The last time Ilya Ponomarev attracted international attention was in March, when he cast the lone “no” vote in the Russian Duma against his country’s annexation of Crimea. It made him a villain in Russia, where the annexation is extremely popular, but better liked in some European countries, where it is not.
The new incursion into Ukrainian territory by Russian forces has led some veteran US foreign policy hands to call for a quick and highly visible Western airlift of military equipment to Kyiv. The aim: to prevent a Russian rout of Ukraine.
Shell is selling about $5 billion of oil assets in Nigeria, and among the properties is one of the most frequently robbed oil pipelines in the world.
Should the US proceed with airstrikes against the Islamic State (IS) in Syria, one of the first targets may be the outskirts of the northern town of Marea, a besieged crossroads for goods, men and material from Turkey.
Ukraine’s president lost no time and this afternoon carried through with a vow to dissolve parliament, paving the way for economic and political reforms opposed by old-guard loyalists to ousted president Viktor Yanukovych.
One of the hottest clashes in technology pits two pathmakers in the new era of electric cars—Tesla and General Motors. Both are developing pure electrics that cost roughly $35,000, travel 200 miles on a single charge, and appeal to the mass luxury market.
Envia Systems, the once high-flying Silicon Valley lithium-ion battery startup that was engulfed in allegations of product misrepresentation last year, is back with $11.5 million in government grants to try again to make its technology work.
Turkey’s president-elect Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a step closer to getting the prime minister he wants—Ahmet Davutoglu, his longtime foreign minister. The nomination demonstrates, if demonstration were needed, that Erdogan still pulls the strings in the ruling Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish acronym, AKP.
As the West applies sanctions on Moscow, the Russian oil giant Rosneft appears to be scrambling for cash to cover a canceled loan-for-oil, according to a leading oil analyst. In piecing together how Rosneft’s situation has deteriorated over the last month, oil analyst Philip Verleger estimates that the company is sitting on a hole of up to $10 billion needed to cover repayments of loans next year.
Since the advance of ISIL into northern Iraq two months ago, foreign businesses have scrambled to obtain fresh or added insurance against political risk and violence. But if they had none prior to the current trouble, they are finding it difficult to obtain insurance now, according to a leading insurance provider.
Leading nations today took financial aim at ISIL, ordering a halt to funding and arming of the brutal Islamist terrorist group, and singling out six leaders for special sanctions.
Only yesterday, Russian president Vladimir Putin seemed to be effectively waving the white flag and signaling that he was prepared to step back from a war footing in Ukraine. Now, Russia and Ukraine appear again to be teetering on the verge of direct combat.
Moscow’s destabilization of Ukraine is hurting the Russian state-controlled energy giant Gazprom, and disrupting Russian president Vladimir Putin’s gas-led strategic plans in Europe.
Whenever the US takes military action in the Middle East, oil surfaces as the supposed primary rationale. So it is with president Barack Obama’s air war against ISIL, the Islamic militants who threaten Irbil, capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. In the New Yorker, Steve Coll writes that the strikes are “effectively the defense of an undeclared Kurdish oil state.” Robert Fisk comments similarly in the Independent and John Judis in the New Republic.
The United Leadership, a tanker containing about one million barrels of oil from Iraqi Kurdistan, has been stuck at sea for two months. The ship has been mostly anchored off the Moroccan coast, the victim of legal threats against potential buyers. It is mired in a battle between Kurdistan, intent on parlaying the sale of such oil into independence, and the US and Iraqi governments, which are just as determined to prevent that and keep Iraq whole.
Western officials hoping to alter the behavior of Russian president Vladimir Putin are examining a lot of targets for sanctions, but analysts say one entity seems to be off the table for now—Gazprom. The natural gas behemoth spearheads Moscow’s economic and foreign policy abroad, but Europe is so reliant on its supplies that any strike against the company could harm the rest of the continent as much or more (video) than Russia.
Europe has mustered only a weak collective response to the apparent missile strike on a Malaysian airliner. But Britain hit out on its own today by reopening a sensational, eight-year murder case implicating Russian president Vladimir Putin.
With an investigation hobbled for the fourth day, efforts to get to the bottom of the crash of Malaysian Airlines flight 17 has turned into a high-level battle of dueling narratives.
Russian president Vladimir Putin has marched into a corner—having opted for war to halt Ukraine’s courtship with the West, he now faces international opprobrium and the probability of stinging new sanctions over the Malaysian Airlines crash.
This story has been updated with US intelligence report that a surface-to-air missile was fired at the airliner.
HALIFAX, Canada—Over the last half-dozen years, a swarm of companies from around the world including General Motors has snapped up licenses for a lithium-ion electrode that promised to deliver the next big step in making electric cars competitive with conventional vehicles. The companies and outside researchers have worked feverishly to optimize the electrode, including an assault on a flaw that gravely undermined its performance.
Oil prices dropped again today, but that doesn’t mean they are low. Indeed, at above $100 a barrel, they’re still at historic highs, as they have been for three years.
ISIL, the business-minded Islamic army threatening Baghdad, has established a new flow of revenue since seizing a large swath of Iraq—an estimated $1 million-a-day oil smuggling business.
Al Shabaab, the brutal Islamic militia, today stormed and captured at least part of the presidential palace in the Somalian capital of Mogadishu, according to some reports. The lightning move, taken two days after a deadly attack by the group in Kenya, points to a new surge of Islamic extremism, carried out by a movement that has metastasized and wreaked havoc.
