EBRD Transition Report Highlights Financial Sector Resilience
The EBRD’s latest Transition Report: Sustaining Growth, issued at the end of November, has highlighted a welcome upturn in the pace of reform in emerging economies where the bank invests, four years after reporting that reforms were stalling or even being thrown into reverse. The EBRD also unveiled a new set of investment criteria for its...
Ukraine’s strange collaboration with Russia over deportations
Ukraine has been in a state of undeclared war with Russia since the latter’s invasion of Crimea in early 2014 and its aggression in eastern Ukraine. The Ukrainian Security Service [SBU] are not loath at times to make use of this, claiming a ‘Russian link’ where there is almost certainly none. More often, however, they demonstrate a...
Watch List: Dec. 5, 2017
The items listed below represent potential emerging issues that our analysts are tracking. These can be long term or short term, but will be updated daily. If an item on our Watch List becomes critical, we will email you a full analysis explaining its significance. Each Saturday, we will follow up our daily Watch List for each week with our...
Russia set to begin its latest Crimean trial on ethnic and religious grounds
Safiye Kuku spent her 7th birthday outside a Crimean court on December 4 hoping in vain to see her father, human rights activist Emir-Usein Kuku. At this last detention hearing before Kuku and five other men are taken to Russia for ‘trial’, the men’s wives and mothers were allowed to be present, but not the children. …read more...
Kremlin Untruths Boomerang
The main sources of strain in Moscow’s ties with the West are actions, such as Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. But untruths add fuel to the fire and can provoke stronger Western reactions and impede the search for solutions. …read more Source:...
Possible Iranian Links to the Claimed Houthi Missile Launch Against the UAE
On December 3, Houthi rebels in Yemen announced that they had fired a “winged cruise missile” at the construction site for al-Barakah nuclear power plant, located 230 km southwest of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. UAE military authorities dismissed the claim, asserting that no strike was launched in their direction and that...
Russian who defended Ukraine in Donbas driven out to face imprisonment in Russia
Yulia Tolopa, a Russian who fought for Ukraine in one of the first volunteer battalions back in 2014 and whose small daughter is a Ukrainian citizen, is being forced out of Ukraine despite the strongest of grounds for fearing her persecution in Russia. The situation is insultingly absurd since she can only obtain the document confirming her lack...
Watch List: Dec. 4, 2017
The items listed below represent potential emerging issues that our analysts are tracking. These can be long term or short term, but will be updated daily. If an item on our Watch List becomes critical, we will email you a full analysis explaining its significance. Each Saturday, we will follow up our daily Watch List for each week with our...
FTAC: Political, Racial, Religious Singularity and Purity / Distribution x Equilibrium
Perhaps by way of the editor’s accidental tourism in poli-sci and poli-psy, BackChannels has from the start been about the distillation of basic concepts and values. That’s evident down the column of the left sidebar (which hasn’t been updated in some time): there are the universals — Compassion Empathy Justice Humility...
Wizz Air in Huge Polish & Ukrainian Expansion
Reflecting customer demand, Wizz Air has announced 15 new Polish and Ukrainian routes, which will connect Katowice with Porto, Munich, Lviv, Kharkiv, Malaga, Faro, Podgorica; Gdansk with Lviv; Warsaw with Podgorica and Poznan with Dortmund from March 2018. “We expect to deliver 30 million passengers in 2018, as Wizz Air currently offers over 550...
