Politics

All of a sudden Russia seems to be keen to perform symbolic moves. By acknowledging the independence of Southern Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia they did not change anything, in practice. They simply gave the western media something to talk about. In practice nothing changed, the Russians tanks are where they were, they did not get a square millimetre more than what they already had. So why did they do it?

As days go by, the Georgian puzzle starts to make some sense. No one can obviously say whether the sides had this scenery in mind on starting the game or not, yet a scenery is coming into focus.

The EU offered its role as a mediator in the Caucasian crisis. The French, in particular, are having an extremely active moment. Since their occupation of Odessa during the Soviet Revolution this is probably the most active Russian period of my good French cousins. One can be quite skeptkical of the possible results, yet at least someone DID something, instead of just taking sides and betting money on who will kick who, while the dead count keeps rising.

I previously wrote that I suspected Italy to be involved in the merge between Gazprom and the EU. The answer to my question marks just appeared on the New Yok Times. So that was a correct guess. There really appear to be two parties within NATO, one of which has interests that are totally diverging from the American interests. This game is getting interesting... let's see what happens :)

The first effects of the falling dollar already appeared: NATO suddenly started to speak european. The Ukraine and Georgia have been told the current expression for forget it in EUese, which sounds "Great! we will surely find the right time to discuss it!". Only it never says when such friendly search is supposed to start. Turkey is listening to this very song since ages, they must have heartily laughed on hearing it repeated in Bucharest, today. So here we are... no bucks, no power. Even the interests of Greece now appear to be stronger than Emperor's Bush's will. 

In Kiev today one euro is worth 8 hriven, while the dollar is down to 4,9. This is pure theory, obviously, because there are no more euro in town. According to official declarations it will take a couple of days to convert enough (now) useless US$ to euro and restore liquidity. The rate is not expected to get any better for the US$, but nobody excludes that it could get even worse.