Tag: US-Russia ties

NOVANEWS By M K Bhadrakumar | Indian Punchline  One of the enduring legacies of my two diplomatic assignments in Moscow in the seventies and eighties has been my passion for ice hockey. Of course, ice hockey is not played in India and it was the thought of experiencing something startlingly new that one evening took me to the famous Dynamo Stadium in Moscow with some course mates in the Moscow University, friends who lured me with the promise of a spectacle unlike anything I’d have known before. Actually, I didn’t need to be encouraged, having watched on television that epic “3-3 game” on New Year’s Eve in 1975, which became the stuff of legends in the world of ice hockey, when the Montreal Canadians played CSKA Moscow (Soviet Red Army team). The North Americans and the Russians played r...

NOVANEWS By M K Bhadrakumar  Russia and the United States could be hurtling toward a showdown following Moscow’s decision on Friday to retaliate, finally, against President Barack Obama’s expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats in the US and the impounding of two Russian compounds on December 30 last year. Consular issues usually signal the real state of play in inter-state relations – and often provide a litmus test. Obama’s intention was most certainly to complicate the Russian-American relationship to a point of no return by the time his successor Donald Trump moved into the White House. Obama expected his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to react strongly, which in turn would have triggered a first-rate crisis in the relationship. But Putin saw through Obama’s game. He opted instead t...