Before you slink away for the weekend given the wonderful weather, take a look at a piece today by the FT's Charles Clover, my former Almaty roommate. In it, Clover weighs in along with a couple of colleagues on the tectonic shift under way in the great game in Central Asia: The U.S. is out, and Russia is in.
The August events in Georgia triggered this shift -- the countries along Russia's western and southern borders learned that friendship with Washington is worth only so much when Moscow is willing to use actual troops in defense of its sphere of influence.
The most interesting part of the long piece is a quote from Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man, did so
to head off a Putin attack on all of them. One oligarch, Mikhail Fridman, told
[John] Lloyd, the Financial Times writer, that he and the other billionaires deserved
Putin's wrath. In an interview at the time, Fridman said they asked only that past wrongs be forgotten. "I think the best plan would be if Putin were to declare an amnesty on everything that happened in the past," Fridman said.
As Central Asia's leaders are all cognizant, Khodorkovsky refused the deal, and consequently has languished in prison. It will be difficult if not impossible for the U.S. or anyone else to again break the region from a similar fear.