Service Announcement: limited posting until July due to relocation / renovation

Apologies to my readers, but we're about to move to 'our little farm' in rural Scandinavia, hence my time to post is limited for the next two weeks

In exchange, I’ll offer a picture of my ‘road ahead’ (taken in the little valley where we live two evenings ago):

Note that it was around 9:30 p.m. when I took the picture.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with what I found to be the most interesting reading pieces from the weekend, i.e., Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s interviews given on the occasion of the St Petersburg Int’l Economic Forum (SPIEF):

1. Lavrov’s interview with the BBC: video w/subtitles, official transcript.

   Highlights include (my emphases):

   Q: But the situation changed four months ago…

   Lavrov: The situation has not changed. We are going back to what the Minsk agreements were coordinated for: protecting Russians in Donbass, who have been betrayed by the French and Germans. The British also played a leading role. All our Western colleagues kept saying they were unable to make Kiev honour the Minsk agreements…
   Q: In the eyes of the West, Russia is responsible for these people. Do you think the death sentence…

   Sergey Lavrov: I am not interested in the “eyes of the West” at all. I am only interested in international law, according to which mercenaries are not combatants. So nothing in your eyes matters.

2. Lavrov’s interview with Russian NTV network: official transcript.

3. And, last but not least, Vladimir Putin’s speech at SPIEF, which include (my emphases):

   When I spoke at the Davos Forum a year and a half ago, I also stressed that the era of a unipolar world order has come to an end. I want to start with this, as there is no way around it…

   After declaring victory in the Cold War, the United States proclaimed itself to be God’s messenger on Earth, without any obligations and only interests which were declared sacred. They seem to ignore the fact that in the past decades, new powerful and increasingly assertive centres have been formed. Each of them develops its own political system and public institutions according to its own model of economic growth and, naturally, has the right to protect them and to secure national sovereignty.

   These are objective processes and genuinely revolutionary tectonic shifts in geopolitics, the global economy and technology, in the entire system of international relations, where the role of dynamic and potentially strong countries and regions is substantially growing. It is no longer possible to ignore their interests.

   To reiterate, these changes are fundamental, groundbreaking and rigorous. It would be a mistake to assume that at a time of turbulent change, one can simply sit it out or wait it out until everything gets back on track and becomes what it was before. It will not.

   However, the ruling elite of some Western states seem to be harbouring this kind of illusions. They refuse to notice obvious things, stubbornly clinging to the shadows of the past. For example, they seem to believe that the dominance of the West in global politics and the economy is an unchanging, eternal value. Nothing lasts forever.

   Our colleagues are not just denying reality. More than that; they are trying to reverse the course of history. They seem to think in terms of the past century. They are still influenced by their own misconceptions about countries outside the so-called “golden billion”: they consider everything a backwater, or their backyard. They still treat them like colonies, and the people living there, like second-class people, because they consider themselves exceptional. If they are exceptional, that means everyone else is second rate.

Please read the rest & have a good day.