Johnson's Russia List
2015-#70
8 April 2015
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"We don't see things as they are, but as we are"

"Don't believe everything you think"

DJ: There may be no JRLs the next few days. Lots of reading for you to catch up on. I hope you will consider reading items you don't agree with. Perhaps you could let me know if you do.

In this issue
 
  #1
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
April 7, 2015
Russian store assistants smiling more, says customer service report
Russia has come 15th out of 69 countries for the friendliness of its customer service, according to data from the Smiling Report, an annual evaluation of how warmly shoppers are greeted around the world. Analysts and industry insiders say that Russia's approach to customer service has drastically changed in the last 10 years - a period that has seen its "smile index" increase by almost 100 percent.
Marina Obrazkova, RBTH

The results of a new survey of "smiles" indicate that Russia may finally be shaking off its reputation for surly service staff and adopting a friendlier and more outgoing approach to dealing with customers in the retail sector.

The country, which has suffered from an association with poor customer service since the days of the USSR, came a surprising 15th out of 69 countries with the most smiling salesmen, according to data from the Smiling Report, an annual evaluation of smiles, greetings and add-on sales across a range of industries carried out around the world by Better Business World Wide.

Sixty-nine countries participated in the 2014 study, organized by the Mystery Shopping Providers Association (MSPA). The 2014 results are based on more than 1.7 million responses from mystery shoppers, anonymous customers who provide feedback on the degree and friendliness of the service at the locations they visit.
 
Smile for the customer... or not

The country with the most smiles in 2014 was Ireland, where customers received a smile in shops, hotels, restaurants, dry cleaners, banks and other services in 97 percent of cases. In second place were Greece and Puerto Rico with 93 percent, while Lithuania came fourth with 92 percent.

The worst results were obtained in Slovenia (46 percent), South Korea (47 percent), Hong Kong (48 percent), Macao (55 percent) and Croatia (56 percent). The most significant smiling achievement in 2014 was made by the Chinese, who improved on their 2013 score of 58 percent significantly, boosting it to 86 percent.

Russia also got a rating of 86 percent to come 15th, an improvement on 2013, when it finished 22nd with 85 percent. These statistics represent a vast difference from a decade ago: In 2005, for example, only in 49 percent of cases were the mystery customers welcomed with a smile.

According to Darya Zhukova, Director of the Analysis Department of NEXTEP Research (which collects information from mystery shoppers in Russia), the situation with service in Russia is stable and there is little variation between regions. "In general, there is no difference in "greeting" and "smile" parameters between the regions," says Zhukova. "Results in the central part of Russia are a bit higher, as well as in the north-western and Siberian regions."

The leaders in terms of smiling personnel are beauty salons and auto dealers, with 86 percent of staff welcoming customers with a smile, while the hospitality business is in second place with 84 percent. The lowest indicator is found in transportation companies - only 48 percent.
 
Hospitality lessons

NEXTEP Research Director Oxana Aukchenkova explained that these high results are due to the fact that companies have realized that polite employees boost sales and attract clients. In order to develop this resource company directors and their staff take hospitality lessons.

Nikolai Scherbakov, president of the National Hospitality Association, says that Russia has come a long way in improving customer service since the 1990s.

"We appeared 15 years ago. Back then hardly anyone gave much importance to the quality of service and the first thing we had to do was teach customer service people the philosophy of hospitality," he said.

"We explained how one should behave, that a client should be perceived as a guest, not as a person who should just be brought and given something. People did not understand that they are not belittling themselves by greeting a client at the entrance of a restaurant, but are helping the person acclimatize to their home, where they have come as a guest."

Scherbakov sees plenty of progress today. "Near my house there are many shops and restaurants of various levels. I go there often and must say that I cannot complain. Honestly, these are small establishments. I don't know how things are in large supermarkets," he said.

Anna, a 34-year-old marketing specialist who asked for her surname not to be published, frequently travels to various Russian cities and says that customer service staff are friendly and smiley.

The only unpleasant incident occurred near Sochi, in the south, when a hotel administrator responded rudely and refused to deal with a problem. "In the end we managed to find common ground, but the unpleasant recollections remained," said Anna. "In the other cases all the administrators and waiters were extremely polite."


 #2
The Vineyard of the Saker
http://thesaker.is
April 7, 2015
Letter from 'deep' Russia

Dear friends,

I recently spoke to a contact of mine in Russia and since he was living in a rather typical Russian town away from the huge Moscow megapolis or even one of the major Russian cities, I asked him to share with us his simple daily experience of Russia.  He kindly agreed and here is his letter below.  I hope that these impression of a 25 year old man from the West will be another useful illustration of the "real Russia" which is rarely, if ever, shown to the people of the West.

Cheers,
The  Saker

---

Hello everyone!

Because the political situation relating to Russia is tense at the moment, please forgive me for writing anonymously. The Saker asked me to write about my experiences in Russia, to shed some light on a country that is still quite unknown in western Europe and North America, and this post is in response his requests.

About me: I'm from North America, 25 years old, nearly completed a Masters degree in Economic Geography, and I'm currently living and working as an English teacher in the Russian province, where I'm able to meet with and talk with a variety of Russian people: everyone from simple workers to skilled tradesmen, lawyers, and city administrators. I'm also a well-informed convert from Roman Catholicism to Eastern Orthodoxy, and some of my friends and acquaintances are clergy (and a bishop) in the Russian Orthodox Church, the Orthodox Church in America, and ROCOR (the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia).

Ever since the situation in Ukraine blew up, I've followed the news regularly and read everything I could about eastern Europe. Most, if not all sources are biased and incomplete to a degree, and that's just a fact of life with information. Bias doesn't mean that you don't listen to other sources of information, just that everything is incomplete or in error to some extent. Get used to it... it's totally natural. The only criteria that I have for checking my sources is that 1. the information that they present is rich, complete, and ideally close to first hand; 2. the source thinks about information in rational, coherent ways; 3. their conclusions are spiritually healthy, and encourage people to get closer to God and peace, instead of to follow destructive passions (anger, lust, cold-heartedness, despair, etc.) away from God. This is how I keep my head out of my ass. Now, academic stuff aside...

Firstly, Russians are quite well-informed. Many of them are able to understand English to a basic level, so they can read western news sources. They are not impressed by western news sources, which are at best incomplete and one-sided. They are even less impressed by mainstream Ukrainian sources, that they consider to be completely insane. Yes, they can understand everything that's published in Ukraine, since Ukrainian is quite similar to Russian. Many people also have relatives in Ukraine and, in the past, made regular trips to Ukraine. In my town, I know two such people personally. They are quite discouraged by Ukraine's self-destruction, but they are hopeful that peace will eventually return to the country.

Secondly, Russians are nationalistic, but less so than other countries (the North American and Poland, for example... I say this because I've traveled in both places). Some of them put Russian flags, St. George's ribbons, and Orthodox prayer ropes from their car mirrors, but many do not. They have a strong, living connection to their history and country, something that I do not really see in the West. Some people are concerned because they understand that their country, and more importantly, their people, are under attack by western powers, but generally they are quite confident in Russia's strength to pull through one way or another. No Russian I have ever met has any desire for anything but peace with Ukraine, Poland, or any other country. Russia has plenty enough land already, and no desire to police or control some unfriendly territory. The people I've spoken with prefer to build trade and investment, without relying on military power.

Finally, Russians are not a bunch of low-achieving drunks. If you have that stereotype in mind, get rid of it now! The people I know are much more addicted to tea and yummy desserts than alcohol. The Russian education system is, in my opinion, substantially better and more rigorous than in North America, and students have many reasons to believe that good, career employment awaits them when they finish school. I am not sure of the details, but in high school the students spend 8-9 hours at school every day, 6 days every week. On the other days and during evenings, most students have tutoring or extra curricular activities, and it's rare to see big groups of school-age kids sitting around drinking or wasting time. Drinking, smoking, and drugs are increasingly looked down on by teenagers as something done by unsuccessful people who lived in disastrous times during the 1990's and early 2000's. That said, there are some social problems and concerns remaining, for example: 1. porn and other unhealthy uses of computers and internet (not discussed within families, because of a conservative mindset that would rather not address such problems). This sometimes develops into promiscuity and pregnancies outside of marriage, both of which seem to be more tolerated here than in the western world; 2. Russians' general love for driving really fast on the roads; 3. a cultural lack of concern for safety standards (religious icons in cars instead of air bags); 4. a cultural willingness to spend a lot of money (often borrowed on credit) for nice cars and clothes. This is mysteriously in contrast to Russians' desire to save money wherever possible, using discount cards, homemade (and dacha-grown) food, etc. Russians always have a love for cute and beautiful things, to a degree not found in North America.

Regarding emigration, many westerners have the stereotype in mind that Russians all want to escape to the west. It is definitely false. Out of approximately 30 students that I teach, I know of 4 who are seriously considering leaving Russia permanently. Others are interested in studying, traveling or working abroad temporarily, while the majority have no plans to emigrate, since there are plenty of good opportunities here in Russia, and people don't want to live far from their families. Learning other languages is a good way to improve employability though.

The last stereotype: Russian girls are very beautiful. This one is obviously true, and I was somewhat shocked when I arrived. The girls here also have the impression that western men are *better* than Russian men, with fewer problems. No, I will not elaborate and provide more details from my own life on the topic of Russian girls.

Unfortunately, I don't have very much time at all to write a beautiful descriptive essay about Russia and experiences here. My work and life keep me very busy, and I can only write some raw and unedited thoughts.

Cheers,
K.
 
 #3
Russia launches new version of president's website

MOSCOW. April 8 (Interfax) - A new version of the Russian president's website launched on Wednesday took a year to develop within the current budget, no extra funds were allocated, the Kremlin said.

"An updated version of the official website of the Russian president has been opened. The previous version was launched more than five years ago, in September 2009. Over the period, technical capabilities have changed noticeably, new formats of data presentation have emerged, but most importantly, a sufficient number of users' feedbacks has accumulated, which we tried to take into account when developing the new website," a Kremlin spokesperson told reporters on Wednesday.

The new version is radically different from the previous one, he said.

"All work was carried out within the current funding for the website, its support and development. The development took about one year of active work," the spokesperson said, adding that five and a half years is a sufficient time period for a website to be renewed.

Throughout a year, the president's website is visited by about 100,000 people daily, and there are days when it gets up to 200,000 visitors, the spokesperson said.

Documents and Pictures are the most popular pages of the website. Both sections were improved. "We have renewed the head of state's photo bank which will be constantly updated. There are also 'official photographs of the president' which can be used for publication and downloaded by any user," the spokesperson said.

The Russian president's website is one of the most advanced presidential websites in the world, said the developers, who did not use foreign examples since the different traditions in data presentation.

"Global experiences vary. If you look at the websites of the CIS leaders, they used to copy that of the Russian president in many ways, but now less so. If we look at the website of the White House chief, this is different, this is the website of the U.S. government. Their emphasis is on a different type of content. And all the news concerning the agenda is contained in the Briefings section. The same can be said about the website of the British prime minister. All have various traditions of displaying information, and that largely defines how the website looks like," the Kremlin said.

The new website of the Russian president underwent all necessary certification and is highly protected. "In terms of security, everything is protected here, the protection scheme is the same as it used to be. The website underwent all necessary certification. It is clear that perhaps there are some people who will want to test the website for strength, but we will beat them off," the source said.

Designers worked over text format to make it more readable. "A team of Russian specialists worked, with whom we regularly cooperate. All work over the presidential website is regulated by the law and supported by the Russian Ministry of Communications and the Russian Federal Security Service," the Kremlin official said.

The personal website of the Russian website remained unchanged but in future will be improved as well, the spokesperson said.

Among the current innovations is the combining of all archives of the previous websites of the Russian president. "Now the entire material, starting from January 2000, has been search-indexed and is available on the current website," the spokesperson said.

Also improved is Documents, the most visited section of the Russian president's website. As well as decrees, orders and laws, the section now contains the president's instructions and copies of the documents posted on the official legal news portal.

"Despite the fact that Kremlin.ru never was and never will be the official publisher, many go to this page in search of documents," the spokesperson said.

A separate technical solution was devised to enable website viewing from various devices, the source said. "Textual format has been changed to make it more convenient to read the website content on the screen. New fonts have been selected. The adaptive web design allows to view the website on various devices, from smartphones to tablets to large-format monitors on which you can read the website content while keeping access to navigation on the page from which you went to the selected publication," the Kremlin official said.

Thus, one can view the website without opening additional pages, by using two independent columns in one window. "Pictograms allow viewing the entire content that is now available," the spokesperson said.

It is estimated that wide screens and mobile phones each account for 20% of the website visitors, the source said. "But we understand that these segments will be growing, so we took that into account straight away," he said.

There are now broader possibilities of working with transcripts of speeches from the events attended by the president. "To make it easier for people to work with large texts, we introduced a search by speaker and subject. One can navigate not only by text but by video as well," Kremlin said.

The website will have fewer sections and links but its overall content has been optimized. "The main page contains links to Events, Structure, Video & Pictures, Documents, Contacts, and Search. Subsections appear upon click. Also, here we have the core material from the current agenda of the past few days. Geographic presentation has been improved. It also contains news about the presidential administration and the work of commissions and councils," the Kremlin official said.

To view the new website, users are recommended to use browsers such as Microsoft internet Explorer 8, Mozila Firefox 4, Google Chrome 5, Opera 11.5, safari 5.0 and above.

The website implements the principle of navigation without page reloading and is supported by all modern browsers, which make its work smoother and speed up navigation.

All images on the website have been adapted for viewing on devices with normal and magnified pixel density.

To watch videos, a hybrid technology is being used that allows playing a video in HTML5 or Adobe Flash.

 
 #4
Moscow Times
April 8, 2015
Former Finance Minister Slams Russian Government on Corruption

While the Russian government is trying to involve itself in more economic spheres, the state is failing to perform its basic functions and corruption has swelled to levels "unimaginable" during the heydays of previous administrations, the head of Russia's second-largest bank said at an international conference on economic development conference on Tuesday.

"The level of corruption that exists today in Russia - I, for one, absolutely could not imagine it even in 1989, in 1990, in 1998-99," head of VTB 24 bank and former Finance Minister Mikhail Zadornov said, speaking at the plenary session of the conference, entitled "Reforms: The Reasons for Success and Failure," RBC reported, citing Interfax.

The periods Zadornov cited marked the final years of the administrations of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who resigned in December 1991, and of former Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who stepped down in December 1999.

Today's Russian state "does not perform its basic regulatory functions," Zadornov said, according to Interfax. "Very often it does not protect the lives and health of people, it does not serve as a regulator of what the state is obliged to do."

"The state in Russia directly participates, or tries to participate, as a subject of economic activity in practically all major spheres," Zadornov was quoted as saying.

Only "businesses of a very large scale" may be able to break free of "direct state participation," he added, Interfax reported.

Zadornov, an economist who went into politics during the liberalization reforms under Gorbachev, served in the Soviet legislature before co-founding the liberal Yabloko party. He was later appointed finance minister during the Yeltsin's administration. The bank he heads, VTB-24, is the retail arm of Russia's second-largest bank, Vneshtorgbank.
 
#5
Moscow Times
April 8, 2015
Ruble Hits New 2015 Highs in World's Best Currency Rebound
By Howard Amos

The Russian currency strengthened rapidly Wednesday as a recent rally driven by greater confidence in the ruble and easing international tensions overpowered the downward pressure of a sliding oil price.

The ruble jumped over 3 percent in morning trading to 53.4 against the U.S. dollar before weakening slightly to 53.8 shortly after midday. The ruble also rose 2.5 percent to 58 against the euro.

Now trading at 2015 highs, the ruble has clawed back some of the losses it sustained during a run on the currency in December that was driven by lower oil prices and Western sanctions on Russia over Ukraine.

"The market has reconciled itself to the growth of the ruble and it's risky to stand against it," ING's chief economist in Russia, Dmitry Polevoy, wrote in a note to investors Wednesday.

Local purchases appear to be driving the ruble's recovery, which has transformed the currency from the world's worst performing currency to the world's best in a matter of weeks. The currency has climbed 34 percent against the greenback since mid-January.

"Companies and, probably, the population as a whole continue to sell," Poloevoy wrote.

Lower levels of violence in eastern Ukraine as a ceasefire between Kiev forces and separatist rebels appears to hold has also given support to the ruble.

The ruble's gains have come against energy market trends. The price of international benchmark Brent oil has ticked up since the beginning of this month but fell towards $58 a barrel Wednesday.

But the rally is put into context by last year's huge devaluation. Even at its current levels, the ruble is down 39 percent over the last six months. The currency shed 41 percent of its value against the dollar in 2014 and in December plummeted to 80.1 against the dollar, its lowest levels since the late 1990s.

Some analysts cautioned that the rally might not last.

"We see more room for advancement but are wary of a potentially sudden reversal, as we see fundamental support as lacking," analysts at Sberbank CIB wrote in a note to investors Wednesday.
 
 #6
Ulyukayev: GDP decline won't exceed 3% in 2015; industrial output to drop 1%-1.5%

MOSCOW. April 8 (Interfax) - The decline in Russia's GDP in 2015 will not exceed 3%, industrial production will drop 1%-1.5%, and investment in fixed assets will fall 11%, Economic Development Minister Alexei Ulyukayev said.

"We assume that this year under the most conservative estimate of the oil market situation - $50 per barrel - we will have a decline of no more than 3% of GDP, the drop in industrial production will be in the neighborhood of 1%-1.5%; we expect a positive trend in agriculture. The main thing of course is investment. Overall, we forecast investment to fall roughly 11% this year, with a significantly smaller decline in capital investment by the state - approximately 3.7% - and a significantly larger decline in private investment," Ulyukayev said during government hour in the State Duma.

The minister said that according to the ministry's estimate, Russian GDP for January-February 2015 fell by 1.9% year-on-year, and industrial output fell by 0.4% and agriculture rose by 3%.

"The serious fall is above all connected with the so called non-tradable sectors, that is, trade and construction, where import substitution has no effect. Therefore with a 6% fall in retail turnover and a 6.4% fall in investments, but the decline in investments is actually a drop in construction by 3% or so. They also determined the fall in GDP," the minister said.

Nevertheless, he said that the decrease is lower than was expected at the end of last year, and now the ministry is preparing an adjusted forecast for the next three-year period.

"But the main thing is that this is not simply forecasting the tendencies that will contribute objectively. It is very important to determine the set of mechanisms, which will allow for the improvement of the situation," he said, noting that the ministry is preparing a target forecast, which proposes reaching growth rates of 4% in 2017 and 5% in 2018.
 #7
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
April 8, 2015
World Bank warns of looming two-year recession in Russia
A report released by the World Bank projects no economic growth in Russia either in 2015 or 2016. This forecast is at odds with the figures from the Russian Ministry of the Economy, which predicts an economic growth of 2.3 percent as early as in 2016. At the same time, the World Bank has approved of the decision to allow the Russian ruble to float in late 2014.
Alexei Lossan, RBTH

Russia will see no economic growth in 2015-2016, according to a World Bank report published on the organization's website. The bank attributes the recession in the Russian economy to a drop in private investment and projects a significant slump in GDP as a result.

According to the report, Russian GDP in 2015 may fall by 2.9 percent in an optimistic scenario and by 4.6 percent, in a pessimistic one. In 2016, the economy will grow by 0.1 percent in the best-case scenario, while negative circumstances could lead to a 1-percent fall in GDP.

One of the main factors that will determine which scenario will be realized is the oil price, warned the report's principal author Birgit Hansl, World Bank Lead Economist for the Russian Federation.

"The impact of the main shock, the slump in oil prices, only began to affect the economy in the final quarter of last year, and the impact is likely to be more profound in 2015 and 2016," said Hansl in the report.

For the positive scenario for 2016, oil prices should reach $68.7 per barrel; for the negative, $50. This forecast is significantly at odds with the figures released by the Russian Ministry of the Economy, which expects the country's GDP to grow by 2.3 percent as early as in 2016.
 
Different approaches

Experts attribute the difference in the forecasts to excessive optimism on the part of the Russian authorities and a difference in approaches.

According to UFS IC chief analyst Alexei Kozlov, Russian officials' outlook is more positive than forecasts from international institutions, though overall their forecasts are broadly similar.

"Inflationary pressure and the rising cost of borrowing are having a negative effect on the country's economy," says Kozlov. In particular, the value of the ruble is largely driven by oil prices since the link between these two factors reflects Russian budget revenues.

"Economic growth forecasting is indeed made more difficult by the Russian economy's strong dependence on changes in oil prices," agrees Finam analyst Timur Nigmatullin.

Another reason for the discrepancy between forecasts lies in differing assessments of development in the key sectors of the Russian economy, explains an associate professor with the Finance and Banking Department at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Vasily Yakimkin.

According to Yakimkin, given the GDP drop of 2.1 percent in January 2015 and the 3.6-percent drop in February 2015, the Russian economy will shrink by 7 percent for 2015 as a whole.

"Capital flight will increase, the ruble will fall and there will be a local surge in inflation, which, taken together, will add up to a recession," says Yakimkin. Therefore, he continues, there can be no talk of economic growth in Russia in 2016, if only on the basis of an analysis of global trends.
 
Government's actions assessed

According to the World Bank, the problems in the Russian economy are of a structural nature. In particular, between the late 1990s and 2013, investment in Russia grew slower than in other world economies. As a result, the World Bank's base scenario also envisages a rise in poverty levels from 10.8 percent in 2013 to 14 percent in 2015, and 14.1 percent in 2016.

At the same time, the World Bank has welcomed the Russian government's decision to allow the ruble to depreciate in response to the burgeoning financial crisis of late 2014, with Birgit Hansl praising the country for being "able to respond swiftly with policy responses that successfully stabilized the economy."

Finexpertiza deputy managing director Stanislav Safin argues that the restrictions on food imports from the EU and the U.S. introduced by the Russian government earlier in 2014 also played a role in limiting the damage to the Russian economy.

"Despite their mid-term ambiguity, these decisions by the government do give serious support to domestic manufacturers," says Safin.

According to Timur Nigmatullin, a cheaper ruble and Russia's countersanctions have had a positive effect on GDP dynamics.

However, Vasily Yakimkin points out, a weaker ruble has been of help only to sectors of the economy that were not laden with debts and that relied exclusively on domestic demand, like the petrochemical sector for example. In the agricultural sector, on the contrary, the low value of the currency has provoked a hike in prices.
 #8
Forbes.com
April 7, 2015
Here's Where Russia Shipped Oil Last Year As Ukraine, Europe Diversified
By Kenneth Rapoza
[Charts here http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2015/04/07/heres-where-russia-shipped-oil-last-year-as-ukraine-europe-diversifies/]

Russian oil companies are diversifying slowly away from their dependence on the European Union, just as the E.U. does the same with its long-time supplier of oil and natural gas. As a result, Russian exports to Germany - its most important market - fell between 2014 and 2013. And Ukraine shipments have fallen by nearly half.

Ukraine and Russia have been going through a bitter divorce. Europe is picking sides, and they've chosen Kyiv. A slower economy in Ukraine and the E.U. are also to blame for weaker Russian oil exports to these markets, but no one can deny that the West is trying to replace Russia with someone else.

Russia's total crude oil exports declined by 5.6% in 2014. Energy exports are imperative to the Russian economy. Oil and gas account for nearly 70% of Russian exports.

Russian oil exports declined last year as its biggest clients diversified to other suppliers. Most notable are direct shipments to Ukraine, which have been reduced by nearly half. Meanwhile, Asian countries represent new, growing markets for Russian oil majors like Lukoil and Rosneft.

The decline in shipments coupled with the steep oil price drop since the middle of last year, led to an 11.4% decrease in export revenues in 2014.

The price of Urals crude, which is the benchmark for Russian oil, went from $108.93 per barrel in June 2014 to $46.58 per barrel by January 2015.

The ruble devaluation helped out a bit, however. Oil is priced in dollars and euros, of course. So when companies like Gazprom , Rosneft and Lukoil, Russia's big three exporters, got paid in hard currency, they were able to exchange that for a whole lot of rubles.

The exchange rate accounted for increasing ruble-denominated federal budget revenues from foreign trade of oil and gas, absorbing the pressure on the federal budget that resulted from lower export volume, CEIC analyst Alexander Dembitski says.

Federal government revenues from export customs duties on crude oil amounted to 2.6 trillion rubles in 2014 compared with the 2.3 trillion rubles in 2013. That was the largest amount recorded in recent history thanks to forex, CEIC data shows.

Former Soviet states in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) accounted for 10.8% of the total crude oil export volume of 223.4 million tons in 2014. In terms of value, however, crude oil export revenue from non-CIS countries totaled $145.6 billion or almost 95% of the total crude oil revenues in 2014.

The main ex-Soviet consumers of Russian oil have traditionally been Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. The balance is changing in favor of Belarus, which increased its consumption of Russian oil by 73.1%, from 3.4 million tons in the first quarter of 2011 to 5.9 million tons in the third quarter of 2014.

On the other hand, oil exports to Kazakhstan significantly diminished in 2014 from 2.3 million tons in the fourth quarter of 2013 to a mere 100,000 tons in the third quarter of 2014 as the country increasingly relies on its own resources, according to CEIC.

Oil exports to its "frenemy" Ukraine contracted to minimum levels and have remained close to zero during the past three years.

Since sanctions were placed on Russia last year due to its support of separatists in eastern Ukraine, the country's oil giants have been frantically turning to China for market share. But it is not only China that has increased its demand for Russian hydrocarbons.

Russia has been leaning more on Asia since 2009. Most of that is due to the fact that oil transportation capacities have grown in Siberia, streamlining Russia's oil exports to its Asian partners - Japan, China and South Korea.

The initial phase of the Eastern Siberia-Pacific Ocean oil pipeline construction was completed in 2009, and expanded to the Pacific coastline by 2012 to reach maximum capacity this year.

As a result of logistics, China is now the second largest single consumer of Russian oil after The Netherlands, replacing Germany.

China imported 8.2 million tons of Russian crude oil in the third quarter of 2014, or 16.2% of the total non-CIS exports, according to CEIC data.

Oil exports to South Korea hit a record 3.2 million tons in the third quarter of 2014.

And oil exports to Japan reached 2.1 million tons in the same period, placing it in the top-10 importer list for the first time.

"Given the deteriorating relations with European partners, Asian markets are becoming increasingly important for Russia and new contracts with China are critical for further growth," says CEIC analyst Dembitski.

Oil and gas exports have been the main source of revenue for Russia and are a contentious topic due to the country's total dependence on oil and gas trade.

 #9
TASS
More Russians move into grey economy because of crisis - vice-premier

Moscow, 7 April: There has been a 5-per-cent increase in the grey sector of the Russian labour market compared with last year, Deputy Prime Minister Olga Golodets told journalists today.

"We currently estimate the increase at about 5 per cent compared to the grey sector employment we had (last year). That is, we see that underemployment is on the rise, and we see that these people do not move to being unemployed. They work somewhere, that is, they move to the grey sector," Golodets said.

Addressing the Modernizing the Economy and Society international conference earlier today, Golodets revealed that grey-sector employment had started rising again at the start of the year. She said a fall in the amount of "grey" wages and a rise in the number of those working in the "normal, transparent way" had been observed in 2013-2014. "In the early months of this year, however, we see that our grey sector started rising again, and this is connected with the crisis phenomena that I spoke about," the deputy prime minister said.
 
 #10
RIA Novosti
April 7, 2015
Russian ex-minister says turned down govt job offers over "half-hearted" reforms

Aleksey Kudrin, Russia's finance minister from 2000 to 2011, has said he still receives offers to return to the government but has turned them down because of "half-hearted" reforms, RIA Novosti (part of the state-owned International News Agency Rossiya Segodnya) reported on 7 April.

"My leaving the government, as is well-known, was related to a fundamental point about increasing spending, but not only in the military (sector), instead of carrying out structural reforms," Kudrin was quoted as saying at a conference in Moscow.

He went on: "I have never said this straight in public before. Not carrying out reforms, half-heartedly carrying out reforms, does not allow me to return to the government today, despite the offers I receive."

Asked about Kudrin's statement that he had received offers to return to the government, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitriy Peskov said "no comment", privately-owned Russian news agency Interfax reported on the same day.

Kudrin resigned as finance minister and deputy prime minister in September 2011 at the request of the then president, Dmitriy Medvedev, after a public row with him over public spending.

In December 2011, Kudrin addressed an opposition rally to protest against the State Duma election results, but received a lukewarm response from the crowd.

In April 2012, he founded the Civil Initiatives Committee (http://komitetgi.ru/), a non-partisan think-tank that aims to support grassroots policy initiatives and civil society and hold the authorities to account.

Though often critical of the authorities, Kudrin is a long-standing associate of President Vladimir Putin, and some observers see him as a possible future prime minister.
 
 
#11
www.rt.com
April 7, 2015
Russian banking ready to withstand $40 oil - CBR head

The banking sector in Russia is stable enough and can withstand the deterioration in the economic situation even with the worst case scenario of oil prices at $40 per barrel, according to the head of the Russian Central Bank.

Russia's Central Bank considers the banking sector is stable, Elvira Nabiullina, the Central Bank head said during the Russian Banks Association meeting on Tuesday.

"The Bank of Russia regularly conducts stress tests and their results show that the key indices, including the sufficiency of cumulative capital, even with the worst case scenario of oil prices at $40 per barrel, remain above the necessary minimum taking into account the measures in recapitalization that were made," Nabiullina said. That shows the banking sector maintains a substantial capital buffer and is able to counter serious shocks even if the crisis deepens, she added.

The factors which had been weighing on the Russian ruble had passed and repayment of foreign debt could be financed without having a significant effect on the Russian currency's value.

"In our view, the appreciation was due to a number of factors: the stabilization of oil prices, the end of the peak payments on foreign debts, and a more uniform sale of foreign currency earnings by exporters will definitely increase our key rate and the development of monetary instruments refinancing", Nabiullina said.

Meanwhile, inflation in Russia hit a 13-year high of 16.9 percent annualized in March and 7.4 percent since the beginning of the year, according to Rosstat data released Monday. The head of the Central bank said she expected inflation to go down to nine percent by next March. The CB would continue cutting interest rates insofar as inflation risks receded, she added. The bank has already cut rates twice this year.

The Central Bank of Russia unexpectedly raised its interest rate from 10.5 percent to 17 percent through the night of December 16 in an effort to stem the ruble's dramatic slide and to curb inflation. The decision followed a 10 percent drop in the value of the Russian currency, which was the biggest intraday drop since 1999. The ruble fell about 44 - 46 percent against the dollar last year mainly due to the sharp drop in oil and Western sanctions. The oil benchmark lost 50 percent of its value during the last six months of 2014. However, the Central Bank's emergency interest rate hike failed to stop the ruble's slide against hard currencies, only temporarily calming the ruble's sharp decline.

However, the Russian currency rallied 4.4 percent during the first three months of 2015, becoming the best-performing currency. Oil has played a much less prominent role in the ruble's exchange rate; the currency is currently doing better than Brent crude.

The Russian economy has been regarded as recovering by Russian and the US economists while all of its key indicators have been improving lately.
 
 #12
Market Watch
www.marketwatch.com
April 7, 2015
Opinion: Sanctions, drop in oil price best things that ever happened to Russia
Russia's economy pivoting away from crony capitalism and energy
By MATTHEW LYNN
 
A round of punitive sanctions designed to cripple the economy. A collapse in the price of its key commodity. A currency in freefall and a central bank hiking rates to emergency levels while a corrupt, authoritarian government embarks on foreign adventures at potentially huge expense. For the whole of 2014, the Russian economy was the most toxic in the world, with one calamity coming hard after another.

But here is something nobody expected. In the first quarter of this year, Russia was doing a bit better than anyone could have forecast. We learned last week that the economy managed to grow by 0.4% in the latest quarter, compared to the zero growth or the outright recession that most economists had pencilled in. The ruble USDRUB, -2.14%   is the best-performing currency of the last three months. Even the Moscow stock index has started to recover.

In reality, sanctions and a fall in the oil price might have been the best thing to have happened to Russia since the invention of double-glazing. Why? Because the problem for a country rich in resources and well-educated, creative people has been an over-reliance on energy, and a tight-knit kleptocracy that distributes the wealth it generates. It has failed to create its own industrial economy.

But with sanctions keeping out imports, and the oil wealth drying up, it might be forced to do so - and paradoxically that might lead to a stronger recovery.

Last year was the worst year for the Russian economy since the ruble crisis of the 1990s.

Vladimir Putin's reckless annexation of the Crimea and adventures in the Ukraine led to a tough round of sanctions from Western Europe and the United States. The web of businesses around the president were especially targeted, and the sanctions made it very hard for Russian companies to roll over their debts.

A 50% drop in the oil price CLK5, -2.45%  , on which Russian depends for most of its exports and tax revenues, led to a run on the currency. In December last year, the central bank pushed interest rates all the way up to 17%. Over the first two weeks of December, the RTS index lost 30% of its value.

And yet economic sanctions are probably the least-effective foreign-policy weapon ever created.

They were imposed for years on countries such as South Africa, Iraq, Iran or North Korea, without making much difference to the people in charge - when change did come to those countries, it was a long, long time after sanctions began, and for different reasons. They are mainly designed to make political leaders sound tough, without actually doing anything. That has been true in plenty of other countries, and it is turning out to be true in Russia as well.

The predictions of collapse have turned out to be wide of the mark.

Putin is still in power, and still in possession of Crimea. Nor is there much sign of anything more than short-term damage. A 0.4% quarterly growth rate is not fantastic, but it is better than France, and roughly the same as Germany or Japan. Neither country is facing imminent collapse. True, the forecasts are for gross domestic product to fall for this year - the IMF suggest it will contract by more than 3% - but those may well turn out to wrong as well. What is certainly true is that the economy has not been devastated.

The interesting question, however, is whether it might actually be strengthened. That might sound odd. But the main problem for the Russian economy over the past decade was an over-reliance on oil revenues, and a state-led kleptocracy, which stifled the emergence of a productive domestic economy.

The contrast with Poland, another big, former Communist country, which inherited lots of useless, uncompetitive heavy industries from that era, is striking. While Poland, which only has a bit of coal by way of natural resources, has gradually transformed itself into an increasingly vibrant, modern economy, Russia had remained stuck in time warp.

There are, of course, lots of reasons for that. It suffered under Communism for far longer, and it is not a member of the European Union (although the trade benefits of that are exaggerated - most countries have access to global markets these days).

Even so, the big reason might well be what plenty of analysts over the years have described as "the curse of oil." The black stuff generates lots of easy money, and by filling the state coffers with cash, it makes it relatively easy for a corrupt, authoritarian regime to entrench itself in power. That has been seen in countries ranging from Saudi Arabia, to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and Hugo Chavez's Venezuela. Putin's Russia was no different.

Without oil, Russia will have to develop its own industries. And with sanctions slowing down imports, there will be space for entrepreneurs to move into. The state will become less powerful, because it will have lower oil revenues, and so will the oligarchs. Russia will have the opportunity to gradually replace crony capitalism with competitive capitalism. In the medium term, that can only be for the better.

Of course, just because it might happen does not mean that it will. You have to go back more than a century before Russia looked like anything more than a functioning emerging economy. Arguably, it never has. At the same time, however, it would be wrong to rule it out. Keep in mind that this is one of the best educated of the emerging markets, with plenty of reliable infrastructure, low taxes and low debts, and a cheap, skilled workforce.

If Warsaw and Prague can rise to Western European standards of living in less than two decades, there is no necessary reason why Moscow and St. Petersburg can't do the same.

Keep in mind as well that this is one of the cheapest markets in the world. The Moscow index trades on a price-to-earnings ratio of 6.7, less even than Greece. For an economy that is solvent, and growing at 0.4%, that is a bargain. Sanctions and a collapsing oil price were meant to torpedo Russia - but they may end up doing it a favor.
 
 #13
The Conversation
http://theconversation.com
April 7, 2015
When in Moscow: how to do business in Putin's Russia
By Peter Rodgers
Lecturer in Strategy and International Business at University of Sheffield

Quarter of a century on from the heady days of perestroika and the Russia Federation still presents an intriguing and tough-to-navigate world for businesses. The collapse of the command economy and the gradual opening up of large and potentially fruitful markets has led to a steady influx of foreign firms keen to operate in the post-Soviet world. The peculiarities of the business environment they face can be explained by examining the political environment for business in a Russia dominated by its president, Vladimir Putin.

Over the past 25 years we have seen two developments in parallel. Efforts have been made to create formal "market" institutions such as an independent judiciary which is capable of enforcing property rights. This is seen as crucial for Russia's transformation from a command-based economy to one based on market forces. But this evolution has taken place simultaneously with the embedding of informal practices of power abuse, patronage and widespread corruption within such institutions.

As such, today's business environment in Russia is one in which companies certainly do not operate in a political vacuum. Local Russian businesses and their international counterparts are, as a matter of course, forced to engage in a dynamic negotiation of different sets of "rules of the game". There are some formal rules, of course - explicitly outlined in Russia's tax and business laws - and then there are some rules which are decidedly more informal in their nature.

Within Putin's Russia, there has grown a unique network-based system of informal governance - Putin's "sistema" - involving the use of informal incentives, control and the flow of capital stocks, operated within specific power networks.

For international businesses, Russia remains challenging. International firms are increasingly being compelled to adhere to international standards of ethical business behaviour or subject to focused and stringent national regulations around corruption.

The UK's Bribery Act is one such example. It explicitly states that, irrespective the jurisdiction in which a UK-based firm operates, it must act according to the rules set out in the legislation. But in Russia today, in order to successfully negotiate the bureaucratic machine and operate successfully, the ability to gain favour with local, regional or national elites often depends on the illicit payment of bribes.

Property rights

For evidence that the environment is still flawed, let's look at that idea of the establishment of property rights again. The enforcement of this through a truly independent judiciary is paramount for the functioning of a fully-fledged market economy. This is the kind of environment which would encourage and crucially, protect, foreign direct investment.

Unfortunately, we are still waiting for the necessary protections - and that has meant Russia remains less attractive than it would otherwise be for foreign investors. It has also contributed to large levels of net outflow of private capital, "capital flight", throughout the post-Soviet period. An easy example lies in the emergence of London as a venue for wealthy Russians to "park" their capital, rather than actually engage in business in the city. This demonstrates the desire of wealthy Russians to find an environment in which their private assets can be protected when this is not the case at home.

Another consequence of informal governance in Russia, involving the embedded and entwined nature of business and political elites, has been the widespread illegal acquisition of companies - reiderstvo or asset-grabbing. This is clearly a key risk for Russian and international businesses alike.

Asset-grabbing like this can only happen when a variety of state organisations - tax authorities, local judiciary and the police - are complicit in the misuse and abuse of power enabling private property to be transferred illegally. Within the Russian judicial system the selective abuse of power by police and security forces - typically making unfounded accusations against specific firms - remains a strategy to negotiate and ultimately control the nature of certain markets.

The singling out and imprisonment of Mikhail Khordokhovsky by the Putin regime and the systematic dismantling of his "Yukkos" empire, whose assets were transferred to state-controlled entities, is one such high-profile example. Similar cases, occur regularly at much smaller levels.

Dodging the duality

Ultimately, asset-grabbing, coupled with an extremely weak formalised rule of law environment and embedded corrupt practices across Russian political, bureaucratic and business spaces act as significant market-entry barriers for firms. It's important to remember too, that this also acts as a key deterrent for existing business operations in Russia to seek to modernise. There is little incentive to strive towards efficient and transparent business solutions when, at any given juncture, either the state or other private firms - in cahoots often with state agencies - can either seek to extract bribes or shift the property rights of a given company.

As outlined above, the informal nature of Putin's sistema certainly lacks the democratic principles of transparency within the business environment. Instead, it encourages the promotion of informal "rules of the game" such as rent-seeking, patronage, asset-grabbing and embedded corruption which often trump formal rules of the game. For international firms and investors, such a business environment may seem foreign, daunting and, without doubt, challenging.

In order to successfully do business in Russia then, company executives are obliged to acknowledge the duality of the formal and informal spheres of business and the importance attached to them by a variety of different state and non-state actors in Russia. Putin has designed the system - and that means there is little option but to engage or keep away.

"When in Rome, do as the Romans" - this, you have to presume, would be a popular adage echoing from the Kremlin.
 
 #14
Moscow Times
April 8, 2015
Kremlin Reliance on the Russian Orthodox Church May Backfire, Analysts Say
By Ivan Nechepurenko

While the Russian federal government's burgeoning reliance on the Russian Orthodox Church is a tool aimed at consolidating society, in using it the authorities risk giving the clergy too much power, an issue that may eventually backfire against the Kremlin, experts told The Moscow Times on Tuesday.

Recent public scandals have cast into the spotlight relations between the Church, society and governments at both the regional and federal levels. Most recently, the Church and its faithful activists have pitted themselves against members of Russia's cultural elite on a number of occasions, from a controversial rendition of a classic Wagner opera in Novosibirsk, to the drama presently unfolding around a popular rock festival in Kaliningrad.

Addressing these recent incidents, analysts interviewed by The Moscow Times said that any time the state sides with the Church, it exacerbates rifts in Russian society, and in doing so, inevitably bolsters and provokes opposition-leaning members of the cultural elite.

Meanwhile, by showing that local clergy members can serve as a separate pillar of power in the Russian regions, the Kremlin risks alienating regional authorities, the experts added.

"When the economy is in crisis, [regional governments] need the Church, because it often has more legitimacy among the local populations. Imagine if a governor comes out and tells people that there is no money to pay pensions, and then imagine if a priest comes out and says that though money may be scarce, people still need to rally around the national leader, to defend against an external enemy: who do you think people will find more credible?" Alexei Malashenko, chair of the Carnegie Moscow Center's Religion, Society and Security Program, told The Moscow Times

"This situation could shore up the Church's grip on power, which would ultimately force President Vladimir Putin to fight back once the crisis is over," he added.

Orthodoxy Against Rock

On Monday Nikolai Tsukanov, governor of the Kaliningrad region - Russia's exclave in central Europe - asked Orthodox activist Mikhail Cherenkov to leave a meeting of the local culture council, which had gathered to vote on whether their region should host the popular Kubana rock festival this summer.

Tsukanov's request was based on the Cherenkov's vociferous opposition to the festival. At the meeting, Cherenkov said the rock festival - which has traditionally been held in the more conservative Krasnodar region, but which was ousted from that region amid a tightening of the screws by the local government - cultivates alcohol consumption and debauchery, and should be investigated by the Federal Security Service and Federal Drug Control Service, according to an entry he later posted on his LiveJournal page.

Cherenkov was initially described by the media as a delegate of the Russian Orthodox Church, but his official links to the Church were quickly denied by local religious leader, Metropolitan Seraphim, Kaliningrad news site Klops.ru reported.

Once Cherenkov was removed from the meeting, Tsukanov told newspaper Kommersant that the decision to host the festival had been approved.

"We understand well that youth festivals are always emotional, but following the law is another thing. If there are violations, law enforcement agencies will react, plain and simple," Tsukanov was quoted as saying.

The 'Tannh�user' Mess

The recent Kaliningrad incident has drawn numerous comparisons to the Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theater's recent scandal-mired production of Richard Wagner's "Tannh�user."

After Novosibirsk's Church elder Metropolitan Tikhon blasted the production - which featured a racy speculation on Jesus Christ's life between the ages of 12 and 30 - as sacrilegious, chaos ensued.

Prosecutors filed administrative charges against the theater's director, Boris Mezdrich, and opera director Timofei Kulyabin. The charges were tossed out by a court on March 10.

Then in late March, Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky fired Mezdrich. Reporting on the incident, news agency TASS attributed the firing to his refusal to follow instructions, citing the Culture Ministry's press service.

The scandal incited outrage among members of the cultural elite both in Novosibirsk - where activists turned out en masse on Sunday to demand Medinsky's resignation - and across the country where directors of Russia's leading theaters wrote letters in support of Kulyabin's rendition of the opera, and denounced conservative censorship.

One analyst told The Moscow Times his theory that the Kubana drama was inspired by "Tannh�user" fallout. "The Kaliningrad issue is a reaction to 'Tannh�user.' Local government officials do not want the Church to issue orders," Alexei Makarkin, deputy president of Moscow-based think tank the Center for Political Technologies, told The Moscow Times in a phone interview.

"The fact that a local Church official has quickly denied any involvement means that they understand that there is opposition from the government," he said.

Us Versus Them

Makarkin added that Russia's diplomatic standoff with the West over Ukraine has pushed Russia's federal authorities to champion an "us versus them" mentality, favoring a loyal majority and marginalizing a contrarian minority.

This separation of society into two groups - friends and foes - has compelled the authorities to make awkward decisions that have only exacerbated the "Tannh�user" scandal and similar affairs, he said.

"It appears that the oppositional minority groups wanted to avoid marginalization," he said. As such, groups that have traditionally been fragmented and relegated to the fringes of society - such as the cultural intelligentsia and religious activists - have grown stronger, and have better consolidated their forces, Makarkin explained.

Malashenko added that Church leaders in other Russian regions may see the "Tannh�user" scandal as an example of their snowballing potential for power. "The Novosibirsk situation was a signal to the clergy that they are more powerful that they thought they were," he said.

The Russian Orthodox Church has become one of the bulwarks of President Vladimir Putin's return to traditionalism and conservative values since the beginning of his third term in the Kremlin in 2012.

One of the most telling manifestations of this pivot was the trial of feminist protest group Pussy Riot, after some of its members staged an anti-Putin protest in Russia's iconic Christ the Savior cathedral.

Three members of the band were then sentenced to two years in prison, though one of them was released on appeal after her sentence was commuted to a suspended one.

The other two - Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, who became international celebrities during the course of their legal battle - were released in late 2013.
 
 #15
New York Times
April 8, 2015
Lawmakers Take Step to Remove Putin Critic
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

MOSCOW - Russian lawmakers took a major step on Tuesday toward ousting Ilya V. Ponomarev, the only member of Parliament who opposed the annexation of Crimea last year and one of the few elected officials who have repeatedly dared to challenge President Vladimir V. Putin publicly.

In a move of seemingly naked political retribution, the State Duma, Russia's lower house of Parliament, voted overwhelmingly to strip Mr. Ponomarev of the immunity from prosecution granted to lawmakers by the Russian Constitution.

That now allows prosecutors to bring a criminal case against him as an accomplice in an embezzlement case that is expected to result in his conviction and his expulsion from the Duma.

Mr. Ponomarev, who was first elected to the Duma in 2007 from the Siberian city of Novosibirsk and re-elected in 2011, became a leader of political protests that shook Moscow before Mr. Putin's return to the presidency in 2012, and he has been one of the Kremlin's most resolute critics. At the same time, he has insisted that his hope is to change Russia from within.

By far his boldest move has been to cast the sole vote against the annexation of Crimea at a time when even many critics of Mr. Putin were afraid to speak out, given broad public support for Russia's retaking of the peninsula. The tally was 445 to 1, and Mr. Ponomarev said he wanted the world to know that the annexation did not have unanimous support.

The looming criminal case stems from the alleged embezzlement of about $750,000 from a government-financed research institute called Skolkovo, in which a vice president of the institute, Aleksey Beltyukov, is accused of paying Mr. Ponomarev, a former technology entrepreneur, for lectures that were never delivered.

Mr. Ponomarev, who has been living outside Russia - mostly in the United States - since last summer, has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, and he did so again on Tuesday in a telephone interview.

Reached as he was driving to Boston from Princeton, Mr. Ponomarev said his friend and fellow opposition lawmaker Dmitry G. Gudkov was not permitted to speak before Tuesday's vote. "The whole procedure in the Duma was orchestrated," Mr. Ponomarev said.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party, said his faction was voting to strip Mr. Ponomarev's immunity and hoped to eject him from the Duma. "He is a man who caused negative feelings from the beginning," Mr. Zhirinovsky said in a speech. "He came to work in shabby bluejeans and a sweater. He acted with a good deal of contempt."

Mr. Ponomarev is not the first critic of Mr. Putin to face ouster from Parliament. In 2012, Mr. Gudkov's father, Gennadi V. Gudkov, was expelled from the Duma, also after being accused of financial crimes.

The younger Mr. Gudkov, posting on Facebook, listed the questions that he had hoped to ask in Parliament to show that there was no basis to the criminal case against Mr. Ponomarev. He pointed out that the dispute over the Skolkovo money had been the subject of a previous civil court case and that it had already been adjudicated and decided mostly in Mr. Ponomarev's favor.

In Tuesday's vote of 438 to 1 to strip immunity, Mr. Gudkov was the sole "no." He said he had also voted on Mr. Ponomarev's behalf, which is permitted under the Duma's rules.

"I pushed the abstain button using Ilya Ponomarev's card," Mr. Gudkov wrote. "I don't think he would mind."
 
 #16
Sputnik
April 4, 2015
Manufacturing Consensus: Why the Western Media Fears 'Russian Trolls'

'Russian trolls,' 'Kremlin trolls' and other search terms that link to this article have been menacing the Western press since around March 25. As the plot thickens faster than that of a Christopher Nolan movie, we look at what is driving the hysteria.

Less than a week after Sputnik debunked a flurry of articles about "Russian trolls" influencing public opinion, the Guardian published another 'glaring expos�' based on the same story by the US government-funded RFE/RL.
The Guardian article essentially acknowledged that the interviewee did not engage in building public opinion. However, it presented another, just as easily-debunked claim about paid employees running fake pro-Kremlin blogs. Unfortunately, they did not give any examples, but the story appears to be about the same as before.

Another Day, Another Rebuttal

Anyone who has blogged on Wordpress, Tumblr or Blogspot has probably noticed that their content sometimes gets "stolen" and reposted with links to furnace repairs or counterfeit sunglasses added in.

LiveJournal, which generally has the most weight in Russian search engines, is much more particular about moderation and has a paid Abuse Prevention Team which combats SEO spam:

"Spam or Malicious Search Engine Optimization ("SEO"): If you engage in behavior that is inconsistent with ordinary use of the Service, as described in the TOS, including, but not limited to, posting Content that contains malicious SEO optimizations... we reserve the right to flag, restrict, or terminate your Account at any time without notice." - LiveJournal Terms of Service.

However, having what appears to be a legitimate blog with original content allows SEO companies to avoid deletion.

This continuing obsession with "Russian trolls" or "Kremlin trolls," despite a lack of hard evidence, does show that a political fear has been mobilized over the past week in what is essentially a propaganda offensive stemming from RFE/RL and related government media outlets.

Trolls Trolls Trolls, Why Are They Called Trolls?

Trolling, originally a fishing term, has been used on the Internet to describe a person who makes provocative posts to trigger emotional responses. The practice, or hobby as it is for some people, predates the Internet, going back to 1980s Usenet newsgroups.

Simply making people angry is not a very effective way to influence public opinion. However, what caused the Guardian to accuse the Russian government of conducting an "orchestrated campaign" of trolling was an emotional response not of its readers, but of its writers.

For such a response, the comments section had to have become an echo chamber, only intended to build consensus toward the paper's editorial point of view. As a result, a shift in the consensus created a significant emotional response for the Guardian, which it could not counter through its reporting.

Instead the publication opted for accusations, both in comments and by the editorial staff, which one of the Guardian's comment moderators admitted:

"A larger problem on these threads is users accusing each other of being "bots", "trolls" or "astroturfers", usually wrongly. These accusations do break the community standards (they're essentially abusive statements) and moderators take a hand here."

A somewhat ironic statement to make for a publication which accused its readers of being "trolls" in the same article.

Does Trolling Even Work?

Let's say there is indeed a person who gets paid to promote a certain point of view in social media. If they are popular enough, which should be the goal of such projects, they no longer need funding as they would get enough in advertising revenue. If they are not popular, there is no point in funding them.

Same thing goes for comment sections, if a person who simply copy-pastes opinions to make people angry, it's not effective. If a person interacts with the text and presents a rebuttal that readers find influential, they are no longer a "troll."

Sputnik previously reported on an attempt by the Ukrainian government to do this. Unlike for example, the Guardian, the articles never used the term "troll" to describe what are essentially attempts to alter public opinion through, literally, a government-orchestrated Internet campaign.
That effort failed, somewhat ironically, due to the collapse of Ukraine's economy at around the same time as when the project was launched.

However, the biased, emotional distinction the Guardian makes between Russian "trolls" and the Ukrainian "information army" does show why people are unhappy about their reporting to begin with. Instead, the Guardian's staff opts for insulting its readers, who disagree with the publication's biased, emotional view of Russia in general.

But of course, they're just a bunch of trolls, right?
 
 #17
Russia Cannot Become a Democracy in Its Current Borders, Walesa Says
Paul Goble

Staunton, April 8 - Just as the notion of a liberal Soviet Union proved to be a contradiction in terms, so too the Russian Federation in its current borders cannot become a democracy, according to Lech Walesa. It must first disintegrate and then some parts of it might be able to come back together in a more democratic state.

In an interview with "Ukrainska Pravda," the former Solidarity leader, Polish president and Nobel Prize winner says that Vladimir Putin's use of force in Ukraine and his threats of using nuclear weapons against the West show that Russia is "30 to 50 years" behind the West (epravda.com.ua/rus/publications/2015/04/7/537408/).

"In Russia," he says, "there has never been democracy and freedom. It has always wanted to have an enemy," and that desire keeps Russia at a distance from everyone else: "Russia will never live according to the principles of the Western world."  Consequently, it must and can be resisted -- the West is stronger -- and contained until it changes, something that will involve its disintegration.

There are "a minimum of 60 peoples" within the current borders of the Russian Federation, Walesa points out. It could fall apart and the center would still have a population of 20 million. Exactly what the borders of the post-Russian states would be, he says, will "depend on how the disintegration happens."

After Russia falls apart, he continues, "it is possible that there will be a repetition of a scenario like the formation of the European Union." There will follow "a union of new states but already on other principles," at least some of whom will become democratic and be open "for cooperation in various configurations."

All this will take a lot of time, Walesa says, noting that "Russians are an unhappy people. It is necessary that their mentality be completely changed." That will happen but it won't be any time soon.

n other comments in the course of a wide-ranging interview about his own past and current views, Walesa argues that the West, having committed itself to the protection of Ukraine in order to secure the removal of nuclear weapons from its territory, must now use every weapon in its arsenal to defend Ukraine from Russian aggression.

If the West fails to do this and shows that it will allow the stronger to win just because they are stronger, the Polish leader says, then this will be "the end of our civilization" and the beginnings of a new barbarism.

And Walesa dismisses the idea that Russian propaganda has been successful in Europe. "Of course, Europe is not united. Each state has its own interests and fears suffering losses, but here there is no success of Russian propaganda." That is something everyone must understand rather than giving Putin another victory he doesn't deserve.
 
 #18
Sputnik
April 8, 2015
Blaming Russia for Everything Becomes New Sport - Kremlin Spokesperson

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - On Tuesday night, CNN cited a source that claimed Russia had hacked the White House's computers, saying those to blame "worked for the Russian government."

"In regard to CNN's sources, I don't know who their sources are. We know that blaming everything on Russia has already turned into some sort of sport. But what's most important is that they aren't looking for any submarines in the Potomac River like has been seen in other countries," Peskov said.
 
 #19
Moscow Times
April 8, 2015
Russian State Agency Accused of Funding Opposition Media
By Anna Dolgov

Russia's Investigative Committee has reportedly demanded explanations about government subsidies to media that support opposition positions after a pro-Kremlin daily accused a government agency of supporting publications that pursue "clearly anti-state" policies.

The report by the pro-government newspaper Izvestia on Tuesday named some of Russia's best-known remaining independent-minded media outlets among the supposed recipients of the funds, including radio station Ekho Moskvy, television channels RBC and Dozhd, and tabloid daily Moskovsky Komsomolets, or MK.

The report accused Russia's federal agency for media development, Rospechat, of having "carried out substantial financial infusions from state budget into mass media outlets whose editorial policy followed a clearly expressed anti-state position," when it subsidized the publications in 2010-2014.

Rospechat - the government agency, not to be confused with a media distribution company of the same name - responded with an online statement, conceding its support for educational and humanitarian projects in the media, but saying that Izvestia's claims of the amounts of the grants were "exaggerated two-fold."

The agency published a list of projects it has supported and the amounts of donations, adding that its subsidies to media outlets named by Izvestia amounted to 0.02 percent of Rospechat's budget in 2010-2014.

"The names of programs and headings speak for themselves: They are all socially oriented and are devoted to the issues of the fight against terrorism and extremism, support for people with disabilities, adoptions of orphans, combating drug abuse, promotion of reading and the Russian language," Rospechat chief Mikhail Seslavinsky said in a statement.

"We support those topics every year in hundreds of media outlets," he added.

But the Investigative Committee appeared to deem the funding issue suspicious, sending a letter to Seslavinsky with demands for explanations, according to a copy of the document published in an online piece later Tuesday by MK.

The letter included a list of media outlets whose funding the Investigative Committee was looking into. The list included Novaya Gazeta newspaper, RBC news agency and its newspaper RBC Daily, Snob magazine, and news portals Snob and Bloshoi Gorod (Big City), in addition to the outlets named by Izvestia.

The Investigative Committee has received "full and exhaustive" information from Rospechat in response to its query, MK added, suggesting that the case was closed.

The report provided no details, but Rospechat said in its statement that neither Dozhd television nor Ekho Moskvy radio received any subsidies in 2014, although during the three preceding years Dozhd received 15.3 million rubles ($278,000 at today's rate), instead of the 30.6 million that Izvestia claimed, and Ekho Moskvy received 7.5 million.

Personal attacks
The Izvestia article also said that the subsidy distribution was supervised by Rospechat deputy chief Vladimir Grigoryev, accusing him of being "benevolent to opposition figures."

It then took issue with Ekho Moskvy editor-in-chief Alexei Venediktov, accusing him of pursuing an "editorial policy that often carries an openly anti-Russian character" - language reminiscent of Soviet-era newspaper diatribes against "anti-Soviet" activities.

MK called the language of the Izvestia report "worth of Stalin's times."

Rospechat, meanwhile, said in its statement that Grigoryev "is not involved in the questions of financing electronic media and is not a member of relevant expert councils."

In yet another assault, Izvestia accused Grigoryev of supporting companies run by Alexandrina Markvo, the partner of opposition activist Vladimir Ashurkov.

The Investigative Committee said in the letter to Rospechat that its interest in media financing was linked to its case against Markvo, but provided no details.

Ashurkov, a close associate of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, has recently received political asylum in Britain. Markvo is also living in London and was arrested in absentia by a Moscow court in February on fraud charges linked to her work for an advertising agency.
 
 #20
Moscow Times
April 8, 2015
Russia Is Flexible When It Comes to Justice
By Mark Galeotti
Mark Galeotti is professor of global affairs at New York University.

The current fad for the Russian Investigative Committee to launch criminal investigations in cases outside Russia's borders - and often outside even tenuous Russian jurisdiction - may well come back to haunt the Kremlin. After all, at a time when the question of "sovereignty" is so central to its foreign and domestic policies, does Moscow really want to encourage the "internationalization" of justice?

As already reported in The Moscow Times, it has most recently opened the case of the desecration of World War II monuments in Ukraine as a breach of Russian laws on vandalism and rehabilitating Nazism.

Obviously, vandalism is a crime and painting pro-Nazi graffiti is especially unpleasant. However, to present this as something meeting the requirements for international investigations, on a par with crimes against humanity, is a reach of tremendous proportions.

There is the danger of crying wolf. The outside world tends to regard these claims as nothing more than propaganda and "lawfare," the weaponization of the machinery of justice for narrow national ends.

I have heard Western justice and police officials describe the Investigative Committee as nothing more than an arm of informational warfare and political persecution. This is, in my opinion, a caricature of an agency also involved in real and serious policing work.

However, if this kind of perspective takes hold, then when the committee is following a real case and looking for Western cooperation, that may not be forthcoming, as it will be assumed that this must simply be a political investigation.

Second, the hyperbole of Russian rhetoric is making it very hard for the West to be able to address or even discuss the extent to which ultranationalism is a rising force in Ukraine. Of course, Moscow's propaganda overstates this by orders of magnitude, but it is not entirely invented.

However, in the current overheated and polarized environment, just as questioning the Kremlin's narrative risks getting someone characterized as some kind of fascist sympathizer in Moscow, so too someone raising the problem of the rise of the far right in Ukraine in the West can all too easily be dismissed as being a dupe or tool of Moscow's.

And a parenthetical note: If Kiev wants seriously to launch an information counteroffensive, it could do worse than put some serious effort into confronting the current rise in neo-Nazism. These people may be just a small, stupid and offensive minority, but their antics play disproportionately into the hands of Ukraine's enemies.

Third, the Kremlin needs to think deeply how far it wants to allow the Investigative Committee to undermine the concept of legal sovereignty. Next time some Russian politician makes a racist slur against U.S. President Barack Obama, how comfortable would Moscow be if a race crime investigation were opened by the FBI? Next time there are allegations of a Russian company's involvement in corrupt practices, would the Kremlin be happy with an inquiry by the British fraud squad?

Of course, no such investigations would get anywhere, not least because of Russia's constitutional bar on extraditing its own citizens. But that is hardly the point: the chances the Investigative Committee's current inquiries in Ukraine will go beyond a press release and some overheated press articles are equally minimal.

Rather, it is the principle that the bar for international justice should be lowered far enough to include vandalism that could become a weapon for the Kremlin's foes.

Putin has long championed Russia's sovereignty, although the nuances to the way he uses this are significantly different to the West's. Just as his "sovereign democracy" meant a rather different beast to the form dominant in the West, so too his championing of national sovereignty carries with it a clear sense of national priority.

The West often may not practice this (just ask the Afghans, Iraqis or Libyans), but it preaches the option that sovereignty is equal. In other words, the national sovereignty of the small and the weak is just as valid and important as that of the large and the strong.

Putin's notion of sovereignty clearly assumes that some powers deserve a privileged place, including Russia in Eurasia. Indeed, he probably would have no trouble conceding Central America to Washington or North Africa to the Europeans, if only they would recognize Moscow's special status in Eurasia.

For all kinds of reasons, this is not going to happen. However, the more Putin, or at least his people, seem to be suggesting that sovereignty is a negotiable value, something that only counts if it can be asserted and protected, the more it is implicitly undermining its own security.

After all, if it is acceptable for one country to try and enforce its values on another, presumably this means that all those Western programs aimed at promoting democracy, questioning media and creating anti-corruption initiatives in Russia - programs the Kremlin not wholly unreasonably regards as instruments of "soft regime change" - are also acceptable?
 
 #21
Rossiyskaya Gazeta
April 6, 2015
Experts comment on possible impact of Iran deal on Russia
Igor Dunayevskiy, Will Obama fail 'Iranian test'?

US President Barack Obama has described as "historic" the achievement of accords on the Iranian nuclear programme that, in his words, "will make the world safer." Addressing one of the most prominent critics of the talks - Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu - the US president assured him that "this is the most effective way to prevent the development of nuclear weapons by Iran."

The achievement of accords on the parameters that are to lie at the basis of the future agreement on the Iranian nuclear programme is undoubtedly an encouraging step that testifies to the existence of political will on both sides, although the final details still need to be agreed before 30 June [passage omitted on opposition to agreement in US Senate].

At the moment it is too early to talk about final success of talks

Aleksey Malashenko, chairman of the Religion, Society and Security programme in the Moscow Carnegie Centre, said: "I think that if everything is normal in June, the conclusion of this agreement will reduce the role of Russia for Iran. During the difficult relations that have existed between Tehran and the West, Moscow has played the role of an intermediary.

"Now, however, when the Iranian and Western establishment are hoping to enter into direct, fairly positive contacts, I think that the Iranian authorities will not have such a great need for Russia as they did before. Of course, there is a lot of talk right now to the effect that after the lifting of sanctions we will be able to develop economic relations with Iran. But Russia's role in the region has always been that it has formed special relations with Iran, relations that are losing their value somewhat in the current circumstances.

"I understand perfectly well that the agreement between the 5+1 international mediators and Iran should be welcomed, but nevertheless, Iran's interest in Russia in the event of the successful achievement of a final agreement will be reduced. There are five key points in the agreement offered to Iran. These are a time limit on the duration of its uranium-enrichment programme, incidentally, of 25 years, in exchange for the lifting of sanctions; the removal of spent Iranian uranium abroad; an agreement that not one of the peaceful nuclear facilities in Iran will be dismantled; and an agreement that Iran will have a peaceful nuclear programme.

"But after all, Iran is a fairly unusual country. Until everything is signed, until everything has been finally stopped, it is impossible to talk about anything specific. Especially seeing that several times already we have seemingly come very close to resolving the Iranian nuclear problem, and the opinion has been heard that the sides have reached agreement on everything, but it has subsequently become apparent that this was by no means the case. Therefore one should wait a little. For example, to see what the reaction to the preliminary accords with the West will be in Iran itself, because there are forces there that are not overjoyed by what has been signed. But then, there are also such forces in the United States."

Accords on Iran give rise to ambiguous feelings

Fedor Lukyanov, chairman of the Council for Foreign and Defence Policy Presidium, said: "The achievement of the basic accord on the resolution of the Iranian nuclear problem gives rise to ambiguous feelings in Russia. At any rate, against the background of the joy of official persons in the United States, Europe, and Iran itself, Moscow's reaction is distinguished by caution.

"There are objective reasons for this. The emergence of Iran from isolation means the expansion of oil deliveries, which is conducive to maintaining prices at a low level. The low level of oil prices also influences the cost of gas, which is tied to "black gold." Moreover, in the longer term, the rich reserves of Iranian gas could breath life into alternative projects to Russia's for deliveries to the European market, the projects that, hitherto, there has simply been nothing with which to fill them. Finally, an Iran that is opening up means the virtually immediate intensification of competition on the Iranian market. Since the negotiating process began 18 months ago in Switzerland, representatives of European companies have become frequent visitors to Iran, studying the potential. All this is true, but the circumstances listed above should not outweigh the general positive significance of what has happened. And Russia, which through the efforts of its team of highly professional diplomats has made a considerable contribution to the achievement of the accords, should not, in layman's terms, fade into the background.

"First, the Iranian nuclear problem is not local, it is connected with the global rules of the game. On the one hand, there is a reinforcement of the nonproliferation regime, which has long been going through far from the best of times, and, to be honest, is simply cracking at the seams. Many commentators have suggested that the failure of the Iranian talks would be fatal for the future of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and that this would lead to unpredictable consequences for international security as a whole.

"On the other hand, the format used for the resolution in itself returns diplomacy of the highest quality to the international context and reinforces the model by which the leading role is assumed by a specially formed group of interested countries. In conditions of the crisis that the majority of the formal institutions are going through, this is a more promising arrangement.

"Second, the lifting of sanctions not only intensifies competition, but also opens up opportunities. The conditions of the extremely tough restrictions of the past five years have provided virtually no opportunity to develop full-blown cooperation with Iran. Moreover, it is possible to build relations with a large and highly ambitious country on the basis that it simply has nowhere else to go only for a short time. Tehran is genuinely seeking to rid itself of economic pressure, which means that sooner or later this will happen. And if Russia were to begin to stall this process on the basis of its own self-interested considerations, Iran's turn in the other direction after changes would be all the more sharp.

"Third, the oil and gas situation. It was clear a long time ago that Russia, which is unable to rid itself of its raw materials dependency in the foreseeable future, needs to think seriously about a new model for its actions in conditions of a very volatile and chaotically developing market. The Iranian factor is, of course, important, but it is only one of the elements of the muddled mosaic of the contemporary hydrocarbon markets. Gazprom has already pondered a significant revision of its export model (not because of Iran, naturally, but as a consequence of profound changes in Europe and Asia), it is time to also examine the possibilities of a more active policy with regard to influencing oil prices in cooperation with other interested sides. Russia has grounds to take pride in its contribution to the resolution of a very important international problem, and also new opportunities, on which it must work diligently."
    
 
 #22
Moscow Times
April 8, 2015
Fight Over Ukraine Darkens Future of Russia-U.S. Nuclear Arms Control
By Matthew Bodner

The rhetoric of the Ukraine crisis has amplified long-standing apprehensions in Moscow and Washington and halted progress on arms control for the time being.

Five years after the United States and Russia signed the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty, the spirit in which it was signed is dead.

Relations between the two countries have crumbled as the crisis in Ukraine prompts mutual accusations and thinly veiled threats of nuclear war.

The New START treaty itself is safe. Officials on both sides have repeatedly stated their commitment to implementing its provisions, while verification procedures are being honored. But the rhetoric of the Ukraine crisis has amplified long-standing apprehensions in Moscow and Washington and halted progress on arms control for the time being.

"While the U.S. continues to strengthen its national security methods, which reduce the level of Russia's national security, to speak of future nuclear disarmament is hardly possible," Mikhail Ulyanov, the Russian Foreign Ministry's senior arms control and non-proliferation official, said in February.

Nuclear Rhetoric

But Ulyanov's concerns go both ways. In the United States, officials and policy experts are becoming increasingly riled by the nuclear rhetoric coming out of Moscow. Their fears are bolstered by a program to modernize all of Russia's nuclear forces by 2020.

Dr. Mark Schneider, an arms control negotiator who worked on New START, said engaging the Russians on further nuclear cuts is completely out of the question.

"The focus must be on deterrence, or we run the risk of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin's first use of nuclear weapons with potential catastrophic consequences," he said.

"I can't read Putin's mind, but I can read what he says and that scares me."

Amid the rhetoric, both sides increased the number of deployed warheads last year after Russia annexed Crimea. Russia has 1643 warheads deployed, one more than the United States, according to the most recent New START report released in October.

The treaty stipulates both sides reduce to 1550 each by 2018.

Arms Control Amid Crisis

New START is the product of U.S. President Barack Obama's policy to reset relations with Russia after coming to office in 2008.

When Obama met then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in Prague in April 2010 to sign the treaty, the leaders heralded it as an important step toward further reducing nuclear arsenals. But that was the last time the two sides sat down to work on nuclear arms control.

Visiting Berlin in 2013, Obama suggested reducing warhead deployments by another 30 percent under New START, but Putin promptly rejected the offer.

"I think at some point, and this may not be for two to three years, the Russians will probably be interested in a dialogue," said Steven Pifer, a former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine and the head of the Brookings Institution's arms control and nuclear non-proliferation program.

According to Pifer, the historical record shows that Moscow has always been interested in some kind of cap on U.S. and Russian strategic warheads. Arms races are expensive, and Pifer said that Russia may come back to the table as New START's 2021 expiration date approaches.

The View from Moscow

According to Dr. Eugene Miasnikov, director of the Moscow-based Center for Arms Control, Energy and Environmental Studies, "Russia always considered the New START treaty a valuable instrument" since it does limit U.S. nuclear arms.

Russia isn't interested in further cuts. Last month, Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov, who was part of the Russian New START negotiation team, said Russia "is satisfied with the current situation" with regard to strategic arms limitations.

Still, Moscow has problems with the treaty, namely that it doesn't limit U.S. missile defense or prompt global strike weapons - a U.S. program to develop a new class of hypersonic non-nuclear missiles capable of destroying any target on the globe in under an hour.

"The sides are unable yet to resolve the related issues of ballistic missile defense and conventional strategic arms," Miasnikov said. Sanctions also hurt strategic dialogue, he added.

Russian officials have said that future developments with U.S. missile defense technology or the Prompt Global Strike program might serve as grounds to pull out of the treaty.

The Foreign Ministry's Ulyanov said Tuesday "the reckless deployment by the U.S. of a one-sided missile defense system damages the interests of Russian national security, and at some point may lead us to reconsider our attitude toward the treaty," Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported.

The View From Washington

In Washington, the Obama Administration remains committed to New START, analysts said. But since the treaty's signing, there has been a large camp opposed to its implementation.

"When measured against the most basic metrics for nuclear arms limitation treaties - for example, significant reductions or limits on nuclear weapons and effective verification measures - New START should be judged a failure," said Schneider.

During treaty negotiations, the Russians pushed for a higher cap on nuclear weapons, with fewer verification procedures, and they were given those concessions. The United States cannot cede more, Schneider said, arguing that holes in verification procedures leave room for a large Russian nuclear buildup - a dire threat to U.S. national security.

Pifer takes a more sanguine view: "The New START treaty is more important now than it was 18 months ago," as it promotes transparency and regular dialogue on nuclear issues while East and West revert to Cold War form over the crisis in Ukraine.

However, these virtues may become harder to defend. Republican congressmen at various times have tried unsuccessfully to stop New START's implementation. Last year the Republican party won a majority in the U.S. Senate.

"I am not sure this will become a serious threat to the treaty, but my guess is that the administration is going to have to devote more time and attention to defending New START against efforts in Congress to undermine it," Pifer said.
 
 #23
The Unz Review
www.unz.com
April 7, 2015
Why the New Cold War Is Here to Stay
BY ANATOLY KARLIN
[Graphs here http://www.unz.com/akarlin/new-cold-war-is-permanent/]

Here are three very important graphs for comprehending the ebb and flow of Russia's relations with the West, and why what some are now calling the New Cold War might well be here to stay.

Russian approval of the United States (green is positive, red is negative):

While it's hard to remember now, there really was an incredible air of optimism about future relations with the US and Europe towards the end of the Soviet Union that, perhaps even more strangely, lasted throughout most of the trials and tribulations and Harvard-supported looting of the country. There was something of a cargo cult in relation to the West, the idea that imitating and appeasing them just right would catapult the country into prosperity and the end of history. Just a few random examples. The term "evroremont," denoting a quality housing renovation, presumably to European standards. Foreigners being allowed first in line to visit museums and cultural attractions. Women flinging themselves at any American adventurer type regardless of his success and social status (Mark Ames and the eXile are a testament to that).

There were sharp dips now and then, in surprisingly regular increments of five years, corresponding to some imperial action or other. The bombing of Serbia in 1998. The invasion of Iraq in 2003. The South Ossetian War in 2008. Crimea in 2014. Relations steadily cooled as the West began an aggressive expansion of its economic and security infrastructure into what Russia saw as its sphere of influence, in so doing breaking informal commitments made with Gorbachev that NATO wouldn't expand an inch east. Russia unquestionably became more authoritarian, though the extent of the break with late Yeltsinism in that regard is highly exaggerated, and this was accompanied by an ever shriller campaign of demonization in the Western media that shows no signs of peaking even to this day. Bearing all this in mind, it is perhaps actually surprising that the moving average of Russian opinion of the US and EU declined only modestly between 2000 and 2013, from around 70% for both the EU and the US, to 60% for the EU and 50% for the US. For all the rhetoric about Russians being taken in by anti-Western propaganda, it's worth noting that US approval of Russia was actually consistently if modestly lower than Russia's approval of the US.

US approval of Russia:

But there's a couple of critical differences between previous dips and today that suggest that prior experience is no longer any guide to the future ever since approval ratings of the US and the EU plunged to less than 20% in 2014:

First, while reactions to Serbia, Iraq, and Georgia were short but sharp affairs, lasting but a few months, the recent collapse in relations as gauged by public opinion is already ongoing for more than a year. Nothing remotely similar has occured since the start of scientific polling in Russia. You might think that in a personalistic and relatively closed political system like Russia polls might not count for much, but you would be wrong; if anything, the lack of strong institutions able to act as a social glue makes polling and ratings all the more important, and it is something that the Kremlin pays heed to religiously. This is largely why Putin keeps participating in all these various stunts which range from the impressive (piloting a fighter jet during the Second Chechen War) to the faintly ridiculous (diving and magically finding ancient Greek amphora). The constant negativity seen ever since February 2014 might well be the start of a new normal, which if so might be increasingly difficult to turn around even if the respective political leaderships were to commit to doing so.

Second, and this ties in with the above, the EU has traditionally been seen slightly more positively than the US, and with the partial exception of 2008, we do not see the same sharp bumps and dips. Until 2014... when it became completely undistinguishable from the US. And that shouldn't be all that surprising, considering the EU's steady drift from what Russians imagined and dreamed it might be - a greater Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok, as De Gaulle saw it - to an unapologetically Atlanticist entity that accepted partnership with no other integration blocs (such as the Eurasian Union), grew increasingly confident in orchestrating regime changes against governments that didn't hew to their neoliberal orthodoxy, and worst of all, subsumed integration into Atlanticist security structures (first and foremost, NATO) as an inalienable component of its economic expansion. Now the average Russian wouldn't think in such terms, of course, but in general, it is probably fair to say that Russians now see both the EU and the US as just two blocs of the same, singularly hostile West.

But the story doesn't quite end there.

Russian approval of China:

Even as the US and EU plumb new lows, Russian approval of China struck an alltime high of 81% (recall that this is equivalent to their approval of the US in the waning days of the Soviet Union). These feelings are mutual, and Putin is highly respected as a leader in CCP circles and reportedly by Xi Jinping personally. Again, this is not surprising: When one side slaps you with sanctions, while the other comes round with a fat wallet and offers to support the ruble should Russia only ask, it doesn't take a genius to figure out who'd be the more popular guy at the party. All pretty obvious. Except, perhaps, for those neocons who appear to believe with all conviction that the West is absolutely indispensable for Russia, and that Russia will eventually agree to pay any cost to mend relations for the privilege of fighting China for them to the last Russian.
 
 #24
Moscow Times
March 29, 2015
A Letter to My Russian Friends
By Robert Berls
Robert E. Berls Jr. holds a Ph.D. in Russian Area Studies from Georgetown University. He was a career Air Force officer and served as air attache in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow from 1985 to 1988. Currently, he is senior adviser for Russia and Eurasia at the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) in Washington, D.C.

Dear friends,

It has been more than a year since my last trip to Moscow. During this year much has changed in the direction President Vladimir Putin is taking Russia. I feel very differently about Russia now. Let me explain why.

Russia has been a central part of my academic and professional life. As a student I studied all things Russian and then devoted my career to trying to understand Russia and the Russian people. I wanted to contribute to improving relations between Russia and the United States. Throughout my career I have been aware of what we have in common, but also of the enormous challenges we face in overcoming our prejudices and preconceived notions of each other.

Over the years I remained optimistic that common sense would prevail as long as we were honest with ourselves and each other. Now, for the first time in many decades, I seriously question whether that optimism is still justified.

I am deeply saddened that Russia is again slipping into a form of authoritarianism where the interests of a few are pursued at the expense of the many. The government I see silences its opponents, demands total control of the mass media, pedals wild distortions of the truth and portrays the outside world as hostile.

I want you to understand that my disappointment is not that Russia failed to live up to Western expectations and standards, which many assumed Russia would adopt after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Russia has always been different because of its unique history and its problems that set it apart from its neighbors. What may have been possible in the Baltic states and Poland never should have been applied to Russia as well. In the 1990s and early 2000s, was I guilty of being swept away by the tide of euphoria that raised expectations in the West and among segments of the Russian population that Russia, at last, was on the road to fundamental change? I was.

Over time, however, I realized that many of my compatriots were striving to create a reality in Russia that was at best illusory and at worst deceptive and harmful. And the Russians who yearned for access to all that they had been deprived of during the Soviet years and for a chance to start a free, new life realized - often bitterly - that the West was making certain promises it could not keep.

Clearly, everyone bears responsibility for the moribund state of the relationship today. Going forward, only frank and honest dialogue conducted at all levels can offer us an opportunity to reverse the downward spiral in Russia's relations with the West.

Unfortunately, I am not optimistic that this is an opportune time for effective engagement. Russia has entered a particularly dangerous stage in its history. The stability that had been a hallmark of the early Putin years is now seriously challenged. Almost all economic indicators are heading downward.

Even more important is that Putin's policy in Ukraine, his hostility toward the West and the resultant sanctions could have a negative impact on his inner circle. These actions could threaten the stability of the regime at the very top, creating a very dangerous and damaging dynamic in Russia and beyond.

It is not too late for Russia to reverse direction from its present course. I hope the day will come when the Russian people will live in a country where their voices are heard and the pursuit of their interests is the primary concern of their government.

I hope the day will come when the optimism that has prevailed throughout my life returns and I can once again feel inspired and hopeful about Russia's future.

Sincerely,
Bob
 
 #25
Russia Direct
April 7, 2015
From Russia with concern: A letter to an American friend
An open letter from Ivan Timofeev, Director of Programs at Russian International Affairs Council, to his American counterpart Robert E. Berls Jr., whose letter appeared in the Moscow Times on March 29, 2015.

Dear Bob,

Thank you for your honest and candid letter. My colleagues and I have always valued your opinion as an experienced officer, academic and diplomat. Besides, I know full well that you never bandy words and do not venture opinions or make pronouncements lightly. If someone of your professional standing issues a statement, it demands considered attention. I agree that the tangle of problems requires open and thorough discussion. This letter is my response to your proposal for dialogue.

I understand your pessimism about the state of U.S.-Russia relations. Believe me, the situation is no less alarming to Moscow than it is to Washington. What's more, the unease would unlikely be so acute were the matter confined to Ukraine. I fear that the problem is broader in scope. The events in Ukraine and the sharp deterioration in our relations are just a symptom of a deeper malaise. Nor is it the first or the only. The reasons are more profound, and their consequences could be catastrophic.

At the end of the Cold War, the United States was presented with a unique opportunity to lead the international community. Ideally, it was about America's role as first among equals in the new multipolar world. Leading by example, not force. Such leadership implied great responsibility, of course. The world was becoming more complex and less amenable to "one size fits all" solutions.

Leadership in this multipolar space required huge resources, expert diplomacy and innovative maneuvering. And let's not forget the most important thing of all: such leadership required joint actions and effective cooperation. Responsibility needed sharing with other centers of power, including Russia.

Regrettably, the chance to lead slipped through the fingers, and we soundly flunked the cooperation test. The seats of instability are now multiplying by the day. No sooner did Eastern Ukraine see a timid hope for peace than the Middle East was engulfed by another inferno. International terrorism has not gone away. The global imbalances are becoming more entrenched. And against this backdrop we flex our muscles, carry on intrigues, threaten each other with war, and eagerly fan the rising flames.

Great danger lies in irrevocably undermining strategic stability. I am gravely concerned about linking our local conflicts to global agreements on nuclear missiles. That issue has always remained on the table no matter how numerous or complex our other problems. The Russian and American people understand that on this matter rests the fate of all humanity.

But now the situation is changing. The Ukraine Freedom Support Act devotes a separate section to compliance with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. Sure, we do not see eye to eye on intermediate and smaller-range missiles. Such divergence of opinion is nothing new. But we have always maintained a calm and reasonable dialogue. Why tie the issue to Ukraine?

Yes, the Ukraine crisis is horrific. Our positions differ in principle, and the subject is one for a separate discussion. But in the context of our relationship, the topic of nuclear missiles lies in a quite different plane. By linking the two issues we will only undermine the INF Treaty, capsizing strategic stability in the process. It is already dead on its feet. Will the security of the United States, Russia and Europe improve as a result? Does Ukraine stand to benefit? No. Neither can we hope to conclude a new INF Treaty in the foreseeable future.

Nuclear missiles are just one of the many areas in which our mutually beneficial cooperation is either coagulated or frozen. Does that make the world more stable? Will it halt the slide into anarchy and chaos? Again, the answer is no.

In my view, a priority task is to minimize the damage inflicted by the Ukraine crisis on those areas of cooperation vital to the preservation of global stability. Through partnership in these areas we may be able to restore at least a modicum of trust. Without it, an unbridgeable chasm will lie between us on the most difficult issues, including Ukraine.

One option is to break up our dialogue into manageable chunks, each labeled with a specific issue. Clearly there will be some overlap, but that is not the point. At least it will guard against overly politicizing the issues, which is harming our countries and the world.

Another important point: I believe that it is vital to separate  the discourse about Russia's political agenda with the problems of international relations. Such discourse is needed. Likewise a consultation on the changes that have taken place in U.S. domestic politics is needed. A tasty appetizer was served recently by Mikhail Gorbachev, who called for perestroika in the United States.

I understand, of course, that in matters of policy, linking the domestic with the foreign is part of the American liberal tradition. But here too, excessive politicization is hindering the search for compromise in international affairs. In our deliberations of international problems, we must remain realists.
That said, familiar as I am with your erudition on our country and given the attention you pay in your letter to the situation in Russia, I wish to touch upon an intrinsically Russian thread.

Americans have always imparted essential meaning to the issue of democracy. Democracy in itself is perceived as a value in the United States.

In Russia we respect the values that Americans hold dear. Moreover, you are unlikely to find in Russia an assured and stable majority that would oppose the idea of democracy and advocate strict authoritarian rule.

Democracy, in my opinion, should be handled like a practical tool. It is a means of insuring the state against political crises. Every country needs talented and visionary leaders. But even more in demand are effective institutions. Therein lies the instrumental value of democracy.

However, a sober analysis requires that several key points be considered. By all appearances, the Russian political system is undergoing a protracted transformation. In France, for instance, such transformation took more than 150 years. And it was not a smooth process. In the United States, too, democracy took a while to find its feet. The country went through a bloody civil war. And that was at a time of favorable external conditions!

Russia, it seems, still has some historical crossroads to navigate. And God help us avoid similar historical upheavals. Russians will need to arm themselves with wisdom, restraint and presence of mind to carry out consistent and cautious reform. Any revolutions or attempts to build a "brave new world" overnight are doomed to fail.

It should also be kept in mind that Russia endured a crisis of statehood not that long ago. Having acquired formal freedom after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian people witnessed the disintegration of institutions, morality, law and order, the shelling of parliament by tanks, and mass electoral manipulation in 1996. The breakup itself of the Soviet Union (unequivocally backed by the West) essentially resembled a coup d'�tat. Is it any wonder that the political structures that arose in its place were so ephemeral and insecure?

Both Russia and the West initially approached the post-Soviet space as a blank slate. But history leaves an indelible mark from which we cannot hide. To a large extent, the crisis in Ukraine is the result of "programming" errors in the past. These errors are compounded by the growing chaos of international relations. They still have the capacity to make themselves felt.

Our common task, as professionals, is to abstract away from the information and propaganda war as much as possible. Anarchy, chaos, prejudice and stereotypes must be countered with reason, common sense, sober judgment and awareness of common interests. The situation is more complex than ever. But that very fact will show the ability of the United States and Russia to remain key players and resolve specific issues.

Sincerely,
Ivan
 
 #26
American Institute of Contemporary German Studies
www.aicgs.org
April 7, 2015
Ostpolitik Reset: How Germany is Re-Evaluating its Relationship with Russia
By Angela Stent
Angela Stent directs the Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies at Georgetown University and is the author of "The Limits of Partnership: US-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century," just released in paperback with a new chapter on the Ukraine crisis.

The Chancellery recently announced that Angela Merkel will not attend the May 9 Moscow celebration to mark the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II. She will, however, lay a wreath at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Moscow with President Vladimir Putin the following day. This dual message symbolizes where German-Russian relations are today: reluctance to give official endorsement to Putin's military parade while armed conflict continues in Ukraine but recognition that, because of Berlin's special historical responsibilities,  Germany must continue to show respect to Russian citizens for the sacrifices they endured during the war. German-Russian relations have seriously frayed since Russia's annexation of Crimea and they face a period of great uncertainty going forward. Merkel's Ostpolitik-which seemed so successful for the past decade-has had to confront the new reality of an intransigent Russia that has challenged the fundamental premises of that policy. Berlin today must grapple with a new paradox: while the expectations of partnership of the past two decades have been jettisoned in face of Russia's continuing support for the war in Ukraine, Germany has emerged as the only country that can broker an end to the most serious crisis in East-West relations since before Gorbachev came to power.

Ever since the Soviet collapse, German Ostpolitik-whether under Helmut Kohl, Gerhard Schr�der, or Angela Merkel-has been premised on a series of fundamental principles. Engagement with Russia was essential, however challenging the process was. Russia was viewed as a large, important, difficult neighbor with whom Germany-and indeed all of Europe-was fated to engage. Moreover, Germany's gratitude toward Russia for facilitating the peaceful unification of the country meant that Berlin had a unique role and responsibility in Europe in assisting Moscow in its difficult post-communist transition. Under the first CDU-SPD grand collation government, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier championed the concept of "Rapprochement through Integration" (Ann�herung durch Verflechtung). As Dimitri Medvedev entered the Kremlin, Steinmeier announced a "Partnership for Modernization" with Russia, and he underscored the importance of the relationship by saying "Russia is and will remain an indispensable strategic partner if we want to create an all-European peace order."[1] Undergirding this project was the assumption that Moscow wanted to be integrated into Europe and indeed that integration was the only option. Hence trade and energy interdependence with Russia were not only beneficial for the German economy but would contribute to Russia's transition and promote closer and more productive political relations and overall stability.

When Gerhard Schr�der, after his electoral defeat in 2005, assumed the role of Chairman of the International Advisory Board of the German-Russian Nordstream gas pipeline project and subsequently described Vladimir Putin as a "flawless democrat" (Lupenreiner Demokrat), he was criticized by some. But many Germans viewed the special German-Russian partnership favorably as economically and politically beneficial, especially against the backdrop of criticism of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and other Bush administration policies.

Chancellor Merkel's attitude toward Russia was, of course, greatly influenced by having grown up in the GDR. Nevertheless, despite whatever concerns she may initially have had about dealing with the Kremlin, she understood the importance of engaging Putin and was also attuned to the views of German industry, for whom Russia is an important market and source of employment. Moreover, Russia is an important energy partner, providing 36 percent of Germany's natural gas supplies. Given the greater skepticism toward Russia of the new European Union members, Merkel also faced the challenge of crafting a more unified EU Ostpolitik and worked closely with Poland and other Central European states to create a joint stance on a range of issues.

Even before the Ukrainian crisis began, Berlin had begun to realize that it was becoming more difficult to deal with Russia after Vladimir Putin returned to the Kremlin in 2012. Like other Western Leaders, Merkel was initially hopeful that when Dimitri Medvedev became president in 2008, Russia would indeed embark on the modernization program that he initially championed. She also expended considerable effort in trying to resolve the frozen conflict in Transnistria. Nevertheless, Putin announced in September 2011 that he was returning to the Kremlin and faced mass protests three months later, which he blamed on the West. Berlin realized that the prospect of Russia embarking on the modernization reforms that Germany supported was becoming increasingly remote. Once Putin was re-elected, the domestic clampdown on opposition groups intensified and German-Russian relations became more testy.

Germany's Russia policy has for some time been a subject of domestic debate and dispute. The Greens have consistently been among the most critical of Putin's domestic crackdown and have demanded a tougher line toward Moscow. Both Die Linke and Alternative f�r Deutschland have largely been uncritical supporters of Moscow. The SPD is divided between those who are more or less favorably inclined toward Moscow, and the CDU-CSU is also split between those whose outlook toward Moscow is shaped by commercial concerns and those who look at Russia through a lens determined more by security and human rights concerns. The previous CDU-CSU official responsible for policy toward Moscow, the late Andreas Schockenhoff, became highly critical of Russia and its domestic and foreign policies, while his SPD successor Gernot Erler was initially less critical, urging continued engagement.

German attitudes toward Russia are also a function of German views of the United States. In a curious throwback to Cold War days, those more critical of the United States are often better disposed toward Russia and vice versa. In this sense, the Snowden affair-coming a year before the onset of the Ukraine crisis-has also affected Germany's relations with Russia. The NSA leaker's revelations about U.S. surveillance activities in Germany-including apparently the chancellor's cell phone-and the fact that Putin granted him political asylum have reinforced the views of those already favorably disposed toward the Kremlin and hostile to the United States.

The Impact of the Ukraine Crisis on German Ostpolitik

Germany played a leading role in the EU's policy toward Ukraine prior to the November 2013 Euro-Maidan movement. Some have criticized the EU negotiators for focusing too much on technical issues in its talks with Kyiv and ignoring the broader geopolitical implications of the Eastern Partnership program-namely that Russia began to view it as a threat.  Berlin supported the negotiations for an Association Agreement with President Viktor Yanukovych but also was insistent that he free his opponent Yulia Tymoshenko from prison as part of the deal. After he rejected the deal at the eleventh hour and the protests grew and eventually turned violent when 100 demonstrators were killed on 20 February 2014, Steinmeier, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, and Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski went to Kyiv to negotiate an agreement with Yanukovych whereby he agreed to early presidential elections in December 2014. The German officials left Kyiv believing that the situation had been defused, only to discover to their astonishment the next day that Yanukovych had fled Kyiv during the night. His security detail had begun to abandon him and he apparently feared that, if he stayed, he might meet the same fate as the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, executed by a firing squad in December 1989.

The Kremlin has repeatedly accused the United States and its allies of supporting a "fascist coup" in Kyiv after Yanukovych fled. Shortly thereafter, Russia annexed Crimea, in violation of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum whereby Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal in return for guarantees of territorial integrity from the United States, Russia, and the United Kingdom. Then came the launch of a hybrid war in eastern Ukraine where Russian troops and military hardware supported groups of Separatists led by an assortment of warlords. Within the space of six weeks, the post-Cold War peaceful European order in which Chancellor Merkel had invested so much effort to nurture and sustain was shattered.

Initially, the German response was cautious. Given the considerable German economic stake in relations with Russia, Berlin was reluctant to impose robust sanctions on Russian individuals and companies. The downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH 17 changed all that. The catastrophic loss of Dutch lives-proportionately worse than the U.S. losses on 9/11-and the callous way in which the Separatists hindered access to the crash site had a profound effect on European public opinion. Chancellor Merkel took the lead in securing EU backing for far-reaching financial sanctions that have made it difficult for Russia to access global capital markets and, along with the halving of oil prices, have imposed considerable economic pain on Russia-although they have not, so far, led to a moderation in Russian policies.

Even as German-Russian relations have deteriorated, however, Merkel has taken the lead in dealing with President Putin and seeking to de-escalate the conflict in eastern Ukraine. Indeed, the White House has delegated the diplomacy of the Ukraine crisis to Germany and has taken a back seat in the negotiations. Merkel is the Western leader who has the most intense contact with Putin, speaking to him frequently by phone.  She has also been the lead negotiator in the two Minsk ceasefire agreements. Her frequent conversations with Putin led her apparently to remark to President Barack Obama that the Russian president has a different understanding of reality than do his Western counterparts. German officials say that Merkel's experiences of having Putin frequently say one thing and do another have hardened her view of the Russian leader. In a speech in Australia, after hours of frustrating talks with Putin, she used forceful language about Russia that would have been unthinkable two years ago and showed how far German Ostpolitik had evolved:

Nevertheless, we've seen that even in Europe there are still forces which refuse to accept the concept of mutual respect or the settlement of conflicts using democratic and rule-of-law means, which believe in the supposed law of the strong and disregard the strength of the law. That's exactly what happened when Russia flouted international law and annexed Crimea at the start of the year. Russia is violating the territorial integrity and the sovereignty of Ukraine. It regards one of its neighbors, Ukraine, as part of a sphere of influence. After the horrors of two world wars and the end of the Cold War, this calls the entire European peaceful order into question. Russia is now seeking to exert influence in order to destabilize eastern Ukraine in Donetsk and Luhansk.[2]

Nevertheless, Merkel remains committed to pursuing a peaceful resolution of the conflict in a variety of formats. The negotiations that produced the Minsk Two ceasefire agreement involved Merkel, French President Francois Hollande, Putin and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, with Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko as the host, and a separate track for the Separatists. It is notable that neither the U.K. nor Poland, for instance, has been party to these talks. So far, the February Minsk ceasefire has been more or less holding, but it remains fragile. Merkel has repeatedly reiterated that there is no military solution to the crisis, a point that she emphasized at the February Munich Security Conference, much to the dismay of Senator John McCain and those of his Senate colleagues who favor sending lethal defensive weapons to Ukraine. Although Merkel has made it clear that she regards sending weapons to Ukraine as dangerous, it is also evident that she has been able to use the threat of U.S. weapons supplies as a way of maintaining EU unity over sanctions, warning that lifting EU sanctions might lead the White House to reverse its current opposition to arming Ukraine.

Can Ostpolitik be Reset?

Berlin will remain committed to making sure the Minsk agreement is implemented. Nevertheless, senior German officials admit that their expectations of achieving a successful outcome are very modest. They understand that, at best, the situation in the Donbass region will remain a frozen conflict that will not be resolved for the foreseeable future. They also recognize that it is highly unlikely that Moscow will acquiesce to Kyiv regaining control over its border in eastern Ukraine. Steinmeier has warned that, if there is a move by the Separatists and their Russians backers to take the port city of Mariupol, it would be the end of Minsk. The Minsk agreement is flawed, but it was apparently the best that could be achieved in February.

Merkel's other challenge will be to maintain EU unity on sanctions. There is pressure from Greece, Cyprus, Hungary, Italy, and Spain to end sanctions, even though Russian policies have not changed. Although the last EU meeting on this subject  produced agreement to keep the sanctions until the end of 2015, there will be a another discussion about whether to maintain them after July, when the post-MH17 financial sanctions come up for renewal. The German business community has so far supported Merkel but, if other countries break their sanctions solidarity, the private sector will be eager to resume business ties with Russia-although that may prove to be challenging after a year of sanctions.

The other plank in German policy is to support Ukraine's efforts to reform its economy, legal system, and governance. Merkel has maintained close contacts with Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, and Berlin is actively engaged with Ukraine in its daunting challenge of dealing with corruption and modernizing its political structures while avoiding financial collapse. The goal is to make Ukraine more resilient to pressures both from Russia and from oligarchic and other domestic elements that want to perpetuate the opaque structures that have led Ukrainians twice in the last decade to take to the streets in the Maidan and overthrow their government. But Berlin, like Washington, is also aware that it is sometimes difficult to help Ukraine.

German officials are also looking beyond the current crisis to a time when it may be possible to re-engage Russia. But how? Russia has upended the post-Cold War European order and shows little inclination to restore it. Indeed, Putin has explicitly rejected the Euro-Atlantic order that, he believes, was unfairly imposed by the West on Russia in the 1990s and has called for  the creation of a new world order based on different-but as yet not articulated-legal and moral norms.[3] In 2008, Medvedev gave a speech in Berlin calling for a new Euro-Atlantic security architecture.[4] His speech was short on specifics, and a later draft of a proposed treaty would have essentially emasculated NATO. It was discussed in a desultory way in the OSCE during the Greek presidency and then faded away. Will Germany seek to revise the debate over a new European security architecture when it holds the OSCE chairmanship in 2016?

Barring a major escalation in the Ukraine crisis or Russian military actions beyond Ukraine, Germany will continue to engage Russia on a number of fronts. Berlin recognizes that Russia is no longer a strategic partner and that expectations for integrating Russia into EU structures were premature and must be put on hold. Nevertheless, Germany will remain Russia's most important European interlocutor. Angela Merkel will continue to take the lead in dealing with Vladimir Putin, however challenging that is. She is confronted with a Russia that has undermined Europe's stability and shows little inclination to resolve the Ukraine crisis. This is a threat to the peaceful European order that Germany has helped to craft since unification. Nevertheless, for reasons of history, geography, and economics-and a German public that remains deeply divided on how to deal with Moscow-Berlin is in this game for the long haul.
 
 #27
Russia Ministry of Foreign Affairs
www.mid.ru
April 6, 2015
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's interview with Rossiya Segodnya, Moscow, April 6, 2015

Question: An agreement was reached on Iran. The Europeans seem to be happy and even grateful to Russia for its constructive involvement. However, some in Russia are now saying that "it's bad, Iran will now start selling its gas, we shot ourselves in the foot, and we are not sure what's going on," almost going as far as predicting Russia's decline as a result of the Iranian agreements. How true is that?

Sergey Lavrov: That's a strange line of thinking that for Russia's economy to grow, we either need our competitors to be under sanctions or have someone bomb them, like America wanted to bomb Iran. Probably, this is what people who don't believe Russia can get off of the oil and gas "needle" are thinking. That's the goal set by the Russian President, though. The Government has been given the instructions. That goal remains our priority.

With regard to the oil and gas market, first, Iranian oil and gas have always been present on the market. As you may be aware, there are no international sanctions by the UN Security Council with regard to Iran's oil and gas. Oil and gas in that country are the subject of illegal unilateral sanctions imposed by the United States, the European Union and some of their allies like Australia. However, there are exceptions to these sanctions. China, India, and several other countries, including Japan, if my memory serves me right, have reached "amicable" agreements with the United States to the effect that they will continue to buy the amounts of oil from Iran that they used to buy from it, but will refrain from buying more.

As a matter of fact, Iranian oil has always been on the market. According to experts, Iranian worldwide oil exports may grow insignificantly in the near future. Iranian gas has never come under any harsh sanctions. For many years, Iranian gas has been sent to Turkey, among other countries. Every winter, and our experts have noted this, there are disruptions in distribution, and the Turks ask us to compensate for the missing Iranian gas. I believe that those who view the current agreements on Iran in terms of money alone underestimate the actual state of the hydrocarbon markets and most importantly, are unable to get over a utilitarian approach: "How is that possible at all? Russia's interests will be hurt if the sanctions on Iran are lifted." On the contrary, when it comes to purely economic interests, we have established a very solid cooperation base with Iran over the years.

Last year, we signed a large package of documents, which make our cooperation in the peaceful use of nuclear energy and the construction of several nuclear power plants in Iran in Bushehr and another new site, a long-term and a highly lucrative endeavour. Will this benefit both sides? Absolutely. Iran will get guaranteed amounts of electricity, regardless of what happens to its oil and gas reserves. They are looking far ahead, and don't want to squander their natural wealth, and we are there to help them do so. Rosatom signed lucrative contracts with Iran. Of course, lifting the economic and financial sanctions on Iran will allow them to pay Rosatom in full and, accordingly, billions will go to the Russian budget.

People should look at the big picture and not worry so much. We have much in common with Iran. It's our long-standing neighbour that we have many common interests with in bilateral relations in the Caspian Sea, fighting terrorism, and preventing the Sunni-Shiite rift in the Islamic world. No one has to worry that our neighbour, a friendly nation is getting free from the sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council and the illegal unilateral restrictions imposed by the United States and the European Union.

Question: You have agreed that Iran can develop nuclear power under IAEA supervision. But some things are easily verifiable, while others, such as the nuclear component, can be interpreted very broadly. Is this the final agreement on Iran's nuclear programme, or do you fear delays with the signing of the agreement by June 30?

Sergey Lavrov: It's very important to see the difference between what we - Russia - agreed to with Iran concerning civilian nuclear programmes and everything else. Neither the first unit of the Bushehr nuclear power plant, nor the other units to be built there or a nuclear power plant that will be built elsewhere in Iran, on which agreements and contracts have been signed, are subject to the UN Security Council restrictions. And neither are our plans and ongoing construction projects subject to the unilateral US and EU limitations. In the process of negotiations, Russian-Iranian bilateral cooperation on civilian nuclear projects has been reliably moved beyond the framework of any restrictions, both legitimate international and illegitimate unilateral ones. Anyway, nuclear power plants are to be built under IAEA supervision. This goes for Iran, for the projects that are underway in Turkey and in Europe and also for our future projects in Vietnam. There are certain IAEA standards for the construction of nuclear power facilities. But these facilities are not subject to any sanctions.

As for the proposed restrictions on Iran's activity without our involvement, which our Western partners would like to make more transparent, we believe that this had to be done. There were serious suspicions and we needed to dispel them and to see the peaceful nature of Iran's nuclear programme. Again, this concerns the projects that Iran was implementing independently. It had several facilities where it was enriching uranium and was building a heavy water reactor capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium. This certainly was a cause for our concern.

The agreement we have reached limits the number of centrifuges Iran can have and stipulates a single uranium enrichment site, while the Fordow facility, where a certain number of centrifuges will be retained, must be used exclusively for research purposes such as the production of medical isotopes, and so it will not be enrichment on an industrial scale. The third facility - a heavy water reactor - will be converted to preclude the production of weapons-grade plutonium and hence any threat of nuclear technology proliferation. At the same time, Iran has agreed, in principle, to the entire range of IAEA verification procedures including the Additional Protocol and the so-called modified codes, stipulating access to all these facilities, full-scale cooperation and complete transparency. In return, the UN Security Council sanctions and the unilateral restrictions imposed on Iran by some Western countries will be lifted.

The key parameters of this deal were coordinated rather quickly, in the final week of the negotiations in Lausanne. The issues that were coordinated later, when I returned to Lausanne, were included in the document that is currently considered the only official result of this round of talks, which EU High Representative Federica Mogherini and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif presented in their joint statement. This could have been done at the beginning of that final week, but we encountered a problem.

Since many people have asked about this, I'd like to use this opportunity to disclose some reasons for the delay. As we agreed in November 2013, when we discussed the procedure for these talks, the final package of comprehensive agreements should be ready by June 30, 2015. An additional goal set for the end of March was to reach an agreement on the component parts of this package: restricting the number of centrifuges, limiting enrichment to one facility and leaving the other facility exclusively for research, and converting the third facility, a heavy water reactor, to preclude the production of weapons-grade plutonium. In addition, there should be very strict IAEA verification measures for the entire range of facilities, in return for lifting the sanctions. All sides agreed on that.

I don't think I am disclosing a secret if I say that our American and European partners wanted to specify, in addition to these fundamental components of the package, the parameters on which they personally needed Iran to agree before the June deadline. We were ready to do this too, because, after all, the further we advanced in terms of concrete figures and volumes, the better it would have been. But the Iranians responded that this concrete approach should be also applied to the sanctions: When will they be lifted and in what amount, and what is the guarantee against possible deception? Our Western partners were not ready for this, but they nevertheless spent several more days trying to unilaterally specify the required provisions and doing their best to avoid the specification of issues requested by Iran, and taxing the patience of the other negotiators and journalists in the process. This explains the delay.
Decisions on the issues of importance to us, including the removal of Russian-Iranian nuclear cooperation from the agenda of the P5+1 talks with Iran, were reached at an early stage of the final week.

Question: Riyadh is saying that this agreement will trigger an "arms race" in the region, as other countries could request the same terms for themselves and gain the right to develop their nuclear energy industry, using this as a cover for something else.

Sergey Lavrov: There are no grounds for an arms race. The agreement, which has yet to be formalised, is not a simple matter, not a done deal. You know how this intermediary political framework agreement is viewed in different circles, including in the US Congress, in Israel and Saudi Arabia. So, we have yet to see to it that these principles are translated into the language of very concrete agreements, down to the last detail. However, in any event, what has been decided and should be put into practice - and I very much hope that it will be enshrined in a legally binding document approved by the UN Security Council - gives no cause to talk about triggering an arms race. Quite the contrary, the agreement closes loopholes that could allow for a military dimension in Iran's nuclear programme. The Iranians have assumed political obligations to ensure that there will be none of that. They have also assumed obligations through their supreme leader, who has even issued a special fatwa. Now a document is being developed in the secular "trust but verify" terms, which will guarantee all this.

I hear that Saudi Arabia has said that this will set off a "chain reaction" in the sense that other countries in the region will want the same conditions for the development of their nuclear energy sector. From my perspective, nothing is impossible here. If there is interest in the legitimate, legal development of the nuclear power industry, I'm sure that Russia will support it. Under the nuclear power agreements that we sign with our partners, as a general rule, Russia builds nuclear power plants, trains personnel, supplies fuel and then removes spent nuclear fuel for reprocessing. Iran has been given the right to enrich uranium. However, it cannot be regarded as something extraordinary because uranium enrichment for purposes of NPP fuel production is not prohibited anywhere. The Nonproliferation Treaty does not prohibit this. Yes, enrichment technology makes it possible to gain experience and potential and achieve higher levels [of enrichment], including weapons-grade uranium. But then this is what the IAEA and negotiating processes are for - to address these issues. If a country needs nuclear energy development guarantees and is prepared do this by acquiring fuel abroad, this is even easier. If a country wants to enrich uranium on its own, Iran's experience shows that this is also possible. And then some guarantees will need to be negotiated.

Question: We've been saying that other countries may request the same terms for themselves. On the other hand, can the international community ask for the same conditions, transparency and verification procedures with regard to other countries, for example, Israel? And can this agreement become the first step towards creating a nuclear-free zone in the region?

Sergey Lavrov: We have always said and will continue to insist at the final stage of the talks that the super-intrusive measures provided for Iran's nuclear programme will not be a precedent because Iran is, after all, a special case. For many years, Iranian governments - of the recent, distant and very distant past - have been hiding a nuclear programme from the IAEA. Even though, when they started getting down to the bottom of it, at first glance it seemed to be simply an enrichment programme, designed to produce fuel. First, why was it concealed when [the Iranians] were supposed to have informed the IAEA immediately? Second, there were suspicions that the programme still had a military dimension, and so on and so forth. This distrust kept building and now, to dispel it, a process is underway between the P5+1 and Iran and between the IAEA and Iran, based on concrete documentary facts that arouse suspicion.

So, the extreme intrusiveness with regard to Iran - however, to reiterate, it has yet to be spelled out and, unfortunately, is not 100 per cent complete (but [we] should work to this end) - is attributable to past "sins." If a country begins a conversation from a clean slate, without any suspicions, then I don't see any need for following the same exact procedure [as with Iran]. Iran should not set any precedents for the nonproliferation regime as a matter of principle, not for the verification regime or for IAEA activity to inspect peaceful nuclear power programmes, since, to reiterate, Iran is a special case.

Question: Aren't there suspicions regarding other countries, Israel, for instance?

Sergey Lavrov: If we speak about peaceful nuclear energy, then it must be understood that Israel is not a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Israel keeps silent when asked if it possesses nuclear arms - that's the official position. But many countries of the region have reason to suspect that it does, and that's why they favour the creation in the Middle East of a zone free of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and means of their delivery. This is a zone that would be free both of nuclear arms and other types of weapons of mass destruction, including chemical weapons. Here, too, not all countries of the region are signatories of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). The history of the matter is rooted deep in the past, when many years ago the UN Security Council, as it looked into ways of resolving conflicts between Middle Eastern countries in the Person Gulf, outlined that task, aware that it could become a systemically important factor in encouraging positive trends. Later, the issue of creating a WMD-free zone in the Middle East was included by the 2010 NPT Review Conference into a package designed to ensure the unlimited extension of that crucial document. Unfortunately, 2012, set as the date for such a conference, passed, as did the following two years. In a few weeks, a regular NPT review conference will begin its work, during which it will be stated that the above-mentioned decision, approved by consensus, has not been fulfilled. We think that it's a big mistake and urge all countries of the region without exception (and you can't hope to achieve any results unless you have universal involvement) to overcome the remaining procedural differences between them and convene this conference.

We are working with the League of Arab States (LAS), Israel and, of course, Iran, because only the full range of participants can ensure a reasonable dialogue, certainly, with the support of other countries, which, though not belonging to the region, will provide assistance during this important event.

Question: Still the suspicions that you've just spoken of exist, and they refer both to Iran and Israel. Doesn't that mean double standards? Iran, as Barack Obama put it, is the most heavily controlled and inspected country in the world, while Israel keeps a low profile.

Sergey Lavrov: I will say again that Iran will be the most heavily controlled and inspected country if the principles coordinated in Lausanne (and that was a big job) are translated into the language of practical agreements. That can only be a mutual language, and it remains to be heard how our American colleagues view the process of lifting the sanctions.

Iran has constantly emphasised its readiness to honour its NPT commitments. Israel has not joined the NPT. As the question of whether Israel possesses nuclear arms continues to arouse suspicions, to which Israel doesn't respond - that being its official policy − an attempt has been made to arrange a more open dialogue through convening a conference on creating a zone free of weapons of mass destruction. Israel agreed to participate in this process, which will take more than a day, or even a year, but may prove to be a much longer process, comparable, perhaps, to the establishment of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

At present, the Israelis are at loggerheads with the Arabs over the conference's agenda. The only issue the Arabs want to discuss is creating the zone and agreeing its parameters. They believe those who possess nuclear weapons must admit it and give them up.

Israel says it's ready to participate in the dialogue, but finds it important to understand how security in the region is going to be maintained. I think it has reason to put the question that way. That's precisely why the zone is necessary - to enable us to maintain security. We all - Russia, as one of the co-founders of that conference, together with the United States and Britain, and Finland, which has offered to host this conference and was appointed its facilitator, of sorts, under the auspices of the UN, a mediator - we all believe that a solution can be found, that the agenda can be developed in such a way as to discuss the zone with a view to enhancing the level of regional security in general. I hope that the procedural squabbles and those that are fuelled by prestige will gradually subside.

Question: What prospects will Iran have with regard to SCO membership after the sanctions are lifted?

Sergey Lavrov: Good prospects. We are advocating for it. Together with India and Pakistan, which, we are confident, will receive not just invitations at the SCO summit in Ufa, but also documents that will launch the process of joining the SCO in accordance with their applications. The organisation has long been developing a package of documents. There are three or four of them: criteria, obligations, a list of agreements that are part of the SCO, which the candidate countries have to sign and ratify. That's the process.

Depending on how the talks with Iran end, if there's no disruption, and if we see that the principles are turned into practical arrangements, then I personally think (I haven't consulted with my SCO colleagues yet) that we, the foreign ministers, can fully recommend that the presidents and prime ministers of the SCO member countries consider such a document for Iran.

Question: How legal is the current operation in Yemen?

Sergey Lavrov: Currently it doesn't have any international legal basis. We were, of course, slightly disappointed, to put it lightly, that the operation was launched without any consultations with the UN Security Council or any bilateral talks, and that our partners (we really value our relations with Saudi Arabia and other participants of the coalition) post factum came to the Security Council and asked for the approval of their actions, again post factum. We can't do this, because it is a request to approve just one side of the conflict and to outlaw the other side.

Our position is different. Right now we are actively working with our Saudi and Egyptian colleagues, with other countries that are taking part in this operation, and are calling for a peaceful settlement. To do this, both belligerents have to take certain steps: the Houthis should stop the combat operation in southern Yemen where there are attempts to capture new territories; the ceasefire must be unconditional; the coalition must stop air strikes; the forces, which confront the Houthis on the ground, also must join the ceasefire. After all that, all parties must come to the negotiating table. This is not beyond our capabilities.

The capitals of the region's countries, possible hosts for the talks, are currently being discussed. They should be acceptable for all of Yemen's parties and allow for the return to dialogue and peaceful initiatives. The capitals had been suggested once before (prior to the Council beginning airstrikes) by the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf. The country is in need of national unity and new elections. We have seen all that in Ukraine.

Question: President Barack Obama said the creation of the Islamic State is "an example of unintended consequences" of the invasion of Iraq. Will we see an unintended consequence to these bombing raids, with the Houthis weakened and Al-Qaeda taking over Yemen? He also said "we should generally aim before we shoot."

Sergey Lavrov: There are more than enough of these "unintentional consequences" from various political activities. After Libya, over a dozen countries have been affected by the inflow of illegal weapons and militants. And these terrorist groups are merging into an alliance, including Al-Shabaab and Boko Haram. Take the recent tragedy in Kenya, where victims were ordered to recite from the Koran to get pardon, and those who couldn't were condemned and killed on the spot.

We are seriously concerned about the growing divide between Sunnis and Shias in Yemen. This confrontation is the focal point of the geopolitical line-up in the Gulf region. When we warned in our public comments of the danger of setting Sunnis in opposition to Shias at the beginning of the Arab Spring, some regional countries accused us of pointing out this danger to provoke a conflict. But now all countries agree that this is a very real danger, a much bigger danger even than the actions or theories that confront Islam and Christianity. If the blow happens inside Islam, if we allow the accumulated hatred to erupt without ameliorating the situation or creating a framework for the resumption of internal dialogue in the Islamic world, the consequences will be terrible. Shias and Sunnis have been confronting each other with increasing aggression in the Persian Gulf and in the Middle East in general. But there are positive examples of peaceful coexistence in the countries that have been described as dictatorial and authoritarian, such as Saddam Hussein's Iraq. You have to choose.

As for what they describe as "collateral damage," the price is too high. Look at what happened in Iraq, which has been weakened to the point of collapse, or Libya, which can no longer be described as a country. They want to do the same to Syria, although US Secretary of State John Kerry keeps telling me that they wouldn't allow a repetition of the Libyan scenario in Syria, and that they would preserve its institutions and so keep the state standing and working in the absence of Bashar Assad. No one knows how to do this. Again they are obsessed with one man, who has suddenly become unsympathetic in their eyes. This happened before to Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic: they didn't like the man, and his country is no more. They didn't like Hussein, and his country is teetering on the edge of a split into three parts. Muammar Gaddafi was acceptable in Libya for a long time, but then he started thinking too much of himself, and his country is in ruins. The next in this line is Yemen, where the actions of those who dislike recent developments are highly personified. This situation should be considered very responsibly.

As you said, irreparable damage has taken the form of Al-Qaeda, which struck on September 11, 2001. This is a consequence of the US-created movement of the mujahedin that ultimately developed into Al-Qaeda. The monsters created by modern Frankensteins are reaching out to new territories, merging and setting themselves more ambitious goals. The point at issue is not Yemen, Libya, Mali, Chad, Algeria or Egypt specifically, but the Islamic world and Islam's holiest sites - Mecca and Medina. Everyone understands this, because they have started talking about it openly. There is a reason that the leaders of the so-called Islamic State have removed two words from its former name, Iraq and the Levant. They are no longer satisfied with this goal; they want to rule the Islamic world.

We need this issue to be seriously considered and discussed by historians and responsible politicians who look beyond the next election campaign when you have to present even a victory, even if with unpredictable consequences, to the electorate. There are serious and clever people who are trying to explain the militant renaissance of Islam by the young age of this global religion, which is approximately 600 years younger than Christianity. They argue that Christians had their crusades when they wanted to become more firmly established in the world, and that Islam is possibly entering a similar period in its history. This is an interesting approach, but we need more than a theory explaining the current developments; we need a very practical and goal-oriented political discussion between the leaders of the West and the Islamic countries (both Shia- and Sunni-dominated countries), as well as countries like Russia and China, which have their own Islamic communities. Islam in Russia is not an imported product. Muslims have lived side by side with Christians for centuries in Russia. There are also Muslims in China. It's time such a discussion was held between the permanent members of the UN Security Council and the leading Islamic countries.

Question: Who stands behind the robbery of our consulate in Yemen? Certainly, it was not included in our plans and Russian diplomats were the last to go. How did this happen? Was this a bolt from the blue for us?

Sergey Lavrov: It happened after our consulate was mothballed and all of the diplomats and other employees left the territory and even Yemen for a Russian Navy ship. This is why it is hard for me to answer this question. When such events happen (air attacks, one group proclaimed another outlawed and called on them to surrender under the threat of bombings until "the victorious end") marauders and simply hangers-on are bound to arrive. Now it is probably impossible to determine who it was.

Question: Ukraine, Petr Poroshenko...

Sergey Lavrov: We evacuated the Ukrainians from Yemen as well.

Question: Yes, we reported on this yesterday. Regrettably, unlike the Poles, they didn't even thank us. Ukrainian President Poroshenko has repeatedly stated in public that a new foreign ministerial meeting in the Normandy format is about to take place. Is this true?

Sergey Lavrov: In principle, the Normandy format was very useful, primarily for preparing a set of measures on compliance with the Minsk agreements. The leaders of Russia, Germany, France and Ukraine coordinated the relevant text and recommended it for signing by the members of the Contact Group represented by Kiev, Donetsk and Lugansk with the participation of the OSCE and Russia. This set of measures was endorsed by a separate declaration adopted by the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and France, and the Federal Chancellor of Germany. It provides for a sequence of steps, a monitoring mechanism and general oversight on behalf of the Normandy format members. It reads that the foreign ministers will create a review mechanism to ensure the implementation of everything upon which Moscow, Berlin, Paris and Kiev agreed.

Participants in the two meetings of deputy foreign ministers and policy directors have reviewed the implementation of the February 12 Minsk agreements.
The last meeting took place in late March. The participants discussed the opportunity to involve the ministers. We said that, at some stage, when the circumstances require this, we do not rule this out. Nobody coordinated any agenda or date. Therefore, I was somewhat surprised to read yesterday a statement by Ukrainian President Petr Poroshenko to the effect that the foreign ministers will discuss a UN peacekeeping mission that would rely on the EU police mission.

We are prepared to discuss all proposals and will respond to all ideas, be they Ukrainian, German, French or some other. However, the peacemaking mission that Kiev would like to see concerns the dividing line between the Ukrainian armed forces and the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk republics and the entire length of the Russian-Ukrainian border. Naturally, the first thing that comes to mind is that the idea of the suggested peacekeeping mission should be discussed with Lugansk and Donetsk under any circumstances.

When we first heard about this two days after the February 12 summit in Minsk that was applauded unanimously, our first reaction was as follows: How come? Nobody mentioned any peacekeepers at the meeting in the least. The emphasis was laid on the need to substantially strengthen the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM). It was suggested that it should be better equipped, have more personnel and receive drones and other equipment to ensure the efficient monitoring of the ceasefire and heavy weapons withdrawal. And, all of a sudden, the need for a peacekeeping mission was mentioned two days later. When asked why it was necessary to promote this idea so suddenly, without even implementing the agreed-upon proposal to consolidate the SMM, Mr Poroshenko replied that nothing would come out of it without security. It is hard to argue against this thought. This is exactly what we are attempting to ensure. Sometimes during the talks, one side needs to procrastinate the negotiating process or gain time. In this case, it comes up with a new idea that nobody has coordinated with anyone and starts sidetracking attention from the work regarding the already achieved agreements.

I'd hate to see a repetition of such a tactical trick. Not so long ago, President Vladimir Putin said over the phone to his Ukrainian counterpart and I said the same to my colleague Pavel Klimkin (we spoke at length over the phone over four days) that we are prepared to discuss this, but the Ukrainian leaders should realise that we will have questions and now they have already been asked.

To begin with, how would the role of a peacekeeping mission differ from that of the OSCE? If you want to introduce peacemaking troops, they will arrive with armoured personnel carriers and stay in equipped camps. They will provide more isolation on the contact line. Moreover, sometimes we hear in news reports from Ukraine that the larger part of the population would simply like to forget all about this self-proclaimed region, which would be very sad. This would become a serious confrontation-prone trend. I don't want even to think about it.

Question: This is "amputation" of a part of the country...

Sergey Lavrov: Yes. I'm simply trying to understand what this idea might lead to and what might stand behind it. One objective explanation is lying on the surface - if they want to cut off this region, it is probably necessary to introduce UN troops and hold the border. But why is this necessary? Why not focus on enhancing OSCE's role? This should be discussed with Lugansk and Donetsk by all means. And finally the last point. Ukrainian leaders insist that the proposed hypothetical peacemaking mission should control not only the dividing line, but also the Russian-Ukrainian border. Meanwhile, the Minsk agreements clearly require that the process of restoring control over the border with Russia be completed not only after the territories are covered by the law on their special status and conduct elections to the local government bodies (primarily, municipal) but also after this special status is sealed in the constitution, in the amendments that should be discussed with the participation of Lugansk and Donetsk and so on and so forth.

This is why the priority given to the UN mission and the promise of a special status when it shuts down the border are driving us into an impasse.
Credit for ongoing constructive consultations on the number of working sub-groups, their mandates and personnel goes to the self-defence fighters, who are displaying a tremendous amount of goodwill. After all, they said that the laws adopted by the Verkhovna Rada have turned upside down the entire sequence of the Minsk agreements and are undermining the efforts of the heads of state and the governments of the Normandy Four. But we are still hopeful and working with Berlin and Paris and are trying to work with Washington in the hope they would straighten up Kiev and make it carry out the agreements this time.
As we know, the failure of the current authorities (who were in the opposition at the time) to implement the agreement of February 21, 2014 was simply ignored. None of the Western leaders who guaranteed these agreements even reprimanded Kiev. The same attitude is displayed today. Meanwhile, we cannot allow the failure of the Minsk agreements that have now been confirmed at the level of the heads of state rather than European ministers.

To be continued...
 

 #28
BBC
April 8, 2015
Ukraine crisis: Tension over rise of nationalist Yarosh
By David Stern
BBC News, Kiev

The recent appointment of a nationalist leader, Dmytro Yarosh, to a high military position in Ukraine has sparked controversy.

In Russia he has become a focus of accusations that "fascists" and extremists control the government in Kiev.

However, the nature of his duties, and the extent of his influence in the armed forces, remains to be seen.

Mr Yarosh is the head of Right Sector, which first burst to prominence as an ultra-nationalist umbrella organisation, battling riot police and helping man the barricades during anti-government protests last year.

After the February revolution, which brought a new pro-Western government to power, Right Sector morphed into a political party.

However, Mr Yarosh received less than 1% in presidential elections, and his party failed to pass a 5% barrier to enter parliament - though he himself was elected as a deputy.

From there, Right Sector created from its numbers one of the many volunteer battalions, fighting alongside regular government forces against Russian-supported insurgents in eastern Ukraine.

Russian condemnation

And now Mr Yarosh and his group have made yet another leap in legitimacy: Ukrainian officials announced at the weekend that the Right Sector leader would serve as an adviser to the army chief of staff, Viktor Muzhenko, acting as a liaison between the military and the volunteer battalions.

Russian media were quick to condemn the move. "Neo-Nazis are strengthening their positions," proclaimed Russia's state-owned Rossiya 1 TV. "Radical armed groups will become a separate assault brigade, led by Yarosh."

Russia accuses him of incitement to terrorism and at Russia's request he is listed as wanted by Interpol. He denies the charges.

The claim that Mr Yarosh comes from neo-Nazi ranks, or represents them, is a distortion.

"He is a nationalist - though there is a discussion, among experts, on whether labels like 'ultra-nationalism', 'fascism' or 'extreme right' should be applied to him," wrote Andreas Umland, an expert on the far right in Ukraine.

Mr Umland points out that Mr Yarosh, unlike many other far-right activists, defines nationality according to citizenship. That is, not just ethnic Ukrainians are considered to be, so to speak, "true Ukrainians", but Russians, Jews, Tartars or any other group living on Ukrainian territory.

That said, Mr Yarosh's political beliefs fall firmly to the right of the political spectrum.

"In the past, he has made critical statements about Western liberalism and European integration," Mr Umland said.

Mr Yarosh's appointment could simply be a bit of canny public relations: the promotion of a popular combat leader, one who received serious injuries in the battle of Donetsk airport and was subsequently photographed, bruised and bandaged in his hospital bed.

The big question is what his position portends for the future of the volunteer battalions, which previously operated free of direct government control. Now, however, Ukraine's leaders are making concerted efforts to limit their autonomy.

Right Sector was the last prominent battalion to resist joining a government structure. Now, officials said the group would "submit to the military leadership over questions of national defence."

That is also significant, given that it potentially removes Right Sector from under the influence of the Ukrainian billionaire, Ihor Kolomoisky.

Mr Kolomoisky showed himself willing to use armed groups in what appeared to be a power struggle last month with Kiev authorities.

But the extent of their subordination to the government could also be open to debate.

A Right Sector spokesman was quoted as saying that his organisation would now be funded by the defence ministry, but it would still remain operationally independent.

"Our combatants will be well-armed from now on, as up until now equipment was supplied by volunteers," said Artem Skoropadskiy, quoted by the AFP news agency.

Still, with Mr Yarosh now a part of the general staff - but crucially not in a deciding role - he and his fighters may now be subject to a degree of oversight. And the volunteer battalions in general may now be better controlled by those who, by law, should be in charge.
 
 #29
Interfax-Ukraine
April 8, 2015
Fortification work on demarcation line in Donbas to cost UAH 1 bln - ATO deputy commander
 
The Ukrainian authorities intend to spend about UAH 1 billion on the fortification work on the demarcation line in Donbas, deputy commander of the anti-terrorist operation (ATO) Colonel Valentyn Fedychev said on Wednesday, the press service of Donetsk Regional Military and Civil Administration reported.

"At present, Ukraine has to spend a lot of money - about UAH 1 billion to transform the demarcation line into a fortress impregnable for Russian occupiers," Fedychev said.

At the same time, he said that the Ukrainian military were preparing "exclusively for defense."
 
 #30
DPR ready for working groups' activity - Purgin

MOSCOW. April 8 (Interfax) - The self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) is ready to participate in the activity of joint working groups, which will address concrete areas of the peace process in southeastern Ukraine.

"We have done more than enough to prepare operations of the joint working groups. We are fully prepared, for instance, we have legal teams studying nuances of Ukrainian legislation. As to the degree of Ukraine's preparedness, we can only guess but it is definitely less than ours. Most probably, they still have a long way to go," DPR People's Council Speaker Andrei Purgin told Interfax on Wednesday.

The joint working groups will help systematize Ukrainian laws, he added.

"Ukraine has adopted plenty of bylaws, for instance, to support the ATO operation, and these bylaws contradict one another because Ukraine loves to adopt new bylaws and is unwilling to repeal the old ones. In short, they need to be organized and harmonized with legal norms," Purgin said.
 
 
#31
Los Angeles Times
April 6, 2015
Ukrainian president says any vote on ceding power to rebels will fail
By CAROL J. WILLIAMS

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on Monday signaled a readiness to let Ukrainian voters decide whether to decentralize their government but denounced the demands of pro-Russian separatists for independence as an "infection" spread from Russia.

At the first meeting of a constitutional commission convened to discuss a proposed redistribution of power from the Kiev government to Ukraine's diverse regions, Poroshenko predicted that 90% of Ukrainians would vote in favor of unity if a referendum were to be held on the issue.

Poroshenko had previously opposed a referendum on whether to revise Ukraine's constitution but said he wouldn't stand in the way of such a vote should the commission decide to hold one.

"Decentralization has nothing to do with federalization," Poroshenko said, the latter restructuring model urged by the Kremlin to give the Russian-speaking eastern regions of Ukraine virtual independence. "Ukraine has always been and, I believe, will remain a unitary state. It is not because we, on the top, have decided so, but because we regularly examine public opinion."

In comments to the parliamentary commission reported by the Ukrinform news agency, Poroshenko compared federalization to "an infection, like a biological weapon, that is imposed on Ukraine from aboard. Its bacilli try to hit Ukraine and destroy our unity. I am sure that we will not allow it."

The discussion of potential constitutional change coincided with the one-year anniversary of the separatists' takeover of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, and a failed attempt to occupy the government offices of Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city.

Ceding more autonomy to the regions is one of the proposals contained in a Feb. 12 peace plan worked out in the Belarus capital of Minsk among the leaders of Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine. The Minsk plan also called for local elections in the rebel-controlled regions to be conducted according to Ukrainian law. The separatists have rejected any vote organized by Kiev authorities, claiming their unsupervised November election of separatist leaders was valid.

Andrei Purgin, one of the separatist leaders elected five months ago in the midst of the conflict, told the Associated Press that none of the separatist representatives was invited to participate in the constitutional commission, "which already says a lot."

More than 6,000 people have been killed in the fighting between Ukrainian government forces and the separatists backed by Russian arms and fighters. Russian President Vladimir Putin denies Kremlin involvement in the Ukraine conflict but concedes that "volunteers" from Russia have gone to assist in the fight against the Kiev government.

The insurrection was sparked by the Feb. 21, 2014, ouster of Ukraine's Kremlin-allied president, Viktor Yanukovich, who fled to Russia after a three-month rebellion against his move to scuttle a trade and political agreement between Ukraine and the European Union.
 
 #32
RIA Novosti
April 7, 2015
Kremlin: We will not hinder Ukrainian media despite "uncivilized" Kiev behaviour

Moscow, 7 April: Moscow has no intention of hindering the work of Ukrainian media outlets in response to Kiev's actions against Russian journalists, Russian presidential press secretary Dmitriy Peskov has said.

"Responding in an uncivilized manner to uncivilized behaviour is not something we are in the habit of doing in Moscow. You know that foreign media work in Moscow without restrictions, according to the law on mass media, they have the same rights as Russian media outlets; that is, the rights of foreign media outlets is guaranteed by our legislation," Peskov told journalists.

"You know that representatives of the Ukrainian media also work here, they work freely, and I hope they will continue to work here as long as the media are interested in what is happening in our country," he added.

Commenting on reports that the Ukrainian authorities had refused to allow the deputy director-general of TASS news agency to enter the country, Peskov said that Moscow regrets this and believes it to be "inconsistent with common sense".

"This once again underlines Ukraine's absolutely uncivilized approach to everything to do with the media and information, the provision of information about what is going on in Ukraine itself, as well as what is going on in the world, for Ukrainian citizens. And, of course, this is one more attempt to block off Ukraine's population from truthful information," Peskov said.
 
 #33
http://gordonhahn.com
April 6, 2015
Maidan Reforms or Maidan Meltdown?
by Gordon M. Hahn

The Maidan regime in Kiev is lurching from crisis to crisis with no end in sight. No sooner did the confrontation between President Petro Poroshenko and Ihor Kolomoiskii quite down (http://gordonhahn.com/2015/03/27/poroshenko-1-kolomoiskii-0/), before a series of corruption charges hit the government of Arseniy Yatsenyuk and the neo-fascist warlord and Right Sector leader Dmitro Yarosh was appointed an advisor to Ukraine's Defense Minister. Reports of Yatsenyuk's possible removal from the prime minister's post were preceded by allegations of corruption within his own circle as well as in government offices under his watch.

Some data points of recent vintage from Ukraine:

(1) In mid-March, Swiss prosecutors file criminal charges against Rada deputy Mykola Martynenko, a close Yatsenyuk ally, for taking bribes (CEPI Ukraine Watch, Central European Policy Institute, 30 March 2015, http://www.cepolicy.org).

(2) Interpol also places National Front Rada deputy Mykola Knyazhytskiy on its wanted list, sought by Cambodia over allegations of child-rape, but is later removed from the list because, according to Cambodia's Interpol office, "the case involves politics in Ukraine and Russia" (CEPI Ukraine Watch, Central European Policy Institute, 30 March 2015, http://www.cepolicy.org).

(3) On March 18, the State Financial Inspector, just removed from his post, announces corruption in the privatization of Ukraine Telecom (http://vesti-ukr.com/strana/92925-jeks-glava-gosfininspekcii-vo-vremja-otcheta-v-rade-obvinil-jacenjuka-v-korrupcii).

(4) On March 28th, the head and deputy head of Ukraine's Emergency Situations Ministry, both included in the quota of government positions given to Yatsenyuk's National Front in the wake of the elections to the Rada, are arrested before television cameras at a cabinet meeting (http://www.regnum.ru/news/polit/1909926.html#ixzz3Vuz8aiUO and http://vesti-ukr.com/strana/93768-glava-gschs-bochkovskogo-zaderzhali-na-zasedanii-kabmina).

(5) Ukraine's General Prosecutor orders on March 29th that the investigation into the Yatsenyuk government's alleged corruption to be completed within one month (http://vesti-ukr.com/strana/94275-genprokurature-dan-mesjac-na-rassledovanie-faktov-korrupcii-v-kabmine).

(6) On April 3rd Petro Poroshenko Bloc deputy in the Rada Sergey Kaplin calls Yatsenyuk's removal from executing the powers of prime minister presumably for the duration of the investigation into alleged corruption in his cabinet (http://vesti-ukr.com/strana/94997-v-rade-iniciirovali-otstranenie-jacenjuka).

(8) On the same day, Poroshenko introduced into parliament amendments to the law on martial law (http://vesti-ukr.com/strana/95036-poroshenko-reshil-opredelit-pravila-vojny-v-ukraine).

(9) On April 6th, independent Rada deputy from the Svoboda Party, Yuriy Levchenko, accused MVD chief Arsen Avakov of covering for the Yatsenyuk government's corruption and functioning as a protector for the machinations of the arrested Emergency Situations Ministry officials (http://nbnews.com.ua/ru/news/146969/ and http://vesti-ukr.com/strana/95003-v-bpp-obvinili-avakova-v-kryshevanii-korrupcionnyh-shem-bochkovskogo).

(10) On the same day an official search of the office of MVD deputy chief Sergei Chebotar discovered a hidden bookkeeping record, gold bullion and other valuables, reported Rada deputy Kaplin (http://vesti-ukr.com/politika/95209-otstavka-jacenjuka-potopim-premera-potonut-vse).

(11) The Rada establishes a commission on April 6th to investigate "Yatsenyuk's machinations" and corruption in the cabinet, including in the housing and communal services sphere (http://vesti-ukr.com/strana/95307-rada-dogovorilas-rassledovat-mahinacii-jacenjuka).

(12) On April 6th, two of the three large ultranationalist party factions besides the National Front in the Rada indicated their support for Yatsenyuk's possible removal; the Radical Party's leader Oleh Lyashko was less unequivocal than Ftaherland's Yulia Tymoshenko who said her faction would support Kaplin's initiative (http://vesti-ukr.com/politika/95209-otstavka-jacenjuka-potopim-premera-potonut-vse).

(13) On the same day, in the now ritualistic Maidan fashion, Rada deputies in National Front's Rada faction, Viktoriya Syumar and  Miksim Burbak, state directly or imply, respectively, that "Russian agents" and Moscow are behind the move to discredit the Yatsenyuk government (http://vesti-ukr.com/politika/95209-otstavka-jacenjuka-potopim-premera-potonut-vse).

(14) On April 6th, leader of the non-parliamentary neo-fascist party 'Svoboda', Oleh Tyahnibok, called for a mass demonstration at the walls of the Supreme rada calling for Yatsenyuk's resignation (http://vesti-ukr.com/strana/95218-svoboda-pozvala-vseh-na-antipravitelstvennyj-miting-pod-stenami-vr).

(15) On April 2nd, President Poroshenko, speaking at Chernigov State University founded in the 17th century, states: "I think there are few universities in Europe that trace their history from 17oo. When there had already been cathedrals in Chernigov for several centuries, Moscow was only a swamp" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrSvZXcS2nU).

(16) Notorious neo-fascist Right Sector leader Dmitro Yarosh is appointed an advisor to Ukraine's Defense Minister on April 5th.

It appears that Poroshenko is administering the carrot and the stick to bring potential challengers into line. Poroshenko may be only marginally better than the corrupt actors in the government and the extremist actors of the Right Sector. It should be noted that there are Right Sector members and associates in both Yatsenyuk's National Front party and in Poroshenko's Petro Poroshenko Bloc, some of whom were removed from its Rada faction and from positions in the Dnepropetrovsk Oblast administration after Kolomoiskii's defeat. In terms of corruption, Poroshenko has not relinquished his business holdings as he promised in his various political campaigns, and remains the owner of Ukraine's Channel 5 television, Roshen, and much else. These holdings were not put in a trust, as is the practice in democratic states.

If Yatsenyuk is removed, it can be expected that the nationalist parties will attempt to move an even more nationalistic politician into his office. Tyahnibok may entertain fantasies in this regard, or he may try to orchestrate a demonstration into a neo-fascist Maidan 3. Tymoshenko may position herself for a comeback, which cannot be entirely ruled out. Poroshenko may find it difficult if not impossible to hold together the parliamentary majority he formed with the National Front. The latter might split, allowing the one or more of other nationalist factions to emerge as kingmaker.
 
 #34
Deutsche Welle
April 7, 2015
Ukraine: Another crisis for 'Europe's bread basket'

A year on since the start of the Ukraine crisis, the power struggle between Brussels, Moscow and Kyiv shows no sign of abating. International affairs expert, Alexander Mercouris, told DW about the wider implications.

Deutsche Welle: Ukraine is one of the world's top exporters of wheat. The former Soviet Republic is known as "Europe's bread basket." How has the conflict affected Ukraine's agricultural purse?

Alexander Mercouris: The whole of the Ukrainian economy, including its agricultural sector, is in deep crisis. We now have a situation in Ukraine, according to official figures, that the economy contracted 7.5 percent in 2014, and it is expected to contract by at least a further 6 percent in 2015.

There is talk of a financial default; there is also talk that inflation is increasing to an extraordinary degree by 260 percent since the start of the year. This is affecting every sector of the economy, including the agricultural economy, which ought to be one of Europe's strongest. Ukraine has some of the richest agricultural land in the world, it has been an agricultural bread basket for all of previous modern history, the city of Odessa was constructed to enable Ukraine to export its food and all of this has come to a stop.

DW: China brokered a major deal with former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych before the political crisis erupted. It would have been one of the biggest so-called "land grab" agreements, with Beijing eventually controlling three million hectares, an area equivalent to Belgium. This is now being disputed by the present government. How can Ukraine even go back to the idea of international trade, given the current crisis?

It needs to stabilize its political situation and achieve a measure of peace within the country because while there is a conflict of the sort that we are seeing, realistically investment is not going to come there.

Ukraine needs investment because potentially it is a very rich country. What it needs is people coming in, bringing their money and their expertise to make all the various parts of the economy start working again.

The Chinese deal may not have been the best way to do it because essentially what it did was cede control of an area of Ukraine to China. It was, however, a way of bringing Chinese investment into Ukraine. Simply cancelling, tearing up these agreements is not going to be a way of attracting more Chinese investment into Ukraine and it is not going to make a good impression on other potential investors. We need a stable political framework, a stable economic policy, and a stable legal framework. If all of these things come together, Ukraine actually has great potential.

DW: Should all of the parties involved in the crisis also be focusing on the socio-economic future of Ukraine, as well as its political stability?

They should be, but the problem is that they are not, and the reason is because this has now become very much an ideological conflict and a geopolitical one. We have two completely different visions of Ukraine, which have increasingly little connection with the lives that ordinary people are living, which are becoming ever harder. It is a dispute between ideologies. It is a dispute within the elite. It is a dispute between great outside powers, but it is no longer a dispute that has any real agenda for the Ukrainian people who are being forgotten, and who are the victims as a consequence.

DW: Can "Europe's bread basket" truly recover from this political crisis without a joint effort from the EU and Russia?

I think it can recover provided that a joint effort is there. If it is not there, then I do not think it can happen. I think this is actually well understood in Russia and the EU by a lot of people, but there are still other people in both blocs who do not want to accept that. If these two blocs, the EU and Russia, came together in Ukraine, the country's potential would be enormous. It could be made to work very well. It could work for the Ukrainian people, it could work for Russia, and it could work for the EU. It could provide a bridge between these two great regions, and have a consolidating role for Europe. Without one or the other, it is impossible because each part of Ukraine - the east faces towards Russia, the west faces towards Europe - unless both parties are involved in Ukraine, the whole thing cannot stand together.

Alexander Mercouris is a former human rights lawyer and the International Affairs Editor of Russia Insider.

This interview was conducted by Lucia Walton.
 
 #35
Fort Russ/Cont
http://fortruss.blogspot.ru
April 7, 2015
Why Putin didn't just pull a "Saudi Arabia" in Ukraine

Rostislav Ishchenko for Cont [http://cont.ws/post/80993/]
Translated by Kristina Rus

The Weapon of Retribution

In the past year, an increasing number of Russians support the disputed opinion that Russia should have spit on the world and quickly occupied Ukraine in March 2014. Now, in light of the actions of Saudi Arabia and its allies in Yemen, the notion that Russia should not follow the protocol, but follow the example of the USA, and now the "wretched Saudis," by bombing left and right is spreading like wild fire (the particularly zealous recommend to use nuclear weapons) to put everyone in their place, afraid to make a peep, and the state interests of the Russian Federation would, thus, be protected worldwide.

Since it is obvious that the tendency of society for mindless use of force in both cases has common roots, and because in both cases it is motivated by Russian national interests, it must be worthwhile to take a detailed look at how realistic are such ideas and whether they really correspond to the national interests of the Russian Federation.

First, contrary to the societal consensus, Russia's armed forces cannot stretch like rubber. To ensure the existence of more or less stable regime in Kiev, not less than one hundred thousand Russian soldiers would have to be stationed in Ukraine on a permanent basis. This is the minimum number of troops under favorable conditions.

If the US was able to organize the Bandera underground, it would have to be increased at least twice. These are not only maintenance costs. And not only unavoidable losses (the hope is they would be relatively small). It is also the need to plug holes that appear in other areas from engaging so many troops. And this is only in Ukraine.

But if Russia goes the way of solving all problems with military means, it would quickly be presented with a dozen more crises requiring an analogous military response. There would simply not be enough armed forces for all potential expeditionary corps.

Secondly, in this case, the sanctions that nobody cares about today, would mean a complete rupture of economic relations with the West. As for the Russian economy, it can certainly survive and even adapt to the autarky regime, only for the decade that it needs to rebuild, it can only meet the minimum needs of the society. Emphasizing: not the minimum needs of fans of jamon and professional oyster eaters, but the whole society.

This perestroika would require all efforts, because the method of the wild 90's (when most of the society was simply abandoned to survive on their own) now is not suitable, the problem would be solved only with the introduction of a system that is painfully reminiscent of war communism, with not even coupons, but piecemeal distribution of food and manufactured goods, and artificial restriction of demand to only the exclusively necessary for mere survival (no frills). I don't think that it would appeal to the society accustomed to abundance. Everyone has something to lose here. Moreover, we are not talking about waiting a year or two.

In a maximum of ten years (ideally) we could talk about starting some kind of minimal growth. In about 20 years we could get back to the minimum level of welfare (not as today, but at least the level of the late 50's-early 60's of the last century). At the end, the "perestroika" generation would die in poverty, and the new generation would grow up in poverty. In real poverty, not when there is not enough for a "Lexus," and thus you have to drive a "Ford".

Thirdly, if you send your troops somewhere, then you have to assume full responsibility for the occupied territory. Not only moral (it's easy), but also economic, financial, political, and administrative. And it all costs money. A lot of money. And the costs may not be recovered. The USSR has invested tens of billions of real (the old) dollars into Afghanistan, buried nearly fifteen thousand soldiers and was forced to leave. The USSR had one Afghanistan, while Russia has a dozen hot spots, where it would have to send troops (and that's just at first glance).

Fourthly, I was not mistaken when I said that the troops would have to be send everywhere. If you once decided to achieve results with military force, you have to solve all your problems in the same way, until you have terrorized everyone to surrender after the first threat. But practice and experience shows that there are always those who are not afraid.

Even the USA, which was at the peak of its power in the 1990's, had to accept "the concept of the simultaneous conduct of two wars of medium intensity". Although they couldn't really pull two wars of medium intensity simultaneously and the concept had to be revised, but the fact that such a need arose, testifies that even a sole hegemon, who had at that time undeniable military superiority over the entire planet, constantly faced with resistance, and at several points at once. That is, there was a need to constantly wage war.

Well, fifthly, the USA took that path - of constant projection of force and permanent deployment of the armed forces to ensure their political interests. As a result, since the mid-90's, they lost their moral superiority, the sole lead, broke their back economically and financially, stretched their military forces across the planet so that they are not able to collect a more or less meaningful team of allies. For carrying out a minor, by the standards of the US, operation in Libya, the forces of all the leading (in military terms) NATO countries were involved, and the preparation took over two months. In Yemen, they had to use the armed forces of the Saudi monarchy, putting in jeopardy the key US ally in the region, since there was simply not enough of their own. The US could not pull another war.

Sixth, even when the USSR had reliable allies, and like Saudi Arabia in Yemen, Cuban volunteers fought in Angola, and the regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia was overthrown by the Vietnamese army, the burden on the Soviet economy was still great. But then the USSR also had the best in numbers and armament ground forces in the world (3 million people, not counting the allied armies) and second in the world Navy after the U.S., constantly present in all the oceans.

Today Russia has no such military or economic opportunities, as the USSR in the 80's. And if even then the Soviet leadership sought in each individual case to avoid direct military intervention, then now this is even more important. In the end, war is the last argument which is applied only when all other avenues to protect your legitimate interests are finally exhausted. The wise Sun Tzu said that the best war is one that is not started.

In the end, if the U.S., which for two decades is fighting whenever they want, against whoever they want and how they want, did not reach their goals and are now trying to impose on Russia the same method to solve problems, to draw it into the infinity of military conflicts, then perhaps they are doing it not from a good life and not in good faith.

But to win the "war that never began" is very possible. While you are not fighting, you don't waist your resources. On the contrary, your military power and your economic opportunities only increase. And they increase the more, the longer you are outside of the fight at the time when your opponent is fighting. Not accidentally, the US won those wars, in which it almost did not participate (WWI and WWII).

Not accidentally they are trying to suck Russia into battle now, and to remain on the sidelines. And they are most annoyed by the fact that the Russian leadership has managed to flip the situation: the United States got bogged down in numerous conflicts, and Russia, as a wise monkey from a Chinese Proverb, is sitting on a hill and watching the tigers fighting in the valley, so when they exhaust each other, to come down and remove the skins.

The strongest weapon of retribution is to allow the enemy to weaken himself in the process of the hunt of the infinitely elusive final military victory, and then to accept the surrender of the enemy who is not only unable to fight any longer, but needs your help just for basic survival. This is the highest skill of a politician, but to heroically die on the battlefield in vain, which could be avoided - is not a method, and not a result.
 
 #36
Atlantic Council
April 7, 2015
Former Putin Advisor on Kremlin's Big War
BY ASHISH SEN
   
Will Sanctions on Russia, Weapons for Ukrainians Keep Putin at Bay?

Western sanctions on Russia are not working and a proposal to provide defensive weapons to Ukrainian security forces will not deter the Kremlin's war in Ukraine, according to Andrei Illarionov, a former advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"For those few people who are there [on the sanctions list], yes, it is rather painful," but otherwise sanctions are "barely seen" in Russia, Illarionov said at an event hosted by the Atlantic Council's Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center April 7.

Arming Ukrainian troops "is not something that can stop" Russia's actions in Ukraine, said Illarionov, a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity at the Cato Institute.

Illarionov said Putin has been planning his war on Ukraine for more than a decade spurred on by Ukraine's shift toward the European Union in 1991.

It was German Chancellor Angela Merkel's decision in 2013 to try and remove obstacles to Ukraine's association with the European Union that set off alarm bells in the Kremlin, Putin's former economic advisor said.

John E. Herbst, Director of the Atlantic Council's Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center, moderated the discussion. He wanted to know what would be Putin's next target.

Putin is playing a "big game" aimed at forcing his opponents to negotiate and if they don't the "stakes on the ground might be raised in Ukraine, in Georgia, in Moldova, in Belarus, in the Baltics," said Illarionov.
 
 #37
Ukraine Today
http://uatoday.tv
April 6, 2015
Former US Ambassador says Putin's ultimate goal is to destabilise Ukraine

Former US ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst has called on the west to extend sanctions against Russia because the ceasefire agreed to by Ukraine and Russia is not holding. Herbst believes that the status quo is contributing to Putin's ultimate goal, which is to destabilise Ukraine.

Herbst, seen here in file footage, was US ambassador to Ukraine from 2003 - 2006. During an interview with Ukrainian TV channel Inter over the weekend, he stated that since the ceasefire was signed back in February, 75 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed in eastern Ukraine and urged western leaders to tighten sanctions on Russia.

Late last year in an interview with Ukrainian news agency TSN, Herbst was critical of Obama for dragging his heels on lethal aid shipments to Ukraine. He gave his thoughts on when lethal aid might arrive to Ukraine.

"There's a chance of this but I'd say the chances are not very high. I personally believe that sometime over the next six or eight months this will happen, but I can't guarantee it, I think eventually congress will act and the administration will change its position."

Four months on from that interview and there are still no lethal arms shipments from Washington, although the White House has said all options are still on the table, it remains to be seen if US President Barack Obama will heed calls on both sides of the aisle to send weapons to Ukraine.
 
 #38
Stephen Cohen Lecture, "The Ukrainian Crisis: A New Cold War?" on the occasion of the 20th Anniversary of the Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies Program, Fairfield University
February 5, 2015

I used to impress people in weather like this, by saying "its nothing for those of us who have lived many years in Moscow". Tonight it's something. And so much of a something that I am amazed so many people are here tonight.

I assume that 90 percent of you are here to honor the Twentieth Anniversary of the Russian, East European, Central Asian Studies Program, and the other 10 percent of you are here to heckle me.

I am a veteran of Russian Studies programs. My career, 45 going on 50 years I guess, I have spent my entire scholarly career in Russian Studies programs. First at Indiana University, then at Columbia, then at Princeton where I headed the program. Then at NYU where I am now.  So I am an appropriate person to say how much we are in debt to Fairfield University for nurturing --founding and nurturing -- a Russian Studies program in the 90s when other universities were closing theirs down because they thought Russian Studies was only about national security. As though they had never heard of Pushkin or Tolstoy or Russia's contributions to science.

So Fairfield is really I'd say, a pioneer in the post Cold War, (we may be in a new cold war) Russian Studies field. And that makes me very happy because I am not only a veteran of Russian Studies, but I'm a fan, an advocate. And believe me it's a fighting battle to keep them alive, or it was until a year ago. The government had taken its money back and now it's debating putting it back in the field. That's not the best reason to fund Russian Studies, but we take it where we can get it.

The other reason I think I'm appropriate person to be here, although I know some of you might not think so, is that I've been here before, haven't I?  You recall Professor Dew? I don't know when it was, but it was more than 20 years ago. About the time you founded the program. And my wife Katrina vanden Heuvel has been here on her own to debate Bill Crystal, I think, on another issue. So I think we are appropriate at least generationally and in terms of our commitment to Russian Studies.

Normally my talk tonight would probably be about fact.  Why, kind of boring, but heartfelt and important, why we need to be studying Russia in this country just as part of the way we educate our young people and ourselves.

Or I might have told you the story of my own educational journey from Kentucky, where I grew up, through Indiana, by chance to Birmingham, England, by chance to Russia, where I began what's been my life with Russia. I have probably spent a quarter of my life living in Russia and some ninety percent, between marriages and children and grandchildren, thinking about Russia.

But these aren't normal times; these are dire times. Our lives and our future I think are at stake. I'm now a grandfather, so I can say so are the futures of our children and our grandchildren. These are very fateful times.
How fateful? Today we learned, Professor McFadden referred to it, that desperate about what's happened, the President of France and the Chancellor of Germany got on a plane and flew to Kiev. It's eight hours earlier so yesterday and now they're on their way to Moscow and I gather Merkel's coming to Washington tomorrow or the next day. The Europeans are in full panic and want this ended. But they think the train may have left the station.

So, our times. The Ukrainian crisis has grown, I think it should be clear to anyone by now, to the most dangerous and possibly fateful international crisis at least since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Now I look out in the audience and I see people who not only were not born at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but weren't alive when the Soviet Union ended. But believe me when I tell you that during the Cuban Missile Crisis literally the discussion was "Are we all going to die in a nuclear war?" And we escaped that crisis. And if you don't know about it, now is a good time to go back and read about it. People thought it would never come again, but it may be. This is the worst international crisis since the Cuban Missile Crisis because as we talk the United States and Russia, the two nuclear powers of the world, are getting eyeball to eyeball.

The origins of the Ukrainian Crisis are to be found back in the 1990s at least. If someone was going to write a history of how we got where we are today you'd start with the end of the Soviet Union, you might start 400 years ago if you are going to do Ukraine. But the immediate history begins in the 90s. But it's current history and even the youngest person in this room will remember. It's been in the newspapers, on the telly, or as Ed Snowden, Edward Snowden told my wife and I when we interviewed him in Moscow a few months ago and I said "you watch T.V.?" he looked at me like I was crazy. He says "Nobody watches T.V. anymore." He says "I see it on the computer." And then I realized my 23-year-old daughter doesn't have a T.V. set.

So I understand that, but you all know this current crisis that began in November 2013. And its history is clear and I think the facts of it are not disputable, so we need to remind ourselves of what happened.  In November 2013, a political dispute in Kiev over a proposed European trade agreement, led to street protests that formed on a famous square called the Maidan.  And led then, depending on how you look at it, this is the dispute, to the overthrow or the downfall of Ukraine's elected president, Viktor Yanukovych. He was corrupt, he wasn't courageous, but he was elected, and everybody agreed the election had been fair in Ukraine. He was made to go away. And that event in Kiev, whether you look at it as a coup as the Russians do, or as a glorious democratic revolution, as some in the west and in Ukraine do, it's a matter of interpretation, that then led to protests in eastern Ukraine. Because Yanukovych represented them, his electoral base was largely in eastern Ukraine. And that then led, directly or indirectly, to Russia's annexation of Crimea. And that led to the onset of the ongoing Ukrainian civil war between the countries, not entirely but largely pro-Russian, eastern provinces that border Russia and its western provinces.

That civil war grew into a new Cold War between the United States and NATO on the one hand, and Russia on the other. And now, as we talk, it has become a proxy American-Russian war. Russia indisputably is abetting militarily the rebel fighters, or the separatists or whatever you want to call them, in eastern Ukraine. And the United States somewhat less openly is funding an army, Kiev's armies. And as you know there is now a debate in Washington and a proposal that we fund them much more grandly. I believe 3 billion dollars worth in the next 3 years with much more substantial weapons.

Still worse, this new Cold War, and there is no doubt about it, call it by whatever name, newspapers can't bring themselves to say, they call it "the worst crisis since the Cold War", they can't bring them to say it's a new Cold War. Fine, they're hung up about this for various journalistic reasons. But this new Cold War maybe more dangerous than the last one, which we barely survived.

Why? Well, first of all, think about it. The epicenter of the last Cold War was in Berlin, a long way from Moscow. The epicenter of this Cold War is in Ukraine, right plunk on Russia's borders. And moreover, right in the center of Russia's Slavic civilization, which it shares with a large part of Ukraine. Not all of it, but certainly with many Ukrainians. Through inter-marriage, through history, through culture, through language, through religion. So that's why, one reason why you can imagine all the potential for misunderstanding, mishap, provocation, accident. A thousand-fold more dangerous than when the center was in Berlin.

Secondly, because this Cold War is unfolding in what was called in the run up to World War I, "A fog of war". That expression refers to misinformation. Before World War I there was no email, there was no digital communication. So it took a while. It's flying today.  It's information from Moscow, yes. It's information from Kiev, excuse me, misinformation from Kiev, it's misinformation from Washington, it's misinformation out of Brussels. Even those of us who are following this, who have the language skills to read it in the original, who know the history, often cannot figure out who's telling the truth and who's lying. It is hard. It is hard to know the actual facts, but it comes down to the fact that the facts are all bad and dangerous and getting worse.

Third, it could be more dangerous this Cold War, because it lacks the mutual rules and practices of constraint that were developed over the decades of the last Cold War. Moscow and Washington worked out certain agreements. The famous red phone, the hot line. The certain "let's check this before we act". The certain agreement that "we won't do this and you won't do that". That we had red lines and boundaries that we knew had not better not be crossed. None of that now exists, none of it. Still worse, decades of cooperative relations with Russia, developed over decades, are now being shredded. Shredded. From education to space exploration. David probably knows other. The cultural museums can't get the exhibits. I mean everything is being shredded. Who's to blame? Both, everybody's reacting. You shred this, I'm shredding that.

There is even talk, which I hadn't heard ever I think, on both sides of using tactical nuclear weapons, as though tactical nuclear weapons because you can only fire them 300 or a thousand miles aren't nuclear weapons. They're radioactive. All those restraints that these were no-nos after the Cuban Missile Crisis seem to be gone.

Fourth and this is important, negotiations. Attempts to restore cooperation between Moscow and Washington are nearly completely blocked by something new. I call it the demonization of Vladimir Putin. The President of Russia. The personal vilification where he is called regularly in The New York Times, on the Op-Ed page, by columnists who are supposed to represent our highest form of informed enlightened commentary, where he is called "a thug". "Putin the thug", "Putin the bandit", "Putin the murderer".  I entered the field during the Khrushchev era. I do not recall in all my years in Soviet Studies, the American media, the American political establishment personally vilifying a soviet, communist Russian leader the way they are Putin.

And this is becoming an institution in the United States. When Hilary Clinton, who wants to be President of the United States, says Putin is Hitler, and if she becomes President, he's going to be eager to see her and talk about cooperation. Because if somebody is Hitler you kill him, you don't negotiate with him, we know that. And the way Obama with personal contempt talks about Putin does not abet a solution. So this demonization of Putin has become another reason why this might be even more dangerous.

And finally, this Cold War may be more perilous because there is no effective American opposition to it. I was on the, I wouldn't say the front lines; I was involved in what used to be called the pro-d�tente movement during the last Cold War. Those of us who wanted to taper down, tamp down the Cold War and seek cooperation. And it was a vigorous movement. We were in the minority, but we had allies in the White House, aides of the President, in the State Department, maybe a dozen Senators, maybe a score or two of people in Congress. We had ready, easy access to The New York Times, The Washington Post, to television and radio. There is none of that today. The handful of us today, who oppose or are critical of the American contribution to this situation can find no allies in the State Department, Congress, and we can't get on the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, or The New York Post. The Nation magazine, for which I write, and, as my wife likes to say, full disclosure, whatever that means, I'm not giving you the full disclosure, but partial disclosure, edited by my wife Katrina vanden Heuvel, is a very important and has become on this issue, I think the  most important alternative medium in the United States. But it doesn't penetrate for some reason the walls of Congress or the White House. All the progressives self identify. Seem to have voted for these congressional bills and resolutions last month. Basically declaring war on Russia. Without debate.  This is astonishing. This is a failure of our democracy. So the question becomes "How did this happen?". "How did this happen?"

After all, 25 years ago when the Soviet Union ended, nearly 25 years ago, when the kids in the room, the young people in this room, excuse me for calling you kids, my daughter doesn't like that either, might not know this but we were told by the Clinton administration for a decade nearly, that there would now be an era of American-Russian strategic partnership and friendship. The Cold War was over forever. And that from now on we were allies with Russia. So how did this happen a quarter of a century later that we're now in the worst conflict with Russia since the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Now the explanation that you know because you hear it everywhere in the mainstream daily, it's grown into an orthodox, a consensual explanation, is this. Back in the 1990s under President Clinton and President Yeltsin of Russia everything was good. Things were fine. And then came Putin in the year 2000. President of Russia and he spoiled it all. In short, whatever bad has happened has nothing to do with American policy, it has all to do with Russia. Russia, or Putin personally, is to blame.

Now I'm gonna talk about this, but before I do, because it was my wife, Katrina vanden Heuvel, who reminded me of it, that the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said something once that people forgot but it's crucial for all of us. He wasn't a politically correct man so he put it only in the male gender. But he said, "Every man is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts." That's good. That's essential.

There look to be maybe 200 or more of you here. Your opinions you are entitled to. Your facts you are not. As at a good magazine, as at a good news agency, as in any news medium, you fact check your facts and if they are wrong they don't get to count. They're out. So let's proceed with Moynihan's adage.

The orthodox, consensual view of how we got where we are with Russia, including the Ukrainian crisis, is based largely on historical fallacies and political myths. On Russophobia, a hang over from the old Cold War and retrospective demonization of Putin. Consider these primary examples. Take the oldest historical myth that is the basis for this narrative. It goes like this. Since then end of the Soviet Union Washington treated Moscow as a desired friend and partner. And in the end Moscow was unable or unwilling to accept the American embrace and rejected it slowly, but then emphatically under Putin.

What's the historical reality? The Clinton administration not only when it was in power, got in its head that the United States won the Cold War when the Soviet Union ended. It didn't bother them that Reagan, Gorbachev, and the first President Bush had all announced the Cold War was over two years before the Soviet Union ended. In 1989. The Soviet Union ended in December 1991. But this was a good story. The Soviet Union ended, we won the Cold War, teach our children this story. And we have taught our children this story, this false story for nearly 25 years. And our politicians have acted on it. Which meant, beginning with Clinton, his administration, that since we defeated the Soviet Union, post Soviet Russia was kind of like Japan and Germany after World War II. Russia no longer had full sovereign rights or interests at home or abroad. We could dictate to Russia. We would help them, but in return they were to be mindful of our preferences as to their domestic and foreign policy. And act on them.

The result was, I call it a winner take all American policy in regard to Russia. You know, I don't have to tell you; it was spearheaded by the expansion of NATO, which is not a sorority, not a fraternity, not a charity, but a military organization. In fact the largest military alliance in the world. Most powerful. Its expansion, beginning under Clinton, all the way to Russia's borders. Now we can argue whether that was a good or bad thing. I think it was a terrible thing, but there's an argument to made it was a good thing. I'm open to hear the argument. But can we say it didn't happen? And we could have, Russia should have said "shall we say, oh never mind. It's okay." As though if a Russian military or a Chinese lets say, military alliance showed up in Mexico tomorrow on the Rio Grande we'd say "Oh great, we'd love to have more neighbors." We'd all be at the White House demanding Obama do something. Nuke 'em. I mean can we not walk in the other fella's shoes for one minute and see what this looked like over 20 years as it was coming at Russia?

And there was more, there was diplomacy, but it was an American diplomacy marked by broken promises and concessions made by the Russians that were not reciprocated. Let me give the young people in the room an example they probably don't know about.  After the United States was attacked on 9-11 the first world leader to call President Bush was Putin. He said, "George, it's horrible. We're with you. Tell us what we can do. We have major military assets in Afghanistan; they're yours. We have a fighting force. We have terrific intelligence.  We have transit bases;  it's all yours." And since Bush was going to send a land force to dislodge the Taliban, Bush took this. And it cost Putin a lot at home. His security people didn't like this, but he did it anyway. And Putin saved a lot of American lives in that war. Mark that down. What did he get in return? Trivia question. Within two years I think, Bush had expanded NATO right to Russia's borders. And, equally fateful, Bush took the United States unilaterally out of what was called the anti-ballistic missile treaty. Which had been the most stabilizing nuclear treaty in the history of the world because it prohibited the kinds of missiles that can eliminate the other side's retaliatory response.

And that led to missile defense and that now led to the new controversy about building missile defense installations on Russia's borders. So that's what Putin got for saving American lives. So when you hear Putin say that "nobody listens to Putin", you might try reading his speeches, they're all at Kremlin.ru in English, "I tried to make a partnership with the United States and I was rebuffed". Remember what happened, and remember what it cost Putin politically at home. They still remind him of his trusting nature toward the Americans. That was a major turning point.

Somewhere along the way, probably in the late 90s, certainly by the early part of the twentieth century, in this American winner take all approach Ukraine became the brass ring. Well, we've expanded NATO to the Baltics. And Brzezinski has told us that without Ukraine Russia will never be a great power again. We believe that. So we need to get Ukraine into NATO, or at least into the EU with maybe a back channel to NATO. But first Georgia because that's the entry to Russia's soft underbelly in the Caucasus. So we had the 2008 war in Georgia, also a proxy war. Did that alert anybody this was a bad idea, that Russia had red lines? No. We pushed on. We pushed on to Ukraine. Maybe it's a good policy, but you can't deny the facts.

So along the way, and here's another bit of current punditry that we hear, "oh, in Ukraine Russia's destroying the European security system by annexing Crimea and supporting the fighters in East Ukraine." Maybe that's true, but Russia was systematically excluded from the European security system after the end of the Soviet Union because it wasn't brought into NATO, the cooperation with NATO was fictitious and we were expanding NATO to its borders. In other words we were building a European security system at the expense of NATO. So when we say to Putin, "Oh, you're destroying the security system" he said "Yes, it's your security system it's not mine."

Gorbachev and Reagan agreed on something very important. This is where Reagan became a great man. If you try to build your security in a way that the other guy thinks you're endangering his or her security, it is no security at all. All you'll get is mutual buildups. You have to do it in a way that each side, both sides, feel reassured and secure. Expanding NATO to Russia's borders was  obviously the reverse of that. That's, by the way, why some young conservatives, and some not  so young,  who adore Reagan, see all this as a repudiation of Reagan's legacy. And they're right. If we just talked about Reagan in terms of what he did with Gorbachev, they're absolutely right. Certainly that's how the Russians have seen it.

So now come to the current crisis. And the myths. The American orthodox assertion is that this is all due to Putin's aggression. That's the phrase, "Putin's aggression". And here too we find myths beginning with this fundamental one. And I apologize to Ukrainians or people of Ukrainian descent in the room, but I think if they think about it they'll agree with me. All this talk of the Ukraine and the Ukrainian people striving to be free of Russian influence and join the West is, to put it politely, fragmentary. For centuries Ukraine has been a divided country. It's not my fault, it's not Putin's fault, it's God's fault. Centuries of being formed from fragments of different empires left Ukraine divided. Religiously, ethnically, economically, politically, geographically. Mainly between the pro-Russian eastern provinces and the western provinces that look to Europe, but not only, you find both sides in central Ukraine. Even in Kiev.

When this crisis began, Ukraine had one state. But it wasn't in the sense that the rhetoric has it one country. It should have remained one country; it was struggling to do that after the end of the Soviet Union. But anybody who was going to tamper with this delicate balance in Ukraine either had an evil deed on his or her mind or didn't know history. Or didn't know Ukraine. So the civil war that we now see in Ukraine is not Putin's fault. It was latent, at very least latent, in Ukrainian society in history all along.

That brings us to a related myth. In November 2013 the European union backed by Washington offered, this is the myth, President Yanukovych of Ukraine a benign generous association agreement with the European union, but Putin bullied and bribed poor Yanukovych to refusing it and then Yanukovych fell to the protests in the streets. What's the reality? The European union proposal was a reckless provocation. It told Yanukovych, even though Putin had said let's do a three-way plan to save Ukraine from meltdown, Moscow, Kiev, Brussels, it told Yanukovych, the European union did, "choose between Russia and us, the west." That was an ultimatum. Why would anybody do this?

Nor was it so benign the financial terms that the European union was offering was virtually no money up front and austerity measures of the kind that Greece has just rejected in a vote. And that savaged European society, 25 percent unemployment, for a decade. What would this have done to Ukraine, which was already on financial ropes, with an elderly population dependent on pensions? What would this have done?

Moreover, nobody seems to read anything anymore. But buried in the thousand-page protocol was the section called Military Security Issues. Which if signed, Yanukovych and Ukraine would have been obliged to abide by Europe's military and security policies. NATO wasn't mentioned, but what are Europe's military and security policies? They are those of NATO. This was clearly an attempt, all right, let me take that back, this seems to have been an attempt in fine print to hook Ukraine to NATO, I'm mixing my metaphors, through the back door. So it wasn't all that benign and Russia has lawyers and they read everything and they knew what was going on. Or thought they did. And they weren't happy about it.

So it wasn't Putin's aggression that initiated the crisis but a kind of velvet aggression by Washington and Brussels to bring all of Ukraine into the west and at least into the embrace of NATO. And here arises another myth:  "The Ukrainian Civil War was triggered by Putin's aggressive response to peaceful demonstrations at the Maidan." The reality was different and you will remember it because you saw it on T.V. You saw the people in the streets throwing flaming Molotov cocktails. You saw that they were increasingly armed. You saw that people were being shot. You saw the burning barricades. You saw the assaults on government buildings. The reality is, is that by February of last year,  what had begun as peaceful protests had become violent. And the violence was inspired in part, in large part, by ultra nationalist Ukrainian forces. Some of whom indisputably, any reasonable person would call neo-fascist.

What does that mean? They want to rid Ukraine of Jews, gypsies, Russians, homosexuals, anybody who's not a pure ethnic Ukrainian. Whatever that is after centuries of mixed marriage. That's their written ideology. Leave aside that they carry around pictures of Hitler. Maybe its just ornamentation. Read your programs. So these people, small, small minority, got traction in the streets. And influenced events.

What happened? What happened? The violence grew. Three European foreign ministers flew to Kiev and they brokered an agreement between the president and the street demonstrators' leaders. They said "look, Yanukovych will form a coalition government, bring in the opposition leaders, he will stay as president until December", February to  December, whatever that is 10 months, "and then there'll be new elections." They brokered a democratic agreement. I don't know who initiated the phone call but within minutes Putin and Obama were on the phone with each other. Apparently Obama said to Putin, "do you support this?" Putin said, "I do." Putin said to Obama, "do you support this?" Obama said, "I do." Within hours it was overthrown as street protestors marched on the Presidential palace. Yanukovych fled to Russia. A new government was formed and was immediately endorsed by the United States and Europe. The new government. Nobody ever mentioned in the west again the agreement they had negotiated themselves. The western diplomats. And out of that came all the rest. Out of that came all the rest.

All the rest meaning Russia's annexation of Crimea, the rebellion in eastern Ukraine, the civil war, the new American Cold War, and Merkel's flight, desperate flight to Kiev, Moscow, and Washington in these last two or three days to ward off actual war.

Finally there is today's perilous fallacy. Which Merkel seemed to publicly support, but apparently has rethought. Though Obama has not. That all this will end only if Putin stops his aggression. That's it. We heard this from Kerry today. We heard it from McCain. We hear it from Pasaki, the spokesman at the State Department. Putin has to stop aggressing and everything will be okay. They call it "we are going to give him a diplomatic off ramp" whatever that is. It's a clich�. They don't say what the diplomacy is. In other words if he capitulates, we're good with that. Everything, we'll call off the sanctions, and he can have Russia, or at least part of it and that's it. All over.

But the reality is two-fold. First I ask you, and I ask anybody from Ukraine, who knows Ukraine in this room, there are 4 to 5 million people still living in Donbass. Donbass is the industrial heartland of eastern Ukraine. I don't know the numbers because so many have  fled, we had a fact checking problem, not I, but my wife did at The Nation. A very good piece about this on The Nation blog by Lev Golinkin who was born in eastern Ukraine. He's an American citizen writing about these people. Do these 5 million people have no humanity? No agency? The American, The New York Times refers to them as "Putin's thugs". Babies, grandmothers, grandfathers, mechanics, schoolteachers, nurses, miners, taxi cab drivers, merchants. They're all Putin's thugs. But what about their rights? They have been bombed by Kiev. And mortared and shelled. For a year. We don't know the exact casualty rate. The U.N. says 5,300. That can't be. Dead. There are thousands dead and wounded, gravely wounded. The refugee count, people who've had to flee the area is somewhere between one and two million. We don't know what it is. The U.N.'s not sure, Russia's not sure. So many people and they flee as we talk. Why do they flee tonight? Because they're still being bombed. At first it was the women folk taking the children. Now the young men are fleeing too. And some are coming from Kiev because they're being conscripted and they don't want to fight. Russia claimed 500 young men are coming out and Russia lies too, who knows. 500 a day are arriving in Russia fleeing conscription. I mean this is a humanitarian disaster of the first magnitude.

And yet the United States has said since the Clinton administration "R to P". Right To Protect is our doctrine. We protect people who are put in a humanitarian disaster situation by natural or warfare means. But the United States government has nothing to say about the fate of these people. Even though the American Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, was the great ideologue of this whole doctrine. And when asked, what did she say? "I think Kiev has shown remarkable restraint." I am ashamed as an American citizen that a representative of my government could not bring herself to say "We feel badly for these people, we're gonna do something to help them."

Now belatedly apparently there's some talk of sending a few million dollars. But meanwhile they've tried to stop those Russian white trucks. Remember all those white trucks we were shown that were supposed to be carrying military equipment and every one that's been opened has had baby food, penicillin, and water, stuff like that. I mean maybe they've stashed some weapons in there, so what? These people are starving. The infrastructure is destroyed, you can't get fresh water, the hospitals are being destroyed. Do they have no agency in this controversy, in this discussion?

What about Kiev's aggression? Backed by the United States. This terrible destruction is done by Kiev under what it calls, and I quote, "An anti-terrorist operation". That's the name of Kiev's military operation, it's been that since April they call it that till today and the United States is endorsing it. I ask you what kind of government declares 5 million of its own citizens terrorists? And if you say people are a terrorist, terrorist, is it your notion to negotiate with them or to kill 'em?

What's the American policy? We don't negotiate with terrorists. We do, but officially we don't, we kill them. There's something wrong here. And what's wrong in Kiev is endorsed in Washington. And that bothers me as an American citizen but it is also the reason that the solution cannot be only the end of Putin's aggression.

So, this is the actual history.

Now let's go back to Moynihan. Maybe I haven't told you the truth. And probably there are some people who think I got it wrong. My facts are correct. I make mistakes, but I correct them. I'm a scholar, if I get my facts wrong I'm cabbage. Now, my analysis and interpretation or what Moynihan would call my opinions, they may be incorrect. My brain may not be able to handle these facts to process them. And that's possible and I'm open to being corrected about my interpretation. But let us say to conclude this evening or this part of it that I'm half right on it. Give me half.

What would this mean if I'm half right? It means that Putin's behavior has been substantially reactive. He's been reacting to American western policy. Now maybe he reacted unwisely. I think he did in some cases. But to call this aggression?

So it means, arguably, that the worst international crisis in decades cannot be blamed solely on Putin. That we bear some responsibility for it. And should own up and think about it and see if we can negotiate.  

Second, it means we may be racing to war with Russia on the basis of a false narrative. Even official falsehoods.

Third, it means that America, the self-proclaimed greatest democracy in the world, sometimes I think we are sometimes I'm not so sure, is going to war without any public debate whatsoever in the mainstream political media establishment. That's not the way democracies operate.  We're supposed to sit down and think this thing through, even regarding the run up to Iraq. Those of us who oppose the war lost the debate but we were given a debate. We were featured on op-ed pages and on T.V. We had a debate.

We should worry about this. And that's not all. Here's where I don't know the answers. Things have happened along the way that have brought us to this moment that we have not been told the full truth about. Though I don't know what the full truth is. At each stage a mysterious event occurred that protracted and deepened the Ukrainian crisis. And the new Cold War. And each remains tonight a question without a clear answer.

In November 2013 why did Washington and Brussels impose an either or choice on the democratically elected president of a divided Ukraine? What was wrong with Putin's tripartheid, three way, let's all chip in agreement? What was wrong with that? We need an explanation.

In February 2014 who organized the sniper attacks at Maidan that killed 100 people, led to more street riots, and eventually Yanukovych's fleeing? Who was behind those snipers? At that time in February, I ask again, why didn't the European foreign ministers and President Obama defend the negotiated settlement that they had brokered and say to the protestors, "No. Wait and vote against Yanukovych in December." "You can wait 8 or 9 months and meanwhile your people are going to be in his government." Why didn't we do that? We don't know. But do we deserve an answer?

In early May a horrible event by anybody's standard occurred in Odessa. 48 people a were almost burned alive in a sealed building. Pro-Russians. Who did that and why?  Why was it never investigated? Why did Kerry say, "Gee that was a terrible thing" and move on and never ask for an investigation? Why did we not demand that our client government in Kiev conduct a real investigation? Why has that massacre, which evoked the horrors of Nazi extermination squads in Ukraine in World War II, why was that just passed over? And who did it? It was clearly organized.

And who shot down in July, Malaysian jetliner 17? All 298 people on board. Who shot that down and why? Was it an accident? Was it a provocation? Was it a Ukrainian military fighter plane? And who was standing there with the artillery on the ground? And since the Minsk accord, which called for a ceasefire negotiation, were signed in September, who has repeatedly violated the ceasefire, since then making sure that no negotiations occurred? Is that  the question Merkel wants to ask Poroshenko the president of Ukraine, Putin, and then Obama? Cause she's been calling for a negotiations, but every time she does somebody violates the ceasefire. Maybe she's now interested in who's doing that.

Here's the point. Washington, NATO and Kiev all have an answer to each of these questions. And all the answers point toward Moscow, all blame Moscow. No American newspaper has shown any investigative interest in these cases. The New York Times has money to send a crew for months to Moscow to investigate the Russian textbook industry to discover that Putin's cronies are profiting there. They could have rung me up on upper west side of New York and I could have told them the exact story they printed because a lot of my colleagues in Russia are complaining about it. But they don't have any money to go and investigate the shoot down of that airplane, or the snipers, or go to the front lines and see who's investigating, who's violating the ceasefire.

Meanwhile around the world there are independent investigations that are claiming that the official American answer is untrue in each of these cases. Are these other investigations true? I do not know. I don't have the brainpower or the knowledge, the resources to investigate, but I think somebody should. So it means, and in this respect we may now be racing to war in a very thick fog of war on the basis of lies or uncertainties.

So I need to end by asking, "What now?" You know the old Russian question. "Chto delat". And probably the answer is "Nichego yeyo slishkom pozdno". "Nothing, it's too late. " I don't know. When I ask "what now" I only know some of the facts, to return to Moynihan. So my opinion is not perhaps what it should be. Here's what I think is the case. The pro-war parties are now ascended in most of the capitals directly involved. Washington, if you wonder who the leader is of course it's Senator McCain, Kerry's lent his weight, certainly Vice President Biden. Kiev, Brussels, NATO headquarters and possibly, I'm not sure in Moscow, there's a struggle going on in Moscow. Putin did not initiate this crisis. Contrary to the orthodox version, it is very bad for him personally and very bad for Russia's national interests. He wants it ended. He isn't going to capitulate, but he wants it ended.

It can be ended by a negotiated settlement based on some variations of the following, which were agreed to in Geneva in April 2014 by Kerry, by Lavrov the Russian Foreign Minister, by the representatives of Kiev, by Germany, and by France. Some variations of the following. A complete ceasefire, withdrawal of all heavy equipment, military equipment from the front lines by both sides, some kind of federated Ukrainian state or decentralized Ukrainian state that gives all the regions, not just the eastern regions but the western regions the right, to a degree, to follow their own traditions. By the way, governors are not elected in Ukraine, they're appointed in Kiev. We don't do that. That doesn't mean our way is the right way, but there are alternative ways to the way Kiev does it. And there are language and other issues.

A militarily non-aligned Ukraine. That means, let me be clear, Ukraine will never ever, ever, ever, EVER, for eternity be a member of NATO. Now what we're offering is "Oh, NATO membership is not on the agenda today." Well neither is going to Mars, but we're trying. The Russians want a flat written commitment even though they know we'll probably break it. They want a piece of paper. Which they neglected to get for promises made in the past. And  Ukraine, vitally important for the well being of the people of Ukraine, free to trade with Russia and with the west. Free to trade with both. Understand that even after a year of war, Russia remains Ukraine's essential, financial, trading, economic partner. By far, Ukraine cannot survive with Russia and Russia needs Ukraine economically. It's good for both of them. And Ukraine should be allowed to do the same with the west as has Russia been for the last 20 years.

Ukraine shouldn't be told, "either you trade with us or you trade with Russia but not both". Not both. And a guarantee of Ukraine's current territorial sovereignty but without Crimea. That train left the station. But the rest of Ukraine stays intact and that is guaranteed by the great powers and possibly by United Nations resolution.

Is there still time for such a reasonable settlement? I have no idea. It was attainable in April, May, maybe June. It may be that too much blood has now been shed.

The people in eastern Ukraine were not for the most part separatists, though we always called them that when this began. They called themselves 'Federalists'. They wanted home rule to some degree. Now what you hear if you watch the social media videos, "we can't live with these people anymore, they killed my grandmother, my grandfather, and my daughter. I'm not living with these Kiev anymore." Maybe that can be overcome. The Confederacy said the same thing about the Union after the Civil War but we paid a price. Decades a price to finally hold a nation together. I don't know. I don't know.  

There are only two possibilities for this kind of solution and that requires leadership. One is Merkel because of her special position. Germany's the strongest country in Europe. Her policy, her position has been to say there can be no military solution and then cave into America's anti-Russian, pro-sanction policies. Maybe her flight yesterday and tonight is a change of mind. I don't know.

But the only person who can end this in terms of negotiation is Obama. Obama controls NATO, or Washington does, controls the international monetary fund, which will have to help pick up the bill. He seems to be drifted toward the war party. I voted for him twice. I'd like to think that this is because he hasn't heard any opposition to the war party. He hasn't felt the heat because we haven't made ourselves heard. I don't mean you, I mean the people I talk to. And the truth is, I say to the young people in this room, because suddenly, somehow I became a grandfather, that my generation and your parent's generation have let you down. We haven't given you a choice. We haven't put it out there so you can think about what's right and wrong and what to do. We've failed you; we haven't given you this democratic debate. So you, the young people in the room, now can do what you think right. Maybe nothing. Maybe something.

As for me, and I end on this note, my hopes and despair rise and fall with the day's news. I'm slightly happy that Merkel's on an airplane. She's worried. Good. But usually I remember what Russians say about being a pessimist and an optimist. They define a pessimist and an optimist differently than we do. Conditioned by their own Russian traumatic history they say, "a pessimist thinks things cannot possibly get worse. And an optimist knows they can". So I leave you tonight an optimist and I thank you for having me on this really great anniversary occasion.