NATO, Meet CSTO.

EP readers, meet the Christian Science Monitor’s Fred Weir

Economic Principals started writing about Russia in July, 2002, with “The Thing’s a Mess,” a glimpse of a story from the kleptomaniacal decade that followed the collapse of the USSR:  how a prominent Harvard economist, his wife, and two sidekicks, working in Russia on behalf of the US State Department, covered by high-level friends in the Clinton administration, had been caught seeking to cut the head of the queue to enter the country’s  new mutual fund business with a firm of their own.

EP followed the saga through the US invasion of Iraq; Vladimir Putin’s objections; his brief 2008 war in former-Soviet Georgia to caution against further NATO expansion; Ukraine’s Maidan protest of 2014 and its aftermath; and the 2016 election of Donald Trump. Its little book, Because They Could: The Harvard Russia Scandal (and NATO Expansion) after Twenty-Five Years, appeared in 2018.

I still scan four daily newspapers to see what government sources are saying about Russia. I look regularly at Johnson’s Russia List, a web-based compendium with a good eye for non-standard views. But mostly I form my views from dispatches of Fred Weir, Moscow correspondent for the Boston-based Christian Science Monitor. They are thoughtful, well-informed, and empathetic.