Two pieces from the Jamestown Foundation provide food for thought.
First, Russia is not keeping its contractual obligations in supplying oil to Germany.
Second, Russia is blatantly trying to use the Austrian government to take over the largest Hungarian oil company against its will (read the fine print on this one, it’s subtle). Austria is happily complying, because their own state-owned enterprise is hopelessly moribund at the same time as MOV, a completely private firm, threatens to make Hungary an energy power in Central Europe — bad for OMV, really bad for Russian geopolitics.
The writing on the wall is that it is in Germany’s geopolitical interest to make certain that MOV survives, and that there are as many alternatives to Kremlin oil (you can’t really call it Russian oil, since the industry is an explicit arm of the siloviki in Moscow) as possible.
Anna
/ September 7, 2007Russ,one small correction: that’s MOL, not MOV, but OMV. Not the same…:-)
Kiki
/ September 10, 2007Sorry, no time to read about wacky Russians… just wondering if you caught the History Channel show Human Weapon’s Savate episode? I was catching up on the DVR and ran across it.
Happycrow
/ September 10, 2007I caught bits of it. The savateur they had fight would lose to our very most junior student, and badly. But, if you rewatch it, pay attention to Paturel and LaFond. Both of them are ridiculously dangerous. When LaFond was younger (he’s something like 90 now) he used to start sparring by having four guys pin him to a driveway, because otherwise it wasn’t interesting.
Kiki
/ September 12, 2007Yeah, I was very unimpressed with the guy he fought but really liked a lot of the instruction they got.
Same thing happened with the karate episode.
He fought a Kyushin champ that was either taking it easy on him or just sucked.
happycrow
/ September 12, 2007Word is the filipino stickfighter intentionally played easy, because the first take was too embarrassing.
Kiki
/ September 13, 2007They should have used that take (Escrima)!
The MT guy absolutely took it easy on Jason. They basically did some light sparring which was dumb considering Jason is a pro fighter. They could have gone at it harder than that.