First published on the Bordering on Lunacy blog on Friday, 15 August 2014 Courtney Weaver of the Financial Times, who has been traveling with the Russian "aid convoy," has been taking a look inside the Russian trucks said to be carrying aid to the Donbas. Unsurprisingly, many of the ones she looked at were mostly empty. See... Continue Reading →

First published on the Bordering on Lunacy blog on Monday, 11 August 2014 "I fear the Greeks, even those bearing gifts." So said the Trojan priest Laocoön, when he saw the great wooden horse built before the gates of the besieged city of Troy by the armies of Agamemnon, as related by the Roman poet Virgil in his... Continue Reading →

First published on the Bordering on Lunacy blog on Tuesday, 5 August 2014 The gaze of the Western media is brief, but intense. When the latest international crisis erupts, it is subjected to detailed scrutiny - for a while. Then another big story breaks, in another far-off location, and the searchlight of media news cycle attention sweeps... Continue Reading →

First published on the Bordering on Lunacy blog on Sunday, 20 July 2014 Ukraine has been thrust into the center of world media attention by the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17. This atrocity may have finally forced the international community to take the threat of Russia’s actions in the east of Ukraine seriously. Predictably, after the... Continue Reading →

First published on the Bordering on Lunacy blog on Monday, 14 July 2014 The fog of war is notorious for obscuring our view of military operations, but it must be rare in the annals of human conflict for a nuclear-armed superpower to attempt to invade a large European country without anyone apparently noticing. But that's apparently what happened... Continue Reading →

First published on the Bordering on Lunacy blog on Thursday, 3 July 2014 There is no weapon of war that is not vulnerable to another type of weapon: artillery, while devastating against mass concentrations of infantry, is vulnerable to attack from the air. Tanks and armor, which can punch through a front and encircle enemy forces quickly, can... Continue Reading →

First published on the Bordering on Lunacy blog on Friday, 13 June 2014 There's an anecdote about a frog in a pot of water that goes like this: If you put a frog in a pot of hot or boiling water, it will immediately jump out (or die). But if you put it in a pot of cold... Continue Reading →

First published on the Bordering on Lunacy blog on Wednesday, 4 June 2014 Something extraordinary happened in the frigid streets of Kyiv during the last winter. Amid the cracked cobblestones and the snow-packed bags of the barricades, between the lines of police and protesters, a national idea began to crystallize. That idea was soon articulated in the Maidan... Continue Reading →

First published on the Bordering on Lunacy blog on Friday, 30 May 2014 When the 10th century Prince of Rus Sviatoslav I resolved to crush a neighboring tribe of eastern Slavs, the Vyatichi, he issued history's most curt, aggressive, direct and unambiguous declaration of war. His quite undiplomatic four-word note to the chiefs of the Vyatichi read... Continue Reading →

First published on the Bordering on Lunacy blog on Wednesday, 21 May 2014 With the May 25 presidential elections in Ukraine now only days away, there is growing evidence that the Ukrainian government may be ready for a decisive final battle to eliminate the armed separatist rebellion in the Donbas once and for all. The government’s anti-terrorist operation... Continue Reading →