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“Taiwan is like two feet from China,” Trump told the senator. “We are eight thousand miles away. If they invade, there isn’t a fucking thing we can do about it.”
Chaos Under Heaven
Josh Rogin
In my presentation, I explained why I believed the apartment bombings were a provocation intended to assure Putin’s accession to power. My remarks became part of a film, entitled Disbelief, which premiered in 2004 at the Sundance Film Festival. A Russian-language version was put on YouTube and circulated on DVDs in Russia. Darkness at Dawn was also translated into Russian, with long excerpts published in the press. Unfortunately, the people capable of helping to make the bombings a serious political issue were disappearing. In 2004, Anna Politkovskaya, Russia’s leading investigative journalist, called on the Russian presidential candidates to answer the outstanding questions surrounding the apartment bombings. Alexander Litvinenko continued to update his book and speak out on the case in London. Politkovskaya was shot dead in the elevator of her apartment block on October 7, 2006. Litvinenko died of radiation poisoning on November 23 after ingesting radioactive polonium, which was put into his tea in a London sushi restaurant. The deaths of so many persons who had investigated the apartment bombings, all of them with the exception of Litvinenko my personal friends, left me as one of the few people still arguing that this monumental provocation could not be ignored. On May 17, 2007, testifying before the House Foreign Relations Committee on Russia’s foreign policy, I explained the role played by the apartment bombings. In a widely quoted passage, I said this: With Yeltsin and his family facing possible criminal prosecution, a plan was put into motion to put in place a successor who would guarantee that Yeltsin and his family would be safe from prosecution and the criminal division of property in the country would not be subject to reexamination. For “Operation Successor” to succeed, however, it was necessary to have a massive provocation. In my view, this provocation was the bombing in September 1999 of the apartment buildings in Moscow, Buinaksk and Volgodonsk. In the aftermath of these attacks, which claimed three hundred lives, a new war was launched against Chechnya. Putin, the newly appointed prime minister who was put in charge of that war, achieved overnight popularity. Yeltsin resigned early. Putin was elected president and his first act was to guarantee Yeltsin immunity from prosecution. In the meantime, all talk of re-examining the results of privatization was forgotten.41 For this I received some odd recognition. When Russia’s First Channel screened a “documentary” alleging the September 11 attacks in the United States were orchestrated by the U.S. government, the station invited me to appear on air to comment on the film. I declined.
The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep
David Satter
Yet the Russian Federation—Russia—still looms over the newly independent states. It sprawls across the map, encompassing eleven time zones from Europe in the west to the tip of the Chukotka Peninsula in the Far East, just sixty miles across the Bering Strait from Alaska. Its population is only half that of the Soviet Union, and in 2019, its economy was only slightly larger than Spain’s—although Spain has only a third of the population and ceased being a great power in the eighteenth century. Yet Russia still has formidable accoutrements of power. It has scale. It has a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons and missiles and considerable cyber skills. It has the determination to project itself on the world stage. And it has natural resources—particularly vast amounts of oil and gas that underpin its place in the world.
The New Map
Daniel Yergin
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