The Train to Helsinki: Entertaining Mr Putin.

US-USSR, now US-Russia, summits used to be no more than glorified ceremonies, grand meetings to sign, or not to sign, essentially nuclear deals that had been thrashed out months before by officials of the two countries: superpowers that had enough weapons between them to destroy humanity and most of other flora and fauna several times over. They are no more than a reaffirmation of the agreement that none will be the first to pull the nuclear trigger. It is as if one is saying to the other: 'hey guy, I know all about the madness involved in MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), so let's shake hands and then use our fingers to commit to paper, put it in black and white, that we we will never use them to make the insanity happen.' You wouldn't know the nuclear weapons they were so frightened to use were the same they had spent billions of resources to make and which they used to send enemies into sleeplessness everyday. These two monsters at the opposite ends of a bipolar world were not going to agree on much else: the Soviet Union wasn't going to back off supporting Vietnam or Cuba and the US wasn't going to stop supplying arms to Jonas Savimbi and his UNITA bandits in Angola or the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. So summits were all about managing the nuclear conundrum. That and a sprinkling of trade and scientific deals.
They could even take on a daub of notoriety. Like the infamous one between Ronald Regan and Mikhail Gorbachev in which the US president arrived in a suit so ill-fitting that a journalist was compelled to ask him if the oversized clothes really belonged to him. Regan had not made a hurried visit to a flea shop, it was a measure of how much esteem with which he held the meeting.
Nothing has much changed. It is now Russia instead of the USSR, the nuclear weapons are still there aplenty, but both countries are even less enthusiastic about using them now. If you held a knife to his throat, Putin wouldn't even think of letting go Crimea, an Ukrainian territory he annexed in 2014 to global outrage. And even less reluctant would he be in admitting his country meddled in the US elections that brought Trump to power even if his counterpart prodded him on it till tomorrow. And neither will Trump be in a hurry to lift sanctions the US and its allies imposed on Russia for her arrant misdemeanors all over the world, from Salisbury in England to Abkhazia in Georgia Republic.Trump himself has placed a thick, damp squib on what would have been the major talking point of the summit, by casting serious and deflating aspersions on the findings by his own officials that it was likely Russia meddled in the polls that brought him to power.
It is no surprise many pundits have predicted the summit isn't likely to achieve anything of substance.
But the sightseeing is going to be okay even though Finland is such a flat, colorless country you begin to wonder if bears roamed the streets of Helsinki. And there is no doubt Trump has been overawed by Putin. He has often spoken of his admiration for the Russian strongman. The enormous powers he wields, the grip he has on his country, the crucial matters of life and death he commands on the tips of his fingers were things Trump covets. And which he would like to lay his hands on but which he is highly unlikely to get because of chuffing lawyers and courts and a liberal, squeamish populace in his own country. His backing down on forced family separations of illegal immigrants and the torrid hounding of his officials in restaurants and public places have been chastening indeed. He will never be Putin and the US will never be Russia. But if you cannot be him, why not shake hands with him. High autograph-hunting can be very pleasant.
Which has brought some trepidation that has been thankfully taken care of. The summit will take place four days after a meeting with NATO allies. Officials of the organization were jittery that if it were the other way round, Trump out of some figure worshipping, might agree certain things with Putin. Things that would later put NATO in an awkward position indeed.

Trump

 Putin and Trump

Gorbachev

Regan

Signing another non-aggression pact.

History repeats itself and in no department of it is this more pronounced than political history. Over time, we had a succession of political monsters that were almost perfect clones of one another: Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Adolf Hitler...or political processes that are, in crucial respects, replicas in actualities or reverse. On 23rd August, 1939, with the 2nd Word War imminent in Europe, the Soviet dictator, Josef Stalin, was compelled to sign a non-aggression pact with another dictator, the rampaging German Nazi monster, Adolf Hitler.  Both sides pledged to refrain from attacking each other, sought cooperation in neutralizing common enemies and so on. But the so-called Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, named after the two countries' foreign ministers was actually no more than mere paper, a document Hitler would tear to shreds barely two years later by invading Soviet positions in eastern Poland.
Fast forward to 2018, almost 79 years later, and one could see another non-aggression pact taking shape again between the two countries. In the reverse. A lot have changed, certainly. The Soviet Union now exists as a rump called Russia and communism that used to be the foundation of the state is now gone. Dictatorship now exists in other forms, propped up by an imperfect democracy but a democracy nevertheless. Germany had lost East Prussia, a third of its territory, is now a pure democracy, if any such thing exists, and now has a woman calling the shots in Berlin. The country is now an economic power but it now relies practically on the United States of America to protect her. Of recent, the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has been setting her sights on the East, on erstwhile bitter foe, Russia, strangely on a country the US has sworn to protect her from. It is just like extricating oneself from a very gentle handshake and then delving into the suffocating embrace of a bear hug. Strange, yet it is a reassessment that is very inevitable. The so-called handshake across the Atlantic has been gradually turning into a fist lock. Physically, President Trump's hands might be small but the grip they enforce could be really humiliating. And in no way is this demonstrated more than the recent peremptory cancellation of the Iran deal, an agreement Merkel and the European powers of Britain and France helped put on the table at great pains. Talk about making allies look small, ineffectual and pathetic! These three countries have had their diplomatic reputation torn to shreds and the outrage from their own nationals and economic concerns have been loud, reverberating. Merkel, a professor of physics, must have been miffed even further that the chap  making them look so inconsequential is one who could not really tell the difference between HIV and HPV, two classes of organisms so dissimilar. And so appalling was the remission that Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder, had to explain it to him twice, according to the billionaire's testimony. There are very audible grumblings in Europe by folks there that they cannot continue to be treated like vassals and Merkel must have been listening to the discontent of her own subjects.
Merkel knows that her Achilles' heels, and that of Europe, is ironically, an economic power that is hugely entwined with that of the United States. Even long before these European leaders had started trying to voice some determination, restating their resolve to shore up the Iran deal, many of their companies and big businesses such as the French energy giant, Total, were already pulling out of Iran. Deweaning Europe of the alliance with the US is going to be tough,  very tough, long and laborious but as a scientist, Merkel very much knows it is never too late taking a first step, no matter how small it is. She knows too that the Transatlantic Alliance is one that needs reappraisal. The world is not what it used to be. There is a new military power in the shape of China which also has a vast economic power. Asia's economy, if we factor in the influence of the Asian Tigers, is rumbling and in the foreseeable future, American economic power might not be decisive again. No doubt, Russia, although a rump of the former Soviet Union, is still an enormous military power and has in fact been behaving badly of late in its annexation of Crimea and elsewhere in Britain and Ukraine but the military picture is not the same as the one that drove it into the arms of the US.. Soviet satellites such as Bulgaria, Poland e.t.c. are now fully independent states with their own credible armies. The same for countries that used to be part and parcel of the Soviet Union itself. Sovereign states such as Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Belarus, Uzbekistan and so on. Russia  will have to roll its tanks through these obstacles to get to western Europe.
Hence in this peace, as in that war, Germany can always forge some partnership with Russia, if not an alliance. For now, Merkel has little to fear from Russia, besides Putin will not be there for ever. Increasing partnership with Russia and China means decreasing alliance, read reliance, with the US. If it gives a new world order, it will also secure Germany's vital gas supplies from Russia. A new non-aggression pact makes sense.

Putin isn't Strongman of the World.

Russia is a superpower, a country that has enormous human and technical resources to prove simply it wasn't behind the notorious poisoning of ex-Russian double agent, Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England. It has chosen not to, relying rather on verbal denials that nobody was going to believe. If Putin was going to wash his hands off the whole mess, he was going to need more than water, and he hasn't even held up a drop. Now even his most ardent supporters will need some convincing the Russian state wasn't behind this insanely stupid attempted murder.
And now, rightly so, Russia is being censured all over the world. Even President Trump has now joined the bandwagon of Russian bashing. Sixty Russian diplomats based in Washington and at the UN in New York have been expelled by the US and Putin should consider this remarkable, knowing he could always count on Trump as a faint ally, very few of which he has on earth. Indeed, Trump had chosen to tread a cautious line over the whole matter, refusing to blame Russia until more evidence had been provided. A lot of people felt the same way all over the earth, rationalizing that Putin and Russian intelligence were too smart to have embarked on such a stupid adventure. The Novichok group of nerve agents used in the attack could be so easily traced to Russia. This medium has even suggested a rogue scientist could have sold the formula to a rogue state or organization with an axe to grind against Russia. Putin and Russia itself has not done anything to encourage such skeptics and for Trump to have moved the way he did, it seems some materials very damaging to the image of the great nation of Russia is circulating somewhere in the labyrinths of international diplomacy.
The response is the same in Russia's backyard, Europe. Germany, France and Ukraine have also expelled Russian diplomats and countries like Latvia and Poland have summoned Russian ambassadors to their foreign ministries. According to them, in solidarity with British friends. A very natural thing to do. If such a brazen murder attempt could be carried out far away in Britain, only God knows what infernal plots could be incubated and hatched in these East European countries so close to Russia. But then there is something faintly grand about that line about solidarity. Ukraine has suffered enormously at the hands of Russia, what with the annexation of Crimea and the switching on and off of gas pipelines from Russia at will by GAZPROM. This is certainly an opportunity to kick some ass in return by Petro Poroshenko. It is a kick at a bully that the Ukrainian president should deservedly relish and which Putin and his Russia deserve for now. He might be liked by his subjects in Russia but Putin is not strongman of the whole world.

The War That Came in From the Cold.

It is just appropriate, very appropriate, that the poison used in the attempted murder of former Russian double agent, Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, Wiltshire, England, was a nerve agent belonging to the Novichok group. It seems the cold war has been resurrected  from its very cold grave. And with it the old, thunderous, East-West spy fiction. James Bond, Len Deighton, Frederick Forsyth, Jeffrey Archer, John Le Carre... Check the name alone, Novichok, translated from Russian as newcomer. Only it wasn't a newcomer, the incredibly lethal chemical weapon having been manufactured by the old Soviet Union in the 70s and 80s. The same way there wasn't much pussy galore in Pussy Galore.
Honestly, it is difficult to tell at the beginning this wasn't fiction. A Russian double agent, a former double agent is the candidate for an extermination plot. We can still go along with the fact that the motive, or lack of it, simply makes the plot a very curious one. Sergei Skripal had been arrested and imprisoned by Russia for his treachery, had come to London as a result of a cold-war-style prisoner swap and has been living in his adopted country for a fairly long time without incident, save for the death of his son and wife. Deaths suspicion must now necessarily revisit. The common consensus is that he is no longer a valuable asset in the esoteric spy business. He no longer did active work for British intelligence and the access he had to secrets in Russia had long been blocked with his arrest. So why would Russia want to kill him? Why didn't they just execute him in the first place, when anger and outrage was still hot? Why now when his malfeasance has grown so forgotten and,  in fact, few remember him? Since it is fiction, we can still live with that and assume that the motive will reveal itself on later pages. We now move to the execution of the plot and this is where fiction, except extremely bad fiction, begins to fall apart. Fiction with its  smooth, seamless plots. It begins to crumble and hues of reality, cold, hard reality with its tangled contrivances begin to set in with its natural sloppiness. Even an amateur can see instantly that the execution of the plot is insanely sloppy. Why use an agent that could be so easily traced to Russia, a rare nerve gas that had Russia's signature sprawled all over it? Even more traceable than radioactive polonium, the agent used in the murder of Russian spy, Alexander Litvinenko. Polonium, discovered  by the famous Marie Currie and named after her native Poland. Lethal it was but in all likelihood, it would have to be used in the open, air interference an issue, and there was simply no guarantee it would kill father and daughter at the same time. Even a rookie assassin would have done a better job. A murderer had left a trail of clues so wide and bright the great Sherlock Holmes or Hercules Poirot would have retired instantly.
All fingers now point at Russia. And even if this were a red herring contrived to embarrass Putin, Russia would still have a lot of explanation to do as to why such a deadly arsenal slipped out of its fingers.  But, in all reality, events emanating from the Skrikpal Affair are in the realm of conjectures and probabilities and it wouldn't do any harm to inject one now. Chemical agents have formulas, well-known to the designers. They are therefore not all that difficult to replicate. Former Soviet scientists have not been well treated and, in fact, some have shifted allegiance to other countries after the break-up of the Soviet Union. What if a determined plotter is able to buy a formula from a pressed or disgruntled scientist? At least one of these countries has an axe, serious axe, to grind with Russia. What if this sordid affair emanated from such a place? We are not mentioning names, just unleashing the amateur detective instincts that all of us possess.
Nobody is exonerating Russia here. At least until the facts are fully unraveled. Indeed someone has suggested that Russia intelligence might be sending warnings to would-be traitors that perfidious undertakings have serious consequences and that no betrayer will be allowed to enjoy the fruits of his exertions, whether in the long or short run.
That would be a very silly thing to do. The opprobrium such acts will attract far outweighs whatever the intended benefits of security. Benefits that could be secured with less money and effort and image damage by plugging the loopholes traitors exploit. The image of Mother Russia has suffered enough with the annexation of Crimea and notorious, worldwide, activities of Russian hackers and it will hardly improve with the grotesque knowledge and imagination of coarse Russian agents sneaking into the UK, hiring cars and smuggling chemical weapons all the way to Salisbury. Just imagine the MI6 carrying out similar plots on British traitors in Moscow!
The whole affair has been a very poor plot and an even poorer execution, stuff of very, very cheap fiction, and if it indeed finally emerges that it originated in Moscow, it would not only cast Putin into serious infamy but would also go a long way in reinforcing the image of Russian agents in cold war spy fictions as brutal, unthinking, muscular spies.

Maybe Kim Jong-un's Sister is the Miracle Worker.

On the night of October 27, 1962, the then Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev  was close, perilously close to a nuclear holocaust. Or he could have been well several hours into it were it not for the restraint of a Soviet naval officer aboard a submarine. Earlier, US forces had dropped depth charges on the submarine and the standard operational response from the warship was to fire nuclear-tipped torpedoes, a move that would have likely triggered a nuclear confrontation. However, all the three officers aboard would have to agree to the retaliation. It was the restraint of Vasili Arkhipov on submarine B59 that saved the world from nuclear annihilation. Still, on the night of the 27th, the Cuban Missile Crisis was far from being resolved and Khrushchev must have sat in a very quiet corner of the Kremlin, mind wrapped in trenchant introspection, a lot of 'what is the point?' going on in his mind.
What is the point of putting the vast, almighty Soviet Union on the firing line for the sake of tiny Cuba thousands of miles away? What is the point of placing nuclear missiles in Cuba when a single Intercontinental Ballistic Missile(ICBM) launched from Russia can equally make the same statement? A lot has been said about the strategic ICBM superiority of the US over that of Russia in that period but placing medium and intermediate-range missiles in Cuba was not really going to bridge the gap overnight. What's the point of the whole crisis? And that train of reflection, perhaps aided by the sight of his young son nearby, must have engendered the biggest of them all. What is the point of building nuclear weapons?
Perhaps North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un had experienced the same epiphany of recent. He has just agreed to hold presidential-level talks with the US, a move a lot of folks now regard as a miracle, and which a greater number now attribute to the huge sanctions imposed on the pariah state by the international community in wake of well-publicized nuclear tests by Kim. In international politics, emphasis is mostly placed on cold, biting calculations. Hardly is there a place for emotions. It might be as well but there is really no hard evidence to suggest that Kim's sudden change of heart, if it is real, was triggered by sanctions. The sanctions have been biting, no doubt, especially with the active cooperation of China, North Korea biggest trading partner, in making them effective but stiffer sanctions had been imposed on Iraq, Iran, Liberia, on many brutal regimes, and there is no single instance in which a positive correlation has been safely recorded between pressure and capitulation. In fact, the US had to move in troops on Iraq and the West African peace-keeping force, ECOMOG, had to go into Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Gambia when it became clear tough sanctions imposed were not working. It is very simple to see. No matter how devastating the sanctions are, some resources will still have to flow in and the brutal dictator only has to appropriate most of these for his cronies and repressive forces for him to continue in power, the sufferings of his people not mattering a jot. Many commentators point to Iran but the sanctions were a diversion for leaders who were increasingly grappling with a young population with whom Great Satan rhetorics were not going to resonate much and who were equally going to be disenchanted with their country's involvement in costly foreign wars. At any rate, Iranian clerics must have come too to the inevitable question: 'What's exactly the point in acquiring nuclear weapons?" Weapons nobody, even a madman, is not likely to fire. The destruction a single one can wreak is so mind-boggling that it even weighs down the hand. Khrushchev's son himself said that his father cut a very forlorn subject on the night of October 27, 1962, clearly unwilling to go down in history as the first person to start a nuclear war. By the following morning, his mind was made up. In fact, he had to accept the terms put forward by President Kennedy for ending the stalemate without consulting the Politburo, the highest decision-making body in the Soviet Union at that time. The capitulation was a severe humiliation for the USSR and was later to pave way for Khrushchev fall from power two years after. He was never a fan of nuclear weapons again and if he had stayed in power longer, there was credible likelihood he would have actively sought their complete elimination. Weapons he had spent billions producing.
Hence there are feelings, emotions, attached to nuclear weapons many of us are not conversant with but which those who produce or control them are too well aware of. The tough, thuggish, Khrushchev was not immune to them and there is no reason to believe the bad Kim Jong-un will be too. Perhaps the guy realized that he was to fear the unreliable, unpredictable Donald Trump more than the American president was to fear him. His own sister, Kim Yo-Jong has been prominent of late and the lady might have had a calming influence on him. And for those enamored of cold, hard calculations, what stops him from coming to the futility of putting all his aces in a couple of nuclear weapons most of which American anti-ballistic missiles are likely to intercept anywhere. The US has thousands of more sophisticated, more reliable ones, five of which can obliterate the whole of North Korea in a couple of minutes.
Still on cold, hard facts, which nobody has exempted Kim from deducing, he and his sister could have stood side by side gazing south of the border, envying the incredible luxury (luxury she was well-acquainted with in her recent visit to South Korea during the Winter Olympics) their kith and kin are living in. Without manufacturing nuclear weapons. Goods that nobody is going to use or use without a single benefit. Goods that invariably constitute a drainpipe.
Goods worse than grasses the often tactless Putin claimed the North Koreans would rather eat than give up nukes. Castro and the Cubans came to the inevitable conclusion they could not go on feeding for ever on sugar cane, another form of grass, so to say. Kim and his sister might have realized that they and their suffering citizens might do better by investing lean resources on pizza or chicken or bread or pills. And not on nuclear weapons America and Russia keep on manufacturing in thousands. And keep on dismantling in thousands.   

This Fire Won't Cease in Syria.

It would have been laughable, the latest ceasefire moves by the UN in Syria if the situation in that country, especially in Eastern Ghouta, has not been so pathetic. On Saturday, the Security Council managed to secure a ceasefire resolution, barely an hour after Russia had strongly objected to the list of groups exempted from the ceasefire. Russia knew anyway that securing a resolution was the only possible part of the whole rigmarole, complying with the ceasefire was well nigh impossible. Of course, by Sunday, barely a day after, Sweden and Kuwait, the originators of the Saturday document, were appealing for a new truce, the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, having said the ceasefire would only come into effect until the details were worked out. By Monday, Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor and Emmanuel Macron, the French president were virtually on their knees begging Vladimir Putin to do something. You would hardly see a more heartbreaking sight in international diplomacy. Russia seems to have scored very big in Syria and that only by brushing squeamishness and pity and humane pretensions aside and realizing the conflict was in effect, a fight to death, a war in which no quarter would be asked or given. The US has long abandoned her dreams or lack of them, in the country, its influence having been reduced to a sliver of territory being controlled by Kurds in Eastern Syria, and even Turkey is making her uncomfortable there.
The whole gobbledygook of the ceasefire was likely to flummox you and me. So if you are excluding big, hardline, Islamist groups like Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, HTS, formely Al-Nusra Front or Jaysh al-Islam or Faylaq al-Rahman from the deal, whom are you expecting to observe the truce? These are the most ferocious and active groups in Eastern Ghouta and their contributions to the conflict has been the most intense. Even if the government forces and their allies were going to stop fighting, the rivalry and fight for turf among these rebel groups were going to make aid convoys reaching those in need a very huge task indeed. It is a bitter truth Russia is very  conversant with and is ready to exploit happily for its burgeoning influence in the Middle East: It is a reality the UN is so distant from and which it has mishandled with pitiable comedy.
Tuesday morning, the UN had abjectly reduced its hopes and pretensions from thirty days of ceasefire to just five hours. Again, Putin was sitting high on his throne, calling the shots. A semblance of peace managed to reign for two hours and then the shelling and airstrikes resumed pell-mell. The two hours in itself was a miracle in Syria, though no succor got to those besieged. Folks in the ultimately senseless revolution have long given up on the miracles the UN is still hopelessly trying to conjure.
The besieged in Hom only got relieved when the rebels could no longer continue with the fighting and had to shipped out. The same with Aleppo. It is a bit difficult saying this but the mot plausible hope for the starving and desperate in Eastern Ghouta lies in the blasphemy of the fight being allowed to continue for some time in the hope that the government forces will ultimately gain the upper hand. That is the solution is military. This in itself is little hope. Check out the geography. Benign territory for rebels to withdraw to from where they are presently entrenched lies far, very far away and the only reasonable scenario is a fight to death. Ceasefire is out of the question and the conflict is going to be drawn out, as is expected of resistance from people happily fighting to die.
And for the 400,000 trapped in Eastern Ghouta, too bad they are caught up in a war not of their own making. Too many proxy wars being fought by so many powers. They don't have many choices now, except miracles they themselves don't believe in. And which the UN is only believing in because of the fear of being seen to be doing nothing. 

China, Xi and the New Revisionism.

What is not important is the news that the Communist Party of China, in the next couple of days, will abolish the two-term limit for the president and his vice, a restraint entrenched in its own constitution. For some time now observers have expected President Xi Jinping to browbeat the party and the rubber-stamp Chinese parliament,  the National Party Congress, into bending the succession rules to enable him perpetuate himself in power. Ten years in power is a very long time, too long by western democratic standards, and the alarm now is that Xi will be given a carte blanche to continue in power as long as he likes in China, a vital player in global economic, social and political affairs.
It is not clear if the party is going to ramp up the limit, three-term or even four but it is instructive to take a closer look at the kite being flown by a party scholar and member: 'China needs a stable, strong and consistent leadership from 2020 to 2035'. Xi was born in 1953 and will be 82 by 2035 in case someone is preparing him or he is preparing himself for such longevity in power. If this is not a revision to Mao, China didn't build a Great Wall.
Mao was a great leader, no doubt, but it is difficult to argue that what he did for China was far greater than the contributions of another great communist leader, Deng Xiaoping. So a heavy argument against dictatorship in present China subsists. The country has witnessed strong economic growth under Xi but it even saw faster growth under his predecessors; he has launched well-publicized crusades against corruption, but any other leader was going to do that anyway, for the sake and survival of the party itself, corruption having eaten deep into the fabric of the officialdom and was fast alienating the common man in the street. The fight against corruption has also conveniently eliminated real and perceived rivals in the communist party. His nationalistic postures have endeared him to many of his countrymen but Trump isn't doing badly too in his 'American First' policy. The same with Putin in Russia. As Trump himself has pointed out, your country first does not mean your country alone. Hence what endears Xi to his people now are ultimately less important than the orderly political succession and stability that China needs. The Gang of Four conundrum that ensued after the death of Mao almost took back the country to the mayhem of the pre-revolution years. The country is now a far more advanced place and is very unlikely to survive any schism that a power struggle will bring. Xiaoping himself realized this and had to orchestrate the present succession pattern that Xi is trying to topple. The arrangement might have thrown up grotesque individuals like Premier Li Peng, architect of the infamous Tienanmen Massacre but by and large it has helped spawn acceptable and capable leaders who had helped steer the affairs of state creditably. What the country can do without now are the grumblings of political repression and exclusion that would eventually unravel in Tienanmen Square.
The communist party has done well in bringing economic growth to China, especially the feeding of its huge population. All thanks to the vision of Deng Xiaoping. And any arrangement he has made for the sustenance of this vision should be held sacrosanct by Xi and his cronies in the Central Committee of the party, a body very similar to the notorious Politburo of the old Soviet Union. The USSR will eventually implode, no thanks to the longevity of Leonid Brezhnev in power. It is a fate that will not augur well for China. And the whole world

FBI and its Investigations: Limbo is the Destination.

The FBI investigation into alleged Russian meddling in US elections reminds one of another probe: the much-worried scrutiny of Hillary Clinton e-mails. Both have generated noise and hype for the theatrics-loving American public, and breakfast for newshounds: and very, very little returns on the huge taxpayers' money that has been liberally invested in them. And both seem destined for a fate that seems like a descent into limbo.
What's the point? No matter the outcome, it will be simply ridiculous to accuse Clinton of treason, or even a lesser official misdemeanor that is deliberate. Maybe lapses in her duty but the censure isn't ever going to be commensurate with the time and energy and resources that have been spent on the quest. In the same way, the Russian probes are not ever likely to be traced directly to Vladimir Putin and even though they have been described as a blockbuster, what they'd succeeded in doing is to thrust a little hammer into the hands of Mr Donald Trump. A weapon which he has wasted little time, trust him, in delving into the image of the FBI itself. With the Parkland shooting giving him a veritable handle. A very tiny fraction of the time and commitment spent on the Russian investigations would have certainly helped in preventing a very visible lunatic from wasting the lives of so many young, innocent souls. It is very difficult not agreeing with the president on that score.
Trump knew that although Americans knew his attentions are a bit on the scrappy side, they equally knew he was too self-conscious to collude with Russians to tweak elections in his favor. The US electorate don't like competitors gaining undue advantages. It instantly confers the tag of the underdog on the opponent and folks don't taste victories sweeter than the triumph that reeks of an upset. It may have little to do with why the Eagles won( a stunning that made the day for millions, minus Patriots' fans) but in an electoral contest where voters were the ones to make the throws and catches and touchdowns, it was going to be a huge determinant.
There is no doubt that Russians actively meddled in the US elections but it seems more reasonable to tie its provenance to Crimea instead of Mr Trump or the elections itself, after all the whole scheme started long before the president announced his intention to contest the polls. The Russians clearly knew they were in for real global censure with the annexation, a prospect even apparent at the planning stage, and it became necessary to work out scenarios that might engender sympathetic ears, no matter how tenuous that understanding might be. It would not be a surprise if Russians also meddled in other post-March 2014 elections in other countries and Trump might have fooled a couple of guys in Moscow with his impetuous profession of love for Putin and Russia during primaries and general electioneering. That the meddlers were also rooting for Bernie Sanders shows they thought another Obama in the White House would not be in the best interest of Russia.
So the so-called Internet Research Agency might be an euphemism for a group of cyber bandits not substantially different from Fancy Bears or the plethora of Russian hackers that make it a profession stealing industrial, sports or military secrets, or just plain cash-most of the heist from the US. A James Bond-style megalomaniac could have superintended over a project that excited his criminal mind and appealed to many other folks. Much noise had been made about the indictment of Yevgeny Prigozhin, popularly regarded as 'Putin's Chef'. It is no more than a hint that must be worked into the blockbuster appeal. It is not always that a master knew what his chef was cooking. It will not be an easy task linking the whole scheme to Putin and neither will it be less difficult tying it to President Trump. Mr Mueller's quest seems destined for limbo. It is hardly tiring repeating it again.
There is something faintly Dantean in the coincidence that Mr Mueller should head this investigation and the probe into the Clinton e-mails. Although he has said it expressly there was no evidence the meddling affected the outcome of the polls, he could turn to his protege, James Comey, to espy what might have affected the outcome. Reopening the e-mail controversy a couple of days to the elections was a recipe that was going to be fatal to the chances of Mrs Clinton.

Ukraine, Russia, Crimea, Pushkin and two Revolutions.

Politically, Crimea did not belong to anybody. The independent Crimean Khanate was annexed by Imperial Russia in 1783 as a consequence of the Russo-Turkish War. Before that time, the enclave had been bossed by powers as diverse as the Cimmerians and the Golden Horde.
Geographically, Crimea is part of Ukraine, even though some folks consider the Isthmus of Perekop that connects it to the Ukrainian mainland to be too narrow. Too bad geography does not determine national boundaries, otherwise the US will not be US and Russia will not be Russia. Many of the rickety republics in Africa would not have existed. A country is a sum of its political history, especially violent political history. Which brings to the mind two revolutions: the Russian Revolution of 1917 that would eventually bring Nikita Khrushchev, an Ukrainian, to power in the old Soviet Union. Honestly, when the old boy was transferring Crimea from Russian to Ukraine, it is very doubtful he envisaged the almighty Soviet Union would disintegrate one day. It bizarrely did in another revolution, a sort of revolution and Russia would part ways with Ukraine, though not completely and some folks in Russia must have cast a very rueful glance at a historic part, political part that seemed lost forever.
It was another revolution that would return it to Russia:  the colorful revolutions in Ukraine  that would eventually lead to the sacking of the pro-Russian prime minister, Viktor Yanukovich, in 2014. Folks in the Russia-leaning east did not like it, did not like it at all, and the beautiful country got partitioned, effectively, into three: Kiev, Donetsk and Crimea. It didn't take Putin much effort to annex Crimea. The 1997 Partition Treaty and the 2010 Kharkiv Pact, now in retrospect, seemed to have been a gross indiscretion on the part of Ukraine. It left a foreign navy, a much bigger foreign navy on its own soil. The Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol was to play the crucial role in the annexation of Crimea. So Crimea had been a puppet on strings, revolutionary strings.
Which brings to mind Alexander Pushkin's, Russia's greatest poet, take on revolutions. In his novella, 'The Captain's Daughter', the hero was to see the the carnage of an insurrection  and remark that the most enduring changes he had witnessed were those effected by peaceful negotiations and not violent revolutions.
So another revolution might yet change the status of Ukraine. A lesson those frenzied faces in the Orange and Pink Revolutions in Kiev might have well heeded. Be very careful, very careful of what you wish for and try as much as possible to take into account the feelings of others. The outcomes of revolutions are very difficult to predict: Stalin, guillotine, Islamic State.
A revolution brought Crimea into Ukraine, another revolution took it away. Another revolution might take it back. After all, apart from rain and taxes, the only constant things are revolutions.