Johnson's Russia List
2015-#89
5 May 2015
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"We don't see things as they are, but as we are"

"Don't believe everything you think"

In this issue
 
  #1
The Independent (UK)
May 4, 2015
Once again, the West fails to understand Russia
Western leaders are staying away from this year's Victory Day, which  mourns the loss of 20 million Russians who died to defeat Nazi Germany
By Mary Dejevsky
One of the country's most respected commentators on Russia, the EU and the US, Mary Dejevsky has worked as a foreign correspondent all over the world, including Washington, Paris and Moscow. She is now the chief editorial writer and a columnist at The Independent and regularly appears on radio and television. She is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Buckingham.
    
Why are Western countries by and large so indulgent of the anniversaries that contribute to their own nationhood, and so insensitive towards those of others?
On Saturday, President Vladimir Putin will take the salute at a grand military parade in Moscow's Red Square. Victory Day - 9 May is when Russia commemorates its part in the Allied victory over Nazi Germany - is at once the most solemn and overtly patriotic occasion. It is one of the few public holidays to have made the transition from the Soviet to the post-Soviet calendar intact.

Victory Day was a highlight of the year I spent as an exchange student in Voronezh - a city rarely mentioned without the accompanying phrase "the last front before Stalingrad". Preparations took weeks: placards were painted; bunting and flags adorned the streets. It was a huge honour to bear the university standard. Food stocks in the shops miraculously improved.

Reporting from Moscow over a decade later, I recall the barriers piled up around Red Square, the overnight arrival of the tanks and, above all, the suffocating stench of their fuel, as the iron monsters waited to join the triumphal formation. The Victory Day parade was something to cling to, even as the Soviet Union neared collapse.

This year's commemoration will be second to none. As the 70th, it is a round-number anniversary. As with the plethora of Second World War anniversaries being commemorated this year, this is probably the last time that there will be anything like a quorum of those who actually participated in or witnessed these events able to attend.

Then, of course, there is the trickier, most contemporary and specifically Russian, aspect. This year is an opportunity for the Kremlin to demonstrate that Russia, as a great power, is back. The advance of the decadent West has been halted in Ukraine and the sacred territory of Crimea has been returned to the motherland.

All this is why Western leaders - who went to Moscow en masse for Victory Day's 60th anniversary - are staying away. They do not wish to associate with Putin - certainly not while Ukraine's very existence as a sovereign state is under threat. They especially do not want to appear at a Russian military occasion, which could be seen as signalling acceptance of the events of the past 18 months.

Strictly speaking there is no Western boycott, and there are degrees of absence. The Czech president will go to Moscow, but not attend the parade. Angela Merkel will arrive a day later and lay a wreath - an act that might anyway seem more appropriate for a German Chancellor at a wartime anniversary. As for the UK, who knows who the prime minister will be by Saturday? Declining the invitation was excusable, regardless of Ukraine.

Some may see the attendance list, headed by the Chinese and Indian leaders - but not by North Korea's Kim Jong-un, who has just cried off - followed by the autocrats of Central Asia, as evidence of where Russia's foreign policy is now heading. Maybe. But the Kremlin's response to the Western stay-away suggests otherwise. It has been peevish, but also shot through with incomprehension. For Russians, what is happening in Ukraine and Russia's part in the victory of 1945 are qualitatively and quantitatively quite different things.

Each 9 May, Russia does not just celebrate victory over Nazi Germany; it mourns the loss of more than 20 million war dead, and it reconsecrates the idea of Russian suffering to save Europe. In conversation with Russians in recent weeks, I have had to field a stream of injured questions along the lines of "has the West ever understood Russia's sacrifice?" and: "Will the West ever appreciate it?" The notion that Ukraine is a real stumbling block here is beyond comprehension; the stay-away is rather seen as further proof that Russia will never, ever, be considered  "one of us".

Countries keep memories alive, often unrealistically flattering ones, for many reasons. Last June, in a recognition of the wartime alliance, Putin was controversially invited to join the Allied commemoration of the Normandy landings, at a time when Russia's seizure of Crimea was even fresher in the memory than it is now. But this offered an opportunity for Western leaders and for Putin to speak their minds, while preserving dignity on either side. One result was the first formal meeting between Putin and Ukraine's newly elected president - without which Ukraine's situation might be even worse than it is today.

To join Putin on the podium for Saturday's parade would not be politic; but to dine in the Kremlin or take part in a wreath-laying would surely not be out of place. Most Westerners might not fear any resurgence of fascism in Ukraine, but discussion with Putin and others - whose fathers fought on that front and others - could afford an understanding of why many Russians might. In recent years, the West has missed one opportunity after another to understand how Russia's past influences its present. And here is another gone.
 #2
News Analysis: Reasons behind Russia's high-profile V-Day celebrations

MOSCOW, May 5 (Xinhua) -- Russia is busy preparing for the Victory Day celebrations on May 9, as this year marks the 70th anniversary of the victory of the Great Patriotic War, Russia's term for World War II (WWII).

Against a background that relations between Moscow and the West hit the lowest point since the end of the Cold War due to the Ukraine crisis, analysts believe that Russia expects to make a decisive response to the precarious pressure from the Western countries with a series of high-profile celebrations across the country.

FLEXING MILITARY MUSCLE

Larger scale celebrations are usually held on the occasion of quinquennial and decennial anniversary of the victory of the Great Patriotic War in Russia.

Thus, Moscow, which is now confronted with economic sanctions, diplomatic isolation and military threat from the United States and Europe, has seen enough reasons for holding grand celebrations this year.

Among the celebrations, the most eye-catching one would be the large-scale military parade on the Red Square in downtown Moscow, which will be the biggest ever held in modern Russia.

According to Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, over 15,000 soldiers will take part in the parade, a 50-percent increase from the one in 2010.

As to the mechanized section, which will involve 194 units of armaments and military equipment, Russian Presidential Administration Chief Sergei Ivanov said that there will be on display for the first time state-of-the-art, brand new weapons systems like, for example, the intercontinental ballistic missile called Yars.

He added this year's premieres also include high-end armored personnel carriers, high-precision artillery systems, as well as the famous Su-30 and Su-35 fighter jets.

Moreover, the parade is not only a military celebration, but a multilateral diplomatic event, as military units from 10 countries, including China, will take part in the Red Square parade.

Military parades are also expected to be held in 27 other Russian cities, and in the capitals of Belarus, Kyrgyzstan and Armenia. In addition, naval parades are planned to take place at the five major bases of the Russian Navy.

BREAKING DIPLOMATIC ENCIRCLEMENT

For the Western world, attending Russia's Victory Day celebration is a departure from their joint stance on keeping up pressure on Russia for its annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and alleged involvement in the fragile situation in Ukraine.

Therefore, it's no surprise that the West has taken a general stance by boycotting, directly or indirectly, the parade.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Russia has sent invitations to leaders of 68 countries and the heads of the United Nations, the Council of Europe as well as the European Union (EU), with leaders of 26 nations having confirmed their participation, including Chinese President Xi Jinping and Cuban President Raul Castro.

By contrast, the Western countries seemed not so active: the United States will be represented by its ambassador to Russia at the parade while France will send a ministerial representative to Moscow on May 9.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is expected to come to Moscow on May 10, but British Prime Minister David Cameron has announced his absence.

Russia has slammed the United States and the EU for discouraging some European countries from attending the celebration. However, the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said that some Western leaders' absence from the event "will not spoil its festive atmosphere and the scale of the holiday."

UPHOLDING WARTIME HISTORY

Russia has been dragged into a war of words with the West over its role in WWII. Clashes were triggered between Russia and Poland in January when Polish Foreign Minister Grzegorz Schetyna said that "the First Ukrainian Front and Ukrainians liberated Auschwitz concentration camp."

Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski later went even further by saying that he was considering holding an international ceremony to commemorate the anniversary of the end of WWII with EU leaders on May 8 in Gdansk.

The remarks provoked an irritated response from Moscow. Putin has on various occasions blasted attempts to revise WWII history, warning that "attempts to rewrite the history of WWII could open the gate for the revival of Nazism" and "the most sacred things have been distorted to serve political ends."

The Russian leader said those attempts are aimed at undermining Russia's power and moral authority, and depriving it of its status of a victorious nation.

Putin urged the Victory Day Celebration Organizing Committee to stand up to the challenge, and to educate people both nationally and internationally about the truth and the contribution of the Soviet people to the victory over Nazism.

The former Soviet Union has lost 27 million lives in the Great Patriotic War. In addition, 1,700 cities and towns were destroyed and many historical and cultural sites and relics were completely ruined.
 
#3
Europeans Underestimate Soviet Army's Role in WWII Victory Over Nazism
April 28, 2015

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - ICM Research questioned over 3,000 people in Germany, the United Kingdom, and France. Interviews were conducted from March 20 to April 9, 2015.

In Germany, 17 percent of respondents said that the Soviet army played a major role in the victory, while in France only 8 percent shared the same opinion.

The largest group of respondents, 43 percent, said that the United States Army played the main role in liberating Europe during WWII. Sixty-one percent of French citizens agreed, comparing with only 16 percent of British residents.

In the past months, a biased interpretation of WWII events has been detailed in Western media and by several politicians, triggering a wave of criticism in Russia.

In January, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said that Kiev "remembers about the Soviet invasion in Ukraine and Germany." In response, head of the foreign affairs committee in the lower house of Russia's parliament, Alexei Pushkov, said that this statement insulted the memory of those killed during the war.

In the same month, the Polish foreign minister dismissed Russia's role in the Soviet Army liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, claiming that the camp was liberated by Ukrainians. Moscow said the statement was "nonsense."

In reality, on January 27, 1945, the Soviet Red Army, consisting of Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Armenian and other soldiers from the Soviet Union, liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

WWII lasted from 1939 to 1945 and engulfed over 80 countries and regions. Up to 70 million people are believed to have died in the conflict. The Soviet Union has lost about 27 million people.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said in January that all attempts to revise Russia's contribution to the victory in the fight against Nazism during World War II should be viewed as a glorification of Nazi crimes.

The international public opinion research project Sputnik.Polls was launched in 2014, in conjunction with leading British public opinion survey specialists ICM Research. It conducts regular opinion polls to monitor public sentiment toward social, political and cultural issues in Europe and the United States.
 
 #4
Fort Russ/Boulevard Voltaire
http://fortruss.blogspot.com
May 4, 2015
Putin "all by himself in Red Square" -- with the leaders of half the planet
Dominique Jamet
in Boulevard Voltaire, May 3, 2015 [http://www.bvoltaire.fr/dominiquejamet/poutine-tout-seul,174560]
Translated from French by Tom Winter

So it is confirmed: No head of state, no chief of government from either North America nor from the EU (Greece being the sole exception) will honor with his presence the grandiose ceremonies that will mark, on the 9th of May in Moscow, the 70th anniversary of the surrender of the Third Reich, and therewith mark the victory of the nations, whatever their regimes and their legitimacy, that were united against nazism.

The reason is known. This slap is to punish the foreign policy of Vladimir Putin, and more precisely his intervention if the interior conflict of Ukraine. Yesterday's ally is treated and punished like a rebellious brat by leaders whose policies of varying geometry nonetheless accommodate ententes, alliances, deals and conversations with countries and people who are no more commendable than the Russian president.

The promoters of this boycott and the ones responsible for it not only err in the most elementary courtesy by not returning the favor to Vladimir Putin, for attending the commemoration of the Normandy landings last June, where he crossed paths for the first time with his Ukrainian counterpart Poroshenko. They not only err at the foremost principle of diplomacy, as General DeGaulle professed it, to put reality in front of feelings, and states in front of friendships; their insult to Russia constitutes first off, an outrage to history, practically a denial of history. Is the present to erase the past, as with Big Brother in Orwell? Should politics be trumping the truth?

Mssrs Obama, Hollande, Cameron and other western leaders -- whose names, if not already forgotten, soon will be -- are too quick to hold cheap the frightening tribute of the twenty million lost that Russia and Stalin payed for the common cause at the time of world war.

These people, all things considered, are seeing only the short term. Yesterday's headline in Le Journal du dimanche: "Putin all alone in Red Square."

Alone? Really?

This calls to mind the old and well-worn joke on the British point of view: "Fog in the Channel; the continent is isolated." Beyond the presence of eleven African heads of state, a dozen heads of asiatic states, and the Venezuelan and Cuban presidents, Vladimir Putin will welcome under Kremlin walls these second-string players: the number one of China and the number one of India.

What does this mean? It means that half of the planet at the highest level will be represented one week from Sunday in Moscow. It will be, perchance, time to view the world not as it was, nor as one dreams that it will remain, but as it is.
 
 #5
Russia Insider
http://russia-insider.com
May 4, 2015
Soviet History Can't Be Erased With a Bulldozer
Soviet era structures and monuments scattered across Russia and Eastern Europe are a poignant reminder of a shared history - and there are plenty of people for whom they mean a lot.  
By Danielle Ryan
Danielle is an Irish journalist and blogger. She has a degree in Business and German from Trinity College Dublin and studied political reporting at the Washington Center for Politics and Journalism in Washington, DC. Special interests: American politics and foreign policy, US-Russia relations and media bias. Her blog can be found at journalitico.com.

Last week, RT Russian reported on a list compiled by Business Insider of the 'most absurd' Soviet era buildings that are still standing today.

The article called the buildings ugly and bizarre - and let's face it, some of them really are bizarre. Whether they're 'ugly' or not really depends on your taste.

When I was in Bratislava last year, I got a pretty lengthy run-down on the city's sights and architecture from the young man who manned the reception in the hostel I stayed in. When he came to the Most SNP bridge (Most Slovensk�ho n�rodn�ho povstania) on the map, which spans the Danube, he said: "That's the UFO bridge, one of the lasting scars of Communism on the landscape."

Scars on the landscape or not, the Soviet era structures and monuments scattered across Russia and Eastern Europe are a poignant reminder of a shared history - and there are plenty of people for whom they mean a lot.

Unlike Business Insider, I don't find it particularly absurd that they are still standing. How boring our cities would be if we just knocked everything down and started again whenever we got bored or found that our values and styles and governments had changed.

Particularly tone-deaf was the inclusion of Volgograd's The Motherland Calls statue, commemorating the Battle of Stalingrad, which saw more than a million Soviet troops die fighting the Nazis. It's a powerful symbol of victory and pride to Russian people that was reduced to something weird and 'absurd' for the sake of a few clicks. Luckily, someone at Business Insider apparently had second thoughts, because The Motherland Calls statue has now been removed from the list. It would be like putting the Statue of Liberty on a list of weird American structures that are still standing today. See if that wouldn't insult a few people.

In February this year, I spent some time in Tallinn, Estonia. It was a quick stopover after Moscow and Saint Petersburg while en route to Riga - and as lovely as the aesthetically pleasing parts of the city were, there was something I enjoyed more.

I spent an appropriately gray and dull late afternoon exploring the now-abandoned Linnahall.
Located just beyond the walls of the Old Town beside the harbor, this building could easily have made it into BI's list of absurd Soviet structures.

With Moscow hosting the Olympics in 1980, and the city lacking a coastline, the Lenin Palace of Culture and Sport (now Linnahall) was built as a venue for the sailing events. The only part of the building still in use today is the heliport, which is used by Copterline for flights to Helsinki across the Gulf of Finland.

The place is desolate, bleak, graffiti-covered and by all accounts 'ugly' - and yet I'd recommend it as a must-see for anyone visiting Tallinn. Because it's real, tangible history - and it's more authentic than walking around a well put-together museum.

We might walk past these things in our daily lives and busily let them fade into the landscape, or we might bemoan the fact that they've become an irritating eyesore, but the fact that they still stand brings history to life a little bit every time we do stop and remember.

Whether they represent good, evil, or something in between, they tell stories that we should never forget. They allow us to briefly walk through another time. They give cities a sense of permanency and endurance.

I'm not talking about every crude and dilapidated Soviet era tower block. If they're dangerous, old and too far gone for refurbishments, knock them down. Rather, I'm talking about the buildings or monuments that meant something more, that served a purpose, that were in some way a greater part of history.

This can be a touchy subject for cities, particularly in Eastern Europe where discussions of Soviet history are delicate, layered and complex. In fact, recent efforts to simplify that history by those who don't understand its intricacies have done far more harm than good.

To understand just how touchy it can be, we needn't look back further than 2007 when riots broke out over the removal of a Soviet war monument in Tallinn. While Estonian speakers felt the monument was a symbol of Soviet occupation, Russian speakers felt it symbolized their heroic defeat of the Nazis.

In a way, these questions of how to handle the past in the present can test a nation. They can determine whether or not a country has truly come to terms with its own history. Choosing to preserve and cherish even that which represents hardship and a troubled past can signal maturity and acceptance, whereas the instinct to destroy, erase or cover up can signal a lingering sense of insecurity - the reasons for which can be just as complex as the history itself.

But Soviet era monuments and structures represent more than just oppression and cruelty. They represent a victory which Europe could not have done without. They represent the millions of men and women who fought oppression from the outside and from within. Perhaps when it comes to Soviet architecture, the shades of gray are even unintentionally appropriate.

Clean them up, refurbish them, repurpose them or just let them be. But what use is it to tear them down? Once destroyed, they're gone forever. History, however hard to accept, can't be erased with a bulldozer - and it shouldn't be.

My afternoon at Tallinn harbor would have been considerably less interesting if someone had told me "Oh yes, there used to be a building here, built for the Moscow Olympics in 1980, but it's gone now...we tore it down".

The French writer Joseph Joubert wrote that "monuments are the grappling-irons that bind one generation to another".

So Business Insider, that's why they're still standing - in all their weird, ugly and bizarre glory.

 
#6
Counterpunch.org
May 4, 2015
The Pseudo-Historical Ukrainian Propaganda Over WWII
Whose Victory Will Ukrainians Celebrate on May 9?
by HALYNA MOKRUSHYNA
Halyna Mokrushyna has written frequently during the past year about the war in eastern Ukraine. In April 2015, she journeyed to Donetsk, eastern Ukraine as part of a media tour. You can find her articles from Donetsk as well as all of her other articles on the website of NewColdWar.org. She can be reached at [email protected].
[Links here http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/05/04/whose-victory-will-ukrainians-celebrate-on-may-9/]

Several days ago, I came across a news report of two videos released by the Ukrainian Informational Resistance channel on YouTube on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the victory of the Soviet Union in WWII.

The first video features a 'ded' (meaning, in Russian, an old man or grandfather). He is a Soviet veteran dressed in military uniform, decorated with WWII honours. He is looking at himself in a mirror, preparing for a Victory Day (May 9) anniversary march. A phone rings. It's his grandson calling, a young Ukrainian army conscript who, as the viewer can guess from the video, is serving in eastern Ukraine, in the so-called 'Anti-Terrorist Operation' of the Kyiv government and army. Like the grandfather depicted, the grandson is wearing a Red Star in the left pocket of his shirt, close to his heart. The young soldier congratulates his grandfather on Victory Day. And his grandfather answers with words that are totally implausible for a veteran of the Soviet army: "Glory to Ukraine".

In the second video, an elderly lady, a grandmother (a 'babushka'), is dressed in a jacket, also bedecked with the insignia of the Great Patriotic War (as World War Two was termed in the Soviet Union and remains so in present-day Russia). She is sitting at a table with tea service set out, looking at a photo in an album. In the photo are five nurses, five combat friends who had served together in the fields of the Great Patriotic War. A telephone rings. It is a granddaughter phoning from the corridor of a hospital. She is dressed in a white uniform. On her wrist is a blue and yellow elastic band, the colors of the Ukrainian national flag. She calls to congratulate her grandmother on Victory Day. And the grandmother answers, again, in words unimaginable for a Soviet veteran: "Glory to the heroes". After these words, the video switches to the granddaughter rushing to a gurney on which a modern "hero", a soldier, who, as the viewer can guess, was wounded in the 'ATO', is being transported somewhere.

Both videos are in Russian, accompanied by Ukrainian subtitles. They were made by a "leading agency of the Ukrainian advertisement market", TABASCO, and by a "leading film production company" in Ukraine, Limelite Studio. The film studio says it allocated "colossal" resources to shoot these videos. Both companies absorbed the costs of production so as not to charge the Ukrainian state for these patriotic public awareness clips. The general producer of Limelite Studio, Vladimir Yatsenko, explains that the entire film crew declined to be paid any royalties. "I am glad that there are so many patriots in our country, ready to do all they can for the victory of Ukraine", said Yatsenko.

The "creative" director of TABASCO, Alexander Smirnov, stated that the two videos are part of a "public awareness" campaign, a task that "social communications" outfits like his should perform in order to form society's notions of what is good and what is bad. TABASCO says its mission is to explain to Ukrainians that "to congratulate veterans for their holiday is good and to keep family traditions is good". TABASCO is helping Ukrainians "to find words that help two completely different generations of Ukrainians to understand each other and to defend together the future of a unified Ukraine".

An advertisement agency seeking to instill in people its own understanding of what is right and what is wrong is, indeed, conducting a campaign. But this is not a "public awareness" campaign. It is a propaganda campaign which seeks to create a myth of a "unified Ukraine", moreover, a myth which goes totally against the historical truth, against the still living, collective memory of Ukrainians who fought in the Great Patriotic War. Not in a thousand years would those who fought in that war against the German Nazis and the collaborators of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) greet their children or grandchildren with the OUN-UPA slogans: "Glory to Ukraine", "Glory to the heroes".

The authors of these two patriotic videos also brushed aside a biological truth - veterans in these two videos would have to be at least 90 years old to have participated as young adults in World War Two. In the videos, they look younger. This reminds me of unnaturally young grandmothers in Hollywood movies, who look more like the mothers of their grandchildren. In my mind, I have always compared implausible, forever-young American grandmothers in the movies to the Ukrainian and Russian 'babushki' I have known, worn down by long, eight-hour days of work followed by never-ending chores in caring for their families and homes. American grandmothers looked so much more glamorous and young!

The fantasy world of post-Euromaidan Ukraine now has Soviet war veterans voicing the nationalist slogans "Glory to Ukraine" and "Glory to the heroes". I wonder what real veterans, so few of whom are now left, are thinking when they hear these slogans being spouted in imaginary conversations in the videos?

These "public awareness" videos are not about history. The author of the news article from which I first learned about the videos is correct: those who produced them were advised not by historians but by specialists "on how to influence mass consciousness". When one looks on the websites of the two Ukrainian companies which produced the videos, the first thing that catches the eye is that both have worked almost exclusively with Western partners. In both companies, the majority of workers are young and Russian-speaking Ukrainians. Both websites are in Russian and English only - no Ukrainian.

These are professionals working with Western partners. They have learned how to appeal to the public, how to sell a message to an audience by enveloping it in an aesthetically appealing form. But their message is based on half-truths, which makes it all the more appealing. These young Russian-speaking Ukrainians grew up in independent Ukraine and were taught a nationalist, Ukrainian version of history. Most probably, they genuinely believe what they were taught. They believe that a civil war, provoked by the Euromaidan regime in Kyiv, has a symbolic continuity with the Great Patriotic War which their ancestors won 70 years ago.

Why do they believe this? Well, because almost all of Ukrainian media are saying that Ukraine is fighting a war with Russia, against 'Putler's Rashists' ('Putler' as in Putin+Hitler). Somehow, simple logic does not enter in their minds: if Russia truly invaded Donbass or anywhere else in Ukraine, such a war would be over in a matter of days. But I digress. I do not wish to go over all of these arguments about Russia's supposed invasion of Ukraine again. This is not the point of this article.

My point is the usage of the symbolism of the Great Patriotic War, which is now playing a fundamental role in the civil war in Ukraine. Pro-Europe Ukraine tries to transform the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War, which is one of the foundations of Russian and Eastern-Ukrainian identity, into a universal, pan-European tragedy, in which Ukrainians triumphed over the Nazis. A short text, accompanying the two videos on YouTube, presents all Ukrainians as fighters against fascists. The irreconcilable, ideological differences between the descendants of Soviet Ukrainians, on the one hand, and those of the virulently anti-Soviet, collaborationist Ukrainians of the OUN-UPA, on the other, are glossed over in an overtly mendacious statement that all of them contributed to the great victory. The collaborationism of the OUN-UPA with Nazi Germany is a well-known historical fact; I will not dwell on it. Here are compelling statistics cited in the above-mentioned text: there were seven million (!) Ukrainians who fought in the Soviet Army and only 100,000 who fought in the OUN. That says it all about the contribution of each part of Ukraine to victory in WWII.

I have written in my previous article about the losses of Soviet Ukraine in WWII. According to Ukrainian historians, eight million civilians died in the war and over 2.5 million soldiers. For these soldiers it was a war against fascist invaders. There was a genuine patriotic drive, which is impossible to negate even in the most nationalistic version of history. The reality is too powerful to forget and to alter. And it is so unwise on the part of the current rulers and masters of Ukraine to twist in such perverted logic the Great Patriotic War into an image of a common war of Soviet Ukraine and UPA-OUN Nazi collaborationists against Hitler's Germany. Or even worse, to make the collaborationists the finest heroes of that war.

Ukrainians fought alongside Russians, Byelorussians, Kazakhs and countless other nationalities of the Soviet Union. The memory of this common fight is too strong to be suppressed. The sense of pride in this victory is too powerful to forget. Even those Ukrainians who are today blinded by nationalist propaganda feel it. Their media is telling them that today Russia has invaded Ukraine. This creates a confused reaction, that modern-day Russia has betrayed them. That is why so many Russian-speaking Ukrainians are expressing such deep resentment towards Russians. What can be more painful than the treachery of a brother?

The "public awareness" videos are a telling example of how propaganda works and of the feelings it generates. Of course, all of this can be interpreted as a product of Western-inspired and financed "zombying", to use a term popular on both sides of the armed conflict in Ukraine. This "zombying" technique is a very powerful tool. Every time I read Ukrainian media, I feel like a fool - why on Earth do I refuse to believe that Russian troops are stationed in Ukraine? It takes an effort on my part to dissipate the doubts by reminding myself that I have not seen any credible proof of Russian military presence in Ukraine - only some unclear pictures from a satellite, taken not by American intelligence but by some private agencies, some postings on social media, and some videos from second-rate websites.

People who believe the Western version of events tell me this is a "hybrid" war. Such warfare consists of blatant lying and telling of half-truths. We are told that Russia has been doing this masterfully since it annexed Crimea in March of 2014. For those who spout such theories, I have one question: was U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell telling the truth when he presented before the United Nations General Assembly and the entire world on February 5, 2003 fake evidence of a mobile biological weapons laboratory in Iraq? Canada, France, Germany and Russia did not accept this as a credible proof and did not join the U.S. war then in preparation. On 15 February 2003, between six and ten million people in over 800 cities around the globe took to the streets to protest against U.S. plans to invade Iraq. It was the largest protest in human history, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. In spite of this strong international opposition, the American military monster went ahead and on March 20 of the same year, attacked Iraq. The war lasted for 8 years and it cost the lives of nearly half a million people.

Because of this war and many others like it waged by the United States in the name of a famous democracy and human rights, the U.S. and its allies are not exactly in a position to teach lessons of moral behavior to Russia. International politics is a dirty game. I do not blame Russia when it chooses to defend ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the Donbas region of Ukraine. On the contrary, I believe that the struggle in Donbas is one of legitimate defense. Yes, Russian volunteers do find their way across the Ukraine-Russia border to fight in the Donbas insurgency. I have little doubt that weapons, too, filter through. But this is no more illegal than the training camps for Ukrainian far-right paramilitary groups operating in Poland and the Baltic states, the assistance provided by the CIA to managing the Security Service of Ukraine, the billions of dollars of Western money spent on 'democracy promotion' in Ukraine during the past 25 years, and now the training camps of the U.S., UK and Canadian militaries in western Ukraine.

What is utterly illegal to me is the war itself, the so-called anti-terrorist operation that Kyiv launched against the people of Donbas with the support of the U.S. and NATO. Donbas did not start the war, Kyiv did. And now the pro-U.S. regime in Kyiv is trying to mutilate the essence of Ukraine by rewriting history, by distorting the memory of the Great Patriotic War. They want to send to oblivion the true celebration of Victory Day on May 9 and instead convert it into the sanitized, "European" way of commemorating WWII, including replacing the profoundly symbolic St. George's ribbon with the poppy!

There is one fundamental problem with this plan. Europe did not defeat the Nazis, the Soviet Union did. The Soviet people have been celebrating that great victory for many decades now. This is a genuinely popular holiday throughout South-Eastern Ukraine, as it is throughout Russia. Even Petro Poroshenko, in his lackey effort to resemble Europeans, understands that. He did not cancel May 9 celebrations in Ukraine. He went on to state that while he acknowledges that people in Lviv and people in Kharkiv will celebrate May 9 in different ways, it does not mean that Ukraine is split.

Poroshenko is living in an imaginary reality. Ukraine is deeply and profoundly split by the actions of his government and its allies. The war in Donbas is in-your-face proof of that. The red poppy which the new Kyiv regime is trying to graft upon the commemoration of the Great Victory will have a very hard time taking root in South-Eastern Ukraine, in Donbas in particular. The St. George's ribbon can be seen everywhere in Donbas. For the Donbas insurgency, their fight against the Kyiv "junta" is a continuation of the fight of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers against Nazi Germany.

During our press-tour in Donbas in April, one of the deputies of the Novorossiya parliament showed me the grave of an unknown member of the Donetsk insurgency who died from a Ukrainian shell. He was buried close to the monument to the victory in the Great Patriotic War.

On May 9, there will be military parades in Donetsk and Lugansk. In Kharkiv and Odessa, Zaporizzhia and Kherson, celebrations will take place that day to commemorate the day of Victory in the Great Patriotic War. In Lviv, Ukrainians will mark the moment as a time of remembrance and reconciliation for those who lost their lives. All this is perfectly fine in a democratic country. Everyone should be free to celebrate in a way which reflects their beliefs and values. But in post-Euromaidan Ukraine, the nationalist Kyiv regime is seeking to prevent Ukrainians from honoring the victory of their grandfathers. In Kharkiv, to take one example, it has been declared that anyone wearing a St. George's ribbon will be searched by the police and checked for suspected ties with the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics. In Odessa recently, an employee of the Minister of Interior of Ukraine was detained by Right Sector gunmen because he had a St. George ribbons and a flag of the Russian Federation in his car. How can Victory Day be celebrated in such an atmosphere of intimidation and fear? The man in Odessa was detained by illegal gunmen because the St. George ribbon is considered the symbol of an "aggressor country".

The current Kyiv regime is exploiting the symbolism of the Great Patriotic war in a perverted way, presenting the current civil war in Ukraine as a war against a non-existent Russian aggressor. This "official" ideology is part of a real, not fictitious, hybrid war that the bankrupt regime is waging against its own people. I have a firm belief that one day my people, Ukrainian people, so many of whom are presently blinded by official propaganda, will wake up and see who is now presiding in Kyiv, will see all these lies. They will remember who they are, will remember the great victory that they fought for side-by-side with Russians. I am pleased to see there are important signs of a growing awakening.

Memory is powerful. It emerges from under the lies and half-truths. And it will return to Ukrainians, no matter how hard the current Western lackeys who now sit in Kyiv try to suppress it. It will re-emerge, like the memory of KGB killings and Soviet deportations of Western Ukrainians in 1939-1948. It will come back because it is rooted in truth, and truth always prevails. It is stronger than time, than propaganda, than denial. And on that day, the Donetsk guys fighting on the "Ukrainian" side will hug the Donetsk guys fighting for the insurgency. And this horrible, fratricidal war will be over.
 #7
Forbes.com
May 4, 2015
Simple Advice On Russia: When Everyone Is Fearful, Be Brave
By Kenneth Rapoza
[Chart and links here http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2015/05/04/simple-advice-on-russia-where-everyone-is-fearful-be-brave/]

Warren Buffet is known for advising investors on the value of being brave when everyone else is fearful. Russia fits the advice to a T. Global investors are paying attention, though admittedly are only tiptoeing into Russian equities from here. This year's CFA Institute survey of global asset managers put Russia at No. 4 for best places to invest.

In Los Angeles on April 29, at the Miliken Institute's annual conference, Russia took center stage. The takeaway: we know there are problems, but Russia is a value investors goldmine. After being the worst emerging market in 2014 thanks to its adventures in Ukraine, Russia is on its way back. The ruble is stable. Everyone loves central bank governor Elvira Nabiullina, who very well be voted as the best central banker in the world this year. And the Russian stock market has beat the MSCI Emerging Markets Index year-to-date in dollar terms. It's even beat China, which is now undergoing a mini-QE stimulus program.

Of course, nobody knows where Russia goes from here.  A bomb can go off in Ukraine. Putin will be blamed.  Europe and the U.S. will talk upping the ante on sanctions, some of which are supposed to expire this summer.

Assuming all things stay as they are, is it too late to get in on the Russia recovery? Or is it premature to think an anti-Russia West and an anti-West Russia story line won't go haywire after a few months of relative calm?

I've been talking to European and Russian based fund managers about investor sentiment there all winter. When the Miliken Institute  did their Russia panel, I was particularly curious about what successful investor David Bonderman had to say. Luckily, there is YouTube.

"When you look at companies in Russia you see that most of them are doing quite well. Which is a harbinger of some stability going forward," said Bonderman, founding partner at hedge fund TPG.  "Our biggest investment is in the food retailing business. People are still eating. Their may be some economic downturns but the sanctions that the Russians put on - preventing the import of certain European and American (food) goods - have actually boosted margins. So what we've seen there is that business has been booming," he said.  You can see the entire panel below.

Watching the panel was a bit Twilight Zone-ish. Can someone in the U.S. actually have something rational to say about Russia? I mean, isn't Vladimir Putin going to blow us all to kingdom come?

After nearly two decades of a Cold War truce, Russia became the West's villain again last March. Political turmoil in Ukraine led to the ouster of pro-Russia president Viktor Yanukovych. Kyiv's new leadership quickly went westward-ho, led by their new captain, Arseniy "Yats" Yatsenyuk. Russia annexed Crimea, a Ukraine peninsula that is home to Russia's Black Sea fleet. Months later, Russians moved to help separatists in industrial hubs along the border in East Ukraine, where ethnic Russians and Chechens fought the Ukrainian military side by side. Sanctions were slapped on Russian companies in July, and again in September.

But here's what's been happening since.  Foreign direct investment, which was negative at the start of the year, is rebounding to a little over 2% of GDP. That puts it right about where it was in 2011, and better than the 2008-09 financial crisis.

Despite the bad news, and a general lack of consumer confidence at the start of the year, retail sales were 2.2 trillion rubles in March, up 91% from the same month when Crimea made headlines, and double February sales.

Russia investment horror stories are not hard to find. Investment firms like Hermitage Capital have lost fortunes in Russia. Some foreign investors have been kicked out of the country on spy charges, and a handful would not invest one red cent in that economy ever again. Businesses like Yukos Oil were ransacked, swallowed up by state competitors; their CEOs arrested and upon release, exiled. These are the stories the Western media love about Russia. We know them. We read them every day. Putin's wrath makes great drama. He's the last real-life James Bond villain.

Russia is not to be taken lightly. This is a tough country. You don't run afoul of the government there, just as you wouldn't in the world's second most important economy: China. Google found this out once.  It's finding it out in Russia now too. (Though, it is only fair to say Google is also feeling the wrath of anti-trust lawyers in Europe. But that would go against the narrative.)

Believe it or not, despite those horror stories, Russia is not the worst country for doing business. It's been improving. According to the World Bank's ease of doing business index, Russia's overall ease is better than China and Brazil - but on other measures worse than Rwanda of all places.  It is actually easier to start a business in Russia than it is in the U.S., according to the World Bank's calculations. Contract enforcement is on par with the U.S.

Where Russia fails, of course, is protecting minority shareholder rights.  That's why investors try to ignore state owned enterprises, as Bonderman points out with this retail stock picks.

American investors have not followed Bonderman to Moscow. But European pension funds and long term capital management has.

I spoke with David Hernes, a European fund manager who has been living in Moscow since the 1990s. He's been on the board of Russian companies like Aeroflot, the first ever foreigner to sit on that airline's board of directors, and now runs a $600 million asset management firm called SPRING.

We spoke while he was being chauffeured home in a Volkswagen Taureg.

"Investor sentiment right now among the locals is really negative...or maybe resigned is the better word," he says. "Russians are always most negative about their own country, which creates the low prices in Russia. They are very skeptical about the economy and think the Iron Curtain will come down again. But foreigners...they are all over the place. You have some contrarians who think Russia is cheap enough to buy."

Herne says he sees light at the end of the tunnel.

"At the end of the day, every investor is after returns. Look at the market this year. I think people will pay attention to that, and remember why Russia is doing well. It is an under levered nation, it has solid infrastructure, unlike India or Brazil. It has a smart population with a 100% literacy rate," he says, practically whispering. Naysayers would tell you that an FSB officer was in the backseat with a loaded Makarov in his lap. Alas, Herne is just not the excitable type. Hell, he hasn't even been to Club Fantomas yet! Before getting dropped off at his apartment, he tells me: "You may not like Putin...but the government is stable and you can count on that."

His two favorite stocks: natural gas producer Novatek and Sberbank. Novatek is up 13% year-to-date in rubles. Sberbank is up 40%.

Low oil prices are forcing Russia to change. High oil prices have made them sick with so-called Dutch disease, where rich oil countries do nothing else but drill, baby, drill.  Today, investors are diversifying and expanding.  Everyone is expecting a 4% decline in GDP this year. From the investors I've spoken with, there is some risk to the upside.

Arent Thijsen manages around $250 million at T&E Inmaxxa near Amsterdam. The Netherlands is one of the two most important markets for Russia. Germany is right beside it. The long money there knows Russia well and understands the risks. They also know how to ignore the propaganda, which surely comes at them full force from Russia, Europe and - can you believe it? - the U.S.

"A lot of my clients are afraid, of course, because they see the news. It's not that 30% of our fund is in Russia. You're looking at maybe five to 10%, and even that is a very large amount," Thijsen tells me, adding that local Rabobank is brave. They have a strong bias for Russia these days.

"We are looking for companies that are under-valued and will be revalued higher sooner rather than later. These are all private and they pay high dividend yields. I'm not going to ignore Alrosa Diamonds (+91% in 12 mos); M.Video (+68.6% YTD); Severstal (+135% in 12) and Dixy (+49% in 12) in food retail," he says. "I don't think you can. They all have nice market share in a large economy. Severstal has a 12% dividend yield."

Sure, it is in rubles. But if you believe oil is going to $60 and $70 over the next two years, rather than $40 and $35, then the ruble will strengthen.

Back in the 1990s, during the fall of communism, a handful of foreign investors got very rich. Triple digit return rich. That might not happen now, but high double digits is and will continue to happen in the Russian stock market.

"Most people realize that the opportunity is too huge to ignore," Martin Charmoy tells me. Charmoy is the director of Prosperity Capital, a $2.4 billion London-based firm managing institutional money in Russia and some ex-Soviet states. "You can buy private companies at multiples of three, four or five. Russia is almost nothing in the MSCI All Country World Index, so for large institutions that can only do All Country World allocation, they won't spend a lot of time looking at Russia. But all the people we talk to see the long term. There's the basic trade of 'oil up buy Russia, oil down sell Russia.' The best approach is to buy and hold for the next three to five years," he says, fresh off a trip to the U.A.E. to tout Russian equities.

"I can tell you that a lot of people are being brave. It is more a question of getting allocation approved by their investment committees than anything else," says Charmoy. "People will come back because it is difficult in this environment to get returns even if equity markets have done well this year and last year thanks to QE."

See the Russia panel here from the Miliken Institute. Sorry Putin haters. They didn't hate on him enough:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZfFRQ3riyE

 #8
Glamour
May 3, 2015
The Life-Changing Lesson I Learned About Love in Russia
By Sarah Jio

Say what you will about Russia. It's cold. The men might drink too much vodka. The leaders have a history of questionable practices. But the women? After a recent trip to Moscow, I came to realize that Russian women have, hands down, the most evolved perspective on love.

This year, my friend Claire and I found ourselves, two divorced (Claire, almost-divorced), moderately disillusioned (jaded?) 36-year-old women, in Moscow-on Valentine's Day.

After one of my novels hit the best-seller list unexpectedly in Russia, I'd been invited by my publisher to go on a week-long book tour in the dead of winter. I asked Claire, my most adventurous girlfriend, to tag along. We each bought enormous down jackets, packed our warmest sweaters, and embarked on an adventure across the world.

On the plane to Moscow, the flight attendant refilled our wine glasses, I stared out the dark airplane window and thought about my divorce, my beleaguered heart, and the endless dating hamster wheel. Though I had recently begun seeing someone exclusively, I still had fears, and even more questions.

"Maybe Russian women have it all figured out?" I asked Claire, remembering one of my friends in Seattle, a Siberian-born Russian with extremely high expectations for the men in her life and a strict no-bullsh*t rule when it comes to dating.

An hour later, when we stepped off the plane in Moscow, Anna, the head of marketing for my Russian publisher, greeted me with flowers. A driver in a black Mercedes waited on the snow-dusted street outside (as pictured above in one of my favorite shots from the trip).

Though my books are not romance novels, my stories all have strong romantic elements. I also write this column for Glamour about love and life after my recent divorce. I'm interested in love, and I couldn't help but ask Anna, the first Russian woman I would meet on my trip, a little about the love landscape in her country.

"Are you married?" I asked her casually and perhaps somewhat deliriously after the long flight. I eyed her bare ring finger as our driver whizzed by bleak-looking fields of snow-covered fields of birch trees.

Anna laughed as if she found my question quite unexpected and somewhat hilarious. "No, no," she said quickly as if the very idea of marriage was somehow silly or unnecessary.

About my age, and beautiful, with dark hair and a petite frame, she quickly changed the subject to something she seemed much more interested in: training for the Moscow Marathon in the fall. We chatted about how she runs on snowy streets in 10-degree weather. The subject of men, it seemed, was the farthest thing from her mind.

In those next few days, everywhere I met Russian women like Anna: stunning, accomplished, clad in designer clothes, fiercely independent, and consciously choosing to remain single. This wasn't just a coincidence. It's estimated that in Moscow alone, there are more than 3 million single women in a population of 11 million.

While I have a few girlfriends who have sworn off men for short periods of time (even Taylor Swift reportedly was on a break from dating, though I think I may have just spotted a tabloid pic of her snuggling with a bad-boy DJ-sigh), and I've had my share of I'm-done-with-men-moments in past months, I'd never encountered anything like this. Women in Russia seemed to not only be at peace with singlehood, they actually seemed to unabashedly embrace it.

Between book signings, I indulged my curiosity by interviewing Russian women and reading everything I could find online written about the plight of women in this beautiful and complex country. According to recent statistics, there are 11 million more women than men in Russia. Experts theorize that not only do Russian men die earlier (the life expectancy for males is a bleak 59), many die in on-the-job accidents, and still more move elsewhere to find work.

The women I spoke to in Russia told me, quite plainly and openly, what most men are like in their country. "They smoke and drink too much," a woman named Olga in St. Petersburg shared, adding that many are unfaithful and almost all expect their wives to cook and clean and look perfect while doing it. But perhaps most shocking of all, even in the year 2015, there is no law against domestic violence in Russia.

And while the previous generation might have married out of necessity, Russian women today have an independence and strength that their mothers and grandmothers did not. As such, many young women in Russia have radically sworn off men and the entire idea of love.

During a photo shoot with a particularly handsome photographer named Alex, I overheard Claire whisper to my 25-year-old Russian-born translator, Nina, "he's cute."

Nina made a disapproving face. "Never ever tell a Russian man he's good-looking," she said, shaking her head. "Men are already too cocky."

Later, I asked Nina what it's like to date in her country. The men here are," she paused to find the right word, "terrible." Though she had recently started dating someone, her attitude toward love mirrored the other women I'd met: guarded, taken with a grain of salt, almost a "take it or leave it" mentality.

I thought a lot about this in contrast with the way American women think about love. As a culture, we believe in happy endings, in soulmates, in the idea of love completing us, making us whole. In America, we're Romance Pollyannas of sort; and being single somehow feels shameful, the quest for love exhaustively ever-present.

You'd think that the social landscape in Russia would send women into a desperation and hysteria to find a suitable mate, but as I wandered the chilly streets of Moscow, I sensed the complete opposite. Russian women seem to have accepted the fact that they may never have their Jerry Maguire moment (cue: "you complete me"). And while they may desire love just as much as any other human being, they appear to be at peace without it, at peace with the idea of being complete, even happy, without love.

This is a sentiment that Svetlana, an editor at Glamour Russia shared, during an interview with me at my hotel one snowy morning. Striking and stoic, with a pixie haircut, she smiled very little but had kind, intense eyes. "You write about love," she said in so many words, "and your stories seem to mostly have happy endings and hint that love is out there for all of us."

Her question felt like a high-powered spotlight aimed directly at me. My cheeks burned. I knew what she was getting at before she continued.

"But that's not really true of real life," she added.

I nodded. She was right. It isn't true of real life, or mine, either. By all standards, love had done me wrong. And yet, my novels, wildly popular in dozens of countries including Russia, employ the following formula: Girl meets boy. Girl and boy fall in love. Girl and boy have some sort of tragic separation but find their way back to love in the end.

There isn't anything inherently wrong with this, and my stories have deeper messages too, but Svetlana was getting at the thing that haunted me. In real life, sometimes girl never meets boy. Or sometimes girl meets the wrong boy. Then what?

"So what are you really saying to readers about love?" she asked.

I paused for a long moment before responding. What sort of advice could I possibly give Russian women? Me, a hopeless romantic, still finding her way, trying to make sense of life alone. "I guess it's hope," I finally said. "Even after everything I've gone through, I still believe in love."

Svetlana didn't seem satisfied with my answer. "In Russia, many women will never get married. Are you saying that you must have love in your life to be happy?"

I fumbled with my words, and thoughts, for a moment. The thing is, she didn't need my answer, because she, and millions of other Russian women already knew it.

But I needed the answer. And I needed to believe it, finally.

"No, women don't need love to be happy," I said, leaning forward in my chair. "We think we do, but we don't. The truth is, being alone scares me. It scares the hell out of me to think that I might never have the kind of love I write about. But I'm learning to be OK with that."

On our last day in Moscow, I turned to Claire. "I'm so glad we went to Russia," I said.

"Me too," she said.

There we were, two Americans with newly minted Russian states of mind.

A few months have passed, and I'm dating the same wonderful man and feeling happy for the first time in a long time. Yes, love is wonderful and beautiful and worthy of attaining (and keeping). And yet, the thing that Russian women taught me is that, even so, it might find you, or it might not. Either way, that's OK. It's actually more than OK.

Life can still be celebrated and lived fully. Besides, men usually die earlier. And in the end, all of us gals will be a bunch of babushkas having tea together. Or vodka.

Hugs to all my Russian sisters.
 #9
Vox.com
May 4, 2015
"America has a simple ideology": how one of Russia's top US experts tries to explain America
By Max Fisher
 
The United States comes up constantly when you talk to Russians about their country's place in the world. But the conversations tend to go a lot differently than many Americans might expect.

In the US, the common view is that Russians feel aggrieved by the loss of the Soviet Union and all the respect that came with being a global superpower. Russia's acts of aggression in Europe, in this telling, are all about challenging the American-led order as a way to prove Russia's might and importance. This aggression is wildly popular among Russians, many Americans believe, because it makes them feel patriotic and powerful to bully the West, and particularly the US, which they blame for Russia's problems.

"RUSSIA TOOK OFF ITS IDEOLOGICAL BLINDERS IN 1991, BUT AMERICA STILL SEEMS TO HAVE THEM ON"

There is certainly truth to this, but it's just a piece of the truth. Rather, when you speak to influential people across institutions and the political spectrum in Russia, as Amanda Taub and I did during a recent reporting trip there, the story you hear over and over is one of Russia's fundamental weakness. And you hear a preoccupation with the United States that goes far beyond what even many Americans, who are famously narcissistic about our country, would expect.

In this telling, Moscow capitulated at the end of the Cold War, and even tried to make itself a friend to the far more powerful United States. But an irrationally aggressive America has instead sought repeatedly to weaken, control, or even destroy Russia. Their country, in this view, is insecure against an overwhelmingly powerful West. Its actions that we see as aggressive are actually defensive. And Moscow is kept safe only by careful vigilance and by the nuclear arsenal that you hear Russians cite over and over.

This is the version of history you hear in Russia from detached foreign policy pragmatists, from pro-Putin ideologues and anti-Putin ideologues, even from members of the pro-Western political opposition who support what they believe be to a Western agenda of weakening Russia.

There's a quote that speaks perfectly to this Russian worldview - and how Americans misunderstand it - in the most recent issue of Russia in Global Affairs [http://eng.globalaffairs.ru/number/Vladimir-Lukin-I-Am-a-Bit-Wary-of-a-Popular-Foreign-Policy-17363], a Russian foreign policy journal that is widely considered to reflect the views of Russia's foreign policy establishment. The quote is from a Q&A with Vladimir Lukin, a prominent Russian diplomat and liberal politician who previously served as ambassador to the US:

Interviewer: In his 1994 book "Diplomacy," Henry Kissinger writes that "integrating Russia into the international system is a key task" for the United States. But as he was saying this, the Americans were actually pushing Moscow away with their policy. Why?

Vladimir Lukin: It is in the genes. America has a simple ideology - that there is only one truth in the world, that truth is held by God, and God created the United States to be an embodiment of that truth. So the Americans strive to bring this truth to the rest of the world and to make it happy. Only after that will everything be well. This ideology has a strong influence on their policy. A wise traditionalist and a geopolitical expert, Kissinger had good reason to call such politicians "Trotskyites" for advocating a world revolution, albeit in their own way, but always in the front and in shining armor. This is a tempting ideology and has been professed by different countries at different times, not only the United States.

Lukin is hardly seen as an anti-American hard-liner in Russia - rather, he's considered to be an objective expert on the United States and a highly professional diplomat. He is a founding member of the liberal opposition party Yabloko. That he would get the United States so obviously wrong - what Americans would call defending democracy and human rights, he sees as a far more radical and explicitly religious agenda of "advocating a world revolution" - is troubling. But his view is a common one, and that tells you a great deal.

The interviewer's response is similarly telling: "So Russia took off its ideological blinders in 1991, but America still seems to have them on. The Soviet Union is gone, but the policy against it is not."

This narrative of an inherently aggressive America is one we heard over and over in Moscow, not just from people who support Russian President Vladimir Putin and his aggressive, anti-American policies but even from those who oppose them. In this view, American politics and policies are bent on, and in many ways driven by, a hatred of Russia and desire to destroy or at least control it. Russia has had no choice but to meet American aggression with defensive actions such as putting nuclear-capable missiles in Europe or arming eastern Ukrainian militias at threat of genocidal extermination by American-backed fascists, if only to deter the US from further actions that could lead to all-out war.

It's not hard to poke holes in this Russian worldview. As Stephen Sestanovich, a longtime senior State Department official who helped engineer the Clinton administration's Russia policies, wrote in a recent article for the American Interest, even the "pragmatic" Russian case for annexing Crimea in March 2014 makes little strategic sense:

Putin has repeatedly claimed that in seizing Crimea he kept the United States from taking over Russia's historic naval base there. Washington, he warned, might have moved its own forces forward so as to change the balance of power in the Black Sea. To this, one has to ask: Which forces, forward from where, and to advance what American goal? Today the United States no longer even bothers to keep a carrier group in the Mediterranean, as it did for half a century. What would make a Russian military planner think it had any interest in the Black Sea?

Yet this was the worldview we heard even from professionals and politicians in Russia who oppose anti-Western policies. One foreign policy expert who wished for rapprochement with the West sighed to us that it would be impossible because Hillary Clinton, whom he said was widely viewed as irrationally anti-Russian, would soon take office. At another meeting, a political opposition leader remarked offhand that he hoped the US would be successful in its efforts to engineer regime change in Moscow.

As Sestanovich writes in his essay, "The idea that the United States aims at a 'color revolution' in Moscow is the single most frequently repeated theme of official Russian rhetoric." This is more than paranoia or government propaganda; it is the accepted worldview: that Russia is under constant threat from a hostile and irrational United States.

Lukin, at another point in his Q&A, lamented that the US had rejected Moscow's gestures at cooperation in the 1990s and instead sought to surround Russia with a hostile NATO alliance, thus forcing Russia into a defensive crouch and creating today's tensions. "It was the biggest mistake the West made," he said, "and gradually led to the current situation."

These fears about America are likely to worsen in Russia if Hillary Clinton becomes president; many people told us she is seen by many Russians, especially Russian policymakers, as unbendingly hostile to Moscow and bent on the Putin government's destruction.

"Hillary is the worst option of any president," Fyodor Lukyanov, an influential Russian foreign policy expert who edits a leading foreign affairs journal and heads a foreign policy think tank, told us.

"Many people here believe that [she and her team] will try to come back to the line of the 1990s to encourage Russia into an internal transformation," Lukyanov added. "Not by force, of course, but to encourage some kind of social development that will upend the current system and will promote a new one."
 
 #10
Irrussianality
https://irrussianality.wordpress.com
May 4, 2015
INSTITUTIONS RULE, BUT WHICH ONES?
By Paul Robinson
Associate Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa. Paul Robinson holds an MA in Russian and Eastern European Studies from the University of Toronto and a D. Phil. in Modern History from the University of Oxford. Prior to his graduate studies, he served as a regular officer in the British Army Intelligence Corps from 1989 to 1994, and as a reserve officer in the Canadian Forces from 1994 to 1996. He also worked as a media research executive in Moscow in 1995. Having published six books, he has also written widely for the international press on political issues. His research focuses generally on military affairs. In recent years, he has worked on Russian history, military history, defence policy, and military ethics.

A couple of pieces published last week - one by John Herbst, director of the Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center of the Atlantic Council, and the other by Forbes' Russian affairs blogger Mark Adomanis - provide a neat contrast which aptly displays the illusions of many Western liberals about the prerequisites of economic progress. Before getting to them, however, we first need to make a little digression into economic history.

As I explained in my book Aiding Afghanistan, in the 1950s, 60s, and to a lesser extent 70s, economists on both sides of the Iron Curtain tended to believe that economic development was a simple matter of capital accumulation. The reason why underdeveloped states were poor was thought to be that they lacked the capital to get the process of accumulation going. Development assistance therefore consisted of providing them with financial capital (normally in the form of loans) or physical capital (dams, roads, factories, etc) in order to kick-start the process.

By the 1980s it had become blindingly obvious to almost all concerned that this wasn't working. Economists therefore had to revise their theories. Rather than capital, what matters, some concluded, is 'institutions', a word which is somewhat misleading as it includes not just what ordinary people consider to be institutions (government, banks, etc), but also less tangible matters such as laws and culture. You can pour almost any amount of capital into a country, but if the correct institutions are not in place, it won't make a jot of difference.

But which institutions? To those in the West, the answer was evident - Western ones. Clearly, the prerequisite for economic growth must be the establishment of a set of institutions similar to those in Western Europe and North America. That meant that in order to prosper, underdeveloped states first had to introduce democracy (multi-party elections, a free press, transparent government, etc), liberalize their economies (via privatization, elimination of price controls, the opening of borders, etc), and liberalize their societies (granting equal rights to women, racial minorities, etc). Success would surely follow.

Following the collapse of communism, the purveyors of institutional economics found a market for their ideas in Eastern Europe. Things did not quite work out as planned. Institution-building is a slow process and inevitably involves a transition period in which some institutions are present and others are not. This can create some strange incentives as well as significant distortions in the economy. Meanwhile, the establishment of a new set of institutions requires the destruction of the old set, but if these are destroyed too rapidly before the new ones are in place, economic and social collapse may ensue. This is indeed what happened in many post-communist countries.

At that point, the logical response might have been a pause to reflect whether one size really does fit all. Instead, the West has by and large chosen to redouble its efforts in the same direction as before. If institution-building hasn't worked as planned, then that must be because it wasn't pushed hard enough. Thus, the European Union's Association Agreement with Ukraine obliges Kiev to liberalize faster, to accelerate the building of the institutions which will make Ukraine a Western, and thus prosperous, country.

It is here that John Herbst fits in. According to Herbst, commentators are mistaken in viewing Ukraine as facing a choice between Russia and Europe. Rather the choice is between the past and the future. As Herbst says:

"Civil society in Ukraine which has been a factor since the first days of independence, or the pre-days of independence, has driven this country towards Europe (in a current phrase). But it is really driving this country towards openness, towards empowerment of its citizens. That is precisely the opposite direction that Mr. Putin has been leading Russia for the last ten years. Since he's not an idiot, he poses this as a question of Russian values versus Western values. But it is really reaction versus the future. ... Russia only has the GDP per capita that it has because of hydrocarbons. Without hydrocarbons  its GDP per capita would be less than Ukraine's. Because talent there is not allowed to develop."

This is, in essence, an institutional argument. Ukraine will succeed where Russia is failing, because it has more liberal institutions. Only 'openness' and 'empowerment of citizens' can foster economic growth.

In theory, the argument is compelling. However, Mark Adomanis demonstrates that Herbst's facts are wrong. It simply isn't true that 'Without hydrocarbons [Russia's] GDP would be less than Ukraine's.' In a recent post, Adomanis analyzed how large Russia's economy would be without 'resource rents' from the oil and gas industries. He concludes that, 'Russia, despite what you often hear, is more than just a gas station. ... after adjusting for resource rents, Russia's GDP per capita would be roughly $19,000, a level that is broadly similar to post-communist countries like Bulgaria ($15,600), Poland ($22,800), and Romania ($18,000).' In contrast, according to the World Bank, Ukraine's GDP in the period 2010-2014 averaged a measly $3,900 per capita. In other words, without hydrocarbons Russia's per capita GDP wouldn't be less than Ukraine's, it would be more than four times larger!

This is a troublesome conclusion. For in many respects Herbst is right when he says that Ukraine has a more vibrant civil society than Russia. Certainly, its elections have always been far more competitive, and its press (until recently) more varied in its political opinions. Ukraine can indeed be described as more 'liberal' than Russia. And yet it is much, much poorer. If 'openness' and 'empowerment of citizens' was what mattered, then Ukraine would be richer than Belarus - the 'last dictatorship in Europe'. Yet Belarusan per capita GDP averaged $7575 in 2010-14, almost twice that of Ukraine. Despite being illiberal, Belarusan institutions clearly work better than Ukrainian ones.

None of this is to say that Western institutions are not desirable. They are. But they are a product of development as much as a prerequisite for it. Nor is it to say that institutional economics is completely wrong. It isn't. Institutions matter enormously. But the question of which institutions best fit any given country at any given time is more complicated than many Western liberals are willing to admit.
 
 #11
www.foreignpolicy.com
May 4, 2015
DISPATCH
In Eastern Ukraine, Doctors Are 'Terrorists' and Antibiotics Are Herbs
Donetsk's medical system is crumbling and starved of even the most basic supplies. What will happen when the current cease-fire collapses?
BY MATTHEW VICKERYB and SHEREN KHALELMAY

DONETSK, Ukraine - The light illuminating the dilapidated halls of Hospital 21 filters through half-boarded-up windows. Electricity has been out in the hospital for more than six months.

Hospital 21, in Donetsk's Kievsky district, is only half a mile away from Donetsk's airport - the scene of a four-month-long battle between fighters from the separatist Donetsk People's Republic (DNR) and Ukrainian forces. The residential area surrounding the hospital is mostly abandoned. Nearly every house has been hit by shelling. Deep blast holes scar the streets, live wires hang from splintered electric poles, and tree branches are strewn across the ground.

But doctors and nurses at Hospital 21 say it's not the damaged infrastructure that worries them. It's the lack of medicine. The shelves of the hospital pharmacy on the ground floor are empty. Two Bibles greet patients at the pharmacy's unattended window - sometimes the only help available is prayer, said one nurse.

A cease-fire was announced on Feb. 12, but the agreement is seen as a dark joke by Hospital 21's medical staff and patients, who hear nearby shelling and artillery fire every day. The cease-fire, called the Minsk II agreement, came about after September 2014's Minsk I cease-fire fell apart completely. By January, DNR separatist fighters finally wrestled control of Donetsk's airport from the Ukrainian army. Around the airport, fighting has never stopped. Like the airport district, Debaltseve, a large town to the north of Donetsk, has been reduced to rubble after months of fighting finally resulted in a DNR victory on Feb. 20, a week after the cease-fire agreement.

On April 13, fierce fighting erupted in Shyrokyne, on the outskirts of Donetsk, killing six Ukrainian soldiers and one rebel fighter - the highest casualty toll since the signing of the cease-fire agreement. On April 26, fighting escalated near the strategic port city of Mariupol, southwest of Donetsk, and at Donetsk's airport. Kiev announced one soldier dead and seven wounded during clashes.

Alekseyenko Aleksandrovich, the head of Hospital 21's surgical department, is adamant that the fighting will increase and that what remains of the cease-fire will fall apart. When this happens, Donetsk's hospitals will face a crisis. Medicine is already limited and infrastructure is severely damaged, said Aleksandrovich. An increase in fighting, with its subsequent influx of civilians to a hospital caught in the crossfire, would pose significant problems.

"We have some help from organizations in providing emergency care for our patients," Aleksandrovich said. "But we have a limited amount of medical supplies and a limited amount of food for our patients. Right now there isn't enough - when the fighting increases it will be worse."

Yulia Gorbunova of Human Rights Watch said that despite the cease-fire, the situation in medical facilities in Donetsk, like Hospital 21, is "quite dire and not far from catastrophic because medical facilities in the DNR are running out of medical supplies and lifesaving medicines." The problem, she said, has been exacerbated by the Ukrainian government's decision in November 2014 to halt funding for hospitals and medical services in rebel-held areas.

On Aug. 22, 2014, a Russian aid convoy of 184 vehicles crossed illegally into rebel-controlled eastern Ukraine. Similar Russian convoys have been going back and forth regularly since. Despite this, hospitals in Donetsk continue to be starved of vital medicines.

At Hospital 1, one of the city's largest hospitals, Alexander Petrovich Stanitskly, the head of the traumatology department, lists the medicines he needs most: antibiotics, analgesics, and anesthetics. The corridors of Hospital 1 have the luxury of electricity, but the patients whose beds line the dirty walls still do not have needed medicines.

The hospital has not been hit by shelling - a blessing, Stanitskly says. But because it is still intact and the electricity and heating still work, the hospital has become the No. 1 destination for Donetsk's ill and injured. It is not just the war wounded who are suffering, but also patients with pre-existing conditions.

The shortage of medical supplies has Stanitskly and other doctors resorting to desperate measures. "There are less and less medicines and drugs now, and it's more difficult for me to treat older people, who are not taking part in war actions but who are truly ill. I have to remember the recipes of our ancestors - herbs, tinctures, homemade remedies - in order to try and make the patient's condition better," said Stanitskly, from behind a desk stacked high with piles of papers. "Sometimes, I'm sorry, but we are treating people just by kind words. We talk with the patient, calm them down, and try and distract them from everything and their pain.""Sometimes, I'm sorry, but we are treating people just by kind words. We talk with the patient, calm them down, and try and distract them from everything and their pain."

Working under immense pressure and dealing with horrific injuries from war have become a daily routine for Stanitskly. And he has been without a wage for months. So have all his colleagues. After separatist fighters proclaimed Donetsk's independence from Kiev in April 2014, the Ukrainian government took steps to freeze all salaries and support to medical staff in Donetsk. The move was implemented in full by November 2014. Stanitskly decided to carry on working for free. This is when his services were needed most, he says.

In early April, Stanitskly was given a month's salary by the DNR government. The salary, Stanitskly was told, was for the month of January, with the wages for the following months to be processed by the DNR in the following weeks. But by accepting the much-needed cash from the DNR's leadership, he claims that he has now been designated an enemy of the state by the Ukrainian government. "They call me a terrorist now. Can you believe that? I am a doctor, and they call me a terrorist."

Stanitskly said he thought for a brief moment about fleeing Donetsk when the war started. He had enough money saved to leave and start a new life elsewhere. Politics is not his business, he says, but saving people is, and here in Donetsk people need help now more than ever.

Although all parties to the conflict were to withdraw heavy weaponry to 15 kilometers from the front line as per the Minsk II agreement - in effect creating a 30-kilometer buffer zone - Alexander Hug, deputy chief monitor of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe's Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine, said violations still continue on both sides. With the cease-fire only holding on paper, doctors and aid workers worry that a resumption of fighting will jolt the DNR's bare-bones health-care system into full-fledged crisis.

Aleksandrovich has no illusions about the task he and his team will face if the fighting increases. His office window has been shattered twice, he says, but no real damage was done. The children's department across the courtyard wasn't so fortunate, he said, pointing toward the shell-riddled roof.

Only a few days after Aleksandrovich spoke to Foreign Policy at the beginning of April, the surgical department of Hospital 21 and the hospital grounds were hit by shelling. There were no fatalities.

Without electricity and with much of the infrastructure destroyed, the medical staff has still found ways to cope. The murky basements of Hospital 21 were never intended for patients, much less complex and lifesaving surgeries. But when shelling increases, patients are moved there to provide safety, Aleksandrovich said. While it has been weeks since patients have had to be evacuated underground, areas of the basement continue to be used as operating rooms due to unrepaired damage in the standard operating wards.

Despite everything, Aleksandrovich tries to remain positive. "What else can we do but stay here and treat people?" he said. "It's our job even if we do not have the tools we need."
 
 
#12
The Irish Times
April 25, 2015
Frontline Ukraine, by Richard Sakwa: Portrait of crisis does not demonise Putin
Review: Account of Kiev's conflict explores Russophobic misconception
By Geoffrey Roberts
Geoffrey Roberts is professor of history at University College Cork

When the first World War broke out Pope Benedict XV declared it the suicide of Europe. But Europe survived and was reborn, albeit after two World Wars and a prolonged cold war that threatened nuclear extinction. At the heart of this rebirth was the European Union and its project both to unify and to pacify Europe.

In this powerful account of the Ukraine crisis Richard Sakwa argues the EU has abandoned that peace project and allowed itself to become an auxiliary of Nato's expansion into central and eastern Europe. Instead of seeking accommodation, compromise and engagement with Russia in relation to Ukraine, the EU leadership in Brussels has turned the issue of Ukraine's "European choice" into an instrument to isolate and destabilise Vladimir Putin's regime. The resultant dangerous confrontation between Russia and the West will divide the continent for at least a generation.

At the forefront of this development have been Russophobes in Poland, the Baltic States and other countries within the "new Europe", who have imported into the EU their historic antagonisms with neighbouring Russia. Supported by resurgent cold warriors in the United States, the anti-Putin camp in Europe has demonised the Russian president and denied his country's legitimate security interests and concerns. The contention that Nato and EU enlargement is no threat to Russia is belied by Nato's military exercises on Russia's borders and belligerent calls to arm Ukraine and increase western military spending.

Prof Sakwa, a British scholar of Polish heritage who specialises in Russian and European politics, intends his book to counter the predominant western narrative that blames Russia for the civil war and crisis in Ukraine.

Sakwa identifies two distinct crises in relation to Ukraine. The first he calls "the Ukrainian crisis", this being the internal clash between two versions of Ukrainian identity, nationalism and statehood: the "mono" versus the pluralist, the "orange" versus the "blue". While the Maidan demonstrations in Kiev began as pluralist and inclusive protests against a corrupt "blue" regime, they turned violent and were captured by ethnic nationalists whose self-definition rests, above all, on their hostility to Russia. Against Maidan mononationalism are those, in the Donbass and elsewhere, who envisage a Ukraine of many diverse identities, a state that is part of Europe but close to Russia, too.

International stage

Second, he identifies "the Ukraine crisis" brought about because of a structural imbalance in post-cold-war Europe. This, he says, has led to the internationalisation of the Ukraine civil war as a clash between Russia and the West. The fundamental source of the imbalance has been Russia's weakness relative to the West, its exclusion from Nato and the EU, and the continent's overall failure to construct a common security system in Europe.

Sakwa's statement that Putin is the most pro-European leader that Russia has ever had will surprise some, but when he came to power 15 years ago the Russian president was committed to partnership with the EU and with the US and Nato. Putin is not an ideologue, says Sakwa, but a rational and pragmatic politician. It is western expansion to Russia's borders that has driven Putin to adopt a "neorevisionist" policy of contesting a western-dominated European and world order, with Ukraine pushed into the frontline of this struggle.

The West has attempted but failed to subdue Putin by sanctions and to isolate Russia internationally. Domestically, the Putin regime is stronger than ever, notwithstanding a growing economic crisis caused by collapsing oil prices. There is very little support for sanctions in countries outside the western orbit, and Putin is busily and successfully constructing new relationships with China, Turkey and other states, including dissident governments within the EU.

Sakwa also draws attention to another dichotomy: between the "Wider Europe" sought by the EU and the "Greater Europe" favoured by Putin. Like ethno-Ukrainian nationalism, Wider Europe is a monopolistic project - the EU writ large and excluding states like Russia that do not conform to the western model. Greater Europe, which would include Russia, is a more multipolar and pluralistic concept. The future of these two projects is at stake in Ukraine. The question is not which will prevail but whether the two can coexist peacefully.

Although much of Sakwa's book is concerned with the international dimensions of the Ukraine crisis, those chapters are balanced by others devoted to Ukraine's internal development since it gained independence in 1991, including a detailed narrative of the events of the past two years. Ukraine's recent history is a fiercely contested story. Sakwa offers a strong interpretation, critical of ethnic nationalism and tending to favour the Russian and "blue" point of view. But he treats differing perspectives fairly and is meticulous in his reconstruction of events, whether it is the violent escalation of the Maidan protests, the secession of Crimea, the revolt in eastern Ukraine or Russia's role in the crisis.

The ultranationalist tendencies of the Kiev regime sit ill with the liberal democratic values of the EU, and they are likely to become increasingly uncomfortable bedfellows. Kiev may succeed in realigning Ukraine with the West, but, as its defeat on the battlefield shows, it does not have the power to impose its will on the Russian-backed separatists. Within Ukraine are millions of Russian-speaking citizens who share neither Kiev's mononationalism nor its Russophobia.

Ukraine is one of the most corrupt and inefficient states in the world, much worse than even Russia. During the civil war its oligarchs have gained even more power and riches, protected now by private armed militias. In practice the alternative to the federalised Ukrainian state proposed by Russia is not some idealised western liberal democracy but a feudal Ukraine based on an opportunistic alliance of oligarchs and ultranationalists.

Before the crisis Russia was Ukraine's biggest and most important trading partner. Ukraine depends on Russian energy supplies. Millions of Ukrainian citizens live and work in Russia and send vital resources back home. Without Russian participation there is no viable solution or alternative to the economic collapse suffered by disintegrating Ukraine.

Dark future

Sakwa is pessimistic about Ukraine. The nationalist genie is out of the bottle in Russia as well as Ukraine, and the EU has been exposed as incapable of transcending hackneyed cold-war perspectives. Cold warriors on both sides are having a field day while those Ukrainian citizens who see their country as a bridge between Europe and the EU have been marginalised by a civil war in which thousands have died. The disintegration of Ukraine will likely continue and may lead to further violent uprisings.

The one hope is that it is in Russia's vital interest to stabilise Ukraine. For that to happen, Sakwa writes, "Moscow needs to show the courage of compassion towards Ukraine. It is a country that in many respects is another part of Russia itself, while Russia is inevitably part of Ukrainian identity. The crisis will only be resolved when 'normal' relations are established between the two countries."
 
 #13
Russia Insider
http://russia-insider.com
May 4, 2015
How the EU Association Agreement Makes Existing Ukraine-Russia Trade Links Impossible
Negotiations to preserve trade links between Ukraine and Russia are in deadlock because the EU and Ukraine reject all changes to an Association Agreement whose purpose is to make Ukraine an EU economic colony
By Alexander Mercouris
Alexander Mercouris is a writer on international affairs with a special interest in Russia and law.  He has written extensively on the legal aspects of NSA spying and events in Ukraine in terms of human rights, constitutionality and international law.  He worked for 12 years in the Royal Courts of Justice in London as a lawyer, specializing in human rights and constitutional law. His family has been prominent in Greek politics for several generations.  He is a frequent commentator on television and speaker at conferences.  He resides in London.

The tripartite negotiations between Russia, Ukraine and the EU to resolve the problems thrown up by Ukraine's Association Agreement with the EU are going nowhere.

The Russians insist on changes to the text of the agreement. The Europeans categorically reject this, as do the Ukrainians.

In order to understand why there is this deadlock, it is necessary to say something about the nature of the Ukraine EU Association Agreement, since it is not very well understood.

Most people believe the agreement is intended to create a free trade area between the EU and Ukraine.  

It is easy to understand why people think this since that is what the Association Agreement itself says in Article 25:

"The Parties shall progressively establish a free trade area over a transitional period of maximum 10 years starting from the entry into force of this Agreement, in accordance with the provisions of this Agreement and in conformity with Article XXIV of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade 1994 (hereinafter referred to as 'GATT 1994')."

Establishing "a free trade area" (in the commonly-understood meaning of that term) between the EU and Ukraine is not however what the Association Agreement actually does.

At almost a thousand pages, the text of the Association Agreement is extremely long and uses convoluted and technical language. [http://www.modernukraine.eu/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/EU-Ukraine-Association-Agreement-ENG.pdf]

This is intentional. The text has been deliberately made much longer and far more technical than it needs to be, precisely so as to confuse people.  

It is certainly far longer and much more complex and technical than it would need to be if its purpose really was merely to create a free trade area. Here by comparison is the text of the EU Association Agreement with Chile. This too purports to be a free trade agreement between the EU and Chile.  

Reading the two documents side by side, the similarities are obvious; but so are the differences. The Association Agreement with Ukraine is much longer and far more technical and complex.

What the EU officials who drew up the document have done is take a standard form of the Association Agreement the EU routinely uses when it negotiates free trade agreements with non-EU countries and graft onto it something completely different.

So what does the Ukraine EU Association Agreement actually do?

What it does is require Ukraine to adopt the whole body of EU law as it affects regulation of its economy.  

EU officials call this body of EU law the acquis. Those with the time and inclination to read through the document will see this word appears constantly throughout the text.  

The key omnibus provision is Article 56, in the section that deals with removing "technical barriers to trade":

"2. With a view to reaching these objectives, Ukraine shall, in line with the timetable in Annex III [to this Agreement]: (i) incorporate the relevant EU acquis into the legislation of Ukraine."

Since Ukraine is committing itself to make the acquis its law, it is surrendering regulation of its economy to the EU in Brussels. Questions of regulation of Ukraine's economy will no longer be decided by the Ukrainian government and parliament in Kiev, but by the European Council and the EU Commission in Brussels.

Moreover what the EU decides will have the force of law. This is made quite clear by the single most important paragraph in the entire document (buried on page 187):

"Article 322

"Dispute settlement relating to regulatory approximation

"The procedures set out in this Article shall apply to disputes relating to the interpretation and application of obligations contained in relating to regulatory or legislative approximation contained in Chapter 3 (Technical Barriers to Trade), Chapter 4 ( Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures), Chapter 6 (Services, Establishment and Electronic Commerce) and Chapter 8 (Public Procurement) [of this Agreement].

"Where a dispute raises a question of interpretation of an act of the institutions of the European Union, the arbitration tribunal shall not decide the question, but request the Court of Justice of the European Union to give a ruling on the question. In such cases, the deadlines applying to the rulings of the arbitration panel shall be suspended until the Court of Justice of the European Union has given its ruling. The ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union shall be binding on the arbitration tribunal."

Since the entire point of the Association Agreement is "regulatory or legislative approximation" through wholesale adoption of the acquis in the key economic areas mentioned in Article 322, what this paragraph does is give the EU effective control of Ukraine's economy, with the EU's decisions having the force of law, with the right of enforcement given not to Ukraine's own courts, but to the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.

To hide away this provision the Association Agreement creates an elaborate arbitration system to settle disputes. However, since in deciding legal questions the arbitration tribunal is bound by decisions of the European Court of Justice, the final decision always ultimately rests with the EU.

Other sections of the Association Agreement are equally far reaching, with Ukraine for example required to harmonize its foreign, defense, tax and transport policies with those of the EU, to base its intellectual property law on that of the EU, and even to allow unrestricted access to EU investigators undertaking "anti-corruption" investigations in Ukraine.

The Association Agreement does not therefore just create a free trade area.  What it does - and what it is intended to do - is make Ukraine in effect a part of the European Economic Area and of the European Single Market administered by the EU Commission in Brussels.

It does so despite Ukraine remaining outside the EU. Ukraine is surrendering control of its economy to the EU without the corresponding benefit of EU membership.  

Many people within the EU today complain about the power the democratically-unaccountable institutions of the EU have over their lives. They are however at least represented in the EU through their governments and can vote in elections to the European parliament. Ukraine's people will have no representation at all, and no say through their government in what the EU decides for them.

Once it is understood that what the Association Agreement actually does is not the creation of free trade area between the EU and Ukraine, but in fact makes Ukraine a part of the European Economic Area and the European Single Market, then the reason why talks with Russia are deadlocked becomes obvious.

The Russians complain that if the Association Agreement comes into force and Russia's trade relations with Ukraine are unchanged, then EU goods can enter Russia without hindrance because Ukraine and Russia have a free trade agreement. Russia does not have a free trade agreement with the EU, but once the Association Agreement comes into effect, it will in effect find itself in a de facto free trade area with the EU through its Ukrainian back door.

Understandably enough, the Russians say they will not let themselves be brought into a free trade arrangement (whose terms they have not negotiated) with the EU in this backstairs way, and that if no change is made to the Association Agreement to prevent this, then their free trade arrangements with Ukraine will end.  They insist this problem can only be solved by making changes to the text.

The Europeans and Ukrainians refuse to change the text of the Association Agreement in any way.  What they offer instead is a labeling system that would enable Russian customs officials to identify the provenance of any goods entering Russia through Ukraine, so as to separate those goods which are Ukrainian from those which are not.

This proposal illustrates everything that is wrong about the way the West treats Russia.

What the Ukrainians and the West never explain is why they think the Russians would agree to such a proposal. What it amounts to is a demand that Russia set up a cumbersome and expensive customs procedure, which would be very easy to evade just so Ukraine can distance itself from Russia and the EU can achieve its geopolitical goals.

As such, this is simply another in a long line of proposals that amount to the Ukrainians and the West demanding that Russia pay the cost of their anti-Russian policies. Not surprisingly, the Russians always say no. Amazingly, the Ukrainians and the West always then seem genuinely surprised, become furious, and accuse the Russians of harboring all sorts of sinister designs when the reason the Russians have said no is actually perfectly obvious.

This proposal however faces a more fundamental problem - that it is incompatible with the Association Agreement. Without rewriting its text it cannot work because the European Court of Justice will set it aside.

The European Court of Justice would be bound to find that the proposal is discriminatory and a barrier to trade and as such that it is incompatible with the rules and regulations of the European Economic Area and of the European Single Market (the acquis), which Ukraine has agreed to adopt. Since according to Article 322, decisions of the European Court of Justice are binding, any agreement made with Russia based on the proposal would then be set aside. Ukraine could not continue with it while it remained bound to observe the acquis.

The simple fact which neither the Ukrainians nor the Europeans want to face is that the Ukraine EU Association Agreement is incompatible with Ukraine's existing economic and trade links with Russia.

That of course is its whole point. There is no logic in the Ukrainians and the Europeans angrily complaining about this when that is precisely what the document they signed together is intended to do.
 
 #14
Rossiya 1 TV (Moscow)
April 30, 2015
Russian TV accuses Kiev of misleading Ukrainian public about situation in east

Russian television has said the Kiev authorities mislead the Ukrainian public by not telling the truth about the situation in the east, by denying that Ukrainian forces have suffered major defeats and by downplaying casualty figures.

The 30 April edition of the "Special Correspondent" political discussion programme on official Russian TV channel Rossiya 1 discussed a film entitled "Price of Defeat", made by its war correspondent Yevgeniy Poddubnyy.

The debate was moderated by Yevgeniy Popov. The programme was two hours long.

Film

The film opens with graphic footage of mangled corpses said to have been left behind by retreating Ukrainian forces in and around Debaltseve in February, after months of heavy fighting. The encirclement and defeat of a large Ukrainian force at this strategic railway hub was a turning point in the war with the Russian-backed rebels in Donbass.

"This is what they are hiding from the Ukrainian public: the terrible pictures of the tragic events near Debaltseve, evidence of Ukraine's crushing military defeat there," were the correspondent's opening remarks in the film.

According to officially reported data, he said, 500 Ukrainian soldiers were killed in Debaltseve but, according to the military commanders of the Russia-backed self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR), the Ukrainian army and volunteer battalions lost as many as 3,000 people there.

Debaltseve was "yet another tragic episode of the civil war in Ukraine" but the Kiev authorities "not only keep quite about it - they have erased it from official reports", the film says.

But the so-called "Debaltseve pocket" did happen and the many-thousand-strong Ukrainian group of forces was defeated there by the militia, the correspondent insisted.

There was similar coverage in Ukraine of the situation at Donetsk airport, he continued. After months of fierce fighting the DPR militia took it under their control but for a week afterwards the Kiev authorities maintained that the airport was still under Ukrainian forces' control.

"The Ukrainian public have still not been told how many servicemen really died during the fighting for Donetsk airport," the correspondent said, adding that "the real number of those killed in the 'Ilovaysk pocket' is not known either".

According to him, a group of Ukrainian regular troops and volunteer battalions were surrounded near Ilovaysk in August 2014, and by September they were "completely wiped out" by the militia fighters. Once again, the official data gives the figure of casualties as "over 1,000" but, according to the militia, "more than 2,000" Ukrainian troops were killed near Ilovaysk, the correspondent said.

Debate

Back in the studio Poddubnyy opened the debate by saying that in his film he wanted to show the "scale of the tragedy unfolding in east Ukraine". "The Ukrainian public still doesn't know anything about the tragedies in Ilovaysk or Debaltseve," he said.

Militia losses

Vyacheslav Kovtun, a Ukrainian political expert on the panel, challenged Poddubnyy by saying that in his regular reports from east Ukraine the correspondent never gives the real casualty figures among the pro-Russian militia fighters. Throughout the programme, he kept asking how many people the separatists had lost. Eventually, separatist negotiator in the Minsk Contact Group Denys Pushylin (Denis Pushilin) answered the question.

"As a result of the terrible aggression against our people, according to the most conservative estimates, as of today, as many as 7,000 have died, 80 per cent of whom were civilians," he said.

He added that "the order to use the army against the civilian population was a war crime".

Vladimir Ruban, a retired Ukrainian general who negotiates prisoner exchanges in the east, agreed that the Ukrainian authorities "continue to hide" the real figures about the losses in the east. But he added that at times of war "all sides downplay their losses".

Pushylin disagreed. "Had there been a war, yes, it may have been expedient for us to play down losses. But this is an act of aggression against us, isn't it? We are being eliminated. It would be illogical for us to play down our losses," he said.

NATO "not involved" in Ukraine

Robert Pszczel, NATO's envoy to Russia, said Poddubnyy's film raised important issues but was "one-sided". He accused Poddubnyy of "recycling propaganda theses".

Moderator Yevgeniy Popov said that, although "officially NATO is not involved in the conflict in Ukraine", all the time NATO websites post satellite pictures alleging to show Russian troops movements in the area; also NATO provides "some consultations" to Kiev all the time.

To that Pszczel responded: "NATO plays no role in the military actions in Ukraine."

As for US military instructors training Ukrainian army personnel in western Ukraine, the NATO envoy explained that it was in line with US-Ukrainian bilateral agreements.

No alternative to political solution

Sergey Stankevich, a former adviser to late President Yeltsin and later an opposition politician, expressed horror not only at what he had seen in Poddubnyy's film - "all these young and not very young lads" killed in a "terrible fratricidal slaughter" who "cannot be brought back" - but also at the studio audience's reaction. The audience had met some of the most aggressive pronouncements by participants in the debate with applause.

According to Stankevich, the combination of dead bodies on the screen and applause in the audience "emphasizes the bloody absurdity of what is taking place" in Ukraine.

He expressed a strong anti-war sentiment and concluded that there could only be a political solution to the conflict. "Ukraine's territorial integrity is recognized and the international community is ready to guarantee it. The question is how [two sides to the conflict] can live together in one country," he said.

To remarks by Vladimir Zhirinovskiy, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, that Kiev does not want to find a political solution, that Kiev does not want "to live in one state" with the separatists and deliberately "fans mutual hatred" between the east and the rest of Ukraine, Stankevich replied that, for a start, Russian commentators should moderate their "language" and "rhetoric" when talking about Ukraine.

Retired Ukrainian General Vladimir Ruban also agreed that there was no alternative to a political resolution of the conflict. "Both the pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian sides have failed to have a blitzkrieg, so both should sit down at the negotiating table," he said.

EU position

According to Stankevich, there have been "major changes" in the EU position on the Ukraine crisis. While the previous EU leaders had a rather "vague position", the current president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, and the EU high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, Federica Mogherini, do pursue a clear "political line" as regards Ukraine.

At the latest EU-Ukraine summit in Kiev, "for the first time the EU told Kiev to have no illusions. There are no obligations that Ukraine will join the EU. There are no obligations that [the EU] will grant visa-free entry [to the Ukrainians] or that the EU will set up a military mission on Ukrainian territory," he said.

According to Stankevich, the EU wants "two things" from Ukraine: tangible "reforms", and "progress" in the implementation of the Minsk accords.

"Ukraine is nothing. Ukraine is nowhere"

A video clip was played during the programme showing one of the participants in the debate, nationalist Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovskiy, ranting in the State Duma 17 year ago, saying that "there has never been a Ukrainian state" and that "you will not find it, not a line of evidence to this effect, in any history books".

Back then, Zhirinovskiy said: "Ukraine is nothing and Ukraine is nowhere. Therefore it is ours, because Ukraine means 'on the edge', i.e. on the edge of the Russian empire."

At the time, in 1998, the Russian parliament punished Zhirinovskiy for these remarks by banning him for a month from addressing parliament.

For some reason, the moderator decided to include these remarks in his programme and the audience met them with applause.

"Would they punish you for these words today?" the moderator wondered, addressing Zhirinovskiy.

Ukrainian expert Vyacheslav Kovtun observed that, while "some here are saying that Ukraine doesn't exist and everyone remains silent, I can't get a word in edgeways".

Zhirinovskiy challenged him: "You are half-Russian and half-Ukrainian. Why are you defending only Ukraine? Why is your Russian blood silent?"

Kovtun retorted: "I am defending my country. My country is Ukraine. And I will be defending it because of the aggression and torrents of lies against Ukraine."

But Zhirinovskiy had the last say. "Ukraine and Russia - we are the same people who have lived together for a thousand years."
 
#15
The Kremlin Stooge
https://marknesop.wordpress.com
How Much Of a Nobody Do You Have To Be, To Be Too Much Of a Nobody To Testify Before a Congressional Committee?
By Mark Chapman

Liz Wahl is a proud American. So proud, in fact, that she will hear nothing against the USA, even if it's true. My country right or wrong, baby. For those who do not know Liz Wahl, she was the news anchor for RT America who quit during a live broadcast, saying she could no longer in good conscience work for a network that "smeared America". Well, that's one of the reasons she gave. On occasion she says it is because Russia invaded Ukraine. In fact, neither of those is true, but we'll get into that in a minute.

She decided "arbitrarily" that March 5th would be her last day; she had wanted to quit for months, but that just did it, the unconscionable way the network was whitewashing Putin's dangerous invasion of Ukraine. So she went to the bathroom, a couple of hours before she quit, to compose some heartfelt notes - and called her good friend, Jamie Kirchik, the flaming Russophobe and longtime planner of gimmicky attacks against RT, to let him know she was about to put on a big show. She announced her resignation in an emotional speech on live TV.

In which she did not mention once, not a single time, her reason for quitting, which was - she just told you, how could you forget already - Russia's invasion of Ukraine. No, instead she blathered on about her family, glancing often at her notes as she recounted how her grandparents had escaped Hungary, fleeing before the Soviet forces in 1956. In fact, Grandpa was already in the USA for 10 years, having immigrated without his family at the close of the war. It was Grandma and some other family members who bribed the border guards and made a run for it in 1956, really stirring stuff.

Too bad, when Liz was interviewing Ron Paul, that she didn't ask him about the 1956 Hungarian revolt. Because he would have told her it might have succeeded if it had gone the way the Hungarians were promised it would...by the United States. Radio Free Europe coaxed the Hungarians to rise up, promising them if they would only get the ball rolling, Uncle Sam would do the rest. The Hungarians believed them, and began large-scale public demonstrations on October 23rd, 1956.

Americans themselves did not learn what really happened until 1960, when Congressman Michael Feighan told a stunned audience in Buffalo, New York;

"You will recall the revolution broke out on October 23, 1956, and that by October 28, the Hungarian patriots had rid their country of the Russian oppressors. A revolutionary regime took over and there was a political hiatus for five days.

Then the State Department, allegedly concerned about the delicate feelings of [Yugoslavia's] Communist dictator Tito, sent him the following cable assurances of our national intentions in the late afternoon of Friday, November 2, 1956: "The Government of the United States does not look with favor upon governments unfriendly to the Soviet Union on the borders of the Soviet Union" (emphasis mine).

It was no accident or misjudgment of consequences which led the imperial Russian Army to reinvade Hungary at 4:00 AM on November 4, 1956. The cabled message to Tito was the go-ahead signal to the Russians because any American schoolboy knows that Tito is Moscow's Trojan Horse."

Oh, Eisenhower's government made the expected protests, and said "the heart of America goes out to the people of Hungary," boo hoo, adding that America would "do all within our peaceful power to help them." When Spanish President Francisco Franco committed to sending the Hungarians weapons, and negotiated an agreement with German chancellor Konrad Adenauer to refuel his planes there, Eisenhower applied pressure and got it canceled. Bet you didn't know that while you were grandstanding about how lucky you were to be American, did you, Liz? Sounds like the State Department was just as clueless then as it was toward the end of the first Gulf War, when the USA urged the Kurds to rise up against Saddam Hussein, and then left them hanging while Saddam rolled over them. Betrayal gets to be a habit.

Anyway, it looks to me like the Soviet forces were "just protecting their country", in the new-age American Foreign Policy lexicon, so that was probably all a big fuss against nothing, and Granny and her associates were western-backed (sort of, in rhetorical terms only) separatist rebels that Hungary was far better off without.

It's fairly clear that the whole resignation thing was staged; Ms. Wahl describes how she had "reached out" to Jamie Kirchik "a few months before" when he actually appeared on RT and made a great spectacle of himself over gay rights. A subject America dropped like a hot potato as soon as the Olympics in Sochi were over, incidentally, and the issue was no longer useful to beat Russia over the head; see anyone outside lately in rainbow lederhosen, pouring vodka into the gutter? That's right - you don't. Although she describes her decision to make a public show of her resignation as spontaneous, it was actually about as spontaneous as open heart surgery. She struck a deal with Kirchik when she first made contact with him, admitting she told him she was willing to "tell the truth about RT".  She called Kirchik from the bathroom the day she resigned, and told him what she was going to do in plenty of time for him to prime other media sources for a PR coup - they were giggling like schoolboys about it on Twitter well in advance of the event.

But it's only fair if a gal wants a little attention, isn't it? She certainly would never have gotten it through her journalistic chops. Before her stint as a reporter on Saipan, where she covered local politics, she was an intern at several U.S. networks and freelanced local news at a station in Connecticut. When she was offered the RT job, she grabbed it because she knew if she did not, but wanted to work in the USA, she'd  probably have to "move to some Podunk town to cover rescued kittens and the Fourth of July parade." Hardly sounds the role of a fireball reporter, what? She did show an early nose for a great story, though, bitching about RT's coverage of the Occupy Movement because it "made America look terrible". As well it should. As she described it herself, "Occupy was our lead story for weeks and then months, even as the number of protesters dwindled and tents cleared out. We sucked that story completely dry...Eventually, it was accepted that a revolution was not upon us."

I guess they did suck that story completely dry, because RT was nominated for an Emmy by the international peer community for its coverage of the Occupy Movement in America. But Liz thought they should have devoted more attention to the ill-fated "White Revolution", in which less than .10% of the population of Moscow staged a couple of weeks of protests while the USA talked it up as if the government of the Russian  Federation was about to fall. When liberal Russian celebrities Ksenya Sobchak and Alexei Kudrin took the stage, they were booed off by the Russian crowd. Alexey Navalny shouted that he had enough people to take the Kremlin, but he wasn't quite sure enough to try it, more's the pity. The opposition selected a "shadow government" from among its members, partly through internet voting, which held a couple of meetings, playacted at governing to see how it liked it, couldn't stop quarreling, and disbanded. Sorry. I made it as exciting as I could. Eventually it was accepted that a revolution was not upon them.

Great instincts, Liz. I can't understand why the New York Times isn't beating down your door.

Putin supports dictators. Yes, I can see how that would prey upon the mind of a native of the country whose government propped up dictator Hosni Mubarak in Egypt for 30 years, during which time his own subjects tried 6 times to assassinate him, just to let him know how much they loved him. A country whose government was complicit in overthrowing the democratically-elected Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran - because he was going to nationalize Iranian oil assets, which would have been uncomfortable for the USA's British friends - and foisted the dictator Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi on the people of Iran for another 26 years. Or, more recently, backed and participated in the coup that deposed democratically-elected Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine and installed a self-appointed junta, which promptly banned opposition parties and brought to power candy king Petro Poroshenko, who has presided over the complete collapse of Ukraine while ignoring his campaign promise to divest himself of his personal business connections.

There is no evidence thus far that Russia has "invaded Ukraine". None. Oh, Kiev sends the western media its talking points every week, and the western media dutifully reports that Russia invaded yet again, sometimes using photos of bearded cossacks from Georgia in 2008 or idling columns of Russian armor waiting on some road that is not even in Ukraine, or squeals that Russian forces are massing on the other side of the Ukrainian border - which just happens to be Russia, surely an odd place to find the Russian army. The United States Ambassador to Ukraine fires off satellite photographs from Digital Globe on Twitter, showing blurry holes in the ground which he claims were made by Russian artillery, and maybe you can tell a hole made by Russian-fired artillery from one made by Ukrainian-fired Russian artillery of the same caliber, but I'm damned if I can see how. The U.S. State Department claims to have tons of proof, but it can't show it to the public because - sorry - it's all classified. You should just believe them because of their track record for timely, accurate information. Ha, ha; sorry, I tried to say that without laughing, I really did, but I just couldn't do it.  Associated Press reporter - a real reporter, Liz, take note - Matthew Lee regularly reduces State Department press conferences to comedy turns, as spokespersons run out of lies and have to just move on to another questioner.

So much for the claim that Russia invaded Ukraine as an excuse for quitting; let's look at how RT  "smears" America. Does it? Does it really? Liz says it "makes America look bad". By extrapolation, the allusion is that America really is doing well, while RT broadcasts a false vision of what's happening. Let's look.

Oh, dear; according to a study by the Center for Retirement Research, using Federal Reserve data, about half of American households will be unable to maintain their living standard in retirement. That could potentially affect about 160 million people; it sounds important.  The middle class is being wiped out as manufacturing steadily declines in the USA, and the income gap continues to widen. Nationally, the income gap between wealthiest and median-income households in the United States gained by 15.8 % over 20 years.  The proportion of the population aged 25-34 who have post-secondary education has fallen from first to sixteenth in the world, according to the OECD, because of tuition rates which have climbed up and up and up. What do you think the Occupy movement was about?

Well, thanks to the internet, we know what Liz thought. It was about "hippies who were camping out, barefoot and beating drums, [who] had jumped at the opportunity to come together in solidarity against The Man". Those liars at RT. And the liars who nominated them for an Emmy for the coverage, which they say nobody else seemed particularly interested in supplying.  I daresay Putin would derive a great deal of satisfaction from seeing the decline in American manufacturing reverse, college admissions in the USA increase as tuition came down, and American living standards begin to climb again instead of dropping like a rock. That'd be just like him, the soulless bastard, and the slimy propaganda network that does his bidding.

So it was only natural that Liz, with her obviously comprehensive knowledge of the RT organization, should be called to testify before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. The deep wellspring of experience who had to google RT two and a half years ago because she knew no more about the network than the night baker at Tim Horton Donuts does; who describes the management of RT as "all Russian guys" but does not appear to know who they are, referring to them even in Congressional testimony as "these people".

The Committee could have summoned someone from Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), who would have told them RT easily leads foreign broadcasters in the United States, with an audience more than 6.5 times as big as its next-closest competitor (Al Jazeera) at a time when FOX, MSNBC and CNN are hemorrhaging viewers. British reporter Oliver Bullough, dedicated Putin-hater, would have told them RT had passed other broadcasters in Britain in 2013 to be the third most-watched in the UK after the BBC And SKY. The BBC, incidentally, is funded entirely by the state and has been caught in lie after lie. Quoth Bullough; "RT does not lie, but it is selective about what facts it uses. Indeed, from its coverage of US politics, you might gain the impression that the only thing saving the Obama administration from collapse is police oppression of dissidents ." Bullough has nothing good to say about RT or about Putin, but he does say that RT doesn't lie. Or the House Foreign Relations Committee could have summoned representation from the broadcast community which nominated RT for an Emmy.

But the U.S. government already knows RT is increasing viewership, and making inroads on public opinion. That's why it has to be stopped, by whatever means necessary. At the same time America knows - and has acknowledged - that it is "losing the propaganda war. Therefore, in the interests of fair play, the appearance must be created that the USA is under attack and defending itself - hence the outlandish accusation  that Russia is "weaponizing information", and that its insidious propaganda tentacles are everywhere. They are setting up to ban RT as a threat to national security. Because they can't compete with it any other way. John Kerry mumbled something about the USA starting a news service in Russian to be aired in Russia, and thereby push the U.S. viewpoint, and I wish he would. It would get the same reception Al Hurra got in Iraq. But if you've got money to throw away...

Since the U.S. government has become almost exclusively an organization which solicits information only from sources it knows will tell it what it wants to hear, let me put it to you: would it be likely to want to hear from a source that will tell it it is losing its mind as it pursues ever-crazier fantasies of global economic and military domination? Or would it rather hear from Liz Wahl, who will tell it that RT is a cult of fringe nutjobs who are making up lies about the USA in order to unfairly tarnish its image?

No contest.
 
 
 #16
Valuewalk.com
May 4, 2015
US Forcing Russia, China And Iran Into Eurasian Military Alliance
U.S. foreign policy is in effect forcing Russia, China and Iran into a new Eurasian military alliance
By Clayton Browne

It is important to keep in mind that Russia is not acting in a vacuum. Russian President Vladimir Putin's belligerence over the last few years is not entirely about whipping up a nationalist fervor to improve his political fortunes. As Pepe Escobar points out in a recent Op-Ed on Zero Hedge, it's also about U.S. foreign policy in effect forcing Russia, China and Iran into a military alliance against the West.

Russia selling Iran S-300 anti-aircraft missiles is a game changer

Russia's decision to sell the S-300 anti-aircraft missile system to Iran is clearly a game-changer, and reflects changing geopolitics and the new world order. Jane's Defense Weekly has been saying for years that Israel would have great difficulty penetrating Iranian airspace, and that will certainly be true soon. Keep in mind that following the S-300s, Iran will almost certainly be offered the yet more sophisticated S-400s, which China is already slated to receive.

Escobar explains the implications of Russia's decision: "The unspoken secret behind these game-changing proceedings actually terrifies Washington warmongers; it spells out a further frontline of Eurasian integration, in the form of an evolving Eurasian missile shield deployed against Pentagon/NATO ballistic plans."

Eurasian military alliance

A possible glimpse of the future was offered at the Moscow Conference on International Security in April of this year.

Iranian Defense Minister, Brigadier-General Hussein Dehghan, unabashedly stating that Iran wanted BRICS members China, India and Russia to jointly oppose NATO's eastward expansion, and calling NATO's missile shield as an existential threat to their collective security.

At the same conference, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu and Chinese Defense Minister Chang Wanquan noted that their military ties are an "overriding priority", and Iran and Moscow also emphasized that they're working together in their push towards a new global order.

NATO versus Russia/China/Iran

The battle lines are becoming more clearly drawn between NATO and Russia/China/Iran, so it's not surprising the three nations are cooperating more than ever before. Of note, Iran is an observer at the Collective Security Treaty Organization, and is virtually certain to join the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) within the next year or two.

Given Russia is providing S-300 systems to Iran and S-400 systems to China, and developing the S-500 systems, which can supposedly intercept supersonic targets, it's clear the current NATO /U.S. military domination is at least threatened.

On a related note, despite its small fleet in the area, China symbolically announced joint naval exercises with Russia in the Mediterranean last week.

More over, as Escobar points out, this "budding military Eurasia integration is a key subplot of the New Great Game that runs parallel to the Chinese-led New Silk Road project."

He argues that this Eurasian military alliance was almost inevitable given Beijing is confronted by U.S. and allies encroachment via the Asia-Pacific; Russia by encroachment via Eastern Europe; and Iran by encroachment via Southwest Asia.

This means the multi-vector Russia-China-Iran strategic alliance is a reality for the foreseeable future. And despite whatever may occur with the nuclear negotiations with Iran this summer, 'Iran is bound to remain - alongside Russia - a key US geostrategic target."

Moreover, it is clear Moscow and Tehran have easily identified the U.S. government's hidden agenda of using a "rehabilitated" Iran to sell oodles of oil and gas to the EU, undermining Gazprom's dominant position.

Pentagon Long War prosecuted against enemies, fabricated or otherwise, all across the "Muslim world"

Some years ago a RAND report described U.S. Middle East policy as the "Long War". It boils down to the fact that the U.S. will continue to support the Saudi Arabian-led Gulf Cooperation Council "petrodollar racket" no matter what in the interest of containing Iranian power and influence.  According to Escobar, the U.S. "diverts Salafi-jihadi resources toward "targeting Iranian interests throughout the Middle East," especially in Iraq and Lebanon, hence "cutting back... anti-Western operations"; props up al-Qaeda - and ISIS/ISIL/Daesh - GCC sponsors and "empowers" viciously anti-Shi'ite Islamists everywhere to maintain "Western dominance"."

He points out that the idea of the Long War was first formulated several years ago by the Highlands Forum, a right wing linked Pentagon think tank. Of note, the RAND Corporation is a major partner of the Highlands Forum. Moreover, notorious Long War practitioners such as current Pentagon big wig Ashton Carter, his deputy Robert Work, and intelligence chief Mike Vickers are now in charge of the "Don't Do Stupid Stuff" Obama administration's military strategy.
 
 #17
Consortiumnews.com
May 1 2015
The Lasting Pain from Vietnam Silence
By Ray McGovern
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was a close colleague of Sam Adams; the two began their CIA analyst careers together during the last months of John Kennedy's administration. During the Vietnam War, McGovern was responsible for analyzing Soviet policy toward China and Vietnam.

Exclusive: Many reflections on America's final days in Vietnam miss the point, pondering whether the war could have been won or lamenting the fate of U.S. collaborators left behind. The bigger questions are why did the U.S. go to war and why wasn't the bloodletting stopped sooner, as ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern reflects.

Ecclesiastes says there is a time to be silent and a time to speak. The fortieth anniversary of the ugly end of the U.S. adventure in Vietnam is a time to speak - and especially of the squandered opportunities that existed earlier in the war to blow the whistle and stop the killing.

While my friend Daniel Ellsberg's leak of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 eventually helped to end the war, Ellsberg is the first to admit that he waited too long to reveal the unconscionable deceit that brought death and injury to millions.

I regret that, at first out of naivet� and then cowardice, I waited even longer - until my own truth-telling no longer really mattered for the bloodshed in Vietnam. My hope is that there may be a chance this reminiscence might matter now - if only as a painful example of what I could and should have done, had I the courage back then. Opportunities to blow the whistle in time now confront a new generation of intelligence analysts - whether they work on Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, ISIS or Iran.

Incidentally, on Iran, there was a very positive example last decade: courageous analysts led by intrepid (and bureaucratically skilled) former Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence Thomas Fingar showed that honesty can still prevail within the system, even when truth is highly unwelcome.

The unanimous intelligence community conclusion of a National Intelligence Estimate of 2007 - that Iran had stopped working on a nuclear weapon four years earlier - played a huge role in thwarting plans by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to attack Iran in 2008, their last year in office. Bush says so in his memoir; and, on that one point, we can believe him.

After a half-century of watching such things closely, this is the only time in my experience that the key judgment of an NIE helped prevent a catastrophic, unwinnable war. Sadly, judging from the amateurism now prevailing in Washington's opaque policymaking circles, it seems clear that the White House pays little heed to those intelligence officers still trying to speak truth to power.

For them I have a suggestion: Don't just wring your hands, with an "I did everything I could to get the truth out." Chances are you have not done all you can. Ponder the stakes - the lives ended too early; the bodies and minds damaged forever; the hatred engendered against the United States; and the long-term harm to U.S. national interests - and think about blowing the whistle publicly to prevent unnecessary carnage and alienation.

I certainly wish I had done so about what I learned of the unconscionable betrayal by senior military and intelligence officers regarding Vietnam. More recently, I know that several of you intelligence analysts with a conscience wish you had blown the whistle on the fraud "justifying" war on Iraq. Spreading some truth around is precisely what you need to do now on Syria, Iraq, Ukraine and the "war on terror," for example.

I thought that by describing my own experience - negative as it is - and the remorse I continue to live with, I might assist those of you now pondering whether to step up to the plate and blow the whistle now, before it is again too late. So below is an article that I might call "Vietnam and Me."

My hope is to spare you the remorse of having to write, a decade or two from now, your own  "Ukraine and Me" or "Syria and Me" or "Iraq and Me" or "Libya and Me" or "The War on Terror and Me." My article, from 2010, was entitled "How Truth Can Save Lives" and it began:

If independent-minded Web sites, like WikiLeaks or, say, Consortiumnews.com, existed 43 years ago, I might have risen to the occasion and helped save the lives of some 25,000 U.S. soldiers, and a million Vietnamese, by exposing the lies contained in just one SECRET/EYES ONLY cable from Saigon.

I need to speak out now because I have been sickened watching the herculean effort by Official Washington and our Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) to divert attention from the violence and deceit in Afghanistan, reflected in thousands of U.S. Army documents, by shooting the messenger(s) - WikiLeaks and Pvt. Bradley Manning.

After all the indiscriminate death and destruction from nearly nine years of war, the hypocrisy is all too transparent when WikiLeaks and suspected leaker Manning are accused of risking lives by exposing too much truth. Besides, I still have a guilty conscience for what I chose NOT to do in exposing facts about the Vietnam War that might have saved lives.

The sad-but-true story recounted below is offered in the hope that those in similar circumstances today might show more courage than I was able to muster in 1967, and take full advantage of the incredible advancements in technology since then.

Many of my Junior Officer Trainee Program colleagues at CIA came to Washington in the early Sixties inspired by President John Kennedy's Inaugural speech in which he asked us to ask ourselves what we might do for our country. (Sounds corny nowadays, I suppose; I guess I'll just have to ask you to take it on faith. It may not have been Camelot exactly, but the spirit and ambience were fresh - and good.)

Among those who found Kennedy's summons compelling was Sam Adams, a young former naval officer out of Harvard College. After the Navy, Sam tried Harvard Law School, but found it boring. Instead, he decided to go to Washington, join the CIA as an officer trainee, and do something more adventurous. He got more than his share of adventure.

Sam was one of the brightest and most dedicated among us. Quite early in his career, he acquired a very lively and important account - that of assessing Vietnamese Communist strength early in the war. He took to the task with uncommon resourcefulness and quickly proved himself the consummate analyst.

Relying largely on captured documents, buttressed by reporting from all manner of other sources, Adams concluded in 1967 that there were twice as many Communists (about 600,000) under arms in South Vietnam as the U.S. military there would admit.

Dissembling in Saigon

Visiting Saigon during 1967, Adams learned from Army analysts that their commanding general, William Westmoreland, had placed an artificial cap on the official Army count rather than risk questions regarding "progress" in the war (sound familiar?).

It was a clash of cultures; with Army intelligence analysts saluting generals following politically dictated orders, and Sam Adams aghast at the dishonesty - consequential dishonesty. From time to time I would have lunch with Sam and learn of the formidable opposition he encountered in trying to get out the truth.

Commiserating with Sam over lunch one day in late August 1967, I asked what could possibly be Gen. Westmoreland's incentive to make the enemy strength appear to be half what it actually was. Sam gave me the answer he had from the horse's mouth in Saigon.

Adams told me that in a cable dated Aug. 20, 1967, Westmoreland's deputy, Gen. Creighton Abrams, set forth the rationale for the deception. Abrams wrote that the new, higher numbers (reflecting Sam's count, which was supported by all intelligence agencies except Army intelligence, which reflected the "command position") "were in sharp contrast to the current overall strength figure of about 299,000 given to the press."

Abrams emphasized, "We have been projecting an image of success over recent months" and cautioned that if the higher figures became public, "all available caveats and explanations will not prevent the press from drawing an erroneous and gloomy conclusion."

No further proof was needed that the most senior U.S. Army commanders were lying, so that they could continue to feign "progress" in the war. Equally unfortunate, the crassness and callousness of Abrams's cable notwithstanding, it had become increasingly clear that rather than stand up for Sam, his superiors would probably acquiesce in the Army's bogus figures. Sadly, that's what they did.

CIA Director Richard Helms, who saw his primary duty quite narrowly as "protecting" the agency, set the tone. He told subordinates that he could not discharge that duty if he let the agency get involved in a heated argument with the U.S. Army on such a key issue in wartime.

This cut across the grain of what we had been led to believe was the prime duty of CIA analysts - to speak truth to power without fear or favor. And our experience thus far had shown both of us that this ethos amounted to much more than just slogans. We had, so far, been able to "tell it like it is."

After lunch with Sam, for the first time ever, I had no appetite for dessert. Sam and I had not come to Washington to "protect the agency." And, having served in Vietnam, Sam knew first hand that thousands upon thousands were being killed in a feckless war.

What to Do?

I have an all-too-distinct memory of a long silence over coffee, as each of us ruminated on what might be done. I recall thinking to myself; someone should take the Abrams cable down to the New York Times (at the time an independent-minded newspaper).

Clearly, the only reason for the cable's SECRET/EYES ONLY classification was to hide deliberate deception of our most senior generals regarding "progress" in the war and deprive the American people of the chance to know the truth.

Going to the press was, of course, antithetical to the culture of secrecy in which we had been trained. Besides, you would likely be caught at your next polygraph examination. Better not to stick your neck out.

I pondered all this in the days after that lunch with Adams. And I succeeded in coming up with a slew of reasons why I ought to keep silent: a mortgage; a plum overseas assignment for which I was in the final stages of language training; and, not least, the analytic work - important, exciting work on which Sam and I thrived.

Better to keep quiet for now, grow in gravitas, and live on to slay other dragons. Right?

One can, I suppose, always find excuses for not sticking one's neck out. The neck, after all, is a convenient connection between head and torso, albeit the "neck" that was the focus of my concern was a figurative one, suggesting possible loss of career, money and status - not the literal "necks" of both Americans and Vietnamese that were on the line daily in the war.

But if there is nothing for which you would risk your career "neck" - like, say, saving the lives of soldiers and civilians in a war zone - your "neck" has become your idol, and your career is not worthy of that. I now regret giving such worship to my own neck. Not only did I fail the neck test. I had not thought things through very rigorously from a moral point of view.

Promises to Keep?

As a condition of employment, I had signed a promise not to divulge classified information so as not to endanger sources, methods or national security. Promises are important, and one should not lightly violate them. Plus, there are legitimate reasons for protecting some secrets. But were any of those legitimate concerns the real reasons why Abrams's cable was stamped SECRET/EYES ONLY? I think not.

It is not good to operate in a moral vacuum, oblivious to the reality that there exists a hierarchy of values and that circumstances often determine the morality of a course of action. How does a written promise to keep secret everything with a classified stamp on it square with one's moral responsibility to stop a war based on lies? Does stopping a misbegotten war not supersede a secrecy promise?

Ethicists use the words "supervening value" for this; the concept makes sense to me. And is there yet another value? As an Army officer, I had taken a solemn oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

How did the lying by the Army command in Saigon fit in with that? Were/are generals exempt? Should we not call them out when we learn of deliberate deception that subverts the democratic process? Can the American people make good decisions if they are lied to?

Would I have helped stop unnecessary killing by giving the New York Times the not-really-secret, SECRET/EYES ONLY cable from Gen. Abrams? We'll never know, will we? And I live with that. I could not take the easy way out, saying Let Sam Do It. Because I knew he wouldn't.

Sam chose to go through the established grievance channels and got the royal run-around, even after the Communist countrywide offensive at Tet in January-February 1968 proved beyond any doubt that his count of Communist forces was correct.

When the Tet offensive began, as a way of keeping his sanity, Adams drafted a caustic cable to Saigon saying, "It is something of an anomaly to be taking so much punishment from Communist soldiers whose existence is not officially acknowledged." But he did not think the situation at all funny.

Dan Ellsberg Steps In

Sam kept playing by the rules, but it happened that - unbeknown to Sam - Dan Ellsberg gave Sam's figures on enemy strength to the New York Times, which published them on March 19, 1968. Dan had learned that President Lyndon Johnson was about to bow to Pentagon pressure to widen the war into Cambodia, Laos and up to the Chinese border - perhaps even beyond.

Later, it became clear that his timely leak - together with another unauthorized disclosure to the Times that the Pentagon had requested 206,000 more troops - prevented a wider war. On March 25, Johnson complained to a small gathering, "The leaks to the New York Times hurt us. ... We have no support for the war. ... I would have given Westy the 206,000 men."

Ellsberg also copied the Pentagon Papers - the 7,000-page top-secret history of U.S. decision-making on Vietnam from 1945 to 1967 - and, in 1971, he gave copies to the New York Times, Washington Post and other news organizations.

In the years since, Ellsberg has had difficulty shaking off the thought that, had he released the Pentagon Papers sooner, the war might have ended years earlier with untold lives saved. Ellsberg has put it this way: "Like so many others, I put personal loyalty to the president above all else - above loyalty to the Constitution and above obligation to the law, to truth, to Americans, and to humankind. I was wrong."

And so was I wrong in not asking Sam for a copy of that cable from Gen. Abrams. Sam, too, eventually had strong regrets. Sam had continued to pursue the matter within CIA, until he learned that Dan Ellsberg was on trial in 1973 for releasing the Pentagon Papers and was being accused of endangering national security by revealing figures on enemy strength.

Which figures? The same old faked numbers from 1967! "Imagine," said Adams, "hanging a man for leaking faked numbers," as he hustled off to testify on Dan's behalf. (The case against Ellsberg was ultimately thrown out of court because of prosecutorial abuses committed by the Nixon administration.)

After the war drew down, Adams was tormented by the thought that, had he not let himself be diddled by the system, the entire left half of the Vietnam Memorial wall would not be there. There would have been no new names to chisel into such a wall.

Sam Adams died prematurely at age 55 with nagging remorse that he had not done enough.

In a letter appearing in the (then independent-minded) New York Times on Oct. 18, 1975, John T. Moore, a CIA analyst who worked in Saigon and the Pentagon from 1965 to 1970, confirmed Adams's story after Sam told it in detail in the May 1975 issue of Harper's magazine.

Moore wrote: "My only regret is that I did not have Sam's courage. ... The record is clear. It speaks of misfeasance, nonfeasance and malfeasance, of outright dishonesty and professional cowardice.

"It reflects an intelligence community captured by an aging bureaucracy, which too often placed institutional self-interest or personal advancement before the national interest. It is a page of shame in the history of American intelligence."

Tanks But No Thanks, Abrams

What about Gen. Creighton Abrams? Not every general gets the Army's main battle tank named after him. The honor, though, came not from his service in Vietnam, but rather from his courage in the early day of his military career, leading his tanks through German lines to relieve Bastogne during World War II's Battle of the Bulge. Gen. George Patton praised Abrams as the only tank commander he considered his equal.

As things turned out, sadly, 23 years later Abrams became a poster child for old soldiers who, as Gen. Douglas McArthur suggested, should "just fade away," rather than hang on too long after their great military accomplishments.

In May 1967, Abrams was picked to be Westmoreland's deputy in Vietnam and succeeded him a year later. But Abrams could not succeed in the war, no matter how effectively "an image of success" his subordinates projected for the media. The "erroneous and gloomy conclusions of the press" that Abrams had tried so hard to head off proved all too accurate.

Ironically, when reality hit home, it fell to Abrams to cut back U.S. forces in Vietnam from a peak of 543,000 in early 1969 to 49,000 in June 1972 - almost five years after Abrams's progress-defending cable from Saigon. By 1972, some 58,000 U.S. troops, not to mention two to three million Vietnamese, had been killed.

Both Westmoreland and Abrams had reasonably good reputations when they started out, but not so much when they finished.

And Petraeus?

Comparisons can be invidious, but Gen. David Petraeus is another Army commander who has wowed Congress with his ribbons, medals and merit badges. A pity he was not born early enough to have served in Vietnam where he might have learned some real-life hard lessons about the limitations of counterinsurgency theories.

Moreover, it appears that no one took the trouble to tell him that in the early Sixties we young infantry officers already had plenty of counterinsurgency manuals to study at Fort Bragg and Fort Benning. There are many things one cannot learn from reading or writing manuals - as many of my Army colleagues learned too late in the jungles and mountains of South Vietnam.

Unless one is to believe, contrary to all indications, that Petraeus is not all that bright, one has to assume he knows that the Afghanistan expedition is a folly beyond repair. So far, though, he has chosen the approach taken by Gen. Abrams in his August 1967 cable from Saigon. That is precisely why the ground-truth of the documents released by WikiLeaks is so important.

Whistleblowers Galore

And it's not just the WikiLeaks documents that have caused consternation inside the U.S. government. Investigators reportedly are rigorously pursuing the source that provided the New York Times with the texts of two cables (of 6 and 9 November 2009) from Ambassador Eikenberry in Kabul. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Obama Ignores Key Afghan Warning."]

To its credit, even today's far-less independent New York Times published a major story based on the information in those cables, while President Barack Obama was still trying to figure out what to do about Afghanistan. Later the Times posted the entire texts of the cables, which were classified Top Secret and NODIS (meaning "no dissemination" to anyone but the most senior officials to whom the documents were addressed).

The cables conveyed Eikenberry's experienced, cogent views on the foolishness of the policy in place and, implicitly, of any eventual decision to double down on the Afghan War. (That, of course, is pretty much what the President ended up doing.) Eikenberry provided chapter and verse to explain why, as he put it, "I cannot support [the Defense Department's] recommendation for an immediate Presidential decision to deploy another 40,000 here."

Such frank disclosures are anathema to self-serving bureaucrats and ideologues who would much prefer depriving the American people of information that might lead them to question the government's benighted policy toward Afghanistan, for example.

As the New York Times/Eikenberry cables show, even today's FCM (fawning corporate media) may sometimes display the old spunk of American journalism and refuse to hide or fudge the truth, even if the facts might cause the people to draw "an erroneous and gloomy conclusion," to borrow Gen. Abrams's words of 43 years ago.

Polished Pentagon Spokesman

Remember "Baghdad Bob," the irrepressible and unreliable Iraqi Information Minister at the time of the U.S.-led invasion? He came to mind as I watched Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell's chaotic, quixotic press briefing on Aug. 5 regarding the WikiLeaks exposures. The briefing was revealing in several respects. Clear from his prepared statement was what is bothering the Pentagon the most. Here's Morrell:

"WikiLeaks's webpage constitutes a brazen solicitation to U.S. government officials, including our military, to break the law. WikiLeaks's public assertion that submitting confidential material to WikiLeaks is safe, easy and protected by law is materially false and misleading. The Department of Defense therefore also demands that WikiLeaks discontinue any solicitation of this type."

Rest assured that the Defense Department will do all it can to make it unsafe for any government official to provide WikiLeaks with sensitive material. But it is contending with a clever group of hi-tech experts who have built in precautions to allow information to be submitted anonymously. That the Pentagon will prevail anytime soon is far from certain.

Also, in a ludicrous attempt to close the barn door after tens of thousands of classified documents had already escaped, Morrell insisted that WikiLeaks give back all the documents and electronic media in its possession. Even the normally docile Pentagon press corps could not suppress a collective laugh, irritating the Pentagon spokesman no end. The impression gained was one of a Pentagon Gulliver tied down by terabytes of Lilliputians.

Morrell's self-righteous appeal to the leaders of WikiLeaks to "do the right thing" was accompanied by an explicit threat that, otherwise, "We shall have to compel them to do the right thing." His attempt to assert Pentagon power in this regard fell flat, given the realities.

Morrell also chose the occasion to remind the Pentagon press corps to behave themselves or face rejection when applying to be embedded in units of U.S. armed forces. The correspondents were shown nodding docilely as Morrell reminded them that permission for embedding "is by no means a right. It is a privilege." The generals giveth and the generals taketh away.

It was a moment of arrogance - and press subservience - that would have sickened Thomas Jefferson or James Madison, not to mention the courageous war correspondents who did their duty in Vietnam. Morrell and the generals can control the "embeds"; they cannot control the ether. Not yet, anyway.

And that was all too apparent beneath the strutting, preening, and finger waving by the Pentagon's fancy silk necktie to the world. Actually, the opportunities afforded by WikiLeaks and other Internet Web sites can serve to diminish what few advantages there are to being in bed with the Army.

What Would I Have Done?

Would I have had the courage to whisk Gen. Abrams's cable into the ether in 1967, if WikiLeaks or other Web sites had been available to provide a major opportunity to expose the deceit of the top Army command in Saigon? The Pentagon can argue that using the Internet this way is not "safe, easy, and protected by law." We shall see.

Meanwhile, this way of exposing information that people in a democracy should know will continue to be sorely tempting - and a lot easier than taking the risk of being photographed lunching with someone from the New York Times.

From what I have learned over these past 43 years, supervening moral values can, and should, trump lesser promises. Today, I would be determined to "do the right thing," if I had access to an Abrams-like cable from Petraeus in Kabul. And I believe that Sam Adams, if he were alive today, would enthusiastically agree that this would be the morally correct decision.

My article from 2010 ended with a footnote about the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence (SAAII), an organization created by Sam Adams's former CIA colleagues and other former intelligence analysts to hold up his example as a model for those in intelligence who would aspire to the courage to speak truth to power.

At the time there were seven recipients of an annual award bestowed on those who exemplified Sam Adam's courage, persistence and devotion to truth. Now, there have been 14 recipients: Coleen Rowley (2002), Katharine Gun (2003), Sibel Edmonds (2004), Craig Murray (2005), Sam Provance (2006), Frank Grevil (2007), Larry Wilkerson (2009), Julian Assange (2010), Thomas Drake (2011), Jesselyn Radack (2011), Thomas Fingar (2012), Edward Snowden (2013), Chelsea Manning (2014), William Binney (2015).
 
#18
Washington Post
May 5, 2015
Editorial
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. tried to help Russians

PRESIDENT VLADIMIR Putin recently was interviewed for a fawning Russian television documentary on his decade and a half in power. Putin expressed the view that the West would like Russia to be down at the heels. He said, "I sometimes I get the impression that they love us when they need to send us humanitarian aid....[T]he so-called ruling circles, elites - political and economic - of those countries, they love us when we are impoverished, poor and when we come hat in hand. As soon as we start declaring some interests of our own, they feel that there is some element of geopolitical rivalry."

Earlier, in March, speaking to leaders of the Federal Security Service, which he once led, Mr. Putin warned that "Western special services continue their attempts at using public, nongovernmental and politicized organizations to pursue their own objectives, primarily to discredit the authorities and destabilize the internal situation in Russia."

Mr. Putin's remarks reflect a deep-seated paranoia. It would be easy to dismiss this kind of rhetoric as intended for domestic consumption, an attempt to whip up support for his war adventure in Ukraine. In part, it is that. But Mr. Putin's assertion that the West has been acting out of a desire to sunder Russia's power and influence is a willful untruth.

The fact is that thousands of Americans went to Russia hoping to help its people attain a better life. The American and Western effort over the last 25 years - to which the United States and Europe devoted billions of dollars - was aimed at helping Russia overcome the horrid legacy of Soviet communism, which left the country on its knees in 1991. It was not about conquering Russia but rather about saving it, offering the proven tools of market capitalism and democracy, which were not imposed but welcomed. The United States also spent hundreds of millions of dollars to make Russia safer from loose nukes and joined a fruitful collaboration in outer space. Avid volunteers came to Russia and donated endless hours to imparting the lessons of how to hold jury trials, build a free press, design equity markets, carry out political campaigning and a host of other components of an open, prosperous society. The Americans came for the best of reasons.

Certainly, the Western effort was flawed. Markets were distorted by crony and oligarchic capitalism; democratic practice often faltered; many Russians genuinely felt a sense of defeat, humiliation and exhaustion. There's much to regret but not the central fact that a generous hand was extended to post-Soviet Russia, offering the best of Western values and know-how. The Russian people benefit from this benevolence even now, and, above Mr. Putin's self-serving hysterics, they ought to hear the truth: The United States did not come to bury you.
 
 
 #19
Inside Higher Education
www.insidehighered.com
April 30, 2015
Endangered Species
Essay on difficulty of finding a job for an expert on Russia
By Mark Lawrence Schrad
Mark Lawrence Schrad is assistant professor of political science at Villanova University and the author of Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State (Oxford University Press, 2014).

With Russia's annexation of Crimea, U.S.-Russian relations are at their lowest point in decades. Consequently, after two decades on the sidelines, America's senior experts on Russia - many of whom came of age during the Cold War - are suddenly in demand again. They are sounding alarms not only about Kremlin aggression, but also the lack of young Russia experts who'll take their places once they retire.

"It is certainly harder for the White House, State Department and intelligence community to find up-and-coming regional experts," admitted Strobe Talbott, President Clinton's top Russia adviser and head of the Brookings Institution. "It's a shorter bench," said Stanford University Professor Michael McFaul - who recently returned from serving as America's ambassador to Russia. "The expertise with the government is not as robust as it was 20 or 30 years ago, and the same in the academy."

In explaining "Why America Doesn't Understand Putin," a Georgetown University professor, Angela Stent, faults foundations' declining funding of area-studies research and academe itself. "Instead of embracing a deep understanding of the culture and history of Russia and its neighbors, political science has been taken over by number-crunching and abstract models that bear little relationship to real-world politics and foreign policy. Only a very brave or dedicated doctoral student would today become a Russia expert if she or he wants to find academic employment."

As one of only a small number of junior (i.e., "assistant") professors in political science departments across the country who specialize in Russia, I am in a unique position to give an insider's assessment of just how dire the situation has become.

By the time I began to study Russian politics, language, and culture in college, it was 1993 and the Soviet Union had already collapsed peacefully. I enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of Northern Iowa, partly for its robust and well-funded Russian program, which regularly sent students to the intensive, summerlong Russian Language Institute at Bryn Mawr College - twice, in my case. Thanks to these programs, I already had five years worth of college-level Russian language instruction under my belt before I even stepped on to Russian soil. Between 1996 and 1998, I'd spent more than a year living, exploring, and studying Russia at Moscow State University. Unforgettable experiences from meeting Mikhail Gorbachev and ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, to getting a public dressing-down from Communist Party head Gennady Zyuganov on the eve of the roisterous 1996 presidential elections only furthered my passion for Russian politics.

As a student, I never asked where money for these programs came from, but as it turns out they were federally funded Title VIII programs for foreign language training. I later learned that - desperate to justify their existence amid flagging interest after the Cold War - these programs needed our numbers to show continued student demand just as much as we needed the funding they provided.

After graduating from Northern Iowa, I enrolled in the master's program in Russian and East-European Studies at Georgetown University, one of the 17 Title VI Comprehensive National Resource Centers for Russia and East Central Europe dedicated to intensive scholarship and language study of the former Soviet Union. The depth of scholarship was incredible: entire courses dedicated to understanding webs of post-Soviet barter transactions, or the domestic politics of Central Asian autocracies or the ecological devastation left by state socialism - all taught by the top experts in the field. While I decided to continue my education with a Ph.D. program in political science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (home to another Title VI center), much of my research interest on the political challenges of Russia's health and demographic maladies - the cornerstone to my recent Vodka Politics book - began with the experts at Georgetown over a decade ago.

Armed with similar Russian expertise, most of my Georgetown colleagues went to work for the government or the private sector. But by choosing to get a Ph.D. instead, my career path lay in academe, where professional success is defined by whether - after six years of nonstop studying, researching and teaching - you land a tenure-track professorship that pays $60,000 a year -- if that.

As grad students, we knew that there were fewer jobs for Russia specialists than for those studying "hotter" regions such as China or the Middle East, but we warmed ourselves with the plausible, yet ultimately unfounded, belief that the entire generation of Sovietologists hired in the '70s would be reaching retirement age just as we'd be hitting the market. Still, no self-respecting political science program trains students as just an expert on a particular country or region: your regional focus always takes a back seat to your concentration, often within the subfields of international relations or comparative politics. So, no one on the job market says "I'm an expert on Russian politics." More likely they'll say "I'm an expert on nationalism, social movements and revolutions in the context of the former Soviet Union."

In that regard, I thought my dissertation - examining how the ideas of international activists are filtered through national policy-making institutions by comparing how temperance activism influenced alcohol prohibition in Russia, Sweden, and the United States - was perfect. Not only did I maintain my passion for Russian politics and history, but also developed marketable expertise in a broad range of subfields of international relations and comparative politics. Add to that a few minor publications, a raft of teaching experience and a dash of naive overconfidence, I hit the market.

For those not familiar with it, the academic job market - especially in political science - is a byzantine system. In the summertime, colleges and universities post listings for positions for the following academic year that will round out their departments' particular teaching needs and research profile. In the fall, search committees winnow through hundreds of applicants to narrow their search down to three, who then get the pleasure of a campus visit. By "pleasure," I mean an exhausting three days of nonstop interviews, teaching, and research presentations, with no guarantee that the committee won't fail to be impressed with any of the candidates and just decide not to hire anyone at all. In the spring, a few one-year "visiting" or "adjunct" positions appear, as departments desperately scramble to fill the teaching holes in their schedules, and out-of-luck applicants desperately scramble to fill the holes in their tattered career dreams. Those who don't land a postdoc or one of these temporary teaching positions have to figure out something else to do until the process starts all over again the following year. Many exemplary - though unlucky - scholars simply drop out.

The spreadsheet on my computer where I've chronicled my job market experience is labeled simply "failure." According to it, in my first foray onto the market in the fall of 2006, I applied to 59 listings for tenure-track jobs in the various topics of international relations and comparative politics that I could reasonably justify some degree of expertise. Of those 59 positions, only two were explicitly looking for experts in the politics of Russia or the former Soviet states: the University of Kansas (another Title VI National Resource Center for Russia), and the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater. Of these two - two - Russia jobs across the entire country (and Canada), both wanted experts on security or terrorism in the region. Neither gave me a call.

The only place that did call was the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which in the spring offered me a one-year "visiting" assistant professorship, which I eagerly accepted as an opportunity to expand my teaching portfolio, turn my dissertation into a book manuscript, and prepare to give the market another go.

The following year (2007-8), I embarked on the market once again, this time armed with undergraduate teaching awards from the popular courses I'd developed on the politics of the former Soviet states and Russian foreign policy. I'd also landed a contract from a Oxford University Press to publish my revised dissertation as The Political Power of Bad Ideas -- a golden ticket to a job, or so I thought. I applied for 67 assistant professor positions, 11 visiting positions, 5 postdocs and 3 non-academic positions - an untold number of which were withdrawn as the global financial crisis smashed state budgets and university endowments invested in the stock market. Still, of those 81 listings, only one was explicitly looking for an expert on Russia: the University of Washington - yet another Title VI center. Like every other place I applied, they didn't call me (though it is worth noting that the scholar that they did hire, Scott Radnitz, has been quite busy publicly contributing insights into the current crisis). Thankfully, even as hiring freezes and furloughs loomed, somehow the Illinois political science department found a way to keep me on for another year.

The great recession saw far fewer academic jobs advertised in year three (2008-9): I applied to 51 assistant professor positions, as well as 8 visiting gigs. The number of departments searching for an expert in Russian politics was one: Villanova University. I obsessed over the ad: a broadly trained expert able to offer a wide variety of courses while maintaining a specialty in Russian politics and foreign policy, at a university that puts a premium on both teaching and scholarship? It seemed too good to be true.

As it turns out, it was: like so many job listings at the time, the search was canceled amid the persistent financial uncertainty. Still, I was encouraged that finally, after three full years, my phone actually rang with a campus interview. But that department wasn't interested in Russia. It was far more interested in my (now extensive) teaching portfolio in international relations, and my research into transnational activism and comparative public policy. In the ensuing battery of interviews, we barely ever talked about Russia. That department passed. Thankfully - largely thanks to another raft of positive student evaluations and teaching awards, Illinois extended me for another year.

No less difficult than years of professional uncertainty are the accompanying personal struggles: nagging doubts about your career choice, your self-worth, and moments of deep depression, which are only amplified as the sole breadwinner for a family that had grown to five. My wife and I decided that if year four didn't land me a tenure-track position, we'd close up shop on the academic career - no regrets. Still, I lamented abandoning the academy without ever writing the book about the politics of alcohol and demography in Russia that had motivated my research from the beginning. So, armed with a prospectus and a draft chapter, I shopped the Vodka Politics project around the Midwest Political Science Association conference in Chicago, and left with interest from a half-dozen academic and commercial publishers. With a second book contract in hand, I had a C.V. that would merit tenure at many colleges, yet given the near-complete lack of openings for Russian scholars, I still couldn't find a job.

In year four (2009-10), I applied for 91 assistant professor positions, 6 postdocs, and 8 non-academic jobs. Of them, there was again only one specifically looking for a Russian-politics expert: my dream job at Villanova had been re-listed. Finally, in year four - having developed seven unique course offerings, and having taught them 25 times - did I start getting interest from search committees, including interviews at Johns Hopkins, Wyoming, and - yes - Villanova. The only offer - thankfully - was the Villanova position that I still consider my "dream job," which I took without hesitation.

From 2006 through 2010, I spent four years on the academic job market, mailed 309 job applications, landed four campus interviews and one job offer. They say about hitting in baseball, that if you fail 7 out of 10 times (.300), you're a success. That's little consolation when you're batting .013 in job interviews on the market, and .003 in actual job offers. Even within political science, many recognize that employment prospects for regional experts are bad - though I doubt any realize just how bad they are.

Whether my tale is one of tenacity or stupidity is certainly up for debate. Still, it suggests that the present lack of junior Russia scholars in academia is attributable more to the near-complete absence of academic employment opportunities than a lack of qualified scholars. If anything, the situation is even worse outside of political science, with few jobs for historians and scholars leaving the field. These are losses not only to academia, but potentially to our collective understanding of future political developments in Eurasia, at a time when such expertise is needed more than ever.

As in the past, when U.S.-Russian relations run cold, employment opportunities for experts on Russia should expand. Unfortunately however, thanks to government austerity measures and cutbacks in higher education, there will be far fewer qualified experts to meet demand.

For instance, the program in Russian/East European Studies that was one of my majors at Northern Iowa does not exist anymore. Moreover - reflecting a national trend in higher education-the Russian language program was liquidated,along with German, French and other programs, leaving a modern languages department that teaches only English and Spanish. What's more, the long-running study abroad program that ferried me to Russia three times in the 1990s is in dire straits as well. Amid deteriorating relations between the U.S. and Russia just this month, Russia's Ministry of Justice ordered American Councils - the nonprofit organization that administers numerous professional, research, and study abroad programs throughout the former Soviet Union - to re-register its offices in Russia.

While the Kremlin has dealt this devastating blow to the promotion of East-West scholarship and understanding just recently, Capitol Hill has been undercutting international programs for far longer, with even more damaging results. Russian studies have been particularly victimized by politicians on Capitol Hill. Funding for Title VI National Research Centers - like those where I was trained and where the very few academic jobs on Russia arose - has been under assault by "fiscal conservatives" for the past few years. The prestigious Fulbright-Hays award for dissertation research abroad was canceled in 2011, before a limited reinstatement. In 2013, House Republicans defunded research in political science supported by the National Science Foundation, unless researchers can show that their research will promote American security or economic interests. Finally, in 2013 the federal government cut its Title VIII programs, which had funded my study abroad opportunities, as well as those of America's top Russia researchers and diplomats.

The lesson is tragic but clear: just when America finds itself in need of new experts and new expertise on Russia and Eurasia, Capitol Hill has effectively castrated most every nonmilitary program that promotes language acquisition, cultural proficiency, and research into the region. This bleak situation is only made worse by the new barriers to international education erected by the Russian side as bilateral relations deteriorate.

If present trends continue, the ability to develop in-depth expertise on the languages, cultures, and politics of the former Soviet Union may soon be limited to heritage speakers with roots in the region, those with a specialized area-studies training in the military, or the narrow stratum of individuals wealthy enough to fund their own language training. For the development of robust expertise into regions that are of strategic national concern - now and for the foreseeable future - none of these are palatable outcomes.