Johnson's Russia List
2015-#48
10 March 2015
[email protected]
A project sponsored through the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES) at The George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs*
www.ieres.org
JRL homepage: www.russialist.org
Constant Contact JRL archive:
 http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs053/1102820649387/archive/1102911694293.html
JRL on Facebook: www.facebook.com/russialist
JRL on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnsonRussiaLi
Support JRL: http://russialist.org/funding.php
Your source for news and analysis since 1996n0
*Support for JRL is provided in part by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York to the George Washington University and by voluntary contributions from readers. The contents do not necessarily represent the views of IERES or the George Washington University.

"We don't see things as they are, but as we are"

"Don't believe everything you think"

In this issue
 
  #1
www.thedailybeast.com
March 9, 2015
Putin's Usual Suspects: The Bullshit Chechen-Charlie Hebdo Connection
By Catherine Fitzpatrick, The Interpreter

Political farce reaches its zenith in Russia as Vladimir Putin fingers Chechen extremists for the murder of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov.

On the night of February 27, 2014, two days before he was to lead a major anti-war march in Moscow, opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was gunned down on the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge, just 300 feet from the Kremlin. He died within minutes as his distraught girlfriend of three years, Ukrainian model Anna Duritskaya, ran to get help from the driver of a snowplow, which had stopped as the murder unfolded.

Pictures of the stark scene-the defeated dissident lying dead in the rain against the backdrop of the Kremlin walls and St. Basil's Cathedral-were broadcast all over the world and struck fear into other opposition leaders and the independent journalists who covered them. Many instantly suspected the involvement of President Vladimir Putin, whose increasingly brutal rule has led to Western sanctions and more protest at home, particularly since the forcible annexation of Crimea and invasion of the Donbass.

Nemtsov, a former first deputy prime minister in the Yeltsin administration, had produced devastating critiques of Putin's regime in the past, from the corrupt $51 billion Sochi Olympics to the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 by Russian-backed militants, and was preparing another report proving Russia's military presence in Ukraine.

Putin responded quickly by calling the murder "a provocation" and implied the opposition wanted to produce a martyr to "destabilize" Russia. The destabilization never came. Instead of the anti-war march originally planned for March 1, activists and citizens who had never marched before turned out for an orderly funeral procession with at least 30,000 participants. But other than a few other pickets and wreath-laying, no unrest was sparked.

From the first day after the murder, Russian authorities followed Putin's lead by offering up a host of wildly divergent whodunit theories, ranging from jealous lovers to the Ukrainian government, the CIA, and Nemtsov's fellow opposition members.

Another theory was the "Chechen scenario."

On February 28, Vladimir Markin, spokesman for Russia's Investigative Committee, said Nemtsov could have been killed by Islamists who were angry at the Muhammad cartoons printed by the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, whose journalists had been brutally massacred by al Qaeda-linked terrorists in Paris on January 7. "There are reports that Nemtsov received threats due to his position over the shooting of Charlie Hebdo staff in Paris," Markin said.

Yet Nemtsov himself never reported any threats related to the Hebdo affair. Nemtsov's colleagues also found this explanation far-fetched, as the matter of the cartoons was never a central plaint for the opposition leader, whose few blog posts on the subject didn't attract any attention at the time and seemed unlikely as an emotional motivation for a murder that took place six weeks later.

However, that has hardly stopped Moscow from filling out the scenario. Soon, officials proclaimed that persons caught by videotape and traffic police monitors at the scene of Nemtsov's murder were of "Caucasian" appearance, i.e. dark-haired and bearded. Half a dozen vehicles were examined for relevance to the murder, and several turned out to be registered in the Russian republic of Ingushetia, in the North Caucasus. Authorities then zeroed in on a silver Ukrainian-manufactured ZAZ Chance, in which they said they found biological materials, including hair that matched the suspects through DNA testing.

On March 7, the ninth day after the murder-a day marked with further memorials in the Russian Orthodox tradition-Aleksandr Bortnikov, the head of the FSB, announced that there were two suspects in the murder. The next day, March 8, three more suspects were announced.

The same day, five men were brought to Basmanny Court in Moscow. Two were arraigned and put in pre-trial detention until April 28. Three others were declared suspects and put under arrest in jail pending investigation until May 7 and 8.

Zaur Dadayev, who was charged in the killing, was confirmed as the deputy commander of a regiment of the Sever [North] Battalion of the Interior Ministry of the Chechen Republic. But at the arraignment, Dadayev didn't confirm this detail, even while pleading guilty. From his cage in the courtroom, he said, "I love the Prophet Muhammad," indicating only that he was a devout Muslim and little else.

Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov also acknowledged that Dadayev was in the Chechen Interior Ministry troops and said he was a staunch believer. Yet Kadyrov claimed that Dadayev had resigned from the police force. Kadyrov said he would investigate the conditions under which Dadayev had left the force.

Anzor Gubashev did not plead guilty. Shagid Gubashev, his brother, said he was not involved. Two others, Khamzad Bakhayev and Tamerlan Eskherkhanov, were detained in the Odintsovsky district in the Moscow region and said they had nothing to do with the murder. A sixth suspect, Beslan Shavanov, 30, blew himself up with a hand grenade when police came to his door in Grozny to arrest him.

Just as there were manifold theories about who killed Nemtsov, there are as many reasons to disbelieve the Chechen scenario-at least as far as it's been depicted by the authorities.

First, Nemtsov's friends and colleagues have confirmed that he was under constant surveillance. His assistant, Olga Shorina, said that a few days before he was killed, they had discussed his report on Russia's military presence in Ukraine, including a visit by the relatives of paratroopers missing in Ukraine, and he had turned to handwritten notes to foil the bugs he was certain were in the woodwork. On the eve of a large anti-war march, it seemed certain that Nemtsov would have been under physical as well as electronic surveillance, especially when he met his companion, Duritskaya, a citizen of Ukraine who frequently traveled from Kiev to Moscow. FSB agents would be looking for signs of "foreign agent" status and "help from abroad," as they had done vigorously with past cases of large protest marches.

Proof that Nemtsov was under surveillance came with the publication of leaked cellphone calls in the past, intended to discredit him, and footage of his meetings on state TV. Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, claimed on Twitter that he had personally seen cars speed after Nemtsov following visits with him.  

If Nemtsov were under such tight FSB surveillance, could the murderers have been able to approach and kill him without some intervention to prevent it? If anything, several analysts of the murder ask whether regular patrols and traffic police were suspended to enable the murder to occur.

Ilya Yashin, Nemtsov's fellow member in the political party RPR-Parnas, said that when another activist unfurled a Ukrainian flag in 2013 from another bridge near the Kremlin, it took mere seconds for cops to arrest him. When Nemtsov was shot dead on a bridge right next to the Kremlin walls, police took 10 minutes to arrive at the scene.

The scenes visible on the original videotape from the weather camera owned and operated by TV Tsentr, the Moscow city administration's TV station, remain a valuable counterpoint to the official narrative, which claims to be build on other video surveillance not publicly revealed.

State media from the outset talked about men "coming up the stairs" or "shooting out of the white car"- said to be a "Chechen trademark" for drive-by killings. Yet the TV Tsentr video shows that there were no men at the stairway throughout the shooting. The video also shows that the bullets were not coming out of the white car, which pulled up to the scene shortly after Nemtsov was shot. Indeed, a figure is seen running from a snowplow or street-cleaning machine that blocks the camera from a clear view of the murder; possibly the person had been riding on the back of it.

Later, the driver of the snowplow was interrogated and said he saw nothing. Duritskaya, who has signed a pledge not to disclose information from the investigation under Russian law, also says she didn't see anything because the killers were behind her.

But no one knows what could be on at least 18 other cameras visible on lampposts in the area-or even who controls them. First, the Federal Protective Service (FSO), a powerful security agency assigned to protect the president and other top officials as well as the Kremlin grounds, said the cameras were "under repair" and not working; then it alleged that the cameras didn't belong to the FSO and that the area was outside the agency's zone of responsibility. The Moscow city administration contradicted this line by insisting that its cameras were indeed functioning on the night of the assassination. But no footage from these cameras has been released to the media, except very short clips of what was said to be the getaway car in which the Chechens were later allegedly found.

A source in the official investigation told RosBalt.ru that Zaur Dadayev allegedly confessed that he was motivated to kill Nemtsov due to his "negative statements" about Muslims. Nemtsov's friends were skeptical of this story because the topic of Islam was not a central one for Nemtsov, who was mainly preoccupied with government corruption in Russia, the economic crisis, and the war in Ukraine.

A close examination of the half-dozens posts Nemtsov did write on the Hebdo affair on Facebook from January 7-15 show that he was mainly concerned with contrasting the unencumbered freedom of Parisians to stage large demonstrations against terrorism, unhindered by police, with the immediate arrest of a lone picketer with a "Je Suis Charlie" poster who tried to demonstrate near the Kremlin.
Nemtsov wrote four times about the demonstrator, Vladimir Ionov, age 75, eerily noting that he was arrested quickly in the very FSO zone where Nemtsov was later to be killed. Nemtsov called the FSO agents "stupid" for not realizing that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was himself taking part in a solidarity demonstration in Paris where everyone was carrying "Je Suis Charlie" signs.

In one post on January 9, reprinted on the website of the radio station Ekho Moskvy, Nemtsov wrote that at various times in history, religion has been responsible for killing people. Islam is a "young religion," he said, somewhere in a period comparable to Christianity in the 14th-15th centuries, when the Spanish Inquisition was actively burning heretics at the stake. Nemtsov's post got only 2,100 views and was hardly noticed or commented on at the time, as the larger story then in Russia was the decision by Alexei Venediktov, editor in chief of Ekho Moskvy, to publish the Hebdo cartoons.

That editorial decision triggered a denunciation from Kadyrov, who personally threatened Venediktov and former oligarch and political prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who had said journalists should publish the cartoons out of solidarity. (Full disclosure: I work for The Interpreter, a project funded by the Khodorkovsky family.) Nemtsov commented that people who were Kadyrov's personal enemies often wound up dead and that Khodorkovsky should get a bodyguard. Nemtsov also slammed the officially recognized Council of Muftis of Russia, which condemned the Paris terrorist attack yet also spoke of the "sin of provocation" of the Hebdo cartoonists-a position that Nemtsov said enabled the justification of murder.

But neither the muftis nor Kadyrov, who went on to organize a million-Muslim march in Grozny, ever reacted to Nemtsov at the time. They also failed to invoke any connection between Hebdo and his murder in the week after it happened. In fact, Kadyrov took to Instagram, his favorite medium of communication, to accuse "Western intelligence services" of Nemtsov's killing.

Indeed, the tenuous theory of the case would mean that the purported Chechen killers would have first had to take notice of Nemtsov's Hebdo posts against a backdrop of much more prominent figures in Russia showing solidarity with the slain French journalists-and then become so angry at his thin gruel blog comments about the lack of freedom to demonstrate in Russia that they'd hatch a plot to kill him six weeks later.

One person who believes that Kadyrov could possibly be responsible for Nemtsov's murder is Nemtsov's close associate and fellow opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Navalny has written that Putin is ultimately behind the murder one way or another but that he might have angled for "plausible deniability" by looking the other way while Kadyrov's enforcers carried out the assassination.

On March 3, before any Chechen suspects were arrested, Navalny pointed out that Kadyrov had gathered tens of thousands of Chechen Interior Ministry troops in a stadium on December 27, 2014, and once again sworn allegiance to Putin. In a skewed, propagandistic version of histor-entirely leaving out the Kremlin's role in the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s and its propping up of Bashar al-Assad in Syria-Kadyrov claimed that Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi were creations of the CIA and that therefore al Qaeda and ISIS now had to be fought because they were enemies of Russia and were attracting Islamist recruits in Russia.

Kadyrov invoked his father, Akhmad Kadyrov, the first president of Chechnya who was assassinated in 2004 and had previously founded the Special Operations Brigade, calling it "Putin's infantry"; Ramzan Kadyrov asserted its power by saying these troops were ready to fulfill orders from Putin at any time.

Navalny called this an "unlawful armed formation"-the term also used for Chechen militants opposed to Moscow-because the Interior Ministry is under the command of Moscow and Kadyrov seemed to be elevating a local branch of the ministry to a higher purpose. This move was also noticed by veteran Russia analyst Paul Goble, who said the "janissary-like forces" could be "available for irregular warfare or active measures [in which] Moscow may want to maintain plausible deniability of its own direct involvement."   

Not coincidentally, Chechens found to be "volunteering" in southeastern Ukraine on the side of the Russian-backed separatists turned out to be trained policemen from Kadyrov's Interior Ministry, hardened in battle with insurgents in their republic. That was discovered as scores of Chechens were killed in battle, including at the Donetsk Airport. Chechens were so angered at losing so many men in these battles that they reportedly mutinied and killed a Russian officer at the airport.

Putin didn't react to the call for recognition of Kadyrov's shock troops in December, but he was confronted at his year-end press conference by Ksenia Sobchak, a talk-show host who is the daughter of the late St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, a man who had once been Putin's boss and mentor. Ksenia Sobchak asked about Putin's tolerance of Kadyrov's order to burn down the homes of relatives of terrorists who had occupied the press building in Grozny in December.

"Who gave her the microphone?" Putin joked, and then dodged Sobchak's questions, saying that while burning down homes was against the law, Kadyrov's anger could be understood because his own relative was among the 14 policemen killed in the shootout, in which 11 terrorists were killed. The terrorists were said to be from the Caucasus Emirate, which took responsibility for the attack.

After Putin's encounter with Sobchak, not only did Kadyrov's lieutenants keep burning down Chechen homes, but the offices of human-rights lawyers who complained about the practice were also torched and Sobchak herself received death threats, as well as hecklers picketing outside her home and a libel lawsuit from the government of Chechnya. At Nemtsov's funeral on March 4, she said, an unidentified man approached her three times to threaten, "You're next."

Throughout Putin's rule, dozens of prominent critics have been assassinated, often after they expressed opposition to his brutal handling of wars and terrorist attacks, in which law-enforcement officers often ended up killing more victims than terrorists. In most cases, the masterminds behind the killing of Putin's critics are never found. Yet in many cases, Chechen suspects are conveniently found to act as Russia's scapegoats for crime in general and for the murder of opposition leaders in particular.

In the case of Paul Klebnikov, the Forbes editor slain in Moscow in 2004 after publishing books on oligarch Boris Berezovsky and the Chechen field commander Khozh-Akhmed Nukhayev, authorities wound up accusing the very subject of Klebnikov's book of the murder but then acquitted him along with two suspects-a rare occurrence in Russia. Later, one defendant was convicted on unrelated charges and two others had their acquittals overturned by the Russian Supreme Court, allowing them to be re-prosecuted, but then they could not be located and the case stalled.

In the case of Novaya Gazeta investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya, who filed critical pieces about the Chechen war, she was personally the subject of a death threat from first an assistant of Kadyrov, then Kadyrov himself, who said she was "an enemy to be shot." She was shot dead on Putin's birthday, October 7, in 2006. Law enforcers then came up with three Chechen suspects who were also acquitted. In May 2014, five suspects, including the same three acquitted Chechens, were tried and sentenced for her murder, although the contractor who ordered and paid for the murder was never found.

Nataliya Estimirova, a human-rights advocate in Chechnya, was abducted and murdered in 2009, but the killers were never found and one suspect was later said to be killed in an airstrike. In each of these cases, Russian officials claimed that the exiled oligarch Berezovsky was the real murderer of people whose cause he in fact had been supporting against Putin, though there was no evidence for the claim. That follows a frequent disinformation tactic used by the Russian government each time a critic is assassinated: A "false flag" operation of the kind common in the KGB's history could only explain the crime, as it was meant to "discredit" the Russian government.

It's important to remember that the "Chechen Scenario" has been common theme throughout Putin's rule-in fact, he owes his rule to it. He came to power 15 years ago under a cloud of suspicion about the mysterious explosions of apartment buildings in Moscow and provincial cities in September 1999-all said to be perpetrated by Chechen terrorists but which occurred immediately after Putin moved from the job of FSB chief to acting prime minister. To this day, many Russian human-rights activists and Western journalists, such as David Satter, are convinced that these apartment bombings were carried out by the FSB as a false flag attacks designed to increase support for the Second Chechen War, of which Putin was the principal architect.

The former KGB lieutenant colonel's popularity soared as a result of the war, and President Boris Yeltsin named him his successor; Putin was elected president in 2000, then spent the next several years "pacifying" Chechnya with scorched-earth military campaigns. He further consolidated his power after the Beslan school massacre in 2004, whereupon he ordered the elimination of direct elections for Russian regional governors. Then, in 2007, Putin installed Kadyrov as warlord "president" of Chechnya. Since then, thousands of people have disappeared, been found dead, or been arrested and tortured in Chechnya.

Now Zaur Dadayev, a man whom Kadyrov has himself identified as a trusted and decorated soldier in his special brigade "available for any assignment given the order," is said to be both the perpetrator and organizer of the murder.  Dadayev is said to be tied directly to the murder through surveillance camera and DNA evidence. The others arrested are Chechens who are always the usual suspects rounded up in such cases. Will Putin overlook once again the involvement of Kadyrov in a high-profile murder in Russia? Or will he continue to tolerate Kadyrov as an enforcer who gives the Russian president "plausible deniability" in these cases?


 #2
The New Face of Appeasement
Paul Goble

Staunton, March 10 - It is time to give Nevil Chamberlain a rest as the sole poster child for appeasement. Yes, he appeased Hitler in a hopeless quest to avoid war. He even was honest enough to say that was what he was doing. But when Hitler violated Munich and seized all of Czechoslovakia, he offered security guarantees to other countries who felt threatened.

Then, when the Nazi leader invaded Poland, Chamberlain listened to those in his own party who demanded he stand up to Hitler, brought Winston Churchill into his government, and declared war. And in the months that followed, months that some called "the phony war" because Hitler paused before moving West, the British prime minister promoted rearmament.

As wrong as Chamberlain was to think that he could win by appeasing a dictator like Hitler, he actually looks remarkably statesmanlike in comparison with some contemporary heads of state.  When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and seized Crimea, they refused to take action or even use those terms, even though he now takes very public credit for what he did.

When they rushed to Minsk to reach an agreement that Putin then ignored, they decided that the best course was to go back to Minsk and sign another agreement, even though the Kremlin leader was violating it before the ink was dry, allowing Putin's forces to continue their expansion into Ukraine.

And when Ukraine asked for weapons to defend itself against Russian aggression, they worried more about not offending Putin than about protecting a democratic country from an invader and if yesterday's reports are to be believed finally decided not to provide such arms to allow Ukraine to defend not only itself but the principles on which the West says it operates.

At every step of the way, these Western leaders have argued that the situation now is different because "Putin isn't Hitler" as if that were the relevant standard and because Russia's possession of nuclear weapons means that they can't stand up to him, thus sending a dangerous message to Iran and others that if you have such weapons, you can do what you like.

Moreover, they have assumed that economic sanctions are an indication that they are in fact "standing up to Putin," even though it has long been established that the Kremlin leader doesn't care what happens to his own people and will only use their suffering to build up his power by blaming everything on the West.

And Western leaders have comforted themselves with the notion that the increasingly short attention spans of their electorates will mean that no one will talk about Ukraine as soon as it disappears from the news. At least, in the 1930s, what Chamberlain was doing is because neither he nor anyone else could forget what had happened in the trenches of World War I.

At the beginning of September 1939, when Chamberlain still was trying to find a way out short of war, Churchill famously complained that the Poles had been suffering and dying as a result of Hitler's aggression for three days.  One should ask oneself: how many months will the Ukrainians suffer until the West acts as well as Chamberlain finally did on September 3rd?
 
 #3
The Guardian (UK)
March 10, 2015
Frontline Ukraine: 'How Europe failed to slay the demons of war'
In an extract from his new book, historian Richard Sakwa argues that the current conflict has its roots in the exclusion of Russia from genuine partnerships since the end of the cold war
Richard Sakwa is professor of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent

In 2014, history returned to Europe with a vengeance. The crisis over Ukraine brought back not only the spectre but the reality of war, on the 100th anniversary of a conflict that had been spoken of as the war to end all war. The great powers lined up, amid a barrage of propaganda and informational warfare, while many of the smaller powers made their contribution to the festival of irresponsibility.

This was also the 75th anniversary of the beginning of the second world war, which wreaked so much harm on central and eastern Europe. The fall of the Berlin Wall 25 years earlier and the subsequent end of the cold war had been attended by expectations of a Europe "whole and free".

These hopes were crushed in 2014, and Europe is now set for a new era of division and confrontation. The Ukrainian crisis was the immediate cause, but this only reflected deeper contradictions in the pattern of post-communist development since 1989. In other words, the European and Ukrainian crises came together to devastating effect.

The "Ukrainian crisis" refers to profound tensions in the the country's nation and state-building processes since it achieved independence in late 1991, which now threaten the unity of the state itself.

These are no longer described in classical ideological terms, but, in the Roman manner, through the use of colours. The Orange tendency thinks in terms of a Ukraine that can finally fulfil its destiny as a nation state, officially monolingual, culturally autonomous from other Slavic nations and aligned with "Europe" and the Atlantic security community. This is a type of "monism", because of its emphasis on the singularity of the Ukrainian experience.

By contrast, Blue has come to symbolise a rather more plural understanding of the challenges facing Ukraine, recognising that the country's various regions have different historical and cultural experiences, and that the modern state needs to acknowledge this diversity in a more capacious constitutional settlement. For the Blues, Ukraine is more of a "state nation", an assemblage of different traditions, but above all one where Russian is recognised as a second state language and economic, social and even security links with Russia are maintained. Of course, the Blue I am talking about is an abstraction, not the blue of former president Viktor Yanukovych's Party of Regions.

The Blues, no less than the Orangists, have been committed to the idea of a free and united Ukraine, but favour a more comprehensive vision of what it means to be Ukrainian. We also have to include the Gold tendency, the powerful oligarchs who have dominated the country since the 1990s, accompanied by widespread corruption and the decay of public institutions.

Since independence, there has been no visionary leader to meld these colours to forge a Ukrainian version of the rainbow nation.

The "Ukraine crisis" also refers to the way that internal tensions have become internationalised to provoke the worst crisis in Europe since the end of the cold war. Some have even compared its gravity with the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. The world at various points stood close to a new conflagration, provoked by desperately overheated rhetoric on all sides.

The asymmetrical end of the cold war effectively shut Russia out from the European alliance system. The failure to establish a genuinely inclusive and equal security system on the continent imbued European international politics with powerful stress points, which in 2014 produced the international earthquake that we now call the Ukraine crisis.

There had been plenty of warning signs, with Boris Yeltsin, the Russian Federation's first leader, in December 1994 already talking in terms of a "cold peace". When he came to power in 2000, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin devoted himself to overcoming the asymmetries.

The major non-state institution at the heart of the architecture of post-communist Europe, the European Union (EU), exacerbated the tensions rather than resolving them. The EU represents the core of what could be called "Wider Europe" - a Brussels-centric vision that extends into the heartlands of what had once been an alternative great-power system centred on Moscow. The increasing merger of Wider Europe with the Atlantic security system only made things worse.

Russia and some European leaders proposed not so much an alternative but a complementary vision to the monism of Wider Europe, known as "Greater Europe": a way of bringing together all corners of the continent to create what Mikhail Gorbachev in the final period of the Soviet Union had called the "Common European Home". This is a multipolar and pluralistic concept of Europe, allied with but not the same as the Atlantic community.

In Greater Europe there would be no need to choose between Brussels, Washington or Moscow. In the absence of the tensions generated by the post-cold war "unsettlement", the peace promised at the end of the cold war would finally arrive. Instead, the double "Ukrainian" and "Ukraine" crises combined with catastrophic consequences.

For me, this is both personal and political. The cold war division of Europe is the reason I was born and grew up in Britain and not in Poland, but, even before that, war and preparations for war had scarred my family. In the inter-war years my father, an agronomist by profession but like so many of his generation also a reservist in the Polish army, marched up and down between Grodno and Lw�w (as it was then called).

He told of the 25kg he had to carry in his backpack, with all sorts of equipment and survival tools. The area at the time was part of the Second Polish Republic, and for generations had been settled by Poles. These were the kresy, the borderlands of Europe grinding up against the ever-rising power of the Russian empire. With the partition of Poland in the 18th century, Grodno and what is now the western part of Belarus was ceded to Russia, while Lemberg (the German name for Lw�w) and the surrounding province of Galicia became part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

On gaining independence in 1918, and with Russia and the nascent Ukrainian state in the throes of revolution and civil war, the various armies repeatedly marched back and forth across the region. In the end the Polish state occupied an enormous territory to the east of the Curzon Line.

These were the lands occupied by Joseph Stalin, following the division of the area according to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 23 August 1939. Poland was invaded on 1 September and against the overwhelming might of Adolf Hitler's armies the Polish forces fell back, only for the Soviet Union to invade on 17 September.

My father's unit soon came up against the Soviet forces, and when greeted initially by the Poles as coming to support them against the Germans, they were asked to disarm. My father escaped to Hungary, but many of his reservist comrades were captured, and eventually murdered in Katyn and other killing sites.

My father subsequently joined the Polish second corps under General Anders, and with the British eighth army fought at El Alamein, Benghazi, Tobruk and then all the way up Italy, spending six months at Monte Cassino. At the end of the war Poland was liberated, but it was not free. Unable to return to their homeland, the family was granted refuge in Britain. In the meantime, the Soviet borders were extended to the west, and Lw�w became Lvov.

These were territories that had never been part of the Russian empire, and when Ukraine gained independence in 1991 they became the source of the distinctive Orange vision of Ukrainian statehood. Today Lvov has become Lviv, while its representation of what it means to be Ukrainian is contested by other regions and communities, notably the Blues, each of which has endured an equally arduous path to become part of the modern Ukrainian state.

As for the political, being a product of an ideologically and geographically divided Europe, I shared the anticipation at the end of the cold war in 1989-91 that a new and united Europe could finally be built. For a generation the EU helped transcend the logic of conflict in the western part of the continent by binding the traditional antagonists, France and Germany, into a new political community, one that expanded from the founding six that signed the Treaty of Rome in March 1957 to the 28 member states of today.

The Council of Europe, established in 1949, broadened its activities into the post-communist region, and now encompasses 47 nations and 820 million citizens, as its website proudly proclaims. The European Convention of Human Rights and its additional protocols established a powerful normative framework for the continent, policed by the European Court of Human Rights, based in Strasbourg. Russia in the 1990s actively engaged with the EU, signing a Partnership and Cooperation agreement in 1994, although it only took effect on 30 October 1997 following the first Chechen war, and the next year Russia joined the Council of Europe.

However, another dynamic was at work, namely the enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato). Also established in 1949 to bring together the victorious western allies, now ranged against the Soviet Union in what had become the cold war.

Nato was not disbanded when the Soviet Union disintegrated and the cold war came to an end. This was the source of the unbalanced end to the cold war, with the eastern part dissolving its alliance system while Nato in the 1990s began a march to the east.

This raised increasing alarm in Russia, and, while notionally granting additional security to its new members, it meant that security in the continent had become divisible. Worse, there was an increasing perception that EU enlargement was almost the automatic precursor to Nato expansion.

There was a compelling geopolitical logic embedded in EU enlargement. For example, although many member states had reservations about the readiness of Bulgaria and Romania to join, there was a fear that they could drift off and become western versions of Ukraine. The project of European economic integration, and its associated peace project, effectively merged with the Euro-Atlantic security partnership, a fateful elision that undermined the rationale of both and which in the end provoked the Ukraine crisis.

The failure to create a genuinely inclusive and symmetrical post-communist political and security order generated what some took to calling a "new cold war", or, more precisely, a "cold peace", which stimulated new resentments and the potential for new conflicts.

It became increasingly clear that the demons of war in Europe had not been slain. Instead, the Ukraine crisis demonstrates just how fragile international order has become, and how much Europe has to do to achieve the vision that was so loudly proclaimed, when the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, of a continent united from Lisbon to Vladivostok.

The Ukraine crisis forces us to rethink European international relations. If Europe is not once again to be divided, there need to be new ideas about what an inclusive and equitable political and security order encompassing the whole continent would look like. In other words, the idea of Greater Europe needs to be endowed with substance and institutional form.

Unfortunately, it appears that the opposite will happen: old ideas will be revived, the practices of the cold war will, zombie-like, come back to life, and once again there will be a fatal dividing line across Europe that will mar the lives of the generation to come. This is far from inevitable, but to avoid it will require a shift in the mode of political intercourse from exprobration to diplomacy, and from denunciation to dialogue.

Thus the personal and the political combine, and this book is much an exploration of failed opportunities as it is an account of how we created yet another crisis in European international politics on the anniversaries of the start of two world wars and a moment of hope in 1989. My father's generation suffered war, destruction and displacement, and yet the European civil war that dominated the 20th century still inflames the political imagination of the 21st.
 
 #4
www.rt.com
March 10, 2015
'We did what we had to do': Putin opens up on Crimea reunification plan
[DJ: In this context please read in JRL#45 www.opendemocracy.net: John O'Loughlin and Gerard Toal, The Crimean conundrum. https://www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/john-o�€™loughlin-gerard-toal/crimean-conundrum]

The decision to give Crimea an opportunity to choose if it wants to be a part of Russia again was made after an unofficial survey showed the majority of Crimeans would back reunification, Vladimir Putin revealed in an interview to a Russian TV channel.

The interview is part of a documentary, "Crimea. The Road Back Home," scheduled to be aired by the Rossiya One TV channel. In the film, the Russian president has given new insights into the events leading up to last year's referendum in Crimea.

The vote took place after days of violence on the streets of Kiev, which came to be known as the Maidan revolution. The government was overthrown in February 2014, and the Ukrainian president fled the capital.

The highly volatile situation prompted President Putin to convene an urgent meeting with his national security and defense chiefs, during which a crucial decision was taken.

"It was the night of the 22nd," Putin told Rossiya One's Andrey Kondrashov. "We were done by 7 am. And I won't conceal it, when we were saying goodbye, I told my colleagues - there were four of them - that the situation in Ukraine has evolved in such a way that we have to start work on returning Crimea to being a part of Russia. We couldn't abandon the territory and people who live there, couldn't just throw them under this nationalist bulldozer."

The Russian president went on to explain that the referendum, on joining Russia, would not have gone ahead without broad public support on the peninsula.

So, he ordered an unofficial poll to be conducted there.

"We found out that 75 percent of respondents there wanted [Crimea] to join Russia," Putin said.

Only then was the referendum was given the green light. There were two choices offered to the voters: to say yes either to the reunification of Crimea with Russia or to Crimea having more autonomy as a part of Ukraine.

"The ultimate goal was not to seize Crimea or annex it," Putin said. "The ultimate goal was to let people express their opinion on how they wanted to live further."

The president emphasized that he was ready to support any decision taken by the people of Crimea.

"We know the results of the referendum. And we did what we had to do," the Russian leader said.

The referendum took place on March 16, 2014. Around 96 percent voted in favor of reunification with Russia. Two days later, Russia and Crimea cemented reunification with a treaty.

The US and the EU have never recognized the Crimea referendum and reacted to it by sanctions against Russia and against the peninsula.

Russian officials have dismissed criticism of the Crimean referendum, citing Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence as an example of self-determination praised by the West.

The issue has recently been touched upon again by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

"When it comes to international law and the attention it gets in particular in connection with the issue of Crimea, we would want our Western colleagues to have no less enthusiasm in dealing with other events in recent history," Lavrov said.

"These include OSCE members bombing another OSCE member, I mean Yugoslavia, the situation with the unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo - without any referendums. No one then even bothered to ask why it happened without a referendum. And also the invasion of Iraq under a fake pretext, and the rude violation of the UN Security Council mandate concerning Libya. A country has been destroyed and now everyone is trying to glue its pieces back together and is asking oneself of how not to allow disintegration of other countries in the region."
 
 
#5
Rossiya 1 TV (Moscow)
March 9, 2015
Russian TV film trailer focuses on Putin's account of Crimea takeover

Presenter Mariya Sittel: Rossiya 1 television channel is preparing for the premier of a new documentary film "Crimea. The Road to the Motherland".

Presenter Andrey Kondrashov: The announcement about this film alone raised so many questions from the viewers that today we will try to disclose some details about how we shot this film. Here we go.

A feature-length documentary film was intended to preserve for history every significant episode of the events that took place in Crimea in spring 2014. It took eight months to shoot and it covered Sevastopol and Foros, Simferopol and Kerch, Yalta and Bakhchisaray, Feodosiya, Dzhankoy, Alushta and a dozen other population centres of Crimea.

Hot on the heels of the events, a big conversation with Vladimir Putin was recorded and then over 50 interviews with participants and witnesses of the Crimean spring were recorded.

How did all this start and how Russia received an official request from the legitimate president of Ukraine [Viktor Yanukovych] asking to save his life?

[Kondrashov, interviewing Putin] [Yanukovych] broke out of Donetsk and headed somewhere, he perhaps he did not know himself were.

[Putin] He headed for Crimea. But when I was shown the map of his movements -

[Kondrashov, interrupts] And you saw the route of his movements?

[Putin] When he phoned, our services of radio monitoring essentially started to lead his motorcade. Each time we established his location.

[Kondrashov, as a presenter] This was an operation that had no equivalents in the modern world history. All the details of how Viktor Yanukovych was secretly evacuated a few kilometres before an ambush with machine-guns will be revealed by Vladimir Putin himself a year later and a detailed reconstructions is dedicated to this in the film. [video shows helicopter taking off at night]

[Kondrashov, interviewing Putin] Do you understand you correctly that you personally spent the whole night on the operation to rescue Yanukovych?

[Putin] Yes, absolutely correct, this was the night from the 22nd to the 23rd [February 2014]. We finished at about 7 o'clock in the morning and departed. I do not hide, I told to all my colleagues - there were four of them - that the situation has developed in such a way in Ukraine that we are forced to begin the work to bring Crimea back into Russia because we cannot leave this territory and the people who live there to the mercy of the steamroller of the nationalists. I set certain tasks, said what we should do and how we should do this. However, I immediately stressed that we will do this only if we are absolutely convinced that the people who live in Crimea themselves want this."

[Kondrashev, as presenter] Why the first instruction given by the president concerned not security services and the Defence Ministry but his own administration, the specialists of which jointly with sociologists conducted in Crimea a closed poll. What questions did residents of Crimea answer if even the word referendum did not feature?

[Putin, in an interview] It turned out that those wanting to join Russia accounted for 75 per cent of the entire population. A closed poll was conducted outside the context of a possible incorporation. For me it became obvious that if we move closer to this, the number of those wanting for this historic event to take place will be much greater.

[Kondrashov, as presenter over video] The attack at Korsun - how many people were killed and went missing after Ukrainian nationalists attacked a column of vehicles of Crimeans and set fire to their coaches, how the Crimean militia was formed and who was its leader? [Video showed burning coaches, a rally shouting: "Sevastopol, Crimea, Russia"] How for the first time 'polite people' [Russian military without markings on their uniforms] appeared in Crimea, who were they and on whose orders were they sent to the peninsula? How long did the special operation take, which resulted in all key buildings of the power structures had been taken under guard by early hours of 27 February? [video shows troops dismounting from trucks]

[Putin, in an interview] The ultimate aim was not to seize Crimea nor an annexation of any kind. The ultimate aim was to give the people an opportunity to express their opinion about how they want to live in the future. I am telling you totally frankly, absolutely honesty, that I thought to myself: If people want this, let it be. They will be there with greater autonomy and with some kind of rights but as part of the Ukrainian state. Then, let it be like this. However, if they want a different thing, we cannot reject them. We know the results of the referendum and we acted the way we had the duty to act."

[Kondrashov, as presenter over video] How did one manage to disarm 193 Ukrainian military units in Crimea? What was the secret of the commander of the Black Sea Fleet, who invited his Ukrainian colleagues to talks exclusively to Khersones? How one managed to close in the ships of the Ukrainian Navy in bays? Why did one still not manage without a storm and an exchange of fire in Feodosiya. How did Russia come to contact with NATO subunits in Crimea and with US Navy at sea? What did Vladimir Putin speak about with Barack Obama during those days and how did our Bastion coastal missile systems end up in Crimea, suddenly changing the entire course of the events. Two frank interviews with Vladimir Putin and all episodes of the Crimean spring that determined the course of the modern history of Russia in the film "Crimea. The Road to the Motherland".

[During the preview of the above report in the headlines, presumably in the context of Putin's conversations with Obama during the events, Putin was shown saying in an interview: "It was not us who carried out the coup d'etat. This was done by nationalists and people with extreme views. You supported them. However, where are you? Thousands of kilometres away. But we are here and this is our land."]
 
 #6
http://joshvanhee.blogspot.com
March 5, 2015
Ukraine: Russia's and Europe's Mexico? A short reflection on the Ukrainian demographic fiasco
By John Vanhee
Josh Vanhee, Belgian Canadian, has lived and worked in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Eastern Europe for twenty years.  Involved in both non-profit and senior business roles, he writes based on his experience.    

Unknown to most of us, the two largest migration streams in the world are the ones involving Mexico to USA, and Ukraine to Russia.  Ever since 1991, Ukrainians have been migrating north and east to Russia in numbers that so far did not approach the 3.5 million Mexicans that choose the USA.  Yet Ukraine is set to break this unenviable record as its crisis also affects a demographic collapse and sees migration waves to the EU and to Russia measured in millions.

Ukraine's chronic lack of adequate governance spiked two revolutions, one of which should be called a coup based on more than circumstantial evidence.  During the last 25 years, Ukraine has lost 7 million people to emigration and a rising death rate - the highest one in Europe.  Going from a nation of 50 million to 43 million,by itself already a staggering decrease of close to 15%, the situation becomes more drastic when we look at the demographic implications of the 2014-2015 crisis.

Maidan and its haste to chase and enforce a mono-thematic Ukrainian identity resulted in a demonization of Russians, and with it a significant part of the country's population.  Two million Crimeans left Ukraine to gladly embrace the Russian Federation, a decision which seemed possibly rash and organized by Russia at the start, but which has since been vindicated: current, 2015 European polls validate the percentages of the original Crimean referendum.  However one turns the pages on the events in Eastern Ukraine, it is hard to see Donetsk and Lugansk as an integral part of Ukraine in the near, never mind distant future.  This means that another 3-4 million people - possibly up to 7 million if the remaining areas in these provinces join the rebel areas - want a lot less Ukraine, and a lot more Russia.

Yet the demographic debacle does not stop there.  Russian Statistics reported that as of mid January 2015, as much as 2.2 million Ukrainians are now seeking refuge in Russia.  While Russian media sarcastically pointed this out as a 'Ukrainian invasion', the fact is that many of these refugees are fleeing for multiple reasons, only one of which is the conflict in the East.  Repeated Ukrainian attempts at conscription - with ever widening age criteria - has led to huge numbers of draft dodgers that are also flooding the Russia border.  The crash of the Ukrainian currency - a process that appears far from having touched rock bottom - is making Ukrainian bankruptcy an active verb covering many months, rather than a sudden and mere momentary state of affairs.  The Ukrainian Parliament's final approval of IMF criteria came early March 2015, but its implications are still to hit pensioners, government workers, businesses and families.

Apart from a huge wave towards Russia - the country where most of the white collar or educated Ukrainians can still use their experience or qualifications - there is an expected tripling of exodus numbers towards Hungary and Poland, and to a lesser extent Romania.  If one adds all of these numbers together, it is not at all outlandish to forecast that this country will, by mid 2016 to early 2017, shrink to less than 30 million. While Russia is already gasping with the burden of lower oil prices and the Ukrainian refugees at 2 million, it may see this number double.  Surrounding EU neighbours may need to forecast a similar 3 to 4 million transient Ukrainian workers that would increasingly stay or seek immigration into other countries.  These numbers go far beyond any current EU plans - 2013 numbers rate at roughly 600,000 to 800,000 for all EU combined; it will add to the existing growing popular discontent with migration policy, and it will inflate national budgets.

Any crisis of this magnitude also has a major impact on life expectancy.   During the US-celebrated shock therapy in Russia in the early 90's, Russian life expectancy dropped by 10 years.  While this may appear financially beneficial in the short term - shorter lives mean less pensions to pay out - the combination with mass emigration of the active workforce is potentially catastrophic.

Are some of these refugees coming back? Knowing whether migration is temporary or permanent is key; Ukraine has always had a high transient workforce with most of that work found in Russia.  Undoubtedly some will come back; yet any comeback is inspired by an improvement in the country's immediate prospects.  Prime Minister Yatsenyuk can seek the crown of well wishing in declaring 2015 the year of stabilization and 2016 that of the first small growth.  It is much more likely that 2015 is the year of full-scale implosion followed by minimum 2 years of stabilization with negative to zero growth.  Already in 2011, three out of five white collar workers were actively considering emigration. This trend was hastened by February 2015 and increased to four out of five (83%).  The most worrisome statistic for Ukraine is that these numbers concern their active skilled workforce right now, a work force that is looking how not to pay taxes inside Ukraine.  Since the government continues to organize mobilization for what has so far been a disastrous war campaign and is organizing increasing repressive measures, as well as creating the unpredictable leviathan of lustration, how can any significant returning numbers be expected?

Joint migration pressures of this magnitude on Russia and the EU should, apart from the extreme human cost of Ukraine's own belligerence, bring even more reasons to find a harmonized approach and force the Kiev regime into compromises that reduce suffering and increase the prospects of some decent level of life quality.

This article does not yet venture into the details of the demographic collapse because that requires looking at the untenable burden of state debt, of maintaining some level of social security with a rapidly shrinking tax base, negative birth rate projections and health statistics. Irrespective of the fact that Crimea and DPR/LNR leave with little likely remaining cost to the Ukrainian budget, the remaining Ukrainian population make-up is unable to engender economic growth in the near to medium future.     

Maidan's idealist delirium, a potent drink manufactured in the US, bottled in the EU and celebrated by so many in the West, has poisoned the well in Europe's second most populous nation for the foreseeable future. Ukraine is about to eclipse Mexico in a record few would envy.

Sources
https://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/fileadmin/files/Publications/Research_Resources/Flows/Ukraine_Country_Report_1of3.pdf
http://www.migrationpolicycentre.eu/docs/migration_profiles/Ukraine.pdf
http://www.ceemr.uw.edu.pl/vol-3-no-1-june-2014/editorial/ukrainian-migration-europe-policies-practices-and-perspectives
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTLAC/Resources/Factbook2011-Ebook.pdf
http://www.indexmundi.com/map/?t=0&v=26&r=eu&l=en
 #7
Reuters
March 10, 2015
Rebel fighters enjoy lull on eastern Ukraine front
BY MARIA TSVETKOVA

MOLOCHNOYE, UKRAINE - Uneasy calm and domesticity have settled over rebel positions in the ruins of front-line towns in east Ukraine as steps are taken to observe a fragile cease-fire that each side expects the other to violate with a fresh offensive.

Near the charred shell of a tank, destroyed in a recent battle in the village of Molochnoye, a woman clad in camouflage fatigues cooked beetroot soup, while rebel fighters fashioned an empty ammunition box into a sidecar for an old Soviet motorbike.
 
Fighting, which virtually razed the nearby towns of Debaltseve and Vuhlehirsk, has died down with a three-week-old cease-fire broadly holding. But pro-Russian separatists are on guard in case violence flares again.

Local rebel commander Vyacheslav, nicknamed Kot (Cat), said he had no desire to launch further attacks, but wished to defend his land. "I don't need to kill you at all," he said, talking in Ukrainian as if addressing government troops directly.

"If you think that I want to take a look at your houses, that's not the deal. I just need my house to be safe and my wife to be at home and to cook food for me," he said, speaking outside the local rebel headquarters, which had a collapsed roof and two armored personnel carriers parked in the backyard.

Under the terms of the peace deal agreed to on Feb. 12, pro-Moscow rebels and Ukrainian government forces were supposed to pull heavy artillery back from front lines to end a conflict that has killed nearly 6,000 people since last April.

Both sides have shown convoys of heavy arms being withdrawn, but each accuses the other of leaving some large weapons near front-line positions.

From hilltop outposts near Molochnoye, rebels observed Ukrainian positions around Novoluhanske, a government-controlled town. Rebel trenches on one of the hills seen by Reuters were manned by three fighters.

They gave orders to keep heads low as if prepared for enemy attack, but only one of them had his helmet on.

Another fighter peered through his binoculars at sandbags on the Ukrainian side of the front about 2 km (1.2 miles) away. Cases of at least five used anti-tank guided missiles lay on the ground nearby. More rebels could be seen on the next hill.

"Yesterday a diversionary group came and checked us out," a gunman, who gave his name as Andrei, said as he squatted on the grass near a trench. "We held them back with suppressive fire from light rifles. We mainly use Pokemon," he said, using a nickname for PKM, or Kalashnikov machine guns.

A few bangs and shots could be heard in the area over the weekend, but it was not clear which side was firing or at what target.

In Molochnoye, a further 2 km from the front line, a T-64 tank was parked near an old one-story house. A gas mask covered the end of the barrel and a camouflage blanket was draped over its turret. Reuters visited the village twice within 24 hours and the tank did not change position.

"Don't take pictures of the tank. It's all covered. We don't use it," a rebel said, coming out of the house. "Its name is Victoria, after my wife."

 
#8
DPR lists 2,000 captives for POW swap deal

DONETSK. March 10 (Interfax) - The Donbas militia has presented three lists of approximately 2,000 captives planned to be exchanged with Ukraine.

"The first list is comprised of the names of about 220 soldiers, the second of another 800, and the third list contains the names of civilians, 900 people, ombudsman of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) Darya Morozova told reporters on Tuesday.

In her words, ten militia men included in one of the lists have already been sentenced.

Morozova alleged that the Ukrainian army had been forcing militia men to refuse from being exchanged.

"Many of our guys are forced to refuse from being exchanged in writing," she said.
 #9
Ukrainian army claims to have only heavy infantry arms left on frontline

KYIV. March 10 (Interfax) - The Ukrainian army is threatening to bring back all artillery guns withdrawn earlier if the militia mounts an offense on its positions.

"Our frontline units still have heavy infantry weapons which can stop an offensive of heavy armaments so that they are not endangered. If the militia moves forward, all the artillery guns will be brought back to the frontline," spokesman for the army operation Andriy Lysenko said at a press briefing in Kyiv on Tuesday.

In his words, the enemy is only simulating the pullout of its weapons.

"In fact, they are relocating their hardware, coaching their soldiers, regrouping, and forming a main attack force," Lysenko said.

Eduard Basurin of the Defense Ministry of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, claimed on Monday that Ukraine had not been fulfilling the arms pullback arrangement to a sufficient degree.

"We continue receiving alarming intelligence about Ukrainian forces' buildup in the safety zone," Basurin said at a press conference on Monday.

He also said that Ukrainian weapons were not being removed to the agreed distance and remained on positions which make their return to the contact line possible within hours.

"The weapons removed are located at a distance of 20-30 kilometers from the actual contact line and can be easily moved back to position within a couple of hours," he said.

More than 200 Ukrainian armored vehicles, nine Uragan rocket systems and six 122-millimeter and 152-millimeter artillery pieces are concentrated near Artemivsk, and over 2,000 Ukrainian servicemen from the 54th separate motorized infantry brigade are located in the city, he said.

"Grad and Uragan multiple rocket launchers have been spotted near the populated areas of Svobodne, Pryazovske, Zorya and Pokrovske. All of them are located within 30 kilometers from the zero kilometer [line]," Basurin said.

"Ukraine has knowingly denied access to its territory to four groups of Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe observers over the past three days," he claimed.

 
 #10
AP
March 10, 2015
Ukraine President Says Arms Withdrawal Almost Complete

KIEV, Ukraine - Ukrainian government and Russian-backed separatist forces have both pulled back the bulk of their artillery and rocket launchers from the front line in the east, in compliance with a cease-fire deal, Ukraine's president said.

Petro Poroshenko told a state broadcaster Monday evening that some heavy weaponry remains in place at the airport of the rebel-held city of Donetsk, however.

Progress in the arms-withdrawal process agreed at high-level peace talks last month will boost attempts to bring a definitive end to a conflict that the U.N. estimates has killed more than 6,000 and displaced almost 1.8 million people.

The pullback is being overseen by hundreds of monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which has complained of a lack of cooperation by the warring sides.

Col. Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for Ukraine's military operations in the east, said that government forces retain the option of returning the weapons if hostilities resume.

"In order not to put out servicemen at risk on the front line, there is some artillery positioned not far away," he said. "In case of necessity, they will be brought back."

Under the accord reached on Feb. 12 in the Belarusian capital, Minsk, heavy weapons are to be pulled back by distances between 25 and 70 kilometers (15 to 45 miles) from the front line, depending on their caliber.

Eduard Basurin, a representative for rebel armed formations, on Tuesday accused Ukrainian forces of running behind schedule in their withdrawal of some armaments.

Poroshenko said in his interview that exchanges of artillery and rocket fire have largely stopped along the 485-kilometer (300-mile) front, but that skirmishes with small arms and grenade launchers persist.

Interfax-Ukraine news agency cited military spokesman Anatoly Stelmakh as saying Tuesday that rebel forces had violated the cease-fire 12 times over the previous day.

The bulk of continued unrest has been concentrated around the separatist stronghold of Donetsk, but pitched battles are also taking place in the town of Shyrokyne, near the strategic port city of Mariupol.

Lysenko said fighting in Shyrokyne raged for more than three hours Monday.
 
 #11
Sputnik
March 10, 2015
'Poroshenko' is Getting Tossed From His Own Party

Ukrainian President's name will be dropped from the name of Petro Poroshenko Bloc, a political party that won the 2014 Ukrainian election. The party plans to return to its old name "Solidarity".

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko continues to disappoint those who stood for him not that long ago; Yuri Lutsenko, the head of Petro Poroshenko Bloc, a political party that won the 2014 Ukrainian parliamentary election with 132 seats, said that the party plans to drop Poroshenko's name from their title and return to their old name "Solidarity".

"Petro Poroshenko Bloc plans to stop using the name of the President in its name and plans to use the name "Solidarity" instead," the press service of the party quoted Lutsenko.

Lutsenko justified the party's decision to get rid of Poroshenko's name by saying that Ukraine needs a party with a strong ideology and team. "We need to move away from forming parties with one leader," he said.

Lutsenko also said that the party was invited to become one of the observers in the European People's Party, the largest political party in the European Parliament since 1999.

Considering Poroshenko's ongoing loss of reputation in the eyes of European leaders, it is probably a wise idea for the party to drop "Poroshenko" from its name to avoid being associated too much with the Ukrainian president in the European Parliament.
 
 #12
Germany's ambassador to US says Obama agreed not to send lethal aid to Ukraine for now
March 9, 2015
By JOSH LEDERMAN

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama agreed last month not to send lethal defensive aid to Ukraine, a top German diplomat said Monday, as lawmakers from both parties continued to press the president to shore up Ukraine's beleaguered military in its fight against Russian-backed separatists.

The German ambassador to the U.S., Peter Wittig, said in an Associated Press interview that Obama agreed to hold off during a White House meeting in February with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. He said Obama had concurred with Merkel that it was important "to give some space for those diplomatic, political efforts that were underway."

"The two leaders exchanged views on that issue and there was unity by them not to impose, or not to go forward with, the delivery of lethal defensive weapons at this time," Wittig told the AP.

The Obama administration has maintained publicly that it's still debating whether to send anti-tank weapons and other defensive arms to bolster Kiev's ability to defend its territory and troops in eastern Ukraine. In remarks to reporters after his meeting with Merkel, Obama said that "the possibility of lethal defensive weapons is one of those options that's being examined" but added that "a decision has not yet been made."

Nearly a dozen lawmakers from both parties joined House Speaker John Boehner last week in urging Obama to supply the weapons without delay, claiming that pro-Russian separatists have only consolidated their gains since the so-called Minsk agreements that led to last month's fragile cease-fire.

Yet many European governments oppose such a move - especially Germany. Those U.S. allies say they fear additional arms would only fuel a military escalation and could spark a wider proxy war with Russia.

"I think we have to weigh carefully whether this would inject an additional element that could be a pretext or a trigger for counter-reaction by the Russian leadership," Wittig said.

The White House declined to elaborate on the status of the decision. But Mark Stroh, a spokesman for the White House's National Security Council, said the U.S. is consulting closely with European allies and continually assessing its policies to ensure they're appropriate to achieve U.S. objectives in Ukraine.

"Our focus from the outset of the crisis has been on supporting Ukraine and on pursuing a diplomatic solution that respects Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity," Stroh said.

As the crisis in Ukraine has deepened over the last year, the Obama administration has sought to show that the U.S. and Europe are operating in lockstep, aiming to deny Russia any opportunity to exploit divisions among Western allies. The U.S. has carefully choreographed economic sanctions on Moscow with Europe while entrusting Merkel, who has perhaps the most productive relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, with much of the diplomatic outreach to Russia.

Yet U.S. defense leaders have laid out an array of military options the Obama administration could consider for arming Ukraine. Testifying before Congress last week, Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, the top NATO commander, said those options range from small arms to more sophisticated weapons that would take longer to arrive and require extensive training.

And America's top diplomat in Europe, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, told Congress that the U.S. was watching to see whether the Minsk agreements are implemented before determining whether to increase its security support to Ukraine. She noted that Obama and European leaders have agreed to deepen sanctions against Russia if there are further cease-fire violations.

The U.S. military said Monday it plans to deploy about 3,000 American troops to Eastern Europe beginning next week, in an effort to bolster support for NATO allies worried about escalating aggression by Russia. Ukraine is not a NATO member, but other nations in the neighborhood like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are NATO allies.

Obama sought to highlight trans-Atlantic unity on sanctions as he discussed the Ukraine crisis Monday with European Council President Donald Tusk, the former leader of Poland. Vice President Joe Biden, in a phone call with Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski, said Russia was still failing to fulfill its obligations under the Minsk agreements.

Putin has denied the U.S. accusation that Russia is arming the rebels in the war in eastern Ukraine, which has killed more than 6,000 people and forced over a million to flee their homes. The fighting began in April, a month after Russia annexed the mostly Russian-speaking Crimean Peninsula.
 
 #13
Moscow Times
March 10, 2015
Decoding the Political Game Behind the Nemtsov Murder Arrests
By Ivan Nechepurenko

As the man suspected of having gunned down opposition leader Boris Nemtsov steps from the Kremlin allegedly confessed on Sunday, citing devotion to Islam as his motive, pundits agreed that the truth is likely much more complex than it seems.

Some reasoned that it would have been impossible for a group of simple thugs to assassinate such a high-profile figure in one of Russia's most secure areas without help from well-connected backers.

Others suggested that the purported Islamist link may be a bid to protect the Kremlin's image.

Still more speculated that the radical Islamist motive provides evidence of an internal power struggle between various branches of the Russian elite.

In particular, analysts pointed to the fact that Chechnya's strongman leader showered suspected triggerman Zaur Dadayev with praise after his arrest went public.

Kadyrov knew Dadayev personally. Until recently, Dadayev served as a deputy chief of Chechnya's infamous Sever police battalion, and had won honors and medals for his police work in the turbulent Caucasus republic. After his arrest was announced, Kadyrov took to Instagram - his preferred method for making important announcements - to refer to Dadayev as a "true Russian patriot."

On Sunday, Dadayev was charged alongside fellow suspect Anzor Gubashev in connection with Nemtsov's Feb. 27 murder. The arrests of three other men were sanctioned by the court: Gubashev's younger brother Shagid, Khamzad Bakhaev and Tamerlan Eskerkhanov.

Another suspect committed suicide by detonating a grenade after police surrounded his Grozny apartment on Saturday, Interfax reported.

A Moscow judge said during two separate hearings related to the case on Sunday that Dadayev had admitted his involvement in the murder, Interfax reported, while the other detained men have maintained their innocence.

The Rosbalt news agency reported that Dadayev told investigators he decided to fire the fatal gunshots upon learning in January of Nemtsov's "negative statements about Russian Muslims, the prophet Muhammad and the Islamic religion."

"Dadayev admitted to having organized this crime," Rosbalt cited an unnamed law enforcement source as having said. "So no one should wait around for any other big revelations or detentions in this case."

Dadayev himself remained silent in the courtroom, neither confirming nor denying the claims of his confession or motive.

Skepticism Mounts

It would have been impossible for a simple group of Islamic radicals to carry out such a precisely calculated execution of a prominent political figure in the heart of Moscow, Russian intelligence expert Andrei Soldatov told The Moscow Times in a phone interview Monday.

"Even if these people are truly responsible for the crime, they represent only the lowest rung of the overall scheme," he said.

Soldatov cited the fact that the assassins knew that Nemtsov would dismiss his driver for the evening, opting instead to take a scenic stroll. They knew precisely where to wait for him as he and his girlfriend crossed an iconic Moscow bridge on their way back to his apartment.

In addition to a wealth of other meticulous security provisions surrounding the Kremlin, parking in the area is restricted. The assassin's getaway driver would had to have known precisely when the shots would be fired in order to take off with the triggerman immediately after the killing, Soldatov said.

"Our worst fears are coming true," Ilya Yashin, a close political ally of Nemtsov, who was among the first people to arrive at the crime scene, wrote on Facebook.

"The official version deflects suspicion from President Vladimir Putin. The state propaganda can now position the president as an effective manager who gave the order to find the killers, and here they are," he wrote.

Yashin pointed out that the slain politician was comparatively tolerant toward Islam. While Nemtsov may have criticized a January attack by Islamist radicals on the headquarters of satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, other public figures criticized the attacks "much more harshly and loudly," Yashin said. The newspaper was targeted after it published a series of cartoon images of the prophet Muhammad that were broadly viewed as offensive.

After the attack, which claimed 11 lives and sparked related violence around Paris, Nemtsov wrote in his blog for Ekho Moskvy: "We are witnessing a medieval Islamic inquisition. ... If Christians live in the 21st century, Muslims live in 1415."

Kadyrov Attacked?

Many analysts have suggested that the arrest of a former high-ranking member of the Sever police battalion - reputed for its brutal crushing of the Islamist insurgency in Chechnya and neighboring Ingushetia - could have been a direct political assault against Kadyrov.

Kadyrov has made no effort to hold back his adoration for Dadayev, particularly with regard to his Islamic piety.

"Anyone who knows Zaur can confirm that he is a deep believer, and that he - like all Muslims - was shocked by the activities of Charlie Hebdo [newspaper] and by comments made in support of reprinting the cartoons," Kadyrov wrote via Instagram on Saturday.

"I knew Zaur as a true Russian patriot," he said.

According to Soldatov, Kadyrov's links to one of the key suspects may be a convenient method of stopping the investigation from spreading to more high-profile figures.

"This may be a convenient tactic: you blame a Kadyrov ally, and the trail stops there, leaving the real instigators unknown to the public," he said.

House of Cards

Others have speculated that the "Islamic trail" may be being used as a tool in political game between various forces both within the Kremlin and among the regions.

The secretary of Ingushetia's security council, Albert Barakhoyev, was the source of the news on some of the detentions over the weekend. Kadyrov is known to have been a source of alarm and irritation for the heads of neighboring republics, including Ingushetian leader Yunus-bek Yevkurov.

In contrast to most other regional heads, Kadyrov has been very active on the federal level, which may be an indication of his political ambitions.

"On one hand there is a desire to 'deter' Kadyrov, but on the other there is an idea that he is a guarantor of stability in Chechnya. As usual, the Kremlin will try to pit different forces against each other in a sort of checks and balances scheme," Alexei Makarkin, deputy head of the Moscow-based think tank Center for Political Technologies, told The Moscow Times.

If the move is aimed at pressuring Kadyrov, Yevkurov may benefit from relative calm emanating from his more powerful neighbor, the analyst said.

But even if the Kremlin's aim is to tame Kadyrov, it will not make too much of a ruckus about it, so as not to disturb the Chechen leader's grip on his home region, Makarkin said.
 
 #14
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
March 9, 2015
How the Nemtsov Affair could reverberate in the North Caucasus
The political situation in the North Caucasus - including the relationship between Chechnya and Russia - is once again being thrown into question as a result of the Nemtsov murder.
By Sergey Markedonov
Sergey Markedonov is Associate Professor of Foreign Policy and Region Studies at Russian State University for the Humanities. Markedonov was also a visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Russia and Eurasia Program, Washington, D.C.

A clearly marked "North Caucasus trail" is beginning to appear in the case of the murder of prominent Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov. Lacking sufficient sources and reliable evidence at present, we risk turning the discussion of this critical issue into idle speculation.

Nevertheless, it is important that we take stock of the circumstances and focus on ascertaining the significance of the event for Chechnya, the North Caucasus and Russia as a whole. The "Nemtsov affair" has not exposed any specific problems of the North Caucasus, but the murder of Nemtsov has certainly shone a spotlight on their potential existence.

Over the past year, the dynamics of this turbulent region have been sidelined by events in Ukraine. The destabilization of the North Caucasus caused alarmists to run wild on the eve of the Winter Olympics in Sochi, yet their predictions failed to materialize. This major sporting event passed off without a hitch from a security point of view. Moreover, compared with 2013, the total number of victims of armed violence in the region fell by 46.9 percent.

April 2014 saw the elimination of one of the most prominent leaders of the jihadi underground, Doku Umarov, and later that fall - after a hiatus of more than two decades - ethnic Chechens were once again enlisted into the ranks of the Russian army (alongside expanded conscription quotas in other regions of Russia's North Caucasus).

Thanks largely to Ukraine, Russian and foreign media began to perceive the North Caucasus not as a "bandit backyard" on the outskirts of Russia, but rather, as a passionate champion of the Kremlin's hegemonic ambitions in the post-Soviet space. This had a considerable impact, too, on public perceptions of the "problem region" across Russia. According to the Levada Center, the slogan "Stop Feeding the Caucasus" in July 2014 was overtly supported by just 19 percent of respondents.

However, these achievements could not hide the flip side of the North Caucasus coin. Sometime back in the 1990s, many politicians and experts discussed the "price" that Russia's central government would have to pay in order to incorporate Chechnya into Russia's overall political and socio-cultural space. On the table were models and methods designed to bring the turbulent region of Chechnya (and with it the whole of the North Caucasus) closer in line with the rest of Russia, together with all its existing flaws yet shorn of some of its distinctly regional characteristics.

The present situation invites a paradoxical conclusion: Over the years the integration of this "problem child" of Russia (a label that could be applied to the region as a whole) has been less about Moscow coming to Grozny than about Grozny coming to Moscow. And that black-and-white rhetoric about "enemies" and "traitors," which only 3-5 years ago was considered an extravagant overture from the "field" (and an acceptable price for regional loyalty and stability there) is becoming increasingly popular in by no means marginal political circles at the national level.

There are rational explanations for this about-face. The grinding external pressure (from sanctions to the effective freeze on a wide range of diplomatic contacts) is forcing a response. However, the fact remains that over the last year the line between Moscow's respectability and Grozny's extravagance has been considerably effaced.

And so it was that after the arrest of a suspect in connection with the murder of Nemtsov, through social media accounts such as Instagram, the head of Chechnya (Ramzan Kadyrov) continued to reflect on said suspect's loyalty to Russia and heroism. Such assessments, as well as earlier statements on the collective responsibility of the families of members of the underground movement and unassisted attempts to reconcile yesterday's militants, still lack a proper appraisal and response from the central authorities.

All this did not suddenly appear from nowhere. The military field management of the North Caucasus (built on the principle of "strong personalities, weak institutions") has posed certain challenges before. In this regard, it is worth noting that the rise in popularity of Islamist sentiments in the region is mainly due not to the successful efforts of preachers, but to the dysfunctional secular systems of various spheres of life. Hence the appeal to mosques, sheikhs or Salafi and radical jihadi groups as potential arbitrators.

As a result, the "competition of jurisdictions" has led to conflict and violence, since the recognition of just one religious authority as legitimate creates problems. Moreover, globalization provides an opportunity to get acquainted with the "achievements" of radical foreign brands without having to visit the Middle East or Afghanistan. And it would be naive to suppose that the far from peaceful reflections on this matter can be kept inside the borders of one select region of the country without there being any attempts to export them further afield.

The individual responsibility and involvement of the parties to this high-profile assassination will, let us hope, be established under a competent investigation and impeccable legal process. But already there is reason to explore at least two basic theses.

First, the regional management, which has been built for many years almost solely on the basis of loyalty, has significant costs, primarily the de-monopolization of violence. In the past year we have repeatedly (and justifiably) criticized neighboring Ukraine for its privatization of law enforcement and security issues. But now it seems the time has come to pay attention to this problem inside Russia and to draw the appropriate conclusions.

Whatever form stability takes in any particular region, the strategic objective should always remain visible behind the tactical goal, namely the integration of the region into the Russian Federation according to the general rules of the game, and not the creation of a state within a state with its own notions of law, power and control. Deprived of that, the tactical achievements of recent years (minimized terrorist activity, military conscription) are not irreversible.

Second, the delegation of considerable authority to the "field" without proper checks and balances is fraught with danger, for it causes the opposition (both liberal and nationalist) to perceive the entire region (in this case, the North Caucasus) in a negative light. It is labeled a "burden" that needs to be cast off.

It is a dangerous illusion, and one that was demonstrated by the dashed hopes for speedy democratization following the collapse of the union state! But without a change of priorities in the process of integrating the North Caucasus, such sentiments will grow - and not only among hard-line oppositionists.
 
 #15
The Vineyard of the Saker
http://thesaker.is
March 9, 2015
Nemtsov murder - more questions than answers

According to RT, Zaur Dadaev, who had reportedly confessed involvement in Nemtsov's murder, said he organized the crime in revenge for the opposition leader's "negative comments on Muslims and Islam," according to Rosbalt's source in law enforcement.  Sounds plausible?

Not really.  Possible?  I suppose so.  But plausible?

Zaur Dadaev  - who supposedly pulled the trigger -  was the deputy commander of the Chechen special operations battalion "Vostok".  Hardly your typical Takfiri freak.  Not only that, but Ramzan Kadyrov came pretty close to vouching for him.  This is what he wrote in his Instagram:

"I knew Zaur as a real patriot of Russia.  He served from the very first days of the formation of the regiment which later became part of the 46th Independent Operational Purposes Brigade of the Internal Troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation.  He had the rank of Lieutenant and the function of Deputy Battalion Commander.  Zaur was one of the most fearless and courageous soldiers in the regiment.  He especially distinguished himself during the battle near Benoi where a special operation was taking place to destroy a large group of terrorists.  He has been awarded the Order of Courage, the medals "For Valor" and "For Service of the Chechen Republic" and a letter of commendation from the President.  I am deeply convinced that he was a real patriot and that he was willing to die for is Motherland.  I don't know why is resigned from the ranks of the Internal Troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.  I was told he explained it by his sick mother.  The media now says that Zaur confessed his participation in the murder of Boris Nemtsov.  All those who knew Zaur agree that he was a deeply religious person and that he, like all Muslims, was deeply shocked by the events of Charlie Hebdo and by all the supportive comments about the caricatures.  I ordered the Head of the Security Council of the Chechen Republic Vakhit Usmaev to conduct a thorough investigation into the resignation of Zaur, to study his behavior and his mood before his departure.  In any case, if the court confirms the guilt of Dadaev then by killing a person he committed a grievous crime.  But I want to stress again that he could never had done anything against Russia for whom he has risked his life many times over the years.  Beslan Shavanov, who died on the previous day during his arrest, was also a courageous warrior.  We believe that a thorough investigation will be conducted and that it will show whether Dadaev is really guilt and what his motives were."

I don't know about you, but this makes no sense to me.  Kadyrov has never been shy about condemning misbehaving Chechens or about his categorically uncompromising stance against all forms of terrorism.  And yet, in this case, he seems to be harboring the deepest doubts even though Dadaev apparently confessed.  Kadyrov does admit that Dadaev was shocked by the events of Charlie Hebdo and the support for the caricatures (of the Prophet) , but at the same time he also finds it unthinkable that Dadaev would do anything which could hurt Russia (which the murder of Nemtsov certainly did).  Let's summarize what Kadyrov says about Dadaev:

Courageous and even fearless
Patriotic to the point of sacrificing his life
Deeply religious

How does any of that fit the Russian TV version about these men killing Nemtsov for money?  In my opinion, not at all.  However, I suppose that if Dadaev did really believe that Nemtsov was a threat to Russia and/or an enemy of Islam, he could have decided to sacrifice his life to kill the man.  After all, his only statement to the media was "I love the Prophet, peace be upon him".

The problem with that version is that men like Dadaev normally do not act on their own: deeply religious people and soldiers have that in common that they typpically act under guidance of spiritual or military superiors. Did Dadaev fall under the influence of an extremist religious figure?  But if that is the case, then how did Chechen counter-intelligence fail to detect that an important Chechen official was having regular contacts with the type of extremists which the Chechens usually ruthlessly suppress?  Furthermore, Dadaev did not act alone, but in a group.  So how did all these man get involved?

Then there is the gun.  A Makarov 9x18mm whose clip was filled with bullets from different factories including 30 year old rounds.  Why would a man like Dadaev use such a weapon and, especially, such ammo when he probably had access to pretty much anything he wanted in Chechnia?!  Dadaev was certainly expert enough in guns to realize that using such old ammo was a terrible choice (a brand new GSh-18 with modern ammo is what I would expect a Chechen special forces officer to carry)

There is also something very wrong with the statement of Dadaev: sure he loves the Prophet, but if he believed that Nemtsov deserved to die, why not say so in front of the press?  And why have all his alleged accomplices remained silent?  Why not act like, say, Brevik and proudly explain his actions?!

The day following Nemtsov's murder I predicted that the FSB would make arrests pretty soon and that I expected them to "find a fall-guy, a patsy, who will have no provable contacts with any western services and who, ideally, might even have some contacts with the Russian services".  Well, Dadaev does have contact with the Chechen security services alright, but for the rest the picture looks far more complicated than just a "crazy lone shooter".

At this point I will readily admit that I am unable to connect the dots, hopefully somebody else will do better.  But until then, I reserve judgment about what really happened.

The Saker

 
 #16
http://readrussia.com
March 9, 2015
Putin's Poll Numbers Aren't "Made up"
by MARK ADOMANIS

Many Russia watchers, particular the more hawkish ones, paint a picture of a Russian government that is universally loathed and despised. The regime, in this narrative, has no social roots worth mentioning, it's merely a small gang of thieves who stole power and have, through methods fair and foul, managed to hang on to it. Were the structure to be given just the slightest push, many argue, the whole rotten thing would come crashing down.

These analysts have a problem, though: according to all of the polls Vladimir Putin remains exceptionally popular. When asked, more than 8 in 10 Russians voice support for his actions as president, within spitting distance of his all-time high.

Their response is as simple as it is elegant: say that the polls are meaningless.

The thing is that even a cursory look at Levada's website shows enormous fluctuations in the data. In December of 2010 Putin's approval was at a robust 79%: not as gaudy as the go-go days of the energy boom, but still quite high by any comparison you'd care to make. However his poll numbers then went on a protracted losing streak, slowing shedding a percent here and a percent there until, in November of 2013, Putin's popularity bottomed out at a mere 61%. A nearly 20% decline in approval rating does not seem to correspond to a thesis that the numbers are fabricated in a Kremlin laboratory.

Now, if anything, during the time of Putin's long swoon in the polls the regime was cracking down more aggressively on the liberal opposition. The period I've indicated above (roughly the three years from the beginning of 2011 until the end of 2013) featured "the switch" between Putin and Medvedev and the former's return to the presidency under a reinvigorated (and often quite nasty) form of Russian conservatism. The "signals" the state was sending, in other words, were not positive ones. And yet, despite this worsening political environment, almost four in ten Russians felt comfortable telling a pollster than they did not approve of Putin's actions. If that's an "environment of fear," it had a strange way of manifesting in the data.

The real bump in Putin's numbers, an 11% increase from 69 to 80%, came not during the Sochi Olympics (there was only a modest 4-5% upward shift) but in March of 2014. What happened during March of 2014? Well quite a lot of stuff but one thing stands out above everything else: the annexation of Crimea.

The simplest explanation for sudden and dramatic increase in Putin's popularity is not that Russians suddenly realized the nature of the regime under which they had been living, the regime itself really hadn't changed very much over the previous year or two, but that they approved of the annexation of Crimea.  

In other words Russians weren't particularly supportive of Putin's policies of 2011-2013, they said as much to the people conducting Levada's polls, but they were hugely supportive of his new, and very different, policies in 2014.

The enthusiastic public support of recent Russian government policy presents a pretty serious problem for people like Garry Kasparov, who simultaneously denounce the annexation of Crimea and claim that a democratic Russia would follow a different path. I'm not so sure. Every available piece of evidence suggests that Russians were extremely supportive of the invasion and subsequent annexation of Crimea.

Given this public support there's no reason to expect a more democratic government would be in any hurry to give Crimea back to Kiev (a fact that the canny oppositionists like Navalny have already realized). In other words Putin could fall but whoever comes after him will likely follow a very similar policy with regards to the newest federal subject.

It's amazing that I need to state it, it really ought to go without saying, but every time I point out Putin's poll numbers someone on the internet accuses me of supporting his policies. So let me be very clear:  the fact that the Russian public supports Putin does not in any way justify his actions. Public opinion supports all kinds of terrible stuff around the world. Even in nice, boring social democracies like Western Europe majorities of the public express support for things like hanging or mandatory castration of sex offenders. Saying "people support politician X" does not in any way mean "politician X is a great guy and I like him."

But even if I personally disagree with the Russian public's position, as I most certainly do concerning Crimea, that position matters. It matters quite a lot. It matters much more than my opinion or the opinion of any of the other "Russia watchers."

There is, I think, a tendency on the part of many Westerners, particularly those of a more hawkish, neoconservative persuasion, to assume that the current standoff is a pure contrivance of the Kremlin, that the foreign policy which we all find so objectionable is being foisted on a reluctant and beleaguered Russian populace. Looking at the poll numbers, and the sharp upward shift in Putin's popularity once he went all in on confrontation, it's hard to find that argument very persuasive.
 
 #17
Christian Science Monitor
March 10, 2015
With sanctions biting, Moscow tries new tack: nurturing small business
The Technopolis project is aimed at helping both Russian and foreign startups circumvent a notoriously predatory bureaucracy. But can its lessons be applied to the country as a whole?
By Fred Weir, Correspondent

MOSCOW - Occupying the cavernous spaces of a former automobile factory in Moscow's industrial zone, Technopolis has been struggling for years.

The project, a brainchild of the city government, targeted Russia's long underperforming technology sector, providing a state-assisted leg up in a forbidding, oligarch-dominated marketplace. Yet it languished while Russia was rolling in oil wealth and had no quarrel with the West.

But now, amid tightening sanctions on Russia, Technopolis is benefiting from a political fair wind and promises of Kremlin cash. It's attracting dozens of mostly hi-tech start-ups who receive reliable premises, access to government assistance, and special customs and tax privileges. In return, they are to help Russia win the "import substitution" battle by producing goods formerly sourced from the West.

"Sometimes crisis is an opportunity. History shows that for Russians, the worse things are, the better they respond," says Igor Ischenko, the CEO of Technopolis. "We have a lot of energies and capacities in this country, and we could accomplish far more for ourselves than we've been doing."

Yet the biggest challenge may not be helping Technopolis flourish, but expanding its model to Russia's market as a whole amid formidable obstacles.

Slashing red tape - and graft

In a speech to parliament last December, President Vladimir Putin outlined what he called a "rational" program to wean Russia from its deep dependence on Western goods. That's where Technopolis, and a handful of other centers like it around the country, have become central to Kremlin plans.

For most of the Putin era, Russian big businesses sold raw materials to the global market, and imported consumer goods. They made money coming and going on that model, and actively discouraged the emergence of domestic competitors.

But that's changing fast. Almost 30 companies have set up production in the vast, modern former AZLK plant, which once made Moskvich compact cars for the Soviet middle class. They produce everything from computer components to medical equipment to fiberglass piping. Mr. Ischenko says there will be 50 by year's end, and there's room for scores more in the 3.7 million square feet of floorspace. Some of the tenants are Russian companies, with original technology, but many are foreigners leaping over the growing wall of isolation to establish themselves in the Russian market.

Most of the tenants say the facilities are key to starting up - and getting established - in Russia. They avoid the pitfalls of trying to find industrial premises in Moscow, which can include high and constantly changing rents, capricious landlords, and the occasional visit from gangsters. Technopolis provides consulting services to slash ubiquitous red tape, and CEO Ischenko claims that it locks out corrupt bureaucrats entirely. It has an in-house customs office, and tenants get tax breaks. It offers direct connections with top Russian banks and skilled labor exchanges, and helps with market outreach.

"They come here with a list of issues that make it really hard to start up a business in Russia, and we help them to solve a lot of them," says Ischenko.

"Here we found reliable long-term premises, government support, various other kinds of assistance and patriotic approval," says Alex Elkind, manufacturing director for NeoPhotonics, a California-based firm that is establishing a production facility to make components for the next generation of photonic communications and wireless devices.

He says that since the revelations of former CIA contractor Edward Snowden, it's been a national security issue in Russia to lessen the country's reliance on the West in critical areas, although full independence is an impossibly tall order.

"In particular, Russia wants to become self-sufficient in terms of data storage and signals processing in telecommunications, and so there's a lot of attention to that."

Newly competitive

Mr. Elkind says his company doesn't fall under any existing sanctions, and that the move to Russia is purely business. "We have customers lined up in Russia and [former Soviet] countries; it's a big market. But, of course, we only produce components; most of the main equipment is still made in the West."

Another workshop here belongs to Amitech, which makes molded fiberglass pipes, seats, and bodies for cars and buses. Business development manager Anna Muravyeva says that 60 percent of plastic pipes for water and gas delivery systems were imported before the crisis. When production lines are fully running, Amitech will be able to replace all of that, she says.

"Technologies like this take a lot of capital investment," she says. "The [Russian] state is only now beginning to take an interest in helping to establish them."

Russia's economic downturn is a mixed blessing, many tenants say. On one hand, the market for all kinds of products is shrinking. On the other, the sharp devaluation of the ruble has lowered costs for Russian-made goods. For those who export, or who normally compete with foreign-made products, that's a boon.

"Before the crisis we had tough competition from foreign competitors, such as General Electric and Siemens, but now it's much better," says Maxim Voronkov, commercial director of Profotek, a Russian company that makes equipment for big electricity providers.

"In the past, even big Russian companies were inclined to give preference to the foreign products rather than take a chance on a small young Russian company. But now, our costs are half those of analogous foreign competitors, and our technology is just as good. And 'made in Russia' is suddenly in favor. So right now, we're the winners. Our production has doubled since last year," he says.

'Little sign of reform'

But Technopolis is a tiny island in Russia, and even within Moscow, a sprawling megalopolis of 18 million people.

"We're talking about the need to rebuild Russia's economy from the grassroots," says Alexei Devyatov, chief economist for UralSib, a Moscow-based investment firm. "There are enormous institutional obstacles - corruption, lack of infrastructure, bureaucracy, weak property rights - that stand in the way of business start-ups. Perhaps you can create a little oasis where these problems are mostly solved, but the task is to do that for the whole country."

And that, Mr. Devyatov says, looks to be a bridge too far.

"The state is paying more attention to the need to stimulate 'import substitution' capacities, and throwing some money at this, but as yet there is little sign of the systematic reforms that we need," he says. "I think Russian authorities are mostly sitting the crisis out, and waiting for the price of oil to go back up."
 

#18
www.rt.com
March 10, 2015
Russia's reserves, swift govt action underpin investment grade - Fitch

The Fitch rating agency remains relatively optimistic about the Russian economy, saying $360 billion reserves and prompt state action support the country's investment grade status. However, Russia's rating could be revised in April, it added.

Fitch currently remains the only rating agency from the so-called 'Big Three' that has kept Russia's sovereign rating in investment territory at BBB-. But this could change next month, Paul Rawkins, a senior director at Fitch Ratings, said in a telephone interview toBloomberg.

"We still take the view that this is a slow-burn situation and the factors we regard as keeping Russia investment grade aren't suddenly all going to disappear overnight," Rawkins said. "There's no question Russia is facing some severe external shocks, but it's also important to keep in mind its strong starting position."

Fitch downgraded Russia to the lowest BBB- investment grade with a negative outlook in mid-January.

However, the agency experts say reserves of over $360 billion are sufficient to contain the crisis. The rising surplus in the balance of payments along with a more realistic budget also supports Russia's investment status.

Rawkins added that wealth levels in Russia are higher than in other emerging economies with the same rating, such as India and Turkey. The economic pain is unlikely to lead to political discontent in the near future, he said.

In January the agency stressed that a prolonged period of low oil prices, as well as the continuation of the recession into 2016, with negative consequences for public finances and the stability of the financial sector is a negative factor for the country's rating.

The uncertain outlook for oil prices and the risks of capital outflow add to the issue. According to Fitch forecasts, the Russian economy will shrink by 4.5 percent in 2015 and by one percent in 2016.

"It could continue next year if sanctions remain on, the oil price remains low and if there's no investment," he said, adding that high inflation is expected to reach 17 percent by the end of 2015, a decline in real incomes and recession exacerbate the situation.

The European Union and the United States share a single opinion that sanctions against Russia should remain in place, said Donald Tusk, chairman of the European Council on Monday in Washington during a meeting with US President Barack Obama. Last week the US announced extending sanctions against Russia for another year.

In January S&P downgraded Russia's sovereign credit rating in foreign currency to a 'junk' level BB + with a negative outlook. In February, Moody's also lowered the rating of the Russian Federation to the speculative grade Ba1.

The decision on a downgrade came despite the currency starting to bounce back and the Minsk agreements being reached. Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov then said the Moody's downgrade was groundless and politically motivated.

However, China's largest rating agency Dagong rated Russia at a high investment A grade with a stable outlook, as it believes that the scale of Russia's fiscal and foreign exchange reserves provides a necessary buffer for its economic outlook to remain stable.


 
 #19
Moscow Times
March 10, 2015
Investors Unwilling to Take a Gamble on Russia
By Gleb Kuznetsov
Gleb Kuznetsov is a Moscow-based political commentator.

Both former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin and current Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, along with numerous other Russian officials and pro-Kremlin economists were outraged and perplexed about the decision by Moody's and Standard & Poor's to assign Russia a "junk" rating late last month.

They claim that economic ratings have become a tool of political pressure and that the agencies themselves have political agendas and are biased toward Russia. "Look at the numbers," they say, "at Russia's assets and reserves."

Back in the boom years I suggested to a British investment banker that the rating agencies unfairly give Russia risk factors on a par with such developing countries as Ghana. He listened to me attentively and said: "We know what to expect from Ghana, but we don't know what to expect from the Russian economy. Economics is, first of all, about predictability. Considering the complete lack of predictability in Russia, we have to factor in added precautions."

All expert opinions and subjective formulas aside, low ratings reflect the possibility of investors losing their money if a country defaults - something that purely economic indicators do not necessarily reflect.

It is unrealistic to hope for a high rating when market players worry that Russian leaders can suddenly announce: "We refuse to repay our debts, however small and insignificant they are compared to our national wealth. And yes, we are seizing the property owned by nationals of countries with whom we have foreign policy differences."

Investors must obviously take such risks into account. For them, it makes no difference if a country defaults because it has no money or because it has no desire to pay. Accordingly, rating agencies must factor in the overall condition of society and where it is headed - as determined by the media agenda, major public protests or rallies, the results of public opinion polls and such things as the steady flow of weapons and "volunteer" soldiers into neighboring countries.

In the same way, the expectation of an electoral win for the Syriza Party in Greece depressed the economy in both that country and the wider European Union for six months. In Russia's case, the problem is not so much politically motivated moves by an insidious West as it is this country's political uncertainty combined with the constant stream of negative domestic news for investors.

For example, United Russia deputy Yevgeny Fyodorov recently proposed a constitutional ban on using U.S. dollars in Russia. What's more, deputies from the Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) and the Communist Party - the second and third largest factions in the Russian parliament - regularly and boldly call for nationalizing foreign assets in this country.

Even if Russia's political elite do not take those proposals seriously, they have become so accustomed to seeing that agenda item that the idea no longer sounds so absurd. Why would investors give more weight to the words of Kudrin - who holds no official status - than they would to the largest political factions in the Russian parliament and the millions of voters who support them?

Economic and investment ratings reflect reality. And that reality is not just figures indicating the national budget's solvency, the price for oil and gas exports, the capitalization of Russia's largest companies and the government's ability to pay down its debt. It also includes the political reality consisting of the laws parliament passes, the public statements senior officials make and, ultimately, the general mood and inclination of the people.

Russia's economic ratings suffer as a result of its political risks, and those derive from the picture it presents to the world and the direction in which Russian society is headed.

If Russia was a rigid dictatorship, it would have lower risks. But Russia is ostensibly a democracy, and it constantly provides "updates" on the public mood by means of television shows, social surveys and statements by senior officials.

Again, the "rating" Russia receives is based not only on national budget figures, but also on the zealous anti-U.S. tirades of television show hosts and the constant stream of parliamentary initiatives meant to "limit," "ban" and "halt access to" this, that and the other.

The Investigative Committee - the most influential policing and law enforcement agency in the land - has proposed removing the principle of the supremacy of international law over national law from the Constitution on the premise that it leads to "legal sabotage" against Russia.

Why should investors and rating agencies ignore the possibility that within six months' time the Russian legal system could degenerate into "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma," rendering futile any attempt to seek justice in Russia through an appeal to international law?

Russian liberals often object to these questions. They argue that it is necessary to distinguish between the "domestic political" and "foreign economic" narratives of the Russian authorities, that the populism that finds acceptable use in domestic politics has no effect on the activities of economic entities and regulators.

Unfortunately, nobody really believes that the government can operate as a "two-faced Janus," showing the world its "political" persona - a grim-faced, bearded boor who longs for his medieval past, while showing investors its young, optimistic, innovative and friendly countenance.

And nobody - not investors, the leaders of neighboring states or Russian businesspeople hoping to develop their assets - can know with any certainty which of those faces they will encounter at any given moment. Will it be the bearded, ax-wielding Slav of lore or the progressive and pragmatic manager sporting a designer watch and fashionable haircut and holding a billion-dollar proposal for developing the untold riches of the Far East and Siberia?

This misunderstanding gives rise to all the risks that cause so much damage to Russia's foreign policy reputation, its economic rating and the social well-being of its citizens.

And not even the creation of a new ratings agency to counter the "slander" of the big three Western agencies, the lifting of sanctions that liberals would see as a sign of a "thaw" in relations, or a new Cold War that has the conservative world so scared will help Russia determine once and for all who it really is.
 
 #20
Brookings
www.brookings.edu
March 9, 2015
One year of western sanctions against Russia: We still live in different worlds
By Clifford G. Gaddy
Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Center on the United States and Europe

Editor's Note: This piece is adapted from an op-ed originally written for Internationale Politik und Gesellschaft, a Berlin-based journal on current international affairs published by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation.

The United States and the European Union have now both announced that they are extending the economic sanctions they first imposed against Russia in March 2014 for its actions in Ukraine. One year on, the West thus remains committed to a policy which has failed so far and which has no chance of succeeding in the future. The sanctions policy was destined to fail because it was based on false assumptions about how most Russians think-in particular, how they think about security.

We and the Russians are fundamentally at odds on what sanctions are all about. The current official Western view is that sanctions are a way to punish Russia for violating the rules of the international order and to thereby correct its behavior in the future. The Russians believe the sanctions are designed to weaken Russia and reduce its ability to defend itself. These diverging views are only the tip of the iceberg of mutual misunderstanding between Russia and the West, misunderstanding that is rooted in our fundamentally different views of how nations can best ensure their security in today's world. Angela Merkel famously said that Vladimir Putin "lives in another world." The meaning was that he has a completely different frame of reference, and as a result, that he does not views events and actions the same way that we in the West do. What Merkel said of Putin applies to the majority of Russians. This is certainly true as regards concepts of global and national security. The West and Russia are worlds apart on what constitutes a security threat, on Russia's actions in Ukraine, and on what sanctions represent.

Our Western view is that security in an interconnected world has to be based on cooperation, dialogue, and trust. It can only be guaranteed by everyone adhering to a rules-based system. Russia rejects that idea of security. It believes that the only real guarantee of its own security and sovereignty is its independent ability to defend itself. No multinational or supranational organization can guarantee that.

We disagree completely about what led to the current standoff in Ukraine. In Putin's world, he acted to defend Russia by neutralizing an imminent security risk. Russia, he believes, is under assault by the West. Russia could not allow Ukraine, with which it is so deeply integrated economically, to be brought fully into the sphere of influence of its enemy. Ukraine would be in a position to be persuaded-or compelled-to act against Russia, and Russia would have no way to counter that pressure. For us, by stark contrast, Russia's violation of the rules threatens our entire system and therefore the security (and prosperity and freedom) of all.

Western leaders explain that sanctions are intended "to change Putin's calculus." This assumes that there are some gains he would be willing to forego in return for easing the pain of current or future sanctions. Yet when we apply this cost-benefit model-which is one adopted from the realm of the economics of crime and law enforcement-we fundamentally misunderstand what is at stake for Russia. Ukraine is not loot from a robbery, whose value Russia weighs against the cost of seizing it. In its own view, Russia acted in Ukraine to defend against an existential threat.

By applying sanctions, we think we are pressuring Russia to shift its behavior towards a more acceptable form. Russians see us as forcing them to choose: either accept a political and military situation that will threaten the survival of their nation or be subject to a constantly intensified campaign of economic warfare. For Russia, this is not a choice. It is defeat in either case.

We are therefore caught in a trap, one of our own making. We adopted a policy that could never work as it was intended, namely, as a way to force Russia to change its behavior and obey the rules of our order. Russia will never respect those rules as long as it remains convinced that our order prohibits Russia from guaranteeing its own security. Sanctions can therefore not solve our "Russia problem." Russia will act as it has in Ukraine, and worse, as long as it feels insecure and still remains capable of defending against threats.

If "winning" in this conflict for us means that we force Russia to acknowledge that our version of international security prevails over its version of security, there is only one way we can win. Russia must collapse completely. There are, of course, those in the West who think Russia is headed for collapse internally, perhaps sooner rather than later, and that sanctions will hasten the day. This is a very dangerous bet. Because if we merely put Russia at risk of collapse, it will feel compelled to act preemptively. As long as Russia has retaliatory capability (across the full range of its arsenal from nuclear and other military weapons to its energy and cyber weapons), it will use them all before capitulating. If our strategy is to force Russia to renounce all goals of independently guaranteeing its own security and sovereignty, then we have to be prepared to fight to the end. We have to have a plan of how to neutralize all of Russia's weapons, or be prepared to survive them.

If this is not where we want to go, what are our options? A nonmilitary outcome can only be achieved by resolving our basic clash over notions of security. Putin is interested in security. So are we. We have fundamentally different notions. Ultimately, reconciling these differences has to be the real subject of negotiation between us.
 
 #21
Reuters
March 9, 2015
IMF Assumes Ukraine To Get $15.4 Billion From Creditor Talks: Reuters Exclusive

(Reuters) - The International Monetary Fund's bailout program for Ukraine assumes Kiev will be able to get $15.4 billion from talks with its creditors, according to four sources familiar with the IMF's documents.

The assumption is necessary to ensure Ukraine's sovereign debt can fall to 70 percent of gross domestic product by 2020, a level the IMF would deem sustainable, according to three people.

Under its rules, the IMF cannot lend to countries unless it believes they will be able to pay back the money eventually.

Targeting a particular level for debt renegotiation, considering debt talks have not yet begun, points to the uncertainty surrounding the $40 billion international rescue package for Ukraine announced last month.

After a year of political upheaval and war, Ukraine's economy is in tailspin with a currency that just pulled back from record lows and the highest interest rates in 15 years.

Under the IMF program, Kiev must make deep changes to its energy sector and banking system, and tackle decades of corruption, even as it battles pro-Russia separatists in its eastern regions.

An IMF spokeswoman was not immediately available to comment. Last month, the IMF declined to share details of the financing package, and said it had not made any assumptions about a debt restructuring for private creditors.

The Washington-based fund announced a preliminary agreement for a new $17.5 billion, four-year loan program for Ukraine last month, alongside pledges from the World Bank, the United States, the European Union and other countries.

The IMF's board is widely expected to approve the program when it meets on Wednesday after Kiev passed a new draft budget last week to help it clinch the deal.

Finance Minister Natalia Yaresko also said the Ukrainian government expects to get $15 billion from talks with holders of its sovereign bonds, and should begin the discussions after the IMF deal goes through.

Boutique investment firm Rothschild has invited investors to organize a Ukraine creditor group ahead of the talks, which are expected to be difficult in light of Ukraine's ongoing war, sources familiar with the situation told Reuters.


 
 #22
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
March 10, 2015
Professor Moty Cristal: Why culture matters when negotiating with Russians
Moty Cristal, a professor of Professional Practice in Negotiation Dynamics at the Moscow School of Management Skolkovo, spoke with RBTH about why Russians avoid bargaining and who is in an advantageous position following the Minsk talks on Ukraine.
Gleb Fedorov, RBTH

In a series of interviews with professors at the Moscow School of Management Skolkovo, RBTH explores the particulars of doing business with Russians. Moty Cristal is a professor of Professional Practice in Negotiation Dynamics at the Moscow School of Management Skolkovo.

RBTH: Does culture matter in the negotiation process?

Moty Cristal: It matters a lot. Negotiations are conducted between people, between human beings. And a human being is a combination of his or her own psychological profile, education system and culture. Culture defines many of the characteristic behaviors of a human being.
10 varieties of Russian smiles

For many years the classic negotiation literature coming from America argued that there is a preferred way to negotiate, which is the "win-win" strategy with the classic rational attitude toward negotiation being to maximize profit (a win-win strategy aims to find a solution advantageous for both parties - RBTH).

When I studied at Harvard 20 years ago, cross-cultural elements were still under-appreciated. There was one right way to negotiate: using the win-win strategy. And I, as an Israeli coming from the Middle East, said you have to incorporate cultural elements, because there is not just one right way to negotiate with Americans, Jordanians or Palestinians. Even Harvard did an abrupt turn and acknowledged the fact that culture matters today.

RBTH: Do Russians conduct business negotiations differently from other cultures?

M.C.: Russian people that grew up and were educated in the Soviet era negotiate differently than a young 23-year old or even a 35-year-old Russian entrepreneur or high-tech visionary. Russian business culture has seen a dramatic shift over the past 20 years from a very "sila"-oriented (power - RBTH) negotiation culture.

One of the key elements for a win-win cooperation strategy is the capability to share information. But information sharing is not in the DNA of Russian people. Russians still have a long way to go to adopt or change their mentality from a power-based mindset to an interest-based or a win-win-based one.
RBTH: What would you name as the key difference of the Russian negotiation style?

M.C.: There are characteristics that are typical now for Russian negotiation culture. Putting aside this "sila" strategy, which translates to, "I will insist and if not, I will threaten, and if it doesn't work, I will threaten more," I find two very dominant elements in Russian negotiation culture.

One is what I call empire perspective. Russians do perceive of themselves as belonging to an empire. This is why some elements that are very common to the rest of the world, Russians are very bad at. They don't know how to bargain, because they prefer to negotiate. They think, "I see the big picture; I see negotiations as a battle." In going to the market, I leave it to Indians, Tajiks or Uzbeks. This is why I say to my Russian colleagues: if you go to India to negotiate a project, take an Uzbek or a Tajik as part of your negotiation team. Because they are very good at bargaining.

The second element is the concept of "otnosheniye" (relations - RBTH), which is a fundamental value in Russian culture. The idea is, if you don't trust someone, you don't share information. This is why in order to do business you need to have very, very good and deep otnosheniye with your partners. In order to have good otnosheniye, it has to be tested over a long period of time. And this contradicts the Western mindset that time is money.

The West sees relationships in a very instrumental way. I can pick up the phone and call the supplier that I worked with five years ago and say, you know, I want to reestablish business. In Russia it will not happen. Here you have to work to build otnosheniye. I ask Americans and other westerners, how much time you think you need to invest just in being social - drinking, eating, going fishing or going bowling just before you get to start talking about business. For westerners, it's simple: you have money, I have a good product, let's do business. It doesn't work in Russia. You need to invest time.

RBTH: Is this the same way that negotiations are done in politics?

M.C.:It's different, because there is no win-win outcome in politics today. There is what we call a strategic alliance, or alliances, which reflect some sort of the win-win idea in a sense, that sides have the same strategic goals at one particular point of time. There are alliances that are much deeper, like those between the U.K.-U.S. and Russia-China. In politics sila is the only game in town, although in business this is not always the case. In business I can be a very small player with no funds, but I have the technology, the knowledge. But politics is the pure power game.

RBTH: Let's take an example. Who do you think won the Minsk talks over Ukraine?

M.C.: I think that looking at it from a perspective of winning and losing is a completely wrong perspective to analyze the situation. You need to adopt a systemic language of equilibrium or patterns, or dynamics. Currently the West is managing to generate the dynamics that corner Russia more and more. You can talk about strategic victory or tactical victory.

I have no clue what Russia's end game is, but it wanted results. There are so many possible outcomes to the current situation. At least the West clarified what their strategic aim is: to get Russia out of Ukraine and bring Ukraine closer to the E.U. and the West.

The West's behavior shows that - I see it as a negotiator - they have already given up on Crimea. If the parties were able to stabilize the equilibrium, that Ukraine is Ukraine and is closer to the E.U. and Crimea goes to Russia, I think that this is a kind of equilibrium that the West would have accepted.

The question is what is Russia's end game? In today's politics the definition of power "full" or power "less" is completely different. Russia cannot use its military might because of the consequences, because of many things. But there is no doubt that if Russia wanted to it could occupy Ukraine in three hours. Why don't they do it?

The big question is, to what extent do you define your interests or prioritize your interests. What is more important for the Russian government: to continue the fight and support the militants or get the sanctions lifted? But this decision will not wait forever. Today with oil prices going down, I think priorities should be with economic decisions rather than political goals. But, tomorrow oil prices could be on the rise and the decision could change. It is a dynamic system.
 
 
#23
www.rt.com
March 10, 2015
Putin signs bill allowing removal of NGOs from 'foreign agents' list

Russian President Vladimir Putin has approved a bill that allows the Ministry of Justice to remove non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from the list of foreign agents after a formal inspection.

The new bill, which was signed by Putin on Monday, was submitted by the president earlier in February, and adopted by the Russian State Duma on February 27. The law will come into force within nine days.

The new piece of legislation allows NGOs in Russia to send requests to the Justice Ministry, asking to be exempted from registering as a "foreign agent."

Following the request, the NGO must go through an unplanned inspection, which would look into whether it received foreign funding or participated in political activities in Russia in the year prior to filing the request.

The Justice Ministry can grants exemptions following the investigation. The decision must be made within three months. Should the request be denied, the NGO has the power to appeal the decision in court.

Read more
Election watchdog Golos demands to be removed from 'foreign agents' list after court victory

Back in 2012, Putin signed into force a set of amendments to the Law on Non-Commercial Organizations, ordering all groups that receive funding from abroad and are engaged in political activities to register as "foreign agents." Currently, the foreign agents list includes over 35 NGOs.

The bill proved to be controversial, with opponents - both in Russia and abroad - claiming that labeling NGOs as foreign agents would threaten their existence in Russia. But Russian authorities countered that foreign agents had equal rights with other Russian NGOs, and the sole task of the new rule was to inform Russian voters about the possible motives of various participants of the political process.
 
 #24
Public Radio International
www.pri.org
March 9, 2015
Putin isn't just trolling for votes. His dislike of the West is real

A report on Russian TV this weekend offered a startling revelation about the annexation of Crimea last year: President Vladimir Putin himself ordered the annexation, weeks before Crimea held a referendum on self-determination.

The Kremlin had previously depicted Putin as merely supporting the vote's call for union with Russia. So it seems like a case of classic Putin: confuse, obfuscate and conquer.

But that's not really true to people who had to work with him. "When I was in the government, I think we had a pretty clear understanding of what he was doing and what he was thinking," says Michael McFaul, the former US ambassador in Moscow. "He doesn't mince his words. He's very clear when you sit down with him and you talk with him about what he believes Russia's interests are."

McFaul thinks the problem is that some people believe the propaganda and the obfuscation from the Russian government. He says if you just look at what's happening on the ground, it's pretty easy to tell what Putin is doing.

But the propaganda is hard to ignore. Paranoid elements in Russia believe the Ukainian revolution may have been a CIA plot. And McFaul saw thousands of tweets that suggested the USA killed Kremlin opponent Boris Nemtsov, to embarass Putin. There was even a protest outside the US Embassy, blaming the US. That belief may change now that Chechens have been detained as suspects in the murder. But McFaul says people still think it was a CIA plot.

"That conspiratorial, blame-the-West mentality is something new. I actually lived in the Soviet Union," says McFaul. "I don't remember it being that way. Back then it was different. It was, 'The regime is bad. Capitalism is bad. The White House is bad. But Americans are basically good.'"

He remembers Russians being friendly to Americans. But not so today. "Russia today doesn't feel like a very friendly place for Americans."

The Kremlin, and by extension Putin, creates much of that sentiment. His messaging seems to indicate the West is the enemy. But does Putin really believe thatt, or is it just a politician pandering to his base?

"I do believe [he believes that]," McFaul says. "I didn't always, I'll tell you honestly. I thought it was a set of arguments to win presidential election back in 2012. But the more I listen to him directly and the more I saw the activities of his government - they have a paranoid view about American intentions. They believe that President Obama and the CIA want to overthrow Putin's regime and want to weaken Russia and some would even say, dismember Russia. It's totally crazy. I want to emphasize that. There is no policy of regime change in Russia. Unfortunately, however, I think that is Putin's view."
 
 #25
Sputnik
March 10, 2015
US Applies Pressure to States Opposing Anti-Russian Sanctions - Nuland

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - The United States government is applying pressure to European countries that oppose sanctions against Russia, US Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland said at a US Senate hearing on Tuesday.

"We continue to talk to them bilaterally about these issues," Nuland said of Hungary, Greece, and Cyprus, whose leaders have opposed anti-Russian sanctions. "I will make another trip out to some of those countries in the coming days and weeks."

Nuland noted that "despite some publically stated concerns, those countries have supported sanctions" in the European Union Council.

Additionally, discussions between the United States and Europe have continued, Nuland said in her opening statements to the US Senate Foreign Affairs Committee.

"We have already begun consultations with our European partners on further sanctions pressure should Russia continue fueling the fire in the east or other parts of Ukraine, fail to implement Minsk or grab more land," she said.

The United States, the European Union and their allies blame Russia for fueling the internal conflict in Ukraine and have imposed a series of sanctions against Russia targeting its defense, banking, and energy sectors. Russia has repeatedly denied the allegations and responded with targeted export bans.

Some European nations including Greece, Hungary and Cyprus, have opposed further sanctions, and Spain has recently stated its opposition as well.
 
 #26
Anitwar.com
March 9, 2015
'F-k the EU,' Revisited
EU-US tensions come to a boil over Ukraine
by Justin Raimondo

When Victoria Nuland, the neoconservative �minence grise of the Obama administration, uttered her now infamous "F-k the EU!" in a phone call with US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, it was a supremely embarrassing moment for Washington. Aside from the scandal of a top US official in referring to our European allies in such vulgar terms, not to mention the ease with which Russian intelligence tapped into presumably secure phone lines, the revelation of growing hostility between the US and the EU was akin to having the ugly domestic disputes of a supposedly happily married couple made public.

Uncle Sam - a wife-abuser? Could this formerly private dispute wind up in Divorce Court?

The behind-closed-doors arguments are out of the closet now that a bipartisan group of the usual suspects in Washington is advocating sending arms to Ukraine to crush a popular rebellion in the eastern part of the country. The other day EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini came out against the arms proposal: the EU, she said, "is doing enough," echoing German Chancellor Angela Merkel's warning against the idea that there is a military solution to the Ukraine crisis. Mogerhini was joined by Austrian foreign minister Sebastian Kurz, who bluntly stated "Our goal must be a ceasefire, not escalation."

Yet escalation is what Washington is intent on, as exemplified not only by the braying of our bipartisan warmongers in Congress but also by the deliberate stoking of tensions emanating from NATO headquarters. As pointed out in a scathing article in Der Spiegel, the public pronouncements of Gen. Philip Breedlove, top NATO commander in Europe, seem designed to destroy the Minsk agreement and destabilize the shaky ceasefire - and the Germans are getting angry. The piece opens with a telling timeline:

"It was quiet in eastern Ukraine last Wednesday. Indeed, it was another quiet day in an extended stretch of relative calm. The battles between the Ukrainian army and the pro-Russian separatists had largely stopped and heavy weaponry was being withdrawn. The Minsk cease-fire wasn't holding perfectly, but it was holding.
"On that same day, General Philip Breedlove, the top NATO commander in Europe, stepped before the press in Washington. Putin, the 59-year-old said, had once again 'upped the ante' in eastern Ukraine - with 'well over a thousand combat vehicles, Russian combat forces, some of their most sophisticated air defense, battalions of artillery' having been sent to the Donbass. 'What is clear,' Breedlove said, 'is that right now, it is not getting better. It is getting worse every day.'

"German leaders in Berlin were stunned. They didn't understand what Breedlove was talking about...."

The Germans may have been stunned, but they probably weren't surprised. German intelligence saw no evidence of a Russian military buildup, but this "wasn't the first time" Breedlove had been guilty of breeding the mistrust that could destroy the Minsk agreement. After all, the Spiegel piece continues, "The pattern has become a familiar one."

With each step taken by the Minsk negotiators toward a ceasefire and a lasting peace, Breedlove has sought to undo the progress made with yet another off-the-wall pronouncement about alleged Russian military intervention that, according to the Germans, has no basis in fact. The Germans are muttering that Breedlove's provocations are "dangerous propaganda," and wonder aloud if Washington is trying to torpedo Minsk. That's because Breedlove isn't a loose cannon: he has powerful allies within the Obama administration.

Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, is a holdover from the administration of George W. Bush, where she served as Dick Cheney's chief foreign policy advisor and subsequently US ambassador to NATO. She goes farther back than that, however, having served under Strobe Talbott at the State Department during the Clinton years - yes, the same Strobe Talbott who, only the other day, tweeted:

"It's time to heed a common Russian phrase that #Putin violates with every breath: 'Call things by their own name.' We're in a new cold war."

Here the continuity of US foreign policy since the end of the cold war is dramatized, and Nuland's career trajectory epitomizes this consistency. The Clinton regime was implacably hostile to the Russians, as the Kosovo intervention demonstrated, but it didn't end there: Clintonian incursions into Russia's "near abroad" in Central Asia were formalized by the creation of a special US agency to promote US oil interests in the region, and the regime change operation in Kosovo and Serbia only served to underscore the seriousness with which they approached this project.

With the implosion of the Soviet Union and Russia losing its near abroad, the US moved quickly to advance NATO eastward. Now Nuland is carrying that "rollback" strategy forward with her aggressive rhetoric and interference in the internal affairs of Ukraine: every time she opens her mouth, the Europeans wonder what kind of belligerent propaganda will come out next.

Breedlove's inaccurate - one might even say lying - assessments of Russian military moves in the region recall the Bush administration's Iraq talking points in the run up to the invasion. Spiegel points out that when the crisis first broke Breedlove said 40,000 troops were massing on Russia's border with Ukraine, warning that an invasion was imminent. European intelligence officials were appalled, not because Europe is from Venus, as Nuland's husband would have it, but because "The experts contradicted Breedlove's view in almost every respect." As it turned out,

"There weren't 40,000 soldiers on the border, they believed, rather there were much less than 30,000 and perhaps even fewer than 20,000. Furthermore, most of the military equipment had not been brought to the border for a possible invasion, but had already been there prior to the beginning of the conflict. Furthermore, there was no evidence of logistical preparation for an invasion, such as a field headquarters." [Emphasis added]

And the lies just kept coming. Breedlove told a German paper that there are "regular Russian army units in eastern Ukraine," without citing any evidence. The next day he told the German magazine Stern that they weren't actually fighters but "mostly trainers and advisors." As to how many of these Russians there were, it depended on what day you asked him: at first, he put the number at "between 250 and 300," and then it escalated to "between 300 and 500," finally making it all the way to 1,000.

Shades of Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction"!

No one doubts the Russians are backing the "separatists," but to do so with "regular Russian army units" just doesn't make sense - when there are plenty of civilian volunteers ready, willing, and quite able to take up arms in the rebels' cause. This is also a problem for Putin, however, since he clearly doesn't want to annex eastern Ukraine, with all its problems, and with all the blowback it would provoke.

Which brings us to the underlying issue in Ukraine: Russia's strategy is strictly defensive. Putin's goal is to maintain a neutral buffer zone between the Russian core and the advance of NATO. For reasons even our hawkiest Russia-haters may understand, if not acknowledge, he doesn't want to see NATO's armies poised a few hundred kilometers from Moscow.

Washington's strategy, on the other hand, is militantly offensive: the goal is to go after the Russians by encircling them and inching ever closer to the heartland. Caught in the middle are the Europeans, who revel in their dream of a continent united and at peace - and are being rudely contradicted by the warlords of Washington, who insist it's all a pipedream.

The Europeans, however, have only themselves to blame: the Lisbon Treaty, which established an inextricable link between NATO and EU membership, ties them to America's apron strings. The EU, in short, is not an independent political-military entity, but one inherently dependent on the "Atlanticist" connection, i.e. it owes fealty to Washington. The Germans are stuck with Breedlove, and Nuland, whether they like it or not.

As Stratfor's George Friedman said in this interview, US foreign policy for the past century or so has been to maintain a balance of power tension in Europe, preventing any one country from achieving dominance, and effectively sabotaging European unity on any basis. Washington is, for this reason, determined to exclude Russia from Europe, and the current campaign in Ukraine - destabilization of the Yanukovych government, the coup, and US support for the new regime's war on its own rebellious citizens - underscores the unchanging aggressiveness of US foreign policy.

Breedlove's provocations, Spiegel reports, are all cleared by Washington: he's not a rogue element, but the representative of a jealous hegemon who brooks no rivals.

The Germans, however, are waking up to the reality of Washington's domination - because they, after all, will be in the free-fire zone if and when an actual shooting war erupts between Russia and the US. That they will be happy to be America's pawns in such a deadly game is rather doubtful. If the Strobe Talbotts of this world insist on a new cold war, then we will see a revival of Euro-neutralism - and that's a good thing. Perhaps the time for a true European declaration of independence is not far - a circumstance in which case Nuland's "F-k the EU" will take on new meaning.
 
 #27
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
March 10, 2015
Can Millennials change the way US and Russia view each other?
As the system of international relations shifts from being unipolar to multipolar, young Millennials in the U.S. and Russia will play an important role in determining how both nations move forward in their relationship.
By Viktoria Samokhina
Viktoria Samokhina is a junior at Columbia University in New York City, majoring in political economics. She is also pursuing a degree in national security law from Kutafin Moscow State Law University. She was born and raised in Magnitogorsk, Russia.

The world is not only on a geopolitical threshold, it also on a demographic threshold. Members of Generation Y (the so-called "Millennials") are coming of age in the 21st century, replacing members of Generation X in leadership positions in the field of diplomacy and international relations.

Demographic and geopolitical changes are closely connected and cannot be analyzed in isolation from one another. A new generation will become, if not fully responsible for establishing a more just world order, at least an important participant in this process and responsible for safeguarding its continuity.

Importantly, geopolitical events at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century that accompanied the maturing of these Millennials have been influencing their views of the world. Understanding how Millennials see the world around them and what impact their perceptions would make on international relations, then, is of paramount importance for understanding the future of international relations.

The Ukranian crisis indictates that the world is on the threshold of a tectonic shift in international relations, as Millennials see it. In fact, it revealed many controversies in the established system of international relations. Because of the growing number of casualties in an increasing number of conflicts, talk of the need for a revival of diplomacy and a "New Yalta Conference," literally or figuratively, where international balance would be reestablished, has become unavoidable.

A good place to start learning about generational identity in the U.S. and how views on international relations among American youth are shifting is the place where this identity and views are being molded: at the university. There has been a growing realization among American academics of the mistakes made by the U.S. in the international arena, mistakes which they now are starting to communicate to their young people.

At Columbia University, for example, Alexander Cooley, a political science professor who studies effects of external actors on the development and sovereignty of post-Soviet states, emphasizes that the world order is changing in no small part because the U.S. has compromised its reputation by "not practicing what it preaches."

Likewise, another Columbia University professor, Robert Jervis, argues that international cooperation has been compromised by U.S. decision makers who are not sufficiently sensitive to the effects of the security dilemma in the field of International Relations. He believes that NATO expansion is a disregard for this security dilemma, which worsens relations with Russia and compromises world peace.

There is a process of growing objectivity in U.S. academic institutions with regard to analyzing events in the international arena, a mood that is becoming contagious for future American leaders. The effect of this new wave of realization is summed up by John Zogby, a founder of Zogby International, and Joan Snyder, a founder of the project Why Millennials Matter, in their book First Globals: Understanding, Managing, and Unleashing Our Millennial Generation. The authors write that, "Millennials shy away from traditionally exaggerated ideas of America as a superpower. American Millennials realized that the U.S. achieved the end of the road as the world's sole superpower because they matured during the times when their country faced crises of confidence at home and abroad."

The crises of confidence in the policies conducted by the U.S. establishment is expressed in the findings of a Pew Research survey conducted in March 2014, according to which only 30 percent of Millennials view the U.S. Congress favorably, compared to 68 percent in 2004. More than half of respondents call themselves political independents, which constitutes the highest level of disaffiliation for any generation recorded by the organization.

Growing dissatisfaction among American Millennials with the work of their government can be interpreted as a potential signal that Russia-U.S. bilateral relations can normalize in the near future, when American Millennials, who are spared from the fetters of ideological confrontation with the Soviet Union or Russia as its successor, can choose a non-confrontational path.

Matthew Asada, a U.S. diplomat, for example, says that American Millennials were raised with a different view of Russia than Gen X or Baby Boomers. They view Russia as a post-Soviet country that the West has been trying to incorporate into Western institutional structures, not a historical foe. Some were surprised by the perceived negative bias in media coverage of the Sochi Winter Olympics.

It goes without saying, though, that bilateral relations are a two-way street and Russian Millennials are responsible for normalizing relations with the U.S. in no lesser degree than the U.S. Millennials are responsible for correcting possible mistakes made by their country after the collapse of a bipolar world order. Russian Millennials are responsible for establishing a reputation as a generation that is concerned and actively engaged in solving global problems. Active cooperation and partnership implies there can be no apathy or lethargy.

In light of the recent article "Generation Putin" in Foreign Affairs magazine - which painted a grim portrait of Russia's future leaders as passive, conformist, xenophobic, homophobic and unwilling to change the system - rebuffing the stereotypes and creating a reputation of an engaged and concerned generation becomes a particularly challenging issue for young Russians.

Jack Snyder, a professor of international relations at Columbia University, for example, is skeptical that such a generation can appear in Russia. Based on his knowledge of the Millennial generation in Russia, he said that there is no real youth activism and existing movements are manufactured by the Russian government. As an example, he used the "government-organized lightly nationalist movement Nashi." Considering the high degree of activism among American youth, Jack Snyder's skepticism regarding the state of Russian youth activism can be understood.

In 2004 the Roosevelt Institute Campus Network, which helps to strengthen students' engagement in foreign politics through policy research and proposals, was founded in the U.S. It seeks to create a bridge between Millennials and foreign policy senior decision-makers. Similarly, Russian Millennials can learn to organize more in a grassroots fashion for pursuing pragmatic problems solving as well as not shying away from introducing new ideas to the government though policy proposals and initiatives.

Robert Jervis, an international relations specialist at Columbia University focusing on improving the world order and international security, has also reflected on the argument that the new Millennial generation can positively influence Russia-U.S. relations. He doubts that relations could normalize while Vladimir Putin is in power in Russia or even after.

This is assuming that Putin's foreign policy course has the genuine support of future Russian leaders. This commentary, which suggests that long-held views of Russia and the United States could be harder to change than first imagined, could be a legacy of the Cold War mentality. This way of thinking, non-existent among the new Millennial generation, may have lingering influence for many years ahead.

In conclusion, it is necessary to bring attention to one important characteristic of the Millennial generation that will have strong influence on international relations, which Russian Millennials need to be aware of. Millennials in the U.S. are known for their global empathy that calls for reconstruction of ideal of citizenship and policy-making that transcends pure national interests. They have a self-conception as part of the "global citizenry" rather than a dominant affiliation with the United States.

In the current environment of heightened political tensions and perceived external aggression, it is important for Russian youth to avoid turning inward. While it is necessary to focus on Russia's national interests and domestic economy, it is also necessary to participate in world affairs.  Educational and cultural exchanges should be encouraged because they are the only way to enable a generation, which will have to function in a globalized world, to learn about differences of other nations, and to build patience and empathy for working with multinational teams on creating a secure and prosperous international community.
 
 #28
Reuters
March 10, 2015
Military analysis of what Russia really wants reveals nuclear dangers
By Commodore Philip Thicknesse
A veteran of the Falklands Conflict and career warfare officer and aviator, Commodore Philip Thicknesse has served as director of the Defence Crisis Management Centre at the Ministry of Defence, Director of the Maritime Warfare Centre, and as Commander of British Forces South Atlantic Islands.
While it is immensely difficult to place oneself in Russian President Vladimir Putin's position and to see the world as he and Russia undoubtedly see it, there are things that we do know.

The first is that Russia has always seen itself as encircled and threatened, a condition exacerbated by the West since the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A simple exercise with a globe can help to demonstrate this. Rotate it until Moscow is in the center and then scan the points of the compass. To the north, over the pole, is the United States; to the east, China; to the south, Islam, and to the west, Europe, the European Union and NATO.

Second, over the past 20 years, Russia has shrunk, physically and conceptually. The Soviet Union was, in all but one way, a force to be reckoned with. It was able to hold the world hostage and force it to focus, above all, on the maintenance of an uneasy but mostly stable peace. The Soviet Union's Achilles' heel was its economy; NATO's Cold War victory was essentially an economic one. The West defeated the Soviet Union by fielding more, and better, military technology with fewer, but infinitely better-trained personnel, funded by economies that worked.

As the Soviet Union collapsed, it shed a number of its republics, which functioned, in part, as buffers between mother Russia and the encircling threat. They also provided vital access to the sea. A sympathetic observer might note that Russia's only guaranteed ports are on its north coast, all of which have, in recent human history, been accessible only in the Arctic summer months. Even now with the ice receding, the Northern Sea Route is a far from reliable route into either the Pacific or Atlantic and therefore strategically unsatisfactory. In the Baltic, St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad serve well, though Russia must be concerned for the long-term stability of Kaliningrad because the city has a long German history as Koenigsberg. This stability should also concern Europe: arguably, as long as Kaliningrad is secure, the threat to the other Baltic ports and countries is reduced. To the east, Vladivostok serves the Pacific but, in extended living memory, has been directly threatened (and occupied) multiple times, by the Japanese in the early 20th century and throughout the Cold War by the United States.

This brings us to the south and the Black Sea and the Russian ports on the Crimean peninsula. The southern access to the Mediterranean has always been problematic because of the Dardanelles, which has forced Russia to find staging posts in the Mediterranean from which to sortie. Throughout the Cold War, the Russian fleet could be found in anchorages all around the eastern Mediterranean, which helps to explain Russia's interest in the Syrian port of Tartus. The port is now unavailable as a result of a civil war made infinitely more complicated by a West that had not taken the time to weigh the true factors and factions, which always included Russia (the leadership of which may, actually, have been right all along in siding with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad).

When Ukraine became independent of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Crimean peninsula became a significant strategic problem and, almost certainly, the subject of contingency planning: The naval ports and other military bases had to be accessible. The matter of which way Ukraine faces is not simply, for Russia, a matter of either lost trade or a lost buffer state, both of which are important, but also of lost oceanic access.

If this is the case, the West needs to think, with great clarity and caution, about what is actually happening in Ukraine to understand the nature of Putin's problem. The need for assured oceanic access at each point of the compass may be so deeply engrained in the Russian psyche as to significantly affect his decision-making and risk appetite.

So what? A Russia that prefers to believe that it is surrounded by enemies is one thing. A Russia denied what it believes to be its birthright - unfettered oceanic access and secure land borders - is another. The West has learned to live, uncomfortably, with the first, just as one learns to accommodate a paranoid neighbour. But it has also learned the consequence of unnecessary needling, which invariably ends in tears. Sometimes it is necessary, for the greater good, to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. The wrong thing, in this case, is to persuade Ukraine to cede the peninsula, and a land corridor, to Russia. Access to EU markets is a possible compensation but not, at any price, membership in NATO. Buffer states are a tragic necessity in an uncertain world - and as important for NATO as for Russia.

Why would the West, and especially Ukraine, do this? Because Russia is on its knees, for three reasons. The first, and most immediate, is the price of oil, which is far below what Putin requires to make the country function. Second is that Russia's political system looks unlikely to survive in the long term. Only a North Korean or a young Saudi would see Russia as a political paradise. One suspects that many Russians, if they had the economic wherewithal, would choose to live in a liberal democracy, for all its faults. The third, and most telling, reason is that the population is in long-term, possibly accelerating decline, with a birthrate way below replacement levels and falling life expectancy in the ethnic Russian population. Current predictions put Russia's population, in 2050, at 118 million, a loss of 16 percent to 19 percent in 50 years.

At the moment, it would appear that Putin has the upper hand because he is able to take a longer view than any of his fellow leaders, almost all of whom are time-limited, or time expired, and most of whom are, at best, tacticians, not strategists. The evidence seems to indicate that the West could regain the upper hand by opting to play a very long game: Russia, as currently constituted, is itself time-limited. Yet the personalization of politics and leadership in the West has increasingly led to tactical behavior driven by short personal horizons - as short as 60 days in the case of the British Prime Minister David Cameron, who is facing a serious reelection challenge. Maybe proper statesmanship requires strong and enduring institutions, rather than individuals, capable of thinking beyond an opponent's horizon?

The alternative approach is to learn to deal with the nuisance and uncertainty of continued ambiguity. Airspace incursions make for good photographs and alarmist tabloid headlines but are mostly an expensive inconvenience. Submarine incursions, such as those off Scotland's coast, designed to test Britain's resolve to protect the submarines carrying Britain's nuclear deterrent may be of a different order. During the Cold War, there were well- established protocols for close encounters, which by and large worked well. But they required well-practiced and well-equipped military services that, through their actions, acquired a familiarity with their opponents and an understanding not just of their capabilities and limitations but also their methods.

What does this mean for the NATO Baltic States, which are seen as being as vulnerable as Ukraine? First, St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad provide access to the Baltic Sea, so there is no pressure on Russia to find another port. Why would Putin test NATO's resolve through an action against one of the Baltic States? Protecting the Russian minorities was a convenient lie used in Ukraine to cover the real reason for intervening - to secure the naval and military bases in Crimea.

And what of the barely veiled threats of lowered thresholds before involving nuclear weapons? Most Cold War veterans were at least passingly familiar with Herman Kahn and his ladder of escalation. He described advancement on the ladder toward war as a series of deliberate choices, the results of which determined the direction of travel. We practiced at every level, from decision-making in Whitehall to the delivery of the weapons and then the whole grim business of operating in an environment partly demolished by biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. I think we came to appreciate that the conduct of nuclear deterrence was a deeply skilled and intelligent business; it demanded very high levels of familiarity. The current risk seems obvious: an oversupply of unpractised tacticians in power in Western capitals, and an absence of strategists.

Finally, then, what should the West do in Ukraine? To fuel a proxy war by supplying materiel and trainers would be foolish, na�ve and wilfully escalatory. Surely the better approach is to use proper, powerful economic sticks and carrots to bring Ukraine and Russia to the negotiating table, with the United Nations in place to keep the peace.

At the beginning of the year, the United Kingdom commemorated the 50th anniversary of the death of Winston Churchill, a man widely seen as the greatest Englishman in all history. He would have seen the strategic need to treat with the new tsar, whether we like him or not.

It is much better to have Putin if not actually inside the Western tent then at least not outside it pulling out the guy ropes and causing chaos. Russia ultimately has a far greater problem with militant Islam than the West, it understands Iran and Syria better than the West and has to deal with China in quite a different way. For all concerned, better a messy peace than a nasty descent into a wider and wholly avoidable conflict, be it long and ambiguous or short and horrific.

The piece appears here courtesy of Project for Study of the 21st Century. You can find more information about the group, as well as other commentaries at www.projects21.com.
 
 #29
New Eastern Outlook
http://journal-neo.org
March 9, 2014
Russia's Remarkable Renaissance
By F. William Engdahl
F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine "New Eastern Outlook".

Something remarkable is taking place in Russia, and it's quite different from what we might expect. Rather than feel humiliated and depressed Russia is undergoing what I would call a kind of renaissance, a rebirth as a nation. This despite or in fact because the West, led by the so-called neo-conservatives in Washington, is trying everything including war on her doorstep in Ukraine, to collapse the Russian economy, humiliate Putin and paint Russians generally as bad. In the process, Russia is discovering positive attributes about her culture, her people, her land that had long been forgotten or suppressed.

My first of many visits to Russia was more than twenty years ago, in May, 1994. I was invited by a Moscow economics think-tank to deliver critical remarks about the IMF. My impressions then were of a once-great people who were being humiliated to the last ounce of their life energy. Mafia gangsters sped along the wide boulevards of Moscow in sparkling new Mercedes 600 limousines with dark windows and without license plates. Lawlessness was the order of the day, from the US-backed Yeltsin Kremlin to the streets. "Harvard boys" like Jeffrey Sachs or Sweden's Anders Aaslund or George Soros were swarming over the city figuring new ways to rape and pillage Russia under the logo "shock therapy" and "market-oriented reform" another word for "give us your crown jewels."

The human toll of that trauma of the total collapse of life in Russia after November 1989 was staggering. I could see it in the eyes of everyday Russians on the streets of Moscow, taxi-drivers, mothers shopping, normal Russians.

Today, some two decades later, Russia is again confronted by a western enemy, NATO, that seeks to not just humiliate her, but to actually destroy her as a functioning state because Russia is uniquely able to throw a giant monkey wrench into plans of those western elites behind the wars in Ukraine, in Syria, Libya, Iraq and well beyond to Afghanistan, Africa and South America.

Rather than depression, in my recent visits to Russia in the past year as well as in numerous discussions with a variety of Russian acquaintances, I sense a new feeling of pride, of determination, a kind of rebirth of something long buried.

Sanctions Boomerang

Take the sanctions war that the Obama administration has forced Germany, France and other unwilling EU states to join. The US Treasury financial warfare unit has targeted the Ruble. The morally corrupt and Washington-influenced Wall Street credit rating agencies have downgraded Russian state debt to "junk" status. The Saudis, in cahoots with Washington, have caused a free-fall in oil prices. The chaos in Ukraine and EU sabotage of the Russian South Stream gas pipeline to the EU, all this should have brought a terrified Russia to her knees. It hasn't.

As we have earlier detailed, Putin and an increasing number of influential Russian industrialists, some of the same who a few years ago would have fled to their posh London townhouses, have decided to stand and fight for the future of Russia as a sovereign state. Oops! That wasn't supposed to happen in a world of globalization, of dissolution of the nation-state. National pride was supposed to be a relic like gold. Not in Russia today.

On the first anniversary of the blatant US coup in Kiev that installed a hand-picked regime of self-professed Neonazis, criminals, and an alleged Scientologist Prime Minister Andriy Yansenyuk, hand-picked by the US State Department, there was a demonstration in downtown Moscow on February 22. An estimated 35,000 to 50,000 people showed up-students, teachers, pensioners, even pro-Kremlin bikers. They protested not against Putin for causing the economic sanctions by his intransigence against Washington and EU demands. They protested the blatant US and EU intervention into Ukraine. They called the protest "Anti-Maidan." It was organized by one of many spontaneous citizen reactions to the atrocities they see on their borders. Internet satirical political blogs are making fun of the ridiculous Jan Paski, until last week the fumbling US State Department Press Spokesperson.

Not even an evident False Flag attempt in the London Financial Times and Western controlled media to blame Putin for "creating the climate of paranoia that caused" Boris Nemtsov's murder is being taken seriously. Western "tricks" don't work in today's Russia.

And look at US and EU sanctions. Rather than weakening Putin's popularity, sanctions have caused previously apolitical ordinary Russians to rally around the president, who still enjoys popularity ratings over 80%. A recent survey by the independent Levada Center found 81 percent of Russians feel negatively about the United States, the highest figure since the early 1990s "shock therapy" Yeltsin era. And 71 percent feel negatively about the European Union.

The renaissance I detect is evident in more than protests or polls, however. The US-instigated war in Ukraine since March 2014 has caused a humanitarian catastrophe, one which the US-steered German and other western media have blocked out of their coverage. More than one million Ukrainian citizens, losing their homes or in fear of being destroyed in the insane US-instigated carnage that is sweeping across Ukraine, have sought asylum in Russia. They have been welcomed as brothers according to all reports. That is a human response that has untold resonances among ordinary Russians. Because of the wonders of YouTube and smart phone videos, Russians are fully aware of the truth of the US war in eastern Ukraine. Russians are becoming politically sensitive for the first time in years as they realize that some circles in the West simply want to destroy them because they resist becoming a vassal of a Washington gone berserk.

Rather than bow to the US Treasury's Ruble currency war and the threat that Russian banks will be frozen out of the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) international interbank clearing system, something likened to an act of war, on February 16, the Russian government announced that it had completed its own banking clearing network in which some 91 domestic credit institutions have been incorporated. The system allows Russian banks to communicate seamlessly through the Central Bank of Russia.

That is inside Russia among banks that otherwise were vulnerable even domestically to a SWIFT cut. Russia joined the Brussels-based private SWIFT system as the Berlin Wall crumbled in 1989. Today her banks are the second largest users of SWIFT. The new system is inside Russia. Necessary, but not sufficient, to protect against SWIFT cutoff. The next step in discussion is joint Russia-China interbank clearing independent of SWIFT and Washington. That is also coming.

The following day after Russia's "SWIFT" alternative was announced as operational, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Cheng Guoping said China will build up its strategic partnership with Russia in finance, space and aircraft building and "raise trade cooperation to a new level." He added that China plans to cooperate more with Russia in the financial area and in January Russia's First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov said that payments in national currencies, de-dollarization, were being negotiated with China. China realizes that if Russia collapses, China is next. Failing empires try desperate measures to survive.

Russians also realize that their leaders are moving in unprecedented ways to build an alternative to what they see as a morally decadent and bankrupt American world. For most Russians the disastrous decade of poverty, chaos and deprivation of the Yeltsin era in the 1990's was reminder enough what awaits should Russia's leaders again prostitute themselves to American banks and corporations for takeover, Hillary Clinton's infamous "reset" of US-Russian relations she attempted when Medvedev was President. Russians see what the US has done in neighboring Ukraine where even the Finance Minister, Natalia Jaresko, is an American, a former State Department person.

Russia and its leaders are hardly trembling behind Kremlin walls. They are forging the skeleton of a new international economic order that has the potential to transform the world from the present bankruptcy of the Dollar System. Moscow and Beijing recently announced, as I discussed in a previous posting, their project to create a joint alternative to the US credit rating monopoly of Moody's, S&P and Fitch. President Putin's travel agenda in the past year has been mind-boggling. Far from being the international paraiah Washington and Victoria Nuland hoped for, Russia is emerging as the land which has the courage to "just say No!" to Washington.

Russia's president has been in Cyprus where possible basing for the Russian navy was discussed, in Egypt where General al-Sisi warmly welcomed the Russian leader and discussed significant economic and other joint cooperation. Late last year Russia and the BRICS states agreed to form a $100 billion infrastructure bank that makes the US-controlled World Bank irrelevant. The list grows virtually every day.

The special human side

For me, however, the most heartening feature of this Russian renaissance is in the generation which is today in their late thirties to early forties-young, highly intelligent and having experience of both the depravity of Soviet communist bureaucracy but as well of the hollow world of US-led so-called "free market capitalism." I share some examples from the many Russians I have come to know in recent years.

What is unique in my mind about this generation is that they are the hybrid generation. The education they received in the schools and universities was still largely dominated by the classical Russian science. That classical Russian science, as I have verified from many discussion with Russian scientist friends over the years, was of a quality almost unknown in the pragmatic West. An American Physics professor from MIT who taught in Moscow universities in the early 1990s told me, "When a Russian science student enters first year university, he or she already has behind them 4 years of biology, 4 of chemistry, of physics, both integral and differential calculus, geometry...they are starting university study at a level comparable to an American post-doctoral student."

They grew up in a Russia where it was common for young girls to learn classical ballet or dance, for all children to learn to play piano or learn a musical instrument, to do sports, to paint, as in classical Greek education of the time of Socrates or Germany in the 1800s. Those basics which were also there in American schools until the 1950s, were all but abandoned during the 1980s. American industry wanted docile "dumbed-down" workers who asked no questions.

Russian biology, Russian math, Russian physics, Russian astrophysics, Russian geophysics-all disciplines approached their subject with a quality that had long before disappeared from American science. I know, as I grew up during the late 1950's during the "Sputnik Shock," where we were told as high school pupils we had to work doubly hard to "catch up to the Russians." There was a kernel of truth, but the difference was not lack of American students working hard. In those days we worked and studied pretty hard. It was the quality of Russian scientific education that was so superior.

Teaching of the sciences especially, in Russia or the Soviet Union, had been strongly influenced by the German education system of the 1800s, the so-called Humboldt Reforms of Alexander von Humboldt and others.

The strong ties in Russian education with classical 19th Century German culture and science went deep, going back to the time under Czar Alexander II who freed the serfs in 1861, following the example of his friend, Abraham Lincoln. The ties were deepened to German classical culture later under Czar Alexander II prior to the 1905 Russo-Japanese War when the brilliant Sergei Witte was Transport Minister, then Finance Minister and finally Prime Minister before western intrigues forced his resignation. Witte translated the works of the German national economist Friederich List, the brilliant opponent of England's Adam Smith, into Russian. Before foreign and domestic intrigues manipulated the Czar into the disastrous Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907 against Germany a pact which made England's war in 1914 possible, the Russian state recognized the German classical system as superior to British empiricism and reductionism.

Many times I have asked Russians of the 1980s generation why they came back to Russia to work after living in the USA. Always the reply more or less, "The US education was so boring, no challenge...the American students were so shallow, no idea of anything outside the United States...for all its problems, I decided to come home and help build a new Russia..."

Some personal examples illustrate what I have found: Irina went with her parents to Oregon in the early 1990s. Her father was a high-ranking military figure in the USSR. After the collapse he retired and wanted to get away from Russia, memories of wars, to live his last years peacefully in Oregon. His daughter grew up there, went to college there and ultimately realized she could be so much more herself back in Russia where today as a famous journalist covering US-instigated wars in Syria and elsewhere including Ukraine, she is making a courageous contribution to world peace.

Konstantin went to the USA to work as a young broadcast journalist, did a master's degree in New York in film and decided to return to Russia where he is making valuable TV documentaries on dangers of GMO and other important themes. Anton stayed in Russia, went into scientific and business publishing and used his facility with IT to found his own publishing house. Dmitry who taught physics at a respected German university, returned to his home St Petersburg to become a professor and his wife also a physicist, translates and manages a Russian language internet site as well as translating into Russian several of my own books.

What all these Russian acquaintances, now in their late 30s or forties share is that they were born when the remnants of the old Soviet Russia were still very visible, for better and for worse, but grew to maturity after 1991. This generation has a sense of development, progress, of change in their lives that is now proving invaluable to shape Russia's future. They are also, through their families and even early childhood, rooted in the old Russia, like Vladimir Putin, and realize the reality of both old and new.

Now because of the brazen open savagery of Washington policies against Russia, this generation is looking at what was valuable. They realize that the stultifying bureaucratic deadness of the Soviet Stalin heritage was deadly in the USSR years. And they realize they have a unique chance to shape a new, dynamic Russia of the 21st Century not based on the bankrupt model of the now-dying American Century of Henry Luce and FD Roosevelt.

This for me is the heart of an emerging renaissance of the spirit among Russians that gives me more than hope for the future. And, a final note, it has been policy among the so-called Gods of Money, the bankers of London and New York, since at least the assassination in 1881 of Czar Alexander II, to prevent a peaceful growing alliance between Germany and Russia. A prime aim of Victoria Nuland's Ukraine war has been to rupture that growing Russo-German economic cooperation. A vital question for the future of Germany and of Europe will be whether Germany's politicians continue to kneel to the throne of Obama or his successor or define their true interests in closer cooperation with the emerging Eurasian economic renaissance that is being shaped by President Putin's Russia and by President Xi's China.

Ironically, Washington's and now de facto NATO's "undeclared war" against Russia has sparked this remarkable renaissance of the Russian spirit. For the first time in many years Russians are starting to feel good about themselves and to feel they are good in a world of some very bad people. It may be the factor that saves our world from a one world dictatorship of the bankers and their military.

 
 #30
BBC
March 9, 2015
Perestroika: Reform that changed the world
By Prof Archie Brown
Archie Brown is emeritus professor of politics, University of Oxford, and the author of The Gorbachev Factor (1996) and Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective (2007).

The tension in relations between Russia and the West is at a more dangerous level today than at any time since the first Reagan administration (1980-84).

So it is worth recalling a period (largely overlapping with the second Reagan administration) when Russia was becoming a freer country by the month.

It was a death in Moscow 30 years ago today - 10 March 1985 - that opened the door to domestic reform and to dramatic change in the political map of Europe.

Konsantin Chernenko, the 73-year-old conservative Communist leader of the Soviet Union, died, and the number two man in the Soviet hierarchy, Mikhail Gorbachev, promptly convened a meeting of the Politburo, the Communist Party's ruling body.

Some of those present would have liked to stop the further rise of Mr Gorbachev, who at 54 was the youngest member of the top leadership team, but they did not have a plausible alternative candidate.

By the afternoon of 11 March, Mr Gorbachev had been unanimously elected by the Central Committee as general secretary of the Communist Party and thus leader of the world's second superpower.

A combination of the difficulties the Soviet Union faced and the authority of the general secretaryship enabled Mr Gorbachev to launch his perestroika (reconstruction), which became a synonym for increasingly radical political innovation.

The new Soviet leader was already more of a reformer than his Politburo colleagues realised. In power, his policies became bolder and more far-reaching. He had an unusually open mind for a Communist politician.

The more, however, Mr Gorbachev reformed the Soviet system, the more he undercut the traditional authority of the party leader - his own powerbase - while the new tolerance brought countless long-suppressed problems, including nationalist discontent, to the surface of political life.

So much so that by 1990 the continuing existence of the Soviet Union was in jeopardy.

In December 1991, Mr Gorbachev's efforts to recreate the union as a voluntary federation ended in failure. The country dissolved into 15 successor states.

It is salutary to remember just how much changed, mainly for the better, in the period when Mr Gorbachev was the Soviet Union's last ruler - the principal architect of the transformation and its crucial facilitator.

Here are some of the internal changes, and, if anything, the even more momentous, international changes:

Internal changes:

-A new policy of glasnost (transparency) quite rapidly developed into freedom of speech

-Hitherto banned books that challenged not only official history but also the legitimacy of Communist rule were published in large editions

-Dissidents were released from prison and past distortions of justice were investigated

-Persecution of the Churches ceased and gave way to religious tolerance

-Contested elections in which votes were counted honestly were introduced in 1989

-The official ideology, Marxism-Leninism, was increasingly discarded and replaced by ideological pluralism and free intellectual inquiry

-Freedom of communication (including an end to jamming of foreign broadcasts) and liberty to travel to Western countries were introduced

-So-called "democratic centralism" within the Communist Party - a euphemism for a hierarchical, strictly-disciplined party, intolerant of dissent - was quietly abandoned. The party of almost 20 million members became an openly argumentative body with the clash of ideas out in the open. Communist Party members stood against one another on radically different political platforms in the elections of 1989, 1990 and 1991

-Constitutional change in early 1990 legalised the creation of oppositional political parties and legitimised the already existing new political pluralism

International changes:

-From the outset, Mr Gorbachev made clear within the leadership that Soviet troops must leave Afghanistan, which they had invaded in 1979. In February 1989, the last Soviet soldier departed

-The Soviet Union's last leader established good personal relations with Western political leaders. Annual summit meetings with American presidents had by 1987 produced substantive results, including reductions in the size of the military superpowers' nuclear arsenals and the removal of their short-range and medium-range nuclear missiles from Europe

-In major speeches in 1988 - Moscow in June and the UN in New York in December 1988 - Mr Gorbachev renounced the "Brezhnev doctrine" of limited sovereignty for the countries of Eastern Europe. He declared that in all countries the people themselves were entitled to decide what kind of political and economic system they wished to live in

-In, arguably, the most important change of all, the peoples of Eastern Europe in 1989 took Mr Gorbachev at his word. They removed their Communist leaders from power (peacefully, except in Romania) and not a shot was fired by a Soviet soldier as the countries of Central and Eastern Europe became independent and non-Communist

-It had long been assumed in Western capitals that, for the Soviet Union, the continued division of Germany was non-negotiable. Yet that country was reunited in 1990. The misleadingly named German Democratic Republic (Communist East Germany) ceased to exist as a political entity and became part of the enlarged Federal Republic of Germany

By 1991 relations between Russian leaders (especially with Mr Gorbachev as Soviet President but also with Boris Yeltsin as President of the Russian republic) and their Western counterparts were warm and trusting.

The failure of East and West to build on the new foundations is a tragedy of major proportions.
 
 #31
Counterpunch.org
March 9, 2015
Canada's Globe and Mail Daily Joins In
Extolling Ukraine's Extreme-Right
by ROGER ANNIS
Roger Annis is an editor of the website 'The New Cold War: Ukraine and beyond'.

Writers at the largest national daily newspaper in Canada, the Globe and Mail, have lately joined writers at the Toronto Star in publishing articles extolling the fundraising efforts in Canada of Ukraine's extreme-right.

This comes in the form of two recent news articles in the Globe, including one by its long-standing correspondent in Europe, Mark MacKinnon.

MacKinnon reported on Feb. 27 in the Globe and Mail from the warehouse in Kyiv where 'Army SOS' gathers the military supplies that it purchases or receives and then provides to the extreme-right battalions fighting Ukraine's war against its citizens in the east of the country.

As an article by me on Feb. 20 reported, writers at the Toronto Star have also been promoting 'Army SOS'. The military equipment provided by financial or direct donations has included technology for improving the accuracy of Ukrainian rocket and artillery attacks against the towns and cities of eastern Ukraine.

MacKinnon describes 'Army SOS' as "a volunteer organization that aids Ukraine's warriors in the field". He writes, "Ukraine's myriad volunteer battalions are famed for their bravery, as well as for their sometimes-extreme nationalism. Along the front line, they are often the ones engaged in the toughest fighting against the rebel army that Kiev and NATO say is armed by Moscow."

Actually, MacKinnon's "warriors" are mostly "famed" for their extreme-right or neo-Nazi views. The most well-known among them, including the 'Donbass', 'Aidar', Azov and Dniper battalions, have been cited by journalists and human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, for kidnappings, torture and executions. They have been condemned for blockading humanitarian shipments into eastern Ukraine.

The rightists do not limit their crimes to warmaking in Ukraine's east. They are also organized politically, including as members of Ukraine's Parliament (Rada). Some are represented through their own political parties, such as the openly fascist 'Right Sector', while others have entrenched themselves in the 'parties' (actually, electoral machines) of President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk.

Across Ukraine today, free expression is severely curtained. The extreme right conducts vigilante attacks against public expressions of concern about the war or the disastrous state of Ukraine's economy and national finances. The rightists are at the forefront of advocating draconian laws and pushing them through the Rada. Newspaper and television stations have already been closed or attacked. New laws would allow the government to control internet publishing and monitor electronic communication more closely. A law currently before the Rada would authorize lengthy jailing of those protesting the government's war in the east or its economic policies. Several prominent journalists have been jailed in Ukraine, even before the adoption of any new laws.

The violence and crackdown in Ukraine is couched in the language of fighting "separatism" and "pro-Russian separatism". To close down an uncomfortable idea in Ukraine, it is enough to shout "separatism" loudly enough. The word refers to the demands of Russian-speaking and other nationally-distinct Ukrainians who want a voice in their political and economic destiny.

Fundraising in Toronto for Ukrainian rightists

A second Globe and Mail article along the same lines as that of MacKinnon was published on March 2 by commissioned writer Sahar Fatima. She reported on a fundraising dinner for 'Army SOS' in Toronto on February 28 that raised $52,000.

The young journalist wrote, "Throughout Saturday's event, speakers and organizers tried to drill home the message that Ukraine is a David fighting a malicious Goliath, Russia, bent on snatching its freedom and autonomy. The only way Ukraine stands a chance is if organizations such as Army SOS help level the playing field using donations from the public, attendees heard."

A keynote speaker at the event was Ihor Kozak, a "defence and security expert" and a retired Canadian military officer. He wants the NATO confrontation with Russia to be escalated, the Globe article reports, including by providing more advanced weapons to Ukraine, extending the economic sanctions in place against Russia, and more bankrolling of the Ukrainian government and its military.

The 'all-out war' theme was also cited by MacKinnon when he quoted Lenna Koszarny. She is the head of the Kiev arm of the extremist Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC). He reported:

"Is the [Ukrainian] diaspora at war with Russia? Absolutely," says Ms. Koszarny, 45. "The diaspora is helping Ukraine defend itself. How do we do that? In any which way we can."

MacKinnon neglected to mention an interesting fact about Koszarny. She is Chief Executive Officer and a founding partner in 2006 of the Horizon Capital investment firm in Ukraine. Another of the founding partners is none other than Natalie Jaresko, the U.S. citizen who was appointed late last year to be Ukraine's minister of finance.

Jaresko is currently embroiled in legal battles for her handling of an investment fund that was created in 1994 with $150 million from the U.S. Agency for International Development. The fund was earmarked for spurring capitalist business activity in Ukraine. Horizon Capital took over the managing of it when the firm was created.

Another of the rightist fundraising efforts in Canada mentioned in both the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star is 'Patriot Defense'.

A prominent player in the rightist fundraising efforts and in the pages of the Globe and Star, is the Ukrainian Canadian Congress. Recently, the organization co-organized and sponsored a speaking tour to Canada and the United States of one of the extremist members of the Ukrainian Rada, Andriy Paruiby.

Parubiy was feted by the Conservative Party government in Ottawa on February 23. He met with Minister of Foreign Affairs Rob Nicholson and with members of Parliament. His message to the government, reported in the Globe and Mail, is that he wants Canada to use its influence in Washington to convince the U.S. government to provide more lethal and advanced weaponry to Ukraine.

Parubiy is one of the founders of modern-day, extreme-right politics in Ukraine. He founded the Social-National Party of Ukraine (SNPU) in 1991. It went on to spawn other fascist or extreme-right formations, including the large, present-day Svoboda Party. Svoboda's leader, Oleh Tyahnybok, was a founder with Parubiy of the SNPU.

Parubiy has sought to moderate his image in recent years, but he wrote in 2008: "I was one of the founders of SNPU and since that time, my political views and ideology haven't changed." During the EuroMaidan protest movement in 2013/early 2014, he was a commander of the extreme-right shock troops that battled police and closed off Maidan Square to political forces with less extreme, pro-Europe views.

In a briefing note to the Canadian government on Feb. 9, 2015, the UCC listed four things it wants the government to do "in order to assist the people of Ukraine as they fight bravely to protect their country from foreign aggression":

1. Provide lethal, defensive military weapons, intelligence, equipment and military advisors.

2. Enact decisive sectoral economic sanctions against the Russian Federation's military.

3. Ensure the political isolation of the Putin regime.

4. Declare the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk "Peoples' Republics" as terrorist organizations, and designate the Russian Federation as a state sponsor of terrorism.

The UCC note says, "Thousands of regular and irregular Russian troops are in Ukraine along with tanks, missiles, heavy artillery, and are directly engaged in an invasion of sovereign Ukrainian territory".

This paranoid, detached-from-reality description is also sounded in a lobbying document in early 2015 co-authored by the very influential, neo-conservative and pro-NATO Atlantic Council, in the United States. The document is titled ' Preserving Ukraine's independence, resisting Russian aggression: What the United States and NATO must do'. It argues vigorously in favour of arming Ukraine to the teeth. It says, "The West has the capacity to stop Russia. The question is whether it has the will."

The ceasefire which Kyiv and its backers were obliged to accept last month should be serving as a time to address the underlying political issues in the conflict in Ukraine, notably the demands of the people in eastern Ukraine and other regions of the country for a real say in the running of the country-or even for the right to a future independent of Ukraine, should they so choose.

Instead, there is the danger that the pause in fighting may serve merely as an occasion for Ukraine's government and extremist paramilitaries to regroup and re-arm, while NATO presses ahead with its sanctions and other threats against Russia. Unfortunately, that's the message coming from the 'war parties' in NATO capitals-in government and from mainstream editorial boards.

It is disturbing, to say the least, to see the extreme right in Ukraine being extolled in the pages of the leading newspapers of Canada. And if anyone in the Parliament in Ottawa is opposed to the drive to war against Russia and the feting of extremists, they are not making their voices heard. Progressive-minded Canadians need to push back against all this. Encouragingly, the torrent of critical commentary by readers of the Globe and Mail in response to the articles it published soft-pedaling Ukraine's extreme-right is a strong indicator that Canadians are wanting to do just that.
 
 #32
Subject: To Post: ASN 2015 World Convention Preliminary Program
Date:     Mon, 9 Mar 2015 1
From:     Dominique Arel <[email protected]>
 
ASN 2015 WORLD CONVENTION PROGRAM
 
160+ PANELS ON THE BALKANS, CENTRAL EUROPE, RUSSIA, UKRAINE/BELARUS, THE CAUCASUS, EURASIA (incl. CHINA), TURKEY/GREECE, MIGRATION, and NATIONALISM STUDIES
 
The preliminary program of the ASN 2015 World Convention can be downloaded at http://nationalities.org/uploads/documents/ASN15_Preliminary_Program-6mar.pdf. The Convention, sponsored by the Harriman Institute, will be held at Columbia University, New York, on April 23-25, 2015.
 
**Registration fees are $100 for ASN members, $130 for nonmembers, $60 for students (and a special rate of $30 for nonpanelist graduate students enrolled in New York area universities). The registration form can be downloaded at https://nationalities.wufoo.com/forms/asn-registration-form/. For registration information, please contact Registration Manager Kelsey Davis ([email protected]). For general convention information, please contact ASN Executive Director Ryan Kreider ([email protected], 212 854 2514)**
 
As always, the Convention boasts the most international lineup of panelists of North American-based conventions, with more than half of the 400+ scholars delivering papers, more than half currently based outside of the United States in nearly 50 countries. More than 750 panelists and participants are expected at the Convention. The program features 160 panels, including the screening of 12 new documentaries that will be announced later. For a glimpse of last year's film lineup, which included Watchers of the Sky, Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, Putin's Games, and Ukraine is not a Brothel, go to http://nationalities.org/conventions/film-presentations/2014-film-presentations

The Convention offers an exceptionally strong lineup of panels in all regions of the former Communist world and Eurasia: Russia, the Caucasus, Central Asia/Turkey-Greece/China, the Balkans, Ukraine/Belarus and Central Europe (including the Baltics and Moldova). The Balkans and Central Europe sections are the largest, with 24 and 23 panels respectively, on par with Russia and the Caucasus-23, Ukraine (and Belarus)-13, Central Asia/China/Turkey/Greece-a combined 19, Nationalism Studies-17 and the new Migration section-7 panels.

Due to the extraordinary situation prevailing in Ukraine and Russia since 2014, up to ten panels will be devoted to dimensions of the conflict, including a NATO roundtable. Other special events will include a roundtable on the Greece crisis and a roundtable on Russia's Oscar-nominated film Leviathan.

In its most visible section, the Convention will be hosting up to 16 special panels featuring important new books. The list includes Ron Suny's "They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else": A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton, 2015), Michael Hechter's Alien Rule (Cambridge, 2013), Allan Patten's Equal Recognition: The Moral Foundations of Minority Rights (Princeton, 2014), Valerie Sperling's Sex, Politics, and Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia (Oxford, 2015), Samuel A. Greene's Moscow in Movement: Power and Opposition in Putin's Russia (Stanford, 2014), Robert Donia's Radovan Karadzic: Architect of the Bosnian Genocide (Cambridge, 2015), Lara Nettlefield's Srebrenica in the Aftermath of Genocide (Cambridge, 2014), Myroslav Shkandrij's Ukrainian Nationalism: Politics, Ideology, and Literature (Yale, 2015), Henry Hale's Patronal Politics: Eurasian Regime Dynamics in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge, 2014), Paul Werth's The Tsar's Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia (Oxford, 2014), Joshua Sanborn's Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire (Oxford, 2014), Michael S. Bryant's Eyewitness to Genocide: the Operation Reinhard Death Camp Trials, 1955-66 (Tennessee, 2014), David Marples' Our Glorious Past: Lukashenka's Belarus and the Great Patriotic War (Columbia, 2014), Sabine Dullin's La fronti�re �paisse: Aux origines des politiques sovi�tiques (�ditions de l'EHESS, 2014), Olga Onuch's Mapping Mass Mobilization: Understanding Revolutionary Movements in Argentina and Ukraine (Palgrave, 2014) and Alexander Osipov et al.'s, Policies of Ethno-cultural Diversity Management in Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine (European Humanities, 2014). A few of these panels are still under construction and will be gradually added to the program.

The opening reception, celebrating the Convention's 20th Anniversary, will be held on the 15th Floor of the International Affairs Building, 420 W. 118th St., New York on Thursday April 23 at 8.00 PM. The closing reception, at the same place on Saturday April 25 at 7.15 PM, will feature the announcements of the ASN Harriman Book Prize, the Best Doctoral Students Papers Awards and the Award for Best Documentary.

For practical information regarding the convention, please contact Ryan Kreider ([email protected], 212 854 2514). For registration information, please contact Kelsey Davis ([email protected]). For information on panels, please contact Dominique Arel ([email protected]).
 
We look forward to seeing you at the Convention!
 
Cordially,
Dominique Arel, ASN Convention Academic Director
On behalf of the Organizing Committee and Program Committee