Epstein Secrets

ir Putin, the Russian President and autocrat, had a plan for the winter of 2014: to reassert his country's power a generation after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He thought that he would achieve this by building an Olympic wonderland on the Black Sea for fifty-one billion dollars and putting on a dazzling t

en muscled its tiny neighbor, eventually waging a war that ended with Russia taking control of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. In a recent Letter from Sochi, I tried to describe Putin's motivations: his resentment of Western triumphalism and American power, after 1991; his paranoia that Washington is so

From: Sent: To: Subject: jeffrey E. <[email protected]> Sunda , Ma 17, 2015 3:16 PM Re: Following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia liberalized some of its anti-LGBT laws. Most notably, homosexual relationships we=e decriminalized in 1993. Transgender Russians hav

re already on the books, all of which seek to penalize "propaganda" of homosexuality, generally with the intent of="protecting" minors. The city of Sochi, which is the site of the upcoming Winter=20 Olympics, has one of those regional laws in place. And while the regional laws are not uniform, like th

ran's regime gains legitimacy by demonising foreign powers. The cold war seems stable by comparison with a nuclear Middle East—and yet America and the Soviet Union were sometimes scarily close to Armageddon. No wonder some people want a pre-emptive strike. But military action is not the solution to a nuclear

s expansionist ambitions; and the rise of political Islam across the Arab world. These were among the topics vigorously debated at a conference at Sochi on Russia's Black Sea coast, held on 17-18 February in the grandiose marble halls of a 22-hectare resort -- with its own elevator to the beach belo