These Grim Baltic Shores . . .

Ariel Cohen has a new piece in the Washington Times, which has some very interesting material on Russia’s growing diplomatic overtures to Mongolia to seal up uranium supplies, as well as some info on a letter sent by President Barack Obama to the president of Azeribaijan (let’s see if Ilham Aliyev treats him a bit better than Dick Cheney).

As the rain falls on St. Petersburg’s glitzy economic forum and the Obama administration plans its summit meeting with Mr. Putin and Mr. Medvedev in July to negotiate Moscow’s accession to the World Trade Organization, Russia is consolidating its geostrategic advantage from the Gobi desert to the Black Sea. The U.S. and Europe had better take notice. While the talk of high-tech diversification appeals to Western businessmen, the real show is happening thousands of miles away from the capital Peter the Great built on these grim Baltic shores.