#2
Antiwar.com
May 1, 2015
Lessons of the Vietnam War
We haven't learned them
by Justin Raimondo

Forty years after the fall of Saigon, Washington is still pursuing the same policies that led to the worst defeat in American military history. We never acknowledged, let alone learned, the lessons of that misconceived campaign to "roll back Communism" in Southeast Asia, thus setting ourselves up for endless repeats - in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now, perhaps, Iran.

Just as today's "war on terrorism" is portrayed as a "generational" struggle against "radical Islam," so the Vietnam war was an episode in a cold war saga the end of which no one could see. The Soviet Union was presented as Satan with a sword, a mighty enemy sworn to our destruction, whose agents had subverted every country worth conquering and were homing in on the American homeland - unless we acted to stop them.

The reality, however, was quite different. Soviet socialism had struggled to survive ever since the Bolsheviks seized power in a 1917 coup, and only endured World War II due to massive Western aid and US intervention in the conflict. Even before the end of the war, which decimated Russia, the Kremlin had been forced by necessity to make its accommodation with the West, formally giving up the much-cited Communist goal of a world revolution against capitalism in favor of "socialism in one country." Unable to feed its own people, let alone conquer the world, the ramshackle Soviet empire could hardly keep a hold on its eastern European satellites, facing rebellions in Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia before the final implosion in 1989.

Such gains as the Soviets made were accomplished either with outright Western complicity - Eastern Europe was handed over to "Uncle Joe" at Yalta - or else due to the stubborn incompetence of the US and its allies. While what was then called the "Third World" was throwing off the chains of colonial rule, Washington sided with the colonialists - in Vietnam, this meant the French, who were aided (in limited fashion) by Eisenhower. President Kennedy had none of his predecessor's caution, however, and he leaped into the fray, declaring we would "pay any price, bear any burden" in the struggle against the Communist Menace. His administration took the first step down that fateful road, supporting the unpopular and repressive South Vietnamese regime and sending in hundreds of US "advisors" - who were soon doing much more than advising.

Then, as today, the Enemy was depicted as a vast centrally-directed conspiracy: according to our "experts" and the pundits, the Vietnamese communists were mere puppets of the Kremlin, and the battle there was yet another chapter in the story of the reds' relentless campaign for the West's destruction. This cartoonish view overlooked developing splits within the international communist movement, and - crucially - the key role played by rising nationalism in communist successes in the developing world.

When it came to Vietnam, the Soviets were far from unconditionally supportive of the native communist movement. Having given up the goal of world revolution in favor of seeking détente with the West, the Kremlin continually acted as go-betweens pursuing a diplomatic settlement of the Vietnam conflict. As early as 1956, the Soviet party sought to rein in the Vietnamese Communists who were contemplating resumption of a military campaign to reunify the country. The US and its allies were ignoring the Geneva agreement to hold elections - which was denounced by then Sen. John F. Kennedy - and they aided South Vietnamese strongman Ngo Dinh Diem in his efforts to consolidate his hold on the South.

The brutality and outright stupidity of the American campaign in Vietnam was the communists' main weapon: as the Americans destroyed villages in order to "save" them, the populace turned to the Viet Cong and their North Vietnamese allies for protection. The Americans were seen as foreign occupiers, the heirs of the French who had lorded over the region in similar fashion: the corrupt and brutal "Republic of Vietnam" was widely hated by its own citizens. The Vietnamese were fighting on their own land against foreign troops and native collaborators: it was a war the Americans could never win, not if they had stayed there for a hundred years.

The parallels with the present are all too obvious. In Afghanistan, we face a similar enemy: native guerrillas fighting against foreign occupiers and a puppet regime that has the allegiance of only those who can be bought. The Taliban is the Viet Cong of our era: supposedly directed by an international "radical Islamist" conspiracy, it is in reality a local phenomenon motivated not by ideology but by the natural opposition encountered by any occupying army. The same goes for our ill-fated attempt to subdue Iraq, where nationalism and not any religious-ideological belief system is what motivated resistance to the occupation and ultimately drove us out.

Keeping in mind the question of scale: just as US intervention on the Soviet Union's behalf during World War II delivered them half of Europe, so US intervention in Iraq effectively handed the country to the Iranians. Now we are told that a regime we empowered is the main threat to peace in the region.

Similarly, such gains as Al Qaeda has made are due, in large part, to our own actions. As our Saudi allies invade and decimate Yemen with Washington's full support, the heirs of Osama bin Laden are expanding their foothold amid the ruins and the misery. In Libya, where we overthrew a secular tyrant at the behest of our European allies and our own "humanitarian" interventionists, Al Qaeda is now cavorting in what was our embassy swimming pool. In Syria, where US support to "moderate" Islamists is weakening another secular tyrant, Al Qaeda and its allies are consolidating their hold. And ISIS, the latest bogeyman to haunt our fever dreams, is the mutant offspring of George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and the neocons who took us to war in Iraq on the basis of a lie.

The lessons of Vietnam, and of the cold war generally, haven't been learned by our political elites for the simple reason that they don't want to know about anything that contradicts their dogmatic worldview. That conception of how the world works is rooted in their own little careers, and the colossal conceit that is the hallmark of elite culture in this country. They live in an ideological bubble, one that punishes truth-telling and rewards conformity - and nothing is more obligatory in the world of Washington than to pledge allegiance to the delusions of a political class that believes it can do anything and get away with it. The same policymakers and pundits who ginned up the disastrous war in Iraq have lost none of their power and prestige: we live in a political culture that rewards failure and comes down hard on anyone who strays outside the Washington consensus.

The US hasn't won a major war since the end of World War II: Korea was a draw, Vietnam a humiliating defeat, Iraq was an American rout, and Afghanistan is a quagmire that is slowly draining the lifeblood out of our military. The only successes we've had is when we picked on a country as small and defenseless as Panama, Grenada, or Serbia. As we push our way into every local conflict, internationalizing it and blowing it way out of proportion - e.g. Ukraine - this is worth bearing in mind. The supposedly mighty US empire, like its Soviet predecessor, projects the illusion of invincibility and permanence, while an inner rot eats away at its core.

That rot is the cancer of debt, corruption, and a cultural nihilism which threatens the very values that made America an economic powerhouse and the envy of the world. As our leaders preen and pose on the world stage, as we bully our way into every local conflict, braying that we embody the concept of "world leadership," and demanding that lesser nations follow Washington's diktat, the mirage of our global hegemony is dissipating. Can we control events in Kabul if we can't even keep a firm grip on Baltimore?

One day the distance between the conceited ranting of our political leaders and the pathetic reality of a country in terminal decline will become so apparent that not even the Washington know-it-alls will be able to deny it. By then, however, it will be too late for anyone to do anything about it. The Soviet Union disappeared in a matter of a few weeks: one wonders if it will take that long when it comes our turn.

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 #3
Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs
www.carnegiecouncil.org
April 30, 2015
How to get from Soviet Studies to Russian Studies
By NICOLAI N. PETRO  

Introduction

David Speedie, U.S. Global Engagement director and senior fellow, Carnegie Council

It is widely acknowledged on both sides of a growing divide that relations between Russia and the United States are at their lowest ebb since the end of the Cold War almost 25 years ago. Indeed, to quote two of our most astute observers: Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Moscow Center, concludes that we may be obliged to look back on the period 1992-2014 as an "inter-Cold War era"; and New York University's Stephen Cohen goes further, arguing that anti-Russia animus in Western media and policy circles is actually more virulent than during the Soviet times.

In this unpropitious environment for bilateral relations, Nicolai Petro, professor of political science at the University of Rhode Island, offers what may be the beginnings of a remedy in the excellent article below, How to get from Soviet Studies to Russian Studies(first published in an April 2015 Russia Direct report and reposted here with the author's permission). Petro makes three main points:

the field of Soviet studies was never exactly intellectually robust-for much of the Cold War period the research agenda was "driven by U.S. military and intelligence needs";

the transition from Soviet studies to Russian studies was, to say the least, inadequate to an understanding of post-Soviet Russia, bogged down as it was in an arid debate over the "real Russia" as either a Soviet holdover, "the Oriental despotism... hopelessly mired in anti-Western and anti-modern values" or "a 'normal' country that is responding rationally to the challenges of transition from an autarkic and ideologically driven Soviet empire, to a contemporary national democracy integrated into the global economy";

a renewal of Russian studies is overdue: Just as in the late Soviet period, "an expansion of educational and professional exchanges is needed to help break down stereotypes." And what might such a learning agenda entail? "A deep understanding of Russia requires a synthesis of political science, history, anthropology, religious and cultural studies-in sum, more area studies rather than less."

The causes of stress on this critical relationship are manifest-from NATO expansion in the 1990s to the ongoing crisis in Ukraine. But critical the relationship indeed is, and greatly in need of work. The encouragement of a next generation of Russian studies in the United States (and, for that matter, U.S. studies in Russia) would seem to be an indispensable first step in the reconstruction process.
---

Back in 1999, Professor Stephen F. Cohen accused Russian studies of having forgotten about Russia.1 In its haste to abandon the intellectual ghetto of Sovietology, it had embraced what he called "transitionology"-the notion that universal concepts, methods and theories, rather than area studies rooted in history and culture, were the best way to understand post-Soviet Russia.

The result, said Cohen, had been an unmitigated disaster. Scholars, journalists and politicians were getting a fundamentally distorted picture of Russia, one that ignored the human suffering being caused in the name of political and economic transition and therefore dramatically underestimated the impact that Russian First President Boris Yeltsin's shock therapy would have on future Russian politics.

Cohen's critique focused on the methodological divide that had emerged in political science between those who advocated more quantitative and comparative approaches, and those who preferred what American anthropologist Clifford Geertz called 'local knowledge'. But the problem at the heart of this dispute goes much deeper than methodology. It is a problem that most scholars are loathe to address, for it requires them to take a stand on which image of Russia they chose to believe is the "real" one.

For one school of thought, the real Russia is, and probably always will be, the Oriental despotism described by the German-American historian Karl Wittfogel, a profoundly reactionary society, hopelessly mired in anti-Western and anti-modern values.2 These entrenched values explain Putin's enduring popularity, as well as the need for the West to put some sort of cordon sanitaire around Russia to restrain its expansion. For others, however, the real Russia is a "normal" country that is responding rationally to the challenges of transition from an autarkic and ideologically driven Soviet empire, to a contemporary national democracy integrated into the global economy. This sharp divide among Russian specialists goes back decades and continues today because Americans have never really taken the time to learn about Russia proper.

For the first century and a half of its existence, America was blissfully ignorant of Russia, so much so that on the eve of the First World War, the Russian language was taught at only three American universities (Columbia, Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley), and Russian history was offered only at the last two.

By the time Americans began to take notice of Russia, it no longer existed. It had been replaced by a new country-the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics-conceived in the name of an ideology that Western policy makers struggled for decades to comprehend, before finally deciding that it didn't really matter for how the Soviet Union was ruled.3 When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 very few felt any need to draw a distinction between Soviet patriotism and Russian nationalism.

The collapse of communism, therefore, did not engender much effort to understand the emergence of Russia as a new nation. Unlike the other nations that emerged from the collapse of the USSR, almost no one asked what values and social expectations might emerge in a post-Communist Russia. Would it seek to establish a new identity, or to reconnect with a prior identity? More importantly, was training as a "Soviet specialist" adequate to the task?

Unfortunately, it is not. Furthermore, the study of Russia proper has yet to really begin in the United States. Before we can appreciate what can be done to change this, however, we need to look at the essential role that governmental sponsorship played in the development of Soviet studies in the United States.

How Soviet Studies Rose to National Prominence during the Cold War

Soviet studies is entirely a product of the Cold War. Had the United States not been drawn into that conflict, it is quite likely that the benign neglect that characterized America's relationship with Russia from its founding well into the 20th century would have continued.

On the very eve of America's entry into World War II in 1941, there were still fewer than 20 people specializing in the Soviet Union within the U.S. government. That included support staff. Training options within the United States were so few that the State Department sent future diplomats like George F. Kennan and Charles "Chip" Bohlen abroad to learn about Russia.

In 1943 the USSR Division of the Office of Strategic Services was set up and staffed with 60 social scientists. Still, it is stunning to realize that at the time the defining strategies of the Cold War were being devised, the actual number of bona fide Russian specialists nationwide was just 64 persons.

The first real impetus to expand study of the USSR was the launching of Sputnik in 1957. This was quickly followed by a series of Soviet "firsts" in space exploration. It was America's apparent technology gap with the Soviets that in 1958 led to the National Defense Education Act, the first large-scale federal government initiative to promote national security through education.

Ever since then, the research agenda of Soviet studies has been driven by U.S. military and intelligence needs. All major Soviet studies centers developed ties of one sort or another with relevant government agencies, the best-known example being the Refugee Interview Project carried out by the U.S. Air Force and Harvard's Russian Research Center. These interviews eventually led to the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System.

The main finding of the Harvard Project was that the typical Soviet citizen's attachment to the values of Soviet society was comparable to the attachment of a U.S. citizen to the values of American society. Despite being more than 50 years old, it remained the single most influential study of Soviet mass values until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. As scholars from the University of California, Berkeley Victoria Bonnell and George Breslauer note, the basic institutional infrastructure put in place during the 1950s "has remained essentially intact ever since." At its heyday, during the early 1970s, there were 58 centers of Soviet and East European studies in the U.S. and 83 degree-granting programs in the field. 40,000 students were enrolled in Russian language classes, a figure unmatched until very recently.

But while funding during the Cold War was at times ample, it was far from constant. The first area studies programs at premier institutions were supported by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, but the passage of the International Education Act in 1966 led them to end their domestic support.

The prolonged period of stagnation during the Leonid Brezhnev years (leader of the Soviet Union from 1964 until 1982), combined with a shift away from area studies generally, led to a loss of interest in Soviet studies. Concern about the aggressive tone being taken by the first Reagan administration (1981-1989), however, led both private foundations and Congress to provide supplemental funding for the study of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet and Eastern European Research and Training Act of 1983, commonly referred to as "Title VIII," became a critical factor in arresting the erosion of U.S. expertise on the Soviet Union. Title VIII prepared the generation of scholars that came of age right at the time of the collapse of the USSR Soon thereafter, however, the field began to see declines in undergraduate enrollments in Russian language, politics and history courses.

Observers attribute these declines to Russia's loss of superpower status, as well as to the incessant drumbeat of negative reporting that depicted Russia as "a space of incompetence... not yet ready to take care of its people or to join the ranks of the 'civilized' world."4

Already in 1991, Russianist Dorothy Atkinson from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies had warned that Soviet and East European studies would lose a quarter of its faculty between 1990 and 1995. As a result, she said, the capacity of the academy to provide expertise to the American public was likely to be "strained."

Despite such dire predictions, however, Congress cut Title VIII funding by more than 40 percent between 2002 and 2012 in constant dollars, Title VI funding for area studies dropped by 47 percent in 2011, and support for doctoral dissertations to Russia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia in 2013 was cancelled. That same year, fiscal uncertainty in the U.S. government and the loss of a small handful of prominent private donors and political patrons in Congress combined to eliminate Title VIII funding entirely.

The Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies still keeps a list of major programs affected by the end of Title VIII on its website. They include:

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), which suspended all competitions in its East Europe Studies Program for 2013-14.
The Arizona State University Critical Languages Institute, which suspended competition for its Title VIII fellowships for domestic or overseas summer language study.
Indiana University, which suspended competitions for Title VIII fellowships for domestic and portable intensive summer language study.
The National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER), which suspended all new Title VIII programming for 2013.
The Social Science Research Council's Eurasia Program, which suspended the competitions for its Title VIII fellowships in 2013-2014.
The Woodrow Wilson Center's Kennan Institute, which suspended competition for its Title VIII
Research Scholarship grants for 2013-14.

Russian Studies beyond Sovietology

The end of government support for Soviet studies does not strike everyone as a tragedy. Some have caustically observed that, for all that investment, Sovietology's ability to predict the rise of the eighth and last leader of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev or the collapse of the USSR was exceptionally low.

This is not entirely fair. There were studies that highlighted how contradictions within the Soviet system might someday cause significant disruption, and some even raised about the possibility of full systemic collapse.5 Still, it is fair to say that these were marginal voices, outside the mainstream of funded research.

As the former Director of Central Intelligence, Stansfield Turner, notes, "I never heard a suggestion from the CIA, or the intelligence arms of the departments of Defense or State... [of] a growing, systemic economic problem... On this one the corporate view missed by a mile." Against this backdrop, the very few prescient voices that urged scholars to think proactively about alternative policies that might be implemented after the collapse of the USSR were all but lost.

Paradoxically, the importance of government support actually increased after the collapse of the Soviet Union, due to the loss of public interest and shrinking enrollments. It can even be argued that pressure to be "policy relevant" has increased, as the broad training and support offered by area studies is being replaced by more targeted government funded programs like Minerva and the Human Terrain System.

The combination of dwindling public interest, shrinking funding, fewer graduate students, fewer jobs for those that did graduate, and fewer foreign correspondents reporting from Russia, thus created a situation in which the story of Russia's emergence from within the USSR has been overshadowed by the familiar and well established Cold War narratives of the past.

Small wonder then that the debate over Russia today looks a lot like it did 60 years ago. As if Putin's Russia, in which three former Soviet republics are members of NATO, where the Internet has become the preferred news source of anyone under 30, where Russians travel abroad freely and account for the fifth largest number of global tourists, and whose economy is more open to foreign trade than that of the United States, were the same as Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union (1922-1952).

Is it any surprise that the current crisis in Ukraine is frequently labeled a "new Cold War"? Perhaps a better question would be why anyone would think this is a "new" Cold War, when the intellectual assumptions underlying the "old" Cold War have scarcely been challenged.

At the heart of the new Cold War, as former U.S. Ambassador Jack Matlock notes, lies the facile triumphalism adopted by the United States toward Russia after the collapse of the USSR.6 But such triumphalism should not have surprised anyone. It flows logically from the decades spent confusing Russia with the former Soviet Union. Indeed, it is only now, with the end of the institutional focus on America's Cold War alter ego, the Soviet Union, that there is an opportunity to discover Russia proper, and to create a field of truly Russian studies in the United States.

What Might a Renewal of Russian Studies Look Like?

An expansion of educational and professional exchanges is needed to help break down stereotypes. The MIT-Skolkovo Foundation project to build a science and technology oriented graduate school ("Skoltech"), which is still apparently unaffected by sanctions, is a good model.

With Russia now more open to foreign students and intellectual collaboration than ever before, this is the ideal time to establish long term partnerships on the basis of mutual respect, unlike the efforts undertaken a decade ago by a handful of American foundations, led by the Ford Foundation, to promote large-scale societal changes by transforming the state educational system.

What about funding? Clearly, Russian studies can no longer afford to rely on haphazard government funding, yet the pool of those whose professional interest in Russia is matched by financial resources is still very small. The logical alternative is to seek funding from wealthy private donors in Russia who have an interest in improving understanding of their country overseas. Yale University has recently taken a step in this direction by accepting funding from the Renova group, headed by "Kremlin ally" and oligarch Viktor F. Vekselberg, for its new interdisciplinary Russian Studies Project.

Some will object that such money is tainted. Some of it may be, but the vast majority is surely not, or at least not enough to have prevented massive Russian investments from being welcome in commercial real estate and business. Why should an exception be made for academia? In any case, such assessment should be made on a case-by-case basis and not on the basis of crude stereotypes.

And, speaking of stereotypes, a serious discussion of the image of Russia in mainstream Western media is long overdue. This image, lampooned by media critics, diplomats, and scholars alike, has become so obviously biased that it has spawned a veritable online rebellion. The meteoric rise of RT (formerly Russia Today) from a novelty news outlet to a global network with an audience of 700 million people can hardly be attributed solely to Kremlin funding, not when the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors spends more than three times RT's annual budget, and the BBC World Service nearly twice as much.

The current focus of Western governments on more effective counter-propaganda measures is thus unlikely to work because it fundamentally misreads why so many people are looking for alternative sources of information about Russia-much of mainstream Western media coverage of Russia no longer makes sense. One of the most urgent tasks of Russian studies should be to repair the credibility gap that has emerged in the West with respect to media portrayals of Russia. A deep understanding of Russia requires a synthesis of political science, history, anthropology, religious and cultural studies-in sum, more area studies rather than less. A good place to begin is by restoring the academic linkages between Russia studies and European studies that have frayed since the end of the Cold War. Restoring Russia to European studies will help the rediscovery our common cultural and religious heritage, so that the definition of Western identity can be broadened to include Russia. It was widely assumed after the fall of the Berlin Wall that Russia would re-join Europe. A decade before the collapse, German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt argued that, "Our concept of Europe will one day have to once again encompass the whole intellectual and artistic life of our Eastern European neighbors if we do not wish to become impoverished."

Unfortunately, precisely the opposite happened. As NATO expanded eastward, Russia was pushed away from Europe both conceptually and practically, thus fulfilling émigré Russian cultural historian Vladimir Weidlé warning of more than half a century ago, that failure to see Russian culture as part of Western civilization would lie at the heart of both the West's persistent inability to overcome the legacy of the Cold War, and Russia's inability to overcome the legacy of the Soviet era.7 But if treating Russia as an integral part of Europe holds out the prospect, as former German President Roman Herzog once put it, of healing of Europe's soul, her continued ostracism is likely to have dire consequences, some of which are already being foreshadowed by the bitter struggle over Ukraine.8

To avoid such a tragedy, we would do well to heed the warning of America's most venerated living specialist on Russia, the Librarian of Congress James H. Billington: "Bridges to other cultures will not be solid unless they begin with casements that are sunk deep in one's own native ground. And all branches of learning die if cut off from the roots that lie within that ground..." If Americans cannot penetrate into the interior spiritual dialogue of other peoples, they will never be able to understand, let alone anticipate or affect, the discontinuous major changes which are the driving forces in history and which will probably continue to spring unexpected traps in the years ahead."

NOTES
1 Stephen F. Cohen, "Russian Studies Without Russia," Post-Soviet Affairs, 15:1, 1999, pp. 37-55.
2 Martin Malia, Russia Under Western Eyes. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1999, p. 6.
3 Illustrated in the shift in perspective from Merle Fainsod in How Russia is Ruled. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953, to his student Jerry Hough in How the Soviet Union is Governed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979.
4 Nina Renata Aron, "Fashioning Russia: The Production of a New Russian 'Other'," Newsletter of the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 27:1, Spring 2010.
5 Laqueur, The Dream that Failed. U.S.A: Oxford University Press, 1996. pp. 187-191.
6 Jack F. Matlock Jr., Superpower Illusions: How Myths and False Ideologies Led America Astray-And How to Return to Reality. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.
7 Vladimir Weidlé, Russia: Absent and Present (translated by A. Gordon Smith), New York: J. Day, 1952.
8 Alexander Ivashchenko, "Roman Herzog: "Europe Needs Russian Soul," RIA Novosti, September 2, 199[7].

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 #4
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
April 30, 2015
Russia Direct presents its Russian Studies Ranking in the US
[Video summary of event here http://www.russia-direct.org/video/russia-direct-presents-its-russian-studies-ranking-us]

On April 27, Russia Direct conducted a panel discussion that brought together academics, experts and students to discuss the future of Russian Studies in the U.S. during a time of deep crisis in U.S.-Russia relations.

This week at an event in Washington, DC Russia Direct presented its first ever ranking of Russian studies programs in the U.S.

The panel discussion included officials from the Russian Embassy in the U.S., academics, diplomats, educators, and business people. Participants focused their discussion on the current state of Russian studies in America.

The general consensus was that this field is currently suffering from lack of resources and that Russian studies need to be reevaluated.
The panelists and guests expressed their concerns about the current crisis in U.S.-Russia relations.

Although the crisis stimulates interest in the U.S. towards Russia, it also reveals the significant gap in understanding between the two countries.

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 #5
History News Network
http://historynewsnetwork.org
May 3, 2015
Is Vladimir Putin an Ideologue, Idealist, or Opportunist?
By Walter Moss
Walter G. Moss is a professor emeritus of history at Eastern Michigan University and Contributing Editor of HNN. He is the author of "A History of Russia," Vol. I and Vol. II. For a list of his recent books and online publications, click here: http://people.emich.edu/wmoss/pub.htm

Does President Putin have any deeply held values or is he just a political opportunist willing to sacrifice any principles to political expediency? This is a question often asked about politicians-and not just in Russia. But it is a simplistic one. Most politicians have at least a modicum of principles and are also somewhat opportunistic. Putin is no exception.

Let's first look at the principles and values side of the mix. One of the best books on Putin, Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (expanded ed., 2015), by Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy states: "The first key to Vladimir Putin's personality is his view of himself as a man of the state, his identity as a statist. . . . The ideas he expresses about the state, as well as the society subordinated to it, belong to a clearly identifiable and long-established body of Russian conservative political thought." The authors also write: "Russian history, the Russian language, and religion-are also themes that Putin repeatedly embraced in the 2000s," and they are "core elements in Russian conservative political thought in both the 1990s and the 2000s." And they cite a more detailed 2012 examination of Putin's "liberal-conservativism" philosophy by Canadian professor Paul Robinson, who contends that "this ideology" has significant roots stretching back to individuals like Tsar Nicholas II's prime minister (1906-1911) Peter Stolypin.

Like many conservatives, Putin often speaks of values. In his first major political manifesto in late December 1999, just before assuming the presidency, he wrote that he was "against the restoration of an official state ideology in Russia in any form. There should be no forced civil accord in a democratic Russia. Social accord can only be voluntary. That is why it is so important to achieve social accord on such basic issues as the aims, values and orientations of development." He also spoke of "the traditional values of Russians." As Hill and Gaddy note, he claimed that "the Russian state lost its status when its people were divided, when Russians lost sight of the common values that united them and distinguished them from all others." These values included "patriotism, collectivism, solidarity, derzhavnost'- the belief that Russia is destined always to be a great power (derzhava) exerting its influence abroad-"and statism, the belief that "the individual and society are, and must be, subordinate to the state and its interests."

Putin's annual presidential addresses to the Federal Assembly often mention values. He has delivered these speeches since 2000, except for the four years beginning in 2008 when Dmitry Medvedev served as president and Putin as prime minister. In his year 2000 address he said, "We have had and continue to have common values. Values which join us and allow us to call ourselves a single people."

In the three addresses he has given since resuming the presidency we see many more mentions of values. In 2012, he stated "We must wholeheartedly support the institutions that are the carriers of traditional values." He expressed understanding for why Russians in the post-Soviet period "discarded all ideological slogans of the previous era" and instead stressed private gain and interests more. But like many nineteenth-century Russian conservatives who thought the West overstressed private gain and material interests, he warned that "working for one's own interests has its limits," and stated that "it is in civil responsibility and patriotism" that should unite Russians. He suggested that in rejecting Soviet collectivism and earlier Russian communalism in favor of Western individualism, "spiritual values" that support "mutual assistance" had been lost.

In his December 2013 address he declared that 2014 was to "be a year of enlightenment" and spoke of "the all-encompassing, unifying role of Russian culture, history and language for our multi-ethnic population." He went on to say that Russian schools need "to help our nation's citizens form their identity, absorbing the nation's values, history and traditions." He also asserted that "today, many nations are revising their moral values and ethical norms," destroying "traditional values," accepting "without question the equality of good and evil."

Shortly after this speech, American conservative Pat Buchanan wrote "Is Putin One of Us?" and suggested that in "his stance as a defender of traditional values" Putin is very much in tune with U. S. conservatives.  Buchanan added, "Peoples all over the world, claims Putin, are supporting Russia's 'defense of traditional values' against a 'so-called tolerance' that is 'genderless and infertile.' . . . Putin is not wrong in saying that he can speak for much of mankind." More recently, columnist William Pfaff has written that "the resemblance of President Putin's ambitions for his Russia to those of the neoconservatives in the contemporary United States bear a striking formal resemblance."

In his December 2014 address Putin said that his government's "priorities are healthy families and a healthy nation, the traditional values which we inherited from our forefathers, combined with a focus on the future, stability as a vital condition of development and progress, respect for other nations and states, and the guaranteed security of Russia and the protection of its legitimate interests." And he once again referred to values when he added, "Conscientious work, private property, the freedom of enterprise-these are the same kind of fundamental conservative values as patriotism, and respect for the history, traditions, and culture of one's country."

In remarks occasioned by Easter 2015, Putin praised the Russian Orthodox Church for reviving "traditional moral values" and encouraging patriotism and "ethnic and religious harmony."

In mid-April 2015 the ISEPR Foundation, an organization "close to the Kremlin," held a forum in Kaliningrad to discuss "Russia and the West: the dialog on values in the civilization field." According to the invitation I received, the forum was to contain three sections: 1) "History and retrospective vision. The origins and essence of Western conservatism"; 2) "Current trends. The support for traditional values in the West and in Russia"; and 3) "Perspective vision. Traditions and future image." In the third section topics to be addressed included "Western civilization in context of traditional values crisis," and "Russia as an emerging source of values system: analysis, evaluation and perspectives." As is clear, the forum agenda certainly suggests that the foundation wishes foreign conservatives to consider the possibility-as Buchanan does-that their views on values have more in common with those of Putin than with those Buchanan brands as militant secularists, whether living in the United States or elsewhere. (See here for a brief report on the forum.)

Thus far we have seen that Putin does hold some basic conservative beliefs and is willing to use various means to trumpet them. There is little evidence to support the charge that he really doesn't believe any of the rhetoric he spouts about values. But he is also opportunistic enough to stress and exploit the universal appeal of his conservative principles. And here we return to the other part of his political makeup-opportunism, defined as "the taking of opportunities as and when they arise, regardless of planning or principle." His opportunism in regard to domestic and foreign policies does not imply that he has no principles or values, simply that he does not worry much about them in pursuing his goals. But his conservative Russian nationalism remains intact.

Again our approach fits in with the viewpoint of Hill and Gaddy. They write not only that "Putin was and remains a restorationist, a conservative reformer. He was not, and is not, a revolutionary," but also that "Putin is a pragmatist, not an ideologue. In setting up his system of governance, he did not follow any specific model that can be captured by a description in the abstract. . . . It is not an intentionally designed, well-formulated system. Rather, it is piecemeal and ad hoc. . . . It has evolved to fit the circumstances." Putin has "not tried to twist some fixed orthodoxy of ideas or ideology to pursue his goals."

Regarding Putin's foreign policy, the authors believe that Putin thinks the United States and NATO are hostile to him and trying to undermine his influence both domestically and in border countries such as Georgia and Ukraine. Possible NATO expansion to these two countries, following the earlier expansion into the former Soviet territories of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, has been one of his main fears. To fight back against such a threat he has been prepared to use all the weapons at his disposal including extensive propaganda. What Hill and Gaddy say above about his system of governance also applies to his foreign policy: "it is piecemeal and ad hoc. . . . It has evolved to fit the circumstances." But it also has a single goal-to strengthen Russia's power and status, especially in the territories that were once part of the USSR.

A recent special issue of Johnson's Russia List, one of the Internet's most valuable blogs dealing with things Russian, devoted 38 articles to the topic of Russian disinformation, which included propaganda and the "information wars" going on between Russia and Western media. Putin's emphasis on conservative values is one of the tools in this propaganda war. Typical of the articles was one that asked, "Is America losing the Information War?" It declared that Western media, including Radio Free Europe and Voice of America, need to emphasize more that the United States and other Western democracies are attempting to create "a truly just society in which all people are treated fairly without regard to the color of their skin, or cultural background, their religious beliefs or gender preferences," and that "when people honestly see things differently, they can express their views openly, even offensively, without fear of arrest or censure."

In a previous HNN essay I agreed with President Obama's contention in The Audacity of Hope, "that Democrats are wrong to run away from a debate about values" and that the question of values should be at "the heart of our politics, the cornerstone of any meaningful debate about . . . policies." Furthermore, I argued that "the Right's attacks during the [U.S.] culture wars have demonstrated more moral flaws than have the responses of the Left." Similarly, I think that the values espoused by Putin are inferior to Western liberal values such as the importance of human rights, including for gays and for dissenters, and tolerance. Especially unsound is Putin's statist position that (as Hill and Gaddy express it) "the individual and society are, and must be, subordinate to the state and its interests." Without attempting to impose liberal Western values on other peoples and recognizing that different countries have varying traditions and needs, Western progressives should welcome any values debate with those defending those of Mr. Putin. Such a debate might also help both sides clarify their values and the extent to which they are living up to them or just proclaiming them mainly for opportunistic purposes.

Although Putin is not an ideologue but more of an opportunist, he still possesses some values. To what extent are Western leaders different? And, as I have explored previously, which values are most worthwhile in the political arena? Should Russian and Western political values differ or was Mikhail Gorbachev more correct when in 1988 he stressed, "politics, too, should be guided by the primacy of universal human values"?

 
#6
http://readrussia.com
May 1, 2015
Russia is a Product of the Second World War, In Terms of Demography
by Mark Adomanis
[Chart here http://readrussia.com/2015/05/01/russia-is-a-product-of-the-second-world-war-in-terms-of-demography/]

Rosstat's new data shows that Russia as it is today is very much a product of the Second World War, at least in terms of demography.

At first I thought it was a little bit hokey, but Rosstat's decision to celebrate the 70th anniversary of victory in world war two with the publication of a "jubilee statistical compilation" was actually a brilliant one. [http://www.gks.ru/free_doc/doc_2015/vov_svod_1.pdf]

By their very nature wars inevitably give rise to enormously strong emotions: the dislocation, pain, loss, and suffering that are inherent to armed conflict are remembered much more vividly than "normal" civilian life.

And, as readers of this column undoubtedly know, there's not another war anywhere in the world that is remembered with more passionate intensity than the Great Fatherland War is in Russia. Even after 70 years, Russians' memories of the struggle against Germany have a strength to them that has long since ceased to be the case in the West. Yes they can be (and, unfortunately, often are) cynically used by the authorities, but it seems safe to say that Russians' emotions about the war are genuine and are not simply the imagined creation of Kremlin propaganda. Indeed it would be rather strange if a country that suffered as much as Russia did during the war didn't remember things just a little more strongly than is the case in the United States or Great Britain.

But emotions can often obfuscate more than they illuminate, hinder as much as they help. No one's memories should be discounted offhand, but when trying to understand a historical occurrence with the magnitude and mind-bending level of violence and destruction of the Second World War it helps to start from a position of objective fact. Only after one comes to a general understanding of the war's cost (how many people fought, how many people died, how many weapons they used and where they used them) can its constituent parts be placed in the appropriate context.

I've not seen another publication that so concisely and so straightforwardly presents the nightmarish costs incurred by the Soviet people in the triumph over fascist Germany as the recent Rosstat publication. There's (thankfully!) almost none of the hysterical rhetoric than often creeps up when Russian government organs try to explain the "triumph over fascism," there's simply a long list of charts and figures that distill enormously complicated events into easily digestible bits of information.

The most amazing comes on the report's 28th page. There's nothing particularly complicated about it at first glance: it's a simple graphical description of the Soviet population's "age and gender structure" at the beginning of 1946 (an "age pyramid" in the often dry and boring parlance of demographers). The figure is color coded to indicate both the actual condition of the Soviet population at that time as well as what it would have been if the demographic trends of 1940 had continued uninterrupted.

I've been looking at these sorts of charts for a long time, but I almost dropped my coffee when I saw this one. The human costs of the war really do beggar belief.

The first and most obvious costs are the people (primarily men between the ages of 19 and 40) who were actually killed in combat. And, as you might expect, these losses were positively enormous: in some age cohorts, fully half the men who should have been alive in 1946 were not.

Somewhat surprisingly the biggest absolute and proportional losses seem to have fallen on those men who were roughly 30 years old when the war started. In most cinematic depictions of the war that I've seen the average rank and file soldier is presented as a fresh-faced recruit straight out of high school, but this evidently isn't a particularly accurate presentation of what actually happened.

Another thing that was somewhat surprising was the relative paucity of losses among the female part of the population. The German occupation of the Baltics, Ukraine, and large sections of European Russia was famously barbaric. Civilians living in those areas were treated brutishly, often for a period of many years. Any number of films ("Come and See" for example) display in quite excoriating detail the horrific ways in which the Nazis treated the people whom they occupied. But unlike the entire generation of young men that was "missing" as a result of the war, from a demographic standpoint Soviet women were not impacted to nearly the same degree. Given what I had read about the egregious losses among civilians in places like Leningrad, Stalingrad, and Rostov this was unexpected.

But what really blew me away was the "unseen" demographic cost of the war: those children that would have been born had pre-war fertility patterns been sustained throughout the 1940's. Here the losses are even more nightmarish than those suffered by young males of prime combat age. In 1946 there were roughly 2.5 million children between the ages of 0 and 5 living in the Soviet Union. There should have been around 6.5 million. These losses of four million lost births won't show up anywhere on a monument or a casualty roster, but that doesn't make them any less real. Indeed, from the standpoint of their impact on Russia's future they were likely even more significant than the millions of young men who died in combat, permanently lowering Russia's potential population.

The Rosstat publication shows that, in a very literal sense, Russia as it is today is very much a product of the Second World War. Had the cataclysmic war with Germany not taken place, or had it not been so enormously costly, Russia would be a totally different country inhabited by many more (and very different) people than is actually the case.

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 #7
Russian oil production remains at post-Soviet high in April

May 2 (Reuters) - Russian oil and gas condensate production, among the world's largest, remained at a post-Soviet record level of 10.71 million barrels per day in April, underpinned by a recent recovery in oil prices, Energy Ministry data showed on Saturday.

Global oil prices jumped 21 percent in April to over $66 a barrel due to slowing drilling activity and increasing political tensions in the Middle East, having collapsed from a peak of $115 per barrel in June last year.

The price slump has significantly hurt the Russian economy, which relies on oil and natural gas for around half the federal budget revenues. Russia's GDP contracted by 3.4 percent in March year on year.

Russian production of oil and gas condensate, a type of ultra-light oil, stood at 43.830 million tonnes in April, the data showed.

A Russian Energy Ministry delegation will fly to Vienna next month to meet officials from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.

So far Russia, which is not an OPEC member, has failed to persuade OPEC to cut oil output in order to prop up prices.

Last month, OPEC oil supply jumped to its highest in more than two years, boosted by record or near-record supplies from Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

Rosneft, Russia's leading oil producer, cut its oil production by 0.1 percent in April to 3.81 million barrels per day.

Total Russian oil exports via pipeline monopoly Transneft edged up by 0.7 percent to 4.4 million barrels per day, or 18.021 million tonnes in April.

Russia is aiming to increase its crude oil exports in the coming years and the Energy Ministry expects exports to be 3 million tonnes higher this year.

Natural gas output was 52.64 billion cubic metres (bcm), or 1.75 bcm per day, down from 1.78 bcm per day in March. The Energy Ministry did not publish gas output data for Gazprom , the world's top natural gas producer.

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#8
Russia cuts key interest rate, hopes worst of crisis over
By Jason Bush, Lidia Kelly and Alexander Winning

MOSCOW, April 30 (Reuters) - Russia's central bank cut its main lending rate by 1-1/2 percentage points on Thursday, its third rate cut this year, a sign that it believes the worst of an economic crisis is over.

The cut to 12.5 percent follows the rouble's recovery in recent weeks after a dramatic decline last year as global oil prices fell and Western economic sanctions over Moscow's role in the Ukraine conflict bit.

The cut was larger than the single point predicted by a majority of analysts, although markets had been pricing in the possibility of a bigger reduction.

In resisting a larger cut, the bank showed it remains worried about inflation and financial stability, especially with sanctions still in place and a truce in eastern Ukraine between pro-Russian separatists and government forces looking shaky.

"This looks like a compromise decision," said Christopher Granville, managing director at Trusted Sources consultancy in London, after the bank cut its one-week minimum auction repo rate from 14 percent..

"The rate cut fell short of those on the radical end of the spectrum while reflecting the bank's commitment to moving steadily and sequentially to bring down its key rate."

The central bank said inflation expectations remained high but that it would be ready to make further rate cuts if inflation slows from its current 16.5 percent as expected.

The rouble briefly pared losses after the central bank announcement before drifting back down.

"The rouble was pricing in a bigger reduction -- in the region of 200 basis points," VTB Capital analyst Maxim Korovin said. "But for now inflation and inflationary expectations remain quite high and this probably restrained (the central bank)."

NOT OUT OF THE WOODS YET

The central bank raised its main lending rate by a total of 11.5 points last year, including a dramatic hike in December to 17 percent from 10.5 percent, to try to halt the rouble's decline. The Russian currency fell by about 40 percent last year, at one point touching an all-time low of 80 per dollar.

But the rouble is now back at around 51.5 to the dollar, and President Vladimir Putin told the nation this month that he expects the economy to return to growth in two years or less.

Finance Minister Anton Siluanov has declared the worst of the crisis over, largely thanks to a partial recovery in oil prices and an easing of fighting following a truce in east Ukraine. Western leaders hoping the sanctions might fuel opposition to Putin have been disappointed.

There has also been a revival of portfolio investment inflows and many major Western companies have shown confidence in Russia by staying put.

Analysts caution, however, that the rouble and economy remain vulnerable to fresh upsets.

"There is an inescapable fear that these rate cuts will have to be undone. Neither the rouble nor the Russian economy are out of the woods yet," said Nicholas Spiro, managing director at Spiro Sovereign Strategy in London.

International oil benchmark Brent was trading at $66 per barrel on Thursday, close to its 2015 highs, but some analysts warn that the oil price could fall back towards $50 per barrel as the market remains oversupplied.

"The oil price is perhaps the greatest risk for Russia, since a further bout of price weakness is a serious possibility in the next six to 12 months," Trusted Sources' Granville said.

The situation in eastern Ukraine remains fragile, with both sides accusing the other of violating the peace deal reached on Feb. 12, and there are widespread fears of renewed fighting.

Macro-advisory analyst Chris Weafer warned in a recent report that Russia's financial situation was "far from safe".

"The key risk remains a resumption of heavy fighting in eastern Ukraine," he warned. "The oil price has also performed better than had been expected. But the rally is based on expectations of supply reductions which, so far, have not happened."

In cutting rates, the central bank is partly responding to signs that inflation, which hit a 13-year high of 16.9 percent in March, has peaked.

It said in a statement said inflation was running at 16.5 percent as of April 27 and that it expected inflation to fall to below 8 percent in 12 months' time and to 4 percent in 2017.

The bank said economic output would contract in 2015 but attributed this largely to cyclical factors.

Nevertheless, the bank cannot ignore sharp declines in economic activity, which may make further reductions in interest rates necessary to stimulate lending.

Gross domestic product fell by 3.4 percent year-on-year in March, with economists polled by Reuters expecting a 4.1 percent contraction this year.

"As inflation risks abate further, the Bank of Russia will be ready to continue cutting the key rate," the bank said.
 

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 #9
Oilprice.com
May 3, 2015
Russian Economy May Be Stumbling Back To Its Feet
By Andy Tully

The Bank of Russia has cut interest rates for the third time so far this year, reinforcing forecasts by some government ministers that the country's economic woes are beginning to stabilize.

The central bank cut its key rate on April 30 to 12.5 percent, a reduction of 1.5 points, and said it would reduce it further - perhaps at its next board meeting on June 15 - as inflation cools down. The reason in part is to keep the ruble from rising too quickly in value, which would make Russian exports - notably oil and gas - more expensive on the world market.

The ruble has been on a rollercoaster ride in the past several months because of the plunging price of oil and Western sanctions imposed on Moscow for its involvement in the crisis in neighboring Ukraine. The currency hit a record low against the US dollar in December, but was up by 13 percent compared with the dollar just before the Bank of Russia acted.

This year began with an emergency rise in the key interest rate in January to help shore up the ruble. That evidently worked, and the central bank quickly lowered the rates in January and March to help cool off the quickly rebounding ruble.

Many analysts though, believe the Bank of Russia will be careful in adjusting interest rates to control the value of the ruble because outside forces could do the job themselves. One is Alexey Tretyakov of Aricapital Asset Management in Moscow. He told Bloomberg he believes that the bank "doesn't want to make too drastic decisions to weaken it."

"The ruble can weaken during summer months by itself, just under the influence of seasonal factors, like dividend payments and a lower current-account surplus," Tretyakov said.

This good economic news for Russia comes less than two weeks after Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich said the country's economy was showing signs of improvement.

"Oil prices are not as important to the Russian economy as before," he told Bloomberg TV on April 20. "As far as oil prices are concerned, we can live with different prices and still grow. ... [O]ur banking system and the economy are stabilizing."

This view doesn't entirely jibe with a report the World Bank issued on April 1, "The Dawn of a New Economic Era?" which said strong Western sanctions and the drop in oil prices would leave the Russian economy in worse shape than many had expected. It said Russia's economy would shrink by 3.8 percent this year and contract 0.3 percent more in 2016.

Nevertheless, the World Bank praised both the country's political leadership and the Bank of Russia for their handling of these challenges, which it said helped prevent a recession last year.

"The government and the Central Bank moved swiftly; policy responses to both shocks were adequate," the report said. "The economy was stabilized successfully: The planned switch to a free float of the ruble was advanced to November, and other measures to support financial stability were introduced promptly, including the recapitalization of banks in December."

Perhaps the current effort to stabilize the ruble will be similarly successful.

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 #10
Forbes.com
May 1, 2015
Many Western Firms Are Still Cautiously Optimistic About The Russian Market
By Mark Adomanis

If you read Western coverage of Russia long enough, you see that there is a really sharp divide between the views of people who work in academia, media, NGOs, and the government, and between people who work in business. This division is by no means ironclad. The famously hawkish Bill Browder did a lot of business in Moscow, while one of the primary advocates of engagement (Ambassador Jack Matlock) spent his entire career in public service.

But, in general, people who are in the business world seem much more bullish on Russia  than people who are primarily concerned with the public sector. You thus have think tank analysts proclaiming that the end is nigh while Western businesses in general are, in the words of Nestle Russia CEO Maurizio Parnello, "still confident in Russia's long-term prospects."

 The Croatian food company Podravka is a particularly interesting case study of this general trend. Croatia is, as I have written before, trapped in a low growth paradigm and has been ever since it joined the European Union. Measured in Euros, Croatia's GDP in 2014 remained smaller than it was all the way back in 2007.

Podravka, like virtually all Croatian companies, currently finds itself in a position in which it needs to expand into new markets if it hopes to achieve any significant revenue growth. As Bloomberg  noted, the CEO Zvonimir Mrsic announced that the company is in the process of raising $71 million in new capital to fund aggressive expansion in Central and Eastern Europe and, in particular, in Russia.

Now, as Bloomberg noted, Podravka has also focused on growing in markets across Africa, the Middle East, and China. But given the way that Russia is often presented, particularly after the recent ruble crisis, it seems noteworthy that it is on the company's radar at all. Despite all of the political problems that the EU has with Moscow, and despite the very real impact of economic sanctions, many businesspeople persist in the belief that Russia is a market worth being in.

Given the highly uneven nature of its post-communist reforms there is still a fair bit of low-hanging fruit in Russia, particularly in the consumer sector. Even as the economy was decelerating from 2012-2014, certain subsectors of consumer retail (most noticeably supermarkets and food processing) continued to experience supercharged growth rates of more than 20% a year. Someone is going to try and take advantage of all that growth, and there are a great many small and mid-sized companies in Eastern Europe which seem very well-positioned to do so. Even in the current environment they appear to be doing so with gusto.

Russia is never a country of black and white. Even when things looked great during the pre-2008 boom years there were significant underlying structural problems that were going unaddressed. By the same token at the present time, when economically speaking things can look simply catastrophic, there is a lot more going on behind the scenes than meets the eye.

And that is one of the real takeaways from the experience of Podravka: there appears to be a rising generation of entrepreneurs in the newly reformed economies of Eastern Europe who, in the clash between politics and profits, consistently choose to focus on the bottom line. Few in the region find Russia's policies laudable or worth imitating, and there is increasingly little love for the Russian government. But there is still confidence in the country's long-term economic potential.

Some might find that business analysis persuasive and others might not, but people with an interest in the region ought to keep it in mind.

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 #11
New York Times
May 1, 2015
New Owner for The Moscow Times and Vedomosti
By ANDREW ROTH

MOSCOW - A Finnish media company on Thursday said it would sell its one-third stake in Vedomosti, Russia's most influential business newspaper, as well as ownership of The Moscow Times, the country's only English-language daily, to a Russian buyer.

The deal, announced Thursday by the Finnish company, Sanoma, is the first in what is expected to be a wave of sales or restructurings in the Russian news media as foreign companies adjust their Russian assets under a new law that limits them to a 20 percent stake. Lawmakers adopted the legislation last year, saying it was needed to ensure Russia's national security.

Vedomosti, which regularly publishes investigations and opinion pieces critical of the government, has been a focus of official ire. Both Pearson, publisher of The Financial Times, and News Corp., which owns Dow Jones, also own 33-percent stakes in the newspaper, which by law they will be required to reduce by 2016.

In a statement, Sanoma said it began the process of selling its holdings in Russian news media in 2013, before the law was adopted, in order to focus on its "core markets."

"We are confident that these iconic titles are in good hands and will continue to develop as some of Russia's leading media titles," the company's group president and chief executive, Harri-Pekka Kaukonen, said in a statement. No price was given for the deal, but the company said it booked a capital gain of $8.9 million before currency translation adjustments.

The buyer was Demyan Kudryavtsev, a veteran Russian media manager and former business partner of Boris Berezovsky, who died in 2013. Mr. Kudryavtsev served as the general director of the Kommersant publishing house from 2006 until 2012.

Acquisitions in Russian news media, particularly those that involve politically sensitive publications, have raised concerns that the Kremlin could be inserting loyal businessmen to help dull critical reporting.

Oleg Kashin, a Russian journalist, defended Mr. Kudryavtsev's record at Kommersant, saying that he had maintained independence at the newspaper under successive oligarch owners despite external pressure.

"There were no forbidden topics, there was no censorship," Mr. Kashin said.

Mr. Kudryavtsev left Kommersant in 2012 amid scandal when an editor was fired for a magazine cover with an image of a voting ballot defaced with an offensive message to President Vladimir V. Putin.

Yet, Mr. Kudryavtsev's purchase of Sanoma's stake also raised a question about where he had found the money to buy all of the Finnish company's investments.

"I know Demyan," said Leonid Bershidsky, the founding editor of Vedomosti, who now lives in Berlin. "He is a good poet and a smart guy, but he doesn't have that kind of money, and if he did, he'd think of a better investment than a minority stake in an independent paper in Russia, of all places."

In an interview with the Russian news agency RBC on Thursday, Mr. Kudryavtsev said that the money was his own and that he had not approved his purchase of Vedomosti with the Kremlin.

The deal also ended 23 years of uninterrupted foreign ownership of The Moscow Times, which was founded by the Dutch publisher Derk Sauer in 1992.

Mr. Sauer, who sold the newspaper to Sanoma in 2008, said by telephone from the Netherlands that Mr. Kudryavtsev's main challenge would be making the paper profitable.

"I urged them to find an owner who supported it from an idealistic point of view because it is important that The Moscow Times stays alive," he said.

At the newspaper, the editor in chief, Nabi Abdullaev, welcomed news of the deal, saying it had put an end to "a certain atmosphere of suspense and lack of certainty about the future."

"I am glad it happened," Mr. Abdullaev wrote in response to written questions. "With the law on the ownership already adopted, it doesn't make sense to be concerned that much about the 'foreign-Russian' thing, but more about the 'which Russian' variant."

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 #12
Business New Europe
www.bne.eu
April 30, 2015
Sanoma sells Vedomosti to comply with Russian media law
bne IntelliNews

Finnish publishing company Sanoma has sold its 33.3% share in the Russian business daily Vedomosti to publishing executive Demyan Kudryavtsev, in the latest shake-up to Russia's media landscape caused by new legislation limiting foreign ownership.

The stake in Delovoi Standard, the publisher of the daily, was sold to a company called Ivania Ltd, while Sanoma also sold its United Press portfolio to MoscowTimes LLC. Both Ivania and Moscow Times are controlled by Kudryavtsev.

Before the deal, the assets were part of Sanoma Independent Media (SIM), which publishes The Moscow Times, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, Men's Health, Woman's Health, National Geographic, and Grazia magazines.

Sanoma posted €104.1mn of net losses in 4Q14 in Russia and Ukraine compared with €31.2mn a year earlier, caused by impairment of assets and devaluation of currencies, the company said in February.

United Press reported revenue of €2.5mn in the first quarter, while Vedomosti revenue in 2013 amounted to RUB1.1bn (€18.9mn/$21.1mn at current rates), the daily said, adding that 2014 financials were not available.

Neither Sanoma nor Kudryavtsev disclosed the value of the deal, although it had been reported earlier that Kudryavtsev was ready to pay €6mn for the 33.3% stake inVedomosti. The Finnish publisher said in a statement that it would make "a non-recurring capital gain of around €8mn before currency translation adjustment". This means Sanoma sold its assets for €8mn more than their worth as estimated by the publisher itself, Sberbank CIB analyst Anna Lepetukhina told Vedomosti. "Obviously the total sum of the deal is higher," Lepetukhina added.

Kudryavtsev is known on the media market as the former head of the Kommersantpublishing house. He was appointed in 2006 by the paper's then owner Boris Berezovsky and held the position till 2012. Commenting on the deal, Sanoma Group President and CEO Harri-Pekka Kaukonen said that the "iconic titles are in good hands".

"At the same time, the agreement to sell these assets is an example of our strategy in action, as we look to focus our resources on our core markets, in which we believe we can create the most value for our shareholders," Kaukonen said.

The deal follows the sale of Sanoma's stake in Fashion Press to US publisher Hearst, agreed in December 2014.

According to Vedomosti sources close to the deal, Dow Jones and FT Group intend to remain co-owners of the paper. "To be partners with these global companies is very useful, it can be a great school. I see no point in immediate changes," Vedomosti cited Kudryavtsev as saying. He also said he would not insist on any changes in the paper's top-management or editorial staff.

Sanoma bought Vedomosti in 2005, and published the paper together with Dow Jones and FT Group. In 2013 the company said it would leave the Russian market, and started to look for buyers.

Rumours about Kudryavtsev's interest in Vedomosti emerged at the beginning of 2015 but the publisher struggled to find buyers for its SIM assets. In February 2015, Sanoma said that it hoped to sell all Russian assets by the end of 2015 to comply with a new legislation on foreign ownership in local media.

Adopted in September 2014, the law limits the foreign presence in any Russian media's capital to 20% or less and bans non-direct ownership. The owners will must finalise all changes in the structure of their business by the end of 2016.

Broadcaster CTC Media is the largest media company affected by the new legislation.Vedomosti reported on April 28 that the company may sell its assets to Russia's Rostelecom. According to the daily's sources, the talks are not at an advanced stage. The details about the size of the stake were not provided.

According to VTB Capital, the purchase of a TV media company would be a bold move by Rostelecom, as CTC's business of advertising and content production deviates from Rostelecom's core business, and synergies between the two are questionable. However, the changes in media law could make the valuation of media assets potentially appealing, analysts said in a note.

CTC Media comprises several TV channels and has a market capitalisation of $1.5bn. Sweden's MTG holds 39% stake in the company, Telcrest Investments Ltd controlled by Yury Kovalchuk and his partners has a 25% stake, and the remaining 36% is free float which also might be partly controlled be foreigners.

According to Vedomosti, the new law will affect more than half of the Russian media. The dozens of non-Russian TV channels currently broadcasting in the country include Viasat, Discovery and Animal Planet. Apart from SIM, foreigners control several publishing houses including Conde Nast, Hearst Shkulev Media and Burda. The Forbes business magazine is published in Russia by Germany's Axel Springer. 

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 #13
TASS
Chechen leader ready to testify in Nemtsov's murder case

Moscow, 30 April: The head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, has announced that he is ready to give evidence in the case of the murder of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov if this helps the investigation. He announced this today in an interview with Govorit Moskva radio station.

"I am happy to give evidence. There is no problem. Even more so if the children (of Nemtsov - TASS note) demand this. If it is proven that Zaur Dadayev was the killer, let him serve the prison term that the court hands down to him. If a person commits a crime, he should bear the responsibility for this," Kadyrov said.

Kadyrov added that he was interested in finding out what questions Boris Nemtsov's lawyers wanted to ask him. "I find it interesting to hear what they say, how they say it and why they have questions for me," he said.

Boris Nemtsov was shot dead late in the evening on 27 February on Bolshoy Moskvoretskiy bridge close to the Kremlin. There are five people implicated in the criminal case.

[Passage omitted: In addition to the head of the Republic of Chechnya, lawyers Vadim Prokhorov and Olga Mikhaylova, who are acting on behalf of Nemtsov's four children, are also insisting on questioning State Duma deputy Adam Delimkhanov and deputy commander of Sever (North) battalion Ruslan Geremeyev.]

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 #14
Interfax
May 2, 2015
Russia ready to cooperate with West in tackling terror, regional conflicts - Sergei Ivanov

Russia will still cooperate with the United States and Europe in fighting terrorism, resolving regional conflicts and countering other modern challenges, if partners are keen on that, says Sergei Ivanov, the chief of the Russian presidential administration.

"New threats and challenges emerged, for example, terrorism, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, regional conflicts. Russia is actively involved in solving all these problems, and we cooperate with U.S., Western Europe," Ivanov said in an interview with the RT television.

"We will never change our principled approach towards solving these problems: we will further work together with our foreign partners, if they, of course, are still interested in that," Ivanov said.

An example of efficient cooperation is the framework agreement over Iran's nuclear problem, which was reached in Lausanne in early April, he said.
"This is a serious breakthrough," he said.

At the same time, a lack of coordination of tackling such problems leads to frustrating consequences, Ivanov said.

"Let us see what happened in the Middle East, in Libya, for example. The United Nations did not make any resolution that would address the bombing of this country. And what we are seeing now are hypocritical attempts to stem the flow of illegal immigrants from Libya who are trying to reach Italy, for example," the Kremlin official said.

On this issue, the European countries "are facing the results of their own policy," he said.

"Of course, it is a terrible human tragedy: hundreds of people died. But the main cause of such illegal immigration is the bombings of Libya and the killing of Gaddafi. Under Gaddafi, there was no illegal immigration," Ivanov said.

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 #15
Russia Direct
May 1, 2015
Russian experts give up hope for reset in US-Russian relations in 2016
Think Tank Review: During April, the Russian expert community turned its attention to the upcoming 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, focusing on the ability of candidates such as Hillary Clinton to change the dynamics of the U.S.-Russia relationship.
By Anastasia Borik

The upcoming 2016 U.S. presidential election and the ongoing discord between Russia and the West were the main topics discussed by the Russian expert community in April. In addition, Russian experts discussed the implications of the recent Kazakh presidential election, which saw the incumbent, Nursultan Nazarbayev, swept into office with more than 97 percent of the vote.

Elections in the United States: Looking ahead to 2016

Russian experts have started to closely monitor America's leading presidential candidates for the upcoming election campaign in 2016. Of particular interest is Hillary Clinton, the presumed candidate for the Democratic Party.

Dmitri Trenin, head of the Moscow Carnegie Center, is pessimistic about Clinton's campaign bid, saying that he "does not expect a new 'reset' in relations, no matter who wins the elections in 2016." Trenin does not expect any attempts from Hillary Clinton to work on reconciliation with Russia, believing it impossible in the current international political context.

However, he believes that the Democrats have made the right choice, since they "traditionally broaden the horizons." "Kennedy was the first Catholic, Obama the first African-American, and now obviously, it is time for a woman," says Trenin. "Clinton has vast experience, and last but not least, the ability to raise money."

Fyodor Lukyanov, head of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, also believes Hillary to be a promising candidate, because she has the "prominence, experience, vast potential to raise funds, and her husband Bill Clinton - a politician from God, and the best speechmaker in the United States. And finally, her gender identity."

At the same time, Lukyanov lists her shortcomings: an inability to communicate with some parts of the American electorate, her age and possible illness, and the ability of critics to characterize her run for the presidency as simply a re-run of the past - "Clinton-Bush - 25 Years Later." (That is, if Jeb Bush will run for the Republicans).

Just like Trenin, Lukyanov also does not expect any warming in U.S.-Russian relations if Clinton wins the election, because "for the Clinton team, which was formed at the beginning of the 1990s, Russia remains a constant reminder of their failures. That which at one time seemed like an unfortunate exception, now is beginning to appear as a fundamental blunder."

Russia-West relations on the decline

A constant topic of interest for Russian analysts remains the relationship dynamic between Russia and the West, and especially between Russia and the United States. In April, these experts reasoned that the relations were growing cooler, and on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, they are saying that today it would be extremely difficult for Russia to join in a common effort with the West against a threat of the scale that German Nazism posed in the 1940s.

Thus Fyodor Lukyanov, head of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, in particular, writes that, "The celebrations of the 70th Anniversary of the victory in World War II have become another clear proof of how the international situation, and the balance of power, have changed."

He points out that, "The days when, despite all the political and ideological differences, the celebrations stressed the ability of countries to unite in the name of the struggle against evil, are now in the past."

Yan Vaslavsky, an expert at MGIMO, noted that in the current conditions, it is becoming more and more difficult to build dialogue, and to go back to the previous level, and not to mention the obvious - "the neglect of the most important principles of foreign policy activities, the value of keeping one's word and guarantees." Vaslavsky considers that the deterioration in the general atmosphere is directly linked to the U.S., and that Europe and Russia would have a chance to reach agreement, if not for the "pushy middleman."

Dmitri Trenin, Director of the Moscow Carnegie Center, looks at the deteriorating relations from a slightly different point of view. He considers that it is wrong to compare the current period to that of the Cold War, because "today, we do not have this symmetry: for Russia, the United States is very large and very threatening, while for the U.S., Russia is a problem of the second or even third echelon."

Nevertheless, the expert believes that we should not underestimate the level of confrontation, and in many respects, the current situation is much more strained than in the previous years. This is because now we have a "game without rules," and "a conflict today is really fraught with serious consequences if all actors are not properly controlled, as well as all the forces involved in a conflict, and especially in Ukraine."

Igor Ivanov and Dominique de Villepin from Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), noting the gradual collapse of hopes for the creation of a "Greater Europe" and an alliance with the United States, are calling for concrete measures to be taken in order to combat the crisis. They are especially appealing to the younger generation, in which experts see hope for future dialogue:

"Let us recall the experience of France and Germany, which achieved national reconciliation after the signing of the famous Elysée Treaty in 1963,  and the establishment of the Common Department of Youth. We would like to propose the laying of the foundation for reconciliation between Russia and Europe, by creating a similar Russian-European Youth Agency, on the basis of student exchange programs, grants to authors of projects in the field of entrepreneurship and innovation, support for language training and many other measures."

Making sense of elections in Kazakhstan

Early presidential elections in Kazakhstan - one of the closest partners of Russia in the post-Soviet space - also attracted the interest of Russian experts. In February 2015, the incumbent President Nursultan Nazarbayev announced plans to hold early presidential elections, the results of which no one doubted, either inside the country or abroad. Nazarbayev received support from 97.7 percent of the voters.

The opinions of analysts diverged. Some were convinced that the elections demonstrated real support for Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan, while others have argued that these elections were fraudulent, and the outcome was predictable from the start. At the same time, the experts speculated about the motives that led the Nazarbayev to hold such early elections.

Those that believe that the election results show support for Nursultan Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan include Andrey Kazantsev (MGIMO). Kazantsev said that, "The recent elections were not so much about the Kazakh people making a choice, because this was obvious, as much as a 'vote of confidence' to show support for their President." At the same time, the analyst recognized that, "he did not see an alternative" among the other political figures of Kazakhstan, and in many respects, this determines the choice of the citizens.

Arkady Dubnov from Carnegie Moscow Center falls into the second category of experts skeptical of the election, noting that, "Given the "Nazarbayev Cult" that has been created in Kazakhstan, these presidential elections look like an artificial, if not forced exercise, and the turnout of 95 percent - is simply unrealistic."

"Electoral sociology teaches us that interest in participating in elections drops significantly if the results are known in advance, and they do not have any element of intrigue." Dubnov also noted that the decision to hold early elections was connected with the shaky position of the Kremlin, which could pull Kazakhstan into a crisis because of Russia's own economic problems. In such circumstances, says the expert, changing a "trusted leader" seemed irrational for the Kazakh elite.

Sergey Markov of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy considers that Nazarbayev "has always been a proactive player" and the decision on early elections is a very timely move. Nazarbayev, the expert writes, "offers the best solutions, in terms of both the economy and social relations, as well as in matters of foreign policy."

Besides this, there are his "inherent strong political will, a complex synthesis of reform policies and hard pragmatism." According to Markov, in such conditions, and with such premises, alternatives to Nazarbayev simply do not exist.

Alexey Malashenko from Carnegie Moscow Center talks not only about the election results, which, in his view, were obvious, but also about the re-elected President's plans to reform the political system. Malashenko talked about upcoming changes, and asked questions about when these changes would be made.

In particular, the expert questions the future existence of the Eurasian project, being promoted by Russia, and for the moment supported by Kazakhstan. In the future, the expert noted, "The fate of 'Eurasianism' is uncertain, in particular the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), in a renewed and post-reform Kazakhstan."

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#16
Russia to reach strategic weapons parity with US by 2018 - missile design head

Moscow. 30 April. INTERFAX-AVN. The leadership of the country realizes the importance of strategic deterrence capabilities and is doing everything possible to develop them, said General Designer of Missile Systems, RAN [Russian Academy of Sciences] Academician, and Hero of Labour Yuriy Solomonov.

"Nuclear weapons, as the most destructive means on Earth, as paradoxical as it may seem, are simultaneously a guarantor of peace. This is why the leadership of our country is giving great attention today to maintaining nuclear parity with our potential enemies," said Yu. Solomonov at a meeting with graduates of several Moscow schools on the eve of Victory Day.

In his words the country's leadership understands that in order to ensure the security of the state "it is of uppermost importance to ensure the reliability of strategic nuclear weaponry."

"It is precisely for this reason that new projects were initiated, which in coming years will be transformed into specific missile systems," said the General Designer, who specifically led the work to create the RVSN [Strategic Missile Troops] Topol-M and Yars missile systems, as well as the Bulava sea-based missile systems.

In his words all of the plans intended to develop strategic nuclear forces are being successfully implemented, which will allow parity with the USA to be achieved. "We have every basis to say that by 2018, within the context of the limitations of the START-3 [SNV-3] agreement currently in effect regarding the numbers of warheads and carriers of nuclear assets, we will achieve absolute parity with the USA," said Yu. Solomonov.

In his turn the ex-chief of the Main Staff of the RVSN, Colonel-General Viktor Yesin, informed INTERFAX-AVN in October 2014 that "based on the number of deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-based ballistic missiles (BRPL), and heavy bombers, which actually represent the real combat capability of the strategic nuclear forces, Russia, substantially lags behind the USA, as it has in the past." "Russia has 538 units of such nuclear assets; the USA has an additional 266 units. Thus, for the time being, unfortunately, we continue to lag behind the Americans," V. Yesin said.

In his words the number of deployed carriers (i.e., those ready for immediate use) to a large extent represents the capabilities of the strategic nuclear forces, rather than the total number of deployed and non-deployed carriers.

But meanwhile it should be considered, the expert said, that in order to conform to the 1 February 2018 level of 700 units of deployed carriers that was established in the START-3 Treaty, Russia will have to solve a complex two-part task.

"Withdrawing carriers forces with depleted service lives from the order of battle of [Russia's] strategic nuclear forces and replacing them with the same number of new carriers, would not only compensate for these losses, but could close the gap in effect on 1 September 2014 of more than 170 units from the level established by the Treaty for deployed carriers. It is substantially simpler for the USA to fulfil the conditions of START-3. They will only have to reduce the number of excess carriers," said V. Yesin.

The new Russian-American START Treaty became effective on 5 February 2011. In accordance with the treaty each side must have no more than 700 units of deployed ground-and sea-based intercontinental ballistic missiles and heavy bombers; 1550 warheads on deployed ICBMs, ballistic missile submarines and heavy bombers; and 800 units of deployed and non-deployed launchers and bombers.

The Treaty remains in force for 10 years and it can be extended another five years.

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 #17
Business New Europe
www.bne.eu
April 30 2015
MOSCOW BLOG: Order of battle
Ben Aris in Moscow
 
Russia will commemorate the end of World War II on May 9 with its traditional military parade through Red Square. But this year the parade will be more closely watched than normal, as it will also be a chance for Russian President Vladimir Putin to show off the fruits of a massive spending binge on new weapons. The whole parade will also serve as a warning to the West and underscore the point that Russia is ready to continue fighting if no resolution to the Ukraine crisis that suits the Kremlin is found.

Talk of war is in the air as tensions remain high. The fragile success of the Minsk II agreement signed early this year is the dyke holding back a serious deterioration that could lead to open warfare between Russia and Ukraine. And while Ukraine has withdrawn its official forces, the militias being used by both sides remain in the field and are maintaining a low level war. Peace in the Donbas is still far off.

Putin is enjoying sky-high popularity at home after successfully tapping a vein of nationalism over the Ukraine conflict. The humiliation that came with the collapse of the Soviet Union and end to Russia's superpower status has to a large extent been erased by the Kremlin's standoff with the US, which has been largely powerless to prevent Putin's machinations in East Ukraine. Moreover, the sanctions have played into the hands of Putin, who has successfully portrayed cutting Russia off from the Western world as a return to the Cold War siege mentality.

The upshot is that Russian disapproval of the West has soared to all-time highs, with two-thirds (68%) of Russians believing that the threat of a military clash with the West is now more real than at any time in the last 15 years, according to an opinion poll from the state-owned polling agency VTsIOM in March. Two out of every five Russians think it's necessary to increase spending on the military to boost its strength, despite the economic slowdown that is already eroding living standards, up from only 30% who thought the same a year earlier.

The military spending is also weighing heavily on the national accounts. Russia's Finance Ministry reiterated its intention to cut this year's total spending plan by 10% in March, which implies zero nominal spending growth for the full year. The government plans to cut state investment projects and freeze wages of state employees, but military spending has been exempted, which will see the largest year-on-year increase this year.

The federal budget ran a RUB278bn (5.7% of GDP) deficit in January versus a large surplus in January a year earlier, largely caused by this massive increase in military spending. Despite the economic slowdown, government revenue has been performing surprisingly well: January revenues amounted to RUB1.32 trillion, up 8.7% of the full-year plan, ahead of economists' expectations. However, expenditures grew even faster to RUB1.59 trillion, or 10.3% of the full-year plan; expenditures are thus well ahead of schedule this year and were the main reason behind the budget deficit in January.

"In fact, very sharp acceleration in spending growth (atypical for the beginning of any given year) caused the unexpected deficit: the spending of RUB1.6 trillion in Jan 2015 substantially exceeds the normal RUB1.0-1.1 trillion for this month as well as the low base of RUB760bn in 2014," said Sberbank's chief economist, Evgeny Gavrilenkov, in a note. "Massive military spending of RUB710bn (over 20% of the annual defence spending plan) caused the spike."

This year's Kremlin shopping list includes orders for two new missile systems, 701 new tanks, 1,545 new armoured vehicles, 126 new aircraft and 88 new attack helicopters, the state-owned TASS news agency reports.

T-14

With the heavy military spending, Putin has basically sacrificed Russia's economic prosperity for the meantime as it races to modernise its military and close the gap with the West. He is banking on the high incomes that Russians enjoy as well as tightening control over the press and opposition to buy enough time to complete this upgrade before living standards fall far enough to catalyse popular protests. It is a fine calculation, but given his poll numbers so far he is getting away with it.

Some of the fruits of all this spending will be on show during the parade. One of the most interesting additions for the spies watching the parade on telly will be Russia's new Armata main battle tank, or T-14, a state-of-the-art motorised gun.

Russia's tank development programme was not going well with the first modernisation programme cancelled due to ineptitude and corruption, but it seems the problems have been overcome. This year Russia will showcase a brand new high-tech tank that is basically an armoured capsule in the front for the crew with powerful guns that can be fired remotely if need be. Photos appeared on the Russian armed forces website in April, but the highly secret new weapons systems it carries were covered with a canvas.

"The new vehicles are principally clean-slate designs and represent the biggest change in Russia's armored fighting vehicle families since the 1960s and 1970s," IHS Jane's Defence Weekly said in a breathless report after the photos appeared.

Other motorised guns on display will be the T-90A tanks, BMP-3 armoured vehicles, MSTA and Khosta self-propelled guns, Tornado-G multiple rocket launchers, TOR, Strela-10 and Tunguska air-defence systems, and the Tigr armoured cars.

S-400

Another bit of kit will be the S-400 anti-aircraft missile system. This is Russia's best missile system that can take down two flying objects - planes or inbound missiles - at a time. Russia has jealously guarded it for years, selling the less effective S-300 system to allies like India.

And taking a leaf out of the US playbook of rewarding allies with arms, Russia lifted an export ban on the S-300 system to Iran in April, much to the consternation of Washington. Delivery of the first batteries is due sometime this year.

However, as part of the Ukraine conflict and the Kremlin's "pivot to the east", the Kremlin announced in April it would sell the far more advanced S-400 system to China - the first time Russia agreed to export its best missile defence system. This could change the balance of power in east Asia, as the S-400 can reach targets across Taiwan, whereas the older system's reach stopped short of the Taiwanese coast. The system also means missiles fired in China could reach Japan and the Indian cities of New Delhi and Calcutta.

Iskander

The Iskander tactical ballistic missile systems is another star of Russia's battle order and will also be on show during the parade. An offensive missile system, Russia threatened to deploy Iskander missiles in its Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad in 2013 as tensions rose in the run-up to the current conflict with the West, which seriously unsettled western military experts. Like the S-400, the Iskander missiles have a range of about 400km and so could hit many major cities in Western Europe.

Topol M

The RT-2PM2 Topol M missiles are a regular feature at the annual parade and one of the few missiles that has been developed since the fall of the Soviet Union.

A powerful intercontinental ballistic missile, it would be the missile of choice in any nuclear exchange with the West should it come to it. The missile carries up to six warheads and has a range up to 10,500km, which means it can hit any country in the world. And because it is "cold launched" from a motorised platform, it is impossible to know where they are hidden in Russia's vast hinterland.

But these missiles are due to be replaced by a new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) called the Sarmat in 2018 and known in the West as the SS-18 Satan missile. Russia's space agency (Roscosmos) also said it plans to begin in 2018 the development of the Fenix medium-class carrier rocket to replace the Soyuz rocket family, spending $600m on this missile development alone, as part of a massive modernization programme to Russia's missile armory.

Sukhoi jets

Amongst the crowd-pleasers will be a flyover by the Sukhoi 27 fighter jets, or possibly the newer state-of-the-art Su-35 jets - a high point of the parade every year. Russia's family of supersonic jets is as good as anything any other country has and remains the backbone of the air force.

The newer Su-35 is unparalleled, with only the US Lockheed Martin F-22 fifth generation fighter coming close to its specifications. Long range with the ability to sustain supersonic speeds without relying on afterburners, some military experts have called it the "killer in the sky".

Again to the consternation of the West, Russia did a deal with Minsk in 2013 to station a squadron of these jets in the Belarusian capital, right on Europe's border. Russia has also been selling Su-27s and more recently Su-35s to its allies India and China.

Long-distance bombers

Long-distance bombers Blackjack, Bear and Backfire, which have been unsettling European nations and the US in recent months, will also almost certainly feature in the flyover during the parade.

Russia will renew the production of its Tu-160 (Blackjack) supersonic strategic bomber and missile carrier, Russian defense minister, General Sergei Shoigu, said only two days before the parade.

The Tu-95 and Tu-22M3 (Bear and Backfire) remain the backbone of the Russian long-distance bomber fleet. Despite being developed in the Soviet-era, they remain a formidable threat to both Europe and the US as recent incursions into the airspace of both have shown, as they have a range of 7,300km without refueling.

Submarines

Obviously, Russia's submarines won't be display at the parade, but here too Russia is making rapid progress. It is currently building its fifth Yassen class attack submarine, which are due to become the main multipurpose nuclear-powered submarines in the Russian military.

At the same time the submarine port in Crimea is being modernised to serve as a major base for the fleet. Thanks to their stealth, these subs can be quickly and easily deployed to the Mediterranean Sea and on to the Atlantic ocean.

New Cold War

As bne IntelliNews wrote in its cover story Rekindling the Cold War in March 2013, all this spending on hardware was already apparent well before the situation in Ukraine spun out of control, but the pace has picked up since then. The Kremlin hopes to have modernised about three-quarters of Russia's armed forces by 2018 and European experts have already expressed doubt that they could defeat Russia's army in a all-out confrontation without help from the US.

And the spending won't stop. Analysts point to the US decision to unilaterally withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in June 2002 as laying the groundwork for the current Russian accelerated spending on arms. This was followed by a US-backed "missile shield" programme for Europe to protect against launches by "rogue states", but drew very strenuous objections from Moscow, which saw the missiles as targeting Russia.

Since then relations have deteriorated further and more of the security infrastructure ensuring peace has decayed. On March 10 Russia announced that effective immediately it was halting all cooperation with the West under the terms of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), citing Nato's de facto breach of the treaty that was signed by Mikhail Gorbachev at the end of the Cold War. The suspension of the CFE means there are no restrictions on Russia's military build-up that could threaten Europe.

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#18
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
April 30, 2015
TROIKA REPORT: EU ready to pin down Gazprom; battle lines drawn against Russia at Arctic Council; Moscow alarmed as Islamic State targets Afghanistan
RUSSIA BEYOND THE HEADLINES presents its weekly analytical program TROIKA REPORT, featuring a look at three of the most high-profile recent developments in international affairs.
By Sergey Strokan andVladimir Mikheev

1. Engaging the West
EU ready to pin down Gazprom with a €4 billion fine

Reigniting an old dispute over Gazprom's place on the European energy market, the European Commission, namely Margrethe Vestager, the EU's competition commissioner, has pulled the trigger on the Russian energy company by sending it a Statement of Objections. This looks like a disengagement policy on the part of the EU, Moscow experts told Troika Report.
The document accuses Gazprom of violating several regulations supporting the free market, in particular, fair play in the energy sector.

Firstly, Gazprom is charged with partitioning the market by introducing territorial restrictions and thus preventing customers from re-exporting gas to other clients. The EU claims this contractual provision has enabled Gazprom to over-charge without fear that its gas could flow to other markets and be sold much cheaper.

Secondly, Gazprom has linked its pipeline projects to supply deals and prices, and it left few choices for the EU nations, which are importing Russian gas, to diversify and find alternative suppliers. This practice amounts to an abrasive breach of competition rules, according to the Statement of Objections.

Thirdly, in the Statement of Objections Ms. Vestager's office claims that oil indexation in Gazprom's long-term contracts was being used to charge unfairly high prices in five different countries: Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, and Bulgaria.

Gazprom has rejected the charges contained in the Statement of Objections, calling them "unfounded" and insisting the Russian energy giant has adhered to "all the norms of international law and national legislation" where it does business. Gazprom's statement emphasized that the Statement of Objections is "just one of the stages of the antitrust investigation and does not imply that Gazprom is being held liable for any violation of the EU antitrust legislation." The official response also noted that Gazprom's pricing practices "meet the standards that are used by other producers and exporters of gas."

How relevant are the EU accusations, or rather the "allegations," as it was carefully phrased by the EU's competition commissioner? Does the Statement of Objections have a political lining? Troika Report approached a staunch critic of Gazprom, Mikhail Krutikhin, a partner and analyst at the Moscow-based RusEnergy consultancy, for comment:

"I do not believe this is political because the same experts have accused companies such as Google and Microsoft of violating European Union antitrust laws. Gazprom is a very interesting company in this sense. Some of the accusations appear irrelevant today. Gazprom has managed to abandon its monopolistic position, which prevented other suppliers of gas reaching out to end consumers. In September last year, Gazprom announced that it had changed its strategy in Europe and no longer insisted on playing a monopoly role at every stage of the chain from Russian gas well to European gas burner. Gazprom decided to deliver gas only to a hub on the border of the European Union, allowing European companies to build access pipelines.

"The other accusation of the EU dealt with Gazprom's differentiated pricing for national markets. The further the country from the Russian border, the lower the price. This is a paradox, at first glance. But the fact is that Gazprom has been able to raise the price for countries which have no other means to meet their gas demand. These countries were ready to pay a premium on Gazprom gas because they had no alternative suppliers. This is the case for Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria and several others. These EU accusations about higher pricing will be difficult to prove.

"However, there are some serious charges against Gazprom, namely its subsidiaries and their fraud schemes. For instance, when Gazprom sold gas at a fraction of the real price to its subsidiaries, Overgas Holding AD in Bulgaria and Gazprom Germania, and then these two companies resold gas to a local distributor, Bulgargaz, at a price more than three times higher than the original one."

What next? The European Commission has given Gazprom 12 weeks to respond to the Statement of Objections. The Russian company has the right to call an oral hearing to make its defense, though industry experts question whether the threat of being fined up to €4 billion is realistic. Any solution will take months. But it is evident that a settlement, let's call it a "workable deal," would be preferred by both sides since the European Commission is hardly likely to find a worthy substitute for Gazprom as a key gas supplier even in the mid-term, let alone the short-term.
 
2. Globally speaking
Arctic Council: a new battlefield between Russia and the West?
 
Controversies over political issues, namely the difference between the Russian and Western approaches to the conflict in Ukraine, are threatening to ruin cooperation within the Arctic Council.

The ministerial meeting of the Arctic Council, held last week in the northern Canadian town of Iqaluit, almost turned into a verbal battlefield when Leona Aglukkaq, Canada's environmental minister and the chairwoman of the organization for the past two years, took Russia to task over its involvement in the hostilities in Ukraine.

This criticism came at a particularly inopportune moment. The drive to untap the mineral riches of the ice-capped region has increased competition between Arctic nations while the recent tensions between Russia and the West have resurrected the specter of the Cold War.

Recently, Oslo blamed Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin of violating the sanctions regime by setting foot on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen on his way to the North Pole. Moscow retorted that in its view Mr. Rogozin's short stop did not violate international law. Moscow's stance is as follows: according to the Svalbard Treaty of 1920, citizens of any treaty signatory country may visit the island without a visa, especially in the case of the Russian settlement, Barentsburg.

These two episodes bear witness to the danger of politicizing the work of the Arctic Council. The organization, which is made up of Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States, was created in 1996 as a diplomatic forum to foster understanding and cooperation in the region.

Canada and Norway have been among Russia's harshest critics over the development in Ukraine. Now the chairmanship has been passed over to the United States. Will recent adverse events turn the Arctic into a new terrain of hostilities?

Here is the opinion of Fred Weir, chief of Christian Science Monitor's Moscow bureau, who shared with Troika Report this somewhat pessimistic forecast:

"With the U.S. set to take over chairmanship of the Arctic Council for the next two years, we can basically expect to see the new Cold War tone extend to yet another forum of international cooperation. It's a pity, since the Arctic was one zone where, despite a bit of saber-rattling from Russia and Canada in recent years, it had looked as though a truly complicated problem of territorial division - of undersea resources opened up by climate change - was going to be solved in a rational spirit through the institutions of international law.

"But the crisis over Ukraine has been gradually poisoning East-West relations across the board over the past year. The outgoing chairman, Canada, has been one of the hard-line countries in terms of isolating and sanctioning Russia, and it used the position to cancel an Arctic Showcase event that was supposed to be held in Ottawa this month, just to block Russian participation. The other main hardliner, the U.S., is now set to take over. Hence, we can look forward to an increase in acrimony and tit-for-tat insults that will only serve to spoil the chances of cooperation in the Arctic for years to come."

Fred Weir's pessimism may be well founded but the parties concerned have not yet passed the point of no return. Russia's minister of natural resources and the environment, Sergei Donskoi, who attended the summit, emphasized that Russia was opposed to engaging in politics where the Arctic was concerned. He insisted that "there is no room here for confrontation or for fear mongering."

The sentiment was shared by Finland's foreign minister, Erkki Tuomioja, who did not like the prospect of political disputes becoming stumbling blocks in dealing with economic, social and environment issues in the Arctic. "It's in no one's interest to let problems elsewhere impact cooperation in the Arctic," he said.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, representing the new host nation of the Arctic Council, also struck a conciliatory note by saying that focusing matters on military activities in the region "could really deter" participants from the overall work, which should be focused on social and environmental issues.

As it stands, Troika Report believes that there is still a reasonable chance that the Arctic Council will not be engulfed in a vicious circle of tit-for-tat insults.
 
3. Going Eastward
ISIS targets Afghanistan; Moscow sets the alarm bell ringing

The Islamic State militant group has expanded its operations by adding Afghanistan to its hit list and directly challenging the Taliban in its role as the pretender to local hegemony, leading Russia to voice its concern over the matter in the United Nations Security Council. A broadening of the campaign being waged by ISIS could engulf Afghanistan, turning it into a hotbed of terrorism in the region, from where it could threaten Central Asia, Russia's soft underbelly.

Lately, ISIS has claimed responsibility for a suicide bomb attack in the Afghan city of Jalalabad that killed 35 government officials and military personnel who were queuing to collect their wages, as well as injuring 100 civilians.

The attack highlighted a gruesome development: Since last fall ISIS-affiliated fighters have expanded their control over areas previously administered by Afghan government forces or by the Taliban. Gaining additional foothold on the ground was made possible by numerous defections from the Taliban.

In October last year, a former Taliban leader known as Hafiz Saeed Khan changed sides and, along with five other top field commanders and operatives, pledged allegiance to ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. In January, Saeed was appointed the warlord in charge of a new group called ISIS Khorasan, which has been commissioned to expand military activities across a wide region embracing Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, as well as parts of Central Asia.

It is now apparent that Islamic State is challenging the Taliban's supremacy and threatens to steal away its role as the region's primary fundamentalist religious force.
Does the fact that defectors from the Taliban are joining ISIS spell doom for the "madrasah students," as they were originally nicknamed? Pyotr Topychkanov, a member of the scientific council of the Moscow-based Carnegie Center, has this to say:

"The Taliban is not a united organization. From the beginning there were different factions in this movement with connections with Islamists, criminals, political parties in Afghanistan and beyond. From this point of view, if Islamic State fighters want to control the situation, they need to learn how to play the game in Afghanistan. I think they would need more time and more resources to do this.

"It will become more and more serious for Russia and neighboring countries.

"However, I feel pessimistic about the future of Islamic State in this region and I am quite optimistic about Russia's abilities to face this threat."

A much less upbeat prophecy was expressed by Ivan Safranchuk, editor-in-chief of the journal The Great Game: Politics, Business, Security in Central Asia, who predicts a major transformation of the Taliban movement. Following the seemingly inevitable clash with ISIS, the Taliban would most probably disintegrate. The moderates would legitimize themselves by going into politics, probably dissolving within the existing political parties and associations, while the radicals would join Islamic State and continue their lethal mission.
For the moment, it is essential to watch closely: Will the Taliban join Islamic State en masse, witness a split or slip toward extinction?

Should the latter happen and ISIS take the upper hand not only in Afghanistan but in Pakistan too, the two countries will become the stronghold of global jihad. This constitutes a grave danger for Russia and its allies in the Central Asian region. ISIS has once again proved that it is a global challenge and requires a concerted rebuff.

Unfortunately, the adopted UN Security Council resolution reiterates the necessity for the international community to lend a helping hand to the Afghan government to deal with the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other extremist groups, as well as drug traders, but falls short of pointing the finger at the new threat posed by Islamic State.

Troika Report is rather puzzled by this oversight: Could this be the result of a lack of detailed intelligence? Or is it a short-sighted approach to what appears to be the largest single threat to stability across a vast region already prone to breeding fundamentalist and militant groupings?

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#19
www.opendemocracy.net
April 30, 2015
Foreign currency protests in Russia - a chance for the opposition?
While political demonstrations are on the slide, economic protests are on the rise in Russia. Can the two be united?
By Dmitry Florin
Dmitry Florin is an independent journalist based in Moscow, Russia.

The Russian opposition is a broad church. Just as radical leftists hold their own marches, so do the liberals and the nationalists. Battles rage around the lists of who speaks on stage, or whether you can use another movement's political symbols. Right now, although the situation in the country has worsened, these political protests have practically died out. Only the death of Boris Nemtsov was able to unite all these forces, and then, it seems, only for 24 hours.

But while the opposition attempts in vain to attract greater numbers, citizen protests are gathering force. Instead of devising catchy names for protest actions, negotiating with the city authorities for permission or advertising their events, Russian citizens have simply gone out and demanded their rights be respected.

Marches of peace in a time of war

Just as the presidential and parliamentary elections in 2011 and 2012, the war in Ukraine has united the opposition. In September 2014, tens of thousands of people came out in the centre of Moscow to demonstrate their opposition to the annexation of Crimea and the events in Donbass.

Optimistic press releases, joyful photos against a background of banners with 'No to War in Ukraine', Ukrainian flags, peace symbols showed the Russian opposition was once again feeling confident. The March of Peace in September 2014 was the last big opposition event in Russia.

As the Russian economy began to contract and violence continued unabated in Ukraine, several opposition movements announced they would hold a joint protest action on 1 March 2015. But even here, opposition groups made different demands: some sent invitations to a March for the Resignation of the Moscow Government, others tried to attract citizens to an Anti-Crisis March, while yet others collected people for an Anti-War March. Despite the fact that, in essence, the organisers were all dissatisfied with Kremlin policy, they were still unable to reach an agreement.

As a result, at the end of February, about a dozen people organised a March of Empty Pockets against the increase in prices and devaluation of the rouble. There were about 20 people at the protest.

Meanwhile, the organisation of the march on 1 March 2015 presented different challenges. Boris Nemtsov's RPR-PARNAS submitted an application to the Moscow authorities to carry out Spring, an anti-Crisis March - billed as 'the largest opposition action of 2015'.

Generating publicity to the upcoming event proved to be hard work. A logo for Spring was designed, an advertising campaign was launched, including ads on Google. Calls from various famous people to take part were published in the media, and Nemtsov called on all opposition forces to unite. However, not everyone agreed.

This time, it was the name of the march that did it. Yabloko demanded that the March be termed not 'anti-crisis' but 'anti-war' and, having been refused, declared that they would hold their own action an hour before the march. Other groups refused to take part because they weren't listed as organisers.

And so instead of the 'largest opposition action of 2015', a local meeting of RPR-PARNAS and its allies was far more likely. Moreover, the city authorities refused to permit a protest in the centre of Moscow and proposed Maryino, a suburb to the south east, instead.

Even journalists were confused as to what to do that Sunday. Instead of covering a large action at a single location, they could, at most, cover several small protests throughout Moscow. That is, if the publication had enough journalists.

Activists were also puzzled. How could one be everywhere? If you went to a protest action with one movement, you could end up offending members of another opposition group: why didn't you attend their protest?

A tragedy outside the Kremlin's walls ended up assuaging everyone's doubts. The murder of Boris Nemtsov the day before the Spring march changed the situation, and 'everyone' came to the march in memory of Nemtsov: 50,000 people is a fairly big figure for any opposition event (inside Moscow and out).

Yabloko still carried out its planned picket an hour before the march.

Pocket marches

After the Nemtsov memorial march, the next widely announced opposition march was planned for 19 April in Moscow, the March for Peace and Freedom. This was supposed to be the official successor to the cancelled Spring march.

The organiser of the event - the Committee on Protest Actions, based in the PARNAS building - announced that they had applied to the city authorities to stage an action in the centre of Moscow. The meeting point was supposed to be Trubnaya Square, 10 minutes from the Kremlin.

As the advertising of the event began, several thousand pledged to attend on social networks. But the city authorities refused the organisers' application and proposed another location: this time some 20km from the Kremlin.

The Moscow government's decision led to arguments among the opposition. Some proposed agreeing, others wanted to end the protest entirely, taking the refusal to allow the protest in the city centre as an insult.

As a result, within a few days, the organisers publicly announced that there would be no march. Instead, a series of one-person pickets would take place in the city centre.

Memorial protest

On 19 April, the 'parade of marches' reached its peak: in the centre of Moscow, at midday, two dozen people gathered with placards.

Soon, however, a group of Novorossiya supporters stopped to argue with the participants of the picket, accusing them of 'supporting the killing of Children in Donbas' and 'receiving money for protests from Americans.'

By the time scuffles broke out, the police had arrested several people, but only those who had taken part in the anti-war picket. The were released without charge half and hour later. Later, roughly 100 people headed to the site on Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge where Boris Nemtsov was shot to lay flowers. About 100 people gathered there. People from the opposition made up less than half the people there. The rest were supporters of 'Novorossiya' and undercover police.

Police at the bridge did not allow those present to stop at the bridge, constantly moving people on from various sides continue moving further along the bridge. Although expected to become the biggest opposition event in Russia after the march in memory of Nemtsov, the protest managed to attract about 50 people in a city of 15 million.

Yabloko, a co-organiser of the 19 April March for Peace and Freedom, sent only one representative (complete with placard and party scarf).

Where are the people?

While the opposition tries to encourage attendance at protests, now, it seems, protests beyond the confines of the opposition are gathering force.

One of these informal movements, which has arisen in relation to the fall in the rouble's value, has already organised dozens of protests not only in Moscow, but across Russia. After taking out mortgages to buy properties in the 2000s, home-owners are now facing impossible rates of repayment. Indeed, back then, Russian banks refused to give credit in roubles, but did allow customers to take out loans in foreign currency.

Putting their faith in the stability of the Russian economy, these people had been paying off property loans before it turned out they owed two or three times more than they owed a year ago. According to estimates, there are between 20,000-70,000 people with foreign currency mortgages in Russia.

These people are not appealing to the 'good Tsar' for help. They aren't coming to sanctioned actions with placards 'Vladimir Vladimirovich, help us!' They aren't threatening civil servants and police that 'Putin will find out what you're doing.' They are openly claiming that they have become victims of the policies of the Russian government.

In conversation, Oksana Semyonova - head of a movement of foreign currency debtors - compares what's happened to them to 'genocide', seeing her problem as a consequence of the policies of the Kremlin in Ukraine and the sanctions that ensued.

'When you lose your living space in our country, you lose your registration [the document detailing the right to live somewhere], the possibility of getting your children into kindergartens and schools, you lose medical services, the ability to get a job, social benefits. We won't even be able to vote because, without registration, we won't be on the electoral register and so able to elect our "fantastic" government,' says Semyonova.

Foreign currency rebellion

The growing movement of people with foreign currency debt has carried out various protests in the last few months. Moreover, in contrast to the small pickets of the political opposition, their protests have attracted hundreds of people. And despite the fact that people had not earlier been involved in politics, or participated in opposition protests, their mood has been decisive.

On 22 March, they went out onto Red Square. Complete with children in prams, female participants donned black T-shirts with the slogan 'Slave of foreign currency mortgage' and, holding black balloons in their hands, walked around the square. A few minutes later, police came up to them and asked them to remove their t-shirts. Finding no legal basis for their request, the participants in the unsanctioned protest refused to do so: 60 people were arrested.

Protests, pickets and flash-mobs of foreign currency mortgage holders have taken place almost daily since. Setting off from work with young children, knowing they could end up in a police station, they protest against the Kremlin's economic policies.

On 15 April, six people with foreign currency mortgages announced an indefinite hunger strike in the centre of Moscow. The next day, Vladimir Putin commented on the situation during his annual 'Direct Line' - a call-in show where Russian citizens can pose questions directly to the Russian president: 'As for foreign currency mortgages, we should help there too, but let me repeat that the approach and philosophy of that aid should be comparable to our support for people who have found themselves in a difficult situation, but who took their loans in rubles.' Currently, the government has set aside 4.5bn roubles (£58mln) to assist people who are having trouble repaying their mortgages.

Meanwhile, Elvira Naibullina, head of Russian Central Bank, stated in Washington that there were to be no further decisions on this issue aside from those already made by the government.

March of the empty plates

On 22 April, a group of women with children marched past the windows of the State Duma in Moscow, banging spoons against empty plates and shouting: 'The people are going hungry!' With little reaction from the police, the column marched on freely to the Central Bank - where they threw their spoons and empty plates at the doors, telling the security guards to pass these broken plates onto their superiors.

While a bus with two dozen riot police arrived at the Central Bank's entrance, the police managed to arrest three women and three journalists at the tail-end of the column. The arrested had their passports taken away.

Clearly, however, having received no orders from their superiors and taken the passport information form those arrested, the police released the protesters. And the next day, the foreign currency brigade went out to protest again.

Professing no loyalty to the opposition or any media organisation, the movement of foreign currency debtors grows by the day. Perhaps one day the Russian opposition and the citizens who aren't afraid to go out on the streets will meet.

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 #20
www.rt.com
May 4 2015
The Russians aren't coming! How & why hawks hype 'threat' to Baltic States
By Neil Clark
Neil Clark is a journalist, writer and broadcaster. His award winning blog can be found at www.neilclark66.blogspot.com.

When it comes to trying to scare people in the West about non-existent threats, neocons and right-wing hawks in the US and Britain have no peers. In 2003, they told us that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. War ensued and thousands died.

They repeatedly told us - without supplying a shred of evidence - that Iran was producing nuclear weapons, so harsh sanctions were imposed on the Islamic Republic, causing great suffering to ordinary Iranians. Now, they're working 24/7 to persuade us Russia poses a major threat to NATO members, with a particular focus on the Baltic States.

An article in the Daily Signal by Lee Edwards, a biographer of Ronald Reagan and a 'distinguished fellow' of the hard-right Heritage Foundation, is a classic of the 'Russian threat' genre:

"Why Putin's 'Russification' campaign against the Baltics should be big news for us" includes not just warnings about Russia, but also the obligatory attacks on RT, a channel which launched in 2005, but which the author states is "barely two years old."

The very first sentence of Edwards' article sets the fear-mongering tone: "Washington policymakers are overlooking a potentially serious foreign policy crisis: the mounting Russian pressure, economic, political and military, on the tiny but strategically located Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania."

Edwards explains to his readers what those dastardly Russkies are up to: "All this activity is calculated to build a Russian presence in the Baltics that would justify Moscow coming to the aid of 'threatened' compatriots as it has done in eastern Ukraine."

In his article, Edwards echoes the warnings made by Britain's belligerent Defence Minister Michael Fallon. In February, Fallon said there was 'a real and present danger' of Russia trying to destabilize the Baltic States. 'I'm worried about his (Putin's) pressure on the Baltics, the way he is testing NATO,' Fallon declared.

But does Russia really pose a threat to the Baltic States? Here's the case for the prosecution.

The Lithuanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced last week they had summoned the Russian Ambassador to express 'strong protest on the repeated Russia's naval activities in the Baltic Sea'.

The Lithuanians stated that 'on April 30 a Russian ship of the Russian Navy Baltic Fleet during its regular military exercises entered the Lithuanian exclusive economic zone and illegally ordered a change of course to the ALCEDO ship managed by the ABB group'. They also said 'similar incidents' took place on March19, April 10 and April 24 this year. In addition, the Latvian authorities claimed on Sunday they have detected two Russian ships and a submarine near Latvia's border

Soldiers of the U.S. Army 2nd Cavalry Regiment deployed in Estonia as a part of the U.S. military's Operation Atlantic Resolve, during the "Dragoon Ride" exercise move past Liepupe March 22, 2015. (Reuters/Ints Kalnins)Soldiers of the U.S. Army 2nd Cavalry Regiment deployed in Estonia as a part of the U.S. military's Operation Atlantic Resolve, during the "Dragoon Ride" exercise move past Liepupe March 22, 2015. (Reuters/Ints Kalnins)

The Russians haven't replied to the Lithuanian charges yet. Should we take them, if confirmed, as evidence that the neocons for once are right? It's very important to see the bigger picture.

Relations between Lithuania and Russia are not very good and it's been the Lithuanians, whose rhetoric has been the more aggressive. Last year, Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite called Russia a "state with terrorist elements" in an interview with the the Washington Post.

In answer to the very loaded question: "Are you worried that he (Putin) will next attack the Baltics?" which is of course predicated on the mistruth that Putin "attacked" Ukraine, Grybauskaite replied: "If he is not be stopped in Ukraine, he will go further."

Then, rather outrageously, the Lithuanian president compared Russia to ISIS (commonly known as the Islamic State), saying: "The danger of Russia's behavior today is not smaller than what we have with ISIS in Iraq and Syria."

In another interview, with a German magazine, Lithuania's so-called 'Iron Lady' compared Putin to Hitler and Stalin. '(Putin) uses nationality as a pretext to conquer territory with military means. That's exactly what Hitler and Stalin did. Such comparisons are spot on.'

In April, Russian Ambassador to the EU Vladimir Chizhov accused Lithuania of driving the EU's anti-trust case against Gazprom, which could lead to the Russian energy company being hit with a fine of more than $10 billion.

Let's be fair: one can understand, given 20th century history, some fear of Russia and indeed security fears in general in the Baltic States, which are small, strategically important countries, and vulnerable to attack from larger, more powerful nations. The Baltic States were invaded by the Soviet Union in 1940, under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and there were mass deportations.

Estonia is a country that at one time or another seems to have been invaded/occupied by just about every major power on the European mainland. The permanent exhibition at the Estonian Museum of History in Tallinn, where I spent a fascinating day in 2013, entitled 'Spirit of Survival, 11,000 Years of Estonian History', helps give you an understanding of how important national independence is to a people who've spent most of their history under the rule of others.

But while it's important - and indeed essential - to understand the Baltic perspective, the crude Russophobia of politicians like Grybauskaite is inexcusable, as are the actions of Western hawks who seek to exploit historic fears of Russia to further their own geo-political interests. The fact is, Russia fully respects the sovereignty of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. To claim that we are 'back in 1940' is ludicrous.

Soldiers of the U.S. Army's 2nd Cavalry Regiment, deployed in Latvia as part of NATO's Operation Atlantic Resolve, ride in armored vehicles named "Stryker" during a joint military exercise in Adazi February 26, 2015. (Reuters/Ints Kalnins)Soldiers of the U.S. Army's 2nd Cavalry Regiment, deployed in Latvia as part of NATO's Operation Atlantic Resolve, ride in armored vehicles named "Stryker" during a joint military exercise in Adazi February 26, 2015. (Reuters/Ints Kalnins)

Two years ago, I visited the beautiful island of Saaremaa, in Estonia, which was the site of the most westerly base in the Soviet Union. The Red Army has long gone though, and the idea that Russia might return with tanks is quite absurd; no matter what the neocons tell us, it simply isn't going to happen.

Only a real mischief-maker would interpret Russia's legitimate concerns for the rights of ethnic Russians living in the Baltic States as an attempt to 'destabilize' those countries.

It's clearly wrong that there is no official status for the Russian language in Latvia, a country where a large percentage of the population are native Russian speakers, and that ethnic Russians in Estonia, who make up around a quarter of the population, have to pass an Estonian language exam to get citizenship if they weren't living in the country in pre-Soviet times.

Conceding that great wrongs have been done to the Baltic States in the past, shouldn't stop us from speaking out about such current injustices, or indeed attempts to rewrite history when it comes to Nazi collaboration in the Baltic States in World War II, which has quite rightly caused outrage, and not just in Russia.

In his 2009 essay on this pernicious revisionism, the Guardian's Seumas Milne wrote.

"The real meaning of the attempt to equate Nazi genocide with Soviet repression is clearest in the Baltic republics, where collaboration with SS death squads and direct participation in the mass murder of Jews was at its most extreme, and politicians are at pains to turn perpetrators into victims. Veterans of the Latvian Legion of the Waffen-SS now parade through Riga and Vilnius's Museum of Genocide Victims barely mentions the 200,000 Lithuanian Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Estonian parliamentarians honor those who served the Third Reich as "fighters for independence."

The attempts to turn perpetrators into victims continue. In March, over 1,500 Latvians marched through the country's capital Riga, to commemorate those who fought alongside Nazi Germany in the Waffen-SS Latvian division. The US Embassy in Riga warned US citizens to maintain 'a high level of vigilance,' but the US didn't condemn the march, as Russia and the anti-fascist Simon Wiesenthal Centre did.

Marches honoring SS divisions are not the only anti-Russian provocations to have taken place in the Baltic States.

In February, over 140 pieces of heavy NATO armory were paraded a mere 300 meters from the Russian border, in the town of Narva, in Estonia.

Soldiers of the U.S. Army's 2nd Cavalry Regiment, deployed in Latvia as part of NATO's Operation Atlantic Resolve, are pictured near their armored vehicle named "Stryker" during a joint military exercise in Adazi February 26, 2015. (Reuters/Ints Kalnins)Soldiers of the U.S. Army's 2nd Cavalry Regiment, deployed in Latvia as part of NATO's Operation Atlantic Resolve, are pictured near their armored vehicle named "Stryker" during a joint military exercise in Adazi February 26, 2015. (Reuters/Ints Kalnins)

We can only imagine what the US reaction would have been if Russia had showed off its weaponry in such a way right on the US border.

This Monday NATO starts 10 days of 'war games' in Estonia, called 'Sill'. It involves 13,000 soldiers.

NATO is increasing tensions in the region with its maneuvers. It's in the interest of the Baltic States and Russia to have a friendly relationship based on mutual self-respect. But the hawks in the West, and their local proxies, clearly don't want constructive co-operation, but more baiting of the Russian bear.

We can expect warnings about the 'threat' Russia poses to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to intensify in the weeks ahead. Why? Because in July the current EU sanctions against Russia are due to expire. The very last thing the Western war lobby wants is for sanctions to be lifted - they want them to be extended to include draconian measures such as Russia's exclusion from the SWIFT banking system. But they've got a problem.

Minsk II is working well. Too well! The peace agreement brokered by Germany, France and Russia is generally holding, to the obvious frustration of the hawks who need a pretext to 'punish' Russia for blocking war against the Syrian government in 2013. Read Ray McGovern's piece on neocon 'chaos promotion' in the Middle East - and my previousOp-Edon the neocon anger that we didn't bomb Damascus in 2013, and reflect how neocon fingerprints at the US State Department were on the 'regime change' operation in Kiev, which led to the country's descent into a bloody civil war.

The anti-Russia brigade need another arena, in which they can point the finger of blame at Putin, to justify sanctions being maintained and (hopefully) strengthened. As a new front in the neocon Cold War versus Russia, the Baltics will do quite nicely.

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 #21
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
May 1, 2015
Why the murder of Russia's royal family remains topical a century after their deaths
The last Russian Tsar Nicholas II and his family were murdered in 1918 but it is only in the past 25 years that the first truly full investigation has been conducted. RBTH talks about the 1991-2011 probe into the historic killings with Vladimir Solovyov, senior forensic investigator with Russia's Investigation Committee, how it contributed to the development of modern genetics and the role played by famous musician Mstislav Rostropovich and the late former Russian deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov.
Darya Lyubinskaya, special to RBTH
 
Launching an investigation into the murder of the Tsar and his family almost a century after their deaths was facilitated by the fact Russia has no statute of limitations for homicides, explains senior investigator and criminologist Vladimir Solovyov. In Soviet times authorities had no interest in investigating the case.

The key challenge was to prove that the remains found near Yekaterinburg belonged to the Tsar's family. "The work of a criminologist is in exposing myths," Solovyov says. "This was a chance to be involved in a fascinating investigation - one that went beyond my normal range of duties."
 
Case study

The first murder probe was conducted by White Guards soon after the deaths by investigators named Namyotkin, Sergeyev and Sokolov. In particular a large amount of material was collected by Sokolov - which was to play a major role in the modern investigation.

"We decided to look for everything connected to the 'Sokolov case,'" Solovyov says.

"The Russian military prosecutor's office had four volumes of his materials, but we widened our search worldwide."

After the Bolshevik revolution Sokolov had emigrated and taken many documents with him. Solovyov's first stop in his search for this material was the British Royal Archives, where he was helped by Britain's Russian-speaking Prince Michael of Kent, who is related to the last Tsar. But he failed to find any sensational data. Later he learned that Sokolov's most important documents had at one time fallen into the hands of Count Orlov and that subsequently the count's descendants had auctioned the fascinating material at Sotheby's in London for more than £600,000. They were eventually acquired by Prince Hans Adam II of Liechtenstein who passed them back to Russia in exchange for other documents relating to his own family.

Many famous people helped Solovyov in his quest. Boris Nemtsov, who at the time headed the government commission, authorised forensic and medical experts who equipped and staffed a genetic laboratory. Mstislav Rostropovich sourced donations for genetic analysis and helped buy, in the Japanese city of Otsu, a key artefact - a piece of cloth which held traces of the Tsar's blood. The blood-soaked handkerchief dated back to an 1891 assassination attempt on Nicholas II during a visit to the city. Anatoly Sobchak, the former mayor of St Petersburg had come across the exhibit by accident. But despite many efforts, it was impossible to obtain genetic analysis from the cloth - the fabric turned out to be unsuitable for examination.
 
Genetic analysis

Initially, genetics experts conducted tests using blood samples from members of the Danish and British royal houses. "The examination was carried out on mitochondrial DNA, so we needed the relatives of the royal family through the female line," Solovyov says. "Alexandra Feodorovna's mother was a daughter of Queen Victoria. And here we were lucky, since Prince Philip, the current Queen Elizabeth's husband, is descended from Queen Victoria."

But the investigators lacked anything with which to compare the modern blood samples. It was only in 2007 that blood suitable for genetic analysis from Nicholas II was discovered.

It turned out that it was literally at the investigators' fingertips all the time; the shirt the last Tsar was wearing on the day of the 1891 assassination attempt in Otsu, complete with testable traces of his blood, was in the collection of St Petersburg's famous Hermitage Museum. The final examination involved several independent geneticist commissions from Russia, the USA and Austria, who came to the same conclusions.

Solovyov says the investigation into the murder of the last Tsar and his family has made a unique contribution to scientific development.

"This case has led to cardinally new approaches," the investigator claims.

"Now, any work related to identifying dead bodies or remains worldwide is conducted according to the techniques developed in the course of the investigation of this case."

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 #22
Interfax-Ukraine
May 1, 2015
War to end when Ukraine regains Donbas, Crimea - Poroshenko

The war will be over for Ukraine only when it regains Donbas and Crimea, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said.

"The war will be over when Ukraine regains Donbas and Crimea. How long will it take? As long as necessary," the president told the STB channel on Thursday evening

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 #23
Wall Street Journal
May 1, 2015
Ukraine Talks Are Planned on Moving Beyond Cease-Fire
All sides in conflict with pro-Russian rebels to discuss reconstruction, security and refugees
By WILLIAM HOROBIN

PARIS-France and Russia said Thursday that working groups from opposing sides in the conflict in eastern Ukraine will meet within a week to discuss reconstruction, security and how to deal with refugees who have fled the fighting in recent months.

"This step will mark the beginning of a political phase" in the implementation of cease-fire agreements, French President François Hollande's office said after a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The working groups will focus on reconstruction, economic issues, security and refugees.

The call between the leaders come as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has warned of an increase in violence in eastern Ukraine, despite a Feb. 12 cease-fire agreement signed in the Belarus city of Minsk. The pact was supposed to bring fighting between Ukrainian government troops and pro-Russian separatists to a halt.

Leaders on the conference call agreed that ensuring peace on the ground is the "absolute priority," Mr. Hollande's office said Thursday.

"The cease-fire violations and fighting must stop, in particular near Mariupol, Shchastya, Donetsk airport and the Shirokino area," Mr. Hollande's office said.

After the call, the Kremlin said they reported "some progress" in the cease-fire effort and weapons pullback.

Leaders also agreed on the call that the OSCE should play a central role in improving the implementation of the Minsk agreement, Mr. Hollande's office said.

-Gregory L. White contributed to this article.

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 #24
Ekho Moskvy radio (Moscow)
May 1, 2015
Senior Russian MP cool on idea of Ukraine peacekeeping mission

There is little prospect of agreement being reached for foreign peacekeepers to be deployed in eastern Ukraine in the near future, a senior Russian MP said on 1 May.

Leonid Kalashnikov, first deputy chairman of the international affairs committee in the State Duma lower house, told the Gazprom-owned, editorially independent Russian radio station Ekho Moskvy that he expected Ukraine to insist that Western peacekeepers should form part of any mission, something that, in his opinion, would make the idea "unacceptable" to pro-Russian separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Kalashnikov was speaking hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, Dmitriy Peskov, denied a suggestion by the Ukrainian presidency that Putin was open to the deployment of peacekeepers in the conflict zone.

"Sooner or later, this issue will still have to be addressed. But it's clear that, at the moment, the conditions don't seem to be there, since, first, Minsk 2 isn't being implemented, and second, for this to be truly realistic, there will need to be a decision from the UN Security Council, and third, there must, of course, be Russian peacekeepers among these peacekeepers, because otherwise this will be unacceptable for Luhansk and Donetsk. For Ukraine, it may be that at the moment they feel it would be more logical for Western representatives to be involved, but for Luhansk and Donetsk, that is clearly unacceptable. And if it's unacceptable to either of the sides, it won't be possible," Kalashnikov said.

According to the Ekho Moskvy news agency, Kalashnikov also said: "In any heavy armed conflict, you need someone who tracks the immediate confrontation and monitors what is happening, including with the help of armed people, so that there are no shootings or killings. Russia has never been opposed to taking part in a peacekeeping mission. We have this sort of experience, including in [Moldova's] Dniester region and [the breakaway Georgian regions of] Abkhazia and South Ossetia."

Sergey Markov, a pro-Kremlin analyst and former MP, told Ekho Moskvy that the priority at the moment was not peacekeeping, but implementation of the 12 February Minsk agreements.

"Russia has never been opposed to peacekeepers being deployed in southeastern Ukraine to separate the territory of the liberated Donbass from the territory controlled by Ukraine's junta. All Russia was opposed to was Kiev replacing implementation of the Minsk agreements with the start of a new campaign to organize a peacekeeping expedition. So Russia is demanding that Kiev first implement the Minsk agreements that have been signed, and then the issue of sending peacekeepers to southeastern Ukraine is addressed after that, once these Minsk agreements have been implemented. The statements from officials in Kiev are not worth viewing as serious statements at all. They're virtually operating in propaganda mode," Markov said.

Journalist and historian Nikolay Svanidze told Ekho Moskvy that there was no chance of Putin agreeing to peacekeepers being sent to Ukraine.

"When it comes down to it, peacekeepers are still troops from countries representing NATO's member-states. In any case, that would be viewed here, in this country, as a retreat by Putin, it would be viewed as backing down in Novorossiya, and as a defeat, and then suddenly there would be a risk his popularity ratings would collapse. He won't opt for that at the moment, and there's no justification for this at the moment, because at the moment it is yet to be proved that the whole situation with the Minsk agreements has been a failure. There's still a chance that somehow something will happen... I think that, at the moment, Putin is interested in the situation remaining in this sort of non-war, non-peace situation, a situation that is pretty suspended. At the moment, of course, there can be no talk of peacekeepers," Svanidze said.

Sergey Lavrov, president of an association of Russian service personnel who have served as UN peacekeepers, told Ekho Moskvy that certain conditions would have to be met if peacekeepers were to be deployed.

"At the moment, the function of peacekeeper is being performed by the OSCE [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe], which has sent its observers there, and they're coping with the task just fine. In addition, the introduction of any other peacekeeping operation probably isn't viable until the Minsk agreements have been implemented, because you can jump from one agreement to another, and then neither one nor the other will be implemented. If this is just an initiative of Poroshenko's, then to whom is it addressed? If we're talking about a peacekeeping operation or an operation to maintain peace under the auspices of the UN, then there are certain conditions that apply here. In order to send a mission, there needs to be agreement from the UN Security Council. The UN Security Council includes five countries - the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China. Each of these countries has the right of veto. If one of these countries vetoes the proposal, then, of course, it won't pass," Lavrov said.

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 #25
USA Today
May 2, 2015
Thousands dodge Ukraine army in fight with rebels
Olga Rudenko, Special for USA TODAY

KIEV - Kostyantyn Kovba never answers calls from unknown numbers on his mobile phone. The 23-year-old is afraid a military commissioner might summon him to serve in Ukraine's army to fight pro-Russian separatists in the east.

When he visits his mother's house, they shutter the windows, lest a commissioner drops by. "We never even barbecue in the yard, because they may see and come over," he said.

Kovba is one of 39,000 Ukrainians who have dodged military service in the first two months of 2015, according to the latest government figures. That's nearly 16% of the total numbers of soldiers supposed to be in the Ukrainian army.

"Serving in the army is a waste of time," said Kovba, who's more interested in building his mobile phone accessories business. "I could spend that time learning something new."

Draft dodgers such as Kovba underscore the national government's difficulty in mobilizing young men to help keep the country united in the face of a potent rebel force better equipped, thanks to Russian weaponry.

One reason is that many civilians feel distanced from the fighting that has consumed two of Ukraine's eastern provinces bordering Russia.

A recent poll by the Kiev-based Razumkov Center found that 41% of Ukrainians said the year-old war didn't affect them even though the insurgents want to cleave off a sizable chunk of the country that is rich in coal and dotted by steel foundries. Their relatives and friends don't serve in the military, they don't live near the fighting, and they don't donate funds to support the troops or Ukrainians displaced by the violence.

Since its independence in 1991, Ukraine has been divided between citizens in the west who view themselves as European and pro-Russian Ukrainians dominant in the east. As a result, western Ukrainians may be reluctant to fight and die to retain eastern regions close to Russia, said Vitaly Chernetsky, an Odessa native and University of Kansas professor who is president of the American Association of Ukrainian Studies.

Those divisions were on display last year. Protesters in Kiev, the capital, forced the ouster of Russian-aligned President Viktor Yanukovych after he used deadly force against demonstrations over his refusal to sign an economic agreement with the European Union. Yanukovych fled to Moscow and was replaced by pro-European President Petro Poroshenko. Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine and fostered rebellion in eastern provinces.

Not everyone is embracing the war," Chernetsky said. "Ukraine is a diverse country of many different regions. A sense of a unified Ukraine is emerging, but it is emerging with many fits and starts."

Recently, Poroshenko increased the size of the Ukrainian army from 180,000 to as many as 250,000 troops. His government has not released draft numbers for March and April but says recruiters have reached their quota to bring the army up to full strength.

Since the conflict broke out a year ago, more than 6,000 fighters and civilians have died, including more than 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers. In February, the two sides reached a cease-fire agreement, but sporadic fighting continues. Sixty-five Ukrainian servicemen have died, and 243 have been wounded since the cease-fire took effect, according to Ukraine's Foreign Ministry.

Chernetsky said military recruitment problems stem from mismanagement of Ukraine's army over the past two decades. "The problems of corruption and inefficiency are huge," he said. "The institution was crumbling. Most of the army was used as a source for some career senior people in the military to get wealthy."

Kovba admitted he had mixed feelings about shirking the military. "I feel ashamed when I think of the guys who are serving, but then maybe I will be more useful for my country here," he said. "Someone has to build a decent country for the returning soldiers."

Yuriy Biriukov, a military adviser to Poroshenko, criticized men like Kovba this year. "He shouts, 'Glory to Ukraine' and tells everyone how patriotic he is," Biriukov wrote of a fictional draft dodger in a Facebook post. "But he is also a cowardly brute. He hides from the military commission, changes his phone number, packs his stuff and goes to Romania, Hungary or Poland. And sits there, proud of how smart he is."

Kovba and others avoiding military service cite reasons other than cowardice for their actions: too little compensation to families of soldiers who are killed and so little equipment compared with the rebels that citizens must hold fundraisers to provide basic items.

Dodging conscription is a crime, though most found guilty have been given probationary sentences. Last September, however, a court convicted a dodger and sentenced him to prison for two years. In February, Ukrainian authorities arrested a pro-Russian blogger, Ruslan Kotsaba, for calls to boycott a military mobilization. Charged with treason, he faces a maximum 15 years in prison if convicted.

Kovba avoided punishment because his mother told authorities he left Ukraine to work abroad. Under Ukrainian law, he's dodging the draft only if officials personally serve him a subpoena to report for duty.

Oles Shevchenko, 23, a student from Kiev, expects to be called up soon because a military commissioner recently called his parents to warn of an upcoming military subpoena.

Raised in a patriotic family, Shevchenko said he feels a duty to protect his land. "If not me, then who?'" he said. "But at the same time, I'm very scared to die now, before I've accomplished anything in life."

Shevchenko hopes he won't need to choose between joining the army or facing shame for avoiding service. "If only this war ended," he said. "I wouldn't even have to make this choice."

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 #26
Kyiv Post
April 30, 2015
Ukrainian Defense Ministry says OSCE exaggerates fighting figures
by Allison Quinn

Ukraine's Defense Ministry accused international monitors of grossly inflating figures for the number of times the military on April 26 fired on combined Russian-separatist forces near the village of Shyrokyne in Donetsk Oblast.

By doing so, monitors from the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe had spread "unreliable and incomplete information" on the war in eastern Ukraine, where a cease-fire has never taken hold and is violated by both sides on an almost daily basis, according to an online statement posted on April 29.

The ministry had taken issue with a report released on April 27 in which the OSCE stated that Ukrainian forces had fired on combined Russian-separatist forces a total of 413 times a day earlier - a claim which the ministry denies.

Irina Gudyma, senior press assistant to the mission, told the Kyiv Post the group "would stick by what we have in the report."

"The information in the report comes from people who saw this for themselves, who were on the ground there," she said.

Spokesman Michael Bocirukiw reiterated these comments at a briefing in Kyiv on April 30, saying, "We check the facts included in our reports. That report was prepared by the special monitoring mission, it wasn't compiled by our Russian colleagues."

In rebutting the OSCE report, the Defense Ministry said that on that day the military had returned fire eight times in response to 17 attacks on its positions.

"This information is directly confirmed by information that the Joint Center for Control and Coordination received from representatives of some districts of Donetsk Oblast who were monitoring the ceasefire regime at their surveillance points," the Defense Ministry said in the statement.

The JCCC consists of Ukrainian and Russian military personnel, pro-Russian separatists and an OSCE envoy.

As fighting continues in areas near Mariupol like Piski and Shyrokyne, information provided by international monitors has been crucial in documenting the numerous violations on both sides.

Yet international monitors have complained repeatedly that their movements are frequently blocked, with access to certain areas continuously denied by pro-Russian insurgents.

The international group has also faced a flurry of accusations that Russian members feed information to the insurgents, and both Ukrainian soldiers and insurgents alike have expressed distrust of the group, saying their positions always end up coming under attack after visits by the monitors.

The accusations have repeatedly been denied by the group, with Bociurkiw reassuring that all members are vetted before joining the special monitoring mission.

During recent patrols of Shyrokyne, the deputy head of the special monitoring mission, Alexander Hug, told the Kyiv Post that both sides in the conflict were guilty of breaking the ceasefire, and that the organization had hard evidence of this.

At a briefing in Kyiv on April 30, Hug reiterated that, saying "both sides have used weapons that were meant to be removed in accordance with the Minsk agreements."

Hug also noted that while fighting had continued in certain areas, some progress had been made in the war-torn village of Shyrokyne, where nearly 40 residents still remain.

"We asked both sides to refrain from firing. There was a period of calm for 72 hours, and during that time people came out of their basements and were able to at least breathe fresh air," Hug said.

Since the latest truce was brokered in Minsk, Belarus on Feb. 12, more than 100 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and 500 wounded, parliamentary speaker Volodymyr said on April 30 cited by Interfax news agency.

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 #27
Fort Russ
http://fortruss.blogspot.com
May 3, 2015
Ukraine: Hostilities (which never stopped) are on the verge of a new break out
Donetsk, May 3, 2015
Cassad [http://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/2170365.html]
Translated by Kristina Rus

Brief account of yesterday's attacks.

1.  On the territory of Donetsk, Gorlovka and Yasinovataya more then 30 buildings were destroyed or severely damaged. Our side yesterday had more than 10 wounded, the junta officially had 1 dead and several wounded. There are victims among civilians.

2. Among others the attack was conducted from artillery of 122 and 152 mm caliber.

3. Concerning the issue about the use of foreign barrels of 155 mm caliber. There are craters of a similar size, but given the fact that the 152 and 155 mm guns are very similar, there is no sufficient evidence.

4. According to the statements by Pushilin, yesterday "everything was on the verge of resumption of hostilities". More empty words for TV, fighting has never stopped. Hot spots are the same. The escalation mechanism is the same as in the winter.

5. The junta naturally stated that it's not their fault, and that it was "the terrorists firing at themselves". In general, continuing the same tune and "strictly complying with the Minsk agreement."

6. Local ceasefire deals are becoming symptomatic, given the fact that the fire had to be terminated in accordance with the agreements of February 12. These new situational ceasefires best indicate that the old [Minsk]  agreement has long been tossed away. As Basurin complains, the junta is "cheating"even in these new deals. A ceasefire was agreed, but the junta continued the shelling for 40 more minutes.

7. Our side of course responded accordingly. The efficiency of counter battery fire is difficult to estimate.

8. Tonight, after dark, a follow up is expected. But today the most likely epicenter is Shirokhino, where the enemy is accumulating forces.

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 #28
Kyiv denies shelling Donetsk

KYIV. May 3 (Interfax) - Kyiv on Sunday denied allegations by Moscow that Ukrainian heavy artillery has been shelling Donetsk.

"Any use of weapons by units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, if it takes place, is purely and simply a forced response to armed provocations from illegal armed units that are active in individual districts and is made in the event of a direct threat to the lives of Ukrainian military personnel," the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

"As before, Ukraine remains committed to unconditional and comprehensive compliance with the Minsk agreements, and takes consistent measures to this end," it said. Ukraine sees "injection of untrue and openly provocative information as systematic action aimed at torpedoing the Minsk documents of September 2014 and February 2014."

"We are convinced that the groundless accusations from Russia should be urgently and carefully investigated by the OSCE [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe] and its Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine," the ministry said.

Earlier, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov urged the OSCE to demand that Kyiv end reported bombardments of Donetsk and hence stop violating the Minsk agreements.

"In connection with reports that Ukrainian armed forces had launched heavy artillery attacks on Donetsk, the minister of foreign affairs of the Russian Federation, Sergei Lavrov, telephoned the OSCE chairman-in-office, Serbian Minister of Foreign Affairs Ivica Dacic, and urged him to use his powers to have the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine demand that Kyiv immediately end violating the Minsk agreements," the ministry said on Facebook.

Dacic promised to take all appropriate measures, the ministry said.

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#29
Kyiv Post
May 3, 2015
Russian-separatist forces cite shelling to justify next offensive

On the May 1 Labor Day holiday, Kremlin-backed separatist leader Oleksandr Zakharchenko said that his forces would take more territory around his home base of Donetsk to "guarantee the safety of our land" from attacks by the Ukrainian military.

Donetsk, which lost more than half of its pre-war population of 1 million people, was pounded with rocket salvos the next day.

Social media from 10:30 p.m. until after midnight were filled with videos shot by local residents, some of whom narrated in English, of shelling of the regional capital, which Kyiv hasn't controlled since mid-April 2014.

Russia's Vesti.ru the same night reported that Kremlin-backed separatists told them that the city was being shelled with 155-millimeter artillery, "a caliber that is only used by NATO."

Next, Ukraine's positions near Donetsk, in government-controlled areas of Luhansk Oblast and a hotspot near the village of Shyrokyne along the Azov Sea coast came under heavy combined Russian-separatist heavy-weapon fire, and included tanks, various mortar calibers of up to 122 millimeters and multiple-rocket launchers.

One Ukrainian soldier and one civilian were killed and six troops were wounded, according to government statements on May 3, including the Defense Ministry.

Shortly after midnight on May 3, Russia's Foreign Ministry released a statement accusing the "Ukrainian armed forces" for "shelling Donetsk using heavy artillery."

Afterward, Ukrainian Gen. Andriy Taran gave a briefing in Soledar in Donetsk Oblast as part of the Joint Centre for Control and Coordination - a group that monitors the so-called truce and consists of Ukrainian and Russian military personnel, Moscow-backed separatists and members of the OSCE.

He denounced Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov's statement, saying that its "contents aren't confirmed by the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine and armed forces of Ukraine."

"The unconfirmed information of the shelling of civilian areas of (the city) of Donetsk, which had been allegedly conducted by the Armed Forces of Ukraine shouldn't be grounds for official statements by the ministries of foreign affairs of other nations," Taran stated.

Ukraine's foreign ministry also on May 3 rejected the "accusations and responsibly claims that Ukrainian military did not commit any shelling of the city, like any other settlement on the territory of individual regions of Donetsk and Lugansk regions.

"Any use of weapons by the units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, if it does occur, carried out as a necessary step in response to military provocations of illegal armed formations operating in the individual regions, in the event of a direct threat to life Ukrainian soldiers."

Ukraine's Ambassador to Austria Olexander Scherba tweeted on May 3: "Whoever conducted tonight's shelling of Donetsk neither acted in the interest of Ukraine nor on Ukraine's command."

More than 100 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in eastern Ukraine since a truce that never took hold was brokered on Feb. 12 in Minsk, Belarus.

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 #30
Sputnik
May 3, 2015
Being 'Absolute Patriots' Puts Ukraine's Right Sector Above the Law

In the Ukrainian Chief Military Prosecutor's book, it is okay for patriots (even whose hands are red with blood) to contravene the law.

The extremist Right Sector fighters' "patriotism" outweighs the fact that they are armed illegally and therefore they cannot be outlawed, Ukraine's Chief Military Prosecutor said in an interview with Hromadske.tv.

The notorious group recently demanded the resignation of President Petro Poroshenko in Kiev and threatened to burn the presidential administration to ashes, after state airborne troops blocked their base in eastern Ukraine. The paratroopers later unblocked the site.

However, even this daring riot is not enough to resolutely crack down on the group.

Armed groups that are not formalized as state institutions are illegal, Prosecutor Anatolii Matios commented on the Right Sector's status. But he added:

"I will probably palter with truth if I say that this armed formation is not Ukrainian. The Right Sector are absolute patriots."

Ukrainian authorities want to take the rogue nationalistic group under control. But the Right Sector declared it would never enter the ranks of the National Guard (the Interior Ministry) and could only possibly join the Defense Ministry as a "separate combat unit."

The intractable ultra-nationalistic group gained notoriety through its participation in the Maidan turmoil, involvement in the Odessa massacre, fighting in Donbass and attacking striking coal miners. The Right Sector threatened to derail the February Minsk agreements.

The governing group's initial plan to use nationalistic sentiments to its advantage looks like it is now backfiring, as Poroshenko's team has serious difficulties in controlling the genie they let out of the bottle.

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 #31
www.rt.com
May 3, 2015
E.Ukraine forces close-up: Meet Margarita Seidler, female voice for Strelkov's cause

The question many people ask: How come hundreds of West Europeans came to fight for the self-proclaimed republics in Eastern Ukraine? In fact, the defense of Donbass became the first major volunteer war in Europe since the Spanish Civil War.

Then the internationalist brigades (briogadistas) composed of the British, French and Polish leftists, coupled with military professionals from the Soviet Union, fought against the onslaught of the Nazi-supported Franco regime on the legitimate leftist government in Madrid. This time, however, the volunteers face the main problems at home: unlike the communists of the 1930s, they are often blacklisted or even arrested upon their return to the 'zone of prosperity, democracy and rule of law' in Spain or Germany.

The usual explanation of the mainstream media: these people were just looking for danger. But is this argument valid? There were plenty of opportunities to tickle one's nerves for Europeans after the collapse of the Soviet Union: ethnic wars in Yugoslavia, the Caucuses and even the Middle East were for everyone to visit. So, why did the German or Spanish volunteers choose Donbass? Because it is the first ideological war, in which one can fight against the evil, which is untouchable in Western Europe: aggressive expansionism of the US, NATO and the EU. This can be made clear by an interview with Margarita Seidler - the only Western woman volunteer from Igor Strelkov's battalion.

In Russia, Margarita Seidler has become known since the summer, when the Russian television aired her first interviews. This young German woman, a native of Lutherstadt-Wittenberg (a prosperous German city, the birth place of Martin Luther) was in the battalion of Igor Strelkov, the former defense minister of the Donetsk People's Republic. Together with her commanders, she defended the town of Slavyansk and took part in Strelkov's famous breakthrough from the encircled Slavyansk to Donetsk. At the time, in summer 2014, people all over the world saw her face on television screens: a tired frail woman in military fatigues, she told in a quiet voice (with only a slight German accent) about the suffering of the civilian population in Slavyansk and about the horrible scenes she was a witness to during the Maidan revolution in Kiev.

Now Margarita lives in Sevastopol, Crimea, making rare trips to Moscow - mostly, on Orthodox Church missions. She got a status of a political refugee in Russia and has no immediate plans to visit her native Germany. Her life story is fascinating - but she never tries to show off, stressing the logical, almost routine side of the sequence of events that led her from the safest place in Europe to the most dangerous one. During our conversation, she speaks in a calm, quiet voice of a woman from church.

Dmitry Babich: Margarita, will you have a chance to go back to Germany, to see your mother?

Margarita Seidler: I don't think I will go any time soon. I am not sure I will be safe. Some German deputies are already suggesting stripping the German volunteers in DNR's army of German citizenship. They say it is for fighting on the wrong side of the barricades. So, of course, I am not in raptures about travelling back to Germany any time soon. I have refugee status in Russia; in future I hope to stay here until the end of my life.

DB: How does your family react to your decision to help Donbass and stay in Russia?

MS: My father has passed away, peace be with him, and my mother is of course concerned about me. But when I told her I was in Slavyansk to fight against fascism, she understood. Both of my grandfathers fought against Russia in World War II. Because my mother's father was drafted into the army against his will in the 1940s, my grandmother was left to raise her four little kids alone. My mother blames fascism for what she had to go through in her childhood, so she understood me.

Photo by Alina EgorovaPhoto by Alina Egorova

DB: The German deputies who want to crack down on the people like you might disagree with your vision. They say you actually helped fascism by helping the people that they call Russian extremist nationalists. Chancellor Merkel and other such deputies even call the new leadership of Ukraine reform-minded and even liberal...

MS: I have my own experience with the Ukrainian nationalists. Before Maidan, I had lived for two years in Ternopol - a city in Western Ukraine and the hotbed of Ukrainian nationalism. I heard what Ukrainian nationalists had to tell their opponents and later, in 2014, I had a chance to see what they did to their opponents. In Kiev, they were yelling "Stab the Muscovites with knives!" and "Hang the communists on trees!" right under the windows of my office.

DB: How come you found yourself in Ternopol?

MS: In the end of the 1990s, I studied medicine in Munich, Germany. It was my dream to become a surgeon. But one day I came to an Orthodox church there, and my life changed. I became a strong Orthodox Christian believer; my whole life has been devoted to the church and the holy Rus, which is a very important word to me. So, in 2002 I got a chance to live and work for six years in the Pochayev Lavra, a famous Orthodox Christian convent near Ternopol.

In the end of 2013, I worked in an Orthodox Christian public organization called Narodny Sobor (People's Convention). I worked in its Kiev office, helping to publish the group's newspaper. So, I was a witness to the Maidan 'revolution' from the beginning to the end. Our office was located on Grushevsky Street, where the bitterest fighting took place. We shared our building with the pro-Yanukovich Party of Regions, so when the people whom the Western media called 'the heroes of Maidan' stormed that building and even set it on fire, I was saved just by a happy coincidence - I was not in the office that day. A woman secretary in the Party of Regions' office was murdered then and the head of our office was beaten nearly to death by metal bars.

After that, it became clear to my colleagues and me that political opposition to the new regime was simply not possible. We went to Crimea, where self-defense groups were formed. I joined one of these groups. We helped to make sure the referendum on Crimea's return to Russia would be conducted in a fair way. I can assure you that no one forced Crimeans to vote for their reunification with Russia. They stood in lines from 6 o'clock in the morning to cast their vote. At the end of June 2014, I went to Donbass, where I saw what the Ukrainian army and the so called National Guard did to Slavyansk.

So, having lived through all of that, I can assure you that what Mr. Poroshenko and the so called Maidan activists did - all of that resembled Hitler's actions in the 1930s.

DB: What did you do in Strelkov's group in Slavyansk?

MS: I did not shoot or hurt anyone. What I did was something that the Western media would later describe as "information war." I was filming the damage to the city and to its people from the Ukrainian artillery and aviation. I put this information on the internet; I distributed it to the Western media. Would I use arms if the worst came? I think the answer is yes. Before going to Donetsk, I had some training in handling weapons.And there was a moment when the Ukrainian forces seemed to close in on Strelkov's headquarters, where I found myself. If they stormed the building, I was ready to shoot. You know, the whole city was encircled; we spent every evening in underground shelters, fearing the bombs. But this was not the hardest moment for me. If I had to shoot, this would have been the worst.

DB: Wouldn't that go against your beliefs of an Orthodox Christian?

MS: No. People who call themselves pacifists often ascribe to Christianity their own wrong ideas about pacifism and what is in fact "peace on earth." Look at the history of Russian church. Look at the biographies of St. Alexander Nevsky, St. Sergius of Radonezh and many other saints who had to take up arms or to encourage warriors. Without these people, Russia would have been colonized and our faith would have disappeared long ago. In Slavyansk, we were not fighting against individual people; we were fighting against the evil idea that you can kill civilians in the name of "united Ukraine." And it is a moral duty to fight evil, sometimes with an arm in your hand. I think not only ethnic Russians in Ukraine, but also ethnic Ukrainians understood us. That is why so many Ukrainian servicemen changed sides or escaped to Russian territory.

An apartment building in Debaltsevo destroyed by shelling. (RIA Novosti/John Trast)An apartment building in Debaltsevo destroyed by shelling. (RIA Novosti/John Trast)

DB: Would you like to start a family in Russia?

MS: I am afraid, it is my destiny to stay free of family duties in order to devote my life to what I can do best - religious education, spreading the word, doing social work. Everyone should do what he or she can do best.

The interview is ended. Margarita excuses herself; she has to go to a church service. Before saying good bye, she stresses what she says is the most important thing for her. "Please, tell your readers that we did not do it for money," she said. "There were hundreds of West Europeans helping to defend Donetsk - not only Germans like me, but also Serbs, Spaniards, Italians, some French people. We did not get anything, except food and a bed to sleep on. We even had to buy our military fatigues for us in the local "Voyentorg" (stores selling uniforms and military paraphernalia) because the commanders required us to look different from civilians.We did not come for money. We came to fight fascism. I am afraid; this fight is far from its end in Donbass."

Margarita appears to be right. When the Spanish police announced the arrest of eight Spanish volunteers who went to fight in Donbass, there was an attempt to present them as a handful of fortune-seekers, who went to fight for money and adrenaline. Charges of being mercenaries and of "fighting against the interests of Spain" were brought against them.

Soon, however, a whole movement in support of the arrested "interbrigadistas" sprang up not only in Spain, but also in several other Western countries. Activists from both the leftist groups (who make up the bulk of the Spanish volunteers in Donbass) and the non-systemic rightist formations (they form the backbone of the French volunteer units there) demanded that the criminal proceedings against their "comrades" in Spain to be stopped.

This situation makes the comparison of the hostilities in Donbass with the war in Spain even more vivid and ominous. It was during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 that the depth of the divide between the Nazi-Fascist Axis and the anti-Nazi alliance of democrats and communists became apparent. In less than two years after the end of hostilities in Spain, the Nazi/Allies conflict, apparent in Spain, became the main collision of the great misfortune known as the World War II. If that is not an omen, then what should the omen be?

Dmitry Babich, political analyst, for RT

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 #32
Fort Russ/Moskovsky Komsomolets
http://fortruss.blogspot.com
May 1, 2015
Interview with Odessa's number one wanted "pro-Russian terrorist", Alena "Viper" Babinina: "The whole Odessa is resistance"
Marina Perevozkina
Moskovsky Komsomolets [http://www.mk.ru/politics/2015/04/29/pozyvnoy-gyurza-pravda-o-terroristicheskom-podpole-v-odesse.html]
Translated from Russian by Kristina Rus

Callsign "Viper": the truth about "the terrorist" underground in Odessa

A Woman considered by Ukraine the head of Odessa terrorists, talked about the background of the events of May 2.

Ukrainian security services claim that current terrorist underground in Odessa was headed by a woman nicknamed "Gyurza" ["Viper" - tr.] . Under her guidance, according to the SBU [Security Service of Ukraine], were the dozens now detained terrorists, from whom hundreds of weapons were seized, dozens of kilograms of explosives, grenade launchers, grenades, plans of terrorist operations...

We were able to have a detailed conversation with "Viper.".

This snake reaches a length of two meters. Head is shaped like a spearhead. Inhabits the deserts, the canyons and mountain slopes. Attacks suddenly, out of hide outs, charging for the distance of the length of her body. Her bite is lethal. The Latin name of Viper - "vipera lebetina," means: "deadly viper".

I look at this woman and try to understand: is there something in her that would justify that nickname? An ordinary woman, mother of two children. There are many like her on the subway, on the streets, in supermarkets. Only her slim figure and black hair color indicate any connection.

- Why are you called "Viper"?

Viper: It's my callsign. But not in a terrorist organization or in the militia of Donbass, but in the Odessa police. I'm still a student of the University of the Interior Ministry in Odessa, unless I was expelled. Last spring we held "Antimaidan" protests, to one of which on April 13 came about 30 thousand people. We were guarding the rally. But I'm not a law enforcement officer, but merely a student. Therefore, I had a shirt with the words: "Public Police Assistant". I was given a walkie-talkie, so we could communicate if anything happened and prevent provocations. I asked our chief, police lieutenant: "What's the callsign for the radio?" He looked at me and said, "Viper". Well, Viper is Viper. So it stuck.

- How did you become a student at your age?

- It just happened. Since my childhood I dreamed to become an investigator, but my family talked me out of it. And now in my forties I realized my dream: enrolled where I wanted since youth ... Even before I had practiced in the courts, engaged in human rights work. Unfortunately, I was not allowed to finish the University. On May 5th of last year, I was just about to start exams for second session of the second year of study. But it so happened that on this day I was already in Moscow..

Alena is now wanted by the SBU. Ahead of the visit to Odessa by Petro Poroshenko (April 10, the day of the liberation from Nazi invaders) there were mass arrests of "terrorists and saboteurs". The exact number of detainees nobody knows. First, SBU announced about ten, then about 27. "Subversive group" of 27 people were the activists of the local Orthodox Cossacks. They were detained right in the gym of Odessa Theatre and Art College hostel, where they met regularly. Besides them, on charges of plotting an explosion were detained the female activists of the public organization "Voice of Odessa".

As Poroshenko's visit was approaching the number of arrested grew. In Odessa, the head of the Kiev authorities had declared that "Overnight on April 9-10 a large terrorist organization was disarmed: more than 40 terrorists detained, hundreds of weapons seized, dozens of kilograms of explosives, grenade launchers, grenades, plans of terrorist operations". If you add up those who were previously detained, it comes to about a hundred. Among them, according to the head of SBU, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, there is even one diver. And the head of this powerful terrorist network, according to the Ukrainian secret service, is a woman nicknamed "Viper". My current companion.

- I was declared a terrorist before the entire world. On one hand - I am thankful for the PR. But I don't like this PR. Because I am a law-abiding person. I like law and order. But what is happening now in Ukraine - it is all illegal. And the witch hunt goes on. We are not saboteurs, we are ordinary Odessans. But for some reason we were presented as citizens of the Russian Federation. I ask them: "SBU, what are you smoking?" Do you think before you make your announcements? It is clear that there are foreign advisers. How do they know who is Babinina? But our Odessa SBU agents know me, know what I was doing. Judges know me. During one trial with my participation the judge was fired for incompetence. After that, everyone already knew: if Babinina participates in a trial - you should not take bribes! There is a saying: "do not give an excuse to those looking for an excuse". They gave me an excuse to tell the truth about them. We can say, gave me a deck of cards with all trump cards.

- Tell us about yourself. What were you doing before enrolling at the MIA University?

Life was interesting, changed many occupations. Finished sewing school, for some time worked as a seamstress. Engaged in social activities. In 2005, after the birth of my second daughter, I was offered to join the socialist party of Ukraine. So I went into politics. Was an election activist, a human rights activist. I like law, like helping to rescue people from unpleasant situations.

In 2008 the crisis came, and all credit unions collapsed across the country. We tried to help the investors to recover funds. I was accepted to work at the Credit Union of Ukraine as head of Department on Public Relations. In 2010 the supervisory board appointed me as the chairman of the Board of the Credit Union. Then I headed the city branch of the all-Ukrainian party "Rus" (leader - Denis Shevchyuk). But we lost the elections, and I left party activities.

- What is the ideology of this party?

The party advocated for a union of friendly states - Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. I personally have never vouched for the disintegration of Ukraine. I advocated against repressions of Russian-speaking population, for human rights, for society's control over the authorities.

- You were an activist of Kulikovo Pole?

[Kulikovo Pole was the park in front of the Trade Unions house in Odessa, were at least 48 activists were shot, butchered and  burnt alive on May 2, 2014 - tr.]

Yes.

- Tell us, how this movement started.

This movement began in Odessa after a coup was staged in Kiev in February 2014. I myself have taken an active stance at the moment, when I saw Maidan. It was then that I realized that Ukraine will be no more. People came  out on Maidan against corruption. And the result was: bandits were replaced with other bandits. Bandits and fascists came to power. I was also moved by the arrest of Igor Markov [Ukrainian politician, the Chairman of the party "Rodina" - M. P.]. He was arrested even under Yanukovych. All of us, the citizens of Odessa, helped him get out of the dungeons.

- Was he a popular leader in the city?

Of course. Odessa put high hopes in him. He was simply pushed aside due to his uncompromising position, because he defended the rights of Odessans.

- How did the events in Odessa unfold after the victory of Maidan?

We all came to the Kulikovo Pole (field). Created groups in social networks. We had a leader - Anton Davidchenko. No one paid us, the people organized themselves. People believed that there is a chance to change things for the better. Our group of 11 people on March 1 collected signatures for a referendum and went to Crimea. Why there? On the Internet there was information that the government of Yanukovych will gather in Crimea. Unfortunately, neither Yanukovych nor his government, we didn't see there, so we handed the lists to the Embassy of the Russian Federation.

- What referendum did you want to hold?

We wanted to hold a referendum in Odessa so Odessans themselves could decide in which state they should live. The entire Southeast was supposed to hold their referendums and to choose the direction in which to proceed. We wanted to join the Customs Union. We didn't want to "go to Europe." Yes, we agree to cooperate with Europe, but Russia is closer to us, we have the same mentality with our Russian brothers. It all started in Western Ukraine - there they stared capturing the military offices, military bases, district administrations. But they are just children, and we are "separatists-terrorists". Why they can, but we can't? We were not allowed to hold a referendum. On May 2 we were simply murdered and burned alive.

- You say "our group". What was it doing?

Our group are lawyers. On the Kulikovo field, at the headquarters, we had a legal department. We wrote complaints, petitions to the prosecutors office. We wanted to hold an election to elect our representatives into the territorial communities, which were supposed to control the authorities on the ground. We took a civilized path.

-Did you set a goal to secede from Ukraine?

This issue was not raised at the Kulikovo field. We wanted to build brotherly relations with Russia. Practically, the South-East is the same as Russia, only in the format of another country.

-What ideology united you?

We are anti-fascists. My grandfather fought in WWII. I remember word for word what he told me about the war. Recently, I called my mom at home telling her: "Hide our books". We have the books "Great Patriotic war", 4 volumes inherited from grandfather. Large, priceless, with maps. I said to my mother: "Hide them, or else you may get arrested". Now for this kind of literature you can go to jail.

-For historical books?

Of course. There is no more history in Ukraine. Banned everything. You can get arrested for a St. George ribbon, not just books. The Verkhovna Rada has banned all communist symbols. Veterans are afraid to wear the medals, especially with St. George ribbon. I was told by my friends from Odessa, how on April 10 veterans were forced to remove their medals. It was painful to watch.

-Where were you on May 2?

At the Greek square. On May 2 we were again called up to help the police, to participate in defending the order in the city. Because on that day there was supposed to be a soccer game, we were awaiting the arrival of soccer fans. We were worried that the same thing as in Kharkov, were there was crackdown, would happen in the city. So our legal department was at the Greek square, there also gathered other active Odessans, Kulikovo activists, Odessa militia.

On the eve of the event we learned that a provocation was being prepared,  that militants will come to Odessa and will burn the Kulikovo field. We have received this information from two boys who came from Kiev to Euromaidan, but got lost and stumbled on us. On April 25 a deputy of regional council came to Kulikovo field with a proposal to move out of there. Otherwise, he said "it will be hot". We had an idea to remove the tent city, leaving only the tent with coffee-tea, the information tent and the stage. Therefore, the Odessa militia and the legal department moved to "Battery 411". That's where we were, until the call came to move to Alexandrovsky Prospect to strengthen the law enforcement.

- What have you seen on May 2?

Enough to be wanted in Ukraine. I had the feeling that we were taken for a slaughter. It was terrifying... there were about 300-400 of us, and much more of them. They had firearms. Right next to me guys were dropping like flies... And the victims at the Greek square were only on our side. From the side of Maidan and the ultras there were no corpses.

-How so?

I can prove it. It all began "with the first body on their side", right? They show a video with a body. At that time I was just at that same spot. We went for a ride just to see how many ultras [Maidan radicals/banderites/maidanites - tr.] gathered at the Cathedral square. At first there were 200-300 people. But when the bells of the Cathedral rang, they, like cockroaches, began to gather. From different sides. In one minute thousands came running. Then the "14th hundred" of Maidan lined up. I filmed all of this. We just stopped at the intersection between Deribasovskaya, Preobrazhenskaya streets and Cathedral square. This is the place that everyone showed. And there were no bodies, which were filmed and showed by the Ukrainian TV channels. It was a staged scene, filmed previously. It was not blood, but paint. Later this [dead] man appeared elsewhere. From our side there were no firearms  at all [the opposite side claims that the first killed on May 2 in Odessa was the Right Sector member Igor Ivanov - M. P.].

-What about the footage, which clearly shows how some people with red arm bands are shooting from behind the police?

You are talking about Botsman [nickname  a famous Kulikovo field activist Vitaly Budko - M. P.]? You know, what's paintball? Botsman had a paintball gun which shoots balls. Also there were traumatic weapons. We had no clue that we will be shot from real firearms.  When bullets and Molotov cocktails flew at us, I broke through from "Athens" [shopping center] to the Primorsky district police department. Shouting to the policemen: "Why are you standing, they have real firearms, there guys are dying, reservists ..." All the dead were ours, "kulikovtsi". And law enforcement officers, information about whom is classified.

-Who were the people with red bands?

I also had a red armband. They put it on from the start to identify our own. But I saw on Admirala Zhukova street 4 people in black uniforms running with red armbands. And they were not our own. Later I received information that there were specially planted provocateurs.

-You said there were police officers killed...

Yes. But there is no information about it anywhere. I knew three of them, one studied at MIA University in a parallel class. Others - armed forces reservists, officers, guards of the detention center. They all died from gunshot wounds. I'm not going to name names. They have families lef

-Did you witness how it all began?

I have a video of this moment. I sat in the car and watched as the 14th hundred was lining up. Suddenly they turned around and marched towards the Greek square, towards "Athens". And there were our people. Suddenly: smoke, fumes, what's happening? I jumped out of a car. I looked near the "Gold" shop, there was a box of Molotov cocktails. Men were distributing these cocktails. In front of my eyes they began to put on body armor. I saw their eyes: they were really deranged. I think it was the same group of para-military provocateurs, who operated in Kharkov and other cities. I went to "Athens", the guys said: "They attacked us, we fought back." It all happened so quickly. Shots were fired, then came a fire truck. They killed the driver. No one talks about this.

-What was his name?

I can not say his name. I am giving you information from unofficial sources. From people who are now there. From current employees of the SBU. Not all of them are scum. This video was also sent not by ordinary people.

-What did the police do?

They were confused. Fuchedzhi (then deputy head of the Odessa regional police - M.P.) had the same shock as everyone else. I've never seen him like that. You could see despair on his face. There were very few of our Odessa cops. The others were brought from other cities: Ternopil, Rivne [Western Ukraine - tr.]. That day I saw Andrey Yusov surrounded by a group of SBU agents near the branch of "Privat-Bank"  [Andrey Yusov was an activist of Odessa Euromaidan, then the leader of the Odessa branch of "Udar" party. In February was appointed adviser to the head of SBU in Odessa region - M. P.]. I saw a barrel of a gun peaking out of the window of the bank, and Yusov was facing the window and making some signs to the person holding that gun. There were snipers at "Privat-Bank".

-When did you leave Odessa?

On the same day, May 2. I did not even go home. I arrived to Moscow just with my passport. When we broke out of the encirclement of pravoseki [the Right Sector - tr.] on the Greek square, I drove to the House of Trade Unions. And there everything was already burning. I watched the scene: cops just standing there, and around them a total mess, people being killed, finished off... I ran to the cops: "What are you doing?" A familiar girl from Odessa militia ran up to me, screaming: "These are not our cops! It's Ternopil. Get out of here, or else you will stay here forever too!" We drove to "Battery 411". Then a phone rang that a group went there to shoot us. Just as we were, we headed out of town, and the next day we were in Lugansk. Put up Ukrainian flags on the cars, that's how we passed the checkpoints. When we saw a checkpoint with  Novorossiya flags, breathed a sigh of relief.

-Why do you think they are bringing such accusations against you in your homeland?

They started hunting me when on March 2 I posted a video of the events of May 2, where there were faces of current SBU agents. SBU agents are filmed there from ours, and their side. They walked  around and watched, gave out orders. They really could have prevented the killings, but did not do it. Although they should have. I have the names of these people. Now SBU made me the chief terrorist to pay for this. I believe that this was an operation planned by special services. They went for it because they failed to provoke us. They saw that we did not attempt to capture the SBU building, the regional administration building, that we were operating in a civilized and lawful way. So they set it all up. All these arrests that occur in the city - it's called a "witch hunt". They themselves set up all of those explosions in the city. Maybe with a small exception. You can tell what was done by professionals and what - by amateurs.

-Are you heading any organisation here?

I am not heading anything and represent only myself. Recently the female activists of the public organization "Voice of Odessa" were detained. They were kept in the SBU for 15 hours. Now they want to charge them for allegedly carrying out the terrorist attacks in Odessa under my leadership.

"Voice of Odessa" - are the people who after May 2 did not break down and continue the work of the Kulikovo field. Using only legal methods. They were attacked, they were able by law to open a criminal case. It turned out that at a time when the president of the organization came to investigators, the attackers were in the regional investigation department on Shevchenko prospect.

That is actually the "Voice of Odessa" was attacked by law enforcement officers. We are the undesirables only because we demand following the law. Thus we need to be dragged in mud, blamed for what we didn't commit, crushed. All these searches, arrests, harassment. SBU knocks  out all the testimony under torture.

I know the person who gave his testimony against me while he was hung up by handcuffs, stuffed needles under fingernails. People come out of there crippled. The woman who allegedly gave testimony against me, some Teresa, I don't even know her. People agree to sign anything just to stay alive. At my friends house they found a St. George ribbon, broke his ribs, now he is in the hospital.

Odessa - is a big village, we all know each other. I was a public figure, held rallies, pickets, protests. We fought against corruption, initiated legal proceedings concerning the Credit Union of Ukraine, exposed criminals, were able to return a lot of  property through the courts. People know me, know my position very well. People are arrested just for knowing me, want to shut me up. Since I now express my position on social media, mocking the laws that they pass. The "Voice of Odessa"operated in the same manner. We carried out the investigation of May 2.

-Has the SBU personnel changed a lot?

According to the latest information, in Odessa SBU practically everyone was replaced. Working there mainly Kiev and NATO people. For the most part - poles. One man recently came out of there and immediately fled here. He said: "We understand the Ukrainian language, but many there speak not Ukrainian. With a clear Polish accent. We heard that American, Polish advisers work there. In Odessa all the phone conversations are fully tapped. People who came out of the dungeons of the SBU, said: Skype conversations, all social networks, any statements  - everything is used as a basis for evidence in criminal cases.

-What can you say about the recent arrests?

It was pure window dressing before the visit of Poroshenko in Odessa. A chieftain of the Orthodox Cossacks Anatoli Kolomiytsev was arrested. He had a kids club of combat sports. Golden soul, always spoke for justice. The idea that he is involved in terrorist attacks is nonsense. Those people whose photos were shown on TV as a captured Russian subversive group are all native Odessans, my friends. They were arrested in connection with me and released. Actually in the basements of the SBU there are now 20-25 people. There are people who simply disappeared. Of the seven people who were taken on April 1, three are in jail, and four have disappeared, among them one woman. Their fate is unknown. The worst thing is that lawyers are not allowed to see them.

-There were allegations that one of the objectives of your "terrorist group" was allegedly the murder of Odessa deputy Alexey Goncharenko. What do you think about that?

Who cares about him? Please... Let Goncharenko think about how to save his soul. He is an accomplice to the murder of Odessans. At that moment he was the right hand of the governor Nemirovsky, what do you think, was he aware of what was being prepared?

-Is Odessa resistance completely suppressed today?

No. Nobody has the power to suppress entire Odessa. For Poroshenko's arrival they brought buses, unloaded the boys lined them up and they shouted "Glory to Ukraine". Even before the events of May 2, Odessa Euromaidan numbered 150 people, the Right sector - 15. Today, the whole Odessa is - resistance, just silent for now. But sooner or later everything will fall into place.

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 #33
Fort Russ
http://fortruss.blogspot.com
May 1, 2015
Odessa tragedy: "There was an inhuman horror," the eyewitness says
Translated by Alya Rea

After horrific tragedy in Odessa on May 2, 2014, Ukraine didn't just turned away from the truth, but its authorities put behind the bars the undesirable eyewitnesses of the events on Kulikovo Field, while the perpetrators of this massacre remain at large. But witnesses, even if they are currently sitting in jail, do not want to remain silent - they are ready to testify at all the indictments and talk about what really happened on May 2, 2014. One of these people is Anatoly Lipovka, who was thrown to the Odessa jail for his anti-Maydan position. Anatoly and six more people were put on trial for "separatism," or rather for what they were about to do after the May 2 - to travel to the Donbas to join the militia.

The prosecution doesn't have any real evidence - it is all fabricated. Anatoly was a direct participant in the Odessa tragedy. He entered the House of Trade Unions along with the rest of the people, and later, when the ultras (pro-Ukrainian football fans from Kharkov) had set the building doors on fire, he was rescuing people. Miraculously, he had survived, while his friends, who also tried to help other people, died a horrible death. We got in touch with Anatoly Lipovka on the phone - he said that he cannot remain silent and, as long as there is such an opportunity, he has to tell what he had seen and experienced on that day.

"Everything in Ukraine is turned upside down. They [Ukrainians] themselves are shelling the cities, and then they claim that it is the 'terrorists' from LPR [Lugansk People's Republic] or DPR [Donetsk People's Republic] who are doing it. They suppress the information about the events in the House of Trade Unions and state that there were special forces of the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate [in Russian, it is abbreviated as GRU]. What kind of GRU are they talking about?! They want to shift the guilt on anyone but themselves. We cannot put up with such a lie," says Anatoly.

His name is on the prisoner exchange list that the Donetsk People's Republic submitted to Ukrainian side. And Anatoly Lipovka hopes that this exchange (or an act of the goodwill, as it was done in DPR, by transferring the prisoners to Ukraine) will take place, eventually.

"We helped people to get out of this hell"

As is already known, when several thousand of so-called "Euro-Maydanites" (Anatoly said that there were mostly the ultras, as well as some representatives of the Right Sector) reached the Kulikovo Field, they smashed and burned down the campground of anti-Maydanites near the House of Trade Unions. The latter were in much fewer numbers - there were only a few hundred people.

"They threw stones and Molotov cocktails and they were shooting. There was a priest in one of the tents - he was holding a cross in his hands. They started to chop his hand with an ax, the hand in which he held the cross," says Anatoly. And then the people (they were ordinary civilians, the Odessans who came to oppose the Maidan, and also the activists of anti-Maydan movement, armed with the sticks only) all panicked and ran to hide in the House of Trade Unions.

"My friends and I started to yell to people that they should run away and not enter this building, because it is dangerous. But some other anti-Maydanites, for example, Artem Davichenko, were shouting to the contrary that they all should hide in the building. When people went in there in mass - at least 500 persons, no less - Davichenko got into the car and drove away. After that the rest of our guys went into the building in order not to leave the people behind. I do not know whether there was an ill intent on Davichenko's part, but perhaps he was just in shock," says Anatoly. And then the attackers set fire to the entrance doors, the fire spread inside the building, and the hell began.

As it was not enough that they set fire in the building, they also used some gas, with a sweet taste. Those who inhaled the gas have not been able to stand up anymore. Anatoly and his friends began to urgently take people out - through a side exit, and then through the upper floors to the roof. "My friend and I actually saved about 20 people," says Lipovka. He believes that there were many more people killed than the authorities say. "There were about 500 people who entered the building. How could it happen that 40 people were killed when approximately 500 people went in there and about 300-350 managed to get out?" He sounds perplexed. According to his estimates, at least 130 people were killed that day.

"There was an inhuman horror"

"There was a real fear and an inhuman horror. Some people were killed by bullets, some burned, some others were shot from the bushes when they ran out of the building. One of the dead was found with a bullet in the back. And people were also finished off in the 'passage of death' [beaten by the clubs as they tried to escape the fire]. And the city authorities and the police stood quietly and looked at it! They were in the know," said Anatoly.

He recalls a woman who, because of the smoke, had nowhere to run. She climbed out of the window and screamed, "Help!" And all she heard back is shouting: "Glory to the nation!" and "Death to the enemies!" And then the woman fell out of the window to her death. And soon after someone posted a Ukrainian flag from that window. "I saw it all from the side, when we got people on the roof," says our source.

He remembers his friend Alexei. "He helped people to escape through the left side door. He led seven people out. And people told him not to go back, let's go to the hospital, they said. But he refused, and returned to save more people. However, he didn't come out. Later, he was found on the floor with three bullet holes in his body. Also, he was nailed to the floor. How could these people do that? They are no people ..." By the way, there is not a word in the investigative materials about what happened to Alexei and to the others. "Ukrainian media reported that people were poisoned by carbon monoxide. They didn't show anyone with gunshot wounds," says Lipovka.

"They did not expect this ..."

Anatoly said that even the attackers were surprised by how many people they had killed. "They thought we were unarmed and scared and that we will run away. But people did not run away; the unarmed people began to resist. This fanned their rage,"- says Lipovka. And here is another important point. Once the gas has dissipated and the fire more or less ceased, a group of people in the light-gray uniform came to the building of the House of Trade Unions. "There were about 20 of them. They did not speak either in Russian or in English but in some Eastern European language... Czech, maybe (here it is worth to recall some of the foreigners running around Odessa on May 2 with the strange jars). Several of them had guns. I have not seen they shot anyone. But they looked as some sort of supervisors. Because all the ultras were all very young - 17-20 years old. And it was easy to organize them," says Anatoly.

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 #34
www.thedailybeast.com
May 3, 2015
A Year After the Odessa Massacre, Burning Hatred Divides the City
This beautiful city on the Black Sea has become a symbol of the complex suspicions and conspiracies that plague Ukraine.
By Anna Nemtsova

ODESSA, Ukraine-Several women surrounded a man taking a cell phone video of people laying flowers around photographs of victims killed in the horrific fire at Odessa's Trade Unions House last year.

The women were hostile, even menacing. The man looked suspicious to them, could be "a provocateur," they said, maybe even a pro-Euromaidan activist, a category of person nobody was going to tolerate on Kulikovo Pole Square, where thousands of local residents gathered on Saturday to mourn 42 victims killed on May 2, 2014.

That had been a day of violent protests and confrontations between those who supported closer ties with Russia and those fighting what they saw as Moscow's attack on Ukraine's sovereignty. In the mêlée, members of the pro-Russian faction retreated into a large office building. Molotov cocktails were thrown back and forth, and the building began to burn. But those on the street would not let those inside escape. Those inside died from fire, and smoke inhalation, and because they leaped from windows to their doom.

A year later, Odessa is still torn by the devastating losses, by dark and controversial memories that left deep unhealed scars.

"Look at him, he laughs at our trouble! Murderer, murderer!" one of the women shouted at the man making cell phone video. "He is from the Right Sector! What did you forget here? Go away!"

The man continued to shoot video of the women attacking him. Several uniformed security personnel guarding the square pushed the man away. "They go their way, you go your way," told the women.

By "they," the officer meant pro-Euromaidan activists, who are opponents of the old government in Kiev, which they overthrew, and supporters of the fight against pro-Russian separatists in the east who would like to carve out a new Moscow allied territory that includes this city. Six Euromaidan activists were killed on Odessa streets that day. Their memorial was in a different part of Odessa, a few kilometers away on Sobornaya Square.

"Look at him, he laughs at our trouble! Murderer, murderer!"

Before the anniversary, agreements were made among the organizers to avoid revenge and stay away from each other's memorials. To keep Odessa calm, Kiev deployed over 4,000 well-equipped police and military to Odessa: military trucks, police buses, uniformed men, some coming to Odessa after weeks spent on front lines in the eastern regions, patrolled the streets from early morning, surrounding both Kulikovo Pole and Sobornaya squares.

"We feel like prisoners with police all around us," said Aleksei Vinogradov, one of the anti-government activists.

How to stitch together two parts of wounded society, both suffering from the ongoing war and the economic crisis, both blaming each other for tragedies?

Zoya Kazanzhy, vice governor of Odessa, told The Daily Beast the conflicts are "sometimes dividing even married opponents in their bedrooms." She said that various surveys conducted by the government had demonstrated that it would take Odessa a long time to heal.

On Saturday night, a local television channel showed a documentary called "Odessa Without Myths," a detailed account of the May 2 tragedy. The film showed that trust for authorities was very low. Odessa, once a successful tourist center, was now growing poorer and unhappier by day. Homeless people were digging in garbage containers on the central Deribasovskaya Avenue. Residents were eager to know who they should blame for their tragedy. To build bridges between heartbroken mourners in the two camps, Odessa Governor Igor Palitsa met with parents of the victims. The documentary aired on the anniversary day showed two fathers whose sons had been killed shaking hands.

"At this point, we see that our society is so radicalized, that only parents of victims, those who lost the most precious things in their lives, their children, can say to Odessa, 'Enough, stop the violence," Vice Governor Kazanzhy told The Daily Beast.

Earlier that day Ukrainian patriots, many in uniforms, were carrying national flags to Sobornaya Square to remember their friends, and some were in gloomy mood amid news reports that thousands were marching in Kiev in sympathy with the victims of the fire.

Odessa volunteers defending peace in their city were concerned about frequent minor terrorist attacks on public places. This spring, over 60 people have been arrested in Odessa for separatist activity. Odessa counted 32 explosions outside volunteer centers, on railroad tracks, outside banks and in other public places.

"Arrests of small activists mean nothing, those who control them are free," said Sergei Sernenko, leader of Odessa's Pravy Sektor (Right Sector), a military movement of Ukrainian nationalists criticized by Kiev authorities as well as by Moscow. "And the government is full of the same corrupt crooks, who are afraid of us and want to disarm us."

Meanwhile, a river of people coming to mourn the 42 fire victims seemed endless.

"If the government wanted to knit the social fabric together, they would not have arrested journalists, they would not have killed our Timer web site on the eve of today's anniversary," said Yuri Tkachev, chief-editor of Timer media and a pro-Russian activist, as we stood in Kulikovo Pole square.

More people hurried toward the scene of tragedy past lined-up security, through the metal detectors, to the building where a year ago dozens of trapped women and men burned alive, suffocated by smoke or leaping out of windows.

A city hall official, Moris Ibragim, spoke before the crowd of mourners. Odessa could not turn the page of history and move on, he said, "until people hear reasons, motives and the names of those who ordered the massacre."

To help relatives and friends of victims relieve the pain a little, mourner sent black balloons and white pigeons into the sky. But the candles arranged into the form of words on the square said: "We remember. We mourn. We will not forget."

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 #35
Facebook
May 3, 2015
The Odesa Massacre
By Ivan Katchanovski
Ivan Katchanovski teaches at the School of Political Studies and the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa. He was Visiting Scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Politics at the State University of New York at Potsdam, Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, and Kluge Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. He received his Ph.D. from the School of Public Policy at George Mason University.

My analysis of the Odesa massacre will be included along with specific sources in my paper prepared for presentation at the upcoming Canadian Association of Slavists conference in Ottawa. This analysis uses various sources, such as a special parliamentary commission report, May 2 group reports, videos and recordings of live broadcasts and calls to firefighters, leaked medical examinations, media reports, and interviews by participants and eyewitnesses from both sides and by the police commanders. The main results of this analysis are as follows:

The Ukrainian and regional government officials planned to use radical Maidan activists to supress the separatist movement in the Odesa region and to disperse the opposition anti-Maidan camp near the Trade Union building before May 9, 2014. The march, led by the Right Sector and football ultras on May 2, 2014, was used to implement this plan, but it is not certain if the mass killing was planned in advance. Odeska druzhyna, a small separatist organization led by an ex-policeman, tried to counter and attack this march. They used red tape labels, and were not Right Sector agent provocateurs, as it was sometime suggested. Use of the same red tape by some of policemen in a police cordon took place later during the clashes, and it was not an organized collusion with the separatists, as the Ukrainian government and the media claimed.

Groups of numerically superior activists of the Right Sector from Odesa and Kharkiv, where this far right organization was led by the neo-Nazi Social National Assembly/Patriot of Ukraine, football ultras with far right political orientations and Maidan Self-Defence units from Odessa and other regions attacked Odeska druzhyna activists. The pro-separatist activists took cover behind the police cordon, and some of them started to shoot at the direction of attackers. A small mobile group of separatists arrived at that time in the area of the clashes to provide reinforcement. One of its members was filmed shooting at the direction of the attackers with an AK-74 type assault rifle or its hunting derivative.

The first victim was a Right Sector activist killed about the same time and place in his chest with a 5.45mm caliber bullet. This suggests a strong possibility that he was killed by this mobile group member. But other possibilities cannot be excluded, since the investigation and videos provide no exact time, place, position of the first killing and shooting and no results of bullet, ballistic and weapons expertise are publicly released. Recently leaked medical expert report concludes that the second Maidan victim killed shortly afterwards in the same area during the clashes was shot by a hunting bullet which was deformed as a result of a ricochet or hitting something. He was often misrepresented as been killed by the Kalashnikov shooter. Like in the first case, the investigation and videos provide no exact time, place, position of the second killing and shooting and no results of bullet, ballistic and weapons expertise are made public.

In the clashes that followed nearby, four anti-Maidan activists were killed and many other anti-Maidan protesters and policemen and at least one local journalist were wounded with hunting ammunition. The recently leaked medical expert report concluded that these four victims were shot by pellets and hunting bullets. A Maidan activist was filmed shooting with a hunting rifle at the direction of the anti-Maidan protesters and the police cordon. But the information about these killings and photos and videos of the shooting were deliberately supressed by the Ukrainian officials and the media. A Maidan activist seen in these videos was later identified and arrested and charged with the shooting, but the suspected killed was soon released. The most Odeska druzhyna activists who took part in these clashes took cover in a shopping mall and were later arrested by the police.

Following the calls from the local Maidan leaders, the mob of the Right Sector activists, football ultras and the Maidan Self-defence members attacked and burned a tent camp of various anti-Maidan organizations, whose activists and supporters then escaped to the Trade Union building and tried to barricade the main entrance doors.  

Some groups of the attackers threw Molotov cocktails and burning tires into the Main entrance and set the entrance doors and the make-shift barricade there on fire, while other groups blocked other exists. Forty two people perished as a result of fire, smoke and trying to jump from the upper floors. Trade Union victims were unarmed, and included mainly pro-separatist supporters and several employees who were at the building at the time. Six women and one minor were killed during the fire. Police and firefighters were ordered by superiors to stand by and not interfere, and a special plan to deal with mass disturbances launched by the Odesa regional police was not registered at the orders from the top, likely the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Similarly, police officials were ordered to attend a meeting during the start of the clashes.  

The official investigation has been deliberately falsified and stonewalled to cover up the involvement of the government officials, the Right Sector, and the Maidan Selfe-defence in the massacre. The highest government officials, including then acting president Turchynov, the new president Poroshenko, prime-minister Yatseniuk, deliberately misrepresented the massacre for the same reasons. These and other government leaders and officials in charge of investigation falsely claimed that the massacre was conducted by Russian agents, that the fire resulted from the Molotov cocktails thrown by separatists from the top of the building and that that the police colluded with the separatists. Before the first anniversary of the massacre, official investigation and May 2 group created by the Odesa governor stated that the deadly fire started at the main entrance when both sides were throwing Molotov cocktails even though there is no evidence of the Molotov cocktails been thrown there by separatists at the time of the start of the fire. In contrast, videos, recorded calls to the firefighters, and admissions posted on the Right Sector, SNA, and another neo-Nazi websites and social media sites, eyewitness reports show that the fire started after the Molotov cocktails and tires were thrown by the attackers. But this evidence is deliberately omitted or the mass murder is justified by the first killing of Right Sector activists or by likely separatist takeover of the Odesa Region. Only anti-Maidan activists are among those currently arrested.

The various evidence indicates involvement of the far right and the Fatherland leaders in the Odesa massacre, but specific nature of involvement of specific leaders remains unclear. The same organizations were involved in the Maidan massacre. The Western governments, media and even many scholars accept each new Ukrainian government account of the massacre for granted. The use of the Ukraine conflict to advance geopolitical interests of the US government and US government backing of Fatherland leaders during and after the Euromaidan can explain otherwise puzzling US policy concerning both the Odesa and Maidan massacres. The same factors can account for the failure of US government to disclose its intelligence and other information concerning both Odesa and Maidan massacres.

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 #36
Seeking Alpha
http://seekingalpha.com
May 3, 2015
IMF To Ukraine: Pain, And More Pain, And Maybe Some Gain
By Constantin Gurdgiev
[Chart here http://seekingalpha.com/article/3133016-imf-to-ukraine-pain-and-more-pain-and-maybe-some-gain]

A very interesting IMF working paper on sustainability and effectiveness of fiscal policy in Ukraine that cuts rather dramatically across the official IMF policy blather.

Fiscal Multipliers in Ukraine, by Pritha Mitra and Tigran Poghosyan, IMF Working Paper, March 2015, WP/15/71 looks at the role of fiscal policy (spending and investment) in the Ukrainian economy.

As authors assert, "since the 2008-09 global crisis, which hit Ukraine particularly hard, the government relied on fiscal stimulus to support recovery. In reality, it was the main lever for macroeconomic management... Today, even after the recent float of the Ukrainian hryvnia, fiscal policy remains key to economic stabilization." In particular, "Over the past five years, the government relied on real public wage and pension hikes to stimulate economic activity, sometimes at the expense of public infrastructure spending. Many argue that this choice of fiscal instruments undermined private sector growth and contributed to the economy falling back into recession in mid-2012."

Since the IMF bailout, however, fiscal adjustment is now aiming for a reversal of long-term imbalances on spending and revenue sides. In simple terms, fiscal adjustment has now become a critical basis for addressing the economic and financial crisis. As the result, the IMF study looked at the effectiveness of various fiscal policy instruments.

The reason for the need for rebalancing fiscal policy in Ukraine is that current environment is characterized by "...the severe crisis, its toll on tax revenues, and financing constraints, necessitate fiscal consolidation. But the challenge is to minimize its negative impact on growth."

In other words, the key questions are: "Will tax hikes or spending cuts harm growth more? Does capital or current spending have a stronger impact on economic activity?"

Quantitatively, the paper attempts to estimate "...the fiscal multiplier - the change in output, relative to baseline, following an exogenous change in the fiscal deficit that stems from a change in revenue or spending policies."

The findings are: "Applying a structural vector auto regression, the empirical results show that Ukraine's near term fiscal multipliers are well below one. Specifically, the impact revenue and spending multipliers are -0.3 and 0.4, respectively. This suggests that if a combination of revenue and spending consolidation measures were pursued, the near-term marginal impact on growth would be modest," albeit negative for raising revenue and cutting spending.

"Over the medium-term, the revenue multiplier becomes insignificant, rendering it impossible to draw any conclusions on its strength. The spending multiplier strengthens to 1.4, with about the same impact from capital and current spending. However, the impact of the capital multiplier lasts longer. Against this backdrop, the adverse impact of fiscal consolidation on medium-term growth could be minimized by cutting current spending while raising that on capital."

The risks are unbalanced to the downside, however, so the IMF study concludes that "Given the severe challenges facing the Ukrainian economy, it is important that policymakers apply these results in conjunction with broader considerations - including public debt sustainability, investor confidence, credibility of government policies, public spending efficiency. These considerations combined with the large size of current spending in the budget, may necessitate larger near- and long-term current spending cuts than what multiplier estimates suggest."

In simple terms, this means that, per IMF research (note, this is not a policy directive), Ukrainian economy will need to sustain a heavy duty adjustment on the side of cutting public spending on current expenditure programs (wages, pensions, purchasing of services, provision of services, social welfare, health, etc.) and, possibly, provide small, only partially offsetting, increase in capital spending. This would have to run alongside other measures that will raise costs of basic services and utilities for all involved.

The problem, therefore, is a striking one: to deliver debt sustainability, current expenditure and price supports will have to be cut, causing massive amounts of pain for ordinary citizens. Meanwhile, infrastructure spending will have to rise (but much less than the cuts in current expenditure), which will, given Ukrainian corruption, line the pockets of the oligarchs, while providing income and jobs to a smaller subset of working population. Otherwise, the economy will tank sharply. Take your pick, the IMF research suggests: public unrest because of cut-backs to basic expenditures, or an even deeper contraction in the economy. A hard choice to make.

In the end, "More broadly, fiscal multipliers are one of many tools policymakers should use to guide their decisions. Given the severe challenges facing the Ukrainian economy - including public debt sustainability, low investor confidence, and subsequent limited availability of financing - it may be necessary for policymakers to undertake stark consolidation efforts across both revenues and expenditures, despite the adverse consequences for growth."

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 #37
Business New Europe
www.bne.eu
April 30, 2015
Ukraine's economy - from bad to worse
Mark Adomanis in Philadelphia

Despite optimistic predictions that, in the wake of its International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout, Ukraine had managed to "turn a corner", a macroeconomic update from the World Bank on April 29 shows that Ukraine's economy is continuing to perform worse than even the already dire forecasts.

After initially predicting that Ukraine's economy would shrink by "only" 2.3% in 2015, the World Bank sharply downgraded its full-year GDP projection to a 7.5% loss. If true, this year would end up being even worse than the already painful 6.8% decline that Ukraine registered during 2014.

The full report makes for harrowing reading. In 2014 virtually the only bright spot in Ukraine's economy was agriculture, which managed to eke out 2.8% annual growth. The story in all other sectors ranged from the bad to the disastrous. Industrial production fell by 10%, wholesale trade by 15% and construction by more than 20%.

The fact that investment declined far more sharply than either industrial production or consumption would suggest (at least to your humble author) that the bank's prediction of a return to 2% growth in 2016 and then sustained growth after that is overly optimistic. So long as investment is in free-fall (and there are no signs that it's started to rebound in 2015), future Ukrainian output will be negatively impacted. Indeed, given the enormous physical damage to the country's economic infrastructure, particularly in the east, total investment would have to sharply increase merely to get Ukraine back to the status quo ante.

Reading through the litany of carnage, the crisis that Ukraine is currently experiencing looks less like a temporary adverse shock and more like a permanent (negative) change in economic trajectory. The report repeatedly states that additional reform is the secret to escaping from the current downward spiral, but it's really hard to see how Ukraine gets to there (stable economic growth) from here (bankruptcy, recession and borderline economic chaos).

Downward spiral

Consider, as one example, the devaluation of the hryvnia. By sharply increasing the costs of imports and making Ukrainian exports much more cost-competitive, the devaluation that occurred during 2014 should have brought Ukraine's current account back into balance. For a little while, at least, this is exactly what happened; by August 2014 Ukraine's current account deficit was basically at zero.

However, as the bank noted, additional "conflict-related disruptions" in export industries and an increased reliance on imported natural gas (Ukraine's domestic coal industry is in ruins, with production down by roughly 60%) prevented the adjustment from taking hold. Despite being essentially out of money - by the end of February Kyiv's foreign currency reserves were down to less than one month's worth of import coverage - Ukraine still ran a more than 4% current account deficit during 2014. The bank projects a more modest deficit of 2.4% in 2015, but full adjustment won't occur until 2016 at the absolute earliest (and that is assuming no resumption of the fighting in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine).

As bleak as the World Bank's conclusions are (and they are quite bleak!), the report notes that the risks are "tilted to the downside". Any "further escalation of the conflict" will deepen the current economic decline and "delay recovery" even further. Additionally, "further deterioration in trade relations with Russia" could result in a "prolonged recession", since the reorientation of Ukrainian exports will require both time and investment, both of which are in desperately short supply.

The above hints at a troubling conclusion about Ukraine's future that the World Bank doesn't explicitly state, but that is nonetheless plainly visible if you read between the lines: Russia holds nearly all of the cards. If fighting in the east flares back up and if Ukrainian exports to Russia do not recover, then Ukraine could very well enter a years-long recession that would likely cripple its nascent move towards the EU. Given the lengths to which Russia has already gone to prevent Ukraine from integrating with the West, one does not need a particularly active imagination to think that it will use the considerable power at its disposal to worsen Ukraine's already existential economic crisis.

The West has the ability to prevent this outcome, but doing so will require a direct infusion of financial resources that, so far, has proven politically impossible. If things continue on their current trajectory, then, Ukraine's short- and medium-term future will likely be one not of "convergence" with the West, but of a downward spiral into depression and collapse.

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 #38
Current Politics in Ukraine
https://ukraineanalysis.wordpress.com
May 2, 2015
VOLODYMYR VIATROVYCH AND UKRAINE'S DE-COMMUNIZATION LAWS
By David Marples
Distinguished University Professor, University of Alberta, Canada

Volodymyr Viatrovych's response to the Open Letter [http://krytyka.com/en/solutions/opinions/decommunization-and-academic-discussion], written and signed by some 70 scholars from North America, Western Europe, and Ukraine in response to the April 9, 2015, laws makes a number of unwarranted assumptions about our intentions and about Western scholarship on Ukraine generally that need to be addressed.

In his opening remarks he comments that the letter does not analyze the circumstances "under which the Ukrainian Parliament approved the "decommunization" package. Later he suggests that we did not read all the laws because we only focused on two of them. Of course we read all the laws. The two laws to which we referred caused most concern. And it was not the circumstances so much as their rapid path to approval without much discussion-not merely in the Parliament, but in the country generally, including among the scholarly community-that elicited our response.

Viatrovych asserts that "similar laws were adopted by other Eastern European countries," a non sequitur as an explanation of the motives for adopting them in Ukraine. First of all, we were not discussing the laws in other countries. Had we focused on them we might well have reached the same conclusions as we did for those of April 9. There is certainly no indication in our letter that we are somehow satisfied with them; they remain a topic for debate and have been roundly criticized in some forums.

Viatrovych dismisses the non-voting MPs on April 9 as pro-Russians who do not have at heart the interests of Ukraine. But are they not elected officials representing their own specific communities? Opinion polls circulating in early 2014 suggest that fear of Euromaidan was as prevalent in Ukraine as support for the protestors. But for Viatrovych all opposition to the laws is either pro-Moscow or of benefit to Moscow and thus should be dismissed and disparaged.

One can accept that there are frustrations with the legacy of the Soviet Union and one can surely remove Lenin statues, which frankly are an eyesore. Yet one cannot force people to change long-held views overnight or ignore their opinions simply because we disagree with them. If one wishes to attain such a goal, it can only be done in stages, by convincing them that a different approach should be taken.

One of the problems of the treatment of Donbas region in general by the Ukrainian authorities is that its residents are somehow backward or not "real Ukrainians" because they do not adhere to a nationalist point of view. For Viatrovych, those in opposition are ipso facto traitors who "confidently hit the 'yes' button on January 16, 2014" to approve the "dictatorship laws." Such intolerance is reminiscent of the Communist period he abhors so much.

He writes further that: "The phrase 'criminal responsibility' does not appear in the text being criticized." True. But much in this law is implicit rather than explicit. It is what is omitted as much as what is included that causes confusion. Public denial is considered "derision," and "humiliation of the Ukrainian people's dignity" is unlawful. But how does one define these phrases? What constitutes humiliation?

It is still unclear what happens to those who fall on the wrong side of these laws. Viatrovych suggests that no scholars will be punished for what they write. But one of the Ukrainian signatories to our letter to Poroshenko and Hroisman has already been harassed and threatened by his superiors, suggesting that opposition to the new laws will not be tolerated.

On UPA he seems to have a blind spot. He suggests inter alia that our comments on ethnic cleansing in Volhynia represent simply one point of view, hinting that perhaps this event never took place or that it has been misconstrued. "It is only one of the opinions that has the right to exist." It is not an opinion, however, but a fact and one that has been carefully documented by a number of scholars, including Timothy Snyder in his Past and Present article of May 2003. I cite this article in particular because Snyder can hardly be accused of being anti-Ukrainian and has been among the most supportive scholars of Ukraine throughout the current crisis.

Viatrovych makes the analogy of Article 2 of the Law of Ukraine on the Holodomor, which recognizes public denial of the event as illegal. There is virtually no scholar alive today, however, who would deny that the Famine of 1932-33 took place and that has been the case for the past 25 years. When President Viktor Yushchenko initially brought this law forward, however, his goals went considerably further. He wished to make it illegal to deny that the Holodomor was an act of genocide, which was not accepted by the Ukrainian Parliament. Such a law would have impeded "comprehensive study of the Holodomor."

The use of symbols and slogans of UPA or Bandera on the Maidan-"the Banderite 'Glory to Ukraine!' became the official Maidan greeting" writes Viatrovych-also seems to me derivative and expedient rather than evidence of commitment to any sort of cause-a statement supported by the miserable performance of far right presidential candidates in the election that followed. Participants in Euromaidan have stated to the contrary that such slogans became popular despite the fact that they originated with prewar and wartime nationalists. Many of those repeating the mantra did not even know its origins. On the other hand, the appearance of the red-and-black flag did seem ominous to some onlookers and Russian propaganda organs instantly exploited their appearance on the square.

Viatrovych's comment on the 1920s also seems misguided. No one is suggesting that the cultural renaissance of this decade justified what followed or the Stalin regime in general. But it did take place in the Soviet period that is universally condemned by these laws. In other words, the Soviet period was like the curate's egg in that not everything about it was universally bad and evil. In turn there were "good" Ukrainian Communists just as there were malevolent ones, as well as Communist leaders who left a mixed legacy such as Petro Shelest.

Lastly, Viatrovych objects to certain signatories on our list whose articles on "primordial Ukrainian collaborationism" are "actively used by Russian propaganda." Unfortunately, propaganda organs, Russian or otherwise, regularly exploit and distort scholarly work in this way. But Viatrovych is suggesting also that our naive trust of a group that wishes to malign Ukraine "was a reason for the appearance of this appeal," which "has already become an instrument in this war."

I cannot speak for everyone who signed the Letter, but my hope is for the development of a Ukraine based on freedom of expression and thought rather than the acceptance of diktats by MPs in parliament backed up by the law courts. One cannot erase the past; one can only seek to understand it. Of course OUN and UPA fought for the independence of Ukraine, and no doubt many of their members did so at great cost to themselves and their families. But one should not try to conceal the darker deeds or pretend that they only exist in the minds of anti-Ukrainians.

There is nothing herein that is unique to Ukraine incidentally; Americans have experienced soul-searching about some criminal acts in Vietnam; my own country, Canada, has faced condemnation for its treatment of the indigenous population; Britain has had to come to terms with many aspects of the colonial period; and more obviously the Germans have tried to atone for the Holocaust. By and large they have done so. The Turks in contrast have refused to acknowledge the genocide of Armenians a century ago, despite what to many appears incontestable evidence; just as Viatrovych refuses to accept criticism of UPA for crimes on a smaller scale.

I have no quarrel with Viatrovych's views on the moral equivalence of Hitler and Stalin's regimes. Personally I do not agree with him because I regard the crime of the Jewish Holocaust as unique, but I have long thought that in the Baltic States and Ukraine, and perhaps also Belarus, it is logical that citizens often adopt such a perspective, including many in the Diaspora who fled from the Red Army.

The difficulty with Ukraine's past is that it is intensely contested and controversial. On many issues there can be no definitive conclusions among scholars as the far more reasoned early 21st century debates among Ukrainian historians about OUN and UPA indicated. And the "circumstances" to which Viatrovych refers are critical: it is precisely the reason why such laws should not be rushed through and approved at this juncture, while a war rages in the East, an economic crisis ravages the country, and the government struggles to deal with its oligarchs.

The Parliament and courts of Ukraine have to be more rational and wise than the gangster regimes that preside in Donbas, or for that matter than the Communist regime that was in power for over seven decades. Perhaps, ultimately, they will be. In the West we can write and think what we want. Our friends in Ukraine should have the same right.

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 #39
Channel One TV (Moscow)
April 29, 2015
Russian TV talk show ponders historical differences with Ukraine

The 29 April edition of the weekly talk show "Politics" ("Politika") on Russia's state-controlled Channel One was dedicated generally to the differences in the perception of World War II history between Russia and Ukraine.

Ukraine should not claim World War II heritage

The take-off point for the discussion was a Ukrainian social ad which draw a parallel between Soviet World War II veterans and the war in east Ukraine. Presenter Petr Tolstoy said that it suggested that what happens in Donetsk "is also a Patriotic War for Ukraine" (Soviet Union's war against Nazi Germany and its allies in 1941-1945 is known as the Great Patriotic War).

Deputy director of the Foreign Ministry's information and press department Mariya Zakharova said that of course this cannot be compared. If Ukraine thinks that the war in Donbass is their Patriotic War and not an anti-terrorist operation, it should announce this and "we will treat you quite differently", she added.

Deputy State Duma speaker Andrey Isayev (One Russia) said that there was something positive about the video, as it demonstrated that Ukrainian authorities are forced to revoke the Soviet people's sacrifice. Tolstoy said that such confused propaganda, which is alternately anti-Soviet or anti-Russian and then pro-Soviet, creates different illusions in two different parts of Ukrainian society. He condemned Ukraine's efforts at de-Communisation as a cover-up for revision of the results of World War II.

Fierce battles on historical fields

The discussion was often heated, deteriorating into shouting matches, as various historical matters and their relation to the present moment were discussed.

Editor in chief of Ekho Moskvy radio station Aleksey Venediktov provoked one early on in the discussion after pointing out that the Nazi collaborators in the Russian Liberation Army (ROA) fought under the tricolour which is now Russia's national flag. Zakharova was particularly offended, shouting "What are talking about? [Rus: Chto vy nesete?]. She also claimed that the nationalist Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) fought under the Ukrainian blue-and-yellow flag, although another panellist corrected her, pointing out that their banners had black and red stripes.

Editor in chief of Govorit Moskva radio station Sergey Dorenko claimed that the Ukrainians have caused the mass hunger in the 1930s (Holodomor) themselves for the sake of statistics. Member of the presidential council for ethnic relations Maksim Shevchenko protested against this victim-blaming, and Tolstoy intervened to point out that "the Holodomor is a Ukrainian myth". Dorenko accused Shevchenko of spreading lies against ethnic Russians, and shouted "Stop it, you creature! [Rus: Ostanovis, tvar!]" as he banged his fist on the podium.

Film director Yuriy Kara said that the countries that became revanchists, like Germany or Japan, want to steal Russia's victory in World War II. Polish far-right politician Mateusz Piskorski said that Ukraine's new historical identity is the common problem for Russia, Poland and other countries that suffered from Ukrainian nationalism.

Senior researcher at the Russian History Museum under the Russian Academy of Sciences Nikolay Lisovoy said that the 15 per cent of Russians who did not share President Vladimir Putin's position regarding Crimea are the Russian intelligentsia, which means that "the intelligentsia unfortunately is never together with its people", never supports the right cause, and the people can do without it.

Other panellists included economist Mikhail Delyagin, editor in chief of Svobodnaya pressa website Sergey Shargunov, and political analysts Sergey Stankevich and Serhiy Belashko.

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 #40
New York Times
May 1, 2015
Judge Rebuffs U.S. in Rejecting Extradition of Ukraine Billionaire
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

VIENNA - In a defeat for the United States, an Austrian judge refused Thursday to order the extradition of Dmitri V. Firtash, a Ukrainian billionaire and onetime patron of the country's ousted president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, siding with defense lawyers who said the American request was politically motivated.

Mr. Firtash, who made his fortune in Ukraine's notoriously corrupt natural gas industry, has been charged by federal prosecutors in Chicago with racketeering and other crimes. He and his associates are accused of having paid $18.5 million in bribes to officials in India to secure a titanium-mining deal that never materialized.

The ruling, by Judge Christoph Bauer of the Landesgerichtsstrasse Regional Court in Vienna, amounted to a scathing rebuke of the Justice and State Departments, and reflected the diminished credibility of the United States authorities, even in the eyes of a European ally.

Judge Bauer said that he did not doubt the veracity of two witnesses cited by American prosecutors in their filings, "but whether these witnesses even existed," because the Justice Department repeatedly refused to provide requested information or respond to questions.

At a hearing that stretched late into the evening, Mr. Firtash's defense team sought to demolish the American case and discredit the Justice Department's extradition request.

The main thrust of the team's arguments, and the issue that clearly dominated the attention of Judge Bauer, was that the case was directed by the State Department in pursuit of larger American foreign policy goals.

In oral arguments, and in testimony by a parade of high-profile witnesses, the lawyers described the American prosecution as an effort to punish Mr. Firtash for his ties to Mr. Yanukovych and his support of Russia, and to sideline him from future political activity in Ukraine.

In perhaps their most electrifying argument, Mr. Firtash's lawyers asserted that an initial request by the United States for his arrest, on Oct. 30, 2013, was directly tied to a trip to Ukraine by an assistant secretary of state, Victoria Nuland, in which she sought to prevent Mr. Yanukovych from backing out of a promise to sign sweeping political and trade agreements with Europe.

Ms. Nuland left Washington on the day the arrest request was submitted to Austria. The request was rescinded four days later, said a lawyer, Christian Hausmaninger, after Ms. Nuland came to believe she had received assurances from Mr. Yanukovych that he would sign the accords.

From that point, nothing happened in the Indian bribery case, Mr. Hausmaninger said, until Feb. 26 - four days after Mr. Yanukovych was ousted after months of street protests.

The arrest request was renewed then, and the Austrian authorities detained Mr. Firtash two weeks later, the same day the new Ukrainian prime minister, Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk, was visiting President Obama at the White House.

The Justice Department has denied any political motivation in the case.

In a statement issued by the State and Justice Departments, the government said it was "disappointed" by the ruling and hoped for an appeal.

While the timing of the arrest request and the meetings in Ukraine could have been coincidental, the lawyers' narrative was compelling enough that Judge Bauer returned to it again and again, with repeated questions about what happened in the Ukrainian presidential administration in early November 2013.

The judge persisted in that line of questioning as one witness after another testified, including the first president of Ukraine, Leonid M. Kravchuk; Mr. Yanukovych's longtime chief of staff, Sergei Lyovochkin; and a former energy minister, Yuriy Boyko.

Judge Bauer also seemed particularly interested in a meeting that Mr. Firtash brokered at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Vienna - in March 2014, even after he had been arrested and released on bail - between another Ukrainian billionaire, Petro O. Poroshenko, and the ex-boxing champion Vitali Klitschko, who were then each vying for the presidency.

After the Vienna meeting, Mr. Klitschko bowed out of the presidential race and instead ran for mayor of Kiev, the capital. Mr. Poroshenko is now president.

In the end, even Patrizia Frank, the lone prosecutor representing the Austrian government and, by extension, the United States, acknowledged that not enough had been done to prove that extradition was justified and that the Americans had met the requirements of a bilateral treaty.

In a brief presentation, Ms. Frank said the Austrians had recently received a new statement from an F.B.I. agent that might help clarify things, but that it still needed to be evaluated.

The defense team said that no further time was needed and urged a ruling.

Judge Bauer said he had concluded that the American authorities had been after Mr. Firtash since at least 2006 and he noted that a finding of political motivation was sufficient to reject extradition even if a crime had occurred.

"America obviously saw Firtash as somebody who was threatening their economic interests," Judge Bauer said, explaining his decision from the bench. But he also said the United States had not provided coherent evidence of a crime either: "There just wasn't sufficient proof."

The rejection of the extradition request does not end Mr. Firtash's legal problems. The Austrian government could appeal. Even if it does not, it is unclear that Mr. Firtash could return to Ukraine without risking arrest. Mr. Poroshenko's administration has recently declared an all-out war on oligarchs, seeking to curtail their power and influence, and some officials have leveled specific charges of wrongdoing by subsidiaries of Mr. Firtash's conglomerate, DF Group.

The Justice Department's indictment still stands, and Mr. Firtash could be arrested in other countries that have extradition treaties with the United States, as he would remain a wanted man as far as the Justice Department is concerned.

Mr. Firtash, who made a fortune as a middleman between Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, and the Ukrainian natural gas company Naftogaz, has long been viewed as close to the Kremlin and has been under scrutiny by the United States since at least 2005.

Taking the witness stand Thursday, Mr. Firtash called the bribery allegations "absolutely untrue."

Smiling contentedly after the ruling, Mr. Firtash said: "I am not an enemy of America. I am afraid America has another problem, which is there are certain people who are pursuing their own personal interests, and by pursuing those personal interests tried to make me into an enemy of America."

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 #41
The Economist
May 3, 2015
Ukraine's fugitive oligarch
Catch me if you can
An Austrian court reckons America's attempt to prosecute Dmitry Firtash for bribery is politically motivated

LAST week an Austrian judge snubbed American prosecutors by refusing to extradite Dmitry Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch whom they had charged with bribery. Mr Firtash, the reclusive son of a truck driver and an accountant, made his fortune as a middleman helping sell Russian and Central Asian gas to Ukraine. He became a political kingmaker during the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych (pictured at left, with Mr Firtash, at the opening of one of Mr Firtash's factories). In March 2014, after Mr Yanukovych was ousted by the Maidan revolution, Mr Firtash was arrested in Vienna at the behest of America's Federal Bureau of Investigation. He claims that his real offence was to get in the way of American interests in Ukraine. The Austrian judge agreed, ruling that the American charges were "politically motivated". The decision exposed the limits of American influence in Europe, and offered a reminder that Ukraine's disarray is not a simple tale of Russian aggression, but also the result of its homegrown demons.

Mr Firtash has long been of interest to American law enforcement. His gas company RosUkrEnergo, which he co-owned with Russia's Gazprom, was seen as a means for the Kremlin to influence Kiev's politics-until Yulia Tymoshenko, then prime minister, cut him out of the business. He allegedly had ties to Semyon Mogilevich, a notorious Russian organised-crime boss. American prosecutors say that Mr Firtash and his associates paid Indian officials $18.5m in bribes to help close a titanium-mining deal. (Mr Firtash's business empire included a large titanium-dioxide manufacturing operation.) In his defence, Mr Firtash cast himself as a victim of Western geopolitical intrigue. Defence lawyers linked his arrest with the comings and goings of Victoria Nuland, an American assistant secretary of state. The judge noted that the evidence of bribery in India provided by the Americans was minimal compared with the political interests at stake.

To bolster the claim that America wanted him sidelined, Mr Firtash boasted of his influence in Ukrainian politics. Last spring, he recounted, he arranged a summit in Vienna between two prospective presidential candidates: Vitaly Klitschko, the champion boxer turned politician, and Petro Poroshenko, the so-called "Chocolate King". After the meeting, Mr Klitschko withdrew from the race, opting instead to become mayor of Kiev and clearing Mr Poroshenko's path to the presidency. Mr Klitschko's political party later became the foundation for Mr Poroshenko's parliamentary fraction. "We achieved what we wanted: Poroshenko became president, and Klitschko became mayor," Mr Firtash said. Both Mr Klitschko's and Mr Poroshenko's camps reject Mr Firtash's claim to have brokered a deal for the presidency. Yuriy Lutsenko, head of Mr Poroshenko's party, calls Mr Firtash's defence the reaction of a "cornered predator".

While Mr Firtash may be cornered, he appears determined to stay in the ring. He has remained active in Vienna, where he has been free since a week after his arrest after posting bail of $125m (allegedly paid by a Russian billionaire close to Vladimir Putin's inner circle). In March, he launched the Agency for Modernisation of Ukraine, holding an international conference in Vienna that attracted British, French and German business figures. Mr Firtash's long-time partner, Sergei Levochkin, is one of the leaders of the Opposition Bloc party, a successor to Mr Yanukovych's Party of Regions. Opposition Bloc has been positioning itself for a comeback in local elections this fall, campaigning against unpopular austerity measures demanded by Western donors.

Mr Firtash may not rush back to Ukraine, and he will find himself a severely diminished figure when he does return. Ukraine's new authorities have been slowly dismantling Mr Firtash's empire. New laws on the natural gas market aim to curb oligarchic influence. The government recently confiscated some 500m cubic metres of gas belonging to Ostchem, one of Mr Firtash's companies. Ukrainian prosecutors have announced charges of their own against Mr Firtash, and the interior ministry has indicated a willingness to cooperate with American investigators.

The crackdown on Mr Firtash is part of Mr Poroshenko's crusade to "de-oligarchise" the country. That is a fraught process: Mr Poroshenko's ability to change Ukraine's social contract is undermined by his own history of oligarchic dealing. He promised during the presidential campaign to make a break with the past by selling off his own business assets, which include the confectionery company Roshen. He has not, and indeed his income rose in 2014, while Ukraine's economy contracted. Ukrainians have taken note: across the country, citizens are sceptical of the president's intentions. At the headquarters of one pro-Maidan "self-defense" group in Odessa, a picture of Mr Poroshenko merged with a pig now hangs on the fridge. The Maidan was supposed to be a revolution against an oligarchic system, not a movement to punish a gas oligarch and reward a chocolate one.

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 #42
Dances With Bears
http://johnhelmer.net
May 2, 2015
SECRET RECORD REVEALED IN AUSTRIAN COURT - YANUKOVICH PRESSURED INTO UNION WITH EU BY NULAND THREAT TO IMPRISON FIRTASH
By John Helmer, Moscow
[Photos, links, and footnotes here http://johnhelmer.net/?p=13293#more-13293]

A Vienna, Austria, court has ruled that Victoria Nuland (right), the US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, attempted to pressure the President of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovich (left), into accepting Ukrainian association with the European Union (EU) by threatening Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash with arrest, extradition to the US, and imprisonment on allegations of bribery several years ago in India.

The details were exposed for the first time in public in a proceeding in the Landesgerichtsstrasse Regional Court last Thursday (April 30). Austrian judge Christoph Bauer was presiding on the application by the US Government for the extradition of Firtash. The transcript of the proceeding has not yet been issued publicly, nor the official text of the judge's ruling from the bench.

Judge Bauer rejected extradition, ruling there had been improper political interference by the US Government in the Firtash case. This is a violation, according to Bauer's judgement, of Article 4, section 3 of the US-Austria Extradition Treaty of 1998. "Extradition shall not be granted," the proviso declares, "if the executive authority of the Requested State determines that the request was politically motivated." Read the treaty in full here [1].

A New York Times reporter, David Herszenhorn (below, left), tweeted during the proceedings against Firtash (right, centre), and then published a report of what was translated for him from the German.

The newspaper version [2]: "Mr. Firtash's lawyers asserted that an initial request by the United States for his arrest, on Oct. 30, 2013, was directly tied to a trip to Ukraine by an assistant secretary of state, Victoria Nuland, in which she sought to prevent Mr. Yanukovych from backing out of a promise to sign sweeping political and trade agreements with Europe. Ms. Nuland left Washington on the day the arrest request was submitted to Austria. The request was rescinded four days later, said a lawyer, Christian Hausmaninger, after Ms. Nuland came to believe she had received assurances from Mr. Yanukovych that he would sign the accords. From that point, nothing happened in the Indian bribery case, Mr. Hausmaninger [defence lawyer for Firtash] said, until Feb. 26 - four days after Mr. Yanukovych was ousted after months of street protests. The arrest request was renewed then, and the Austrian authorities detained Mr. Firtash two weeks later, the same day the new Ukrainian prime minister, Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk, was visiting President Obama at the White House."

A different record of what was said in court can be read in Herszenhorn's twitter feed for April 30; there were 87 separate tweets [3]. This record reveals that Judge Bauer heard evidence that the US Government had shown political favour for Yulia Tymoshenko to replace President Victor Yanukovich; intervened to block the Firtash-supported candidacy of Vitaly Klitschko as Ukrainian president after Yanukovich's ouster on February 21, 2014; and sought reallocation of Firtash's assets in the gas and titanium sectors. For more on the US interest in Ukrainian titanium, read this [4]. For the file on the US decision not to prosecute Tymoshenko for corruption, making and receiving bribes, click this [5].

Herszenhorn hints that the Austrian government intervened administratively to swing the outcome of the case against the US. "At least 4 lawyers arguing for #Firtash in Vienna court, more in gallery or not here. Only 1 Austria govt lawyer in support US extradition."

The US State Department has yet to respond. "We are disappointed with the court's ruling" Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr said [6] in an e-mailed statement to US newspapers. On the telephone to a London outlet on Friday, Carr claimed [7] the Justice Department has "filed an appeal".

The time line for the US charges against Firtash was first reported here [4]. The allegations claim bribery commenced in April 2006. Transactions identified in the published indictment are dated between April 2006 and July 2010. The Chicago grand jury investigation is dated January 2012. The official indictment, according to the Austrian documents, was not dated until June 2013. The US request to the Austrian government for the arrest of Firtash on the extradition warrant was dated October 30, 2013, then withdrawn on November 4. It was re-issued on February 27, 2014. The Austrian arrest took place on March 12.

Eric HolderThe US Government officials in charge of this process included Eric Holder (right), who was US Attorney-General from February 3, 2009 until April 27, 2015; Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State from January 21, 2009, until February 1, 2013; and Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State from September 18, 2013. In that same month, September 2013, there was a change of director at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) - Robert Mueller was replaced on September 4, 2013, by James Comey.

The FBI Chicago office conducted [8] the investigation. At the start, the agent in charge in Chicago was Robert Grant, who was in his position from 2004 until September 2012. Grant was replaced by Cory Nelson on November 2, 2012, but he lasted only seven months until July of 2013. His temporary substitute was Robert Shields until Robert Holley took over on November 12, 2013 [9].

The US District Attorney in charge of the Firtash grand jury was Patrick Fitzgerald (below, left), but he resigned in June of 2012. He was then succeeded temporarily by a deputy until Zachary Fardon (right) took office on October 23, 2013 [10].

The State Department announced [11] Nuland's visit to Kiev for November 3 and 4, 2013. According to the US Embassy in Kiev, in a transcript of Nuland's statement [12] on November 4, Nuland had "a very good and very long meeting with the President." She claimed in addition: "The President made clear in that meeting that Ukraine has made its choice and its choice is for Europe. The United States supports Ukraine's right to choose, and we are committed to supporting Ukraine as it works to meet the remaining few requirements for an Association Agreement with the European Union and the trade benefits that come with it. We also took the opportunity tonight to congratulate Ukraine on all of the work it has already done to meet the conditions that the European Union has set forth - literally dozens of pieces of legislation. I delivered a letter this evening from Secretary Kerry to the President."

In the wake of the revelations in the Austrian court proceeding a record of part of what Nuland and Yanukovich discussed has surfaced. Tape-recordings of Nuland's confidential remarks in Kiev have surfaced in the past and can be read here [13]. The following content cannot be corroborated, and its accuracy should be treated with caution:

"NULAND: Mr President, we will have Firtash arrested unless you agree to sign the [EU] Association Agreement.
YANUKOVICH: Okay, I'll sign.
In the background, a telephone rings. Audible footsteps, mumbling, as Yanukovich excuses himself to take the call. In his absence, Nuland whispers to Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt.
NULAND: We got the guy by the [f...... b....], huh?
PYATT: Way to go, Toria!
(Separate telephone tape, in Russian)
YANUKOVICH: You're off the hook, Dima. The АМЕРИКАНКА fell for it.
FIRTASH: МОЛОДЕЦ! Mr President."

According to Herszenhorn's twitter feed, "True or not #Firtash lawyers have strung together fascinating narrative of his legal travails rising/falling based on US State Dept goals."

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 #43
The Nation
April 30, 2015
How the Senate Armed Services Committee Is Undermining Minsk II
A peaceful solution to the crisis in Ukraine may be at risk.
By James Carden
James Carden is a contributing editor to The American Conservative magazine and is a frequent contributor to The National Interest and Russia Direct. Formerly an Advisor to the US Department of State, he resides in Washington, DC.

On April 28 three European foreign ministers-Serbia's Ivica Dačić, Germany's Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Switzerland's Didier Burkhalter-met in their capacities as members of the OSCE's Ministerial Troika to discuss the latest developments in eastern Ukraine. According to the OSCE, the foreign ministers "reiterated that [the Ukraine] crisis can be resolved only through peaceful means and that the political process in that regard should be advanced without delay" and "called on all sides to fully and unconditionally respect the cease-fire."

Meanwhile, on April 26, The Financial Times reported that Kiev is coming under increased pressure from Western European capitals to do its part to implement the Minsk ceasefire agreement. According to the FT, German diplomats expressed frustration that Kiev is "dragging its feet" in implementing the agreement. For his part, French President Francois Holland has warned Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko that "the only line of conduct is the full implementation of the Minsk accord."

Yet it seems these calls for a peaceful solution to the crisis are not only falling on deaf ears, but are also purposefully being undermined, in Washington.

To wit: the same day the aforementioned Troika met in Belgrade, the 28th, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on "United States Security Policy in Europe," though perhaps, given the tenor of the hearing, it should have been held under the rubric "The Russians are Coming!"

Armed Services Committee Chairman, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), got right to the point, running down a list of Russia's sins-real and imagined. He derided the Obama administration's "so-called reset" policy and warned of Mr. Putin's "neo-imperial objectives." McCain accused Russia of violating the Minsk II cease fire agreement and hectored NATO allies to follow the example of Poland and Estonia and increase their defense expenditures. Unbelievably, McCain closed his remarks by telling the gallery, which included a visiting delegation of Ukrainian parliamentarians, that "none of us wants to return to the Cold War."

Depressingly, there seemed to be little daylight between McCain and the committee's ranking member, Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI). Both he and McCain have called on President Obama to "provide defense lethal assistance" to Ukraine. Only Senators Angus King (I-ME) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) expressed any skepticism towards the idea of sending lethal aid to Ukraine. The situation that pertains in the Washington of 2015, is in stark contrast to the previous Cold War. Today, it would seem, Democrats and Republicans are engaged in a contest of who can 'out-hawk' the other on Russia.

McCain and Reed set the tone of Tuesday's hearing by striking a martial note at the outset, and the witnesses, representing the Council of Foreign Relations, the Fletcher School of Diplomacy and the Atlantic Council were all too happy to pick up where the Senators left off.

The most hawkish of the three, the Atlantic Council's Ian Brzezinski (perhaps channeling his father Zbigniew) opined that the US should impose tougher sanctions on Russia in order to "aggressively shock the Russian economy by shutting off its energy and financial sectors from the global economy." Further, the US should "provide military equipment to Ukraine, including air defense and anti-tank weapons as well as key enablers, such as drones . . ."

Most alarmingly, however, was Brzezinski's recommendation to grant the NATO Supreme Allied Commander the "authorities necessary to deploy in real time against provocative Russian military operations," thereby taking the decision to go to war with a nuclear armed power out of the hands of the Commander-in-Chief and transferring it to the NATO Commander in Brussels.

Two days later, as it happened, it was that very NATO Commander's turn before the Armed Services Committee. US Air Force General Philip Breedlove, who, according to a recent article in Der Spiegel is viewed by many European diplomats as a serial exaggerator, told the committee that NATO's principle concern is a "revanchist Russia" which in his view is a "global, not regional" threat.

Since, in his view, the current lull in the fighting in eastern Ukraine is only allowing Russia to "prepare for another offensive" it would "not make sense to take any of our own options off the table." Indeed, later on in the hearing, in response to a question from Sen. McCain, the General said, "I support the use, um, [quickly correcting himself] the consideration, of offensive military aid . . ." His referencing of "offensive" weapons raised an eyebrow from Sen. Reed who quickly interjected to ask if the General had misspoken. Breedlove confirmed that he had not.

Breedlove's testimony also inadvertently helped confirm the basis of one of Russia's principal objections to American policy: that it is being hedged in on all sides by the American military. Breedlove testified about what he called a Russia Strategic Initiative which seeks to coordinate the various combatant commands which border Russia: CENTCOM (US Central Command); EUCOM (US European Command); USNORTHCOM (US Northern Command); USPACOM (US Pacific Command), the better to respond to a future Russian offensive.

Breedlove also praised the US European Command's Ukraine Joint Initiative which has carried out a series of 25 visits to Ukraine with the goal of helping Kiev identify and address its most urgent military needs. Breedlove also noted that NATO is "war gaming and table topping scenarios" in the event the US decides to arm Ukraine. Should we fail to send military assistance to Ukraine, the General warned, somewhat paradoxically, that "inaction is also an action and the Russians will react to that as well."

And so, it is hard, given the tenor of the policy discussion on Capitol Hill over the past week, to escape the conclusion that President Obama is under intense pressure-not only from both political parties, but also, disturbingly, from the NATO Supreme Allied Commander-to wade ever deeper into the Ukrainian morass.

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 #44
Russia may be readying for new Ukraine offensive -NATO commander
April 30 2015

(Reuters) - Russia's military may be taking advantage of a recent lull in fighting in eastern Ukraine to lay the groundwork for a new military offensive, NATO's top commander told the U.S. Congress on Thursday.

U.S. Air Force General Philip Breedlove, the NATO supreme allied commander, said Russian forces had been seeking to "reset and reposition" while protecting battlefield gains, despite a fragile ceasefire agreed in February.

"Many of their actions are consistent with preparations for another offensive," Breedlove said.

Pressed during the hearing, Breedlove acknowledged he could not predict Moscow's next move but characterized its ongoing actions as "preparing, training and equipping to have the capacity to again take an offensive."

"In the past they have not wasted their effort," Breedlove told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which is monitoring the ceasefire, says the violence is down markedly since the accord was signed in Minsk, Belarus, in February.

But the United States says Russia now has its largest force on the border since October and has deployed additional air defense systems, the biggest number since August.

Breedlove said Russia was seeking to tighten its grip over separatist fighters, bolstering its command and control "because there was disunity in some of the earlier attacks."

"We do see a very distinct Russian set of command and control in the eastern part of Ukraine," he said.

"Command-and-control, air defense, support to artillery, all of these things increased ... making a more coherent, organized force out of the separatists."

The United States has so far declined to provide weapons to Ukraine, a move which advocates say could help end the conflict but opponents warn might escalate the war.

Breedlove said no options should be taken off the table but that there was no consideration of giving Ukraine the kind of military might needed to defeat Russia.

"What we do believe is that we should consider changing the decision calculus of (Russian President Vladimir) Putin. That's what we look at," he said.

Still, Washington is keen to maintain solidarity with Europe, some of whose leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, strongly oppose arming Ukraine.

Breedlove said Putin was concerned about Western sanctions imposed against Russia over the Ukraine crisis "and that may be affecting how he currently does things in eastern Ukraine."

"But we really have no way of knowing one way or another," Breedlove said.

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#45
Defense News
April 30, 2015
Breedlove: Russia Intel Gaps 'Critical'
By Joe Gould

WASHINGTON - NATO's top military commander warned of gaps in US intelligence gathering in Eastern Europe and its ability to understand Moscow's intent in the wake of Russian aggression.

"Russian military operations in Ukraine and the region more broadly have underscored that there are critical gaps in our collection and analysis," US Air Force Gen Phillip Breedlove told lawmakers at a Senate Armed Services committee hearing in Washington.

"Some Russian military exercises have caught us by surprise, and our textured feel for Russia's involvement on the ground in Ukraine has been quite limited."

Breedlove said the US first learned through social media that a large Russian military exercise, billed as being tied to the Arctic, in fact had a much larger reach.

Breedlove, the commander of American forces in Europe, said his command's pool of Russia experts had "shrunk considerably," since the Cold War and intelligence assets of all kinds were shifted to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - or toward understanding future threats.

He called for more intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) assets, and improved intelligence sharing with partners and allies. "A small investment in this area could lead to a large return," he said.

Senators expressed dismay that the US military in Europe was caught off guard by Russia's actions and told Breedlove to advocate for what he needs.

"This government spends over $70 billion a year on intelligence, and I hate hearing the word 'surprise' in a hearing, and I get frustrated when I hear about your need for ISR," said Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine.

"Sometimes we forget who needs the intelligence, and you're the guy that needs it."

Breedlove defended the wartime reallocation of intelligence analysts and tools, at a time when the US was trying to make Russia a partner. He complimented the intelligence community for recent shifts back to Eastern Europe.

Earlier, Sen. Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, remarked that the US' relationship with Russia appeared to be "colder than the Cold War of yesteryear, and asked what activities were underway to build a dialogue.

Breedlove replied that Secretary of State John Kerry is working with his Russian counterpart, but the relationship between Breedlove and his equivalent existed but is "diminished."

Meanwhile, the US has begun to address a Russian propaganda effort that Breedlove described as "dedicated, capable and very lively information campaign from Russia." Russia's campaign, estimated to cost $350 million, includes successfully compelling broadcasts into the Baltics, he said.

"They are in all those spaces, from print, to Internet, to TV, and they're in those spaces in a dedicated, capable way," Breedlove said.

To prepare the response, Breedlove will meet next week with a State Department's team. Special operations forces are already working with NATO and other allies, he said.

Lethal aid was a hot topic in the hearing, as several senators questioned why the US hasn't sent weapons to Ukraine.

Breedlove, who is said to support sending lethal aid to Ukrainian forces, said that discussions - presumably inside NATO - are underway to determine whether such a move would have a detrimental effect.

No one, he said, advocates arming the Ukrainians to defeat Russian forces on the battlefield, but "we do believe we should consider changing the decision calculus of Mr. Putin."

"We need to be intellectually honest that anything we do will provoke a Russian response," Breedlove said.

"I have also said that inaction is also an action, and the Russians will react to that. Mr. Putin does understand weakness and takes advantage of it. We need to take a look at both sides of the ledger and we are doing that."

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 #46
Russia Insider
http://russia-insider.com
May 1, 2015
Who Is Ukraine's Stepan Bandera?
The hero to Ukraine right and a newly rehabilitated figure in post-Maidan Ukraine was a Nazi collaborator and an architect of mass murder and ethnic cleansing
By Graham Phillips
[Graphics here http://russia-insider.com/en/who-stepan-bandera/6217]

On Sunday, I went along to the Stepan Bandera museum in north London that apparently has been open in London for over 50 years. That Sunday perhaps saw the museum achieve the most coverage in its half-century term, as I was physically denied entrance to the premises, housed in an Islington townhouse.

Attention descended on the museum, and the man behind it, unknown to many in the western world - so just who is Stepan Bandera?

Stepan Andriyovych Bandera was born in Ukraine's western village of Staryi Uhryniv to a clerical family. Politicised from an early age, Bandera rose through activist, scout, up to leader of the Ukrainian nationalist movement. Well-known through Ukraine in his life, primarily for being responsible for the proclamation of an Independent Ukrainian State in Lvov in 1941, his fame to some, notoriety to others, grew to such an extent after his 1959 KGB assassination that then-President Viktor Yushchenko attempted to award him the Hero of Ukraine accolade as one of his final acts in power, in 2010. It was annulled a year later by then new President Viktor Yanukovych.

To pro-Ukrainians, though, Bandera is a hero and veneration him was already rising in Ukraine before, over 50 years dead, he became one of the most prominent figures of Euromaidan (pictured) hanging in Kiev's central administrative building even. German historian Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe believes the mythologizing of Bandera began in Canada after his death as a way of bonding the separate Ukrainian diaspora, so keen to have a 'hero' they could identify as Ukrainian they were prepared to overlook all else. Over time, with the active hold Canadian expat Ukrainians exert over Ukraine, (Stepan Bandera's grandson, Stephen,along with other Bandera relatives, lives over there), the cult of Bandera found its way back to Ukraine, with inconvenient facts of Bandera's life pushed aside by the new Bandera mythology.

To get back to Bandera facts - from boyhood he was involved with Ukrainian ultra-nationalist organisations, rising through the ranks to become chief propaganda officer of the OUN in 1931, active in recruiting Ukrainian nationalists in both western and eastern Ukraine. By 1932 he was second in command of OUN in Galicia, and 1933 head of the OUN.

Along with other Ukrainian ultra-nationalists, Roman Shukhevych, Stepan Lenkavsky, Yaroslav Stetsko, Yaroslav Starukh, Bandera was key in developing the concept of "permanent revolution" in Ukraine. This took the premise that Ukrainian people would always be exploited by an 'occupier', revolution would be required to overthrow that system, and then another once the inevitable 'exploitation' emerged again, and so on.
 
After becoming head of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, OUN, in 1933, Bandera set about either converting to his cause, or driving out the Poles and Soviets in the at the time disputed territory of Galicia . This policy failed to have his desired effect in obtaining autonomy for the region. Bandera then turned to an attempt at assassination, plotting to do away with Polish minister of internal affairs, Bronisław Pieracki - it failed, he got caught, and sentenced to death for that.

By the time of his arrest and subsequent imprisonment, in 1934, Bandera's political career had long moved to the insurgent terrorism he had chosen as the method of achieving an independent Ukrainian state. Death sentence commuted to life, then released after five years, after agreeing unconditionally to cooperate with Nazi Germany, in 1939, Bandera headed straight to occupied Krakow, capital of Nazi Germany's General Government. However, there he failed to regain control of his former organization, the OUN, falling out with current leader, Andriy Melnyk (pictured).

As a result of the fallout, the OUN (right) split into two, as Andriy Melnyk who had been leading the organization, refused to endorse Bandera's intent to actively seek Nazi collaboration. So it was, the OUN split and Bandera's OUN-B sought out Nazi partnership. Breaking away from the more conservative Melnyk, Bandera formed the OUN-B (to Melnyk's OUN-M), and set about full integration with Nazi German forces. Bandera himself held meetings with the heads of Germany's intelligence, with the aim of forming battalions 'Nachtigall' and 'Roland', comprising Ukrainian OUN members, loyal to the Nazis.

February 25, 1941 saw head of the Abwehr, Wilhelm Franz Canaris sanctioning the creating of "Ukrainian Legion", to comprise 800 fighters, fighting as part of Nazi Germany's forces, under Shukhevych. Bandera himself oversaw the formation of small units of the OUN-B, named 'Mobile Groups', comprising teams of 5-15 members who would travel around Western Ukraine and beyond spreading propaganda and recruiting. The recruitment pitch shared a Nazi platform - with anti-Semitism at its core, the difference being that supposedly an independent Ukraine would be allowed to exist independently alongside any German super-nation.

The tactic was successful, with the mobile groups some 7000 strong, recruiting waves of fighters, and support for the Nazis spreading across Western Ukraine, with towns in the west turning out in force to greet Nazi forces (pictured), even to parts of the capital of Kiev, and prominent Western Ukrainian literary figures lending their support, notably the duo of Ivan Bahrianyi and Vasyl Barka.

In early 1941, the Nachtigall unit was formed, under Bandera, and outfitted in the standard Wehrmacht uniforms, placing blue and yellow ribbons on their shoulders. Their aims were outlined in a May 1941 Krakow meeting:

"Moskali (derogatory term for Russians), Poles, Jews are hostile to us must be exterminated in this struggle, especially those who would resist our regime: deport them to their own lands,importantly: destroy their intelligentsia that may be in the positions of power ... Jews must be isolated, removed from governmental positions in order to prevent sabotage, those who are deemed necessary may only work with an overseer... Jewish assimilation is not possible."
 
So it was, the OUN-B followed behind the Nazi invasion into Ukraine. Bandera and his Nachtigall battalion have been accused of a particularly ruthless approach towards the extermination of the Jews, Poles, and Russians they viewed as the enemy. On June 30, emboldened by a Ukraine which looked like it was falling to the Nazis, the OUN-B, led by Bandera, declared an independent Ukrainian State from Lvov, stating that it would work closely with Hitler and the Nazis to form the 'new order in Europe'. The first tangible manifestation of this was the 'Lvov Pogrom', the mass extermination of Jews and Poles which took place from June 30th to July 2nd, murdering a number estimated as high as 10s of thousands. (Photos from pogrom).

Bandera's Nachtigall battalion, and Bandera himself, were actively involved in this pogrom, with reports that the Nazis themselves were shocked at their brutality in execution. This independent 'Ukrainian state' lasted less than a week, with Bandera arrested by the Nazis, who had duped the gullible 32-year-old at the time, into believing they supported an independent Ukrainian state. Of course, they simply wanted to ease their passage into occupying Ukraine.

Bandera himself was arrested on July 5th 1941 and taken to prison in Berlin. The Germans treated Bandera well, but he was a prisoner, not allowed to leave Berlin for the remainder of 1941, then in January 1942, transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp's special barrack for high profile political prisoners, Zellenbau. Bandera made no attempts to escape from here, watching on in comfort as hundreds of thousands of his countrymen perished in conflict.

He spent most of the next three years in prison, albeit with special treatment after indicating ongoing willingness to help the Nazis. He had access to a radio in prison, and even certain communication with the outside world, so by 1944, he knew the Nazis were losing. Actually, the military branch of his own OUN, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, UIA, had even changed sides to start fight against the Germans in early 1943. Yet, when Bandera was approached in April 1944, he enthusiastically agreed to throw himself into the Nazi effort, released in September of 1944, setting up office in Berlin arranging supplies of arms and intelligence in an attempt to enlist the Ukrainians once more to fight for the fast-losing Nazis.

Yet, by this time, most of them were dead or had switched sides. The seeds sown by the OUN-B's dissemination of anti-Semitic propaganda had seen Ukraine engage in several atrocities against Jews during the war, most shockingly perhaps the Babi Yar massacres. Bandera's re-recruitment attempt was unsuccessful, the war finished just a few months later, seeing Nazi defeat and Bandera revert to civilian life. Sort of.

As for Bandera's family, reports that Bandera's brother Bogdan was killed by the Nazis, are unconfirmed. His brothers Oleksandr and brother Vasyl (below left) were killed in Auschwitz, with Bandera acolytes having observed over the years that Stepan could hardly endorse a regime which had executed his brothers. In reality, evidence points to them being killed by Polish inmates who discovered their identity. It is known Bandera's father was executed by the Germans, though it is reported his father did not share Stepan's extreme politics and some have suggested he was executed for harboring a member of the OUN opposed to the Nazis. This was the month before Stepan proclaimed Ukrainian independence in Lvov.

The remainder of the 40s and early 50s, saw Stepan Bandera, working for the German equivalent of the CIA, giving freelance spy training for infiltration into the Soviet Union. Bandera had met his future wife, Yaroslava, in Krakow in 1940, with her at 22 already a seasoned activist for the Ukrainian cause. The two married in June of that year and had three children, Natalia, born 1941, Andrei (year of birth given as 1944 or 1946), Lesya 1947. Bandera was never able to take adequate care of his family, with Natalia having spoken of a childhood of assumed names, hiding, living in cabins in forests, going for long periods of time without seeing her father, subsisting on inadequate food.

In 1954, Yaroslava and the children joined Stepan in Munich. Yet, life for the family was still tough here. Post war, the Germans were willing to leave Bandera alone, the western forces to occasionally use him for espionage assistance. But the Soviets had not forgotten Bandera, with repeated attempts made on his life over the years. In 1959, these reached an apotheosis, with German police arresting a man seen taking a suspicious interest in Bandera's children. Bandera was given extra security, but strongly advised to leave Munich, which he declined to do.

On October 15th, 1959, Bandera was killed in his own apartment, by KGB assassin Bogdan Stashinsky, who had been watching him since January, but intensely for several days. Despite this, the (in Stashinsky descriptions) 'short, bald, blue-eyed' Bandera (living under the named Stepan Popel) had let his bodyguards off that day. As Stashinsky produced his cyanide gun inside a rolled-up newspaper, Bandera's last words, as he held his shopping, were the rather redundant "What are you doing here?" Bandera didn't even produce his own gun, on him at all times, with him a proficient marksman (he had taken an active part in the Lvov pogrom). Shot in the face, quickly turning purple, then black, the 50-year-old Bandera died on a third-floor landing before the ambulance had even arrived.

Bandera's wife and children, upon his death, quickly moved to Toronto to start a new life. Bandera had politicized his children from infanthood, yet it was only after his death they learned they were Banderas, not Popels. Natalia took some part in Ukrainian movements, yet unable to recover from the health problems of their childhood, Natalia died in 1985 at 44, she had two children, Sophia, born 1972 and Orestes, 1975. Andrei, Andrew, took an active role in the Ukrainian diaspora, forming several organizations, a newspaper 'Ukrainian Echo', and arranging mass demonstrations. With his wife Mary, he had three children, Stepan (Stephen, Steve), 1970, Bogdana, 1974, and Helen, in 1977.

Stephen, Steve, who has tried to forge a career as a journalist, has been the most vocal defender of his grandfather, accusing others of unwarranted attacks on the grandfather he frequently referred to as a 'hero'. However, his actions on behalf of him seem to have waned in recent years. Steve previously did extensive 'historical' work to exonerate his grandfather, though his fallback position was always that no one really knows the truth: 'an accurate account of Ukraine's 20th century history remains largely unwritten.' Sadly for 'Steve', countless, verified, articles of history exist from that time.

Suffering health problems, Andrei died in 1984 at either 38 or 40, depending on sources. Lesya, who worked as an interpreter for Ukrainian organizations and had no children, lived on to the age of 64, dying in 2011. Yaroslava had died in 1977 at the age of 59. Despite his wish to be returned to Ukraine in death, Bandera was buried in Munich, where he remains to this day, his burial place the subject of several recent attacks.

Even in death, Bandera's fortunes have been little better than life. In 2009, to mark 100 years of his birth, he was put on a stamp (pictured), which many outlets in Ukraine refused to stock. Then, on January 22nd, Ukraine's Day of Unity, in 2010, Viktor Yushchenko, in his final weeks as President, attempted to use the controversial figure (in Ukraine as a whole, pre-Euromaidan, only 6% had a strongly positive opinion of him, as high as 37% in the west, down to 1% in parts of the east), as a last stand, and two-fingered farewell. Bandera was made a Hero of Ukraine, with grandson Stephen accepting the award on his behalf.

The award was internationally condemned, not to mention widely ridiculed with other Hero of Ukraine holders speaking out of their wish to renounce the award, even criticised by the European Parliament. Bandera held it for less than a year, it was annulled on January 12th 2011, by then new President Yanukovych. There had been talk of huge uprisings across the country if the award was annulled, but in these pre-Euromaidan days of calm in Ukraine, that didn't materialize.

As for his tangible legacy, statues of Bandera, several exist in the West of Ukraine, have enjoyed mixed fortunes. One near Lvov was destroyed in 2013, the Lvov statue itself, unveiled in 2012, cost double the projected amount, $1.2 million, with sources indicating substandard materials used in the finished article.

 And then of course, his museum in London, of which more to come. A strange, closed doors museum with admittance only to those on a pre-approved list. Those pro-Ukrainians who go attempting to find vindication for their reverence for Bandera in a museum of revisionism, in which Bandera appears as a 'hero', rather than what he was - an unapologetic, ruthless, failure-prone Nazi collaborator.

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 #47
Foreign Affairs
April 30, 2015
The Failure of Russia's Anachronistic Antagonism
By Brandon Valeriano and Ryan C. Maness
BRANDON VALERIANO is Senior Lecturer at the University of Glasgow in the School of Social and Political Sciences. He is a co-author, with Ryan C. Maness, of Cyber War versus Cyber Realities. RYAN C. MANESS is Visiting Fellow of Security and Resilience Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. He is a co-author, along with Brandon Valeriano, of Russia's Coercive Diplomacy: Energy, Cyber, and Maritime Policy as New Sources of Power.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is not as strong as he might seem, or, more important, as he might hope. Although Russia supports fighters in Ukraine, invaded Georgia in 2008, sold missile systems to Iran, and recently threatened Denmark and Lithuania with nuclear war, it is, in reality, a muted and restrained power operating in a system that no longer supports grand-scale intervention. If anything, Russia's recent military and diplomatic adventures have revealed its desperate weakness. Meanwhile, its shift toward a self-defeating utilization of new forms of power (covert warfare, cyber conflict, and coercive energy policy) demonstrates the limitations it faces in coercing its neighbors.

FROM BAD TO WORSE

Russia's involvement in the Ukraine conflict has not gone the way Putin intended. Betting that the West would decline to help new Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, Moscow attempted to strangle Ukraine's economy, nullifying the bailout package and the gas deal that the two countries signed under former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych's rule in 2014. But Putin's calculation proved incorrect; the West did offer financial support and training forces, granting Ukraine $17.5 billion in economic packages and loans to keep its economy afloat. Meanwhile, as the West was coming to Kiev's aid, the price of oil collapsed, leaving Russia with barely enough funds to even contemplate purchasing a quarter of the new T-50 stealth jets it had planned on acquiring. That, combined with Russian soldiers and mercenaries' limited success in Ukraine so far, and the fact that the government had to move troops in from Siberia and force conscripts to sign up for the long term just to get enough boots on the ground at the border, a full-scale invasion of Ukraine seems unlikely, even as the ruble recovers.

For Russia, the story in Ukraine gets even worse. Russia's involvement in Ukraine has roots in the nation's role as a Soviet-era energy pipeline for natural gas sales from Russia to Western Europe. Until 2014, when civil strife began, 80 percent of Russian natural gas headed for Europe traversed through Ukrainian territory. To this day, gas supplies have been used as a political tool by Russia to keep Ukraine aligned with Moscow. But now, Russian pipelines in Ukraine operate at about half capacity, owing in part to Western sanctions, the effects of war, and a network of new pipelines that circumvent Ukraine. Thirty percent of all natural gas imported to the EU comes from Russia, where state-owned Gazprom has been charging countries different prices according to the their political stance. Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and are being charged well above the EU average price, due in part to their supplying gas back into Ukraine after the Russian shutoff. On the other hand, Hungary and Slovakia are paying well below the average EU price, as these governments have shown more support for Putin. Now the EU is accusing the company of anticompetitive practices and formally bringing it up on legal charges. This could spell disaster for Gazprom's revenues and further damage the energy export-driven Russian economy.

Things aren't going much better for Russia in other parts of its foreign policy. In the wake of the impending Iranian nuclear deal, Russia resumed its S-300 surface-to-air missile sales to Tehran, a deal that was nixed in 2010 as sanctions on Iran mounted. Moscow officials declare that the sales abide by the framework of the tentative agreement between world powers and Iran. The United States has criticized the move as jeopardizing the final deal in June. The U.S.-Russian rivalry has continued even with the Soviet collapse, and this recent move by Russia can be seen in that context. Discord between the United States and Russia has moved from a geopolitical ideological rivalry to a regionally based, issue-centered rivalry. The fates of democracy, human rights, and economic independence within of post-Soviet states have been at the center of this animosity. Arms sales to U.S. adversaries by Russia and missile defense placements by the U.S. in Europe have also deepened the post-Cold War rivalry. The resumed sales demonstrate Russia's desire to provoke the United States, even if the missiles themselves are unlikely to be a major factor in U.S. foreign policy considerations. These missile sales are an empty gesture, as the West is now very unlikely to attack Iran given that a nuclear deal seems imminent.

Russia is attempting to counter the EU's growing economic might by creating its own economic free trade zone, the Eurasian Union. As of now, the Eurasian Union only has four members: Russia, Armenia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, and is a customs union that allows for the free movement of goods, services, and persons across borders. Other Eurasian countries, however, are looking westward, signing bilateral deals via the EU's neighborhood policies.

Another source of Russian antagonism against the United States comes from the nation's growing cyberpower status. Now considered the second strongest cyberpower after the United States, Russia has the capability to compromise government networks and e-mail accounts. Moscow's capabilities, however, have created few real accomplishments. Attacks on the White House, the State Department, and the Defense Department achieved nothing of strategic value. Moscow's attack against Estonian servers in 2007 only brought Tallinn closer to its NATO allies, aligning the nation within the Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence. Cyber disruption launched before the conflict in Georgia in 2008, which included denial of service attacks of Georgian government networks and telecommunications companies, did not do any damage nor help Russia achieve any strategic objectives. These cyber campaigns caused confusion and left some parts of the country in the dark, but it was conventional military attacks that secured the separatist territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia for Russia.
Given that, as far as we know, Russia has not even tried cyber measures against Ukraine, one wonders what these methods really achieve for it. The recent attacks on the United States Department of State, Department of Defense, and White House, which involved a security breach on Obama's non-classified computer network that could have revealed sensitive-but not classified-documents and messages, are troubling and notable, but they still do not constitute a successful operation. Penetrating the White House's systems might seem scary, but if no classified information is compromised, little is accomplished. If anything, it is more of a wakeup call for the U.S. government to shore up the backdoors throughout its own systems. The United States is vulnerable, but it is not clear that Russia is able or even willing to exploit these weaknesses in a significant way.

WHAT'S A WORLD TO DO?

Given that Russia's bark is worse than its bite, there are several options for responding. John Mearsheimer advocates buffer-state status for Ukraine, a seemingly interesting proposition that avoids a full-scale war in the region. Yet given the troubled history of warfare and occupation within buffer states such as Afghanistan and Poland, this idea becomes a nonstarter. Furthermore, buffer-state status can lead to continuous territorial disputes. Leaving Ukraine in limbo between the West and Russia is not a solution that is fair to Ukraine or to any other interested party.  

Letting Russia assert its regional interests has resulted in outcomes that counter its own goals. And that is why rushing to deal with a perceived Russian threat would be folly. Continued support for Western allies and investment in alternative energy sources and cyberdefenses as (opposed to cyberoffensive capabilities) would lead to continued stability in the international system despite Russia's use of force. Pushing a confrontation between the West and Russia will only lead to a demonstration of the West's own weaknesses; strategically incompatible goals, limited weapons supplies (excluding the United States), and the West's own vulnerability when it comes to cybersecurity would lead the West to appear weak just as it attempts to look strong.

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 #48
The National Interest
May 1, 2015
Time to Rethink Collective Defense within NATO?
Recent challenges on the alliance's doorstep may have exposed a major problem...
By Sean Kay
Sean Kay is Robson Professor of Politics and Government at Ohio Wesleyan University and an Associate at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at the Ohio State University.  His most recent book is America's Search for Security:  The Triumph of Idealism and the Return of Realism (2014).

In spring 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry said: "...together we have to make it absolutely clear to the Kremlin that NATO territory is inviolable. We will defend every single piece of it....Article V of the NATO treaty must mean something, and our allies on the frontline need and deserve no less." And last week Graham Allison and Dimitri Simes asked whether the ongoing crisis with Russia could lead to war with the United States, observing that:  "...the United States has an unambiguous and undeniable responsibility to deter and defend attacks on the Baltic states."

Would America go to war with Russia over the three small Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, risking escalation that could turn into a nuclear confrontation?            

Since the Ukraine crisis heated up in late last winter, there has been considerable debate about what NATO should be doing to bolster collective defense of its new member states. The nature of this fear was explained by the Polish prime minister during the 2008 Russian war against Georgia. He said: "Poland and the Poles do not want to be in alliances in which assistance comes at some point later-it is no good when assistance comes to dead people."  A number of specific dilemmas affirm the nature of this fear. Yet, tragically, the solution to the fears risks exacerbating the conflict with Russia and dividing NATO, thus lessening allied security.

First, there is the actual NATO treaty, which is rarely mentioned when assessments of what commitment among the allies in NATO have to each other are articulated. This is what the allies are committed to in terms of mutual defense:

"The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area."

The allies who negotiated the NATO treaty were keenly aware of that the American Congress had powers under the Constitution that allowed it to prevent American participation in the League of Nations. They also understood the need for flexibility in a crisis. Dean Acheson described NATO's collective defense role at the founding that the alliance as being a "pre-integration organization, aimed to produce general plans for uncoordinated and separate action in the hope that in the event of trouble, a plan and forces to meet it would exist and would be adopted by a sort of spontaneous combustion." At the time when it faced the greatest threat, when the alliance was founded, NATO had no headquarters, no integrated defense structure, no Secretary General-but the political cohesion of the West signaled a strong political commitment to contain Soviet expansionism. The credibility of this commitment was, nevertheless, eventually manifested by several hundred thousand U.S. troops deployed in Europe and nuclear weapons. Even then, however, doubts persisted as to whether the United States would really risk its survival to defend its European allies in NATO.

Second, the NATO allies are obligated to take care of their individual national security concerns and their populations first and foremost. Consequently, the allies appear to have concluded the best way to secure the Baltics is to see the conflict in Ukraine de-escalate.  Political scientist John J. Mearsheimer summarizes the core issue in this regard by advising against arming Ukraine:  "Such a step is especially dangerous because Russia has thousands of nuclear weapons and is seeking to defend a vital strategic interest." Likewise, Henry Kissinger cautions: "I'm uneasy about beginning a process of military engagement without knowing where it will lead us and what we'll do to sustain it...I believe we should avoid taking incremental steps before we know how far we are willing to go...This is a territory 300 miles from Moscow, and therefore has special security implications."

Third, NATO defense plans specifically do not include forward deployed forces for maximum deterrence. Since NATO's enlargement process has been in place, collective defense of new members has been based on a model of reinforcement. NATO, in fact, has emphasized this point in official statements so as to disprove Russian claims that the alliance was a threat to its interests. Thus a NATO fact sheet from fall 2014 reads:  "...in the current and foreseeable security environment, the Alliance will carry out its collective defence and other missions by ensuring the necessary interoperability, integration, and capability for reinforcement rather than by additional permanent stationing of substantial combat forces." The 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act ensures no permanent deployment allied troops or the deployment of nuclear weapons or related infrastructure among new NATO allies. While there are now many ideas about how troops could be redeployed, especially rotationally, within NATO, there is no existing consensus in NATO to abrogate this agreement and deploy large scale deterrent forces.

Fourth, to make its reinforcement plans more reassuring, NATO is creating a spearhead rapid response force for quick deployment to facilitate further follow-on reinforcements. The force will not be ready until 2016 and has already encountered problems of who contributes and who pays for it. Meanwhile, NATO decision-making, which requires consensus, would not necessarily make this kind of deployment automatic, because all members agree in consensus to implement it. The Russians have clearly shown that they understand that there are tactical advantages to calibrating their strategy in ways that make agreement on more robust actions from NATO hard to achieve. Effectively, Russia has learned that it can affect the consensus decision-loop within the alliance to its advantage. Allies concerned about this dilemma need only look as far as Turkey, which waited a month while consensus was blocked over an Article V defense planning request in the run-up to the Iraq war in early 2003.

Finally, the NATO allies are increasingly divided on what are the major threats to European security. For most all of Europe, the Eurozone remains the most significant risk-especially as Greece continues to flirt with default. Thus the idea of a costly military build-up or return to a Cold War posture is very difficult to fathom across Europe. Even the idea of ramping up economic sanctions on Russia over Ukraine is difficult to sustain, particularly given energy dependence of many NATO and European Union members on Russian supplies. Just after terrorist attacks in France in January 2015, NATO Secretary General Jan Stoltenberg said:  "That's the reason why we still strive for a more cooperative and constructive relationship with Russia"-a reflection on the benefits of working with Russia on counter-terrorism. Last week, columnist Jim Hoagland reported that a senior hawkish French parliamentarian had told him:  "Nobody in France is debating about arming Ukraine...We are debating how much national surveillance we need to spot terrorists returning from war zones in Syria and Iraq, and how to stop Africa from completely imploding." Likewise, an Italian with a long career working on NATO issues told Hoagland: "For us, the biggest threat comes from the South...Our nightmares are not about Russian tanks invading from the east. They are about the terrorists a short boat ride away in Libya." Thus it is a significant dilemma that there is no likely solution to this the problem terrorism without Russian involvement.

Graham Allison and Dimitri Simes reference the Baltic dilemma as being the "Achilles Heel" of the alliance. These states are basically defenseless and steps to rectify that could provoke a dangerous Russian response. Russian officials have made clear that if the NATO allies continue to build-up forces in the Baltic countries, Moscow would respond with "a spectrum of responses from nuclear to non-military...." While it seems unlikely Moscow would risk the depth of economic and military isolation that such actions would bring upon themselves, defense planners have to calculate the relative costs and risks associated with reinforcing the Baltic countries at this time. To do so could actually undermine the broader security concerns of NATO and even decrease Baltic security. If that happened, then there would be further pressure to escalate, and we would risk moving from a possible Cold War into a highly dangerous hot war.

The good news for the Baltic countries is that the political signaling of alliance solidarity, backed by power, also creates serious uncertainty that serves as a psychological deterrent to Russia. Thus when NATO is united, it has structural advantages in both political and military terms over Russia. If Vladimir Putin, and perhaps more importantly, the senior military staff around him, are thinking rationally about their nation's long-term interests, they would not risk a challenge to the Baltics. That said, Putin could gamble that dividing the alliance by threatening the Baltic states as an alternative path to his diplomatic push to leverage Ukraine's future, thus sparking a dangerous escalation on both sides. But what if Russia did actually invade a Baltic country, directly or by proxy? What then would happen? The fact is, The fact is, we really do not know the answer, and it is not a question that anyone would benefit from its being tested. Therefore, NATO faces a dilemma. The strongest way to make clear to the Russian leadership that under no circumstances should they even consider a threat to the Baltic countries would be via a maximal conventional and nuclear deterrent posture. The problem is, even putting this on the agenda would risk destroying the existing level of consensus towards Russia within NATO. And, implementing it would likely trigger a series of Russian responses while they would accuse the allies of violating the NATO-Russia Founding Act. Tragically, this would further expose allied divisions and thus undermine the political cohesion that gives power to the Baltic states' memberships in NATO. The Baltic countries have legitimate concerns about the reliability of the security guarantee in NATO. NATO today is more like a series of concentric circles which gives strategic depth to the large countries. This is not a minor thing as it keeps the major powers distant from each other but raises questions about what is the right level of deterrence for peripheral allies.

There is no magic formula to fix this dilemma, particularly in the midst of ongoing crisis. Any possible fix to bolster the credibility of collective defense at this time could cause a whole new series of problems and undermine cohesion in NATO. If cohesion and consensus in NATO is undermined, that weakens the Baltic states' position and plays into the hands of Russia. Thus staying the course-with symbolic but not-unimportant tripwire forces rotationally deployed in exercises is, at least in the current environment, likely to define these layers of thinking in contemporary European security. Better to keep allied unity as a patient source of power than to exacerbate divisions within the alliance which would play right into Russia's hopes to NATO divided and irrelevant.    

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 #49
AP
May 2, 2015
Analysis: US Experts on Russia Fear Escalation Over Ukraine

WASHINGTON - U.S. experts on Russia see a growing danger the crisis in Ukraine that has already taken thousands of lives could explode, although the latest cease-fire agreement has partially held.

U.S. and Western European moves to isolate Russia and damage its economy for its seizure of the Crimean peninsula and support of separatists in eastern Ukraine against the Western-backed central government have not forced President Vladimir Putin to back down.

The State Department says Russia is beefing up its troops and weapons along the Ukrainian border. Meanwhile, the U.S. has dispatched 300 American military trainers to work with the Ukraine army, and other NATO members are adding hundreds more.

Experts say that's a fuse of a much wider conflict waiting to be lit after a year of battle that the U.N. says has taken at least 6,100 lives.

Andrew Weiss, Russia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said an egregious action by Russian forces in eastern Ukraine or an incident between U.S. and Russian forces could cause an escalation. He said a recent near-collision of U.S. and Russian military jets over the Baltics highlighted the risk.

"So there's a lot of volatility here that's embedded in the crisis," Weiss said. "So I'm thinking the current lull just doesn't look sustainable. And it's only a matter of time before something triggers a new escalatory spiral."

Fighting in eastern Ukraine has ebbed substantially since the signing of a February cease-fire deal, but sporadic clashes still break out along the 280-mile front line separating government and rebel forces. U.S. Gen. Philip Breedlove, commander of NATO forces in Europe, told a congressional hearing Thursday that it appears Russian forces have used the lull in fighting to reposition for another offensive.

Western economic sanctions have taken their toll on the Russian economy that President Barack Obama said in his State of the Union address in January "was in tatters." The impact of those economic woes was felt most by average Russians.

Russia, however, has won some economic breathing space as its currency, the ruble, regained ground from panic-level lows at the end of last year. Oil prices - for the time - have ended a precipitous decline and the flow of capital out of the country has slowed. The latest poll by the independent Levada agency showed Putin's approval rating was an overwhelming 86 percent in April.

But there are signs that Russia could be headed for deeper economic problems. This year's first-quarter gross domestic product is off 2 percent and a fairly deep recession still is forecast for the next two to three years. Capital outflow this year is projected at $90 billion to $100 billion, which is much better than 2014's disaster, but that projection is still about 50 percent higher than the outflow of 2013. And oil prices, while stabilizing, are down about 50 percent, which cuts deeply into Russian government income.

"You've seen some bad news about the Russian economy," Weiss said, "but nothing that's catastrophic or dire. None of what has been put on the table so far (in terms of sanctions) has had an effect on what Putin will do or not do in Ukraine tomorrow."

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As for Ukraine itself, Weiss warns that the state is fragile, and it will be difficult for President Petro Poroshenko to deliver on ambitions for significant economic reform and changes in the political system that has been dominated by a corrupt Ukrainian elite for most of the past 25 years.

So what is the way out of the standoff?

"At the moment all the signs are bad," said Stephen Cohen, a Russia expert and professor emeritus at Princeton and New York University.

Cohen is a longtime and vocal critic of American policy toward Russia. He, like Putin, believes U.S. policy has been provocative ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, starting with the expansion of NATO into former Soviet republics and Soviet satellite nations in Eastern and Central Europe.

Washington is determined that the new Western-leaning Ukraine government be freed of Moscow's orbit. Putin has declared it must not.

"Putin has said from the beginning what he wants is enough home-rule in the southeastern territory," Cohen said of the industrial and coal-producing region that is heavily populated with ethnic Russians.

Putin has said he's never going to desert the people in eastern Ukraine. And he wants a guarantee that Ukraine never joins the NATO alliance.

Who's going to blink?

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