Before watching this speech, I recommend reading the Richard Pipes piece from over the weekend (which may merit a second posting and commentary as it features great lines such as "One unfortunate consequence of the obsession with "great power" status is that it leads Russians to neglect the internal conditions in their country."), and LeVine's reaction over at his blog Oil and the Glory.  It was the thesis of LeVine's last book that the current political murders and impunity (Klebnikov, Politkovskaya, Estemirova, etc.) connect to a larger historical trend, arching over centuries of events in Russia.  It's a controversial theory, and not without its problems, but both Pipes and LeVine are certainly hitting the right issues.  More to come from us on all this later on. ...

Registan.net has posted up a nine-page executive summary of a long report compiled by John Bumgarner of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit.  Steve LeVine at Oil and Glory talked with and analyzed the results...  which show that complicity with the government in the cyber attack on Georgia was highly likely, and, in fact, it could have been much, much worse (just as the Russian air strikes purposely bombed all around the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline without hitting it to prove the point.From Oil and Glory:Yet, the cyber attackers did not go in for the kill, Bumgarner told me -- they didn't attempt to cripple sites that could have caused chaos or injury, such as those linked to power stations or oil-delivery facilities, but merely those that could trigger comparative "inconvenience." "There was a political decision not to attack those critical infrastructures directly. They ...

Steve LeVine has a blog post up about the William Browder and Hermitage lawsuit against Renaissance ... yet points out that the foreign investors will keep on going back for more abuse.We've seen this movie before. For instance, BP keeps returning for more despite its own experience with the rough-and-tumble Russian system.To his credit, Browder's stratagem at least in part is meant to free one of his Moscow lawyers, Sergei Magnitsky, who was jailed after filing a court statement alleging official corruption in the seizure of the subsidiaries.Yet BP and Browder stuck around because of the money -- in BP's case, despite it all Russia remains one of its main profit centers. As for outsiders, there's the entertainment value of gaping at the road wreck. ...

This post provides links to some thought-provoking articles I have read over the past few days that you may also find of interest.

• Paul McCulley (Pimco - Global Central Bank Focus): The shadow banking system and Hyman Minsky’s economic journey, May 2009. As we look for answers about the current financial crisis, it’s clear that creative financing played a massive role in propelling the global financial system to hazy new heights - before leading the way into the depths of a systemic crisis. But how did financing get so creative? It didn’t happen within the confines of a regulated banking system, which submits to strict regulatory requirements in exchange for the safety of government backstopping. Instead, financing got so creative through the rise of a “shadow banking system,” which operated legally, yet almost completely outside the realm of bank regulation. The rise of this system drove

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A new book by Bernard-Henri Lévy, Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against The New Barbarism, will have a good chapter dedicated to the resurgence of Russia. Here's an excerpt from a review: Solzhenitsyn dies, unleashing a torrent of memorial journalism honoring his immense feat of baring the truth about Soviet brutality in The Gulag Archipelago, and Lévy offers a prescient section that salutes the Russian master's greatness, declaring that the "Communist dream dissolved in the furnace of a book." Vladimir Putin fulfills the prediction of close Kremlin watchers and moves toward re-Stalinizing Russia, and Lévy attributes to the Russian prime minister "the beastly scowl of the murderous KGB man he has always been." Nicolas Sarkozy takes center stage as the European Union's leader and chief negotiator between the United States and a resurgent Russia, and Lévy's new book functions as a sideways conversation with his new president, ...