The State Department on Thursday slammed the Russian government's decision to stop making public its peacetime military casualties, calling the decree a clear attempt by Moscow to hide the deaths of Russian soldiers conducting clandestine operations inside eastern Ukraine.
Russian government officials -- and even some outside banking institutions -- are sounding increasingly confident that the Russian economy has weathered the storm brought on by U.S. and European sanctions, but some private analysts say the worst is yet to come.
On July 28, 1943, in one of his famous fireside chats, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt told his fellow citizens: "The world has never seen greater devotion, determination and self-sacrifice than have been displayed by the Russian people and their armies this country of ours should always be glad to be a good neighbor and a sincere friend in the world of the future."
Some things should rise above even the calculations of diplomacy, not just in Washington but on the world stage too. And the 70th celebration of the end of World War II — perhaps the last major anniversary to be celebrated honoring the "Greatest Generation" while it is still on this earth decades it fought in the epic conflict — is one of them.
Does anyone remember what it was that turned America hostile toward the tropical paradise of Cuba? Our president tells us that "we're caught in a time warp, going back to the 1950s and gunboat diplomacy, and 'Yanquis' and the Cold War." Yes, really, "gunboat diplomacy." That is how University of Chicago adjunct law professors talk about American foreign policy. And he adds, "Sometimes those controversies date back to before I was born." So, what got America so riled up over the Castro brothers and Cuban communists even before Barack Obama was born?
