#2
New York Times
May 25, 2015
The New Dictators Rule by Velvet Fist
By SERGEI GURIEV and DANIEL TREISMAN
Sergei Guriev is a professor of economics at Sciences Po, Paris. Daniel Treisman is a professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles.

THE standard image of dictatorship is of a government sustained by violence. In 20th-century totalitarian systems, tyrants like Stalin, Hitler and Mao murdered millions in the name of outlandish ideologies. Strongmen like Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire left trails of blood.

But in recent decades, a new brand of authoritarian government has evolved that is better adapted to an era of global media, economic interdependence and information technology. The "soft" dictators concentrate power, stifling opposition and eliminating checks and balances, while using hardly any violence.

These illiberal leaders - Alberto K. Fujimori of Peru, Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Viktor Orban of Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia and Hugo Ch�vez of Venezuela - threaten to reshape the world order in their image, replacing principles of freedom and law - albeit imperfectly upheld by Western powers - with cynicism and corruption. The West needs to understand how these regimes work and how to confront them.

Some bloody or ideological regimes remain - as in Syria and North Korea - but the balance has shifted. In 1982, 27 percent of nondemocracies engaged in mass killings. By 2012, only 6 percent did. In the same period, the share of nondemocracies with no elected legislature fell to 15 percent from 31 percent.

This sea change might have started with Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, who combined parliamentary institutions with strict social control, occasional political arrests and frequent lawsuits to cow the press - but also instituted business-friendly policies that helped fuel astronomical growth.

The new autocrats often get to power through reasonably fair elections. Mr. Ch�vez, for instance, won in 1998 in what international observers called one of the most transparent votes in Venezuela's history.

Soaring approval ratings are a more cost-effective path to dominance than terror. Mr. Erdogan exploited his popularity to amend the Constitution by referendum and to pack Turkey's Constitutional Court.

The new autocrats use propaganda, censorship and other information-based tricks to inflate their ratings and to convince citizens of their superiority over available alternatives. They peddle an amorphous anti-Western resentment: Mr. Orban mocked Europe's political correctness and declining competitiveness while soliciting European Union development aid.

When their economies do well, such leaders co-opt potential critics with material rewards. In harder times, they use censorship. The new autocrats bribe media owners with advertising contracts, threaten libel suits, and encourage pro-regime investors to purchase critical publications.

They dominate the Internet by blocking access to independent websites, hiring "trolls" to flood comments pages with pro-regime spam, and paying hackers to vandalize opposition online media sites.

The new dictatorships preserve a pocket of democratic opposition to simulate competition. Elections prove the boss's popularity. In Kazakhstan, President Nursultan Nazarbayev was recently re-elected with 97.7 percent of the vote.

Advertising technology that was devised to sell Fords and cans of Pepsi gets reapplied. Mr. Putin hired a top Western public-relations company, Ketchum, to lobby for the Kremlin's interests in the West. Others recruit former Western leaders as consultants - Mr. Nazarbayev, for instance, hired Tony Blair - or donate to their foundations.

Above all, the new autocrats use violence sparingly. This is their key innovation. Hitler took credit for liquidating enemies. Mobutu hanged rivals before large audiences, while Idi Amin of Uganda fed the bodies of victims to crocodiles. Claiming responsibility was part of the strategy: It scared citizens.

The new autocrats are not squeamish - they can viciously repress separatists or club unarmed protesters. But violence reveals the regime's true nature and turns supporters into opponents. Today's dictators carefully deny complicity when opposition activists or journalists are murdered. Take the case of the former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma. A tape of him reportedly ordering the abduction of a journalist, Georgy Gongadze, who was later found dead, helped fuel the Orange Revolution of 2004, which brought Mr. Kuchma's rivals to power.

And violence is not just costly - it's unnecessary. Instead, the new authoritarians immobilize political rivals with endless court proceedings, interrogations and other legal formalities. No need to create martyrs when one can defeat opponents by wasting their time. Mr. Putin's agents have begun numerous criminal cases against the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny: He has been accused of defrauding a French cosmetics company and stealing wood and interrogated about the killing of an elk.

The West first needs to address its own role in enabling these autocrats. Lobbying for dictators should be considered a serious breach of business ethics. Western democracies should provide objective native-language news broadcasts to counter the propaganda and censorship. And because the information-based dictatorships are susceptible to the pressures of modernization and inevitable economic failings, we need patience.

Besides propaganda, citizens get information by their paychecks - in the Russian idiom, they can choose either "the television or the refrigerator."

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 #3
The Fiscal Times
www.thefiscaltimes.com
May 26, 2015
Putin Isn't Reviving the USSR, He's Creating a Fascist State
BY ROB GARVER
A longtime reporter on the intersection of the federal government and the private sector, Rob Garver is National Correspondent, based in Washington, D.C. He has written for ProPublica, The New York Times and other publications.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has memorably called the breakup of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics a tragedy, and that has led many to believe that he is hoping to restore the old USSR as he consolidates control within Russia and projects military power outward into Ukraine and beyond.

However, the government Putin is building in Moscow bears little resemblance to Socialism, Communism, or anything that Karl Marx would have endorsed based on his thinking. Surely, the man who described religion as the "opium of the people" wouldn't likely associate himself with a regime that has rehabilitated the Russian Orthodox Church as a key element of Russians' patriotic identity.

No, the new Russia looks more like a copy of a totalitarian state from Europe's dark past, dressed in 21st century clothing.

"When you hear the word Fascism you always have to ask yourself: what are they talking about, how are they using the word?" Oxford University Professor Roger Griffin, one of the world's foremost scholars of Fascism, once warned in a 2012 interview. "The word 'Fascist' can be a simple way of insulting somebody, of saying that they are horrible, nasty, that they should go away."

Indeed, it's a favorite epithet of none other than Vladimir Putin, whose surrogates in the Russian leadership alternately accuse the government in Ukraine of either associating with Fascists or actually being Fascist.

What we have here, though, may be an example of what mental health professionals call projection.

A more precise definition of Fascism, according to Griffin, is a political ideology with three broad elements: populist ultra-nationalism, the claim that the country has become soft or 'decadent,' and a "rebirth myth." The third is the promise, typically made by Fascist leaders, to restore a country to some sort of former greatness, usually taken from it treacherously by its enemies, either external or internal.

American scholar Robert Paxton has identified other elements of Fascism, including an obsession with reversing national decline, usually blamed on betrayal, through restriction of civil liberties, purification of the people, military strength, and national expansion. Violence, Paxton notes, is not seen as inherently bad in a Fascist system, and its use to eliminate challenges to the state is glorified.

Given the massive changes imposed on Russian society in the past several years, it's easy to argue that, under Putin, the country is turning into at least a quasi-Fascist state.

The rebirth myth is a near-constant theme for Putin, who has for years now been feeding the Russian people a steady narrative about the global conspiracy to weaken Russia, and the need to rise to greatness again.

The erosion of civil liberties and the rise of ultra-nationalism are, likewise, obvious features of Russia in 2015. Over the past few months, Putin accused "the West" of being responsible for Russia's economic ills. Then he piled on, alleging that Ukrainian troops were in league with NATO against the rebels and Russia. Putin's propaganda war against the West finally hit home.

Last week, for example, Putin signed into law a new measure that allows government prosecutors to declare certain foreign organizations "undesirable" without trial or other approval by a judge, making it possible for Russian citizens to be punished for associating with them. The justification is that outside forces, mainly the United States and its NATO allies, are allegedly seeking to undermine Russia, and must be stopped.

Two weeks ago, one of the remaining English-language newspapers in Russia reported on the development of the "Safe Capital" project, in which vigilante squads made up of men drawn from military associations and groups like the ultra-nationalist Cossacks, would patrol Moscow to enforce public order. The squads, which will be uniformed, will be organized by United Russia - the party of Vladimir Putin, which controls the Russian parliament.

The government, meanwhile, has gradually consolidated control over the press by forcing foreign owners to reduce their holdings in Russian media companies while at the same time funding a growing network of government-run media outlets to feed Kremlin-friendly stories to both the Russian people and the rest of the world.

As for increased militarism and expansionist tendencies, the Russian government has greatly accelerated its spending on the military, even as its economy slides into recession. At the same time, it is occupying Ukraine's Crimean peninsula, continuing to support armed rebellion in eastern Ukraine, and regularly mounting threatening military patrols either inside or close to the territory of its neighbors.

Russians have also witnessed ongoing moves to purge the country of people seen as weak or threatening to the regime, from legislation targeting homosexuals, to the murder of prominent dissident journalists and politicians, most recently noted Putin critic Boris Nemtsov.

Another characteristic typical of Fascist states is the conflict of interest between the business community and the ruling political party. Enterprise and private profit are typically encouraged  within the context of service to the state. It has been well established that many of the country's top business leaders have close ties to Putin, and earlier this year, the Kremlin announced that members of Putin's cabinet would begin to serve on the boards of directors of ostensibly private companies.

Finally, there is Putin himself.

Historically, Fascist governments have relied on strong, charismatic individual leaders in the mold of Hitler or Mussolini, while at the same time encouraging a sort of masculine ideal for the population at large - Hitler's idealized Aryan, or Mussolini's "new Man." In today's Russia, Putin seems to play both roles.

The Russian media routinely idolizes Putin as a model of masculinity, whether he is pictured toting a hunting rifle while bare-chested, practicing judo, or playing hockey. (Putin, who took up hockey in late middle age, scored an improbable eight goals last week, in a game with former professional hockey stars.)

In the end, whether Russia in 2015 really has transformed into a Fascist state, or is breaking new ground in the area of oppressive totalitarianism is a question for academics. Regardless of how the system is eventually labeled, the newly aggressive power on Europe's Eastern doorstep is exhibiting many of the traits of past regimes that have caused untold human suffering. Today, the world should be paying close attention.

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 #4
The Week
www.theweek.com
May 9, 2015
Vladimir Putin's global Orwellian campaign to undermine the West
By The Week Staff

What is Russia doing?

Since it annexed Crimea a year ago, Russia has launched an all-out disinformation campaign on multiple fronts. State-run international news channels and websites such as RT and Sputnik give a pro-Kremlin slant to real news stories, and spread outright lies and outlandish conspiracy theories. State agencies and private firms employ platoons of bloggers who scour Western and Russian news sites for articles about Russia or Ukraine and swamp them with pro-Kremlin comments. Russian agencies have set up news websites in several East European languages. The order to create this propaganda campaign, on which the Kremlin spends an estimated $600 million a year, came straight from the top: President Vladimir Putin said in 2012 that Russia would develop "a matrix of tools and methods to reach foreign policy goals without the use of arms but by exerting information and other levers of influence." The propaganda is surprisingly successful in sowing confusion. "Journalists are taught to report both sides," said Rick Stengel, former managing editor of Time and now a U.S. undersecretary of state. "When the Kremlin says there are no Russian soldiers in Crimea, they have to repeat it. How do you combat someone who just makes stuff up?"

What tools does the Kremlin use?

One primary tool is the television network RT, which was called Russia Today until authorities renamed it to obscure the Russian connection. RT has cable and satellite channels in English - including RT America, which potentially reaches 85 million viewers. It covers current events in the U.S., focusing on police brutality, protests, and poverty, but it also produces wacky segments investigating whether, for example, the CIA created Ebola. Few Americans watch RT, and one of its anchors quit after publicly disavowing the "lies" that she and others were ordered to tell about the conflict in Ukraine. But the web version, RT.com, does have reach. It became the first news channel to rack up 1 billion views on YouTube. In the past year, the main theme has been the supposed rise of neo-Nazi groups and fascism in Ukraine - making pro-Russian separatists the good guys.

How are stories faked?

StopFake, a Ukrainian myth-busting site run by journalism students, has documented hundreds of fake photos spread by Russian news sites and social media. Peter Pomerantsev, a leading authority on Russian propaganda efforts, says that stories alleging that Ukrainian fascist gangs, trained by NATO, had murdered children were popping up all over these sites in early 2014, when Russia was taking over Crimea and fomenting unrest in eastern Ukraine. StopFake traced the photos back to their original sources and found that some were from past Ukrainian conflicts, some were from crime scenes in other countries, and some were actually stills from movies. The group also discovered that Russian news shows were using actors to play weeping or wounded victims and tell tales of Ukrainian government brutality. Russians call this maskirovka, or masquerade - an information war to accompany actual war.

What about East European sites?

Dozens of pro-Russian news sites have cropped up in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria. Fluently written in the local languages, the sites carry the same kinds of faked photos and articles about supposed Ukrainian fascism as well as skillfully argued analyses extolling Russia's benevolent intentions. Czech counterintelligence has flagged one of the sites, Aeronet.cz, as "a source of dangerous pro-Russian propaganda." Earlier this year, when a NATO convoy passed through Czech territory, several of these Czech sites reported that the local population was outraged by the incursion of "foreign" troops. In fact, the convoy was greeted with Czech throngs waving U.S. flags.

What do the Kremlin's bloggers do?

Russia has a 24-hour "troll factory" in St. Petersburg, where hundreds of employees work in 12-hour shifts writing pro-Putin comments on Western and Russian news articles, fabricating their own news stories, creating and posting satirical videos, and posting tweets and Facebook updates from fake profiles. "They bombard the websites of CNN and the BBC," says one former employee, Marat Burkhard. One day's assignment, he said, was to assert that NATO troops had been embedded with Ukrainian forces all along. Another was to call President Obama an uncultured "monkey" for chewing gum during his January visit to India. "You work in the Ministry of Truth, which is the Ministry of Lies, and everyone kind of believes in this truth," says Burkhard. "It's Orwell."

What's the ultimate goal?

To give the Kremlin plausible deniability of its aggressive activities, and create sympathy for Russia in the old Soviet bloc. In eastern Ukraine, Pomerantsev says, Russian media managed "to create a parallel reality where 'fascists' have taken power in Kiev, ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine are in mortal danger, and the CIA is waging a war against Moscow." Russia recently launched a similar campaign in former Soviet republic Estonia, which has a large ethnic Russian population. In March, Russian-language television in Estonia broadcast a faked clip purporting to show Estonian government support for Nazism - a clear attempt to foment another pro-Russian uprising. "This is a new idea of war," Pomerantsev says. "This is information-psychological war with endless subversion."

Putin's movie star pals

To bolster Vladimir Putin's cult of personality, the Kremlin cultivates washed-up Western movie stars. Action hero Steven Seagal, for example, is a personal friend of the Russian leader. Both men have black belts in martial arts, and palling around with Seagal helps bolster Putin's ultramacho image. "He is one of the greatest world leaders, if not the greatest world leader, alive today," Seagal has said of Putin. On a boxing tour of Russia last year, actor Mickey Rourke wore a Putin T-shirt and said Putin was "a real good regular guy." Another Putin admirer, French actor G�rard Depardieu, even accepted Russian citizenship as a way of avoiding French taxes. He has praised the Russians' "powerful temperament," adding, "One must be very strong to be Russian."

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 #5
Moscow Times
May 26, 2015
Russians Must Ditch Illusions for Bright Future
By Vladimir Ryzhkov
Vladimir Ryzhkov, a State Duma deputy from 1993 to 2007, is a political analyst.

Analysts traditionally classify authoritarian regimes as either successful or unsuccessful, based on their political stability, rate of economic growth and their ability to implement economic and social reforms for modernization.

"Classic" successful authoritarian regimes include those of modern China, Singapore under former leader Lee Kuan Yew, Chile under former dictator Augusto Pinochet, South Korea under its first presidents, as well as Mexico and Taiwan.

They are the exceptions. The overwhelming majority have failed because authoritarian regimes are generally corrupt and unstable, create stagnant economies, force the people to live in poverty while the ruling elite bask in luxury and eschew all meaningful attempts at modernization.

There are dozens of them in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Classic examples of unsuccessful authoritarian regimes are found in Nigeria, Angola, Cuba, Myanmar, Zimbabwe and the former Soviet republics of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Belarus and, unfortunately to an ever greater degree, Russia.

According to a democracy rating conducted by the Economist magazine based on conditions in 2012 of 167 countries, 59 were democracies or imperfect democracies, 35 had transitional regimes and the remaining 73 were classified as authoritarian regimes.

Of the latter, only China, Vietnam, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan had successful authoritarian regimes - the latter three only due to their natural resource wealth and small populations. All of the other authoritarian regimes were examples of failure and suffering populations.

The existence of a few successful authoritarian regimes is a challenge to the theory that societies and economies can only achieve sustainable development through the rule of law, protection of property rights, government officials' accountability before the people and the regular transition of power through free elections.

However, those rare exceptions usually enjoy their success due to the presence of a strong leader or founder such as Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore or Deng Xiaoping in China who set a productive modus vivendi for their regimes from the outset.

They created meritocracies, properly functioning public institutions, market economies and advantageous foreign policy and foreign economic policies. Examples of this type include Chile, Saudi Arabia and Singapore, all of which are geared toward the United States and the West.

However, there is one more fundamental but frequently overlooked difference between successful and unsuccessful authoritarian regimes.

North Korea, Iran, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Myanmar and Venezuela are ranked as the worst for their suppression of democratic freedoms, widespread corruption, economic backwardness, increasing social stratification and failure to modernize. At the same time, these countries share another common feature - the extremely ideological nature of their respective regimes. In contrast, all successful authoritarian regimes are fundamentally rational and pragmatic.

In fact, both Lee Kuan Yew and Deng Xiaoping considered rationalism and pragmatism their main credo. One of the great Chinese reformer's favorite sayings was, "It doesn't matter what color the cat is, as long as it catches mice."

In contrast, the Castro brothers in Cuba have struggled for socialism and against the United States for decades and the Kim dynasty in North Korea continually fights "South Korean militarism and U.S. aggression" while building a bloody, repressive and hunger-inducing form of communism at home.

Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe - who constantly criticizes the U.S. and the European Union and whose policy decisions have prompted international sanctions - builds his own special brand of socialism and once drove thousands of white farmers out of the country, pushing the national economy to a condition of collapse.

Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez and his successor, Nicolas Maduro, combined Castro's socialism with nationalism in the style of 19th-century Venezuelan leader Simon Bolivar, and proclaimed their opposition to the U.S. and world capitalism. They have managed to cause the economic collapse of their country - rich in raw materials - and found themselves forced to ration foodstuffs and consumer goods to their people.

All of these countries and their ruling elite live in a world of illusions and ideological chimeras that shape their domestic life and their economic and foreign policy. They all struggle against imaginary foreign and domestic enemies, hold deficient understandings of the modern economy and isolate themselves from the world.

That approach has imbued their populations with a similarly delusional understanding of themselves and the world, robbing them of both present opportunities and all hope of future progress.

In recent years, Russia has increasingly moved away from rationality and pragmatism and toward the world of illusions and chimeras. In place of rational arguments, government officials - most of whom grew up as atheists - now frequently speak of sacred territory, a nebulous "Russian world," blasphemy and sacred objects, divine providence, a special Russian civilization, the sanctity of military victory and so forth.

With the help of a concerted and full-scale propaganda campaign, leaders have resurrected past national myths - the chimerical and persistent mental constructs of Russia's mass consciousness. They include the alleged need for an autocratic personal savior of the Russian people, the superiority of Russian civilization and the subsequent need for isolation from the modern world and the rejection of modernization. After all, if Russia is already better than everyone else, why change anything?

It also promotes the idea that rulers and the state are sacred, and that any sacrifice or deprivation is justified for the sake of asserting Russia's greatness - a term defined strictly as Russia's military might, territorial holdings and its geopolitical influence.

 And finally, it includes the idea that Russia exists in a hostile environment, that it is locked in a confrontation with the United States and the West - because of which the country must remain on the constant war footing of a "besieged fortress," arm itself against foreign aggressors and crack down on domestic enemies ranging from the intelligentsia to ordinary discontents.

The whole picture of the world is completely illusory and false, and yet that is now what motivates the domestic and foreign policy decisions of the Russian authorities. And that is why Russian policy has become so unpredictable and irrational.

Authoritarian regimes only succeed if they are rational. Irrationalism and an escape into the world of illusions and chimeras is a sure path to the quagmire of underdevelopment and poverty, violence and instability. To return to the path of development, Russia must first abandon its chimeras and stand on the solid path of rationalism and pragmatism.

 #6
The New Yorker
May 10, 2015
Putin's Victory Day, Not My Grandmother's
BY MASHA GESSEN

As my grandmother lay dying in Moscow last month, her live-in caretaker, a former math instructor from Ukraine who had come to love my grandmother in the six years she had been with us, wrote in a Skype message to me: "The ambulance comes really fast now and doctors are under orders to pay special attention to veterans so they live to see Victory Day." She seemed almost convinced that the Kremlin's expressed will to keep veterans alive meant I didn't have to schedule a flight from New York to Moscow quite yet. On some level of the caretaker's imagination, deathless Putin himself would be keeping my grandmother alive.

My grandmother, who had never liked taking orders from the Kremlin, died one month before Moscow convened its celebration of the seventieth anniversary of victory in what Russia calls The Great Patriotic War, which in Russian historiography began in June 1941, when Germany broke its non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, which had been its ally for the first two years of World War II. This year, for the first time in my life, I had no phone calls to make on Victory Day.

For decades, I called or visited on May 9 and said, "Happy Victory Day," and grandmother would have said, "This is the one holiday no one can doubt and everyone can agree on." Coming from my grandparents, this meant that the victory over Nazi Germany was so huge and joyous an occasion that they had been willing to celebrate it with the Soviet regime, which they hated, and, now, with the Putin regime, which they despised.

This year, those words would have been difficult to say. The holiday, which has taken a variety of shapes and sizes in the last seventy years, has finally turned into a war-mongering orgy of such proportions that even the memory of triumphing over Hitler might pale in comparison.

The holiday has never, in fact, been rooted in living memory. For the first two decades after the war, the Soviet Union tried diligently to forget it. Casualty figures were kept secret. Discussion of Nazi crimes was strongly discouraged, and books about the Holocaust were censored. There were no parades or fireworks: May 9th was a workday like any other.

It was during Leonid Brezhnev's nineteen-sixties that Victory Day became a celebration of Soviet valor. The tradition of military parades in Red Square was launched; Great Patriotic War veterans were paraded before school children; Soviet directors began making movie after movie about the war. It was a freshly written history with some notable omissions: the Holocaust was never mentioned, the official casualty estimate was fixed at the staggering-but still low-figure of twenty million, and the name of the Red Army's commander-in-chief during the war went unuttered.

Even twenty years after the end of the war, the number of veterans, many of whom had returned damaged physically or mentally, was starting to dwindle. To keep the pageantry going, the government kept expanding the ranks of people accorded the official status of Great Patriotic War veteran-first to include those who had never seen battle (because, in many cases, they had served in the secret police), then to include those who had worked in the rear for the benefit of the war effort, and later to include soldiers who had taken part in the Soviet Union's later wars. My grandmother, in fact, received her veteran credentials as part of one of those expansions: her own plan to volunteer for the Army was foiled by pregnancy, so she stayed behind while her twenty-two year-old husband went off to the front and was killed.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia, which was uncertainly trying to find a post-imperial, post-militatristic identity, stopped the military parades. It also acknowledged that it had lost about twenty-seven million people in the war. In the nineteen-nineties, Victory Day briefly became a holiday my grandparents could fully enjoy. Moscow's central avenue would be closed to traffic for the day, and my grandparents-three of them were alive at the time-would step out into a sea of people, most of whom would thank them and many of whom would give them flowers.

The first post-Soviet Victory Day military parade in Red Square took place in 1999. It was framed as a response to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, which had begun six weeks earlier, but the timing suggests this may have been a last-minute pretext. Russia was starting to reshape its politics, and this required tapping into what the country's most perceptive sociologist, Yuri Levada, had long maintained lay at the heart of Soviet national identity: a sense of pride for the victory over the Nazis mixed with the pride of citizenship of a great and expanding power. Seven months later, Vladimir Putin came to power.

Over the fifteen years that Putin has ruled Russia, the story of the Great Patriotic War has acquired new meanings and symbols. Stalin's name and likeness have gradually been reintroduced into the story-and into the streets of Russian cities. A new visual symbol has been invented, the orange-and-black St. George's ribbon. It once accompanied the country's highest military medals, but now people tie a length of the striped ribbon to their cars' antennae in advance of May 9th. The intelligentsia meekly protested the ribbon's misappropriation and mass production, but it was too handy a symbol not to catch on.

In the last couple of years, St. George's ribbon has turned into an all-purpose badge of patriotism, which can now be worn year-round. It was worn, for example, by thugs who attacked members of the protest group Pussy Riot last year. This year, Moscow schoolchildren were required to wear it to school on the Friday before Victory Day. It is now pinned to lapels, or enlarged to the size of a neck scarf, or worn elsewhere on the body-including as that part of a flip-flop that insures the toehold.

This Victory Day, Putin was snubbed by the Western powers, whose leaders declined his invitation to greet the biggest military parade yet in Red Square. He was surrounded instead by friends from North Korea, Venezuela, China, Zimbabwe, and a handful of other countries. They watched sixteen thousand troops march past, while others drove tanks or accompanied a giant nuclear submarine that looked like it had come up through the cobblestones in front of the Lenin Mausoleum. Putin gave a speech in which he underscored the relevance of the holiday for today's Russia.

"As we celebrate this sacred date today, we are once again made aware of the grandeur of the victory over Nazism. We are proud that it was our fathers and grandfathers who managed to overpower, destroy and annihilate that dark force. Hitler's adventurism turned into a terrible lesson for the world community," he said, using the very word-'adventurism'-that the U.S. State Department uses instead of the word 'war' when it talks about Putin's own actions in Ukraine. "Back then, in the nineteen-thirties, enlightened Europe failed immediately to see the deathly threat of Nazi ideology. Seventy years later, history calls on us to be aware and alert once again. We have seen an effort of creating a unipolar world, and we are seeing force-oriented thinking gain traction." Without naming the United States, Putin said that Russia needed to fight the enemy's attempts to gain world domination.

A car-window sticker that has become wildly popular in Russia in the last few weeks puts the same message in simpler language. It features two sets of schematic figures. On the left, a stickman with a Soviet flag in place of a head is anally penetrating a stickman with a Nazi flag for a head. On the right, the top's head is a Russian flag and the bottom's head is a U.S. one. The left pictogram is captioned, "1945." The right says, "2015."

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 #7
Putin Faces New Kind of Parade of Sovereignties in Degraded Russian Regions
Paul Goble

Staunton, May 27 - Russian governors, "even the most loyal" to the Kremlin, as a result of the intensification of the economic crisis, find themselves between a rock and a hard place and are beginning to complain about Moscow's failure to articulate an anti-crisis strategy which takes the interests of their regions into account, according to Nikolay Petrov.

"A clear example" of this, the head of the Moscow Center for Political Geography Research says, was the recent statement by Voronezh Governor Aleksey Gordeyev that the government in Moscow "doesn't recognize what is really happening in the regions" (daily.rbc.ru/opinions/politics/25/05/2015/5563343b9a79472e7e3ed3e4).

This does not mean that Moscow is at risk of "regional fronds" like those in the 1990s: neither the regions nor their leaders have the capacity to make themselves independent actors, Petrov says. "But an increase in the economic and political independence of the regions is inevitable" in the run-up to the 2016 elections.

Also "inevitable," he suggests, are fundamental changes in the regional elites, which have been degraded during Putin's time in office, because "some of them are not ready for such a turn of events. And they will give way to more effective commands of crisis managers," in some cases with Moscow's help and in others despite what Moscow is doing.

As anyone who has been following the Russian media knows, governors have been retiring at a rapid rate in recent months, some to put themselves in a position to win back their offices in upcoming elections, others to take new positions at the center, and some because they have proven unable to govern their regions under conditions of economic stringency.

But all of these changes, especially over the next two years, are going to affect center-periphery relations in the Russian Federation, not transforming the country into a genuine federal system but making the regions and their leaders more independent because both the regions and Moscow need that at the present time.

"Today," Petrov writes, "Russia if it is a federation at all is more a federation of corporations than of regions," with the big companies like Gazprom, Lukoil, Russian Rail, and the like "generating and controlling the main financial flows in the country" and in many cases installing as governors their own people.

That makes the current situation of regional politics "in part similar to what it was in the 1990s."  But, Petrov argues, "over the last 15 years, regional elites have strongly degraded, the result of both intentional efforts of the center and of negative selection," something almost inevitable when loyalty counts for more than effectiveness.

From his very first days in office, Putin sought to "restore control" of Moscow over the regions. He created presidential plenipotentiaries, chiefs of regional militias, and other federal officials who were installed in regional governments.  That worked more or less as long as oil prices were high, but with their fall, it has become a problem and not just for the regions.

"The strengthening of the vertical to a large extent occurred at the expense of the weakening of horizontal ties," something that means that "federal structures in the regions today often coordinate their actions very poorly."  Clearly, Petrov says, Putin's approach went too far and now there needs to be a correction of some kind.

Initially, he points out, Putin sought a solution through the creation of new bureaucratic structures "with extraordinary authority."  The regional development ministry was broken up, and now there are three ministries with specific regional responsibilities. Moreover, Moscow worked hard to increase its direct control of governors.

The Kremlin doesn't need "strong politicians" like Yury Luzhkov, Mintimir Shaymiyev and Murtaza Rakhimov of the 1990s; it doesn't even want relatively independent ones like those which have been dismissed or even arrested in recent months. But it both needs and wants effective managers, and such people have to have the authority to do their jobs.

The September gubernatorial elections - 11 that had long been scheduled and nine more that have become necessary because of changes of cadres - also are affecting this process, Petrov argues.  While candidates are still selected primarily for their loyalty, they do need to be able to do their jobs or Moscow faces problems.

"The system of administration at the regional level is degrading," and that has the effect, he argues of weakening "the entire regional pyramid of power," something that means Moscow is forced to intervene when it really doesn't want to and would not have to if there were stronger people in office.

"This degradation," Petrov concludes, is especially dangerous in view of the fact that the center of gravity is inevitably shifting to the regional level." The governors will play a major role in the 2016 Duma elections, and if they don't have the resources they need, they will inevitably weaken the federal center in order to do what Moscow wants.

That in turn, Petrov says, will "create the preconditions for a new strengthening of the regions" and of those who head them.

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 #8
RFE/RL
May 26, 2015
Rights Groups Condemn 'Dangerous' Russian Undesirables Law
by Tom Balmforth

MOSCOW -- Rights groups named as potential targets of a new law allowing the government to brand international organizations "undesirable" and shutter their Russia operations have criticized the legislation, calling it a "dangerous" new weapon in a Kremlin campaign to suppress civil society.

Activists expressed concern on May 26 that the "loosely worded" legislation could potentially be used against almost any organization, and would deepen the chill over advocacy groups within Russia by threatening to cut them off from the global network of rights groups.

The law signed by President Vladimir Putin late last week gives the authorities the power to shut down foreign and international organizations deemed a threat to Russia's security, defense capability, or public order.

The law "is formulated in such a way that they can brand whoever they want," said Svetlana Gannushkina, director of the Civic Assistance Group, which advocates for migrants and displaced people, and a member of the board of the widely respected Russian human rights organization Memorial.

Activists say it threatens to intensify a clampdown on civil society that began when Putin returned to the Kremlin for a third term in May 2012, after weathering big street protests he claimed were incited by the United States and other Western states.

Gannushkina compared the "undesirables" law to legislation Putin signed later that year under which dozens of NGOs with financing from abroad have been forced to register as "foreign agents" -- a term that evokes the Cold War days when dissenters were sometimes stamped as "enemies of the people."

On May 25, two days after the Kremlin said Putin had signed the bill, a little-known lawmaker from ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky's party asked the Prosecutor-General's Office to check whether Memorial and four other prominent groups should be listed as "undesirable."

The other groups named by lawmaker Vitaly Zolochevsky were Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Transparency International, and the Carnegie Moscow Center -- the Russian office of the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

While most of those groups are based abroad, human rights advocates suspect the law is intended to isolate activists in Russia. Putin has frequently portrayed civil society groups, particularly those with foreign funding, as instruments used by the West to undermine his government and Russia itself.

After a number of warnings, alleged violators of the law can face criminal prosecution and punishment including financial penalties, forced labor, restrictions on movement, or up to six years in prison.

"The law is not so much about us, but primarily about Russian activists and Russian organizations," said Tanya Lokshina, Russia program director at Human Rights Watch. "The law aims to cut them off from international networks -- to put them in further isolation, in a vacuum of sorts. I think that's what's most important here."

"Frankly, in order to shut down our Russia office, the government doesn't need another piece of legislation," Lokshina said. "That could be done in a fraction of a second."

In comments to RFE/RL, members of four of the five groups named by Zolochevsky said his request suggested he was not acquainted with the text of the law and that he may have made the statement to raise his public profile.

Lokshina said, for instance, that Memorial is a registered Russian legal entity and therefore "cannot possibly be defined undesirable to begin with."
But Russian authorities have cast a wide net with past laws, and Memorial Rights Center Chairman Aleksandr Cherkasov was more cautious.

"No one knows yet what it means to have been placed on this list because this law has not been implemented before," Cherkasov wrote on Facebook.

Sergei Nikitin, head of Amnesty International's Russia bureau, said that the "wording of the law is unclear and itself represents a danger not only to foreign and international social organizations, but also for Russian organizations."

At the same time, he expressed doubt that the government would go so far as to brand Amnesty International "undesirable."

Amnesty and the other groups named by Zolochevsky "in no way work on issues that undermine defense capability or the security of the country," Nikitin said.
"Our work is primarily focused on defending the rights of people in Russia. If they want to shut our organization, they'll have to recognize all our activities as 'undesirable'. I think there'd be a big scandal," he said.

"Russia would be the only country that has branded Amnesty undesirable," Nikitin said. "It's difficult to predict what's going to happen, but this would really be a very strange step."

The Prosecutor-General's Office has not commented publicly on Zolochevsky's request.

Russia's rights ombudsman Ella Pamfilova has she was "seriously concerned" by the law, which has also drawn condemnation from the United States and European Union.

In a report released late on May 25, Pamfilova said the legislation was overly vague and that the power given to the government to tag groups "undesirable" without a court decision contradicted the Russian Constitution.

Under the law, authorities can ban foreign NGOs and jail Russians working with them for up to six years.

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 #9
Moscow Times
May 25, 2015
Weekly Wrap: Russia Deals With Undesirables
By Unfair Observer
Unfair Observer is the pen name of a Russian journalist that The Moscow Times has invited to observe the most brain-dead weekly developments in Russia.

With the May holidays over, it is back to the everyday war for Mother Russia. Last week was marked by an atrocious, brutal, inhuman attack on the country, delivered by the Canadian ice hockey team, which dared to trounce the Russians in the World Championship finals. Luckily, the team found a way to retaliate by snubbing the Canucks on the congratulations. But otherwise it was business as usual - which in Russia means bans.

The Undesirables

The State Duma passed in the final reading a bill allowing for the expulsion from Russia of "undesirable foreign organizations." Undesirability will be decided by the Prosecutor General. Companies and NGOs may be sanctioned, and any locals who continue working for an undesirable face up to six years in prison. The OSCE begged Putin to veto the bill, which ensured it was signed into law.

Lawyers around the world must be reeling from the attempt to legalize desirability (or the lack thereof). The courts are bypassed - the desires of a nation of 140 million will be decided by a single prosecutor. The law opens breathtaking possibilities - there are so many undesirable things from an official Russian viewpoint. Ukraine should be listed thus, as should the White House. Both should be fined and required to disband immediately. The likes of Alexei Navalny should be banned and ordered to disappear into thin air. As for that Canadian ice hockey team ...

It would be funny, however, if someone else were to come to power and declare all the people who passed undesirability laws undesirable.

Breed, Woman, Breed

The queen of moralists, lawmaker Yelena Mizulina (you know, the woman who asked the state for a bigger apartment because her cat was giving birth) finally found the root of all evil - abortions. State health care bankrolls cheap, grungy abortions for Russian women who cannot afford a private clinic. Mizulina, a mother of two, proposed banning the sinful practice - pay for it yourself, girl - and banning medical abortion pills.

Last week, we advocated polygamy for officials, because they already have it in Chechnya. But forcing millions of women in the provinces, where $300 a month is a coveted salary, to breed indiscriminately to fill the demographic gap is something else entirely. Beating a child, shouting at it, ignoring it, or mentally breaking it as a post-apocalyptic drill sergeant might are already popular parenting methods amid poor, overworked Russian mothers; if they are saddled with millions of real, not illusory, undesirables, this might very well produce a nation of neurotics.

Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko already called the bill "extremist." Perhaps she, unlike Mizulina, cares about women's rights. But maybe she just remembers that the 1917 revolution in Russia was kicked off by women, who took to the streets just because there was not enough bread in the capital. How about an abortion revolution?

The Invisible Math

Meanwhile St. Pete teenager Roman Krutovsky came in second place at the Intel ISEF 2015 Grand Awards in math, which is something like a Nobel Prize for high schoolers. A handful of Russian kids performed impressively in the rankings, to the utter indifference of the country's media (theorems are not twerking).

It's amazing that kids like these are popping up. But it's anyone's guess if they will one day triumph over the moralists and the prosecutors - or grab those prizes and apply to Oxford or MIT.

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 #10
RFE/RL
May 25, 2015
Russia Could Use Prison Labor For 2018 World Cup
by Tom Balmforth

MOSCOW -- A prominent member of parliament for the ruling United Russia party has drafted a bill to allow enterprises to employ thousands of convicts as a cheap workforce to build infrastructure for the 2018 FIFA World Cup.
 
The legal amendments reported on May 25 in leading business daily Kommersant create a mechanism for companies to use prisoners as laborers on work sites hundreds of kilometers from where they are incarcerated.
 
Any type of enterprise -- state, private, or public -- could employ prisoners facing compulsory correctional labor or serving time in penal colony settlements -- facilities used to isolate prisoners typically convicted of less severe crimes.

There are 39,500 prisoners serving sentences in 128 penal-colony settlements in the Russian Federation, according to 2015 statistics from the Federal Penitentiary Services (FSIN) cited by Kommersant.

This is just a fraction of Russia's prison population, which last year was estimated at 670,000 by the International Center for Prison Studies.

The bill was drafted by  Aleksandr Khinshtein, a deputy for the ruling United Russia party and deputy chairman of the parliamentary committee for security.

Khinshtein, unlike several deputies in the State Duma, does not have a reputation for making eccentric legal proposals that never see the light of day.

Khinshtein proposed offering companies tax breaks to encourage them to use prison labor. He said the cheap workforces would be particularly useful as Russia prepares to hold the 2018 World Cup, soccer's grandest global event.

Memories Of The Gulag

He told Kommersant that the prisoners would be held in "isolated areas that function like colony-settlements outside the correctional facilities with the aim of adapting the convicts to work."

"For example, if an enterprise is interested in using prisoners for work and has a hostel, then the convicts could live in that hostel but only on condition that it will be appropriately equipped and guarded by FSIN," he said.

The Federal Penitentiary Service supports the initiative, according to Kommersant, but only with the proviso that prison laborers be employed in the same federal province where they are incarcerated.

Russia's opposition condemned the initiative as reminiscent of the gulag economy under Josef Stalin that saw millions of Soviet citizens sent to camps and used as forced labor in inhospitable mines and abortive infrastructure projects.

"During a crisis, a cheap workforce is needed, and here we have it -- the simplest decision: to use prison labor, the classic Stalin model," wrote Dmitry Gudkov, an opposition lawmaker and often a lone voice of dissent in Russia's lower house.

"We only need to recall how many people are serving time for trumped-up cases, how many of them are entrepreneurs -- these people are also going to be sent to take part in this slave labor," said Gudkov.

Vladimir Osechkin, head of human rights project Gulagu.Net, was quoted by Kommersant as saying: "The initiative is correct, but only if the prisoners are given the opportunity to voluntarily choose to work."

"Otherwise, we are talking about the revival of the economic model of the Gulag when all of the main construction projects of the USSR were built at the expense of the poorly paid or completely unpaid."

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 #11
Forbes.com
May 21, 2015
(Un)Holy Alliance: Vladimir Putin, The Russian Orthodox Church And Russian Exceptionalism
By Paul Coyer
I cover foreign policy, with a focus on Eurasia, for Forbes. I have spent quite a bit of time in academia, having graduate degrees from Yale University and the London School of Economics and Political Science. My PhD, from the LSE, was on Sino-American relations and diplomatic history. From 2007-2013 I was a visiting scholar at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and I served as a visiting lecturer on Chinese foreign policy and Sino-American relations at the University of Florence, Italy, in 2011 and 2012.

Amidst the geopolitical confrontation between Vladimir Putin's Russia and the US and its allies, little attention has been paid to the role played by religion either as a shaper of Russian domestic politics or as a means of understanding Putin's international actions. The role of religion has long tended to get short thrift in the study of statecraft (although it has been experiencing a bit of a renaissance of late), yet nowhere has it played a more prominent role - and perhaps nowhere has its importance been more unrecognized - than in its role in supporting the Russian state and Russia's current place in world affairs.

And while much attention has been paid to the growing authoritarianism of the Kremlin and on the support for Putin's regime on the part of the Russian oligarchs whom Putin has enriched through his crony capitalism, little has been paid to the equally critical role of the Russian Orthodox Church in helping to shape Russia's current system, and in supporting Putin's regime and publicly conflating the mission of the Russian state under Vladimir Putin's leadership with the mission of the Church. Putin's move in close coordination with the Russian Orthodox Church to sacralize the Russian national identity has been a key factor shaping the increasingly authoritarian bent of the Russian government under Putin, and strengthening his public support, and must be understood in order to understand Russia's international behavior.

The close relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and the Russian state based upon a shared, theologically-informed vision of Russian exceptionalism is not a new phenomenon. During the days of the Czar, the Russian ruler was seen as God's chosen ruler of a Russian nation tasked with representing a unique set of value embodied by Russian Orthodoxy, and was revered as "the Holy Orthodox Czar". Today, a not dissimilar vision of Russian exceptionalism is once again shared by the ROC and the Kremlin, and many Russians are beginning to see Vladimir Putin in a similar vein - a perception encouraged both by Putin and by the Church, each of which sees the other as a valuable political ally and sees their respective missions as being interrelated.

The 70 plus years of Soviet rule wreaked havoc on the Church. The Church was severely oppressed, with many of its clergy imprisoned, tortured and/or executed. Parts of it were also co-opted by the Soviet state, with many clergy becoming KGB informants (it has long been rumored that Kirill, the current Patriarch, or "Pope", if you will, of the ROC, has KGB connections). As soon as the Soviet Union fell in 1991, the ROC began working to rebuild its formerly dominant role in Russian society. At first, it had competition for religious adherents and for influence in the religious sphere in Russia. In the newly open environment of the 1990's, a flood of Western missionaries, including evangelicals, Catholics, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, etc., set up missions in the former Soviet Union, and in the spiritual vacuum that accompanied the fall of the atheistic Soviet system these missionaries found fertile and receptive ground, causing the ROC to fear that its opportunity to rebuild its social influence would be short-circuited and it would be merely one of many religious bodies in Russia - not the dominant religious institution and culture shaper. In response, the ROC successfully pushed the government to pass a law in 1997 that restricted the freedom of religious practice of faiths considered "foreign" in origin and put the ROC back in the driver's seat in terms of its ability to shape of the emerging national culture.

Russian nationalism began to rise along with the spread of ROC influence in society and the diminishing of the influence of alternative religious groups. This restriction of religious freedom on the part of non-ROC groups and privileging of the ROC also marked the beginning of a trend of increasing restrictions on citizenship rights and the beginning of the slow death of Russia's fledgling democracy, illustrating that religious freedom is many times the first freedom to be curtailed by the state. Its demise is usually the metaphorical canary in the coal mine - indicating that an unhealthy political atmosphere exists and that other freedoms will soon likewise be curtailed. In terms of church-state relations, this privileging of the ROC status in Russian society marked the beginning of a political alliance between the ROC and the Russian state that has grown increasingly close and formalized under Putin and which has been beneficial to both parties.

When Putin came to power he shrewdly noted the ROC's useful role in boosting nationalism and the fact that it shared his view of Russia's role in the world, and began to work toward strengthening the Church's role in Russian society. Early in his presidency the Russian Duma passed a law returning all church property seized during the Soviet era (which act alone made the ROC one of the largest landholders in Russia). Over the past decade and a half, Putin has ordered state-owned energy firms to contribute billions to the rebuilding of thousands of churches destroyed under the Soviets, and many of those rich oligarchs surrounding him are dedicated supporters of the ROC who have contributed to the growing influence of the church in myriad ways. Around 25,000 ROC churches have been built or rebuilt since the early 1990's, the vast majority of which have been built during Putin's rule and largely due to his backing and that of those in his close circle of supporters. Additionally, the ROC has been given rights that have vastly increased its role in public life, including the right to teach religion in Russia's public schools and the right to review any legislation before the Russian Duma.

The glue that holds together the alliance between Vladimir Putin and the ROC, and the one that more than any other explains their mutually-supporting actions, is their shared, sacralized vision of Russian national identity and exceptionalism. Russia, according to this vision, is neither Western nor Asian, but rather a unique society representing a unique set of values which are believed to be divinely inspired. The Kremlin's chief ideologue in this regard is Alexander Dugin (see a good summary of the historical roots of Dugin's philosophy and of his impact on the Russian government here.) According to this vision of the relationship between church, state, and society, the state dominates, the ROC partnering with the state, and individuals and private organizations supporting both church and state. This has provided the ideological justification for Putin's crackdown on dissent, and the rationale behind the Church's cooperation with the Kremlin in the repression of civil society groups or other religious groups which have dissenting political views. And the ROC's hostility toward the activities in Russia of other religious groups have dovetailed with that of Putin, who views independent religious activity as a potential threat to his regime.

Internationally, Russia's mission is to expand its influence and authority until it dominates the Eurasian landmass, by means of a strong central Russian state controlling this vast territory and aligned with the ROC as the arm of the Russian nation exercising its cultural influence. This vision of Russian exceptionalism has met with broad resonance within Russia, which goes a long way to explaining Putin's sky high polling numbers. Putin has successfully been able both to transfer to himself the social trust placed by most Russians in the ROC and has also to wrap himself in the trappings of almost a patron saint of Russia. The conflict between Russia and the West, therefore, is portrayed by both the ROC and by Vladimir Putin and his cohorts as nothing less than a spiritual/civilizational conflict. If anyone thought Europe's wars over religion were finished in 1648, the current standoff with Russia illustrates that that is not the case.

The forceful articulation of a muscular Russian exceptionalism and of Putin's role as the defender of the Russian nation has become increasingly important to the Kremlin in the past three years or so - first as a response to the Moscow street protests that accompanied Putin's re-election to the presidency in March 2012, and particularly in the past 18 months as Russia's economic implosion has undermined the previous foundation for Putin's domestic political legitimacy. The legitimacy of the Putin regime rested, until relatively recently, on his ability to raise living standards for everyone and to enrich the oligarchs surrounding him on the backs of high energy prices that brought a flood of money into Russia. Putin's system of inefficient, crony capitalism that left the economy underdeveloped and overly dependent upon global energy prices worked as long as energy prices remained high and Russia still had fairly cooperative relations with the West. With the collapse of that model due to the combination of the sharp drop in energy prices, the impact of Western sanctions, and growing antagonism with the West, it has been useful for him to portray himself as the champion of a Russian nation beset by a hostile West determined to reshape Russia in its own image. The West's goal, says the Kremlin, is to spread liberal Western values within Russia and so dilute the Russian national character and keep Russia weak and divided. The Russian nation, therefore, must remain united behind Putin's leadership, and hold fast to its distinctive national identity. Putin has so successfully tied his fate to the fate of the Russian nation that a senior Russian government official stated last year that "If there's Putin - there's Russia, if there's no Putin - there's no Russia." Putin's sky-high approval ratings are evidence that this message, repeated by the Kremlin controlled media and reinforced by an ROC whose reach into Russian society and cultural influence is so extensive, has been widely accepted by the Russian public.

Taking this a step further, the view of Putin as a quasi-sacral figure is becoming increasingly widespread throughout Russia. In St. Petersburg, Putin's hometown, he has been portrayed as an angel reaching out his hands and blessing the city's inhabitants. Just this past weekend St. Petersburg unveiled a bust of Putin in the attire of a Roman Emperor. Sects within the ROC revere Putin as the reincarnation of the Apostle Paul and even pray to him. Drawing an analogy between the Apostle Paul's conversion experience on the road to Damascus, this sect believes that, just as Paul persecuted Christians and then became their leader, Putin once was part of the KGB, which persecuted the Church, and he now works to strengthen it. (Although it is perhaps of more than passing interest to note that the leader of this sect began praising Putin so highly only after her superiors in the ROC asked the FSB (the successor to the KGB) to begin tailing her - after beginning her pro-Putin sect the investigation of her ceased.)

The Russian Orthodox concept of the spiritual father, which encourages almost complete deference to the Church's hierarchy and clergy, is one that most Russians understand, and a defining aspect of Russian culture. This widely understood theological concept has paved the way for Russians to accept and defend Putin's authoritarianism and to see him as the country's spiritual father. Government officials, as well as religious leaders, have been known to speak of Putin in quasi-religious terms. Vladislav Surkov, who has held various senior positions surrounding Putin, including Deputy Prime Minister, has referred to Putin as "a man whom fate and the Lord sent to Russia."

It would not be true to say that here has not been occasional conflict between the Kremlin and the Church, nor that support for the Kremlin has been unanimous within the Church, but any opposition has been nipped in the bud and the public support of the ROC hierarchy for Putin's regime has grown even stronger since Putin returned to the presidency. Once considered a liberal, Patriarch Kirill was supportive of the Kremlin and of then President Medvedev's government when Kirill became Patriarch in 2009, but the protests that marred Putin's return to the presidency in early 2012 marked a turning point. At first, Kirill did not immediately come to Putin's aid, and even made comments vaguely supportive of the protestors' demands. After stories began appearing in Kremlin-controlled media, however, pointedly criticizing Kirill for lavish material possessions, he fell into line, repeating the warnings he had made in previous years of an "apocalypse" if Western-style liberalism was allowed to become dominant in Russia. Since then, Kirill has given Putin his full spiritual and political backing, labelling him "a miracle of God" and belittled the "ear piercing shrieks" of Putin's political opponents.

Within the Church, those who have dared to say anything critical of Putin face being defrocked and publicly humiliated. When a priest who had responsibility for ministering to the Siberian prison camp within which the former billionaire turned Putin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky was imprisoned had the temerity to say that he believed Khodorkovsky to be a political prisoner, he was defrocked and forced to repent on his knees. Most clergy, however, appear to be strongly supportive of Putin's role as the leader of a Holy Orthodox Russia with some making no secret of the fact that they hope that Russia is on the road to theocracy.

Just how much influence the ROC has within Russian society is is illustrated by poll numbers that show that the vast majority of Russians self-identify as Russian Orthodox (estimates range from 68-90%), although the majority of these do not attend services or otherwise publicly practice their faith. In fact, a sizeable minority of Russians (polls have shown around 30%) who self-identify as Russian Orthodox simultaneously describe themselves as being atheist, illustrating that many value the Church primarily a symbol of Russian culture and national identity than as an actual spiritual presence in their day to day lives. For both those who practice their faith regularly and for those who view Russian Orthodoxy as primarily a cultural symbol, however, the Church has a deep well of social trust, and the vast majority of Russians share the Church's vision of Russian national exceptionalism and suspicion of the West. Putin has successfully tapped into that well of social trust, wrapping himself in the trappings of almost a patron saint of Russia. And because of the depth and breadth of ROC influence in Russia, the Church's support has helped to dampen any emerging unrest with his rule.

The anti-Americanism that is an important part of the militant Putin/ROC vision of Russian exceptionalism has found fertile ground in broad swathes of the Russian public, and although the Russian media, controlled by the Kremlin, plays a role in shaping such opinions, this Russian mindset is not dependent upon media stoking - the messianic sense of national identity is deeply rooted.

A Levada poll that was just released indicates a worrying trajectory among Russians: nearly 60% believe that the United States poses a serious threat to their country (a 12% increase since 2007), 40% believe that the United States would possibly attempt to take control of the Russian economy, 31% believe that Washington could actually attempt to invade and occupy Russia, and, perhaps most importantly, 36% are convinced that the United States is attempting to impose its (alien and decadent) values system on Russian society.

Some analysts have argued that, unlike during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the current conflict between Russia and the United States is based upon national interests, and that ideology is not a major factor. President Obama himself has assured us that the ideology does not play a role in the current confrontation with Russia.
However, the influential and highly nationalist role of the ROC in Russian society, the way in which Putin has moved to sacralize the Russian national identity, and the receptiveness of many Russians to this messaging on the part of the Kremlin and the Church, all illustrate that the current conflict is no less an ideological conflict than was the Cold War. The Marxist historical dialectic may no longer be a point of debate, but it is an ideological conflict nonetheless.

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 #12
Kyiv Post
May 26, 2015
Russian journalists move to Riga to set up an independent media in exile
by Olena Goncharova

RIGA, Latvia - It's a typical newsroom, but not typical journalists.

This tiny apartment in downtown Riga is headquarters for a team of Russian journalists who call themselves Russia's free press in exile.

They started their Meduza news outlet (Russian for "jellyfish") in October, when some 20 veterans of the Russian online newspaper Lenta.ru, headed by their chief editor Galina Timchenko, relocated to Riga.

Many quit their jobs in March, following Timchenko's firing by website owner Alexander Mamut, reportedly for publishing an interview with Ukraine's Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh, who holds ardently anti-Russian views.

Russia's regulator considered the material as a violation of a law against extremism. The journalists got the message that they wouldn't be able to escape censorship if they stayed in Russia.

"The dismissal of the chief editor and the appointment of the pro-Kremlin official is a violation of the law on media, which discusses the inadmissibility of censorship," reads an open letter of the Lenta journalist in protest of Timchenko's dismissal.

Timchenko described their move to Riga as a "forced measure" that was the result of suffocating working conditions in Russia, she said in an interview with The Moscow Times.

Konstantin Benyumov, chief editor of English-language edition of Meduza, explains that they ended up in an ex-Soviet republic because it's cheaper to start a business and register new media in Latvia.

Moreover, there is a big Russian community in Latvia with a population of only two million people.

Some of the Russians in Latvia are pro-Kremlin, however.

"I'm afraid they like Russian regime a bit more than we do," he explains. "A taxi driver once told me that Russians should have deployed troops to Helsinki also."

The team focuses on mostly Russian topics, but also keeps an eye on Ukrainian events. They still have special correspondents in Russia. Meduza translates its stories in English and aggregates. They also have stories published by The Guardian, Quartz and Buzz Feed.

Even though they launched its English version a couple of months ago, they already have more than 3,300 Twitter followers. Meduza's home page has more than 123,000 Twitter followers and 50,000 Facebook likes.

The team also attracts its readers with quizzes and special projects aimed to explain Russia for the Russian audience and English speakers. Index cards explain complex topics of Russian politics or economy in a format that mixes Q&A and slideshow.

In an interview with Forbes Russia in September Meduza's publisher Ilya Krasilshchik said that "if everyone didn't discuss Meduza in a year - it would mean that we have failed."

Benyumov is certain that Meduza is succeeding.

Meduza collections donations and has investors behind the project, although they won't identify them. "They have nothing to do neither with media nor with the politics," Timchenko was quoted as saying.

The site has already reached three million unique visitors a month. Around 80 percent of their audience lives in Russia.

Meduza is also the biggest Baltic media outlet, but rarely covers local news.

"None of us could answer the question how long we'll stay in Riga. We left so we could keep doing our job, and we made our work secure - so Russian authorities won't be able to come to our newsroom and take away our computers and a server - we cut off this danger and left."

However, the team would be ready to return to Russia as soon as the repression ends.

For now, they have each other and freedom of speech.

"If there's a need for urgent work - say, at night - none is hanging out in the bar. Our life scheme is work and sleep, so we're ready to work even at 3 a.m." And that's what Meduza did while reporting on a murder of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, killed near the Kremlin on Feb. 27.

They miss home, but are happy to work together in new circumstances.

"We're kind of a dysfunctional family," Benyumov adds, smiling. "But all people here are nice."

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 #13
Meduza
https://meduza.io
May 19, 2015
The most draconian law yet
Everything you need to know about Russia's new legislation against 'undesirable organizations'

On May 19, the Russian Duma approved a third and final draft of legislation that criminalizes "undesirable organizations." If the Federation Council and President endorse the bill, any foreign or international NGO that the government declares "undesirable" will be banned from working in Russia. All an organization's subsidiaries will be closed, its accounts frozen, and its supervisors and staff can even face civil and criminal penalties. For all Russia's recent laws in this vein, the "undesirable organizations" bill is still unprecedentedly draconian, and the power it grants authorities to ban NGOs is extrajudicial. Meduza breaks down the most important facets of legislation that is likely to change Russia's NGO landscape dramatically.

How does the Russian government justify this law?

Not without confusion. Some Duma deputies believe that certain destructive organizations-supposed platforms for terrorist, extremist, and nationalist ideas-are threatening the country with "color revolutions" and attempting to sow interethnic and sectarian conflict.

The legislation's authors admit that the state already has instruments to combat terrorist, extremist, and nationalist organizations, but they consider them insufficient. In the future, deputies are certain, Russia will need to prevent even the "emergence of conditions that facilitate the activities of such foreign organizations," which threaten the country's "fundamental values."

How do officials decide which organizations are "undesirable"?

It's hard to say. The law states that foreign and international organizations can be declared "undesirable" for "presenting a threat to the basic constitutional order of the Russian Federation, its defense capability, or its state security."

The Attorney General's office would play the main role. It will be tasked with deciding when and if to add an organization to the list of "undesirables," while working in conjunction with the relevant law enforcement agencies. These decisions will likely be made in cooperation with the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but the specifics of this process remain unclear. The procedure could boil down to the Attorney General's office simply notifying the police of its decision.

An organization becomes "undesirable" just as soon as the Justice Ministry makes the announcement on its website. In other words, the Justice Ministry will need to create a special list, similar to the list of "foreign-agent NGOs" is operates now.

The Russian government can't close down foreign and international organizations. An "undesirable" organization's Russian subsidiaries are shut down and the parent group is not allowed to establish new ones.

Blacklisted organizations can appeal the decision in court. The Attorney General also has the prerogative to exclude an organization from the list itself.

Can commercial organizations be labeled "undesirable"?

Yes. After the bill's first draft, lawmakers declined to clarify its language, leaving the it ambiguous about whether commercial organizations are vulnerable. In other words, there is nothing to stop the authorities from applying this law to businesses.

The law is, generally speaking, surprisingly vague. The term "foreign non-government organization" is not defined under other Russian laws and it's not entirely clear what it means here, either. Many believe that "non-government" and "non-commercial" organizations are one and the same. It is also not entirely clear why the lawmakers didn't use the term more common term in Russian legal language: "foreign non-commercial, non-governmental organization."

Will an organization be able to work without being legally incorporated in Russia, through the use of freelancers, for example?

No. Anyone working for an "undesirable" organization-including in an unofficial capacity-faces fines of up to 15,000 rubles (about $300) for ordinary citizens, up to 50,000 rubles ($1,000) for officials, and up to 100,000 rubles ($2,000) for the organization itself. Criminal proceedings will be initiated against repeat offenders and the punishments can be even harsher, with fines of up to 500,000 rubles ($10,000) and prison sentences ranging from two and six years.

"Undesirable" organizations are also forbidden from holding public events (which can mean anything from seminars to protests) and from possessing or distributing promotional materials, including via mass media. It's not entirely clear from the text of the law, but it appears that the ban on possession and distribution affects not only members of the organization, but also ordinary citizens.

In addition, all Russian banks and financial institutions are forbidden from cooperating with "undesirable" organizations and they are required to inform Russia's financial watchdog agency about any such organizations that attempt to contact them.

Will foreign employees also be held responsible under the law?

Yes. The civic and criminal codes don't apply to Russian citizens only. For foreigners who take part in the work of "undesirable" organizations, the authorities can fall back on additional measures: they can be ban these people from entering Russia.

Who can end up on the list?

No one really knows. Judging by the legislation's memoranda and the transcripts from discussions of the bill, Russian lawmakers are relying on the same logic they used to create a registry and additional regulations on so-called "foreign agents." Noncommercial, foreign-funded organizations can, according to the Duma, threaten Russia's security insofar as they "act at the beck and call of their masters overseas."

The law against "foreign agents" affected a large number of NGOs, including those that criticize the policies of the Russian authorities, defend human rights, or monitor elections. Clearly the law against "undesirable" organizations is directed at NGOs with similar mandates, but in this case it targets foreign and international groups, not merely Russian outfits.

What is the likelihood of this law being passed?

Extremely high. Judging by other highly-politicized initiatives in recent times (such as the ban on US Citizens adopting Russian children and the ban on "propagandizing non-traditional sexual relations"), laws of this sort rarely raise questions in the Federation Council (the upper house of Russia's parliament) or with President Putin, both of whom need to approve the bill, in order to make it law.  

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 #14
The Daily Beast
www.thedailybeast.com
May 18, 2015
What It's Like To Be On Putin's Enemies List
Natalia Pelevina status as a major opposition leader has protected her-until now.
By Michael Weiss

If the history of modern Russia is a history of ominous knocks at the door, then last month, history caught up with Natalia Pelevina.

One of the few female Russian opposition leaders, Pelevina at first mistook the visitor to her apartment in the Butovo district of Moscow on April 17 as a roving potato merchant. "We thought it was some farmers and so we just ignored it. Then, a couple of hours later, when I was ready to leave, I opened the door and this guy sticks a badge in my face and starts pushing me inside. The first things he says is, 'We're coming in because we have information that a highly dangerous criminal lives in this apartment.'"

Pelevina was more bemused then scared, figuring the cop had the wrong address. But then the badge-brandisher was joined by six of his colleagues, a mixed team featuring officers from Russia's Investigative Committee (SK) and its Interior Ministry (MVD). The former head of the December 5 Party-so named for the date of Russia's largest protest movement since the collapse of the Soviet Union-was about to have her home upended in search for proof that she was an American agent and financier of "riots."

Now, any story out of Putinist Russia needs to be accompanied by its own glossary of terms, which appears invented by a commissar assigned to oversee ideological rigidity of Lewis Carroll. "Fascist," for instance, means "democratic," while "democratic" almost certainly means "fascist," especially when the subject is a foreign country, such as Ukraine, Lithuania, or Estonia. "Rioter," meanwhile, is a domestic coinage referring to "protester" or "member of the opposition" or, in more ennobled cases, "dissident."

"I was trying to call my lawyer right away," Pelevina, a longtime friend, tells me, a few weeks after her uninvited guests had gone. "The main guy with the badge starts ripping the phone out of my hand. 'Both of you have to sit down,' he said to me and my partner. 'You can't talk to each other, you can't make any calls. This is the warrant to search your place.' They were very thorough; they went through everything-my clothes, my dresses, my tights, my socks. They took all my computers, phones, anything remotely electronic, even battery chargers. They took my passport. The house was a mess. Every time I told them they were violating my rights by not allowing me to call my lawyer, they didn't care."

A house raid is less common than you might think in Putinshchina. The reason one generates panicked headlines in the dwindling sphere of an independent Russian media is that it rarely, if ever, occurs in isolation: typically, having one's home searched is preliminary for an impending dam-break of state harassment, vilification, and inevitable prosecution.

"I can't say I was shocked," Pelevina, says. "Especially after Boris's assassination."

Boris here is Nemtsov, the former deputy prime minister of Russia who, on February 27, was shot in the back five times as he walked home alongside his Ukrainian girlfriend on Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge, 61 meters from the Kremlin and one of the most heavily invigilated areas of Moscow. This week, Nemtsov's colleagues published a report the slain dissident had been working on for months, documenting the number of Russian soldiers who have died in Putin's dirty, undeclared war in Ukraine, as well as the total cost to Russian taxpayers of underwriting that war ($50 billion) and maintaining an illegal occupation of Crimea ($1 billion). Several astute observers of Nemtsov's murder have argued that, given the skill and competence required to perpetrate such an "operation," it is highly probable that agents of the Federal Security Service (FSB)-the latter-day KGB-were behind it.

Time has since been measured by the opposition as Pre-Boris and After-Boris: After-Boris, any attention involving badge-flashers and drawer-riflers has come to mean, "Will I be next?" At Nemtsov's funeral, a strange man approached Kseniya Sobchak, the TV chat show host and daughter of former Leningrad mayor Anatoly Sobchak-once upon a time Putin's political patron and mentor-and told her that she would be next. Sobchak wisely left Russia for a time. Alexei Venediktov, the editor-in-chief of Ekho Moskvy, a still somewhat independent radio station, was personally threatened by Ramzan Kadyrov, the warlord-president of Chechnya, for publishing on the outlet's website the Charlie Hebdo cartoons mocking religion, including Islam. (In one of the least plausible explanations for the motive behind Nemtsov's murder, it was alleged that his solidarity with the Hebdo massacre victims led to a fall into disfavor with Islamic extremists who then exacted revenge.) Venediktov, too, left Russia for a while, then came back. Rumors abound that there may even be a Kadyrov "hit-list."

Nonetheless, Pelevina has retrenched rather than retreated. In early March, largely as a show of solidarity, Pelevina quit her own party and joined Nemtsov's Republican Party of Russia-People's Party (RPR-PARNAS), which, formerly headed by a troika, has now been reduced to one co-chair, post-Boris: former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov. It was to put pressure on Kasyanov, Pelevina believes, that she was targeted. There may have been another reason, too. The warrant to raid her place was signed by Artur Karpov, a "Magnitsky judge"-that is, one of a number of jurists who have been implicated in Russia's largest conspiracy under the Putin regime, in which officials from the nation's tax bureaus, Interior Ministry and FSB stole $230 million in a tax scam, then allegedly had Sergei Magnitsky, the whistleblowing attorney who exposed them all, murdered.

In 2013, Karpov refused to hear a lawsuit brought by the law firm Firestone Duncan, demanding that the Investigative Committee do its titular job and investigate the officials implicated by Magnitsky. (A U.S. sanctions law now bars entry into the United States and seizes any American-held assets of those officials). Theoretically the Magnitsky Act can and should be used to blacklist other officials credibly accused of gross human rights abuses not related to this one affair, although the Obama administration has obstructed every attempt to do that, even with Russia sanctions in place over the invasion of Ukraine.

(In 2013, Magnitsky was found guilty, posthumously, of tax evasion in Russia's first ever trial of a corpse and human history's second ever since the "Cadaver Synod" of Pope Formosus in the 9th century.)

Pelevina had been scheduled to leave for Washington, D.C., on Friday, April 17-three days after the raid-where she was to speak at an event hosted by the National Endowment for Democracy and brief legislators and State Department officials on the dire condition of civil liberties and human rights in Russia. A frequent visitor to these shores owing to her family's residence in New Jersey, she has also been an important conduit of information to Congress on the Magnitsky case, and makes no secret of the fact. She resides on the advisory board of the Justice for Sergei Magnitsky Inter-Parliamentary Group, on which I also sit. A few years ago, after trying in vain to open a criminal investigation into the origins of a mysteriously sizable fortune held by Russia's First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov, Pelevina received a death threat via her lawyer. "When we do you it won't be clean like [murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya]," it read. "It'll be a drunkard smashing your head in with a cinder block."

So Judge Karpov may have had a personal interest in seeing this activist's home upended and her travel plans aborted. He's lately ordered the arrests of other "rioters" affiliated with the 2011 protest movement (launched after one stolen Duma election too many), and by certifying the house arrest of the opposition's rioter-in-chief, Alexei Navalny. Pelevina is close friends with Navalny, and Putin's enforcers know it. One of these is Interior Ministry officer Michail Voinovsky, who conducted her apartment search and has also conducted several in Navalny's home. "He was trying to intimidate me," Pelevina says. "'Oh, look what we found'-that kind of shit. He told me at one point, 'Say hello to Lyosha [Navalny's nickname]. Tell him I'll be coming to his place soon. I'll be seeing both of you a lot in the near future.'"

There was one item in her apartment Pelevina actually wanted Voinovsky to confiscate. It was a letter written by Dmitry Dovgiy, a former director of the Main Investigative Department of the Investigative Committee, depicting the entire agency as being thoroughly compromised, with payoffs both dictating what cases were opened against people and which were shut.

Dated May 19, 2008, Dovgiy's letter was addressed personally to former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. Dovgiy alleges that his boss, Committee Chairman Alexander Bastrykin, a man who once threatened to behead a journalist in a forest for unflattering press coverage (he apologized for it), has transformed his law enforcement bureau "virtually... into a branch of the FSB" and subordinated its jurisdiction to the FSB's former counterintelligence chief V. P. Maksimenko.

Maksimenko, wrote Dovigiy, headed a sub-section of the Committee and allegedly staffed it with cronies from his prior job until his resignation in 2009. He thus used a putatively independent and autonomous law enforcement body to settle old FSB scores, typically against rival government arms, such as the Federal Narcotics Service.

When Dovgiy himself blew the whistle on this racket, he was sacked, as were all of his loyal subordinates. He was then accused of taking bribes for doing what he accused Bastrykin of doing-putting the kibosh on credible criminal cases. Although a separate investigation conducted by the Prosecutor General's Office exonerated him, Dovgiy succumbed to the tendentious judiciary now hoovering up critics of the regime: He was arrested and served more than half a decade in prison. He was released two months ago and now lives in St. Petersburg. With his permission, Pelevina sent me a copy of his letter to Medvedev, which has never before been published publicly. (A full English translation, done by my colleague Catherine Fitzpatrick, can be read here.)[https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2082862-pelevina-bastrykin-document-3.html]

"If these guys who tore up my house had any soul, or even any sense of their own eventual fate, they'd realize who they're working for," says Pelevina. "I told Voinovsky, 'Yes, please take this letter and read it carefully!'"

She was ultimately hauled into the SK's headquarters, where officers tried questioning her for a few hours. "I remained silent. I referred to Article 51 [of the constitution], which allows you to not testify. I was without my lawyer, I didn't have my phone. They kept pushing, kept pressuring me to say something, anything. And I wouldn't. They got really mad. One of the interrogators started yelling at me and threatening me: 'What you're doing is making the situation worse.'"

They also threatened and insulted her friend, Navalny. "'We have nothing against him,' they said, 'But he's a thief.' With me, it's that I'm a Western spy who financed the protests. There's even a video now of me being a foreign agent, with a funny song and collage of myself with [John] McCain. This was released on YouTube a couple of days after the whole thing."  

As of this writing, Pelevina feels somewhat at ease. "There's reason to be optimistic that my status hasn't changed for the worse," she says. "But they do have my passport, which means I can't leave. They think they have time. They've understood that I'm not going to run without a passport."

"I'm not ruling out that they will charge me with something. In Russia, with politically active people, mistakes don't happen. I don't think I'll be killed. My case got a lot of attention. And, you know, the regime monitors the reaction of society and media. If there's no reaction, they know they can do anything."

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 #15
Bloomberg
May 26, 2015
Russia Is Using Mobile Crematoriums to Hide Ukraine's Dead
By Josh Rogin
Josh Rogin is a Bloomberg View columnist who writes about national security and foreign affairs. He has previously worked for the Daily Beast, Newsweek, Foreign Policy magazine, the Washington Post, Congressional Quarterly and Asahi Shimbun.

Russia is so desperate to hide its military involvement in Ukraine that it has brought in mobile crematoriums to destroy the bodies of its war dead, say U.S. lawmakers who traveled to the war-torn country this spring.

The U.S. and NATO have long maintained that thousands of Russian troops are fighting alongside separatists inside eastern Ukraine, and that the Russian government is obscuring not only the presence but also the deaths of its soldiers there. In March, NATO Deputy Secretary General Alexander Vershbow told a conference, "Russian leaders are less and less able to conceal the fact that Russian soldiers are fighting -- and dying -- in large numbers in eastern Ukraine."

Hence the extreme measures to get rid of the evidence. "The Russians are trying to hide their casualties by taking mobile crematoriums with them," House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry told me. "They are trying to hide not only from the world but from the Russian people their involvement."

Thornberry said he had seen evidence of the crematoriums from both U.S. and Ukrainian sources. He said he could not disclose details of classified information, but insisted that he believed the reports. "What we have heard from the Ukrainians, they are largely supported by U.S. intelligence and others," he said.

Representative Seth Moulton, a former Marine Corps officer and a Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, was with Thornberry on the Ukraine trip in late March. He tweeted about the mobile crematoriums at the time, but didn't reveal his sources. He told me this week the information didn't come just from Ukrainian officials, whose record of providing war intelligence to U.S. lawmakers isn't stellar.

"We heard this from a variety of sources over there, enough that I was confident in the veracity of the information," Moulton said, also being careful not to disclose classified U.S. intelligence.

Both Thornberry and Moulton agreed with Vershbow's assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin was struggling to keep up the ruse that he has no soldiers fighting inside Ukraine. Moulton said the mounting evidence of dead Russian soldiers is causing a domestic backlash for Putin. Russian and Ukrainian bloggers and activists have been compiling lists of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine, including details of their service and circumstances of their deaths. New organizations in Russia representing soldiers' families have sprung up to publicly challenge Putin's narrative.

"Russia is clearly having a problem with their home front and the casualties they are taking from the war," Moulton said. "The fact that they would resort to burning the bodies of their own soldiers is horrific and shameful."

There had been unconfirmed reports of Russia using mobile crematoriums in Ukraine for months, including leaked videos purporting to show them. But never before have U.S. lawmakers confirmed that American officials also believe the claims.

The head of Ukraine's security service, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, said in January that seven truck-mounted crematoriums crossed into his country over a four-day period. "Each of these crematoriums burns 8-10 bodies per day," he said.

The next month, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko held up the passports of several Russian soldiers and intelligence officers he said were captured or killed in Ukraine, rejecting the Russian assertions that these troops had accidentally wandered over the border.

For many in Washington, the Russian casualties represent a rare vulnerability for Putin -- one that should be exploited through providing weapons to the Ukrainian military. This is a position held by the top U.S. military commander in Europe, General Philip Breedlove, Secretary of State John Kerryand many top lawmakers in both parties.

Yet, in the face of European resistance, President Barack Obama said in March that he was still pondering providing defensive arms to Ukraine. More than two months later, he has yet to make a decision. The result has been a de facto policy of limiting U.S. assistance to Kiev to non-military items. Even that assistance has been delivered late, or in many cases not at all.

Thornberry said arming the Ukrainians would raise the price Putin pays for his aggression. As long as Putin feels the cost of his Ukraine policy is manageable, Russian fueled instability will continue, he said.

The recently passed House version of next year's national defense authorization act contains explicit authorization for appropriations to support Ukraine's military and provide it with defensive lethal weapons. This goes further than the action Congress took last year in passing the Ukrainian Freedom Support Act, which Obama signed but still has not acted on with regard to lethal support for Ukraine. The new legislation would set aside money specifically for the arms, and provide for increased production of items the Ukrainians want including Javelin anti-tank missiles.

"We're doing anything we can possibly think of to get at legislatively forcing it to happen.  How do we force the president to provide weapons to a country if he doesn't want to?" Thornberry said. "I can't find anyone who is against this except for President Obama."

Moulton said that the West has a moral obligation to help the Ukrainians, and under current conditions, the Ukrainian military simply can't face down the heavy weapons Russia continues to pour into Ukraine. He also said that if Putin isn't confronted now, he will only become more aggressive later. "When a bear comes out of hibernation, he doesn't have a few blueberries and go back to sleep. He is hungry for more," said Moulton.

The Obama administration is understandably concerned that giving the Ukrainians arms will fuel the fire and risk a retaliatory Russian escalation. But if that's the decision, Obama should let the Ukrainians and the American public know it. He then must come up with an alternative to the current, failing approach to stopping Putin's murderous mischief.

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 #16
AFP
May 25, 2015
Full-house in Kiev bar inspired by Russian propaganda

The title of the menu, "Long live Junta", and its Hitler-like caricatures of Vladimir Putin are some of the more benign gags at a new bar in Kiev packed nightly with crowds.
Opened this month, the Karatel bar, whose name translates as "The Punisher", offers a tongue-in-cheek gastronomical take on all the main cliches of Russian propaganda about Ukraine's conflict with pro-Moscow separatists in the east.

The owners, some of them Ukrainian army veterans, offer a discount to active soldiers.

They say their black humour is harmless, and that it helps people affected by the conflict feel at ease.

But serving novelties such as the salmon "grilled separatist" and poultry-based "Berkut-grill" -- a reference to riot police accused of brutally dispersing pro-Western Maidan protesters last year -- the bar brazenly pushes the boundaries of political correctness.

As they enter Karatel, guests are asked to leave their handcuffed "slaves" at the door, in a nod to a claim in a Russian television report that Kiev gives two slaves to every soldier who fights against pro-Moscow rebels.

"All these funny things in the restaurant are inspired by fake stories used by Russia's misinformation campaign," cafe manager Igor Pylyavets said.

Pylyavets said he and his friends couldn't help but chuckle at Russia's designation of Ukrainian soldiers as "punishers" who aim to eviscerate east Ukraine's population.
"We laughed and that's how we decided to name the bar as such," he said.

Former nightclub director Pylyavets, 29, was drafted into Kiev's forces and was heavily injured last summer in Ilovaysk.

It was one of the most devastating battles for the Ukrainian army, and left a heavy psychological toll on the young man.

"I went on a drinking binge. It was so hard to forget everything I'd seen," he told AFP.

So he decided to set up a "place where people that went through war are comfortable".

'Always full'

The group of friends sought the expert help of French chef Andre Pettre, who believes the bar is a success because it appeals to people's curiosity.

"Since we opened, we're always full," said Pettre, 60, who had previously worked at the same address when it housed Claude Monet, a French restaurant. "We work and work."
The prices are average for Kiev, attracting clients of all walks of life.

One of the bands whose songs get played most here is Okean Elzy, which was very active during the 2004-2005 Orange Revolution and last year's Maidan protests.
The cream-coloured walls and fancy tablecloths are leftovers from the previous French theme.

Those aspects of the decor clash with new additions, like posters showing fighters of the nationalist Azov battalion and the army surplus T-shirts worn by the waiters.
Pettre compared the bar's dark, satirical humour to the style of French magazine Charlie Hebdo.

"We play a bit with the news," he said.

So far, the response has been mixed. Fair-haired Oksana Senienko, 29, said she was expecting the gags to be even more extreme.

"I came here because of the theme... The name of the bar is so interesting. But I thought it would be more (politically) charged," Senieko told AFP.

Nearby, a soldier who had to have his leg amputated after he was injured fighting in eastern Ukraine, came to Karatel because of the discount on offer.

In good spirits and accompanied by at least five of his friends, the soldier laughed as he enjoyed the night.

With the conflict in Donetsk and Lugansk dragging into its 14th month, many cafes now make references to the war and Moscow's annexation of Ukraine's Crimean peninsula in March 2014.

But Karatel is the first Kiev bar to focus entirely on the theme of Ukraine's "anti-terrorist operation" in the east, said Pylyavets.

"Some people criticise us because they think it's not the right time to do it, during war," he said.

"But it is the right time. We are not attacking anyone and we don't stoke hatred. We are only laughing."

Some people disagree, and find the morbid humour off-putting.

"To name a bar The Punisher when there is real war going on, that shows cynicism and contempt to people who fight," said political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko, director of the Penta Centre for Political Studies in Kiev.

"They don't have ethical boundaries," he said.

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#17
New York Review of Books
May 14, 2015
Russia: Twenty Feet from War
At the Tallinn conference, Baltic presidents and NATO officials were unusually blunt in describing how Russia poses the gravest threat to peace since World War II, and how the conflict in Ukraine and the loss of the Crimea has left the Baltic states on the front line of an increasingly hostile standoff. Amid these tensions, the thought of a plane crash leading to war seems scarily plausible.
By Ahmed Rashid
Ahmed Rashid is the author of Pakistan on the Brink: The Future of America, Pakistan, and Afghanistan and several books on Afghanistan and Central Asia. He lives in Lahore. (April 2015)

On April 7, a war between Russia and NATO forces defending the three Baltic republics was avoided by just twenty feet. A senior Estonian official explained to me in vivid detail how on that day a Russian Su-27 fighter jet buzzed a US military plane over the Baltic Sea, only veering off after coming within twenty feet of causing a mid-air collision. Such an event could have prompted retaliation by NATO and possibly given Moscow a pretext for invading Estonia (population 1.2 million), where a few NATO planes are now based.

Several times a month since the conflict in Ukraine began, Russian jets have been buzzing Western military and civilian flights over the North Sea and as far off as the English Channel and the Atlantic. The European Leadership Network (ELN), a non-profit research group devoted to European security, has recorded dozens of close military encounters between Russian fighter jets and Western planes since the Russian annexation of Crimea in March 2014, a majority of them over the Baltic Sea. At least eleven were described as "serious incidents of a more aggressive or unusually provocative nature." Some of these incidents, like the April 7 near miss, had a "high probability of causing casualties or a direct military confrontation between Russia and Western states."

These incidents have occurred across Europe and near the coast of the United States and Canada. In March 2014, a Russian reconnaissance plane with its transponder turned off nearly collided with an SAS passenger plane fifty miles southeast of Malmo, Sweden. "A collision was apparently avoided thanks only to good visibility and the alertness of the passenger plane pilots," the ELN found. And last summer, an armed Russian fighter flew within ten meters of a Swedish surveillance plane flying in international airspace between Sweden and Latvia.

For the three tiny Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, the situation is particularly unnerving. Russian fighter jets based in Kaliningrad can be over Baltic airspace within minutes of takeoff, leaving hardly any time for air traffic controllers to respond. And many Russian military planes fly with their electronic transponders, which make them easy to track, switched off. With no sign of the confrontation between Russia and the West over Ukraine coming to an end, what most frightens the peoples of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania is not war by design but war by accident.

NATO officials at last month's annual security conference in Tallinn, the Estonian capital, made no bones of the fact that they were being challenged in the air by Russian President Putin almost every day, and that Russia was essentially leaving it up to them to take precautions to make sure there was no accident. One official described some Russian pilots as almost kamikaze in their reckless fly-bys of NATO planes and forays into Baltic airspace. According to the ELN, Latvia has recorded more than 150 incidents of Russian planes approaching its airspace since March 2014, while Estonia has recorded numerous Russian violations of its airspace in the same period.

The three Baltic republics have a combined population of just six million people. They have the highest standard of living among the former states of the Soviet Union with a per capita income of nearly US $27,000; and they are also the only former Soviet states to become members of the European Union and the European currency union. They are model states for democracy, respect for human rights, and transparency, and have among the highest rates of Internet access in the world.

But the mood in all three countries is dark. At the Tallinn conference, Baltic presidents and NATO officials were unusually blunt in describing the extent to which the security architecture in Eastern Europe has collapsed, how Russia poses the gravest threat to peace since World War II, and how the conflict in Ukraine and the loss of the Crimea has left the Baltic states on the front line of an increasingly hostile standoff. Amid these tensions, the thought of a plane crash leading to war seems scarily plausible.

As if this were not enough to worry about, there was also discussion of nuclear weapons. In recent years, Russia's defense budget has increased some 50 percent, with a large chunk of it going to nuclear weapons. Russian President Vladimir Putin has made clear that Russia's annexation of Crimea could be defended by both nuclear and conventional military means, and at the Tallinn conference, Radosław Sikorski, the Marshal of the Polish parliament, said that Russia's military strategy appears to have changed to allow the first use of nuclear weapons.

Others spoke of the influence on Russian public opinion of the Kremlin's portrayal of the conflict in Ukraine, which it describes as a Western military aggression against a pro-Russian population that must be met with Russian force if necessary. As a result, nuclear weapons have once again become an acceptable part of the debate in Russia, with Russian TV bolstering the idea of nukes just being one more tool in the Russian arsenal. One official told me that new opinion polls in Russia show that large numbers of Russians are ready to discuss the possibility of nuclear war with the West and that some 40 percent of young people believe that Russia could win a nuclear war with the US and Europe.

In fact, as NATO Deputy Secretary General Alexander Vershbow made clear, NATO has been taking Russia's nuclear threats quite seriously for some time and has also been preparing countermeasures, including ways to pre-empt Russian use of small scale tactical nuclear weapons, which Russia might consider as a strategy to end the war on Russian terms while avoiding an all-out nuclear war. For example, some participants in the discussion in Tallinn outlined a scenario in which Russia might threaten to use nuclear weapons over a dispute such as Ukraine or an invasion of the Baltic states, but then might ultimately choose to use a tactical weapon with a small blast range on a European city or a Western tank division. Vershbow himself was so blunt that the moderator Nik Gowing of the BBC had to check constantly that his comments were on the record.

Being from Pakistan, I tend to be more concerned about the spread of the Islamic extremism than the spread of the new Russian empire. But I was struck nevertheless that the new rhetoric that is emerging from Russia about nuclear weapons-including statements in the Russian media last year that Russia is "the only country in the world capable of turning the USA into radioactive dust"-is in some ways as chilling as the Islamic State discussing the annihilation of all Shia Muslims and minorities such as the Yazidis in the Middle East.

For now, though, the greatest threat may come from Russian fighter jets. It's not clear that NATO has a strategy for dealing with these everyday provocations. To some extent, NATO forces can meet the Russian incursions by scrambling their own jets and making clear it is ready to defend Baltic airspace. In 2014, for example, it conducted over one hundred intercepts of Russian aircraft, triple the number of the previous year; nearly seventy "hot" identification and interdiction missions were conducted off the coast of Latvia alone. Talks, trade sanctions, bluster, and appeasement have all been tried at one time or another and nothing has worked with Putin. This week, NATO sent a thousand troops to take part in the largest military exercises ever staged by Estonia. But Baltic leaders also want the US to permanently deploy more military forces in Eastern Europe, and Washington has been reluctant to do that.

Meanwhile, the deliberate Russian near misses continue, and it is largely up to the Western planes, caught be surprise, to simply get out of the way.

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#18
Atlantic Council
May 26, 2015
The Disastrous EU Summit on the European Partnership
BY ANDERS �SLUND
Anders �slund is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and author of "Ukraine: What Went Wrong and How to Fix It."   

The European Union's Summit on the Eastern Partnership, held May 21-22 in Riga, was a disaster for Ukraine. For friends of democracy, the rule of law, and Ukraine, it would have been better had this EU summit never taken place and its joint declaration never written.

This summit was expected to be a major embarrassment for the EU, delivering nothing in terms of European perspectives, financial support for Ukraine, freer trade for all, or freer travel. But the outcome was even worse than expected. The Riga gathering backtracked from the elevated Vilnius summit in November 2013, which sparked Ukraine's Euromaidan.

The thirteen-page joint declaration by the twenty-eight EU heads of state, and representatives of the six Eastern Partnership countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine) reads like a successful sting operation by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). Twenty of the thirty paragraphs contain no substance and would have been better left out, while the remaining ten are nothing short of disastrous.

The most fundamental development in the Eastern Partnership in the last eighteen months was Ukraine's democratic breakthrough in February 2014. Ukraine has carried out free and fair presidential and parliamentary elections - marking Europe's greatest democratic achievement in a decade. The joint declaration does not even mention this success, much less congratulate Ukraine. The first three paragraphs praise democracy in perfunctory terms, as would any bland United Nations document. Apparently, the EU summiteers did not care about democracy and freedom.

The second important regional development is Russia's military aggression against Ukraine. The EU declaration does not mention Russia apart from once when emphasizing "the importance of the EU's continued role in facilitating gas talks between Russia and Ukraine." Apparently, the EU sees itself as a trade mediator between Russia and Ukraine. A phrase about the "illegal annexation of Crimea and Sevastopol" is to be found at the end of the fourth paragraph, but it does not name the culprit and does not condemn this act.

Similarly, the EU found no reason to condemn Russian military aggression against Ukraine and thus reneged on the UN Charter, the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, the 1990 Charter of Paris for a New Europe, and the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. This looks like a wholesale EU sell-out of international law.

The big drama in November 2013 was whether then Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych would sign the EU Association Agreement. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko did so in 2014, and both the Ukrainian and the European parliament ratified it swiftly and simultaneously. But then the European Commission agreed with Russia to delay its application, which amounted to the postponement of vital structural reforms in Ukraine.

The EU summit backtracked further: "Summit participants look forward to the provisional application of the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) with Ukraine starting on 1 January 2016." How did the application become "provisional?" The next sentence reveals the source, talking about "[c]onstructive efforts in the trilateral consultations on EU-Ukraine DCFTA implementation." How can the EU and Ukraine have "trilateral consultations"? Again the EU has given in to the unmentionable Russia.

The real trade drama is not the DCFTA but Russia's severe sanctions against Ukraine. In 2014, these sanctions cut Ukraine's exports to Russia by half, eliminating 12 percent of Ukraine's exports. The main reason for the sharp fall in Ukraine's GDP in 2014 was the war in eastern Ukraine. Needless to say, the declaration did not mention this problem. The EU commits itself to consider Russia's largely imaginary trade problems with Ukraine, while it ignores Russia's real trade war with Ukraine.

Ukraine has gone ahead with the most far-reaching economic reform program in its history. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) plays a major role in this reform effort, while the EU is at best a bit player. The long declaration contains virtually no recognition of or encouragement of Ukraine's impressive reform efforts amid war and economic hardship. The only mention is that "[p]articipants take note of the progress made on energy sector reform in Ukraine."

The IMF's Ukraine program is seriously underfunded because the EU lacks interest in contributing more than a pittance of real credits to Ukraine. Neither the underfunding nor Russia's many demands for debt repayments are mentioned. Ukraine is in a tense negotiation about debt restructuring with its private bondholders and Russia, which is also ignored. Here, the EU could have offered at least verbal support.

The hypocrisy of the EU declaration reaches its peak in the paragraph on security and defense issues. Tellingly the word "defense" is not written out. It might have made this paragraph too embarrassing even for the EU. Ukraine is rightly praised for its contribution "to the EU-led Naval Military Operation and "to an EU Battlegroup in 2014." But the Russian-sponsored war in Ukraine's east is not mentioned, and there's no word about the absence of any EU military support to Ukraine. Hence, Ukraine offers the EU admittedly minor military support, while the EU does nothing for Ukraine.

This disastrous summit would not have happened if the founders of the Eastern Partnership, Sweden's former Foreign Minister Carl Bildt and Poland's Marshal of the Sejm Radek Sikorski, had run the show.

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 #19
Atlantic Council
May 26, 2015
Ukraine Is Still Caught between a Hammer and an Anvil
BY ALEXANDER J. MOTYL
Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark, specializing on Ukraine, Russia, and the former USSR.   

For most of the 20th century, Ukraine was the victim of two equally malevolent empires-Germany and Russia. Germany's contribution to Ukraine's devastation was the two World Wars; Russia's was the imposition of Soviet rule and the concomitant destruction of Ukraine's peasantry and elites. Unsurprisingly, one of the most constant images in 20th-century Ukrainian commentary is that of their country being caught between a hammer and an anvil.

The 21st century may be witnessing a fundamental break with Ukraine's tragic geopolitical position. While Russia is acting according to its historical script, post-Holocaust, post-unification Germany appears to be emerging as Europe's benevolent hegemon. As such, Germany has no choice but to exercise its clout and take a lead in Europe. But given its awful past and the continued importance of that past in shaping German foreign policy behavior, Germany also has no choice but to eschew the kind of crude realpolitik that produced two World Wars and took the lives of millions.

Ukraine's 20th-century encounter with Germany and Russia was devastating. According to a 2008 study by the Moscow-based Institute of Demography, Ukraine suffered close to fifteen million "excess deaths" between 1914 and 1948. About half of the deaths were attributable to Soviet Russian policies and half to the two World Wars with Germany. As a result of the destruction, approximately three million Ukrainians emigrated in this time period, and another six million failed to be born. Overall, Ukraine's population in 1948 (thirty million in 1900) was about twenty-three million less than it would have been if Germany and Russia had stayed out. And that's just population losses. The two World Wars also produced trillions of dollars of economic damage: cities, towns, and villages were destroyed, as were infrastructure and industrial and agricultural assets.

In sum, Germany and Russia set back Ukraine's political, social, and economic development by decades, if not centuries.

In 1945, the geopolitical Germany that had produced two world conflagrations was destroyed. In 1991, the Soviet empire collapsed. New democracies emerged on the ruins of both criminal dictatorships. In Germany, perhaps as a result of the extended US influence on the country's internal affairs, democracy took root and was consolidated. In Russia, democracy was blamed for the imperial collapse and subsequent economic hardships and, in 1999, effectively abandoned. By the late-2000s, Vladimir Putin had replaced Russia's democratic facade with a fascist regime.

Ironically, neither country has accepted its responsibility for the devastation it brought to Ukraine. Russia glorifies Stalinism, while Germany has still to fully appreciate that a people called Ukrainians in a country called Ukraine exist as more than an appendage of Russland. Heinrich B�ll's 1949 novel, The Train Was Punctual, still captures the regnant mood among most Germans, if not among most German intellectuals. The novel's hero, a young soldier on furlough, is returning to his base in southern Ukraine. Remarkably, while repeatedly referring to Russians, Poles, and Jews-and peasants-he fails to mention the word Ukrainian or Ukrainians even once.

Now, as then, Ukrainians don't exist in most Germans' mental maps of Eastern Europe. Instead, most Germans insist that they fought a war against Russia and Russians, even though, as historian Timothy Snyder has shown in Bloodlands, Russian losses were less than those of Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Poles. And for a simple reason: most of World War II was fought in Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland, and not Russia.

On the other hand, Germany and Russia have adopted diametrically opposed foreign policies toward Ukraine. Despite the continued prominence of "Russland-Versteher" insisting that the West provoked Putin to invade Ukraine, much of Germany's political and intellectual class has come to understand that Putin's unilateral revision of state borders is an unacceptable violation of the post-war security architecture that gave Europe more than seven decades of unprecedented peace and that Ukraine, as the victim of unprovoked Russian aggression, needs to be defended. Inasmuch as this stance is motivated largely by Russia's imperialism and not by any sense of moral responsibility toward Ukraine, it may be open to revision should German Chancellor Angela Merkel's government be replaced by the left, which is more prone to emphasize that Russia needs to be understood.

Putin's Russia, in contrast, has reverted to 20th-century Soviet Russian behavior, both insisting on its manifest destiny in the former Soviet space and refusing to countenance any degree of responsibility for its criminal acts vis-�-vis Ukraine and the other non-Russian states.

The ongoing war in Ukraine is thus a test for Germany and a test run for Russia. Germany has to decide whether its role as a benevolent hegemon rests on both ethics and interests. Russia has to decide whether its invasion of Crimea and the Donbas can serve as a model for its behavior with Estonia, Latvia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. If Germany fails the test, Russia may well decide that its test run is positive.

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 #20
Euromaidan Press
http://euromaidanpress.com
May 24, 2015
The decolonization of Ukraine is irreversible - Viatrovych

Article by: Stanislav Kozliuk, Tyzhden, May 21, 2015

Tyzhden.ua interviewed historian Volodymyr Viatrovych, director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, about the decolonization of Ukraine, the post-colonial elite and the image of "passive citizens" that has emerged among Ukrainians since independence.

Q: The Soviet Union raised "passive Ukrainians." During the years of independence both the   government and employers viewed Ukrainians the same  way. Are citizens ready to reject this image?

The Soviet system has collapsed in Ukraine. This happened despite the fact that until recently many people continued to harbor Soviet values or rather anti-values. Through its civic activism Ukraine is offering a clear contrast to other post-Soviet republics. We have witnessed revolutionary events: the Orange Revolution, the Revolution of Dignity. What is taking place now is evidence of the disintegration of the post-Soviet culture. I mean the development of volunteering, of people who have signed up for the army, people who support the army. These sacrifices prove that Ukrainians are overcoming the Soviet past and assuming responsibility for the further development of the country.

Q: How long will it take to form a socially active Ukrainian?

The revolution of dignity was the final stage of the collapse of the "Soviet man." It is hard to say how long it will take for the creation of a new citizen. Everything depends on exterior and interior factors. Of course, Russian aggression is one factor that is accelerating the formation of both a new civil society and a political nation.

Q: The reforms that have begun in Ukraine are not being accepted by the population. However, Ukrainians who travel to Europe notice that prices are higher there and that there is a different level of social responsibility. To what extent are Ukrainians willing to accept that?

I think society is more ready than in previous years. The process of getting used to responsibility, especially the refusal of additional social benefits that were the legacy of the Soviet Union, has been very delayed. If it had happened earlier, society would be reacting to change more positively. But now we all find ourselves in a difficult economic situation. However, I'm convinced that unpopular reforms teach us a certain responsibility. People need to become used to the idea that social benefits from the state should go to the most vulnerable people and that the majority need to rely primarily on their own resources. This is also one of the elements of overcoming the Soviet past.

Q: To what degree are the Ukrainian elites post-colonial?

Our country is post-colonial, post-genocidal, post-totalitarian. Obviously this is true of the elites as well. Even though certain changes have taken place over the past several years. People who enter government now are already closer to the image of leaders who would be called upon to implement changes. Time goes by and the communist establishment is becoming a thing of the past. There is less and less of it in government; there are more young people who have experience of study and work in the West, who know how the state apparatus should work. The replacement of the elites will continue. New elections will contribute to it. We have to admit that the current parliament is pretty interesting. Perhaps it is not sufficiently professional, but it is better than the previous one. And subsequent elections need to give us better deputies, a better government and generally better state leaders. This is why it is so important to preserve the institution of elections. Actually it is for this reason that there were two revolutions - the Orange one and the Revolution of Dignity. This is the tool that will help shape the new political elite that will build the country.

Q: What segments of society are most subject to the colonial influence?

These are the poorest segments of society, the older generation - people who have been subjected to propaganda the longest. These are people who because of their age are unable to begin a different life because most of them are retired and they need state support.

Q: What are the specifics of Soviet post-colonialism?

It takes different forms. The Soviet Union created a passive citizen who was ready to give up his own freedom and opportunities for self-realization in exchange for a feeling of security. A citizen who did not want to be responsible for his own life and that of his family. A citizen who was afraid of government and especially of any contact with it. It was believed that the less contact the better since the government is foreign a priori.

Q: How will the proximity to Moscow influence the colonial effect?

The claim that has been repeated by Russian propaganda for decades if not centuries that "we are one  people" is crashing completely. First of all, as a result of Russian aggression. All of Moscow's assurances of "brotherhood" of "blood ties" are worthless in light of the war that Russia has launched against Ukraine. Right now the imperial cord is being cut and Ukrainians are asserting themselves as an independent nation.

Q: What is the role of the middle class in societal change?

In any society the middle class is the main promoter of democratic change. These are independent people who seek freedom, who are ready to take the initiative, who are ready for responsibility. The more numerous these people are, the more opportunities there will be for the development of Ukraine as a normal democratic country. We were slow in that development since we had poor representation of the middle class: after the economic turmoil there were very many impoverished people. At the same time, the oligarchs emerged who were interested in preserving the Soviet mentality that guaranteed them a cheap and submissive labor force. And we can see that in the areas most exploited by Ukrainian oligarchs - mining, heavy industry - the "Soviet man" as such was preserved the most. First of all, in the Donbas. That kind of culture allowed the oligarchs to exploit a large number of people at low cost.

Q: Can the war in the Donbas become a kind of societal  elevator? Or, on the contrary, a factor that polarizes society?

I think that the war and the earlier events on Euromaidan have launched the societal elevators. We have renewed the composition of the Verkhovna Rada and many volunteers have begun to work in government. The serious social upheavals taking place in Ukraine in one way or another provide opportunities for proactive, responsible people. Ukraine is so weak now that it cannot offer her citizens anything other than to be part of structures that will change it for the better.

Q: Ukrainians are helping the military but are also negatively predisposed to the government. How can we attract people to work in the public sector?

There should be a dual process. We must train society in constructive behavior. Ruthless criticism and opposition to any government is part of Ukrainian culture. Most of the time in Ukraine the government has been foreign. For this reason anyone who becomes part of the government is perceived the same way. It is important to understand that the government is part of us and that we have to control it and that we can create it. If there are constructive proposals we can change the government. On the other hand, the government itself must be open to such factors in order to assume new powers and to rotate officials.

Right now both sides have flaws. On the part of society there is criticism that is not always constructive, and on the part of government officials there is incomplete understanding of how to work with the public and how to renew their own ranks. Although the situation is certainly better than a few years ago.

Q: Until recently business and patriotism existed as parallel realities. Today we are witnessing "patriorization." How will this influence the transformation of society?

This was  an inevitable process. When we talk about the average business, the middle class - these people need a state that will protect them and their right to have a business. The oligarchs do not need the state. On the contrary, it interferes. The average business that displays a patriotic position undoubtedly is not doing so strictly for ideological reasons. It also realizes  that it will be able to develop only in a democratic state. And if Ukraine turns into a colony, then there will be no opportunities for the business. For this reason the average businesses become more activist and openly position themselves as patriotic.

Q: Speaking of the point of no return, has Ukraine passed it already? Are the economic and social upheavals that Ukraine is experiencing now capable of creating the basis for colonial revenge?

I don't see that possibility. Colonial revenge was possible during the final months of the Yanukovych regime. The fact that Yanukovych lost - despite huge support from Russia and despite Russia's control over the security forces and the vertical power - was the point of no return. The decolonization of Ukraine is irreversible.

Q: Society is placing many expectations on the volunteers and activists today. However, as experience shows, their cooperation with the government has not been too successful. The old system either swallows them or throws them out. Perhaps Ukrainians need a new social contract?

This is just loud complaining. We have no other state. If we want to change something we need to become part of government and to change it from within. The fact that people come to government with new approaches and then leave government, slamming the doors behind them, is the fault of both sides - of the system itself that is unable to change and also of the new officials. They need to understand where they are going. Nobody in the state apparatus is going to welcome them, nobody is going to create conditions where they can develop. On the contrary, there will be barriers. But if these people have a desire to change the country then they need to grit their teeth and work, and change the system from within. I'm not aware of any  reformer in history who was given ready-made favorable conditions for his reforms. On the contrary, the successful reformer is the one who creates these conditions despite his enemies and sometimes even despite his allies.

Translated by: Anna Mostovych
Source: Tyzhden.ua

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 #21
The German Marshall Fund of the United States
www.gmfus.org
How to Counter Russia's Anti-Democratic Strategy
By Nicolas Bouchet, Resident Fellow, Europe Program    

BERLIN-At a summit last week in Latvia, the European Union and the countries of the Eastern Partnership reiterated that democracy is essential for a closer political and economic association. The joint declaration issued by the EU members and Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine avoided any specific mention of Russia. But events since Ukraine's Euromaidan protests in 2013-14 have made it clear that any democracy promotion efforts toward the region have to consider direct ideological competition from Russia.

Russia's actions vis-�-vis Western democracy promotion over the past 15 years form a three-stage process of containment and rollback. The first relates to Russia itself, the second to the post-Soviet states, and the third and most recent to Central Europe and the Balkans. Moscow's objective has been to protect its increasingly autocratic regime with layers of insulation from outside efforts that might make democratic political change in Russia possible. A fuller understanding of Russia's role in creating regime competition would improve the ability of the EU and the United States to promote democracy in the region.

The debate over whether the West is embroiled in a new Cold War with Russia is simultaneously misleading and relevant as far as democracy promotion is concerned. It is misleading if we get bogged down in whether or not Russia has an ideology that it wants to spread, and a strategy and policy tools to export it, in the same way as the Soviet Union did. The debate is relevant, however, because countering Russia's anti-democratic agenda requires a better understanding of why and how it has been successful in containing and rolling back Western democracy promotion efforts.

Three points need to be made in this regard. First, the anti-democratic and illiberal political developments in Russia since the 1990s have gradually amounted to a coherent set of norms. They are not far from forming an ideology, even if one has not been formalized or expressed as such.

Second, the argument that Russia's actions are purely geopolitical - rather than ideological - is also flawed. Moscow's domestic norms are closely linked to its policy toward the post-Soviet states and to President Vladimir Putin's vision for Eurasia. Russia's leadership supports and encourages these norms abroad because it sees this as essential to its survival at home, as well as for driving back general Western influence in the region and rebuilding a Russian geopolitical sphere.

Third, the sum total of Russia's actions abroad - however reactive, improvised, or tactical each may be on its own - indicates an embryonic strategy to support and promote non-democratic norms. The growing number of channels and actors that Russia uses to influence political developments in its neighborhood, while not as institutionalized as those in the West, is beginning to resemble a toolkit for engaging in regime competition.

If EU and U.S. democracy promotion in Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans is to have any traction, existing efforts need to be adapted by taking into account the specifics of Russian counter-policies, for example in the field of civil society support. New ones also need to be developed in less traditional fields - for example, socio-cultural initiatives - in which Russia has been active. The United States and EU also need policies that are more specifically designed for democracy protection where progress has been made, including wider diplomatic, security, and economic support for reforming governments.

Finally, policymakers and civil society organizations on both sides of the Atlantic should look much more seriously at how they can collaborate better and overcome the obstacles that have so far prevented closer cooperation. Without this, and in the context of resource constraints and an adverse geopolitical climate for democracy promotion, it will be much harder to make progress against greater regime competition with Russia.

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 #22
Vice.com
May 24, 2015
Meet the Colonel in Charge of Countering Russian Propaganda in Lithuania
By Katie Engelhart

The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was once mighty and vast. Formed in the 13th century, it rose to be largest state in Europe after Vytautas the Great vanquished an army of Teutonic knights in 1410.

Yet today, Kremlin ideologues argue that the Lithuanian empire was effectively Belorussian all along - and that modern-day Belarus, a close ally of Moscow, is the legitimate heir to the Grand Duchy's august legacy

This narrative enrages many Lithuanians - including those who sit on the Lithuanian military's STRATCOM (or, strategic communications) team, the body tasked with running "counter-propaganda" programs in the country. "The Middle Ages is a very important and sensitive question here," one Colonel, who leads STRATCOM's efforts in Vilnius, told me. Russia-backed academics "create 'truth' about how Slavs created the Lithuanian state... They are trying to create a pool of youngsters who will finish school... and then, if Lithuania is invaded, will speak not of occupation but of reconquering. Like in Ukraine."

On a recent Monday, I visited the Colonel's office at Lithuania's Ministry of Defense building in central Vilnius, which once served as a school for Jesuit monks. Inside, his desk was layered with yellowing books - volumes of old military ballads, Polish cartoons about the Middle Ages, and bulky tomes on the history of Russian propaganda. The Colonel greeted me in full military regalia: camo jacket, cropped hair and crippling handshake. He said he was glad that I had come - glad that someone outside the Baltic region was paying attention.

"The battlefield is transforming," he began, handing me a sparkling water and sitting me down before a laptop, which displayed the first slide of a PowerPoint presentation in all capital letters: "ENEMY DESIRED END STATE: WILL TO RESIST IS BROKEN!"

"The [1805] Battle of Trafalgar led to a clear understanding that you can win a war by sea," he said. Today, the Colonel continued, Lithuania in engaged in a "post-modern war," in which "the same importance is given to informational influence as to weapons."

The Ministry of Defense's STRATCOM division was formed at the end of 2009. Since then, and especially since events in Ukraine, Vilnius has devoted ever more attention to its "information war" with the East.

This, as Russia continues to pour soldiers and arms into Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave that borders Lithuania, to the east.

My meeting with the Colonel came at a critical moment: Lithuania, a former Soviet state, is turning to the weighty task of hardening defenses against Russian messaging. In September, the country's State Security Department warned citizens to be "remain vigilant" in the face of an "extensive propaganda campaign" orchestrated by Moscow. Be on guard, it warned, against Putin's arsenal of Russian-language "articles, reports and announcements defaming Lithuania." In March, Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite told the BBC that her country is "already under attack."

Last month, Lithuania's media regulator suspended the Russian-language TV channel RTR Planeta for three months on the grounds that the network was disseminating Kremlin "propaganda" to the reported 14 percent of Lithuanians who regularly watch Russian TV, "inciting discord, warmongering, spreading biased information." Controversially, military officers were the ones who advised the regulator to take action.

The drive is part of a broader push by Lithuania to anticipate and mobilize against the sort "hybrid warfare" tactics that are on display in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions - foreign-backed riots, shadowy rebel gatherings, and sabotage attacks from within - and, with any luck, avoid the fate that has befallen Kiev.

Earlier this month, VICE News embedded with the Lithuanian Army as it carried out Operation Lighting Bolt, a nationwide war games drill that pitted Lithuania's new Rapid Reaction Force against shady insurgents from the fictional nation of Udija. According to the premise of the drill, the Udijans had pre-empted their kinetic aggression by sending out a barrage of pro-Udija propaganda.

This new preoccupation with what some call the "weaponization of information" extends beyond the Baltics. In America, the chairman of the US House Foreign Affairs Committee is pushing legislation that would increase support for Voice of America (VOA) - a US government-funded broadcaster - and charge it with "act[ing] as the free press in repressive societies like Russia."

'They are trying to create a pool of youngsters who will finish school... and then, if Lithuania is invaded, will speak not of occupation but of reconquering.'
In March, at a meeting in Brussels, the European Council agreed that the Union's foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini should prepare, by June, a campaign plan to resist Russian propaganda. The same month, NATO's supreme commander Gen. Philip Breedlove said Western countries should do more to counteract "false narratives" emanating from the Kremlin. "We need a western group of nations or an alliance to engage in this informational war." Countries such as the UK and Denmark have called for the EU to fund of Russian-language TV channels.

In March, a NATO Parliamentary Assembly draft report entitled "The Battle For The Hearts And Minds: Countering Propaganda Attacks Against The Euro-Atlantic Community" noted, "It is plausible that... Moscow is increasingly relying on its propaganda machine to advance its foreign policy agenda."

That events in Ukraine have inspired this info call to arms is no secret. Ever since Russia invaded the Crimean peninsula last February, Russian language networks have been pushing revisionist accounts of the Ukraine conflict: that Ukraine is run is by fascists, that Russian speakers are not safe in Kyiv, that the Maidan revolution was a neo-Nazi coup, that Crimeans kicked out the Ukrainian government on their own initiative, that Russian soldiers haven't set foot in Donetsk or Luhansk.

In response, Lithuania's STRATCOM Colonel has taken a hawkish line. Back in his office, he argued that offensive information strategies are required. Lithuania, he said, must create and disseminate its own narratives in order to boost patriotism and stave of the kind of defections and turncoat activity that the Ukraine military has endured.

Yet in this charged environment, some critics have accused Vilnius of indulging in anti-Russia hysteria and talking tough to little effect. Lithuania, these skeptics note, is in a less precarious position than the other Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia, which boast much larger Russian populations and thus play more readily into President Vladimir Putin's narrative of a pan-Slavic society under Moscow's protection.

When I asked the Colonel whether shutting down Russian-language TV stations was an affront to free speech, he bristled: "Like Goebbels? Mein Kampf? He could just say: 'That's just my opinion!' If Nazi propaganda is wrong, why is chauvinistic Russian propaganda fine?" Later, the Colonel explained, more calmly, that Russian-language TV channels have violated European law.

What is clear is that the Colonel's approach is deeply shaped by history. One of his PowerPoint slides - filled with excited CAPS LOCK and red font and exclamation points - showed images from 1795 and 1940, two years in which Lithuania endured Russian invasions, first by Tsarist forces and then by the Soviets. "Why has Lithuania twice lost statehood without a single shot [being fired]?" he charged. "How has the enemy twice enslaved our government?"

The answer, said the Colonel, is not military unpreparedness. Rather, Lithuania's leaders were manipulated and their citizens rendered idle - by misinformation.

In the eyes of the Colonel, Russian propaganda is bountiful and varied. Seated in his office, he guided me through a list of subjects that Russia has purportedly targeted for propaganda purposes.

Target 1: History of Lithuania

Target 2: The Lithuanian Armed Forces. "They are trying to deny our capability in the eyes of our society... that the tiny Lithuanian army will lose in the first 10 minutes!"

Target 8 was listed as "Sport." The Colonel argues that Russia is aggressively recruiting Lithuanian athletes to play in Russian sports leagues - and that this must be stopped. "We talked to the Scandinavians and we said: Maybe we can create a Northern League here. You can teach us to stay on the ice and we can teach you to play basketball. They chickened out."

Yet another target is "Culture." The Colonel spoke at great length about a Russian animated children's show called Masha and the Bear. Sometimes, he said, aghast, "Masha wears the hat of a Red star cadet officer! Or a Russian tanker helmet! ... Animation is the easiest way to do propaganda." The Colonel said that if Russia wanted to host a music or arts festival in Lithuania, he would advise the government to forbid it.

The primary concern, the Colonel explained, is Lithuania's "Lumpenproletariat that doesn't have critical thinking," and thus can easily be convinced that "Lithuanians are fascists."

The Colonel's general contention that Russia's propaganda strategy has shifted decisively since the Cold War - and that Russian propaganda outlets are operating with more sophistication - is increasingly shared by Kremlin watchers.

This change is evidenced most patently by RT (formerly Russia Today), the TV channel founded by Putin in 2005 that now broadcasts in a variety of languages, including English, German, and Arabic. Unlike Russian news outlets of yore - which tirelessly, and overtly, pushed official party lines - RT positions itself more broadly as a global and alternative media voice that is healthily skeptical of America and Western orthodoxy.

Importantly, RT rarely takes a single, anti-Western media line on any given story. That would be too obvious. Instead, RT journalists present gaggles of competing and contradicting narratives which together create the impression that the truth is indecipherable - or that, in the words of former Russian TV producer Peter Pomerantsev, "nothing is true and everything is possible."

But according to Nerijus Maliukevicius, a scholar of Russian information war at Vilnius University, countering propaganda is not, in itself, a sufficient information strategy for Lithuania. Neither is it enough to offer Russian-language news alternatives, as countries like Britain have proposed. Rather, said Maliukevicius, over a recent coffee in Vilnius, "you have to make alternatives that are attractive... The challenge is to be interesting."

RT, after all, and for all of its many flaws, is wildly interesting, beautifully shot and packed with high-budget thrills.

In the meantime, Maliukevicius thinks countries like Lithuania should invest more heavily in media literacy courses, especially in Russian-speaking schools. They might also fund training courses for Russian-speaking journalists, just as Russia has financed journalism schools abroad.

The 2014 NATO Parliamentary Assembly draft report on countering propaganda has proposed some other solutions. The Alliance might launch "a commonly-funded Russian-language TV station." It could apply travel sanctions "against the most active propagandists and political technologists." It could consider legislation that imposes fines for "clear disinformation."

Some of these proposed alternatives will sit uneasily in Washington and Brussels with those who would eschew NATO's involvement in strategic anti-Russia messaging. One draft report proposal, for instance, proposes that the Euro-Atlantic community develop "a more coherent narrative and a set of arguments refuting myths cultivated by Moscow."

But if they do manage to hammer out that narrative, says Maliukevicius, they should make sure to keep it flashy.

Old Soviet propaganda was so "boring, so official," he insists. The result was that "any alternative - like [US-funded] Radio Free Europe, jazz music channels from Luxembourg, and so on - everything seemed interesting" and persuasive.

Now, the tide has turned. NATO's messages have dried up. "And suddenly, Putin's virtual Soviet project has become quite sexy. No Siberia, No Stalin anymore."

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 #23
Jamestown Foundation Eurasia Daily Monitor
April 21, 2015
Russia Prepares for Possible New Summer Military Campaign in Eastern Ukraine
By Pavel Felgenhauer

Summer is the best time for major offensive military action in the Donbas region (Donetsk and Luhansk provinces) of eastern Ukraine. In the spring and autumn, long periods of bad weather turn unpaved roads and plains into a mud quagmire (Rasputitsa), seriously hampering troop maneuverability and logistic support. In 2014, intensive summer fighting in Donbas lasted until early September and ended with the so-called "Minsk One" ceasefire after a massive intervention of Russian regular troops stopped and reversed an offensive by Ukrainian government forces. A wobbly ceasefire, punctured by constant barrages and clashes, lasted until mid-January 2015, when the dirt froze and a full-scale winter campaign began. It effectively ended in mid-February 2015 with the so-called "Minsk Two" ceasefire and after Russia-backed forces captured the strategically important town of Debaltseve, northeast of Donetsk, routing the Ukrainians. A wobbly ceasefire followed, punctured by constant barrages and clashes. Attempts by observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to solidify the present ceasefire, mediation efforts, as well as negotiations to revive the Minsk accords seem to have little effect. This week (May 20), Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko accused Russia of supporting the rebels and of direct involvement in the fighting after two wounded Russian special forces servicemen, allegedly from the 3rd separate guards Spetsnaz GRU (military intelligence) brigade, were captured north of Luhansk following a clash with Ukrainian forces. Poroshenko declared: "They are preparing an offensive, we must be ready" (Kommersant, May 20).

The two servicemen-Captain Yevgeny Yerofeyev and contract Sergeant Alexander Alexandrov-were allegedly captured on May 16 near Shchastya, a Ukrainian-controlled town north of the Seversky Donets River (see EDM, May 20). A major electric power plant that supplies Luhansk is located in Shchastya. The rebels want to take the town to secure a steady electricity supply to Luhansk, and the Ukrainian forces threaten to destroy the plant, if attacked. According to footage of testimony by Yerofeyev and Alexandrov, published by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), the 2nd Battalion of the 3rd GRU Brigade (some 220-man-strong) was deployed in Donbas on March 26, 2015, under the command of Major Konstantin Napolskykh. On April 16, a group of Spetsnaz soldiers led by Captain Yerofeyev allegedly infiltrated Ukrainian-controlled territory near the Seversky Donets River. They were on a reconnaissance mission "to find a new position to stop constant Ukrainian bombardments," according to Yerofeyev, when they were ambushed by the Ukrainians. Apparently, Russian special forces were led to believe strategically important positions in Shchastya were abandoned by the Ukrainians during a badly organized rotation of forces and could be taken. A reconnaissance team was sent to investigate and possibly spearhead an attack (YouTube, May 20).

Yerofeyev and Alexandrov insist they are active service members. The Kremlin flatly denies this claim, "since there are no Russian servicemen in Donbas." The Russian defense ministry recognized Yerofeyev and Alexandrov as "former special forces members, who were retired at the time of their capture." The Luhansk rebels claim the two men are members of their militia. The Russian authorities, though officially disavowing the two captured "black ops" soldiers, have promised to use "all possibilities" to free them "as captured Russian citizens" (Kommersant, May 19). Apparently, some informal exchange may be organized in the future, but a backdoor tradeoff may take months.

The failed Spetsnaz reconnaissance mission near Shchastya looks like an attempt to tactically improve positions and secure the safety of the strategically important power plant in the run up to a possible escalation of hostilities-a summer campaign. Currently, the skies over Donbas are blue, and the pro-Russia rebel proxy forces seem to have been armed, reinforced and led by pro-Russia military personnel. One last problem needs to be sorted out before all is ready to go in the possible summer campaign-the massive seasonal rotation of Russian combat-ready forces must be concluded. The spring call-up of some 150,000 conscripts began in Russia on April 1, lasting until July 15. As new conscripts are mustered in, some 154,000 well-trained soldiers called up a year ago, must be demobilized and sent home (Trud, March 25).

The actual mass demobilization of conscripts during the spring call up (veseniy prisiv) typically begins each year in mid-May and lasts sometime until July. Russian soldiers and specialists integrated into the proxy forces inside Ukraine in Donbas may be mostly volunteers, but the forces camped on the Ukrainian border and in Crimea, or in mobile battle-ready units all over Russia, including the GRU Spetsnaz and the 3rd Guards Brigade, have large conscript contingents. A former 3rd Brigade conscript soldier, who insisted his identity be concealed, told BBC's Russian service he had served under Captain Yerofeyev's command and alleged Yerofeyev was not much liked by the men, hence he was abandoned on the battlefield, wounded and captured (BBC-Russian service, May 19).

The situation in Donbas today is at a crossroads: A summer campaign may begin in a month or so. In July and August, the weather is best for war-making in the Donbas region, and the Russian military is operationally at its peak for carrying out mass engagements if the confrontation, by chance, begins to escalate out of control. Come September, major operations must be wound up. Maybe some "Minsk Three" ceasefire accord will be agreed to sometime next September, with French and German participation, to solidify the further possible Russian gains on the ground: perhaps the capture of Shchastya, Slavyansk, Kramatorsk or Lisichansk-all north of Luhansk and Donetsk. Peski north or Luhansk, the western suburbs of Donetsk and Mariupol (Mariupil) port in the south are the other obvious points of a possible offensive. Come next October, the autumn rains bring back Rasputitsa mud and a new autumn call-up and demobilization will begin in Russia-at that point, another operational pause in fighting seems inevitable.

If a summer campaign can be avoided somehow, the next possible chance would not be until January, in the dead of winter; or maybe action could be postponed until the summer of 2016. It is up to one person-President Vladimir Putin-whether the Donbas conflict will be frozen, allowing the consolidation of the present regime in Kyiv, or whether more immediate military pressure will facilitate a regime change in Kyiv, which, in turn, could lead to more punitive sanctions on Russia. Moreover, the Kremlin is beholden to domestic political, social and economic repercussions of the pending decision to go or to freeze the conflict. The clock is ticking, and Putin must make a decision soon.

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 #24
Albuquerque Journal
May 24, 2015
Russia expert doesn't rule out Putin-approved Ukraine push
By Michael Coleman

WASHINGTON - It's been 15 months since Russia annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea, and despite a fragile three-month cease fire between the Ukrainian government and Russian-backed rebels, the situation continues to deteriorate.

The United Nations estimates that 6,000 people have died in the conflict and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has predicted an all-out offensive by the pro-Russian fighters this summer. Against that provocative backdrop, an expert on the region is coming to Albuquerque to discuss the geopolitical conflict.

Mark Von Hagen, an author of several books on Russia and Eastern Europe and a professor of Russian and Ukrainian history at Arizona State University, will discuss the crisis May 31 at the UNM Continuing Education Auditorium in conjunction with the Albuquerque International Association.

In a Journal interview, Von Hagen said he hopes to provide attendees with a solid overview of the crisis.

"I plan to focus on the contemporary crisis between Russia and Ukraine and put that in a historical context," Von Hagen said. "Why is Putin behaving the way he is 25 years after the end of communism?"

Asked if a Russian-sanctioned offensive in Ukraine is possible this summer as Poroshenko predicts, Von Hagen did not rule it out.

"A lot of things people didn't think were possible about a year ago have become possible," he said. "I don't think people are ruling out anything with Putin these days. He certainly won't announce if it's going to happen because he hasn't been prone to do that in the past, and he'll probably deny it's even happening if the past is prologue in this case."

Von Hagen explained that the United States has a keen interest in Ukraine's territorial integrity, which is why the U.S. has slapped economic sanctions on Russia in reaction to the invasion of Crimea.

"It's not just a Ukraine problem," he said of the Russian aggression. "Russia is presenting a threat not just to Ukraine, they're presenting a threat to all of eastern Europe and even to western Europe in terms of its hyperwarfare, economic pressure and propaganda pressure. Insofar as we are still connected to Europe, we are connected to Ukraine and Russia."

Von Hagen said Russian President Vladimir Putin's aggression in Crimea is consistent with a long history of Russian imperialism, but the action is in conflict with international treaties.

"They've violated several treaties they're party to including ones we've signed, including the Budapest Memorandum that guaranteed Ukraine's integrity for its giving up its nuclear weapons back in 1994 and the United Nations charter that says you can't go take pieces of other people's countries without paying consequences."

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#25
Carnegie Europe
May 27, 2015
Judy Asks: Is the U.S. Wobbly Over Ukraine?

Every week, a selection of leading experts answer a new question from Judy Dempsey on the foreign and security policy challenges shaping Europe's role in the world.

 Federiga Bindi, Senior fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies:

There are at least two different visions for Ukraine (and Russia) in the U.S. administration, as the recent visits to the countries by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland testify.

In his press conference with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on May 12, Kerry expressed an opinion about the future of Donetsk airport in eastern Ukraine that contrasts with what Nuland said less than a week later. Nuland's stance on the Ukraine crisis was infamously revealed by a leaked phone call in which she said "F*ck the EU." At the same time, Kerry is trying to save what is salvable in the relationship with Russia, a much-needed policy given that most of today's world issues cannot be approached without Russia on board.

The Kerry-Nuland differences go well beyond a "good cop, bad cop" strategy and rather suggest a sharp divergence of views that can only weaken U.S. influence in the region and beyond.

The question is where the White House stands. If U.S. President Barack Obama sides with his secretary of state, the obvious consequence would be to move Nuland, a career diplomat, to another job. If he does not, the result would be to undermine Kerry at a time when he cannot be undermined-or else the United States will lose any leverage it has in the negotiations on Iran's nuclear program. Either way, there will be casualties; but better a small casualty than wobbly policies.

 Anna Korbut, Deputy chief editor at the Ukrainian Week:

Since U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry's visit to Sochi on May 12, there has been barely a signal of change in U.S. policy toward Ukraine or Russia. President Barack Obama has never stated any intention to fully isolate Russia for its behavior over Ukraine, as long as Moscow does not launch a full-scale war on Ukrainian territory. Instead, the West has demonstrated its willingness to maintain channels of communication with Russia. The United States seems to be sticking to that line, while probably also testing the waters in Moscow and reasserting its presence in Europe's security crisis diplomacy.

Washington's true stance, however, will become clearer as the United States, along with its European partners, responds to the implementation of the Minsk II agreement, which seeks to end the fighting in eastern Ukraine. If the United States offers the Kremlin too many concessions before Russia allows Ukraine to regain control over its border, pulls out Russian mercenaries and equipment, and stops meddling in Ukraine's internal affairs, then this will show that the United States has sacrificed Ukraine's interests to normalization with Russia. Otherwise, there is probably no need for Ukraine to worry about the U.S. position now.

Given the fear and uncertainty over Russia in its near abroad, this behind-closed-doors diplomacy has fueled speculations that spark frustration and distrust for Western diplomacy. That plays into Russia's hands. Ukrainians need clear signals of long-term support on their path to development and democracy, especially as they pave that road with their lives, not with murky assumptions and misinterpretations.

John Kornblum, Senior counselor at Noerr LLP and former U.S. ambassador to Germany:

U.S. condemnation of Russian behavior remains clear and unequivocal. But the United States did not risk upsetting the existing East-West balance in the 1956 Hungarian Uprising or the 1968 Prague Spring, and it did not stop former East German leader Walter Ulbricht from building the Berlin Wall.

The same holds true today. Even worse, U.S. readiness to intervene in Europe has declined dramatically since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Europe's substitution of an EU peace policy for a common transatlantic security strategy has convinced many that, in the view of the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, Europe is no longer relevant to the United States.

Many U.S. think tankers now seem almost ashamed of Western successes in Eastern European democracy building. They seem ready to buy Russian diplomatic support by compensating Moscow for the threatening growth of civil society on its Western borders.

European Parliament President Martin Schulz taunted the United States by claiming that the Ukraine crisis had become a European moment-just as Luxembourg's former foreign minister Jacques Poos did over twenty years ago when the conflict in the Western Balkans began.

Unfortunately, this time, Kerry agrees. Soon, Europeans will be shocked to learn that their wishes have been fulfilled. Germany is hoping against hope that the fiction of the Minsk II agreement, which aims to end the war in eastern Ukraine, will hold. When it doesn't, Europe will find that the United States doesn't really care. Kerry might instead be in Tehran.

 Kadri Liik, Senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations:

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry's recent meetings with the Russian leadership in Sochi cannot be considered a success. These meetings sent unproductive messages to Moscow, caused incomprehension in Europe, and weakened a common Western stance toward Russia.

The Western interest in Ukraine is for the country to restore its territorial integrity, reform, democratize, and be free to make its own decisions. Moscow, however, still hopes to gain leverage over Kiev's decisionmaking that would enable Russia to manipulate its neighbor's geopolitical choices.

Russia sees the February 2015 Minsk II agreement as a useful tool in this context. The Kremlin hopes that Ukraine's failure to reform and the West's emerging Ukraine fatigue-combined with other pressing issues such as Iran-will make Western leaders accept Moscow's interpretation of the accord. Many in Moscow understood Kerry's messages in Sochi as a confirmation that this hope would be met. That surely caused dismay in some European capitals, such as Berlin, which has been diligent and consistent in delivering tough messages to Moscow.

If Washington has not gone soft, as U.S. diplomats rushed to confirm, then the danger is that Moscow-notoriously bad at reading Western minds-will once again feel cheated and will respond with increased aggression.

The West must be aware that that its problems with Russia are here to stay for years. Quick fixes are not available; the West needs a proper multidimensional strategy to manage the challenges as well as messaging that is consistent with that strategy.

This truth is slowly dawning on Europe. More of that illumination is needed in Washington, where much of the debate seems to lack depth, causing concern about the possibility of sudden U-turns inspired by other priorities.

Edward Lucas, Senior editor at the Economist:

It certainly looks that way. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry's meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on May 12 conveyed weakness, not strength. Russia has not stopped its proxy war in Ukraine and has not paid any significant price in economic or diplomatic terms.

However, the real culprit is the EU: the crisis in Ukraine is first and foremost one of European security, and the United States-with a lot of other problems on its plate-can quite reasonably expect the EU to deal with it. As the EU's May 21-22 Eastern Partnership summit in Riga showed all too clearly, that expectation is unfounded.

Marek Magierowski,Columnist for Polish weekly Do Rzeczy:

Being wobbly doesn't necessarily mean being inefficient. The two may appear to be the same if only the short-term effects of U.S. diplomatic and economic actions are taken into account. But I strongly believe that the financial sanctions imposed on Russia after its March 2014 annexation of Crimea are hurting President Vladimir Putin and his closest friends in business circles more than it seems.

At the same time, the U.S. administration doesn't have many tools available. Unlike during the Cold War, the economies of today's world are deeply interconnected. Russian money is constantly flowing through the City of London, Russian companies are investing heavily on all continents, and Western ex-politicians have become advisers to Russian oligarchs. Imposing sanctions on the Soviet Union in the 1980s was easy and relatively harmless for the international community. Waging an all-out economic war against Putin's Russia right now would be not only counterproductive but perhaps even suicidal.

Nevertheless, there is one lesson the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama should draw from the Cold War era: deterrence worked thirty years ago, and it would in all likelihood work now. Putin is aware that NATO's military capabilities are far superior to Russia's. But he is also aware that the West is reluctant to make use of its own force. Permanent bases in Poland, boots on the ground in Lithuania, and massive back-to-back exercises in Eastern Europe-this is what the United States and NATO need to avoid looking wobbly.

Julianne Smith, Senior fellow and director of the Strategy and Statecraft Program at the Center for a New American Security:

The United States isn't necessarily wobbly over Ukraine, but it is divided, even in the halls of the State Department.

At the strategic level, Washington's views are split on the degree to which Russian aggression in Ukraine poses a serious challenge to U.S. national security. Some argue that Russia's flagrant violation of international norms and of Ukraine's territorial sovereignty merits a heavy response from the West. Others argue that while Russia's actions in Ukraine are worrisome, they simply aren't on a par with the threats stemming from the Middle East.

At the tactical level, one finds sizable divides on the question of lethal assistance, with some arguing that the only way to stop Russian President Vladimir Putin is by putting defensive weapons in the hands of the Ukrainians. Others, though, warn against escalating the conflict in ways that would potentially end all chances for the Minsk II ceasefire agreement to succeed.

These Russia-related debates, however, pale in comparison to those on the self-styled Islamic State. U.S. foreign policy elites are consumed by a steady stream of rather heated exchanges on how best to address the militant group, who is to blame for its rise, and which presidential candidate would be best suited to cope with this challenge.

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 #26
AFP
May 26, 2015
Obama says Russia adopting 'increasingly aggressive posture'

Washington (AFP) - US President Barack Obama accused Russia of toughening its battlefield stance Tuesday, as he met with the NATO secretary general to discuss the rolling crisis in Ukraine.

"We had a chance to discuss the situation in Ukraine and the increasingly aggressive posture that Russia has taken," Obama said, after Oval Office talks with Jens Stoltenberg.

Both men stressed the need for parties to respect a largely-ignored February ceasefire agreement, which Stoltenberg said could still be a "path to peace."

The deal, between European powers, Russia and Ukraine was aimed at ending a 13-month war that has claimed nearly 6,300 lives and left well over a million people homeless.

In recent days there has been particularly heavy fighting between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian separatists near the strategic port city of Mariupol.

At the same time there has been an uptick in tensions as Russia aircraft and submarines have made provocative forays into European airspace and waters.

Obama said this was a "challenging and important time for NATO."

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 #27
Kyiv Post
May 24, 2015
Is Obama ready to strike a deal with Putin?
by Alexei Bayer
Alexei Bayer is a New York-based economist and writer. His detective novel, Murder at the Dacha, set in the U.S.S.R. in the 1960s, was published in 2013.

Editor's Note: First of three articles on the U.S. presidential politics and how the 2016 election campaign will impact U.S. policy toward Ukraine.

First, a disclaimer: I voted for Barack Obama both times he ran for president and would do so again, even though his presidency has been a disappointment to many of his supporters and a failure by his own standards.

Most of Obama's policy failures follow the same pattern: He starts out with good intentions and exhorts everyone to do the right thing, but then does nothing to bring about the desired results. When his efforts run into opposition he simply gives up. His good intentions (which, as the saying goes, pave the road to Hell) only serve to make the failures worse.

Back in 2008, candidate Obama promised to heal the ideological rifts that beset Washington and to usher in a new era of bipartisanship and cooperation. At the time, he had an opportunity to stomp on his Republican opponents, pinning on them the blame for the disastrous economic and international policies of the Bush Administration. He could then work with them from a position of political strength. Ronald Reagan did this very effectively in the 1980s, never missing an opportunity to criticize "our predecessors" well into his second term in office.

But Obama started his term on a wrong foot: he tried to ingratiate himself with the Republican Right, allowed his opponents to reorganize and rally, and ended up presiding over the most bitterly divided and dysfunctional government in modern history.

Candidate Obama was going to be the first post-racial president; instead, the country has been convulsed by the worst race protests and riots since the 1960s, whereas political attacks on the President himself have acquired distasteful racist undertones.

No president has ever spoken more about the need to support working families, and yet on his watch the middle class continued to disintegrate, income differentials widened substantially and a new class of the super-rich "one-percenters" has become solidified. Increasingly, the wealthy are using their enormous resources to privatize the American democratic system.

Early in his presidency, Obama laid out a bright vision of a democratic Middle East in his famous Cairo speech. The result? He is set to leave the region in a state of unprecedented turmoil. Arab Spring revolutions were either suppressed or brought disaster almost everywhere they occurred, while the army of the Islamic State is now conquering strategic cities in Iraq and Syria.

Obama's tentative efforts to get Israel to limit settlement expansion in occupied territories have come to nothing: Obama is now widely despised by the Israelis and distrusted by the Palestinians. His common-sense deal with Tehran to keep Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon is regarded with great suspicion, if not disgust, across the entire Middle East.

And then there is the misbegotten "reset" in relations with Russia. It was a nonstarter from the start: its embarrassing mistranslation into Russian as "overload" revealed that Obama's State Department lacked competent Russian translators and suggested that the White House completely misunderstood the nature of the regime in Moscow.

It is true that at the time, early in Dmitry Medvedev's presidency, there was hope for liberalization, shared both inside and outside Russia. No one could have predicted that Putin would return to power in 2012 amidst widespread protests by Moscow intelligentsia, and then would promptly become divorced from reality. The annexation of Crimea came as a complete surprise amid the costly Winter Olympics extravaganza in Sochi, designed to showcase Russia's modernity and normalcy to the outside world.

Nevertheless it is a fact that Obama risks leaving a new Cold War as his legacy. Combined with his other policy failures, it is not going to look good on his historical record. However, it is also the one policy area where something can be done relatively quickly. Moreover, the White House may need Moscow's cooperation to keep the situation elsewhere in the world, notably in Syria, from deteriorating further in the next year and a half.

Putin may be open to a compromise deal - if it satisfies his conditions. Crazy or not, the Russian president realizes that he has painted himself into a corner. The dismemberment of Ukraine and the acquisition of a land corridor to Crimea is not going to happen imminently, the Russian economy is precariously balanced and any further military escalation in "Novorossiya" will trigger more severe sanctions. Putin is therefore seeking to trade restraint in Eastern Ukraine for a de facto American acquiescence to the annexation of Crimea and an easing of the sanctions regime.

The Obama Administration seems to be leaning toward some kind of bargain along those lines. It would also help Hillary Clinton's efforts to succeed Obama. If relations with Russia continue to deteriorate when the election campaign heats up, her role in formulating the reset policy with the Kremlin while she was Secretary of State may come to haunt her.

Russia has already started to wind down its Novorossiya project and mop up recalcitrant commanders in Donetsk and Lugansk. Terrorist commander Alexei Mozgovoy became the latest prominent victim of Putin's "peace process". Meanwhile, during his latest visit to Russia, Secretary of State John Kerry pointedly avoided any mention Crimea.

Needless to say, any retreat by Putin will be tactical in nature as well as very temporary. He will not stop trying to undermine Ukraine, degrade its economy and damage political stability. He has no choice. A pro-Western, prosperous Ukraine outside its orbit is something the Kremlin is not ready to contemplate conceptually, but even on a strictly practical level, without a land link, Russian Crimea is neither politically nor economically viable over the long term.

Obama's political expediency in striking an agreement with Putin is understandable. However, if it happens now, while Ukraine is still politically weak, while its economic and financial situation is shambolic and while it has only limited ability to protect itself from Russian terrorism, the issue will merely be swept under the carpet. The next U.S. president - be that Hillary Clinton or her as-yet-unknown Republican opponent - will have to deal with it soon after assuming office - unless, of course, the whole thing blows up in Obama's face even before he leaves the White House.

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 #28
AFP
May 27, 2015
Ukraine under 'continual attack' despite truce: NATO

Kiev (AFP) - A top NATO commander warned on Wednesday that "continual attacks" against Ukraine were hampering Kiev's efforts to modernise its army enough to one day join the Western military bloc.

The Cold War-era alliance's security chief Thrasyvoulos Terry Stamatopoulos made no direct reference to Russia -- a former superpower that flatly denies allegations it is orchestrating the conflict in order to halt Ukraine's march toward the West.

But he reaffirmed NATO's commitment to helping the ex-Soviet country both defend itself and build up an intimidating army that averts the possibility of future conflicts.

"We are well aware of the formidable challenges that Ukraine is facing," Stamatopoulos told a defence meeting in Kiev.

"It's not easy to launch wide-ranging reforms while managing a major conflict and deterring continual attacks against your territorial integrity," he said.

The assistance secretary general's visit to Kiev comes three months into a ceasefire that has managed to scale down but not halt the pro-Russian uprising that has claimed nearly 6,300 lives in Ukraine's industrial east.

Russian President Vladimir Putin rejects accusations his generals are fomenting the insurgency to weaken the pro-Western leadership that toppled a Moscow-backed president in February 2014.

The Kremlin hopes that the ceasefire's ability to stem the worst bloodshed will prompt the European Union to lift some of the more punishing sanctions against Russia in the next few months.

A first wave of punitive measures was adopted in response to Russia's March 2014 seizure of Ukraine's Black Sea peninsula of Crimea.

Nations such as Greece and Cyprus -- their own economies in peril -- have balked at the idea of extending sanctions through the end of the year.

Winning back Crimea

The latest truce leaves parts of the Russian-speaking Lugansk and Donetsk regions in the east under the insurgents' control.

Some rebels now warn that they may try to push back government forces even further should President Petro Poroshenko fail to award them permanent semi-autonomous status.

State and local officials said the latest of what remain daily clashes claimed the lives of four civilians and one Ukrainian soldiers across the devastated war zone.

Poroshenko has thus far been unable to secure offensive weapons from his allies because of Western fears about Putin's potential response.

But he has pushed through legislation lifting Ukraine's neutral status and allowing the nation of 45 million to permanently host NATO troops.

Poroshenko on Wednesday also signed a new national security strategy focused on "restoring territorial integrity within the frameworks of the internationally-recognised borders of Ukraine".

The wording implies that Kiev still hopes to win back Crimea from Moscow despite Putin's decision to deploy new forces and weapons on the disputed peninsula.

The new security document also targets "Ukraine's integration with the European Union and creating the conditions necessary to join NATO".

Kiev hopes to receive an EU membership invitation by 2020 but has not targeted a NATO membership date.

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#29
RAND Corporation
www.rand.org
The Ukrainian Crisis and European Security
Implications for the United States and U.S. Army
by F. Stephen Larrabee, Peter A. Wilson, John Gordon IV
[Full text for sale here http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR903.html?utm_source=t.co&utm_medium=rand_social]

What implications do Russia's annexation of Crimea and attempt to destabilize eastern Ukraine have for European security and the United States, particularly the U.S. Army?

Abstract

Vladimir Putin's decision to annex Crimea and attempt to destabilize eastern Ukraine have sparked widespread concern among Western policymakers that Russia has embarked on a confrontational national security policy that could have far-reaching implications for Russia's relations with the United States and for European stability. The annexation of Crimea challenges two basic assumptions underlying U.S. policy toward Europe in the post-Cold War era: (1) that Europe is essentially stable and secure, thereby freeing the United States to focus greater attention on other areas, particularly Asia and the Middle East, and (2) that Russia had become more of a partner than an adversary. The annexation of Crimea and attempt to destabilize eastern Ukraine suggests that both these assumptions need to be revisited because Russia can hardly be viewed as a partner. The requirement that NATO may now have to build a much more robust deterrence and defense posture in Eastern Europe would require the Army and the Air Force to revisit their planning assumptions that have minimized U.S. military commitments to the region since the end of the Cold War.

Key Findings

Implications of the Ukrainian Crisis

The assumption that Europe had become a strategically stable continent has been overturned.

If the Department of Defense is tasked to help NATO build a much more robust deterrence and defense posture in Eastern Europe, the Army and Air Force will need to revisit planning assumptions that have minimized U.S. military commitments to that region since the end of the Cold War.

Russia's military actions in Crimea and in the Ukrainian crisis demonstrated a new model of Russian military thinking, combining traditional instruments of Russian military thought with a new emphasis on surprise, deception, and strategic ambiguity.

The possibility of overt Russian military action against East European members of NATO cannot be excluded.

When added to the steady or growing demands for U.S. deployments and activities elsewhere (e.g., East Asia, the Middle East, Africa), the more stressful security environment argues for a reappraisal of the balance between the requirements of the defense strategy and resources available to support it.

 

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 #30
Business Insider
www.businessinsider.com
May 26, 2015
Putin's dream of reuniting the Russian empire is falling apart
By TOMAS HIRST
Tomas Hirst is politics reporter at Business Insider, based in London. Tomas was previously editorial director and co-founder of Pieria magazine and commissioning editor, digital content at the World Economic Forum. His work has been featured in The Times, the Guardian, Prospect Magazine, the Financial Times and Quartz.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's dream of uniting the self-declared separatist republics in eastern Ukraine under the banner of Novorossiya, or New Russia, was put on hold indefinitely last week as Moscow moved to abide by the terms of February's cease-fire deal.

Last week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told the Russian state-owned newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta that "we say that we want [these republics] to become part of Ukraine."

His comments echo those of Alexander Kofman, the defence minister of the separatist-run Donetsk People's Republic, who told the Vechernyaya Makeevka newspaper: "The Novorossiya project is frozen until a new political elite emerges in all these regions that will be able to head the movement. We don't have the right to impose our opinion on [the Ukrainian cities of] Kharkiv, Zaporizhia, and Odessa."

The move is most likely aimed to ensure the Russian side lives up to the commitments made in the second Minsk cease-fire agreement signed with Germany and France earlier this year. The deal called for local elections to be held in each of the separatist-held regions of Lugansk and Donetsk under Ukrainian law to decide on "local self-government" - a condition that could have been put under threat by the Novorossiya project.

Since the onset of fighting in eastern Ukraine following the collapse of President Viktor Yanukovych's government, suspicions of Russian involvement both militarily and politically have been repeatedly raised. NATO command has openly accused Moscow of sending troops and equipment (including tanks and heavy artillery) across the border to support the Russian-speaking rebels against the government in Kiev.

Yet the end goal for many in the Kremlin has always been grander: the reformation of a large part of the former Russian empire through the unification of Russian-speaking people across the region.

Putin said as much in his annual televised Q&A session last year, recalling that the breakaway territories in Ukraine had a long, shared history with Russia:

"I would like to remind you that what was called Novorossiya (New Russia) back in the tsarist days - Kharkov, Lugansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Nikolayev and Odessa - were not part of Ukraine back then. These territories were given to Ukraine in the 1920s by the Soviet government. Why? Who knows. They were won by Potyomkin and Catherine the Great in a series of well-known wars. The centre of that territory was Novorossiysk, so the region is called Novorossiya. Russia lost these territories for various reasons, but the people remained."

At the time, effectively laying claim to regions that are formally part of Ukraine was seen as a quite extraordinary statement to make. But it is in keeping with the Kremlin's broader strategic positioning over recent years.

Moscow has spent the past decade trying to rebuild economic and political ties with its former Soviet neighbours under the auspices of the Eurasian Union. Yet international sanctions against Russia and the collapse in the oil price over the past year have put serious strains on its ambitions.

In March, Putin attended a Eurasian Union conference with his Kazakh and Belorussian counterparts in Astana, the Kazakh capital. Tensions were higher than usual, with the government in Astana having to dip into its gold and foreign-currency reserves to defend its currency and rein in rampant inflation over recent months.

In July last year, the Kazakh government passed a new law increasing the sentence for separatist activity in a possible hint that the Kazakh authorities were becoming concerned about a possible Russian landgrab, not dissimilar to what has been seen in the breakaway regions of eastern Ukraine. The government had previously refused to sign up to Moscow's tit-for-tat sanctions imposed on Western goods imports, making clear that it viewed the Eurasian Union as a purely economic undertaking and not political.

The apparent success of the Novorossiya project in Ukraine provided some welcome relief from these setbacks.

In August, Putin directly addressed the "Novorossiya militia" in Ukraine following the establishment of a so-called Union of People's Republics between the rebel administrations in Lugansk and Donetsk. In effect, the Russian president appeared to be recognising the separatist republics as a unified political bloc - something Kiev's western allies have long refused to do.

Moreover, in February of this year the Russian TV station Channel 1 filmed the flag of Novorossiya flying over the key railway town of Debaltseve a day after rebels claimed to have captured the town after weeks of fierce fighting between the two sides.

The decision by separatist forces to raise the Novorossiya flag rather than that of their own Donetsk People's Republic flag is itself interesting and potentially highly symbolic. Raising the flag could be seen as playing into the Kremlin's narrative of the crisis, which is that the government in Kiev is trying to undermine the right of ethnic Russians in the east of the country to self-determination - albeit within Moscow's sphere of influence.

That dream, however, has now been paused indefinitely. Russia's domestic economy has suffered from a combination of international sanctions and the collapse in global oil prices and, it seems, there now seems to be little appetite left to further the standoff over Ukraine.

How that will play with separatist leaders is an open question.

Last year, separatist leader Oleg Tsarov ruled out the possibility that the rebel-held regions could find a mutually acceptable compromise with Kiev, saying "the reattachment of Novorossiya to Ukraine is not possible ... it is not possible given the current government in Kiev." He said those who had "experienced artillery bombardments, and who have lost comrades, who have lost relatives, whose homes have been destroyed," would never accept the current administration.

The two sides remain a long way apart, but without Moscow's backing the People's Republics would struggle to continue as independent entities. It seems the first step toward a dialogue on the future of Ukraine might just have been taken.

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