#2
Bloomberg
June 12, 2015
Dasha Zhukova: Russian Public Now Less Skeptical About Contemporary Art
The founder of Moscow's Garage Museum of Contemporary Art speaks on the occasion of its grand re-opening, and discusses politics, the ruble, and Russia's approach to experimental work
By Lili Rosboch

Founded in 2008 by art autodidact Dasha Zhukova, Moscow's Garage Museum of Contemporary Art is the first philanthropic institution in Russia with a public mandate for contemporary art. It's home to the largest archive of Russian art from the 1950s to present day, and it is permanently moving to a new space that will open to the public on June 12. After four years in a building designed by Constructivist architect Konstantin Melnikov, and then a few more in a temporary pavilion especially conceived for the museum by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, the 34-year-old wife of Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich asked Rem Koolhaas and his OMA studio to undertake the renovation of the 5,400 square-meter building in Moscow's Gorky Park. With a unique 11-meter wide profile and a facade of polycarbonate, the new Garage building includes five exhibition galleries, a screening room, an auditorium, and educational spaces as well as a bookshop and café. I spoke with Zhukova, who divides her time between London, Moscow and Los Angeles, by phone. Here are edited excerpts of our conversation, wherein Zhukova discusses the challenges of opening a global-scale fine art museum in a tricky Russian economic climate.

On changing Russian attitudes toward contemporary and modern art, which for decades was quashed under Soviet rule:

Reactions are always mixed, as with many things, but our core audience has definitely grown. When we first opened there was still a bit more skepticism but in the past seven years, people's perspectives and tolerance-at least our audience's-have opened up.  

What I'm particularly proud of is that the average age of our team is 27. That's phenomenal because it's truly contemporary to be driven by young people.

On her own collection:

I prefer to support artists of my own generation. My taste varies. The way I go about it is really a mix: a lot of it is from exhibitions I go to or from someone that helps. I really love single-artist shows, when you can walk into an artist's environment. I spend a lot of time in London, Moscow and Los Angeles-I really get to see all galleries, established and smaller size. Also the Internet has brought a lot of accessible art around the world.

I'm an investor in Artsy. I use it a lot when I can't get to an art fair because a lot of the galleries put up whatever they're showing and they get a much wider audience through it. I find that very helpful.

On choosing Gorky Park and Rem Koolhaas:

As a little girl I grew up with Gorky Park, so I have a sentimental attachment to it. At the time it was a magical experience to go there, always such a treat. Then in the early 1990s it became very dilapidated, aggressive. And then when the new mayor Sobyanin was elected, he decided with his team to clean up the park and fully give it back to the public. They really gave it a big push.

I wanted to show Rem the park. As you know his career is very much influenced by Russian history and architecture. Rem and I were friends and I took him through the park and thought he would be a great person to get some advice about master planning Gorky Park. And as we were walking through the park and speaking, it just stood out that he would be the perfect person to work with. And so we looked at the building and definitely had a similar philosophy about how to approach it.

On sourcing work for shows in the face of international political discord:

Although we are a publicly minded museum, we are privately funded so we are completely independent. People understand that cultural exchange is very important and even at a time of political difficulty and breakdown on some level, I think that people find that culture is a bridge that is infallible.

We've worked with LACMA, MOCA, I think MoMA for one of our recent shows, and there is some difficulty but we have been able to work around it.  

On financing a museum in the era of a troubled ruble:

We've raised a lot of our funding through corporate sponsorship, and we felt a change in the companies' desire to be in Russia and the size of their budget. So it's definitely had an effect on us.

On Garage's financial structure:

We provide for two thirds of the program and for the rest we fundraise, and the reason we do this is that we want to grow our education department, our research department and we also want to have a sustainable model because we want to be around forever and ever. 

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 #3
www.rt.com
June 15, 2015
Russia cuts key rate to 11.5%, as inflation fears ease

The Central Bank of Russia (CBR) has cut the key interest rate by 100 basis points to 11.5 percent, saying inflation risks have weakened as the economy is cooling. The CBR hopes to reach its target of 4 percent inflation by 2017.

"Amid significant contraction in consumer demand and ruble appreciation in February-May 2015, consumer price growth continued to slow down. According to the Bank of Russia forecast, given these factors annual inflation will fall to less than 7% in June 2016 to reach the target of 4% in 2017," the bank said in a statement Monday.

The CBR added that it was ready to continue cutting the rate, but the scale of the cut will depend on inflation in the coming months.

Inflation in Russia has been steadily falling since reaching its peak in March. In April it stood at 16.4 percent and in May at 15.8 percent. As of June 8, the annual rate was 15.6 percent with weekly inflation stabilizing at about 0.1 percent in May-early June, said the regulator.

Lower interest rate means cheaper loans for businesses in Russia, which could then boost economic activity in the country.

The CBR said it expected GDP to contract by 3.2 percent in 2015. Longer range economic growth will depend on energy prices and the economy's capacity to adjust to external shocks, the regulator said. If oil prices recover to $70 per barrel by late 2016, GDP will grow by 0.7 percent next year. Should prices remain at $60 per barrel GDP will contract by 1.2 percent.

Monday decision marks the fourth consecutive rate cut this year, which proves the regulator sees the inflation danger fading and the ruble having found its fair value.

In April the ruble was the world's best performing currency of 2015. At its peak it was trading at about 49 to the dollar, but has seen an 11 percent downturn since then. The continued fighting in Ukraine and OPEC'sdecision not to cut crude output are the key factors.

Last week the weekly inflation rate in Russia reached zero, the first time since early August 2014.

On December 16, the Russian Central Bank hiked the key interest rate to 17 percent in an attempt to halt the ruble depreciation. The first reaction saw the currency lose more than 20 percent, with one dollar buying 80 rubles on the day. However, the ruble has significantly recovered this year, trading at about 55 against the greenback on Monday on the Moscow Exchange.

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 #4
Carnegie Moscow Center
June 15, 2015
Ever So Great: The Dangers of Russia's New Social Contract
By Alexander Baunov
Baunov is a senior associate at the Carnegie Moscow Center and editor in chief of Carnegie.ru.

Someone wants to take the World Cup away from Russia, or at the very least to besmirch the event, tarnish it, sully it - that's how Vladimir Putin interpreted the recent FIFA corruption scandal and the purge of international soccer's governing body.

Some will argue that corruption was the target and Russia got hit by accident. The interpretation in Russia has been the opposite: Russia was the target all along, and corruption just got grazed by the by - same as in the past, when the supposed targets were communism, or a retrograde monarchy, or communal farming, but the real prey was Russia.

As seen by Russian elites, the arrests in Zurich pose two threats. One of them is personal: A bunch of Russians and Arabs allegedly bribed a bunch of Africans and Englishmen and here they are being arrested in Switzerland to be put on trial in the U.S. This means anyone of us is fair game - any time, any place, no hiding behind Swiss watches or Swiss bank accounts.

The other threat is social: Again, someone wants to spoil our party. On several occasions, in references to Russia's hosting of the Olympics, an offended Putin has mentioned not just criticism or doubts but a concerted campaign to discredit the event, waged from places "including the U.S."

The minute Russia tries to celebrate something great, worldwide, outstanding - to organize an unparalleled Olympics, an unrivaled Eurovision, an unprecedented World Cup - along comes some English, American, Polish, Czech, whoever and poops all over it.

After the 2012 presidential inauguration, which took place in a nearly empty Moscow because of the tumultuous protests on Bolotnaya Square the day before, Putin's actions followed the principle "you ruined my party, I'll ruin your life." It's possible even that Yanukovych's ouster wouldn't have cost Ukraine so much had the Maidan protests not coincided with the Olympics, designed to showcase Russia's global triumph. Instead of the Russian celebration in Sochi, the world saw an anti-Russian celebration in Kiev. Some believe that Putin's chagrin over this did more to embolden him to annex Crimea than some sort of head rush from Russia's Olympic achievements.

From the standpoint of the outside world, punishing Russia probably seems only fair. But if fairness can be sacrificed for the common good, then Russia should get not just the World Cup but another Olympics and a world expo to boot.

This is so because the World Cup partly answers the question of what will happen instead of Crimea. What can replace Crimea? What can satisfy today's booming demand for Russian greatness? Nearly half of Russians, 47 percent, want their country to be a great power, respected and a bit feared by others - that's 10 percentage points more than 10 years ago. Almost 70 percent, up from 30 in 2005, believe Russia already is оr most likely is a great power

This nationwide demand for greatness emerged in the second half of Putin's lengthy reign as part of a new unspoken social contract between the authorities and the people. And it's better to put this energy to peaceful use. Stripping Russia of the World Cup would be like fueling war in Ukraine.

PEACE STREET

Many observers have noted that the new Cold War, which has barely started, differs from the old one in the ease with which Russians talk about a real war. "War-shmar," the thinking seems to go: "The Yanks have gotten totally out of hand, meddling everywhere, not taking us seriously. We can't put up with this anymore. Maybe it really would be better to duke it out, show them their place and win ours in the sun." It's like a recent toast by a left-wing Greek legislator at a formal dinner: The forces of evil are preparing World War III, so let's drink to celebrating another Victory Day in Moscow!

No one knows whether there will be anyone left to drink with later, but there are plenty of people who share these sentiments now. In late April sociologists at the Levada Center released poll results entitled "Rampant Fearlessness, or War as a Sporting Event on TV." They found that only half of respondents fear that the war in Ukraine might grow into a war between Russia and the West. The other half doesn't. Among young people 40 percent are against such a war, while 3 percent are certain Russia would win. Putin's statement that he was ready to put the country's nuclear forces on alert during the Crimea crisis failed to frighten 47 percent of those polled.

The Soviet Union may have produced thousands of tanks and deployed SS-20 missiles on its European territory, but its ruling elders didn't chatter blithely about war. The Soviet propagandist would never have said, "We can turn the U.S. into a heap of radioactive ashes." He would've said: "There are so many nuclear weapons in the world that mankind can turn the earth into a heap of radioactive ashes."

The first thing Soviet schoolchildren learned in the class called "political information" was that nuclear war has no winners; the first thing they heard at festive holiday concerts was that "our planet is fragile glass."
It's not only that the Soviet leadership, which had a genuine impact on the world's fate, had a sense of responsibility and thus exercised caution. The country also suffered from intense war trauma: The war that had been a subject of idle chatter in the 1930s went and actually happened. The Soviet Union was attacked from the West. The enemy advanced all the way to Moscow and the Volga River; 20 million to 30 million classmates, loved ones and co-workers were killed. Soviet leaders promised their people that this would never happen again. There would be trade-offs: some shortages perhaps, and some restrictions. But no one would kill their loved ones and classmates anymore.

Peace was part of the post-war, late Soviet-era social contract between the authorities and the people: Yes, we're ready to sacrifice prosperity, and even freedom, for peace. Hence the common adage that all's well "as long as there's no war." In other words, freedom and prosperity in exchange for peace.

Even the localized Afghan war turned out to be a significant breach of that contract - hence its importance in understanding the Soviet collapse. The shortage of consumer goods and restrictions on all imaginable freedoms remained, but classmates and neighbors started coming home in coffins. Thus, the regime made hardship and lack of freedoms pointless.

SIGN RIGHT HERE

The unspoken social contract between the Russian people and their leaders has changed a number of times. The goal set at the time of the Soviet collapse - to live like the West - wasn't achieved in the 1990s for a variety of reasons. On the contrary, people saw that decade as yet another breach of contract, a major bamboozle even: We gave up our own country in its past incarnation and even its past borders in order to gain a Western standard of living and become part of the West. And where's that all now?

When the Soviets opposed the U.S. at the height of the Cold War and then, later, when they were making peace with the Americans during perestroika, much to the jubilation of the entire world, Soviet citizens had their hardships but felt like equals of the greatest power on earth. In the 1990s, the economic hardships remained, while the sense of equality and one's own significance disappeared.

The contract of the late Yeltsin and early Putin years went along the lines of this: Please, someone take away these dirty, boring, stupid, useless politics, with all their battles among third-world clans, and give us back our first-world country - decent, clean, not one to be ashamed of. In other words, people were willing to give up freedom in exchange for prosperity.

This contract was fulfilled in part, and then the subject of greatness unexpectedly came to the fore. Russians have come to feel very strongly about it - about the greatness they lost and the desire to get it back.

The current unspoken social contract promises Russians greatness in exchange for freedom and prosperity. But greatness encompasses the possibility of war. War, after all, can be a means of manifesting greatness. So people have adopted a more militaristic posture, and there is much less of a sense that war is impossible or that it should be feared than there was even during the real Cold War of the Brezhnev-Andropov era.

It's hard to say where exactly this demand for greatness came from and why now. Perhaps the previous social contract hadn't been completely fulfilled: Russians came closer to Western standards of living but still no cigar (economic growth has slowed after all). Or maybe, once their essential material needs had been more or less satisfied, people got to hankering for a higher purpose, a mission? Russians are used to having one: For 70 years they had a sense of purpose, leading the vanguard of humanity, and suddenly - poof! - it was gone. Life got boring.

Maybe in exchanging freedom for prosperity we made a mistake and this thought is gnawing at us? Hence the desire to enslave the West - if not literally, then at least verbally, describing it in terms of a lack of freedom: They're also slaves, we like to say, of tolerance, political correctness, gays, coloreds, corporations, and, most of all, America. We gave up our freedom in exchange for prosperity and now try to make up for what we're missing by attacking others.

Our standard of living has gone up, the thinking goes, but we agreed to pay for it with our rights, while you (in the West) are living just as well and paying nothing for it. So why don't you pay with your peace and quiet. As my colleague the political commentator Ivan Davydov put it, our government puts us over a barrel at home, so we join forces with the government to do the same to those abroad.

GAGARIN ALSO SUFFERED

Greatness in a backward country is a very convenient thing for the authorities - especially if it's expressed in negative terms, rejecting the accomplishments of others rather than stressing one's own: Where you ended up doesn't matter; what matters is that someone else got lost. How much milk your cow gives doesn't matter; what matters is that your neighbor's is some foreign breed, so it'll croak sooner or later, get cold, freeze, run off, get torn apart by wolves, and deserves all of it, the foul beast, better sooner than later.

What does Russia's greatness consist of? Of being different from the West. And it doesn't matter how imperfect we are; what matters is that we're not like them.

Afghans living under the Taliban wear tattered clothes, heat their homes with dry dung, live in mud huts, get their water from a spring that they also use to bathe - to quote the poet Joseph Brodsky, they "have no home address, much less an envelope, protected from the wind by nothing but their backs." Those living under the Islamic State don't dare to turn on any music, to step outside more often than necessary, to wear the wrong clothes or look at someone the wrong way; the world is horrified by this. But in both cases, the Taliban and IS, their followers revel in their own greatness.

In terms of costs, it's quite a winning business model. According to the Levada Center poll, 40 percent of respondents consider their city or region to be in bad shape economically, and only 10 percent think it's in good shape. Nevertheless, the vast majority of Russians are certain that the country is heading in the right direction.

Russia has all the right conditions to make Western sanctions work in its favor. After all, privations themselves can be taken as a sign of greatness here. If you think about it, over the past 70-80 years (which more or less live on in people's memory), any time we achieved anything great, it was during a time of hardship. We won the war, rebuilt the country, explored space, built giant plants and collective farms with millions of workers - all this was done when life was no picnic. But when we merely consume, produce or import something, or just shop, could that mean we're do nothing of importance? In the cloud of collective consciousness, the link between greatness and privations shines on.

DELUSIONS OF EXAGGERATION

The danger of greatness lies not only in militarism but also in the difficulty of determining whether the greatness in question is genuine - meaning it's easy to be deceived. This happens in the modern world all the time (see the above-mentioned Taliban). Russia is no exception: Not only did it spend 70 years preaching the dusty theories of a bearded German scholar to a perplexed world, it actually bent over backwards trying to live by them.

A popular demand for greatness holds its own dangers. So, better to have the World Cup, the Olympics or the world expo. And it would be good to find a new formula: a new conquest of space or how's about an infrastructural revolution, i.e. our ancestors built us a great country and we'll connect it with modern highways and railways and whatnot.

It's impossible to build true global greatness on domestic fictions - crusades against homosexuality and Ukrainian fascism or attempts to build a unique civilization out of myths. That kind of thing will always raise eyebrows, just like at the Pacific Forum, where high-level representatives of Asian countries had come to discuss their pressing issues and a Russian delegate proposed a discussion of a local TV news broadcast about Ukraine's outlawed Right Sector and the mechanics of "orange" revolutions.

Under the Soviet-era social contract offering "privations for peace," both privations and peace were easily verifiable realities: There was the Cold War, but no big hot ones. In the first post-Soviet trade-offs - "old country for freedom" and "freedom for prosperity"- the second part of the deal, caveats notwithstanding, could also be empirically confirmed: The 1990s were definitely freer than the 1970s, and the 2000s were more prosperous than the 1990s. But the second half of the current formula - "prosperity and freedom in exchange for greatness" - is very difficult to verify. And there's a high likelihood that the costs will be real but the gains imaginary.

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 #5
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
June 14, 2015
Does Russia Have a Future?
There is a misguided consensus among American experts in political science and economics that Russia has no future
By Gilbert Doctorow
Gilbert Doctorow is a professional Russia watcher and actor in Russian affairs going back to 1965. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College (1967), a past Fulbright scholar, and holder of a Ph.D. with honors in history from Columbia University (1975). After completing his studies, Mr. Doctorow pursued a business career focused on the USSR and Eastern Europe. For twenty-five years he worked for US and European multinationals in marketing and general management with regional responsibility. From 1998-2002, Doctorow served as the Chairman of the Russian Booker Literary Prize in Moscow. A number of his early scholarly articles on Russian constitutional history under Nicholas II drawn from his dissertation remain 'in print' and are available online. Mr. Doctorow has also been an occasional contributor to the Russian language press including Zvezda (St Petersburg), Russkaya Mysl (La Pensée russe, Paris) and Kontinent (a journal sponsored by Alexander Solzhenitsyn) on issues of Russian cultural and political life. He regularly publishes analytical articles about international affairs on the portal of the Belgian daily La Libre Belgique.

I periodically return to an unfinished, in fact barely begun chat in our parlor in early March with one of the leading exponents of the Realist school of international relations in America over the question of whether Russia has a future as a great power and a justified seat at the world's governing board.

My interlocutor was fairly certain it has no future and based his judgment on economic indicators, in particular GDP/per capita, but also on the loss of half the population of what was the USSR, the de-industrialization that took place in the 1990s, the over-dependence today on extractive industries, and so forth. His position is without doubt shared by the overwhelming majority of expert opinion in the United States within the disciplines of economics and political science. I won't mention history, because historians have run for cover and plead ignorance of the present and especially the future.

This is not a minor issue. Indeed I think it is the fundamental issue over how we are dealing with Russia today. If Russia is a declining power, there is no reason to show it mercy and many good reasons to cut it down to size in the international community, which is exactly what bipartisan US foreign policy is trying to do today, with mixed success (or possibly with disastrous results if you look closely at the Russian-Chinese strategic partnership that is flowering as we speak).

On the other hand, if it is a rising power, kicking the dog will not play out well. It also is obvious that the clamorous minority who insist that resolution of many key international challenges depends on a strategic partnership between the US and Russia is totally misguided if the Russian future is oblivion.

Therefore I want to go public with a few thoughts that upend the certitudes on which even Realists who are unsympathetic to the Washington narrative on Ukraine have built their argument.

First, the notion that the downsizing of the Soviet Union to the borders of its "continuer state," the Russian Federation, means a proportional loss of military, economic strength misses the point of the dysfunctional imperialism that the Soviet Union represented.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky is hardly the only thinker in Russia today who sees the Soviet Union as having been a great drain on Russia's strength and watches like a hawk to ensure that no new commitments are made to real or pretended ideological soul-mates, let alone the resurrection of a new Soviet Union under a different name. Add to that the further drain of resources to maintain the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe during the Cold War. Russia was exchanging its gas and oil with the Comecon countries and received in return shoddy consumer goods that would have been unsaleable on world markets.

While economic historians may debate forever whether the European colonies were a net benefit or loss to the home countries, as opposed to the imperial ruling castes and classes, there is nothing to debate in the Soviet case. The break-up of the Soviet Union smashes the mold of conceptualization of empire. It is the only case I can think of where the nation supposedly running the show was among the first (second republic in fact) to abandon ship and opt for sovereignty, leaving all the other republics in the lurch to find their own identity.

Compare that with the Hapsburg, the Ottoman and other traditional empires where the titular nation was always the last to find its feet and its identity, where it was what was left when the others left, and you see that we have not begun to comprehend what the break-up of the Soviet Union means for Russia today.

Regarding Russia's military potential, the truisms about its dependence on its nuclear strike force as its equalizer have been overturned since March 2014 and the display of the new Russian army's prowess. The latest military gear may not yet be in wide circulation but it is in production. The latest S400 missile defense system is potent proof of the country's cutting edge military technology (just ask the Chinese who cannot wait to install it on their southern coast), and the latest tanks shown off on the 70th anniversary celebrations on Red Square also give the lie to the idea that Russia will be down and out if the nuclear arm is neutralized by US ABMs.

All of this is being done on a relatively tiny budget. Russia is spending 4% of GDP on arms today, whereas the Soviet Union spent an unsustainable 25%. Why doesn't this fact figure in our calculations of the Russian challenge?

As for the economy: From the moment Putin came to power, the Kremlin was pursuing the neo-liberal economic agenda that swept the world in the 1990s. However, the difference under Putin from the start was the restoration of the vertical of power, the re-centralization of political authority and the curbing of excesses of the oligarchical rule that underpinned the weak, shambolic Yeltsin regime.

Russia pursued globalization and national specialization in the diversified world economy by exploiting to greatest advantage its position as the world's best endowed territory for hydrocarbons and metals.. WTO membership was accepted even though it threatened nascent re-industrialization and brought immediate harm to Russian agriculture which desperately needed state credit subsidies for purchase of farm equipment, seed, and breeding cattle to become globally competitive.

The US/EU sanctions policy has now overthrown the shackles of globalization and introduced direct rewards for protectionism and re-industrialization. It is beginning to put Russian agriculture on a pre-WTO footing, and it is beginning to address the dire state of farm machinery production, where 40,000 of last year's 41,000 tractors put into operation across the country were imported.

In brief, the Russian economy is in a transition phase with the recessionary statistics covering up a wholly new phenomenon of import substitution and recovery of domestic manufacturing potential. This is taking place in an atmosphere of very cautious dirigisme, because the market principles have not been swept aside, merely been given more modest room to act where they do not collide with national defense potential. Mr Kudrin's ideas have been fenced in. Even the IMF has recently shown respect for the way that the Bank of Russia has managed the country's economic policies amidst a perfect storm.

Are we about to witness an ascent of the free Russian economy similar to what happened in the five years after Peter Stolypin's reforms of 1907? Watch this space. Given the history of the country and its record over centuries as a hammer rather than an anvil, I believe it is a grave mistake to dismiss this 'traditional competitor,' as Hillary so diplomatically put it in her NYC campaign speech yesterday.

 #6
http://catherinebrown.org
June 6, 2015
Deconstructing Russophobia
By Catherine Brown
My academic position is as Senior Lecturer and Convenor (Head of Department) of English at New College of the Humanities in London. I took a BA in English Literature at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, then an MSc in Russian and Post-Soviet Studies at the London School of Economics. I lived in New York and Moscow, and learned Spanish and Russian, before coming back to literary academia with an MA in Comparative Literature at University College London, and a PhD at Caius College Cambridge as an Anglo-Russian comparatist. I taught English at the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, and Greenwich, before starting in my current position in London in 2012. My book The Art of Comparison: How Novels and Critics Compare (London: Legenda, 2011) draws conclusions about comparative literature and comparison per se by comparing how three major novels (Daniel Deronda, Anna Karenina, and Women in Love) invite comparisons between their two main plots. My next book will be about representations of torture in 19th and 20th century literature. It was conceived in response to the post-2001 rise in the Anglo-American practice, representation, and acceptability, of torture in the War on Terror. My main area is the novel 1870 to 1930, and my specialist authors are D.H. Lawrence (I am Vice-President of the D.H. Lawrence Society) and George Eliot (I am co-editing a book on Eliot's reception in Europe with Elinor Shaffer, forthcoming from Bloomsbury).

Imagine that Vladimir Putin were not a murderous autocrat and kleptocrat who has spent his fourteen years in power living up to his KGB past and dragging Russia ever back towards Communist autocracy, illiberalism, and expansionism. Imagine that instead he were the one of the greatest leaders that Russia has had, whose policies have helped produce a massive rise in living standards and life expectancy, recuperation of national pride, and enforcement of the rule of law, who has tackled kleptocrats and gangsters wisely and well, whose foreign policy has on balance been realistic, diplomatic, and conducive to peace, who has presided over a country of which the human rights record is considerably better than that of the United States and in which civil rights are improving, and who richly deserves the steady support of 65% - currently at a Ukraine-related high of 83% - of the population that he possesses. It is my understanding that the reality is closer to the second scenario than the first - and I may note that I say this as someone with no ethnic, financial, professional or political ties to Russia whatsoever. It follows that I am not a Russian expert - but nor am I, on the other hand, parti pris. I am a friendly, distanced observer of the country.

Let me start by explaining the history of my connection to the country. When I was a teenager my somewhat timid and unimaginative school uncharacteristically decided to organise a trip to a wacky place such as Russia, where, as it seemed, considerable political change happened to be taking place. So it was that I visited the Soviet Union during the last month of its existence, whilst myself having almost as little conception of what the Soviet Union was, as of what might be about to replace it. Some years later, in my year, so-called 'out', before university, I found myself living on the Danube's South bank in Ruse, Bulgaria, learning some Bulgarian but telling myself that if ever I properly learned a Slavic language it would be one that would allow me to converse with hundreds of millions not just seven million users. After a degree in English I made a diagonal move into an MSc in Russian and Post-Soviet Studies at the London School of Economics, where it was abundantly clear that Britain's finest kremlinogists had had very little idea that or when the Soviet Union was going to end - and who, tsarist nostalgists and Soviet nostalgists alike - were dismayed at what was happening in the country at the time. The worst time was already over when, in 2002, I moved to Moscow to improve my book-learned Russian, and to teach English. I became amongst other things an Anglo-Russian literary comparatist, and have visited the country at least annually since then.

The Moscow I remember of 1991 was febrile, almost but not quite panicked, and throngingly poor. The Moscow I remember of 2002 can best be summarised with the word 'rough'. Though safe in ways in which London isn't - I often used private cars as taxis, alone, at night - there were also several obvious ways to die which London lacked. Open manhole covers, slipping drunk in the snow, crossfire. This was 'diky capitalism' - wild capitalism, with its gloves decidedly off. Legless - literally - Afghan vets pushing themselves through the snow, their torsoes balanced on makeshift skateboards. Families camped out singing for their supper. Concert-quality violinists busking. Professional gymnasts stripping in nightclubs. Makeup stores where Western brands were sold at what I at first thought were ruble prices but were in fact hugely inflated and illegal US dollar prices. My employer at a private English school wasn't paying tax, on the grounds that he couldn't both do that and be solvent. Police one crossed the street to avoid - both because one's own affairs would inevitably involve some illegality, and because they were underpaid and relied on bribes.

A year later, on a visit, the situation was slightly better. The most extravagant misery was no longer apparent. A year later, better still. And that has been the consistent pattern on all my visits since then. Capitalism has been getting its gloves back on. Public facilities are in a much better state. Nothing is sold in dollars and Western brands have Russian rivals. A sensible tax structure means that businesses and salaried employees can and do pay their taxes. One sees no-one drunk in public. Muscovite women no longer exaggerate their femininity in a way which testifies to financial insecurity and a strenuous imitation of a pornographically-imagined West. And most reassuringly of all, to Westerners used to this custom, people have begun to smile. Even the hardest cases - the babushki guarding the museum rooms, and the border guards at passport control - will now return a smile. Last year, for the first time, I felt that Russia was in a new phase - the post-post-Soviet, in which people are no longer waiting for normality to be re-established, or yearning to live in a 'normal' country. A new normality, and a new optimism, have emerged.

My locus of pulse-taking of the country has usually been Moscow - to a lesser extent St Petersburg, Nizhnii Novgorod, and Perm - but from what I hear of the rest of the country, the improvement has been, if slower, widespread and also steady.

Now this period of my acquaintance has coincided with Putin's time in power.
It is one feature of the Western media treatments of Russia that it makes Putin metonymic of the country, one of its assumptions being his increasingly autocratic control of it. I dispute that assumption; but I have no doubt that Putin has had a decisive impact on Russian politics in this century. For this reason, my target in this post is not only Russophobia but Putinophobia, and I consider these to be related biases: here I am taking a phobia in the sense of a negative prejudice.

The impetus for this post is my sense that the Russia which I have got to know, and the Russia I see described in Western and specifically British mainstream media, have become increasingly discrepant. As Russia, in my experience, has improved with regard to just about every indicator I can think of, its image in the Western press has deteriorated. Now, there are all kinds of ways in which improving living standards could be compatible with increasing autocracy and international belligerence - one thinks of Hitler. But I believe that no such combination pertains in Putin's case.

I will just finish this introduction with an anecdote. This April I visited the British Council in Moscow and spoke to two of its young Russian employees. One expects such people to be broadly Western-orientated and Anglophile. Part of their job was to analyse British press coverage of Russia, and, for as long as they were under the mistaken impression that I was a BBC journalist, they were guarded to the point of hostility. When I clarified my position as an academic, and a sceptic of British coverage of Russia, they burst into smiles, and shared with me how depressed reading and watching this coverage makes them. I know no Russian who has any knowledge of Russia's representation in Britain who is not strongly critical of it. I too am depressed by it, specifically because I think that it is intellectually and morally demeaning, and counter-productive to a dangerous degree.

In the rest of this post I'm not going to simply contrast mainstream British and American media assertions with my own. What I will try to do is describe a few of the ways in which what I consider to be a false image is constructed, and the factors favouring the survival of this image - in the hope that if my description of those processes rings true, then it may influence your responses to the media's representations henceforth. Finally, I will consider the practical effects of the media's image of Russia.

The means of its creation are the usual suspects in cases of bias: distortion of fact through exaggeration, understatement, and fabrication; false inferences; inconsistent application of standards; and misuse of language.

To start with exaggeration: the argument that Putin has overwhelming control of the Russian media is often highly overstated. Much TV is state-owned, but some of the state-owned channels, such as RIA Novosti, criticise Putin, as do many radio stations and newspapers. Putin gets far more criticism in the Russian press as a whole than does Cameron in the British press. Now this isn't comparing like for like, since there might in theory be more grounds for criticising Putin - but it is nonetheless a fact, which conflicts with part of the image of Russia as frequently presented. The internet is freer than it is in Britain - one reason why online intellectual piracy is rife - and many Russians get their news from the internet. Government control of the media therefore cannot convincingly be adduced as a significant reason for Putin's consistently high popularity ratings.

Protests against him, on the other hand, receive coverage far out of proportion to their size - even as overestimated, despite the fact that large, peaceful protests indicate the right to protest. The demonstrations in Moscow after the March 2012 presidential election are a case in point. Coverage of such protests also involved understatement of their most important political component - the Communists. Support for the Communist Party is running at a steady 20%, making it by far the most important opposition party. The British media, however, focuses overwhelmingly on the 'liberal' opposition. It is understandable that it does this given that that is the tendency which it supports, but it also gives a false impression that the 'liberal' opposition is in fact at present the main one. Footage of the demonstrations in which the Communist flag predominated undermined the British commentary which was voiced over it.

This exaggeration of size and importance both of the protests and of the liberal component in them, is clearly the product of wishful thinking - but if one is really interested in seeing the replacement of Putin by a liberal, it does one no favours to overstate the current importance of the liberal opposition even to oneself. One should instead confront the fact that the liberal parties combined poll around only 5% of the vote, and should then try to work out what is wrong with these parties' message and or leaders, and/or what is wrong with the voters' ability to perceive the attractiveness of their message.

But the most important elision in coverage of Russia is of those improvements in demographic indicators, living standards, national affluence, and the rule of law, which I mentioned. During his first twelve years in power GDP increased by some 850%. The country is now largely debtless, with a large reserve of currency reserves. Due to Putin's policies revenues from oil now serve the national economy. Mortality has sharply declined, and the birth rate increased.

Then there is fabrication, or speculation presented as fact.

A good example of this is Putin's personal wealth - which has received some fantastically high estimates in Forbes and Bloomberg, including that he is the ninth richest man in the world, or indeed the richest man. These theories took much of their impetus from claims by two men, analyst Stanislav Belkovsky, cousin of Berezovsky, and liberal politician Boris Nemtsov. The allegations are that he secretly owns a large part or all of Gazprom and related energy companies such as Gunvor. Indeed, when The Economist published allegations about Putin's ownership of Gunvor in 2008 it was sued and forced to print a retraction. There are probably only a very few people in the world who actually know the size and precise form of Putin's wealth: he himself, and one or two others. I would only observe, first, that specific allegations have not been proved; second, that speculations should not be presented as confirmed fact; and third, that nothing which is known about Putin's history and proud, workaholic character suggests someone to whom the things that money can buy have a strong appeal; a sybaritic Goering he is not.

Other claims made about corruption in Russia are self-evidently absurd. Certain claims made about corruption at the Sochi Olympics would, if true, mean that more money had been lost to corruption than the entire GDP of the country.

The credulity leant to the claims made by critics of Putin by virtue of being made by Putin's critics leads me onto one false inductive inference found commonly in coverage of Putin: that my enemy's enemy is my friend. When combined with the assumption that there is governmental interference in the operation of the law in Russia, this has the outcome that when somebody who is accused of a crime in Russia voices criticism of Putin they effectually enlist on their side in protestation of their innocence a preponderance of the British media.

That is, not only is my enemy's enemy my friend, and not only is Putin's critic therefore my friend, but Putin's critic is innocent - not only negatively innocent of any crime as charged, but positively innocent and good, because by virtue of opposing a tyrant they are dissident, and therefore of the same genre of person as the saintly Solzhenitsyn or Sakharov. In actual fact, a prisoner with political views is not the same as a political prisoner.

It is true that the Russian legal system is less fair than the British, and lacks several of its important features in both criminal and civil law - for example the principle of disclosure of adverse evidence. The system is young, having been created for the new capitalist system at the end of Communism. Many of the lawyers and judges are therefore still relatively young and inexperienced, and adhere rather too closely to the letter of the law. Defence is still not as well established a profession as prosecution, and this shows. These factors affect the justice of all trials in the country.

But two things must immediately be added to this. First, that the situation is getting gradually better. Putin did not destroy the independence of the judiciary; before him it scarcely existed, and is being gradually built up. Second, the allegation that all trials of Putin's critics are unjust by the standards of the system as it exists has very little evidence to support it.

In the 1990s much of Russia's wealth corruptly and often violently became the private property of a few so-called oligarchs. When Putin became President he made them an offer that constituted quite possibly the optimum intersection of pragmatism, forward-thinking, and justice. They could either pay back some of their unpaid tax, invest some of their wealth in their home regions, and refrain from leveraging their wealth into political power - or be prosecuted for their past crimes as committed. Some, like Abramovich, accepted the compromise offered, and have flourished. Others, like Khodorkovsky, didn't. His trial for tax evasion was widely criticised in the West as politically motivated and unfair. What has scarcely been reported is that on 25th July 2013 the European Court of Human Rights (to which Russia as a member of the Council of Europe is subject) found that the trial was not politically motivated, that Khodorkovsky was guilty as charged, and that he was appropriately sentenced (although it found certain procedural irregularities in his treatment, for which it ordered compensation to be paid). In other cases, such as those of Pussy Riot and would-be presidential candidate Aleksei Navalny (whose appeals to the European Court of Human Rights have yet to be heard), the defendants were found guilty of crimes under Russian law on the basis of strong evidence, and were given sentences which not only fitted well within the range of sentences available for the crime concerned, but which resembled sentences which the same crimes would have received were they committed in Britain. In Britain, Pussy Riot would have been charged under the Public Order Act 1986, for offences under which the maximum sentence is two years in prison (which is what Pussy Riot received). Navalny would have been charged under the Theft Act 1968, for offences under which the maximum sentence is six years (Navalny received five). In certain respects the operation of the Russian law is more lenient than the British. Prior to their 'punk prayer' in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, members of Pussy Riot had performed public sex in a museum, and thrown live cats at workers in a McDonalds restaurant. In Britain such acts could have resulted in prison sentences of at least two years, whereas in Russia they were not prosecuted at all. One reason why Pussy Riot were prosecuted for their 'punk prayer' was that it disrupted and parodied a religious act of worship, which is specifically prohibited under Russian (as also British) law, and which is particularly comprehensible in a country with a history of state persecution of religion.

Finally, criticism of the conviction on well-founded criminal charges of those who have opposed Putin amounts to a demand that anyone who has opposed Putin should be above the law simply by that virtue. It should rather be argued that Putin's closest allies (such as the former defence minister Serdyukov, whose trial for fraud has been much delayed), if suspected of criminal activities, should not be above the law. To do the inverse is to argue that the rule of law in Russia be undermined. Indeed, it is implicitly to argue that Putin should prevent the law taking its course in the case of anyone who criticises him, which is the same as calling for political interference in the law, which is precisely what is ostensibly being criticised. If the point is made that not all oligarchs have been treated equally, the proper response is to demand that they all be held accountable for their crimes, not none of them.

It is worth adding that supporting anyone, no matter how criminally malodorous, provided that they publically oppose Putin, turns us into their useful idiots, and makes us appear idiotic to many Russians who cannot understand on what basis other than political enmity such a person as Boris Berezovsky was given asylum in Britain rather than being extradited to stand trial for crimes in Russia.

Internationally, something of the same dynamic of support for an enemy's enemy is apparent. NATO is hostile to Russia, therefore, for some, there is a reason to support NATO. But on what bases do NATO and Russia disagree?

First, Russia weakly or strongly opposed NATO's interventions in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. Which was right depends on your attitude towards those interventions, but if one desires peace rather than war - civil or otherwise - then Russia rather than NATO should be judged to have acted better.

Second, NATO has behaved with much greater hostility towards Russia than Russia towards it. In 1990 both the EU and NATO promised Russia they would not expand Eastwards. Since then they have done that relentlessly. Russia has done almost nothing in response. It did, however, protest loudly and understandably against the planned deployment of US ballistic missile interceptors in Poland and Romania. The US would certainly not tolerate Russia basing similar systems in Cuba or Venezuela.

This brings us on to inconsistent application of standards. The Russian government is almost invariably interpreted in the worst possible light by being held to higher standards than other countries.

Let's take the recent controversial 'gay law'. Such positive aspect as the Russian government uncharacteristically and briefly enjoyed in the eyes of Edward Snowden's supporters when he was granted asylum in Russia was quickly lost in the US-centred campaign against the gay law which began immediately afterwards. The law making it an 'administrative offence' [minor crime] to present homosexuality in a positive light to minors is a bad law, because it makes a minor offence out of something which was scarcely practised and which should not be banned. It explicitly outlaws 'homosexual paedophile propaganda' whilst making no mention of 'heterosexual paedophile propaganda'. However, in Russia private and public homosexuality is as legal as heterosexuality - yet there was negligible support for a boycott on for example Qatar, scheduled to hold the World Cup, which has vastly more repressive anti-gay legislation. Furthermore several US states have anti-gay legislation much stronger than what exists in Russia, but nobody has proposed any kind of boycott of America on this basis. Pro-gay American barmen did not pour Scotch whiskey down the drains between 1988 and 2003 to protest against the very similar law (Section 28 of the Local Government Act) which was then in place in Britain. It seems clear that the anti-Russian gay law campaign flourished because of Russophobia - the phenomenon I am describing. You may remember during the coverage of the Sochi Olympics there was Claire Balding being genially responsive to the impressive facilities and the warm support of the local Russians, standing alongside BBC Russian correspondent Daniel Sandford, who would repeatedly interject - rather in the manner of a Soviet commissar - comments such as: 'ah, but we must never forget that this is the country where the presentation of homosexuality to minors in a positive light is an administrative offence'.

I am not saying that any amount of impressive facilities and warm locals should whitewash egregious human rights violations - but the Russian gay law simply isn't that. Russia's leading gay activist, Nikolai Alexeyev, became increasingly distressed at the way in which the US-based anti-gay-law campaign was being used as a tool of Russophobia. On the 17th August 2013 he tweeted: 'All Western media want to hear from me that Russia is shit and I don't want to take part in this hypocrisy. So all interviews are over!' For this reaction, he, a brave campaigner against the gay law, was unfairly branded a stooge of Putin - and so a divide opened up between Russophobic pro-gay activists and Russian gay activists, whose job it is to actually change opinions on the ground.

And as with gay rights, so with human rights in general. Russia gets held to higher standards not only than countries such as Bahrain and China, but the United States. On the basis of Western media coverage one would think that Russia's human rights situation was worse than that of the States, and at least as bad as that of China - both of which notions are preposterous.

Let us compare Russia to the United States (China being of course much worse than both). The US has around 730 to Russia's 598 prisoners per 100,000 of the population. It uses the death penalty, executes minors, and empowers its President to authorise the kidnap, torture, and killing of domestic and foreign citizens without trial. Russia does none of these things. The US government has significantly curtailed Americans' civil liberties under the Patriot Act, extensively spies on the media activities of its own and other countries' citizens, and detains hundreds of people without trial in an international network of secret prisons. Russians' civil liberates are now more strongly guaranteed by law than are Americans'; there is no evidence or suggestion that Russia kidnaps individuals abroad or outsources torture, nor that it runs a torture camp resembling Guantanamo Bay, nor that the FSB spies on Russian citizens to anything near the extent that the NSA spies on Americans, let alone on foreigners. In this respect - the extent of spying on their own citizens - Russia and the US have changed places since the end of the Soviet Union. Whereas the trend of US law over the last decade and a half has been to diminish civil liberties, in Russia the legal culture is becoming gradually more humane and liberal. Russia puts suspected Islamic terrorists whom it has captured on trial within a reasonable period, and does not deny them habeas corpus. America's popular culture (including films such as Zero Dark Thirty) acknowledges that America has practised torture, and suggests that it may have been justified in doing so. Russia's popular culture does not endorse the practice of torture. The contrast between Western treatments of Russia and of the US with regard to human rights was apparent when in 2012 Amnesty International ran a Priority Action campaign on behalf of Pussy Riot, whose members it had designated prisoners of conscience, whilst not running such a campaign on behalf of Bradley - now Chelsea - Manning, whom it had not (and has not) designated a prisoner of conscience. The members of Pussy Riot had been sentenced, as I mentioned, to two years in prison, according to the law, for a crime which they had committed. At the time, Bradley Manning was being subjected to cruel, inhuman, and degrading punishment, prior to being tried for any crime. This gave an unfortunate appearance of political partiality to Amnesty's decisions, implying that they considered the relatively humane and legal treatment of critics of Putin to be a more urgent and flagrant violation of human rights than the torture before trial of a whistleblower on American torture.

On the issue of double standards let us consider too the advice which America gives to Russia. During the protests on Maidan Square in Kiev you may remember John Kerry urging Yanukovich to demonstrate 'restraint' with regard to the protesters. He showed so much restraint that he left the city rather than ordering his police to defend his Presidency by force, as they would have been capable of doing. Can you imagine any American President being induced to flee by violent street protests in Washington? In Washington the Maidan protests wouldn't have lasted a couple of days. If you draw a lethal weapon in the presence of a police officer you may legally be shot dead. In Kiev, around 20 policemen were killed. One can imagine the scornful and outraged response were Putin, for example, to urge that Obama show restraint in the face of violent protests, to the extent of allowing himself to be overthrown.

It goes without saying that the dictators with whom Russia has relatively good relations, in Syria, North Korea, and Cuba, are excoriated in a way in which not only does the West not excoriate the dictators in Saudia Arabia, Bahrain, Quatar, Uzbekistan, Honduras, Thailand, and Egypt - but a way in which Russia doesn't excoriate them either. Overall not only does the West not practice what it preaches to Russia, it preaches where Russia does not - and although I have no general objection to preaching - I'm a Lawrencian for goodness sake - I do object to the preaching of hypocrites.

One thing that assists in our inconsistent application of standards is our use of language. Protesters on Maidan were protesters; in Slaviansk, Kramatorsk, Mariupol they were rebels. Putin's government is frequently referred to as a regime, and therefore likened to a dictatorship, whereas not only does Russia, like the US, have an imperfect democracy, but Putin personally has a twenty percent higher approval rating than does Obama, and at least twenty-five percent higher than Cameron. But there is one word in particular which is misused in a Russian context - 'liberal'. Now, this is a notoriously protean word, but there does seem to be agreement over its denotation in a Russian context, where it generally assumed to mean 'promoting Western values with regard to individual liberty, equality, democracy and the rule of law'. However, when one considers the policies of those politicians and commentators described as liberal, one finds that what is in fact denoted is 'promoting foreign and economic policies which are aligned with Western interests, whatever other (possibly illiberal) views are held'. For example, Aleksei Navalny, who was frequently described as a liberal opposition leader, holds views which most Western liberals would categorise as racist. Since most Russians do not want Russia to conform to NATO geopolitical or economic interests at its own expense, and since Western capitalism is damaged by association with the nineteen-nineties (a period which has never sufficiently been accepted in the West as having been a catastrophe), so-called 'liberals' account for a relatively small proportion of the popular vote. Yet Russophobic narrative conflates 'liberal' with 'democratic'. The fact that Putin's policies have vastly more appeal than so-called liberal ones does not make Putin an anti-democrat, and those who oppose the democratically elected Putin are not 'pro-democratic' by that virtue.

Russophobia, like Said's account of Orientalism, therefore relies on and generates contradictions. On the one hand it constructs an enemy which is aggressive and to be feared, threatening its neighbours such as the Ukraine and Georgia. On the other hand it creates a risible enemy of which the economy is flimsily dependent on oil - a point far less often made about far more strongly oil-reliant allies such as Saudi Arabia.

Both Russia's aggression and its weakness are overstated - that is, the desire (for reasons I'll come on to) to construct an enemy produces an image (and to a small extent, a reality) which is then actually feared, the power of which needs to be understated. Since 1989, when it withdrew from Afghanistan, it has sent its troops only into Georgia, and that in support of the inhabitants of a semi-autonomous enclave which Georgian troops had entered in violation of international treaties. In fact it threatens noone.

But the understatement of its power is just as striking.

Speaking to businessmen working in Russia - Russian and foreign alike - it became clear to me that Russia is hugely and diversely economically productive, avoiding many of the pitfalls of indebtedness and a phony banking system which afflict our own economy. L'Oréal, Danône, Peugeot, and Renault are all making huge profits in Russia. Far from being entirely reliant on the export of oil, Russia makes a range of manufactured goods including steel, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, clothing, ship building, machine tools, aircraft, food processing, furniture, computers, tractors, optical devices, commercial vehicles, and mobile phones. It has a big construction industry, and in fields such as nuclear power engineering and space technology it is one of the world's leaders. These are perhaps little thought of in the West perhaps because they tend to be heavy goods, not consumer goods, and are therefore not found in Western shops. Income tax is flat at 13%, in a way which at present encourages economic growth (though is, I assume, a temporary measure, before a more socialist graduated income tax one day replaces it). There is around 10% interest on current accounts. The sanctions have hurt, but have also led to more inward investiment. And the narrative of Russian weakness is also assisted by ignoring its relations with the rest of the world beyond the West. There are strengthening Russian-Chinese ties, and warm relations between Russia and most countries of Asia, Africa, and South America - including both China and Japan, both India and Pakistan, both Israel and Palestine.

When I attended a meeting of businessmen discussing responses to the sanctions in Moscow in April it was telling that the Ambassadors who decided to come - at least, those that I met - were from South Africa, Mexico, Peru, Benin, Indonesia and Malaysia. Not one from the 'West', and that is really a metaphor for the fact that the West does not witness, and does not want to see, the good relations which Russia has with the rest of the world.

But there are many factors which favour the construction and persistence of Russophobia.

One of the first and most obvious is limited contact with the country itself. From the sixteenth century, when West Europeans started travelling to Russia in any numbers, it's been rightly observed that Russia is difficult to get to, travel in, and onerous in its passport requirements. Tit-for-tat visa policy means that it is not easy to pop to St Petersburg for a quick city break - indeed, there are very few direct flights between London, the world's air-transport hub, and the second biggest city of the world's biggest country - which, thinking of some of the other places you can get more frequent direct flights to from London, is extraordinary. Limited contact with Russia, and limited learning of its language, mean limited ability to test the validity of the media's image of Russia. That image is itself partly the construction of journalists who themselves know very little about the country, and who echo each other. But it also the construction of local foreign correspondents such as The Guardian's Luke Harding and The Economist's Ed Lucas, who in my opinion fall into that category of people who can live in a country whilst loathing and misrepresenting it, just as people can live in a country, love it, and misrepresent it in a positive direction.

One feature favouring the re-echoing of opinions between journalists resident and otherwise is the obverse of a phenomenon I have discovered amongst people who disagree with them. In Moscow friends of mine who approve of Putin include  Russians, Americans, a Finn, and a Frenchman. They work in Russia as journalists, businessmen and lawyers. Their political views range from Conservative to nearly-Communist to green. But they have all, along their different paths and from their own perspectives, come to admire Putin, whose politics can't easily be described in terms of traditional left-right analysis. The obverse of this is that he can be criticised from all perspectives, so what we have is a rare unity in British Russophobia between left wing and right wing media outlets, and indeed broadsheet and tabloid newspapers.

Another feature favouring Russophobia is that its image of Russia chimes with much older images that Russia has had in the West - chiefly, as autocratic. The main period of contact between West Europe and Russia has been characterised by increasing disparity between levels of democracy in the West and the East; this remained true until relatively recently. Assertions that Putin is autocratic fit into a primordialist narrative about Russia as unfitted to democracy: there are just two problems. One, primordialism is now largely as discredited in political science as is racism, and for similar reasons (pace the success of Martin Sixsmith's 2011 Russia: A Thousand Years of the Wild East). Second, Putin isn't autocratic. The narrative of reversion to autocracy after the relatively democratic Yeltsin years is particularly absurd given that in 1993 Yeltsin closed down news outlets and sent tanks to the White House to disperse the Russian Parliament, which was opposing his deeply unpopular economic policies. Over the following few days it's estimated that between 187 and 2000 people were killed. Putin has never done anything remotely similar, and it is of course possible to misinterpret someone whose policies are widely supported - inside of and beyond parliament - as a dictator who brooks no opposition.

It has to be said, though, that Russia itself has been a major home of primordialist thought, mainly about itself. What is the idea of the russkaia dusha, or Russian soul, but an argument that Russia is a) distinctive and b) unchanging, in its essence? The discourse of the Russian soul is complicated (please find my article about it here), but part of it fits with the idea that the Russian people are subservient and long-suffering. And this idea gets a lot of reinforcement from Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. However, it was not the only primordialist account in town. Eurasianism competed with Slavophilism, and both with Westernism - Westernisers arguing, of course, that Russia could and should catch up with the West. Nonetheless, Russia of all countries has, in its literature and philosophy, given considerable encouragement to primordialist thought about itself.

I mentioned the homology of primordialism to racism - and I would argue that there is a racial dimension to Russophobia or what I might alternatively have called Russism. Here again it operates through contradiction. On the one hand Russians are othered as favouring autocracy and subservience. On the other hand they are expected to behave just like Western Europeans despite their vastly different historical circumstances, and I am sure that one reason for this is that European Russians look almost exactly like West Europeans, which the Chinese or the Turks, for example, don't. In proportion as there is little difference of melanin pigmentation, eye colour, and facial structure, little difference of political behaviour is tolerated - and where it occurs, is then by reaction essentialised.

Putin himself has been very successfully demonised. His KGB past is frequently invoked in a way which overlooks the fact that the KGB was a standard career option for ambitious young Soviets when he was choosing his career. I might mention the fact that he cites Maxim Isayev as an influence on his desire to join the KGB. Isayev is the hero of the 1972 cult Soviet miniseries Seventeen Moments of Spring - the Soviet answer to James Bond. Isayev is a Russian agent pretending to be an Obergruppenführer in Berlin at the end of the Second World War. He is brave, cultured, intelligent, merciful, and of complete integrity - a Soviet hero, protecting Russia from Germany and Germany from itself, of a kind that young men such as Putin aspired to become. Of course as we know, spying is not as it is in the films. But in our post-Snowden-revelations era, it is most odd to continue to deplore someone for having spied on the citizens of another country, and to repeatedly use this as a lens of negative interpretation of all of their subsequent actions.

In his self-presentation as a macho man Putin does himself no favours in the West. But I think that Russians need pay no more attention to our generalised scorn for this image than the British need pay to Americans, whose generalised impression it is that all British men are gay. The reason is that normal male behaviour here is in various ways softer, and less literally and metaphorically muscular, than is the norm in North America. In Russia Putin's performance of masculinity is far more acceptable than it is here - and all the more so in contrast to the series of gerontocrats who ruled the Soviet Union after Stalin, and the embarrassingly hard-drinking Yeltsin. It should also be noted that it is not only for his macho personal qualities that he is admired; he is also admired as clean-living, in contrast to Yeltsin and many of the country's men during Yeltsin's period in power, and as highly educated - speaking Russian without grammatical errors, again in contrast to Yeltsin.

But his self-projection is emphatically directed at the Russian people, rather than the rest of the world, and this fits with the fact that Putin does not try to woo the West - he plays them (to adopt an English metaphor) with an entirely straight bat. Something of a Communist contempt for advertising is apparent in his lack of interest in spin for either himself or his country, when it comes to the West. This was one reason why Georgia got the best of the coverage of the Georgia-Russia conflict, in a way which even Martin Sixsmith admits was biased on the part of the BBC. Columbia-educated Saakashvili was willing and able to do PR in a way in which Medvedev wasn't. A different contrast to Russia here is provided by China, which responds very sharply, and indeed aggressively, to public criticism, and which if anything is a beneficiary of the opprobrium heaped on Russia, since it takes attention away from itself, the far more credible threat to Western interests. Russia, on the other hand, does next to nothing to tackle Russophobia head-on. Nobody sent me here tonight.

I will add one more reason for the traction of Russophobia. Distrust of the media goes back a long way in Russia, to the early nineteenth century - and with very good reason. The default attitude of Russians, still today, is scepticism and cynicism. They may vote for Putin because they like him or his policies, but this does not make them trustful of what they read, and there is still a lot of insecurity about the state of the country, about which they openly complain. Despite the voter disaffection in this country, I think that there is a far higher level of trust of what is said by The Guardian, The Economist, The Sun, the BBC, amongst the British than there is of equivalent channels in Russia. That is, one difference between us and the Russians is that we are less sceptical of what we are told.

Cuyu bono? What are the most obvious motivations for fostering Russophobia?

In brief (and the substantive reasons really are brief): Russia's foreign policy does not follow that of the West. Western armaments manufacturers have an interest in stoking a new Cold War, because the War against Terror has not filled the gap in arms sales - especially of nuclear weapons - left by the end of the Cold War. And NATO desperately needs a raison d'être.

But the interests of arms companies and NATO are not those of the West as a whole. Russophobia acts in massively counter-productive ways. It restricts its potentially enormous economic cooperation and cultural and touristic interchange with Russia - one reason why businesspeople have been opposed to the sanctions - and it pushes Russia decisively towards economic, political, and military cooperation with China and indeed the rest of the world. The sanctions have had the effect of making Russia look at developing its own version of VISA. It has welcomed the repatriation of Russian wealth held abroad. And in the Ukraine, Western support for a coup against an elected president has had the country on the brink of civil war, and has increased the size of the territory of Russia. As a friend of mine has repeatedly commented to me, 'wars start when politicians lie to journalists then believe what the read in the press.' Putin's popularity is at a high of 83% in the wake of the events in the Ukraine, and feeling against the US and EU on the part of ordinary Russians is beginning to increase. This makes life harder for Russians whose political agenda has support in the West. A good example is gay rights activists, who have found their aims much harder to achieve since a pro-gay attitude has effectually been aligned with an anti-Russian one. Russian gay activists are now arguably a more highly distrusted and isolated group than before they received Western backing.

Also, as is apparent to all Russians who are familiar with Russophobia, Russia is being criticised for the wrong things - and this is its most tragic irony. The country is far from perfect. Social security is miserably low; there is bullying in the army and prisons, and problems with racism, drugs, and domestic violence; health and education are under-funded; income tax is flat. But these are not the things for which Russia gets criticised, either by Westerners or their own so-called liberal parties, which are obsessively concerned with Putin himself.

The people who are suffering in Russia are not liberal opposition leaders with their abundant coverage in the Western press, but the poor.

And who apart from the Communists, and to some extent Putin, is talking about them?

Russophobia is composed of ignorance, a failure of scepticism and reasoning, pride, hypocrisy, condescension and churlishness, turned to the service of the military-industrial complex and NATO. It supports a one-sided Cold War against a country which is only just getting on its feet after collapse, is primarily focused on improving the living conditions of its people, wants war nowhere, and has no desire to be our enemy unless forced to defend itself. I wish it well.

 [return to Contents]

 #7
Huffington Post
June 13, 2015
Former Ambassador Michael McFaul: A Lot Of Prominent Russians Don't Like The Mess They're In

Every week The WorldPost asks an expert to shed light on a topic driving world headlines. This time, we speak with Michael McFaul, professor of Political Science at Stanford University and former U.S. Ambassador to Russia.

President Barack Obama announced on Monday that leaders of the G7 countries have agreed to maintain sanctions against Russia over Moscow's role in the ongoing conflict in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

There's been much debate over the West's decision to impose sanctions. Critics have pointed out that Russia is still refusing to honor the Minsk II cease-fire, despite the heavy economic burden of the sanctions.

The WorldPost spoke with former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul about the G7 sanctions policy. McFaul is currently a professor of political science at Stanford University.

Q: G7 leaders announced this week that they would be keeping sanctions against Russia in place. What's the general scope of these sanctions and whom are they targeting?

The scope of the sanctions are both individuals and Russian companies that are in some way implicated. There are two different rounds of them, first for Crimea and then for what's happening in eastern Ukraine. If you look at the list, you'll see these are senior Russian government officials and some of the biggest companies in Russia.

Q: How have these sanctions affected the Russian economy?

It's a really hard question. What I see sometimes in the debate is that sanctions aren't working or sanctions are working, but tracing causality on a dependent variable when there's multiple independent variables is difficult.

So, what percentage of the decline in the Russian economy is due to sanctions versus falling oil prices versus other factors is a very difficult question. I think what's most interesting is just listening to what Russian government officials are saying. They all say, including Putin, that sanctions have impacted what's going on there. The fact that Putin is repeatedly looking for sanctions relief, such as on Wednesday when he met with the pope, must mean that they're having some effect.

If they were as ineffective as some people say, why would he keep calling for them to be lifted? That to me is pretty strong evidence that there is an impact, and there's no doubt in my mind that the Kremlin has a strategy focused on a small set of countries in Europe to try to get the sanctions lifted. If they don't have any effect then why are they courting the Hungarians and the Greeks and maybe even the Italians to look for sanctions relief?

Sometimes in international relations you have to take measures to demonstrate disapproval. I believe strongly that had there been no response at all to Russia's annexation of Crimea and now Putin's support of a proxy war in Ukraine, that it would encourage bad behavior both by Putin and other international actors.

Q: Have these sanctions changed Russia's calculus in eastern Ukraine?

Well the cause and effect between sanctions and a change in foreign policy needs to be measured in years and decades rather than weeks and months, because it's an indirect effect. But sanctions, for instance, have stopped the activities that [Russian state oil producer] Rosneft and Exxon Mobil were planning for the Arctic -- a project that I heard Putin personally say was one of the most important U.S.-Russian projects in the last several years. They just announced they're not doing that. There's no doubt in my mind that's an effect of sanctions. The private capital to support Russian companies has all dried up and that's a direct effect of sanctions, but to trace those effects onto Putin, that's a harder thing to do. I would say so far, no he hasn't withdrawn from eastern Ukraine, but he also hasn't marched to Kiev.

You also have to remember that Novorossiya, which was an idea people were kicking around very seriously a couple months ago, has disappeared from Putin's lexicon. Maybe that's because he's decided that going forward would be too costly.

But finally, imagine if you called up [Cold War-era American diplomat] George Kennan a year after they adopted containment and said, 'Well hey George, it doesn't seem like your plan is working.' What would that analysis lead to? That policy took decades to show results, several decades. Yet now we all look at containment as this strategic wisdom, one of the smartest foreign policies of the 20th century.

That was a strategy set on patience, staying the course and not rethinking our strategy a couple years into it.

Q: Will this then be the status quo of sanctions being continually implemented and there being a degree of instability in the region for the foreseeable future?

My hope is that Putin rethinks what's going on out in eastern Ukraine and adopts the Minsk accords, which in my view are very favorable to Russia and Russia's proxies, and that could be a new status quo.

My worry and my prediction is that the current situation actually benefits Putin's short-term interests of destabilizing the Ukrainian government and undermining the Ukrainian economy. He wants to see them fail, so having this open, low-level intensity conflict but not a resolution of it adds pressure on the regime. He doesn't have a lot of short term reasons to change his course, but over the long term and medium term I think that will change.

Let me be blunt, there's a lot of people I know in Russia -- prominent business people, even some people in the government -- that don't like this mess that they're in. There was a different way, a different worldview to make Russia strong and great that was about integrating with the West, developing markets and increasing foreign investments.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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 #8
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
June 14, 2015
US Government Documents Prove It Conclusively - Putin Was NOT 'Chosen' by the Oligarchs
Declassified US government documents finally bury myth of Berezovsky hand-picking Putin and show Putin was always his own man
By Alexander Mercouris
Alexander Mercouris is a writer on international affairs with a special interest in Russia and law.  He has written extensively on the legal aspects of NSA spying and events in Ukraine in terms of human rights, constitutionality and international law.  He worked for 12 years in the Royal Courts of Justice in London as a lawyer, specializing in human rights and constitutional law. His family has been prominent in Greek politics for several generations.  He is a frequent commentator on television and speaker at conferences.  He resides in London.

A recent article by Masha Gessen for the New York Times has revived the story of Putin having been hand-picked for the Russian Presidency by the former oligarch Boris Berezovsky.

In this article Gessen quotes Berezovsky telling her in 2008 that he proposed to Putin a fake two-party system to control Russia (see also Boris Berezovsky's Evil Plan to Mimic the U.S. Political System, Russia Insider, 12th June 2015).

Gessen, who is a staunch opponent of Putin's, implies that this is the political system Putin has created in Russia, presumably under the influence of his former mentor, Berezovsky.

It needs to be said clearly and unambiguously that the story of Putin being hand-picked by Berezovsky is untrue and is a fantasy invented by Berezovsky himself. In the light of new evidence that has recently come to light it is incredible that it is still being peddled.

Before discussing how Putin actually came to power and what role (if any) Berezovsky had in it, it is necessary to say something about Berezovsky himself.

This is what a British High Court Judge said about Berezovsky in a court case that was decided in London in 2012:

"I found Mr. Berezovsky an unimpressive, and inherently unreliable, witness, who regarded truth as a transitory, flexible concept, which could be moulded to suit his current purposes.  At times the evidence which he gave was deliberately dishonest; sometimes he was clearly making his evidence up as he went along in response to the perceived difficulty in answering the questions in a manner consistent with his case; at other times, I gained the impression that he was not necessarily being deliberately dishonest, but had deluded himself into believing his own version of events. On occasions he tried to avoid answering questions by making long and irrelevant speeches, or by professing to have forgotten facts which he had been happy to record in his pleadings or witness statements. He embroidered or supplemented statements in his witness statements, or directly contradicted them.  He departed from his own previous oral evidence, sometimes within minutes of having given it. When the evidence presented problems, Mr. Berezovsky simply changed his case so as to distance himself from statements and in witness statements which he had signed or approved, blaming the 'interpretation' of his lawyers, as if this somehow diminished his pleadings and witness statements. His 'I blame my lawyers' excuse was not convincing."

Given how comprehensively the Judge trashed Berezovsky's reputation, it is incredible that his numerous fantasies about Putin and Russia continue to have such currency. The almost certainly invented story of his conversation with Putin about setting up a fake two-party system is a case in point.

In an article I wrote shortly after the court case was decided I pointed out that almost nothing Berezovsky said about anything could be assumed to be true, and that many of the things he said were demonstrably his own inventions.

I particularly took issue with the claim that Berezovsky hand-picked Putin for the Presidency. I pointed out that not only is there no evidence for that beyond Berezovsky's own uncorroborated word - which the Judge said was worthless - but that it made no sense since at the very time Berezovsky was supposedly lobbying for Putin to be made President he was simultaneously accusing the FSB - headed by Putin - of trying to kill him. The idea that Berezovsky would want the man who headed the organization he said was trying to kill him to become President of Russia is just too bizarre, even for the convoluted world of Kremlin politics in the late Yeltsin era.

Since the Judge said those words and since I wrote that article the whole question of Berezovsky's role in Putin's rise to power has been finally and conclusively settled by the publication of recently declassified U.S. government documents from the Clinton era. They show conclusively that Putin was not Berezovsky's man and that Berezovsky did not hand-pick him for the Presidency.

The contents of these documents have been brilliantly summarised by Graham Stack for Business New Europe in an article that has failed to attract the attention it deserves.

The documents show that Berezovsky's choice to lead Russia was not Putin, whom he hardly knew, but the then foreign minister Igor Ivanov (whom Graham Stack mistakenly calls "Ivan Ivanov").  

The connection between Igor Ivanov and Berezovsky was previously unknown. It probably explains Igor Ivanov's subsequent - and previously explained - disappearance from Russian political life following his dismissal from the post of foreign minister in March 2004 - shortly after the power of the oligarchs was finally broken with Khodorkovsky's arrest in October 2003 and Kasyanov's dismissal in February 2004.

As to Putin's relations with Berezovsky and the other oligarchs in 1999 when he rose to power, these are the key paragraphs that describe them in Graham Stack's article:

"Contrary to reports that Berezovsky had selected Putin as presidential candidate, Putin and Berezovsky seem to have had little contact with each other before Putin became president, which may have been another reason for Berezovsky's misjudging him. Berezovsky himself told U.S. diplomats that he backed new foreign minister Ivan Ivanov to succeed Primakov as prime minister in 1999, although Putin eventually got the nod, after an interlude of six weeks.

"Oligarch banker Pyotr Aven confirmed to U.S. diplomats that there was no special tie between Putin and Berezovsky, even 'noting that he himself had introduced the two', U.S. diplomats wrote. 'Putin knows no-one,' Aven told the diplomats, while at the same time acknowledging that the oligarchs have 'no instrument of influence over him'."
In other words so far from being Berezovsky's protege Putin was his own man and he and Berezovsky had previously had "little contact with each other". According to the oligarch banker Pyotr Aven (still a prominent if much diminished figure in Russian life) "Putin knows no-one" and the oligarchs had "no instrument of influence over him".

Graham Stack's article is worth reading in its entirety because of the astonishing picture it gives of politics in Russia in the 1990s, with a group of seven oligarchs including Berezovsky having effectively usurped power while assuring the U.S. of their intention to subordinate Russia to U.S. interests - to the point of even welcoming the eastward expansion of NATO.

So far from Putin being a creature of Berezovsky and the oligarchs, it was almost certainly because he was known to be his own man and someone the oligarchs "had no instrument of influence over" that Putin was selected for the Presidency, almost certainly at the insistence of the more patriotically minded members of the political and security establishment, who were outraged at the oligarchs' betrayal of Russia at a time when Yugoslavia was being bombed.

Graham Stack's article, unlike the overwhelming majority of articles written about Putin and how he came to power, is not based on surmise and speculation - mostly ill-informed - but on actual documents of the time setting out information that was being provided to the U.S. government by the U.S. embassy, which was in turn being kept well-informed of events by the oligarchs. Graham Stack's article is therefore an authoritative and definitive account of these events in a way that the vast majority of books and articles written on the subject are not.

There is therefore no longer any excuse for perpetuating Berezovsky's self-serving fantasy that he was responsible for Putin's rise to power.  

Nor is there any excuse for saying Putin is a creature of the oligarchs and that he governs Russia on their behalf.  

Anyone now who persists in peddling these myths is either ill-informed or is being deliberately misleading about them.

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 #9
'Almost No One in Russia Wanted Real Democracy with Division of Powers,' Gudkov Says
Paul Goble

Staunton, June 14 - Vladimir Putin and his regime are a logical reflection of the fact that "almost no one [in Russia] wanted a real democracy with division of power and a vital civil society," according to Levada Center head Lev Gudkov.  Consequently, it is possible to say that "Russians have received what the majority of them wanted."

In an interview with Radio Liberty, he says that today, an authoritarian regime "with recidivist aspects of totalitarianism has been established in Russia," with the regime having "practically a complete monopoly on the media" and with "information channels having been converted into instruments of propaganda" (svoboda.org/content/article/27062161.html).  

Moreover, he continues, "all the authority of the political police has been restored and in fact any normal political activity has been liquidated. No space in fact remains for political competition and free discussion."

And Gudkov points out, "even a new ideology has appeared, one that didn't exist and almost Nazi in its character: this is the idea of the divided nation that must be assembled under the roof of 'the Russian world,'" one that trumps talk about division of powers, responsible government, and elite circulation with "a mythology of the organic unity of power and people."

Russia has developed in this way, the sociologist suggests, because "in 1990, no one seriously raised the question about the transformation of Soviet society into something democratic."  There was a lot of talk, but most of it was about ending the CPSU's monopoly of power. Fearful of witch hunts, "no one raised the question of lustration."

As a result, "power was very quickly handed over from the union nomenklatura to a new grouping, only anti-communist in appearance but one that kept in its hands all the instruments of administration," Gudkov continues. And that had an impact on everything else, including the entire "construction of power."

The political parties which arose were "not parties which grew 'from below,' out of society itself and thus represented the interests of various social groups." Instead, "these were simply various fractions of the nomenklatura which were competing and struggling among themselves for power."

The only people who took the idea of reform seriously were the economists, Gudkov says. And that promoted the redistribution of property with "its privatization into the interests of the former second echelon."  But "nothing was done" in the political sphere to promote the growth and institutionalization of democracy.

With the collapse in Boris Yeltsin's level of support by the mid-1990s, the pollster continues, "expectations for an authoritarian leader grew" alongside intensifying "conservative or reactionary trends."  Yeltsin might have chosen to try to recover his popular support, but instead, he decided to rely on the force structures "and above all the political police."

Consequently, according to Gudkov, Putin's elevation was entirely logical, but in fact it would not have mattered that much "who became successor." Others would likely have moved in much the same direction. And whenever popular support declines, such a Russian leader will rely on the police rather than trying to mobilize people by democratic means.

This could not have happened without a certain amount of popular approval or at least willingness to go along.  The calculations of the president and the attitudes of the population were mutually "reinforcing" and there is no way to decide which is the chicken and which is the egg.  "No propaganda could have been effective if it had not relied on definite structures of mass consciousness.

The roots of this mass consciousness, Gudkov argues, lie in the sense of loss Russians experienced after 1991,and then the transformation of these feelings of loss in a "masochistic" direction, one in which Russians and their leaders acknowledged that they were not like others but bad while at the same time insisting that others respect them.

"The result of this became the growth of dark lowlife nationalism and xenophobia and assertiveness in opposing oneself to the rest," he says. Putin has exploited these feelings "very effectively" while turning increasingly to repression and the restoration of "institutions which existed in Soviet times, the centralization of administration and the rest."

From this perspective, Gudkov suggests that the reason Russia did not become democratic is "because in general no one wanted this. No one raised the question seriously about the creation of parallel institutions, programs of political action and so on." Some people talked about these things but no groups have emerged which effectively act on them.

And as a result, "whatever the nature of the regime and whatever propaganda or demagogy it engages in, its main force consists of the fact that resistance to it is very weak. There is no alternative - that is the main problem. Or there is no faith in the possibility of an alternative," Gudkov concludes.

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 #10
Moskovskiy Komsomolets
June 5, 2015
Daily looks at Russia's recent tactical mistakes over Ukraine
Mikhail Rostovskiy, The Donbass triangle conundrum. As spring turned into summer Russia made a whole number of tactical mistakes

There is a new Russian-Ukrainian maxim: As soon as yet another EU summit that might in theory adopt a decision on easing the sanctions against Moscow starts to appear on the horizon, things immediately start getting worse in the Donetsk Basin [Donbass].

This "natural arithmetic" has been fully validated during the first month of the summer too. As is known, the long-awaited European Union summit is scheduled for the end of June. And at the very beginning of June serious fighting started up in the Donbass crisis zone again.

Maybe it is a coincidence after all? I am afraid that it would be more correct to talk about a coincidence within quote marks - a prearranged coincidence. President Petro Poroshenko is a politician who produces heartfelt speeches, unbreakable vows, and solemn promises all over the place with such largesse that their "political value" is negligible. But sometimes the Ukrainian president - evidently by mistake - says what he is actually thinking. The last time that he had such a "moment of truth," as I see it, was at the very end of April. At that time, in an interview for the local STB channel, the Kyiv [Kiev] leader said that "the war will end when Ukraine recovers Crimea and Donbass" and hostilities may continue "for just about as long as you like."

Ukraine is never now going to recover Crimea, of course. But Petro Poroshenko is indeed not averse to continuing the "war games" with Donbass. A Russian reconciliation with the West would be detrimental to the Ukrainian president. He intends to constantly rub salt into the wounds, fan the flames of conflict between Moscow and its key international partners, and play on their differences of opinion. From Petro Poroshenko's viewpoint, the worse the situation in Donbass, the greater the chances of this rebel region being reintegrated into "Mother Ukraine."

Strange logic. Strange and destructive first and foremost for Ukraine itself. But Poroshenko, who regards himself as a great political strategist and a person who can dupe everybody and scam everybody, is not for turning. So we are not going to talk about him any more in this article. We will talk about an entire series of strange tactical mistakes that Russia has made in recent days and weeks - mistakes which, despite their petty and ridiculous nature, have objectively worsened our position.

The first and perhaps most secondary miscalculation was presidential spokesman Dmitriy Peskov's argument about language with FRG Chancellor Angela Merkel. "In her statement Mrs Merkel made one terminological mistake. She used the word 'annexation' rather than 'accession.' We regard this as an erroneous definition. It is specifically a question of Crimea's reunification with the Russian Federation - and on a voluntary basis" - I was highly surprised when I heard this response from Peskov to Merkel's generally pretty boring and vacuous interview in the Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail.

I was surprised because I well remember Angela Merkel's 10 May statement in Moscow at her meeting with Vladimir Putin: "In recent years we have sought greater cooperation in Europe.... Severe damage was done to this cooperation by the annexation of Crimea, which was carried out in violation of international law, and by the military actions in Ukraine." I believe that Dmitriy Peskov also remembers this statement by Merkel very well.

So why then he is insisting on the scenario of a "linguistic mistake" by the chancellor? Because it is clear to everybody that it is not a matter of "linguistic issues" but a matter of fundamental political differences which will indeed remain such for the foreseeable future. And we should not try to blur this fact and carry out a fatuous postmortem - such attempts look frankly ridiculous and do not increase Russian diplomacy's moral authority.

Nor was our diplomacy enhanced by the Russian Foreign Ministry's clumsy actions in the saga involving the publication of "black lists" of Europeans who have been prohibited from entering the Russian Federation. No, formally speaking our foreign policy department did not do anything bad. The Foreign Ministry had only done a "good turn" - it acceded to our partners' requests and declassified lists that had previously not been made public.

The problem is that "good turns" alone do not get you very far in diplomacy. In addition to them there has to be garden-variety diplomatic skill and an ability to work out a situation at least two moves ahead.

Official Moscow should either have made our "black lists" public immediately after the European "black lists" were made public or should have stuck to its previous line of not disclosing our "register of individuals to be denied entry." Instead of this the Foreign Ministry "swapped horses in midstream" and quite rightly paid a high price for it. Russia's "well-wishers" from Western countries skilfully exploited the situation and depicted it all as if Moscow had imposed absolutely new sanctions on Europeans ahead of the EU summit.

"This is reprehensible, colleagues!" was how official representatives of our foreign policy department responded to this. Pardon me, friends, but do I have to remind you that in diplomacy there are no such concepts as "reprehensible" and "laudable" whereas there are the concepts of "effective" and "ineffective," "it works" and " it does not work?"

But all of these are essentially minor details. But something that, as I see it, is not a minor detail is the insufficient activity demonstrated by Russian diplomacy - and Vladimir Putin personally - in the Western direction. "Putin's problem is that he takes it badly when people do not trust him and doubt his words and actions. When he is not accepted, he shuts himself off" - this comment! from former French Foreign Minister Michele Alliot-Marie was cited in a major political portrait of VVP [Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin] published by Society magazine recently.

As is known, Mrs Marie was not a great success as head of French diplomacy. The first woman to hold the post of head of the French Foreign Ministry managed to hold on to her position for only a few months and then resigned as a result of a scandal. But Michele Alliot-Marie apparently makes a splendid political psychologist. If we are talking about the Russian Federation's relations with the West, in my opinion, Putin did indeed shut himself off and withdrew into his shell when he encountered collective distrust from the US and EU leaders following the start of the Ukrainian crisis.

The Russian president is not rejecting contacts with Obama and European leaders. But at the same time VVP is not particularly initiating such contacts either. At a human level this is understandable and forgivable. But not in political terms. Maybe they do not trust us. Mayb! e they are not letting us in the door. We need to also climb in through the window and all other possible cracks.

Any chance of resolving the Ukrainian crisis will emerge only when the Russian Federation, the United States, and the EU start acting as a united front on at least a few key issues. And if it should not be said that such a united front is an unscientific fiction. A conflagration in the centre of Europe - and that is precisely how the present state of Ukraine can be described - is unequivocally not in the interests of the EU and only partially in the interests of the United States. Chances of reaching definite agreement within the EU-Russian Federation-US triangle do exist.

But it is necessary to fight to achieve such agreement. Russia needs to persistently and even aggressively involve the West in a dialogue on every possible platform, starting at the VVP level. Instead of this, dialogue between the Russian Federation and the West is cu! rrently clearly lacklustre and anaemic. Putin sometimes has a word with Merkel and Hollande. Sometimes - on a very big anniversary - he will receive John Kerry. And all of this against the backdrop of our above-mentioned high-profile and public arguments with the Europeans over some stupid details. That is not the way to go. We need to stop personally putting political trump cards in Poroshenko's hands.

Quote of the day

"I am being attacked from all sides. Pocket armies have been unleashed against me, and oligarchs have staged protests by pseudo-miners who are in fact thugs for hire. Every oligarch has his own pocket TV channel, and they are firing media 'missiles' at me. But am I planning to abandon the de-oligarchization process? No, I do not."
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.

On Thursday, Petro Poroshenko briefed parliament on the first year of his presidency. Admittedly it is a big stretch to describe his speech as a briefing. The head of state mainly talked about what he intends to ! do, modestly keeping quiet about his past performance. He mentioned only two positive accomplishments: the country had succeeded in avoiding a default, and Ukrainian troops had succeeded in winning back Maryinka the previous day.

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 #11
TASS
June 9, 2015
Russian experts warn UK, USA not to go too far in their anti-Russian rhetoric

British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond has said the UK could site American nuclear missiles amid heightened tensions with Russia, while the USA accused Russia of violating the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF). Russian military experts have described the statements as "a destructive path leading to the destruction of nuclear deterrence", according to a report by Russian state news agency TASS.

Maj-Gen Pavel Zolotarev, deputy director of the USA and Canada Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said Hammond's statement should be viewed as part of anti-Russian rhetoric whipped up by the West. "In order to really deploy nuclear missiles in Britain, Washington will have to leave the INF Treaty, something the White House is not interested in," he told TASS.

"Russia implemented the INF Treaty a long time ago. Therefore, when in 2010 Moscow and Washington signed a Treaty on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (START III), no provisions were made to the effect that there should be a commission for monitoring the observance of the INF Treaty. At the time it was a technical error. But when the Ukraine crisis broke out, the West, led by the USA, decided it was possible once again to engage in sabre-rattling as during the Cold War and to threaten to deploy land-based missiles in Europe and US nuclear missiles in Britain," the expert continued.

"In order to resolve mutual complaints the most important thing at this point would be for the commission for the implementation of the INF Treaty to resume its work. But the question remains - is the USA interested in this since Washington nowadays uses any excuse to whip up threats against Russia," the expert said.

"The current anti-Russian military rhetoric is dangerous because the West is increasingly moving from words to deeds. As part of the Strike-2015 military exercise in which NATO members states are taking part and which are taking place outside Russia's western borders, last Sunday [7 June] two US strategic Stealth B-2 bombers, New York and Missouri, that can carry both conventional and nuclear weapons, flew to Britain and landed on the British Fairford Air Base which is the only airfield in Europe where aircraft of this type can be based and serviced. US warships that were taking part in the NATO exercise in the Black Sea stayed in its waters longer than originally agreed. Rhetoric apart, Washington may be going too far," Zolotarev said.

"Hypothetically speaking, deploying US nuclear missiles in Britain would mean breaking the INF Treaty that would lead to the denunciation of the START III Treaty and to a total destabilization of the situation in the world. That would mean a collapse of all international obligations regarding the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons," the former commander-in-chief of the Russian Nuclear Missile Troops, Army Gen Vladimir Yakovlev, told TASS.

"I believe that behind Philip Hammond's statement is the desire to see Moscow's reaction. Russia has enough answers to challenges of this sort," the army general concluded.

As a loyal US ally, Great Britain is toeing Washington's line, in fact going back to the rhetoric and practices of the Cold War," Vladimir Dvorkin, chief researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of World Economy and International Relations and former head of the 4th Central Scientific Research Institute of the Russian Defence Ministry, told Russian military news agency Interfax-AVN.

"Britain and Washington's statements to the effect that they intend to deploy nuclear weapons in Europe are nothing more than rhetoric at the moment. It is a warning about a potential arms race which will be particularly difficult for Russia," Dvorkin told Interfax-AVN on the sidelines of the International Luxembourg Forum conference of the parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).

In Dvorkin's opinion, destroying the INF Treaty is in no-one's interests. "If this treaty is destroyed, first of all the threats will grow against Europe. Russia can deploy on its European part intermediate-range nuclear forces. Essentially this will be a repetition of the Cold War period when large groups of intermediate-range RSD-10 Pioneer missiles were deployed in the Soviet Union and American Pershing-2 and cruise missiles were deployed in Western Europe which posed a considerable threat to the Soviet command posts of the central command," Dvorkin said.

According to the expert, the USA is concerned about Russian cruise missiles that can exceed the established range of 500 km. On the Russian side there are suspicions that containers for launching American SM-3 interceptor missiles are similar to those used for launching intermediate-range cruise missiles.

"I think these problems can be resolved through negotiations. In the current situation it is possible to accelerate the resolution of all these disputes by diplomatic means," Dvorkin said.

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 #12
New York Times/Bloomberg
June 15, 2015
Confronting Russia Holds Peril for U.S.
By ALBERT R. HUNT
Albert R. Hunt is a Bloomberg View columnist. He was formerly the executive editor of Bloomberg News, directing coverage of the Washington bureau. Hunt hosts the weekly television show "Political Capital with Al Hunt." In his four decades at the Wall Street Journal, he was a reporter, bureau chief and executive Washington editor, and wrote the weekly column "Politics & People."

WASHINGTON - It could have been President Obama issuing a firm warning - measured, devoid of bellicose threats - to President Vladimir V. Putin that the West would keep the pressure on as long as Russia interfered with Ukraine's sovereignty.

Instead, it was Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor and a leading 2016 Republican presidential aspirant, speaking at a news conference in Berlin on Wednesday.

The political implication is minimal. It's not clear Russia will be a top issue in the presidential race, and Mr. Bush has bigger problems than sounding a bit like the president on one foreign policy matter. But the similarity of tone underscores how difficult and problematic United States-Russian relations are.

Mr. Obama, his Republican critics notwithstanding, has been pretty resolute since Mr. Putin took over Crimea and began assisting separatists in eastern Ukraine last year. In response to the aggression, the United States has initiated tough economic sanctions and isolated Russia.

The instinct among many in America, including more than a few politicians, is to see Mr. Putin as a thug and Russia as a pale copy of the old Soviet Union - "a gas station masquerading as a country," as Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, is fond of saying.

Russia's economy is weak, reliant on the slumping oil and gas market, and suffering from the sanctions. But the country remains a huge military threat with a lethal nuclear arsenal. It also exhibits a public nationalism that feeds on restoring the glories of yesteryear and is an important player on global issues such as Syria, Iran and terrorism.

Two recent articles in The National Interest, published by the Center for the National Interest, illuminate the risky challenges the United States faces in dealing with Mr. Putin. (This is the former Nixon Center, no hotbed of mushy peaceniks.)

Dimitri K. Simes, a Russia expert who runs the center, and Graham Allison, a Harvard professor and confidant of Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter, wrote that ratcheting up pressure could play into Mr. Putin's hands. For example, a number of Mr. Obama's critics are calling on him to supply lethal arms to Ukraine, but Mr. Simes and Mr. Allison warn that such action might provide Russia a "pretext" to respond "with arms or even troops, initiating a game of escalation."

In Moscow, they report from personal observations, the anti-West hawks are ascendant: "Putin is not the hardest of the hard-liners in Russia."

In the other article, Leslie H. Gelb, a former diplomat and leading member of the United States foreign policy establishment, notes that Russians felt humiliated by the West after the fall of Communism. They lost a quarter of Soviet territory, half the population and much wealth. Thus, he argues, it's "totally unrealistic to think the West can gain Russian restraint" unless Russia is dealt with as a great power.

The United States and Russia, he says, have to adopt a "Détente Plus strategy" of diplomacy, which he acknowledges that "formidable segments of the policy communities on both sides will not reconcile themselves to."

Dealing with a bully that behaves worse when it senses a lack of resolve or a lack of respect is a delicate task.

Yet Americans, focused on the atrocities of Islamist terrorists and the economic and political challenges posed by the superpower China, have little recognition of the potential peril from Russia.

This threat is the subject of "Imperial Gamble: Putin, Ukraine and the New Cold War," by Marvin Kalb, a former diplomat and Russia scholar, to be published this autumn. In a recent blog post, he wondered whether the United States was "stumbling towards conflict with Russia."

Reflecting the reasoned postures taken by Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama, Michael A. McFaul, the American ambassador to Russia until last year and a nemesis of the regime, warns that there are no quick fixes: "The United States-Russia conflict is not going to be resolved in weeks or months; this challenge will take years, even decades."

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#13
Bloomberg
June 12, 2015
Ukraine's Neo-Nazis Won't Get U.S. Money
By Leonid Bershidsky

It's easy to see why Representative John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, would have a problem with the military unit commanded by Ukrainian legislator Andriy Biletsky: Conyers is a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, Biletsky is a white supremacist.

The House of Representatives has unanimously approved an amendment to the U.S. military budget, proposed by Conyers and Florida Republican Ted Yoho, banning support and training for "the Ukrainian neo-Nazi paramilitary militia 'Azov Battalion.'" Azov was set up in May 2014 to fight pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. Here's how the group's Facebook page describes the circumstances:

"In the first weeks after the Putin invasion of Donbass began, the authorities and law enforcers were confused and demoralized. Nationalists had to take initiative. The Patriot of Ukraine organization and allied unofficial groups of right-wing youth rallied around Andriy Biletsky and challenged the separatists."

By now, though, the Azov Battalion has become a regiment of the Ukrainian National Guard and enjoys the enthusiastic support of Interior Minister Arsen Avakov.

Biletsky had run Patriot of Ukraine since 2005. In a 2010 interview he described the organization as nationalist "storm troops" with its biggest unit in Kharkov, Biletsky's native city in eastern Ukraine. The group's ideology was "social nationalism" -- a term Biletsky, a historian, knew would deceive no one.

The main targets for Biletsky and his organization's hostility were immigrants in Kharkiv and the capital Kiev, both of which are relatively cosmopolitan cities. In 2007, Biletsky railed against a government decision to introduce fines for racist remarks:

"So why the 'Negro-love' on a legislative level? They want to break everyone who has risen to defend themselves, their family, their right to be masters of their own land! They want to destroy the Nation's biological resistance to everything alien and do to us what happened to Old Europe, where the immigrant hordes are a nightmare for the French, Germans and Belgians, where cities are 'blackening' fast and crime and the drug trade are invading even the remotest corners."

Such expressions of hatred would be beyond the pale even for the European far right. Biletsky landed in prison in 2011, after his organization took part in a series of shootouts and fights. Following Ukraine's so-called revolution of dignity last year, he was freed as a political prisoner; right-wing organizations, with their paramilitary training, played an important part in the violent phase of the uprising against former President Viktor Yanukovych. The new authorities -- which included the ultra-nationalist party Svoboda -- wanted to show their gratitude.

The war in the east gave Biletsky's storm troopers a chance at a higher status than they could ever have hoped to achieve. They fought fiercely, and last fall, the 400-strong Azov Battalion became part of the National Guard, receiving permission to expand to 2,000 fighters and gaining access to heavy weaponry. So what if some of its members had Nazi symbols tattooed on their bodies and the unit's banner bore the Wolfsangel, used widely by the Nazis during World War II? In an interview with Ukraine's Focus magazine last September, Avakov, responsible for the National Guard, was protective of his heroes. He said of the Wolfsangel:

"In many European cities it is part of the city emblem. Yes, most of the guys who assembled in Azov have a particular worldview. But who told you you could judge them? Don't forget what the Azov Battalion did for the country. Remember the liberation of Mariupol, the fighting at Ilovaysk, the latest attacks near the Sea of Azov. May God allow anyone who criticizes them to do 10 percent of what they've done. And anyone who's  going to tell me that these guys preach Nazi views, wear the swastika and so on, are bare-faced liars and fools."

Two months later, Biletsky was a member of parliament. In that election, far-right parties failed to draw enough votes to make it into the national legislature, but individuals such as Biletsky did. He ran for office in a middle-class constituency of Kiev, on this program: "Strong nation! Honest authorities! A mighty country!" That was enough to win him more than 30,000 votes.

This year, when the U.S. sent military trainers to western Ukraine to help the National Guard, Avakov said Azov would be among the first units to take part in the Fearless Guardian exercise, but the U.S. insisted the unit be left out.

Now, Conyers and Yoho have almost succeeded in making Azov ineligible for any form of U.S. assistance. "These groups run counter to American values," Conyers told Congress. "And once the fighting ends, they pose a significant threat to the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian people. As we've seen many times, most notably within the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan, these groups will not lay down their arms once the conflict is over."

That is a reasonable assumption, given that Biletsky's organization was training to fight well before the war started. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko should take note of Conyers' view, as well as of Western calls for the repeal of a recent law that makes it obligatory to honor World War II-era Ukrainian nationalist groups. Biletsky's graduation thesis was about one of them, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a militia guilty of the ethnic cleansing of Poles in western Ukraine.

This kind of baggage is hardly useful to a country that aims to become part of the Western world. Someday, official Kiev will need to distance itself from its far-right "heroes" and perhaps even fight them.

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 #14
Bloomberg
June 14, 2015
U.S. Readying Plan to Put Tanks on Putin's Doorstep
by David Lerman and Marta Waldoch

The U.S. may announce agreements later this month to station tanks and fighting vehicles in eastern European and Baltic countries, a U.S. defense official said.

The Pentagon is trying to finalize plans to station equipment for as many as 5,000 soldiers in about a half-dozen countries as the U.S. attempts to reassure allies worried about Russia's intentions.

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter is expected to announce the plans in Brussels, where NATO defense ministers will meet on June 24 and 25, although details remain to be negotiated with some countries, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.

The positioning of U.S. heavy equipment in the easternmost countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would be a significant step aimed at countering Russian aggression, said Angela Stent, director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service in Washington.

"Deterrence, as we conventionally understand it, hasn't worked," Stent said. "It probably is time to do something to try to reinforce the credibility of deterrence against further violence."

Carter told reporters this month that U.S. and European sanctions aren't enough to force Russian President Vladimir Putin to back down in Ukraine, where Russian fighters are aiding separatists against the Kiev government.

Strategy Mapping

"There are other things we need to be doing in recognition of the fact that, at the moment at least, Vladimir Putin does not seem to be reversing course, nor does he give any sign in what he says of an intention to do so," the Pentagon chief said on June 5, while returning from a conference in Germany where he mapped strategy on the Ukraine crisis.

If approved, the plan would provide enough equipment for a full brigade, or 3,000 to 5,000 soldiers, the official said. A brigade-sized force would include more than 200 Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, Army leaders have said.

"I think it is a necessary move, forced upon the alliance because of new Russian aggression in Europe," Michael McFaul, who served as U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014 and is now a professor of political science at Stanford University, said in an e-mailed statement.

While the defense official declined to name the countries that would receive equipment, they could include Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and possibly Hungary, according to the New York Times, which reported on the plan on Saturday.

Unabating Crisis

"Over the last few years, the United States military has increased the prepositioning of equipment for training and exercises with our NATO allies and partners," Army Colonel Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement. "At this time, we have made no decision about if or when to move to this equipment."

Military officials have discussed prepositioning equipment closer to Russia's border for months as the crisis in Ukraine showed no signs of abating.

Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, commander of U.S. Army forces in Europe, told the Army Times in February that he had survey teams in the Baltic states, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria to determine where additional equipment should be stationed.

Long-Debated Moves

NATO has been debating the moves since at least the start of this year, two other U.S. officials, who also asked not to be named, said on Sunday. Baltic officials began discussing it publicly, they said, to ratchet up pressure on the U.S. and other NATO members and to ensure that Russian officials couldn't complain that it took them by surprise. Allied intelligence officials are confident that their Russian counterparts have been aware of the discussions from the start, one of the officials said.

Carter met at the Pentagon with Polish Defense Minister Tomasz Siemoniak in May and discussed how European Reassurance Initiative funds "may eventually be used to temporarily preposition training equipment in Europe," according to a Defense Department statement.

Poland expects a decision on deployment of U.S. heavy weaponry such as battle tanks "soon," Siemoniak said in a Twitter post Sunday.

"Talks on placing storehouses for the American army's equipment in Poland are ongoing," Siemoniak, who is also deputy prime minister, said. "This is the next step to increase the United States' presence in Poland and the region."

'Combat Forces'

Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine in the Clinton administration, said stationing equipment on the terrain of NATO's newer members, which include most of eastern Europe and the Baltics, would be useful.

"It puts down a marker that the United States is prepared to defend NATO territory," said Pifer, a career diplomat who is now an analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "It makes sense to deploy some American hard power in that part of NATO territory. If there is a crisis, you would only have to move people," not equipment, he said.

A 1997 agreement between NATO and Russia aimed at strengthening military and political cooperation included an "internal NATO understanding" against placing "substantial combat forces" close to Russia's borders, Pifer said.

While Russia is sure to object to U.S. tanks near its borders, such a move wouldn't violate the agreement because the numbers being considered fall below that threshold, he said.

'Insane Person'

NATO officials will watch to see how Putin responds, the two U.S. officials said. The worst outcome would be an abrupt redeployment of Russian tank, infantry and air forces close to NATO's eastern border based on a claim that the 1997 agreement had been violated, they said.

Another worrisome possibility would be stepped-up Russian cyberattacks similar to one against Estonia in 2007, one of the officials said. One possible target would be NATO's Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence in Estonia, the official said.

Putin denied any intention of trying to invade NATO countries in an interview this month with Italy's Il Corriere della Sera.

"Only an insane person and only in a dream can imagine that Russia would suddenly attack NATO," Putin was quoted as saying. "I think some countries are simply taking advantage of people's fears with regards to Russia."

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 #15
Sputnik
June 15, 2015
US Deploys Heavy Weaponry in Europe; Russia to 'Answer Adequately'

Russia will provide an 'adequate answer' to the deployment of the US heavy weaponry in Eastern Europe and the Baltics, a senior Defense Ministry official said on Monday, commenting on earlier claims that the Pentagon is poised to station battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and other heavy weaponry in several Eastern European countries.

"In case the US heavy weaponry, including battle tanks, artillery systems and other combat weaponry is going to be deployed in a number of Eastern European countries and the Baltics, it is going to be the most aggressive step of Pentagon and NATO since the end of the last century's Cold War," the Russian media quoted Yuri Yakubov, the Coordinator of the Department of the General Inspectors of the Russian Defense Ministry, as saying.

"And there will be nothing left for Russia but to build up its might and means at strategic western locations," added the senior Defense Ministry official.

Russia will commence by reinforcing its military along the perimeter of its Western border, including new tank, artillery and aviation units.

The Russian Ground Forces' guided missile brigade stationed in the westernmost Kaliningrad region will be promptly reequipped with the Iskander-M ballistic missile systems, Yakubov added, and Russia's combined forces in Belarus will also be considerably reequipped.

The announcement comes as a comment following US media speculation that "the Pentagon is poised to deploy battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and other heavy weapons for up to 5,000 US troops in Eastern Europe and the Baltic countries."

As the media put it, "a company's worth of equipment - enough for about 150 soldiers - would be stored in each of the three Baltic nations: Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Enough for a company or possibly a battalion - about 750 soldiers - would be located in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and possibly Hungary".

The senior Defense Ministry official however stressed that Russia has completely withdrawn from the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe and won't be bound by any lateral restrictions, as it was earlier, on the number of tanks, aircraft or artillery systems it was allowed to have in its near-border territories.

"We have completely withdrawn from this treaty which many European countries have not stuck to and we have a free hand in organizing responsive measures and strengthening our western borders," he said.

The Kremlin so far has not commented on the issue.

"There was no official announcement from the US, therefore I have nothing to say. We will comment when there is any," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday.

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 #16
US plans of deploying heavy weapons close to Russian borders will push Moscow for response
By Tamara Zamyatina

MOSCOW, June 15. /TASS/. The US plans of prepositioning additional heavy weapons in Eastern European countries will threaten regional security and will push Moscow for a response, experts told TASS.

On Saturday, The New York Times referring to the US authorities and NATO allies reported the Pentagon "is poised to store battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and other heavy weapons for as many as 5,000 American troops in several Baltic and Eastern European countries."

In early June, Vladimir Putin in an interview with Italy's Corriere della Sera in connection with the "threat of Russian aggression" said: "Only an unhealthy person, and in deep dreams, could imagine Russia may attack NATO." The president said "some may prefer becoming frontline states, thus hoping for additional support: either in the military or economic, financial aspects."

A Russian academic, former Secretary of the national Security Council Andrey Kokoshin said the US plans of building up its military presence in Europe mean another effort the US have been applying in relation to the "Ukrainian crisis." "Those actions are first of all of political-demonstrative origin, though they may as well cause certain military consequences," he told TASS.

"Concerning the political and military situations in Europe, it is necessary to mind the improvement of the Russian Armed Forces, their better equipment, better combat training. Russia should be watching closely what the US is doing in Europe in the political and military directions, as at a certain moment those activities may destabilise the situation there," he said.

Deputy head of the Institute for the US and Canadian Studies Major-General Pavel Zolotarev says putting of 1,200 units of the US heavy equipment is of no threat for Russia, especially since they will be spread over different countries. "However, the very tendency is worrisome. We can hear the Pentagon wants to deploy in Europe ground based missiles. The UK foreign minister announces the US may deploy nuclear missiles in his country. It is a clear aggravation of the situation," he said.

"The current spiral of the military tension reminds of the early 'cold war' in the middle of last century, where the former allies in World War II - Russia and the US - turned for confrontation. At that time, the Americans feared without the arms race they could face again the depression of 1929-39. Thus, ideological confrontation had an economic base, the base of state support for the military complex," the expert said.

"Nowadays, there seems to be no disputes between Russia and the US, but priorities seem to be changing in spheres of influence, in forming of polycentric world order. Stronger Russia has outlined its interests in various parts of the world. In response to that, Washington adds pressure on Moscow not only in the information, but, which is more dangerous, in the military sphere," he continued.

"Russia will have to react to placing next to its borders of the US additional heavy weapons, it will have to supply modern equipment to its armed forces, to have more military drills. As a result, the confrontation is bound to grow," he said.

"The first stage of the 'cold war' was over as the parties signed several agreements on disarmament and on non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. At the current stage of resumed "cold war" the US, Europe and Russia need to have new rules to prevent the situation from growing into an armed conflict," the major general said.

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 #17
Washington Times
June 14, 2015
Solving the crisis in U.S.-Russia relations
There is an urgent need for bilateral talks to replace mutual disrespect
By Edward Lozansky
Edward Lozansky is president of the American University in Moscow and professor of world politics at Moscow State University.

It is unrealistic at the moment to expect a speedy improvement of U.S.-Russia relations. This is regrettable, but it is a fact: The relations between the two countries today may be even worse than during Soviet times - a really disturbing development.

Russians and Americans alike are aware that their leaders are facing off on the political, economic and informational fronts, but they are also confronting each other in another area only followed by a narrow circle of experts. Tension there, though, bears directly on the most important security issues facing the whole planet.

The reference is, of course, to major arms control treaties. These took many years and tremendous efforts to negotiate, and yet they now dissolve one after another. Washington and Moscow keep accusing each other of violating and abrogating these treaties and plan new and often drastic retaliatory countermeasures.

Russia complains that 2002 saw a dramatic turn for the worse when the United States withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, becoming the first nation since World War II to exit a major arms control agreement. This move was followed by the development of the U.S. Missile Defense System in several countries in Eastern Europe right near the Russian borders.

Moscow also repeatedly airs grievances regarding NATO. Despite the dissolution of the Soviet-era military Warsaw Pact, NATO, far from following that example, has expanded its membership from 12 nations to 28 and does not want to stop there. The United States continues to maintain significant nuclear arsenals in some European countries even though NATO has an overwhelming superiority over Russia in terms of conventional weapons in Europe.

Washington in turn accuses Moscow of numerous violations of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. This is a very important treaty signed in 1987 by Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev. It led to the destruction of 2,692 such weapons, 846 by the United States and 1,846 by the Soviet Union. Under the treaty, both nations are also allowed to inspect each other's military installations, which definitely adds to mutual security.
 
In response to the lack of progress in U.S.Russia missile defense talks and America's definite intention to ignore Russia's concerns, Moscow announced it will no longer abide by the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE). As the next step, it is seriously considering withdrawing from the INF Treaty as well.

Despite certain budgetary and technological constrains, some American defense experts now suggest that Washington should also exit the INF Treaty and begin a crash program on its own to develop new missiles to confront not only Russia's but also China's growing military ambitions. All of this adds up to the beginnings of a new and incredibly dangerous arms race with totally unpredictable consequences.

The most logical way out of this nightmarish scenario would be direct negotiations or at least discussions between American and Russian experts in search of mutually satisfactory solutions. This, however, has not happened.

When Barack Obama came to the White House in 2008 and announced his now-defunct reset policy, a total of 21 bilateral government groups were formed to deal with almost all imaginary issues ranging from science, medicine and human rights to space, climate control and security. Some groups were to deal with the issues like arms control, international security, cybersecurity, defense and military cooperation, military technical cooperation, nuclear security and several other related subjects.

Later, however, President Obama with the support from Congress, following some logic that is hard to comprehend, ordered the work of all these groups to be frozen as a symbolic gesture to punish Russia for invading the Crimea and Ukraine. Regardless of one's feelings about what is going on there, this seems irrational in light of the real dangers such negotiations were set up to avoid.

Scientists in both Russia and the United States are worried about the track the two governments seem to be headed down. Sigfried Hecker, former head of Los Alamos Laboratory, and many other top American nuclear scientists insist "U.S.Russia cooperation is absolutely essential when dealing with some of the lingering nuclear safety and security issues, like the threat of nuclear smuggling and nuclear terrorism, and to limit the spread of nuclear weapons."

The Russian and American people should be demanding that their governments abandon symbolic brinksmanship in favor of serious negotiations and policies designed to protect their citizens and the world from future catastrophe. No one in either country contemplates a nuclear confrontation, but if comparatively minor differences are allowed to escalate through inattention, no one can predict what might happen in 10, 20 or more years into the future. The discussions that were taking place within the bilateral working groups set up to deal with arms control and nuclear security should resume as soon as possible.

Surely this is the only right move in a situation that is daily growing more dangerous.

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 #18
http://gordonhahn.com
June 14, 2015
U.S.-Russian Relations: The Problem Is Not Resolving the Relationship's Core Problems
By Gordon M. Hahn
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.

At the recent NATO summit in Antaliya, Turkey several senior NATO officials indicated during a media briefing that "NATO will attempt in its bilateral relations with Russia to prioritize issues on which the alliance and Moscow can see eye to eye, rather than focusing on issues of contention" (Ivan Nechepurenko, "Kerry Brings Cautious Signs of Russia Detente to NATO Meeting," The Moscow Times, 14 May 2015). This is precisely the wrong approach to the West's relationship with Russia. It leaves untouched the very contentious issues that over the last decade and more have created the overall dynamic of deterioration in the relationship and driven a growing frequency of Russian-U.S. conflict, increasing the risk to international security in Europe and Eurasia.

The only way to salvage the NATO-Russian and larger Western-Russian relationship is to begin working and developing mutual compromises on the most difficult issues, most notably the European-Eurasian security architecture, NATO expansion, and mutually exclusive approaches over spheres of influence. Unfortunately, it may already be too late for either side to make the compromises necessary to avoid further destabilization and conflict over the long-term.

The basic problem of an approach focused only on areas of agreement and leaving unresolved more contentious issues in the relationship is that it allows difficult issues to fester, to be stealthily contested, and then explode in conflict under the weight of events and the parties' opposing policies. This is what happened in the runup to both the 2008 Georgian war and the present Ukraine crisis. Western support for color revolutions and the primarily nationalist and anti-Russian, though semi-democratic regimes in both countries - along with the 2008 NATO summit's declaration that both countries would someday be NATO members - sparked two wars in no less than six years.

This mistaken approach has a somewhat long pedigree. It first surfaced with a report published by a series of writers in 2007 recommending to whatever incoming U.S. administration would be in waiting in 2008 that America's Russia policy focus on issues such as arms control. This in effect left all the serious post-Cold War issues in purgatory and reverted the relationship to something like the Cold War era's détente' which centered precisely around arms control issues. As I noted in a 2008 report for the Gary Hart-Jack Matlock Working Group on U.S.-Russian Relations for then new Barack Obama Administration, a better approach would be to focus on the core issues of a new post-Cold War European-Eurasian security architecture and an end to NATO expansion. One way to establish a foundation of trust and confidence in the relationship I proposed was to negotiate a maximally robust U.S.-Russian and larger Western-Russian regime of cooperation in the war against jihadism, including NATO recognition of, and cooperation with the CSTO and even SCO. From there, the core issues could move to the center of further negotiations (Gordon M. Hahn, U.S.-Russian Relations and the War Against Jihadism, Century Foundation Hart-Matlock Russia Working Group Paper, May 2009, http://old.tcf.org/publications/2009/5/pb688).

The easy-issues approach continued with the 'reset', which was based on precisely this idea. Thus, there was initial progress in U.S.-Russian relations on issues such as nuclear arms control, U.S. missile defense systems in Europe, and even trade. However, the issues that truly vex U.S.-Russian relations were swept under the rug, and the policies that drove disagreements in these areas persisted.

Now we see this approach potentially being applied to the very problems it created in places like Georgia and Ukraine. Some argue that not only Russia but the West as well may be willing to accept a long-term impasse over Ukraine - read: unresolved conflict in Ukraine. This is not only potentially fatal for Russian-West relations, it is almost certainly unsustainable for Ukraine. With a permanent threat of the civil war's renewal in the east, investors will not invest, Ukrainian neo-fascists will not be excluded to the periphery of Kiev's politics, and the threat of a neo-fascist takeover or an additional civil war between neo-fascists and moderates of the Maidan regime will continue to hang over the country.

The only way to salvage the relationship is to begin working on the most difficult issues, most notably the European security architecture and NATO expansion, with both sides making compromises on them. Unfortunately, it may already be too late for either side to make the compromises necessary to avoid further destabilization and conflict over the long-term.

As Secretary of State John Kerry noted in his press conference after meeting with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and President Putin: "From the Geneva communique to the removal of Syria's chemical weapons, I would emphasize that we have seen what happens when Russia and the United States work together. It is clearly possible to make real progress and make important things happen." As never before, it is time for Russia and the West to cease the struggle for spheres of influence and work together more often and, most importantly, not just outside but also inside the post-Soviet space. It is precisely there that tensions and conflicts between the U.S. and Russia - east and west - threaten cooperation in other regions posing more real and fundamental threats to both countries, most notably the rising global jihadi revolutionary movement.

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 #19
Forbes.com
June 14, 2015
American Hawks Should Stop Flattering Themselves: They're Not Playing A Great Game With Putin
By Tim Reuter
I am researcher at a Washington D.C. think-tank and a graduate of Columbia University. I have had work published at Forbes, Real Clear Markets, and Real Clear Sports.

Days before his death on February 8, 1725, Tsar Peter the Great gave his last will and testament. He exhorted his successors to fulfill Russia's destiny and conquer the world. The keys to this great endeavor were Constantinople and India, the former for its symbolism and the latter for its wealth.

Neither the actual records nor documentation of Peter's instructions have ever been found. It is likely that he never issued those deathbed commands. Yet, the legend has endured. For nearly three centuries, hawkish statesmen in the West have watched Russian activity in Eastern Europe and Central Asia with a mixture of trepidation and disdain.

The most recent example is the Crimean Crisis of 2014. American hawks vocally supported the Ukrainian rebels who overthrew President Viktor Yanukovych and his pro-Russian government in late February. When Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed the Crimean Peninsula (the historic headquarters of Russia's Black Sea Fleet) a month later, hawks were apoplectic. Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) bellowed about Putin's master plan to recreate the Soviet Empire. To counter Putin's lofty ambitions, both senators have proposed arming the government of Ukraine and enlisting former Warsaw Pact nations in NATO.

Such alarmism and overreaction has a strange persistence to it: American hawks sound like their British counterparts in the Nineteenth Century. As Peter Hopkirk reveals in his classic book, The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia, British hawks routinely fretted about Tsarist Russia's ability to threaten British supremacy. For Americans who believe that imperialism is easy, The Great Game should be required reading. Hopkirk's epic account of Britain's duel with Russia for territory and influence in Central Asia vivifies how empires are actually built, slowly and subject to setbacks.

The rivalry between Britain and Russia had an auspicious beginning. On March 31, 1814, Tsar Alexander I led his victorious army into Paris. Many Europeans celebrated the fall of Napoleon, but some British statesmen were apprehensive about Alexander's achievement. The Russian Army had ended a quarter-century of war in two years by marching across Europe. Might Russia score a similarly grand victory at the expense of Britain some time in the future?

British fears soon centered on the "jewel in the [imperial] crown", India. In the six decades since its victory at the Battle of Plassey in 1757, the East India Company had emerged as the ruler of vast swaths of the subcontinent. British politicians would spend the next century arguing about how to defend this dominion. Conservative hawks, such as Lord Palmerston and Benjamin Disraeli, favored "forward policies." The best way to protect India from attack was to create buffer states along invasion routes, namely the Bolan Pass and Khyber Pass in Afghanistan. Dovish Liberals, such as William Gladstone, disagreed given the topography of Central Asia. Even if a Russian invasion force trekked two thousand miles across mountain ranges, deserts, and the Indus River, a rested and ready British army awaited in India.

But in 1814, both nations faced the same problem; no one knew a lot about Central Asia. Few Europeans had ever set foot in the present-day nations of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, let alone mapped the area. Any European caught exploring the region, whether the "Khanates" of Khiva and Bokhara or Afghanistan, was likely to end up enslaved or executed by the region's tribal peoples. Men such as Lieutenant Henry Pottinger and Captain Nikolai Muraviev risked life and limb to map Central Asia in the two decades following the first defeat of Napoleon.

Meanwhile, the first influential anti-Russian tract to emerge in Britain was Sir Robert Wilson's best-selling book, A Sketch of the Military and Political Power of Russia. Published in 1817, Wilson claimed the tsar, "inebriated with power", was a greater threat than Napoleon. He would use the Russian Army to devour the Ottoman Empire before turning east to conquer India. Such claims appeared prophetic when the Russians attacked the Turks in the 1820s and Muslim tribesmen in the Caucasus Mountains in the 1830s. British anxiety about India reached feverish levels when Tsar Nicholas I dispatched an envoy to Afghanistan. The arrival of Yan Vitkevich in Kabul in January of 1838, not to mention his warm reception at the court of Emir Dost Mohammad in April, began a chain of events that ended in the First Anglo-Afghan War.

Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston articulated the war's primary objective in a letter to the British Ambassador in St. Petersburg: "[Lord] Auckland [Governor General of India] has been told to take Afghanistan in hand and make it a British dependency." To end Dost Mohammad's overtures to Russia, 21,000 British and Indian soldiers set out for Afghanistan in December of 1838. The Army of the Indus captured Kabul, deposed Dost Mohammad, and installed rival claimant Shah Shuja on the Afghan throne by August of 1839.

Palmerston would have done well to heed the counsel of the Duke of Wellington, "where the military successes ended the political difficulties would begin." Afghans had plenty to chafe about during the two-year occupation, whether it was higher taxes or Shah Shuja's "lavish personal lifestyle." Major Henry Rawlinson warned in August of 1941, "their mullahs are preaching against us from one end of the country to the other." On November 2, Akbar Khan, a son of Dost Mohammad, proclaimed a revolt against the British. Shortly thereafter, an Afghan mob routed the emir's troops and murdered a senior British officer, Alexander Burnes, in Kabul. Faced with a deteriorating situation, the British opted to withdraw and head for their garrison at Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan. From Jalalabad, they would cross into India via the Khyber Pass.

They never made it. Bad weather and the incompetence of General Elphinstone resulted in a catastrophe: The Afghans slaughtered 4,500 soldiers and 12,000 camp followers (civilians) in early January of 1842. Although an "Army of Retribution" repaid the Afghans by razing parts of Kabul in September of 1842, Britain did not save that much face. The war had not only ended with a debacle, but Britain had failed to achieve its main objective. After his release from captivity in India, Dost Mohammad returned to Afghanistan and eventually reclaimed his throne.

A decade of détente with Russia followed the war. Unfortunately, the improved relations were not destined to last. Relations soured quickly after Palmerston returned to power, first as Home Secretary in 1851 and then as Prime Minister in 1855. As a dispute between Russia and the Ottoman Empire over Christian holy sites turned violent in 1853, British hawks saw their chance to renew hostilities with Russia. The prospect of Russian control of the Bosporus Strait proved sufficient cause for Britain and France to declare war on Russia in March of 1854. The Crimean War lasted two years and claimed 600,000 lives, including that of Tsar Nicholas I in March of 1855. It drew to a close only after the great naval base of Sevastopol fell to the Allies in September of 1855.

"By defeating the Russians in the Crimea, the British had hoped not merely to keep them out of the Near East, but also to halt their expansion into Central Asia." Britain ostensibly achieved its primary objective. Russia agreed to demilitarize the Black Sea in the Peace of Paris, which was signed in March of 1856. But British hawks soon discovered their victory in the Crimean Peninsula had unintended consequences in Central Asia. Keeping Russia away from the Bosporus and out of the Near East forced the new tsar to look to the east for territorial gains.

Tsar Alexander II was as capable a leader as Russia has ever known. He understood that Russia needed domestic reforms and a realistic foreign policy after losing the Crimean War. In 1857, he calmly watched Britain struggle to suppress a mutiny of Indian soldiers. During the American Civil War, his pro-Union diplomacy helped prevent Anglo-French intervention on behalf of the Confederacy. Finally, in the summer of 1864, Alexander felt ready to commence an advance toward India. The Russian Army started by consolidating the frontier with Central Asia. Shortly thereafter, the drive to India began in earnest as one-by-one the khanates of Central Asia fell under Russian control. "So it was that the Russians, in a period of ten years, had annexed a territory half the size of the United States."

The Russian advance largely coincided with the reign of the Liberals in Britain, first under Lord John Russell (1865 - 1866) and then William Gladstone (1868 - 1874). (The Conservatives held power from 1866 to 1868). The Conservatives blamed the Liberals' policy of "masterly inactivity" in Central Asia for emboldening Russia and jeopardizing India's security. The British public paid little attention to the fact that Benjamin Disraeli, the Leader of the Opposition, had been a critic of the last major "forward policy", the war in Afghanistan. So after eight successful years, Gladstone's government fell in 1874 and the Conservatives took power.

Now prime minster, Disraeli promised the return of "forward policies", particularly in Afghanistan. He instructed his new Viceroy of India, Lord Lytton, to bring Afghanistan into "a defensive alliance with Britain." As the outgoing viceroy, Lord Northbrook, knew, this was a fool's errand destined to end in "another unnecessary and costly war." Yet, events elsewhere played into Disraeli's hands. Renewed hostilities between Russia and the Ottoman Empire threatened to ignite a major war in 1877. However, the Russians were prepared for a showdown if Britain sided with the Turks. An army of 30,000 soldiers stood ready to attack India via Afghanistan. But in early 1878, Alexander stepped back from the precipice and ended the war with the Ottomans.

The war scare had the unintended consequence of placing Emir Sher Ali, a son of Dost Mohammad, in an impossible position. Lord Lytton initially heeded his advisers' counsel that "the presence of British officers anywhere in Afghanistan would prove unacceptable to the Emir." Sher Ali had insisted that he could not accept a British diplomatic mission at the risk of the Russians demanding a presence in Kabul. When Sher Ali yielded to intense Russian pressure and agreed to receive Russian diplomats, Lord Lytton demanded he accept British diplomats in Kabul or face war. When no answer to his ultimatum arrived on November 20, 1878, a British army of 35,000 soldiers crossed the border.

The British invasion force had to cope with several difficulties in the opening phase of the Second Anglo-Afghan War, such as bad weather and illness. Yet events fortuitously turned in their favor. Sheri Ali died in February and his son, Yakub Khan, sued for peace. He agreed to harsh peace terms; Afghanistan ceded control of its foreign policy to London; Britain took some Afghan territory, including the Khyber Pass; the Russian diplomats were expelled while a British mission took up residence in Kabul. In return, Britain agreed to protect Khan from the Russians and neighboring Persians.

Predictably, the Afghans did not react well. Mutinous Afghan soldiers attacked the British diplomatic mission in early September of 1879 and killed the inhabitants. What followed was a punitive campaign every bit as savage as the one nearly forty years earlier. The British military expedition reached Kabul in October, and those accused of participating in the massacre were executed. In retaliation, 100,000 tribesmen answered a call for jihad and marched on Kabul. But in a stark reversal of events from four decades earlier, the British inflicted 3,000 casualties on the Afghans in a battle outside of Kabul in December.

The war ended when the British agreed to name Abdur Rahman, a nephew of Sher Ali, as Emir of Afghanistan in July of 1880. The formal cessation of Afghan foreign policy to London profoundly changed the dynamics of the Great Game. Indeed, the Russians decided to negotiate with Britain about the thorny issue of Afghanistan's northern boundary. As a result, imperial play shifted to the Far East. Although Britain would end up fighting military battles in China and Tibet in the early Twentieth Century, these engagements were often one-sided massacres.

Meanwhile, Russian expansion continued apace. Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II had managed to carry on the expansionist legacy of Alexander II - he was assassinated in 1881 - with little incident. By the turn of the century, Russia had pushed deep into northeastern China and acquired the naval base of Port Arthur. Consolidation of such far-flung territorial holdings depended on the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway.

However, the ever-growing Russian presence in East Asia alarmed an important regional player, Japan. Determined to end Russian penetration of their sphere of influence; Japan chose war on February 8, 1904. Japan's surprise attack on Port Arthur began an eighteen-month struggle in which little went right for the Russians. By 1905, stalemate had given way to a "succession of spectacular disasters." After a long siege, Port Arthur fell on January 2. On February 18, the largest battle of the war began at the major railway center of Mukden in southern Manchuria. Despite roughly equivalent strength at 300,000 men apiece, the Russians suffered 27,000 casualties. The Japanese Navy then completed Russia's humiliation in May by destroying the Baltic Fleet and killing 5,000 Russian sailors at the Battle of Tsuhima Strait (between Japan and Korea).

Peace brought little respite for the beleaguered Tsar Nicholas II. In October, one month after signing the Treaty of Portsmouth, Nicholas agreed to liberal reforms under threat of losing his throne. It is little wonder that, after so much turmoil, Russia was willing to negotiate an end to the Great Game. The Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 was based on a simple premise, mutual recognition of each nation's interests. A deal that recognized British preeminence in India and a Russian sphere of influence in Central Asia made a lot of sense. Britain and Russia could finally end a century of wasteful imperial competition.

World War I restarted the Great Game and raised the stakes. The Bolsheviks did not intend to foment revolution solely in the capitalist West, but all across world. Lenin dreamed of turning colonized peoples against their imperial masters. His failure to set the east ablaze was not the end of this renewed imperial rivalry between Russia and the West, but the beginning. The conflict encompassed a second global war and a multi-decade nuclear standoff. Ironically, the U.S.S.R. lost the Cold War by committing a classic mistake, invading and occupying Afghanistan. The ten-year effort to prop up a Marxist government in Kabul bankrupted the Soviet Union, which dissolved in 1991.

All of which brings us back to the Crimean Crisis. American hawks should stop deluding themselves about being engaged in a "New Great Game." Vladimir Putin does not possess the capability to reconstitute the Russian Empire. Hawks would do well to learn that imperialism is hard; power takes a long time to accrue and comparatively little time to spend. Britain and Russia built their empires over centuries and lost them in a matter of decades.

Non-interventionists have correctly pointed out that control of faraway territory, such as the Crimean Peninsula, is of little interest or consequence to Americans. Pat Buchanan, Daniel Larison, and others have written extensively about the follies of arming Ukraine and offering war guarantees to nations in Eastern Europe. However, such proposed policies do not exist in a vacuum. They are an outgrowth of hawkish assertions that a refusal to go to war is evidence of American "retreat" or, worse, decline.

In the words of Charles Krauthammer, "[national] decline is a choice." He is right. A government that chooses a foreign policy of constant confrontation guarantees national decline. To paraphrase James Madison, war begets state centralization, taxes, and debt. This is to say nothing of the blood and treasure that is lost in conflicts that are otherwise avoidable. At the risk of mixing metaphors, war is both the health of the state and the germ of national decline. Doubters should look at the fall of the British Empire.

In 1897, Britain was the greatest of all nations: Its empire encompassed one-fifth of the world's territory and one-fourth of its people. To commemorate Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee (sixty years on the throne), and the empire more broadly, Britain threw a celebration not seen since the days of ancient Rome. Amid such national exuberance, the British public turned to Rudyard Kipling for an exaltation of the Pax Britannica. However, the man who popularized the phrase "Great Game" did not share his countrymen's jingoistic mood. Kipling's poem "Recessional" was then, and remains today, a powerful warning about the perils of imperial hubris.

God of our fathers, known of old-
Lord of our far-flung battle line-
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine-
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget-lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies-
The Captains and the Kings depart-
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget-lest we forget!

Far-called our navies melt away-
On dune and headland sinks the fire-
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget-lest we forget!

One could forgive those Britons who read "Recessional" with a mixture of surprise and indignation amid the celebratory mood of the day. Yet, for the small children who watched the British Army parade through London, national decline would become their reality. Two world wars and three decades of socialist economic policies sapped Britain's vitality and destroyed its empire. In one lifetime, Great Britain went from imperial splendor to moribund.

Foreign policy is not exempt from the Law of Unintended Consequences. The fate of national decline that American hawks so loudly decry awaits any nation that frivolously indulges in militaristic behavior.

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 #20
The National Interest
June 12, 2015
The Bear and the Elephant
"It may take the election of a Republican to the White House in 2016 to improve relations between the Russian Federation and the United States."
By Maria Butina
Maria Butina is the founding chairman, The Right To Bear Arms, a Russian version of the NRA.

It may take the election of a Republican to the White House in 2016 to improve relations between the Russian Federation and the United States. As improbable as it may sound, the Russian bear shares more interests with the Republican elephant than the Democratic donkey. No doubt leading Republicans will denounce Russian aggression during the campaign season, as former Florida Governor Jeb Bush did recently during his visit to Berlin where he called Russian president Vladimir Putin a "bully." He added, "I'm not talking about being bellicose, but saying, 'Here are the consequences of your actions.' And that would deter the kind of bad outcome that we don't want to see." But talking tough on the campaign trail is one thing. Governing is another. Perhaps a Republican president would look for ways to move past the increasing confrontation that has characterized the U.S.-Russia relationship in the past few years.

A Republican president could start looking for a new future in U.S.-Russia relations by examining the past. The golden age of diplomacy between Russia and America occurred during the rule of Russian Emperor Alexander II and President Abraham Lincoln - the first Republican president of America.  They were in close correspondence during their respective attempts at massive domestic reforms.  These leaders shared a contemporary challenge of abolishing slavery within their nations - with Alexander II ending serfdom in 1861 and Lincoln ending slavery in 1863.  Alexander also followed America's example by instituting trial by jury and authorizing local government.  At a time of upheaval in both nations, diplomatic relations were durable and effective.

Given all that has transpired between these two nations and around the world the past several years, a more modern political parallel might also apply.  Just as only Nixon could go to China, perhaps only a Republican can repair relations between the U.S. and Russia today. How could a Republican president help in building that relationship?

First, shared economic interests can lead to political resolutions. Following the imposition of economic sanctions upon Russia by Europe and the United States, European imports to Russia have fallen dramatically.  The Russian Federal Customs Service notes that in 2014, for example, there were 21.3% fewer goods sent from the U.K. to Russia than in 2012; 41.2% fewer from Portugal.  But during the same period and under the same sanctions, U.S. Customs reports that trade volume between the U.S. and Russia increased by 5.6% -- by almost $29.2 billion.  ($18.5 billion of that was increased American imports into Russia.)

So when U.S. Secretary of State Kerry recently flew to Sochi to suggest to Russian President Putin a lifting of U.S. economic sanctions in exchange for Russian support of American policy toward Iran-this, at least, is the interpretation that the Russian media attached to Kerry's visit-Russians may legitimately have been a bit puzzled as to what the Obama administration was offering.

A second point of shared interest revolves around the global oil market.  As long as America maintains its ban on selling its oil reserves to foreign markets, American oil companies seeking international markets will need international sources of oil.  Russia has them.  Huge proven reserves in the Arctic and huge proven reserves of oil shale within the Russian mainland.  But Russian oil companies lack the technology to exploit these reserves.  And the current economic sanctions have frozen cooperative agreements like that between Russian Rosneft and American ExxonMobil like an Arctic drilling rig.

But Derek Norberg, President of the Council of U.S. - Russia Relations and Executive Director of the Russian American Pacific Partnership (RAPP), believes that a cooperative agreement over tapping Arctic oil reserves could thaw U.S. - Russia relations.  (Some geological estimates predict as much as one-fourth of global oil reserves lie trapped beneath the floor of the Arctic Ocean.)  Such agreements do not alleviate the tensions over Crimea and Ukraine.  But they might provide progress as other diplomatic issues are resolved.

Finally, many Russians have taken note of recent Pew Research Center data that shows that the American Republican Party derives much of its support from social conservatives, businessmen and those that support an aggressive approach to the war against Islamic terrorism.  These are values espoused by United Russia, the current ruling political party in Moscow. At the very least, it would appear that modern Russia has more to talk about with American Republicans than American Democrats. Since 1989, the Russian Federation has and will work with American presidents of all political parties.  But at this moment, perhaps more can be accomplished with a traditional Russian foe leading America.

My plea is simply to not surrender to what many view as inevitable conflict between these two great nations, no matter the consequences.  We must remember and reject the counsel of the Marquise de Pompadour at the end of the Seven Year's War in medieval Europe.  After France had lost its American colonies to Britain, she whispered in the French king's ear, "after us, the deluge."  Meaning, chaos and disaster are beyond our control.  Nyet!  Global maps may be redrawn, global economies will ebb and flow, but chaos need not reign.  A time may be coming when Russia and America can move from turmoil to calm.

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 #21
Sputnik
June 14, 2015
Saakashvili: 20 Years Needed to Reach Social Level of Yanukovych's Ukraine

We know not what is good until we have lost it: Mikheil Saakashvili, who actively supported the Euromaidan turmoil that toppled President Viktor Yanukovych, now asserted that it will take 20 years to reach the social level of Yanukovych's Ukraine.

Ukraine has slid into such poverty that it will take 20 years to reach the level of 2013, if the country develops in favorable conditions, Odessa region governor Mikheil Saaksshvili said, local Timer reported Sunday. [http://timer-odessa.net/news/saakashvili_lish_cherez_20_let_ukraina_vernetsya_k_pokazatelyam_epohi_yanukovicha_987.html]

"Now Ukraine is the poorest country in Europe. If the collapse of the economy suddenly stops, and Ukraine develops by four percent annually, we will reach the level of 2013 in 20 years," the former Georgian president said.

"Only in 20 years will we return to the figures of Yanukovych's Ukraine," he concluded.

Ukraine's dramatically worsening demographic situation over the past year-and-a-half is set to result in a sharp future decline in the country's working-age population which, according to Forbes, will result in new economic crises, the consequences of which will be wrought by Western creditors.

The ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 plunged the country into a civil war, caused economic collapse and led to the drastic impoverishment of Ukrainians.
The average life span in Ukraine is 71 years, which means that not all of those who are a little over 50 now will see their situations improve, Timer said.

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 #22
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
June 12, 2015
Where is the Middle East heading?
Russian Middle East experts unanimously agree that the current deepening of division lines across the Middle East increases the risk of a bigger regional conflict and urge for close coordination with the West.
By Alexey Khlebnikov

Amidst the ongoing turmoil in Syria, tensions in Yemen and the increasing threat of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Russia's experts are preoccupied with the future of the Middle East.

Recently, they gathered in Moscow to discuss the current transformation of the region within the framework of the "Middle East Week" organized by the Moscow State Institute of International Affairs (MGIMO-University) and unanimously agreed that the current deepening of division lines across the Middle East increases the risk of a bigger regional conflict.

"The conflicts that are happening across the region increase the level of disintegration, which can lead to the deterioration of international security problems and to the change of world trade and energy flows," said Rector of MGIMO-University Anatoliy Torkunov.

What has profoundly changed in the Middle East in recent decades is the changing power balance and fragmentation of the Arab world.

Traditionally strong Egypt, which claimed to be the leader of the Arab world, as well as relatively strong but ambitious Iraq and Syria - all lost their positions. Iraq lost its position due to the U.S. invasion in 2003 and further occupation; Syria and Egypt because of the "Arab Spring" which threw one country into civil war and put another on the brink of economic collapse.

This led to the absence of unity among the Arab nations because everyone holds a different approach to the chaos that occurred in the region and how to deal with it.

In such circumstances, the Saudi Arabia-led Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states form a sort of regional power center. With an abundance of energy resources giving them a certain degree of economic independence, the GCC states managed to come through the turbulence of the last few years almost untouched, albeit seriously challenged.

As a result, the balance of power in the region tilted more towards the economically and politically stable Saudi Arabia-led GCC states.

Also, Shia Iran has become the most influential state in the Persian Gulf capable of challenging Saudi leadership. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq contributed to that, resulting in the toppling of Saddam Hussein, the weakening of Iraq and the rise of Shia groups to power. Consequently, Iran expanded its power through Iraq into the Mediterranean, creating the so-called "Shia crescent" in the region - Iran-Iraq-Syria-Lebanon, which Sunni Arab states are so afraid of.

The majority of Russian Middle East experts argue that the role of the Sunni-Shia confrontation is highly overestimated as a major source of instability in the region.

In this vein, senior researcher at the Oriental Studies Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences Lana Ravandi-Fadai underlined that, "Iran's role in the region is overestimated and Tehran's ability to influence political processes in the Middle East is exaggerated." She also echoed other experts and Russian diplomats arguing that, in general, the Sunni-Shia struggle in the region is clearly overstated.

Former Russian ambassador to Yemen, Libya and Tunisia Veniamin Popov argues that, "Previously people in the region did not pay much attention to the Shia-Sunni division at all, because there was none."

The rise of Iran and the quite real possibility that the sanctions that are keeping Iran down might be lifted will most likely lead to Iran's faster economic development. This would lead to an increase of political influence in the region, something that threatens Sunni leadership in the Middle East, thus creating more instability.

As Saudi Arabia and the GCC states have become the power center of the Sunni Arabs in the region, their perceptions of regional security and threats automatically affect the entire regional security system.

Russia and the US must coordinate their actions in a volatile region

Recent developments in the region indicate that the current Sunni Arab leadership perceives threats to security and stability differently. Saudi Arabia, being the regional leader, perceives the political threat from Shia Iran as more acute than the conventional military and ideological threat from Sunni Islamism.

From this perspective, the threat from Iran puts the entire region at greater risk of instability. Recent developments in Yemen have proven that.

In March of 2015 Saudi Arabia spearheaded a coalition of nine Arab states into a military air campaign against the Houthi coup in Yemen. Saudis see Iranian involvement everywhere when Shia minorities in the Gulf protest (Bahrain, Yemen, and within Saudi Arabia itself).

However, Iranian political influence is not an existential threat to Saudi Arabia, unlike radical Sunni Islamism, whose adepts already declared a war against the Kingdom and conducted a suicide attack on its territory in May 2015.

As a result, Yemen is in tatters and regional stability is under greater threat than it was before. Moreover, it increased the threat from terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda of the Arab Peninsula (AQAP) and ISIS, as they are the ones who benefit from the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen. In this situation, Houthis represent the only force on the ground which can fight against AQAP and IS.

Pakistan and Egypt, which were initially ready to deploy their ground troops to Yemen, currently are reluctant to do so. Saudi Arabia alone is unlikely to deploy its ground troops without backing from the U.S. The White House is also reluctant to launch any ground campaign in Yemen, but is still expressing its support for Saudi Arabia.

Ambassador Popov noted that, "The U.S. is currently in a very unpleasant situation in Yemen: Previously Washington conducted anti-terror operations against Al-Qaeda which now controls twice more territory."

Partly because of this, partly because of Washington's "betrayal" of Riyadh (flirting with Tehran over its nuclear program), Saudi Arabia's elite started to understand that they needed to start seeking alternative supporters whether it is China, Russia or Europe, Popov said.

Another aspect here is that the U.S. is already involved in crisis in Syria and Iraq and cannot afford to get bogged down in Yemen or even to create another volatile area in the region because it directly affects its attempts to counter terrorism in the Middle East and to make a deal with Iran. Therefore, the U.S. cannot solve the whole pack of problems in the region alone.

Russian experts and diplomats see current conditions in the Middle East as a unique opportunity for a larger coordination of actions between Russia and the West, especially the U.S. This is the moment when Russia and the U.S. can have a fresh start.

As the deadline for the final nuclear deal agreement with Iran, June 30, is approaching and the possibility of its successful conclusion is looming, major powers should take more decisive steps in settling the crisis in Yemen. In these circumstances, the U.S. and Russia should exercise their influence over all involved parties in the conflict and make them sit around the table and negotiate.

Major powers should resolve the crisis in Yemen so that it does not reach the scale of the one in Syria. Either way, it might be too late and it may give Islamists another fertile ground for operations, which will minimize the impact of any major anti-terrorism attempts of the world's powers in the Middle East.

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 #23
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
June 15, 2015
Russia faces tough choices on what to do with Syria and ISIS
RD Interview: Russia Direct sat down with Alexei Malashenko, Moscow Carnegie Center's expert in religion and security, to discuss the significance of the ISIS threat for Russia and the Kremlin's shifting policy on Syria.
By Pavel Koshkin

According to recent media reports, Russia is about to change its policy toward Syria and potentially even turn its back on President Bashar Al-Assad's regime, which now appears to be under increasing pressure from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Greater Syria (ISIS). If the Assad regime falls, however, Russia will have to contend with an expanded ISIS presence near its borders.

And that is especially significant given the increasing signs that ISIS is starting to gain a toehold in the North Caucasus and some states in the post-Soviet space. There are now even reports about a student from Moscow State University running off to join ISIS.

Amidst the background of these events, Russia Direct recently sat down with Alexei Malashenko, an expert on religion and security matters for the Moscow Carnegie Center. Below, Malashenko shares his thoughts on Syria, the threat posed by ISIS, and the opportunities that Russia might have to partner with other nations in the Middle East against radical Islam.

Russia Direct: There are now concerns in the media that President Bashar Al-Assad's regime in Syria will finally fall without Russia's support. Do you share such concerns?

Alexei Malashenko: I believe that Russia conducted a very smart policy toward Assad from the point of view of its own national interests. Generally, Moscow didn't face as many losses as initially expected.

Any change in policy with regard to Assad is not a sign of the flexibility of Russia, but rather a sort of ambivalence. But there is another question: With no support for Assad, who should the Kremlin back? Should Russia support an obscure [opposition] coalition that consists of Islamists or nationalists, some of who are allegedly moderate?

But given the recent events [in the Middle East] and the more active role of the Islamic State, I don't know who is better. In the end, not only Russia, but also the entire world might face a dilemma: Choosing between a very sinister authoritarian regime and the Islamic State. There is no other choice because all talk about democracy in the Middle East is for little children.

RD: Given the Kremlin's hesitant position towards supporting Assad's regime and the ISIS threat, will Moscow and Washington be able to come up with a compromise on Syria?

A.M.: So far, nobody has come up with this compromise and there is no reason to speculate on this issue. But the fact is that the Syrian problem is a specific case of the Middle East. That's why to assume that coming up with a consensus only on Syria and then dealing with the rest of the problems is not the best way of thinking. In fact, Syria is a complex problem that needs to be resolved in a complex way.

Moreover, it is impossible to resolve it at the level of U.S.-Russia bilateral relations, because the world in the Middle East is indeed multipolar, with interests of America, Russia, Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia shaping it geopolitical landscape. And without consensus of all these stakeholders, it is impossible to achieve progress. But, so far, there is no sign of consensus.

RD: The second Syrian Peace Talks took place in Kazakhstan's capital Astana, while the first one was held in Moscow. How can you account for such a shift?

A.M.: The fact is that Moscow brought together people who don't have any differences: They didn't have something to talk about. In Astana, there was a hope that the Syria peace talks would bring together somebody else. But what results did these negotiations lead to finally? I didn't see real opponents there who could really clash with each other and, then, could agree on the thorniest issues.

RD: But the Astana Peace talks brought together Syria's opposition, right?

A.M.: Yes, the opposition that attended these negotiations is monochrome, but not the real opposition, which consists of radicals who believe that they have enough potential [to win the war]. Again, the situation in the Middle East is very complex, with a lot of links subtly intertwined. And the main mistake of Americans and Europeans is that they missed this complexity. Initially, they assumed that as the worst-case scenario the radicals would form a sort of Al-Qaeda, but, in reality, we have seen a qualitatively different phenomenon [ISIS].

RD: ISIS seems to expand its influence beyond the Middle East and attract people from all over the world. Recently, a student from Moscow State University decided to leave her family and join the Islamic State. Do you think it is a specific case or a result of increasing ISIS propaganda?

A.M.: For Russia, it is rather a specific episode, not the trend, even though there are the same examples in other countries, such as France. So far, I haven't seen girls coming to ISIS on a massive scale. In the case of the Russian student, it is not recruiting, but rather a psychological shift, the desire to find oneself. There is a lot of speculation on these topics and all discussion adds up to the need to increase the patriotic upbringing among young people.

Some naively believe it will prevent them from wearing hijab and going to the Islamic State. But there is no mention [in public debates] that there is a big difference between a hijab and a Kalashnikov rifle. In addition, it is not clear how we are going to nurture patriotism, given the fact there are more than 16 million Muslims in Russia, who are very active in defending their positions. So, it is a heavy-handed and inefficient approach of resolving the problem [the ISIS threat]. Now there is more irrelevant noise than good proposals.           

Even though Muslim neophytes are very active in Russia, this specific case of the student coming to ISIS is just an episode. There is a version that she went to ISIS to teach Russian. The question is: Whom was she going to teach?

RD: Nevertheless, there are some claims that ISIS propaganda is threatening Russia.

A.M.: So far, it is significantly exaggerated by Russia's intelligence and security services. But at the same time, we should not forget about ISIS propaganda, which is indeed transmitted in about 23 languages, including Russian. And there have been some results. Totally, there are between 1,700 and 3,000 Russian citizens who have joined the Islamic State.

But having been disappointed, some came back. But thinking that those who returned to Russia from ISIS pose a significant threat is again an exaggeration. But in the case of a worsening economic situation and economic crisis, corruption and the growth of indignation in Northern Caucasus, there might be social unrest, which could, partly, turn into religious radicalism. In this case, those who returned from ISIS, given their military experience, could play a role.

RD: And what is to be done to prevent it?

A.M.: This is the question that should be addressed to Russian Predient Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin missed the moment when it was necessary to do something in the 1990s. Now the third generation of Islamic opposition is fighting [on the side of ISIS].

RD: So, you mean that the authorities whacked the hornet's nest.

A.M.: Absolutely. They plucked at the hornet's nest. It is impossible to kill or imprison all radicals. Even though we want to talk, we are not able to foster dialogue with them. The problem is that Islam is not a homogeneous tradition and culture, but it contains a significant number of branches. And this problem will be forever in place.

RD: Recently, ISIS announced its intention to acquire nuclear weapon through Pakistan. Given that such statement is propagandistic in its nature and hardly likely realistic, nevertheless, what are the chances of such a scenario?

A.M.: They won't get nuclear weapons, but they might get chemical and biological weapons. It is just a matter of time before they get them. They could poison wells. Water is much easier to poison. And it is a very serious problem to prevent these madmen from getting weapons of mass destruction, whether they are chemical or biological.
r
And this threat is real. And there will always be a madman who will dare to launch it in the Volga, the Rhine, the Moscow River or elsewhere. And this is impossible to predict, like it was impossible to foresee the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York. Something is bound to happen.   
            
RD: Yet despite the ISIS threat, Russia hasn't so far joined the coalition to fight ISIS together with the U.S. and other Middle East countries ... .

A.M.: Russia now is like a lonely wanderer. It is looking for its own position. But the fact Russia doesn't directly participate in the campaign against ISIS, it scores additional points, because the fight against ISIS is perceived by Muslims - even by moderate ones - as the fight against Islam.

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 #24
Ukrainian army shells Donetsk republic 191 times over past 24 hours - DPR

MOSCOW, June 15. /TASS/. The Ukrainian Armed Forced have violated the ceasefire regime 191 times over the past 24 hours by shelling the territory of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR), spokesman for the DPR Defence Ministry Eduard Basurin told a press briefing on Monday.

"The number of the attacks by the Ukrainian side over the past 24 hours totaled 191, with 50 tank shells and 108 82-mm and 120-mm mines hitting the territory of the Donbas region," the Donetsk news agency quotes him as saying.

The ceasefire regime in the war-torn Donbas region formally entered into force on February 15. The demand to halt the hostilities was envisaged by the Package of Measures for the Implementation of the Minsk Agreements. The document was signed by the Contact Group members on February 12. DPR officials have repeated stressed that the observance of the truce depended entirely on the Ukrainian side.

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 #25
www.rt.com
June 12, 2014
Aftermath of Donetsk shelling attack (video)

The footage shows the aftermath of the shelling of a residential area in Donetsk's Oktyabrsky district on Thursday. At least four people were injured. A hospital and two homes were reportedly hit by the shells, leaving at least parts of them uninhabitable.

Video: http://rt.com/in-motion/266992-donetsk-shelling-attack-aftermath/

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 #26
Vineyard of the Saker
http://thesaker.is
June 14, 2015
Very interesting public survey in the occupied Ukraine
[Charts better read here http://thesaker.is/very-interesting-public-survey-in-the-occupied-ukraine/]

First, the disclaimers: no, I am not naive enough to believe that it is possible to make a truly representative survey in the Nazi-occupied Ukraine. Yes, I do understand that each article, survey or opinion piece published in the Ukraine has been paid for by some interest group.  And no, I do not believe that the people living under the Nazi junta are given enough information to make up their own opinion about these topics.  But still, I think that even with all these caveats the following survey is fascinating.

The survey was made by the Ukrainian based Center for Sociological Studies.  The survey itself is entitled "The results of the survey "Socio-political orientation of citizens".  The full survey can be seen here in Ukrainian:

http://www.sofia.com.ua/page167.html

and here in machine-translated English:

https://goo.gl/BHXVYr

There are many interesting responses in this survey, but here are the most interesting ones (I have bolded out in red some of the most interesting figures)

Generally speaking, do you think that things in Ukraine are in the right or wrong direction?

Definitely in the right direction 4.1
Rather in the right direction 21.2
Rather in the wrong direction 31.4
Definitely in the wrong direction 34.6
Do not know / do not know 8.7

In your opinion, to what extent the President and government to blame for the economic problems that the country is going through?

Fully to blame 40.4
Partly to blame 47.9
Not not blame 5.6
Hard to say 6.1

In your opinion, which tasks should be a priority for the president and the government?

Improving the economic situation and job creation 15.6
Uniting the country, overcoming contradictions 6.0
Stopping the war in Donbass 48.5
Preventing rising prices 8.9
Corruption Eradication     7.8
Normalization of relations with Russia 1.6
European integration, EU membership 3.3
Increasing social benefits and guarantees 3.6
Back Crimea to Ukraine 0.7
Expanding the powers of local government, decentralization of power 0.6
Ensuring energy independence of Ukraine 0.6
Cutting taxes 0.5
Other     0.2
Nothing indicated 0.3
Hard to say 1.8

Do you think the President and the government are doing everything necessary in order to stop the armed conflict in the Donbas?

The government is doing everything in its power to end the conflict 12.2
The government is doing something, but this is not enough 48.7
The government practically does nothing to end the war 33.5
Hard to say 5.6

Some believe that is most important to stop the war in Donbas, even if you have to give up the occupied territories. Others believe that Ukraine should continue to fight until they establish control over all occupied territories. Which view is closer to you?

The main thing - to stop the war in Donbas, even if you have to give up the occupied territories 61.8
Ukraine should continue to fight until they establish control over all occupied territories 22.9
Hard to say 15.3

In your opinion, in what steps can go to stop the war in Donbas and normalize relations with Russia?
[Need to read this chart here http://thesaker.is/very-interesting-public-survey-in-the-occupied-ukraine/]    
.....

To sum up:

Even though a strong majority (58.7%) of Ukrainians do not accept the secession of Crimea or the independence of the DNR/LNR (56.5%), an even bigger majority (61.8%) is willing to give up part (or all?) of the Donbass in order to achieve piece.

Furthermore, in spite of the crippling economic crisis, a very strong relative majority of Ukrainians (48.5%) believe that achieving peace should be the top priority of the Ukraine and the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians believe that the government does too little (48.7) or even nothing (33.5%) to end the war.

Please remember that these are public opinion figure without the Donbass and without Crimea!  In fact, 81.9% of the respondents referred to their nationality as "Ukrainian" and only 26.6% said that they spoke only Russian at home.

In other words, the vast majority of Ukrainians want peace above all else, and the vast majority of the Ukrainians believe that they are not getting it primarily due to the fault of the junta in power.  Add to that the whopping 88.3% (40.4%+47.9%) who also believe that the economic mess is also the responsibility of the regime and you will get a sense of how truly unpopular the junta really is!

It is particularly interesting to contrast these results with the result of similar surveys in Russia where well over 80% of respondents consistently fully support President Putin and the political course of Russia.

So who do you think is winning this one?

The Saker

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 #27
The International New York Times
June 16, 2015
Putin's Risky Game of Chicken
By FIONA HILL and STEVEN PIFER
Fiona Hill and Steven Pifer are senior fellows at the Brookings Institution.

WASHINGTON - Russian SU-24 fighter-bombers buzzed a U.S. Navy destroyer in international waters in the Black Sea late in May, just days after the Royal Air Force scrambled to intercept nuclear-capable Bear bombers near British airspace. These dangerous Russian games of chicken are now regular occurrences and come hard upon a Russian threat in March to aim nuclear missiles at Danish warships if Denmark joins NATO's missile defense system.

As tensions between the West and Moscow sharpen over Ukraine, NATO countries have seen a dramatic spike in provocative actions that risk a harrowing accident or devastating miscalculation. A NATO-Russia military-to-military dialogue would reduce these risks - if President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin allow it.

NATO has ratcheted down its political dialogue with Moscow in protest over Russia's illegal seizure of Crimea and involvement in the conflict in eastern Ukraine. But the alliance should seek to engage Russia on a professional military level to minimize the danger of missteps or misunderstandings when their forces operate in close proximity or near each other's territory. They would have good antecedents to draw on: a set of Cold War agreements whose titles clearly convey their purposes.

Neither NATO nor Russia would want a miscalculation - say, a NATO fighter misreading a Russian plane's actions and shooting it down - that could lead inadvertently to a larger armed clash. An agreement could set down rules on how to approach an aircraft or ship, and whom to call in the case of an uncertain situation. Such measures could and should become part of standard operating procedures.

In the 1960s, encounters between the U.S. and Soviet navies became similarly dangerous. Soviet intelligence trawlers maneuvered to interfere with U.S. aircraft carriers conducting flight operations in the Mediterranean Sea. U.S. pilots buzzed Soviet ships - sometimes at high speed and so low that the shock wave blew crewmen overboard. In 1972, the United States and Soviet Union concluded the Prevention of Incidents at Sea Agreement to curb these kinds of occurrences. Russian reconnaissance flights were given minimum standoff distances and altitudes when flying near U.S. warships, and U.S. pilots had rules for intercepting and escorting Russian aircraft in a nonthreatening manner. U.S. and Soviet naval officers periodically met to review and discuss cases where the procedures had been violated.

The early 1980s saw a new phase of escalatory encounters, including the interception and shooting down of a Korean Air Lines passenger plane by a Soviet fighter near Sakhalin Island after the Soviets mistook it for a U.S. spy plane operating in their airspace. And, in 1983, a large-scale NATO nuclear forces exercise, coming just as U.S. Pershing missile deployments were about to begin in Europe, generated a full-blown war scare in Moscow that some historians consider as serious as the Cuban Missile Crisis.

As part of efforts to reduce tensions, Washington and Moscow concluded the Dangerous Military Activities Agreement in 1989. This was designed to avert hazardous or ambiguous situations between U.S. and Soviet ground forces along the inner-German border while Germany was still divided. Among other provisions, U.S. and Soviet units at the tactical level were given radio frequencies, so in the event of possible misunderstanding during an exercise or routine movement of forces they could talk directly to sort things out.

These agreements remain in force, but they apply only to the United States and Russia. Russia has similar bilateral agreements with other NATO members, but the current situation demands that similar arrangements be worked out to cover all NATO and Russian military forces operating in Europe and the North Atlantic area. It would also be wise to update the arrangements as they are negotiated. Senior NATO and Russian officers are best suited to conduct this dialogue. The NATO defense ministers meeting set for June 24-25 offers an opportunity to explore this idea.

What is not clear is whether Mr. Putin and the Kremlin would welcome this step. Mr. Putin presents himself as acting to protect his country and its independence. Russian officials have created a narrative in which the West seeks to overthrow the Putin regime by supporting Russian opposition movements, ruining the economy with sanctions, and rolling Russia back from dominance in its traditional neighborhood through the expansion of NATO and European Union institutional arrangements. Mr. Putin's domestic popularity has become entwined with the annexation of Crimea and the war in Ukraine.

This provides the backdrop for the more aggressive and seemingly irresponsible Russian military operations, like the SU-24 and Bear flights. Last year, an SAS airliner carrying more than 130 passengers narrowly averted a mid-air collision with a Russian military aircraft that had shut down its transponder and thus did not show on the radar of civilian air traffic controllers.

Mr. Putin and other senior officials have deliberately employed bellicose rhetoric, even threatening the nuclear card. They appear to have taken a page from Thomas Schelling's famous work on conflict behavior. They act a bit crazy in a way intended to intimidate NATO and the European Union. They resort to warmongering to convince the West that they are prepared to take greater risks.

In spite of the saber-rattling, Mr. Putin and the Kremlin do not want war with NATO. Mr. Putin is not hell-bent on the destruction of Russia or his presidency in a nuclear exchange. But Russian security elites know they lack the economic and military resources for a major conventional conflict, so Moscow has to accomplish its goals without triggering total mobilization - through hybrid tactics and bullying, including threats of a nuclear strike.

And here lies the problem. Limiting the risks of miscalculation between NATO and Russian military units would seem to be a no-brainer. No one wants an accidental war. But, given Mr. Putin's desire to intimidate the West, would the Kremlin permit such a dialogue to go forward?

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 #28
CNN.com
June 14, 2015
UN Ambassador Samantha Power believes that there could be a possibility of Russia invasion in Ukraine. (headline)

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