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| Khasan Zakaev |
Interesting news this morning: Khasan Zakaev, one of the terrorist which organized and executed the 2002 attack against the Dubrovka theater in Moscow and an aid to Shamil Basaev was arrested in Crimea when he tried to enter from the Ukraine with false documents.
I very much doubt that Zakaev wanted to visit Crimea to enjoy the beautiful sights, sample the local cuisine or to relax on the seashore. Not coming from the Ukraine. Not with fake documents. In fact, I would argue that it is pretty darn obvious that if he took the huge risk of entering not just any Russian territory, but a highly monitored and secured one, he was there on a mission.
Continue..
A (well anonymized) anonymous reader sent me a very interesting link today. It is an opinion piece by Strobe Talbott for Reuters entitled "In 2015, Vladimir Putin may witness his empire’s death knell" in which Talbott predicts that:
The year ahead could see the outbreak of the third Chechen war, which, in turn, could be the death knell of the Russian Federation in its current borders. (...) For the past five years, the situation has been more or less quiescent, though neighboring republics have been rocked by violence. The lull in Chechnya, however, ended in early December with a series of bloody incidents in the Chechen capital of Grozny. The group behind the resurgence of unrest is advocating a “Caucasus Caliphate,” with ties to al Qaeda and, more recently, Islamic State. There is at least an indirect tie between outside support for Islamic radicalism in the Caucasus and Putin’s sponsorship of Russian secessionism in eastern Ukraine. By proclaiming ethnicity and religion as the basis for Russian statehood and aggression against its neighbors, Putin is inadvertently stoking the forces of secessionism in those parts of Russia that are historically and culturally Islamic.
There is one specific aspect of the recent thaw between the US and Cuba which nobody has mentioned and that bothers me a lot.
We have all heard about the Cuban 5, the last three of which were now freed and we heard about the Jewish American spy Alan Gross who has now returned to the USA. The media has also reveled the name of the top US mole in Cuba who had provided the USA with information about the Cuban 5 which lead to their arrest: Rolando Sarraff Trujillo who is now in the USA. So all is well, and everybody is back home, right?
