#2
The Intercept
https://firstlook.org
March 18, 2015
THE CROSS AND THE SWORD
THE MAKING OF A CHRISTIAN TALIBAN IN UKRAINE
BY MARCIN MAMON
Marcin Mamon is a journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Krakow, Poland. He has made a number of documentaries about Chechnya, including The Smell of Paradise, for BBC's Storyville program.

THE RECRUITMENT POINT for volunteers in Dmytro Korchynsky's holy war is located in the basement of a building in central Kiev, on Chapaev Street, in what used to be a billiard club. Anyone can sign up, and the location isn't secret - its address and phone number is on the Internet.

Inside, lying on the billiard tables, are toy Kalashnikovs, which recruits can use to shoot at targets on the wall. Behind the bar, shelves are lined not with liquor bottles but with Molotov cocktails left over from the violent protests that ousted the government a year ago; the firebombs may be useful in the next stage of Ukraine's upheavals.

Along with being a recruitment center, the former billiard club also serves as the headquarters of Korchynksy's political organization, "Bratstvo" (in English, the Brotherhood). I find Korchynsky in a side room furnished with a large billiard table, worn-out leather sofa, armchairs and a piano. Lying on the piano are the notes of Chopin's funeral march and the lyrics to the German national anthem, whose first verse, beginning "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles," harkens back to the Nazi era. It is perhaps an unfortunate choice of song for a political figure that is often described as an extremist, ultranationalist and fascist.

Korchynsky does not pretend to be moderate, but he doesn't appreciate the worst epithet used against his forces.

"We are not Nazis," he tells me. "We are patriots and nationalists."

Korchynsky is nearly a caricature of a Russian-hating Ukrainian nationalist. His silver hair contrasts with his dark, bushy mustache, which is turned down at the edges in the Cossack style. The St. Mary's Battalion, which is one of more than a dozen private groups fighting alongside the Ukrainian Army against Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, is Korchynsky's creation. It is also one of the more unusual volunteer formations in the ragtag forces taking on the separatists, incorporating an ideology that manages to mix Christian messianism with Islamic jihadism.

The religious thread is not entirely surprising - Korchynsky and his men are devout Orthodox Christians. It was in the 1990s that Korchynsky learned the advantage of mixing religion and politics when he fought in the Caucasus region alongside Muslims, who were battling Russia for independence.

Korchynsky points approvingly to Lebanon. There, Hezbollah participates in government as a political party, while its paramilitary wing wages war independent of the state (and is thus considered, by the United States and the European Union, a terrorist organization). Korchynsky believes that sort of dual structure would be beneficial for Ukraine. He sees himself as the head of an informal "revolutionary community" that can carry out "higher order tasks" that are beyond the formal control of government.

That's the theory. In practice, Korchynsky wants the war in eastern Ukraine to be a religious war. In his view, you have to take advantage of the situation: Many people in Ukraine are dissatisfied with the new government, its broken institutions and endemic corruption. This can only be solved, he believes, by creating a national elite composed of people determined to wage a sort of Ukrainian jihad against the Russians.

"We need to create something like a Christian Taliban," he told me. "The Ukrainian state has no chance in a war with Russia, but the Christian Taliban can succeed, just as the Taliban are driving the Americans out of Afghanistan."

For Korchynsky and the St. Mary's Battalion, the Great Satan is Russia.

KORCHYNSKY WAS BORN to fight Russia.

He is the descendent of a noble Polish family that, in the late 18th century, fought in the Kosciuszko Uprising, which was a doomed attempt to liberate Poland from the Russian empire. The Poles lost, and Korchynsky's family moved to what was called the Kresy, or borderlands, in what is today Ukraine. As a Ukrainian, Korchynsky is continuing his family's war against the Russian empire.

In the early 1990s, he was one of the founders and leaders of a right-wing, nationalist organization known, somewhat awkwardly, as the Ukrainian National Assembly-Ukrainian People's Self Defense. When an uprising erupted in late 2013 against Ukraine's corrupt president, Korchynsky immediately joined the fight, which was centered on the main square in Kiev, known as the Maidan.

On Dec. 1, 2013, Korchynsky led his newly formed paramilitary unit, the Jesus Christ Hundred, as it stormed the presidential administration buildings. He was photographed on a bulldozer as demonstrators tried to break through a police cordon on Bankovskaya Street.

Not everyone supported Korchynsky and his fighters. Opposition politicians, including Vitali Klitschko, who is now the mayor of Kiev, tried to stop them. Amid the melee, Korchynsky's detractors shouted that he was trying to provoke violence. At the time, there were rumors he was a Russian agent trying to create a pretext for a crackdown. Korchynsky's response: "In Ukraine, you can say four things about any more or less well known figure: that he is an agent of Moscow, he is homosexual, a Jew, or that he stole money."

In March 2014, Russia annexed Crimea, and Korchysnky tired of what he saw as passivity in the new government of Kiev. In September, Korchynsky formed a battalion made up of fighters from the Jesus Christ Hundred. The new battalion would defend Mariupol - the City of Mary - and so he named it St. Mary's in the city's honor.

The day I met with Korchynsky at his headquarters in Kiev, recruits were sitting on the high bar stools filling out their paperwork and collecting the necessary documents to register with the Ministry of Internal Affairs. (Technically, the private volunteer battalions fall under the ministry's control, though they operate independently.) Members of Bratstvo register these recruits, help them fill out their paperwork, and then send them to the base in Mariupol, a city in southeastern Ukraine. There they get a few weeks of military training at most.

The volunteers that come to the billiard hall are eager to get into the fight, and some of them arrive with backpacks, dressed in homemade military uniforms. They are here to fill out enlistment forms for the battalion.

The recruits are young, mostly between the ages of 18 and 25 years old. Only a few have served in the regular army. Many have never held a gun. Some don't have the medical documents needed for official enlistment in the battalion, but this isn't a problem, because Korchynsky's wife is a member of the Ukrainian Parliament - and simultaneously responsible for medical care in War Sector "M" - the area in and around Mariupol.

Once they've enlisted, the recruits are sent almost 500 miles from Kiev, to the battalion's base in Mariupol, which lies on the coast of the Azov Sea. The battalion's base there is set in a series Soviet-era buildings and hangars. Above the base flies a flag with the image of Christ. In the main hall, once used by a local yacht club, the battalion's volunteers have created a chapel. On the wall are crosses and icons - the most important icon is one depicting the Virgin Mary, painted by the wife of a fallen volunteer. The brothers, as the fighters call themselves, recite the Lord's Prayer even during military briefings. As they pray, the commander joins the ranks of the soldiers to signify that no one stands between them and God.

Copies of the Catechism of Brotherhood, which for the battalion is a sort of ideological and religious guidebook, are lying everywhere at the base - in the offices, in the rooms where the fighters sleep, and in the dining room. It's the cover that's most striking. It depicts a young woman in a military uniform, her face obscured like a jihadi fighter. In one hand she holds a Kalashnikov. Her other hand is raised, index finger pointing to the sky, a gesture common to Islamic fighters.

Above her is the emblem of the Brotherhood, which is also pinned to the uniforms of fighters in the battalion. The emblem includes an early Christian Orthodox symbol of Jesus. Underneath is the Latin inscription: "In hoc signo vinces," which means, "In this sign you will conquer."

Just as Islamic extremists selectively highlight Quranic passages that endorse violence, the St. Mary's Catechism opens with the words of Jesus from the Gospel of Matthew: "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword." The Catechism then adds its own interpretation: "Christianity should be treated like a sword, and not as a pillow."

And like the jihadi emphasis on the glories of martyrdom and life in the afterworld, the Catechism explains that only those who follow the path prescribed by the Brotherhood shall receive the highest reward in heaven: "The end of the world is joyous, the destruction of the solar system will be a great celebration, and the second coming of Jesus to earth will be unexpected, and the terrible Final Judgment will become joyful. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen."

Korchynsky has grafted onto the fighters the idea that their mission is about more than just defending Ukraine - they are involved in a civilizational struggle against a force of evil. The battalion's iconography even shares imagery associated with the Islamic State. On the door to one of the rooms where the militants live is a picture of a fighter wearing a cap with a drawing of the Ukrainian national symbol, the tryzub (trident). In one hand he is holding the decapitated head of a man with the Russian flag coming out of his mouth. The text of the poster says, in Ukrainian, "Don't regret."(An anonymous blogger who writes on Facebook under the pseudonym Bulba Bulba, created it, I later learned). It's just a joke, a blue-eyed fighter wearing a balaclava and holding a gun tells me.

A chaplain known as Father Volodymyr attends to the spiritual needs of the battalion. Tall, slender, and quiet, he's not much more than 30 years old. He comes from Mariupol, and he persuaded some of his parishioners to join the battalion. He used to be a monk in the Russian Orthodox Church, but when the war broke out he joined the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. He could not have done otherwise, he says.

When the fighting first started, he saw supporters of the separatist Donetsk People's Republic bullying young girls on Ukrainian Independence Day simply because they wore traditional Ukrainian embroidery. One time, he says, the separatists brutally punished a woman for wearing the embroidery. They drove nails into her feet and forced her to walk through the street. It was pure evil, he explains, and is why it's now necessary to fight. Father Volodymyr invoked the words of St. Paul, who said, "if you do that which is evil, be afraid; for he bears not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, an avenger to execute wrath upon him that does evil."

Today the sword is the Kalashnikov, the weapon of choice for the fighters of St. Mary.

THE CHRISTIAN TALIBAN of Ukraine are not fighting for heaven on earth, but for Mariupol, perhaps the most dismal place under the sun. Mariupol is an impoverished city, painted in shades of gray and dominated by Soviet-era concrete apartment blocks and small, dilapidated houses. A few hundred yards from the sea, industrial garbage and plastic is washed up by the waves in big heaps. The residents of Mariupol gather this garbage to burn in their furnaces.

Yet this port city of half a million people is now a key piece of territory in the war in eastern Ukraine, and is largely expected to be the target of the next major Russian offensive. The residents of Mariupol suffer from the bad luck of being in a strategic location.

I arrived at the St. Mary's base in February, which was marked by a series of deaths for the battalion. The first man to die was "German." He was killed Feb. 10 when Ukrainians attacked the separatists' positions near Mariupol, hoping to relieve desperate Ukrainian troops who had been encircled near Debaltseve. German led the battalion's assault on Pavlopol, a key spot for defense, just outside of Mariupol. German was shot; the bullets pierced his vest, and he died before paramedics could reach him.

German's real name was Kiril Geinc. The origin of his nickname is simple. He came from a family of ethnic Germans living in Russia. He was a citizen of Russia and had no Ukrainian passport, but fought on the side of Ukraine out of personal conviction. He was buried with honors in Kiev.

The members of the battalion all use nicknames. The Chief of Staff is "Partisan." His deputy is "Syndicate." Then there's "Professor," "Virus," "Psych," "Alligator," "Shepherd," "Horse," "Sun," and so on. Partisan explains that the nicknames are just a convenient way to communicate. But there is another reason: The battalion includes volunteers from areas occupied by the separatists, and they prefer not to disclose their real names for fear of endangering their families.

A few days after German was shot, "Quiet" and "Amen" died in a car accident. On the day of his death, Quiet was only 22 years old. He came from Transcarpathia, in western Ukraine, and had only recently joined the battalion, but he was a top student and had learned to shoot well.

Amen had served in the battalion since the early autumn of 2014. He spent the winter in forward positions, rarely returning to the base. He was the most experienced fighter in the battalion and participated in numerous raids behind enemy lines. "He survived so many bombings and battles with the enemy, and yet he died in a car accident," Syndicate said. "Fate is fickle."

The third victim of the car accident wasn't from the battalion, but he was a loss for the cause. Leonid Suchocki was a legendary Ukrainian Army tank driver. Separatists feared him like the plague, and his old Soviet T-64 tank, from 1967, was called "black death."

The battalion's military equipment is almost exclusively made up of Soviet relics produced in The fighters have one BRDM-2 armored vehicle, essentially a museum piece, and several Ural military trucks that have been heavily used. The BRDM has weak armor, so volunteers have welded a metal cage around it, hoping to provide additional protection from enemy attack.

The pride of the battalion is a new Toyota Tundra pickup painted in camouflage. Most of the other volunteer battalions can only dream of such a vehicle. Syndicate would nonetheless prefer something that runs on diesel, because the Tundra burns too much gasoline, which is always in short supply.

The battalion has set up checkpoints along the road to Novoazovsk, a strategically located port town near the border with Russia. If pro-Russian forces take the city, and the port, it would bring them a step closer to creating a land link between Crimea and Russia.

The main checkpoint, about 10 miles from the base, is surrounded on two sides by concrete slabs and is built of anything and everything that can be used for fortification, giving it the look and feel of a scene from the "Mad Max" films. This checkpoint is the last one before the front lines with the Russian separatists.

Inside, the checkpoint is a mess. It's filled with field blankets, boxes of ammunition, and jars and bowls of food, mainly sauerkraut, potatoes and bread. Religious icons and children's drawings decorate the walls. The fighters are rarely inside. Usually they are standing at the checkpoint - often in rain, sleet and snow - wearing balaclavas, with white rosaries pinned to their uniforms. They check passing cars and the occasional buses that travel between the front lines. Driving in this area is not safe. On Jan. 13, on the road from Mariupol to Donetsk, rockets fired by Russian separatists hit a bus carrying civilians. Twelve people were killed.

The St. Mary's checkpoint is often under fire. Russian soldiers and rebels of the Donetsk People's Republic are about three miles away, in villages and the forest. When the shooting starts, the St. Mary's fighters retreat to their bunker, which consists of metal containers buried in the earth and lined on the inside with wood planks. The outside is covered with concrete slabs and camouflaged with earth.

Partisan, the battalion's chief of staff, is deeply frustrated. He's been fighting for nine months now. He fought in Donetsk and Ilovaisk, where in August of last year the Ukrainian Army suffered a severe defeat. Several hundred soldiers, cut off from arms, ammunition and supplies, surrendered to the Russians. "Many times we've agreed to a suspension of hostilities, but we're the only ones who observe it," he says. "And if we don't shoot at them, they shoot at us, and we can't shoot back."

To the northeast are the separatists. To the southwest, it's still Ukraine, but the residents living in in the small villages on the way to Mariupol are strongly pro-Russian. So the fighters are in essence surrounded on all sides, and expect attacks from every direction. In Mariupol itself, the residents speak Russian, not Ukrainian, and many support the separatists, preferring to live in Russia, where the state at least pays salaries and pensions.

When the fighting for Mariupol starts, it's expected that many of the city's residents will pull out weapons hidden in their homes and fire on the Ukrainians who are defending the city. It's a seemingly doomed situation, so the St. Mary's fighters rely on religion to guide them.

"Everything with us is based on faith in Jesus Christ," says Partisan. "We believe that only a religious community can win in today's world, and in a society where all our values ??have declined in importance, and only faith survives. War makes this evident. There is no place for atheists when there are mortars and rockets firing."

FOR ALL HIS talk of religion, Korchynsky is in many ways the ultimate pragmatist. His alliances have always been more practical than ideological. In the 1990s, he fought in the Caucasus because he hated Russia, not because he loved the Muslim fighters there. "We understand that if we do not want the front line to be in Crimea, we should keep the front line in the Caucasus," he told me. "And that is why we should help the resistance movement in the Caucasus."

He still has contacts with fighters in Chechnya, as well as with Muslims from the Caucasus now in Ukraine.

"I don't want to divide people based on religions," he says, "Because what we have in front of us is a much worse enemy - the Russian Federation. We should strike Russia together with our allies."

I asked Korchynsky how a man like him - contesting the political order in Ukraine - gets along with his wife, a member of the parliament. He replied that his wife understands that the country's key problems can't be solved in parliament. The most important thing is to continue the revolution, but it's useful to have friends in the government. "Sometimes it helps get something done, like gets someone out of jail, or gets the authorities to give us extra weapons," he says.

Even his religious rhetoric is practical. Korchynsky would prefer to speak about Crusaders and the Crusades, but that would require a detailed and long explanation. He says he uses the terms Taliban, Hezbollah and al Qaeda because he wants to speak a language understood by the world.

I asked what distinguishes his organization from Islamic jihadists. The radical Islamists in Afghanistan and the Middle East are, according to Korchynsky, interested in destroying the world order. Not so with the St. Mary's Battalion.

"We really like civilization," he explained. "We want to have hot water in the bath and a functional sewage system, but we also want to be able to fight for our ideals."

Korchynsky wants to move the war to Russian territory, and he says his people have already formed underground structures there. Like the Islamic State, one day his "brothers" will receive orders and begin their work.

"We will fight until Moscow burns," he says.

Read Part One and Part Two on Ukraine's Private Battalions. https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/02/26/midst-war-ukraine-becomes-gateway-europe-jihad/
and
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/02/27/isa-munayevs-war/

The material for this story is part of a documentary film being developed for Germany's WDR, "Die Story."

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 #3
Interfax-Ukraine
March 19, 2015
Center for Russian Studies created in Ukraine
 
An analytical organization, the Center for Russian Studies (CRF), has been created with the participation of state figures and experts.

The center will research events and processes in Russia, and its foreign policy.

"A group of experienced experts decided to unite for an in-depth study of processes taking place in Russia," former Foreign Minister of Ukraine Volodymyr Ohryzko said at the presentation on the creation of the CRF.

He said that since the 1990s no one in Ukraine and the West had studied these issues seriously.

"As it turned out, since the beginning of 90s, everybody has thought that Russia turned from the totalitarian USSR into a phoenix that will become democratic and beautiful. Now there's a need to understand what's really happening in Russia, how it plans on living in this world, how Ukraine and the world should build relations with this country," Ohryzko said.

In turn, former Prime Minister, former Chief of the Security Service of Ukraine and former Defense Minister Yevhen Marchuk said that media coverage of Russia's political direction in Ukraine was fully blocked during Viktor Yanukovych's administration.

Others involved in the CRF include famous reporter Vitaliy Portnykov, energy expert Mykhailo Honchar, professor of Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv Volodymyr Serhiychuk, and Ukrainian diplomat Oleksandr Samarsky.

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 #4
Foul stench in rebel-held east Ukraine as war hits water treatment
By Gabriela Baczynska

DONETSK, Ukraine, March 18 (Reuters) - Fighting in east Ukraine has interfered with water treatment, producing a foul stench from the taps that aid workers say could bring health risks.

"The water has gone bad," said Raisa Prilipko, head of a Donetsk orphanage that gives shelter to 21 pre-school children. "We remove sediment and boil water, we filter it to minimise any risks to the children's' health."

The water supply system in the Donetsk region of east Ukraine has suffered repeated damage during almost a year of fighting between Ukrainian government forces and Russia-backed separatist rebels that has killed more than 6,000 people.

The regional water company, Donbas Water, says it is still safe to drink. The smell is a result of a shortage of purification chemicals like chlorine, which have not arrived from territory under Ukrainian government control and are being used in smaller amounts than normal.

The International Rescue Committee, an aid organisation looking into the water situation, said it believes the water may no longer be chlorinated at all.

"I wouldn't drink it and I would not advise anyone to drink it without further treatment," Bibi Lamond, the IRC's Senior Environmental Health Coordinator, said earlier this week. Bacteria numbers were bound to increase as temperatures were warming, she added.

"In the last two weeks we've seen quite a substantial deterioration in the turbidity of water and there is this very strong fishy, earthy smell.... People are being quite heavily impacted by this dramatic change in the quality of water."

The main filtering station for Donetsk, a rebel-held city with a pre-war population of 1 million, has been out of order since mid-January, Donbas Water says.

However, there has been anecdotal evidence of an improvement, with the smell less overpowering in recent days.

A person familiar with the matter who declined to be identified said chlorine supplies had started arriving under strict security from Russia. This would be sensitive, because Russian support for the rebel areas is a point of contention in the war.

The utility's headquarters are located in Donetsk and 70 percent of its water usage is in rebel-held areas, but it also serves government-held territory. Its water supply is fed from open channels and pipes located mainly in territory held by the Kiev government.

According to the company, eight of its workers have been killed and 10 wounded in fighting as they ventured out to fix damage to water infrastructure.

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 #5
Interfax
Ukraine separatists say won't compromise until parliament retracts amendments

Moscow, 18 March: Donetsk and Luhansk say that henceforth they will not be able to find any compromise with Kiev until "yesterday's shameful decisions by [Ukrainian President Petro] Poroshenko and Verkhovna Rada [Ukrainian parliament]" are cancelled, according to the joint statement by the leaders of the two self-proclaimed republics, Oleksandr Zakharchenko [Russian: Aleksandr Zakharchenko] and Ihor Plotnytskyy [Russian: Igor Plotniskiy], published on Wednesday [18 March].

Zakharchenko and Plotnytskyy said the amendments to the law on the special status for Donbass and on recognizing the LPR [Luhansk People's Republic] and DPR [Donetsk People's Republic] as occupied territories, passed by the Verkhovna Rada on 17 March, actually denied Donbass the special status stipulated by the Minsk agreements.

"Kiev has crushed the fragile Minsk deal and led the situation to a deadlock. Poroshenko and [Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy] Yatsenyuk have laughed cynically at their donors from the European Union who spent so much effort on the talks," they said.

Donbass said the "main achievement of the meeting between [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel and [French President Francois] Hollande in Minsk was that they forced Poroshenko to officially include in the set of measures the principle of a direct dialogue between Kiev and the republics on all the issues of military and political settlement". By passing the documents that had not been agreed with the DPR and LPR "Kiev showed us that it is incapable of negotiating".

Zakharchenko and Plotnytskyy said "Kiev does not want peace. It aims at destroying Donbass through violence and economic blockade".

"Kiev has already suffered military, political and moral losses many times. The economy of Ukraine has actually ceased to exist. Nevertheless, Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk persist and put on a brave face. Well, if this is what they want, they will be beaten once again. They will be beaten as many times as necessary for the ultimate defeat of the Ukrainian party of war," the authors of the statement said.

They raised complaints about the decisions passed by the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada on 17 March, saying the decisions "undermine the foundations of the peaceful settlement".

Zakharchenko and Plotnytskyy said the Rada's decision "lists only the populated areas marking the line of contact [between troops], not all the regions, cities, settlements and villages where the special status should be introduced according to Article 1 of the Ukrainian law on the special status".

In addition, Article 10 of the law on the special status was amended with conditions for local elections in Donbass. These amendments were not agreed with the DPR and LPR. "At the same time, the paragraphs 4 and 12 of the Minsk set of measures to implement the Minsk agreements of 12 February that oblige Kiev to discuss and coordinate the modality and issues relating to the local elections with Donbass representatives were completely ignored," the authors of the statement said.

They said the "introduction of the special status (regime) in some regions is being postponed indefinitely by Poroshenko's amendments", a gross violation of the paragraph 4 of the set of measures.

Donetsk and Luhansk also said "Kiev raises the question of deploying peacekeepers to the conflict zone. This has not been stipulated by the Minsk protocol of 5 September 2014 or the memorandum of 19 September 2014 or the set of measures of 12 February this year". Therefore, Ukraine "violates the whole logic of the peace plan that has been developed with such difficulty. It is another attempt to leave the Minsk agreements covered with good intentions," they said in the document.

 #6
DPR accuses Ukraine of railroad war in Donbas

DONETSK. March 19 (Interfax) - Thirty-five railroad bridges have been blown up in the hostilities in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR).

"Ukraine continues to wage a railroad war on the DPR. The Yasynuvata-Skotovata railroad is the only stretch connecting the DPR to Ukraine. It has been bombed over 30 times," DPR Transport Minister Semyon Kuzmenko told reporters on Thursday.

"Thirty-five rail bridges have been blown up by now and we are unable to rebuild them," the minister said.

He also said that the Ukrainian Security Service was blocking food supply to Donetsk. Krasnyi Lyman-Slovyansk-Kostiantynivka stretches are controlled by the Ukrainian Security Service. Any consumer goods or essential items are immediately blocked, Kuzmenko said.

There is no passenger traffic from Ukraine to the DPR, and cargo traffic is limited.

"We will be able to resume rail traffic via Debaltseve by weekend. Besides, rail traffic will resume on the Yasynuvata-Debaltseve-Luhansk stretch," Kuzmenko said.

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 #7
Russia Insider
http://russia-insider.com
March 19, 2015
Less Than Half of Ukrainians Support EU Integration
Support for EU integration in Ukraine is as low as ever. Before Maidan turmoil it stood at 41%, now it's 47%
RI Staff

The stated support for Russia integration has decreased by a great margin, but the main beneficiary has been independent course rather than EU integration.

Recent poll from the Kiev International Institute of Sociology reveals 47% of Ukrainians (Crimeans were not polled) support Ukraine joining the EU. 12% expressed support for economic integration with Russia. 27% say they want to stay outside pan-national economic blocks. 13% are undecided.

http://kiis.com.ua/?lang=ukr&cat=reports&id=507&page=1

In September 2013 41% wanted EU integration, 35% wanted integration with Russia, 9% favored an independent course.

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 #8
Fort Russ
http://fortruss.blogspot.com
March 18, 2015
The High Mysteries of Ukrainian Mobilization and Demobilization

Not everyone will be demobilized [http://politrussia.com/vooruzhennye-sily/na-dembel-uydut-534/]
By Yurasumy
Translated from Russian by J.Hawk

Ukraine is experiencing its first demobilization in 18 months. Initially it was planned to release more than 50 thousand troops, to be replaced by 52 thousand of the fourth wave of mobilization. Many of the 90-100 thousand troops drawn into the UAF in the fall of 2013 or the spring of 2014 are no longer on the rolls. Some died, others demobilized due to health issues (there are many of those), some are missing or deserters. Therefore a new intake of 50 thousand was justifiable on the basis of actual losses of the UAF.

The implementation of these plans quickly became impossible due to the collapse of the fourth wave. So far only 30 thousand were inducted, and their quality is abysmal (up to a third are openly announcing their desire to surrender at the first opportunity). The continuation of mobilization, whose target was lowered to only 40 thousand, causes doubts even among the most hardened supporters of the Kiev regime. Tsenzor.net chief editor Yuriy Butusov is one of them. Therefore one has to start changing demobilization plans. They are already saying that no more than 30 thousand soldiers will be demobilized. If more troops leave, personnel strength will likely decrease.

It means that not everyone will be demobilized, only the lucky ones. As of today, up to 9 thousand were demobilized ahead of schedule. This is how the process seems to work:

1. If you are lucky, you won't have to fight and you'll be the first to demobilize.

There are soldiers who can't be sent to the front. Not because they want or don't want to fight, but because there aren't enough weapons for them.

One of the first demobilizations affected the 26th Berdichev Artillery Brigade. It demobilized about one thousand of its soldiers. Everyone called up as part of the first wave was sent home.

The 26th Brigade is unique in the UAF. It is the only unit to have heavy self-propelled artillery. During the entire time of fighting, the brigade was only able to send one battalion to the front, out of four available. It suffered heavy losses in both the summer and winter campaigns. Several of its howitzers were lost or captured. They were not able to bring into service any new equipment.

All the remaining Msta-S howitzers were consolidated in one four-vehicle battery. There seems to be no prospect of finding replacements. Therefore there is no point in keeping 1000 extra mouths to feed in the brigade-contract soldiers are sufficient to operate what's left. It also makes no sense to transfer the soldiers to other brigades, because they too are short of equipment. Therefore demobilization is the only option.

P.S. 200 soldiers returned to Sumy from the 27th Rocket Artillery Regiment. This represents about a quarter of its personnel strength, and more than a third of its mobilizees. The regiment lost 30-40 killed. Most were killed by a Smerch strike against their encampment (16 killed), which also destroyed 6 loading vehicles and 2 Uragan launchers. During the summer an Uragan battery was destroyed south of Donetsk. The fourth battalion is still without equipment (and it probably will remain that way), therefore that unit can also safely demobilize.

2. Not everyone will be demobilized.

It was already announced  that about 30 thousand will be demobilized. Who are the lucky ones, and who the unlucky?

UAF leadership already made clear that if they can't replace you, you will not be demobilized. Therefore you'll have to serve and serve and serve until they find someone to take your place. The UAF will either offer them service under contract, or will quickly find a replacement.
Furthermore, anyone undergoing medical treatment can also have his demobilization delayed.

3. Demobilization and a new mobilization

This is another peculiarity which may occur during the next wave of mobilization. Those who served since 2013 will become the first candidates for the fifth wave of mobilization.  They are the easiest to find, and they had recent training.

So far they are not being demobilized for their own good, otherwise they might be swept up by the fourth wave. But if Kiev introduces martial law (which is probably already in the spring), they aren't going anywhere.

4. In civilian life.

Demobilized soldiers also have a mass of delayed problems in civilian life. Many of them lost their health. Their socialization to civilian life looks doubtful, and causes concerns among physicians and even the government. They could care less about suicides, but the habit of solving problems through violence and the ready availability of weapons which were unlawfully take out of the war zone force one to hink.

Moreover, it's hard to find work in Ukraine. The law on military service says that the employer must keep the job available for the returning soldier for a year. Many of the reservists were called  up in March of last year, for them staying in service for even a day means a loss of a job. And they can't find a new one.

The Rada is considering a law that would extend the job guarantee to 18 months. The flip side is that it can (and likely will) extend the term of service to 18 months for those who "can't be replaced".

But in the meantime all of those who were unofficially employed and those who didn't make it back on time will lose their jobs (there are already examples).

Conclusions

The demobilization is yet another test for the junta. The soldiers can't be held indefinitely. New legislation will only delay the inevitable. The most recent battles show that the soldiers' morale is very low, which in combination with the low level of training yields minimal results at the front.

Judging by everything, the morale situation is so catastrophic that the junta will have to conduct mass demobilization to prevent the apathy toward service from erupting into mutinies. The junta will try to minimize its impact, but it will decrease the size and battleworthiness of the UAF. I can't imagine how the UAF leadership proposes to increase troops levels at the front. And you can forget about their quality. Even maintaining current numbers will be a challenge.

P.S. Poroshenko just gave the demobilizees another gift. Should anything happen (and it might happen in the next month or two), they will be called back into service as the best-trained ones.

"I am signing a decree on changes to the mobilization reserve law. Everyone who performed well will be automatically included in the ready reserve and kept on an electronic list."

J.Hawk's Comment: The junta has a genuine "use it or lose it" incentive to try something in the next few months. Keeping unmotivated, unpaid troops under arms leads to tragedies like Konstantinovka. Therefore they have to be either sent home...or thrown one last time against Novorossia.

I wouldn't put too much stock in the efforts to re-mobilize the demobilizees. They've done their bit-why should they have to go and fight yet again? Are there no other people available in the country? If you were promised, back in 2014, that you'd have to serve for only one year and that was it, you'd feel betrayed by your own government if it attempted to haul you in for another year. And another, and another...

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 #9
Time.com
March 18, 2015
Theft of Ukraine's 'Golden Loaf' Reflects the Revolution's Failings
The disappearance of a symbol of the revolution comes as President Poroshenko's approval rating crumbles
By Simon Shuster

When revolutionaries stormed the mansion of Ukraine's President Viktor Yanukovych one year ago, a few of them ran up the winding staircase to the master bathroom, expecting to find the golden toilet that was rumored to be in the house. Instead, as they rifled through the gaudy rooms that day, they found something better, or at least more bizarre: a golden loaf of bread, weighing about two kilograms, that a prominent businessman had given the President as a gift in an elaborate wooden box.

Of all the pieces of cartoonish opulence found on the palace grounds - including a stuffed lion, a golf course, a private zoo and a floating restaurant in the shape of a pirate ship - the golden loaf became the most famous token of the corruption that fueled the rebellion. In the months that followed, key chains and refrigerator magnets of the loaf were sold on Kiev's Independent Square as mementoes of the revolution and its promise to make politicians stop stealing from the people. But on Tuesday, March 17, its symbolism came full circle when Ukraine's new government announced that the loaf had itself been stolen.

"It turns out that the location of the famous golden loaf is unknown," said Dmitri Dobrodomov, chairman of the committee in charge of combating corruption in Ukraine's post-revolutionary parliament. "In essence, it was stolen. The question is: by whom?" said the lawmaker, an ally of Ukraine's new President Petro Poroshenko.

It was another embarrassing setback for Poroshenko's government, which has struggled to keep the pledges of the revolution over the past year as Ukraine fights a war with Russia's proxy militias in its eastern regions. "With one hand we're firing back at the aggressor, with the other we're speeding up reforms," Poroshenko said in a speech last month, on the one-year anniversary of the uprising that brought him to power. "Once we stop the war," Poroshenko assured the nation, "it'll just take a few years before everyone notices how Ukraine is changing."

But Ukrainians are getting impatient. At the start of February, Poroshenko's approval ratings dropped below 50% for the first time since he took office in June, according to a nationwide poll conducted by the Research & Branding Group, a leading Ukrainian pollster. More alarming for his government, nearly half of respondents in the survey (46%) said the revolution had failed to meet its goals of uprooting corruption. One in five said they were prepared to take part in another uprising to finish the work of the last one. "This is an incredibly huge number," says Evgeny Kopatko, the director of the polling agency. "It shows that the protest potential is still extremely high. People just don't see the changes that they were expecting."

That is especially true when it comes to graft. More than a year since the uprising, not one senior official from the Yanukovych government has stood trial for corruption. The revolution has failed to improve Ukraine's standing in Transparency International's annual Corruption Perceptions Index released in December; out of 175 countries, Ukraine stood in 142nd place, still the most corrupt in Europe and still lagging behind Russia, which took the 136th slot.

Poroshenko's reluctance to crack down on Ukraine's political elites is easily understood. During the past year of war in Ukraine, he has often relied on the wealth and influence of the country's oligarchs, who have helped bankroll the military forces that are fighting against separatist rebels along the border with Russia. Antagonizing these oligarchs with a far-reaching crackdown on corruption could risk a mutiny among them, which is the last thing Poroshenko needs.

"There is a great disappointment in this sense," says Alyona Getmanchuk, the director of the Institute of World Policy, a Kiev-based think tank. "People see that the war is being used as an excuse to delay various reforms," she says. "And it occurs to people that [the government] may even be interested in having this conflict to delay the war against corruption."

But as the fighting eases and the ceasefire takes hold in eastern Ukraine, Poroshenko will have to turn his focus back toward the promises of the uprising he helped to lead. Yanukovych's abandoned palace might be a place to start. Although the new government had planned to turn it into a "museum of corruption," the property has instead become a monument to the revolution's unfinished business. "It's all still up in the air," says Petro Oleynik, the former revolutionary who has been living at the palace for more than a year, serving as a kind of unofficial groundskeeper. "Other than Yanukovych this place doesn't belong to anyone, because no one has come here to claim it. Only the marauders still come here and steal things."

In late February, when TIME visited the property, the golden loaf was still prominently displayed in a window, perched alongside a mocking effigy of Yanukovych that sat on the sill. Above it was a sign offering tours of the mansion for 200 hryvnia per person, about $7 at the current exchange rate but prohibitively expensive for most Ukrainians. Oleynik said the profit from these tours goes toward maintaining the house, as does the money from the other businesses he is running on the property, such as the sale of milk from Yanukovych's cows.

But when TIME called him to inquire about the loaf on Tuesday, Oleynik replied that he was busy and hung up the phone. The theft, in any case, would likely not have surprised him. On a recent Saturday, he showed a French family around the property, pointing at various items in the gilded bathrooms, private cinema and karaoke room and stating their supposed prices. Lebanese cedar for the ceiling: $12 million. A shiny trash can near the sink: $700. "It's another world," said one of the awestruck tourists.

Many of the smaller items, Oleynik explained, had already been stolen as souvenirs, a practice he seemed to feel was unavoidable. "Sometimes it's better to look the other way even when someone is stealing," he said, "because if you anger them, they'll return and start breaking things."

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 #10
Over half of Ukrainians do not approve of Kiev policies - poll

KIEV, March 19. /TASS/. Most Ukrainians do not approve of policies of President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and do not believe Ukrainian media, Research & Branding Group pollster said on Thursday.

According to the poll conducted on March 6-16, 58% of Ukrainians do not approve of president's actions. One third of respondents (33%) positively assess Poroshenko's activity.

Sixty-eight percent of Ukrainians do not support Prime Minister Yatsenyuk, while 24% approve of his actions.

Neither political parties not Ukrainian media are trusted in the country. Only 8% of respondents said they trust political parties, while 81% are skeptical about them. Fifty-eight percent said they do not trust the Ukrainian media.

The poll was conducted in all regions of Ukraine, except Donetsk and Luhansk. Around 1,500 people over 18 were participated in the poll. Statistical error does not exceed 3%.

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 #11
Moscow Times
March 19, 2015
Russia Will Overcome Post-Crimea Challenges, Putin Vows
By Ivan Nechepurenko

With the Kremlin walls glowing crimson in the background Wednesday, President Vladimir Putin praised tens of thousands of adulating fans for their support of Russia's annexation of Crimea one year ago.

He acknowledged that issues have mounted since the annexation, but assured the cheering crowd - the size of which Moscow police estimated at about 110,000 - that Russia would overcome all obstacles in its path.

"We ourselves will continue moving forward. We will strengthen our statehood and our country. We will overcome the difficulties that we have so easily created for ourselves over these recent times," Putin declared.

"We will also overcome, of course, the problems and obstacles that others try to create for us from outside. Such attempts are doomed to fail in general when it comes to Russia," he said.

Striking perhaps a more controversial note, Putin said: "Friends, we in Russia always saw the Russians and Ukrainians as a single people. I still think this way now. Radical nationalism is always harmful and dangerous, of course. I am sure that the Ukrainian people will yet come to an objective and worthy appraisal of those who brought their country to the state in which it is in today."

He then added that Russia would do all it could to help Ukraine through "this difficult period in its development," and to normalize ties with its southwestern neighbor.

In Moscow, the jubilee took the form of a massive, star-studded concert on the edge of Red Square under the domes and spires of St. Basil's Cathedral. Though Putin's speech predictably stole much of the spotlight, some of Russia's most iconic pop and rock acts turned out to entertain the massive crowd as well, including Grigory Leps, Larisa Dolina and Lyube.

Russia's State Duma shortened its Wednesday session to ensure all of the deputies would be able to attend the event, RBC news agency reported. Each of the Duma's parties vowed to turn out for the big celebration.

And to ensure Moscow's general population didn't miss out on the fun, some 300 billboards were posted around the city in the days leading up to the event.  

The concert was held just a few hundred meters from where Boris Nemtsov, one of Putin's most vociferous critics, was gunned down in late February. The spot of Nemtsov's death - which has since become a makeshift memorial site - was expected to be fenced off by police for the duration of Wednesday's event, Interfax reported

Some 140 celebrations were set to take place around Russia to honor the anniversary of the annexation, the Interior Ministry said in a statement, adding that some 365,000 people were expected to take part in the festivities.

Building Up Crimea
Shortly before his appearance at the rally, Putin presided over a meeting in the Kremlin on the socioeconomic development of the Crimean Peninsula.

Speaking to representatives of Russia's federal government and top Crimean officials, the president said that young families, pensioners, people with disabilities, military personnel and public sector workers have enjoyed improved living standards thanks to Russia's federal coffers.

But he stressed that a great deal of work still remains to be done.

"Now it is essential to organize the same kind of effective efforts to support business, farmers and specialists in key sectors of Crimea's industry and agriculture," he added. "Our goal is to make Crimea and Sevastopol into self-sufficient and dynamically developing Russian regions."

Wednesday marks one year since President Vladimir Putin delivered a landmark speech in the Kremlin, declaring Crimea's accession to Russia's federal fold and launching a turbulent era of Russian relations with the West that many pundits have described as a new Cold War.

Despite suffering a significant economic downturn, Russians continue to harbor overwhelming support for their leader. Moscow-based pollster the Levada Center revealed in February that Putin's approval rating currently sits at 86 percent. The poll was conducted across Russia among 1,600 respondents, and had a margin of error not exceeding 3.4 percent.

But he is not quite so popular abroad, having courted scathing criticism and waves of sanctions from Western leaders who view Russia's annexation of Crimea as destabilizing and detrimental to international security.

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 #12
Kremlin.ru
March 18, 2015
Concert celebrating Crimea and Sevastopol's reunification with Russia

Vladimir Putin attended the We're Together! concert and meeting celebrating the first anniversary of Crimea and Sevastopol's reunification with Russia.

The concert took place on Moscow's Vasilyevsky Spusk, just near the Kremlin. Popular Russian music groups and singers performed at the event.

PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA VLADIMIR PUTIN: Friends!

Exactly one year ago, Russia, which we are speaking of so much right now, and the Russian people showed amazing togetherness and patriotism in supporting the aspirations of the people of Crimea and Sevastopol to return to their native shores.

We understood and felt with our hearts and minds at that moment just how much the links between time and generations matter to us, and how much our heroic forebears have done for our country. We understood that Crimea was much more to us than just a piece of land, even a strategically important piece of land.

What was at stake here were the millions of Russian people, millions of compatriots who needed our help and support. We understood how important this is to us and that this was not simply about land, of which we have no shortage as it is.

The issue at stake here was the sources of our history, our spirituality and our statehood, the things that make us a single people and single united nation.

Friends, we in Russia always saw the Russians and Ukrainians as a single people. I still think this way now. Radical nationalism is always harmful and dangerous of course. I am sure that the Ukrainian people will yet come to an objective and worthy appraisal of those who brought their country to the state in which it is in today.

For our part, we will do everything we can to help Ukraine get through this difficult period in its development as soon as possible and establish normal interstate ties.

We ourselves will continue moving forward. We will strengthen our statehood and our country. We will overcome the difficulties that we have so easily created for ourselves over these recent times.

And we will also overcome of course the problems and obstacles that others try to create for us from outside. Such attempts are doomed to fail in general when it comes to Russia.

Thank you for your support. Long live Russia!

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 #13
Kremlin.ru
March 18, 2015
Meeting on socioeconomic development in Crimea and Sevastopol
The Kremlin, Moscow

Vladimir Putin held a meeting on socioeconomic development in Crimea and Sevastopol. The meeting took place on the first anniversary of Crimea's reunification with Russia.

PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA VLADIMIR PUTIN: Good afternoon, colleagues,

We are meeting on what is a special day, a symbolic date. Exactly a year has passed since Crimea and Sevastopol were reunified with Russia. I want to congratulate once again the people of Crimea and all of Russia's people on this event and thank of course the people of Crimea and Sevastopol for the courage and steadfast spirit they showed a year ago.

A year ago, we already understood the extent of the huge task before us. Together as a country, we must work now to develop Crimea and resolve problems that were neglected for decades. We now have to address the many tasks involved in raising people's living standards, developing the economy and social sector, and solidly integrating Crimea and Sevastopol into Russia's legal, financial and administrative system.

It was clear that we would encounter objective difficulties during the transition period as well as attempts to resist the process from outside. This is just what happened. A number of Western countries imposed sanctions and restrictions on Crimea and on Russia as a whole.

Our neighbours, it must be said, have not shown much inventiveness. They cut off the water supply or create other problems. None of this is fatal, but it does of course hamper our ongoing work somewhat.

We had to start by resolving the most urgent priorities. Around two million people in Crimea and Sevastopol have already acquired Russian passports. We raised pensions and social benefits and increased public sector wages.

We also decided that families in Crimea and Sevastopol, who had a second or subsequent child starting from 2007, were entitled to receive the maternity capital payment, regardless of whichever benefits they received earlier.

Education and healthcare facilities received emergency material and technical assistance. We set up new reserve capacity in the energy sector and increased air and sea transport links.

I note the hard work accomplished in all different areas by the specialists at the federal agencies, the Ministry for Crimean Affairs, and the local authorities. They really have accomplished a lot. The people of Crimea and Sevastopol have shown understanding towards the inevitable transition period difficulties in integrating the two new regions. I want to thank them of course for their understanding.   

At the same time, people hope that the concrete problems they face in their everyday lives will be resolved in organised fashion and without delay, and that there will be steady improvement for the better in Crimea's development.

I want to make it clear to the authorities at all levels, federal, regional, and local, that you must be in constant contact with people and public organisations and respond to the issues that people bring to your notice.

In general, you need to monitor the situation constantly, above all the socioeconomic situation in the region. You must keep greater watch on the quality of provision of state and municipal services and organise immediate responses to any breakdowns, even individual incidents, and cases of officials taking a bureaucratic approach to people.

Sociological surveys show that population groups that have already felt the effects of Russia's social policy programmes have noticed the biggest increase in living standards and quality of life. This includes the families with children I mentioned before, pensioners, people with disabilities, military service personnel, and public sector workers.

Now it is essential to organise the same kind of effective efforts to support business, farmers, and specialists in key sectors of Crimea's industry and agriculture.

The socioeconomic issues most on people's minds right now are rising prices, high unemployment, low wages, poor roads, development of towns and villages, the housing problem, and affordable, quality service in the housing and utilities sector, education and healthcare.

All of this is nothing new. These are problems that people face in other Russian regions too, but some regions have their own specific circumstances. One of the most serious social problems is of course that of drug addiction.

It will take long-term, systemic work to resolve these problems. Our aim is to make Crimea and Sevastopol self-sufficient and fast-growing regions of the Russian Federation. Crimea and Sevastopol need to make real advances in strengthening their own economic base.

We need to stimulate business activities in industry, agriculture, tourism and other sectors, support small and medium-sized businesses, create new jobs, and provide employment and income growth.

The most important challenge is developing infrastructure, including energy, housing and utilities, and transport. And I would like to ask you to report about progress in the work on a key infrastructure project: the Kerch bridge crossing.

And, of course, the region's culture, education, and science potential needs to be further developed. It is imperative to bring medical services and mass sports infrastructure to a new, higher level.

Our demographic programmes, measures to promote healthy lifestyles, families, and protection of motherhood and childhood, should work in Crimea as effectively and efficiently as possible. I repeat, right now, it is important to shift focus to challenges of comprehensive, sustainable improvement throughout the entire region.

Last August, the Federal Targeted Programme for Developing Crimea and Sevastopol was adopted; it is designed for the 2015-2020 period. We are planning to allocate about 700 billion rubles toward its implementation.

Let me point out that all activities and programmes should be linked, ranged based on priorities and deadlines. It is imperative to establish strict monitoring over the efficient use of allocated resources, and there needs to be precise interaction between federal agencies and local authorities.

The free economic zone, which contemplates significant benefits for entrepreneurs, should become another important instrument for developing Crimea and Sevastopol. As you recall, a corresponding law came into force on January 1, 2015.

Today, I also expect to hear how the practical work to implement the provisions of this law is going. Have all the necessary legal provisions been adopted? How carefully are business and investor interests taken into account? What problems remain unresolved?

I also ask that you report on preparations for the upcoming holiday season, which has enormous influence on Crimean residents' employment and income.

Today's meeting participants include the heads of federal ministries, as well as legislative and executive branches of Crimea and Sevastopol's government, and members of the public. In this composition, I suggest that we discuss the issues I listed, our objectives and priorities.

Let's begin our work.
<...>

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 #14
Moskovskiy Komsomolets
March 16, 2015
Russian commentator says long-term costs of Crimea annexation hard to predict
Mikhail Rostovskiy, Crimea has been ours for one year. And so what?

On Monday [16 March] Russian Federation citizens will be able to celebrate (or mourn, if they hold radical pro-opposition views) the first anniversary of the return of Crimea to the bosom of mother Russia. The person who reclaimed Crimea - no need to name him because it is clear to everyone who it is - made his assessment of these events on television on Sunday evening. But Putin has no monopoly on making assessments, so I will try to give my verdict on the first year of "Crimea's road to the motherland."

And this is my "verdict": history has not yet passed its final verdict on what Russia did one year ago. Just as it was the case then, everything can still go either way for our country.

At the beginning of 2014, Vladimir Putin was not a politician who decided out of boredom that the world Europe was used to should be turned upside down. VVP [Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin] was a leader who (at least from his point of view) had been cornered and forced to choose between two extremely risky options. One involved the violation of all conceivable and inconceivable rules of the game in European politics with subsequent ostracism from the West. Under the other, Crimea could become a NATO "zone of responsibility" in the not too distant future.

Putin was not afraid of "casting lots" and, in doing so, turned the world order the Euro-Atlantic space was used to upside down. Why did I use this relatively neutral wording, rather than emotive language like "restoration of historical justice" or "flagrant violation of international law"? Not just because of my intrinsic sympathy for my country's "cause" or my reluctance to get involved in fruitless debate.

It is usually an account "cleansed" of all emotions that can create a full and comprehensive impression of the essence of what happened. That is also true in our case.

What exactly was the "flagrant violation of the rules of the game" committed by Putin? It was not the redrawing of borders in Europe by force. We remember that one such case of redrawing happened without it prompting particular protests in Europe. Serbia ceded effective control over Kosovo not voluntarily, but after being presented with a "compelling argument" such as NATO bombs.

Putin's "crime" is that he has changed Europe's borders against the express will of America. Does it seem to you that so far I have merely repeated VVP's justification for his actions, which he constantly uses? I admit that I am guilty of that. I am guilty, but I promise to reform immediately, in this very paragraph. In the eyes of the majority of the Russian public, America is some kind of dark force intent on destruction and suppression. In the eyes of the majority of people living in Europe, America is the guarantor of their security.

Around 15 years ago or so, I had the opportunity, on several occasions, to talk with the German ambassador to a country that is not the least important one in Europe. He usually called ordinary Americans "morons [Russian: urody]." But, in the same informal conversations, as soon as the discussion touched on his country's alliance with the United States at interstate level, he all but stretched to attention.

I hate what I am about to write, but you have to face the full truth: from the point of view of an ordinary European, Russia is a dangerous and incomprehensible force refusing to "live by the rules" and constantly threatening to destroy the cozy world built in the EU. I, naturally, find this view ridiculous because it is NATO that keeps trying to move closer to Russia's borders, not the other way round. But this is not about my views, but about how we are viewed in Europe.

The incorporation of Crimea into the Russian Federation added credibility and urgency to these views and magnified them greatly. Imagine that next to you, in a "civilized and politically correct" forest, lives a domesticated vegetarian bear. You do not fully believe that it is vegetarian, but every morning the bear dons its top hat in a dignified manner, cuts the grass in front of its den with a lawnmower, and talks about its commitment to European values.

But then, one not so fine morning, everything changes: The "domesticated" bear tears off its top hat with a loud roar and tucks in two bunnies right on the lawn. Do not laugh at the grotesqueness of the scene as it is a very accurate description of how Europe perceives Russia's actions in Crimea. Europe was seriously scared, so it rallied around America.

One year has passed since Russia staged this political "shock therapy", but it is too early to speak of the final results of these audacious actions by Putin. And I am not sure that it will be possible to do so in a year's or even five years' time. It is impossible to bring the relationship between the West and Russia to what it was at the start of 2014. Whether things take a good or bad turn for us, this relationship will certainly be different.

America certainly does not intend to change from wrath to kindness in its attitude towards Russia in the foreseeable future. However, in Europe, there is an internal battle of opinions. For example, there is a view like this: you say that the bear has gone berserk? But you should not have poked it with red-hot iron rods! Have respect for its legitimate and natural interests and everything will be fine!

Only retired politicians who have no longer anything to lose, such as former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and former French President Valery Giscard D'Estaing, can risk expressing such viewpoints in their concentrated form. But such viewpoints also have quite a few supporters among existing politicians in the leaderships of Italy, Spain, Germany, France, Greece, Cyprus, Hungary, and other EU countries.

However, the opposite view - the bear has proved its inability to live in a civilized society, so its section of the forest should be fenced off with a "cordon sanitaire" - has no fewer proponents. And they are certainly shouting much louder. In Great Britain, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and some other countries, saying anything about compromise with Russia is tantamount to political suicide.

It is not clear at all which of the opposing views will eventually prevail. There are too many unknowns: how will the situation develop in the Donets Basin? Will the second "Minsk peace" last or everything will again roll back to war? How will things develop in our economy? A year of "sailing autonomously" is certainly not enough to make a judgment. What will happen in our domestic politics? Putin's power in the country, by all indications, is very strong. But the high level of mutual hatred in Russia is bound to develop into something very bad.

That is why I go back to my main conclusion: Crimea is, of course, ours. But even Putin does not know how long Russia will have to pay for it and how many zeros there will be in the figure at the very bottom of the final check.

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 #15
Business New Europe
www.bne.eu
March 18, 2015
Crimea - withering on the vine or Russia's blossoming new stronghold?
Anna Kravchenko in Moscow and Nick Allen in Berlin

A year on from its whirlwind absorption by Russia, Crimea's change of flag was on March 18 celebrated with a 'rebranding' and a splash of festivities across the world's largest country.

"I'd like to congratulate people in Crimea and all Russian citizens once again on this occasion and to say thank you to those who live in Crimea, in Sevastopol, for the courage they showed a year ago," President Vladimir Putin said during a Kremlin meeting with Crimean officials.

While most of the international community condemns Crimea's effective annexation by Russia after a hasty local referendum last March, Moscow regards the matter as done and dusted, a long-overdue restoration of historical justice.

The pen Putin used to ink the document that returned the peninsular to Russian control is now in a Moscow museum. And amid speeches and Russian flag-waving parades, March 18 saw the launch of a new Crimea logo that will adorn local signs and wine labels. Designed by a top Russian art studio, authorities wanted the logo to "symbolize an original tourist product of high quality".

But although the peninsular can still count on its fine wine, sunny weather and hefty injections of money from Moscow for its military facilities, plans to turn Crimea into what its Moscow-appointed prime minister, Sergei Aksyonov, calls the "best region in Russia" are spiralling over budget.

Think of a number

Riding a wave of jubilation at its bloodless land grab, Russia last May approved a RUB680bn (around $20bn) Crimean development programme that will run to 2020. Although Economic Development Minister Alexei Ulyukaev said Crimea would be spared government budget cuts as Western sanctions began to bite, it wasn't to be. And amid reported claims of mass illegal property theft by the new authorities, the general number crunching became increasingly nebulous in recent months.

The main infrastructure project launched since March 2014 was the bridge across the 5-kilometre Kerch Strait from mainland Russia. In the past year, the cost of the project more than quadrupled from RUB50bn to RUB228.3bn, making it Russia's most expensive bridge when - if - it is completed in 2019.

On March 16, Russian Minister of Crimean Affairs Oleg Savelyev also warned of delays in building new infrastructure targeted for 2020 due to budget limitations. "We will commission the major highways a bit later than was planned," Savelyev told RBC news agency.

But if better roads can wait, the need for power can't after Ukraine cut electricity  supplies. Parallel to the bridge project, installation of a power line across the Kerch Strait will now start this year rather than 2017, it was announced.

Regardless of the difficulties, many Western companies are ready to invest in Crimea, Savelyev claimed. "The entire world is interested in Crimea. But many, including Europeans, cannot enter [the market] due to the existing sanctions. Nevertheless, many businessmen and companies from various countries come to the peninsula - from Turkey, Israel, the Netherlands, Finland and Italy."

Prior to the one-year anniversary of the referendum, PM Aksyonov said Crimea had signed the first $30mn contracts with investors in the energy sector. There were also 200 pending investment requests, he added.

Waylaid

Crimea's story has some parallels, especially seen in the context of the ongoing armed conflict in eastern Ukraine.  Russia has previously used breakaway regions to strengthen its positions in the former Soviet space. In 2008, it recognized the self-proclaimed republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. But after the fanfare, pledged funds failed to materialize or were "diverted".

The signs are that Crimea's new authorities are as partial to the windfalls of office as are Moscow's proxies in South Ossetia, or those running the 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi, which are said to have seen huge amounts of funding go astray. It's not idle 'Russia bashing' either. The rampant nature of corruption in Russia has been a stock feature of Putin's state of the nation address since he came to power in late 1999 - at least until last year, when it was not mentioned by name.

In February, Aksyonov pledged an end to the wave of "nationalizations" of valuable assets in recent months, from mobile operators to banks, shipyards and energy concerns. By the end of 2014, some 4,000 enterprises, organizations and agencies had been affected, according to Ukraine's Justice Ministry. "The new authorities are taking property and giving it to businessmen who are close to them," Sergei Mitrokhin, leader of Russia's liberal Yabloko Party, told The Moscow Times.

Prices are also marching upwards. But whatever the disappointments for the population at present, Crimea's strategic importance will always up the ante - and the cash flow - to maintain it. So intent was Russia not to back down last year, that "we were ready" to put Russia's nuclear forces on alert during the Crimean operation, Putin said in the documentary "Crimea: The Way Home", aired on state television on March 15.

Meanwhile, supporters of the annexation turned out at around 140 celebratory events across in Russia, according to the interior ministry. In the Siberian city of Omsk, a TASS photo showed one participant in a parade bearing a sign saying "Je suis Crimea". "For Crimea it is a long-anticipated holiday of homecoming," Aksyonov said in a message of greetings to compatriots. "Russia has defended our legitimate right to self-determination, to unity with our historic Motherland."

The gift that stopped giving

Crimea was a part of Russia from 1784 until 1954, when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev transferred it to the USSR republic of Ukraine as a gift. After the 1991 Soviet collapse, Crimea remained part of independent Ukraine until the disputed referendum held in Crimea on March 16, 2014. While Moscow cites the wish of more than 90% of those who voted to rejoin Russia as justification for its actions, critics note than many thousands boycotted the rush vote. "90% is a complete and utter lie. Most of our friends didn't participate in that 'referendum'," says Irina, 52, an entrepreneur from Crimea's southern coast.

And despite Putin's insistence that Crimea is Russia's "historical territory", the international community will not let it lie. Speaking after March 16 talks in Berlin with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the annexation of the peninsula was a violation of international law that "called the peaceful order in Europe into question". It was essential to "not rest until the full sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine is restored, and of course this includes Crimea," she said.

Punch those nostalgia buttons

Among the new education and cultural projects, there was solid funding for Artek, a famous Soviet-era summer camp on the peninsula. Such projects play the nostalgia card very successfully, as generations of Russians holidayed in Crimea every summer and know every pebble there. "[Crimea] is for people who like hiking, wild beaches, meditation in the forest - so for those who don't ask for much service-wise," says Natalia Latkina, 30, a journalist from Moscow.

But whether yesteryear memories and the breezy new logo will work their magic, the next few seasons will show. For many, holidays across the Black Sea in Bulgaria or Turkey are more enticing in terms of service and price. "I would go if Crimean holidays cost significantly less than holidays abroad," says Dmitry Vasilyev, 37, an IT manager in Moscow.

"There is definitely a drop [in trade], prices grew several times while pensions were raised only one and a half to two times... Only people from Crimea and some Russians come [as tourists] from time to time. Last year's high season failed," says Stanislav, 54, a pensioner from the resort of Yalta.

Others disagree. "Wages in the public sector grew at least twice, pensions grew as well. There is improvement in healthcare," Sergei Meshkovoi, 36, told gazeta.ru in Simferopol. He also praised anti-corruption measures, especially in law enforcement. "When we were in Ukraine, it [corruption] just was ignored," Meshkovoi said.

There is no disputing that a significant part of the Crimean population (the Kremlin claims the vast majority), is happy to be part of Russia, especially in such traditional Russian bastions as the naval port of Sevastopol. But many Crimeans have had to take a rigid stand against what they cannot agree with.

"I am half Ukrainian, half Russian, and now I feel more Ukrainian than ever," says Andrei, a 42-year-old international company sales manager also from Yalta but now living in Kyiv. "There is no legal, human or common sense reason for one country to annex a huge territory of another, and then even start war in another territory of the latter country, bringing heavy weapons and armed regular army forces to kill 'good former neighbours'."

Come fly with me

With its Black Sea trade routes and proximity to markets, Crimea has clear economic potential. But its physical distance from the Russian 'mainland' and political isolation currently offset many of those advantages.

Until the bridge is built, there are no road or rail links to mainland Russia and Crimea that does not pass through Ukraine, so an extremely overburdened ferry from Krasnodar to the peninsular is the most popular mode of transportation. "Up to 2,000 cars queue for the Kerch ferry, with a two-day wait, and that's in good seafaring weather," says one 53-year-old resident of the peninsular who did not want to be identified.

Expanded air connections to Crimea took off last June, only to nosedive six weeks later.  In 2014, Russian airlines said they would introduce cheap flights to Crimea from 30 Russian cities, tripling the number of flights over 2013.

In a government-pushed bid to woo holidaymakers and business travellers, Aeroflot promised a cut-price link from Moscow to the Crimean capital Simferopol from June through its budget subsidiary Dobrolet ("Goodflight"). But the airline was grounded by EU sanctions in August. Aeroflot's new low cost airline Pobeda then said in February that it wouldn't fly to Crimea.

For some Crimeans now living across the new border in Ukraine, home now seems a world away. "I now have to seriously think twice to decide upon travelling to Crimea to see my homeland and the graves of my parents," says the sales manager Andrei. "There are occasional cases of Ukrainian citizens being arrested or taken into custody in Crimea for no obvious reasons. I feel as though a piece of my heart was torn away."

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 #16
Moscow Times
March 19, 2015
Will Either Side Back Down on Crimea?
By Will Wright
Will Wright is a political analyst and journalist focused on Eurasia.

This week marks the one-year anniversary of Russia's annexation of Crimea. To note the occasion, the U.S. State Department announced on Monday, "We do not, nor will we, recognize Russia's attempted annexation and call on President Vladimir Putin to end his country's occupation of Crimea." The State Department official statement continued, "We reaffirm that sanctions related to Crimea will remain in place as long as the occupation continues."

The Russians appear even more unmovable on the Crimea question. In his 2014 state of the nation speech in December, Putin framed Crimea as a cradle of Russian Christianity and of "sacral importance." Military analysts are quick to point out that the naval base in Sevastopol, home to Russia's Black Sea Fleet, is a key strategic asset as well.

Putin has also invested tremendous political capital into standing firm against Western indignation over his bold and unexpected decision to annex Crimea. After the annexation, Putin's approval rating spiked to around 85 percent and has held steady ever since, according to the Levada Center.

In a documentary aired by state television to celebrate the anniversary, Putin even said that he had been ready to put Russia's nuclear arsenal on alert to secure his policy course in Crimea. Meanwhile, Crimea has been integrated into the Russia Federation over the last year, from the installation of new political, economic and legal structures to the switching of the peninsula's very time zone.

In short, there appears to be no realistic scenario in which the current political leadership in Russia would ever return Crimea to Ukraine, and little reason to think that any foreseeable future Kremlin leadership would do so either.

So, if Russian control of Crimea must now be considered permanent in every practical sense, does this mean that American sanctions against Russia over Crimea will remain in place indefinitely?

The current political situation in Washington suggests that the United States may be as unlikely as Moscow to give ground on the Crimea question anytime soon. Earlier this month, Democrats joined Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in unanimously pressuring the White House to arm Ukraine. Support for Ukraine's territorial integrity enjoys solid bipartisan support.

All leading 2016 presidential hopefuls are also expected to take a tougher line with Putin than Obama has, if elected. The Obama administration's perceived weakness in punishing Russia over its actions will surely be a favorite foreign policy talking point for Republican contenders in presidential debates.

The attitude of ordinary Americans toward Russia has also noticeably cooled. A Pew center Global Attitudes poll found that, from 2013 to 2014, the percentage of Americans with an unfavorable view of Russia rose from 43 to 72 percent.

Perhaps the only voices opposing sanctions in Washington will be the lobbyists of energy companies and other business interests. Already hurting from the sustained drop in world oil prices, ExxonMobil will not want to lose the potential boost offered by Russia's Arctic reserves, which it has been exploring with Rosneft. These lonely holdouts seem unlikely to stem the anti-Russian tide in Washington, however.

In contemplating how long U.S. sanctions against Russia may last, it is perhaps worth remembering the story of the Jackson-Vanik amendment. This Cold War relic, signed into law in 1975, remained on the books until 2012, long outliving the issue it was designed to address, and forcing American presidents to periodically issue Moscow trade restriction waivers.

However, with two sides as irrevocably entrenched on opposite sides of an issue as the United States and Russia are today on the status of Crimea, there is no telling whether or not these sanctions will make a run at Jackson-Vanik's 37-year record.

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 #17
Putin says no reason for confidence in economy, officials say worst over
By Darya Korsunskaya and Oksana Kobzeva

MOSCOW, March 19 (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday it was still too soon to feel confident about the country's economy, although his ministers said the worst is over.

Speaking to a conference of Russian businessmen, Putin said the central bank's main interest rate, now at 14 percent, remains high but that the level was warranted by the situation.

The central bank cut its main rate, the one-week repurchasing rate, by 100 basis points in a second easing this year. Businesses have complained that it is still too high to spur much-needed economic growth.

"Indeed, for now the key rate is high enough," Putin said. "For now, there are no fundamental grounds for us to feel confident."

Gross domestic product fell 1.5 percent in January in annual terms. The economy has been hit by Western economic sanctions over the Ukraine crisis and the fall in the global price for oil, Russia's main export.

Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, speaking at the same conference, said however that there were signs that the economy had now entered a period of stabilisation.

"The end of last year and the beginning of this year were especially difficult when we saw volatility in the foreign exchange market, the value of our assets declining sharply," Siluanov told a conference of Russian entrepreneurs.

"These two shocks hit us hard. Now, in general, we see that the worst is over, and quite the opposite, we see some signs of stabilisation."

The rouble, which in mid-December fell briefly to 80 roubles per dollar, has been trading at around 60 roubles per dollar in recent weeks. But it is still 40 percent down against the dollar compared with the middle of last year.

Russia is expected this year to record its first year of recession since 2009, the aftermath of the global financial crisis. According to the central bank's latest forecast, GDP is likely to shrink by 3.5 percent-4.0 percent this year.

The United States and the European Union imposed sanctions on Russia last year over the crisis in Ukraine, where Russia has annexed the Crimea peninsula and supported pro-Russian separatists fighting Kiev's forces in the east.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in Brussels the sanctions would remain in place until the conditions of a ceasefire deal agreed in the Belarussian capital Minsk are met.

Economic forecasts also predict the pace of economic contraction will grow in the coming months.

But Economy Minister Alexei Ulyukayev saw positive signs, telling the congress that inflation had peaked and capital flight this year could be lower than expected and may even be below $100 billion.

Even so, inflation, now running at an annual rate of 16.7 percent, remains far above the central bank's long-term target of 4 percent.

Siluanov said inflation could ease to an annual rate of 11-12 percent by the end of 2015 and his ministry expects the recovery to be under way by 2016.

Ulyukayev told the congress that GDP could grow by 2.0 percent-2.5 percent in 2016. However the central bank predicts the economic contraction will continue in 2016.

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 #18
http://readrussia.com
March 18, 2015
Russia Faces a New Threat: Inflation
by CHRIS MILLER

Though the media was focused last week on the whereabouts of Vladimir Putin, news from Russia's Central Bank may prove more significant in the long run.

The central bank lowered its main interest rate from 15% to 14% and promised more rate cuts in the future. In part, this was a technical decision, marking a retreat from a policy of high interest rates that the bank embraced this winter as part of a strategy to stabilize Russia's currency.

Yet the rate cut is an important political signal, too. By affecting everything from the unemployment rate to food prices, interest rate decisions shape the distribution of resources in society, making some people wealthier and others poorer. As Russia struggles through a recession that may last two years, the interest rate cut sheds light on the Kremlin's strategy for surviving the lean years ahead.

Last week's rate cut was the latest move in a drama that has been playing out for over half a year. A series of interrelated factors began to place sharp downward pressure on the ruble in late 2014: low oil prices and Western sanctions shocked currency markets at the same time that the war in Ukraine and the high-profile expropriation of Vladimir Yevtushenkov's oil company, Bashneft frightened capital and led to a sharp outflow. As trust in the country's economic policymaking institutions declined, the ruble steadily depreciated against the euro and the dollar throughout late 2014, at times sharply, before stabilizing slightly below 60 to the dollar.

The falling exchange rate left Russia with a dilemma it has yet to resolve. Economic theory suggests that countries face a three-sided dilemma-a 'trilemma'-whereby they can attain only two of the following three goals: a fixed exchange rate, an independent monetary policy, and unrestricted capital movements in and out of a country. The tools that would enable a country pursue all three policies act at cross purposes, meaning that any country that strove to attain all three goals would soon find it lacked the resources to do so.

Polls show that most Russians do not personally follow news about the ruble's foreign exchange value, and most do not express great concern about the currency's wild ride over the past half year. Yet among upper middle class Russians, the ruble's declining value has sparked anger and concern. Compared with a year ago, imported goods and European vacations cost twice as much in ruble terms. Those who saved in rubles rather than in dollars or euros found their savings bought far fewer goods than before. The ruble's fall primarily affected wealthier Russians-the type of people who buy imported goods and take foreign vacations-but this is the same section of the population whose mobilization in anti-Putin protests in 2011 and 2012 frightened the Kremlin.

The ruble's wild swings have also endangered many Russia firms, which have revenue in rubles but debts in dollars. Such debts have become much more challenging for firms to pay, and many large companies-including some of Russia's biggest state-owned companies such as Rosneft and Russian Railroads-are getting government bailouts to help refinance debt.

One option for stabilizing the currency would be to reintroduce currency controls, which Russia formally eliminated in 2006. Top government leaders, including President Putin himself, have repeatedly stated that the government is not considering reintroducing capital controls. But other officials, especially those with closer connections to the security services than to sectors of the economy reliant on international financial markets, have suggested that the government should regulate the sales of rubles and the purchase of dollars. For example, Aleksandr Bastrykin, the powerful head of the Investigative Committee, announced in late February that he believed the ruble should be valued between 40 and 45 to the dollar, and threatened to impose restrictions on currency trading.

Yet by cutting interest rates-which will put further downward pressure on the ruble-Russia's central bank signaled its continued willingness to let the ruble float (or sink) freely. The ruble's decline over the past year raised prices for imports, which is a major reason that inflation has shot up, reaching 16.7% in February. Letting prices increase, especially on everyday goods such as food, is a politically risky strategy. Levada Center, an independent pollster, has found that 82% of Russians say that rising prices are an issue that worry them greatly, more than any other social or political problem.

In public comments after the interest rate hike, Elvira Nabiullina, the head of the central bank, reiterated the central bank's willingness to tolerate current inflation levels, warning that "an attempt to reduce inflation at any cost would clearly be a short-sighted strategy."

Nabiullina is right that focusing solely on inflation comes with risks. For one thing, high interest rates threatened the stability of the banking system, and Russia's influential state owned banks had been lobbying hard for a rate cut, which would reduce their funding costs. By reducing interest rates, the Central Bank transferred resources into the financial sector, reducing the likelihood of further bank failures. At the same time, by abandoning its attempts to stabilize the exchange rate, the government has retained the ability to set its own monetary policy, meaning that it can cut interest rates in order to encourage economic growth and to prevent a sharp increase in unemployment.

There are sensible economic reasons for the central bank to cut interest rates. But in gambling with inflation rates, the government has embarked on a path strewn with political risks. In large part because of higher inflation, 2014 was the first year since Putin took power that Russians saw their real disposable income decline, in large part because higher prices eroded the purchasing power of wages. Unless oil prices recover, wages this year are unlikely to rise rapidly enough to keep up with inflation. How will Russia's political system-whose popularity is based in large part on its successful track-record of economic management-adjust to a second year of austerity and stagnant wages? We are about to find out.

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#19
Huffington Post
March 18, 2015
Will the Market Forces Replace Sanctions in Pressuring Russia?
By Elena Ulansky, Managing Director at Platinum Partners
[Chart here http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elena-ulansky/will-the-market-forces-re_b_6895702.html]

The world is undergoing a wave of change. The world is seeing negative interest rates in European countries, the dollar is rising at a disturbingly fast rate, and most significantly, deflation the magnitude of which the world hasn't been seen in decades is here. Russia also has to worry about its economy free falling into a deflationary graveyard. The price of oil, the ability to export, and the declining ruble spell nothing but difficult times ahead for the Russian Economy.

The chart above created by Thompson Reuters, Amp Capital shows that approximately 35% of the world economies have less than zero inflation. Deflation means lower employment and wages, as corporations reduce work forces and reduce wages. One needs only look at Japan to see the impact of deflation. Real Estate in Japan is worth 1/3 of what it was 10 years ago. Certainly, the problems of deflationary debt ridden Greece threaten the very existence of the European Union. America has taken no steps to affect the deflation that is spreading throughout the world. In fact the likely raising of interest rates in the United States is only likely to cause dollar to rise and cause an increase in the world deflation.

Russia after America has been the country attracting the most immigrants in the world. It has been a simple reality that jobs and opportunity were more plentiful in Russia then in many of the former members of the Soviet Union. In particular Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan have been seen the largest number of its citizens move to Russia. If Russia is, as a result of deflation, no longer an attractive solution for immigrants, they will return home. Poland and Czechoslovakia are already deflationary economies. It is not clear what the impact on Russian foreign policy the deflationary economy (which is symbolized by the departure of immigrants working in necessary, but low paying jobs) will have. Certainly, the return of a large number of former immigrants cannot be good for unstable, poor countries Moldavia, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Can we expect to see domestic turmoil there?

Certainly in Russia, deflation is only increasing as oil falls, foreign investors exit, sanctions stay in place and the ruble depreciates against the dollar. America expected that its sanctions would add to the economic pain in Russian and cause a change in Russian foreign policy. There clearly has been no thawing in cold war relations with Russia. American and European sanctions have not changed Putin's foreign policy in Ukraine or anywhere. One of the reasons is deflation. Deflation is a bigger problem for Russia then sanctions. Without the sanctions Russia would still be in deflation. American sanctions while a negative are not as negative as the forces of deflation.

Russia's foreign policy will not be influenced by sanctions as much as it will be by deflation. Because of this, sanctions are like throwing salt into a wound. America might consider ending sanctions to win some needed good will with Putin. The idea that sanction would force him to change his policy has not worked. Maybe assistance in decreasing deflation could be a more effective American policy in affecting Russian foreign policy.

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 #20
www.rt.com
March 19, 2015
Russia slaps personal sanctions on 200+ foreign citizens - report

A fresh sanctions list issued by Moscow includes about 200 people known for their anti-Russian positions and actions, such as US Deputy National Security Advisor Caroline Atkinson and firebrand Arizona Senator John McCain.

The report about the new list of foreigners subject to entry bans and asset freezes in Russia was published in the Thursday issue of the popular daily Izvestia. The newspaper referred to an undisclosed source in the presidential administration and the Foreign Ministry refused to comment on this information.

According to Izvestia, the new list includes mostly politicians, civil servants and other public figures known for their openly anti-Russian activities. About 60 people on the list are from the United States. Among these are Deputy National Security Advisor Caroline Atkinson, presidential advisers Daniel Pfeiffer and Benjamin Rhodes, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations Robert Menendes and Senators John McCain, Daniel Coats and Mary Landrieu.

"We have no special desire to play this banning game with the West, but if they maintain their sanctions activity we will also launch new blacklists prepared by our diplomatic missions," the Kremlin source told the newspaper.

The Foreign Ministry sources also did not exclude further expansion of the Russian sanctions lists if western nations choose to continue the standoff.

The deputy head of the State Duma Committee for Foreign Relations, Leonid Kalashnikov, said many European nations had already understood that antagonizing Russia was hurting them and that politicians from these countries were actively seeking contacts with Moscow. According to media reports, seven EU states - Italy, Greece, Cyprus, Spain, Austria, Hungary and Slovakia - intend to oppose the prolongation of anti-Russian sanctions, the MP noted.

"No one needs these blacklists; neither Russia nor the West. Russian politicians who fall under restrictions have never had real estate or bank accounts in Western countries. The only objective of the sanctions is to deprive us of the opportunity to deliver our position at international parliamentary conferences. But if the West is preaching the freedom of speech, why do they try to silence politicians?" Kalashnikov told Izvestia.

In March 2014, the United States and the European Union introduced sanctions, such as visa bans and asset freezes, on a number of Russians whom they accused of being "key ideologists and architects" of the policy towards Ukraine. As the relations between the West and Russia continued to deteriorate, more names were added to the blacklists. Russia replied with its own blacklist which, however, has not been published.

Earlier this month, Russian presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov told the press that "no sanctions will force Russia to make changes to the persistent line it follows in international affairs." Peskov also called the sanctions "a double-edged sword" that, while causing certain discomfort to the Russian economy, was also hurting businesses in the countries that introduced them, not to mention the world economy as a whole.

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 #21
Interfax
Best effort put into investigation of Nemtsov murder - Russia's former minister

Moscow, 18 March. The investigation into the murder of politician Boris Nemtsov is regarding all possible theories of the crime using best law-enforcement practices, former Russian Finance Minister Aleksey Kudrin has said.

"I know what effort has been put in there and so far I cannot say that the investigation is on the wrong track," Kudrin told journalists in Moscow.

"I can assure you that in comparison with the information that gets around to us, it is much deeper, more detailed and it is actually considering various theories," he said.

Kudrin said that the information on the elimination of a contract killing theory of the murder of Boris Nemtsov "raises questions".

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#22
Carnegie Moscow Center
March 17, 2015
Will the Chechen Connection Lead to Ramzan Kadyrov?
By Alexey Malashenko
Malashenko is the chair of the Carnegie Moscow Center's Religion, Society, and Security Program. He also taught at the Higher School of Economics from 2007 to 2008 and was a professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations from 2000 to 2006.

The Chechen connection has been discovered behind the murder of Boris Nemtsov, one of the Russian opposition leaders. This discovery has catapulted the Chechen head, Ramzan Kadyrov, to the center stage. Some consider him the chief organizer of the crime, while others think he fell victim to Russian special services' efforts to besmirch his reputation in the eyes of Vladimir Putin.

The intrigue around Nemtsov's murder once again highlighted the fact that Kadyrov is a federal-level politician whose reach extends well beyond the Chechen border.

Chechnya is a special region for the Russian Federation. Its two wars, separatist movement, and terrorism made it the central threat to the North Caucasus, as well as to the stability of the entire state. Boris Yeltsin won the 1996 elections thanks in no small part to the Khasavyurt Accord, which ended the first Chechen war, while Vladimir Putin gained authority and popularity as a result of the victory in the second Chechen war. Afterwards, he made a surprising move by appointing the separatist mufti Ahmad Kadyrov, who used to fight against Russia, as the head of Chechen Republic. After the elder Kadyrov's tragic death in the Grozny stadium terrorist attack on May 9, 2004, his son Ramzan was elevated to the top position. In a way, this was a skillful improvisation.

But Putin made the right choice on two accounts. First, Ramzan is deeply grateful to the Russian president for his appointment (after all, Chechen elections have long been just a formality). Second, he was able to restore order in Chechnya, quite often resorting to blatantly brutal methods, which included killing his rivals and any other enemies of political stability in his republic. Putin, who is well aware of such "peacekeeping methods," forgives Ramzan these "stabilization costs." Perhaps, this was the reason why Putin went ahead with awarding Kadyrov the Order of Honor this March, despite the allegations that Kadyrov is tied to Nemtsov's killing. By bestowing this award on Kadyrov, Putin was in effect saying, "I trust you, Ramzan."

Putin also turned a blind eye to Chechnya's Islamization: sharia laws and prohibitions are in full force in the republic, and Islam is used by Kadyrov to consolidate the society around his personal power. Essentially, we are dealing with an Islamic space within the borders of the Russian Federation, where traditional rules take precedence over federal laws. It is true that islamization is also a factor in other republics of the North Caucasus, but only in Chechnya is it initiated by a secular politician.

The Russian president and the Chechen head enjoy a special relationship tinged with mutual personal attachment. Putin generally tends toward informal ties. As a result, the Chechen relations with the federal center also have an air of intimacy to them.

The problem is that Kadyrov believes that these informal relations apply to all of Russia. He believes that he and all other Chechens have a right to extraterritoriality and thus can be either punished or exempt from punishment for violating Russian law when they so choose. He effectively removes himself from the jurisdiction of the Russian authorities, including special services, which are understandably extremely displeased with such independence on Kadyrov's part.

All of this begets the question of how firmly the Kadyrov regime depends on Putin, and how self-sufficient he really is. It is likely that the "Putin factor" is decisive. Apparently, Ramzan understands it too. In 2013, he frankly admitted, "as long as I am supported by Putin, I can do anything." We can also remember Ramzan's statements that the current president of Russia should remain in office for life. The October 2014 rally in honor of Putin's birthday, which attracted thousands of supporters, looks symbolic as well. Finally, it is also appropriate to recall how alarmed Kadyrov was when Dmitry Medvedev came to power in 2008.

Another amazing and rather eccentric pledge of fealty to the Russian president came in the form of Kadyrov's support for the Russian position in the Ukraine crisis. Kadyrov stated that he could deploy 74,000 Chechens that could march all the way to Kiev to fight in Ukraine, and that he is personally ready to go there to sort out the local chaos. It is hard to say how much Putin liked the idea, since it did cast a shadow on his reputation; nevertheless, despite its restraint, the Kremlin was quite understanding of these pronouncements.

Vladimir Putin needs Ramzan Kadyrov as a guarantor of stability in the Chechen republic and, by extension, in the entire North Caucasus region. But during my visits to Chechnya, I heard numerous comments that Kadyrov could actually be replaced. In early 2015, it was rumored in Moscow that Putin was disappointed with Kadyrov, which gave rise to the theory that Nemtsov's murder was a tactical move by some politicians directed at Ramzan's elimination. It might be true, but no clear alternative to Kadyrov has emerged as of yet. His departure will inevitably destabilize the situation in Chechnya.

In this context, Putin and Kadyrov resemble Siamese twins, whose separation will result in complication for both of them, and thus for the country at large.

At the same time, Ramzan Kadyrov's career plateaued after he became a federal-level politician. Where can he go next? There is simply no higher position that he can hold. Of course, we can hypothesize that such a position can in fact be invented to suit him-for instance, he could become a deputy prime minister, but what issues would he be responsible for?

On the other hand, Kadyrov clearly wants to claim the mantle as one of the leaders of Russia's Muslim community, which includes 16 million Russian citizens and 4 to 5 million migrants from Central Asia and Azerbaijan. He is constantly meeting influential Muslim spiritual leaders and hosting countrywide religious and political-religious events. Kadyrov finances the construction of a mosque in Yekaterinburg as well as the repair and reconstruction of mosques in several other Russian cities. The higher echelons of Russia's Muslim clergy willingly cooperate with him, both for financial and political reasons; such a friendship serves as an additional, albeit indirect, demonstration of their loyalty to the regime.

In another attempt to assert his leadership position in the Muslim community, Kadyrov organized a 700,000-strong rally in Grozny in connection with the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, when terrorists killed magazine staffers for publishing Prophet Muhammad cartoons (Kadyrov claims that close to a million people took to the streets). However, instead of being directed at the terrorists, the Grozny protests assailed the blasphemous Europeans who also betrayed their own traditions and chose the path of total permissiveness.

In fact, this position is in line with official Russian ideology and can therefore be embraced by Vladimir Putin. But even if we are to assume that the idea to hold the rally belongs to the Kremlin, Kadyrov's actions were genuine and reflected his own beliefs.

It was not a present for Putin, and neither was Boris Nemtsov's death. Neither one of them stood to benefit from it.

This publication originally appeared in Russian.

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 #23
New York Times
March 19, 2015
Chechen's Ties to Putin Are Questioned Amid Nemtsov Murder Case
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

GROZNY, Russia - Ramzan A. Kadyrov, the strongman leader of Chechnya, has been at the center of intrigue surrounding the murder of Boris Y. Nemtsov, a prominent critic of the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. So before a busy weekend that included a night out with the boys to watch cage fighting, Mr. Kadyrov wanted to clear something up: "I am utterly devoted to Vladimir Putin and ready until the end of my life to resist the enemies of Russia," he wrote on Instagram.

The question these days is not so much Mr. Kadyrov's fealty to Mr. Putin, his political patron, but whether Mr. Putin's Faustian bargain to gain stability in Chechnya, where Russia fought two grisly wars to suppress Muslim separatists, has backfired, unleashing a violent and unpredictable despot.

Critics of Mr. Putin have warned that he has allowed Mr. Kadyrov, 38, to effectively create the Islamic republic that Chechen separatists had dreamed of - albeit one entirely reliant on Moscow for financial support and where Shariah law is selective, not absolute. And, they say, Mr. Kadyrov may now be seeking power and relevance far beyond his base in the jagged hills of the North Caucasus.

Unlike in other regions, where local security forces are subordinate to federal authorities, Mr. Kadyrov controls his own internal security troops, known as Kadyrovtsy. He is known for ruthlessly eliminating critics at home and abroad. And in Moscow, he is widely resented by the security services for being allowed to operate with impunity.

"The F.S.B. hate Ramzan because they are unable to control him," Alexey Malashenko, an expert on the Caucasus at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said of the successor intelligence agency to the K.G.B. "He does whatever he wants, including in Moscow. Nobody can arrest members of his team if there is no agreement with Putin."

Mr. Nemtsov had recently called attention to the dangers inherent in such a security arrangement. "I cannot understand what Putin expects when arming 20,000 Kadyrovtsy gathered today in the stadium in Grozny," Mr. Nemtsov wrote in a Facebook post in December, after Mr. Kadyrov led his troops in chants of "God is great!" at a rally in the Chechen capital's new soccer arena.

"What will happen next?" Mr. Nemtsov wrote. "The country is entering a crisis. There is not enough money for anything, including the support of regions. And the unspoken contract between Putin and Kadyrov - money in exchange for loyalty - ends. And where will 20,000 Kadyrovtsy go? What will they demand? How will they behave? When will they come to Moscow?"

While the authorities have produced no evidence that Mr. Kadyrov or anyone close to him ordered the Nemtsov killing, investigators have arrested five Chechen suspects, including a former deputy commander of one of Mr. Kadyrov's security battalions. Even allies of Mr. Nemtsov who believe the Kremlin is behind his death say the investigation so far has exposed a dangerous rift between chiefs of the security services in Moscow and the brash Chechen leader.

The rift is of Mr. Putin's making. For eight years, he has sanctioned Mr. Kadyrov's iron-fisted rule while seemingly turning a blind eye to assassinations, torture and other human rights abuses. At the same time, the Kremlin bankrolled an expensive rebuilding effort that has transformed Grozny into a glittering Caucasian oasis, and allowed Mr. Kadyrov to amass his heavily armed personal militia.

The result, admirers and detractors agree, is an over-the-top political persona the likes of which Russia has never seen: Islamist warlord; Russian nationalist; and fierce Putin loyalist - at least for now.

Long tied to the killings of his personal rivals and critics, Mr. Kadyrov has emerged in recent months as one of the strongest backers of Mr. Putin's policies in Ukraine, allowing fighters and weapons to flow from Chechnya to support the pro-Russian separatists. He was a leader of a huge "anti-Maidan" rally in Moscow to protest Ukraine's shift toward Europe, and in January he led a mass demonstration in Grozny after the shootings at the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical French newspaper, denouncing the publication as anti-Muslim.

Posters proclaiming "We Love the Prophet Muhammad" now hang on buildings throughout the city.

On Saturday evening, Mr. Kadyrov was in his element, lounging on a plush high-backed sofa in the V.I.P. section of Grozny's main sports arena, watching mixed martial arts fighters bloody one another in a metal cage.

Wearing a red baseball cap and a jersey from the local Akhmat Fight Club, Mr. Kadyrov sat next to Aleksandr S. Zaldostanov, nicknamed the Surgeon, who is the leader of the Night Wolves, a pro-Putin biker gang in Russia. At times flashing thumbs up, and at other times thrusting his arm in the air triumphantly, Mr. Kadyrov yelled encouragement to the young local athletes battling international challengers.

"Hold him!" Mr. Kadyrov screamed in Chechen. "Be more confident!" "Go forward!" "Attack!"

Mr. Kadyrov does not go in much for mercy. He has been linked to some of Russia's most jarring, politically charged killings, including that of a prominent investigative journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, in 2006 and of a human rights advocate, Natalya Estemirova, whose colleagues said Mr. Kadyrov personally threatened her months before she was abducted outside her Grozny apartment in 2009.

Two of Mr. Kadyrov's bitter rivals in Chechnya's notorious tribal politics were eliminated in public killings. Ruslan B. Yamadayev was shot to death while sitting in a car in central Moscow in 2008, while his brother, Sulim B. Yamadayev, was killed in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in 2009. The Dubai authorities issued an arrest warrant for Adam Delimkhanov, a close adviser to Mr. Kadyrov.

A former bodyguard of Mr. Kadyrov, Umar Israilov, who had documented gruesome torture and other human rights abuses by Mr. Kadyrov and his associates, was killed in 2009 in Vienna, where he had fled with his family.

Mr. Kadyrov has generally waved off past accusations, and he was similarly dismissive when asked about Mr. Nemtsov, a pro-democracy crusader and dogged critic of Mr. Putin, who was assassinated just outside the Kremlin walls.

Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story
"What? Am I an investigator?" Mr. Kadyrov snapped to a reporter as he strode out of the Grozny Coliseum at 1:30 a.m. into a brisk night, surrounded by his phalanx of heavily armed guards.

"Heh!" he said, exaggerating a laugh. "This is a question for the Investigative Committee, for the prosecutor's office, for the F.S.B. I don't know. I am head of the Chechen Republic. I am not a Muscovite."

The uncomfortable questions are not likely to go away anytime soon.

Speculation about Mr. Kadyrov's role began immediately after the authorities announced that they had arrested the five Chechen suspects, including Zaur Dadayev, who served in one of Mr. Kadyrov's security battalions. In a curious posting on Instagram, Mr. Kadyrov said he knew Mr. Dadayev personally as a "true Russian patriot."

Questions mounted when just a few days later Mr. Putin gave a state award to Mr. Kadyrov (and to Andrei K. Lugovoi, who was charged by Britain with killing the fugitive Russian intelligence officer, Aleksandr V. Litvinenko, by poisoning his tea with polonium).

In Chechnya, Mr. Nemtsov was perhaps best known for leading a petition drive in 1996 that gathered one million signatures to protest the first Chechen war. And given the republic's history and reputation for violence, skeptics of the government's investigation say that charging Chechens with his murder is simply too convenient.

Supporters of Mr. Kadyrov say that his enemies in Moscow are trying to undermine his relationship with Mr. Putin. Mr. Kadyrov, in his post on Instagram, accused the United States of trying "to cause chaos and instability in Russia."

Relatives of the suspects insist that they are innocent.

"I know they are not guilty; I know my sons," Zulai A. Gubasheva, the mother of two of the suspects, Anzor and Shagid Gubashev, said in an interview at her home in the town of Malgobek, in Ingushetia, a region bordering Chechnya. Ms. Gubasheva is also an aunt of Mr. Dadayev, the suspect whom Mr. Kadyrov called a patriot.

Human rights monitors in Moscow who visited the suspects in prison say there are signs they may have been tortured, and despite early reports of confessions all now seem to be denying the charges.

Though there are sporadic flare-ups in violence, Chechnya, with a population of more than 1.3 million, has enjoyed relative calm in recent years, a result of Mr. Kadyrov's authoritarian rule and a sustained crackdown on jihadists that has driven many to neighboring Dagestan and Ingushetia, to Syria, or to support the Islamic state.

Portraits of Mr. Putin hang on buildings all throughout the rebuilt Chechen capital, often alongside similar portraits of Mr. Kadyrov's father, Akhmad, who became president in 2003 and was assassinated in 2004.

Islam Saidayev, who works in the Chechen government counseling youths against extremism, rejected the idea that Chechens had killed Mr. Nemtsov. The opposition leader had invited his own death, Mr. Saidayev said, by taking on a system that could not be defeated.

"The Russian Federation is a big train," he said. "Maybe it's going in the wrong direction, but no one can stop it. Nemtsov stood on the tracks and tried to stop it. Of course, it ran over him."

The arrested men, he said, were being framed: "It's just settled opinion that anything bad is done by Chechens."

Alexandra Odynova contributed reporting from Grozny, and Neil MacFarquhar from Moscow.

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 #24
http://readrussia.com
March 18, 2015
Nemtsov, Putin, and the Nature of Russian Politics
by MARK ADOMANIS

Ever since the murder of Boris Nemtsov, which, judging by Vladimir Putin's recently concluded and exceedingly strange week-long absence from public view, seems as if it might have sparked a full scale political crisis within the confines of the Kremlin, Western Russia watchers have been bemoaning the missed opportunity that Nemtsov represented.

There is a general sense, particularly among the business press, that there was a liberal "path not taken." Russia, in this telling, could be much like Poland today, a country of transparent and high-functioning markets, more or less honest bureaucrats, and, most importantly of all, free and fair elections were it not for a single poor decision on the part of Boris Yeltsin. Had Nemtsov been chosen instead of Putin, these people say, Russia would have been able to move past all of the nasty parts of its history that are one again reestablishing themselves.

The narrative is shockingly similar to the one that many leftists of a Trotskyist bent still cling to, the idea that Russia ended up going down the path of repression and failure only because of the "good luck" of a thuggish, mediocre government functionary.

Many of the encomiums to Nemtsov are less rational analyses than they are (understandably!) pained recollections about a dear friend and colleague. Nemtsov had a lot of friends. Despite the fanfare the reality is that Nemtsov wasn't a very good politician: any discussion about his supposed political brilliance must crash into the awkward reality that for most of the past decade his poll numbers floated somewhere around 2%. Even among the, relatively narrow, ranks of the Russian liberal opposition, Alexey Navalny long ago surpassed him in terms of mass appeal.

But despite Nemtsov's limitations as a retail politician he was exceedingly good at cultivating connections with foreign journalists, diplomats, businessmen, and politicians. He had a deep roster of close friends within the halls of congress and the establishment think tanks, and he had frequent opportunities to make presentations to a who's who of the Washington foreign policy establishment. That is a tough world to break in to, and Nemtsov did as good a job as could possibly be expected of a foreigner.

By and large the people with whom Nemtsov dealt have a similar view of Russia, one that has bled into their remembrances: they think that, during the 1990's, there was a relatively successfully, if bumpy, transition to "capitalism" and "democracy" and that this largely positive transition was later derailed by Vladimir Putin.

The problem with this sunny, upbeat, narrative is that it badly mischaracterizes the nature of the regime over which Yeltsin presided. Indeed that was one of the most bizarre things about so many of the remembrances of Nemtsov, many of them could be summarized as "imagine what a wonderful, prosperous place Russia would have been if only Nemtsov had been in power!" But we don't need to imagine this: it actually happened! Nemtsov was very close to the top of the Russian government during a time when the man who was actually at the top was blind drunk most of the time. Boris wasn't some minor paper-pusher languishing in provincial obscurity, he was at the very center of the action.

And the Russian government of those years was at least as corrupt, violent, and incompetent as today's. Corruption in Russia is still, obviously, a really big problem but it was arguably quite a bit worse during the Yeltsin years. The entire government bond market during those years was essentially rigged for the benefit of a few insiders. That's not a matter of suitcases full of money changing hands, it was the transformation of some of the state's most basic building blocks into vehicles for naked private gain. If Nemtsov was upset by any of this thievery he did an uncharacteristically poor job of letting the world know.

The sad truth is that there simply isn't a fundamental break between the "democratic" Yeltsin years and the "autocratic" Putin. It's not a question of black and white, just varying shades of gray. Yeltsin's government stole elections, it waged bloody wars, it physically repressed its opponents (remember the bombing of parliament?), it lied, it cheated, and it stole on a monumental scale. Putin's government hasn't really stopped doing any of these things, but it is following in the footsteps of its predecessor, not blazing a new trail.

Nemtsov seemed like a decent enough guy and his murder was (obviously!) a monstrous crime. Someone ought to hang for it, though there are strong reasons to doubt that will actually happen. But while remembering his accomplishments we shouldn't delude ourselves about what Russia was really like in those years. The story about "democratization" was little more than effective PR, gloss put on a very nasty and chaotic reality. There isn't a "puzzle" about the Putin years: the fundamental attitudes and behavior of the Russian state never really changed. Maybe they will change in the future or, more likely, maybe they won't, but as much as we might wish it to be otherwise they didn't.

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 #25
http://gordonhahn.com
March 18, 2015
Nemtsov's Legacy: A United Russian Democratic Opposition?
By Gordon M. Hahn
Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is an Analyst and Advisory Board Member at Geostrategic Forecasting Corporation (Chicago), Adjunct Professor, Middlebury Institute for International Studies at Monterey (California), and Analyst and Consultant for Russia - Other Points of View (www.russiaotherpointsofview.com). He has authored three well-received books: The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia's North Caucasus and Beyond (McFarland Publishers, 2014), Russia's Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007), and Russia's Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction Publishers, 2002).

There are only four domestically-driven ways for an authoritarian regime to become democratic, and all but one require a united and strong democratic opposition movement to one degree or another. It is more the absence of a united and strong democratic movement since the mid-1990s than the authoritarian nature of President Vladimir Putin and his inner circle that has plagued Russia's democratic development. The February 27 murder of Boris Nemtsov, one of Russia's key democratic opposition leaders, is generating an impetus for the still weak democratic opposition to unite as 2016 Duma elections come over the horizon.

A Typology of Regime Transformations

There are four domestically-driven ways for an authoritarian regime to become democratic: revolution from below, revolution from above, pacted transition, and imposed transition. Revolutions from below are familiar to us all. They are burned into our memories by images of peaceful or violent crowds seizing power against the will of the old regime and its ruling groups. The opposition forces are rooted in society and arrayed against the present forms of rule, state organization, elite behavior, and state-society relations.

Revolutions from below are rooted in one or more state ruling groups and institutions. Regime groups controlling one or more state institutions unconstitutionally use them to undermine other traditionalist ruling groups and the existing order of rule and establish a new system of rule. There is little societal mobilization, especially in comparison with revolutions from below. There have been numerous military-led revolutions from above, including in Turkey, Meiji Japan, Egypt, Syria and Iraq. Only one, Ataturk's in Turkey, led to democracy, and that process took decades and in some ways is still not complete. In 1990-1991 Boris Yeltsin and other disenchanted apparatchiks of the ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) led the only civilian-led revolution from above when he used the state apparatus of the Russian Federation to fully separate the CPSU's apparatus from the Soviet state apparatus in Russia and to destroy the Union state apparat's power or transfer them to 'his' Russian state apparatus. The results so far lag behind Turkey's democratic achievements.

Non-revolutiuonary 'transitions to democracy' require a strong softline or reformist regime group and a strong, united democratic movement that dominates among the forces opposed to the regime and rejects violence and radical methods of transition, preferring instead to cooperate, even nudge the regime through the process of democratic reforms (imposed transition) or force the regime softliners to negotiate with it the process of transition and the details of institutional design (pacted transition).

Regime Transformational Types, Democratic Movements, and Democratic Outcomes

While each of these modes of regime transformation needs a strong democratic movement, especially in the post-takeover democracy building and consolidation stage, such is especially crucial for several of them in the phase of the old regime's destruction. Most obviously, if a revolution from below is to produce a democratic outcome, a strong, united democratic opposition movement is needed. Otherwise, more extremist elements are likely to destroy the old regime through violent means, which historically has not led to democracy in many cases. Radicals also might undermine democracy-building and consolidation in the constructive phase of the revolution. Democrats may risk an alliance with radicals (socialist, communist, fascist or others) in order to gather the critical mass to remove the old order, but they do so at the peril of the democratic outcome they seek.

Following revolutions from below, the mode of regime change that most needs a strong, united democratic opposition is the 'pacted' or negotiated transition. In this case the opposition needs to be strong enough to force a key regime ruling group of softliners to negotiate a transition pact outlining the path to, and design of the aspired democracy. An alliance of strong, united democratic forces and pro-democracy elements within the regime groups with whom they negotiate ensures a strong democratic core that can isolate both regime and opposition radicals during the transition process of state and or constitutional design and defeat them in successive elections needed to consolidate the institutions, culture and habits of democracy.

Revolutions from above, being largely state-based in both the destructive and constructive phases of the regime transformation require less societal mobilization than revolutions from below and pacted transitions. Nevertheless, a significant opposition movement with a substantial democratic component is needed on occasion as an ally for pressuring the regime hardliners to abstain from reactionary actions to combat the efforts by the softline revolutionaries from above to dismantle the old order and bring in the new. The threat of revolution can be held out to intimidate potential putshcists seeking to restore the old system. After the seizure of power, the revolutionaries above are likely to try and demobilize the societal opposition in the nascent revolution from below with which they had allied during the destructive phase in coming to power. The revolutionaries above might also co-opt former hardline or fence-sitting regime elements in order to shore up their power base and obviate the need for support from the societal and democratic revolutionaries. In this way, they are likely to quash the prospects for democratization in the short- to mid-term at the least. This is why a more robust united democratic opposition is more requisite for a democratic outcome in revolutions from above than in imposed transitions.

Imposed transitions are least in need of strong democratic opposition movements at least during the outset of the transformation process, since a core group of regime softliners is committed to a democratic regime transformation and needs little or no pressure to stay the course. However, as the process moves from declaration of intent and institutional design to implementation a strong, united democratic movement must be nurtured in society or culled from one or more of the ruling groups into one or more parties agreeing to the uncertainty of the democratic process and prepared to be out of power for some period of time as elections are held.

Russia's Revolution From Above and the Stalling of Russian Democracy

It is more the absence of a united and strong democratic movement since the mid-1990s than the so far weak authoritarian impulses of President Vladimir Putin and his inner circle that has plagued Russia's democratic development. The 1991 Soviet Revolution was neither a peaceful revolution from below like Czechoslovakia's "velvet revolution" from below or a negotiated transition to democracy like that in Poland and Hungary. Nor has it been like the violent first Russian Revolution against tsarist autocracy or the Chinese Revolution won by political movements organized in "councils (soviets) of workers, peasants and soldiers" rooted in society and independent from the state.

The essence of the Soviet/Russian transformation was a bureaucratic, state-led revolution from above. Led by Boris Yeltsin, elected chairman of the new RSFSR Congress of People's Deputies in June 1990, opportunistic Soviet Communist Party and state apparatchiks who defected from the reform camp led by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev were most instrumental in overthrowing the communist regime, not the Soviet people. Soviet Party bureaucrats and younger members of its nomenklatura ruling class won control in mid-1990 over the core "republic" in the Soviet Union - the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) - and proceeded to carry out a creeping bureaucratic revolution against the central Soviet party-state machine. Their weapons were RSFSR state institutions, parliamentary laws, presidential decrees and administrative orders, not the marches, strikes, bombs and bullets of revolution from below.

The RSFSR Supreme Soviet declared Russia sovereign in June 1990, establishing the supremacy of RSFSR law over USSR law on Russian territory. Russian law then transferred all property, financial and natural resources in Russia from USSR to RSFSR jurisdiction. The Russian Central Bank and new quasi-commercial Russian banks destroyed the Soviet centralized financial and banking systems. By winter, Russia outlawed at all levels combining the posts of Communist Party first secretary and chairman of the soviets semi-democratized by Gorbachev and took the first steps to establishing its own presidential, KGB and military institutions. Upon election as Russian president in July 1991, Yeltsin decreed the removal of Party organizations from all state institutions and enterprises in Russia. During the failed August 1991 hardline coup, Yeltsin placed under RSFSR control all USSR institutions, including the KGB and military. When the coup failed, the Party was banned, effectively abolishing the old regime. With the Party gone, Russia easily abolished or expropriated the Soviet state ministry by ministry. With the regime and state apparatus gone, there was little reason for the republics to maintain the Union. The USSR was tossed into history's dustbin. Throughout this entire period the masses were rarely mobilized. When they were it was most often to defend Russia's revolutionaries from above (as in February-March and August 1991), not too overthrow the remnants of the partocratic regime. This explains the limited extent of social revolution and the lack of violence during the fall of the Soviet regime.

But it also explains much of the troubled development of democracy and the market in post-Soviet Russia (and other former Soviet republics). The co-optation of Party and state apparatchiks and entire structures by the revolutionary Russian regime has left the nomenklatura in power along with its limited understanding of, and weak commitment to building political and economic institutions based on the rule of law. A good part of the elite represents economic interests formed under the old regime or its death throes, so the "new" Russian state is rendered deeply penetrated by old and new economic oligarchs. Thus, state institutions are politically divided, diminishing the cohesion needed for concerted revolutionary economic transformation. This contributed to undemocratic, uneconomical insider "nomenklatura privatization" and cemented the relationship between corrupt bureaucrats and criminalized semi-private and private financial-industrial groups. The expropriation of the old regime's structures has also prolonged old operating procedures, preserving the massive bureaucracy's strong role in the economy. The result is a weak Russian state unable to defend either its interests or those of society from the preferences of bureaucrats and oligarchs and an inefficient state that does too many things and does them all poorly.

The limited mobilization of the masses, while it may have helped avert the violence typically attending revolutions, stunted the development of civil society, especially the formation of political parties and trade unions that defend societal interests. Thus, society is too weak to encourage the state to concentrate on the development of a civil polity and economy. The consequence of these limitations in Russia's revolution is an unstable, corrupt, oligarchic, and almost anarchic quasi-democracy and market.

The Nemtsov Murder as Impulse to Democratic Unity and Mobilization

The murder of Nemtsov, regardless of who stands behind it, could be playing a mobilizing and rallying function similar - in a scaled-down form - to that played by the hardline crackdown in Latvia and Lithuania in January 1991, the August 1991 hardline putsch in Moscow, or other reactionary crackdowns in past political crises. Those regime-driven violent incidents sparked both Russia's nascent revolutions - one developing above inside the state, another still slowly simmering within society and consisting of democrats, moderate and radical nationalists, and moderate socialists.

Nemtsov's murder has generated an impetus for the still weak democratic opposition to unite as 2016 Duma elections come over the horizon. In November Nemtsov put forward a proposal for the formation of broad democratic coalition or association called the 'United Democrats. Thus, in the wake of his murder, there is some movement towards taking up this idea more aggressively. The democratic opposition's sense of being embattled and even under threat of physical extinction has concentrated their minds on some form of effective unification.

Last week, a key member of Aleksandr Navalnyi's Party of Progress, Leonid Volkov, has called on Russia's democratic opposition forces "to stop quarreling and unite" in preparation for participation in the 2016 elections to the State Duma. Navalnyi's Party of Progress is a potentially potent force, especially in Moscow (9 percent of Russia's population), where as candidate for mayor in 2012 he won 29 percent of the vote, suggesting the kind of take a united democratic force could muster. The older, mainstay democratic 'Yabloko' party's leader Sergei Mitrokhin responded with a list of conditions his party would insist on for joining a democratic coalition. It is likely that Nemtsov's co-chairman in the RPR-Parnas party, former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov will follow his late co-chair's wishes. In addition, former leader of the party Vladimir Ryzhkov has been rumored to be considering a return to RPR-Parnas, where he was the founder of the Republican Party of Russia (RPR) that formed one-half of the later united RPR-Parnas. In 2013 Ryzhkov left the party as the result of a dispute over strategy and leadership positions within the united party.

Another impetus might be the return of the single-mandate seats that will comprise half of the Duma's 450 seats and will be contested in 2016. None of the democratic parties will be able to field candidates in all 250 districts, and in many key districts, such as those in Moscow and other large cities, there will be many cases where several democratic parties will run candidates, reducing the ability to defeat the Kremlin's United Russia-affiliated candidates. However, with organizational unity or at least inter-party coordination in forming a joint candidate list, the democratic parties could field candidates in all 225 districts quite easily with each single-mandate candidate having an open field when it comes to mobilizing democratic voters, allowing him to focus on real opponents. Moreover, this would allow the democratic parties to make maximal use of their limited resources.

Conclusion

A united democratic party consisting of Yabloko, RPR-Parnas, the Party of progess and other smaller parties could give democrats a minimum of 10 percent (22-23 seats) and as many as 20 percent (45 seats) of the party list seats, depending on the situation in Russia at election time. If unification is limited to the formation of a coordinated candidate list and an agreement on full abstention from running competing candidates, the united democrats would be very unlikely to garner 10 percent of the districts which is less than 5 percent of the overall number of Duma seats. If they ever managed to fully unite, democrats could easily take 12 percent of the seats in the Duma (say, with 15 percent of the party list and 10 percent of the district seats) and possibly 20 percent. This would make the democrats a much more potent force outside the parliament as well, more able to amass larger demonstrations in protest against Kremlin policies.

Over the mid-term, along with other developments (such as the troubled Russian election process itself), a unification of Russia's democratic forces could yield the kind of mobilization that occurred in December 2011 and forced then President Dmitrii Medvedev (and presumably then Prime Minister Putin) to institute a series of concessions and other processes that bore a resemblance to regime-opposition pacting over issues of democratization.

Combined with domestic economic difficulties and foreign military-political ones, the democratic opposition could galvanize into a potent force and ally with moderate nationalists and socialists. Navalnyi is essentially a reformed radical nationalist and has staked out moderately nationalist and patriotic positions on issues such as immigration. In October he said that if he were elected president he would not return Crimea to Ukraine (contrary to Yabloko and RPR-Parnas). Yabloko's platform is well-suited to attracting moderate socialists, who support a strong state welfare system Russians have grown accustomed to.

Ultimately, a united opposition of democratic and moderate socialist and nationalist forces could pose sufficient a challenge in parliament and/or the on the streets that Putin would have to meet either through concessions towards democratization or with an uncharacteristically harsh and broad crackdown on opposition activity that would have unforeseeable consequences and outcomes - even a regime transformation.

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 #26
Russia says mulls maximum gas discount for Kiev of $100/1,000 cm

MOSCOW, March 18 (Reuters) - Russia may consider giving Ukraine a maximum discount on gas supplies of $100 per 1,000 cubic metres (cm), Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said on Wednesday, staking out Moscow's position before talks in Brussels.

Last year, Russia and Ukraine clinched a 'winter gas' deal negotiated by the European Union. It included a $100 discount, temporary lifting of Moscow's demand for Kiev to 'take-or-pay' for gas and a request for Kiev to pay off some of its debts.

The deal expires on March 31 and Ukraine, a transit country for around 40 percent of Russian gas to Europe, will return to the original 2009 gas contract. Russia, the European Union and Ukraine plan to meet on March 20 to discuss a new deal.

"Regarding a discount - it is provided by the government, this is our good will. It (the discount) could be provided in the amount of our export duty but no more than the export duty," Medvedev said.

Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak told Reuters last week that if the gas price was $330 or more per 1,000 cubic metres in the second quarter, then the maximum discount for Kiev would be $100.

If the price was lower, the discount would be no more than 30 percent of the price. The price for the second quarter could be in the range of $350-$360 with no discount, he said.

On Monday, Ukraine's Naftogaz paid another $15 million for Russian gas, enough for seven days of supplies. Gas supplies to east Ukraine, where an uneasy truce has reduced fighting between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian troops, are excluded from current bills but should be paid, Novak has said.

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 #27
TASS
Russia has taken lenient position on Ukraine's 3bn-dollar debt - deputy minister

Moscow, 17 March: The Russian Federation has taken a lenient position toward Ukraine despite the breaking of the covenants (breaking of obligations the borrower took upon itself when it received the credit) regarding the loan of 3bn dollars. This was announced by Russian Deputy Finance Minister Sergey Storchak during a ceremony of closing the week of financial literacy in the Financial University.

"It is totally obvious that the covenant which we have (in the conditions of the loan) has been broken. We have taken a position of forbearance towards the debtor and did not use our right (to call in the loan)," he noted.

According to Storchak, the violation of covenants comes from the parameters of Ukraine's economy which were disclosed in the recently adopted IMF assistance programme. "The programme is excessively ambitious from the point of view of the obligations that the Ukrainian side takes upon itself," he also commented. At the same time, Storchak noted, the amount of financing "is most likely insufficient". "I don't know where the Finance Ministry would find additional sources of financing," he doubted.

Earlier Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said that Russia continued to expect for Ukraine to pay off its debt in December 2015. "Our position on the matter has been outlined and it is not changing, "Siluanov stressed. "We are now not calling in the loan earlier despite having the grounds to do so. On the other hand, we are saying that we will expect to be paid back 3bn dollars in December this year, as was promised by the Ukrainian Finance Ministry," he added. [passage omitted]

[The IMF programme for Ukraine envisages restructuring only the private sector debts while the debt of 3bn dollars to Russia will not fall into this category, RIA Novosti (part of the state-owned International News Agency Rossiya Segodnya) quoted Storchak as saying. For his part, Siluanov said on 16 March that Ukraine has not  officially approached Russia with a proposal to restructure the loan of 3bn dollars.]

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 #28
www.rt.com
March 18, 2015
Russian military exercises 'logical response' to NATO troops on its border

As NATO increases its activity by putting troops on the Russian borders, it is hardly surprising that Russia responds in a similar way, political analyst Chris Bambery told RT.

Vladimir Putin has ordered the Russian Northern Fleet put on full combat alert as part of large snap military exercises. The announcement came with increased NATO activity near the Russian border.

RT: The media generally reports that these are a response to the NATO exercises. What's your take?

Chris Bambery: I think they are a response to NATO exercises which have taken place at first in the Black Sea and now in the Baltic. Why America has sent 750 military vehicles to the Baltic states including Abrams tanks, I don't know. Plus 3,000 troops. Germany is sending 600 troops. This is quite an escalation for Russia and it's on their border we should remember. But I think we also have to say something else. The rhetoric from America and to some extent from London is this idea that Putin is this "new Hitler," "the aggressor." The German military intelligence know full well that Vladimir Putin has got no ambition to occupy Ukraine. He's got no ambition to occupy the Baltic states. He's not an idiot. He is not going to invade the Baltic states and have a war with NATO. If there was evidence that Putin had sent in armored columns into Ukraine, NATO which has been [monitoring] this and the Americans who have been [monitoring] this very carefully would have flooded the world with those images.

And in fact Germany and France have secured a ceasefire which is relatively successful. So why they are going along with the Americans who clearly have much more aggressive agenda here, I don't know. This is a question we should ask Francois Hollande and Angela Merkel. But I think the answer to your first question is: sure, if you are going to put troops on the borders of Russia, isn't it logical; is it hardly a surprise that Russia is going to respond in kind?

RT: NATO says it's boosting its presence in Eastern Europe to counter what it calls Russian aggression. What do you make of that?

CB: Well, where is this Russian aggression? As it's been the case, it's well known that there are Russian volunteers fighting in Eastern Ukraine. They are not Russian regular forces operating with heavy weaponry because if they were, as I said, the Americans and NATO would have had those images all over the news media and we haven't had it. Secondly, there is not an ounce of veracity about the idea that Putin is about to attack Estonia, Lithuania or Latvia. He is not suicidal. He knows if he does this he is going to engage in a war with NATO, the EU and the US. He is not going to do this.

There is a big difference between Ukraine, its bankrupt economy which has failed its own people, and the Baltic states which are relatively okay and a part of the NATO alliance, part of the EU. So Putin is not going to do anything so silly as to threaten the Baltic states. But this is why we are told we have to rush American and NATO troops to the Baltic states because there is a supposed aggression paralleling - we are told -what Hitler did in 1939 with all that rhetoric which is about to be unleashed by Putin. It's a fantasy world.

RT: The NATO chief says that Russia's snap drills are destabilizing the region. What about NATO's own exercises, are they impacting on the situation?

CB: It's a very good question. If you have anti-aircraft, anti-submarine exercises in both the Baltic and the Black sea, you might think the Russians will be a bit alarmed. If you have 3,000 American troops, 750 military weapons on you border, you might feel you are a bit alarmed. And clearly the Americans, the British and NATO have gone ahead with this just ignoring the fact that Russia has got every right to be perturbed at this build-up. And of course there is the ongoing story of NATO expansion into Eastern Europe along Russia's borders despite, as Russia sees it, promises which were made back in 1991 that this would not happen when the [Iron curtain] came down. So the Russians are looking at this and have the right to be paranoid about this given what's happened to them.

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 #29
Huffington Post
March 18, 2015
Don't Let the Crisis in Ukraine Damage Decades of Progress on Nuclear Cooperation
By General Norton A. Schwartz and Stanley A. Weiss
General Norton A. Schwartz, USAF (Ret.), is the president and CEO of Business Executives for National Security and a former chief of staff of the United States Air Force. Stanley A. Weiss, a global mining executive and the founder of Business Executives for National Security, has been widely published on domestic and international issues for three decades.

WASHINGTON AND GSTAAD--This December, the world will witness the 70th anniversary of a publication best known for tracking the end of the world. Founded in 1945 by veterans of the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was launched in the wake of the devastating nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with the goal of informing the public about nuclear policy. But since 1947, it has been known largely for a metaphorical device it introduced in June of that year: the Doomsday Clock, which measures how close humanity is to extinction.

Launched at seven minutes to midnight, the clock hit two minutes after the first hydrogen bomb was tested in 1953; jumped back to 12 after the United States and the Soviet Union backed away from nuclear confrontation over Cuba in 1962; moved to three minutes at the height of Ronald Reagan-era U.S.-Soviet tensions in 1984; and widened to 17 minutes in 1991, after the Berlin Wall fell and both sides began cutting their nuclear arsenals. While it has moved up and down ever since--based on new threats like climate change and other weapons of mass destruction--it never crossed five again.

That is, until January, when the Doomsday Clock moved back to three minutes to midnight, pushed, once again, by the danger of nuclear confrontation. With Israel threatening Iran over its nuclear program, Pakistan and North Korea building up stockpiles, China sinking billions into nuclear submarines and missile systems, and the White House seeking to modernize America's aging arsenal, the world, as the Economist put it, "is entering a new nuclear age." But make no mistake: Even with this burgeoning activity, the greatest threat today is being driven by an increasingly belligerent Russia, which is using its nuclear arsenal as a nationalist rallying cry while posing a dilemma for the U.S.: If Russia is no longer committed to arms reduction, should the U.S. continue to carry the flag for disarmament by itself?

It's hard to imagine, but when the Cold War ended in 1991, there were more than 52,000 nuclear warheads worldwide, about 97 percent of which were owned by the U.S. or the Soviets. That year, the U.S. Senate, led by Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, created the Cooperative Threat Reduction program, known as Nunn-Lugar. It provided training, technology, and U.S. taxpayer dollars to dismantle and destroy nuclear and chemical weapons in Russia and the former Soviet states while preventing such materials from falling into the wrong hands.

The program has been highly successful, helping Russia and other former Soviet states deactivate more than 7,600 warheads while dismantling more than 2,600 vehicles that deliver nuclear weapons. The Boston Globe recently reported that from 2010 to 2012, the program "secretly removed enough highly enriched uranium from Ukraine to make nine nuclear bombs--some of it from parts of the country now wracked by violence and lawlessness."

It is the current crisis in Ukraine, brought on by Russian troops that first invaded the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea and then ignited a border war in eastern Ukraine last year, that has seen nuclear tensions ratchet up, continuing a Russian position that hardened when Vladimir Putin won back the office of President in 2012. That same year, Moscow announced that it would not extend the Nunn-Lugar Agreement, despite its overwhelming success. In 2013, the Kremlin decided to end Russian Defense Ministry involvement in the program entirely. In December 2014, clearly stung by Western sanctions imposed for its aggression in Ukraine, Russia announced the end of all remaining cooperation.

Far from reducing its stockpile, Russia has shifted to using its nuclear arsenal as a tool for intimidation. Close Putin ally Dmitry Kiselev, the head of Russia's main state news agency, who bragged last year that Russia was the only country that could turn America "to ash," told Russian viewers in February that while the Soviet Union "pledged to never use nuclear weapons first ... Russia's current military does not." Political strategist Sergey Markov, reflecting a widely held Russian view, was quoted in the Telegraph as saying "In Russia, we believe that Ukraine has been occupied by the U.S ... which is the first step in a war against Russia ... under these circumstances, the threat of nuclear confrontation is very real."

Meanwhile, Moscow has also begun to rebuild and modernize its arsenal, reportedly increasing its defense budget by more than 50 percent since 2007, a third of which has been spent on nuclear weapons. Its military now routinely carries out mock nuclear attacks on European capitals, and Russia recently staged nuclear exercises in the Arctic. For eight years, it has also reportedly been in violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty--signed in 1987 by President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev--by developing cruise missiles with a range prohibited by the treaty. Such nuclear chest beating is finding an audience among Russia's young, who have bought T-shirts with slogans praising Russia's nuclear arsenal at a record clip. It's little wonder that anti-American invective has now reached Stalin-era levels in Russia, as the Washington Post reported this week.

Whether these nuclear taunts are real or are simply meant to placate hardliners in Moscow, the question remains the same: What is Washington to do?

One path was illuminated last month by newly appointed Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, who suggested that America provide a strong response to Russia's violations of the INF Treaty, one that would clearly "make Russia less secure than they are today."

Some members of Congress have gone further, calling for the deployment of tactical nuclear gravity bombs and accompanying short-range aircraft at new sites in Eastern Europe. Others have called for the U.S. to abandon its arms-control efforts altogether and block implementation of a new Strategic Arms Treaty that the U.S. and Russia agreed to in 2011. Last December, Congress took a step in this direction by voting to defund U.S. efforts to secure loose Russian nukes for the first time in a quarter century.

But this is foolhardy. The U.S. and Russia haven't worked hard for two decades to rid the world of nuclear weapons to abandon the effort at the first sign of difficulty. Carter is right to call attention to these violations and to stand firm in pressuring Russia to fulfill its obligations, but the U.S. needs to take a holistic approach to our arms-control agreements with Russia.

What should the U.S. do? Three things.

First, provide needed resources. Russia claims that it is planning to take over the responsibilities of the Nunn-Lugar program and increase related funding. But given the deteriorating economic situation in Russia, and the fact that there is still much to be done on the dismantling of weapons systems while securing nuclear materials, it is possible that there will be a window for U.S. officials to restart cooperation by offering much-needed resources. The security of these weapons systems and materials is an issue that affects not only Russia but the U.S. and all other countries concerned about the potential for terrorist attacks.

Second, push to get relations back on track. U.S. officials should stand ready to renew dialogue with any component of the Russian government that indicates willingness to work in this area. Specifically, the U.S. Department of Energy should continue to pursue dialogue with Russian state atomic energy firm Rosatom, which, even though it tried to blame the U.S. for deteriorating relations in a January press release, has simultaneously expressed interest in eventually resuming cooperation.

Third, become an evangelist once again for nuclear diplomacy. The U.S. should become a loud voice in defense of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which slows the development of nuclear weapons by discouraging enrichment of uranium, which is at the heart of the negotiations between Washington and Teheran over Iran's nuclear program today.

Nearly 70 years ago, one of the founding godfathers of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists wrote in a fundraising letter, "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe." His name was Albert Einstein. It's hard to believe that seven decades later, we are closer to midnight today than we were then. Here's hoping we get our "modes of thinking" back on track.

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 #30
Cornell Chronicle
www.news.cornell.edu
March 18, 2015
Former ambassador addresses strains in U.S.-Russia relations
By Aaron Coven

Before a crowded Statler auditorium audience March 16, former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul tackled the question haunting U.S.-Russia relations: "What happened ... why are we in this mess?" In delivering the Henry E. and Nancy Horton Bartels World Affairs Fellowship lecture, McFaul looked at recent history to decipher the current chill.

McFaul - a self-described "recovering bureaucrat and aspiring professor" - served as U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014. Relations between the two superpowers are more strained today than anytime in the last 30 years, McFaul said. Today, 83 percent of Russians have a negative view of the U.S., he said, but just three years ago, 60 percent of Russians had a positive of view of the U.S. McFaul further noted there have been a number of signs of conflict between the two countries, such as Russia's removal from the G8 in 2014.

McFaul first proposed that this, perhaps, is typical international politics, and we're seeing expected changes in the balance of power among nations. In other words, this cycle might simply be "the natural order of things." While Russia was weak after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the country is again rising as a great power and beginning to "press against" weaker powers. However, referring to the conflict in Ukraine, McFaul noted that not all rising powers attack their neighbors. It's likely that something else is going on, he suggested.

Maybe America pushed too hard against Russia, McFaul said, or maybe President Obama's administration was simply too weak dealing with Russia. But he cited evidence to discount both these theories. McFaul alluded to the recent "reset" between the United States and Russia - the two states recently cooperated on a number of initiatives, including the New Start Treaty, the Northern Distribution Network and passing of UNSCR 1929. McFaul also opined that compared with President George W. Bush, Obama's response to Russian actions has been far more forthright, and he rejected the view that Obama was weak on Russia.

A key event in domestic Russian politics, McFaul said, was former Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev's withdrawal from the Russian presidential elections in September 2011. While Russian President Vladimir Putin takes a zero-sum view of the world, seeing the United States as a competitor rather than a partner, Medvedev had a win-win perspective, similar to Obama's, McFaul said.

Putin has a different mental model of the relationship between Russia and the United States. Recently, McFaul suggested, Putin has used the U.S. to legitimize the falsified Russian Parliamentary election of December 2011, which provoked massive protests, and as a means to legitimize his regime and counter dissent. Essentially, McFaul said, the Russian leader has "resurrected" the United States and its leadership as the enemy and stirred hatred of the West in his country.

McFaul said that the current state of the U.S.-Russia relationship is troubling. While Putin's previously dual impulses of wanting to cooperate with the Western world yet remain untrusting and paranoid of the United States and its intentions were evident, we now exclusively witness the latter. Although McFaul intimated that history suggests Russia and the United States will ultimately avoid military conflict, he questioned how Putin can possibly back down now with his current full-steam-ahead approach.

The Bartels lecture was sponsored by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

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 #31
Foreign Affairs
www.foreignaffairs.com
March 17, 2015
Broken Ukraine
The Mess Isn't All Russia's Fault
By Paul Stronski
PAUL STRONSKI is Senior Associate in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 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.

Continued violence between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine is dashing hopes about last month's Minsk II cease-fire agreement. February's terrorist attacks in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and the continued threat of a separatist assault on the strategic port city of Mariupol suggest no real pause in violence anytime soon. But that might not be eastern Ukraine's biggest problem: the region is now broken. The rise of an ungoverned, violent Donbass-which had a prewar population of six million-is likely to be one of the war's most important lasting legacies. This grim reality is a problem that few in the West are ready to acknowledge, let alone confront.

VIOLENT CALCULATIONS

The human costs of fighting are obvious: at least 1.5 million people-one out of four residents-have fled the region. Over 6,000 people have been killed according to official numbers, but actual numbers are likely higher. Local infrastructure such as roads, bridges, schools, power stations, sewers, water pipes, and apartment buildings are damaged or have been turned into rubble. Legitimate economic activity in Donbass, once an industrial powerhouse, slowed to a halt as workers fled, electricity supplies became sporadic, and violence made the shipment of goods to Russian and Ukrainian markets impossible. Instability and the rise of criminal groups in the region scared off investors, who are not likely to return. A vast humanitarian crisis is growing, and painfully few resources are being directed toward fixing it.

There are other, less obvious costs of war in the region as well. Administrative bodies in separatist-held regions function poorly, if at all. This is not new, however, as governance in eastern Ukraine has never been efficient, and corruption in local administrative structures is a persistent problem in both Russia and Ukraine. Neither country created transparent and accountable institutions over the past 20 years. Rather, eastern Ukraine has long been ruled by a nexus of political power, business interests, and criminal groups. An important power figure before the war was Ukrainian businessman Rinat Akhmetov, who enjoyed greater authority than many local governors or law enforcement officials. After the conflict erupted, corrupt local institutions collapsed as prewar officials and business leaders fled west or threw in their lot with separatists, leaving the separatist-held territories to devolve into lawlessness.

MOUNTING FRUSTRATION

Many of the residents who stayed behind in eastern Ukraine appear dissatisfied with the government in Kiev, but they do not necessarily sympathize with separatists, either. Instead, they are stuck in the deadly crossfire of a geopolitical game they do not control. The separatist officials controlling the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (Donetskaya Narodnaya Respublika, DNR) and Luhansk People's Republic (LNR) generally have little experience governing and even less interest in taking responsibility to meet the needs of the residents of territories under their control. Proclaimed DNR Prime Minister Alexander Zakharchenko, a former electrician, was a member of a militant group, Oplot, before being catapulted to a leadership role last summer. Since then, his group has turned into a militia.

In fact, most of the higher-ups in the separatist movement are pure opportunists trying to advance their own political or economic interests even if those interests do not always align with the Kremlin's. This will complicate Russian President Vladimir Putin's ability to turn off the conflict quickly, if he ever decides to do so.

PUTIN'S PRECARIOUS PUPPET SHOW

The separatist forces in DNR and LNR are ideologically incoherent. Russia's hybrid approach to the war­-using irregular, often unruly militias and criminal groups with limited Russian regular forces and security service personnel-stems from the Russian public's distaste for direct military intervention in eastern Ukraine. Russia empowered a ragtag group of paid mercenaries, Cossacks, Chechens, organized crime groups, and radical Russian aggressors bent on building Novorossiya by destabilizing the region. As Western sanctions begin to take their toll on the Russian economy, which likely faces a recession within the year, Putin has doubled down on his strategy, hoping that persistently denying Russia's hand in the conflict will undermine Euro-Atlantic unity and temper Western outrage over Moscow's actions in Ukraine.

The problem with hybrid warfare, however, is that deniability comes at the cost of complete control. Moscow had to give up some control over individual separatist elements that have divergent, conflicting agendas. Putin purged some of the most unreliable separatists after the Malaysia Airlines disaster but has struggled to rein in others. As the International Crisis Group noted late last year, separatist groups demonstrated serious divisions during the signing of the Minsk I agreement-some recognizing the need for peace as a precondition for building a functioning state on the territory they hold, others pushing to escalate the crisis in order to expand their territory and continue to work toward building Novorossiya.

For their part, criminal and militant groups, although united formally against the Ukrainian state, truly desire to reap the spoils of war. The commanders of these groups are not unlike warlords seen in the Balkans, Georgia, and Tajikistan; they have little incentive to build a peace that weakens their power over the small dominions of land they now control through brute force, corrupt patronage systems, and threats against local populations. Militia commanders have been accused of a wide variety of criminal behavior, including kidnapping, theft, drug trafficking, smuggling rackets, and summary executions. Akhmetov's business empire in eastern Ukraine has taken a hit from these groups, and some of his assets being threatened with expropriation by separatists. In response, Akhmetov established a private militia of his own, consisting of steelworkers and coal miners who patrol Mariupol, a city frequently under separatist attack that is home to a significant number of the oligarch's business interests.

Since then, many separatist leaders have actively sought to undermine the September and February Minsk agreements because of the negative impact that peace could have on their war profiteering and dreams of expansion. Some separatists involved in taking Debaltseve publicly rejected Minsk II and have made repeated claims that a larger buffer zone between the city and Ukrainian government-controlled areas is needed. Others have called to push farther westward, a worrying sign that they plan to advance deeper into Ukrainian government-held territory regardless of what Moscow tells them to do. Although Putin himself has not been negotiating in good faith, the actions of his proxies make it unclear if his doing so would swiftly end this conflict.  

PROFITS OVER PEACE

The potential for long-term insecurity is not confined to rebel-held areas: Ukraine too has its share of independent and semi-independent battalions, some of which descend from Ukrainian nationalist groups, extreme elements of the Maidan self-defense forces, and criminal groups. For example, the Kyiv Post indicates that one volunteer battalion in Luhansk Oblast is composed mostly of former convicts from the Donbass jailed for everything from extortion to murder and has since been implicated in looting charges. Some brigades have been accused by Amnesty International of human rights abuses similar to those committed by Russian-backed separatist groups and criminal gangs.

Other Ukrainian militias fighting in the east are financed by, and likely ultimately answerable to, Ukrainian oligarchs rather than the government itself. In addition to Akhmetov's army, Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky has provided supplies and personnel to pro-Kiev fighters by way of Privat Group, his multinational holdings corporation. Kolomoisky's critics, including Akhmetov, fear he is using these groups to advance his economic interests and political power inside the country.

Some of these independent and semi-independent groups already bemoan Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko's signing of Minsk II and have been critical of civilian and military officials' handling of the war, particularly the unorganized Ukrainian retreat at Debaltseve. One probable loser in the continued violence after the February cease-fire agreement is Poroshenko himself: his prospects for political survival, not to mention the hopes for political and economic reform inside Ukraine, depend in part on how these oligarch-funded and nationalist-oriented groups react to the loss of the city. Poroshenko should worry, as should the West, particularly given that members of an ultranationalist brigade last autumn called for a junta against the Ukrainian president to install a stronger and more decisive leader.

Putin appears to be in a stronger domestic political position than Poroshenko, but he faces his own critics from the far right who claim he is not doing enough to defend Russian interests in Ukraine. Several former separatist fighters from Luhansk, now in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg, have violently threatenedantiwar activists. Some of them roughed up at least one of those critics before attacking a group of migrant workers in a racist assault. And while the public may never know who ordered the assassination of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, there is speculation in Russia that right-wing groups-perhaps with ties to rogue security service elements-could have been involved in the attack. In other words, Moscow's decision to evoke ethnic chauvinism to justify its intervention in Ukraine is causing violence at home. If separatist fighters return from combat with radical views and military-grade weapons, Russia could become just as much a mess as Ukraine.

The Russia-Ukraine conflict has moved into its second year with no sign of resolution ahead. What has become clear, however, is that neither Russia nor Ukraine needs any more thugs with guns.

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 #32
Kremlin.ru
March 17, 2015
Meeting of the Russian Pobeda (Victory) Organising Committee
The Kremlin, Moscow

Vladimir Putin chaired the 36th meeting of the Russian Victory Organising Committee at the Grand Kremlin Palace. Great Patriotic War veterans and heads of veteran and youth public organisations also took part in the meeting.

The meeting participants discussed preparations for celebrations in Moscow and other regions of the 70th anniversary of Victory in the 1941-1945 Great Patriotic War, as well as efforts to improve the veterans' social and economic situation.

Excerpts from transcript of meeting of the Russian Victory Organising Committee

PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA VLADIMIR PUTIN: Good afternoon, veterans, colleagues, friends.

We have 53 days left before May 9, which is not much considering how quickly time passes by and the scale of the tasks we have set ourselves in connection with preparing the celebrations of the 70th anniversary of the Great Victory. This is a round anniversary and requires special precision in our actions combined with an informal, creative and warm approach to organising all the events.

Today we will have a detailed discussion of the main issues the Victory Organising Committee is working on. I would like to stress that we must focus on the state of readiness for the planned events, including the nationwide ones to be held in Moscow. A special organising committee is responsible for all this, and it is headed by Mr Ivanov, Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office.

Colleagues,

May 9 is a day of glory, a day of pride for our entire nation, a day of supreme veneration of the victorious generation. However, we all know that our veterans need constant, daily support. Therefore, the main issue for the Russia Victory Organising Committee is whether everything has been done to ensure all-round complete support for our veterans. As you may know, a Presidential Executive Order instructed the Government to take additional measures to improve the veterans' social and economic situation, and this is something we will also speak about today.

There are over 2.5 million veterans in Russia. Each of them contributed to the Victory in decisive battles and on nameless heights, at military hospitals, in resistance units, during the siege of Leningrad, in Moscow, in all the regions, in the rear, in evacuation, where the vital power of this country was being strengthened by gruelling labour - all this was achieved through the efforts of specific individuals.

Unfortunately, today we see not only attempts at distorting the events of that war, but also unmasked cynical lies and impudent defamation of an entire generation of people who gave up everything for this Victory, who defended peace on earth. I am certain that all of you know this, there is no need to repeat it, but sometimes one finds it hard to even speak of the shameless conclusions and so-called observations that have nothing in common with the truth.

Their goal is obvious: to undermine Russia's power and moral authority, to deprive it of its status of a victorious nation, with all the ensuing international legal consequences, to divide peoples and set them against each other and to use historical speculations in their geopolitical games. At times, it sounds like downright ravings - it is amazing how people get these ideas. In fact, they are not as harmless as they may seem because this is an attempt to implant very dangerous ideas and warped perception of history into the minds of millions of people, primarily the younger generation.

Therefore, preparations for the celebrations are not limited to organising gala events. This also involves efforts to educate and inform both nationally and internationally. We should constantly, firmly, persistently and with reason assert the truth about the war, about the colossal contribution of the Soviet people to the Victory, about the unifying and decisive role of the Soviet Union in the defeat of Nazism.

When I speak of a unifying role I mean that many nations within the then conquered Europe followed the developments on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War with hope. This, in turn, gave all of Europe strength and hope for a Nazism-free future.

Unfortunately, Russia, our whole society, is still being tested for its maturity and unity, for the strength of our historical traditions and the link between generations. Therefore, the task of the Russian Organising Committee and of the organising committees in every region of the Russia Federation is to meet these challenges with dignity, relying on the active support and involvement of the citizens.

It is also very important to make use of every opportunity to speak of our Fatherland's history, of our ancestors' glory in combat and in labour, to open the doors to all who wish to show their worth in this area and participate in the national cause of promoting patriotism and defending the national interests of this country.

Our veterans should be certain that we will never let them down; that we have always been able to pass on to our children our pride in them, in their Victory, which will forever stand great in history; that rejection of Nazism is in our blood.

In conclusion, I would like to thank the Russian media, both electronic and print, and those who operate on the Internet, for their special attitude to covering the anniversary. Both public and non-public media are treating this issue with a great deal of attention. Some not only speak of various initiatives in advance of the holiday, but also run stories about veterans, about search groups, young people's participation in efforts to preserve historical memory, about the events of the Great Patriotic War and the key role of the Soviet Union in the Victory over Nazism. This work is very important and should be continued after the holiday, after May 9.

Let us begin our discussion.

CHIEF OF STAFF OF THE PRESIDENTIAL EXECUTIVE OFFICE, HEAD OF THE ORGANISING COMMITTEE FOR THE MAIN EVENTS TO MARK THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY OF VICTORY IN THE 1941-1945 GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR SERGEI IVANOV: Mr President, colleagues,

Preparations for the celebration of the 70th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War began well in advance, to be precise in April 2013, as soon as the corresponding Executive Order was made public. Back then, we could not even imagine that we would be working in such complicated conditions. A number of countries have launched a campaign to revise the outcome of World War II and the Great Patriotic War. True, we have met with such attempts before; however, lately the stream of cynical lies and falsifications has become unprecedented, as the President has just said.

For obvious reasons this did not leave our people indifferent and stirred in them a desire to make their contribution to upholding the historical truth and retaining the memory of the Soviet people's courage. The Organising Committee was practically buried under an avalanche of proposals and projects coming from the citizens, veterans, public organisations, regions, municipalities, academic and artistic communities.

We are of course considering all of them with great care and taking them into account in our work. We know we should not only ensure that the events are held at the highest level possible, but also do all we can to defend the truth about the war, the victory and the role of the Soviet Union in the defeat of Nazism.

Of special value here are the recollections and records of those who took part in combat operations, who worked in the rear, of all who survived the horrors of the concentration camps, occupation and siege. Victory Day is first and foremost their day. In the period leading up to May 9, over 2.5 million veterans will be awarded the 70 Years of Victory medals.

We have also envisaged a one-off payment for them amounting to 7,000 and 3,000 rubles, depending on their category. Anniversary medals will also be presented to those Great Patriotic War veterans who currently reside in other countries, primarily the CIS.

Veterans will be the guests of honour at all the gala events; therefore during the holidays Great Patriotic War veterans, disabled veterans and those accompanying them will be able to use all public transport, except taxis, free of charge. As you may know, the Government received instructions to take measures to improve the veterans' socioeconomic situation.

The Organising Committee is also receiving many requests from the regions to hold military parades and march-pasts. The Defence Ministry will make every effort to involve servicemen in the celebratory events.

I would like to highlight that 70 cities of the Russian Federation will host gala events involving the Army and Navy. The parades and marches will demonstrate various types of armaments and military equipment. Five cities will have Naval parades. Demonstration flights are also planned in five cities of Russia and in Minsk [Belarus] and Bishkek [Kyrgyzstan].

Undoubtedly, gala events in Crimea will be of special significance. We all remember the people's enthusiasm in Crimea and Sevastopol on Victory Day last year, right after they returned to their home port. This year will see our first joint celebration of Victory Day in over 20 years. We need to do everything possible to ensure the atmosphere is not only solemn, but also warm and sincere, fraternal.

Military parades will be held in the hero cities of Kerch and Sevastopol, the latter is of course to see a naval parade as well. The focal point of the day will be the parade in Moscow's Red Square.

I don't want to disclose all the details now; I will only say that, just as we said at the Organising Committee meetings, the focus this year will be on the historical part of the parade. Troops will appear on Red Square on foot and in vehicles, dressed in the uniform of those times and bearing war-time weapons. Military equipment from those times will be on display in various locations in the capital (this is the first time we are doing this): it will be parked in places approved by the Moscow Government and people will be able to not only see them, but children will have a chance to climb all over them - it will be all very lively and informal. The parade will also demonstrate several samples of the latest military equipment. Here we remain true to tradition.

The foreign guests we have invited include war veterans, heads of state and government, defence ministers from the CIS and other friendly states and from the anti-Hitler coalition countries. More than a dozen countries will be sending their military units to take part in the parade, some of them for the first time. In turn, Russian servicemen, military equipment and armaments will take part in gala events in Minsk, Bishkek and Yerevan.

We are planning an informal meeting of the presidents of CIS states on May 8. The Defence and Foreign Ministers will provide more details on the foreign guests and participants and their itineraries.

There is just one more thing I would like to note here. The Organising Committee's main approach to arranging events across the country is to support new creative approaches without imposing a universal mandatory programme. I believe this is already working. We can see the diversity of cultural itineraries for the anniversary in various regions.
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Another aspect of the coming anniversary that the Organising Committee has supported is the broad-scale involvement of young people in organising and conducting the events. Rosmolodyozh [Federal Agency for Youth Affairs] is forming a national volunteer corps for the 70th Anniversary of the Victory, which will bring together up to 80,000 young people. They will take part in military memorial efforts and in upgrading military burial grounds and memorials.
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A large number of projects are being implemented on the Internet. Of course, we are paying close attention to information support. On May 9, we are planning to hold unprecedented television coverage of all the military and naval parades.

We are also setting up a large international press centre for the events - we are almost done here. The centre has the most advanced equipment, similar to what we had in Sochi. The official website has already been launched where journalists are being accredited.
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DEFENCE MINISTER SERGEI SHOIGU: Mr President, colleagues,

In line with tradition the military parades will become one of the highlights of the celebrations of the 70th anniversary of Victory. They are to be held in 28 Russian cities, and in the capitals of Belarus and Kyrgyzstan, and in Armenia. Marches with the participation of military equipment and armaments are to be held in 40 cities.

Naval parades are to take place at the five main bases of the Russian Navy. Aviation is to take part in the parades in five cities in Russia and two cities in the CIS - Minsk and Bishkek. On March 25, the parade teams will begin their training.

As of today, 78,653 people will be taking part in the events. A total of 1,880 units of military equipment and armaments, 238 aircraft and 51 naval vessels will be involved. Taking part in the parades in Belarus, Kyrgyzstan and Armenia will be more than 1,000 servicemen, 74 units of modern armaments and military equipment and 16 aircraft and helicopters of the Russian Federation Armed Forces. The main parade will obviously be held in Red Square.  Compared to the 2010 anniversary parade, there will be 50 percent more servicemen marching on foot, which is more than 15,000. The historical part of the parade will undoubtedly be of great interest. I will not go into this - Mr Ivanov has already mentioned it briefly.

As for the mechanised section, it is to include 194 units of armaments and military equipment, some of which were created on instructions from the Defence Ministry and will be demonstrated for the first time on May 9. I would like to note that 16 military units from friendly states and anti-Hitler coalition members have been invited to take part in the military parade. Nine of them have confirmed their participation, two have turned down the invitation, and five are still pending.

The Defence Ministry intends to invite 26 heads of foreign military departments whose units will take part in the parade in Red Square and our partners in defence and military technology cooperation.

Official invitations have also been issued to 85 participants in the Great Patriotic War in all regions of Russia and to 75 veterans in 23 countries.

I would like to add that veterans will take part in all key events on May 9: the military parade, the gala reception with the President of Russia and the gala concert in Red Square. In addition, we have envisaged a varied cultural programme for the duration of their stay in Moscow.

Preparations for the military parade and marches and the visits by participants and guests are on schedule. The Defence Ministry will perform all the tasks set before it with success.
<...>
FOREIGN MINISTER SERGEI LAVROV: Mr President, colleagues,

The Foreign Ministry is giving priority attention to participation in all events related to preparations for the Great Victory anniversary. Invitations to the celebratory events have been sent to the heads of 68 foreign states, as well as the heads of the UN, UNESCO, Council of Europe and the European Union. As of yesterday, the leaders of 26 nations have confirmed their participation, as have the heads of UNESCO and the Council of Europe.

For reference, only 28 foreign participants attended the 65th Victory anniversary in 2010. Those who confirmed their participation in this year's events include Chairman of the People's Republic of China Xi Jinping, presidents of India, South Africa, Vietnam and Mongolia, and leadership from Cuba and North Korea.

Naturally, as far as the European nations are concerned, the current actions by the Americans and the aggressive core of the European Union are having an effect, as Mr President already explained in detail. But in Europe, there are many who understand the significance of the upcoming celebrations in Moscow - not just to pay tribute to the memory of those who defended Europe and the world against Nazism, but also to improve the situation on our continent today, to prevent a new schism in Europe.

It is expected that the President of the Czech Republic, the heads of Slovakia, the Prime Minister of Greece, the President of Cyprus will participate; the heads of Bosnia and Herzegovina, including the President of the Serb Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the heads of Iceland, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Norway have confirmed their participation in various ways. Again, these confirmations came in various forms, including some who confirmed their participation orally; all of this is subject to clarification.

Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel's agreement to visit Moscow has particular significance in disrupting the anti-Russia campaign. The specific parameters of her participation in this event are currently under discussion. Naturally, the heads of all foreign diplomatic missions in Moscow will be invited.

Foreign delegations will attend the parade, and it is planned that military units from a whole range of nations will take part, as Mr Shoigu just noted. In addition to CIS nations, India, Mongolia and China have confirmed their participation, and we will most likely soon have a final confirmation from Serbia.

After the parade, foreign guests will participate in a collective ceremony of laying flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Alexander Garden, followed by a gala reception at the Grand Kremlin Palace. A special programme is planned for veterans from 23 countries in near and far abroad, as Mr Shoigu just explained.

We are giving particular attention to strengthening coordination and actions with partners in the Commonwealth of Independent States. We are preparing an informal meeting between CIS leaders who will be participating in the events, and a special meeting is proposed on the eve of the events, on May 8, in the format of the heads of state who arrive in Moscow.

Given that this year has been declared the Year of Great Patriotic War Veterans in the CIS, suggestions are being prepared on having the heads of state who participate in these events make a special address to war veterans and home front workers. This would have great unifying significance for the veterans and for our cooperation with our close neighbours, including in our efforts to fight the falsification of history. In addition, together with our key allies in the CSTO and the CIS, we are planning large-scale events within the framework of the UN General Assembly, the OSCE and the Council of Europe, which are timed to coincide with the 70th anniversary of Victory.
<...>
VLADIMIR PUTIN: I would like to say the following in conclusion. It is clear that this is an important, major, grand event and will require a great deal of effort on your part. We have been working on this for a long time, as Mr Ivanov already stated. There are some perennial things we will be doing so long as the last veteran is among us. I am referring, first and foremost, to socioeconomic matters.

Of course, one of the most important aspects is providing them with housing. We have been working on this actively since 2008. Everything we have done has surpassed all of our expectations: we increased the volume of housing provided manifold. As you know, we initially thought we would need 28,000 or so units, but now we have more than 100,000 - we have provided nearly 200,000 apartments and have not yet completed our work. But we will need to complete it, and we will do so.
<...>
Now, with regard to the work of the Pobeda (Victory) Organising committee itself. It was created not just as a body to deal with preparations for the celebratory events related to anniversaries and May 9 in general. This structure was created as an effective tool for carrying out patriotic work in the nation overall.

I want to point this out, and I know that Mr Ivanov and other colleagues working on this project will use this structure to resolve this greater but, of course, no less important, and perhaps even more important work, than the official celebrations themselves.

We understand that May 9, Victory Day, is a day that unites the entire nation. And we certainly need to use this fact to not only resolve issues of promoting the appropriate caring attitude toward veterans, but also to ensure that the cause they served was not in vain, so that young people in our nation appreciate all the best things our veterans gave us, things from our past, from our history.

Allow me to once again express gratitude and respect to the veterans of the Great Patriotic War, to thank all the participants in preparations for May 9 and express hope that we will carry everything out and hold the celebration of the 70th anniversary of Victory of the Soviet People in the Great Patriotic War at the highest, most commendable level.

Thank you very much.

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#33
ClubOrlov
http://cluborlov.blogspot.ru
March 17, 2015
The Rage of the Cultural Elites
Reported by ClubOrlov's special Kiev correspondent, Yu Shan

A certain unhappy incident happened to my aunt in the summer of 1966. The Cultural Revolution-a political movement initiated by Mao Zedong-was beginning to engulf the country. That same year many American college students were protesting against the Vietnam War and Leonid Brezhnev was keeping his seat warm as the General Secretary of CPSU, having replaced the somewhat volatile Nikita Khrushchev two years earlier. My aunt was then a freshman studying literature at Fudan University in Shanghai.

It so happened that my aunt, then a sensitive and somewhat dreamy young woman, had stubbornly and haplessly clung to certain musical tastes which at that time in China came to be regarded as politically incorrect, being said, in the trendy ideological jargon of that time, to reflect "decadent bourgeois revisionist aesthetics." To wit, my aunt had kept in her record collection a rendition of "The Urals Mountain-Ash" (Уральская Рябинушка), a Russian folk song in which a young girl meets two nice boys under a mountain-ash tree and must choose between them, performed by the National Choir of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. It was an old-style LP spinning at 78 RPM. It had a red emblem in the middle emblazoned with "CCCP."

One of my aunt's roommates, who probably had always resented her for one reason or another, found out about it and reported her to the authorities. For this rather serious infraction, student members of the Red Guard made my aunt publicly smash her beloved record, then kneel upon the fragments and recite an apology to Chairman Mao while fellow-students threw trash at her face shouting "Down with Soviet revisionists!" This generation of Chinese young people, who once donned Red Guard uniforms, beat people up around the country and smashed various cultural artifacts, is now mostly living on government pensions or earning meagre profits from home businesses, but some have prospered and can be found among the upper crust of contemporary China's business, cultural, and political elites.

This episode came to my mind when in the summer of 2014 I came upon video clips of Ukrainian student activists storming university classrooms in mid-lecture and ordering everyone to stand up and sing the Ukrainian national anthem, then forcing the professor to apologize for the lecture not being adequately patriotic. There were also ghastly spectacles of "Enemies of the People" (guilty only of having served under the overthrown president Yanukovich) being paraded around in trash bins. In Ukrainian schools, children were made to jump up and down, and told that "Whoever doesn't jump is a Moscal" (a derogatory term for "Russian").

Add to this the destruction of public monuments to World War II and the ridiculous rewriting of history (turns out that, during World War II, Germany liberated Ukraine, but then Russia invaded and occupied Germany!) and a complete picture emerges: the Ukrainian Maidan movement is one of a species of "cultural revolution." The new, fashionable term being thrown around is "civilizational pivot," but it and the old "cultural revolution" can be understood as approximate synonyms, sharing the need for frenzied spectacles of mass humiliation and destruction.

In 1971 the Vietnam War began to draw toward an agonizing and, from the American government's point of view, highly unfulfilling conclusion. That same year Dr. Henry Kissinger made a secret trip to Beijing, flying in from a military airport in Pakistan. This was followed by the joint Nixon-Kissinger summit in 1972, which culminated in Nixon's historic handshake with Mao Zedong, completing China's civilizational pivot away from the USSR and toward the west. In hindsight, this dramatic opening could only be properly characterized as a swift dagger-in-the-back against the USSR, in both geopolitical and ideological senses. The decrepitating, inflexible body of the USSR never recovered from this stab wound, leading to its final collapse, from a multitude of internal and external causes, two decades later.

In late February, 2014, just as Ukraine was attempting its civilizational pivot away from Russia and toward the west, I interviewed a senior captain of the Right Sector, a radical Ukrainian nationalist group with neo-Nazi stylings. The burly man looked aggressive in his paramilitary garb, and arrived with bodyguards, but turned out to be rather amiable. He was particularly glad to see me because I look Chinese. He spoke Russian, reluctantly, after announcing that he was ashamed of it. (This is typical; Ukrainians use Ukrainian to spout nationalist nonsense, but when they need to make sense they lapse into Russian.) He said that he had served in the Red Army and had been stationed in the Far East, on the Chinese border. He expressed hope that China would soon do something big in Siberia.

That was my only meeting with the man from the Right Sector. It's safe to guess that the recent Russian-Chinese embrace has dashed his hopes concerning Siberia. The Chinese government's unambiguous expressions of solidarity with Russia starting in March of 2014 have been noted by all. But he would have been far less disconcerted, and the many international supporters of Russia far more discouraged, had they been able to read the comments on various popular Chinese social sites, which abounded with slogans such as "Crimea to Putin, Siberia to China!" or "Putler will hang on lamppost!" or "Glory to Ukraine! China sides with the Civilized World!"

To explain what is behind this phenomenon, which affects certain Chinese internet users, young and old, we need to introduce a Chinese neologism: "Gong Zhi" (公知). The literal meaning of the term is "public intellectual," but it is used sarcastically and sometimes even derogatorily. It denotes a cute, successful, popular, trendy individual, who is often involved in the mass media, and who, for various reasons, has millions of virtual followers via Tweeter and various social networking sites. Such individuals make daily, sometimes hourly, witty and biting public remarks on a vast range of social and political subjects, and, to add human interest, on their own kaleidoscopic emotional states.

In a Russian/Ukrainian setting, more or less analogous figures are to be found in the public personae of Ksenya Sobchak, Irina Khakamada, Masha Gessen, Lesha Navalny, and the late Boris Nemtsov. The base audience for such people consists of what in Russia and the Ukraine came to be known as the "creative class," or "creacl" (креакл) for short. In China such a term does not yet exist, but the reality of a very similar social group definitely does and, by an overwhelming margin, they are inclined to follow and worship the "Gong Zhi." Many of these, in spite of carefully maintained youthful appearances, are in their late 50s or early 60s-in other words, they are former Red Guards who did well financially by becoming informal spokespersons for what they regard as a hip and new ideology and attempting a new, technologically enhanced "civilizational pivot."

The trendiness of said ideology comes from the use of a kit of parts that includes canonical words and phrases from which clichéd narratives can be generated effortlessly. It includes: institutional building, civil society, rule of law, enhance democracy, raise transparency, economic growth, entrepreneurship, innovation, privatization, good guidance, western expertise, human values, human rights, women's rights, minority rights. There is also a mantra; instead of "OMing," they "west": the west, the west, the west, western values, western civilization, west west west west. Never mind that this kit of parts fails in application; these are articles of faith, not reason.

And the opposite of all this western goodness is the horrible, unspeakable easternness of Russia. Here we have another kit of parts, from which one can fashion any number of Russophobic rants: Putin/Stalin, tyranny, gulag, low birth rate, alcoholism, mafia, corruption, stagnation, aggression, invasion, nuclear threat, political repression, "the dying nation." Never mind that this kit of parts does not reflect reality; again, these are articles of faith, not reason. And the reason Russia is so horrible is, of course, the Russian people. When will the Russian people wake up? Will they ever rise up and overthrow their dictator, their tyrant? Will they ever become civilized, cool, happy, normal, WESTERN people... like we already are, or at least, like we will be... someday... if western people pick us up, take us home and make love to us...

The overall goal of this civilizational cross-dressing is one of personal transformation, personal rebranding: "If we look western and we quack western, then we will BECOME western, we will become cool, accepted, rich and prosperous and civilized. And what's holding us back is 'this country,' and 'these people,' who are so uncool, so un-trendy, so un-western. Ugh! There is nothing to be done about them, so let's just accept funds from western donors who want to destabilize Russia, and spend this money organizing virtual opposition parties like little girls organizing tea parties for their dolls. But we are getting lots of sympathetic western press coverage, so whatever we are doing must be working!"

The above-mentioned events, trends and movements arose in very different historical periods and in distant, non-contiguous parts of the world, but they share a singular emotional overtone and an orientation towards a singular goal: to cut Russia down, in word, if not in deed.

And then there is what is real.

It is really hard tell Ukrainians apart from Russians. About 90% of the conversation one overhears in the Kiev metro is and probably will remain in Russian, some speaking it with an accent, some with hardly any accent at all. A man or a woman from Yaroslavl (where the late Boris Nemtsov held on to a seat in the regional legislature) could without the slightest effort blend into the crowd surging through the Kiev metro. But should a Russian or a Ukrainian be traveling through the Beijing metro, it will be rather simple to tell them apart from everyone else.

It would also be quite easy to tell an American tourist, reporter, NGO-representative, or Ukrainian wife-hunter apart from the rest of the people in the Kiev metro. The signals would be unmistakable: the demeanor, the style of speech and the facial expression, regardless of ethnic or racial traits. But most of the young Ukrainian students who were shouting and jumping up and down on the Maidan would also take great pride in showing off their English language skills, good or not, and in being seen hanging out with Americans. Why would Ukrainians want to jump out of their Russian skins and try to impersonate Americans?

And are Americans, by some quirk of mystical collective nature, spontaneously anti-Russian? Are 'we'-the Americans I have lived and studied and worked with for years-anti-Russian? Now, come on, of course not! But we certainly are anti-something else! Take a couple of minutes to gaze at the face of Victoria Nuland, or Jan Psaki, or Samantha Power, or Hillary Clinton. Don't they all remind everyone-that is, us regular American guys of whatever ethnic origin-of that quintessential "cool crowd" we had to contend with during our student days? Aren't they all a bunch of uppity up-tight feminist radical liberal bitches who once made a living hell out of our fresh, green and naïve college days? Well, now that we are not so horny and stupid any more, and they are all wrinkly and saggy (or worked on and Botoxed to hell) don't we all want to metaphorically get down on our knees and thank Jesus or Yahweh or Allah or whoever that we didn't end up marrying one of these specimens?

But our country, the former land of the free and home of the brave-it has sunk. We all know this, deep in our hearts, don't we? The Victoria Nuland clone army, like a cruel, evil, insidious high school rumor, like the reflection of a witch's face in a polluted river, spread and flew into every crevice and corner of this land, high and low, far and wide. We encounter her avatars and lookalikes everywhere-in Hollywood, in the publishing houses, universities, school boards, kindergartens, in elevators on the way to our offices, and of course, on the pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times.

The questioning, seeking, original, fearless, rebellious, fractious and individualist American soul is expiring on its air-conditioned deathbed. America is not an interesting place any more. When was the last time we heard a new singer who could be compared to Tom Waits, or Suzanne Vega? Which one of you loose-pants hip-hoppers ever heard of Robert Altman, Wim Wenders, Gore Vidal, John Cassavetes? All of them are fading away, dying away, withering away, and this started to occur during roughly the same time period when the lookalikes and talkalikes of Victoria Nuland started to make their appearances around American universities, en masse.

Thirty years was the portion of my lifetime which fate had allocated to America. As a non-philosopher, non-psychologist, non-cultural historian, I attest with my own irretrievably lost youth that America's unprecedented and unexplained spiritual, intellectual, cultural, romantic, literary, linguistic and political decline did mysteriously and biblically occur during this same period.

Within these same 30 years the world also witnessed the miraculous rise of China's economy, whose windfalls and overnight profits I had largely missed out on. But observing America's bitter and terminal illness had taught me something. For example, when people talk about China being the next America, one thing I've got to ask myself is: will the 1.4 billion Chinese people make good neighbors and interesting company? Will they be liked and likable, or will many of them likewise come to be regarded as impudent louts and aggressive, greedy, egotistic, crafty pricks and bitches?

Regarding my own original motherland and my own people I have mixed feelings. The initial signals aren't promising. The drastic and depressing contrasts in personal manners between your typical Chinese tourist and the meek and quiet locals of Hong Kong, Tokyo, Taiwan, Singapore, indeed all of East Asia, is a dreadful omen. In 2014, the outbursts of hysterical and ludicrous hostility towards Russia from the clueless Chinese Creative Class and the internet mobs who follow them has to be another big sign. Those who have bright hopes for Russia-China geopolitical alliance would be well-advised to keep them in mind.

Keep what in mind, exactly? What we need to keep in mind is the normally hidden collective psycho-mental pathology of populations, which is often embodied in erratic and destructive intellectual trends, and is upheld by their self-doubting and neurotic cultural elites. This pathology has everything to do with self-identity.

For the Chinese and the Russian/Ukrainian "creative classes," America represents the Ultimate Cool Place, the Olympus of Coolness, to be strived towards intellectually, culturally and emotionally, if not always physically. Because America represents to them not only a theory or a line of argument, but a profound source of emotional self-identification, there arise within them ferocious flames of fury and rage whenever someone is perceived as preventing them from basking within the aura of this self-identification. They become like adolescents who put on the cool clothes and want to go and dance to the cool music, but are told that they can't wear these clothes and can't dance to this music. Why? Because they are not as cool as they think, and because those cool kids don't care about you, and don't really want you as their friends.

Actual political, economic and social problems are of secondary importance. What is of upmost importance is that they-the cultural elite, "the creative class," the cool kids who consider themselves so much cooler than the rest-feel insulted and denied their self-respect. They are angry that real life in Russia/Ukraine or China does not back up a certain concept of their own aspired coolness. Russia gets a special designation in such a line of discourse, or cultural narrative: it gets to be the ultimate spoiler of coolness. Even before the February 2014 putsch, Eastern Ukraine was always referred to as ground zero of "Sovok," the land of Soviet-era retrogrades-backward, dim-witted slaves who held cool, cute Ukraine back from its well-deserved western coolness.

I will never forget the sight of the torn limbs of a five-year-old Donbass girl, or the bits of blood-soaked shawl and the mangled grandmother's aged body scattered about on the ground. What have they done-and tens of thousands like them-to deserve this end? On the Kiev metro, most people appear modest, polite, humble, gentle, and, occasionally, very kind. Over the last year many of them have also looked weary, worried, numb and exhausted. But I could not detect one iota of disparity in features, skin tone, bone structure, and the modest yet lively style of clothing between these riders on the metro in Kiev and the dead girl or the dead grandmother in the Donbass. Is it all because of someone wanting to be cool, and throwing a tantrum, because they didn't get to feel cool like they wanted?

Returning to America, the supposed Olympus of Cool, trudging through trash-strewn sidewalks of Queens, tramping along the endless alleys of Brooklyn, stepping into a dimly lit Manhattan office elevator and there encountering yet another Victoria Nuland lookalike, I began to understand. The year 2014 was the fatal year when it was suddenly revealed who is who and what is what, like a sharp knife slashing through an old, moldy, dusty curtain. Think not of conspiracies and dark, complex, sinister geopolitical plots. These went with a different generation, when people might have been greedy and cruel, but they also had the ability to distinguish reality from fiction. That was the era of western imperialism, which is long dead. Churchill and Roosevelt and Nixon are all dead; Kissinger is a nonagenarian. Their replacements do not think in terms of Realpolitik; they think in terms of optics, and dwell in a mirrored hall devised to generate an optical illusion of their hallucinated greatness.

Don't think of reality; instead, think of neurosis, obsession, delusion, perpetual psychic adolescence (real adolescence long gone and even menopause unacknowledged). From the midst of these there arises a white-hot fire of rage so fierce and so random that Nietzsche or Sartre, in their most diabolical existential revelations, could never have foreseen them. Thus is the new Zeitgeist, in this advanced stage of decay of the collective consciousness of America's cultural/political elite and their overseas groupies. It explains their reckless and maniacal love affair with the Ukrainian Maidan, their rekindled but now impotent rage against Russia, and their despicable, narcissistic indifference to the tragedy suffered by the population of the Ukraine.

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 #34
New York Times
March 19, 2015
Valentin Rasputin, Russian Writer Who Led 'Village Prose' Movement, Dies at 77
By SOPHIA KISHKOVSKY

MOSCOW - Valentin Rasputin, a patriarch of the so-called village prose writers who emerged in the Soviet Union in the 1960s to address moral and environmental issues and depict the remains of a rural Russia about to be consumed by industrialization, died here on Saturday. He was 77.

He died in a hospital one day short of his birthday after falling into a coma, the Russian Union of Writers said.

In a reflection of Mr. Rasputin's stature, Patriarch Kirill I of the Russian Orthodox Church led his funeral service at Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow on Wednesday, and President Vladimir V. Putin paid his respects on Tuesday.

The inward-looking worldview that shaped Mr. Rasputin's writings and public statements has in recent years been mirrored by the positions of Mr. Putin and the patriarch. Mr. Rasputin, who was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church in 1980, had advocated the prosecution of members of Pussy Riot, the feminist collective that was tried for performing a "punk prayer" at the cathedral in 2012. In 2014, he signed a letter by writers in support of Mr. Putin's annexation of Crimea.

"It seems there are no grounds to believe, but I believe that the West will not get its hands on Russia," Mr. Rasputin said in a series of conversations that first appeared in the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya and were published in 2007 as a book called "Valentin Rasputin: Pain of the Soul." "It's not possible to drive all patriots to the grave, and there are more and more of them. And if they were driven to the grave, the coffins would rise upright and move to defend their lands." He also defended Joseph Stalin.

In a flurry of commentary after his death, conservatives praised Mr. Rasputin as a keeper of the Russian soul, and liberals, even while praising his writing, expressed concern about his nationalist, Stalinist and anti-Semitic views. For example, he told The New York Times Magazine, in an interview published in 1990, that Jews bore responsibility for the terror that followed the Bolshevik Revolution and that "their guilt is great."

Mr. Rasputin's books sold millions of copies under communism, and toward the end of the Soviet era he received major state awards. But he and the other village prose writers, with their alternately romantic and brutal portraits of peasant life, were seen by some members of the Communist establishment as deviating from the socialist realism that the state usually demanded of artists and writers.

Valentin Grigoriyevich Rasputin was born on March 15, 1937, in the village of Ust-Uda in what is now the Irkutsk region. His parents, Grigory and Nina, were peasants. After completing primary school in the village of Atalanka, he had to travel, alone, to another town to continue his education in the hungry postwar years - an experience he portrayed in the story "French Lessons," published in 1973.

His writing first attracted attention when he was a student at Irkutsk State University and wrote for a youth newspaper during the thaw begun by the Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev after Stalin's death, when the bounds on expression were relaxed. He continued to work as a journalist after graduating in 1959.

But Khrushchev's agricultural and industrial policies were also a death knell for traditional village life. The fate of Mr. Rasputin's childhood villages became fodder for one of his most famous works, the 1976 novel "Farewell to Matyora." The novel is about an island village on the Angara River that is about to be subsumed in the 1960s by construction of the Bratsk hydroelectric plant, and the elderly residents who try to resist resettlement and cannot adapt to city life.

After a vivid description of the beginning of spring in the opening chapter, Mr. Rasputin - an ardent environmentalist who fought to protect Lake Baikal, the world's largest freshwater lake - continues, "Everything was in place, but everything was wrong."

Mr. Rasputin had difficulty working for years after being beaten by street thugs in Irkutsk in 1980. He returned with "The Fire" (1985), and then focused increasingly on essays that reflected his fears about the state of Russia under Mikhail S. Gorbachev's reforms and, later, in the post-Soviet era.

He served in the Congress of People's Deputies, a legislative body created by Mr. Gorbachev, from 1989 to 1990, and was appointed to the presidential council in 1990. But Mr. Rasputin quickly lashed out against Mr. Gorbachev and co-signed letters with nationalist cultural figures, academics and politicians that provided an ideological basis for the 1991 coup against him.

Mr. Rasputin is survived by a son, Sergei, and a granddaughter. His wife, Svetlana, died in 2012, and his daughter, Maria, died in a plane crash in 2006.

Kathleen Parthé, the director of Russian studies at the University of Rochester and the author of two books that address village prose, said of Mr. Rasputin in an email, "Like many of Russia's best-known writers, he was always slightly out of step with the times - too bold in the 1960s and 1970s with his nostalgia for the radiant village past, too critical of the Soviet destruction of the environment around his beloved Lake Baikal, too disdainful of Western-style democracy, too bitter about those he said had brought a millennium-old civilization to an end in 1917."

She added, "As a writer he may have been a spent force, but as a cultural icon who helped legitimize the latest version of Russian authoritarianism," he was receiving "a very grand send-off."

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 #35
New York Times
March 19, 2015
Arthur A. Hartman, U.S. Ambassador to Soviet Union, Dies at 89
By SAM ROBERTS

Arthur A. Hartman, who was Washington's longest-serving ambassador to the Soviet Union and the Reagan administration's point man in Moscow during a succession of delicate Cold War crises, died on Monday in Washington. He was 89.

The cause was complications after surgery for a leg he broke in a fall, his daughter Lise Hartman de Fouchier said.

For nearly four decades after quitting Harvard Law School in 1948, Mr. Hartman filled a dozen or so economic and diplomatic Foreign Service posts under both Republican and Democratic administrations. President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, named him ambassador to France in 1977 - he was only the second career diplomat since World War II, after Charles E. Bohlen, to hold the Paris post - and Ronald Reagan, a Republican, appointed him envoy to the Soviet Union in 1981.

His tenure in Moscow bridged the tense aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the shooting down of a Korean airliner by the Russian Air Force, the arrest of an American journalist as a spy, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the abandonment of the unfinished eight-story United States embassy in Moscow after electronic listening devices were discovered, and the beginnings of glasnost, or transparency, under Mikhail S. Gorbachev in the waning years of Soviet Communism.

In France, without mincing words, he managed not only to get along with Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, a centrist, and François Mitterrand, a Socialist; he also captivated normally unimpressible Parisians. One week, Le Nouvel Observateur even chose Mr. Hartman as the arbiter of local cultural events.

"That the newspaper, a pillar of the French left, should pick the American ambassador to tell Parisian intellectuals what to go see or hear was nothing short of remarkable," The New York Times said in a profile of him. "Not since Benjamin Franklin has an American envoy to France been given such public recognition for his culture."

Arthur Adair Hartman was born on March 12, 1926, in Flushing, Queens, to Joel Hartman, who owned a paper mill, and the former May Weinstein. He graduated from Flushing High School, served in the Army Air Corps in Asia in World War II, returned to graduate from Harvard University and left law school to join the Marshall Plan administration in Europe. His next step was the Foreign Service, and he served in Saigon in the 1950s.

Before being posted to Paris, among his posts were under secretary of state for economic affairs in the 1960s and assistant secretary of state for European affairs under Henry A. Kissinger.

Elegant and intellectual, Mr. Hartman was described in the Times profile as "silver-haired, tall, and with a slight stoop that is more purposeful - it is, after all, necessary to communicate with shorter people - than deferential."

In an email, Leslie Gelb, a former assistant secretary of state, said of Mr. Hartman, "Instead of taking on direct fights, he'd often ask questions designed to show the silliness or unworkability of what was being discussed."

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In Moscow he dealt with four successive Soviet leaders. Even before he formally presented his credentials, he had to assure the Soviets that President Reagan had misspoken when he suggested that a limited nuclear war could be waged in Europe without spreading to the United States. He later defended trade sanctions imposed by Washington to punish human rights abuses and rebuked American businessmen for balking at them.

He left Moscow in 1987 and was succeeded by Jack F. Matlock Jr., another career diplomat.

Besides his daughter Lise, Mr. Hartman is survived by his wife, the former Donna Van Dyke Ford, whom he married in 1949; four other children, David, John, Ben and Sarah Hartman; 15 grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren. The couple lived in Washington. He died in a hospital there.

In Moscow, the Hartmans transformed the ambassador's residence, Spaso House, into a gathering place for intellectuals, dissidents and artists. Some of them, including the pianist Vladimir Feltsman, were allowed to emigrate at the couple's behest. Vladimir Horowitz, the Russian-born pianist, stayed there when he returned to his homeland for the first time in six decades.

Mrs. Hartman organized the gatherings, a task made more challenging when the Kremlin barred 260 Soviet nationals from working for the embassy in response to accusations of security breaches there. She had to do the cooking. He drove himself to work.

The allegations prompted an American investigation, which criticized the ambassador for failing to correct lapses that led to the bugging of typewriters and the seduction of Marines stationed at the embassy. Mr. Hartman said the criticism was unfair. American officials did not offer any evidence that secrets had been compromised.

Years later, according to a former colleague, David Kenney, Mr. Hartman remembered telling the investigators that while it would have been disturbing if Soviet agents had indeed penetrated the old embassy and intercepted messages between Washington and Moscow, there might have been a bright side.

"At least," he was said to have remarked, "they would have learned that we were telling them the truth."

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 #36
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https://nplusonemag.com
March 17, 2015
Breaking Muscovy's Silence
Edward Keenan, 1935-2015
By GREG AFINOGENOV
Harvard University, PhD Candidate History

IN LATE FEBRUARY, when the news of Boris Nemtsov's murder had just emerged, my friend Tom Hooker observed that "who you think killed Nemtsov is a nearly one-to-one reflection of how you think Russia works"-an indication, in other words, of whether you think of Russia as a dictatorial one-man show or a tangle of shadowy power blocs, a land of cops or a land of robbers. How you think Russia works has a lot to do with how you think it has worked in the past, and if you want to see that past as something more than the play of contemporary ideological shadows, you owe a debt to Edward L. Keenan, a retired Harvard historian who died on March 6.

When Keenan began his blistering career of skepticism and historical heresy in 1971, only two grand narratives existed in the West to explain Russia's history to students, policymakers, and experts from other fields. The first posited a history of detours away from Western-style constitutional liberalism, the most important of which was the October Revolution. Russia had been on track to become a real European country rather than a despotic police state, went this theory, first under the prematurely assassinated Tsar Alexander II and then under the Provisional Government in 1917. But Bolshevik ideology had put an end to that, replacing the steady amelioration and convergence of the imperial era with an aggressively expansionist totalitarian ideology that would threaten freedom around the world if not contained. This theory took practical form with George Kennan's landmark 1946 "Long Telegram," which formed the basis for cold war foreign policy in the US, and appealed to both anticommunist liberals and conservatives in search of historical justifications for the fight against communism. A variation on this line of thinking, which substituted Trotsky or Bukharin for Alexander and de-escalation for containment, was popular among historians on the left who had not been fatally compromised by their support for Stalin.

The second narrative held that Soviet politics was only loosely connected to Marxism, and that the Soviet state rested on a legacy of authoritarianism and institutionalized illiberalism that stretched back perhaps as far as the Mongol or Viking era. This version, most famously propounded by future Reagan advisor (and Harvard historian) Richard Pipes, described a past in which the Muscovite grand prince held patrimonial power over every object, person, and scrap of land in his realm, and in which no countervailing institutions-such as a self-interested nobility-ever emerged as a competing locus of power. In a tragic dialectic of radical dissent and police-state crackdown, Russia and the Soviet Union were doomed to reenact the repressive drama of Muscovy. This narrative was far more persuasive than the first, and had the intuitive appeal of being easy to memorize. (Early in my PhD, I was half-jokingly taught to rehearse on the spot a version of imperial history based on pine needles: the acidic pine needles that cover the soil of Russia's heartland cause low agricultural yields, which prevent surpluses, which limit the growth of market towns, which means the lack of a bourgeoisie, which means a failure to develop a public sphere or a discourse of rights, and so on).

In retrospect, neither of these arguments are halfway intellectually satisfying. Most of the liberal narrative's supposed "moments of divergence" collapse upon closer examination (Alexander II, for instance, had no intention whatsoever of relinquishing absolute imperial authority), and the patrimonial model is all too crude a tool to dissect the sometimes very intricate negotiations that exercising power in the Russian Empire required. In 1976, two years after the publication of Pipes's defining work, Russia under the Old Regime, Edward L. Keenan wrote the initial version of "Muscovite Political Folkways." Though it was prepared under a State Department contract, it would eventually come to define the field's response to cold war as well as Pipesian historiography.

Keenan was born in 1935 in a small village in western New York, where he grew up hunting small game ("critters," he called them) and selling the pelts to visiting buyers-an experience he would revisit in lectures when he described the fur-trade economy of early Muscovy. An underachieving basketball player in 1953, Keenan began to study Russian history by accident after a college counselor advised him to pursue a "language major." His knowledge of Russian and research expertise soon became legendary. Semi-mythical stories circulated among his students and colleagues. His Russian was said to be such that he could travel and pass as a native anywhere in the Soviet Union. Having left his dissertation on a train in Eurasia, he went home and simply started a new one-rewriting the old would apparently have been too tedious. According to declassified CIA documents, Keenan was present at the US Embassy in Moscow in 1959 when Lee Harvey Oswald attempted to renounce his American citizenship. Certain JFK assassination conspiracy-theory websites, as well as old issues of Pravda, assert that Keenan was in fact a CIA agent at the time; Keenan himself relished the stamp in his passport which marked him as having been expelled from the USSR. Still, it would be somewhat un-Keenanesque to accept such sources at their word: after all, his relentless questioning of apparently solid documentary evidence came to define his scholarly career.

Keenan's most provocative and divisive attempt at this kind of debunking came in 1971, with the publication of his book The Kurbskii-Groznyi Apocrypha. Much of what we think we know (and what we teach undergraduates) about the reign of Ivan the Terrible comes from a compilation of letters supposedly exchanged by the tsar and a dissident nobleman named Andrei Kurbskii, who defected to Lithuania in the middle of a war in 1564 to escape political persecution. Using highly technical methods, Keenan argued that the compilation was a 17th-century forgery, provoking a decades-long debate between scholars in the Soviet Union, Europe, and the United States. It has not been conclusively settled, although most would now agree both that a correspondence took place and that it did not exactly resemble the text we now possess. In later decades, Keenan would argue that the Lay of Igor's Campaign-one of the most cherished monuments of early Slavic literature-was a late-18th-century Czech fabrication; this claim has not been as eagerly received. From the very beginning of his career (his dissertation debunked a key text about the end of the "Tatar Yoke"), Keenan was known as someone committed to destroying traditional assumptions by paying close and exacting attention to once-unimpeachable sources, even if many held that this had led him down the wrong path.

It may seem ironic, then, that the essay which made Keenan's name outside the community of medieval Russian historians-the famous "Muscovite Political Folkways"-includes not a single quote or citation. After its State Department genesis, it circulated as a typescript in a small circle of Keenan's associates before finally being published in 1986. Pipes had shaped the basic assumptions about Muscovy shared by most nonspecialists: patrimonialism, the dictatorial power of the tsar, the inherent slavery of his subjects, the systematic eradication of all traditions that might have offered a political challenge. Keenan aimed to shake them up-to "provoke," as he claimed, and not to "convince," but of course to convince as well.

"Muscovite Political Folkways" did not fall into the traditional liberal trap of going through the chronicles with a magnifying glass in search of scraps and shadows resembling parliaments and natural rights. In fact, Keenan said, that impulse was part of the problem. Historians had spent so long seeing Russia in terms of what it lacked (and thus what set it apart from the supposedly normal case of Western Europe) that they had forgotten to see it in its own right. What Russia did have was a long heritage of fragile peasant survival in marginal agricultural lands, which bred risk-aversion, suspicion of outsiders, and strong norms of communal solidarity. These formed the template for Muscovy's political culture.

From this starting point Keenan drew a set of startlingly original conclusions. The tsar was not an autocrat but a kind of central figurehead, the guarantor of the system's legitimacy but in practice a cipher. The actual political culture of Muscovy was not autocracy but a tug-of-war between powerful clans of boyar (noble) oligarchs, who hid behind the window-dressing of dictatorial absolutism to ensure stability as they jockeyed for access to power. "The thud of limp bodies in the Kremlin" was heard during the all-important bride-choosing and marriage ceremonies that determined the struggle's next round-not when someone challenged the tsar. Meanwhile, foreign visitors who strove to interpret Muscovite politics through the lens of their own political experience inevitably ended up perpetuating the official façade. This, together with the fact that boyar culture as such was fundamentally non-literate, meant that all existing sources on Russia before 1700 needed to be read against the grain in a nearly Straussian fashion-dovetailing, conveniently, with Keenan's habitual skepticism about documents.

"Folkways" was a functionalist interpretation of Russian history, relying on the vocabulary of cultural anthropology to pry into the goals and behaviors of Muscovite elites. Where ideological interpretations strove to simplify and render familiar, Keenan insisted on dividing and making strange. Muscovy did not have just one political culture-it had three or four, including the church, the court, and the bureaucracy, each of which left a distinct literary and cultural legacy. Even the tradition of political dissent, which so many others had seen as a clear forerunner to the 19th-century revolutionary progenitors of Bolshevism, came into question in "Folkways": hardly anti-authoritarian, dissent in Muscovy was conservative and fundamentally unwilling to challenge the structure of princely rule.

Like Keenan's previous work, "Muscovite Political Folkways" produced a storm of controversy. This time it was not small clutches of specialists defending their chosen turf but a whole field that had suddenly found its basic foundations whisked out from underneath. Most aggravating of all, the essay was riddled with apparent howlers. The Russian peasant commune, to take only one example, was a product of the 18th century created for the convenience of recruiters and tax collectors, not serfs (indeed, Keenan barely mentioned serfdom at all). Statements based on sources from later periods seemed to be applied uncritically to previous ones. It seemed particularly absurd of Keenan to claim that Muscovite political culture was a tissue of lies and then rely on sources from it for other parts of his argument. Many objections to Keenan's arguments did not stand the test of time, rooted as they were in the flawed historical models Keenan tried to reject. But neither would anyone today introduce "Muscovite Political Folkways" as an accurate picture of how Muscovy worked.

Curiously enough, the critical response to "Folkways" ultimately left the critics-who raised a number of damaging points-worse off than their target. Richard Hellie, the author of the harshest criticism in a 1987 journal discussion, found himself increasingly marginalized despite being one of the preeminent American specialists in the field. Others have since drifted toward more recognizably Keenanite positions. Over the long term, Keenan's victory was due in large part to his prodigious cadre of graduate students (sometimes labeled a "Keenan" or "Harvard School," though Keenan himself did not like the label), who have transformed the discipline by taking the functionalist view and marrying it to a new focus on archival sources. In the 1980s and '90s, Valerie Kivelson, who teaches at the University of Michigan, produced groundbreaking studies of Muscovite local "gentry"; Nancy Shields Kollman analyzed kinship networks and the role of honor; Russell Martin followed Keenan's lead in investigating the role of marriage in Muscovite politics. While some of Keenan's students have already retired, others-like Kivelson-remain at the forefront of the field. No corner of early Russian history-writing today remains untouched by Keenan's influence, both as a scholar and as a servant of the profession. Toward the end of his life, Keenan expanded this portfolio, serving as dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and then as head of the Dumbarton Oaks research institute in Washington, DC.

Few scholars follow Keenan in thinking the tsar was a cipher, but to claim he ruled unchecked over a landscape peopled by human chattel is now distinctly old-fashioned. In some ways, then, "Folkways" has conquered its field. As for the rest of us, we can only take heart from Keenan's injunction against seeing Russia in terms of what it is not. Contemporary reporting and writing about Russia remains mired in 1971, married inextricably to the fantasy that removing the autocracy (or even just the autocrat) would leave us with a country that looks like France. But it won't. There are always the boyars to reckon with.

I am indebted to Keenan's one-time students, Professors Alison Frank Johnson and Kelly O'Neill, for their stories and recollections; I draw on these as well as numerous published sources throughout the piece.

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