#2
Kremlin.ru
April 14, 2015
Working meeting with Healthcare Minister Veronika Skvortsova
The Healthcare Minister briefed the President on the Ministry's performance in 2014 and its current activities.

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Ms Skvortsova, have you got any good news for us?

Healthcare Minister Veronika Skvortsova: Mr President, I would like to tell you about the results for 2014, but I want to begin by mentioning a decrease in the death rate among mothers, children and infants in this country.

2014 was marked by the fact that along with a small number of other countries we managed to meet the fourth and fifth United Nations Millennium Development Targets by reducing the child mortality rate threefold and the mortality rate among mothers by 4.5 times.

Vladimir Putin: Was this after we adopted international standards?

Veronika Skvortsova: Yes, since the adoption of international standards in 2013, we have reduced the death rate to 8.2 per 1,000, and in 2014 to slightly over 7 per 1,000, and in the first two months of this year, the figure is 6.3. This is a more than 20 percent reduction compared to 2012. We have actually reached our national minimum in both the maternal and infant death rate.

This is primarily due to the development of a well-operating three-tier system. On your instructions, we have already started building additional perinatal centres. This year we are to commission two perinatal centres ahead of schedule - in Nizhny Novgorod Region and in Belgorod Region. The other 30 will be commissioned next year.

The second area I would like to speak about is the development of preventive healthcare. As before, we are working in two main directions here: a mass preventive care strategy aimed at promoting healthy living, health screening and regular medical check-ups.

We have already made significant progress in promoting healthy living: the adoption of the anti-tobacco law made it possible to introduce in 2014 the second package of limitations, which has resulted in a 17 percent reduction in the number of smokers since 2008.

Vladimir Putin: 17 percent? That is a significant number.

Veronika Skvortsova: Yes, and at the same time we have seen a decrease in the number of alcohol abuse cases, while per capita alcohol consumption has gone down by almost one third in the same period.

Vladimir Putin: And the number of people doing sports has grown.

Veronika Skvortsova: Yes, by almost 2.5 times.

We have paid special attention to increasing regular medical check-ups, and over 40 million people have already been covered in 2014. The most important thing is that these check-ups are becoming more detailed.

We have increased cancer detection rate from 50 to 70 percent compared to 2013, that is in one year. This is a very good achievement especially for the types of cancer that are not visible to the eye. Up to 70 percent for gastric, intestinal and prostate tumours.

Most importantly, with this proactive approach, we have increased the rate of early detection - at stages I or II. The detection rate was 72 percent in 2014. We have managed to save 15,000 young women with stage I and II breast and reproductive system cancer alone.

We continue our efforts in this area and 2015 will be primarily dedicated to adjusting risk factors of cardiovascular diseases within the framework of the National Year for Combatting Cardiovascular Diseases.

The third area where we can report positive results is healthcare in rural areas and the development of primary medical assistance. For many years, we observed a reduction in the number of rural first aid stations, paramedic centres and various rural outpatient clinics.

In one year, we built 328 paramedic centres and first aid stations, and about 700 rural outpatient clinics and general practitioners' offices. As a result, the number of rural outpatient facilities has grown by more than 3,000 since 2011, with the number of various rural hospitals going up simultaneously - from local and regional to inter-municipal medical centres. In 2013-2014, their numbers exceeded 3,000 for the first time.

At the same time, I would like to note that in the same period of time the life expectancy of rural residents went up by 1.5 years, while the death rate has dropped by almost 3 percent.

Vladimir Putin: The current average national life expectancy is 71, isn't it?

Veronika Skvortsova: The national life expectancy is 71. For women it has grown in the past year to reach 76.5; however, for men it is still rather low at 65.3. This is an 11-year difference.

Vladimir Putin: ...and 71 is the average.

Veronika Skvortsova: Another important achievement is a sharp, almost 40 percent increase in the scope of high technology medical assistance achieved in only one year, in 2014. This was made possible by the decision made a year ago to transfer 459 high technology treatments to the basic Comprehensive Medical Insurance programme.

Mr President, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that regional facilities have already completed 80 percent of this work. Their number has grown since 2011 more than three-fold - 3.4 times to be exact. The overall number of facilities providing high technology assistance is now 657.

Vladimir Putin: Is that in the regions or total?

Veronika Skvortsova: This is the total number. There are 461 in the regions, compared to 135 in the past. Such an increase in the infrastructure capable of providing high technology medical assistance made it possible to sharply reduce the waiting time for high technology treatments: from 93 days for both adults and children in 2009, to 41 days for adults and 35 days for children in 2011, and 21 and 14 days, or 3 and 2 weeks respectively in 2014. A very significant reduction. There is practically no waiting time for high technology treatment now.

I would also like to draw your attention to the fact that we were happy last year that rural residents accounted for 25 percent of all patients receiving high technology medical assistance, while this year the number is 26 percent. This actually corresponds to the share of rural residents within the total population.

 Vladimir Putin: I would like to hear how you asses the overall funding of healthcare after the Government substantiated and amended the budget for this year and the planning period.

Veronika Skvortsova: This year our funding has gone up by more than 200 billion rubles. This is not only sufficient to reproduce the scope of medical assistance provided last year, but also gives us an opportunity to expand, provided we manage to keep down the prices of medications and medical implants.

Vladimir Putin: The Government has resolved to increase funding in this area, I mean medications. Are you receiving the money?

Veronika Skvortsova: Currently we do not need this money, so we have set it aside for now. We have stabilised the situation. Retail prices for vital medicines have gone up by 6.6 percent since the year began, while for hospitals the growth is 3 percent. I would like to note here that the main hike occurred in January, while in February we already observed a drop, and in March there was no sharp increase. The most important thing is that we have observed a negative tendency in the prices for non-vital medicines, meaning that in March they were lower than in February.

We are trying to maintain direct contacts with both producers, key wholesalers and the association of pharmacies and pharmaceutical organisations. The pharmaceutical organisations, for example, have decided to freeze prices.

We have our resources and so far, the prices for vital medicines are within the limits set by the Government. Together with the Prosecutor General's Office, we are actively conducting inspections in the regions. In March, we exposed 15 violations of the law, when prices had been raised by 15-16 percent above the limit set by the state. In such cases, we simply launched legal proceedings.
<...>

[return to Contents] 

 #3
TASS
April 14, 2015
Russian Finance Minister calls for "unpopular" spending cuts, pension age rise

Russia's Finance Ministry has proposed a series of budget cuts and "unpopular social measures" including raising the retirement age, as part of a plan to balance the budget in the next three years, Russian state-owned TASS news agency (formerly ITAR-TASS) reported on 14 April.

The proposed measures were announced by Finance Minister Anton Siluanov at an annual meeting of Finance Ministry officials.

Closed markets, no growth in domestic investment and the collapse of oil prices have forced the government to consider firm measures on state spending for the next three years, the report said. Siluanov has set the ambitious goal of producing a balanced budget by 2017. Increasing government debt is impossible while the international financial markets are closed to Russia, and domestic borrowing rates are too high, so the state must live "within its means", the report said.

Siluanov sees five areas in which to cut spending from 2016, of which three are social - supporting employment across the economy, cutting the number of state employees, and a general cut in social spending. Another measure involves further optimization of spending on defence including "putting off a series of tasks until a later period", the report said. The government has the ability to do this, Prime Minister Dmitriy Medvedev said. Defence currently accounts for 40 per cent of budget spending and social spending 30 per cent, the report said.

Among the main social spending measures being considered is a rise in the retirement age to 65 and dropping support for employment, which would save the budget R52bn (almost a billion dollars) a year. "We need to decide rapidly on the issue of a change in early pensions, raising the pension age," Siluanov said to his ministry colleagues. A series of alternative timeframes for doing this is being studied, he said. "From the point of view of the economy, the sooner we resolve this issue, the better for the economy and the budget," he said.

Recently, Labour and Social Protection Minister Maksim Topilin said it was not appropriate to raise the pension age in Russia now, as while most Russians retire at around 55-60, they only live to around 71, while Europeans, who retire at 63-65, live to around 80.

The Kremlin said the issue of raising the retirement age "should be rigorously worked out in government and with the public, privately-owned Russian news agency Interfax reported the same day.

"The president has repeatedly said that we need to carefully work out this issue. Working out this issue should be done in government; the subject should be discussed publicly and only after that can a position be laid down," said President Putin's press spokesman Dmitriy Peskov.

 [return to Contents] 

 4
Moody's: Russian inflation to peak at 17%-18% in Q2 2015, drop below 10% by mid-2016

MOSCOW. April 15 (Interfax) - Moody's Investors Service expects Russian inflation to peak at 17%-18% in the second quarter of 2015 and to drop below 10% by mid-2016 as the impact of the ruble's depreciation fades, Moody's said in a report on Russia's banking sector in 2015.

"Therefore Central Bank of Russia (CBR) is likely to loosen monetary policy on a forward-looking basis in 2015; but its key policy rate (1-week repo) will likely remain in double-digits," Moody's said.

Russia's current-account balance remains volatile. Import substitution policies and slowing demand are unlikely to fully offset the impact of low oil prices in 2015, likely putting further downward pressure on the foreign exchange reserves, the report said.

Moody's expects a GDP contraction in the 5%-6% range in 2015 due to the impact of significantly lower oil prices (Moody's forecast for oil prices is $55 in 2015) and the large depreciation of the ruble. The medium-term outlook for the economy will be impaired by weak investment and the poor business climate, exacerbated by international sanctions.

The federal budget deficit may total about 2.7 trillion rubles (3.7% of GDP) and will be financed by drawing on the Reserve Fund, Moody's said.

 [return to Contents]

 #5
Over 1.5 million questions asked in upcoming Putin's Q&A session

MOSCOW. April 15 (Interfax) - Over 1.5 million questions have been asked in the upcoming Q&A session of President Vladimir Putin to begin at noon on April 16.

"We have received 1.2 million calls, approximately 24,000 MMS messages, 285,000 text messages, 6,500 video questions and almost 190,000 e-mails sent to the website," Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov said.

Russians wishing to ask the president a question have been very active, he said.

According to Peskov, Wednesday is the final day of preparations for the Q&A session. The Kremlin spokesman said the preparations involved many companies, organizations and people.

 #6
Sputnik
Top Russian Officials Report 2014 Personal Income
April 15, 2015

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Russian President Vladimir Putin's income doubled to approximately $151,000 in 2014 as opposed to 2013, according to a personal income tax declaration published on the Kremlin website Wednesday.

In 2013, Putin earned just over $71,000, and in 2012, he earned around $114,000.

The income's dollar equivalent was calculated taking into account the Russian ruble's current exchange rate. The ruble has lost some 40 percent of its value against the dollar since summer 2014.

Putin's income will most likely drop in 2015 after he takes a 10 percent pay cut due to the economic situation in Russia. The salaries of those in his administration will be slashed by the same amount beginning May 1.

The Russian economy has been experiencing a slowdown, caused mainly by a rapid decrease in the price of oil, a commodity on which the Russian budget is heavily dependent. Western economic sanctions imposed on Moscow over the situation in Ukraine have also hit several key sectors of the economy.

In January, the Russian government unveiled an anti-crisis plan to stabilize the country's economy by 2017. The plan stipulates 10-percent spending cuts in most categories of the 2015 budget.

Last week, Russian Economic Development Minister Alexei Ulyukayev said Russia's economic recession will come to an end in the third quarter of this year and the gross domestic product (GDP) will begin growing in the fourth quarter of the current year or beginning of 2016.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev doubled his income in 2014 to $158,000 in comparison with 2013, according to an income declaration posted on the Russian government's website on Wednesday.

In 2013, Medvedev earned just over $83,000.

The incomes of four Russian ministers in 2014 exceeded $2 million each, according to information from tax declarations published by the government's press service on Wednesday.

The leader of the pack was Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Khloponin, raking in $5.5 million for 2014. Khloponin overtook the richest minister in 2013, Mikhail Abyzov, who this year earned just over $4.3 million, placing him in second place.

Closing the group of four richest ministers for 2014 are Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Trutnyev with $3.5 million and Industrial Trade Minister Denis Manturov with $2.2 million.

 [return to Contents]

 
#7
Putin has no problem with high earnings of his subordinates - press secretary

MOSCOW, April 15. /TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin calmly treats the fact that many officials, both in the government and Kremlin administration, earn more than the head of state, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday.

Answering a journalist's question on whether Putin is discontent with this fact, Peskov said: "No." "Everyone has different incomes, everyone's past is different," the spokesman noted. "Some people worked in business, some of them have bank accounts from back then, something else, some means, incomes," he noted.

"That's why everyone has a different situation and one shouldn't try to compare," Peskov said. "The main thing is that it is all in line with the law and declared properly," he noted.

Today, Kremlin and government officials published their income declarations.

Russian President Vladimir Putin earned 7.65 million rubles ( a little over $147,000 at current exchange rate) in 2014, twice as much as in 2013, according to his tax declaration published on the Kremlin's website.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev's income doubled in 2014. Medvedev earned around 8 million rubles (a little over $153,000), which is 3.8 million rubles ($73,000) more than in 2013, when he earned around 4.3 million rubles ($82,7532).

The richest official in the Russian government is Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Khloponin who earned 280 million rubles ($5.4 million). Minister for Open Government affairs Mikhail Abyzov, Industry and Trade Minister Denis Manturov and Deputy Prime-Minister, presidential representative in the Far Eastern Federal District Yuri Trutnev are also high on the list earning respectively 222 million ($4.2 million), 113 million ($2.1 million) and 179.5 million ($3.4 million) rubles.

 [return to Contents]

 #8
Russia must review participation in international funds, finance minister says
April 15, 2014

(Reuters) - Russia must review its participation in international funds and financial organisations to conserve resources which are being used up by fees, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said on Wednesday.

Russia has been forced to cut expenditure after the oil price plunged, shrinking revenues needed to fund President Vladimir Putin's social spending promises and his plan to boost the defence industry, key to his aim of boosting national pride. BRI

Asked whether the fall in income would hurt Russia's role on the international scene and in its participation in the BRICS bloc of large emerging economies, Siluanov said funds for forming the charter capital of a BRICS bank were accounted for in Russia's budget law.

"When we are faced with the question of optimising costs. We see that Russia is involved in many different funds, international organisations, which in our opinion, are not of fundamental significance," he told the Federation Council, the upper house of parliament.

"And we pay a fee everywhere. In our view, there is a need to approach this question seriously and review the appropriateness of being involved in various international communities, organisations etc."

He did not give any further details.

Russia helps fund various international aid and development programmes organised by the United Nations, World Bank and other global organisations.

[return to Contents] 

 #9
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
April 15, 2015
Being a member of the WTO may not be that easy for Russia
Even though it is still too early to talk about the results of Russia's accession to the WTO, it is quite clear that in order to enjoy the potential benefits over the long term, Russia should address a range of important domestic factors today.
By Ksenia Zubacheva
Ksenia Zubacheva is a Managing Editor at Russia Direct. Previously she worked as an editor at The Voice of Russia. Ksenia holds a BA (Honors) in Oriental and African Studies from the Institute of Practical Oriental Studies (Moscow) and an MSc in International Relations from the University of Bristol.

Trade disputes within the World Trade Organization (WTO) are nothing new, something that Russia is quickly finding out after finally joining the WTO in 2012. China is taking steps to counter EU tariff policies on its poultry and meat products, while the European Union is taking more active action in its dispute with Russia and its tariff reatment of paper products, palm oil and refrigerators.

Following an unfruitful round of consultations and an initial request to establish a panel that was blocked by Russia (a step allowed by WTO rules), the EU decided to take the case into the Dispute Settlement Body of the organization once again, stating that measures "are still in place and continue to severely hamper trade." It was only on March 25 when the WTO finally established a panel to investigate this - currently the fifth case overall against Russia.

To those unfamiliar with WTO practices, the establishment of the Dispute Settlement Body does not necessarily mean that one country has started an economic trade war with the other. This is just the usual way the organization operates: The member states challenge each other's trade policies and negotiate a better way that could benefit all sides the most.

Russia itself, while being in the organization for only two and one-half years, has already taken upon itself the role of a third party in 20 disputes and is a complainant in two cases against the EU (countering the EU's anti-dumping measures on imports from Russia and measures related to the energy sector).

These developments show that Russia is taking steps to start using available instruments more actively and support its stand on major trade policy issues. For instance, one of the questions actively posed by Russia in the WTO concerns EU financial sanctions. Keith Rockwell, director of the information and external relations division of the WTO, explained this to Russian journalists at a WTO workshop in Geneva:

"This issue has come up in the General Council, in the Council of Trading Goods, in the Services Council, because the Russians are concerned that their rights under the services agreement are being violated as part of these sanctions. We'd have to wait and see how this process will work itself out," said Rockwell.

Russia's lack of experience and trade policy specialists

Raising concerns and being able to defend one's interests in current and future disputes is key to ensure that Russia reaps maximum benefits from being a member of the organization. According to Alexey Portanskiy, professor in the faculty of World Economy and International Affairs at the Higher School of Economics, this is only possible when Russians have enough experience with the WTO.

"One of the points sometimes overlooked by our policymakers and average citizens is that being a member of the WTO is a more complex thing than acceding to it [a process that took 18 years - Editor's note]. It requires the country to be able to effectively use the trade policy instruments, which is not possible without having extensive experience in the WTO's negotiation process and dispute settlement system. Learning from the experience of other member states is key in this respect," he points out.

Unfortunately, Russia lacks such experience. In this regard Russia's participation in dispute settlement processes, both as a complainant and a respondent, is key "because it allows the country, on the one hand, to protect its interests, and on the other, to accumulate experience in the WTO," explains Tatiana Isachenko, an expert on the WTO with a Ph.D. from Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO-University).

Another problem is that Russia does not have enough highly qualified lawyers and specialists in the field of trade policy. "Let's admit that the time for training such professionals has been lost and now we have to make up for that," Portanskiy points out.

Indeed, notwithstanding significant changes and the emergence of specialized structures (such as the Center of Expertise on WTO issues, the Information and Analytical Center for Foreign Trade, the Center for the Study of the Tariff and Non-Tariff Regulation, and the Russian Mission to the WTO), the situation is still difficult and demand for qualified specialists continues to persist, notes Isachenko.

"The lack of qualified experts and personnel often leads to an erroneous interpretation of the rules and regulations and, as a result, the wrong policy decisions," warns Isachenko. "Professionals with knowledge of the WTO rules and possibilities of their application to protect the interests of domestic producers should be represented in all major companies involved in foreign trade activities, as well as domestic producers associations."

Russia's domestic companies are not interested in foreign markets?

Apart from the lack of Russian specialists in international trade disputes, the country's economic interests also suffer from state officials' unfamiliarity with potential export opportunities, and domestic producers' disinterest in entering foreign markets, thinks Ivan Rubanov, head of the analytical group of the expert council of the Agricultural Committee of the Russian State Duma.

"Russia hardly uses the WTO mechanisms when it comes to promoting domestic agricultural products. Our agricultural exports are still rather low and represented, to a large extent, by liquid and inexpensive primary products, namely grains and oilseeds. The main problems are provoked by administrative and infrastructure barriers at home, not abroad," he told Russia Direct.

In addition, the expert says, the majority of Russian companies are not competitive enough for developed markets, plus they seem more enthusiastic about new import-substitution opportunities.

"At the moment, we can rather see the reverse trend - the mechanisms of the WTO may be used either for advancing imported goods to Russia or to dispute the food embargo not long ago introduced by Russia. This way in August last year Poland turned to the European Commission and called to file a complaint against the Russian food embargo in the WTO. It's worth noting though, that thanks to the devaluation of the ruble, there are new opportunities opening for Russian products on foreign markets," Rubanov says.

Vladimir Salamatov, director general of the World Trade Center Moscow, also acknowledges the positive incentive that the devaluation of Russian national currency gave to Russian enterprises.

"At the moment, the devaluation of the ruble creates an additional protection from imports; however, it does not give domestic producers a reason to relax, but, on the contrary, to increase their competitiveness and produce goods that will be in demand not only on the territory of the Customs Union, but on other global markets as well," he says.
Salamatov shares the opinion of the Minister for Trade of the Eurasian Economic Commission Andrei Slepnev in saying that the current economic goal should be not import-substitution in itself, but rather the creation of products that are competitive not only at home, but also abroad. Substitution with outdated and unprofitable products does not make any sense.

"Nothing can promote growth better than competition," he points out.

Encouraging domestic producers to enter foreign markets, eradicating administrative barriers and helping local producers get cheaper loans and create sufficient infrastructure will allow small and medium enterprises to increase their share of the GDP from the current 20 percent to the worldwide average share of 50-60 percent, Salamatov believes.

Improving the dialogue between government and business

Another urgent question in the context of Russia's membership in the WTO concerns the effectiveness of government-business dialogue, which should consist of an open discussion of state economic policy and business participation in the future policymaking processes. What is important here is that the government should be able to quickly address the concerns and feedback coming from the business community, points out Portanskiy.

"Unfortunately, we have not achieved this ideal yet: Government officials do not always react to what business representatives are saying, and those speaking for the business are often big business alliances, such as The Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs [RSPP], and do not always represent the interests of the whole business community," the expert believes. "The business community should be able to debate with the authorities the major political and economic issues that might potentially have a long-term impact on the business environment."

According to Isachenko, in order to address this issue it is necessary to organize the work in a systematic way interacting with industry associations of domestic producers. The main goal should be to convince Russian firms that the WTO agenda is directly related to their business activities.

"During the negotiations on Russia's accession to the WTO and during the last two years, RSPP and the Russian Business Council held a significant number of roundtables and seminars on these issues, but in practice, it was not enough," she says.

What are Russia's achievements so far?

According to the data provided by the World Trade Center Moscow, as a result of two years in the WTO, Russian exports grew by 1.8 percent. This seems to be a relatively small gain, but if looking at specific industries, this number will grow significantly. Although exports of metals and chemical products fell, by 3 and 10 percent respectively, other areas enjoyed an increase in their exports: Machinery and equipment exports grew by 16 percent, mineral resources - by 2 percent, food products - 5 percent, clothing and shoes - by 26 percent.

"These signs make us hopeful that membership in the WTO, as planned, will become one of the main drivers of Russian economic growth," says Salamatov.

 [return to Contents] 

 #10
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
April 15, 2015
Drugs emerge in the Nemtsov murder case
Investigators probing the murder of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was gunned down outside the Kremlin February 27, say drugs may have been involved, according to Russian daily newspaper Kommersant. Lawyers claim the new evidence makes little difference.
Yekaterina Sinelschikova, RBTH
 
A "drug connection" has emerged in the case of the murder of former Russian deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov, Russian daily newspaper Kommersant has reported.

According to the newspaper, prosecutors in the Caucasian republic of Ingushetia, where the suspects in the case were detained, claim the main suspect, Zaur Dadaev, and former colleagues from Chechnya's regional interior ministry North Battalion, were initially detained by the Federal Drug Control Service (FSNK), on suspicion of involvement in drug trafficking.  Only later that same day was Dadaev handed to Russia's Federal Security Service, KGB-successor body the FSB, in connection with Nemtsov's murder.

Dadaev's military associates were released and there have been no reports of the results of the FSNK drugs probe. Dadaev was charged with Nemtov's murder the next day. Kommersant says it believes that the key charge Dadaev now faces - carrying out a contract murder - may be altered if it can be proven that the suspect was involved in illicit drug trafficking and use.
 
'Drug connection'

That Dadaev was held for two days before he was officially arrested in connection with Nemtsov's murder, is accepted by both the defence and Dadaev himself, although he also claims he was kidnapped and tortured by unknown men in black uniforms. As Kommersant points out, the drugs angle could radically change theories around the crime, "because it will be difficult for the prosecution to convince a jury that an unknown contractor hired drug addicts to murder an opposition leader in the very centre of Moscow."

The drugs connection is backed up by the discovery of traces of "a white powder" found in a rented apartment used by the defendants. Investigators have ordered chemical analysis of the substance.

Speaking to RBTH, Zaurbek Sadahanov, lawyer for Khamzat Bakhaev, who has been charged with aiding and abetting murder, said that the discovery of the substance means nothing and does not relate to all the defendants.

"Even if it is established that this is a drug, you need to find out to whom it belongs. It could have been brought by guests, or simply planted," he said. Sadahanov also noted that so far prosecutors have no evidence that any of the defendants were hired to kill Nemtsov.

Vadim Prokhorov, the Nemtsov family's lawyer, told RBTH, that according to his sources, a fee of less than 25 million roubles (£332,500) was offered for the murder and that part has already been paid. He refused to say whether he has evidence for a money transfer or cash payment to back up his claim.
 
Media campaign

Prokhorov insists the new evidence suggesting drugs were involved does nothing to challenge the theory the killers came from Chechnya.

"Many criminals, including those from the region, are also drug addicts. They just hired whom they could," he said.

"What is surprising is the tenacity with which journalists of Kommersant and other media are trying to talk about yet another alleged collapse of the investigation as soon as there is any new information," Prokhorov says.

This, he believes, only confirms that powerful vested interests in official circles are working to discredit the prosecution case, "including, those with the capability of launching media campaigns directed against the investigation."

Vladimir Markin, of the government Investigative Committee has gone so far as to urge people to pay no attention to "even the most respected publications."
 
Alibis

What can really change the course of the case is whether the alibis of the three defendants, Dadaev, and alleged accomplices Bakhaev and Tamerlan Eskerkhanov, stand up. Their lawyers insist that none of the three were at the scene of Nemtov's murder - Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge - at the time of the killing.

Bahkaev's lawyer has already submitted a request to the Investigative Committee to question a witness he says will confirm his client's alibi. Russian law says the application should be considered "immediately, and if this is not possible, no later than three days from the date of the application," Sadhanov states. However, the Investigative Committee has yet to act on his request and he plans to file a complaint with the Prosecutor General's Office.

 [return to Contents] 

 #11
Russia hints its gas export strategy may get harsher
By Lyudmila Alexandrova

MOSCOW, April 14. /TASS/. Russia has for the first time described in detail what its likely response to the European Union's new energy concept may look like, and it did so in very clear terms. After 2019 the flow of Russian gas to Europe through Ukraine will run dry. By that time Europe must have its own new pipeline infrastructure up and running: otherwise it will be unable to receive gas from the Turkish Stream pipeline, Russian experts say. This is the gist of what the chief executive officer of Russia's gas monopoly Gazprom, Alexey Miller, and Energy Minister Alexander Novak said at a meeting of the discussion club Valdai in Berlin on Monday. From now on Gazprom is determined to adhere to a combined Eurasian export strategy, in contrast to the previous Europe-oriented one, they said.

Russia's gas giant Gazprom intends to completely abandon gas supplies to Europe through Ukraine after 2018 with the help of a new pipeline to Turkey. Infographics by TASS
Russia's gas export strategy began to find new bearings immediately after the conclusion of contracts with China, analysts recall.

Miller said that Gazprom had already begun to lay the Power of Siberia pipeline from East Siberia to China. And another gas carrier, Altai, connecting West Siberia, which is a provider of gas for the European Union, with China would bring into being a common mega market with a single reserve base. Its emergence will reduce to nothing the value of debates over pricing in Europe, because the Asian market would become the determining factor. And the European idea of a common price does not mean that it will be the lowest price of all - it will be the highest cutoff price.

In fact, Gazprom has for the first time ever mentioned the possibility of suspending gas export to Europe officially and unequivocally. If no infrastructures for the further transportation of Russian gas to Europe emerge by the moment the Turkish Stream pipeline terminating on the Turkish-Greek border goes operational, Gazprom "will take a pause."
"I would like to draw you attention to our competitive edge. We can afford to take a pause and we will take that pause, if we are forced to," Miller said. "We have warned in advance - if the transport infrastructures are not created on time, it will be no fault of ours."

In general, the Russian gas export strategy began to be re-oriented after the conclusion of the contract with China and the construction of an LNG plant in Yamal, the leading research fellow at the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies, Vladimir Blinkov, told TASS. "As for the Altai project, the reserve base is the same for Europe and for Asia, while the prices of gas in Asia are higher than in Europe. This approach looks fairly reasonable."

"That the South Stream project was disrupted is entirely Europe's fault," Blinkov believes. "We had been prepared not only to lay a pipeline under the Black Sea, but also to build infrastructures in Europe on credit. Now we will lay the pipeline to Turkey only, and the first line of the gas carrier will be servicing Turkey alone. Whether Europe will build its own infrastructures or not is entirely its own business. There are some countries that would like to do this, such as Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria, but they lack the funds."

This situation is not very pleasant for Europe, but it is not hopeless either. "Alternative options, such as Azerbaijan's gas in Italy or Greece or greater import of LNG, which is far more expensive, will not resolve the problem. As far as Iran as a potential source is concerned, the beginning of commercial supplies of gas may follow no earlier than several years after the sanctions have been lifted. "But even in that case Iranian gas will have to be transited through Turkey. That country would then turn into a gas super-giant. To Europe this possibility looks far from inspiring.

At the same time, Blinkov said, Russia is capable of meeting Europe's demand for gas without Ukraine and without Turkish Stream by and large. For that it would be enough to use Nord Stream to capacity and also to step up traffic through Belarus and Poland.

Blinkov pointed to the fact that Miller and Novak made the harsh statements at an informal gathering, although some officials were present there, too.

"Whatever the case, those were unofficial negotiations and unofficial solutions." He believes that Moscow has been trying to establish a dialogue with Europe in response to its attempts at dictating.

Moscow's new export strategy formulated in Berlin was declared in retaliation for unprecedented pressures on Russia as the exporter of gas to the European market, which has been observed for the past few years, research fellow at the World Energy Markets Studies Centre of the Energy Institute, Svetlana Melnikova, told TASS. "We are witnesses to massive, systematic pressures on Russia as the provider of gas. The thought of dependence on it makes Europeans feel panic fears. All discussion formats have been curtailed. No meaningful dialogue is on the agenda at the moment."

Russia's transition from the European gas strategy to a combined Eurasian one looks quite reasonable, the analyst said. It became possible with the conclusion of gas contracts with China. "We have now gained opportunities for diversification and room for maneuver. We enjoy far greater freedom than a year ago, when we were tightly pegged to the European market," Melnikova said, adding that there has been no clear response from the Europeans to the latest changes to Russia's stance yet.

 [return to Contents] 

 #12
Russia Insider
http://russia-insider.com/
April 15, 2015
Why Do We Stand by and Watch the Destruction of European Unity?
If we do not start asking questions about the stories that are being spun, we risk not only the destruction of European unity but a potentially cataclysmic war with Russia
By Vlad Sobell
Vlad Sobell teaches political economy to university students in Prague and Berlin

More than a year into the Ukraine crisis, it is becoming painfully clear that the promotion of democracy, peace and prosperity is not - and never was - the objective of Western involvement in that part of the world. On the contrary, Washington and its European partners have systematically engineered the collapse of Ukraine's economy and the creation of a neo-totalitarian state being primed to cause yet more mayhem in the country's south-east.

The horrendous events in Ukraine that have unfolded before our eyes are in accordance with a geo-political plan that serves first and foremost our trans-Atlantic ally. What is that plan? The EU is to limit, if not sever altogether, its ties with Russia and instead boost its economic relations with the US, thereby underpinning Washington's already entrenched military grip on the continent. Germany has been all but ordered to reject any idea of a Russo-German economic powerhouse linking up with China's New Silk Road. In effect, the Union is being told to wave goodbye to any idea it might have had of closer ties with Eurasia and the much-needed regeneration such ties could have brought. The now infamous US dismissal of Europe's significance in determining its own affairs - in language that was not only offensive but also reflected an habitual need to patronize and humiliate - says it all.

The carving up of territory over and above the natives' heads so that empires can "divide and rule" has long been standard practice. But, arguably, it has never been done before in such a brazen manner, by such mediocrities and with such damaging consequences. The club of developed countries that together comprise the world's largest economy (the EU) is being detached from its natural supplier of fuels and raw materials, while European businesses are being made to surrender their positions on Russia's dynamic market. Wilfully preventing the consummation of such a complementary relationship between two economic giants is economic barbarism on a par with Communism.

The West's official narrative is that the Kremlin must be kept at arm's length so that we can preserve our democratic values - that just over the Ukraine's eastern border there is a murky world of autocracy-loving savages with whom we must not do business lest they contaminate our civilized ways. Give the likes of Putin an inch and the next thing you know you'll have Russian tanks on your streets. And why do business with the eastern hordes when America - the land of plenty and opportunity, or so we're told - is offering us new economic vistas under the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.

But where is the evidence for such allegations about Russia? How many countries has Putin conquered during his 15 years in power? Why was Georgia not occupied after the Russian army had intervened to stop the massacre of South Ossetians and reached the gates of Tbilisi? Why was there a referendum in Crimea when Russia could simply have annexed the peninsula (just as West and East Germany were united after decades of illegal partition, so Crimea is once again part of the country to which it historically and culturally belongs). Where are the detailed economic studies proving that the EU's pivot away from Russia is to its advantage? And who says economic ties with America and Russia are mutually exclusive and that it is "America or bust"?

It is said that people deserve the governments they get - presumably, because remaining silent in the face of misrule signifies their consent. However, that may be a bit too harsh. The truth is that there is a grand scheme to prevent Europe from becoming more unified and the European public - and, indeed, the American public too - is being led by the nose. Believing what the mainstream media tell them, they are predisposed to accept the official narrative. So if they are repeatedly told that Putin is a new Hitler who wants to see Russian tanks rolling through the streets of Western Europe, most will accept that such is the case.

But it is high time that we should start to query such narratives and ask for the "evidence" that would support them. At a minimum, we are entitled to a sound and rational explanation why, exactly, deepening economic links with Russia (and, for that matter, China) as well as with the US would spell the end of our democracy. This is no time for timidity. If we do not start asking questions about the stories that are being spun, we risk not only the destruction of European unity but a potentially cataclysmic war with Russia.

 [return to Contents] 

 
#13
Moscow Times
April 15, 2015
Despite Confrontation, Russia Still Looks to West for Approval
By Ivan Nechepurenko

Despite the ongoing confrontation with the West over Ukraine, Russian leaders still see it as the ultimate source of prestige and approval, analysts told The Moscow Times on Tuesday after readers of U.S. magazine Time named President Vladimir Putin the most influential person in the world.

Putin's victory came after heavy campaigning on the part of Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Russia's republic of Chechnya, who has previously slammed Western media for bias and conspiracy against himself and Russia overall.

Putin beat South Korean female rapper CL to win with 6.95 percent of the vote, Time announced Monday. Pop stars Lady Gaga, Rihanna and Taylor Swift rounded out the top five. The only non-entertainers in the top 10 apart from Putin were the Dalai Lama, Pakistani feminist activist Malala Yousafzai and Pope Francis.

"Russia's bellicose president has acquired notoriety abroad and adulation at home thanks to his rumored support for Ukrainian rebels and his annexation of Crimea last year. He continues to challenge European authority in the former Soviet states, and has stood by Syrian President Bashar Assad as the rest of the world has condemned his conduct in the civil war," Time said in one of its statements about the vote.

The online poll asked readers in late March to vote for who they thought had "changed the world this past year, for better or worse." Time did not specify how many people had participated in the poll, which allowed readers "a say" ahead of the editor-compiled list of the world's 100 most influential people that will be released Thursday.

Last year, Putin came 28th in the poll, with Indian politicians Arvind Kejriwal and Narendra Modi dominating the vote. Analysts did not rule out that Kadyrov's support could have made a difference this year, with one suggesting that some people could have been given money to vote for Putin.

"I don't exclude the possibility that this result was somehow paid for," Alexei Malashenko, a leading analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, told The Moscow Times in a phone interview.

According to Time, 57.4 percent of the votes were cast in the United States, followed by Canada and Britain with 5.5 and 4.6 percent respectively.

Time named Putin person of the year in 2007 and ran an extensive interview with him.

Answering a question about being awarded the title during his annual news conference in 2008, Putin said that "if I were to react to everything that is written about me and change my behavior accordingly, I do not think we would have achieved all we have today."

Chechen Support

There were no reports of Chechens being coerced to vote for Putin, but in the past, Kadyrov has managed to drum up huge rallies in support of the Russian president.

Last October, Kadyrov summoned about 100,000 people for a march in the center of the Chechen capital Grozny to honor Putin on his birthday. Public workers were given a day off, with many people forced to attend the rally, Kavkazsky Uzel (Caucasian Knot) regional news website reported at the time.

Ahead of the Time poll, Kadyrov posted five appeals on his Instagram account, which has nearly a million followers, calling on people to vote for Putin "to show how we love our national leader."

Last month, Kadyrov accused foreign media outlets of "using any excuse to blame the head of Chechnya."

"If a pedestrian crossed the street in the wrong place, Kadyrov is guilty, if someone is suspected of a crime, Kadyrov is guilty," he said at a meeting with law enforcement officers, according to his Instagram account.  

Kadyrov is using the situation to earn points and show that his relationship with Putin is personal and exclusive, which is also a signal to law enforcement officers in Moscow who are irritated with him, Malashenko said.

"Ramzan has a very highly developed political instinct that doesn't fail him," he said.

Last year, Kadyrov told The Daily Beast news website "As long as Putin backs me up, I can do everything - Allahu akbar! [God is great]"

Following the Time vote, Kadyrov suggested the prominent publication was a credible platform to identify the most influential person in the world.

"We have proven again that there isn't a more authoritative leader in the world than Vladimir Putin," Kadyrov wrote on Instagram after Time closed the voting.

Added Value

While it might seem at odds with modern Russia's patriotic rhetoric to cite a foreign magazine as proof that Putin is the most authoritative leader, according to Malashenko, members of the Russian elite understand well that "authority and influence are made in the West."

"If his rating was low, Nikolai Patrushev [secretary of Russia's Security Council] would say that the Americans are doing their best to humiliate Russia," he said.

According to Alexei Makarkin, deputy head of the Center for Political Technologies, a Moscow-based think tank, Western opinions of Putin are more important for the Russian elites that domestic ones, as they are regarded as more objective.

"Things like the Time 100 list are more important than the approval ratings produced by Russian pollsters," Makarkin said in a phone interview.

According to a March poll conducted by the independent Levada Center in Moscow, 85 percent of Russians support Putin's actions despite the fall in their real incomes.

The poll was conducted among 1,600 people with a margin of error not exceeding 3.4 percent.

"Even when people say that they don't like the West and see it as an enemy, mentally and culturally they still see it as the ultimate point of reference," Makarkin said.

"For instance, even fans of Stalin mention Churchill's praise of him to try to prove their point," he said.

 [return to Contents] 

 #14
Vedomosti
April 8, 2015
Russian Duma approves more funding for RT channels, TASS news agency
Yekaterina Bryzgalova, Media will get more roubles for the dollar

Functionaries and State Duma deputies have increased funding for several state media for this year. The State Duma adopted the relevant amendments yesterday [7 April] at the second reading. The amendments should be examined at their third reading on 10 April. More additional money has been earmarked for "News TV" (the RT television channel) with subsidies to this company rising by R5.5bn to R21bn. At the beginning of the year subsidies to the media were cut by 10 per cent within the framework of the overall budget sequestration.

The additional funds will be channelled into paying debts to foreign contracting parties, RT chief editor Margarita Simonyan explained to Vedomosti. In 2014 RT spent about 260m dollars on disseminating its television signal in various countries, she specified, and the channel's entire budget at the previous exchange rate (R30.5 to the dollar) was about 445m dollars: "Following the decline in the rouble exchange rate, our entire budget for this year was only 236m dollars (at an exchange rate of R65 to the dollar). So expenditure on paying partner television networks exceeded the channel's entire budget, Simonyan explained.

Because of this the channel was already prepared to withdraw from broadcasting in several countries. The company's debts to its broadcasting partners started to mount. "The television channel had already had to substantially reduce the number of programmes it produces and to broadcast repeats of existing programmes, and the administrative staff have been cut," Simonyan says. "Projects for the launch of French and German versions of RT have been frozen, and it is unclear when we will be able to return to them."

Obtaining additional subsidies from the federal budget will enable RT to retain its former presence in various countries with minimal cuts, Simonyan says happily.

Additional funds have also been earmarked for TASS - the subsidy to the news agency has been increased by R1.6bn to R2.6bn. This money will be channelled into developing TASS and also supporting the operation of correspondent networks, Vedomosti was told by TASS spokesman Dmitriy Pertsev. He refused to reveal the details. In January 2015 the agency's general director, Sergey Mikhaylov, told employees the staff had to be cut 25 per cent and the overall wages fund was cut by 20 per cent. "We are expecting a serious crisis and we are tightening our belts in advance," he said. By the start of the year TASS had 68 foreign offices operating in 63 countries. Following the decline in the exchange rate it has become increasingly difficult to maintain the foreign correspondents network, one TASS leader told Vedomosti. In particular, the option of freezing the operation of correspondent networks in a number of countries was examined, he said. Most likely TASS, like RT, will spend the additional subsidy on retaining its presence abroad.

On the other hand funding for VGTRK [All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company] will decline - by almost R2bn to R17bn. In addition the state holding company has seen a cut to its compensation for switching to digital broadcasting (by 320m to R2.9bn). On the other hand , after discussion the deputies rejected the Finance Ministry's proposed reduction to subsidies to federal channels for analogue broadcasting in small cities, Leonid Levin, chairman of the State Duma Committee for Information Policy, specified.

 [return to Contents] 

#15
Sputnik
April 15, 2015
How a Twitter Propaganda Army Can Be Yours for Less Than $20
[Complete text with many graphics here http://sputniknews.com/science/20150415/1020924770.html]

As the campaign of allegations that the Russian government is fielding a "troll army" continues, we look at yet another theory, this time about "Kremlin trolls" on Twitter and find out how you can have your very own online army.

A recent article on Global Voices claimed that an "internet research" analysis using the NodeXL tool found a "staggering" network of 2,900 "Kremlin bots." However, an analysis of Russian-language bots on Twitter as well as the infrastructure shows that this is most likely not the case.

Recently, hype over a series of "Kremlin trolls" stories was apparently used to justify the US government international broadcaster's 2016 budget, which includes $15.4 million for "Countering a Revanchist Russia" in social networks.

The biggest problem with "research" was that the authors had no real idea of how such Twitter botnets actually work. More significantly, it failed to take into account that bot creators and their users tend to be different people and that posts made by bots have little relation to their actual goals and have more to do with avoiding detection.

In addition, a network of 2,900 accounts is not exactly "staggering" and can be bought for around $19.95 with a valid credit card, which is a few orders less than the US government's propaganda budget for 2016.
It also showed the problem with using "internet research" as evidence by people who are not familiar with the environment they are researching.

We looked at several "political" bot trends with Aleksandr Zimarin, a social media consultant to a Russian State Duma Deputy and a Federation Council Senator. Zimarin is also the head of the "Open Internet" marketing agency and director of the marketing department for the venture capital fund ItRuStore.

Case 1: Who is Talking About Nemtsov?....

Case 2: "Putin doesn't understand that he won't win the battle this way?"...

Case 3: Putin Jokes From 2012...
 

 [return to Contents] 

 #16
The Nation
www.thenation.com
April 14, 2015
Why We Must Return to the US-Russian Parity Principle
By Stephen F. Cohen
Stephen F. Cohen is professor emeritus of Russian studies, history, and politics at New York University and Princeton University. A Nation contributing editor, his recent book, Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War, is available in paperback from Columbia University Press.
(The text below is a somewhat expanded version of remarks I delivered at the annual US-Russia Forum in Washington, DC, held in the Hart Senate Office Building, on March 26.)

When I spoke at this forum nine months ago, in June 2014, I warned that the Ukrainian crisis was the worst US-Russian confrontation in many decades. It had already plunged us into a new (or renewed) Cold War potentially even more perilous than its forty-year US-Soviet predecessor because the epicenter of this one was on Russia's borders; because it lacked the stabilizing rules developed during the preceding Cold War; and because, unlike before, there was no significant opposition to it in the American political-media establishment. I also warned that we might soon be closer to actual war with Russia than we had been since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

I regret to say that today the crisis is even worse. The new Cold War has been deepened and institutionalized by transforming what began, in February last year, as essentially a Ukrainian civil war into a US/NATO-Russian proxy war; by a torrent of inflammatory misinformation out of Washington, Moscow, Kiev and Brussels; and by Western economic sanctions that are compelling Russia to retreat politically, as it did in the late 1940s, from the West. Still worse, both sides are again aggressively deploying their conventional and nuclear weapons and probing the other's defenses in the air and at sea. Diplomacy between Washington and Moscow is being displaced by resurgent militarized thinking, while cooperative relationships nurtured over many decades, from trade, education, and science to arms control, are being shredded. And yet, despite this fateful crisis and its growing dangers, there is still no effective political opposition to the US policies that have contributed to it-not in the administration, Congress, mainstream media, think tanks, or on campuses-but instead mostly uncritical political, financial, and military boosterism for the increasingly authoritarian Kiev regime, hardly a bastion of "democracy and Western values."

Indeed, the current best hope to avert a larger war is being assailed by political forces, especially in Washington and in US-backed Kiev, that seem to want a military showdown with Russia's unreasonably vilified president, Vladimir Putin. In February, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande brokered in Minsk a military and political agreement with Putin and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko that, if implemented, would end the Ukrainian civil war. Powerful enemies of the Minsk accord-again, in both Washington and Kiev-are denouncing it as appeasement of Putin while demanding that President Obama send $3 billion of weapons to Kiev. Such a step would escalate the war in Ukraine, sabotage the ceasefire and political negotiations agreed upon in Minsk, and provoke a Russian military response with unpredictable consequences. While Europe is splitting over the crisis, and with it perhaps shattering the vaunted transatlantic alliance, this recklessness in Washington is fully bipartisan, urged on by four all-but-unanimous votes in Congress. (We must therefore honor the 48 House members who voted against the most recent warfare resolution on March 23, even if their dissent is too little, too late.)

What more can I say today? I could use my limited time to point out that the primary cause of this fateful crisis has been US policy since the 1990s, not "Russian aggression." But I did so here nine months ago and subsequently published those remarks ("Patriotic Heresy vs. The New Cold War," September 15, 2014). Instead, I want to look back briefly to the US-Soviet Cold War, as well as ahead, in order to ask, perhaps quixotically: Even if negotiations over the Ukrainian civil war proceed, how do we sustain them and avoid another prolonged, more perilous Cold War with post-Soviet Russia?

The answer is through a new détente between Washington and Moscow. For this, we must relearn a fundamental lesson from the history of the 40-year US-Soviet Cold War and how it ended, a history largely forgotten, distorted, or unknown to many younger Americans. Simply recalled, détente, as an idea and a policy, meant expanding elements of cooperation in US-Soviet relations while diminishing areas of dangerous conflict, particularly, though not only, in the existential realm of the nuclear arms race. In this regard, détente had a long, always embattled, often defeated but ultimately victorious history.

Leaving aside the first détente of 1933, when Washington officially recognized Soviet Russia after fifteen years of diplomatic non-recognition (the first Cold War), latter-day détente began in the mid-1950s under President Dwight Eisenhower and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. It was soon disrupted by Cold War forces and events on both sides. The pattern continued for thirty years: under President John Kennedy and Khrushchev, after the Cuban Missile Crisis; under President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, in the growing shadow of Vietnam; under President Richard Nixon and Brezhnev in the 1970s, the most expansive era of détente; and briefly under Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, also with Brezhnev. Each time, détente was gravely undermined, intentionally and unintentionally, and abandoned as Washington policy, though not by its determined American proponents. (Having been among them in the 1970s and '80s, I can testify on their behalf.)

Then, in 1985, the seemingly most Cold War president ever, Ronald Reagan, began with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev a renewed détente so far-reaching that both men, as well as Reagan's successor, President George H.W. Bush, believed they had ended the Cold War. How did détente, despite three decades of repeated defeats and political defamation, remain a vital and ultimately triumphant (as it seemed at the time to most observers) American policy?

Above all, because Washington gradually acknowledged that Soviet Russia was a co-equal great power with comparable legitimate national interests in world affairs. This recognition was given a conceptual basis and a name: "parity."

It is true that "parity" began as a grudging recognition of the US-Soviet nuclear capacity for "mutually assured destruction" and that, due to their different systems (and "isms") at home, the parity principle (as I termed it in 1981 in a New York Times op-ed) did not mean moral equivalence. It is also true that powerful American political forces never accepted the principle and relentlessly assailed it. Even so, the principle existed-like sex in Victorian England, acknowledged only obliquely in public but amply practiced-as reflected in the commonplace expression "the two superpowers," without the modifier "nuclear."

Most important, every US president returned to it, from Eisenhower to Reagan. Thus, Jack Matlock Jr., a leading diplomatic participant in and historian of the Reagan-Gorbachev-Bush détente, tells us that for Reagan, "détente was based on several logical principles," the first being "the countries would deal with each other as equals."

Three elements of US-Soviet parity were especially important. First, both sides had recognized spheres of influence, "red lines" that should not be directly challenged. This understanding was occasionally tested, even violated, as in Cuba in 1962, but it prevailed. Second, neither side should interfere excessively, apart from the mutual propaganda war, in the other's internal politics. This too was tested-particularly in regard to Soviet Jewish emigration and political dissidents-but generally negotiated and observed. And third, Washington and Moscow had a shared responsibility for peace and mutual security in Europe, even while competing economically and militarily in what was called the Third World. This assumption was also tested by serious crises, but they did not negate the underlying parity principle.

Those tenets of parity prevented a US-Soviet hot war during the long Cold War. They were the basis of détente's great diplomatic successes, from symbolic bilateral leadership summits, arms control agreements, and the 1975 Helsinki Accords on European security, based on sovereign equality, to many other forms of cooperation now being discarded. And in 1985-89, they made possible what both sides declared to be the end of the Cold War.

We are in a new Cold War with Russia today, and specifically over the Ukrainian confrontation, largely because Washington nullified the parity principle. Indeed, we know when, why, and how this happened.

The three leaders who negotiated an end to the US-Soviet Cold War said repeatedly at the time, in 1988-90, that they did so "without any losers." Both sides, they assured each other, were "winners." But when the Soviet Union itself ended nearly two years later, in December 1991, Washington conflated the two historic events, leading the first President Bush to change his mind and declare, in his 1992 State of the Union address, "By the grace of God, America won the Cold War." He added that there was now "one sole and pre-eminent power, the United States of America." This dual rejection of parity and assertion of America's pre-eminence in international relations became, and remains, a virtually sacred US policymaking axiom, one embodied in the formulation by President Bill Clinton's secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, that "America is the world's indispensable nation," which was echoed in President Obama's 2014 address to West Point cadets, in which he said, "The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation."

This official American triumphalist narrative is what we have told ourselves and taught our children for nearly twenty-five years. Rarely is it challenged by leading American politicians or commentators. It is a bipartisan orthodoxy that has led to many US foreign policy disasters, not least in regard to Russia.

For more than two decades, Washington has perceived post-Soviet Russia as a defeated and thus lesser nation, presumably analogous to Germany and Japan after World War II, and therefore as a state without legitimate rights and interests comparable to America's, either abroad or at home, even in its own region. Anti-parity thinking has shaped every major Washington policy toward Moscow, from the disastrous crusade to remake Russia in America's image in the 1990s, ongoing expansion of NATO to Russia's borders, non-reciprocal negotiations known as "selective cooperation," double-standard conduct abroad, and broken promises to persistent "democracy-promotion" intrusions into Russia's domestic politics.

Two exceedingly dangerous examples are directly related to the Ukrainian crisis. For years, US leaders have repeatedly asserted that Russia is not entitled to any "sphere of influence," even on its own borders, while at the same time enlarging the US sphere of influence, spearheaded by NATO, to those borders-by an estimated 400,000 square miles, probably the largest such "sphere" inflation ever in peacetime. Along the way, the US political-media establishment has vilified Putin personally in ways it never demonized Soviet Communist leaders, at least after Stalin, creating the impression of another policy orientation antithetical to parity-the delegitimization and overthrow of Russia's government.

Moscow has repeatedly protested this US sphere creep, loudly after it resulted in a previous proxy war in another former Soviet republic, Georgia, in 2008, but to deaf or defiant ears in Washington. Inexorably, it seems, Washington's anti-parity principle led to today's Ukrainian crisis, and Moscow reacted as it would have under any established national leader, and as any well-informed observer knew it would.

Unless the idea of détente is fully rehabilitated, and with it the essential parity principle, the new Cold War will include a growing risk of actual war with nuclear Russia. We must therefore strive for a new détente. Time may not be on our side, but reason is.

To those who say this is "appeasement" or "Putin apologetics," we reply, no, it is American patriotism, not only because of the risk of a larger war but because real US national security on many vital issues and in many critical regions-from nuclear proliferation and international terrorism to the Middle East and Afghanistan-requires a partner in the Kremlin.

To those who insist that an American president must never enter into such a partnership with the demonized Putin, we explain that his vilification is largely without facts or logic. We also point out that NATO expansion eastward since the 1990s willfully excluded Russia from Europe's post-Soviet "security order," which Putin is now accused of betraying, while that expansion betrayed the West's earlier promise to Moscow of a "Common European Home."

To those triumphalists who insist that Russia is not entitled to any "sphere of influence," we answer that the issue is not nineteenth-century imperialism but a reasonable zone of security on its borders free of US or NATO military power-in Ukraine and Georgia, to take the most pressing examples. And we ask: If the United States is entitled to such zones of security not only in Canada and Mexico but throughout the Western Hemisphere, according to Washington's Monroe Doctrine, why is not Russia so entitled regarding its neighbors? (To those who answer that any country that formally qualifies has a right to NATO membership, we say, no, NATO is a security organization, not a charity or the AARP, and indiscriminate NATO expansion has not truly enhanced any nation's security but only discouraged diplomacy, as the Ukrainian crisis demonstrates.)

To those who say Russia lacks such equal entitlements because Moscow lost the 40-year Cold War, we explain how it actually ended.

And to those who maintain that America must pursue "democracy promotion," even regime change, in today's Russia, we answer, as I did in Congressional testimony in 1977: "We do not have the wisdom or the power, or the right, to try directly to shape change inside the Soviet Union. Any foreign government that becomes deeply involved in Soviet internal politics...will do itself and others more harm than good. What the United States can and should do is influence Soviet liberalization indirectly by developing a long-term American foreign policy, and thereby an international environment, that will strengthen reformist trends and undermine reactionary ones inside the Soviet Union.... In short, détente."

That truth was confirmed by events less than a decade later, and then forgotten. It is no less applicable to Russia, and to US-Russian relations, today, beginning with the application of the parity principle to Ukraine. This means both sides agreeing to an independent but militarily non-aligned Ukraine with a fair degree of home rule for those regions fighting to preserve their historical affinities with Russia and for those seeking fuller relations with the West. Implementing the embattled Minsk accords would be a major step in this direction, as its enemies understand. Others say it is too late for such a détente, that too much blood has been shed in Ukraine. But consider the alternatives.

 [return to Contents] 

 #17
The National Interest
April 15, 2015
How Russia Plans to Save Its Massive Military Buildup
"For those who expected that sanctions and the fall in energy prices would tame the bear's claws, think again."
By Nikolas K. Gvosdev
Nikolas Gvosdev, a professor of national security studies and a contributing editor at The National Interest, is co-author of Russian Foreign Policy: Vectors, Sectors and Interests (CQ Press, 2013). The views expressed here are his own.

The announcement that Russia is planning to lift its self-imposed ban on selling the advanced S-300 air defense system to Iran gives us an important insight into how Moscow plans to move ahead with its ambitious plans to modernize and reequip the Russian armed forces.

Initially, the rearmament plan announced by President Vladimir Putin was to be funded from the golden river that was generated by the taxes on energy exports that had helped to fill the Kremlin's coffers. The collapse in world energy prices over the past year (as prices have gone down, the amount of the windfall tax collected has also contracted)-coupled with the recession Russia is now undergoing (with its economy expected to contract by at least 3 percent in 2015), has diminished the resources available. The Defense Ministry expects to cut military spending by 3.8 percent-less of a haircut than what other ministries and departments must slash (generally 10 percent of their budgets)-but it will be a test as to whether the Russian defense industry can mitigate the impact of any reduction by finding greater efficiencies. A forthcoming test will be whether the chassis for the 5th generation tank the T-14 Armata can be used as the basis for other new vehicles such as armed personnel carriers and self-propelled artillery, simplifying production and cutting down on maintenance costs. There will also be pressures to cut costs for procurement by holding the line on salaries-which, paradoxically, may not produce labor unrest as the deteriorating economy makes it less likely professionals would be able to easily switch into other, higher-paying jobs.

A number of experts have predicted that, with less revenue coming in, and increasing pressure to shift spending towards social welfare needs as a way to tap down the bubbling discontent that has been generated (particularly as food and consumer goods prices have been going up over the past six months), the ambitious defense plan would have to be scrapped. However, there is no such willingness on the part of the Putin administration to junk these plans. Instead, the emphasis is on finding ways to get through the rough patch of the next two years and then, after the expected economic recovery (especially on the assumption that critical European sanctions will have been largely rolled back by 2016), resume implementing the plan.

A trend that was already visible six months ago is a willingness to stretch out the timetable and to accept delays as to when the defense program will be completed. Some have argued that the program will have to be extended by five years and that targets will not be achieved until 2025. Certainly, a slowdown allows for greater flexibility and gives the Russian economy more of a chance to recover. A longer timetable, however, would also mean reducing purchases in any given year-and thus the Russian defense industry, if it cannot rely on state orders (nor, given the condition of the Russian budget, state subsidies), must seek alternate ways to finance its operations.

So the strategy shifts from relying on domestic orders to increasing arms exports to generate the necessary income to finance the defense buildup. To keep factory lines operating and to pay for research and development, the Russian defense industry needs to find customers for its newest products until such time as the Russian government has more funds to increase its purchases and so be able to carry the programs largely on the basis of domestic orders.

Export sales are critical because the Russian military, as it retires old and dilapidated equipment, may not immediately replace it with the newest (and more expensive) designs but is likely to continue to order more cost-effective 4th generation equipment. Thus, for every obsolete tank or fighter being taken out of service, another T-90 or Su-35, rather than a next generation T-14 Armata or the Sukhoi PAK FA T-50, will be ordered. This has the benefit of replacing ageing equipment with new machines-but utilizing pre-existing designs and factory lines so that defense rubles can be stretched further.

Despite sanctions, Russia saw a slight increase in the volume of its arms exports business in 2014. To some extent, the "new world disorder" that we are facing is a boon to the Russian defense industry. The rise in tensions between the United States and China has been a major spur in Beijing's interest in increasing its purchases from Russia, while, paradoxically, the rise of China itself, which is unsettling to its neighbors, causes those states, such as Vietnam and India, to increase their own defense spending. Russia thus remains attractive as a source for high-end weaponry-and in the case of India, a partner that can provide both financing and technology for use in the Russian military-industrial complex. Instability in the Middle East drives purchases from Iraq, Iran and Egypt. To the extent that the United States is seen as an unreliable provider of security, the desire of a number of countries to hedge their bets by purchasing weapons from Russia accelerates. As a result, Russian defense executives are cautiously optimistic in the prospects of their industry to not only maintain but expand the volume of sales and so ensure a steady income stream that can keep their factories humming and their design bureaus employed. Russia now enjoys a 29 percent share of the global arms trade, a percentage that has steadily increased over the last decade.

If current trends hold, Putin can move his defense program into a short-term holding pattern, slowing down some of the plan's implementation but without having to halt modernization altogether. For those who expected that sanctions and the fall in energy prices would tame the bear's claws, think again.

 [return to Contents] 

 #18
The National Interest
April 15, 2015
Russia's Missile Moves Explained: The S-300 Challenge
Breaking down Moscow's decision and what it will mean for the Middle East and relations with Washington.
By Dmitri Trenin
Dmitri Trenin is Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center.

President Putin's decision to lift the ban on the transfer of the S-300 air defense system to Iran signals a new departure for Moscow's policy in the Middle East. Coming soon after the interim agreement between the P5+1 powers and Iran, the Kremlin's decision does away with the only sanctions measure Moscow unilaterally imposed on Tehran in 2010, in an effort to bring it to the negotiations table. It is also the first fruit collected by the Iranians from the Lausanne accord. Thus, Russia has rewarded Iran for its willingness to do a deal with the international community over its nuclear program. Negotiations with Iran, of course, will continue ahead and possibly beyond the June 30 deadline, but Moscow's message is clear: should the talks fail, Russia will not support new sanctions against Iran.

In the event, however, that existing sanctions are eased and lifted, Russia will have strengthened its position as an arms supplier to one of the leading regional powers in the Middle East. Even if Iranian-Western trade suddenly blossoms again, it will probably not include arms and military equipment. There, Russia will try to fill the void. Strategic competition between Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia has been intensifying recently in the Gulf, the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula, and Iran appears a particularly lucrative customer for the Russian defense industry-particularly as the Arab states rely on Western, mostly American arms imports. Nuclear energy and arms are the two niches that Russia clearly prioritizes in its economic relations with Iran.

In the post-Ukraine geopolitical environment, however, economic gains are not the only advantage that Russia is seeking in its relations with Iran. With its relations with both the United States and the European Union under severe strain, the Russian leadership has redefined its country as a non-Western power in search of a new openings, and a new world order. Toward that goal, Russia has been expanding and deepening connections with major countries such as Iran. Once the UN sanctions are lifted, the Russians will be actively promoting Iran's membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

The Kremlin's decision on the S-300, of course, has irritated Washington. The Russians, for their part, claim that provision of a defensive weapons system does not undermine the interim accord and the chances of a final settlement. Indeed, the weapons to be delivered would not be able to protect Iran against a U.S. strike, should it be launched. Informally, the Russians are telling the Americans that they cannot expect their concessions from the era of post-Cold War cooperation to be automatically transferred into the present era of confrontation. Against all fears, Russia so far has been playing ball within the P5+1, because it was also in Moscow's interest to avoid a nuclear Iran or a U.S. attack against Iran. The S-300, however, is a different matter, for all the reasons explained above.

Perhaps more importantly, Putin's decision risks straining Russia's relations with Israel. Yet, Moscow-Jerusalem differences over Iran have persisted for a long time. The Russians usually consider Israeli worries overblown, and the Israelis believe the Russians are complacent, or worse. Of course, Russia would want to keep its generally good relations with Israel intact. However, the deepening conflict with the United States has already impacted adversely on the links between Russia and a number of U.S. allies in Europe and Asia. Moscow may have concluded that when push comes to shove, all U.S. allies, including Israel, will follow Washington's lead in its Russia policy.

Since the start of the war in Syria, Russia has gained a number of vocal critics among Arab countries, mainly in the Gulf. Moscow's support for Bashar al-Assad contrasts with the support given by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and others to Assad's opponents. On the other hand, Iran has been Russia's de facto ally in Syria; it has been active in opposing Islamic State in Iraq, which Russia sees as clear and present danger; and it is seen as a positive force in Afghanistan, which is entering a delicate phase in its evolution. Recently, Moscow has also voiced objections against the Saudi-led-and U.S.-blessed-military intervention in Yemen against the Iran-friendly Houthi tribesmen. All this falls short of a Russo-Iranian alliance in the region, but Moscow's and Tehran's interests on a number of important issues run in parallel.

Five years ago, one could safely say that Russia had no interests in the Middle East, save some commercial ties, old arms relationships with surviving Cold War-era regimes and beaches for Russian tourists. Since then, the picture has dramatically changed. Syria has become a symbol of Russian reentry into the Middle East; Egypt, of Moscow's hope for rekindling some old ties; and Turkey, of a new type of energy relations with the European Union. It is Iran, however, that can give Russia's Middle East policy a strategic depth-if only the Kremlin were able to devise a strategy that would benefit Russia, rather than entangle it in a web of increasingly complicated regional rivalries.

 [return to Contents] 

 #19
Moscow Times
April 15, 2015
Why Russia Ended its Ban on Selling Advanced Air Defense Systems to Iran
By Matthew Bodner

Russia's decision this week to lift a self-imposed embargo on selling powerful S-300 anti-aircraft systems to Iran is likely an attempt to turn the Middle Eastern country into a major new market for Russian arms exports.

As the international community edges closer to a nuclear deal with Iran, the prospect of lifting international sanctions on the Islamic republic presents weapons manufacturers with windfall opportunities for arms sales.

"Iran needs to almost entirely re-equip its military. It will need to spend about $40 billion to modernize," Ben Moores, a senior analyst at arms industry analytics firm IHS, told The Moscow Times on Tuesday.

Moscow wants to grab that market, but it still has barriers to overcome.

Obstacles to Iranian Market

The lifting of the UN embargo on the supply of offensive arms to Iran depends on whether a tentative framework agreement on a nuclear deal reached on April 2 turns into a successful deal in final negotiations in June.

If agreement is reached, Russia's biggest obstacle to entering the Iranian market will be political resistance, both from Israel, which has highlighted the dangers of arming Iran, and from Iran itself.

Moscow was once Tehran's largest single supplier of arms, but pulled out of the relationship in favor of closer relations with the West following the end of the Cold War. This, combined with Russia's 2010 decision to halt the export of the S-300 air defense systems, left Iran embittered.

Iran submitted a $4 billion lawsuit against Russia in the International Court of Arbitration in Geneva - which Tehran has said it would drop if the weapons are delivered.

"Certainly Russia lost credibility when it canceled the S-300 deal," said Siemon Wezeman, an arms trade expert at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), which tracks arms deals.

"But Iran does not have that many options and Russia has in general been publicly fairly supportive of Iran," Wezeman added, which should play well with Iranian officials in future arms trade negotiations.

However, Russia would have to overcome Israeli opposition to the S-300 and other sales, which Moscow may not be keen to do.

"The Israelis almost tacitly supported Putin in Ukraine and he won't sacrifice [the relationship] for a handful of dollars," said Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Center for the Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST), a Moscow-based defense industry think tank.

"As long as [Israeli prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu is in power ... Russia will not be delivering S-300s to Iran," Pukhov said.

Desperate for Cash

Russia is the world's second-largest arms exporter, raking in $13 billion last year, according to Russia's arms export agency, Rosoboronexport. But its arms exports are expected to plateau this year according to IHS.

Some of Russia's biggest customers, such as Venezuela - which last year received $1 billion worth of Russian arms - are heavily dependent on oil revenues. But the price oil has fallen by half since last summer, and these countries' budgets are now under pressure. Meanwhile, India and Vietnam, two other major Russian customers, are increasingly buying U.S. arms.

Russia has also been hit by the oil price fall and needs to find new markets to tap and offset these trends. Oil-exporting Iran also suffers from low crude prices, but its need for new hardware would likely still make it a major arms market.

Russia's Competitive Edge

Russia's hold over the Iranian arms market is not guaranteed even if it pleases Tehran by delivering the S-300s, the nuclear deal with Iran is successful and UN sanctions are lifted.

Moscow will face stiff competition from suppliers such as China, which "can offer very similar products and has also shown political support for Iran in the past," said Wezeman.

While some European nations such as Italy may move in to supply Iran, analysts said that the United States and its closest Western allies will shy away from arms deals with Iran, even if a deal is reached.

"But in certain cases Russia can offer things that others won't," such as air defenses and airplanes, Pukhov said.

Iran desperately needs airplanes. Its interceptor aircraft are old MiG-29s from the 1970s, and the rest of the air force isn't much newer.

Pukhov estimated they would be looking to procure at least 24 new aircraft - a contract that could cost up to $3 billion, depending on the specs and armaments included in the deal.

Iran will be looking for more than airplanes. According to Moores, "the priorities [for Iran] will be helicopters, frigates, fighter aircraft, army [communications] and radios, and air defenses."

Russia is competitive in many of these categories. According to IHS data, Russia last year sold helicopters and aircraft worth around $6.6 billion. It also exported $900 million in ship hulls.

Iran will want this equipment to ward off attacks from their Gulf rivals, according to Pukhov.

Iran's biggest regional competitor, Saudi Arabia, overtook India last year as the world's largest arms importer. According to IHS data, the Saudis purchased over $6.4 billion of hardware, mainly from the United States. The United Arab Emirates, another enemy of Tehran's, was the fourth-largest importer in 2014, spending $2.2 billion on arms.

Meanwhile Iran, said Moores, is using U.S equipment dating from the 1970s.

 [return to Contents] 

 #20
Moscow Times
April 15, 2015
How Much Power Will Russia's S-300 Missile Defense Systems Give Iran?
By Matthew Bodner

Moscow's decision to lift its unilateral ban on exporting advanced S-300 air defense system to Iran will boost the Islamic republic's air defense capabilities, but their military impact depends on the outcome of ongoing negotiations on Iran's nuclear program.

The air defense systems, built by Russia's largest defense contractor Almaz-Antey, are some of the most advanced weapons of their kind on the market, which has prompted fears that the weapons would be used to defend Iranian nuclear sites.

Iran signed a contract with Russia to buy five S-300 systems for $800 million in 2007, but in 2010 then-President Dmitry Medvedev decided to freeze delivery as a sign of good will toward the West.

With Iran and international community closer than ever to a deal, President Vladimir Putin lifted the ban Monday. No delivery date has yet been set.

Defending the decision, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov explained that "[the S-300] is not designed for attacks and will not put at risk the security of any regional state, including Israel," news agency TASS reported Monday.

The S-300 systems are not covered by the UN arms embargo in place on Iran, since it is classified as a defensive weapons system and has no offensive use.

"It would provide Iran with a long-range air defense capability that is currently lacking in its inventory [and] provide an additional defensive tier to Iran's air defense plan," Ben Goodlad, a weapons expert at defense analytics firm IHS was quoted as saying in a statement.

Depending on the specific model and the missiles loaded into the system, an S-300 battery can track up to 100 targets and engage 12 to 36 of them within a range of 150 kilometers.

How Iran would use an air defense system with these kinds of specifications depends on the outcome of the current nuclear negotiations.

If the deal falls through, and Iran continues its nuclear program, then the S-300s would most likely be used to defend Iranian nuclear facilities, greatly increasing the cost of any U.S.- or Israeli-led air strikes on the sites.

But if the deal goes through and fears over Iranian nuclear weapons fade, the S-300s would likely be used by Tehran to bolster its defenses against more capable regional rivals - such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

This point was made by Lavrov: "For Iran, taking into account the very tense situation in the region surrounding it, modern air defense systems are very important," he was quoted by TASS as saying Monday.

In particular, Iran is significantly outgunned by its Gulf rivals the UAE and Saudi Arabia, which is flying modern U.S. aircraft such as F-15s. Last year, Saudi Arabia purchased $1.5 billion worth of aircraft, while the UAE purchased $105 million worth, according to data published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Meanwhile, Iran's military is an aging force populated with 1970s Soviet and American hardware, such as MiG-29 interceptors and U.S. F-4 Phantoms.

Even then, the U.S. planes in Iran's inventory have only been kept flying by "spare parts acquired in Vietnam that were left behind after the U.S. withdrawal," said Ben Moores, a senior military analyst at defense analytics firm IHS.

The five S-300s stipulated in the 2007 contract with Russia would go a long way to redressing Iran's lack of aerial firepower in the region.

 [return to Contents] 

 #21
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
April 15, 2015
What Scandinavia's stance against the Russian threat means for the Kremlin
The decision by five Scandinavian defense ministers to release a public joint declaration on strengthening defense capabilities may irritate the Kremlin further and exacerbate tensions in the region.
By Artem Kureev
Artem Kureev is an expert from the Moscow-based think tank "Helsinki+" that deals with protecting interests of Russians living in the Baltic countries. Kureev graduated from Saint Petersburg State University's School of International Relations. His research interests include domestic policy of the Baltic countries, ecology of the Barents Sea, national minorities in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, Russia-NATO relations.

On April 10 the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten published a joint declaration by the Defense Ministers of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden on the expansion of military cooperation in connection with the growing military threat emanating from Russia.

The statement, curiously published in the form of a newspaper article, explains how and in what areas the Scandinavian countries plan to work together to strengthen defenses. The question arises as to whether the declaration presages the creation of a new regional military structure in Scandinavia and the Baltic region, or just closer military contacts.
The statement itself is quite symbolic. It begins by openly accusing Russia of violating international law, strengthening its army, and showing willingness to use force if need be. There is no doubt that the move towards closer military cooperation between the Nordic countries is linked solely to the "Russian threat."

That said, the five initiators of the declaration are far from being homogenous. Finland and Sweden, for instance, are not members of NATO, and the latter has for many years maintained a policy of neutrality. Iceland has no army. Norway's interests are mainly concentrated in the Arctic. Denmark lies a fair distance away from Russia's borders.

Nevertheless, all five countries intend to pursue a regional format of cooperation in the area of defense. More interesting still was the absence in Oslo of the defense ministers of the Baltic countries, all new NATO members whose governments have expressed even greater concern about the Russian threat. At the same time, one of the priorities of military cooperation highlighted in the declaration is the need for close cooperation with Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania.

It should be noted that military cooperation between the countries of the Baltic Sea is already quite solid. Since the 1990s, Finland has granted Estonia use of its firing ranges and military centers, primarily to train artillery officers. In the early 1990s, Stockholm took a hands-on part in creating the armies of the newly independent states, and actively supplied them with weapons. Perceived by many as a neutral power, Sweden has always operated in close collaboration with NATO.

Suffice it to recall that NATO and U.S.-backed reconnaissance flights along the Soviet Union's borders involved the Swedish Air Force, one of whose scout planes was shot down over Liepaja, Latvia, in 1952. Perhaps only Finland, which maintained close economic ties with the Soviet Union, could be said to have been non-aggressive and truly committed to its non-aligned status.

Helsinki and Stockholm watched NATO's expansion in the 1990s and 2000s from the sidelines. What's more, the idea of joining the North Atlantic Alliance did not appeal to the general populace of either country. In 2013, according to the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency, only 36 percent of Swedes supported the country's accession to NATO. In Finland the figure was even lower, just 30 percent.

That is not surprising given that Swedes and Finns are well aware that joining NATO would mean additional military spending and, as a consequence, a review of their traditionally socially oriented budgets. However, both Sweden and Finland de facto maintain close relations with NATO.

Since 1994 they have participated in the Partnership for Peace program and regularly taken part in joint exercises. For example, NATO's largest regional maneuver, Steadfast Jazz 2013, involved the Swedish and Finnish military. Another circumstance of no little importance is that the armies of these two non-aligned countries are effectively armed according to NATO standards, which greatly facilitates reciprocal action with Western allies, as and when required.

Over the two decades since the end of the Cold War, this state of affairs has suited everyone. The Swedes and Finns have acted as allies of NATO and its de facto leader, the United States, yet maintained a kind of special relationship with the Alliance. The statement in Aftenposten was seen by many as a major step towards NATO on the part of Stockholm and Helsinki.

That being the case, a detailed analysis of the document raises questions as to which parts are declarative in nature and which will actually be implemented. The four areas highlighted pertain to increasing the number of joint exercises, intelligence sharing, military industry, and combating cyber threats.

The mechanisms needed to implement the initiatives in the declaration are lacking at present. Moreover, most of them require permanent cooperation and the establishment of coordination centers in the field of intelligence gathering and cyber security.

Put another way, it is, in fact, a bid to set up a separate entity with its own staff, divisions and, it seems, head office. However, all this requires significant additional outlays and the signing of specific multilateral agreements. Yet such structures already exist within the NATO framework; for instance, Estonia's cherished Cyber Defense Center.

It is more than likely that within the framework of enhanced cooperation all five Nordic countries will start taking an active part in the operations of these structures. However, it is clear that neither Stockholm nor Helsinki wants to play second fiddle to the Baltic countries and both are intent on creating their own agencies in the field of security in conjunction with the rest of Scandinavia. Hence, another cyber center could crop up on Russia's borders within a few years.

It is also quite possible that large-scale military exercises simulating a joint response to an attack from the East could be carried out with the Nordic countries. However, the preparations for such maneuvers take time, so they are unlikely to be a near-term prospect. Stockholm and Helsinki will rather increase their involvement in exercises already scheduled, by sending troops or increasing the size of their contingents.

For instance, expect to see Finnish and Swedish, as well as Danish and Norwegian, observers at the Hedgehog 2015 drills in Estonia to be held in May this year. In terms of scope and number of participants, they will be the most ambitious exercises to take place in the Baltic region since independence.

The declaration itself, incidentally, provoked a very mixed response from experts, some of whom noted the absence of real content and stated that the most likely effect would be to irk Moscow. Markku Kivinen, director of the Aleksanteri Institute at Helsinki University, said that the Defense Ministers should have chosen their words more carefully.

Of interest in this context is the statement by Finnish Prime Minister Alexander Stubb, who said that Nordic cooperation is not directed against Russia and specifically mentioned collaboration with Sweden as the key factor in ensuring Finland's defense capability. His statement essentially contradicts the text of the declaration, and suggests that Finland wants to avoid any further deterioration in relations with Moscow, which has expressed concern about the release of the declaration.

What were the Nordic Defense Ministers trying to achieve? What practical effect has the declaration had? Basically, two previously neutral countries have said they are ready to cooperate more closely with NATO, but only to ensure the safety and status quo of their own region.

Sweden and Finland seem to be saying to their large eastern neighbor that they are ready to act as a united front with the Alliance if called upon to do so. At the same time, neither Helsinki nor Stockholm is prepared to intensify the dialogue on NATO membership or bear the costs involved, although public support for Euro-Atlantic integration inside Sweden and Finland in the wake of the recent anti-Russian rhetoric has increased slightly.

It is clear than neither country wants to completely abandon its neutrality given that the international tension could one day abate. Instead, they are looking to maintain long-term cooperation with NATO in the specific regional format declared in Oslo.

 [return to Contents] 

 #22
Sputnik
April 14, 2015
NATO's Russia Myths: Busted

Amid NATO's growing military presence in Eastern Europe, it's worth taking a moment to consider the kinds of talking points the organization uses to explain away some pretty obviously belligerent and expansionist behavior.

With NATO's beefing up of its presence in the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, with more troops, a bevy of exercise activity and macho US troops parading across Eastern Europe, it's worth taking a moment to consider the kinds of arguments the organization uses to explain away some pretty obviously belligerent and expansionist behavior.

A neat policy document released late last year entitled "Russia's Top Five Myths About NATO" contains pretty much all the mantras the organization uses to explain away Russian fears, prove its peace-loving nature and continue its buildup in the region. The neat and tidy talking points go about their merry way in explaining why Russia is always wrong and why NATO has every right to do what it's doing. In fact there's only one criticism to be made of the 'Top Five Myths': every one of them can be easily tripped up by anyone with an elementary knowledge of history and a sliver of common sense.

Russia's Myth #1, according to NATO, is that Western leaders "promised at the time of German reunification that the Alliance would not expand to the East." In fact, the fact sheet says, "no such promise was ever made, and Russia has never produced any evidence to back up its claim." The document goes on to note that there was no written record of the decision, notes that Eastern European countries couldn't join NATO anyway at the time due to the existence of the Warsaw Pact, and quotes retired Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who it is claimed had never discussed NATO expansion with Western leaders. The talking point notes that "when the countries of Central and Eastern Europe applied for NATO membership, it was of their own free choice, through their own national democratic processes, and after conducting the required reforms."

But no matter how much the NATO document's authors might try and squirm regarding some uncomfortable truths, and no matter how much Russia's present leaders and policy analysts might kick themselves over Gorbachev's foolishness in failing to get a written agreement from the US on NATO expansion, facts remain facts.
Back in 1996, Gorbachev wrote in his massive 750 page tome Memoirs that "during the negotiations on the unification of Germany, they gave assurances that NATO would not extend its zone of operation to the east."

And the ex-president would repeat the assertion in 2009, this time with a commentary, telling German newspaper Bild that "[German Chancellor] Helmut Kohl, US Secretary of State James Baker and others assured me that NATO would not move an inch to the east. The Americans did not fulfill their promise, and the Germans showed indifference. Maybe they even rubbed their hands in satisfaction over how they had managed to put one over on the Russians. But what has this given us? Only that the Russians no longer believe in the assurances of the West."

Russia's Myth #2, NATO says, is that "Russia has the right to demand a '100% guarantee' that Ukraine will not join NATO." The organization cites Article 1 of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, which states that countries have the right to belong to any international organization, to sign any treaty and to be party to any alliance. "In line with those principles, Ukraine has the right to choose for itself whether it joins any treaty of alliance, including NATO's founding treaty."
First of all, it takes a lot of chutzpah for an organization to cite the Helsinki Final Act, given NATO's repeated violations of the document's provisions on European security in the former Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s, first during the Slovenian and Croatian declarations of independence in the early 1990s, and then following the war in Kosovo at the close of the decade.

Second, throughout the 1990s and to the present, Russia has abided by the legal framework outlined at Helsinki, and Russia does stand by the idea that Ukraine, or any other country, has the legal right to choose which organizations, including security treaties, it joins. But what Russia does not agree to is the idea that a small group of protesters, backed by armed bands of radical nationalist revolutionaries, can seize power, overthrow the democratically elected government, and proceed to forcefully tear two nations with a thousand years of cultural, linguistic, economic and other ties apart from one another by force, all with the direct support of the US State Department.

Russia will continue to abide by the international security agreements it has signed, including the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, signed by its legal predecessor, the Soviet Union (then led by a Ukrainian -Leonid Brezhnev, incidentally). But the Russian Bear's strong sense of restraint today does not mean that every Tom, Dick and Harry should just endlessly do all they can to move closer and closer to the bear's cave and to taunt it by thumbing its nose, sticking out its tongue or waving some other body part in its face to see how long it takes for the animal to snap.

With regard to Russia's Myth #3, which is that "NATO has advanced its infrastructure toward Russia's borders," the NATO document basically just admits that it's not really a myth at all. And how could they? Their own PR officials have been playing up the organization's growing involvement in states bordering Russia, while their armies brazenly carry out parades 300 meters from the Russian border. The document just listlessly cites the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act on Mutual Relations, and notes that it has proceeded to advance its infrastructure towards Russia's borders with "transparently and in full accordance with the Founding Act."

Russia's Myth #4 is similarly puerile. According to the 'Russian myth', "NATO's response to the Russia-Ukraine crisis and its reinforcement of Allies in Central and Eastern Europe breaches the Alliance's international commitments." Perhaps the rocket scientists working on the document couldn't think of five actual myths, so they snuck this one in at number 4. A quick googling of this myth's phraseology yields only NATO's own statements of Russia's alleged 'violations of its international commitments' and, incidentally, a statement by Jack Matlock, the last US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, who notes that the West did give the Soviet leadership a "clear commitment" not to expand east.

Saving the best for last, NATO's Russian Myth #5 is that "NATO has a Cold War mentality." The document offers a one sentence summary of the Cold War as a conflict "characterized by the opposition of two ideological blocs," and notes that Russia no longer has "a credible ideology to export, nor significant international allies who support its aggressive actions in Ukraine." Combined with the various NATO-Russia partnership initiatives, this means that NATO cannot possibly be stuck with a Cold War mentality.

Unfortunately, the argument falls flat on its face by the beginning of the sentence about ideological blocs. Yes, Russia is no longer communist. Yes, it no longer has pretensions for a global revolutionary movement uniting the world's proletariat and creating a global workers paradise. Yes, Moscow does not even show any willingness or ability to hold an Eastern European buffer zone to defend against nations which have attacked it three times over the last century.

Nearly a quarter of a century has passed, but despite all the cooperation agreements, all the promises of a Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok, all the feel good riffs and lyrics by the Scorpions and Billy Joel, NATO is still there. This year marks the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Several generations with no memory of the war apart from what their grandparents or the History Channel have told them have grown up, but US bases, across Germany, Italy and Japan, remain. Russia, first out of weakness and then out of politeness and trust toward its partners, has stood idly by while NATO expanded, first into Eastern Europe and then into the states of the former Soviet Union. Now NATO is giving equipment and training support for the Ukrainian military of post-coup Kiev, in the very heart of Kievan Rus'. And still, Russia is the security threat? Sorry comrades, but Russia's not the one maintaining a relic of a security organization formed three generations ago and charged with defending against Russian hordes waiting to break into the West German plains.

 [return to Contents] 

 #23
The International New York Times
April 16, 2015
In Exile, but Ready to Save Russia
By ILYA V. PONOMAREV
Ilya V. Ponomarev, a technology entrepreneur and a member of the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian Parliament, is now living in exile.

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Early in the morning on Monday last week, a phone call woke me. It was a friend from Washington, a political consultant who follows Russia closely: "There's a billboard with your picture facing the Kremlin. It's huge. Sending you the pic, in case you didn't see it yet."

My smartphone vibrated a second time, with the image: There, on the facade of a 10-story Stalinist-era building on Moscow's central Tverskaya Street, were the words "National Traitor," across a photo showing me, smiling. "I kind of like the picture, but not so sure about the message," I told my friend, in an attempt at levity.

The next day, the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian Parliament, voted to lift my legislative immunity so that I can be prosecuted on charges of misappropriation of public funds and then removed from office. The charges were trumped up, in a fashion typical for modern Russia.

My real crime: I was the lone dissenter, in March 2014, when the Duma voted, 445 to 1, to approve the annexation of Crimea. My vote made headlines across the West, where my distaste for President Vladimir V. Putin is well known. I am an entrepreneur and an outspoken advocate of the use of technology to make government more transparent. I was democratically elected to represent Novosibirsk, Russia's third-largest city. I once worked for one of Mr. Putin's chief rivals, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, who was imprisoned from 2003 to 2013. I took part in mass protests against Mr. Putin's rule in 2005 and 2012. Over the years I've received too many threats to keep count.

I will never forget the gloomy afternoon of March 18, 2014, when I sat still in the Kremlin while members of the Duma stood and cheered as Mr. Putin defended his seizure of Crimea. He called me and my fellow critics "national traitors," a phrase once used by Hitler. I knew that invading Ukraine meant war, economic collapse for Russia and the reversal of everything I have sought, including the Obama administration's attempt to "reset" United States-Russian relations, which I had advocated passionately.

Over the next few months, Russia witnessed yet more brain drain, as Mr. Putin's government tightened its crackdown on any dissent. In mid-August, during a business trip outside Russia, I found that my credit cards were not working. A leading Russian newspaper soon reported that the authorities had prohibited me from traveling abroad and had seized my assets. I had the equivalent of $21 on me. I haven't been back since.

I am one of roughly a million Russians - thinkers, reformers, business leaders, scientists and regular people seeking freedom - who have been exported from Russia in recent years. We are no longer in our home country, not because we don't love it, but because the values and culture of our Motherland have changed so radically that we sought refuge in the freer countries of the West. We miss our homes and families and, most of all, we miss our countrymen, whom we knew to be curious, caring and among the brightest in the world. Sadly, those traits have been harnessed to blame people like me and other elements of political change for the economic and cultural problems of my country.

Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story
The Russia of 2015 is like the Germany of 1933. I don't make the comparison lightly. Mr. Putin's promises to revive Russia's economy (despite crushing Western sanctions) and "restore" our national dignity can be sustained only by further conquest and bloodshed. The West shares in the blame: At the end of the Cold War, it repeated the mistakes of Versailles of 1919, by imposing shock capitalism instead of integrating Russia into a stable world order. But it is fruitless to debate the past: The question is what should be done.

The political opposition in Russia has been so thoroughly suppressed that I think the best hope lies with exiles. After the collapse of the Soviet bloc, progressive East European elites reoriented their countries around national renewal. In Russia and Ukraine, in contrast, the old Soviet-style bureaucracy held on. Elites cannot be changed gradually, as newcomers will be corrupted by the bad practices and approaches of the past. The future needs to be built from scratch.

Those of us who have left can help lead the start-up class of a new Russia. We possess great treasures: people who read or listen to us (despite Internet censorship), communicate with us and trust us, despite differences in distance and status. Entrepreneurs, journalists, artists, scholars and scientists - we have intangible but real power. That's why we're a threat to Mr. Putin.

Our vision for Russia is simple, but it goes beyond the noble (but doomed) opposition mantra of calling for fair elections. We want a smaller, more responsive central government. We want an independent and modern court system, with strong separation of powers. We want the bulk of taxes to go to self-governing regional and local communities, ending centuries of centralized control from the Kremlin. We want to unleash the forces of entrepreneurship and competition, so that Russia, while blessed with plentiful oil and gas, does not solely depend on them for economic survival.

Skeptics, including fatalistic Russians, say that our country's only experience is of autocracy - but they are mistaken. Decades of Soviet totalitarianism, followed by kleptocracy, taught Russians to rely on themselves, and survive through their own initiative. Our creative and entrepreneurial energies can be unleashed - if there is equality before the law, and the political will to enforce it.

From London to Silicon Valley to Mr. Putin's prisons, Russia's people of change are waiting. They are people like Pavel Durov, who founded the leading Russian social networking service, Vkontakte, which Mr. Putin's cronies seized, and who is now in exile in the West; Leonard Blavatnik, the wealthy businessman and philanthropist living in New York; Aleksei A. Navalny, the political activist who has been prosecuted for his battle against corruption and who remains in Russia, precariously; and Mr. Khodorkovsky, now in exile in Switzerland.

What do they have in common? They all care about Russia and they all have a global vision, ready to embrace what's best about the West to benefit their home country. Is it better to stay and fight from a prison cell, or to change things by applying pressure from the outside? It's a question I grapple with every day. But I know that Russia's future demands a new start-up generation that will take our country back.

 [return to Contents] 

 #24
Ukraine Today
http://uatoday.tv
April 14, 2015
Khodorkovsky: Putin started war in Ukraine to avoid political downfall in Russia

Russian opposition leader Mikhail Khodorkovsky believes that Russian President Vladimir Putin stoked war in east Ukraine because he is unable to ensure economic growth in the country. Khodorkovsky made the comments during a speech at California's Stanford University.

The former oil baron also expressed confidence that Ukraine will be able shake off the threat from Russia to become a succesful independent state even while Putin was still in power. Khodorkovsky also said the the Russian opposition did not support the annexation of Crimea.

 [return to Contents] 

 #24a
Russia Insider
http://russia-insider.com
April 8, 2015
Russian Hackers: Putin Foe Khodorkovsky To Spend $5Mil on New Media Product
The group calling itself "5th Power" claims they've got proof and have put it on their website.  (Russian only http://5estate.com/?p=7)
We can't speak to the veracity of all this.  We just found it on Lifenews.ru this morning, translated it, and put it up.  
We're curious ourselves.
(LifeNews.ru)
[Graphics here http://russia-insider.com/en/khodorkovsky-allocates-5-million-launch-new-media-outlet/5422]

This article originally appeared this past Monday in Russian at the popular Russian news site, Lifenews.ru   It was translated for RI by Aleksei Shestyan.
http://lifenews.ru/news/152264

The businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky is planning to organize and launch his own media entertainment channel and a news website, spending over $5,289,000 on the projects' launch. Correspondence between the businessman and journalist Olga Pispanen, who is also Khodorkovsky's official PR representative, was published on the website 'Anonymous Group -Fifth Power', a hacking organisation.

According to the (leaked) documents, the businessman plans to name the television channel 'V', which portrays a sign for 'victory' made by the two fingers of a hand.

In preparing for the launch, technical support and pilot production of content should take about six months, and the promotion and promotional media should take about 30 months, or 2.5 years.

According to the data obtained by hackers, in launching his own media, Khodorkovsky plans to spend over five million dollars, while for just the service information there has already been developed a six-month budget of almost $ 4 million dollars.

Also, according to the documents, salaries to future employees of the TV channel will be paid in dollars. For example, the pay of the chief editor will depend on the specialization, and varies according to the documents from around 3000 to 4500 dollars a month.  Executives of the new media outlet will receive 10 thousand dollars monthly. As for the financing of all of the media, it would be through a non-profit organization, the head office of which office would be in Prague, with other outlets across Europe and in Moscow.

Information of the intention to create this media outlet became available to the online-hackers after they hacked into Olga Pispanen's email account. In the tab "Inbox," she had led a correspondence with a person who was using the pseudonym of 'МВК' (Mikhail Borisovic Khodorkovsky), which according to the hackers, Khodorkovsky used to stay anonymous.

It can be noted, however, that there is no certainty as to whether Khodorkovsky will proceed with the outlets' creation, and it is unclear the extent to which the plan has been developed.

This is not the first time the hacking group - 'Anonymous group' - has laid out the details of a correspondence between the businessman and PR representative. Previously LifeNews reported that the hackers published evidence of financial ties between Khodorkovsky and (Lyudmila) Ulitskaya. This was from a correspondence between Olga Pispanen and an addressee calling themselves Lyudmila U. and it was revealed that in February 2014 the writer (Lyudmila Ulitskaya) planned to meet the ex-head of Yukos (Mikhail Khodorkovsky) in Berlin or Zurich. In the end, the meeting was confirmed, and Ulitskaya notified that she had arrived in Switzerland. A few days after meeting with Khodorkovsky, Ulitskaya sent Pispanen details for a money transfer.

Also from the correspondence it also became known that at the time, Mikhail Khodorkovsky promised the leadership of (television channel) «Дождя» (or "Rain") financial assistance in the amount of one hundred thousand dollars, when the channel began to be excluded from satellite packages of television operators after the scandalous poll on the topic of 'The Siege of Leningrad.'

 [return to Contents] 

 #25
Stanford.edu
April 14, 2015
At Stanford, dissident describes Russia at crossroads
By May Wong

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, one of Russia's most visible opposition figures, blasted the current regime and expressed his vision and hope for a new "open Russia" during a visit to Stanford during his first appearance at an American university since his release from prison in 2013.

"Russia is not going to be able to avoid this transition period," said Khodorkovsky, a former political prisoner of Vladimir Putin's regime who is now living in exile in Switzerland. "And the task of this transition period is to hold fair elections."

President Putin has created a war - not economic growth, he said. And Russia is paying for the loss of freedom inside the country and the destruction of democratic institutions with the lives of soldiers and volunteers dying in Ukraine. Even economists loyal to the Kremlin are predicting no growth for the next 10 years, he said, speaking through an interpreter.

"I'm quite confident that if there were honest elections in Russia today, then the people who would come to power would be far more left-leaning than I am," he said. "The people in power now are intentionally dragging the people back into the Middle Ages."

Khodorkovsky addressed a crowd of about 600 people during an April 13 event hosted by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and its Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. The Russian oil magnate had funded opposition parties before his arrest in 2003. Many, including FSI Director Michael McFaul, believed Khodorkovsky's conviction and 10-year imprisonment for tax evasion and money-laundering charges were politically motivated.

McFaul, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Russia between 2012 and 2014, recalled how the Obama administration debated theories on why Khodorkovsky was released after a presidential pardon in December 2013.

"One theory is that Putin was ready to release you because he thought you would come out a broken man," McFaul said. "And we have witnessed today that that theory was incorrect."

Khodorkovsky told the Stanford audience "the regime will fall as the result of internal problems and civil disobedience."

The nation's economic problems stemming from "capital flight, brain drain and a decline in entrepreneurial activity" will deepen, he said, and "people will gradually realize that the only thing conformism will lead to is un-freedom, poverty, and loss of self-dignity."

Khodorkovsky launched Open Russia, a civil society movement, in 2014 following his prison release. Its goal, he said, is to help establish a democratic structure of power in Russia.

The opposition movement has struggled in its campaign, however, against a nationalistic fervor following the annexation of Ukraine's semi­autonomous Crimean region last year.

"We often hear that the opposition in Russia doesn't stand a chance, that this is just an impossible dream," Khodorkovsky said. "But I bring to your attention that the entire history of humanity was based entirely on this type of dream," he said, citing Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King.

"The Russia we dream of seeing is completely different," he said. "It's a country of clean streets; of successful, smiling, self-confident people; people who have a job they love and who don't have to struggle for existence day in and day out."

"It's a country where, if you obey the law, you need not be afraid of anybody - not a prosecutor, not a judge, not the governor, not the president.  Not even the president of Chechnya," he continued, drawing claps from the audience.

Khodorkovsky's vision is for Russia to have an independent judiciary and an influential parliament.

In a nod to Stanford and Silicon Valley, Khodorkovsky said that with a regime change, Russia would need to quickly bring the country out from isolation with the help of people, capital and technologies.

"This is the reason why I'm here. You are the leaders of today's technological world," he said. "Much of what has already changed our life and will continue to change it going forward is being created right here."

"We in Russia believe you aren't going to start helping our authoritarian regime suffocate the opposition," he added. "You're not going to start passing them information and technologies that help record our conversations in the net, break into correspondence, or set up barriers."

"On the contrary, you are going to help us to bring people the truth, to self-organize on top of the established prohibitions."

 [return to Contents] 

 #26
www.project-syndicate.org
April 14, 2015
The Challenge of Russia's Decline
By Joseph S. Nye
Joseph S. Nye, Jr. a former US assistant secretary of defense and chairman of the US National Intelligence Council, is University Professor at Harvard University and a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Future of Government.

CAMBRIDGE - As Europe debates whether to maintain its sanctions regime against Russia, the Kremlin's policy of aggression toward Ukraine continues unabated. Russia is in long-term decline, but it still poses a very real threat to the international order in Europe and beyond. Indeed, Russia's decline may make it even more dangerous.

Make no mistake: what is happening in Ukraine is Russian aggression. President Vladimir Putin's pretense that Russian troops were not participating in the fighting was all but shattered recently, when a Russian fighter in Donetsk confirmed to the BBC Russian service that they are playing a decisive role in rebel advances. Russian officers, he reported, directly command large military operations in eastern Ukraine, including the siege and capture of the important transport center of Debaltseve in February.

But the threat posed by Russia extends far beyond Ukraine. After all, Russia is the one country with enough missiles and nuclear warheads to destroy the US. As its economic and geopolitical influence has waned, so has its willingness to consider renouncing its nuclear status. Indeed, not only has it revived the Cold War-era tactic of sending military aircraft unannounced into airspace over the Baltic countries and the North Sea; it has also made veiled nuclear threats against countries like Denmark.

Weapons are not Russia's only strength. The country also benefits from its enormous size, vast natural resources, and educated population, including a multitude of skilled scientists and engineers.

But Russia faces serious challenges. It remains a "one-crop economy," with energy accounting for two-thirds of its exports. And its population is shrinking - not least because the average man in Russia dies at age 65, a full decade earlier than in other developed countries.

Though liberalizing reforms could cure Russia's ailments, such an agenda is unlikely to be embraced in a corruption-plagued country with an emphatically illiberal leadership. Putin, after all, has sought to promote a neo-Slavophile identity defined above all by suspicion of Western cultural and intellectual influence.

Instead of developing a strategy for Russia's long-term recovery, Putin has adopted a reactive and opportunistic approach - one that can sometimes succeed, but only in the short term - to cope with domestic insecurity, perceived external threats, and the weakness of neighbors. He has waged unconventional war in the West, while pursuing closer ties with the East, raising the likelihood that Russia will end up acting as China's junior partner, without access to the Western capital, technology, and contacts that it needs to reverse its decline.

But Russia's problem is not just Putin. Though Putin has cultivated nationalism in Russia - according to Harvard University's Timothy Colton, at a recent meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club, Putin called himself the country's "biggest nationalist" - he found fertile ground to plow. Given that other high-level figures - for example, Dmitry Rogozin, who last October endorsed a book calling for the return of Alaska - are also highly nationalistic, a successor to Putin would probably not be liberal. The recent assassination of former Deputy Prime Minister and opposition leader Boris Nemtsov reinforces this assumption.

So Russia seems doomed to continue its decline - an outcome that should be no cause for celebration in the West. States in decline - think of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1914 - tend to become less risk-averse and thus much more dangerous. In any case, a thriving Russia has more to offer the international community in the long run.

In the meantime, the US and Europe face a policy dilemma. On one hand, it is important to resist Putin's challenge to the fundamental principle that states should not use force to violate one another's territorial integrity. Though sanctions are unlikely to change Crimea's status or lead to withdrawal of Russian soldiers from Ukraine, they have upheld that principle, by showing that it cannot be violated with impunity.

On the other hand, it is important not to isolate Russia completely, given shared interests with the US and Europe relating to nuclear security and non-proliferation, terrorism, space, the Artic, and Iran and Afghanistan. No one will benefit from a new Cold War.

Reconciling these objectives will not be easy, especially given Ukraine's continuing crisis. At February's Munich Security Conference, many US senators advocated arming Ukraine - an approach that could exacerbate the situation, given Putin's conventional military dominance there. With German leaders, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, opposed to this approach, pursuing it would also split the West, strengthening Putin's hand further.

Others at the conference argued that the West should change the game by expelling Russia from SWIFT, the international framework for clearing bank payments. But critics point out that this would damage SWIFT and the West, whose banks would lose the hundreds of billions of dollars that Russia currently owes them. For their part, the Russians have warned informally that this would be "the real nuclear option."

Designing and implementing a strategy that constrains Putin's revisionist behavior, while ensuring Russia's long-term international engagement, is one of the most important challenges facing the US and its allies today. For now, the policy consensus seems to be to maintain sanctions, help bolster Ukraine's economy, and continue to strengthen NATO (an outcome that Putin undoubtedly did not intend). Beyond that, what happens is largely up to Putin.

 [return to Contents] 

 
#27
Vedomosti
April 7, 2015
The Forgotten Reformer
By Nigel Gould-Davies
Nigel Gould-Davies teaches International Relations at Mahidol University International College, Thailand

Last month saw the hundredth anniversary of the death of Sergei Yulievich Witte, Finance Minister and later Prime Minister. This towering figure deserves pride of place in the pantheon of great Russian reformers. No-one contributed more to the country's remarkable development in the last decades before the First World War.

The breadth of his achievements is astonishing. By putting Russia onto the Gold Standard and securing essential loans, he brought the country into the international financial system and stabilised the rouble. By developing an export-led strategy, he laid the foundations for rapid industrialisation. By attracting major foreign investment, he secured the capital and technology to begin modernising the country. As a result, Russia achieved the highest growth rates of any major economy before 1914.

But in recent years Witte's reputation has suffered neglect. Russia's search for a useable past has focused instead on Witte's contemporary, Interior Minister and Prime Minister Petr Stolypin. President Putin and other senior figures have extolled him as an inspiration for modernising reform today. Stolypin is a significant figure who carried out important agrarian reforms. But his achievements hardly compare with Witte's comprehensive modernisation strategy. Moreover, his harsh repression of unrest was so notorious that the hangman's noose became popularly known as 'Stolypin's necktie'. Witte himself was a fierce critic of Stolypin's reactionary and chauvinistic views and 'arbitary, deceitful and brutal actions'. Unlike Stolypin, Witte died peacefully in old age.

History may not repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes. One recurring theme of Russian history is the enduring effort of an economically backward great power to catch up with its more advanced partners and rivals. Over the centuries Russia has tried many approaches, none wholly successful. The dilemma persists today. Many of the challenges Russia now faces resemble those that Witte addressed so effectively: the urgent need for infrastructure; the challenge of diversified economic development; and the attraction of foreign investment -nationalist resistance to which Witte assailed as 'folly and ignorance'.

In politics, Witte was a faithful servant to two tsars but made the case for constitutional government. He was also keenly aware of the dangers of foreign adventures. While a brilliant treaty negotiator, he consistently warned of the damage that wars could inflict on Russia's modernisation. He opposed the seizure of Port Arthur, begged Nicholas II not to go to war in 1914, and accurately predicted the ruin this would bring.

These themes still resonate. At a time when Russia seems intent on withdrawing from globalisation, and in escalating instability across its border, Witte's invaluable service a century ago reminds us that a different path once helped modernise Russia and bring it a greatness measured in the prosperity of its people rather than the intimidation of others. This was a path of reform, international openness and peace.

 [return to Contents] 

 #28
Ukraine's current potential for social protests is highest in past decade - expert

KIEV, April 10. /TASS/. The number of Ukrainians ready to take to streets in protest against social deterioration is now the biggest in the past decade, a Ukrainian political expert said on Friday.

"Today, the potential for protest is much higher than it was before the 'maidan' [Maidan is the name for Kiev's downtown Independence Square, which is the symbol of Ukrainian protests that started when President Viktor Yanukovich refused to sign an association agreement with the European Union in November 2013 - TASS]: about ten to fifteen percent are ready to take to streets to express their protests," Ruslan Bortnik, the director of the Ukrainian Policy Analysis and Management Institute, said at a news conference answering TASS' question about perspectives of social protests in Ukraine over the sharp deterioration of living standards. In his words, this is the highest percentage in the past ten years.

At the same time, he noted that despite the worsening social situation Ukrainians are not taking to streets because there is no real leader. "There is no leader who would enjoy confidence of these potential protesters" because of the actions of the current Ukrainian authorities, Bortnik said. "Any person who might potentially be a leader of these protest movements immediately falls under information, administrative and other kinds of pressure from the authorities and hence cannot take a position maidam leaders enjoyed during the Viktor Yanukovich regime."

Konstantin Bondarenko, the director of the Ukrainian Politics Fund, noted that social tensions in Ukrainian society might trigger a Haiti-type scenario of developments. "The situation in Ukraine might follow the Haiti scenario, when the semi-totalitarian authorities use a special stratum which bullies any manifestations of opposition thought and keeps a lid on any manifestations of social discontent," he said.

Consumer prices in Ukraine have hiked by 45.8% on March 2014, while real wages dropped by 6.5% According to the Fund of Mandatory State Insurance against Unemployment, the number of people who have no permanent jobs nears five million.

 [return to Contents] 

#29
New York Times
April 15, 2015
In Rebel Territory of Ukraine, Relief for Illness and Pain Is Blocked
By ANDREW ROTHA

PEREVALSK, Ukraine - In a cramped cardiologist's office in southeast Ukraine, Tatyana Ivanovna, 76, begged for sedatives.

Andrey Polyakov, her doctor, took time to listen, though he knew there was nothing he could do. In the past half-hour, he had turned down requests for antibiotics, hypertension pills and several other routine medicines that have all but disappeared from this separatist-held part of Ukraine.

"And for the anxiety?" the patient asked, her voice trailing off expectantly. Already suffering from high blood pressure and back pain, she began having panic attacks when a mortar round landed on her neighbor's house in October.

"Moonshine!" Dr. Polyakov interjected, and the consultation was over.

Even before the war, it was tough here in the Donetsk coal basin to navigate the aches and pains of old age on a meager pension. Now, it is a battle for survival, and looking grimmer by the day as fighting intensifies despite a shaky cease-fire. Pensions are blocked, banks are closed, and drugstore shelves are empty, largely a result of measures taken by Kiev to isolate the Russian-backed militias and prevent government money from falling into the hands of the separatists.

"A woman comes in, and she says her kidneys hurt," said Dr. Polyakov, who was working at a hospital that serves as a base for Doctors Without Borders. "I go down the list of the drugs we have, and there's nothing there. I can tell her to go out and buy it, but the drugstores are empty. And what's the point, because there is no money anyway?"

Doctors Without Borders can provide very limited help because of Ukrainian restrictions on the kinds and amounts of supplies that the organization can bring into the country.

Six months ago, hospitals like this one were filled with victims of recent shellings and postoperative amputees, the casualties of a hot artillery war. With a cease-fire holding in most of the conflict zone, the war-wounded have now been replaced by the elderly, who hid in cellars during the fighting and have emerged to find the social safety net stripped from under them.

Of the 200 people who come each day to the clinic where Dr. Polyakov works, more than 90 percent are elderly, often with treatable chronic illnesses like hypertension, heart problems and diabetes. Prices have doubled or tripled for the few drugs that are available, patients, doctors and pharmacists say.

Delivering medicine for the elderly would seem like a simple task, but it has become mired in an intractable political question: Who will govern and pay for the Ukrainian territories held by pro-Russian separatists?

In November, President Petro O. Poroshenko signed an order that closed all government institutions in areas of southeastern Ukraine under rebel control: police stations, courthouses, universities and hospitals. As a result, deliveries of drugs to regional hospitals were also halted. People with health problems could receive pensions and medical treatment if they traveled across the front lines into government-held territory.

Russia has demanded that Ukraine resume paying social benefits and health care costs in the southeast, but still recognize the autonomy of the separatist governments. Under the Minsk cease-fire agreement signed in February, Kiev is required to prepare for a "full restoration of social and economic connections" with the country's southeast.

But levels of distrust are high. While the latest cease-fire has held for the last two months, there are periodic surges in fighting and little progress on political reconciliation between Ukraine and the southeast.

Dorit Nitzan, the head of the World Health Organization's Ukraine office, said that international health organizations working with Ukraine's government could supply some drugs to the conflict zone, but that there was still an enormous gap between supply and demand. There is no firm data on how many have died because of the lack of medical care, she said. Ms. Nitzan said she hoped that legislation would soon formalize a path for drugs to the region.

Meanwhile, hospitals delay planned surgery because there are no anesthetics. Diabetics are told to travel across the front lines for treatment.

"Just imagine a health care system without drugs," said Loic Jaeger, the deputy director of the Ukraine mission for Doctors Without Borders. "With diabetes or heart problems, it is easy to say someone will die if they don't get their medicine."

"But we cannot predict everything that is happening out there," he added. "We just don't know."

In city after city, the young have left, either to the rest of Ukraine or to Russia, while the elderly have stayed.

At an aid point in the severely damaged town of Vuhlehirsk, about 50 older men and women milled around outside an improvised soup kitchen, picking through cardboard boxes stacked with quilts and donated clothing. Nearby, a line formed outside a grocery store that promised free bread.

"Doctor!" the cry went up. A 69-year-old woman had collapsed in her apartment around the corner, apparently from hunger.

A coal-mining town, Vuhlehirsk is one of the last in Ukraine to see serious combat. Pro-Russian forces seized it in February during an advance on the rail junction of Debaltseve. Separatist forces continued advancing even several days after a cease-fire was supposed to be in effect.

On a walk along the town's main street, named for the 19th-century Russian poet Nikolay A. Nekrasov, one finds several buildings severely damaged by tank rounds and almost no one under the age of 50.

A patient at one mobile clinic, Nadezhda Sokol, wore a fur-lined coat and a beret and said she had come for blood-pressure medicine.

"I came here to get my pills," she said. "But when I showed up, they said that they don't have the ones I need. You can't find them anywhere in Vuhlehirsk anymore."

Vita Trukhan, an emergency medical worker, said medicine was only part of the problem. Food is scarce. The departing young left many grandparents in homes and apartment buildings that require repairs. And the violence of the last year has left emotional scars as well.

"Many of the older people come to my clinic simply because they have no one to talk with," she said.

Boris Indershtein, 74, put on a trench coat and fedora and set out on a recent sun-drenched morning to search for bread.

The warm spring weather was a blessing, said Mr. Indershtein, who had been living with plastic sheeting over his windows since February, when a rocket exploded in the shed behind his house, narrowly missing his vital stockpile of potatoes.

His son has urged him for months to cross the front lines and join him, but Mr. Indershtein, driven by nostalgia and fear, has continued to live alone. He is loath to abandon the home left to him by his wife, who died in 2010. And what would be waiting for him on the other side of the front?

"The troops are standing over there," he mused. "That means the war can't be far away."

By the time Mr. Indershtein reached the store, the free bread had run out. He was told to come back the next day.

In Perevalsk, a new patient entered Dr. Polyakov's office every three or four minutes. The doctor could prescribe some basic medicine like painkillers, but more often patients left empty-handed.

A woman with chronic bronchitis said she had trouble getting out of bed in the morning. Another asked about her husband, who had uncontrollable bouts of coughing.

"Did he work in the mines?" a nurse asked. When the patient said yes, she and Dr. Polyakov threw up their hands as if to say: "What do you expect?"

"We will all be that way if we live to a certain age," Dr. Polyakov said. "Nothing can help, and no one needs you. Most important is that there's nothing to be had, and it can't be bought anyway.

 [return to Contents] 

 #30
Moscow Times
April 15, 2015
Ukraine Is Attempting to Wipe Away Its Past
By Georgy Bovt
Georgy Bovt is a political analyst.

Ukraine recently adopted a raft of laws designed to strip the country of all reminders of its Soviet and communist past. What began as a haphazard effort to oust unwanted political opponents and tear down monuments to Vladimir Lenin and other communist leaders after the current regime came to power last year has now become a coordinated political course.

The "de-communization" of Ukraine should proceed at a breakneck pace - that is, in true Soviet fashion - and, according to Ukrainian Justice Minister Pavel Petrenko, must reach completion by Victory Day on May 9.

This suggests that the campaign is motivated not so much by deeply felt feelings as it is by the desire to spite Russia, just as Moscow is placing even greater importance than usual on celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Great Patriotic War.

One of the laws grants public access to Soviet-era secret police archives. Another grants new legal status to the "fighters for Ukrainian independence" - a reference to those once considered "Nazi collaborators," primarily the people's army of Stepan Bandera. A third law bans the use of Soviet symbols, equally condemns both the Nazi and Soviet totalitarian regimes and prohibits the propaganda of either.

Most of the former Soviet republics have already undergone "de-Sovietization" in one form or another. In the Baltic states, the process even reached the point that it was called "overcoming the consequences of the illegal occupation" and set out to restore the states that existed between World War I and World War II.

The Russian-speaking population suffered as a result, enduring restrictions on some rights in Latvia and Estonia as well as getting branded as "invaders" and an ethnic minority obstructing the path to national identity for the small Baltic states as they joined with Greater Europe.

Similar processes occurred in the Central Asian states as well. However, for reasons of foreign policy expediency, Moscow chose to overlook those injustices, some of which were even more egregious than the cruel treatment of the Russian-speaking population in the Baltic states.

Ukraine, however, is a special case. This is not only because Soviet leaders parceled up its territory more or less arbitrarily - tacking on the Donbass in 1918 and Ukraine's western region along with Galicia as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939 - but because Ukraine shared the distinction with Russia of serving as the backbone of the Soviet Union.

Ukraine was central not only in terms of industry and defense, but also for defining what was "Soviet" - the very thinking and symbolism Kiev is now intent on uprooting. It is impossible to imagine the Soviet Union without Ukraine, and impossible to imagine the Soviet elite without its Ukrainian members.

For its part, Russia did not attempt to extirpate its communist and Soviet past in the 1990s, even though all the prerequisites and necessary conditions were in place then. In my opinion, that was a major mistake that former President Boris Yeltsin and his group of reformers committed.

What's more, that process could have grown into a mass civic movement carried out not only from the top, as is now happening in Ukraine, but also from the grassroots, with greater involvement from society.

As a result, the Russian reformers have left the country still facing the task of overcoming the legacy of communism and totalitarianism. This has led to ideological confusion and made society unable to formulate a positive vision of its future, other than to imagine it as a replay of its "glorious" Soviet past.

But if leaders had "de-Sovietized" the country in the 1990s, it would be clear to what Russia could now return - namely, to its age-old traditions that predated the Soviet era. But as for Ukraine, a country that first achieved statehood only in the 20th century, what can it return to now? Can it return to the myths of "Ukrainian-ness" that had taken tenuous form in Galicia in the 19th century?

The current authorities in Kiev have decided to follow a radical path by attempting to combine "nation-building" with Baltic-style "de-Sovietization." That is why, in Kiev, both Stalinism and communism are equated with fascism, and "de-Sovietization" is akin to "de-Nazification."

However, this is all happening at the hands of ruling elite that are direct successors of the Soviet-era Ukrainian elite. Now we will witness the widespread renaming of cities and streets, the destruction of Soviet-era symbols found in everything from movies to the bas reliefs on public buildings.

This "self-cleansing" - and especially the opening of the KGB archives - would be a welcome step if only it was sincere and a response to grassroots demand, and not dictated by the cheapest type of political cynicism. If it is sincere, the authorities will grant public access to the entire KGB archives, but if it is not, they will open only those parts that do not incriminate the ruling regime in any way.

By the way, such cynicism and insincerity is characteristic of the ruling elite in all of the former Soviet republics. As Komsomol members, they would zealously apprehend young churchgoers on Easter day, and now, a few decades later, they solemnly get baptized before the faithful.

There is no evidence that the majority of Ukrainians, unlike the people of the Baltic states, deeply disliked the Soviet system, or that they now like the fact that their leaders, in place of implementing long-needed reforms to stave off economic collapse, focus on playing these political games with Moscow.

Former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko already made similar attempts, but his presidency ended ingloriously. Perhaps Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko will make greater progress by taking advantage of the "hybrid war" with Russia. If so, he will feel compelled to first turn the "de-Sovietization" process into an anti-Russian campaign.

Second, he will try to cement his hold on power by suppressing all other ideologies - including communism - in favor of the dominant theme of "integrating with European democracy to spite Moscow." However, considering the enormous difficulty of that task, Poroshenko might yet end his presidency even more ingloriously than his predecessor.

 [return to Contents] 

 #31
Jerusalem Post
April 13, 2015
Ukrainian parliament recognizes militia that collaborated with Nazis
The Simon Wiesenthal Center condemned Ukraine's recognition of the group as well as a second bill that equated communist and Nazi crimes.
By Sam Sokol

Seventy years after the end of the Holocaust, Ukraine's parliament has extended official recognition to a nationalist militia that collaborated with the Germans during the Second World War.

According to a bill passed on Thursday, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, an ultra-nationalist faction that sought to establish an independent Ukrainian state, would be eligible for official government commemoration, according to the Kiev Post.

While the group, an offshoot of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, engaged in warfare against both the Soviet Union and the Nazis, it also collaborated with Germany and took part in actions against local Jews.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center condemned Ukraine's recognition of the group as well as a second bill that equated Communist and Nazi crimes.

"The passage of a ban on Nazism and Communism equates the most genocidal regime in human history with the regime which liberated Auschwitz and helped end the reign of terror of the Third Reich," said Wiesenthal Center director for Eastern European Affairs Dr. Efraim Zuroff.

"In the same spirit the decision to honor local Nazi collaborators and grant them special benefits turns Hitler's henchmen into heroes despite their active and zealous participation in the mass murder of innocent Jews. These attempts to rewrite history, which are prevalent throughout post-Communist Eastern Europe, can never erase the crimes committed by Nazi collaborators in these countries, and only proves that they clearly lack the Western values which they claim to have embraced upon their transition to democracy," he added.

This is not the first time that the wartime Ukrainian nationalist movement, led by Stepan Bandera, has been the center of controversy there.

In 2010 president Viktor Yushchenko declared Bandera a hero of Ukraine in a decision that was subsequently rescinded by his successor Viktor Yanukovych a year later.

The issue of Nazism has been central to the recent Ukrainian-Russian conflict, with Moscow accusing the administration in Kiev of neo-Nazi and fascist tendencies.

Ukraine has made efforts to deflect such criticism and in January its Foreign Ministry announced that it was planning on appointing a special envoy tasked with preventing and combating anti-Semitism and xenophobia.

The most recent anti-Semitic incident in the country occurred last month when a group of masked men yelling racist slurs beat a Jewish surgeon in Kharkov.

And while a series of anti-Semitic attacks during the 2013- 14 Maidan Revolution put communities around Ukraine on edge, violence against Jews has not been a large concern over the past year, especially when compared to the war raging between government troops and separatists in the east, residents say.

Following the revolution the Svoboda party, a neo-Nazi faction with significant parliamentary support, lost most of its mandates, sidelining the far Right in the political sphere, even as extreme nationalists found a place among the volunteer battalions in combat against Russian-backed separatists in the Donetsk region.

While Jewish worries over anti-Semitism have been on the back burner due to the war, several recent developments have shown that antipathy toward Jews, or at least indifference toward such attitudes when held by important military or political figures, still exists in Ukraine.

Last November Jewish organizations expressed their displeasure when it was disclosed that the newly appointed police chief for the Ukrainian province in which Kiev is located came under fire after it was alleged that he had past ties with a neo-Nazi organization.

Meanwhile, last week local media reported that the leader of a far Right nationalist movement that assembled the bulk of the fighters involved in the 2013 Ukrainian revolution will now advise the head of his country's armed forces.

 [return to Contents] 

 #32
The Nation
www.thenation.com
April 13, 2015
Will Ukraine's New Anti-Communist Law Usher in a Free-Speech Dark Age?
The law, still to be signed by the president, is more about silencing the left than anything else.
By Alec Luhn
Alec Luhn is a Moscow-based journalist who has written for The Guardian, The Independent, Slate, GlobalPost and other publications.

Including "Communist" in the name of a political party, selling a Soviet-flag souvenir or even singing the Soviet hymn would be punishable by up to 10 years in prison, according to a new law passed by Ukraine's parliament.

The law "on the condemnation of the Communist and National Socialist (Nazi) totalitarian regimes in Ukraine and ban on the propaganda of their symbols" is ostensibly supposed to prevent the recurrence of Soviet-style repressions, but critics say it would limit free speech and marginalize the already embattled left. Although President Petro Poroshenko has yet to sign the law against communist propaganda, the bill received 254 votes and was sponsored by members of his own party, among others.

"Even if the state won't be interested in persecuting Ukraine's marginal, weak leftist organizations, the far right will likely use this law...to harass politicians and also scholars on the basis that they are not critical enough of the Soviet Union or are over-critical of Ukrainian nationalists," Volodymyr Ishchenko, deputy director of the Center for Social and Labor Research and a member of the editorial board of the progressive journal Commons, told The Nation.

Meanwhile, another law passed last Thursday recognizes as independence fighters a controversial nationalist group accused of ethnic cleansing and collaboration with the Nazis.

The new laws would likely tap into widespread anger with Russia, which has backed a separatist campaign in eastern Ukraine. But they would also further provoke tensions within Ukrainian society, which has been fractured by a pro-Russian separatist campaign that enjoys popular support in eastern Ukraine. A peace plan sponsored by France, Germany, Ukraine, and Russia foresees constitutional reforms giving the rebel-controlled areas of eastern Ukraine greater autonomy.

The anti-totalitarian law is less wide-reaching than a bill introduced last year that proposed banning "communist ideology," and it's hard to disagree with its condemnation of the repressions conducted under the Soviet regime. But it also would give the authorities the power to shut down any organization that makes even oblique reference to the Communist tradition.

Public use of the symbols of the USSR or other Eastern Bloc countries, including the Soviet hymn and the hammer and sickle, would be punishable by up to five years in prison for an individual, or up to ten years for an organization. (The ban would apparently even include "The Internationale," which the Soviet Union used as its national anthem until 1944.) If a political party, mass media outlet, or other group of citizens engages in "propaganda" valorizing the Communist or Nazi regimes or uses their symbols, it could be denied registration or ordered to cease its activities.

The law would also apparently legalize Ukraine's "Leninfall," the tearing down of Lenin monuments in cities around the country. Among the banned items are monuments, pictures or quotations featuring anyone who had the rank of district committee secretary or higher in the Communist Party, as well as monuments or pictures of actions committed by the Communist Party. In eastern cities like Kharkiv, where nationalists tore down the central Lenin statue in September, pro-Russian locals have previously defended such monuments.

It would also entail the renaming of a huge number of cities and streets, since it bans the use of names taken from Communist leaders and "connected with the activities of the Communist Party." This huge and fraught bureaucratic challenge would be one more task on top of the many reforms demanded of Kiev under its loan program from the International Monetary Fund. More importantly, it would only contribute to the split in Ukrainian society, which has seen thousands in the largely Russian-speaking east take up arms against perceived persecution by a more nationalist government.

"The legislation bans citations of Lenin, which means that we'll need to destroy half of our academic works, it bans all Communist symbols, which means a war veteran will forbidden from wearing the Red Star medal he shed his blood for," said Pyotr Simonenko, the leader of Ukraine's Communist Party, which will have to change its name. "All this is a path to an even bigger schism in Ukrainian society and a continuation of war."

Even though the Ukrainian group Left Opposition has criticized the Communist Party for its defense of Vladimir Putin's "conservative and imperialistic policies," it also condemned the law, noting that it had been found to be overly harsh by the Ukrainian parliament's own research department. In an analysis, the group argued that since the law forbids not only propaganda but also "information justifying the criminal character of the Communist regime," almost anyone can be accused.

"This document will strike a blow to academic discussions, create an instrument for repression, and hinder the struggle against oligarchy and the creation of a real left alternative," it wrote.

Bill sponsor Yury Lutsenko, a former internal affairs minister who was imprisoned under former president Viktor Yanukovych, argued that the legislation "doesn't ban ideology, because that's not acceptable in any democratic country."

"This legislation bans a totalitarian regime under whatever colors it uses, fascist, communist, any others," he told journalists.

But the law is not so much anti-totalitarian as it is anti-Russian, and its content dwells more on Communism than Nazism. Its sponsors pointedly pushed it through before the celebration on May 9 of the defeat of Nazi Germany. The St. George ribbon commemorating the Soviet victory has become a de facto symbol for the pro-Russian campaign in eastern Ukraine, which the Kremlin and the rebels have described as a similar struggle against fascism.

Communism is widely associated with Russian control of Ukraine, and the Ukrainian Communist Party, which had taken pro-Russian stances in the past, did not win any seats in parliament in the last elections, partly because it drew much of its support from the eastern regions now torn by conflict. Mikhail Pogrebinsky, a Kiev analyst who previously served as an aid to pro-Russian politician Viktor Medvechuk, called the law an act of Russophobia hidden under "anticommunist flare."

Kiev-based analyst Vadim Karasyov, who supports the law, called it a reiteration of the government's pro-European policy and a symbolic "final break with Russia, which is the successor to the Soviet Union."

"Why did they pass it? Because in the economy there are no successes, but they need to show some results, so they pass laws that have a more symbolic character," he said.

Other Eastern Bloc countries that left Russia's orbit after the breakup of the Soviet Union, in particular Poland and the Baltics, passed similar anti-communist laws. But Ishchenko, who is working on an analysis of these laws, said the Ukrainian legislation is "far more repressive than laws in other European countries." In particular, he said it limits academic research by stipulating that you can cite symbols or propaganda of a communist regime only if you're not legitimizing it.

The legislation could also encourage far-right groups in their conflicts with leftist activists. During the Euromaidan protests in Kiev in the winter of 2013-14, nationalist groups intimidated and even attacked left-wing activists.

Even those who agree with the law's content have questioned how it was adopted. "I'm not a supporter of communism and in general am a supporter of such laws," Volodymyr Yavorskyy, a member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union, wrote on his Facebook page. "But for me, it's going to far to pass so-called de-communization laws without discussion in parliament, without going through readings, without deputies having the chance to propose changes, without expert analyses."

Perversely, the anti-totalitarian law reportedly softens regulations on pro-Nazi speech in one case: A section of article 436 of the criminal cade, which forbids "denying or justifying" the crimes of fascism, the Waffen-SS or those who "cooperated with the fascist occupants," has been removed, leaving only a ban on using "symbols of the Nazi totalitarian regime."

While it's not clear why this article was changed, it could be seen to benefit some nationalist organizations. Notably, the pro-Kiev Azov volunteer battalion fighting in eastern Ukraine, many of whose members have expressed neo-Nazi views, uses the Wolfsangel symbol that was also employed by a Waffen-SS tank division. And one of the troubling legacies of today's Ukrainian nationalists is that members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, their ideological predecessor, have been accused of collaborating with the Nazis.

Another law passed last Thursday declared fighters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and others to be "members of the struggle for Ukraine's independence." While the law would mainly entitle nationalist fighters to more government benefits, it also helps more firmly establish their reputation as heroes of the state, despite the fact that nationalists also reportedly orchestrated ethnic cleansing that killed thousands of Poles and Jews during the war years.

David Marples, a history professor specializing in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine at the University of Alberta, called the law a "crude distortion of the past" that lumps controversial nationalist organizations like the UPA together with less ruthless ones, lending credence to Kremlin claims that the Kiev government is run by nationalists.

"Presumably now historians can be arrested for denying the heroism of [nationalist] Stepan Bandera or the father of the introducer of the bill, [UPA leader] Roman Shukheyvch," Marples wrote in a blog post. "Russian trolls operating on social networks, very prominently featured in Western media over the past week, have now acquired new and authentic ammunition for their verbal arsenals."

Karasyov said "some time needs to pass" before Ukraine will be ready for a "balanced view" of its 20th-century nationalist movement. "Now the authorities are rushing laws through, they often don't take into account the opinions of southeast and opposition block," he said, referring to the country's more pro-Russian areas.

If the nationalists now in parliament have their way, the anti-totalitarian legislation may be only the start. Deputy Oleh Tyahnybok, the leader of the nationalist Svoboda Party, called on the government to go further and pass a "ban on communist ideology," cancel pensions for former Soviet officials and completely ban the Communist Party's activities.

 [return to Contents] 

 #33
SBU head insists Surkov was in Kyiv on Feb 20-21, 2014

KYIV. April 15 (Interfax) - Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) chief Valentyn Nalyvaichenko claims that Russian presidential aide Vladislav Surkov was in Kyiv on February 20-21, 2014.

"We are convinced that there is a need to investigate both crimes committed by Ukrainian officials and the role of Russian high-ranking officials in the events in Kyiv's Maidan. I can confirm that we have already prepared all necessary documents, and Mr. Surkov was in Ukraine on February 20-21 [2014] for some reason. Today the investigation is working to establish why he and Mr. Yakymenko, former SBU head, visited one of the SBU facilities on February 20-21, used the government's phone line and traveled to the presidential administration," Nalyvaichenko told a session of the Ukrainian parliament's committee for the fight against corruption on Wednesday.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said on February 20 officers of the SBU Alpha special force have testified that the teams of snipers who shot and killed protestors during the February 2014 events on Independence Square in Kyiv were coordinated by the Russian president's aide Vladislav Surkov.

In commenting on statements by Ukrainian officials alleging the presence of "a Russian trace" in the Maidan events and Surkov's alleged role in them, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich called them "ravings."

 [return to Contents] 

 
#34
Christian Science Monitor
April 14, 2015
Ukraine hits 'dead end' as lasting peace deal eludes leaders
The foreign ministers of Russia and Ukraine on Monday called for incremental steps to de-escalate the fighting in eastern Ukraine. But the two sides have yet to agree on a long-term political settlement.
By Fred Weir, Correspondent

KIEV, UKRAINE - While just about everyone here says they're weary of the war against pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, there appears to be little agreement on how to accomplish long-term peace.

Opinions in Kiev are divided between those who believe that the fighting is inevitable because there can be no compromises with separatist rebels, and others who hope the shaky ceasefire will be extended long enough - perhaps years - for Ukraine to undergo fundamental reforms.

The latter group got a slight boost yesterday after Russian, Ukrainian, French, and German foreign ministers meeting in Berlin called for all sides to withdraw heavy weapons, including tanks, mortars, and small-caliber artillery, from the front line. In a statement, they said the so-called "contact group," which includes rebel leaders, should be given more input into the negotiations.

"These are small steps forward, and maybe the logjam can be broken, so that we can actually feel our way forward to a political settlement. We know there can't be a military one," says Vadim Karasyov, director of the independent Institute of Global Strategies in Kiev. "We are presently in a dead end."

Two ceasefires in the past eight months have sought to stop the fighting and map out steps toward a political settlement. But the latest deal, which was signed in February in the Belarusian capital of Minsk, has become bogged down over interpretations of its political prescriptions. Meanwhile, a surge in fighting in recent days has threatened to upend the fragile truce.

The blame game

Moscow maintains that rebel leaders should negotiate a settlement directly with Kiev before reintegrating their territories into Ukraine and accepting government rule. But authorities in Kiev say elections must first be held under Ukrainian law in the rebel-held region. Only then can discussions take place about a redistribution of regional powers and other disputed issues.

"If we stop the war, seal the border, and get all Russian troops and mercenaries out of there, we'll have lots of grounds to reconcile with people in [the rebel republics of] Donetsk and Luhansk," says Viktor Zamyatin, an expert with the independent Razumkov Center in Kiev. "But there cannot be negotiations with the rebel leaders. They are nobody under Ukrainian law. These territories are occupied by people who have simply declared their control. That will not be recognized."

Kiev and the West say the conflict is an undeclared war waged by Russia against Ukraine. Moscow - which denies overwhelming evidence that it has supported the rebels with arms and troops - calls it a civil conflict between Kiev and eastern Ukrainians.

"Unfortunately, the only way to deal with this is to ramp up the sanctions against Russia and increase the cost for [President Vladimir] Putin by sending more Russians home in body bags," says Alexiy Shevchenko, a former parliamentarian and civil society adviser to the present government. "The Minsk process leads nowhere. Sure, polls show Ukrainians strongly support the Minsk agreement, but they don't believe it will stop the aggression. They just think it's the only chance to end the war."

Missed opportunities

Some experts in Kiev agree that there was disquiet in eastern Ukraine after the overthrow of former President Viktor Yanukovych last year. They say the new government probably missed opportunities to initiate a political dialogue before sending troops east to fight Russian-backed separatists, who had supported Mr. Yanukovych. But most experts here staunchly insist the armed conflict was of Moscow's making.

"I think we could have solved this if it were not for Russia's interference," says Alexander Chernenko, a parliamentary deputy with President Petro Poroshenko's party. "Now, I fear things have become so complicated that it will take years. We have to hope that the ceasefire will last, and we can go through that long process. There cannot be a military solution, that's for sure."

The Ukrainian parliament has established a Constitutional Assembly of about 70 members. It's expected to produce a plan to give greater power to the country's eastern regions by next autumn. The scheme, which has been stalled for almost a year, would probably fall short of rebel demands for near-total autonomy. But it could provide a starting point for broader national reconciliation.

President Poroshenko has suggested the reforms might be put to a nationwide referendum to determine whether Ukrainians want to abandon the "unitary" model that concentrates power in Kiev.

"This is a really difficult path. It's risky and dangerous, and the whole country could fly apart while we're trying to do it," says Mr. Chernenko. "But this is all we've got, so we have to try to do it."

 [return to Contents] 

 #35
Donetsk republic envoy suggests Ukrainian foreign minister should read Minsk accords

MOSCOW, April 15. /TASS/. The self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) envoy Denis Pushilin said on Wednesday that Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin should attentively study the Minsk agreements "so he doesn't demonstrate to the whole world his flagrant incompetence."

Klimkin earlier said that Ukraine does not recognize the election that took place on November 2, 2014 in Donbas, and Kiev "cannot talk to these representatives of Luhansk and Donetsk." "We need legitimate elections and representatives, We must ensure that the next elections are recognized by all international organizations and that OSCE [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe] monitors the process," the Ukrainian foreign minister said.

"It seems like Klimkin did not read the package of measures signed on February 12 in Minsk by [Ukraine's former President Leonid] Kuchma [he serves as Ukraine's official envoy to the Contact Group on Ukraine] and publicly supported by [Ukrainian President Petro] Poroshenko. Points 4 and 12 of the package of measures on Ukraine stipulate that they [Ukrainian authorities] should launch dialogue with Donbass representatives precisely on issues of preparations for elections, coordination of the procedure. This means that the elections themselves, after which Klimkin is going to talk to us, should be preceded by negotiations with us on holding them," the Donetsk News Agency cited Pushilin as saying.

On February 12, negotiations in the so-called "Normandy format" were held in the Belarusian capital Minsk, bringing together Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Francois Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. The talks lasted for around 14 hours. Simultaneously, a meeting of the Contact Group on Ukrainian settlement was held in Minsk.

As a result, the Minsk agreements were signed that envisage ceasefire in Ukraine's south-east, heavy weaponry withdrawal, prisoner exchange, local elections in Donbas and a constitutional reform in Ukraine.

The Ukrainian forces and DPR and LPR self-defense forces have repeatedly accused each other of violating the ceasefire regime in Donbas.

 [return to Contents] 

 #36
Russia Insider
http://russia-insider.com
April 14, 2015
Donbass and Russia Talk Peace, Kiev Attacks, Germany Does Nothing
Germany again appeases Kiev as ceasefire is again violated, preparing the ground for the failure of Minsk 2.0
By Alexander Mercouris

Those who follow the military news from Ukraine closely will know that there has been an outbreak of fighting over the last few days in the area around Donetsk airport.

As usual, both sides have blamed each other; however reports by Colonel Cassad and Gleb Bazov - both acknowledged supporters of Novorossiya, but both consistently reliable reporters of the conflict - make clear the fighting began as a result of a Ukrainian attack.  

Both Colonel Cassad and Gleb Bazov report that the militia was initially taken by surprise and lost ground in the town of Peski.  However, as of the time of writing, the very latest reports from Gleb Bazov say (based on information from sources he "considers reliable") that the ground lost by the militia has been recovered, and that both sides are now back at their start lines.  

If so, then this would suggest that the latest fighting was more a probing attack by the Ukrainians, testing the militia's defenses and trying to make some tactical gains, rather than the start of a general offensive for which Kiev still looks unprepared.

This, however, begs the question of why the fighting has resumed now?  

The short answer is that the attack was intended as a show of force in advance of the meeting on 13th April 2015 in Berlin of the foreign ministers of the Normandy Four (Russia, Germany, France, and Ukraine).  

The Ukrainian leaders were presumably hoping that a military victory - however minor - would show that, despite its recent defeats and its economic crisis, Ukraine is still a force to be reckoned with and that this would strengthen the hand of their negotiators at the meeting in Berlin.

Colonel Cassad, Gleb Bazov, and others have speculated - probably rightly - that the Ukrainians were also hoping to use the resumption of fighting to push their idea for a peacekeeping force whilst giving themselves excuses for their failure to implement the political sections of the Minsk Memorandum. As to that, the Berlin meeting appears to have ruled out the idea of a peacekeeping force, so if this was the Ukrainian gambit, then it appears to have failed.

However, that is not the most important lesson to take from this episode.  

Ukrainian motives for restarting the fighting are irrelevant.  What matters is that they restarted it.

The resumption of the fighting shows again that the present government in Kiev is not seeking peace.  

It has refused to implement the political section of the Minsk Memorandum. As the recent fighting shows, it is not committed to the ceasefire either. At the first chance, it goes back on the attack.

The nature of the Ukrainian government makes it incapable of seeking peace.  

This point has now been made by many commentators, including by some whose articles have appeared on Russia Insider.  It has been made by highly regarded scholars like Dmitry Trenin and Paul Robinson. It has also been made (repeatedly) by me (see for example Ukraine Goes to War - And Always Will As Long As Maidan Holds Power).

Any idea that a Ukrainian government that employs someone like Dmitro Yarosh, the head of Right Sector, as an adviser in the Defense Ministry, can possibly be interested in peace, is frankly delusional. However, it is a delusion that the one government that has it in its power to decide whether there will be peace or war continues to cling to.

That government is the government of Germany.  Germany is the only country that has both the means to force Kiev to compromise and potentially the self-interest to make it want to do so.  

However, based on the recent conduct of Germany's foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, its government is nowhere close to finding the courage to do so, even though the part it played in the negotiations that led to the Minsk Memorandum shows that at some level it understands the need to do so.

In a situation where Kiev has clearly violated the ceasefire, all Steinmeier could bring himself to say in an interview with Die Welt was "we expect both Moscow and Kyiv to seize the central issue of the implementation of the next phase of Minsk."  Bizarrely, as the shells rained down on Donetsk, he lauded the "progress" to date, citing the "well-advanced withdrawal of heavy weapons."  

With the fighting intensifying and the ceasefire in tatters, all Steinmeier could say at the Berlin meeting itself was that there is "no alternative" to the Minsk ceasefire agreement and that "nothing is easy in the Ukraine crisis, this is not new. During these talks today the differences of opinion between Kiev and Moscow also became clear once again."

These weak and banal comments, splitting the difference between Moscow and Kiev for violating a ceasefire that Kiev is plainly in breach of, in a conflict in which Moscow is not even directly involved, must leave the Russians baffled - or would, if they were not by now wearily used to them. Certainly these comments are not the straightforward condemnation of Kiev's conduct that the situation on the ground and the cause of the negotiated peace as envisaged by the Minsk Memorandum urgently calls for.

So long as the German government persists in this pusillanimous behavior - whatever the reason for it - the conflict will continue, until one side or the other achieves final victory on the battlefield. Since there seems little chance of the present German government ever finding the will or the courage to take a firm stand, victory on the battlefield by one or side or the other looks like the way this conflict will end.

 [return to Contents] 

 #37
Jamestown Foundation Eurasia Daily Monitor
April 14, 2015
Rebel Forces Prepare Spring Offensive in Ukraine
By Roger McDermott
 
All parties to the Minsk Two agreement, which has resulted in a shaky ceasefire in southeastern Ukraine since February 12, express varying levels of concern about a possible full resumption of hostilities. On April 10, the pro-Russian Ukrainian rebel leader who heads the Donetsk "People's Republic" (DPR), Alexander Zakharchenko, warned that the conflict could resume, pointing to Kyiv's reluctance to implement the Minsk Two agreement. In fact, Zakharchenko implied that the possible targets of a fresh rebel offensive might by the key cities of Mariupol (Mariupil) and Slavyansk-lost to the regular Ukrainian army last year. "The problem is that we must recover territories that were temporarily occupied, preferably by peaceful means," he said on April 8 (PressTV, April 9).
 
Zakharchenko's warning and the wider fears concerning a fresh outbreak of violence in Donetsk are also reflected in recent statements from both Kyiv and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). On April 8, a Ukrainian military spokesman said that rebel forces were placed on "full alert" for a military offensive that Kyiv and Washington believe will occur within the next two months. "According to intelligence reports, the leaders of the Donetsk People's Republic have put their troops on full alert, calling on the militants to return back from health treatment in Crimea, and Russia, as well as in other places," Ukrainian military spokesman Colonel Andriy Lysenko said (Ukrinform.ua, April 8).
 
By April 12, the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (SMM) expressed disappointment over the eruption of renewed kinetic contact between the Ukrainian forces and the Russia-backed rebels. The SMM's Ambassador Ertugrul Apakan said in an official OSCE press release: "The renewed fighting followed three days of calm in Shyrokyne facilitated by the SMM, which had allowed monitors the opportunity to re-enter the village on April 9 and April 10 to assess the humanitarian needs of the remaining local population. The SMM monitors had observed and recorded severe destruction in the town, as well as the presence of vast amounts of unexploded ordnance." Members of the SMM witnessed renewed engagement on April 11 between Ukrainian and rebels forces in Berdianske and Shyrokyne. By April 12, fighting was reported again in and around Donetsk airport. Apakan noted that rebels had prevented the SMM monitors from entering Shyrokyne on April 11-12 (Osce.org, April 12).
 
Indeed, rebel forces, including snipers, frequently open fire on Ukrainian positions within fifteen minutes after OSCE observers leave an inspection area. This suggests that members of the SMM are not receiving full cooperation from rebel forces or gaining a fuller picture of the on-the-ground developments (Gazeta.ru, April 10). These developments also coincided with a hardening of Zakharchenko's rhetoric and clear dissatisfaction with Minsk Two and Kyiv's political willingness to implement the agreement. On April 10, in another ominous sign, Zakharchenko cancelled military leave for rebels serving in the local DPR separatist forces (Echospb.ru, Lenta.ru, April 11; Interfax, April 10).
 
Meanwhile, sources within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), though sparse on specific details, have alleged that since the latest ceasefire began Russia has continued to arm the rebels. According to a high-ranking Ukrainian officer in the command of the Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO), as of April 8, the combined rebel forces in Donbas (eastern Ukrainian region encompassing Donetsk and Luhansk provinces) possess approximately 700 tanks, 600 artillery systems and more than 300 multiple launch rocket systems (MLRS). If true, on a comparison of the tank holdings alone, the Donbas rebels have more tanks than France, Germany and the Czech Republic combined (Inforesist.org, April 9).
 
However, the movement of weapons and hardware into the hands of the rebels also implies the existence of a Russia train-and-equip program that has largely escaped the attention of Western commentators. In fact, this Russian train-and-equip program in southeastern Ukraine has resulted in the rebel force order of battle coming to reflect that of the Russian Armed Forces: in other words, it is a brigade-based system with the maneuver units deployed as battalion tactical groups (BTG). This has given rebel forces a powerful edge in the field, not only benefiting from Russian direct and indirect support, but exploiting the fact the BTGs are significantly more likely to win the day over the ATO battalions (Live Journal, February 27). A recent analysis of the weaknesses of the ATO in Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye provides insight into the type of lessons being drawn and no doubt addressed in these rebel exercises (Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye, April 4). Eyewitnesses report combined-arms maneuver warfare being rehearsed regularly in southeastern Ukraine in which rebels and regular Russian military personnel participate. This is explicit in video footage of such exercises uploaded by the separatists showing the involvement of hardware that is exclusive to the Russian Armed Forces (InformNapalm, January 20).
 
Russia's unofficial train-and-equip program to aid the rebel forces in Donbas appears to be intensifying, and perhaps not without reason; ahead of what is likely to be a decisive period in the crisis and supporting Western and Kyiv-based suggestions of a renewed rebel offensive within 60 days. One illustration of this train-and-equip program recently emerged in Yenakiyeve. Russia-backed rebels were conducting military exercises outside this southeastern Ukrainian town. According to the rebel battalion commander, Ostap Cherny, an important visitor was delighted by the progress on show: "The general is very pleased," he told his troops. The general in question was not named, but the implication was that he is a Russian general. Cherny had referred to an individual observing the exercises surrounded by five camouflaged armed guards, who later stayed at a Luhansk hotel under high security (The Moscow Times, April 5).
 
If, indeed, the Russian train-and-equip program in Donbas presages a fresh rebel land-grab, it is likely to be masked as an entirely rebel offensive. The initial target seems most likely to be Slovyansk, using combined-arms joint operations that draw on units of the Donetsk and Luhansk "People's Republics" and utilize the same pincer movement used in Debaltseve in February. The risk to Mariupol is also considerable. And with sufficient Russian support, including regular troops and logistical support, the risk of the city falling to the rebels is particularly high. But the ongoing Russian train-and-equip program for rebel forces and Zakharchenko's belligerent statements and actions, including freezing leave for personnel, should raise concern.

 [return to Contents] 

 #38
Carnegie Moscow Center
April 15, 2015
All for All? The Breakdown of POW Exchanges in the Donbas
By Isaac Webb
Isaac Webb is a junior fellow in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Russia and Eurasia Program.

Despite a relative lull in fighting in eastern Ukraine over the past several weeks-daily casualties have hovered in the single digits recently-prisoner of war (POW) exchanges, a central element of the Minsk agreements, have stalled. According to the February 11 "Minsk II" treaty, the Ukrainian and separatist leadership had until the end of February to withdraw heavy weaponry from the conflict zone. After this process was completed, they would have five days to exchange prisoners on an "all for all" basis.

Two months after Minsk II, the OSCE has been unable to confirm the complete withdrawal of heavy weaponry from the line of contact. After the Ukrainian side negotiated the release of 16 Ukrainian POWs on April 6 (Kyiv did not release any prisoners at that time), former Ukrainian President and member of the trilateral contact group on Ukraine Leonid Kuchma announced that prisoner exchanges had been officially suspended. For now, he lamented, only volunteers are addressing the issue. (Volunteer groups have had mixed success in negotiations. "Patriot," a group funded by private donations, was able to negotiate the release of 42 Ukrainians, including 13 civilians, without the government of Ukraine giving up any POWs in return. Other groups' efforts have been less fruitful.)

The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), which has played an important role in arranging POW swaps, is singing a different tune, continuing to insist that negotiations are ongoing "at the highest level." The head of prisoner exchanges in the Ukrainian Defense Ministry also says that he expects that process will resume "in the coming days." These conflicting messages reflect the fact that the Ukrainian government has yet to come up with a properly functioning mechanism for POW exchanges. As Kuchma has noted, there is no single group in charge of the process in Kyiv.

The Russian government continues to deny that Moscow is a party to the conflict in eastern Ukraine and has refused to release the most high-profile Ukrainian POW, military pilot Nadiya Savchenko, whom it has accused of complicity in the killing of two Russian journalists. However, according to the leader of one Russian human rights organization, more than 1,000 Ukrainian POWs were held in Russian hospitals and detention facilities at the beginning of the year. The head of a Ukrainian volunteer organization that works on POW exchanges claims that the number of Ukrainian soldiers in captivity in Russia is closer to 100 currently.

Separatist leaders maintain, somewhat contradictorily, that they no longer have any POWs to exchange and that all swaps must be postponed until several other unrelated provisions of the Minsk accords are fulfilled. The total number of pro-Kyiv prisoners held by the separatists remains unclear. The SBU believes that more than 400 Ukrainian soldiers remain in captivity in the Donbas. Ukrainian volunteers estimate that 200 POWs are being held in the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR), some of whom have been in captivity for more than seven months. On April 6, DPR "Commissioner for Human Rights" Darya Morozova claimed that 1,378 separatist supporters remain in Ukrainian custody. Less than a week later, she alleged that 200 separatist soldiers and "no less than two thousand civilians" remain in Ukrainian custody.

The fact that the process of prisoner exchanges is still incomplete after months of fits and starts-not to mention harrowing accounts and images of the brazen mistreatment of prisoners-speaks volumes about the messiness of the situation in eastern Ukraine. Resolution of the POW issue is complicated by the direct involvement of an array of competing interests in the Donbas, including those of local separatists, criminal gangs, shady business figures, Russian "volunteers," as well as representatives from the Russian special services and military organizations.

A recent move (with European support) to create a website with information about captive and killed soldiers in the Donbas is a step in the right direction, but far more needs to be done. Kuchma suggests creating a central body to oversee the work of governmental and non-governmental groups who are currently involved in POW exchanges. Unfortunately, with hundreds of soldiers and civilians remaining in captivity, it is hard to imagine a speedy resolution to this often-overlooked humanitarian issue.

 [return to Contents] 

 #39
Business New Europe
April 15, 2015
Eastern Ukraine returns to the ruble
Graham Stack in Kyiv and Mari Bastashevski in Donetsk

The Russian ruble is gaining ground against the hryvnia across rebel-held parts of East Ukraine's Donbas region, 19 years after Kyiv introduced the national currency to end the country's membership of the ruble zone.

As Eastern Ukraine heads towards becoming a frozen conflict, the ruble is in widespread circulation after Russian-backed separatists who control the self-styled Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics (DPR/LNR) launched payments of pensions and salaries in the currency at the start of April.

While the symbolism of the ruble's resurgence in the east is strong, the move may reflect as much economic necessity, as well as a political desire to integrate with Russia, after Ukraine severed financial ties.

Cash-strapped and wracked by conflict, Kyiv excluded rebel-held territories from the national payment and banking system, making it impossible for pensions and state salaries to be paid out. It also introduced controls on traffic and passage to and from the disputed areas, leading to a shortage of food products. Meanwhile, supplies of hryvnia cash are also dwindling.

Introducing the ruble as legal tender will also facilitate secret direct funding of the self-proclaimed DPR and LPR by Moscow, say analysts. Moscow denies sponsoring the Donbas rebels, who claim the ruble influx is caused by tax revenues from local exporters, and locals who left in large numbers to work in Russia and send money home.

Ruble rolling

Officials were quoted in the local press as saying that the total sum of ruble payments made by the DPR in April was RUB1.9bn ($30mn).

Galina Sagaidakova, head of the rebels' 'DPR Pension Fund', told bne IntelliNews that the shift to the ruble was a pragmatic decision. "We began to pay out pensions in rubles from April 4, after the decree from the head of the republic March 25, 2015. We pay out according to the pension law, simply multiplied by two because we're paying out in Russian rubles," Sagaidakova said.

Sagaidakova emphasised that the DPR is paying Ukrainian pensions, not Russian. "In truth the pensions should be paid out by Ukraine, even the ones that we're paying out now," she said.

According to Sagaidakova, the reason pensions are being paid in rubles is simply that "we're paying out in the currency that we have because we get money in rubles." The rubles in turn are coming from the DPR, she said, declining to say where the DPR was receiving ruble funds.

Sagaidakova said that the DPR pension fund even exchanges information with Ukraine's state pension fund. "Until recently it was a one-way correspondence, we were notifying them, but I think in due time this is going to work, because the Ukrainian pension fund also began to contact us and request the files," she told bne IntelliNews.

Shops now display prices in rubles and hryvnia, and many have set up cash desks for rubles.

With many of those remaining in the rebel-held territories pensioners, the sudden flow of rubles starting on April 4 has caused rubles to appear in circulation very quickly, on a par with the hryvnia.

Initially DPR officials spoke of allowing dollars and euros alongside ruble and hryvnia, but there is no evidence of pricing in, or circulation of, euros or dollar.

Payment of pensions by the rebel authorities is still only partial. According to government announcements posted in Donetsk announcing the advent of DPR pensions, "no pensions will be paid to those who have applied to receive pensions in Ukraine". Pensions are paid out at the 'Central Republican Bank,' which comprises former branches of Ukraine's state-owned banks on the rebel-held territories, now commandeered by the rebels.

Since many local pensioners still hope to get payment for arrears on Ukrainian pensions, they were wary about talking about their receipt of ruble pensions in DPR. "I got 1,000 rubles in aid payment because of the pensions I have missed, and then my pension for April, in rubles at a rate of 2 rubles to the hryvnia," said Tanya, an 80-year-old resident of Donetsk city center, who declined to give her last name in case she loses pension entitlement in Ukraine. Despite receiving her pension, she was standing in line for humanitarian aid provided by local oligarch Rinat Akhmetov.

Drifting to Moscow

Not only pensions, but also salaries to state employees are increasngly being paid in rubles. "We started to receive salaries [in rubles] recently," said a librarian at the district library on Tchemoskinov street, requesting not to be named.

"For seven months we received nothing," she said, adding that she also received three months back salary paid by the DPR along with the April salary. "We're all law-abiding citizens, first of all we paid off the rent and the utility bills. We paid that to the DPR," she said. "It's not enough [money] but that's how we live now. Those who survived the 90s have some experience," she said.

"In the last month we got paid in rubles," said Artem Neizvestny, a 43-year-old park worker. "We spend it on food and clothes, we're not exactly happy, but it sort of works," he said.

"Of course using rubles makes me think we're more part of Russia, but prices here remain Ukrainian," said 30-year-old Nastya Golodets, the employee of an international hotel chain in Donetsk, who had also worked in Moscow for a number of years. Nastya said she had savings in rubles, and her mother received a pension payment for April in rubles, while because of hotel closure she received a third of her former salary paid in hryvnia.

Increasing use of the ruble symbolises the rebel-held territories' slow drift towards Moscow, and may also accelerate the drift. With Kyiv alleged by locals to have introduced a de facto blockade of the rebel-held territories, food products may now be easier to source across the border, while exports of coal to Russia are growing, according to recent reports by OSCE monitors on the Russia-Ukraine border.

Kyiv-appointed governor of Donetsk Oleksandr Kikhtenko, in a newspaper interview on April 10, said that Kyiv should restore economic relations with the rebel-held territories, in order to reintegrate them in Ukraine.

But Ukraine's interior minister Arsen Avakov furiously rejected the idea. "I call to break off Kikhtenko's economic relationship with state service," Avakov blogged, calling Kikhtenko a "collaborationist" and demanded he be fired by President Petro Poroshenko.

 [return to Contents] 

 #40
The Vineyard of the Saker/Odnako
http://thesaker.is
April 14, 2015
The Ukrainian oligarchs have lived a year without a state, but what future awaits them?
By Ivan Lizan
translated by Aleksey
source: http://www.odnako.org/blogs/kak-ukrainskie-oligarhi-prozhili-god-bez-gosudarstva-i-kakoe-ih-zhdyot-budushchee/

Since the victory of the "revolution of dignity" a year has passed which allows us to draw an interim debit / credit of oligarchic activities in Ukraine and understand, who out of the most active participants in the Maidan coup has been the winner, who has been the loser, and what the future holds for the Ukrainian oligarchs.

It was smooth on paper, but they forgot about the ravines.

The primary purpose of the first, "velvet" Maidan, organized by Sergei Lyovochkin, the apogee of which was the beating of the "онижедетей" pro-European protesters on November 30, 2013, - changed the model of relations between the oligarchic clans of the Ukrainian republic.

The Donetsk clan, headed by Yanukovych and Akhmetov opposed the Dnepropetrovsk clan, whose symbol was Yulia Tymoshenko, and the richest representative being, Igor Kolomoisky. The key claim from the clan of "Dnepropetrovsk" to the "Donetsk" were insatiable appetites for riches of the family of Viktor Fedorovich Yanukovych and their refusal to sign the euro-association agreements that would fit into some oligarchs designs to fit into the trade commodity chains on a grassroots level. (The fight over wealth interests)

The Moscow agreements which were initiated by Mykola Azarov, allowed not only the satisfaction of appetites of Ukrainian oligarchs, but also the beginning of a process of a gradual reversal of Ukraine in the direction of the customs union headed by Russia . However, in January 2014 at the Maidan events it became clear that in the case of larger geopolitics, the Ukrainian oligarchs were not orchestrators of a larger game, but chess pieces of medium value, who were moved and operated by the United States.

Because by February the oligarchs almost completely lost control over the activities of the revolutionary masses, and the only one who in retrospect benefited was Igor Kolomoisky. The others were among those who had already lost much more than they received.

The revolution eats not only its children, but also the parents.

It's hard to say whether the Ukrainian oligarchs counted through the different combinations and results of their revolutionary activities in Ukraine or not. The probably attempted to, but could not calculate all the results fully. According to the results of the past year it can be stated with confidence: the winner, at least in terms of aggregate capital gained has not been a single one. Not one single oligarch became richer..

The oligarch whose riches took the biggest hit was the prince of Donbass Rinat Akhmetov, who has lost almost half of all capital and lost his feudal fiefdoms. The only thing that keeps Akhmetov afloat is a solid reserve of strength and energetic DETEK empire, which is a tasty morsel for competition, but can not be taken away due to its strategic importance and the complexity of the management. An important fact is that the structure DETEK includes both thermal power plants, a key element in the Ukrainian energy system, and power production and transportation of coal. Another key fact is that the taking of such an asset from Akhmetov can lead to unpredictable risks to Kiev elite.

However, the war on the Eastern Front and the struggle with Igor Kolomoisky utterly damaged Akhmetov, and with these events the wealth losing oligarch is risking celebrating the New Year completely broke, the steel plants of Rinat Akhmetov are still standing in Donetsk People's Republic, and almost all the other assets in the Donbas are in contention between Ukraine and the Donetsk People's Republic.

One of the organizers of the "velvet" Maidan, Dmitry Firtash, is now located in Austria, where the local government is deciding whether to extradite Ukrainian oligarch to the United States. Since Firtash was the chief chemist of Ukraine and specialized in the manufacture of fertilizers, he got what was coming. Problems with gas supplies, falling hryvnia and contraction of the domestic market led to a decline in demand for fertilizers and closure of his plants. Gorlovskiy "Styrene", for example, was on the territory of the Donetsk People's Republic and was most likely badly damaged by the shelling of the city. Firtash's arrest showed the fragile position of this Ukrainian oligarch, who has even been deprived of the plant "Tajik Nitrogen" back in far away Tajikistan, not to mention his assets in the Ukraine.

Viktor Pinchuk also got what was coming, his pipe company went bankrupt, and the insurance business died soon after.

Vadim Novinsky is virtually bankrupt, and lost profits in shipbuilding amounted to about $ 4 billion and this is the estimated value of the contract in the construction of LNG for "Gazprom" at Nikolaev shipyard. Also suffered was his bank "Forum", and a February investigation into "Smart group" could lead to deprivation of more of the oligarch's assets.

Sergei Taruta became a real bankrupt (his own words for describing his financial situation). It is noteworthy the tycoon went bankrupt not because of digging trenches along the Russian border-Donbass, but due to the loss of assets that are now located in the Donetsk People's Republic.

Konstantin Zhevago and Sergei Tigipko moved aside and decided not to take part in the feud, so they got hurt the least, but their capital also lost weight. Zhevago business is suffering because of falling prices for iron ore, and the bank of the tycoon, "Finance and Credit" is on the verge of bankruptcy. The businesses of Tigipko is predicted to crash land, and the actual oligarch faces financial ruin.

The government - that is "Private". The oligarch - that's me. Igor Kolomoisky

By year end, the only oligarch left standing in Ukraine was Igor Kolomoisky and his colleagues in the financial and industrial group "Privat". Despite the reduction in the size of capital, "Private" has what the other oligarchs and their organizations do not have, and that is a lot of muscle.

Igor Kolomoisky and the two Gennadys who are close to him, Korban and Bogolyubov, by virtue of their last positions managed to hire mercenaries in time and form their battalions. The power shifts helped provide cover not only to protect their existing assets, but help them increase their sphere of influence to the area of Odessa, Zaporozhye and Kharkov regions, practically creating a state within a state, in which Igor Kolomoisky became leader. The parliamentary elections provided an opportunity to "Private" to cement its representation in parliament and repeatedly "bend" Kiev. Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk were forced not only to allocate billions to the refinancing of "Privat," and turn a blind eye to the theft of some six hundred and three thousand tons of oil from the main oil pipeline, but also tolerate Kolomoiskiy as governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region, and his deputy, Igor Papitzu, in the seat of the head of the Odessa region. Removal of Papitzu and Kolomoiskiy without a declaration of war on the bank "Privat" is not possible, the guarantee of victory against such a powerful force is not there, so no one in Kiev can decide or take such a bold step.

In fact Kolomoysky, is the only oligarch in Ukraine who poses a real threat to Kiev rulers and is in turn a reserve force for Washington, whom which the United States could use after the bankrupting of the existing political projects.

Successful crisis-managers

In the meantime, the competitor of Kolomoiskiy is the president Peter Poroshenko, who despite a 9-fold increase in profits of his confectionery corporation "Roshen." is in whole a loser. Not even arms trafficking is helping the oligarch-president via the plant "Lenin's smithary". On a side note it is true that there is growth in the bank Poroshenko "MIB", which over the past year increased its capital by 85%, probably surpassing the financial performance due to the talented and hardworking former chief dentist Oleksandr Yanukovych.

We should also mention the extensive work of Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who has certainly increased his capital, as on the development of credit and the cost of money all the way to the arms trade. However, the ratings Arseny Petrovich did not score because of difficulties in proving the ownership of supplies and funds that were originally of the treasury of money and disbursed loans.

Survival in habitat destruction

The trouble all the Ukrainian oligarchs that they are no longer able to control the political processes in the country in which they earn their money. The maximum that the two Poroshenko and Kolomoysky can affect is the process of reallocation of budget funds and distribution of attractive assets. However, the oligarchs cannot affect the economy in ways that they could before.

The procedure of limiting Yanukovych and taking away his assets, which coincided with the launch of the script for the disintegration of Ukraine, led to the destruction of habitual Ukrainian bourgeoisie and oligarchy. If earlier issues of personal security were left to structures of the Ukrainian government and also the ones that supported law enforcement agencies which were funded by the state budget, once they fell apart the next path is the increase in spending on the defensive component of power by everyone.

The collapse of the economy and the uncontrolled collapse of the banking system will not only hit the mere mortals, but also affect such gods as the oligarchs. Once again, the reallocation of assets plundered from Ukraine can be done. But to keep the loot, to make it work, bringing profits in dollars, would be incredibly difficult.

Ever since the engineering and metallurgy fell into a tailspin, and a there is a hole in the budget that is of epic proportions, the ones who will be able to survive are these,

- Connection in relations with the state defense department in order to repair equipment for the army of Kiev;

- To fit into the scheme of arms procurement and development of Western aid, including financial;

- Be able to retain control of the business related to critical export / import for the currency or to control strategic sectors of the economy (since PPG "Private" can survive, which is the backbone of the monopoly on the production of ferroalloys and export of currency, and Rinat Akhmetov with his holding DETEK as a supplier of electricity).

The Ukrainian oligarchs are going to suffer with the fall of agricultural holdings: the cost of fertilizer, machinery and fuel significantly more expensive, and access to credit will be difficult. However, the oligarchs will transfer the costs to farmers and other market actors, and the sale of grain for the currency will stay afloat.

The bankers will get hit all the harder, the bankruptcy of "Delta Bank" and the catastrophic outflow of deposits, the inability to repay clients payments on loans will lead to the death of almost all the banks and the financial system of Ukraine. The last one to fall on the Ukrainian banking market, will be the "Privat" of Igor Kolomoisky.

The reduction of pillaging opportunities will sharpen the war between the oligarchs, and the country will disintegrate into separate a principalities, formally included in the one and indivisible Ukraine.

This year will be crucial for the Ukrainian oligarchy, the same ones that destroyed their habitat - Although the state had its curves and obliques, but it provided, now the oligarchs are forced to build their feudal principalities on the ruins of Ukraine, and forced to live independently. Ukraine's experience shows that the loss of a sense of proportion in the privatization of profits and nationalization of losses leads to the destruction of the state and the ruin of those who parasitized its body. The readers are sure to be told again next year again of news of another splurging and talented managers who have fled abroad as a once successful entrepreneur.

The Ukrainian economic system which works on a set of assets belonging to different oligarchs, has exhausted itself and is on its last legs. Because in a year or two, a war of the same intensity or worse, will decay the rate in which Ukraine is functioning not only for the oligarchs, but for the people as working state institutions would collapse.

Consequently, everything will have to start from scratch nationalization and industrialization.

 [return to Contents] 

 #41
Moskovskiy Komsomolets
April 6, 2015
Russian experts criticise Yarosh appointment to Ukrainian General Staff
Artur Avakov, Yarosh honourably pensioned off. Right Sector's paramilitary wing is living out its last days, experts believe

Dmytro Yarosh, leader of the neo-Nazi Right Sector, which is banned in Russia, has become an adviser to the head of Ukraine's General Staff. Only recently the Right Sector leader had proposed disbanding this body for incompetence. The organization's militants are now hoping to create the country's reserve army, dreaming of emulating Estonia. However, experts see the new appointment as marking the decline of Right Sector and predict the impending withdrawal of its fighters from the zone of the antiterrorist operation on indefinite leave. [Passage omitted]

Moskovskiy Komsomolets has learned from experts how the sensational appointment will affect Right Sector and the future of Ukraine:

Kostyantyn Bondarenko, Ukrainian political analyst:

"With the appointment of Yarosh it is possible to speak about a compromise being reached between the Ukrainian authorities and Right Sector. I do not believe that there are any other far-reaching plans here, and nor is there any question here of Yarosh having any influence over the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The talk of the creation of something like the Estonian Defence Union remains just one of many plans being proposed to integrate the volunteer battalions into the armed forces. We have hundreds of such ideas, but from declaring them to implementing them is a very long road. For now it is all the more difficult to say how effective or at all necessary this union will be. We have already had the idea of creating an alternative general staff -an idea that was successfully buried a few days after it was aired...."

Vladimir Zharikhin, deputy director of the CIS Countries Institute:

"The United States has evidently said that Right Sector has done what it had to do and must go now so as not to discredit Kiev. Yarosh has been given an honorary post, but he will be unable to exert any substantial influence over decision-making on the General Staff. The talk of creating a 'Defence Union' will also lead to nothing, since all attempts to form parallel paramilitary structures will now be prosecuted quite robustly. Yarosh can have been promised something like this only in order to drag him into the bureaucratic vertical and to disarm him there.

"After his appointment it became clear that the days of Right Sector's paramilitary wing are coming to an end. The organization's militants will now be sent from the zone of the antiterrorist operation on indefinite leave or for just as lengthy retraining.... Maybe some of them will agree to serve with the Ukrainian Armed Forces or the National Guard, but Right Sector will disappear as an independent combat subunit. Remaining a political organization, Right Sector will go on trying to struggle for power, periodically engaging in banditry. But I do not believe that it has any prospects: Such organizations can be popular only in the active period of a revolution, and they start to lose their positions when the regime is consolidating its hold."

 [return to Contents] 

#42
www.rt.com
April 15, 2015
Russia to turn to courts if Ukraine fails to pay $3bn debt in time - Siluanov

Russia will go to arbitration court if Ukraine fails to repay its $3 billion debt by the end of the year, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov has said.

"We will act in accordance with the agreements on the investment of money from the National Welfare Fund into Ukrainian bonds that stipulate that we will turn to arbitration courts if the money is not repaid," Siluanov told Rossiya-1 television channel Tuesday. The Minister added that Ukrainian counterpart Natalie Jaresko assured him during their last discussion that "the debt had been taken into account in Ukraine's budget."

Russia bought $3 billion worth of Eurobonds from Ukraine in December 2013, with Kiev due to pay the debt off by December 2015. The Eurobonds were placed on the Irish Stock Exchange and facilitated by VTB, Russia's second largest bank. A total of $15 billion was promised by Russia to help buffer Ukraine's dire economic situation on the condition a new government was formed. But Russia hasn't offered new funds to Ukraine after the Maidan turmoil broke out in the country.

Worsening conditions

Meanwhile, Ukraine has been facing a dilemma with international creditors refusing to write down the country's debts and the IMF acquiring some of its liabilities. Ukraine has to pay about $10 billion to service its debt this year, including corporate and sovereign loans and bonds, with the total debt amounting to $50 billion.

Kiev has to reach an agreement with creditors by the end of May to save $15.3 billion over 4 years as a condition for receiving the next tranche of a $17.5 billion International Monetary Fund loan. It comes in exchange for tough economic, budgetary and monetary reforms in the country.

Moscow is Ukraine's second-biggest creditor and is not going to demand early repayment of the $3 billion loan, despite the fact that one of the contract's conditions was violated as Ukraine's national debt exceeded 60 percent of the GDP. The Russian authorities have repeatedly stated that they expect Ukraine to fulfill its obligations.

Currently, Ukraine is seeking to restructure at least $21.7 billion of public debt. The country's central bank reserves stood at the dangerously low level of $5.6 billion as of March 5, and the national currency, the hryvnia, has lost more than half of its value in the past six months and emerged as the worst performing currency in 2014.

Last month Moody's rating agency downgraded the long-term issuer rating of Ukraine to the second lowest Ca grade from Caa3. Ukraine will most certainly default on its debt without restructuring and new complex loans, Bloomberg analysts said. Other experts think that Ukraine's debt will be restructured with difficult conditions, as a default by Kiev is not in the interests of any of its creditors.

 [return to Contents] 

 #43
www.euractiv.com
April 14, 2015
Ukraine faces 'unprecedented' energy crisis

Ukraine faces an unprecedented energy crisis after the loss of coal mines and shale gas fields in war-torn regions, and Russia's push to bypass it as a transit country for natural gas to Europe, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has warned.

Russia's annexation of Crimea further hit domestic energy production in Ukraine, according to an IEA report, which was published yesterday, as a Gazprom boss cautioned against any European Union attempts to block new pipelines.

Also on Monday, Russia's energy minister said his country would not renew transit contracts with Ukraine, and there were reports of fresh fighting in separatist-held territory.

"Ukraine is confronted with unprecedented challenges as it faces geopolitical, economic, financial, humanitarian and energy crises at the same time," the IEA report on Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia said.

Since it erupted last year, the Ukraine crisis has hit energy imports and denied Ukraine revenue from transit costs, according to the IEA.

It warned that new pipelines bypassing Ukraine, such as the mooted Turkish Stream through Turkey and Greece, could ultimately strand "severely ageing" Ukrainian gas infrastructure. That infrastructure will need huge investment to handle future lower volumes of gas transit, the IEA said.

Ukraine is currently the largest transit country for natural gas in the world. About 40% of Russian gas supplies to Europe go through Ukraine, which has needed two international bailouts since 2008, most recently last year.

Ukraine's stability was important for the EU's energy security, the IEA said. In 2014, as relations worsened after the ousting of Kremlin-backed Ukranian President Viktor Yanukovych, Russia turned off the taps.

The resulting shortages in the EU gave political impetus to the Energy Union project, which aims to bolster the bloc's resilience to such shocks.

Transit

Alexei Miller, the head of Russia's top gas producer Gazprom, warned the EU on Monday against moves to block Moscow's plans to transit gas to Europe through other routes.

Russia and Ukraine signed a gas contract in 2009, which expires in 2019. Russia does not plan to extend its gas transit contract with Ukraine after the existing deal expires, Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak said yesterday.

Ukraine currently transits between 75-85 billion cubic metres (bcm) of Russian gas to European markets every year. There was a record low of 60 bcm in 2014, from about 120 bcm in the mid 2000s.

This was because of state monopoly Gazprom's strategy to diversify export routes, the IEA report said.

Gazprom has reduced Ukraine's transit from over 65% of total Russian gas exports to Europe by 2007, to below 50% in 2014. Supplies to Germany, France and Belgium are being routed away from Ukraine via Nord Stream. The Belorussian Yamal, or Northern Lights routes, could also offer lower transportation costs in the future.

Military damage

Ukraine has large coal resources, but most of its 300 mines are located in the war-torn Donbass region. "Damage caused by military action to the coal mining and energy-intensive industries in this region is immense," the report said.

More than 6,000 have been killed since the conflict erupted a year ago, when rebels declared independence from Kyiv. Ukraine and the West say they have evidence that Russia has sent men and weapons to support the rebels, a charge Moscow denies.

Coal supplies from the Donbass to power plants and central Ukraine stopped almost entirely in the middle of 2014 because of destroyed transport links. This poses a "major level of irreversible damage for the coal and industry sectors".

In 2014, according to preliminary data from the Ukrainian Ministry of Energy, there was a 22.4% decline in the production of raw coal to 64.9 million tonnes (Mt). Coking coal output fell by 32.1% in the same year to 16.1 Mt, while production of power-generating coal declined by 18.5%, to 48.8 Mt.

Ironically, coal and electricity imports from Russia are among the options the Ukrainian government is looking at to mitigate the problem.

Shale gas halted

Ukraine has scope to develop its domestic gas production. Estimates for natural gas production are 27-30 bcm by 2025, the IEA said.

But the price of domestically produced gas will need to increase to raise the investment needed. Household gas bills are subsidised by the state in Ukraine.

The price for consumers is set to increase by nearly four times to 1,590 Ukrainian hryvnia (about €64) per thousand cubic metres (kcm) from UAH 419/kcm.

Ukraine has considerable unconventional gas potential, the IEA said, but future shale gas developments led by Shell in the east, and Chevron in the west, were now uncertain.

The projects were halted in 2014 because some of the shale concessions were close to the conflict zones.

The Minsk ceasefire between separatist and government forces, struck in February, remains in place. But yesterday, military sources in Kyiv told Reuters that one Ukrainian serviceman was killed and six were wounded in separatist territories.

It accused rebels of using heavy weapons that were meant to have been withdrawn under the ceasefire deal. The truce, brokered in the Belarussian capital, is still technically in force, though both sides accuse each other of intensifying attacks in the past few days.

The foreign ministers of Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany met in Berlin later on Monday (13 April) to discuss the next steps in implementing the ceasefire agreement.

Imports hit

Before 2012, Ukraine got all of its natural gas imports from Russia. All energy imports to Ukraine decreased in 2014, the IEA report said.

Natural gas imports represent 57.2% of all energy imports to Ukraine. Last year, natural gas imports dropped 15% compared to 2012 to 27.5 bcm. They were 37.6% lower than the 44 bcm imported in 2011.

About 92% of gas imports were from Russia, with the remainder coming mainly from Germany, Hungary, Austria and Poland.

Since April 2014, Ukraine has ramped up reverse flow gas imports from the EU. They reached 0.9 bcm per month by the end of the year. Reverse gas flows is when customers of Russian gas in the EU sell the gas to Ukraine.

"2014 marked a fundamental turning point in Ukraine's foreign gas trade," the report said, "For the first time ever, the share of imports in total gas consumption was below 50%."

Strategy needed

Ukraine's government needs to substantially revise its 2030 energy strategy to bring it up to date, the IEA said. It was written before the crisis escalated and makes no mention of measures to boost energy supply security and efficiency.

Efficiency had multiple advantages, including job creation and health benefits, said IEA executive director Maria van der Hoeven at the launch of the report in Brussels.

The new strategy would need to promote a substantial increase in domestic gas production and other domestic energy sources, and improve conditions to attract private investment, the report said. More suppliers would also need to be found.

Ukraine brought in emergency measures to manage shortfalls during the 2014-2015 winter.

"But more robust policies and measures will be required to address possible gas, coal and electricity supply disruption risks in the short to medium term," the report said, before calling on Ukraine to fundamentally reform its energy sector to encourage competiton and investment.

The European Commission was asked to comment specifically on Ukraine but did not want to add to those below, made in the press release accompanying the report.

Mechthild Wörsdörfer, director for energy policy at the European Commission's DG Energy said, "In the long term intra- and inter-regional energy interconnections (oil, gas and electricity) can help overcome political tensions and create solidarity."

 [return to Contents] 

 #44
www.rt.com
April 14, 2015
Ukraine: Which way to Europe and for Europe?
By Dr Alexander Yakovenko, Russian Ambassador to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Deputy foreign minister (2005-2011).

The Ukraine crisis served as a trigger for a broader crisis in the West-Russia relationship. Today, a year and a half after it started, what are the stakes and the bets?

Firstly, the declared objective of the EU's Ukraine policy is to have it firmly integrated in a Greater Europe, represented by the EU. Thus, it would influence Russia's development in the right direction. We have no problem with that, all the more so that Ukraine's transformation is long overdue and in everybody's interest.

But why acting secretly and unilaterally, rather than openly and multilaterally? We had always been told by the EU, that a routine Association Agreement with Ukraine was in the works. We never minded. But then, all of a sudden, it turned out that a Deep and Comprehensive FTA was going to be part of that. When we enquired, we were told that it was none of our business. Though it was obvious, and recognized later on, that such an FTA was not compatible with Ukraine's membership in the CIS FTA.

It took a year for the Financial Times (on 7 April) to admit that "in Ukraine's case, the ENP's mechanical approach blinded EU policy makers in 2013." The paper called on Brussels unaccountable bureaucracy "to avoid such mistakes." The British House of Lords in its February report also concluded that the EU sleep-walked into the current crisis. Alfred Tennyson's line "Someone had blundered" comes to mind. In any case, the EU made a risky foray into old geopolitics with disastrous results. Why lay the blame for one's blunders at Russia's door?

Secondly, the US and NATO have enough technical capabilities to know what was really happening in the Crimea. It equally applies to Eastern Ukraine. They either cannot provide evidence to support their allegations of Russia's involvement or cannot manage their alleged truth.

We will never put up with a war by proxy on our border. When we get the response from NATO general's mouths, rather than their guns' muzzles, it would be laughable, had it not been for the death and destruction caused by Kiev's Orwellian anti-terrorist operation (ATO). The New York Times was right when in its editorial (July 3, 2014) it described Kiev's decision not to extend the June truce, but conduct the ATO, as a fateful step.

What is more, Ed Lucas, no friend of Russia, writing in The Times on 12 August 2014, was appalled by the prospect of the West "bankrolling indefinitely a failing state, run by corrupt politicians, oligarchs and paramilitary thugs." So far, the developments in Ukraine have not proved that prediction wrong. The choice is clear: it is either war or transformative reforms. Kiev still insists on the military solution, which undermines the Minsk agreements.

Thirdly, President Barack Obama in his CNN interview with Fareed Zakaria in February did admit that the US "had brokered a deal to transition power in Ukraine," i.e. behind the backs of the German, French and Polish Foreign Ministers who helped reach the 21 February agreement between President Viktor Yanukovich and the parliamentary opposition. The US thus endorsed the power grab which destroyed the politics of consensus and constitutional order that had held the country together for 23 years. The people in the Crimea fled the revolutionary chaos and violence of an obviously nationalistic regime.

For Russia, when the cause of Ukraine's territorial integrity was lost in the coup, the interests of the people on the ground became a paramount concern. Is it not in line with Europe's post-modern values, relegating a state's sovereignty to the status of a secondary concern.

Fourthly, Russia is accused of waging an effective propaganda campaign in the West, the situation that the West and "outgunned" Brussels' Eurocrats cannot reverse in the media space they have been controlling for ages. Maybe, the reason is they cannot manage the truth, which is the ATO and its consequences, including indiscriminate shelling of civilian infrastructure and civilian population. But, first of all, the West cannot explain why Kiev has chosen war over political settlement. And I fully agree that innovative thinking is in scarce supply in Europe.

The recipes are obvious - no prospect of NATO membership for Ukraine and federalization of a divided country (the latter option favored by Vernon Bogdanor on The FT's pages). Henry Kissinger and Zb. Brzezinski are among those who support these outcomes.

Finally, on rules-based order and Russia's revisionism. In this particular case the EU laid down the rules of unilateralism which we thoroughly followed. The Soviet Union was once, at the time of the Cultural Revolution, accused of revisionism. Remember that there was no formal post-Cold War settlement in Europe. Recently, the Ditchley Foundation conference came to the conclusion that "it was difficult to see how current tensions could be resolved without moves towards a new security system" in Europe.

George Friedman (of Stratfor) revealed to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, that the Ukraine crisis represents America's grand strategy to establish a cordon sanitaire to keep Russia and Germany apart. So far this conspiracy against Europe succeeds. Hopefully, the Europeans will wake up to the reality and will not allow their continent to be raped by divide and rule tactics.

The revisionism outcry betrays politics and policies of status quo, both internationally and domestically. Russia became a symbol of rejection and untenability of old European order and old mindset. The radically evolving regional and global context will ultimately determine the outcome of the present complex European crisis. A new mainstream is taking shape. And Russia is proud to be part of this process, to be on the side of common sense and truths universally acknowledged, that underlie it.

 [return to Contents] 

 #45
Irrussianality
https://irrussianality.wordpress.com
April 14, 2015
'DETERRING RUSSIAN AGGRESSION'
By Paul Robinson
Associate Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa. Paul Robinson holds an MA in Russian and Eastern European Studies from the University of Toronto and a D. Phil. in Modern History from the University of Oxford. Prior to his graduate studies, he served as a regular officer in the British Army Intelligence Corps from 1989 to 1994, and as a reserve officer in the Canadian Forces from 1994 to 1996. He also worked as a media research executive in Moscow in 1995.

Not content with extending its bombing campaign in the Middle East to Syria, the Canadian government has announced that it will get involved in yet another country's war by sending 200 troops to Ukraine. The objectives, we are told, are to deter Russian aggression and to 'help Ukrainian forces' personnel to better defend their country's sovereignty and territorial integrity.'

Most of the contingent (150 in total) will train members of the Ukrainian National Guard in Yavoriv in the far west of the country. The remaining 50 Canadians will provide training in explosive ordnance disposal, military policing, military medicine, and logistics. They will join 800 American and 75 British soldiers doing similar jobs.

There are a couple of ways of assessing this decision: the first is in terms of its own internal logic, that is to say examining whether the policy in question is capable of achieving the desired objectives; the second requires stepping outside that logic and questioning the assumptions behind it. The first approach involves asking whether Canada's action will deter 'Russian aggression' and enable the Ukrainians to fight more effectively; the second involves asking whether 'Russian aggression' really is the primary cause of Ukraine's current difficulties.

Looking at the first of these questions, will Canada's 200 men and women serve as a deterrent? The answer is clearly no. If by 'Russian aggression' one means the support which Russia is giving the Donbass rebels, then to date nothing which any Western nation has done, individually or collectively, has had any noticeable impact on Russian behaviour. Certainly, it hasn't dissuaded Russia from providing aid to the rebellion. In fact, over time Russian assistance to 'Novorossiia' has grown steadily. It is quite obvious that Russia will not permit the rebels to be defeated, and Moscow certainly isn't going to be dissuaded from this objective because 200 unarmed Canadians, located 1,000 kilometres from the front line, are doing a bit of training.

It is also doubtful that the Canadians will help the Ukrainians fight more effectively. Although poor training has been a factor in the Ukrainians' defeats, it hasn't been the most important one. After all, the rebels aren't exactly better trained. The real problem on the Ukrainian side has been very poor high level political and military leadership, which has resulted in a series of major strategic and operational errors. These led to Ukrainian troops being surrounded on at least three occasions - in the 'southern cauldron', at Ilovaisk, and at Debaltsevo. No amount of low level tactical proficiency can compensate for failure at the higher level, and since Canada's training mission does not address that, it won't do much for the Ukrainians' overall performance.

Moving on to the second approach mentioned above - questioning assumptions - it is worth noting that Ukraine's greatest strategic blunder has been the Anti-Terrorist Operation itself. Support for rebellion was actually fairly low a year ago, and the numbers willing to protest, let alone take up arms, was small. A year of living in cities which are being shelled has driven thousands of Donbass residents into the rebel armies. Listening to Canadian politicians and generals speak on the matter, it appears that they view the conflict in Ukraine in utterly black and white terms - the war is the result of 'Russian aggression', period. That implies that the solution lies in 'standing up to Russia'. But this is a grotesque oversimplification of reality. While Russia shares some responsibility for what has happened, the rebels aren't rebelling because Moscow told them to. They are doing so because they dislike the Ukranian government. Deterring 'Russian aggression' is irrelevant to this.

A route to a political settlement does exist. It was laid out in the Minsk II agreement, according to which Kiev must negotiate constitutional reform with the representatives of the provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk. The agreement doesn't specify who these representatives are, but it is obvious that they have to include the rebel leaders, because the latter will not accept any agreement which does not involve them. Ukraine cannot defeat the rebels by military means. That is now impossible, regardless of how much training Canada or any other country provides. Realistically, the only way to a lasting peace which preserves Ukrainian territorial integrity is for Kiev to strike a deal with the rebel leaders. This means engaging in political negotiation and compromise. Unfortunately, the military training mission not only doesn't contribute to this but is also likely to strengthen the hand of those within the Ukrainian government who believe that no compromise is necessary.

Politically, therefore, the Canadian mission sends entirely the wrong signals to Kiev, indicating that Western states will support it regardless of the errors it makes and regardless of its degree of willingness to take the steps required for peace.

 [return to Contents] 

 #46
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
April 14, 2015
Fascinating Interview with Vlad Wojciechowski - an Active Participant in the Odessa Anti-Maidan Movement
He tells a harrowing tale of his journey from the Trade Unions House on the day of the massacre, to his flight to Crimea, his return and arrest in Odessa, and then finally to the Donbas via a prisoner exchange.
[Photos and videos here http://russia-insider.com/en/mortal-combat-antimaidan-interview-vlad-wojciechowski/5653]

(Red Star Over Donbass) http://redstaroverdonbass.blogspot.ru/2015/04/mortal-combat-antimaidan-interview-with.html
Vlad Wojciechowski
This article originally appeared at Commitee2May. It was translated by Greg Butterfield at Red Star Over Donbass
http://www.2may.org/smertelniy-boy-antimaydana/

I've known Vlad Wojciechowski for several years. Once upon a time, before the Maidan, which split history into "before" and "after" and destroyed the Ukrainian state, I loved coming to Odessa, meeting there with local activists of Borotba, including Vlad. At night we sat in noisy Odessa courtyards, walked around Primorsky Boulevard, and discussed the prospects of political struggle. I remember on one of my last visits we strongly criticized Yanukovych and thought about how great Ukraine would be without him. It was, it seems, two years ago.

And now, two years later, we are back together in the trench, placing guns on the parapet, watching the movements of "Ukropov" at the checkpoint. A ridiculous irony of fate. Vlad was one of the most active participants in the Odessa Antimaidan movement from the beginning, and was in the House of Trade Unions on May 2. After the terrible violence against opponents of the junta on Kulikovo Field, he was forced to flee to Crimea with other activists. He returned to Odessa at the end of the summer, was arrested and thrown into prison by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). In late December, he was exchanged for captured Ukrainian soldiers, and found himself in Novorossiya. Ukrainian officials took his papers, and now he's unable to leave the country. However, it is not too perplexing. He seems to have found himself here -- in the political department of the Ghost Brigade. We sit at the headquarters of the political department in Alchevsk and reminisce...

Free Press: How did Antimaidan begin in Odessa?

Vladislav Wojciechowski: For us, Antimaidan began in late 2013. The leader of the Odessa chapter of Borotba, Alexey Albu, was then a regional council deputy. The head of the Party of Regions faction asked his assistance in protecting the regional council -- they really expected an assault then. Of course, we were no friends of the Regionals, but everyone understood that it was better for them to remain in power than the alternative ...

And were there supporters of the Maidan in Odessa?

Of course, we had Maidan from the beginning. A small number of people, several hundred on average, hanging around the monument to the Duke of Richelieu, but nobody took them seriously: there were fools, what could they take over? Nobody even tried to disperse them. And Odessites plainly did not support them.

How did the local authorities treat them?

The local authorities panicked a little. During the defense of the regional council, after we had already spent three nights there, the TV reported that Yanukovych had proposed Yatsenyuk to become head of government. This was a serious wake-up call, as it showed that he had no other way to cope with them. Yatsenyuk ultimately refused, that is, he was aware that the power had already shifted 100 percent. Therefore, the local authorities were in a panic, not knowing what to do.

How did the Kulikovo Field movement develop?

It turned out that the defense of the regional council had rallied many people from various organizations, including some we sometimes protested, like "Slavic Unity." A collective decision was reached to create a unified council to build a real people's resistance to Maidan. All the Antimaidan forces rallied. That's how the Kulikovo Field movement was born -- because the first rally was held on the Kulikovo Field. Once there was a statue of Lenin there, before it was brought down and moved. It's just a very large area in the center of the city. When the first rally was held there, we were about 10,000 people. It was just a rally, not yet a march. Prior to this, the largest rally that I had ever seen in Odessa was held by the Communist Party on January 24, 2009, against the Rada's infringement of workers' rights. About 900 people had come to that.

And here there were about 10,000, and from the podium it was announced that we're not going anywhere and we will create a tent city. At the same time a people's defense team was set up -- young guys with bats who were supposed to protect Kulikovo Field. And on March 16 the first march was held - it brought out 20,000 to 25,000 people. Everyone thought here there would be no change of power.

There was euphoria of victory?

Of course. Twenty-five thousand people. Odessa had never seen anything like it. I stood at the beginning of the march at a crossroads, where it turned in the direction of the regional council, filming it on video. I was shooting continuously for 40 minutes. And the march had still not ended, the tail was not visible. Moreover, 90 percent of the participants were not in any organizations. People spontaneously took to the streets to prevent what was happening in Kiev. Then it seemed, what Maidan in Odessa? There's nothing here for them.

What happened on May 2?

The day before, on the first of May, we had a small May Day action -- we held a march, which was about 4,000 people. By that time people had become tired of marches as they began to realize that they accomplished nothing. Every weekend we held marches, the first was 25,000, then 20,000, then 15,000. Everyone complained that there was nothing but talk and walking around the city. Four thousand people on the first of May -- and that's respectable. Then everyone crashed and went to rest.

On May 2, not suspecting anything, at about 2 o'clock I went with my sister to the Tavria supermarket on Deribasovskaya Street. We went (everything started then, but I still did not see anything), we bought something, and the guard started runningaround, yelling that everyone must leave, they are closed ...

Did you know that football fans gathered there?

I knew, because just the week before when Chernomorets [Odessa soccer team] played, there were rumors that Kulikovo Field would be razed, so an urgent mobilization was called to defend the encampment. Naturally, we all ran there, but no one came. Everyone got fed up and no one took it seriously afterward. So, the guard kicked us out of the supermarket, and we saw shooting, flying stones, firecrackers ... I took my sister home, went on the Internet, watched an online broadcast and was stunned, because there were never so many of these morons in the city.

You mean, it was all people from out of town?

That's right. Because the Chernomorets fans who participated in the march "For a United Ukraine," for the most part, when they saw how it was flying off the handle, said, "We don't want to be part of this!" and went on to the football match. I'm not talking about the ultra-rightists, but about those who just came to the march.

I called my friend Andrei Brazhevsky. I was sure that he went there because he was always near the action. I asked him: "Andrei, what's happening?" He said, "We got squeezed, but we're still holding on, we have no forces here." I said, "Come on, we will try to get to you!" We must help our comrades - you can't throw them to the wolves. We decided to go to the Kulikovo Field, to see what was happening there. People were preparing for an attack on Kulikovo ...

We arrived to a depressing spectacle. At that time there were only about 150 people. Moreover, the composition was depressing. About 40 young guys, 50 women aged 30 to 60, and 50 men aged 50-60-70 years. A sad spectacle, but, nevertheless, we tooks sticks in hand, made barricades--in general, prepared to defend ourselves. Of course, we all understood coming here that we will get it in the neck, but we had no moral right to leave the people. We decided to stay with them, arm them with sticks, collect stones.

We gathered up 250-300 people. There was a rumor that those who were defending themselves on Greek Street, a few hundred people, were coming back to us, and with their help we would repulse the crowd. Eventually, exactly 15 people returned from the Greek. These were the only ones who managed to get out of there without being stopped by police. They escaped the crowd, ran to Kulikovo, we met them ...

So. We get a call from the city center, saying the fascists have already passed the Little Book, the book market halfway between Kulikovo and Greek. A march of a thousand. Several hundred from the Maidan, fully equipped with firearms. And half with bats and chains. We are told that they were 10 minutes away, get ready! Well, we looked at the perimeter. It turned out that we had one person for every meter of barricade, well, it's just gibberish, so we narrowed the barricades to the porch of the building.

You controlled the building then?

No one had control. It was empty. No, there were some workers from the House of Trade Unions. But on May 2, along with security, the usual guards, there were the boys from the Odessa squads. We decided to stay at the building. Naturally, we tried to send the women away. Many accuse the leaders of the Antimaidan of bringing people into the building, but that's a lie. There are videos taken by us when Deputy Vyacheslav Markin, who died there, went to the podium with a microphone and starts yelling, uncharacteristicly for him, demanding all women leave the Kulikov Field. And there were grandmothers walking around with shields and helmets. He says, "Go away! Why do you need it?! Go away! Do not bother us! We will not run to save you."

But some refused to retreat from the fight. In the confusion that followed, people ran into the building, because they could already see the march coming. We were part of the group left on the porch ...

And were there attempts to strengthen the defenses, in terms of military science? Were there experts among you, who knew how to hold the defenses?

From the point of view of military science, it was all for nothing. There was no defense as such. Well, there were pieces of asphalt that we broke up for half an hour before their arrival, broken pallets -- all spontaneous.

We had one person with military experience, a friend. When we saw him, he came up and said: "Guys, you know that it's all over if we stay here?! You must understand this! What are you doing?" We said," Come on, suggest something else." And what is there to offer? There is nothing to offer. As a result, this highly intelligent military guy fled, and said to hell with it.

Some people who had shields remained on the porch and began throwing stones. A wooden shield is, of course, a good thing when you're deflecting stones, but then they started to shoot at us ...

What kind of firearms were used?

A 5.45 mm barrel was definitely used. This is either a Saiga semi-automatic hunting rifle, or a Kalashnikov assault rifle. Most likely they were hunting rifles, the only difference being that such weapons cannot fire bursts.

When our people with shields began to fall, riddled with bullets, we all went into the building, because there was no other choice. We were in the building, and they were over forty meters away. We threw stones, they stood and shot. They did not even have to come close.

When we entered the building, there was a fuss. I saw a man of about 60 standing at the window, watching. Then he just crumpled -- shot in the head, I saw it, it's clear that it was not a thrown stone, but a shot in the head that killed him. There were a lot of pictures. Don't look through a window or at once a couple of bullets will fly, or a Molotov cocktail.

We continued to throw stones until we ran out. There were few stones - we had to shove everything in our pockets! Then he started throwing pieces of glass at them -- well, at least it was something. It was a little confusing. You throw a piece of glass about twenty meters, and someone forty meters away shoots at you.

Then we ran into a wing of the building, with one exit on the side stairs. Apparently they had already infiltrated it and sprayed a lot of pepper spray. Normal police "pepper" -- it was impossible to breathe, just tears. We ran from that wing. By this time, the bottom had flared up ...

And you had some personal weapons, gas cylinders, blunt weapons?

I didn't see any, though I ran through all our "defenses." We really had nothing to fight back with. If we had had two Kalashnikovs and a hundred rounds of ammunition each, we could have at least put up some resistance -- they would have just run away.

At what point did you understand that it was necessary to leave the building?

There was already heavy smoke. I started running around, looking for Alexey Albu and Andrei Brazhevsky, and there's turmoil, a lot of people running around. At one point, Deputy Markin caught me by the arm and said, "Vlad, don't be nervous, everything will be fine!" I said, "Ok, I'm not nervous!" And I ran on. I saw Andrei Brazhevsky. But Andrei had a problem - he couldn't see well. Although he was an athlete, his vision was very poor, he just couldn't recognize you past three to five meters. I yelled, "Andrei!" He heard me, but couldn't see. Looking-looking, bang, and he ran off somewhere. Then I met Alexey Albu. He said, if there is a fire, it makes no sense to run upstairs, because you can't jump and will either burn or suffocate, so let's stick to the first floor.

Following this logic, we gathered who we could, and hand in hand, went through one of the wings of the building, down the stairs to a second floor window, and now two to three meters below us is a playground! A lot of people still stood under that window. We simply knocked out all the glass and breathed the air. And those below were saying, "Okay, let's go!"

Well, we thought we'd preserve the defenses, hold the line on that floor. It was a narrow space, and in a narrow space, as is well known, the number of defenders is not so significant. And so there we were, until after a while one of the ultras with a Ukrainian ribbon crashes in and says, "Oops, this is the end of you!" And beside me was an old grandfather. Maybe a former military man -- he was wearing camouflage. Well, I respected this grandfather -- he kept his head and immediately threw a punch at this fool. He hit him in the stomach so hard that he got up and ran away. And I was holding a large fire extinguisher. I took it in case we had to hold back the flames, it had very strong pressure. I sprayed him with the fire extinguisher, he scrambled up and fled, dramatically threw a bottle at us, but missed.

Then they decided to talk with us. They said: "Bring out the women, and then let's deal!" We said, "Well, just let them withdraw peacefully, without problems." They still said: "Bring out the women, we will not touch them, we are local." We said: "Local, what area are you from?" They: "We'll kill you all!" Just local right-wingers, right, we know them all. We had five years of conflicts, we fought constantly with them. In general, there are only 50 people in Odessa, morons. It was clear that they were not local.

Eventually, we brought the women through the second floor window. Firefighters helped by putting up a ladder. We evacuated eight women, and we had seven people left. Four were young men up to 35, the rest 45-50 years. We realized that they are ready to shower us with Molotov cocktails, yet we need to somehow get out. We already realized that this was the end - all will have to pass through their hands, there were no other options -- the smoke was already very heavy, there was nothing left to breathe.

We came out and immediately it began. First the firefighter went down, he said, "Come on, guys, I'll try to bring you!" It was clear that he did not have a chance to bring us, because up comes a bald goon with a revolver in his hand who said to him: "Freedom! Go home." The firefighter left. Us: "Hands up!" But he was not alone, there were a bunch of morons standing around.

We reached the ground, and then another fascist runs up with a bat in one hand, and a chain in the other, swinging for me (and I was in a bright light green jacket): "This is the reptile who threw glass at us! " I was surprised the glass hit someone in their march ...
And that's all of us, 15 people in the corridor that the police made ...

The police were present?

Yes, but there were only about 30 of them, okay, so where to intervene? War has come ... In fact, we were grateful because they brought a lot of people out and saved them. Simply, if they had fled, the crowd would have snuffed us all. In general, they made a corridor for us to withdraw -- there were fifteen policemen on one side, fifteen on the other, and among them about a hundred of these goats with bats and chains. We had just started to come out haphazardly, I did not even have time to do anything. Just trying to cover my head, when a chain hit me. Now I have a scar from the chain [shows wound]. Hit, I fell down in a heap. Then some idiot brings the Ukrainian flag and tells me, "Kiss the flag!" There I sat with a busted head. I pretended to be stunned, to not understand anything. Then he was dragged off by his own people, so as not to shame them.

Then time seemed to run a little differently, it's hard to remember now, as I lay there in a pool of blood. In the end, it was dark, and we tried to reach the police. There is a video showing a handful of us, the gangsters walking around us, someone laughs, someone spits. An old grandfather tries to take me by the hand, hit me with a shovel. Then the police drove their van closer to us, saying, "Get up quickly, crawl, get in!" This was another test, because there I was, ­­ my head was busted, but at least I could move. But there were a few people with us who were lying unconscious, beaten to a pulp - we dragged them. Those who could went toward the police van, and got beaten on the head with sticks. We rolled away in this van, and they started to run, hitting it with sticks.

Once we got away, the police brought us to the station on Malinowski. One of the commanders of the district department came out, and said: "Guys, hold on! We are morally with you, but you see, there's nothing we can do to help you, we have orders to arrest all of you. But I'm leaving these orders in the dark! I called an ambulance and you are leaving!"

Yes, the police were behind us. But what chance did their hundred people have to disperse 3,000 hoodlums?! The thirty or forty people that were at the House of Trade Unions, they almost didn't intervene, they couldn't do much. But if they hadn't, we would not have gotten out. We would have just been beaten to death. A blow on the head with a stick by itself isn't fatal, but 20 times in the same place, ­­ this is serious. So we went to the hospital, my head was bandaged. I was supposed to have an x­-ray, but we didn't wait, we wanted to hide at home to recover, find out what's going on ...

In your opinion, what was the cause of death of the majority of those killed in the House of Trade Unions? There's been much speculation that the burned bodies were already dead ...

I can't answer unequivocally. Yes, there were several bodies that were burned, but there were so many armed gangsters with Wolfsangels [neo­-Nazi symbol], and even members of the Azov Battalion. Sasha Gerasimov, a member of the Komsomol who spent 11 years in prison, was there. He began to choke from carbon monoxide, lost consciousness and fell. Men in black helmets with Wolfsangels pulled him up. They dragged him to the window and said, "Jump! Better jump, or we will beat you to death!" On the fifth floor! Naturally, he did not jump, he tried to resist, they began to beat him. There is even a piece of video where he crawls out as they beat and beat on him. He stayed in the hospital for three months, one leg severely burned, the other knee crushed --­­ he is disabled now, and still walks with a cane.

But I think if not half, then at least one­-third died from firearms. I'm a hundred percent sure. They could be seen, that's the way it was ...

But did any experts see the bullets ...

The experts saw, but they had to blame us. They wrote on Andrei Brazhevsky's death certificate that he died from the crash after falling from a window. But the video shows that when he fell, he just broke his leg. He was still alive and tried to get away. No, he was finished off. Some worthless fascist bashed his skull. Well, was it the crash? In the video everything is clearly visible, including those who pursued him prior to his death.

Then you had to flee from Odessa?

Yes. We left urgently on the night of May 8-9, that is, a week later. There was danger of arrest. A good friend warned comrade Alexey Albu by phone that they were preparing to arrest all the Borotba members on May 9, and that it was better for us to disappear. We left all together, the whole organization, in two cars, by taxi, then hired a minibus to Kherson, then to Crimea. I returned to Odessa on August 12 ...

For what purpose?

I just wanted to, and came back. No, I knew it was dangerous. But I had nothing to hide. The SBU and police came to my home several times - they wanted to call me in for questioning as a witness to May 2. I wasn't afraid, let them call me. I'll come if I have to. I witnessed what happened, I didn't kill anyone. But they did not call me for any interrogations. A month later I was arrested, exactly one month after I returned.

Of course, they knew that I was back. The phone was tapped, and naturally I did not change any of the numbers since I was not hiding from anyone. Nothing frightened me, and my mother and sister had long been accustomed to having the phone tapped. No one was hiding, I lived in a rented apartment, worked ...

When I came back, I started to communicate with people from the Antimaidan -- ­­ these were people who did not accept what had happened and wanted to do something. We went out at night, painted graffiti like "Junta out!" We pasted leaflets - something, anything to contribute to the struggle. Propaganda for Novorossiya, of course. Novorossiya is the only living example of confrontation with the Kiev authorities, this was not happening anywhere else. That's where the banner was raised. And the people there took up arms and risked their lives to prevent this plague from descending upon them.

Friday, September 12, was a lovely autumn evening, the "velvet season" in Odessa, when the sea is still warm and the air is a little cool. An ordinary evening, a small group had gathered, all seemed normal. Our door was always open - we were not afraid. This was a typical Odessa courtyard, any neighbor can stop by without asking. And some people flew in. At first it was not clear who they were. Half of them were "citizens" and those who were in uniform were unmarked. No Ukrainian flags or insignia. The first thing I saw was some reptile with a brand new Kalashnikov. A good Kevlar helmet with a skull and crossbones. He ran in, shouting "All hands up!", handcuffed us, start kicking people out. That left me, Popov and the third bad man,­­ Palycha Shishman, who, it turned out, had cooperated with them. Comrade Popov was with us on the second of May. He is now in the Lugansk people's militia, in the fourth brigade.

At night we were brought into the SBU, and various officers began questioning us. They already had a finished "pidozra" --­­ in Russian, literally "suspicion." Something like an indictment. First, they document a "suspicion," then try to prove it in a pre­trial investigation, and then refer the case to the court. Personally, I was charged with "suspicion" under Article 28-­3, "Organization of a Terrorist Group." By organization, they meant financing. That is, if you bought a drink for someone and talked to them about Novorossiya, ­­ it was already terrorism. A bottle of cognac - this is funding. The investigator said: From eight to 15 years in prison. But, he says, you have a problem there. I said, what? He said: You're the organizer. I say, so what? He: Well, okay, not 15, but you'll get 14 years for sure.

We spent a few days waiting for lawyers. We talked to them about the tactics of our defense, hoping for some relief in the court. But at the first trial, extended preventive measures were applied, and we realized that it's useless. The lawyer says, the best thing to do is try to have you transferred to house arrest. The judge read it all, laughing: Article 28­-3? She looks at the investigator: Are you serious? But what have they done? The investigator says: They did it! Well, the judge says she understands that we should be under house arrest. But there are no options, and ... 60 days in jail! The judge said bluntly: "I have no options. If I release you, tomorrow there'll come for you ... "

So for four months, I ended up in jail. There, in Odessa. Once a week, I was pulled in for questioning by the SBU - not very pleasant conversations with not very nice people ...

How did you come to be exchanged?

This was due to hard underground work, because it was difficult to get ahold of our lists, we had no connection to normal due process. On December 26, at eight in the evening, during the evening roll call, a senior officer came with a sheet of paper, called four names, and said: "You have fifteen minutes to get ready, a car is waiting for you, you are free, goodbye!"

We were in shock, they were going to let us go. The door opened, there were some fools in uniforms wearing masks, and one lead us somewhere. Well, we thought then it was the exchange, we had heard about it before. We were issued a ruling from the Prosecutor's Office that the case was closed for lack of evidence. A note that says you are officially free. So I thought with this certificate I could leave prison quietly and go home to sleep. But I was taken out in handcuffs. "Alpha" soldiers put us in the trunk of a Volkswagen minivan. The Alphas took the seats, and the four of us were in the trunk. They handcuffed us together, took off and announced we were being taken to Kharkov. We already knew that. In Kharkov, they gathered 200­-something men from all over Ukraine - this is kind of a transit hub. And then through Izium to Donetsk.

What happened after the exchange? How did you get into the Ghost Brigade?

In Donetsk, military intelligence took over. Everyone had to go through questioning, to find out who was really a rebel and who was just mishandled. The next day my comrades from the LC arrived and brought me to Lugansk. For the first month I lived with a man from the Hooligan Battalion, just thinking that this is freedom, cool! Then I met with Evgeni Wallenberg, who I knew from Borotba. Evgeni took me to Alchevsk and said: "Don't you want to help me in the political department? I need people who are intelligent, ideologically savvy!" I said that I'd think about it. I thought, and now I'm here.

Why do you think the resistance in Odessa lost? Why did it succeed in the Donbass region, and not yours

Frankly, I'm ashamed to answer, because I am ashamed of Odessa. Seventy percent of the people there still support us. Yes, they are all intimidated. But here, too, they tried to intimidate and arrest everyone. Here they began to bomb people ...

In Odessa, the leaders of Antimaidan, rather than unite, were each pulling the blanket. Some used volunteers to collect money in the name of Antimaidan, and spent it on themselves. There was no cohesion. There were a thousand people, and 1,500 organizations. Fifteen hundred organizations per thousand people! And May 2 happened. If we knew what would happen, we could have gathered 20,000 people and chased all that crap out of town. But it turned out that in general no one gathered. There was an opportunity, but it was not taken advantage of.

Maybe people were not completely aware of the seriousness. This may have played a role. The mentality of Odessites is different from Donbass. Odessans are more opportunists by nature. On May 2 our enemies managed to intimidate most of the city's population. On the one hand, shame and disgrace - fear is stupid! But on the other hand, you can understand them --­­ stones against guns are not good odds ...

How do you see the resolution of the whole situation? Do you see Odessa liberated?

I see it. I even see the liberation of Kiev ...

Should Novorossiya be established within the borders of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions? Or within the boundaries of the eight regions [of southeastern Ukraine]? Or should all of Ukraine be liberated from the junta, and the country rebuilt?

As I said, in Odessa 70 percent support us. They now live under occupation. I understand that you cannot leave them that way. How could you say that in 1941-­1945 ...

It's necessary, as you say, to "rebuild" on a new basis. Novorossiya is a new banner, which has risen for many people, they want to separate and build their own state. But a neighboring country, Ukraine, is suffering, and we are duty­-bound to help get rid of the junta. And give people the freedom to choose the country in which they live, to choose their government. To release them from the occupation is just the beginning. Our enemy is not the soldier of the Ukrainian Armed Forces (APU), who stands in the trenches at the front, but the Kiev junta, the power of the oligarchs.

 [return to Contents] 

 #47
Subject: The Report Of The Very Good Judge Valeriy Zorkin Made On 24 March 2015
Date:     Wed, 15 Apr 2015
From:     Lawyer in Moscow

Here is a non-definitive chain of thought addressing the combination of unusually intelligent "spotting" of what are the most germane factual issues plus genuinely serious legal reasoning generously bestowed upon us by the eminent Chairman Valeriy Zorkin.

On the one hand, Zorkin associates himself with the esteemed 20th century jurist Karl Llewelyn who once non-trivially suggested the law as being "what officials do about disputes." On the other hand, Zorkin recognizes and reminds us that on a planetary level, we do not have a structure of officialdom to make those vital "calls" of strikes, fouls, and the like. This is why international law is said by the skeptical to be a mere chimera and acknowledged by the pragmatic to be "soft" law, where the emphasis is upon the adjective rather than the noun.

Your anonymous commentator is at the other end of the spectrum. He is a decided idealist which places him in the very distinguished company of Plato, among others. In terms of philosophic disquisition, there is a great deal to be said in such a theoretical domain.

However, in terms of getting anything tangible done - this is a dead-end. For those of us active in our finite lives upon the world's finite playing field - triage, approximation, interpolation, and analogy are worthy (if imperfect) tools.

Some will have noted the absence of the 05 December 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances that was executed in connection with the Ukraine's accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Among the many sound reasons for Zorkin's omission of it are the uncertainty of national sovereignty as being more than a vestigial political construct, international law's "soft" character, the absence of any enforcement terms in that particular instrument, plus the scandalously long list of instances of similar disregard being paid to even more significant international agreements see inter alia (http://www.fletcherforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Koplow_37-1.pdf); Byers & Nolte, editors, US Hegemony & The Foundations Of International Law (Cambridge, 2003); Goldsmith & Posner, The Limits Of International Law (Oxford, 2005); Neil MacCormick, Questioning Sovereignty (Oxford, 1999); Kalmo & Skinner, editors, Sovereignty In Fragments (Cambridge, 2010).

Zorkin's arguments are made to the court of public opinion (us!) wherein your commentator immunizes himself from any responsibility to make controversial judgments in our logically and morally and politically messy world. This is worse than a character flaw viz., it is an indicia of the pernicious thoughtlessness that the so-wise Hannah Arendt has with such desperation tried to warn us - one and all - about.

 [return to Contents]