, and in particular China.

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‘Russia is sorry and has cleaned up its act. Please let us compete in Rio’

In less than three months, one of the world’s greatest sporting spectacles will begin in Rio de Janeiro: a festival of sporting excellence and excitement bringing together athletes from all corners of the globe.

Except from Russia. As it stands, when the Olympic flame is lit in the Maracana stadium on August 5, our track and field athletes may not be there. These are men and women who have sacrificed years of their lives striving to compete at the very highest level, who have dreamt of taking part in the Olympic Games, and who now face having their sacrifice wasted

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Russian Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko has issued a plea for Russia's athletes to be allowed to compete in the Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games and apologized for the "deceptive" sportsmen caught doping in the past in an article he wrote for Britain's Sunday Times.

With less than three months before the Rio Games open in August, Moscow is seeking to have a global ban overturned to allow its track and field athletes to compete.

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"We are very sorry that athletes who tried to deceive us, and the world, were not caught sooner. We are very sorry because Russia is committed to upholding the highest standards in sport and is opposed to anything that threatens the Olympic values."

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WADA President Craig Reedie told BBC radio in an interview on Saturday that it was "highly unlikely" that Russia's anti-doping authority would be declared compliant with world sports rules in time for Rio.

Russia has to convince the IAAF that it has put in place measures to show improvement in its anti-doping operation and a "change of culture".

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That Guy: This is Why People Hate You II


Have you ever met That Guy?(...)He would have won that sparring match, but his opponent used an “illegal move.”(...)He would have gone home with that girl, but the mass media brainwashes young women so they don’t appreciate his qualities. In childhood and adolescence it’s to be expected. In early adulthood it’s a personality flaw. Past the early twenties- it’s pathological.

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For those of you who haven’t heard, Sergei Lazarev, who was a apparently a favorite to win Europe’s worst disaster since WWII, AKA Eurovision, was beaten by Crimean Tatar singer Jamala from Ukraine. So far the reaction in the Russian media has been akin to what you might expect if Russia somehow lost its seat on the UN Security Council.

Almost immediately there were conspiracy theories and ad hoc explanations as to how this tragedy unfolded. The “information war” against Russia was invoked. It was implied that the Europeans may have chosen Ukraine so as to suck up to the United States, because as we all know, European countries don’t have sovereignty and their people are incapable of having opinions of their own. All in all it was a weekend laugh riot on Twitter, as we broke out the popcorn and enjoyed watching the colorful explosions of buttrage.

Fascists! Nazis! Sodomites! Yankee boot-lickers! Information war! NATO! BLEEEEEARGGGGGH!!!!]

Now in case you haven’t picked up on it yet, I don’t give a damn about Eurovision. Russia, for some reason, seriously does. They care about it in spite of the fact that they hate Europe. It seems to go something like this: “You Europeans are a bunch of limp-wristed Sodomites who let marauding Muslim immigrants take over your worthless, US-controlled puppet states…but you’d better support us in your super gay song contest, the one where the winner gets to host said super gay song contest the following year!” In fact, they care so much that they seem to have spent so much time whining about their defeat in Eurovision that they totally forgot Moscow’s CSKA basketball team won the European league final on Sunday.

And this all brings us back to the topic of That Guy. Sunday’s sour grapes storm was classic That Guy behavior. Nor was it the first time. The FIFA investigations were alleged to be a conspiracy to take Russia’s World Cup away. During the Winter Olympics in 2010, a colleague of mine said students had told him that Evgeni Plushenko was denied the gold medal for figure skating thanks to “biased Canadian judges” who conspired to give the gold to…the United States. In 2014, the US cheated the Russian hockey team out of a victory because…Okay actually even I kind of have to agree with that one.

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And the funny thing is that in a way, Russia’s media might be right. People might have a bias against Russia. Surveys have found that much of the world holds a negative opinion about Russia in spite of millions of dollars spent on “soft power” around the globe. Sometimes that bias might end up hurting someone who really has nothing to do with the actions of the regime. Sergei Lazarev, who seems like a decent enough guy and who apparently took the loss like an adult, could possibly be an example of that collateral damage. But if this is the case, maybe the average Russian citizen who buys in to this worldwide anti-Russian conspiracy might want to dig a little deeper and learn about why this bias exists.

Here’s one tip, for example. When ordinary Russians, politicians, and media figures call Europe and the Sodom and Gomorrah, when they falsely claim that Western countries don’t really have free speech, when they support and endorse far right-wing fringe parties, neo-Nazis, and conspiracy cranks in those Western countries- Westerners find out about it. Even the ones that barely follow Russia news (AKA the majority of Westerners), they sure as hell find out when Russia implies it can nuke their countries. I also imagine a lot of Europeans aren’t thrilled when figures such as Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov imply that their governments’ failure to go along with whatever Russia wants them to do indicates that they are nothing but puppets of the United States. And maybe they are a little put off by massive tantrums every time something doesn’t go the Kremlin’s way.

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Just a final note for the record. I was invited to a Eurovision viewing party held in a cinema and since beer was available, I naturally went along. One young man in the audience was wearing a Ukrainian flag over his shoulders. Later, when Jamala’s song was announced, there was loud applause. Some people were actually singing along with her.

On one hand, these young people demonstrated far more maturity than some of Russia’s top state media personalities, as well as the fact that the Kremlin’s hate machine cannot control everyone.

On the other hand, they like Eurovision, but that’s another matter entirely.

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