On Thu, 27 Mar 2003, Doug Henwood wrote:
> >Obviously, Russian intelligence has a lot of reasons to monitor
> >what's going on.
>
> Monitor, for sure. But disseminate?
For some reason I'm convinced that this is a Russian spinoff of Stratfor.
Stratfor now stinks. But it was originally great on two points: it's ongoing analysis of the Kosovo war; and it's analysis of Putin. Three days after Putin was appointed they announced that this was an epochal coup by the progressive wing of the KGB and the best thing that had happend to Russia since the break up of the Soviet Union. They completely nailed it immediately when every other observer in the world was sure Putin was just another in a long line of Potemkin Prime Ministers with no real power.
For some reason I was convinced that both of these analyses were the work of the same man, and that he was clearly a Russian insider. And it's also clear that he left Stratfor years ago. Their stuff on Russia is now just as jejune as their stuff on everything else.
These RU analyses have the same qualities as Stratfor's old writing on Kosovo: the same directness and easy familiarity with the facts of war and the the particular theatre; and the same seeming access to inside knowledge. Or perhaps just the familiarity that allows him to access and organize semi-public knowledge about war, the same way economists know how to find all the relevant statistics.
It also has the same air of semi-mystery that Stratfor used to enjoy cultivating to give themselves an aura.
Michael