On 9th September, Inside Russia and Eurasia returned to publication after an absence of several months. The interruption has permitted the website to make technical changes and refurbish the format in which it appeared for 23 years, at the hand of a small but devoted work team. The website continues to operate on a modest budget, in most cases without cost to subscribers. It is produced by journalists and academics, reliant on their own means, wanting to offer an alternative to mainstream reporting and to analyse ongoing events in the interests of truth and understanding.
During the interval in its publication, the publishers have not ceased to follow events in the countries of the former Soviet Union and in the world at large. These have included the still further worsening of relations between Russia and Ukraine, the deterioration of the Russian economy as a result of Western sanctions, the clash of interests between Russia and the West over Syria and the other parts of the Middle East, and, most recently, the reckless politicisation of the Olympic Games.
At this, and other follies, has contributed to a general degradation in the international environment, not excluding the most frightening possibility of all – a nuclear mishap. Witness former US Secretary of Defence William Perry (in his book “My Journey at the Nuclear Brink”, reviewed in the New York Review of Books, 14 July 2016) that ‘the danger of some sort of nuclear catastrophe is greater than it was during the Cold War’ and that ‘nuclear danger is growing every year’.