#2
UNICEF
http://blogs.unicef.org
March 22, 2015
In eastern Ukraine children suffer as fighting breaks water supply
By Noor Bakhsh
Noor Bakhsh is a WASH Manager for UNICEF Ukraine.

In my home country, Pakistan, the lack of access to safe drinking water is a constant problem in rural areas. However, when I came to Ukraine, I was really surprised to discover that in this country, too, some people have to cope with no drinking water for months at a time.

Ukraine has rich natural water resources, and a water supply system that is much more developed than that of Pakistan. But the water supply infrastructure has been damaged due to the ongoing conflict in the east of the country. Currently, at least 700,000 people are without access to safe drinking water in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.

"During the winter months with no water, I was so desperate that I melted snow to get drinking water for my children. I was relieved to find the wet napkins in the UNICEF kit that we received so that I could clean my children. We had not been able to bathe them for days," said Maria, a mother of two, who had just been displaced from the city of Debaltseve.

In order to respond to the urgent need, UNICEF Ukraine, in collaboration with partners, has provided bottled water to more than 118,000 people in eastern Ukraine. Moreover, UNICEF with the support from the EU Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection Department (ECHO) has provided three water purification units to Krasnohorivka town (Donetsk oblast), which will secure a continuous supply of safe drinking water to 20,000 people.

Last week I visited the cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, where I talked to many people displaced from conflict-affected locations where those remaining still do not have access to safe drinking water. In some cases, water is available, but it is not drinkable as it is mis-coloured and has a bad taste. I worry that bad water quality and lack of hygiene supplies may lead to diseases, especially among the most vulnerable - the children and women.

Safe water is fundamental human right, and we need to make sure everybody has access to it, be it in Pakistan or Ukraine. We need to do our best to ensure that this basic right is fulfilled for the children.

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 #3
Doctors Without Borders
www.doctorswithoutborders.org
March 19, 2015
Ukraine: Voices from the Front Line

Since May 2014, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has supported around 100 medical facilities on both sides of the front line in Ukraine with medical supplies, in addition to running an ongoing psychological support program. To address difficulties people in rural areas face accessing health care and medicines after more than ten months of conflict, MSF is also running mobile clinics in 25 locations in Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Below are testimonies gathered from people who are feeling the impact of the conflict every moment of every day:

Antonyna, 79, lives in Kuteyniekovo, Donetsk region, where MSF runs a mobile clinic.

"I've been living in Kuteyniekovo since the 1960s. My husband died 17 years ago and I don't have any children. I haven't received my pension for eight months. The food in my cellar was stolen, but some people helped me by bringing some potatoes and biscuits, and I received some humanitarian aid twice. I couldn't manage to buy coal this year, so I heat the house with some firewood.

I have many health problems: angina; and problems with my ears, sinuses, and joints. I can't afford to buy medicines. I received some drugs I needed from MSF, but before that I lived without them. I was just using plants to treat myself.

Our village was shelled in August. Once I went down to the cellar, but the sound of the shelling was so loud I preferred just to lie on my bed instead.

I can't leave, I'm too old. I was born here and I'm going to die here. I worked hard all my life. I've now experienced two wars. I have buried my husband and my baby daughter who died when she was born. Nothing good can happen here, I don't have hope."

Ludmila, 66, lives with her husband in Kuteynikovo, Donetsk region, where MSF runs a mobile clinic.

"Our lives have changed a lot since the conflict started. There is no stability, we try our best to survive. The main problem is money, we don't receive our pension. It's impossible to get it in Donetsk now and the banks in the area are closed. The only way to receive our pension is to cross the front line and come back. Once we went to Dnepropetrovsk [about 155 miles away on the other side of the front line] to get it.

My husband had gastric cancer and had surgery five years ago. I have diabetes as well as complications with my heart, high blood pressure, and a gastric ulcer. I have enough insulin for the next month, but after that I don't know. In December I was ill because of my diabetes. I went to Kiev and stayed with my granddaughter so I could get treatment. I spent one month there and I managed to receive my pension. But I spent it all on medical expenses.

The problem here is that drugs are not available, and if they are, they're too expensive. The price of drugs has doubled. There was a pharmacy here where we could buy basic drugs, but it closed [because it was not possible to get supplies]. So then we had to go to Amrovsievka, Ilovaysk, or Donetsk, but to get there we need money. Besides, there hasn't been a doctor here in Kuteyniekovo for many months."

Lydia, 65, lives in Uspenka, Donetsk region, where MSF runs a mobile clinic.

"I've lived here all my life. I was a storekeeper, but retired in 2009. When the conflict started many people left Uspenka, mainly to Russia. My son left too, but he came back, and now the majority of people have returned. Our village wasn't directly hit by shelling-it was used as a base to shell other villages and the fields around [us] are mined.

The biggest problems here are unemployment and the lack of money. I stopped receiving my pension in July last year. I grow some potatoes in my yard and also have chickens so I can sell the eggs. My brother lives in Russia and sends me some money every month as well.

I have heart problems and high blood pressure. Now many people face difficulties when they need to buy drugs, as they've become more and more expensive since the conflict began. It's possible to find some medicines in pharmacies, but they are too expensive now.

We haven't had a doctor in Uspenka for many months-the previous doctor died before the conflict. So people had to go to Amvrosievka [about 14 miles away] if they needed to see a doctor. Now Dr. Wael from MSF comes here and there are long queues to see him. I'm very grateful to MSF, they help people here a lot."

Serguei, 49, lives in Lugansk, and is a member of the Blind Association where MSF provides mental health counseling.

I contracted measles when I was eight and lost my sight. I have been living in Lugansk for 32 years. I moved here just after graduating from a special school for handicapped kids. I was doing some work making lightbulb sockets. It was a regular job, I was paid, and I also received a pension from the government. Sometimes the work was sporadic and the salary as well, but with the pension, I had everything I needed.

Now the business here is not working anymore, so I don't get a salary. Since July, I haven't received the pension. We received some money once in October, but that's it. People now have to rely on humanitarian aid, but for the past months we haven't been receiving anything because Luhansk is isolated. We now live in very difficult conditions: we have to eat the food we stored before the war, the sugar and the cereals we have. Fruit and meat are too expensive, we just buy bread and some dairy products we get at cheap prices from a local dairyman. I don't know how long we can keep holding on.

I stayed in Lugansk during the war in the summer. There was a lot of shelling in the district where we live, but it was impossible to go to the basement. How can you go quickly to the basement when you are blind? We didn't have fresh water. We could get some bread from the shop or distributed by charities, but some days it was impossible to leave the apartment.

My wife is suffering from a chemical burn she had many years before, but we can't get the necessary medication from the local pharmacy anymore. She still has some from her stock, but only for the next six weeks."

Svetlana, a nurse, works in the health center in the village of Kuteynikovo, Donetsk region, where MSF runs a mobile clinic.

"Many people left Kuteynikovo when the conflict started. The majority went to Russia. People have come back, but not everyone. Before there were 1,600 people in the village, now there's around 1,000. There were many young people, but they've mostly left, so now this is a village of elderly people.

So the most common health problems here are heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and problems with joints. It is very difficult for diabetic patients to get insulin. There was a pharmacy here, but it was closed because of the problems with getting supplies.

In September our village doctor was transferred to another town, Metalist, because the health center there serves more villages. He comes back once a week and now Dr. Wael from MSF comes twice a week. We're very happy to have his help. It's very important that the drugs are given for free because people do not have money. Businesses are not functioning, so there is a lot of unemployment and people are poor. Dr. Wael is a kind person; he's become like a member of our family. He always comes here in a good mood and even after seeing 100 patients, he's still smiling.

We've been working without salaries since the summer. We received it once in January. People often ask me why I still work without receiving any money. I just say I belong to a kind of people who do their job despite the difficulties. People here are very strong. We survived for months just from growing some vegetables in our yards. My husband was able to go to Russia to work and bring some money here.

Although our village was shelled in August, I didn't leave. Kuteynikovo is my home, I can't forget it. My house is here, my grandchildren. The shelling came in the morning and at night; we didn't know when to expect the next bombs. There was no electricity, no water. It was very scary.

Now it's quiet, but I don't think it's the end. People here live in constant fear that the fighting will start again. If the shelling returns, I won't stay here. I will run from the war because it's impossible to experience it again."

Olga*, 72, lives in Kuteynikovo, Donetsk region, where MSF runs a mobile clinic.

"In August our village was shelled. It felt so close. We stayed in the house, we had nowhere to run and my husband couldn't move because he was disabled-he had no legs and was in a wheelchair. He told me I should hide in the cellar, like everyone else. But I didn't, I couldn't leave him. So I stayed and we lay together on the bed. We expected the worst. We were ready to die together.

We were married for 51 years. He died suddenly last month of cerebral thrombosis. He was 78. He used to sit in his wheelchair near the road and drivers would stop and give him some money, food, or cigarettes. You can see a wreath by the road where he used to sit every day. I received 1,000 UAH [about $43] in humanitarian aid in December. But I spent all my money on my husband's funeral. A place at the cemetery costs 2,000 UAH.

I haven't been receiving my pension for eight months, so I can't buy medicines. I was given the drugs I needed for hypertension at the MSF clinic. I want this war to stop. What did we do wrong? We worked hard for all our lives, we paid taxes. Why is everything taken from us?"

*Name changed to protect patient anonymity.

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#4
Kyiv Post
March 22, 2015
Civilians wait out war in Donetsk bomb shelters
By Stefan Huijboom
Kyiv Post contributor Stefan Huijboom is a Dutch journalist

DONETSK, Ukraine - For 67-year-old Lyudmila and many others, the harsh reality of war means living in a smelly bomb shelter with no electricity because they've got nowhere else to go and little money.

Lyudmila's tiny flat in the Kyivsky district of Donetsk was severely damaged by shelling nearly five months ago. Since then, she has lived in the bomb shelter with others. Nothing has been the same since.

"Everything that I once loved reminds me of war," she said, wiping tears. "There's no light. It's cold at night. Why is this happening to us?"

Lyudmila still fears for her life, but not because of more shelling.

"I cannot express my opinion about my situation. There are traitors everywhere," she said, still crying, explaining why she would not give her last name. "If the authorities here find out that I tell this I might get into more trouble."

Others in the bomb shelter also have nowhere else to go.

Anastasia, a single mother of three children, said that the humanitarian aid they receive is not enough.

"My children are hungry." she said, referring to her two boys and one girl, all lying under a thick coat. "Why is DNR (the Kremlin-backed Donetsk People's Republic) not helping us? Why does Ukraine keep bombing innocent civilians?"

The bomb shelter Lyudmila and Anastasia live in is a few hundred yards from the ruins of the Donetsk Airport, the center of many fierce battles for months between Russian-backed forces and Ukraine's soldiers. The district is destroyed. Shops and kiosks that were once selling food are closed and damaged. Outside life is nowhere to be found other than the few people that still commute by trolley bus that still connects to the city center of Donetsk every 30 minutes.

"Going by bus cost me at least four hryvnia per day!" Anastasia said. "Usually I walk three to four kilometers, because I don't have a lot of money. I can only be lucky that I don't have to pay for my children on the bus."

Anastasia tries to find her way through the dark shelter, but daylight can't get through the thick walls of the shelter. With a little flashlight, she walks through the shelter.

"The bathrooms are dirty. There is no water here. We have to buy water to flush it. Because of the horrific sanitary situation many of us have become sick. Our skin doesn't get enough sunlight. We don't get enough vitamins. Sometimes I wonder if being dead would be better after all."

The desperation is multiplied hundreds of times in other bomb shelters where other civilians live.

The separatists blame Ukraine's government for the humanitarian crisis, but say they are helping these civilians with adequate humanitarian aid. "It is untrue that aid is unequally spread," she told the Kyiv Post.

The civilians in the bomb shelter in the Kyivsky district say otherwise.

"I wish that I wouldn't be dependent on the authorities. If I would have enough money, I could be a good mother. Now it feels as though as I have failed my children," Anastasia said. "I hope there will come a day that my children have prospects. For now I pray to God for a miracle to happen."

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 #5
Sputnik
March 20, 2015
Hackers Reveal Drastic Plans in Ukraine to Brainwash Donbas 'Idiots'
By Ekaterina Blinova

A prominent Ukrainian journalist has come up with suggestions of how to brainwash the "idiotic" population of Donetsk and Luhansk regions, addressing Verkhovna Rada.

CyberBerkut, the Ukrainian hacker group opposed to the Kiev regime, have released a number of emails sent by a prominent Ukrainian journalist to a Verkhovna Rada deputy, describing how to brainwash "foolish" Donbas residents.

In letters addressed to parliamentarian Irina Lutsenko, Natalia Gumenyuk, a co-founder of Ukraine's Hromadske TV, suggested measures which were aimed at brainwashing the residents of eastern Ukraine into believing that DPR and LPR leaders are killing them and deliberately destroying the region.

The journalist referred to civilians of Donetsk and Luhansk as a "biomass," stressing that the Ukrainian southeastern regions were predominantly inhabited by "idiots" and "fanatics." Natalia Gumenyuk emphasized that the Ukrainian government should wage a large-scale propaganda war against the region, proposing to release false reports in the name of DPR and LPR leaders "exposing" that a large number of peaceful civilians of the region were killed by independence supporters. Gumenyuk's letter included an example of such a "report": "We [DPR and LPR militia] have accidently killed ten peaceful civilians, but we hope that their relatives will forgive us: Russia has provided us with new sophisticated weapons and we are still testing it."

According to the journalist, the Ukrainian government should also unleash a propaganda war in Russia, spreading rumors that the Kremlin "would use" its nuclear arsenal against Ukraine in order to protect Novorossiya.

Remarkably, Natalia Gumenyuk actually proposed to establish a dictatorship in Ukraine for "at least 2-3 years," claiming that Verkhovna Rada should be shut down while some categories of the Ukrainian population be deprived of voting rights.

It is worth mentioning that Irina Lutsenko, a deputy of Verkhovna Rada, is a wife of Yuriy Lutsenko, Petro Poroshenko Bloc party leader and former interior minister of Ukraine. Responding to the radical measures proposed by the journalist, Irina Lutsenko thanked Gumenyuk for her "unbending" position and praised her ideas as valuable and useful, pledging to spread them among Ukrainian policy-makers.

It should be noted that in the beginning of March 2015, CyberBerkut hacked Ukraine's Information Army's website and released a number of embarrassing emails, revealing the Army's goals and practices. CyberBerkut notes that some of Gumenyuk's "brilliant" ideas could have already been adopted by the notorious Ukrainian cyber forces.

#6
Counterpunch.org
March 19, 2015
And the Crushing of the Political Opposition
The Victory of National Democracy in Ukraine
by HALYNA MOKRUSHYNA
Halyna Mokrushyna is currently enrolled in the PhD program in Sociology at the University of Ottawa and a part-time professor. She holds a doctorate in linguistics and MA degree in communication. Her academic interests include: transitional justice; collective memory; ethnic studies; dissent movement in Ukraine; history of Ukraine; sociological thought.  Her doctoral project deals with the memory of Stalinist purges in Ukraine. In the summer of 2013 she travelled to Lviv, Kyiv, Kharkiv and Donetsk to conduct her field research. She is currently working on completing her thesis. She can be reached at halouwins@gmail.com

What is democracy? It is a political, economic and social arrangement of a territorial unity of people in which the majority rules but minority rights are protected and there is a robust political opposition. How does Ukraine measure up to this standard? Very badly. A failure, I would say. And here is why.

Is there any real political opposition in Ukraine? No. The official opposition party, the Opposition Bloc, which includes deputies from the former Party of Regions, has forty seats in the current Ukrainian parliament out of 422 .  In the last election to the Verkhovna Rada (Ukraine's Parliament) on October 26, 2014, this party won the majority of votes in five oblasts (regions) of Eastern Ukraine - Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Luhansk, Donetsk, and Zaporizzhia. It obtained the second largest number of votes in Mykolaiv and Odessa oblasts, and the third largest number in Kherson. The participation in the election in the whole of Southeastern Ukraine reached an all-time low - less than 50 per cent in all of the oblasts. This is a clear indicator of the population's apathy and mistrust of the current Ukrainian parliament.

In the Verkhovna Rada, the ruling coalition for the first time in the history of independent (post-1991) Ukraine has the largest majority in the Parliament - 303 deputies. The breakdown of the majority is 150 deputies from the Poroshenko Bloc, 82 deputies from the Narodnyi (Peoples) Front of Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk, 31 deputies of the Samopomich party of Lviv mayor Andriy Sadovyi, 21 deputies of the Radical Party of Oleh Lyashko, and 19 deputies of the Batkivshchyna Party of former Ukraine's prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko.

The Opposition Bloc is the only official opposition party in the Verkhovna Rada. Deputies of the Bloc have stated on several occasions that they are ignored in the Parliament and their work is blocked. For instance, Vadym Rabynovych said that he has registered 19 bills but none of them has been proposed for examination by the Rada.

Tatiana Bakhteeva has been a Rada deputy since 2002 and has experience working in the opposition as well in the ruling coalition in the Rada. She stated recently that for the first time in the history of the Ukrainian Parliament, there is not a single deputy from the opposition in the executive of the Rada - for instance, the positions of speaker or vice-speaker. Not a single member of the opposition chairs a parliamentary committee, whereas in the previous Parliament under President Victor Yanukovych, 12 out of 26 parliamentary committees were chaired by the opposition. Bakhteeva also says that the first 100 days of work of the Euromaidan parliament have shown it to be the most unprofessional Parliament in the history of independent Ukraine.

The Ukrainian NGO CHESNO, which was created in 2011 with grants from various European agencies with the goal to monitor the parliamentary elections of 2012 and in general the work of the Rada, has conducted its own analysis of the Euromaidan parliament. It found that the old plagues of Ukrainian politicians persist in the new parliament. Deputies vote on behalf of their absent colleagues. The Rada does not respect standing orders - bills are put to a vote with blatant violations of procedures. As a result, deputies sometimes do not know what they have voted for, as was the case during the adoption of the 2015 budget, when deputies voted "blindfolded" during night of December 29, 2014 for a budget without having seen a print copy.

Another example is the voting of the bill to reduce pensions at the demand of the International Monetary Fund. When the bill was put to a vote for the first time, there were not enough votes in the ruling coalition to support the bill. So the speaker of the Rada put the bill to a repeated vote until it finally passed, on the fifth time. But according to the standing orders of the Rada, a bill which has been rejected cannot be put to a vote again during the same session or a next special extraordinary session of the Verkhovna Rada.

Tatiana Bakhteeva has noted another violation of the regulations by the Euromaidan Rada. According to the standing orders of the Rada, any bill, before being put to a vote, must be sent for evaluation by a group of experts and scholars. Upon examination, the group recommends whether the bill can be submitted for a vote. Bakhteeva says that none of the bills approved during the first 100 days of the new Ukrainian Parliament have been sent for expert review.

Democracy is also about the rule of law. How do Ukraine's new power holders score in that respect? I have already written about the witch-hunt of former members of the Party of Regions and specifically about the so-called suicide of Mikhail Chechetov. Chechetov's death was but one in a series of recent deaths of former members and leaders of the Party of Regions. There have been nine such deaths since the coming to power of the "most democratic" politicians in the history of Ukraine.

Another prominent member of the Party of Regions, Oleksandr Peklushenko was found dead in his country house in Zaporizzia oblast. He died from a gunshot wound in the neck. To no one's surprise, it was officially declared a suicide. Peklushenko was suffering from depression, it is said, exactly that has been said about Chechetov. Like Chechetov, Peklushenko was under a criminal investigation, charged with enacting laws to disperse Euromaidan protests in Zaporizzhia in January of 2014. Peklushenko was appointed as head of the Zaporizzhia regional administration in 2011. As stated on the website of the Party of Regions, he was a man of principle and was not afraid of standing up for his positions. He did not quit his post, as the participants in Euromaidan demanded. He stayed until the end because he wanted to ensure order in Zaporizzhia. He once said: "I have lived with the Party of Regions membership card, and I will die with it". So he did.

The Opposition Bloc has called upon the "civilized world" to react to this series of suspicious suicides and to give a legal assessment of the actions of Ukrainian power holders who are organizing cynical reprisals against their political opponents. According to the Opposition Bloc, those in power in Ukraine are "effectively creating an internal concentration camp for over 11 million Ukrainians who once supported the biggest party in the country, the Party of Regions".

Western governments and media have ignored the Bloc's declaration. They are too busy calling upon Russia to investigate the February 27 murder of Boris Nemtsov. Why would the European Parliament be concerned? After all, Ukraine is now a free and democratic country, where the rule of law and freedom of expression reigns.

What about freedom of expression in Ukraine? Dissent is not allowed. It is seen as treason against the national interests of Ukraine, infringement on the inviolability of the territorial integrity of the country. Oleh Lyashko, leader of the Radical Party in the Rada, known for his scandalous behavior and declarations, has called upon the Rada to dissolve the city and regional administrations in Kharkiv (Ukraine's second-largest city) because they have refused to declare Russia an aggressor country. He says that makes them accessories to separatism.

Not surprisingly, the mayor of Kharkiv, Gennadiy Kernes, is under criminal investigation, charged with kidnapping, torture, and death threats regarding two residents of Kharkiv who are members of the Euromaidan movement. Kernes does not believe in the possibility of a fair trial. He says the investigation against him is politically motivated. He has been harassed and intimidated by the new Ukrainian power holders for a year now, aiming to discredit him in the eyes of Kharkiv residents.

Kernes is a separatist, according to black-and-white logic of the jingoist patriots in Ukraine. However, the same Kernes was not afraid to come out into the streets during the conflicts  between Euromaidan and Anti-Maidan supporters in February of 2014 and ask the Anti-Maidan protesters to take down  the flag of the Russian Federation they hoisted on a flagpole in downtown Kharkiv.

Kernes was elected mayor in 2010. He has a reputation as a good manager and has done a lot for his native city. In March of 2014, he stated that he as well as members of his family had received dozens of threats over the telephone and that Arsen Avakov, the former governor of Kharkiv region and the current minister of the interior (of police) of Ukraine, might be behind this campaign of intimidation. On April 28, 2014, while cycling on a road near Kharkiv, Kernes was shot and seriously wounded. He was taken to hospital and operated on. His condition was life-threatening and he was taken to Israel by plane for further treatment. After returning to Ukraine, he reiterated that, in his opinion, Avakov and the new governor of Kharkiv region, appointed by the Euromaidan Parliament, were behind the attempt to kill him. Kernes rejected allegations of a "Russian footprint" in the attempt on his life.

Under the current nationalist-style democracy in Ukraine, dissenting opinion is not allowed. The former prime minister of Ukraine, Nikolai Azarov, stated in a February 21, 2015 interview on the Russian TV channel Lifenews that there are now seven thousand political prisoners detained by the SBU (Ukraine's national police). On March 13, in front of Kyiv City Hall on Khreshchatyk Avenue, a crowd of around one thousand people wearing white bands and carrying white flags, protested against rises in the prices of food and public transportation, and drastic increases in the cost of housing services. They demanded the resignation of Kyiv mayor Vitaly Klychko. It was the third such action by Kyiv residents, the first two having taking place on January 28 and February 26.

Anton Herashchenko, an adviser to Minister of Interior Avakov, declared that those protests were financed by the Opposition Bloc. Each participant, he said, was paid 150 hryvnia (approximately seven U.S. dollars). The budget for this 'fake' protest action, he said, was 500,000 hryvnias (app. 23 thousand dollars). The goal of the action was to create an "image" for Ukrainian and Russian television channels that in Ukraine, mass protests against the politics of the current government are on the rise. Herashchenko acknowledged that the people of Ukraine are disatisfied by the sharp increases in the price of natural gas, food and other essential goods, the freezing of salaries and pensions, decline in the value of the national currency, and "other negative phenomena accompanying war and loss of part of the territory of Ukraine". But in the same breath, he said no one has the right to organize fake protests with "paid for" crowd scenes.

In order to stop such "shameful practices", Herashchenko and his team immediately wrote a bill to introduce criminal liability for the organization of paid-for protests. According to this bill, organizers of such "black actions" will be punished by a fine for up to 500 non-taxable minimum monthly incomes, arrest for up to six months, or imprisonment for up to three years.

Another adviser to Avakov, Zorian Shkiriak, has also made inflammatory statements about the protests in downtown Kyiv. In his opinion, the protests are a special operation by the Russian FSB (Russian Security Service) aimed at destabilizing the situation in Ukraine. Moscow is doing this with the connivance of traitors of Ukraine, he said, namely the members of the "criminal-terrorist group" in the Rada which goes by the name of the 'Opposition Bloc'. Enormous amounts of money have been spent on this anti-Ukrainian project by Moscow, said the perspicacious counselor.

Of course, who else could do this? The long hand of Moscow is everywhere these days in Ukraine. Russia shamelessly bribes ordinary Ukrainians to express their discontent on the streets. Members of the trade union of Kyiv's transportation agency who went on strike and organized protests in December of 2014, demanding that their salaries be paid, are another group of agents of Russian president Vladimir Putin. Miners from Western Ukraine, who came to Kyiv to similarly protest and demand the payment of their salaries, are another group of Putin's agents. Soon the whole working population of Ukraine will become Putin's zombies.

Democracy in Ukraine is triumphant. The "most democratic power in the history of Ukraine" has an explanation for any political use and abuse of the law, any silencing of the opposition, any anti-popular austerity measure. And if you think that the new authorities are failing in their promises to ordinary Ukrainians to institute a "new Ukraine", you are a traitor and an agent of the Kremlin. Glory to Ukraine, indeed!
 

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 #7
Ukraine Today
http://uatoday.tv
March 22, 2015
President Poroshenko reveals 30% of Ukrainian conscripts deserted in early days of conflict

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko says Ukraine saw shocking levels of desertion during the first wave of mobilisation in the early days of the country's fight against Russian-backed militants.

The numbers, Poroshenko told Ukrainian media, were as high as 30%. But he siad that during the latest wave of mobilisation earlier this year, Ukraine's armed forces saw a less than 1 percent desertion rate.

The Ukrainian government, which came to power last year, inherited a poorly equipped and staffed military, which suffered from years of neglect following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The government has made steps toward modernising its military, but soldiers and defence analysts still complain of corruption and mismanagement among officers and defence ministry staff. Political analysts say that is likely one of the key reasons the United States has resisted sending weapons to Ukraine.

The country has relied heavily on volunteer defence battalions which organised to compensate for the lack of military readiness during the Russian-backed uprisings in eastern Ukraine in the spring of last year.

In recent months, Ukraine has dramatically upped the budget for the military, aiming to increase its ranks to 250,000 soldiers.

British military personnel have been dispatched to Ukraine to train soldiers, in the hope that the armed forces can be reformed and turned into a modern European defence force.

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 #8
Moscow Times
March 20, 2015
Crimea Is the Final Nail in the Soviet Union's Coffin
By Fyodor Lukyanov
Fyodor Lukyanov is editor of Russia in Global Affairs.

The one-year anniversary of the takeover of Crimea sparked renewed debate over what that means for Russia's history. Perhaps the main result is that it put a definitive end to the history of the Soviet state.

The Crimea question has been around since 1991, when the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus met at Belovezhskaya Pushcha in Belarus to abolish the Soviet Union, free themselves of Soviet control as personified by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and gain full control over their respective republics.

But they chose not to risk dealing with the delicate issue of Crimea, leaving that political time bomb for future generations to defuse. They didn't, and in 2014 it exploded, setting off a chain reaction.

Crimea was a milestone in the history of the Soviet Union's disintegration. As strange as it might sound, this huge territory remained relatively stable, with some exceptions during wars and other upheavals. Nobody seriously questioned its configuration as it stood following the Soviet collapse. But now the idea of one day returning Crimea to Ukraine is not even on the table.

The events of 2014-15 are the final act of a drama that began in the 1980s and 1990s. Russian self-determination put an end to Gorbachev's perestroika and the attempt to reform the Soviet Union. In fact, the Soviet Union was doomed from the moment Russia's political forces ceased associating themselves with the center of that union. There were several reasons for this.

The progressive democrats considered Gorbachev indecisive and out of touch, while the communist reactionaries saw him as a radical traitor. Everyone wanted to distance themselves from him, and Gorbachev's desire to pursue a neutral, centrist path proved fatal.

By themselves, the efforts of the Baltic republics, the Caucasus or even Ukraine could not have led to the rapid disappearance of such a large country. Only the will of the Russian establishment - first the old, attempting to hold onto power while turning its back on the general secretary, and then the new, eager to take the helm - had the power to bring down the Soviet empire.

It is only natural that today's Russian leadership, as the heir to the leadership that put an end to the Soviet Union 25 years ago, is taking the next step in the same direction.

The "Russian world" to which President Vladimir Putin refers is not an attempt at holding a zone of influence, much less at imperial expansion. Rather, it is a conceptual, rather than administrative, delineation of mental ethnic boundaries, an attempt to define Russians as apart from others.

The final years of the Soviet Union were marked by rich intellectual life - initially semi-underground, and then increasingly public. The Soviet project was always an impressive undertaking, and attempts at its transformation retained that aspect of scale.

Its repercussions were felt around the world. At home, the idea of reform spawned active debate of every type, much of which is still interesting to read. It often devolves into endless Russian arguments over the best path of development, but it is not narrow-minded because the Soviet Union was a global power and therefore always thought in broad categories. The Kremlin believed that by changing the state, it would change the world.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the country's international ideological campaign ended and Russia shifted its focus inward. The restructured Soviet leadership did an about face, rejecting class values for universal human values. Russian leaders took a long hiatus from any form of values-based rhetoric.

There was no opportunity for reflection immediately after the collapse: all efforts were directed toward social, economic and political survival. Then pragmatism prevailed and leaders set out to repair the structure of the state. That was followed by a period of searching that led to an interest in values - this time national, if not nationalistic.

However, nationalism is more limited in its scope than universal or even class values, and cannot attract anyone beyond the members of its specific cultural and ethnic group.

Perestroika was the most recent period of Russian history when the country not only drew attention, but offered a "grand idea," striving to attract the world with its new openness. Post-Soviet Russia at first tried to follow in the tracks of others. It hoped to integrate into the world of Western ideas, but became disillusioned when that approach did not achieve the desired results.

Those grievances gave rise to a defensive ideology inspired not by a desire to look beyond Russia's borders, but to buttress itself against an unpredictable and dangerous world.

In this sense, Gorbachev's perestroika and Putin's modernity are at opposite extremes. The optimistic idealism of the late 1980s is diametrically opposed to the grim realism of the mid-2010s.

But in both eras, political interests eclipsed economic considerations, the latter receiving short-lived tentative overtures at best. The "acceleration" that preceded perestroika and glasnost compares to the "modernization" of 2008-2011. Both were empty and soon-forgotten slogans.

However, the discrepancy between the country's weak economic foundations and the overly heavy political structure it supported proved fatal to the Soviet Union, and threatens the current Russian government as well.

When Mikhail Gorbachev became the general secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee 30 years ago in March 1985, nobody could then imagine that the country stood on the verge of convulsions that would reverberate for decades.

The naive faith Soviet leaders held 25 years ago that the country would smoothly and easily make the transition to a better mode of functioning proved unfounded - and the zigzag course Russia has since pursued is the natural consequence of those events.

Unfortunately, it remains unclear how long Russia will continue searching for its own path.

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 #9
www.rt.com
March 20, 2015
Gorbachev blames war in Ukraine on Perestroika failure and USSR breakup

Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev holds that the roots of the Ukraine conflict are in the breakup of the Soviet Union and he warns against attempts to solve the crisis by military force.

"The deep rooted reason for the turmoil is in the deliberate failure of Perestroika, in irresponsible decisions that were made by the heads of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus in the Belovezha Forest," Gorbachev wrote in his Rossiiskaya Gazeta column.

The first and only president of the Soviet Union referred to the events of 1991, when the leaders Russian, Ukrainian and Belarussian Soviet republics signed the agreement on forming the Commonwealth of Independent States that replaced the USSR and de facto deprived Gorbachev of his post.

The former Soviet leader also noted in his article that the few years that followed the Belovezha events became a test for Ukraine as Western nations started dragging them into the Euro-Atlantic community openly ignoring the interests of the Russian Federation. Gorbachev stated that all sides lost as a result of these actions because they created the threat of a new Cold War, or even a real war.

Gorbachev urged all involved parties to stop mutual accusations and support any steps aimed at the settlement of the crisis. "There is no military solution to this conflict and there will be no winners in it. It is important to support any constructive steps and any manifestations of a more responsible approach that could lead to peace," he wrote.

The former Soviet leader also stated that the anti-Russian steps of Western nations, no matter how persistent, were doomed to fail. "Attempts to isolate Russia or ignore it would always be unsuccessful. I am sure that our country will overcome the current period of economic difficulties. But we need to seriously analyze the reasons behind them," he wrote.

Gorbachev has already expressed the opinion that the military conflict in Ukraine was rooted in the hasty and thoughtless breakup of the USSR. This is one of the ideas of his latest book of memoirs called "After the Kremlin" - released in December last year.

He also reiterated to the leaders of Western nations to stop dragging Ukraine into NATO because these attempts would result in nothing but deeper strife with Russia, and further escalation of the conflict.

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 #10
Business New Europe
www.bne.eu
March 19, 2015
How to end the Ukraine conflict
Ben Aris in Moscow

March will be a tense month as Russia has decided to poke its finger in Nato's eye again. Russia's Armed Forces are holding for the first time Arctic military exercises, which kicked off on March 16 and will last through March 21.

The exercises are massive. The entire Northern Fleet has been put on alert, as well as units of the Western Military District and the Airborne Forces, which cover the territory right up to the border with the Baltics. A total of 38,000 personnel are in the field, together with 3,360 pieces of military hardware, 500 tanks, more than 55 battle ships and submarines, and 110 aircraft and helicopters. And if that wasn't enough, Russian President Vladimir Putin said explicitly in a documentary to commemorate the annexation of the Crimea a year ago that he would have put Russia's nuclear missiles on alert if the West had tried to stop him from taking over Eastern Europe's favourite holiday resort.

The military exercises are clearly more sabre rattling by Russia and a warning to Nato, which has increased its military training on the other side of the border in recent months. It's like two bullies in the playground trying to "shirt-front" each other, as Austrian prime minister Tony Abbott threatened to do to Putin during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in November.

It is time to start to walk things back, as this is starting to get dangerous. To paraphrase Thucydides, the author of "The History of the Peloponnesian War" and father of realpolitik: "The longer a standoff lasts, the more things tend to depend on accidents".

And it is still possible to walk things back from here, but the focus needs to change from principles and punishment to realism and compromise. Currently all the talk is about punishing Russia, lethal weapons and extending sanctions, when what needs to be discussed is how to deal with the substantive issues in this dispute: Ukraine's potential Nato membership, what can be done to improve security arrangements in post-Cold War Europe, turning Ukraine's collapsing economy around, and thrashing out a new pan-European trade regime that takes in both Russia's and the EU's interests.

Happily all the pieces needed are already on the table. A shaky ceasefire following the Minsk II talks seems to be holding, although The Economist correspondent Tim Judah on the ground in the Donbas says it is more like a "less-fire than a cease-fire". A new International Monetary Fund (IMF) deal and the arrival of the first $5bn tranche at the start of March has stabilised Ukraine's financial system and currency for the moment. And dealing with the Nato and trade issues is complicated but fairly clear cut. Still, actually cutting a deal in this toxic atmosphere will be very hard.

Rescue Ukraine

The government in Kyiv has now been put in an extremely uncomfortable position of trying to persuade its main private investors to take a substantial haircut - something they can refuse to do - while Russia has opted itself out of the same haircut on its $3bn bond that comes due in December. This is the time when the government should be spending ever joule of its energy on building a new economy, not having heated conversations with fund managers at Franklin Templeton about how much money it is going to lose.

Moreover, these are the very same people that Ukraine will have to turn to as soon as the first green shoots of growth appear. The IMF calls for $40bn of borrowing over the next four years, but says Ukraine needs to spend $45bn. Why did the IMF sign off on a plan that is short $5bn? Surely the international donors could have come up with the extra $5bn so the government can get to work undistracted.

The investors should not be worried by the overall level of debt. Ukraine's debt/GDP ratio has soared from the mid-30s before the Maidan protests, to over 70% now, and is on course to end this year at whopping 100-130%. However, given the economy can be expected to as much as quadruple in size when it finally starts on its post-Soviet catchup growth - as Russia's and many of the other former Soviet states have done since the 1990s - the current high level of debt is not an issue, as growth will shrink the ratio back to manageable levels in just a few years time.

Moreover, when international investors do agree to start lending again after the crisis, Ukraine will be made to pay back the money saved by the proposed "debt operations" many times over in higher borrowing costs.

When Russia defaulted on its debt in 1998 it was very careful not to actually default. It imposed a five-year moratorium on debt payment and locked their money up in special "S" accounts. As the economy recovered (GDP grew by 10% in 2000 during the bounce back) the Russian Ministry of Finance gradually relaxed the restrictions on recovering this debt. Investors lost money, but after a few years they were given their original stake back and also offered opportunities to make money on other investments.

There is also a political aspect to getting Ukraine back on its feet as fast as possible. The IMF riders on its programme have imposed a terrible cost on the people. Household gas prices are to rise by over 200% and pensions will be cut. Inflation is already on the cusp of tipping over into hyperinflation and the quality of life is already visibility deteriorating, while unemployment is rising. In short, Ukraine is having its 1998 Russia moment or perhaps even its 1993 Russia moment, which was far worse.

The pressure on the Ukrainian people will lead some to ask whether they should not have gone with Russia's offer to join the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) after all? Of course this is not an issue now, but when elections come up in four years time there will clearly be a pro-Russia party that can play on the current economic nightmare. This is already happening in Georgia where a rising proportion of young people, still in the minority, have more sympathy for Russia and its EEU than last year. It would be ironic for Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to win the war only to lose the politics at the next elections, because he can't deliver on his implicit promise of a better life under a more EU-oriented government. The IMF's penny pinching in this light looks incredibly short sighted. And if Europe and the US are really serious about containing Russia on the Continent, then given a military solution is off the table, transforming Ukraine into a prosperous country is not only the only option available, but also a highly attractive one for the rest of Europe.

Nato

Nearly everyone says Ukraine cannot join Nato, except the Ukrainians, so why not take this off the table? An alternative would be for the West to sign a separate deal to guarantee Ukraine's borders outside of Nato, by creating some sort of new "strategic and economic partnership" category. Indeed, Ukraine already exists in this category of countries that Europe wants to support and boost trade ties with, but will never be asked to join the EU. Ukraine would not be alone in this - countries like Turkey and Azerbaijan are also in the same category.

The danger is that the West will fail to honour this commitment if push comes to shoot, just as they failed to honour the Budapest Agreement, signed when Ukraine gave up its nuclear missiles in 1994. But that is a risk Ukraine will have to take and having an actual signed treaty is more protection than the embarrassment that Ukraine's application to Nato and subsequent rejection will cause. Indeed, to go down this road is downright dangerous, because Russia is guaranteed to take a strong line to Ukraine's Nato bid and could reignite the current conflict.

Security deal

Drawing up a new pan-European security pact is an extension of the Nato problem and also its solution. Nato is a security pact from the Cold War, but the Russians have argued that it needs to be replaced with a new European security deal that defines everyone's place and responsibilities to reflect the new realities on the Continent. The Kremlin has already drawn up detailed proposals, which it is willing to negotiate. But if a new security deal is agreed, the need for Ukraine to join Nato becomes superfluous, as Ukraine's borders and independence will be guaranteed by the new deal without the need for Nato. Nato can act as the guarantor for the West, but membership would not be necessary.  

EU trade deal

Merkel has already admitted that a trade regime between the EU and the EEU is possible and has proposed three-way talks between the EU, Ukraine and Russia. But these have yet to start.

The point here is that trade will restart as soon as peace returns. Ukraine and Russia are both large countries with large populations that need almost everything that the EU has to sell. Even if relations remain bad, some sort of trade deal will have to be worked out.

And a trade deal between Russia and Ukraine is imperative for Ukraine's recovery. Trade between Ukraine and Russia fell by 30% in the last quarter of 2014, but Ukraine has no prospect of redirecting those goods to the EU. The chances that Volkswagen will buy Ukraine's diesel engines, Siemens will order Ukraine's locomotives, Hochtief will ship in Ukraine's low quality raw steel for construction projects, or that the EU farmers will welcome a flood of cheap Ukrainian eggs and vegetable oil are next to zero. Trade relations between Ukraine and Russia have to be normalised or else some of the biggest and best known of Ukraine's few productive industries will go bust.

Instead of flooding Ukraine with guns, the EU should flood it with consultants and technical assistant programmes. Equipping the Ukrainian government with a new IT system and putting the entire government online would be a practical measure to fight corruption and improve efficiency that would cost a fraction of equipping the ragged Ukraine army with smart rockets and modern tanks.

Kyiv has already taken a step towards outsourcing its government operation by hiring three foreign-born nationals to high office, including US-born Natalie Jaresko as finance minister. Why not go the whole hog and bring in the EBRD and IFC to run the economics ministry and privatisation agency amongst other things, like the Kazakhs are proposing to do? Desperate times call for desperate measures - and things in Ukraine are desperate.

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 #11
Fort Russ
http://fortruss.blogspot.com
March 21, 2015
EU Ukraine policy: "stupidity on a grand scale"
Interview with Richard Sakwa, March 9, 2015 in Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten
http://deutsche-wirtschafts-nachrichten.de/2015/03/09/britischer-forscher-eu-politik-in-der-ukraine-war-dummheit-im-grossen-stil/
Translated from German by Tom Winter

The British Russia scholar and political analyst Richard Sakwa makes the case that the fault for escalation in Ukraine lies in Washington and Brussels. Putin has no interest in a war, that is the last thing he needs. Sakwa calls for pressure from the west on the Kiev regime, since Ukraine, as a federal state, must also consider the interests of the people of Donbas. In the Guardian Jonathan Steele, former correspondent in Moscow, reviewed a remarkable book: Richard Sakwa, in Frontline Ukraine, has set forth the one-sided view of the West toward the conflict, and has minutely examined the mistakes of the EU and the US. He criticizes the lack of an independent European foreign policy as well as the undifferentiated faulting of Russia's President Vladimir Putin. Steele notes that not once in the darkest times of the Cold War were Soviet politicians like Brezhnev or Andropov so openly and massively insulted as Putin in the present conflict.

German Economics Reports [Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten] spoke with Richard Sakwa, who holds a professorship in Russian and European Studies at the University of Kent. He is a Fellow of the Russia and Eurasian Program in the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House. Since September 2002 he is a member of the Academy of Learned Societies for the Social Sciences. In his book The Crisis of Russian Democracy, he took a critical view of the process of transformation in Russia.

Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten (DWN): In your book on Ukraine, you used history to clarify the current dilemma: The Russians, as Gorbachev has often insisted, gave up their empire without a war. They did it since they took the development as a success for both sides. They expected a partnership. The Americans, though, took the fall of the Soviet Union as a one-sided victory. Is this the background that has brought back the Cold War in Europe?

Richard Sakwa (RS): Exactly. The point of departure was the Malta conference in December 1989. It was here, immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that the new post-war system was formed. US President George W. Bush certainly understood that the power of the Soviet Union was waning, but he failed to understand that Mikhail Gorbachov planned to establish a new kind of policy, without winners, without losers. Instead, the US considered it a victory of their own policies.  Today, 25 years later, we understand the depth of the strategic defeat. The worst thing about the Yalta conference was that there was no European statesman there, like Churchill at Yalta, who would hold up the interests of the western Europeans. So our fate on this side of the continent was settled without our participation.

DWN: Can the differing views of history also lead now to a new Cold War?

RS: They've already done it. and I've been warning about it for years. We in Europe have lived for 25 years in a paradise of the blessed, in which none of the fundamental security issues have been settled. So rather it has been a period of Cold Peace. Now it has come to a collapse of order that has resulted in a kind of Cold War.

DWN: NATO seems determined to act. Is the existence of NATO in its current form in a modular world part of the problem, or part of the solution?

RS: We could have dissolved NATO after 1989, or should have included Russia in a reformulated organization. Instead we took the worst possibility of them all: an enlarged NATO, that now begins encircling Russia on all sides and yet excludes Russia. You don't have to be a strategic genius to understand that Russia, a nuclear power, would sooner or later oppose this.

DWN: You argue that Europe failed, in this historic moment, to formulate its own independent policy.

RS: The EU has a weak sense for strategy, and the outcome of their own dealings for the existing power relationships reveals it, as they acted in Ukraine. That was stupidity on a grand scale, driven by Poland and the baltic states. I'm speaking now about the new Atlantic Pact, in which NATO, the US, and the EU are in fact interwoven. This doesn't mean that countries like France and Germany cannot individually, independently, take initiatives. But everything they do is tightly bound to the transatlantic partnership. Germany under Merkel has lost a lot of its earlier global independence. That was the price of the Atlantic support for Germany being a leader in European policy and being able to be active in economic policy. I believe that EU foreign policy under Federica Mogherini has the potential to learn from the mistakes of history, but Mogherini is under tremendous pressure from the Atlanticists who want her to adopt their point of view. The results are a disaster, as we are now seeing.

DWN: How do you see the position of Russian President Vladimir Putin?

RS: Putin is a known quantity, and he has warned from the Munich Security Conference of February 2007 that Russia is not happy with the current strategic situation. Unfortunately, nobody listened to him.  You have to realize that any leader of Russia would hardly act any differently than Putin has. It is not the case, that Putin lives in a different reality; the problem is that nobody in the West has thought that Putin would act in the current situation in exactly this manner.

DWN: Is Putin taking advantage of the conflict, to use the situation to present his own people with an external enemy?

RS: No, I think that is a false argument. He doesn't need this war. He has done everything to avoid it. The responsibility lies in Washington and Brussels. Putin has fantastic approval ratings. He successfully pulled of the Olympic Games in Sochi. What's happening now is the last thing he needs. He is not a revisionist leader, and therefore the western reading of his handling is mostly all wrong.

DWN: How do you explain the fact that throughout the West there is a completely closed view of the story, namely that it is Russian aggression -- in spite of the fact that, through that intercepted phone call of US diplomat Victoria "Fuck the EU" Nuland, we have clear indication that Washington was actively involved in the overthrow of the Yanukovich regime?

RS: I think the prevailing and utterly simple western view of the matter is the most unsettling aspect of the whole crisis.  It is frightening to see how the public and the elites in the West have accepted this false viewpoint. It is always easy to put blame on Russia for everything. Russia is far from perfect, but it is for sure not the evil force that the West is now proclaiming. For me, it is also shocking to see how easily the western economic leadership have been led to this false reading.

DWN: Can you spell out what would be the best government organization for the Ukrainians?

RS: Best thing would be a federal state, not a central one. This is unlikely in the near term, but, taking the long view, it is the only way for Ukraine. The Donbass will never again be a part of a nationalist, centralist Ukraine.

DWN: Should the West review the matter of "territorial integrity" of existing states, with consideration to the existence of ethnic minorities in most of them?

RS: That probably should happen. We need a grand new conference, like Yalta or Helsinki, to take up all these themes. These problems are getting more and more pressing. This also relates to Transnistria and other regions, even Kosovo.

DWN: The Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk has many a time said that everybody, who wants to be Russian, should get out to Russia. Does the idea of "ethnic cleansing' in east Ukraine lie behind this?

RS: Yatsenyuk is today the most dangerous man in Europe. I can't understand how such an outright Nationalist can be treated with respect.

DWN: Is this conflict a war over resources? Is it the case that the Americans want a foot in the door, towards energy policy?

RS: That is certainly a part of the problem. However, I believe that this perspective isn't there for the Americans: basically, the same thing is happening as in Libya or Syria, or in Iraq. A "chaos regime" has brought a new style of realpolitik to Europe, and we let it happen. What's the point of the EU if it can't even prevent a war on its own continent?

DWN: What's your take on the activity of American officials in the Ukrainian regime, Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko, for instance?

RS: Shocking. A proud nation like Ukraine doesn't need people like that. That was a purely demagogic step of Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk.

DWN: How is this conflict going to end?

RS: We're walking a fine line between outright war and a kind of standstill agreement. The courageous Merkel-Hollande initiative for Minsk II might stabilize the situation. But we have to understand that this is only the beginning of a possible peace-process. The Kiev regime must be pressured to formulate the land so that there is an acceptable mode of return for the people of the Donbass into Ukraine. I think, though, that a further division of Ukraine has become very likely. The current government in Kiev is making the problems worse rather than addressing them.

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 #12
Moscow Times
March 23, 2015
Poll: Russian Volunteer Fighters in Ukraine Enjoy Broad Support at Home
By Peter Spinella

Only 7 percent of the survey's 1,600 respondents said they personally know someone who has gone to fight in east Ukraine as a volunteer.

Sixty-five percent of Russians are supportive of their countrymen who are volunteering to fight alongside the rebels of eastern Ukraine, a recent survey by state pollster the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM) revealed.

Only 16 percent of respondents believe that the Russians fighting there have been hired to do so, VTsIOM said in a statement Friday.

But the country is equally divided at 45 percent on whether they would positively or negatively view a friend or relative's decision to fight in the region as a volunteer.

One in five respondents (22 percent) said they disapprove of Russians volunteering to fight in eastern Ukraine. That figure increased to one in three among residents of Russia's two largest cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg.

More than half of respondents nationwide (57 percent) said the Russian government should not interfere with Russians fighting in east Ukraine.

Only 7 percent of the survey's 1,600 respondents said they personally know someone who has gone to fight in east Ukraine as a volunteer.

The pollster said the survey, conducted across 46 of Russia's regions on March 7 and 8, had a statistical margin of error that did not exceed 3.5 percent.

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 #13
Moscow Times
March 23, 2015
Poll: Record Number of Russians Reject Emigration
By Peter Spinella

Eighty-three percent of Russians say they're not interested in moving anywhere outside of the former Soviet Union, the independent Levada Center pollster revealed, noting that this represented the highest such figure since the end of the Soviet era.

Another 81 percent of respondents said they never even think about the option of moving abroad, and only 12 percent expressed a desire to relocate somewhere beyond the former U.S.S.R.

Levada Center director Lev Gudkov attributed the increased numbers to "powerful state propaganda, the government's full control over the information space, and an absence of large-scale public discussion," according to a statement posted Friday on the pollster's website.

Gudkov noted that even the country's severe economic downturn - which has seen the ruble plummet against the U.S. dollar over the past year and led to crippling inflation - is not driving Russians to flee.

"The worsening economic situation has not reached a critical level whereby it would entail an evaluation of the political environment," Gudkov said in the statement.

Only about one in 10 respondents said they might enjoy living abroad, while just 5 percent said they regularly think about leaving.

Gudkov said that the few Russians with the desire to live abroad forever are usually those who have already achieved a certain level of success.  

"This is a very unique contingent, the most well-off groups of people. They are educated, have made money and see social capital for their departure," he said.

"They understand that their way of life is incompatible with an authoritarian regime, with its lack of guarantees about the inviolability of property ownership, its limitations on freedom and the deteriorating business climate."

The statement also cited the head of the prestigious Higher School of Economics' Institute of Demography, Anatoly Vishnevsky, as saying that propaganda on television instills fears in Russians about living abroad.

"When people say they would like to leave, it doesn't mean that they can leave and do so," he said. "Among those who say they will stay in Russia, many of them are afraid that if things don't go well abroad they won't be able to come back."

"This fear is reinforced by propaganda, which builds a barrier between Russia and the West in the minds of Russian citizens."

The Levada Center, a respected pollster founded in 2003, said the survey was conducted among 1,600 people across Russia, and had a statistical margin of error that did not exceed 3.4 percent.

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 #14
Bloomberg
March 20, 2015
Russia Rebounds, Despite Sanctions
By Matthew A. Winkler
Matthew Winkler, editor-in-chief emeritus of Bloomberg News, writes about markets.
[Charts here http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-03-20/russia-rebounds-despite-sanctions]

Sanctions meant to punish Russia for snatching Crimea from Ukraine one year ago were supposed to hurt Russian business. And they did. Russian stocks, bonds and commodities had the worst performance in 2014 of those in any emerging market.

That was then. Now the picture is changing, with investors starting to favor Russia in 2015. The ruble, which became the world's most volatile currency last year after President Vladimir Putin's land grab, is stabilizing. The swings in its value narrowed this year more than any of the other 30 most-traded currencies.

Investors in Russian government securities denominated in rubles have earned the equivalent of 7 cents on the dollar so far this year, as measured by the Bloomberg Russia Local Sovereign Bond Index. In contrast, anyone holding similar government debt in emerging markets across-the-board has lost 1.1 percent in 2015.

The picture is even rosier for Russia's corporate bondholders; they've had a 7.3 percent total return in 2015, leading the gains in the index for emerging market corporate bonds compiled by Bloomberg. And while shareholders in the global emerging market stocks measured by the MSCI Emerging Market Index gained 1.7 percent this year, the 50 Russian stocks in the Micex index are up 11.9 percent -- better than the Standard & Poor's 500 or any other North American market.

The ruble's relative value helps explain why there are some signs of confidence in Russia. Although the ruble remains the most volatile of the 31 most-traded currencies this year, its swings are narrowing. This is visible in implied volatility, a measure of traders' bets on how much the currency's value will change day-to-day. After surging in late 2014 amid the widening Ukraine crisis, the ruble now is fluctuating the way it did in 2009.

Business also appears to be on the rebound. Some 78 percent of the Russian companies in the Micex index showed greater annual sales growth than their global peers, even though the shares of these Russian companies lagged behind their international competitors, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That's consistent with a two-year improvement in the relative value of Russian companies.

One possible reason for the growth? Sanctions. With foreign goods unavailable, Russians had to choose homegrown products and services.

For all the disruption caused by the sanctions, Russian companies represented in the Micex index are more profitable measured by Ebitda margins (earnings before taxes, depreciation and amortization) than the rest of the companies included in the global MSCI Emerging Market Index.

A number of Russian companies are outperforming their global peers. Magnit PJSC, which operates a chain of discount supermarkets with a market capitalization of $16 billion, is one worth noting. The retailer's one-year revenue growth was 31.66 percent, overwhelming the 0.87 percent increase in sales from its global competitors. Novatek OAO, a $22.8 billion independent producer of natural gas in western Siberia, is another. The company saw its sales increase 19.5 percent, compared with 0.76 percent from its global sector. And then there's Rosneft, a $41 billion international brand with production in western Siberia, Sakhalin, the North Caucasus and the Arctic, which reported an 18.26 percent annual sales growth when its international competitors disclosed a revenue increase of just 0.76 percent. By any conventional measure, the shares of these companies are cheap.

Are global investors optimistic about corporate Russia's continued resilience? It seems so. The shares outstanding of the largest U.S.-based exchange traded fund tracking Russian companies -- more than 90 percent of the companies in the ETF are Russian -- surged 5 percent so far this year. At the same time, an ETF that's a proxy for money flows into and out of Russian equity shows a 27 percent increase. Putin's Ukraine adventure has led to instability in the region and frayed relations with the West; what it hasn't destroyed is confidence in corporate Russia.

(With assistance from Shin Pei.)

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 #15
Russia Insider
http://russia-insider.com
March 23, 2015
What the Story of Putin's "Disappearance" Says about How the West Misunderstands Russia
A story was spun out of thin air - simply because it fit the West's fantasy about Russia torn by internal conflict
By Alexander Mercouris

A week has now passed since the collapse of the media story concerning Putin's "mysterious disappearance".  That makes it a good moment to take stock of what happened.

Firstly, in its reporting of Putin's "disappearance" the Western media finally exposed the utter incompetence of its reporting on Russia.

A glance at Putin's website shows Putin never "disappeared".

Putin's "disappearance" is supposed to have begun on 5th March 2015.  Yet on 8th March 2015 he met in the Kremlin with a group of women to celebrate International Women's Day.  The meeting was publicised and photographs exist.

On 12th March 2015 Putin spoke over the telephone to the President of Armenia.  His website on the same day carried a report of the conversation.

On 13th March 2015 Putin met in his country residence at Novo-Ogaryovo with Vyacheslav Lebedev, the head of Russia's Supreme Court.  The meeting was again publicised and television film and a partial transcript of the meeting also exist and were made public on the same day the meeting took place.

On the same day, 13th March 2015, it was publicly announced that Putin would be travelling to St. Petersburg on 16th March 2015 to meet with the President of Kirghizia.

All these events and announcements took place as the Western media was becoming increasingly shrill spreading stories that Putin had disappeared.  The announcement of Putin's meeting with the President of Kirghizia in St. Petersburg on 16th March 2015, which should have finally silenced the story, failed to do so.

It beggars belief that any of these people Putin is reported to have met or whom he was going to meet, especially the head of the Supreme Court and the presidents of Armenia and Kirghizia (two proudly independent countries), would be parties to a plot to conceal from the Russian people and the world that Putin was ill or dead or away fathering a child in Switzerland or was facing a political crisis or had been overthrown in a coup.  

The film of Putin's meeting with Lebedev on 13th March 2015 shows him fit and well.  That incidentally proves that the rumours that he was ill with the flu were also untrue.

Putin did postpone a Eurasian Union summit meeting with the presidents of Kazakhstan and Belarus.  A Russian liberal website found in a local newspaper a report that a meeting between Putin and a regional governor, which Putin's website said happened on 11th March 2015, may have taken place on 4th March 2015.  Putin also postponed ratification of a defence agreement with South Ossetia.  Lastly, Putin skipped a meeting with the personnel of Russia's state security service, the FSB.

None of this however proves that anything was amiss or shows that Putin had disappeared.

The Eurasian Summit meeting might have been postponed for any number of reasons.  A good candidate is that Putin wanted to canvass the opinions of the president of Kirghizia, whom he was due to meet in St. Petersburg on 16th March 2015, and postponed the summit meeting with the two other Eurasian leaders in order to do so.  Kirghizia wants to join the Eurasian Union and it might have been that Putin wanted to iron out some issues with its president before the summit meeting.  Another possibility is that Putin wanted to flesh out the details of his proposals for a currency union, which he made when the summit meeting finally took place on 20th March 2015.  Or there could be any number of other reasons.  

Summits of this sort are often postponed and for all sorts of reasons.  European Union summit meetings get postponed all the time.  That is not usually taken as a sign of crisis.

As for the meeting with the governor, if it really did take place on 4th March 2015 and news of it was indeed held back until 11th March 2015 in order to cover up Putin's "disappearance", then that can only mean that the "disappearance" and the coverup were planned in advance.  

That seems overcomplicated and even absurd.  Most likely the report of the meeting in the newspaper was a mistake.  The newspaper probably simply reported a routine meeting before it took place.  That would show how routine and formal meetings like this have become.  It does not show that anything important was going on.  Such things probably happen all the time without anybody noticing.

As for the postponement of the defence treaty with South Ossetia, that is hardly an important agreement with an important country but is merely a tidying up document that confirms what is already the case, while the meeting with the personnel of the FSB was also a relatively unimportant commemorative meeting and it is not clear that Putin was even expected to attend it.

Most likely the truth behind this whole bizarre episode is that Putin, like many busy people, had fallen behind with his paperwork and decided to cut down on his meetings to give himself time to get on top of it.  

The real mystery about this affair is not why Putin "disappeared" for a few days, given that he actually didn't disappear at all, but why for almost a week the Western media became so obsessed with this story and continued to report it long after it had become obvious that it was untrue?

At a most basic level, what this episode shows is the unhealthy obsession the West has with the person of Vladimir Putin.  

It is now practically impossible to read a book or article about Russia in the West that does not refer to Putin, sometimes indirectly but far more often as the lead character.  This is true even of art criticism or film reviews.  For the West Putin is not the big story in Russia,  he is the only story.  The entire life of this huge country is reduced to the words and actions (often misreported) of one man.

This bears no relation to reality.  There are simply not enough hours in the day for Putin to do all the things the West attributes to him.  In fact as anyone who visits Russia for any length of time can see, Putin is not the overwhelming presence in the life of the country the West takes him to be.

This lack of realism about Putin however reflects the West's failure to understand Russia as a whole.

The Western view of Russia, hammered home in an unending flow of media articles, documentaries, books and talk shows, and which has become an article of faith for many people, is that Russia somehow lost its bearings and became diverted from its supposedly natural course, which would have ended with it becoming a liberal democracy in alignment with the West, by adopting instead a non-Western course, which led it away from the West.  By definition that means that Russia today cannot be a democracy since, according to Western ideology, "democracies" automatically align with the West and do not distance themselves from it.  

Since the West is ideologically incapable of accepting it had any part in this outcome, or that a country like Russia might choose a non-Western alignment of its own choice, it is obliged to look for a villain upon whom to put all the blame.  In Russia's case it is the country's longstanding leader: Vladimir Putin.

Since the West cannot accept that a country that chooses a non-Western path can be a democracy, it also cannot accept that such a country can also be successful and happy.  Instead the West assumes the "Russian autocracy" is corrupt and selfish, lacks political legitimacy, enjoys fragile popular support, and has an economy that is badly run, is inefficient and one-dimensional and depends entirely on oil and gas revenues.

This provides the key to understanding the whole otherwise bizarre "Putin's disappearance" story.

The West imposed sanctions on Russia assuming the country is economically weak.  It supposed that the sanctions would devastate the economy and that this would in turn trigger a popular revolt against Putin that would either cause his overthrow or which would force him to change his Ukrainian policy.  

The West assumes this revolt will be led by Russia's business leaders, who in the West are always called "oligarchs" (though there is no evidence any of them actually possess political power and are in any true sense "oligarchs") and who the West always assumes are selfish and corrupt.

These business leaders or "oligarchs" are supposed to carry out their coup in alliance with pro-Western liberal politicians within the government and with certain pro-Western political activists outside the government who previously headed the Moscow protests of 2011 and 2012.  The latter are in reality marginal figures but mainstream Western opinion has never accepted this and continues to believe them to be far more important and influential than they really are.

We know that this is what the West intended because a stream of articles in the Western media has told us so.  We also know it because no less a person than Angela Merkel has said as much.  

We know that right at the start of the Ukrainian conflict Merkel was advised by the German intelligence agency the BND that Putin risked being overthrown by an oligarch-led coup if Western sanctions were imposed on Russia - which is why of course she imposed them.  Merkel continues to say publicly that the sanctions will force a change in Russia, though she is now more circumspect than before and tends to speak of that change as something that will happen in the distant future.

In the event, what has actually happened in Russia since the sanctions were imposed is the exact opposite of what the West expected.  

Putin has not changed his Ukrainian policy.  Nor has he come under any pressure in Russia to do so.  Far from the sanctions causing the elite to fracture and to plot a coup against him the elite has instead consolidated around him.  Not a single member of the government or of the business community has broken ranks to call publicly for a change of policy or of government.  Putin's popular support meanwhile has hit unprecedented levels.  Most alarming and baffling of all, instead of collapsing under the weight of sanctions and of the oil price fall as the West expected, Russia's economy is rebounding.

Western bafflement and frustration at the failure of its policy is what ultimately lies behind the story of Putin's "disappearance".  

Since the West cannot accept that its ideas about Russia are wrong, its analysts scour the Russian landscape for "evidence" to prove it right and to show that its policy is working after all.  Since the objective of the policy is to provoke a coup - or at least a political crisis - in Russia, Western analysts look obsessively for signs of one.  Since evidence for a coup or of a political crisis does not actually exist, the analysts have to invent it.  This they do so by over analysing inconsequential facts.  Thus a few missed meetings in the schedule of a busy man become evidence of the political crisis the West desperately wants to believe is happening.

What has given this all added urgency is the growing sense in the West over the last few weeks that it is losing in Ukraine.  Not only was the Ukrainian army badly defeated in February but the Ukrainian economy is collapsing and the Minsk Memorandum of 12th February 2015 ceded control to Russia of Ukraine's border whilst leading to talk of a split between the US and Germany.  If a coup is to happen in Russia before Ukraine is entirely lost, then that coup must happen soon.  That is what lies behind the febrile atmosphere of a week ago.

If this were simply an isolated incident it would be good for a laugh and there would be no more to say.  Unfortunately that is not the case.  The West's false conception of Russia guarantees that similar episodes will continue to happen, some doubtless even more preposterous than the one we have just see.  When they do they will cloud understanding of Russia even more.

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 #16
Moscow Times
March 20, 2015
Is There Another Maidan Brewing in Ukraine?
By Josh Cohen
Josh Cohen is a former U.S. State Department project officer involved in managing economic reform projects in the former Soviet Union. He currently works for a technology company and contributes to a number of foreign policy-focused media outlets.

Since the parliamentary elections in October and recent events in eastern Ukraine, the Ukrainian people have been largely focused on the perceived external enemy in Russia. At some point, however - especially if the Minsk II cease-fire continues - Ukraine's citizens will turn their gaze inward toward Kiev - and they might not like everything they see.

Ukraine's economy is currently in a state of collapse. After shrinking 7.5 percent last year, Ukraine's economy is now projected to contract by another 6 percent in 2015. Not surprisingly, the effects of Ukraine's economic problems are largely borne by ordinary people.

The average monthly salary at current exchange rates is only $170, and headline inflation is nearly 30 percent. Even worse, according to a study by the Cato Institute, when the collapse in the value of Ukraine's currency is taken into account, the real inflation rate is 272 percent - meaning that Ukraine is at risk of experiencing hyperinflation that would devastate Ukrainians' spending power.

Unfortunately, these numbers may not even tell the full story of what Ukraine's people are facing. As a result of a stringent austerity program mandated by the International Monetary Fund, Ukraine's parliament has already enacted sharp cuts in pensions and other social income support expenditures for retirees and public employees, frozen Ukraine's minimum wage and cut public sector wages.

Meanwhile, in the energy sector, the price of gas used by consumers is expected to triple, which threatens to make gas and utility bills - not to mention basic necessities - unaffordable for millions.

The flip side of this is that Ukraine's citizens will want to see real improvements come out of these painful reforms, particularly in the fight against the corruption that Ukrainians see on a daily basis. Ukraine was judged by anti-corruption NGO Transparency International to be the most corrupt country in Europe in 2013 and a key impetus for the Maidan revolution was the desire to bring an end to what had become a predatory mafia state.

Unfortunately, however, progress in the fight against corruption remains uneven at best. In August 2014 Tetiana Chornovol, one of Ukraine's most prominent anti-corruption advocates, resigned as head of the government's National Anti-Corruption Committee. In a widely read article on the website of Ukrainska Pravda titled ''Goodbye Cabinet of Ministers,'' Chornovol slammed the post-Maidan government, asserting that "there is no political will in Ukraine to carry out an uncompromising, large-scale war against corruption."

By all accounts, while the government is no longer blatantly run as an organized mafia state, corruption remains endemic throughout Ukrainian society. In a recent interview with Ukraine's EMPR Media, Tomas Fila, head of the European Business Association, asserted that the post-Maidan ruling parties continued to remain involved in corrupt activities.

Fila's concerns are demonstrated by the scandal surrounding Ukraine's tax service. Amid much fanfare, 36-year-old investment banker Igor Bilous was appointed to head the tax service in March 2014. Bilous epitomized the type of young reform-oriented activists of the Maidan protests. Less than a year later, however, Bilous was fired amid allegations that his inspectors were colluding with police and prosecutors in a variety of corrupt schemes.

This is not to say Kiev has taken no steps to fight corruption. Ukraine has created a new anti-corruption law enforcement bureau which will operate as an independent national law enforcement agency with authority to investigate government officials at all levels from the president on down. Government officials are also now required to annually disclose financial information that will be publicly accessible. These steps have the potential to help.

The challenge is one of perceptions. According to a survey by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology (KIIS), a wide majority of Ukrainians believe the level of corruption has either not improved or even gotten worse. "90 percent of people are dissatisfied with how Poroshenko has performed in the fight against corruption," said KIIS general director Volodymyr Paniotto.

The risk is that Ukrainians will be much less inclined to suffer economic austerity themselves if they believe that government officials are carrying on with business as usual. Volodymyr Ischenko, who studies social protest movements in Ukraine at the Center for Social and Labor Research in Kiev, has already observed rumblings of social and economic discontent within Ukrainian society.

Ischenko has collected data on public demonstrations from August 2014 and the end of 2014, and he has seen some striking differences. Whereas the earlier demonstrations were generally pro-Ukraine and anti-Russian - what Ischenko termed "patriotic demonstrations" - by the end of 2014 Ischenko was observing a far greater number of protests against social and economic conditions in Ukraine.

"Many people are starting to speak quietly about the idea of another Maidan - maybe not at the senior political level, but by regular people in everyday discussions. The economy will deteriorate more and we are about to see huge energy price increases. This will affect not just the poor but the middle class as well, and the question is how long society will tolerate this?" said Ischenko.

Ischenko cannot predict exactly when Ukraine may see additional widespread social upheaval, but he worries that the spark could come from the right wing private militias who have carved out a tremendous amount of autonomy for themselves due to the weaknesses of the Ukrainian state and military.

Many of the most controversial battalions have already intimated that they could overthrow the existing government if conditions in Ukraine do not improve. Azov has promised to "bring the war to Kiev," while Aidar militants recently tried to storm the Defense Ministry to protest plans to fold the battalion into the regular military.

Kiev Prosecutor Sergei Yuldashev has even publicly stated that he's worried about Aidar trying to mount a coup at some point. Meanwhile, the Donbass Battalion's commander Taras Konstanchuk threatened parliament's deputies, saying that "until we start controlling what they actually do, nothing will make sense. We should come into the building and say: What kind of laws are you adopting, you lazy bums? There's only one way you'll leave here, and that's feet first."

"If there is another Maidan, right-wing forces would play a leading role," said Ischenko, "they would attack the government for not 'defending the nation' plus for causing for poverty and a social crisis. Between corruption, the economy and the nationalist right, the rough ingredients for another big upheaval exist - it reminds me a bit of 1930s Europe during the Depression," concludes Ischenko.

It's important to note that none of this means mass upheaval is right around the corner. Although anti-austerity protests by ordinary citizens have increased, to date Kiev has managed to keep the lid on widespread social unrest.

If there is a "Maidan 3," however, its shock troops may not be the type of young democratic activists favored by the West.

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 #17
Forbes.com
March 20, 2015
One Year After Russia Annexed Crimea, Locals Prefer Moscow To Kiev
By Kenneth Rapoza
I've written about Brazil pre-Lula and post-Lula and spent the last five years covering all aspects of the country for Dow Jones, Wall Street Journal and Barron's.

The U.S and European Union may want to save Crimeans from themselves. But the Crimeans are happy right where they are.

One year after the annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula in the Black Sea, poll after poll shows that the locals there - be they Ukrainians, ethnic Russians or Tatars are mostly all in agreement: life with Russia is better than life with Ukraine.

Little has changed over the last 12 months.  Despite huge efforts on the part of Kiev, Brussels, Washington and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the bulk of humanity living on the Black Sea peninsula believe the referendum to secede from Ukraine was legit.  At some point, the West will have to recognize Crimea's right to self rule. Unless we are all to believe that the locals polled by Gallup and GfK were done so with FSB bogey men standing by with guns in their hands.

In June 2014, a Gallup poll with the Broadcasting Board of Governors asked Crimeans if the results in the March 16, 2014 referendum to secede reflected the views of the people.  A total of 82.8% of Crimeans said yes.  When broken down by ethnicity, 93.6% of ethnic Russians said they believed the vote to secede was legitimate, while 68.4% of Ukrainians felt so. Moreover, when asked if joining Russia will ultimately make life better for them and their family, 73.9% said yes while 5.5% said no.

In February 2015, a poll by German polling firm GfK revealed that attitudes have not changed. When asked "Do you endorse Russia's annexation of Crimea?", a total of 82% of the respondents answered "yes, definitely," and another 11% answered "yes, for the most part." Only 2% said they didn't know, and another 2% said no. Three percent did not specify their position.

With two studies out of the way, both Western-based, it seems without question that the vast majority of Crimeans do not feel they were duped into voting for annexation, and that life with Russia will be better for them and their families than life with Ukraine. A year ago this week, 83% of Crimeans went to the polling stations and almost 97% expressed support for reunification with their former Soviet parent. The majority of people living on the peninsula are ethnic Russians.

The U.S. made a big deal about the rights of ethnic minorities there known as the Tatars, which account for around 10% of the population.  Of the 4% total that said they did not endorse Russia's annexation, the vast majority - 55% - said that they feel that way because they believe it should have been allowed by Kiev in accordance with international law. Another 24% said the referendum vote was "held under pressure", which means political or military threats to vote and vote in favor.

The GfK survey also asked if the Ukrainian media have given Crimea a fair assessment. Only 1% said that the Ukrainian media "provides entirely truthful information" and only 4% said it was "more often truthful than deceitful."

For now, the Gallup and GfK polls show a deeply divided Ukraine. The division of political allegiances ultimately threatens Ukraine's territorial integrity. Only 19% in the east and 26.8% in the southeast think Ukraine should join the European Union, while 84.2% in the west believe Ukraine is a natural fit with the E.U..  Nearly 60% in the north agree that E.U. is the place to be, and just under half in the center part of the country want E.U. integration.

NATO integration is even less supported in the southeast and east, and a little over a third in the center and north agree that Ukraine should join the Western military powers. In the west, that number rises to 53%.

Those numbers also coincide with Ukraine's trust or distrust with Washington. The pro-integration west, north and center portions of Ukraine all view the U.S. role in the crisis as mostly positive.  Well under a third say so in the east and southeast, and almost no one, including the Tatars, believe so in Crimea, GfK poll data suggests.

Interestingly enough, despite Russia's involvement in the separatist movement in eastern Ukraine, only 35.7% of people polled there said they viewed Russia's involvement as mostly positive while 71.3% of Crimeans were more in line with Russia's world view, according to the year old poll from Gallup.

This week, the State Department's press secretary Jen Psaki said sanctions on Russia will continue until Crimea is returned to Ukraine. Both the State Department and Treasury Department did not clarify whether that was an actual policy statement, nor whether that included the sectoral sanctions which were applied in a third round of sanctions last July following the downing of Malaysian flight MH17 over east Ukraine.

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 #18
Most of Ukrainians no longer believe in Crimea's returning to Ukraine

KIEV, March 20. /TASS/. More than half of Ukrainians no longer believe that Crimea will ever be back in Ukraine, Yevgeny Kopatko, a sociologist and founder of Research and Branding Group, said on Friday, citing a recent opinion poll results.

Only 25% of respondents answered positively to the question whether Crimea could ever be reintegrated into Ukraine. As many as 56% of the polled answered "no" and the rest did not answer this question.

"The percentage of optimists is higher in Ukraine's western regions (30%) than in its east (18%). As many as 51% of those polled in western regions and 69% in eastern regions said Crimea would never be back in Ukraine," Kopatko said.

"Ukraine society is now at a stage when hatred is subsiding leaving profound bitterness, a deep wound from this [Crimea's separation]," said Ruslan Bortnik, director of the Ukrainian Policy Analysis and Management Institute. He admitted there were practically no "grounds to speak seriously about Crimea's returning" to Ukraine.

The opinion poll was conducted in a period from March 6 to 16 and involved 1,500 respondents in all of Ukraine's regions, except the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

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#19
Rossiyskaya Gazeta
March 17, 2015
Russian filmmaker interviewed on Crimea TV documentary
Yuriy Snegirev interview with TV presenter Andrey Kondrashov, maker of "Crimea, Road to the Motherland" film: "Crimea. Road to Rossiya 1; Conversation with TV presenter Andrey Kondrashov about what happened on and off camera"

People started talking about this film long before the premiere. They were mainly our ideological enemies. The foreign ministers of the Baltic countries were even pleased at the alleged acknowledgement by Putin himself of the peninsula's annexation, while Ukraine sent a pirated copy of the film to the Hague Tribunal. I watched the film from the first frame to the final credits. There was much that I did not know even though I spent the entire "Russian spring" in Crimea., And I could understand the West's reaction. I met with the film's author, VGTRK [All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company] political observer Andrey Kondrashov. Andrey is currently in great demand, but I managed to talk with him in intervals between planning sessions, live broadcasting, and the recording of his evening programme. He was as frank as he could be with me, as President Putin had been with him.

[Snegirev] The film has not yet gone out, but the "awards" have already been received - from the US State Department. Plus Europe has got itself worked up. Are you not afraid there will be sanctions against you personally?

[Kondrashov] This will only make me happy, because I will be among those who deservedly are seen as patriots of Russia in the full sense of the word

[Snegirev] How did you manage to get the president to be so frank? We learn details - even to do with the nuclear forces and how they might have been put on combat alert, and to do with how the Main Intelligence Directorate special troops were operating there.

[Kondrashov] I myself was surprised at the degree of frankness in which both the talks I recorded with Vladimir Putin took place, particularly that we were recording literally right after the Crimean events. Our conversation was so frank that not even all the revelations went into the film because our first interview lasted something like two hours. Many of his emotional assessments did not go into this film. You know that the helicopters actually came in for Yanukovych twice and not once, because not all of his retinue could fit in the first time? One further detail: The entire operation proceeded in the most complete radio silence as far as the pilots were concerned. In addition, the flight was at a super-low altitude so that they would not be spotted by the Ukrainian air defence troops. In terms of its execution, it was a highly skilled and exquisitely executed operation.

[Snegirev] It was interesting to learn that Yanukovych had had time to approve Crimean head Serhiy Aksyonov and Sevastopol' head Oleksiy Chalyy in their new posts.

[Kondrashov] At that moment, according to every legal canon, Yanukovych was still the legitimate incumbent president. Moreover, until the referendum he was de jure on Ukrainian territory. So his signatures were of an utterly legal nature. And what Putin says about how this was beyond reproach from the legal viewpoint is after all the truth.

Who is "brother" to whom

[Snegirev] I was at the Maydan, and from there I flew to Crimea. And it all happened before my eyes. The "Right Sector" training sessions, Berkut [riot police] on fire, and the "Hrushevskyy cocktails." Later Berkut was brought to its knees for all the world to see. I would like to ask: After all that you have seen, after these [burning] tires, after this fighting, after "Right Sector" and the overt fascism, what you think of the people who during their impressive march walked to the scene of Nemtsov's death and shouted: "The people in Kyiv [Kiev] are our brothers, the junta is in the Kremlin!" How can that be?

[Kondrashov] You know, my feeling is that these people have constructed some kind of illusory world around themselves and do not want to leave it.

[Snegirev] The film lasted almost two and one half hours. There were no advertisements, there were only programme announcements. Was this a special agreement?

[Kondrashov] That was the channel's decision - not to touch the body of the film but simply to give people a chance to take a rest, to go and get a cup of coffee or have a cigarette - that was all. Perhaps they reckoned it was wrong to earn money from advertising at such a moment.

What did Chalyy try to give a bribe for in Kyiv?

[Snegirev] I saw unique interviews in the film. I should boast that I was the first journalist to interview Crimean Prosecutor Nataliya Poklonska. She was so trusting, so lovely, that I felt awkward asking her any personal questions, delving into her heart and digging down. Did you have that feeling?

[Kondrashov] I did Poklonska is an incredibly beautiful person both inside and out. And she seemed to me utterly defenceless as a woman and absolutely human with two internal pivotal elements, as a professional and as a person. That incredible combination of both in her simply amazed me. It is true that we did not manage to film at home. The federal protection service would not allow it. After all, attempts on her life are not ceasing to this day. It seemed to everyone that we were sitting somewhere at her country house when she was digging the flower bed. In actual fact, we were sitting under a tree next to the prosecutor's office. We just bought a marquee at the store and set it up there so that there was at least some kind of informal atmosphere. Incidentally, she agreed to put on a little vest and to remove her uniform, she put on a sweater and drank tea with us.

[Snegirev] I can add the following detail: When I interviewed her, it was her birthday. She did not even mention it.

But the interview was interrupted. There was shooting in the city and people were killed. She and I went to the scene of the crime next to a military unit. That was the "gift" that "Right Sector" had given her on her birthday.

[Kondrashov] That was the topographic unit in which our Russian Cossack from Volgograd, Ruslan Kazakov, died. That episode did not go into the film, but we did show it as an item on Vesti Nedeli [News of the Week"].

[Snegirev] And now about Chalyy. Also an unusual person, if only because he brought Sevastopol to Russia.

[Kondrashov] But Chalyy's services do not end there. For many years he paid with his own money for the historians who created the "Sevastopol knowledge" course. He paid teachers for this subject to be studied optionally in all Sevastopol schools. He helped the population counter the historical implantation of new heroes like Stepan Bandera.

He kept the people of Sevastopol Russian and helped them at least to survive. He used his own money to restore the 35th coastal battery and saved it from being built over with the villas of local oligarchs. He admitted to me: "Only once in my life have I given a bribe. Do you know what for?

"I gave that bribe to functionaries at the Ukrainian Ministry of Education. I brought it to Kyiv in my briefcase so that they would recommend my "Knowledge of Sevastopol" textbook for study in the city's schools."

[Snegirev] The bribe was to legalize what belongs to Sevastopol', its very history...

[Kondrashov] Otherwise that textbook would never have gotten to the schools. And Bandera would have been foisted on them as he was throughout Ukraine.

"Bastion" will not fire today

[Snegirev] How did you manage to mobilize an entire army for filming? I saw the "Bastion" missiles for the first time, I saw some serious equipment and people in uniform. I think that with an army like that you could reunite Crimea a second time. How did you manage it? Who helped? Those shots in terms of the scale of the vehicles and crowds involved can probably be compared to a good thriller.

[Kondrashov] There were a very great many vehicles. We had five helicopters alone. We spent three days flying on them.

[Snegirev] But for the filming you moved to a combat position a secret "Bastion" [coastal defence system] system, which probably caused a stir in the world balance of forces during the filming. Just as the "Bastion" frightened an entire American destroyer just by turning on its radar. An entertaining moment!

[Kondrashov] The local inhabitants and children were gathered there and they greatly surprised deputy commander General Ostrikov when they started shouting: Comrade General! Will the 'Bastion' fire today?" He said: "You can see what a secret weapon this is, but all the kids round here already know full well this is a 'Bastion' and not a 'Buk' or anything else."

Our channel did indeed succeed in mobilizing all resources. Representatives of the authorities in Moscow and in Crimea did come to our assistance so that the agreements could get through very quickly. But I can tell you that an enormous role here was played by the people themselves and the commanders and functionaries themselves on the spot. For instance, Aleksandr Viktorovich Vitko, the commander of the Black Sea Fleet, asked us: "What else do you need? You only have to say! If you want another armoured personnel carrier, we will bring it in. Do you want more KAMAZ trucks?" It is true, if you remember, that in actual fact it was not KAMAZ trucks but Ural trucks that took part in the operation with the naval infantry. So  we came on Urals. If there were Urals, that means there were Urals. If a K-27 helicopter came to pick up Yanukovych, it had to be a K-27. If there were three Mi-8 helicopters with it, then that was how everything had to be. Everyone helped us and everyone offered us even more assistance than we asked for.

[Snegirev] As a result you got a kind of anthology of Crimea's most recent history for our descendants. It was probably not just you but also those taking part in the filming who understood that?

[Kondrashov] Everyone was utterly aware that they were indeed taking part in a historical re-enactment of those events. That is why we had an enormous problem with Crimeans not wanting to put on Ukrainian uniforms. They said: I don't want my grandson to look at this film when he grows up and see his grandfather with a trident [Ukrainian symbol] on his sleeve patch.

[Snegirev] I can attest that the scene with the arrival of the "friendship" train from Kyiv was reproduced right down to the last shield. I was at the station and I saw it all.

[Kondrashov] Thank you, that is very pleasant to hear. There was actually one other interesting thing. All these hundreds of people with their home-made shields were marching along Karl Marx Street from the railroad station to the centre, to the headquarters where Aksyonov was. It was the middle of the night - about 0300 hours. Sheremet was in the column - now he is the first deputy in the Crimean Council of Ministers - and he got a telephone call from Aksyonov: "Misha, where are you? Listen, the Right Sector guys have broken through to Simferopol'. You must go get them right away. They are telling me that they are marching down Karl Marx Street right now, about 1,000 of them." "Serhiy Valeriyovych, that's us!" The city was mobilized to such an extent and the people were all so vigilant that they rapidly reported to the headquarters any movements by any groups. The crime rate had dropped to zero in the city.

We even had to close the airport

[Snegirev] What need was there for the "little green men?" Now we are being rebuked for annexing...

[Kondrashov] The need was simply obvious. A very, very powerful strike force with "Grads" was there in Chonhar, Perekop, and Turets'kyy Val. They were stopped only by the presence of several thousands of reinforcements who swelled the numbers of the personnel from our base at the Black Sea Fleet. This was an absolute necessity.

[Snegirev] How was the film born? Where did you look for your protagonists with their incredible stories? The boy who lost a leg, the Armenian who closed the airport, the blacksmith who forged the victory shields...

[Kondrashov] First we spent three months touring Crimea in order to talk to people. And these stories surfaced during our conversations. These people do not immediately tell their stories to camera. We recorded the conversations on a voice recorder. Then we laid out all these stories and the  artists set to work. We drew something like 250 pictures in A3 format, every frame. At the airport we got the opportunity to have six military Ural trucks with real naval infantrymen enter there. We had to close the airport and the railroad station for several days for filming.

"We will survive it all and everything will be fine..."

[Snegirev] People went to the referendum in Crimea voluntarily. It was raining terribly hard. In weather like that, particularly on a Sunday, you want to sit at home and watch TV. They all went, it was crowded, and they had to wait in line. The only people I saw in uniform were one or two policemen keeping order, but no more. But if you listen to our opponents, the referendum took place at gunpoint. There is famine in Crimea and it is about to reunite with Ukraine. How can we counter these lies? I get the impression that we are constantly having to justify ourselves. For what?

[Kondrashov] You know, if you look at specific steps, I think the time has come to organize press tours for foreign journalists. It is easier for them to write that Crimea is going hungry than to come here and look at the shelves in the stores and talk to people. After all, our work, which at one time consisted of war journalism, including the Donetsk Basin [Donbass] as an example, has for some reason suddenly ceased to be in demand by the West. Are there many people like our fine Englishman Graham Phillips? One Finn ventured to go to see the volunteer militia and he got a punch in the face from the Ukrainians.

[Snegirev] And what is going on now in Crimea? It has become virtually an island. You were last there a month ago, when the filming was being completed. What is the mood like?

[Kondrashov] You know, I cannot say the mood has changed by any substantial amount. It is as it was before. With the caveat: Do you think we are exchanging our non-functioning Visa cards so that everything goes back the way it was? Never! These are irreconcilable things.

When I actually managed to find people who had voted "against" at the referendum - 4 per cent actually did - then they are critical: We don't need your high prices, they say, although they realize what is happening to prices now in Ukraine - no, there is much we don't like! And then you ask them, just to check: Perhaps then you will return to Ukraine? God forbid! is what we always hear in response.

And those who voted "for" say: We shall surmount all the difficulties, we will survive it all and everything will be fine and, most importantly, we must ensure the Russian people understand that we will benefit them, that we have not joined Russia for nothing. That is the kind of talk we are hearing.

[Snegirev] At the end it is usual to ask about creative plans. Do they include making a similar film about Donbass?

[Kondrashov] It seems to me the time for a film about Donbass has not yet come, because we cannot yet sum anything up. War follows truce, we have seen that. But I think that when the time comes to make a similar film about Donbass, a group of film makers will have to gather together because those who today are seeing the grief and seeing the blood, who are running through the trenches and coming under the bomb raids and even dying, as you know full well, they should take part.

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 #20
Carnegie Moscow Center
March 20, 2015
Long Live Minsk II?
By BALÁZS JARÁBIK
Jarábik is a visiting scholar focusing on Ukraine and Eastern Europe.

More than a month has passed since the Minsk II agreements were signed on February 11. Fighting in the Donbas has quieted, though Kyiv has tabulated over a thousand ceasefire violations since the ceasefire was agreed upon. Compared to Minsk I, signed on September 5, the second provides a significantly better political framework for peace. However, all sides have competing interests at stake, and as a result, frequently contradictory interpretations of this framework. Indeed, if Minsk II is successful and the conflict in the Donbas ultimately freezes, Moscow will likely continue to destabilize other parts of Ukraine to prevent it from reorienting toward the West.

Ukraine, Russia, and the West each have their own red lines, many of which are dictated by domestic political agendas. Kyiv, for example, can neither admit its defeat nor agree to a Russia-brokered peace with the separatists. Russia can neither admit its war against Ukraine nor let the rebels fail. The West can neither give Ukraine the means to defend itself militarily and avoid economic collapse nor admit that Russia has more at stake in the crisis. These competing agendas present long-term impediments to a resolution of the conflict.

Control over the town of Debaltsevo was the most contentious issue during the February 11 Minsk talks. The separatists' capture of the town gave Moscow and the Donbas rebels what they wanted:  a transportation hub between Luhansk and Donetsk that allows Moscow to supply the regions and freeze the conflict. But there were also upsides for Kyiv when Debaltsevo fell. Most importantly, it consolidated Western solidarity and support for Ukraine's resistance efforts, which has become a key component of Ukraine's attempts to push back against Russian aggression.

The founder of this doctrine is Vladimir Gorbulin, a former national security adviser to President Leonid Kuchma who now advises President Poroshenko. If this doctrine prevails, what will it look like? Unable to defeat Russia militarily, Ukraine can only secure a victory by political means. Gorbulin's doctrine posits that Ukraine needs to prove that it is capable of resistance, not allowing Moscow to dictate the terms of Kyiv's relationship with the outside world. Western political unity in support of Kyiv is the key element of this strategy.

The implementation of this strategy relies not only on effective institution building (such as modernizing the armed forces), but also on waging an information war at home and in the West. Reported arms "deals" with Lithuania, the UAE, and others, and an appeal for an international peacekeeping mission are all part of Ukraine's information strategy.  While Russia wages its hybrid war against Ukraine, Kyiv is trying to use peaceful, hybrid methods to engage the West in its struggle-although not all the information it puts out is fully verifiable (and sometimes it is downright untrue). For example, in place of holding an official investigation into the killing of scores of protesters and police officers in February of 2014, the head of the Security Service of Ukraine simply accused Vladislav Surkov-one of Putin's advisers and a frequent visitor to Kyiv-of being in charge of a Russian sniper unit on the Maidan (an assertion that was later called into question by the Ukrainian General Prosecutor's office).

The Minsk agreements are fragile.How effectively they are implemented will depend primarily on the Europeans' ability to convince Moscow to pressure separatists into observing the ceasefire, and on Kyiv's ability to keep nationalist militias in line. If either side fails to do so, the fighting is likely to resume.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the city of Mariupol unlikely to be the next battlefield in the Donbas. The separatists may be able to circumvent it by using the Berdyansk' airport that Rinat Akhmetov is trying to acquire.  An assault on Mariupol might diminish its value as a functional port city. By attacking a Russian-speaking population, it would undermine Moscow's narrative that it seeks to protect the interests of Russian speakers. Although popular dissatisfaction with Kyiv is growing in the region and Mariupol oligarchs and separatist authorities signed a memorandum on order and security last May, that memorandum does  not mean the residents and local business leaders in Mariupol would prefer to be folded into the separatist republics.

Thus, the residents of Mariupol are caught in a bind.  They agree that life under separatist authorities would not be easier and are worried about being cut off from Russian markets. Yet many working class residents are not optimistic about Ukraine's future and are fearful of Ukrainian nationalist volunteer battalions they believe have brutalized some local populations in the east. The much-discussed land corridor to Crimea that Russia presumably needs to sustain the peninsula does not need to include Mariupol. Gas, water, electricity, and food travel to Crimea from other parts of Ukraine. If Kyiv actively pursues a policy of isolating and blockading the peninsula-based on legitimate political and security concerns-Russia and the separatists may have no other choice but to re-open the front there. Continued restrictions at the border between Ukraine and Crimea, fragile coal supplies, unpredictable gas negotiations, and trade relations that increasingly resemble a short-term barter system do not inspire much hope for the region.

The Kremlin understands that it cannot win Ukraine back through military means alone. The Russian public is not supportive of a full-scale war with Ukraine, so Moscow needs to take pressure off of its military. It also understands that the best way to foment unrest in other parts of the country and undermine Ukraine's integration with the West is to exploit corruption, the rapidly worsening economic and social situation, and oligarchs' dueling interests. In light of this, Moscow will likely pressure the separatists to freeze the conflict in the Donbas and try to shift its focus to undermining the fragile political situation in Kyiv.

A covert campaign to destabilize the Ukrainian government would play on Kyiv's existing internal divisions and may turn out to be the Kremlin's best weapon. The fight for Ukraine's future could move into a new phase of hybrid warfare, increasing the risk of Russian-sponsored "soft" terrorism. Unless Kyiv can kick-start the country's ailing economy, attempts by some in Ukraine's leadership to isolate the country from Russia will make life even worse for those in the south-eastern regions who are most dependent on eastern markets. This may further disharmonize the relationship between Kyiv and the regions and pave the way for an opposition victory in the upcoming local elections. South-eastern Ukraine may strike back.

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 #21
Moskovskiy Komsomolets
March 19, 2015
Russian expert decries Ukrainian bill on Donbass self-governance
Yelena Gamayun, Has Supreme Rada offended Merkel? Ukrainian deputies decide to hoodwink 'Normandy Four'

The Ukrainian Supreme Rada's adoption of amendments to the law on the special status of individual regions of Donetsk and Luhansk Regions has resulted in a scandal. "Kiev has crushed the fragile Minsk peace and brought the situation to an impasse. The DNR and LNR [Donetsk people's republic and Luhansk people's republic] say that no compromises with Kiev are possible until yesterday's shameful decisions by Poroshenko and the Supreme Rada are revoked," the republics' heads Oleksandr Zakharchenko and Ihor Plotnytskyy have already said in a joint statement.

Russian Foreign Ministry head Sergey Lavrov joined in the volunteer militia leaders' anger. "The resolutions adopted by the Supreme Rada making the introduction of special status in the Donets Basin [Donbass] conditional on holding elections are an attempt to overturn all previous accords," he said. After all, by its amendments to the law the Supreme Rada has determined that "some regions of Donetsk and Luhansk Regions" will get special status only after early elections held under Ukrainian laws. It is clear that it is not a case of the sequence of the points, which might still be acceptable, but of details which destroy the thrust of the matter as laid down in the 12 February Minsk agreements. The main thing to which the Minsk accords were geared was the holding of dialogue between Kiev and the supporters of the DNR and LNR. So immediately after the pull-put of heavy weapons there followed point 4, which reads: " On the first day after the pullout a dialogue is to start on modalities of conducting local elections in accordance with the Ukrainian legislation and the Law of Ukraine 'On temporary Order of Local Self-Governance in Particular Districts of Donetsk and Luhansk Regions', and also about the future of these districts based on the above-mentioned law." Even those who do not follow events in Ukraine particularly closely could note that Kyiv has not conducted any negotiations with the Donbas Not to mention the other essential points of the accords such as this: Provide pardon and amnesty by way of enacting a law that forbids persecution and punishment of persons in relation to events that took place in particular departments of Donetsk and Luhansk Regions of Ukraine, provide safe access, delivery, and distribution of humanitarian aid, define the modalities of a full restoration of social and economic connections, including social transfers, such as payments of pensions and other payments... Has anything in these points been enacted already? Or at least prepared at legislative level? There is not the slightest sign of it.

Instead the Supreme Rada, together with amendments to the law on special status, is adopting a document on the recognition of some regions of Donetsk and Luhansk Regions as "occupied" territories. And it is stating that elections can only take place there after all the "occupiers" leave these lands and that political parties registered in Ukraine will take part in the elections with active campaigning by the Ukrainian media. That is, if we read between the lines, these regions will receive special status only if there are no volunteer militia or any representatives of the DNR and LNR at all there. Actually, that is precisely how Petro Poroshenko faction leader Yuriy Lutsenko formulated the goals of the newly adopted amendments to the draft law: "We are adopting a law by which we are determining the possibility of elections to local organs of power on this territory when and only when the Ukrainian army and Ukrainian state bring the Ukrainian flag, Ukrainian parties, and Ukrainian law to this territory. These draft laws do not give a single concession either to the Kremlin or to the separatists, still less to the terrorists." And to cap it all, to make sure the meaning of the action was clear, the next day Lutsenko  wrote the following on his social networking site page: "The rest will be decided not by papers from the Supreme Rada but by the combat capability and morale of the Ukrainian Armed Forces." A peace plan in action, so to speak.

Expert's opinion

Mykhaylo Pohrebinsky, director of the Kiev Centre for Political Studies and Conflictology:

"In the words of the unforgettable [Soviet-era comedian] Arkadiy Raykin, this law can be described as 'playing stupid.' Its point is as follows: Ukraine is seemingly following the programme for the fulfilment of the Minsk accords but in actual fact is thwarting them. Since the Minsk accords clearly state that a law on special status should be adopted. Yet in the current draft law this law is simply mentioned in the context of having been adopted earlier. Now Poroshenko indicates that special status will be introduced only after local elections have been held, and that was not in the previous law. And local elections can be held only after the territories pass completely to the control of the Ukrainian authorities. And probably after the supporters of 'Right Sector' have dealt with all dissidents there. And so special status will be received by territories under the control of some kind of Yarosh [reference to Ukrainian nationalist Dmytro Yarosh]. It is clear that this suits no one on the other side. Moreover, I think this will ultimately not suit Merkel either. And they will clearly put pressure of some kind on Poroshenko. And if they do not, that will freeze the conflict and turn the DNR and LNR into territories with uncertain status. As a result the DNR and LNR will orient themselves towards economic ties with Russia and will move even further away from Ukraine. So that this draft law is harmful from the viewpoint of preserving the country's territorial integrity."

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 #22
Consortiumnews.com
March 19, 2015
Ukraine's Poison Pill for Peace Talks
By Robert Parry
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.

Exclusive: The Ukraine government's latest maneuver - undermining the Minsk-2 agreement with a requirement for a rebel surrender - is likely to drive the country back into a full-scale civil war and push the U.S. and Russia closer to a nuclear showdown, reports Robert Parry.

By adding a poison pill to legislation implementing the latest Minsk agreement, the Ukrainian government has effectively guaranteed a resumption of the civil war, which U.S. hardliners and the mainstream U.S. media will no doubt blame on ethnic Russian rebels and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The U.S. media has focused on the so-called Minsk-2 agreement's cease-fire component, first claiming it was being sabotaged by the rebels and Russia but now acknowledging that it is shaky but relatively successful. But the larger point of Minsk-2 was that it would provide for a political settlement of the civil war by arranging talks between Kiev and authorities in the east that would lead to giving those areas extensive self-rule by the end of 2015.

But the implementing law that emerged this week from the Ukrainian parliament in Kiev inserted a clause requiring the rebels to first surrender to the Ukrainian government and then letting Kiev organize elections before a federalized structure is determined.

The Minsk-2 agreement had called for dialogue with the representatives of these territories en route to elections and establishment of broad autonomy for the region, but Kiev's curveball was to refuse any talks with rebel leaders and insist on establishing control over these territories before the process can move forward, in effect requiring a rebel capitulation.

Reflecting that view, Vadim Karasyov, director of the independent Institute of Global Strategies in Kiev, said: "Ukraine isn't going to go along with any legalization of those so-called people's republics. We need them to be dismantled," according to the Christian Science Monitor.

The leaders of the Donetsk and Luhansk "people's republics" have protested this bait-and-switch tactic, declaring in a statement that the change was unacceptable: "We agreed to a special status for the Donbass within a renewed Ukraine, although our people wanted total independence. We agreed to this to avoid the spilling of fraternal blood."

Kiev's maneuver - reflecting the bellicose position of neocon Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and other U.S. hardliners - puts pressure on German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande to either get Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko to return to the original understanding of Minsk-2 or watch the fighting resume leading to a potential showdown between nuclear-armed Russia and the United States on Russia's border.

The surrender-first-negotiate-later stipulation also raises questions about the strength of Merkel and President Barack Obama to overcome resistance from America's powerful neoconservatives who have exploited the Ukraine crisis to isolate Russia and drive a wedge between Obama and Putin. The two leaders had cooperated to reduce tensions with Syria and Iran in 2013 when the neocons were hoping for more "regime change."

Following those Obama-Putin collaborations, Nuland and other neocons both inside the Obama administration and in Congress took aim at Ukraine, egging on public disruptions in Kiev to destabilize the elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych during the winter of 2013-14. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Neocons - Masters of Chaos."]

To a great extent, the Ukraine crisis became Nuland's baby as she rallied Ukraine's business leaders and political activists to challenge Yanukovych and discussed with U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt in early February 2014 how, in his words, to "midwife this thing."

In that same conversation, Nuland expressed her disgust at the European Union's less aggressive approach to the crisis with the pithy expression, "Fuck the EU." She also handpicked new leaders, ruling out some politicians and declaring that "Yats is the guy," a reference to Arseniy Yatsenyuk who became the post-coup prime minister. (This past week, it was Yatsenyuk who oversaw the insertion of the poison pill into the legislation for implementing the Minsk-2 agreement.)

Cue in the Neo-Nazis

The uprising in Kiev reached its peak on Feb. 22, 2014, when a violent coup - spearheaded by neo-Nazi militias from western Ukraine - drove elected Yanukovych from office, with the U.S. State Department immediately declaring the new regime "legitimate." The coup government then sought to impose its control over the ethnic Russian east and south, which had been Yanukovych's base of support.

Protected by Russian troops who were already based in Crimea on a base-lease agreement, the people of Crimea voted to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia, an annexation that took place one year ago. Uprisings also occurred in the eastern Donbass region with hastily arranged referenda also seeking independence from Kiev.

The coup regime responded by declaring those resisting in the east to be "terrorists" and mounting a punitive "anti-terrorist operation" that relied on army artillery to bombard cities and neo-Nazi and other right-wing militias to go in for the brutal street-to-street fighting.

Thousands of ethnic Russians were killed in these offensives as the rebels were pushed back into their strongholds of Donetsk and Luhansk. However, receiving supplies and other assistance from Russia, the rebels turned the tide of the conflict and began driving the Ukrainian military back, inflicting heavy losses.

To stop the rout of government forces last September, the first Minsk ceasefire established a tentative frontline around the rebel strongholds. But Kiev continued to squeeze the rebel-held cities by cutting off access to banking and other services while neo-Nazi and other militias undertook "death squad" operations to kill rebel sympathizers in government-controlled zones.

When that first cease-fire broke down, the rebels made new gains against the Ukrainian military, prompting Merkel and Hollande to broker a second ceasefire, which included a structure for resolving the crisis with a political settlement to grant eastern Ukraine substantial autonomy.

But Nuland and other U.S. hard-liners objected to the concessions and trade-offs arranged by Merkel and Holland and accepted by Poroshenko and Putin. The U.S. hard-liners began plotting how to reverse what they claimed was "appeasement" of "Russian aggression."

The German press has reported on some of this U.S. strategy after the Bild newspaper obtained details of conversations that Nuland and other U.S. officials held behind closed doors last month at a security conference in Munich. Nuland was overheard disparaging the German chancellor's initiative, calling it "Merkel's Moscow thing," according to Bild, citing unnamed sources.

Another U.S. official went even further, the report said, calling it the Europeans' "Moscow bullshit."

Talking Themselves into a Frenzy

The tough talk behind the closed doors at a conference room in the luxurious Bayerischer Hof hotel seemed to be contagious as the American officials, both diplomats and members of Congress, kept escalating their rhetoric, according to the Bild account.

Nuland suggested that Merkel and Hollande cared only about the practical impact of the Ukraine war on Europe: "They're afraid of damage to their economy, counter-sanctions from Russia."

Another U.S. politician was heard adding: "It's painful to see that our NATO partners are getting cold feet" - with particular vitriol directed toward German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen as "defeatist" because she supposedly no longer believed in a Kiev victory.

Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, got himself worked up into such a lather that he started making comparisons to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain going to Munich to "appease" Adolf Hitler, likening Merkel to Chamberlain and Putin to Hitler: "History shows us that dictators always take more, whenever you let them. They can't be brought back from their brutal behavior when you fly to Moscow to them, just like someone once flew to this city."

According to the Bild story, Nuland laid out a strategy for countering Merkel's diplomacy by using strident language to frame the Ukraine crisis in a way that stops the Europeans from backing down. "We can fight against the Europeans, we can fight with rhetoric against them," Nuland reportedly said.

NATO Commander Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove was quoted as saying that sending more weapons would "raise the battlefield cost for Putin." Nuland interjected to the U.S. politicians present that "I'd strongly urge you to use the phrase 'defensive systems' that we would deliver to oppose Putin's 'offensive systems.'"

Yet, through all of the past year's scheming and maneuvering by Nuland and other U.S. officials, the mainstream U.S. media has studiously ignored the coup side of the story, insisting that there was no coup and adopting an "I-see-nothing" response to the presence of neo-Nazi militias leading the fight against the ethnic Russian east.

For the New York Times, the Washington Post and the rest of major U.S. press, everything has been explained as "Russian aggression" with Putin supposedly having plotted the entire series of events as a way to conquer much of Europe as the new Hitler. Even though the evidence reveals that Putin was caught off-guard by the coup next door, the U.S. media has insisted on simply passing along Nuland's propaganda themes.

Thus, it is a safe bet that when the current ceasefire breaks down and the killing resumes, all the American people will hear is that it was Putin's fault, that he conspired to destroy the peace as part of his grand scheme of "aggression." And, the Nuland-Yatsenyuk sabotage of Minsk-2 will be the next part of this troubling story to disappear into the memory hole.

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 #23
Gazeta.ru
March 14, 2015
Moscow website views claim that Kiev has agents in separatist leadership
Vladimir Dergachev, Kiev's long reach. Nalyvaychenko claims Ukrainian agents inside LPR and DPR leadership

The Ukrainian special services have agents inside the leadership of the self-proclaimed Donbass [Donets Basin] republics. This has been publicly stated by Valentyn Nalyvaychenko, leader of the Ukrainian Security Service [SBU]. An expert close to the Kremlin interprets these words as nothing more than an attempt at psychological pressure.

In an interview with Ukrainian publication Levyy Bereg [LB.ua], the SBU leader asserted that the Kiev authorities have full control over the situation in Donbass. Nalyvaychenko says there are people in the self-proclaimed DPR [Donetsk People's Republic] and LPR [Luhansk People's Republic], including within the republics' leadership, who are cooperating with the Ukrainian Security Service and are immediately reporting to Petro Poroshenko on any strategic decisions made by the DPR and LPR leadership.

"What I mean is that despite everything, we have the situation in Donetsk and Luhansk under control. There are people on the ground who are helping us, including within the direct leadership of the DPR and the LPR. Therefore we are fully informed," Nalyvaychenko stated.

The SBU head gave no details about the agents' work in the Donbass people's republics. "I am simply saying that our level of understanding of the situation is pretty profound," the SBU head added.

In the interview, Nalyvaychenko mentioned the tasks the SBU is working on. The first is creating, jointly with Internal Affairs Ministry Forces, a security belt around the temporarily occupied territories, and the second is winning over the minds of people who are still there. "These tactics will give us the opportunity to gradually change the situation and minimize the local population's support for the terrorists," the SBU head remarked.

Aleksey Chesnakov, a political analyst close to presidential aide Vladislav Surkov, said that from a professional viewpoint this statement can hardly be taken seriously: "This is clearly a political statement. It is either intended for a domestic audience - to demonstrate the SBU's 'effectiveness' to Ukrainians. Or for an external audience - Nalyvaychenko has decided to introduce discord and wavering into the ranks of the republics' leadership so that they look for enemies within their own ranks."

Many former Ukrainian functionaries and people closely associated with the Party of Regions are indeed among the leaders of the self-proclaimed republics.

However, it is in any case impossible to verify Nalyvaychenko's words about agents in the entourage of [DPR head Oleksandr] Zakharchenko and LPR premier Ihor Plotnytskyy. And the republics' closed state security structures are unlikely to comment publicly, considering they usually report sparingly on their activities.

Several Gazeta.ru sources in the republics' leadership have previously spoken about DPR leaders' closeness to Donetsk oligarch Rinat Akhmetov. The figures that they linked to Akhmetov include DPR head Oleksandr Zakharchenko and Vostok Battalion commander Oleksandr Khodakovskyy, among others.

In one interview at the beginning of the uprising in Donbass, people's governor Pavlo Hubaryev told Rossiyskaya Gazeta that two-thirds of militants were funded by the oligarch.

Gazeta.ru sources close to the Kremlin said that Moscow is using the Donetsk oligarch as a bridge for negotiations with Kiev.

It is well known that humanitarian aid from Akhmetov's foundations has not been plundered and has reached the local population, unlike humanitarian aid from Russian white trucks.

As regards the LPR, Gazeta.ru has written in the past that Oleksandr Yefremov, former governor and prominent member of the Party of Regions, has a considerable number of his people in the leadership.

They include Luhansk head Manolis Pilavov, who under Yefremov handled negotiations with municipal  order contractors and directors of enterprises in charge of budget funds. Rodion Miroshnyk, journalist, former press secretary to Viktor Yanukovych, and deputy head of Luhansk Region administration, is another "ex" who has now been raised on LPR's political pedestal. Miroshnyk is currently Ihor Plotnytskyy's internal policy adviser.

Meanwhile, criminal proceedings have been initiated in Ukraine against Yefremov himself as well as several other prominent leaders of the "regionals".

It can be confidently said that there are many rank-and-file saboteurs in Donetsk and Luhansk. The SBU regularly posts intercepts on the web in which local militants complain about mobile sabotage groups in Russian uniform and with Russian passports firing on the city. The DPR explained these incidents to Gazeta.ru by saying that several million Ukrainians, including supporters of Kiev, have Russian passports.

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 #24
Sputnik
March 22, 2015
Ukraine's 'Ministry of Truth' Wants 15-Year Prison Terms for Journalists

Ukraine's Minister of Information Policy, Yuri Stets, said in an interview to Radio Liberty that he wants people who work for local television in Donetsk and Luhansk to serve eight to 15 years in prison.

"I think that it's effective enough for law enforcement to work there so that people who worked for the channels of the so-called LPR [Luhansk People's Republic] and DPR [Donetsk People's Republic] got the following sentences: eight to 15 years."

In the same interview, Stets says that he has been able to convince Europeans that his ministry will not be a "Ministry of Censorship." In addition, he announced that a new radio station aimed at Crimea will be launched sometime next week.

The Ministry of Information Policy remains the least-popular ministry in Ukraine according to opinion polls, and often refer to it as the "Ministry of Truth" for its contradictory aims, referencing George Orwell's novel '1984.' On Thursday, the ministry took control of a financial education television channel, intending to launch a new international broadcaster, Ukraine Tomorrow.

In February, the Ministry of Information Policy launched the "Ukrainian Information Army," a project which intended to start arguments in comment sections of Russian news websites to shift public opinion. The project failed after warriors failed to convince Russians that Ukraine's declining standard of living is the fault of Russia and personally Putin, and has since become a mailing list of links to share on social media.

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 #25
U.S. faces meager options for further Russia energy sanctions
By Timothy Gardner
March 23, 2015

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States will struggle to follow through on threats to impose deeper sanctions on the Russian energy sector, as European fears over collateral economic damage leave President Barack Obama's administration with diminished options.

Energy is the economic lifeblood of Russia, which vies with the United States and Saudi Arabia to be the world's top oil producer, and the sector is the main target of Western sanctions over Moscow's role in the conflict in Ukraine.

But current sanctions have already hit the easiest targets in Russia's high-tech exploration projects in the Arctic, Siberian shale, and deep-sea. That leaves the United States with less palatable options, such as trying to target the country's oil exports, as it has done with Iran.

Even though global oil prices have dropped by roughly half since last year, the United States' European allies remain skittish over any damaging repercussions on energy supplies.
Russia could respond by squeezing the gas exports on which Europe relies heavily.

"If you start playing around with oil prices, Russia is going to play around with gas, and there's no way Europe is going to go along with it," said Carlos Pascual, who until last August was the top energy diplomat at the U.S. State Department.

The current top U.S. diplomat on energy issues, Amos Hochstein, says Washington has not exhausted its sanctions toolkit should Russian President Vladimir Putin expand the war in Ukraine. And Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said last week that the administration is ready to "increase the costs" on Russia if it breaks the terms of a ceasefire.

Hochstein, the State Department's special envoy and coordinator for international affairs, told Reuters it was unlikely Washington would put sanctions on Russia's current oil production, though he stopped short of ruling it out.

"We'd want to look at what affects Russia, the assessment today versus a year ago is different, because the oil markets today are different than they were then," Hochstein said.
"Russia can and should be a market participant, but it has to play by the rules of the game."

Cracks are showing in European support for more sanctions. Going alone on sanctions is not a realistic option for Washington since it would block U.S. energy companies from collaborating with Russia and let European ones in.

Western sanctions imposed late last year forced U.S. oil company Exxon Mobil out of Russia's Arctic and ended its collaboration with Russian state oil company Rosneft, with which it signed a $3.2 billion deal in 2011 to develop the region.

European Council President Donald Tusk said on Friday it was increasingly hard to maintain a united position on sanctions in the 28-country bloc. EU officials speaking on condition of anonymity said that half or more of the bloc's countries would like to see easing of the measures.

So far, Western sanctions have blocked investments and technology transfers in the frontier oil drilling projects, targeted capital flows into Russia and slapped Putin's inner circle with asset freezes and travel bans.

Combined with the drop in oil prices, the sanctions have hammered the Russian economy, with the rouble down 40 percent against the dollar since mid-2014, driving it toward recession.

But none of this has loosened Putin's grip on Crimea since Russia annexed it a year ago, even though Russia agreed last month in Minsk to a cease-fire with Ukraine. Putin's domestic popularity has risen since the imposition of sanctions.    
 
The West could take further steps to halt investment in Russian shale oil drilling, which Moscow is counting on to offset eventual declines in output from traditional oil fields.

But more sanctions on shale drilling would be slow to do further damage to the Russian economy because that resource is three to 10 years from significant production.

That underlines how the West lacks obvious options to hit Russia's energy business in the short-term and influence its Ukraine strategy, experts said.

"These tools may hurt and bite over time, but the inherent fragility of the Ukraine is so high it is working against the ability of the West to achieve its goals," said Andrew Weiss, a Russia expert in two previous administrations.

The bluntest sanctions tool available would be to block Russia access to the SWIFT global electronic banking system, as the West did with Iran. Russian bankers and officials have described this as a nuclear option that would lead to full economic warfare.

And beyond energy technology, the United States and Europe simply do not have much that Russia needs, experts say.

"Apart from capital, technology, and certain market access, some of which has been targeted by previous sanctions, there are not that many things Russia wants from the West," said Marik String, a sanctions lawyer at WilmerHale and former counsel on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

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#26
The National Interest
March 20, 2015
Reckless: Obama's Advisers Go Rogue
On the issue of Ukraine, the president has lost control over key administration officials.
By James Carden
James Carden is a Contributing Editor for The National Interest.

A high-profile campaign by three well-regarded think tanks (Brookings, the Atlantic Council and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs) urging President Obama to send so-called defensive weapons to Kiev recently kicked off a surprisingly intense debate inside the Beltway over the wisdom of such a policy. Former government officials and academics acting in a very public manner to try and influence administration policy one way or another is par for the course and is, especially when it results in a substantive debate over the merits of a given policy choice, a very good sign that democratic discourse is not dead in Washington-at least not yet.

The debate over whether to arm Kiev is raging inside the Obama administration as well, and it is here that the behavior of some of the president's men and women has been somewhat questionable. Unlike former high-office holders ensconced in multimillion-dollar ivory towers off of Massachusetts Avenue NW, current government officials reporting directly to the president of the United States might consider keeping their own counsel (or at least, conveying their counsel privately), rather than publicly trying to corner Mr. Obama into endorsing a policy for which he may rightfully have reservations.

It will surprise just about no one that most aggressive lobbyist for arming Kiev among Mr. Obama's team has been the Department of State's Victoria Nuland. At the Munich Security conference last month, the German newspaper BILD reported that Nuland huddled with the U.S. delegation and NATO Supreme Allied Commander Philip Breedlove to strategize on ways to sell the idea of arming Kiev to the Europeans. According to the BILD report, Nuland advised the assembled that when discussing the possibility of arming Kiev, "I'd strongly urge you to use the phrase 'defensive systems' that we would deliver to oppose Putin's 'offensive systems.'" At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on March 10, Nuland again pushed the case for arming Kiev, noting that "in the last few days, we can confirm new transfers of Russian tanks, armored vehicles, heavy artillery and rocket equipment over the border to the separatists in eastern Ukraine."

She is hardly alone. On March 3, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee and expressed his openness to sending weapons to Kiev: "I think we should absolutely consider providing lethal aid...and it ought to be in the context of our NATO allies because Putin's ultimate objective is to fracture NATO." His boss, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter signaled his willingness to provide weapons during his confirmation hearing, telling Senator John McCain, "We need to support the Ukrainians in defending themselves...I am inclined in the direction of providing them with arms, including...lethal arms."

Not to be outdone, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper recently testified before the same committee and said that, despite the recommendations of the very agencies he oversees (and the opinion of Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency), he personally favors sending arms to Ukraine. And for his part, NATO's Breedlove has been doing his level best to keep up the pressure on both the Europeans and the administration, having, according to an eye-opening report in Der Spiegel, established a pattern releasing what might be termed "disinformation" to the press to undermine the tenuous ceasefire. According to the report:

The pattern has become a familiar one. For months, Breedlove has been commenting on Russian activities in eastern Ukraine, speaking of troop advances on the border, the amassing of munitions and alleged columns of Russian tanks. Over and over again, Breedlove's numbers have been significantly higher than those in the possession of America's NATO allies in Europe. As such, he is playing directly into the hands of the hardliners in the US Congress and in NATO. [emphasis added]

Intra-administration squabbles over foreign policy often do go public; many recall the battles between Vance and Brzezinski during the Carter years; the differences between Weinberger and Shultz under Reagan; Powell versus, well, almost everyone under George W. Bush. But for direct reports of the president of the United States to be openly and quite publicly lobbying for a policy goal that he still has under consideration is a new and troubling development. Worse, the military, in the person of Gen. Breedlove, seems to be intentionally exaggerating claims of Russian malfeasance with the intent of stirring up alarm on Capitol Hill. And just as bad is the damage that all of this is doing to a transatlantic alliance already divided over the issue of Russian sanctions and more.

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 #27
The New Statesman (UK)
March 23, 2015
We can only stand up to Russian propaganda by being true to ourselves
Russian attempts to blame the West or Ukrainian fascists for the crisis in Ukraine are nonsense, but if we don't stay true to our values, we'll hand the Kremlin another PR victory.
BY DAVID CLARK
David Clark is the editor of Shifting Grounds.

Information warfare is the hot topic of the moment one year on from Russia's annexation of Crimea. Caught off guard by the scale and audacity of Moscow's propaganda offensive, Western governments and think tanks are straining to catch up with seminars and conferences devoted to analysing Russia's mastery of the information landscape. The governments of the UK, Denmark, Lithuania and Estonia have tabled joint proposals for an EU response. The Ukrainian government is launching a TV news channel and mobilising an Internet army in a conscious effort to emulate Russian tactics. Matching Russia, spin for spin, seems to be the desired goal.

Some of this may be worthwhile, but much of it will be ineffective or even counterproductive unless greater effort is made to understand why Russian propaganda works. The starting point has to be an honest acknowledgement that the Kremlin's most effective lies are built on foundations of truth. They play on the insecurities of Western societies that have become disoriented by economic crisis and the divisive legacy of the War on Terror. Messages are cleverly targeted at those who are already questioning their values and place in the world. Above all, Putin's propagandists are adept at exploiting our mistakes and turning them against us.

Russia's depiction of the revolt that ousted Viktor Yanukovych from power as a Western-sponsored fascist coup may be absurd, but it's a fiction we helped to create. An intercepted phone call between US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and her Ambassador in Kiev, in which they mused imperiously on who should run the country as the regime crumbled, made it seem like Washington was pulling the strings. The decision to include the Russophobic and anti-Semitic Svoboda party in the post-Yanukovych government allowed Putin to warn Crimeans that the fascists were coming. America didn't overthrow Yanukovych, the people of Ukraine did. The far right has very little support in Ukraine; Svoboda failed to get 5% in last autumn's parliamentary elections. Yet these mistakes enabled Russia's information warriors to make their narrative stick.

A favoured theme of Russian propaganda is the status of ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking minorities in the ex-Soviet states. The Russian government routinely refers to the seventeen million or so 'compatriots' living in neighbouring countries as persecuted minorities in need of protection. Although the claim is flimsy, Ukrainian lawmakers helped to give it substance in the days following the fall of Yanukovych by voting to repeal legislation that granted the Russian language official status in certain regions. The decision was vetoed by the acting President, but the damage had already been done. The language issue still crops up in conversation with those who think that Putin's claim to be acting in defence of human rights has some basis in fact.

The Baltic States have long been a focus of criticism from Moscow and last autumn a senior Russian Foreign Ministry official threatened them with "unfortunate consequences" over their treatment of ethnic Russian minorities. Some fear that Putin is preparing the ground for his next military adventure. The reality is that Russians living in the Baltic are far less likely to be victims of discrimination than, say, people from the Caucasus living in Moscow. Yet tough language requirements do mean that many Russians in Latvia and Estonia are unable to get citizenship and experience reduced educational and employment opportunities. More could and should be done to integrate them into society.

Given the fear of Russian intervention and the suspicion that ethnic Russians might be used as a 'fifth column', examples of overt discrimination and political persecution are quite rare. A particularly glaring exception concerns the treatment of Viktor Uspaskich, the Russian-born founder of the Lithuanian Labour Party, prosecuted for fraudulent accounting of his party's finances. In a case that featured political pressure on the judiciary, the use of forged evidence and countless abuses of due process, Uspaskich was eventually sentenced to four years in prison in 2013. Only his immunity as an MEP now prevents his incarceration. Tomorrow, the European Parliament will vote on a request from the Lithuania authorities to revoke that immunity.

For once the suggestion that the judicial process has been politically manipulated doesn't need to be inferred. A leaked US diplomatic cable records the boast of a senior Lithuanian official that he and his government "engineered the departure of Labor Party kingpin Viktor Uspaskich from Lithuania because of the latter's ties to the Russian SVR". The SVR is Russia's foreign espionage service, but no evidence linking Uspaskich to it has ever been produced, nor does a charge to that effect appear on any indictment. The only real connection appears to be Uspaskich's Russian ethnicity.

Our best protection against Russian propaganda isn't counter-propaganda; it's the resolute defence of democratic standards. Compromising those standards plays into Putin's hands by allowing him to blur the distinction between his methods and ours. This, in turn, weakens our capacity to resist by sowing doubt about what we are seeking to defend. A renewed attempt to restrict the Russian language in Ukraine would suggest to many people that this is not a fight between European values and authoritarianism, but between two different forms of nationalism. It's a fight most Europeans would not wish to be part of. Weaponising the legal system to take out your political opponents is pure Putinism. If we weaken the rule of law to combat Russia, we have already lost.

We can't defeat the cynicism of the Kremlin's information war unless we remain true to ourselves. The European Parliament would be doing itself, Lithuania and the West in general a favour if it votes this week to uphold Victor Uspaskich's immunity instead of handing Vladimir Putin yet another stick with which to beat us.

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 #28
The Independent (UK)
March 20, 2015
Alexander Litvinenko murder inquiry: Suspect's evidence could radically change the final outcome
Dmitri Kovtun's 11th-hour request to testify could drastically change the inquiry's results
By MARY DEJEVSKY
One of the country's most respected commentators on Russia, the EU and the US, Mary Dejevsky has worked as a foreign correspondent all over the world, including Washington, Paris and Moscow. She is now the chief editorial writer and a columnist at The Independent and regularly appears on radio and television. She is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Buckingham.
    
After eight years of delay and eight weeks of brisk court hearings, the public part of the inquiry into the radiation death of the Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko was on track to hear closing statements before Easter. Now, the whole process has fallen into disarray with the disclosure that one of the two men wanted by Scotland Yard for murder has asked to take part.

The bombshell came at what had been billed a routine procedural hearing on Thursday afternoon. The counsel for the inquiry, Robin Tam QC, disclosed that Dmitri Kovtun had been in contact with inquiry officials over the previous two weeks and asked to become a "core participant".

"Core participants" are those regarded as having a direct interest in the case; they are entitled to legal representation and to testify. So far, they are Litvinenko's widow, Marina, the Metropolitan Police, the Home Office, and the UK Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston. Mr Kovtun and his fellow suspect, Andrey Lugovoy, were offered core participant status but declined it, as did the Russian government.

Mr Kovtun's application has two main consequences. The first is that the inquiry has been adjourned for a week to consider the request; whatever is decided, there is little chance now that the open hearings can be wrapped up before Easter. All the efforts of the chairman, Sir Robert Owen, to keep to schedule and overturn the reputation of such inquiries for extravagance in time and money look set to be frustrated.

Alexander Litvinenko died in November 2006 (Getty Images) Alexander Litvinenko died in November 2006 (Getty Images)
Long term the effect could be to change the course, character, and possibly the outcome, of the proceedings. It seems unlikely Mr Kovtun's application will be refused. In opening statements Sir Robert, as well as counsel for the inquiry, virtually pleaded with the two accused to take part. They made clear that arrangements could be made, even at that late stage, for them to be represented and to testify from Moscow. Russia has cited constitutional constraints as the reason for refusing extradition.

It can only be speculated why Mr Kovtun has changed his mind. His 11th-hour move could be seen as a deliberate KGB-type ploy, designed to sow chaos and confusion. But there could be quite a different explanation. Ever since the Met named Mr Kovtun and Mr Lugovoy as the chief suspects, the running in terms of publicity and denials has been made by Andrey Lugovoy.

Early on, he gave press conferences and interviews in Moscow; it was he who took a lie-detector test (much ridiculed during the inquiry) for a Russian TV documentary. And it is he who was allocated a safe seat in the Russian parliament, which carries with it immunity from prosecution. Mr Lugovoy has also received two honours from President Putin, the latest only two weeks ago.

Could Mr Kovtun perhaps have become angered by the disparity between Mr Lugovoy's treatment by the authorities and his own? The Litvinenko Inquiry has heard that both men were treated in a Russian hospital for radiation exposure, but the reports also suggested that Mr Kovtun was the worse affected, suffering hair loss and burns. His family circumstances also appear to be less stable. Might he have less to lose by spilling some (or all of the) beans?

If the motives for Mr Kovtun's change of heart are so far unknowable, what has emerged from the inquiry so far suggests he has a story to tell. He took last-minute flights and stayed in hotel rooms all booked by other people and paid for with other people's money. Unlike Mr Lugovoy, he left no credit card or mobile phone trail. And he seldom appears on CCTV footage, though he does show up on the way to the toilet, on the afternoon Litvinenko drank the possibly fatal tea at the Millennium Hotel in Mayfair. He also left contradictory, if any, impressions with those he met - the perfect cover for an assassin.

The inquiry was told that Mr Kovtun had contacted a former workmate at a Hamburg restaurant and asked him whether he knew anyone in food or drink establishments in London who might administer a "very expensive poison". That testimony has yet to be heard (there appear to be difficulties agreeing terms with the German authorities). But an Albanian émigré in London has testified that he had worked in Hamburg with Mr Kovtun, who contacted him out of the blue shortly before Litvinenko fell ill. The inquiry was not told about the outcome of that conversation or any meeting; such information, it may be surmised, was deemed too sensitive for the open hearings.

Whether or not he testifies, the prospect of Mr Kovtun being represented at the inquiry could change its character. So far little cross-examination has taken place. Witnesses whose evidence supports the thesis that the two suspects, and ultimately Putin, "did it" have been heard generally at length and without challenge. The few who have questioned that consensus have found themselves savaged, with attempts made to discredit them personally. If Mr Kovtun is represented, that can only enhance the credibility of an inquiry that was becoming more one-sided by the week.

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 #29
Russia Insider
http://russia-insider.com
March 23, 2015
Hey, NYT! We Fixed Your "Scary Right-Wing Conference in Russia" Story
What could be more horrifying than fringe political groups congregating in a room in St. Petersburg for a single day? We have some ideas
By Riley Waggaman

Russia is in the midst of a fringe ultra-nationalist renaissance, according to The New York Times, which witnessed firsthand some racists talking in a room in St. Petersburg. For a day.

Brace yourself, reader. In Putin's Russia, right-wing groups (and a guy dressed up like a cossack) met together and shared their common woes: The looming Muslim takeover of Europe; Asians stealing all the good university scholarships; babies still not white enough. The usual grievances from the usual weirdos. Which isn't to say it's not terrible.

But can we really say it's so much worse than the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference, held annually in America's swamp-capital? Your Moscow correspondent once covered a CPAC extravaganza, and basically it was non-stop anti-immigrant, Islamophobic garble - the major difference being that at CPAC all the racist garbage came from Donald Trump, and not some no-name skinhead from Golden Dawn.

Yes, Russia allowed right-wing groups to meet and complain about their right-wing problems. And we're very glad that The New York Times decided to write about this particular, one-day "haven".

But did you know that there is a country that gives right-wing groups far more than an afternoon lease on a St. Petersburg ballroom? There is actually a country quite close to Russia that gives its right-wing groups carte blanche to kill and terrorize uncooperative citizens. This country is called Ukraine. And it is a bastion of freedom and European values, according to The New York Times.

Ukraine is hands down the world's safest haven for right-wing groups, because instead of throwing its swastika enthusiasts in prison like other European nations, it gives them guns and laurels.

In August, Ukrainian chocolate sultan Petro Poroshenko awarded the leader of the pro-choice knitting club Azov Battalion, Andriy Biletsky, with the Order For Courage.

Biletsky is not only a courageous Wolfsangel-bedazzled freedom fighter, he is also the head of Ukraine's creatively named Social-National Assembly, which is committed to "punishing severely sexual perversions and any interracial contacts that lead to the extinction of the white man."

Close your eyes and try to imagine the font size 72 Caps Lock New York Times front page screamfest if it was discovered that Vladimir Putin had decorated a brain-dead maniac who has promised "to prepare [Russia] for further expansion and to struggle for the liberation of the entire White Race."

Now change "Vladimir Putin" to "Petro Poroshenko" and "Russia" to "Ukraine" and you will finally understand why we live in an upside down nightmare garbage world where people freak out about a one-day conference of fringe groups in St. Petersburg.

(True to their mission of proliferating misery, western newspapers have described the gentlemen who serve in Biletsky's battalion as "battle-scarred patriots.")

Of course, it all depends on how you define "battle-scarred." One of the nationalist battalions under the control of Ukraine's Ministry of Defense has been accused by Amnesty International of "widespread abuses, including abductions, unlawful detention, ill-treatment, theft, extortion, and possible executions" - what Newsweek describes as "ISIS-style war crimes."

The United States Army now has tentative plans to start training these gentlefolk, and The New York Times seems A-Okay with this.

So anyway. Russia. Host to right-wing scum for a day-long conference. What's next? Will Putin start giving them guns, medals and military training?

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 #30
http://journalitico.com
March 21, 2015
The Washington Post needs a reality check
By Danielle Ryan
Reporter, The Sunday Business Post (Ireland). Danielle is an Irish journalist and blogger. She has a degree in Business and German from Trinity College Dublin and studied political reporting at the Washington Center for Politics and Journalism in Washington, DC.

The Washington Post's latest editorial on Ukraine (Helping Ukraine in its time of need), deserves some attention.

In an ideal world, it would - being so totally useless - be disregarded as waffle. But things as they are, that is highly unlikely and so let's give it a look.

It begins, as many before it have, with a statement so ludicrously one-sided you would be forgiven for giving up and going to Instagram a picture of your lunch instead.

"RUSSIA HAS not abided by the latest cease-fire in eastern Ukraine."

But let's persevere.

For some time now, it's been apparent that the Washington Post is living in a mystical world where lethal weapons cause death and destruction only if they're launched from east to west. As such, the anti-government forces in the east can be conveniently blamed for everything.

And when the reality on the ground doesn't always match that neat little narrative, it is either barely referenced, reported as ambiguous or simply written out of history.

Take for example - and let me detour here for a minute - the media blackout on an incident last week which saw an eight-year-old girl mowed down and killed by a Ukrainian army tank, full of reportedly drunk Ukrainian forces in the town of Konstantinovka.

Yes, this particular incident was an accident. No one is suggesting that it wasn't. But that's not the point.

This would have been a major international news incident had anti-government rebel forces killed an eight-year-old Ukrainian girl by rolling over her with a tank - such a horrific death. It would have been presented to the world as proof that the rebel forces are careless, terrorist thugs unmoved by human suffering.

Instead there was silence. Type the word 'Konstantinovka' into Google News now and see what you can find. It's not the kind of story that BuzzFeed, CNN, Newsweek, Time or the BBC etc. felt justified any attention.

But back to the Post's editorial.

Russia, the writers continue, has taken the opportunity offered by the ceasefire to "send more weapons across the border" and "its forces" (Russia's official forces, we can assume?) "continue to shell Ukrainian positions".

No one else is doing any shelling, of course.

Russia may well be sending weapons to the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk people's republics. I don't know. Neither, I'm willing to bet, do the editors of the Washington Post. But pfft, why let a little formality like evidence deter you?

In the same fashion, they continue on, excoriating Vladimir Putin for ordering new military exercises in western Russia; a sign, they say, that he is preparing an offensive to seize some territory. It's unclear where this territory is.

Interestingly, the Post brings this detail about Russian military drills to our attention without any context whatsoever or any explanation for why Russia might feel justified in conducting military drills on its own land.

What context, you ask?

Perhaps it was, after US and UK tanks rolled through eastern Estonia 300 yards from the Russian border three weeks ago, that Putin felt a little perturbed. Not to mention the rapid build-up of NATO troops in numerous other eastern European countries during the past year. Or the hundreds of unreported NATO flights along Russian borders (because it's only a big deal when Russia does it, remember!).

It is ironic, the surprise and dismay that is apparent in our media, when Russia conducts military exercises inside its own borders or in international airspace. Shock! Horror! How dare they!

It's just a suggestion, but the US and its NATO allies might want to reconsider the provocative nature of their own actions before expressing outrage when other powers make moves to resist them or to similarly display their own strength.

Of course then they wouldn't be able to use Russia's completely justified responses for fear-mongering purposes, so that suggestion is probably a no-go.

And, perfectly in step with Washington and Downing Street, the Post prefers to paint Russia as a loose cannon, saber-rattling in an otherwise peaceful and unthreatening world.

There is no great value in a game of 'my tank is bigger than yours' but let's not act surprised that world leaders will always line up for a seat at that table.

The editorial here changes direction, meandering into a discussion about how the IMF's recently agreed-upon package of financial aid for Ukraine gives Russia "an opening".

The Post notes the IMF's recent determination that Ukraine needs at least $40 billion to keep its currency afloat and meet its external debt commitments in the next four years. It also notes that the desperate-to-help-Ukraine West has only pledged $7.5 billion so far, leaving Ukraine to extract $15 billion in debt relief from its foreign bond-holders, the largest of which is Russia.

What a fantastic, game-changing opening. An end to all Russia's woes really, isn't it?

The point the Post is making is that Russia is taking the "hard line" on Ukraine's debt - and how dare they! Because of course, Western countries would never take the hard-line with a debt ridden country hard-pressed to pay it back. That would be terribly unfair, wouldn't it?

This leads us to a real kicker.

This debt dilemma puts Natalie Jaresko, Ukraine's American-born finance minister, in the position of attempting to negotiate debt relief with an enemy (Russia, that is) which seeks "nothing less than the destruction of her government".

Interesting. What were the editors saying when the freedom-loving Ukrainians of yore were demanding nothing less than the destruction of the Yanukovych government? Can someone dig up that editorial?

What's the difference? Could it perhaps be that Yanukovych was not part of a hand-picked pro-US Ukrainian government, and that Mr. Poroshenko and his (literally) foreign ministers are?

In fairness, the Post does then admit that Western leaders, using "lofty rhetoric" about how important it is to help Ukraine, have not followed up with particularly big checks. The $2 billion offered by the United States, they say, is a "paltry sum compared with the bailouts that have been delivered to other allies in crisis".

The editors go on to lament that not only are Western leaders not coughing up the cash to help Ukraine pay its debts to Moscow, but neither will they help "stop its army".

The future of Western values in "much of Europe" (is there another war we don't know about?) depends on whether the West will come to Ukraine's defense. Which parts of Europe is the Post referring to?

Estonia? Latvia? Maybe Lithuania, which recently confused a train full of Russian students for an invasion...? Or perhaps Hungary, which has seen its attempts to keep friendly relations with both Russia and the West seriously hampered by an insistence from Brussels and Washington that "unity" is of paramount importance in "dealing" with Moscow.

'Unity' here is a code word for: Don't evening f***ing think about it.

The Poroshenko government, the Post finally pleads, has not asked for a no-strings handout. It is committed to a program of radical and painful reforms, presumably to become more functional and to be fully recreated in the West's image - and we should all do more to help.

I suppose banning Euronews from being broadcast in Ukraine, which Kiev just did, fits nicely in line with these European values of free speech and democracy we hear they are so ardently committed to.

It's against this backdrop that Germany and the United States have pledged to keep sanctions on Russia in place until the Minsk agreements are "upheld" - a self-serving Catch 22.

As pointed out by Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the Russian parliament, tying the easing of sanctions to the full implementation of the Minsk ceasefire leaves Russia in a no-win situation.

Kiev will now have no incentive to implement the Minsk agreements because their priority is to keep sanctions in place - and because they know full well they will not be held accountable for anything.

Let me finish by referring to a book written in 1996 and which caught my attention on Twitter yesterday. The book is Flashpoint: World War III, written by Andrew Murray.

In it, he wrote:

(and remember this is 1996)

"The Ukraine itself is clearly pregnant with the possibility of conflict, divided between a Russian-oriented and heavily industrial east, and a nationalistic west..."

"'Ukraine for the Ukrainians' shout the western Ukrainians; 'union with Russia' and 'life was better under the Communists' say the eastern. Russia's conflict with the Ukraine over control of the Crimea, most of whose people wish to be reattached to the Russian Federation, is a further source of friction. The US and Germany have clearly declared for an independent Ukraine, primarily as a means of weakening their Russian rival.  Germany is in the lead here, too....the burgeoning Ukrainian fascist movement is closely aligned with German sympathisers."

"The splits among the Ukrainian people, reflecting different histories and culture, could provide any number of internal pretexts and possibilities for external intervention."

Revisiting his '96 predictions today, Murray writes that four major factors have contributed to bringing this all to pass.

The first he says, is the breakdown, but not yet collapse, of US hegemony. American might is no longer unchallengeable. China is rising. Russia is resisting. The "war on terror" has been a nightmarish failure.

The second factor he notes is the rise of Russian power. Russia, under Putin, he says, has taken a more cohesive approach to world politics, based on a doctrine of Russian nationalism and domestic conservatism. The third has been NATO's dangerous march to the east - a NATO which is "above all an instrument of US global power".

Finally, the fourth factor was greatest economic crisis since the 1930s, which left Russia and China (thus far) mostly unscathed. The attempt to draw Ukraine away from Russia and into full dependence on NATO, he argues, was a gamble driven by a determination to stop an economic competitor (Russia, China) emerging stronger from the economic crisis.

Maybe someone could send a copy of Murray's book to the Washington Post?

I'm serious.

Is there a complete vacuum of independent thought at these newspapers? Week after week, they fire out thoughtless and useless editorials, thrown together in a few hundreds words. Editorials that pour fuel on the fire, make no effort to explain the historical roots of this conflict and leave readers non-the-wiser about anything. You go, Western free press!
.

Murray wrapped up his recent piece with another prediction:
.
"It may be that it is best to quit while you're ahead in the field of prophecy, but it is all-but-certain that, if NATO and the EU carry on expanding eastwards, above all at a time of economic crisis, a third world war will be a near-certainty."

Let's hope he's not right this time.

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#31
Georgetown Journal of International Affairs
March 20, 2015
THE UKRAINE INVASION AND PUBLIC OPINION
BY HARLEY BALZER
Dr. Harley Balzer is Associate Professor of Government and International Affairs and an Associate Faculty Member of the Department of History at Georgetown University.
[Footnotes here http://journal.georgetown.edu/spotlight-on-16-1--the-ukraine-invasion-and-public-opinion/]

Russia has engaged in a "war without war and occupation without occupation" in Ukraine, replicating its tactics in Georgia in 2008 and Moldova for more than a decade.[i] Media coverage worldwide emphasizes the tremendous surge in Vladimir Putin's popularity while Russian government-controlled media trumpet support for pro-Russian insur­gents. The conflict in eastern Ukraine has made tacit acceptance of Russia's annexing Crimea almost a given, with few questioning the popularity of this development inside Crimea itself or within Russia.

Ukraine is far more important to Russia's rulers than it is to the United States or the European Union. A Eurasian Union is the cornerstone of Putin's foreign policy, and that union is a far less meaningful entity without Ukraine. Russian leaders refuse to admit that closer Ukrainian ties with the EU might produce economic benefits for the entire region.[ii] Russia's military leadership perceives Ukraine's closer economic relationship with the EU as a step toward joining NATO. These concerns, voiced publicly, pale beside a greater threat not to Russia but to Putin's regime: a prosperous and democratic Ukraine economically integrated with Europe would exist in stark contrast to Putin's resource-based non-democracy. Ukraine's turn to Europe is not a threat to Russia and would almost certainly benefit the Rus­sian economy over time, but it is an existential challenge to Putin and Rus­sia's ruling elite.[iii]

Given that the stakes are far higher for Putin than for Europe or America, and that Russia enjoys clear military superiority over Ukraine, what might curb Russia's aggression? This article finds some basis for optimism in public opinion: Ukrainians, including Rus­sian speakers in eastern Ukraine, have consistently expressed a preference for living in Ukraine, not Russia, and many are willing to fight for it. Russians have expressed opposition to direct Russian military involvement in Ukraine, and in September 2014 tens of thousands staged protests against Putin's poli­cy.[iv]Putin's ratings boost from seizing Crimea, while real, is not unusual in comparative perspective and may well be temporary.

Opinion in Ukraine

Surveys in Ukraine have consistently indicated a desire for independence and territo­rial integrity. Opinion has fluctuated over time, but even in Russian-speak­ing regions a majority has never favored separation or Russian military inter­vention.

The referendum on Ukrainian inde­pendence in December 1991 indicat­ed that an overwhelming majority of Ukrainians, including a majority of Russian speakers, prefer independence. In the Russian-speaking regions joined to Ukraine in 1954, over half of those voting favored independence (54 per­cent in Crimea and 57 percent in Sevastopol). In the heavily Russian-speaking Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, major centers of violent separatist activ­ity in 2014, 84 percent voted for inde­pendence in 1991.[v]

Surveys in 2014 produced results similar to those in 1991. In March 2014, just before Russia's invasion of Crimea, a clear majority of Ukrainian citizens stated that they prefer to live in a sovereign Ukraine, with 85 percent of respondents opposing Russian military intervention.[vi]When asked whether the Russian army should be sent to protect ethnic Russians if they were threatened, ethnic Russians living in Ukraine were evenly divided in their response, with 43 percent on each side of the issue. The number of ethnic Russians strong­ly opposed to seeing Russian troops in Ukraine (32 percent) was greater than the number strongly in favor of such action (23 percent).

A poll by the Democratic Initiative of Ukraine conducted in March 2014 found that 8 percent of the residents of the country as a whole favored separat­ing from Ukraine and joining another state, with the figures ranging from under 1 percent in western Ukraine to a high of 18 percent in the Donbass.[vii]Fewer than 10 percent expressed sup­port for southeastern Ukraine becoming part of Russia. Donbass respon­dents expressed the strongest support for separatism, at 27 percent.

The referendum Russia organized in March 2014 to ratify annexing Crimea officially claimed that 97 percent of Crimean residents supported separat­ism. This data is of questionable valid­ity, as the atmosphere was fraught due to Russian provocations. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, noted "misinformation and hate speech used as propaganda," and urged the authorities in Crimea to account for killings, torture, and arbitrary arrests in the buildup to the referendum.[viii]

The Russian president's Coun­cil for Development of Civil Society and Human Rights reported turnout of just 30 to 50 percent, well below the official 83 percent. Putin's own Council found that just 22.5 percent of registered voters in Crimea voted for Russian annexation.[ix]CNN polled one thousand Ukrainians one day after the Russian-organized referendum and reported that just 19 percent expressed loyalty to Russia, while 67 percent sup­ported sanctions against Russia and 56 percent felt loyalty to Europe.[x]

Surveys by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology in April 2014 produced results confirming the March International Republican Institute (IRI) data. Although majorities in both Luhansk (60 percent) and Donetsk (71 percent) accepted the Russian media claim that the events on Maidan were an armed coup sponsored by the West, this did not create a demand for separation. Just 16 percent of Luhansk residents supported unification with Russia, while 73 percent supported Ukrainian independence. Few supported armed intervention.[xi]

A major pretense for Russian annex­ation of Crimea and support for sepa­ratists in eastern Ukraine has been ostensible threats to native Russians and Russian speakers living in these areas. Yet despite a barrage of propa­ganda from Russian media, surveys in Ukraine have provided no evidence that large numbers of Russian-speakers feel threatened or suffer discrimina­tion. In the March 2014 IRI survey, there was no region of Ukraine where a majority of respondents agreed with the statement, "the rights of Russian-speakers are being encroached upon." The strongest support for this view was ­in Donetsk, where 40 percent agreed and 57 percent disagreed. In the entire eastern region, 72 percent disagreed. In eastern Ukraine, only 17 percent supported Russia sending military forces into Ukraine; in the south, Russian intervention was favored by 27 percent.[xii]

Longitudinal data from Ukraine over the past twenty-three years indicate a consistent preference for continued sovereignty and a growing desire for closer ties with Europe. This trend has grown stronger during the months of conflict following Russia's annexation of Crimea. The two high points in support for an independent Ukraine were December 1991 and September 2014. After 1991, hyperinflation and the economic crisis caused support for independence to decline, reaching lows of 56 to 60 percent. Russia's armed incursion into Chechnya in 1994 caused support for independent state­hood to increase, reaching 71 percent. Pro-independence sentiment declined again during the 1997-98 economic crisis. The second Chechen war pro­duced another bump, accentuated by Russia's war with Georgia in 2008, resulting in 83 percent favoring inde­pendence. Support for independence declined again, but in 2014 it reached 90 percent, its highest level since 1991.[xiii]

As a result of Putin's aggressive poli­cy, an overwhelming majority of Ukrai­nians now view Russia as their enemy and perceive affiliation with Europe as necessary. In 2009, just one-quarter of Ukrainians thought Russia exerted a negative influence on their country; now the figure is two-thirds.[xiv]Accord­ing to a Pew Research poll in 2009, a majority of Ukrainians-51 percent-opposed NATO membership, while only 28 percent favored it.[xv]

Two polls by the Ukrainian sociolog­ical group Rating illustrate the impact of Putin's policies.[xvi]

July 2012: 17 percent for NATO membership, 70 percent opposed

July 2014: 44 percent for NATO membership, 34 percent opposed

Continuing Russian pressure in fall 2014 induced more Ukrainians to sup­port sup­port NATO membership. In Kyiv, a growing number of people now prefer to speak Ukrainian rather than Rus­sian.[xvii]

Opinion in Russia

Analyzing opin­ion data from Russia requires interpre­tive nuance. The regime has portrayed Russia's people as nearly unanimous in supporting the annexation of Crimea and providing aid to separatists in Ukraine. While Russians are proud of regaining great power status, a grow­ing number are not willing to pay the economic cost of rebuilding Crimea, much less sacrifice their sons for east­ern Ukraine.

Most Russian citizens accepted their government's media message that Rus­sian speakers in Ukraine were threat­ened (88 percent) and agreed that Rus­sia's president should seek to further the interests of those Russian speakers (84 percent).[xviii] But this does not translate into support for armed intervention. While Russians believe that Ukraine would be better off with an economy oriented to Russia and its Customs Union, they do not agree that this is something warranting military action.[xix]

A poll in June 2014 found that more than 90 percent of Russia's citizens approved of the annexation of Crimea, but they did not agree with the official Russian view that Russian speakers in Ukraine were threatened, or that Ukraine's relationship with Europe would damage Russia's economy. Polls at about the same time found that only 5 to 10 percent supported military intervention in Ukraine.[xx]

At no point has a significant share of Russia's population expressed support for military intervention in Ukraine. In mid-July 2014, two-thirds of respon­dents in a VTsIOM (All-Russian Cen­ter for the Study of Public Opinion) poll said the conflict should be resolved by diplomatic means. Another 22 percent favored "surgical strikes," and just 11 percent wanted to send Russian troops. In a later survey, only 13 percent thought Russia should send troops to Ukraine even if NATO intervened. A much larger number perceived the threat of war stemming from the activity of the separatists-groups armed and aided, if not organized and led, by Russian "volunteers."[xxi]

In August 2014, 60 percent of Russian citizens viewed the situation in Ukraine as an internal conflict. VTsIOM General Director Valery Fyodorov suggested this "explains why very few Russians want their army to help the federalist forces in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions."[xxii] An absolute majority of Russians said the Russian leadership should not privilege foreign-policy goals, including "interference" in Ukraine, over attention to "Russia's social and economic problems."[xxiii]

Just as many Europeans do not want to pay the price for sanctions imposed on Russia, most Russians oppose paying to rebuild Crimea. Support for paying the cost of annexation has eroded sig­nificantly over time. A Levada Center poll conducted in August 2014 showed continuing support for annexation, but the number willing to pay for Crimea dropped from 26 percent in March to 17 percent in September. The share opposed to paying increased from 19 percent to 30 percent.[xxiv]

Domestic public opinion explains Russian officials' persistent denial that Russian military personnel are par­ticipating in the conflict in eastern Ukraine (except "volunteers" and sol­diers who have chosen to spend their vacation aiding Russian speakers in Ukraine). President Putin in March 2014 denied that Russians were involved in the occupation of Crimea, but in May acknowledged that the "little green men" were from Russia. Despite this moment of frankness, Russian offi­cials have consistently maintained that contingents in eastern Ukraine wearing identical unmarked uniforms and car­rying identical equipment are not from Russia. The rationale for the invasion of Ukraine was what Russian sources describe as an illegal coup against the elected president Viktor Yanukovich, but planning for a possible invasion was done well ahead. One Russian acquain­tance described the experience of a family member who served in the mili­tary in 2013. The contract soldiers in his elite unit were asked if they would be willing to fight in Ukraine, either officially or unofficially. Those who declined did not have their contracts renewed. This suggests that contingency preparations were underway well before President Yanukovich was forced from office.[xxv]

Russian authorities clearly are con­cerned about a potential backlash. They have been careful to conceal evidence of Russian casualties in Ukraine. Returned corpses are labeled "Cargo 200," a des­ignation used in the Afghan War. Dmi­tri Gudkov, the lone opposition deputy remaining in the Russian parliament (Duma), inquired about thirty-nine Russian paratroopers from the 76th Airborne Division based in Pskov who likely perished in Ukraine. The Minis­try of Defense responded that the Rus­sian Federation is not involved in the conflict and that releasing information about specific individuals would violate their right to privacy.[xxvi]The local Sol­dier's Mothers group also raised ques­tions. When the St. Petersburg branch of this homegrown NGO joined in asking about the situation, they were denounced as foreign agents.[xxvii]In August 2014, President Putin awarded the 76th Airborne Division the Order of Suvorov for its work in "local con­flicts" in previous decades.[xxviii]The tim­ing caused many to believe the honor reflected recent service in Ukraine. The decree (ukaz) is not available on the Kremlin website. Journalists were told that it is not in the public domain.

One of the ways information about dead and injured Russian "volunteers" is reaching the public domain is from reports about individuals punished for divulging this information. In mid- October 2014, Liudmila Bogaten­kova, a seventy-three-year-old human rights activist, was detained for report­ing information about Russian casu­alties.[xxix]The website most active in publicizing "Cargo 200" casualties was blocked at the end of September for "nationalism."[xxx]On September 26, the site posted an item by Konstantin Zel'fianov stating that the number of dead and wounded Russian soldiers and mercenaries was more than four thou­sand. Zel'fianov added that while some bodies were returned to Russia, many, if not most, were simply thrown into mine shafts.[xxxi]

Intimidation of critics has been both direct and indirect. Levada Center Director Lev Gudkov suggested that the views expressed by Russians in many opinion polls reflect economic coer­cion: two-thirds of Russians live pay­check-to-paycheck, many on the gov­ernment payroll, so fear of being fired has a strong influence on what they will tell reporters and sociologists.[xxxii]A bet­ter-informed Russian public is likely to have a less positive view of the Ukraine invasion.

Putin's Rating

Russian media have trumpeted the enormous popularity of Putin's Ukraine gambit. Western media speak of his "skyrocketing" rating. Putin's favorable rating increased from about 60 percent to above 80 percent following the annexation of Crimea and remained high until the end of August 2014, when it dipped slightly. But is Putin's "bump" in popularity unusual for a leader when a conflict begins? And is it sustainable?

Putin's approval rating increased about half as much as that of George W. Bush following the attacks organized by Osama Bin Laden. A Gallup poll taken 7 to 10 September 2001 gave Bush a 51 percent approval rating, with 39 per­cent expressing disapproval. In a Gallup poll taken after the attacks, Bush's rat­ing jumped to 90 percent approval.[xxxiii]

The rise in Putin's approval rating pales in comparison to the growth in his popularity during the first Chech­en War. In July 1999, when he was appointed Prime Minister, Putin regis­tered about 30 percent approval and 30 percent disapproval. By the end of the year, after vowing to "rub out" Chechen fighters "in the outhouse," his approval reached 80 percent.[xxxiv]

The annexation of Crimea remains popular in Russia, and Putin's ratings reflect this, though Putin's approval may have peaked in August 2014. A Levada Center poll at the end of the month indicated a drop from 87 per­cent to 84 percent approval, with a slight increase in disapproval.[xxxv]

Job approval does not mean voters would support someone's re-election. George H. W. Bush reached a 90 per­cent approval rating during the first Gulf War in 1991, but lost the 1992 presidential election. In July 2014, the number of Russians who said they would vote for Putin again was just 52 percent.[xxxvi]By September it fell below 50 percent. Putin's officials still count the votes, but extensive falsification of vote counts was a major reason for the protests in 2011-12, and there is a risk this could be repeated.

The costs of the Ukraine conflict and rebuilding efforts will be a significant factor in a myriad of ways. Russia's economy was close to a no-growth situ­ation before the annexation of Crimea resulted in economic sanctions. The ruble fell, stock market values dropped, and capital flight increased. Now many domestic constituencies will get less funding as a result of the war in Ukraine. Economic development proj­ects in Chechnya and the rest of the North Caucasus are being cut to pay for Crimean development. Pensioners have been warned to prepare for increases in "communal services" costs (heat, water, electricity, etc.), and the pension fund has been confiscated to help pay the costs of Crimean annexation.[xxxvii]

While the macroeconomic problems are manageable in the short- to medi­um-term, negative effects are likely to be felt by individuals, enterprises, and regions more quickly. Negative reac­tions to these economic consequences will take a further toll on Putin's popu­larity.

Policy Implications

Despite the dangerous precedent of using armed aggression to revise borders in Europe, neither Europe nor the United States has evinced willingness to pay a signifi­cant price to reverse Putin's annexa­tion of Crimea or prevent the eastern regions of Ukraine becoming another frozen conflict.[xxxviii] European business interests and politicians receiving sub­stantial financial benefits from Russian state-owned companies are leading the effort to rationalize Putin's behavior, arguing that Russia has legitimate inter­ests in the region and emphasizing the economic costs to Europe from sanc­tions.

Targeted sanctions and efforts to reduce European dependence on Rus­sian hydrocarbons are important pol­icies that should be maintained for an extended period. Sanctions rarely achieve results in the short term.

The most important area for Western action is the information space. Most Russian citizens appear to have for­gotten the lessons of state-run media from the Soviet era. They are less cyni­cal in part because Putin's regime has effectively chosen themes with popular appeal, but also because the regime continues to aggressively attack inde­pendent information sources.[xxxix]Pro­viding alternative Russian-language media could help balance Putin's pro­paganda. The European Union should finance this effort, with technical help from the United States. Early 2015, when Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk becomes EU President and Latvia assumes the presidency of the Council of the European Union, would be a good opportunity to establish a new "Radio Free Europe."[xl]

Public information is crucial to helping Russian elites and ordinary cit­izens understand the impact of Putin's policies on their own country. The economic consequences of the Ukraine invasion will take time to develop, but they will be significant.[xli] Non-Russians inside Russia and some Russian regions are already asking why they too should not have real federalism.[xlii] Putin's fix­ation on the potential consequences of Ukraine orienting its economy to Europe distracts Russia's policy focus from more serious threats.[xliii] When some of the North Caucasus fight­ers currently in Syria return to open an Islamic State front in Dagestan or Ingushetia, the need for a common effort will be more apparent but less achievable.[xliv]

Putin is winning the information war in part because the Ukrainian govern­ment genuinely does need to address concerns about Ukrainian national­ist groups and future policies. The armed wings of nationalist organiza­tions helped protect protestors on the Maidan and battled "volunteers" from Russia in eastern Ukraine. However, their presence and potential influence has allowed Putin to portray post-Yan­ukovich governments as neo-Nazis, so-called Banderovtsy. Russian television has persistently conveyed this message.[xlv]

Ukrainian leaders must clean up their economic system as well as their govern­ment. Fixing the damage bequeathed by Yanukovich and his cronies requires difficult measures that will be unpopu­lar. The temptation to use ongoing conflict as an excuse to defer economic reform will be strong. Without stead­fast efforts to fix the economy, Putin's effort to promote instability in the region will continue to be successful.

The United States and NATO need to develop greater capacity to respond to "war without war" and "new wars," where stealth and deniability obscure the nature of the conflict and insurgents perpetuate instability over an extended period as extortion, expropriation, and kidnapping become their income stream.[xlvi]

The new NATO "rapid reaction" force should be accompanied by establishing "rapid response" peacekeeping groups that threatened governments could invite to areas when the sort of "invasion without invasion" practiced in Crimea and eastern Ukraine is ini­tiated. The new units would be able to provide information about events and could interpose themselves between unidentified paramilitary fighters and local civilians and military units to deter violence. Halting the informal incursions at the outset will be far less costly than dealing with long-term occupations and frozen conflicts.

The appetites of nationalist revan­chists rarely are assuaged by victories. They grow. High-level nationalist politicians in Putin's administration have produced monographs not only defending the Crimean annexation but also advocating Russia's right to recover Alaska.[xlvii] Putin has said (even if taken out of context) that his forces could be in Kiev in two weeks. They could prob­ably be in Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius in a few hours. An attack on new NATO members may be precisely what Putin views as the way to undermine the alli­ance.

NATO should do what it can to raise the costs, both economic and military, of continued Russian aggression in Ukraine. Steven Pifer and Strobe Tal­bott have suggested providing defen­sive weapons to the Ukrainian govern­ment.[xlviii] This is a good start. Enhancing current information sharing and mak­ing it clear that other options are under consideration could also help deter aggression.

Finally, it is time to separate Putin and Russia in our discourse. In the current situation, being anti-Putin, far from being anti-Russian, is to be in favor of a healthier and wealthier Russia that is less dangerous to Russians, non-Russians within Russia, and democratic governments now faced with a threaten­ing alternative worldview.[xlix]

Conclusion

Putin's creeping annexa­tion of former Soviet territory should not be allowed to escalate into a broader armed conflict, but fear of conflict should not deter the United States and Europe from doing everything possible to stop Putin's aggression. Numerous analysts have noted the broad range of issues on which U.S. and Russian cooperation is essential: terrorism, Iran's nuclear program, North Korea, Afghanistan, piracy, and others.[l]

If Putin extends the conflict to more of Ukraine or to the Baltics, coopera­tion on these areas of mutual interest could become impossible. The results of the 2014 U.S. elections will make it even more difficult for the Obama administration to work with Putin's government. If Putin's spokesper­sons continue to present cooperation on mutual interests like terrorism as "favors," there may be no hope of over­coming U.S. domestic political con­cerns.

Encouraging Russians who oppose the military conflict with brother Slavs is not only plausible but is also possible. They do not need a regime change but merely need to convince their lead­er that the current policy is unpopu­lar as well as irrational for Russia's future. Opinion data indicate that an overwhelming majority of Ukrainians, including Russian speakers, favor inde­pendence, an overwhelming majority of Russians oppose military intervention in Ukraine, and Putin's approval rating has far outpaced his electoral rating as a result of his Ukraine policies. Both ratings have fallen since June. These data offer hope that the policies could be changed. Growing conflicts within Putin's elite as economic sanctions create competition and tensions could accelerate the process.

Levada Center surveys indicate that 85 percent of Russian citizens believe they have no influence on policy deci­sions.[li] The regime's extensive efforts to contain protest, control the media, and thwart civic activism suggest that Russia's rulers do not share this view: Putin and his cronies remain seri­ously concerned about public opinion. Doing more to open the information space will help.

 [return to Contents] 

 #32
The National Interest
March 20, 2015
Debunked: Why There Won't Be Another Cold War
The new generation doesn't believe in a "New Cold War."
By Matthew Rojansky and Rachel S. Salzman
Matthew Rojansky is Director of the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington DC. Rachel S. Salzman is a Doctoral Candidate in Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

In the wake of the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, talk of a "New Cold War" is in vogue. Even experts who studied the Soviet Union and Russia from the depths of mutually assured destruction and détente to the fall of Communism now say that it will be decades again before "normal" relations between Russia and the West can resume. We disagree.

The "New Cold War" narrative goes something like this: Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine has constituted an unpardonable violation of the European security order and of international law, which will poison relations with the United States and Europe to the point that any hopes of rapprochement would be dashed. Putin himself is determined to make contempt for Western values-and anti-Americanism especially-the centerpiece of his regime's official ideology. Further, he has successfully brainwashed the younger generation of Russians with these views. For the foreseeable future, we will at best achieve limited agreements on issues like arms control, only because of a grudging recognition that without them, we risk destroying each other and the world. It's the Cold War and détente all over again.

True, relations between Russia and the West have become severely strained, and the sources of that tension-principally the catastrophic situation in Ukraine-may not change any time soon. But we believe the "New Cold War" narrative misreads both Russia and the West, especially when it comes to the generation that has fully come of age after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the original Cold War.

As members of that generation in the United States, both Russia watchers with experience working on second-track diplomacy and living and working in Russia, we suggest that it is a mistake to define the current conflict primarily through the lens of the previous one. The declaration of a "New Cold War" has come too soon, and the label does not fit.

In geopolitical terms, there are clear differences between the current conflict and the Cold War: the absence of a global ideological dimension to the conflict; the prevalence of tension in the post-Soviet space versus in other regions; and the much greater relative power of non-Western states (China, India, Brazil and others) that have, so far, refused to take sides. As others have noted, such differences do not preclude a renewal of Cold War-type relations between the United States and Russia, with considerable spillover effects for Europe and other regions.

Yet what distinguishes the contemporary situation from the conflict that governed the second half of the twentieth century-and the reason this cannot be called a New Cold War-is the profound difference in interpersonal relations.

Far from a new iron curtain of mutual hostility and distrust descending between East and West, Russians and Americans can in most cases travel back and forth, interact freely with one another and seek to find common ground on the toughest issues through mutually respectful dialogue. During recent visits to Moscow, we each found Russian experts at all levels open to engagement; with the younger generation especially keen to offer helpful and insightful analysis of events in Russia, Ukraine and Russia's relations with the West.

Make no mistake: "helpful and insightful" is not a euphemism for "pro-Western." Just as anywhere else, attitudes among the rising generation of Russian experts run the gamut. But they are professional, intelligent and willing to engage with Americans, even if that engagement does not yield an immediate meeting of the minds. They also have (so far) been willing to speak openly and on the record without fear of official repercussions, a clear distinction from a time when even a banal conversation with foreigners was fraught with complications and outright risks.

And thanks to the Internet and international voice calling, our dialogues are able to continue with great ease-something that Cold Warriors never dreamed could be possible. Through social media, we exchange messages and links with Russian friends and colleagues on a daily-sometimes even hourly-basis. This is not just the usual trope about the Internet making the world smaller. On Facebook and Twitter, we see the images that Russian peers curate when their Russian friends are watching and without them necessarily thinking about the Americans in the room. But it also means we see each other's birthdays, children and family vacations. Our relations with our Russian counterparts are therefore fundamentally deeper and more complex than were those of the previous generation of American and Russian experts.

This is all to the good, because while such dialogue cannot alone deliver an end to the current conflict, it helps ensure that tensions will run less deep and for less long. Still, it takes a critical mass of expert voices on both sides to maintain such engagement and to have any impact on official opinion or policy in Moscow and Washington. In this respect, the United States is unfortunately less well equipped than it should be. Ironically, the disappearance of Cold War-era U.S. government programs for supporting Russia-related scholarships and travel to Russia has decreased the number of young Americans wishing to join our field and the number of opportunities available to them. As a result, the voices of the Cold War generation still predominate.

Without a renewed appreciation of the importance of preparing American experts to work with and on Russia, the interpersonal connections that have made such a difference for us and our Russian colleagues will atrophy and disappear. Then we really will find ourselves in a new Cold War.

 [return to Contents] 

 #33
The Unz Review
www.unz.com
March 21, 2015
The Moor Has Done His Duty
Russian Opposition Journalist Andrey Babitsky Discovers Western Freedom of Speech
BY ANATOLY KARLIN

Andrey Babitsky was the quintessential Russian democratic journalist.

A correspondent for the US government funded Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe (RFERL) since 1989, his star began to shine at the start of the Second Chechen War in 1999, when he was embedded amongst the rebel fighters in Grozny. He took a harshly anti-Russian line, writing the following about a summarily executed Russian POW:

It must be said that the Chechens don't cut the throats of [Russian] soldiers because they are sadists inclined to treat them with brutality, but because in this manner they can make the war more visceral and visible to the public opinion, to explain that there really is a war and that war is cruel and terrifying.

He was detained by the Russian military when attempting to leave Grozny in January 2000. US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright personally appealed for his release in a visit to Moscow. In an ironic twist, he was freed, but to the Chechens, in exchange for several Russian POWs. His Chechen friends kept him locked up in a cellar until finally releasing him with a forged passport the following month.

Babitsky would continue being a thorn in the feet of Russian security forces thereafter, his biggest coup being an interview for ABC News with Shamil Basayev in 2005, the man who organized the 2002 Nord-Ost Theater Siege, the Beslan school massacre, and numerous other terrorist atrocities before his assassination in 2006. Needless to say, Russia's siloviki weren't fond of him either. Apart from the murky events of 2000, he was again temporarily detained in 2004, delaying him from going to North Ossetia to report on the Beslan crisis.

The rest of his reporting appears to have been much in the same general vein. He condemned "Russian aggression" against Georgia in 2008. He railed against Russian state media propaganda. The blog La Russophobe, a now defunct but once one of the most widely read Russia blogs in the Anglosphere, whose content was exactly what it said on the tin, habitually reprinted Babitsky's scribblings and called him a "hero journalist." Since 2009, he has been heading RFERL's "Echo of the Caucasus" section.

Which makes recent revelations that he was fired from RFERL in 2014 rather... interesting.

Why? His troubles with the editors began with an article on his Russian language blog from March 2014. Just its first sentence, really. It has since been deleted, but the Internet remembers:

This is not about Crimea - on this question, I'm fully agreed with Vladimir Putin's main thesis, that Russia has the absolute right to take the peninsula's population under its protection. I am aware that a significant number of my colleagues don't share this viewpoint. After the President's speech, I am now a supposedly correct, officially approved citizen, while those who are disagree with Russia's actions in Ukraine have become national traitors.

That's it. The rest of the essay is his standard spiel about Russia's never ending descent into authoritarianism and the persecution and denigration of dissidents. He affirms the absolute right to free speech, and expresses great concern for the fate of the 10% of people who disagree with Crimea's incorporation into Russia when the other 90% so passionately supports it in an atmosphere of fear, suspicion, and demonizing rhetoric.

As it soon turned out, he might as well have been talking about himself.

A week later, Babitsky was removed from his position as chief editor of Echo of the Caucasus, and suspended from work for one month without reimbursement. The decision was condemned by Mario Corti, a former director of RFERL who had also ran into terminal disagreements with the senior American management and resigned in disgust. Although he stressed that he disagreed with Babitsky's position on Crimea, he notes that the overall article was "harshly critical of Vladimir Putin," and affirmed that opinion in a commentary is "legitimate journalism" and that his demotion goes counter to RFERL's standing as a "paragon of free speech."

Babitsky was reinstated as a journalist following his one month suspension, but was quietly dismissed in September 2014 after a stint as a war correspondent in the Donbass. He left without much fanfare, unlike, say, Liz Wahl, whose theatric resignation from and denunciation of RT live on air was carefully choreographed in advance with neocon waterboy and professional troll James Kirchick. Possibly Babitsky didn't want to risk his Czech residency permit - RFERL is headquartered in Prague - until his daughter finished school. In any case, it was only a few days ago that we finally got access to the juicy details of his departure when he gave an interview to the Czech daily Lidové noviny (here is a Russian translation).

First off, here is a full annunciation of his views on Crimea, which basically reduces to an absolute but in his case principled stand on questions of self-determination and national sovereignty:

LN: Crimea became important to you in another sense: You were forced to leave RFERL after 25 years of working for them on account of your attitudes towards the annexation?

AB: One of my blog posts contained some words supporting Putin's decision to incorporate Crimea into Russia. The rest of the content was critical towards Putin and Russia. For instance, I condemned the fact that it has became acceptable in Russia to call those who disagree with the peninsula's incorporation into Russia - traitors to the Motherland. About Crimea itself and its incorporation into Russia there was just one sentence.

LN: Considering that you worked for an American, government-sponsored radio station, wasn't it at the very least shortsighted to support Crimea's annexation?

AB: We worked in Chechnya for many years, and even then I was completely certain - if there is some minority, some part of the population, that considers that its rights are in conflict with their host country's territorial integrity, then there must be a divorce. This oppressed group, if its interests are harmed, has the full right to an independent existence, according to its own rules. As a journalist I supported this right, both when this concerned Chechens, and today in the case of Crimea, and also the Donbass.

...

LN: [You were fired] because your opinion on Crimea's annexation differed from your employer's?

AB: I have a special relationship with Crimea. We have a house there. My wife is a native of Crimea, and her parents - former military - still live there. We go there every summer. So I know that many Crimeans have always regarded Ukraine as a foreign state. Crimeans never felt at home there. They were annoyed by Ukrainization policies. They had the Ukrainian language forced upon them in place of Russian. Ever since its independence, Kiev has carried out an incorrect national policy towards minorities, first and foremost, in regards to the Russian one. During this time period a lot of insults accrued, and people felt it was injust and feared that in the future things would become even worse.

LN: Worse after the arrival of the new Ukrainian leadership?

AB: Crimeans' feelings are informed by experience: Once again nobody knows what the hell's happening in Kiev, and what awaits us. The reaction that followed was, in my view, completely normal and even legal. You see the hand of Putin everywhere, but in Crimea people simply revolted in defense of their rights. Just as, in your opinion, did the residents of Kiev. You, like the rest of my Western colleagues, like to argue that in Kiev people were genuinely fighting for their rights and freedoms, while in Crimea and Donbass it is all a conspiracy behind which stand Putin and the Russian secret services. But this isn't true. The entire peninsula was overtaken in horror by what awaited it, so the separation was an unequivocal reaction to the threat that Euromaidan represented to Crimeans. Doesn't Crimea have the same right to rebel against injustice and suppression as the Maidan?

...

LN: [Every minority might have a right to sovereignty], but surely not with support from big neighbors who use not only propaganda but also real weapons to grab territories. A free referendum is one thing, anything else is an incitement of separatism.

AB: Wait a second. Several weeks back the organization GfK Ukraine, a German sociological company - not Russian - published a telling study, according to which 93% of Crimeans are happy with their incorporation into Russia. 93! I do not view Crimea's incorporation, unlike several of my Western colleagues, as the resurrection of the USSR. To the contrary, it is but a continuation of that entity's collapse. It is the Soviet regime that created weird, unnatural, and historically unfounded borders, and divided them up into different oblasts and republics that were wholly artificial. ...

This didn't go over well with his Czech interviewer. Babitsky might be a pro-Western liberal who had spent his entire life struggle for "your freedom and ours"... but how dare he put loyalty towards liberalism in front of loyalty to pro-Westernism?

As the interview goes on, the questions gradually become more loaded and hostile. At first, he attempts to respond reasonably, but eventually gives up.

LN: It's improbable how you, a person who was nearly killed by Vladimir Putin's regime, and forced into exile, have today become a supporter of Putin...

But Putin isn't Russia! Russia - it is history and rich tradition. Pushkin is Russia. Apart from that, it must be said that Russia today resembles a European country to a much greater extent than does Ukraine. Yes, Russia has its nationalists, but that is a problems of deviants. But in Ukraine, nationalism has become a state doctrine. Nationalism, be it Ukrainian or Georgian, leads to Hitlerian Nazism. Russia is a multinational country, where nationalism doesn't have a future.

LN: Is there anything at all in Russia that deserves your criticism?

AB: It still has many Soviet aspects. First and foremost, a very difficult situation in respect to free media, with free access to information. Anti-Western sentiments are growing, there is a lot of belief in extreme conspiracy theories, restrictions on civil rights, and so on. But in Ukraine the situation is worse in all respects.

LN: So Crimea, according to you, ran away from those Ukrainian nationalists into the warm embrace of big, good, traditional Russia. Just as if it came from Russian state TV...

AB: Crimea escaped the bloody drama that Donbass didn't. There were 20,000 Ukrainian soldiers on the peninsula, if some fool in Kiev had given the order, the conversation would have been overtaken by heavy artillery, and Crimea would have been completely destroyed.

LN: Czechs are always drawn to the Sudetenland comparison. Do you also believe that back then the German minority should have battled for its rights?

AB: This was, first of all, an act of external aggression. You didn't persecute Germans. Or did you also wish to make them Czechs, like Ukrainians were doing in to Russians in Crimea? In Crimea, it was completely different. A big conflict was decades in the making. People were becoming cardinally disillusioned. And as soon as the revolution engulfed Kiev, they started fearing further restrictions on the usage of the Russian language and the promotion of Ukrainian... and not only this. You see, there is also historical experience to consider. My mother was born in Kiev. Seventeen members of our family were killed during the war by Ukrainian nationalists.

LN: I am not the only one with serious doubts that Russians' rights in Crimea were likewise restricted under the regime of the pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych.

AB: Do you trust me as a journalist? If so, think about it - in the past ten years I have been to Crimea thirteen times, I spent every summer there, and it is from this position that I tell you: Go to hell with your doubts.

But interesting as this all is, the Crimea sentence wasn't what he was fired from RFERL for.

He was fired by a US government funded media outlet for exposing possible Neo-Nazi atrocities.

LN: Fear about the consequences of the Maidan were mostly spread by Russian media. Surely you, as a journalist, know the power of information...

AB: When I was still working at RFERL, I asked the managers to send me to Donbass. I went there and worked as I usually do in a warzone. On September 2, 2014, I filmed the exhumation of four corpses: Two civilians, and two insurgents. According to the locals - not the militias, but ordinary residents of Novosvetlovka - these people had been executed by Ukrainian volunteers from the Aidar batallion. I didn't provide any commentary on this, just filmed it and sent it to the Moldovan division of RFERL. The video was published online. After this, the nationalists in the Ukrainian division of RFERL became hysterical. There was a big scandal. All this, just because I had published a video, which only recorded what I saw with my own eyes, without any additional commentary.

LN: But sometimes the specific selection of facts, presented without context, can create a cardinally false version of events...

AB: The video was deleted. On September 26, I returned to Prague. I was invited to the office and was told that my position has been removed. RFERL has clearly and definitively become nothing more than an instrument of American propaganda.

Who could have imagined it?

Now don't get me wrong. RFERL is funded by the US government, so in principle, the US government can dictate how it uses its resources (although ideally, if not in practice, subject to electoral accountability and journalistic ethics). If that involves kicking out journalists whose opinions and reporting overstay their welcome, then so be it. After all, virtually all state-sponsored international media, in some capacity or other, serve the interests of their sponsors: Al Jazeera - Al Jazeera, the BBC, CCTV, France 24, Deutschewelle, and... RT.

But it is primarily the Western media organization that tend to have the chutzpah to deny this and instead claim an altruistic and universal dedication to truth, objectivity, free speech, and fluffy pink rabbits. Maybe it's just a case of people talking on about that what they don't have. RT at least is honest enough to admit its blatant pro-Russia biases. As its director Margarita Simonyan put it, "There is no objectivity - only approximations of the truth by as many different voices as possible." This brutal honesty annoys the Western establishment real bad, because they view their social arrangements and global hegemony as a revealed truth, and anything that even so much as suggests that it may be just one of many truths is equivalent to heresy, and calls upon the rage of the chiliastic monotheist in battle with other faiths. Hence the vilification of RT, and even calls for it to be banned, with several investigations against it already launched by the UK's Ofcom media watchdog.

RFERL is, in this respect, the quintessential Western MSM outlet. Not only does it supposedly strive for objectivity, but it even has a quotation from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as its motto (Article 19: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression"). That's even better than The Guardian's "comment is free"!

But RFERL's response to concrete questions about its treatment of Andrey Babitsky and their commitment to his freedom of opinion and expression is... a bit more laconic.

Namely, zero, zip, zilch, nada.

I made an inquiry to Brian Whitmore, a blogger at The Power Vertical, RFERL's Russia blog. No reply, though I had interacted with him on several occasions in the past. Okay, so I'm a Putin lackey, and RFERL is possibly keen to avoid "exploitation by the pro-Kremlin media in Russia." Why not, then, answer Ben Aris, a journalist who supported the Maidan?

The answer is as simple as it is cynical.

The Moor has done his duty, the Moor can go. In the big scheme of things, it is just a minor iteration of what happened to Solzhenitsyn after he rejected neoliberal capitalism, or Gorbachev after he came out in support of Russia's incorporation of Crimea. It's either their way, all the way, or the highway.

But don't mention this, or we'll hound you out of our mutual agreement societies too, because you're biased and hate freedom.

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 #34
New York Times
March 21, 2015
In Putin's Nationalist Russia, a Tolstoy as Cultural Diplomat
By RACHEL DONADIO

YASNAYA POLYANA, Russia - On a sunny winter afternoon here, Vladimir Tolstoy, a great-great-grandson of Leo Tolstoy and an adviser on cultural affairs to President Vladimir V. Putin, strode up the birch-lined path that leads to the bucolic family compound where his forebear wrote "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina." It is now a state museum. At each step, he was greeted by staff members heading home for the day.

"Good evening," Mr. Tolstoy said with a warm smile. "Good evening," the museum employees, mostly women, responded. "Please send our best regards to our czar and tell him we respect him very much," one woman told Mr. Tolstoy, who nodded cheerfully.

At once friendly and feudal, the scene at this estate some 125 miles south of Moscow captured something of the mood in Russia today, where Mr. Putin is regarded as a czar, especially outside the big cities, even as the liberal intelligentsia reviles him and laments his popularity. It also reflects the benefits for Mr. Putin of enlisting the support of a member of an illustrious family as he continues to strike notes of national pride.

Since being tapped by Mr. Putin in 2012, Mr. Tolstoy, 52, has emerged as the more conciliatory, highbrow and Western-friendly face of Kremlin cultural policy. He works with, but is temperamentally different from, Russia's more combative culture minister, Vladimir Medinsky, who is known for aggressive assertions of Russian superiority and conservative values.

Mr. Tolstoy said he had worked to remove language from a ministry policy draft that was leaked last year stating that "Russia is not Europe." But, like most Russians, Mr. Tolstoy is full-throated in his support of Russia's invasion and annexation of Crimea, a territory that many Russians believe should not have been ceded to Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1954.

"Leo Tolstoy was a Russian officer who defended Russia in the Fourth Bastion in Sevastopol," he said, speaking through a translator over tea in a cafe near the museum. "For us, in our mind, this has always been Russia."

He was referring to the siege of Sevastopol in 1854-55 in the Crimean War, in which Russia fought the allied forces of France, Britain, Sardinia and the Ottoman Empire and ultimately lost control of the city. "Of course, as a descendant of the Russian officer Leo Tolstoy, I cannot have any other attitude toward that," he added.

Mr. Tolstoy was raised in a middle-class family in the Moscow region and trained as a journalist. In 1994, he was named director of Yasnaya Polyana, which is centered on the house where the novelist wrote and has been preserved as it was at the time of his death, in 1910. There are also a working farm and orchards, and Tolstoy's grave is in a wooded glen that the writer associated with his beloved older brother, who died young.

Mr. Tolstoy improved the quality and range of activities at the museum, adding lectures, a literary prize and Russian-language classes. His wife, Ekaterina Tolstaya, took over as director after he became an adviser to Mr. Putin.

Mr. Tolstoy said that Mr. Putin had offered him the post after a meeting of museum directors in April 2012 at which Mr. Tolstoy criticized the government's cultural strategy and the president's advisory council for culture as ineffective. "When the meeting was over, the president asked me to stay for a bit and asked if I was so critical, could I do this job better?" Mr. Tolstoy said. Now, he briefs Mr. Putin on cultural issues and acts a bridge between Russia's cultural world and the Kremlin.

On a recent afternoon, he was fielding calls from Irkutsk, Siberia, for help with funeral arrangements for the writer Valentin Rasputin, who died last week at 77 and had expressed a preference to be buried in Irkutsk, his birthplace. Mr. Tolstoy said he regarded Mr. Rasputin as the best writer of the past half-century. He was known for his vivid portrayals of the environmental devastation caused by industrialization in rural Russia and also for his conservatism: He called for prosecuting the punk activist group Pussy Riot after its provocative performance in a Moscow church and inveighed against perestroika, the liberalization initiated under Mikhail S. Gorbachev before the Soviet Union disintegrated.

Not long ago, the sense that Russia had somehow lost its way after the fall of the Soviet Union was pervasive here, but Mr. Tolstoy and other Putin loyalists have succeeded in reviving a sense of national pride expressly through cultural policy.

Guided by Mr. Tolstoy, a committee of leading cultural figures and state officials ultimately produced an 18-page policy document that defines culture broadly, saying it is as valuable to Russia as its natural resources. It also touches on moral precepts, the importance of religion in shaping values and the place of the Russian language in uniting a country of more than 140 million people and diverse ethnicities. The document also highlights Russia's distinctiveness "as a country which unites two worlds, East and West."

Some cultural figures have criticized the document for not addressing the pervasive influence of Russian state television, which operates as a mouthpiece for the Kremlin. Many didn't pay it much attention. "It's abstract, like a biblical text," said Kirill Razlogov, a prominent film historian.

Far more concrete is the impact of laws that ban obscene words in the theater, films and public performances and that criminalize giving offense to religious believers, both of which were passed after Pussy Riot's members were jailed in 2012.

While Mr. Tolstoy may agree with the general direction, his approach is more tolerant. "I believe everything has a right to exist unless it's a provocation," he said. "I think art shouldn't be offensive." As for Pussy Riot, he said: "I don't support them, but on the other hand I also believe the reaction was inappropriate. An artist shouldn't be punished in court."

He described himself as a moderate who could "find balance" between traditionalists and liberals looking Westward. "On the one hand, Russia is open for cooperation," he said. "And on the other hand, we have our own perspective on good and evil."

Mr. Tolstoy seems to be generally respected by the intelligentsia. Victor Erofeyev, a writer who has been critical of Mr. Putin, said he thought Mr. Tolstoy was "a smart guy" who also reflects a growing tendency since Mr. Putin's re-election in 2012 to see Russia as somehow purer than the West.

"They really believe in it," Mr. Erofeyev said. "It's not like during Communist times under Brezhnev" when "people say, 'I love Communism,' but we never believe in it. Here they play with a notion of Russia in a more delicate way. They say, 'You know, Russia is still is a country of big culture, it's a country of big human relationships, friendship, love affairs and so on, and that's why we are more interesting than the West.' "

Back at the cafe, Mr. Tolstoy grew animated in talking about Russian pride. "Today's Russia cannot be forced to do what it doesn't want to," he said. "It's impossible to achieve either by sanctions, or even by an overt attack. Russia respects itself, and it wants only justice, nothing else."

On that wintry afternoon, dozens of visitors flocked to Yasnaya Polyana. There was snow on the ground and gray ice on the pond, and the birch trees caught the afternoon light. The spirit of the novelist's former home "is love," Mr. Tolstoy reflected.

In Tolstoy's novels, "there are no characters who are complete villains," his great-great-grandson said. "All of his characters are real people."

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 #35
http://bwog.com
March 22,2015
Barnard Professor Catharine Nepomnyashchy Has Passed Away

This afternoon, Barnard students received an email from Provost Linda Bell in regards to the passing of former Barnard professor Catharine Nepomnyashchy this past Saturday. Nepomnyashchy served on the Barnard faculty for 28 years as both a professor in Russian Literature and Culture and the chair of the Slavic Department. We send our deepest condolences to all those affected. Please find the email sent to students below.

Dear Members of the Barnard Community,

It is with tremendous sadness and a very heavy heart that I write to inform you of the death of Catharine Nepomnyashchy, a much beloved member of our faculty for twenty-eight years. Cathy died Saturday morning in her home after a courageous battle with lung cancer. She is survived by a beautiful and loving daughter, Olga Nepomnyashchy, and a brother, James Theimer. Her husband, Slava Nepomnyashchy, who she met as a teenager in the summer of 1970 on her first trip to the Soviet Union, passed away in 2011.

Cathy, the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Russian Literature and Culture and Chair of the Slavic Department, joined Barnard's faculty in 1987. In addition to her teaching duties for the Slavic Department, for which she was renowned for an inclusive and engaging classroom, she was affiliated with Barnard's Comparative Literature Program and Human Rights Program. She also served on the Executive Committee of the Harriman Institute at Columbia University.

Cathy's research and teaching interests were as fascinating as she was-twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russian literature and popular culture, Russian women's studies, and the works of Alexander Pushkin, Andrei Sinyavsky, and Vladimir Nabokov. She approached these subjects with true passion and devotion, and her love of Russia and its history were boundless.

She was the author of many books including "Abram Tertz and the Poetics of Crime"; "Strolls with Pushkin," which she translated with Slava Yastremski and for which she wrote the introduction; "Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness," which she edited with Nicole Svobodny and Ludmilla Trigos; and "Mapping the Feminine: Russian Women and Cultural Difference," which she edited with Irina Reyfman and Hilde Hoogenboom. Cathy also published extensively on Soviet and post-Soviet literature and popular culture, Pushkin, Russian ballet, Russian émigré literature and culture, and the future of regional studies.  At the time of her death, Cathy was working on a book entitled "Nabokov and His Enemies: Terms of Engagement."

Cathy served as Director of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University, from 2001 to 2009 (the first woman to hold that position) and was honored as the Institute's 2012 Alumna of the Year.  As Director, Cathy was credited with broadening faculty engagement in the Harriman Institute by expanding its scope of activities to arts, literature, and culture, and in deepening its connections to Central Asia and the Caucases. In addition, she served as President of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Language (AATSEEL), as well as on the Advisory Council of the Kennan Institute and on the Board of Directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. She chaired the Executive Committee of the Slavic Division of the Modern Language Association and served on the editorial boards of "Slavic Review," "Novyi zhurnal," and "La Revue Russe." In 2011, she received the AATSEEL's Award for Outstanding Service to the Profession.

Above all, Professor Catharine Nepomnyashchy was a true Barnard treasure. She was an inspiration to countless students and an example to her colleagues. She knew how to find joy and excitement in any situation, and loved being part of, and central to, the action. People were drawn to her for good reason-for her energy, enthusiasm, and commitment to leading the fullest possible life, unencumbered by convention. Her smile could fill any room, and she continued to smile even as her name was, repeatedly and with all good intent, being constantly misspelled.

We are deeply saddened by this loss and know that Cathy will be dearly missed. It was Pushkin who said, "The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths," and for now we will let ourselves imagine that Cathy is still very much here at Barnard, her smile and enthusiasm pushing us, as always, forward.

My very best,
Linda Bell
Provost and Dean of the Faculty

Please note that funeral details, as well as information on a Memorial Service at Barnard, will be forthcoming.

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