The Eastern Border

Azeri president Aliyev scores a powerful diplomatical haymaker, bruising Putin's ego, vatniks are losing the will to live and...well...Happiness is mandatory for You in the New Year!

Ramzan Kadyrov gets more air defence, uses it to shoot down a civilian Azerbaijani plane. Russia now has a law that will put a fee on all volunteer donations to the army and they've been using the cars, confiscated from the troops to plug up their lack of armored vehicles on the front.

General who spewed the "biolab" nonsense killed; Putin spends over 4 hours, spewing nonsense and irritates Z-vatniks; Russian Central Bank thinks it can get the inflation to 4% next year.

Vatniks have now reached the point of irrepairable cognitive dissonance. Russian economy is doing horribly bad, mobilized realize that they probably won't have any carreer to go back to...and many other symptoms of a failed state.

Reaction to the collapse in Syria. Girkin's buddies plotting to take power at the right moment. Russian economy is basically in the drain...and Ramzan Kadyrov appears to be humbled and a bit weak.

Actually, I should've just called this episode War in Syria. But, as usual, it all ties together as we're seeing a second front open up...and then collapse violently. And in between all of this, Ramzan Kadyrov just MASSIVELY overstepped the line, and now there's just complete madness everywhere. 

While I was preparing for an economy episode, major events in Syria happened. Oh, and the Russian army is taking away cars from the front line now. Together with the phones.

Yeah, this is a long one – lots of important things happened during my vacation, which just shows that I’m not alllowed to relax. I talk about the Oreshnik, economy, Merkel’s memoires…oh and the Orthodox Church have been extra weird lately.

As I'm about to go to a short vacation to The Netherlands, I'm bringing You my discussion with our friend Alex from History Impossible podcast, where we talk about the Trump election, it's impact and how you might deal with it on a philosophical level. It's a weird, catharsis episode. I, for one, tried to find optimism where I could.