Dispatches from Vilnius

There seems to be nothing Putin loves more than keeping himself in the spotlight.  Calling up 300,000 "reservists" and holding illegal referendums in the four oblasts definitely caught everyone's attention. Not to mention yet another nuclear warning if Russia feels its new borders are threatened.   The UN was alit with angry protests to these referendums.  Even China voiced its concerns with the bellicose positions Putin has taken since suffering brutal losses in the Kharkiv region, as reported in the Chinese propaganda network Global Times . Yet Putin is undeterred.  By staging this "vote" in the Ukrainian oblasts, he has extended his boundaries and can now say that any hostilities directed toward the occupied regions is a direct attack on Russian soil.  It doesn't matter that many of the original Ukrainians who lived in these oblasts were forcibly extracted from their homes and processed through detention facilities set up in the Donbas region, while man...

It had been 28 years since I last visited Warsaw.  At the time I was waiting for a train to Vilnius in the damp, chilly central station with pigeons flying in out of the broken windows overhead in the waiting area.  I was reading a copy of Milosz' The Captive Mind at the time, a collection of essays that included his thoughts on the relationship between Eastern Europe and the West.   In 1994, the tallest building in Warsaw was The Palace of Culture and Science.  Today it is joined by a myriad of skyscrapers.  We went up to the 40th floor of the Hotel Marriott where you can take in a panoramic view of the city from the sky bar.  Initially, the young host didn't want to let us in, as there were 20 of us and we didn't have a reservation.  We were waiting for the elevators to take us back down when the manager came out and apologized for the young man's impertinence and escorted us in.  There weren't that many persons and there was no way the ma...

There was an interesting piece on DW last night - Friends or Foes?  Russia and the Baltic States .  Although the piece was aired recently, much of the footage was from last March.  Trees were all bare, as the reporter interviewed a young Lithuanian woman who was helping Ukrainian refugees to settle in Vilnius.  Since then many Ukrainians have returned home or settled elsewhere.  The two mothers and their children that we sponsored for three months traveled onto Spain and the United States, where they have relatives. A number of things struck me as askew in this documentary, not least of all the way the three Baltic countries were presented.  Estonia was pictured as the vanguard of high technology, showing the ultra-modern Delta Center at the University at Tartu where Skype was born.  Latvia was viewed as a country still living off its Soviet past in a locomotive repair shop in Daugavpils, and Lithuania seen as a safe haven for Ukrainians fleeing the wa...

We picked up The Crown at Season 4, having seen most of the first three seasons before growing bored with all the heavy royal accents.  Prince Philip was the hardest to take.  I had a fairly good impression of him before watching this series but came to loathe the way he was presented.  How much is true is anyone's guess but I assume these are fairly accurate depictions. Season 4 is quite telling, not just as a reminder of Charles' turbulent marriage with Diana but the nature of all the Queen's children.  Princess Anne comes off the best.  I remembered when she competed in the equestrian events of the 1976 Olympics, a tradition carried on through her children.  The Princess Royal got to present the medals to her daughter and the rest of the British team which won silver at the 2012 London Olympics.  That must have been a great moment for her! The series tries to be as sympathetic as possible to Charles, noting that he was a withdrawn child and that se...

Driving along the Nemunas River reminded me of when I first came to Lithuania in 1994.  Daina took me to Panemunė pilis , a picturesque castle that dates back to the 17th century.  This time we were headed to Lower Panemunė on the south side of the river to see the remains of a 16th-century estate, built by the Sapiega family, one of the principal noble families of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. We were met by a young couple and their golden Hovawart, which I had mistaken for a Labrador.  They bought the estate two years ago and have done a remarkable job cleaning the standing walls and the grounds, revealing this long hidden treasure.  It had been white washed during the Soviet era and used as a hospital before falling  into ruin.  Rasa said few gave the mansion any thought but she and her husband saw there was something special here, and began doing research on their own.  Eventually, they managed to attract restoration experts who verified that this ...

The death of Ken Starr brought up a bunch of bad memories of the Clinton administration, least of all Monica Lewinsky.  I didn't give a damn whether Monica prodded herself with cigars , much to Bill's amusement.  It was that he apparently couldn't get enough of his intern, keeping visiting leaders on hold while he reveled in these fun and games.  This was true throughout his administration. He was notoriously late for meetings, even with heads of state. It was often said he was reworking speeches or going over his notes again so as to be in command of the press conferences and high level meetings.  You do have to give him credit for appearing to be in control of the situations.  He was a remarkably adroit politician, able to find a way to worm himself out of any uncomfortable situation, until he met Monica.  He didn't figure she would keep a souvenir .  While it didn't bring down his presidency, it left an indelible stain. However, the blue dress dist...

To borrow a title from John Steinbeck, it appears we are headed for a cold winter, especially here in Europe.  Gas shortages abound, people are starting to panic, and for a brief moment it appeared Count Vlad was starting to gloat that he would freeze all of Europe into submission by cutting off gas supplies.   Then a funny thing happened.  Ukrainian forces routed Russian forces in the Kharkiv oblast, taking back 3000 square kilometers of territory, roughly the size of Luxembourg, which left Count Vlad stewing in his own juice.  He had to explain this setback to his Russian audience, so he simply said his forces were being redeployed to other key areas, much like when his vaunted 60-kilometer long caravan failed to take Kjiv back in March. While the gains may seem small in comparison to what Russia has taken in Ukraine, it is a significant blow to Putin's forces.  They were retreating so rapidly that they left much of their munitions behind.  You don...

The Confederacy lives on in the strangest of places .  Long before Nazis fled to Brazil, Confederates sought the Amazonian jungles as a sanctuary, replete with Confederate flag that flew for four short years in North America.  You really can't call it white supremacy anymore as the community has become so mixed race that Jefferson Davis would roll over in his grave.  But, they still take enormous pride in their Southern heritage. It reminds me a bit of George Saunders CivilWarLand in Bad Decline , although he was making fun of the ongoing Civil War re-enactments you see every summer in the Southern states.  I remember when I was living in a dilapidated antebellum mansion on the outskirts of Charleston in the 1990s, I had to endure one of these re-enactments for three days.  The Historical Charleston Foundation had rented the old house and field to the local reenactment group.  I thought it was a joke but arriving back home late one night I found they took t...

I suppose she wanted to spend her last days at Balmoral , although you would think she was doing well enough if she was able to greet the new prime minister .  Still, it was a bit of a shock having her go just two days later.   This link to Balmoral has always been fascinating to me as there isn't much Scottish about the royal family other than Queen Victoria's professed love for the culture mostly through the literary work of Sir Walter Scott.  She was the one who commissioned having the castle built back in the 19th century and went out of her way to identify herself with Scottish Gaelic culture at a time most English looked down on Scots and many still do.  I suppose Victoria thought it might heal the kingdom after the notorious Highland Clearances , which stretched from the mid 18th to mid 19th century.  It seemed to work, as Scots accepted her rule, not that they had any choice. Victoria had been the longest reigning monarch until Elizabeth.  Her...

It would seem that Biden made the same mistake Hillary made back in 2016 by calling out the MAGA crowd in his Philadelphia speech this past Friday.  I know it is tempting to do, especially in the wake of the January 6 hearings and the continued sentencing of those that were directly involved in the insurrection attempt.  However, it is never worth it to poke the bear.  Best to leave these yahoos alone and focus on matters at hand.  There's nothing they love more than to play the victim. We've hit the stretch drive of the midterms and things are looking surprisingly good for the Democrats.  They have won House special elections, the most recent in Alaska where Native American Mary Peltola defeated Mama Grizzly herself in a statewide election.  This is the first time in 50 years that a Democrat has done so in Alaska.  There were any number of factors, not least of all Palin's toxic personality.  It is hard to say whether these surprise victories ...

Gorbachev in Vilnius, 1990 Gorby didn't stay in the news cycle very long.  Still, I was surprised the eulogies were so one sided in the Western press.  Here in the East, he is not so well respected.  Certainly not in Lithuania . There was nothing particularly remarkable about Gorbachev other than he presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union.  This wasn't by design.  Gorby wanted to remake the USSR into a kinder, gentler nation, to borrow a campaign slogan from George H.W. Bush, only to see the entire country implode.  When Lithuania chose to secede in March, 1990, he did everything in his power to try to nullify this bid.  He even traveled to Vilnius on a very rare state visit to try to convince the breakaway republic to return to the Soviet fold. This would have been fine as far as the rest of the world was concerned.  No country recognized Lithuania's independence bid, although Lithuanians saw it as a restoration of their former state....