#1
Business New Europe
www.bne.eu
March 17, 2015
Debaltseve counts its dead - and blames Ukraine
Graham Stack in Debaltseve
Debaltseve is still counting its dead following the eastern Ukrainian town's capture by Russian-backed rebels on February 18 after weeks of heavy shelling. Life has started to return to normal, but the townspeople are still traumatised - and counter-intuitively blame Ukrainian forces that had been defending the town for the intensive shelling.
30-year-old manager Sergei Rudenko watches beside rows of new crosses at Debaltseve cemetery as a coffin is lowered into a grave. Rudenko and his friend are the only people attending the burial. "She was the mother of a friend, I didn't actually know her," he tells bne IntelliNews. He says the friend had contacted him from Russia and asked him to attend the burial of her mother, killed during the shelling of the city.
"I promised to check she was buried properly in a marked grave," Sergei says as the purple-clothed casket is lowered into the thick clay soil. Gravediggers fill in the grave and place a cross with nameplate over it. According to the date on the cross, the woman died on February 21, after the end of the shelling. "This is the date the body was recovered," Sergei explains.
Bodies still being counted
At the city cemetery, municipal undertakers say they have buried around 80, which roughly matches the estimated number of fresh graves. But the number is not final, as a long trench excavated in the graveyard for further burials indicates.
The head of the Debaltseve municipal morgue, who says he preferred not to be named, tells bne Intellinews that new corpses are still being delivered to the morgue, nearly a month after the pro-Russian rebels captured the town, as many as four a day. During the shelling, with the former morgue staff having already fled the town, the deceased were hastily buried in shallow graves, he explains, which are only now being exhumed for official registration and burial, according to information becoming available.
Vadim Shevchenko, newly appointed as head of the city police by the rebel authorities of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, tells bne IntelliNews that the municipal morgue had registered 105 corpses of civilians since resuming work on February 23. "The number includes not only those killed as a direct result of shelling, but those who died during the shelling, often people such as pensioners with frail health for whom the shock was too much," he says.
Some corpses of those who died in Debaltseve were taken to other towns for processing, before the Debaltseve morgue resumed work. Corpses were also taken to Enakievo, Torez and Stepnoe, the self-styled 'mayor' of Debaltseve, Aleksandr Afendikov, said in a press interview at the end of February, acknowledging that "very many" civilians had been killed by shelling in the town, without naming a figure. He added that 2,500 out of an original population of around 25,000 had stayed in the town throughout the shelling, and around 5,000 had returned since the shelling ended.
30 corpses of civilians who had died in the village of Vuglegirsk close to Debaltseve - marked by widespread destruction as a result of heavy fighting - were registered by the morgue at the municipal hospital at nearby Enakievo, according to the head of the morgue, who preferred not to be named.
US Permanent Representative to the UN Samantha Power on March 6 said that around the bodies of 500 civilians had been "found in in the cellars of houses in Debaltseve". And the UN in a March 2 report said it estimates that over 200 civilian casualties as a result of the fighting at Debaltseve and at Donetsk Airport in January and February. Neither the Red Cross nor the OSCE has figures for the civilian dead in Debaltseve.
Locals blame Ukrainian forces
The weeks of shelling of Debaltseve finally prompted the Ukrainian forces holding the town to pull out in a chaotic nightime retreat in the early hours of February 18. Most buildings in the town show some signs of damage, although two of its most prominent constructions - the railway station itself, and the Russian Orthodox church named after Aleksandr Nevsky - seemed to have escaped the shelling quite lightly. Ukraine's defence ministry said on March 3 that the rebels had already succeeded in restoring some train connections.
Kyiv and the West have blamed Russia and the rebels for the shelling, and even Russia has largely not disputed that the rebels attacked the town. Rebel leaders had themselves declared that they intended to take the town, and excluded the Debaltseve 'pocket' from a ceasefire agreed in Minsk on February 11. Oleksandr Zakharchenko, head of the Donetsk People's Republic, acknowledged on February 14, hours before the ceasefire was due to take effect, that his forces would adhere to the ceasefire "throughout DPR territory except internal areas -Debaltseve," and that "the Minsk agreements don't say a word about Debaltseve".
Even studiously neutral reports from the Organisation of Security and Cooperation in Europe recorded its observers directly witnessing on February 18 outgoing shell fire from DPR multiple-launch rocket systems such as Grad or Urugan in Yasynuvata, at a time when Debaltseve was the most likely target within range.
But town residents questioned by bne IntelliNews counter-intuitively blame the shelling and destruction of the town on the very Ukrainian forces that were ostensibly protecting the town - some perhaps out of confusion, others perhaps out of fear.
According to Rudenko, the Ukrainian forces were responsible for shelling the town. "I saw with my own eyes how Ukrainian troops fired mortars which exploded within the town," he says. "And we saw in January and February when there was shelling every day how Ukrainian TV crews would be on the scene of any shell impact within minutes."
"Everyone knows this in the town," he adds. "Ask anyone you want they will say the same."
Rudenko's claim surprisingly turns out to be true. Railway accountant Ludmilla, who declines to give her last name, gives bne IntelliNews a 10-minute tirade on the death and destruction visited on the town by what she alleges was Ukrainian shelling. According to Ludmilla, the Ukrainian nationalist Pravy Sektor organisation was based a number of camps on the outskirts of Debaltseve and responsible for most of the shelling inwards - and also for mowing down Ukrainian forces when they finally fled Debaltseve on February 18. Like Sergei, Ludmilla claims that, "we were here and saw it with out own eyes," while also acknowledging she spent most of the bombardment in a bomb shelter.
Taxi driver Roman Maksimov, 31, who stayed in the cellar of a housing block during the shelling, tells bne IntelliNews a similar story: "Of course it was the Ukrainians that bombed here. Why would the militia bomb here when they were planning to retake the town because of its strategic importance? They sent special forces units in to take the station and other locations."
"The Ukrainians wanted to make sure that not a stone was left unturned before they pulled out. And when they pulled out, we saw how their tanks fired on houses directly," he adds.
Traumatised
Confusion among civilians on the ground often arises during intense exchanges of artillery fire between defenders and attackers, with these people taking incoming fire to be the impacts of outgoing fire.
Ivan Maksimov, a former rebel who remained in Debaltseve during the shelling, admits to bne IntelliNews that it was the rebels' shelling that had left the town in ruins. "It's obvious: our guys [in the DPR] had encircled Debaltseve and were trying to knock out the Ukrainians from the town - war is war," he says. "But everyone is very frightened and will tell you the Ukrainians shelled the town."
A hotel receptionist a Enakievo backs up Maksimov's explanation. "We had around 150 displaced persons here from Debaltseve, and I heard how they talked amongst themselves about the shelling, saying that the rebels should have shown restraint - and how they changed what they said as soon as anyone from outside asked them. Of course it was the rebels that were responsible, but these people are traumatised," she says.
Serhiy Garmash, pro-Kyiv editor of the Donetsk region independent news resource ostro.org, says that there are a range of reasons for the people's siding with the rebels. Some, he says, are afraid of speaking out against the separatists, while others are suffering from Stockholm Syndrome - the condition of supporting one's own kidnappers. "Others are pro-Russian separatists and refuse to acknowledge any mistake in their views, and perhaps some really did suffer at the hands of the Ukrainian army," he says.
Unsurprisingly, the story that the Ukrainian forces themselves caused the destruction in Debaltseve and nearby Vuhlehirsk has featured heavily on state-owned Russian TV and local rebel-controlled TV.
The fact that townsfolk - even after heavy shelling by the rebels themselves - appear to remain loyal to the rebel cause may come as an unpleasant surprise to the Ukrainian authorities in Kyiv, who are engaged in a battle for hearts and minds in East Ukraine.
Ukrainian government media pursued a similar strategy of spin in the summer of 2014, when Ukrainian forces were on the offensive around Luhansk and Donetsk, and shelling caused scores of civilian casualties in Luhansk, as bne IntelliNews reported. Ukraine government-backed media claimed the rebels were themselves firing on the towns that they held, allegedly for propaganda purposes. But in contrast to Debaltseve, few in Luhansk at the time believed in this version of events.
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#2
Fighting rages near Donetsk airport despite Ukraine ceasefire
March 16, 2015
By Gabriela Baczynska
SPARTAK, Ukraine (Reuters) - Heavy machinegun and light artillery fire pounded a district of Donetsk, the biggest city of eastern Ukraine, on Monday and pro-Russian rebels said there had been no lull in the fighting since a February ceasefire.
The Spartak district, adjacent to the city's now-flattened airport, is one of several sites in eastern Ukraine to have seen continued hostilities between the rebels and Ukrainian government forces since last month's ceasefire, brokered by France and Germany in the Belarussian capital Minsk.
The ceasefire is broadly holding in the rest of the region.
"Not a single day has been quiet here since the deal. One of our guys got killed here today and we have lost nine in total since the deal," said one rebel fighter who gave his name as Roman and bore the nickname Gruzin, or 'the Georgian'.
He commands some 120 members of the rebel Vostok (East) battalion in Spartak, an area where most houses and other infrastructure were destroyed during months of heavy fighting for control of the nearby Donetsk city airport.
The airport is now completely destroyed but its ruins lie in an area now controlled by the rebels.
Gruzin's men had two large anti-aircraft guns mounted on a truck and an armed personnel carrier in Spartak.
While the vast majority of Spartak residents fled long ago, several dozen desperate people are holding on, saying they don't want to leave their belongings behind or have nowhere to go.
"The war has been going on for a year here. We are used to it by now, though I guess we should not get used to it. We have a basement and we run there when the fighting gets intense," said 61-year-old resident Yelena.
She lives in a badly damaged house with her 14-year-old daughter Marina who has not been to school since last May.
Both sides in the conflict, in which more than 6,000 people have died since last April, have accused each another of violating the truce. Gunfire came from both sides of the line of contact in Spartak on Monday.
The Kiev government and its Western supporters accuse Moscow of deliberately driving the rebellion in eastern Ukraine by providing the rebels with arms and money and sending serving Russian troops across the border.
Moscow denies direct military participation in the conflict.
The rebels said on Monday they only opened fire when attacked by the Ukrainian troops, but said they did not expect the latest truce to hold for long and they threatened to capture more ground.
Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko said during a visit to Berlin on Monday he wanted European Union leaders to make clear they would impose further economic sanctions against Russia if Moscow did not implement the Minsk ceasefire.
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#3
DPR accuses Kyiv of imitating peace process
MOSCOW. March 17 (Interfax) - The administration of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) believes that Kyiv is only imitating peaceful intentions on Donbas and is actually trying to disrupt the realization of the Minsk agreements.
Andrei Purgin speaker of the DPR People's Council, told Interfax the amendments to the law on the special status of Donbas submitted by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko do not contain a list of the areas of Donbas that are granted special status as the set of measures signed in Minsk in February requires.
"The Verkhovna Rada meeting has begun. But what is happening is a show. The thing is that [Ukrainian President Petro] Poroshenko simultaneously submits a mutually exclusive decree and amendments to the law on the special status of Donbas. That is, we have a situation when the coalition in the Rada won't want to vote for the document that eventually won't be in line with the Minsk agreements - and that will allegedly be the most what the authorities can get from the Rada," Purgin said.
Purgin said these actions constitute "imitation of the peace process for Western viewers, who don't really go very deeply into the details of what is happening."
"They are creating an illusion of a peace process to give the West the impression of active peace activities that are allegedly conducted by the Ukrainian authorities: they want to make people think that they are trying, but the peace initiatives cannot be implemented without the Verkhovna Rada approval, there is no consensus, and it cannot be pressured," Purgin said.
The DPR also finds the submission of amendments to the law on the special status of Donbas a major breach of the Minsk agreements.
"The submitted amendments envisage a whole range of issues that are totally unrelated to the implementation of the law on special status and even contradict it. Among other things, it establishes conditions for elections unilaterally without consultations with us. At the same time, all they had to do to submit to the Rada for approval a list of the areas where a special status will be introduced. It would make it possible to immediately begin dialogue on economic issues and lift the blockade," Purgin said.
Purgin said that these actions by Kyiv "essentially invalidate the law on special status." The DPR is unhappy about Kyiv's refusal to discuss the political part of the set of measures with the self-proclaimed republic.
"The Minsk agreements envisage compulsory consultations with us on political issues. However, it's not happening, which is a major breach of the peace plan," he said.
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#4
Kiev Withdraws Heavy Arms, Ready to Deliver Humanitarian Aid to Donbas
KIEV, March 17 (Sputnik) - Kiev has withdrawn its heavy artillery from the line of contact in eastern Ukraine and is prepared to deliver humanitarian aid to the region, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said Tuesday.
"Today, we have come to agreement on fulfilling the Minsk agreements...Ukraine announces that it will fulfill each point...Ukraine has withdrawn heavy artillery in accordance with the procedure set out by the OSCE, and Ukraine is ready to provide a solution to the humanitarian issue to occupied territories of individual regions of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions," Poroshenko said after talks with Romanian President Klaus Iohannis in Kiev.
The head of eastern Ukraine's breakaway republics asks why Ukraine's president is talking about the delivery of weapons from a dozen countries in Europe while publically proclaiming his commitment to peace.
Continual violence in Donbas pushed the leaders of Russia, Germany, France and Ukraine to negotiate a reconciliation deal on February 12 in Minsk. Alongside the February 15 ceasefire and heavy weapon withdrawal, the agreement includes an "all-for-all" prisoners exchange.
East Ukraine's regions of Donetsk and Luhansk completed the pullout of heavy artillery March 1. The withdrawal is one of the key points of the ceasefire deal, hammered out by the leaders of Russia, France, Germany and Ukraine in February and signed by Kiev forces and independence supporters.
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#5
https://irrussianality.wordpress.com
March 16, 2015
WHAT PALACE COUP?
By Paul Robinson
Associate Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa. Paul Robinson holds an MA in Russian and Eastern European Studies from the University of Toronto and a D. Phil. in Modern History from the University of Oxford. Prior to his graduate studies, he served as a regular officer in the British Army Intelligence Corps from 1989 to 1994, and as a reserve officer in the Canadian Forces from 1994 to 1996. He also worked as a media research executive in Moscow in 1995. Having published six books, he has also written widely for the international press on political issues. His research focuses generally on military affairs. In recent years, he has worked on Russian history, military history, defence policy, and military ethics.
According to the rumours circulating this past week, Russian president Vladimir Putin was either ill, dead, a new father, or had been secretly thrown out of power by unknown forces in the Kremlin. Forbes magazine, for instance, ran an article entitled 'Can Putin's absence indicate a palace coup in Moscow?' Forbes cited Putin's former economics advisor Andrei Illarionov, who wrote of a 'general's plot' which would result in the forcible retirement of Putin, Prime Minister Medvedev, and Foreign Minister Lavrov. Britain's Daily Mail newspaper had a slightly different take on the matter. 'Former FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev was behind the plot', it claimed, referencing the 'chairman of the pro-Kremlin National Islamic Committee, Geydar Dzhemal.'
We now know that none of this was true. This Monday Putin was around and about visiting St Petersburg. But the palace coup rumours did not come out of nowhere. For several months now, commentators have been speculating with increasing regularity that such a change of power was inevitable. Thus novelist Boris Akunin mused in The Interpreter in June last year that Putin's rule would end either 'in a palace coup or a social explosion'. The Interpreter's Paul Goble later betted firmly on the former with an article claiming: 'Interest in a Palace Coup against Putin Said Growing among Russian Elites'
Others have taken up the theme. In December 2014, for instance, Shaun Walker wrote for The Guardian that, 'the Russian oil crash could threaten Putin with a palace coup.' If the Russian economy collapsed, claimed Walker, there could be 'splits' among the elites: 'even among those ideologically in tandem with Putin, if their vast wealth begins to be threatened, their loyalty may waver.' 'Some day, I suspect Putin will fall to a political coup,' agreed Mark Galeotti this week. And Donald Jensen wrote in February that:
"Although Putin appears firmly in charge, any threat to him at the moment lies in the corridors of power rather than in the streets. Western sanctions and the drop in oil prices demonstrate that Putin is no longer able to protect the economic interests of key members of the ruling class. ... There is little doubt these disaffected oligarchs have begun to quietly consider a change in the regime's leadership."
Yet what this coup would consist of is unclear. Illarionov speaks of a 'general's plot', but Galeotti denies that a military coup is possible and speaks instead of some 'political' action which might lead to Putin's fall. This vagueness strongly suggests the palace coup is not a properly thought-out scenario. Moreover, no evidence is ever provided to justify Jensen's claim that the Russian elite are considering a change of leader. With Putin's approval rating currently at 88%, toppling him would be both extremely difficult and politically suicidal. In addition, the Ukrainian experience has surely demonstrated the catastrophic consequences which follow from running roughshod over constitutional technicalities. It is very hard to see who could benefit from an unconstitutional change of government. Russia's economy is not doing very well at the moment, but the predicted 2-4% decline in GDP is hardly coup-worthy.
How then can one explain the current obsession with the possibility of a palace coup? The answer seems to lie in the abject failure of Russia's liberal opposition to overthrow Putin by other means. Three years ago, there was great optimism that the demonstrations in Moscow which followed the 2011 Duma elections showed that the political tide had turned decisively against Russia's ruler. This optimism proved to be mistaken. The opposition is as isolated and unpopular as ever, while Putin's popularity has grown and grown. But as Nina Khrushcheva writes, 'One hope remains, a palace coup.' The talk of a coup thus appears to be the final straw of wishful thinking to which those opposed to Putin cling now that it is clear that they will never defeat him by legitimate political means or mass protests. Rather than being a sign of Putin's political weakness, therefore, the rumours of a palace coup are a sign of his continuing strength.
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#6
www.rt.com
March 16, 2015
Putin looking very well for a man who died last week
By Bryan MacDonald
Bryan MacDonald is an Irish writer and commentator focusing on Russia and its hinterlands and international geo-politics.
The media spent a whole weekend following the Putin 'story' and then discovered it wasn't news at all. And some say journalism is dead?
Lost weekends, eh? Most of us have had them. Arrive at the pub Friday after work and before you know it, it's Monday morning. Sometimes, your wallet could be missing, or a tooth. Maybe you've met the - temporary - love of your life Saturday night or, on a bad day, still have a lingering taste of Kebab?
Fun as it can be, most of us eventually grow out of it. Past the age of 30, it's more lost hopes than lost weekends that bother one. By 60, loss of memory is a more likely affliction, allowing you to experience lost weekends without even leaving home.
At 62, it's fair to say that Vladimir Putin is hardly in the first flush of youth. While a very fit man for his age, one doubts that three-day long benders are his forte. However, in the increasingly nutty world of Western Media 'Kremlinologists,' the Russian President has just had a weekend that'd make the cast of the Hangover movies blush.
The experts that aren't
Experts...who? Most of them have either barely or never lived in Russia. Many have not even visited Russia for a considerable length of time. Even more can't speak enough of the language to order a pizza in downtown Moscow. None of this stops them from pontificating across social media and the airwaves with their unique brand of collective baloney. One "pundit" trying to outdo the other for impact. Like bar-bores looking for a bit of company on a lonely Monday night.
So this was it, as now we know: Putin died on Thursday. Following the shock of his sudden death, he then fathered a child on Friday, in Switzerland. Surely overjoyed at overcoming the obstacle that was his passing, his weekend took a turn for the worse on Saturday when he was overthrown in a military coup - on top of having had a fit of aggressive flu.
No wonder so many people were surprised by how well he looked on Monday morning, considering these supposed exertions.
Instead of meekly sliding back into the bushes from which they had emerged, some of the Western press held out. Take a look at this mid-Monday tweet from young British neocon Ben Judah. A few months ago, the Londoner seriously damaged Polish politician Radoslaw Sikorski with his unique brand of incompetence. Now he is refusing to surrender his hopes that Putin might have serious problems.
Ben Judah @b_judah
Putin reappeared today. The video is short. He is sweaty and does not speak.
10:04 AM - 16 Mar 2015
Judah is a regular pundit on British television, hired by producers who vastly over-estimate his knowledge of Russia. He helped to lead a Twitter frenzy and some of his fellow travelers joined in. The world of anti-Russia journalism/activism is a relatively small - albeit lucrative - one, and the chief players are all familiar with one another through various think-tanks and fora.
Rising from the ether like Zombies
Anders Aslund is a '90s hold-over who predicted Russia's collapse in 1999. He was wrong. Aslund circulated a Tweet on Sunday which suggested that Putin's famous/infamous aide Vladislav Surkov had fled to Hong Kong, as a kind of reverse Edward Snowden
Anders Aslund @anders_aslund
Clearest indication so far: Putin's aide on Ukraine Vladislav Surkov flew suddenly w family to Hong Kong = Putin losing & Ukraine policy key
8:05 AM - 15 Mar 2015
Later, an actual Russia expert, Eric Kraus, explained to Aslund that Surkov, a noted culture vulture, was probably attending Art Basel in the former British colony. Aslund didn't acknowledge Kraus.
Another canard was that Putin's long-time bodyguard, General Viktor Zolotov, had died . Meanwhile, Mark Galeotti, a popular pundit, helped fan the conspiracy theories last Thursday, showing the same vaunted accuracy as exactly one year ago when he claimed Russia wouldn't seize Crimea.
Mark Galeotti @MarkGaleotti
If we don't get to see #Putin in next 24 hours or just get more press stills, can assume something serious up - & succession wars begin
5:40 PM - 12 Mar 2015
Of course, neocons have instigated similar fantasies before. In 2009, false rumors that Ayatollah Khamenei of Iran was dead spread like wildfire around the web.
So where was Putin? I have no idea. Also, given the peculiarities of Russian politics and the traditions of the country, speculation is futile. Russia is not America. Politicians don't share their medical histories or personal lives with the media in the manner that has become almost compulsory in Washington. Anyway, if he really was sick, why the surprise? A 62-year-old man picking up the flu is hardly unusual. Especially at a time of year when the harsh Russian winter transforms into spring.
However, the non-event of the weekend does confirm a few suspicions.
Firstly, how one-track the Western media has become in the social media age. Despite a host of issues relating to the Ukraine ceasefire and the Russian economy, almost the entire press pack were distracted by the kind of nonsense that should be restricted to the silly season.
When a once-respected newspaper like London's Daily Telegraph has its Moscow correspondent, Roland Oliphant, producing this kind of piffle, there's little that can be said in its defense.
Additionally, and most importantly, a key fact was reinforced: Too many prominent 'Russia experts' are simply not fit for the designation. They've either been too long out of Russia to commentate with authority on the country's current state or they never knew much to begin with. It's time to sideline the Cold War dinosaurs and their protégés. In Russia-focused journalism, as in many areas of life, les grandperes ont toujours tort.
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#7
Russia Insider
http://russia-insider.com
March 16, 2015
The Great Putin Disappearance
Western media and experts be-clown themselves again
By Patrick Armstrong
Patrick Armstrong received a PhD from Kings College, University of London, England in 1976 and retired in 2008 after 30 years as an analyst for the Canadian government, specializing in first the USSR and then Russia. He was a Political Counselor in the Canadian Embassy in Moscow from 1993 to 1996. He has been a frequent speaker at the Wilton Park conferences in the UK.
As consumers of media outlets in the West know, Putin's "disappearance" is a sign of something very, very important. Probably.
He's dead. There was even a Twitter thingee #ПутинУмер.
It's a coup. "Vladimir Putin is 'alive' but 'neutralised' as shadowy security chiefs stage a stealthy coup in Moscow, it was claimed last night." says the Daily Mail. "Social media was thrown into a frenzy after pictures emerged late Friday night of multiple unmarked white trucks pulled up beside the Kremlin." said Ukraine Today. There to cart away his loot suggested the Daily Mail. A coup: "Former presidential adviser, Andrey Illarionov reports that in a few days it will be announced about the resignation of Vladimir Putin and the power will be taken by a group of officers and security forces led by the head of the presidential administration." Anders Äslund speculates on who is who in the coup.
Maybe everything or anything suggests the ever-amusing New York Times. Flu perhaps but also: "There have been periodic glimpses of the tension behind the high red walls of the Kremlin, infighting over the wisdom of waging war in Ukraine that has only deepened as the value of the ruble crumbled..." Nemtsov murder, distraction, "dusty playbook of the Soviet Union", mistress, blah, blah, blah. (And, Dear Readers, because it is the NYT, after all, I can't resist this at the end of the piece "Correction: March 13, 2015. An earlier version of this article misstated the surname of the Italian prime minister. He is Matteo Renzi, not Renzo. It also misstated the year the submarine Kursk sank. It was 2000, not 2002." What corrections will be discovered by the NYT's layers of fact-checkers in a week?).
The Independent shoves them all in (except the possibility that nothing has happened. But hey! It's Russia, something must have happened) and tosses plastic surgery into the mix.
In Switzerland to witness the birth of the heir shouts the New York Post quoting a Swiss paper. Of course we can't expect the mainstream media to have the resources of Anatoly Karlin who found a photo of the obviously un-pregnant so-called girlfriend.
Julia Ioffe uses up some trees in the Washington Post darkly speculating - Stalin in June 1941, Gorbachev in August 1991 - a sign of something, that's for sure.
The Economist: "What is one to make of it all? In the absence of better information, one might ask what it has meant in the past when rulers of secretive governments vanished from public view." So let's go back to 1564, because it's well known that nothing in Russia ever changes. (Just think how long and hard people would laugh at you if you used Henry VIII as evidence of something in today's Britain).
No, it's war. All the Russian Embassy staff had left London. That was apparently connected with the British nuclear first strike that didn't happen.
Something vaguely Brobdingnagian is about to happen. Some huge announcement is coming on the weekend.
Abducted by aliens? Well, probably not but let's put it out there anyway.
Flu, says a CIA source (ah something rational at last). But Ioffe authoritatively informs us they'd never admit he's sick ("manly men don't get sick").
The BBC is magisterial as ever but still manages to make a big deal of it: "And all this because there's been no verifiable sighting of the omnipotent and normally omnipresent Vladimir Putin since 5 March."
Well, here's his schedule on the Presidential website: there's something nearly every day. But that doesn't count because the Western media can't find the website, can't read Russian, don't know anyone who does, wouldn't believe it, has to get excited because everybody else has got excited. Anyway, he met with the President of the Kyrgyz Republic (a country not too far from the NYT's Kyrzbekistan, but probably not in the Austrian-speaking world, one assumes) today so the panic is over.
What have we learned? Well that the BBC, NYT and so forth don't think alien abduction or nuclear first strikes are credible enough to toss into the list. (Although trucks removing the temporary skating rink on Red Square make the cut in several outlets.) So we've discovered that they do have some standards, after all. So that's something on the credit side.
The West has developed a hysterical obsession with Putin and this "absence" was a chance to display it and make fools of themselves. Certainly, the Western media, losing ground and credibility steadily, will not have gained any from this preposterous performance. I can't help wondering whether Putin and his team (which has shown itself to be much smarter than anybody in the West) didn't concoct the whole fake disappearance to allow the West and its tame sources to be-clown themselves and take their reputation down another couple of points. Now, that would be clever. And fun to watch; a tiny hint from Putin? "Life 'would be boring without gossip'".
Also notice the assumption in practically every one of these stories. Which is that Russia is a tremendously unstable place held together by one man. This despite the fact that the Constitutional successor, a long-time member of The Team, has actually been president before and that The Team has demonstrated a remarkable coherence - to say nothing of competence - for fifteen years now.
The second thing to notice is this crackbrained obsession with one man. Putin is the Qaddafi, the Saddam Hussein, the Milosevich, the bin Laden, the Aidid, of Russia. If only he would go, the bear would roll over and expose his tummy. Well, getting rid of those guys didn't work, and getting rid of Putin won't either. It's not just one man, it's a whole country. When are they going to learn this?
My theories: normal few days, maybe some flu. But Putin does take a three or four day retreat most years to a monastery and it is Lent.
(But I really like the idea of a sting operation to allow the Western MSM and its tame "experts" to make fools of themselves.)
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#8
Christian Science Monitor
March 16, 2015
Putin's disappearing act: Was he just trolling everyone?
The Russian president made his first public appearance in 10 days on Monday, laughing off the intense rumors that followed his sudden disappearance.
By Fred Weir, Correspondent
MOSCOW - A smiling Vladimir Putin reappeared in public Monday after a still-unexplained 10-day absence that sent Russia's notorious rumor mill into overdrive, including speculation that he might be dead, sick, removed by a hard-line coup, or even attending the birth of his "secret love child."
It's a movie that veteran Kremlin-watchers have seen many times before. In Russia's opaque, leader-oriented political system, where one man is all that seems to stand between order and chaos, President Putin's slightest disappearance inevitably cues mass anxiety and waves of gossip. Like Soviet leaders before him, he is obsessively secretive about his private life. No one even knows where his ex-wife and two daughters live.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin's press service, which ought to provide an informative window on the president's activities, confined itself over the past week to chiding reporters for what it denounced as their silly pursuit of gossip.
Some experts suggest Putin may have even staged his own extended absence from the public eye, perhaps to distract attention from the recent murder of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, or just to see what would happen.
"He's trolling everyone," says Sergei Karaganov, a senior Russian foreign policy expert. "He's the boss, he can do that. His people are shrewd manipulators and, look, they've got everyone talking about Putin."
Putin certainly looked as if he had enjoyed the frenzy of conjecture over his whereabouts when he resurfaced Monday at meeting with Kyrgyz President Almazbek Atambayev in St. Petersburg.
"Life would be boring without rumors," he told journalists.
The Kremlin press service and Russian media have been furiously scolding all those, particularly the Western media, who ran with gossip rather than waiting for the facts. But there is still no explanation for Putin's disappearance after he canceled a string of meetings last week and his website posted a photograph of him with a regional leader, labeled "March 11," which had reportedly appeared in a local newspaper a week earlier.
"Our political system is totally concentrated on the leader," says Nikolai Svanidze, a leading Russian TV personality. "We do not have a reliable system of succession, so can you blame people for getting scared when Putin suddenly falls off the radar screen?"
The Russian constitution mandates that the prime minister - who happens to be former President Dmitry Medvedev - should take charge if the president is incapacitated, followed by elections within three months. But Mr. Medvedev, whose presidency was little more than a placeholder for Putin, inspires little confidence among Russians.
"Our institutions are not working. Putin has substituted himself for them, and so obviously people fear disaster if he should suddenly go," Mr. Svanidze says.
Health-related rumors were a monthly staple under former President Boris Yeltsin, who had serious heart trouble and constant sobriety issues. He actually suffered a heart attack days before the crucial 1996 presidential election, which his aides kept secret for weeks. On Election Day, a fake polling station was set up in Mr. Yeltsin's intensive care unit in a carefully staged ploy to convince the public that he was in good health. The extremely ill president was briefly shown on TV casting his ballot.
A much more vigorous and apparently sober Putin has had fewer public disappearances, but he too has been dogged by rumors about his health. His occasional absences from the public spotlight have even prompted nervous speculation.
"The bottom line here is that the Russian president must be seen to have irreproachable good health. Nothing else is acceptable," says Alexei Makarkin, deputy director of the independent Center for Political Technologies in Moscow. "That's why even the slightest illness has to be covered up, because it might tarnish the image of our indispensable leader."
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#9
Moscow Times
March 17, 2015
82% of Russians See Steep Prices Rises as Nation's Biggest Problem - Poll
Inflation is the biggest concern for Russians with 82 percent of the population picking it as the most pressing issue facing the country, according to a poll published by the independent Levada Center on Monday.
The figure is up from 71 percent in August, and from 69 percent this time last year.
Price rises have gathered pace in Russia in recent months, fueled by a food import ban imposed by the Kremlin and the ruble's rapid devaluation last year when it lost more than 40 percent against the U.S. dollar. Moscow in August banned select food imports for a year from countries that had sanctioned it over its role in the Ukraine crisis.
Food inflation has outpaced total inflation, which hit 16.7 percent in February.
Poverty was the second most pressing issue, selected by 43 percent, followed by rising unemployment, which was picked by 38 percent, the Levada Center said.
A majority of Russians - 55 percent - also said the government was failing to deal with inflation and falls in real income, according to the Levada Center. The poll was held on Feb. 20-23, surveying 1,600 people across 46 of Russia's regions. The statistical margin of error was no more than 3.4 percent, the pollster said.
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#10
Russian Elites but Not Russian People, Ready to Capitulate to the West, Kagarlitsky Says
Paul Goble
Staunton, March 17 - The West does not understand Russia, but it does understand very well indeed Russia's elites; and as a result, it has seriously miscalculated in its dealings with Moscow about Ukraine, according to Boris Kagarlitsky, who argues the elites are ready to capitulate in the face of sanctions but the Russian people never will be.
In fact, the Moscow analyst says, while increasing sanctions may increase the willingness of Russian elites to find compromises, they "not only will not frighten the population of Russia but on the contrary will push" all other Russians in the opposite direction and make them more anti-Western and anti-elite as well (stoletie.ru/vzglyad/elity_gotovy_kapitulirovat_627.htm).
Although the West and the elites assume the population will always be passive, in fact, that is not the case, and popular anger at anything that ordinary Russians view as a capitulation will be something the Kremlin will have to take into account. Indeed, Kagarlitsky says, this divide between elites and masses will form the core of Russian politics in the months ahead.
The Presidential Administration understands this, he says, but the government and even more the Russian liberal elites on whose views the West relies do not. And consequently, the West's own actions instead of pushing Moscow in the direction it hopes for are in fact pushing the regime in very different ones.
And he argues that in this conflict, Moscow's liberal intelligentsia will find itself in an ever weaker position because its support of the West on Ukraine means that it "has isolated itself from society and even from those of its strata which a year or two ago were ready to listen to its arguments."
The West's sanctions have been "ineffective" and counter-productive in several ways. They have allowed the government to shift the blame from itself to the West for the crisis that was coming in any event. And they have convinced both those in the government and many in the population that everything would have been well if they had just continued on as before.
But while the sanctions could have Moscow with the excuse it needed to get out from under certain harmful WTO restrictions, to seek to boost food production at home as part of its import substitution drive, and to revise its general economic course, that has not happened because of the way in which sanctions have become "an alibi" for the regime.
According to Kagarlitsky, "practice measures for import substitution and the modernization of the economy are not being taken, the development of infrastructure as before is limited to talk about several super-roads and super-ambitious projects which will not give anything to provincial Russia which is suffering from elementary roadlessness."
There is a reason Russian elites aren't prepared to do anything to help correct the situation except talk about making concessions to the West: their "way of life, ideology, culture, and private interests" are all in that direction. Their money is abroad and so too are their interlocutors.
They aren't listening to the Russian people who are unhappy that they are not being given more help but who are insistent that Moscow make no concessions on Crimea as some in the elites are quite prepared to do, assuming as the West does that the Russian people will go along with anything the elites tell the masses to do.
"But," Kagarlitsky says, "the population of the country is in no way as passive as it seems to bureaucrats in the capital. It is just that so far, the majority of the citizens of Russia prefer not to rock the boat for the completely understandable reason that the people have something to lose" and do not want to take risks.
The people rocking the board, he suggests, are the government bureaucrats "not only when they try to reach agreement with the EU on the lifting of sanctions but also when they conduct all kinds of 'optimizations,' which are killing education, health care, science and transportation."
"Sooner or later," the Moscow analyst says, "they will have to pay for all of this, and the political price will be extremely high." For the moment, it is clear that "Russian elites are seeking a compromise with the US and the EU without reflecting about whether they will retain the trust of their own people."
And he predicts that "very soon they will disscover that the price of such a compromise could turn out to be their own political death."
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#12
http://cassad-eng.livejournal.com
March 16, 2015
Crimea. The Path to the Motherland. Afterword
Colonel Cassad
A more detailed review of the documentary "Crimea. The Path to the Motherland".
Yesterday I watched it together with friends and acquaintances who took part in this process. Overall, people had positive impressions about the film, although certain moments were sacrificed for the benefit of tolerance, which was a pain to see.
1. Naturally, the film offers a review of the events, where certain moments were emphasized and other moments were deemphasized. On the one side this is motivated by the time limit of the film, it was hard to compress every interesting detail to fit it, on the other side this is motivated by secrecy considerations in those matters that were deemed necessary to be ignored.
2. The following moments remained uncovered or barely touched:
a) Who was the other party in the conversations of admiral Ilyin in the Sevastopol regional administration building, following the attempt to set the [Ukrainian] troops in Sevastopol to combat readiness? Was admiral Ilyin our man or he was simply negotiated with?
b) The questions of "Rubanovism" and the attempts to impede the takeover of power in Sevastopol remained effectively untouched.
c) The role of Kerch was completely missed, even though it was in Kerch where the Russian flag was raised for the first time in Crimea on February 22.
d) I would like to see more details about the SBU attempts to impede the capture of the government district in Simferopol. Also, I'd like to see more about the shooting incident in Dzhankoy.
e) With regards to the role of NATO in those events, they could cover the work of the radio-interception center near Alushta, which cooperated with the NATO ships in the Black Sea.
f) The questions of the behavior of the previous Ukrainian authorities, which pretty much withdrew from the events or even tried to throw monkey wrenches into the works, were barely touched.
g) Regarding the blissful picture with Tartars, the question of squatting remained effectively untouched. This question has been a constant reason for tensions on the peninsula, during the Ukrainian rule and after it.
h) Also they could show more details about the role of Chubarov and Dzhemilev in inciting ethnic hatred and their connections with Hizb ut-Tahrir, and also about their contacts with the leaders of NATO countries and Kolomoisky.
But this is just nitpicking. Clearly, a part of the operation is still secret and many details will be uncovered gradually, as their confidential status will be lifted and some of the participants of those events will start speaking.
Regarding the question of Donbass, at this time it is hardly possible to make a film of this kind about the start of the war in Donbass. The reason is that Crimea situation has played out, but the Donbass situation continues to develop and the majority of the mechanisms associated with Russia's participation remains secret. Will there be such a film about Donbass and what will it look like - it depends upon the process and the result of the ongoing warfare. Honestly, I'd really like to watch the film "Donbass. The Path to the Motherland", and this Motherland ain't Ukraine.
[Note from the translator: at this time I cannot find an English version of this fim or even a version with at least some sort of English transcript or closed captions. But in several days I'm pretty sure that something will show up, at which point I'll update the video. In the meantime, if you run into a version of this film which has at least some sort of English translation, even if it is the "drunken sailor" stuff, then please post it in the comments or send the link to me by a private message/email.
Original article: http://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/2091520.html (in Russian)
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#13
International Media Hysterical Over Putin's Comment on Nuclear Readiness
March 16, 2015
MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Leading western newspaper headlines have focused on Russian President Vladimir Putin's comments about Russia's readiness to place its nuclear forces on alert in the event an "unfavorable scenario" had unfolded in Crimea, despite the United States and the United Kingdom making similar statements before.
"We were ready to do it [place nuclear forces on alert]. I talked with colleagues and told them that this [Crimea] is our historic territory, Russian people live there, they are in danger and we cannot leave them," Putin said in the "Crimea. Way Back Home" documentary released Sunday by Rossiya-1 TV.
While Putin said that the nuclear forces would have been put on alert only to protect Russian citizens residing in Crimea, Western media have been considering the implications of the statement an aggression. However, ownership of nuclear weapons, and the implied threat of their potential, not actual use, acts as a defensive deterrent.
Leading British newspapers, including The Guardian, The Independent, The Mirror, and the Daily Mail, have paid much attention to Putin's claims on Russia's readiness to use nuclear force if there had been shown to be a threat to the Russian-speaking residents of Crimea.
The New York Times and The Washington post also focused on this particular statement by the Russian president.
"After the revolution in Ukraine last year, President Vladimir V. Putin sent military forces to secure Crimea and even weighed putting Russia's nuclear arsenal on alert because of his concerns about both anarchy and Western intervention," The New York Times said.
However, the United States made similar claims in October 2014 when it said it was ready to use nuclear weapons if North Korean forces crossed the border into South Korea, an ally of Washington. Several years earlier, the UK's then-defense secretary Geoff Hoon said that the United Kingdom was ready to use nuclear weapons against Iraq if they ever used weapons of mass destruction against British troops.
Crimea became a Russian region following a referendum held March 16, 2014, in which over 96 percent of Crimean voters backed a move to leave Ukraine and rejoin Russia. Crimea's reunification with Russia was triggered by the February 2014 coup in Ukraine.
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#14
Kyiv calls for more pressure on Moscow to secure Crimea's return
KYIV. March 17 (Interfax) - Ukraine has called on the international community to consolidate efforts to pressure Russia into returning Crimea and paying compensation for the losses caused to Ukraine.
"We are calling on the global community to pay more attention to the problem of occupied Crimea, to consolidate international pressure on Russia to force it back immediately into complying with international law, cancelling all its illegitimate decisions that led to the temporary occupation of a Ukrainian territory, and compensating for the losses caused to Ukraine and its citizens," the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said in a statement released on Tuesday.
"Russia has violated the basic principles of international law and European structure, upset the existing balance of forces in the region and provoked Europe's biggest security crisis since the Second World War," the ministry said.
"Over 400 Ukrainian enterprises were illegally nationalized, Ukraine's subsoil mineral resources are being used illegally, 18 gas deposits have been seized," the ministry said.
"Ukraine's tourist gem has been transformed into a military base where Russia, in breach of the NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty), threatens to deploy nuclear weapons, which poses a real threat not only to regional but global security," the ministry said.
Kyiv also accused Moscow of violating human rights in Crimea, suppressing dissent, primarily among Crimean Tartars as well as independent media and journalists, the ministry said.
"Crimea was, is and will be part of sovereign Ukraine," and "the aggressor and invader will be brought to justice," the Ukrainian foreign ministry said.
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#15
Kremlin rules out handing back Crimea to Ukraine
March 17, 2015
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia said on Tuesday it would not hand back Crimea to Ukraine, despite warnings by the United States and European Union that they will not drop sanctions over the Black Sea peninsula's annexation a year ago.
"There is no occupation of Crimea. Crimea is a region of the Russian Federation and of course the subject of our regions is not up for discussion," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters during a conference call.
Russia's parliament approved the annexation of Crimea on March 21 last year after residents of the peninsula supported the move in a referendum. Moscow has said repeatedly it will not return it to Ukraine.
Russian forces had already seized control of Crimea after the overthrow of a Ukrainian president backed by Moscow, a move described by Russian officials as a coup which threatened the safety of Crimea's mainly Russian-speaking population.
U.S. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said on Monday Washington would keep economic sanctions in place on Russia over the annexation as long as Crimea remains under Russian rule.
EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said the 28-nation bloc would stick to its policy of not recognizing the annexation, including through sanctions.
President Vladimir Putin's popularity has soared since the annexation of Crimea, which was given to Ukraine by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1954 when it was part of the Soviet Union.
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#16
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
March 17, 2015
Politicians trade barbs over Crimea on anniversary
Putin's press secretary responds to comments by Jen Psaki and Federica Mogherini on the status of the peninsula.
Anna Sorokina, Elena Bobrova, RBTH, combined report
Russian President Vladimir Putin's press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, has responded to comments by foreign officials about Crimea by saying that any situation worth discussing regarding the peninsula is a Russian domestic issue and not the business of other countries.
"There is no occupation of Crimea. Crimea is a region of the Russian Federation," Peskov told reporters on Tuesday, commenting on remarks made by U.S. Department of State Spokeswoman Jen Psaki.
Foreign countries have no right to discuss the situation in Russian regions, Peskov said.
On March 16, Psaki said that Washington would maintain economic sanctions related to Crimea "as long as the occupation continues."
"The Russian Federation attempted to annex sovereign Ukrainian territory, disrupting 70 years of international order and drawing the condemnation of free, democratic societies across the globe," Psaki said in a report posted on the official website of the U.S. Department of State. "The United States continues to support Ukraine's sovereignty, territorial integrity, and right to self-determination."
EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini also said the 28-nation bloc would stick to its policy of not recognizing the annexation, including through sanctions.
Commenting on Psaki's statements to Russian news site Snob.ru, Viktor Supyan, deputy director of the Institute for US and Canada Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences said: "The American and European sanctions towards Russia are synchronized, but the Americans have a more rigid position compared with the EU. After all, European economic sanctions have some bite as Europe has closer economic relations with our country.
"For the U.S., trade with Russia has a little meaning; Russia accounts for only 1 percent of U.S. trade turnover, so the States can prolong sanctions as long as necessary."
The point of no return?
Russian President Vladimir Putin commented extensively on the circumstances surrounding the absorption of Crimea by Russia in a documentary entitled "Crimea: Return to the Motherland," which aired on state TV channel Rossiya 1 on March 15.
Putin said that the idea of taking Crimea away from Ukraine did not develop until after Yanukovich was ousted.
"We never thought of separating Crimea from Ukraine, never. But when the developments related to the coup, the armed and unconstitutional seizure of power began, and these people found themselves in danger of being humiliated by nationalists, then of course we, I immediately thought of that," Putin said.
According to the Russian State Duma Speaker Sergei Naryshkin, "Crimea was essentially separated from Russia illegally and against the people's will in 1991, and its return home took place in accordance with the will of the people of Crimea and in full accordance with the norms of national and international law."
Naryshkin made his comments while opening a plenary session of the State Duma on March 17, the one-year anniversary of the day the Supreme Council of Crimea declared independence from Ukraine and asked to join Russia.
The declaration followed a referendum held on the status of Crimea on March 16, 2014, in which more than 95 percent of voters opted to join Russia. The referendum is regarded as illegal by most countries, including the entire EU and the United States because it was held on very short notice and while Russian soldiers were on the territory of Crimea, among other reasons. There are also many questions about the size of the turnout and legal status of those voting. The OSCE did not monitor the referendum, although observers from 23 countries invited by Russia did oversee the voting.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, speaking at the National Defense Center during a TV linkup between Moscow and Sevastopol, home of Russia's Black Sea Fleet, called the absorption of Crimea by Russia "an act of restoring historical justice."
"There was a brief, although complicated and bitter interval, when Crimea was outside our country - legally, perhaps, but not spiritually," Shoigu said.
Crimea was part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic until 1954 when Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev made the peninsula part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic instead. Crimea became part of independent Ukraine with the fall of the Soviet Union.
Russia's parliament approved the request of Crimea to join Russia on March 21. Moscow has said repeatedly it will not return Crimea to Ukraine.
Viktor Supyan does not find the situation completely hopeless, despite the rhetoric.
"The U.S. is unlikely to soften its position concerning the Crimea, at least, in the nearest future," Supyan said. "But I assume that America can be softened if the conflict in the Donbass stops. Then we can repeat in some ways the situation with the Baltic States after the war. The U.S. and Western Europe considered the three Baltic countries occupied by the Soviet Union as of 1940. Trade and political relations developed, but the conflict was frozen.
"And in this case, there is more support now among the population of Crimea for accession to Russia than was the case then among the population of the Baltic states. So morally the situation for Russia now is more favorable than it was for the Soviet Union."
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#17
Political part of Minsk Accords for Ukraine harder to enforce than truce
By Tamara Zamyatin
MOSCOW, March 16. /TASS/. Forging mutual consent over to the rules of granting a special status to some territories of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in the east of Ukraine will be far harder than bringing hostilities to an end, polled experts have told TASS.
Last Saturday was the last, 30th day of the deadline that had been set for the Ukrainian President, Petro Poroshenko to ensure the adoption of a bill on determining the status of some districts of Donbas and special rules of local self-government. He assumed the obligation under the February 12 package of measures to enforce the Minsk Accords. Late Saturday night Poroshenko submitted a corresponding bill to the Verkhovna Rada, which is now to be considered on March 17. The draft, made public on the Ukrainian parliament's website, says the territories where a temporary regimen of local self-government will be in effect for a certain period of time includes the areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk republics beyond the line of disengagement between the rival factions, established under the Minsk Accords of September 19, 2014.
The director of the Political Studies Institute, Sergey Markov, says: "The conditions of determining the border between border some territories of Donbas and the rest of Ukrainian territory, enshrined in the Minsk Accords of September 19, 2014, and confirmed by a package of measures to enforce them, adopted on February 12, 2015 are utterly unacceptable for the militias. Otherwise Kiev would retain control of Debaltsevo and a number of other localities and the ruins of the Donetsk Airport - in other words, areas that saw fierce fighting just recently and which at the moment the February 12 agreements were signed were under the militias' control."
"The militias cannot afford to recognize the border of the special status territories the Ukrainian president has proposed, and this is precisely what Poroshenko counts on," Markov said. "This explains why he has not notified the leaders of the Donetsk and Luhansk republics of the contents of the document he had submitted to the Verkhovna Rada. In this way Poroshenko demonstrates his reluctance to comply with the political part of the Minsk Peace Accords, such as the constitutional reform, the lifting of the economic and financial blockade from Donbas, and so on," Markov said.
"Apart from the bill on the special status of some Donbas territories Poroshenko in a public statement put forward the demand all political parties registered in Ukraine, including the outspokenly nationalist ones, should be allowed to participate in the local elections of Donbas territories. But this is nonsense: letting those parties whose supporters from the volunteer and national guard battalions had been killing Donbas civilians participate in the elections," he remarked said.
"While submitting to parliament a bill on the special status of the Donbas area's militias-controlled territories Poroshenko has been pushing ahead with the mobilization of the Ukrainian army with the aim to build up its strength to 250,000, purchasing weapons from the EU countries, and inviting foreign military instructors. This may indicate an intention to order the Ukrainian army to mount another offensive against Donbas in May, thereby overshadowing Russia's May 9 celebrations on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany in World War II," Markov believes.
"For the Donetsk and Luhansk leaders and for the people of Donbas it would be utterly unacceptable to give back to Kiev the territories regained from the Ukrainian Armed Forces and the paramilitary battalions. Therefore the political part of the Minsk Accords will be far harder to enforce than the ceasefire and pullback of heavy weapons from the disengagement line," the president of the Academy of Geopolitical Problems, Konstantin Sivkov, has told TASS.
"As one can see in Ukrainian media reports, Poroshenko's bill on the special status of some Donbas territories does not envisage the self-proclaimed republics' rights to have their own armed police (in other words, to legalize the militia units), or conduct their own economic policies and foreign economic transactions. In other words, it is a discriminatory document, the militias' refusal to accept it would be tantamount to Kiev's preparations for another spring offensive against Donbas," Sivkov believes.
Some experts believe that in the current situation the best way out would be to freeze the status quo in the east of Ukraine for sometime. "When the tide of emotion subsides, it will be easier to come to terms. I believe that the leaders of the Normandy quartet will achieve this," the president of the Euro-Atlantic Cooperation Association, Anatoly Adamishin, has told TASS. "I do not rule out that the conflict in the east of Ukraine will be frozen: not now, though, but by the end of the year, when the West exhausts the political resource for supporting the Kiev authorities in their policies," Markov said.
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#18
Poll suggests only half of Russians believe Minsk agreements are violated
MOSCOW, March 17. /TASS/. Most Russians who think that the Minsk agreements are not observed in Donbas blame the Ukrainian authorities for this, a poll by the Russia Public Opinion Research Center (WCIOM) said on Tuesday.
A little more than half (53%) of respondents think that the Minsk agreements are not observed. Thirty-three percent of people are confident that Kiev and Donbas observe the truce.
Of those who consider the agreements not observed, every fifth person (21%) says both sides are guilty, 68% blame the Kiev authorities, and 2% of respondents think that Donbas militia are the ones violating the ceasefire.
Around 1,600 people were polled in 46 Russian regions on February 28 - March 1. The margin of error does not exceed 3.5%
The Minsk agreements were signed in February 2015. They envisage ceasefire in Ukraine's south-east, heavy weaponry withdrawal, prisoner exchange, local elections in Donbass and constitutional reform in Ukraine.
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#19
Interfax
March 16, 2015
Russia: All five men in custody charged with Nemtsov's murder
All five men held in custody in connection with the murder of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov have now been formally charged, privately-owned Russian news agency Interfax news agency has reported.
Three men - Shadid Gubashev, Khamzat Bakhayev and Tamerlan Eskerkhanov - were charged on 16 March, the agency reported the same day. Two others, Zaur Dadayev and Anzor Gubashev, were charged earlier.
The law-enforcement bodies have amended the murder charges brought against the men in custody: crime committed "for personal or financial gain" has been changed to "on the motives of political, ideological, racial, ethnic or religious hatred," the agency quoted a source close to the investigation.
"The investigators so far do not possess concrete information about who could have commissioned the crime but this does not mean that this version has been ruled out," the agency sources said.
Earlier Interfax sources said that the trail of the person commissioning the murder could lead to abroad.
According to preliminary information, Nemtsov was shot dead by Dadayev, a former deputy commander of the Chechen battalion "Sever", the agency quoted its source as saying. "However, this can be asserted with 100 per cent certainty when the murder weapon is found," the agency source said.
A source familiar with the investigation said that, according to the investigation, Nemtsov's murder had been carefully planned. The investigators think that the suspected killer, Zaur Dadayev, made use of the noise made by the street cleaning machine on the bridge, moved close to Nemtsov, shot him in the back and was probably picked up by car in which were brothers Anzor and Shadid Gubashev.
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#20
Interfax
March 17, 2015
All defendants in Nemtsov murder refusing to cooperate with police - source
Defendants in the murder of politician Boris Nemtsov have refused to cooperate with the police, a source familiar with the situation told Interfax.
"The defendants have declined to help the detectives," he said.
He also confirmed that some of the defendants had refused to answer police questions on the basis of article 51 of the Russian constitution.
"Zaur Dadayev was the only cooperative one at the start but he retracted the testimony and changed his tactics later," the source said.
Nemtsov was killed near the Kremlin in downtown Moscow late at night on February 27.
Interfax reported earlier that five defendants - Zaur Dadayev, Anzor Gubashev, Khamzat Bakhayev, Tamerlan Eskerkhanov and Shadid Gubashev - had been arrested.
A source in the law enforcement authorities told Interfax that Zaur Dadayev, a former deputy commander of the Chechen battalion North, might have perpetrated the murder.
A source close to the investigative group told Interfax on Monday that the accusations brought against the detainees had been changed from a crime motivated by greed or mercenary reasons to a political or religious hate crime.
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#21
Moscow Times
March 17, 2015
Lawyer Claims Main Suspect in Nemtsov Killing Has Alibi
By Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber
Three more suspects in last month's assassination of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov have been officially charged with his murder, the Interfax news agency reported Monday, as the main suspect's lawyer said his client had an alibi.
Zaur Dadayev's lawyer, Ivan Gerasimov, told the RBC newspaper Monday that his client had an alibi on the night Nemtsov was killed. Gerasimov told the newspaper that Dadayev was in Moscow, but nowhere near where the murder took place, without elaborating.
Earlier Monday, Tamerlan Eskerkhanov, Shagid Gubashev and Khamzat Bakhayev, three of the five Chechen men arrested earlier this month in connection with Nemtsov's murder, joined Dadayev - a senior police officer - and Anzor Gubashev in being charged with the killing.
An unnamed source close to the investigation told Interfax that law enforcement had changed the charges against the suspects, replacing the charge of murder motivated by greed or mercenary purposes with that of murder based on "political, ideological, racial, ethnic or religious hatred or enmity."
Nemtsov was gunned down on the night of Feb. 27 on Moscow's Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge, steps from the Kremlin. He had been set to lead an anti-government protest on March 1.
Each of the suspects had a planned role in the assassination, according to an unnamed source familiar with the investigation quoted by Interfax.
According to Interfax's source, Dadayev, a former deputy commander of Chechnya's Sever police battalion, likely followed Nemtsov onto the bridge from the restaurant in the GUM shopping mall on Red Square where the politician was dining with his girlfriend, who was unharmed in the attack.
Brothers Shagid and Anzor Gubashev allegedly drove onto the bridge to pick up Dadayev in a getaway car after the latter fatally shot Nemtsov several times from behind.
The alleged roles of Bakhayev and Eskerkhanov in the murder were not detailed in the source's account.
Interfax's source also claimed that investigators had found a private property in the Moscow region where the suspects allegedly gathered to plot the murder.
Independent media reports have speculated about indirect links between the murder suspects and high-ranking Chechen officials. Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov - who suggested earlier this month that Nemtsov's stance on religious-themed caricatures in French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo could have been the motive behind the murder - said in an Instagram post he knew Dadayev to be a "true Russian patriot."
According to independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, Dadayev traveled to and from Moscow with the commander of the Sever battalion, Alibek Delimkhanov, who is the brother of State Duma Deputy Adam Delimkhanov.
RBC news agency reported Monday that Dadayev had been living in Moscow for the past six months, despite numerous previous media reports stating he was on vacation from Chechnya in the Moscow at the time of the murder. RBC cited a source as saying Dadayev likely cohabited with Ruslan Geremeyev, another member of the Sever battalion. Geremeyev, according to Novaya Gazeta, is the nephew of Adam Delimkhanov and Russian senator Suleiman Geremeyev. Ruslan Geremeyev is currently in the Chechen capital Grozny where he is under the close protection of Chechen security forces, Novaya Gazeta reported Monday.
Eskerkhanov, one of the men charged Monday, is a former local police officer in a unit headed by Vakha Geremeyev, another uncle of Ruslan Geremeyev, according to Novaya Gazeta.
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#22
Russian oil, gas production expected to decline by 2035 - media
MOSCOW, March 17. /TASS/. Russia's Energy Ministry has predicts a 2% decline in the country's oil production by 2020 with a risk of a 10% decline by 2035, the Kommersant daily reported on Tuesday.
The natural gas production forecasts have been downgraded due to dwindling prospects for LNG projects, at the same time officials are ready to admit independent producers to exports, maintaining the single sales channel represented by the natural gas monopoly Gazprom, said Kommersant that has received materials on Russia's draft energy strategy until 2035.
This document was planned to be adopted at the beginning of last year, but it had to be finalised with taking into account the Western sanctions. Now the Energy Ministry that was preparing the draft even in the target scenario expects a decline in oil production in Russia by 2020 by 11 million tons to 514 million tons. Despite the production issues, the Energy Ministry expects by 2025 oil exports to grow by 15-17% because of the curtailment of downstream refining in Russia by 2035.
The forecasted 2035 natural gas production level has been downgraded from 936 billion to 885 billion cubic meters. Along with the forecasted decline in domestic consumption, the LNG production prospects have been cardinally - by 70% - downgraded: if a year ago the production volume by 2035 was projected at 100 million tons, then the current forecast expects only about 60 million tons.
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#23 www.rt.com March 17, 2017 Ukraine cops get 'shoot-to-kill orders' amid unrest over army hit & run killing of 8yo [Video and photos here http://rt.com/news/241293-ukraine-army-konstantinovka-violence/] Police have reportedly been allowed to use live rounds as tensions flare in the eastern Ukrainian town of Konstantinovka, where an eight-year-old girl was killed in a hit-and-run accident by a Ukrainian forces' armored vehicle. Tensions have been boiling in Konstantinovka after Ukrainian soldiers driving through the town at high speed lost control of their vehicle and ran into a crowd of pedestrians, hitting a woman with a baby in a stroller and killing the older girl. "The accident occurred at the Lomonosov Street near City Hospital No. 5. Three pedestrians suffered under the wheels of the fighting vehicle: A girl aged eight died on the spot, a woman and a child in a stroller were taken to hospital," Ukraine's Interior Ministry reported Monday night. Locals believe the driver of the vehicle was drunk at the time of the accident. According to local press, the perpetrators barely escaped the scene of the crime, as the fury of the locals erupted in clashes, with stones being thrown at security vehicles. Other residents were quick to surround the army barracks, where warning shots were reportedly fired. Following the incident, enraged people gathered in front of the military unit stationed in the local school building, demanding the military surrender those who were involved in the hit and run accident, Sputnik reported. The crowd has also reportedly set fire to the entrance of the dorms of the Ukrainian forces. "In the evening, near the dorms occupied by security forces, several hundred local residents gathered. They shouted: 'Fascists!' And threw stones at the windows of the barracks, set fire to two cars of the National Guard and overturned a third. In response, security forces fired several shots into the air," one eyewitness told Sputnik. One of the people from the crowd reportedly threw a Molotov cocktail at one of the dorm windows, starting a fire. According to Popular Front deputy Anton Gerashchenko, shoot-to-kill orders are enforced in Konstantinovka, to stop those trying to "incite" the violence. "If someone in Kostyantynivka uses arms to oppose the laws of the Ukrainian authorities, uses this accident (hit and run) for mass unrest, then we will fire one warning shot, and then will be shooting to kill. If there is no time to warn , we will be shooting to kill immediately," said Gerashchenko. "No one is allowed to undermine the Ukrainian government with arms in their hands." The Ukrainian soldiers responsible for the incident reportedly fled the scene in a taxi. Authorities later announced that the perpetrators were detained. "Those responsible for the accident, two soldiers, were detained and handed over to the military prosecutor," announced Vyacheslav Abroskin, head of Donetsk Regional Police, loyal to Kiev. According to unconfirmed reports on social media, additional reinforcements were dispatched to Konstantinovka to quell the unrest. Some alleged those might include members of the radical nationalist units. Meanwhile Ukraine's Interior Ministry announced that a task force from the General Staff of the Armed Forces was sent to lead the investigation, promising to punish those responsible. Kiev authorities also report that they have singled out the individual they believe was solely responsible for the en masse reaction against the negligence of Kiev's forces. A Ministry of Internal Affairs spokesman for Donetsk Region, Ilya Kiva, promised that the "instigator" will soon be caught and be brought to justice. Kiva also urged Konstantinovka residents to stay calm and not to incite further violence. |
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#24
Kyiv Post
March 16, 2015
Riots in Kostyantynivka after Ukrainian armored vehicle hits and kills a child
by Alyona Zhuk
A freak road accident involving a Ukrainian armored personnel vehicle that killed an 8-year-old girl escalated into a series of riots in Kostantynivka, Donetsk Oblast, on March 16.
The accident took place at around 3 p.m. in the center of the city of 95,000 residents. The armored vehicle lost control on the road and hit the little girl, her aunt and her baby cousin. The aunt received heavy injuries and was taken to a local hospital, but the baby was not injured, according to the Ukrainian authorities.
The accident caused unrest in the city, where many residents do not welcome the Ukrainian authorities and troops. According to some reports from the ground, Ukrainian military barracks were set on fire, but Kyiv Post has not been able to get an independent confirmation.
The Ukrainian authorities have said the soldiers who drove the military vehicle have already been detained.
"When investigation ends, those who are guilty will be severely punished," Ukraine's Defense Ministry said in a statement. "Moreover, commanders will be held responsible for absence of proper control."
The ministry also said a special group of investigators was sent to the ground, and the military prosecutor alerted. Meanwhile, head of the interior ministry department in Donetsk Oblast wrote on his Facebook page that he was also traveling to Kostyantynivka to personally oversee the investigation.
"The criminals will be punished whoever they are," Vyacheslav Abroskin wrote.
Meanwhile, videos of unrest in Kostyantynivka have become viral in social networks. Most of them showed people shouting in the streets and fires burning. The local office of the interior ministry said protesters burned tires in the streets.
Also, propaganda machines on both sides geared up and pumped out scores of tweets about the incident. On one side, trolls issued warnings that the Right Sector "punishers" were coming into town to rein in the local population. On the other side, numerous tweets warned that somebody was using the accident to incite riots.
As the situation escalated by the evening, the Ukrainian authorities allowed police officers to use weapons in case of mass riots, Anton Herashchenko, an adviser to Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, told 112 TV channel.
"If anyone in Kostyantynivka, with weapons, stands against the laws of the Ukrainian authorities, using this road accident for mass clashes, then a single warning shot will be fired, and then they (police) will shoot to kill. If there is no time for warning, they will shoot to kill immediately," Herashchenko said.
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#25
Russia Insider
March 16, 2015
Dead Newspaper Editor Latest Addition to String of Mysterious Deaths in Ukraine
Olga Moroz was the editor of "Neteshinsky Vestnik". She joins a long list of strange deaths in recent months.
By RI Staff
It should be noted that there are conflicting reports about the circumstances surrounding Moroz's death. While the following article claims there are no obvious signs of foul play, other sources disagree. As the article points out, Ukraine has been less than "hospitable" to journalists. Translated by RI's Alina Belyanina [http://vz.ru/news/2015/3/15/734493.html]:
The editor-in-chief of Neteshinsky Vestnik was found dead in the Khmelnitsky region, tells the Ukranian regional MIA's press service.
It is reported that " 44 -year-old woman who worked as a chief editor of the city newspaper Neteshinsky Vestnik was found dead in her apartment this morning in the city Netishin by her sister."
"At the initial examination the obvious signs of violent death wasn't found on the deceased's body," - according to the Management Department.
"For now, Investigative Netishinskovo City Police Department team with the experts of the regional crime lab are working at the place of the accident. The cause of death of the victim will be known only after the forensic examination,"- as it was said in a statement.
To recall, the Russian Foreign Ministry said that Ukraine continues to hunt for dissidents and journalists. On Sunday, the SBU reported on the detention of the "New Russia TV" channel.
On 5th of March it became known that the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry stopped accreditation of all the Russian media. The Ukrainian press is also being persecuted.
On Monday, the newspaper LOOK reported that Finnish journalist and politician Antero Eerolu was beaten in Ukraine.
In addition, the journalists in Ukraine are working with the risk for life. The Ukranian troops are the main source of danger for them. These people have been already killed by the actions of security forces: RTR employees Igor Kornelyuk and Anton Voloshin, the operator of the Channel One Anatoly Klyan, Italian journalist Andy Rokkelli and translator Andrei Mironov, photojournalist MIA "Russia Today" Andrew Stenin.
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#26
http://gordonhahn.com
March 16, 2015
Radio Liberty Fires Andrei Babitskiy for "Incorrect Position on Crimea"
By Gordon M. Hahn
The anti-Putin opposition newspaper Novaya gazeta as well as Tass are reporting that Andrei Babitskii has been fired for taking an "incorrect position on Crimea" by supporting Russia's reunification of the peninsula with Russia. Babitskii took the politically incorrect position in a blog not in an article or broadcast connected with RFERL. In the blog commentary, he also criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin, of whom Babitskii has always been a critic (www.novayagazeta.ru/news/1680987.html).
Tass reported that Babitskiy had been terminated because he had exposed some of the many war crimes committed by Ukrainian neo-fascists fighting alongside the Western-backed Ukrainian army in its civil war with the Donbass insurgents, citing the Czech newspaper Lidove noviny (http://tass.ru/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/1829143).
Ironically, the US government correctly supported Babitskii in the 1990s when he was temporarily detained by Russian security services for his coverage of the war in Chechenya and an interview he conducted with Chechen terrorist Shamil Basayev.
Perhaps, this is what the great Soviet dissident and human rights champion Andrei Sakharov meant when he referred to the inevitable "convergence" of our respective political systems.
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#27
Forbes.com
March 16, 2015
The Legatum Institute Thinks Ukraine's Economy Improved In 2014
By Mark Adomanis
The Legatum's institute's "prosperity index" is an attempt to look past crude GDP per-capita figures in order to provide a broader, more comprehensive look at which countries afford their citizens a high quality of life. Economics plays an important role in the ranking, but other spheres such as health, safety and security, social capital, and personal freedom play important roles as well. [http://www.prosperity.com/#!/]
In examining the rankings, though, I want to focus on economics because the other areas inevitably involve value judgements on incredibly contentious topics about which there is little or no scholarly consensus. Legatum, for example, thinks that social capital should be measured by looking at a composite of trust, charitable intent, and the strength of family networks. Why those three? Well because they're the most highly correlated with wealth. But there are other variables that are arguably far more relevant to what actually constitutes " social capital" (which itself is defined in various ways). Legatum's analysis of social capital, on its face, seems entirely reasonable, but there's no one "right" way to measure such an amorphous and ambiguous concept.
Economics, on the other hand, is just a lot more concrete as a discipline. While not totally immune from debate, it seems fair to say that there is a general consensus about how to measure a country's economy.
Interestingly, according to Legatum's rankings, Ukraine's economic performance marginally improved from 2013 to 2014. It jumped two spots in the rankings, moving from 72nd in 2013 to 70th in 2014. Now a 2 spot jump in the rankings might not seem like very much. Other countries in the region saw far more dramatic swings. But that two spot improvement is vastly better than Legatum's estimation of Russia's economic performance over the same time frame. Russia fell a full seven spots, from 50th to 57th. Indeed on the overall prosperity rankings Russia was one of worst performers in the entire world (Ukraine, on the other hand, saw its overall ranking improve).
The thing is when you look at the actual, as opposed to the hypothetical, performance of the Russian and Ukrainian economies Russia's unquestionably performed a lot better. Russia recorded 0.6% year over year GDP growth in 2014. That's hardly world-beating, but it was growth nonetheless. What happened in Ukraine? Well, according to IMF estimates, its GDP shrank by 7.5%. There was thus a gap of 8.1% in Russia's favor. Roughly speaking, that is the difference between China's growth rate and Italy's: it's an enormous difference by any possible reckoning.
Inflation told a broadly similar story. Russia's performance was decidedly mediocre: prices there increased by 11.5% over the course of 2014. It was Russia's worst performance in many years and hit the average consumer quite hard. In Ukraine, however, the situation was dramatically worse: prices there increased by 24.9% during 2014. Ukrainian inflation was thus more than twice as bad as Russia's (already pretty bad!) figure.
Likewise when it came to the performance of the currency Russia, while performing poorly in absolute terms, performed better than Ukraine. Compared to the US dollar, the ruble shed about 46% of its value during 2014. Again, just to be clear, that's really bad. It was one of the worst in the world. The hryvnia, however, performed even worse, losing 48% of its value against the dollar.
Ukraine also under-performed Russia in the labor market: during 2014 unemployment in Ukraine was about 9% in comparison to about 5% in Russia.
So, when we look at Ukraine and Russia, we see that, in 2014, Russia's economy grew more rapidly, it had a much lower inflation rate, its currency (although greatly weakened) retained more of its value, and its unemployment rate was substantially lower. In Legatum's estimation, however, it was Russia that had become, even in only narrow economic terms, a less "prosperous" society while Ukraine had actually improved. I'm all for contrarianism, but that seems a bridge too far.
It's possible, I suppose, to argue that Maidan and the overthrow of the stupendously corrupt and incompetent Yanukovych government enormously improved Ukraine's long-term economic outlook. Personally I think that such a view is mistaken, largely because it doesn't take into account the gigantic demographic headwinds against which Ukraine will be straining in the coming years, but it's a perfectly fair position to hold. Some of my best friends are optimistic about Ukraine, and all that.
But what doesn't seem very reasonable is to argue that during 2014 Ukraine's economy began to perform better. This, after all, is an economy which shrank by more than 7% and which recorded almost 25% inflation. Justified satisfaction at Yanukovych's downfall shouldn't blind us to the ugly, and rapidly worsening, reality of Ukraine's economy. Wishful thinking doesn't help anyone, least of all the Ukrainians.
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#28
Wall Street Journal
March 17, 2015
Ukraine Finance Minister Seeks More Bailout Financing
Natalie Jaresko says security, political risks could push up debt-restructuring needs
By IAN TALLEY
WASHINGTON-Ukraine needs more bailout financing than currently promised to help jump-start the embattled nation's economy, Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko said Monday, just days after the International Monetary Fund approved an expanded rescue package.
"The package that we have is going to stabilize the financial banking system, but it's not enough to seriously restart growth and promote growth," Ms. Jaresko said in an interview after meetings with U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew. "I'm looking for more support."
The IMF last week approved a $17.5 billion emergency loan as part of a larger $40 billion international financial package designed to keep the country afloat as Kiev's pro-West government overhauls its creaking economy and contends with Russian-backed separatists in the east.
In meetings with senior U.S. Treasury, State Department and White House officials and lawmakers, Ms. Jaresko this week is making the case that backing Ukraine will pay geopolitical dividends.
"No one is paying more to protect the world from a nuclear power that is an aggressor" than Ukraine, the finance minister said, referring to Russia. "If, for whatever reason, one of our partners is not willing to come up with, or not able to come up with defensive military support, then provide us with financial support."
The White House has rebuffed requests by Ukraine and some U.S. lawmakers to provide Kiev with lethal support. But Washington has been instrumental in pushing through the IMF bailout and whipping up around $7.5 billion in aid from other international lenders.
Still, the U.S., the IMF and other lenders are wary of a number of what fund officials call "exceptional risks" to the bailout. Previous governments have twice before abandoned IMF bailouts. The violent conflict in the east has cost thousands of lives, displaced large portions of the Ukrainian population, drained government coffers, and helped push the economy into a deep, two-year contraction.
The overhaul required under the IMF bailout requires painful and controversial budget belt-tightening, tackling deeply vested interests and a restructuring a bureaucracy known for corruption. It relies on a cease-fire with militants holding, economic forecasts that many economists say are too optimistic, and $15 billion in debt relief from creditors.
For many analysts, the fact the IMF is moving ahead with the bailout in the face of those risks shows the international aid is a political decision by the West to shore up a strategic Eastern European country against Russian aggression.
U.S. officials have praised the efforts of the new government while showing caution. "Secretary Lew underscored the importance of continuing to implement urgently needed reforms," the Treasury Department said in a readout from the meeting with the finance minister.
But aside from promising to guarantee $2 billion of new Ukraine debt and working with the World Bank, Europe and other international lenders to provide support, U.S. officials haven't indicated they are prepared to cough up any more cash.
Even so, part of Ms. Jaresko's Washington tour is for reassurance, convincing officials that the bailout won't be throwing good money after bad.
"Right now the coalition seems to be unified," the finance minister said. The governing parties know "there is no other way, that the half-fulfilled of half-implemented reforms have been a big part of the reason why we're in this very difficult situation."
"You can't be half-pregnant. You can't half-reform your economy," she added.
Still, Ms. Jaresko acknowledges the risks to the bailout program are real. The cease-fire may fail, bank runs are a possibility, and there could be "a serious blowback to the reforms we're undertaking," she said.
Those risks could even push up the amount of debt relief required under the IMF bailout, she said. "Before we finish the debt operation, we'll have to come back and see where we are."
Given the potential for those negotiations to sour and all the other threats, analysts are hedging their bets.
"The new program is likely to run smoothly enough to allow for IMF support to continue earlier in the year without major adjustments," said Alex Brideau, a top Ukraine expert at the Eurasia Group.
"But uncertainties over the debt-restructuring plan, the conflict in the Donbas, and domestic political support for reforms lead to a strong possibility the program will need to be revised later this year or in 2016," Mr. Brideau said.
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#29 Dances With Bears http://johnhelmer.net March 16, 2015 THE IMF IS POSTUREPEDIC, SO IGOR KOLOMOISKY CAN SLEEP WELL AT NIGHT By John Helmer, Moscow [Links, footnotes, charts, photos here http://johnhelmer.net/?p=12944] The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has decided to give the Ukrainian banks R&R&R - that's rest from regulation and refinancing. Inspection of the foreign exchange book, unwinding related-party credits, recovery of non-performing loans, and obligatory recapitalization, which were all conditions of the Fund's 2014 Ukraine loan, have been relaxed. The new loan terms announced by the IMF last week [1], postpone reform by the commercial banks until well into 2016. In the meantime, the IMF says it will allow about $4 billion of its loan cash to be diverted to the treasuries of the oligarch-owned banks. That is almost one dollar in four of the IMF loan to Ukraine. The biggest beneficiary of last year's IMF financing is likely to repeat its good fortune, according to sources close to the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) [2]. This is PrivatBank, controlled by Igor Kolomoisky (lead image), governor of Dniepropetrovsk region and financier of several units fighting on Kiev's side in the civil war. Last Thursday, the IMF's chief spokesman, Gerry Rice, claimed [3] in a press conference that "the authorities [in Kiev] have demonstrated a strong commitment to reforms. They have implemented, as you have seen, last week a set of prior actions that in many respects breaks from the past and tackles issues that were once considered taboos." The taboo against admitting failure is one the IMF hasn't broken. The new loan dossier [4] reveals that IMF supervision of the Ukrainian banks, introduced last April and pursued through ten months, failed to staunch capital outflow from the Ukrainian banks; failed to recover value from the assets of insolvent institutions; and failed to require control shareholders to recapitalize their bank balance-sheets. These include Kolomoisky's PrivatBank; Rinat Akhmetov's First Ukrainian International Bank (FUIB, Cyrillic acronym PUMB); and Credit Dnepr Bank of Victor Pinchuk. The remedy, newly proposed by the IMF last week, lets the oligarchs off the hook, promising to feed their banks with public funds. That's to say, IMF funds. According to the latest IMF staff report, the Ukrainian banks are now in a worse condition than they were last June. This is because the cash provided by the IMF and the World Bank through the NBU and the Deposit Guarantee Fund (DGF) has disappeared from bank balance-sheets and left the country. "As of end-January 2015," the IMF reported last week, "the banking system's capital adequacy ratio (CAR) stood at 13.8 percent, down from 15.9 percent at end-June." Fund officials now reveal they were novices at Ukrainian accounting, admitting "the balance sheets of intervened banks turned out worse than the books indicated; little value has, so far, been recovered from the assets of failed banks." As for success in renewing bank liquidity and recapitalizing the biggest institutions - announced by the NBU Governor, Valeria Gontareva, last August [5], and endorsed by the IMF since then - that has now been postponed into the uncertain future. "For the nine large banks that needed a capital increase, and for which: (i) credible recapitalization plans were approved, and (ii) capital shortages were reduced by 25 percent, the recapitalization deadline has been set for end-June 2015. Banks that did not reduce the capital shortage by 25 percent will be put under regulatory constraints, including on asset growth, and will be subject to higher degree of on-site monitoring. One out of the nine large banks, accounting for about 2½ percent of the system assets, failed to submit a credible plan and was resolved." The NBU and IMF aren't identifying the non-compliant banks. Without mentioning names, but plainly targeting the oligarch groups, the IMF announced [6] last April, when it commenced its Ukrainian bank programme, that it was setting up "a central credit register at the NBU." The objective was "to monitor credit risk concentration and enhance the monitoring of large business groups (including those related to bank owners), and become an important tool of off-site and on-site banking supervision." The targets of the operation were to be given plenty of time and manoeuvre room. "The existing legal framework for the credit register will be revised by end-August 2014 in consultation with the IMF and WB [World Bank] staff, with the aim to become operational no later than August 2015" (page 69). According to the new loan papers, the top-10 banks haven't reported to the NBU yet, and won't for at least another two months. They will then have another year to negotiate over the "discrepancies" without putting shareholder money up front. Here is the IMF loophole for the Ukrainian banks: annex Source: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2015/cr1569.pdf [4] at page 112 Altogether, the IMF team working on Ukraine numbers 25 - 24, if Olga Stankova, a press officer who fails to answer press questions, is subtracted from the count. The team has been headed by Nikolai Gueorguiev, a former Bulgarian finance ministry official with a US university degree; he reports to Poul Thomsen (below left, in Athens with bodyguard) and Thanos Arvanitis (right); they are the director and deputy director, respectively, of the European Department of the Fund. The reason for Thomsen's bodyguard is that Thomsen, a Dane, has become well-known among the Greeks for his work [7] supervising the IMF and European Union loan programme for Greece. Arvanitis, a Greek, is also well-known for success of another sort: he was ordered out of Hungary when the government of Viktor Orban leaked IMF loan terms, cancelled the programme, and in 2013 made a pre-term repayment [8] of the IMF's loan. Last April, Gueorguiev, Thomsen and Arvanitis reported to the IMF board that in return for phased payouts of loan instalments to Kiev, "we will monitor the banking system closely and send inspection teams to the field as needed. If a bank's capital declines below the regulatory minimum, the NBU will require that the shareholders submit an action plan to recapitalize the bank, as well as impose restrictions on the bank's activities in line with the law." For a brief time, Gueorguiev answered the telephone at his Washington office to explain how well his scheme was going. For what he said then, click [9]. GontarevaIn practice, the 24 IMF officials let the Ukrainian banks work out with the NBU what books to open and close; what plans to file or delay; and how much money to receive. NBU records reveal [9] that IMF cash was poured into PrivatBank. World Bank money [5], too. On August 15, Gontareva (right) announced at the NBU that "the fifteen biggest Ukrainian banks have already gone through a review and have not revealed any substantial problems..." Last week Gueorguiev and his 23 colleagues acknowledged these problems were yet to be addressed. The new loan conditions, they are now claiming, make a "comprehensive strategy to strengthen banks' financial health, through bank recapitalization, reduction of related party lending, and resolution of impaired assets, which are critical to regain public confidence and support economic recovery." The IMF team now says they weren't in charge, as they had claimed to be last year. The fault that the Ukrainian banking system has deteriorated, they claim, is the NBU's, not the Fund's. "Preliminary [sic] information suggests that several institutions intervened by the Deposit Guarantee Fund (DGF) had breached credit limits to insiders. Opaque ownership structures and lending schemes have made it difficult for the NBU to limit effectively banks' exposures to insiders. This highlights the need to strengthen the supervisory framework to better address related lending. International experience shows that excessive lending to insiders raises the banks' likelihood of failure and reduces expected recovery in cases where banks turn insolvent and need to be resolved." For the record of how the IMF encouraged Ukrainian officials at the NBU and Finance Ministry - officials with records of past ties to Kolomoisky - to make PrivatBank the biggest recipient of emergency liquidity, read this [2]. One of those officials, Stepan Kubiv, lost the governorship of the NBU to Gontareva when President Petro Poroshenko appointed her last June [10]. Six months later, in mid-January, Kubiv (below, first left) was returned to office as the government's lobbyist at the Verkhovna Rada. The IMF remedy for the banks is as generous as Kubiv had been at NBU. Poulsen, Arvanitis and Gueorguiev have recommended to Lagarde and the IMF board what they call "forbearance". "In view of the large shocks buffeting the economy, [IMF] staff and the authorities agreed that some forbearance on capital indicators was appropriate. To this end, an agreement was reached to allow banks that were solvent to meet a minimum capital adequacy ratio of 5 percent as of end-January 2016 and gradually reach 10 percent no later than end-December 2018." Last April, according to the first loan papers [6], the IMF's capital adequacy target for the largest Ukrainian banks was supposed to be 7% "within an overall capital requirement of 10 percent... under the baseline scenario" (at page 66). The oligarch bank owners are not only to be let off that hook; the IMF has decided that its cash should be theirs for the asking. "Overall, staff believes that capital injections by the private owners remain the best option for bank recapitalization and restructuring. However, given the uncertainties and risks associated with this strategy, the program contains a buffer of nearly 4 percent of GDP in public funds that could be used for bank recapitalization and restructuring." On last week's IMF projections of this year's Ukrainian GDP, that percentage means about $4 billion in cash. If the $17.5 billion now agreed for the new IMF loan to Ukraine is fully disbursed, the oligarch-owned banks should collect almost one dollar in four. "This is mainly explained," the Fund reports, "by the incorporation of potential additional losses associated with the conflict in the East and the higher than expected exchange rate depreciation." A Geneva banker with an office close to Kolomoisky's residence in the city comments: "Not even the Swiss have thought of war financing like this - funding civil war, then taking international loans for compensation, then banking the profit margin in Geneva." At IMF headquarters in Washington, the Bulgarian, Dane and Greek don't appear to be speaking the same language. On the one hand, they recommend that what hasn't worked for a year should be attempted all over again; if IMF supervision doesn't work for the second time, the banks should be left to their own devices. "Revise the existing related party lending framework. The authorities will analyze the current legal and regulatory framework on related parties and identify loopholes that need to be fixed in the near future with IMF and WB technical support. Allow bank self-assessment. The aim would be to identify exposures that are above limits according to the revised regulatory framework." There's a contradiction between proposing a regulatory scheme, and if it fails, allowing the banks to regulate themselves. This is the nub of the IMF's problem in Kiev, say Russian bankers, and everyone else's too. They say that Gontareva at the NBU and Jaresko at the Finance Ministry have no power to regulate their domains; if they had, they wouldn't have been appointed. So it's the bank owners who dictate to them, not the other way round. In the Ukrainian Letter of Intent and Memorandum which Gontareva and Jaresko have signed, along with Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk, the IMF has been assured they have set up "a specialized unit to follow up on credit exposures with the banking industry of economically related groups and individuals (financial and non-financial groups)." Kolomoisky's Privat group is the most powerful of them, and sources in Kiev expect it to dispose of the "specialized unit", and the IMF's new targets for the banking sector as it did last year's. For comparison, here are excerpts from the IMF staff report's table, "Prior Actions and Structural Benchmarks". LAST YEAR'S IMF TARGETS FOR THE UKRAINIAN BANKS IMF targets last year Source: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2014/cr14106.pdf [6] at page 78. THIS YEAR'S IMF TARGETS FOR THE UKRAINIAN BANKS IMF targets this year Source: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2015/cr1569.pdf [4] at page 109. In the year elapsing between the two "actions" and "benchmarks", the IMF confirms that nothing concrete has been done. Gontareva and Jaresko now say they will need another nine months, plus outside help, to find out what Kolomoisky, Akhmetov and Pinchuk could tell them directly, if they were asked and obliged to say. "With technical assistance from the IMF and the World Bank, by end-September 2015 we plan to have this unit [credit register] fully operational and with an action plan for the following 12 months, which would include the mapping of the largest 10 industrial and financial groups by end-December 2015" (page 86). Even former US White House officials are conceding this week that if the Ukrainian Government lacks the clout to "map" the oligarch groups, it cannot govern, and cannot reform. "Ukraine survives today," according to this Clinton Treasury official [11], "largely on the good will of several oligarchs. More robbers than barons, these bosses control key provinces, fund private armies and finance divisive factions in Parliament." Kolomoisky has been assured by the IMF that he is one of the few Ukrainian taxpayers to be safe from an increase in income tax. According to the memorandum of government intentions, "we will continue with measures, begun in 2015, to broaden the base and further increase progressivity of taxation. This will include steps to better detect and tax the income and wealth of high net worth individuals, drawing on technical support from the IMF." Since Kolomoisky has publicly declared himself to be a tax resident of Geneva [12], and the Swiss authorities renewed his permit late last year, taxing him is a non-starter. Last Friday, the same day as the IMF confirmed payment to the NBU of the loan first tranche of $4.6 billion [13], the NBU issued this release [14], confirming it was sending UAH$1.215 billion, equivalent to $61 million, to the account of PrivatBank. The NBU claims the money was "to ensure timely implementation of... PrivatBank's obligations to depositors...[and] to support its liquidity." The justification for the PrivatBank payout, Gontareva's press office claimed on Friday, is that Kolomoisky (below, right) has "concentrated 26% of the deposits of individuals in the banking system and 15% of the assets of the banking system, and...is the largest bank in Ukraine." For collateral, Gontareva has accepted a shareholding in the bank, plus an undisclosed number of airplanes owned by Kolomoisky, or by airlines associated with the Privat group. These airlines include Dniproavia (above, right) , Aerosvit, Cimber Sterling, Skyways Express, and City Airline. They are all bankrupt, and so the asset value is uncertain and the subject of creditor claims pending in several countries. For that story, read this [15]. The latest PrivatBank financial statement [16], dated September 15, 2014, reveals the asset value of the bank attributable to shareholders was 22.8 billion hryvnia; that's about $1.1 billion. Asset value has declined since then, and the bottom-line profit, which was negligible in September, hasn't improved. About $1 billion was recorded in the September report as impairment for loan losses. Kolomoisky admits to owning only 37% of the bank's equity [17] himself. Indirectly, through cutout companies in Cyprus and the British Virgin Islands, he owns at least another 8%. How the NBU determined what value to put on Kolomoisky's collateral, and how to capture it in case PrivatBank defaults, the NBU refuses to say. Instead, it reports that it consulted "one of the leading international accounting firms which meet the criteria established by regulations of the National Bank of Ukraine." Asked to say which accounting firm was employed, and what check Gontareva ordered for a conflict of interest which the accountant might have in relation to Kolomoisky's businesses, the NBU refuses to say. |
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#30
Russia not ready to restructure Ukraine's debt - FinMin
March 16, 2015
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia is not ready to restructure Ukraine's debt and expects Ukraine to repay the money it owes in December, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov told reporters on Monday.
"We have stated our position several times and are not changing it," Siluanov said. "We expect $3 billion in December of the current year, as was promised by the Finance Ministry of Ukraine."
His comments come after Ukraine began formal talks with private sector creditors over restructuring of its foreign debts, which is a condition of a $17.5 billion IMF loan package.
Ukraine's Finance Minister Natalia Yaresko said last week that the restructuring would include principal writedowns as well as maturity extensions and coupon reductions. She also said that Ukraine intends to treat all creditors equally.
Some investors have expressed doubts over whether a restructuring deal is possible if Russia, which holds $3 billion of Ukrainian bonds maturing in December, does not take part.
Russia has previously said that it regards Ukraine as being in violation of conditions that were agreed when Russia lent the money, in particular a clause that requires Ukraine to keep its debt below 60 percent of gross domestic product.
However, Russia has said that it does not intend to exercise its right to demand early repayment of the bonds.
Siluanov also said on Monday that Russia had not received any formal invitation to participate in debt restructuring talks. "No one has approached me personally. There have been no official letters," he said.
He said last month that Ukraine had raised the issue of restructuring with Russia in January.
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#31
Bloomberg
March 17, 2015
Ukraine Bondholders' Tough Talk Signals Debt Deal Won't Be Easy
by Lyubov Pronina and Krystof Chamonikolas
(Bloomberg) -- The jockeying has begun in Ukraine's debt restructuring talks.
The government's notes slid below 42 cents on the dollar on Tuesday as Russia said it wouldn't budge on being paid back a $3 billion loan in full on time and the Financial Times reported Franklin Templeton won't accept a cut to its $7 billion bondholdings, citing people it didn't identify. The nation's debt, which handed investors a loss of 25 percent this year, may fall below 40 cents, according to Arca SGR SpA.
The stakes are high for Ukraine. One of the conditions it agreed to when receiving a $17.5 billion loan package last week from the International Monetary Fund was that it would work out a restructuring with bondholders. Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko set a June target for getting a deal done and said it may include a principal reduction to help the nation save much-needed hard currency after a year of fighting between government forces and pro-Russian rebels crippled the economy.
"There is lot of pressure on Ukraine's bonds simply because of the uncertainty on the outcome of the restructuring," Giuliano Palumbo, a money manager who helps oversee $3 billion in emerging-market debt for Arca SGR in Milan, including Ukrainian bonds, said by e-mail on Monday. "Franklin Templeton and others may in the end have to take some sort of hit as the country is broke."
Russia's Stance
Franklin Templeton has hired Blackstone to advise on the talks, according to a person with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be named because the details are private. The New York-based consultancy will sit across from Lazard Ltd., chosen by Ukraine last month for the negotiations along with White & Case LLP.
Templeton hired Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP to help with talks, according to a spokesman for the legal adviser. A spokesperson for Franklin Templeton declined to comment when contacted by Bloomberg News on Monday.
Russia holds $3 billion of Ukrainian Eurobonds due this December, making it the nation's largest foreign bondholder after Franklin Templeton. The country isn't taking part in Ukraine debt talks because it's not a private creditor, Deputy Finance Minister Sergey Storchak told reporters on Tuesday.
Limiting Losses
Relations between the neighboring countries have soured since President Vladimir Putin bought the debt in December 2013, two months before pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych was toppled in a bloody uprising in Kiev. The ouster paved the way for the annexation of Crimea and led to a year of fighting between Ukrainian government troops and separatists in the country's east.
"We are not now presenting calls for early repayment of the loan, even though there are grounds for that," Interfax cited Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov as saying on Monday. "We await $3 billion in December of this year, as was promised."
Ukraine's ability to service liabilities, including $5.4 billion due this year, has been curtailed as the insurgency drove international reserves to $5.62 billion in February and pushed the country deeper into recession.
Having negotiating power concentrated with a few large investors may help limit losses for bondholders, according to Lutz Roehmeyer, a money manager at Landesbank Berlin Investment GmbH.
"If big holders oppose nominal cuts, then Ukraine should be as creative as possible to design a restructuring that avoids a haircut," Roehmeyer, who oversees $1.1 billion of emerging-market assets, including Ukraine's bonds, said by phone on Monday. "If you lower coupons and push out maturities by more than five years, you can achieve the same improvement in debt sustainability."
'Hard Ball'
Ukraine's bonds have posted the worst losses among 58 nations tracked by the Bloomberg U.S. Dollar Emerging-Market Sovereign Bond Index this year.
The government's $2.6 billion of bonds due in July 2017 slumped for a fourth day on Tuesday to within less than a cent of an all-time low of 41.35 cents on the dollar reached three weeks ago. The notes may drop toward this trough, according to Richard Segal, the head of emerging-market credit strategy at Jefferies Group LLC in London.
Ukraine will hold its next review with the IMF in June after securing the first $5 billion from the package. The Washington-based fund and the government envision aid reaching $40 billion with contributions from the U.S. and European Union and a prospective $15 billion in savings to be negotiated with bondholders.
"The bonds continue to fall as the markets may perceive that negotiations will be tougher and the June deadline might not be met," Segal said by e-mail on Monday. Reports suggesting big bondholders have hired their adviser "imply the negotiations could be more hard ball from both sides," he said.
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#32
EU Unlikely to Lift Anti-Russia Sanctions Despite Lack of Consensus
March 17, 2015
MOSCOW (Sputnik) - The lack of unity between European Union member states regarding anti-Russia sanctions will not change anytime soon, as support for Moscow by individual countries is outweighed by the official EU diplomatic position.
March 16 marks a year since Crimea voted to rejoin Russia, a key factor in the deterioration of relations between Russia and the West.
The European Union and the United States introduced a number of sanctions against several individuals and sectors of Russia's economy. In response, Moscow imposed a year-long embargo on food exports against those countries that introduced sanctions.
Last week, the EU Council extended individual sanctions against Russian officials and representatives of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics in eastern Ukraine until September 15, 2015. Dozens of legal entities and 150 people are included on the restrictions list.
The extension of economic sanctions may be discussed at an upcoming EU summit on March 19-20, but will likely be delayed until July due to lack of consensus.
"At the moment, I'm not expecting any unanimity regarding the extension of (economic) sanctions," an EU spokesperson told journalists.
Pros and Cons
Last week, Donald Tusk, the chairman of the European Council, spoke about the absence of a common position in the European Union regarding anti-Russia sanctions.
"It's very difficult because the member states demonstrate very openly that they have different points of view and different interests. There is no doubt. A common policy of the 28 member states doesn't exist. We have 28 different foreign policies," Tusk told European media.
The Czech Republic supports Russia on the issue of sanctions. Earlier this month, the country's president Milos Zeman said there was no reason to tighten anti-Russian sanctions, as the ceasefire in Ukraine was seen to be holding.
Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias told Sputnik his country believed that economic sanctions are not effective in attempting to force another country to modify political reasoning.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban spoke about the need to establish good relations between the European Union and Russia, and that Hungary is eager to find useful, effective solutions.
Other states expressing skepticism over anti-Russia sanctions are Austria, Cyprus, Italy, Spain, Hungary and Slovakia.
Officials from various countries, including Britain and Denmark, have stated that sanctions will be relieved when the Minsk agreements on Ukrainian reconciliation are implemented.
The Baltic States, denying the potential for enormous trade benefits with Russia, support long-term tightening of restrictions. On Thursday, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius said that the European Union "has to stand united next week" in sanctioning Russia.
US Influence
Washington remains the primary cheerleader for anti-Russian actions and, last month the US Department of State criticized a visit to Moscow by Cyprus President Nikos Anastasiades.
"The [US] discontent focused on the fact that they believe that Putin's government should be isolated by the 28 EU Member States and all other members of the North Atlantic Alliance," Kasoulides said, in an interview to state-owned television channel RIC.
US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland stated earlier this month that Washington would have talks in coming days and weeks with Greece, Hungary and Cyprus, all three countries whose leaders oppose anti-Russia sanctions.
Kirill Kortysh, assistant professor of political theory at Russia's MGIMO university told RIA Novosti that the European Union sanctioned Russia under heavy pressure from the United States.
"There are currently no conditions for sanctions relief. The EU caves in under the US pressure, sanctions war is losses for Europe. The United States are pressuring [Europe] strongly, they retain many tools for such pressure," Kortysh said. He added that it was hard to call Berlin independent, as thousands of US troops are stationed in Germany.
The Distant Future
Sanctions relief is unfortunately unlikely in the foreseeable future. Several EU countries have expressed their support for Russia, but the majority, bowing to consistent US influence, have not.
"I would not be counting on alleviation of sanctions, despite the fact that Italy is supporting alleviation, Hungary, Greece, maybe Slovakia, Spain's views are calmer. The position of the "heavyweights" is firm, countries such as Poland, Baltic States have an extremely negative view, Great Britain is negative," the head of political integration of the European Union of Russian Institute of Europe, Lyudmila Babynina, told RIA Novosti.
Many countries stated that the implementation of the Minsk agreements would be the condition for alleviation of sanctions. On February 12, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany agreed on a deal for Ukrainian reconciliation. The deal stipulates a ceasefire, which came into force on February 15, as well as withdrawal of heavy artillery, constitutional changes in Ukraine and prisoner swaps.
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#33
The Vineyard of the Saker
http://thesaker.is
March 16, 2015
Kiev's every move undermines the position of the United States
By Rostislav Ishchenko
Source: http://ria.ru/crimea_interview/20150302/1050489532.html
Translated from the Russian by Robin
In an interview with the radio station Russia Today, Rostislav Ishchenko, President of the Center for Systematic Analysis and Forecasting, talks about who is trying to draw Russia into a military conflict, and why, Crimea's role in the situation, and the splitting of the Ukraine into separate territories.
Q: In one of your articles, you wrote that the Ukraine was in all likelihood considering some sort of attack on Crimea. What exactly did you mean?
First, I don't think the Ukraine or even the powers that be in Kiev want to attack Crimea. I believe that even the orders to shoot that [Oleksander] Turchynov allegedly gave the military in February 2014 were a PR move. It's doubtful whether he gave such orders at that time. And, if he had given them, of the 20,000 soldiers who were in Crimea at that time, someone would have fulfilled them.
Second, as for an attack on Crimea by the Ukraine, I have already said and I'll repeat it: from my point of view, it's one of the last ways to start a war with Russia. It's perfectly clear that, from February to March of last year, they began trying to draw Russia into direct combat in the Ukraine. And it's clear that the idea came not from Kiev but from Washington.
After the failed attempts to get Russia to send troops to southeast Ukraine in March, April, May, and August, as well as in January of this year, the only more or less justified chance, from the point of view of international law, to instigate a Ukrainian-Russian war is to attempt to play the return-of-Crimea card. And it has been important from the very beginning to ensure that the Ukraine is not seen as the aggressor.
Q: Is the goal of drawing Russia into military operations still on the agenda?
Yes. Now it's much more difficult to achieve because all the major forces of the Ukrainian army are tied up in the southeast, so Kiev can't mount an offensive on the isthmus [connecting Crimea to the mainland]. Last summer, they could have. I think the danger of that was quite high. But then another decision was made: the United States tried once again to draw Russia into war, and active military operations began in the southeast. Donetsk and Luhansk were practically under siege. At that point, the goal really was almost achieved, because in that situation Russia could not let the DPR and the LPR be crushed, and if it had not managed to reverse the course of events, troops would have gone to Crimea.
Q: Who benefits from dragging Russia into the war? After all, it's dangerous for Europe to have fighting right on its doorstep.
The idea of a coup d'eetat and the most negative unfolding of events, namely a military scenario, clearly does not come from the European politicians. They had no objection to gaining economic control over the Ukraine, which would allow them to pass freely through the Ukrainian market to the Russian and CIS markets. But they had no interest whatsoever in getting into a political and military confrontation with Russia.
On the other hand, the United States, which was clearly not thrilled with the developing economic cooperation between Russia and Europe - cooperation with such great potential that the United States would eventually be crowded out in Europe, first economically and then politically - had a vested interest in having Europe and Russia clash somewhere.
It could not have happened in Poland or Lithuania or even in Belarus - it was possible only in the Ukraine, thanks to the thoroughly inept policies of [Victor] Yanukovych and his government, which tried to continue [Leonid] Kuchma's outdated "multivector" policy of being friends with, and milking, everyone. This policy created conditions for the emergence of conflicting interests in the EU, Russia and the Ukraine, and they were above all economic.
Q: In other words, European politicians also were not inactive?
European politicians have played a most active role in the situation in the Ukraine: they visited, supported, guaranteed, signed agreements, and organized negotiations. Merkel believed that [Wladimir] Klitschko was guaranteed to be the next president of the Ukraine. But on February 21 the Europeans were cut out. And the very next day the United States took control of the situation in the Ukraine. And all further actions took place on orders from Washington, because any government in Kiev, even the most incompetent, would have clearly understood that what was needed most of all was to stabilize the situation, even if concessions had to be made in Crimea and the southeast. It was the wrong time for the Ukraine to take aggressive action; it was not strong enough, and the government in Kiev was not consolidated, but the Ukraine was literally [sic] being pushed toward a confrontation with Russia.
They also tried to provoke Russia. I'll give you a simple example: at the beginning of March, when Crimea was not even legally part of Russia, Putin said that Russia would not tolerate terror against the population in the southeast. Immediately units of the Ukrainian army started moving toward the southeast. Two months into the process they still weren't fully assembled, but nevertheless Kiev said it was starting to conduct antiterrorist operations there. Then came the events in Odessa: brazenly, with television cameras rolling, they killed dozens of people. Then there was firing into Russian territory. Somehow, today we don't see any shells from Ukrainian territory coming into Russia, but in June and July they were arriving in droves. It's unlikely the Ukrainian gunners didn't learn how to shoot until August.
If the shells were reaching Russian territory, someone needed it to happen. If aircraft were violating the airspace of the Russian Federation, someone needed that too. They were making every effort to pull the Russian Federation into the war.
Q: How will the U.S. benefit if Russia is drawn into a military conflict?
How quickly Russian troops might occupy Kiev or even Lvov was of no concern whatsoever to the United States. The main thing was to show that Russia had invaded a sovereign state. Europe would not have been able to remain silent, and in that case the rhetoric and sanctions would have been broader and deeper than now. This would have led to a direct confrontation, severing Europe from Russia for a long time. In addition, it would have caused concern among Russia's allies in the customs union and the recently created Eurasian Economic Union.
Quite naturally other capitals would start to worry: if you can go into the Ukraine, then why not go into Kazakhstan and Belarus too? Even now, when efforts to propel Europe into a direct confrontation with Russia have failed and are unlikely to succeed, the U.S. is interested in seeing Russian troops in the Ukraine, because they cannot hold onto the Ukraine, and it's clear that the Kiev government will fall. The longer the government lasts in Kiev, the more money and resources, including political, diplomatic, and economic resources, the U.S. will inevitably lose in propping it up. No one wants to waste resources on what is basically a lost cause. If Russia takes control of the Ukraine, then it will become Russia's responsibility, politically, economically and financially.
Until then it's the responsibility of the United States. And each successive move by the Kiev regime, each escalation of the terror is slowly but surely eroding the position of the United States, because sooner or later it will be necessary to admit that they have organized and supported a Nazi regime. And people are talking about this openly in Europe. I think that, by December, the United States realized there would be no direct invasion; anything is possible except a direct invasion.
Q: What, in your opinion, awaits the Ukraine? What is the possible outcome of the situation?
Most likely, there will be another coup in Kiev. It boils down to one simple thing: it's necessary to remove the last, quasi-legitimate President, [Petro] Poroshenko, who is keeping the various groups from going at one another's throats. It's clear that Poroshenko will be overthrown by openly Nazi battalions, and the next government will be even more rigid, resulting in a regime of outright terror.
Then the powers that be won't be able to maintain complete control over their territory. They will begin to gradually splinter into "principalities," each with its own troops, and these principalities will engage in conflict with one another. This will destroy what remains of the industrial capacity and will increase the number of refugees flooding into the Russian Federation and the EU, as well as the loss of life, because of the density of the population and the time it will take to disarm these gangs. The question then arises: how do you ensure this "Somalia" doesn't spread over the borders? It will be primarily Russia's problem because Europe doesn't have the military resources.
Q: Is there a way out of this situation? How can order be restored and the cities made secure, if at all possible?
The war will end sooner or later - most likely sooner rather than later, simply because the Ukraine's economic capacity will not allow it to wage war for long, and its neighbors are not interested in having an endless "Somalia" going on in the Ukraine. Russia's actions over the past year show that it's not fighting for Crimea or the Donbass; it's fighting for all of the Ukraine. I very much doubt whether the Ukraine, even with substantial outside support, will last as an independent state for the next five or 10 years.
It will have to be rebuilt, starting from zero. It would be nonsensical for Russia to create a continually hostile state on its borders. The problem is not whether it is necessary to integrate the Ukraine into the territory of the Russian Federation, but how to do so from the standpoint of international law. It all comes back to the confrontation between the Russian Federation and the United States, because if Russia loses, it will be Russia that is divided. But since I'm sure that the U.S. will lose, or even that it has already lost, it's just a matter of time and formalities; the framework of international law will change. And within this new framework will be decided the matter of what should be done with the Ukrainian territories and what their legal status will be. The one that rebuilds them will decide their fate and questions of governance, and that will be Russia.
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#34
Foxnews.com
March 12, 2015
Jews in Baltics fear creep of anti-Semitism
By Paul Alster
Paul Alster is an Israel-based journalist.
Jews in the Baltics fear a series of disturbing events in the three-nation region of Eastern Europe may be signaling a revival of the Holocaust-era hatred that once nearly wiped out their numbers.
Across the countries of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, Jewish leaders say their communities are feeling increasingly uncomfortable as anti-Semitism once again appears to be on the rise. An Estonian museum exhibition mocking the Holocaust, a stage musical celebrating the life of a notorious Latvian Nazi mass murderer and the repatriation of the remains of a Lithuanian leader long linked to Nazis have all contributed to a climate of hate that has Jews on edge.
"We have to say that the support of Hitler and rewriting history to turn Hitler into a liberator of this area is not a western value," Yiddish scholar Dovid Katz, founder of the DefendingHistory.com website, told FoxNews.com. "If you're repatriating Nazi war criminals to be re-buried and honored as part of national history, that is not behavior compatible with western ethics and values."
Katz has been amongst the most vocal objectors to a growing list of questionable events in the Baltics, including the 2012 repatriation from the U.S. to Lithuania of the body of wartime leader Juozas Ambrazevicius Brazaitis. He was re-buried with full honors, endorsed by the Lithuanian government, despite having been a Nazi puppet during his brief tenure. Brazaitis was accused of overseeing the establishment of a concentration camp, and also signed off on the establishment of the Kaunas ghetto.
Although a 1975 U.S. posthumous investigation into Brazaitis' wartime activities cleared him of Nazi activities, critics suspected his record was scrubbed to spare the U.S. of embarrassment for having granted him citizenship.
After complaints from Jewish groups, Lithuania's much heralded Museum of the Genocide in the capital, Vilnius, only recently created a section acknowledging the annihilation of the once flourishing Lithuanian pre-war Jewish community of more than 200,000 that was very nearly wiped out, many at the hands of Lithuanians. March 11 marked 25 years of Lithuanian independence from the Soviet Union and a parade by far-right groups took place in Vilnius, prompting uneasiness on the part of Jews.
In Talinn, Estonia, a highly controversial Holocaust-themed exhibition caused outrage last month when, among its exhibits, was a picture showing the iconic Hollywood sign replaced by the word "Holocaust," which some perceived as a suggestion the genocide was an entertainment event. Another sick exhibit recreated a gas chamber and had 20 naked actors pretending to be Jews playing tag, seemingly suggesting there was humor in the gas chambers experience. The exhibits were eventually withdrawn.
In October 2014 a Latvian musical 'Cukurs, Herbert Cukurs' premiered celebrating the life of the 'Butcher of Riga,' Herbert Cukurs, who was tracked down and killed by Israel's Mossad intelligence service in Montevideo, Uruguay, more than 20 years after he fled Europe. He had overseen the murder of many thousands of Jews in his native Latvia where he had been a pre-war national hero. He was witnessed personally shooting more than 500.
Last month's Estonian general elections saw the far-right EKRE party break the electoral threshold and gain seven of the 101 seats in parliament. Considered by some to have Fascist-Neo-Nazi sympathies similar to many other flourishing nationalist parties in the Baltics and Eastern Europe, the EKRE's leader Mart Helme is a controversial figure, especially after the party's "If you're black, go back" slogan was attributed to him.
Efraim Zuroff, chief Nazi hunter of the Simon Weisenthal Centre in Jerusalem, has been monitoring a series of "Nuremberg-esque" marches in the Baltics in recent weeks and has been dismayed by the fact that no western media have shown up to report on the worrying trend.
"The European Union... does not appear to be particularly perturbed by genuinely disturbing phenomena in the Baltic countries and elsewhere, which, of course, in no way would justify Russian aggression, but deserve to be handled seriously and promptly before they get out of hand," Zuroff wrote in the International Business Times.
Zuroff accused Helme's party of racism under its slogan 'Estonia. For the Estonians' but Helme flatly rejected that interpretation.
"This is a wrong translation of a slogan which was used during our demonstration," Helme told FoxNews.com. "The slogan really is 'For Estonia.' A Russian TV channel mistranslated this because in Estonian it sounds very similar. They use this in their propaganda against us."
Helme also rejects any accusation of anti-Semitism in his party, pointing out there are very few Jews left in Estonia, and "there is no hatred against Jews in Estonia today". He admitted though that his party is generally against Muslim and African immigration. "We have seen what happened in France and in Sweden, in Malmo for example, so we don't want similar slums in Estonia's cities."
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#35
Wall Street Journal
March 17, 2015
How Looming Recession Is Unsettling One of Russia's Boom Cities
Ailing economy has rattled consumers and businesses, including in the once booming city of Kaluga
By PAUL SONNE
KALUGA, Russia-When the flashy American-style Black Bull steakhouse opened here six years ago, it was a sign that this Russian provincial city had arrived.
These days, the restaurant is preparing a new menu for a new era. Gone are the American and Australian cuts of beef now subject to a Russian ban. Gone, too, are expensive imported duck and the foie gras that once topped arugula salads. Head chef Yuri Skorinov says he will offer steaks from Uruguay, Russian duck and domestic brie fried to mask its provenance.
A new economic reality is dawning in Kaluga, as it is in the nation as a whole. Falling oil prices and Western sanctions over the conflict in Ukraine have raised the prospect of a recession. Last year marked the first annual decline in real disposable income since Vladimir Putin assumed power. Russia's central bank said Monday it expects the economy to contract by 0.7% in the first quarter, and has forecast a contraction of up to 4% this year.
The ruble has lost nearly half its value against the dollar since the beginning of last year. Russia's gross domestic product fell by 1.5% in January from the year-earlier period, and an important manufacturing index reached a 5½ year low. Consumer-price inflation hit 16.7% in February, with a 23.3% jump in food prices. Mr. Putin has warned of economic pain that could last as long as two years.
The result is the kind of economic uncertainty Russians haven't seen since a brief period in 2008-09, and before that in the 1990s, when the Soviet Union's collapse brought hyperinflation and financial collapse. A top Bank of Russia official said Monday that the central bank was considering halting currency trading on the Moscow exchange in the event of excessive volatility.
European and American investors are growing wary. That is especially worrisome for Kaluga, which had transformed its economy by enticing foreign companies to build factories to supply nearby Moscow with everything from cars to cement. "If all the factories become unprofitable, there will be a bust," says Mr. Skorinov, the chef.
Kaluga, located about 110 miles southwest of Moscow, dates to the 1300s. Parts of it look like they popped out of the pages of Nikolai Gogol. Pastel-colored czarist-era buildings alternate with old wooden cottages. A grand theater in the center of the city resembles Moscow's famous Bolshoi. It has a heartland feel: Kaluga fisherman dotted the city's frozen river on a rainy day late last year, even as the ruble crashed and the ice around them thawed.
When Mr. Putin took office in 1999, Kaluga was a sleepy backwater suffering from nearly a decade of post-Soviet neglect. But as energy prices soared, the roughly 20 million people in and around Moscow began renovating their homes and buying television sets, high-end cosmetics and their first smartphones and cars. Foreign firms, looking to save on labor and escape import duties, sought places near the Russian capital to manufacture their products.
Foreign companies
Anatoly Artamonov, governor of the Kaluga region since 2000, realized its proximity to Moscow was its main competitive advantage. He went on a crusade to convince multinational companies that Kaluga was the cheapest, least bureaucratic place to set up shop.
Even amid economic slump, the 62-year-old governor, a former Communist Party member who ran a socialist collective farm in the days of Leonid Brezhnev, travels to European capitals courting executives. He gives Western investors his personal cellphone number. He offers generous subsidies, reduced tax rates and promises of no corrupt business.
"We take care of our investors like parents look after their children," he likes to say.
Among the multinational companies to set up facilities in the area are L'Oréal SA,Samsung Electronics Co., General Electric Co., AstraZeneca PLC, and Lafarge SA. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, established to help former Communist countries make the transition to capitalism, has invested €638 million ($675 million) in the region since 2007, financing a number of new factories via loans and equity investments.
The influx of foreign money helped change Kaluga. An English-language international school opened. Brick sidewalks appeared in the city center, a rarity for small Russian provincial cities. Western-style restaurants and hotels opened downtown. People learned English. There was even money to help transform one regional village into an outdoor museum and artist commune.
"The city has become cleaner, and the roads have become better. The mentality of people has changed," says Ksenia Denisova, the 30-year-old manager at a travel agency in Kaluga. "People who work here now have contact with foreigners."
The region became a hub for European auto makers. Volkswagen AG, PSA Peugeot Citroën, and Mitsubishi Motors Corp. opened car plants. Volvo AB established a factory to make trucks. Parts makers, such as Magna International Inc. and Benteler International AG, launched operations to supply bumpers and chassis to the auto plants. In 2014, Kaluga pumped out its one-millionth car. The motor-vehicle industry now accounts for 42% of the Kaluga region's industrial output.
The boom taxed Kaluga's resources. The factories required more electricity, produced more waste and demanded more skilled labor. But the prosperity they brought outweighed the drawbacks.
Then, last year, Russia invaded and annexed Crimea and backed separatist rebels in a war in east Ukraine. The resulting political tension, instability and Western sanctions spooked investors.
Net direct foreign investment outside of the banking sector dropped to $18.6 billion last year, from $61.5 billion a year earlier, according to the World Bank. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which had financed many of the foreign factories in Kaluga, halted all new investments in Russia because of the sanctions.
At the same time, the price of oil, Russia's most important export, plunged. Brent crude fell to less than $55 a barrel this month, from more than $110 in June 2014. In December, as the ruble declined sharply, the central bank raised interest rates. For many Russians, that effectively cut off access to credit to buy homes or cars.
Russian consumers, whose spending supports much of Kaluga's factory-floor economy, are feeling the pinch. Retail sales in Russia were down 4.4% in January from the year-earlier period, the biggest decline since the 2008-09 financial crisis. Real wages dropped 8% in January from a year earlier, the largest drop on record, according to research firm Capital Economics.
As East-West relations deteriorated to their worst point since the Cold War, many Russian officials sang the praises of self-sufficiency. "We can have our own fun without your Coca-Cola," said one of many T-shirts released by Russian companies in response to sanctions. Russian authorities, alleging health violations, temporarily shut down McDonald's restaurants around the country, including its flagship on Moscow's Pushkin Square. McDonald's said at the time it was studying the closures and aimed to reopen the restaurants as soon as possible.
Mr. Artamonov, Kaluga's governor, says those who contend that Russia can go it alone don't understand economics and remain mired in Soviet-style thinking. He criticizes Western politicians for pushing through sanctions. "They're trying to cut Russia off from the world," he says. "That's bad. It can't come to that."
Western investors, he says, have become more cautious about their communications. "If before no one hid that I was talking with someone in some country, now they are saying, 'It'd be better if no one else knew about our meeting,' " he said. "This is some kind of stupidity."
Auto troubles
The Russian auto sector has been hit hard. Sales of new passenger cars and light commercial vehicles declined 37.9% in February from the year-earlier period, after dropping 10.3% during 2014, according to the Association of European Businesses. As the ruble plunged late last year, the chief executive officer of Renault SA, part-owner of Russian car maker Avtovaz, described the situation as a "bloodbath."
For foreign-branded cars coming off assembly lines in Russia, only about 30% to 40% of production costs are localized, in some cases even less, according to Sergei Litvinenko, a Moscow-based director in PricewaterhouseCoopers' automotive practice. Imported parts account for most of the rest of the cost, and their prices in rubles have soared. As a result, sticker prices of domestically assembled cars are rising.
The Volkswagen plant in Kaluga temporarily suspended production three times last year amid the sales slump. The factory, which has roughly 5,000 workers, has let go hundreds of temporary employees and likely will start laying off regular staffers, according to Dmitry Trudovoi, a union representative for the plant.
A spokesman for Volkswagen said the company is committed to the Russian market and intends to invest a further €1.2 billion by 2018, including in a new engine plant in Kaluga.
In February, Volvo let go 30% of the roughly 600 workers at its truck-manufacturing facilities in the region and suspended production indefinitely, citing sluggish demand, the company told Russian news outlets.
Kaluga's joint Peugeot Citroën and Mitsubishi factory also has repeatedly suspended production. About 40% of the plant's roughly 2,000 workers are on fixed-term contracts that end March 31 and might not be renewed, according to union representative Dmitry Kozhnev. A spokeswoman for Peugeot in Russia declined to comment.
Mr. Putin has pledged government support for auto makers, including foreign firms where local labor and content accounts for at least 50% of the cost of their products. The Russian government also has embarked on a broader economic bailout package worth 2.34 trillion rubles ($37.46 billion), which includes auto-industry support. In addition, Russia has ordered ministries to cut spending by 10% to control the budget deficit, and has authorized plans to tap the country's reserve fund for the first time in six years.
Not all of the businesses in Kaluga are in such dire straits as auto makers. The Kremlin has stepped up military spending, a boon for facilities in the region that make military equipment. Some local farmers and agricultural firms have received a boost from Russia's ban on an array of food imports from the European Union and the U.S.-a response to sanctions.
Authorities in Kaluga say the region will fare better than others in the economic downturn because of the work it put into diversifying the economy and building infrastructure when times were good. A new airport is opening. The region is expecting a number of pharmaceutical enterprises to start production this year. The drop in the ruble has helped boost export-focused firms, including one of Russia's largest steel companies.
Even in the automotive sector, there are some bright spots. Continental AG recently opened a new Kaluga tire factory. So far, it distributes its Russian-made products to dealers who sell the tires as replacements. "If it's a crisis, you think, 'I could run an additional couple thousand kilometers,' but you still have to change them," says Georgy Rotov, Continental's director for Russia.
Locals are trying to adjust to the economic changes. Ms. Denisova, the travel-agency manager, said she booked a New Year's trip to St. Petersburg instead of heading abroad like usual. Customers looking to vacation abroad have dwindled.Mr. Skorinov, the chef, says he could devise an entire menu of Russian products if he had to, and it still would be delicious.
Workers at the Volkswagen plant had been approaching the salary of their counterparts in Europe, but the ruble's fall has set them back.
Mr. Kozhnev, the union organizer, characterized the situation as a reality check. "This idea that we can show the world what's what when we have an economy so dependent on oil and gas had to end at some point," he says. "Now this is a moment of truth."
Mr. Artamonov, Kaluga's governor, is trying to stay positive. In an interview with a Russian radio station, he pledged to re-evaluate and further improve the business climate. "There's probably a crisis," he said. "But we're banning that word from being said."
-William Boston contributed to this article.
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#36
Financial Times
March 17, 2015
Civil society in Russia is bloodied but not buried
By John Lloyd
The writer, an FT contributing editor, is chairman of the Moscow School's advisory council
Many determined to battle authoritarianism despite Kremlin's iron blanket, writes John Lloyd
The Moscow School was planned as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of openness allowed the exhumation of the suppressed people, histories and literature of pre-Soviet times and the USSR's early years. Lena Nemirovskaya and Yuri Senokosov were Soviet intellectuals, she an art historian, he a philosopher; comfortably placed in the official intellectual hierarchy, uncomfortable in their Soviet skins. They were the planners - planning to illuminate how freedom might be used.
They were guided by Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili. "Russia," he told an American interviewer in 1989, "jumped out of history and committed the metaphysical suicide of trying to bypass reality for the ideal." The task this middle-aged couple took on was to help Russians, especially the rising generation, to construct a grounded reality of democratic process, civil society, rights and, above all, responsibility.
Thus the Moscow School of Political Studies, later the Moscow School of Civic Education, was founded as the USSR crumbled. From the start its funding was largely foreign: a succession of western ambassadors told their governments that here was a centre to which support could be given that would not be wasted or diverted to Switzerland.
Ms Nemirovskaya taught herself English then buttonholed politicians, officials, institution presidents, journalists and corporate bosses to imbue in them the urgency she believed the civic education of Russia required. As throughout the post-Communist world, money from financier George Soros was vital. The school's success, most evident in the late 1990s and early 2000s, attracted imitation: there are a dozen Moscow School-type institutions in the world now, modelled on the original.
Foreign money paid for most of it, from seminars and conferences to a lively website, all run by dedicated young staff. Seminars were addressed by Russians and foreigners. The former included Yegor Gaidar, the economist and former acting prime minister, and Alexei Kudrin, a previous finance minister. The foreigners included Boris Johnson, London mayor; Lord Mandelson, former UK cabinet minister; Lord Skidelsky, the biographer of John Maynard Keynes; and many more.
The participants - usually well educated, confident, clamouring to be heard - grew more self-assured, less impressed by western attitudes. In one session during Nato action against Serbia in 1999, French policy analyst Dominique Moïsi and I were subjected by the audience - mainly journalists - to a tirade of protests, pointing out that "the west" had attacked a traditional Russian ally (we were reminded that Anna Karenina's lover, Vronsky, goes off to assist Serbia against the Turks).
Now the Moscow School has been closed. Identified as a "foreign agent" under the 2013 law that stigmatises non-governmental organisations operating in the field of politics and accepting money from abroad, it struggled to survive - but, shorn of funds, denied venues and faced with a vicious,
co-ordinated attack in the pro-Kremlin media, Ms Nemirovskaya and Mr Senokosov were obliged to shut up shop and try to chart a new course.
The aftermath of the murder of pro-democracy activist Boris Nemtsov (another former speaker) is both a good and a drear time to craft a memorial - but not an obituary. The energy powering the Moscow School was a determination on the part of many, more than is now obvious, to grapple with Russia's historic default to authoritarianism.
"We have to lift up our heads and liberate independent social forces," said Mamardashvili, the School's philosophical inspiration. "When nobody is independent no politics is possible." Civic politics is still possible. And it will be fashioned by Russians, not - as the Kremlin believes - by foreign plotters.
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#37
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
March 17, 2015
The real reason why Russia finally left the CFE Treaty
As might be expected, Russia's full withdrawal from the CFE Treaty has resulted in a flurry of negative statements from Western politicians. But should we really be concerned about a treaty that was already showing signs of being obsolete?
By Artem Kureev
Artem Kureev is an expert from the Moscow-based think tank "Helsinki+" that deals with protecting interests of Russians living in the Baltic countries. Kureev graduated from Saint Petersburg State University's School of International Relations. His research interests include domestic policy of the Baltic countries, ecology of the Barents Sea, national minorities in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, Russia-NATO relations.
On March 10, the head of the Russian delegation at negotiations discussing military security and arms control, Anton Mazur, announced that as of March 11, Moscow will cease its participation in the Joint Consultative Group within the framework of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe. In this manner, Russia has finally withdrawn from the treaty that it suspended back in 2007.
Russia's complete withdrawal from the CFE Treaty has caused a flurry of statements from Western politicians who responded negatively to Russia's decision. Polish Defense Minister Tomasz Siemoniak said of the treaty: "[It] was one of the factors that we have had peace in Europe for the last 25 years." He also noted, however, "It was the Russian side that for many years has tried to reform the CFE Treaty and make it relevant to actual circumstances. Essentially, the cessation of the treaty is simply a statement of its complete ineffectiveness."
By and large, the CFE Treaty was late in coming. It was signed in Paris on November 19, 1990 by 16 NATO member states and six members of the Warsaw Pact as a natural result of a warming of relations in Europe resulting from perestroika in the Soviet Union. At the time, it was already clear that there would be no return to the former European system. Socialist countries had essentially left Moscow's sphere of influence after a series of "Velvet Revolutions" in 1989 and already had installed pro-Western governments.
In the document, NATO and the Warsaw Pact agreed to limit the number of tanks, armored combat vehicles, artillery and military aviation in the "area of application" - from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural Mountains. Each bloc would have 20,000 tanks, 30,000 armored combat vehicles, 20,000 artillery with a caliber greater than 100mm, 6,800 military airplanes and 2,000 helicopters. The parties would have 40 months after the CFE Treaty came into force to reduce their weapons to the necessary quota.
Furthermore, additional limitations were agreed on to limit the quantity of military equipment in "flanking regions" (areas adjacent to the blocs). In addition, there was provided a detailed mechanism for mutual monitoring of the execution of the treaty by establishing groups of inspectors and providing information on troop locations and movements.
One should observe that the CFE Treaty demanded that both blocs should determine among themselves their quota of military equipment. So the Warsaw Pact countries came to an agreement on this shortly before the signing of the CFE Treaty, signing the appropriate agreement in Budapest on November 3, 1990.
The CFE Treaty came into force on November 9, 1992. More than a year earlier, on July 1, 1991, the Warsaw Treaty was annulled, and several new countries appeared in the post Soviet space, each with its own army and military equipment. Under these circumstances, on May 15, 1992 the Tashkent Agreement was signed, distributing the quota for the former Soviet Union between Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia.
Of the 13,500 tanks granted to the Soviet Union, only 6,500 remained with the Russian Federation; at the same time, Ukraine had the opportunity to possess 4,080. However, the Tashkent Agreement never came into effect - Azerbaijan and Georgia refused to ratify it. Furthermore, the Baltic republics didn't participate in the CFE Treaty at all. Russia fulfilled de facto the terms of the Tashkent Agreement, reducing the quantity of its military equipment in the European part of the country.
A further test for the treaty was the first Chechen campaign, which took place within a designated "flanking zone" with additional limitations on the quantity of military equipment. With the start of military operations, Russia was forced to break the terms of the CFE Treaty, but announced it and launched an initiative to reexamine the agreement about flanking zones, which it managed to achieve in May 1997.
The treaty had lost its original meaning already in the early 1990s. The confrontation of two ideological or military blocs no longer existed. Instead, Moscow's former allies in the Warsaw Pact and Baltic republics aimed to join NATO and the difficult economic situation did not allow Russia to build up its armed forces. In 1999 three former Soviet allies - Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic - joined the North Atlantic alliance.
Now the balance of power had changed even from a formal point of view. In connection with that, at the Istanbul Summit of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, on November 19, 1999, an agreement was signed to adapt the CFE Treaty altering several provisions to meet the current circumstances. At the same time, the quota for the number of forces practically did not change, so that NATO continued to maintain a European superiority in the number of tanks of 3:1.
Then again, NATO countries failed to ratify the new agreement. Furthermore, neither the Baltic states nor the Balkan countries in the treaty participated. However, having put forward their candidacies to join NATO, they nonetheless did not join.
Over the last few years, Russia has followed policies to fulfill the terms of the treaty, while at the same time, a number of NATO countries have essentially breached its requirements, periodically refusing to provide information to the Russian side or allow inspections. Pouring oil on the flames was the decision to deploy a missile defense system in Europe. This is not a breach of the CFE Treaty but goes strongly against its spirit.
In addition, NATO continued to expand right to Russia's border. Nonetheless, it was Moscow that has attempted for the last time to save the treaty. In June 2007, at Russia's initiative, an extraordinary conference was called at Vienna for countries participating in the CFE Treaty during which representatives of the Russian Federation put forward several logical conditions:
* Include Baltic countries in the treaty;
* Reduce the total quantity of NATO military equipment;
* Cancel the flanking zone limitations for Russia;
* Confirm that the agreement on adapting CFE Treaty should come into effect by July 1, 2008;
* Ensure that the altered treaty should be open for any European country that is a member of the OSCE.
These proposals were not accepted. The basis of the objection by NATO representatives was that Russia had not withdrawn its forces from the territory of Moldova (Transdniestr) and Georgia (Abkhazia, South Ossetia), although having equipment located there in no way exceeds the quota.
Tellingly, the presence of Russian units in unrecognized states is the main argument the West uses at negotiations with Russia, which enables it to shift responsibility to Russia for failing to meet the conditions of the treaty. For NATO countries, the complete withdrawal of troops is a necessary condition for them to agree to ratify the Agreement on Adaptation of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe.
On July 13, 2007, Vladimir Putin signed an order on the cessation of the CFE Treaty, including a memorandum that clearly states that the treaty would not be in effect for Russia "until NATO countries ratify the Agreement on the Adaptation of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe and begin in good faith to execute the document."
Furthermore, the moratorium on the CFE Treaty only entered into force 150 days after the order was signed, giving NATO the opportunity to finally ratify the Agreement on Adaptation, in this way preserving the effectiveness of the treaty. Even Mikhail Gorbachev, the former president of the USSR, who signed the CFE Treaty when he was in power, positively received this step. "Here it is clear that Russia's rights are being abused, and that our partners are not acting like partners," announced the former Soviet leader the day after Vladimir Putin signed the order.
At the time of the suspension of the CFE Treaty by Russia, its armed forces consisted of more than 21,000 tanks, which was used by a number of experts and politicians as evidence that Moscow not fulfilling the treaty obligations. However, the Russian side clearly complied with all its obligations, by placing all military equipment that exceeded the established quota for the country beyond the Urals.
It should also be noted that most of the arms are obsolete or mothballed, and hence the actual number of units is considerably less than the amount indicated by statistical reports. In any case, since 2007 all Russian cooperation within the framework of the CFE Treaty was reduced to the work of the Joint Consultative Group. In this case, in the statement of March 10, Anton Mazur noted that the group not only failed to carry out practical work, but did not discuss the possibility of new agreements on arms limitation.
Thus, in March 2015, Russia only confirmed the decision to suspend the CFE Treaty, adopted in 2007. In fact, Moscow has not attempted to fulfill any obligations under this Treaty for the last seven years.
It is clear that already in 1990 the CFE Treaty was an obsolete concept. This treaty needed numerous changes and corrections that never entered into force. It would have been much more effective to replace it with a new agreement which took into account the current political reality and the interests of all participants.
Now Russia and NATO need to start a new dialogue from square one. Furthermore, the Russian side has given Brussels and Washington a clear signal that it is not prepared to waste its time with ineffective international agreements that do not work and do not take its interests into consideration.
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#38
Yezhednevnyy Zhurnal
March 11, 2015
Russian political scientist predicts purge of elites after Nemtsov killing
"Direct Line" column by political scientist Dmitriy Oreshkin
We are forced to pick over the bones that are tossed for us to discuss from the special services. All reports about what the cameras did or did not record and whether there was external surveillance or not are regulated by the people who want to control our thinking. I am confident that Novaya Gazeta's journalists are sufficiently professional, and that what they say has not been sucked from out of somebody's fingers. But they too use information that somebody has told them. And they have to decide for themselves how trustworthy this "somebody" is. But I do not want to be like [theatre producer and politician, founder of "Essence of Time" public patriotic movement, Sergey] Kurginyan or [political scientist and social activist, Professor] Sergey Markov and make conjectures about who organized this. The facts that have been published as of the present moment in time suggest a "Chechen trail," but how far it goes, we will find out later. At the moment, there is too much information garbage.
But it already seems obvious that Nemtsov's murder drastically reduces for Putin the corridor of opportunity in the sphere of rebuilding normal relations with the West. The bottom line is that this is advantageous to those who seek Russia's isolation and the restoration of a "cold war" climate in order to move in the direction of freezing the conflict and to make restoring ties more difficult. To put it crudely, this is an act of terror that one hemisphere of the "collective Putin's" brain - the military hemisphere - has organized against the other, rationally thinking and economic, hemisphere. The hypothetical ["Novorossiya" field commander Igor] "Strelkov" versus the hypothetical [Kremlin ideologist Vladislav] "Surkov." Putin takes no pleasure in this; he likes it when his hands are free and he has several options. But now, in the eyes of the West, he is not simply a person who breaches international accords, but also a person who either connives at the murder of a well-known opposition politician, or who organizes such murders, or who is not in control of the situation.
It appears that right now we are in the phase of the exacerbation of inter-elite squabbles, in which the silovoye hemisphere is beginning to dominate. In the long term, this will lead to the revival of "cold war thinking" and the unconditional priority of the military industrial complex in the distribution of budgets, and so forth. For us, all this will redound in a deterioration of living conditions, restrictions on the media, censorship, intimidation, and "hybrid repressions." The state will not engage in repression itself, but we will watch with horror while people who seem dangerous to the siloviki groups become victims. And to them, everyone who wants to establish a normal relationship with the outside world and does not want to build a second Berlin wall, only this time much closer to Moscow, seems dangerous.
So that in the near future we will be witness to a purge of the elites during which Vladimir Putin will increasingly become not the man who makes the decisions, but a man who reacts to what is happening in the country. He will begin to act reactively rather proactively. Now that they have killed Nemtsov, Putin is already forced to react and to take steps to show that he is still in control of the situation. Though how he will do this, I find it difficult to imagine.
But as the economy deteriorates, so he will increasingly rely on the siloviki to stop the growing protest. Moreover, not an "orange" protest in Moscow, but demonstrations in factories and plants that are losing orders. And the main threat to the regime right now stems not from the Moscow liberals, who act exaggeratedly peacefully, but from the far more dangerous and less law-abiding people in the one-company towns. Of course, it is possible to set them against someone else, but this would lead to the restoration of "siege" ideology, which entirely suits both the siloviki and [Chechen leader Ramzan] Kadyrov. At the same time, a highly bitter competition is under way among them for influence over the chief executive officer, and the siloviki are also in conflict with one another. So that in the near future, we will see surprising personnel changes at the top, which is the harbinger of a harder line in internal policy. In foreign policy, to advance further already means total destruction, so that they will freeze the situation there and occupy themselves with "restoring order" internally, and not only in the sphere of rhetoric, but in actual fact.
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#39
Los Angeles Times
March 16, 2015
Kiev, not Moscow, should be the choice for marking V-E Day
By STEVEN PIFER, JOHN HERBST, WILLIAM TAYLOR
Steven Pifer is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. John Herbst is the director of the Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council. Bill Taylor is the acting executive vice president at the United States Institute of Peace. All three are former U.S. ambassadors to Ukraine.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister David Cameron have rightly turned down Vladimir Putin's invitation to go to Moscow on May 9 to mark the 70th anniversary of the Allies' victory in Europe, and President Obama may soon follow suit.
However, there is still a way for Western leaders to attend a commemoration that honors the heroism and sacrifice of the Soviet people during World War II, and Merkel, Cameron and Obama should seize the opportunity because this will be the last major anniversary for so many veterans and other war survivors.
Instead of commemorating V-E Day in Moscow, they should go to Kiev.
It was the combined efforts of the Soviet Union, United States, Britain, France, Canada, Poland and others that defeated Nazi Germany. Many Americans, however, do not appreciate that, for much of the war, the Red Army carried the brunt of the fight against Adolf Hitler's Wehrmacht. Soviet forces confronted and destroyed far more German divisions than did the Western allies' armies once they landed in Italy in 1943 and France in 1944.
The Soviet people - Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians and others - paid a horrible price: an estimated 20 million to 27 million soldiers and civilians killed.
Even though Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush traveled to Moscow in 1995 and 2005 for other V-E Day anniversaries, Moscow in 2015 is hardly the right place for Western leaders to gather now.
Given the conflict that Russia has conducted against Ukraine, Western leaders could not sit in a reviewing stand on Red Square and watch parading Russian troops, whose comrades had so recently waged - and might continue to wage - war in eastern Ukraine, just 500 miles to the south.
Russian soldiers, without insignia, seized Crimea last March. The following month, they began providing leadership, funding and arms to separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk. In August, regular Russian army units invaded Donetsk and Luhansk to attack Ukrainian forces, which had seemed on the verge of defeating the separatists. Russian soldiers remain in eastern Ukraine.
In recent years, Putin has tried to arrogate for Russia the Soviet Union's victory in World War II. That understandably angers Ukrainians and others in the post-Soviet space, whose parents and grandparents also fought, suffered and died in great numbers.
No one should dispute the role played by Russians in the war or that Russians made up the largest number of Soviet war dead. Ukraine bore the second-most casualties in absolute terms but, on a proportional basis, it suffered more than Russia, losing an estimated 25% of its population during the war.
Kiev offers a logical alternative to Moscow for V-E Day. Western diplomats and the Ukrainian government could structure a ceremony without a parade of war materiel (the Ukrainians don't seem to have a penchant for reviewing tanks and rockets). And the events could be designed to remember the losses suffered by all the Soviet people. Ukrainian veterans groups could, for example, invite veterans from Russia and the other post-Soviet states.
Not far from the city center in Kiev are memorials to the 13 Soviet hero cities of World War II. Western leaders could salute the sacrifices of the soldiers and citizens of Moscow and Leningrad (now St. Petersburg); of the Belarusian capital of Minsk; and even of Sevastopol, which is part of Crimea, illegally annexed by Russia one year ago.
Marking the May 9 anniversary in Kiev would allow Obama, Merkel, Cameron and other leaders to pay homage and respect to the millions who fought so bravely and died in stopping Hitler's war machine on the eastern front. But they could do so on their terms, not Putin's.
Gathering in the Ukrainian capital would also send a powerful message to the Russian populace of the isolation of their country's leader because of his aggression against Ukraine. Let the Kremlin propagandists try to hide the sight of Western leaders in Kiev respectfully honoring the heroic World War II struggle of the Soviet people, including Russians.
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#40
Reuters
March 17, 2015
Vladimir Putin's absence proves chaos will be his only successor
By Masha Gessen
Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist and author of "Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot" and "The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin." Her new book, "The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy," will be published in April
It was a coup, a stroke, a boy. That was the range of rumors published as analysis in both Russian and international media in the days after Russian President Vladimir Putin suddenly disappeared from TV screens: He'd been toppled, he'd died, his girlfriend had a baby. It was probably nothing, just a breather before Putin makes some obscurely worded announcement that will spell the next step in his ongoing crackdown. But this period of silence and rumor, which ended yesterday, has been instructive in a number of ways.
The first and most obvious should come as no surprise: We have no way of knowing what is happening inside the Kremlin. Putin's disappearance and the resulting information vacuum show more clearly than anything that has happened before that there is only one way that information leaves the Kremlin: if it originates with Putin or his press secretary.
Second, there is also only one person in Russia who creates political news. This is why Putin's absence was so eerie. It looked as though television news and, with it, time itself had come to a standstill. After a week of starvation news rations, Russian TV viewers were treated on the weekend to a film timed for the first anniversary of the annexation of Crimea. In it, Putin bragged of having planned the operation in advance - and personally - and that he had rattled every saber he could conjure. Life itself supplied two more news items: the death of nationalist writer Valentin Rasputin and a disastrous fire at Moscow's historic Novodevichy Monastery. Between the similarity of the writer's name to the president's and the monastery's magnificent dome in flames, things looked more and more ominous.
Third, in his absence Putin provided the clearest illustration yet of the concept of being accountable to no one. Dictators don't need to call in sick, tired or in a bad mood. If the world has a hysterical fit because the man with the nuclear button is taking a weeklong nap, too bad for the world. This is precisely why the most likely explanation for Putin's absence is that there is no explanation: Common colds are a lot more common than palace coups, but in Russia, their outward manifestations would be identical.
One more thing was conspicuously missing from Russian-language media, including the few outlets that function independently of the Kremlin: discussion of what would happen next if Putin had indeed died or been toppled. In fact, the more reputable media, which did not traffic in rumors about Putin's supposed new offspring, found themselves with as little to say as the official media on the subject of everyone's preoccupation. Herein lies the biggest lesson of this Putin-less week.
The Russian president has monopolized not only the decision-making process in Russia but also the very ability to make decisions. Such is the nature of his regime that the price of admission to the elites is the forfeiture of agency. For his part, Putin has refused to engage the very idea that there can be a time after Putin. Not only has he made it clear that he plans to be president for life, but he also has acted in accordance with the apparent belief that this life will last forever.
Putin has engineered a change to the Russian constitution increasing the presidential term from four to six years and has interpreted the document's ambiguous text to mean that he can serve as many sets of two-consecutive terms as he wants, as long as he takes breaks in between. He became prime minister in 1999, president in 2000, took a breather term in the prime minister's office between 2008 and 2012, and is now set to stay in office until 2024 before being required to take another break. It is ironic that he originally took office thanks to some undemocratic actions by his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, who rigged the system to place his hand-picked successor in the presidential chair but did not dream of extending his own term beyond the two-term mark.
Putin may have once looked like a younger and more modern alternative to Yeltsin, but he has worked to take Russia back to the Middle Ages. Not only has he merged the state and the church into one mechanism of persecution; not only has he mobilized the Russian population behind the idea of "traditional values," but he also has restored a centuries-old concept of state power. Like a tyrant of old, he believes himself to be deathless. This is why Russia, which has such essential trappings of a modern power as nuclear weapons, does not have a succession plan, a contingency plan or, really, any plan at all. This is why the media have nothing to say on the issue of what happens next. No wonder the burning dome of the Novodevichy Monastery looks so sinister to Muscovites today.
But then, the last time Russia was ruled by someone with a similar self-concept was less than a century ago. When Joseph Stalin lay dying, Russian news also went black for a while. American pundits wondered: Would the hard-liners take over now (there was the belief that there was such a thing as "hard-liners" in the party in relationship to Stalin); did Stalin have a hand-picked successor? What actually happened in the years immediately following Stalin's death was the discovery that there was no succession plan or procedure. There was a mess, a shuffle followed by a reshuffle and then another. In this limited respect, history is probably not a bad guide. We can assume that when Putin goes, there will be no one who knows what's happening or is supposed to happen.
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#41
Los Angeles Times
March 14, 2015
How Nemtsov's killing puts Putin in the crosshairs
By PAUL STRONSKI
Paul Stronski is a senior associate in the Carnegie Endowment's Russia and Eurasia program. A former career State Department official, he served as director for Russia and Central Asia on the U.S. National Security Council staff from 2012 to 2014.
Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov's killing is not just a tragedy for Russia, but could be a harbinger of political turbulence. Commentary in the West implicitly blames President Vladimir Putin, highlighting the long list of Putin critics who have met violent deaths over the years. The focus has now turned to possible Chechen connections. However, the arrest of five men from the North Caucasus sheds little light on who ordered the attack, particularly since Chechens have served as easy scapegoats in previous high-profile deaths. What this discussion has missed is the larger question of whether the Russian political system is less stable than commonly assumed.
What makes the killing of Nemtsov shocking is that overt violence against prominent politicians - not the same thing as political pressure and intimidation - had become somewhat rare. The last assassinations of prominent opposition leaders occurred in 2003. Anatoly Chubais, who spearheaded President Boris Yeltsin's privatization campaign in the 1990s and later became an influential businessman, survived a 2005 assassination attempt, and a senior central bank official was gunned down in 2006. Back then, the killing or attempted killing of prominent Russian politicians was relatively common; the BBC reported in 2003 that nine members of parliament had been gunned down in as many years.
Russia in the 1990s and early 2000s was a place of political violence and instability. Organized crime groups ran rampant, renegade justice resolved disputes and the country fought two brutal wars in the North Caucasus.
Putin supposedly changed all that. Moscow is less dangerous than it was 20 years ago, although it remains hazardous for journalists and human rights advocates to do their jobs. Yet, even among these groups, political violence peaked in 2003-06 with the killings of journalists Paul Klebnikov and Anna Politkovskaya, among others. These were the early years of Putinism, a time when politics remained in flux and some questioned Putin's longevity in office as he stumbled through several crises. There was another spike in politically motivated deadly violence against human rights advocates in 2009, but that too was a time of transition with the arrival of the Putin-Medvedev tandem.
Since 2009, political assassination has not been a prominent force in Russian politics. Opposition leaders could be critical of the regime and might instead be bullied, beaten, arrested, blackmailed, labeled a Western agent or encouraged to go abroad.
Does Nemtsov's death signal a return to levels of political instability in Russia that the Kremlin may have unleashed, but may no longer be able to control? Problems similar to those of the 1990s have returned and scapegoats are needed.
Unlike Putin's first terms, economic growth and improved living standards are a thing of the past, replaced by falling oil prices, sanctions, inflation and salary cuts. Putin 3.0 has no positive agenda and state propagandists are trying to hide that fact, along with the human and financial costs of war, with vile rhetoric about threats emanating from Ukraine, the West and traitors and other "fifth columnists."
A group of radical thugs has been empowered to protect the state from organized internal dissent similar to the way in which Russian volunteers have been encouraged to fight in Ukraine. Russian society is increasingly barraged with violent hate speech at a time when radical elements - largely sidelined until 2014 - have been emboldened to take matters into their own hands.
Nemtsov was labeled as one of those "fifth columnists" for his opposition activity. But it was his work on Ukraine that probably made him a real threat. He was working on a report documenting Russia's military involvement in Ukraine, including highlighting the misery of Russian soldiers and the civilian population. This is potentially dangerous stuff for those claiming to defend the interests of ethnic Russians.
Overshadowed by the violence in Ukraine is another battle brewing in Russia about the overall direction of the country. Many Russian elites - and they are not exclusively liberals - were unhappy with Putin's decision to return to the presidency in 2012. Their dissatisfaction has grown since the start of the Ukraine conflict as they see its financial and reputational costs, as well its destabilizing effect on Russia. Their private grumblings have become increasingly public as they fight a pro-war faction - consisting of some service elements, reactionary oligarchs and Russian chauvinists - that is largely responsible for orchestrating, escalating and financing the Ukraine war.
Some in the pro-war faction label their opponents within the Russian elite as dangerous "sixth columnists," purportedly more treacherous than the "fifth column," for their quiet efforts to de-escalate the conflict.
Nemtsov was not directly part of this elite debate, but he certainly had connections to people who were. His killing is not just a warning to the opposition, but also to those elite insiders who question Russia's current trajectory. The anger and brutality unleashed by the war, combined with the pro-war faction's efforts and eagerness to find enemies at home and abroad, could very well undermine the stability that Putin has long trumpeted as his primary achievement.
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#42
http://gordonhahn.com
March 15, 2015
Everyday Neo-Fascism in Ukraine
By Gordon M. Hahn
On the Friday evening broadcast of the popular Ukrainian television talk show Black Mirror on channel 'Inter' Aleksandr Velichko, the head of the legal department of Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk Oblast run by President Petro Poroshenko-appointed governor, oligarch Ihor Kolomoiskiy, said that his scandalous recent nine-day abduction had been organized by Kolokoiskiy's deputy Gennadii Korban and the neo-fascist 'Right Sector' (PS or Praviy Sektor) party headed by Dmitro Yarosh and generously funded on and off the battlefield by Kolomoiskiy (www.youtube.com/user/podrobnosti).
Velichko, claiming to be hiding abroad, detailed his captivity at the hand of the PS goons while being held at PS's base, which he said was "rampant with Kolomoiskiy people" and is located in Donetsk's village of Peski. According to Velichko, he was told to write and sign a note with a negative information on the mayor of the city of Dnepropetrovsk, Maxim Romanenko and was threatened with physical violence and the use of "cold weapons" (knives, blades, etc.). They also threatened to shoot his knee, cut off his finger, make me an invalid, cut up my family and force him to listen over the cell phone while they "cut his family "into pieces." He said he therefore signed and was let go, adding: "After the horror I fear for my life. And only under the guarantee of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine am I ready within the law to testify against Korban. If the Attorney General's Office will not stop Gennady Korban, he will kill me and my family. And as long as Korban is at large and represents the interests of the regional authority, not a single resident of Dnipropetrovsk region can be safe" (www.youtube.com/user/podrobnosti).
This occurred on the background of no less than seven 'suicides' of former Yanukovich regime officials in the last month in 'democratic' Ukraine.
One definition of fascism is the overlap of authoritarian state power and large capital interests. It appears that here too Ukraine is developing in the 'right' direction, driven by corrupt and criminal oligarchic clans that have and continue to privatize the state and violent neo-fascist para-military groups like PS functioning as their political and business shock troops.
Velichko's abduction, accordingly, appears to be part of an intensifying struggle for position as Ukraine prepares to carry out ostensibly over the next few years a major privatization that Kolomoiskiy and other oligarchs seek to gain from. Thus, Dnipropetrovsk mayor Romanenko is said to have been tied to local Dnipropetrovsk oligarchs loyal to former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich that Kolomoiskiy seeks to defeat (www.ng.ru/cis/2015-03-16/1_ukraina.html).
It should be noted that new Ukrainian Finance Minister and former American USAID official Nataliya Yaresko will play an important role in designing the privatization mechanism. She is believed to have received government grants from the State Department immediately after leaving USAID and used them to build her own business as well as a cadre of businesses and business people who would be interested, perhaps, in overthrowing Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich (http://johnhelmer.net/?p=12317 and http://johnhelmer.net/?p=12437).
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#43
Der Spiegel
March 9, 2015
The Isolation of Donetsk
A Visit to Europe's Absurd New Border
By Christian Neef
The heavy fighting may have stopped for the time being, but Donetsk is more isolated than ever. Those wishing to enter and leave the city need difficult-to-obtain special IDs. Meanwhile, food and other supplies are only trickling into the metropolis.
Borders can be annoying, but largely predictable -- in Europe at least. That is what truck driver Yevgeny believed until recently. Many of them are no longer monitored at all, but even those that are guarded rarely hold surprises for those wishing to cross them. "You know if you can zip across them or if you have to plan for a five-hour wait. But this one? I have no idea how it works."
The border he is referring to is that of a wartime stronghold on the edge of a largely borderless European continent. At the first checkpoint after Kurakhove, travelers must present their papers, open the trunks of their cars and submit to pat-downs as guards search for weapons. Another 500 meters down the road, there are blocks of concrete, barricades, antitank barriers and signs that curtly order travelers to switch off their headlights and stop immediately. After that, there are containers and hooded soldiers, their Kalashnikovs at the ready.
Fields line the road on both sides. It looks almost as though oversized moles have been at work in the brown soil, covered with dirty snow. Black smoke pours out of chimneys sticking out of the smaller mounds while tank canons protrude from the larger ones. Further along, a single excavator is digging a trench in the heavy, wet dirt.
One kilometer from here, the territory of the "Donetsk People's Republic" begins, an area the Ukrainians treat as enemy territory and as a stronghold for terrorists. The Ukrainian army, though, is holed up here, just past the small city of Kurakhove. In between is the road that leads from Zaporizhia to Donetsk -- at least when traffic is allowed to flow. Yevgeny's truck is now parked on this road. He has the heat and the TV on, and the cab smells of coffee. You could almost call it cozy. "But not if you've been sitting here for three days and have no idea when you'll start moving again," he complains.
A seemingly endless chain of vehicles -- big trucks, small delivery vans, long-distance buses and shared taxies -- are parked on the shoulder. In the midst of it all is Yevgeny's small, green-and-white truck, a Russian-made GAZelle designed to carry 1.5 tons of cargo.
Yevgeny drives for a businessman in Donetsk and he is carrying supplies for shops in the rebel capital -- a load of canned goods, tomato paste, condensed milk and spices that he picked up in Mariupol, the port city 120 kilometers (75 miles) away that could be the separatists' next target. Yevgeny has passed through six checkpoints since leaving Mariupol, but now his trip has come to a standstill near Kurakhove, 40 kilometers from his destination.
As Isolated as West Berlin
One can argue whether the separatists are to be blamed or whether Kiev is exacting revenge. But either way, Donetsk is now just as isolated as West Berlin once was. Even from the east, where the border to Russia lies nearby, hardly any goods are allowed through. The rebels control the border, and they only allow the propaganda-driven aid shipments from Moscow to pass. Everything from milk to meat and vegetables is becoming scarce in the city. And the Ukrainian government has all but sealed off access to the "People's Republic."
More recently, anyone wishing to cross the line between the two warring camps must present a "propusk," a small, white identity card with a large "B" printed on it. The Ukrainians have divided the demarcation line between their forces and the separatists into sections. The propusk is the Open Sesame for crossing the line in "zone B." Since January, no one has been able to cross the line without this propusk. The problem is that it's difficult to get.
There is currently a two to four-week waiting period to obtain the propusk, which is issued in Velyka Novosilka, a village 90 kilometers west of Donetsk. But a "Sector B" propusk is required to reach Velyka Novosilka from Donetsk in the first place. The result is that people from Donetsk are in a paralyzing catch-22.
Even in divided Berlin, such problems were more effectively solved. West Berliners were able to obtain travel permits from East Berlin officials in West Berlin so that they could cross the Wall. It was a small gesture of goodwill in the Cold War.
"It's a theater of the absurd," says Yevgeny, while another driver calls the situation at the border Kafkaesque. "Just look at the people over there, who have come from Donetsk. They give their documents to Ukrainian soldiers, hoping that the documents will somehow reach Velyka Novosilka. And then they come back, two weeks later, and spend days standing outside in the cold here to get their propusk."
Yevgeny obtained the pass, but it's not much help now that the Ukrainians have come up with a new requirement: Anyone transporting goods into rebel-held territory must now present proof of permit from the tax authorities. All companies that sell products to the rebels must possess such a permit, including the company in Mariupol where Yevgeny picked up his canned goods.
'Obama Is a Beast'
"Of course, the company doesn't have the document," says Yevgeny. "I went to the border anyway. Last week, we waited here for six days. Then we gave a police officer 1,000 hryvnia. That's only about €35 ($38), but here it's a month's pension. The police officer guided us to Donetsk through villages where there were no checkpoints yet." But even these loopholes have now been closed, leaving only the official crossing, which is also closed. No one, no matter which documents he presents, is crossing the border on this winter day. According to an officer at the checkpoint, the order to open the border hasn't arrived yet.
Donetsk, which is east of the checkpoint, seems peaceful on this day, with a fragile ceasefire having been in effect since Feb. 15. City workers are cleaning the streets, damaged buildings are being repaired in the Kiev and Petrovsky district, and even the university is open. But the war-torn city seems to have lost its moral bearings, with the newspapers reporting 18 murders in the last three days.
Supporters of the new leaders have gathered on Lenin Square, carrying flags with images of former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and the words "Victory will be ours" and "Obama is a beast."
War films are being shown on the "First Republican Channel," with messages running across the bottom of the screen like: "The 'Oplot' special battalion seeks tank drivers and paramedics." Interested parties are instructed to call the phone number listed and ask for "Natasha." Similar recruitment efforts are also underway in the streets. One poster depicting a Kalashnikov with a scope, along with the phone number of the Donetsk Republic army, reads: "I am waiting for my hero." Novorossiya, the separatist newspaper, writes: "Following our military victory, we have achieved a diplomatic victory in Minsk: We have become de facto independent." A man like Russian President Vladimir Putin, the article continues, is "born only once in a thousand years. The day will come when he will also be our president."
There is very little artillery fire to be heard, and yet hardly anyone ventures out onto the streets, especially at night. "After 6 p.m., 40 percent discount on vodka, wine and champagne," reads a sign outside the El Torro Steakhouse on Pushkin Boulevard. But the restaurant remains empty even after 6 p.m. So does the fur shop on Artem Street, which promises a "20 percent discount for wives of soldiers in the People's Army."
Other businesses lack products instead of customers. Not even aspirin makes it into the rebel-held territory, let alone pain medication for patients in the cancer clinics and methadone for the city's drug addicts. "Either I hang myself or I join the People's Army," says a young man who has been in methadone therapy for four years. "Then I'll fight with those guys, and I won't be buried as a junkie but as someone who defended his homeland."
Getting Out of Donetsk
As difficult as it is to get into Donetsk, it's just as difficult to get out. Those hoping to escape the besieged city go to the southern bus terminal in Donetsk. Older women stand around holding out paper cups, quietly begging for money and a man digs through a trashcan, looking for anything of value. People are lined up at the information booths, where they pay 2.60 hryvnia for information. To prevent arguments, notes on the windows read: "We don't know how to get a propusk either!"
There are 21 bus platforms at the terminal. The ones for buses traveling to destinations within the "People's Republic" are empty, while the others are crowded, with buses departing for Mariupol, Sloviansk and the industrial city of Kramatorsk. The drivers only allow passengers holding a "Sector B" propusk to board their buses.
A rickety Indian-made Tata bus is ready for departure at platform four. As the passengers push their way inside, a young woman tells the driver that her mother is in the hospital in Kramatorsk and asks if he can take her along without a propusk. "Not without verification from the hospital," says the driver. "But they won't give it to me," the desperate woman replies.
Another female passenger is more successful. She wants the driver to help her smuggle a relative into Donetsk on his way back. "Well," the man says tentatively and then says "well" again, until she hands him a carton of "President" cigarettes. "How many are inside?" he asks. "Two hundred," the woman replies. The driver opens the carton and pulls out four $50 bills. "Well," he says again, but this time he sounds more approving. Although the war has officially cut off all connections to the outside world, ways around the blockade can still be bought.
Yevgeny, sitting in his truck over at the checkpoint, is familiar with these ways. In a country that is on the brink of economic disaster, why shouldn't soldiers be open to bribery? "You simply go up to the checkpoint and pick out one of the more trustworthy-looking faces," he says, "and then you strike up a conversation."
No Future
How much does one have to pay to get a truck carrying food supplies through the front lines? Until recently, drivers had to pay the Ukrainians 10,000 hryvnia per truck, but now the price has spiked to 20,000 -- the equivalent of five to six months' salary for a soldier.
And that isn't all. At the rebel checkpoint on the other side, soldiers from the "People's Republic" demand "customs" payments. There is no fixed price, but the separatists normally requisition three out of five fuel tankers carrying gasoline. Even the richest businessman can't afford such a price for long, says Yevgeny. Besides, he explains, the price of diesel has almost doubled since early February.
"I've spent almost my entire life in Donetsk. I have nothing bad to say about Viktor Yanukovych. When he was still in charge, he got us an apartment," he says of the time prior to Yanukovych's presidency when he was a local business leader. "Now I have a small house, where my wife is waiting for me. But we took our 16-year-old daughter to a school in Zaporizhia. There is no future for her in Donetsk anymore."
The people in charge of the "People's Republic" were unknowns until recently, Yevgeny says. "Now each of them has a Kalashnikov, and they behave like our new masters. I didn't vote for independence."
Then Yevgeny crawls into his sleeping bag. Another night at Europe's new border? Or perhaps two or three?
Whether people are for or against the "People's Republic" appears to have become a question of money. While Yevgeny waits at the border and curses the rebels, Fyodor Ilyishenko, at the Donetsk bus terminal, holds precisely the opposite views. He is holding an envelope that contains a letter to the district court in Kiev -- a complaint againstPrime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. With his decision to impose an economic blockade on the People's Republic, the premier was the one who caused the misery and suffering in the city in the first place, says Ilyishenko.
'You Have to Fight'
"It was a criminal decision. Yatsenyuk is narrow-minded and as dull as a cork. He claims that we are no longer entitled to anything, because we live in occupied territory," Ilyishenko continues.
Short and good-natured, Ilyishenko, 78, once served as an air force general in the far east of the Soviet Union and pulls out his veteran ID as proof. He fought against the Chinese in the 1960s, and he fought on the side of the Egyptians in the Six-Day War with Israel. Now he is a military adviser to the separatists. He no longer receives his pension, now that Kiev has cut off all payments to the "People's Republics."
"I have 70,000 hryvnia in my account with the state-owned Oshchadbank. The money is for my retirement, but I can't get to it because there are no longer any banks in Donetsk. They have promised to give me all the money, but I would have to go to a branch in Ukrainian territory to get it" -- which he is unable to do.
The government in Donetsk recently paid him 1,000 hryvnia in emergency assistance, he says, and he immediately spent half of the money on food. Now he is standing at the bus terminal holding a plastic bag with the words "Diamonds Delight" printed on it. The bag contains medicines.
The post office is also no longer in operation, which is why Ilyishenko is trying to find someone headed for Mariupol to take along his complaint letter. He has a friend there who can pass it on to the right place. He approaches a group of women, and one of them agrees to help. The old man shows her the letter, seals the envelope and gives her 25 hryvnia. "It will hardly change the situation, but you have to fight," says the retired general.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
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#44
Subject: Ned Keenan
Date: Sun, 15 Mar 2015
From: William Hill <williamhhill@gmail.com>
Thank you very much for including the sad news of Ned Keenan's passing
in JRL #51. I had not heard and appreciated reading the tribute to him.
Ned was my tutor and thesis advisor my senior year at Harvard. Although
he completed the requirements for his doctorate a bit earlier, he
formally received the PhD at the same ceremony I received by BA. I
remained in touch with his work through a couple of his graduate
students, one of whom was in Leningrad with me on the IREX exchange. I
still use his piece on Muscovite political folkways to help instruct USG
students on Russian political culture.
The article on Ned and the next one on the Russian Research Center bring
back many memories. I am old enough to have been at Harvard and to
remember when the RRC moved from buildings about to be torn down on
Dunster Street to a "fine new building" on Cambridge Street!
Much water under the bridge since then. The members and alumni of the
RRC have made a truly incalculable contribution over the years to
Russian studies in this country and around the world, not the least of
which from and with the help of Ned Keenan. My thanks again for leading
with the tribute to his memory.
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#45
Date: Sat, 14 Mar 2015 13:09:38 +0000
From: Boyle, Francis A <fboyle@illinois.edu>
Subject: Ned Keenan
I note with a heavy heart the death of my teacher, mentor and friend
Ned Keenan. Ned was my PhD Examiner in the field of Russian History. Ned
also wrote a very fine letter of recommendation for me to become a
professor. Ned was always very fair, balanced and reasonable when it
came to Russia and the Russians. He taught his students to do the same.
We shall miss him.
R.I.P.
Professor Francis A. Boyle
University of Illinois College of Law
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