#2
The Guardian
June 9, 2015
Patriotism, propaganda and parmesan: what do Muscovites really think?
In the wake of the Ukraine crisis, the recession and sanctions, everyone in Moscow agrees life is changing dramatically - but that's where the agreement ends. We asked four Muscovite families for their unvarnished opinions
Amelia Gentleman in Moscow
[Part of the Guardian's Moscow Week. Many interesting articles here http://www.theguardian.com/cities/series/guardian-moscow-week]

When asked how sanctions and counter-sanctions have changed their lives, some middle-income Moscow residents start with the cheeses they are missing - products that have disappeared from shelves since Russia imposed a ban on European cheese, and selected other food products, in response to EU and US sanctions. Conversation can often turn to the merits of gorgonzola, camembert and parmesan, and the defects of their disappointing Russian equivalents.

The shadow of the conflict in Ukraine still lingers over Moscow, making life harder for its residents in many ways - some of them momentous, including unemployment and acute financial problems; others no more than minor irritations. But everyone here agrees life has changed - both in a practical sense and in terms of people's moods.

Surgeon Dmitry Ravilevich, 31, gives me a tour of the local supermarket in his home town of Noginsk, on the outskirts of eastern Moscow. Three fridge units that used to stock European cheeses and yoghurts are now full of 17 Russian varieties - there's no shortage here. "We used to have Polish apples, now we have apples from Asia. You can't taste any difference," he says.

Back in their one-bedroom flat in the krushchevka opposite - the identical five-storey apartment blocks built all over Russia in the 1960s (five storeys was the maximum allowed before the expense of installing an elevator was required) - Dmitry and his wife Elena open their fridge to try to analyse how sanctions are affecting them. Elena, 26, is an engineer currently on maternity leave with their
seven-month-old son, Georgy. The fridge is full of Russian sausages, jars of homemade pickled cabbage, black forest gateau from Russia, a jar of locally made Nestle babyfood, and local eggs and bread; they find it hard to point to anything that has disappeared from their lives.

"We felt the effect for the first couple of months - now we don't feel it any more," Dmitry says. "Those products which disappeared from the market weren't really things that we bought - we couldn't ever afford to buy foreign cheeses so we bought Russian cheese anyway. Things like Norwegian fish disappeared - but it's not a massive problem for us to stop buying that. We probably wouldn't have noticed it at all if it hadn't been talked about so much on television. Richer people who were used to buying those kind of things might have noticed, but we didn't feel it."

Dmitry has a good job in a Moscow hospital but rents in the city are unaffordable, so at 5.30 every morning he leaves home to make a two-hour commute along the traffic-clogged Enthusiasts' Highway - at one point passing a heart-sinking motorway sign that announces it is 29 months and 15 days until the end of the current roadworks.

In the evening he returns home again, past the ripped-up earth of construction zones and dozens of skeleton high-rise blocks that stretch up 20 and 30 storeys, their mammoth advertising hoardings giving details of how to buy flats here long before the apartments are anywhere near completion. Dmitry is phlegmatic about the journey, and about life in Moscow.

"It hasn't changed much, except maybe we talk more about the economy. Stop anyone in the street and they'll be able to tell you how much a barrel of oil costs today, and what the rouble-dollar exchange rate is," he says, turning on his computer in the corner of the sitting room - which doubles as his office and as a bedroom for the baby and their three-year-old son, Alexander. "Look: every website has a panel updating readers on both indexes. Everyone is very conscious of it - but for the moment we're interested, not worried."

The family has felt the collapse of the rouble, but the consequences can hardly be described as catastrophic. "We won't take the children to Greece this summer, we'll go to Egypt instead," Dmitry says. "Our friends are going to Crimea, which is ours now, or Egypt or Turkey. It makes no real difference to us. We plan to go to Crimea when the hotels there get a bit better." Their friends have also decided not to buy European cars, choosing Korean or Japanese models instead; they fear the European car manufacturers will leave Russia and it will be impossible to get replacement parts.

The collapse of the rouble has prompted tighter spending controls at the hospital where Dmitry works. "We have rationalised our attitude to equipment over the past year; we are using our resources more carefully. Where we might have done two tests previously - an extra one to double-check - now we will only do one. But in terms of quality of the medicines and the equipment we use, it has had no effect. Most of our medicines come from Russia or from India."

Both Dmitry and Elena feel broadly supportive of what happened in Ukraine. "We had a moment of uncertainty; we wondered, 'do we need this Crimea?' But, like the majority of our friends, we thought it was good for Russia. We don't talk about it so much any more though." Dmitry says he has noticed attitudes towards to the west changing in the past year. "We have become more patriotic as a country. People have become more negative in the way they view the west."

'Any Putin-related story is what they call a priority story'

Up until March 2014, Liza Lerer worked for Rossiya, the second-most-watched channel on Russian television. She was in charge of the promotional department, making clips that were broadcast between shows, advertising what was coming up later on the channel. She began to realise several years ago that there was growing pressure on her to make sure the tone of these apparently-innocuous 30-second clips reflected government thinking.

"You can cut these clips in a neutral way, to promote a documentary or a news programme coming later in the day - or they can become an advertisement for the state. Gradually they became tiny bits of propaganda," Liza tells me. And so she resigned from her job, no longer willing to turn the trailers advertising news programmes and documentaries into pro-government publicity.

Life for her has changed immeasurably in the past year. As a result of the moral stand she took, Liza has had to move out of the large, expensive flat she and her husband were renting, back to the small one-roomed flat where she grew up. She has been unable to find new work elsewhere, and worries about how she will pay for her college-aged children's education or repay the loans taken out, in more prosperous times, for travel to Europe.

She is speaking in the tiny kitchen of her flat on the top floor of another krushchevka. Through the open window comes the happy sound of children playing in a playground that was installed by the Moscow government sometime in the last decade - before the economy turned for the worse.

Liza says she first became uncomfortable with her work in 2011, when she had to make promotional clips for an eight-part documentary on Vladimir Putin, which she describes as "beautifully filmed" but "extremely boring" - with episodes focused on "Putin and Russia's youth", "Putin and agriculture", and so on. Russia's then-prime minister looked tanned and healthy in every episode, she says.

"I asked why we had to do so many clips for such a tedious series that no one was going to watch" - but it was a rhetorical question. It was already clear to Liza that for the channel, "any Putin-related story is what they call a priority story. No matter how well or badly made the documentary was, the trailers themselves would be shown repeatedly and seen by a huge audience; in theory the trailers were promoting a series on Putin, but in fact they were actually promoting Putin himself."

It would be easy to underestimate the significance of these short clips, squeezed in between the Russian equivalents of Dancing on Ice and Dancing with the Stars and advertisements, but Liza explains they are a significant part of the state broadcasting machine: "Tens of millions watch the channel every night. That's why I was so worried about my role in the process."

When tens of thousands gathered in Moscow in May 2012 to protest against contested election results and Putin's return to the presidency, the nature of the news programmes put out by the Rossiya channel became much more pro-government. Liza, 43, who had attended these demonstrations herself, says she found it very difficult. She found herself undermining the behaviour and motives of the protesters and the protest leaders with suspicious-sounding questions: "The promotional clips we made told viewers the programme would be asking: 'Who are these protesters? What do they want? Are their goals the same as their leaders? What are these people gathering for?'"

Liza discussed her unease with a few of her colleagues. She says a small proportion of them agreed with her but were afraid to lose their jobs by taking an ethical decision and resigning. A small group were ardent supporters of Putin. "The majority, though, just don't care. There is a sense of apathy, a sense that we have the leader we deserve. People say: 'Well is it any better in the west? They have corruption there too.' People are so used to conforming - we grew up in the Soviet era. Very few people resigned for political reasons. I thought there would be more - but even those who do feel uneasy, they have comfortable lives; it's hard to give that up."

A couple of months into the Ukrainian crisis, there was renewed pressure to toe the party line. "We were told that the trailers should be more aggressive. We had to make a montage of the Ukrainian leaders, of Ukrainian protesters fighting, to show them in a bad light; to show that if they come to power, things will be very bad," she recalls. "I began to feel that what I was doing was intolerable and positively dangerous for the country; I felt ashamed. I knew it was only going to get worse, and that the pressure to propagandise for the government would increase."

Liza resigned. "I had no choice. I couldn't stay. My immediate boss knew why I left, but it wasn't widely known. The head of the channel wouldn't really have cared about the departure of an editor-in-chief of the promotions department."

While she doesn't regret her decision, it has come at a huge cost to her family. Things over the past year have not been easy because her departure coincided with the economic crisis. She remains unemployed. She couldn't go to another state channel, broadcasting news and politics, because she would have been confronted with the same problem. Elsewhere in the media sector, few people are hiring.

Sitting in her warm apartment, the walls lined with books and CDs, a grand piano squeezed into the main room, beautiful antique typewriters on display, she shrugs off her financial problems as "unimportant". Because she was brought up in the Soviet Union and lived through the economic difficulties of the 1990s, she is familiar with the sensation of being short of money.

"But in the 1990s we were young and happy to be poor. We felt were were living through an interesting time, the country was changing for the better. We got used to freedom, to writing openly, to talking openly. It is frightening how far things have gone back in another direction," she says. "Now we're in this dead-end and it is hard to see how things will change for the better. It is a horrible period. For the first time in my life, I don't see a future."

Her husband Alexander Stoliarchuk, an arts journalist, has also noticed a stark change in the past year. "It is like living in a foreign country," he says, coming in from the flat's other room, to stroke their elderly black cat and make black tea. "Over the last year I have heard some people who I considered friends, people who I always thought were 'on my side', say things like: 'It's time we taught a lesson to America'; 'We need another Stalin'; 'It's so good to see Russia defend her values at last.'"

Alexander feels Moscow has become more xenophobic and hostile to the west. It is a difficult time for both of them.

Beneath the European veneer

On the surface at least, Moscow seems as prosperous as ever. If you walk around the centre of the city, it is impossible not to be struck by the proliferation of new bars and restaurants, with tables on the streets; when the sun is out it feels positively Parisian. As well as Starbucks and Burger King, there are dog salons and 24-hour-sushi restaurants, karaoke nightclubs and artisanal breadshops, selling hand-made macaroons in pastel colours. On the metro, commuters travel with their necks bent at the same angle you can observe on any European metro, staring into tablets and iPhones (Moscow has Wi-Fi underground), playing Candy Crush as they make their way along the platform.

Beneath the European veneer, there are traces of a new, more ostentatious nationalism - visible in the orange-and-black St George's ribbons that celebrate victory in the war but have become a symbol of the pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine, which can be seen tied to car aerials and pinned to school children travelling home on the metro.

In the loos in the recently opened Sanctions Bar, customers get to use toilet paper decorated with $100 bills or images of Barack Obama's head. The walls are covered with cartoons that underline the fundamental stupidity of the US president and Putin's relative wisdom. Bills are presented inside matryoshka wooden dolls decorated with Putin's face, the place is lit by a chandelier made of bank notes (dollars and euros at the bottom, roubles at the top) and the menu prides itself on using only Russian ingredients. Evgeny Belkin, the restaurant's art director, who helped to come up with the theme, explains that the idea was partly a joke, but that some customers come because they want to show their annoyance at the western imposition of sanctions.

For most this new patriotism is welcome, but one woman, who is not a Putin supporter, tells me she is devoting a lot of time to the lengthy process of applying for Israeli citizenship, because she is anxious that her young daughter will come under pressure to conform to this new spirit of nationalism at school. "I grew up during an era when you could say one thing at home, but needed to be careful to say something else at school. Why would I want to put her through that?"

'We swapped our values for Snickers and Coca-Cola'

Alisa Krylova, a former Mrs Russia and Mrs Globe, achieved a certain notoriety in March when she was interviewed laughing off the significance of sanctions and the roubles' collapse, explaining that she had merely been forced to cut down on European ski trips and postpone plans to upgrade to a new Mercedes. She didn't need to worry about the blockade on western cheeses, she said, because she stocked up on her favourites during regular trips to Paris.

Conscious of the danger of sounding obnoxious and out of touch with the rest of Russia, she is more considered when we meet in her spacious flat in a new glass apartment complex, located above the orchid-festooned Italian restaurant Mario (which is listed, with relish, in guidebooks as one of Moscow's five most expensive places to eat). To reach her apartment, you have to pass through two layers of security: a videophone, operated by security guards behind the thick metal gate that separates the block from the street, and beyond it, a second security guard in the entrance hall before you can travel up to the flat. A child-sized silver Bentley is parked in the lobby next to a pram, by the lift.

Krylova has imposed her own kind of austerity measures on family life: holidays have been taken in Russia. "Of course I haven't travelled with the children for a holiday abroad. Why would I pay several times over the odds just to go abroad? I can't see the point," she says. "I've become very aware of how much everything costs now and how much I am prepared to pay for everything. I'm conscious of the rouble's collapse, but I can't say I've been tremendously worried by it. I haven't felt any panic."

She points out that as a result of people from her circle shying away from overpriced European brands, there has been an explosion in the popularity of Russian designers. "Now we are supporting our own designers - that's a positive result," she says, while acknowledging that her own neon pink shirt is made by the Parisian label Balmain.

Krylova's daughters, five and 11, zoom in and out of the sitting room, leaning over the sofa to whisper to their mother, desperate to pick bits of icing off the enormous and unusual cake she has had made for her husband's birthday - decorated with a large marzipan model of her, instantly recognisable with flowing blonde hair and cheekbones, perched on the edge of the cake, next to a winged angel. She is polite and hospitable, offering tea in porcelain cups, and a saucer of strawberry jam, made by her grandmother, to eat with a teaspoon. Huge oil paintings of her in sleeveless ball gowns hang on the walls, painted to celebrate her victory at the Mrs Russia awards in 2010 and the Mrs Globe awards in 2011.

Krylova, 32, studied economics at university before becoming a model, and her sense of perspective on the crisis allows her to shrug off the mild privations she is currently experiencing. Her family's eating habits have changed but barely in a way she feels able to complain about. "We ate French fish before and now we eat Tunisian fish ... and so what?" She does, though, lament the disappearance of some of her favourite Moscow shops, particularly the jewellery and diamond shop Graf, which recently shut the branch nearest her house: "A lot of shops have closed, because their rents were pegged to the dollar and have become unaffordable."

Beyond these minor inconveniences, Krylova is frustrated by the sanctions and counter-sanctions because of the damage they have wrought on economic ties built up by Russia and the west over the past two decades. "All the work we have done over years and years, has been wasted overnight - what's it all for?"

Yet she fully supports Putin's actions both in reclaiming Crimea and in his response to the imposition of western sanctions. The events of the past 18 months have made her feel more patriotic and loyal to the president.

"It is good that we have such an intelligent, wise man, a worthy leader at the head of our country. As a Russian citizen, I'm very proud that finally we have a leader capable of governing this huge country," she says. "Perhaps his methods appear rather harsh to some people, but people who understand a bit about politics and the economy and history, will understand that his actions are quite well thought through and are exactly what we need at the moment. Vladimir Vladimirovich has done so much positive for our country."

She welcomes the new emphasis Putin has put on promoting patriotism in Russia. Her older daughter spent a month at school preparing for the 70th anniversary of the end of the second world war, and the triumph over fascism - learning poems, writing essays and preparing a show for parents. "We lived through an era when all our most important values were swapped for Snickers and Coca-Cola. This new focus on the preservation of our history is very important."

Krylova says she knows people on the list of named individuals who have been banned from travelling and subject to asset freezes. She admits it had been a very difficult period for them, and for anyone trying to do business in Russia - she herself has seen a 30% drop in the modelling work offered over the past year because of the crisis, but is trying to see a positive in this too. She plans to branch out from modelling by setting up a personal training centre: "I'm going to teach people how to be a supermodel, how to be a successful woman, mother and wife."

'The country has become more xenophobic since Crimea'

Evgeny, 68, a retired translator and Elena, 67, a retired bio-chemist agree readily to be interviewed in their central Moscow flat about how their lives have changed in the wake of the Ukraine crisis, the recession and sanctions, but they quickly decided they do not want their full names to be published and that they would rather not be photographed. Evgeny's explanation of why he prefers to remain anonymous reveals how swiftly attitudes are changing in Moscow.

"Maybe five years ago, I wouldn't have minded naming myself, but people have become more xenophobic since the hysteria around Crimea. The country has become a more isolated place; people are very sceptical of foreigners. We are old enough to have experienced many of the pleasures of the Soviet era - when there was punishment for contact with foreigners, suspicion and displeasure," he said.

He remembers being telephoned from America by a US journalist friend in the 1980s. "I was contacted by the KGB. I had to go in for a meeting to be asked: why do you know her, how did you meet her, who introduced you? That suspicion is returning - not to the same extent, but I feel it. I think there are people who monitor the western press, who are watching what people say. I don't know how diligently, but they do monitor it."

Both Evgeny and Elena opposed the annexation of Crimea, and have stopped talking to some former friends who they feel have become excessively nationalistic in their response to the situation in Ukraine.

"There has been a very sharp division of people in terms of their attitude to the Crimea. For a while, people were talking about it all the time and we began to mix with fewer people as a result. Mostly I restrain myself from talking about it. I never initiate this kind of conversation. I try to be as neutral as possible. But some of those who hold more xenophobic views are prone to be a bit more aggressive. There are a couple of friends I know not to speak to about this, and there's another couple I haven't seen for almost year - because their views are so different, I don't want to hear them. In any case, we talk about it less now than a year ago. It has started being part of our life."

Both of them say they are much more cautious about how they talk about politics now, and would be careful not to express hostility towards Putin in public. "I definitely wouldn't speak about Putin in public. I wouldn't want to provoke any confrontation. When you lived in the Soviet Union, you would tread very carefully; you would always be looking for signs that this was a person you could share opinions with - it was a subtle thing; you'd know from a couple of words, or a couple of grimaces. But if someone else brought the subject up, you would hold your tongue. It's not dangerous like that now, it's just that it has the potential to be very unpleasant."

Evgeny recoils at the heightened patriotism on display in Moscow: "A patriot now is not someone who loves their country. It means you support the government, you support xenophobia, that you are opposed to the west, opposed to liberal thinking. It has taken on a very particular new meaning." But he finds it hard to envisage a post-Putin era: "I'm afraid I can't even imagine it. He has been here 15 years - how can you imagine life without him?"

From their sunny balcony, the pair point out how radically the skyline around their apartment has changed in the past decade. Two looming, glass-panelled buildings have arrived, obscuring smaller, older landmarks; they are not enthusiastic about the architecture, but try to focus their attention instead on the carnations they are growing in the window box. Elena bought them in Europe's biggest new shopping mall, Aviapark - a massive new venture that opened in north Moscow last November with a 70ft-high aquarium, and which is due to have 500 shops and 80 restaurants. Its launch coincided with the rouble's collapse, and many of the planned shops are still empty.

With their combined state pensions coming to around 30,000 roubles a month (£385), Elena and Evgeny, like most Moscow shoppers, have become more cautious in their shopping and have felt the impact of the sanctions and the devalued rouble. Products that they used to buy routinely have become luxuries.

"I used to buy a bottle of wine a week; now perhaps it's more like once a month," Evgeny says. "And, absurd as it sounds, I miss the cheeses. In Soviet Russia there were no specialist cheeses, there was really just one type. It wasn't even really cheese - something similar to cheese, but not quite cheese - so when you got these cheeses in the 1990s, when people tried them ... cheese came to symbolise the range of things you could have in a post-Soviet state.

"Even poorer people could choose between five and 10 imported varieties and it was quite affordable," Evgeny adds, laughing about the amount of attention cheese consumption has attracted since sanctions were introduced. "I really love mature cheese, camembert, brie. You can still find them in some shops, but the prices are exorbitant."

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 #3
The National Interest
June 16, 2015
Why Arming Ukraine Is a Really Bad Idea
Advocates of arming Ukraine against Russia have failed to provide convincing arguments for why their course of action will produce the results they want, rather than something worse...
By Paul J. Saunders
Paul J. Saunders is executive director of The Center for the National Interest and associate publisher of The National Interest. He served in the U.S. State Department from 2003 to 2005. Follow him on Twitter:@1796farewell.

Renewed fighting in Ukraine has in turn renewed calls to arm Ukraine, including in the United States Congress. Yet there is an enormous and largely unacknowledged flaw in the argument to provide the Kiev government with lethal weapons.

Advocates of this approach assert that sending anti-tank missiles, mortars and other arms to Ukraine will help Ukrainian forces to kill more of the Russian troops fighting alongside separatist forces in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine. Since Russian president Vladimir Putin and other senior officials have repeatedly denied that Russian soldiers are in the country, they say, he must be trying to hide Moscow's involvement from the Russian people because he fears political opposition from soldiers' mothers (a significant political constraint during the first war in Chechnya, not to mention in Afghanistan a decade earlier) and others. If we can only kill enough of Putin's troops, they continue, Putin will no longer be able to conceal the scale of Russia's engagement in the conflict and will face public pressure to limit it or even to withdraw.

While this might appear logical on its face, this line of thinking ignores a fundamental reality of the politics of war-fighting that Americans should well understand from their own experiences: how many soldiers are dying in combat is considerably less important than why they are doing it.

Think about this. Most Americans supported the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq when the goals were to oust the Taliban in the former case, and to prevent Iraq from using (mostly nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and to oust Saddam Hussein in the latter. Had those initial goals taken longer to achieve, and had U.S. troops discovered significant WMD stockpiles following some of their early victories in Iraq, the American people may well have tolerated higher casualties to achieve these objectives. Conversely, rising casualties alone did not drive opposition to these wars; Americans turned against them because of the combination of the casualties with the evolution of U.S. aims in each country toward costly and open-ended nation building that few supported, particularly after the 2008 financial crisis.

Americans easily grasp these "facts of life" in their own country. Thus, they-and their elected (in Congress) and self-appointed (in the media) representatives-expect presidents who want to go to war or continue or escalate in lasting conflicts to make a clear and compelling case for doing so. Presidents, in turn, seek to make the most powerful arguments they can and to sell them in major speeches, conversations and briefings with Congressional leaders, and interviews.

When the U.S. government played a greater role in American media during World War II, Washington went so far as to produce a series of propaganda films to explain "why we fight," among other steps.

How does this relate to Russia's intervention in Ukraine? The answer is simple. If the United States arms Ukraine-and announces that the policy is an explicit effort to kill more Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine-its impact on Russian public opinion is likely to be the opposite of what advocates say they intend. Indeed, it could transform the war there from a popular but essentially optional effort to help separatist forces and civilians in eastern Ukraine into a necessary conflict against a hostile American proxy. At the same time, for most Russians, it will probably confirm their government's overheated rhetoric about U.S. ambitions in Ukraine and alleged American plans to force Russia to its knees or overthrow its government. Taken together, these shifts might increase Russians' tolerance of battlefield deaths and injuries rather more rapidly than new U.S. arms will (or can) increase Russian casualties.

Moreover, the idea that more Russian deaths in Ukraine will "expose" Moscow's role in the fighting is ludicrous. While Vladimir Putin and others may deny that Russian troops are in Ukraine in official meetings and statements, commentators on government-controlled television channels discuss Russia's assistance to the separatists extensively. If the Kremlin were truly trying to conceal its participation, surely the Russian government would start by limiting this. On the contrary, Moscow's denials are a diplomatic position in communicating with foreign audiences-a polite fiction-and are widely understood as such inside the country.

From this perspective, forcing Russia to publicly acknowledge its support for the separatists may not be such a good idea, especially if Washington pursues this in tandem with an effort to increase Russian casualties. In that environment, Vladimir Putin may find it not only politically easier, but even politically important to escalate Russia's intervention. In fact, Russia's government could use American arms supplies to justify cross-border airstrikes and/or much larger ground deployments. Kiev is in a poor position to defend itself in anything that approaches a real war with Russia.

Ending Russia's military involvement in Ukraine should be an important objective of U.S. policy and is an essential first step in stabilizing the country and facilitating political and economic reforms there. Moreover, the longer the conflict continues, the greater the risks to Ukraine's fragile political order and to wider U.S. security aims in Europe. Nevertheless, advocates of lethal arms supplies to Ukraine have not yet met the first requirement of policy making-demonstrating with reasonable confidence that their proposed course of action will produce the results they want and expect, rather than something worse. Taking into account Washington's frequent and unpleasant encounters with the unintended consequences of its choices over the last two decades, Americans should insist on a much stronger case.

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#4
www.rt.com
June 16, 2015
Putin: 40+ ICBMs targeted for 2015 nuclear force boost

Over 40 intercontinental ballistic missiles will be delivered to Russia's strategic forces in 2015, President Vladimir Putin announced at the opening ceremony of the Army-2015 Expo, an international military forum held near Moscow.

"This year, our nuclear forces are going to get more than 40 intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of penetrating all existing, even the most advanced missile defenses," the Russian president said, adding that the state would persist in paying specific attention to realization of a massive military rearmament program and modernization of the defense industry, Putin said.

Vladimir Putin also said that tests of a new radar station capable of beyond-the-horizon aerial target detection will start soon in Russia. The system will be directed westward. A similar radar station is also due to be deployed eastward. And in April a new radar station started operations in the city of Armavir, in southern Russia.

Meanwhile, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov says that NATO is provoking Russia into an arms race. Antonov's statement was made referring to US plans to put its F-22 jets in Eastern Europe.

"I believe the statement must be looked at together with other similar statements, which have recently been numerous," the deputy defense minister said. "A few days ago, reports started to turn up about certain [American] missiles put in a certain location and about certain ammunition depots in Eastern European countries and the Baltic. It looks like our colleagues from NATO member states are pushing us into an arms race," he said.

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 #5
Bloomberg
June 15, 2015
Why Russia Still Attracts Immigrants
By Leonid Bershidsky

Russia isn't often thought of as a country of immigration. Yet the country's enormous territory and shrinking indigenous population invite a striking number of immigrants: Last year, despite the collapse of  oil prices and the Ukraine crisis, Russia was the biggest originator of migrant workers' remittances in Europe.

When President Barack Obama said in an interview last year that "immigrants aren't rushing to Moscow in search of opportunity," commentators with a less  gloomy view, and perhaps a bit more knowledge, rushed to point out that, according to a 2013 United Nations report, Russia had the world's second biggest migrant population after the U.S. I wouldn't put much stock in that statement, and not just because the U.S., with more than twice Russia's population, had four times as many immigrants. The UN report also showed Russia's migrant stock barely increased from 1990 to 2013, even though the collapse of the Soviet Union caused many ethnic Russians to leave breakaway republics.

As a Muscovite, I was accustomed to workers from Tajikistan cleaning my yard and Uzbek cooks and waiters in restaurants. Nannies were from Ukraine and Moldova. The contractor who renovated my mom's apartment was from Georgia. They were all there looking for opportunity, as the remittance flows show:

The 2014 data from the International Fund for Agricultural Development are stunning in two respects. First, Russia ranks highest, with $20.7 billion in remittances, even though its per capita gross domestic product is less than those of other nations. The U.K., which recorded $17.1 billion in remittances, has per capita GDP that is almost 50 percent higher. The second surprise is that last year's economic woes didn't strip Russia of its leadership. Anecdotal evidence suggested that many immigrants from Central Asia and the poorer ex-Soviet nations in Europe and the Caucasus have been going home, but many evidently stuck around. In November 2014, the latest month for which official data are available -- and when the Russian ruble began its freefall -- net immigration, at 23,754 people, was higher than the 2013 monthly average.

So Russia still needs immigrants. And it will need more of them. In the first quarter of this year, the natural decline of Russia's population (the difference between the number of deaths and births) reached 34,584 people, 13 percent more than in the first three months of 2014. There simply aren't enough Russians to do the mostly menial jobs that migrants do.

Another reason why the remittances from Russia are so high is that its strong tech sector has driven down the cost of transfers. The average cost of sending money home was 7.3 percent last year in Europe's wealthier nations, according to IFAD. In Russia, it was just 2.4 percent.

Russia's immigrant laborers often have to put up with awful living and working conditions, as well as racism. The bribe-extorting bureaucracy treats them poorly, and even opponents of President Vladimir Putin such as anti-corruption crusader Alexei Navalny often take anti-immigrant positions. Yet the abundance of low-paid work, the cheapness and ease of sending money home, large diasporas and the widespread knowledge of Russian in the former Soviet nations make Russia attractive. Even the pervasive corruption plays a role: There are more ways to avoid deportation than there would be in any Western European country.

Of course, many of the migrants tend to come and go. And in general, they aren't likely to be the doctors, programmers and other white-collar workers who are welcomed to the U.S. and developed Europe. Still, their efforts help keep their home countries afloat. Ukraine has 4.4 million migrant workers in the rest of Europe, most of them in Russia, according to IFAD. It receives $7.6 billion a year in remittances from them. Belarus, Moldova, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are all dependent on the money their citizens send home from Russia.

It's in Western Europe's interest to keep it this way. If Russia's economy goes into a tailspin and the migrant workers begin to face unbearable hardship, they will look for opportunity elsewhere. For some Central Asian Muslims, this will mean the Middle East; for the people of Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and the Caucasus, the European Union is likely to be the new destination.

 #6
www.thedailybeast.com
June 15, 2015
Confessions of Moscow's Last Independent Radio Newsman
In an exclusive interview, the courageous editor in chief of Echo of Moscow radio talks about his complex relations with Putin, and the scandal that's shaken his station.
By Anna Nemtsova

MOSCOW - Not many in Russia nowadays could give you a revealing look inside the head of Russian President Vladimir Putin, but Alexei Venediktov has been there. Over the last 15 years, the editor in chief of the independent radio station Echo of Moscow has spent many hours chatting, arguing, and philosophizing with the Russian president.

As Venediktov and I talked the other day in his Moscow office, he said there was one particular conversation with Putin that stuck in his mind. It lasted for two and a half hours back in 2000. Putin had just come back from Vidyayevo in the Arctic Circle, while Russia was still in mourning over the accidental sinking of the nuclear submarine Kursk with 118 crewmen on board.

"He kept me for a philosophical discussion-what else could two non-stupid men of the same age do but talk philosophy," said Venediktov. One was a product of the KGB, the other a key figure in the struggle for freedom of speech, and Venediktov asked Putin how he planned to deal with his critics and the opposition.

"Putin told me that he saw two kinds of opponents: betrayers and enemies." Defining and labeling opponents was always the most crucial part of Putin's world view, Venediktov said.

Many radio news reporters are unseen faces, but Venediktov, with his cloud of curly gray hair and his checked shirts, is well-known to the public, and on this day his face was unusually sad. He is heartbroken by the political course Russia has taken under Putin, and also by a series of damaging scandals that have shaken Echo to its foundations.

To Putin, "enemies" are those who fight him openly. "Sometimes he makes peace with them, draws borders, then again begins the war. Putin defined 'betrayers' as those who first pretended they were his friends and as soon as he grew weak stabbed him in his back. 'No mercy to betrayers,' he told me," the editor said. And when Venediktov wondered how Putin defined him, he was told that by Putin's lights he was an enemy. "True," said Venediktov. "I always played against Putin openly and honestly. That was probably why Echo has still survived."

But the game in Russia has gotten very rough for people perceived by Putin or his allies as their enemies. Venediktov has lived under a constant threat of assassination. Since Jan. 9, he has doubled the number of his bodyguards. "Might not save me, but I feel a bit more confident," he told me. "Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov considers me an enemy of Islam and friend of Charlie Hebdo; Kadyrov promised there would be somebody to punish me, and a month and a half later some people killed [political opposition leader] Boris Nemtsov, whom Kadyrov had threatened, too, in the same fashion."

About a million Muscovites and many more across the country love to listen to Echo and read its website. The Echo community has fretted every time their radio station has been on the verge of getting killed.

But this time it is not only the Kremlin threatening Russia's only independent radio station, the danger also has come from within. Echo was shaken by series of noisy scandals that seemed all the more disgraceful because it is such a respected institution. One after another the radio's longtime guest authors and speakers, including former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and novelist Boris Akunin, have chosen to boycott Venediktov and his radio station.

The apple of discord is a 23-year old blond woman, Lesya Ryabtseva, Venediktov's personal assistant, who has shown herself capable of extraordinary boorishness and vulgarity in a series of vulgar blog posts that aggressively target Russia's key opposition leaders. On Echo's website, she has called them "spineless jerks who lie to themselves." Fans of the station who've been appalled by her behavior note that she lacks expertise and authority, she confuses facts, uses curse words, and publicly insults Echo's oldest guests and Venediktov personally.

You'd think those would be firing offenses. But no. To the surprise of all his friends, Venediktov did not dismiss his personal assistant, even after Echo's founder, Sergei Korzun, quit his job at the station, saying that Ryabtseva was "dangerous for the mental health" of Echo and its audience. For her part, as if to further humiliate her boss, she has even suggested that sex played a role in his decision making.

One of the most popular of Echo's guest speakers, satirist Victor Shenderovich, tells The Daily Beast, "Venediktov is either madly in love, which I don't believe; or he deliberately decided to damage Echo by turning it into a stinking closet, so we feel disgusted with that rubbish and all quit."

I asked Venediktov point blank: "Is Ryabtseva more important for you than Echo?"

"No," he said, "this is not a choice between Ryabtseva or anybody else and Echo of Moscow but a choice of our basic principles: Echo gives voice to everybody, including those who represent the majority and also including radicals," and then he added, "It's me who suffered most of all from Ryabtseva's comments."

Echo of Moscow should turn 25 year old this summer. For any celebrity or political leader, Echo's studios, cluttered with papers and old furniture, have been a must-stop on a visit in Moscow.  (A joke about Bill Clinton and Venediktov kicking each other under the table during last week's live show has already become a part of Echo's history.) Venediktov has interviewed U.S. Secretaries of State Hilary Clinton, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice, as well as Richard Gere and Liza Minnelli, Angela Merkel, Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schröder, and many more famous figures.

And then, again and again, Echo's boss spoke with Putin, Putin's friends and team members, who today condemned everybody who has a different opinion, as non-patriots, or betrayers, or enemies.

"Many out there are keen on warming up by the fire of Putin's fury," Venediktov said, considering the idea with a grin. He is proud of Echo's journalism, of broadcasting voices from the higher floors of mostly opaque Kremlin hierarchy. Echo's voices continue to criticize the Kremlin for the war in Ukraine, for anti-Western propaganda, for persecuting the opposition.

"Many politicians claim that Echo of Moscow is not behaving," said Venediktov. "They accuse us of being U.S. State Department's radio, enemy radio. They give me all sorts of names a Gasprom, a jihadi or an Assad agent-OK, these are all their own difficulties," Venediktov said looking though the window at the cityscape of the Russian capital.

Venediktov said he has told Putin face to face about the most damaging side of his politics. "I told Putin that he burned to death all competition, all alternative opinions in all spheres-now everything, including aggressive lies and propaganda about Ukraine is the consequence. The competition's been destroyed when it comes to decisions on the economy, in the political field, in opposition and in ideology-as a result obscurantism took over in all decisions."

Venediktov said he felt heartbroken seeing how isolated Russia has become. And after Putin, he warns, it could be even worse. "If instead of Putin some really bloodthirsty creature comes to power-and I am sure that creature is waiting in Putinist disguise right now-the institutions are ready for Stalinization."

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 Russians' Social Bonds Increasing, Giving Them Resource for Protest, Schulmann Says
Paul Goble

Staunton, June 16 - Social networks among Russians have grown and deepened over the last two years, according to a poll conducted by the Russian Academy of Economics and State Service, thus creating the basis for the rise of civil society and more protests by making Russians less dependent on the state.

In a commentary on this 6,000-person poll in "Vedomosti" yesterday, Ekaterina Schulmann of that academy says that this, not the responses to explicitly political questions, is the survey's most important finding. (For the poll, see ranepa.ru/about-the-academy/consulting-services/evrobarometr.html; for her analysis, vedomosti.ru/opinion/articles/2015/06/16/596463-lyudi-stanovyatsya-blizhe).

"The least valuable part of the research," she says, "is its political block.  Much more important is that portion devoted to how people assess their own lives and what they would like to change.  And within that, the most significant concerns changes in "social capital" with "the growth of so-called strong and weak social ties."

Put in simplest terms, Schulmann says, "'strong ties'" are defined by the researches as those which exist between people who could ask each other for a loan or take a vacation together, while "'weak'" ones are those in which the participants feel free to ask for a recommendation for a job or for a child in school.

It is of course "difficult to say how realistically citizens asses the strength of their ties and their extent and how closely their ideas correspond to reality."  But "what is important is something else: in comparison with the result of 2012," respondents say that now, "the number of their strong social links has doubled, and the number of weak ones gone up by 1.5 times."

"The importance of this fact for social and economic self-assessment of people is enormous," Schulmann says. The study's authors seek to link this trend with what they call "'political optimism,'" but in fact, "there is nothing political in this optimism" and it does not speak to public attitudes toward the leadership of the country.

"People who feel themselves part of a social network think that they can get by without the state: their feeling of subjective well-being is growing not because they are well led but because they have become more confident in themselves," Schulmann continues. And that is explained by "a different correlation."

That is the one "between the growth in the number of ties and the reduction of trust in government institutions," and consequently, the reason for such a rapid growth in the number of social ties "is not state policy" which in fact has "destroyed any chance for legal political and social activity."  Instead, it lies elsewhere.

Specifically, it is a product of the joint impact of relative material well-being over the last decade "and the corresponding growth of labor and residential mobility and new information technologies" like mobile phones, Skype and online social networks, according to the Moscow scholar.

"It is difficult to overrate the importance of this trend," she says, because it shows that the social atomization of Soviet times is being overcome. "Post-Soviet citizens like graduates of children's homes and jails knew a lot which an individual shouldn't know," but they lacked "the basic habits of social life which are based not on a struggle of all against all ... but on cooperation and the exchange of services and trust."

Such a growth in horizontal ties provides "the substrate out of which grows civil society" rather than as some imagine from "'correct values' or democratic convictions."  Those are "secondary," she says.

And here lies a paradox, Schulmann argues, that "all political regimes of a semi-authoritarian type encounter."  Such feelings of community "make people at one and the same time braver and happier" and that means they are pleased with much that is happening but are ready and able to protest against what they don't like.

Many Russians to this day accept the "vulgarized Marxist myth" that "only 'people driven to despair' protest.  In fact, for protest, one needs resources: the starving do not take part in political life but rather look for food." With the growth of ties, Russians are acquiring some of the resources needed to protest.

But there is a problem: "the political regime does not foresee any legal mechanisms of civic activity: neither protest not expressions of loyalty. Therefore, it suppresses the first and imitates the second even though it could incorporate both one and the other if it were a little more open and democratic."

How will the Kremlin respond? Schulmann asks rhetorically, suggesting that "Each hybrid seeks its own methods, but they reduce nonetheless to two [opposing] strategies: resist and collapse or adapt and democratize."

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#8
Sputnik
June 15, 2015
Russian Central Bank Forecasts Unemployment to Reach 6.5% by End of 2015

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - The Central Bank of Russia forecasts unemployment in the country to grow from the current 5.6 percent to 6.5 percent by the end of 2015, the bank's head Elvira Nabiullina said Monday.

"Amid economic recession, there has been a certain increase in unemployment, which, seasonally adjusted, currently stands at 5.6 percent," Nabiullina told reporters.

"The continuing drop in demand will lead to higher unemployment, which we estimate will rise to 6.5 percent by the end of the year," she added.

According to the Central Bank head, a gradual recovery of economic activity will lead to a fall in unemployment, which is set to again reach about 5.6-5.8 percent in 2018.

Russia's GDP is expected to grow at 1.7-2.4 percent in 2017-2018, head of the Bank of Russia said.

"Russia's GDP growth will increase in 2017-2018, but will stay at a moderate level at about 1.7-2.4 percent," Nabiullina said at a news conference in Moscow.

According to a press release issued by the Central Bank earlier on Monday, the Russian economy is expected to contract by 3.2 percent in 2015.

Annual inflation in Russia will stand at 11 percent in December 2015 and may slow down to a target level of 4 percent in 2017, Elvira Nabiullina said.

"According to our updated estimates, the annual inflation rate will be around 11 percent in December 2015. A year from now, in June 2016, inflation will decline to less than 7 percent per annum, and come close to the target level of 4 percent in 2017," Nabiullina told reporters.

The Central Bank head noted that Russia's ban on certain food imports from the European Union no longer affects inflation in the country.

The current recession in Russia has not yet reached its peak, head of the Nabiullina said.

"Unlike the peak of inflation, the bottom of recession, in our opinion, has not yet been passed," Nabiullina told reporters.

The net capital outflow in Russia may slow down from $90 billion in 2015 to 55-65 billion in 2018, Nabiullina, said.

"We are expecting the financial sanctions against Russia to remain in place [in the near future]. Payments on foreign debts during this period will constitute the bulk of the capital outflow," Nabiullina said.

"It [the capital outflow] will gradually reduce from $90 billion to about $55-65 billion during 2015-2018, depending on the scenario," she added.

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 #9
Moscow Times
June 16, 2015
Russia Embraces Yuan in Move Against U.S. Dollar Hegemony
By Peter Hobson

Russian financial authorities, energy companies and state-controlled banks are stepping up their use of China's yuan currency as Western sanctions spur diversification away from the U.S. dollar.

In recent weeks, major Russian institutions have lined up to announce moves to use the yuan, which will likely emerge as the key challenger to global dollar supremacy this century.

The dollar's status as the world's reserve currency has amplified the impact of U.S. sanctions imposed last year over Moscow's actions in Ukraine by making financial institutions nervous of violating U.S. rules, prodding Russia to embrace other currencies.

Two state energy companies, gas producer Gazprom and its oil arm Gazprom Neft, said they would use more Chinese currency in trade, while Russia's largest bank, Sberbank, has also promoted the use of the yuan. The Russian Central Bank said it was working to create a new funding instrument in yuan, and the Finance Ministry said it was considering issuing debt in the currency.

The flurry of announcements came as Washington's reach was dramatically illustrated by an anti-corruption swoop on a luxury hotel in Switzerland that bagged several senior figures at FIFA, the global football association, earlier this month. Washington, which requested the arrests, said the suspects' use of the U.S. financial system gave investigators license to act, but the raid earned a rebuke from Putin, who denounced it as "yet another blatant attempt [by the U.S.] to extend its jurisdiction to other states."

"If anything happened, it did not happen on U.S. territory and the United States has nothing to do with it," Putin said.

Moscow has looked to China for trade and investment since sanctions and Russian counter-sanctions last year curbed Russia-West trade flows. China is already Russia's second-largest trading partner after the European Union, with a trade turnover of more than $95 billion in 2014, news agency TASS reported citing Chinese customs data.

Yet the omnipresence of the dollar in global finance has meant that even non-Western financial institutions have been wary of lending in Russia.

A way around that problem is increased use of local currencies. State-controlled Gazprom Neft, Russia's third-largest oil producer, led the pack. The company said this month it had begun settling shipments of oil to China in yuan and using the bulk of the revenue to source equipment in China.

Gazprom Neft said it would export 2.7 million tons of oil to Asia this year, up from 1 million tons in 2014.

Alexei Miller, head of gas company Gazprom, which owns Gazprom Neft and signed a $400 billion long-term supply deal with China last year, said soon afterward in an interview on television station Rossia-24 that Gazprom was negotiating with China to use yuan and rubles for gas deliveries via a planned pipeline in Western Siberia.

Gazprom Neft's swift embrace of the yuan was likely spurred by sanctions, not profits, said Alexei Devyatov, chief economist at UralSib Capital. Lacking the dollar's convertibility, the yuan is a less convenient currency for the company, he said.

"It will have caused certain losses," Devyatov said.

Sidestepping the dollar also lets companies avoid the time-consuming risk checks put in place by Western institutions following the imposition of sanctions.

"Western banks work slower, with more restrictions, and it becomes simpler to move to the currency in which trade is being done," said Vladimir Pantyushin, senior strategist at investment bank Sberbank CIB.

Also this month the first deputy governor of Russia's Central Bank, Ksenia Yudayeva, said the regulator was in talks with banks over a new funding instrument in China's yuan currency.

"Talks with banks are going on, a discussion about which concrete instrument there will be. We have sent them proposals, now their responses have arrived. We will discuss the matter further," Yudayeva said.

The Central Bank last year opened a 150 billion yuan ($24 billion) swap line, but has so far not made use of it.

Sberbank on June 5 said it had issued its first yuan-denominated promissory notes as part of agreement with the Export-Import Bank of China to finance a pharmaceuticals import contract worth more than 29 million yuan ($4.7 million). Sberbank said in a press release that increased cooperation with the Chinese bank "expands Sberbank's possibilities to finance clients' foreign trade with Chinese counterparties."

The Finance Ministry meanwhile said it was studying possible debt issues in yuan.

"In general, study of the Chinese market's opportunities is under way," news agency RIA Novosti quoted Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Storchak as saying earlier this month.

Yet it will take decades for the yuan to circulate on the scale of the euro, and even longer to challenge the dollar, which has the advantage of scale, said Sberbank CIB's Pantyushin.

"It could rival the euro, but I doubt it on the dollar," he said.

Material from Reuters was included in this article.

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 #10
Moskovskiy Komsomolets
June 9, 2015
Russia's economy is failing - expert
Vladislav Inozemtsev, We will live like under Brezhnev's rule - and everything will end in more or less same way

At the end of spring several prominent Russian officials all stated that the crisis that had shaken the country at the end of 2014 had finished and we could expect the restoration of economic growth in the very near future, and afterwards only success and prosperity. As often happens in our country, almost immediately after these declarations the statistical services issued data on the deepening of the economic recession in April by comparison with the first quarter. So what should be believed: figures or words, facts or wishes? To answer this question I would advise focusing on two features that are characteristic of our economic problems.

The first relates to how this crisis began and how it is developing.

I will not even talk about the fact that the majority of crises in large countries (from the Great Depression in America to the Asian collapse of 1997-98) have been the consequence of a big (and mostly lengthy) boom. This can also be seen in Russia - albeit with certain peculiarities, but on the whole it is quite distinct. Thus, the 1998 crisis erupted after the economy posted its first growth in post-Soviet history in 1997 (of 1.4 per cent, but if you take into account that the average annual rate of decline in gross product in 1992-96 reached 9.4 per cent, then this can be considered an unprecedented ascent). Stock exchange indices also in 1997 reached figures to which they did not later return for almost six years. A decade later, in 2008, the situation looked much more optimistic: in the previous five years, average growth in GDP had been 7.5 per cent, while the stock markets were posting record after record. In both cases the crises could have been seen as the natural growing pains inherent in the market economy, and the fact that they coincided with periods when oil prices collapsed could be considered the same kind of coincidence as, for example, the involvement of representatives of one of the constituent parts of our federation in the majority of high-profile crimes committed in the country.

However, the current crisis looks quite different. In 2012-14 the economy was not gathering momentum but was showing a steady fall in pace, "achieved" by populist decisions, increasing taxes, and the inordinate appetites of the thieving security agencies. During the last quarter of President Dmitriy Medvedev's presidency, annual growth remained at 4.9 per cent, but at the end of the whole of 2012 it had fallen to 3.4 per cent, comprising 1.3 per cent in 2013, and 0.6 per cent in 2014.

Today, seven years after the peak figures for the stock indexes in May 2008, the main index of investment attractiveness - the RTS index - is at a level of 40 per cent of the previous record, while seven years after the 1998 crisis it exceeded the previous highs 1.6-1.7 times. We are creeping into a new crisis, without even having left the previous one yet - as Medvedev rightly said recently. The deepening of the slump from minus 1.6 per cent in January to 3.3 per cent in March and 4.3 per cent in April is accompanied by reassuring rhetoric and this means the formation of the habit of living in crisis conditions, which looks like an extremely alarming signal: essentially, political stability gives rise to economic stability - but at best being created at a pace described by the term "close to zero" and in the absence of any positive expectations. The longer this is perceived as the norm - and our government is de facto "promoting" just such an approach - the more difficult it will be to overcome the economic recession.

The second feature is no less significant and it concerns what economists call advance indicators or the reflection of the expectations of entrepreneurs and citizens, their ideas about the near and more long-term future.

These indicators are becoming more and sharply negative: thus, the index of expected changes in the economic situation over the short term fell to minus 18 per cent in the first quarter of 2015 against minus 14 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2014, the index of expected changes to people's personal financial position was minus 19 per cent against minus 12 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2014, and the integral consumer confidence index collapsed from minus 18 per cent to minus 32 per cent. These figures, obtained during polls (where citizens can express their subjective perception of the crisis rather than trying to reflect on the real state of affairs), are backed up by more important statistical data: the majority of the population are reducing their consumer spending by more than their real incomes are decreasing (the first fell by 6.9 per cent in the first quarter on an annual basis taking inflation into account, although the second fell by just 1.4 per cent). This means that there is no optimism in Russian society. Not to mention entrepreneurs who are demonstrating a rapid reduction in investments and removing capital from the country wholesale.

It should be stressed that these expectations of a significant section of the population, which clearly indicate a deepening of the recession, are developing in circumstances of almost total support by the same citizens for the political policies of the current Russian regime. The latter point means that the regime will be able, with relatively little pain for itself, to "change" the abundant political trust for people's willingness to resign themselves to economic difficulties - which, in turn, implies the absence of any agenda to fight the crisis. It can be assumed that while striving not to change the general system for governing the country, the Kremlin will have no difficulty in maintaining the complete stability of its position for at least eighteen months to two years, during which the depressed economic situation will just become established and the crisis will become more and more all-embracing and all-round.

In my view, there is not and there cannot be anything worse than habit in the economy as in politics. However much our leaders may persist in nihilistic rhetoric regarding any drastic changes - both economic and public life develop via revolutions. It may seem improbable but even the Great Patriotic War did not undermine the economy of the Soviet Union like the years of Brezhnev stagnation did. The exertion of the nation's forces is evidence of the expectation of a more favourable time, which they need to strive to reach. In periods of hardship - if they are regarded as temporary (and crises should be perceived like that and not in any other way) - expectations are always positive, reflecting "the will to live".

That is why the situation of everyday crisis that is developing in the Russian economy and politics today is so alarming.

Unlike many of my colleagues and opposition friends, I am convinced that the modern Russian political system is very, very stable - but it seems to me that it is this stability that will ultimately play a cruel joke on our country. What is happening in Russia today is very reminiscent of the situation in the USSR in the middle of the 1970s when the reforms in the economy came to a halt, the pace of economic growth started to slow down, and all the problems in daily life were attributed to the hostile environment and the worsening of the international situation. Like then, the population now more and more obviously perceives stagnation if not as normal then at least as an acceptable state of affairs that can be put up with - and it acts in such a way as to prevent the situation from becoming simply intolerable for as long as possible.

This can certainly be achieved - it is just that you cannot drive the stopped car at high speed subsequently: it will simply fall to pieces when it is started. By getting used to the crisis, we are thus resigning ourselves to a future catastrophe, just consoling ourselves with the fact that it will not happen tomorrow. But it probably will occur the day after tomorrow.

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 #11
Antiwar.com
June 16, 2015
Do the Russians Have a Perspective on G-7 Sanctions?
By Ivan Eland
Ivan Eland is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and author of Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty.

Recently making the news was the successful attempt by President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, at the G-7 summit in Germany, to get all seven industrialized nations to continue economic sanctions on Russia in response to its annexation of Crimea and military meddling in eastern Ukraine, as did the recent U.S.-led allied boycott of Russia's celebration of the seventieth anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany in May of 1945. Yet the seventy-first anniversary of the allied D-Day landings in Normandy in June of 1944 went off as planned.

Russia was iniquitous to have violated international law and snatched Crimea and is also wrong to be militarily stirring up an insurgency in eastern Ukraine. However, the Western media, in their usual self-righteous manner, avoid any discussion of the Russian perspective or motives for Russia's actions. Although despite my first name, I have no Russian blood and do not favor Vladimir Putin's autocracy; however I think some exploration of the Russian side of things is in order.

Ukraine has always been important for the Soviet Union and Russia because of its industry, agriculture, culture, and large Russian-speaking population. In February 2014, the Russia-friendly, democratically elected government of Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown by unelected street protesters and replaced by a Ukrainian government actively hostile to Russia. Russians believe that such street protests were instigated by the CIA to get a more Western-friendly government - a conspiracy theory not out of the realm of possibility, given the CIA's track record of overthrowing democratically elected governments and replacing them with more U.S.-friendly ones.

Salvaging what they could from an important nation in their sphere of influence (those "so yesterday" great power spheres of influence do still exist, as the U.S.-enforced Monroe Doctrine in the entire Western Hemisphere attests), the Russians took advantage of the chaos in Ukraine to snatch Crimea, a very Russophilic region transferred from Russia to Ukraine by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev only in 1954. That strategic region housed bases from which the Russian Black Sea fleet already operated. In addition, Russia continues to destabilize the eastern, more Russophilic, part of Ukraine to keep the country out of the ever-expanding NATO alliance, which the Russians regard as hostile and right on its borders.

After the Cold War had ended and the Warsaw Pact alliance had collapsed, to get then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to allow Germany to re-unify in 1990, George H.W. Bush agreed formally that NATO would not expand into what had been East Germany. Yet subsequently, the Western alliance's repeated expansion eastward right up to Russia's borders violated the spirit of that agreement. More recently, George W. Bush promised that Ukraine and Georgia, a country which in 2008 started a war with Russia, would be admitted to NATO. Yet the United States and its NATO client states haven't the faintest idea why Russia might be nervous about these developments, because they assure themselves that they are benevolent. Really?

In 1999, the U.S.-led NATO alliance violated international law and went to war with Serbia, a Russian ally in the Balkans, and dismembered the country - yanking out the province of Kosovo and making it a new country. In 2001, the U.S.-led alliance invaded Afghanistan, a country outside the European continent that NATO is supposed to be protecting. Then there was the U.S.-led coalition of the willing that again violated international law, invaded Iraq, and overthrew the dictator Saddam Hussein. In 2011, Russia agreed to a United Nations Security Council Resolution for a no-fly zone in Libya to protect opponents of dictator Muammar Gaddafi, a former Russian ally. Instead, U.S.-led NATO, acting again outside of Europe, used the resolution authorizing limited military action to overthrow Gaddafi. The Russians felt swindled.

More generally, after the Cold War ended, instead of including the loser, Russia, in the larger European realm - as the Congress of Vienna did with France in 1815 after it lost the Napoleonic Wars, leading to a century with no European-wide war - the United States followed the post-World War I model of punishing Germany, which led to World War II, by not only excluding Russia but penalizing it because NATO was expanded to its borders. The West's rubbing Russia's nose its Cold War defeat has been a major factor in the rise and success of the nationalist autocrat Vladimir Putin.

Given its long history of being invaded by the Vikings, Mongols, Swedes, French, and Nazis, the Russians are determined to have a friendly protective buffer zone in Eastern Europe. The last Nazi invasion during World War II resulted in the most titanic and fierce combat in world history, vast tracts of the Soviet Union being scorched earth, and 27 million dead - by far more than any other country in World War II. Two out of every three German divisions in that war were sent against Russian forces, and Russia inflicted almost 75 percent of German casualties during the conflict.

The Russians always felt that D-day in the West should have come earlier in the war to relieve pressure on the eastern front. They didn't believe the excuse that the vast U.S. industrial juggernaut, in its safe haven from the conflict, could not produce enough small Higgins landing boats to hit the beaches at Normandy until June of 1944. The Germans had been on the run since their loss at the Battle of Stalingrad to the Russians in late 1942 and early 1943. Although you would never know it from U.S. history books, the United States may have defeated Japan, but the Russians had already turned the tide against Nazi Germany long before the Normandy landings. Instead, prior to 1944, the Western allies had wasted time, men, and weapons invading non-strategic regions of the world, such as North Africa and the Italian peninsula, while the Russians won the war in the heart of Europe.

The prior catastrophic invasions of Russia do not excuse the Russian annexation of Crimea and destabilization of eastern Ukraine to keep the country out of NATO, but they do make Russian behavior less ominous and more understandable. Russia feels surrounded and vulnerable and thus succumbs easily to nationalist demagogues like Putin.

However, in the future, perhaps the United States will be more understanding of the relatively weak Russia's need for a geostrategic buffer zone in Eastern Europe as the more powerful China rises in East Asia, and the Americans need an ally to balance it there.

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#12
www.rt.com
June 16, 2015
Legal activists contest Putin's decree classifying military casualties in peacetime

A group of lawyers specializing in freedom of information rights are asking the Supreme Court to annul the recent presidential decree classifying all casualties suffered during special operations as state secrets.

The head of the "Team 29" group, lawyer Ivan Pavlov, told Interfax that he and his colleagues consider that the president had no right to classify the casualties suffered by Russian military forces during special operations. The activists claim that the reason is purely technical - such actions are allegedly outside presidential powers.

In late May, President Vladimir Putin signed a decree making all casualties suffered by the Russian military during special operations in peacetime state secrets.

"The thing is, access to information can be limited only by a federal law and not by a decree," Pavlov said.

Pavlov said the Supreme Court now has to register their lawsuit within the next three days and in five further days it should either officially reject it or schedule a first hearing for the case.

In earlier comments published on his Facebook page, the lawyer explained that the decree contradicts the Federal Law on State Secrets, which expressly lists all data that can be made classified, but it does not mention military casualties.

Soon after the decree was made public, Vladimir Putin's press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, commented on it, claiming that the main objective of the document was to perfect legislation. He also denied the allegations that the decree was connected with the current crisis in Ukraine. On Tuesday, Peskov commented on the news about Team 29's lawsuit, saying that Russian citizens had the right to contest all legal acts and the final decision would be made by the court.

Pavlov became famous earlier this year when he headed the defense team of Svetlana Davydova, the Russian housewife who faced charges of high treason after she called the Ukrainian embassy in 2014 and shared her suspicions that the troops from the military base near her home could be deployed to the Donetsk region. In mid-March, all charges against the woman were dropped, as court experts decided that the information she delivered to the Ukrainian Embassy contained no state secrets.

Pavlov also was the head of the NGO Freedom of Information - a major group specializing in citizens' rights. In August 2014, Russian Justice Ministry included the NGO Freedom of Information in the list of foreign agents, as it received funding from abroad and at the same time participated in political activities.

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 #13
www.opendemocracy.net
June 15, 2015
Remembering Budyonnovsk
By Svetlana Bolotnikova
Svetlana Bolotnikova is a Russian journalist and correspondent for KavPolit, an online publication specialising in political developments in the Caucasus.

I was in Budyonnovsk on 14 June 1995, when Chechen separatists raided the town and took hostages, killing 129. Twenty years later, this town in southern Russia is still known as the 'town of black shawls'.

On 14 June 1995, the small steppe town of Budyonnovsk in southern Russia (population: 60,000) became famous all over the world. But no one wants this sort of fame. At midday, the quiet provincial lives of its citizens were suddenly interrupted by the sounds of automatic gunfire and explosions.

Residents of the town were, of course, aware that there was a war raging just 300km away in Chechnya, where the Russian government was fighting irregular forces that had seized power in the former Soviet Autonomous Republic and were demanding independence. A helicopter unit was stationed just outside the town. Flights took off from there every day in support of the government's military actions. And this situation had come back to haunt them. Chechen irregulars periodically attacked bordering areas in Stavropol krai, taking livestock and prisoners ransom. But they had never ventured so deep into the neighbouring region before.

First victims

The first victims of the attack were members of the police force who had pursued (and stopped) a column of three Kamaz lorries. The passengers and drivers, who were wearing Russian military uniforms, refused to be searched. Under instructions from the interior ministry, the police escorted the lorries to the regional branch of the interior ministry.

No one would have believed that 195 fighters had left Chechnya and crossed through the entirety of Dagestan, disguised as Cargo-200 (the military euphemism for soldiers' bodies being shipped home). Later, Shamil Basayev, the leader of their detachment, spoke of the greed of Budyonnovsk police officers that considered the bribes they had been offered too low.

As the rest of the convoy entered the town, one of the lorries began to hang back. Fighters jumped out of it and shot the traffic cops who were escorting the convoy. By this time, the fake soldiers at the interior ministry building had already opened fire. The building was seized in a matter of minutes and the police officers standing in the Chechens' way were dead.

Police Chief Nikolai Lyashenko was at work at the time. He had given the order to escort the suspicious lorries and when he learned that they had dispersed, set off from his office. Suddenly he heard the explosions.

'It felt like the start of an earthquake,' Lyashenko remembers. 'The building shook. It sounded like gravel was falling on the roof. Then I heard the sounds of rocket launchers. They called me on the phone. "There's an attack on the police station!"' At the time, Lyashenko had about 10 prisoners who'd been arrested for various crimes (fighting, murder). 'We knew someone might try to free them, but we never expected a raid like that.'

Several police officers dived in to Lyashenko's office and locked the door. (Though aside from a standard issue pistol, Lyashenko kept no weapons in his office.) One of the women, Larisa Panteleyeva, had lived in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, for many years. The window in her office looked out onto the street. Seeing the faces of the attackers, Panteleyeva realised they were Chechens. Meanwhile, Lyashenko was being overwhelmed with calls from everywhere asking who these armed people were going through the town shooting innocent people.

Not a film set

Within 15 minutes, the fighters had left the police building and seized other buildings in the town centre. They now controlled the local administration, the telecommunication centre, the banks, the Young Pioneers' centre, medical facilities and the market. The Chechens were taking hostages everywhere and driving them to the main square in front of the local administration building. They killed people who refused to move.

Tatyana Fomenko, 16, was on the bus returning home from school. She assumed the gunfire and sound of helicopters were part of a military exercise for the local pilots. Tatyana remembers it like it was yesterday:  'I understood what was really happening when they started shooting at the bus. They were in green fatigues, military uniforms. About 8-10 passengers were killed. Everyone got down. I also hit the floor. The fighters started shouting at the driver to open the bus. He was in shock. He opened the door and they shot him right in the head.'

The surviving passengers were driven to the central square and placed on their knees with the other hostages.

I was 15 at the time, and I was hitching a ride into town in the vehicle behind the bus. The armed men in the car, the broken glass and finally the dead bodies convinced me that we were not, as I had first assumed, on a film set. The driver and I couldn't turn back. We were stopped by a fighter in a Lada.

We caught up with the bus whose driver had been shot. An armed man ordered me out of the car with a gesture and, together with some passengers from another car, I was taken to the main square. All the prisoners were being taken to the courtyard of the town administration building. There was a fuel tanker there and, as helicopters began to surround the town, the fighters warned us that any rescue or escape attempts would result in us being blown to bits.

Under a tree not far from us, a badly injured woman - a bank worker - was bleeding profusely. She was groaning incomprehensibly, and people were looking for a doctor among the hostages to help her.

A few hours later they lined us up and then split us into several groups. We were led to the hospital about a kilometre from the square.

Pyotr Bukarev, 14, was being treated for pneumonia at the hospital. He was one of the first to learn of the attack, but didn't take what was happening very seriously. 'I was standing in the hospital courtyard when the ambulances arrived with the wounded. I thought someone had lost their mind and run out and shot everyone. The doctors were moving the injured from the waiting room to the basement, hoping to save them. If I'd known the Chechens were coming, I'd have been home like a shot.'

My mother sent my father Vasily to find me. He was informed that everyone had been sent to the hospital. He arrived there on bicycle after work around six o'clock, assuming that he would be greeted there by Russian forces. Moving through the labyrinth of hospital doors, my father finally reached the part of the building where I was hiding

Basayev's hostages

We were placed in a ward and given mattresses. During the shooting you could take cover under the bed: but such a luxury wasn't given to everyone.

A large young man lay beneath one of them. He assumed, and rightly, that he would be the first in line to be shot. The fighters had already dealt with several pilots and police officers, including the Muslims who refused to take off their uniforms and join Basayev.

For the first few days, the television in the recreation room continued to work and we watched it nervously, following how the state channels were deceiving viewers with figures of 200-300 hostages - when we were nearly 2,000 people. At some point, the fighters, fed up with the lies, turned off both the television and the radio.

While the official version stated that the terrorists had simply wanted to carry out an attack in any city in Russia, we found out what the Chechens were demanding firsthand: the withdrawal of Russian forces from their republic. They explained this not only to Yeltsin's government, but also to us, the hostages. One young fighter wearing a black headband came over to us. He told us that, after Russian troops had killed his whole family in Chechnya, he had become a suicide bomber.

Indeed, Shamil Basayev, the commander of the unit, had been pushed to this desperate act by a personal tragedy. Around 10 days earlier, on 3 June 1995, a Russian air strike had destroyed his uncle's home in the village of Vedeno. Twenty-four of his relatives were killed, including his sister and her young children.

The inhabitants of Budyonnovsk, this small provincial town, including mothers with newborn infants, were destined to answer for these orders of the Russian military leadership. Over five days, 129 people were killed and more than 400 were injured.

After several days, our living conditions were already getting worse. The toilets and showers had stopped working. Food ran out. On the first day, we were given a bowl of soup and tea, but by the second day, it was only tea. On the third and fourth day, we were subsisting solely on air. Only on the fifth day, when the Russian government made concessions, were we given bread.

Basayev had ordered his fighters not to rape the women in the hospital. But not everyone avoided this fate.

One female doctor approached Tatyana Fomenko trying to convince her to have sex with the Chechens. 'I started to cry and asked her to tell them that I was still a child. But she said, "No, you'll go into a room, I'll give you some wine for courage and everything will be fine. I lived with a drunk for many years, had two children but I've never seen happiness. Only in this have I felt like a woman."

'They brought me a bearded Chechen. I lied to him that I had a mother who was a medic and asked to speak to her. He commanded me to "stand up and turn around." I turned around and my whole life passed before my eyes. I thought he would kill me. But then he said: "If I find out you're lying, that's the end of you." I raced off,' she remembers with a shudder.

Tanya managed to hide in a small compartment under a table in a different wing of the building. Later, the fighters came looking for 'a girl in a violet dress', but no one gave her up.

'Don't shoot!'

Pavel Bukarev remembers every day spent in the hospital - even down to the small details. 'I remember a painting. They had drawn our lake on it. There was only a small scratch on the painting but all around it was shot up. I remember my grandmother crying out in a child's voice,' he tells me.

I can picture the old woman in front of me: during the attempted storming of the building on the fourth day, she shouted 'Don't shoot!' the loudest.

Right at the beginning of the pre-dawn raid, the Chechen fighters forced the hostages to stand by the windows at gunpoint in order to forestall the plan of the Russian Special Forces to storm the building. 'Look, your own soldiers are shooting at you and we're defending you,' the terrorists said to us. And we believed them. And from behind our backs, they took up rocket launchers and fired on the Russian soldiers. I saw a man in khaki fall out of a tree like a sack.

The first raid was unsuccessful, and led to the deaths of dozens of fighters and hostages. After a short break, the shooting intensified. This was the second raid. We were again forced to the windows to face our deaths.

A fire started on our floor and we were taken to the second floor where a sea of people had formed. People bandaged from head to toe and angry terrorists scurried past. They had mined the hospital with explosives and oxygen canisters. They were preparing to blow it up. The Special Forces were ordered to withdraw.

Saving lives

This failure forced the Russian government to make concessions. The main aim of Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin was to preserve the lives of the hostages. And for this, he was later named an honorary citizen of Budyonnovsk.

Basayev promised to leave peacefully and remove his forces. As a security guarantee, he took a hundred hostages including journalists, human rights activists and my father.

Six months later, a military detachment that had taken part in the fighting was stationed in the town. In August 1996, the Khasavyurt Accords were signed between a de facto independent Chechnya and Russia, bringing the first Chechen War to an end.

But within three years, a motorcycle brigade from Russia was one of many other military units that was used to again bring the separatist republic under Moscow's control. The terrorist attack that took place between 14-19 June 1995 merely postponed this process instead of preventing it.

The actions of the local police during the attack were also commended. According to Nikolai Lyashenko, the Special Forces also acted correctly, bravely and professionally.

But Yevgeny Perkun, former operations chief at the Budyonnovsk interior ministry, says the command of the operation left much to be desired. 'No one knew anything at the top. Not the intelligence or counterintelligence services. Drunken generals rushed around from here to there. I talked to one of the Alfa group officers. He told me: "We'll take it, but there will be casualties and those in charge here will blame it all on us."

'Maybe it's for the best they called off the raid and there weren't serious casualties. It's hard to judge here. But the fact that it was chaos is clear even to a non-military observer. The hostages who accompanied Basayev's withdrawing fighters said that they were greeted like victors at the border. They were in great spirits. Just imagine: Russia, the mass, the monolith, versus tiny Chechnya?
'
Postscript

Now, though, much has settled down, and relations between Chechens and ethnic Russians are improving.

'After the attack, I was afraid of non-Russian men,' Tanya admits. 'When I saw them, I thought they would hurt me or shoot me. But an adult said to me: "Tanya, nations don't walk the earth, people do. Every nation has its monsters." And I think that's right.'

Pyotr regularly deals with Chechens for work. 'They can't be held guilty for what happened in their republic,' he says. 'A lot of people say that they [Chechens] didn't start everything, that it was a tussle between the "big boys" at the top. And the people suffered.'

Nikolai Lyashenko now runs the Budyonovsk branch of the Institute of Friendship of the Peoples of the Caucasus. 'We have students of 28 different ethnicities. A lot of Muslim lads from Dagestan, Chechnya, and the other North Caucasus republics. The students and teachers get along just fine. They understand the need to respect one another, regardless of nationality or religious beliefs, especially in the North Caucasus,' he says. 'The dead fighters were from different ethnicities. There weren't just Chechens, but Arabs, ethnic Russians, people from the Baltic states. That's why, despite the fact that the Chechen Basayev led the attack, none of the police took it to be an attack by Chechens.'
 
During the attack, and after, though, Russian attitudes to Chechens understandably hardened. Cossacks wanted to gather up the relatives of the terrorists and exchange them for the hostages. Many families were resettled or simply driven out of Budyonnovsk region.

'I know that there was a Chechen being held hostage there, and they threatened to shoot him several times because he refused to pick up a gun and start shooting,' Yevgeny Perkun tells me. 'We had a captain in the police. He was taking wounded to the hospital and he was shot in front of it several times. They dragged him into a ward. He told me that, when the fighting started, a Chechen from the Basayev squad came up to him, took him and hid him in a bathroom. He said: "Sasha, I know you're a cop, but don't worry. I'm not here of my own will. I'm a veterinarian and they told me they needed a doctor. That's why I'm here. When they exchanged prisoners, this Chechen carried the police officer out in his arms.'

After the attack, people started to call Budyonnovsk 'the town of black shawls'. Every 14 June, there's a memorial ceremony at the monument to the victims, and a service in the chapel built on the grounds of the hospital. These days, though, the victims try not to remember the events too often.

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 #14
Christian Science Monitor
June 15, 2015
Russian microwave cannon added to arms catalog. Just business, or a bit of bravado?
The Russian government is unveiling several new high-tech weapons at this week's Army 2015 show, including a microwave anti-drone cannon and new tanks and planes. But the show is about more than just sales.
By Fred Weir, Correspondent

MOSCOW - Russia is unveiling its 21st century weaponry, including a microwave cannon that can disable drones and warheads, as well as a new generation of fighting robots.

The Army 2015 show that opens Tuesday near Moscow will be Russia's biggest ever arms exhibition. And it will showcase a revived arms industry that no longer just recycles and updates old Soviet designs, but has a catalog filled with advanced modern weaponry for both domestic use and for export.

"We now have a full-scale attempt to revive our military-industrial complex," says Pavel Zolotaryov, deputy director of the official Institute of USA-Canada Studies in Moscow. "Previous attempts have failed, due to lack of funding. The current effort has the long overdue, primary goal of re-equipping the Russian military," he says.

But the show may also serve another purpose - to boost public spirit at home and distract from the military's spotty record as it attempts to rebuild after the Soviet era.

The Russian defense ministry and national space agency are sponsoring the show, and have been talking it up for months now. Vladimir Putin is expected to make an appearance, along with thousands of curious Russians and a good many foreign military observers and prospective buyers. The show will reportedly feature 5,000 "cutting-edge" Russian weapons systems, along with displays by the country's top aviation stunt teams, and a spectacle billed as "tank ballet."

The exhibition's highlights will include the new microwave gun, which will fit right into the 21st century battlefield by killing drones and disabling warheads with a blast of high-frequency radiation at a distance of up to 10 km. All the country's newest combat aircraft will be on display, along with the first post-Soviet family of armored vehicles, especially the new Armata battle tank, first rolled out at the Moscow Victory Day parade last month.

Russia's venerable maker of assault weapons, Kalashnikov, will debut its new line of guns, body armor, and  all-condition clothing for special forces.

A rough recovery

But the Russian military is experiencing a lot more problems than will be on display at the Army 2015 exhibit, Mr. Zolotaryov says.

Russia is in the midst of a massive rearmament program which will see over 70 percent of the military's hardware replaced by 2020. Despite slowdowns in some key programs due to the economic crisis, including the much-discussed fifth-generation fighter plane, Russian media claims that development and procurement of advanced weapons will continue without a break.

Russia's military-industrial complex virtually collapsed along with the Soviet Union a quarter century ago, and despite Mr. Putin's $700 billion rearmament program it reportedly still suffers from lack of skilled personnel, massive cost overruns, and less-than-satisfactory production.

Accidents have also plagued Russia's ambitious attempts to revive its space program.

Even the venerable Soviet era Tu-95 "Bear" bomber has suffered a string of mishaps, and the entire fleet has been grounded. The bomber had recently garnered headlines as it ventured out into European and North American airspace to revive Russia's cold war-era global patrol patterns.

Still, none of that looks likely to cloud the Army 2015 show, which experts say is at least as much about bolstering public spirit as it is about publicizing Russia's new warfare capabilities.

"One major purpose of this exhibition is to stimulate patriotic feeling, and to help the military improve its public image, especially among the youth," Zolotaryov says.

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 #15
Sputnik
June 15, 2015
'Go Home': Odessa Residents Rally Against New Governor

Odessa residents rallied on Sunday against the appointment of fugitive Georgian ex-president Mikheil Saakashvili as governor of the region.

Around 500 residents of Ukraine's Odessa rallied on Sunday against the newly appointed governor, fugitive Georgian ex-president Mikheil Saakashvili.

Saakashvili fled Georgia after the country's new president was elected in November 2013. Saakashvili was appointed as Odessa's governor on May 30, after a brief stint as an advisor to Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko. In Georgia, he is accused of embezzling at least $5 million from the state for personal use.

"We were appointed a governor who has no relation to Odessa at all. Odessans, are there no worthy people among us?" activist Alexei Tsvetkov was quoted by Ukrainian media as saying.

Activists carried signs and banners saying "Saakashvili Go Home," "Freedom to Political Prisoners" and "Free Buzila," referring to journalist Artyom Buzila who was arrested on April 29, ahead of preparations for mourning of victims of the May 2, 2014 Odessa massacre.

During the rally, the leader of Odessa's Antimaidan, Moris Ibragim also spoke out in favor of a monument to the victims.

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 #16
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
June 16, 2015
What to expect from Saakashvili in Odessa
The former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili's sudden appointment to the governorship of the Odessa region in Ukraine is primarily a domestic reshuffling of cadres in anticipation of further infighting among the various clans in Ukraine, rather than a policy decision aimed at Russia.
By Nicolai Petro
Nicolai N. Petro is a professor of political science at the University of Rhode Island specializing in Russia and its neighboring states. He has previously served in the Office of Soviet Union Affairs in the U.S. Department of State and at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, and has held fellowships at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars. He is the author of several books on Russian democratic development and foreign policy and has published in The American Interest, The New York Times, The Nation, The National Interest, The Wilson Quarterly and elsewhere. He has just returned from a year-long State Department sponsored Fulbright Research Fellowship in Ukraine. His professional web site is www.npetro.net.

In early June Ukranian President Petro Poroshenko made a very controversial desicion: He appointed former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili as the governor of the Odessa Region in Ukraine. Not surprisingly, reactions to this sudden appointment  tend to mirror one's overall assessment of the Ukrainian Maidan.

Those who support the Maidan and the current government deem his appointment a stroke of genius. They point to Saakashvili's reputation in the West as a person who successfully curtailed Georgia's rampant corruption and streamlined the bureaucracy. They cite the country's dramatic rise in the World Bank's rating of countries where it is easiest to do business to suggest that Saakashvili has both the determination and skill to do the same for the Odessa region.   

Skeptics of the Ukrainian revolution, however, are often equally skeptical of the "Georgian Miracle." Low-level corruption shrank, they say, because it was pushed up into the upper echelons of power, where it festered and eventually became the basis for the indictments against Saakashvili and several of his associates for embezzlement and abuse of power.

They point out that while Georgia soared in Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index between 2003 and 2013, the percentage of those who reported actually paying a bribe in the past year scarcely budged. At the same time, Georgia does only slightly better than Russia, which is often portrayed as its antithesis, on the Global Integrity Report, and the Polity IV rankings of democratic indicators, and worse in the Open Budget Index assessment of transparency of state accounts.

Meanwhile, Georgia's economic growth rate under Saakashvili, while robust, eventually fell behind that of not just Russia, but also Belarus, Azerbaijan, and even Armenia, and was accompanied by record levels of unemployment, poverty, incarceration, and mortality. His critics, moreover, worry that his methods cannot be replicated in Odessa, where Saakashvili has no local political allies in the regional parliament or the city council.

His supporters, on the other hand, do not see these as disadvantages at all.  Not being beholden to any financial or political group in the region, they say, will make him a reliable conduit for imposing the reforms Kiev wants. In short, the old, entrenched elites won't be able to get in the way.

To this, his critics have their own counter argument, namely, that this merely proves that Saakashvili's appointment is not really about economic revitalization, decentralization, and combatting corruption, but rather about getting rid of his predecessor Igor Palytsia, a key ally of the now disgraced oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, who is now in open economic conflict with the current government.

Whatever one may think of these various scenarios, it is clear that Saakashvili's appointment has potential advantages and disadvantages for the region.
The most notable advantage is its PR value. According to Sergei Leshchenko, a member of parliament from the Poroshenko Bloc, all other Odessan politicians are mere "pygmies" compared to Saakashvili, who can "get Western investment based on his name alone."

On the other hand, his greatest disadvantage might be the secretive - one might almost say "traditional" - manner in which he was foisted upon the region. So sudden was his appointment that the president's own deputy chief of staff apparently did not even know he was being considered. Ukrainian politicians of all stripes, including some in the president's own party, have begun to express concern that this new phenomenon of "outsourcing of political power" might be getting out of hand.

In any case, Saakashvili has hit the ground running, making a number of bold promises. They include reconstruction of international highway M15 connecting Odessa to Reni on the Moldovan border, reducing paperwork so that government permits can be issued in a day, while at the same time reducing the size of the regional administration from eight hundred workers to "a maximum of fifty" and appointing new heads for all regional districts, and freeing all Odessans from crime, corruption and the "heartlessness" of the current bureaucracy by the end of the year.

If he does not succeed, it will not be the first time that he has raised expectations beyond his reach.  One example from his last year as president of Georgia is "Lazika," a ten-year project to create, from scratch, a Black Sea port to become the country's second largest city. To prevent it from being mired in "Soviet patterns," Lazika was given a special legal status based on English commercial law, rather than the codified civil law used in the rest of Georgia. The project was shelved a month after his electoral defeat by the new prime minster who considered it unfeasible. Given his rhetoric on Odessa, one can only wonder whether he is envisioning something equally grandiose for the city.

But of all the questions currently being asked, perhaps the most intriguing is this: What does Saakashvili actually gain from what he himself envisions as a relatively brief term in office? Such brevity is suggested by his interpretation of his recently granted Ukrainian citizenship as a two-year "transitory period" that allows him to keep his Georgian citizenship (ignoring the fact that dual citizenship is prohibited by the Georgian constitution), as well as recent comments to the Georgian media that he is ready to return to Georgia "the very minute the country needs me."

Many observers in Ukraine believe that he is aiming to rise higher even in Ukrainian politics. Most likely, he fully intends to someday re-enter Georgian politics. To do this, however, he needs to demonstrate a recent political success.

His current appointment coincided with the de facto disintegration of the United National Movement (UNM), the Georgian political party that he founded and nominally still leads. Just three days before his appointment, four senior party leaders simultaneously abandoned the party, citing its failure "to fully renew itself after its 2012 defeat." As a result, Saakashvili has almost no parliamentary political base to return to.

But were Saakashvili to be successful in turning around Odessa, a region that, despite being only half as large, shares many similarities with Georgia, it could serve as a rallying point for his now demoralized supporters. Therefore, his ambitions in Odessa are best understood in the context of Georgian rather than Ukrainian politics.

Finally, there are also those who believe that Saakashvili's success or failure in Odessa will have political implications for all of Eurasia. Yuri Tkachyov, a writer for the Odessa news website Timer, argues that Saakashvili reputation as a reformer bolsters the populist notion that if you don't like what is happening, the solution lies not in tedious political compromises and time consuming legal procedure, but in forcing out the old to make way for the new.

Saakashvili's whole political career has been a metaphor for this approach to politics, and his singular importance today lies in the fact that he is the last participant of the decade of "color revolutions" whose liberal reputation has remained more or less intact.

Odessa is therefore not just a test of Saakashvili, but of the very concept of social transformations through revolution. If it were to fail, Tkachyov suggests, the revolutionary approach to politics within the former Soviet Union would be left without a single positive example to its credit.

Saakashvili's appointment: The Kremlin's response

The Kremlin's response has been dismissive, but this is an internal matter of Ukrainian politics that is unlikely to have international repercussions unless Saakashvili is given some international responsibility. As governor, his impact on military policy and border issues (for example, in Transnistria) is negligible.

Saakashvili was known for months to have been Poroshenko's confidante. One of the possible interpretations of this appointment is that it puts a reliable ally of Poroshenko at the head of a key region. Again, however, this appointment is primarily a domestic reshuffling of cadres in anticipation of further infighting among the various clans in Ukraine, rather than a policy decision aimed at Russia.

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 #17
The Kremlin Stooge
https://marknesop.wordpress.com
June 15, 2015
About That Batumi Miracle...
By Mark Chapman

Hey, remember back when Al Jazeera was the object of loathing and fear in the USA? Bankrolled by the Emir of Qatar - a thriving democracy in the Middle East whose ruler has been a male member of the Al Thani family since 1850 - Al Jazeera was once described by American media as "a mouthpiece for terrorists", "anti-Semitic" and "anti-American". It earned the anti-Semitic tag honestly enough, broadcasting an on-air birthday party organized by Al Jazeera's Beirut bureau chief for a Lebanese militant convicted of killing four Israelis, including a four-year-old girl. And considering it was the outlet which carried Sheik Qaradawi's weekly program, "Sharia and Life" and Sheik Qaradawi "extended his Koranic blessing to suicide bombing against American civilians in Iraq", you could make an argument that it earned the anti-American tag honestly as well.

No more, though - all water under the bridge, let bygones be bygones. The outlet's managers could not now be more pro-American, as this gushing testimonial to Mikheil Saakashvili's appointment as Odessa's governor attests. Penned by former United States Army officer Luke Coffey, it is a progressive tongue bath of Saakashvili that is almost embarrassing to read, kind of like watching a bizarre peep show featuring repugnant sex. Unless you're an admirer of the former Georgian president, of course, in which case it is only his due as the Caesar Of His Time; render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's.
[http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/06/odessa-future-saakashvili-georgia-ukraine-russia-150610094925790.html]

Coffey pitches a quick little historical vignette, describing how observers and analysts should not be surprised at Poroshenko's appointment of a foreigner to lead Odessa, since that was de rigeuer back in 1803. Two French noblemen were appointed during this period, the first by Tsar Alexander himself, as governors of Odessa. These appointments join wife selling, tobacco smoke enemas, lobotomy and the Divine Right of Kings as examples of a progressive society, for the period in which they were common.

But when you top that historical precedent with Mikheil Saakashvili's success in fighting corruption and improving the Georgian economy, why, as Mr. Coffey avers, the appointment "makes perfect sense".

Mikheil Saakashvili's success in fighting corruption and improving the Georgian economy; my, yes. Let's take a look at that. Especially as Mr. Coffey avers that President Poroshenko appointed Misha specifically to clean up corruption in Odessa; you may want to keep an eye on that, see how he's doing, from time to time. Mr. Coffey must have had an affectionate little smile on his face as he thought about Misha's charisma, he positively oozes it. And energy, too - he's engaging, and "has endless amounts of energy". I think I can explain that last bit, as his increasingly porcine appearance suggests he is living on a diet of candy bars. Corruption-fighting by Cadbury.

Some more licking follows, as Saakashvili is described as a visionary who gravitated to Ukraine because it was the only way he could help the country of his birth that for some unaccountable reason wants to arrest him for corruption and various other allegations. Yes, you heard it here first: "...he understands that the geopolitical reality of the Black Sea means that a secure Odessa is a secure Georgia. For him, this is part of his destiny". Jesus wept; I don't know if I can finish this.

Mr. Coffey is fond of statistics to back up his claims, and that's good. According to him, the Index of Economic Freedom - compiled by a conservative right-wing Washington think tank and an ideological conservative newspaper - just loves Mikheil Saakashvili for how easy he made it to do business in Georgia. And it hardly needs saying that Transparency International - supported by Shell International, Microsoft, Google, BP and General Electric, among others - saw him as a mythic corruption-fighter of epic proportions, like Batman, The Flash and Diogenes all rolled into one charismatic, energetic package.

I wonder what those organizations think of the current Georgian President. He does not seem to get a mention, nor does the government of Bidzina Ivanishvili, who headed the Georgian Dream party that knocked the charismatic corruption-fighting dynamo off his perch. Because Saakashvili's crime-fighting spree coincided with record unemployment in Georgia: it was 12.6% when he took office, zoomed to nudge 17% under his able command, and was still 15% when he was ignominiously kicked out of office. It's back down to 12.4% now. But Mikheil Saakashvili is credited with being "the one reason Georgia did not become a failed state". You can't see me, but I am doing that fingers-down-the-throat gagging thing.

Similarly, Georgia's per-capita GDP is currently at a record high. So are monthly wages , which reached their record low in 2007, while Saakashvili was apparently too busy fighting corruption to look after his subjects. Wages in manufacturing - a critical component in national self-sufficiency -  same story: record high at present, record low under the Cadbury Dynamo. So weary from fighting corruption around the clock, it escaped his attention that his Defense Minister had started up an offshore business in his own name which roared from a paltry $8 Million and something USD in turnover in 2009 - the year he started it up - to nearly a Billion in 2012, three years of non-stop, rolling-in-moola corruption right under Saakashvili's nose. The profits before taxes (taxes, ha, ha) that year amounted to more than $51 Million USD. That year, the per-capita GDP for Georgia - what your average Georgian would have to live on and support his family for a year, adjusted for purchasing power - was $6,322.50 USD.

But don't let my stage-setting implant any preconceived notions, as we step uncritically and with open minds into the showpiece of Saakashvili's renaissance of the Georgian economy - The Batumi Miracle.

"[T]he capital city [of the Adjara Region], Batumi, is booming. Foreign Direct Investment is flowing in. Five-star hotels mark the skyline. The old city has been rebuilt and preserved", enthuses Coffey. Really? You know, I'm coming around to Mr. Coffey's viewpoint. Mikheil Saakashvili actually is the one reason Georgia did not become a failed state. Because if he had won another term, it would have been. He saved Georgia, by getting thrown out of office.

The roof of the Batumi Trade Center - a Saakashvili project of which he laid the foundation stone himself in 2010 - collapsed in 2012, doing about 25,000 Lari (about $11,000.00 USD at today's exchange rate) in damages. Fortunately it happened at night, when the building was empty.

But nothing says Sweet Smell of Saakashvili Success in Batumi - a miracle, if I may be so bold - as the Batumi Technological University. The American Technological University, as some referred to it, since it was built with American money from the Second Compact with the Millennium Challenge Corporation. MCC itself, if you can imagine the cheek, was unconvinced that Saakashvili's bold plan to build a technological university was a sensible or justifiable expenditure of grant money (some of that Foreign Direct Investment cash that "flowed in", according to Mr. Coffey). No, they argued (shortsighted fools) that building a technological university would be more likely to benefit privileged families than poor families, that the money would be better spent on addressing systemic failures in higher education, and refused to approve the project.BatumiTower

And this is where Saakashvili proved his worth as a guy who won't be told "No". Undaunted by the unseemly quibbling over poor people's educational opportunities, he played the wild card that sucked all the air out of the room - our technological university will have the world's only miniature Ferris Wheel. How do you like me now, bean-counting eggheads?

Of course it did not happen just like that; I have no idea if the Ferris Wheel was Saakasvili's idea or the architect's - although Saakashvili would most certainly have seen the designs - and it was not the addition of this feature that swayed the decision. But just imagine it: struggling all day with difficult technological problems, and then the glorious rush of freedom at the end of the academic day - all the students rushing for the roof, shouting "Me first!!" "No, me!!". And then whirling around and around high above the earth...what a great way to blow American taxpayers' money!!

Honestly; what kind of lunatic spends that kind of money on a Ferris Wheel on the roof of a technological university, in a country where the average citizen lives on about $6000.00 a year, after being told by the donors it was a stupid idea. The kind of lunatic who would be perfect for fighting corruption in Odessa, obviously.

Saakashvili opened the Batumi Technological University in 2012, just before the Georgian Dream wave rolled over him and swept him away. It was to have its first students in 2013. The incoming government studied the madcap project, and scrapped it. The new government requested proposals for improvements to the higher-education sector - just like MCC had initially suggested - and announced the intent to co-fund successful proposals with $50 million over 20 years. After spending more than $30 Million USD to build it (plus around $90,000.00 USD annually in maintenance in 2012 and 2013, Saakashvili's ivory tower was sold for $25 Million, to be turned into a hotel.

Where a little Ferris Wheel just might be almost appropriate. Good luck, Odessa. Remember, it's easy to ride the tiger. The hard part is getting off.

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 #18
Business New Europe
www.bne.eu
June 16, 2015
MINSK BLOG: EU's Belarus dilemma
Sergei Kuznetsov in Minsk

Minsk's recent efforts to shepherd peace talks between the EU, Russia and Ukraine have borne fruit - Brussels has shown that it is ready to renew its dialogue with Belarus, a country that has been a pariah in recent years. However, this process will not be smooth; Brussels is not ready to abandon its human rights principles, while Alexander Lukashenko's regime is not going to ease off the oppression of its internal political opponents. Belarus's heavy dependence on financial support from Russia will add to the difficulties.

"Lately we have seen speculation in the media that someone is changing their foreign policy vectors. We view Russia as our strategic partner... and will abide by all agreements," said Vladimir Makei, the Belarusian foreign minister, as he met with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov on June 8.

These remarks appeared shortly after the EU's Eastern Partnership summit in Riga, where Belarus, alongside Armenia, heavily opposed attempts to include any mention of the "illegal annexation" of Crimea by Russia in the summit's final declaration.

Although avoiding such discussions would possibly have been a good signal for the EU that Belarus is ready to improve its relations with Western nations, the Minsk government instead preferred to continue to support Russia. And cash-strapped Belarus has been rewarded for its efforts. Russia is considering restructuring Belarus' debt in 2015, and could also support its request for a new loan from the bailout fund of the Eurasian Economic Community.

Russia traditionally has taken a negative stance towards the EU's activities in post-Soviet space, considering them as a threat to its vital interests in the territories which it considers part of the so-called "Russian World". The crisis in Ukraine has shown that the Kremlin is ready to defend its influence there, even through military force.

However, the EU is not ready to give up. An informal meeting of the foreign ministers of the member states of the Eastern Partnership has been scheduled to take place in Minsk at the end of June, the first such event in Belarus since the EU initiative was launched in 2009. "The EU wants to see stable, peaceful, prosperous countries on its borders. I would presume that this could be also in Russia's interests, because we [the EU and Russia] border on the same countries," Maira Mora, head of the EU delegation to Belarus, tells bne IntelliNews.

Meanwhile, Andrei Yeudachenka, permanent representative of Belarus to the EU and Nato, believes that the country has sent many "positive signals" to the EU over the years, and that these "deserve more attention" from Brussels and could provide the basis for improved relations. "Unfortunately, many of these signals were not heard by the political elite of the EU... But better late than never," Yeudachenka tells bne IntelliNews.

Principles and prisoners

"The EU will never compromise on the principles on which it is based: the principles of democracy, the rule of law and human rights," Mora says, underlining that the existence of political prisoners in Belarus is in "first place" among the obstacles to a fast improvement of EU-Belarus relations.

The figure of Nikolai Statkevich, a 59-year-old former military officer and a presidential candidate during the disputed 2010 election, is at the forefront of this dispute. Statkevich was accused by the Belarusian authorities of plotting to riot on election night and found guilty by a local court soon after. He has so far refused to write a plea for a presidential pardon (as many other opposition politicians did) in order to be freed.

It could be argued that Statkevich's stubborn stance makes little sense from the political point of view, given that the general public in Belarus has almost completely forgotten his name; this is at least partly attributable to tough government control over the country's media. However, the former presidential candidate's position is well understood in Brussels. "I perfectly understand Statkevich's stance. He is a politician, a prominent politician. And asking for a pardon means admitting guilt, whereas he does not consider himself a person who did any wrongdoing," Mora says.

A release of political prisoners and an improvement in the country's human rights environment may lead to an easing of the sanctions currently in place against Belarusian officials and companies. The next review of the sanctions list is due in October, the EU delegation head underlines. However, any preconditions will be met with sharp criticism from Minsk. "Preconditions, which violate the principle of equality, are unacceptable to us. Especially when they border on interference in the internal affairs of our country," Yeudachenka says.

Upcoming election

Despite some signs of a possible normalisation in the EU's relations with Minsk, it is more likely that the EU will delay any significant decision over Belarus until after the presidential election later this year. On June 9, after a meeting with Lukashenko, the head of the country's Central Election Commission (CEC), Lidia Yermoshina, recommended that the election should be held on October 11.

Lukashenko, who has been in power since 1994, has already announced that he intends to run in the election, and there is no serious doubt about whether he will be re-elected for his fifth term in October, considering the almost complete lack of opposition in Belarus. The West seems ready for such a result. The only thing required from Minsk is that violence is avoided, as is blatant pressuring and harassment of opponents.

Mora says that the EU wants to see "free and fair" elections and she expects that the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) will be given all necessary opportunities for observation. "Candidates must not be prosecuted for their political views, no single party should be denied from participating in the elections," Mora adds.

"The EU officials express their wishes at bilateral meetings, and, where appropriate, we try to take them into account," Yeudachenka says. "Especially, considering the fact that in many respects they coincide with our own intentions and expectations. Today, we and the EU are aiming to ensure positive dynamics in our relations, both before and after the election."

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 #19
Moscow Times
June 16, 2015
British Explorers Aiming to Cross Bering Strait
By Alexander Stirling and Laura Ridpath

In February 2016, a team of three British men will attempt to travel across the Bering Strait by ski and kayak, traveling westward from the United States to Russia. If successful, the expedition, headed by Scotsman Mike Laird, will join eight others in completing this treacherous journey.

With temperatures often dropping to well below minus 40 degrees Celsius, the team of highly experienced explorers Mike Laird, Neil Laughton and James Bingham will attempt to cross the strait which links Russia and the United States.

"Four thousand five hundred people have done Everest, over 600 have been into space, only eight people in the world have walked across this," said Laird, who failed in his attempt to cross the straits in 2015, in an interview in Moscow last month.

Laird said the experience will be "brutal," due to the risk of frostbite and the rigorous physical challenges. It will also be brutal for the equipment, most of which will return with varying levels of damage. The team also faces the very real danger of being attacked by polar bears.

Previous unsuccessful expeditions have been left with no choice other than extraction by helicopter after being constantly hunted by polar bears. The team will carry a shotgun to fend off the dangerous beasts.

The terrain is the biggest challenge as unlike other polar areas, the Bering Strait is not comprised of flat, solid ice, but a mixture of slush, seawater, ice rubble and snow.

There is also the constant risk of ice drift. "We can put up the tent on a piece of ice at night and we could wake up 20 kilometers away in the morning," he said.

In the very worst of conditions, terrain like this paired with harsh weather conditions could leave the men traveling at only 300 meters per hour. The strait is 81 kilometers wide at its narrowest point.

The team will be constantly moving in and out of water and slush, often traveling in a kayak, which on firmer land converts into a sledge to carry supplies.

"It's draining. Like nothing you could imagine. If you put a big rucksack on your back and a dry suit on, go to the gym and do running and all the machines and everything for 14 hours and then go to bed, then you'll understand what tired is," he said.

Laird is confident that his team is as prepared as possible, due not only to their own experience and expertise, but to assistance given to them by their Russian colleagues. Yevgeny Mashkovsky a Moscow-based sports doctor, will be providing support for the team, assisting them with preparations and most importantly acting as the main point of contact on land once the expedition is under way. The information he provides on weather and terrain conditions will be vital during the crossing in adjusting and preparing for changes in the route.

The team aims to complete the crossing without any outside material help once they have set off. They have chosen not to have food parcels parachuted to them on the expedition, as other teams before them have.
 
Given the severity of the conditions, the overriding goal is a successful first attempt, which based on previous expeditions could take between six and 20 days. "I would prefer to call in a food drop toward the end rather than failure," said Laird. "Better to have some assistance and complete an assisted crossing, than to fail an unassisted crossing."

The crossing is not all frostbite and polar bears, however. Mashkovsky hopes the team will be able to conduct various types of scientific research, such as noting the effect of climate change on the ice, for example.

"We might do research to see how [the team] copes with the jet lag and time zones," on longer nights near the Arctic Circle, said Laird.

There are also plans for a football match to be played on ice that will use the International Date Line between the United States and Russia as the halfway line. In this rare instance the Date Line falls on solid ground - sea ice, one of the only places on the planet where you can, as Laird puts it, "kick a football from a Tuesday to a Wednesday."

Laird also speaks fondly about the moments of respite the team will have during the expedition. "The best time," he said, "is when you're all in the tent, you've got the cooker going, you've got water going, and you're all eating hot food - that's just beautiful."

See thedeadliestjourney.com for more details about the trip.

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 #20
http://readrussia.com
June 16, 2015
A Ukrainian Journey: Part II
By Jim Kovpak
Jim Kovpak is the founder of Russia Without BS
[Photos here http://readrussia.com/2015/06/16/a-ukrainian-journey-part-ii/]

Artemivsk is one of dozens of small towns and cities in Ukraine's embattled Donetsk oblast which might have remained in total obscurity had it not been for the war that started in the spring of 2014. Like Kostiantynivka, Artemivsk was also once under rebel control until it was recaptured by government forces last summer. The town became a focal point during the battle for Debaltseve as Russian-backed forces cut the highway between the two towns, surrounding Ukrainian forces in the "Debaltseve cauldron." The battle continued unabated in spite of the Minsk II ceasefire that went into effect at midnight on 15 February.

Finding a bus to Artemivsk was easy enough, and as expected we reached a checkpoint just before entering the town. It wasn't much different from the checkpoint I'd encountered on the way to Kramatorsk the day before, though I did notice an RPG resting on one of the concrete barricades. Probably not the best place to leave it lying around, but that's just me. In any case I now had my press card so I was no longer concerned about checkpoints. Gimme all the checkpoints you've got!

Upon arriving at the bus station I decided to find a shop or supermarket to get something to snack on until I could find a proper, functioning café or restaurant. On the way I noticed one residential building had an arrow with the words "to cover" in Russian spray-painted on its side. The arrow was pointing to what appeared to be a cellar entrance, no doubt intended to be used as a makeshift bomb shelter. After my short trip to the supermarket I returned to the immediate area around the bus station, stopping to ask directions to the town centre from a shopkeep, who directed me to go through the large park immediately next to the station.

Immediately off the park's tree-lined path one finds a fenced-in skate park with one of the most common traces of war I found on my trip - graffiti. It's hard to tell who struck first, but two spray-paint artists had a duel over the phrase "Na Ukraine" versus "V Ukraine." The former is the typical Russian way of saying "in Ukraine," whereas the latter preposition denotes, or in fact acknowledges, Ukraine's independence and sovereignty as a country rather than a region. During my whole time in the Donbas it seems that these graffiti duals were more evident than signs of battle damage.

Beyond the skate park was an amusement park, complete with a Ferris wheel. I decided to check it out, but in spite of the fact that it was a holiday none of the rides were operating. The most striking feature so far was the silence. To be sure there were people in the park, but it seemed as if there should have been far more. I began to suspect a great deal of the city's population must have fled. The eerie silence, the low cloud cover with a light drizzle, and the emptiness of the amusement park presented a perfect setting for a scene in a low-budget horror film. To the unknowing viewer, this part of Artemivsk could easily pass for the ghost town of Pripyat, evacuated in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster.

I continued walking past the park toward the town center. Eventually I found that proper restaurant I'd been looking for, a place called Biblos. Like the streets, it was virtually deserted. There was only one other person dining besides myself. As I had my coffee and ate shashlyk I decided that I might be able to discuss recent events with the restaurant staff on my way out, seeing as how they clearly had a light workload after the other man left. One thing I was keen on discussing was the town's recent history. As I've noted before I had little time to prepare this trip, and while towns like Artemivsk appeared on the media radar due to its proximity to Debaltseve, I hadn't managed to find any detailed information about what combat, if any, had taken place in this city when it was recaptured from the rebels.

My plan went awry, however, just as I was about to get up and talk to the barman after paying my bill. Just then a large group of soldiers walked in. At first they were Ukrainian, but then I spotted a Pole, followed by some Danes and a Canadian. The hostess ushered them up a staircase to a banquet room. I figured this was an opportunity so I approached the one Ukrainian soldier who remained at the bottom of the staircase and introduced myself with credentials in hand. I asked him if they were busy or if they were just having lunch, to which he answered the latter. Unfortunately he wasn't interested in letting a journalist sit in on the meeting. I politely apologized and moved toward the exit when the soldiers emerged from the banquet room and started moving outside once again, presumably to smoke, I thought.

That's when I had a minor stroke of luck. The Canadian soldier lagged behind, fixated on his phone. I don't know Canadian rank insignia so I couldn't address him by his proper title, but in this case I hoped I could still exploit the world famous politeness that is associated with our neighbors to the north (which, incidentally, is bullshit according to several Canadian friends and acquaintances I've had over the years). Luckily this particular Canadian was quite jovial in spite of the difficult task he surely had. He was limited in what he could say about his mission, but it was connected to the control of illegal arms, the trade of which had become a side-effect of the war. At first he took me as a member of the OSCE's Special Monitoring Mission, but I explained that I was a freelance journalist trying to find material for a story, and that this was really sort of a vacation for me. "You sure picked a hell of a place for a vacation," he replied. Indeed.

Finding no luck with the soldiers I attempted to speak with some of the wait staff. They seemed rather nervous, saying they couldn't talk about politics. I assured them that I wasn't interested so much in politics but rather history, specifically what happened in the town the previous year. Again they apologized but said they couldn't help me. I left, feeling I'd lost at least 500 journalism points.

I eventually reached the town center, which was in surprisingly good condition, though again it looked as if there were far fewer people than one might expect in a city of this size at this time of day. I noted a few makeshift military vehicles - originally civilian SUVs and vans with camo paintjobs. Thus far Artemivsk had the most noticeable military presence of any place I'd visited during my trip, though that wasn't saying much. I began walking along what passed for a busy street.

At one point I passed a school and I could hear music playing behind the building. I walked around to the back to find a crowd of local residents watching their children perform songs for Victory Day. In fact, this year Ukraine officially changed its celebration of V-E Day to 8 May, unlike the traditional Soviet 9 May. Being Donbas, however, it wasn't immediately clear whether this concert was celebrating the new holiday, on this particular day, if they were preparing for the next day, the 9th, or if they actually planned celebrations for both days. Two boys wearing Soviet WWII-era "pilotka" hats were singing while an orchestra composed of older children and teens with pioneer-style costumes shuffled into place with their instruments. I was going to stay for a bit but it looked like the teachers decided to put the concert on hold for fear that it was about to rain again. They began to shuffle back into the school building and I left.

After a while I remembered that I had only a vague idea of where I was going and figured I should start heading back toward the bus station as I had no idea how late the busses here ran. I asked directions from a mother who was with her husband and small daughter and she was shocked to learn that I was a foreigner, in fact an American. One would think given the recent attitudes in Russia and the influence of Russian propaganda, this revelation would provoke a wave of vitriol at a representative of the "Kyiv junta's backers," but then one would have been wrong. The couple reacted with the same politeness and openness as Vladimir, whom I'd met the previous day by the side of the road in Kostiantynivka. Before I left she tried to get her young daughter, probably four or five, to say "goodbye" in English. Instead she said "hello," to the amusement of everyone. I helped her pronounce "goodbye" and waved before resuming my walk back to the bus station.

Once again I noticed another subtle but tell-tale sign of war - apartment windows bearing crosses made of tape, a protection against flying shards of glass in case of an artillery attack. It's an old remedy - you could have just as easily seen the same in 1941 instead of 2015. Beyond that I saw nothing remarkable on my way back to the bus station. Events at the station, however, merited attention.

My options for tickets were limited so I ended up waiting around for some time, drinking cheap coffee outside the station. At one point a large bus pulls up and among the people who got off were a group of Ukrainian soldiers and another man wearing a uniform - a British DPM uniform, to be specific. Uniform notwithstanding, he clearly wasn't British. I also noticed he wasn't exactly in military shape and his face had several minor cuts on it. For some reason he came up to me and asked me where he could buy something, but I couldn't understand what he was looking for. I figure it was probably some kind of slang. I informed him that I was a journalist and had only been in the area for a short time, and he apologized and went to pose the same question to a nearby taxi driver. I can only assume he was satisfied with the answer because he walked off and out of sight for several minutes.

When the young man returned he again came up to me and invited me to join him on the bus to Severodonetsk. He told me that his unit had a very good chef and promised plenty of drinking. I told him I had no idea who controlled Severodonetsk at the time, but all he could tell me was that it was in the Lugansk oblast, also divided by the war. That answer wasn't satisfying and I wasn't in a particular mood to be that adventurous at this time. I politely declined and he got on the bus. As soon as he did so, I casually approached one of the Ukrainian soldiers who'd been on the same bus and asked him if that man had been with their group, to which he answered in the negative. None of the soldiers knew the man. Perhaps under normal conditions, without a war and without the proliferation of illegal weapons and criminal activity, I might have taken up the invitation, but just because I arrived in the Donbas the previous day doesn't mean I did so by falling off a turnip truck.

I began to explore the grounds around the bus station as the time ticked away toward the arrival of my bus. There was little to see beyond a person herding a couple goats in the grass by the station. I was looking down the street at the houses when I suddenly heard a loud whump! It's been a long time. Not wanting to jump to conclusions, I listened carefully to make sure that it wasn't just rolling thunder. Again, another whump, and another. I wasn't mistaken - it was artillery. I'd taken a compass attached to my keychain with me so I took it out and found my bearings. The sound of artillery was coming from the south, southeast, i.e. the direction of the front, just as one would expect. It wasn't particularly intense, and unfortunately I couldn't determine whether it was incoming or outgoing, but it was just another sign that the Minsk ceasefire was nothing but a farce.

I returned to Kostiantynivke and took the time to explore the city a bit more. I had some borscht at a café and watched as a young man with a bandaged hand entertained some teenage girls with a laser pointer. At one point I saw a group of Ukrainian soldiers sitting down to eat at an outdoor café, but after the failure to secure any comments earlier in the day I wasn't about to approach them. I was beginning to believe that I was the problem; Moscow's anti-social attitude, very different from other parts of Russia and of course Ukraine, had imprinted on me.

Heading back to my hotel I took a shortcut through the dark wooded area behind the establishment. Once again I encountered a sight that would have fit perfectly as the set of a horror film. Overrun by the woods was a large building that looked as though it were once a school. Remains of two flood lights could be seen perched on the inner corners of the U-shaped structure. Most of the windows were shattered and piles of debris could be seen from the outside. The creepiness of the place was only matched by a nearby park, filled with sculptures from fairy tales. The rival for most disturbing image was a collection of sculptures depicting a scene from The Jungle Book. Mowgli sits facing the wolves that raised him since childhood, but someone had removed their faces, in some case just their muzzles, in others the whole thing. All you needed was a mutilated corpse posed symbolically in the middle and you'd have a pilot for another season of True Detective.

I ended up having dinner at the unusually fancy Komilfo restaurant in front of my hotel, where I finally managed to score an exclusive interview. I was a bit tipsy from the beer but experience shows that this often facilitates communication with strangers in places like this, thus I introduced myself to my new source - the two young women at the table behind me.

They introduced themselves as Olga and Yana and we began to discuss the town's history and their lives. Olga was lucky enough to have an office job at some kind of lead works, whereas Yana had just graduated from what I assume was a technical college, but was unemployed due to a lack of job prospects. We discussed how the rebels came to Kostiantynivka and how they left. As they told it, one day armed men with guns arrived and suddenly they were a part of the "Donetsk People's Republic," complete with a referendum on independence, and then in July the armed hordes fled the city in retreat and the Ukrainian army arrived. After a short period with a curfew, life in the town returned to normal, no different than what I'd seen thus far. There was no love for the Kyiv government, but once again there was also no longing for "Novorossiya" nor were there feelings of being "occupied." Yana considered that both the West and Russia were interfering in Ukraine's affairs, but she agreed that Russia had clearly interfered more. They also both agreed that Russian military personnel were definitely involved in the rebellion.

I can't say that I learned anything particularly new during our conversation, but a general impression, or rather confirmation of a growing suspicion, began to form. One key contributing point was that according to them, there was no actual fighting of any significance in the town. The rebels simply abandoned it. That led to an interesting, if not disturbing conclusion - all the signs of decay and dilapidation in the town were in fact not caused by the war, and it might have looked more or less the same before the war broke out. Based on what I'd heard from people more knowledgeable on the region prior to my trip, the economic destitution of the Donbas goes far in explaining the rebellion and the residents' resentment toward the center.

This understanding led to a realization that more or less summed up my first two days in the Donetsk oblast. In a sense, this was, as Moscow's ideologues have recently started claiming since 2014, part of the "Russian World" or "Russkiy Mir" as they say. But this is not because of language or culture, but rather because of corruption, stagnation, and decay. If this place had been a part of Russia since 1991, it would look the same as it does today - another backwater for the elite in Moscow to crack jokes about. Yet in spite of the neglect they experience from the center and whatever resentment they have towards Kyiv now, they are not known for organizing protests as a means of driving political change. What sympathy they had for Russia was largely an economic question rather than any sense of shared beliefs or cultural bonds. As such, there's not much reason to believe that they'd suddenly organize a grassroots rebellion for autonomy or independence without outside encouragement.

I am only summarizing my thought process here, but it was becoming crystal clear that this war was, as I suspected, something artificially manufactured. Without outside interference, there would never have been any Donetsk or Lugansk People's Republics. These people would be busy trying to get by day-to-day, just as they had been doing since 1991. Otherwise they wouldn't be doing exactly that right now. They'd be fleeing into the rebel republics, to Russia, or they'd be resisting the "occupiers." You wouldn't have small groups of Ukrainian soldiers relaxing in outdoor cafes without weapons or equipment as though they were on leave. You wouldn't have people going to discotheques. It became clear, to me at least, that these people were being used as political props by a foreign regime which has shown time and time again that it doesn't care for its own people, let alone the people of the so-called "Russian world." Putin uses the conflict to shore up his support at home, but it's the people of Ukraine, on both sides, who get stuck with the consequences.

I got to bed a bit later that night. The next day was Victory Day - the traditional Soviet date. This time I'd be spending the holiday in Sloviansk, the scene of a major battle in a war that makes no sense.

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 #21
Euromaidan Press
http://euromaidanpress.com
June 15, 2015
Putin's unrealizable dream vs. his all too-real nightmare
By Paul Goble

That Vladimir Putin lives in a different reality than do other world leaders is now more or less common ground. Now, two commentators have described respectively what the Kremlin leader dreams about and what his worst nightmare might turn out to be.

In a commentary of Kyiv's "Novoye vremya," Yury Felshtinsky, a Russian historian who now lives in the US, says that Putin's dream is that the world will treat his Russia as having a status equal to that of the United States, something the writer says is beyond his capacity to achieve.

For Putin, Felshtinsky says, "the US is the main problem. Not Chechnya, not Georgia and not Ukraine." But he has a problem: "Perhaps America would be glad to recognize Russia as an equal partner but Russia has nothing besides Gazprom, and the earnings of Gazprom are less than those of the American company Apple."

"America has no ideology regarding Russia. It wants to see Russia as it wants to see everyone else as a peaceful and reliable partner in politics and business," he continues. However, "there cannot be relations of parity between the two because Russia in the literal sense is not a great power. It exports raw materials and imports everything else."

"Over the course of the last century," he writes, Russia "has destroyed its farmers and its own intellectuals, carried out the terror famine in Ukraine, and conducted a global purge of its own Soviet communist nomenklatura and army. And the Soviet Union fought with Hitler only because the latter attacked it."

In contrast, "Washington dreams only about one thing" - that Russia will stop causing problems. "No one ever expected anything good from Russia, only something bad," although when periods of a warming of the relationship happen, "all are ready to accept this as a long-term strategic change and look with hope into the eyes of Putin, a KGB guy who, as President Bush said, one could believe."

"Unfortunately," he writes, "ordinary Americans on the whole do not think or know anything about the Russian-Ukrainian conflict: if you turn on the main American television channels, you won't hear about Crimea, Luhansk or the Donbas."

And when Putin annexed Crimea, "almost all world leaders indicated to Putin that they were ready to recognize the annexation if Putin would declare an end to his plans for seizing the territory of the former Soviet republics." Putin spat in their faces, declaring the existence of a Russian world that he would defend and denying that Ukraine was a state at all.

But now it is clear that Putin's Russia doesn't have the resources to carry out his threats. "There is a lot of boldness, bluffing, and even more bad behavior, but the boorishness of Zhirinovsky and Rogozin won't help you to take on America." What you can do and what Putin has done is to harm Russia."

"One can intimidate the entire world with nuclear weapons; one can help Iran and North Korea; one can kill Nemtsov; one can poison Kara-Murza; and one can ban the import of sprats from the Baltics," Felshtinsky says. But those who will suffer as a result of this ban are not the Balts but the Russians.

Putin, of course, "is thinking in other categories. This is already not about money; it is about eternity, empire and glory. Putin has to prepare Russia for global isolation from the West in the case of the beginning of a major war. Sprats are a serious test of Russians' firmness, because if they are not ready to live without sprats, they won't fight for Putin. But if they will, then they will be able to do everything else."

"The time for talks with Russia, unfortunately, has passed," Felshtinsky concludes. "Russia does not plan to reach agreement with the West, but the West sincerely does not understand how one can reach an agreement with a negotiating partner if he does not plan to agree on anything."

If Putin's dream is to have his country be treated as the equal of the United States, his nightmare is that he is on course to become a second Gorbachev and preside over the disintegration of his country into a plethora of smaller states with himself ousted from the stage of big politics and history.

In a comment on Ekho Moskvy, Aleksandr Goldfarb, the head of the Litvinenko Foundation in London, says that there are some good reasons why Putin may have such fears. The Soviet Union fell apart "quickly and unexpectedly" because of the coming together of five factors: there was a war in Afghanistan, a collapse in oil prices, the non-existence of the Soviet economy, corruption and cynicism among the elite, and pressure from the West.

Now, all five of these have been recreated: there is a war in Ukraine, a collapse in oil prices, a systemic economic crisis, corruption and "colossal income differentiation," and Western sanctions and "a course directed at isolating Russia."

"Economists predict," Goldfarb says, "that the stabilization fund will run out of money within a year, that then inflation will reach 25 percent and social dissatisfaction will rise. Oil apparently isn't going to become more expensive. The Ukrainian fiasco will be no smaller than [the Soviet one] in Afghanistan, and the West will not weaken sanctions."

Moreover, he continues, "whatever anyone says, [the West] has clearly adopted a course directed at regime change" in Russia. "In this situation, Putin has three options."

First, he can leave office and transfer power to one of his slightly less corrupt comrades in arms, hoping against hope that they won't turn him over to the international court even as they reverse his policies and his support disappears "like smoke."

Second, Putin can "tighten the screws, extend the war, completely break with the West and build a mobilization economy." That could extend his rule for "many years," but he could achieve these things only by instituting the kind of purges of his colleagues that Stalin used to maintain his power.

And "finally" there is "the third path: do nothing and await the collapse of the economy, an uncontrolled disintegration with an unpredictable outcome" as the situation spins "out of control."

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 #22
Ukraine Today
http://uatoday.tv
June 15, 2015
'Ukraine is on road to becoming a model for other countries', Samantha Power

Exclusive interview with the United States Ambassador to the United Nations

Ukraine Today spoke to United States Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power during her visit to Ukraine about the situation in UN Security Council and ways to stop Russian aggression in Ukraine.

'Sometimes when I'm on Security Council I feel like, I mean what I call, the upside down land, where Russia says what is down is up, Russia says what is white is black, and vice versa. So it is great to be in Ukraine, to be getting facts and the truth'.

"We are still very invested in the Minsk implementation and in using other tools - economic, political, isolation - as a way of seeking to change President Putin's calculus.

"Moving in a direction of providing lethal weapons is something that, we worry, President Obama worries, would increase the risk of military escalation".

"I am overwhelmed by the Ukrainian spirit and tenancy people seem to have to get along with it".

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 #23
Consortiumnews.com
June 15, 2015
Samantha Power: Liberal War Hawk
By Robert Parry
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.

Exclusive: Liberal interventionist Samantha Power - along with neocon allies - appears to have prevailed in the struggle over how President Obama will conduct his foreign policy in his last months in office, promoting aggressive strategies that will lead to more death and destruction, writes Robert Parry.

Propaganda and genocide almost always go hand in hand, with the would-be aggressor stirring up resentment often by assuming the pose of a victim simply acting in self-defense and then righteously inflicting violence on the targeted group.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power understands this dynamic having written about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda where talk radio played a key role in getting Hutus to kill Tutsis. Yet, Power is now leading propaganda campaigns laying the groundwork for two potential ethnic slaughters: against the Alawites, Shiites, Christians and other minorities in Syria and against the ethnic Russians of eastern Ukraine.

Though Power is a big promoter of the "responsibility to protect" - or "R2P" - she operates with glaring selectivity in deciding who deserves protection as she advances a neocon/liberal interventionist agenda. She is turning "human rights" into an excuse not to resolve conflicts but rather to make them bloodier.

Thus, in Power's view, the overthrow and punishment of Syria's President Bashar al-Assad takes precedence over shielding Alawites and other minorities from the likely consequence of Sunni-extremist vengeance. And she has sided with the ethnic Ukrainians in their slaughter of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.

In both cases, Power spurns pragmatic negotiations that could avert worsening violence as she asserts a black-and-white depiction of these crises. More significantly, her strident positions appear to have won the day with President Barack Obama, who has relied on Power as a foreign policy adviser since his 2008 campaign.

Power's self-righteous approach to human rights - deciding that her side wears white hats and the other side wears black hats - is a bracing example of how "human rights activists" have become purveyors of death and destruction or what some critics have deemed "the weaponization of human rights."

We saw this pattern in Iraq in 2002-03 when many "liberal humanitarians" jumped on the pro-war bandwagon in favoring an invasion to overthrow dictator Saddam Hussein. Power herself didn't support the invasion although she was rather mealy-mouthed in her skepticism and sought to hedge her career bets amid the rush to war.

For instance, in a March 10, 2003 debate on MSNBC's "Hardball" show - just nine days before the invasion - Power said, "An American intervention likely will improve the lives of the Iraqis. Their lives could not get worse, I think it's quite safe to say."

However, the lives of Iraqis actually did get worse. Indeed, hundreds of thousands stopped living altogether and a sectarian war continues to tear the country apart to this day.

Power in Power

Similarly, regarding Libya, Power was one of the instigators of the U.S.-supported military intervention in 2011 which was disguised as an "R2P" mission to protect civilians in eastern Libya where dictator Muammar Gaddafi had identified the infiltration of terrorist groups.

Urged on by then-National Security Council aide Power and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Obama agreed to support a military mission that quickly morphed into a "regime change" operation. Gaddafi's troops were bombed from the air and Gaddafi was eventually hunted down, tortured and murdered.

The result, however, was not a bright new day of peace and freedom for Libyans but the disintegration of Libya into a failed state with violent extremists, including elements of the Islamic State, seizing control of swaths of territory and murdering civilians. It turns out that Gaddafi was not wrong about some of his enemies.

Today, Power is a leading force opposing meaningful negotiations over Syria and Ukraine, again staking out "moralistic" positions - rejecting possible power-sharing with Assad in Syria and blaming the Ukraine crisis entirely on the Russians. She doesn't seem all that concerned about impending genocides against Assad's supporters in Syria or ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.

In 2012, at a meeting hosted by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, former U.S. Ambassador Peter W. Galbraith predicted "the next genocide in the world ... will likely be against the Alawites in Syria" - a key constituency behind Assad's secular regime. But Power has continued to insist that the top priority is Assad's removal.

Similarly, Power has shown little sympathy for members of Ukraine's ethnic Russian minority who saw their elected President Viktor Yanukovych overthrown in a Feb. 22, 2014 coup spearheaded by neo-Nazis and other right-wing nationalists who had gained effective control of the Maidan protests. Many of these extremists want an ethnically pure Ukrainian state.

Since then, neo-Nazi units, such as the Azov battalion, have been Kiev's tip of the spear in slaughtering thousands of ethnic Russians in the east and driving millions from their homes, essentially an ethnic-cleansing campaign in eastern Ukraine.

A Propaganda Speech

Yet, Power traveled to Kiev to deliver a one-sided propaganda speech on June 11, portraying the post-coup Ukrainian regime simply as a victim of "Russian aggression."

Despite the key role of neo-Nazis - acknowledged even by the U.S. House of Representatives - Power uttered not one word about Ukrainian military abuses which have included reports of death squad operations targeting ethnic Russians and other Yanukovych supporters.

Skipping over the details of the U.S.-backed and Nazi-driven coup of Feb. 22, 2014, Power traced the conflict instead to "February 2014, when Russia's little green men first started appearing in Crimea." She added that the United Nations' "focus on Ukraine in the Security Council is important, because it gives me the chance - on behalf of the United States - to lay out the mounting evidence of Russia's aggression, its obfuscation, and its outright lies. ... America is clear-eyed when it comes to seeing the truth about Russia's destabilizing actions in your country."

Power continued: "The message of the United States throughout this Moscow-manufactured conflict - and the message you heard from President Obama and other world leaders at last week's meeting of the G7 - has never wavered: if Russia continues to disregard the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine; and if Russia continues to violate the rules upon which international peace and security rest - then the United States will continue to raise the costs on Russia.

"And we will continue to rally other countries to do the same, reminding them that their silence or inaction in the face of Russian aggression will not placate Moscow, it will only embolden it.

"But there is something more important that is often lost in the international discussion about Russia's efforts to impose its will on Ukraine. And that is you - the people of Ukraine - and your right to determine the course of your own country's future. ... Or, as one of the great rallying cries of the Maidan put it:Ukraina po-nad u-se! Ukraine above all else!" [Applause.]

Power went on: "Let me begin with what we know brought people out to the Maidan in the first place. We've all heard a good number of myths about this. One told by the Yanukovych government and its Russian backers at the time was that the Maidan protesters were pawns of the West, and did not speak for the 'real' Ukraine.

"A more nefarious myth peddled by Moscow after Yanukovych's fall was that Euromaidan had been engineered by Western capitals in order to topple a democratically-elected government."

Of course, neither of Power's points was actually a "myth." For instance, the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy was sponsoring scores of anti-government activists and media operations - and NED President Carl Gershman had deemed Ukraine "the biggest prize," albeit a stepping stone toward ousting Russian President Vladimir Putin. [See Consortiumnews.com's "A Shadow US Foreign Policy."]

Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland was collaborating with U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt how to "midwife" the change in government with Nuland picking the future leaders of Ukraine - "Yats is the guy" referring to Arseniy Yatsenyuk who was installed as prime minister after the coup. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Neocons: Masters of Chaos."]

The coup itself occurred after Yanukovych pulled back the police to prevent worsening violence. Armed neo-Nazi and right-wing militias, organized as "sotins" or 100-man units, then took the offensive and overran government buildings. Yanukovych and other officials fled for their lives, with Yanukovych narrowly avoiding assassination. In the days following the coup, armed thugs essentially controlled the government and brutally intimidated any political resistance.

Inventing 'Facts'

But that reality had no place in Power's propaganda speech. Instead, she said:

"The facts tell a different story. As you remember well, then-President Yanukovych abandoned Kyiv of his own accord, only hours after signing an agreement with opposition leaders that would have led to early elections and democratic reforms.

"And it was only after Yanukovych fled the capital that 328 of the 447 members of the democratically-elected Rada voted to strip him of his powers - including 36 of the 38 members of his own party in parliament at the time. Yanukovych then vanished for several days, only to eventually reappear - little surprise - in Russia.

"As is often the case, these myths reveal more about the myth makers than they do about the truth. Moscow's fable was designed to airbrush the Ukrainian people - and their genuine aspirations and demands - out of the Maidan, by claiming the movement was fueled by outsiders.

"Yet, as you all know by living through it - and as was clear even to those of us watching your courageous stand from afar - the Maidan was made in Ukraine. A Ukraine of university students and veterans of the Afghan war. Of Ukrainian, Russian, and Tatar speakers. Of Christians, Muslims, and Jews. ..."

Power went on with her rhapsodic version of events: "Given the powerful interests that benefited from the corrupt system, achieving a full transformation was always going to be an uphill battle. And that was before Russian troops occupied Crimea, something the Kremlin denied at the time, but has since admitted; and it was before Russia began training, arming, bankrolling, and fighting alongside its separatist proxies in eastern Ukraine, something the Kremlin continues to deny.

"Suddenly, the Ukrainian people faced a battle on two fronts: combating corruption and overhauling broken institutions on the inside; while simultaneously defending against aggression and destabilization from the outside.

"I don't have to tell you the immense strain that these battles have placed upon you. You feel it in the young men and women, including some of your family members and friends, who have volunteered or been drafted into the military - people who could be helping build up their nation, but instead are risking their lives to defend it against Russian aggression. ...

"You feel it in the conflict's impact on your country's economy - as instability makes it harder for Ukrainian businesses to attract foreign investment, deepens inflation, and depresses families' wages. ... It is felt in the undercurrent of fear in cities like Kharkiv - where citizens have been the victims of multiple bomb attacks, the most lethal of which killed four people, including two teenage boys, at a rally celebrating the first anniversary of Euromaidan.

"And the impact is felt most directly by the people living in the conflict zone. According to the UN, at least 6,350 people have been killed in the violence driven by Russia and the separatists - including 625 women and children - and an additional 1,460 people are missing; 15,775 people have been wounded. And an estimated 2 million people have been displaced by this conflict. And the real numbers of killed, missing, wounded, and displaced are likely higher, according to the UN, due to its limited access to areas controlled by the separatists."

One-Sided Account

Pretty much everything in Power's propaganda speech was blamed on the Russians - along with the ethnic Russians and other Ukrainians resisting the imposition of the new U.S.-backed order. She also ignored the will of the people of Crimea who voted overwhelmingly in a referendum to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia.

The closest she came to criticizing the current regime in Kiev was to note that "investigations into serious crimes such as the violence in the Maidan and in Odessa have been sluggish, opaque, and marred by serious errors - suggesting not only a lack of competence, but also a lack of will to hold the perpetrators accountable."

Yet, even there, Power failed to note the growing evidence that the neo-Nazis were likely behind the crucial sniper attacks on Feb. 20, 2014, that killed both police and protesters and touched off the chaos that led to the coup two days later. [A worthwhile documentary on this mystery is "Maidan Massacre."]

Nor, did Power spell out that neo-Nazis from the Maidan set fire to the Trade Union Building in Odessa on May 2, 2014, burning alive scores of ethnic Russians while spray-painting the building with pro-Nazi graffiti, including hailing the "Galician SS," the Ukrainian auxiliary that helped Adolf Hitler's SS carry out the Holocaust in Ukraine.

Listening to Power's speech you might not even have picked up that she was obliquely criticizing the U.S.-backed regime in Kiev.

Also, by citing a few touching stories of pro-coup Ukrainians who had died in the conflict, Power implicitly dehumanized the far larger number of ethnic Russians who opposed the overthrow of their elected president and have been killed by Kiev's brutal "anti-terrorism operation."

Use of Propaganda

In my nearly four decades covering Washington, I have listened to and read many speeches like the one delivered by Samantha Power. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan would give similar propaganda speeches justifying the slaughter of peasants and workers in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, where the massacres of Mayan Indians were later deemed a "genocide." [See Consortiumnews.com's "How Reagan Promoted Genocide."]

Regardless of the reality on the ground, the speeches always made the U.S.-backed side the "good guys" and the other side the "bad guys" - even when "our side" included CIA-affiliated "death squads" and U.S.-equipped military forces slaughtering tens of thousands of civilians.

During the 1990s, more propaganda speeches were delivered by President George H.W. Bush regarding Panama and Iraq and by President Bill Clinton regarding Kosovo and Yugoslavia. Then, last decade, the American people were inundated with more propaganda rhetoric from President George W. Bush justifying the invasion of Iraq and the expansion of the endless "war on terror."

Generally speaking, during much of his first term, Obama was more circumspect in his rhetoric, but he, too, has slid into propaganda-speak in the latter half of his presidency as he shed his "realist" foreign policy tendencies in favor of "tough-guy/gal" rhetoric favored by "liberal interventionists," such as Power, and neoconservatives, such as Nuland and her husband Robert Kagan (whom a chastened Obama invited to a White House lunch last year).

But the difference between the propaganda of Reagan, Bush-41, Clinton and Bush-43 was that it focused on conflicts in which the Soviet Union or Russia might object but would likely not be pushed to the edge of nuclear war, nothing as provocative as what the Obama administration has done in Ukraine, now including dispatching U.S. military advisers.

The likes of Power, Nuland and Obama are not just justifying wars that leave devastation, death and disorder in their wake in disparate countries around the world, but they are fueling a war on Russia's border.

That was made clear by the end of Power's speech in which she declared: "Ukraine, you may still be bleeding from pain. An aggressive neighbor may be trying to tear your nation to pieces. Yet you ... are strong and defiant. You, Ukraine, are standing tall for your freedom. And if you stand tall together - no kleptocrat, no oligarch, and no foreign power can stop you."

There is possibly nothing more reckless than what has emerged as Obama's late-presidential foreign policy, what amounts to a plan to destabilize Russia and seek "regime change" in the overthrow of Russian President Putin.

Rather than take Putin up on his readiness to cooperate with Obama in trouble spots, such as the Syrian civil war and Iran's nuclear program, "liberal interventionist" hawks like Power and neocons like Nuland - with Obama in tow - have chosen confrontation and have used extreme propaganda to effectively shut the door on negotiation and compromise.

Yet, as with previous neocon/liberal-interventionist schemes, this one lacks on-the-ground realism. Even if it were possible to so severely damage the Russian economy and to activate U.S.-controlled "non-governmental organizations" to help drive Putin from office, that doesn't mean a Washington-friendly puppet would be installed in the Kremlin.

Another possible outcome would be the emergence of an extreme Russian nationalist suddenly controlling the nuclear codes and willing to use them. So, when ambitious ideologues like Power and Nuland get control of U.S. foreign policy in such a sensitive area, what they're playing with is the very survival of life on planet Earth - the ultimate genocide.

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 #24
www.rt.com
June 15, 2015
'West's foreign policy leaders - intellectual dwarfs compared to Cold War'

Western leaders seem not to have a clue about conflict resolution and confidence building and their mentality will sooner or later lead to war, says Jan Oberg director of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research.

Poland is on its way to hosting NATO heavy weapons. Warsaw has confirmed it expects ongoing talks to come to an agreement. Neighboring Lithuania is also considering some NATO weaponry will be stationed on its territory too. Heavy weapons would be also stored in Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria and possibly Hungary.

RT: Some are comparing today's tension with the Cold War. What about you?

Jan Oberg: Of course there is a political tension and it's backed up particularly by this type of steps which you can interpret as signaling, and which you can also interpret as a preparation for a future war under certain circumstances. I think that what we see is conflict illiteracy. It's that these men who decide these things and it's particularly the US, put in NATO's headquarters and in foreign ministries and defense ministries in Europe - simply they don't have a clue about reconciliation conflict resolution, confidence building and all the things that we actually worked with during the first, old Cold War. This is what they have on the shelves, this is the way they think, that mentality will sooner or later lead to war.

RT: It could be the first time NATO permanently deploys weapons in member states that were once part of the USSR. What do you make of the timing?

JO: I should be joking about it and saying "I'm looking forward to the Russian forces or equipment being stationed in Mexico or close to the US border in Canada." There is no doubt about that this is foolish from a realpolitik security policy viewpoint. Secondly the timing of course has to do with the fact that they see it as a buildup necessitated by the annexation of Crimea and the tension in Ukraine. However instead of talking, meeting, you avoid meetings when you have a chance to meet President Putin, you avoided the 70th anniversary of the end of the WWII, whereas what you do is you use weapons to signal with. And this is not a kind of mature politics that we had during the first Cold War where we had brilliant figures like Urho Kekkonen and Willy Brandt and others in Europe who knew how dangerous these things were, but today's foreign policy and security policy leaders in the West are intellectual dwarves compared with what they were during the first Cold War.

RT: NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has been saying the Alliance wants a healthy and friendly relationship with Russia. Are the latest developments helping?

JO: It's the usual nonsense that we point offensive hard hitting weapons at you, and then we tell you that we do not have any bad intentions. Everybody does that, Russia and the Soviet Union have done that, the West does, small countries in Africa do it against each other, it's a whole conceptualization of foreign and security policy that is wrong. Because you do one thing and you say another thing and you ask people to trust your good or non-evil intentions although you point offensive weapons against each other. Now we have to discuss what is defensive defense, that would not be considered a threat in the eyes of anybody else, but which would be helpful in case confidence building breaks down, and there is an invasion or an overreaction somewhere. What we have now is a hellishly dangerous system because the thinking underlying it is madly wrong and it's been madly wrong since [19]45. We have long range offensive weapons, we are pointing them at you but we ask you to believe that we have only friendly intentions. This is intellectually so low level and the world could end by that type of thinking.

RT: Eastern Europe has seen large protests against NATO when it was parading its military hardware earlier this year. How will the new hosts of NATO arms deal with public discontent?

JO: We have public discontent in the West, in the East. Ordinary citizens do not want war; they do not want their tax payers money spent on these types of toys which could undermine their security. People are willing to pay for something if they feel more secure. Now they are paying horrendous sums for the militarization of the world and getting less secure, more likely seeing a war in this generation or in the next one thanks to this policy. I would say if you want prepositioning which we abstained from in the first Cold War, if this dangerous policy is now being the policy vis-à-vis our policy pursued in the East - then let's have a referendum about it. Let the people decide whether they want it or not. Let people in the nuclear countries for the first time in human history have a referendum about whether they want nuclear weapons on their territory or not. Practice democracy in security politics or admit that you are dictatorial kinds of regimes that want militarism rather than peace.

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 #25
Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs
www.mid.ru
June 11, 2015
Comment by the Information and Press Department on the US State Department's Report on Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments

On June 5, the US Department of State published its 2015 Report on Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments.Apart from writing about the United States' adherence to its obligations, the report provides assessments of adherence to international agreements by other countries. This includes complaints about the Russian Federation over the alleged violations of its obligations under several international agreements.

We note that the United States continues to act as the supreme certifier who has assumed the right to give the other countries marks for their compliance with their commitments under arms control, non-proliferation and disarmament agreements.

It is obvious that such documents are primarily designed to service Washington's political interests and are therefore openly subjective, prejudiced and biased. These documents are noted for numerous speculations, exaggerations, forced arguments, false messages and distortions.Considering this, the 2015 report, just as all the previous reports, can hardly be described as serious documents that reflect the real state of affairs in the sphere of non-proliferation and arms control.

We point out that the United States used this report to again refer to Russia's alleged occupation and annexation of Crimea and provocations against Ukrainein violation of its agreements under the Vienna Document 2011 (VD11) adopted by the participating states of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). This formula has nothing to do with reality and turns the matter around.

Crimea's return to the Russian Federation was completed in strict compliance with international law as a result of the free expression of will by the residents of the peninsula, when over 96 per cent of the people voted for reunification with Russia.

As for the alleged Russian provocations against Ukraine, these are completely ungrounded states that are only preventing the international community from understanding the real causes of the Ukrainian crisis. It is all the more strange that these allegations are made by a country that never fails to declare its commitment to the maintenance and strengthening of international peace and security, but which has contributed to the highly destructive destabilisationof the situation in Ukraine and several other countries in the past few years.

While making unfounded accusations, the United States has not only failed to take any practical steps - unlike Russia - to settle the Ukrainian crisis and prevent a humanitarian catastrophe in the Lugansk and Donetsk regions, but has actually prodded the Kiev authorities towards keeping up a fratricidal internal conflict.

The US State Department's report once again accuses Russia, without reason, of violating its obligations under the Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles (INF Treaty). In fact, it proceeds from the report that in 2014 Russia possessed, produced or flight-tested ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCM) with a range capability of 500 km to 5,500 km, and that it also possessed or produced launchers of such missiles.

This is a completely ungrounded allegation. Evidence of this is the inability by the United States to provide any concrete facts but only refers to "highly sensitive information and sources and methods,"the reliability of which cannot be verified.

It appears that the main goal of the US campaign over the INF Treaty is to discredit Russia and at the same time to divert public attention from the free interpretation of INF Treaty provisions that prevent it from creating weapons systems that Washington needs.

In this connection, we are very worried about US plans to deploy vertical missile launch systems (VLS) at its bases in Romania and Poland. According to our assessments, these systems can launch SM-3 interceptor missiles and Tomahawk intermediate-range missiles. This would be in direct violation of the INF Treaty.

We also have questions about the United States using target missiles for BMD tests with characteristics that are similar to those of intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles. There are grounds to assume that the United States may be using these tests to improve the production and combat characteristics of prohibited ballistic missiles.

We also note that the unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs or combat drones), which the United States has been manufacturing for years, also fall under the INF Treaty definition of ground-based cruise missiles, including in view of the specified interpretation of the term "weapon-delivery vehicle"from the diplomatic notes exchanged between the Soviet Union and the United States on May 12, 1988.

We have urged the United States on many occasions to conduct an expert discussion of issues related to the implementation of the INF Treaty by the participating parties. However, the United States clearly prefers to use "loudspeaker diplomacy" instead. We see this, above all, as evidence of US weakness and lack of confidence in its arguments, especially when real facts rather than allegations are used by its opponents.

We have taken note of statements by Pentagon officials to the effect that the United States is considering several military responses to alleged Russian violations, including the potential deployment of intermediate and shorter-range missiles, which are prohibited under the INF Treaty, close to the Russian border. This would amount to an irremediable violation of the INF Treaty by the United States, with all the ensuing consequences.

We are urging the United States to implement its obligations under the INF Treaty and not to undermine the viability of this document.

The US approach to the compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) raises a number of questions. The so-called joint nuclear missions practiced by the United States and its NATO allies are a grave violation of the Treaty. As is known, Article 1 of the NPT forbids nuclear states to transfer nuclear weapons to any recipient, as well as other nuclear explosive devices, or to assist any non-nuclear state in manufacturing or acquiring such weapons or devices either directly or indirectly. We have repeatedly drawn our US colleagues' attention to the fact that the participation of the European non-nuclear-weapons members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation in joint nuclear planning and practicing skills of using nuclear weapons involving aircraft carriers, their crews, airport infrastructure and ground services of the aforementioned states openly contradicts the spirit and the letter of the NPT. However, the United States persists in pursuing the same line.

We believe that this problem has only one solution - the return of all non-strategic US nuclear weapons to its national territory and establishing a ban on its deployment abroad, the liquidation of the respective infrastructure which allows to rapidly deploy those weapons, as well as a dismissal of trainings (drills) related to the issues of preparing and using nuclear weapons by the troops of the states that do not possess such weapons.

The persistent refusal of the United States to participate in working out international agreements on the prevention of weapons deployment in space causes grave concerns. Washington continues to be guided in this issue by its national conceptual principles. The latter, among other things, make provisions for the use of preventive military measures even in the case of presumed hostile actions from other states, which in itself contradicts the norms of the international law. For example, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff's document JP 3-14 Space Operations allows for "preventive diplomatic, information, military and economic measures" against an adversary's space capability.

Such a presurmise most evidently echoes the draft Code of Conduct for Outer Space Activities that the United States has been so vigorously supporting since 2012. In particular, regarding the provisions of the Code which entitle one state to take unsanctioned, out-of-jurisdiction unilateral military actions against space devices of other nations.

Clearly, such doctrine-related provisions along with the initiatives supported by the United States with the invariable will of the US administration to preserve total "discretion" in space can hardly be considered facilitating international efforts to ensure equal and indivisible security for all and to sustain global stability.

The United States' inconsistent stance on the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) obviously contradicts the US' claim of adhering to the non-proliferation regime. Despite repeated declarations to ratify the Treaty and to make efforts on its coming into effect as soon as possible, no practical steps have been made in this direction. Washington's arguments that the United States has not yet achieved favourable conditions for ratifying the Treaty do not hold up to criticism. Considering that the other countries whose ratification is needed for the Treaty to come in effect largely behave with an eye to the United States, Washington's "stagnant" position appears to be a major hurdle on the way to turning the CTBT into an active international legal instrument.

We have also noted that the United States failed to ratify key international legal instruments in the area of physical nuclear safety: the 2005 Amendment to the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material and the International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism. At the same time Washington attempts to assume the role of the main and privileged actor in this area. We believe that we should be able to expect a more responsible approach from a country with such leadership ambitions in the area of the Physical Nuclear Security. We would like to hope that the United States will manage to display such an approach in practice by ratifying the documents named above.

Regrettably, the United States has long chosen the tactics of spreading provocative conjectures and insinuations about other states on the issues related to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC) instead of fruitfully participating in the efforts of the international community to strengthen the Convention. This is probably being done to hide the United States' own poor record regarding the compliance with the BWC.

Consider the scandal around new cases of sending out live anthrax samples, a potential biological weapons agent. Just like in 2001, when a similar incident occurred, the source of the deadly infection was Pentagon's military biological facilities: back then it was the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Maryland, whereas now it was the Lothar Salomon Life Sciences Test Facility (LSTF) at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah. Due to the sending out of anthrax samples from the Lothar Salomon Life Sciences Test Facility, an increased risk of a highly dangerous infection threatened not only the US population but also that of other countries: Canada and Australia. The shipment of bacteria to the US military facility in the third country, Osan Air Base in South Korea, was particularly alarming.

Pentagon's activities on deploying its medical and biological laboratories next to the Russian borders raise deep concerns. The most salient example in this respect is the R.G. Lugar Center for Public Health Research in a suburb of Tbilisi, a laboratory of a high biological isolation level. The Center is "home" to a medical research unit of the US army, a branch of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR). The US and Georgian authorities make efforts to conceal the true content and focus of the activities of this US army unit, which studies highly infectious diseases. Pentagon is also trying to introduce similar undercover military medical-biological facilities to other CIS countries.

This worrying activity of Pentagon is being conducted in areas directly related to the BWC against the background of apparent lack of interest on the part of the US Administration in strengthening the Convention as a tool of mutual security. It is a known fact that in 2001 the United States unilaterally disrupted multilateral talks in Geneva on designing a BWC verification mechanism, and has been resisting the resumption of the talks ever since. Decade-long efforts of the international community on strengthening the Convention have been derailed.

We could not help but notice that the US Department of State iterates the already common argument that the United States cannot certify the fulfillment of Russia's statements regarding the amount of stockpile of toxic substances, the number of former chemical weapons production facilities, production capacities - implying that Russia does not fully observe the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).

We would like to remind the US that compliance with the CWC remains within sole competence of the recognised international Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Washington should not take up OPCW functions - particularly, because the organisation itself has never had any complaints regarding the credibility of reports provided by the Russian Federation.

The alleged gaps in the fulfillment of the obligations by other countries are apparently pointed out in order to shade Washington's own omissions and violations. Specifically, it is known that during their presence in Iraq, US-led NATO troops, without any international supervision or OPCW approval, neglected security requirements and destroyed Iraq's toxic weapons that they obtained, which caused significant harm to the health of involved personnel. Speaking of Syria's dragging out of the removal of chemical weapons from its territory - which was carried out under the extreme circumstances of a domestic armed conflict - the report authors somehow forgot about the delays in the destruction of Syria's toxic weapons at Veolia in the United States, which resulted in the destruction deadline being pushed back to November of this year.

Regarding the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), we do not think it reasonable to revisit this subject. The actions of the United States and its allies determined the fate of this treaty as they attempted, with persistence and stubbornness, to promote their own geopolitical interests through using their control over the conventional armed forces in Europe.

A serious discussion of an agreement to replace CFE based on balancing the interests of all the parties, including Russia, is possible if the US and other NATO states can abandon this discrediting approach.

Like last year, the 2015 report by the US State Department enumerates US complaints about other parties' compliance with the Treaty on Open Skies (OST).

Regarding Russia's alleged airspace restrictions,we will reiterate that the limitations on flight altitudes over the Moscow and Chechnya restricted zones are due to flight safety regulations.

The maximum flight distance for flights over the Kaliningrad Region was introduced underOST provisions and the related decision of the Open Skies Consultative Commission (OSCC). This procedure allows for effective observation of the region the same as withother regions of Russia and adjacent countries (Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia).

Restrictions for Open Skies flights near the borders of Abkhazia and South Ossetia were introduced in accordance with OST provisions, according to which the flight path of an observation aircraft shall not be closer than ten kilometres from the border with an adjacent state that is not a signatory state. Abkhazia and South Ossetia are not OST signatories.

The report also claims that Russia refused to provide priority flight clearance for certain Open Skies flights. Under OST, Open Skies flights "shall take priority over any regular air traffic", that is, scheduled airline flights.

We are surprised by the US' insistent attempts to discredit Russia's decision to close military airfields for all declared national holidays. Other OST signatories widely use this practice.

The Russian Federation has encouraged the United States to determine a procedure for the observation of areas and territories outside its continental area on several occasions. Unfortunately, we have not received any reply, even a framework reply, to our inquiries. This unregulated issue leaves parts ofUS territories out of view, which is a major violation of the OST.

As for several countries' requests for clarification under the "unusual military activities" provisions in Chapter III of the Vienna Document in 2014, Russia has, on several occasions, said unambiguously that its armed forces are not conducting any unusual or unscheduled military activities that must be reported under the Vienna Document. We have pointed out several times that the routine activities of the Russian armed forces within national territory do not threaten the safety of the OSCE member states. No country that has requested clarification under Chapter III of the Vienna Document has provided any evidence of Russia's unusual military activity.Nor have inspections identified any significant military activity by the Russian armed forces.

We have to say that this disregard for the findings of inspections is doing a disservice to the regime of confidence- and security-building measures (CSBMs). It appears that the CSBM regime is only effective in "good weather" and is not used as intended during crises, but to demonstrate support for one side and to put political pressure on the other.

The only conclusion we can draw from the 2015 State Department report is that the United States continues to rely on propaganda and misinformation to the detriment ofcareful, thorough and meaningful discussions of issues pertaining to the signatory states' compliance with their commitments under arms control, non-proliferation and disarmament agreements. Our experience of relations with our US colleagues on these issues shows that Washington's policy is based on a lack of evidence of Russia's alleged violations and neglect to work with all the concerned parties within specialised formats.

Russia is always ready for this discussion.

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