Putin’s power base is formed by the so-called “ Siloviki”” – representatives of the secret services and the military in addition of representatives of the military-industrial complex.
Olga Kryshtanovskaya, director of the Moscow-based Center for the Study of Elites at the Russian Academy of Sciences, commented on December 20, 2006, in Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty the [...]

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Ambrose Evans-Prichard’s recent piece, China threatens ‘nuclear option’ of dollar sales, sounded a further alarm. The foolishness of trading with Communist China now comes into sharp focus. The same can be said for free trade with all those countries that are not truly free. According [...]

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Buried for 2,000 years in its native soil, China’s terracotta army is on the move. Our critic joins the parade
In 1974 a group of Chinese peasants sinking a well on scrubby land outside the city of Xi’an discovered some fragments of terracotta. As the work progressed, one side of the well disappeared into an underground [...]

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Canada fired a warning shot in a new Cold war over the vast resources of the far North by announcing last night that it will build two new military bases in the Arctic wilderness.
A week after Russia laid claim to the North Pole in what is rapidly becoming a global scramble for the region’s vast [...]

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Thousands of Chinese citizens, and Chinese-Americans caught up in what the Chinese call the “thousand grains of sand” espionage system. Basically, China tries to get all Chinese going overseas, and those of Chinsese ancestry living outside the motherland, to spy for China, if only a tiny bit. This approach to espionage is nothing new. Other [...]

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TOKYO: Japan’s defense ministry has decided to build a stealth fighter and wants a first test flight within five years, a news report said.
The move could concern Washington as Japan is a major customer of US defense equipment, the Tokyo Shimbun said.
Japan is moving ahead because the US military has been reluctant to sell [...]

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Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, in an Op-Ed in The Washington Post, calls Russian President Vladimir Putin’s proposal for NATO-Russian cooperation on missile defense “a bold initiative.” VOA’s Suzanne Presto talked with Kissinger on his views about this issue in New York.
Mr. Putin has proposed the creation of a new missile defense-plan that [...]

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MOSCOW, Aug. 10 (UPI) — Russia’s new S-400 anti-missile will have twice the range of the U.S. Patriot, the Kremlin’s top soldier said this week.
But it will take more than seven years to equip 24 battalions with the new S-400 Triumf, Army Gen. Yury Baluyevsky, the chief of staff of the Russian armed forces, [...]

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