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2015-#77
18 April 2015
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"We don't see things as they are, but as we are"

"Don't believe everything you think"

In this issue
 
  #1
Kremlin.ru
April 16, 2015
Kremlin.ru
April 16, 2016
Direct line with Vladimir Putin (transcript continued)

Maria Sittel: Be it the United States, the Islamic State or other challenges and threats, to sleep peacefully, we need a strong army and a powerful navy. However, it is no less important for us to have an industrial potential that will ensure the army's needs in the form of modern weapons, for one, or even more important, that will promote growth in the civilian branches of our economy. A strong economy means social stability, and this is very important. So let's go live again, this time with the Irkut Corporation, an aircraft manufacturer from Irkutsk, and our correspondent Dmitry Kaistro.

Dmitry Kaistro: Good afternoon, Moscow! This is the Irkutsk aircraft manufacturer with an 80 year-long history. During this time it has produced 7,000 combat aircraft of 26 models. The place we are in now is called the final assembly shop. Next to me is the head of this shop, Igor Ivanov. Mr Ivanov, what aircraft do you assemble here?

Igor Ivanov: Our shop assembles Su-30 heavy fighters and Yak-130 combat trainers. Now we are actively getting ready for the assembly of MS-21 passenger liners.

Dmitry Kaistro: Mr Ivanov, I guess you and your colleagues have questions for the head of state?

Igor Ivanov: Yes, of course.

At present our Irkutsk aircraft manufacturer is working at full capacity. We are producing aircraft both for exports and our Defence Ministry. Naturally, we are very interested in our plant's prospects. Today we can easily produce 50-60 combat aircraft. Over a thousand jobs have been created at the plant in the past few years, and we work in two shifts. Needless to say, we don't want to lose the pace of production. Can we hope to get a long-term steady government contract for combat hardware?

Vladimir Putin: Of course. You just said that you manufacture Su-30, Yak-130 and are getting ready to make the MS-21 aircraft. Your order book for the next two or three years is full. I assume that you know this all too well. If not, that's how things are. Afterwards, new orders will be discussed - this may concern new military aircraft.

As for the MS-21 that you've mentioned, this is a very promising aircraft. We already have about 100-120 so-called unconfirmed contracts that are signed until the relevant certificates are issued. However, I hope that by 2017 the certificates will have been issued, the unconfirmed orders will become fixed contracts and the aircraft will have been duly certified.

These aircraft are being ordered by Russian companies, mainly Aeroflot along with some other airlines. That said, foreign companies are also interested, including from Indonesia. I assume that this work will go smoothly. We will not allow any setbacks in the enterprise's operations.

Kirill Kleymenov: Thank you, Irkutsk.

Now we are joined live by Vostochny Space Launch Centre. This is truly a nationwide construction project. This is not just about building a launch pad, but a whole city with the necessary infrastructure. However, it so happened that a number of high-profile scandals occurred in and around this project in the last few weeks. It started with the Accounts Chamber report revealing that the costs were blown out of proportion, then the scandal with unpaid wages and the workers' refusal to turn out for work. We have an opportunity to find out what is going on out there on the construction site. Our colleague Yevgeny Rozhkov is there.

Yevgeny Rozhkov: Good afternoon, Mr President, colleagues!

Although, as you can see, I should really say good evening, because we have a six-hour time difference. Nevertheless, it is still the Vostochny Space Centre, the country's top priority construction project. How can it possibly be otherwise? After the APEC Summit in Vladivostok, the Universiade in Kazan and the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, this site has, without a doubt, become the number-one construction project. After all, it is from this "fire ring" - this is what it will be called - that a Soyuz-2 carrier rocket will be sent into orbit in December with three satellites on board.

I think you can only appreciate the scale of this construction project when you get here. I was lucky. This is my second visit here and I know that it is not only a huge launch pad from where the rocket will lift off but also a great number of other buildings, including a mobile service tower, a command and control centre, a technical centre, two plants and seven floors below us with utilities and corridors.

As we were told at SpetsStroy - the construction company that is working here - the facilities are 80-90 percent complete. In other words, there's only a little left to be done, and the rocket should fly in December.

As with any big project, this one has not been problem-free. The last problem came up literally two days ago, when we came here. It turned out that about a dozen people, a dozen construction workers, or even several dozen construction workers, to be precise, have not seen their wages here for about four months now. They contacted our editorial office, they called Moscow - moreover, they wrote their demands on top of their trailers to make their problems known and attract attention. We decided to invite some of these people here so they can go on air.

Good afternoon, tell us about your problems and what caused them. All I know is that your company went belly up and you came from the Primorye Territory, right?

Anton Tyurishev: Yes, that's correct.

Good afternoon, Mr President, we are the builders of the Golden Bridge. In 2012, we built some of the main facilities at the space launch centre; however, due to some factors, our company ended up facing bankruptcy. We have not been paid for four months and people have started to leave the site. Thirty personnel remained at the site to guard it.

The indifference we encountered has driven us to despair and made us appeal to you directly in this innovative manner, so you can see us and help us resolve our problems. We still want to stay here and go on with our work despite everything. So we have two requests - one is to help us receive our overdue wages and the other is to give us an opportunity to stay here and work.

Yevgeny Rozhkov: All the more so as a greater workforce is required for the space launch centre project.

Anton Tyurishev: Yes, we are professional builders and we built the bulk of the facilities for the summit.

Vladimir Putin: I understand. I would like to ask you a counter-question: Have you been paid your overdue wages? Regarding wages, how do things stand now?

Anton Tyurishev: All 1,123 members of our team were paid 17 percent of their December wages. Earlier today, 70 personnel who guard the site received from 70 to 80 percent of their overdue wages - the amount varies from person to person.

Vladimir Putin: Did you say that they were paid earlier today? This must have been done in anticipation of our talk.

Anton Tyurishev: Yes, and in light of the recent events, I would like to ask you to allow me to report to you personally on the last rouble that will be paid to us.

Vladimir Putin: Agreed. What is your name?

Anton Tyurishev: Anton Tyurishev.

Vladimir Putin: What is your patronymic?

Anton Tyurishev: Anton Ivanovich.

Vladimir Putin: So, Anton Ivanovich, we'll take it under double control: you on the site and I here from Moscow.

I have to say that it was yours truly who initiated this construction project. I ordered the recent inspections. All the slip-ups in the construction and pay delays are absolutely inadmissible and will certainly not be tolerated. The main reason is that the project is financed entirely from the federal budget.

I'm not going to speak about all the resources committed in recent years, but this year alone the sum is 40 billion. Forty billion once again. Most importantly, the money has been transferred to the general contractor. Why it has not reached the subcontractors and why they are not paid their wages is a big question that requires an answer and a painstaking investigator, not only the Control Directorate and the Accounts Chamber, but also the Investigative Committee. I hope all that is needed will be done. I know that criminal cases have been brought. Make no mistake, we will make sure that what you are talking about will be done: payment of all the wages and your continued employment at what is truly a major and very important project in Russia.

Maria Sittel: Vostochny Space Launch Centre, you can ask President Putin one more question.

Yevgeny Rozhkov: Yes, we have many interesting people here and many interesting questions. There are those who have been working here from day one of the project, they came here three years ago and are still working here.

Mr Ostamchenko, hello. Come over. I know that you poured concrete to make the slab we are standing on. You've been here from the start. Please introduce yourself and ask your question.

Vladimir Ostamchenko: My name is Vladimir Ostamchenko and I come from Khabarovsk.

In the film about Crimea you spoke about very important events, about the return of Crimea. You played a major role in this, personally supervising it. I would like to say that the space launch centre we are building is as important for our country as the return of Crimea. So the people who are responsible for the launch centre, I think, ought to know that you are personally holding under constant review all the subsequent stages.

Vladimir Putin: Mr Ostamchenko, whenI spoke in the film about the return of Crimea and said that everything was under control, including under my own control, it was not my intention to single out my personal role. The point I wanted to make was to show that where there are authorities that are legitimate and ready to assume responsibility, issues are solved in a way that is in the interests of the people. But when it comes to the collapse of a state and the collapse of the power structures, everything falls to pieces and nothing works, and the results are dire, if not disastrous.

As for the space launch centre and Crimea... I would agree with you that the space launch centre is very important, but with Crimea, the lives of millions of people were at stake. The construction site is of course very important, but still it is a different story. But I agree that it is one of the most important if not the most important construction project in the country, a very large and very necessary one. And we will go ahead, not because I initiated the project at some point, but because the country needs a new space launch centre.

We need it because we practically do not have a normal launch site. We have launching pads in Plesetsk, but that is a military launch site. We do not have a civilian one. We are using Baikonur, but it is in another state, even though it is a friendly state and our closest ally. If any problems crop up they are routine problems, but there are no fundamental problems, and we will continue to use this launch site. But Russia is a major space power and it must have its own space launch centre to be able to orbit every type of spacecraft, and we will of course do this, we have ambitious plans.

We just said that by the end of this year Soyuz-2 must be launched. However, your fellow correspondent mentioned three satellites. I think there are two, one of which is the Moscow University's satellite. Anyway, the plan is to do the launch in December. Also, there is Angara, a heavy-lift launch vehicle. Lately, we have been planning a super heavy-lift launch vehicle but I agreed with the experts who believe that the deadlines should be moved forward a little. Not for economic but for technology-related reasons. The idea is to develop our own national orbital space station by 2023.

It is a remote but very important prospect. It is important for the national economy because the ISS is widely used for research and in the national economy, but it is only able to see five percent of Russia's territory. A national space station must see the entire territory of our enormous country. This has a huge significance for the national economy, as well as other uses. Therefore, we will definitely go through with this project. There is no doubt it will be fully under our control.

Kirill Kleymenov: Thank you, Vostochny. Now back to the call centre. Tatyana, please.

Tatyana Remizova: Thank you, Kirill.

We have been on the air for three hours. The total number of messages has exceeded three million, which is an all-time record for Direct Line. We have received two million phone calls, half a million text messages. Now I would like to cover a very common issue that concerns all Russian car owners starting this week.

Blagoveshchensk is on the line. Good afternoon. I should say, good evening for you. Your question please.

Galina Zagorskaya: Good afternoon, Mr President. This is Galina Zagorskaya, a pensioner from the city of Blagoveshchensk.

On 12 April, the cost of the Compulsory Third-Party Liability Insurance (OSAGO) policy increased by 60 percent. That is around 10,000-12,000 rubles. This also includes a driver's life insurance policy, without which the OSAGO is not issued. My pension is 14,000 rubles a month. The car is our breadwinner. It takes us to our garden plot. My question is this: how can I keep going for a month with what remains of my pension? Thank you. Wish you all the best.

Vladimir Putin: Ms Zagorskaya, this really is a stumper. What can I say? The decision to raise the cost of the OSAGO was made by the Central Bank. It was an economically indispensable measure. First, because the rates have not been reviewed for 11 years. Second, because the cost of car parts has grown due to exchange rate differences. And, third, because the cost of payments related to people's life and health have increased. These three components have caused such a sharp rise.

The only thing that can be said is that such necessary things should be done in good time, and then there will be no abrupt hikes. Otherwise, insurance companies will simply leave this market segment and then, unfortunately, a situation may evolve that cannot be described other than as chaos.

So, we will consider this issue and I will give relevant instructions to the Central Bank and the Government. My colleagues here have said that if support is to be provided it should be targeted. We will consider how this could be done in this particular case.

Kirill Kleymenov: We still have a lot of questions here in the studio. Let's hear one of them.

Olga, over to you.

Olga Ushakova: Thank you.

Let's turn once again to the business community. There are a lot of questions, and I think it would make sense to give the floor to someone who represents the business community as a whole. Boris Titov, Presidential Commissioner for Entrepreneurs' Rights, go ahead with your question.

Boris Titov: Thank you very much.

Mr President, a lot has been said today about small business. However, since I am receiving so many appeals from small business, I cannot fail to mention this issue.

It is true that these are challenging times for small businesses. It is equally true that a lot is being done in this respect. That said, decisions coming out of nowhere are taken from time to time that frustrate all previous efforts. Today this is about street stalls: war is being waged against them across the country. We are talking about the fact that social insurance contributions have been raised.

You know, I think that the approach to small business should be changed in its entirety. We often say that it generates budget revenue. In fact, the financial institutions are talking a lot about this, while refraining from taking such serious decisions. I do not think that it is the case, and that is for two reasons.

First, small businesses account for a very small share of budget revenues. Small businesses contribute to the budget six times less than Gazprom does. Second, the main purpose of small businesses lies elsewhere: it has a social function, it creates jobs. Small business owners are able to sustain themselves. In addition, they create affordable goods and services that meet the basic needs of the population. This is especially important in times of crisis. Small businesses act as a buffer, a safety cushion for the country's economy.

What I want to say is that we need to fundamentally change our approach. We must take the second road, understand the importance of small businesses, their social function. Administrative pressure should be reduced dramatically. When we ask for easing the pressure on businesses, we are calling for the emergence of a new cohort of small entrepreneurs called the self-employed, who would be able to operate without having to register.

Olga Ushakova: So, you sooner have a proposal than a question - to revise the attitude towards small business?

Boris Titov: Yes. Mr President, if possible I would like to hear your comment on this score.

Vladimir Putin: If something fails to work, this is your fault as well because after all you are an advisor on these issues, so you should be more meticulous as our famous and favourite satirist used to say.

But speaking about the gist of the matter, you know about the decisions that have been made recently and you said yourself that there are no grounds to assert that nothing is being done. To the contrary, much is being done to support small and medium-sized businesses, but apparently not enough if it is in the condition that we know about. However, saying that this is a strictly social issue is way too much because small business is still business albeit of a special type.

We are expanding the opportunities of the patent system - take a patent and simply get to work. We are saying that some benefits that individual entrepreneurs enjoy could be applied to small business. We discussed this with you at the recent State Council meeting and I think we should follow this road.

Let's be specific and formulate not just our attitude but also additional measures that should be taken to make people feel confident. I have already spoken about the programme under which the Central Bank provides funds to private banks at an interest rate of 6.5 percent. All in all, it has 50 billion rubles for this purpose and they have not been spent yet.

You understand what the problem is - I think that only 20 or 30 billion were used. Hence, there are no adequate mechanisms for using even available resources and the Central Bank is prepared to increase these funds to 100 billion. This means that we do not have adequate mechanisms for getting these funds and decisions to the end consumer. Let's think about this. Thank you.

Kirill Kleymenov: I will now give the floor to Natalya Yuryeva. She is literally showered with video questions. Go ahead please.

Vladimir Ostamchenko: My name is Vladimir Ostamchenko and I come from Khabarovsk.

In the film about Crimea you spoke about very important events, about the return of Crimea. You played a major role in this, personally supervising it. I would like to say that the space launch centre we are building is as important for our country as the return of Crimea. So the people who are responsible for the launch centre, I think, ought to know that you are personally holding under constant review all the subsequent stages.

Vladimir Putin: Mr Ostamchenko, whenI spoke in the film about the return of Crimea and said that everything was under control, including under my own control, it was not my intention to single out my personal role. The point I wanted to make was to show that where there are authorities that are legitimate and ready to assume responsibility, issues are solved in a way that is in the interests of the people. But when it comes to the collapse of a state and the collapse of the power structures, everything falls to pieces and nothing works, and the results are dire, if not disastrous.

As for the space launch centre and Crimea... I would agree with you that the space launch centre is very important, but with Crimea, the lives of millions of people were at stake. The construction site is of course very important, but still it is a different story. But I agree that it is one of the most important if not the most important construction project in the country, a very large and very necessary one. And we will go ahead, not because I initiated the project at some point, but because the country needs a new space launch centre.

We need it because we practically do not have a normal launch site. We have launching pads in Plesetsk, but that is a military launch site. We do not have a civilian one. We are using Baikonur, but it is in another state, even though it is a friendly state and our closest ally. If any problems crop up they are routine problems, but there are no fundamental problems, and we will continue to use this launch site. But Russia is a major space power and it must have its own space launch centre to be able to orbit every type of spacecraft, and we will of course do this, we have ambitious plans.

We just said that by the end of this year Soyuz-2 must be launched. However, your fellow correspondent mentioned three satellites. I think there are two, one of which is the Moscow University's satellite. Anyway, the plan is to do the launch in December. Also, there is Angara, a heavy-lift launch vehicle. Lately, we have been planning a super heavy-lift launch vehicle but I agreed with the experts who believe that the deadlines should be moved forward a little. Not for economic but for technology-related reasons. The idea is to develop our own national orbital space station by 2023.

It is a remote but very important prospect. It is important for the national economy because the ISS is widely used for research and in the national economy, but it is only able to see five percent of Russia's territory. A national space station must see the entire territory of our enormous country. This has a huge significance for the national economy, as well as other uses. Therefore, we will definitely go through with this project. There is no doubt it will be fully under our control.

Kirill Kleymenov: Thank you, Vostochny. Now back to the call centre. Tatyana, please.

Tatyana Remizova: Thank you, Kirill.

We have been on the air for three hours. The total number of messages has exceeded three million, which is an all-time record for Direct Line. We have received two million phone calls, half a million text messages. Now I would like to cover a very common issue that concerns all Russian car owners starting this week.

Blagoveshchensk is on the line. Good afternoon. I should say, good evening for you. Your question please.

Galina Zagorskaya: Good afternoon, Mr President. This is Galina Zagorskaya, a pensioner from the city of Blagoveshchensk.

On 12 April, the cost of the Compulsory Third-Party Liability Insurance (OSAGO) policy increased by 60 percent. That is around 10,000-12,000 rubles. This also includes a driver's life insurance policy, without which the OSAGO is not issued. My pension is 14,000 rubles a month. The car is our breadwinner. It takes us to our garden plot. My question is this: how can I keep going for a month with what remains of my pension? Thank you. Wish you all the best.

Vladimir Putin: Ms Zagorskaya, this really is a stumper. What can I say? The decision to raise the cost of the OSAGO was made by the Central Bank. It was an economically indispensable measure. First, because the rates have not been reviewed for 11 years. Second, because the cost of car parts has grown due to exchange rate differences. And, third, because the cost of payments related to people's life and health have increased. These three components have caused such a sharp rise.

The only thing that can be said is that such necessary things should be done in good time, and then there will be no abrupt hikes. Otherwise, insurance companies will simply leave this market segment and then, unfortunately, a situation may evolve that cannot be described other than as chaos.

So, we will consider this issue and I will give relevant instructions to the Central Bank and the Government. My colleagues here have said that if support is to be provided it should be targeted. We will consider how this could be done in this particular case.

Kirill Kleymenov: We still have a lot of questions here in the studio. Let's hear one of them.

Olga, over to you.

Olga Ushakova: Thank you.

Let's turn once again to the business community. There are a lot of questions, and I think it would make sense to give the floor to someone who represents the business community as a whole. Boris Titov, Presidential Commissioner for Entrepreneurs' Rights, go ahead with your question.

Boris Titov: Thank you very much.

Mr President, a lot has been said today about small business. However, since I am receiving so many appeals from small business, I cannot fail to mention this issue.

It is true that these are challenging times for small businesses. It is equally true that a lot is being done in this respect. That said, decisions coming out of nowhere are taken from time to time that frustrate all previous efforts. Today this is about street stalls: war is being waged against them across the country. We are talking about the fact that social insurance contributions have been raised.

You know, I think that the approach to small business should be changed in its entirety. We often say that it generates budget revenue. In fact, the financial institutions are talking a lot about this, while refraining from taking such serious decisions. I do not think that it is the case, and that is for two reasons.

First, small businesses account for a very small share of budget revenues. Small businesses contribute to the budget six times less than Gazprom does. Second, the main purpose of small businesses lies elsewhere: it has a social function, it creates jobs. Small business owners are able to sustain themselves. In addition, they create affordable goods and services that meet the basic needs of the population. This is especially important in times of crisis. Small businesses act as a buffer, a safety cushion for the country's economy.

What I want to say is that we need to fundamentally change our approach. We must take the second road, understand the importance of small businesses, their social function. Administrative pressure should be reduced dramatically. When we ask for easing the pressure on businesses, we are calling for the emergence of a new cohort of small entrepreneurs called the self-employed, who would be able to operate without having to register.

Olga Ushakova: So, you sooner have a proposal than a question - to revise the attitude towards small business?

Boris Titov: Yes. Mr President, if possible I would like to hear your comment on this score.

Vladimir Putin: If something fails to work, this is your fault as well because after all you are an advisor on these issues, so you should be more meticulous as our famous and favourite satirist used to say.

But speaking about the gist of the matter, you know about the decisions that have been made recently and you said yourself that there are no grounds to assert that nothing is being done. To the contrary, much is being done to support small and medium-sized businesses, but apparently not enough if it is in the condition that we know about. However, saying that this is a strictly social issue is way too much because small business is still business albeit of a special type.

We are expanding the opportunities of the patent system - take a patent and simply get to work. We are saying that some benefits that individual entrepreneurs enjoy could be applied to small business. We discussed this with you at the recent State Council meeting and I think we should follow this road.

Let's be specific and formulate not just our attitude but also additional measures that should be taken to make people feel confident. I have already spoken about the programme under which the Central Bank provides funds to private banks at an interest rate of 6.5 percent. All in all, it has 50 billion rubles for this purpose and they have not been spent yet.

You understand what the problem is - I think that only 20 or 30 billion were used. Hence, there are no adequate mechanisms for using even available resources and the Central Bank is prepared to increase these funds to 100 billion. This means that we do not have adequate mechanisms for getting these funds and decisions to the end consumer. Let's think about this. Thank you.

Kirill Kleymenov: I will now give the floor to Natalya Yuryeva. She is literally showered with video questions. Go ahead please.

Natalya Yuryeva: Thank you.

Questions about social security and social protection are the absolute leaders in our video centre, followed by housing and utilities, then salaries. There are many questions about education. Schoolkids have tried to take advantage of this opportunity to lobby for the complete abolition of exams with the President. There are some serious proposals as well. Let's watch a video sent by three students from St Petersburg.

Question (posed by schoolgirls from St Petersburg): Good afternoon, Mr Putin. On behalf of all Russian school students, we would like to ask you to have the National Final School Exam replaced with the ticket-based exam that was used in the Soviet Union. We believe that ticket-based examination is a very convenient system that allows the student to reveal all his or her knowledge. With the standardised test, even if students try hard and do well in a particular subject, the test does not allow them to show all their knowledge and skills. We may get a small amount of points even if you have good or extensive knowledge.

We would like to ask you to introduce more books that students must read in literature classes, particularly in the 10th and 11th forms.

Thank you very much. Goodbye.

Vladimir Putin: I see.

I don't think we should open a full-blown debate on the National Final School Exam now. I think that public opinion is always focused on this issue. Anyway, it's up to the experts who have in-depth knowledge of this issue to make the decision.

It has its downsides and upsides. I will not dwell on this, but the comforting fact remains that more and more talented young people from Russian regions are being admitted to our leading universities based on the results of the National Final School Exam. There are, of course, disadvantages to this system, because it looks like some kind of rote learning when students don't go deep into a subject but rather train specifically for the test the way they do when they take their driving test.

There are downsides, indeed, but the Education Ministry is trying to compensate for them. Literature essays are back, for example. Also, some universities, such as Moscow State University, are allowed to run additional exams that build on the results achieved at various school contests and competitions. At any rate, I agree that this system needs to be improved.

Kirill Kleymenov: Natasha, you can have your audience ask one more question. Please go ahead.

Natalya Yuryeva: You know, our centre is receiving a lot of unusual videos: someone sings, someone does push-ups in front of the camera and Timur Kochebayev has asked us to persuade his girlfriend to accept his marriage proposal. Yulia Dorokhova, if you're listening to us, I would think about it if I were you. Many videos have come from children, even very young ones. Let's look at one of them.

Question: Mr Putin,I come from Nalchik, and I am four years old. I have wanted to become president since I was born. Is it hard to become president? How many hours a day do you sleep? I like sleeping, you know. Thank you.

Vladimir Putin: I didn't hear him very well.

Kirill Kleymenov: How many hours do you sleep, because he likes sleeping and he has been dreaming of becoming a president since he was born.

Maria Sittel: And is it hard to be president?

Vladimir Putin: Is it hard to be president? I'm sure you'll succeed if you really want to; judging from your personality, your attitude and drive, you'll make it. And it's great that you like sleeping, it shows that you'll be a healthy president.

Maria Sittel: Let's take one more question from Yekaterina Mironova's section.

Yekaterina Mironova: Thank you. I suggest that we get back to serious matters. Let me introduce one more small business representative: Sergei Bakhov from Khabarovsk. Go ahead, Sergei.

Sergei Bakhov: Hello, Mr Putin.

The latest State Council meeting was devoted to small business. They said all the right things there, but very little was said about the fact that small business is in an unequal position compared to big business. Big business has long-term loans on easy terms from the Reserve Fund, which enable it to live comfortably, to pay millions in salaries and if necessary open up their "golden parachutes".

Just one percent of that money, if distributed fairly and if it finds its way to small businesses, would give a big boost to production development. I can safely say this about the Far East because getting new equipment would enable us to replace imports, which come to us from China. We are working on that.

We have some success to report. Chinese businesses are among the biggest buyers of our products. Question: is there a need and a possibility to redistribute money to small business so that there is more money for to develop production?

Vladimir Putin: You know, Boris Titov already spoke here about high tax payments, social contributions and so on. But let me draw your attention to something that Boris should be aware of, by the way: social contributions have been reduced, and they are significantly lower than payments from other kinds of businesses. Above all, this concerns small and medium-sized businesses engaged in research, the social sphere and production.

As for long money, on the whole there isn't enough of it in the economy. You said that large enterprises receive so-called long and cheap money. But if you ask the heads of large enterprises, they won't agree with you.

On the whole, we don't have enough long money in our economy. And where does it come from? It comes from people's savings, from the deposits of legal entities, and also from pension money. That's why we are being told that the accumulative pension system should be brought back. It is true that while it worked, almost no money for economic development was borrowed from it, except in the interests of the Finance Ministry to issue debt securities backed by that money.

I agree that this is a necessary measure. And, frankly, I would very much like for you to discuss this issue together with Boris Titov, regarding what can be done, including additionally, for small and medium-sized businesses in the Far East. It is especially important there.

I already spoke of a possible transition to a patent system. I already said that it's possible to get subsidised loans through funding from the Central Bank. There could be other ways of benefiting and supporting small and medium-sized businesses. Talk it over. If there are additional constructive proposals, I will gladly support them.

Kirill Kleymenov: Mr Putin, I'd like to ask about money as well, although a different kind of money. The top officials' income declarations were published yesterday. They were very interesting to look at. So why aren't the leaders of major state corporations required to disclose their incomes? How is this fair?

Vladimir Putin: I think the Government decided against it because there are quite a few foreign nationals sitting on their management boards and boards of directors. They are not top executives of course - something that is quite common in Ukraine, by the way. What they have is external management. They even have a foreigner serving as finance minister, and other key ministers, for that matter, as if there are no honest, decent and professional Ukrainians to fill these posts. In our corporations, many foreign professionals hold the second or third position, as board members. We cannot require that they disclose their incomes; we can't just tell them to do so. Neither can we discriminate between Russian and non-Russian board members with regard to their disclosure requirements. It would be wrong to make Russians do so and waive this requirement for their foreign co-workers.

However, in most Western economies, the leaders of large corporations do this voluntarily. Our Government has even adopted a business code. It has been adopted, but it is not actually working. If you ask me, I would suggest that the leadership of large corporations simply declare their incomes - it won't hurt them.

Maria Sittel: Now is the right time to go to the message processing centre. Tatyana, what are the most popular topics now? Who is calling? What is the level of activity?

Tatyana Remizova: Maria, there is unprecedented activity, as I said earlier. We have already set an all-time record for call-in shows, reaching over 3 million questions. The number of phone calls is continuing to grow exponentially. The most popular topics include social issues and housing and utilities. There are a lot of calls about the healthcare system and especially many questions about medicines. We are ready to put on one such call now. The village of Voronezhskaya in Krasnodar Territory is on the line. Yelena will now ask her question.

Good afternoon, Yelena, go ahead.

Question: Good afternoon, Mr President. My child has acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. Doctors have prescribed medications - five in all. Pharmacies have not been providing them since January, saying they have none in stock. We are on a federal list for free medicine provision. When my child is in hospital, we get the necessary medicines. I am asking you to ensure that we receive life-saving medications. Thank you very much.

Vladimir Putin: I would like you to give me all the contact information on the woman who has just called, and here is why. The fact is that the Russian Government has not only expanded the list of vital medications to 608 (by 52 positions) - it now includes a total of 21,000 trade names, including 317 positions for people with disabilities, veterans and other groups entitled to benefits.

Judging by what we have just heard, these people are entitled to free medicine provision. And, very importantly, according to Healthcare Ministry reports, enough such medications have been purchased to last for almost a quarter of a year, for several months.

The Russian Government has allocated an additional 16 billion [rubles] for these purposes, but according to the healthcare minister, they do not even need to use up this 16 billion now because there is everything there should be, and supplies have been distributed among the regions. If this does not trickle down to the people, then this is simply something criminal. We must get to the bottom of this problem. I will instruct the Healthcare Ministry and the relevant agencies to look into this. I need information on that case.

Kirill Kleymenov: Mr President, this happens in many regions. We have received many similar questions.

Maria Sittel: Yes, not just from one region.

Vladimir Putin: Ok, this is what the Direct Line is for.

Kirill Kleymenov: Moreover, there are currently no free medicines for privileged categories but they are available for money. Here is, for example, a message from Moscow Region, which is not even far away: "My father is a veteran of labour, with a B class disability. He has not been able to get a prescription for free drugs for four months now. He is told there are no supplies. He has to buy them."

Vladimir Putin: I want information on this case, too. This is what the Direct Line is for.

Maria Sittel: Thank you.

Tatyana, let's hear one more phone call.

Tatyana Remizova: Yes, Mr President, we will pass all the details of the call from Krasnodar to you. It turns out that there is more to the problem. Let's take one more call, this time from Yaroslavl.

Good afternoon, you are on air. Your question please.

Question: Good afternoon, Mr President. My name is Yekaterina and here is my question: is it true that the Healthcare Ministry plans to abandon foreign medication imports? I think it's wrong because our drugs are not of the same high quality. There have been cases when people with kidney transplants died after taking Russian analogues.

Thank you for your answer.

Vladimir Putin: Firstly, the Healthcare Ministry is not going to abandon foreign medication imports.

Secondly, we must develop our own pharmaceutical industry. It is obvious and you should agree with it. That is why several years ago, we developed and are now implementing an upgrade programme for the Russian pharmaceutical industry. If I am correct the cost of the programme is about 180 billion rubles. Russia produces a significant amount of quality medication that meets all international standards.

I think what you described is a situation that may happen every now and then, but such cases need to be examined by experts, by the professional community, and also investigated by law enforcement agencies to evaluate the legal aspect, and relevant conclusions need to be drawn. But I can assure you that the Government has no plans at all to fully denounce pharmaceutical imports.

Incidentally, this question raises a good opportunity to mention the recent price hikes on the pharmaceutical market, including Russian-made drugs. This happens because, although these drugs are manufactured locally, they still use imported ingredients, which went up in price due to exchange rate difference. However, we saw some stabilisation of the pharmaceutical market last month, and even some downward adjustments.

This wasn't the case everywhere of course - the people listening to me right now might say, we haven't seen any adjustments, and drugs are as expensive as they were before - but I mean on the whole across Russia, drug prices did go down a little.

Kirill Kleymenov: Let's continue with calls and text messages and watch one more video call. Please, Natalya.

Natalya Yuryeva: Our video centre has received 13,000 video calls, already 5,000 more than last year. A lot of videos address medicine-related issues. Let's watch one from Sofya Babich.

Sofya Babich: Good afternoon, Mr President. My name is Sofia Babich. I am from the city of Togliatti and I am fifteen years old. I have been suffering from cerebral palsy since childhood. I would very much like to be able to walk. I am trying hard, but I need a treadmill outfitted with lots of things. We cannot afford to buy one - it costs about 20,000 rubles. We don't have rehab in our region. My mother is doing all she can, I have been operated on several times, but I need training equipment. Please, help me. I want to be able to walk very much. I love you. Yours, Sonya. Goodbye.

Vladimir Putin: Don't worry. It is not a question that needs too much effort to solve. We will certainly solve it, don't worry. Get well soon. I see that you have a strong character - you will fight and achieve results.

Maria Sittel: Thank you, Mr President. Thank you.

As a follow-up to this topic I would like to give the floor to Anna Federmesser who is here in the studio. She deals with many problems, including cancer. Go ahead.

Anna Federmesser: Thank you very much, and good afternoon.

Today I represent the most vulnerable category of patients: they are patients who are incurably ill; you can't cure them, but you can help them. Which brings me to my two questions, which are really requests.

Number one. Even in this group there are fellow citizens who are even less fortunate. They are people, mainly children and young people, who depend all their lives on artificial lung ventilation. They cannot live without it because they cannot breathe without it.

In our healthcare system they are in intensive care units. Speaking about children, they cannot develop there, they cannot communicate with their mothers and they die early because the environment is far from friendly. Elsewhere in the world such patients are at home, they study and attend school. I have brought some photos: a good many children, including those under the wing of the VERA Hospice Charity Fund, which I head, are already at home with artificial lung ventilation.

But as soon as they are back home they are no longer entitled to state support because the state is not obliged to provide them with expectoration or artificial lung ventilation kits. And medical institutions are also interested in these patients going home because they then vacate a very costly bed, they make room for intensive care people to work with more promising patients.

My request is as follows: to devise a mechanism, to give instructions to the relevant agencies to work out a lending mechanism for temporary use - unfortunately, these patients don't live long - free of charge, funded by the state, of artificial lung ventilators and mucus clearance devices.

And my second question is much more acute and stems from yesterday's situation, which was actively mulled by the media. It concerns narcotic pain relieving analgesics for cancer patients. Yesterday, we tried to help Aminat, a girl from Daghestan, who is in Moscow now, to get analgesia.

I will say at once that everything went well, she received morphine, and I hope that she is not suffering from pain now, but for that we had to appeal to lots of agencies and dozens of officials. In short, many people tried hard to get morphine for the little girl to relieve her of her pain during her last remaining weeks.

This is, in fact, a systemic problem. Today, Russia has no system of palliative aid and analgesia for people where they live, not where they are registered.

In other words, all of this aid can only be provided locally - where a person is registered. And if relatives took him or her out somewhere, for instance, from a village to a big city, to give better care - in that case, the patient is cut off from aid.

These people have no strength for paperwork - reregister, deregister.

And one more request - to help work out a relevant mechanism.

If I understand it correctly, this should be done together with the Ministry of Finance as this will involve mutual settlements between regions - so as to provide palliative, hospice aid to dying patients where they live, where they need it, and not where they should be staying in accordance with their passports.

Thank you very much for your attention.

To be continued.


 #2
Business New Europe
www.bne.eu
April 16, 2015
Putin says Russia has weathered sanctions storm
bne IntelliNews
 
In an anticipated display of defiance towards Russia's Western critics, President Vladimir Putin on April 16 said his country is not to blame for the continuing conflict in Eastern Ukraine, has now weathered the worst of the sanctions storm, and can expect economic growth to resume in two years.

In his 13th live annual 'Direct Line' question and answer session in Moscow, Putin responded to 60 of more than two million questions received by the Kremlin before the event, as well as some put to him by studio callers. Most concerned the conflict in Eastern Ukraine and the economy, although some advice on a pet dog was also sought.

"We've survived the peak of the problems," Putin said, highlighting signs that the Russian economy is stabilising after months of precipitous decline because of Western sanctions and low oil prices.

After losing 40% of its value in 2014, the ruble has recovered about 30% in the first three months of 2015, becoming the world's best performing currency in April.

Growing pains

EU and US sanctions, imposed last summer in response to Russia's seizure of Crimea in March 2014, are likely to remain in place for some time to come, Putin warned, because these were more of a political tool to "contain" Russia's development.

Nonethless, growth would resume in around two years, the president added optimistically, reflecting the broad consensus among Russia's leadership and financial circles.

The Central Bank of Russia expects the economy to contract by 3.5% to 4% this year and by 1% to 1.6% in 2016. However, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov expects a return to growth in 2016, while Economy Minister Aleksey Ulyukaev forecasts an average 2.5% annual growth between 2016 and 2018.

Russia's record oil production was another cited indicator of economic strength. Production increased 1.1% to 525mn tons in 2014, a new post-Soviet record that stands to be equalled or surpassed this year too, Putin said.

He also pointed to some selective banking sector statistics as proof that Russia is not heading towards financial collapse.

"Loans in the real economy have increased ... domestic bank assets increased to 77 trillion rubles, the first time it [the sum] exceeded GDP. This is a very good indicator of the stability and reliability of the Russian banking system," he said.

'No imperial ambitions'

Russia has been increasingly isolated internationally over its role in the crisis in Ukraine, where Nato and Western leaders accuse it of fighting a proxy war by supporting ethnic Russian separatists with weapons and troops against government forces.

"There are no Russian troops in Ukraine," reiterated Putin, who also assured a caller that there would be no war with Russia's neighbour. "I think a war [between Russia and Ukraine] is impossible," he told the resident of a town located on the border.

Moscow has no imperial ambitions, but is rather looking for "regional integration" to improve the lives of Russians living outside the country, the president continued, saying that he still regarded Russians and Ukrainians as one people.

Meanwhile, the continuing hostilities in eastern Ukraine were the result of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko's failure to fully implement the February peace deal reached in Minsk, he stressed.

Cool showing

In a typically calm three-hour appearance, Putin generally kept the lid on inflammatory statements about the current stand-off with the West, apart from at one particular juncture.

"Our partners should at least try to seek compromise rather than put pressure on us," he said, before going on to liken US foreign policy to the subjugation by the Soviet Union of its satellite states after World War II. "The US doesn't need allies, it needs vassals. Russia cannot exist in such a system of relations," said Putin, whose stiff-necked stance towards the West has taken his popularity at home to unprecedented high levels.

Moreover, in economic terms, the US would do well to look more closely at its own problems. "US debt is alarming, not just for America but for the world economy," Putin said, adding that the eurozone was also "coming apart at the seams".

Addressing one source of tension with the US in recent days - Russia's decision to unfreeze the delivery of S-300 surface-to-air missiles to Iran, which was put on hold in 2010 - this merely reflected Iran's willingness to sign a deal over its controversial nuclear programme, Putin said.

Russia's suspension of the deal was never part of any UN sanctions, meaning that accusations that Russia is undermining the international sanctions against Tehran were "groundless".

In the dog house

One puzzling addition to the calls shed a little light on how the former KGB agent's mind works, as a woman asked for his help to persuade her friend's husband to agree to getting a pet dog.

Putin said he had no right to order a family to take a dog, but suggested some subtle psychological manipulation to achieve the desired result. He would ask the husband to meet his spouse halfway, and she in turn would tell her husband that she would do as he decides. Then, having primed the ground, "He would buy her an elephant" if she wanted, Putin joked.

The 62-year-old Russian leader has held a call-in almost every year since he was first elected president in 2000, fielding questions on issues ranging from housing to regional and international conflicts.

"This is a great opportunity to take one's eyes off dry statistics and see what is actually going on," his spokesman Dmitry Peskov said before the latest session, offering some statistics of his own attesting to Putin's public speaking stamina. The president's first session was held in 2001, lasting two-and-half hours. Since that time, his appearances have totalled 36 hours. The longest was in 2013, lasting 4 hours 47 minutes.

The event has been used by Putin to show that he is in command but is also accessible to the people if they want to raise problems with him. This time too he made a point of displaying his 'common touch'.

The government's response to the current economic crisis includes 10% budget cuts in most areas of spending. But Putin said he would try not to inflict too much hardship on the population. "To carry out a competent economic policy you have to use your head, of course, but if we want the people to trust us, we also have to have a heart. And we have to feel how the ordinary person lives," he said.
 
 #3
Putin demonstrates constructive mood over both foreign, home policy matters - analysts

MOSCOW, April 16. /TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin's calm and businesslike tone throughout the nearly four hours he spent in a TV studio answering questions live was clear evidence the authorities in general are very constructively minded in both home and foreign policies, polled political analysts have told TASS.

"The president looked very amicable, without the slightest hints at getting confrontational," the chairman of the Foreign and Defense Policy Council, Fyodor Lukyanov, has told TASS. "For instance, while declaring the impermissibility of putting an equal sign between Nazism and Communism, Putin remarked that predecessors created a certain pretext for such a comparison, and that the Soviet Union was trying to dictate its own political system to the East European countries," said Lukyanov, a member of the Valdai discussion club, who was among those present in the studio. "Such an acknowledgement by Russia's leader was uttered for the first time ever, and it sounded conciliatory. Even Putin's promise Russia would not demand from France any indemnities for the delayed delivery of Mistral ships was indicative of his positive vision of further cooperation with Western partners."

The director of the Political Studies Institute, Sergey Markov, believes that "the traditional 'Direct Line with Vladimir Putin' question-and-answer session indicated that Russian president is pretty certain about what he is doing and that the situation in the country is under control. Putin sent a clear message to the people not to get nervous. He promised that the authorities were hearing messages from society and reacting to its expectations," Markov, a member of the Civic Chamber, told TASS.

"In a sense, Putin waved 'hello' to those who introduced sanctions against Russia. He explained in very clear terms how sanctions might be used in Russia's national interests. The ruble has become weaker, but that merely benefited the country's economy. Russia's counter-sanctions, which restricted the import of foreign foods, forced providers to look for sources of import substitution and to develop farming. The economic slump prompted greater support for small and medium businesses. The answer is clear - talking to Russia in a language of ultimatums is useless," Markov said.

"As for foreign policy matters, Putin made it quite clear that Russia had no enemies, there will be no war on the Russian-Ukrainian border, that Russian troops were absent from the south-east of Ukraine and that Moscow had no intention of reviving an empire. But at the same time Putin emphasized the need for strengthening national defenses to ensure nobody should ever have the wish to go to war with Russia.
 
 #4
Experts back up Putin's appeal to top managers to make incomes public
By Lyudmila Alexandrova

MOSCOW, April 17. /TASS/. Russian experts believe that President Vladimir Putin's appeal to top managers of state-controlled companies to make their incomes public will facilitate stabilisation in the society and assure Russians' better trust in government.

On Thursday during an annual question-and-answer session officially known as "The Direct Line With Vladimir Putin," the Russian head of state drew a bottom line under a two-year dispute on whether top managers of major companies should submit their income declarations.

Putin recommended heads of state-owned companies to follow the example of Western business people and to declare their incomes voluntarily.

"The government has adopted a code of conduct, even in business. It's been accepted, but in practice, it does not work. If you ask my opinion, I would strongly recommend that the heads of companies disclose the incomes. I don't see anything wrong with that," Putin said.

Back in July 2013, Putin signed a decree obliging the government to ensure publications of this information by state-owned companies. In December 2014 the government approved a relevant resolution but three major companies - Rosneft oil giant, RZD Russian Railways and Gazprom - ignored the demand.

At the end of March reports came that the government had allowed top managers of state-controlled companies to stay away from disclosing their incomes. Heads of 23 open corporations alongside members of their families were relieved of these obligations. But heads, their deputies and chief accountants of the companies 100% owned by the state were made to publish their incomes.

"Good that Putin gave such a recommendation but it is not a fact that all will use it," Professor Vladimir Sokolov of the RANEPA state service-and-staff policy department told TASS adding that it should have been prescribed by the law.

"In the countries that pose themselves as civilised, any organisation related in the slightest degree to the government (either possesses state shares or state officials are delegated to it, or receives orders from the government) must be fully open, including in the salary sphere," Prof Sokolov said.

"Moreover, in the United States, and Japan, and some other countries staff members of purely commercial organisations, not related to the government but with spending outlawed by their inside rules are liable for criminal prosecution," he said. "Thus, in Japan several top managers of commercial companies were jailed for using corporate jets for personal purposes or wasting public money on boozing."

"In Russia, actually all major corporations are linked to the government to some degree and in this case incomes must be made public," he said. "People have an unalterable opinion that managers do not get salaries eight times higher than average ones in the company (as the law says) but much higher. For example, at higher educational establishments."
Russian top managers earn far more than their counterparts abroad. According to recent statistics, average incomes of CEOs at major corporations in the West vary from $600,000 to $1mln, while in Russia top around $15mln.

"An impression that a gap in salaries of employers and employees is absurdly enormous creates negative moods in the society and undermines its stability," he said. "People's trust in the authorities is vanishing and a feeling of acute injustice is emerging, rooted in this situation."

Svetlana Sergeyeva, the RANEPA associate professor in political sciences, says that complete transparency in incomes and spending of state-owned company executives is necessary.
"If it fails to happen, civic society and the state will lack understanding then and this will eventually trigger confrontation in society at large," she said. "Covering-up of the incomes just widen the gap between the state and society."

The more they are transparent, the more opportunities emerge for discussions as Truth is sprout in discussion.

"That's far better than to cover up the incomes, as people will learn about high earnings from various sources all the same," Sergeyeva concluded.
 
 #5
Salon.com
April 17, 2015
The New York Times "basically rewrites whatever the Kiev authorities say": Stephen F. Cohen on the U.S./Russia/Ukraine history the media won't tell you
There's an alternative story of Russian relations we're not hearing. Historian Stephen Cohen tells it here
By PATRICK L. SMITH
Patrick Smith is the author of "Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century." He was the International Herald Tribune's bureau chief in Hong Kong and then Tokyo from 1985 to 1992. During this time he also wrote "Letter from Tokyo" for the New Yorker. He is the author of four previous books and has contributed frequently to the New York Times, the Nation, the Washington Quarterly, and other publications. Follow him on Twitter, @thefloutist.

It is one thing to comment in a column as the Ukrainian crisis grinds on and Washington-senselessly, with no idea of what will come next-destroys relations with Moscow. It is quite another, as a long exchange with Stephen F. Cohen makes clear, to watch as an honorable career's worth of scholarly truths are set aside in favor of unlawful subterfuge, a war fever not much short of Hearst's and what Cohen ranks among the most extravagant expansion of a sphere of influence-NATO's-in history.

Cohen is a distinguished Russianist by any measure. While professing at Princeton and New York University, he has written of the revolutionary years ("Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution," 1973), the Soviet era ("Rethinking the Soviet Experience," 1985) and, contentiously but movingly and always with a steady eye, the post-Soviet decades ("Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia, 2000; "Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives," 2009). "The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin" (2010) is a singularly humane work, using scholarly method to relate the stories of the former prisoners who walk as ghosts in post-Soviet Russia. "I never actually lost the uneasy feeling of having left work unfinished and obligations unfulfilled," Cohen explains in the opening chapter, "even though fewer and fewer of the victims I knew were still alive."

If I had to describe the force and value of Cohen's work in a single sentence, it would be this: It is a relentless insistence that we must bring history to bear upon what we see. One would think this an admirable project, but it has landed Cohen in the mother of all intellectual disputes since the U.S.-supported coup in Kiev last year. To say he is now "blackballed" or "blacklisted"-terms Cohen does not like-is too much. Let us leave it that a place may await him among America's many prophets without honor among their own.

It is hardly surprising that the Ministry of Forgetting, otherwise known as the State Department, would eschew Cohen's perspective on Ukraine and the relationship with Russia: He brings far too much by way of causality and responsibility to the case. But when scholarly colleagues attack him as "Putin's apologist" one grows queasy at the prospect of a return to the McCarthyist period. By now, obedient ideologues in the academy have turned debate into freak show.

Cohen, who is 76, altogether game and remembers it all, does not think we are back in the 1950s just yet. But he is now enmeshed in a fight with the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, which last autumn rejected a $400,000 grant Cohen proposed with his wife, Katrina vanden Heuvel, because the fellowships to be funded would bear Cohen's name. Believe it, readers, this is us in the early 21st century.

The interview that follows took place in Cohen's Manhattan apartment some weeks after the cease-fire agreement known as Minsk II was signed in mid-February. It sprawled over several absorbing hours. As I worked with the transcript it became clear that Cohen had given me a valuable document, one making available to readers a concise, accessible, historically informed accounting of "where we are today," as Cohen put it, in Ukraine and in the U.S.-Russia relationship.

Salon will run it in two parts. This is an edited transcript of the first. Part two follows next week.

Q: What is your judgment of Russia's involvement in Ukraine? In the current situation, the need is for good history and clear language. In a historical perspective, do you consider Russia justified?

Well, I can't think otherwise. I began warning of such a crisis more than 20 years ago, back in the '90s. I've been saying since February of last year [when Viktor Yanukovich was ousted in Kiev] that the 1990s is when everything went wrong between Russia and the United States and Europe. So you need at least that much history, 25 years. But, of course, it begins even earlier.

As I've said for more than a year, we're in a new Cold War. We've been in one, indeed, for more than a decade. My view [for some time] was that the United States either had not ended the previous Cold War, though Moscow had, or had renewed it in Washington. The Russians simply hadn't engaged it until recently because it wasn't affecting them so directly.

What's happened in Ukraine clearly has plunged us not only into a new or renewed-let historians decide that-Cold War, but one that is probably going to be more dangerous than the preceding one for two or three reasons. The epicenter is not in Berlin this time but in Ukraine, on Russia's borders, within its own civilization: That's dangerous. Over the 40-year history of the old Cold War, rules of behavior and recognition of red lines, in addition to the red hotline, were worked out. Now there are no rules. We see this every day-no rules on either side.

What galls me the most, there's no significant opposition in the United States to this new Cold War, whereas in the past there was always an opposition. Even in the White House you could find a presidential aide who had a different opinion, certainly in the State Department, certainly in the Congress. The media were open-the New York Times, the Washington Post-to debate. They no longer are. It's one hand clapping in our major newspapers and in our broadcast networks. So that's where we are.

Q: The Ukraine crisis in historical perspective. Very dangerous ground. You know this better than anyone, I'd've thought.

This is where I get attacked and assailed. It's an historical judgment. The [crisis now] grew out of Clinton's policies, what I call a "winner take all" American policy toward what was thought to be-but this isn't true-a defeated post-Cold War Russia, leading people in the '90s to think of Russia as in some ways analogous to Germany and Japan after World War II: Russia would decide its internal policies to some extent, and it would be allowed to resume its role as a state in international affairs-but as a junior partner pursuing new American national interests.

That was the pursuit that Clinton and Strobe Talbott, who's now very upset about the failure of his policy, in the Yeltsin era. That's what they wanted, and thought they were getting, from Boris Yeltsin. You can read Talbott's memoir, "The Russia Hand," and know that all the official talk about eternal friendship and partnership was malarkey. Now it's all gone sour, predictably and for various reasons, and has led us to this situation.

The problem is that by taking the view, as the American media and political establishment do, that this crisis is entirely the fault of "Putin's aggression," there's no rethinking of American policy over the last 20 years. I have yet to see a single influential person say, "Hey, maybe we did something wrong, maybe we ought to rethink something." That's a recipe for more of the same, of course, and more of the same could mean war with Russia....

Let me give you one example. It's the hardest thing for the American foreign policy elite and the media elite to cope with.

Our position is that nobody is entitled to a sphere of influence in the 21st century. Russia wants a sphere of influence in the sense that it doesn't want American military bases in Ukraine or in the Baltics or in Georgia. But what is the expansion of NATO other than the expansion of the American zone or sphere of influence? It's not just military. It's financial, it's economic, it's cultural, it's intermarriage-soldiers, infrastructure. It's probably the most dramatic expansion of a great sphere of influence in such a short time and in peacetime in the history of the world.

So you have Vice President Biden constantly saying, "Russia wants a sphere of influence and we won't allow it." Well, we are shoving our sphere of influence down Russia's throat, on the assumption that it won't push back. Obviously, the discussion might well begin: "Is Russia entitled to a zone or sphere in its neighborhood free of foreign military bases?" Just that, nothing more. If the answer is yes, NATO expansion should've ended in Eastern Germany, as the Russians were promised. But we've crept closer and closer. Ukraine is about NATO-expansion-no-matter-what. Washington can go on about democracy and sovereignty and all the rest, but it's about that. And we can't re-open this question.... The hypocrisy, or the inability to connect the dots in America, is astonishing.

Q: The nature of the Kiev regime. Again, there's a lot of fog. So there're two parts to this question. The coup matter and the relationship of the Yatsenyuk government to the State Department-we now have a finance minister in Kiev who's an American citizen, addressing the Council on Foreign Relations here as we speak-and then the relationship of the Kiev regime with the ultra-right.

It's a central question. I addressed it in a Nation piece last year called "Distorting Russia." One point was that the apologists in the media for the Kiev government as it came to power after Feb. 21, and for the Maidan demonstrations as they turned violent, ignored the role of a small but significant contingent of ultra-nationalists who looked, smelled and sounded like neo-fascists. And for this I was seriously attacked, including by Timothy Snyder at Yale, who is a great fan of Kiev, in the New Republic. I have no idea where he is coming from, or how any professor could make the allegations he did. But the argument was that this neo-fascist theme was Putin's, that what I was saying was an apology for Putin and that the real fascists were in Russia, not in Ukraine.

Maybe there are fascists in Russia, but we're not backing the Russian government or Russian fascists. The question is, and it's extremely important, "Is there a neo-fascist movement in Ukraine that, regardless of its electoral success, which has not been great, is influencing affairs politically or militarily, and is this something we should be worried about?"

The answer is 100 percent yes. But admitting this in the United States has gotten a 100 percent no until recently, when, finally, a few newspapers began to cite Kiev's battalions with swastikas on their helmets and tanks. So you've gotten a little more coverage. Foreign journalists, leaving aside Russians, have covered this neo-fascist phenomenon, which is not surprising. It grows out of Ukraine's history. It should be a really important political question for Western policy makers, and I think it is now for the Germans. German intelligence is probably better than American intelligence when it comes to Ukraine-more candid in what it tells the top leadership. Merkel's clearly worried about this.

It's another example of something you can't discuss in the mainstream media or elsewhere in the American establishment. When you read the testimony of [Assistant Secretary of State] Nuland, this is never mentioned. But what could be more important than the resurgence of a fascist movement on the European continent? I'm not talking about these sappy fascists who run around the streets in Western Europe. I'm talking about guys with a lot of weapons, guys who have done dastardly things and who have killed people. Does that warrant discussion? Well, people said, if they exist they're a tiny minority. My clich�d answer is, "Of course, so was Hitler and so was Lenin at one time." You pay attention and you think about it if you learn anything from history....

We say we're doing everything we're doing in Ukraine and against Russia, including running the risk of war, for a democratic Ukraine, by which we mean Ukraine under the rule of Kiev. Reasonably, we would ask to what extent Kiev is actually democratic. But correspondents of the Times and the Washington Post regularly file from Kiev and basically re-write whatever the Kiev authorities say while rarely, if ever, asking about democracy in Kiev-governed Ukraine.

Q: Rewriting handouts. Is that actually so?

Until recently it was so....  I haven't made this a study, and one could be done in a week by a sophisticated journalist or scholar who knew how to ask questions and had access to information. And I would be willing to wager that it would show that there's less democracy, as reasonably understood, in those areas of Ukraine governed by Kiev today than there was before Yanukovych was overthrown. Now that's a hypothesis, but I think it's a hypothesis the Times and the Post should be exploring.

Q: I take Kiev's characterization of its war in the eastern sections as an "anti-terrorist campaign" to be one of the most preposterous labels out there right now.

But, then, why did Washington say OK to it? Washington has a say in this. Without Washington, Kiev would be in bankruptcy court and have no military at all. Why didn't Washington say, "Don't call it anti-terrorist?" Because if you call it "anti-terrorism" you can never have negotiations because you don't negotiate with terrorists, you just kill them, a murderous organization with murderous intent.

By saying that this is not a civil war, it's just Russian aggression-this omits the human dimension of the entire war, and also the agency of the people who are actually fighting in the east-the hairdressers, the taxi drivers, the former newspaper reporters, the school teachers, the garbage men, the electricians, who are probably 90 percent of those fighting. There are Russians there, from Russia. But Ukraine's army has proved incapable of defeating or even holding off what began as a fairly ragtag, quasi-partisan, ill-equipped, untrained force.

The horror of this has been Kiev's use of its artillery, mortars and even its airplanes, until recently, to bombard large residential cities, not only Donetsk and Luhansk, but other cities. These are cities of 500,000, I imagine, or 2 million to 3 million. This is against the law. These are war crimes, unless we assume the rebels were bombing their mothers and grandmothers and fathers and sisters. This was Kiev, backed by the United States. So the United States has been deeply complicit in the destruction of these eastern cities and peoples. When Nuland tells Congress there are 5,000 to 6,000 dead, that's the U.N. number. That's just a count of bodies they found in the morgues. Lots of bodies are never found. German intelligence says 50,000.

Ever since the Clinton administration, we've bleated on about the right to protect people who are victims of humanitarian crises. You've got a massive humanitarian crisis in eastern Ukraine. You've got 1 million people or more who have fled to Russia-this is according to the U.N.-another half a million having fled elsewhere in Ukraine. I don't notice the United States organizing any big humanitarian effort. Where is Samantha Power, the architect of "right to protect?" We have shut our eyes to a humanitarian crisis in which we are deeply complicit. This is what's shameful, whether you like or don't like Putin. It's got nothing to do with Putin. It has to do with the nature of American policy and the nature of Washington-and the nature of the American people, if they tolerate this.

Q: You've written about the second Minsk accord as the only hope we've got left. Tell me briefly your take on Minsk II and whether there's a chance it will hold.

The second Minsk Accord has a lot of moving parts. The primary part is the cease-fire and the withdrawal by both sides of heavy artillery. It would appear that this has been significantly accomplished, but the cease-fire is very unstable. The political parts are supposed to come now. Kiev is supposed to pass certain constitutional reforms, giving a certain autonomy to the eastern regions. The eastern regions are supposed to hold new elections that in some way comply with Ukrainian law. If all that happens by December, then the Ukrainian-Russian border will be turned over to the Kiev authorities along with some European monitors. The political parts are going to be the hardest because there is no political support for this in Kiev.

[President] Poroshenko went to Minsk because he had no choice: Merkel told him he had to sign Minsk II. But Kiev is ultra-nationalist. They want no concessions to the east or to Russia. Getting Minsk II through parliament in Kiev will be very difficult. But the main fact for now is that Minsk II is the last, best choice to avoid a wider war that might well cause a direct war with Russia. [Since this interview the Kiev parliament has passed legislation either contradicting or negating the Minsk II terms.]

Minsk II was Merkel's initiative with President Hollande of France, and why, at the last minute, she suddenly realized that the situation was different than she thought-desperate-I don't know. And remember, this is a woman with enormous executive responsibilities for the economic crisis of the European Union and Greece. The enemies of Minsk II...

Q: I think the main enemy is Washington.

That's right. I wouldn't call them the enemy, but we can't be children about this. Washington controls the IMF. Washington controls NATO. NATO and the IMF are the two agencies that can make war happen on a broader basis in Ukraine and in regard to Russia, or stop it. Whoever is the decider in Washington, if it's Obama, if it's somebody else, now has to make the decision.

All the enemies of Minsk II speak freely and are quoted in the papers and on the networks as rational people. And yet there's not one dissenting voice from the establishment. Outwardly, it appears to be a very uneven struggle. One hopes that somewhere in dark corridors and dimly-lit rooms in Washington, serious conversations are taking place, but I don't think so. [One March 23, 48 members of Congress did vote against sending weapons to Kiev, a point Cohen commended in an email note.]

Q: Our post-Soviet politics after 1991, it turns out to be war by other means. The Cold War never ended, in my view. The tactics changed, perhaps the strategy did, too, but there was very little by way of even a pause.

It's complicated. The main problem today of getting the American political class to think freshly is Putin. They use Putin as the excuse to do whatever they want and not rethink anything. But Putin came much later.

The historical facts are not convenient to the triumphalist narrative, which says that we defeated the Soviet Union and thereby ended the Cold War, and therefore and therefore. According to Gorbachev, Reagan and Bush, the Cold War ended either in 1988 or 1990. When Reagan left the White House-I think he wrote in his diary in January 1989, "We have ended the Cold War"-so he thought he had ended it with Gorbachev. I was in Moscow when he walked across Red Square in that heat, I think it was July 1988, and somebody shouted to him "President Reagan, is this still the Evil Empire?" And he, in that affable way, said "Oh, no, that was then... everything's changed."

The Cold War was a structural phenomenon. Just because the president says its over doesn't mean it's over, but then there was Malta in December 1989, when [George H.W.] Bush and Gorbachev said the Cold War was over, and that continued all through the reunification of Germany. Between '88 and '90 we were told repeatedly by the world's leaders that it was over. Jack Matlock, Reagan's ambassador to Russia, has written very well about this, and because he was there as a personal testimony, of how this truly was. So the conflation of the end of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War is an historical mistake.

Bush then continued to maintain the official line that he had pursued with Gorbachev that there were no losers at the end of the Cold War, everybody had won. Bush maintained that position until the polls showed he was running behind Clinton in his reelection campaign. And then he declared in 1992 that we, and he in particular, had won the Cold War. I saw Gorbachev shortly thereafter. My wife, Katrina vanden Heuvel, and I had been friends with him for several years. He was deeply, deeply hurt, with a sense of betrayal. He's forgiven Bush, being a forgiving man.

But at that moment, '91 and '92... well, words are words, but as Russians say, words are also deeds. By announcing that we had won the Cold War, Bush set the stage for the Clinton administration's decision to act on an American victory, including the expansion of NATO.

This history brings us to where we are today.

Q: What has changed in U.S. policy toward Russia between 1991 and now, and what hasn't?

I think the history that we know is what I just told you. Behind the scenes, there were clearly discussions going on throughout the '90s, and there were different groups. Big historical decisions, whether we talk about the war in Vietnam, or, a subject that interests me, why slavery and segregation lasted so long in the American South, where I grew up, can never be explained by one factor. Almost always they're multi-factored. But you got, in the 1990s, some people who genuinely believed that this was the moment for an enduring post-Cold War, American-Russian, full-scale strategic partnership and friendship between equals. There were these Romantics, so to speak.

Q: On this side of the ocean?

I think there were people who believed in this. Just like there're people who really believe in democracy promotion as a virtuous profession-some of my students have gone into it. They believe in it: It's a good thing. Why not help good countries achieve democracy? The dark side of democracy promotion for them is either not visible or not in their calculation. People are diverse. I don't judge them harshly for their beliefs.

There were others who were saying Russia will rise again, and we have to make sure that never happens. To do that, we need to strip Russia of Ukraine, in particular. Brzezinski was writing that. At some point during this time he wrote that Russia with Ukraine is a great imperial power, without Ukraine it's a normal country. But there were people in Washington, the same people I heard in private discussions, saying that Russia's down and we're going to keep it down. They were feeding opinion into the Clinton administration, and that clearly helped lead to the NATO expansion.

They use the excuse that everybody wants to join NATO. How can we deny them the right? It's very simple. People say every country that qualifies has a right to join NATO. No, they do not. NATO is not a junior Chamber of Commerce. It's not a non-selective fraternity or sorority. It's a security organization, and the only criterion for membership should be, "Does a nation enhance the security of the other member countries?" The Ukrainian crisis proves beyond any doubt, being the worst international crisis of our time, that the indiscriminate expansion of NATO has worsened our international security. That's the end of that story. I don't know what they think NATO is. Is it like AARP membership and you get discounts in the form of U.S. defense funds? It's crazy, this argument.

But then you got these guys who are either Russophobes or eternal Cold Warriors or deep strategic thinkers. You remember when [Paul] Wolfowitz wrote this article saying Russia had to be stripped of any possibility ever to be a great power again? These people were all talking like...

Q: It goes back to your comparison with Japan in '45.

The question is why Clinton bought into this. That would then take you to Strobe Talbott. Strobe was a disciple of Isaiah Berlin, who taught that if you want to understand Russia, you have to understand the history, the culture and the civilization. And certainly if you took that view, you never would have done, as George Kennan said in 1996 or 1997, you never would have expanded NATO. I knew George during my 30 years at Princeton. George's social attitudes were deeply alarming, but about Russia he had a very important idea. Russia marches to its own drummer, let it, don't try to intervene or you'll make things worse. Be patient, understand Russian history, the forces in Russia. That was Isaiah Berlin's position. Once, that was Strobe's position. Look at Strobe Talbott today: We have to send in weapons and overthrow Putin and turn Russia around. Now it's all outside agency.

Q: How did this guy go from A to B?

Well, they say power corrupts, or at least changes people. He had been Clinton's roommate at Oxford, and he ended up in the White House as a Russia aide, very smart guy. I think Russia disappointed him. One phenomenon among Russia-watchers is that you create an artifice, and that's your Russia. And when it disappoints you, you never forgive Russia. Check out Fred Hiatt at the Washington Post. Fred was writing from Moscow during the '90s that democracy was going to be great. So did most the guys who are now were still in editorial positions. Russia let them down. They can't forgive Russia anymore than they can the ex-wife who cheated on them. They can't think anew. It's a phenomenon, probably not only American, but it's particularly American. You cannot reopen any discussion with these people who bought into Yeltsin's Russia in the 1990s and were certain that though the road was rocky, as they liked to say... "Failed Crusade" is about this. They can't get over it.

Part of it also had to do with Yeltsin. He was so desperate, not only for American affirmation but for American affection. He was so insecure, as his health declined and he became more and more the captive of the oligarchs, that he wanted to mean as much to Washington as Gorbachev had. He was getting close to virtually giving Washington anything, saying anything, until the Serbian war. Then it dawned on him that Washington had a certain agenda, and the expansion of NATO [was part of it], but by then it was too late, he was a spent force.

Later, when Dmitri Medvedev was president [2008-12], I think, he told a group of people that Yeltsin hadn't actually won the election, that Gennadi Zyuganov, leader of the Communist Party, had. So assuming that Medvedev wasn't lying and assuming he was in a position to know, all this talk of American support for democracy, when it comes to Russia, at least, is, shall we say, complex.

Q: Let's go to Putin. What is your view here? What is he trying to accomplish?

It's impossible to answer briefly or simply. This is a separate university course, this is a book, this is for somebody with a much bigger brain that I have. This really is for historians to judge.

I wrote an article in, I think, 2012 called the "The Demonization of Putin," arguing that there is very little basis for many of the allegations made against Putin, and that the net result was to make rational analysis in Washington on Russian affairs at home and abroad impossible, because it was all filtered through this demonization. If we didn't stop, I argued, it was only going to get worse to the point where we would become like heroin addicts at fix time, unable to think about anything except our obsession with Putin. We couldn't think about other issues. This has now happened fully. The article was turned down by the New York Times, and an editor I knew at Reuters published it on Reuters.com.

The history of how this came about [begins] when Putin came to power, promoted by Yeltsin and the people around Yeltsin, who were all connected in Washington. These people in Moscow included Anatoly Chubais, who had overseen the privatizations, had relations with the IMF and had fostered a lot of the corruption. He came to United States to assure us that Putin was a democrat, even though he had been at the KGB.

When he came to power, both the Times and the Post wrote that Putin was a democrat and, better yet, he was sober, unlike Yeltsin. How we got from 2000 to now, when he's Hitler, Saddam, Stalin, Gaddafi, everybody that we have to get rid of, whom we know killed Boris Nemtsov because from the bridge where Nemtsov was killed [on February 27] you can see the Kremlin.... Well, remember, Sarah Palin could see Russia from Alaska! It's preposterous. But the demonization of Putin has become an institution in America. It is literally a political institution that prevents the kind of discussion that you and I are having.

Kissinger had the same thought. He wrote, last year, I think, "The demonization of Putin is not a policy. It's an alibi for not having a policy." That's half correct. It's much worse now, because they did have a policy. I think the "policy" growing in some minds was how to get rid of Putin. The question is, "Do they have the capacity to make decisions?" I didn't think so, but now I'm not so sure, because in a lot of what comes out of Washington, including the State Department, the implication is that Putin has to go.

I asked a question rhetorically several years ago of these regime changers: Have you thought about what would happen in Russia in the event of regime change? If what you say is true, if Putin is the pivot of the whole system, you remove Putin the whole system collapses. Russia has every known weapon of mass destruction in vast quantities. What would be the consequence of that conceit on your part-that we're going to get rid of Putin-for the rest of the world?

So this Putin phenomenon has to be explained. How did he go from a democrat for sure, now to maybe the worst Russian leader since Ivan the Terrible. How do you explain it? Does that tell us more about Putin or more about us?

Q: I think his sin is an unacceptable take on, broad-brush terms, Eastern ethos vs. Western ethos, and on narrower terms a rejection of a neoliberal economic regime in the Washington consensus style. Although he's got a lot to answer for, I think, in this respect, he's not an evangelist for what he's doing. What does he face domestically? What's he trying to do?

Let me tell you just briefly. When I ask Russians, they think the answer is American presidential envy. We've had a lot of unsuccessful presidents lately.  Clinton left basically in disgrace, Bush left not beloved for the war that he had got us into and lied about, Obama is before our eyes a shrinking, failing president. And here's Putin, now in his 15th year of growing stature inside Russia.

And by the way, until recently the preeminent European statesman of his time, no doubt of this. In the 21st century, only Merkel can stand anywhere near him as a European statesman, whether you like what a statesman does or not. This, of course, changes everything. Not to take the famous cop-out, but let history judge. X number of years from now, when we've joined the majority, as Lenin used to say, historians will undoubtedly look back and do the pluses and minuses, and it's going to be a very close call.

For my short-term take on Putin, he was put in power to save the Yeltsin family from corruption charges, and the first decree he signed upon becoming acting president was to exempt the Yeltsin family from future prosecution. He has honored that, by the way. One of the beefs against Putin in Russia is that he's honorable to his friends and appointees to an extreme; he can't bring himself to fire anybody. He's got this KGB code of honor. I kind of like it. I'd rather that than people stab you in your back....

I operate under the assumption that no matter how or why people come to power, when in power they begin to ponder what their mission is, what history asks of them. For Putin it was quite clear: The Russian state had collapsed twice in the 20th century. Stop and think what that means. It had collapsed in the 1917 Revolution and the Soviet Union didn't collapse in 1991- it was plucked apart- but then the state collapsed and the result was what Russians call smuta, a time of troubles. It means misery; it means foreign invasion; it means civil war; it means that people fall into poverty. This is the Russia that Putin inherited. Remember, when he came to power in 2000, Russia was on the verge of collapsing for a third time as a result of Yeltsin's policies. The governors were corrupt, were not obeying the law, were not paying taxes, were running criminal fiefdoms in scores of regions. Russia was highly vulnerable, NATO was expanding, Russia had no influence in world affairs.

Putin comes to power and perceives that his first mission has to be to stop the collapse of the Russian state- which he calls the vertical, because Russia has always been governed from the top down, which has made it ungovernable because it's so big- and, most of all, to make sure it never, ever, ever happens again. In Russian history, the worst thing that can happen to Russia is smuta, when the state collapses. Stop and think: Between 1917 and 1991, it happened twice in the largest territorial country in the world. Is there any precedent for that in history? How a leader could come to power and not see that....

The second piece of this conversation will run next week.


 
 #6
Russia Insider
http://russia-insider.com
April 16, 2015
Revisiting the Prophetic Memoir of Clinton's Top Russia Adviser
A fresh look at Strobe Talbott's The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy
By Gilbert Doctorow
Gilbert Doctorow is a professional Russia watcher and actor in Russian affairs going back to 1965. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College (1967), a past Fulbright scholar, and holder of a Ph.D. with honors in history from Columbia University (1975). After completing his studies, Mr. Doctorow pursued a business career focused on the USSR and Eastern Europe. For twenty-five years he worked for US and European multinationals in marketing and general management with regional responsibility. From 1998-2002, Doctorow served as the Chairman of the Russian Booker Literary Prize in Moscow. A number of his early scholarly articles on Russian constitutional history under Nicholas II drawn from his dissertation remain 'in print' and are available online. Gilbert Doctorow is a Research Fellow of the American University in Moscow.

"I made the mistake of trying to insert my own view into Clinton's stream of consciousness...The president gave me a look that combined amusement and impatience. I'd just reminded him, he said, of why I was a journalist and not a politician."

Given that Strobe Talbott's memoir was published back in 2002, one might reasonably ask why do a "review article" now, in 2015? To that I have several justifications for what follows.

First, re-examination of this memoir of Strobe Talbott's years in government is timely because the author is reportedly the first choice of Hilary Clinton to be her Secretary of State if she wins the presidency. Hilary has just announced her candidacy for the 2016 election. and by general agreement of the pundits, she is the front runner. The book provides invaluable information about Talbott, the respected friend and adviser to the Clintons.

The blurbs on the dust jacket rightly highlight the author's journalistic eye for detail and felicitous command of language. What we do not see praised are the author's analytical skills, capacity for intellectual leadership, or ability to take the long view. Nor do we find inside the covers that his professional training in Russian literature endowed him with any profound understanding or appreciation of Russia.

Secondly, quite apart from any future possible return to power, Talbott has recently been in the news with respect to one of the most important issues of our day. In his capacity as director of the Brookings Institute, the leading think tank of the Democratic Party, Talbott was the spokesman for a team of experts which, in early February of 2015, issued a report entitled "Preserving Ukraine's Independence, Resisting Russian Aggression: What the United States and NATO Must Do." That report urged President Obama to send lethal arms to Ukraine. It touched off the biggest controversy in the United States over its Russia policy since the onset of the great power confrontation over Ukraine in February, 2014. The Russia Hand shows that Talbott has had consistently hard-line views on dealing with Russia going back 25 years, when that country was flat on its back and hard-liners were in the minority.

Thirdly, the book provides invaluable information about how we got ourselves into the New Cold War. Historians and political scientists are actively sifting clues and re-examining the decisions taken in the 1990s on the shape of the new security architecture of Europe, particularly the fateful decisions to expand NATO to the East, ultimately right up to Russia's borders. Talbott was both participant and fly on the wall when all these decisions were taken.

Now that I have explained how and why Talbott's book could be valuable if it were truthful and unbiased, qualities which are fairly rare in memoirs generally and in political memoirs in particular, I can confirm that The Russia Hand passes the test of veracity comfortably. The tell-tale sign of doctored memory is absent. This book was patently not self-serving when issued. Talbott gives us too much material putting himself in a poor light in relation to his boss, Bill Clinton, and he puts his entire milieu in poor light in relation to the phenomenal opportunities to change the world for the better that lay before them if they had possessed more imagination and more guts.

Curiously, from among them all, only the boss, Clinton, comes across as having dared to envision what a 'blue sky' future might look like and hoped not to build obstacles to its realization, even if he could not find the political strength to facilitate a positive outcome materially. Indeed, part of Clinton's blue sky was precisely an eventual Russia in NATO scenario. As he told Talbott in his first term: "We've got to put this NATO thing in tomorrow terms. The Russians' getting in someday may or may not happen, but keeping it out there as something we're not against is a no-brainer."

Published less than two years after the author left office, this book displays none of the amnesia that typically damages memoirs of elder statesmen. What lacuna there are in the narrative are due to Talbott's staying close to what he saw on the job and not trying to present a comprehensive account of the age.

The third reason for going back to Talbott's memoir today is that with the passage of time, wholly new and previously unnoticed causal lines emerge in classics like this. He recorded some remarkably telling observations by the prominent statesmen he met, whether socially or in his official duties, and many of their words have taken on new meaning and profundity.

Now let's turn to the light which this book sheds on how the present crisis came about. It is common currency on the side of the argument where I stand to put a lot of the blame for bad decisions in the 1990s to the euphoria in the West that followed the end of the Soviet Union and collapse of Communism. 'We won the Cold War' was on everyone's mind. There was now no power on earth to thwart the United States in its mission of making the world safe for democracy. And it would do so to create public goods from which everyone would benefit. This was reflected in Francis Fukuyama's End of History, which brought Neoconservative and Neoliberal values and ideological points of faith into the mainstream of American political life.

However, in Strobe Talbott's narrative there is no sign of triumphalism at work informing decisions of the Clinton administration. What we do see is a number of other serious conceptual problems that, to greater or lesser extent, carry over into our own day. This begins with condescension towards what was then the Sick Man of Europe. There was the hubristic assumption that we knew best how to cure the ills of Russia and were there to give them the 'spinach' they needed for their transformation from command to market economy, from dictatorship to democracy, from superpower to regional power at peace with its neighbors.

In a way, the physical ills of President Boris Yeltsin were a metaphor for the condition of Russian society and economy in the 1990s. Much of the time, Yeltsin suffered from bouts of drunkenness that made his behavior in public at summits and at joint press conferences, not to mention behind the scenes during state negotiations, volatile and unpredictable. At other times, his heart disease took him out of action for lengthy periods during which speculation was rife over his very survival. Strobe Talbott and other key members of the Clinton staff were permanently in damage control mode when dealing with Yeltsin. This was just a short step away from the desire to stage manage the Russian President to be sure he did the right thing while they cornered him to gain concessions to American interests on all the policy issues under joint review.

Talbott notes several times how the administration's opponents criticized it for excessively personalizing the relationship with Russia, just as the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations had placed excessive reliance on a special relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev. This criticism is justified by everything Talbott tells us about his work.

Of course, it is hard to see how things could have been otherwise because of the second dimension of Yeltsin's ills - his political weakness. He was under constant attack from a parliament that was controlled by his enemies, whether the Communist majority or the significant nationalist "brown" minority. Yeltsin's constant refrain, his main point of leverage in negotiations with Americans, was that he alone could deliver the goods, and that they must not undermine his delicate situation by excessive or untimely demands. This was particularly true in all issues relating to NATO, especially before and during 1996, when both Russia and the United States had presidential elections. The corollary to the foregoing is that the other political forces in Russia were much less attractive to the Americans and could not be cultivated. Indeed, meetings with the Communist Party leader Zyuganov were kept in the open and tightly circumscribed, while the LDPR leader Zhirinovsky was excluded altogether from Clinton's occasional meetings with the Russian political establishment.

It is rather ironic that in the last couple of years of Clinton's second term, when the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, when the scandal over the President's relationship with Monica Lewinsky and impeachment proceedings against him undermined his authority both in Washington and in the nation at large, Clinton and his team found themselves using the very same logic of 'we're your best and last option' when negotiating with the Russians. This is what it trotted out when it tried to secure Russian agreement to modifications of the ABM treaty. But by this time an assertive Putin had come to power and was able to muster a patronizing tone in dealing with the lame duck American president.

During the greater part of the Clinton years, the inequality of power between the Russian and American negotiators was such that Talbott and his colleagues were knowingly offering trinkets in exchange for real assets. Hence, the Partnership for Peace and its sequel in the Russia-NATO Council instead of a full treaty bringing Russia into the security architecture of Europe. Hence, the expansion of the G-7 into a G-8 as a sop to cover Russia's humiliation when its former allies were being welcomed into the North American defense alliance.

The politics were personalized and concessions were wrung out of Boris Yeltsin in the knowledge that the political elites in his country were determinedly opposed to the decisions he took jointly with the Americans. What is curious in all this was the expectation that these decisions could be made to stick.

This happened despite the clear warnings of none other than Yeltsin himself, as we learn from Talbott in an extensive quotation from the Russian president that bears repeating because of what it says about his lucidity then and also about the source of our conflict with his country today:

"I don't like it when the U.S. flaunts its superiority. Russia's difficulties are only temporary, and not only because we have nuclear weapons, but also because of our economy, our culture, our spiritual strength. All that amounts to a legitimate, undeniable basis for equal treatment. Russia will rise again!...And when we do, even then I don't intend to try to compete with the U.S. but to pursue an equal partnership. We've got to maintain this basis for our relations. We need to be close to the U.S., but not on the basis of your monopoly in the world - rather, on the basis of equality."

It emerges from Talbott's memoir that the very notion of equal treatment for Russia was absurd to him and to those in his circle, just as the idea of Russia rising again seemed to them to be a chimera. They could not see beyond the here and now of their day, when all the statistics spoke against Russia.

We should not be too tough on them for this lack of understanding of the country and its reserves of steely determination to be a great power once again. Even today, in the face of a Russia that has come a long way back from its nadir, some of our most eminent exponents of the Realpolitik school see Russia as an expiring force and concentrate their attention on rising China.

From the evidence Talbott presents, President Clinton seems to have had greater intuitive understanding of Russia than his 'Russia Hand.' Here is another very revealing quote that Talbott has served up, this time from Bill Clinton:

"We haven't played everything brilliantly with these people; we haven't figured out how to say yes to them in a way that balances off how much and how often we want them to say yes to us. We keep telling Ol' Boris, 'Okay, now here's what you've got to do next - here's some more shit for your face.' And that makes it real hard for him, given what he's up against and who he's dealing with...We've got to remember that Yeltsin can't do more with us than his own traffic will bear."

Indeed, unlike Talbott and the rest of his staff, Clinton, the politician, knew the dangers of overplaying his hand. In a citation relating to American treatment of Jacques Chirac, we find Clinton remarking what was equally applicable to his Russia policy:

"I'm just saying that you shouldn't kick a wounded dog because it will get well and bite you."

There was no issue in American-Russian relations during the Clinton years in which this principle was more relevant than in NATO's air war on Serbia over Kosovo and the eventual implementation of the KFOR peacekeeping mission in the breakaway republic. Russia was kicking and screaming all the way before accepting the "Bosnian reporting lines" in its relations to the US commander of the mission. And the impotent fury of the Russians in 1998 arguably set the stage for their decisions on the fate of the Crimea in 2014.

Let us return now to the critical years 1996-97, when plans for the expansion of NATO were finalized and made public. Talbott gives us some readings on NATO from his own circle of officials in the State Department, from major political personalities of his time - including Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Henry Kissinger, and George Kennan, as well as from academic institutions representing the foreign policy establishment at the time.

In connection with her famously quoted telephone conversation with American Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt when they conspired as puppet masters directing the forthcoming coup d'etat of 22 February 2014, Victoria Nuland has been very much in the news over the past year. Back in the Clinton administration, she was a key assistant to Strobe Talbott on his missions to Moscow, and it is interesting to see how she, Richard Holbrooke and, of course, his immediate superior, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, all formed a core force behind what was still a minority position among senior officials in favor of a bold and rapid expansion of NATO. For his part, Talbott recruited Alexander Vershbow and Ron Asmus to his immediate team. Asmus, in particular, later exerted a nefarious influence on evolving U.S. policies by pleading the case of a policy that finally crossed Russia's red lines: inclusion of the Baltic states in NATO. It was not for nothing that these countries later awarded Asmus their sashes of knighthood.

To put it charitably, Talbott and his fellow crusaders saw NATO as a guarantor of democratic government and security throughout Central and Eastern Europe in case of either scenario for evolving Russia: either collapse from its internal weaknesses and contradictions or a return of its imperialist ambitions and might. In this position, they were much closer to prevailing political thinking on Capitol Hill than to the ambivalent President to whom they reported.

Talbott illustrates the correlation of expert opinion at the time when he describes a gathering of Harriman Institute faculty he attended in the fateful year 1996, when determination of the administration's policy still hung in the balance. He tells us that every faculty member opposed the NATO expansion except for a non-Russian specialist, the historian of Germany and Western Europe, Fritz Stern. Talbott chose to ignore this expert consensus, claiming that public opinion polls showed that NATO expansion had the vote of the American public. This is a curious stance on the value of expertise for the man who today heads a major think tank.

As regards George Kennan, Talbott's words are even more damning for the memoirist's personal standing as would-be statesman. Talbott makes a point of telling us that he systematically invited Kennan to State each year for a private meeting, intimating that he valued the insights of the former chief strategist of America's Cold War diplomacy. However, after Kennan came out publicly against NATO expansion in 1997, denouncing it as a deeply flawed and nearsighted policy which would lead to no good, Talbott had to explain this criticism away to his boss, the ever watchful Bill Clinton. Talbott now reminded Clinton that Kennan had been against the concept of NATO from the time of its creation, thereby disparaging the value of his counsel.

Henry Kissinger, at 92, is today the iconic exponent of Realpolitik and dispenser of masterly wisdom in op-ed articles and occasional television interviews, in which he calls upon the Obama administration to temper its vilification of Vladimir Putin and find a compromising solution to the Ukraine crisis that takes into account Russian interests.

On the basis of Kissinger's several 'guest appearances' on the pages of Talbott's memoir, we have an instructive reminder that Kissinger himself voted with both hands and feet for policies that have led to the present confrontation that he proposes now to alleviate. In Clinton's first term, he opposed the Partnership for Peace, because he believed even that fig leaf program gave too much mouth honor to Russia. In 1997 and 1998, he publicly condemned the Clinton administration for making a commitment to the Russians not to move nuclear weapons or troops into the newly admitted Eastern European members of NATO. This is the very issue that the Obama administration is trying to subvert by the tactic of troop rotations and its rapid deployment force. Said Kissinger back then: 'Whoever heard of a military alliance begging with a weakened adversary? NATO should not be turned into an instrument to conciliate Russia or Russia will undermine it.'"

Finally, it is worth mentioning the curious comments of Helmut Kohl justifying his strong support for eastward expansion of NATO with America forcing the pace:

"In Kohl's view, in addition to its internal demons, Germany had been cursed in the twentieth century by political geography. Immediately to the east were the Slavic lands, historically regarded more as Eurasian than truly or entirely European. As long as Germany's border with Poland marked the dividing line between East and West, Germany would be vulnerable to the pathologies of racism and the temptations of militarism that can come with living on an embattled frontier. That frontier would disappear, he said, only if Poland entered the European Union. His country's future depended not just on deepening its ties within the EU but on expanding the EU eastward so that Germany would be in the middle of a safe, prosperous, integrated and democratic Europe rather than on its edge. 'That is why Germany is the strongest proponent of enlargement of the EU,' he said, 'and it's why European integration is of existential importance to us.' Kohl believed that the EU was unlikely to expand unless NATO, nudged by the U.S., led the way. 'This is not just a moral issue,' he said, 'it's in our self-interest to have this development now and not in the future.'"

It would be hard to imagine, without the help of Strobe Talbott's memoir, that such mumbo jumbo explanations for the pathologies of his nation, such musings about the Eurasian civilizations could come from one of Europe's larger-than-life leaders of European politics in the 1990s, from a leader with a rare interest in history. This citation obliges us now to study the thinking behind Angela Merkel and her present advisors, the successors to the CDU leadership and authors of Germany's new Ostpolitik, and to accept nothing on faith in what our media report.

For all of these reasons, I heartily recommend The Russia Hand as an essential guide to today's political landscape.
 #7
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
April 16, 2015
Minsk II is hanging by a thread
Clearly neither side is in any mood to back down and so we should expect a major springtime offensive in the Donbas sooner rather than later.
By James Carden
James Carden served as an Advisor to the US-Russia Presidential Commission at the US State Department. Since then, he has contributed articles on US-Russia policy to The National Interest and The Moscow Times.

The situation in the Donbas region of Ukraine continues to unravel. Fighting has continued in and around the Donetsk airport while the economy has basically collapsed. On a near-daily basis the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe (OCSE)'s Special Monitoring Mission reports incidents of artillery shelling and machine gun fire.

Most disturbingly, this shelling often happens in the vicinity of residential neighborhoods. Shelling still rocks some of the neighborhoods I had occasion to visit in late March. In the Oktyabrskaya and Petrovskyi districts, frightened civilians - mainly elderly women and children - were living in bombed out apartment blocks.

Kiev's economic and military blockade of the city is only hardening the resolve of the ordinary citizens of the Donbas region. One refugee who had fled her home because of the fighting told me, "There is no 'back' for Ukraine." Others expressed outrage and incredulity at the tactics of the government of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.

One non-combatant, a pretty young woman in her mid-twenties asked me: "Do I look like a terrorist?" Standing outside a welfare agency where scores of people waited for Russian-supplied handouts, she asked: "Are these people terrorists?" The answer is self-evident. And yet, if we are to believe the mainstream American media narrative the war that continues to wreak havoc on the southeastern corner of Ukraine is solely the work of one man: the president of Russia.

This prevailing wisdom was summed up neatly by Ukraine's Ambassador to the U.S. at an event at the Carnegie Endowment last month. One of the participants in the panel discussion referred to the "civil war in Ukraine." This prompted the Ukrainian Ambassador to rise in a frisson of self righteous anger to declare: "There is no civil war in Ukraine, there is no civil war in Ukraine, there is war which was brought by Russia."

The assertion that there is "no civil war in Ukraine" is a politically expedient formulation for the government in Kiev because it absolves them of their share of the responsibility for the unfolding catastrophe. No, I'm sorry to say that there very much is a civil war taking place in the Donbas. Yet troublingly, the Ambassador's view is taken as gospel here in Washington. And while it is simply inconceivable that the rebels in Donbas are not indeed "Russian-backed," spend any time at all in their company and one thing above all else becomes clear: These people will fight to the very last man, Russian "supplied" or not.

The idea that this is Russia's war is a commonplace notion in the West; and yet, for all the accusations, neither NATO nor the Pentagon nor the State Department nor Westminster has produced very much evidence on that score. At a recent Senate hearing one prominent Russia-hand, Stephen Blank, cited a report in Jane's Defense that claimed Russia has between 12,000-20,000 Russian troops operating inside Ukraine. If the government had aerial surveillance photographic evidence for this, does anyone not think it would have made its way to CNN forthwith?

And so, while U.S. President Barack Obama has  - so far anyway - resisted repeated calls to arm the Poroshenko government in Kiev, one wonders how much longer he can hold out: After all, he has been the object, for months now, of a relentless lobbying effort by members of his own administration to pursue a policy for which he clearly has deep reservations.

The lobbying will only grow more intense when (not if) the Minsk II agreement collapses. Some of the rebels indicated they expect a renewed offensive by Kiev to begin as early as this week. What is almost entirely inarguable is that Kiev has zero interest in the success of Minsk II.

Proof of this came last week when the government in Kiev - in contravention of the accords - stated that it would not negotiate with the rebel governments and would only begin to pursue a political agreement once the rebel leaders had unilaterally surrendered; this is what the journalist Robert Parry has called a "surrender-first negotiate-later stipulation." This stipulation will only have the effect of killing Minsk II in its crib.

And so, what then? Clearly neither side is in any mood to back down and so we should expect a major springtime offensive in the Donbas sooner rather than later. What American policymakers desperately need to understand is the true nature of the conflict so as to formulate a responsible policy that will work towards an end to the fighting, rather than an intensification of it.

The nature of the conflict is this: the rebel fighters (and yes, their Russian backers, however many or few they may be) have the support of the population of the Donbas. There are, despite what we are hearing from the media and from the likes of NATO Supreme Allied Commander Philip Breedlove, indigenous forces that sincerely believe that they are fighting an army of - in their words - "fascists" and "Nazis" who want to exterminate them and their way of life.

Western governments must understand that this indigenous force - which no doubt has some support (with the potential for much, much more) from a powerful patron - will continue to oppose with force of arms Kiev's "anti-terrorist operation" (ATO) until such time as Kiev assents to negotiations.

What responsible policymakers should be doing is to pressure Kiev to negotiate in earnest with the representatives for the breakaway republics. Meanwhile, a diplomatic effort headed by France and Germany should press the Russian government to encourage the rebels to negotiate in good faith when the time comes.

The idea that, but for Russian support, Kiev would be able to handily defeat the separatist fighters is as fanciful as it is misleading. It is time American and European policymakers face up to this fact and proceed accordingly.

 #8
Antiwar.com
April 17, 2015
The Murderers of Kiev
Ukraine's gangster regime shows its true colors
By Justin Raimondo

There seems to be a "suicide" epidemic afflicting opponents of the current Ukrainian government - nine opposition politicians and two journalists have mysteriously died since the beginning of the year. Here is the timeline of terror that has opponents of the regime fearing for their lives:

January 26 - Nikolai Sergienko, former deputy chief of Ukrainian Railways and a supporter of Viktor Yanukoych's Party of Regions, reportedly shot himself with a hunting rifle. The windows were all locked from inside, and no note was found.

January 29 - Aleksey Kolesnik, the former chairman of the Kharkov regional government and a prominent supporter of the now-banned Party of Regions, supposedly hung himself.  There was no suicide note

February 24 - Stanislav Melnik, another former Party of Regions member of parliament, was found dead in his bathroom: he is said to have shot himself with a hunting rifle. We are told he left a suicide note of "apologies," but what he was apologizing for has never been revealed, since the note has not been released.

February 25 - Sergey Valter, former Party of Regions activist and Mayor of Melitopol, was found hanged hours before his trial on charges of "abuse of office" was set to begin. Whoever was responsible neglected to leave a "suicide" note.

February 26 - Aleksandr Bordyuga, Valter's lawyer and former deputy chief of Melitopol police, was found in his garage, dead, another "suicide."

February 26 - Oleksandr Peklushenko, a former Party of Regions member of parliament and chairman of Zaporozhye Regional State Administration, was found dead in the street with a gun wound to his neck. Officially declared a "suicide."

February 28 - Mikhail Chechetov, a professor of economics and engineering, former member of parliament from the Party of Regions, and former head of the privatization board, supposedly jumped from the seventeenth floor window of his Kiev apartment. Another "suicide"!

March 14 - Sergey Melnichuk, a prosecutor and Party of Regions loyalist, "fell" from the ninth floor window of an apartment building in Odessa. Or was he pushed?

April 15 - Oleg Kalashnikov, yet another prominent Party of Regions leader, died of a gunshot wound - the eighth since the beginning of the year.
Kalashnikov, a former member of the Ukrainian parliament and a very vocal and visible critic of the Kiev regime, was found shot to death in his home. This time, the authorities are having a hard time spinning it as a "suicide," although they haven't come right out and said it was murder. Kalashnikov had recently been campaigning for the right of Ukrainians to celebrate the victory of the Allies during World War II - a controversial topic in Ukraine, where sympathy for the Third Reich and its Ukrainian collaborators is rife among supporters of the current government. He had reportedly received numerous death threats because of his stand.

And as I write this, the news that two other prominent critics of the Kiev gang, both journalists, have been found dead is being reported. Historian and journalist Oles Buznya was gunned down by two marked gunmen while jogging near his home. He had recently resigned his position as editor of the newspaper Segodnya, stating that he would no longer put up with the censorship imposed by government pressure on his employers: he had also been forbidden to make any media appearances. Earlier this year, a group of Ukrainian "journalists" with the oxymoronic moniker of "Stop Censorship" demanded that Buznya be banned from making appearances in the media on the grounds that he was "an agent of the Kremlin."

Buznya enraged Ukrainian ultra-nationalists by debunking the cult of poet Taras Shevchenko. Buznya, like Kalashnikov, was active in the antigovernment protests that have become more numerous in recent days as that war-torn country cracks down on political dissent and cuts pensions while prosecuting a vicious civil war against eastern "separatists."

Within hours of Buznya's murder - on either Tuesday or Thursday, accounts differ - journalist Serhiy Sukhobok was kiled in Kiev. The 50-year-old Sukhobok founded the news web sites ProUA and Okbom, and had been a business journalist in the Donbass. There are reports that his assailants have been found and arrested, but authorities aren't releasing much information.

Both Buznya and Sukhobok are being described in the Western media as "pro-Russian," but this is just a synonym for anyone who opposes the current regime. Sukhobok was born in Donetsk, and naturally sympathized with the poverty and neglect suffered by its people. Buznya, for his part, was an opponent of the perverted nationalism of the country's ultras, and wanted true independence for Ukraine rather than assimilation into the EU super-state.

The narrative supported by the Western media - that the "revolution" which overthrew the democratically elected government of Viktor Yanukovych was a blow struck against authoritarianism and for "European values" - is no longer credible. Indeed, in the face of these murders - covered up by the regime as "suicides" - it is a sick joke. The thugs who executed the coup - with the invaluable help of the US and German governments - are outright fascists who don't even bother to disguise their colors. Between banning Russian films and declaring the WWII era Nazi-collaborator Stephen Bandera a "national hero," these crazies are the ideological heirs of the worst of the pro-Nazi militias that murdered thousands of Jews at Hitler's behest. Legislation recently passed outlaws all "Communist" propaganda and symbolism, as well as Nazi emblems - but hails the OUN, the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists, which fought alongside the German SS during World War II.

Banning web sites and television stations they disapprove of, as well as the bass guitarist for the US rock band Bloodhound Gang, the warlords of Kiev are showing their true colors. However, the list of bans doesn't stop there: it includes all inter-bank transactions over $10,000 and all gold transactions over $125. And to top it off, they've also banned Bitcoins - in the name of "protecting consumers' rights"!

As a wave of terror and repression sweeps Ukraine, my early warning of where that country was headed has been proved all too accurate. And it has come to this largely as a result of intervention in Ukraine's internal politics by the US and the EU - who did so in the name of "promoting democracy."

Those "libertarians" who hailed the Ukrainian "revolution," mostly in the unelected leadership of "Students for Liberty," have a lot of explaining to do: it was they who denounced Ron Paul for his lack of support to the Ukrainian coup leaders, shamelessly smearing him as "pro-Putin" because he saw where Ukraine was going. Now that the regime they tried to prettify is arresting journalists and young people en masse for resisting the draft - and murdering its political opponents - we don't hear a peep out of these phony "libertarians."

US taxpayers have shelled out billions to a regime that is one of the most corrupt - and, now, one of the most repressive - regimes in the world. And the Obama administration  continues to support the gangsters of Kiev, even stationing US troops there for "training" purposes - for they are the mutant progeny of Washington's "democracy promotion" project. Ukraine is a convenient base from which to achieve the ultimate goal of this project - regime change in Russia itself, a deadly dangerous game that could well spark a nuclear confrontation.

What more evidence is needed that US foreign policy is utter madness?
 
#9
Russia Direct
April 16, 2015
History of Ukraine Told by Assassinated Ukrainian Writer Oles Buzina
Is this the Ukrainian democracy the West wants to see?
By RI Staff
[Graphics and video here http://russia-insider.com/en/listen-very-interesting-short-history-ukraine-assasinated-oles-buzina/5751]

This is Oles Buzina, well known Ukrainian writer and journalist who opposed civil war, Maidan, Poroshenko and Yastsenyuk.

Can you imagine what would happened if, in Russia, three opposition figures, a well-known writer and two politicians, were killed in the span of two days? We have a vague of idea of what that would look like, after the Western hysteria about Nemtsov.

Oles' assassination was the third in a row of political killings in the last four days: Sergey Sukhobok (April 13); Oleg Kalashnikov (April 15); and Oles Buzina (April 16).

Why are the Western media silent about these political assassinations? And all of this happened after 9 "mysterious suicides" in Ukraine in the last 2 months.

One can only see a few tweets from Russia and Ukraine based Western journalists labeling the victim as "Pro-Russian" and "anti-Maidan." In this way they want to implicitly legitimize and minimize the value of this cold-blooded murder. You almost hear them saying "this assassination is cool, move on."

Oles considered himself a true Ukrainian patriot and was certainly not pro-Russian by default. However, he was not anti-Russian either since, as an historian by education, he knew a lot about the deep and unbreakable historical, religious, and cultural connections between Ukrainians and Russians.

Poroshenko's statement was more than cynical: two recent assassinations of pro-Russia public figures in Kyiv are 'provocations' and attempt to 'destabilize' Ukraine. The current chief of Kiev's police is a former deputy commander of neo-Nazi Azov battalion. Can we really expect a transparent investigation?

Ukrainian coordinator of security services, Anton Geraschenko, already accused Putin of killing both Oleg Kalashnikov and Buzina, calling them Putin's sacral victims.

This is what Anton Geraschenko posted on his Facebook page few days ago before Kalashnykov was killed. [See graphic}

"Each beast will get what they deserve."

In this video, Oles tells a very interesting story about Ukraine's history, where he obviously doesn't take sides and talks only about the hard facts. Rest in peace, Oles.
 
 #10
Amnesty International
www.amnesty.org
April 17, 2015
Ukraine's spate of suspicious deaths must be followed by credible investigations
John Dalhuisen, Europe and Central Asia Programme Director at Amnesty International

The killing of journalist Oles Buzyna on a Kyiv street this week was shocking enough in and of itself.

According to Ukraine's Interior Ministry, the 45-year-old journalist - who was widely known for his pro-Russian views - was gunned down by masked assailants in a drive-by shooting.

But what makes his murder especially chilling is the fact that it is just the latest among a string of suspicious deaths of former allies of Ukraine's deposed former President Viktor Yanukovych. It came only a day after a member of Ukraine's political opposition, Oleg Kalashnikov, was also found shot dead in the capital.

This week's deaths are not alone. Since the end of January, several allies of Ukraine's deposed former President Viktor Yanukovych have been found dead - many of them in suspicious circumstances.

Oleksandr Peklushenko, a former regional governor, and ex-MP Stanislav Melnyk were also shot. Mykhaylo Chechetov, former deputy chairman of Yanukovych's Party of Regions, allegedly jumped from a window in his 17th-floor flat. Serhiy Valter, a mayor in the south-eastern city of Melitopol, was found hanged, as was Oleksiy Kolesnyk, ex-head of Kharkiv's regional government. The body of Oleksandr Bordyuh, a former police deputy chief in Melitopol, was found at his home.

This string of deaths has put the Ukrainian authorities in the hot seat.

Police were initially quick to classify many of them as suicides.

It is certainly plausible that some of the deaths were suicides or accidents. However, in the absence of credible investigations, and given the rapid succession of the deaths within the wider context of Ukraine's political climate at the moment, nobody can rule out that some of them were politically-motivated killings. But by whom? No-one will know without independent, impartial and thorough investigations.

Most of the deaths took place amid mysterious circumstances. Maybe as a recognition of this, the authorities have opened probes into some of the cases. But Amnesty International has yet to see evidence of a credible outcome of any of these.

They must be followed up by prompt, impartial and effective investigations. All such investigations must be credible if Ukraine is to begin to tackle its pervasive lack of accountability for serious human rights violations. A recent Amnesty International report revealed, for example, how virtually nobody has been brought to account for more than 100 killings, and an even greater number of police beatings and ill-treatment, of protesters during the February 2014 EuroMaydan demonstrations.

Beyond the lingering lack of justice for the EuroMaydan deaths, and the more recent spate of deaths of opposition members this year, the organization has also documented a worrying rise in other forms of persecution.

Opposition politicians are facing mob violence, often carried out by groups or individuals affiliated with the right-wing.

Meanwhile, members of the media are suffering harassment at the hands of the authorities. Among them is the journalist and prominent blogger Ruslan Kotsaba - recently named as Amnesty International's first Ukrainian prisoner of conscience in five years. He could face more than a decade in prison on the charge of "high treason" and for his views on the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine.

Ruslan Kotsaba was arrested on 7 February in Ivano-Frankivsk, 130 km south-east of Lviv, after he posted a video describing the conflict as "the Donbas fratricidal civil war". He also expressed opposition to military conscription of Ukrainians to take part in the conflict.

After being formally charged on 31 March with "high treason", he faces up to 15 years in prison, as well as up to an eight-year sentence on a further charge of "hindering the legitimate activities of the armed forces". Amnesty International has called for his immediate and unconditional release, and we see his treatment as a brazen restriction on the right to freedom of expression.
The freedom to peacefully exercise that right was one of the fundamental rallying cries of the EuroMaydan protesters.

To now deny Yanukovych's allies or other opposition members that same right - through imprisonment or death, or through lack of an effective investigation - would be the height of hypocrisy. It is also a betrayal of human rights, which must be protected for everyone, regardless of their political stripes.
 
 
#11
www.rt.com
April 17, 2015
Personal details of murdered journalist & ex-MP found posted on Ukrainian 'enemies of state' database
[Graphics here http://rt.com/news/250529-ukraine-journalists-killed-database/]

The journalist and ex-MP who were gunned down in Kiev this week were on an 'enemies of the state' database - a social media website supported by the aide to Ukraine's interior minister. The bloggers also have a Twitter account to share 'successes.'

The volunteer-made website calling itself 'Mirotvorec' (Peacekeeper), posts very thorough and comprehensive information on anyone who happens to make the list - journalists, activists, MPs opposing the current Kiev authorities' policies and rebels fighting against the government in the east. The posts include their addresses, social media account links, a substantial biography and any mentions in the Ukrainian press. There is also labeling involved e.g. "terrorist; supporter of federalization" and other tags.

The website indicates that politician Oleg Kalashnikov's and journalist Oles Buzina's details were published on the site no more than 48 hours before both were found dead.

The website has its own social media account, which frequently tweets cryptic messages of "successful missions."

Tweet translation: Agent 404 has done it again. For successfully completing today's assignment, he has been granted a short-term vacation (vato-News) - Peacemaker center, 16 April 2015.

The website enjoys the support of at least one high-profile Ukrainian official: Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to the interior minister and a member of the Ukrainian parliament. In one of his Facebook posts, he advised people to post updates to the website.

Praising the work of the website for helping him shoulder the heavy load of information on "terrorists" and "separatists," Gerashchenko attacks the view that sharing extensive personal information is a breach of privacy.

"Not at all!" he says, citing Article 17 of the Ukrainian Constitution, which states, according to him, that "the defense of national sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine, ensuring its economic and information security is one of the external functions of the state, and is the business of all the people of Ukraine... Everyone who reports a name to the website, or another [resource] is doing the right thing," Gerashchenko writes.

Below is a video of Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov physically assaulting Kalashnikov during a TV show.

The radical Ukraine Insurgent Army (UPA) organization claimed responsibility for Kalashnikov's and Buzina's murder. The statement was made in a letter to Ukrainian political analyst Vladimir Fesenko, who says he received it.

Ukraine's national security service SBU has said that the letter was sent from a German-hosted service, with the help of an anonymizer, such as Tor. After conducting a linguistic examination of the text, the agency claimed that the author appears to be a non-native Ukrainian speaker, peppering the missives with words borrowed from Russian.

This week alone has seen at least four killings of opposition figures in Ukraine. It all started on April 13 with the slaying of journalist Sergey Sukhobok - followed by Kalashnikov two days later and Buzina, the day after that - on the 16th.

The latest murder happened last night when another journalist Olga Moroz - the editor-in-chief of the Neteshinskiy Vestnik, a Ukrainian paper - was found dead in her home, RBK Ukraine reported.

Her body showed signs of a violent death. Some possessions were missing from the apartment, according to police. Although her work is listed among the causes investigated, the police say there are no allegations relating to any complaints of pressure or threats of violence reported by the journalist.

Buzina's murder has led to strong condemnation from the OSCE's Representative on Freedom of the Media Dunja Mijatovic.

"This appalling act is yet another reminder about the dangers associated with journalism as a profession. This killing must be immediately and fully investigated by the competent authorities... My sincere condolences go out to Buzina's family and colleagues."

"I reiterate my call on the authorities to allocate all necessary resources to investigate all attacks on journalists," she said. "There must be no impunity for the perpetrators and the masterminds behind any violence against members of the media."

The official also commented on the murder of Sukhobok, who was co-founder of a number of online news portals and contributor to several more Ukrainian media outlets. An investigation is underway.

On Friday, UN General Secretary Ban Ki Moon released a statement expressing "serious concern" about the spate of murders in Ukraine, demanding a thorough investigation that will restore "the primacy of law."

Mijatovic's and Ban's comments are the latest in a long string of international condemnation of the alarming rise of media murders.

In February, the European Union called for stricter observance of freedom of speech in the media by all sides in the Ukrainian conflict.

"We continue to condemn and call for an end to attacks on journalists notably in eastern Ukraine, including killings and abductions," the statement read.
 
 #12
http://gordonhahn.com
April 12, 2015
The Maidan Regime's Growing Democracy Deficit
By Gordon M. Hahn
Gordon M. Hahn is an Analyst and Advisory Board Member of the Geostrategic Forecasting Corporation, Chicago, Illinois; Senior Researcher, Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group, San Jose, California Analyst/Consultant, Russia Other Points of View - Russia Media Watch; and Senior Researcher and Adjunct Professor, MonTREP, Monterey, California.

The February 2014 Maidan revolution that overthrew democratically elected if gravely corrupt Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich was supposed to usher in an era of liberal democracy and the rule of law. Despite relatively free and fair elections, the democracy deficit, among the Maidan regime's other deficits, might be the most dangerous deficit of all. Put aside the war crimes Kiev's army and ultra-nationalist-dominated volunteer battalions committed during the civil war and the ongoing massive corruption that is actually worsening in conditions of state financial collapse and economic dislocation. Even after these issue are removed from the equation and we focus on governance and rights issues, democracy in Ukraine still stands at the edge of an abyss. It is perhaps one no less profound than another just outside Kiev, at Babi Yar, which saw tens of thousands of Jews slaughtered at the hands of German Nazis and Ukrainian collaborators of the Nazi-allied Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in a matter of a day or two.

The Ukraiian government has adopted numerous draconian, repressive laws since the rise of the Maidan regime. The most authoritarian law was that which declared the 'anti-terrorist' operation - a declaration of civil war - after pro-federalization and anti-Maidan groups' takeovers of government buildings in the Donbass and temporarily elsewhere in the manner of the Maidan's seizure of power in Kiev. This was done within weeks after the Donbass revolts without any serious effort to negotiate a resolution of the dispute with Donbass demonstrators turned rebels. Democracies rarely emerge after violent revolutions. By contrast, Russia, faced with a far more radical uprising in Chechnya in 1991, waited and negotiated on and off for three years before embarking on its fateful war.

More recently, Ukraine's parliament, the Supreme Rada, passed a law allowing for the firing of bureaucrats and officials for ill-defined 'separatism' or support thereof without a court decision (http://vesti-ukr.com/strana/92160-uvolnjat-chinovnikov-za-separatizm-sobirajutsja-bez-reshenija-suda). On April 8th, the Rada passed another new law that, along with banning supposedly fascist as well as communist propaganda and symbols, criminalizes them as well as any displays of "disrespect" for OUN veterans. OUN and its leader, Stepan Bandera, are held up as heroes by Ukraine's nationalist, ultra-nationalist and neo-fascist parties, whose members comprise a near majority in the Rada.

One part of the country rules over the other with few protections for political minorities. Western Ukrainians hold a monopoly of power in Kiev, and numerous Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and neo-fascists have been appointed to important positions. President Petro Poroshenko appointed Western Ukrainian governors in the central eastern regions of Kharkiv and Dniepropetrovsk, angering pro-Russia majorities there. Of the 19 ministerial positions in the new government, only two were given to eastern Ukrainians.

Representatives of ultra-right forces so popular in the western regions received several high-ranking government posts, including Ihor Tyahnibok's misnamed Svoboda or Freedom Party, condemned in a European Parliament resolution in 2012 as "xenophobic, racist and anti-Semitic." Svoboda members were appointed to head five ministries in the provisional government of spring and summer 2014: Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Sych; Ecology and Natural Resources Minister Andrey Mokhnyk; Agriculture Minister Ihor Shvayka; Prosecutor General Oleh Makhitskiy; and Defense Minister Ihor Tenyukh. Members of the neo-fascist Social-National Assembly, a radical Nazi party that seeks worldwide Ukrainian rule, were appointed last year to high-ranking police posts in the MVD, including the post of Kiev Oblast's police chief - appointments that were condemned by democratic activists but not by Western governments. This week the leader of the neo-fascist Right Sector (RS) party, Dmitro Yarosh, was appointed an advisor to the Ukrainian Armed Forces General Staff. In the immediate aftermath of the overthrow of Yanukovich, he was offered but turned down the deputy chairmanship of the country's powerful Security and Defense Council under the then provisional government.

The formation of Right Sector on the night of November 26-27 was part of this quasi-militarization of the Maidan. Four ultra-right groups joined forces to found Right Sector: Stepan Bandera's Trident, named after the head of the Ukrainian nationalist leader who allied and carried out massacres of Poles and Jews in league with the Nazis during World War II; the Ukrainian National Assembly; White Hammer; and the ultra-fascist Social National Assembly (SNA). The SNA's program gives a glimpse of its ideology: "nationocracy." It proposes banning all political parties, organizations, associations and ideological groups. The elite of the Ukrainian ethnic group or nation will hold full power: "Political power is wholly owned by the Ukrainian nation through its most talented, idealistic and altruistic national representatives who are able to ensure proper development of the nation and its competitiveness." "Supreme power (executive, legislative and judicial) of the Ukrainian state will be in the hands of the head of state, who is personally responsible to the nation's own blood and property." Capitalism is to be "dismantled" and democracy is to be "eliminated." All actions that fail "to comply with obligations to the nation and the state will entail the restriction of civil rights or deprivation of citizenship ... The ultimate goal of Ukrainian foreign policy is world domination" (http://snaua.info/programa/).

Repression is not just being left on paper or limited to potential oppressors sitting in offices of power. For more than a year now, RS activists have been carrying out a more 'soft' reign of terror across the country - from war crimes on the Donbass war front to beatings of officials, alleged criminals, drug dealers, and prostitutes to attacks on media organs. RS claimed responsibility on its website for the 2 May 2014 terrorist porgrom in Odessa in which more than 40 pro-federalization, anti-Maidan demonstrators were burned alive, shot and beaten to death. RS was effusive about the Odessa atrocity: "May 2, 2014 is another bright page in our national history." It noted that "about a hundred members of 'Right Sector' and patriotic-minded Odessa residents countered the rebels," and "Dmitro Yarosh ignored the 'expedience' of the election campaign to coordinate the action against the Russian aggression" (Eugene Trofymenko, "ATO Po-narodnomu, Abo chomu ne Vladimir Putin ne vviv viyska," Pravyi Sektor, 2 May 2014, http://pravyysektor.info/articles/ato-po-narodnomu-abo-chomu-ne-vladimir-putin-ne-vviv-vijska/). The election campaign to which the RS claim of responsibility refers was the presidential election held 23 days after the terrorist pogrom, and Yarosh openly campaigned and won just over 1 percent of the vote. But Yarosh's game and that of the other ultra-nationalists is politics by anything other than normal democratic means.

Independent, 'insufficiently patriotic' media are under constant threat from the authorities and its allied ultra-nationalist thugs. Leading maidan revolutionaries call for the closure of television stations (http://vesti-ukr.com/politika/83684-turchinov-potreboval-zapretit-vewanie-telekanalu-inter and http://vesti-ukr.com/strana/83767-v-rade-predlozhili-nakazat-1-1-za-unizhenie-bandery). In recent months, the SBU has blocked more than 10,000 websites and recently searched the offices and seized the servers against two major domain registration companies (http://business.vesti-ukr.com/95702-sbu-zablokirovala-bolee-10-tysjach-sajtov).

More traditional media's freedom and independence are also under threat. Television programs have been closed or threatened with closure for allowing 'Kremlin agents' to participate. An Information Ministry with the power to pressure and shut down media was established in autumn. Major media are owned in full or in part by sitting government officials, including President Poroshenko (Channel 5) and Ihor Kolomoiskii, who owns Channel 1+1 but was fired from his position as Denpropetrovsk Oblast's governor a week ago.

Meanwhile, the independent Vesti (News) newspaper and radio channel, stalwarts of actual democracy and the freedoms of speech and information in Ukraine, have been under constant threat of closure and attack since the Maidan seizure of power. In a July 2014 attack, the media company's offices were rampaged by ultra-nationalists organized by one of the Fatherland party's then deputies in the Kiev city Rada, Ihor Lutsenko, who now sits in the federal parliament (http://vesti.ua/kiev/59814-otvetstvennost-za-razgrom-vestej-vzjali-na-sebja-nacionalisty-vo-glave-s-rasistom-vahniem and http://vesti.ua/kiev/59757-obrawenie-vestej-k-pervym-licam-ukrainy-kasatelno-razgroma-nashej-redakcii).

Just a few days ago and one day after Yarosh's appointment to the General Staff, RS thugs attacked a Vesti newspaper delivery truck, stealing the papers and beating the truck's driver (http://pravyysektor.info/news/v-chystyj-chetver-kyyany-ochystyly-stolytsyu-vid-informatsijnoho-smittya/ and http://video.vesti-ukr.com/kiev/3571-zakazchiki-napadenija-na-vesti-mogut-byt-iz-organov). Vesti brought to the attention of President Poroshenko, the leaders of the siloviki, and "first of all the Security Service of Ukraine" (SBU) the "criminal chaos in the center of Kiev", adding: "We demand the cessation of terror against the mass media as well as against business and regualr citizens, which is being implemented by representatives of various political and criminal groups. We are sure that the state organs' reaction to this disorder in the capitol will be a clear indicator as to whether the attack on the newspaper was an independent initative of criminality or an act planned on the order and under the cover of the authorites" (http://vesti-ukr.com/strana/95772-vesti-trebujut-ot-pravoohranitelej-prekratit-napadenija-na-rasprostranitelej-gazety). The next day a bomb scare threatened Vesti's offices (http://vesti-ukr.com/strana/96015-v-pomewenii-radio-vesti-iwut-vzyvchatku).

Moreover, some nine members of the Opposition Bloc and/or the pre-Maidan party of Yanukovich, the Party of Regions, have 'committed suicide' over the last few months (http://www.rferl.org/content/suicide-homicide-ukraine-officials/26888375.html). More recently, the governor of Zaporozhe Oblast was found dead (http://vesti-ukr.com/pridneprove/92178-jeks-glava-zaporozhskoj-oga-najden-mertvym). The leader of the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU) is under constant investigation and threat of arrest. Deputies and members of the opposition parties, the Opposition Bloc and the CPU are often harassed by RS and other activists.

Finally, the SBU is more often and in increasingly large numbers making arrests on charges of sabotage and terrorism, without providing proof of their charges. On April 9th, for example, some 25 alleged terrorists were arrested in a single operation in Odessa on charges of planning terrorist attacks. Odessa was the scene of the abovementioned RS terrorist pogrom on May 2nd continues to include many pro-autonomy and pro-Russian elements.

Now the poisonous atmosphere of the revolution's ultra-nationalism threatens to eat its own. The most recent attack on Vesti came a day after the news agency reported on the now nearly universal ritual of condemning anyone with views slightly at odds with the reining ultra-nationalist atmosphere or its guardians in corridors of power as "Kremlin agents." Such charges were leveled against Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Yulia Tymoshenko's Ftaherland party, the ultra-nationalist Svoboda (Freedom) party, and former head of the State Financial Inspectorate Nikolay Gordienko, who has charged Yatsenyuk and his government with massive corruption now being investigated, as I noted in a previous article. Vesti noted sarcastically that "Kremlin agents were multiplying in the Rada day by day" and that "(s)oon no one will be left in the Supreme Rada, except 'Kremlin spies' and 'Yanukovich agents'" (http://vesti-ukr.com/politika/95705-rjady-agentov-kremlja-v-rade-mnozhatsja-den-oto-dnja).

In sum, the struggle between democrats and nationalists, between the different nationalist groups, between the oligarchs, and eventually even between more ultra-nationalist western Ukraine and less nationalist and more Russianized central Ukraine - not to mention the unfinished, latent civil war between Donbass and much of the rest of Ukraine - make a democratic outcome of the violent Maidan revolution problematic. The utter failure of Western governments and media, especially here in the U.S., to point out and criticize Ukraine's democracy deficit and nationalist surplus, as I have here and elsewhere, makes a democratic outcome even less likely.
 
 #13
Christian Science Monitor
April 16, 2015
Curbing the kleptocrats: Kiev chips away at its pervasive corruption
'We have a total kleptocratic state,' says Yegor Sobolev, Ukraine's lead anti-graft legislator. But he is cheerfully confident that 'we will win.'
By Fred Weir, Correspondent

KIEV, UKRAINE -It happens any time Ukrainians get stopped by a cop, put their kids in a new school, see a doctor, or seek any kind of official permit, from driver's license to death certificate. You've got to pay a bribe.

"My friend got a new job, but now she has to pay a kickback of 500 hryvnias [about $20] per month to the middleman who helped her find it," says Olga Klimenko, a middle-aged office worker. "That's how it works. You don't get anything done otherwise."

Even now, a year after the Maidan revolution installed a new crop of politicians who vowed to sweep away the country's notorious and unpopular top-to-bottom corruption, people say nothing has been accomplished.

"I've begun to think that the only way to deal with corruption is to bring in foreigners to do the job," says Larisa Blokhina, a Kiev housewife. "It's just obvious that Ukrainians are not up to it. We're all completely compromised by this system."

That's just a taste of what Yegor Sobolev, the head of the Ukrainian parliament's anti-corruption committee, is up against. A former opposition journalist, Maidan activist, and newly-minted parliamentary deputy from the liberal Self-Reliance Party, his resume sounds like exactly what's needed. And he cheerfully admits that most of his predecessors in the job, which has existed for two decades, have indeed turned out to be part of the problem.

"We've never made any headway against corruption in the past because it totally pervades this society," he says. "It's the biggest problem in Ukraine. Not war, not economic crisis, but corruption. Every judge, cop, general, prosecutor, politician and teacher is accustomed to using his position to line his pockets. And they protect each other. We have a total kleptocratic state."

Europe's most corrupt country

Mr. Sobolev started his parliamentary career barely six months ago as head of the Lustration Committee, charged with weeding out former communists and officials of the disgraced regime of Viktor Yanukovych from government offices. He earned brief notoriety earlier this year by getting into a fist-fight with a conservative lawmaker (the video went viral on YouTube.)

These days, he's up against Ukraine's ranking as Europe's "most corrupt country." The global corruption watchdog Transparency International lists it at 142nd place out of 175 countries, somewhere near Uganda and much lower than Nigeria. It's been estimated that officials on the take annually pocket about 20 percent of Ukraine's GDP.

There has been no shortage of past clean-up attempts. Yury Panenko, a middle-aged professional, says he's seen numerous anti-corruption campaigns come and go. "There are always big slogans, and some new instruments created to crack down on bribery and graft," he says. "And those new instruments always end up being vehicles to protect the guilty and generate even more corruption. It's just impossible."

But Sobolev insists that this time will be different. "The members of our committee are the most active and determined group ever to take on this huge problem," he says. "We have a former investigative journalist, a battalion commander from the front, civil society activists. And they are completely focused on doing this."

And the new anti-corruption campaign is being conducted with total transparency, he says. "We have a partnership with the media, and with civil society. They uncover and publicize corrupt schemes, and we take action."

The new effort has seen some success. One win Sobolev takes credit for is the recent resignation of Ukraine's chief prosecutor, Vitaly Yarema. Mr. Yarema could be a textbook example of the deeply rooted and seemingly incorrigible nature of the problem. He was a Maidan activist, put into his post by President Petro Poroshenko to fight corruption. "But of course he did nothing," says Sobolev.

Then journalists exposed Yarema's deputy for corrupt dealings with members of the former Yanukovych regime. Under intense pressure over both his department's dealings and a lack of high-profile prosecutions, Yarema was forced to quit. "It's the first time in Ukrainian history that a prosecutor-general has been fired not at the wish of the president, but by public demand," Sobolev says.

'We will win'

Less successful was the televised arrest of two top officials last month while they were attending a government meeting. Sheepish law enforcement officials later released one of the men due to lack of evidence.

And Sobolev says many corrupt officials are insulated by the system. Sobolev says he faults President Poroshenko for stalling efforts to remove corrupt judges. Even the prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, has been the subject of intense corruption rumors. (Sobolev did not comment on the accusations against Mr. Yatsenyuk.)

"We need fresh people to come into the justice system, but Poroshenko doesn't support this idea," he says. "He saves many people from the old system from losing their positions. That's a big topic of discussion around here."

Sobolev says he and civil society allies are now lobbying hard for a law that will require the names and assets of every Ukrainian citizen to be made public. That will enable the population to help track down corrupt individuals whose property or other assets doesn't match their declared incomes. He brushes off privacy objections, saying he got the idea from a similar Finnish law.

And within weeks Ukraine's new professional anti-corruption bureau, which will work with police, secret services, and public groups to track down corruption schemes, should be up and running.

"Of course corruption is a huge and daunting problem. We need very strong medicine," he says. "Thousands of state officials hate us, but millions of Ukrainians support us. That's why we will win."
 
 #14
Antiwar.com
April 17, 2015
A US-Russia War Over Ukraine?
by Patrick J. Buchanan
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World.

"Could a U.S. response to Russia's action in Ukraine provoke a confrontation that leads to a U.S.-Russia War?"

This jolting question is raised by Graham Allison and Dimitri Simes in the cover article of The National Interest.

The answer the authors give, in "Countdown to War: The Coming U.S. Russia Conflict," is that the odds are shortening on a military collision between the world's largest nuclear powers.

The cockpit of the conflict, should it come, will be Ukraine.

What makes the article timely is the report that Canada will be sending 200 soldiers to western Ukraine to join 800 Americans and 75 Brits on a yearlong assignment to train the Ukrainian army.

And train that army to fight whom? Pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine whom Vladimir Putin has said will not be crushed, even if it requires Russian intervention. Says Putin, "We won't let it happen."

What are the forces that have us "stumbling to war"?

On our side there is President Obama who "enjoys attempting to humiliate Putin" and "repeatedly includes Russia in his list of current scourges alongside the Islamic State and Ebola."

Then there is what TNI editor Jacob Heilbrunn calls the "truculent disposition" that has become the "main driver of Republican foreign policy." A "triumphalist camp," redolent of the "cakewalk war" crowd of Bush II, is ascendant and pushing us toward confrontation.

This American mindset has its mirror image in Moscow.

"Putin is not the hardest of the hard-liners in Russia," write the authors. "Russia's establishment falls into ... a pragmatic camp, which is currently dominant thanks principally to Putin's support, and a hard-line camp" the one Putin adviser calls "the hotheads."

The hotheads believe the way to respond to U.S. encroachments is to invoke the doctrine of Yuri Andropov, "challenge the main enemy," and brandish nuclear weapons to terrify Europe and split NATO.

Russian public opinion is said to be moving toward the hotheads.

Russian bombers have been intruding into NATO air space. Putin says he was ready to put nuclear forces on alert in the Crimea. Russia's ambassador has warned Copenhagen that if its ships join a NATO missile defense force, Denmark could be targeted with nukes.

In coming war games, Russia will move Iskander missiles into the Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad on Poland's northern border.

"Russia is the only country in the world that is realistically capable of turning the United States into radioactive ash," brays the director of the television network Rossiya Segodnya.

As of now, the "pragmatists" represented by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov retain the upper hand. They believe Russia can still do business with the United States and Europe.

"The 'hotheads' take the opposite view," the authors write, "they argue that NATO is determined to overthrow Putin, force Russia to its knees, and perhaps even dismember the country."

In Ukraine, Putin has drawn two red lines. He will not permit Ukraine to join NATO. He will not allow the rebels to be crushed.

Russia hard-liners are confident that should it come to war in Ukraine, Russia would have what Cold War strategists called "escalation dominance." This is what JFK had in the Cuban missile crisis - conventional and nuclear superiority on sea and land, and in the air around Cuba.

With Ukraine easily accessible to Russian forces by road and rail, sea and air, and Russia's military just over the border while U.S. military might is a continent away, the hard-liners believe Russia would prevail in a war and America would face a choice - accept defeat in Ukraine or escalate to tactical atomic weapons.

The Russians are talking of resorting to such weapons first.

The decisive date for Putin to determine which way Russia will go would appear to be this summer. The authors write:

"Putin will attempt to exploit the expiration of EU sanctions, which are scheduled to expire in July. If that fails, however, and the European Union joins the United States in imposing additional economic sanctions such as excluding Moscow from the SWIFT financial clearing system, Putin would be tempted to respond, not by retreating, but by ending all cooperation with the West, and mobilizing his people against a new and 'apocalyptic' threat to 'Mother Russia.'

"As a leading Russian politician told us, 'We stood all alone against Napoleon and against Hitler.'"

As of now, the Minsk II cease-fire of February seems to be holding. The Ukrainian army and pro-Russian rebels have both moved their heavy weapons back from the truce lines, though there have been clashes and casualties.

But as Ukraine's crisis is unresolved, these questions remain:

Will the U.S. train the Ukrainian army and then greenlight an offensive to retake the rebel-held provinces? Would Russia intervene and rout that army? Would the Americans sit by if their Ukrainian trainees were defeated and more Ukrainian land was lost?

Or would we start up the escalator to a war with Russia that few Europeans, but some Americans and Russians, might welcome today?
 
 #15
Russia Direct
April 16, 2015
Why Russia's political elites need to play a more subtle game
RD Interview: Prominent Russian political consultant Evgeny Minchenko sheds light on the thinking of the Kremlin's inner circles, the problems of Russian lobbyists in the U.S., the country's 2016 parliamentary elections, and the impact of the current U.S. presidential campaign on Russia policy.

In November, 2014 and in March, 2015, Evgeny Minchenko, director of the Moscow-based International Institute for Political Expertise (IIPE) and ranked among the Top 10 political consultants in Russia, visited the United States to study the art and science of American political campaigns. He also presented his recent report about Russia's political elites and the Kremlin's inner circle, referred to as Politburo 2.0. As a result of his trips, he and his team came up with a report about the outcomes of congressional elections and upcoming presidential campaign in the U.S.

During his two recent trips, he met with American prominent political consultants, politicians and experts, including legendary American diplomat Henry Kissinger (in November, 2014) and Stuart Stevens (in March, 2015), a famous American political consultant who served as the top strategist for Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign and worked for President George W. Bush's media team in 2000 and 2004. In addition, he talked to the political consultants of current U.S. presidential candidates.

Russia Direct sat down with Minchenko to discuss his trips to the U.S., the impact of the 2016 American presidential race on Russia, the Russian political elites and Politburo 2.0, the Kremlin's perception of the U.S. and Russia's 2016 parliamentary elections. In addition, Minchenko shared his views on the problems of Russia's lobbying efforts in America and why he doesn't regard the current confrontation between Moscow and Washington as a new Cold War.  
 
Russia Direct: This week, Hillary Clinton announced her 2016 presidential bid from the Democratic Party. You've just come from the U.S. and witnessed the preparations for the U.S. presidential campaign. From your point of view, who is better for Russia - a Republican candidate or a Democratic one - as the next president?

Evgeny Minchenko: It depends not on the affiliation of the party, but on the name of the candidate, because today there are "hawks" from both sides. Both Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, and Republicans, including neo-conservatives, agree on the core issues of U.S. foreign policy. So, if the next president will be a "hawk," it will not be good for Russia.

Given the fact that Clinton is an obvious frontrunner of the race, I think that her victory will not bring big advantages for Russia: Her personal relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin are not ideal. In addition, Clinton has an image of a radical feminist and perceives Putin's image and style as sexist. On top of that, she is accused of being too mild toward Russia because of the "reset" policy and, thus, she will try to prove that she is tough and intransigent with Moscow.

If we talk about the Republican camp, there are likewise candidates close to the neo-conservatives such as Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, who are both "hawks." However, the story is more complicated with the Bush family: I see Jeb Bush as a person who is ready for compromise and dialogue and who is easier to get along with.  He can listen and he is not ideology-driven. In addition, Jeb is more balanced and rational, unlike his brother and former U.S. president George W. Bush. That's why, hypothetically, I find Jeb more suitable for Russia.

RD: What about other Republicans: Rand Paul and Scott Walker?

E.M.: The isolationism of Rand Paul would be comfortable for Russia, but I am very skeptical about his odds in the primaries and general election. He looks to be too radical for the current situation. Scott Walker has good odds, I guess, but he looks untested in foreign policy and his position will depend on the team of his advisers.

RD: It is not your first visit to the United States. Is it your personal initiative? Why did you decide to study political campaigns in the U. S.?

E.M.: Yes, it is my personal initiative. I also visited this country during the 2012 presidential campaign as well and spent about two weeks there. I met political consultants, spin-doctors and politicians and studied the political campaigns of Barack Obama and his main rival Mitt Romney. The U.S. is a huge market of "political technologies."

In its size, it is comparable with the political consulting market of the rest of the world. Why? There are many elections in the U.S. on all possible levels: not only at the presidential and congressional levels, but also at the level of county, city and district elections and even local school councils. There is also a huge emphasis of what is placed on the boundary of lobbying and political technologies.  

RD: Regarding lobbying, some argue that Russia doesn't have a lobby in the U.S. because of its negative image abroad: No one would dare to lobby the Kremlin's interests in Washington to risk their career. From your point of view, what is the main problem of Russian lobbying efforts in the U.S.?

E.M.: Russia is an imperial nation. The problem of such nations is that their citizens are easily assimilated into other countries. And, unfortunately, the Russian Diaspora in the U.S. is not pro-Russian, but rather consists of dissidents [who relentlessly criticize Russia instead of promoting its interests].

RD: Ok, Russians living in the U.S. criticize their country, yet they might criticize it for a reason. How can you account for their criticism?

E.M.: Initially, such a critical approach was set by the waves of emigration. The emigration from the Soviet Union has an effect on the current sentiments among the Russian community in the U.S. Soviet expatriates shift their negative attitude from the Soviet Union to modern Russia.

In addition, those people who earned money in Russia and then left it are also critical toward the country. Finally, there are people who emigrated from Russia to the U.S. for the quest for a better life. They just try to assimilate and show that they are Americans, not Russians: They speak good English and pretend to understand American culture.

RD: Partly, this problem stems from the domestic policy of the authorities, from their inability to be attractive for those people who are leaving the country. So, how should authorities resolve the problem?          

E.M.: You know the problem is that there is a lack of interest in lobbying Russian interests in the U.S. The problem of Russian lobbying is that Russian officials don't understand what they are selling and promoting. Every time we change our strategy. They can't clearly say what we want from America and what we can offer to them to be attractive. We should send other messages.

But the challenge is whether the Russian authorities are ready for a subtle game. The game should be very subtle, not the heavy trolling of Russia's Foreign Ministry. Today, we have to expand our contacts with Americans and seek more dialogue and exchanges. In this regard, it was a mistake to close the Future Leaders Exchange (FLEX) educational program last year. We need more such contacts.

RD: Let's return to your trip to the U.S. Where did you take the floor in America?

E.M.: I had three public appearances during the recent visit: I took the floor at John Hopkins University, Georgetown University and at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP). The audience comprised students, professors and journalists.

The meeting in John Hopkins University was organized with the support of the Center on Global Interests, headed by Nikolai Zlobin, while the lecture at Georgetown took place thanks to Gary Nordlinger, a well-known U.S. political consultant [who contributed to political campaigns in about 30 countries].  In addition, the discussion at CEIP was closed and it brought together experts and representatives of American governmental agencies and big corporations.

RD: How did the audience react to your speeches?

E.M.: The most positive meeting was with students from Georgetown University. All questions were interesting, professional and relevant. Some expressed interested toward our recent report about Russia's political elites, "Politburo 2.0." Moreover, in November, Thane Gustafson, a professor from Georgetown, recognized me (even though we hadn't met before) and said that he would discuss this report with students at his next seminar, which indicates there is an interest in Russia's expertise in the U.S. and the potential for dialogue.    

In contrast, John Hopkins brought together a very politicized audience: many, instead of asking questions, tried to express alternative political statements. And this was despite the fact that I warned everybody in advance that I was not going to promote any political agenda; instead, I told them that, as a political expert, I would just tell what is going on in Russia's political circles.
      
Although my speech contained a series of critical statements toward the Kremlin and the political situation in Russia, there were still some people who believe that if you don't lambast Russian President Vladimir Putin, you are by definition engaging in propaganda. In other words, during my trip I witnessed the inability of some people to listen to another position and talk about subtle nuances.

Based on this experience, I can say that there is a big radicalization, even bigger than the one that took place six months ago. Half a year ago I took the floor at CEIP before the same audience and it was a very positive and substantive communication. Yet this time, the questions that came from the audience were ideological. But, what brought about the controversial polemic is my thesis that political competition increased after Putin's return in comparison with the presidential tenure of Dmitry Medvedev. However, [my opponents] insisted that there were no political competition at all.

Even though I said that some Russian regions had opposition candidates and parties elected [during the 2013 regional elections in Russia], the audience remained skeptical; it doesn't see this opposition as real one. Following such logic, if the opposition doesn't seek regime change, it can't be considered a real opposition.    

RD: And does Russia really have a real political rivalry today?

E.M.: There are objective factors. Finally, parties started registration on a larger scale. After all, previously, there wasn't any opportunity to register a party. Under different pretexts, authorities denied parties the right of registration [This year more than 100 parties were registered, while in 2014 there were 77 registered parties, according to Russia's Justice Ministry - editor's note]. Then, there was the return of gubernatorial elections. All this led to an increase in the market for political consulting in Russia. According to my estimates, the size of the political consulting market in Russian increased 15-20 times.  

RD: Yet the big number of parties could be very confusing and misleading for voters. After all, a great deal of parties might be just spoilers to distract voters and it could lead to low turnout. Right?

E.M.: Sure, the Kremlin is using this strategy as well. It calls this "party diffusion." It's not new. But what stops opposition to use it in their interests?

RD: What are your predictions about the 2016 parliamentary elections? What are the chances of Russia's systemic and non-systemic opposition to get into Russia's State Duma?

E.M.: First, the elections will be very competitive, especially in the regions. According to my estimates, there will be a close rivalry in a minimum of half of the single-mandate constituencies. Regarding the liberal opposition, I see its chances as very low, because, in my view, these people are constantly quarreling, they can't come up with a compromise and a good agenda.

However, the murder [of opposition leader Boris] Nemtsov created the chance to bring together liberal and nationalistic protests. Yet I don't see that they try to use this chance in their favor and continue to stick their typical rhetoric: We, the 14 percent, are up against the 86 percent [of Putin's majority voters]. I don't understand how they are going to win in the elections with such slogans. So, I am very skeptical about their chances.

RD: Some American experts and journalists complain that their knowledge about Russia is based primarily on guesses because of the lack of access to Russian political elites, whom they see as very suspicious and out-of-touch. How can you account for such suspiciousness among the elites and their high level of secrecy?

E.M.: Yes, Russian officials are suspicious, especially toward those who work in embassies, because there is an opinion among Russia's political elites that all these "color revolutions" were orchestrated by American ambassadors. And the recruiting of representatives of local elites took place during meetings with U.S. ambassadors. That's why Russian political elites try to avoid meetings with American ambassadors, in order not to be accused of betraying their country.   
 
RD: Some experts and academics complain that their expertise doesn't reach the political elites. Could you explain why?

E.M.: You know any expertise should be practical in its character. And this is the problem for Russia's expert community: They are not able to come up with practical recommendation that would work. In contrast, in the U.S. there are interconnected links between university circles, business and politics. Today, you are a professor, tomorrow - an ambassador. After working in a corporation one can switch to politics. It is not the case with Russia. In Russia, there are few people who came in into politics from academia.

RD: And what are the roots of this trend?    

E.M.:  It results from the Soviet legacy that viewed academics as secondary and political appointees (or those with a practical mentality) as primary.

RD: Could you tell about your concept of Politburo 2.0 and the orbits of power in Russia?

E.M.: The idea of that concept came from the fact that the standard scheme of making decisions [in Russia] doesn't work well because of a more significant factor. We try to measure this factor and came to conclusion that the informal process of decision making in Russia is much more important than the formal one. And we described this informal structure as Politburo 2.0.

Unlike the previous Politburo, the new one is a sort of network structure and its members never come together for sessions in one place. There are no protocols and officials statements, just informal or tacit agreements. They communicate in the framework of their sectors (energy, military-industrial, law enforcement structures and so on). This is what I call the orbits of power.  
     
RD: In the context of the Politburo 2.0 concept, what changes in Russia's political elites can the Ukrainian crisis and the murder of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov bring about?

E.M.: Actually, it [Ukraine and the Nemtsov murder] led to the growth of the influence of the elite in national security, law enforcement agencies and the military-industrial complex and to the weakening of the liberal clan in the orbit of power. This is the key.     

RD: After coming back from the U.S. and talking to your American counterparts, can you say that there is a new Cold War between Russia and the U.S., as some experts argue?

E.M.: The current state of U.S.-Russia relations is far from a new Cold War. A friend of mine told me how he and his classmates trained in the 1970s during school drills to prepare for a potential nuclear strike from the Soviet Union.

Today there is no such hysteria and anger toward Russia, because Russia is not perceived in the U.S. as an alternative to America. Now Washington sees Russia as a country with spoiled capitalism and unpredictable dictatorial regime. Unpredictability of this regime is the major problem that preoccupies the U.S. In this regard, the Soviet authorities were predictable for them. They believed that they understood the mentality of the Soviets.

Today, the idea that Putin is irrational, unpredictable and impossible to explain is prevailing in Washington's political discourse. Previously, American experts saw him as an authoritarian leader, but a predictable one, who is possible to get along with and whose interests are understandable. But now, it is not the case. And this is a bad sign. The dictator who lost control over the situation is currently the mainstream narrative around Putin in the U.S. They chalk up the problem [of U.S.-Russia relations] to one person, to Putin, and believe that democracy will come to Russia after he steps down. But this is not the case. It's overly simplistic.
 
 
#16
Deutsche Welle
April 15, 2015
Russia's pivot to Asia - A Sino-Russian Entente?
The rupture between Russia and the West stemming from the Ukraine crisis has led Moscow to expand ties with Asia, especially China. Dmitri Trenin, head of the Carnegie Moscow Center, talks to DW about the implications.

The Ukrainian crisis has certainly strained Russia's relations with the West. Sanctions have been imposed on Moscow, hurting Russian's economy as well as causing its currency and energy exports to plunge. Western countries are also trying to reduce their dependence on Russian gas - at least in the long run.

As a result of the rapidly deteriorating relations between Russia and the West, the government in Moscow is moving closer towards Asia, particularly Beijing. This became clear with President Vladimir Putin's visit to China on May 20, during which a multi-billion dollar gas supply deal was signed, among other things.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev also recently visited Vietnam and Thailand to step up the country's engagement in both Southeast Asian nations and advance trade and investment ties.

In a DW interview, Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, says that due to the Ukraine crisis and the ensuing economic sanctions by the West, what was originally Moscow's "marriage of convenience" with Beijing has turned into a much closer partnership. He also argues that Russia is now more likely to back China in the steadily growing competition between Beijing and Washington.

DW: What impact has the Ukraine crisis had on Russia's foreign policy alignment?

Dmitri Trenin: The Ukraine crisis has shifted the axis of Moscow's foreign policy from the Euro-Atlantic to the Asia-Pacific. China, rather than Europe and Germany, is emerging as Moscow's principal foreign partner. Russia, however, began pivoting to Asia even before Ukraine.

The Kremlin realized some time ago that the situation in which its most depressed regions were physically abutting the world's most dynamic region was not tenable in the long term. It also saw the chance of using Asia's dynamism as an external resource for Russia's economy - heretofore only to be found in the West. The current conflict with the West, of course, expanded this geo-economic calculus through including geopolitics into the equation.

Q: How is Moscow's foreign policy re-balance being reflected?

Moscow had long hoped for a balance between its Western and Asian foreign policy directions. This balance is no longer there, in the wake of the Ukraine crisis. The need for balance is now a need for Moscow's policy in Asia and elsewhere outside the West.

Aware of this, Russia is seeking to balance its all-important relationship with China by an outreach to India and Vietnam in Asia; Brazil within the BRICS group. It also supports bringing not just India and Pakistan to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which is due to happen this year, but also Iran, once the United Nations Security Council sanctions are lifted.

Q: What are Russia's goals and aims in Asia, and why is China so important to achieve this?

Russia does not have overarching strategic goals in Asia. It advocates a multipolar world within which US global dominance would give way to a great-power concert. China, of course, is very important in achieving this new global balance. In Asia itself, Russia would want to see reduced US presence/influence. It is sympathetic to China's "Asia for Asians" slogan.

Q: Who is likely to profits most from this situation China?

No Sino-Russian bloc is in the offing, but the relationship is getting way beyond the "marriage of convenience" formula. In the fields of energy, arms transfers, global and regional diplomacy the relationship has already acquired a new quality. China will be certainly strengthened as a result, but also Russia will strengthen its relationship with one major power which is not interested in its surrender to the West.

Q: What are the implications of Russia's tilt towards China for both the United States and Europe?

Instead of a Greater Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok which Putin proposed in 2010, the EU will see something like a greater Asia from Shanghai to St. Petersburg. The United States will see its principal 21st century competitor being able to rely on the resources and support of its 20th century adversary.

Q: How is a stronger Russian presence, commitment to Asia likely to impact the region?

From Turkey to ASEAN to Korea, Russia will be actively seeking economic opportunities which would compensate for those lost in Europe. Over time, it will have to be more engaged diplomatically. Rather than competing with China, Russia will more likely accommodate it, as in Central Asia.

However, Russia will not become a "UK to the US," accepting Beijing's leadership. It will work toward some kind of a "great power relationship" wit its giant neighbor.

Q: How important is this development for world politics and what can the West do about it?

The Sino-Russian entente - with its unstated, but transparent goal of reducing U.S. global dominance - is easily the most important result of the Ukraine crisis and the preceding deterioration of Russian-Western relations. The West needs to take this seriously.

Dmitri Trenin is director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. He also chairs the research council and the Foreign and Security Policy Program.
 
 #17
'Putin isn't an Imperialist; He's a Nazi,' Portnikov Says
Paul Goble

Staunton, April 17 - Vladimir Putin's statements about Ukraine in his "direct line" program yesterday look "moderate" but only in comparison with the militaristic declarations of the Russian defense minister and chief of the Russian general staff. But no one should be deceived into thinking he has changed his mind or assumptions, according to Vitaly Portnikov.

Clearly, the Ukrainian commentator says, Putin is "at the stage of taking decisions about the Donbas" but the Kremlin leader "still doesn't know how to achieve his goals without war" and in fact believes that "war is the best means of realizing his political ambitions" (liga.net/opinion/231254_imperskiy-nadoy-izmenilis-li-tseli-putina-v-ukraine.htm).

Putin's "moderation" in words which so many analysts and politicians are rushing to present as a change in course in fact "changed nothing," Portnikov says. In fact, he repeated "his version of the development of the situation in Ukraine" and flagrantly lied when he again said there are no Russian troops in that country.

But there is one thing Putin said which deserves attention because the real meaning of his words is so often misconstrued.  "When [he] says that his country has no imperial ambitions, he is not being disingenuous. It is simply that [his] understanding of empire is different from what we are accustomed to - and from that state that was the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union."

"Putin is not an imperialist," Portnikov says; "he is a Nazi. And his notion about the state is in no way different from that of his predecessors - Adolf Hitler who dreamed about 'lebensraum' for Germans or Slobodan Milosevic who promised his fellow citizens that 'all Serbvs will live in one state.'"

That approach allows the Kremlin leader to deny that he has any imperial ambitions toward Ukraine and the former Soviet republics even as he insists that Russia must be "interested in the life and status of those [in those countries] who consider Russian culture their own and identify with Russia."

That is what he said yesterday, and he said something else as well that provides a clue to Putin's worldview: he declared that he "considers Russians and Ukrainians one people.  This is Nazism in the purest form: Hitler also considered Austria an independent state. But he constantly reminded its leadership that Germans lived in that state and that they must not be oppressed."

Of course, Portnikov continues, as history shows, Hitler "at the very first possibility swallowed Austria." "Putin would have swallowed Ukraine if it hadn't been for the Maidan." Had he succeeded in swallowing Ukraine, he would have insisted as Hitler did that this wasn't an act of restoring an empire but simply of uniting one people.

"No one must have any doubts about Putin's political goals," the commentator says. The issue is "only how he now is prepared to pursue them."  His "moderate" words suggest only that he is now thinking about what to do next, but they do not suggest any change in the goals he has long had in place.

"As before, he wants to force Ukraine to finance the Donbas; as before, he counts on the incorporation of the 'DNR' and 'LNR' in Ukraine as territories which will constrain" Ukraine's development. "And as before, he does not know how to get out of this situation without a war" if Ukraine doesn't agree to those conditions and "convert itself into a Russian protectorate."

 
 #18
Three prominent Washington Russia experts on Johnson's Russia List:

"You might start by eliminating the people on Moscow's payroll and I am not being facetious"

"I hardly read your list any longer because it reads predominantly as Kremlin propaganda"

"I think the coverage over the past year or so has become unbalanced with too many obscure writers that do not really provide me value-added"
 
 #19
Wall Street Journal
April 15, 2015
Countering Putin's Information Weapons of War
Kremlin propaganda is far outstripping our ability to get the truth out. The U.S. needs a new approach.
By ED ROYCE
Mr. Royce, a Republican from California, is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Vladimir Putin has a secret army. It's an army of thousands of "trolls," TV anchors and others who work day and night spreading anti-American propaganda on the Internet, airwaves and newspapers throughout Russia and the world. Mr. Putin uses these misinformation warriors to destabilize his neighbors and control parts of Ukraine. This force may be more dangerous than any military, because no artillery can stop their lies from spreading and undermining U.S. security interests in Europe.

Neither can the U.S. international broadcasting services that performed such a valuable service during the Cold War. They have withered until they are no longer capable of meeting today's challenges. Until this changes, Russia's president and his propaganda will flourish.

Some members of Mr. Putin's information army pose as journalists. Some-including conspiracy cranks, Holocaust deniers and other discredited figures in the West-appear on Russia's RT television service posing as "experts." RT, formerly known as Russia Today, which is available in Russian, English, German and Spanish, is carried on cable systems and hotels world-wide, and streamed globally. The goal is to obscure the truth by spreading "alternative" (as in conspiracy) theories, distract audiences and discredit Western sources.

On Wednesday the House Foreign Affairs Committee, of which I am chairman, will hear from journalist Liz Wahl, who dramatically interrupted a live broadcast on March 5, 2014, to resign from RT's English-language television service, explaining she could not stand by its distorted coverage of Russia's occupation of Ukraine. But Ms. Wahl is a rarity, so Mr. Putin's propagandists march on, telling the world that the armed thugs who have invaded eastern Ukraine are "freedom fighters," and that the CIA is responsible for everything from 9/11, to the downing of Malaysia flight MH17 over Ukraine, to the pro-democracy uprisings in Ukraine.

Mr. Putin has sold this narrative so successfully at home that he has approval ratings over 80%, despite a crumbling economy. But he also has a megaphone in Ukraine and Moldova, where hours of Russian programming are broadcast daily. In the NATO-member Baltic states, Kremlin-backed stations are inciting violence and stoking ethnic tensions by spreading false and misleading stories about discrimination against ethnic Russians.

Globally, RT claims an audience of some 600 million. The Kremlin's latest propaganda effort-dubbed "Sputnik"-has opened at least 29 new media offices across Central and Western Europe, and is even setting up shop in Latin America. Mr. Putin's online trolls work out of an office called the "Internet Research Center" in St. Petersburg, blogging in 12-hour shifts to keep the propaganda flowing 24/7.

Why are Mr. Putin's efforts so alarming? The U.S. has security commitments with 27 NATO countries, several of which have been targeted by Russia with misinformation. We had better start checking this influence if we want to prevent instability that could spread armed conflict beyond Ukraine.

The U.S. can help bring a free, fair and balanced press to these countries in which Mr. Putin is undermining truth and fact. It has worked before. During the Cold War, broadcasters funded by the U.S. government-like the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL)-helped Russians, Eastern Europeans and countless others shed tyranny by providing the truth about events in their own countries, and showed them a world outside the prison of Soviet propaganda.

These broadcasts to Europe were deprioritized at the end of the Cold War, and in 1998 a restructuring created the Broadcasting Board of Governors-the U.S. agency now charged with overseeing America's public information efforts abroad. The BBG undermined the U.S. broadcasting services, hollowing out those in Europe and leaving them unable to defend against Russia's resurgent information war.

Responding to the invasion and occupation of parts of Ukraine, the BBG launched a joint VOA and RFE/RL venture in October called "Current Time"-a 30-minute Russian-language news television program that was broadcast to Lithuania, Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine and Latvia. But after only four months, the program was taken off the air in Latvia due to a lack of viewership.

From its inception, the BBG has drawn criticism from right, left and center. A part-time board that is supposed to oversee and spend $740 million a year, it has a fundamentally flawed structure. A 2013 Inspector General report for the State Department found the BBG to be dysfunctional. The same year, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described the BBG as "practically defunct." No wonder the agency isn't coming close to competing with Mr. Putin.

Righting this ship must be an urgent foreign-policy priority. I will soon introduce bipartisan legislation to do just that. The bill would charge one U.S. broadcasting organization (VOA) with reporting U.S. policy and other global news, and another, including RFE/RL and similar services, to act as the free press in repressive societies like Russia. Each organization will have its own CEO and its own board, with accountability that is clear to all.

Mr. Putin is using his information army to attack the U.S. and undermine our interests around the globe. We cannot continue to pit a failed bureaucracy against this Russian strongman.
 
 #20
Sputnik
April 17, 2015
WikiLeaks Release: US Recruits Hollywood to Boost 'Anti-Russian Messaging'

The latest documents released by Wikileaks reveal some uncomfortable - yet unsurprising - truths about the relationship between Hollywood and the US Government. In its propaganda efforts against Russia, the US State Department may have pressured Sony - and some of the biggest stars - into cooperating.

The latest Wikileaks release includes thousands of documents which reveal ties between the White House and Sony pictures. It's taking journalists a long time to comb through the weeds, but some troubling details are emerging.

As Wikileaks notes, Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton is also on the board of trustees for the RAND Corporation, a research arm of the US military. According to emails, the State Department may have taken advantage of Lynton's dual positions to further its own propaganda aims.

"As you could see, we have plenty of challenges in countering ISIL narratives in the Middle East and Russian narratives in central and eastern Europe," an email to Lynton from Richard Stengel, US State Department undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, reads. "Following up on our conversation, I'd love to convene a group of media executives who can help us think about better ways to respond to both of these large challenges."

"This is a conversation about ideas, about content and production, about commercial possibilities," Stengel adds. "I promise you it will be interesting, fun, and rewarding."

"Who are folks I can or should see in NY re anti-Russian messaging - and also anti-ISIL messaging?" he asks Lynton in another email.

While comparing a sovereign nation to a terrorist group may be nothing new for US officials, such blatant evidence of Washington's propaganda war is newsworthy.

In response, Lynton provided a list full of other Hollywood executives who would presumably also be cooperative. This included senior level management from Turner Broadcasting and Walt Disney International.

Other emails suggest that Lynton was also asked to pressure Hollywood celebrities into promoting foreign policy objectives of the Obama administration.

"We have already started to think through ways your superstars could potentially help amplify some of the great work US Embassy Paris is doing," wrote a staffer on behalf of the US ambassador to France.

"We'd love to include Sony names in events here, either as guests or performers, and would love the opportunity to leverage their popularity to promote the President's priorities and agenda overseas."

Celebrities suggested by Lynton include George Clooney, Kerry Washington, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, as well as major filmmakers like David Fincher and Steven Spielberg.

"Would also include Natalie Portman as she has just done a movie in Israel and is very involved there," one email read.

But Sony's ties with the government extend even beyond the State Department emails. Documents reveal that Lynton also had contact with the president, having dinner with the Obamas.

Wikileaks also revealed an email from Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer, which detailed his concerns with a perceived Russian threat.

"Putin is little more than a schoolyard bully, so if he refuses to back down, we must bring Europe in as part of an aggressive solution," Schumer wrote to Amy Pascal, a senior executive with Sony. "Sanctions have already hurt him, and the threats of expelling Russia from the World Trade Organization and forbidding it from hosting the next World Cup give us a strong hand."

Of course, the knowledge of close coordination between Hollywood and the US government is nothing new. As David Sirota points out in his book, Back to Our Future, a conflict of interest has existed for years.

"The Pentagon - and it's very open about this - the Pentagon will line edit screenwriters scripts that are about the military if those screenwriters and the studios want to have access to be able to photograph planes, or tanks, or aircraft carriers," Sirota said during an interview with RT.

Giving the example of 1986's Top Gun, Sirota notes that the "filmmakers of that movie submitted their script to Pentagon editors, for the Pentagon to line edit it to make sure it was perfectly mimicking what the Pentagon wanted it to say."

War correspondent Keith Harmon Snow echoed these sentiments in relation to the film Act of Valor.

"We have at it as a psychological operation against the American public," Snow told RT. "That means this is not Hollywood, it's total propaganda by and for the Pentagon using Hollywood as the face..."

Still, during a State Department briefing on Friday, spokesperson Marie Harf noted that Sony Pictures is only the tip of the iceberg.

"We have a dialogue with companies, with social media companies, about the challenges as we see them and what we are doing to counter that kind of propaganda," she said. "We are having this conversation not just with social media companies, but other people who have public platforms, and that could be entertainment organizations."
 
 #21
Peter Pomeranzev
Senior Fellow, Legatum Institute
House Committee on Foreign Affairs
April 15 2014, 'Confronting Russia's Weaponization of Information'

During the Russian invasion of Crimea last year, most of the world's
journalists seemed confused. Most of the West's leaders were taken aback. But
when it was over, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), General Philip
M. Breedlove, defined what had happened very precisely. The Kremlin had launched
"the most amazing information warfare blitzkrieg we have ever seen in the history of
information warfare'. To put it differently, Russia has launched an information war
against the West - and we are losing.

Crimea was the culmination of a long process, not the beginning. The
Kremlin's military theorists have long been preparing to fight what they call
'information-psychological war', a mix of media, psychological, economic and
cultural warfare. We saw an early example of these tactics in Estonia in 2007. When
Estonian authorities decided to move a Soviet war memorial from the center of the
city, Russian media went into a frenzy, accusing the Estonians of fascism. Russian
vigilante groups started riots in the center of Tallinn. A massive cyber attack disabled
Estonia's government and banking sectors. Moscow was sending a message: despite
its membership of NATO and the EU, Estonia was still vulnerable, and the Kremlin
could cripple it even before Estonia had a chance to invoke NATO's Article 5.

Ultimately the aim was not just to humiliate Tallinn, but show that Western,
and specifically American, promises of security are empty. And once the NATO
alliance has been undermined and American influence weakened, then the Kremlin
will have a stronger hand to play - economically, politically, culturally - in Europe and
around the world.

Since 2007 the Kremlin's information-psychological strategy has indeed
expanded. The Kremlin is now bankrolling and lending political support to both farright
and far-left parties in Europe. Unlike their Soviet predecessors, this regime will
work with anyone as long as its agenda helps creates instability. Its aim is not to
persuade anyone Russia is 'right'. Their aim is to disorganize and demoralize the
West.

The Kremlin is also putting out its message in multiple media, 24/7. Russian
media directly reaches some 30 million Russians outside the country, in Nato
countries such as Estonia and Latvia as well as Ukraine. The Kremlin has also invested
hundreds of millions of dollar into foreign language media, including the multilingual
news channel RT, or Russia Today, which reaches millions of watchers in English,
Spanish, German and Arabic, just for a start. In addition, the Kremlin funds Sputnik, a
website news service and radio channel, in many languages. The Kremlin also funds
"troll farms," regime-funded companies which hire people to spread messages on
social media, using Facebook, Twitter, newspaper comment sections and many other
spaces. Through these networks, Russia propagates conspiracy theories,
disinformation and fake news. After the Malaysian flight MH17 was shot down over
eastern Ukraine with Russian missiles last summer, Russian media spewed out scores
of outlandish stories, alternately blaming Ukrainian fighter jets and NATO, and at
one point claiming that the plane had deliberately taken off from Amsterdam
carrying dead bodies. Their aim was not so much to persuade a potential viewer of
any one version, but to trash the information space with so much disinformation so
that a conversation based on actual facts would become impossible.

This is not merely an 'information war', in other words, but a 'war on
information'. If the very possibility of rational argument is submerged in a fog of
uncertainty, there are no grounds for debate. Sooner or later, public will give up
trying to understand what happened, or even bothering to listen.

This strategy is working. Recent research by independent NGOs shows that
audiences exposed to both Russian and Ukrainian media end up not trusting anyone,
the same trend in the Baltic states. In Germany 43 % do not trust anything that they
read in Ukraine. Throughout Europe conspiracy theories are on the rise and in the US
trust in the media has declined. The Kremlin may not always have initiated these
phenomena, but it is fanning them.

In this effort, Russia is not acting alone. The Kremlin is now partnering up
with other anti-Western regimes to create international networks of informationpsychological
operations. RT shares stories with Assad's Syrian TV, and is
rebroadcasting with the Argentine state broadcaster. Other rising authoritarian
states and non-state actors are developing their own versions of informationpsychological
war. ISIS' use of media has transformed the Middle East. China is also
using a mix of media, legal and psychological warfare to stamp its authority in Asia.
In the 21st century the question of whose story wins can be more important than the
question of whose army wins.

Democracies are singularly ill equipped to deal with this type of warfare. For
all of its military might, NATO cannot fight an information war. The openness of
democracies, the very quality that is meant to make them more competitive than
authoritarian models, becomes a vulnerability.

But we are not powerless, and we can fight back. If the United States and its
allies finally agree to focus on this problem, to treat it with the seriousness it
deserves, then there are many options. I hope in today's discussion to elaborate
further, but here are some thoughts to begin with.

1. Defend our information space: the Kremlin's strategy is not so much an
information war as a 'war on information'. During the Ukraine we have
seen the importance of NGOs such as Stop Fake in Ukraine, the
Interpreter in the US and Belingcat in the UK who expose Kremlin
disinformation and launch open-source investigations into such events as
the downing of flight MH17. These should be supported, and can
oordinate with each other to form international networks of critical
inquiry.

2. Develop media literacy: You can't stop disinformation but you can teach
people to be more critically aware of how they are being manipulated.
Media literacy should be prioritized in education, in the West and beyond.

3. Anti-corruption networks: The Kremlin's information-psychological
operations often rely on murky funding and corruption to co-opt foreign
actors. Journalists and activists should be trained and funded to
investigate this world. Currently there are brave groups working
independently in various countries, but little coordination. Those
investigating corruption need to be protected by a legal fund so they are
not intimidated by threats of libel, and need to have the ability to launch
their own political lobbying and legal campaigns against the perpetrators.
Research isn't enough: action needs to be enabled, a cross of
investigative journalism, activism and legal work.

4. Support quality journalism in Central and Eastern Europe: The West
pulled out of media development in Eastern Europe too early. In countries
such as Moldova or Ukraine there is no strong quality journalism: media is
controlled and manipulated by politicians and oligarchs. In the absence of
a beacon of quality journalism, the national conversation disintegrates
and a foreign state like Russia can easily spread information chaos. We
should support the building up of public broadcasting in the region,
rigorously independent of both state and oligarchical influence.

5. Support independent Russian media through production companies that
create new content the Kremlin avoids: The Kremlin's media operations are
impressive but have an Achilles heel. Russia news media virtually ignores
'local news': preferring to distract viewers with the war in Ukraine. This leaves
a gap. For local news, and for shows akin to PBS' 'This American Life' or
investigations like 'Serial', engaging the Russian language viewer by seeing the
world through their eyes. This is a deeper way of projecting democratic values
than superficial 're-branding' of the US or 'the West'. The Kremlin wants a PR
war. What it is bad at is media that deals with reality.

6. Help Russians with an alternative vision for their country:
The Kremlin defines Russia as at war with the rest of the world. But many
Russians have an alternative vision of their country integrated into the
international community. Creating a world class Russian university abroad
that could foster these values is a way to nurture this vision. One of the
many weaknesses of the Kremlin is its failure to support Russian
education- putting the lie to its 'great power' propaganda drive.

Most important, it is important for the USG to realize that the 21st century will
be defined by new forms of information conflict. A comprehensive approach is
urgently needed to deal with this- the West, including the US, is behind the
curve.


 
 #22
www.khodorkovsky.com
April 13, 2015
RUSSIA: BACK TO THE FUTURE
By Mikhail Khodorkovsky

On April 13th Mikhail Khodorkovsky spoke at Stanford University at a seminar entitled "Russia: Back to the future". The event was hosted by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.

Ladies and gentlemen, Stanford teachers and students,

It is a particular honor for me to speak here in Palo Alto, inasmuch as people here are creating the future every day.  I have no doubt that my country too will soon stop living in the past and will start moving towards success and prosperity.

For starters let me tell you a bit about myself.

In the Western press they usually call me an oil tycoon, because at the moment of arrest in 2003 I was the head of YUKOS.  This was the most efficient and transparent oil company in Russia.  Its market capitalization was valued at $35 bln., we were planning a merger with Chevron Texaco, and were getting ready to create the biggest oil company in the world.

However, YUKOS was far from being first business, nor was it my only one.  I started my first project, which would be called a "start-up" today, way back in 1987.  It had a frightfully Soviet sounding name:  the Center for Inter-sectoral scientific-technical programs.

You're going to laugh, but our business was in some ways a lot like what Michael Dell was doing in his early days.  We bought components, assembled computers out of them, installed an operating system, taught them to "talk" to a printer, and sold them to Soviet enterprises, whose directors wanted to have the latest toy in their office.

At the beginning, a dollar invested in a computer returned 7-10 dollars in profit.

This wasn't a bad business, but it was clear that soon there would be serious players coming into the market and that we'd no longer be able to sell at such a markup.  And that's exactly what happened.

After a year, we took the money we'd earned and opened ourselves a commercial bank.

All in all, my partners and I created four businesses that surpassed the billion mark.  Eight billionaires and dozens of millionaires grew out of my companies.  To the best of my knowledge, some of them have been successful in the world internet business and have even ended up not far at all from where we are right now.

We were creating companies in a wide range of industries.  The �Siberian internet-company� was for a long time one of the biggest systems integrators in Russia.  �Gazeta.ru� became one of the first internet-publications and remains to this day one of the most widely read Russian mass information media.

In 1999, we began funding non-profit projects in the field of education and to engage in overcoming digital divide.  This is how �Open Russia� and the �Federation of Internet Education� appeared.  50 thsd. Russian schoolteachers went through our professional retraining courses.  They learned how to teach their subjects using the internet.  We helped bring the internet into schools.  Our dream was that any Russian schoolchild, even in the most faraway region, could get access to this worldwide repository of information.

But subsequently, as you all know, these plans were interrupted, and I was deprived of liberty for 10 years.

 Time travel

When I was coming out of prison, I wanted to see another country.  One expects the future to bring not only technological progress, but social progress as well.  One wants to see not only ipads, iphones, and social networks, but also how these technologies are making people more free, more open, more confident in the future, and more independent.

Unfortunately, the feeling I got was completely different.

It was in some ways reminiscent of what the main hero of the �Back To The Future� trilogy felt when he found himself in the alternative Hill Valley of 1985.  The Russia of 2015 is being ruled singlehandedly by a cynical and unprincipled Biff Tannen surrounded by a group of kleptocrats.  And the inhabitants, while realizing what is happening, don't have anything with which to counter the massed propaganda and the police and criminality that are often indistinguishable from one another.

Russia could have become a completely different place if it had not turned off from the trajectory that it had started moving along in the last decade of the previous century.  If our country had continued moving in the direction of an open society, political competition, a real fight against corruption, and equality before the law.

The period of reforms of the 1990s was indeed hard.  It has become customary to utter curses at those years and to frighten people with warnings about their return.  But it was precisely in this period that Russia's economy was rebuilt and started growing at a headlong pace.  At the end of the 90s and the beginning of the 2000s, per capita GDP increased on average by 7% per year, while the size of the middle class got to be as much as 30% of the population.

A part of the citizens associated this period of prosperity with the person of Putin.  It's easy to understand why:  independent television had been destroyed, while on state television he was portrayed as a superhero.  You got the impression that the money had begun to flow into the country exclusively thanks to his supernatural abilities.

This is a rather tragic fact, because he used the credit of trust that had been earned by completely different people in order to turn the country's development around in a totally opposite direction.

Many opponents of the regime said, on the contrary, that the reason for the economic growth had to do exclusively with the rise in oil prices.

The role of the oil-and-gas sector is big, but it's clearly not enough to call Russia a petro-state.  In that same Saudi Arabia, oil-and-gas export comprises 50% of GDP.  In Russia it's a mere 10% of GDP, calculated at purchasing power parity.  All the rest of the value is created by millions of citizens, employed in other industries, who are being told that they've had their civil rights taken away because they're being fed by the state oil-and-gas companies.

The economic boom of the 2000s, which in Russia is only partially explained by the rise in oil prices, would have been impossible without the reforms of the 90s, without the new class of entrepreneurs who were creating entire new industries from scratch:  retail, banks, automobile manufacturing, telecommunications, media.  Our internet companies became the biggest in Europe.  Russia doubled the production of oil and started exporting wheat, even though only recently the USSR had been forced to bring grain in from the USA and Canada.

Putin is still in place today, as are the oil-and-gas incomes, but there's no more economic growth.  On the contrary, a decline has begun.

In 2004-2008, Russia was getting on average $306 bln. in export incomes.  And in 2010-2014 - $490 bln.  That's 60% more.  This while the rates of economic growth had fallen nearly three times - from 7% to 2.5%.  In 2014 there was an outright decline in GDP, even though export incomes remained at the same level - $490 bln per year.  This was and still is a huge number - it's $15 bln. more than Russia got in total throughout all six years of Yeltsin's rule.

So why have export incomes stopped turning into economic growth then?  This is the inevitable result of the destruction of freedom and the liquidation of normal democratic institutions.

The authorities had taught society to detest business that's independent of the state.  But until 2011, hope still remained that this was temporary.  In 2010-2011 it became clear that Putin wasn't planning on going anywhere.  That there wasn't going to be any political competition and independent judiciary in Russia.  That nobody wanted to recognize the contribution that entrepreneurs had made to improving the lives of the citizens.

Not having received recognition and respect, having lost all hope for understandable and transparent rules of the game, entrepreneurs began to abandon Russia.  In 2003-2008, capital flight comprised a mere $10 bln.  In 2010-2014 it was $383 bln.  A nearly 40-fold increase.  Business started fleeing from Russia.  And also running away with it is the entrepreneurial spirit, competition, and respect for the consumer.  And at the end of the day - material prosperity as well.

In 2015 Russia can expect a decline in GDP.  Even those economists who are loyal to the Kremlin are forecasting that 10 years of no growth lie ahead.

The citizens of Russia won't see good roads, universities, hospitals, and polyclinics.  Hundreds of thousands more people are going to be unlawfully convicted or will become victims of arbitrary rule.

Russia is paying for the loss of freedom and for the destruction of democratic institutions with the lives of the soldiers and volunteers who are dying in the Ukraine.

After all, Putin has realized that the state capitalism he has created is no longer capable of ensuring growth.  States of such a type were always created only for war.  And this war had to be started in order to justify the existence of the current system.

The internal enemy represented by independent business has been destroyed.  An external enemy was needed to mobilize the masses around the kleptocracy.

Back to the future

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

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.  Where every citizen who obeys the law will feel himself far more confident than a president who violates the law.

A country with an independent judiciary and an influential parliament, where the citizens themselves determine the future at honest elections.  Where the real power isn't in Moscow, but in each and every municipality.

A country where the state has no choice but to respect people's rights and international obligations, and not engage in pillaging and plundering beyond the confines of the country and protecting criminals inside.

A country from which capital isn't fleeing, talented people aren't fleeing, but on the contrary, one that attracts enterprising people from all over the world.  Where the only criterion in business is how good you are at what you do.  If you're talented and not afraid of work, then you'll certainly achieve success, irrespective of how close your friendship with the president is.

Good schools, hospitals, and roads will appear only when every person who has power and money conferred on them will know that if he doesn't do his job well, someone else will take his place.  Voters will choose another candidate, consumers - another producer.  This is called political and economic competition, and many countries have learned how to use it for the benefit of society.  Russia is no different in this regard.  Our country was developing and growing rich thanks to the competition of the 1990s-2000s, and now that competition has been destroyed it's getting poor.

Political competition is the only chance to turn the state around to face the people.  Only if there are several more or less equal forces vying for power is each individual vote going be important, because it will be able to tip the balance in favor of the one or the other-

But even if you do lose the competition, this won't mean it's the end for you - the state and society guarantee still you a decent life.

And that's our program.

Besides a program, you need people who believe it can be carried out and who are prepared to act, tens of thousands of people, those who aren't yet 40.  They're the ones who are going to have to build what is now destroyed.

In Russia there's a multitude of people who share our vision.  This is at a minimum that 16% of society which even during a time of post-imperial hysteria had the courage to speak about the annexation of Crimea as an ill-considered and irrational step, a violation of international law that led to international isolation and a decline in the standard of living.

This is the 30% of society that comes out in favor of a modern, democratic path of development for the country, for separation of powers, for their regular replacement, against self-isolation, and for an open Russia.

- it is important that both the program and the people prepared to carry it out be known to our fellow citizens, that they believe that these people can make their lives better

I hope they'll be able to show a democratic alternative to the regime at the elections, and we're going to help them.

We often hear talk about how the opposition in Russia doesn't stand a chance, that this is just an impossible dream.

The entire history of humanity was made precisely by those who dreamed.  If we recall the great Americans  -  Thomas, Jefferson, or, let us say, Martin Luther King - their dreams also seemed impossible, but they believed, and in the end they turned out to have been right.

The same can also be said about the Soviet dissidents.  Their contemporaries also considered many of them to be na�ve dreamers.

So how can you bring dreams to life?  By waving a magic wand?  With the help of a time machine?  No, every inhabitant of Russia who dreams of turning his country back to the future is going to have to take some kind of action.  The regular efforts of even a small group of active citizens are enough for changes to come.

We never know what can become the catalyst for these changes.  For example, an African-American woman refuses to move to the back of the bus.  Or several people who come out on the central square of the city.

The regime will fall as the result of internal problems and civil disobedience.

For now it is most visible in the form of capital flight, brain drain, and a decline in entrepreneurial activity, i.e. on the individual level.  But the process is going to deepen.  People will gradually realize that the only thing conformism will lead to is un-freedom, poverty, and loss of self-dignity.

- after the regime falls, we're going to need to quickly bring the country out from isolation in the practical sense.  And this means people, capital, technologies.  It is precisely for this reason that it's important for us that people here know those who are going to have to build the Russia of the future after the regime change

This is the reason why I'm here.  You are the leaders of today's technological world.  Much of what has already changed our life and will continue to change it going forward is being created right here.  For modern youth, this is Mecca, which not everybody has been to, but everybody expects miracles to come from here.

This is a great honor and a great responsibility.  Your example shapes not only the technological future.

If you believe in democracy and openness - the leading-edge youth of the whole world dreams of democracy and openness.

If you let yourselves be pulled along on a leash by authoritarian regimes for the sake of money, youth the world over becomes a little bit more cynical.

If you help overcome barriers established by not very smart politicians - the world becomes a brighter place,

If you help establish these barriers - darkness descends on entire countries.

We in Russia believe - you aren't going to start helping our authoritarian regime suffocate the opposition, 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, you're not going to start creating the illusion that all is well with the help of window-dressing projects and on the contrary are going to help us to bring people the truth, to self-organize on top of the established prohibitions.

I believe that those of you who have left Russia in order to bring their ideas to life here will at some moment return and help your country deal with the legacy left by this regime, but for now I wish you luck over here.

I see all of you as friends and colleagues with whom we'd like to build the future of all of humanity together.

Thank you.
 
 #23
The Vineyard of the Saker
http://thesaker.is
April 16, 2015
Ukraine Analysis by the Saker: a "Croatian" attack scenario?

It is pretty clear that the chances of peace, which were always tiny, are getting worse and worse by the day.   I personally never believed that the Minsk-2 Agreement (M2A) would be implemented by the Kiev junta and I am not in the least surprised.  The most what the junta could do was to withdraw some (not even most!) of its heavy weapons and then bring news ones in.  As for the political steps foreseen by M2A they are simply unthinkable for the junta.  In fact, even if Poroshenko decided to comply with M2A and, say, negotiate a future Ukrainian constitution with the representatives of Novorussia, he would probably be overthrown within 24 hours, not only because the Nazi freaks like Iarosh would never accept that but because, more importantly, Uncle Sam would never accept that either.

The key actor: the USA

The single most important actor in the Ukrainian crisis are the USA which has far more influence than the EU or any local political force.  And the fact is that the USA have everything to lose from a peaceful outcome of the Ukrainian civil war.  Why?  Simple!

The US powerbase in the Ukraine is composed of two very different groups: first, the Nazi ultra-nationalist freaks with very strong ties to the Ukie emigrants in Canada and the USA and, second, the corrupt oligarchs.  Now here is the key factor here: neither of these two groups are a majority of the Ukrainian people, even if we exclude the Donbass.  In fact, even when put together into one "pro-US 5th column" the Nazi freaks and Ukie oligarchs are still not a majority.  This crucial fact translates into a very simple but crucial policy imperative: the USA cannot allow anything remotely "democratic" in the Ukraine: it is either "people power" or "US power", but it will never be both.  From that flows a 2nd very simple policy imperative: the US needs to maintain a state of crisis at all costs: war, civil war, industrial or ecological disaster, MH-17, unknown snipers, etc.  Peace will sooner or later bring some form of people power which, in turn, will mean that the USA would lose control of the situation.

This is why whether the next crisis results from yet another military defeat or from food shortages and riots, the junta's "solution" will be the same one: martial law.  The Rada, in fact, just passed such a law allowing easy imposition of martial law.

Martial law as a way to save the current regime

The big advantage (for the USA) of the introduction of martial law in the Ukraine is that the two "pillars" of US power in the Ukraine (Nazi freaks and oligarchs) will most obviously the ones to declare and implement martial law, thus their power over the country will remain safely in their hands.  Furthermore, martial law will allow the regime to viciously crack down and crush any opposition under minimal or even no legal constraints of any kind.  Any person or group protesting or otherwise disagreeing with anything the junta does will be declared "agent of Putin" and dealt with by either imprisonment or simply executed.

The imposition of martial law will also be a financial bonanza for the oligarch which will use it to ruthlessly eliminate any opponents or anybody questioning their practices.  But there is more to a martial law option than just short term benefits:

Longer term benefits of martial law: the preparation of a "Croatian" scenario

More and more people are coming to the conclusion that the junta in Kiev is preparing for what is often called a "Croatian" scenario.

[Sidebar - short reminder: at the end of the first phase of the civil war in Croatia, the Croats were unable to defeat the local Serbian population which had lived in areas called "Krajinas" - from the same root as the word "Ukraine" meaning "border region". The UN then established "UN Protected Areas" or UNPAs in which the local Serbs were supposed to be safe from Croatian attacks.  These areas are shown in dark blue on the map.  The Croatians then waited a few years, while being trained and armed by the USA, and eventually they attacked on the under the cover of the USAF.  The UN forces immediately surrendered and the Krajinas were rapidly overrun resulting in a massive movement of Croatian Serb civilians feeling the Croatian offensive.  The "civilized world" stood by and either applauded or said nothing].

The US-Ukie oh-so-subtle plan appears to be very similar to the "Croatian variant": buy enough time to prepare for a massive attack and then crush the "separatists" is a short but very intense campaign. The big question is - can that work?

An "Operation Storm" in the Donbass?

Externally, the similarities between the two wars are striking: two US-run Nazi states use the cover of a peacekeeping operation to prepare a massive assault against its own population.  But there are also crucial differences which one should not underestimate:

The first and most important difference is the difference between the rump-Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) under Milosevic and Russia under Putin.  For one thing, Yugoslavia was obviously not a nuclear superpower and Milosevic had to count with the possibility that Serbia and Montenegro could be simply invaded by the USA and NATO.  There is exactly zero risk of that happening in Russia. But even more importantly, Milosevic did betray his Bosnian-Serb and Croatian-Serb brothers and impose sanctions on them.  In contrast, Putin allowed both "Voentorg" (the delivery of weapons) and "Severnyi Veter" ( or "Northern Wind" - i.e, the sending of volunteers) Novorussia).  But this goes way beyond Putin: there is a 90% or so agreement in Russia that there is no way that Russia will allow the Nazis to overrun the Donbass.  So if Putin did let that happen, he would be putting himself and his allies in grave danger.  In fact, Putin had a very hard time even defending his decision not to send the Russian military into Novorussia last year, most Russians did agree, but it took some very intense PR campaigns and a lot of convincing.  The 80%+ support Putin enjoys in Russia is exceptional and strong, but it is not unconditional and while the pro-western "liberal" opposition presents no threat to him, the nationalist opposition is currently rather weak only because Putin is very careful in his policies. But should he "sell out" Novorussia or suddenly turn pro-Western and that rather currently tame nationalist opposition could become very dangerous.  In reality, since it is the "patriotic" (but non-nationalistic - big difference!) segment of the population which is the real power base of Putin I don't see him doing anything to alienate them, especially not by allowing Novorussian to be invaded by the Nazis.

There is also a pragmatic reason why Russian cannot allow the Kiev Nazis to overrun Novorussia: not only would their next attack be inevitably be directed at Crimea (they already promised that numerous times!), but even the combats in Novorussia only would most likely pull the Russian forces in anyway.

The bottom line is this: Russia will never allow an "Operation Storm" in Novorussia.

The second big difference is the terrain and forces involved.  The Serbs in the UNPAs had given up their heavy weapons, the terrain was either low mountains or a narrow valleys and, most importantly, they did not have a "safe border" from which they can be supported and resupplied (like the Afghans had with Pakistan during the Soviet occupation).  Furthermore, the Novorussians have slowly and painfully struggled to transform their militia of volunteers into a regular army force and while this process has not been easy, to say the last, it appears to have been pretty successful.  Keep in mind that even before these reforms, the militas were rather successful in all their operations and that their air defenses had succeeded in imposing a no-fly zone over the Donbass.  Their biggest weakness was their limited capability for coordinated attacks and counter-attacks, but that has probably changed now.  Not only that, but by all accounts the Novorussians now have large stores of weapons, plenty of armor and more than enough men.   As a result, the Novorussians are now probably capable of combined arms operations.

When the US and NATO bombed the Krajina Serbs, they enjoyed air supremacy, they faced no air defenses, the number of targets they had to engage was very limited and the Serbs, having been betrayed by everybody, had no will to fight left.  The Ukrainians have lost most of their airforce, the number of potential targets they might want to hit in the Donbass is very large and very well defended.

Last but not least, there are at least two major cities in Novorussia, Donetsk and Lugansk.  These cities are large, easy to defend, very well prepared and capable of resisting for a very long time.  No such cities existed in the Serbian Krajina.

Back to reality

The similarities between the civil wars in Croatia and the Ukraine are both superficial and deceiving.  In purely military terms the conquest of Novorussia by the Kiev junta would be infinitely more difficult than the relatively simple Croatian operation to invade the Krajinas.

As for the famous US aid, let's remember not only the little good it did to the Georgians, but also all the other US allies who benefited from lavish US aid, huge weapons deliveries, CIA organized death squads, the full propaganda support of the US corporate media and who still were defeated.  Even the deployment of US military forces as a solution of last resort rarely proved effective against a popular insurgency.

Do the Ukrainians and the Americans understand that an Krajina-like operation in the Donbass is impossible?  The latter probably do, especially the military specialists.  As for the Ukrainians, they don't really care.  For them it is all about pretending, keeping a rationale alive to justify their actions, making promises of "defeating the Moskal's with the help of the USA and NATO".  Whether that actually happens or not is irrelevant for them.  What matters is keeping the good times (for them, of course) going for as long as possible.  And when the inevitable happens, they will flee like so many other US stooges in the past, from the Shah of Iran to Ferdinand Marcos.

But in the short term we should have no illusions about the immediate future: the junta forces will attack again and even though their next offensive will probably be much more effective than their previous ones, they will be defeated again, either by the Novorussians or by the Russian military.

The Saker