DO NOT BITE THE HAND THAT FEEDS YOU!

The strain has been intensifying since the launch of Ukraine’s long-planned counteroffensive in June, and its initially slow progress in overcoming deeply entrenched, heavily mined Russian positions in the east of the country.

It was thrust into the open at the European ministers’ meeting by media reports quoting unnamed U.S. and Western officials as criticizing Ukraine’s battlefield tactics.

Prompted for comment by reporters, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba did not mince his words. “I would recommend all critics to shut up,” he retorted, “to come to Ukraine, and try to liberate one single centimeter by themselves.”

"so-called" is a very reserved and polite form of expressing doubt and scepsis.

President Putin told pupils on Friday, at the start of the school year, that Russia's triumph in World War Two proved that their nation was invincible.

"I understood why we won the Great Patriotic War," he said in a lecture designed to strengthen patriotism in schools. "It is impossible to defeat this kind of nation with this kind of attitude. We were absolutely invincible. And we are the same now."

The Kremlin's so-called "important conversations" were introduced in schools after the Russian full-scale invasion began.

By Frank Gardner

BBC security correspondent

Ever since he led a mutinous march on Moscow in late June Yevgeny Prigozhin was described by Russia watchers as "a dead man walking".

Commenting recently on the mercenary boss's life expectancy the CIA Director William Burns even said: "If I were Prigozhin I wouldn't fire my food taster"

If it is ever proven that the mid-air destruction of a plane carrying Yevgeny Prigozhin was an act of deliberate, cold-blooded revenge by the Kremlin, this will go down in Russian history as the ultimate "special military operation".

Prigozhin, a former convict, chef and hot dog salesman-turned mercenary boss, had a lot of admirers amongst the ranks of his Wagner mercenary army and beyond. Many will have witnessed his warm reception by the public in Rostov-on-Don when he turned up there exactly two months ago in the throes of his aborted one-day rebellion.

But he also had a lot of enemies in Moscow, most notably in the upper ranks of the Russian military whose leaders he frequently and publicly criticised.

What has probably turned out to have been his fatal mistake was crossing President Putin when he launched that march on Moscow on 23 June. Although he did not mention Putin by name at the time, Prigozhin infuriated the Kremlin by very publicly criticising the official reasons given for Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He told Russians they had been deceived and that their sons were dying in the Ukraine war due to poor leadership. This was heresy and Putin's video message on that day was sizzling with vitriol. He called Prigozhin's march on Moscow a betrayal and a stab in the back.

musicThe image of Napoleon is "translated" into our reality with the help of painting, music, books and films - intersemiotic translation in terms of Roman Jakobson.

The Napoleonic propaganda machine was a very, very powerful tool in the course of the Empire and churned out a version of his wars in which much of the fault was down to perfidious Albion," he adds. "It wasn't France at all – it was everybody making war against France. This powerful Napoleonic legend continues to operate to this day. Napoleon is a living presence. He continues to operate from beyond the grave. He continues to mould the way in which we see him."

But Esdaile also rejects the Hitler and Stalin comparisons.

"Napoleon had many faults and was a loathsome individual but the racial ideology that underpinned the Nazi regime simply wasn’t there," he says. "Napoleon is not guilty of genocide. Napoleon doesn’t engage in wholesale purges. In fairness to Napoleon, the number of political prisoners in the course of his reign is relatively limited. To compare him with Hitler and Stalin is a historical nonsense."

Of course, Ridley Scott, a titan of the film industry, director of Blade Runner, Gladiator, Thelma and Louise, Alien and many others, has been in the business long enough to know how to promote a movie. (Napoleon is a return to the milieu of his first feature, The Duellists, released more than four decades ago.) It's entirely possible he knew t

Putin is not irrational or war-mongering for the sake of it, but rather “European interests are not aligned to the US’” -

an ambivalent interpretation of litotes.

According to Sarkozy, Putin is not irrational or war-mongering for the sake of it, but rather “European interests are not aligned to the US’”, and EU leaders must act accordingly.

First and foremost, for him, this would mean “Ukraine must not join the EU. “

“Ukraine is a bridge between the West and the East [and] must remain so”, such that the country’s EU candidate status is at best “disingenuous”, comparing the process to Turkey’s negotiations to join the EU, which have reached a years-long stalemate, he said.

Instead, Ukraine ought to remain “neutral”, so as not to feed into Putin’s “anti-West paranoia”.

"a spending spree" - the metaphor will certainly send shock-waves in Ukraine because it implies disapproval on the part of the American tax-payer who hates to see his money "wasted" on a far-away country of whose existence he discovered only recently.

US Aid to Ukraine Amounts to $900 Per American Household, Economist Says
Samantha Aschieris / @samantharenck /

August 09, 2023

Congressionally approved aid for Ukraine has cost each U.S. household hundreds of dollars, Heritage Foundation budget expert Richard Stern says.

“The formal aid packages alone amount to a staggering $113 billion—roughly $900 per American household and almost 12 times the spending cuts promised by House leadership in the annual spending bills,” Stern, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget, said in an email to The Daily Signal, Heritage’s news outlet.

“As with all new federal spending,” Stern added, “this $113 billion spending spree was added to our national debt and will cost more than $300 in interest costs per household over the decade. Of course, we’ve given more aid than that, but haven’t paid the bill on it yet.”

Congress already has greenlighted over $113 billion in “aid and military

Matthews, Owen. Overreach: the inside story of Putin’s war against Ukraine. – London: Mudlark, 2022. – 414 p.

Matthews, Owen. Overreach: the inside story of Putin’s war against Ukraine. – London: Mudlark, 2022. – 414 p.

“For the Ukrainophile intellectuals of the nineteenth century language was the key to a non-Russian, post-imperial future.”

[Matthews, 2022, 56]

“If any historical event served as the root cause of the 2022 invasion it was not Kyivan Rus’ nor the Hetmanate nor the Second World War, but Ukraine’s role in precipitating the death of the USSR.”

[Matthews, 2022, 56]

US ambassador in Moscow Robert Strauss:

 “The most revolutionary event of 1991 for Russia may not be the collapse of communism but the loss of something Russians of all political stripes think of as part of their own body politic and near to the heart of that: Ukraine.”
[Matthews, 2022, 56]

“If history played any role at all in Putin’s decision to invade, it was first and foremost in the form of historical payback for Kyiv’s betrayal of 1991.”
[Matthews, 2022, 56]

McGlynn, Jade. Russia’s War. – Croydon: Polity, 2023. – 256 p.

 In quotations a change of the narrative occurs in conformity with the change of the "point of view". Below one may find a clash of the Russian and Western narratives:

“With expansion,, NATO went from a defensive to aggressive alliance. NATO began to expand and then it began to go to war. It had never been to war before. So this claim we hear that NATO is a defensive alliance – that was true only during the cold war. Since the Cold War there’s been Yugoslavia, Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq.” [McGlynn, 2023: 119]

Fedor Lukyanov:

“It is strange we didn’t expect it because if we go to Putin’s essay because … it delivers a strong historical foundation as to why Russia and Ukraine are one people. He says very clearly we consider it is one nation, any divisions are artificial, we can recognize the presence of two states but there are conditions: these two states can co-exist  if one remains friendly but if one becomes hostile, like the anti-Russia stated there, then that state won’t exist. As simple as that.” [McGlynn, 2023: 143]

Sergei Lavrov:

“Ukraine tried to build up its sovereignty through the rejection of its history. Ukraine has no history of her own without the Russian nation” [McGlynn, 2023: 143]

But wars end, and someday this war will end. It may end with compromises, with some sort of “off-ramp” for Putin’s Russia, and with an essential push from the United States and its nato allies. 

Но войны заканчиваются, и украинский конфликт тоже когда-нибудь будет разрешен. Он может завершиться компромиссом, некими уступками со стороны России. Возможно, урегулирование украинского кризиса начнется с подачи Соединенных Штатов и их союзников по НАТО.

By Oliver Berry17th July 2023

Very few people outside the island know that Jersey has its own language – or that it was cannily used as a clandestine code during German occupation in WW2.

"Bonsouair! Seyiz les beinv'nus!" announced Jo Thorpe, as she stepped up to the microphone and spread her arms in welcome. "Or for anyone who's not from Jersey, good evening and welcome! We're thrilled to see you tonight, and we hope you enjoy the show."