#2
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
May 9, 2016
"Life Is Such a Simple, Yet Cruel Thing" By Vladimir Putin
President Putin pens recollection of his family's experience during the Leningrad siege

This article originally appeared at Russian Pioneer [http://ruspioner.ru/cool/m/single/4655]
Translated by Kristina Aleshnikova

Frankly, my father did not even like to touch on the subject of the war. It was more like I was simply nearby when the adults were discussing or recalling things among themselves. All my knowledge about the war - about what happened to my family - arose out of those overheard conversations between adults. Still, there were times when they spoke to me directly.

My father was a sailor. He was called up in 1939 and served in a submarine squadron in Sevastopol. On his return, he worked in a factory in Peterhof where he lived with my mother. I think they even built some kind of little house there.

When war broke out he was working in a military company, which entitled him to an exemption from conscription. However, he applied first to join the party and then again to be sent to the front. He was dispatched to a NKVD sabotage squad. It was a small contingent of 28 people who were sent into the nearby rear to carry out acts of sabotage - blowing up bridges, railway tracks, etc. Almost immediately they ran into an ambush - someone betrayed them. They entered a certain village, then left it, and when they returned some time later the Nazis were already waiting for them. They were chased through the woods. My father survived by hiding in a swamp where he spent hours under water breathing through a reed. I remember this from his story. He said that while he was in the swamp breathing through the reed, he could hear the German soldiers passing by, just a few steps away from him, and how the dogs were yapping...

On top of that, it was already presumably early autumn, which is to say it was already cold. I also remember well how he told me that the head of their group was a German. A Soviet citizen, but German nonetheless.

Interestingly, a couple of years ago I was handed a dossier on this group from the archives of the Defense Ministry. I still have it at my home in Novo-Ogaryovo. There is a list of the group - surnames, first names, patronymics and brief descriptions. It was indeed 28 people and their leader was a German, exactly as my father had said.

Of the 28 people, only 4 crossed the front line back to our side. The other 24 were killed.

They were then reassigned into the active army and sent to the Nevsky Pyatachok. It was probably the most violent spot during the whole of the Leningrad Blockade. Our troops held a small bridgehead four kilometres in width and some two kilometres in depth. It was supposed to be a springboard for the future breaking of the blockade, but it never got used for this purpose. They broke through the blockade elsewhere. Still, the spot (Nevsky Pyatachok) was held for a long time and there was exceptionally heavy fighting there. There are commanding heights above and all around and it was shot at throughout. Of course the Germans were also aware that it was the most likely place for a breakthrough and tried simply to erase the Nevsky Pyatachok from the face of the earth. There is data about how much metal there is in each square meter of this land. To this day it's solid metal.

My father told me how he was wounded there. The wound was severe and he lived the rest of his life with shrapnel in his leg as not all the fragments could be removed. His leg always ached and he could never straighten his foot properly afterwards. They chose not to touch the small fragments to avoid shattering the bone. And thank God, they kept his leg when they could have amputated - he had a good doctor. He was assigned group II disability. As a disabled veteran, he was eventually given an apartment. It was our first separate apartment - a small two-room place. (Note: Before that the Putins lived in a communal apartment, where several families share the facilities, corridor and kitchen, and sleep in separate rooms.) Before we were given the apartment, we lived in the city centre and now we had to move, not quite to the outskirts, but to a newly-built area. That did not happen immediately after the war, but when I was already working at the KGB. I was not given an apartment then, but my father finally got his, and it was cause for great happiness. His account of how he was wounded was as follows:

He, together with a comrade, carried out a little sortie into the rear of the Germans, crawling, crawling, and then it becomes both funny and sad at the same time. They reached a German bunker, from which a huge guy emerged and looked straight at them. They could not get up because they were under the machine gun sight. "The man looked at us very carefully," said my father, "took out one grenade, then another and threw those grenades at us. Well and ...."  Life is such a simple thing, yet cruel.

What was his biggest problem when he regained consciousness? The fact that it was already winter. The Neva was icebound, and he had somehow to get to the other side to get help and skilled medical care. However, he was in no condition to walk.

True, he did manage to regain his people on this side of the river. But there weren't many who were willing to drag him to the other side because that stretch of the Neva was exposed to artillery and machine-gun fire. There was little chance of reaching the opposite bank. However, purely by chance a neighbor of his from the house in Peterhof appeared. And this neighbor didn't hesitate to drag him across and indeed dragged him all the way to the hospital. They both made it there alive. The neighbor waited at the hospital, made sure that he was operated on and said, "Well, now you are going to live, but I'm off to die." And off he went.

I later asked my father if that man really did die. He said that he had never heard from him again and believed he was in fact killed. He was never able to forget that episode and it tormented him tremendously. I remember that sometime in 1960s (I don't remember the exact year as I was still very young then), but sometime in the early 60's, he suddenly came home, sat down and began to weep. He had run into his saviour in a shop in Leningrad. Like their earlier encounter, it was purely by chance, a one-in-a-million coincidence that both men were in the same store at the same time. They would meet again later at our home. My mother told me how she visited my father at the hospital where he lay after he was wounded. They had a small child who was only three years old at the time - that time of blockade and hunger. My father smuggled his hospital rations to her and she in turn took them home and fed their child. When he began fainting from hunger in the hospital, the doctors and nurses figured out what was going on and prevented my mother from visiting him again.

Then her child was taken from her. It was done with no prior notice, as she later recalled, in an attempt to save small children from starvation. The children were brought to orphanages for subsequent evacuation. The parents weren't even asked.

He fell ill there - my mother said it was diphtheria - and didn't survive. My parents were not even told where he was buried, and they never did find out. Just last year, some people I don't know, working on their own initiative, searched through the archives and found documents about my brother. And it really was my brother, because I knew that after fleeing Peterhof from the advancing German troops, they lived with one of their friends - and I even knew the address. They lived on the so-called "Water Channel" (Vodnyj Kanal). It would be more accurate to call it a "Bypass Channel" (Obvodnyj Kanal), but in Leningrad it's called the "Water Channel". I know for sure that they lived there. Not only did the address where he was taken from match, but the name, surname, patronymic, and date of birth matched as well. It was, of course, my brother. The place of burial was Piskaryovskoye Cemetery. Even the exact site was specified.

My parents were told nothing of this. Obviously, other things were of higher priority back then.

So everything that my parents told me about the war was true. Not a single word was invented. Not a single day was moved. Everything told to me about my brother, the neighbor, and the German group commander - everything matched, all confirmed in an incredible way. After my brother was taken away and my mother left all alone, my father was finally able to walk with crutches and returned home. When he made his way to his building, he saw that there were orderlies carrying bodies out of the entrance. He identified one of them as my mother. He approached them and it seemed to him that she was breathing. He told the orderlies: "She's still alive!" "She'll pass away along the way", they said. "She'll not survive now." He then attacked them with his crutches and forced them to carry her back into the apartment. They told him: "Well, we'll do as you say, but know that we will not come here for another two, three, or four weeks. You'll have to deal with things yourself then." My father nursed her back to life. She survived. She lived on until 1999. My father died in late 1998.

After the blockade was lifted, they moved to the Tver province, their parents' homeland, and lived there until the end of the war. My father's family was quite large. He had six brothers, five of whom were killed in the war. This was a disaster for the family. My mother's relatives also died. I was a late child as my mother gave birth to me when she was 41 years old.

Our situation was not unique. There was, after all, no family from which someone didn't die or which didn't suffer grief, misfortune, and tragedy. However, my parents still harbored no hatred for the enemy, which is simply amazing. To be honest, I still cannot fully understand it. Mama was generally a very kind and gentle person. I can remember her saying: "Well, what kind of hatred can one have toward these soldiers? They are simple people and they also die in the war." It's amazing. We were brought up on Soviet books and movies... and we hated. But she somehow did not have it in her. I can still clearly remember her words: "Well, what can you have against them? They are also hard workers, just like us. They were simply forced to go to the front."

These are the words that I remember from my childhood.

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 #3
Kremlin.ru
May 10, 2015
Press statement and replies to journalists' questions following talks with Federal Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel
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President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Madam Federal Chancellor, ladies and gentlemen,

Today, Ms Merkel and I laid wreaths at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and honoured the memory of the victims of the Great Patriotic War, which was such a tremendous tragedy for the entire world and for our nations. We stand in agreement in our assessment of these events and on the historical lessons to be learned.

Today's joint ceremony reminds us of the difficult road that Russia and Germany traversed in the name of reconciliation. We went from bitter, hardened feelings to mutual understanding and cooperation. I am grateful to the Federal Chancellor for her sincere words of regret over the crimes that Nazi Germany committed against our citizens.

The Federal Chancellor and I held substantive talks and discussed a broad range of bilateral and international matters. It is no secret that Russian-German relations are not going through the best of times due to our differing positions on the events in Ukraine.

Our bilateral trade decreased by 6.5 percent in 2014 - the first drop in the last five years. The drop exceeded 35 percent in the first two months of this year. This situation is not in the interests of either Russia or Germany. In this respect, I must say that the business community in Germany itself would like to see the lifting of these artificial barriers to developing our mutually advantageous trade and economic ties.

Businesspeople are pragmatic by nature. They are therefore not leaving the Russian market and are assessing the current opportunities for doing successful business here. More than 6,000 German companies have a presence in the Russian market, and total accumulated German investment in the Russian economy comes to more than $21 billion. I remind you that around 100 German companies took part in just the single project of preparing the infrastructure for the Sochi Olympic Games. They had contracts worth a total of 1.5 billion euros and they performed the work and received the money as agreed.

There are other areas where the cooling in our bilateral relations has affected our business ties. But there are also areas that continue to develop. Interregional cooperation is one such area. For example, 23 Russian regions have solid ongoing contacts with 14 regions in Germany. A large conference of twin cities is scheduled to take place in Karlsruhe at the end of June, and around 100 pairs of twin cities are expected to attend.

We are developing our cooperation potential in the cultural and humanitarian sphere. We are now summing up the results of the reciprocal years of the Russian and German languages and literature, which took place in 2014-2015. Around 200 events were organised as part of this programme, many of them focused on our two countries' youth. This prompted the idea of organising a year of youth exchanges in 2016. I think this is an important initiative with a focus on the future.

I want to remind you that our countries have succeeded in pursuing constructive cooperation in much tougher conditions and more difficult times than the situation today, times when it seemed that insurmountable ideological barriers divided us. There were plenty of positive examples of cooperation back then. I will not go through them now, I think that you are all familiar with them.

Naturally, our discussion of the international agenda focused primarily on the situation in Ukraine. Ms Merkel and I are in regular contact on this issue, including through our joint discussions with the Presidents of France and Ukraine in the Normandy format talks, which has shown itself to be quite an effective instrument for international facilitation of a peaceful settlement for the conflict in the Donbass region.

Yes, it is true that we differ considerably in our assessment of the events that led to the anti-constitutional coup in the Ukrainian capital in February 2014. But at the same time, I am sure that you will all agree, and the participants in the peace talks say this constantly, that there is no alternative to a peaceful diplomatic solution. To achieve this, we must fully and strictly abide by the Minsk agreements reached on February 12 this year. I remind you that peace settlement measures form a package that ties together all of the key aspects for a settlement: political, military, socioeconomic and humanitarian.

I think that we have every reason to say that the Minsk process is making progress, not without difficulties along the way, but it is moving forward. You know that after February 12, in spite of all the problems in southeastern Ukraine, the situation has been quieter there, even if there are still the problems that we know about. I firmly believe that the only way to guarantee a reliable and lasting settlement is to organise direct dialogue between Kiev, Donetsk and Lugansk.

I think this is one of the key conditions for a settlement in general. I also think it essential to lift the economic embargo, restore financial and banking ties, and carry out constitutional reform with the southeastern regions' involvement. The Minsk Agreements of February 12 cover all of these areas, and as I said, they must be implemented.

We are happy that after the Normandy format consultations on April 30, when we had another telephone conversation, the four sub-groups set up to address specific areas of the settlement process began their work in Minsk on May 6. We will do everything possible to make their work effective, though success here depends above all on the people who have power, above all the authorities in Kiev.

We will exert all possible influence on the authorities in Donetsk and Lugansk in order to ensure that this process goes at the hoped-for speed and quality. Ms Merkel and I agreed to work more closely on the crisis in Ukraine, including through the Normandy format.

We also discussed our bilateral relations and spoke about the need to continue our talks on Ukraine's association agreement with the European Union with respect to its impact on our economic interests. I want to inform you that a Russian delegation headed by the Economic Development Minister will go to Brussels on May 17-19.

Thank you for your attention.

Question: Mr President, at a meeting with historians at the end of last year, you asked a rhetorical question: "What was wrong with the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact?" Recently, Minister of Culture Mr Medinsky, called this pact a triumph for Stalin's diplomacy from the point of view of the Soviet Union's state interests.

Such words stir fears in Poland and the Baltic states. Yesterday, at the parade, you spoke of the need for a new security system. How can we build a system that would take into account the interests of Poland, the Baltic states, Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine? What can Russia and Germany do to assuage these nations' fears?

Vladimir Putin: This is the sort of question that we could discuss all night long. But when it comes to assuaging fears, this also has to do with the internal state of those who have these fears. They need to step over their fears, move forward, stop living with the phobias of the past and look instead towards the future.

Concerning the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, let me draw your attention to the historical events, when the Soviet Union... It is not even so important who was in charge of diplomacy at the time. Stalin was in charge, of course, but he was not the only person thinking about how to guarantee the Soviet Union's security. The Soviet Union made tremendous efforts to put in place conditions for collective resistance to Nazism in Germany and made repeated attempts to create an anti-Nazi bloc in Europe.

All of these attempts failed. What's more, after 1938, when the well-known agreement was concluded in Munich, conceding some regions of Czechoslovakia, some politicians thought that war was inevitable. Churchill, for example, when his colleague came back to London with this bit of paper and said that he had brought peace, said in reply, "Now war is inevitable."

When the Soviet Union realised that it was left to face Hitler's Germany on its own, it acted to try to avoid a direct confrontation, and this resulted in signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In this sense, I agree with our Culture Minister's view that this pact did make sense in terms of guaranteeing the Soviet Union's security. This is my first point.

Second, I remind you that after the Munich Agreement was signed, Poland itself took steps to annex part of Czech territory. In the end, following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the division of Poland, they fell victim to the same policy that they tried to pursue in Europe.

We need to remember all of this, not forget any of it. If you paid attention to what I said yesterday, I said that a truly effective security system must be built not on a bloc basis, but on the basis of an equal approach to security for all actors in the international community. If we could build our work on these principles, using the United Nations as a base, I think we would achieve success.

Question: Mr President, how do you view the fact that the German leader has come to Moscow today, the leader of the country that we fought against during the war, but the leaders of the other nations in the anti-Nazi coalition did not come? I spoke with German journalists today, and they say that deep down, you surely feel offended by this. Is this the case?

Vladimir Putin: Regarding the tragedy that was the war, our country fought not against Germany, but against Nazi Germany. We never fought Germany, which itself became the Nazi regime's first victim. We always had many friends and supporters there. Yesterday at the parade, if you recall, I said this too.

Many people of different political persuasions ended up in concentration camps and lost their lives. We see today's Germany as our partner and a friendly country. I think it is natural that the Federal Chancellor should have come to Moscow today.

As for the leaders of other countries, including the countries in the anti-Nazi coalition, this is their choice, their decision. I think that current political considerations are less important in the end than the more fundamental issues of maintaining global peace and preventing a repeat of the past catastrophes, if we remember the disaster of World War II. But this is their decision.

You know, yesterday at the reception, veterans from the Unites States, Britain, Poland and several other countries came up and thanked me for all that was done during the war. They are the main participants in these celebrations, and I was very happy that they were here together with us.

Question: Mr President, this is your first meeting since the marathon negotiations in Minsk. You said that the diplomatic process has stalled somewhat, and that at the same time, military action has resumed and people are again being killed. Although weapons were supposed to have been withdrawn, the separatists often say that new attacks have taken place. Ms Merkel spoke about President Putin possibly using his influence on the separatists. Why is President Putin not using his influence more boldly to give this diplomatic initiative a chance?

Vladimir Putin: First of all, we need to have some common criteria for assessing and responding to events taking place in the world, a common set of rules. Look at what is happening in Yemen and what we are seeing at the moment. A coup took place there and the president stepped down. Now, other countries, with which Russia has good relations, want to return him to power, and everyone is calling this a coup. After the coup in Ukraine took place, we heard goodness knows how much venom heaped on former President Yanukovych, and saw all manner of support for those who carried out the coup.

If we apply different standards to the same kind of events, we will never be able to agree on anything. We need to abandon the 'law of the strongest' and 'rule of the fist' in international affairs and base ourselves instead on norms of international law that the entire international community accepts, understand in the same way, applies and defends.

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 #4
New York Times
May 11, 2015
In Talks With Merkel, Putin Calls for Improving Relations With Europe
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

MOSCOW - President Vladimir V. Putin used a visit on Sunday by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, to call for a return to normal relations with Europe, brushing aside the widespread boycott by Western leaders of the huge Victory Day parade on Red Square a day earlier.

"We do face some problems today, but the sooner we can end their negative impact on our relations, the better it will be," Mr. Putin told Ms. Merkel at the start of their talks, after both leaders laid large bouquets of red flowers on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier along the Kremlin wall.

Ms. Merkel and other Western leaders avoided the colossal official outpouring marking the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. The parade included 16,000 soldiers marching through Red Square, along with the first new Russian tank in decades, the T-14 Armata, and three updated Yars intercontinental ballistic missiles. (An Armata stalled in the square during a practice run on Thursday, but all went smoothly during the real event.)

The guests of honor were Presidents Xi Jinping of China and Pranab Mukherjee of India. Their nations were among 10 countries with military contingents in the parade. Most of the others were former Soviet states. The presidents of Egypt, South Africa, Cuba and Venezuela were also among those attending.

Western leaders declined to take part because of the seizure by Russian forces of Crimea from Ukraine last year, which touched off a diplomatic crisis and led to sanctions. Of some 68 leaders invited, only 27 attended, with virtually every Western country represented by its ambassador at the event, the biggest military parade ever staged on Red Square. Wave after wave of Russian soldiers marched past for more than 30 minutes.

Yet Ms. Merkel said she felt obliged to mark the end of the war against Nazi Germany during which the Soviet Union lost more than 26 million people, far more than any other country. "It is important for me to pay tribute to the fallen soldiers," Ms. Merkel said at a news conference. "We will always tell the Russian nation that we will remember the losses and the atrocities."

Mr. Putin sought to use Ms. Merkel's visit, as well as that of the other world leaders, to underscore that the Ukraine crisis had not left Russia isolated.

"Everyone we wanted to see was here," he said at one point when asked on television about the boycott.

In his speech during the parade, Mr. Putin thanked the Western nations for the wartime alliance, saying, "We are grateful to the peoples of Great Britain, France and the United States of America for their contribution to the victory."

He also obliquely castigated the United States, as he often does: "We saw attempts to establish a unipolar world," he said. "We see the strong-arm bloc thinking, gaining momentum. All that undermines sustainable global development."

On Sunday, Mr. Putin emphasized reconciliation. At the news conference after he and Ms. Merkel had met for a couple of hours, he emphasized that about 6,000 German businesses operated in Russia and that they would like to see the "obstacles removed" from trade.

For her part, Ms. Merkel made the kind of critical statement about the Ukraine conflict rarely heard in Moscow these days and one that made it clear that Germany, at least, was not quite ready for business as usual. "We have sought more and more cooperation in recent years," Ms. Merkel said about German-Russian relations. "The criminal and illegal annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine have led to a serious setback to this cooperation."

Both leaders expressed new support for the cease-fire agreement agreed upon in Minsk, Belarus, in February, although both suggested that the implementation was flawed.

Mr. Putin asserted that Kiev needed to enter a dialogue with the separatist areas of Donetsk and Luhansk to work out their future relations, while Ms. Merkel noted that a complete cease-fire had not been achieved.

Diplomats said that behind the scenes senior Russian officials had been emphasizing the idea that the Ukrainian issue was basically a domestic dispute that Moscow and the European Union must shepherd toward a solution, while they themselves should concentrate on broader, more important issues.

Mr. Putin evidently hopes that differences among European Union nations might prevent an extension of financial, defense and energy sanctions at a European summit in June.

"He thinks that he can wait for a while until business as usual comes back," said Nikolai Petrov, an independent political analyst. "He is waiting for them to maintain the rhetoric but make life easier in the banking and financial sector."

Mr. Putin is feeling slightly more confident, analysts said, because the economic picture is not as bleak as it seemed a couple months ago despite still serious problems.

Russia has been aided by a rise in oil prices, and the ruble has stabilized at about 50 to the dollar - far higher than the roughly 34 rubles to the dollar last spring, but far less than at its most volatile five months ago.

The prime minister, Dmitri A. Medvedev, has said gross domestic product declined by about 2 percent in the first quarter of this year. It is somewhat less than anticipated, although the World Bank has said that it will contract by 3.8 percent for the year. Inflation was nearly 17 percent in March, the World Bank said.

"The main goal for Putin now is to attain not the cancellation of Western sanctions, but weakening sanctions," said Kirill Rogov, an economic analyst. "I think he will use the combination of threats and peaceful statements to compel Western leaders to weaken restrictions in the financial sphere."

Mr. Putin received support from some of his guests, including the longtime president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, 91. "You are fighting sanctions, like we are. It's the reason why we should be together," Mr. Mugabe said during a meeting Sunday.

Perhaps the biggest outpouring of support for the Russian government came from the estimated 500,000 people who turned out to march through Red Square for the "Immortal Regiment" parade on Saturday afternoon. Most carried pictures of their parents or grandparents who fought in the war.

Mr. Putin joined the march in Moscow carrying a picture of his father. Ironically for a government that has crushed all public demonstrations, this march was begun four years ago by an independent television station that has since been forced out of business.

The mood among ordinary Russians was either perplexed that Western leaders stayed away or defiance that Russia could go it alone. Russians have long felt that despite the differences between the Soviet Union and the West, marking the victory over Germany was the one time that they could set aside any differences.

One veteran, Stanislav Prokofievich, 86, leaning heavily on a cane, said he was part of the parade a decade ago when President George W. Bush attended. "Bush was sitting in the front row with the president. Why isn't Obama here today?" Mr. Prokofievich said. "What happened? What is his problem?"

Fyodor Lukyanov, a political analyst who was out among the crowds on Saturday, said he noted a kind of good riddance mood toward the Western leaders.

"Many people were asking why did we invite them, it is our celebration and our victory, so why pay so much attention to who came and who did not," he said, with some people noting that in Soviet times foreigners were not invited. "We are back to this tradition, back to the Soviet tradition."

Alison Smale contributed reporting from Berlin.

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 #5
Business New Europe
www.bne.eu
May 11, 2015
MOSCOW BLOG: Building a fragile EM coalition
Ben Aris in Moscow

The May 9 victory parade on Red Square was a show of strength by Russia, which is locked in conflict with Ukraine and the West. But it was also a show of solidarity by some emerging markets that have sided, to a greater or lesser degree and with mixed enthusiasm, with Russia.

Appropriately, President Vladimir Putin's speech was largely dedicated to honour the circa 25mn Soviet citizens (including 13.9mn ethnic Russians) that lost their lives in World War II. But he couldn't help taking a backhanded swipe at the US as well.

"However, in the last decades, the basic principles of international cooperation have come to be increasingly ignored. These are the principles that have been hard won by mankind as a result of the ordeal of the war," Putin told Russia's assembled military might on the square and the majority of Russians tuning in on TV. "We saw attempts to establish a unipolar world. We see the strong-arm block thinking gaining momentum. All that undermines sustainable global development."

Putin was reiterating the Kremlin's increasingly constant refrain of: "we want a multipolar, not unipolar world," (ie. one where the US doesn't get to dictate terms in global affairs but all countries, especially the rapidly developing emerging markets, have a proportional say. The 2008 crisis already saw the response to the global meltdown shift from the G7 to the G20 when then US president George W. Bush called a global meeting of the bigger group to come up with a collective response. However, this change remains a work in progress.

Putin's words were given some weight by his standing shoulder to shoulder with the heads of state of the world's two most populous countries, India and China, as well as those of most former Soviet Republics (except Ukraine of course) and the leaders of other developing countries such as Cuba, Egypt and Venezuela amongst others.

On the face of it the line-up was a powerful reminder that the West's attempts to isolate Russia have conspicuously failed. Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian President Pranab Mukherjee agree with Putin in that they would like to have more say in world affairs and China in particular already has several substantial disagreements with the US, such as the South Sea territorial dispute.

The emergence of an eastern political bloc in the form of the increasing cooperation between the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), which has gone from an investment bank acronym to political body, have led some to speculate on east-west division emerging in the world. But scratch the surface and the relations between the heads of state standing next to Putin on Red Square remain uncomfortable, bringing into question just how serious a challenge the emerging market bloc on display on May 9 can mount.

Bloc-heads

Starting close to home, the heads of the newly minted Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) met a day earlier to discuss trade amongst other things. Intended as the mirror image of the EU things are not going well with the new trade area. A mini-trade war has broken out between Russia and Kazakhstan, which embarrassingly banned Russian imports of chicken to the Central Asian state in the run-up to the parade. In response, Russia banned the import of Kazakh cheese, which is in short supply after Russia banned the import of cheese from the EU last year. The Kazakhs complain that rather than a free trade zone between the two countries, the EEU has just turned their country into a dumping ground for cheap Russian goods.

There are similar tensions with Belarus, who Russia accused of large-scale sanctions busting after the now infamous Belarusian shrimp and oysters turned up in Moscow shops (Belarus has no coastline). Russia effectively reintroduced border controls for goods transiting from Belarus and economically crucial exports from Belarus to Russia have slumped as a result. Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko was sufficiently peeved with the Kremlin that while he attended the May 8 EEU meeting, he celebrated May 9 at home in Minsk with his own parade.

The problems are not limited to the EEU or Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) members either. Apple exports from Serbia to Russia to replace the banned Polish apples that were a mainstay of Russian green grocers have grown so fast one economist quipped: "Its amazing. Obviously the Serbs have learnt how to not only grow apples on the branches of their trees, but on the roots as well if the export numbers are anything to go by."

Far more serious are the lingering disputes between Russia and China over their gas deal. While state-owned Gazprom chief Alexei Miller announced that a deal had been signed with the Chinese over exactly where the "Power of Siberia" gas pipeline would cross the border, he admitted that a deal on the crucial question of how the gas will cost. This deal is supposed to be worth a total of $400bn to Russia and would go a long way of cementing the anti-Western economic bloc the BRICS are talking about. The deal remains elusive.

It is often said that China and Russia are not natural partners and currently are in a marriage of convenience. But the same is true for Sino-Indian relationships. "Together, China and India have a population of 2.6bn - 36% of the global total - and a GDP exceeding US$12trn. They share a border nearly 4,000km long," says Tom Miller of Gavekal Dragonomics. "Yet China trades more with Thailand than with its most populous neighbour, and there are eight times as many flights between Beijing and Bangkok per week as there are between Beijing and Delhi. The weak ties between Asia's two giants are a gigantic missed opportunity for global trade and investment."

So who is Russia's real friend? Ironically that probably remains Germany. While the politics of the Ukraine conflict meant that German Chancellor Angela Merkel had to stay away from the May 9 parade, conscious of the insult she went out of her way to mitigate its effects as much as possible. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier was in Volgograd (Stalingrad) on May 8 where he gave a moving and impassioned speech about Germany's culpability in the war and Merkel was in Moscow on May 10 to lay a wreath at the flame of the unknown soldier with Putin. The two then held talks that ran two hours over time.

While the other European leaders have been content to ignore Russia over this holiday, Merkel is working overtime to keep relations alive and find a way out of the diplomatic mess.

Putin and Merkel stressed in a meeting on May 10 that Moscow and Berlin need to find diplomatic solutions to problems in bilateral relations as soon as possible. "We have done a lot to ensure that relations between Russia and Germany are developing successfully and have achieved a lot in this direction. There are various problems today [between Russia and Germany]. The sooner these problems end their negative effects on developing our relations, the better. We will strive for this," Putin told Merkel in the Kremlin.

Merkel stressed that lines of communication are still open, although added that a solution remains a long way off. "And with today's visit I would like to show that we are working with Russia and not against it," Merkel said, highlighting that the terms of the Minsk II ceasefire agreed in February are not being met. "We hoped that a ceasefire would be reached. Unfortunately, this hasn't happened."

Reports that Germany is receiving daily from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe objectively described why the ceasefire was not being observed, she said. "We can't say that one side is fulfilling [the obligations] by 100% and the other side isn't doing anything, but we do have information that there are many violations of the ceasefire from the separatists' side too," Merkel added in muted criticism of Russia's failure to bring peace to the region. "We cannot yet say exactly that [Minsk II] will be successful, but we don't have anything else so we must continue working in this direction."

Some of the sanctions imposed by the EU on Russia come up for renewal in June and July and Brussels has already said the regime will be extended until December if there is no progress in implementing Minsk II and possibility beyond. So even relations with Russia's best friend in Europe are extremely tense and could break by the end of the year.

The bottom line is that despite the show on May 9, Putin has yet to make real friends with any of the leaders that showed up. Unless this changes, Russia could truly find itself truly isolated in a few years time, if not sooner.

 #6
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
May 11, 2015
Moscow's Victory Day Parade: A New World Order on Full Display
After watching Moscow's 70th anniversary Victory Day celebrations, it is clear that a very different new World Order is emerging from the rubble of the post-Cold War period.
By Gilbert Doctorow
Gilbert Doctorow is the European Coordinator of The American Committee for East West Accord Ltd.

One of the benefits of the live and continuous broadcasting of the 70th Anniversary Victory Day Celebrations in Moscow via Vesti 24 and Pervy Kanal/RT was that we would-be commentators seated at home in Brussels, New York or wherever could follow the events without intermediation of professional reporters advising on what we should make of it all, without cuts and selective editing from central studios. Given the wealth of material for those of us with Kremlinology backgrounds from a day that began at 10.00 am Moscow time and continued well into the night, our cup runneth over. Not only can we draw our own conclusions, but we can see with perfect clarity what was picked up by our mainstream media from a cornucopia of messages to suit their preconceived ideas. And it would be naïve to deny that the Kremlin surely intended to present a variety of images of Russia, even mutually contradictory images, to draw the greatest possible attention to itself.

The complexity also arose from the two very different audiences being addressed: Russians and the world at large. For the Russian population, this was a day of bread and circus. To put it in Vladimir Putin's language, it was the biggest, most lavish block party since the opening day ceremony of the Sochi Olympics. For the world at large, it was a reminder of Russia's decisive role in the defeat of Nazi Germany and also a demonstration of its growing military might now that the Bear is Back. Moreover, by the central role accorded throughout the day to Chinese President Xi Jinping, who was ever at Vladimir Putin's side, and by the announcement of various major Russian-Chinese commercial agreements, the fruits of Russia's pivot to the East and its new independence from the Atlantic Community were underscored for all to see.

Vladimir Putin's short speech opening the parade was itself rich in nuances. Notwithstanding the celebratory mood, he saw fit to castigate US foreign policy for its pursuit of a unipolar world and military block mentality that denies equal security for all. This was the raisin taken from the cake by the Financial Times coverage: "Putin takes swipe at US in parade speech." By contrast both the BBC and Euronews reports on the parade highlighted the Russian President's bouquet in the speech to the wartime Allies who were not present at the parade - the U.K., France and the USA - expressing gratitude for their contribution to the common cause of defeating Nazism.

And then there was the United States print media reporting of Moscow's celebrations. The New York Times led the way with zero coverage. As I write these lines on the day after, the NYT has not posted a single article on its online edition. Even The Washington Post saw fit to put up an article, to be sure, on how the West was absent from the Moscow events, a continuation of the black PR that we have seen for at least the last 18 months.

The parade itself was declared by the Kremlin to be the largest military show in history. That may place it in the Guinness Book of Records, but it tells only part of the story. For a layman, the parade was not just about who was present on the reviewing stand and who was not, which honor guard troops from which countries were present and which were not. Yes, the Western leaders were absent while BRICS and other nations we would previously call 'nonaligned' were present. But you had the pageant of Azerbaijan troops being followed directly by Armenian troops; this made Moscow the city where lions and lambs exercised mutual respect and restrain, at least for the day. The rollout of Russia's latest military hardware was important for foreign military attaches in attendance and to prove the words of Russia's leadership to its people about the vast improvements in national defense achieved in the past several years. Otherwise this part of the day did not break new ground.

What came next in the celebrations was entirely different and marks the age of Putin. I have in mind the so-called "Regiment of Immortals," the march of perhaps 500,000 ordinary Russians through Red Square, each carrying photographs of their "family heroes," their parents, grandparents, great grandparents who fought in the Great Patriotic War and died in battle or who otherwise did not live to see this 70th anniversary celebration. This march was repeated all across Russia with reports that as many as 4 million people took part.

Successful politicians are by nature or training photogenic kissers of small babies. In joining this "regiment of immortals" and carrying a photo of his own father who fought in the war as a simple soldier, not a decorated general, Vladimir Putin took politics to the heights of statesmanship. He drove home the point that this is a day for every Russian family and not just a pompous show of military capability for the high and mighty to strut on the stage. He invited a sea of emotion to sweep the land. Here you had the bread.

A BBC reporter in Moscow shared with viewers some very relevant information to appreciate what Vladimir Putin was tapping into. She cited a recent poll of Russians asking them to name the most important day in the calendar to them. Twenty-six percent said it is their birthday. Forty-two percent said it is 9 May.

The impact of the 'regiment of immortals' procession was such that even the normally dry-eyed UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, who took part in the Moscow proceedings, commented to reporters that what he first supposed was a mass demonstration against the government was to his surprise, a vast wave of support for the Kremlin leadership. He congratulated Vladimir Putin for earning this high regard of his people. No wonder the Obama administration took such pains to keep the Allies from coming to the ceremony.

The day did not end there. In the evening, there was a gala performance staged on Red Square that combined all the talents of song, mass choreography and other entertainment forms that had first been put on display in the Sochi Olympics opening event. In Sochi, the message was that Russia has its own traditions of both popular and high culture but is open to the world and hospitable to all. Here was the circus, and as almost always in such efforts by the Russians, it was at a supremely professional level of execution, showing very great respect for the spectators, both those on the Square and the others watching it on their television as I did. And it all ended on the traditional note of a fireworks display.

During the day, press releases on the Russian-Chinese commercial deals that were being concluded ever since the arrival of President Xi Jinping in Moscow the day before gave substance to the featured position given to the Chinese leader in the constant company of Putin all day long. The most important of the announcements concerns the New Silk Road, which Beijing now will run in a Northern route passing through Russia as opposed to the expected Southern route bypassing Russia. This is a change of thinking and of politics that puts Europe on notice. Germany especially has been looking to the Silk Road as a boon to the enormous goods traffic between the world's two largest export nations, Germany and China. Now that route, with all the opportunities for investment and participation, passes through Moscow, not Teheran.

No doubt, Richard Nixon is turning over in his grave. It took the hard work of two US administrations, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, to undo the geopolitical achievements of one of America's greatest president-Realpolitik strategists. But now Nixon's work is undone, and a very different new World Order is emerging from the rubble of the post-Cold War period.

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 #7
The Vineyard of the Saker
http://thesaker.is
May 9, 2015
Something truly amazing happened today

Today will go down in Russian history, as a truly historical celebration of the victory over Nazi Germany.  The parade - by far the most beautiful I have seen (alas, only on video, not in person) - was superb and for the first time included the Chinese PLA [People's Liberation Army].  Clearly, we see history in the making.  But something else, no less amazing, also happened today: Defense Minister Shoigu made the sign of the Cross before the beginning of the celebrations.

This is an absolutely momentous moment for Russia.  Never in the past history had any Russian Minister of Defense done anything like it.  True, the old tradition was to make the sign of the Cross when passing under the Kremlin's Savior Tower, if only because there is an icon of the Savior right over the gate.  However, everybody in Russia immediately understood that there was much more to this gesture than an external compliance to an ancient tradition.

The Russian journalist Victor Baranets puts it very well when he wrote:"At that moment I felt that with his simple gesture Shoigu brought all of Russia to his feet.  There was so much kindness, so much hope, so much of our Russian sense of the sacred [in this gesture]".  He is absolutely correct.  To see this Tuvan Buddhist make the sign of the Cross in the Orthodox manner sent an electric shock through the Russian blogosphere: everybody felt that something amazing had happened.

For one thing, nobody in his right mind would suspect Shoigu of ever doing anything just "for show".  The man has an immense capital of popularity and credibility in Russia and he has no need for political hypocrisy.  Furthermore, those who saw the footage will immediately see that Shoigu was very concentrated, very solemn, when he did this.  Personally, I believe that Shoigu quite literally asked for God's help in one of the most dangerous moment in Russian history in which he, the Russian Minister of Defense, might be called to take momentous decisions from which the future of the planet might depend.

For centuries Russian soldiers have knelt and asked for God's blessing, before going into battle and this is, I believe, what Shoigu did today.  He knows that 2015 will be the year of the big war between Russia and the Empire (even if, due to the presence of nuclear weapons on both sides, this war will remain 80% informational, 15% economic and 5% military)

Does that mean that Shoigu converted to Orthodoxy?  Not necessarily.  Buddhism is very accepting of other religions and I don't see much of a contradiction here.  But the fact that the first Russian government official to begin the historical Victory Day parade by making the sign of the Cross and appealing for God's help is a Buddhist, is, in itself, quite amazing (even if it shames his nominally "Orthodox" predecessors who never did so).

I can only imagine the horror, outrage and despair Shoigu's gesture will trigger in the pro-Western Russian "liberal intelligentsia" and in the western capitals.  In placing himself and all of Russia in God's hands, Shoigu declared a spiritual, cultural and civilizational war on the Empire.  And just for that, he will go down in history as one of Russia's greatest men.

The Saker

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 #8
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
May 11, 2015
Russian historian: Importance of Lend-Lease cannot be overestimated
History professor Oleg Budnitsky speaks with RBTH about the economic assistance the U.S. gave the USSR in WWII.
Oleg Budnitsky is Director of the International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences at the Higher School of Economics.

RBTH: How great was the economic importance of military cooperation between the USSR and the U.S.? What is the importance of Lend-Lease for the formation of economic relations between our countries?

Oleg Budnitsky: It was large-scale military technical assistance from the Allies, especially the U.S., but also the UK and Canada. Volumes of this support are assessed differently. In the Soviet tradition, it was assumed that it was 4 percent of the total production capacity of the USSR, but the latest research shows that in reality the level was as high as 7 percent. The importance of economic cooperation with the U.S., UK and Canada cannot be overestimated. According to the dollar rate of 2003, the inflation-adjusted value of these supplies amounted to $130 billion. These supplies were critical in some key areas. For example, in the beginning of 1942, Western tanks fully replenished Soviet losses, and exceeded them by three times. About 15 percent of the aircraft used by Soviet air forces were supplied by Allies, including the Airacobra fighter and Boston bomber. The Allies supplied 15,000 state-of-the-art machines at that time; for example, famous Soviet ace Alexander Pokryshkin flew Airacobra, as did the rest of his squadron. He shot down 59 enemy aircraft, and 48 of them were thanks to American military equipment.

RBTH: If we speak not only about the supply of military equipment, but also industrial appliances and accessories, what was the volume of cooperation here?

O.B.: One of the main areas of cooperation was aviation fuel. The USSR could not produce gasoline with high octane. However, it was this fuel that was used by the equipment supplied by the Allies. In addition, the Achilles heel of the Soviet Army was communication and transport. The Soviet industry simply could not meet the demand either in number or in quality.

For example, the army lost 58 percent of its vehicles in 1941 alone. To recover these losses, the Allies supplied more than 400,000 vehicles, mainly trucks, to the USSR. During the occupation, the German concern Daimler Benz set up a vehicle assembly line at a factory in Minsk (now the capital of Belarus). After the liberation of the city, the assembly of American vehicles under Lend-Lease was organized there.

It was not only supplies of finished products, but also raw materials that were extremely important - metals, chemicals and products, which were either not produced in the USSR or lost to the enemy. For example, more than half of Soviet aircraft were produced using aluminum supplied by the Allies.

RBTH: What portion of these supplies served military needs directly, and can we talk about a fully-fledged civil partnership?

O.B.: In the first protocol of Lend-Lease (there were four of them), only 20 percent of deliveries were in military equipment, while 80 percent were related to industrial and food production. The Allies supplied 1900 locomotives to the USSR, while only 446 locomotives were produced in the country itself during the same period, as well as 11,000 carriages, while only a few more than 1,000 were made in the USSR. It is impossible to imagine how the Soviet economy would have functioned without these supplies. For example, the telephone cable provided by the Allies could wrap the Earth at the equator. The Allies' aid was also critical in the reconstruction of production in the liberated regions of the country, including the role of seeds for the resumption of agriculture. Specific products were also supplied; the Allies delivered 610,000 tons of sugar to the USSR, whereas the USSR itself produced little more than 1.46 million tons.

RBTH: How serious was the decline in cooperation after the war?

O.B.: The fall was quite sharp, in the first place because Lend-Lease had ended. The equipment destroyed during the fighting was written off, but what was left was to be returned. Before ending the war, the USSR and the U.S. were negotiating loans for the restoration of the national economy. In particular, the U.S. offered to the Soviet leadership a large-scale loan for 35 years at 2 percent per annum. There were counter-pleas from the Soviet government, specifically Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov tried to negotiate a loan for $6 billion for 30 years, but economic ties failed to develop. The USSR was afraid to get into economic dependence on the West, since the Soviet leadership did not believe in the sincerity of help from the Allies.

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#9
Reconsidering Russia and the Former Soviet Union
http://reconsideringrussia.org
May 11, 2015
Five myths of the Soviet effort in World War II - debunked
By Pietro A. Shakarian

This Saturday (9 May) marked the 70th anniversary of World War II (or the Great Patriotic War) in Russia and the former Soviet Union. Yet, misconceptions of the Soviet involvement in the war and its legacy persist in the West. Here are five of them - debunked:

1. The Americans won World War II in Europe. While one can justifiably state that the Americans won World War II in the Pacific, in fact it is clear that the Soviet Union unambiguously won the war in Europe. The battles of Stalingrad, Kursk, Kiev, and other cities, as well as the sieges of Leningrad and Sevastopol, will be forever burned in the collective memory of the people of Russia and the former Soviet Union. The major Soviet sacrifice in the war can be best illustrated factually by the sheer statistics. At least 27 million Soviet citizens, or 14% of the USSR's prewar population, died in the war, compared to less than 1% of the British prewar population and less than 0.5% of the American prewar population.  3 million Soviet soldiers from the war remain missing in action action to this day.

Noted Russia scholar Dr. Stephen F. Cohen of NYU and Princeton stated in a recent interview on the war that "when the Germans came in June 1941 and there was an emergency call-up, they called up the class that graduated that May-June from high [secondary] school. 18 year old boys. And sent 'em off to fight. Of every 100 high school boys who went off to fight in June 1941, only three came home... What that meant was, as life went on after the war, was that millions of Soviet women never had a husband, never married. And there was actually a name for them. They were called 'Ivan's widows.'"

2. The Soviet victory of World War II in Europe was a Russian victory alone. In fact, the victory of the Soviet Union was not a Russian victory alone. Even though Russians formed the highest number of military casualties (close to 70%), soldiers of other Soviet nationalities also sacrificed greatly for the victory. Ukrainians, Belarusians, Jews, Armenians, Georgians, Kazakhs, and others made major contributions to the war effort. Some of the greatest heroes of the war were non-Russians, such as Marshal Semyon Timoshenko and Marshal Ivan Bagramyan, who were Ukrainian and Armenian respectively.  Belarus, the Soviet republic that served as a major center for partisan activity during the war, proportionally suffered the greatest loss of life against the Nazi onslaught - over 25% of its prewar population. The Soviet soldiers who raised the Soviet flag over the Reichstag in the famous World War II image were from Daghestan (Abdulakhim Ismailov), Ukraine (Aleksey Kovalev), and Belarus (Leonid Gorychev) while the photographer, Yevgeny Khaldei, was a Jew from the Ukrainian Donbas.  To this day, Victory Day is a major holiday in all former Soviet republics.

3. The war is viewed very differently in Ukraine than in Russia. In reality, this only applies to those areas of Western Ukraine, annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939, where the Ukrainian nationalist movement was active and where the Red Army was seen as an "oppressor." By contrast, throughout the rest of Ukraine, primarily in the Central and Southeastern parts, the war is remembered as a patriotic endeavor against the hated Nazi German invader. The war saw major figures emerge from these parts of Ukraine. They included not only Timoshenko, but also Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, Marshal of Armored Troops Pavel Rybalko, General Mikhail Kirponos, fighter ace and Chief Marshal of Aviation Ivan Kozhedub, and the sniper Major Lyudmila Pavlichenko, who was immortalized in song by the American folk singer Woody Guthrie. The different perceptions of the war in the different regions of Ukraine is perhaps best illustrated by Dr. Ivan Katchanovski of the University of Ottawa in his study on the subject.

4. The Americans liberated the prisoners of Auschwitz. While it is true that the Americans liberated the prisoners of Buchenwald, it was in fact the Soviet Red Army that liberated the prisoners of Auschwitz on 26 January 1945. Further, the Holocaust itself largely took place on the Eastern Front.

5. The orange-and-black St. George Ribbon sported by Russians and other former Soviet peoples on 9 May is a recent invention. In fact, the St. George Ribbon has a history dating all the way back to Tsarist times in the late 18th century. During World War II, the ribbon was later re-adopted by the Soviet military. The ribbon gained greater visibility and public significance in Russia under Putin, beginning in the mid-2000s as a symbol representing the war effort, part of a greater campaign focused on reviving Russian patriotism after the chaotic Yeltsin years.

Since the Ukraine conflict in 2014, the ribbon has become associated by the Ukrainian government and its supporters with the pro-Russian rebels of Donbas.  In response, the Ukrainian government has controversially adopted a new symbol to commemorate the war - the red-and-black poppy common in the UK, Canada, and the British Commonwealth. The poppy is favored by nationalists in the Ukrainian government because the red-and-black colors match those used on the flags of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) which collaborated with the Nazis during the war.  According to Ivan Katchanovski, the red-and-black colors "in turn were adopted from the Nazi blood and soil colors." The move has consequently met with much controversy in Ukraine, especially among veterans of the Red Army and the pro-Soviet partisan movement.

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 #10
The Daily Telegraph (UK)
October 18, 2008
Stalin 'planned to send a million troops to stop Hitler if Britain and France agreed pact'
Stalin was 'prepared to move more than a million Soviet troops to the German border to deter Hitler's aggression just before the Second World War'
By Nick Holdsworth in Moscow

Papers which were kept secret for almost 70 years show that the Soviet Union proposed sending a powerful military force in an effort to entice Britain and France into an anti-Nazi alliance.

Such an agreement could have changed the course of 20th century history, preventing Hitler's pact with Stalin which gave him free rein to go to war with Germany's other neighbours.

The offer of a military force to help contain Hitler was made by a senior Soviet military delegation at a Kremlin meeting with senior British and French officers, two weeks before war broke out in 1939.

The new documents, copies of which have been seen by The Sunday Telegraph, show the vast numbers of infantry, artillery and airborne forces which Stalin's generals said could be dispatched, if Polish objections to the Red Army crossing its territory could first be overcome.

But the British and French side - briefed by their governments to talk, but not authorised to commit to binding deals - did not respond to the Soviet offer, made on August 15, 1939. Instead, Stalin turned to Germany, signing the notorious non-aggression treaty with Hitler barely a week later.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, named after the foreign secretaries of the two countries, came on August 23 - just a week before Nazi Germany attacked Poland, thereby sparking the outbreak of the war. But it would never have happened if Stalin's offer of a western alliance had been accepted, according to retired Russian foreign intelligence service Major General Lev Sotskov, who sorted the 700 pages of declassified documents.

"This was the final chance to slay the wolf, even after [British Conservative prime minister Neville] Chamberlain and the French had given up Czechoslovakia to German aggression the previous year in the Munich Agreement," said Gen Sotskov, 75.

The Soviet offer - made by war minister Marshall Klementi Voroshilov and Red Army chief of general staff Boris Shaposhnikov - would have put up to 120 infantry divisions (each with some 19,000 troops), 16 cavalry divisions, 5,000 heavy artillery pieces, 9,500 tanks and up to 5,500 fighter aircraft and bombers on Germany's borders in the event of war in the west, declassified minutes of the meeting show.

But Admiral Sir Reginald Drax, who lead the British delegation, told his Soviet counterparts that he authorised only to talk, not to make deals.

"Had the British, French and their European ally Poland, taken this offer seriously then together we could have put some 300 or more divisions into the field on two fronts against Germany - double the number Hitler had at the time," said Gen Sotskov, who joined the Soviet intelligence service in 1956. "This was a chance to save the world or at least stop the wolf in its tracks."

When asked what forces Britain itself could deploy in the west against possible Nazi aggression, Admiral Drax said there were just 16 combat ready divisions, leaving the Soviets bewildered by Britain's lack of preparation for the looming conflict.

The Soviet attempt to secure an anti-Nazi alliance involving the British and the French is well known. But the extent to which Moscow was prepared to go has never before been revealed.

Simon Sebag Montefiore, best selling author of Young Stalin and Stalin: The Court of The Red Tsar, said it was apparent there were details in the declassified documents that were not known to western historians.

"The detail of Stalin's offer underlines what is known; that the British and French may have lost a colossal opportunity in 1939 to prevent the German aggression which unleashed the Second World War. It shows that Stalin may have been more serious than we realised in offering this alliance."

Professor Donald Cameron Watt, author of How War Came - widely seen as the definitive account of the last 12 months before war began - said the details were new, but said he was sceptical about the claim that they were spelled out during the meetings.

"There was no mention of this in any of the three contemporaneous diaries, two British and one French - including that of Drax," he said. "I don't myself believe the Russians were serious."

The declassified archives - which cover the period from early 1938 until the outbreak of war in September 1939 - reveal that the Kremlin had known of the unprecedented pressure Britain and France put on Czechoslovakia to appease Hitler by surrendering the ethnic German Sudetenland region in 1938.

"At every stage of the appeasement process, from the earliest top secret meetings between the British and French, we understood exactly and in detail what was going on," Gen Sotskov said.

"It was clear that appeasement would not stop with Czechoslovakia's surrender of the Sudetenland and that neither the British nor the French would lift a finger when Hitler dismembered the rest of the country."

Stalin's sources, Gen Sotskov says, were Soviet foreign intelligence agents in Europe, but not London. "The documents do not reveal precisely who the agents were, but they were probably in Paris or Rome."

Shortly before the notorious Munich Agreement of 1938 - in which Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, effectively gave Hitler the go-ahead to annexe the Sudetenland - Czechoslovakia's President Eduard Benes was told in no uncertain terms not to invoke his country's military treaty with the Soviet Union in the face of further German aggression.

"Chamberlain knew that Czechoslovakia had been given up for lost the day he returned from Munich in September 1938 waving a piece of paper with Hitler's signature on it," Gen Sotksov said.

The top secret discussions between the Anglo-French military delegation and the Soviets in August 1939 - five months after the Nazis marched into Czechoslovakia - suggest both desperation and impotence of the western powers in the face of Nazi aggression.

Poland, whose territory the vast Russian army would have had to cross to confront Germany, was firmly against such an alliance. Britain was doubtful about the efficacy of any Soviet forces because only the previous year, Stalin had purged thousands of top Red Army commanders.

The documents will be used by Russian historians to help explain and justify Stalin's controversial pact with Hitler, which remains infamous as an example of diplomatic expediency.

"It was clear that the Soviet Union stood alone and had to turn to Germany and sign a non-aggression pact to gain some time to prepare ourselves for the conflict that was clearly coming," said Gen Sotskov.

A desperate attempt by the French on August 21 to revive the talks was rebuffed, as secret Soviet-Nazi talks were already well advanced.

It was only two years later, following Hitler's Blitzkreig attack on Russia in June 1941, that the alliance with the West which Stalin had sought finally came about - by which time France, Poland and much of the rest of Europe were already under German occupation.

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 #11
Izvestia
May 6, 2015
Russian foundation presents sociological portraits of Putin majority
Alena Sivkova, Foundation for Development of Civil Society figures out Vladimir Putin's supporters

The Foundation for the Development of Civil Society [FoRGO] has prepared a study in which it has presented the formation phases, structure, and values of the "Putin majority" - the broad social and political coalition of citizens representing practically all social strata and groups of Russians, who share the ideology of President Vladimir Putin, and consistently support the Russian leader's programme and all his political actions. The Russian leader's supporters approve of Russian democracy, and also support the ideological doctrine of the head of state about our country's right to independently determine the spheres of its development, including specific forms of a democratic structure. The "Putin majority" approves of all of the president's steps amid the sanctions, believing that Putin is acting exclusively in the interests of Russia and all its people in the best possible way, and therefore is worthy of trust and support.

Putin's supporters can also influence politics - for instance, by giving electoral support to leaders who are running for elective positions and who are Putin's proteges.

The document (which Izvestiya has at its disposal), notes that "Vladimir Putin's core electorate" has recently grown substantially in quantity and quality because of the constant pressure on the part of the West, and specifically following the political, diplomatic, and economic pressure from a number of states - the USA, the EU and their allies.

As a result of the study, the sociological portraits of the Russian president's supporters have also become clear: based on the results of all kinds of sociological studies, the experts have categorized as the "Putin majority" "the most varied social groups" from various Russian components.

"You can say that the structure of the 'Putin majority' effectively reproduces the structure of the country's population in the form of a model. Putin's supporters are spread out fairly evenly throughout all the types of population centres in accordance with their proportion in the overall numerical strength of the country's population: cities with a million-plus population (15 per cent), cities with a population between 250,000 and 1 million (19 per cent), towns with a population between 50,000 and 250,000 (14 per cent), and towns with a population of fewer than 50,000 (17 per cent), and also the countryside (29 per cent)," the study reports. But it will be problematic to determine the age of a typical representative of a supporter of the president - representatives of all ages are to be found in equal proportions in the "Putin majority": 18-30 (27 per cent), 31-45 (24 per cent), 40-60 (24 per cent), and over 60 (24 per cent).

Andrey Kochetkov, chief of the FoRGO Centre for Political Studies, explained to Izvestiya that the "Putin majority" first and foremost represents practically all social strata of Russia society and is made up of people who are supporters of the president.

"They share his ideology and support his programme, and also his policies. And it is important to note that the "Putin majority" is the core of Putin's electorate. These are not all of the people who vote for him, because in the period of an election campaign, the "Putin majority" plays a consolidating role, it manifests itself the most actively and distinctly, and the unification of other groups of citizens who will ultimately choose this candidate for themselves to vote for in the election takes place around it," he said.

Kochetkov explained that at present the "Putin majority" had considerable potential to expand.

"First of all, if we look at the data for Putin's electoral support which we have for the period of his first term in office and in the period of his second term - there the figure is an average of approximately 47-50 per cent a year. The figures from recent polls (June 2014) show that practically 20 per cent more Russians (66 per cent) would like Putin to continue his work in the post of president after 2018," he added, noting that a rise in the figures has occurred because of the integration of Crimea and Sevastopol into Russia, the upsurge in patriotic feelings, and the strong economic and political pressure from the USA and the EU, which has led to the opposite effect and has rallied around the authorities even those who were originally sceptical about Putin.

The demand for responsible leadership, which had formed in Russian society by the beginning of the 2000s, the correspondence between the president's ideological platform with the value system of the overwhelming number of Russians, the successes in the implementation of the programme of Russia's development, the realization of an independent foreign policy, and the consolidation of Russia's role in the world are singled out among the main preconditions that have influenced the consolidation and expansion of the number of supporters of the head of state. The main clinchers for the "Putin majority" were Russia's power to make its own decisions, patriotism as a basic element of the value system of the citizens and the state, a market economy, social justice and social guarantees, and also stability.

The study notes that the "Putin majority" started to form during Putin's first presidential term. The unification in 2001 of previously competing political organizations - unity on the one hand, and Fatherland and All Russia on the other hand, into the new One Russia party, was of great significance. The development of the political "Putin majority" in society's life occurred in 2004 during the fresh presidential election. Since 2011, with the creation of the All-Russia People's Front, the "Putin majority" acquired new status and started being seen as a broad supra-party public coalition in support of the head of state, bringing together supporters of various political views around his strategic programme for the country's development and his ideology.

According to the experts' information, in the public sphere at the present time the key mechanism of the manifestation of the "Putin majority's" activity is precisely the All-Russia People's Front, which gives the president powerful instruments of civil control, including over the authorities themselves (for the sake of comparison: One Russia is playing the main role in ensuring the representation of the "Putin majority" in the organs of power).

"In this connection, you can say that thanks to the All-Russia People's Front, today the "Putin majority" is the most active and organized part of Russia's civil society, ensuring a system of feedback between the authorities and society," the work asserts.

Oleg Matveychev, political analyst and professor at the Higher School of Economics National Research University, believes that "the study showed exactly what it should have shown."

"It is always far easier to study the minority rather than the majority. The majority is studied by ordinary statistical methods, and when it is large, then it is extremely difficult to fish out the core. That is why it has turned out that there are equal numbers of Putin's supporters among men and women, equal numbers among young, middle-aged, and elderly people, and equal numbers among business people and people in budget-funded sectors. It is impossible to track down a clear portrait of a supporter of the president," he said. "Earlier, in the1990s, you could say in a segmented way that young people, business people, and the intelligentsia voted for the liberals. Now it is not like that. I spend time with young people, and I see that there are left-wing, and even ultra-left-wing, young people. You could say that there are liberals and pro-Western people among them, but no more than 5 per cent. For the past three years or so I have not come across any business people who would be against Putin at all. The same can be said for the older generation.

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 #12
Politkom.ru
May 5, 2015
Pundit ponders challenges posed by "conservative trend" in Russia
Tatyana Stanovaya, head of the Centre for Political Technologies Analysis Department, After Crimea: Tests for the Pro-Putin Majority

According to figures from the Public Opinion Foundation, Vladimir Putin's electoral rating is close to its highest ever at 76 per cent. The poll figures indicate that the crisis has in no way worsened Russians' assessments of the regime and what is happening in the country. But opinions in the expert community are not so unequivocal: A discussion has gotten underway about the nature of the broad popular support for the president and the applicability of poll numbers for predicting the real dynamic of Russians' sense of social well-being.

2014 was a year of extensive consolidation of the population around the Russian regime and President Vladimir Putin: A pivotal role was played by the return of Crimea, the Western policy of containment, increasing military rhetoric, and the ideological mobilization of the population. And Russians' political mood is not changing now either. Whereas indicators of economic optimism had "dipped" as recently as the fall of 2014, according to figures from the All-Russia Centre for the Study of Public Opinion, the political numbers remain firm. And this is happening against a backdrop of a significant increase in food prices, the surge in inflation that followed the sharp devaluation of the rouble in December, and the deterioration of the situation in the economy (which immediately led to negative social consequences - cutbacks, wage cuts, the closure or halting of production facilities, and so forth). The problem of cancelled commuter trains also reverberated right across the country - protest actions were staged in the country. There were the doctors' protests against healthcare reform. And despite all of this, in February the Public Opinion Foundation produced record figures: President Putin's performance in his post is rated highly by 84 per cent. His electoral rating reached a record 74 per cent, and at the end of April it rose by a further two points - to 76 per cent. Russians' support for Putin is at its highest since the all-time highs of 2008.

The 84 per cent figure was regarded as purely nominal among experts, and vigorous arguments and debates began around it. The nonestablishment opposition is convinced that the figures do not reflect the real picture because there is no alternative [to Putin] and the regime has an information monopoly in the mass media. In his column in Vedomosti, for example, political analyst Aleksandr Kynev pointed to the mythologization of the 82 per cent figure (his article was about a Levada Centre poll that talked about 82 per cent of people who have made up their minds - 54 per cent of all those polled - being prepared to vote for Putin). In his opinion, the cultivation of this contention knowingly exerts pressure on the doubters, who do not want to set themselves against the majority, and in this situation the regime is sacralizing the significance of the ratings. Also in Vedomosti, another expert, Aleksandr Shmelev, urges people to forget about the 84 per cent as the political driver is not this amorphous majority but the minority that is prepared to come to the defence of the regime voluntarily rather than out of compulsion: These are the "national patriots" and supporters of a "Pax Russica" and to some extent the army, the siloviki, and the bureaucracy. The business community that is friendly towards the regime should also be added to this. Altogether they can compete with the comparable number of active and committed liberals both among the population or business circles and also within the elite. Finally, yet another argument against this 84 per cent is the nature of authoritarian regimes. Even in the most difficult situations ruling leaders have achieved their 90 per cent in elections with no particular effort. But none of these arguments cancels out the fact that in opinion polls more than 80 per cent of Russians voice support for Putin - we can only talk about the specifics of this figure or the consequences that flow from it.

At the same time it cannot be said that Russians are not noticing the problems. Almost 70 per cent of those polled have a vague or no idea about what direction the country will be following and what objectives the current leadership is setting for it, Levada Centre data from March say. Only 4 per cent of participants in a "Russia's Historical Path" poll feel that Russia is developing in a sustainable manner. A year ago 17 per cent of people fell into this category, while in 2013 the figure was 10 per cent. But almost 50 per cent see the difficulties as "temporary." This is totally in line with the regime's rhetoric, which suggests that the crisis has generally been overcome and that Russia has succeeded in coping with the most difficult challenges, whose nature is, as a rule, categorized as external.

The "television factor" is also of great significance. Thus, the number of adherents of "Russia's special path" has increased by 9 per cent over the past year and by 18 per cent since 2013. The figure now stands at 55 per cent. In 2013 the figure for supporters of European civilization stood at 31 per cent. Two years on the figure stands at only 17 per cent. The number of supporters of a universal path, Aleksey Grazhdankin said in an interview for the BBC, "started to fall against the backdrop of the 'Crimean Spring,' and now the majority of the country's population firmly believes that we need to travel our own special path, which for many people is linked to the name of Vladimir Putin."

The Levada Centre has also identified a state takeover of the 9 May public holiday. The number of people who think this is now equal to the number of those who regard it as a people's holiday (31 per cent). The number of Russians who consider that the 70th anniversary of Victory should be marked with parades and official receptions has risen to 29 per cent while, conversely, the number of those who talk about concern for war veterans has declined: Whereas 56 per cent felt like that in 2010, the figure in 2015 was 49 per cent. There is a growing number of Russians in whom the holiday triggers joy at the Victory (59 per cent) and a shrinking number of those who talk about grief for those who died (18 per cent). The number of those who regard the secret protocols to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as a fake has increased to 17 per cent.

A paradoxical situation has developed, Levada Centre Deputy Director Aleksey Grazhdankin told Vedomosti: The significance of the holiday is growing, and an increasing number of people regard 9 May as a state holiday, but the number of those who will celebrate it on 9 May is shrinking. In his words, in the last two years we have seen a state takeover of awareness - the state's values are starting to play a bigger role in people's lives. "These kinds of perturbations of public awareness encourage a more active confrontation with the world, while such euphoria leads to a situation whereby people will get more enthusiastically involved in a conflict should one arise," Grazhdankin says. In the sociologist's words, we are seeing the return of notions of Soviet historiography - increasing numbers of people consider that Germany's attack was unexpected and that the USSR had not prepared for war in order to avoid provoking Germany to attack. There is a growing number of people who do not believe that crimes were committed against people in the past, historian Nikita Petrov, deputy chairman of the Memorial Council, agrees: Hence the floods of fake literature questioning real historical facts: "This is a worrying trend since we are seeing the return of not just Soviet myths but historical illiteracy and a lack of understanding of our own country's history."

Together with the partial rehabilitation of Stalin by the state, the population's attitude towards him is also changing. One third of Russians regard Soviet leader Iosif Stalin with respect, although three years ago only 21 per cent of those polled mentioned such an attitude, the Levada Centre points out. There has also been an increase in the number of those who regard Stalin's death as the "loss of a great leader and teacher": Whereas 18-19 per cent of people responded in this way in 2010-2013, the figure in 2015 was 24 per cent. Asked whether the fatalities suffered by the Soviet people during the Stalin era were justified by the great objectives and results achieved in a very short period of time, 45 per cent of those polled gave a positive answer - in 2012 the figure was just over half that (25 per cent). At the same time there has been a significant reduction in the number of people who consider that nothing can justify the fatalities. Only 25 per cent of respondents agree that Stalin can be described as a state criminal, whereas 57 per cent object to such an assessment. Five years ago 32 per cent of those polled regarded Stalin as a criminal. The level of expectations of protest remains low. According to figures cited by the Levada Centre, 73 per cent of Russians consider that mass protests by the population against falling living standards and in defence of their rights are unlikely; 20 per cent feel that they are absolutely possible; and 7 per cent refrained from commenting. In comparison with last year there has been a decline in the number of Russians who regard protests for economic and political reasons as possible (28 and 23 per cent respectively in 2014 as against 20 and 15 per cent in 2015). Some 11 per cent said that they are prepared to participate in street protests. Among inhabitants of Moscow, 36 per cent of those polled consider mass protests against falling living standards and in defence of their rights to be totally possible. The sociological centre's representatives note that the decline in protest activism is the result of the consolidation of the population in the face of the "external threat" and the disunity among the leaders of the nonestablishment opposition.

Taking account of the opinion poll data, several political problems arise that will inevitably have an impact on the course of the development of the situation in the country. The first problem is a buildup of internal aggression among the population, which is prepared, as Putin says, to put up with deprivations as it trusts the authorities. The very fact of the presence of this aggression creates political capital and potential for the active section of Putin supporters ("national patriots," "conservatives," radical Orthodox believers, and so forth) by indirectly legitimizing all of the obnoxious phenomena that have occurred in respect of "blasphemous" theatre productions, "revolting" dances, or other "unpatriotic" acts that offend believers' feelings. The deterioration in living standards will require moral compensation, which will feed the most improbable "conservative" initiatives by the regime and those who look to it.

Here too the regime's resources for endlessly trying to keep up with the demand for this internal social aggression to be satisfied is extremely limited. We are seeing a gap between the activity of "conservatives," Orthodox believers, and national patriots operating increasingly frequently on their own initiative - albeit with the regime's tacit approval - and the rhetoric employed by Putin, who during the famous "phone in" did not focus attention on either traditional values, the Russian language, or "spiritual underpinnings." Recently there was also a big reaction to comments by State Duma Speaker Sergey Naryshkin, who, following a vicious anti-Western article in Vedomosti, suddenly called for the unification of the Eurasian Union and the European Union, describing Russia as a natural part of Europe. The values gap between Europe and Russia, which has been increasing over the last three years, is probably starting to frighten the Kremlin, which realizes that situational horsetrading has very quickly turned into an uncontrollable trend and a drift away from the civilized world on Russia's part. The problem is not that the Kremlin is against such a drift. The problem is that if the need for a turnaround was to arise tomorrow (against the backdrop of growing doubts within the EU about continuing the sanctions) it would no longer be within the power of even a leader with an 84-per cent rating to halt it. And this is the root of the problem: Unless the internal social aggression is successfully curtailed it will inevitably lead to growing social dejection, creating the basis for the situation in the country to descend into chaos.

Yet another difficulty is the impossibility for the active middle class - the repository of a modernization agenda and a European vision of Russia's future - to fit in with current social trends. This section of society does not have all that much of a choice: Either emigration or growing disharmony with the majority, polarization within society, and a kind of "internal emigration." The slightest setback for the regime, as happened at the end of 2011, would lead to a situation where the nonestablishment opposition would be able to amass 100,000 people in the event of strong emotions among its supporters, whereas the regime would not be able to compete here without coercive mobilization. This would be not an ideological confrontation between a minority and the majority but a conflict between two minorities as people prepared for voluntary mobilization to protect the regime are also a minority.

The regime's plausibility in difficult financial and economic conditions and its ability to sustain the population's ideological consolidation around it will depend not so much on the population's living standard as on the regime's own ability to satisfy and channel the social aggression that it itself is shaping and which ensures a kind of tolerance with regard to social problems. This means that conservative rhetoric and a conservative trend are becoming not a byproduct of the growing confrontation between Russia and the West but a condition for the stability of the political regime in its current form in the medium term. At the same time it is also becoming a destabilizing factor - this time in the long term, however - should there be a further deterioration in the socioeconomic situation: The negative potential that is currently building up in the social environment may find itself an outlet, including in anti-regime aggression.

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 #13
www.thinkadvisor.com
May 11, 2015
Russian Economy Improves but Investors Staying Clear
By Savita Iyer-Ahrestani
Contributing Editor, Investment Advisor Magazine

Bill Mann, CIO at Motley Fool Asset Management, owns just one Russian stock: Sber Bank.

It's a large position for Motley Fool Asset Management, though, Mann said, and it figures prominently because "Sber Bank is an extremely high quality bank and far and away has the best corporate governance. You could have bank failure after bank failure in Russia but Sber would be the last bank standing."

The bank has chosen to maintain high lending standards, even if it would continue to rank high among Russian corporates if it lowered them. "To me, that's a signpost for a really good company, and I don't care where it's located," Mann said.

Otherwise, he views Russia as being "largely un-investable," mainly because corporate governance standards are so low. Many other investors feel the same way and yet "someone has to be investing there," Mann said, because Russia's ruble-denominated MICEX has been one of the best performing stock market indices this year.

The ruble, too, has skyrocketed and risen in value by close to 25% in the last few months, thereby leading investors to purchase Russian sovereign debt. And with the recent rise in oil prices, the Russian economy, too, seems to have stabilized compared to where it was at the beginning of this year.

"The rebound in oil prices means that Russian exporters have been able to shore up because they have more hard currency," said Ben Rozin, analyst and portfolio manager at Manning & Napier.

The window of opportunity has also enabled Russia to recap its banking sector in order to maintain stability in the financial sector and to inject funds into Vnesheconombank, the state-owned development bank. The Russian Central Bank has also extended loans to exporters, so the liquidity default risk that was a fear some months ago has been avoided.

All the same, Rozin is not at all keen on Russia.

"It's very hard to get excited about Russia, with the geopolitical situation and you need to have rule of law in place to have faith in your investments," he said. From the geopolitical standpoint, there is no sign that the Russian government is backing away from supporting the Ukraine uprising, "and we feel this will be a long drawn out issue," Rozin said.

Although Russian companies are more competitive now in their key trading markets, the overall environment is still not favorable. Russia is still in recession, Rozin said, and the latest estimates for GDP growth now stand at minus 3%.

Sanctions against Russia have been in place since March 2014 and have taken their toll on the economy and one of the consequences has been the exclusion of Russian corporates from the international capital markets. This could prove to be a problem in 2017, when many corporates have large amounts of debt coming due, Rozin said, "and it's hard to see how that will sort itself out."

Still, since sanctions were imposed, Russia has been looking Eastward more than it has been counting on the West, he said, and taking steps to cement new relationships-even if they are uneasy ones-with countries like China. In looking for new trade partners, Russia is clearly realigning itself to find new allies and this could work out favorably for the economy, Rozin said.

In Mann's view, Russia and the Russian people are extremely resilient, something that the West, the U.S. in particular, has not fully comprehended. Russia may be closely linked to Western Europe, but Europe does need Russia, he said, and so even if the sanctions are a "bother" to Russia, "they're really the equivalent of a horsefly, because Russia and Russians can withstand a lot. The last 10 years of prosperity in Russia was the outlier, not the sanctions, so I really don't think the level of financial pressure on Russia is the same as it would be on other parts of the Western world." However, investing in Russia is another question altogether and it's going to take a long time and a great deal of will on the part of strong and powerful leaders to fix the kinds of issues that would lead investors like Mann to consider companies other than Sber Bank, which he purchased at its height, but is still worth it, he said, given that it is such a high quality institution.

"A lot of people hold their noses and invest broadly in Russia but because we own fewer companies, we are pickier about where and what we invest in," Mann said.

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#14
Gulf News
http://gulfnews.com
May 3, 2015
Europe ignores Russian gas to its disadvantage
Cost dynamics suggest the US cannot step in and become the favoured supplier
BY SAADALLAH AL FATHI, SPECIAL TO GULF NEWS
The writer is former head of the Energy Studies Department at the Opec Secretariat in Vienna.

The gas war between Russia and the West has been limited to the verbal so far and not seen any casualties except for the cancellation of the South Stream project.

The problem is not between Russia and Europe, except for the fact that Ukraine is in between and that the US is exploiting the situation for possible huge exports of its gas in the future.

The 'Telegraph' said in an article that 'The United States is poised to flood world markets with once-unthinkable quantities of liquefied natural gas" and 'posing a major threat to Russian gas dominance in Europe'. It quotes the US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz that 'four LNG export terminals are under construction and the first wave of shipments may begin before the end of this year or in early 2016 at the latest'.

It is a fact gas production in the US has increased sharply in the last 10 years with the advent of shale gas, which has become possible through new fracking technology, improved rig efficiency, reductions in costs and the near acceptability of the industry by the public there.

Shale gas production has increased from very little in 2000 to about 400 billion cubic meters (bcm) a year now, almost half of total US production. But the gas has been absorbed by the US itself, which brought in a revival for many industries - especially in the petrochemical sector - by taking advantage of low gas prices as a result of increased production.

There are many LNG export projects under consideration for licensing in the US, but the process is slow and the cost may be high. The $18 billion terminal at Sabine Pass in Louisiana is expected to export only 2 bcm, and by extension you can imagine what an export capacity of 70 bcm a year would cost by the early 2020s.

At the same time, the LNG market is forecast by IEA to expand to 540 bcm a year by 2020 from about 226 bcm in 2012. Similarly, AT Kearney forecasts European imports to climb from 327 bcm today to 413 bcm in 2020.

To adjust to US LNG exports, the cost on the other side of the Atlantic in Europe is expected to be around $200 billion in new terminals, pipelines, storage and interconnections between countries according to Sanford Bernstein analysts.

Therefore, US LNG is not seen to be competitive with the much cheaper and readily usable Russian gas. This is why experts are split on whether the US can become dominant in LNG exports as 'Moody's (has) warned that most of the 30 gas liquefaction projects planned in the US and Canada will never get off the ground, chiefly due to the linkage between LNG contracts and the price of crude' and 'The drop in international oil prices has wiped out the price advantage of US LNG projects'.

Some investors are still going ahead regardless, while others believe that as soon as the political situation clears, Europe will revert to the much cheaper Russian gas.

The question then is strictly geopolitical as Europe tries to diversify its supply away from Russia even though British Gas owner Centrica chairman Rick Haythornthwaite said recently: "Whatever we might want as Europe, we need to be very careful about being pragmatic about the realities of it ... I think it's unrealistic to think that Russian gas is going to be replaced in the near-term."

His chief executive added: "There is no way the United States can supply that volume of LNG to replace it." He added that Russia had been "a reliable supplier of gas all the way through the Cold War" and that Europe and Russia need each other.

Europe may be shooting itself in the foot by opposing the Russian South Stream project which would have bypassed the trouble spot of Ukraine to bring 67 bcm of gas to Europe. The US is also in opposition of a potential deal between Russia and Greece to supply gas to the latter through Turkey even though Greece's foreign minister, Nikos Kotzias, said Gazprom made a "very good offer", with guaranteed gas supplies for 10 years at good prices.

It is said that Russia would supply 47 bcm of gas to Greece, generate much-needed revenue for the Greek and create 2,000 jobs. The US favours deliveries from Azerbaijan and is scrambling to make a different offer to Greece.

Europe may diversify its supplies of gas by US imports, Norwegian expansion, imports from West Africa and so on. However, given the increase in demand there will always be a huge need for Russian gas. And it is better for Europe to bring a peaceful solution to the Ukraine crisis or to foot the bill of Russian gas to Ukraine and give no reason whatsoever for Russia to cut supplies.
 

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 #15
China Times
www.wantchinatimes.com
May 11, 2015
Xi's Moscow trip a risky move worth taking: People's Daily
Staff Reporter

Chinese president Xi Jinping's high-profile attendance at Russia's Victory Day parade in Moscow to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe was a "risky move" that was "definitely worth taking," says a commentary published by the Communist Party mouthpiece People's Daily.

On May 9, Xi attended the parade with a 112-member guard of honor comprising members of the People's Liberation Army's three service branches: the Ground Force, Navy and Air Force. It marked the first time in the People's Republic of China's history that the country's leader and troops have appeared together in a military parade overseas.

Xi was also seen chatting cordially with President Vladimir Putin of Russia throughout the festivities, in what has been described by Western media as sending an obvious message to the international community about the strength of the Sino-Russian relationship in the conspicuous absence of the Soviet Union's allies in the war against Nazi Germany.

Five years ago, Russia invited the US, UK and France to attend the parade, but in the event only China accepted at a time when Russia is under Western sanctions following its annexation of Crimea last year. China's attendance therefore gives Russia a lot of "face," the People's Daily article said, adding that the current situation between China, Russia and the US can be compared to the warring states of the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history, immortalized in the classic novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms and countless TV dramas and movies.

While appearing to side with the unpopular Russia is a "risky move," the People's Daily said, it is definitely one "worth taking." On the surface, Russia is trying to make it seem like that China has joined it on a mission against a common enemy, the United States, which has led the economic sanctions against Russia and meddled in China's territorial disputes in the East and South China seas with its "Asia Pivot" policy.

This is not an assumption Beijing necessarily wants the world to make, which is why has made it clear that it officially regards its relationship with Russia as a "comprehensive strategic cooperation partnership" as opposed to an "alliance." China's leaders have steadfastly refused to be seen as teaming up with Russia against the West, a point on which the Chinese foreign ministry was quick to issue a denial when Russian sources claimed that China was backing Moscow over Ukraine, though Beijing tacitly acknowledged the annexation of Crimea.

The flexibility of an official stance that promotes peace and the refusal to target a third party offers a lot of diplomatic flexibility, the article said, though Beijing must remain cautious when executing this strategy in practice.

Chinese leaders will likely have to continue a long-term campaign to dispel confusion and develop a stronger national mentality so that bolstering ties with Russia does not become unpopular among the general public, the People's Daily said.

Beijing is also seeking greater recognition of China's role in WWII, which has been diminished by Western-centrism, the article said. adding that this is why China last year introduced three new memorial days - the Sept. 3 Victory Over Japan Day, the Sept. 30 Memorial Day, and the Dec. 13 Nanjing Massacre Memorial Day.

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 #16
The Unz Review
www.unz.com
May 9, 2015
Translation: Xi Jinping - To Remember History, to Open the Future
BY ANATOLY KARLIN

Xi Jinping penned an op-ed in a Russian newspaper [http://www.rg.ru/2015/05/06/knr-site.html] on May 6th in which, in stark contrast to the typical Western bile and hostility, he acknowledges the role of the Soviet Union in defeating Nazism and warns off against attempts to revise that outcome, be it on paper or in real life.

I am translating it in full for two reasons.

First, it constitutes a first-hand glance at official relations between China and Russia, which - much to the consternation of neocons, Russophobes, Sinophobes, and Western imperialists - are instead of fighting each other for make benefit of the US are instead building strong relations and continuing to ink dozens of deals whose total value now probably stands at close to a trillion dollars.

Second, to explicitly give the lie to Western propaganda that Russia is somehow "isolated" by the fact that none of Washington's European stooges turned up at the Victory Day parade in Moscow this May 9th. Who cares? Not many Russians, at any rate. China, India, and dozens of other countries did turn up. That's the world's second superpower and the representatives of half of humanity. As for Obama, Merkel, Hollande, and Dave - quite frankly, the air is cleaner for their absence.

--

To Remember History, To Open the Future
by Xi Jinping

On May 9th, Victory Day in the world war against fascism, at the invitation of Russia's President Vladimir Putin, I will visit Russia and take part in the celebrations in Moscow devoted to the 70th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War. This sacred day I will celebrate together with the Russian people and the entire world.

Everyone remembers that the aggressive wars begun by the fascists and militarists inflicted unprecedented damage and suffering on the peoples of China, Russia, and the countries of Europe, Asia, and other parts of the world. The relentless struggle between justice and evil, light and darkness, freedom and slavery, was joined by the peoples of China, Russia, and more than 50 other countries, as well as by all the other peace-loving peoples of the world, who stood up as one and formed a broad international anti-fascist and anti-militarist front. All these nations fought in bloody battles against the enemy, and in so doing defeated the most evil and brutal aggressors, bringing peace to the world.

I remember, in March 2013, when I first visited Russia on a state visit, I laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier near the Kremlin walls. There was a depiction of a soldier's helmet and a red banner on the tomb, and there burned an eternal fire, symbolizing the unbroken life and unwavering fearlessness of our fallen heroes. "Your name is unknown, your deeds are immortal." They will never be forgotten by the Russian people, the Chinese people, or anyone else.

China was the main theater of military operations in Asia during the Second World War. The Chinese people stood up before anyone else in the struggle against the Japanese militarists, waged the longest war, fought in the hardest conditions, and, like Russia, suffered the most enormous losses. The Chinese army and people fought stoically and persistently, locking down and destroying numerous contingents of the Japanese aggressors. At the cost of a huge national sacrifice - the lives of more than 35 million people - a great victory was finally won and an enormous contribution was made to victory in the world struggle against fascism. The exploits of the Chinese people in the war against the militarists, just like the exploits of the Russian people, will be immortalized forever in history and will never die.

The Chinese and Russian peoples supported each other, helped each other, they were comrades in arms in the war against fascism and militarism, and built a friendship with each other forged with blood and life. In the most difficult times of the Great Patriotic War, many of the best sons and daughters of the Chinese people decisively joined in the battle against German fascism. Mao Anying - the eldest son of Chairman Mao Zedong - fought on many battles as a political officer of a tank company of the 1st Belorussian Front, up to the storming of Berlin. The Chinese fighter pilot Tang Duo, as deputy commander of a fighter company of the Soviet Army, distinguished himself in air battles against the fascist forces. Children of the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party and descendants of the fallen heroes of the Chinese Revolution, when studying at the Ivanovo international boarding school, despite that they were still only children, nonetheless went off to dig trenches, prepared Molotov cocktails, prepared food and clothes for the fighters, chopped trees, dug out potatoes, and looked after the wounded in hospitals. Apart from that, many of them regularly donated blood - 430 millilitres once per month for the soldiers at the front. The Chinese female journalist Hu Jibang, small and weak, underwent the entire war from the first day to the last, through bullets and fire, writing about the resilience and courage of the Soviet people, the barbarous cruelty of the fascist hordes, and the joy of the Russian soldiers and people in their times of triumph. It emboldened the armies and peoples of both countries, raising their will to fight to the end, to the final victory. Alongside the above heroes there are many other representatives of the Chinese people who contributed to the Great Patriotic War while remaining unknown soldiers.

The Russian people gave the Chinese people valuable political and moral support in their war against Japanese invaders. This included large convoys of arms and war material. More than 2,000 Soviet fighter pilots joined the Chinese air force and helped in the air battles over China. More than 200 of them died in battles over Chinese soil. In the closing phase of the war, Red Army soldiers of the Soviet Union were sent to north-east China. Together with the Chinese army and people they fought against the Japanese militarists, which helped China tremendously in achieving final victory. The Chinese people will always remember the Russians, both soldiers and civilians, who gave their lives for the independence and liberation of the Chinese nation.

The famous Russian historian Vasily Klyuchevsky said, that, having forgotten history, our soul can get lost in the darkness. To forget history is to commit treason. The Chinese and Russian peoples stand ready, together with all peace-loving countries and peoples, and with the automost determination and decisiveness, to oppose any actions or attempts to deny, distort, and rewrite the history of the Second World War.

This year, China and Russia will hold a series of events to mark the 70th anniversary of Victory in the Second World War. There will also be many other events conducted by the UN and other international and regional organizations. The purpose of these events and celebrations is to demonstrate our determination to defend the results of the Second World War, to protect international equality and justice, and to remind out contemporaries that it is necessary to preserve and guard the peace that was won for humanity at too high a price.

The hard lessons of the Second World War tell people, that humanity's coexistence is not subject to the laws of the jungle; that world politics is diametrically contradictory to belligerent and hegemonic power politics; and that the path of human development is not founded on the principle of "winner takes all" or in games with zero-sum outcomes. Peace - yes, war - no, cooperation - yes, confrontation - no, mutual gains are honored, while zero-sum results - are not: This is what constitutes the unchanging core and essence of peace, progress, and the development of human society.

Today, mankind has unprecedentedly good opportunities for the realization of our goal - peace, development, and the formation of a system of international relations that is ever more strongly based on the spirit of cooperation and mutual benefits. "Unity - is strength, while self-isolation - is weakness." Cooperation and the win-win principle should be adopted as the basic orientation of all countries in international affairs. We have to unite our own interests with the common interests of all countries, find and expand on the common points of interests of different parties, develop and establish a new conception of multilateral win-win, to always be ready to extend a helping hand to each other at difficult times, to partake together of rights, interests, and responsibilities, and to collectively collaborate to solve growing global problems such as climate change, energy security, cybersecurity, national disasters, and so on. In short, we are in it together on our planet Earth - the homeland of all humanity.

The Chinese people and the Russian people - they are both great peoples. In the years of grief and misery, our indestructible camaraderie was cemented in place with blood. Today the peoples of China and Russian will hand in hand and shoulder to shoulder defend peace, promote development, and make their contributions to lasting world peace and human progress.

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#17
The Atlantic
May 20, 2015
China and Russia Grow Even Closer
Xi Jinping's appearance at Vladimir Putin's side at the Victory Parade in Moscow signifies a deepened relationship based on a common adversary: the United States.
By MATT SCHIAVENZA

MATT SCHIAVENZA is a contributing writer for The Atlantic. He is a former global-affairs writer for the International Business Times and Atlantic senior associate editor.

On Saturday, Russia staged a grand celebration in Moscow to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the country's defeat Nazi Germany in World War Two. The occasion-which featured a military procession through Red Square-did not include the leaders of the United States, France, and the United Kingdom, who declined to attend out of protest of Russia's interference in Ukraine. But of the 30 or so world leaders who did arrive, only one had the privilege of sitting beside Russian leader Vladimir Putin: Chinese president Xi Jinping.

As Russia's relationship with the United States and its European allies grows worse, its ties to China have never been closer. On the eve of the parade last Friday, the two countries announced 32 separate bilateral agreements, including a non-aggression pledge in cyber warfare. The deals complement a $400 billion deal made last May, when Russia agreed to ship 38 billion cubic meters of natural gas each year between 2018 and 2048 to China. And next week, Russian and Chinese naval vessels will conduct live drills in the eastern Mediterranean Sea.

In remarks published last week in Xinhua, China's official news service, Xi Jinping ascribed the closeness between China and Russia to the their shared sacrifice in World War Two. "Decades ago, the Chinese and Russian nations shared weal and woe and forged an unbreakable war friendship with fresh blood," he said. But in the seven decades since the war, relations between the two haven't always been warm-when they existed at all. Ideological and geographical disputes triggered a Sino-Soviet split in 1960, and over the next three decades the two countries had a more adversarial relationship with each other than either had with the United States. This division was the primary geopolitical rationale behind Richard Nixon's decision to re-engage China in 1972.By the late 1980s, Sino-Russian relations began to thaw, and in 2001 the two countries cemented ties through a landmark "friendship agreement."

Despite many differences and possible points of contention, China and Russia are united by a major strategic interest: disrupting the United States. Beijing and Moscow have found common cause on the United Nations Security Council, where they have repeatedly blocked U.S.-led foreign policy initiatives. And when Washington and its European allies slapped sanctions on Russia's economy after Moscow's forcible annexation of Crimea, Beijing remained neutral-despite non-interference being the bedrock principle of Chinese foreign policy.

Both Russia and China have sought to challenge American hegemony by creating new multilateral institutions. The Moscow-led Eurasian Economic Union links together Russia, Armenia, Kazakhstan and Belarus, economies with a combined GDP of more than $4 trillion. Meanwhile, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, headquartered in Beijing, has snapped up 57 members since its formation last year, including countries like the United Kingdom that joined over American objections. Major Chinese initiatives like the New Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st Century Maritime Silk Road-referred together as "One Road, One Belt"-will feature road, rail, port, and pipeline investment across 65 countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe with a combined population of 4.4 billion. In the United States, meanwhile, President Obama has struggled to persuade Congress to pass the far less ambitious Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Geopolitical analysts have argued that the Sino-Russian friendship is unequal, and that Moscow needs Beijing far more than Beijing needs Moscow. China's close ties with energy-rich nations like Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, once joined with Russia in the Soviet Union, gives it leverage in negotiating energy deals. Despite the bonhomie generated by Xi's visit to Russia, the two sides failed to agree on a price for a new pipeline linking Western Siberia to China. Yet these details are unlikely to spark a rupture in ties.

"We are strong if united but weak if isolated," Xi Jinping told Xinhua.

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 #18
Sputnik
May 11, 2015
Russia to Launch US Comms Satellite Into Space

Russia will launch a US communications satellite from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan this year, the government said in a statement on Monday.

The Intelsat DLA-2 satellite, also known as Intelsat 31, will be put into orbit by Russia's Proton Breeze M launch vehicle.

The 6 metric ton probe will provide in-orbit protection services for the DIRECTV Latin America Direct-to-Home (DTH) television platform, a leading DTH digital television services operator in Latin America.

This will be the 11th ILS Proton launch for Intelsat and the 5th mission to support DIRECTV.

The launch will consolidate Russia's position on the global space services market and promote international cooperation in space exploration, the government statement said.

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 19
Alaska Dispatch News
www.adn.com
May 11, 2015
Commentary
Russia and US must maintain Arctic relations in an interconnected world
By David Slayton and Lawson W. Brigham, Ph.D
David Slayton is research fellow, co-chair and executive director of the Arctic Security Initiative at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.vLawson W. Brigham, Ph.D., is distinguished professor of Geography and Arctic Policy at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and a fellow at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy's Center for Arctic Study and Policy.

Russia is in the news, again. NATO ministers continue to discuss how to upgrade their response capabilities to contain Russia, an increasingly unpredictable neighbor, and Pentagon officials advise Congress that Russia is a primary military threat. All the meanwhile, President Putin ramps up his military modernization effort. Could this finally be the end of strong Russia-U.S. cooperation in the one region where our interests have aligned since the end of the Cold War: the Arctic?

Hopefully, the answer is no. There are examples of cooperation in recent history. In 2011, when both countries recognized that linkages of Arctic natural resources to global markets meant increased marine traffic and, thus, greater maritime risks, they came together and co-led negotiations that resulted in the Arctic Search and Rescue (SAR) Agreement. In 2013, in an effort to protect the region's fragile ecosystems, Russia, Norway and the U.S. led the preparation of the Arctic Oil Spill Preparedness and Response Agreement, also signed by the eight Arctic states. Further, just last month Russian officials participated in an Arctic Coast Guard Forum experts meeting in Washington. The U.S. welcomes strong Russia participation in the development of a highly cooperative Arctic Coast Guard Forum.

As the U.S. assumes the chairmanship of the Arctic Council this month, Russia-U.S. cooperation in the Arctic must continue. While it is impossible for Russia's military operations in Ukraine not to influence U.S.-Russia relationships, the U.S. must remember that maritime safety, environmental stewardship, research and economic development in the Arctic are important areas of mutual interest and benefit. In addition, the two nations need to closely cooperate, as all decisions of the Arctic Council must have the consensus of Russia, the U.S. and six other states.

There are four major reasons to urge cooperation with Russia in the Arctic.

First, the search-and-rescue and oil-response agreements that have been hailed as a success of Arctic cooperation will only be a true success if the Arctic nations, including Russia, also cooperate on implementation. Rescue and environmental response both require the presence of infrastructure and assets throughout the Arctic. Russia has been developing a chain of 10 SAR stations along its Northern Sea Route -- and also military facilities that worry some U.S. military officials. Unless both Russia and the U.S., and six other Arctic states, invest in the necessary facilities, manpower, navigational aids and satellite and communications technology, the extensive cooperation that went into negotiating the SAR and Oil Response Agreements will be lost.

Second, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) has negotiated a mandatory Polar Code to govern shipping standards for the polar regions. The code will enter into force on Jan. 1, 2017, but implementing it -- and enforcing the standards -- will require strong support from both the U.S. and Russia. To lead the international maritime community, the two nations must be seen to implement the new code in their own territorial waters and across the Bering Strait region.

Third, the Arctic Ocean is a tightly interconnected marine environment, and as the Arctic nations start or ramp up oil and gas exploration, only uniform and cooperative environmental protection standards will ensure appropriate environmental safety. Russian companies are eager to develop their vast oil and gas offshore resources but face challenges operating in the extreme Arctic conditions. This provides the U.S. an opportunity to work with Russian companies, and commercial firms across the Arctic, to develop environmental protection standards for prevention and liability mechanisms in response to a spill.  

Fourth, the U.S. and Russia share a border. Russia-U.S. cooperation will be required across the entire Arctic but it is particularly important in the Bering Strait region. The 46 nautical-mile-wide strait has historically seen little international traffic but with longer seasons of navigation in the Arctic Ocean, that trend is changing. Although a seasonal ice cover, risky waters and uncertain economics may mean that Arctic waterways never rival the Panama or Suez routes, increased traffic in the Bering Strait poses significant safety and environmental concerns.

Without question, strong U.S. leadership in the Arctic coupled with Russian engagement will be needed to make meaningful progress in ensuring maritime safety, improving navigational support and establishing voluntary routing schemes. And there are new areas for collaboration. The U.S. agenda for its Arctic Council chairmanship includes a desire to promote Arctic research, and there is potential for a new binding agreement among the Arctic states to be signed during 2015-2017.

Although it is impossible for either nation to ignore the challenges and conflicts they face elsewhere in the world, Russia and the U.S. both have key roles to play in preserving a peaceful Arctic and exhibiting to the world that Arctic cooperation will continue. This is the enduring challenge for the U.S. in its upcoming role as Arctic Council chair.

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#20
Sputnik
May 10, 2015
Gerhard Schröder: US Tone Towards Russia is 'Wrong and Dangerous'

Former German Chancellor claims that Russia and the West are not enemies, adding that both sides should maintain friendly relations.

The US adheres to a "wrong and dangerous tone" in its policy towards Russia, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder said during the conference "All Quiet on the Eastern Front?" held in the Evangelical Academy Bad Boll.

According to Schröder, relations between Russia and the West deteriorated during the presidency of George W. Bush, when there was a reorientation of Washington's policy towards Russia.

The US has always viewed Russia as its "global competitor." This is confirmed by a provocative phrase of President Obama, who said that Russia is "only a regional power," Schröder argued.

The politician stressed that US tone is wrong and dangerous, adding that Russia is a direct neighbor to the EU and that EU-Russia relations are a "matter of existential nature."

"NATO and the EU, on the one hand, and Russia, on the other, are not enemies. They should become partners again," Schröder said.

According to the politician, security in Europe can be guaranteed only with Russia, not against Russia. Both parties should build their relations on dialogue and cooperation, otherwise Europe "will not be a safe home for us and future generations," he said.

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 #21
No decision made yet on Putin's meeting with Kerry - Kremlin spokesman

MOSCOW. May 11 (Interfax) - Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has not confirmed reports that President Vladimir Putin is to meet with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in Sochi on Tuesday.

"We will make an announcement if such a meeting takes place," Peskov said on Govorit Moskva radio on Monday.

The radio station said citing Peskov that no decision has been made yet on Putin's meeting with Kerry.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said earlier on Monday that talks would be held in Sochi on May 12 between Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. It also said that Lavrov and Kerry would exchange views on the current bilateral agenda and on the most pressing international issues.

The U.S. Department of State in turn said that Kerry hopes to meet with President Putin in Sochi.

It also said that in Sochi Kerry plans to discuss the entire spectrum of bilateral and regional issues, including Iran, Syria and Ukraine.

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 #22
AFP
May 11, 2015
John Kerry to meet Putin in Sochi on Tuesday

US Secretary of State John Kerry is expected to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin for crucial talks in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi on Tuesday amid tensions with Moscow over Ukraine, both sides said.

President Vladimir Putin has refused to budge on Ukraine but has signalled his readiness to mend ties with Washington and Brussels as Russia chafes under the burden of biting Western sanctions.

The US State Department said Kerry would meet with Putin, who is spending the week at his summer residence in Sochi.

It will be Kerry's first visit to Russia in two years.

"US Secretary of State John Kerry will pay a working visit to Russia on May 12," said the Russian foreign ministry, adding that Kerry will meet his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in Sochi.

"We expect that Secretary of State Kerry's visit to Russia will serve the normalisation of bilateral ties on which global stability depends to a large extent," the statement said.

Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined immediate comment.

Separately, the state RIA Novosti news agency, quoting a diplomatic source, said Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov were set to discuss the Ukraine crisis as well as Syria, Iran and Yemen.

"Kerry's visit to Russia is very symbolic," the diplomatic source was quoted as saying.

"He cancelled his visit many times and finally decided to come. This will not be a breakthrough meeting but it is very important."

The source added that the US diplomat's Sochi visit was a sign that Russia was open to cooperation.

"We never clam up, we are open and are ready to discuss everything," the source said.

Last year's popular uprising in Ukraine that ousted a Kremlin-backed president sparked a diplomatic crisis and led Moscow to wrest the peninsula of Crimea from Kiev's control and support Russian-speaking separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Kiev and the West accuse Putin's Kremlin of masterminding the brutal conflict that has killed more than 6,100 people in just over a year, and have slapped several rounds of sanctions against Russia.

A source told the Interfax news agency that Russia expected Washington to play a more high-profile role in resolving the Ukraine crisis.

"It's important that the United States begin to play a more constructive role in the Ukrainian settlement, that they force Kiev to enter into a direct dialogue with the Donetsk People's Republic and Lugansk People's Republic," the source said, referring to the rebel-controlled regions.

"Let's see what the secretary of state will be able to offer in this context."

The source also said Moscow would urge Washington to refrain from supplying Kiev with lethal weapons.

"For us it's a principal issue."

Despite a truce brokered by the West and Putin in February, Kiev and the insurgents accuse each of violating the ceasefire deal.

But after a year of raging tensions signs are emerging that both Russia and the West may be ready to seek detente.

'Decades to restore ties'

Kerry's visit would come after US President Barack Obama skipped Russia's celebrations of the 70th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in what was widely seen as a snub over Moscow's meddling in Ukraine.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, too, ducked out of attending the Red Square military parade on May 9 but visited Moscow on Sunday to pay tribute to the Soviet dead and hold talks with Putin.

Putin has said Russia is ready to mend ties with Brussels and Washington amid hopes in Moscow that tough Western sanctions could be lifted or eased.

Kerry called Lavrov on Sunday to congratulate Russia on the 70th anniversary of Nazi Germany's defeat during World War II.

"Sergei Lavrov noted that for Russia the memory of the Allies' joint fight against Hitler's Germany was sacred," the foreign ministry said in a statement.

The source, speaking to Interfax, said bilateral ties between Moscow and Washington had hugely suffered over the past year.

"Americans destroyed nearly everything," the source was quoted as saying. "Decades will be needed to restore bilateral ties."

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#23
Moscow says it's ready for dialogue with US on condition of no attempts of pressure

MOSCOW, May 11. /TASS/. Russia is ready for a dialogue with the US on an equal base, Russia's Foreign Ministry said in a comment regarding the upcoming visit of the US Secretary of State John Kerry.

"In the dialogue with the US we have been stressing that we are open for cooperation on the basis of equal rights, non-interference with home affairs and necessary respect for Russian interests, where attempts of pressing us are fully rejected," the ministry said.

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and the US Secretary of State John Kerry will have negotiations on May 12. The meeting is due in Russia's Sochi.

They will "exchange views on the current aspects of the bilateral relations and on international problems," the Foreign Ministry reported on Monday.

Moscow hopes John Kerry's visit will favor improvement of relations with the US.

"We hope the visit of the US Secretary of State Kerry will favor improvement of bilateral relations the global stability to a big extent depends on."

The ministry also noted that US visa, property sanctions against Russians, Russian companies and banks contradicts international law. The statement says Russia has to react to sanctions initiatives and undertake measures to protect own security.

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 #24
The Motley Fool
www.fool.com
May 9, 2015
15 Ways Moscow Has Changed in the 15 Years Since I Left Russia
By Rich Smith
Rich Smith spent most of the mid-to-late '90s in Moscow, advising U.S. and European companies eager to get in on the action of Russia's emerging market. Segueing into Ukrainian law, he then did the same thing for Westerners investing in Kiev. At some point, he decided that instead of telling these companies how to make money for themselves, he'd prefer to own a piece of the companies (and their profits) -- and began investing. Retiring to rural Indiana to continue this project, he continues to invest for his own account, and to advise other investors on how to maximize their profits, and minimize their risks, by writing directly for The Motley Fool as a contributor, and on special assignment for Yahoo! Finance and AOL DailyFinance. He undertakes assignments for other media outlets -- online, print, radio, and television, upon request.
[Photos here http://www.fool.com/investing/international/2015/05/09/15-ways-moscow-has-changed-in-the-15-years-since-i.aspx]

I just flew back from Russia (and boy, are my arms tired!).

But seriously, folks. A lot has changed in Russia since I left the country in 2000 (just in time to see America's Internet Bubble burst). From time to time, I've revisited the country -- and maybe you have, too. But if you haven't been to Russia on this side of the millennium, here are a few changes you can expect to see on your next trip.

1. Welcome back!

Let's start with the first thing you encounter upon arriving by plane to Moscow (Russia's main port of entry). First off, "Moscow" is no longer synonymous with "SVO." Sheremetyevo airport (northwest of the city) remains the most famous, but Domodedovo (to the south) and Vnukovo (southwest) are now both in common usage. Major airlines including British Airways, El Al, and Austrian Airlines now fly into Domodedovo. Lufthansa and Transaero, for example, service Vnukovo. Aeroflot, the flag carrier, still prefers to use Sheremetyevo.

So long, "taxi mafia"

Skipping merrily past customs and immigration, probably the greatest improvement to meet the weary traveler's eye is outside the airport. Once upon a time, this was the hunting ground of semicriminal syndicates of unlicensed "taxi" drivers. They controlled traffic from airport to city center, charging an arm and a leg for passage.

Today, each of Moscow's three main airports boasts safe, efficient rail service shuttling travelers from airport to city center via Aeroexpress train from 6 a.m. to midnight. Sheremetyevo's train drops you off near the Belorusskaya Metro station, Domodedovo connects to Paveltskaya Metro station, and Vnukovo links up with Yugo-Zapadnaya. Each trip takes 35 to 45 minutes one-way.

All aboard the Moscow Metro!

Speaking of Metro stations -- there are a lot more of them. Since 2000, Moscow has added 35 new stations -- including a new seven-station, elevated Butovskaya line -- and reopened the Vorobyovy Gory station after years of repairs. Altogether, that's an even three dozen.

21st-century Metro-ing

All those new stations don't come cheap. Once upon a time, a trip aboard Moscow's ultra-efficient (most trains arrived as little as two minutes apart), wide-ranging Metro station would set a babushka back about $0.20 -- but no longer.

Today, a one-way ticket costs 50 rubles, or roughly $1. (And yes, Moscow uses paper, mag-strip tickets now; no more plastic tokens.)

Exercise? In Russia?!

Upon exiting the Metro, you may be surprised to see that Moscow now has bike paths. What's more, people are actually using them! As a tourist or business traveler, you probably won't. But you do need to be aware that a lot of the city's sidewalks are now half as wide (for you) as they used to be -- and you must keep on the lookout for two-wheeled travelers.

Whatever will we do with all this oil money?

Metros and bike paths aren't the only thing Moscow built during the decade-long period when it was flush with $100-per-barrel oil money. The Russian capital also spent big money to turn its flagship Moscow State University (MGU) into a world-class institution of higher learning.

Between 2005 and 2009 alone, MGU got a new Main Library Building, a new Economics Building, and a new Humanities Building and Medical Center. And even with oil now sub-$100, the spending spree isn't over. The 28-year-old daughter of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Ekaterina Tikhonova, has reportedly just been put in charge of a new $1.7 billion project to build a dedicated science campus.

A children's paradise -- in seven stories

The Russian government isn't the only one rolling in money and spending like mad. Ordinary Russians in the nation's capital have caught the spending bug as well. As evidence, you need look no further than the recently reopened Detsky Mir (Children's World) mall. The Soviet Union's biggest (and self-proclaimed world's biggest) toy store now hosts neon signs, 73,000 square meters of shopping space encompassing more than 100 stores spread across seven floors -- and sky-high price tags.

Too old for toys?

That's OK. Moscow is undergoing a retail renaissance in all sectors -- including supermarkets, for example. As early as the late 1990s, supermarkets had already begun arriving in Moscow. Today, they're everywhere, sometimes two per block, and they come in sizes from minimarts and supermarkets (Magnolia, Azbuka Vkusa) to warehouse stores (Metro Cash & Carry, Auchan).

Don't like to cook?

Once a difficult place to find a bite to eat on the street, Moscow is now littered with fast-food joints. McDonald's was the first and most famous, of course. But Burger King has joined in the fun, and there's always a line of caffeine-crazed customers at the city's numerous Starbucks outlets.

Plus, for anyone who remembers one recent blockbuster IPO, Moscow has Shake Shack!

"Would you like jewelry with that?"

Moscow's retail build-out does create some curious dichotomies, however. For example, take a look at this pic of one of Starbucks' local competitors, side-by-side with Tiffany's just-opened first-ever outlet in Russia:

Look, Ma! No kiosks!

One thing you won't see much of on Moscow's streets: kiosks. In the 1990s, Boris Yeltsin's Russia was a kiosk-based economy. Everywhere you looked -- in and near the metro, along every city street, and in the walkway passages underneath the streets -- there were kiosks selling candy, cigarettes, vodka, groceries, cosmetics, and more vodka.

They're almost all gone. Some very few have been enclosed and turned into ultramini minimarts. The rest have simply vanished.

Cash or credit? Preferably cash

Way back when, these kiosks were cash-only operations -- credit cards not accepted. Today, Russia's many stores, shops, restaurants, and shopping malls...still don't take credit cards.

Oh, Russians know about credit cards. They exist in theory. And the use of debit cards is starting to catch on. There's at least a chance that if you bring a debit card with you to Russia, you might be able to use it at an ATM, if nowhere else.

Eureka! An ATM!

In a cash-loving economy like Russia's, ATMs are crucial to tourists who want access to U.S.-based funds. More interesting, though, is the spread of ATM-lookalike machines from Qiwi. The 21st-century answer to paying utility bills in cash at Sberbank, these e-kiosks are popping up all over the place, and they permit a user to pay the electric bill, reload a smartphone, and even play the lottery.

Yandex comes into fashion

One more stock idea for you before we return to our regularly scheduled programming. (At The Motley Fool, we do have a reputation for obsessing over stocks). A few years ago, we began hearing word that Google was facing a homegrown challenger in Internet search in Russia. This upstart was dubbed Yandex (a clever name referring to the creation of "yet another index"), and apparently it had rocketed to as much as 65% market share in just a few years. Yet few people I spoke to actually used Yandex. Nearly every Russian I asked said they "googled" (гуглировать) their Internet queries.

From a "don't believe everything you read" perspective, that worried me. Claiming "65% market share" was one thing, but I needed to hear people talk about Yandex "on the ground" before I could give that number credence -- so here's the good news.

On my most recent trip, I finally began hearing people refer to news items they had read on Yandex. While Yandex recently reduced its claimed Russian market share to less than 60%, which sounds bad, what I heard on the street is that people are using the service more, rather than less. And that's a good thing.

Sanctions? What sanctions?

Of course, the one thing that both investors and tourists in Russia really want to know is: What's up with the sanctions? Are they wrecking the economy? And do the Russians hate us now?

Well, the answers are (mostly) no and no. Under the West's sanctions, prices on many imported consumer goods have skyrocketed. But in Moscow at least, where most of Russia's wealth concentrates, shoppers are still shopping regardless -- and as you can see in the photo at left, not all Westerners have turned their back on Russia.

True, Muscovites aren't thrilled with the sanctions, and there's anti-Western propaganda on the television and on the streets -- but not everyone is taking it at face value. As an illustration of that, I'll leave you with one last photo of a billboard disturbingly touting Russian military strength in the face of economic sanctions -- and of one graffiti jokester letting some air out of the bubble with a reminder: One year after sanctions commenced, Russia's still here -- but half the ruble's value is gone.

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 #25
Political dialogue only way out for Ukraine crisis: Putin

MOSCOW, May 10 (Xinhua) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin reiterated Sunday that the Ukraine crisis should only be solved through political dialogue.

"I am convinced that a reliable, long-term settlement can only be achieved by establishing direct dialogue between Kiev, (the two self-proclaimed republics of) Donetsk and Lugansk," Putin said during a meeting with visiting German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the Kremlin.

Putin added that it was necessary for all parties to stick to the full implementation of the Minsk ceasefire agreement.

"There are reasons to believe that the Minsk process is moving, although with difficulties," the Interfax news agency quoted him as saying.

"The situation in southeastern Ukraine became more stable after Feb. 12 (when the Normandy format talks were held in the Belarusian capital of Minsk), despite all problems," said the president.

While expressing his hope for the working subgroups of the three-party Contact Group on the Ukraine crisis, he vowed to exert all possible influence on Donetsk and Lugansk to ensure the effective work of the subgroups.

He also noted that the success of a peaceful settlement in Ukraine depends mainly on the Kiev government, calling for constitutional reforms and economic restoration in the country.

Merkel agreed that Germany and Russia would continue to work for "the restoration of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine", and would support the monitor mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

There are possibilities of making progress to solve the Ukraine crisis, Merkel said, urging all the relevant sides to do everything possible to improve the humanitarian situation in the country's eastern Donbass regions.

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 #26
Sputnik
May 10, 2015
Putin: Russia, Germany Differ in Assessing Coup in Ukraine

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel arrived in Moscow on Sunday to meet with the Russian leader and lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to honor the memory of millions of Soviet people who had been killed during WWII.

"While discussing the international agenda, naturally the situation in Ukraine was the center of attention. [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel and I discuss [this issue] on a regular basis, as well as with the president of France and the president of Ukraine in the so-called Normandy format, which has proven itself quite an effective mechanism of international contribution to the peaceful settlement of the conflict. Yes, we differ greatly in the assessments of the events that led to an anti-constitutional coup in the Ukrainian capital in February 2014," Putin said.

Relations between Moscow and Berlin are not in their best shape, Putin said.

The Russian president explained that the goods turnover between the two countries dropped by 6.5 percent last year for the first time in five years, adding that the figure nosedived by over 35 percent in the first two months of 2015.

"This situation clearly is not in the interests of Russia or Germany," Putin said.

Economic Blockade of Donbass

The economic blockade of eastern Ukraine must be lifted; while the issue must only be resolved through dialogue between Kiev and the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, the Russian leader said.

"I'm convinced that in order to provide reliable and long-term settlement, only setting up direct dialogue between Kiev, Donetsk, and Lugansk is possible. I believe that this is one of key conditions for the settlement as a whole."

In November 2014, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed a decree imposing an economic blockade on eastern Ukraine and withdrawing all state-funded health, educational and social protection organizations from the region.

"We believe that it's necessary to lift the economic blockade, renew financial and bank ties, as well as to hold a constitutional reform with the participation of the country's southeast," Putin added.

The set of measures to de-escalate the conflict in Ukraine reached in Minsk in February stipulates full restoration of social and economic networks in Donbass, as well as resuming social payments, such as pensions, among other provisions.

Ukraine-EU Association Agreement

A Russian delegation headed by Economic Development Minister Alexei Ulyukayev will visit Brussels in mid-May to discuss Ukraine's Association Agreement with the European Union, the Russian president said.

"I would like to inform you that on May 17-19 of this year our delegation headed by the Economic Development Minister will be in Brussels."

Putin said that, when speaking with Merkel, the sides had agreed on the necessity of continuing talks in regard to Ukraine's Association Agreement with the EU taking into account both Russia's and EU's economic interests.

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 #27
www.rt.com
May 11, 2015
'No people there, only terrorists': Pro-Kiev governor eyes cutting road transport with rebel areas
[Video here http://rt.com/news/257465-ukraine-traffic-rebel-cut/]

The Kiev-appointed governor of Lugansk region plans to cut all road transport between Ukraine and the self-proclaimed Lugansk People's Republic. On Friday, almost 170 freight trucks were prevented from crossing the border.

"Soon any crossings of the disengagement line [between areas controlled by the Ukrainian government and the rebels] for transport, including cars, will be cut. All motorways will be blocked. An exception would be made only for pedestrians," said a statement published on Gennady Moskal's website.

Moskal, who was appointed as the head of "civilian-military administration" of the Lugansk region by Kiev, was reporting the seizure of two trucks, which were "illegally" transporting beer to the rebel-held areas. A video of the episode was published on YouTube.

"There are no people there, only terrorists. Normal people have all gone to our side," Moskal told a truck driver while studying cargo papers. "If you are feeding the terrorists, then you are aiding and abetting them."

"But it's all Ukraine. Nobody declared martial law here," the driver argues.

"I banned everything from crossing except cars and pedestrians. And starting 12th there would be only pedestrians. Because of the likes of you," the governor replies.

"Yesterday we detained 168 freighters, and they started rioting at the checkpoint and threatening me. I don't give a f**k about your threats," Moskal continues. "As for the beer, let them drink urine!"

Earlier on Friday 168 freighter vehicles were prevented from going across the disengagement line by the Ukrainian authorities Moskal's administration said they were going to smuggle goods to the rebels with the help of corrupt Ukrainian military.

In November 2014, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko ordered that all bank services be halted for the rebel-controlled areas. The move effectively made impossible many business transactions between those areas and the part of Ukraine remaining under the government's control. In the dissenting areas it was viewed as an attempt to strangle the rebellion economically after a failure to do it through military force.

The blockade is meant to be canceled as part of the Minsk agreement, a peace roadmap brokered in February by France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine in the Belarusian capital, Minsk. There was a scaling down the level of violence in eastern Ukraine since then, but little progress in finding a long-term solution that would restore peace in Ukraine.

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 #28
https://medium.com
April 25, 2015
This Is Life in Militia-Controlled Eastern Ukraine
Photographs behind the rebel lines of the Donetsk People's Republic
by ZACK BADDORF
[Photos here https://medium.com/war-is-boring/this-is-life-in-militia-controlled-eastern-ukraine-f1d9b93c044]

Crossing the border into the self-declared Donetsk People's Republic is a pain in the ass.

I must have gone through 30 checkpoints on both the Ukrainian and separatist sides of the border, despite only being in the country for about a week. I waited nearly two hours at one checkpoint alone.

The guards aren't friendly and the process is tedious. But once you get through the borders and into the cities, life is pretty normal.

Well, unless you count the near constant shelling and small arms fire at the Donetsk International Airport-which lies in ruins just five miles from the center of the city. That's one of the hotspots in the war. The fighting there has gone on for months.

All photos by Zack Baddorf

Russian-backed separatists posted this sign inside a former Ukrainian government administration building.

To demonstrate their loyalty, some residents in the separatist-held areas have put DPR stickers over their Ukrainian license plates.

Inside the mayor's office of a DPR-controlled town, a drawing of a woman and a child wished a family member good luck. "Get back home victorious and alive," the card stated. "We are waiting for you!"

Another drawing depicted a cute tank. "It's not easy to be a man in our days, to be a winner, a wall, a reliable friend, a sensible person, a strategist between war and peace," the drawing read.

"In this festive day [Defender of the Fatherland Day], we wish you patience in your life. We wish you to have health, love and inspiration."

"We wish you have artistic success and good fortune!"

The other two cards commemorated the Feb. 23 "Defender of the Fatherland Day," which celebrates members of the Soviet army.

The orange and black stripes adorned many of the Soviet Union's medals during World War II, and the symbol has become ubiquitous in eastern Ukraine and Russia in recent months.

Inside Donetsk, the first thing I noticed was the empty billboards. I'd reported from Donetsk back in 2014, months before the fighting began here.

Back then, it seemed like a booming and prosperous city-and a surprising place for a rebellion.

"Defend the Country-Revive Donbass," a billboard with the DPR flag on it urged motorists. The billboard next to it was empty. Most of the ads in the city are gone, a sign of a weak economy.

Rebels captured the city and held a referendum in May 2014. The predictable results were for independence from Ukraine. Western nations said the day of polling had "no democratic legitimacy" while Russia said the world should respect the results.

Ukraine has been at war with the Russian-backed separatists since.

The city seemed peaceful, but there were some big changes since I was last in the region.

Inside the formerly Ukrainian-run administration building, a wall honored the "memory of the militants killed for the independence of the Donetsk People's Republic."

Outside the Donetsk Regional State Administration Building, a Russian flag flew higher than the DPR flag.

There are traces of the war throughout Donetsk. One battle-scarred bank closed down during the fighting.

Retirees lined up outside another bank to collect their pensions. The DPR is now paying out retirement benefits in Russian rubles.

In his 1999 book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas Friedman wrote that no two countries with McDonalds restaurants had ever gone to war.

But there was a McDonalds in Donets...which is now shuttered. The fast food franchise has recently been a popular target of anti-Western sentiment in both Russia and countries with strong ties to Moscow.

Someone had scrawled graffiti on a bus stop painted in the blue and yellow colors of the Ukrainian flag. "It [this area] is not for you anymore," the Russian-language graffiti warned.

At a makeshift checkpoint on a road leading to Donetsk, guards repeatedly refused to let me photograph them, citing security concerns.

This separatist fighter carried a sidearm next to his camouflaged car. Soldiers on both side of the conflict often rely on homemade gear and crowdfunded weapons.

The industries in the east continue to function, but the conflict has devastated production. Donetsk and rebel-held Luhansk are steel towns that once provided metal to both Russia and Ukraine.

Near a DPR-Ukrainian border crossing, truck drivers chatted by the side of a road while waiting in a long queue. The Ukrainians have stopped much of the trade going into the DPR to pressure the rebels.

The young man in the white shirt is from Russia. He said he's fighting on his own behalf to protect children and civilians in the area.

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 #29
Donetsk militias register 37 ceasefire breaches by Ukrainians, including artillery attacks

DONETSK. May 11 (Interfax) - The Ukrainian military have shelled the Donbas territory nearly 40 times in the past 24 times, the defense ministry of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) said on Monday.

"Over the past 24 hours we have registered 37 instances of ceasefire violation, including the use of artillery," the ministry said in a statement, according to the Donetsk News Agency.

Several cities and towns came under fire, including Donetsk, Horlivka, Spartak, Zhabichevo, Belaya Kamyanka and Golma.

The ministry also confirmed the overnight mortar attack on the village of Sakhanka, Novoazov district, which was reported the day earlier by the rural head, Alexander Pelipas.

"Data about casualties among civilians and militias are being checked," the ministry said.

For his part, the military-operation spokesperson in the Ukrainian presidential administration, Oleksandr Motuzianik, said at a briefing on Monday that the militias in eastern Ukraine had continued to stockpile weapons and munitions near Donetsk and Stanitsa Luhanska in the past 24 hours.

"(The militias) violate the Minsk agreements all the time by using artillery weapons which must be removed under the truce terms," he said.

Militias launched 16 shell attacks against the army positions, using 120 millimeter grenade launchers, and once fired a 122 millimeter artillery weapon, he said

Peski remains the main hotspot in the Donetsk region, with the Ukrainian military having registered ten shell attacks against their positions there. Militant activity near Horlivka has abated slightly.

In Luhansk region, the truce is being violated near Schastya, Stanitsa Luhansk, Zolotoye and Krymskoye, the spokesperson said.

Near Mariupol, the village of Shyrokyne has again become an epicenter of the standoff. Seventeen instances of ceasefire violation by militias have been recorded there. Militias also shelled the villages of Mirnoye, Chermalyk and Pishchevik.

Motuzianik also said that the militias continued using unmanned aerial vehicles for aerial reconnaissance. Ukrainian border guards have spotted five such drones flying over Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

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#30
Newsweek.com
April 30, 2015
Thanks to the police force, Kiev's sex trade is booming
By Maxim Tucker

High heels clatter down a pavement crowded with bare legs, stockings and miniskirts as a police car approaches. The vehicle pulls up and two young officers sidle out. After briefly questioning a couple of scantily clad girls hovering near a petrol station and some shady-looking male bystanders, they're back in the car and off down Kiev's main route out of town, the eight-lane highway known as "Victory Avenue". A tall blonde in skin-tight jeans beckons to a white van cruising behind them. Business continues as usual.

For years Ukraine's police force has profited handsomely from the country's multi-million dollar sex industry, demanding both payment in cash and payment in kind. It's forever been the elephant in the parliamentary chamber; the political elite has always known about the problem but never really wanted to talk about it. The country's government continues to be riddled with corruption and the money generally flows up.

That appeared to have changed earlier this month when the police minister himself, Arsen Avakov, drew attention to the problem in a blog. After a three-month investigation, ministry officials had caught Kiev's vice squad raking in an average of €325,000 per month from the capital's sex trade.

"Employees of the DBZTL [Department for Crimes Relating to Human Trafficking] in Kiev were not fighting prostitution and brothels, but the opposite," Avakov said. "They created and organised a protection racket network for underground brothels and saloons. These dirty police officers established a cash flow into their pockets - covering up and co-ordinating a pimping organisation providing paid sex services through internet sites."

Avakov said he had ordered the arrest of two of the unit's chiefs, Colonel Slyusar and Lt Colonel Olkhovik. Four other policemen were detained and 30 people in the enterprise are under investigation. The head of the national DBTZL, Myhailo Andrienko, and the head of DBTZL unit in Kiev, Jarosval Guk, were both dismissed.

The minister's announcement piqued the interest of undercover TV reporter Yaroslava Koba, who was sceptical about whether the arrests heralded a genuine crackdown on police involvement in the sale of sex. Koba has spent the past three years investigating human trafficking, brothels and massage parlours in Ukraine, even pole-dancing in a strip-tease club to research one of her stories.

When she and her hidden camera crew took to Victory Avenue and started propositioning passing drivers, she was quickly taken to one side by a sex worker who explained each spot by the side of the road was paid for. "You can't stand here. Up to the bridge, this is my policeman."

Nothing, it seemed, had changed.

"I have several contacts in the police," Koba tells Newsweek. "They tell me that they are fighting with prostitution. But it doesn't happen. A lot of politicians, policemen and parliamentarians are involved in brothels. It's for the public we pretend that we fight against prostitution, but in reality nobody will fight this."

Koba explains there are three main markets for sex. At the bottom of the ladder are "girls on the street" who must pay the police 150 UAH (€6) per night to stand in a fixed location, and provide their services to officers for free on demand. The second market is brothels advertised online with a telephone number, for which the brothels must pay €3,700 per month - a kind of line rental fee to avoid harassment by the DBZTL, which maintains a database for the numbers. Lastly there is the "elite prostitution" racket, where producers of beauty pageants and struggling girl bands will "loan" girls out for a few thousand euros per night, but the police are not involved.

The vice squad arrests and Koba's latest programme have fuelled furious debate in Ukrainian society on whether to legalise and regulate prostitution to help prevent corruption, abuse of sex workers and the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases. Some argue that revenue from one of Ukraine's few thriving industries should flow into treasury coffers rather than police pockets.

But they also highlight a deep-rooted flaw in the country's law enforcement structure that goes well beyond the prostitution debate and cuts right to the heart of the grievances behind last year's revolution, frequently depicted as a simple geopolitical struggle between autocratic Russia and the democratic West over the future of Ukraine.

In fact, protest had begun to spill over into unrest well before then-President Yanukovych abandoned the Association Agreement with the EU. In July 2013 Ukraine was rocked by news that two police officers and a taxi driver in Vradiyivka had gang-raped and savagely beaten a 29-year-old woman police claimed to be a prostitute but who was in fact walking home from a nightclub. They left her for dead in a forest with a fractured skull.

After the attack, Vradiyivka residents laid siege to the local police station, burned it to the ground and marched in protest to Kiev. The following week Kiev residents assailed a police station after media reported a police officer had punched a young woman in the stomach.

Frustrated with police criminality and lack of accountability, Ukrainians were increasingly taking the law into their own hands. Indeed, it was police violence against the few hundred remaining pro-Europe demonstrators on 30 November that galvanised a small Euromaidan protest into a revolution involving hundreds of thousands of people.

Since then, the post-revolutionary government has done little to address systemic police criminality, focusing instead on replacing old foes in law enforcement with allies. The vice squad arrests appear little more than window-dressing, not taken seriously by the law enforcement colleagues that are expected to investigate and prosecute them.

"Prostitution is the 25th problem right now that Ukrainian society is worried about," Alyona Yakhno, a spokeswoman for the Kiev prosecutor's office, responded when asked by Newsweek why criminal cases had not been brought against the dismissed vice squad chiefs.

"Because we have a lot of real problems - there is a war and [dropping] exchange rates. The last thing I'm interested in is prostitutes. The last thing."

Under the Ukrainian criminal system, it's up to the local prosecutor's office to investigate police officers accused of an offence, but the officials are usually colleagues with whom the accused work regularly. A 2013 Amnesty International report showed that of 114,474 complaints made about police officers in the preceding year, only 1,750 were investigated.

That system was finally due for a shake-up this spring after Ukraine's president Petro Poroshenko signed a law reforming the Soviet-era prosecutor's office, but on 21 April ex-internal affairs minister Yuriy Lutsenko, who himself served a jail term for corruption, led a successful parliamentary initiative to postpone implementation of the law until July. Reform campaigners fear the delay will now be used to make amendments to the law aimed at preserving the old, corrupted system.

"Little has changed in terms of curbing police criminality," says Amnesty International's Ukraine office director Tetyana Mazur. "The recent postponement of prosecutorial reform is a setback for justice - the new government must learn from the mistakes of the old and introduce an independent police complaints process without delay. Ukrainians have already demonstrated once they will not tolerate abuse from the very people supposed to protect them."

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 #31
Jerusalem Post
May 10, 2015
Report: Anti-Semitic vandalism spiked in Ukraine in 2014
By SAM SOKOL

Anti-Semitic vandalism in Ukraine, including occurrences of graffiti and attempted arson, spiked in 2014, according to a new report by the Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities (Vaad) of Ukraine.

However, the surge in anti-Semitic violence expected in the wake of early 2014's Ukrainian revolution, failed to materialize.

Vyacheslav Likhachev, who monitors anti-Semitism for the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress and the Vaad, recorded 23 such incidents over the course of the year within both Ukrainian and separatist- held territory. Incidents of vandalism had held steady at nine annually since 2011, having fallen from a peak of 21 in 2006.

"Thus, even though the statistics for 2014 display significant growth in both anti-Semitic vandalism and anti-Semitic violence in comparison with previous years, the peak of the crimes remains in the mid-2000s [first decade of the century], and when taking the long perspective, the situation over the last five years seems to be relatively stable," Likhachev explained.

Popular targets for vandals were Holocaust memorials, including Kiev's Babi Yar. Several synagogues, in Zaporizhya, Simferopol, Mykolaiv, Kiev and Hust, also were targeted in attempted arson attacks.

According to Likhachev, the increase in the desecration of Jewish sites can be explained by the fact that "symbolic violence has now been legitimized in Ukrainian society," with a significant percentage of Ukrainians approving of the destruction of statues of Lenin and other Russian and communist symbols.

"The psychological barrier between theoretical intolerance and symbolic violence has become quite transparent for persons leaning towards radicalism," he wrote. "One needs to take into account that thousands of young people in Ukraine have experienced making and using incendiary mixtures in the winter struggle, as well as have undergone even more extreme and traumatic experiences that have seriously shifted the boundaries of what is acceptable."

The researcher added that the Jewish community's outspoken support for Ukrainian nationalism has "provoked anti-Semitic acts from pro-Russian separatists."

According to Likhachev's numbers, however, just four incidents of violence that could definitely be causally linked to anti-Semitic motives occurred during the course of 2014, all of which occurred in the first half of the year in Kiev, the capital.

In January of that year, during the height of the revolution, an Israeli teacher was beaten after leaving synagogue following Shabbat prayers, followed a week later by the stabbing of a local yeshiva student near the same synagogue.

The circumstances surrounding both incidents, including the fact that the attackers knew where to stand to avoid being spotted on security cameras and the detention of a skinhead scoping the premises, led Likhachev to conclude that "we are dealing with a professionally organized provocative act and not with a spontaneous increase in authentic anti-Semitic aggression."

A number of senior Jewish leaders, including Vaad President Joseph Zissels and Chief Rabbi Yaakov Dov Bleich, have accused the Kremlin of fomenting anti-Semitism to justify its interventions in Ukraine, a charge denied by Russia.

"Even though I lack complete certainty in this, I will allow myself the tentative supposition that some anti-Semitic incidents, including both attacks and acts of vandalism, were of a provocative character, intended for use in propaganda - first in context of the struggle against former Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovich with the Maidan protesters and then to legitimate Russian aggression. I believe that it is quite likely that the January attacks on religious Jews in Kiev, the February desecration of the synagogue in Simferopol, acts of vandalism in Odessa and possibly some other incidents were all provocations," Likhachev asserted.

Accusations of anti-Semitism have been used by both the pre-revolutionary Ukrainian government, to discredit protesters, and the Russians, to discredit the post-revolutionary government. Some anti-Semitic statements by separatist leaders, as well as Ukrainian nationalists also have been recorded, though a letter ostensibly on behalf of the rebels calling on Jews to register themselves is widely believed to have been a forgery.

Some Ukrainians held protests against what they termed the "regime of Yids and Khazars" following the appointment of a Jew as parliamentary speaker in December.

"Notably, the use of anti-Semitism in public rhetoric has been greatest in territories occupied by Russia, parts of Donetsk and Lugansk districts," wrote Likhachev.

While the number of incidents of vandalism did increase, however, it was not significant, according to a recent report by the Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry at Tel Aviv University.

According to the Kantor Center, violent anti-Semitism surged 40 percent in 2014, especially in western Europe.

Thirty-eight percent of Ukrainians harbor anti-Semitic attitudes, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

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 #32
RFE/RL
May 8, 2015
EU Says No Visa Liberalization For Ukraine And Georgia

The EU Commission has said neither Georgia nor Ukraine would obtain visa-free travel to the EU's Schengen zone at the Riga Eastern Partnership Summit later this month.

Speaking in Brussels on May 8 after the EU Commission published its annual visa report on both countries, the spokeswoman for home affairs, Natasha Bertaud, said the commission was "aware" Georgia and Ukraine had expressed a desire for visa-free status at the summit, but this was "very ambitious in terms of timing."

She said the commission was willing to move forward the next report to the end of 2015 provided progress is made.

The report stated both Ukraine and Georgia need to do more to implement legislation in areas like anticorruption and human-trafficking.

Georgia was urged to do more to tackle the trafficking of drugs, whereas Brussels urged Ukraine to step up laws concerning organized crime and antidiscrimination.

Moldova received visa liberalization in 2014 and remains the only one of the six Eastern Partnership countries to achieve this status.

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 #33
Christian Science Monitor
May 11, 2015
Honors for Ukrainian nationalists anger their victims - in Poland
Poles have joined critics in Moscow and eastern Ukraine in opposing a new Ukrainian law that would grant World War II-era nationalists an honored status. The nationalists killed tens of thousands of Poles during the war.
By Fred Weir, Correspondent Monika

MOSCOW; AND WARSAW - Szczepan Siekierka was a teenager in 1943 when irregular Ukrainian nationalist forces entered his village in Volhynia, now part of western Ukraine, and brutally slaughtered 16 members of his family.

His voice still shakes when he describes how the men, members of the Nazi-linked Ukrainian Insurgent Army [UPA], murdered everyone they could find, including women and children. "They weren't fighting for a free Ukraine. The people they killed were civilians, ordinary farmers who often couldn't write their own names and who knew nothing of politics."

These UPA fighters, along with other Ukrainian nationalist factions, waged a little-known wartime ethnic cleansing campaign that sought to eliminate unwanted groups, such as Jews and Poles, from what they deemed to be the territory of a future independent Ukrainian state. As many as 100,000 Poles died at their hands.

And it is they, along with the UPA's fascist founder and leader, Stepan Bandera, who would be enshrined as "fighters for Ukrainian independence" by a controversial raft of legislation passed last month by Ukraine's parliament. While the law has drawn predictable fire from Moscow, and from many in Russified eastern Ukraine, it is also raising hackles in Poland - showing that the debate over Ukrainian fascist history isn't simply a he-said-she-said between Moscow and Kiev, but a deeper problem of how to square Ukraine's sometimes sordid past with its efforts to find a modern identity.

"It's hard to see reconciliation and forgiveness when the Ukrainians treat the UPA criminals and Bandera like national heroes," says Mr. Siekierka, who is president of SUOZUN, a civic organization devoted to the memory of Poles killed by the Ukrainian nationalists. "Accepting one extremism now will lead to the acceptance of other extremisms in future."

An old, deep scar

On the surface, ties between Ukraine and Poland have never been so strong. Poland has been one of the new Kiev government's strongest advocates in its year-old efforts to quell rebellion in eastern Ukraine, break ties with Russia, and move closer to Europe. Last month, shortly before the passage of those controversial laws, Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski visited Kiev.

"Poland's outstretched hand is not just an indication of the current political trend but our understanding of the historic processes turning Ukraine into an equal and extremely important partner and neighbor," he told the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine's parliament.

But the new Ukrainian laws - which have yet to be signed by President Petro Poroshenko - are clearly reopening old wounds around the UPA's campaign, known in Poland as the Volhynia or Volyn massacres. "Ukraine is searching for its own historic identity, and we should try to understand that," Polish Foreign Minister Grzergorz Schetyna told Gazeta Wyborcza. "But at the same time we should tell the Ukrainians what is hurting us."

The former Polish prime minister and leader of the opposition Democratic Left Alliance, Leszek Miller, was less circumspect. "[Komorowski] went to Kiev to extend a hand to the Ukrainians, but left with a knife in his back" due to those laws, he told Polish Public radio.

He said his party would introduce a resolution condemning Ukrainian nationalism in the Sejm. In 2013, Poland's lower house of parliament, the Sejm, came within a hair's breadth of declaring the anti-Polish wartime massacres a "genocide" committed by Ukrainians.

Tensions between Ukrainians and one of their traditional oppressors, Poland, go back centuries. But the current acrimony has its roots in the chaotic events of World War II, when Ukrainian nationalists sided with Nazi Germany in hopes that defeat of the Soviet Union could lead to creation of a Ukrainian state. The Nazis had other plans, and Bandera was arrested when he tried to declare independence in 1941.

But thousands of his followers in the UPA continued their battle, often in collaboration with the Nazis, in hopes of achieving that goal. Critics argue that, while they were certainly "fighters for Ukrainian independence," they are in no way presentable as founding father figures due to their fascist ideology, collaboration with the Nazis, and involvement in mass ethnic cleansings of non-Ukrainian ethnic groups.

"Every country in Europe had people who collaborated with the Nazis, but no modern European country names them as heroes," says Iryna Vereschuk, a civil society activist who was mayor of a small Ukrainian town on the Polish border until earlier this year.

She says the Volhynia massacres have always been an issue, but it did not stop cross-border cultural exchanges and growing understanding between Ukrainians and Poles. "This year, the mood is a bit more sour. Our Polish friends are on our side against Putin and Russia, but many of them are asking painful questions about this law. I have no idea why we need this."

Settling the past

Despite efforts by Poland's Institute of National Remembrance to engage Ukrainian historians in dialogue about the Volhynia massacres, consensus seems further away than ever.

One of the key authors of the new laws, historian Volodymyr Viatrovych, director of the official National Memory Institute, recently defended them in a lengthy rebuttal to international critics. Mr. Viatrovych derided claims that Ukrainian nationalists participated in World War II pogroms against Poles and Jews as only "one of the opinions that has the right to exist" and an image that was "masterfully created over the decades by Soviet propaganda."

Most experts in both Ukraine and Poland say the controversy is unwelcome, but unlikely to seriously impact the growing geopolitical alliance between the two countries as they seek to pull Ukraine out of Moscow's orbit.

"If Poroshenko signs this law, it certainly won't do our relations with Poland any good," says Vadim Karasyov, director of the independent Institute of Global Strategies in Kiev. "At least as long as this crisis goes on, Poland will close its eyes to the implications of this law."

Indeed, the shared animosity toward Russia is, for the moment, papering over many cracks in Ukrainian-Polish relations. For example, another law passed by the Ukrainian parliament aims to "de-communize" the country by outlawing communist ideology and symbols. While that may be controversial for Moscow and many in eastern Ukraine, many Poles seem to approve.

"Actions like tearing down monuments of Lenin are good news for Poland, because it signifies that Ukraine doesn't want to be part of the Russian empire any more," says Pawel Kowal, former Polish deputy foreign minister.

Still, Mr. Kowal says, "Polish politicians shouldn't shrink from using the word 'genocide' when talking about the Volhynia massacres, because we need to prod the Ukrainians to be more interested in settling the past. Any Ukraine under the flag of Bandera will never join the European Union. Period."

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 #34
Salon.com
May 7, 2015
The New York Times does its government's bidding: Here's what you're not being told about U.S. troops in Ukraine
U.S. troops are now operating openly in Ukraine. The "paper of record's" "coverage" is an embarrassment, per usual
By PATRICK L. SMITH
Patrick Smith is the author of "Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century." He was the International Herald Tribune's bureau chief in Hong Kong and then Tokyo from 1985 to 1992. During this time he also wrote "Letter from Tokyo" for the New Yorker. He is the author of four previous books and has contributed frequently to the New York Times, the Nation, the Washington Quarterly, and other publications. Follow him on Twitter, @thefloutist.
 
As of mid-April, when a Pentagon flack announced it in Kiev, and as barely reported in American media, U.S. troops are now operating openly in Ukraine.

Now there is a lead I have long dreaded writing but suspected from the first that one day I would. Do not take a moment to think about this. Take many moments. We all need to. We find ourselves in grave circumstances this spring.

At first I thought I had written what newspaper people call a double-barreled lead: American soldiers in Ukraine, American media not saying much about it. Two facts.

Wrong. There is one fact now, and it is this: Americans are being led blindfolded very near the brink of war with Russia.

One cannot predict there will be one. And, of course, right-thinking people hope things will never come to one. In March, President Obama dismissed any such idea as if to suggest it was silly. "They're not interested in a military confrontation with us," Obama said of the Russians-wisely. Then he added, unwisely: "We don't need a war."

Don't need a war to get what done, Mr. President? This is our question. Then this one: Washington is going to stop at exactly what as it manipulates its latest set of puppets in disadvantaged countries, this time pretending there is absolutely nothing thoughtless or miscalculated about doing so on Russia's historically sensitive western border?

The pose of American innocence, tatty and tiresome in the best of times, is getting dangerous once again.

The source of worry now is that we do not have an answer to the second question. The project is plain: Advance NATO the rest of the way through Eastern Europe, probably with the intent of eventually destabilizing Moscow. The stooges now installed in Kiev are getting everything ready for the corporations eager to exploit Ukrainian resources and labor.

And our policy cliques are willing to go all the way to war for this? As of mid-April, when the 173rd Airborne Brigade started arriving in Ukraine, it looks as if we are on notice in this respect.

In the past there were a few vague mentions of an American military presence in Ukraine that was to be in place by this spring, if I recall correctly. These would have been last autumn. By then, there were also reports, unconfirmed, that some troops and a lot of spooks were already there as advisers but not acknowledged.

Then in mid-March President Poroshenko introduced a bill authorizing-as required by law-foreign troops to operate on Ukrainian soil. There was revealing detail, according to Russia Insider, a free-standing website in Moscow founded and run by Charles Bausman, an American with an uncanny ability to gather and publish pertinent information.

"According to the draft law, Ukraine plans three Ukrainian-American command post exercises, Fearless Guardian 2015, Sea Breeze 2015 and Saber Guardian/Rapid Trident 2015," the publication reported, "and two Ukrainian-Polish exercises, Secure Skies 2015, and Law and Order 2015, for this year."

This is a lot of dry-run maneuvering, if you ask me. Poroshenko's law allows for up to 1,000 American troops to participate in each of these exercises, alongside an equal number of Ukrainian "National Guardsmen," and we will insist on the quotation marks when referring to this gruesome lot, about whom more in a minute.

Take a deep breath and consider that 1,000 American folks, as Obama will surely get around to calling them, are conducting military drills with troops drawn partly from Nazi and crypto-Nazi paramilitary groups.... Sorry, I cannot add anything more to this paragraph. Speechless.

It was a month to the day after Poroshenko's bill went to parliament that the Pentagon spokesman in Kiev announced-to a room empty of American correspondents, we are to assume-that troops from the 173rd Airborne were just then arriving to train none other than "National Guardsmen." This training includes "classes in war-fighting functions," as the operations officer, Maj. Jose Mendez, blandly put it at the time.

The spokesman's number was "about 300," and I never like "about" when these people are describing deployments. This is how it always begins, we will all recall. The American presence in Vietnam began with a handful of advisers who arrived in September 1950. (Remember MAAG, the Military Assistance Advisory Group?)

Part of me still thinks war with Russia seems a far-fetched proposition. But here's the thing: It is even more far-fetched to deny the gravity of this moment for all its horrific, playing-with-fire potential.

I am getting on to apoplectic as to the American media's abject irresponsibility in not covering this stuff adequately. To leave these events unreported is outright lying by omission. Nobody's news judgment can be so bad as to argue this is not a story.

Last December, John Pilger, the noted Australian journalist now in London, said in a speech that the Ukraine crisis had become the most extreme news blackout he had seen his entire career. I agree and now need no more proof as to whether it is a matter of intent or ineptitude. (Now that I think of it, it is both in many cases.)

To cross the "i"s and dot the "t"s, as I prefer to do, the Times did make two mentions of the American troops. One was the day of the announcement, a brief piece on an inside page, datelined Washington. Here we get our code word for this caper: It will be "modest" in every mention.

The second was in an April 23 story by Michael Gordon, the State Department correspondent. The head was, "Putin Bolsters His Forces Near Ukraine, U.S. Says." Read the... thing here.

The story line is a doozy: Putin-not "the Russians" or "Moscow," of course-is again behaving aggressively by amassing troops-how many, exactly where and how we know is never explained-along his border with Ukraine. Inside his border, that is. This is the story. This is what we mean by aggression these days.

In the sixth paragraph we get this: "Last week, Russia charged that a modest program to train Ukraine's national guard that 300 American troops are carrying out in western Ukraine could 'destabilize the situation.'"

Apoplectically speaking: Goddamn it, there is nothing modest about U.S. troops operating on Ukrainian soil, and it is self-evidently destabilizing. It is an obvious provocation, a point the policy cliques in Washington cannot have missed.

At this point, I do not see how anyone can stand against the argument-mine for some time-that Putin has shown exemplary restraint in this crisis. In a reversal of roles and hemispheres, Washington would have a lot more than air defense systems and troops of whatever number on the border in question.

The Times coverage of Ukraine, to continue briefly in this line, starts to remind me of something I.F. Stone once said about the Washington Post: The fun of reading it, the honored man observed, is that you never know where you'll find a page one story.

In the Times' case, you never know if you will find it at all.

Have you read much about the wave of political assassinations that erupted in Kiev in mid-April? Worry not. No one else has either-not in American media. Not a word in the Times.

The number my sources give me, and I cannot confirm it, is a dozen so far-12 to 13 to be precise. On the record, we have 10 who can be named and identified as political allies of Viktor Yanukovych, the president ousted last year, opponents of a drastic rupture in Ukraine's historic relations to Russia, people who favored marking the 70th anniversary of the Soviet defeat of the Nazis-death-deserving idea, this-and critics of the new regime's corruptions and dependence on violent far-right extremists.

These were all highly visible politicians, parliamentarians and journalists. They have been murdered by small groups of these extremists, according to reports readily available in non-American media. In my read, the killers may have the same semi-official ties to government that the paramilitary death squads in 1970s Argentina-famously recognizable in their Ford Falcons-had with Videla and the colonels.

The Poroshenko government contrives to assign Russia the blame, but one can safely ignore this. Extreme right members of parliament have been more to the point. After a prominent editor named Oles Buzyna was fatally shot outside his home several weeks ago, a lawmaker named Boris Filatov told colleagues, "One more piece of sh-t has been eliminated." From another named Irina Farion, this: Death will neutralize the dirt this sh-t has spilled. Such people go to history's sewers."

Kindly place, Kiev's parliament under this new crowd. Washington must be proud, having backed yet another right-wing, anti-democratic, rights-trampling regime that does what it says.

And our media must be silent, of course. It can be no other way. Gutless hacks: You bet I am angry.

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 #35
New York Times
May 10, 2015
Battle Tested, Ukraine Troops Now Get U.S. Basic Training
By ANDREW E. KRAMER

YAVORIV, Ukraine - The exercise, one of the most fundamental in the military handbook, came off without a hitch. A soldier carrying a length of rope and a grappling hook ran to within 20 feet or so of a coil of concertina wire and stopped.

For a moment, he twirled the rope in his hands like a lasso, then threw the hook over the wire, and tugged hard, testing for explosives.

When nothing happened he signaled two comrades, who ran up and started snipping the wire with cutters.

Although this was a typical training exercise for raw recruits in an elemental soldierly skill, there was nothing typical about the scene. Far from enlistees, these soldiers were regulars in the Ukrainian National Guard, presumably battle-hardened after months on the front lines in eastern Ukraine. And the trainer was an American military instructor, drilling troops for battle with the United States' former Cold War foe, Russia, and Russian-backed separatists.

"It's been a long time since I heard a target called an Ivan," First Sgt. David Dzwik, one of the trainers, said in an interview out in the sunny forest, while observing the Ukrainians run through drills. "Now, I'm hearing it again."

The course on cutting wire is one of 63 classes of remedial military instruction being provided by 300 United States Army trainers in three consecutive two-month courses.

Here in western Ukraine, they are far from the fighting, and their job is to instill some basic military know-how in Ukrainian soldiers, who the trainers have discovered are woefully unprepared. The largely unschooled troops are learning such basic skills as how to use an encrypted walkie-talkie; how to break open a door with a sledgehammer and a crowbar; and how to drag a wounded colleague across a field while holding a rifle at the ready.

When the war began a year ago, the Ukrainian Army was all but worthless - rife with corruption and Russian spies, and made up largely of "skeleton" battalions of officers with just a few men. About 1 percent of the equipment was manufactured in the past decade.

Needless to say, morale was dismal. One armored column in the early weeks of the civil war simply surrendered to a crowd of drunken local men rather than fight. At that point, the defense minister estimated that there were at best 6,000 troops from a rapid reaction unit who were actually prepared for combat, out of the 130,000-member army.

Severely pressed, the government took to sending newly recruited National Guard soldiers into combat after only two months of training. They fumbled with their rifles, stumbled into traps and died from treatable wounds.

"Some learn in the classroom, some on the battlefield," Col. Sergei Moskalenko, the commander of the group now retraining at this base, said in an interview. "We had no other choice."

From the earliest days of the war, the government in Kiev had asked for military help from the United States. Its request for a sophisticated antitank missile went nowhere, as Washington feared it would just encourage Russia to send more weapons and men to Ukraine. What eventually arrived was basic training.

The wire-cutting drill was part of that. On a recent spring day two weeks into the course, other similarly low-tech tips were being passed on.

Bewildered Ukrainian troops were being made to hoist one another on their backs, firefighter style, and run up a hill, part of an effort to improve the dismal mortality rate for the wounded.

The American instructors barked simple orders - "Hurry up!" and "Keep moving!" - duly rendered into Ukrainian by interpreters.

The training aims to remold the Ukrainian units by increasing the responsibilities of noncommissioned officers, fixing a Soviet legacy of an officer-heavy infantry. Without sergeants paying attention, basic mistakes were being made, the trainers said.

Capt. Nicholas Salimbene, an American trainer, noticed with alarm that the Ukrainians were carrying their rifles with the safeties off. "It's about the professionalism of the force," he said. "We want them to look like soldiers."

"You see reports about the little green men," he said, referring to the Russian soldiers who invaded the Crimean Peninsula last year in unmarked uniforms, "and they all walk around professionally, and carry their weapons professionally." The Ukrainians should, too, Captain Salimbene said.

The United States is also providing advanced courses for military professionals known as forward observers - the ones who call in targets - to improve the accuracy of artillery fire, making it more lethal for the enemy and less so for civilians.

Oleksandr I. Leshchenko, the deputy director for training in the National Guard, was somewhat skeptical about the value of the training, saying that "99 percent" of the men in the course had already been in combat.

"I don't see anything new," in the American training courses, he said. "Just a different approach." The Ukrainians, he said, had been squeezing a lot into their own two-month boot camp, where the days were "28 hours long."

Capt. Andrii Syurkalo, a Ukrainian officer, said it was commendable that the trainers were willing to use the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal as an element in a class on the Geneva Conventions.

American officers described the course work as equivalent to the latter months of basic training in the United States. The courses will train 705 Ukrainian soldiers at a cost of $19 million over six months. The Ukrainian National Guard is rotating from the front what units it can spare for the training. American instructors intend to recommend top performers to serve as trainers within other Ukrainian units, and in this way spread the instruction more broadly.

In the first two weeks of training, the Americans found the Ukrainians' soldierly skills lacking, and the group generally in need of instruction.

"I came into it expecting them not to know much of the basics," said Sgt. Michael Faranda, who is teaching maneuvers. He was correct. Things "every soldier should know," he said, they did not. Some even forgot their helmets on the first day of exercises.

Still, Sergeant Faranda said, the Ukrainians' willingness to go into combat was all the more notable for their lack of preparation for it.

Shaking his head, Sergeant Faranda said had he asked one group about the Ukrainian procedure for handling a dud grenade. He was told none existed. "They said, 'We just put it in our pocket, or throw it away.'"

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 #36
Sputnik
May 11, 2015
Bad Teacher: Right Sector Invites Ukrainian Armed Forces for Lessons

Right Sector nationalists continue to flirt with the Ukrainian armed forces. Here is why they need it and what they can teach the regular army.

Right Sector extremists on Monday invited the Ukrainian Armed Forces for joint military drills where they will teach recruits their tactics and share their experiences.

After scandalously demanding special status in the Armed Forces, the hardline paramilitary group now wants to settle any disagreements with the Defense Ministry through joint exercises slated for May 12 in Donetsk and Dnepropetrovsk Regions.
In its appeal, the Right Sector calls for "uniting all forces to achieve a victory over the enemy" and states its readiness to defend the country "to the last gasp, to the last bullet".

Rise & Fall

But in essence the formation is trying an ulterior diplomacy, as it is going through a bad stretch.

Its fighters quickly rose on the wave of violent nationalism and emerged unscathed with authorities turning the blind eye to their atrocities.

But they clearly failed to become the heroic spearhead of Kiev's offensive on Donbass and only gained notoriety for looting and terrorizing of defenseless civilians.
To make matters worse, Kiev finally realized that the daredevil radicals were only useful during the Maidan power grab and shortly after it, but not now.

Petro Poroshenko's team probably understood that the extremists went too far when they rallied in Kiev demanding the president's resignation and threatening to burn his administration to ashes.

But the Right Sector still believed in its permissiveness and exclusive self-importance, requesting a special position in the Armed Forces.

So on the one hand, the ultranationalists are maneuvering to avoid a resolute crackdown.

On the other hand, they are still using war for PR.

The Curriculum

In their statement, the Right Sector voiced their readiness to train Ukrainian soldiers. But what can the infamous paramilitary nationalists teach soldiers, for example?
First, they can explain how to burn alive almost 50 people in Odessa and walk free in front of the whole world.

Second, they can teach soldiers to attack striking coal miners who justly demand unpaid wages.

Third, they can instruct servicemen to torture those who witness uncomfortable truths; even if those witnesses are renowned activists and former friends.

Fourth, they can "prove" international peacemaking agreements are a matter of blackmail.

Fifth, they can reveal how to be ultranationalists in a European country and feel at ease despite multiple accusations of neo-Nazism.

There are indeed many things the Right Sector can teach.

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 #37
The Daily Signal
http://dailysignal.com
April 20, 2015
Two Weeks to Make a Soldier: A Ukrainian National Guard Unit Trains to 'Fight to the Death'
By Nolan Peterson
Nolan Peterson, a former special operations pilot and a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, is The Daily Signal's foreign correspondent based in Ukraine.

KYIV, Ukraine-At its training camp on the outskirts of Kyiv this past weekend, the Ukrainian National Guard Azov Regiment held its Spartan Test-a grueling three-hour rite of passage meant to test the mental and physical strength of both new recruits and battle-hardened veterans.

The ordeal is the capstone to a two-week-long whirlwind military training program, after which many recruits travel to the front lines for the first time. The regiment, which began as a civilian volunteer battalion after the Maidan revolution last year, is stuck balancing the competing interests of building a military unit from scratch while sustaining continued combat operations.

With little time or resources available to mold civilians into soldiers, the Azov Regiment's training program focuses on developing the most essential skills and traits necessary to keep soldiers alive.

The director of the program is Mikael Skillt, a 38-year-old Swedish sniper who has been fighting in Ukraine for 14 months. Skillt said that pushing a recruit to his mental and physical limit is an effective way to predict how he will react under the pressures of combat.

"We put them through stress tests to induce panic, and we see how they handle themselves," Skillt said. "We have to see how they react to stress before we send them into combat."

Along with a small cadre of Azov combat veterans chosen to be instructors, Skillt uses techniques such as burying soldiers alive for up to 20 minutes, pepper spray and water boarding to induce panic in the recruits.

Each class starts with about 50 trainees, and the attrition rate is about 10 percent. The most recent class began with 55 recruits, 50 of whom completed training this past weekend. One of the dropouts was a French paratrooper, Skillt said.

The Spartan Test is a series of physical challenges-including a 10-kilometer run, obstacle course and wrestling match-all of which recruits must complete in under three hours.

Forty soldiers, comprising both recruits and soldiers returned from the front (as well as four Russians) participated in Saturday's Spartan Test. Only 23 finished.

"All 40 will go to the East," Skillt said. "But 23 will go a little taller, a little prouder."

The Spartan Test is a rite of passage for the Azov Regiment. Its completion is not a prerequisite for front-line service, but a source of pride within a unit that eschews traditional military chains of command and calls its organizational structure a "brotherhood." Those who successfully complete the Spartan Test receive a pin and are eligible for specialized training programs like sniper school.

The Azov Regiment comprises foreign fighters from 19 different countries, including two Americans currently serving in the unit, according to Azov personnel. Because the rules of the most recent cease-fire ban the use of foreign fighters on both sides of the Ukraine conflict, most of Azov's foreign soldiers have either returned home or left the battlefield to continue serving as trainers.

The Kyiv training camp is in an abandoned industrial park on the city's outskirts. The owners of the property allow the Azov Regiment to use a section of the facility in exchange for protection against looters. The Azov camp is basic, with instructors living in residential trailers similar in size and shape to the Containerized Housing Units (CHUs) the U.S. military used on bases in Afghanistan and Iraq. And while the camp is within Kyiv's city limits, the area has been designated a special "tactical area," allowing for live-fire training under special circumstances.

The makeshift camp was a flurry of activity this past weekend. Girlfriends and other supporters came out to cheer on Spartan Test participants while local volunteers were busy constructing camp facilities. After the event was over, there was a cookout sponsored by civilian supporters of the regiment.

"It helps morale to see this kind of civilian support," Skillt said.

Skillt is a former sniper in the Swedish military. While he has received media coverage in the past for his alleged far-right political ideology, he said images of Ukrainian protestors being gunned down by snipers in Kyiv during the 2014 Maidan revolution spurred him to fight in Ukraine.

"I don't hate Russians, only Putin," he said.

The Azov Regiment has also come under scrutiny due to accusations of promoting Nazi ideology, with many pointing to the similarity of the group's symbol to the Nazi Wolfsangel.

The regiment has downplayed the claims, calling them Russian propaganda. Skillt acknowledged that some of Azov's members held far-right political beliefs, but said they were not representative of the group as a whole.

"All of them are willing to die for their country," Skillt said. "Does their support mean any less if they are nationalistic?"

Skillt joined the Azov Regiment when the unit was still a civilian volunteer battalion with 120 soldiers-only two of whom had any military experience.

"We were a rough bunch," he added. "At first we just had shotguns and other small arms."

"In the beginning we only had pistols," said Ivan Kharkiv, an Azov Regiment soldier in an earlier interview with The Daily Signal. "Now the National Guard gives us all we need."

"We need weapons," he added. "But instructors are more important."

The unit was officially incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard earlier this year, tightening government oversight on combat operations and training. Soldiers now receive a salary and government benefits for their service, and the government has also begun to equip the Azov Regiment with armored fighting vehicles and tanks.

The unit is still mostly autonomous, however. It retains control of its own training program and still independently plans and executes its combat operations in most circumstances. And unlike regular Ukrainian military units, which are heavily composed of draftees, Azov's soldiers are volunteers.

Skillt said the volunteer mentality has made Azov more effective than most regular army units, despite its equipment and weapons shortfalls, and reliance on civilian donations for funding.

"I think this is how it was in World War II in America," Skillt said. "Ordinary people who would never have been in the military under normal circumstances are ready to die for their country. These guys would do anything for their brothers; you will never see them running away from a fight."

The unit currently has about 1,000 soldiers and is training 50 new personnel every two weeks to achieve its desired force strength of 1,200, which is the benchmark required by the Ukrainian government for additional armored equipment delivery.

The unit's rapid growth has spurred its ad hoc training program, which Skillt was tapped to organize due to his prior military experience and performance on the battlefield.

"We're not some fancy military school like West Point," Skillt said. "It's all beta testing, basically."

Despite its manpower goals, Azov remains selective about its recruits. Some are turned away for psychological reasons, and with the help of the SBU (Ukraine's equivalent of the FBI) background checks are completed to weed out potential Russian spies.

One of the key challenges of creating soldiers from scratch in two weeks is educating them with the discipline and knowledge to operate according to the laws of war, as well as within the terms of the Feb. 12 cease-fire. In the opening months of the war, when Azov was not under formal government oversight, the group's conduct in battle was self-policed according to a "warrior code."

But a string of separatist executions of captured Azov soldiers has left many on the Ukrainian side with little faith in their chances of survival if taken prisoner. In one instance, Skillt described, separatists forced a captured Azov soldier to call his grandmother on his cell-phone so that she could listen to his execution.

"Now there is no surrender," Skillt said. "If we are wounded we fight to the death."

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 #38
AP
May 8, 2015
Ukraine president says almost 7,000 civilians killed in war
By Peter Leonard

KIEV, Ukraine - Nearly 7,000 civilians have been killed in the war in eastern Ukraine between government forces and Russian-backed separatists since fighting erupted in April last year, the nation's president said Friday.

Speaking before parliament, Petro Poroshenko said that more than 1,000 people remained unaccounted for.

The figures mark a sharp increase from the most recent United Nations tally of around 6,100 people killed.

Addressing an assembly packed with soldiers, Poroshenko said that 1,657 Ukrainian troops had also been killed in combat - which he described as aggression from Russia.

Moscow has always denied supplying separatist rebels with either equipment or manpower, but it has been open in its diplomatic support for the separatists.

Poroshenko said Russian involvement in the war had forced Ukraine to seek to align further with the West.

"Given that the Russian threat is long-term and considering that the aggressive stance and policy of the Russian Federation poses a major threat to national security, the strategy aims to reach full compatibility in the security and defense sectors of Ukraine and NATO," Poroshenko said.

The uneasy cease-fire that has been in place in the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk since mid-February has been marred by regular violations, although the scale of fighting has largely subsided since its peak.

International cease-fire monitors say both parties are violating the peace agreement by deploying heavy weapons near the front-line.

Separatists have been showing off large amounts of their hardware in rehearsal for a military parade to take place later this week in their stronghold of Donetsk. The city is only a few kilometers from the front-line, so deployment of any firepower with a caliber superior to 100 mm would nominally be in violation of the cease-fire deal.

Poroshenko said that the peace deal remained the only option in place for restoring stability to east Ukraine.

"This has enabled some degree of de-escalation in the conflict," he said. "Every day in which nobody dies is like a feast day for me."

Ukrainian military spokesman Andriy Lysenko said Friday that two soldiers had been killed and another 26 injured over the previous day.

In a calculated snub to Russia, Ukraine this year brought its World War II victory celebrations forward by one day to May 8, the date marked in western Europe. Moscow is set to hold a grand military parade Saturday to mark the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany.

Ukraine has adopted the red poppy as a WWII commemorative symbol at pointed variance with Russia, where wearing the black and orange St. George's ribbon has been commonplace.

On Friday, a stunt climber scaled a 102-meter Motherland Monument war monument in Kiev to install a braid of giant artificial poppies around the head of the statue.

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 #39
Sputnik
May 10, 2015
Ukrainian Conflict Left up to 10,000 Civilians Dead - DPR

According to the data released by the UN recently, more than 6,000 people have been killed in the conflict in eastern Ukraine since April 2014, but DPR parliament speaker believes these are conservative estimates.

A new propaganda campaign by Ukrainian information warriors features a series of posters attempting to compare the heroism of Ukrainian veterans of the Great Patriotic with today's military operation in eastern Ukraine.

The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) maintains that 6,243 people have been killed and 15,615 injured in the southeastern regions of the country after Kiev launched a military operation against independence supporters who refused to recognize the coup-imposed authorities.
OHCHR's spokeswoman warned that the real number could be higher.

"From 6,000 to 10,000 civilians have been killed in Donbass since the military operation began," the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) parliament speaker Andrei Purgin said.

In February, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany worked out a new ceasefire deal for Ukraine. However, both sides report regular violations of the truce.

The participants of the latest contact group meeting on May 6 formed four working subgroups on key aspects of the de-escalation of the conflict. The subgroups are expected to start working in mid-May.

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 #40
RFE/RL
May 10, 2015
Nemtsov's Report On Putin And Ukraine War Finally In Print, With A Little Help From His Friends
by Tom Balmforth

MOSCOW -- On the evening of February 25, the Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov came to his friend, Ilya Yashin, to ask for help with his latest investigation: a sensitive report on Russian soldiers secretly fighting in Ukraine.

Two days later Nemtsov, a relentless critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was brazenly shot dead near the Kremlin as he was walking home.

Now, the report that Nemtsov never wrote has been finally completed by a group of opposition activists and journalists led by Yashin, who pieced together the trail that the slain former deputy prime minister left behind.

"When he was killed and I'd emerged from the initial shock, I realized it was my duty to the memory of my dead comrade to take this work to its end and publish the report that he began," Yashin told RFE/RL.

The report -- titled Putin. War. -- has already undergone an initial print run and is set to be presented to the public on May 12. It was seen by RFE/RL on condition that its contents not be disclosed.

"We're already running into big problems," said Yashin. "Printing shops are being pressured, and so it's going to take a real special operation to print a big run in May. We have experience with this, and Boris Nemtsov had experience with this. I think we'll get over this problem."

'Frightened To Talk'

Initially, Yashin and his colleagues did not know if they had enough material to put the report together.
 
Nemtsov had already sketched out its outlines, contents, and its "ideology." He had gathered documents pointing to the presence of Russian military hardware in Ukraine and interviewed representatives of several relatives of soldiers killed in eastern Ukraine, Yashin says.

But much of this small archive disappeared after his assassination, in which five suspects from the Russian North Caucasus region of Chechnya are suspected of involvement.

Putin's critics fear the investigation may never uncover who was behind the killing because the trail could lead too close to the Kremlin.

After Nemstov was dead, investigators swept his apartment, confiscating computers, hard drives, contact books, and notebooks, his friends say.

"We spent the first week restoring all the documents he'd gathered, which had been seized by investigators," said Yashin. "Some of the documents were stored with his assistants and his employees."

These documents included mere scraps, such as the handwritten note Nemtsov passed to his assistant, Olga Shorina, on the eve of his assassination, Yashin said.

The note -- apparently scrawled on paper in order to avoid possible listening devices and first shown to Reuters in March -- reads: "Some paratroopers have got in touch with me. Seventeen killed, they didn't give them their money, but for now they are frightened to talk."

The Kremlin has repeatedly rejected accusations by Kyiv and Western governments that Russia is providing weapons and personnel to separatists battling Ukrainian forces in eastern Ukraine.

Yashin says he and his team managed to get in touch with all of Nemtsov's contacts, but that persuading them to go on the record proved to be an insurmountable challenge.

"As you can imagine, the death of Nemtsov did not make them bolder," he said.

"We spoke to them, and we really did get specific, really important information from them, but they categorically declined to speak publicly," Yashin added.

"We were persuading them to go on the record, saying that it would be much safer for them to speak publicly than to speak to us secretly."

Their efforts were ultimately futile, he says.

"This wall of fear that we came up against was probably the biggest problem," he said.

'Striking Where It Hurts'

The report is set to be presented to journalists and activists on May 12 at the Moscow headquarters of the political party Nemtsov co-founded, RPR-PARNAS. Much of the material appears to rely on open sources, as did the eight previous reports that Nemtsov published on issues such as corruption and the Sochi Winter Olympics in his crusade against Putin.

Opposition activists and well-known Russia journalists were brought in to contribute to the report. They included Ilya Barabanov of the newspaper Kommersant, who has produced resonant articles from war-torn eastern Ukraine, as well as Lev Shlosberg, a member of the liberal opposition Yabloko party in the western city of Pskov.

Shlosberg was badly beaten by unidentified men after he exposed secret funerals of two soldiers killed fighting in Ukraine.

Yashin said that he and his colleagues have invested in a preliminary print run of 3,000 copies of the report, which will also be posted online. He intends to raise money online to fund a planned first mass print run later this month, though past experience suggests circulating Nemtsov's report may be difficult.

In 2010, police seized a car containing 100,000 copies of Nemtsov's joint report on the boom in corruption during Putin's first 10 years in power. The report's website was also hit by cyberattacks.

Nemtsov's assassination on February 27 provoked an outpouring of grief, particularly in Moscow where mounds of flowers and photographs still adorn the spot where he was killed.

Overall, however, polls show that the overwhelming majority of Russians support Putin's policies in Ukraine.

Nonetheless, Yashin was adamant that the report will make a splash.

"Judging by how we are being hindered in even printing a small run, there is going to be a fair amount of resonance," he said. "We realize that we are striking where it hurts."

The goal of the report, he says, is to "disprove lies."

"They say there aren't Russian troops [in Ukraine]," Yashin said. "We say there are. For Putin, it's very painful to be caught lying."

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 #41
Reuters
May 10, 2014
Special Report: Russian soldiers quit over Ukraine
BY MARIA TSVETKOVA

Some Russian soldiers are quitting the army because of the conflict in Ukraine, several soldiers and human rights activists have told Reuters. Their accounts call into question the Kremlin's continued assertions that no Russian soldiers have been sent to Ukraine, and that any Russians fighting alongside rebels there are volunteers.

Evidence for Russians fighting in Ukraine - Russian army equipment found in the country, testimony from soldiers' families and from Ukrainians who say they were captured by Russian paratroopers - is abundant. Associates of Boris Nemtsov, a prominent Kremlin critic killed in February, will soon publish a report which they say will contain new evidence of the Russian military presence in Ukraine.

Until now, however, it has been extremely rare to find Russian soldiers who have fought there and are willing to talk. It is even rarer to find soldiers who have quit the army. Five soldiers who recently quit, including two who said they left rather than serve in Ukraine, have told Reuters of their experiences.

One of the five, from Moscow, said he was sent on exercises in southern Russia last year but ended up going into Ukraine in an armored convoy.

"After we crossed the border, a lieutenant colonel said we could be sent to jail if we didn't fulfil orders. Some soldiers refused to stay there," said the soldier, who served with the elite Russian Kantemirovskaya tank division. He gave Reuters his full name but spoke on condition of anonymity, saying he feared reprisals.

He said he knew two soldiers who refused to stay. "They were taken somewhere. The lieutenant colonel said criminal cases were opened against them but in reality - we called them afterwards - they were at home. They just quit."

Russia's President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly denied that Moscow has sent any military forces to help rebels in eastern Ukraine, where clashes and casualties persist despite a ceasefire struck in February. Putin's spokesman has derided such allegations by NATO, Western governments and Kiev. Officials say that any Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine are "volunteers," helping the rebels of their own free will.

The former Russian soldiers who spoke to Reuters, as well as human rights activists, said some soldiers were fearful of being sent to Ukraine, were pressured into going, or disgruntled at the way they were treated after fighting there.

The former tank soldier from Moscow said he would not have gone to Ukraine voluntarily. "No, what for? That's not our war. If our troops were officially there it would be a different story."

He said he had been sent to fight in Ukraine last summer and returned to Russia in September when the first peace talks took place. His crew operated a modernized Russian T-72B3 tank, he said.

"(Back in Russia) we were lined up and told that everyone would get a daily allowance, extras for fighting and medals," he said. But he said that they did not get the extras they expected. "We decided to quit. There were 14 of us."

The names of nine soldiers who quit the Kantemirovskaya division are mentioned in an exchange of letters between Viktor Miskovets, the head of the human resources department of Russia's Western Military District, and Valentina Melnikova, who runs the Alliance of Soldiers' Mothers Committees, a group based in Moscow.

In the letters, seen by Reuters, human rights workers asked Miskovets to approve the soldiers' resignations - which one soldier told Reuters the military had been unwilling to do. The letters do not mention service in Ukraine.

The soldiers left the service on Dec. 12, according to a letter signed by Miskovets. He and his deputy did not answer calls.

Three soldiers from the list, contacted by Reuters, confirmed they had quit the service recently but declined to discuss Ukraine.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence declined to comment on soldiers quitting the tank unit or being sent to Ukraine.

FINANCIAL INCENTIVES

In Russia, all men aged between 18 and 27 have to serve 12 months in the military. By law, these conscripts cannot be sent abroad. But according to human rights activists, military officials have been promising conscripts financial incentives to sign contracts that make them professional soldiers. The officials then push the soldiers into going to Ukraine.

Sergei Krivenko, head of a rights group called "Citizen. Army. Rights" and a member of a human rights council created by the Kremlin, has dealt with soldiers' rights since the early 2000s. He said military commanders are trying to find more people who will go to Ukraine voluntarily, "but this is still 'volunteers' in quotation marks, because there is harsh pressure."

Krivenko said commanders take a carrot-and-stick approach: They offer large financial rewards to contract soldiers willing to go to Ukraine. If soldiers refuse, they are told to resign, he said. "You can't criminally prosecute someone for not following the order, because the order itself doesn't exist on paper. It's only oral."

Since 2012, contract soldiers' pay has risen, said Krivenko, who traveled to Murmansk to meet soldiers, about 30 of whom told him they had been to Ukraine. "Now they receive 20, 30, 40,000 rubles a month depending on their rank. Some even get 60,000 a month."

The average wage in Russia is about 30,000 rubles ($580).

Resignation is not an easy decision for the soldiers, Krivenko said: "Just like others in Russia, they're paying off apartments, foreign-made cars... The question becomes where do they find the money to pay off debts, to feed their families?"

Reuters could not independently verify Krivenko's account.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence declined to comment on Russian involvement in Ukraine, but Putin has made his position clear. On April 16, the president said during a televised question and answer session: "I tell you directly and definitely: There are no Russian troops in Ukraine."

"FIELD CONDITIONS"

Another soldier who said he quit the army over the Ukraine conflict is a 21-year-old who was a member of a Grad missile unit. The soldier, who asked that he and his unit not be identified, told Reuters that in the summer of 2014 his team took up position about 2 km (one mile) from the Ukrainian border in the Rostov region of southwest Russia. The operation appeared to be an exercise, though the men were ordered to prepare as if for real combat.

"We drove there without insignia. We took off all the buttonholes and stripes. We were told that we did not need them in field conditions."

In early September the men were ordered to fire their rockets at a target "about 17 km" away, "maybe less." It was possible the target was in Ukraine, he said. "I was hoping I did not aim at any people. Or at least that I missed the target."

He said his fellow soldiers told him another battery from his unit had crossed the border and spent 10 days in Ukraine. "I did not understand who was fighting and what for, and the point of it," he said.

While on leave in January, the soldier said, he was unexpectedly summoned back to his unit.

"We were moved to another (artillery) battery that was supposed to go to some exercises in Rostov region. They said they were really big exercises and very big forces were involved," the soldier said.

Although he offered no proof, he said he had no doubt it was related to the conflict in Ukraine. "Of course it was. Why else would we be called off from vacation?"

He and four others decided to quit the army rather than risk being sent to fight in Ukraine. After completing the necessary procedures, they left in March, according to the soldier's account and documents from human rights activists and military prosecutors.

SPOTTED IN DONBASS

Most Russian soldiers who fought in Ukraine last year - whether volunteers or not - came from Central Russia, the North Caucasus or the Volga region, according to soldiers' accounts, relatives and Russian media. More recently, Reuters reporters in east Ukraine spotted fighters from Siberia, thousands of miles away.

Their appearance lends support to claims that Russian troops from regions closer to Ukraine have become reluctant to join the conflict.

Early this year Asian-looking fighters were seen maneuvering armored vehicles and manning checkpoints in Donbass, eastern Ukraine. The fighters turned out to be Buryats, a Mongolian ethnic group from Russian Siberia near Lake Baikal, about 4,500 km from Ukraine.

Dorjo Dugarov, a politician from Buryatiya, a region in southeast Siberia, said a Siberian soldier who had returned from Ukraine had told him that "people from the western part (of Russia) didn't want to go. Their morale has fallen."

Yevgeniy Romanenko, a 39-year-old rebel fighter in east Ukraine, told Reuters that during battles near Debaltseve in February he drove a truck in a convoy that was accompanied by two tanks with Buryat crews. The tank crews provided cover for the truck convoy.

"One of them drove in front of the convoy and the second one behind," Romanenko said at a hospital in Yenakiyeve, where he was recovering from shrapnel wounds to his leg.

Asked if they were servicemen from Russia, Romanenko said: "Yes, that's for sure. The guys were from there. It was clear."

In February, a Buryat soldier also appeared in an interview on a TV station in eastern Ukraine. Popular singer Iosif Kobzon, who is a member of Russia's State Duma, the lower house of parliament, was filmed visiting injured fighters in a hospital in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine's biggest city. Kobzon says he spoke to a soldier who said he was a member of a tank crew from Buryatiya. The Russian independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta later identified the soldier as Dorji Batomunkoyev from military unit 46108 based in Ulan-Ude, the capital of Buryatiya.

Rebels in Ukraine said the Buryat were not soldiers sent by Russia but volunteers. "We have volunteers from the Russian Federation," Vladimir Kononov, the Ukrainian rebel defense minister, told Reuters in early March. "This tankman could have left the army before he came here."

Reuters could not reach Batomunkoyev. His mother Sesegma, contacted by telephone, confirmed that her son had served in the army and been injured in Ukraine. She visited him in a hospital after he was transferred back to Russia. She declined to say whether he had been ordered to go to Ukraine or had volunteered.

"He did not say he was going," she said. "He called me on February 19 and shouted 'Mum, I got burnt in a tank.' And that's it."

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 #42
World Affairs
http://worldaffairsjournal.org
May 7, 2015
The State of Ukraine
By Alexander J. Motyl
ALEXANDER J. MOTYL is professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark.

The following is an interview with Taras Kuzio, a leading expert on Ukraine and post-communist politics.

MOTYL: You've just completed a tour of the Ukrainian territories adjoining the Donbas enclave controlled by Russia and its proxies. What are some of your key conclusions?

KUZIO: Since the Euromaidan Revolution I've made six visits to southeastern Ukraine for research on a book on the Donbas (supported by the US-based Ukrainian Studies Fund). My just-completed visit was to Mariupol and Volnovakha, which is on the road to Donetsk and 20 kilometers from the front line. I have also visited Donetsk (during the Euromaidan) as well as Slovyansk and Kramatorsk, both of which have been controlled by Ukrainian forces since summer 2014. The visit to Mariupol was with four journalists (two from Kharkiv, one from Kyiv, and one from Lutsk). It was funded by the EU through the Association of Polish Journalists and the TeleKrytyka Ukrainian media monitor and coordinated by Yuri Lukanov, president of the Trade Union of Independent Journalists of Ukraine.

The eight Russian-speaking Ukrainian provinces that comprise Vladimir Putin's "New Russia" project can be divided into three parts. The first consists of Luhansk and Donetsk, which are similar to Crimea in that they have a Soviet identity and a third of the population supports separatism (either independent statehood or union with Russia). The second consists of Kharkiv and Odessa, which are swing regions that experienced street battles in spring 2014 that were won by pro-Ukrainian forces backed by Kyiv. The third consists of the four clearly pro-Ukrainian regions of Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhya, Kherson, and Mykolayiv. Putin's "New Russia" project failed to take into account these regional differences. He remains unable to comprehend the very notion of a patriotic Russian-speaking Ukrainian, because in his imperialist mind-set to be Russophone means to be Russian. Putin's views are strikingly similar to Nazi pan-Germanism.

In most of the regions I visited, the population can be divided into three more or less equal groups: those who support Ukraine, those who are neutral and only want peace, and those who support Russia. Today, the vast majority of activists are pro-Ukrainian due to the fact that a political and social vacuum was created after the Communist Party and pan-Slavic groups either fled to the self-styled Donetsk People's Republic (DNR) or disintegrated, as in the case of the Party of Regions. Many in the pro-Russian camp are deeply demoralized. In spring 2014, when the separatist disturbances first began, there was euphoria among the pro-Russians, who believed that Putin would invade and annex much of Ukraine's southeast, just as he did Crimea. When he didn't and Ukraine fought back, the euphoria collapsed.

MOTYL: So the pro-Ukrainian forces have the upper hand?

KUZIO: Yes, in western and southern Donbas and in northern Luhansk. Putin and the separatists not only did not capture "New Russia": they only control a third of the Donbas. To pursue your comparison of the Donbas with the postbellum American South: with the pro-Russian pan-Slavists, Communists, and Regionnaires leaving the scene, space was opened for the repressed and marginalized Ukrainians to come out of the shadows. Ukrainian NGOs are very active in Mariupol and Slovyansk, and the main one in the former, New Mariupol, is run by Professor Mariya Podybaylo, originally from Ternopil. Women are playing a leading role as civil activists on the front line: such as those we witnessed sewing sniper camouflage and painting road block-posts. Journalist Olena Mokrynchuk heads the Volnovakha-based "Soldatska Poshta" [Soldiers' Mail] NGO.  These pro-Ukrainian forces have the support of the military, the National Guard, and the Security Service, which has been filled with new patriotic personnel since the Euromaidan.

MOTYL: How do average residents view the ongoing crisis?

KUZIO: It's important to remember that Mariupol is billionaire oligarch Rinat Akhmetov's factory town. Essentially, the workers are 19th-century serfs who work in inefficient and heavily polluting Soviet-era factories (one is nine miles long!), are desperate to hold on to their jobs, decide nothing, and have zero voice. Akhmetov wants the factories to continue operating so he can keep sending his large profits to offshore tax havens. If the DNR takes control of Mariupol, his plants will be destroyed or closed. (And these furnaces, if closed, cost millions of dollars to re-fire.) Some people might not like Kyiv, but they do not want war, which they know leads to death and destruction. At the same time, voters are, as in Soviet times and when the Communists or Regionnaires had a monopoly of power, ordered to vote for whomever Akhmetov supports. In 2014 that was the Opposition Bloc, which largely consists of ex-Regionnaires. The remarkable thing about many of the people in the areas of the Donbas I visited is that, no matter how badly the Regionnaires or ex-Regionnaires treat them, the people have a Stockholm syndrome and still vote for them.

MOTYL: What's the mood like among Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers?

KUZIO: We visited the district center of Volnovakha, which is full of Ukrainian troops in high spirits and eager to do battle. I was impressed by their high morale. The highly motivated volunteer Donbas battalion is also in the area. The main base of the volunteer National Guard (Ministry of Interior) Azov battalion is in Mariupol; most of its members are 18- to 22-year-old former Euromaidan activists, students, and soccer ultras who would fight to the death. They believe they could retake Shyrokyne, but are constrained by Kyiv's weak political will.

MOTYL: Is appending the modifier "neo-Nazi" to Azov warranted?

KUZIO: We visited the base and met with their press officers. Two thirds of Azov are Russian speakers from eastern and southern Ukraine and the largest foreign contingent are 50 volunteers from Russia. Only 5 percent of Azov are members of the Social National Assembly and the Azov therefore are hardly the stuff of Nazis. For most people, Azov is a guarantee against the DNR coming to the region and bringing death and destruction with it. Russian-speaking locals will often pay the bills of Azov members in coffee bars and bring the humanitarian assistance to their base. Azov is the locals' guarantee that Mariupol won't come to resemble Donetsk airport or Debaltseve.

MOTYL: Are people thinking of leaving if the instability continues?

Kuzio: Those who have been able to leave Mariupol have done so. Both Volnovakha and Mariupol include refugees from the DNR who live in limbo and are reliant on civil society humanitarian (rather than Ukrainian government) assistance.

MOTYL: What do people expect Russia to do next?

KUZIO: Nobody knows what will happen because the decision lies in one man's hands. Fortifications are everywhere: on the beaches, fields, and roads, showing that Kyiv is actively preparing for a potential invasion. But for Putin to establish a land bridge to Crimea would mean a risky escalation from hybrid to full-scale war (it would require 50,000-100,000 Russian troops, not just "green men"). That would have untold regional and international ramifications.

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 #43
Consortiumnews.com
May 9, 2015
Enforcing the Ukraine 'Group Think'
By Robert Parry
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.

Exclusive: U.S.-taxpayer-funded Radio Liberty has a checkered history that includes hiring Nazi sympathizers as Cold War commentators. Now, one of its current writers has used the platform to bash an American scholar who won't join Official Washington's "group think" on Ukraine, Robert Parry reports.

It may be fitting that the U.S.-funded Radio Liberty would be the latest media outlet to join in the bashing of an American academic who dares to disagree with U.S. policies on Ukraine, which have included supporting a 2014 coup that ousted the elected president and installing a new regime in which neo-Nazis play a prominent role. After all, Radio Liberty has a history of cuddling up to Nazis.

On May 6, a Radio Liberty pundit named Carl Schreck joined the Official Washington herd in demeaning Russian scholar Stephen Cohen as "a Putin apologist" who, Schreck said, was once "widely seen as one of the preeminent scholars in the generation of Sovietologists who rose to prominence in the 1970s, [but] Cohen these days is routinely derided as Putin's 'toady' and 'useful idiot.'"

While hurling insults, Schreck did little to evaluate the merits of Cohen's arguments, beyond consulting with neoconservatives and anti-Moscow activists. Cohen's daring to dissent from Official Washington's conventional wisdom was treated as proof of his erroneous ways.

In that sense, Schreck's reliance on vitriol rather than reason was typical of the "group think" prevalent across the U.S. mainstream media. But Radio Liberty does have a special history regarding Ukraine, including the use of Nazi sympathizers during the ramping up of the Cold War propaganda by Ronald Reagan's administration in the 1980s.

In early 2014, when I was reviewing files at the Reagan presidential library in Simi Valley, California, I stumbled onto an internal controversy over Radio Liberty's broadcasts of commentaries into Ukraine from right-wing exiles. Some of those commentaries praised Ukrainian nationalists who sided with the Nazis in World War II as the SS pursued its "final solution" against European Jews, including the infamous Babi Yar massacre in a ravine outside Kiev.

These RL propaganda broadcasts provoked outrage from some Jewish organizations, such as B'nai B'rith, and individuals including conservative academic Richard Pipes, prompting an internal review. According to a memo dated May 4, 1984, and written by James Critchlow, a research officer at the Board of International Broadcasting, which managed Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, one RL broadcast in particular was viewed as "defending Ukrainians who fought in the ranks of the SS."

Critchlow wrote, "An RL Ukrainian broadcast of Feb. 12, 1984 contains references to the Nazi-oriented Ukrainian-manned SS 'Galicia' Division of World War II which may have damaged RL's reputation with Soviet listeners. The memoirs of a German diplomat are quoted in a way that seems to constitute endorsement by RL of praise for Ukrainian volunteers in the SS division, which during its existence fought side by side with the Germans against the Red Army."

Harvard Professor Pipes, who was an adviser to the Reagan administration, also inveighed against the RL broadcasts, writing - on Dec. 3, 1984 - "the Russian and Ukrainian services of RL have been transmitting this year blatantly anti-Semitic material to the Soviet Union which may cause the whole enterprise irreparable harm."

Though the Reagan administration publicly defended RL against criticism, privately some senior officials agreed with the critics, according to the documents. For instance, in a Jan. 4, 1985, memo, Walter Raymond Jr., a top official on the National Security Council, told his boss, National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, that "I would believe much of what Dick [Pipes] says is right."

That three-decade-old dispute over U.S.-sponsored radio broadcasts underscored the troubling political reality of Ukraine, which straddles a dividing line between people with cultural ties oriented toward the West and those with a cultural heritage more attuned to Russia. Since the Feb. 22, 2014 coup that ousted President Viktor Yanukovych, some of the old Nazi sympathies have resurfaced.

For instance, on May 2, 2014, when right-wing hooligans chased ethnic Russian protesters into the Trade Union Building in Odessa and then set it on fire killing scores of people inside, the burnt-out building was then defaced with pro-Nazi graffiti hailing "the Galician SS" spray-painted onto the charred walls.

Later, some of Ukraine's right-wing "volunteer" battalions sent to eastern Ukraine to crush the ethnic Russian resistance sported neo-Nazi and Nazi emblems, including Swastikas and SS markings on their helmets. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Seeing No Neo-Nazi Militias in Ukraine."]

Targeting Cohen

But anyone who detects this reality can expect to confront insults from the mainstream U.S. media and U.S. government propagandists. Professor Cohen, 76, has borne the brunt of these ad hominem attacks.

One of the ugliest episodes came when the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies joined the bash-Cohen mob. The academic group spurned a fellowship program, which it had solicited from Cohen's wife, The Nation's editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, because the program's title included Cohen's name.

"It's no secret that there were swirling controversies surrounding Professor Cohen," Stephen Hanson, the group's president, told the New York Times.

In a protest letter to the group, Cohen called this action "a political decision that creates serious doubts about the organization's commitment to First Amendment rights and academic freedom." He also noted that young scholars in the field have expressed fear for their professional futures if they break from the herd. Cohen mentioned the story of one young woman scholar who dropped off a panel to avoid risking her career in case she said something that could be deemed sympathetic to Russia.

Cohen noted, too, that even established foreign policy figures, ex-National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, have been accused in the Washington Post of "advocating that the West appease Russia," with the notion of "appeasement" meant "to be disqualifying, chilling, censorious." (Kissinger had objected to the comparison of Russian President Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler as unfounded.)

So, as the United States rushes into a new Cold War with Russia, we are seeing the makings of a new McCarthyism, challenging the patriotism of anyone who doesn't get in line. But this conformity presents a serious threat to U.S. national security and even the future of the planet. We saw a similar pattern with the rush to war in Iraq, but a military clash with nuclear-armed Russia is a crisis of a much greater magnitude.

One of Professor Cohen's key points has been that Official Washington's "group think" about post-Soviet Russia has been misguided from the start, laying the groundwork for today's confrontation. In Cohen's view, to understand why Russians are so alarmed by U.S. and NATO meddling in Ukraine, you have to go back to those days after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Instead of working with the Russians to transition carefully from a communist system to a pluralistic, capitalist one, the U.S. prescription was "shock therapy."

As American "free market" experts descended on Moscow during the pliant regime of Boris Yeltsin, well-connected Russian thieves and their U.S. compatriots plundered the country's wealth, creating a handful of billionaire "oligarchs" and leaving millions upon millions of Russians in a state of near starvation, with a collapse in life expectancy rarely seen in a country not at war.

Yet, despite the desperation of the masses, American journalists and pundits hailed the "democratic reform" underway in Russia with glowing accounts of how glittering life could be in the shiny new hotels, restaurants and bars of Moscow. Complaints about the suffering of average Russians were dismissed as the grumblings of losers who failed to appreciate the economic wonders that lay ahead.

As recounted in his 2001 book, Failed Crusade, Cohen correctly describes this fantastical reporting as journalistic "malpractice" that left the American people misinformed about the on-the-ground reality in Russia. The widespread suffering led Putin, who succeeded Yeltsin, to pull back on the wholesale privatization, to punish some oligarchs and to restore some of the social safety net.

Though the U.S. mainstream media portrays Putin as essentially a tyrant, his elections and approval numbers indicate that he commands broad popular support, in part, because he stood up to some oligarchs (though he still worked with others). Yet, Official Washington continues to portray oligarchs whom Putin jailed as innocent victims of a tyrant's revenge.

After Putin pardoned jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the neocon Freedom House sponsored a Washington dinner in Khordorkovsky's honor, hailing him as one of Russia's political heroes. "I have to say I'm impressed by him," declared Freedom House President David Kramer. "But he's still figuring out how he can make a difference."

New York Times writer Peter Baker fairly swooned at Khodorkovsky's presence. "If anything, he seemed stronger and deeper than before" prison, Baker wrote. "The notion of prison as cleansing the soul and ennobling the spirit is a powerful motif in Russian literature."

Yet, even Khodorkovsky, who is now in his early 50s, acknowledged that he "grew up in Russia's emerging Wild West capitalism to take advantage of what he now says was a corrupt privatization system," Baker reported. In other words, Khodorkovsky was admitting that he obtained his vast wealth through a corrupt process, though by referring to it as the "Wild West" Baker made the adventure seem quite dashing and even admirable when, in reality, Khodorkovsky was a key figure in the plunder of Russia that impoverished millions of his countrymen and sent many to early graves.

In the 1990s, Professor Cohen was one of the few scholars with the courage to challenge the prevailing boosterism for Russia's "shock therapy." He noted even then the danger of mistaken "conventional wisdom" and how it strangles original thought and necessary skepticism.

"Much as Russia scholars prefer consensus, even orthodoxy, to dissent, most journalists, one of them tells us, are 'devoted to group-think' and 'see the world through a set of standard templates,'" wrote Cohen. "For them to break with 'standard templates' requires not only introspection but retrospection, which also is not a characteristic of either profession."

Nor is it characteristic of U.S.-taxpayer-funded Radio Liberty, which has gone from promoting the views of Nazi sympathizers in the 1980s to pushing the propaganda of a new Ukrainian government that cozies up to modern-day neo-Nazis.

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