You might have thought that a serious book on the Ukraine crisis, written by a distinguished academic in good clear English, and published by a reputable house, might have gained quite a bit of attention at a time when that country is at the centre of many people's concerns.
But some readers here now understand that publishing, and especially the reviewing of books, are not the simple marketplaces of ideas which we would all wish them to be.
And so, as far as I can discover, this book:
Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands, by Richard Sakwa. Published by I.B.Tauris
...though it came out some months ago,
has only been reviewed in one place in Britain, the
Guardian newspaper, by Jonathan Steele, the first-rate foreign correspondent whose rigour and enterprise (when we were both stationed in Moscow) quite persuaded me to overlook his former sympathy for the left-wing cause (most notably expressed in a 1977 book
Socialism with a German Face about the old East Germany, which seemed to me at the time to be ah, excessively kind).
Comment: The banks and the US industrial complex run the show..."its about the economy, stupid"...dang, there's that phrase again! And, because it is not really about war (although war has a habit of thinning out populations and making economies better), there is a giant Israeli elephant in Washington that is becoming increasingly visible. Just how many more destabilized sovereign countries will it take to permanently disguise the problem? Syria, Iran, Russia...? How'd that work out so far for Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya? Is the EU content to remain a pawn on the geopolitical chess board or a hostage in an imperial power play? The EU should remember that "The Biggest Threat" always has the least to lose! The EU should remember who runs the US banks and the IC.