This past summer was atypical. Perhaps the stock brokers could enjoy vacation time on the beaches, but journalists remained on the job to cover the never-ending flow of ‘breaking news’ from the Russia-Ukraine war and from West Asia, where latest reports on Israeli genocide in Gaza were intermixed with news suggesting an imminent outbreak of regional war.
The worse the international situation becomes, the more we in the ‘expert’ community of commentators are called before the microphones. Therefore, please accept my apologies for posting here so many interviews day by day. I do my best to avoid repetition in each.
This morning, I offer the link to last night’s discussion on Press TV, which opened with news of Russia’s attack on a communications institute in Poltava (Ukraine) that killed more than 50 and injured several hundred. Immediately after the attack, both Russian and Ukrainian sides traded accusations of indiscriminate killing of civilians by the other side.
For those unfamiliar with Russian-Ukrainian history, I note that Poltava is well known to Russians as the site of an historic battle in 1709 between the army of Peter the Great and Sweden’s king Charles XII. The Swedish defeat there was a decisive event in the long Northern War that ended Swedish imperial ambitions in Central Europe. The Poltava region was also the setting for Tchaikowsky’s opera Mazeppa, which deals with the same period and events, wherein the heroes and heroines in a love drama embody the national interests of the warring parties. This story holds all the more interest for me since a direct descendant of one protagonist, Kotchubey, the father of the heroine at the center of the opera, and the embodiment of Ukraine such as it was in 1709, happens to be a neighbor and friend of ours in Brussels.
As they often do, the Press TV team put me together with one other panelist. In this case it was their correspondent in Moscow. Accordingly, those of you who want an additional perspective may find particular value in what she has to say.
US will likely send long-range missiles to Ukraine; delivery could take months
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