| The mainland of Western Alaska is about 50 miles from the Chukchi peninsula, part of the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug. Islands within the Bering Strait belonging to the U.S.A. and Russia respectively are no more than a mile distant.
So you might think that there would be some contact between those in charge of the two remote areas of the two great superpowers that come closest to each other. It may not be as important a part of the world as in the Cold War, when almost every plane-crash in Alaska led to suspicions of Soviet involvement, but maybe something happened.
Chukotka's governor from 2000 up until July 2008 was one Roman Abramovich. I doubt he's well known in America, but in Britain, he's notorious as the owner of the (association) football team Chelsea F.C. Somewhat more substantively, he's also a Russian oligarch and previously a close friend of Boris Berezovsky.
Abramovich was elected in 2000 and spent large amounts of his own vast wealth (acquired from asset-stripping) on the province, perhaps to try to retain some social capital. He didn't visit particularly often, and wouldn't have stood again, but Putin turned the governorship into an appointed position and refused to let Abramovich resign.
When he was allowed to stand down, he was succeeded by his deputy, Roman Kopin, who appears to be a career bureaucrat, famous exactly nowhere.
So how much contact did Palin have with either?
With Abramovich, it's hard to tell. Searching for "Roman Abramovich" "Sarah Palin" merely gets you a lot of articles on news sites about Palin but with a link in a sidebar to an unrelated article about the other.
So I used the following search term: "Roman Abramovich" ********** "Sarah Palin"
If I've used the command right, that should flag up every occasion those two phrases pop up within 20 words of each other.
And what do we get?
This is result no. 34. It's the first one to mention them in the same context. And all it's doing is asking the same question as me (although it's out of date about the governor).
None of the other results in the top 50 mention them in the same context. Hell, half of the Palins in the search results referred to Michael, not Sarah.
And Palin and Kopin?
"Sarah Palin" "Roman Kopin" returns three results. Two are duplicates. None of them mention them in the same context. Roman Kopin, in fact, is so obscure he's probably John McCain's back-up pick.
So let's hear about their relationship. Who knows, maybe there are a few paragraphs in the archives of a newspaper in Nome about them negotiating about a few fishermen who wound up on the wrong side of the border. Maybe their police chiefs cooperated to fight some small scale smuggling (when they weren't concentrating on firing their workforces).
But while that was happening, Joe Biden was chair of the Foreign Relations Committee. Barack Obama was dealing with the most important issue there is in Russia today - loose nukes. We're dealing with a whole different level of importance here.
Ask Palin. Feign interest. Get her talking, and tape it. Because it would be hilarious. And devastating for Republican chances. |
