South Asia Investor Review

The mighty Russian military's recent string of losses to the much smaller Ukrainian forces are bringing back memories of the humiliating Russian defeat at the hands of the Mujahideen in  Afghanistan  in the 1980s. The Communist Party leaders who presided over the disgraceful Soviet exit were soon ousted from power and replaced by Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev's attempts to reform the Soviet system resulted in its complete collapse. The Soviet Union then ceased to exist by 1991. Could something similar happen to the Russian Federation now?  Mikhail Gorbachev (Left) with Vladimir Putin Some people in Ukraine and elsewhere in the West do believe that Ukraine will be another  Afghanistan  for the Russians. For example, Pakistani-Ukrainian billionaire  Mohammad Zahoor  believes “Ukraine is going to be the next Afghanistan for Russia". Talking with Arab News, he said: “This is time, actually, for us not to keep quiet. We have to take sides". Zahoor told...

Ukraine is under a massive Russian assault. Kiev is under siege. Russian President Vladimir Putin's main objective is to keep Ukraine permanently out of NATO, the western nations' military alliance. Putin says the West has broken its promise to not expand NATO after the end of the Cold War. Ukraine is complaining that the West has left Ukraine at the mercy of Russia's powerful military after it agreed to give up its nuclear weapons under firm security assurances contained in the Budapest Memorandum.  NATO Expansion. Source: BBC Ukraine Gave Up Nukes: When Ukraine became independent in the early 1990s,  it was the third-largest nuclear power in the world with thousands of nuclear arms. In the years that followed, Ukraine made the decision to denuclearize completely based on security guarantee from the U.S., the U.K. and Russia, known as the Budapest Memorandum.  Ukrainian analyst Mariana Budjeryn explained in an interview with  NPR's Mary Louise Kelly  as follow...

In a 2017 Super Bowl Sunday interview with President Donald Trump,  Fox News anchor Bill O'Reilly authoritatively declared  Russian President Vladimir “Putin’s a killer.”  Trump replied with the question: “What, you think our country’s so innocent?” Trump did something similar more recently after his Singapore Summit meeting with North Korean leader Kim JongUn.  When Fox News' Brett Baier  raised the question  in an interview about "Kim's oppression of his own people", Trump said: “Yeah, but so have a lot of other people have done some really bad things.” American Narrative: Both O'Reilly and Baier were essentially repeating the standard American narrative that wants the world to believe that "we (Americans) are the good guys and those opposing America are the bad guys". Trump, an unconventional American leader, displayed rare candor in his responses.  The American  media and " research scholars ", managed by the "Deep State...