What's Russian for Cardinal?

So we colluded with Russia. See our Russia Rising article, this time on Substack: 'The Russian military is undergoing a transformation that will fundamentally alter its organization and the way it fights. In the coming decades, the blunt instrument that destroyed the Whermacht, was poised to steamroll Western Europe and utterly annihilated Chechnya will be no more. Under the directorship of Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov, the Russian army is becoming smaller, mobile, and professionalized. It is also modernizing. The end goal of this transformation is to create a well armed, well trained, professional army capable of battling both Muslim insurgents, like those the Russians fought in Chechnya, and conventional forces, like China’s People’s Liberation Army.' Click on through. It's a freebee.

Russia rose alright. As the editor's note states, we wrote Russia Rising waaaaay back in 2009. Our style has changed a bit since then and we have a passive voice problem, don't we? But overall Russia Rising holds up pretty well. 

By 2009 we'd published 30-40 magazine articles, mostly in Decision Games' constellation of magazines. We were at the time obsessed with breaking out into other publications. And so we did, Military Heritage, Medieval Warfare, Ancient Warfare, etc etc. Heh, we even colluded with the Russians back then, getting a trio of articles published in ArtofWar.ru. 

For those of you wanting to get your own stuff published in military history magazines, it's not as hard as you think. The formula is simple. Write good and stuff and you'll get published. Remember, editors are desperate for content. They lose sleep at night thinking, 'How am I going to fill this issue?...Maybe Will can bail me out.' We're not really joking.

Anyway...we talked to one of our men on the ground in Russia about the Ukraine situation. This is a contact deep within the Kremlin, a member of the Inner Party. We've codenamed him Red Bird. Here's what he had to say: 

Putin will never fall on Ukraine first, it's out of question
Kremlin is worried about Donbass and fears Ukraine will attack Donetsk or Lugansk
Ukraine has about 200 thousand troops near Donbass, that's why Kremlin has there about 100 thousand there, too
Russia wants to implement Minsk agreements
Kremlin is worried about US/Nato military help to Ukraine
Kremlin won't tolerate US/Nato missile defense deployment in Ukraine (Putin's Red line)
Also, there will be very negative consequences if Nato absorbs Ukraine.

Hmmm....sounds kind of like the Georgia situation, nyet?