Sochi poem

#Sochi2014 is almost here. Write a haiku about Sochi with hashtag #sochihaiku - the best will get published on a special blog on RBTH!
— RBTH (@russiabeyond) January 17, 2014

Russia Beyond the Headlines is an international outlet for le poutinisme, somewhat less sophisticated than Russia Today—it features stories like

Put Putin on your fridge door

 and

Olympic beauty: Sochi girls to meet world famous athletes

Their haiku project backfired a little bit, leading to a "special blog" on BuzzFeed instead, and poems quite unlike the ones RBTH presumably envisaged:

Krasnaya Polyana, Sochi. Via Wikipedia.

Got paranoia? Cui bono update

I don't so far see anybody outside Chechen nationalist propaganda organs (which can't by definition be believed, no matter how much you might favor one or another of them politically) sharing in my horrible feeling about the origins of the Boston bombing, with one exception: UK diplomat and human rights activist Craig Murray. Here, he outlines why Russian authorities might not be sorry to see Chechen terrorists attack the US:

Cui Bono? Putin. The alleged actions of the Tsarnaev brothers are a massive setback to the cause of Chechen nationalism. The Russian government have been trying for a decade to conflate the repression of Chechen nationalism with the western construct of “the global war on terror”, with very limited diplomatic success. Now expect to hear continually about “Al Qaeda in the Southern Caucasus” in the next few years. Events in Boston have been a massive diplomatic coup for Putin.

Thug-in-chief Ramzan Kadyrov, from Prague Watchdog. Chechens asked for self-government and Vladimir Vladimirovich gave them government by id.

Notes on Caucasians

Caucus race. By ArtSpark Theatre.

Booman:

I have been somewhat amused by the discussion of their ethnicity. Before we knew that they were literally from the Caucuses, and therefore quintessentially caucasian, there was debate about whether they were white or not. 

ProPublica:

The brothers are ethnic Chechens whose family moved around the war-torn Caucuses region when the boys were young.

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