#2
Subject: March 26 event in Washington: "Major Crisis in US - Russia relations and searching for the way out"
Date:     Tue, 24 Mar 2015 10:38:26 -0400
From:     Edward Lozansky <lozansky@gmail.com>

Please join the discussion with the leading American foreign policy experts on "Major Crisis in US - Russia relations and searching for the way out"  on Thursday, March 26  from 2.30 - 6.30 PM at the Hart Senate Office Building, Room 216,

To register visit www.RussiaHouse.org/wrf.php

Four US administrations have been in power since the collapse of communism and the USSR.  It looks like not a single one, however, has developed a truly sound Russia policy.  As a result we see the most dangerous level of confrontation not only since the end of Cold War but probably since 1962 Cuban missile crisis   

The current crisis in Ukraine which many see as a result of U.S. - Russia geopolitical confrontation underscores once again the urgent necessity of developing a new foreign policy agenda that will benefit both American and Russian long term strategic interests.

President Barack Obama keeps saying that "it's not a new Cold War but a very specific issue related to Russia's unwillingness to recognize that Ukraine can chart its own path."  However, as the deterioration of conditions in Ukraine continues we may face not only the return of the new Cold War but even more dangerous scenario.

It is extremely important, therefore, for both Washington and Moscow to rise above the level of mutual finger pointing. From our perspective, U.S. policymakers, spokespersons and public commentators need to recognize that restoring trust, dialogue and mutual respect with the only other major thermonuclear power on the planet is absolutely crucial for our national security and the peace of the world. The US and Russia have fundamentally compatible interests on terrorism, proliferation of WMD, piracy, illegal cyber activity, drug trafficking, climate change, and many other areas.

It may be worth recalling that in the most dangerous periods of the Cold War the risks of military confrontation were defused by the Administrations of Eisenhower, Kennedy and Reagan.  It is the time for both Washington and Moscow to negotiate an honorable end of this crisis.

Edward Lozansky, President, American University in Moscow
Professor, National Research Nuclear University
Tel: +1-202-364-0200; Fax: +1-240-554-1650 Moscow office: Tel.+7(495)509-7346
www.US-Russia.org
www.RussiaHouse.org

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 #3
Ultra-nationalist Ukrainian battalion gears up for more fighting
By Gabriela Baczynska
March 25, 2015

URZUF, Ukraine (Reuters) - The far-right Azov battalion, whose symbol resembles a black swastika on a yellow background, is preparing to defend the port city of Mariupol in southeastern Ukraine against a widely expected attack by pro-Russian separatists.

The 1,000 strong ultra-nationalist militia has a reputation as a fierce pro-government fighting force in the almost year-old conflict with the Russia-backed rebels in east Ukraine, and is disdainful of peace efforts.

But the radical views of the commanders of a group affiliated to Ukraine's national guard which works alongside the army, and the use of symbols echoing Nazi emblems have caused alarm in the West and Russia, and could return to haunt Kiev's pro-Western leadership when fighting eventually ends.

"We don't like the ceasefire at all. As with the previous ones, it'll only lead to another offensive by the enemy," Azov commander Andriy Biletsky told Reuters while watching artillery drills at Urzuf, on the shores of the Sea of Azov, about 40 km south-west of Mariupol.

"Appeasing the aggressor will only lead to more aggression. This war will inevitably continue - either until our complete defeat or until our full victory and return to our land in all east Ukraine and Crimea. We believe in the second scenario," said the 35-year-old from the city of Kharkiv.

As the drills continued, other members of the battalion were in combat with the separatists at the village of Shirokino, some 60 km (38 miles) to the northeast.

Shirokino, where Ukrainian and rebel positions are separated by only a few kilometers of village dwellings, is one of several places along the line of contact where fighting has continued despite a February ceasefire.

Mariupol, which Azov helped recapture from the rebels last year, is a big prize. Its capture would offer the separatists the chance to open a road further south a year after Russia annexed the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea from Ukraine.

Kiev and the West say Russia drives the rebellion in east Ukraine and has sent in troops as well as weapons to help the separatists. Moscow has sided with the rebels but denies direct military involvement.

"PATRIOT OF UKRAINE"

The Azov battalion originated from Biletsky's paramilitary national socialist group called "Patriot of Ukraine", which propagated slogans of white supremacy, racial purity, the need for authoritarian power and a centralized national economy.

"Patriot of Ukraine" opposed giving up Ukraine's sovereignty by joining international blocs, called for rolling back of liberal economy and political democracy, including free media.

In 2008, Biletsky urged "thousands of young fanatic apostles" to advance its ideas. Local media have reported on several violent incidents in which the group was involved.

Since Azov was officially created last May, it has been involved in fighting on the outskirts of the rebel stronghold of Donetsk, a battle for the town of Illovaysk which Ukrainian forces lost last summer and across the coast of the Sea of Azov.

But, since Azov was enrolled as a regiment of Ukraine's National Guard in September and started receiving increased supplies of heavy arms, Biletsky has toned down his rhetoric.

Most of "Patriot of Ukraine" websites are now down or under restricted access. He denied Azov's symbol was a reference to Nazism, saying it was rather a Ukrainian nationalist symbol.

Biletsky said he now has infantry and artillery units and was building a proper tank force. His troops training on the cannons in Urzuf were heavily armed with quality uniforms.

Biletsky said his troops, all volunteers, were "officially" making 6,000 hryvnia ($316) a month but in fact around 10,000 hryvnia. Apart from getting funds from the interior ministry, Azov is believed to be getting support from among Ukrainian super-rich oligarchs.

Biletsky did not say whether and how his views have changed since he wrote the "Patriot of Ukraine" program but said his priority now was extinguishing the pro-Russian rebellion.
"We have only one goal right now - fighting for the homeland until all of it is freed. And then we will try to build a new Ukraine that we could all be proud of. We are patriots. We believe in our nation, nationalism is our ideology," he said.

Biletsky, a historian by education who is married with a son, was detained in 2011 on charges of assaulting a man.

He was released after an amnesty in February 2014 and his aides dismiss the case as an example of political persecution of Ukrainian nationalists under Ukraine's ousted president and Moscow ally Viktor Yanukovich.

He has since been elected to the Ukrainian parliament, riding a wave of an increased nationalist sentiment in Ukraine triggered by the war.

PRESSURE ON KIEV

Some Ukrainian politicians have defended Biletsky and his troops as patriots. There is lingering doubt, however, over what role Azov might play when the military conflict ends and whether its members could challenge President Petro Poroshenko and his government or threaten the wider public security.

Biletsky has criticized Poroshenko for losing out on in an information war against Russia and the rebels, and is dismissive of the chances for a negotiated solution to the conflict.

"How can we settle it peacefully if part of our territory is occupied? Will they give us Crimea back? How can there be a peaceful way to stop an aggression?," he said.

In a sign of persistent tensions between the pro-Ukrainian volunteer battalions and Ukraine's regular army, Biletsky blamed Ukraine's top military commanders for battlefield defeats.

He said he has lost about 60 men in the conflict and wants a revamp of Ukraine's armed forces to promote a new generation of field commanders who have fought on the ground in a conflict that has killed more than 6,000 people.

"We have loads of generals brought up in the Soviet Union who have no idea of combat, who rose as state officials in uniforms rather than commanding officers in the field. These people don't want to and don't know how to fight."
($1 = 19.0000 hryvnia)

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 #4
The Guardian
March 25, 2015
Fragile truce brings limited respite to war-weary people of eastern Ukraine
The population of eastern Ukraine faces a humanitarian crisis with an acute lack of basic amenities and mental health problems taking a heavy toll
By Clár Ní Chonghaile
Clár Ní Chonghaile is a freelance reporter based in London. She has worked as a journalist in Paris, Madrid, London, Abidjan, Dakar and, most recently, Nairobi. You can follow her on Twitter at @clarnic

Just over a month after a fragile ceasefire came into effect in eastern Ukraine, a traumatised population is struggling with a lack of basic services, critical shortages in medical supplies and power outages, and the mental scars caused by the conflict.

At least 1.1 million people are displaced in the region, while a further 743,000 have left Ukraine because of the conflict between pro-Russia rebels and government forces. The UN estimates that more than 6,000 people have been killed.

"In non-government controlled areas, the greatest need now is food because people have no income, especially when the government has seized welfare payments. This has the biggest impact on the most vulnerable," said Vanno Noupech, interim representative for the UN refugee agency, UNHCR.

"In the areas affected by fighting before the ceasefire, there has been a lot of destruction, [there is a] lack of access to water and sanitation, and a need for food and shelter," he added.

Loïc Jaeger, deputy head of mission for Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) in Ukraine, said access to healthcare was dire, with drug stocks running out in some places, while in other areas people could not afford to buy what was available.

MSF has shifted its focus from dealing with the wounded to general healthcare and the treatment of chronic diseases.

"We are worried about tuberculosis because it is endemic in the area, and with people being displaced and living in crowded places, the risk of transmission is higher," said Jaeger.

"Besides the direct effect on physical health, the lack of access to basic services is affecting people's mental health. It was very tough when the conflict resumed in January. A lot of our patients, who were attending mental health consultations, were really depressed," he added.

In early March, the United Nations human rights office warned that Ukraine stood on the brink of a "new and very deadly chapter" after fighting escalated in mid-February, causing hundreds of deaths and "an untenable situation" for people trapped in conflict zones.

Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein, the high commissioner for human rights, said all sides must abide by the Minsk peace agreements signed in February.

"The human rights situation in Ukraine remains grave," he said. "Should this trend continue, this would represent a new and very deadly chapter in this conflict, expanding the areas where the rule of law and the protection of human rights are effectively absent."

Although attacks have fallen significantly since the ceasefire was agreed, there have been accusations of continued violence on both sides.

Jaeger said the uncertainty was taking its toll in a declining industrial region where the closure of mines meant many young people had already left before the war, leaving behind mostly older people.

"[The people] need to be able to get back to a more or less normal life because whatever humanitarian organisations might do here, it will remain a drop in the ocean. It's not a refugee camp of 30,000 people that we can handle as humanitarian organisations. We are talking about three million people, in Europe," he said.

Noupech said some people were now trying to return to their homes in areas previously affected by fighting, but unexploded ordnance remained a problem.

"People would like to go back and see what has happened but it is probably too early to talk about a sustainable return," he said.

"The response by the civilian society has been extraordinarily good for the last year, but there is also already a certain fatigue, especially because of the general economic situation, so that is quite worrying," he added.

Earlier this month, the International Monetary Fund signed off a $17.5bn (£11.8bn) four-year aid programme for Ukraine, including an immediate payment of $5bn for general budget support to help stabilise the economy.

Jaeger said stocks of anaesthetics and psychotropic drugs, such as anti-depressants and sedatives, were running very low and hospitals were no longer carrying out planned operations, but instead saving their anaesthetics for emergency surgery.

The UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) said on 13 March that supplies of critical medicines were "alarmingly low", adding that bureaucracy continued to hinder entry to non-government controlled areas where access to benefits and services has been cut off since last December.

Humanitarian funding remains "critically low" with just 15% of the $316m required for 2015 funded or pledged.

Jaeger said more aid had arrived in Donetsk over the last two months but that the Luhansk area lacked support.

"Even before the war, Luhansk was much poorer than Donetsk so the coping capacity of the population is less," he said, adding that MSF was also concerned about people around Slavyansk, where mobile clinics are being used to meet medical needs.

"The main aid providers so far have been local organisations, which are doing a great job, but they don't have the capacity to scale up to big volumes. They used to collect clothes for the people of Africa before the war and they now collect food and clothes for displaced people in their area," he said.

The UN's children's agency says more than 140,000 children have been displaced, with more than 100,000 children and caregivers needing psychosocial support.

Jaeger said the mental toll was especially acute because war was a relatively new experience.

"We are not talking about people who have been living in a conflict environment for 20 years. They were in Europe. Euro 2012 was played in Donetsk. In that stadium now, you have hundreds of volunteers preparing food parcels for the population," he said.

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 #5
Financial Times
March 25, 2015
The purpose of Putin's diplomatic acrobatics
By Samuel Charap
The writer is senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies

The Russian president's goal is not to deceive his counterparts. So why lie, asks Samuel Charap

In the past year,Vladimir Putin has become almost as notorious for his falsehoods as for the truth of his actions in Ukraine. He delivered a perfect example in a state television documentary this month: "Our ultimate objective was not the seizure of Crimea or some sort of annexation," he said. "[Instead,] it was to give people the opportunity to express their opinion about how they want to live. . . Since we stayed below the maximum number of troops allowed on our base in Crimea, we actually didn't violate anything."

In addition to this denial, and the gloss of "self-determination" on the annexation of Crimea, Mr Putin's persistent disavowals of Russian military presence in eastern Ukraine have become staples of the Kremlin's script.

With these rhetorical acrobatics he and his senior officials have destroyed any diplomatic credibility they had, undermining the personal rapport among leaders needed for negotiations. Moreover, with basic facts disputed by their interlocutors, western officials find it almost impossible to engage in diplomacy about urgent geopolitical developments such as Moscow's military activities in Ukraine.

Yet Mr Putin's goal is not to deceive his counterparts. He knows western leaders have been briefed by their intelligence services, which have spy satellites and other capabilities that make it almost impossible to send tanks into Ukraine unnoticed. So why continue to lie?

The usual explanation is that he needs to keep his public in the dark. Although the "return" of Crimea is highly popular, most Russians oppose a war with Ukraine. But domestic politics alone cannot explain the stream of un­truths.Just 2 per cent of Russians support Ukrainian government forces re­taking control of rebel-held areas. On the pretext of preventing that outcome, Mr Putin could justify involvement in the conflict to the public - especially with his approval rating at 88 per cent.

The more compelling explanation is international. Russia is often denounced in the west as a revisionist power, determined to tear down the postwar international order. Given Moscow's flagrant violations of basic principles of international law, and its bilateral and multilateral commitments to Ukraine, these allegations have merit.

Yet if Russia were a truly revisionist power, its leaders would not be devising ever more creative ways to portray the country as a law-abiding actor. Instead of conducting a referendum in Crimea, no matter how preposterously biased, Mr Putin would simply have seized the peninsula without engaging in any procedure or any explanation. Rather than denying his invasion of Ukraine's east, this revisionist Putin would have been the first to announce his troops' progress across the frontier. And he would have had no hesitation in admitting that he would continue violating his neighbour's sovereignty as long as he deemed it in Russia's interests to do so.

In other words, paradoxically, Moscow could well be lying about its behaviour in Ukraine not because it wants to destroy the international system but because it wants to preserve it; hypocrisy, after all, is the homage vice pays to virtue. As the legal successor of the Soviet Union, Russia was one of the system's architects. It is a veto-wielding permanent member of its central decision-making body, the UN Security Council. The Kremlin sees itself as behaving much like Washington, which devises clever legal arguments for what are considered in Moscow grave in­stances of rule-breaking; the invasion of Iraq, say, or the recognition of Kosovo. Many in the Kremlin would say great powers can and do break the rules - but they must cloak their violations in rhetoric to prevent others following suit.

None of this is to say that Russia's actions are anything but illegal and highly dangerous. But perhaps we in the west should not be so worked up about all the lying. It might be much worse for the international order if Mr Putin were to start telling the truth.

 #6
Survival
International Institute for Strategic Studies
April-May 2015
Consequences of a New Cold War
By Samuel Charap and Jeremy Shapiro
Samuel Charap is Senior Fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the IISS.
Jeremy Shapiro is a Fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution

The Ukraine crisis poses vexing policy challenges for Washington. President Barack Obama has sought to strike a balance between the imperative of responding to Russian actions and the equally important need to avoid an all-out confrontation with Moscow. As he put it in July 2014, 'it's not a new Cold War ... [It] is a very specific issue related to Russia's unwillingness to recognise that Ukraine can chart its own path.'The problem is that the administration's balancing act cannot last long. As the deterioration of conditions in Ukraine in recent weeks has demonstrated, forces beyond the president's control are pushing him toward the very new Cold War that he wants to avoid. He will eventually face a choice between that outcome, which would be hugely dangerous and costly, and negotiations on a revised regional order in Europe, which might hurt him politically but would be far better for the United States and for the world. He should move toward the negotiated outcome now.

Obama's instinct to avoid a new Cold War is clearly the right one. Gratuitously seeking confrontation with Russia could lead to Armageddon, after all. More to the point, the US needs Russian cooperation on any number of global priorities: particularly Iran's nuclear programme, but also the Syrian civil war, the Middle East peace process, the stability of Afghanistan and counter-terrorism. As long as Russia is willing to play ball on those issues, the US has every reason to continue to do so as well.

The administration's lack of interest in negotiating a new deal on the European security architecture is also understandable. The potential for success at such talks seems like a long shot at best, and the status quo, while unpleasant, is not hugely detrimental to US interests. Americans are not dying; the US economy is not affected; US treaty allies are safe.

The administration's policy is a middle way between these two extremes. It is defined by maintaining cooperation on key global issues while keeping up the pressure on Russia over its actions in Ukraine and supporting the new government in Kiev. It also is dependent on avoiding significant  escalation on the ground in Donbas and on the Kiev government managing to stay solvent.

The middle way seems prudent today. But it cannot last; politics in Washington and Moscow, and the interaction between them, will make it impossible to sustain. Obama's middle way will likely devolve into the very new Cold War that he is seeking to avoid.

Time is short

It will become politically untenable for the United States and Russia to avoid escalation in Ukraine while maintaining cooperation on global issues. In the US, this dual-track approach - condemning Russia as an aggressor one day, and seeking to work with Moscow the next - creates regular opportunities  for Obama's critics to decry him as weak and feckless. Indeed, charges of appeasement can be heard from Capitol Hill each time senior US and Russian officials confer on global issues, or when the Obama administration takes steps to avoid escalation in Ukraine.

For example, former Bush administration official David Kramer condemned Obama in the pages of the Washington Post for inviting Aleksandr Bortnikov (director of the FSB, Russia's domestic security service) to a February 2014 summit in Washington on countering violent extremism. That same day, a bipartisan group of senators published a letter urging the administration to arm Ukraine and impose further sanctions on Russia.

In Moscow, officials are regularly criticised for having betrayed Donbas, or for being too soft on the US by cooperating on other issues, such as arms control. Since these political dynamics play out in public and are picked up by the other side in real time, the hawks in each country tend to feed off each other, progressively raising tensions.

Meanwhile, both countries' bureaucracies will prove incapable of resisting the urge to link the dispute in Ukraine to other aspects of bilateral interaction. The US began to do so almost immediately after the annexation of Crimea in March 2014. All joint work considered non-essential - from the Bilateral Presidential Commission to most space cooperation - was suspended. What remains of the relationship is therefore what matters the most to the United States, from the Iran nuclear talks to the purchase of Russian rockets to launch US military satellites. Moscow has, for the most part, continued to cooperate on these issues, insulating them from the Ukraine dispute. But this mutual compartmentalisation has already started to fray. In November 2014, for example, Russia announced that it would not be attending the US-led 2016 Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, and in
late February 2015 Moscow revealed that it had offered to sell the powerful Antey-2500 air-defence system to Iran. It is only a matter of time until tensions undermine the remaining areas of cooperation in the relationship.

And those tensions will rise. Moscow is not content to let the conflict in Ukraine simmer on the back burner. Accepting even a rump Ukraine rapidly hurtling into the arms of the West and its institutions is a political non-starter in Moscow. So if the agreement reached in Minsk on 11-12 February does not give the Kremlin what it wants, the recent escalation in Russian support for the insurgency in Donbas will not be the last. If the next rebel offensive were to push deeper into Ukrainian territory, the political pressure on the US to escalate, through further sanctions or the supply of lethal assistance to the Ukrainian military, might prove overwhelming. Under those conditions, even if the US wished to continue to cooperate with Russia on global issues, Moscow might well baulk, while further intensifying its own involvement on the ground in Ukraine.

But even if the conflict in eastern Ukraine were to be frozen in some form, with no bloodshed but also no settlement, the middle way cannot hold. It has already proven politically difficult for the Obama administration to continue working with Russia on key global issues. Senator John McCain has called it a strategy 'in the finest tradition of Neville Chamberlain'.

It will only get harder, as most of the likely presidential candidates - Democratic and Republican - appear set to take a hard line toward Russia. A similar dynamic plays out in Moscow, where nationalists, now including some fighters who have returned from the front lines in Ukraine, often criticise Putin for 'betraying Novorossiya' and denounce his 'Chekist-oligarchic regime'. Hardliners publicly call for Russia to renounce arms-control treaties and to end all cooperation with NATO.

The middle way is explicitly a temporary policy, in place until Putin and his regime give in to Western demands to change course in Ukraine. As Obama said in December:
"You'll recall that three or four months ago, everybody in Washington was convinced that President Putin was a genius ... And I said at the time we don't want war with Russia but we can apply steady pressure working with our European partners, being the backbone of an international coalition to oppose Russia's violation of another country's sovereignty, and that over time, this would be a strategic mistake by Russia."
In other words, the middle way is designed as a means to an end; it assumes that Western pressure will change Russian policy in Ukraine.

There is a debate about this assumption in Washington. But even those who agree with it do not see it as a short-term proposition; it is a matter of many months, if not years, of squeezing Russia to produce results. The problem for the Obama administration is that the political dynamics pushing toward escalation, and the bureaucratic dynamics pushing for linkage, will produce results in a matter of weeks, or months at most. In other words, even in a best-case scenario, it is just a matter of time before a new Cold War will overtake the middle way.

Cold wars old and new

It is important to be clear-eyed about what a new Cold War would entail, first and foremost by honestly assessing the old one. One detects a certain Cold War nostalgia in Washington. Many recall it as a period of comforting predictability. Confrontation with Russia evokes a supposed halcyon period of US foreign policy when the cause was just and the strategy was clear. The language of deterrence, containment and economic isolation has returned from well-earned retirement.

This language, notwithstanding its comforting familiarity, carries significant baggage that will reinforce the current US-Russia impasse. It recalls the existential Soviet challenge, an evil the US had to fight until its ultimate demise. It demands unflinching fortitude and clarity of purpose, in a long-term struggle fought on multiple fronts across the world. Any compromise amounts to appeasement; any cooperation is tantamount to aiding a ruthless enemy.

Cold War nostalgia is dangerous, and not only because of its semantic baggage. That period was not one of comforting stability and clear-eyed strategy. To the contrary, it was a time of deep strategic uncertainty, costly proxy wars and extraordinary danger, when American children were first taught to hide under their desks and in cellars to keep themselves safe - and then eventually told that there was no point to such exercises because they could be vapourised at any moment. That the Cold War ended without a nuclear exchange did, to a degree, reflect effective statesmanship and well-crafted policy. But as numerous near-misses - from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Able Archer episode - attest, this success was as much a function of luck as strategy. A nuclear stand-off with Moscow is not an experiment we should care to repeat.

The Cold War was also enormously expensive, both fiscally and politically. Military expenditures alone amounted to $18.45 trillion (in 2014 dollars) over 45 years. Politically, the Cold War created the shameful legacy of McCarthyism. Institutionally, it bequeathed the US the military-industrial complex of which President Dwight Eisenhower warned over half a century ago. Today, Americans continue to pay for gold-plated weapons systems they no longer need, 25 years after the Cold War ended.

Finally, the Cold War was extremely destabilising throughout the world. The bipolar confrontation was the lens through which the United States and the Soviet Union saw every aspect of their respective foreign policies. They eventually imported that rivalry into every region of the world, fuelling seemingly endless proxy civil wars in such diverse locales as Guatemala, Angola and Vietnam. As The Economist has reported, 'by the end of [the Cold War], civil war afflicted 18% of the world's nations ... When the cold war ended, the two enemies stopped most of their sponsorship of foreign proxies, and without it, the combatants folded. More conflicts ended in the 15 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall than in the preceding half-century.'

A new Cold War would be very different in its specifics, but hardly more salutary. Ukraine, as we know it today, would be finished. Its economy is already in tatters. In 2014, industrial production shrank by a fifth and GDP contracted by nearly a tenth, while the hryvnia lost nearly half its value and inflation skyrocketed by 24.9%. As the conflict in the east drags on, this will only get worse, since Donbas accounted for 16% of GDP, 25% of industrial output and 27% of exports before the crisis. Putin's tanks might never occupy Kiev, but a new Cold War would transform Ukraine into a violent, perennially destabilised economic basket case, a Sudan on the Dnieper.

A new Cold War would also destabilise Europe well beyond Ukraine. During the last uptick in tension between Russia and the West, from mid-2007 to early 2009, Europe experienced a cyber war in Estonia, a real war in Georgia and a gas war in Ukraine. This time around, Russia has allegedly financed fringe parties in the EU that threaten to undo the European integration project; abducted an Estonian intelligence officer; and pushed brinksmanship in the skies to dangerous new levels, with weekly close encounters between Russian air patrols and Western jets (both civilian and military).

For the United States, all of this adventurism may not be as threatening as the potential of Soviet tanks crossing the Fulda Gap, but treaty obligations to NATO allies mean it cannot be ignored. Indeed, the Obama administration has already spent $1 billion on its European Reassurance Initiative, and we can expect that sum to be a mere down payment on billions more in reassurance measures and further military deployments. The new tensions on the continent will divert resources and attention from priorities in other regions, such as the all-important Asia-Pacific, at a time when sequestration has already forced significant belt-tightening.

Once the prospect of a settlement of this crisis fades completely, and a new Cold War sets in, the gloves will come off in Moscow: Russia will seek outright to spoil US efforts to address global challenges. The US should be prepared for Russia to disrupt any number of processes that matter dearly to Washington. We caught a glimpse of what this might look like in 2007-09. In that period, among other moves, Russia concluded a contract to deliver the S-300 air-defence system to Iran, which would have entailed near-immediate Israeli strikes and the end to the P5+1 process; and offered a $2bn 'bribe' to the leadership of Kyrgyzstan to kick the US out of the Manas Air Base, a key stop-off point for troops en route to Afghanistan.

This time around, the US could face, among many other things, the end of the P5+1 process, Russian collusion with China on Asia-Pacific regional security issues, vetoes of all US initiatives at the UN Security Council and the blocking of the IMF's work in Ukraine (Russia is on the fund's board). The US-led international order was created after the Second World War, but it only began to function in earnest once the Cold War ended. A new Cold War would reverse 25 years of progress.
--
A new Cold War, and the tensions it would introduce into the international system, would likely return us to the levels of nuclear danger of the old Cold War. Once again, we risk finding ourselves in a stand-off that at any moment could destroy life on earth. Admittedly, the end of the world is not a likely outcome, but it is a very bad one - and it should focus our minds on the stakes in this crisis. Obama's middle way cannot hold. Eventually, he will have to choose between a new Cold War and a new arrangement on the regional security order in Europe. That new arrangement will involve difficult compromises. To put an end to Russian intervention in its neighbourhood, the West might have to recognise its special role there, and forswear further enlargement of NATO and the EU in the region. This would be a tough pill for any US president to swallow. But the alternative, a new Cold War, is far worse - for the United States, Russia, Europe and, most of all, for Ukraine. It is already past time to begin talks with Moscow.

Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to John Drennan for his research assistance.

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#7
The Blaze
www.theblaze.com
March 23, 2015
'The United States Must Stand Up to Putin': House Dems, GOP Slam Obama's Inaction in Ukraine
By Pete Kasperowicz

The House sent an unmistakable message to President Barack Obama Monday night - send defensive weapons to Ukraine, and send them now.

Congress passed legislation in December authorizing Obama to give Ukraine defensive weapons to protect itself from the ongoing invasion of its country by Russia. But Obama has dithered, and has essentially done nothing other than sending Ukraine about $60 million in non-lethal aid.

Just last week, for example, senior officials admitted that they are still considering whether to send lethal defensive weapons, and haven't made any decisions on whether to help train Ukrainian troops. More immediately, the Obama administration has watched for more than a month as Russia violates a ceasefire in Ukraine, and seems mostly to be hoping things get better - there are no signs the administration is about to pursue tougher sanctions against Russia at this point.

On Monday night, the House had enough, and passed a Democratic resolution calling on Obama to implement last year's law by sending Ukraine munitions before it's too late. Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), who sponsored the resolution, warned that failing to act against Russia would put all of Europe on a course similar to what it experienced during World War II.

"We cannot view the crisis in Ukraine as just some faraway conflict or someone else's problem," he said. "This war has left thousands of dead, tens of thousands wounded, a million displaced, and has begun to threaten the post-Cold War stability of Europe."

"This war poses the greatest threat to European security since World War II, and we shouldn't take it lightly, and we shouldn't be idle, and we shouldn't sit back, and we shouldn't let other countries tell us what to do," he said.

Engel was joined by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), who lamented that Obama has "chosen inaction in the guise of endless deliberation."

But Democrats sounded just as tough on Obama as the Republicans did. Rep. David Scott (D-Ga.) said the U.S. simply must act to save Ukraine from Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"There are some times, in my view, you've just got to stand up to the bully," Scott said. "The United States must stand up to Putin, and let him know that there's a light in this world, and the United States is going to show the way."

The House passed the resolution 348-48 - only 10 Republicans voted against it, and the rest of the "no" votes were from Democrats. The resolution makes several findings that Russia is illegally intruding on Ukraine's sovereignty, and says Obama should move quickly to help defend the embattled country.

"The House of Representatives strongly urges the president to fully and immediately exercise the authorities provided by Congress to provide Ukraine with lethal defensive weapon systems to enhance the ability of the people of Ukraine to defend their sovereign territory from the unprovoked and continuing aggression of the Russian Federation," it reads.

But despite the overwhelming vote, it's not clear whether Obama will act any time soon to help Ukraine. A decision to do nothing would seem to fit in with Obama's general preference of relying on negotiations for all issues, regardless of whether it's on Ukraine, Iran or elsewhere in the Middle East, despite growing criticism that this tactic is not working.

Last year, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko spoke to Congress, and warned that the blankets the U.S. was sending were not enough to win the war.

"Blankets, night-vision goggles are also important," he said. "But one cannot win the war with blankets. Even more, we cannot keep the peace with a blanket."
 

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#8
Ukrainian Magazine (Chicago)
http://ukrainianchi.com
March 24, 2015
VLADIMIR PUTIN: A REINCARNATION OF DRACULA?
By By Rev. Myron Panchuk, M.A.

In August of 1991 a miracle occurred: Ukraine declared its independence. I remember the joy, the euphoria felt in our Ukrainian-American community in Chicago. People greeted each other in the streets as if it was Easter Day, and on that day we all stood up proudly to sing the Ukrainian national anthem in church, in neighborhood restaurants and in the streets. The resounding message was that "God granted us a miracle. Not a drop of blood has been shed. Ukraine is free."

I found solace in this miraculous reality; a God-given miracle and not a drop of blood shed. A quarter of a century later this miracle has been marred, the joy of my parents' generation stained by the blood of young, self-sacrificing Ukrainians fighting for their independence and their future. A bloodthirsty, vampire-like force was lurking in the shadows of the post-Soviet political vacuum created after the fall of what President Ronald Reagan labelled "the evil empire."

Little did we know that a young KGB agent who had been stationed in Germany, by the name of Vladimir Putin, was rising in the ranks of the new Russia, a Russia that was humiliated by the loss of its empire and a Russia that could no longer truthfully claim to be a super power.

Masha Gessen in "The Man without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin" (2012) describes the future president of Russia as a teenage thug who learned to fend off bullies by fiercely attacking them. A lackluster student, the young Putin had a dream. Whereas most boys of his era dreamed of becoming cosmonauts, Putin dreamed of becoming a KGB agent. Gripped by heroic spy narratives and television serials the young Vladimir did everything he could to fulfill his quest.

Gessen's description of Putin as a "man without face" has encouraged me to frame this reflective discourse in terms of an archetypal reality. What archetype best fits Vladimir Putin's personality, his behavior, his dark spirit? I came to the conclusion that Putin is possessed by the archetype of a vampire. He is bloodthirsty, sinister, and lives outside the boundaries of ethics and morality. Just as vampires are unable to see their physical reflection, Putin lacks the ability to grasp his own existential depravity. He maneuvers in the shadows, in the darkness of night when it is difficult for others to see his true intentions.

Like the 15th century Wallachian prince, Vlad Dracula, Putin destroys and kills his enemies for thinking and speaking differently: a symbolic rather than a literal impaling of heads.

How did Putin come to power in the first place? It was Boris Berezovsky, the billionaire oligarch that died by hanging himself in London in 2013, who persuaded Putin to become Russia's prime minister and paved his way to the presidency.

Gessen mentions that upon meeting Putin for the first time, Boris Yeltsin stated that Putin was alright, although rather short. But as history has shown, Putin's short physical stature has in no way deterred him from standing above the crowd.

It was Berezovsky who helped catapult Putin, the "man without a face," out of the shadows of the KGB and into the daylight of world politics.

Vampires can be charming, they know how to seduce. But you have to invite them into your house and into your life.

Although Berezovsky may have been the kingmaker, he did so for his own gain, to make sure that his wealth and influence would be secure. The historical narrative places emphasis on Berezovsky's role, but it is Putin who made sure that the oligarchs whom he charmed would serve his purpose. They would bleed the Russian economy in order to fill their pockets as long as Putin allowed them to do so. It was the oligarchs who invited Putin the Vampire into their lives and they would become his slaves.

Vampires are also able to hypnotize their victims. In two public statements Vladimir Putin summarized the trajectory of his domestic and foreign politics which had a hypnotic effect on the Russian people. In April of 2005, Putin stated that: "The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century." The second statement made during a meeting with President George W. Bush in 2008 was as follows: "Ukraine is not even a nation."

These two statements serve to continually remind the Russian people of the ''greatness'' of the Soviet Union, of the humiliation experienced by the loss of Russia's imperial historical destiny, and of the need to restore national pride through territorial expansion and economic dominance. Instead of crafting forward-looking policies and creating vehicles for future growth, Putin knew that he could easily manipulate his people by fueling the narrative of Russian greatness. Russians lamented the loss of Soviet ''greatness'' and especially of Ukraine which many regard as their historical patrimony.

Political statements are often, and mistakenly, dismissed as sheer rhetoric. But, these statements have hypnotic power and it should be of no surprise that during the years when the Kremlin could still pump countless petro-dollars into its economy and maintain a decent standard of living for its citizens that the figure of Joseph Stalin would rise to prominence once again. His crimes of genocide were swept under the carpet and his face would once again become an icon of Russian greatness. Putin the Vampire created the illusion he himself needed in order to destroy his enemies and suck the life out of the Chechens, Georgians, and now the Ukrainians by resurrecting his master Stalin.

The genocide of the Chechen people, the terrorist acts in Moscow and Beslan, the invasion of Georgia, the unnatural deaths of 205 journalists, the annexation of Crimea and the military invasion of Donbas all trail back to Vladimir Putin. You might not believe in the existence of vampires and we know well that no amount of holy water, crucifixes, and garlic can stop Putin the Vampire. But, Masha Gessen cites a conversation a journalist had with Alexander Litvinenko on the topic of the murder of Anna Mazepa Politskovskaya. Litvinenko was certain that Putin ordered her killing because she was ready to expose Putin's crimes of genocide in Chechnya.

The world turned a blind eye.

Litvinenko was killed by polonium poisoning. Many others who have tried to drive the stake of truth through Putin and Russia's heart have also been killed. We must remain vigilant, focused and centered in our battle against evil and against the man who personifies evil. Let's not be fooled by his recent disappearance. Vampires do that, but they lurk and they stalk and they return.
 

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 #9
Kyiv Post
March 24, 2015
Western defeatism in stopping Russia's war against Ukraine
By Boris Danik
Boris Danik is a retired Ukrainian-American living in North Caldwell, New Jersey.

Special status within the Ukrainian state for separatist-held territory in the east, envisioned in Minsk II agreement, is an incongruously crude attempt to undermine stability and make turmoil in Ukraine.

It was Vladimir Putin's script, accepted by the shameless Barack Obama-Angela Merkel-Francois Holland trio, even if the U.S. president was not there in person.

It was their alternative to offering Ukraine weapons for self-defense.

In the month after Minsk II, the government in Kyiv has handled its part of the deal as best it could.

It passed a law conditioning special status on elections in rebel-held territory under Ukrainian law and with international observers.

The Kremlin yelled foul, accusing Kyiv of trying to replace the current proxies there by pro-Ukrainian politicians.

No one can seriously expect "zhiteli Donbasa" (Donbas residents) elect anyone other than the pro-Russian officials, under any law, as they had done during Viktor Yanukovych's presidency.

Moscow simply sees Kyiv's move as foot-dragging.

From Putin's point of view, it would be perfectly proper to have the same pro-Moscow stooges govern in Donbas (as part of Ukraine) who showed their hate of the country by boisterously trampling on Ukrainian national flag and openly abusing captured Ukrainian soldiers in the streets of Donetsk.

News media also mentioned that "nationalists in Kyiv" protested the special status law. But what did they expect? The government has not much maneuvering space. Logic dictates that the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics must be kept outside the Ukrainian state, rather than let them in under Putin's cynical formula.

President Petro Poroshenko and the leadership around him can see it clearly. The talk about "regaining border control" between Donbas and Russia is not serious.

Many or at least some Ukrainians had erroneously believed that pro-Russian orientation of voters in Donbas does not mean they would actually prefer to be part of Russia, given a chance.

That was wishful thinking.

Most of Donbas population has shown itself decidedly anti-Ukrainian, regardless of ethnic origin.

And they despise the presence of Ukrainian army.

Kyiv has been actively seeking military and economic aid in the West. Not much will be forthcoming unless and until the White House inner circle starts treating Ukraine as a major factor in their world view.

So far it has been treated as an expendable chip, despite all the "concern" and the smooth talk.

Western leaders should readjust their receptors to understand that Ukraine is important because it is the first line of defense of Europe.

With the White House shift of attention towards Asia in the last 15 years, NATO has gradually abandoned its original mission to defend Europe (without saying so), and is becoming irrelevant.

There is still a nonsensical discussion under way about which of the two is the bigger threat to the United States, ISIS or Russia.

Meanwhile, American influence in Europe is waning. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier is openly at odds with NATO supreme commander U.S. General Philip Breedlove concerning war in Ukraine ("Back off NATO, there is a new army in town," op-ed by Pyotr Romanov, Kyiv Post, March 17).

But, of course, "the new European army," envisioned by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker in a recent talk, is in a dreaming phase.

Europe is more likely to retreat into its traditional rivalries, as the US is gradually removing itself from Europe.

Obama recently announced more cuts of U.S. troops in NATO.

American combat units now are down to two brigades (about 4,000 each). And so did Britain.

Not promising moves to protect NATO image, much less defend anything. If the neo-isolationist trend in the USA is not reversed, European nations may be returning to their pre-World War II usual self-defeating initiatives quicker than could be expected, with gates open for Russia to trample into almost any central European country.

Rather than providing an escape for Europe's playmakers, who possibly are expecting miracles, Minsk II looks like the precursor to a quicker "skid of the West," fulfilling the prediction in a famous 1918 book on the same subject ("The Downfall of the West" by Oswald Spengler).

The Minsk experience of Merkel and Hollande shows the fantasy qualities of what they have achieved. "Through both of us, our countries (Germany and France) have found each other again," Hollande after the all-night negotiating session with Russia's President Vladimir Putin in Minsk (Financial Times, March 19).

They will find the rest later.

Such paltry talk is on the same plateau as the drivel about "no military solution" in Russia's war on Ukraine (repeated by Steinmeier on March 22).

The latter equivocation is by far more devious than a pretended learning disability could be among fools. It falls in the same category as rationalizing that weapons delivered for Ukrainian army (which, by the way, is now among the strongest in Europe and has a much more supervised and reliable logistics base than it had last year, according to Poroshenko) could fall in the Russians' hands.

Ultimately, it is the defeatism in the 21st century Western vision -- an antithesis to the notion that "freedom is not free" -- that nurtures the absurdities and excesses of addiction to the good life with lifelong guarantees.

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 #10
Ukraine leader fires oligarch Kolomoisky as regional chief
By Richard Balmforth
March 25, 2015

KIEV (Reuters) - Ukraine's president has fired billionaire Ihor Kolomoisky as governor of a key region in the east, the presidential website said on Wednesday, after armed men that lawmakers said were linked to the oligarch raided a state-owned oil firm.

Kolomoisky has been at the center of a political storm since the masked men briefly entered the offices of UkrTransNafta on Thursday night after its director, his ally, was summarily replaced.

As governor of Dnipropetrovsk, Kolomoisky, a banking, energy and media tycoon with a fortune put at $1.8 billion by Forbes last year, has been a valuable ally to the central government by financing volunteer battalions there to defend against pro-Russian separatists.

But a statement on President Petro Poroshenko's website said he had dismissed Kolomoisky after the oligarch had offered to step down during a meeting late on Tuesday .

Poroshenko came under pressure from deputies opposed to the power of Ukraine's super-rich to sack Kolomoisky after the March 19 night raid on UkrTransNafta's offices. The tycoon himself appeared at the scene and angrily cursed and berated journalists.

But it will have been a difficult decision for Poroshenko, who, while a shaky ceasefire is still holding, is seeking to win back the diplomatic initiative in the crisis with Russia over separatist-held territories in the east.

The separatists control large swathes of the east including the two big towns of Donetsk and Luhansk and Poroshenko owes much to Kolomoisky for preventing the rebels seizing control of areas of Dnipropetrovsk region too.

There was no immediate word from Kolomoisky's camp.

Kolomoisky, 52, is one of a handful of so-called oligarchs who emerged in the early years after Ukraine's independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 to secure control over large sections of the economy, including key areas such as energy, and becoming key political players behind the scenes.

Poroshenko himself built a billion-dollar empire in confectionery before becoming president last May after street protests ousted the Moscow-backed Viktor Yanukovich from power, triggering Russia's annexation of Crimea and the separatist rebellions in the east.

The affair at the Kiev offices of UkrTransNafta turned the spotlight again on the role of Ukraine's super-rich and the future of their business empires as the country grapples with an economic crisis and a separatist war.

Kolomoisky, co-founder of the banking chain Privatbank, has interests in energy, media, aviation and metals. He has no direct business connection with UkrTransNafta, which is under full state ownership.

But Serhiy Leshchenko, one of two radical deputies who are pressing for the wings of the oligarchs to be clipped, had accused Kolomoisky of making a crude power play which challenged the state and the President's legitimacy.

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 #11
Christian Science Monitor
March 24, 2015
Ukraine's latest challenge: oligarchs with private armies
Gov. Igor Kolomoisky, who was given political power and the right to create a private army last year, last week used that power to seize the state oil company's headquarters in Kiev.
By Fred Weir, Correspondent  

MOSCOW - As Ukraine struggles with near-financial meltdown and a shaky peace deal with pro-Russian rebels in the east, the last thing it needs is a showdown with a powerful oligarch with a private army. But that may be just what is brewing.

Igor Kolomoisky, governor of the restive Dnipropetrovsk region of east Ukraine and a rough-and-tumble tycoon, was handed political power and the right to establish an army in the wake of last year's Maidan revolution. Last week, he triggered what some are calling a serious political crisis by using that force to seize the state oil company's headquarters in Kiev. At stake, experts say, is a harsh redivision of property and influence under way as Ukraine tries to meet International Monetary Fund demands for deep reforms to its oligarch-dominated economy.

The standoff at the oil company escalated Tuesday as Mr. Kolomoisky's supporters in Dnipropetrovsk announced that they will stage a huge rally Wednesday in support of greater regional "decentralization" and more cash from Kiev.

A domestic affair

Unlike the war against rebels in the east, who enjoy considerable support from Moscow, this is an entirely home-grown problem. One of the key demands of the Maidan protesters who overthrew former President Viktor Yanukovych was to end the economic reign of predatory oligarchs. Instead, many oligarchs were empowered by the new government, given governorships of important regions and a relatively free hand to maintain order.

Some experts have warned that enabling economic oligarchs to effectively transform themselves into warlords was storing up trouble for the future. Kolomoisky, a banking and media mogul, cracked down hard on rebel sympathizers in Dnipropetrovsk, and funded several private militias who've played an important role in the war. Rumors suggest that he controls as many as 10,000 armed men.      

President Petro Poroshenko has ordered all such private battalions to be integrated with the official armed forces. But in a strong indication that may not have happened, he found it necessary to repeat himself in a meeting with military commanders Monday. "Territorial defense will be subordinated to the strict military vertical. Our governors will not have their own armed forces!" he said.        

Russian media, perhaps hoping to inflame the situation, are playing up unconfirmed reports that private militias are leaving the front lines in the Donbass region and heading for Kiev. They are also promoting reports that Mr. Poroshenko, himself a top tycoon, has ordered two Army battalions to Dnipropetrovsk to keep order.

"It's getting quite serious. The chances of an internal war of oligarchs is growing," says Volodymyr Horbach, an expert with the independent Institute of Euro-Atlantic Integration in Kiev. "Kolomoisky has challenged Ukraine's leadership because he sees them taking the side of all the other oligarchs he competes with. It's pretty bad, but Kolomoisky doesn't have the resources to win in a battle with everyone else."

Laws unfriendly to oligarchs

The trigger for the current crisis was a law passed by parliament last week to make it easier to change the management of state corporations. Kolomoisky owns a minority stake in state oil company UkrNafta, but he has controlled the company for years, cutting out competitors and channeling oil to his own concerns through the state pipeline company, UkrTransNafta, which he also controlled. When the government tried to fire the head of UkrTransNafta, the Dnipropetrovsk governor stormed its Kiev office with his armed militia. In an epic rant caught on video, he told journalists that he was protecting the building from "Russian saboteurs."  

But he may be overstepping, say observers.       

"Kolomoisky is an extremely influential oligarch and politician. He has a very strong lobby in Kiev," and he owns a major Ukrainian broadcaster, says Vadim Karasyov, director of the independent Institute of Global Strategies in Kiev. "But he's going up against the state here. He's threatening political stability in Ukraine."

Most experts say Kolomoisky's actions in Kiev, and the rally his supporters at home are planning Wednesday, are a bargaining ploy and not a declaration of war. The conflict might even have positive consequences if it forces Kiev to move on long-stalled plans for "decentralization" of power to the country's diverse regions.

"Kolomoisky isn't a separatist; this is a very different kind of challenge from what we face in Donbass," says Yury Yakimenko, an expert with the independent Razumkov Center in Kiev. "This is basically about division of influence and assets, but Kolomoisky should understand that he's a political figure and not just a businessman. It is to be hoped that the parties to this conflict will realize the stakes, and come to some agreement. This is about the survival of the state."

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 #12
Moscow Times
March 25, 2015
Internal Rifts in Ukraine Play in Russia's Favor - Analysts
By Ivan Nechepurenko

When the incoming Ukrainian government faced the threat of sweeping separatism in the country's eastern regions one year ago, pugnacious billionaire Ihor Kolomoisky was the only oligarch to help.

As other tycoons hovered on the fence, unsure of how the ongoing fighting between pro-Russian rebels and government troops in the country's east would end, Kolomoisky assumed the office of governor of the key Dnipropetrovsk region, funding voluntary military battalions to fight against the rebels and offering hefty cash rewards for each captured separatist mercenary or government building returned to state control.

But as Kolomoisky, an owner of Ukraine's largest bank PrivatBank, gained political power in his stronghold, he sought to expand his influence to the national level and have a say in Ukraine's defense and foreign policies - ambitions that were at odds with the government's attempts to assert its power throughout the country, experts said.  

Now the precarious balance of powers holding Ukraine together appear to be cracking. During the past week, Kolomoisky and his team have clashed with Ukraine's president -fellow tycoon Petro Poroshenko - and the central government in Kiev over the control of key national companies. While Russia may be indifferent to the ultimate winner in the struggle, the conflict itself plays in Russia's favor, said Alexei Makarkin, deputy head of the Moscow-based think tank Center for Political Technologies.

"The more conflicts [in Ukraine], the better for Russia, because this way the Kiev government becomes weaker and is compromised in the eyes of the West. The Ukrainians [factions] understand this and use it to blackmail and threaten each other" in order to get what they want, Makarkin told The Moscow Times.

Prize Assets

On Sunday, armed men in full military gear bearing a striking resemblance to the volunteer battalions that Kolomoisky has financed during the last year surrounded the headquarters of Ukrnafta, Ukraine's leading oil company.

The conflict was provoked by a state attempt to regain control over Ukraine's oil extraction and oil transportation companies Ukrnafta and UkrTransNafta, which Kolomoisky has long exercised management control over despite only owning minority stakes.

Kolomoisky, whose sponsored armed groups include the Dnepr-1 battalion that many pundits have called his private army, denied that members of any of his volunteer battalions participated in the raid on the company headquarters.

The tycoon himself appeared at the offices of both companies, claiming Thursday that UkrTransNafta had been raided by "Russian saboteurs."

Trading Accusations

The government's reaction was swift. In a speech to military commanders Monday, Poroshenko vowed that regional governors would not be allowed to have their own "pocket armies - that's over!"

Arsen Avakov, the country's Interior Minister, issued an ultimatum Monday, ordering all armed groups not under state control to give up their arms within 24 hours.

The head of Ukraine's Security Service, Valentin Nalivaichenko, on Monday accused Kolomoisky's deputies in the Dnipropetrovsk administration and allies in the parliament of shielding criminal gangs responsible for abductions, murder and smuggling in the Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions.

In retaliation, at least five members of Ukraine's parliament apparently loyal to Kolomoisky said they would leave Poroshenko's party.

At a news conference in Dnipropetrovsk on Monday, one of these deputies, Vitaly Kuprin, accused Poroshenko of "the mass murder of civilians in the Donetsk region," Ukrainian news website Vesti.ua reported, in a move that could deepen the conflict-torn country's rifts even further.

Victory at the Cost of Ukraine
The cost of Kolomoisky winning this personal conflict would be "destroying Ukraine," according to Vladimir Fesenko, head of the Kiev-based Penta Center for Applied Political Research.

"Thanks to him, Dnipropetrovsk did not turn into Donetsk, though separatist sentiment there [in Dnipropetrovsk] was admittedly much weaker," Fesenko said in a phone interview from Kiev.

"Now he cannot preserve everything as it is - he has to accept a compromise," he said.

Enemy of the Kremlin

While the Kremlin has accused Kolomoisky of a catalog of sins during the past year, ironically it is in Russia's interests for the tycoon to retain some of his power, as he is someone who argues for Ukraine's decentralization, said Mikhail Pogrebinsky of the Center of Political and Conflict Studies in Kiev.  

"He is someone who promotes the idea of giving more powers to the regions, which coincides with Russia's policy," he said in a phone interview.

A year ago Kolomoisky described President Vladimir Putin as "a diminutive schizophrenic" who is "completely unreasonable and crazy" during a meeting with local government members in Dnipropetrovsk.

The next day, Putin responded by calling Kolomoisky a crook.

"He even managed to cheat our oligarch Roman Abramovich two or three years ago. Scammed him, as our intellectuals like to say. They signed some deal, Abramovich transferred several billion dollars, while this guy never delivered and pocketed the money," Putin told journalists during a meeting on the unfolding Ukraine crisis.

In June, Russia's Investigative Committee opened a criminal case against Kolomoisky, accusing him of organizing murder, kidnapping and using banned methods of warfare.

Time to Bury the Hatchet?

But despite his support for the Kiev government and deep enmity with Russia, Kolomoisky has recently expressed support for reaching a compromise with the pro-Russian rebel-held areas of eastern Ukraine.

Kolomoisky said Monday in an interview with the 1+1 television channel, which he owns, that the Ukrainian government must find a way to reconcile with the leaders of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk people's republics.

"We have two subjects that we do not recognize, but that have achieved a certain success, unfortunately. They exist," he said.

That stance brings him closer to the position of Moscow, which has pushed throughout the Ukraine conflict for greater autonomy for the regions.

"At the same time, the overall situation demonstrates that there is no consolidation in Ukraine, and the whole power struggle resembles a circus more than anything else," said Pogrebinsky.

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 #13
Ukrainian tycoons' war fraught with crisis of power - analysts
By Tamara Zamyatina

MOSCOW, March 24. /TASS/. The current stand-off between Ukrainian big business tycoon Igor Kolomoisky, the governor of the Dnipropetrovsk Region, and President Petro Poroshenko has not only a commercial side to it, but underlying political reasons as well, and this may well trigger a crisis of power in the country, polled experts have told TASS.

In brief, the unfolding conflict looks as follows. First, President Poroshenko made a decision to replace the chief of the country's largest oil and gas company Ukranafta, in which Kolomoisky's businesses control an aggregate 42% stake, while the government owns 50% plus one share. Kolomoisky rose in revolt last Sunday to venture into Ukrnafta's building with a group of gunmen by his side to put it under control.

The US ambassador in Kiev, according to the Ukrainian press, has intervened to take President Poroshenko's side.

Kolomoisky has not confined himself to fighting for his business interests, though. In an interview to the television broadcaster 1+1 he owns the tycoon explained his political platform. He declared that in his opinion the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk Republics were "an accomplished fact" and urged negotiations with their leaders. In the meantime, the deputy governor of the Dnipropetrovsk Region, Gennady Korban, has accused the authorities in Kiev of concealing the true casualties sustained by the Ukrainian army during what the Ukrainian establishment invariably refers to as "anti-terrorist operation" in the south-east of the country.

President Poroshenko has repaid Kolomoisky with his own coin. He vowed he would not let any governor have a "private army", thereby making a clear hint at the head of the Dnipropetrovsk Region, who is known to keep several volunteer battalions on his payroll. The Ukrainian Security Service has dealt its own blow on Kolomoisky. As its chief Valentin Nalivaichenko has said at a special news briefing, the security service is probing into the rumoured involvement of senior officials of the Dnipropetrovsk Region's administration in financing a crime ring responsible for smuggling goods across the line of disengagement with the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics and for kidnappings.

"Kolomoisky has laid hands not only on the country's largest oil and gas company, but on the largest pipeline network, too, and this is a kind of business that is inseparable from politics," the director of the Globalization Problems Institute, Mikhail Delyagin, has told TASS. "Now the question of power is high on the agenda for him. Kolomoisky is ready to pay his supporters with a lavish hand. He can easily afford to literally buy up a majority in the Ukrainian parliament. This, in turn may lead to the overthrow of Petro Poroshenko, for instance with the help of more massive street protests."

"In Dnepropetrovsk, some have already called a mass rally to rehearse Maidan-style demonstrations," Delyagin warns. "It is not ruled out that the Kolomoisky-led Dnepropetrovsk Region will become a country within a country, independent from Kiev. US ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, after having a word with Kolomoisky, came out in support of the Poroshenko team, which Washington had railroaded to power, but he tends to underestimate how really dangerous the Dnipropetrovsk governor can be. He defies any restrictions on the use of violence".

The deputy director of the Political Technologies Centre, Alexey Makarkin, believes that "as most of the volunteer battalions Kolomoisky was financing throughout the crackdown on Donbas have become integrated with Ukraine's law enforcement system, President Poroshenko has decided to strip the Dnipropetrovsk governor of his risky influence on the events in the country and to bar him from the strategic oil industry."

"But Kolomoisky does not give up," says Makarkin. "He tries to keep Ukrnafta under control and achieve a compromise with Poroshenko. Kolomoisky will certainly not go as far as an armed confrontation with Kiev. Firstly, he lacks the resources for that. Secondly, in the latest flare-up of the conflict the United States has preferred to throw its weight behind the Ukrainian president. The big business tycoon will surely not dare confront the United States."

"The Kolomoisky-Poroshenko clash merely mirrors the confrontation of these two heavyweights in both politics and in business. Everything is tightly intertwined here. Kolomoisky is adamant to expand his zone of influence in Ukraine. Naturally, the president is very unhappy about this. He has been using all available administrative leverage to hamstring his competitor," the head of the Niccolo-M political consultancy, Igor Mintusov, has told TASS.

"Objectively, the conflict between Kolomoisky and Poroshenko is provoking a crisis of government in Ukraine, which harms the positions of the state in the international scene and in home politics."

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 #14
Business New Europe
www.bne.eu
March 25, 2015
Ukraine's Catch 22 over its oligarch class
Mark Adomanis in Philadelphia

As the Soviet Union collapsed in both Russia and Ukraine, small groups of extremely clever and even more ruthless men "privatized" (or if you prefer less exalted language "stole") all of the prize industrial assets. Virtually overnight, these formerly mid-ranking bureaucrats and functionaries became billionaires, some of the very wealthiest people in the entire world. They owned giant steel mills, oil refineries, nickel smelters and other vestiges of the Soviet Union's hard-won prowess in heavy industry. And having won wealth and the political power that it brought, they set out to defend their turf, to hold on to what they had won.

In Russia this "family" of oligarchs, comprised of people like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, and Boris Berezovsky, largely ran the show during the Yeltsin years, particularly as old Boris' health deteriorated and left him increasingly bed-ridden. They were the people who chose Vladimir Putin as Yeltin's successor, believing that he would be a compliant yes-man who wouldn't do anything to shake up the previously established rules of the game. They made a disastrous choice. With the lack of sentimentality and clear-eyed ruthlessness that they had employed in creating their business empires, President Putin set about bringing them to heel.

Putin imposed a new deal: the oligarchs would be allowed to keep their money - ever the realist, Putin recognized their value as managers and business leaders - provided that they stayed out of politics. Stay out of politics and their wealth would remain safe. Indeed, they would be given every chance to prosper. Many like Oleg Deripaska and Mikhail Prokhorov did exactly this, and rode Russia's decade-long boom to ever-higher positions on the Forbes list of the world's wealthiest people. Those who blanched at the deal, however, were crushed. By the early 2000's Russia's political system (while still possessing a very long list of faults) was no longer "captured" by the oligarchs: they were an important political constituency, but they weren't calling the shots.  

Rivalry

In Ukraine this reassertion of state control never took place. The government remained effectively captured by varying groups of oligarchs. Accordingly, the Ukrainian government was not as repressive or heavy-handed as Russia's, and this was reflected in all of the varying democracy indices, but it was also a lot less effective at governing: its economic practices remained appalling, as did its tax collection, fiscal policy and service delivery.

In Ukraine, then, one can say that the most important political fight was not between the state and the oligarchs, as was the case in Russia during Putin's early years, but rather between different groups of oligarchs. Much of Ukrainian politics was, in fact, a struggle between politicians who, rather than representing grass-roots constituencies, represented the interests of rival oligarch groups. Ousted president Viktor Yanukovych was the creation of one these oligarchic clans, as were the Orange Revolution leaders Yulia Tymoshenko and Viktor Yushchenko.

To a significant extent the Maidan uprising reflected popular exasperation with oligarchic misrule. Yes, the varying groups on the Maidan had different values and different goals, but there was genuine outrage among the educated middle and upper middle classes at the fact that Ukrainian politics had so consistently been dominated by a small group of unelected oligarchs. One of the main demands of the pro-European parties was thus the overthrow of the oligarchy and its replacement by a "civilized" version of European social democracy. Precisely how this was going to work was never made clear (the Maidan movement has never been particularly concerned with the practical implementation of its agenda), but there was agreement on its general necessity.

The problem, however, is that this confrontation of the oligarchs had never happened. In fact, the Ukrainian government, which is now led by Petro Poroshenko, widely regarded one of the wiliest and most capable of the lot, was forced to come to an early accommodation with the oligarchs due to the rapidly escalating military standoff with Russia. In the aftermath of the annexation of Crimea, against which a demoralized Ukrainian government was able to offer no effective resistance, Russian Special Forces began infiltrating into East Ukraine and doing their best to sow chaos there. There was a risk that the entire eastern half of the country could collapse.

The Ukrainian government was left scrambling to find an adequate solution to this infiltration. Knowing that its armed forces were in no condition to be used in such a "hybrid war", it decided to use the only people with the organizational expertise and financial heft capable of mounting an effective defence: the oligarchs. Kyiv thus installed several oligarchs, like Igor Kolomoiksy, as governors of the eastern oblasts and essentially gave them carte blanche to get the situation under control. Soon there were all kinds of privately funded militias doing battle against pro-Russian forces, and they were able to keep the "separatists" from making any gains outside of Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts.

While this was an understandable decision given the horrible financial and military constraints facing the Ukrainian government, allowing the oligarchs to run their own private armies was always going to end in disaster. It's easy to give someone a gun; it's a lot harder to take it away.

Chickens coming home

Recently, the tensions that have previously been buried in a cloud of nationalist enthusiasm and determination to confront Russian aggression have exploded to the surface.

Since mid-March, the Ukrainian government has faced off against one its putatively biggest supporters, the aforementioned Igor Kolomoisky. The details of the dispute can be a bit baroque, but essentially Kolomoisky is angry that the government tried to replace people whom he had installed within the upper management of a state-owned pipeline operator. When "his" people were fired, Kolomoisky responded by sending a bunch of his hired guns to the company's office in Kiev. Men in masks and camouflage raiding a corporate office: it was a scene shockingly reminiscent of Russia during the late 1990s or early 2000s.

As of now, it's not clear how the situation will be resolved. Poroshenko fired Kolomoisky in the early hours of March 25, five minutes after signing into law a bill effectively depriving Kolomoisky of backdoor control over the state oil company Ukrnafta. Two days before, he warned that no governors would be allowed to keep a "pocket army" and, in another formulation that reeks of early 2000's Russia, he pledged that all armed formations would be subordinated to a "clear-cut military vertical".

But even if the current standoff is resolved peacefully, and there are a million ways it could turn violent, the Kolomoisky-Poroshenko fiasco highlights the awkward fact that a revolution that was aimed at weakening oligarchic control of the government has succeeded in further empowering the oligarchs. Ukraine desperately needs to find a way to subordinate these powerful financiers and businessmen to the state, to deny them the effective control over the government that they have wielded for the past two decades.

I have no idea how this will happen. Due to the Maidan movement's emphasis on grass roots democracy and "European values", a Putin-style crackdown on the oligarchs is off limits: even if Poroshenko could somehow marshal the requisite force needed for such a step, it wouldn't pass muster with Ukraine's Western creditors. Some kind of more peaceful, law-based approach is thus necessary. However, the oligarchs (who are obviously not very keen on the prospect of being deprived of power!) have countless levers at their disposal to thwart, water-down, delay and otherwise undermine any such attempt.

Maybe some politician of unique foresight, brilliance and skill will appear to engineer such a compromise, one that would deprive the oligarchs of their political power while allowing them to keep their business empires. But so far it seems that Ukraine faces a Catch 22: the options available to it won't work, and the options that will work aren't available to it.

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 #15
Dances With Bears
http://johnhelmer.net
KOLOMOISKY, DISMISSED AS GOVERNOR OF DNIEPROPETROVSK, ISSUES NEW THREAT FOR THIS PRESS QUESTION - HAS HE LOST HIS SWISS RESIDENCE PERMIT?
By John Helmer, Moscow
[Footnotes, links, photos and charts here http://johnhelmer.net/?p=12986]

Igor Kolomoisky, the single largest beneficiary of international lending to Ukraine and until Tuesday night the most powerful figure in the country, has lost his residence permit for Switzerland, according to a reliable source in Geneva. Coming after the news of Kolomoisky's armed and vocal clash in Kiev with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, the Swiss action adds to Kolomoisky's isolation.
Overnight, Kolomoisky announced through his deputy, Boris Filatov, that he had sent his resignation as Governor of Dniepropetrovsk to Poroshenko, and that Poroshenko is "satisfied". At 3 a.m., Filatov announced on Facebook: "Kolomoisky has retired". An hour and a half earlier in Kiev, at 1.45 a.m., the presidential website issued a notice [1] that Poroshenko had signed a decree dismissing Kolomoisky. "We have to ensure peace, stability and tranquillity," Poroshenko said. "The Dniepropetrovsk region should remain a bastion of Ukraine in the east, to protect peace and peace."

Valentin Reznichenko (below, left), whom Poroshenko had named Governor of Zaporozhye region just a month ago, has now been moved into Kolomoisky's place. For more on Reznichenko, read this [2].

According to Kolomoisky's deputy Filatov (above, right), "let's stop drinking valerian drops and we will show to the whole world that we can be civilized people for whom our country is higher than our ambitions. Don't give reasons for pleasure to our enemies, both internal, and external. And now, let's all go to sleep." Filatov did not say where Kolomoisky will go.

In Berne, Switzerland, at midday on Tuesday, a spokesman for the State Secretariat for Migration (SEM, formerly BFM) at the Federal Department for Police and Justice said: "we cannot comment on specific cases, this for reasons of protection of privacy." The SEM is not denying that Kolomoisky has acquired the status in Switzerland, where he and his family have lived since 1999, of a significant public figure, political appointee, and military commander. For the start of the Swiss government review of Kolomoisky's permit last June, read this [3].

A Swiss source claims the government in Berne has deliberately delayed granting Kolomoisky his new permit, while his wife and children have received their authorization. The source claims the SEM has stopped short of rejecting the permit, but it is avoiding a decision to exclude Kolomoisky while the permit process is protracted indefinitely. "Switzerland, as usual, doesn't take any responsibility," the source comments. "Of course now things can change."

At the headquarters of Privatbank and at the Governor's office in Dniepropetrovsk, Kolomoisky was asked to say whether he continues to hold a current residence permit for Geneva, yes or no. Boris Braginsky, spokesman at the governorate, responded: "Why did you decide that Mr. Kolomoisky will certainly want to communicate with your media? And who gave you the right to make demands in the form of an ultimatum? Sorry, but it looks like a fake letter. Self-respecting media do not allow tosend information requests in such an outrageous tone. You can find your own answer to this question by referring to the relevant authorities in Switzerland. We reserve the right of recourse to the courts, in the event of publication in your publication of false information regarding Mr. Kolomoisky."

Missing from Braginsky's answer is confirmation that Kolomoisky has renewed his permit to live in Geneva.

For Kolomoisky's response to press questioning last week about his takeover of the headquarters of Ukrtransnafta in Kiev, click to listen [4] (parental guidance recommended).

Federal Swiss and Geneva cantonal regulations for foreigners allow the purchase of residency for a lump sum payable every time the permit is renewed. The amount is calculated by the cantonal authorities and then negotiated with the applying resident. To qualify, an informed Geneva source said, Kolomoisky is likely to be obliged to pay between 750,000 and one million Swiss francs ($783,000-$1.1 million) per year. In addition, the Swiss regulations require Kolomoisky to qualify for residency by showing he makes Switzerland the "centre of his life". For the story of the start of the Swiss investigation last year, read this [3].

If the Swiss have not renewed last year's permit, Kolomoisky's travel options are now limited. His legal right to cross the border into France, where he requires a permit de séjour to live at his summer home on the French shore of Lake Leman (pictured), would also be lost if the Swiss permit is withdrawn.

Kolomoisky is the target of a Russian prosecutor's warrant for conspiracy to murder; commission of war crimes; and kidnapping. Interpol is unlikely to have accepted the Russian request for his arrest and extradition, but if Kolomoisky were to leave Ukraine, the only country certain to allow him entry would be Israel, where he and his family have lived in the past. In the present conflict with Poroshenko and elements of the Ukrainian security services, Kolomoisky may also have reason to doubt that once outside Ukraine, he would not be arrested if he attempted to return. Kolomoisky's means of transportation have also been curtailed, since much of the aircraft fleet he used to control has been grounded by bankruptcy litigation.

Monthly financial reports [6] from the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) and the state Deposit Guarantee Fund reveal that since December a total of $210 million has been given to Kolomoisky's Privatbank. For an analysis of the latest International Monetary Fund (IMF) support for Privat, and for the airplane collateral Kolomoisky has offered, read this [7]. The Financial Times, a supporter of Kolomoisky to the end, reports him as saying that noone else in the Ukraine should "receive any new funds from the International Monetary Fund until all 'illegally' privatised property had been restored to state ownership."

Following Kolomoisky's dismissal, Kiev sources say they now expect a government raid against Kolomoisky's financial position. Privatbank has been conceding in recent days that the NBU is increasing its pressure on Kolomoisky to add personal cash to the balance-sheet of his bank.

On the Berlin Bourse, where the Privatbank bonds are traded, confidence in the bank and in its chances of refinancing from Kolomoisky, have plummeted. The 9.375% bond maturing in September of this year is now worth less than half its face value.

The 2016 Privatbank bond is now below 25% of face value [9]; and the 2018 bond is at 44.9%.

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 #16
Fort Russ
http://fortruss.blogspot.com
March 24, 2015
The list of most high-profile fraud cases of the Kiev junta
Journalist Denis Bigus, the host of the program Nashi Groshi discovers a new corruption case every week
Maxim Butchenko for nv.ua (Ukrainian media)
http://nv.ua/publications/navorovano-za-god-spisok-samyh-gromkih-zhurnalistskih-rassledovaniy-korrupcii-v-novoy-vlasti-39173.html
Translated by Kristina Rus

About a hundred anti-corruption investigations against the leaders of the new government were published by journalists over the last year. Only a minuscule proportion have turned into criminal cases.

Journalist Dmitry Gnap has long been professionally engaged in the investigation of corruption cases of government officials. He has not left this occupation today. And while many Ukrainians speak about the changes that have occurred in the country after the Euromaidan, Gnap sees more of the same - fraud, the scale of which has not changed. "None of the participants in corruption schemes of Viktor Yanukovych have been punished, so fraud has vigorously blossomed," - he says.

Such pessimistic views about post-maidan bureaucratic Ukraine are shared by many colleagues of Gnap. Over the past year, journalists have published hundreds of cases siphoning the budget money through inflated prices for products or services, the emergence of middle "pad" firms and state tenders conducted under questionable conditions. However, as noted by Gnap, only a small proportion of these investigations is picked up by the law enforcement to follow up on the facts, and rarely a case goes to court.

"The work had not diminished, but on the contrary, increased," - echoed Gnap Denis Bigus, investigative journalist of "Nashi Groshi" (Our Money). "Every week - a new case. This is a list a lifetime long".

NV is publishing its own "list of a lifetime" - the most high-profile journalist investigations that occurred under the new government. Most frequent culprit is the Ministry of Defense, which is symptomatic of Ukraine as a warring country.

2014

March

Ukroboronprom [Ukrainian Defense Manufacturing] state enterprise has managed to sell 27 thousand AKM machine guns, 7.62 mm, to a private company for a price of children's toys. The seller was the state company Ukrinmash, and most of the weapons were  acquired by the firm NPK Tekhimpeks. Transaction amount - 12 million UAH, that is, the average cost per machine gun was 460 UAH. In retail these machine guns converted into civil (hunting) version were worth at the time 17 thousand UAH per unit.

April

A story appeared in the media that the head of the South-Western Railways, Alexey Krivopishin is associated with most private firms, who now work with the state railway monopoly - Ukrzaliznytsa. Only 10 companies regularly win all the cash tenders of the railway. Half of them, as shown by the investigative journalists, exist only on paper. All of them managed to acquire from the budget of Ukrzaliznitsa (Ukrainian Railways) over 758 million UAH.

Link: Railway workers who exposed the fraud of the head of Ukrainian Railways are prosecuted (Russian)

May

The Defense Ministry has signed an agreement with the company "Auto City Service" for the supply of jet fuel. As journalists found out, the phone numbers of the company, specified in the tender documentation were fake, and the company could not be found at the address of registration. Meanwhile the family of the owner of the "Auto City Service" - the Kiev businessman Gennady Chastyakov - is connected by a common business with the former chief of the General staff - commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Michail Kutsyn.

June

Journalists from Слідство.Інфо released information about the state enterprise Kiev Armored-Tank Plant transferring approximately 30 million UAH to three commercial companies as payment for non-existent BTR hulls. Scandalous purchase was carried out under the supervision of representatives of Ukroboronprom [Ukrainian Defense Manufacturing] state-owned company, who are both members of the Dubov clan - two nephews and a niece's husband of Alexander Dubov, the People's Deputy from the Fatherland party [Batkivshina].

August

Kharkov National Law University named after Yaroslav the Wise made a number of contracts for the supply of equipment in the amount of 8.4 million UAH at inflated prices. For example, Italian heat exchangers-coil units Vierro 93 (Wito) cost the University 9.4 thousand UAH a piece, although at the market they cost 7.7 thousand UAH.

The circulation pump MAGNA125-80 Grundfos (Denmark) was acquired by the University for 9.4 thousand UAH at market value of 3 thousand UAH.

Odessa City Council leased almost 3 hectares of beaches in the city center district of Arcadia at a rate lowered 11 times. So, owned by local businessmen with ties to the leadership of the City Council, "Start Limited" and "Pearl" companies paid 1 UAH per square meter of the beach a month. For seven other companies that received the beaches for rent, the rate was 11 UAH / sqm. In the end, the city budget on a monthly basis lost about 300 thousand UAH.

September

The Ministry of Defense published the data about the sale of military property for the first half of 2014. Military officials reported that they made nearly 84 million UAH. Journalists have checked the transactions and found that the companies-intermediaries, authorized by the government, received a "cut" of almost 3.5 million UAH as commission. More than 17 million UAH were spent on suspicious organizations involved in the sale of the property.

October

Journalists published evidence that the NBU [National Bank of Ukraine] retained the "cash scheme" of former Ministers Sergey Arbuzov and Alexander Klymenko.

Two private firms - UkrCart and Interplat - continue to receive money for services for the collection and transfer to the State Fiscal Service of data from store cash registers. Just 1 UAH, but on a daily basis. In light of the fact that there are 221 thousand cash registers in the country, the total is about 6.6 million UAH per month.

November

Customs-brokerage firm Sсherp officially announced that under the guise of environmental protection the Ministry of Natural Resources demands bribes from businessmen. Director Victor Prudkovskikh told that in many documents of the Ministry fraud is inherent.

Firms close to the Ministry received a license from the Department for the disposal of industrial oil. In the end, according to estimates of Prudkovskikh, in just six months of this year, the importers of oil transferred to these companies almost 100 million UAH.

The State Service of Geology and Mineral Resources under the leadership of Dmitry Kaschyuk at auction on November 12 sold two special permits for the use of oil and gas deposits in Poltava and Sumy regions. The licenses were sold for 3.4 million and 3.2 million UAH, respectively.

These licenses were planned for auction in July - at a starting price of 6 million UAH and 5.9 million UAH respectively. But then they were removed from the auction. In the end, in the fall the licenses were sold with a special discount from the State Service of Geology and Mineral Resources, the amount of which for two sites was 5.4 million UAH.

December

In early December, the Western Apartment-Operational Management of the Ministry of Defense without a tender (by negotiation procedure) has purchased coal from the company OOZ. This firm has committed to supply 16 thousand tons of gas coal. The purchase amounted to more than 20 million UAH. Competitive bidding, as explained by the military, was canceled "due to weather conditions" - the cold weather. The weather was even colder for the military, when they found out that the coal proved to be non-combustible.

On December 19 a private trading company Chaika received diesel engines UTD-20 from the state scientific-production association "Bosphorus" for 1 million UAH. And three days later resold them to the state Kiev Armored-Tank Plant - for more than 1.6 million UAH. Net profit of the "pad" company was 600 thousand UAH.

2015

January

State company Mariupol Sea Trading Port on December 29th according to results of a tender signed an agreement with the company Agrariy for the purchase of sheet metal for 1.2 million UAH. The price of steel amounted to 20 thousand UAH per ton, while on the market the steel of such parameters and brand is sold for 9 thousand UAH per ton. The amount of the fraud was 600 thousand UAH.

February

Former Minister of Agriculture, Igor Shvaika stated that the corruption schemes blooming at the state monopoly Ukrspirit were created by the management of the State Fiscal Service and Andre Ivanchyuk, deputy head of Prime Minister's faction "Popular Front". According to Schvaika, Ukrspirt had a significant increase in profits and taxes paid, and all due to the halting of corruption schemes.

The Ministry of Defense has signed a number of agreements for the supply of sleeping bags for 34 million UAH. The bags were ordered for delivery before the end of February for 920-951 UAH per unit. The purchase price of the Ministry of Defense was twice the price paid in the same month by the Ministry of Internal Affairs: a similar product the police bargained for 460 UAH per unit. In the end, "corruption tax" for the purchase of the Ministry of Defense amounted to 17 million UAH.

Information from Слідство.Інфо, Наші гроші, Центр противодействия коррупции, НВ

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#17
Consortiumnews.com
March 22, 2015
Crimeans Keep Saying No to Ukraine
By Robert Parry
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.

Exclusive: In a rare moment of honesty, a Western news outlet, Forbes, admits that the people of Crimea expressed their legitimate will in last year's referendum when they voted to abandon Ukraine and rejoin Russia, an inconvenient truth for the U.S. State Department and press corps, writes Robert Parry.

A central piece of the West's false narrative on the Ukraine crisis has been that Russian President Vladimir Putin "invaded" Crimea and then staged a "sham" referendum purporting to show 96 percent support for leaving Ukraine and rejoining Russia. More recently, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland claimed that Putin has subjected Crimea to a "reign of terror."

Both elements have been part of the "group think" that dominates U.S. political and media circles, but this propagandistic storyline simply isn't true, especially the part about the Crimeans being subjugated by Russia.

Consistently, over the past year, polls conducted by major Western firms have revealed that the people of Crimea by overwhelming numbers prefer being part of Russia over Ukraine, an embarrassing reality that Forbes business magazine has now acknowledged.

An article by Kenneth Rapoza, a Forbes specialist on developing markets, cited these polls as showing that the Crimeans do not want the United States and the European Union to force them back into an unhappy marriage with Ukraine. "The Crimeans are happy right where they are" with Russia, Rapoza wrote.

"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 Tartars are all in agreement: life with Russia is better than life with Ukraine," he wrote, adding that "the bulk of humanity living on the Black Sea peninsula believe the referendum to secede from Ukraine was legit."

Rapoza noted that a June 2014 Gallup poll, which was sponsored by the U.S. government's Broadcasting Board of Governors, found that 82.8 percent of Crimeans said the March 16 referendum on secession reflected the views of the Crimean people. In the poll, when asked if joining Russia would improve their lives, 73.9 percent said yes and only 5.5 percent said no.

A February 2015 poll by German polling firm GfK found similar results. When Crimeans were asked "do you endorse Russia's annexation of Crimea," 93 percent gave a positive response, with 82 percent saying, "yes, definitely." Only 2 percent said no, with the remainder unsure or not answering.

In other words, the West's insistence that Russia must return Crimea to Ukraine would mean violating the age-old U.S. principle of a people's right of self-determination. It would force the largely ethnic Russian population of Crimea to submit to a Ukrainian government that many Crimeans view as illegitimate, the result of a violent U.S.-backed coup on Feb. 22, 2014, that ousted elected President Viktor Yanukovych.

The coup touched off a brutal civil war in which the right-wing regime in Kiev dispatched neo-Nazi and other extremist militias to spearhead a fierce "anti-terrorism operation" against resistance from the ethnic Russian population in the east, which - like Crimea - had supported Yanukovych. More than 6,000 Ukrainians, most of them ethnic Russians, have been killed in the fighting.

Despite this reality, the mainstream U.S. news media has misreported the crisis and distorted the facts to conform to U.S. State Department propaganda. Thus, many Americans believe the false narrative about Russian troops crushing the popular will of the Crimean people, much as the U.S. public was misled about the Iraq situation in 2002-03 by many of the same news outlets.

Or, as Forbes' Rapoza put it: "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." The FSB is a Russian intelligence agency.

The GfK survey also found that Crimeans considered the Ukrainian media, which has been wildly anti-Russian, unreliable. Only 1 percent said the Ukrainian media "provides entirely truthful information" and only 4 percent said it was "more often truthful than deceitful."

So, the people at the frontline of this conflict, where Assistant Secretary Nuland, detected a "reign of terror," say they are not only satisfied with being restored to Russia, which controlled Crimea since the 1700s, but don't trust the distorted version of events that they see on Ukrainian TV.

Practical Reasons

Some of the reasons for the Crimean attitudes are simply pragmatic. Russian pensions were three times larger than what the Ukrainian government paid - and now the Ukrainian pensions are being slashed further in compliance with austerity demands from the International Monetary Fund.

This month, Nuland boasted about those pension cuts in praising the Kiev regime's steps toward becoming a "free-market state." She also hailed "reforms" that will force Ukrainians to work harder and into old age and that slashed gas subsidies which helped the poor pay their heating bills.

Last year, the New York Times and other U.S. news outlets also tossed around the word "invasion" quite promiscuously in discussing Crimea. But you may recall that you saw no images of Russian tanks crashing into the Crimean peninsula or an amphibious landing or paratroops descending from the skies. The reason was simple: Russian troops were already in Crimea.

The Russians had a lease agreement with Ukraine permitting up to 25,000 military personnel in Crimea to protect the Russian naval base at Sevastopol. About 16,000 Russian troops were on the ground when the Feb. 22, 2014 putsch occurred in Kiev - and after a crisis meeting at the Kremlin, they were dispatched to prevent the coup regime from imposing its control on Crimea's people.

That Russian intervention set the stage for the March 16 referendum in which the voters of Crimea turned out in large numbers and voted overwhelmingly for secession from Ukraine and reintegration with Russia, a move that the Russian parliament and President Putin then approved.

Yet, as another part of its false reporting, the New York Times claimed that Putin denied that Russian troops had operated inside Crimea - when, in fact, he was quite open about it. For instance, on March 4, 2014, almost two weeks before the referendum, Putin discussed at a Moscow press conference the role of Russian troops in preventing the violence from spreading from Kiev to Crimea. Putin said:

"You should note that, thank God, not a single gunshot has been fired there. ... Thus the tension in Crimea that was linked to the possibility of using our Armed Forces simply died down and there was no need to use them. The only thing we had to do, and we did it, was to enhance the defense of our military facilities because they were constantly receiving threats and we were aware of the armed nationalists moving in. We did this, it was the right thing to do and very timely."

Two days after the referendum, which recorded the 96 percent vote in favor of seceding from Ukraine and rejoining Russia, Putin returned to the issue of Russian involvement in Crimea. In a formal speech to the Russian Federation, Putin justified Crimea's desire to escape the grasp of the coup regime in Kiev, saying:

"Those who opposed the [Feb. 22] coup were immediately threatened with repression. Naturally, the first in line here was Crimea, the Russian-speaking Crimea. In view of this, the residents of Crimea and Sevastopol turned to Russia for help in defending their rights and lives, in preventing the events that were unfolding and are still underway in Kiev, Donetsk, Kharkov and other Ukrainian cities.

"Naturally, we could not leave this plea unheeded; we could not abandon Crimea and its residents in distress. This would have been betrayal on our part."

But to make it appear that Putin was denying a military intervention, the Times and other U.S. news outlets truncated Putin's statement when he said, "Russia's Armed Forces never entered Crimea." The Western press stopped there, ignoring what he said next: "they were there already in line with an international agreement."

Putin's point was that Russian troops based in Crimea took actions that diffused a possibly violent situation and gave the people of Crimea a chance to express their wishes through the ballot. But that version of events didn't fit with the desired narrative pushed by the U.S. State Department and the New York Times. So the problem was solved by misrepresenting what Putin said.

But the larger issue now is whether the Obama administration and the European Union will insist on forcing the Crimean people - against their will - to rejoin Ukraine, a country that is rapidly sliding into the status of a failed state and a remarkably cruel one at that.

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#18
AFP
March 24, 2015
Moody's cuts Ukraine rating to just above default

Washington (AFP) - Ratings firm Moody's cut Ukraine's sovereign debt rating to one notch above default Tuesday, saying creditors will be forced to take deep losses in a debt restructuring.

"The key driver of the downgrade is the likelihood of external private creditors incurring substantial losses as a result of the government's plan to restructure the majority of its outstanding Eurobonds" and other debt, Moody's Investors Service said.

Ukraine's long-term issuer and government debt ratings were downgraded to Ca from Caa3, and the outlook remained negative, the firm said.

Also included in the government's debt restructuring plan is the external debt of state-guaranteed entities and selected other state-owned enterprises, and the Eurobonds issued by the capital city of Kiev.

Moody's said the debt restructuring was aimed at providing $15.3 billion of the four-year, $40 billion bailout arranged by the International Monetary Fund and other multilateral and bilateral creditors for Ukraine, which is fighting a war with pro-Russian separatists in the east.

The IMF approved $17.5 billion for the bailout on March 11, in exchange for the government's successful implementation of economic, budget and monetary reforms.

Crucial to the program is a restructuring of the country's debt. Kiev says it wants a voluntary deal with creditors, but some have already expressed opposition.

"Although negotiations over the specific details of the restructuring are only now getting underway, Moody's believes that the likelihood of a distressed exchange, and hence a default on government debt taking place, is virtually 100 percent," the ratings firm said.

The outlook for the country's rating remained negative.

Moody's said that Ukraine's government and external debt will remain at very high levels even if it successfully implements reforms and cuts its debt burden.

"These solvency challenges are the key reason for maintaining a negative outlook on the government's downgraded ratings."

The Moody's ratings cut came as Ukraine appealed to the Group of 20 for more financial aid. Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko said in London on Tuesday that she had asked the major economic powers "to continue and increase the support for Ukraine."

Moody's noted that Ukraine's gross domestic product contracted 6.9 percent in 2014. The IMF estimates that Ukraine's debt-to-GDP ratio will rise to 94 percent this year.

 [return to Contents] 

 #19
Analysts: ending Russian gas transit through Ukraine by 2020 is realistic
By Lyudmila Alexandrova

MOSCOW, March 25. /TASS/. Curtailing Russian gas transit to Europe through Ukraine by 2020 looks like a realistic task, Russian experts say, adding that Europe-bound gas export will be inevitably shrinking due to the current EU policies, while eastward traffic will keep growing. In any case, neither the West nor the East will be able to do without Russian gas altogether.

At present there are two major routes bypassing Ukraine that Russia uses to export natural gas - Nord Stream laid under the Baltic Sea to Europe and the Blue Stream going to Turkey. Instead of the South Stream gas pipeline project, disrupted through the EU's fault, Moscow has proposed an alternative Turkish Stream that would let Europeans receive Russian gas through a hub on Turkey's border with Greece. However, the talks with Turkey have been slow-going, as Ankara would like to get major discounts off the price of gas. Besides, Europe is not very happy about these plans and it is not ruled out it may try to disrupt this project, too.

Europe has declared its firm intention to ease its dependence on Russian gas.

In a situation like this Russia plans to step up gas export to China and to the Asia-Pacific countries via two pipelines - Altai and Power of Siberia. Their first units are to go operational by the end of 2018.

The task of terminating gas transit through Ukraine has been identified, but it can be addressed in various ways, and far from everything depends on Russia, research fellow at the RAS Centre of World Energy Markets Studies, Svetlana Melnikova, has told TASS. "We are unable to employ all Nord Stream branches to the full extent due to the operation of the third energy package. In the meantime, this is a real potential for expanding gas traffic. Naturally, Moscow is nervous about that."

Besides, as Melnikova said, Europe's gas market has been shrinking dramatically. Over the past five years demand has fallen by 100 billion cubic meters. "The Europeans are doing their utmost to minimize the consumption of gas, as a matter of fact, Russian gas. If this trend continues, by 2020 we shall see a further decline, which will reduce the demand for Ukrainian transit to the minimum, if not to zero."

Last year more than 60 billion cubic meters of gas was transited through Ukraine, Melnikova recalls. If Nord Stream is employed to capacity and if the Blue Stream to Turkey is expanded, they will be able to pump through about 20 billion cubic meters. There remains about 40 billion. If the demand for Russian gas on the European market remains on the decline, the role of Ukrainian transit may be minimized.

It is too early to say what the Turkish Stream affair may eventually end in, because many aspects of it remain highly uncertain.

As for the possibility of stepping up Russian gas supplies to China and other countries in Asia and the Pacific, it looks quite realistic and economically reasonable. They fit in well with the logic of forming the Eurasian gas market, where Russia is the key player," Melnikova remarked.

"At this point it is hard to say whether east-bound export will compensate for the likely losses in the Wet, because the markets of gas, including those in the Asia-Pacific Region, are undergoing fast transformations, so making long-term forecasts is a rather daunting task. One thing is pretty clear, though: it is worth turning east. But since the Western and eastern markets experience energy shortages, the demand for Russian gas will remain high. It remains to be seen what happens to prices, though."

Assistant lecturer at the presidential academy RANEPA, Ivan Kapitonov, has said the termination of gas transit through Ukraine is more than likely. Firstly, because the Turkish Stream pipeline will be available by then, which he sees as a very realistic project. "The odds are it will be laid rather than not," Kapitonov told TASS.

He sees the eastern routes of Russian gas export as very promising, although the Chinese, he warns, are very tough partners to deal with.

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 #20
Fort Russ
http://fortruss.blogspot.com
March 23, 2015
Russian survival tips for collapse and anarchy in Ukraine
Alexey Ivakin
http://ivakin-alexey.livejournal.com/857750.html
Translated by Kristina Rus

A letter to Odessa civilians

The text below is only for the normal and adequate citizens of Odessa. Also, for the citizens of other cities of former Ukraine.

Hope that SBU agents reading my blog, adequately and correctly understand the phrase "former Ukraine" - it's not me and not Putin who raise tariffs, ruining the hryvnia, destroy the industry. All questions to Benya [Kolomoisky] and Potrokh [Poroshenko]. Oh. Sorry, I promised Poroshenko not to use abusive words. But I didn't promise anything to Yatsenyuk.

Now, for the citizens of Odessa.

Forget all political issues - who's to blame. Screw that.

Now the most important question for you is - "what to do next?"

Supplies of flour, salt and matches honestly will help a little.

Because in the situation of a Big f%ck up rule not matches, but bullets. And you are law-abiding citizens - "mirnyaki". You have no bullets. And will not. And if you find them, you are not "mirnyaki".

In such situations survive not lonely survivalists. Those are shot first.

Survives always a community.

What do you need to do?

1. Gather with your neighbors [most Russians and Ukrainians live in multi-family apartment houses - KR]. Or with the courtyard [most Russian and Ukrainian houses are arranged around a courtyard with a playground and community structures - KR], if you live on Moldavanka. First you need to choose a commander. A man. Serious, smart, strong. Who can. Tell maidanites and anti-maidanites to go f$ck themselves. The man needs to be apolitical. In general, I recommend to expel all political whores from the courtyard with piss rags.

2. Regardless of political views - again: f%ck this dirty business - you need to address the following issues:

2.1 Safety

Under conditions of anarchy different kinds of gangs will be chasing each other on the streets - Right Sector, partisans, red, white, and green. And bandit gangs. From time to time they will run into your yard\front door. Not because you are bad, but simply because they were running past your house. Mirnyak [civilians] for gangs are just meat. Some will just stay the night and accidentally pee outside the toilet. Others will take the toilet and your daughter to go with it. Third will just shoot you. Thus you need to team up with neighbors and have a patrol around the clock. Just like the army guard. Arrange an emergency phone. From it to the phones of all the men of the house, if anything - an urgent call to all. Establish contacts with the cops. If you have contacts with private security firms - get in touch. In general, no matter with whom - but you have to have it. Next, think for yourself what to do.

2.2 Children

Let's suppose there is war on the streets. Not a good idea to send children to school and daycare. Therefore, someone needs to take care of the kids. And that's where chicks are useful. Make a schedule so some of the girls will take care of your kids every day in the courtyard. And at home. In general, chicks should be given tasks so they don't panic. Otherwise they will start to scream...

2.3 Food

No maraudering. Shop. But why go shopping with the entire block? One car is enough, go shop for the whole yard. It will be cheaper. If anything, be ready for a field kitchen. I mean, starting a fire and cooking for the entire courtyard.

2.4 Mutual help

Every one of you are pros of your trade. Someone is a medic, someone is a lawyer, someone is a plumber. Make a simple arrangement - you do everything for the neighbors of your house/ courtyard for free. Quid pro quo.

2.5 Think for yourself, what else do you need.

All sorts of tactical questions - how to cover windows or how to buy gasoline - decide for yourself.

My point is to explain the system of organization. So you will have more chances to survive - and survive safely - than alone.

3. Repeat a hundredth time - to all who call for Maidan or anti-maidan tell to screw themselves. Your task is to survive and not to change the government. They will change it without you.

4. Do not spare money. Life is more valuable. Not your life. The lives of your children.

5. Create lines of communication with neighboring courtyards\houses.

Especially for anxious security agents: the creation of such organizations is in the framework of the Constitution of Ukraine.

They are called "gromady" [communities - KR].

I am sorry for writing from the safety of Moscow.

I'll be back soon.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Comments:

- Are things that bad in Odessa?? If the issue is about survival...

- It is believed that soon street fighting is possible

- Horror, f#ck...may I ask - who with whom? My nephew is in school there

- Cops with cops, SBU with SBU, angels with Right Sector and so on.

- All against all? ... and the reason?

- There is no specific reason.

Anarchy, her mother. The anarchy brought by Benya, Peter, bunny [Yatsenyuk - KR] and other b%tches. Some will avenge the May 2, some will look for Colorados, some will be pressing business.

- Well, it's f$cked up!!! Is the present pseudo-government not going to react to the loss of control over a strategic region? Understand that all is shaky there, but not to that degree!

- And who is the government?

First at the top everyone will kill each other screaming "Who's the authority? I am the authority!"

- I have a neighbor, Georgian from Tbilisi. Their war (the guys of Shevarnadze against the guys of that dissident) was hot only around two city blocks. Just around his house. That was enough for him.

- Do you think this will happen in Dnepropetrovsk?

- Even if not - why not create a "gromada" in your house?

- What you've described, is not a big collapse, it's a small collapse.
If there is a phone, then there electricity too.

Not a word about water and sanitation, it means it's working.

A big collapse is described in the memoirs of some Bosnian. But they were surviving for three years in the city.

What about alcohol and medicines to stock up - do you think it's too early?

And about appearances. That guy emphasized that the house has to look poor, so the passing gangs will not notice it. Because if they spot it - that's it, will track it down, find a convenient time - and it's over. Oh and so the "neighbors" don't know whether you have supplies or you are eating the last hedgehog.

- Until you write to buy toilet paper - you think they won't buy it?

- It depends on duration... Roughly speaking if there will be Romanian/Turkish/any occupation after three or four months of anarchy - the collapse will remain small, no danger besides an occasional gang.

But if anarchy is for a year or more, then its better to read about other experiences, while there is Internet ...

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 #21
New York Times
March 25, 2015
A Ukraine Factory That Can't Close, and Workers Who Won't Quit
By ANDREW ROTH

AVDIIVKA, Ukraine - The armored Mercedes-Benz pulled up to a factory chimney discharging an endless column of milk-white steam and out stepped Musa Magomedov, the broad-shouldered, bespectacled 45-year-old general director of the Avdiivka Coke and Steel plant.

"When the bombing started he did everything right, he ran for the nearest tunnel," Mr. Magomedov said, standing on the spot where a young mechanic and father of two had died in a Feb. 4 rocket strike, five strides from safety. "We tried to fix him up, but he died in the ambulance before he could reach the hospital."

Caught on the front lines of a grinding artillery war since last July, Avdiivka's several thousand workers have held on, stubbornly returning to work every day despite 160 documented rocket and artillery strikes, periodic blackouts (one lasted 27 days), an endless list of repairs and, worst of all, the deaths of five colleagues.

An act of heroism in Ukraine's civil war, for sure, but also one of pragmatism: If the plant, the largest coking operation in Europe and a vital cog in Ukraine's steel industry, ceases operation, it will almost certainly be for good.

Coke, the fuel used in steel-making furnaces in Ukraine, is a purified form of coal, produced by special ovens. When the furnaces cool, they crack, and the cost of repairing and restarting them could run to a prohibitive $1 billion or more. Those in the business like to say that a coking plant can only be shut down once.

"We are like a shark," said Mr. Magomedov, an economist by training. "It has to swim all the time because if it stops, it drowns. We are the same. We always have to be working."

Avdiivka Coke and Steel sits on the Ukrainian side of the front lines, just five miles from the ruins of Donetsk International Airport. The area is one of several focal points where two cease-fires in the last six months have gone largely unheeded. Wayward rocket and mortar strikes happen so often and are over so fast, Mr. Magomedov says, that sometimes workers simply ignore them and stay at their posts.

No hiding place above ground guarantees safety at the plant, a sprawling 52-year-old behemoth that produces blast-furnace coke, the fuel used in Ukraine's steel mills, as well as dozens of chemical products, electricity and heat, along with an acrid stench that stays in clothing for days.

After repeated attacks at the plant, rain pours through a gaping hole in the machine-room roof. Mortars rounds have slammed into the coke ovens that heat coal at a temperature of more than 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (about 1,000 degrees Celsius). One rocket strike nearly obliterated a turbine crucial to production. Another ruptured a gas pipe, igniting a nine-hour blaze that Mr. Magomedov still seems surprised he was able to extinguish.

"You can't wait until tomorrow," he said. "You can't wait until they stop shooting. We wait a few moments and then we act. To extinguish the fires, plug the gaps, replace power sources. And you keep going until you fix all the holes."

The plant is critically important to Ukraine and its efforts to revive an ailing economy. Prime Minister Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk has named the factory a strategic asset for Ukraine's ailing economy.

The steel mills of Mariupol, an industrial hub also threatened by the separatists, run on coke produced in Avdiivka. If the supply of coke stopped (production has already fallen by more than half), the steel mills would be stranded.

"They are purposely bombing Avdiivka in order to destroy the coking plant, to stop the Mariupol factories," Mr. Yatsenyuk said during a news conference broadcast on national television last month. "To leave 30,000 people without work and to provoke a social explosion, to leave us as a government without currency."

Political views within the factory are mixed. Many workers, hailing from territory controlled by the separatist Donetsk People's Republic and with family still living there, sympathize with the separatists. Others, including some top managers like Mr. Magomedov, favor the government.

But the plant, owned by Rinat Akhmetov, once Ukraine's richest man, continues to pay salaries and is a lifeline for the thousands who work there, so politics takes a back seat.

Fearing what they call response fire, the workers have opposed placing artillery positions near the plant or the town of Avdiivka, which is in the throes of a humanitarian crisis.

Despite the danger of shelling and extensive damage, the factory is considered one of the safest places in the area. Because roads to the plant are contested and the nearby towns where workers live lack electricity and water, nearly 2,000 employees are living on the factory grounds, sleeping on cots just a few feet from where they work.

Four of the five workers who died amid the shelling were on roads near the plant or in the city of Avdiivka. But there have been many close calls.

Anna Skvortsova, a personnel director, grew up in Avdiivka. But for the last several months she has been living in the factory's Soviet-era nuclear bomb shelter, which has been converted into an office and living space. As bomb shelters go, it is surprisingly cheerful, with good lighting, a bank of computers with access to the Internet and plans for a new heating system.

Ms. Skvortsova and a colleague, also named Anna, work in a concrete-walled boiler room. Earlier, they traveled occasionally to Avdiivka to see if their apartments had been damaged. Now, the trip of several miles into town, even under the cease-fire negotiated last month, is too dangerous.

The two moved into the bomb shelter when two shells crashed through the roof of their office on the second floor of the factory's administrative building. Ms. Skvortsova, who had just left the room to speak with a colleague, was thrown to the ground by the explosion. If she had been at her desk, she said, she would have been killed.

"I didn't see it; I felt it," she said, still shaken by the experience. "I was only saved by a miracle."

Nearly every worker at the factory has a similar story. Nikolay Skhadyak, 39, was pouring superheated coal from the ovens into a transfer cart when mortar rounds began falling about 100 yards away. It was the third time he had been under fire.

When asked why he did not quit on the spot, Mr. Skhadyak gave a familiar answer.

"How can I not work? I have to feed my family," he said, sitting soot-faced in an aging control booth that glides back and forth among the ovens. Through a window, an open coking furnace, a 20-foot-high maw of fire, appeared to sail by.

"There is no way out," Mr. Skhadyak said. "And there is no work anywhere else in the chemical business."

Every other major factory in Avdiivka has closed, and other coking plants in the region have either stopped or are producing a tenth of their normal output.

Since the bombing began, 600 workers have quit or taken extended leave from the plant, while 324 others agreed to come in periodically, receiving two-thirds salaries, Mr. Magomedov said.

But thousands more stayed on full time. They did so for their salaries, for their safety, or out of fealty to the plant.

Pavel Zhelavy, a grizzled foreman, has been working at the plant for 36 years, since he was 24. When he planned to retire, he was asked to stay on as an adviser because of his knowledge of the coking process.

He was moving in earlier this month, carrying a folding cot into the administration building.

"There are two reasons I'm moving in. First, I'm almost always needed here. Second, because it's cold in my house," he joked. He had moved his family away from danger to an apartment in Berdyansk, well behind the lines. But now he needed the money to pay the rent.

His two brothers live near Donetsk. He said he had not seen them since the fighting began because he had not crossed the front lines.

"We don't need a cease-fire," he said. "We need peace."

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#22
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
March 19, 2015
China will win the war over Ukraine
Over the past year as Russia and the West have faced off over whose integration project Ukraine will join, China has been preparing a third way forward.
By Fyodor Lukyanov

When a year ago Crimea became part of the Russian Federation, many said that this was the Rubicon not only for Russian politics, but for the entire world order. Moscow showed the West a real red line, whose crossing would produce real consequences. Moscow's message to the West was that there could be no stopping now - the prestige and authority of great powers were at stake.

Since then, there has been an extremely full year, and an entire series of events must be commented on.

First of all, political motivation prevailed over economic expediency. No matter how you evaluate the decisions made in Russia and in the West since Spring 2014, it is clear that economic costs were considered secondarily. Other criteria, such as security, the need to uphold strategic positions and national dignity, drove the decision-making.

In the case of Crimea, Moscow raised anew the issue of national sovereignty. In the 1990s and the early 2000s, many analysts nurtured the illusion that the process of globalization would bring about the end of the sovereign nation-state system.

Crimea shattered these dreams. But, as a result of these integration processes, a state can no longer protect its territory from external influences - whether these be economic, ideological or cultural. And when internal problems cannot be managed effectively, they collide with these external impulses, with disastrous consequences. The situation in Ukraine is a vivid example.
 
What will be the new status quo?

A year after Crimea was integrated into the Russian Federation the balance of power in the world has changing, although there is no established new status quo. The nature of relations between Russia and the European Union has changed, and most likely irrevocably. The model that was called "strategic partnership" lasted for two and a half decades. In it, Russia and the EU intended to build a "Big Europe," which called on a certain form of economic and normative integration. The perception changed with time, and the initial enthusiasm turned into realism, and then even into skepticism, but no one ever rejected the objective - until the Ukraine crisis.

Even if the situation stabilizes, there will be no return to the former relationship. Mutual trust has been undermined - trust that had been in a state of inertia since the early 2000s. It is also necessary to understand that the cancellation of formal sanctions when it happens will not immediately remove all the barriers they constructed. Political and economic institutions have the necessary tools to continue to enforce them informally. After Ukraine, Russia and the EU will need to fine a new way of dealing with each other.

Transatlantic relations are also changing. In the rounds of talks to deal with the Russian threat, we are witnessing the attempt to resurrect the consolidated West the way it was during the Cold War, both through the reanimation of NATO and the creation of powerful economic blocs under the aegis of the U.S. The U.S. is working to build the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership; the first is unlikely to work, but the second is possible. These processes of consolidation may not succeed, but it is clear that the West is trying to achieve cohesion after a period of gradual loosening of unity.

The most unexpected result of the crisis in Ukraine is the emergence of China as a leading Eurasian power. As Russia and the West clashed over whose integration project Ukraine will join, Beijing announced a completely different initiative, although one aimed at that geographical area.

It is symbolic that Chinese President Xi Jinping's initiative to create the Silk Road Economic Belt was announced precisely at the time - Fall 2013 - when Russia and the EU where reaching the culmination of their confrontation on Ukraine.

With the Silk Road Economic Belt, China is noticeably distancing itself from any competition, proposing a project that bypasses all others and may even absorb them. With the volume of resources that Beijing is capable of investing, it is impossible for anyone to compete. While Russia, the EU and the U.S. are operating in Eurasia mainly with political instruments that are creating friction, China is offering real money - and political neutrality.

The emergence of China as the leading Eurasian power is the result of the Ukrainian crisis that is likely to have the most impact on Russia, the European Union and the United States.

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 #23
Moscow Times
March 25, 2015
Is the Worst Over for the Russian Economy?
By Chris Weafer
Chris Weafer is a senior partner with Macro Advisory, a consultancy advising macro hedge funds and foreign companies looking at investment opportunities in Russia.

For investors, business owners and everybody else with an interest or involvement in the Russian economy, this is now a period of waiting; waiting to see whether the relatively good start to 2015 for the ruble, investment returns and some segments of the economy mean that we can all breathe a huge sigh of relief that the predictions of doom and gloom in late 2014 have not materialized, or whether this is just the eye of the storm and another battering still awaits.

Equity investors still generally believe the former, and Russian indices are the best-performing of the major markets so far in 2015 with the RTS up 17.5 percent and MICEX 11.2 percent better, although those returns were higher at the end of February. The indices have fallen by 5 percent this month as concerns about growth re-emerge.

The yield on Russia's 30-year sovereign eurobond is now at 4.9 percent compared to 6.4 percent at the start of the year, and this is despite the downgrade by two of the three international rating agencies of the country's credit status to junk.

In my last column I wrote about the surprising strength of the ruble, which has, at least temporarily, suspended its vulnerability to the oil price. Year to date the ruble has rallied 6.4 percent against the U.S. dollar, with 4 percent of that move since the start of March, during which time the price of Brent crude has fallen 11.5 percent.

The macroeconomic indicators are also generally trending on the positive side of expectations and are pointing to a full-year contraction in gross domestic product of about 3 percent, which would be a positive outcome given the prevailing winds hitting the country.

The continuing positive contribution from import substitution and the substantial increase in federal budget spending have gone a long way to balance out the decline in the consumer and construction sectors and in investment spending.

The state has also played its part in creating the more optimistic backdrop. The Minsk II agreement certainly helps because, despite the still-tough rhetoric from EU leaders at their recent summit, it still offers hope of easing restrictions against raising new external debt in the summer or autumn.

The Central Bank's decision to start easing its benchmark interest rate in anticipation of an earlier, and lower, peak in inflation has also added to the more confident mood as well as reducing debt service costs.

By now you know that there is a "but" coming, and it is a big one. It really is far too early to be confident about the trend in the economy over the medium term or for the next 12 to 24 months. The second quarter was always expected to be the big testing period, and that is the way events are shaping up.

Business and consumer confidence, interest rates and inflation form a big part of what drives activity and investment in any economy, so government spending, which has resulted in a budget deficit equal to more than 10 percent of GDP since the start of the year, and the Central Bank's change in approach to interest rates are a worthwhile gamble to try and improve confidence and provide short-term stability.

But these actions are a gamble nevertheless. The current administrative measures being employed to support the ruble, including a steady conversion of foreign currencies held in the Reserve Fund into rubles, only have a limited shelf life.

The ruble is unlikely to be able to withstand a falling oil price for much longer. If Brent tracks back to $50 per barrel, or lower, then the ruble-dollar rate will move back above 65. The price of Brent crude moved above $60 per barrel in February because of hopes that there would soon be a cut in U.S. shale oil production and that OPEC may be forced into an emergency supply cut.

Neither has happened. U.S. production continues to rise as technology improvements steadily reduce costs and, in any event, producers are making money at the current oil price on a marginal cost basis.

Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies are refusing to agree to an early meeting to consider a cut in production, while a deal with Iran regarding its nuclear program will open up the country's energy sector for investment and eventually lead not only to a restoration of the 1 million barrels of daily output lost since sanctions were tightened against Tehran, but will lead to a longer-term rise in both oil and gas output.

Iran needs the cash to rebuild its economy and will not agree to hold back as part of an OPEC supply reduction deal. If it is announced that a nuclear deal has been agreed, this will knock the oil price further as traders will factor in future supply growth. In addition to the over-supply issues, the steadily rising value of the U.S. dollar, which is reacting to the expectation of a Fed rate rise this summer, is also a negative factor for the oil price.

For investors and business owners, the Russia challenge goes beyond economics and ruble concerns. The Kremlin's global swagger means that investing in Russia is a lot more difficult than is the case for almost all other emerging economies.

Sentiment, rumors and conspiracies all play a part in creating greater relative volatility and uncertainty, as well as the more tangible factors such as poor rule of law and corruption.

All of which drive the perception of risk and reward and lead to such market swings as, for example, the RTS Index collapsing from over 2,500 to under 500 from May 2008 to January 2009 and then doubling to over 1,000 three months later. We saw the same effect in the ruble market since last September. It is that volatility which both attracts speculative investors and drives longer-term investors crazy.

I recently came across a book, which, while not directly about investment, offers a good template for looking at Russia. Published in 2012, ''Thinking, Fast and Slow'' is by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman. One of the topics he discusses is how and why people initially react to news and then change their stance on reflection. He elaborates on that, and makes it very relevant for the Russia story, in a discussion of "what you see is all there is" or WYSIATI.

In other words, people are far too quick to dismiss what they actually see and instead try to create conspiracies or other factors that are simply not there. We see a great deal of this with regard to Ukraine and even recently, Putin's absence from public view has led to dozens of conspiracies and will be a factor in investment risk perception for weeks, if not months. Simple explanations based on WYSIATI are almost always dismissed when it comes to Russia.

Another of Kahneman's discussion points is about "regression to the mean," i.e. nothing ever stays bad or good forever. We saw that with the stock market and the economy in 2008-09 and it provides an explanation as to why investors were willing to pile into Russian equities in January and February.

It also helps explain why there is greater optimism concerning the ruble and the economy today than there was at the end of last year. However, based on the visible facts, it is far too early to assume the worst has passed.

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#24
Levada.ru
March 24, 2015
Two in three Russians see their country as "great power" - poll

More than two-thirds of Russians believe their country is a great power, according to the findings of an opinion poll published on 24 March.

The research, conducted by the Levada Centre [1], Russia's leading independent polling organization, also suggests that more Russians believe this now than at any time in the past 15 years.

Is Russia a "great power"?

Asked whether Russia is currently a great power, 19 per cent polled said "definitely", and 49 per cent said "probably", a combined total of 68 per cent. Twenty-four per cent said "probably not", 3 per cent said "definitely not" and 6 per cent were unable to answer.

On its website, the Levada Centre also published the findings of its own polling from previous years. In March 2014, 17 per cent said "definitely", 46 per cent said "probably", 27 per cent said "probably not", 5 per cent said "definitely not" and 5 per cent were unable to answer. In November 2011, several months before Vladimir Putin returned for a third term as president, the figures were 11, 36, 35, 11 and 6 per cent respectively. In June 2009, less than a year after the war between Russia and Georgia, the figures were 17, 44, 27, 6 and 6 per cent respectively. In March 2004, at the start of Putin's second term as president, the figures were 8, 31, 42, 15 and 3 per cent respectively. According to the earliest poll the centre provided for comparison, conducted in March 1999, when Boris Yeltsin was still president and Putin was director of the Federal Security Service, the figures stood at 12, 19, 34, 31 and 4 per cent respectively.

For the latest poll, the sample was asked what sort of country they would like to see Russia as. Of the two main options, 47 per cent picked "a great power, which other countries respect and are a little afraid of", while 49 per cent chose "a country with high living standards, even if it is not one of the world's most powerful countries", and 4 per cent could not answer. These figures compare with 48, 47 and 5 per cent respectively in March 2014, 42, 53 and 6 per cent respectively in November 2011 and 40, 57 and 3 per cent respectively in March 2004.

Russia's role

Asked for the present poll what sort of role they believed Russia was playing "in resolving international problems", 11 per cent described it as "decisive", 57 per cent said "fairly important", 24 per cent said "not very important", 5 per cent said "secondary" and 4 per cent were unable to answer. This compares with 11, 56, 26, 3 and 3 per cent respectively in March 2014 and 7, 44, 34, 11 and 4 per cent respectively in November 2011.

Asked what sort of policy they wanted to see Russia pursue towards the West, 60 per cent favoured "the future expansion of economic, political and cultural ties and rapprochement with the West", 29 per cent preferred a "reduction in ties and relations and a distancing from the West" and 11 were unable to answer. This compares with 57, 30 and 14 per cent respectively in November 2014 and 76, 14 and 11 per cent respectively in March 2000, the same month Putin won his first presidential election.

Asked about the idea that Russia has "enemies", 63 per cent said that "Russia is genuinely under threat at present from numerous domestic and foreign enemies", while 23 per cent said that "enemies are being talked about in order to frighten the population and make it an obedient puppet in the hands of the authorities", and 14 per cent were unable to answer. This compares with 61, 27 and 12 per cent respectively in August 2014 and 42, 30 and 28 per cent respectively in December 2007, near the end of Putin's second term as president.

Asked whether other countries' attitudes towards Russia and Russians had changed over the past six months (respondents were allowed to provide more than one answer), 35 per cent said "they fear us more now", 26 per cent said "they hate us more now", 16 per cent said "they respect us more now", 11 per cent said "they despise us more now", 8 per cent said "they understand us more now", 2 per cent said "they love us more now", 17 per cent said there had been no change, and 10 per cent were unable to come up with an answer. Back in October 2014, the figures stood at 30, 24, 10, 9, 11, 1, 13 and 15 per cent respectively.

"Messiah"

In its report on the findings of the research, Izvestiya, one of Russia's main pro-Kremlin dailies [2], quoted Karina Pipiya, a researcher at the Levada Centre, as saying that the majority of Russians continued to view their country as a great power "despite the difficult economic situation, which has led to rising prices and other negative consequences for the populace, which citizens do not deny in other opinion polls".

In a longer comment published by Izvestiya at the end of its report, Pipiya said: "What we are seeing in these responses is people concentrating more on negative feelings. But at the same time, citizens understand that there's a reason why people fear Russia. And here, in my opinion, there are two important points. First, following the reunification with Crimea, there's now a conviction that Russia has gone against the international community and defended Russians. Second, our country's role as a messiah has been updated. Citizens believe that Russia is ready to defend itself, and Russian-speakers living abroad, from various types of enemies."

The polling was carried out during the period 13-16 March 2015, among a representative sample of 1,600 people aged 18 and over and living in 134 towns and villages in 46 of Russia's regions, the Levada Centre said. The statistical margin of error is 3.4 per cent, it added.

[1] http://www.levada.ru/23-03-2015/pozitsii-rossii-na-mezhdunarodnoi-arene
[2] http://izvestia.ru/news/584415

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 #25
Vedomosti
March 15, 2015
Moscow daily urges Russia to tackle its "Weimar syndrome"
Editorial by Nikolay Epple: "National humiliation as factor in foreign policy. Only awareness of problems can help overcome postimperial grievances"

In a recent column in the Financial Times, well-known international affairs journalist Gideon Rachman reminds us that feelings of national humiliation are a factor in foreign policy. This theme is exploited by Greece, Russia, China, and even quasi-state ISIL - the main sources of international tension in 2014-2015. And a decade earlier, New York Times columnist Thomas Freedman named national humiliation as "the most underestimated driving force in international relations."

In truth it has not been particularly underestimated but until recently this assessment had remained primarily an academic one. It was only in the second half of the 20th century that national humiliation began to be recognized as an important factor in foreign and domestic policy. This happened as a result of the collapse of the colonial system after World War II, when whole nations with a long list of grievances from the times of colonial politics entered the world community. And in Germany the theme of humiliation was perceived as the reason that allowed Fascism to develop and subsequently drew the world into World War II.

A regime that does not wish to tackle its domestic problems can relatively easily channel humiliation into aggression against external enemies. An inferiority complex can thus turn into megalomania. But if instead of nursing grievances an effort is made to comprehend them and overcome their causes, it is possible to develop further. This principle works at both individual and societal levels.

Germany in the 20th century exemplified both models of dealing with national humiliation - the aggressive and the constructive. It was able to transition from the first model to the second not because of military defeat but because of its willingness to reassess its history and acknowledge its mistakes. Last week in Japan, [German Chancellor] Angela Merkel spoke about understanding one's history as a prerequisite for full participation in international politics. "If it had not been for our neighbours' generosity, we would not have been able to return to the world community after the crimes of the war and of the Holocaust. But Germany was also willing to openly and entirely take responsibility for its own history." Both countries were losers in World War II but were able to learn lessons from it; however, in recent years [Japanese Prime Minister] Shinzo Abe's policy - called militaristic by many - has disgruntled China and South Korea, past victims of Japanese aggression.

The Weimar syndrome, the threat of which [Russian First Prime Minister] Yegor Gaydar warned about back in 2006, has taken on extremely morbid forms in today's Russia. Attempts to blame economic and political problems on external enemies are almost farcical, but they work: The degree of aggression is rising. Rachman ends his column with this conclusion: To solve international conflicts, talk needs to switch "from emotions to interests." In a study on the political effects of national humiliation, Caroline Varin from LSE [London School of Economics] illustrates how Deng Xiaoping channelled the postimperial grievances nursed by Mao Zedong into "pragmatic nationalism." This opened the country up to economic reform and international cooperation.

A comprehensive reassessment of the past is not always possible. But with a certain amount of will, historic grievances and disappointments can be transformed from destructive energy directed at others into creative energy for self-reformation.

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#26
Carnegie Moscow Center
March 25, 2015
A Chechen Dragon Splits Moscow
By THOMAS DE WAAL
De Waal is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment, specializing primarily in the South Caucasus region comprising Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia and their breakaway territories as well as the wider Black Sea region.

In June 2004, a few weeks after the assassination of pro-Moscow Chechen leader Akhmad Kadyrov, Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya sought out his son Ramzan in his home village of Tsentoroi.

Ramzan was only 27. Officially he was only head of his father's security service, but in Politkovskaya's terrifying account of the meeting, the younger Kadyrov was acting with impunity, as if he was already in charge of Chechnya. He bragged that he would "destroy" his enemies. He took a call from Kremlin spin-doctor Vladislav Surkov. He mocked and threatened Politkovskaya until she made a hasty exit, fearing for her life. Reading her Novaya Gazeta article is all the more chilling now with the knowledge that two years later she would be murdered in Moscow, with Chechen assassins implicated in her killing.

Politkovskaya ended her piece with the prophetic observation that "the Kremlin has nurtured a dragon and now constantly needs to keep feeding it so that it does not spew fire."

She then writes, "The total failure of the Russian special services in Chechnya, which these special services are trying to present to society as a victory and 'construction of peaceful life'."

In 2004, Kadyrov and the men under his control had just crushed another armed group trying to take control of Chechnya, led by the two brothers, Ruslan and Sulim Yamadayev. That battle was also a proxy war between the two Russian intelligence services, the civilian FSB backing Kadyrov and the military GRU.

The Yamadayevs were pushed out of Chechnya. In 2008 and 2009 each was assassinated in turn in Moscow and Dubai. Ramzan Kadyrov then claimed that he was "70 percent certain" that Sulim Yamadayev (and by implication the GRU) had organized the assassination of his father.

Politkovskaya's comment about the "total failure of the Russian special services" grew more prescient with time. If the "Kadyrovtsy" were initially linked to the FSB, then they slipped that leash as well and became a force accountable to no one but Kadyrov himself.

A grim trail of murders all have a trail leading back to Kadyrov's Chechnya. As well as the Yamadayevs  and Politkovskaya, human rights activist Natalya Estemirova was killed in Chechnya  and Umar Israilov, a former bodyguard of Kadyrov's in Vienna in 2009.

Last year an exiled Chechen official Said-Emin Ibragimov said he was abducted and tortured by two Russian-speaking men in Strasbourg (Ibragimov said the two were not Chechens however).

Analysts have used different terminology to describe the phenomenon of the "Kadyrovtsy." Sergei Markedonov talks about "outsourcing sovereignty." Yulia Latynina says that President Putin has "lost the monopoly on punishment" in Russia.

Power, wealth and impunity are all fused. Take the case of Adam Delimkhanov, who is a deputy in the State Duma, Kadyrov's cousin and the man he has named as a potential successor. Delimkhanov was estimated in 2011 by Finans magazine to have a fortune of 300 million dollars. During a fistfight with another parliamentary deputy, he allegedly dropped a golden gun. Most importantly, he was named by the Dubai police as a suspect in the murder of Sulim Yamadayev-but the charges were dismissed in 2012, after Kadyrov visited Dubai.

The murder of Boris Nemtsov has exposed the tensions within the Russian elite about this "third force."

There are at least three different versions about the arrest of the Chechen suspects for Nemtsov's murder: that the arrested men directly targeted Nemtsov on their own initiative for his statements on Islam; that they were hired killers sub-contracted by someone in Moscow; or that they are innocent and were set up to deflect suspicion from the real killers inside the Russian political system.

In any case, the Chechen connection has split the ruling elite. Putin faces a backlash from those who object to his reliance on Kadyrov. Anti-Chechen racism is only part of it. Kadyrov's enemies in the FSB and other places suspect, for good reasons, that the loyalty of the Kadyrovtsy to the Russian state is provisional. They recall that many powerful Chechen warlords, including the Yamadayevs and the elder Kadyrov, fought against Russian forces in the first Chechen war of 1994-1996.

Putin's problem is that Kadyrov has completely cleared Chechnya of all rivals, either Chechen or Russian-having fed and groomed his "dragon," he has no Plan B in Chechnya.

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 #27
http://buchanan.org
March 24, 2015
Are NGOs Agents of Subversion?
By Patrick J. Buchanan

Though "Bibi" Netanyahu won re-election last week, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations will still look into whether the State Department financed a clandestine effort to defeat him.

Reportedly, State funneled $350,000 to an American NGO called OneVoice, which has an Israeli subsidiary, Victory 15, that collaborated with U.S. operatives to bring Bibi down.

If we are now secretly pumping cash into the free elections of friendly countries, to dump leaders President Obama dislikes, Americans have a right to know why we are using Cold War tactics against democracies.

After World War II, my late colleague on CNN's "Crossfire," Tom Braden, delivered CIA cash to democratic parties in Europe imperiled by communist parties financed from Moscow.

But that was done to combat Stalinism when Western survival was at stake in a Cold War that ended in 1991.

Hopefully, after looking into OneVoice and V15, the Senate will expand its investigation into a larger question: Is the U.S. using NGOs to subvert regimes around the world? And, if so, who decides which regimes may be subverted?

What gives these questions urgency is the current crisis that has Moscow moving missiles toward Europe and sending submarines and bombers to probe NATO defenses.

America contends that Vladimir Putin's annexation of Crimea and backing for pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine is the cause of the gathering storm in Russian-NATO relations.

Yet Putin's actions in Ukraine were not taken until the overthrow of a democratically elected pro-Russian regime in Kiev, in a coup d'etat in which, Moscow contends, an American hand was clearly visible.

Not only was John McCain in Kiev's Maidan Square egging on the crowds that drove the regime from power, so, too, was U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland.

In an intercepted phone call with our ambassador in Kiev, Nuland identified the man we preferred when President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted. "Yats," she called him. And when Yanukovych fled after the Maidan massacre, sure enough, Arseniy Yatsenyuk was in power.

Nuland also revealed that the U.S. had spent $5 billion since 1991 to bring about the reorientation of Ukraine toward the West.

Now, bringing Ukraine into the EU and NATO may appear to Nuland & Co. a great leap forward for freedom and progress.

But to Russia it looks like the subversion of a Slavic nation with which she has had intimate ties for centuries, to bring Ukraine into an economic union and military alliance directed against Moscow.

And if NATO stumbles into a military clash with Russia, the roots of that conflict will be traceable to the coup in Kiev that Russians believe was the dirty work of the Americans.

If the U.S. had a role in that coup, the American people should know it and the Senate should find out whether Nuland & Co. used NGOs to reignite a Cold War that Ronald Reagan brought to an end.

And if we are now using NGOs as fronts for secret operations to dump over regimes, we are putting all NGOs abroad under suspicion and at risk.

Not in our lifetimes has America been more distrusted and disliked. And among the reasons is that we are seen as constantly carping at governments that do not measure up to our standards of democracy, and endlessly interfering in the internal affairs of nations that do not threaten us.

In this new era, U.S. foreign policy elites have boasted of the "color-coded" revolutions they helped to foment in Belgrade, Kiev, Tbilisi. In 2003, we helped to overthrow the Georgian regime of Eduard Shevardnadze in a "Rose Revolution" that brought to power Mikheil Saakashvili. And Saakashvili nearly dragged us into a confrontation with Russia in 2008, when he invaded South Ossetia and killed Russian peacekeepers.

What vital interest of ours was there in that little nation in the Caucasus, the birthplace of Stalin, to justify so great a risk?

Nor is it Moscow alone that is angered over U.S. interference in its internal affairs and those of its neighbor nations.

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi of Egypt has expelled members of U.S. NGOs. Beijing believes U.S. NGOs were behind the Occupy-Wall-Street-style street blockages in Hong Kong.

If true, these U.S. actions raise a fundamental question:

What is the preeminent goal of U.S. foreign policy?

Is it to protect the vital interests and national security of the Republic? Or do we believe with George W. Bush that, "The survival of liberty" in America "depends on the success of liberty in other lands."

If it is the latter, then our mission is utopian - and unending.

For if we believe our liberty is insecure until the whole world is democratic, then we cannot rest until we witness the overthrow of the existing regimes in Russia, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Belarus, most of the Arab and African nations, as well as Venezuela and Cuba.

And if that is our goal, our Republic will die trying to achieve it.

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 #28
Russia Direct
http://www.russia-direct.org
March 24, 2015
The Nemtsov factor: The politics of opposition in Putin's Russia
Russia Direct's new Brief provides a comprehensive analysis of the current political sentiment in Russia and offers a detailed look at the state of both "systemic" and "anti-systemic" opposition forces.
By Ksenia Zubacheva

The murder of the prominent liberal politician Boris Nemtsov - a crime that shocked everyone in Russian society - is likely to become a landmark event in the political life of contemporary Russia. The tragedy, which brought to the streets thousands of people to rally in support of Nemtsov, raises questions about the ability of the Kremlin and its opposition to deal with issues related to foreign and domestic policy.

The new Russia Direct Brief "Mapping Russia's political landscape after Nemtsov" will be of great interest to all those concerned not only with Russian foreign policy issues, but also its domestic political and social developments.

The author of the Brief, Yury Korgunyuk, the head of the political science department at the Moscow-based Information Science for Democracy (INDEM) Foundation, shares his perspective on the options available to the Kremlin after Nemtsov's murder, explains how the event changed the existing political landscape and explores the prospects of Russia's opposition parties in the 2016 elections.

"Over the past year, the liberal opposition has grown accustomed to living in an atmosphere of hatred and direct threats, but never did it expect that its opponents would move so quickly from word to deed," starts Korgunyuk.  No one among the opposition ranks could have predicted that soon they would become a live target.

This situation, as the author describes, poses serious challenges to the Kremlin. Will it be able to make the right step? Korgunyuk suggests that there only two possible options available: "Either backwards towards reconciliation with the opposition and the restoration of 'peace' in the country, or forwards over the edge, whereupon Russia's version so-called 'sovereign democracy' will morph into outright dictatorship."

Neither of these options, however, is acceptable for the Kremlin, says the author.  The only thing that the Kremlin is ready to do in the near future is "to balance on the edge."
As for the state of the current opposition forces, the political science expert shows why the parliamentary ("systemic") opposition cannot be taken seriously. He thinks that "the Kremlin effectively brought it to heel, and did so less through intimidation and bribery than through hijacking its agenda."

For example, consider the so-called "Dima Yakovlev law," which was initially lobbied for by the Communist Party, or the law on NGOs as "foreign agents," which fits well into the worldview of the Communist and the Liberal Democratic parties. Korgunyuk also proposes that the highest point of this co-opting of agendas was the incorporation of Crimea.

Speaking about the "anti-systemic" opposition, the author provides evidence that the killing of Nemtsov led to a bifurcation in its ranks by provoking two different reactions. The nationalists followed the parliamentary opposition's reaction by "condemning the murder, but immediately began to talk about the scheming of the West and the harm caused by Russia's liberals," while the liberals, on their part, went as far as organizing the march in memory of their ally and spoke of the need to unite against the current regime.

Finally, Korgunyuk looks into the electoral chances of Russia's opposition in the 2016 State Duma elections. Casting aside the nationalists and the non-systemic left in general, Korgunyuk seems to think that it is the liberals that have a much better chance, if only, of course, they can consolidate their efforts.

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#29
www.foreignpolicy.com
March 24, 2015
Is Russian Literature Dead?
How the land of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy became a book lover's afterthought.
BY OWEN MATTHEWS
Owen Matthews, author of Stalin's Children, was Newsweek's Moscow bureau chief from 2006 to 2012

Speaking at an event in January to launch the "Year of Literature," a series of public events and projects extolling the virtues of Russian letters, President  Vladimir Putin laid out his mission to raise the "prestige and influence in the world" of his country's writers. Generations of American readers weaned on Leo Tolstoy and Boris Pasternak may see cause for hope in such a revival: They want to return to that magical land they first discovered in books - one of passion and tragedy where vast forces tumble characters like ice cubes in the 11-time-zone-wide cocktail shaker that is Russia. Yet though nostalgic for Natasha Rostova and Yuri Zhivago, those readers might struggle to name a single contemporary Russian writer.

The last Russian novel to become a genuine American sensation was Doctor Zhivago, which was published the year before Pasternak won the 1958 Nobel Prize in literature. The most recent nonfiction book of comparable fame was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, which was published in the West in 1973. Since then, no Russian writer has enjoyed true breakout American celebrity.

Noble efforts to translate and promote Russia's contemporary literature persist, but today in the United States, only about 4.6 percent of books translated into English were written in Russian, placing the language far behind French, Spanish, and German. "Great books are being written in Russia today," Dmitry Bykov, Russia's leading contemporary critic and a biographer of Pasternak, said in a radio interview. "But not nearly enough get translated."

Putin biographer and journalist Masha Gessen disagrees, saying the reason for limited international interest is that modern Russian writers aren't producing world-class books. Russian literature "is not as popular because there is very little to read," says Gessen. Russia's "general cultural rot has affected literature to an even greater extent than other cultural production."Russia's "general cultural rot has affected literature to an even greater extent than other cultural production." Chad Post of the Three Percent translation project at the University of Rochester provides a more benign explanation: "poor distribution networks" in the United States. But Natasha Perova, whose famous Moscow publishing house, Glas, announced it was suspending work in late 2014, says the American market is more to blame. These days, people buying from Perova's U.S. distributors "seem to have an allergy to everything Russian," she says. In the early 1990s, "everything Russian was welcome because the world had great hopes for Russia. We thought Russia would be  reintegrating into the European context. But it gradually went back to its former practices, and people turned away from us."

A glib case can be made that characters in Russian novels are incomprehensible to a new generation of Western readers - like the chemotherapy patients in Solzhenitsyn's 1967 Cancer Ward, changed forever by the poison they have ingested, Russians' lives have become too grim to elicit immediate empathy. The #FirstWorldProblems suffered by the suburban protagonists of writers like Jonathan Franzen, the argument goes, are nothing like the avalanches of despair that their Russian contemporaries face. To be sure, being set in a violent, feudal, and unfamiliar world is not necessarily an impediment to a book's U.S. sales; just look at Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell cycle. In that case, however, the reader's guide is Cromwell, constructed by Mantel as an outsider - a man of almost modern sensibility projected into a late medieval world.

Perhaps that need for a detached perspective is why many of the Russian authors best known to Western readers are themselves Westernized. Boris Fishman and Gary Shteyngart, for example, are now New Yorkers. Russian author Mikhail Shishkin is lavishly praised in the West and widely translated, but he lives, at least in part, in Zurich. The brilliance of his 2005 novel, Maidenhair, lies in his skewering of the disconnect between hardscrabble Russia and bourgeois, defenseless, self-satisfied Switzerland. And his masterly latest novel, The Light and the Dark, reflects not Russia's complex present, but its past: During the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in China, a soldier's love letters transcend time and place.

Offering another theory of why so few Russian books find Western readers, Will Evans, a translator and founder of Dallas-based Deep Vellum Publishing, says Americans "read Russia" in a particular way. Given the Cold War and its unsettled aftermath, American readers tend to "politicize [Russian literature], read it for big ideas and political insight." Indeed, just as in the mid-20th century, when superpower politics were projected onto Pasternak, some of the new Russian authors best known in the West carry political freight. Zakhar Prilepin, for example, whose novels Sin and Sankya were published recently in English, is a former paramilitary police officer who did tours in Chechnya and became a radical opposition activist. Then, after Russia's annexation of Crimea last year, he surprised his admirers by praising the volunteers in Novorossiya (eastern Ukraine). His hyperrealist depiction of the cynical post-Soviet generation "in search of fathers" in Sankya is sharp and vital, and he has drawn comparisons to Tolstoy.

Tellingly, some Western readers are also drawn to surreal visions of Russia: Many books making it into English translation today conjure horrific dystopias. In one of the tales in young Muscovite Anna  Starobinets's debut collection of short horror stories, An Awkward Age, Moscow has been destroyed by a war between humans and androids. And veteran satirist Victor  Pelevin's work, The Helmet of Horror, creates a nightmarish world where characters who meet in an Internet chat room find themselves trapped in a virtual labyrinth.

For all their virtue, though, modern Russian works may never satisfy the nostalgia that Americans harbor for the crowd-pleasing grandeur of bygone writers' novels. This may have something to do with the fact that Russia's literary culture has changed. Russia still produces more books than most other countries: Some 120,000 new titles were published in Russian in 2013, according to government figures. But today, Russia's writers are content providers vying for attention in a vibrant marketplace of entertainment and information. In the past, Russians looked to their literature for a design and philosophy of life.In the past, Russians looked to their literature for a design and philosophy of life. The stern God of Russian Orthodoxy provided an immutable baseline of good and evil, but authors were the country's spiritual legislators. In the works of Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Alexander Pushkin and Anton Chekhov, Russians found their moral nuts and bolts, wrestling with the forces of history that threatened to break them apart. Writers, in short, were asked to live more deeply than ordinary mortals.

Today, Putin's promised renaissance notwithstanding, Russian writers are no longer deified at home, let alone abroad. Yet at least the right to publish in Russia holds good; in comparison with the centuries that came before, the past 23 years have been largely free of censorship. Even if Russia is now entering another cycle of oppression, writers will be there to document every turn of the screw - and the best among them will produce classics.

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#30
CNN.com
March 25, 2015
Drive from Europe to the U.S.? Russia proposes world's greatest superhighway
By Chuck Thompson

(CNN)London to New York City by car?

It could happen if the head of Russian Railways has his way.

According to a March 23 report in The Siberian Times, Russian Railways president Vladimir Yakunin has proposed a plan for a massive trans-Siberian highway that would link his country's eastern border with the U.S. state of Alaska, crossing a narrow stretch of the Bering Sea that separates Asia and North America.

The scheme was unveiled at a meeting of the Moscow-based Russian Academy of Science.

Dubbed the Trans-Eurasian Belt Development (TEPR), the project calls for a major roadway to be constructed alongside the existing Trans-Siberian Railway, along with a new train network and oil and gas pipelines.

"This is an inter-state, inter-civilization, project," the Siberian Times quoted Yakunin. "The project should be turned into a world 'future zone,' and it must be based on leading, not catching, technologies."

"Are we there yet?"

The road would run across the entirety of Russia, linking with existing road systems in Western Europe and Asia.

The distance between Russia's western and eastern borders is roughly 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles).

Yakunin said the road would connect Russia with North America via Russia's far eastern Chukotka region, across the Bering Strait and into Alaska's Seward Peninsula.

The road would likely enter Alaska some distance north of the town of Nome, where the famed Iditarod sled dog race ends.

How would drivers span the ocean gap between Siberia and Alaska? Ferry? Tunnel? Bridges?

The report didn't offer specifics on the route across the sea.

The shortest distance between mainland Russia and mainland Alaska is approximately 88 kilometers (55 miles), according to the Alaska Public Lands Information Centers.

A theoretical drive (as fancifully calculated by CNN) from London to Alaska via Moscow might cover about 12,978 kilometers (8,064 miles).

Relatively isolated even by Alaska standards, no road connects Nome with the rest of the state's road system.

About 836 road-less kilometers (520 miles) across desolate terrain separates Nome from the closest major city and road network in Fairbanks, the unofficial northern terminus of the Alaska Highway.

From Fairbanks, Canada and the 48 contiguous U.S. states can be reached by road.

Assuming a road to Nome were ever built (the idea has been studied by the state of Alaska), a fantasy road trip from London to New York might cover a grueling but presumably photo-op-laden 20,777 kilometers (12,910 miles).

Facebook posts from forlorn Siberian rest stops might alone make the trip worthwhile, though the journey would also easily establish irritating new records for "Are we there yet?" gripes from the kids.

Who's gonna pay for this thing?

Yakunin has been described as a close friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Some sources have speculated that he could be Putin's likely successor as president.

TEPR would reportedly cost "trillions of dollars."

According to Yakunin, however, massive economic returns would more than make up for the massive cash outlay -- about which the report also included no details.

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 #31
Two of Russia's Greatest Misfortunes - Roads and Fools - Once Again Come Together
Paul Goble

Staunton, March 24 - Even though the Russian government currently repairs less than one percent of its horrific roads in many regions, Moscow has announced plans to build a superhighway and rail line extending across the Russian north to the Bering Straits and a tunnel to Alaska, a project in which enormous sums will be stolen and little else is likely to happen.

Vladimir Yakunin, the head of Russian Railways who attracted notice recently for his very public refusal to make a public declaration of his income, announced this week that the Kremlin has decided to develop what he called the Trans-Eurasian Belt that will link by road and rail European Russia to the Bering Straits.

He said that the project which because it will involve thousands of kilometers of road and rail over permafrost, bridges over major rivers and an enormous network of tunnels will cost "trillions and trillions" of US dollars and not be completed for several decades but that it was justified by "civilizational reasons" (siberiantimes.com/business/investment/news/n0160-plans-for-new-transport-route-unveiled-to-link-pacific-with-atlantic/).

This project, Yakunin said, is "an inter-state, inter-civilization project ... an alterantive to the current neo-liberal model which has caused a systemic crisis. [It] should be turned into a world 'future zone,' and it must be based on leading technologies" not simply those intended to allow Russia to catch up.

The railway chief said this project "could become the GOELRO of the 21st century," a reference to "the large-scale electrification of Russia proposed by Lenin and Stalin between 1920 and 1935."

But Yakunin's announcement immediately provoked dissent. Many questioned where the money could come from and even where it would go, likely into the pockets of Russian officials and their business partners; others pointed out that the route could not be profitable at any conceivable point; and still others that perhaps China would benefit but not Russia (russianrealty.ru/analytic/articles/rr/572759/). (forum-msk.org/material/news/10751356.html).

Some even suggested that Yakunin's project was nothing more than the latest Soviet-style gigantist project that might have propaganda value but would do nothing else for the country and its people. But the most serious criticism took the form of complaints about what Moscow isn't accomplishing on either every-day or other mega-projects.

One such report featured pictures of Russia's anything but good roads, and another said that less than one percent of the roads in some regions were being repaired in any given year.  Until that situation is corrected, writers asked, why should money flow into new projects that will never be finished or used? (sobkorr.ru/news/551011D3AD79E.html).

Another commentator pointed out that Moscow is finding it hard to come up with the money for a seven kilometer-long bridge to Crimea and said that was a symptom of a system that shouldn't be proposing any more giant projects of the kind the Russian railways head and his Kremlin supporters have now come up with (forum-msk.org/material/news/10751356.html).

And he continued, "the Olympic M4 highway still hasn't been finished; it simply ends 70 kilometers beyond Krasnodar ... there are no roads [there] allowing the supplying of Crimea ... From Moscow to Leningrad there isn't a highway but a complete adventure. It is impossible to get around Moscow without hours-long delays."

"This is a world power?" he asked plaintively.

But the most devastating comment about the absurdity of the latest link up of fools and roads in Russia came from another quarter: RBC released a new study about Skolkovo, the much-hyped Russian effort to create a Silicon Valley research center within Russia (daily.rbc.ru/special/business/23/03/2015/5509710a9a7947327e5f3a18).

Having asked "whatever became of Skolkovo?" the authors concluded that a great deal of money had been allocated but that a large part of that had disappeared without much to show for it - the typical outcome of such Russian super-projects that initially attract so much interest and even support but then gradually peter out, like Russian roads, into nothing.

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 #32
Interfax
March 24, 2015
Moscow will not stay indifferent to U.S. decision on lethal arms supplies to Kiev

Russia will not stay indifferent to Washington's possible decision to begin supplying lethal weapons to Ukraine, Alexei Pushkov, who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee in the State Duma, the lower chamber of Russia's parliament, has said.

"The Congress is urging the president of the United States to begin delivering weapons to the country which has extremely complicated relations with Russia, one of the world's leading states and a country that has nuclear weapons. If these weapons are sent, the American Congress and the American executive branch of power, if it makes such a decision, will embark on a path toward sharply hiking the grade of confrontation," Pushkov told Interfax on Tuesday.

"I do not think that Russia will stay indifferent to such a decision, should it be adopted," he added.

Pushkov offered his comments after the U.S. Congress overwhelmingly passed a resolution urging President Barack Obama to send lethal weapons to Ukraine.

The Russian parliamentarian believes that this resolution is "aggressive", uses distorted facts and reflects both anti-Russian sentiments of the majority of American politicians and the "hegemonistic hysteria that is now gaining momentum in the U.S. and will obviously intensify even further during the election campaign," Pushkov said.

"At the same time, this resolution is highly dangerous and extremely irresponsible because many wars, including the war in Vietnam, started with the delivery of American weapons to other countries," he said.

At the moment, everything depends on President Obama's decision, he added.

"Obama came to power using anti-war slogans and was one of the few American senators who voted against the war in Iraq. Obama should realize that arms deliveries could pave the way for the United States' involvement in this conflict, subsequently leading to an uncontrolled and extremely dangerous course of events," Pushkov said.

"That is why, if Obama is still committed to his anti-war principles, although he recently has not followed them in a consistent manner and can be accused of many things, but if he still realizes that America should not get involved in civil conflicts, he ought to make an appropriate decision," Pushkov said.

However, very strong pressure is being put on Obama today, including by his own administration, the Russian parliamentarian said.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry also favors the idea of lethal arms supplies to Ukraine, he said.

All these circumstances make the prospects of Obama making a positive decision of this issue "quite probable," Pushkov said.

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 #33
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
March 24, 2015
Why Cold War-style military exercises of Russia and NATO are heating up
Amidst Russia-NATO tensions over Ukraine, the Kremlin is testing the country's military capability. In response, NATO has also been initiating large-scale maneuvers in Europe.
By Artem Kureev
Artem Kureev is an expert from the Moscow-based think tank "Helsinki+" that deals with protecting interests of Russians living in the Baltic countries. Kureev graduated from Saint Petersburg State University's School of International Relations. His research interests include domestic policy of the Baltic countries, ecology of the Barents Sea, national minorities in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, Russia-NATO relations.

Last week's unannounced inspection of the combat readiness of Russia's Northern and Baltic fleets, Western Military District and airborne troops was perceived in the West as yet another demonstration of power by the Kremlin. The scale of the maneuvers is certainly impressive, ranging as they do from the mountains of the Caucasus to the islands of the Arctic. Moreover, they are not the first such exercises this year. Since the beginning of the events in Ukraine, both Russia and NATO have sharply increased military training, drilling different scenarios of potential military conflicts.

It all evokes memories of the large-scale military exercises of the Cold War. Against the backdrop of these events, here is an overview of how military drills evolved during and after the Cold War, as both Russia and NATO alternated between a cycle of trust and distrust.

Military exercises during the Cold War

The bloc system that took shape after the Second World War gave rise to the need for major international drills. The two opposing sides - NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries (formally known as the Warsaw Treaty Organization) - carried out joint exercises involving troops from each of their respective member countries, the purpose of which was to ensure a coordinated response in the event of war.

The largest maneuvers conducted by the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact as a whole, such as Dnepr-67 and Zapad-81, involved hundreds of thousands of troops. At the same time, some extremely complex and out-of-the-ordinary scenarios were run through, such as the landing of military aircraft on civil highways, the simultaneous airdrop of large airborne units, the use of tactical nuclear weapons, and others.

NATO's maneuvers during the Cold War did not yield an inch to the Soviet Union in terms of scale. For instance, Able Archer-83, a large-scale command and control exercise in Europe, was regarded by the Soviet leadership as cover for the deployment of troops in advance of a nuclear strike, which provoked reciprocal measures and in November 1983 brought the planet to the brink of Armageddon.

The arrival of a new and promising Soviet leader, Michail Gorbachev, did not put a stop to NATO exercises, the largest of which in the perestroika years was Reforger-88 in West Germany, involving 125,000 army personnel. The basic idea of such maneuvers was to drill different scenarios for either repelling a potential enemy attack or launching a preemptive strike.

From distrust to trust: Military exercises after the Cold War

The end of the Cold War and the resulting drop in international tension put paid to global demonstrations of force and preparations for large-scale hostilities. Moreover, starting in the early 1990s, a package of agreements was signed to help build trust between the former adversaries.

The 1990 "Vienna Document of the Negotiations on Confidence and Security" was the first to provide for the exchange of information on the two sides' armed forces, including the consolidation of large bodies of troops and planned maneuvers.

The Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), which was signed in late 1990 and entered into force in November 1992 (and from which Russia recently withdrew), introduced restrictions on the number of weapons that could be deployed from the Atlantic to the Urals. In addition, the document also set a limit on the number of military groups in so-called "flank zones" - points of contact between Russia and NATO countries.

Both sides virtually abandoned large-scale maneuvers. For many years the main focus of NATO drills was on local tasks: averting terrorist attacks, peacekeeping operations, raising the combat readiness of new and potential Alliance members. The scenarios envisaged under NATO's exercises were "peaceful" and pertained to protecting civilians caught up in war zones, freeing hostages and routing terrorist groups.

For example, the large-scale (for the 2000s) Sea Breeze-2008 drills, held two weeks before the conflict in South Ossetia, involved 1,000 soldiers and 18 ships. Peacekeeping and humanitarian operations were stated as the main purpose of the exercise.

It should be mentioned that in the first decade of the 21st century, NATO and Russia actively cooperated in peacekeeping and humanitarian activities. For instance, Russian military units took part in the Rescuer/ Medical Exercise Central Europe (MEDCEUR)-2002, which took place in the Baltic region in July 2002 under the NATO Partnership for Peace initiative.

In March 2004 the operational center of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency at Schriever Air Force Base held joint staff command exercises between NATO and Russia dedicated to non-strategic missile defense, in which 15 Russian experts participated. 2011 saw the first joint exercises to combat air terrorism, codenamed Vigilant Skies-2011, which role-played a scenario in which NATO and Russian fighters rescued a Polish airliner hijacked by terrorists.

From trust back to distrust: Military exercises after the South Ossetian conflict

After the South Ossetian conflict, Russia-NATO relations took a dramatic turn for the worse. A year later, in August-September 2009, Belarus hosted Zapad-2009, the largest exercise since the collapse of the Soviet Union with the participation 33,000 Russian and Belarusian service personnel. The drills simulated large-scale offensive and defensive operations, including the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons.

Yet military analysts concur that the main objective was not a demonstration of power aimed at the West, but the correction of certain "errors," namely the ironing out of the numerous institutional weaknesses in the armed forces of the Russian Federation identified during the war in South Ossetia. On evaluating the maneuvers, NATO analysts assessed Russia's combat readiness as fairly low. In Russia, meanwhile, the results prompted a number of changes at the top of the Ministry of Defense and adjustments to the ongoing reform of the country's armed forces.

After Ukraine: Once again, military exercises go global

Looking ahead, one sees the nature of such exercises becoming ever more global. Russia's Zapad [West] and Vostok [East] exercises have been carried out several times since 2009. For instance, Vostok-2010 involved more than 100,000 service men and women, 1,500 tanks, 120 aircraft and 70 ships, while Vostok-2014 upped the figures to 155,000 troops and 2,500 units of equipment, making them the new record holder as the largest maneuvers since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Ukrainian events of February 2014 and the subsequent rise in tension on Russia's borders could not fail to provoke a response. The Kremlin was forced to take steps to rapidly increase the combat readiness of Russia's armed forces. In this regard, the period 2014-2015 has seen drills carried out with high frequency, many of them unscheduled.
Zapad-2014, involving tens of thousands of service personnel and joint exercises with India and China, on top of large-scale maneuvers in the Far East, is proof of that. In August 2014, Ashuluk Air Base in the Astrakhan region hosted aviation drills with more than 100 aircraft. For comparison, NATO's Ample Strike-2014 exercises in the Czech Republic a month later featured just 30.

But NATO is becoming more active: in May last year the Partnership for Peace-2014 naval exercises were conducted in Latvia, in which 700 people took part, while the Baltops exercises of June 2014 in the Baltic Sea were a little more ambitious with 1,400 participants from 13 countries. Each of NATO's largest exercises, Spring Storm, held in May 2014 in Estonia, and Steadfast Javelin, which took place in Poland and the Baltic States in September 2014, involved about 6,000 military personnel.

In 2014 alone NATO conducted in total more than 10 different exercises in countries bordering Russia, from Ukraine to Norway. So far this year Estonian, Latvian and American troops have held winter drills on the island of Saaremaa for the purpose of repelling a potential amphibious assault and training the Estonian Air Force. Almost simultaneously with Russia's spot check of the combat readiness of its armed forces, which began on March 16, NATO started exercises in Norway.

What's more, the largest maneuvers ever in the modern history of the Baltic region are planned for May of this year. Codenamed Hedgehog-2015, the exercises will involve a total of 12,000 troops.

Military exercises: Russia vs. NATO

Today, against the backdrop of the Ukraine crisis, it is important to bear in mind that the objectives of NATO's and Russia's military exercises differ substantially. As the leader of the Alliance, Washington is primarily concerned with overseeing the precise coordination of allied actions, developing ways to redeploy U.S. troops to Europe in the event of a global conflict, and ensuring that allies address military infrastructure requirements. After all, despite the common set of standards, the armies that make up NATO forces differ significantly in terms of both weaponry and combat training.

Meanwhile, Russia is primarily focused on training its national army (weakened as it was by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic upheavals of the 1990s), increasing combat readiness, ensuring the capacity to respond quickly to any challenge, and "breaking in" new military equipment. All international exercises involving troops from the Russian Federation (save for Russian-Belarusian drills) are of a purely humanitarian nature, military officials claim.

At the same time, the U.S. Army, whose presence in Europe since the late 1990s has decreased by an order of magnitude in some areas, is still NATO's driving military force. And it regularly raises its combat readiness without being bound by any agreement to exchange information about maneuvers on its territory (save for training launches of some types of missiles).

Moreover, far less is known about large maneuvers conducted on U.S. soil. The scenarios and scale of such exercises are typically kept under wraps, but it is not ruled out that they are comparable to Russia's in terms of numbers involved.

At the same time, the U.S. military has been honing its cyber defense capability and techniques to intercept enemy aircraft. It regularly carries out exercises in Alaska (codenamed Northern Territory and Red Flag), which were canceled in 2013 due to the budget sequestration, but are on the whole far larger than most of NATO's European drills.

It can be assumed that the international tension over Ukraine will prompt both sides to maintain the high frequency of military maneuvering. The declaration made at the NATO summit in September last year in Wales on the creation of a rapid reaction force will likely compel the Alliance to initiate Russian-style unscheduled spot checks of combat readiness, which are vital to ensure that its diverse and heterogeneous forces can indeed deliver a rapid response to military threats

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 #34
Russian Defense Policy
https://russiandefpolicy.wordpress.com
How the Third World War Begins

What would happen if the U.S. and some NATO allies decided to intervene in eastern Ukraine by supplying Kyiv with arms or by sending their own troops to the front lines?  Mikhail Khodarenok has tried to answer this question, and provides much-needed tonic for Western observers wowed by the Kremlin's "surprise" exercises since 2013.  He is a conservative critic of the Russian MOD leadership and post-Soviet military "reforms" up to Sergey Shoygu's tenure.  

Khodarenok argues against allowing Russian forces to be drawn into an escalating conflict because ill-conceived and continual "optimization" has left them unprepared for a conventional war against the West.

Khodarenok is editor-in-chief of Voyenno-promyshlennyy kuryer or VPK. He's a retired colonel, professional air defender, General Staff Academy grad, and former staffer of the General Staff's Main Operations Directorate.  In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he was an outstanding military journalist for Nezavisimoye voyennoye obozreniye, but by 2003 or 2004, he left for VPK.

His latest for VPK is interesting, and follows in its entirety.
http://vpk-news.ru/articles/24284

Script for the Third World War

Volunteers from the USA and Western Europe are interfering in the conflict in south-east Ukraine.

One has to repeat yet again:  statements, from time to time voiced by ultraliberal Russian politicians like "the problem has no military solution" and "all wars end in peace," have no relationship to reality.  Wars end only one way - a crushing defeat for some and brilliant victory for others.  If the phrase "there is no military solution" appears, this means that one of the parties to the conflict simply has no strength for the victorious conclusion of the war.  And if some armed confrontation ends like a draw, it is so perhaps because of the complete exhaustion of military capabilities on both sides.  Of course, there are possible variants with some very minor deviations from this general line.

Begin with the immediate and future tasks of the parties to the conflict in the south-east Ukraine.

For the Kiev leadership the immediate, and future, and enduring goal for the historically foreseeable future is only one thing:  restoration of the territorial integrity of the country by any means, primarily military ones.  The strategic mission is to wipe the armed formations of the south-east from the face of the earth.  Waiting for negotiations, for changes in the constitution of Ukraine in the right way for the unrecognized patches of territories, for federalization of the south-east - all this is from the realm exclusively of suppositions and imaginary games. Carthage (i.e. the separatist south-east) must be destroyed - and this thesis, without any doubt, will be dominant in all Ukrainian foreign and domestic policy.  To hold other views today among the [Maydan] Square elite means immediate political suicide.  Still Kiev doesn't have the forces and means to solve the problem militarily.  But this doesn't at all signify the Ukrainian leadership's refusal of a policy of crushing the south-east by military means.

It's necessary to say directly that, on the whole, the external and internal political missions of Ukraine in the south-east are clear and logical.

It's more complicated with the unrecognized south-east.  Everything here is much foggier.  It's possible to demand self-determination for these territories, but what then?  How can people live on this piece of land if it is practically impossible to guarantee the economic, financial and any other independence for the south-east (or more precisely, two torn off and extremely curvy pieces of Donetsk and Lugansk Oblasts)?  Demanding federalization is also theoretically permissible, but official Kiev will never, under any circumstances, grant it.  Return to [Maydan] Square?  But so much blood has already been shed, the scale of destruction of the region's infrastructure is simply astonishing, and the gulf between the parties to the conflict is so great that this is hardly possible without subsequent pogroms and mass shootings of insurgents by Ukraine's central government.  In general, a complete zugzwang - what to do is not clear to anyone, and the next move can only worsen the situation.  It seems that the political line of the south-east, in these circumstances, can be only one thing - hiding behind a verbal veil and temporizing.  And then, maybe, something will happen.

In this regard, it doesn't due to forget one important circumstance.  In predicting the future, futurists of all stripes mainly use the very same method.  From the point of view of a representative of anti-aircraft missile troops, as the author was in the past, -  this is the hypothesis of a rectilinear and uniform motion target.  A significant part of the forecasts is based on this postulate.

But there is the "Black Swan" theory.  Its author - Nassim Nicholas Taleb, wrote about it in the book "The Black Swan:  The Impact of the Highly Improbable. " The theory considers difficult to predict and rare events that involve significant consequences.

In other words, it is impossible to describe the processes of the real world with only mathematics, employing even the most advanced models.  From a certain point anything and everything can go contrary to predictions, extremely askew.  It seems that the unspoken political line of the south-east - to wait is built on this.  And then it will become apparent.  Is it good or bad - only time will tell.

Today in the south-east of Ukraine a cease-fire regime is in effect.  But all parties to the conflict seem to realize that this is not the end, but rather only a pause before the summer campaign.

We now turn to hypothetical scenarios of the developing situation in the south-east of Ukraine (we emphasize - scenarios exclusively from the realm of hypotheses and assumptions).

How does the war in the south-east present itself from the point of view of military art?  Essentially, two Soviet armies are fighting.  One is a 1991 model (it is the armed forces of Ukraine), the other is a somewhat modernized version of the same Soviet army - better trained in an operational-tactical sense, manned by more competent specialists, and commanded better.  And the armed confrontation is currently playing out solely on the ground - with only the forces of combined arms units and sub-units.  The south-east doesn't have its own air forces, and Ukraine's - formerly small - air forces have gradually dwindled to nothing in the course of the conflict.  Practically no serviceable aircraft and trained pilots remain for the [Maydan] Square. Volunteers for the south-east on their TO&E air defense equipment helped the development of such a situation a lot.  Sometimes vacationers in their planes acted fairly quietly and unnoticed for the same purpose.  But from the point of view of military art, the armed confrontation in the south-east is all just a somewhat modernized variant of World War II in its final stage.  Neither this nor that side has identified new weapons and military equipment or new techniques and methods of conducting armed warfare.

As is well-known, volunteer-vacationers are fighting on the side of the south-east. With their TO&E weapons as a rule.  But now suppose such a variant (again, purely hypothetical, why not), that volunteers and vacationers from the USA and Western Europe began to arrive in the ranks of the armed forces of Ukraine, also with their TO&E weapons.

Let's begin with the air forces.  Suppose F-15, F-16, F-22, A-10, "Panavia Tornado," E-8A, E-3A began landing on the airfields of Kharkov, Poltava, Dnepropetrovsk, Zaporozhye.  Previous identification markings and side numbers painted over, and marked in their place is the trident and yellow-blue banners of Ukraine.  Prior to this, many flights to Ukrainian airbases delivered fuel and the most modern aviation weapons.

Three CSGs (carrier strike groups) are deployed on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria which has prostituted itself politically for the past 140 years.  The typical composition of each is one nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, two-three guided missile cruisers, three-four guided missile destroyers, three-four nuclear-powered attack submarines.

Armored and mechanized divisions of volunteers from the West outfitted with "Abrams," "Leopard," "Leclerc" tanks, "Marder" and "Bradley" BMPs, modern artillery are unloaded in the area of Mariupol,  Pavlograd, Izyum, and Lozove.

In addition, we should make note of the volunteer units and sub-units (also manned by vacationers from the USA and Western Europe), electronic warfare, communications, unmanned aerial vehicles and so on, and so on.  Do not forget also about the volunteer logistics and technical support units, without which modern war is unthinkable.

Now a question.  How long would the armed formations of the south-east hold out if a qualitatively different enemy entered the war, if a hail of modern aviation weapons - anti-bunker bombs, laser- and satellite-guided bombs, air- and sea-based cruise missiles showered down on LNR and DNR formations and units?  If the order-of-battle were attacked by the newest armored combat vehicles and artillery?  And the action of all this military splendor was supported by American intelligence of all types which has not even a close analogue in the world?  And the planes of the volunteers of the West chase after every BMP, gun, and tank of the units and formations of the south-east, separately bomb every trench, firing point, and mortar position taken.  And destroy the target with margins commensurate with the size of the trench itself.

We'll repeat the question:  how long can the armed formations of the south-east hold out?  A day?  Two?  A week?  The answer is unfortunately:  several hours would be good.

Of course, the elder comrades - the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation - of the volunteers of the south-east can support them.  And precisely at this moment - please get shaved(1) - the Third World War has begun.

Such a version of events is the crystal dream of the current Ukrainian leadership. But Anglo-Saxon blood is too dear to shed for the future happiness of some half-wild Ukrainians.  Therefore, such a version of developing events is still to be assessed as the game of a warmed-over imagination.

And if you still continue to fantasize and try to imagine how the development of such a conflict in the South-West Strategic Direction [YuZSN] might look, if all interested sides take part in it under this or that flag.

We say directly - the success of armed confrontation employing only conventional weapons is obvious in this case.  It certainly will be on the side of the West.  Unfortunately, the modern Russian Army is still less than qualitatively different from its Soviet predecessor of the 1991 model.  And there is not very much of the latest weaponry, meeting the highest demands of the XXI century, in it.

For example, at this time, we do not have a single operational large formation [объединение] of the air forces (which by the way are no longer themselves a service of the Armed Forces), equipped with modern aircraft with supplies of the newest aviation weapons for the conduct of at least 30 days of combat actions.

The Black Sea Fleet today, to our great regret, is a branch of the Central Naval Museum.  On the ships of the BSF it would be possible to study the history of Soviet shipbuilding in the 1960-1970s.

Yes, and combined arms formations and units, if you collected everything that is on the territory of the former SKVO(2), you would get not more than 1.5 army corps (by Western standards).  You clearly couldn't form a 1st Ukrainian Front from the available set of forces and resources.  There are no operational reserves on the district's territory.  That is, the formations and units clearly do not have the strength for operational-strategic missions on the YuZSN.

To understand the sharpness of the situation, let's add just one thing:  if there are four-six specialized EW aircraft on every American carrier, then we don't have a single similar aircraft in our entire air forces.

One should note still one more very important point - the operational outfitting of theater of military actions in the South-West Strategic Direction hardly meets the tasks of conducting combat actions successfully.  The airfield network, the quantity and quality of roads and railways far from fully meet the demands of pursuing armed confrontation.  It suffices to note that some railroads pass through the territory of Ukraine, and the famous quadrangle in which there are generally no railways lies precisely on the YuZSN.  In a word, the first railroad parallel to the front line goes through Ukraine, and the next - only through Volgograd.  And as is well-known, where the railway ends, and so ends the war.

As for the quartering of formations, units, and sub-units of the RF Armed Forces on the YuZSN, they are located mainly in the dispositions of the Soviet-era North Caucasus Military District.  In those days, this district was deep in the rear with a small set of reduced-strength and cadre units and formations.  The situation in this respect has changed a little since 1991.  But now the neighboring country of the district with the most militant and anti-Russian mood is modern Ukraine.

A fully legitimate question arises:  what did you do the last 20 years?  This period in the life of the Russian Armed Forces awaits its impartial historian. Still one can say the following concisely.  All force in the 1990s and 2000s, maybe, went into continuous organizational-staffing measures(3).  Meaning:  form, then disband the very same, then restore it, disband it again, but incidentally with the aims exclusively of optimizing and improving the organizational structure, zeroize military science and education, cut military academies to the root under the well-meaning pretext of relocating them, scatter valuable cadres in the course of continuous cuts and reformations.  Just two words - "reform" and "optimization" - in their harmful effect on the life of the Armed Forces are comparable, perhaps, only with the consequences of delivering a series of MRAUs (massed missile-air strikes).

Perhaps, if we look at the matter critically, nothing qualitatively new was created (in any case this is debatable).  We have essentially marked time for more than 20 years, while other countries have made a breakthrough in military affairs.  If any positive trend has been noted, then it is only with the arrival of Sergey Shoygu in the Ministry of Defense.

And somebody should be responsible for it - at least in terms of an objective analysis of the situation.  Let's examine try the defense ministers in recent years - from Pavel Grachev to Anatoliy Serdyukov.

Which of them could be called "a prominent builder of the Armed Forces of modern Russia?"  Or write the line in their performance appraisal:  "A talented military theorist, who made a significant contribution to strengthening the defense power of the state?"  Finally, he "developed, established, introduced, and adopted weapons into the arms inventory?"

Try to include the following lines in their testimonials:

"Extraordinary concentration, inquisitive mind, analytical skills, ability to make correct, forward-looking conclusions;"
"Creative mind and a remarkable memory, ability to quickly grasp a situation, to foresee the development of events;"
"Has a rich combat experience, broad erudition, high operational-strategic training, gave all his strength to the training and education of military personnel, to the development of military science;"
"Distinguished by deep knowledge of matters, persistent daily work, high culture and personal manners;"
"Dedication to affairs, high professionalism, intelligence."

Having presented a line on the [MOD] leaders noted above, we can say - almost nothing suits, however.  Or its suits, but not much.  In the best case, all the enumerated persons were occupied with only one thing - "merge-unmerge," and then cut.  But court of history is impartial - no matter how so-and-so puffed out his cheeks or furrowed his eyebrows in the past, it is not at all the generals for special assignments from his inner circle who will write his testimonial for him.

By way of conclusion.  What do Russia's Armed Forces do in the event of such a development of the conflict?  Threaten to use tactical nuclear weapons?  Meaning:  if you do not stop, we will strike at Ukrainian nuclear power plants, chemical facilities, the series of hydroelectric power stations on the Dnieper River in order to create a flood zone and destruction.  But this, as is well-known, is a double-edged sword.  And there are not so many long-range tactical nuclear weapons delivery vehicles.  After all, with our own hands we destroyed the class of missiles most needed for the defense of the country - RSMD(4).

Of course, all the above described and enumerated is no more than speculation, fantasies, and hypotheses.

But there can be only one exit from the Ukrainian crisis - under no circumstances should the Russian Federation Armed Forces be allowed to be dragged into the conflict in the south-east.  Our country, the army and navy, needs to note objectively that we are still not ready for large-scale armed confrontation employing only conventional weapons.  If you sort out all the criteria of the state's readiness for war (Armed Forces training, preparation of the country's economy, the preparation of the country's territory to support the RF Armed Forces, preparing the population for defense), then most of them have very substantial problems.

And it's necessary to strengthen the country's defense capability at a forced (downright Bolshevik) tempo, and create Russian Armed Forces which meet the highest standards of modern warfare.  And the first thing is to stop the nervous organizational-staffing(3) delirium.
--

A post-script to Khodarenok's opus:  where does he leave us?  

A frozen conflict [a draw - to use his term] is, of course, a win for the Kremlin.  At least through the medium term.  

If the West intervened militarily in the conflict as Khodarenok hypothesizes, both sides would have to make dangerous decisions about working up the conventional escalation ladder.  Moscow might conceivably back away from eastern Ukraine if given a serious bloody nose.  Along the way, the U.S. and EU might also go "nuclear" economically by revoking Russia's membership in the SWIFT international money transfer system.  

But if, as Khodarenok suggests, the West trumps conventionally, Moscow could consider a game-changing resort to nuclear weapons. With probably only messy endings in store for him anyway, Putin might have fewer compunctions here than the U.S. or NATO.  He would have fewer choices too - escalate again or lose the war (and his grip on power).  Would Russian military men be willing to use nuclear weapons over eastern Ukraine or to save Putin?

There is, of course, an alternative more likely to be chosen by the West:  Cold War-style containment of eastern Ukraine and Russia. It's a less dangerous, but slow and frustrating process placing much of the burden of nation-state building on pro-Kyiv Ukrainians themselves and on the West's willingness to finance the emergence of a viable country in contrast to the Russian-backed statelets in the east.  However, this long road is open everywhere to Russian meddling, and frontline NATO allies would require lots of tangible reassurance.

Whatever the policy course, it isn't clear to this author that the U.S. and the West possess the same fortitude to pursue it that they did in the 1940s and 1950s.  They don't have the same cohesion in decisionmaking.  Not many are willing to view what happens in Ukraine as a top policy concern.  The U.S. is tired and distracted. Putin's Kremlin, however, has already defined Ukraine as an immediate and vital interest.

(1) Refers to Alexander the Great having his men shave before battle.
(2) North Caucasus Military District.
(3) A term used in the Russian workplace for reorganizations entailing closure of some entities, establishment of new ones, physical relocations, and personnel transfers and cuts.
(4) Medium and shorter range missiles - covered by the INF Treaty.

 [return to Contents] 

 #35
Russia Beyond the Headlines/Rossiyskaya Gazeta
www.rbth.ru
March 21, 2015
Mikhail Gorbachev: On perestroika today
It is now 30 years since Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev began the process of perestroika in the USSR, launching a chain of events that eventually ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. In an RBTH exclusive, Gorbachev shares his thoughts on perestroika and its consequences and argues that many of the political and economic problems currently facing Russia and the world are the result of a failure to seize the chances offered by perestroika.
Mikhail Gorbachev, special to Rossiyskaya Gazeta and RBTH

Thirty years ago changes began in the USSR that transformed the aspect of the country and the world. History allotted a relatively short term to perestroika: less than seven years. Yet people continue to discuss it. I believe that today it is necessary to understand what happened in those years and why it happened the way it did.

First and foremost, perestroika was a response to a historical challenge that the country was facing in the last decades of the 20th century. The awareness of the need for fundamental change was universal back then - both in government and in society.

In the 1980s the country was going through a difficult period in its development. Problems had accumulated throughout the decades and needed to be dealt with urgently.

Some attempts at solving these problems had a systematic nature. Such was the agricultural reform approved by Alexei Kosygin, which was based on analyses and work done by scientists and economists. It was an attempt to free the economy from diktat, to give people and entrepreneurs more opportunity to show initiative.

However, Kosygin's reform was blocked. In fact, the decision to block it was made during the plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. And this means that the problem was political.

I remember one conversation with Kosygin. I asked him directly: "Alexei Nikolayevich, why did you concede, why didn't you insist on the realization of your proposals?" He looked at me rather attentively and responded calmly: "And why didn't you support the reform during the plenum?"

I did not know what to say.

There was another factor. Leonid Brezhnev proposed dedicating one of the plenums to the problems of scientific and technological progress. The proposal was accepted, since our backwardness in this field was becoming more and more obvious. We created a committee to prepare the plenum headed by academician Nikolay Inozemtsev. The committee did a lot, making serious suggestions.

Today there is an entire sack of these suggestions in our archive. But everything remained on paper, since the plenum never took place. Time had been lost and only in the middle of 1985 did we organize an all-Soviet Union conference dedicated to the problems of scientific and technological progress.

The thing is that for many years the country's leadership had refused to reform the system. The centralized administrative command system hindered people's initiative, holding the economy in a straitjacket, while punishing - and punishing hard - those who did demonstrate initiative.

As a result, by the beginning of the 80s we were by two and a half times behind the leading countries as far as industrial productivity was concerned, and four times behind in the field of agriculture. The economy was militarized; it was becoming difficult for it to support the arms race. Its structure was twisted towards the mining and extraction sectors and heavy industry. The country, which had 40 percent of the world's resources and a talented and highly educated population, was incapable of satisfying many of the people's basic needs. People had to stand in line and run after "deficit" goods.

Society was becoming adamantly convinced that it could no longer live in this way. Changes were knocking at the door. We had to welcome them, risky and dangerous as they were.
But the changes could not start by themselves. For them to become possible a lot had to happen, without which perestroika could not have begun. These changes became possible after Stalin's death, after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, after a new generation of politicians assumed leadership in the USSR.

I can say that we started changing not for honors and fame but because we understood that people deserved a better life and more freedom. Because people have the right to participate in solving the issues that determine their future and the future of their country.

At that moment we saw perestroika as part of a global process, taking place in an interconnected and interdependent world. The global problems concerning us today - security, poverty and backwardness, the ecological crisis - were telling us that we had to combine our efforts already back then. And we wanted our country to assume a dignified position in the drive for a safer and more just world.

Reviewing the principles and aims of our foreign policy, we generated views that were called "the new political thought."

New thought actually meant simple and clear things: abandoning ideological and any other biases, the willingness to review familiar stereotypes, the capability to look at the changed world with a new and broader vision.

In concrete terms this meant we had to stop the arms race, first of all nuclear; normalize relations with the U.S. and China, and regulate the regional conflicts that had lasted for decades. We needed dialogue, and most of all trust in international relations.

Perestroika had various stages. The creators of perestroika were accused of not having a plan, an idea. But there were no ready-made recipes lying around anywhere. The idea of perestroika was created as it developed, as the people were being liberated. But our determination to unite politics with morality and ethics remained unchanged. We wanted the state and the economy to serve man.

Glasnost became the fundamental instrument of perestroika. What is glasnost? Freedom of speech. People finally received the opportunity to speak about their problems, to voice their opinion without fearing censorship and repression. But glasnost is also transparency in the affairs of state, it is the demand that the leadership explains its decisions and takes people's opinions into consideration.

That is why I had to object to what our great writer Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn once said in the 90s: "Gorbachev's glasnost ruined everything." I replied that if it had not been for glasnost, the country would have continued stagnating, blocked at a dead-end, and Solzhenitsyn himself would have still been living in Vermont, U.S., where he had moved after his country exiled him.

Glasnost stirred society; it opened the eyes of the country's leadership. We saw that people wanted faster movement forward. We understood that to do so it was necessary to democratize all facets of public life, including the democratization of the political system. In 1988, during a party conference, we decided to conduct elections to the highest organs of government on an alternative basis. This was a very important step towards democracy.

Today this move, which back then had everyone's enthusiastic support, is subjected to harsh criticism. People say that first we needed to deal with the economy and leave politics for a better day. However, it is enough to remember the fate that awaited the abovementioned attempts to solve the country's problems without first touching the system's political foundations.

And today I am convinced that the course we took was correct. It certainly does not mean that the decisions we made were right or precise, that we always acted opportunely. Sometimes we were late, sometimes we rushed. We underestimated the resistance of the opponents of perestroika.

At first literally everyone spoke in favor of the changes. But then we realized that not everyone among the people, the leadership and the "elite" was happy about the decisive yet evolutionary changes.

On the one hand there were the radicals who meshed with the separatists and, feeling the people's impatience, especially that of the intelligentsia, demanded that "everything be completely destroyed," while feeding the people with irresponsible, unrealistic promises that in a year or two there would be paradise in the country.

On the other hand there were the conservatives, who were stuck in the past, fearing real changes, distrusting the people's free choice and not wishing to lose their former privileges. It was them who, having lost in the open political battle, staged the 1991 coup that weakened my position as the country's president and paved the way for radical forces that in a few months destroyed the Union.

I fought for the preservation of the union government with political means. I underline -political. It was unacceptable for me to use force, which could have led the country to the brink of civil war. In these conditions a lot depended on the position that Russia's leadership would take. And in the end it chose the way of the country's disintegration.
Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who played a positive role in defeating the coup, assumed a duplicitous position. A secret conference was held in Bialowieza Forest [in western modern-day Belarus - RBTH], where the leadership of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus announced the dissolution of the Union.

I was ready to agree to maximum economic decentralization and to giving the republics the broadest authority. But a completely different decision was taken as the Russian parliament applauded. As a result all ties, even our most important asset, the single defense of the union state, were destroyed. Today we are witnessing the consequences. I could not agree with this. That is why I resigned as President of the USSR.

But is the result of perestroika the dissolution of the Union, as many say - some due to ignorance, others out of spite? No. The dissolution of the Union, the hardships and privations that many experienced in the 90s were only the result of the failure of perestroika. But this does not annul the most important thing: The changes that perestroika had introduced were so profound that it was impossible to go back.

First and foremost this means political freedoms, human rights - those rights and freedoms that today are taken for granted, such as the opportunity to vote in the elections, to elect your leaders. The opportunity to openly voice your opinion. The opportunity to practice your religion. The opportunity to freely travel abroad. The opportunity to open your business and become successful.

Not everything has been realized to the utmost degree, however. In the last years we have seen breakdowns and understandable movements. A lot has caused and continues to cause anxiety. But I am convinced that no one will take perestroika's main achievements away from the people.

I can say the same thing about perestroika's foreign policy results. We ended the arms race. We began the process of reducing nuclear weapons, the stockpiles of which in the 80s would have been enough to destroy the planet over and over again (now the arsenals have been reduced significantly, on both sides). We normalized relations with the West and with China. We left Afghanistan. We have regulated many regional conflicts. The process of the country's integration in the world economy has begun.

These are real achievements. But many ask today: Why is the current global situation so alarming? Perhaps perestroika is to blame for this, as well as the new thought that we proposed to the world?

No, I do not agree with this. Today's dangers are the results of the breakdown of perestroika, the dissolution of the Union, a departure from the principles of "new thought," the incapacity of the new generations of leaders to build a system of security and cooperation that would respond to the realities of a global, interdependent world.

The opportunities that were presented after the end of the Cold War were neglected. They were not implemented as they should have been. And the main reason for this is the distorted view of what brought about the end of the Cold War.

Many in the West welcomed with joy the dissolution of the Union, which had been caused by internal factors. The end of the Cold War, from which both sides and the whole world emerged victorious, was interpreted as the victory of the West's and the U.S. The triumphant mood led to the "only remaining superpower" claiming monopolistic leadership in world affairs and even in the creation of the "American Empire."

In the end the world did not become safer. Instead of "world order" we received "global turmoil." Conflicts raged not only through third-world countries but also through Europe. And now an armed conflict is literally standing at our threshold.

I will not speak in detail about the Ukrainian conflict. Its core causelies in the breakdown of perestroika, in the irresponsible decisions made in Bialowieza Forest by the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. The subsequent years led to the rupture in Ukraine. By pulling Ukraine into the Euro-Atlantic Community, the West has defiantly ignored Russia's interests.

No one has gained from this. Everyone has lost. There now exists a real danger of a new Cold and even a Hot War.

Now is not the time for reciprocal accusations and maneuvers aimed at announcing victory in the conflict. This conflict does not have a military solution - there will be no victors. It is important to support all constructive measures, all attempts at a more responsible approach that can lead to peace.

I am convinced that the large-scale historical challenges that faced perestroika, its ideas and principles -solving society's problems by including people in the political and democratic processes, the evolutionary nature of the changes, the understanding of the interdependency of today's world and the country's determination to integrate with international policy and economy - are still relevant today, both in Russia and in the world.

Obviously neither the experience of perestroika nor a foreign policy based on "new thought" presents ready-made recipes for solving today's problems. The world has changed. There are now new "characters," new dangers in world politics. But none of the problems facing humanity can be solved by the efforts of just one country, or even a group of countries. None of these problems has a military solution. The current generation of world leaders must finally understand this. And act accordingly.

Russia can make a substantial contribution to overcoming the current "global chaos." The West must understand this. No attempt to isolate Russia or ignore it will be successful. I am convinced that the country can overcome the current economic hardships. But this requires a serious and sober analysis of their causes.

With all the poignancy of the international situation and the unpleasant internal economic conditions we must admit that the economic crisis and the harsh economic problems are something that we have created ourselves, something for which we bear the responsibility and must resolve ourselves.

And as harsh as the current economic problems are, we must understand that the root of everything is not in economy but in politics.

Russian politics still has many challenges facing it, challenges that were on the agenda during the perestroika years. This includes the creation of a pluralistic, competitive political system, a real multiparty system, the formation of a system of checks and balances that would equalize the authority of the branches of government and guarantee a regular change of that government.

I am convinced that the discovery of a way out of the dead end in which Russian and world politics have found themselves will occur only through democracy. In other words, we need the democratization of Russia's political life and the democratization of international relations. There is no other way.

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 #36
Subject: In Memoriam: Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, 1951-2015
Date:     Tue, 24 Mar 2015
From:     The Harriman Institute <harrimanevents@gmail.com>

Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy
1951-2015

The Harriman Institute is profoundly saddened to announce the passing of our friend and colleague Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, who has been a cherished member of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University, and Barnard College communities since she enrolled as a doctoral student in Columbia's Slavic Department in 1973. Nepomnyashchy was the first woman to direct the Harriman Institute (2001 - 2009), and was honored as the Institute's Alumna of the Year in 2012.
 
During her eight years as Director of the Harriman Institute, Nepomnyashchy broadened the Institute's scope in the areas of culture, literature, and the arts. She hosted numerous conferences on topics ranging from Russian ballet to contemporary post-Soviet politics and began the tradition of mounting art exhibits on the Institute's walls-the first exhibition was a collection of Horst Tappe's photographs titled "Nabokov in Montreux," organized in collaboration with the Russian American Cultural Center. She also invited Mikhail Gorbachev to deliver the 2002 Annual Harriman Lecture, played an integral role in the programming surrounding the Czech playwright and former President Václav Havel's 2006 residency at Columbia, and deepened the Institute's ties to Central Asia and the Caucasus. In 2008 and 2009, she led faculty trips to Turkmenistan and Georgia.
 
In addition, Nepomnyashchy was on the Harriman Institute's Executive Committee and its National Advisory Council, and was affiliated with Barnard's Comparative Literature Program and Human Rights Program. She served as President of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Language (AATSEEL), as well as member of the Kennan Institute's Advisory Council and 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, and co-founded the Columbia Slavic Department's graduate student-run academic journal Ulbandus Review. In 2011, she received AATSEEL's Award for Outstanding Service to the Profession. She demonstrated remarkable commitment to the Harriman Institute's course "Legacies of Empire and the Soviet Union," which she taught from the mid 1990s until the fall of 2014.
 
Nepomnyashchy joined the Barnard College faculty in 1987, and became Chair of the Barnard Slavic Department in 2000 and Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Russian Literature and Culture in 2003. A groundbreaking scholar who wrote the first comprehensive book on the Abram Tertz works of Russian dissident writer Andrei Sinyavsky (Abram Tertz and the Poetics of Crime, 1995) and co-edited with Nicole Svobodny and Ludmilla Trigos the first-ever English-language volume on the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin's African heritage (Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness, 2006), she was known for exploring topics-such as Russian chat rooms that focus on the English writer Jane Austen and President Vladimir Putin's fashion choices-that fell outside the conventional boundaries of Slavic studies. In 2008, she wrote the introduction for and co-translated, with Slava Yastremski, Abram Tertz's Strolls with Pushkin (1994); co-edited Mapping the Feminine: Russian Women and Cultural Difference (2008) with Irina Reyfman and Hilde Hoogenboom. With Nadezhda Azhgikhina she co-authored Три Дня в Августе (Three Days in August, 2014), an eyewitness account of the 1991 Moscow coup. She 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, she was working on a book titled Nabokov and His Enemies: Terms of Engagement.
 
Last summer, shortly before her diagnosis, Nepomnyashchy, together with Professor Charles Armstrong, led a group of fourteen students on a month-long journey from Germany to China as part of a Columbia Global Scholars Program Summer Workshop, co-sponsored with the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, exploring the theme of socialist and post-socialist cities.
 
Nepomnyashchy passed away peacefully in her sleep on the morning of Saturday, March 21, 2015, after a courageous battle with cancer. She is survived by her daughter, Olga Nepomnyashchy, her brother, James Theimer, and her mother, Jo-Anne Theimer. Her husband, Viacheslav (Slava) Nepomnyashchy, whom she met during her first trip to the Soviet Union as a Brown University undergraduate in 1970, died in 2011.  
 
An energetic, and innovative scholar and a kind, caring, and adventurous person known for her insatiable intellectual curiosity, her love of languages, and her extraordinary generosity toward students, colleagues, friends and family, Nepomnyashchy was an inspiration. Her students emphasize the democratic approach with which she treated people-putting undergraduates, graduate students, and clerical workers on equal footing with even the most distinguished scholars in her field-and remember her as an engaging educator and an invaluable mentor who always pushed them to achieve their potential and believed in them even during times when they did not believe in themselves.
 
A memorial service will be held in the fall of 2015. Follow this link for a feature profile about Catharine Nepomnyashchy published in the inaugural issue of Harriman Magazine (June 2013). Visit http://www.cathynepomnyashchy.com/ for a compilation of Nepomnyashchy's writings and interviews; the Barnard College website for a note about Nepomnyashchy from Linda Bell, Provost and Dean of the Faculty; see the Columbia Spectator for an article in memory of Nepomnyashchy; and the ASEEES website for David A. Goldfarb's remembrance of her.

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