Dear friends,

Excellent news!  First, I am happy to announce the official launch of the Saker Community Translations YouTube channel which you can find here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgh-2Oe7nK5lp_H3f0SQ89Q

This project has been launched by three volunteers of the Saker Community and its main goal is to regularly post the insightful political commentaries of Ruslan Ostashko, one of the most insightful Russian analysts whose videos have been regularly translated and subtitled on this blog in the past.  This time, however,  we will endeavor to present these videos to you on a regular basis (just today, I posted two of them, here and here).  Ostashko, along with Sergei Mikheev, is one of the most pragmatic and insightful Russian political commentators and I think that his analyses deserve to be translated into English and into other languages as they will give you a most valuable insight into what kind of political discussions are really taking place in Russia.

By the way, if you want to help with this community effort, please email me.  All you need to do is be capable of translating spoken Russian into written English (the current team will gladly help you with the subtitling which is rather easy to do).

There is even more good news:

Today I also have the joy of announcing that I have entered into an agreement with Ollie Richardson and Angelina Siard at The Stalker Zone (http://www.stalkerzone.org/ – make sure to check out their website, they have a huge archive of excellent translations!) to have their translations regularly cross-posted on the Saker blog. Their translations will primarily focus on more detailed analyses and will often feature analyses written by Rostislav Ishchenko.  I posted a first example of their work today here: http://10.16.86.131/this-is-how-wars-start/.

The bottom line is this: our community continues to grow and expand and we are going to make a special effort to bring you translations of the best of the Russian media.  I strongly believe that by encouraging new initiatives (like the Saker Community Translations) and partnerships with friends (like with Ollie Richardson and Angelina Siard) we can offer you, our friends and readers, a wider range of high quality information sources.

The Saker blog will never become a news aggregation site – most of the contents of this blog will always be original contributions written specially for this blog, and there are plenty of other excellent news aggregation sites out there who are already doing a great job presenting various articles and translations (as always, we encourage them to use our materials which are all licensed under the the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 4.0 International license; and no, we will not hunt you down and harass you with petty “copyright infringement” complaints!).  However, by focusing on a specific subset of authors, we believe that we can offer a valuable service which can complement what more general news aggregation sites have been already doing until now.

In closing I want to thank all those who have made this possible for all their hard work and dedication to our cause.  You guys are the best!

Hugs and cheers,

The Saker