#2
Moscow Times
June 11, 2015
Putin-Era Prosperity Fades as More Russians Slip Into Poverty
By Anastasia Bazenkova and Peter Hobson

More Russians have fallen into official penury as the country's economic troubles cause the largest increase in poverty of President Vladimir Putin's 15-year rule.

The government last week published an order raising its recognized bare minimum required to live in the first quarter of this year to 9,662 rubles ($180) per month, a 17 percent rise from the previous quarter and 25 percent more than in the first three months of 2014. The government adjusts the poverty line every quarter.

The increase is higher than inflation, which has surged over the past year as Russia's economy has faltered. But it far outstrips nominal growth in incomes, meaning more people will now find themselves below the poverty threshold.

Prices were 16.2 percent higher in the first quarter of this year than in the first quarter of 2014, while nominal incomes had risen just 11 percent over the same period, according to the Rosstat state statistics agency.

Russia's economy began contracting this year after being struck by Western sanctions imposed on Moscow over the Ukraine crisis and falls in the price of oil, Russia's main export.

The slump threatens to push nearly 2 million more people into official poverty this year, according to government estimates.

Setback for Putin

Such a rise would be a setback for President Putin, whose 15 years in power were accompanied by an oil boom that pulled tens of millions of people out of poverty.

In 2000, the year that Putin ascended to the presidency, 42.3 million Russians, or 29 percent of the population, were below the poverty line, according to Rosstat. With only the occasional wobble, the rate fell steadily through most of Putin's reign, hitting a low of 15.4 million people in 2012 before rising slightly the following year.

But last year, as Russian economic growth stalled, the number of Russians below the poverty line increased by 600,000 people to reach 16.1 million. The increase was the largest annual rise since 2000, and left 11.2 percent of the population in official poverty, according to Rosstat.

This year, with the economy expected to shrink by around 3 percent, will be worse.

The Economic Development Ministry said earlier this year that the share of people whose incomes are below the living minimum would increase to 12.4 percent by the end of 2015, according to news agency RIA Novosti.

Based on Rosstat's end-2014 population figure of 143.75 million, that rise would put 1.7 million more people into poverty, raising the number in penury to just over 17.8 million.

The World Bank in an April report was bleaker, predicting that 14.2 percent of Russians would be in poverty by the year's end, implying an increase of more than 5 million people to 20.4 million.

Children Hit Hardest

Those most at risk are families with children, experts told The Moscow Times.

Along with its overall poverty threshold, the government sets different minimum subsistence figures for different regions and social groups. In the first quarter the nationwide averages were 10,404 rubles ($193) for the working-age population, 9,489 rubles ($176) for children and 7,916 rubles ($146) for pensioners, according to the government.

This means pensioners were expected to get by on less than $5 per day on average, and working people on under $6.50 per day - which may be possible in rural regions where many supplement their incomes by growing their own vegetables, but would barely buy a cup of coffee in the capital, Moscow.

But while pensioners have the smallest number, they have the biggest guarantees.

"[State] pensions cannot be lower than the minimum subsistence level, but wages can," said Sergei Smirnov, director of social policy and socio-economic programs at Moscow's Higher School of Economics.

The official minimum salary that employers can legally pay workers is 5,965 rubles ($110) per month, just over half the official subsistence level for working-age Russians.

"The cost of raising a child is huge but monthly child benefits in some regions don't exceed 300 rubles ($5.50)," said Oksana Garnayeva, head of charity fund Russkaya Beryoza ("Russian Birch"), which supports low-income families and pensioners.

What's more, many regions don't have enough jobs, Garnayeva added.

Underestimating Poverty

The poverty line is a relative number, and the official statistics do not reflect the real level of poverty in Russia, analysts said.

"By global standards, the poor are considered those who earn 50 to 60 percent of the average wage in the country," said Alexei Zubets, the head of the sociology department at Moscow's Financial University.

In April, the average wage was 32,805 rubles ($607) per month, according to Rosstat. That means that those whose income is less than 15,000 rubles a month should be considered poor, not just those who fall below the 9,662 ruble official poverty line.

These people are not starving, but they can not afford anything but food and necessities, according to Zubets.

"And they account for 50 to 55 percent of the population," he said.

[return to Contents] 

 #3
Moscow Times
June 11, 2015
Russia Day Holiday Important for only 3% of Russians
By Anna Dolgov

Only 3 percent of Russians consider the upcoming Russia Day national holiday, celebrated on June 12, among the important celebrations of the year, according to a recent poll by the analytical Levada Center.

By far the most significant holiday for Russians is New Year's, which more than 80 percent of respondents listed when asked which holidays were most important to them. Respondents could choose more than one answer. The birthdays of friends and loved ones had the next highest ranking, with 44 percent.

One's own birthday and Victory Day, celebrated on May 9, tied for the third and fourth places with 42 percent each.

РЕКЛАМА
Russia Day ranked the same on the importance scale as wedding anniversaries, which also scored 3 percent, according to the poll. But it beat the Nov. 7 anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Nov. 4 National Unity Day, and Russia's Constitution Day, which scored 1 percent each, the poll indicated.

Easter was considered one of the most important holidays by 27 percent, while Russian Orthodox Christmas lagged behind with 15 percent, according to the poll. Catholic Christmas was viewed as important by 1 percent, the poll indicated, in a country where Catholics reportedly make up less than 1 percent of the population.

Russia Day marks the day when the legislature of the then-Russian Federative Socialist Soviet Republic adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty - June 12, 1990. The day was made a national holiday in 1992.

Despite Russians' indifferent attitudes toward the holiday, a majority of the population, or 61 percent, consider national independence proclaimed in 1990 to have been "definitely" or mostly beneficial for the country, the poll indicated.

That is down from 71 percent a year earlier, but marks a rise from a low of 35 percent in 2002, Levada Center said in its report.

Fifteen percent of Russians think national independence was damaging for the country, according to this year's poll, compared to 26 percent in 2002 and a high of 35 percent in 2004, according to Levada Center data.

The poll was conducted on May 22-25 among 800 people in 46 of Russia's regions, and had a margin of error of no more than 4.1 percentage points.

 [return to Contents] 

 #4
Reuters
June 10, 2015
Russia Grows Oil and Gas Reserves Faster Than Rivals

LONDON - Russia added the most oil and gas reserves during the past year while the United States overtook it as the top energy producer, oil company BP said Wednesday in its benchmark annual review of world energy.

The BP Statistical Review of World Energy, first published in 1951 and considered an industry handbook, showed Russia added as much as 10 billion barrels of reserves, enough to supply the world for more than 100 days.

The review also showed that world oil demand grew by just 843,000 barrels per day last year, the slowest pace in 14 years outside U.S. recessions.

Russian reserves jumped above 100 billion barrels for the first time with BP estimating proved reserves at 103 billion, up from 93 billion in the 2013 review, which is based on primary official sources, third party data and independent estimates.

"The big picture remains one of abundant reserves, with new sources of energy being discovered more quickly than they are consumed. Total proved reserves of oil and gas in 2014 were more than double their level in 1980, when our data begin," BP said.

"The issue is not whether we will run out of fossil fuels, but rather how we should use those ample reserves in an efficient and sustainable way," it said in the review.

52 Years

Russia jumped up the ranks of the global reserves league table, overtaking OPEC heavyweights Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates for the first time to rank sixth behind Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Iran and Iraq.

The revisions came about after BP started using official Russian data, first published last year, BP Chief Economist Spencer Dale said.

The United States also saw a significant upgrade of its oil reserves to 48.5 billion from 44 billion a year earlier.

Thanks to the Russian and U.S. increases, global reserves climbed to 1,700 billion barrels, or enough to supply the planet for more than 52 years at current production levels, from 1,688 billion in the previous report.

Other leading global energy producers all saw their reserves remain relatively stable throughout 2014.

On the gas side, Russia also had the largest gain adding 1.35 trillions cubic meters, or enough to supply the world for almost five months.

Russia long dominated the world's gas reserves league table before ceding top spot to Iran recently after BP put Iranian gas reserves estimates at 34 trillion cubic meters (tcm)

Over the past year, Russian gas reserves increased to 32.6 tcm from 31.25 tcm in the 2013 report.

Russia has long been the world's top oil and gas producer but a U.S. shale oil revolution led to a spike in energy production volumes in North America allowing the United States to overtake Russia and Saudi Arabia as the world largest oil producers for the first time since 1975, according to BP.

 [return to Contents]

 #5
www.rt.com
June 11, 2015
Yabloko party wants founder Yavlinskiy to run for presidency

The veteran Russian liberal Yabloko party has announced it will back one of its founders, Grigory Yavlinskiy, to run in the 2018 presidential elections on a pacifist and anti-oligarchy agenda.

The decision to register Yavlinskiy as a candidate to run in the 2018 presidential election was made by Yabloko's political committee and published on the party's website. However, the message also reads that a final decision on the issue will be made at the next party congress.

The political committee stated in their message: "The only effective political decision that has some perspective" was to create an alternative to Vladimir Putin. They added that Yavlinskiy was a perfect candidate for this as he was capable of uniting "all voters with democratic leanings."

In the message, the party defined their leader's program as opposition to the "Russian authoritarian and oligarchic economic and political system."

According to the authors of the plan, despite extensive experience in politics Yavlinskiy managed to keep an untarnished reputation and remain free of any associations with oligarchy or corruption.

Yabloko is one of the oldest political parties in modern Russia. Founded in 1993, it always targeted a liberal-minded voter and several times managed to get minor parliamentary representation. In the last parliamentary poll, Yabloko garnered over three percent of votes, which didn't grant it any seats but gave some procedural preferences for future elections.

Grigory Yavlinskiy was among the party's three co-founders and headed it until 2008 when he stepped down and gave way to his longtime deputy Sergey Mitrokhin. Yavlinskiy still remains in Yabloko's political council and regularly represents the party at various events.

Yavlinskiy is no stranger to Russian presidential elections. In 1996 he got 7.4 percent of the votes and in 2000, 5.8 percent. He also registered as a candidate in 2012 but the authorities removed him from the polls after a large share of supporters' signatures provided by his headquarters were deemed invalid.

 #6
Moscow Times
June 11, 2015
Poll: Russians Dislike West About as Much as Westerners Dislike Russia
By Ivan Nechepurenko

A staggering majority of Russians view the West negatively, and the feeling is mutual, a poll conducted by the U.S.-based Pew Research Center revealed Wednesday.

According to the poll, 81% of Russians have unfavorable opinions of the United States, and 80% feel similarly about NATO. The European Union fared slightly better, with 60% of Russians harboring negative views toward it.

This general anti-Western sentiment may stem from the fact that popular Russian opinion dictates that the West is to blame for many woes.

One-third of Russians attribute the current economic crisis to Western sanctions imposed against their country in connection with the conflict in eastern Ukraine. And half of them believe Western nations are to blame for the ongoing violence in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Russians continue to sing the praises of President Vladimir Putin. Despite the fact that 73 percent are unhappy with the country's economic situation, 66 percent of Russians hold highly favorable views of their leader.

And despite the economic woes and diplomatic tiffs, the number of Russians who hold their own country in very high regard has soared 40 percentage points since 2013, to 69 percent at present.

In the West, the opposite trend can be observed, with many primarily blaming Russia for the ongoing Ukraine crisis. Respondents from several key member nations were polled for the Pew survey, including the United States, Britain, Germany, Poland, France, Italy, Spain and Canada.

Of these countries combined, a median of 39 percent said Russia is the main villain in the Ukraine conflict. Half said Russia poses a major military threat to other neighboring nations.

Most of the Western respondents said they viewed Russia negatively, with only 25 percent saying they look fondly at the country. Russia's median favorability among these countries has dropped 11 percentage points, to 26 percent at present. Putin's median favorability also took a dive, down from 28 percent in 2007 to 16 percent currently.

When asked how the West should help fix the Ukraine conflict, most respondents voiced a preference for the option of economic aid over military aid.

Only 41 percent of respondents expressed the view that NATO should send arms to Ukraine. A median 70 percent opined that Western countries should send economic aid to the embattled nation.

The survey was conducted among 11,116 respondents between April and May. The pollster did not reveal the survey's overall margin of error.

 [return to Contents]

#7
New York Times
June 11, 2015
Jeb Bush's Learning Curve on Russia
By CAROL GIACOMO  
Editorial Page Editor

Few world leaders are easier to criticize these days than President Vladimir Putin of Russia. There can be no defense of his decision to annex Crimea, worsen Ukraine's civil war by sending troops and weapons to the eastern region and threaten nuclear responses if NATO tries to deter his aggression.

So it was no surprise that Jeb Bush, an all-but-declared Republican presidential candidate, used Mr. Putin as a target during a visit to Berlin on Tuesday and Wednesday that was intended to burnish his non-existent foreign policy credentials.

"Ultimately to deal with Putin you need to deal from strength - he's a bully and ... you enable bad behavior when you're nuanced with a guy like that," Mr. Bush said. He called for a "more robust" approach and asked, "Who can doubt that Russia will do what it pleases if its aggression goes unanswered?"

It was also no surprise that Mr. Bush took the opportunity to fault President Obama, saying the administration's attempt to "reset" relations with Russia had failed.

Despite the venue, his most important audience was not Germans or even Europeans but Republican voters who are eager to blame Mr. Obama for everything that goes wrong in the world.

It has sometimes been hard to watch the Europeans waffle over imposing sanctions on Russia. But they and the Americans have done just that, and the sanctions seem to be holding even if they don't seem to have altered Mr. Putin's outrageous behavior.

So what would Mr. Bush do differently? Nothing, it seems. He proposed a beefed-up presence of NATO troops along Russia's border with the Baltic states and said the allies should signal what further sanctions Russia could face if it persists in its aggression - things the United States and its allies are already doing.

Mr. Bush coupled his exhortations about strength with caution, insisting, "I'm not talking about being bellicose." That suggests the kind of nuance that Mr. Obama has tried to bring to his Russia policy. Getting the balance right is complicated by the fact that Mr. Putin's help is still needed to solve other challenges, including in Syria and Iran.

What Mr. Bush failed to offer is a detailed plan for ending the presence of Russian-backed troops in Ukraine.

He apparently saw no irony in the fact that while he faulted Mr. Obama for trying in 2009 to reset relations with Russia, his own brother, President George W. Bush, famously declared on meeting Mr. Putin in 2001 that he had gotten "a sense of his soul" and found him "trustworthy."

President Bush obviously went overboard with his naïve and cloying assessment. But like Mr. Obama, he was serving the national interest in trying to establish a working relationship with the leader of a major country that controls thousands of nuclear weapons.

As Jeb Bush correctly noted, Mr. Putin has changed and is far more aggressive than in the past. If he wants to be taken seriously as a presidential candidate, Mr. Bush will have to come up with more thoughtful explanations of what Mr. Obama's failings are and how he will tackle the world's most thorny problems differently.

 [return to Contents]

 #8
Interfax
June 11, 2015
Russia urges U.S. not to destroy INF Treaty

The deployment of intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles near Russian borders by the U.S. would totally destroy the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty), the Russian Foreign Ministry said.

"We have taken note of statements by Pentagon representatives that the U.S. is studying options for military responses to Russian 'violations', up to the potential deployment of intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles banned by the INF near our borders. It is clear that such actions would constitute the treaty's total destruction by the American side, with all ensuing consequences," the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a commentary on June 11.

"We are calling on the U.S. to ensure the full implementation of the INF Treaty and not jeopardize this document's viability," it said.

"Questions arise in relation to the U.S.' approach toward the implementation of the provisions of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons [NPT]. So-called joint nuclear missions pursued by the U.S. and its NATO allies constitute a serious violation of this treaty," it said.

[return to Contents] 

 #9
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
June 10, 2015
Fear-Mongering in Baltics Does More Harm Than Imagined Russian Threat
Divisions and cracks that already exist within these nations should be fading with time - instead they are being deepened
By Danielle Ryan
Danielle Ryan is an Irish journalist and blogger. She has a degree in Business and German from Trinity College Dublin and studied political reporting at the Washington Center for Politics and Journalism in Washington, DC. Special interests: American politics and foreign policy, US-Russia relations and media bias. Her blog can be found at journalitico.com.

The Baltics "have reason" to worry about Russian aggression, according to an article published today by Bloomberg News.

But while the headline talks a big game, the content doesn't back up the claim. What it amounts to is this: The Baltics should be worried that Western Europe doesn't relish the thought of coming to their rescue if Russia attacks them - not, as the headline suggests, that they have real reason to believe it's going to happen.

So while an initial glance at the piece gives the impression that we're going to learn something new, in reality there is nothing that indicates an impending Russian attack at all.

But the article does highlight something interesting. It notes new polling released by the Pew Research Center which shows a "lack of public support" in key Western nations for using military force against Russia if it does attack a NATO member state.

In Germany, 38% said Russia should be responded to with force after such an event, while in the UK, France, Spain and Germany support was higher, but still under 50% in each country. The author notes that public opinion can change in a crisis (and it usually does) but it's hardly surprising that as of today, most Germans and a majority of Britons aren't exactly champing at the bit for a military engagement with Russia.

It's a different story in the US, where a majority (56%) support the idea of using military force if Russia attacked a NATO member. A less scientific indicator of America's willingness to engage Russia militarily presents itself in a recent video posted online by journalist Mark Rice, who asked average Americans on the street to sign a petition to support a "pre-emptive nuclear strike" against Russia to "send a message" to Putin.

I'd like to believe the video is a set-up and that these people were actors who know better than to sign a petition in support of a nuclear war, but something tells me there really are people out there who pay precisely zero attention to the world. Conversely, someone should take a camera out into the streets of Moscow and ask people if they support a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the US - maybe Americans are getting the short end of the stick when it comes to these street experiments? The results could be interesting. But, I digress.

The Bloomberg piece also points to the "ominous sign" of growing polarization in public opinion in Eastern Europe - where there is "widespread concern" that Russia poses a "major threat" to NATO countries.

What the Baltic speculation does prove, more than anything, is how little most people actually know about the full spectrum of events that unfolded in Ukraine. Sure, there are comparisons to be made between the Russian-speaking populations in Ukraine and the Baltics and the more Russia-friendly eastern regions in each country, but what so many Western reporters seem to have forgotten, is that the Baltics have been ticking along relatively peacefully beside Russia for more than two decades, despite their complicated political and ethnic divisions.

Something else which is rarely seen expressed, is that US-led NATO fear-mongering in the Baltics is actually doing real damage to these countries as we speak. Washington has been drumming up fear in Eastern Europe at an alarming rate. Last September, Obama traveled to Estonia to personally announce that any NATO ally in peril would be protected. The vision of a whole, free and peaceful Europe is under threat from a Russia whose actions "evoke dark tactics from Europe's past," he said, in a thinly veiled reference to Nazi Germany.

The cruel irony is that the speech was not really intended to make Estonians feel safe, it was intended to make them feel scared - and as far as Washington is concerned, it may be that the more scared they are, the better.

So what do I mean when I say the fear-mongering is already doing damage? Well, the flipside of all this is that the Russian speaking populations of these countries, particularly in areas like the borderlands of Estonia, could become increasingly jaded by this rhetoric from the more EU-oriented Western regions. When the divisions and cracks that already exist within these nations should be fading with time, they are in fact being deepened.

Whether that is really by design or not, it's impossible to know - but if the last two years have taught us anything, it's that America either simply does not understand the fragility of Eastern Europe or it's using that fragility for its own ends. In some strange way, it's probably both. The US has shown all the grace of an elephant in a China shop in Ukraine. Washington's tendency to simplify a problem by pretending the complications don't exist has been on full display - and in Kiev they meddled with a time bomb.

With expected presidential candidate Jeb Bush in Europe this week rebuking Putin for - and he said this with a straight face - "shattering international norms" - and with Hillary Clinton's record-breaking levels of Putin hatred, we can surely expect that fear-mongering will remain the biggest tool in America's arsenal for Eastern Europe, regardless of who takes the Oval Office in 2016.

The baffling thing is, if Putin never attacks the Baltics, the US will pat itself on the back for preventing something which was more than likely never going to happen in the first place. And if trouble does visit those lands, Washington will feel it's been vindicated - but whether it would admit to its role in the proceedings is another story entirely.

In the 15 years since he came to power, if Vladimir Putin had wanted to recreate the Soviet Union, it seems to me that he's really left it a little late. But who knows? Maybe towards the end of his tenure he's just going to pull an all-nighter and do it in one fell swoop? Might be better to go out with a bang.

 [return to Contents] 

 #10
www.rt.com
June 11, 2015
US attempt to 'lecture the Pope' before Putin meeting a 'big responsibility' to take - Kremlin

During their conversation, Pope Francis and Vladimir Putin touched on the issue of Ukraine, the Russian president's spokesman said, noting that US advice on what concerns should be raised, was an attack on sovereignty and an attempt to lecture the Pope.

Just hours before the meeting between visiting Russian President Vladimir Putin and His Holiness Pope Francis, the US ambassador to the Holy See Kenneth Hackett encouraged the pontiff to take a tougher stance against Vladimir Putin. In particular, Hackett said the Vatican "could say more about concerns on territorial integrity".

"Maybe this is an opportunity for the Holy Father to privately raise those concerns," Hackett said. Pope Francis had "certainly" been made aware of the violence in Ukraine and was not unaware of the crisis, he added.

However, at the hour-long private audience with the Russian President, the Pope took a neutral stance. He urged for more humanitarian assistance, which Russia already provides, and for a peaceful solution to the crisis via Minsk II roadmap.

"It was agreed on the importance to restore a climate of dialogue and that all parties commit themselves to implement the agreements Minsk," Holy See said in a statement. "Also essential is the commitment to address the serious humanitarian situation, including by ensuring access to humanitarian agents and with the contribution of all parties to a progressive relaxation in the region."

The apparent move by Washington to interfere with talks and exert influence on the foreign policy of another state has been condemned by the Russian presidential spokesman, Dmitry Peskov.

"This is surely a blatant attempt in suppressing sovereignty of other nations," Peskov told Russian media. "This is what the Russian President never agreed with, and now categorically opposes."

Lecturing, or even "pretending to have the right to lecture the Pope of Rome" is surely a "new move" in international diplomacy, and a "big responsibility," Dmitry Peskov noted.

Putin and Pope Francis had a "profound" discussion that focused on a number of issues. They have discussed the threat posed by radical Islam to Christian communities in Syria. They have also discussed common values that unite Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and other world religions.

During the private meeting in the library of the Apostolic Palace, Putin and the Pope exchanged gifts. President Putin gave Francis an embroidered panel depicting the Christ the Savior Cathedral, while the Pope presented a medallion depicting an angel of peace who brings justice and solidarity.

The meeting with Pope Francis was Putin's second. The two men champion similar conservative values in a rapidly changing world, as well as concerns for emerging threats to Christianity. During their last meeting in 2013, Putin and the Pope discussed the dangers that Christians face in the Middle East at the hands of radical Islamists.

 [return to Contents] 

 #11
Carnegie Moscow Center
June 10, 2015
Mr. Putin Meets the Pope
By Paul Stronski
Paul Stronski is a senior associate in Carnegie's Russia and Eurasia Program, where his research focuses on the relationship between Russia and neighboring countries in Central Asia and the South Caucasus.

Unwelcome in most European capitals, Russian President Vladimir Putin's trip to the Vatican on June 10 was likely a Kremlin attempt to show the West that its policy of isolation is not working. Pope Francis is one of the world's most prominent religious and political leaders, so the meeting provided the Kremlin ample opportunity for spin. Neither side gave much of a readout, but any suggestion that the Pope is a potential Kremlin ally would be deeply misguided. Here's why:    

Although he has not publicly assigned blame for the war in eastern Ukraine, Pope Francis has been increasingly outspoken against the war there, focusing on the plight of civilians and the growing humanitarian crisis. In February, he called for an end to the "horrible fratricidal violence" in Ukraine. The fate of Christians in war has been longstanding concern of the Pope's, given his efforts to promote interfaith dialogue and growing threats against Christian communities in conflict zones (Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine)-most of which are actually Orthodox, not Catholic.  

The Pope's comments on Ukraine have opened him up to criticism-mainly from Ukraine's Greek Catholic community-for not being strong enough in condemning Russian aggression. Greek Catholics, who represent about seven percent of the Ukrainian population and live mostly in western regions of the country, follow eastern Christian rites, but accept the authority of the Pope. Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, dismissed the Pope's cautious February statements on the Ukraine war as reminiscent of "Soviet propaganda." Others in Ukraine complain that the Pope's views of the conflict in Ukraine shows his "ignorance" about the country. Some even suggest that unnamed "pro-Russian forces in the Vatican" are deceiving him. Nearly all his critics believe Francis has been far too deferential to Moscow for the sake of promoting reconciliation between the Catholic and Orthodox churches-a centuries-old goal of the Catholic Church and a process his two immediate predecessors had focused on in the post-Soviet era with few results.   

The reality is more nuanced. A close reading of the Pope's homily during his mass in Sarajevo, Bosnia on May 7 suggest that he has a more astute understanding of the war and is aware of the dangers of a religious leader stepping into a conflict-particularly one where religion hangs loosely in the background. Ukraine is religiously diverse. Its main religion is Orthodoxy, but that community is divided into three branches-only one of which accepts the authority of the Patriarch in Moscow. In addition to the Greek Catholic community, Ukraine is also home to small Jewish and Muslim minorities. Its main Muslim group-the Crimean Tatars-now lives under Russian occupation, although some have fled the peninsula to other parts of Ukraine. Thus far, religion has not been at the center of this conflict. The Pope appears intent on keeping it that way.

This seems to be what the Pope was trying to do in Sarajevo. When releasing the full text of his Sarajevo homily, the Vatican underscored that Sarajevo-once known for its vibrant cosmopolitan culture-now knows "the abyss of pain and suffering inflicted by war" and is an appropriate venue for the Pope to speak out against the conflicts of today. The contemporary conflict that comes to mind in reading the homily-which was given just three days before his meeting with Putin-is Ukraine.

Like the Russia-Ukraine war, the Balkan wars sprang largely from political elites who pursued their own narrow purposes. Concerned about losing political and economic power as the Yugoslav state collapsed, the political leaders of its constituent parts took to the bully pulpit to stoke ethnic, religious, and historic grievances, allying themselves with nationalists and the criminal world to advance their political agendas. The Balkan wars soon took on a life of their own. Russia's leadership found itself in a similar position in 2014. Having banked on Yanukovych to keep his Eurasian integration project alive and prevent Ukraine from moving closer to Europe, Putin allied himself with hardline chauvinists and lashed out at the West in order to thwart the political consequences of Yanukovych's collapse. Activating elements of the criminal underground to help fight his hybrid war, he cloaked the annexation of Crimea and efforts to seize other areas of Ukraine as necessary to defend ethnic Russians from "fascist" Ukrainians. As was the case in Bosnia, the manufactured conflict quickly became a real and intractable one.

No doubt with these two wars in mind, Francis in Sarajevo called for political leaders to tone down irresponsible and aggressive rhetoric, which creates an "atmosphere of war" across the globe. He condemned those who "wish to incite and foment this atmosphere deliberately, mainly those who want conflict between cultures and societies." Recalling Jesus' words in the Gospel "Blessed are the peacemakers," the Pope criticized modern-day "preachers of peace" who are "capable of proclaiming peace, even in a hypocritical or indeed duplicitous manner," but who do not actually make peace. These comments are noteworthy given the repeated failures to implement the Minsk agreements brokered by Putin.

But disagreements between Putin and the Pope are not limited to Ukraine. Recent speculation in Western media about a budding relationship between the two men seems overblown. They have met only once before, and that was before Russia's aggression in Ukraine upended peace in Europe. The two men appear to be on vastly different political and ideological trajectories when dealing with many issues. The Russian President is known for his lavish lifestyle and elaborate-often doctored-photo-ops that build up a public image as an athlete, strong leader, and man of the people. Francis, by contrast shuns the trappings of his office, does not use the papal residence, and is known to reach out, often spontaneously, to some of the world's least empowered citizens-the terminally ill, impoverished children, orphans, and the disabled. Putin's Russia has a poor record for all four groups.  

Since his return to the Kremlin and particularly after the annexation of Crimea, Putin's Russia has moved increasingly to narrow Russia's tolerance for diversity and pluralism. Pope Francis, however, has tried to move the Church toward greater tolerance and openness, even if he has not changed official doctrine. For example, Russia has passed (and Putin signed) discriminatory legislation that marginalizes-and contributes to violence against-Russia's gays and lesbians. The Kremlin presents itself as a defender of traditional Christian values and morality against purportedly decadent influences from the West.

By contrast, Pope Francis has tried to steer the Church away from divisive ideological issues, instead stressing the importance of social justice. He has urged greater openness to and acceptance of gay Catholics, famously stating "who am I to judge" if a gay person seeks God. He also has urged the Church to be more accepting of divorced Catholics, those who have had children out of wedlock, and other marginalized groups, often to the dismay of conservatives in the church. At a time when Putin's regime has imprisoned some of its critics on charges of blasphemy, the Pope has spoken out against all forms of religious fundamentalism.

On foreign policy, it is the case that Putin and the Pope have seen eye-to-eye on some issues-most importantly the Pope's 2013 opposition to the impending U.S. military strikes on Syria-but for vastly different reasons. The Pope argued against escalating a conflict that would lead to greater civilian casualties, but the Kremlin appeared more concerned with preventing a unilateral show of force by the United States in the Middle East.

On other foreign policy issues, their interests diverge. The Pope, for example, played a role in jumpstarting the normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba. If normalization succeeds, it could begin to erode Russian political, military, and economic interests in Cuba. Any loss of influence there would be a symbolic blow for Russia, because Cuba was the cornerstone of Moscow's Cold War policies in Latin America, a region where Russian power and presence has dimmed considerably in the post-Soviet era.

Putin might be looking for a partner in Pope Francis, but the issues that divide them are many. With the Ukraine conflict again on the verge of escalation, that divide will likely only get larger.

 [return to Contents] 

 #12
West loses tool of pressure on Russia after its withdrawal from G7 - Pushkov

MOSCOW. June 11 (Interfax) - The value of the G7 has markedly depleted in the U.S.' eyes without Russia, State Duma International Committee Chairman Alexei Pushkov has said.

"To my mind, the G7 is merely another incarnation of the Western alliance, a club for friends of the United States of America. So, I believe its value has markedly depleted even for the United States," Pushkov said at a press conference at Interfax on Thursday.

When Russia was a member of the group, the G8 was a tool via which Western alliance countries could pressure Russia and its position, he said.

"Now this tool is gone. The absence of India and China in the group is definitely its weakness because these two countries rank first and third by global GDP parameters," the committee chairman added.

In the opinion of Pushkov, the West is retiring into its own shell.

"In the middle of the 1990s, Samuel Huntington, the author of the famed book, The Clash of Civilizations, said that the world was unstoppably sliding into a condition of opposition between the West and the rest of the world. He expressed that condition with a formula, 'The West against the rest'. Now his forecast is coming true," Pushkov said.

 [return to Contents] 

 #13
www.rt.com
June 11, 2015
Thanks to sanctions Russia turned to Asia - Medvedev

Western sanctions have encouraged Russia to work more actively with Asian partners, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said prior to this month's EU summit in Brussels. The EU will then make a decision on anti-Russian sanctions.

"In economic terms, of course, all those sanctions, introduced against us, stimulated us to ensure more active cooperation with Asian countries. Thank you very much too all those states that have adopted them," Medvedev said to reporters at XVII World Congress of Russian Press Thursday.

Its high time Russia turned to Asia, as the West don't give money and push Russian companies out of business, he added.

Russia's choice of trading partners will be based on national interests, but the markets in the Asia-Pacific region and BRICS are of utmost importance, said the PM.

"Sixty percent of the world GDP is there. The whole global growth is mainly in the Asia-Pacific region and in the BRICS countries. Therefore, it is essential for us to gain a foothold in the partner states of the Eurasian Economic Union and the Asia-Pacific region,"said Medvedev.

However, Russia hasn't closed the door to Europe, he added.

Baltic partnership suffers

During his speech, Medvedev paid special attention to Russian trade relationship with the Baltic states.

Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania suffered badly from Russian counter-sanctions, he said.

"You know, we were forced to declare the so-called counter-measures, sanctions, as they are sometimes called, counter-sanctions. I looked, [Russian - ed.] trade turnover with Latvia fell by 40 percent, Lithuania - 30 percent, Estonia - 25 percent. We understand how significant these figures are for the Baltic countries. These are largely agricultural products, you won't find them in our markets," Medvedev said.

The last 25 years were in vain and the reasons are political. No business can be made, when Russia has an enemy image amid Soviet phobia there. However, Moscow is ready to develop sound relations with the Baltic countries, he said.

The EU summit will take place in Brussels on June 25-26. The EU will decide whether to prolong the economic sanctions against Russia expiring in July. The sanctions were introduced over the reunification of Crimea with Russia, and its stance in the Ukrainian crisis.

 [return to Contents] 

 #14
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
June 10, 2015
Can the BRICS form an economic union?
The group of emerging nations has the opportunity to form a powerful economic bloc, which with time will grow in stature.
By Alisen Alisenov, special to RBTH
Alisen Alisenov is Professor of Economy and Finance at the RANEPA Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences.

Ever since BRICS was established, few experts have expected its members to form an informal economic union. Despite the fact that BRICS was created for informal discussions of global developmental issues, the new association is following more of a policy of economic integration and political interaction.

The union of the world's five largest developing economies has good potential for growth. These countries contain the most valuable resources for the global economy. Brazil is rich in agricultural production, Russia and South Africa in their natural and mineral resources, India has inexpensive intellectual resources and China has a powerful production base.

The BRICS countries have the opportunity of forming a powerful economic bloc, which with time will be very difficult to oppose. The collective indicators of the five countries are even more impressive. According to the World Bank, BRICS's total GDP in 2014 was around $16.5 trillion, or 18 percent of the world's GDP. The combined currency reserves of the grouping stand at about $4 trillion, 75 percent of world's currency reserves. The total population of the five countries is more than 3 billion. Other developing markets are also showing an increased interest in the BRICS countries. Argentina, Mexico and Indonesia could become members in the future.

It is important to note that in general the BRICS countries are maintaining their leading positions as the most dynamically developing markets in the world. Investors and creditors are particularly interested in China, Brazil and India. Russia, although being an important player in world markets, has seen a decrease in interest, if compared to those three countries. This is largely because of the economic sanctions, the weakening of its investment rating and the devaluation of the ruble.

One of the most significant agreements reached by leaders of the BRICS countries during the last summit was to create a joint pool of national currency reserves in the event of a possible deterioration of the financial crisis. In particular, it was agreed to establish a new development bank with a charter capital of $100 billion. The new bank's funds will be used to finance and support developing economies. The agreement on the pool of conditional currencies will have similar functions to those of the International Monetary Fund. The bank will give financial assistance to those BRICS countries that have difficulties in their payment balances.

Another agreement that was signed concerns the expansion of mutual trade with payments in national currencies, which in the future may destroy the dollar's monopoly on the BRICS countries' mutual payments.

Russia will feel the most perceptible advantage of the creation of the national currency reserves pool. This necessity is conditioned by global political tensions and the effect of the anti-Russian economic sanctions, which cuts off Russian enterprises from inexpensive western credit.

Despite all the positive steps taken in bringing the BRICS countries closer together, it must be noted that this powerful association cannot expect deep economic integration within the next 15-20 years. The main deterrent to a more active interaction between BRICS member countries is the difference in their political-economic system. However, it is becoming clear that the policy being enacted by the BRICS countries' leaders may provide a free trade market within the group. This is demonstrated by the positive trade dynamics among the BRICS countries.

In the last ten years Russia's commodity turnover with its BRICS partners increased by almost nine times: from $14.2 billion to $121.4 billion. The macroeconomic effect for Russia from such a policy should be the reduction of prices on goods produced on the association's territory or the expansion of competition in the common BRICS market.

The prospects of the development and modernization of Russia's economy and the reduction of its dependence on the volatility of world financial markets will depend on the effectiveness of the interactivity of the BRICS countries in key issues. But closer economic interaction within such a large association, as it happens, for example, in advanced integrated associations (such as the EU and Eurasian Economic Union) is not needed.

The future of the BRICS should be tied to the minimization of losses for national economies in the conditions of globalization with an orientation to a more balanced distribution of resources and a positive effect on the global economy. Especially since the trends in the development of BRICS' financial institutions indicate its potential to change the existing international currency-financial systems.

The union of the five largest developing economies of the world should help its members deal better with the financial crisis and prevent a further stagnation of the economy. The revival of trade between the BRICS member countries should be of help and in turn lead to the growth of supply and stimulation of the real sector in these countries' economies. In this case, BRICS has all the grounds and possibilities to become a comprehensive strategic and tactical mechanism to deal with issues of global politics and economics.

 [return to Contents] 

 #15
BRICS, SCO look sound alternatives to Russia's strategic partnership with West - experts
By Tamara Zamyatin

MOSCOW, June 10. /TASS/. The period of Russia's "strategic partnership" with the Euro-Atlantic community may be drawing to a close, as follows from what was said at Tuesday's round-table meeting arranged by the Foreign and Defence Policy Council. The gist of the discussion entitled How to Preserve the Development Potential in the Context of Geo-Political Confrontation was: Russia is turning towards wider cooperation with its partners in the BRICS group and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

The deputy board chairman of Russia's Vneshekonombank, former deputy economic development minister Andrey Klepach, believes the project of Russia's European integration had plunged into crisis long before the current turmoil in Ukraine and the introduction of anti-Russian sanctions. "Europe has never regarded us as a full-fledged partner," he said.

"In the early 1990s Russia developed the delusion the light at the end of the tunnel was in the West. In reality we got the economic collapse of the 1991-1999. But even after that period Russia's economic policies continued to be built on the very same liberal principles. Russia has joined the World Trade Organization and supported the ideas of a common market with the European Union and the creation of free trade zones. The crisis of Russia's former euro-integration model will last a while," Klepach predicts.

At the same time Klepach acknowledged that Russia's greatest trade was with the European Union countries and it will remain so for another ten years. Europe's energy dependence on Russia will last till 2025. There remains the possibility of cooperation with the United States in space exploration and the struggle against the terrorist Islamic State. "Regrettably, the United States' opportunities for cooperation with Russia will expand only with the worsening of the international situation," he said.

Germany's federal chancellor, Angela Merkel, voiced a similar thought on Monday after the G7 summit in Bavaria. She recalled that the European Union was cooperating with Russia in overcoming the Syrian crisis and addressing Iran's nuclear problem. At the same time she did not forget the prolongation of anti-Russian sanctions until full compliance with the Minsk Accords. In other words, the West permits opportunities for cooperation with Moscow only in crisis-stricken areas, and not in joint economic projects, which is well-seen in Brussels' resistance to the laying of the Turkish Stream project across Europe.

In the run-up to the BRICS and SCO summit meetings in Bashkortostan's capital Ufa due in July the round-table discussion focused on making Russia's cooperation with these organizations more meaningful. Most speakers mentioned the joint projects with BRICS and SCO not as an alternative to strategic partnership with the West, but as an opportunity for a large share of humanity to make a technological breakthrough.

The BRICS countries account for 40% of the globe's population and for 30% of the world economy, says chief GLONASS analyst Andrei Ionin. "It would be constructive to promote greater unity of the BRICS countries with an idea of technological alliance. This scenario will not be targeted against the United States or the European Union, but acceptable and fruitful for all," he said.

"The Western sanctions hit Russia's sorest spot - the lack of advanced horizontal drilling know-hows and space and IT technologies," Ionin said. "BRICS are the non-Western states which are prepared to pay for their national interests. The pooling of resources, finance and competencies of the BRICS countries and joint development of technologies might let a large share of humanity to achieve a breakthrough into the future. For a start the BRICS group might launch a joint space project, for instance, the creation of a joint orbital station or a personal space communication system. Too bad we are late to make this proposal at the BRICS summit in Ufa," Ionin regrets.

"Time is ripe for the BRICS countries to start generating ideas and technological products," says the deputy CEO of the Russian Venture Company, Yevgeny Kuznetsov.

"Whereas the Euro-Atlantic community regards itself as a 'golden billion', the BRICS countries are humanity's three silver billions," says lecturer at the Moscow state institute of international relations MGIMO, Oleg Barabanov. The BRICS countries, he believes, might benefit a great deal from the idea the honorary president of the Foreign and Defence Policy Council, Sergey Karaganov, proposed at a meeting of the international discussion club Valdai. Karaganov came out with a proposal for creating what he called as Greater Central Eurasia, with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization playing the key role, in particular, after the SCO has admitted two new members - India and Iran.

Coupling China's Silk Road Economic Belt project and the Eurasian Economic Union may yield great mutual benefits for all participating countries. The West finds this possibility worrisome, and with this in mind it has been trying to throw the BRICS and the SCO groups off balance. But these efforts will reach nowhere, because both organizations are groups of sovereign states," Barabanov believes.

 [return to Contents] 

 
#16
www.rt.com
June 11, 2015
American dreaming, from G1 to Bilderberg
By Pepe Escobar
Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times/Hong Kong, an analyst for RT and TomDispatch, and a frequent contributor to websites and radio shows ranging from the US to East Asia.

What's the connection between the G7 summit in Germany, President Putin's visit to Italy, the Bilderberg club meeting in Austria, and the TTIP - the US-EU free trade deal - negotiations in Washington?

We start at the G7 in the Bavarian Alps - rather G1 with an added bunch of "junior partners" - as US President Barack Obama gloated about his neo-con induced feat; regiment the EU to soon extend sanctions on Russia even as the austerity-ravaged EU is arguably hurting even more than Russia.

Predictably, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande caved in - even after being forced by realpolitik to talk to Russia and jointly carve the Minsk-2 agreement.

The hypocrisy-meter in the Bavarian Alps had already exploded with a bang right at the pre-dinner speech by EU Council President Donald Tusk, former Prime Minister of Poland and certified Russophobe/warmonger: "All of us would have preferred to have Russia round the G7 table. But our group is not only a group (that shares) political or economic interests, but first of all this is a community of values. And that is why Russia is not among us."

So this was all about civilized "values" against "Russian aggression."

The "civilized" G1 + junior partners could not possibly argue whether they would collectively risk a nuclear war on European soil over a Kiev-installed 'Banderastan', sorry, "Russian aggression."

Instead, the real fun was happening behind the scenes. Washington factions were blaming Germany for making the West lose Russia to China, while adult minds in the EU - away from the Bavarian Alps - blamed Washington.

Even juicier is a contrarian view circulating among powerful Masters of the Universe in the US corporate world, not politics. They fear that in the next two to three years France will eventually re-ally with Russia (plenty of historical precedents). And they - once again - identify Germany as the key problem, as in Berlin forcing Washington to get involved in a Prussian 'Mitteleuropa' Americans fought two wars to prevent.

As for the Russians - from President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov downwards - a consensus has emerged; it's pointless to discuss anything substantial considering the pitiful intellectual pedigree - or downright neo-con stupidity - of the self-described "Don't Do Stupid Stuff" Obama administration policy makers and advisers. As for the "junior partners" - mostly EU minions - they are irrelevant, mere Washington vassals.

It would be wishful thinking to expect the civilized "values" gang to propose alternatives for the overwhelming majority of citizens of G7 nations getting anything other than Mac-jobs, or barely surviving as hostages of finance-junkie turbo-capitalism which only benefits the one percent.Rather easier to designate the proverbial scapegoat - Russia - and proceed with NATO-infused fear/warmongering rhetoric.

Iron Lady Merkel also found time to pontificate on climate change - instilling all and sundry to invest in a "low-carbon global economy." Few noticed that the alleged deadline for full "decarbonization" was set for the end of the 21st century, when this planet will be in deep, deep trouble.

Achtung! Bilderberg!

Obama's neocon-induced newspeak continues to rule that Russia dreams of recreating the Soviet empire. Now compare it to what President Putin is telling Europe.

Last week, Putin found time to give an interview to the Milan-based Corriere della Sera at 2 am; the interview was published as the Bavarian Alps show went on, and ahead of Putin's June 10 visit to Italy. Russia's geopolitical interests and US- Russia relations are depicted in excruciating detail.

So Putin was a persona non grata at the G1 plus junior partners? Well, in Italy he visited the Milan Expo; met Prime Minister Renzi and Pope Francis; reminded everyone about the "privileged economic and political ties" between Italy and Russia; and stressed the 400 Italian companies active in Russia and the million Russian tourists who visit Italy every year.

Crucially, he also evoked that consensus; Russia had represented an alternative view as a member of the G8, but now "other powers" felt they no longer needed it. The bottom line: it's impossible to have an adult conversation with Obama and friends.

And right on cue, from Berlin -where he was displaying his sterling foreign policy credentials, Jeb Bush, brother of destroyer of Iraq Dubya Bush, fully scripted by his neocon advisers, declared Putin a bully and rallied Europe to fight, what else, "Russian aggression."

The rhetorical haze over what was really discussed in the Bavarian Alps only began to dissipate at the first chords of the real sound of music; the Bilderberg Group meeting starting this Thursday at the Interalpen-Hotel Tyrol in Austria, only three days after the G1 plus junior partners.

Possible conspiracies aside, Bilderberg may be defined as an ultra-select bunch of elite lobbyists - politicians, US corporate honchos, EU officials, captains of industry, heads of intelligence agencies, European royals - organized annually in a sort of informal think tank/policy-forming format, to advance globalization and all crucial matters related to the overall Atlanticist agenda. Call it the prime Atlanticist Masters of the Universe talkfest.

To make things clear - not that they are big fans of transparency - the composition of the steering committee is here. And this is what they will be discussing in Austria.

Naturally they will be talking about "Russian aggression" (as in who cares about failed Ukraine; what we need is to prevent Russia from doing business with Europe).

Naturally they will be talking about Syria (as in the partition of the country, with the Caliphate already a fact of post-Sykes-Picot life).

Naturally they will be talking about Iran (as in let's do business, buy their energy and bribe them into joining our club).

But the real deal is really the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) - the alleged "free trade" deal between the US and the EU. Virtually all major business/finance lobbyists for the TTIP will be under the same Austrian roof.

And not by accident Bilderberg starts one day before "fast track" presidential authority is to be debated at the US Congress.

WikiLeaks and a ton of BRICS

Enter WikiLeaks, with what in a fairer world would be a crucial spanner in the works.

The fast track authority would extend US presidential powers for no less than six years; that includes the next White House tenant, which might well be 'The Hillarator' or Jeb "Putin is a bully" Bush.

This presidential authority to negotiate dodgy deals includes not only the TTIP but also the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA).

WikiLeaks, just in time, published the Healthcare Annex to the secret draft "Transparency" chapter of the TPP, along with each country's negotiating position. No wonder this draft is secret. And there's nothing "transparent" about it; it's an undisguised hold-up of national healthcare authorities by Big Pharma.

The bottom line is that these three mega-deals - TTP, TTIP and TiSA - are the ultimate template of what could be politely described as global corporate governance, a Bilderberg wet dream. The losers: nation-states, and the very concept of Western democracy. The winners: mega-corporations.

Julian Assange, in a statement, succinctly nailed it "It is a mistake to think of the TPP as a single treaty. In reality there are three conjoined mega-agreements, the TiSA, the TPP and the TTIP, all of which strategically assemble into a grand unified treaty, partitioning the world into the West versus the rest. This 'Great Treaty' is described by the Pentagon as the economic core to the US military's 'Asia Pivot.' The architects are aiming no lower than the arc of history. The Great Treaty is taking shape in complete secrecy, because along with its undebated geostrategic ambitions it locks into place an aggressive new form of transnational corporatism for which there is little public support."

So this is the real Atlanticist agenda - the final touches being applied in the arc spanning the G1 + added junior partners to Bilderberg (expect a lot of crucial phone calls from Austria to Washington this Friday). NATO on trade. Pivoting to Asia excluding Russia and China. The West vs. the rest.

Now for the counterpunch. As the show in the Bavarian Alps unrolled, the first BRICS Parliamentarian Forum was taking place in Moscow - ahead of the BRICS summit in Ufa next month.

Neocons - with Obama in tow - knock themselves out dreaming that Russia has become "isolated" from the rest of the world because of their sanctions. Since then Moscow has signed major economic/strategic contracts with at least twenty nations. Next month, Russia will host the BRICS summit - 45 percent of the world's population, a GDP equivalent to the EU, and soon bigger than the current G7 - as well as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit, when India and Pakistan, currently observers, will be accepted as full members.

G1 plus junior partners? Bilderberg? Get a job; you're not the only show in town, any town.

 [return to Contents] 

 
#17
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
June 11, 2015
Why Russia will not return the Southern Kurils to Japan
Besides emotive issues and natural resources, the Southern Kuril Island chain holds immense strategic value and is one of Russia's main naval gateways to the Pacific Ocean.
Ajay Kamalakaran, RBTH

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe recently invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to visit Japan for an official visit, where the countries could look at resolving a 70-year old territorial dispute.

Japan and Russia are still in a technical state of war, since the countries have not yet signed a World War II peace treaty. The bone of contention between the Asia-Pacific neighbors is a chain of islands between Russia's Sakhalin and Japan's Hokkaido.

The Southern Kuril Islands, which comprise of Iturup, Kunashir, Shikotan and the Habomai Archipelago, were first colonized by Japan in the 19th century. They came under the Soviet Union's control at the closing stages of the Second World War, when Imperial Japan was evicted from southern Sakhalin.

Japan claims sovereignty over the islands, calling them the Northern Territories. Since the 1960s, Moscow has shown a degree of willingness to compromise with Tokyo by offering Shikotan and Habomai but Japan has been unrelenting in its demands for the return of the entire chain.

An emotive issue in both countries

When Japan was evicted from the Southern Kuril Islands in 1945, 17,000 Japanese citizens were deported from the chain. Many of these people are still alive and reside in Hokkaido. "It would be political suicide for any government in Tokyo to compromise on the Northern Territories," says Shigeo Tanaka, a political analyst based in the Japanese city of Sapporo. "The association of former Northern Territory residents has great political lobbying power and sympathy."

Anytime a country talks about transferring territory, there is bound to be a section of the public that would be unhappy. In 2004, when Russia transferred Tarabarov Island and half of the Bolshoi Ussuriski Island on the Amur River to China as a final settlement of the border dispute, there were protests in many parts of the Russian Far East.

Tamara Chikova, a professor at the Sakhalin State University believes that a transfer of Shikotan and the Habomai archipelago (an offer made by different Russian governments) would trigger strong protests. "The logic of the nationalistic groups is that Russia should not return land seized from a country that allied itself with Nazi Germany," she says.

"Would Russia return Kaliningrad to the Germans," she asks rhetorically.

Tanaka says such a proposal would also be unacceptable for Japan since it insists on the return of Kunashir and Iturup. "Japan already believes it compromised by accepting Russian sovereignty over the southern half of Sakhalin Island, which was legally a part of Japan since the 1904-5 war," he adds.

Russia's gateway to the Pacific Ocean

The islands of Kunashir and Iturup are resource-rich and are believed to have an abundance of rare earth metals. The success of oil and gas projects off nearby Sakhalin Island has also spurred energy companies to survey the waters near the Kurils for hydrocarbon deposits. The islands, with their virgin forests, volcanoes and waterfalls, also hold immense potential for tourism.

Yet, the Russian government has given a cold response to such ideas and has kept the sparsely populated islands closed to foreigners and Russians, who are not residents of Sakhalin. The reason, most analysts say, is the immense strategic value that the islands hold.

Over the last few years, Russia has stepped up its military activity around the islands. On June 8, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu ordered the speeding up of the construction of military facilities on the Southern Kurils. Russia will spend around $1.2 billion on the development of the chain, with a large part of that amount going into defense installations. Russia has already started building military garrisons on Iturup and Kunashir.

Shoigu also called for the rapid development of military infrastructure in the Russian Arctic. This is part of a grander design to connect Central Russia with the Pacific Coast via a new sea route.  

In an article titled 'The Strategic Value of Territorial Islands from the Perspective of National Security,' the Japan-based Review of Island Studies says the increased Russian military activity on the Southern Kurils is largely in anticipation of the opening of the Northern Sea Route, a shipping lane that connects the Kara Sea to the Pacific Ocean.  The route runs along the Russian Arctic Coast and would provide both military and economic advantages to the country.

"The route effectively makes Russia a major Asia-Pacific power," says Tanaka. "At a time when we are seeing a new kind of Cold War, Russia and China possess the capability to blockade Japan, in case there is some sort of American misadventure instigated in the region." Tanaka insists that this is only a deterrent against the United States, which still maintains bases across the region, including in Okinawa.

The islands of Kunashir and Iturup are an integral part of Russia's Asia-Pacific defense and economic strategy. Under these circumstances, the only way a World War II peace treaty can be established between Russia and Japan is through a compromise on Tokyo's part.

 [return to Contents] 

 #18
Moscow Times
June 11, 2015
How the Soviet Union Wrecked Russia's Military-Industrial Complex
By Matthew Bodner

While Russia's tussle with Ukraine may seem an unfair match, Ukraine does have one simple advantage - it makes a number of important vehicles and components that Russia needs to equip its military.

After Moscow's annexation of Crimea last year, Kiev brought its leverage to play and placed a moratorium on all defense industry exports to Russia's military, effectively bringing production of certain military hardware to a halt.

But Ukraine isn't the only country able to curtail Russia's military development at will - thanks to the legacy of the U.S.S.R.'s sprawling military-industrial complex, Russia needs enterprises in Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan

Over the decades, industrial plants developed specialities and supply chains that "simply remained after the collapse of the Soviet Union," said Julian Cooper, an expert in Soviet economic history at Britain's University of Birmingham.

The Moscow Times takes a look at some of the largest thorns in the side of Russia's military-industrial complex.

The Shipbuilding Industry in Ukraine

Ukraine during the Soviet period was a major shipbuilding hub. The Soviet navy's largest ships, such as aircraft carriers, were all built at a massive dry dock in the port of Nikolayev, situated on the Black Sea. Modern Russia does not have any shipyards capable of handling shipbuilding projects larger than 60,000-70,000 tons.

Close to these shipyards, the Soviets built highly specialized production centers for naval gas turbine engines and power plants - the most complicated component of modern shipbuilding, and therefore extremely difficult to duplicate.

Those turbines have now become an Achilles heel for Russia. Ukraine in March stopped shipping the turbines, torpedoing plans for Russia's next generation Admiral Gorshkov- and Admiral Grigorovich-class frigates and compromising plans to build a massive super aircraft carrier with a 100,000 ton displacement.

"I think the problem with gas turbines is very serious, and its solution in terms of the organization of production in Russia will require several years," said Mikhail Barabanov, a military expert at the Moscow-based Center for the Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, a defense think tank.

Several cutting-edge shipbuilding projects have been placed on two to three year holds while the Zvezda factory in St. Petersburg and aircraft engine manufacturer Saturn launch production of Russian turbines and power plants.

The Aerospace Industry in Ukraine

Southeast Ukraine is home to two massive aerospace enterprises: Motor Sich in the city of Zaporizhia and Yuzhmash in the city of Dnipropetrovsk. Since at least the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, an event that swept out pro-Russian politicians, Moscow has been keenly aware that these dependencies are dangerous for its military.

This is especially true in the field of helicopters - almost every Soviet helicopter engine ever built came out of Ukraine's Motor Sich plant. Ten years after the Orange Revolution, Russia's Klimov plant in St. Petersburg has only been able to ramp up production to 100 engines a year.

This is enough to cover Russia's military orders - which dropped to 88 this year from over 130 on the 2014 defense order - but could pose a problem for civilian helicopters and military helicopters built for export by top helicopter firm Russian Helicopters.

Despite the ban, so far Motor Sich, one of Ukraine's few defense firms not owned by the state, is still delivering engines for civilian and export helicopters, according to Barabanov.

Another major Ukrainian firm building components for Russia is Yuzhmash, which makes rocket engines and fuel tanks for Russian ICBMs. Yuzhmash has also managed to avoid curtailing exports, although in the event of a cut-off Russia's own rocket industry would be able to produce similar components.

Military Components From Belarus and Central Asia

Moscow is also seriously dependent on other former Soviet states such as Belarus for a variety of components used in all types of Russian military equipment.

"Belarussian supplies account for 15 percent of Russia's [state] defense order," said Sergei Gurulev, the head of the Belarussian State Military-Industrial Committee, news agency TASS reported.

According to Gurulev, around 99 Belarussian defense firms supply Russia with almost 2,000 types of defense-related goods.

Russia has yet to burn any bridges with Belarus, though, and keeps a firm hold over the tiny nation thanks to its preeminence as a trade partner.

Birmingham's Cooper pointed out that most of these military goods are not final products, but components such as optical equipment and military electronics for use in final assembly of Russian military vehicles - which have become more important after an EU arms embargo cut Russia off from advanced electronics made by European defense firms.

Beyond Belarus, Russia has lingering dependencies on defense industry firms in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, which according to Cooper make torpedoes and other equipment for the Russian army.

However, just because Belarus and Kazakhstan have a weaker hold on Russia, a cut in exports alongside Ukraine's embargo could seriously unbalance Russia's rearmament plans.

Russia is set to spend around 20 trillion rubles ($368 billion) on replacing or modernizing 70 percent of its Soviet-era military hardware by 2020.

 [return to Contents] 

 #19
http://readrussia.com
June 10, 2015
Russia is Not a Reading List
By Mark Galeotti

James Stavridis, former four-star US Navy admiral and now dean of Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, has had a brilliant military career and his notion of "smart power"-combining "hard" and "soft"-is both an excellent encapsulation of modern conflict and also, in their own distinctive way, the kind of thing Russia is trying in Ukraine. For all that, he ran a piece in Foreign Policy that fewer than a dozen works of fiction tell us everything-everything-we need to know about Russia and the Russians.

Gosh. Had only I known that the years wading through journals, newspapers, memoirs and monographs, the conversations and fieldwork, all of this could have been replaced by a month at the beach with my Kindle. Still, I suppose students at Tufts can rejoice as their syllabi must suddenly be getting much, much lighter.

Of course I am caricaturing; I am sure - hope - that Stavridis was just aiming for a punchy lede when he wrote:

"Want to really understand what's going on in Russia? Get rid of that CIA report full of dusty Cold War tropes. Forget the NSA intercepts or spy satellite imagery. And drop the jargon-filled scholarly analysis from those political science journals.

"Instead, get back to the richest literary gold mine in the Western world: Russian novels and poetry. Read Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, and Bulgakov. That's where you'll really find how Russians think. And it's all unclassified!"

And yet we nonetheless have the dean of one of the USA's most eminent foreign affairs schools and a former Supreme Allied Commander Europe outright saying that the CIA's reports are "full of dusty Cold War tropes" and offer not just no better but worse insights than, say, a fictionalized memoir of a day in a Stalinist Gulag. Quite what should we take from this?

First of all, credit where it is due. It's actually encouraging to find a piece of Russia punditry that does acknowledge the distinctiveness of the national culture and is also willing to show respect and praise certain aspects of it. In some ways, this speaks to my own perennial campaign to try and introduce more nuance to a debate all too often simplified down to a caricature contest of hypocritical-West-versus-embattled-Russia or evil-Russia-versus-noble-West.

It's also a pretty damning indictment of the output of both the US intelligence apparatus (and remember, this is a man who in his day would have been one of the key consumers of those reports) and also Western scholarship (and remember, this is a man who today runs what describes itself as "a leading professional school of international affairs, working to solve the world's most pressing problems"). To be honest, I think he's unfair on both counts. I suspect the "Cold War tropes" come more from the policy people than the intelligence analysis professionals, and there's actually a lot of outstanding, relevant insight to be found in those so-called "jargon-filled ... political science journals." But let's put that aside, assuming it was just the quest for a catchy intro.

My main concern, though, is the assumption that a handful of books, most dating back to the nineteenth century, somehow tell you everything you need to know about "how Russians think."

Has Russia not changed over that time? Have the experiences of wars, Stalinism, privation and triumph, perestroika and privatization not left their mark? And do all Russians think the same? The provincial vatnik and the Muscovite middle-class creative? The Vladivostok street vendor working for a Chinese co-venture and the Kaliningrad customs officer?

This is the kind of shallow Orientalism into which we always risk slipping when talking about other countries, but which seems a particular problem with Russia. Amongst the many curses with the country has to contend, stereotyping may not seem the worst, but it contributes to many others, from misunderstanding its motivations to influencing business decisions. (On that last point, I painfully remember once a conversation with a Western would-be investor who said he had pulled back from an opportunity because "I know all Russians can't help but try and rip off foreigners." Sure, there has been much "raiding" and similar sharp practice, but it proved impossible to shift his conviction that he could encapsulate all Russians in that soundbite.)

DIY Orientalism

But don't just take my word for it. Think of your own country and consider how comfortable you'd be with the assertion that your entire population can adequately be encapsulated by a handful of works, most of which are a hundred or more years old.

After all, of course everything you need to know about British class values and social mores are to be understood by reading Pride and Prejudice (1813). Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857) explain the stirring morality at the heart of every Brit. But hang one, doesn't Vanity Fair (1847) suggest there's also hypocrisy and opportunism there? Still, everything you need to know about Britain's bullish martial pluck is to be found in the writings of Rudyard Kipling, just as the Yes, Minister (1980-84) and Yes, Prime Minister (1986-87) TV series plumb the cynicism and subtle Machiavellianism of the political system. And as more and more CCTV cameras open their glassy eyes across the country, Orwell's 1984 (1949) tell us what all that is about.

Except, of course, that it doesn't. Class is still a major factor in understanding British culture, but in an age when even the accent of the Royal family is beginning to pick up traces of common "estuary English" and football players may be richer than bank managers, this is a much more dynamic and complex issue. And that's even before you consider the impact of successive waves of migration, from the Caribbeans of the "Windrush generation" of the 1950s to today's Central Europeans (Polish has become England's second language). British responses to today's conflict in Afghanistan is considerably more conflicted than even in Kipling's day and the modern surveillance state owes more to The Truman Show than Orwell's dystopian masterpiece.

This may be a banal and obvious point, but sadly it appears to be one worth restating. Today's Russia obviously displays its heritage, like a grandchild who learned certain values on a parent's knee, and has the same hair as a grandparent. But just as that child will also be a product of environment, upbringing, changing values, random genetic mutation and simple chance, so too Russia is much more than a compound of its history.

Back to School

Russia spans eleven time zones, embraces every climate from polar wastes to the Sochi sub-tropics, and has a history informed by a wealth of cultures and experiences. Of course it is human nature to simplify complexities to make them manageable, and equally of course there is truth is saying that there are certain broad national characters and characteristics. But we need to look at Russia today to find them, not draw them from stereotyped historical classics and cherry-picked later works.

Arguably, you can learn more from a modern TV comedy drama like Fizruk ("PhysEd Teacher") than Dead Souls. In it, gangster-turned-security-chief Foma gets sacked because his "biznisman" Mamaev gets fed up with his thuggish, old school ways. Desperate to get back into Mamaev's good books, Foma bribes his way into becoming the fizruk at the school where his daughter is studying, hoping to be able to demonstrate that he can predict what Mamaev would want for her and accomplish it. Meanwhile, he has his own deals and money-making schemes, not least with his nightclub-owning gangster friend "Psikh," while his school colleagues are torn by scorn for his uncultured ways and fascination with his tough and unselfconscious methods.

Let's play the game. The urbane, distant Mamaev is, of course, Putin. Foma, the kleptocratic elite, at once eager to predict and please him, and yet also carrying out shadowy scams on the side. The rest of the faculty are the other Russians, scorning yet also envying and appreciating the self-interested ruthlessness of their lords and masters?

Am I being serious? In part. It's quite a fun series that does illuminate some aspects of modern Russia-or rather one particular modern Russia. But it neither sets out to tell great truths, nor can it be said to tell the truth. Let's revel in the complexities of the country, appreciate that it is now more, less, and different than the sum of its historical influences and representations-and a complex, dynamic and growing culture all its own.

 [return to Contents] 

 #20
Transitions Online/Carnegie.ru
www.tol.org
June 9, 2015
A Brief History of Anti-Americanism in Modern Russia
Or how contemporary Russians came to see the United States as Enemy No. 1.
By Denis Volkov    
Denis Volkov is a sociologist with the Levada Center in Moscow. This article originally appeared on the website of the Carnegie Moscow Center.

Russians' attitudes toward the United States have been monitored by the Levada Center on a regular basis since the early 1990s (with small breaks in the first few years). During this time there have been four sudden bursts of negativity toward the United States: in 1998, 2003, 2008, and 2014-2015. It's not hard to guess that they coincided with the differences between the two countries about events - respectively, in Kosovo, Iraq, Georgia, and Ukraine. The word "sudden" here indicates that the relationship is reversed for one to two months, and every time (except for the current situation) as quickly returns to its original "benevolent" state. These bursts are easy to explain as the work of propaganda on Russian television, as when it shifts into gear, hostility immediately increases. Conversely, as soon as the switch is released, everything returns to normal. But understanding why that propaganda is so effective requires a more in-depth analysis of changes in Russian public opinion toward the United States.

A FRIEND AND ROLE MODEL

 Today it seems hard to believe, but in the early 1990s, for most Russians the United States represented not just the sole superpower, but also the undisputed role model, the main reference point in foreign policy. According to surveys of 1990-1991, the United States aroused the greatest interest of all countries of the world: 39 percent, versus 27 percent for Japan and 17 percent for Germany. When respondents were asked to choose which Western country Russia should cooperate with primarily, most (74 percent) voiced an unconditional preference for America. Germany, for example, was mentioned almost half as often. The United States was seen as the richest and most developed country in the West.

In this short period America not only served as a guide, but was also considered the most reliable partner, whose support could be expected. If Russia needed help, most (37 percent) said the United States would be the first to provide it. By comparison, only 9 percent expected Germany to help. Most (44 percent) were confident that the United States would help (18 percent did not think so, while the remainder found it difficult to answer or said Russia should not seek such assistance). In the United States Russians saw a friendly country (51 percent) or an ally (16 percent). No more than 1-2 percent saw hostility to Russia.

 In 1992, more Russians (38 percent) placed a higher priority on cooperation with the United States than even on cooperation with the post-Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States (25 percent). In light of these figures, the U.S.-centric foreign policy of Boris Yeltsin and his first foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, looks logical. However, in 1993, attitudes shifted somewhat: 35 percent thought cooperation with the United States was of primary importance, compared with 45 percent for the CIS. The deepening economic crisis made people feel that Russia would not reach America's level of development in the near future. Rapture with the United States was replaced by disappointment, followed by the dismissal of unrealizable desires on the principle that if the grapes are out of reach, they are likely sour anyway.

 Today it seems obvious how unrealistic were hopes that Russia, which had just lost the Cold War and did not meet accepted Western economic and political standards, would be welcomed with open arms by the international community. Some processes, such as long-term negotiations on accession to the World Trade Organization, the reluctance of the United States to abolish the Jackson-Vanik amendment [which restricts trade with controlled economies], etc., must have seemed especially frustrating (but rather for the elite, not for the general population). The process of establishing a trusting relationship would be long and painful. But no one wanted to wait, so expectations were fairly quickly replaced by disappointment and resentment. The origins of anti-Americanism are also rooted in the feeling of offense and injury at a fast slide from the status of superpower to junior partner who constantly needs to learn and catch up to be finally treated equally.

CHANGING VIEW

In the next few years, polls showed a shift in the public's image of the United States. One of the first hits to the positive attitude toward America was the 1993 bombing of Iraq. Public opinion was divided: one-third was ready to support the U.S. actions, but half was against (with 26 percent calling for "strong condemnation" of the bombing). It is difficult to say whether the negative reaction was due to opposition to the war or to the fact that such decisions were taken without consulting Russia.

However, in 1995-1996 America's actions were still generally assessed as friendly by a majority of Russians. No more than 7 percent saw the United States as an enemy, compared with 62 percent today. America was sixth on a list of perceived enemies, after the mafia, corrupt bureaucrats, Chechens, etc., but it was not an ally. In 1997, half the population already considered Russia an opponent of the West, while 30 percent did not. And while only a third of the population was ready to accept the idea that the United States posed a threat to global security, these numbers would soon change dramatically.

A series of events in 1998-1999 had a huge effect on how the United States was perceived in Russia. Those two years saw the U.S military action in Iraq; the intervention of NATO forces in Yugoslavia; the second Chechen war, for which Russia received sharp criticism from the West; the United States amending the ABM Treaty; and NATO's first post-Soviet eastward expansion.

It was during this time that we see the apparent debut of the notion that the United States is involved in all international conflicts. One-half (or more) of the respondents said America wanted only to establish control over territory rather than to enforce international norms and punish their violators. ... This pattern can still be found in how the NATO intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the events in Libya and Syria are perceived in Russia.

The Russian military action in Kosovo, which, according to journalists who observed these events, made no practical difference for Serbs, had important consequences and was warmly welcomed by both the general public and the elite.  It caused an explosion of optimism at home, and stoking patriotism with the use of foreign policy to maintain the legitimacy of power would become the favorite method of the next president.

In 1999 the announcement that the United States would amend the ABM Treaty and NATO would enlarge only confirmed for Russians American perfidy. In surveys, 55 percent said the U.S. position on missile defense "was contrary to the interests of Russia." Approximately the same number (50 percent) said Russia should strengthen security and defense in response to NATO expansion (23 percent still insisted on the development of cooperation, and 13 percent believed Russia did not need to respond). At the same time the United States for the first time topped the list of countries that "threaten the security of Russia" (in 1998, 23 percent thought so; by 1999 it was at 35 percent). Seventy-five percent agreed with the statement that "the United States uses Russia's difficulties to transform it into a secondary country." Another 60 percent were confident that the United States would like to see our country divided into several parts, although only 8-9 percent could seriously imagine a military conflict between the two countries. By the time Vladimir Putin came to the presidency in early 2000, the image of the United States had taken a familiar shape, without the help of the daily TV propaganda to which we usually attribute it.

Another event in 1999, which received a response from the Russian authorities, was criticism from the West of the Russian military action in Chechnya. It was the first time Russia openly accused the West of supporting terrorists. Around the same time, the tendency to Russian hardships on the machinations of the West returned to the repertoire of domestic propaganda.

THE FINAL TRANSITION

Such explanations worked. In 2008, half of the population considered the main cause of the Russia-Georgia war the desire "of the United States to extend its influence in a country neighboring Russia"; 32 percent blamed Georgia, and 5 percent blamed Russia. This demonstrates another feature of having experienced the USSR's collapse - the refusal to confer subjectivity on former Soviet republics, the reluctance to admit that for them the Western project could be more attractive than the Russian. This pattern can be observed in relations with Georgia, new countries joining NATO, and Ukraine today.

Before finally moving on to the present day, it's worth saying a few words about the failed "reset" in relations between Russia and America. The attacks of 11 September 2001 provided a chance to change the situation. Russians saw cooperation between Putin and George W. Bush as a sign of the revival of their country's role in foreign affairs, and the "joint fight against international terrorism" was seen as the main thing uniting the two countries (51 percent in 2002). However, by that time the population of Russia more firmly saw the United States as a global hegemon. In the same survey, 38 percent blamed "the arrogant attitude of Americans toward other nations" as the main reason the countries were moving away from each other. Thirty-six percent blamed "the desire of the U.S. authorities to extend their power," and 32 percent U.S. officials' "unwillingness to reckon with the interests of other countries."

The point of the final break can be considered the period 2003-2004: the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a series of "color revolutions" that the Russian elite clearly saw as a conspiracy against Russia (it is interesting that at the time, only a fifth of the population shared that view), and the second wave of NATO enlargement to the east. Since then, polls have shown a growing alienation of Russia from the United States and NATO, based on a doctrine of Russia's "special path." So if in 2002 half of the population was in favor of cooperation with NATO, and a quarter was against it, in the next 10 years, the situation was reversed. In the mid-2000s, the United States and NATO took a leading position among the "enemies of Russia," and the United States was among the states "most unfriendly toward Russia."

NOT ONLY PROPAGANDA

As for the current record levels of anti-Americanism (in January the proportion who had a negative view of the United States reached 81 percent), there are several reasons. First of all, from the beginning of Euromaidan, Russian TV channels successfully worked out a formula to describe it as an American plot against Russia: for half the population, the main force that brought protesters to the streets of Kyiv was the "influence of the West, seeking to draw Ukraine into the orbit of their political interests." Over time, this conviction only strengthened (41 percent in December 2013 to 54 percent in December 2014). Most (56 percent) say the conflict in southeastern Ukraine continues because it "benefits the United States and the leadership of the West" and not because of Russian participation (6 percent).

Rather, it is the Russian authorities who "exposed" the Euromaidan as an American project, recalling the Orange Revolution and compelled to quickly discredit the popular uprising, which in its origins strongly resembled the 2011-2012 protest movement in Russia. A successful version of civil protest in the adjacent Russian territory must not happen. Then, as events unfolded, the Russian media underlined this interpretation.

But to explain existing views only as the work of propaganda would be simplistic. Across the country, about 30 percent have access to alternative sources of information. In Moscow and other large cities, the figure is more than double that, but satisfaction with Russian policy in Ukraine is only slightly lower than in the general population. Alternate information is available, but the majority refuses to take it into account. With all frankness, these sentiments are expressed in the responses to the question of whether there are Russian troops in Ukraine: 37 percent are certain there are not. Another 38 percent say that "even if the troops are there, under the current international situation it is the right policy for Russia to deny these facts."

The annexation of Crimea, about which the West and the United States could do nothing, then the sanctions and the war, have for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union made most Russians feel that Russia is once again becoming a "great power" (70 percent versus 47 percent in 2011). It is a kind of revenge for the lost Cold War and compensation for the inability to catch up with American living standards. Focus group participants say, "We're being noticed again," "We bared our teeth," and "They'll have to take us into account." And that brings great satisfaction and a new sense of power. According to one respondent, "If before Putin we only spoke of Russia's greatness, now he has proved it in practice" and proved it not only to us, but also to the United States.

Thus, Russian anti-Americanism has its roots in the collapse of unreasonable and unrealistic expectations of the early 1990s - hopes that the new Russia, which did not meet accepted political and economic standards in the West, would immediately and unconditionally be welcomed into the circle of leading world powers. The realization that the American standard of living would not be achieved quickly played a role as well, as did U.S. military action in Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and so on, which was perceived as unfriendly toward Russia.

However, throughout the 1990s, anti-Americanism remained largely situational; U.S. policy was perceived as aggressive but not directed against Russia. The defining event proved to 1998-1999 and 2003-2004, when the majority of people in Russia first saw America's actions as a threat to Russian security, reinforced by Russia's isolationist streak.

Since it became clear in the late 1990s that a confrontation with the United States could boost the popularity of Russian authorities, rising anti-Americanism has been a key theme of propaganda. And in recent years opposition to U.S. leadership has been one of the main instruments for maintaining Russian officials' own legitimacy in the economic crisis.

 [return to Contents] 

 #21
New York Times
June 11, 2015
Library of Congress Chief Retires Under Fire
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

WASHINGTON - James H. Billington, a leading Russia scholar in 1987 when President Ronald Reagan nominated him to be the 13th librarian of Congress, will step down from his post on Jan. 1 after nearly three decades leading the world's largest library, officials announced Wednesday.

The move comes after Dr. Billington, who turned 86 on June 1, presided over a series of management and technology failures at the library that were documented in more than a dozen reports by government watchdog agencies.

In a statement, Dr. Billington said he had informed President Obama and members of Congress of his intention to leave one of the central repositories of American cultural history.

"Over the years, I have been asked if I have been thinking about retiring, and the answer has always been 'not really,' because this library has always been not just my job, but my life," Dr. Billington said in the statement. "However, I have never had more faith in the leadership and staff of the Library of Congress."

In a 2013 audit, the library's inspector general warned that millions of items, some from as far back as the 1980s, remained piled in overflowing buildings and warehouses, virtually lost to the world. In addition, just a small fraction of its 24 million books are available to read online, 200 years after Thomas Jefferson laid the foundation for a vast national library by selling Congress his personal collection of books after the War of 1812.

The latest government investigation, delivered in March, accused the library of "widespread weaknesses" in managing its technology resources and cited a "lack of strong, consistent leadership" in that area. That report, and other recent complaints about Dr. Billington's leadership, had caught the attention of the library's congressional patrons.

"I am aware of the concerns that have been raised," Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri, said in a statement before Dr. Billington's retirement was announced. "We will be looking into this and other aspects of the library operations in the coming months."

In addition, there has been mounting criticism from former staff members and other libraries that the Library of Congress, which has long been the premier institution responsible for collecting and cataloging the world's intellectual and cultural knowledge, is becoming increasingly irrelevant in the digital age.

"All librarians sense is a vacuum, a lack of leadership that concerns the whole world of learning," said Robert Darnton, the director of the Harvard University Library and a former colleague of Dr. Billington's at Princeton.

Before Wednesday's announcement, Mr. Darnton said: "I think that James Billington should resign. We should have a new librarian of Congress."

In interviews, current and former library employees and others who have worked with Dr. Billington over the decades say they no longer recognize the charismatic, energetic librarian they once knew. They say he has slowed down so much that he rarely comes in before noon or works a full week in his majestic office overlooking Capitol Hill and the Supreme Court. Co-workers say that he does not use email and that they often communicate with him through a fax machine at his house.

But Dr. Billington's supporters say he has continued to carry out the library's missions with vigor. David McCullough, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and longtime friend, called him a "man of infinite interests and extraordinary ideas."

Responding to questions about the library in an interview last week with a reporter for The New York Times, Dr. Billington said that he had no intention of retiring and that the criticism of him came from rivals and disgruntled former employees. "Let me emphatically say that I am still involved in every major decision at the library," Dr. Billington said. "I don't know where you are getting this kind of gossip."

In the statement announcing his departure, the library noted that Dr. Billington had created two online portals for the library, including the World Digital Library, with about 11,000 items. The statement noted that collections grew to more than 160 million items today from 85.5 million items in 1987.

The statement said Dr. Billington was "recognized for having brought the world's largest library into the digital age."

But Mr. Darnton and other university librarians insist that Dr. Billington is stuck in a past era and that he has resisted their entreaties to cooperate on a large-scale digitization of the library's collection. They say the vast majority of the library's archives remain largely closed off from digital information seekers, stored on physical shelves the way they have been for decades.

"One expects the Library of Congress to be a leader," said Paul Courant, the former librarian and former provost at the University of Michigan. "But with regard to digitization and the use of digital technologies, the library has basically been a bust."

Dr. Billington was already a seasoned Washington figure when he arrived at the library after serving for more than a decade as the director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a leading policy think tank.

A Rhodes scholar, Dr. Billington joined Reagan at the 1988 Moscow summit meeting with President Mikhail S. Gorbachev of the Soviet Union, and he quickly became an imposing figure on Capitol Hill and a powerful fund-raiser. He reached out to some of the wealthiest Americans to help collect books and manuscripts from around the world.

"Rarely do you meet one man who can say he's been a Princeton valedictorian, a Harvard professor, a Rhodes scholar, an expert on the Kremlin and a veteran, but that's Dr. Billington," Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said in a statement Wednesday morning.

In 2000, Dr. Billington used his star power to persuade John W. Kluge, the chairman of Metromedia, to donate $60 million to establish an academic center for scholars. In 2007, David Packard, a founder of Hewlett-Packard, donated $155 million to help preserve audiovisual materials. Two years later, Dr. Billington announced the World Digital Library, a joint effort with other countries to begin putting some material online.

The 1802 statute that created the librarian of Congress position does not specify a term of office. It has effectively become a lifetime appointment, vacated only by retirement or death. During his tenure, Dr. Billington regularly courted lawmakers, for whom the library serves as a kind of in-house consulting service.

But in recent years, Dr. Billington clashed with senior staff members at the library, many of whom have left for other jobs. Several co-workers described what they called "walk-through" sessions in which he asked to see rehearsals of presentations they were scheduled to give to a member of Congress or potential donors, and then belittled their performances.

"He is a man who has an explosive quality to him," said Jeremy Adamson, the library's former director for collections and services, who left in 2014 after many arguments with Dr. Billington. "You live in fear of the man."

Karl Schornagel, who for a decade sparred with Dr. Billington as the library's inspector general, said he increasingly received bitter complaints from the library's senior management in the years before he left the oversight position in 2014.

"I got a sense of how frustrated they were," Mr. Schornagel said in an interview. "How he would lash out at people and yell at them and throw things."

Dr. Billington dismissed the criticism from his former employees, saying in the interview, "I only have one way to work, and the way I work is very intensive."

But if Dr. Billington's behavior has produced anxiety among his staff, it has been his management of the $600 million, 3,100-employee library bureaucracy that has caught the attention of government oversight agencies.

Investigations in 2002, 2008 and 2012 focused on the library's hiring of contractors. One inquiry identified "deficiencies and weaknesses" in the library's management. Another found a "widespread lack of compliance with library contracting requirements."

A 2010 report said the library had "no assurance that service and support units are appropriately managing the records in their custody." A series of investigations from 1996 to 2015 documented technology issues that a Government Accountability Office report this year said put "the library's systems and information at risk of compromise."

"We definitely believe there's a leadership issue as it relates to information technology," said Joel C. Willemssen, the author of the G.A.O. report. "There wasn't anybody running the ship with the necessary skills."

Dr. Billington said he welcomed constructive advice from oversight agencies. He said contracting, storage and technology issues had been fixed or were being addressed.

Library officials said that Dr. Billington created the library's office of the inspector general and corrected deficiencies in the library's financial management systems early in his tenure.

"We have an entirely new management team," Dr. Billington said. "We are putting this institution on a great path moving forward to continue our mission."

Supporters of Dr. Billington acknowledge that the library has not focused on digitizing its 24 million books. But they insist that the library is properly working first to digitize rare manuscripts, maps and photographs.

The library was one of the first to put a legislature online with its Thomas.gov website in 1995. It has made e-textbooks available, archived websites and digitized the archives of the Public Broadcasting Service. And it has proposed new worldwide standards for describing material in an online environment.

"What counts to me is that he is still either initiating new ideas or is open to new ideas that come from members of the library," said Ismail Serageldin, the director of Egypt's national library in Alexandria.

But Mr. Courant, Mr. Darnton and others said Dr. Billington had been unwilling to work with university librarians and others to make more of its books available to researchers and the public.

They said Dr. Billington refused to cooperate with the Digital Public Library of America, a consortium begun by major university libraries. Library of Congress officials point out that some of its materials are available through one of the consortium's partner institutions, the Hathi Trust.

But Mr. Darnton said such efforts, and others like the World Digital Library, which hosts only 11,000 items, were more for show than anything else. "The Library of Congress just sat on the sidelines while this digital revolution took place," he said.

 [return to Contents] 

 #22
The Japan Times
June 8, 2015
Opposing Russian aggression
BY GWYNNE DYER
Based in London, Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist and military historian whose articles are published in 45 countries.

LONDON - Just before he sat down to a traditional Bavarian meal of sausages and beer with German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the start of the Group of Seven summit on Sunday, U.S. President Barack Obama told the media that one of the meeting's priorities would be discussing ways of "standing up to Russian aggression in Ukraine." Which begs the question: what kind of aggression are we talking about here?

There are unquestionably Russian troops in the rebel provinces of eastern Ukraine, and that is certainly an act of aggression under international law. (The Russian troops there are definitely not just volunteers lending the rebels a hand while they are on leave, as Moscow maintains. How can we be sure? Because soldiers on leave do not take their tanks and artillery with them.)

But is this a prelude to a Russian invasion that would take over all of Ukraine, as Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko recently alleged? If it is, it would require a whole different level of response, and the result could easily be a new Cold War.

Is it also the first step in a Russian campaign to take back everything that used to be part of the Soviet Union, and before that of the Russian empire, as many in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Georgia and other former "Soviet Republics" fear? If so, "standing up to Russian aggression" would be an even bigger task, involving a major NATO troop build-up in Europe and probably a new nuclear arms race.

Might Russian President Vladimir Putin actually be the next would-be world conqueror, out of the same mold as Napoleon and Hitler? In that case, get ready for the Third World War, because it's unlikely that anything less would stop him. So exactly what kind of aggressor Putin is matters quite a lot.

Here's a clue: Putin was first elected president of Russia in 1999, and for his first 15 years in power he didn't attack anybody. (He responded very toughly to the cretinous Georgian attack on Russian peacekeeping troops in South Ossetia in 2008, but he didn't start that war.) On the whole, would-be world conquerors don't wait 15 years before making their first move. They get started as soon as possible, because it's a big job.

After three months of non-violent demonstrations against Ukraine's pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, in the winter of 2013-14, and after a day of shooting on Independence Square (the Maidan) in Kiev that killed at least 50 protesters and three policemen, Putin agreed to a deal on Feb. 21, 2014, that promised new elections in Ukraine within a month.

It was always puzzling why the demonstrators went out onto the square and spent three bitterly cold months there demanding that Yanukovych quit right away, given that elections were due in Ukraine within a year. Why not stay warm at home and vote him out next year? He couldn't do anything irrevocable in the meantime.

Never mind that. The representatives of the protesters definitely did agree to the deal hammered out by Russian and EU negotiators on the evening of Feb. 21. Yanukovych was to resign and there would be new elections in one month. Yet only hours later the demonstrators attacked the presidential administration buildings and Yanukovych had to flee. Why couldn't they wait even one month?

Maybe because they were afraid that they would lose the election. Kiev is in western Ukraine, where most people are strongly pro-Western and would like to join the European Union, even NATO if possible. It certainly looked to people watching it on television as if all Ukrainians wanted Yanukovych out.

But Yanukovuch had won the 2010 election fair and square with a 52 percent majority, thanks to the votes of eastern Ukrainians. Their ancestors had lived in the Russian empire for more than three centuries, unlike those of western Ukrainians. Most eastern Ukrainians speak Russian, share the Orthodox religion of Russians, are actually pro-Russian in general.

What's more, eastern Ukraine is the home of almost all of the country's heavy industry, and it was Russia that bought most of the coal, steel and industrial goods produced by eastern Ukrainians. It was their votes that elected Yanukovych in 2010, and there was no reason to believe that they would vote differently in 2014. There really was a coup in Kiev in 2014, and Putin was quite right to feel deceived and betrayed.

He was wrong to respond as he did, taking back the province of Crimea (which had an overwhelmingly Russian population but had been bundled into Ukraine in a communist-era decision in 1954). He was very wrong to back the rebellion in the eastern Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk. If he actually encouraged them to rebel (which is not clear) he is even more in the wrong. It is all being done in defiance of international law.

But he is not setting out down the path of world conquest. He is not even planning to take over Ukraine. "Standing up to Putin" is an invigorating moral exercise, but it is not strictly speaking necessary.

 [return to Contents] 

 #23
US pushes Kiev to continue conflict in Ukraine - Russian Foreign Ministry

MOSCOW, June 11. /TASS/. Russian Foreign Ministry on Thursday accused Washington of destabilizing events both in Ukraine and other world regions.

In its commentary on the US State Department's annual report outlining US and international compliance with arms control, non-proliferation and disarmament agreements and commitments, the ministry said:

"The United States was not slow to take advantage of the publication to accuse Russia of 'occupation' and 'attempted annexation' of Crimea, as well as 'provocations against Ukraine' in violation of its OSCE [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe] commitments, including those under the 2011 Vienna Document [on confidence-and security-building measures].

"Putting the question in such a way is fundamentally wrong and turns everything upside down," the ministry's commentary said.

"Crimea's reunification with Russia was carried out in full accordance with international law and followed the free expression of will made by residents of the peninsula, where more than 96% spoke in favour of reuniting with Russia," it said.

"As for accusations against Russia of its alleged continuing provocations against Ukraine in general, there is no substance behind such statements and they only divert attention of the international community away from understanding the real causes for the Ukrainian crisis," the ministry said.

It was particularly strange to hear such allegations from "a state which, constantly declaring its commitment to maintaining and strengthening international peace and security, had a hand in destabilizing the situation, both in Ukraine and other regions".

"While making unfounded accusations, the United States, unlike Russia, not only fails to make any real efforts to resolve the crisis in Ukraine and prevent a humanitarian catastrophe in the [eastern] Luhansk and Donetsk regions, but in fact spurs the current authorities in Kiev to continue fratricidal civil conflict," the commentary said.

 [return to Contents] 

 #24
Valdai Discussion Club
http://valdaiclub.com
June 11, 2015
The Myth of Hybrid War
By Ruslan Pukhov
Ruslan Pukhov is director of the Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST), a private Moscow-based think tank.

Last year's events in Ukraine and Russia's actions in Crimea and then developments in eastern Ukraine gave rise in the West to the widespread belief that Moscow has been conducting an innovative form of military intervention known as "hybrid war" throughout the Ukraine crisis.

Many Western media outlets and politicians have seized on this idea of hybrid war, turning it into an entrenched meme. But an objective view of the situation shows that the term "hybrid war" is more propagandistic than descriptive, as any attempt to define "hybrid war" undercuts the notion that it is something new and innovative.

Hybrid war, according to one of the most popular Western definitions, is a "combination of overt and covert military operations, provocation and sabotage in conjunction with official denial of any involvement, making it difficult to adequately respond."

According to the more comprehensive definition contained in the editorial preface to The Military Balance 2015, hybrid war is "the use of military and non-military tools in an integrated campaign designed to achieve surprise, seize the initiative and gain psychological as well as physical advantages utilizing diplomatic means; sophisticated and rapid information, electronic and cyber operations; covert and occasionally overt military and intelligence action; and economic pressure."The report states that during the Crimean operation in February-March 2014, Russian forces "demonstrated integrated use of rapid deployment, electronic warfare, information operations (IO), locally based naval infantry, airborne assault and special-forces capabilities, as well as wider use of cyberspace and strategic communications. The latter was used to shape a multifaceted and overall effective information campaign targeted as much at domestic and foreign audiences." In eastern Ukraine, Moscow has allegedly demonstrated its ability to quickly create "pressure groups" consisting of "local elements," albeit guided and supported from the outside - a tactic that can be used to protect ethnic minorities.

As such, hybrid war is portrayed as a serious challenge to NATO, since it falls into a "gray zone" with respect to the alliance's obligations and could lead to political divisions between its members.

It is easy to see that these definitions of hybrid war, and especially the description of Russia's actions in 2014, are a far cry from reality. For example, it is hard to understand what special "information" and "cyber" operations involving "wider use of cyberspace" were conducted by Moscow in Crimea. Indeed, there have been no reports of "cyber operations" in Crimea. What would have been their purpose against the outmoded Ukrainian armed forces?

And Russia's propaganda effort in Crimea was sluggish both for international and domestic audiences. Moscow's actions in Crimea were not promoted, but rather downplayed, just like its end goals. In fact, Crimea's unification with Russia came as a surprise to many. Justifications for Russia's actions in Crimea that came after the event were also quite half-hearted. Indeed, the accession of Crimea was received with mass support and even enthusiasm in Russia, but it was achieved without much propaganda, since the belief that Crimea is Russian land was widespread already, while Ukraine is regarded as a "separatist inferior state" in the popular consciousness in Russia.

However, the Russian military did work on Ukrainian servicemen in Crimea, suggesting that they switch en masse to the Russian side. This was a highly successful campaign that led to the complete demoralization of the Ukrainian forces in Crimea. Only about 20 percent of Ukrainian servicemen decided to continue serving in the Ukrainian armed forces and leave Crimea, while the rest either went on to serve in the Russian army or deserted.

Nonetheless, the successful demoralization of the enemy forces was entirely determined by the unique nature of these forces (most of the Ukrainian servicemen in Crimea were locals), rather than by any specific propaganda successes.

In general, the actions classified as hybrid war have been fairly standard in low-intensity armed conflicts around the globe in recent decades, if not centuries. It is hard to imagine the use of military force without information support or economic sanctions, covert warfare, or attempts to demoralize the enemy and exploit divisions (ethnic, social, economic, political, etc.) in the enemy camp. These have been the ABCs of war since antiquity.

The widespread definition of hybrid war as combination of overt and covert military operations and the focus in the West on the unmarked "polite people" ("little green men") in Crimea ignore the unique nature of the Crimean operation, where Russia's actions enjoyed virtually undivided support from the local population, which isolated and paralyzed the Ukrainian army in Crimea. This made it possible to use unmarked servicemen for a fairly long time. But again, this has to do with the specific situation in Crimea. It is difficult to imagine such "polite people" operating in a different environment, such as Poland or the United States. In that case, no formal denial of involvement would have any credibility.

In general, the use of unidentified regular military units, without any indication of nationality, for limited military or special operations has a long history and cannot be viewed as something new. Passing regular forces off as "volunteers" also has numerous precedents in history. In essence, any foreign military intervention in a civil war (which is what we observe in Ukraine) inevitably involved similar circumstances throughout history.

The combination of regular and rebel forces can hardly be considered an innovation, either. This is a classic military tactic that is employed when the circumstances are right. As you may be aware, one of the main tasks of the US Special Operations Forces Command, particularly the Green Berets, is to organize and support allied rebel and guerrilla movements.

Moscow's actions in Ukraine are a classical example of a foreign force supporting one side in a domestic political and civil conflict. But this kind of support is only possible when one side actually has irredentist aims and wants to draw the country it wants to unite with into the conflict.  

It's worth noting that the current Ukrainian conflict most closely resembles not the Munich Agreement and Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938 (which, incidentally, involved German irredentist militias), but rather the US-Mexican War of 1846-1848 (resulting in annexation of Texas and several other Mexican states by the United States), or the unification of Italy in the middle of the 19th century, known as the Risorgimento. In both cases, irredentism was the cause of war. The parental country (the United States and the Kingdom of Sardinia Piedmont) could not, for political reasons, immediately start an open military intervention to support the irredentists. Therefore, they provided what help they could, including supporting and replenishing their formations, sending large numbers of real and fake volunteers and covert units of their armed forces, organizing limited interventions, etc.  Russia has used these same tactics in the current Ukrainian conflict. There are very close parallels between Moscow's relationship with Igor Strelkov, who led the first phase of the armed opposition in Donbass, and Giuseppe Garibaldi's troubled relationship with King Victor Emmanuel II of Savoy and his Prime Minister Cavour, who initially used and supported Garibaldi but then began to consider him a loose cannon and a potential political threat.

Thus, a closer examination of history debunks the idea of hybrid war as an innovation. Its "hybrid" nature is not determined by any ground-breaking strategy or tactic; rather it is derived from techniques employed basically since the beginning of military and political history in conflicts with a significant domestic component. Provided there is a strong presence of one's "own" faction in the enemy country, a foreign actor can implement elements of what has now become known as hybrid war. Describing events in Ukraine as hybrid war is an attempt to use politically biased language to exaggerate the importance of external factors in the conflict, and to downplay the significance of internal factors, which the external forces are simply exploiting in a fairly traditional manner. This desire to downplay the importance of internal factors in the Ukraine conflict can be clearly seen in the way the West treats the entire Ukraine conflict as a new kind of hybrid war that Russia is waging against Ukraine.

 [return to Contents] 

 #25
Moscow Times
June 11, 2015
Russian Soldier Captured in Ukraine Under Pressure, Offered Asylum
By Anna Dolgov

Yevgeny Yerofeyev - who identified himself as a Russian army captain when he was captured last month in the rebel Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine - is "under very serious pressure" to cooperate with investigators looking into his case, his lawyer Oksana Sokolovskaya said Wednesday, news agency Interfax reported. "He is being offered political asylum," Sokolovskaya said.

Another Russian captured along with Yerofeyev - Alexander Alexandrov, who said he was a Russian army sergeant on a military assignment in the rebel region - has agreed to participate in the investigation, while Yerofeyev declined, his lawyers said earlier.

Now Yerofeyev is facing pressure to "open up all the cards that are possible," Sokolovskaya was quoted by Russian and Ukrainian media as saying.

"He is under very serious pressure from pre-trial investigative organs, and from jail employees, and from everybody else," she was quoted as saying. "He is being offered political asylum, his family is being offered political asylum, while he is accused of betraying the Russian Federation and [warned] that if he ends up in Russia he would be killed or would be imprisoned for the rest of his life and so on."

In video interviews from the Kiev hospital where they are being treated for their injuries, Yerofeyev and Alexandrov both said they had been on an intelligence-gathering mission in eastern Ukraine when they were captured.

Kiev has accused them of "terrorism" - a term Ukrainian authorities use for the acts of Moscow-backed separatists in the country's eastern regions. While Moscow has publicly endorsed the separatists' cause, it denies accusations of supplying troops and weapons to the insurgents, and claims that the captured soldiers had resigned from the Russian military before leaving for Ukraine.

Ukrainian authorities have offered Yerofeyev a minimum sentence should he accept the asylum offer, his lawyer said, news portal RBC-Ukraina reported.
Sokolovskaya was speaking after a court hearing on Yerofeyev's appeal to be released from custody for health reasons, the report said. The court turned down the petition, RBC-Ukraina reported.

The men have received visits from envoys of international organizations and from the Russian consul in Ukraine while in the hospital. The consul said after his visit in late May that the men were "feeling relatively well.

 [return to Contents] 

 #26
The Vineyard of the Saker
http://thesaker.is
June 10, 2015
American citizen tortured by Ukrainian government
By Tatzhit Mikhailovich
(original here: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=bd4_1433956858)
[Photos here http://thesaker.is/american-citizen-tortured-by-ukrainian-government/]

As previously reported on LiveLeak  and RT (and completely ignored in Western mass media - hello "free and unbiased reporting") there have been two protests against the regime in Kiev in the past few days: a large protest march and a smaller "Maidan 3.0" protest camp.

On Sunday night, the protest camp has been dispersed by unknown masked assailants, apparently with the blessing from the government.

From the Sputnik piece on the mattter:"Several dozen masked men dispersed a protest on Kiev's Maidan Square, after about 100 demonstrators set up several tents and unfurled banners ahead of the one year anniversary of President Petro Poroshenko's inauguration. The masked men were reported to have first approached police, who had surrounded the protest site, to demand police action, before themselves entering the makeshift camp and dismantling it. According to [Head of Ukraine State Security Service] Nalyvaichenko -"the 'Maidan Self-Defense' force had effectively done its job"."

One of the protest organizers, a USA-naturalized Ukrainian native Ruslan Tashbaev (pictured below with US Sen. John McCain), was arrested by police after the protest camp was destroyed.

As usual, Ukraine State Security head announced that the civil activist was working for DPR/LPR "terrorists", Putin, and the gray aliens (because obviously, that's the only reason anyone could want the Kiev regime to fulfill its promises), and was "deported and banned from the country".Lucky man - thought we. US citizenship saved him from being detained for months without trial and being exchanged to the DPR for government soldiers.

Sure, Tashbaev is rabidly Russphobic, and says Poroshenko isn't doing enough to "win the war", but protesting in a fascist state takes guts.However, the story had an unexpected twist - Tashbaev came online today saying that he was not deported. He was detained by the police, passed to the custody of unknown masked men, and taken to the forest - to be beaten, tortured, and probably killed.It is unknown why they dumped him in the forest instead - maybe because Tashbaev's lawyers started asking head of State Security about his whereabouts (Nalivaychenko answered that he is detained and giving evidence about his ties to terrorist organizations), or maybe they hoped he would not be able to make it out the forest in his state.Anyway, Tashbaev made it out. Here are the photos he posted of himself - taken after he walked two hours to nearest residential area.

He flew out of Ukraine some hours later and underwent medical evaluation in a US hospital. He vows those responsible will be brought to justice.PS. Wanna bet if any mass media outlets run stories on this? The same exact thing has been going on for a year, and nothing so far...Maybe it'll turn out he "beat himself up to blame police", just like 40 protesters in Odessa "burned themselves to slander innocent patriots".

 [return to Contents] 

 #27
DPR Defense Ministry and JCCC record damage in Krasny Oktyabr after shelling

DONETSK. June 11 (Interfax) - Representatives of the Defense Ministry of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) and the Joint Control and Coordination Center (JCCC) have arrived in the locality of Krasny Oktyabr, which came under fire recently, an Interfax correspondent has reported.

A large number of craters left by shells have been found in its residential areas.

"Four houses were damaged as a result of shelling. The strikes began at 4:40 a.m. and continued for an hour and 20 minutes. None of the civilians were hurt," one of the local residents told reporters.

JCCC officers and DPR Defense Ministry representatives, including Eduard Basurin, found pieces of shells intended for Grad multiple-launch rocket systems at the site of shelling in Krasny Oktyabr.

"The strikes originated from Hranytne," a JCCC spokesman told reporters.

The Ukrainian Armed Forces carried out more than 30 strikes against Krasny Oktyabr, injuring one militiaman, Basurin said.

"More than 30 explosions of ammunition were registered. These were high-explosive ammunition items. None of the civilians were hurt, but one of our soldiers was injured. Ukraine is no longer concealing that it is using weapons banned by the Minsk agreements," he told reporters.

The JCCC also said that the locality of Telmanove was shelled along with Krasny Oktyabr. One of the shells hit a functioning petrol station, it said.

A spokesman for the DPR Defense Ministry told Interfax earlier that the Ukrainian army's strikes targeted Donetsk airport, the Oktyabrska mine, the village of Oktyabrsky and the Kyivsky district of Donetsk, as well as the localities of Shyroka Balka, Krasny Partyzan, Spartak, Vesele, Shyrokyne, Horlivka, Holmivsky, and Krasny Oktyabr.

 [return to Contents] 

 #28
RFE/RL
June 10, 2015
Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk Digs In To Complex Decommunization Process
by Yulia Ratsybarska

DNIPROPETROVSK, Ukraine -- As Ukraine pushes forward with the controversial process of decommunization, the east-central city of Dnipropetrovsk has its work cut out.

The huge Petrovsky Metallurgical Plant -- to take one example -- is named after Bolshevik revolutionary Grigory Petrovsky, who oversaw the state security agency in the early years of the revolution, advocated a state policy of terror, and suppressed Ukrainian nationalism. The plant is in the city's Leninsky Raion. And the city itself is named in honor of -- you guessed it -- Grigory Petrovsky.

Prospekt Gazeta Pravdy. Vulytsia Dzerzhinskogo. Prospekt Kirova. That's just a sample of what needs to be addressed to comply with a recently adopted law to eliminate place names honoring the Soviet past. A quick survey indicates that about 80 streets, embankments, squares, and boulevards fall under the provisions of the law. As do five of the city's eight regions. And the name of the city itself.

"We've been given a maximum of two months for everything," Vadim Shebanov, acting chief of staff of the Dnipropetrovsk City Council and a member of the newly formed commission overseeing the name-changing process, said at the commission's first meeting on June 8. "To make a list of the places that need to be renamed and a list of what the new names will be. And there is a third task -- dealing with Lenin monuments. And obviously, we have a lot of Lenin monuments."

On May 15, President Petro Poroshenko signed the laws mandating that within six months Soviet monuments -- except for those relating to World War II -- must be dismantled and public places with communist-related names need to be rechristened. More than 20 Ukrainian cities across the country will have to be renamed, as well as thousands of other locations.

During its first session this week, the 46-member Dnipropetrovsk commission began the onerous task and quickly ran into controversy. Some members argued that, for instance, Vulytsia Chekistov, named to honor members of the Soviet security agencies, might not fall within the scope of the decommunization law, although all agreed it needs to be renamed. On the other hand, opinions were divided over places named in honor of ambiguous historical figures such as Red Army General Grigory Kotovsky (who died in 1925) and Ukrainian Communist Party boss Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, who took some steps to support the Ukrainian language and resist the Russification of Ukraine in the 1970s and 1980s.

Case By Case?

It already became clear at the first session that many commission members want to conduct case-by-case assessments of the historical figures involved. Commission member Serhiy Svitlenko, head of the history department of Dnipropetrovsk National University, resisted suggestions by other members that the body's work be divided up in order to make the tight deadline.

"We must approach the renaming as a whole -- the renaming of cities, streets, squares, and other places is one whole," he said during the commission meeting. "It must be settled systematically."

He added that it is important to have a single, agreed-upon conception of decommunization in order to avoid "half-baked decisions."

Local commissions such as the one in Dnipropetrovsk must also wrestle with the question of how to take public opinion into consideration. There is no national legislation on local referendums and little time to hold them in any case.

In Dnipropetrovsk, committee members discussed organizing opinion polls or conducting an online survey, but no conclusions were reached.

"What can be considered public opinion?" asked acting city executive Halyna Bulavka during the commission meeting. "Relying on the ideas we find on the Internet or social media is obviously not enough."

"We need to determine what the public's opinion is on each question," she added.

Decommunization was one of the key demands of the Euromaidan movement that ousted the government of former President Viktor Yanukovych. However, Russia is against the effort and particularly resents the fact that Ukraine's decommunization laws expressly equate Soviet Communism and German Nazism as criminal regimes. Moscow has argued that Kyiv is trying to rewrite history and that decommunization is part of an effort to oppress Ukraine's ethnic Russians and Russian speakers.

Yet advocates insist Ukraine must pass through the process, just as other former Soviet bloc countries have.

"All postcommunist states understand that abandoning the communist legacy requires abandoning communist thinking, thought patterns, and mentalities," Rutgers University political science professor Alexander Motyl said in a recent interview with Business Ukraine magazine [LINK: http://issuu.com/businessukrainemagazine/docs/businessukraine_may2015/26].

"There is, in this regard, no difference between East European attempts to rid themselves of the communist legacy and German attempts to rid themselves of the Nazi legacy.... Both Nazi Germany and communist Russia wreaked absolute havoc on these countries, and the legacies of both need to be viewed as equally noxious."

Meanwhile in Russia, RIA-Novosti reported on June 8 that communist lawmakers in the Duma have introduced a bill making the equation of communism and Nazism a criminal offense punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

RFE/RL correspondent Robert Coalson contributed to this story from Prague

 [return to Contents] 

 #29
http://gordonhahn.com
June 9, 2015
(Not So) Random Questions About Recent Ukraine Developments
By Gordon M. Hahn

What does Russian President Vladimir Putin's statement that Donbass (Donetsk and Luhanks) should remain with Ukraine in an interview to Italian journalists Putin say about: (1) the alleged 'Novorossiya project'; (2) Putin's plan to restore the Soviet empire; and (3) Western - especially American - rusology, media, and academia?

What does the DNR's and LNR's offer the next day to remain part of Ukraine say about: (1) the alleged 'Novorossiya project'; (2) Putin's alleged plan to restore the Soviet empire; and (3) Western - especially American - rusology, media, and academia?

Does the DNR's and LNR's refusal to recognize Crimea as part of Russia say anything about: (1) the alleged 'Russian war' in Donbass; (2) Russia's alleged control over the separatists; and (3) the separatists allegedly being comprised largely of Russian citizens and servicemen sent by Moscow to seize Donbass and Ukraine as part of a strategy for restoring the USSR?

Why hasn't the neo-liberal foreign policy orientation of the Barack Obama Administration led to pressure on Kiev to engage in 'truth and reconciliation' per South Africa's truth and reconciliation commissions and has led instead to a mass lustration and a neo-fascist witch hunts against anti-Maidan elements, gays, and pro-Russian elements?

Activists from the radical, neo-fascist Right Sector party have in recent days attacked a gay pride parade in Kiev, attempted to initiate another ("third") Maidan revolution against Petro Poroshenko's Miadan regime, and held a threatening neo-fascist march in Lviv, a hotbed of neo-fascism in Ukraine. Questions: Why hasn't the leader of Right Sector Dmitro Yarosh been arrested? Why hasn't the Poroshenko regime's offer of a position as an advisor to the Ukrainian Armed Forces General Staff to Yarosh been withdrawn? Why hasn't the Right Sector's "Volunteer Ukrainian Corps" or DUK been unarmed or at least forced to be integrated into the regular armed forces? Why hasn't a single U.S. official addressed these issues in a public statement?

Gordon M. Hahn is an Analyst and Advisory Board Member of the Geostrategic Forecasting Corporation, Chicago, Illinois; Senior Researcher, Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group, San Jose, California Analyst/Consultant, Russia Other Points of View - Russia Media Watch; and Senior Researcher and Adjunct Professor, MonTREP, Monterey, California.

 [return to Contents] 

 #30
Europe-bound Rusian gas transit via Ukraine to end in 2019
By Lyudmila Alexandrova

MOSCOW, June 10. /TASS/. After 2019, when the gas transit agreement with the Ukrainian side expires, Gazprom will not in any circumstances pump natural gas to Europe via Ukraine, 'even if the Sun and the Moon change their places,' Gazprom Deputy CEO Alexander Medvedev said on Tuesday.

Gazprom Chief Alexey Miller earlier said Gazprom would be able to fully cease gas transit via Ukraine by building the Turkish Stream gas pipeline. Experts say this is not an easy task: Gazprom will have to lay new gas pipelines over four years and also conclude new long-term contracts with European partners.

Gazprom Deputy CEO Medvedev has said the Russian energy giant has not yet held negotiations with European consumers on transferring gas delivery/acceptance points because it is unclear which routes will be used for delivery.

'We'll build the Turkish Stream but will wait for proposals from the European side on what to do further with this gas because we don't want to breach energy packages," he added.
Gazprom has contracts signed with some countries until 2035. These contracts designate the gas delivery and acceptance points. Sometimes these are gas distribution hubs and sometimes gas metering stations immediately after the Ukrainian border," Nezavisimaya Gazeta daily quoted Mikhail Krutikhin, partner of RusEnergy consulting firm, as saying.

"That is why, if Gazprom gives up the Ukrainian transit, it will have to do two things for the observance of long-term contracts: to persuade European partners to change these formulations in the contracts and convince them to build infrastructure for gas delivery from the Turkish-Greek border," the expert said.

Now that Gazprom and Ukraine's Naftogaz are embroiled in litigation at the Stockholm Arbitration Tribunal over the terms of the transit agreement, it is difficult to imagine negotiations between them on transit deliveries from 2020, Chief Adviser to the Director General of the Analytical Center for the Russian Government Leonid Grigoryev told TASS.

"Gazprom runs high risks and has made a decision on using the Turkish Stream to deliver the gas currently transited via Ukraine and this is a large part of the gas supplied to European consumers under contracts," the expert said.

As for the routes of gas delivery to consumers, this issue should be depoliticized, he added.

"If politics is excluded, then the route is Gazprom's business. The task of how to connect the Turkish Stream with Austria in the area of Istanbul and the Bosporus Strait is a technical problem and the issue of investments," the expert said.

The expert community has long been discussing the expedience of building a gas hub at the border between Turkey and Greece, Deputy Head of the Faculty of World Economy and World Politics at the Higher School of Economics Andrei Suzdaltsev said.

"No one can guarantee that Europe would rush to build its own infrastructure to the hub. And what if the gas pipeline is built but no one would make connection to it? Europe has a tough stance on attempts to enter the European market 'from the back door,'" the expert said.

There are no doubts that the construction of the Turkish Stream gas pipeline will begin, he added. "But it is not clear whether it will end, considering that Turkey depends on the US and the EU, although it is surely a more reliable partner than Ukraine," the expert said.

 [return to Contents] 

 #31
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
June 11, 2015
Now Kiev Threatens Its Western Creditors with Default
Ukrainian finance minister Jaresko threatens a "debt moratorium" but IMF hints it may press ahead with aid to Kiev regardless
By Alexander Mercouris

Ukraine took a further big step towards default when finance minister Jaresko threatened on 10th June 2015 to declare a moratorium on debt repayments.

A moratorium is simply another word for default.

Ukraine has already passed legislation allowing it to impose such a moratorium (see It Begins: Ukraine Takes First Real Steps To Default, Russia Insider, 19th May 2015).

With Ukraine's private Western creditors continuing to resist pressure from Washington to agree to Kiev's demands for a restructuring, the prospects for default are growing greater.

In the face of what is increasingly looking like an inevitable default the Western powers continue to throw Kiev a financial lifeline.

It seems that even if Kiev defaults on the debt it owes its Western creditors, the IMF may try to continue to provide Kiev with financial support on the grounds that Kiev is implementing "reforms".

This is nonsense. There is no sign of any reform, as opposed to promises of reforms.

There is also the small matter that the continued support being talked about contradicts what the IMF was previously saying.

When the restructuring negotiations were first launched a few weeks ago the IMF was saying that a restructuring was an essential precondition for its aid package. It seems that the political imperative to support Ukraine is however so strong that aid will continue to be provided regardless of whether a restructuring is agreed or not.

Beyond that serious legal questions arise over whether the IMF should be providing support to a country that is threatening to default on its debts. It looks like a bank continuing to lend to a bankrupt customer.

Whilst it might in theory be legally possible for the IMF to continue to provide support if Ukraine defaults exclusively on its private debts, its creditors might in that case say that any money the IMF provides Ukraine should be paid by Ukraine to them to settle the debt Ukraine owes them. If the creditors press this demand through court action then it is easy to see how this situation could become very messy.  

In the meantime it is entirely possible the IMF's hints of continued support for Ukraine might be causing the creditors to harden their stance.

The fact that Ukraine is now openly threatening to default on its debt to its private Western creditors, taken together with the IMF's hints of continued support regardless of whether Ukraine defaults or not, should be seen as further proof that the debt negotiations are deadlocked.

 [return to Contents] 

 #32
Economic growth may resume in Ukraine in 2016 if reforms continue - PM Yatsenyuk

KYIV. June 11 (Interfax) - Hopefully, the Ukrainian economy will resume growth in 2016 if reforms continue in the country, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk has said.

"Any simple recipes or quick solutions do not exist. But, hopefully, if everything goes according to our plan, 2016 should become the first year of economic growth," Yatsenyuk was quoted as saying by the Ukrainian cabinet's press service.

At the end of his trip to the United States, the Ukrainian prime minister reiterated the need to continue reforms in the country's energy and agrarian sectors, tax reforms and the fight against corruption, the press service said.

In their official statements, the G7 leaders and finance ministers, as well as the International Monetary Fund, reiterated their support for the reforms being implemented by the Ukrainian government, Yatsenyuk said.

A top priority today is to secure investment, including from the U.S., for the Ukrainian economy, he said.

"Our task is to attract as many investors and as much American money [as is] needed for Ukraine's economic development as possible in order to be able to create new jobs and resume economic growth in Ukraine," he said.

Yatsenyuk said that the goal of his visit to the U.S. was to lay the groundwork for a Ukraine-U.S. investment conference, set for July 13.

During their trip to the U.S., Yatsenyuk and Ukrainian Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko held 30 meetings. The prime minister described the level of support for Ukraine expressed at these meetings as 'unprecedented'.

In Washington, Yatsenyuk met with U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde, U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, Secretary of the Treasury Jacob Lew, and Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker.

Meetings with U.S. Congressional leaders, including House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner and members of the Democratic and Republican Parties, were also held.

 [return to Contents] 

#33
Business New Europe
www.bne.eu
June 10, 2015
IMF will still lend to Ukraine if private creditors go unpaid
bne IntelliNews

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) says it will continue lending to Ukraine, even if the country fails to make payments to private creditors.

"We have a policy of lending into arrears which allows us to continue lending to a member state when it has arrears with private creditors, providing it's fulfilling all its other commitments that it's made to us," IMF First Deputy Managing Director David Lipton said in Washington on June 9, as quoted by Bloomberg. "This is a way we can go forward."

The IMF has required Ukraine to restructure $23bn in debts in order to receive further installments of a $17.5bn extended funding facility. But international bondholders have shown little willingness to accept a deduction in the principal, which the IMF believes is required in order to bring Ukrainian debt down to a sustainable level.

Following the official's remarks, Ukraine's $2.6bn of bonds maturing in July 2017 dropped 1.4 cents to 51.16 cents on the dollar after reaching a four-month high on June 8. Analysts predicted a further "cooling" of interest in Ukrainian sovereign bonds with the sudden strengthening of Kyiv's hand in the restructuring issue.    

"Such a comment from a top IMF official adds some bargaining power to the Ukrainian government in its talks on restructuring $23bn in state and quasi-sovereign debt owed to private lenders," said Alexander Paraschiy of the Kyiv-based Concorde Capital investment bank.

Another boost after weeks of wrangling with the creditors came with the adoption on May 19 of a law granting the government the authority to avoid servicing some of the debt in question. "With Lipton's statement, the Ukrainian government seems to have received a green light from the IMF to use a repayment moratorium on certain debt instruments as an argument in its negotiations," Paraschiy added.

Compounding the uncertainty, Ukraine has had to send out a written appeal to anonymous holders of the Eurobonds to identify themselves as the country approaches a mid-June deadline to restructure the debt. This was supposedly essential for the disbursement of further IMF money until Lipton's comments cast doubts on the necessity.

Kyiv is hoping to receive more than $2bn from the Fund in June following payment of an initial $5bn tranche in March. Both sums are part of the agreed $17.5bn aid package to be spread over four years. Meanwhile, in an interview with Ukrainian media on June 6, Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko argued that a sovereign default would not greatly impact on Ukraine anyway.

"There is no reason to be afraid of a default... The negative effect of a default will only be felt by commercial firms who currently operate normally and can access external capital markets... But there are very few such companies in Ukraine," she said. "To be honest, it will have no effect on the Ukrainian people." Underscoring its hard line on the restructuring, the finance ministry called the bondholders' proposals "unacceptable" after a telephone call on June 5 with the committee of bondholders led by US asset manager Franklin Templeton.

Jaresko and Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk are currently visiting Washington DC for talks with IMF and US officials before the Fund's review of the requirements for the continued aid package in mid-June.
 

 [return to Contents] 

 #34
Wall Street Journal
June 11, 2015
Ukraine Warns Bailout Could Be Derailed
Creditor talks, conflict with separatists endanger $40 billion bailout, leaders say
By IAN TALLEY and  PHILIP SHISHKIN

WASHINGTON-Ukraine's leadership warned Wednesday that the likelihood of prolonged conflict against Russian-backed separatists and deadlocked creditor negotiations threaten to derail the West's $40 billion bailout program.

Ukraine Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko, in Washington to win approval for the next payout of International Monetary Fund loans and to seek stronger support from the U.S., said Kiev will likely secure a key tranche of emergency financing from the IMF in early July to help keep the beleaguered economy afloat this year.

Ms. Jaresko said Ukraine's parliament would move next week to approve three final preconditions for the $1.7 billion IMF payout, including legislation strengthening the independence of the central bank, paving the way for the fund's board to greenlight the cash next month.

But unless creditors agree to take a loss on their bondholdings, Ukraine's economy will struggle to right itself. Stalled creditor talks have forced the government to ramp up threats to halt payments.

"If there is no acceptable solution on a consensus basis, we are ready to impose a moratorium," the prime minister said.

Mr. Yatsenyuk urged the West not to succumb to "Ukraine fatigue" as he described a long-term battle both against the separatists who have commandeered major cities in the east, and against mounting economic malaise and dysfunction that have roiled the entire country.

"We are fighting with everyone, we are trying to fix everything at once," he said, referring to his government's attempts to tackle entrenched oligarchic interests, keep the shrinking economy from collapsing and negotiate debt relief with intransigent bondholders. Those economic overhauls "have caused a lot of pain" for the average Ukrainian, he said, describing it as "the only strategy" to establish "the foundation for a future strong economy."

Despite a tenuous cease-fire, the yearlong war in east Ukraine is far from over. The prime minister said the costs of the military campaign total $5 million to $7 million a day-roughly 5% of the country's gross domestic product. Exacerbating the severe economic contraction, fighting in the manufacturing-heavy regions of eastern Ukraine has also destroyed infrastructure. Kiev is still paying pensions and supplying the region with water and natural gas but few revenues are flowing into Kiev from the separatist-controlled areas.

Interest payments are taking an equal toll on the economy, the central reason why Kiev is negotiating with creditors, such as U.S. mutual fund Franklin Templeton, to write down the value of their debt. As part of the IMF's bailout program, the fund expects Kiev to secure a total of $15 billion in debt relief.

"We cannot keep bleeding in repayments to the debt this year," Ms. Jaresko said.

Talks with creditors have made little headway, however. The finance minister said she's seeking a 40% cut in the face value of the bonds but creditors won't accept any reduction. Now Kiev says it may halt payments to creditors.

"They are provoking the use of other tools, including the moratorium," the finance minister said. The IMF bolstered Kiev's negotiating leverage Tuesday when the fund's No. 2 official, David Lipton, signaled the IMF would move ahead with the $1.7 billion loan payout despite the absence of a debt deal.

A lanky bespectacled economist in office since last year's ouster of Ukraine's previous corrupt regime, Mr. Yatsenyuk, 41, described Russian President Vladimir Putin as "a very tough political animal." The Russian president, a former KBG officer, has a "comprehensive and sophisticated" plan to derail Ukraine's ambitions to turn westward and bring the former Soviet satellite state back into Moscow's sphere of influence, the prime minister said.

That strategy, he said, comprises "military escalation of the situation, small-scale assault operations, social unrest in Ukraine, desperate financial flight, political turmoil" as well as efforts to sow discord among Ukraine's Western allies.

A centerpiece of Mr. Putin's plan is carving out two separatist enclaves in east Ukraine with Moscow's help. Although a February cease-fire has halted large-scale hostilities between the separatists and Ukrainian forces, smaller clashes continue, underscoring just how tenuous the truce is.

Ukrainian officials and independent analysts believe the Kremlin is looking to create a frozen conflict in east Ukraine, modeled on earlier Moscow projects in Moldova and Georgia-and then use the separatist entity as a way to keep the political and financial pressure on Kiev.

The U.S. and the European Union have responded with economic sanctions against Moscow, preferring not to enter into any overt confrontation with the Kremlin by, for instance, arming Ukraine. Maintaining the trans-Atlantic unity is key in containing the Kremlin's ambitions, Mr. Yatseniuk said

U.S. President Barack Obama and other leaders from the Group of Seven industrialized nations mulled escalating sanctions against Russia, warning Moscow against "doubling down" on aggression in Ukraine. But despite plummeting oil prices and financial sanctions ratcheting up the economic pressure on the Kremlin, there are few signs Mr. Putin plans to back down.

Kiev hopes that by proving their commitment to economic restructuring, the West will continue to support the country.

"We don't want to give anyone an excuse to abandon Ukraine," the prime minister said.

 [return to Contents] 

 #35
Bloomberg
June 10, 2015
IMF Offers Ukraine a Poisoned Chalice
By Leonid Bershidsky

A top International Monetary Fund official is offering Ukraine a generous gift: continued loans, even if it stops paying private creditors. It is, however, a trap of sorts. Accepting the deal risks undermining Ukraine's ability to borrow on the open market and strengthening its dependency on the IMF.

"If at some point Ukraine finds that it can't continue to pay its creditors and meet the goals of the program, and it stops paying the private creditors, we have a policy called lending into arrears," IMF First Deputy Managing Director David Lipton said Tuesday before talks with Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk of Ukraine and Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko.

Jaresko started talks with creditors almost three months ago and got nowhere. Ukraine demanded a partial debt write-off. The creditors offered maturity extensions.

The creditors' stand is more logical. Jaresko and Yatsenyuk have insisted that the terms of Ukraine's IMF bailout -- $15 billion in savings from debt restructuring over 4 years , a debt-to-gross-domestic-product ratio of 71 percent by 2020, a gross refinancing limit of 10 percent of GDP for 2019-2025 -- require a haircut for Ukrainian bondholders. The latter, led by the U.S. asset manager Franklin Templeton, countered that a maturity extension and a deferral of interest payments would satisfy the first requirement. As for the other two, the bondholders suggested waiting to define the terms until Ukraine has a better idea of what it GDP would look like in 2019 and 2020.

Now, the economy is shrinking: Bloomberg's consensus forecast from 20 economists' predictions is a 6.75 percent decline this year. Yet the Ukrainian government says it's pursuing ambitious structural reforms. Why doesn't it expect these measures to spur fast growth, perhaps not this year or the next, but in 2017 and 2018? After all, the economy of Georgia, whose experience Ukraine is now trying to emulate with the help of that country's former president and his team, grew 9 percent to 12  percent a year in 2005-2007 as a huge shadow economy was made legitimate. Ukraine has a shadow sector that accounts for about 58 percent of GDP, so growth potential is comparable.

By saying that keeping debt to 71 percent GDP requires a write-off, the Ukrainian government is admitting that it doesn't believe that efforts to eradicate corruption and get citizens to pay taxes will be successful. JPMorgan said recently that even now, it was getting harder to justify a haircut because of Ukraine's higher than expected inflation and budget surplus.

The IMF could privately point that out to Ukraine. Instead, if Lipton's remark is anything to go by, the fund is about to deal a blow to the private creditors, making a moral and political point rather than a financial one. After all, bondholders lent to Ukraine's previous, monumentally corrupt governments, and knew they were taking a big risk. And Russia, which owns a $3 billion Ukrainian bond maturing at the end of this year, has wreaked so much havoc in Ukraine that its claim is egregious.

The fund's lending into arrears policy was first adopted in 1989, precisely so debt holders couldn't use the IMF's ability to provide assistance as leverage against debtor countries. So Ukrainian bondholders, especially the funds managed by Templeton's Michael Hasenstab, should be more malleable if the IMF keeps pumping money into that country, even if it makes good on its threat to declare a  moratorium on private debt payments. There would be no deadline for a debt deal and Ukraine would have an official sanction to default at will.

If the IMF executive board agrees with Lipton, Jaresco can break out the Champagne. But Hasenstab will suffer his first big defeat in years of successful investment in distressed bonds, and Russia may never get its money back.

In response to this new situation, Ukrainian bond prices have dropped from the high of 53 cents on the dollar they reached after JPMorgan's note.

The problem for Ukraine, however, is that failure to reach a negotiated solution with the private creditors will be a blot on the current government's reputation. If it did a no-haircut deal, it could borrow on the market this year. If instead Yatsenyuk and Jaresko get a free pass from the IMF, they will look unreliable to prospective lenders.

For now, IMF approval and funding, bolstered by bilateral aid from Europe and the U.S., is enough to keep Ukraine afloat. But what if its needs increase? Lipton pointed out that Ukraine's economic restructuring is "half-completed and heavily challenged" by a corrupt establishment and predatory oligarchs. Suma Chakrabarti, president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, praised the Ukrainian reforms in a recent speech but urged the government to be even bolder, particularly in fixing the oligarch-controlled banking sector.

With so much work ahead, Ukraine would be wrong to fleece the creditors. A haircut isn't necessary, though it may be needed in five years' time. Make a deal that won't antagonize the market is a test for Jaresko and Ukraine's government.

 [return to Contents] 

 
#36
AP
June 11, 2015
Educated Ukrainians Flee East Ukraine for New Lives in Kiev

KIEV, Ukraine - Alesya Bolot worked for a contemporary arts foundation that converted an abandoned factory into a mecca for young and bright people with daring ideas. Vibrant and cosmopolitan, the 27-year-old would not look out of place in a gallery in New York.

She was at the forefront of the avant-garde arts scene in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk when a pro-Russian insurgency took over and upended her life. When a rebel-controlled local television station portrayed creative people like her as the enemy, she decided it was time to flee.

"Everything we did ran counter to their ideology," she says, "the fact that we worked with foreign artists, the fact that we advocated for a plurality of opinions."

Bolot arrived in the capital Kiev a year ago with only a backpack, not planning a long-term stay. But she decided to remain after she was told she was on the wanted list of the self-styled Donetsk People's Republic, for alleged subversive activity. A year on, the Izolyatsia contemporary arts center runs a much smaller gallery in Kiev.

More than 2.2 million people have fled their homes in eastern Ukraine since the war between government forces and Russia-backed separatists began in April last year, according to the United Nations, some to neighboring Russia, but about 1.3 million to Ukrainian regions under government control.

Educated, middle-class people like Bolot, whose arts center was turned into a rebel training camp and prison, represent a big chunk of those who opt for Ukraine-controlled areas, especially the capital - a serious brain drain for Ukraine's east. There are so many of them in Kiev, the displaced say, that it often feels like their city has moved with them.

According to the U.N., a total of 94,000 people from eastern Ukraine are now living in Kiev and its suburbs. More than 8,000 are subscribed to a "Donetsk people in Kiev" group on Facebook, set up by Vladimir Voronov, a 36-year old who created the brand for the glittering new Donetsk airport, which was transformed into an apocalyptic wasteland by months of heavy fighting there.

For people who have left their careers, homes and often extended families behind, community outreach is vital for survival, Voronov says. Along with the war trauma, he explains, people from the east have to struggle with the dire financial realities of a recession, with the government offering a paltry 400 hryvnias ($20) a month in benefits.

"Because of the need to survive many people here have discovered new resources in them," Voronov says. "It's a seasoned community that has nothing to lose, has nowhere to go back to, all bridges burnt."

Voronov's friend and business partner, Andrei Budyak, runs the informal Donetsk community in Kiev. He says the community is helping newcomers to integrate, offering legal advice as well as a chance to simply "meet and chat, to have a good time to reminisce about the good old days." The community trades advice, organizes picnics and offers free classes for children.

The displaced long to return home but are afraid that the war has changed their homeland beyond recognition. Some feel betrayed by those who stayed, regarding them as supporting the separatists. Bolot says she is certain that many people who stayed in Donetsk do not share the separatists' views - but still finds reconciliation difficult.

"I don't know how you can live and work alongside people who have supported what is going on there," she said.

The population of Donetsk, the rebel region's largest city, is believed to have shrunk by a third from its pre-war 1 million. A city that hosted the Euro 2012 football matches, with glittering store fronts and a vibrant restaurant scene, Donetsk is now eerily empty during what could be the rush hour, as if it's always a lazy Sunday morning.

The exodus has drained the region of countless professionals. Viktoria Sosnina, a gynecologist from Donetsk who fled to Kiev, says roughly half the doctors at her once-prestigious hospital have left. And so have many patients.

But Sosnina also defends those who choose to remain at home. She says a professor at her hospital in Donetsk stayed "because the hospital is his child. It doesn't mean he betrayed someone, like a child he cannot abandon it."

The Ukrainian government never organized a proper evacuation from rebel-held areas, but it has taken pride in "evacuating" major universities - opening new campuses in Ukraine-controlled areas and inviting students and faculty. Many stayed behind, however. The Donetsk rebels say 17 universities with 38,000 students operate on the territory they control; schools are open too.

The Donetsk National University literally split in two when it was ordered to move to the city of Vinnytsia and some professors and students chose to stay put. The university staff who moved issued a statement last year accusing those who stayed of "taking part in terrorist activities."

Most of those who have fled war-torn areas still have friends and relatives on the other side of the front lines, and are baffled by such claims.

Konstantin Reutsky, a human rights activist from the rebel-controlled city of Luhansk who now lives in Kiev, says many of those who fled the heavy fighting last summer are coming back to their hometowns, some driven by the hostility they often face as refugees "who came to take our jobs," some by the failure to build a life from scratch. But most of these people, according to Reutsky, leave again "when they begin to see the lack of prospects" in the rebel-controlled zone, a weapon-choked land in limbo.

Still, many of the displaced believe in an eventual revival in the east.

"Reconciliation is possible," says Sosnina. "But only when the fighting stops and people can talk freely without weaponry around them and without the poisonous rhetoric from both sides."

She says she is still in touch with her former colleagues in Donetsk: "When we talk, we try not to talk about politics."

 [return to Contents] 

 #37
New York Times
June 11, 2015
Russian Groups Crowdfund the War in Ukraine
By JO BECKER and STEVEN LEE MYERS

WASHINGTON - The Novorossiya Humanitarian Battalion boasts on its website that it provided funds to buy a pair of binoculars used by rebels in eastern Ukraine to spot and destroy an armored vehicle. Another group, Save the Donbass, solicits donations using a photograph of a mortar shell inscribed with its web address and the names of donors. Yet another, Veche, states that its mission is to "create modern, combat-ready" military units fighting Ukraine's central government.

These organizations are part of an online campaign that is brazenly raising money for the war in eastern Ukraine, using common tactics that have at least tacit support from the government of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Although they often portray their mission as humanitarian, most of the groups explicitly endorse the armed insurgency and vow to help equip forces in the two regions at the center of the fighting, Donetsk and Luhansk.

An examination by The New York Times of the groups' websites, social media postings and other records found more than a dozen groups in Russia that are raising money for the separatists, aiding a conflict that has killed more than 6,400 people and plunged Russia's relations with the West to depths not seen since the Cold War.

The groups have relied on social media - including YouTube and the Russian version of Facebook - to direct donations through state-owned banks in Russia and through a private system of payment terminals owned by a company called QIWI that is affiliated with Visa and traded on the Nasdaq. While most of the donations appear to come from Russia, the organizations have also solicited funds from abroad using large American and European financial institutions, including banks and companies like Western Union and PayPal, even though many of the groups are targets of international sanctions.

The fund-raising could pose legal risks for those companies, which are prohibited from doing business with blacklisted people or groups. In fact, the sanctions have helped give rise to a cat-and-mouse game in which the fund-raising groups morph with the shifting circumstances, changing names and redirecting donations to new accounts to keep the money flowing.

With the European Union expected to renew its sanctions, Mr. Putin has continued to insist that the fighters in eastern Ukraine are part of a homegrown opposition movement, even though a preponderance of evidence shows that Russia has provided manpower and weapons. In late May, for instance, two Russian soldiers were captured on the battlefield and charged with terrorism.

In recent days, new signs of a buildup of Russian troops and equipment at the border, as well as fighting that killed at least 19 people on the outskirts of Donetsk, have raised fears that the simmering conflict will erupt again.

Mr. Putin participated in the negotiations that produced a tenuous cease-fire in February, and he has called on both sides to reach a lasting political settlement, most recently during his meetings with Italian officials and Pope Francis in Rome. Officials in Ukraine and elsewhere, however, say that he has continued to stoke the conflict in order to keep his neighbor weak and unstable.

The fund-raising network is another of the tools the Kremlin has used to do so. It is unclear just how extensive the network is, or how much money flows through it, though the separatist groups identified by The Times claim in social media posts to have raised millions of dollars.

The network features a disparate yet overlapping cast of characters that includes a mustachioed former Russian military intelligence officer credited with starting the uprising, Igor Girkin, who uses the nom de guerre Igor Strelkov; the dissident writer and Putin critic Eduard Limonov, whose neo-nationalist followers have championed the territorial expansion in ethnically Russian regions with far more vigor than Mr. Putin's Kremlin; and a former "foreign minister" of the Donetsk People's Republic, Yekaterina Gubareva, and her husband, Pavel, an ethnic Russian from Ukraine and one of the most prominent separatist leaders there.

All share a common cause: establishment of a region loyal to Russia that is sometimes called the Donbass or Novorossiya. They make similar appeals to ethnic and political solidarity with the fighters opposing the central government in Kiev, and they share methods for raising money for illicit activities that the Internet has made vastly more efficient, according to experts and officials monitoring financial flows of criminal and terrorist groups.

"Violent groups operating in war zones and their supporters abroad are exploiting advancements in communications and financial services technologies to more efficiently increase popular support and raise funds for their cause," said Howard Mendelsohn, a former deputy assistant Treasury secretary and now the managing director of Camstoll Group, an advisory firm in Washington.

According to their own online appeals, the organizations have directed that donations be made via state-owned or state-controlled banks in Russia, including the country's largest, Sberbank, or credit cards issued by those banks, some branded with MasterCard and Visa logos. Mr. Putin's government, which strictly regulates nongovernmental organizations to monitor opposition political activity, has done little to stop the fund-raising.

The head of Russia's Federal Service for Financial Monitoring, Yuri A. Chikhanchin, for instance, recently told Mr. Putin that his agency had frozen 3,500 bank accounts suspected of supporting terrorist organizations. The fighters in eastern Ukraine, however, are not among the groups Russia has designated as unlawful.

"Anyone in Russia who wants to provide assistance to the D.P.R. and the L.P.R. is encouraged by and gets support from the Russian government," said John E. Herbst, a former American ambassador to Ukraine now at the Atlantic Council in Washington, using the abbreviations for the self-proclaimed People's Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.

One of the fund-raising groups, Save the Donbass, claimed in May to have raised the equivalent of $1.3 million in donations through Sberbank and other payment systems, including QIWI.

The fund run by Ms. Gubareva and her husband, the Humanitarian Battalion of Novorossiya, claims to have raised $213,000 since its founding in May 2014, shortly after the fighting began.

Its website allows donors to direct their contributions to specific militia units, including a mortar battery named after the Russian version of Pinocchio, a puppet called Buratino, and boasts that it has provided not only the binoculars used in the destruction of the armored vehicle, but also tactical military gloves, laser range finders, radios and a car used by the battery's spotters.

At least five of the organizations solicit donations through PayPal, the online payment company based in California that is now owned by eBay. PayPal has in the past faced legal trouble for processing payments to entities in Iran, Sudan and Cuba, recently paying nearly $7.7 million in penalties in a settlement with the Treasury Department.

When asked about the Ukrainian-related accounts - identified by email addresses in Russia - a PayPal spokeswoman, Sarah Frueh, said none of the accounts were valid. She declined to respond to additional questions seeking clarification.

Many of the organizations openly advertise ways to donate using American and European banks. On the Humanitarian Battalion website, for instance, Ms. Gubareva explains how to wire dollars or euros into her account at Sberbank using correspondent accounts at Citibank, JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank in New York, among others. So did the separatist group Veche.

It remains unclear how much money is flowing into eastern Ukraine from abroad. Only one of the international banks said it had detected illicit donations, blocking a contribution to Ms. Gubareva's organization, according to a bank official who spoke on the condition that the bank not be identified. Another donation of $200 did pass to Veche, which is not on any blacklist but proclaims links to organizations that are - including Mr. Strelkov's Novorossiya Movement and the Ghost Battalion, led by Aleksei Mozgovy until he died in an ambush last month.

But the widespread use of QIWI has created potential risks for its partner, Visa. Nearly all the fund-raising groups solicit donations through QIWI, a virtual payment company founded in 2004 and later incorporated, like many Russian companies, in Cyprus. QIWI provides consumers in Russia - and increasingly other countries - with a variety of ways to make payments online or through a network of tens of thousands of terminals that act like reverse A.T.M.s, allowing users to deposit cash and then pay participating vendors.

Users can also move money to individuals - or charitable organizations - as long as they have accounts linked to working telephone numbers. Its partnership with Visa, begun in 2012, allows customers to use a QIWI-Visa credit card to pay vendors outside QIWI's network.

The system has become wildly popular, used by 17 million Russians, but it has also skirted legal trouble. The company's terminals and credit cards - along with the failure to require identification for transactions, as demanded by Russian law since last year - can be easily exploited to transfer proceeds from illicit activities, from drug dealing to tax evasion.

In a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, required because its stock is traded on the Nasdaq, QIWI said its system "remains susceptible to potentially illegal or improper uses" such as money laundering by organized crime groups and other illicit actors, including those named in sanctions by the West for their activities in Ukraine.

In February, the company filed an amendment, saying that law enforcement officials had carried out an investigation at its Moscow offices involving "a small number of clients," though it did not elaborate.

Officials with Visa said they did not believe their company had processed any donations to the organizations examined. QIWI's chief executive, Sergei Solonin, said in a telephone interview that QIWI blocked some of the accounts identified by The Times last summer because they were engaged in fund-raising activity prohibited by company policy. The company, for instance, blocks the use of its system for political fund-raising.

Mr. Solonin said other accounts were blocked after The Times brought them to QIWI's attention. One group, Tricolor, posted photographs of donations made on QIWI accounts as late as October 2014, but Mr. Solonin would not say whether that was one of the accounts closed later, citing Russia's financial confidentiality laws. After that interview, a number of groups noted on their websites that their QIWI accounts had been blocked, and removed them as payment options.

But underscoring just how tricky it can be to curtail the groups' fund-raising activities, a number redirected money to new accounts. On April 20, a group called Batman noted on its social media page that all but its Sberbank account had been blocked. But by May 18, it had updated the page to include a new QIWI account number and a plea: "Donbass needs your help!"

The Western sanctions lists, for their part, have not kept up with the groups' ever-changing names. Mr. Strelkov's Novorossiya Movement, for instance, stopped soliciting funds after the European Union placed sanctions on it in February. Instead, it asked that the funds be sent to a related group, not blacklisted, called Global Initiatives, run by the movement's chief of staff and chaired by Mr. Strelkov.

In early May, it morphed yet again, redirecting funds to yet another related group, ANO KNB. Later in the month, a group identified by the Novorossiya Movement as its partner, Strelkov Info, wrote that because of constant blocking of its accounts, "we've decided to not post them in places open to all"; donors could send an email "to find out transfer details."

Meanwhile, new fund-raising appeals keep popping up. A group calling itself Dobrovolec.org was soliciting funds online as of May 26, with QIWI and Sberbank accounts among the payment options. The group, which claims to be conducting at least two campaigns involving volunteer snipers and "tankmen," called on fighters familiar with such deadly weaponry as surface-to-air missiles, flamethrowers and anti-tank guided missiles to join its effort to "participate in military conflict in the west of former Ukraine on Novorossiya side."

Andrew Roth contributed reporting from Moscow.

 [return to Contents] 

 #38
Washington Post
June 11, 2015
Ukrainian prime minister says Putin wants to control all of his country
By Carol Morello
Carol Morello is the diplomatic correspondent for The Washington Post, covering the State Department.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said Wednesday that Russian President Vladimir Putin aims to extend Moscow's control over all of Ukraine, and that the country needs more military aid from the United States to force back 10,000 Russian troops already on the ground.

"This is the only language that Putin understands," Yatsenyuk said. "We have to stay strong, not retreat."

Yatsenyuk made his remarks during a visit to The Washington Post editorial board, one of many stops he is making in Washington with Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko to drum up support for their beleaguered nation.

They have met with the International Monetary Fund and key members of Congress, who urged President Obama to arm Ukrainian troops fighting pro-Russian rebels in the eastern part of the country. The United States has provided training to Ukrainian troops, but the White House has balked at providing lethal aid, fearing it will only provoke Russia and escalate the conflict further.

Yatsenyuk said he hopes his trip returns Ukraine to the forefront of American consciousness at a time of urgent U.S. domestic concerns and international crises elsewhere.

"The idea is to have Ukraine on the U.S. radar screen, as its attention has been directed to ISIS, and Yemen, and police officers in Texas," he said. ISIS is one of a number of acronyms for the Islamic State.

Yatsenyuk spoke scornfully of Putin, accusing the Russian leader of trying to distract from domestic woes caused by a slide in oil prices and sanctions, and rally support by appealing to Russians mourning for lost empire.

"Putin is playing with the far-right nationalistic sentiment that still exists in Russia," he said. "They believe they have no chance to be an empire without Ukraine."

"He wants to take over the entire Ukraine, no doubt. His ultimate goal is to fight with the West, and win this war against the West," Yatsenyuk said. "And Ukraine has become a battlefield of this war."

Ukraine's problems are as much economic as military. The country is hamstrung under the strains that began when Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014. Since then, Kiev has accused its neighbor of fomenting a civil war in the industrialized sections of the east by supplying equipment and troops to separatist rebels, something Moscow has vehemently denied despite what U.S. and Ukrainian intelligence say is documented evidence.

Today, inflation in Ukraine is rampant, and the government has been forced to freeze social programs and end some subsidies.

"We need to get the country back to work," Yatsenyuk said. "We can't do it without U.S. investment."

He implicitly acknowledged the weakness of the government, saying that if Russia sent its tanks across the border, it would lead to a run on the banks.

Jaresko evoked the sense of abandonment that some Ukrainians have expressed, saying the best way to support their struggle against Russia is through a steady stream of aid from the West.

"It's extremely important to give Ukrainian people confidence they are not alone in this fight," she said. "We need to keep showing that the world recognizes how much Ukrainians have sacrificed, and the world is going to be there, every day."

Though Ukraine is not a member of NATO, Yatsenyuk said he has been telling everyone that Ukraine is where NATO needs to make a stand against Russian aggression.

"If we fail, this will be a failure of the entire free world," he said. "No one will trust that those who are fighting for their freedoms and liberties can be supported and they can win this war against dictatorship and a kleptocratic Russian regime. This is about a core value of the free world."

 [return to Contents] 

 #39
Washington Post
June 11, 2015
Editorial
The U.S. should send aid to democracy's front lines in Ukraine

IN THE past several months, Ukraine's freely elected government has taken dramatic steps to reform its economy, fight corruption and rebuild democratic institutions. It has imposed painful austerity on average Ukrainians, stripped oligarchs of political and economic privileges and rewritten laws to encourage free enterprise and foreign investment. It has done all this even while fighting a low-grade war against Russia, which has deployed an estimated 10,000 troops to eastern Ukraine and, with its local proxies, attacks Ukrainian forces on a near-daily basis.

Ukrainian leaders such as Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who visited Washington this week, see themselves as fighting on the front line in defense of Western democracy against Vladimir Putin's imperialist autocracy. "This is about the core values of the free world," he told us. "If we fail, this will be a failure for the entire free world."

In spite of the government's exertions, the odds of a Ukrainian collapse remain alarmingly high. In addition to the ongoing Russian-led military assaults, waged in blatant violation of a peace deal Moscow agreed to in February, Mr. Yatsenyuk's government is struggling to meet staggering financial obligations. Private creditors, including the U.S.-based Franklin Templeton firm, are refusing to cooperate with a debt restructuring, sanctioned by the International Monetary Fund, that is needed to save the country $15 billion over four years.

The United States and European Union have, meanwhile, provided only paltry amounts of help, including $3 billion in U.S. loan guarantees spread over two years. While leaders of the Group of Seven nations agreed at a summit meeting this week to continue sanctions against Russia until it implemented the peace terms to which it agreed, the Obama administration and its European allies continue to deny Ukraine the financial support it desperately needs - not to mention the defensive weapons it has repeatedly requested.

Even symbolic measures of political support have been lacking. While Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited Kiev last weekend and promised more aid, President Obama, who, like Mr. Abe, was in Germany for the G-7 meeting, has not visited Ukraine.

Mr. Yatsenyuk said he renewed his request for U.S. military aid in meetings at the White House and in Congress, which already passed with a large bipartisan majority a bill authorizing arms deliveries. To save Ukraine, he said, "you have to stop the war. To stop the war you have to undertake all efforts, including diplomatic and military. We accept that there is no military solution. But there is no way to deter Russia rather than to have a strong and effective Ukrainian military."

Mr. Yatsenyuk found some support from Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, who "emphasized the continued commitment of the United States and the international community to provide Ukraine with the financial support it needs," according to a statement. A group of senators the Ukrainian leader met, including Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), endorsed his request for military aid - an appeal that previously has been supported by the secretaries of state and defense.

What's missing is a decision by Mr. Obama to make the defense of Ukraine a priority. The president has ceded leadership on the issue to Germany and France and overridden those in his administration and Congress who support arms deliveries. In dispatching Secretary of State John F. Kerry to meet Mr. Putin last month, he appeared more intent on obtaining the Russian ruler's cooperation on Iran than in stopping his ongoing aggression.

A stronger U.S. commitment to Ukraine will not guarantee its success. But Mr. Obama's lukewarm support risks a catastrophic failure for the cause of Western democracy.

 [return to Contents] 

 #40
AP
June 10, 2015
Poll: Americans and Europeans differ on aid to Ukraine

MOSCOW - A new survey shows that Americans are less willing than Europeans to send economic aid to Ukraine, where the government is struggling to keep the economy afloat while battling Russian-backed separatists.

At the same time, Americans would be more willing than Europeans to use military force against Russia if it were to attack a neighboring country that was a member of NATO, according to the survey released early Wednesday by the Pew Research Center.

While Ukraine is not a NATO member, other former Soviet republics are and they worry that the Western alliance would not defend them if it meant military confrontation with Russia.

The survey examined public opinion in eight NATO countries: the U.S., Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain. The interviews were conducted in April and May among about 1,000 adults in each country, with margins of error ranging from plus or minus 3.4 to 4.1 percentage points.

Of the eight countries, only Italy was less supportive of sending economic aid to Ukraine than the U.S., where 62 percent of those surveyed were in favor. Support was highest in Poland and Spain, at 77 percent.

But when asked whether NATO should send arms to Ukraine, the U.S. and Poland were most in favor, at 46 percent and 50 percent, respectively. Germany was at the bottom of the pack with only 19 percent support.

Americans and Germans were also at opposite ends on the question of whether their country should use military force to defend a NATO ally if it were attacked by Russia. In the U.S., 56 percent surveyed said yes, while in Germany only 38 percent said they would support military action.

In Italy and Poland, the interviews were conducted face-to-face; in the other six countries they were done over the telephone, on land lines and cell phones.

 [return to Contents] 

 #41
Interfax-Ukraine
June 11, 2015
Ukrainian Security Service chief invited to speak at U.S. congress - adviser
 
Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) chief Valentyn Nalyvaichenko will visit the United States next week to speak at hearings at the House of Representatives' Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Senate's Committee on Foreign Relations, Markiyan Lubkivsky, an adviser to the SBU chief, said on Facebook.

"The U.S. Congress, particularly the House of Representatives' Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Senate's Committee on Foreign Relations, will hold hearings on Russian military presence in Ukraine on June 16-17 this year. The organizers planned to invite Ukrainian Security Service Chairman Valentyn Nalyvaichenko to present evidence of the Russian Federation's armed aggression against Ukraine," Lubkivsky said.

Nalyvaichenko should also discuss "efficient ways of assistance for Ukraine in the security area" with U.S. partners, he said

 [return to Contents] 

 #42
The New Republic
May 21, 2015
Ukraine Makes Amnesia the Law of the Land
Poroshenko wants his nation to forget its role in Nazi atrocities
By Jochen Hellbeck
Jochen Hellbeck is the author of Stalingrad: The City that Defeated the Third Reich (PublicAffairs, 2015). He directs a team of historians and photographers who observe how different regions of Ukraine commemorate the end of World War II.

Few Western observers took notice when Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko signed a package of laws last Friday. They should have. The laws, which were rushed through parliament without public debate, strive to provide the country with a "correct" and binding historical memory. Those holding alternative views of Ukraine's past risk prison terms of up to ten years. Vedomosti, a liberal Russian newspaper generally sympathetic to Ukrainian reformers, lamented the passage of the laws: "The attempt...to turn history into a handmaiden of ideology is removing Ukraine from democratic values, bringing it troublingly close to contemporary Russia."

Vedomosti understates the problem. Existing laws in Russia criminalize historical views that "relativize Nazism" and question the narrative of Soviet victory in World War II. The new laws in Ukraine go further. Their aim is to impose a sharp break between present-day Ukraine and its entire Soviet past, now deemed criminal. As they foreground a questionable story of ethnic Ukrainians who throughout their history fought Russian domination, these initiatives also whitewash dark areas of the country's past.

One of the laws condemns "the Communist and Nazi totalitarian regimes in Ukraine and bans propaganda of their symbols." For the most part, however, the law focuses on the Soviet era. All that it has to say about Nazism is that its racial theories drove certain groups out of their professions. It makes no mention of the mass murder of Jews, let alone the participation of Ukrainians in these atrocities.

The omission is strategic: This is made clear by another law, which hails soldiers and partisans who fought in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) as national freedom fighters. During World War II, the UPA collaborated with the German Wehrmacht against the Soviet Red Army. As the Germans withdrew from Ukraine in 1943, scores of Ukrainian policemen who had served with the occupiers, killing communists and Jews, joined the ranks of the UPA. During its prolonged fight for independent statehood the insurgent army committed numerous atrocities against ethnic minorities. Roman Shukhevich, the army's commander, was a notorious anti-Semite. The new law glorifying the UPA was drafted by Yuri Shukhevich, Roman Shukhevich's son.

In an open letter to President Poroshenko this April, a group of scholars and Ukraine experts lamented that the law would make it "a crime to question the legitimacy of an organization (UPA) that slaughtered tens of thousands of Poles in one of the most heinous acts of ethnic cleansing in the history of Ukraine."

Earlier this month, for the first time in Ukrainian history, veterans of the UPA were invited onto a national stage. At a ceremony in Kiev marking the seventieth anniversary of VE-Day, they occupied the front row of an honorary stand and were cheered by spectators. Next to them, separated by a corridor, sat a contingent of Red Army veterans. The rows behind the veterans were reserved for young Ukrainian soldiers who had been recalled from the front in Eastern Ukraine. The image conveyed the passing of the torch from the generation of the grandfathers, who had supposedly all fought for Ukraine during World War II, to their grandsons, who are continuing the same fight today.

As I observed the ceremony, I spoke with Volodymyr Viatrovych, the 38-year-old director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory. A native from Lviv in Western Ukraine, the historic center of Ukrainian nationalism, Viatrovych has been instrumental in applying an ethnic understanding of Ukrainian history to the country as a whole. His institute had also prepared the choreography of the national commemorations surrounding VE-Day. As the UPA veterans entered the stage, Viatrovych excitedly pointed to one of them, explaining that the man had served as Roman Shukhevich's aide-de-camp.

The evening culminated with Poroshenko's address to the soldiers. The president invoked the spirit of May 8, a new national holiday that was introduced to directly precede Victory Day, the traditional Soviet-style holiday that falls on May 9. He spoke of the need to commemorate the end of the war in a non-Soviet, "European" manner. He went on to evoke the valiant efforts of his countrymen during WWII and their valiant fight today, and he detailed the sufferings of millions of Ukrainians.

Poroshenko said nothing about Ukraine's Jews. His silence felt eerie on this European holiday, and all the more so because the event took place a few miles from Babi Yar, one of the greatest killing sites of the Second World War.

Towering over the president, and making for jarring symbolism, were illuminated flags of Ukraine and the European Union. Following Poroshenko's speech a choir sang Beethoven's Ode to Joy, the anthem of the European Union. The frigid evening concluded with the crowd boisterously singing the Ukrainian national anthem.

My friends in Kiev-all of them professional historians-seem to understand my concern. But they keep saying that Ukraine is under siege, and that a critical discussion of the country's past has to wait until after the war. I disagree. Nationalistic narratives of suffering and struggle against external enemies have great mobilizing power, particularly in times of war. Left unchecked, they will only intensify and perpetuate the war.

The new laws that criminalize the Soviet past and glorify the UPA "freedom fighters" are certain to alienate countless Ukrainians. Already in December 2013-this was before the fall of Viktor Yanukovych's regime-political scientist Andreas Umland warned that the imposition of a narrow ethnic-national vision of Ukraine's past would estrange the populations of the Crimea and the Donbass where UPA rhymes with fascist. Looking back, the fact that one of these two regions now is part of Russia, and the other yearns to become absorbed by Russia, seems far from accidental. Ukraine needs to embrace a history that excludes no one and recognizes the country's complex past.

Europeans should not watch passively as core European values are being silenced or denied in Russia's hybrid war against Ukraine. What unites Europe today is the memory of the Holocaust as a singular crime and a starting point for a new era. This memory is shared not only by French and Germans, Poles and Greeks; it also extends to a Russia that affirms the central role played by the Red Army in liberating Europe from fascism. Indeed, Soviet soldiers-Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, soldiers from the Caucasus and Central Asia-stopped Hitler's forces at Stalingrad and proceeded to liberate scores of death camps in Poland and the Baltic states. On the seventieth anniversary of VE-Day, it is worth reflecting on the way Europe was rebuilt on the ashes of Auschwitz. As we envision a new Europe after the current war, it is clear that both Ukraine and Russia must have a place in it.

 [return to Contents] 

 #43
Wall Street Journal
June 11, 2015
We're Making Steady Progress in Ukraine, Despite Putin
A crackdown on corruption is boosting investment and growth, even as we contend with Russian aggression.
By PETRO POROSHENKO
Mr. Poroshenko is the president of Ukraine.

When I became president of Ukraine a year ago this month, Crimea had been annexed, the country was standing on the brink of war and-after more than 20 years of Soviet-style governance, endemic corruption, cronyism and inefficient policy-our economy was sliding into decay.

Now, another revolution is under way. The struggle this time is just as vital as during the 2013-14 pro-democracy Revolution of Dignity on the Maidan in our capital city of Kiev. It has the potential to move Ukraine closer to the European future that the majority of its citizens want. We have already made great progress.

A year ago Ukraine was weak, with only 5,000 troops defending the country, making it an easy target of aggression. Today, more than 50,000 troops are fighting Russian-backed forces in Donbas, while the number of military servicemen has grown to 250,000.

We had a notorious traffic-police force, widely despised and ridiculed for corruption and abuse of power. At the beginning of next month, as a pilot program in reforming law-enforcement agencies, we will launch a new patrol police based on a similar force that has been effective in Georgia.

Before the revolution, we were almost fully dependent on gas imports from Russia. Today, by the diversification of supplies, we have reduced the consumption of Russian gas to 19.9 billion cubic meters from 28.1 billion cubic meters since 2014 and the Russian share of our gas imports to 37% from 90%. We have adopted legislation that establishes transparent rules on the industry.

Our citizens once had limited influence over public policies, often due to questionable election practices and the lack of democratic freedoms. Today, following free, fair and internationally praised elections, the Ukrainian leadership is transparent and accountable as never before. The newly formed National Reforms Council brings the president, government and coalition leaders to one table with leaders of civil society to discuss the most urgent reforms and ensure their implementation.

The Anti-Corruption Strategy for 2015-17 was developed in cooperation with the corruption watchdog Transparency International Ukraine. Most of the recruiting to public offices is now held openly. And we have implemented the ProZorro e-procurement system, which is based on transparency throughout the bidding and procurement process. It is designed to root out corrupt schemes and expected to save about 20% on procurement costs this year.

At the heart of this fight against corruption and inefficiency are hundreds of Ukrainians who would never have imagined working in a public sector that was once almost entirely made up of Soviet-era bureaucrats, many of whom were ineffective. Over the past year, 2,702 former officials have been convicted of corruption.

At the ministerial level, our current team includes many leading professionals, including Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko, a Harvard graduate and former investment banker. I suspect that in terms of efficiency our team would meet the standard of any European government. And with an average age of just 44, we have possibly the youngest government Europe has ever seen.

Alongside our ministers are many young people who have come to us from leading foreign and domestic companies and universities to join in our battle to overhaul our country. Many of these young reformers have found their place in the presidential administration, where 40% of our staff is made up of new faces. We have increased the efficiency of the state apparatus and are projected to cut expenses by around $50 million in 2015.

Realizing the importance of a transparent and fair judiciary, we are working toward limiting immunity for judges, and considering the dismissal of 300 judges. Legislation has now been passed to set new rules for judicial nominations.

The latest International Monetary Fund mission to Ukraine has recognized our efforts. The IMF stated that we have achieved "good implementation" of our agreed-to reform program. There are signs now of economic stabilization, and the IMF expects our gross domestic product to grow by 2% and the unemployment rate to shrink by 0.5 percentage points in 2016. According to the BDO International Business Compass, Ukraine has increased its investment competitiveness for small- and medium-size companies by 20 percentage points during 2014, despite the crisis.

We have shown the world the true face of our nation, one that fights for European values and defends European security on its frontiers. We have been adhering to the obligations of the Minsk accords, and we will keep standing for a peaceful resolution in Donbas.

Now we want to focus on building the country of our dreams-free, democratic and economically developed, with our territorial integrity restored. But we will need the support of the international community to help defend against our aggressor. Just last week, rebels backed by Russian troops attacked Ukrainian positions in the city of Maryinka with tanks and other heavy weaponry in brutal violation of the Minsk agreements.

Regardless of the serious challenges ahead, I am certain my country will succeed. I am honored to work with a highly professional team of reformers who care deeply about this country. I am lucky to have people who would do anything for the good of Ukraine. And we are grateful we have true friends around the world to help us find the strength during these difficult times to make the best of our country.

 [return to Contents]