#2
Reuters
June 23, 2015
U.S. to pre-position tanks, artillery in Baltics, eastern Europe
BY PHIL STEWART

The United States will pre-position tanks, artillery and other military equipment in eastern and central Europe, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced on Tuesday, moving to reassure NATO allies unnerved by Russia's intervention in Ukraine.

Carter, during a trip to Tallinn, said the Baltic states - Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia -- as well as Bulgaria, Romania and Poland agreed to host elements of this equipment. Some of the equipment would also be located in Germany.

After Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimea region last year, NATO leaders agreed to step up exercises and rotations of forces through NATO allies in eastern Europe as well as storing hardware there for use in an emergency.

The United States had not formally disclosed where in Europe the equipment would be stored but news reports about military planning triggered an angry response from Moscow ahead of Carter's trip to Europe this week.

HYBRID WARFARE

A Russian defense ministry official said stationing tanks and heavy weapons in NATO states on Russia's border would be the most aggressive U.S. act since the Cold War.

President Vladimir Putin announced Russia would add more than 40 intercontinental ballistic missiles to its nuclear arsenal this year. Carter has condemned Russia's "loose rhetoric" involving nuclear arms.

A fact sheet provided by the U.S. military said the United States' pre-positioning would include about 250 tanks, Bradley infantry fighting vehicles and self-propelled howitzers.

The amount of equipment that would be temporarily stored in each country would be enough to supply either a company, so enough for about 150 soldiers, or a battalion, or about 750 soldiers. Much of it is already in Europe, officials say.

Moscow denies providing troops or arms to pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. But neighboring NATO countries, especially the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, which have Russian minorities, fear Russia could foment trouble on their territories.

U.S. officials say Ukraine has illustrated the importance of being able to counter "hybrid warfare", the blend of unidentified troops, propaganda and economic pressure that the West says Russia has used there.

It also involves cyber warfare. Carter also announced plans on Tuesday to work with an Estonia-based NATO cyber center to help allies develop cyber defense strategies and critical infrastructure protection planning.

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#3
RFE/RL
June 23, 2015
Russia Is Biggest Force Against Democracy In Eurasia, Report Finds
by Patricia Hill and Ron Synovitz

Russia saw its biggest loss of democracy in a decade last year, while it and other authoritarian states took aggressive action to block efforts to form new democracies elsewhere in Europe and Eurasia, a new report by Freedom House finds.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's moves to annex Crimea and back separatists in eastern Ukraine waging civil war against Kyiv had a cascading effect of stifling democracy at home and snuffing out freedom and democratic achievements in neighboring regimes, said the U.S.-based watchdog group in its annual Nations In Transit report, which monitors the democratic development of 29 nations from the former Soviet Union, Balkans, and Central Europe.

"Russia has been at the center of Freedom House's narrative, as regards Eurasia, for a number of years," the report's author, Sylvana Habdank-Kolaczkowska, told RFE/RL, but last year Russia's disruptive influence grew exponentially because of the "escalation of Russia's aggression internationally and the new forms that it took."

The fallout from Russia's crackdown on democracy and freedom was felt both at home and abroad.

"As it sought to destabilize the new democratic government in Ukraine, the Kremlin stepped up its suppression of dissent at home -- targeting online media, opposition figures, and civil society groups with legal bans on extremism, trumped up criminal charges, and other restrictions," Habdank-Kolaczkowska said.

Putin's struggle for survival in the face of an economic embargo by the West, combined with his efforts to justify his actions in Ukraine, led to a dubious achievement, she said: "The birth of a new kind of Russian propaganda -- with Russian state-controlled media broadly disseminating misinformation, targeting mostly countries that have large Russian-speaking minorities."

This new media-propagated propaganda tool has, along with Russia's nearby military exercises, been making the Russian-speaking peoples of other Eurasian countries feel "extremely insecure," inhibiting democratic efforts in those countries, she said.

Despite Russia's attempts to intervene in Ukraine and the collapse of its own democracy rating, Ukraine managed to spur a big jump of four notches in its rating, thanks to the collapse of Viktor Yanukovych's corrupt presidency and two rounds of well-administered, competitive elections, the report found.

While Russia won special attention in the report this year, it also singles out Azerbaijan and Ilham Aliyev's regime for a "new intensity" to its multiyear crackdown on activists and journalists who threatened to expose official corruption and other abuses.

Many regime opponents were jailed during the year on fabricated charges like hooliganism or possession of weapons and drugs. And all that happened at a time when Azerbaijan was being honored by European leaders with hosting the 2015 European Games and chairing the executive body of the Council of Europe.

In light of these developments, Habdank-Kolaczkowska said, Azerbaijan's rating slide has gotten so bad that now that "it actually has a worse ranking than Russia, Tajikistan, or Belarus."

The growing "audacity of democracy's foes" also was a factor in Hungary, which under the right-wing rule of Viktor Orbán drove a decline in democracy throughout Central and Eastern Europe, the report found. Hungary was demoted from a "consolidated democracy" to a "semiconsolidated" one.

In the Balkans, with journalists in a precarious situation and judicial reforms stalling, four out of seven countries registered declines.

In general, the trend was negative throughout the whole Eurasian region, the report found.

Twenty years ago, when Freedom House first started rating countries, only three -- Belarus, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan -- were considered "consolidated authoritarian regimes."

That number has more than doubled since then, however, and Eurasia's average democracy score has fallen from 5.4 to 6.03 on a 7-point scale, the report found.


 

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 #4
Kremlin.ru
June 19, 2015
Plenary session of the 19th St Petersburg International Economic Forum. (and Charlie Rose interview) [transcript continued]

Charlie Rose: Thank you. Next, we have Mr Mahmood Hashim Al-Kooheji, the general director of Bahrain Mumtalakat Holding Company. What investment opportunities do you believe exist in Russia, and what questions do you have?

General director of Bahrain Mumtalakat Holding Company Mahmood Hashim Al-Kooheji: Please allow me to thank you, Mr President, for organising this forum and for inviting me to attend, because this gives us an opportunity to meet our partners in Russia.

Mumtalakat is Bahrain's sovereign fund. Like other sovereign funds, we have the opportunity to invest throughout the world. We feel that it is imperative to have sustainable growth and there should be potential for investments that will give us long-term stability and interest.

We have investments in Europe, the United States and other regions. We are currently considering and analysing opportunities to invest in Russia. When you ask me about the Russian economy, I think that it is very promising and it has a very solid foundation. The reason I think this is because the Russian economy has a highly trained workforce, a highly educated workforce within the country. In addition, it has the necessary resources that support this workforce - this has been brought up extensively. So the Russian economy is a very large market, which makes it much simpler for us to find a niche. These three components allow us to feel confident that investments in Russia will be good market investments and will be long-term.

Our fund tries to find partners that will allow us to work freely in the economy. I think, Mr President, your initiative in organising the Russian Direct Investment Fund is a very good idea and it is a major step because when we came to the Russian market, we found an institution, an organisation, that knows this market and works with it professionally and transparently. This is very important when we are selecting our partners. Any investment in the Russian economy allows us to find the necessary partner. This makes the Russian economy very appealing to us in the long-term.

Charlie Rose: Thank you.

To my right is Miguel Galuccio from Argentina. As you know, Argentina and Gazprom have signed an agreement on working tougher on a gas field. What are the opportunities for joint work between the two states in the energy sector?

President of YPF Argentina Miguel Galuccio: First of all, thank you very much, Mr President, for giving me the opportunity to participate in this forum.

Energy is a very important direction for all South American nations, especially Argentina. We have extensive experience in economic growth, which our economy demonstrated over the past ten years. We are producing oil and gas - mainly gas. We have traditional natural resources, we also have natural gas and traditional energy resources. Moreover, we also have non-conventional sources of energy, which we are now beginning to develop.

Our production volume has increased by 25 percent recently. We believe non-conventional energy sources can be very efficient, and their production can be very profitable. To meet this goal, we must make major investments into this sector, and we need other nations' and companies' technologies and know-how. We feel there are great opportunities arising in energy.

We are engaged in strategic cooperation with Russian companies. Russia and Argentina have formed a wonderful relationship. We strive to develop the potential of our relations and work in various sectors. Our company has signed an agreement with Gazprom that will give us the opportunity to continue cooperating effectively in the future. We have signed a memorandum of mutual understanding, which is aimed towards the joint development of our country's resource base.

Thank you.

Charlie Rose: Do you have any other comments on this issue, as far as opportunities that are becoming available for both countries are concerned? It seems to me it would be very interesting to hear the points of view from different regions.

We already talked today about the effect of sanctions. You feel the effect of the sanctions is overstated. Many people have said so. How do you view the opportunities and the need for further advancement of the Russian economy? What paths exist for this, in terms of the institutional framework, the rule of law and so on?

Vladimir Putin: With regard to what was just said by our colleagues, as far as Argentina is concerned, President of Argentina Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and I discussed the opportunity for cooperation in the oil and gas sector during her visit to Russia and my visit to Argentina. We agreed that our leading companies will engage in joint work. To be honest, I don't know what happened next, but I was very glad to hear just now about the specific agreements to begin this joint work. Indeed, Argentina has enormous potential, and naturally, working together with a leading global company like Gazprom can give a very positive result.

As for sovereign wealth funds, if I am not mistaken, the Bahrain sovereign fund is not only a partner of our Russian Direct Investment Fund, but also has an agreement that, I believe, your fund has 10 percent participation in all the projects by the Russian Direct Investment Fund - is that correct? Please note what our partners have agreed to. Automatically, as soon as the Russian Direct Investment Fund implements a project, the Bahrain fund automatically joins at 10 percent. This is a very high level of trust not only towards the Russian economy, but also towards the professionalism of the colleagues at the Russian Direct Investment Fund. I would like to ask everyone to welcome our partner and express words of gratitude for this trust.

Things are not so bad as far as sanctions are concerned: there are upsides and downsides. This is a time when we are undergoing structural changes and it is genuinely possible to take steps that can have long-term positive effects.

As for the sanctions you mentioned, and how we are going to overcome today's situation, I would describe the current state of affairs by saying that it is not any kind of catastrophe for us. We feel that we must achieve several goals; they are less ambitious than the ones we set several years ago, but I very much hope that this will be a different quality - a better quality - than we had in previous years.

Here is what we want to achieve: first of all, we want to ensure our economy's growth in the short term, over the coming years, at the global average level, which is about 3.5 percent.

Second, it is imperative for us to achieve annual labour productivity growth of 5 percent.

And third - this is a very important indicator - we must bring inflation down to 4 percent. This is what we must strive for - absolutely, through a coordinated and balanced macroeconomic and budget policy.

All the trends we are currently seeing in our economy allow us to assert that these goals are absolutely realistic and we will reach them soon. At the same time, we would naturally prefer not to respond to the destructive actions that some of our partners are attempting to impose - and which they are imposing at a loss to themselves. There have been various calculations among our European partners; some have said that European manufacturers are losing around 40 to 50 billion; now, the most recent reports I saw and heard from Europe say that European manufacturers may suffer losses of up to 100 billion.

Our trade with Europe has dropped by nearly a quarter. Meanwhile, trade with your country, the United States, has grown by 5.6 percent. Our commodity flows from EU countries to the Russian Federation have decreased somewhat, and import has nearly halved; it used to be just under $30 billion, and now it is slightly over $15 billion.

At the same time, if we look at the trade structure, with the increase in trade with the United States, imports from the US have increased by about 11 percent. Overall, we can certainly say that this does not balance out the losses in cooperation with Europe, but I am confident, I know for certain, that nobody wants any losses at all, in the sense that Russia is experiencing a recession and many experts in Europe - not Russian experts, European ones - are talking about stagnation.

So if we want to create absolute growth in the global economy, in Europe, in Russia and in general, then we certainly need to eliminate various sanctions, especially unlawful ones imposed outside the framework of the United Nations, and work together. I have already stated how we are going to do that. We will broaden economic freedoms, this is a key element; we will ensure a competitive jurisdiction and work on our human resources and improving management systems.

Charlie Rose: On my right is Heinz Hermann Thiele, Knorr-Bremse chairman of the supervisory board. We were just talking about sanctions and import substitution. What do you think are the risks and opportunities? What could you say in this regard about Russia? How do you see the situation from a Western point of view?

Supervisory Board Chairman of Knorr-Bremse Heinz Hermann Thiele: I doubt I can present the European point of view here, because you know, many countries on the continent hold different views. I can only speak for myself personally and I can share my view of the situation.

I have always been against sanctions and I still believe they are wrong. I am not the only person in Germany who holds this view. I support President Putin's statement: it is time to bring the sanctions to an end.

I hope that now everyone in Europe has seen that Europe itself has suffered from the sanctions, and very significantly. If we look at the statistics from 2014-2015, the last two years, exports from Germany to Russia have dropped by 50 percent. I am not counting our subsidiaries which are working in Russia - and we have many of them - incidentally, they are working quite successfully in manufacturing and transport; we have excellent experience in cooperating with Russian partners.

Coming back to the situation in other European nations, look at Italy: Italy has lost only 10 percent of exports compared to the indicators for last year. So the situation is not as bad for them. In other words, the effects for different European nations also differ. Their interests vary as well. In this respect, I cannot say that we have common interests. Common decisions are made at the political level, but one way or another, regardless of the motivation, these are wrong decisions.

We must understand that Russia, in implementingits policy of turning to the East, is taking an absolutely logical step, because the East can offer Russia a great deal. We should not forget that we Europeans, we Germans - my company, I have a medium-sized company - we are working on the international arena, we have great relations with, for example, the Chinese. We have excellent joint business, and we very much like working with them. Why shouldn't Russia do the same?

To some degree, it is tragic that we have pushed Russia in that direction through the sanctions. We need to leave the sanctions behind. But all nations should have the opportunity to make independent decisions on where it is best to develop partnerships: in the West or the East, it does not matter. We are in favour of global development - peaceful development, I should add. Unfortunately, at this time, we cannot say that we are satisfied with the situation in either aspect.

To be continued.

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 #5
Fort Russ/Vesti
http://fortruss.blogspot.com
June 21, 2015
Vladimir Putin schools Charlie Rose
http://www.vesti.ru/doc.html?id=2632416
Translated from Russian by J.Hawk

The annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (PMEF) which is traditionally considered as the main venue for meeting Russian business partners, concluded on June 20. The culmination of the forum is usually the appearance by the Russian head of state at the plenary meeting and his subsequent participation in a free-wheeling discussion.

During previous years PMEF served as a platform for announcing major international political ideas, but this time Vladimir Putin decided to limit himself to purely economic matters.

Interestingly, Putin did not say the word "reforms", let alone "structural reforms", even once, although that's what he was talking about. Let's focus on only one statistic: the physical volume of non-raw material exports from Russia grew by 17% in the first quarter of this year. Which means the structure of exports are changing, something that until recently could only be dreamt about.

In other areas, Russia's economy also displayed a resilience that many did not expect.

Already in January, Obama rubbed his hands as he was saying that Russia's economy was "torn to shreds", but the reality is such that the budget is stable, inflation is under control, the banking system is stable, there is no jump in unemployment, there are no capital controls, taxes are stable, and the business climate actually improved. "We are absolutely certain that we'll succeed," is how Vladimir Putin ended his report.

One must also mention the scandalous behavior during the panel discussion which was proposed by the US moderator immediately after Vladimir Putin's report. It was the well-known Charlie Rose, a veteran CBS anchor, the winner of the Emmy prize.

Instead of organizing a brainstorm on the economic forum themes, he, as if under hypnosis, was obsessed with Putin to the point of leading a personal interview for more than an hour--about Ukraine, the fears of a new Cold War, the relations with Russia, with Iran, Syria, and Iraq, Germany, Iran, and China.

At first everyone treated it as an example of American directness, but Charlie Rose did not notice the awkwardness. Putin at first delicately tried to remind of the forum's theme but then it's as if he literally felt he was on a tatami mat, and implemented a full anti-illiteracy program by teaching Rose about democracy so skilfully that almost each of his answers was followed by applause.

The effect was sometimes comical. "Our moderator is a genuine American. I say: without external intervention, and he is asking me whether we are prepared to call on President Assad to resign? That's something that only the Syrian people can do, how can we miss something as basic as that?", said the President of Russia.

When it comes to Ukraine, Putin clearly explained the context and the fundamental reasons for what has transpired. "It would seem that some of our partners are laboring under an illusion that a certain world order was established after WW2, with a global power center in the form of USSR, now it no longer exists, there's a vacuum, and it needs to be filled as quickly as possible. I think that's a mistaken approach to the problem. That's how we got Iraq, and we know that even in the US many think that mistakes were made in Iraq. Many have acknowledged them, but nevertheless repeated them in Libya. Then they went after Ukraine. We are not the fundamental cause of the crisis currently unfolding in Ukraine. I said many times that one should not have supported the anti-state, anti-constitutional overthrow and armed seizure of power which in the final account led to the bitter stand-off on Ukraine's territory, a de-facto civil war."

Putin then reminded that Russia strictly adheres to the Minsk Agreements, of which the most important aspect is the direct dialogue between Kiev and Donbass.

Charlie Rose would not calm down, so he received a very blunt answer: the US only has to want peace.

"As you know, the US believes that you are arming separatists, encouraging them, use the Russian military, in order to add fuel to the fire of this conflict. Many are concerned it might cause a new Cold War," Rose said.

"A Cold War will not be caused by local conflicts but by global decisions, for example, the US unilateral abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. It was a step that pushed everyone toward a new round of rearmament, because it changed the global security system. As to regional conflicts, no matter where they are taking place, the warring parties always find weapons somewhere. That's also the case for eastern regions of Ukraine. If the current situation will be resolved through political means, there will be no need for weapons, but that would require good will and the desire to engage in a direct dialogue, something that we will facilitate. What we can't do, what we will never agree to, is someone, no matter who or where and with whom, negotiating from the position of strength, at first using the police, then the secret services, then the armed forces. Until the military and the so-called "battalions", the armed nationalist formations, appeared on those territories, there were no weapons there. And there wouldn't be any right now, if they tried to resolve the problem through peaceful means. Weapons appeared only after people started being killed by tanks, artillery, rocket launchers, combat aircraft. That's when the resistance appeared. But a soon as someone undertakes an effort to resolve the conflict peacefully, the weapons will disappear," Putin said. "Thanks to all the participants of our discussion, everyone who came to PMEF. Thank you for the friendly tone which you set for today's discussion. In some aspects of our discussion it was sharp, but friendly nonetheless."

J.Hawk's Comment: By popular demand, the video:
http://fortruss.blogspot.com/2015/06/vladimir-putin-schools-charlie-rose.html

 #6
Kremlin.ru
June 18, 2015
Meeting with heads of Russian industrial companies

Within the framework of the 19th St Petersburg International Economic Forum, Vladimir Putin met with the heads of Russian industrial companies.

Excerpts from transcript of meeting with heads of Russian industrial companies

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Good afternoon, friends.

We regularly have meetings with business representatives. However, today the group is special. It is a pleasure to meet with those who are in charge of what they call real production. Moreover, I see here both people who built their businesses from scratch in the new conditions and those who began back in Soviet times and managed to retain their teams and their production facilities. In other words, here we have people of different generations and of various experience, but all of you are successful.

I hope this meeting on the sidelines of the economic forum will be a success because, apart from the general discussions that are typical for forums and seminars, it is always interesting to talk to people who are involved in the work themselves, to hear from them whether the economic support measures proposed by the Government and formulated within the Presidential Executive Office work in real life or not.

Therefore, we would like to begin by thanking the organisers of this meeting - the Russian Popular Front, which is hosting this meeting.

Let us begin our work.
<...>
Vladimir Putin: I have already heard from some liberally minded people of the need to reinstate state planning. This is no joke. Obviously, it is impossible to revive the old, Soviet model in modern conditions. However, we should consider some elements of planning, primarily in developing the infrastructure. If we consider the tasks facing the state, there should be some strategic elements pertaining to providing certain benefits to specific territories - and we have some priority development areas that have been granted certain preferences, as well as free economic zones. We need to consider all of this and discuss it, bearing in mind (as we keep saying over and over again) mandatory compliance with macroeconomic parameters and maintaining a balanced budget policy.

When I say 'balanced' I mean (I believe you will understand me) that we need to hold back inflation. We cannot squander our reserves; on the contrary, we must consolidate them and take good care of them, treat them like our safety cushion, if we want to have a stable political and social situation in the country. This is in the interests of businesses, of all the industry leaders who are here today, so that we can retain the populations' income level. All this needs to be carefully analysed and formulated.

We need to do this together. We have already developed a mechanism for joint work. True, it developed through the entrepreneurs' union. If you would like to suggest any other mechanism - please, go ahead, everyone will only be grateful, I am sure.
<...>
Vladimir Putin: Regarding the ruble exchange rate. First, of course, we are talking in public, on camera; this is all a market area. However, as you have noticed, as soon as the ruble became stronger and the rate dipped below 50 rubles to the dollar, it started gradually growing. An excessive weakening of the national currency has its negative components, as we all know. However, we will continue supporting it for the real sector, especially for those companies that produce for external markets. We will use all the instruments at our disposal, even though these are somewhat insufficient (funds may also be allocated in amounts that do not reach the level that we would like to support our exporters, especially in industrial and high technology production). However, we will continue to do it and I would like everyone to know this. We will improve and build up these instruments. However, regardless of how much we build them up, the exchange rate is more powerful and efficient than budget support, as we all know.

It is generally clear now how, say, the hydrocarbon market will develop if nothing extraordinary happens. The prices will remain in the current range for at least the next year or two, I believe, but we have no way of knowing what will happen after that. However, overall the budget has adapted to the present situation, as well as the real sector of the economy. This is reflected in the currency exchange rate, the rate of the ruble to the dollar and other currencies. Overall, we are satisfied with the situation.

The Central Bank has numerous instruments to regulate the ruble mass in the country, to increase or decrease it and to buy other currencies to renew reserve funds. This, by the way, is what the Central Bank has been doing, more actively at some stages, less at others. Such regulation within market conditions will continue to ensure the interests of our real sector producers.

Concerning your relations with small and medium-sized businesses, I was happy to hear that you can feel the benefits of such work. If you see any problems here, you have to make them known to the corresponding Government agencies and financial institutions. We should all consider how to support this interaction. We must consider support instruments because this is all of great importance. This is what Russia's overall economic growth will largely depend on.
<...>
Vladimir Putin (answering a question on environmental standards): You know, this is a well-known issue that has long been under discussion. And I personally have always approached the introduction of such standards very carefully, understanding that they are an extra burden on businesses. But we all live in Russia: this is our country, we have no another. We cannot live in one place and have companies working in another; some are trying to do that, but lately, that does not seem to work for all of them, even for those who want to. However, we must think about ourselves, our children, citizens in general, in the broader sense. And naturally, we need to introduce environmental standards. But not only for that reason.

I think we all understand that modern production methods, modern equipment, including eco-friendly equipment, are more effective and more productive. So if we want to develop, if we want our fleet to remain up-to-date, the standards need to be introduced. If they are not justified - to be honest, I'm hearing what you just said for the first time - if they are absolutely oversized, then we simply need to look into it and think it over with experts and get back to this issue. I do not see anything extreme or scary about this. We should not be more Catholic than the Pope, so to speak. But we can look into it.

I don't know whether it is worth declaring a moratorium [on certain environmental standards]. We might come under a lot of criticism from the part of our citizens. But that does not mean we need to leave things as they are. If this absurdity exists and these demands are clearly inflated, we need to look at this in a simple way. Only in that case, I ask you to present specific suggestions with specific figures.

It even seems strange that it sounds that way, because it appears that we have examined these issues from all sides, there was a battle between those who demanded the introduction of these special standards and those who felt it was too early to do that. I had understood that a compromise had been reached, but based on what I just heard from you, it seems there may still be imbalances.
<...>
Vladimir Putin: Please don't be angry with me, but we need to end this meeting. Although I feel it was interesting and useful - useful for me and for my colleagues. I hope that it was useful for you as well, that you got additional information. It's not even a matter of additional information, because you can get it one way or another from open databases, of which there are now many.

I think that what's more important was for you yourselves to get a sense of how we intend to work in the real sector, to work with you. I think you were able to see that there is not a single topic - I want to stress this, not a single topic that has truly escaped our attention. In other words, in general, we are constantly seeking answers, thinking and working on everything that you have just raised as problematic issues. But certainly, this kind of live contact is highly important. And I regretfully realised that I am hearing certain things for the first time today. One of them was brought up by a colleague, and it turned out to be an exceedingly important issue - a problem that is systemic in nature.

So I hope that this is not our last meeting in this format. We once again thank the Russian Popular Front for this format and this meeting. I want to ask you to finalise specific issues we discussed today with my colleagues, to give them suggestions, present them in writing and provide contact information. I have already agreed with some speakers that they will work with the corresponding departments. And overall, we will try to maintain this format.

Thank you very much. Goodbye.

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 #7
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
June 22, 2015
SPIEF afterword: End of Russian isolation or Kremlin buzz?
In the aftermath of the 2015 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, which brought nearly 10,000 foreigners to St. Petersburg last week, RD analyzes possible implications of the event for Russia's economy.  
By Pavel Koshkin

Even though some Russian officials and experts were bullish about the results of the 2015 St. Petersburg International Forum (SPIEF) and even started talking about the end of Russia's isolation from the West, their optimism didn't prevent the EU from imposing trade and investment sanctions on Crimea on the second day of the Forum and extending economic sanctions on Russia on June 22.

This naturally leads to the following question: Was this year's St. Petersburg forum a sign of the easing of Russia's isolation from the West, or just more relentless promotion of the Kremlin's economic agenda?

This year the number of the foreign participants of the Forum was much higher that last year: There were about 10,000 foreigners from 120 countries who took part in the events. Among the participants of the Forum were many Western entrepreneurs and politicians, including former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. As a result, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Prikhodko didn't hesitate to debunk the statement about Russia's isolation from the world at the opening ceremony of the Forum.

Perception vs. reality

Nevertheless, the high attendance at the Forum doesn't necessarily mean that Russia is still not isolated from the West's leading countries. Even though the Forum "is seen by outsiders as being generally open to opposing viewpoints and frank discussion," given its regular nature, one "can't say that this Forum signals the end of Russia's isolation, even with Tony Blair being present," said Christopher Hartwell, the president of the Center for Social and Economic Research in Warsaw (CASE).

"What country does Tony Blair lead now? Was he paid to be there? If David Cameron had been there, perhaps it would be a better signal that Russia's isolation is ending, but Russia remains out of the G7, out of important international discussion, and still in Ukraine. Isolation will continue so long as present policies continue," he told Russia Direct.

Likewise, Oleg Buklemishev, associate professor of Economics at Lomonosov Moscow State University (MGU), is also doubtful about the message the Forum sent.

"The results of any conference need to be assessed not by the number of foreign participants and signed agreements," he said, adding that among foreign participants at the Forum were primarily political retirees, who didn't play a significant role in the current political agenda in their counties. Besides, Buklemishev thinks that the impact from signed deals at forums is usually exaggerated, since "the real content [of the agreements] differs from the declared."

"What is more important for any other forum is clarity and substance of the message, sent to the country and to the world," Buklemishev said, pointing out that some Forum participants failed to understand how the Kremlin really deals with economic problems such as the investment crisis, declining incomes of the population and severe budget cuts. "Nobody talked frankly about mistakes of others nor admitted their own mistakes," he added.

Hartwell believes that the Forum is often used as a platform for government officials, including President Vladimir Putin, to signal the official line, "and it's usually no new news."

"So in that sense, the Forum is a tool to promote Kremlin propaganda, but it's not really a tool, since you'll hear from other people there contradicting the government," he clarified. "A forum is just a collection of words and speeches, it will take concrete action to reverse Russia's isolation. Putin may portray it as a win, but that's a big stretch. Perhaps more important is that it's a signal that he has less good news to trumpet daily."

Indeed, the Kremlin seems to have less positive news to brag of, especially, amidst the prolonged sanctions.  Ironically, sanctions themselves and their negative implications on Russian, European and American businesses were among the most discussed issues at the Forum's numerous panel discussions (there were even talks about the urgent need for economics to influence the political agenda).

But all negotiations look like just rhetoric regardless of the Forum's ambitious goal and motto to move from words to deeds, because the EU extended the sanctions until January 31, 2016 shortly after the SPIEF Forum, which indicates that Russia's isolation from the West is very far from over.

Buklemishev argues that the Forum confirmed Russia's isolation, but not physically.

"It is impossible, because our country is strongly involved in international division of labor and communication," he said. "Mutually beneficial cross-border business, despite sanctions, is still alive. Our isolation today is different: It is an attempt to create a separate informational space, which lives in accordance with its own peculiar laws and is weakly related to reality."

Buklemishev is pessimistic. He is concerned with the possibility that Russia's physical isolation will be increasing in the future, if there will be a build-up of this "isolated information space."  And this, according to him, could have confused many investors who came to the SPIEF Forum this year.     

Sanctions will stay in place until Russia changes its Ukraine policy

So, the gap between rhetoric and deeds remain big, as indicated by Russia's economic record. Some experts interviewed by Russia Direct believe that Russia's economy is still weak and not ready to survive big shocks, with the easing of the recession in the first quarter just an illusion.

"The crisis has abated somewhat, especially in currency markets, but the underlying structural defects are still there," said Hartwell. "Russia is a terrible hybrid of an economy - it's a petro-state that is tied closely to commodity prices, meaning that it has uneven development but is not resilient to shocks."

Hartwell argues that the best measure of an economic crisis is not necessarily a straight downward line in production or foreign exchange markets, but in the increasing volatility and unpredictability.

When asked what is to be done to minimize the exacerbation of the crisis, Hartwell said that "the short-term remedies" won't help. He believes that Kremlin needs "a bold and radical shift in Russia's economy from a quasi-state-dominated one, with massive stratification between government mega-corporations and tiny kiosks, to one where there is a middle class and medium-sized firms."

However, Harwell doubts that Putin will be able to make such an economic shift, no matter how much foreign and Russian entrepreneurs and economists talked about it at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum this year. The expert believes that problem lies in Putin's "narrow economic viewpoint that politics and the nation trumps all," which is embedded in the Russian economy.

Hartwell argues that sanction will remain in place, as long as Russia sticks to its previous foreign policy toward Ukraine. And the only way to avoid the exacerbation of the crisis is to change its position toward Ukraine, according to him.

"The elephant in the room, Russia needs to stop invading Ukraine. Full stop. No discussion. Russia is much weaker than it was in 1986, and it cannot afford a new arms race with the West," Hartwell said.  

So, prolonging the sanctions and imposing investment and trade sanctions on Crimea is a logical consequence of the Kremlin's intransigence toward Ukraine and Russia's controversial economic record after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he argues, adding that "sanctions haven't had a direct impact, but they continue to contribute to the perception that Russia is a mono-state, built on oil and ready to fall apart at any time."

"That's no Western conspiracy, no shadowy cabal of the CIA and Mossad trying to harm Russia's image, it's just the truth - Russia had a bad decade with the 1990s, culminating in a crisis, and the global financial crisis a decade later hit them hard. Markets forgive, but they rarely forget," he said adding that Russia's political response to sanctions is making things worse.

"Doing business in Russia I would say is now nearly impossible for a foreigner. Who wants to deal with the hassles of harassment, of being labeled a foreign agent, of having to play along to get along?" Hartwell asks. "This is not seen as a fault but is by design - Russia for Russians, Russian firms selling cheaply at home and soaking foreigners abroad. If you don't see this as a problem, how can you fix it?

In contrast, Stanislav Tkachenko, an associate professor at St. Petersburg State University, believes that Russia should keep following its previous economic policy and actively keep expanding to Asia-Pacific markets, because, according to him, the crisis in Russia resulted from the U.S. and EU policy of the sanctions and "the dependence of Russia from their trade and financial markets should be diminished twofold."

Tkachenko argues that, "U.S. and EU sanctions severely affected Russia's economy, stopped its modernization and deprived business of loans while severely squeezing money market." At the same time, he expresses doubt that sanctions, even prolonged ones, will further hamper Russia's economy, because government and business have already adjusted to them and "the chance of toughening sanctions are almost close to zero."

"Business in Russia and in the EU and in the U.S. has learned how to live with sanctions and even bypass them," he said. "That why we could forget about their negative implications."

At the same time, other Russian experts are more cautious about the effect from sanctions.

"The effect from sanctions is psychological," said Yakov Mirkin, head of the Department of International Capital Markets at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of World Economy and International Relations. "They create the atmosphere of confrontation and increasing risks. So far, sanctions have contributed to creating economic problems no more than by 15-20 percent. In two-three years, if the situation will be the same, the effect [from sanctions] will double."

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 #8
Business New Europe
www.bne.eu
June 22, 2015
Business confidence in Russia falls but firms see economy improving
Henry Kirby in London

Russia has fallen from the "positive" into the "neutral" expectations range in a Europe-wide study measuring business confidence of companies operating there.

Russia's score in the Association of European Businesses' AEB-GfK Index dropped by 9 points from 115 in 2014 to 106 this year, out of a possible 200. While pushing Russia into the "neutral" range, this year's drop was less pronounced than the 29-point fall seen between 2013 and 2014, when Russia's score fell from 144 to 115.

The slowing decline in business confidence in Russia suggests that expectations of European companies regarding Russia's economy have stabilised. This year 22% of companies surveyed said that the economic situation had improved, while in 2014 only 6% said so.

Companies cited ongoing Western sanctions and the depreciation of the ruble as the main factors affecting their ability to operate in Russia. 5% of surveyed companies said their activities fell directly under sanctions, with 16% saying they were partially affected by them. 81% of companies surveyed said they were affected by the ruble's depreciation.

Aleksander Demidov, managing director of GfK Russia, said that, "after the shock of last year's spring events and the skyrocketing negative expectations connected with them, European companies have adapted to the new and difficult economic climate in Russia."

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 #9
Wall Street Journal
June 23, 2015
Russia Weathers Financial Risks but More Remain, Bank of Russia Says
Unpredictability of oil prices and ruble's rate poses threats, as does a U.S. rate increase, bank's report says
By Andrey Ostroukh

MOSCOW-Russia's sufficient reserves and flexible monetary policy ensures the country's financial stability for now, but a possible interest-rate increase in the U.S. and unpredictable oil prices keep the central bank ready to intervene, the Bank of Russia said Tuesday.

Facing soaring inflation and a contracting economy, the Bank of Russia has been increasingly active in adjusting its monetary policy over the past months in an attempt to preserve financial stability. The latest report reckons that Russia's financial system is shielded from existing risks but its future looks uncertain.

In a semiannual report on financial stability, the central bank noted Tuesday that, in the fourth quarter of 2014 and the first three months of 2015, Russia endured a number of risks to stability. They ranged from the more expected causes, such as Russia's rating downgrade and a lack of foreign currency due to repayment of foreign debt, to such unexpected reasons as a rapid drop in global oil prices.

"The financial system turned to be resilient to external shocks, which is related to better banking regulation and financial market developments of the past few years," the central bank said.

As an average oil price of $60 to $65 per barrel is comfortable enough for Russian oil companies and the budget, the central bank said, it is now preparing to address external shocks related to debt issues in Europe as well as risks linked to monetary policy of the U.S. Federal Reserve.
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The Bank of Russia, which cites a Wall Street Journal poll of economists on Fed policy, said a possible increase in the U.S. interest rate in September will make it more expensive for emerging economies to service dollar-denominated debt. Higher rates in the U.S. will put selling pressure on such emerging currencies as the ruble, and may spur capital outflows, the bank said.

The Bank of Russia said it can't rule out another wave of volatility on global markets on the back of higher U.S. rates, which could prompt the Russian central bank to intervene in the currency market and to boost lending of dollars domestically.

At the same time, emerging market economies are likely to continue dovish monetary policies given risks stemming from poor domestic demand. The central bank of Russia is also widely expected to ease its policy further, after four rate cuts brought the key rate to 11.5% in early June.

Though the central bank's and the government's anticrisis measures helped to mitigate financial risks in the past few months, Russia's banking system isn't in the best shape. According to the central bank, the share of bad loans will reach a peak of up to 17% in 2015 and the first half of 2016 before an expected decline later.

The central bank reiterated that the current amount of international reserves of around $360 billion looks sufficient, though it needs to be gradually boosted to $500 billion to cover possibly massive capital flight given than global capital markets remain shut for Russian borrowers.

As Russia drained more than $150 billion in net capital outflow in 2014, when the West imposed sanctions against Moscow over its role in the Ukrainian crisis, Russia's gold and forex reserves fell drastically. To avoid a deeper financial and economic crisis, the central bank limited the ruble's depreciation throughout 2014 by selling billions of dollars of foreign currency, which sent foreign exchange reserves from some $510 billion in late 2014 to their lowest levels since 2009.

After Western sanctions cut off Russia from global capital markets, the Bank of Russia also used reserves to provide foreign currency to the financial system, injecting $36 billion as of June 9. This helped to compensate for the lack of borrowing opportunities during the peak payments on foreign debt between October and April, the Bank of Russia said.

"Generally, rather good conditions of external trade balance and budget, a low level of state debt, an absence of excessive dependence of nonfinancial companies on foreign currency funding, and a substantial stock of international reserves allow Russia to retain rather high immunity to possible imbalance on global financial markets," the bank said.

The central bank also said that despite the downgrade of Russia's sovereign rating below investment grade in early 2015, the country's treasury bonds, known as OFZs, are still in demand among foreign investors.

Russian officials have recently been playing down the scale of the economic and financial crisis that hit the oil-dependent economy following its annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. While the central bank report is similar to recent government rhetoric saying the worst of the crisis is over, Russia's economy has slid into recession and is on track to contract by around 3% this year, suffering from double-digit inflation above 15%. The ruble's volatility, among the most notable movements on the global currency market over the past year, also remains a conundrum for Russia's financial system. Its volatility has been killing any investment activity, one of the key economic growth drivers, as the unpredictable exchange rate makes it difficult to do business.

Herman Gref, the head of Russia's largest lender, Sberbank, said in late March-the period addressed by the central bank in its report-that the worst for the country's banking system was clearly not over and that the bad debt issues would remain for a while.

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 #10
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
June 22, 2015
Russia still faces long uphill battle to win over foreign investors
At the same time as Russia was attempting to win over foreign investors at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Europe was taking steps to limit Russia's financial options abroad.
By Anastasia Borik

The St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, which took place last week and featured the appearance of President Vladimir Putin, without a doubt was the main source for news and discussion in the Russia media. At the same time as Russia was attempting to court foreign investors in St. Petersburg, however, Europe was extending sanctions against Crimea and Sevastopol and freezing Russian financial assets abroad.

The St. Petersburg International Economic Forum

The business paper Vedomosti analyzed Putin's address at the forum and observed that the president was overly optimistic, although one can understand why - a year ago, it looked likely that sanctions would deal a more severe blow to Russia's economy.

In the meantime, as the head of state observed, not everything is going badly. In several areas - for example, the growth of processed exports and the development of agriculture - things have even improved. Based on responses from businessmen who were questioned, the publication also accuses the president of lacking a clear plan of action to develop business.

Pro-government Rossiyskaya Gazeta believes that the forum demonstrates the invalidity of the theory that Russia has been internationally isolated. The publication also highlights the high degree of representation at the forum and the numerous contracts that were signed.

The website for Ekho Moskvy radio station criticized the forum, calling it "the Kremlin's latest campaign in economic propaganda." One thing is certain, says the radio station: The investment climate in Russia is extremely unfavorable, and an improvement cannot be expected until the government starts to create a coherent economic policy.

Furthermore, says the radio station, the belief is that any foreign investors present at the event came not to invest money, but to bide their time for a better opportunity to invest.

Independent media publication Slon also criticized the forum's agenda, noting that the authorities are not in the mood for any form of serious reforms and lack a coherent economic plan, while hoping for a miracle.

Yukos and sanctions against Russian overseas assets

The situation surrounding the foreign assets belonging to oil company Yukos, which at one time was headed by fallen oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, has clearly escalated out of Russia's control.

Several years ago, a number of former Yukos shareholders filed a lawsuit against Russia's actions in liquidating the company. According to the decision of The Hague court in July 2014, they won their case; as a result the Russian Federation must pay compensation.

Last week authorities in Belgium, Austria, and also France blocked several Russian foreign assets, including property of several separate government representative offices, and also bank accounts.

Although the process of unblocking the accounts was initiated almost immediately, the Russian media paid a great deal of attention to the scandal.

Business publication Vedomosti discussed why this was such a shock to Russia. Neglecting official institutions, the Russian authorities simply did not expect such decisive action from the European courts.

Opposition-minded Novaya Gazeta wrote that blocking the accounts of official missions is a breach of international law since it hinders the usual business of diplomatic representation. In this sense, the newspaper notes, the situation is very tense and is close to a scandal.

Pro-government TV network Channel One reported on the situation in an indignant tone, and quoted Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who promised a response from the Russian Federation.

Europe extends sanctions against Russia

Last week, European nations prolonged sanctions against Crimea and Sevastopol, an act that Russian government officials reacted to with harsh words.

Business publication Vedomosti gives the reaction of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which called the decision "political blackmail." The Ministry of Foreign Affairs also stated that such a pressure tactic would not bear fruit.

Opposition Novaya Gazeta gives the response of the Russian Ministry of Economic Development, which is not planning to introduce new limiting, counter-measures but is intending to maintain the existing ones.

Business Kommersant published a long, analytical article connected with this based on the latest European research on sanctions: The sanctions regime is harming Europe, in particular, it is threatening more than two million jobs and is imposing a total cost of around 100 million euro.

The news about maintaining the sanctions had another extremely unpleasant element in it for Russia: The European officials named the date for the extension of sanctions against Russia as June 22 - the anniversary of Nazi Germany's invasion of Russia. (On June 22, 1941, Germany attacked the USSR. - Editor's note.)

Russia perceived this as being a diplomatic faux pas, and a number of officials immediately commented on it. The official Rossiyskaya Gazeta quoted Konstantin Kosachev, the head of the Council of the Federation Committee on Foreign Affairs, who criticized Europeans for being ignorant of history.

The Russian military shows off its latest and greatest

The large Army 2015 Military and Technical Forum took place last week at Kubinka near Moscow and was designed not only to demonstrate the latest achievements by Russia's arms industry, but also to improve the image of the Russian army.

Popular tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets gives an overview of the most interesting examples of new equipment on display at the forum, including next generation pistols, underwater drones and the latest mobile SAM missile systems.

Independent Slon compares Army 2015 with the Le Bourget Air Show, observing that Russia has gradually become unnecessary at European air shows: Europeans are not interested in Russian equipment and Russia sells a large number of its weaponry to Asian partners.

Pro-government Rossiyskaya Gazeta gives a positive summary of the forum, especially emphasizing the size of the event - it was simultaneously an air show, exhibition, study and even a musical event. The publication talks about the debut of several types of weapons.

Quotes of the week:

Vladimir Putin on his refusal to accept the decision of the Arbitration Court in The Hague on the Yukos Case:
"For cases of such a nature, The Hague Arbitration Court only has jurisdiction on those countries that have signed and ratified the European Energy Charter."

Sergey Lavrov, Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs on blocking Russian accounts and property:
"This is an extremely crude breach of all the Vienna Conventions on diplomatic relations. We must, first and foremost, respond in kind. I hope that common sense will prevail, at least in respect to our embassies and other diplomatic offices. And that it will be unnecessary for us to create a similar situation for the Belgian Embassy in the Russian Federation."

Official statement by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the extension of sanctions against Crimea and Sevastopol:
"In accordance with the provisions of international law, we consider as absolutely unacceptable any discrimination against the people of Crimea and Sevastopol on a political and territorial basis. We all remember the historical examples of collective punishment of nations. It was hard to imagine that Europe would face it in the 21st century."

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 #11
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
June 22, 2015
Foreign companies may have to quit Russia if sanctions are tightened
Sergei Kravchenko, the head of Boeing in Russia and the CIS, has said that if U.S. and EU sanctions against Russia remain in place or become tougher, Western companies will have to reduce their presence on the Russian market. The Coca-Cola Company, however, is under no circumstances prepared to leave the Russian market and views itself as a local player.
Alexei Lossan, RBTH

If U.S. and EU sanctions against Russia remain in place or become tougher, Western companies will have to comply and reduce their presence on the Russian market, the head of Boeing in Russia and the CIS, Sergei Kravchenko, said at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on  June 19.

According to Kravchenko, his company always follows the letter of the law, and sanctions are "a set of laws." He said would not like to do this "because we create hundreds of thousands of jobs in Russia." At the same time, according to other entrepreneurs, business contacts between Russia and the United States have so far remained at the same level.
 
Stable relations in hi-tech sector

According to Russian Deputy Economic Development Minister Oleg Fomichev, "cooperation between Russia and the U.S. began to contract only starting from 2015, whereas in 2014 it was even higher than the previous year."

However, trade between Russia and the United States dropped by a hefty 20 percent in the first quarter of 2015. "This indicates that business, which put up with it for a year, has begun to slow down after all," Fomichev explained.

According to head of IBS Group (a software development and IT services provider) Anatoly Karachinsky, "those businesses that are involved in intellectual matters continue to cooperate with [their] American partners."

"Technologically, the world is so complex that it is impossible to concentrate everything in one country. That is why we have not lost a single partner and continue to work with players like Boeing, IBM and Microsoft," said Karachinsky.

Chairman of the board of the Ilim Group, which specializes in timber and pulp exports, Zakhar Smushkin (net worth $750 million in 2015, according to Forbes), said that the weak ruble was helping to keep business buoyant.

"Because of the depreciation of the ruble, we have seen a sharp rise in the rate of return; our financial situation has improved. However, a company that generates profit but does not carry out investment is a threat," Smushkin said. He went on to add that if the freeze in Russian-U.S. relations, which he described as purely political in nature, lasts for a year or two more, this situation will slow down investment in Russia.
 
Major investors unlikely to budge

However, when it comes to major Western investors into the Russian economy, said Coca-Cola's senior vice-president Clyde Tuggle, they already feel like local players and are unlikely to go anywhere.

"Looking at people's incomes and a potential growth in consumption, there is no better market for our company than Russia. Current opportunities here are the same as they were before," he said. Tuggle added that Coca-Cola owns 12 plants in Russia, which create 100,000 jobs for the local economy.

"When I look into the future, to me Russia is one of our main markets despite the sanctions. Having said that, we as an investor need economic, political and public stability, we need predictability and transparency," Tuggle continued. Thus, he said, he only had one request to make of the Russian authorities: for Coca-Cola to be treated just as any Russian company would be treated.

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 #12
Putin says NGOs should be supported by granting benefits to them

MOSCOW, June 23. /TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said it is necessary to consider the issue of granting benefits to non-profit organizations (NGOs).

"We badly need non-profit organizations, which are a more subtle tool of achieving a balance [of public interests], " Putin told a plenary session of Russia's Civic Chamber. "We have definitely supported and will support this activity, but some benefits, certain support is needed, I have no doubt about it."

The president admitted that the NGOs often faced pressure from the fiscal authorities whilst their activities were not aimed at making profit. On the other hand, Putin noted to the underlying risks: as soon as benefits are granted, industries may crop up under the guise of public activity producing everything - "from nails to diamonds".

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 #13
Moscow Times
June 23, 2015
Moscow Edges Closer to First Referendum Since Soviet Collapse
By Daria Litvinova

Moscow looks set to get its first referendum in post-Soviet times - and one of the burning issues on the ballot will be the restoration of a monument to the founder of the secret police to central Moscow.

On June 11, the Moscow election committee approved the Communist Party's request to start the procedure to hold a referendum in September.

Three questions are planned to be on the ballot. The first two deal with whether Muscovites approve of reforms to the city education system and the health care system. The third asks whether the monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky - a Bolshevik revolutionary and founder of the dreaded Cheka secret police that later evolved into the KGB - should be restored to its original spot. The statue of "Iron Felix" was removed from its pedestal in the center of Lubyanskaya Ploshchad, in front of the KGB headquarters, in 1991 in a symbolic gesture of closing the chapter of Russia's Soviet era.

The next step is for the Communists to convince the Moscow City Duma, or parliament, that these questions are eligible for a plebiscite. If the City Duma decides that they are, the signatures of 146,000 people - 2 percent of all city residents eligible to vote - will have to be gathered within a month in support of the referendum.

If that is achieved, Muscovites will head to the polls in September to express their views on all three issues.

"We've been trying to initiate a referendum since 2011, but the Moscow election committee always found an excuse not to allow us to do it," Andrei Klychkov, head of the City Duma's Communist faction, told The Moscow Times last week.

"This time we went to court to challenge the committee's decision. We went through all the stages, from the Moscow City Court right up to the Supreme Court, and won every time. With all those court decisions, the committee simply had to rule in our favor."

All or Nothing

It's not a victory yet, Klychkov acknowledged. The Moscow City Duma has yet to determine the eligibility of the questions prepared for the referendum and their compliance with municipal and federal laws, and signatures have yet to be gathered.

The City Duma will consider the questions on Wednesday. The eligibility criteria are: the question should be answerable with a simple "yes" or "no" answer, and that answer, regardless of what it is, should be the basis for concrete legal action, Tatyana Portnova, head of the City Duma commission for state building and local self-government, told The Moscow Times.

"Any referendum should compel the authorities to adopt new legal acts, and questions should be formulated accordingly," she said. It's doubtful whether the Communists' questions about the education and health care systems would compel anyone to do anything, she said: They simply ask whether Moscow residents support the reforms.

"Even if people unanimously answer 'no' to 'Do you support the city education system reform?' from the point of view of the law we can only say - so what? It's unclear what kind of legal changes that answer would lead to," said Portnova.

Those two questions were formulated more than six months ago, before the reforms were actually carried out, and can't be changed now. So it's difficult to say exactly how the referendum could impact the education and health care systems, Klychkov agreed.

But if the plebiscite goes ahead and shows that people don't support the reforms, they will have to be reversed one way or another, he said.

The Dzerzhinsky question is far less ambiguous, said Portnova. "It's clear: The city will either have to return it to Lubyanka or not," she said.

But the City Duma can't approve one question for referendum and reject the other two: It has to make a decision on all three questions, she said. "We will either decide that all the questions are eligible, or that all of them aren't," the Duma representative said.

Divisive Issue

It is the question about Dzerzhinsky that is making headlines. The monument to Iron Felix symbolized the power the KBG, designed to fight "enemies of the nation," had over people's lives in Soviet times. In the early '90s, when life started to change for Russians, Muscovites didn't want the figure of Dzerzhinsky looming over them, representing as it did the tens of thousands of victims of political repression shot without trial by KGB officers.

"Journalists only know that there will be a referendum about Dzerzhinsky," Klychkov complained on Twitter on June 11.

It's hardly surprising that the focus is on Dzerzhinsky, and not on the reforms, Dmitry Oreshkin, an independent political analyst and the head of the Mercator political research group, told The Moscow Times.

"Putin has to use leftist rhetoric now that nationalist ideas have been exhausted. The political situation and economy aren't getting any better, so there has to be something to distract our attention," he said.

The analyst said he doubted that Iron Felix would make it back to Lubyanka, even if the referendum goes ahead. "People don't like Cheka officials as much as Communists would like to think they do," he said.

Dmitry Orlov, a political analyst with close ties to the Kremlin and a member of the supreme council of the ruling United Russia party, disagreed.

"I'm not prepared to predict the actual outcome right now, but the situation is highly competitive," he said.

The whole movement to hold a referendum is an attempt to galvanize the electorate, Portnova from the Moscow City Duma suggested.

"These referendum initiatives come up every time a year before the elections. It's possible that the initiative's only objective is to galvanize the electorate into action," she said.

Paper War

The trickiest part could turn out not to be getting the electorate on side, but collecting the signatures for the referendum's go-ahead. The Communists' initiative is not the first to make it through the Moscow election committee stage of the procedure. Last year, the A Just Russia party passed this stage with flying colors with their proposal to conduct a referendum on paid parking zones in Moscow. The questions on the list were approved by the City Duma, but activists failed to collect enough signatures.

"We were given a month to collect 146,000 signatures, but that month included the New Year's public holidays, and it was very hard to find people in Moscow motivated enough to take part in it," Ilya Sviridov, the municipal A Just Russia party member and municipal deputy who started the initiative, told The Moscow Times.

After 10 days of collecting signatures the party found out that the rules had changed. "We had gathered a significant number of signatures when the election committee informed us that we had to use another kind of signature lists, and the signatures we had already gathered would have to be excluded," said Sviridov.

Adding insult to injury, pro-Kremlin youth activists infiltrated the campaign and deliberately forged some of the signatures, said Sviridov. The falsifications didn't go unnoticed by the media, sparking a scandal and making the initiative look bad, so the party decided to abandon it, he said.

"The Communists will face the same problems this year," he said. "First of all, they will have to collect signatures in July and August when the city is empty because most people are on vacation. And for those who aren't, the political agenda will be the last thing on their minds," Sviridov said.

The Communist party is worried by the prospect of interference in the referendum process. On Thursday, party activists protested in front of City Hall against corruption and potential governmental manipulation of the plebiscite. They have pledged to hold another protest in front of the City Duma on Wednesday, when the decision about the initiative will be made.

Direct Democracy

The Communist party's Klychkov said he was well aware of the problems the initiative might face. "I'm not delusional, I know that the authorities don't want the referendum to succeed," he said.

"The referendum itself, though, could set a good precedent - a good tradition of giving Muscovites the opportunity to decide on important matters," he added.

"We said exactly the same thing last year about our initiative," said Sviridov of A Just Russia. "Of course it could be a good precedent. Even our experience, though unsuccessful, helped change many aspects of paid parking."

Grigory Melkonyants of the independent election watchdog Golos agreed that the initiative to hold a plebiscite is a good thing.

"It could be a good experience for our political culture, no matter what questions are put on the ballot," he said. "Any referendum is an inconvenience for the authorities because it helps the voters believe they can actually influence things."

Oreshkin disagreed, arguing that the Communists' initiative was on the contrary very convenient for the authorities.

"If the Kremlin needs it to go ahead, it will go ahead. If they don't, it's very easy to undermine it," the political analyst said, stressing that Moscow's election system works in accordance with the Kremlin's decisions.

"The presidential administration holds the key to the whole situation," Oreshkin said. "So basically the outcome of the initiative depends on how the administration decides to use this key."

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 #14
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
June 22, 2015
Russia's Dynamic Duo - Rogozin & Shoigu - Part I Dmitry Rogozin
The revival of Russia's military power owes much to Dmitry Rogozin's flamboyant leadership of the country's defense industries - he's a politician rather than a technocrat
By Alexander Mercouris
Alexander Mercouris is a writer on international affairs with a special interest in Russia and law.  He has written extensively on the legal aspects of NSA spying and events in Ukraine in terms of human rights, constitutionality and international law.  He worked for 12 years in the Royal Courts of Justice in London as a lawyer, specializing in human rights and constitutional law. His family has been prominent in Greek politics for several generations.  He is a frequent commentator on television and speaker at conferences.  He resides in London.

Putin's announcement that Russia will deploy as many as 40 intercontinental ballistic missiles this year, the announcement of new production of the TU160 bomber, the bewildering array of new equipment on display during the Victory Parade in Moscow on 9th May 2015 and the (for NATO) terrifyingly effective performance of the Russian military during the Crimean events of last year, all confirm something that even the most skeptical of commentators on Russia are being forced to admit - Russia is back as a leading military power.

At the centre of this revival stand two extraordinary - and very different - men: Dmitry Rogozin and Sergei Shoigu.

Rogozin is the deputy prime minister in overall charge of Russia's defense industries. Ultimately he is the man responsible for the flood of new weapons that are appearing and which have recently been on display.

Shoigu is Russia's defense minister - the man in overall charge of Russia's sprawling defense establishment.

Both men deserve attention. Though both are well-known in Russia, neither man gets the attention they deserve in the West.

In this piece I will focus on Rogozin. In a later piece I will deal with Shoigu.

Though Rogozin's present post makes him Russia's top military industrial technocrat, nothing about his background appears to qualify him for that role.

Rogozin comes from an academic family with connections to the military. His father is sometimes said to have been a "military scientist", and sometimes a "military historian".  

The two do not necessarily contradict each other. In Russia - and previously in the USSR - military history is treated as a science whose study is seen as essential to prepare the military for war.

Rogozin's own degrees from Moscow State University do not however suggest a man with a great interest in military affairs. His first degree was in journalism, his second in economics.  

Putting aside the question of his education and intellectual interests, Rogozin's career is that of a professional politician, something he has been since the age of 30, soon after he completed his degrees.

In his politics at least Rogozin has been consistent. He has always been a prominent and outspoken representative of the "national-patriotic" tendency in Russian political life.  

Where Rogozin differs from other Russian politicians of the same tendency is that he has always been something of an establishment figure, always keeping in with the power structure and always eschewing opposition activity.  

An Orthodox Christian, he has never associated himself with either of the two big opposition parties - the Communist Party of the Russian Federation or Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party - which emerged in the 1990s and which in their very different ways have traditionally attracted people of "national-patriotic" views.

Rogozin's entry into politics began in 1993 as a supporter of General Alexander Lebed, a nationalist soldier turned politician, who controversially supported Yeltsin in the second round of the Presidential election of 1996 after standing as an independent candidate in the first round.

Lebed broke with Yeltsin shortly after the election, and at about the same time Rogozin went his own way.

Rogozin was first elected to the Russian parliament in 1997 as an independent deputy for the city of Voronezh in Russia's south

Rogozin's flamboyant personality - very evident throughout his career - and his outspoken advocacy of the rights of ethnic Russians in the former Soviet republics (what the Russians call "the near abroad") soon made his name for him in the parliament as one of its more colourful deputies.

Following Lebed's death in a helicopter crash in 2002, Rogozin formed his own party in partnership with the prominent economist Sergei Glazyev.  The party - Rodina ("motherland") - sought to position itself as a patriotic left wing alternative to the Communist Party, filling the space previously occupied by Lebed.  

Rodina was initially successful. It gained a significant measure of support in the 2003 parliamentary elections, winning almost 10% of the vote, mostly at the expense of the Communist Party which was badly hit by revelations that it had taken money from the recently arrested Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

At the same time as Rogozin was working with Glazyev to set up Rodina, he also began his long association with Putin, being appointed by Putin as his Special Representative in Kaliningrad.

Inevitably this fostered suspicions that Rodina was actually a Kremlin project stitched together by the Kremlin's "political technologists" (i.e., by Putin's spin-doctors) to take votes away from the Communists, and that Rogozin was not an independent figure but was really the Kremlin's man.  

Whether that was so or not, Rodina was unable to build on its strong start. Perhaps because it was always something of a hodgepodge of groups and individuals with very different ideas, it soon fell prey to factional infighting.

Rogozin and Glazyev fell out. Glazyev has been consistently more leftist in his economic thinking - and less of a Russian nationalist - than Rogozin. Glazyev also gives the impression of being a much more independently minded person - less close to the Kremlin power structure - than Rogozin.

Just months after Rodina's strong showing in the 1993 parliamentary elections Rogozin and Glazyev were at loggerheads over who the party should support as its candidate for the forthcoming Presidential elections in 2004. Rogozin wanted Rodina to back Putin. Glazyev wanted to run against Putin as Rodina's candidate.   

Rogozin won that particular battle - ousting Glazyev from Rodina's leadership - but the price to Rodina's reputation was high and the party never recovered.

Rogozin - now Rodina's sole leader - tried to retrieve the situation by repositioning Rodina as an anti-immigrant party. His campaign slogan for the 2005 Moscow city elections - "Let's clean the garbage" - provoked uproar, and complaints from none other than Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who may have felt that his own political territory was being invaded.

The sequel was that Rodina was banned from standing in the election on grounds of racial incitement. Shortly after it was absorbed by A Just Russia, the new social democrat party that subsequently emerged and which remains the main leftist alternative to the Communist Party to this day. Rogozin did not join and found himself left out in the cold.

Rogozin was plucked from likely political oblivion by Putin who unexpectedly appointed him Russia's ambassador to NATO in 2007.

Nothing about Rogozin's previous career would appear to have marked him out as a suitable candidate for such a sensitive diplomatic post. Tact has never been Rogozin's strong point and to the extent that tact is commonly considered an essential quality for a successful diplomat he hardly comes across as someone who is likely to be one.

In the event Rogozin's performance in the post is testament to a recurring feature of Rogozin's career - his ability to succeed in the most unlikely posts by remaining completely true to himself.

Where a less confident man might have tried to make a success of the post by moderating his language and by behaving in a more "diplomatic" way, Rogozin instead went out of his way to stir things up and to court controversy.

He trenchantly defended Russia's position during the 2008 South Ossetia war. He vigorously opposed NATO's expansion to Ukraine and Georgia. He loudly protested NATO's plans to install an anti-ballistic missile system in eastern Europe. He vigorously condemned NATO's campaign in 2011 against Libya.  

On all of these issues he made his opinions public in an extraordinary series of pungent and highly undiplomatic tweets. A celebrated example was one he tweeted shortly after Gaddafi's death. In it he compared NATO leaders gloating over Gaddafi's death to delinquent youths hanging cats in a basement.

The result was that no-one in NATO was ever left in the slightest doubt about where Russia stood on any one of these issues.  

Since making the stance of his country clear to his hosts is the single most important part of an ambassador's job, Rogozin's stint as Russia's ambassador to NATO must be considered a success.

As for Rogozin, his spectacular performance as Russia's ambassador to NATO restored his reputation in Russia.  

In February 2011 Medvedev appointed him Russia's Special Representative on Anti-Missile DefenSe, leading negotiations with NATO on this issue.  

In December 2011 - shortly after the announcement of Putin's decision to stand again for the Presidency - Rogozin was appointed deputy prime minister in overall charge of the defense industries.

Rogozin's appointment to this post was hardly less unexpected than his appointment as ambassador to NATO.

At the time of his appointment Rogozin had no history as a military or industrial technocrat. Nor did he have any experience as a top manager. The idea that he would be the man to turn round Russia's sprawling military industrial complex must have looked farfetched to many people.

The facts however speak for themselves. Where prior to Rogozin's appointment the story was of constant procurement failures despite a rising defense budget - with a seemingly endless succession of meetings in the Kremlin at which recriminations were traded by the participants as they searched fruitlessly around for a solution - since Rogozin's appointment a bewildering range of new weapons has appeared, coming in a growing flood.

This success must partly reflect Rogozin's sheer enthusiasm for his job.  

Since his appointment Rogozin has lost none of his gift for flamboyant promotion - both of Russia's defense industries and of himself.

The result is a never-ending series of tweets proudly touting whatever new weapon the military industrial complex comes up with.

There is something in this of the boy delighting in his new toys.  To the grizzled veterans of the defense industries - accustomed to the hard times that followed the USSR's collapse - such enthusiasm must however have come as a hugely welcome boost, making them at last feel appreciated after years of indifference.

Importantly it is enthusiasm which has also come with money.  Whatever his possible weaknesses as a manager, Rogozin has proved an exceptionally tough and capable lobbyist for the defense industries. Under his watch the money has kept flowing, keeping the defense industries humming with work, even during the hard times that have followed last year's oil price collapse.

Rogozin is also the man in overall charge of Russia's space program, where he has overseen work on the Vostochny cosmodrome in Russia's far east, and development of the new Angara rocket family.  

These are both very difficult, complex projects. Here again Rogozin's drive and enthusiasm appears to be producing results. Both seem to be on track after initial cost-overruns and delays.

However the sheer size and complexity of these projects means that Rogozin's lack of management experience may here have been more of a problem. Strikes at Vostochny earlier this year by disgruntled workers complaining of non-payment of wages, plus allegations of corruption, have forced Putin to step in and take personal charge of the project.

Despite this setback Rogozin's star seems to be rising.  

He appears to have Putin's confidence. There is little sign of any overt disaffection with his leadership on the part of the defense industries.  Though little is know of his relationship with Shoigu - the other key figure in Russia's defense establishment - there are none of the tell-tale signs that might suggest strain between them. On the contrary the pace of Russia's military build-up suggests a successful partnership, with the two men's very different skill-sets complimenting each other.

It is easy to dismiss Rogozin. Some of his gimmicks - such as his threat to fly to Moldova in a TU160 bomber - might suggest a man who lacks seriousness.

The reality - as both his record and the transcripts of his meetings with Putin posted on the Kremlin website show - is of a man who delivers results, and who manages to stay on top of his brief. He is definitely someone to watch, and in one capacity or another he is likely to be around for a long time.

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 #15
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
June 22, 2015
Russia's Dynamic Duo - Rogozin & Shoigu - Part II - Sergey Shoigu
A brilliant manager, Sergey Shoigu is rapidly re-establishing Russia's military as the strongest force in Europe and western Eurasia
By Alexander Mercouris
Alexander Mercouris is a writer on international affairs with a special interest in Russia and law.  He has written extensively on the legal aspects of NSA spying and events in Ukraine in terms of human rights, constitutionality and international law.  He worked for 12 years in the Royal Courts of Justice in London as a lawyer, specializing in human rights and constitutional law. His family has been prominent in Greek politics for several generations.  He is a frequent commentator on television and speaker at conferences.  He resides in London.

Any comparison between the career path of Sergey Shoigu - Russia's defense minister - and Dmitry Rogozin, the deputy prime minister in charge of Russia's defense industries, is a study in contrasts.

Where Rogozin is a professional politician, Shoigu is as an apolitical technocrat.  

In only one important respect do Rogozin and Shoigu resemble each other. Shoigu, like Rogozin, is a civilian not a soldier.

Shoigu was born in the region of Tuva in Siberia in 1955. His father was Tuvan and his mother was Russian.

The Tuvans are a Turkic speaking ethnic group who traditionally practice Shamanism or Tibetan Buddhism.

Shoigu's ethnically mixed background has fed many stories - that he is a practitioner of Shamanism or Buddhism, that he speaks nine languages including English, Japanese and Turkish, and that he has built up a collection of ancient Japanese samurai swords worth $40 million.

The reality is that he is a civil engineer. He graduated in 1977 from the Krasnoyarsk Polytechnical Institute - a prestigious engineering college that has since been absorbed into Krasnoyarsk's Siberian Federal University.  

Thereafter Shoigu worked for about a decade in various posts in the Soviet construction industry.  

A background in civil engineering is widely acknowledged to provide the best quality training for a projects manager and it is as a manager that Shoigu excels.

At some point Shoigu joined the Soviet Communist Party. In 1988 Shoigu he became a party functionary in the party organisation in the south Siberian city of Abakan. He also seems to have undertaken some work for the Communist youth movement, the Komsomol.  This makes Shoigu the only member of the Russian government to have once been a Soviet Communist Party apparatchik.

In one of the most inspired - and mysterious - decisions of his career, Yeltsin plucked Shoigu from obscurity in 1991 and, before the USSR fell, appointed him the first chairman of the newly formed State Committee of the Russian Federation for Civil defense Matters, Extraordinary Situations and the Liquidation of Natural Disasters ("EMERCOM").

Shoigu was promoted to full minister in 1994. The emergencies ministry he headed however continues to be called EMERCOM.

In the same year 1994, in a sign of growing trust, Yeltsin made Shoigu a major general in the Russian army and a member of Russia's Security Council.  

Shoigu has since had more promotions, and at the time of his appointment to the defense ministry he was a full general. The military uniform he wears reflects this. It does not mean he is or ever was a soldier.

Yeltsin's reasons for appointing Shoigu have never been explained. In 1991 EMERCOM was newly established and unimportant. The best guess is that Shoigu was appointed because someone told Yeltsin he was available and was a good manager.  

In the event Shoigu's performance in the job has - at least in Russia - become the stuff of legend.

Despite what must initially have been a limited budget Shoigu was able to build up EMERCOM from scratch into a well-run organisation of 200,000 men.

What however captured the imagination of the Russian public was the inspirational leadership he provided.

In a crisis Shoigu proved to be an excellent hands-on manager and also a highly visible one.

Whenever a disaster happened Shoigu somehow always seemed to be there, taking personal charge, issuing crisp and clear orders and providing his subordinates with the help and support they needed.

This is very much the style of a civil engineer undertaking a big project and it is likely Shoigu learnt it during his work in the construction industry.  

To the Russian public, accustomed to remote desk-bound ministers, it was something new.

Shoigu's direct involvement in disaster management undoubtedly speeded response times and improved efficiency.  The active presence during a crisis of the man in charge, able to assume responsibility, make quick decisions and cut through red tape, has repeatedly been shown to be essential. The muddled and bureaucratic response to the  Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans in 2005 shows the contrast.

Shoigu became Russia's most popular minister. At a time in the 1990s when the Russian government appeared to be in a state of barely controlled chaos and the whole country seemed in danger of falling apart, he and his ministry provided a desperately needed example of efficiency and success.

Beyond efficiency, another reason for Shoigu's popularity was his refusal to involve himself or his ministry in political conflicts.  

Initially this may have reflected the political insignificance of EMERCOM. However even as he became popular Shoigu never sought to use his popularity to gain political influence. He seems to have been purely focused on his job.

The result was that Shoigu accomplished the astonishing feat of remaining a minister throughout the chaotic Yeltsin years without making any enemies. Even individuals like Berezovsky seem to have respected him, as did the Communists who were Yeltsin's most bitter opponents.

This combination of ability and apparent lack of ambition explains Shoigu's extraordinary political longevity. He is the only member of Putin's government to have served in the Soviet Communist Party apparatus, to have been a minister under Yeltsin, and to have been appointed to head a ministry before the USSR broke up.

Shoigu's popularity, and his lack of ambition and enemies, meant he managed the transition from Yeltsin to Putin with ease.  

In 1999 he was made nominal leader of Unity, the new governing party formed that year. The actual leader was and remains Putin himself. Shoigu was given this role to give Unity a popular public face. He continued in that role when the party became United Russia, stepping down in 2005.

In May 2012 he finally stepped down from EMERCOM, handing over to his longstanding deputy Vladimir Puchkov.  

There is no reason to think this resignation was anything other than voluntary. After more than a decade in a demanding post it is understandable if he wanted to move on.

On the day Shoigu stepped down from EMERCOM Putin appointed him governor of Moscow Oblast, presumably to compliment Sergey Sobyanin - another capable manager whom Medvedev had just over a year before appointed mayor of Moscow.  

This seems to have been part of a plan to reorganise and expand Moscow and to strengthen the government's support there.  Moscow was the only place in Russia where in the Presidential elections in March 2012 Putin's vote fell below 50%.  

In the event fate intervened and just a few months later in December 2012 Putin hurriedly appointed Shoigu Russia's defense minister.

This appointment was unplanned and was a consequence of what might have been the single most disastrous appointment of Putin's career.

Shoigu's predecessor as defense minister, Anatoly Serdyukov, was a former businessman and tax official Putin appointed to the post in 2007 to carry out a major shake-up of the Russian military.   

Serdyukov's reputation as a reformer continues to gain him plaudits from those like the writer Mark Galeotti for whom the word "reform" has acquired a kind of mantric quality.

The reality of Serdyukov's time as defense minister was of repeated failures in procurement programmes, unwise attempts to import Western weapons that needlessly upset Russia's defense industries and which exposed Russia to outside pressure (the Mistral ships being a case in point), widespread purges and chaotically conducted and insensitive reorganisations of military units - all of which managed to antagonise Russia's senior military and which caused morale to plunge.

It all finally imploded in autumn 2012 with public revelations of massive corruption at Oboronservis, a company affiliated to the defense ministry, with one of whose directors - Yevgeniya Vasilyeva - it turned out Serdyukov was having an affair.  

Putin had to sack Serdyukov, and in order to stabilise a crisis situation in the defense ministry he turned to Shoigu.  

It is a tribute to Shoigu's reputation that news of his appointment was by itself sufficient to raise morale in the defense ministry.  

It is testament to Shoigu's abilities as a leader and a manager that morale has remained high ever since.

In place of the chaos, low morale and constant infighting of the Serdyukov years, the impression is of a defense ministry that has stabilised into a smoothly functioning machine, with the military at last spared constant reorganisation and able to concentrate on training itself and its troops the better to carry out whatever tasks it is given.

In the nature of things Shoigu's work in the defense ministry is less visible than was his work for EMERCOM. However the conduct of the Crimean operation shows that Shoigu's methods remain the same: painstaking administration during times of quiet; dynamic hands-on management in times of crisis.

Shoigu further consolidated his already immense popularity with the Russian public by an extraordinary gesture at the start of the 9th May Victory Parade earlier this year.  

Before reviewing the troops he made the sign of the cross - an act that had the whole of Russia buzzing and which went down well in a rapidly re-christianising country.  

It was also a gesture that may have been intended to refute rumours of Shoigu being a practising Buddhist. He has since revealed that he was baptised into Orthodoxy by his Russian mother at the age of five.

Inevitably the theatricality of this gesture has sparked further speculation that Shoigu is positioning himself as Putin's successor.  Given that he is the second most popular official in Russia after Putin himself such speculation is understandable.  

Arguing against it is the fact that at 60 Shoigu is barely younger than Putin himself, and that he has previously shown no ambition for such office.

Rather than speculate about Shoigu's political prospects, it seems more useful to consider what he has already achieved.

In partnership with Rogozin - appointed deputy Prime Minister in charge of Russia's defense industries a year before Shoigu's appointment - Shoigu is rapidly re-establishing Russia as a great military power - by far the strongest in Europe and in western Eurasia. Widely expressed alarm in the West about the supposed "threat" from Russia - though groundless and exaggerated - is nonetheless a tribute to what Shoigu in partnership with Rogozin has already achieved.

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 #16
Vedomosti
June 16, 2015
Russia-West confrontation worsens due to intransigence - newspaper
Konstantin Simonov, director of the National Energy Security Foundation: Headless horsemen; Russia and West dream up fantastical projects for each other

The issue of confrontation between the West and Russia was and remains a determining aspect of the international situation. Too much depends on how it will be resolved. If any of us had illusions generated by the visits by US Secretary of State John Kerry to Sochi and Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, to Moscow, they can now safely forget them.

Probably there were some grounds for optimism. Nevertheless, almost a year has passed since the introduction of sectoral sanctions: Russia's economy does not look great but is not in ruins. The same could be said about the Putin regime. However, in the end, it was perversely decided to raise the stakes. This is evident from the G7 summit, and the situation in the Dniester region, the matter of US missiles in Britain, and, finally, the fresh idea of supplying heavy military equipment from the USA to the Baltic states and Eastern Europe. I have no doubt that Putin will respond in kind. So we await the deployment of nuclear weapons in Crimea or in Kaliningrad.

Each side has become hostage to its position. And every day the compromises become less possible. The main value is having the ability to demonstrate "toughness". It is essential to have only iron ladies, gentlemen, and comrades (perhaps the iron Feliks [reference to statue of Dzerzhinskiy in Moscow's Lubyanka Square] is also remembered in tribute to the situation).

In addition, the opposing sides are still hostage to grotesque images of each other. In the West it can increasingly be heard that Putin's chief goal is to restore the Soviet Union. That was stated even in a recent speech by newly minted presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. In reality this looks extremely far-fetched. Moreover, there is a certain paradox. On the one hand, it is said that Russia's economy has been badly damaged by sanctions. On the other hand, Putin is credited with some kind of fantastically expensive political project. I see an alliance with China. I see games with Iran and Turkey. But the restoration of the Soviet Union is a questionable thesis. Crimea, meanwhile, is about something else.

However, we were not born yesterday. The West's main goal is supposedly the destruction of the Russian world, which is like a bone in the throat.

Russia and the West have dreamed up political projects for each other, which have quickly become the explanation for any actions in response, and along the way to shift responsibility to the opposing side. And be sure to add values that are not for sale. Actually, if it comes to values, as you will understand, further reasonable dialogue is almost impossible.

The main problem is it is impossible to see a way out. This question was asked a year ago: what ultimately do the West and Russia want to achieve? There is no realistic end goal. Trust in each other is starting to totally disappear. Which makes impossible the already fantastical scenarios (for example, the scenario of lifting sanctions in exchange for another referendum on Crimea after a certain number of years). It turns out that a flare-up of the conflict is becoming probably not the best scenario. However, the cowboys might well speed things up. t and Russia want to achieve? There is no realistic end goal. Trust in each other is starting to totally disappear. Which makes impossible the already fantastical scenarios (for example, the scenario of lifting sanctions in exchange for another referendum on Crimea after a certain number of years). It turns out that a flare-up of the conflict is becoming probably not the best scenario. However, the cowboys might well speed things up.

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 #17
What's between the lines of NATO defence ministers' belligerent rhetoric?
By Lyudmila Alexandrova

MOSCOW, June 22. /TASS/. A Cold War between Russia and the West is in fact well underway, although it is different from the one observed in the Soviet era, Russian analysts believe. It is in this context that one should consider the latest belligerent statements by the US and German defence ministers and the European Union's decision to prolong sanctions against Russia. However, they see explanations for the United States' belligerent rhetoric in internal political factors, while the European countries have no chances of conducting their own policy, independent from the United States.

The US and its NATO allies proceed from the assumption the acute differences with Russia will last long, and they are determined to stick to a "strong and balanced" approach to Moscow, US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter said last Sunday on the eve of a week-long tour of Europe. He claimed that the alliance must use a "two-pronged approach" in relations with Russia because, he said, the United States continued to hold out the prospect that Russia under Vladimir Putin and later would not return to what he described as a "forward-looking course."

"We would like to be on peace terms with Russia, but the security situation has changed and it is forcing us to upgrade the defence alliance. It is better to talk to Moscow from the position of strength," Germany's Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen told the daily Bild in an interview.

A day earlier the EU Council met in session at the foreign minister level to have prolonged the operation of anti-Russian economic sanctions by another six months, till January 31, 2016.

"On the one hand, a hard line is a characteristic feature of US foreign policy," the deputy chief of the European Security department at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Europe, Dmitry Danilov, has told TASS. "But the fact that such statements are being made these days does mean that the United States sees no practical successes on the Ukrainian settlement track, while it is precisely such a settlement that Washington regards as crucial to the outlook for changing its policy towards Russia."

Danilov believes that the internal political situation inside the United States should be borne in mind: the US Administration feels it has to follow a hard line in the political-diplomatic space, for it is prone to continued fire of criticism from the Republicans and the Congress.

"NATO's military and political course was mapped out back last September, at the alliance's summit in Wales, when a decision was made to reformat military activities and to reorient the collective defence against a hypothetical threat allegedly coming from Russia. In a situation like this the defence ministers are unable to depart an inch from the warmonger's vocabulary. It is an entirely different matter that military policies set the Western countries' common political vector. But the risk this vector may grow strong enough to cause a decisive influence on NATO's overall course does exist.

The United States has demonstrated its intention to the Europeans quite clearly. Europe was told in very unequivocal terms to formulate its stance regarding the sanctions.

"The Europeans find it rather hard to shrug off US influence. Also, there is a certain force of retardation. For quite obvious reasons the EU countries follow the well-trodden path of sanctions-oriented logic and political inertia they have chosen for themselves. Small wonder the European Union has preferred to prolong the sanctions. But the question remains: does the European Union have its own strategy of leaving the space of sanctions, and even if it does, to what extent will it be able to do that independently, while the United States' policies remain unchanged. Danilov believes this is hardly possible. In the meantime, the United States is entering into a pre-election period, so the chances the Obama Administration may opt for some constructive moves look bleak.

"The United States over the coming 12-18 months will be seeking a balance of hardline approaches and self-restraint, so the Europeans will have very few chances of making any decisions on their own at all."

All key features of another Cold War are already in place: "starting from an economic war and information war to belligerent, confrontational rhetoric," Danilov said. "However, in contrast to the previous Cold War period the point at issue for the time being is not that of a looming military-political confrontation. True, the potentials of mutual deterrence are getting stronger. But there exists the understanding that the risks, including military and political ones, are so great that there have to be some safety catches."

Any improvement of relations between Russia and the West will be possible only in the context of tangible shifts in settling the Ukrainian crisis. In the meantime, this possibility looks highly questionable, he concluded.

"The vision of an improvement of relations with the West has changed. Now it will pretty much resemble what it was during the Cold War years," a member of the Foreign and Defence Policy Council, Fyodor Lukyanov, has told TASS. Over the previous two decades Russia and Europe were drifting towards each other institutionally. These days any improvement of relations would be tantamount to concluding technical agreements to defuse certain tensions, the way it was done in the Soviet era. "The situation will be put under external administration, but no fresh chances of a fundamental improvement of relations will emerge."

"Russia last year said that it disagreed with the existing world order and its rules and demanded their revision. It challenged the West, and the West accepted the challenge the way it understands it," Lukyanov said.

There will be another Cold War, but a very different one from its predecessor that lasted for 45 years, he forecasts. Isolation and self-isolation are ruled out for economic reasons.

"This or that form of containment tactic will continue to be employed on the Western side. This state of affairs is bound to last," he said.

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#18
www.rt.com
June 23, 2015
NATO vs Russia: 'US tries to create enemy out of nothing'

The Ukrainian crisis is about Ukraine, but not about Central or Western Europe, says Jonathan Steele, Guardian international affairs columnist. But NATO needs to justify its existence and sell arms, that's why a demonization of Russia is taking place.

On Monday, US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter claimed America will provide more aircraft, weapons and soldiers to NATO's rapid reaction force in Europe. This is meant to help Europe face security threats including Russia. Earlier, the US announced plans to store battle tanks, combat vehicles and heavy weapons for as many as 5,000 troops in Eastern Europe.

RT: Washington says no US troops will move to Europe immediately, but they could be made available within 48 hours if requested. What kind of request are we talking about? What's the danger Europe has to be afraid of?

Jonathan Steele: It means exactly that they will be on standby and they will be flown to Europe within 48 or 72 hours maximum. Whether this is going to change anything is doubtful because they could fly there anyway. So the fact that they are on standby doesn't really change anything, it's just part of saber rattling. The threat they claim is from Russia. And I think, as Ashton Carter said, they think Russia is trying to recreate a Soviet-style sphere of influence across Europe. This of course is a complete exaggeration, if not nonsense... To accuse Russia of planning to extend its sphere of influence is an astonishing accusation.

RT: NATO's all about cooperation and yet Washington is planning to send more of its own soldiers to Eastern Europe. Can the White House not rely on its partners?

JS: I think it's meant just to give a lead because they are trying to get to all the NATO member countries to apply 2 percent of their GDP to defense, and many of them are behind, including Britain. They want to give a lead and say "We are showing the way, we are supplying more arms, men, equipment, logistics and you must follow suits". So it's meant to try to persuade the NATO allies to follow suit.

RT: Can the alliance really afford more military spending right now?

JS: That's the reason why it isn't 2 percent at the moment. It's because countries can't do that and many of them have to cut their budgets and these huge austerity programs going on throughout Europe and defense is unpopular. Public opinion doesn't see the need for increasing defense expenditure especially since we've had two very unpopular wars - Iraq and Afghanistan - and people don't want to spend more money on defense and they don't believe politicians' analyses that Russia is a threat.

RT: And what about people who are living nearby? Are they happy with the growing military presence?

JS: I think many of them are dubious about it. They don't want to be the frontline in any kind of a new hot war that might develop in Europe. So there is a great deal of concern as well as the economic issues. The trouble is that the US is trying to create an enemy out of nothing. The Ukrainian crisis is about Ukraine, it's not about the Baltics, it's certainly not about Central Europe or Western Europe. But NATO is a big bureaucratic empire, they have to have a reason for existence, that's a good thing for the US arms manufacturers to cascade or sell their arms to Western European countries, and so there is a lot of heavy corporate interest involved in all this demonization of Russia.

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 #19
New York Times
June 23, 2015
NATO Returns Its Attention to an Old Foe, Russia
By ERIC SCHMITT and STEVEN LEE MYERS

CAMP ADAZI, Latvia - After years of facing threats far beyond its borders, NATO is now reinvigorating plans to confront a much larger and more aggressive threat from its past: Moscow.

This seismic shift has been apparent in military training exercises in this former Soviet republic, which is now a NATO member and on the alliance's eastern flank, bordering Russia.

On a recent day, Latvian soldiers conducted a simulated attack on dug-in enemy positions in a pine forest here as two United States A-10 attack planes roared overhead and opened fire with 30-millimeter cannons.

Two days before, a B-52 dropped nine dummy bombs radioed in by the Latvians on the ground - all just 180 miles from the Russian border.

The symbolism of the B-52s, stalwarts of the Cold War arsenal, was lost on no one. The bombers' main mission was once was to deliver a nuclear knockout punch to Soviet forces, but they were put to use for the first time over this former Soviet republic to show resolve on the new front between NATO and Russia, the heir of the Soviet war machine.

"If the Russians sense a window of opportunity, they will use it to their advantage," said Estonia's chief of defense, Lt. Gen. Riho Terras, who recently mobilized 13,000 soldiers across his tiny country in a separate exercise. "We must make sure there's no room for miscalculation."

The military drills that unfolded here, part of a series of exercises planned over coming months to demonstrate the alliance's readiness to confront Russia, emphasize the depth of the challenge facing an alliance that for a quarter of a century turned its attention to threats much farther afield.

After years of reducing military spending and conducting expeditionary missions beyond NATO's border, from the Balkans to Afghanistan to the Horn of Africa, the alliance has had to reinvigorate plans that commanders and political leaders had largely consigned to the past.

This week, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter travels through several NATO capitals before sitting down on Wednesday and Thursday with other defense ministers in Brussels to debate how to counter a resurgent Russia.

Russia's annexation of Crimea - and its role in the war in eastern Ukraine - has already resulted in what NATO's secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, recently called "the biggest reinforcement of NATO forces since the end of the Cold War."

It has involved a marked increase in training rotations on territory of the newer NATO allies in the east, and stepped up patrols of the air and seas from the Baltic to the Black Sea intended to counter an increase of patrols by Russian forces around NATO's periphery.

Most of those are temporary deployments. But in February, NATO announced that it would set up six new command units within the Eastern allies and create a 5,000-strong rapid reaction "spearhead" force.

And the Pentagon now plans to preposition heavy American tanks and other weaponry in Eastern Europe for the first time, prompting unease in some quarters ahead of the NATO defense ministers' meetings, and strong protests from Moscow that coincided with an announcement by President Vladimir V. Putin that he was bolstering Russia's arsenal of strategic nuclear weapons.

With the leaders of NATO's 28 members scheduled to gather in Warsaw for an important summit meeting next year, the alliance is now considering what other measures are needed to adjust its forces, to increase spending that had plummeted as part of a "peace dividend," and to revisit NATO's military strategy and planning.

"During the Cold War we had everything there in the neighborhood we needed to respond," said Julianne Smith, a former defense and White House official who is now a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington. "It's all atrophied. We haven't gone through the muscle movements of a conventional attack in Europe for decades."

NATO's steps, and its deliberations over future ones, have exposed internal tensions within the alliance over the extent of the threat Putin's Russia poses. That in turn has colored the debate over how vigorously the allies should prepare.

Some view the threat as imminent, while others view Russia as less a threat than the instability, the flood of migrants and the rise of extremism emanating from North Africa. A recent poll suggested that residents in some member nations were far from committed to the notion of going to war to protect the other NATO allies - let alone Ukraine.

NATO's response to the events in Ukraine has required a shift in strategic thinking as profound as the one that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the alliance's main adversary suddenly no longer existed. For years, the Russia that emerged from the Soviet ruins seemed destined to be a partner if not an ally, something Mr. Putin himself did not rule out when he first came to office in 2000.

"I don't think we're in the Cold War again - yet," said James G. Stavridis, the retired admiral and NATO military commander, now dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, who served on a destroyer as a "thorough seagoing cold warrior" when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

He added, however: "I can kind of see it from here."

While some do not rule out a conventional confrontation - something Mr. Putin himself rejected as "insane" - others point to the potential threats shrouded in subterfuge and subversion, much like Russia's annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and its continuing support for ethnic-Russians in the war in eastern Ukraine, which has claimed more than 6,000 lives.

Britain's defense secretary, Michael Fallon, warned in February that there was a "real and present danger" of Russia moving to destabilize the Baltic States: Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia.

A confidential assessment of that risk is expected to be presented at the coming NATO meetings in Brussels. But the potential for such an attack has implicitly been the focus of much of the training and planning going on in places like this.

In private and in public, some officials and commanders argue that much more is needed to reverse two decades of policy, particularly to shore up an eastern flank that to many, especially here in the Baltics, feels gravely exposed to a Russian attack.

Poland's defense minister, Tomasz Siemoniak, said that NATO had to undertake a "strategic adaptation" that accounted for the fact that Russia's hostility toward the alliance was "a change in climate and not a summer storm." It is time, he said, to consider significant deployments of heavy weapons in Eastern Europe, brushing aside the worry that such a move would provoke Russia.

"I think the caution expressed by some of our European allies is excessive," Mr. Siemoniak said during a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington in May.

Some believe that stoking divisions among the allies is simply another of the tactics that Mr. Putin has employed.

Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, the commander of United States Army forces in Europe, said in an interview, "I am sure they want to create doubts in the minds of some members of the alliance that the other 27 members won't be there for them."

The rising tensions between NATO and Russia come at a time of sharp decline in the United States military presence in Europe, to 64,000 troops now, including just 27,000 soldiers, from more than 400,000 at the height of the Cold War. Other nations' militaries have shrunk, too. Britain now has a smaller army than during the Crimean War in the mid-19th century.

The notion of a more robust NATO has encountered inertia that has built over the last two decades. The "peace dividend" that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union could prove hard to reverse, said David Ochmanek, a former senior Pentagon official who is a senior analyst at the RAND Corporation.

NATO's militaries drew down so precipitously that it has become a regular challenge for members to maintain military spending at 2 percent of gross domestic product, a level considered minimal for effective defense. "The assumption was that this was pretty much cost free because there was no plausible threat to the security of members," Mr. Ochmanek said. "Putin has changed that."

At the same time, few of the NATO allies are looking to increase military spending significantly. "Nobody in any military establishment is looking for more bills to pay right now," Mr. Ochmanek said.

Even before the annexation of Crimea, NATO had watched Russia warily.

"NATO has reduced defense spending over a long period of time, especially European NATO allies," Mr. Stoltenberg said in an interview in Washington in May. "Russia has increased substantially. So they have modernized their forces. They have increased their capacity. And they are exercising more. And they are also now starting to use nuclear rhetoric, nuclear exercises and nuclear operations as part of their nuclear posture. This is destabilizing."

While American officials say that exercises like the one at this former Soviet tank base are mainly to allow NATO and Baltic States to hone their training together, they are also intended to send a strong message of solidarity.

More than 6,000 troops from 14 allied nations - three times the number of soldiers that joined the same exercise two years ago, before Russia's invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine - conducted the annual Saber Strike training exercise in the Baltics and Poland that ended Friday.

On a brilliant, sunny day this month, 150 Latvian infantry members fought across a sandy pine barren to seize locations defended by Atropians, a fictional foe played by Gurkha soldiers of the British Army. Both sides traded simulated artillery and rocket fire, before the Latvians dashed from the woods and used smoke screens as cover to seize their targets. The A-10 attack planes roared overhead. But what really snapped back the necks of Baltic and other European observers was the B-52 bomber, on call for any additional strikes.

Latvia's defense chief, Lt. Gen. Raimonds Graube, looked up admiringly at the warplanes, and dismissed any suggestion that a NATO exercise with B-52s might provoke the Russians, as some European officials have complained. "Our soldiers must be ready to train on an international level," he said.

For a United States military that has spent nearly two decades fighting insurgencies in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, the tensions with Russia have young soldiers - many born after the Soviet Union collapsed - learning new skills and brushing up on an old adversary.

"It's not lost on me or my soldiers where we're operating," said Lt. Col. Chad Chalfont, an Army battalion commander training at a former Soviet base in Rukla, Lithuania.

Colonel Chalfont, whose father served as an Air Force officer in an underground nuclear missile silo during the Cold War, said American and Lithuanian troops drilled together on mundane but critical tasks like talking on the same radio frequency. Lithuanian infantry troops also learn more complex skills, like operating together with American battle tanks for the first time in dense pine forests.

The threat to the Baltic nations, at least in theory, is acute. For the Pentagon, Mr. Ochmanek of RAND has run war games trying to anticipate how to defend the Baltics in particular, the most immediate concern for the alliance. "It's not realistic to think they could defend themselves against a determined Russian attack," he said.

There is a hope that deterrence will suffice to prevent Russia from moving, but many fear that Mr. Putin's government could seek to undermine the allies by subterfuge, as Russia did in Crimea and is doing in Ukraine.

More likely than any ground attack from Russian troops, NATO officials say, would be some kind of cyberstrike or information warfare assault, two of the critical components of a hybrid warfare style that is central to a new Russian military strategy unveiled in 2013 by Russia's chief of the general staff, Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov.

The doctrine explicitly acknowledged the use of "military means of a concealed character, including carrying out actions of informational conflict and the actions of special operations forces."

For those on NATO's front lines, the doctrine appears all too real. This month, unknown hackers targeted the website of the Lithuanian Army leadership, posting false information about NATO exercises in the Baltics and Poland, a Lithuanian Defense Ministry spokesman said.

Lithuanian officials said the false messages included a report that the NATO exercise was a pretext for a possible annexation of the Russian region of Kaliningrad, which lies between Lithuania and Poland.

"They use information like artillery and rockets, in barrages," said General Hodges, the Army commander in Europe.

All of this is on NATO's mind as it takes interim measures to deal with the threat.

Asked what steps his military would take if Russian "little green men" tried to sneak across his border, General Terras, Estonia's chief of defense, said bluntly, "We will shoot them."

Bravado aside, Baltic commanders and civilian leaders said they were scrambling to improve and enlarge their militaries and other security forces.

These countries are overcoming years when Russia was not considered an enemy, but was still eyed warily. When Baltic nations joined NATO more than a decade ago, they were encouraged to develop niche specialties rather than territorial defense, which was no longer thought necessary. Latvia, for instance, developed capabilities like explosive demolition experts and ground spotters to call in strikes - all skills that filled needs in NATO missions outside Europe, such as Afghanistan.

Now with standing forces of about 5,000 to 10,000 troops, the Baltics feel vulnerable despite being members of NATO. They have no tanks, no air forces to speak of and only patrol craft and minesweepers to ply coastal waters. Each country is now rushing to correct this shortfall.

The Estonians have a "defense league" that is made up of about 30,000 civilians and includes farmers, carpenters, lawyers and other professions. They engage in basic infantry training once a month, receive arms from the government, and in the event of an invasion would be called to active duty to be commanded by professional soldiers.

Juozas Olekas, Lithuania's defense minister, said in an interview that the government was developing a more comprehensive self-defense plan coordinating across several government agencies. The army will soon add some 3,000 new conscripts. In January, Lithuania's Defense Ministry published a pamphlet intended to instruct Lithuanians how to survive a foreign occupation and organize nonviolent resistance.

In Latvia, Defense Minister Raimonds Vejonis said that with the Baltics' bitter history under Soviet occupation, the public and the government were only too aware of Mr. Putin's attempts to use propaganda and military might in Ukraine to intimidate NATO's smallest members. "We will stay united because if we don't, NATO will die," said Mr. Vejonis, who becomes Lithuania's president in July.

Col. Martins Liberts, a Latvian brigade commander who joined his country's new military when it formed upon Latvia's independence in 1991, said: "We are all monitoring closely what's happening in Ukraine. And we're learning lessons. We're different from Ukraine."

Not all of the NATO allies are as ardent. While there has been striking unanimity against Russia's actions in Ukraine - and separately, the European Union extended its sanctions against Russia this week - divisions remain.

"There's a hope this is all a bump in the road and with a little bit of tweaking we can get back to the status quo," the former American ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, said in a telephone interview. "In my view, that's naïve. Putin's not going to change his position, and he's not going away. You've got to be in this for the long haul."

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 #20
Foreign Affairs
www.foreignaffairs.com
June 22, 2015
Putin's Throwback State
Undoing Moscow's Shift West
By Gregory Feifer
GREGORY FEIFER is author of Russians: The People Behind the Power.

The twists and turns of Russia's development may have never been more tied to the West than they were in 1997. That summer, Moscow's stock market began to boom as new Western-style grocery stores replaced those of the foul-smelling Soviet variety, even in Moscow's most remote districts. A growing number of Russians began to believe that the trauma of market reform and democratization had finally started to show at least some small promise of an eventual payoff. It was therefore surprising to hear a young Moscow professional back then declare that the West wants only to make Russia weak. That protestation came not from a die-hard Communist or nationalist politician but rather from a well-spoken 30-something who had traveled abroad. Nothing, it seemed, could bridge what appeared to be an ideological divide between us.

Today, such views are common among young Russians. Western antagonism toward Russia has become a standard trope in Moscow's official gospel since the 1998 financial crisis that derailed then President Boris Yeltsin's Westernizing reforms and led to a bitter political battle for succession. Yeltsin's handpicked heir, Russian President Vladimir Putin, won that struggle by resurrecting the country's traditional political culture that many Russians hoped had been left behind in their transition. Fifteen years later, the central, centuries-old political practice of hiding reality with bluffs and façades is back in style.

Few would deny that Putin is a master of international bluster. He has rejected years of Western overtures and mocked the United States and Europe, despite their willingness to overlook Russia's invasion of Georgia in 2008. Rather than engage with the West, as Washington and Brussels had hoped, he has redrawn European borders and launched a war in Ukraine that has killed more than 6,000 people. All the while, he has justified his actions by blaming the West. Ukraine's conflict, he said in February, "emerged in response to the attempts of the USA and its Western allies . . . to impose their will everywhere." Putin regularly risks civilian aviation catastrophes by sending bombers with their transponders turned off near-and sometimes into-the airspace of NATO member countries. And he favors a television news host who gleefully warned that Russia is capable of nuking the United States into "radioactive dust."

Given Moscow's apprehension toward dealing with the West on practical and reasonable terms, Westerners would be forgiven for asking whether Russia can ever be normal. The answer is crucial for the years and decades ahead, particularly since Putin fits a leadership mold: many Russian leaders have held power by adopting foreign influences and remaking them into more traditionally Russian forms. Catherine the Great left out much of the Enlightenment thought that she claimed her reforms reflected; the tone and practice of Soviet communism would have dumbfounded Marx. Those and other façades have obscured the maneuverings of Russia's rulers: remember the decades Western scholars of the Soviet Union spent interpreting the lineups of Politburo members atop Lenin's mausoleum for subtle signals of who was in or out, much the way their successors try to divine the current regime's players. As long as Putin benefits from such old practices, persuading him to play by Western rules will remain difficult.

Putin sustains his 80 percent public approval rating by presenting himself as a restorer of Russian greatness and sole guarantor of the state's security. The invasion of Ukraine is only the latest example of a series of actions that he claims have been vital for Russia's survival, which began by launching a war in Chechnya before his election as president in 2000. His rule over Russia requires the image of a fearless defender of his people because the opposite is true: far from boosting his country's influence, Putin is acting against Russia's long-term interests, undermining stability and prosperity by consolidating power to serve a corrupt inner circle of billionaires and don-like officials. Weakening the economy by incurring Western sanctions is but a case in point. Ordinary Russians have seen their savings shrink even as some of the president's closest friends have reaped huge profits from government contracts and concessions ostensibly aimed at countering the decline.

For those who do not buy into Putin's demonstration of strength, there is an ongoing crackdown on dissent for both internal and external organizations. In May, Putin enacted a new law enabling prosecutors to declare foreign organizations with offices in Russia as undesirable, presumably to be able to shut them down. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are among the groups currently under scrutiny. Many foreign organizations such as the United States Agency for International Development have already been forced out. Among the few remaining domestic dissenters, the vitally important human rights group Memorial is under constant threat.

However irrational it may appear in the West, Putin's method of consolidating power is effective. Although the most optimistic Russian forecasts predict the shrinking economy will improve only by next year at the earliest, the country's finances have proved more resilient than the West had hoped, despite sanctions that bar Russian companies from raising badly needed credit abroad. Regardless, Russia's current course of action is probably no more sustainable politically or economically in the long term than the Soviet Union's, which led to disaster.  Although there is no way to predict how long it may take, Putin will last only until Russians realize that.

Western countries must show Russian citizens that Putin, not the West, is responsible for their deepening problems. It must do so by setting a strong example when it comes to sanctions and policy. A European Union summit in May consisting of leaders from Ukraine and other eastern neighbors proved a major disappointment on that front. Despite much fine talk about cooperation and democracy, it provided no promises for countries interested in joining the bloc. Last week, EU governments managed to overcome their differences to agree on extending Russia sanctions for six months, but it was hardly the kind of unambiguous resolve that is required. EU countries should make it clear there will be no change in their policies until Moscow honors the cease-fire agreement in Ukraine.

Deeper and broader measures are also needed. The West must supply Ukraine with defensive weapons to ensure Moscow's fanning of the conflict becomes more controversial at home. For as long as war continues to fuel Putin's popularity, opposing the West will remain in his immediate political interests. Constructive engagement with the international community-that is, acting normally by our definition-will come only when his façade is punctured.

For now, escalating conflict may have enabled Putin to tap into a deep current, but by playing on Russian tradition, he has probably set a course for the country to repeat its history. Moscow does not need to succumb to the same fate, however, if it is willing to come back to the table. Russia can become normal even if doing so will take a very long time.

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#21
Subject: RUSSIA AND AMERICA:  A FALSE START TOWARD A NEW DÉTENTE (response to Leslie Gelb)
Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2015 16:55:45 +0000 (UTC)
From: Kirk Bennett <kirkbennett7@yahoo.com>

RUSSIA AND AMERICA:  A FALSE START TOWARD A NEW DÉTENTE
By Kirk Bennett
Kirk Bennett is a former Foreign Service Officer who served in both Moscow and Kyiv.  The opinions in this article are his own and do not reflect the views of the U.S. Government.

"Russia and America: Toward a New Détente," a recent 6,500-word essay in "The National Interest" by the preeminent foreign-policy expert Leslie Gelb, was a heartfelt plea for urgent, high-level action to restore U.S.-Russian cooperation and to combine their efforts in addressing urgent world problems.  While critical of "recent Russian provocations," Gelb placed most of the blame for poor relations on the thoughtless triumphalism of the past few U.S. administrations, epitomized by NATO enlargement.  The situation calls for "détente-plus," in which Washington shows Russia the requisite respect, Moscow curbs its bad behavior, and the two countries cooperate to deal with mutual problems such as terrorism and proliferation.  

Notwithstanding the nobility of his cause, and the impressive experience and erudition that Mr. Gelb brought to the task, the analysis was disappointing and suffused with an air of unreality.  The issue is not so much the platitudes (e.g., "both parties have got to understand that the solution lies in diplomatic sensitivity and compromise, rather than fighting").  Rather, the disappointment arises from a stereotypical analysis of the current crisis in European security, and a cloying faith in the ability of old-fashioned superpower diplomacy to set things right.   In the interest of brevity, I must highlight only the most problematic aspects of the essay.  

There is a glaring factual error in the assertion that, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, " Russia lost a quarter of its territory [and] half of its population."  In fact, Russia was just one of fifteen Soviet republics, and when the USSR ceased to exist, Russia lost precisely zero territory and zero population.  To assert otherwise would be the equivalent of claiming that the loss of their empires deprived Great Britain and France of more than 90% of "their" territory and population.  Ukraine, which Mr. Gelb characterizes as "integral to Russia's history and identity," has its analogies (albeit inexact) in Ireland and Algeria.  If the proportional magnitude of a country's territorial and population losses were the determining factor in national humiliation, then Portugal would have far greater justification for post-colonial syndrome , and the resulting disruptive behavior, than Russia.  The notion of Russia's dismemberment in 1991 is a myth, and analysts should stop trotting it out as an objective factor in Russian post-Cold War resentment.  The fact that this myth has become part of the Russian humiliation narrative, and hence a subjective aspect of the Russian sense of grievance, is another matter that deserves fuller treatment.  Unfortunately, it receives no treatment whatsoever in Mr. Gelb's article, which uncritically accepts the Russian humiliation narrative as almost completely justified.  

Even more disappointing is the superficial analysis of Russia's 2014 invasion of Ukraine.  Mr. Gelb asserts that a Ukrainian parliamentary vote on repealing a language law, along with other unspecified "anti-Russian noises," constituted "more than enough pretext for Putin to initiate the present crisis."  The law in question, which granted the Russian language official status on a regional basis, had been in effect for barely a year.  Its repeal would have in no way affected the ability of Ukrainian citizens to speak Russian, access Russian-language media, or be educated in Russian.  The law was galling to Ukrainian patriots because it embodied the idea that Russian-speakers in Ukraine need not learn the national language, since all Ukrainian-speakers should "naturally" learn Russian as the language of inter-ethnic communication.  In any event the Ukrainian government rejected the Rada's vote to repeal the law, which remains in effect.  More importantly, since the onset of the war there has been no systematic persecution of the millions of Russians and Russian-speakers in Ukraine, who do not - as Moscow would have us believe - live in fear of their lives because of the "fascist junta" in Kyiv.  To his credit, Mr. Gelb does finger Putin as the instigator of the war.  However, with a careless throw-away line about "the ill treatment of Russian minorities," Mr. Gelb gives credence to one of the most baseless lies of the Kremlin's anti-Ukrainian propaganda blitz.

Mr. Gelb derides NATO for lacking a strategy in the Ukraine crisis, adding that "[t]he reason for the West's limp hand is painfully evident to all: Russia's military superiority over NATO on its western borders."  It would have been not charity but simple fairness to observe that the Alliance's lack of military muscle in the vicinity of Russia is due to a long-standing, conscious decision to assuage Moscow by keeping combat forces away from Russian soil.  One is left with the impression that Mr. Gelb neglected this rather important point because it would have undermined his narrative about the recklessness of NATO enlargement.  As NATO begins reinforcing the member states on Russia's borders, it will be interesting to see if Mr. Gelb leaps to chastise the Alliance for once again ignoring Moscow's sensitivities in Russia's backyard.

Perhaps the weakest contention in the essay is a line of argumentation not peculiar to Mr. Gelb, but frequently encountered in analyses of the "realist" school - that the current crisis in relations is distracting Russia and the West from recognizing their common interest in solving other pressing world problems.  Mr. Gelb writes that "a good case can be made now that these two powers [the U.S. and Russia] have more shared interests than conflicting ones."  Unfortunately, if a good case can be made, Mr. Gelb certainly failed to do so in his essay, and his list of topics for the common U.S.-Russian agenda - terrorism, Syria, Iran, and proliferation - reveals just how little analysis went into his assertion.
The idea of U.S.-Russian cooperation to address global and regional problems is a hardy perennial of the post-Cold War bilateral relationship, spanning all U.S. administrations from the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission of the Clinton White House through the Obama reset.  The track record of achievements has been exceedingly modest, not because of bad faith, dilatory bureaucracies or lingering Cold-War attitudes on either side, but due to the blindingly obvious fact that Russia and the U.S. generally view the world differently, and often have flatly contradictory interests.

Syria is a case in point.  Syria under the al-Assad family has been a reliable Russian ally for decades and the last redoubt of post-Cold War Russian influence in the Middle East.  While the West sees Bashir al-Assad as a bloodthirsty dictator, Russia views him as a faithful friend and the linchpin of Russian interests in the region.  Moscow rejects efforts to remove al-Assad not because of pique over NATO enlargement, but because Western and Russian interests in Syria are diametrically opposed.   Mr. Gelb's suggestion that there is, or could be, some common U.S.-Russian agenda on Syria is perplexing to say the least.

Russian relations with Iran are more complex, but common ground with the U.S. remains very limited.  Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moscow and Tehran have recognized their common interest in limiting Turkish and American influence in the Caucasus and Central Asia.  Iran' subversive activities in much of the Middle East have not extended to Russia's vulnerable North Caucasus, a fact noted with gratitude by Moscow.  Were it not for the country's pariah status, Iran would be the natural conduit for most of the Caspian Basin's hydrocarbon exports - giving Russia a vested economic interest in Iran's continued isolation.  Moreover, Tehran and Moscow are united in their determination to prop up al-Assad.

Terrorism or proliferation ought, in principle, to offer brighter prospects for U.S.-Russian cooperation, but even here dramatically different perspectives limit collaboration.  Russian concerns about terrorism are sharply focused on Islamic radicalism in the post-Soviet space, above all the North Caucasus.  There was enough overlap in interests for Russia to provide support to the Western military deployment in Afghanistan.  However, Moscow does not share U.S. opposition to groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, the proxies of Russian clients Syria and Iran.  As for proliferation, Moscow and Washington were able to cooperate well enough to remove nuclear weapons from neighboring post-Soviet states, but Russia has been reluctant to support curbs on the far more dangerous proliferation activities of North Korea or Iran.  Giorgiy Mirskiy, the dean of Russian Iran experts, has observed that many Russians would frankly prefer a nuclear Iran to a pro-Western one.  Putin's surprise call for the removal of Syria's chemical weapons came only after decades of Russian denial that any such weapons existed.  It was not a strategic reversal of Russia's historically indulgent attitude toward Syrian WMD, but a tactical move to avert American airstrikes against a Russian ally.

Thus, short of a dramatic change in perceived interests on one side or the other, the popular notion of a joint U.S.-Russian agenda on global and regional problems will remain a will-o'-the-wisp, enticing but ultimately illusory.  It is hard to see how refraining from NATO enlargement, or accepting a Russian "sphere of privileged interests" in the post-Soviet space, would have had any substantive effect on basic U.S.-Russian divergences of viewpoint and interest on the issues Mr. Gelb enumerated.

The most astonishing aspect of Mr. Gelb's article was its breathtaking condescension toward Russia, particularly the Russian leadership.  Having placed most of the blame for the current crisis on Western arrogance, and especially the short-sightedness of the last two U.S. administrations, Mr. Gelb does not propose a policy of Western contrition or a reversal of NATO enlargement.  Quite the contrary - "[t]he West need not silence its complaints about the Kremlin's brutality, nor concede vital interests," he writes, proposing to "retain the sanctions regime and credible prospects for a greater NATO presence" until his diplomatic strategy begins to bear fruit.  And what does this diplomatic strategy consist of?  It "has to be rooted in what matters most to Russian leaders - their historical sense of self and their passion to be treated as a great power," and would consist of three elements:

First, diplomacy at the highest levels - "annual presidential summits and semiannual meetings of foreign and defense ministers."

Second, high visibility to U.S.-Russian joint ventures - "optics are critical both to reestablish Russia's status as a great power, and for the United States to gain more restrained and cooperative Russian behavior in return. Kremlin leaders are surely realistic enough to see this trade-off and curb themselves."

Third, simultaneous progress on two fronts - "maintaining the basic integrity and independence of countries on Russia's borders while being attentive to Russian interests there; and fashioning joint action on broader issues."

Well, there you have it.  There is evidently no U.S.-Russia disagreement that cannot be fixed with a little more POTUS face time.  Optics, high-level hand-holding, and joint pursuit of a largely imaginary common agenda, perhaps in a reincarnated Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission, will supposedly induce the Kremlin to end its mischief-making in the post-Soviet space.  I beg to differ - Putin is not such a fool.  The "integrity and independence" of post-Soviet neighbors is precisely what Moscow finds objectionable and contrary to its interests.  Moreover, it is risible to imagine that Russia would show the slightest interest in some faux superpower status graciously bestowed upon it by a magnanimous Washington, or would respond with anything but contempt to such a transparently patronizing gesture.  Moscow will not give up its perceived birthright in the post-Soviet space for a mess of pottage served up at senior-level meetings with the Americans.  What a shame the Kremlin leaders are not as "realistic" as Mr. Gelb seems to believe.

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 #22
Sputnik
June 22, 2015
Putin and the Saudi Caravan
By Pepe Escobar

No one - as usual - saw it coming.

So guess who walks into a room in St. Petersburg this past Thursday; Saudi Arabia's Deputy Crown Prince - and Defense Minister - Muhammad bin Salman, favorite son of King Salman; Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir (former ambassador to the US and very close to key players in the Beltway); and all-powerful Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi. They were all there for a face-to-face with President Vladimir Putin, on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg Economic Forum.

In principle, there could not be a more spectacular game-changer-in-waiting. A royal Saudi caravan offering tribute, in the form of incense, gold and myrrh (or higher oil prices)? No one knows, yet, how this will play out in the New Great Game in Eurasia, of which a major spin-off is Cold War 2.0 between the US and Russia.

Putin and King Salman - very discreetly - had been in touch over the phone for weeks. The King's son invited Putin to Riyadh. Accepted. Putin invited the King to Moscow. Accepted. No question, the suspense is already killing everybody. But is this real life? Or smoke and mirrors?

Who's allied with whom?

First of all, the crucial energy front. Putin is now discussing what was, so far, an oil price war but may become - and the operative concept is "maybe" - a "petroleum alliance" (in Naimi's words), directly with the source: the House of Saud.

Assuming this entente cordiale will eventually lead to an oil price rise, Putin scores a major internal victory against what could be described as an Atlanticist Fifth Column trying to undermine Russia's multipolar drive. Moreover, geoeconomically, it doesn't hurt that Moscow is now able to add Saudi Arabia as a top purchaser of superior Russian defense systems.

Russian intelligence is fully aware that the House of Saud has been tremendously "disappointed" - and that's a monster euphemism - with the self-described "Don't Do Stupid Stuff" Obama administration, for a vast number of reasons, not least the concrete possibility of an Iran-P5+1 nuclear deal on June 30, which is code for Washington finally accepting to breach its own Wall of Mistrust against the Islamic Republic, built 36 years ago.

A highest-level meeting with the House of Saud, on top of it in Russia, ruffles infinite feathers in the Beltway. This won't go unpunished - for both Moscow and Riyadh. After all, real Masters of the Universe - not their paperboys in different sectors of the US government - have been mulling for a while how to dump the House of Saud.  

Russian intelligence also knows that in Washington, the House of Saud actually depends on the good favors of the Israeli lobby - and it's all about demonizing Iran. And now an Iran nuclear deal - which will "normalize" Tehran with the West - could not provoke a more glowing red alert in an already vulnerable Riyadh.

Putin's message to Iran is more sophisticated. Moscow has been very active working for a successful Iranian nuclear deal; so that invalidates the theory Moscow might be starting to play Riyadh to extract "concessions" from Tehran.

There are no "concessions". Russia - and eventually Iran - will both provide energy to European markets. Not immediately, because the upgrading of Iranian infrastructure will take years and torrents of investment. But as soon as next year, a non-sanctioned Iran may be finally admitted to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).  

So Iran won't be turning feverishly pro-West from one day to another - as much as some, non-neocon Beltway factions dream. Iran will be solidifying its regional power; engaging in normalized relations especially with Europeans; but most of all accelerating its Eurasian integration, which implies ever close relations with both Russia and China. Not to mention that in Syria, Iran and Russia are exactly on the same geopolitical page, which happens to be totally opposed to the House of Saud's.

Putin's move also carries the potential of isolating Qatar - which is indirectly, but very effectively, subsidizing al-Qaeda in Syria to facilitate its ultimate geoeconomic aim; a natural gas pipeline from South Pars through Saudi Arabia and Jordan to the Mediterranean coast.

The rival project happens to be the Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline, which is now perennially threatened as a great deal of "Syraq" is under the vise grip of ISIS/ISIL/Daesh. Here, we see the fake Caliphate supporting Qatari designs, geoeconomically, and Saudi, geopolitically.

What is certain is that the top-level Saudi pilgrimage to St. Petersburg could not be more antithetical to (disgraced) Bandar Bush threatening Putin in August 2013 to unleash Chechen jihadis on Sochi if Moscow didn't back off on Syria.

Who's on message?

It's tempting to watch this fabulous unfolding drama as a subplot of the BRICS - mostly Russia and China - advancing in the Middle East, with Washington as the loser. It's more like Putin playing Multipolar World, not Monopoly, and ensuring the Empire of Chaos will really have to sweat to keep its puppet/vassal blocs, such as the GCC, "on message."

It remains to be seen, long-term, whether this is not a desperate Saudi play to extract "concessions" from its imperial protector. But assuming this is a real deal, Moscow retains the ability to match both Iran and Saudi Arabia's interests, and ensure this concerted "pivoting to the Middle East" may turn out to be as spectacular as Russia's "pivoting to Asia" and China's New Silk Roads.  

There is no evidence so far to attest that the House of Saud has conclusively seen which way the wind is blowing, that is, towards the 21st century Silk Road Eurasian caravan, no matter any exceptionalist wishful thinking to the contrary.

They are fearful; they are paranoid; they are vulnerable; and they need new "friends". No one better than Putin - and Russian intelligence - to play the new groove in multiple ways. The House of Saud can hardly be trusted; see the latest, Wikileaks-released, Saudi cables. So this may turn out to be a geopolitical/geoeconomic bonanza. But it can also be a case of keeping your friends close, and your enemies closer. 

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 #23
http://strataforum.org (Kyiv)
June 21, 2015
Pavlo Zhebrivskyi: Ukraine might resolve the conflict in eastern Ukraine by force
By Vitalii Usenko

Pavlo Zhebrivskyi, Head of Donetsk regional military and Civil Administration gave interview to France 24 television and the newspaper Le Figaro (video posted on his Facebook page). He mentioned "In case of the violation of Minsk Agreement [by Russian terrorist forces], Ukraine should implement a short-term economic blockade of the occupied territories by force.

He mentioned "In case of the violation of Minsk Agreement [by Russian terrorist forces], Ukraine should implement a short-term economic blockade of the occupied territories by force and to resume control over them."

"If the other side will not enforce Minsk Agreement conditions we should impose short-term blockade, and then actually use force option to resume control of the Ukrainian authorities over the entire Donetsk region", - Pavlo Zhebrivskyi said.

According to him, the economic blockade will help people realize that only a life in unified Ukraine is the key to their well-being. "The economic blockade can help in this strategy, so that people realize that in fact that [occupied] part of Donbass is not necessary to Russia. And people need to understand that only a life in unified Ukraine is the key to their well-being, the key to the rule of law" - he added.

At the same time, Pavlo Zhebrivskyi pointed out that only the central leadership must take all decisions regarding the occupied territories. "Our goal is quite different - it's putting things in order, infrastructure projects, build a normal life here [in Donbass]. Our job as civil administration is to make life here be absolutely and considerably different from the life there [in occupied territories]," - summarized the Head of Donetsk regional military and Civil Administration.

During his visit to Avdeevka Pavlo Zhebrivskyi put an ultimatum to the leadership of Donetsk Oblast police and made a request to Donetsk Oblast police to take measures to restore order in the front-line areas in the territories controlled by Ukraine as soon as possible.

"Today there are many complaints against the [Ukrainian] police. Especially in the front-line areas. Moreover, it is clear that we will be hard to put things in order in the near future. We will force to eliminate drug trafficking, protection racket («roofing»). The current leadership of the police has two options to eliminate this or to resign. No other way out exist. A short time will be provided to put things in order on the territory of the Ukrainian controlled Donetsk Oblast. Order [on the territory of Ukrainian controlled Donetsk Oblast] should be much better than in Kyiv ", - said Pavlo Zhebrivskyi.

As previously reported by 62.ua, Paul Zhebrivskyi believes that no later than two years Ukraine will return control of Donetsk.

Video of Pavlo Zhebrivskyi interview to France 24 television and the newspaper Le Figaro:
http://strataforum.org/pavlo-zhebrivskyi-ukraine-might-resolve-the-conflict-in-eastern-ukraine-by-force/

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 #24
http://milakovsky.livejournal.com
June 22, 2015
Who on earth are "Enclavians"? A response to Alexander Motyl on the blockade
By Brian Milakovsky
Brian Milakovsky, a volunteer with refugee aid organizations in Kiev, Kharkiv and the Donbas. Brian Milakovsky first traveled to Ukraine in 2009 with the Fulbright program, and for the past five years has worked in Russia as a forest ecologist. This year he returned to eastern Ukraine for three months to volunteer with refugee aid organizations and learn more about the humanitarian crisis there. He blogs about this experience at http://milakovsky.livejournal.com.

The well-known Ukraine commentator Alexander Motyl published a recent piece in World Affairs called "Should Kyiv Blockade the Donbas Enclave?" He puts forward for and against arguments, in which he sees the for being that a blockade could "hasten the Donbas enclave's economic decline and make the region ungovernable" and the against the obvious humanitrian consequences.

In the end he decides that the blockade is justified, and explains it with this terrible argument:

"Would the people of the enclave suffer as a result? Yes, but remember this. The choice before Kyiv is not who should     suffer, but who should suffer more: the 40 million Ukrainians in Ukraine, who are already paying an exorbitantly high     price in terms of blood and money for Putin's war, or the 3 million "Enclavians" in the Donbas, who are also paying an     exorbitantly high price for their misguided support of the separatist adventure? For me, 40 million who made the right     choice beats 3 million who made the wrong choice hands down."

If you read the commentary after Motyl's argument you will see that I'm not the first person to take issue with his characterization of the Donbas as "the 3 million people who made the wrong choice" or the truly bizarre title for millions of Ukrainian as "Enclavians." But it's worth going at his logic in more detail.

Does Motyl really believe that the only way to end the suffering of the 40 million Ukrainians not in separatist-held territories is to make life unlivable for the 3 million in the "enclave"? (Actually, with 1.3 million already displaced as internal refugees, and up to 800,000 as external refugees I don't know if there are still 3 mln people in separatist-held Donbas).The suffering has indeed spread across the entire country, and I don't mean to downplay the sorrow felt over the death of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers. But what he writes as if there's just one choice - starve and collapse the Donbas enclave or Ukraine will keep suffering.

Isn't it even possible any more to imagine ending the suffering across the entirety of Ukraine, gov't- and separatist-held both?

What about a major push to call Moscow's bluff and implement the political aspects of the Minsk agreement? Afford autonomy, language rights, special elections and the other political demands of the separatists in order to stay within Ukraine? I have been told by some Ukrainian acquaintances that I am naive to believe this deal could be struck, and even if it could it would not be right to let Moscow and Donetsk dictate the terms (although Poroshenko more or less agreed to them at Minsk-2). And yet while that is inconceivable, many people are seriously considering the idea of sealing off the "cancerous growth" of separatist-held Donbas (in the phrasing of Poroshenko's parliamentary leader Yury Lutsenko) which could only lead to several terrible outcomes: it's total loss to Ukraine in the form of a new Pridnistrovie or a continuation of the awful stalemate, with thousand and thousands more Ukrainians deliberately turned into refugees by government policy in an attempt to depopulate the enclave. These outcomes are inconcievably worse than an ugly compromise with the separatists.

(For the record, I understand that the military aggression of the separatists has done as much or more as Kyiv's obstinance about implementing the political portions of the deal to bring Minsk-2 to its current sorry state. They remain morally culpable for the prolongation of the suffering of "their" people. If I spend more time writing about what Kyiv should do it is because I think it is capable of much better policy than what is being implemented now.)

Motyl's logic becomes a little more comprehensible (but no less inhumane) when we understand that he thinks the enclave must be cut off if Ukraine is to recover from this crisis:
"The choice before Kyiv-and it's one that Ukrainian policymakers have assiduously been pretending doesn't exist-is     quite stark. Either a reformed, Western-oriented, and prosperous Ukraine without the Donbas enclave or an unreformed,     Russia-oriented, and backward Little Russia with the enclave. You can't have both. And if you don't believe me, listen to     Yuri Shvets, a former Ukrainian KGB agent now living in Washington: "The Donetsk and Luhansk province territories     captured by the aggressor ... are a Trojan horse. Putin created it; let him now feed it. To let that 'horse' into Ukraine is     tantamount to political and economic suicide."

Motyl is wrong, first of all, to image that there is a homogenous bloc of "Enclavians" who all think alike and who Ukraine would be better off excluding from the country. He does not indulge the fantasy of some Ukrainian commentators that separatist supporters are a small, marginal minority in the Donbas, but he swings to the other side and imagines that everyone there is a dedicated separatist who made their choice and now must take their medicine ("the 3 million who made the wrong choice"). And so he neatly sews up the problem that should be haunting Kyiv - how to help those dedicated pro-unity Ukrainians who remain on the wrong side of the line? They simply aren't there, says Motyl, just a bunch of Enclavians. If by some chance they do exist, well, let them become refugees and move to the government side. (I won't even mention the even more underexplored question of how Kyiv might try to win back the loyalty of some separatist supporters, make them want to return to the fold.)

I can somewhat understand Motyl's reasoning that if Ukraine is to give up on the "Enclave" it should first try to make it ungovernable by starving it of resources. I think he casually glazes over the huge human suffering this would cause, but it has a certain internal logic. Separatist leaders have indeed claimed they wish to expand to the boundaries of Donetska and Luhanska Oblasts (although recently their rhetoric has been tamer, claiming they instead want a few key cities like Slavyansk that 'were always Republican'), so trying to starve them of resources is a comprehensible strategy for reducing further Ukrainian casualties.

What is just so damn sad is that Motyl (and numerous other commentators) are talking as if this is really the only way - the Donbas enclave is lost, for pro-unity Ukrainians there the only choice is to throw in their lot with the blockaded "Republics" or become internal refugees. Reconciliation, reintegration - just pipe dreams. And meanwhile the ugly, ideologically suspect (but vastly preferable to war or a frozen republic) political deal of Minsk-2 is left to wither on the vine, with no seriuos attempt having ever been made to implement it.

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 #25
http://milakovsky.livejournal.com
June 21, 2015
"Uncitizens": Gleb Prostakov on the moral implications of the Donbas blockade
By Brian Milakovsky
Brian Milakovsky, a volunteer with refugee aid organizations in Kiev, Kharkiv and the Donbas. Brian Milakovsky first traveled to Ukraine in 2009 with the Fulbright program, and for the past five years has worked in Russia as a forest ecologist. This year he returned to eastern Ukraine for three months to volunteer with refugee aid organizations and learn more about the humanitarian crisis there. He blogs about this experience at http://milakovsky.livejournal.com.

In my opinion the best writing about the Ukrainian crisis and the war in the Donbas is in the journal Vesti.Reporter. In contrast with many other media Vesti sends its writers deep into the war zone, and in fact publishes works by people who remain in separatist-held territory. The article Линии жизни Донецка, or "Lifelines of Donetsk", written by a Donetsk resident about the hellish artillery duel of last autumn and winter, is the most powerful thing I have read about this war.

On my trip to Ukraine I had the chance to meet the senior editor of Vesti.Reporter, Gleb Prostakov, and interview him several times. Today on Facebook Gleb wrote an extensive post about the most important question facing Ukraine today: whether or not to impose a full blockade on the separtist-held portion of the Donbas. I translated most of it, because I think Gleb captures the essence of this debate much better than I can express it.

Here is the original: https://www.facebook.com/gleb.prostakov/posts/1126574260692843:0

And my translation:

Uncitizens

What is this war for? For people or territory?

Hostages, accomplices to separatism or lost sheep? How the Ukrainian authorities choose to identify those people living on occupied territories will determine their fate and, unquestionably, the future of our country. The intense debates over the need to tighten the blockade of separatist-held territories in the Donbas have raised a critical question: who are these people who live on the "other side," and what rights do they have? Or rather, do they have any rights at all?

It hasn't been a month yet since the Verkhovna Rada adopted a motion which established our country's refusal to further observe the norms of the Convention on Human Rights in the zone of the anti-terror operation (ATO). Seeming at the time to be a sheer formality, it now has taken on ominous significance. The tightening of the Donbas blockade, right up to a ban on shipments of food and medicine, is being seriously discussed in the highest levels of government. Such a decision would be equivalent to the diagnosis "amputate, impossible to treat." It would deny people work on both sides of the conflict line, and thus would deny them the means of survival. In practices it would deny them the fundamental human right to a living. And in many cases this is by far not journalistic exaggeration.

A final breaking of all economic connections would not be a means for fightin g financing of the separatists, which is facilitated by contraband through the front lines and bribe-taking by regular soldiers and their superiors. For that we need different methods. Is it meant to cause a popular uprising in the occupied territories, which would somehow bring the war to an end? Raising the costs for the aggressor? Maybe. All's fair in war, after all. But what is our final goal? That's what we are having the most heated arguments over, that's the question that is causing governors to lose their heads and the government coalition to shake apart.

So what is it that we want? Are we fighting for people, or just for territory?

Ukraine is sometimes named as a candidate for status of "failed state." And this is not only because we are amongst the poorest countries of Europe and the world, or in connection with our underdeveloped government institutions and unending social strife. The real issue is that we don't love our own people. We irreversibly break off any connections with them. We don't recognize dual citizenship, because we fear capital flight that is happening anyway. But we happily give citizenship to ministers and foreign governors. We don't pay pensions to emigrants, who even without Ukrainian passports don't stop being Ukrainians. Even when we know that this contradicts our country's Constitution. We easily give the label of second class people to anyone who, despite everything, has remained on occupied territories. These are people who can be sacrificed. After all, they've only got themselves to blame, they've got nothing to complain about.

So in the end who are we and who are they: just people who coincidentally ended up in one state structure, left over in the ruins of the USSR? Or a cohesive nation, connected by something more than just sharing the same kind of passport?

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#26
http://milakovsky.livejournal.com
June 7, 2015
The blockade of separatist-held Donbas
By Brian Milakovsky
Brian Milakovsky, a volunteer with refugee aid organizations in Kiev, Kharkiv and the Donbas. Brian Milakovsky first traveled to Ukraine in 2009 with the Fulbright program, and for the past five years has worked in Russia as a forest ecologist. This year he returned to eastern Ukraine for three months to volunteer with refugee aid organizations and learn more about the humanitarian crisis there. He blogs about this experience at http://milakovsky.livejournal.com.

The desire of many Ukrainian politicians to "seal off" rebel-held territories in the Donbas may be coming to pass. The head of Poroshenko's bloc in parliament, Yury Lutsenko, has declared that the president desires to extend the present automotive blockade of the so-called Luhansk Peoples Republic to all separatist held territories. Passage into them will be possible only by foot or compact car.

Effectively this would do two things: stop shipments of food and other essentials onto separatist held territories, and prevent residents of those areas from crossing back and forth regularly (such as pensioners who live in Donetsk but have registered their pension on the government-controlled side), since the poorer of them do so by bus.

"Large industrial holdings that are registered in Ukraine can move their loads and pay their taxes. But trucks with groceries and consumer goods should not be allowed to cross over onto occupied territories of Donetska and Luhanska Provinces. That is the president's firm decision," Lutsenko reported.

My first reaction is "My God, what are they thinking?" Such an order ignores the reality of life for hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million Donbas residents who cannot tear up their roots in their home towns and transfer their entire lives to those territories that today are under government control. It strikes me as atrociously hard-hearted, unbelievably tonedeaf. Don't they realize how much this will alienate the people that live there, the loyalty of whom they desparately need to maintain or restore?

Does anyone really believe that separatist fighters will go hungry because of this decision? They can get whatever they need from across the swathe of the Russian border that they control. This will fall almost entirely on civilians, especially the poorest.

If someone can put forward a serious argument why such a blockade will be more beneficial than harmful, I'd be glad to hear it. I'd like to believe this is not as cruel as it appears to me at first glance.

But commentary is already coming out from Ukrainians who work with the most vulnerable in the Donbas. It seems to confirm my first reaction. Here is a quote from the Ukrainian paper Vesti from archpriest Vladislav Dikhanov, who answers for social and humanitarian issues in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church:

"Areas located in direct proximity to the front lines will suffer the most from a blockade. The worst situation will be in the 'buffer zone' [one of the zones established by the Minsk protocol]. That is already where conditions are the worst - people are truly dying of hunger. Of course, people did their best to evacuate the children, but many elderly people remain, and also younger people who simply do not wish to abandon their homes. If you don't associate the idea of a full blockade  with actual people, then of course it's politically quite attractive. But it takes on an entirely different appearance if you remember that real people live there, many of whom cannot make the move or simply wish to stay on their native land, where they were born and lived all their lives."

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 #27
http://milakovsky.livejournal.com
June 7, 2015
A surreal memory of bombs and bees
By Brian Milakovsky
Brian Milakovsky, a volunteer with refugee aid organizations in Kiev, Kharkiv and the Donbas. Brian Milakovsky first traveled to Ukraine in 2009 with the Fulbright program, and for the past five years has worked in Russia as a forest ecologist. This year he returned to eastern Ukraine for three months to volunteer with refugee aid organizations and learn more about the humanitarian crisis there. He blogs about this experience at http://milakovsky.livejournal.com.

I remember a surreal recollection of one refugee from outside of Luhansk, whose village has been under sustained artillery fire for nearly a year. In February, during the intense artillery duel that preceeded the second Minsk summit, a shell landed in her front yard in the middle of the night. After waiting several minutes, she emerged from her basement bomb shelter to assess the damage. Thankfully only the windows were blown out, but as she stood in the bitter cold, with snow falling around her, she became aware of a buzzing separate from that which always happens in your ears after a shell lands.

She looked around and realized that the shell had landed amongst her husband's beeboxes. The bees that survived had woken from their winter stupor and were languidly buzzing all around her in the darkness and falling snow. "I decided to go inside before they started stinging me," she told me. "How would I explain that at the hospital - a bee sting in the middle of February?"

Today I came across this passage in Isaak Babel's 1920 field diary, published together with his great Red Cavalry, about his experiences during the Russian Civil War in Volynia and Galicia:

"I remember the broken frames, thousands of bees buzzing and beating themselves against their shattered hives."

True, it's only a small and coincidental resemblence. But in many more significant ways the Donbas War reminds of the brutal Civil War that so inspired Babel, Bulgakov, Sholokhov. I wonder - will there be a literature of the Donbas War? Or will its chronicle just be Russian and Ukrainian state TV and the online polemic of bloggers and trolls?

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 #28
http://milakovsky.livejournal.com
May 30, 2015
How to lose hearts and minds in the Donbas
By Brian Milakovsky
Brian Milakovsky, a volunteer with refugee aid organizations in Kiev, Kharkiv and the Donbas. Brian Milakovsky first traveled to Ukraine in 2009 with the Fulbright program, and for the past five years has worked in Russia as a forest ecologist. This year he returned to eastern Ukraine for three months to volunteer with refugee aid organizations and learn more about the humanitarian crisis there. He blogs about this experience at http://milakovsky.livejournal.com.
It became very obvious to me in the Donbas how wide the gap in understanding is between people who live there and the Kyiv government regarding the movement of goods and people.

Eastern Ukrainians usually speak out for the free movement of goods and people across the line of demarcation because they recognize that many people cannot utterly cut themselves off from their homes in separatist-held territory. If they stay there, or if they cross back and forth with some frequency, that does not clearly demonstrate their support for separatism. Many pro-unity Ukrainians live in this way, and the government should be interested in supporting them, like strands that bind the breakaway territories to the rest of the country. It should not try to drive people out of the "Peoples Republics" by making life there unbearable, since the first to leave will be the pro-unity residents, leaving a population dominated more and more by its irreconcilable opponents.

Many government officials, unfortunately, think otherwise. Here's a recent example from Minister of the Interior Arsen Avakov:

"Three days ago the Prime Minister held a meeting on the problem of contraband in the zone of the Anti-terror operation [ATO]. The temptation is great, for one tractor trailer truck enormous sums are paid, we need to do something about this. I have the following position: we need to seal off the line of demarcation entirely. Seal it off to everything. That's my radical point of view, 'junta' style, our style. Just close the line. You can cross it on foot, in civilian compact cars, go ahead, but no goods. Let them get their goods from Russia."

Ah yes. Let "them" get their goods from Russia. That is, Ukrainians. They are Ukrainians, aren't they? You could forget it when reading the Minister's comments. He speaks as if everyone who lives on the other side of the line is irrevocably lost to Ukraine and deserves to be taught a tough lesson.

This is a logical position only if his first priority is to look maximally tough. It is not logical if  Avakov were to recongize that there are many people on the other side of the line who are not "them" but "us" (that is, who consider themselves Ukrainians; to be semantic, I don't belong to the "us" in this case). Does he really wish for all of these people to abandon their homes? And does he not realize that trying to starve the Donbas and force it under Russia's sponsorship is a major factor in turning "us" into "them?"

And if he really believes there are no 'no Ukrainians' left there, then what's the point of spending so much blood and treasure on dragging the Donbas back? For the black earth? For the factories that are being bombed to ruins in this war? Or just for revenge's sake?

And something approaching Avakov's desired shut-down of the border is already coming into effect. Recently a ranking officer of the Ukrainian Security Council (SBU) confirmed what many have long suspected: there is an official "grocery blockade" imposed against separatist held territories. The Donetsk journalist Anna Khripunkova wrote about how the remaining pro-unity Ukrainians in Donetsk received the news: "It demoralizes them: they can and want to work for their country and earn their living, but they have been placed in conditions in which realizing their potential is impossible. It's impossible to work for Ukraine, impossibe to be useful and needed, impossible to feed you family."

Yet if Avakov's comments seem like a tour de force of alienating public discourse, he was quickly outdone by the vice-head of the Interior Ministry police in Donetska Province, Ilya Kiva, who wrote on Facebook:

"I call on public organizations and activists in Kyiv to block the movement of busses between Donetsk and Kyiv, which allow for the spread of the terrorist plague and filth across the territory of Ukraine. If I had my way I'd just shoot these tourists to the DNR [Donetsk Peoples Republic], these lovers of referenda and parades of Ukrainian prisoners of war... Only a harsh public position will force the Donbas to sober up! There are no more nuances! There's only 'ours' and the enemy! That's the only way we'll defeat this plague."

The mind boggles. It isn't even that there are no more Ukrainians left in the Donbas in Kiva's understanding. There are no more people there. Just "plague and filth." Who must be quarantined from Ukrainians, and if need be shot for trying to infect the commonwealth.

Pro-unity Ukrainians in Donetsk responded to Kiva's rabid post on Facebook:

Journalist Veronika Medvedeva:They [politicians] can talk so much about "Unified Ukraine," but just one sentence from this man in epaulettes tears off the mask.

Businessman and activist Enrique Menendez (I know it's an unexpected name for Donetsk, but he does live there):
I thought we had already experienced the maximum of humiliation and insult at the roadblocks. When they address everyone as a potential criminal, despite the presumption of innocence (what about that, anyway? They haven't repealed it yet?)...But no. That's not all. Now it's straight to shooting. And this isn't written by some delerious junkie, but by the vice-head of the Donetsk Police.

Reading Kiva's scree, I thought about one of my new acquaintances from the Donbas, one of the occupants of those busses that cross the demarcation line. That is, one of the "plague and filth" crowd, in his understanding. She is a dedicated pro-unity Ukrainian, who worked diligently in an 'evacuated' government agency on Ukrainian territory to develop a more conciliatory information policy, which would highlight the bonds that connect Donbas residents on both sides of the line. She recently quit, partially because she realized that her bosses always prefered the "tough" position, and partially because she was hounded by rivals who accused her of aiding the separatists. You see, she travels every weekend to see her husband on the other side of the demarcation line. She is a human being, not capable of regarding everyone on the other side of the barricade as "plague and filth."

An extraordinarily resilient love for her homeland keeps her pro-unity, despite the humiliation and the realization of what many government officials think of people like her. But how long will the Avakovs and Kivas test that resilience? Eastern Ukrainians like her are Kyiv's to lose. And if it does, then any hope of a unified Ukraine is lost as well.

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#29
Anti-Ukrainian moods growing in Ukraine's southern Odessa - Self Reliance party leader

ODESSA, June 23. /TASS/. Anti-Ukrainian moods are growing in Ukraine's southern city of Odessa, the leader of the Ukrainian Samopomich (Self Reliance) party based in western Ukraine said on Tuesday after meeting with the new governor of the Odessa region, former Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili.

"Powerful anti-Ukrainian moods that are fuelled from outside against the background of deep poverty and region's isolation, a very weak presence and influence of the Ukrainian state power in these regions," Odessa's Timer online edition quoted Andriy Sadovyi as citing the reasons.

Sadovyi, mayor of the western city of Lviv, also said the Ukrainian authorities were fully unaware of how serious the situation was. In his remarks posted on a webpage after talks with Saakashvili, he urged the new Odessa leadership to take "swift and resolute moves towards integration of the region".

Among these measures he mentioned the construction of a highway connecting Odessa and Reni, a town in the Odessa region, that would "strengthen the presence of Ukraine in the region". In a conversation with Odessa journalists, the Lviv mayor also criticized local radical nationalists for wearing balaclavas.

"Wearing masks in the streets of peaceful cities is nonsense, especially when it refers to the feeling of safety for their residents and guests. When investors or tourists arrive in Odessa and see people in masks, they immediately get back to the airport, buy return tickets and fly away," Sadovyi told reporters.

"People who wear balaclavas are hiding. But they are hiding from their own nationals, which is nonsense and is absolutely inadmissible," he added.
 

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 #30
Kyiv Post
June 22, 2015
Resident of Russian-held Horlivka: 'We have nothing'
By Stefan Huijboom

HORLIVKA, Ukraine - Night has fallen over the Russian-occupied city of Horlivka that lies 10 kilometers from the war front.

Outgoing explosions are heard regularly. According to a Russia-backed separatist fighter, who identifies himself only as Slava, the fighters are merely responding to Ukrainian-fired shells. "They started, and we simply respond," he explained, although shells fired from Ukrainian positions were not heard anywhere near Horlivka on night.

Once the sun has gone down the streets are empty. People walking on the streets raise suspicion and are likely to be taken in for questioning.

"There are Ukrainian spies operating in Horlivka, because this city is very close to the frontline," Slava told the Kyiv Post. "During the last few months as fighting kept increasing we have arrested a couple of spies, and we have reason to believe there are dozens operating here."

Horlivka, whose pre-war population of 272,000 people has dipped to 180,000 today, has been severely damaged during Russia's war against Ukraine.

People who remain in the city spend most of their nights in bomb shelters in extreme circumstances. Some by choice, others simply because they don't have money to leave the destructed town.

Maria Pronin, a 63-year-old woman, stands in front of a partly destroyed apartment building not far from the center of Horlivka.

In her hands, she holds a couple of roses.

"I need to at least bring some rest downstairs," she said, as minutes after she walks down the stairs that leads to the bomb shelter where six families live. "We have nothing, but these roses are a symbol of love. That's all we need in these tough times."

The further the stairs lead down, the darker, dustier and smellier it gets.

"Be careful," Pronin kept saying, touching the walls to not get disoriented in the bomb basement. Every sound, every voice, echoes in the bomb shelter. A small curtain separates two areas where each three families live. The dust and unhealthy conditions result in different spider webs in the two respective areas.

Then, suddenly a loud cry echoes in the shelter. It's a young child. "We think she has diarrhea," Pronin said, as she then hurried herself to the 20-year-old mother of the 9-month-old child. "She's left behind by her husband, and now she needs to take care of two children. She has enough worries on her head. It's emotionally too much for her."

There are no doctors in Horlivka that have tested the nine-month-old baby, and living in extreme conditions in a bomb shelter will make things only worse. "She doesn't want to leave Horlivka," Pronin then whispered so nobody could hear her. "She's afraid of the Nazis," she added, referring to the Ukrainians on the other side of the front.

"We simply don't know what to believe," Pronin said.

She, too, has chosen to stay in Horlivka rather than to move to Ukraine.

"I don't have money," Pronin explained, adding that she doesn't want to be put in a shelter program. "If I'm registered in a shelter program, I become possession of the Ukrainian authorities that will tell me what to do and not to do. It's inhumane," she vaguely explained.

According to a spokesperson of the Horlivka Regional City Administration, humanitarian aid is being distributed, but it's simply not enough for all people that need it in Horlivka.

"Lately we've seen an increase of humanitarian aid being blocked at Ukrainian checkpoints, and for now we mostly depend on humanitarian aid coming from Russia."

And as the Ukrainian authorities keeps implementing more rules to further cut off the occupied territories in eastern Ukraine, only humanitarian aid from Russia will be let through.

However, the question remains how much more money Russia is willing to send in to the separatist-held areas, and how long it will take until the Russian government will send less humanitarian aid to the Russia-held territories in eastern Ukraine.

One resident, who didn't want to be identified because she is critical of the separatists, said it is only a matter of time before Russia cuts off aid supplies.

"Russia has made clear that it doesn't want to take these territories. It's just a provocation to the West what they're doing now as fighting increases. Its involvement will stop, but when? Nobody knows," she told the Kyiv Post/

For people living in extreme conditions like Pronin, neither the war's end nor the suffering it has caused looks like it will end anytime soon.

"Sometimes I just hope I wake up and it all was nothing but a nightmare," she said.

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 #31
EU recommends Kiev to grant special status to Donbas - media

KIEV, June 23. /TASS/. Europe urges the Ukrainian authorities to implement the political provisions of the Minsk agreements, the Evropeiska Pravda Ukrainian edition said citing its own sources. According to the publication, that was the purpose of the visit to Kiev by the European Commissioner for Enlargement and European Neighborhood Policy Johannes Hahn last week.

"Europeans demand that we come up with a strategy for the special status for the Donbas region. This status must not be limited to three years (the way it is envisaged in the law on the status of separate territories) and be applicable on a permanent basis," first deputy head of the parliamentary committee on foreign affairs Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze said.

The newspaper's reporter who took part in a closed discussion has cited "one of the highest-ranking officials of the European Commission": "Is Ukraine doing everything to meet the Minsk requirements? Why don't you make a step towards granting a special status to the Donbas region? This can be done right now, displaying Kiev's good will to implement the Minsk agreements."

The Package of Measures for the Implementation of the Minsk Agreements signed in the Belarusian capital envisages the constitutional reform in Ukraine, whose key moment should be decentralization and "passing a permanent law on the special status for separate districts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions."

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov earlier described the situation with the implementation of the law on a special status for Donbas and the constitutional reform as "the crude violation of Kiev's commitments under the Minsk agreements." This reform should proceed in coordination with the republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. However, their representatives were not even included in the Constitutional Commission, which comprises about 15 Western experts.

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 #32
Interfax
June 22, 2015
Difficulties between Russia, Ukraine "temporary" - PM Medvedev

Gorki, 22 June: Russian Prime Minister Dmitriy Medvedev is convinced that Russians and Ukrainians remain close, and the current difficulties in relations are temporary.

On the anniversary of the start of the Great Patriotic War [USSR's war against Nazi Germany and its allies on the Eastern Front in 1941-45] on Monday [22 June], the prime minister met the creators of the films Territory and The Battle for Sevastopol.

The producer of the Russian-Ukrainian film The Battle for Sevastopol, Natalya Mokritskaya, said that the Russian and the Ukrainian versions of the film were totally identical and that the Ukrainian side intended to put it forward for an Oscar.

"You touched upon an instance of cooperation with Ukraine, and it seems to me that this is really great. In the current conditions it is the best confirmation of the fact that we really are close, and even all the problems and difficulties of today, they are temporary after all," Medvedev said.

"I am sure that what is forever is what made us into one people, and the huge calamities that we overcame together," the head of government added.

In his view, the fact that Ukraine intended to put the film forward for an Oscar means that "there are quite sensible forces which realize that [our] history is a common one, and that it is not written to the bidding of a president or a prime minister, but is formed by the actions of millions of people, and cannot be turned inside out".

"There will always be different views but [our] history is still common," Medvedev stressed.

The film The Battle for Stalingrad tells the story of the heroic defence of Sevastopol and Odessa during the Great Patriotic War and of a famous woman sniper Lyudmyla Pavlychenko, played by Yuliya Peresild.

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 #33
Consortiumnews.com
June 22, 2015
NYT's Orwellian View of Ukraine
By Robert Parry
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.

Exclusive: In the up-is-down Orwellian world that is now The New York Times' editorial page, there was no coup in Ukraine in 2014, no U.S.-driven "regime change," no provocation on Russia's border, just Moscow's aggression - a sign of how propaganda has taken over mainstream U.S. media, writes Robert Parry.

In George Orwell's 1984, the leaders of Oceania presented "Two Minutes Hate" in which the image of an enemy was put on display and loyal Oceanianians expressed their rage, all the better to prepare them for the country's endless wars and their own surrender of freedom. And, now, in America, you have The New York Times.

Surely the Times is a bit more subtle than the powers-that-be in Orwell's Oceania, but the point is the same. The "paper of record" decides who our rotating foreign enemy is and depicts its leader as a demon corrupting whatever he touches. The rest of us aren't supposed to think for ourselves. We're just supposed to hate.

As the Times has degenerated from a relatively decent newspaper into a fount of neocon propaganda, its editors also have descended into the practice of simply inventing a narrative of events that serves an ideological purpose, its own version of "Two Minutes Hate." Like the leaders of Orwell's Oceania, the Times has become increasingly heavy-handed in its propaganda.

Excluding alternate explanations of events, even if supported by solid evidence, the Times arrogantly creates its own reality and tells us who to hate.

In assessing the Times's downward spiral into this unethical journalism, one could look back on its false reporting regarding Iraq, Iran, Syria or other Middle East hotspots. But now the Times is putting the lives of ourselves, our children and our grandchildren at risk with its reckless reporting on the Ukraine crisis - by setting up an unnecessary confrontation between nuclear-armed powers, the United States and Russia.

At the center of the Times' propaganda on Ukraine has been its uncritical - indeed its anti-journalistic - embrace of the Ukrainians coup-makers in late 2013 and early 2014 as they collaborated with neo-Nazi militias to violently overthrow elected President Viktor Yanukovych and hurl Ukraine into a bloody civil war.

Rather than display journalistic professionalism, the Times' propagandists ignored the evidence of a coup - including an intercepted phone call in which U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt discussed how to "mid-wife" the regime change and handpick the new leaders.

The Times even ignored a national security expert, Statfor founder George Friedman, when he termed the ouster of Ukraine's elected president "the most blatant coup in history." The Times just waved a magic wand and pronounced that there was no coup - and anyone who thought so must reside inside "the Russian propaganda bubble."[See Consortiumnews.com's "NYT Still Pretends No Coup in Ukraine."]

Perhaps even more egregiously, the Times has pretended that there were no neo-Nazi militias spearheading the Feb. 22, 2014 coup and then leading the bloody "anti-terrorist operation" against ethnic Russians in the south and east who resisted the coup. The Times explained all this bloodshed as simply "Russian aggression."

It didn't even matter when the U.S. House of Representatives - of all groups - unanimously acknowledged the neo-Nazi problem when it prohibited U.S. collaboration in military training of Ukrainian Nazis. The Times simply expunged the vote from its "official history" of the crisis. [See Consortiumnews.com's "US House Admits Nazi Role in Ukraine."]

Orwell's Putin

Yet, for an Orwellian "Two Minute Hate" to work properly, you need to have a villain whose face you can put on display. And, in the case of Ukraine - at least after Yanukovych was driven from the scene - that villain has been Russian President Vladimir Putin, who embodies all evil in the intense hatred sold to the American public.

So, when Putin presents a narrative of the Ukraine crisis, which notes the history of the U.S.-driven expansion of NATO up to Russia's borders and the evidence of the U.S.-directed Ukrainian coup, the Times editors must dismiss it all as "mythology," as they did in Monday's editorial regarding Putin's remarks to an international economic conference in St. Petersburg.

"President Vladimir Putin of Russia is not veering from the mythology he created to explain away the crisis over Ukraine," the Times' editors wrote. "It is one that wholly blames the West for provoking a new Cold War and insists that international sanctions have not grievously wounded his country's flagging economy."

Without acknowledging any Western guilt in the coup that overthrew the elected Ukrainian government in 2014, the Times' editors simply reveled in the harm that the Obama administration and the European Union have inflicted on Russia's economy for its support of the previously elected government and its continued backers in eastern and southern Ukraine.

For nearly a year and a half, the New York Times and other major U.S. news organizations have simply refused to acknowledge the reality of what happened in Ukraine. In the Western fantasy, the elected Yanukovych government simply disappeared and was replaced by a U.S.-backed regime that then treated any resistance to its rule as "terrorism." The new regime even dispatched neo-Nazi militias to kill ethnic Russians and other Ukrainians who resisted and thus were deemed "terrorists."

The upside-down narrative of what happened in Ukraine has become the conventional wisdom in Official Washington and has been imposed on America's European allies as well. According to The New York Times' Orwellian storyline, anyone who notes the reality of a U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine is engaging in "fantasy" and must be some kind of Putin pawn.

To the Times' editors, all the justice is on their side, even as Ukraine's new regime has deployed neo-Nazi militias to kill eastern Ukrainians who resisted the anti-Yanukovych coup. To the Times' editors, the only possible reason to object to Ukraine's new order is that the Russians must be bribing European dissidents to resist the U.S. version of events. The Times wrote:

"The Europeans are indeed divided over the extent to which Russia, with its huge oil and gas resources, should be isolated, but Mr. Putin's aggression so far has ensured their unity when it counts. In addition to extending existing sanctions, the allies have prepared a new round of sanctions that could be imposed if Russian-backed separatists seized more territory in Ukraine. ...

"Although Mr. Putin insisted on Friday that Russia had found the 'inner strength' to weather sanctions and a drop in oil prices, investment has slowed, capital has fled the country and the economy has been sliding into recession. Even the business forum was not all that it seemed: The heads of many Western companies stayed away for a second year."

An Orwellian World

In the up-is-down world that has become the New York Times' editorial page, the Western coup-making on Russia's border with the implicit threat of U.S. and NATO nuclear weapons within easy range of Moscow is transformed into a case of Russian aggression. The Times' editors wrote: "One of the most alarming aspects of the crisis has been Mr. Putin's willingness to brandish nuclear weapons."

Though it would appear objectively that the United States was engaged in serious mischief-making on Russia's border, the Times editors flip it around to make Russian military maneuvers - inside Russia - a sign of aggression against the West.

"Given Mr. Putin's aggressive behavior, including pouring troops and weapons into Kaliningrad, a Russian city located between NATO members Lithuania and Poland, the allies have begun taking their own military steps. In recent months, NATO approved a rapid-reaction force in case an ally needs to be defended. It also pre-positioned some weapons in front-line countries, is rotating troops there and is conducting many more exercises. There are also plans to store battle tanks and other heavy weapons in several Baltic and Eastern European countries.

"If he is not careful, Mr. Putin may end up facing exactly what he has railed against - a NATO more firmly parked on Russia's borders - not because the alliance wanted to go in that direction, but because Russian behavior left it little choice. That is neither in Russia's interest, nor the West's."

There is something truly 1984-ish about reading that kind of propagandistic writing in The New York Times and other Western publications. But it has become the pattern, not the exception.

The Words of the 'Demon'

Though the Times and the rest of the Western media insist on demonizing Putin, we still should hear the Russian president's version of events, as simply a matter of journalistic fairness. Here is how Putin explained the situation to American TV talk show host Charlie Rose on June 19:

"Why did we arrive at the crisis in Ukraine? I am convinced that after the so-called bipolar system ceased to exist, after the Soviet Union was gone from the political map of the world, some of our partners in the West, including and primarily the United States, of course, were in a state of euphoria of sorts. Instead of developing good neighborly relations and partnerships, they began to develop the new geopolitical space that they thought was unoccupied. This, for instance, is what caused the North Atlantic bloc, NATO, to go east, along with many other developments.

"I have been thinking a lot about why this is happening and eventually came to the conclusion that some of our partners [Putin's way of describing Americans] seem to have gotten the illusion that the world order that was created after World War II, with such a global center as the Soviet Union, does not exist anymore, that a vacuum of sorts has developed that needs to be filled quickly.

"I think such an approach is a mistake. This is how we got Iraq, and we know that even today there are people in the United States who think that mistakes were made in Iraq. Many admit that there were mistakes in Iraq, and nevertheless they repeat it all in Libya. Now they got to Ukraine. We did not bring about the crisis in Ukraine. There was no need to support, as I have said many times, the anti-state, anti-constitutional takeover that eventually led to a sharp resistance on the territory of Ukraine, to a civil war in fact.

"Where do we go from here?" Putin asked. "Today we primarily need to comply with all the agreements reached in Minsk, the capital of Belarus. ... At the same time, I would like to draw your attention and the attention of all our partners to the fact that we cannot do it unilaterally. We keep hearing the same thing, repeated like a mantra - that Russia should influence the southeast of Ukraine. We are. However, it is impossible to resolve the problem through our influence on the southeast alone.

"There has to be influence on the current official authorities in Kiev, which is something we cannot do. This is a road our Western partners have to take - those in Europe and America. Let us work together. ... We believe that to resolve the situation we need to implement the Minsk agreements, as I said. The elements of a political settlement are key here. There are several."

Putin continued: "The first one is constitutional reform, and the Minsk agreements say clearly: to provide autonomy or, as they say decentralization of power, let it be decentralization. This is quite clear, our European partners, France and Germany have spelled it out and we are quite satisfied with it, just as the representatives of Donbass [eastern Ukraine where ethnic Russians who had supported Yanukovych have declared independence] are. This is one component.

"The second thing that has to be done - the law passed earlier on the special status of these territories - Luhansk and Donetsk, the unrecognized republics, should be enacted. It was passed, but still not acted upon. This requires a resolution of the Supreme Rada - the Ukrainian Parliament - which is also covered in the Minsk agreements. Our friends in Kiev have formally complied with this decision, but simultaneously with the passing by the Rada of the resolution to enact the law they amended the law itself ... which practically renders the action null and void. This is a mere manipulation, and they have to move from manipulations to real action.

"The third thing is a law on amnesty. It is impossible to have a political dialogue with people who are threatened with criminal persecution. And finally, they need to pass a law on municipal elections on these territories and to have the elections themselves. All this is spelled out in the Minsk agreements, this is something I would like to draw your attention to, and all this should be done with the agreement of Donetsk and Luhansk.

"Unfortunately, we still see no direct dialogue, only some signs of it, but too much time has passed after the Minsk agreements were signed. I repeat, it is important now to have a direct dialogue between Luhansk, Donetsk and Kiev - this is missing."

Also missing is any objective and professional explanation of this crisis in the mainstream American press. Instead, The New York Times and other major U.S. news organizations have continued with their pattern of 1984-ish propaganda.

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 #34
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
June 23, 2015
Whistling Dixie in Western Ukraine
When we sponsor racially motivated terrorism abroad, why do we wonder when it occurs at home?
By Lisa Marie White
Lisa Marie White is a regular contributor to Russia Insider. She literally cannot even cope with this crap anymore. She can be reached on Twitter: @lisa_white

Reviled in America. Good enough for Ukraine.

Anyone who has visited Charleston will tell you that the city is gorgeous. Nestled on a harbor and dotted with palmetto trees and slate-roofed historic buildings, Charleston maintains an atmosphere of quiet sophistication; at once austere and trendy.

That's why what happened in Charleston this past week, although tragic, is so emblematic of present-day America. Like the country as a whole, the shooting in Charleston showed that the city is, like the United States as a whole, gifted with architectural and natural beauty, yet sponsor of and party to the most craven ugliness.

American talking heads are claiming this shooting was about something other than yet another gun falling into yet another pair of the wrong hands. They want to make this about religion or the Confederate flag. It looks like Kiev's Misanthropic Division has it figured out, though. They share Dylann Roof's repugnant political persuasions and have been engaging in ethnically motivated killing in Ukraine under the direction of the United States government, so at least they're able to identify one of their own.

Whistlin' Dixie in Western Ukraine

I am unable to pinpoint when exactly the Ukrainian "independence" movement lost me, but I think it was somewhere between Obama double-swearing there were no Nazis in Ukraine despite evidence to the contrary, and the "pro-democracy" protesters entering City Hall in Kiev and hanging up a Dixie flag.

I'm a white Northerner. To me, the Confederate flag is a symbol of racism, treason, and sedition. To a white Southerner, it is symbolic of their declaration of independence from the Union. Growing up in a small town in the Midwest, I often saw the Stars and Bars displayed on the back of pick-up trucks - pretty amusing given that Michigan was a Union state. Accustomed though I am to seeing it in geographically illogical locations, I couldn't for the life of me understand what in the name of all that was holy it was doing in Ukraine. Was there a midnight airing of Gone with the Wind on Ukrainian cable? Did Ukraine experience a sudden outbreak of Southern pride?

What were people supposedly protesting against their president and his cozy relationship with the Kremlin doing hanging up a Confederate flag? Why did my government expect me to support individuals who espouse a point of view and display a symbol that vast swathes of the American public find offensive? How did the American leadership justify this? Simple. They ignored it.

What's worse is the Russophobic media establishment, in a stunning display of ignorance and Americentrism, was in so much denial that they even tried to convince us that the Novorossiya flag resembled the Stars and Bars, with the implication that the "pro-Russian separatists" were the racists. The Moscow Times published an idiotic article claiming the separatists had straight up adopted the Confederate flag. It wasn't just the Moscow Times. Slate couldn't tell the difference, either. Neither could the trusty scribes at the Kyiv Post.

There are two types of people in the United States who have Confederate flags: actual racists and people who have what is, in my opinion, misplaced romantic nostalgia for the Old South and the Lost Cause. We can debate all day about whether Dixie should fly at the state capitol of South Carolina, but I think we can all agree that it doesn't belong in Eastern Europe.

I won't condescend to Ukrainians and pretend they don't know what the Confederate flag symbolizes. Paraded by the Ku Klux Klan and unfurled during the one hundred years of lynchings that the African American population endured, the Confederate flag has come to symbolize the racism and oppression of slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation.

Considering the outcry over the flag in recent days - and the fact that it enjoys questionable prestige during the best of times - I think it's safe to say that the Confederate flag is something that many Americans and their leaders say find objectionable. I am uncertain why Washington felt comfortable turning a country over to protesters who hoisted up a flag that isn't exactly welcome in America itself. To be certain, it is a complicated and controversial symbol, but when it's accompanied by white power and Nazi regalia and torchlight parades honoring a Nazi collaborator, the meaning is entirely clear. So why is it unacceptable to fly in South Carolina and not worth mentioning when it's flying in a governmental office in Kiev?

For anyone who isn't a complete moron, the Novorossiya flag is derived from the Russian naval ensign.

It's Okay. It's Just That One Guy.

We're told that it's a "minority" of people in the Kiev coup government who are right-wing racists. We're told, no worries, only a few members of Azov and Aidar battalion are neo-Nazis. Just a few white supremacist dudes in the Rada. No big deal.

Dylann Roof was one racist terrorist with one gun. Imagine entire battalions of Dylann Roofs, armed with heavy weaponry, motivated by racial hatred, with the full weight of their government, the United States, and NATO behind them, operating with impunity.

Now you understand the situation in Ukraine. Now you understand why the ethnic Russians must fight back.

What I am hearing from the Americans and the media is that Dylann Roof is a monster. Roof has drug problems. He owns pro-apartheid paraphernalia. He wears a jacket emblazoned with the flag of Rhodesia. He takes selfies with the flag of the Confederacy. His manifesto is terrifying. Americans are livid with this kid, and rightly so. What's missing from the outrage is their inability to connect the dots between a home-grown terrorist and the extremists America is sponsoring abroad. If this is unacceptable here, why is America justifying the presence of people like this in Ukraine? Let's not pretend there are ideological distinctions or degrees of bigotry between Roof and the extremists in Ukraine.

Let's also not pretend Americans don't know. I think we're past the point where the media dutifully parrots Obama's lie that there are no Nazis in Ukraine. Several American media outlets have reported on Ukraine's little Nazi problem. The U.S. House admitted the Nazi role in Ukraine and voted against training Azov battalion, but there was neither outrage nor elation from the American press.

When the Obama administration finally realized that there was this thing called the internet, and Ukrainian Nazis are all over it, the narrative switched from denying their presence, to justifying it by claiming that neo-Nazis only make up a "minority" of the battalions and a "minority" of the Rada.

America has seen first-hand the damage that a "minority" - one person - can inflict when armed and motivated by ethnic hatred. When we sponsor racially motivated terrorism abroad, why do we wonder when it occurs at home?

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 #35
BBC
June 22, 2015
Ukraine crisis: Yanukovych regrets bloodshed in Kiev
By Gabriel Gatehouse, BBC Newsnight
[Video here http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33224138]

Ukraine's former President Viktor Yanukovych has said he accepts some responsibility for the killings that led to his overthrow in February 2014.

"I don't deny my responsibility," he told BBC Newsnight, when asked about the shooting of demonstrators in Kiev's Maidan Square.

He never ordered the security forces to open fire, he said, but admitted he had not done enough to prevent bloodshed.

It is his first Western media interview since the civil war erupted last year.

"I did not give any orders [to use firearms], that was not my authority... I was against any use of force, let alone the use of firearms, I was against bloodshed.

"But the members of the security forces fulfilled their duties according to existing laws. They had the right to use weapons," he said.

More than 100 protesters died in the clashes on Kiev's central square, where huge crowds had confronted police for months.

A year after the bloodshed some witnesses told the BBC that fatal shots had also been fired at the police.

In February 2014 Mr Yanukovych was whisked away by Russian special forces to a safe haven in Russia.

Crimea 'tragedy'

Within weeks Russian troops in unmarked camouflage took over Ukrainian bases in Crimea. Then in April pro-Russian rebels stormed government buildings in the heavily industrial Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, triggering civil war.

Mr Yanukovych told the BBC that the war was a "nightmare" that had become a reality.

Russia's annexation of Crimea was a "tragedy", which would not have happened on his watch, he said.

"What happened there was very bad. And we need, today, to find a way out of this situation... Now there is war. They talk about getting Crimea back. How? By war? Do we need another war?"

He denied allegations that he had embezzled funds from the Ukrainian state and was hiding money in foreign bank accounts.

His opulent residence outside Kiev, thrown open to public gaze by protesters after he fled, did not belong to him personally, he said.

Receipts detailing millions of dollars spent on the complex were, he said, "political technology" and spin. The ostriches in the residence's petting zoo, he maintained, "just happened to be there".

"Yes, there was corruption, no one denies that. But a year and a half has passed, those in power have all the means at their disposal. Show us, where are the bank accounts of Yanukovych? They don't exist and never have done."

Interpol placed him on a wanted list in January this year, as Ukrainian officials accuse him of embezzling millions of dollars.

Rescued by Putin

He said Russian President Vladimir Putin had saved his life by ordering special forces to bring him to Russia on the night of 23 February 2014.

"The fact that Vladimir Putin took that decision, on the recommendation of his own special forces, that was his right and his business. He did not consult me.

"I am of course grateful to him for giving the order and helping my security to get me out, and save my life," he said, adding that he believed his life was still in danger.

He said he still hoped one day to be able to return to Ukraine.

The Donbas region - much of which is now controlled by separatists - should remain part of Ukraine, he said, urging the United States and the European Union to force Kiev to negotiate directly with the rebel leaders.

He said his opponents in Kiev "should not have carried out a military coup - they should not have drawn in radical far-right forces".

"I warned that they would not stop at Maidan - that they would go further. And they went further... They've broken up the country. They've drawn the whole world into this conflict."
---
Viktor Yanukovych

    July 1950 - born the son of a poor metalworker and nurse in eastern town of Yenakiyeve
    Jailed twice for violent crimes in his youth
    1970s - transport manager in Donetsk region in communist era
    1997 - appointed Donetsk governor
    2002 - appointed prime minister of independent Ukraine
    2004 - elected president but ousted in Orange Revolution, as his election declared fraudulent
    2006-2007 - serves as prime minister
    2010 - wins presidential election fairly
    February 2014 - flees Kiev amid huge anti-government protests

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 #36
Sputnik
June 23, 2015
Lost in Translation, or What the BBC Cut From Their Yanukovych Interview

The ВВС was the first Western media to interview ex-Ukrainian president Yanukovych since his overthrow in February 2014, however they inexplicably left out the most vital answers in their English translation. While keeping the parts about the ostriches, it deems to be important, it left out the key answers about Crimea and genocide in Donbass.

Here is what its English speaking readers and viewers will never learn from the story on its English language website.

Out of over eight minutes of conversation between the former president and the interviewer about Crimea, the editors cut the responses down to several sentences, concluding with a dry "Crimea is a tragedy for the Ukrainian state."

Here is what the former leader had to say on the issue, according to the full version of the interview posted on the BBC's own Russian language website.

Viktor Yanukovych said that he was in Crimea when he decided to leave the country. At that time he was already ousted and faced two options whether to start bringing together those loyal to him and begin a war or leave the country.

While that was a very hard decision, he opted to leave the country.

"If I hadn't done it then, quite likely we would have had in Crimea something very similar to what we now have in Donbass," he said. "Probably, in some other regions as well; we would have had a full scale civil war."

"What is better for the population of Crimea? War or Peace?" he questioned.

"In any country, in any part of the world population would choose peace. That is why when Crimea was holding a referendum, people were scared for their future, for the future of their children. And Crimea did not want to take up the rightwing radical ideology Maidan was bringing onto them."

"Maidan scared Crimea and Donbass and the southeast of Ukraine with their rightwing radical outlook. That was the main issue which forced the population of Crimea to build up the units of self-defense and defend themselves. And the Supreme Council of the republic made a decision to hold a referendum."

"90 percent of the population voted for the exit [from Ukraine]."

"We knew only too well what the mood was in the southeast of Ukraine. We understood perfectly well what the mood was in Crimea. The question of exit [from Ukraine] was not on the agenda when I was the president, there was no talk of separatism," he said.

Genocide in Donbass

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko appealed to the country's constitutional court, asking the court to recognize the ousting of former President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 as illegitimate.

Asked about what he thinks is going on in his native region of Donbass, the ex-president said that it pains him to watch the unfolding events, and can do so only in short bursts.

However infrequently he watches what is being shown on the situation in the region, his heart always sores as he is always looking at the familiar faces, familiar homes and familiar cities.

"Here are the graves of my ancestors, my parents, my relatives, my close ones, my friends," he said, "It is a terrible tragedy."

"What is going on now in Donbass is a genocide. Genocide of the population of Donbass. And it is being committed by those who brought in tanks and guns to shoot at the peaceful civilians," he said.

"Even during the truce over 500 civilians have died. That is the disaster."

Like any other ordinary man, the ex-president wants to return to his motherland. And sincerely does not understand why he had been deprived of the one.

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 #37
Kyiv Post
June 23, 2015
English-language subtitles to entire BBC interview with Yanukovych

Editor's Note: The following is the full BBC Newsnight interview of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych with Gabriel Gatehouse with English-language subtitles. In settings, turn on subtitles to view.

http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/english-language-subtitles-to-entire-bbc-interview-with-yanukovych-391797.html

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 #38
Sputnik
June 20, 2015
Confusing U(kraine)-Turn: Yanukovych Ousting Was Illegitimate - Poroshenko

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko appealed to the country's constitutional court, asking the court to recognize the ousting of former President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 as illegitimate.

"I ask the court to acknowledge that the law 'on the removal of the presidential title from Viktor Yanukovych' as unconstitutional," Poroshenko said in a court statement published on the website of the Ukrainian constitutional court.

The current Ukrainian president said the law violates the constitution, according to which the President of Ukraine is protected by law and his title remains with him forever. He also added that by enacting the law in February of 2014, the parliament of Ukraine undermined the constitution.

Now, the amusing fact is that Poroshenko himself actively supported the Euromaidan protests between November 2013 and February 2014 in Kiev that resulted in the overthrow of Yanukovych.

As the current head of Ukraine, who became the president after the illegal coup, Poroshenko's statement seems strange at best. By admitting that the overthrow of Yanukovych was illegal and stressing that the President of Ukraine should be forever protected by the country's law, Poroshenko might be insinuating that his own presidency is put in jeopardy.
Otherwise, why would someone else who became the president after the coup all of a sudden defend the former leader of the country? Seems illogical.

Alexei Pushkov, the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Lower House of Russia's parliament, commented on Poroshenko's bizarre revelation.

"Here we go, Poroshenko acknowledged the unconstitutional nature of Yanukovych's removal from power. The EU and PACE both denied it. Now it's recognized," Pushkov wrote on his Twitter account.

Last year, Yanukovych became the scapegoat of Ukrainian politics after his government was accused of all the misfortunes in the country. Now, more than a year after the former president was gone, his legacy is still around. Mikheil Saakashvili, the new governor of Ukraine's Odessa Region, said that in the best case scenario, Ukraine will need 20 more years to reach the economic level of Yanukovych's government in 2013.

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 #39
www.rt.com
June 22, 2015
Member of Kiev's top brass 'defects' to anti-govt forces, predicts more like him
[Video here http://rt.com/news/268828-kiev-officer-defects-dpr/]

A man claiming to be a Ukrainian major general and former assistant to the country's defense minister has announced he is now working with the forces of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic.

"I am Ukrainian Armed Forces Major General Aleksandr Kolomiyets. My latest posts are chief analyst of the Ukrainian armed forces, assistant to the Ukrainian defense minister," the man said at a news conference at the Donetsk news agency loyal to the self-proclaimed republic. Kolomiyets had also spent 19 years as the chief enlistment officer in the Donetsk region.

"I am going to work for the good of the Donetsk People's Republic," Kolomiyets (not to be confused with oligarch Igor Kolomoysky) announced.

The defector says he took his family out of the Ukrainian capital, fearing repercussions from officials.

He also claims a lot of people in the Ukrainian military want to switch to the self-proclaimed republics' side, including officers. According to Kolomiyets, hundreds have already abandoned Kiev.

"Look at who is actually fighting. Only the volunteers from nationalist squads," the defector said at the news conference.

There is growing dissatisfaction with the commanders, Kolomiyets said. "Soon, there is going to be unrest within the military. They do not understand the orders they are given, to kill civilians. We are going to see that by autumn, everything will change."

He added that morale is very low in the Ukrainian army: "All the officers, the generals that understand the criminal nature of the authorities' actions, do not want to fight."

Meanwhile, the press secretary of Ukraine's General Staff has told Ukrainskaya Pravda newspaper that Kolomiyets was fired from the army in 2012 due to incompetence. "He could not handle the post of the army's top analyst," the newspaper quoted the press secretary as saying. "Besides, he traveled to Russia as a private [individual]. Military men are supposed to inform their commanders about such visits, but he broke the rules."

Kolomiyets, if it is him, is not the first Ukrainian official to have switched sides in the conflict that has been tearing the country apart for over a year now. Previous defections include the head of the Lugansk customs office, an officer of the Ukrainian foreign intelligence office and a member of staff of the Ukrainian embassy in France.

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 #40
Kyiv Post
June 22, 2015
Former Ukrainian general defects to Russian-separatists in Donetsk

A former major general who served in Ukraine's military during Viktor Yanukovych's disgraced presidency has joined Russian-separatist forces in occupied Donetsk, according to a recorded news conference published by Vesti.ru media outlet on June 22.

Oleksandr Kolomiets said he moved his family from Kyiv to Donetsk "in order to protect them," UNIAN news agency reported.

Ukraine's Defense Ministry released a statement confirming that Kolomiets headed the information analysis department of the Army General Staff until August 2012.

"He was dismissed because of incompetence and numerous unauthorized trips to Moscow, Russia," the Defense Ministry said in a June 22 statement on its website. "In addition, at the request of employees of military counterintelligence, Oleksandr Kolomiets was denied access to state secrets."

A Defense Ministry spokesman told the Kyiv Post that after his dismissal, Kolomiets was a civilian and his occupation was unknown. Kolomiets also had been the military commissar of Donetsk Oblast for 19 years, the Defense Ministry added.

Last week the Security Service of Ukraine announced that two of its foreign intelligence officers had joined Russian-separatist forces in Luhansk Oblast. They were brothers Oleksiy and Yuriy Miroshnichenko. Former state security head Valentyn Nalyvaichenko told journalists last week that criminal proceedings were started for treason.

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 #41
Levada.ru
June 22, 2015
Russians' criticism of Ukraine differentiates between state, residents - poll

More than half of Russians have a negative view about Ukraine, with almost the same number of Ukrainians mirroring the sentiment, Levada Centre and the Kiev International Institute of Sociology (KIIS), the Russian and Ukrainian pollsters respectively, have learned. The results of their survey were published on Levada Centre's website (tinyurl.com/pkp76rg) on 22 June.

However, as revealed by the survey, the Russian respondents appeared to differentiate between Ukrainians and the Ukrainian authorities.

Some 86 per cent of the Russian respondents displayed a generally negative attitude towards Ukraine's authorities and 25 per cent to its residents. Nevertheless, 56 per cent appeared to think high of Ukrainians and 11 per cent could not make up their mind.

Overall, 59 per cent of them described their attitude to Ukraine as a state as "bad" or "very bad" against 26 per cent who said they were fond of Ukraine. These indicators have decreased significantly since January 2014 when 66 per cent of Russians described their opinion as "good" and "very good" and 26 per cent as "bad" and "very bad".

According to the KIIS, 56 per cent of the Ukrainian respondents described their opinion about Russia as "bad" and "very bad" and 30 per cent as "good" and "very good". The figures are much lower than they used to be in February 2014 before the annexation of Crimea by Russia, when 78 per cent of Ukrainians "spoke warmly" of Russia, the pollster said. The share of those who found it difficult to answer varies from 9 to 14 per cent.

Russian and Ukrainian respondents appeared to significantly fall out in their views on the USA. In Russia, 73 per cent did not think high of the USA, 15 per cent mentioned their positive opinion and 12 per cent could not make up their mind. However, in Ukraine, 54 per cent of respondents displayed strong positive feelings about the USA and 22 per cent did not approve of it. One out of four Ukrainian respondents found it difficult to answer the question.

The idea of an open border between the two countries is popular with 54 per cent of Russians and 46 per cent of Ukrainians. There are 10 per cent more people in Russia (30 per cent) who would like the countries to close borders than a year before, whereas in Ukraine the idea is welcomed by 45 per cent of respondents. The number of Ukrainians who would like the countries to merge hit the all time low of 2 per cent.

When asked about the probability of a war between Russia and Ukraine, 49 per cent of the Russian respondents said the prospect seemed real, which is 19 per cent less than in July 2014. The share of those who reject such a probability went up from 26 per cent to 46 per cent. The KIIS study did not cover the issue.

Levada Centre carried out its survey among 1,600 persons aged 18 and above in 134 population centres in 46 regions of Russia on 22-25 May 2015. The margin of error does not exceed 3.4 per cent.

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 #42
AFP
June 22, 2015
Ukraine's restless lenders question sweetened debt deal
By Dmitry Zaks

Kiev (AFP) - Ukraine's main debt holders responded with extreme caution Monday to a sweetened but "final" debt restructuring offer that would keep the war-torn nation from imposing a repayment moratorium next month.

Franklin Templeton and three other US financial titans own about two-thirds of the debt upon which Ukraine is trying to find savings of $15.3 billion (13.5 billion euros) over the coming four years.

That target is part of a $40-billion global package the International Monetary Fund patched up to help the ex-Soviet nation weather an economic implosion that was only exasperated by the pro-Russian revolt in its industrial east.

But the sides' failure to find a debt compromise carries unpredictable consequences for Ukraine's Western-backed leadership -- already under pressure from Moscow and domestic discontent with the lingering war.

The IMF is almost certain to keep meting out upcoming loan payments in return for Ukraine's commitment to an unpopular but much-delayed break with its Soviet-era subsidies programme and tradition of sweetheart business deals.

Kiev's international allies are also likely to pitch in as part of their effort to keep the strategic east European state from slipping back into its historic reliance on Russia -- an uneasy neighbour that denies involvement in Ukraine's separatist war.

But a technical default sparked by the lack of a commercial debt compromise would make the longer-term cost of borrowing even more expensive and push back Ukraine's prospects for a quick return to growth.

The so-called Ad-hoc Committee of Ukrainian Noteholders said it was "studying" a new more lucrative offer Ukrainian Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko unveiled on Friday.

Sources told AFP the proposal includes a promise to issue investors new high-yield bonds to help recoup the 40-percent loss Kiev would like them to take on the existing debt.

But people close to the talks said Kiev did not expect to overcome the current crisis and issue the new Eurobonds until 2020.

The investors argued on Monday that Ukraine -- its economy projected to shrink by 9.0 percent this year and annual inflation to hit 46 percent -- had built its case around an overly pessimistic growth forecast whose details have not been revealed.

"The proposal is based on IMF assumptions about the Ukraine economy which have not yet been placed in the public domain and which are not scheduled to be made public until mid-July," the US creditors said in a statement released to AFP.

"In order to properly consider the proposal, the committee and its advisers urge Ukraine and the IMF to publish those assumptions as soon as possible," the four US investment funds said.

The bondholders had earlier said that Ukraine's economy should revive much sooner than the IMF predicts.

Ukraine's central bank appeared to pour cold water on that line of thinking by releasing data showing debt ballooning and placing the budget under even further strain.

It said total debt had shot up to 110.5 percent of Gross Domestic Product in April from 95.1 percent at the start of the year. The figure is similar to that of Belgium -- sustainable only in cases when the overall economy is strong.

'Time to help Ukraine'

Ukraine has warned repeatedly that it may simply stop servicing its obligations if no solution with the bondholders is found before the end of July.

The IMF has backed Ukraine's cause throughout the negotiations -- as has US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. The Fund is expected to approve the release of a delayed $1.7-billion loan payment within the next few weeks.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk -- a former banker with a strong reputation in global business circles -- said it was time for plain speaking with investors who bet so heavily on the corruption-stained leadership of a Russian-backed president that protests toppled last year.

"We have openly told our creditors: it is time to help Ukraine," Yatsenyuk said in an address to the nation televised on Sunday evening.

"Ukraine's debts before private creditors must be restructured," he said

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 #43
The National Interest
June 23, 2015
Why America Can't Stop Russia's Hybrid Warfare
In important respects, America's inability to counter Russia's hybrid tactics may have less to do with Moscow's approach than our own.
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.

Hybrid warfare-the term applied to Russia's particular approach to irregular warfare in Ukraine-is the threat du jour in international security affairs. Unfortunately, by focusing attention on Moscow's purported deviousness and cunning, and conflating the annexation of Crimea with the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk and Lugansk regions, it avoids examining the real reasons for the Kremlin's successes (and failures). Both deserve greater scrutiny.

Russia's annexation of Crimea was shockingly effective-and bloodless-and it is appropriate that it should provoke thinking, analysis, debate and even constructing new models (or giving greater attention to existing ones) to explain it. Nevertheless, since we might see more such irregular warfare in the future, we should insist on greater precision and honesty in our conversations.

First, however successful Vladimir Putin's little green men may have been in seizing Crimea, that particular approach is unlikely to be widely applicable. Crimea was unique, or at least very, very rare, in combining a substantial foreign (Russian) naval base and associated military presence, a major power with well-developed special operations capabilities, a very substantial local majority sympathetic to the government owning the base (including some of the host nation's military personnel and local officials), and a parliament that had already voted more than once (before current events) to join that country. Where else is this true?

In fact, what worked in Crimea demonstrably failed in eastern Ukraine, where Vladimir Putin appears to have fundamentally miscalculated support for the separatists (and reactions even among some Russian-speakers elsewhere in Ukraine). The Kremlin did not swiftly and cheaply establish new Russian provinces (which was probably not Putin's aim), relatively stable quasi-independent unrecognized regions under Russian protection like Georgia's Abkhazia and South Ossetia (not too likely but a possible objective), or some other enduring arrangement winning long-term Russian influence in Ukraine (most probable). Instead, Russia's leader has ensnared himself and his country in a costly, long-term insurgency/nation-building quagmire that is difficult to exit and could escalate to something much worse. Fomenting instability for political ends in far off lands is one thing, but doing it on your own border is something else entirely.

Second, why is it exactly that the United States and its NATO allies have had such difficulty responding to what Russia is doing? It is not only because Moscow developed seemingly novel tactics. On the contrary, a degree of self-examination-which can always be a little painful-suggests that in important respects the answer may have less to do with Moscow's approach than our own. Three factors stand out.

One is that Russia's seizure of Crimea happened very quickly. U.S. and European decision-making processes just don't move at that speed, particularly when facing ambiguity. Once a Crimea-style operation has begun, it will be extremely difficult if not impossible for Western decision-makers to be sufficiently confident about the other side's intent to take consequential action before it's too late. While we can and should strive to improve our intelligence-collection (to get information more quickly and make better sense of it), this makes deterrence and long-term responses important and limits our options for immediate reaction.

Another factor is that widespread feelings of military (and moral) superiority over Russia and even invulnerability to conventional warfare essentially blinded decision-makers to Russia's perspectives, capabilities and potential actions. In other words, Western leaders have had a hard time formulating a response because they weren't even thinking in these terms before the spring of 2014. U.S. and European leaders were wholly unprepared for an angry Russia that dared to use force in a region they thought they owned militarily, politically and economically.

As former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said last year, "we have underestimated, for a long time, the magnitude of the humiliation that Russians felt with the collapse of the Soviet Union because it also involved the collapse of the Russian empire." This is primarily a result of consolidated conventional wisdom and political correctness in much Western discussion of Russia over an extended period-the same intellectual blinders that prevented hard questions from receiving serious attention in Washington prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

A similar problem is that many Western analysts, politicians, commentators and even leaders have not been honest with themselves about their real commitment to Ukraine, much less wider public interest. Russia's actions have exposed the fact that talk is cheap and that no small number of Ukraine's Western supporters are cheapskates. It has also uncovered the degree to which elite-level aspirations for Ukraine moved far beyond what voters are prepared to back. A recent Pew Research Center survey illustrates this by demonstrating tepid Western support not only for Ukraine, but even for fighting to defend other NATO members.

More concretely, after years of statements about Ukraine's importance, the European Union was unwilling to provide what now looks like quite limited economic support to former President Viktor Yanukovych as he balked at signing the Association Agreement that contributed to this whole mess. Likewise, some leading individuals in the U.S. Congress who repeatedly voiced strong support for Ukraine are now (correctly) unwilling to risk American or NATO military action after apparently assuming that they would never have to answer this question. And they cannot mobilize sufficient votes from their colleagues to provide Ukraine with financial assistance comparable to what the tiny and less strategically significant Georgia received after its 2008 war with Russia-another way in which aspirations became disconnected from reality.

This is dangerous behavior. America's-and the West's-ability to understand reality before making important policy choices is critical to our success in a complicated world where two rival major powers are dissatisfied with the Western-defined and U.S.-led international order.

Moreover, one could argue that leaders' failure to understand reality was what brought down the Soviet Union-America's previous challenger. Soviet central planning ignored economic realities and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev apparently did not foresee predictable outcomes when he permitted criticism and even protests while simultaneously demonstrating that he would not use force to contain them. We (and many Soviet citizens) may have welcomed the outcome in that case, but it is clearly not what leaders wanted or expected. If American leaders don't take a serious look around at the world and examine some of their own assumptions, they might face increasingly expensive surprises themselves-perhaps next time in East Asia. As wealthy and powerful as it is, the United States can't afford too many outcomes like that.

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