This past Sunday, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev made a brief visit to Abkhazia, the «breakaway statelet» within the Caucasus region’s nation of Georgia.

Medvedev chatted with an Abkhazian rebel leader, and then reflected on Russia’s decision in August 2008 to «liberate» Abkhazia and neighboring South Ossetia from what the Russians insistently described as Georgian ethnic domination. «It was not a simple decision,» Medvedev said, according to Agence France-Presse. «But time has shown that it was the right decision. The existence of the peoples of South Ossetia and Abkhazia was under threat.»

No sooner had the Anna Chapman row died down, than the newspapers found themselves filled with the adventures of another Anna. This concerns Anna Fermanova, an American of Latvian-Russian extraction, who entered the United States in the late nineties through the Jewish emigration channel. According to mass media reports, she attempted to carry out in a suitcase on a direct flight from New York to Moscow American third-generation sighting devices for shooting in conditions of limited visibility, without the permission of the relevant US services. So far, admittedly, it has not been proven that the second Anna was working for the Russian state, although, as one foreign commentator remarked in connection with the case in question, to use these sighting devices to hunt wild boar is tantamount to shooting sparrows with a Kalashnikov. The second Anna, however, as is well known, has claimed in cross-examinations that she was carrying the classified product as a gift for her Muscovite husband, an amateur hunter.

The sovereign debt crisis would seem to create worry enough for European banks, but there is another gathering threat that has not garnered as much notice: the trillions of dollars in short-term borrowing that institutions around the world must repay or roll over in the next two years.

The European Central Bank, the Bank of England and the International Monetary Fund have all recently warned of a looming crunch, especially in Europe, where banks have enough trouble raising money as it is.