For those in the know – and with the willpower not to drink up their assets – fine whisky can be quite a rewarding investment. A bottle of 1995 Brora, for example, was worth 100 euros in 1998. Now it sells for five times as much.
Pricey whiskies can be worth holding on to (saschafatcat)
Whisky has become more than just a classy drink. It can also be a pretty good investment – better in some cases than stocks, at least when markets are all over the place, as they are now.
Because there is increased demand for a decreasing supply, Michel Kappen, founder of an online platform called the World Whisky Index, sees prices rising long-term. The ex-banker estimates annual yield at 12%. So it's hardly surprising that more and more yield-oriented connoisseurs are buying whisky and hoping for price rises.
By way of example: a bottled 1995 Brora was selling for around 100 euros in 1998. By 2006 the value had doubled. Today, the 75 cl bottle costs no less than 500 euros.
The World Whisky Index presently tracks 46,610 bottles that together are worth 5.62 million euros. The site, created in 2007, brings buyers and sellers together. Whisky fans can build their own portfolio, and buy and sell. The most expensive bottle, a 1919 Springbank Single Malt, is presently quoted at 55,000 euros.
Whisky auctions have existed since the 1980s. But they're risky for casual whisky fans since the lucrative market is littered with ever more fakes. According to connoisseurs, the Italian mafia has already firmly established itself in the fast-growing market. Even dealers occasionally get taken in. Tricksters use fake seals and labels on the bottles, or original bottles with fake contents.
"Never buy expensive bottles from an unknown dealer," warns Tomas Ide, a foremost expert and founder of the Whisky Chamber. Before bidding on the Internet, he says, ask for pictures of the bottles and labels so that these can be compared with originals.
"Collectors should be on the lookout for bottles available only in limited quantities," says Ide. Whiskies from distilleries that have closed, such as Rosebank, are also an excellent bet. Pittyvaich is another potential winner, says Ide, as are whiskies from the Banff Distillery which closed its doors in 1983.
The two 90-something European-Americans spoke separately at the Davos summit this week, offering very different assessments of what the West should do in the face of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
The Davos summit was the setting for a heavyweight contrast of aging but still influential power brokers of another era. Henry Kissinger and George Soros, two Americans, born in pre-World War II Europe, offered very different takes on what to do about the war in Ukraine.
Stay up-to-date with the latest on the Russia-Ukraine war, with our exclusive international coverage.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, 98, told a Davos audience that the way out of the conflict with Russia was for Kyiv to cede territory in eastern Ukraine. The Telegraph quoted him Tuesday as telling the annual meeting of business and political leaders: “Negotiations need to begin in the next two months before it creates upheavals and tensions that will not be easily overcome.”
Kissinger, who fled Nazi Germany as a teenager, added that “ideally, the dividing line should be a return to the status quo ante,” a reference to Russia controlling parts of the eastern Donbas region.
George Soros, 91, who survived the 1945 siege of Budapest before becoming a billionaire financier in the UK and U.S., instead warned that Russia's invasion of Ukraine risks being the the start of World War III, “and our civilization may not survive it.”
Soros concludes that: "the best and perhaps only way to preserve our civilization is to defeat Putin as soon as possible. That's the bottom line."
There was no reaction in Moscow to the comments from either 90-something. But in Kyiv,
Mykhailo Podoliak, an adviser to the Ukrainian presidential office, went on Twitter to call Kissinger a "Davos panicker."
"As easily as Mr. Kissinger offers to give part of Ukraine to Russia, he would allow Poland or Lithuania to be taken away. It is good that Ukrainians in the trenches do not have time to listen to the advice of the Davos Panickers.”
Narrowing Battles In The East Will Determine Rest Of The War
The battles taking place in eastern Ukraine could determine the fate of the war and the country, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said.
According to the US think tank the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), Russia has abandoned efforts to complete a single large encirclement of Ukrainian forces in the region and are instead attempting smaller encirclements. The ISW said that Russian forces have secured more terrain in the past week than efforts earlier in May. However, they have done so by reducing the scope of their objectives.” The institute points out that Russian performance remains poor.
Severodonetsk, a city in northeast Ukraine in the Luhansk oblast, is strategic to Russia’s plans because of its position on the Donets river. Attacks by Russian forces on the city are increasing according to Luhansk governor Serhiy Haidai. Writing on Telegram, Haidai also accused Russian forces of targeting the Azot factory where civilians are hiding in bomb shelters. He said six people died and eight were wounded, with most of the incidents taking place near bomb shelters.
President Volodymyr Zelensky declared that Russia will have to leave Crimea, as well as all other occupied Ukrainian territories.
"Of course, the occupiers will have to leave the Crimea as well. As well as from Kherson, Melitopol, Energodar, Mariupol and all other cities and communities where they still portray themselves as masters," said the president during his evening online address Tuesday night.
Zelensky reminded that the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 began with the Crimea.
"This was not the first item on the list of mistakes of the Russian state towards Ukraine, but the first fatal one for Russia itself.”
Russian Defense Minister: We’re Moving Slowly On Purpose
Russia is deliberately slowing down the pace of its assault in Ukraine in order to allow evacuation and avoid civilian casualties, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu was quoted as saying by Russian state news agency Ria Novosti.
The statement was mocked in response by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky: "After three months of searching for an explanation for why they failed to break up Ukraine in three days, they came up with nothing better than to claim that it was planned. Nearly 30,000 Russian soldiers were killed, more than 200 planes shot down, thousands of lost Russian tanks, armored vehicles on their equipment, and almost completely spent Russian missile ammunition. They want to cover all this with lies that they are not fighting at full strength."
Finland And Sweden Delegations In Turkey To Overcome NATO Objection
Delegations from Finland and Sweden are opening talks in Turkey with senior Turkish officials to try to overcome the country’s objections to them joining NATO.
This comes after Finland and Sweden submitted their applications to NATO last week, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared that Turkey was opposed to the membership because the Nordic countries “harbored” his political opponents that he considers terrorists.
Hungary Prime Minister Viktor Orban has declared a state of emergency due to the war in Ukraine. In a video posted on Facebook, Orban said that the war presented a constant danger to “Hungary, our physical safety, the energy supplies and financial safety of families and the economy.”
This comes after the Hungarian parliament passed a constitutional amendment on Tuesday allowing for legal states of emergency to be declared when armed conflicts, wars or humanitarian disasters were taking place in neighboring countries.
Film By Director Executed In Mariupol To Be Screened At Cannes
Lithuanian filmmaker Mantas Kvedaravičius, who was killed during the siege of Mariupol, will be featured at the Cannes film festival, with footage from the Russian invasion edited into his final feature.
The director of Barzakh (2011), Mariupolis (2016) and Parthenon (2019), was captured and murdered by the Russian army in Mariupol on March 30. Since 2014, Kvedaravičius had focused much of his work on Mariupol, drawn to ts history, where traces of Greek culture were combined with Soviet heritage and new Ukrainian realities.
Soon after the Feb. 24 invasion, Kvedaravičius went to film in Mariupol again, before he was summarily killed. After the death of filmmaker, his producers and collaborators have put together all the footage to make Mariupolis 2, which depicts life continuing amid the bombing and reveals images that convey both tragedy and hope.
The risk of the Kremlin launching a tactical nuclear weapon on Ukraine is small but not impossible, notes Les Echos. The French newspaper looks into what the possible scenarios could be in the wake of such an attack.
“And so what would happen if Putin were to press the button? Let’s think the unthinkable, which is not so unthinkable after all, since he was only a hair's breadth away from setting off nuclear fire on at least three occasions already.
The Russian president presses the red button (which does not exist by the way, instead it is in fact the activation of a code with the help of a bag nicknamed "Tcheget"), to launch a bomb of 2 kilotons on Ukraine.
He would then likely obtain the immediate surrender of Kyiv. How can one imagine that soldiers, as brave as they may be, continue to fight against an adversary determined to kill 40,000 fighters and civilians with just one missile? Not to mention the panic caused by the deadly radiation. This is what led Japan to surrender in only a few hours in August 1945.” (Read more here)
The company had initially announced in early March that it was halting shipments to Russia, but now becomes the latest multinational (after Starbucks and McDonald’s) to have permanently abandoned Russia.
The UK government has approved the sale of Premier League soccer club Chelsea from Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich after a lengthy delay. The $5 billion takeover bid had been complicated by sanctions placed on Abramovich because of his alleged close links to Putin, which the oligarch denies.
Abramovich has insisted that all net proceeds from the sale would be used “for the benefit of all victims of the war in Ukraine.”
The two 90-something European-Americans spoke separately at the Davos summit this week, offering very different assessments of what the West should do in the face of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Facing resurgent protests in several provinces, Iran's clerical regime now relies on two defenses: brute force and Western appeasement. But its days may be numbered as younger Iranians are increasingly emboldened to demand a different future.
The risk of the Kremlin launching a tactical nuclear weapon on Ukraine is small but not impossible. The Western response would itself set off a counter-response, which might contain or spiral to the worst-case scenario.
As a psychoanalyst, Wolfgang Schmidbauer has researched the psychological effects of war on children — and in the process, also examined his own post-War childhood in Germany. In this article, he warns that parents tend to use their experiences of suffering as a method of education, with serious consequences.
Central to the tragic absurdity of this war is the question of language. Vladimir Putin has repeated that protecting ethnic Russians and the Russian-speaking populations of Ukraine was a driving motivation for his invasion.
Yet one month on, a quick look at the map shows that many of the worst-hit cities are those where Russian is the predominant language: Kharkiv, Odesa, Kherson.
Then there is Mariupol, under siege and symbol of Putin’s cruelty. In the largest city on the Azov Sea, with a population of half a million people, Ukrainians make up slightly less than half of the city's population, and Mariupol's second-largest national ethnicity is Russians. As of 2001, when the last census was conducted, 89.5% of the city's population identified Russian as their mother tongue.
The martyrdom of Mariupol
Between 2018 and 2019, I spent several months in Mariupol. It is a rugged but beautiful city dotted with Soviet-era architecture, featuring wide avenues and hillside parks, and an extensive industrial zone stretching along the shoreline. There was a vibrant youth culture and art scene, with students developing projects to turn their city into a regional cultural center with an international photography festival.
There were also many offices of international NGOs and human rights organizations, a consequence of the fact that Mariupol was the last major city before entering the occupied zone of Donbas. Many natives of the contested regions of Luhansk and Donetsk had moved there, taking jobs in restaurants and hospitals. I had fond memories of the welcoming from locals who were quicker to smile than in some other parts of Ukraine. All of this is gone.
Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
According to the latest data from the local authorities, 80% of the port city has been destroyed by Russian bombs, artillery fire and missile attacks, with particularly egregious targeting of civilians, including a maternity hospital, a theater where more than 1,000 people had taken shelter and a school where some 400 others were hiding.
The official civilian death toll of Mariupol is estimated at more than 3,000. There are no language or ethnic-based statistics of the victims, but it’s likely the majority were Russian speakers.
So let’s be clear, Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
Putin’s Public Enemy No. 1, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is a mother-tongue Russian speaker who’d made a successful acting and comedy career in Russian-language broadcasting, having extensively toured Russian cities for years.
Rescuers carry a person injured during a shelling by Russian troops of Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine.
Yes, the official language of Ukraine is Ukrainian, and a 2019 law aimed to ensure that it is used in public discourse, but no one has ever sought to abolish the Russian language in everyday life. In none of the cities that are now being bombed by the Russian army to supposedly liberate them has the Russian language been suppressed or have the Russian-speaking population been discriminated against.
Sociologist Mikhail Mishchenko explains that studies have found that the vast majority of Ukrainians don’t consider language a political issue. For reasons of history, culture and the similarities of the two languages, Ukraine is effectively a bilingual nation.
"The overwhelming majority of the population speaks both languages, Russian and Ukrainian,” Mishchenko explains. “Those who say they understand Russian poorly and have difficulty communicating in it are just over 4% percent. Approximately the same number of people say the same about Ukrainian.”
In general, there is no problem of communication and understanding. Often there will be conversations where one person speaks Ukrainian, and the other responds in Russian. Geographically, the Russian language is more dominant in the eastern and central parts of Ukraine, and Ukrainian in the west.
A daughter of Kyiv
Like most central Ukrainians I am perfectly bilingual: for me, Ukrainian and Russian are both native languages that I have used since childhood in Kyiv. My generation grew up on Russian rock, post-Soviet cinema, and translations of foreign literature into Russian. I communicate in Russian with my sister, and with my mother and daughter in Ukrainian. I write professionally in three languages: Ukrainian, Russian and English, and can also speak Polish, French, and a bit Japanese. My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
At the same time, I am not Russian — nor British or Polish. I am Ukrainian. Ours is a nation with a long history and culture of its own, which has always included a multi-ethnic population: Russians, Belarusians, Moldovans, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, Poles, Jews, Greeks. We all, they all, have found our place on Ukrainian soil. We speak different languages, pray in different churches, we have different traditions, clothes, and cuisine.
My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
Like in other countries, these differences have been the source of conflict in our past. But it is who we are and will always be, and real progress has been made over the past three decades to embrace our multitudes. Our Jewish, Russian-speaking president is the most visible proof of that — and is in fact part of what our soldiers are fighting for.
Many in Moscow were convinced that Russian troops would be welcomed in Ukraine as liberating heroes by Russian speakers. Instead, young soldiers are forced to shoot at people who scream in their native language.
Starving people ina street of Kharkiv in 1933, during the famine
Putin has tried to rally the troops by warning that in Ukraine a “genocide” of ethnic Russians is being carried out by a government that must be “de-nazified.”
These are, of course, words with specific definitions that carry the full weight of history. The Ukrainian people know what genocide is not from books. In my hometown of Kyiv, German soldiers massacred Jews en masse. My grandfather survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, liberated by the U.S. army. My great-grandmother, who died at the age of 95, survived the 1932-33 famine when the Red Army carried out the genocide of the Ukrainian middle class, and her sister disappeared in the camps of Siberia, convicted for defying rationing to try to feed her children during the famine.
On Tuesday, came a notable report of one of the latest civilian deaths in the besieged Russian-speaking city of Kharkiv: a 96-year-old had been killed when shelling hit his apartment building. The victim’s name was Boris Romanchenko; he had survived Buchenwald and two other Nazi concentration camps during World War II. As President Zelensky noted: Hitler didn’t manage to kill him, but Putin did.
Genocide has returned to Ukraine, from Kharkiv to Kherson to Mariupol, as Vladimir Putin had warned. But it is his own genocide against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine.