Friday 26th of April 2024
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theatre of the absurd .....

theatre of the absurd .....

If there were a prize for the world's sulkiest state, it would surely go to Russia. 

Enter the Kremlin, and you get an overwhelming sense of a great power that has been deeply offended. 

'We always try to smile at one another,' President Vladimir Putin's foreign policy adviser Sergei Prikhodko says wearily when I ask about the atmosphere at recent Russian-American summits. 

'But we've asked many questions, and we haven't got answers.' 

He is talking about the deepening chill in East-West relations over the last year, a chill some see as the prelude to a new Cold War. 

The Kremlin has a simple explanation: America, it believes, has never given up its ambition to contain Russia. And the eastward expansion of the Nato alliance is designed to achieve that. But Washington dismisses those claims as mere bluster, aimed at reasserting Russian control of an Eastern European empire it lost with the fall of the Soviet Union. 

Dancing With The Russian Bear

Umbrage at umbrella

Bush in missile shield talks with Polish PM

George W Bush says US officials will draw up a plan for the missile shield before January 2009. (File photo)

George W Bush says US officials will draw up a plan for the missile shield before January 2009. (File photo) (AFP: Saul Loeb)

United States President George W Bush has promised the visiting Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk that the US will help modernise the Polish military as part of a deal to install US interceptor missiles in the country.

Mr Tusk argued that if Poland hosted a US missile shield, the country itself would become a target and its security would be reduced.

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Gus: see toon at top.