#2
http://readrussia.com
July 2, 2015
Moscow Never Sleeps
By Louise Dickson

A new film by Irish director Johnny O'Reilly strives to show Moscow doesn't fit any one stereotypical mold - it is corrupt, challenging, charming, and caring all at the same time.

The film opens with sweeping shots of Russia's capital city at dawn. Architecturally stunning panoramas show an almost empty city of 15 million before the hustle and bustle of Moscow City day, an annual festival celebrating the biggest metropolis in Europe.

Moscow Never Sleeps is a multi-narrative story based on characters that hail from a reach of social demographics in Russia's capital city. From sleek apartments in the city center to cramped suburban quarters adorned with carpets on the walls, the film follows the story lines of several Muscovites: an oligarch forced to leave Russia, a young man conflicted about sending his grandmother to a nursing home, a famous comedian on his death bed, a woman who is powerless in her own marriage, an aspiring chanson singer.

Thematically the film is quite loose, but depicts how characters live, love, and die in Moscow, says director Johnny O'Reilly, who considers himself a Muscovite. He first visited the city 20 years ago as a student and has lived and worked here as a journalist and filmmaker for the last 12 years.  His first film The Weather Station was released in 2010.

"The city is the main character of the movie, and that was always my intention. Moscow is not well known in the West. Very few people have an idea of its texture, of its atmosphere, and I wanted to make a film that would redress that," O'Reilly said.

"Moscow is a prison, but we Love it"

Individual plot lines drag the characters to different reaches of the city, either by choice, in the case of Lera who follows her biological father around the city, or by force, like Valery, played by famous Soviet comedian Yuri Stoyanov, who is abducted from a cafeteria by hooligans when he sneaks away from the hospital on a quest for booze.

Characters are connected by past relations, such as divorce and ex-lovers, as well as by chance, such as when the hooligans who kidnapped the comedian happens to be at the 'Premiere Lounge' at the same time as Lera and her step-sister Ksenia.  

The characters do not always physically cross paths, but all experience a certain element of Moscow at the same time, like a traffic jam. Each character is stuck in their respective vehicles whether a Mercedes, Mini-Cooper, taxi, or bus.

After dropping off Grandma at assisted living, Stephan, played by newcomer Sergey Belov, sitting in the back seat of a taxi, asks his uncle why Muscovites put up with such terrible driving conditions.

The camera cuts to Alexey Serebryakov, who plays Anton Nikolaevich, the oligarch who decides to take on the bureaucrats after losing a development project, endangering his family and fortune. He flees to New York City with his new younger wife and leaves behind his toddler son Dima.

"Moscow is a prison, but we love it. To leave, you must pay a bribe to the prison guards," Anton, says, referring to his unwilling exile.

Having lived inside the cogs of Moscow, O'Reilly explains how even getting outside to the countryside for the weekend is made impossible by traffic.

"People in this city accept their suffering, but some way find humor through this suffering," the director said.

"Show your documents"

O'Reily's favorite story line is that of Lera, who lives with her mother, alcoholic step-father, and step sister who turns tricks for extra cash. The relationship between the two girls is rocky, but they are forced to spend the holiday together in the city so their parents can host friends at the apartment.

After a tumultuous night out with her step-sister, Lera ends up at her biological father's apartment in the early hours of the morning. When she presents herself, he asks, "do you have identification," a popular question in Moscow, a city historically obsessed with documents, papers, and identity.

Mild-mannered Lera asks to stay with her father and his new wife, only to be rejected, and returns to her dysfunctional, but accepting family.

Many of the characters don't go to sleep throughout the 24-hour period of the film, hence the title Moscow Never Sleeps.

"At the end of the day we aren't sleeping, we woke up and started to live, our story continues, the businessman and his wife leave for New York, my step-sister and I started to have a better relationship, my mother and stepfather found things in common; each story ends positively," said Anastasia Shalonko, who plays Lera.

Back at the Moscow Day Celebration in the sleepy neighborhood, Lera's mother and step father toast to "everyone choosing their own fate" which is a metaphor for a city like Moscow, a city of great opportunity, or conversely, of despair, according to O'Reilly's interpretation.

Inspired by Odessa

O'Reilly, who not only directed, but also wrote and produced the movie, considers himself a Muscovite. He wrote the bulk of the script over a 3-month summer stay in Odessa in 2012 and said that other multi-narrative films such as Magnolia and Crash heavily influenced his scriptwriting.

The official budget of the film was $3.7 million, and one the most famous backers of the project is Ukrainian-born and now US citizen Len Blavatnik, who is listed as an executive producer of the film.

Moscow Never Sleeps made its debut at the Moscow Film festival, which took place from June 19 to 26. The next stop for Moscow Never Sleeps will be the Galway film festival in mid-July.

The Moscow premiere drew quite an eclectic crowd. Muscovites of all age sat snugly in their seats at the Oktyabr movie theatre on New Arbat, interested to see their city through the eyes of a foreigner who has called Russia's capital home for more than a decade.

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 #3
Russia: Other Points of View
www.russiaotherpointsofview.com
July 29, 2015
Citizen Diplomacy in Volgograd: June 2015
By Sharon Tennison
Sharon Tennison has worked for 30 years in Russia and the CIS, creating numerous multi-year, multi-million dollar programs to provide training for Soviet and Russian citizens to gain independence and skills designed for self governance. She is founder and President of the Center for Citizen Initiatives (CCI). She lives and travels extensively part of the year in Russia.

Friends,

Plans for Volgograd had changed during the final weeks. We weren't quite sure how the schedule would work out.   We arrived at 8:25 am on a bright sunny morning. The train came to a halt and we hurriedly got our luggage to the exit door.  I was among the last to deboard and emerged to see what looked like a sea of eager faces coming toward our car.  They were weighted down with flowers.

Our women in the train cars ahead were already receiving long-stem roses and bouquets.  Running toward our car was Alexander (Sasha) Malashkin, the raging entrepreneur pictured on the front of my book,  The Power of Impossible Ideas.  Hugs and exclamations abounded. We had never had such a welcome here before!  Always it was warm, but nothing like this.  More on this to follow.   

Our Volgograd friends had rented a van, apparently not accepting our intent to travel by taxis and metros.  They whisked us off to our hotel in downtown Volgograd.  I'd been gravely concerned about this hotel, remembering it as a tired old rundown piece of Soviet architecture. Since inexpensive was "in" for this trip, I took the low price and hoped for the best. Pulling up to Hotel Volgograd the exterior appeared as before, drab brown Soviet architecture; upon entering I was shocked.  Renovated with 19th century moldings, gold leaf, walls full of gorgeous fabric and paintings, plus two sleek Otis elevators ....  it all bespoke of foreign money. Who would have invested in this old building in an outlying Russian city?  Waiting for passports, I marveled at the new stained glass behind the registration desk.  On inspection, the rooms were small but elegant--and all of this for $50 to $70 a night depending on occupancy?

Later I learned that a former Mayor had purchased the hotel for a song in the 90s and renovated it himself. This was during the period when bureaucrats were making lots of money off of Russia's struggling entrepreneurs -- our alums may have contributed to this elegance, but not necessarily by choice. In any case, today Volgograd has a classy hotel that operates efficiently, has excellent food, and accommodates guests in style. I recommend it highly if you visit Volgograd in the future.

Following a fast breakfast we were taken straight to a Rotary Meeting.  Since we couldn't be in Volgograd on their normal Rotary day, they chose our day of arrival!  Their van drove up to an old building I'd remembered from two decades earlier.  It sits in the harbor area down near the Volga River--and probably had earlier housed employees with river-related work.  

The exterior was the same as in years past; however, inside it had morphed into a "business incubator" on the scale of Silicon Valley!  The same types of bright techy faces peered out of cubicles similar to such incubator spaces near Palo Alto, CA. Several of them proudly gave us their product spiel.  All were start-up operations ready to break into the market. It became obvious that this whole business incubator belonged to Sasha.  He is mentoring and sharing his enthusiasm for micro-businesses with Volgograd's millennial generation. They couldn't hope for a better coach.

In the 90s, Sasha systematically began creating what became the largest wholesale food operation in the Volga Region. He is the owner of several other enterprises and also is this year's president of Volgograd's only Rotary Club. Those who have read my book realize that Sasha started out desperate to feed his young family in 1991. He had no way to make a living, so he borrowed a truck, drove to Moscow, picked up a load of cookies to sell around Volgograd's metros -- and in the process made enough extra money to go back to Moscow the next week and get more cookies to resell.  In 2001, he told Secretary of State Colin Powell his story complete with becoming the largest food distributor in the Volga region. Powell was so excited by his story that when leaving the hall, he broke ranks with his handlers and ran over to shake Sasha's hand--hence the photo on the book cover!

This young man, educated to be a lawyer, moved into entrepreneurism to feed his wife and small son when the ruble was worthless.  Today he is a multi-millionaire and is just hitting his stride.

Volgograd's Rotary meetings are held in a hall inside his business incubator.  It was a typical meeting--Rotary is Rotary wherever one goes! On this day there were Russian and American flags side-by-side,  Rotary banners, the Four Way Test, and excited faces that were considerably younger than in most American Rotary clubs.

Sasha rang the Rotary Bell and called the meeting to order.  A large screen lit up with their club's insignia and information.  Music came from all sides--the Russian anthem began; all of the Russians stood and sang in unison with gusto.  Those of us who knew the melody hummed along.  After the anthem, the screen gave a history of the club which was chartered by the Rocky River and Lakewood Clubs in Cleveland, Ohio back in the late 1990s.  These clubs are still in touch with each other.  Phil Ardussi, past President of the chartering club, sent greetings to the Volgograd Rotarians.  Next on the screen the club's service projects were shown along with their newly opened Rotary Park for Disabled Children!  We were the club's speakers for the day.  We introduced ourselves, the 15 states we came from and told why we were making this trip.

After the Rotary meeting,  we went to the new Rotary Park which is central in the city where people of all ages can get to it.   A sign shows the contributors who participated in the building of this park. Different kinds of play equipment for disabled youngsters included a large swinging container into which a wheelchair can be strapped!  The backdrop of it all was a park-wide lovely mural with flowers, animals and children playing in a happy world.   

Volgograd's 38 dedicated Rotarians are clearly proud of their contributions to their city. The average age of club members is probably 45.  They are entrepreneurs with adequate personal funds to meet financial expectations from Rotary International. Quite a few of them are Paul Harris Fellows (meaning they have contributed $1000 to RI's Foundation Fund). Some are multiple Paul Harris Fellows.  They certainly embody Rotary principles and the Four Way Test.

Next we were taken to an elegant "countrified" restaurant, Gretel, in the center of town.  It is owned and operated by Sasha's lovely wife, Oxanna. Gretel is something like our Blackeye Pea restaurants, but is a little more upscale. She treated us to a great lunch.

Afterward, we met with Volgograd's Rotaract Club at their service project for disabled children. The Rotaracts were delightful young people in the typical 18 to 30 year age bracket.  The Center we visited was heart warming and seemed to be run by a tiny little lady, maybe 3.5 feet tall.  She was all over the place, running around making introductions, getting the music makers organized, helping us feel at home. We were serenaded with songs by a combination of Rotaract members and the Center dwellers.

In case you are wondering ..... we were still on "day one" in Volgograd.  We were picked up at the train a few hours earlier.... somehow it felt like a week ago.  After a quick dinner in the evening, we were taken to a large group meeting where we could ask and answer questions about the differences in news coming out in each of our countries.

There are two radically different narratives about Russia in world news these days, depending on where one resides.  One is in the NYT, other U.S. mainstream media and NATO countries; and the other in Russian TV and print media and other nonaligned countries. Along side both of these there are rapidly growing alternative news outlets and investigative journalists who are determined to get a more comprehensive and truthful understanding of what's going on internationally out to the world at large--they are operating primarily on Internet.  Traditionally,  Russians have had zero trust in their media, hence it is quite normal for them to depend only on Internet for national and international news, which they do today.    

In Volgograd, we held both small and large group discussions about the painful topics between us. Our Russian hosts tried valiantly not to criticize our country, yet when it came down to it,  they were vocal and couldn't imagine why the distortions coming from Washington are so exaggerated against Russia and Putin. They strongly suspect it has to do with a final attempt at world domination and were quite frank in their assessments.

Fortunately, Russians separate citizens from governments and don't hold peoples responsible for what their governments do.   I encountered this first in 1984 when touring Volgograd's  WWII monuments. I asked why they played German music (Schumann) at these monuments.  They explained, saying that Schumann's music is the most appropriate for deep grief, and that it was written before the Nazi movement existed in Germany. At the war's end, Soviet spokespersons promoted the idea that the war was not the fault of the German people, but the cause was the heinous Nazi philosophy and economic system that caused them to do what they did. Even after the Nazi's plundered their nation, killing millions of soldiers and citizens, one never hears Russians criticize Germany or Germans--they have a very high regard for both--however they are frightened at any possibility of Nazi outcroppings, such as Kiev's Azov battalions fighting with West Ukrainian forces in the Donbass area.

The next morning we went to the Volgograd Memorials. Regardless of how many times one experiences them, the pathos is fresh and gripping--and the size of them is inconceivable.  The gigantic "Motherland Calls," with sword raised toward the East where the Nazi's came across Russia, is simply too enormous to take in.  How they created her, I cannot fathom.  She is taller than the Statue of Liberty, but none of us ever stand at ground level around the latter.  We see her from planes or ships, hence her size isn't registered. And by contrast, the Statue of Liberty is more or less static.  But Motherland Calls is deeply passionate .... every limb, every curvature of her immense body is a defiant message to those who might come again with ill purpose--NEVER AGAIN!, she reiterates.

On the way to the Motherland Calls, we pass the Sorrowful Mother--the monument closest to my heart.  When I first visited her in the 80s, I had three sons in their late teens and early 20s.  I was simply overwhelmed with her deep grief, my grief and women's collective grief .... for mothers over the centuries who have had to lose their young sons to wars.  For all of the young men born across the Soviet Union in 1923, only 3% of them survived WWII.  Can we grasp what this would do to a population of survivors?   Sorrowful Mother is a huge monument also, with nothing but her head and upper torso cradling the body of her dead son, he with a veil over his head .... to remind that any grieving mother can identify the veiled head as her own son.  The mother and son rest in a large pool of water symbolic of tears. Google her. What a powerful message she is!

Next we visited the huge battleground Diorama portraying multiple aspects of the Stalingrad battleground where 1.7 to 2 million lives were lost. It is a masterpiece-in-the-round with actual battlefield relics such as plane and tank parts, dugouts, dummies of war heroes, battles going on throughout multiple fronts.  With accompanying sound effects of planes, bombs and gunfire, it felt like we were walking through the battlefields themselves.

Afterward we visited Sasha's plaster and wall board factory. New automated equipment was churning out and packaging huge amounts of product. It's clear walking with him through these companies, he has mastered the art of human relations with his managers and staff.   I ask myself, how did this guy go from purchasing cookies in Moscow to where he is today?  He is still SO young, probably 45-47, but he looks 25.  And he has the energy of a 15-year-old.

Our travelers were parceled out to different families for dinner. I was fortunate to go to Sasha's home and meet his mom, an aging woman of great presence, who has lived long enough to see her only son succeed. His father left early on, so Sasha became responsible when quite young. His mom committed that he always had lots of energy and worked hard as he grew up. It was great to be with Sasha and Oxanna's  strongly-knit warm family consisting of Mom, one son and two lovely young daughters.

The next day group members had meetings in Volgograd's small and medium-sized businesses.  In the afternoon we were taken to a large concert hall to hear the Volgograd Children's Symphony Orchestra, comprised of children from ages 8 to 18 years.  They were extraordinary.  Considerable funds must go into music training for the city's youth.  The audience of several hundred ordinary parents, siblings and grandparents, gave us yet another cross-section of what ordinary Russians look like today: upbeat, nicely dressed and proud. We saw no babushkas with scarf-wrapped heads this trip.

Last, a wonderful farewell dinner at a Brewery and eatery -- also owned and operated by Oxanna.  This completed our short three day stay in Volgograd.  We hardly had time to sleep or change clothes, but we picked up impressions that will be with us for a lifetime.   

Probably the most important understanding to bring home is:  

This is not a city or a nation to pick a war with.  

Russians across 11 time zones feel an inordinately deep patriotism to the Russian soil itself.  They may be divided ethnically and may disagree on large and small points, but when it comes to protecting Mother Russia, they become shoulder to shoulder.  Throughout their history they have done whatever it took to protect their "mir" or soil, their deeply embedded Russian culture and Russia's 1,000 year history. Outsiders need to remember what befell Napoleon and Hitler in their attempts to take this country down in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Consider Russian losses in WWII:   27,000,000 dead, (500,000 Americans were lost) and 25,000,000 Russians left homeless after the war .... and I always thought we won WWII.

In 1984, I was talking with a henna-haired little grandmother in Volgograd who asked me,  "CAN YOU IMAGINE HOW WOMEN CAN TAKE UP WAR MAKING?  We are the birthers of life. How is it possible?  I will tell you.  When our young men were mortally wounded and dropped their guns, we picked them up and carried on the battle in their places!  You can't imagine how hard it was to do ....  for us women to go against our biological urges and take life.  BUT WE DID.  We had no choice, there was no one else to protect our city, our country."  One forgets many things, but I will never forget this little 5 ft. babushka confessing her painful past on the battlegrounds surrounding then Stalingrad.

That evening, we traveled by plane from Volgograd to Moscow to Ekaterinburg out in the Ural Mountains, a long trip after continuous activity. But not a peep out of the stalwart travelers. Amazing given the wide differences in ages, professions, and politics. The group bonded around our citizen-to-citizen mission--other aspects made no difference at all.

Next stop Ekaterinburg .....

FYI:

Earlier I pondered why Volgogradians were so attentive to us from our arrival to departure?

Russians are known for their hospitable natures. But their response to this trip was qualitatively different.  

In earlier years, we had come under normal circumstances .... our countries were getting along well.

Russians were traveling back and forth to America to get training.  

But this time the situation had changed drastically. Their way of life is being threatened.

Their borders are being surrounded with NATO missile installations and troops.

They read Internet, they understand the misinformation about Russia in US mainstream media.

There were no other Americans visible in Volgograd while we were there. We were the only ones.

We had come out of deep concern, disturbed about sanctions, about their currency losing near half of its value.

We had come to document in videos the Russian points of view and to make a difference if possible.  

In spite of all that is going on, we will work to rebuild the bridges that have been nearly destroyed.

And wonderfully, we found that the citizen-to-citizen bridges of earlier years hadn't been destroyed.

Indeed, those bridges have become even more precious than ever.

All of this was no doubt factored into why we were treated like royalty in Volgograd.

Now to take what we have experienced and documented and make a difference with it before all life on our planet earth is further jeopardized.

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 #4
Russia's parliament gives citizens 'right to be forgotten in Internet'

MOSCOW, July 3. /TASS/. The State Duma, the lower house of Russia's parliament, passed a law on Friday, giving citizens the right to demand that Internet search engines should erase all irrelevant information about themselves.

The document, informally called the law on the "right to be forgotten," caused heated debates in society and criticism from search engines but was subsequently finalized following active interaction between deputies and the industry's representatives.

The new regulations allow citizens to demand that search engines should stop providing hyperlinks to information on citizens, if it is disseminated in violation of the Russian legislation, is irrelevant or "has lost significance for the claimant owing to subsequent events or the claimant's actions."

The exception is made for information on events showing the signs of criminal offences, under which the term for bringing offenders to criminal liability has not expired, and also information on the commitment of crimes, for which criminal records have not been removed or cancelled.

Chairman of the State Duma Committee for Information Policy Leonid Levin said the finalized version of the law excluded the notion of "authenticity" as this created the risk of deleting any authentic information older than three years. Instead of this, the term "irrelevance" was introduced to come closer to the principles used in the EU and allow deleting hyperlinks to inaccurate, inadequate and incomplete information, the deputy said.

A claimant's demand should contain the claimant's full name, passport data and contact information. The demand should indicate the hyperlink, which does not suit the claimant, the grounds for a search engine to erase it and confirm the claimant's consent to personal data processing.

After considering a citizen's claim and arguments, an Internet search engine may decide either on deleting hyperlinks or rejecting this demand.

The term of considering a user's claim was increased to 10 working days from 3 calendar days. The term for correcting mistakes in the documents included in a claim was also increased to 10 working days.

Search engines may not disclose information on citizens' requests filed to them. If a search engine denies a citizen's claim to remove hyperlinks, a claimant may turn to a court of law "with the demand that the provision of hyperlinks to the corresponding information should be stopped." Lawsuits may be filed at the claimant's place of residence.

The law will come into force from January 1, 2016.

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 #5
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
July 3, 2015
AIDS: Is there an epidemic in Russia?
According to the Center for the Prevention and Fight Against AIDS, there are now about 900,000 cases of people infected with HIV in the country. Is there an AIDS epidemic and how are HIV patients treated?
Svetlana Arkhangelskaya, special to RBTH

Russia is one of the few remaining countries in the world where the number of HIV cases and related deaths from the disease is still increasing. As of May 1, 2015, according to the Rospotrebnadzor Federal Monitoring Agency, there were more than 900,000 registered cases of HIV infections. This is 60,000-120,000 more than in 2014.

"The Russian Federation is facing a large and growing HIV epidemic that is concentrated among key populations, most significantly people who inject drugs," said Vinay Saldanha, Regional Director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia at the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). However, experts believe that today the epidemic could be entering a dangerous phase in which HIV spreads to the wider population. Out of the new infections in 2014 almost 42 percent were related to the sexual transmission of the virus.
 
"Prevention is cheaper than treatment"

Dr. Vadim Pokrovsky, director of the Russian Center for AIDS Prevention and Treatment, says that the number of people infected with HIV in Russia, China and the U.S. is about the same - between 900,000 and 1,400,000.

The first case of HIV infection in the USSR was registered in 1987. The patient was a military translator who had returned home from service in Tanzania. It was determined that he infected another 25 people.

This fact is officially considered the beginning of the diffusion of HIV in Russia. By the mid-1990s most infections in Russia were spread among drug users as a result of dirty syringes.

However, in terms of population, the U.S. (324.7 million) has twice as many people as Russia (146.2 million), while China (1.3 billion) has almost 10 times as many. The country with the highest number of HIV infections is South Africa.

Moreover, the official statistics in Russia include only registered cases of infected people. "We are working with the Russian Ministry of Health to agree on new HIV estimated data for the Russian Federation," says Saldanha. "Such estimates are essential to show the full extent of the HIV epidemic and should not only be limited to the number of people confirmed to have HIV."

Pokrovsky believes that the main reason for the spread of HIV in Russia is unsatisfactory prevention measures. "Prevention is always cheaper than treatment," Pokrovsky says. "If you can prevent new cases, expensive medicine will not be necessary. Contemporary sexual behavior in Russian society inevitably results in new infections. It is important to systematically teach people how not to get infected. And teach them not only how to have safe sex, but also how not to transmit HIV among drug users."
 
Russia researching a new medicine

According to the Center for Prevention and Fight Against AIDS, out of all the cases of people infected with AIDS in Russia, only 200,000 are being treated. Treatment is given preferentially to those individuals whose immune system demonstrates abnormalities. Resources for medicine are allotted from the federal budget, while local budgets cover the maintenance of hospitals and the salaries of medical workers.

Modern medicine is still incapable of reversing the development of HIV infections, but it can slow them down and even permanently stop the worsening of the disease's effects. However, the patient will have to take antiretroviral therapy (ARV) drugs for the rest of their life.

France spends approximately 7,000-8,000 euro for one HIV-infected patient annually. In the U.S. the treatment is more expensive ($10,000-15,000). Russia spends 2,000 euro annually per HIV patient and this sum, according to Professor Pokrovsky, could be reduced by a third due to generic ARV drugs produced in India and China.

Until recently, Russia did not produce its own anti-HIV drugs. But now the country is about to embark on the production of an original formula. For example, Rospotrebnadzor's Central Epidemic Institute is carrying out research on gene therapy that is capable of killing the virus within the gene and completely curing the patient of the HIV infection. However, experts say that it will take at least five years for the research's findings to be approved for use in clinics.
 
Vaccines: can they help neutralize the virus?

In Novosibirsk the State Scientific Center of Virology and Immunology produces polyepitope vaccine, the St. Petersburg Biomedical Center and the State Scientific Research Institute of Specially Clean Biologics manufactures DNA vaccines and the Moscow Scientific Research Institute of Clinical Immunology makes vaccines based on recombinant proteins.

"Through a gene-engineering method our vaccine contains a synthesized protein, which has fragments of the virus and internal proteins," says Rakhim Khaitov, the scientific director of the Immunology Institute. "A certain molecule, the immunostimulator, is chemically attached to it. Together they create very strong immunity. Thus the infected patient's body produces an antibody that neutralizes the virus."

The vaccine can carry out its function in as little as a few days. Then the polymeric molecules break down to elementary monomers and leave the body. As a result the drug practically has no side effects and is completely non-toxic. The drug, which the Immunology Institute developed in 2004, became Russia's first anti-HIV and anti-AIDS vaccine to be used in clinical experiments.

In 2012 in the first phase of testing the vaccine for safety and activity the results were a success. However, the second and third phases (the fourth phase must be international) have still not taken place due to technical complications and a lack of volunteers and financing. Meanwhile, Khaitov says that in these three years science has advanced greatly and today the institute could produce a more updated vaccine.

According to Saldanha, the absence of necessary funding for the production of vaccines is a global problem. "In 2013, global HIV vaccine research and development saw the largest decline in funding since 2008," says Saldanha. "In order to transform promising concepts into an effective and accessible HIV vaccine, increased and sustained funding will be critical."

 #6
Foreign financing of Russian NGOs surge in 2014-2015 - financial monitoring authorities

MOSCOW, July 3. /TASS/. Foreign financing of Russian non-government organizations (NGOs), including those engaged in destructive activities, has considerably increased in the past 18 months, Pavel Livadny, a deputy director of Russia's Federal Service for Financial Monitoring, said on Friday.

"As compared with 2013, financing of foreign agents from certain organizations has considerably increased in 2014 and 2015 (although certain decrease is reported in 2015). Moreover, there is a tendency of consolidation of resources in big organizations and certain decrease in those which financed local movements," he told a meeting at the Federation Council, or upper house of the Russian parliament, dedicated to the formation of a 'patriotic stop list" and a list of "undesirable NGOs."

"It means we can now single out these organizations, which undoubtedly can be referred to as undesirable or put on the 'patriotic stop list,'" he said.

"These biggest organizations are financing the activity of various NGOs in Russia, first of all, foreign agents, as political players," Livadny said.

"'Foreign agents,' or organizations directly engaged in political activities, account for 90-95% of financing."

Livadny drew attention to the variety of methods used by non-government organizations. "Sometimes, these are demonstrative methods. Having encountered tough reaction of the Russian authorities and society, these methods give way to guile, i.e. financing via commercial organizations, via individuals and be means of using e-payment systems," he said.

When asked to confirm that foreign financing of Russian NGOs in 2014 had reached 70 billion rubles ($1.25 billion), Livadny said, "About that much, even more." "It is rather lavish financing. But the situation is developing dynamically and it is difficult to say a concrete figure - it will only disorient society," he said.

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 #7
www.rt.com
July 3, 2015
Foreign Ministry praises law banning undesirable foreign groups in Russia

Russia's deputy FM has told senators that the recently introduced law allowing automatic bans on groups that pose a threat to national security was a necessary step, adding that many such NGOs were in reality funded by foreign governments.

"We hold that the passing of the law on undesirable organizations was without any questions a step in the right direction," Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov said at the Friday session of the Federation Council. He added that the new law was a significant and much-needed follow-up to the "Foreign Agents Law" passed in 2012.

Gatilov also said that a long time ago the Russian Foreign Ministry had noticed that many organizations working abroad as NGOs were in reality funded by their home country's governments.

At the same time, the deputy minister stated that recognizing certain organizations as undesirable must happen only after serious joint work of several state agencies, and such moves should target only particular groups, with detailed explanations at every step.

Next week, the Upper House of the Russian Parliament is scheduled to look into the list of organizations that can be listed as undesirable, according to prosecutors' decisions. Russian media has reported that the preliminary list includes 15 groups, but has not disclosed any names.

The bill on undesirable foreign organizations was signed into law by President Vladimir Putin in late May. The new law allows the Prosecutor General's Office and the Foreign Ministry to create a proscribed list of "undesirable foreign organizations," making the activities of such groups in Russia illegal. The main criterion for putting a foreign or international NGO on the list is a "threat to the constitutional order and defense capability, or to the security of the Russian state."

Non-compliance with the ban can be punished by administrative penalties, and for repeated and aggravated offenses can carry prison sentences of up to six years. Russian citizens and organizations that continue to work with banned groups would face administrative fines only.

Foreign and international NGOs, as well as the Russian domestic rights community, criticized the new law as "exotic" and "shocking," while the European Union and the United States have officially expressed their concern over the new Russian law. The US State Department said in a statement that the move banning cooperation with various foreign groups could bring about the isolation of the Russian people from the outside world.

Russian politicians who had prepared and promoted the bill replied that it was more of a preventive measure and it was not targeting any particular organizations.

The so-called "Foreign Agents Law" introduced in late 2012 orders all NGOs engaged in Russian politics and receiving any funding from abroad to register as foreign agents or risk substantial fines. Groups with "foreign agent" status are banned from sponsoring Russian political parties, but otherwise their activities are not restricted.

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 #8
Politkom.ru
June 29, 2015
Russia set to further increase pressure on "foreign agent" NGOs - commentary
Konstantin Yemelyanov, Fight against 'foreign agents': A new level?

Twice last week President Vladimir Putin spoke angrily about foreign influence on Russia's domestic affairs. First, at a meeting with members of the Public Chamber, he sharply criticized the Society for the Protection of Consumer Rights, which published advice for Russian tourists travelling to Crimea. Then, on 24 June, speaking at a meeting of the Council for Science and Education in the Kremlin, he warned about foreign organizations and foundations operating in the Russian Federation that "rummage around schools" under the guise of supporting talented young people.

Putin's meeting with Public Chamber members proceeded along the usual lines: The president repeatedly said he was satisfied with the chamber's work and that he views it as a successful project. Nowadays the Public Chamber has become a convenient and comfortable platform for the authorities to build their relationships with the section of society that has adapted to the current political conditions and, in return, has gained access to a dialogue with the state. Public Chamber members, in turn, expressed appreciation for the authorities' moves to give them a chance to influence the legislative process (through the "zero reading" [of draft laws] and the public councils attached to official bodies).

The political issues raised at the meeting stayed within the framework of the agenda set by the authorities. For example, the Public Chamber has worked on amendments to the law on non-commercial organizations: The decision was taken to place high-profile non-profits and those that provide major benefits to society on a separate register. They will need to make more information public, but in return they will get concessions. Human rights campaigners see this register as a way of dividing non-profit organizations into "good" and "bad", as a result of which the latter group may come under increased pressure from the authorities. The members of the Public Chamber did not raise more controversial issues, for example, the changes to the concept of "foreign agent", themselves. This problem was brought up by Putin himself, who largely spoke in support of this idea but agreed that the term needed to be "spelled out".

It was while discussing the work of "foreign agents" that Putin described the work of the Society for the Protection of Consumer Rights (OZPP) as "serving the interests of foreign states". He said that this was exactly why the concept of "foreign agents" had been introduced, so that "foreign states did not use instruments like this to interfere in our internal political affairs". In its Crimea travel advice the OZPP advised Russian citizens to obtain permission from the Ukrainian authorities. The organization explained that this advice was given because under "the current norms of international law" Crimea and Sevastopol are "occupied" territories. The OZPP also advised not to buy expensive, international-brand items. After the advice was published, the Russian Federation General Prosecutor's Office ordered a criminal investigation to be opened under the law on attempts to violate the country's territorial integrity.

Two days after the criticism from Putin, Roskomnadzor [Federal Agency for Oversight in the Sphere of Communications, Information Technology, and the Mass Media] blacklisted OZPP Chairman Mikhail Anshakov's blog for inciting extremism and mass unrest (in actual fact for publishing the travel advice, which had by that time already been taken down). Anshakov claimed that his organization did not get funding from abroad, but adopted the status of "foreign agent" as a sign of solidarity with other nonprofit organizations. It turned out, however, that the society was not even registered as a legal entity.

Following this Putin gave made a further statement, this time at the meeting of the Council for Science and Education in  he Kremlin. He called for attention to be paid to the work of foreign organizations and foundations in the Russian Federation, who "rummage around schools" under the guise of supporting talented young people. The head of state complained that many gifted children get foreign grants and head abroad straight after graduating from high school. The president said this after a speech by Vladimir Fortov, head of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in which he raised the issue of the large number of Russian scientist leaving the country.

As the meeting continued the head of state said that life itself often determines the priorities for the development of science. He said that in Soviet times "the priorities were dictated by the country's need to survive, and all efforts were focused on that". "Nowadays the challenges are more diverse and sometimes it is hard to determine what is most important, even from the point of view of ensuring our state's defence capability and security. But in order not to miss anything, we need to organize our work properly so that the state's resources are used effectively," he added. Putin also said that science and education should not be over-regulated. He added that it would be a "terrible mistake" if we were to specify exactly what needed to be done and by whom, because, as always happens in any bureaucratic structure like a government, this would lead to no-one doing anything else.

The president's rhetoric indicates that it is not just those organizations with organizational or financial links to the West that are considered an internal threat, but also those which, in the eyes of the authorities, are potentially acting in a way that advantages the West. This drastically expands the area of interest to the security services, which may also result in tightening the legislation (intended to reduce the possibilities of "influencing" Russia's domestic policy) and an increase in pressure on "dissenters".

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 #9
Rossiya 1 TV (Moscow)
July 1, 2015
TV says NGOs sponsored by foreign funds want to destabilize Russia

The 1 July edition of the "Special Correspondent" talk show on Russian official state TV channel Rossiya 1 was dedicated to "foreign agents" operating in Russia - those whose "single goal is to destabilize the country", according to presenter Yevgeniy Popov.

A 25-minute film, "Poisonous exports", made by correspondent Olga Skabeyeva, was shown as part of the talk show, and was discussed by guest panellists.

Introducing the film, Popov said: "A lot of organizations and foundations don't hide that their aim is to destabilize the situation, change our authorities, change the course of history and rewrite history."

The film

The film, as clear from its name, took a dim view of Russian NGOs which receive grants from foreign donors. Before the film, the author Skabeyeva said: "There are many NGOs which are openly engaged in subversive activities. They are no simply foreign agents, they are provocateurs, they are traitors who are ready to betray Russia."

Several "foreign agents" and their donors were named in Skabeyeva's film:

- the Memorial Yekaterinburg office, led by Anna Pastukhova, takes money from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and is on friendly terms with US consul in Yekaterinburg Otto Hans Van Maerssen;

- Aleksandr Yermoshkin, a "notorious Khabarovsk-based provocateur" and "an open homosexual", had contacts with American diplomats and is "ready to carry out instructions by American special services";

- Arkhangelsk-based NGO Rakurs, which deal with LGBT issues, is funded by NED;

- NGO Planeta Nadezhd (Planet of Hopes), led by Nadezhda Kutepova, is funded by the NED. Ostensibly, the NGO supports mothers and children, but in fact is engaged in industrial espionage and wants to lift restrictions on access to several Russian towns, such as Ozersk, which hosts the Mayak nuclear enterprise;

- Scott Blacklin, former president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Russia, recorded while he was in custody after being detained in Nizhniy Novgorod for "illegally" entering Russia. He has since been deported from Russia and barred from entering the country. Correspondent said that in Russia Blacklin had been "looking for gifted students" in order to persuade them to study in US universities;

- US national Kendrick White was allowed to hold the post of vice-rector at the Lobachevskiy State University of Nizhny Novgorod; during his tenure portraits of Russian scientists "disappeared from the corridors for some reason".

- the National Endowment for Democracy promotes US government interests in Russia while hiding its real objectives;

- "Three Washington foundations" - the International Republican Institute, the Soros Foundation and the McArthur Foundation - have "increased their anti-Russian budget"; the McArthur Foundation "has been unsuccessfully investing hundreds of thousands" in research into opposition figure Aleksey Navalnyy's impact on Russian minds;

Skabeyev enlisted support of several American political analysts:

- Executive Intelligence Review magazine chief editor Jeffrey Steinberg said the US state system wants to destroy Russia's state system;

- William Blum, introduced as a former US State Department employee, attacked American foreign policy and accused the USA of interfering into Russia's affairs;

- independent correspondent Michael (?Huge) said Washington pumps billions in NGOs around the world, which overthrow governments and destroy whole countries.

The discussion: Russia

A usual full-scale shouting match followed. Mediator Popov strongly supported those panellists who agreed with the views expressed in the film.

Sergey Kurginyan, political scientist and leader of the Sut Vremeni (Thrust of Time) movement, said Russia would never be a banana republic controlled by two or three American organizations that carry out colour revolutions throughout the world.

Vitaliy Tretyakov, journalist and political analyst, said he did not want the American experts to improve the situation in Russia. "I will improve it myself, my fellow citizens will improve it," he said to the audience's applause.

People disagreeing with the Kremlin line are usually shouted down on such shows but Sergey Mitrokhin, chairman of the Yabloko party, offered an unexpectedly robust resistance and managed to get his views across, despite numerous attempts by his opponents and the presenter to interrupt him.

Mitrokhin condemned the film as lies, "pure Stalinist propaganda" and example of spy-mania reminiscent of Stalin's purges the 30s of the last century. He said the current Americanophobia is absurd and accused the ruling One Russia party of hypocrisy as its members regularly go abroad using money from foreign funds.

Mitrokhin was supported by Boris Nadezhdin, president of the Institute of National Projects and Legislation, who slammed the current "witch-hunt" and said that much of what the USA and the EU are trying to sponsor is very useful for Russia.

The discussion: Ukraine

The perils of NGOs working on foreign sponsors' money was illustrated by Ukraine's example.

Kurginyan said: "The Americans bring nothing but evil to the world. <...> They brought enormous harm to Ukraine. They did not strengthen democracy there. They have strengthened fascism there, and are going to do the same in Russia."

Wrapping up the discussion, Popov said: "We hope very much that malicious NGOs that aim to destabilize the situation in Russia will be reined in. <...> It is obvious from the film that the forces behind these NGOs don't care whether Russia faces a revolution, or floods, or poverty, or economic collapse. They need a certain illness in Russia, because when a country suffers from illness, when it hurts, it is very easy to manage. And it will accept any terms, as Ukraine has clearly demonstrated."

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#10
Sputnik
July 3, 2015
Russian Consumer Confidence Grows as Middle Class Foresees Recovery

Russia's middle class reported a positive outlook about the country's well-being for the first time ever in an economic survey published by Sberbank's corporate investment subsidiary.

Russia's consumer confidence index grew by eight percentage points in the second quarter of 2015, Sberbank Investment Research said in a release on Thursday.

Much of the growth in the index was a result of a growth in optimism regarding personal well-being in the next 12 months compared to previous periods. In the index, respondents also recorded an optimistic outlook about national well-being for the first time since the index began tracking responses in 2013. The index is aimed at tracking the well-being of middle-income consumers, colloquially called "the Ivanovs," a common Russian surname.

"The optimism is explained by the fact that the Ivanovs' most gloomy expectations did not materialize, while diminished concerns about the exchange rate and inflation contributed to an improved perception of the current economic environment," the release said.

Russian consumer confidence was lowest in the fourth quarter of 2014, when falling oil prices, compounded by structural economic issues and Western sanctions, led to a devaluation of the Russian ruble. Russia's economy continued struggling in 2015 as relative GDP and industrial output continued to decline in May, although inflation and the decline in retail trade decreased year-on-year.

"We believe this is mostly due to eased fears of inflation, ruble depreciation and a less downbeat perception of the current state of the economy (9% fewer respondents believe that the Russian economy is unstable)," the release added.

Negative trends remained, including 39 percent of respondents having no savings, compared with 36 percent in the previous quarter. In addition, unemployment remained high at 10.3 percent and remained the second-biggest concern after inflation.

Positive trends included a considerable 10 percent rise in people prepared to make large purchases while 8 percent increased spending across the board.
Respondents also increased the number of chains they shop at, indicating bargain-hunting, while the proportion saying that they are trying to save on staple goods decreased, which could indicate increased competition among chains.

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 #11
Bloomberg
July 2, 2015
Ruble's Top Forecaster Sees Deeper Rout as Companies Repay Debt
by Ksenia Galouchko

While still the best performer in the world this year, no emerging-market currency has fallen more in the past month as the effect of rebounding oil prices faded. Approaching foreign-debt payments and a shrinking economy probably mean it has a further 10 percent to drop this quarter, according to BNP Paribas SA's Piotr Chwiejczak, the most accurate ruble forecaster in the four quarters through June 30.

After a year of sanctions over Ukraine, Russian corporations remain shut out of foreign capital markets, meaning someone needs to sell rubles every time an international debt is paid. As well as a corporate bill this quarter that's more than half as big again as the previous three months, the ruble is also under pressure as the Bank of Russia continues to buy foreign exchange, fueling speculation the government is demanding a weaker currency.

"Rolling over debt has become a problem for companies under sanctions," Chwiejczak said by phone on Thursday. "Russia has serious long-term structural issues."

The ruble has slumped about 11 percent since the Bank of Russia's purchases, designed to help rebuild its reserves to $500 billion from $362 billion, began on May 13. Companies need to pay back or refinance $33.4 billion of foreign debt through September, with almost half of the total coming due that month, central bank data show. On top of that, Brent crude has fallen about 7 percent since mid-May.

Major Drivers

The range of factors buffeting the Russian currency make its strength or weakness in three months' time hard to predict, according to Chwiejczak, who says the ruble will end the period at 62. It dropped 0.4 percent to 55.776 versus the greenback as of 1:17 p.m. in Moscow on Friday.

In April, Chwiejczak lowered his exchange-rate forecast for the end of the second quarter to 58.94, while the currency finished the period almost 7 percent stronger.

Regardless of the discrepancy, Chwiejczak sees risks for a "gradual weakening" through September. "Major drivers for the ruble will be sanctions, economy, Ukraine, external debt payments and oil," he said.

The European Union last month extended its penalties over Russia's role in the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

Oil Support

Dmitry Polevoy, the chief economist at ING Groep NV in Moscow, was more bullish on the ruble's prospects, saying it will weaken only slightly to 56.1 in the period. The fifth most accurate forecaster expects oil will be supportive as it recovers to average $70 per barrel. That's more than 12 percent above where Brent was trading on Thursday.

Options data compiled by Bloomberg show a 57 percent probability that Russia's currency will reach the level Polevoy envisages by Sept. 30, compared with a 21 percent chance for the drop forecast by BNP Paribas.

Higher oil prices "will neutralize the negative effect from rising foreign-debt payments and concerns regarding a possible September rate hike in the U.S.," Polevoy said by e-mail.

Still, with 50 percent of Russian budget revenue generated from oil and natural gas industries, Chwiejczak at BNP said it's in the government's interests to keep the ruble lower. It slid 5.4 percent against the dollar in June, the most since January.

Budget Benefit

Having a weaker currency boosts budget revenue from exports priced in dollars and euros. It's also a "much more potent" tool than government spending to counter the economic slump, because it makes local producers more competitive, President Vladimir Putin said last month at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

The economy will contract 3.5 percent this year, the first recession since 2009, and the budget deficit will be the widest since 2010 at 3 percent of gross domestic product, economist forecasts compiled by Bloomberg show.

"Russia will need to keep the ruble weaker to fill the budget," Chwiejczak said. "Russia is facing not just sanctions, but also a very high reliance on the oil price. So the central bank had to find an equilibrium between all its supportive measures and huge political uncertainty."

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 #12
Business New Europe
www.bne.eu
July 2, 2015
MOSCOW BLOG: And now...a murder rap for Khodorkovsky?
Ben Aris in Moscow

On June 30, the spokesman for Russia's Investigative Committee, Vladimir Markin, made a shocking allegation. He accused the former head of Yukos oil major Mikhail Khodorkovsky of ordering the 1998 murder of Vladimir Petukhov, the mayor of Nefteyugansk, and several other crimes.

The announcement was shocking, as throughout the scandal that followed Khodorkovsky's arrest and trial in 2003, ending with the re-nationalisation of his company, which now makes up the core of state-owned oil giant Rosneft, observers were expecting exactly that charge to come up every day. It is the Kremlin's trump card in its perennial battle with Khodorkovsky, because unlike the spurious tax evasion and fraud charges he was eventually jailed for, this could credibly be laid at his door. Indeed, former KGB officer and Yukos head of security Alexei Pichugin was convicted of precisely this murder in 2007, as well as killing and assaulting several other people who stood in Khodorkovsky's way.

There are a few possible explanations why this Kremlin ace is being played now, including that after the toppled tycoon found his feet in the free world again, his family's stance against his former captors is starting to become more than an irritant. But there are other reasons that require a recap on this mucky and bloodstained chapter in modern Russia's history.

Surprise!

At the end of the 1990s, Khodorkovsky was locked in conflict with the popular Petukhov for control of the local oil producer Yuganskneftegaz, one of the three oil enterprises that eventually formed the heart of Yukos (and now Rosneft). Petukhov successfully resisted Yukos' attempts to privatise the facility until on June 26, 1998, he was brutally mown down by machine gun fire while walking home after work and left to die in a ditch.

The investigation concluded that the killing was an assassination, coordinated by former Yukos oil company vice-president Leonid Nevzlin, who has lived in self-imposed exile in Israel since 2003, and organised on the ground by Pichugin.

The killing happened to fall on the birthday of Khodorkovsky, who was informed of Petukhov's death at a party he was holding at the Yukos club house in central Moscow. According to several bne IntelliNews sources who were present at the party, Khodorkovsky was furious, presumably realising that he could be implicated in the killing. He was right.

This is not the first time the accusation of Khodorkovsky's involvement has come up. Petukhov's widow, Farida Islamova, also accused Khodorkovsky of complicity in her husband's death in a book published in Prague last June. "There is a man whose name is Khodorkovsky who is telling the whole world that he's not guilty of the murder of Vladimir Petukhov, but the truth is the opposite," Islamova said during the book's English-version launch in Prague. She argues in the book that Khodorkovsky was aware that "an organized gang of killers was operating under the 'roof' of his Yukos company".

Before that, Steve Allen, a prominent oil analyst who worked at Renaissance Capital during Yukos' heyday and is now co-head of investor relations at a leading commercial Russian oil company, sent a letter to the Wall Street Journal just before the13th anniversary of Petukhov's death asking: "Is Khodorkovsky the Al Capone of Russia?"

"Regarding the editorial on Russia in today's Journal by Anne Jolis ('Khodorkovsky heads back to Siberia' June 15th, 2011), I could not help but notice the significance of the date," Allen wrote. "Exactly 13 years ago today, on June 15th, 1998, the mayor of the Siberian oil city of Nefteyugansk sent a letter to Boris Yeltsin and nine of the top officials in the Russian government. The mayor, Vladimir Petukhov, used the letter to assail the 'murderous policies' carried out by Khodorkovsky's YUKOS group in his city, and demanded a tax and criminal investigation into that group and various related (and named) shell companies. In his closing, instead of using the typical 'with respect', he uses the less typical phrase 'with hope!' Eleven days later, on Khodorkovsky's 35th birthday, Petukhov was shot to death on the street outside his office."

Petukhov's letter goes into a great deal of detail making very specific allegations of scams, fraud and non-payment of taxes, naming names and calling for the sacking and/or arrest of several key local officials that the mayor claimed were on the Yukos payroll.

Timing is everything

That leaves the biggest question of: why is the Investigative Committee now making the accusation? If it is so easy to bring a charge of murder against Khodorkovsky that could be made to stick, given the malleability of the Russian legal system, why wasn't it brought in 2003 and Khodorkovsky put away for life?

There is no easy answer to this question. One likely answer is that the Kremlin didn't want to play all its cards at once. It was always going to win the showdown with Yukos and convict Khodorkovsky on tax evasion charges, so there was no need to charge him with murder. Now that Khodorkovsky is living in Switzerland a free man and events connected with him and his former company have taken a decidedly bad turn for Russia, it's time to play that trump card.

The Kremlin is clearly unhappy with Khodorkovsky's political activities, despite the fact that he has maintained a pretty low profile since being released. The same is not true of his son Pavel Khodorkovsky, who has financed the Institute of Modern Russia, a political lobbying organisation that is actively denigrating the Kremlin and runs things like The Interpreter, a website dedicated to rubbishing the Kremlin.

Then there has been the continuing international legal actions taken by former Yukos shareholders against the Russian state. Their most significant victory came last year when the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague awarded them $50bn, which the Russian state has refused to pay. This has led to the investors seeking court orders to freeze, and ultimately seize, Russian state assets all over the world, which exploded into the headlines on June 18 when court bailiffs in Belgium and France began seizing Russian state property and freezing bank accounts, including the Paris offices of the Russia Today television channel. The Kremlin is said to be seething.

Finally, there is simply the reason that Alexander Bastrykin, head of the Investigative Committee, has a personal grudge against Khodorkovsky. The committee has been running a pretty much continuous investigation into Khodorkovsky since it was set up - even while he was still in jail.

It's who you know

Liberal economist and the intellectual powerhouse behind Russia's most liberal reforms in the last decade, Professor Sergei Guriev, fled Russia on April 30, 2013 after he was called in for questioning by the Investigative Committee's investigators in connection with his contacts with Khodorkovsky a few days earlier. (Khodorkovsky provided some financing for Guriev's New Economic School.)

"They said I was being questioned in an investigation, but they made it sound more like I was a suspect," Guriev told First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov the weekend before he fled while asking for protection, according to bne IntelliNews sources familiar with the meeting. Shuvalov told Guriev there was nothing he could do and recommended he keep a low profile for a few months. Guriev decided he didn't want to live in a country where his freedom was in jeopardy for simply knowing the wrong people and chose political exile instead.  

Meanwhile, Russia seems not to doubt its 'long arm of the law' in following up the new charges with a questioning of the suspect. Khodorkovsky's "absence from Russian territory would not be an insurmountable obstacle", Investigative Committee spokesman Markin said in his June 30 statement.

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 #13
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
July 3, 2015
Dismissal of American vice rector in Nizhny Novgorod causes controversy
The dismissal of an American lecturer from a leading position at a Russian university following an "incriminating" report on television sparked talk of an increase in the harassment of foreigners. Russian lawmakers are planning to introduce a "patriotic stop list" - a list of foreign funds allegedly destabilizing the situation in the country. In interviews with RBTH, experts discuss whether the Russian authorities are on a greater course toward isolation.
Yekaterina Sinelschikova, RBTH

Renowned venture capitalist Kendrick White, a U.S. citizen, was dismissed as vice rector for innovation at Nizhny Novgorod State University (UNN) after state television aired a report on "exposing" foreigners.

On June 28, Dmitry Kiselyov, a television journalist and head of Rossiya Segodnya international news agency, reported on the initiative of the upper chamber of the Russian parliament to form a so-called "patriotic stop list" - a list of foreign organizations that are likely to work to destabilize Russia.

A source at the Council of the Federation revealed to the media on condition of anonymity that the "stop list" would include more than 20 groups, such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, the Soros Foundation and others. It is expected that the activities of some of these organizations will be effectively prohibited following inspections by the Prosecutor General's office.

After this introduction, Kiselyov presented a report about likely candidates for this "list." One of them happened to be White. "How could it happen that such a position was taken by a U.S. citizen, a businessman from Washington, is still not clear," the report stated. White was reproached for hanging pictures of American scientists on the walls of the university, while "portraits of Russian scientists have disappeared."
 
Mysterious dismissal

In the 1990s, White created one of the first Russian training centers for aspiring entrepreneurs. In 2005, he founded and headed the investment and consulting company Marchmont Capital Partners and since 2013 he has worked as a vice rector at UNN, where he was engaged, among other things, in the commercialization of technology projects, including taking them to global markets.

The day after the television report all information about White was removed from the university's website and it was reported that White was dismissed as a result of "the restructuring of the system of UNN's innovation management connected with the need to strengthen its scientific component." The university told RBTH that White was "on vacation abroad."

White himself was unavailable for comment. Scientists familiar with White underlined that the dismissal came "after a propagandist broadcast," as a "sinister" event and expressed concern that it could be "the beginning of the persecution of foreigners."
 
Move towards greater isolation?

In an interview with RBTH, Isak Froumin, director of the Institute of Education at the Higher School of Economics, described the Nizhny Novgorod incident as a "shot in the foot."

"The country that now needs most to break through the isolation continues to isolate itself," Froumin said. According to him, this case is "not the first."

"A year ago I was asked to give advice on the strategic development of the education system in one of the Russian regions and it happened so that I was being visited at that time by a renowned scholar who advised the governments of different countries," Froumin said. "I asked him to come with me. At first the partners from the region were very happy, but then they said, 'No, we're going to discuss strategic issues, why do we call the Americans?'"

If foreign experts already have thought 10 times before coming to work in Russia, they "will now think a hundred times," he said.

"To dismiss him after the broadcast is nonsense," Alexei Kondrashov, a professor of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, told RBTH.

"Five years ago, the country allocated mega-grants to invite foreigners for a lot of money, but now they are being kicked out, it turns out," he said. "Have they lost their minds?" Kondrashov also works at Moscow State University's Laboratory of Evolutionary Genomics that he founded and admits that, despite his dual citizenship (Russian and American), he has "not yet been harassed" by anyone, although he could now be considered a foreign specialist.

The story of the American vice rector is "not very good" indeed, agrees Sergei Markov, director of the Institute of Political Studies. The institute is considered loyal to the Kremlin. On the other hand, Markov says that, "it is quite natural and necessary."

"It is the public opinion that demands that the Russian authorities at all levels, including university rectors, raise suspicion against citizens of countries that support the terrorist policy of the Kiev authorities," he told RBTH, referring to the government in Ukraine, which some in Russia regard as illegitimate.
 
"Neither morally nor politically right"

"What is now observed in Russia is a tendency toward self-isolation, to erect a new wall between Russia and, above all, the West," Pavel Salin, a political scientist and director of the Center for Political Studies at the Finance University under the Government of the Russian Federation, told RBTH.

Froumin notes that the presence of foreign professors and leaders at the university is "definitely a competitive advantage, it is normal." For example, take the Moscow Physical and Technical University, which is closely connected to defense topics, among other things. "Fortunately, no one so far is surprised that the Chairman of its International Advisory Council is the President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [Leo Rafael Reif]," Froumin says.

As for the "stop list," its emergence is an attempt to give the law on "undesirable" foreign organizations (the registry still lists none) some kind of effect, said Salin. As the initiator of the "stop list", Konstantin Kosachyov, the head of the Federation Council Committee on International Affairs, previously announced at a meeting of the upper house, "we do not have either moral or political right to allow the collapse of the country," so "we must maintain effective control of foreign players."

At the time of writing, Kosachyov was unavailable for comment. It is expected that the "patriotic stop list" will officially be adopted at a session of the Duma on July 8, 2015.

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 #14
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.com
July 2, 2015
The Greek crisis: Implications for Russia and the U.S.
Head of Russia's Council on Foreign and Defense Policy (CFDP) Fyodor Lukyanov, says the Greek crisis may have knock-on effects for relations between Russia, the United States and the European Union.
By Fyodor Lukyanov
Fyodor Lukyanov is the Editor-in-Chief of Russia in Global Affairs. He graduated from Moscow State University's philology faculty. He has been writing on international affairs since 1990. He has worked with Moscow Radio International, the newspapers Segodnya, Vremya MN and Vremya Novosti. He is Chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defence Policy.

At this stage in the crisis, no one can be certain how the Greek fiasco will end. This is partially due to the fact that it is not a cause, but rather a consequence and symptom, of a deeper structural crisis at the heart of the European Union.

However, the view that a horrible end is preferable to an endless horror is beginning to become increasingly apparent.

After all, even if Athens and its creditors had shaken hands on Saturday, that would not have resolved the situation. It would merely have granted the parties involved a reprieve of six months, at most, before passions began to boil once more with even greater intensity. In any case, the euro zone will not heal itself without a large dose of painful medicine.

Strange as it may seem, despite the enmity between the Greek government and the leaders of the euro zone, another deferment is still on the table. Greece is running out of options. A default will solve nothing by itself, but simply mark the start of the acute phase of the calamity.

For German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the chief architect of the five-year policy of "saving" Athens, a collapse would mean not only political defeat, but also the need to embark on an extremely risky voyage over the waves of European reform with a view towards integration - i.e., towards assuming a level of responsibility many times greater than before. In any event, perhaps for the first time in its history, the European project faces a major internal challenge to the very principles of its existence.

Russia and the U.S. in Southern Europe

Russia is no curious bystander. The structural shifts taking place in the country's immediate vicinity are of the same magnitude as those during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Moreover, the EU is still Russia's biggest trading partner. Even the strained relations of the past year have not dented the volume of trade significantly. What conclusions can one draw from this?

First of all, the European Union's once predictable-looking path of development can no longer be taken as certain. The model will change, accompanied by an inevitable adjustment in policy, both regionally and globally.

However, the exact course it will take is difficult to calculate, since there are many variables, some of which are contradictory. An unpleasant consequence for Moscow could be a larger role for the United States on the European continent.

The surge of problems (including Greece and the perhaps-even-more-explosive issue of mass immigration from the south) will cause the EU to focus inwards, reducing options for outer expansion, in particular a more active policy in the post-Soviet space.

But the EU's failure as a regional manager is alarming the United States, which in the past decade has taken its eye off Mother Europe in the vain hope that a unified continent would ensure order as a matter of course. Not only did that not happen (case in point: Ukraine), but now, even events that once seemed certain are now being called into question.

In particular, Washington is anxious about Brussels'inability to deal with Athens in connection with Greece's role in NATO. Given the Cold War rhetoric that has reentered Russian-U.S. relations, a weakening of the chain of collective defense in southern Europe is unfortunate timing for the White House.
The result may be the return of the United States to European affairs. The doubling of efforts in European capitals (Berlin in particular has espoused the values of Atlanticism) to reach an agreement on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), designed to economically cement the collective West, is already noticeable.

Accordingly, Washington's willingness to delegate policy in the post-Soviet space to European partners will decrease, and its own involvement will increase.
That could reopen a division that took place 30 years ago, perhaps with more serious consequences. Back then some European countries (Germany, France, Italy) contrived to conduct a non-U.S. policy in respect of the Soviet Union, since Washington generally trusted them. Today the United States is beginning to doubt their competence.

Greece: seeking support from Russia and China

If in the coming days Athens and Berlin/Brussels do not pull off another nifty move, Moscow (and Beijing) can expect a file of Greek supplicants asking for loose change. Caution is called for, however, since investments in the country at present are a game of roulette.

This game is one in which the wheel can be manipulated by the croupier and the players themselves. Substantive talks with Greece on economic cooperation are only possible once the situation has become clearer - in whichever direction. Otherwise, there is no point in playing a game that can be rigged at any moment.

Another lesson to be drawn from the Greek crisis is that ill-conceived integration in which politics prevails over economics is a dead horse. Official proponents of the Eurasian Economic Union should take heed, and put an immediate end to the dreamy statements issued periodically about an imminent transition to a monetary union.

The article was first published in Russian in the Russia in Global Affairs magazine.

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 #15
Reuters
July 3, 2015
Russian Engages in Waiting Game Over Greece's EU Referendum

Russian President Vladimir Putin must be finding it hard to contain a wry smile as the European Union struggles with Greece's debt problems.

Events are playing into his hands by diverting attention from the conflict in Ukraine and offering him a chance to exploit differences in the EU which might undermine unity on sanctions against Russia over Ukraine.

Russia's fragile economy would certainly not escape unscathed if Greece left the euro zone or the EU, and the crisis could serve as a worrying lesson for Moscow as it builds its own political and economic bloc with other former Soviet republics.

But Russia is now one of the few countries Athens might realistically turn to for money and state-run media are having a field day, depicting the EU as a discredited and dysfunctional empire in terminal decline.

"I do think that they're going to use Greece as a tool against Germany, as a tool against the European Union," Yevgenia Albats, a prominent Russian commentator and editor of the independent New Times magazine, told Reuters.

"That's exactly what the Soviets did, that's exactly what the KGB did during the Cold War, when they were using countries and governments, especially poor ones, in their war with Western civilization."

State media portray Greece's crisis as just the start of the EU's problems, suggesting Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy could be next if Greece left the euro zone.

"Grexit", many loyal media outlets suggest, is now all but inevitable.

News about the crisis on state-controlled news channel Russia-24 is accompanied by a graphic declaring: "Greece - almost over." The popular daily Komsomolskaya Pravda this week ran the headline: "Greek tragedy. Divorce already near."

Far-left politician Eduard Limonov wrote an article for Izvestia newspaper under the headline "Crumbling empire" that smacked of a feeling of revenge, nearly a quarter of a century after the Soviet Union fell apart.

"In short, many countries have reasons to leave the EU but Greece will be the first to summon up the courage to do so," he wrote. "Everything is bad, everything is heading towards the European empire falling apart..."

Reassuring the People

The Kremlin has played down suggestions Russia might bail out its Orthodox Christian brothers, describing it as a problem for Athens and its creditors to solve, "not a matter for us."

With a hint of schadenfreude, the Kremlin voiced concern about "negative consequences" for the EU and the central bank and the Finance Ministry offered reassurances that the Russian economy and financial markets would not be badly affected.

Russia has relatively little exposure to Greek banks and government debt, but a Greek exit from the eurozone would limit risk appetite worldwide and Russian assets are seen as risky.

Few would rule out entirely the possibility that Putin is still waiting for the best moment to come to Greece's rescue, or that Prime Minister Alexei Tsipras might make a last-minute request for aid after making two visits to Russia this year.

Washington has been lobbying European leaders to do all they can to support Greece; global markets would be disrupted if Athens left the euro and Greece could block an extension of EU sanctions against Russia or make NATO decision-making difficult if it felt it had little to lose.

Some Russian experts want Greece to give up on its Western partners, join a Russia-led customs union and sign up for the Moscow-dominated Eurasian Economic Union, intended to challenge the economic power of the EU, China and the United States.

"It has one option; leave NATO and then, for company, join us," said Mikhail Delyagin, a prominent economist.

But Russia's embrace of Greece has so far been less than fulsome. Both sides said financial aid was not discussed when Tsipras and Putin met in St Petersburg last month, where the main outcome was the signing of a memorandum of understanding on cooperation over building a gas pipeline.

"There are no resources (in our budget to provide money)," Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Storchak told Reuters at the time.

Russia has its own economic crisis, worsened by the EU and U.S. sanctions over Ukraine and a fall in the global price of oil, its most important export. Bailing out another country might anger voters facing financial problems themselves.

Moscow did not bail out Cyprus when it faced a debt crisis in 2013 and a $3-billion loan to Kiev in December 2013, intended as a sweetener to prevent Ukraine joining mainstream Europe, backfired when President Viktor Yanukovych was toppled two months later following street protests.

Russia has other reasons for caution. Holding together a large political bloc is not proving easy for Brussels and may not be for Moscow if its Eurasian Economic Union expands beyond Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan.

Russia is already struggling to convince others to adopt one currency.

Some experts say the EU's problems could also cause the United States to lose faith in Brussels as an economic, security and political partner, encouraging it to play a more direct role in Europe, something Moscow would oppose.

"All this strengthens the tendency towards a return to the standoff of 30 years ago, possibly in the worst form," foreign policy analyst Fyodor Lyukanov wrote in the government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta.

In other words, Putin might yet not have the last laugh.

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 #16
Christian Science Monitor
July 3, 2015
Goodbye Washington, hello Moscow? Saudi Arabia finds friendly face in Putin.
The two oil-producing giants seem to have made a breakthrough last month in their often adversarial relationship, signing several cooperation pacts. But incompatible foreign policies may yet cool the new warmth.
By Fred Weir, Correspondent

MOSCOW - As the world's two biggest oil producers, Russia and Saudi Arabia working together have the potential to dominate the globe's petroleum markets. So far, that hasn't happened, as seemingly irreconcilable differences - and particularly US-Saudi relations - have kept them apart.

But all the smiles and deal-making last month between Vladimir Putin and Mohammed bin Salman, the youthful and ambitious Saudi deputy crown prince and defense minister, has some claiming that the two energy giants, driven together by geopolitical crisis, may bet set for a much closer relationship.

Some experts perceive signs of an "emerging partnership" driven by shifting global winds, in which Saudi cash helps Moscow dodge Western sanctions, while Russian arms, engineering expertise, and diplomatic support assist the energetic new Saudi king to wean his country from dependency on an increasingly uncooperative US.

But others argue that, while change is definitely in the air, the outreach is purely tactical and of limited intent on both sides. Vast differences remain, particularly over critical issues such as regime change in Syria and a big power-sponsored nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia's archenemy, Iran.

"In the past, relations between Russia and Saudi Arabia were very bad, so any movement is going to attract notice," says Irina Zvyagelskaya, a Middle East expert at the official Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow. "But I wouldn't exaggerate this. Everyone is jockeying for a better position, seeking what advantages they can, but there are no earthshaking changes underway here."

Mr. Putin and Prince Salman sat down for a friendly meeting on the sidelines of a St. Peterburg economic forum last month, where they reportedly signed six deals, including a nuclear cooperation agreement that could see Russia helping to build up to 16 atomic power stations in the desert kingdom. They also are reported to have inked contracts on  space cooperation, infrastructure development, and a deal on high-end Russian weaponry.

For the Kremlin, the effort to establish good relations with a major Mideast player that has long shunned Russia comports well with what Ms. Zvyagelskaya calls "Moscow's long-standing policy of trying to be friends with everyone."

She says Western sanctions are a factor leading Mr. Putin to seek new diplomatic openings - and exploit growing Arab frustrations with the US - as he did with a visit to Egypt earlier this year, which also included a Saudi-financed arms deal.

"For Russia it's very important to position itself as a regional power that can talk to all sides. At the same time, we see that many Middle Eastern states are disaffected with US policies, and they want to have Russia around. For the Saudis, this is mostly about sending a signal to Washington, not switching partners," she says.

Currently, Russia, China, the US, Britain, France, and Germany are in down-to-the-wire negotiations with Tehran for an accord that would end Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program. All signs suggest that Moscow is an enthusiastic backer of that projected agreement, and is actively positioning itself to rush into the Iranian market once the country's isolation is lifted. It's already greenlighted a deal to sell S-300 air defense systems to Iran, and another to build up to eight new nuclear power stations in the country.

Experts say that for Saudi Arabia, Iran is going to be the main adversary and existential threat whether it has nuclear weapons or not, and it has been alienated by US support for the accord.

"The Saudis feel they're in a corner, they can't trust the US [to counterbalance Iran] anymore, and so they're playing the Russia card," says Yevgeny Satanovsky, president of the independent Institute of Middle East Studies in Moscow. "I think they understand in the Kremlin that this is just a big game that will not amount to very much."

In St. Petersburg Putin invited the Saudi king to visit Russia - which would be a first - while Prince Mohammed invited Putin to reprise his 2007 trip to the kingdom. Mr. Satanovsky says that during Putin's previous visit to Saudi Arabia, there was much hype about improved relations, and even arms deals, that never panned out.

"It's all theater. The Saudis do this periodically; apparently they think it will make America jealous," he says.

Syria and Yemen

The other big issue is Syria, where Moscow continues to back beleaguered President Bashar al-Assad, while the Saudis are bankrolling rebels trying to overthrow him.

There has been some speculation lately that Russia may be distancing itself from Mr. Assad, and has reportedly pulled many of its experts out of the embattled country.  But Moscow recently reaffirmed its support for Damascus, and Russian experts say the evacuation of Russians from the country over the past two months has been mainly due to the deteriorating security situation.

Saudi Arabia has also been angered by a perceived lack of US support for its intervention in next-door Yemen. But there, too, Moscow's policies - which call for a ceasefire and "national dialogue" - wouldn't seem to offer much comfort to the Saudis.

Andrei Klimov, deputy chair of the Russian Senate's international affairs committee, says the mistake many analysts are making is to view shifting relationships in today's world through a cold war prism, assuming a country must be "in" one bloc, or the other.

"Reality is moving Russia and Saudi Arabia together, to cooperate on issues where we can," he says. "The Saudis are learning that they can't rely on the US for everything, and there's considerable advantage in developing relations with Russia."

"As countries we're not much alike, but neither of us shares 'Western values' or likes being criticized by the US. We can work together" without upsetting the world order, he says.

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 #17
Oilprice.com
July 1, 2015
Is Saudi Arabia Leaving The U.S. Behind For Russia?
By Robert Berke

The news from the recent St. Petersburg Economic Forum, which took place from June 18 to 20, inspired a torrent of speculation on the future direction of energy prices.

But the real buzz at the conference was the unexpected but much publicized visit of the Saudi Deputy Crown Prince, as an emissary of the King. The Prince, who is also his country's Defense Minister, carried the royal message of a direct invitation to President Putin to visit the King, which was immediately accepted and reciprocated, with the Prince accepting on behalf of his father.

It would be news enough that the unusually high level delegation from a long-time ally and protectorate of the U.S., like Saudi Arabia, was visiting a Russian sponsored economic conference, in a country sanctioned by the U.S.

Some saw this well publicized meeting as the first sign of an emerging partnership between the two greatest global oil producers. If the warmth of the meeting was any evidence, it seems likely that Russia, a non-OPEC producer, might come a lot closer to the fold.

That could mean that, at the very least, Russia would have a voice in the cartel's policy decisions on production. And if so, it would be a voice on the side of stable but rising prices.

The great Indian journalist, M.K. Bhadrakumar (MKB), may have been the first to point out that there was plenty of reasons for the Saudis and Russians to come closer together. Among these are the U.S.' diminishing dependence on Middle Eastern energy, due to the momentous development of shale resources. There's also the over-riding goal of the U.S. to pivot toward the East, where a huge economic transformation is unfolding, while reducing the U.S. role in the Middle East. It's clear that the Saudis are going to have to make new friends.

MKB also makes the point that although the Saudis are wildly opposed to any form of U.S. entente with Iran, the clear-eyed Kremlin understands that there are many temptations for its erstwhile ally, Iran, to move much closer to the west.

Pepe Escobar of Asia Times saw the Prince's visit as harboring the first glimmer of light in ending the current global oil trade war, in which the Saudi's might turn down the spigot and lower production, enabling prices to rise:

"Facts on the ground included Russia and Saudi Arabia's oil ministers discussing a broad cooperation agreement; the signing of six nuclear technology agreements; and the Supreme Imponderable; Putin and the deputy crown prince discussing oil prices. Could this be the end of the Saudi-led oil price war?"

Bullish oil traders thought they found some hope in the words of Ali al-Naimi, the famous and longtime President and CEO of the Saudi National Oil Company, Aramco, and current oil minister. Naimi publicly stated: "I am optimistic about the future of the market in the coming months in terms of the continuing improvement and increasing global demand for oil as well as the low level of commercial inventories." This, the minister said, should lead to higher oil prices by year's end.

Ali al-Naimi publicly praised the enhanced bilateral cooperation between Riyadh and Moscow, stating that, "[t]his, in turn, will lead to creating a petroleum alliance between the two countries for the benefit of the international oil market..."

This could be music to the ears of oil price bulls. But more skeptical minds were quick to clamp down excessive optimism. "Of course, we shouldn't read into any new developments outside political frameworks, because I can hardly imagine that Saudi Arabia has decided to turn against its alliances-but it probably wants to get out of the narrow US corner and expand its options," Abdulrahman Al-Rashed, the General Manager of Al Arabiya News Channel, wrote in a column after the summit.

At the meeting, the Saudis and Russians signed several memoranda of understanding including the development of nuclear power plants in the Kingdom, with the Saudis planning some 16+ plants

The two sides also plan on setting up working groups to study other possible energy joint ventures in Russia. Russia also agreed to the construction of railways and metro subways for the Saudis. Russia is also believed to have agreed to supply advanced military defense equipment to the Kingdom, despite the Saudis being long time arms customers of both the UK and U.S.

However there is quite a bit of doubt that the U.S. is ready to just step aside and be replaced by Russia as the Saudis' main ally. Saudi Arabia and Russia are on opposite sides on a range of geopolitical issues, including Iran, Syria, and Yemen. These conflicts will likely put a limit on any potential entente.

Also, there is serious doubt as to whether it is so simple for the Saudis to raise oil prices. Flooding the markets with oil to crash prices only requires the Saudis to over-produce by some one and a half million barrels of oil per day, easily within their grasp, and something the Saudis can do on their own.

Bringing prices up is a different story, requiring global oil producers to comply in oil cutbacks.

At the same time, rising prices are a clear signal to global producers to increase production, worsening the current glut, so that any price increase may prove to be temporary.

And yet, the fact is prices have been rising since the first of the year, and many are convinced there is more to go. C. DeHaemmer, a well-known energy newsletter writer, is now predicting a price rise by WTI to a range of $73-$78, and a Brent range of $82-85, by years end. Not impossible, but long term, the issue becomes cloudier.

On a different matter, there was another surprise announcement at the forum, with India, a longtime U.S. ally, confirming that it will sign a free trade agreement with the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), a Russian-led trade bloc including Belarus and Kazakhstan.

Russia and China have agreed on making the EEU a central part of the Chinese sponsored Silk Road, so by default, it would appear that India is moving towards joining the grand Chinese project.

As has become standard at the St. Petersburg Forum, a number of energy deals were signed, including a BP deal to buy a major stake in a Siberian oil field owned by Rosneft, a company suffering under international sanctions. BP, as a twenty percent stakeholder in Rosneft, says it is seeking to expand on its joint ventures with the Russian company

Another deal was signed with Gazprom to build a second pipeline under the Baltic, following the path of Nordstream to Germany, in partnership with Royal Dutch Shell, Germany's E.ON, and Austria's OMV. Apparently, Western Europe's oil giants find Russian sanctions to be no hindrance in dealing with Russian energy companies.

After his onstage TV interview with Putin, Charlie Rose, the well-known TV celebrity, was asked why he had decided to become a moderator at the Forum. He said, "I believe it's important to talk to people."

In the meantime, the U.S. reporter, with camera man in tow, found nothing of interest to report at the conference.

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 #18
Interfax
July 2, 2015
Russians concerned about spread of terrorism from Caucasus to other regions - poll

A total of 67% of Russian citizens are concerned about the spread of terrorism from the North Caucasus to other regions of the country and 32% say they are very disturbed by this issue, the Levada Center told Interfax following the poll held on June 19-22 among 1,600 respondents in 134 cities, towns and villages in 46 Russian regions.

This topic does not concern 20% of Russians and another 9% have not thought about it, the survey showed.

When asked about the level of terrorism in the North Caucasus, 48% said it had declined in the past ten years, 29% believed it had remained the same as in the 1990s, and 10% supposed that it was growing.

The proportion of Russian citizens certain that funds sent to the North Caucasus are used more efficiently than in other Russian regions grew in the past year from 13% in 2014 to 20%, sociologists said.

Another 22% of Russians think that funds in the North Caucasus are spent as effectively as in other regions, the survey showed. Meanwhile, 31% of respondents are pessimistic in this regard, and 15% of them believe that funds sent to the North Caucasus are mostly embezzled. A total of 28% of respondents failed to respond.

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 #19
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
July 2, 2015
Can Russia and the West reconcile through counter-terrorism?
Russia Direct presents a June think tank roundup covering the rising threat from ISIS, Russia's top investment conference and Putin's visit to the Vatican.
By Anastasia Borik

June certainly wasn't short on news. Russian political analysts focused on ISIS, Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to Italy and the Vatican, the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum and the ongoing dispute between Russia and the West.

The challenge of militant Islam

June saw an intensification of the debate around the Islamic State of Iraq and the Greater Syria (ISIS) and prospects for its expansion into Russia. This was due not only to the group's increased activity, but also because of the case of 19-year-old Muscovite Varvara Karaulova, who was intercepted trying to cross the border from Turkey into Syria where she apparently intended to join the ranks of ISIS.

Council on Foreign and Defense Policy (CFDP) expert Vitaly Naumkin pointed out the strengths of ISIS, in particular its high level of governance and society. "ISIS is not just barbarians and savages,"he wrote. "It employs highly qualified specialists, some of whom have created a powerful informational machine."

This orderliness helps recruit more people into its terrorist ranks and strengthens the organization, making it extremely difficult to combat. Naumkin argued that ISIS will only get stronger in the near term, and the only way to deal with it is for its opponents to unite.

The analyst said Russia and the West must find the will to overcome their differences.

"We remember how the Soviet Union entered into a coalition with the West against Nazi Germany during the Second World War. I believe that the situation today is similar, and that we must put aside our differences and work together to fight this new evil," he wrote.

Moscow Carnegie Center head Dmitry Trenin gave a long interview about the threats posed by ISIS. According to Trenin, the main danger lies in the fact that ISIS is the first terrorist organization to have created an effective proto-governmental structure, drawing into its orbit many problematic regions and large numbers of people who do not necessarily support ISIS.

Trenin said he sees "global consequences"in this development, and believes that faced with a common threat, Russia and the West can unite to fight against it. However, at present,"Russia and the countries of the West are fighting ISIS in isolation," he said.

In June, several experts from Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO-University) drew attention to the prospect of ISIS expanding its influence into Russia. According to the group itself, there is a separate cell, or wilayah, operating in Russia's North Caucasus.

Despite the fact that Russia is clearly not the first target in the group's list of enemies, ISIS is actively recruiting on Russian soil with considerable success, experts note.

Ahmed Yarlykapov, in particular, highlighted ISIS'system of recruitment, which aims to attract a wide variety of specialists from volunteer soldiers to economists and oilmen. ISIS is able to persuade such people that the group offers an alternative and new opportunities for development, which, according to Yarlykapov, is potentially dangerous in the tinderbox of Russia's North Caucasus and other regions.

Yarlykapov's MGIMO-University colleague Sergei Druzhilovsky played down the rhetoric about the spread of ISIS'influence in Russia. "Russia is not their target," he said. Druzhilovsky believes that ISIS can only take on Russia with a firm footing in the Middle East and North Africa, which it presently lacks.

The St. Petersburg International Economic Forum 2015

June's most important economic event, the St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), was widely discussed by Russian think-tankers. Analysts differed in their assessments of SPIEF, but most concurred that the Forum demonstrated both the difficult situation that Russia finds itself in as well as opportunities to make progress.

MGIMO-University expert Ekaterina Arapova noted the modified agenda of the Forum, in particular the strong shift in focus towards economic ties with Asia and cooperation within the BRICS framework. The author linked this to new political and economic difficulties. Yet she wrote that she considers the shift of emphasis to be a highly positive outcome. Arapova stressed that geopolitical tensions are not the only issue.

"The focus on potential partnerings with the countries of Asia is due not only to the cooling of relations with the West and the geopolitical tensions, but to objective factors relating, first, to the need to strategically realign the Russian economy and overcome the structural imbalances and, second, to major systemic reform and reorientation of the overall model of economic growth, which are timely matters for a number of Asian countries,"she wrote.

Georgy Bovt, CFDP, looked at the obvious contradictions between Russia's official position in the international arena and its statements at SPIEF 2015 about openness and willingness to cooperate. Bovt put his finger on the fact that, economically, the Forum was a total failure. But politically, it pointed the way towards restoring ties with the West, which was not a bad result.

The analyst quipped caustically that "we sense intuitively that we are not ushering in a new Cold War, but at the same time no one is rushing to invite us to Yalta-2."

Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC) published an interview with renowned Russian economist and head of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, Alexander Shokhin. Shokhin noted the positive results of the Forum, the potential solutions to economic problems that had been raised there, and the agreements reached with Russia's foreign partners.

Although progress in talks with Asian partners warranted special mention, Shokhin said, Russia's long-standing ties with Europe shouldn't be ignored. Moreover, he noted some downsides of the Forum.

"It is very important that the Forum does not concentrate solely on Russian issues with foreign governments and businesses,"he stated. "And that our companies are actively involved in the global discussions of the G20 in shaping the business agenda with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and BRICS countries. It is very important to preserve the globality of the Forum, so that it is international in all aspects."

Putin's visit to Italy and the Vatican

Russian analysts looked closely at Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to Italy and the Vatican, during which Putin met with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and Pope Francis. Putin also attended the opening of Expo 2015 in Milan, where he inspected the Russian pavilion.

RIAC expert Marco di Liddo believes that we could soon see a rapprochement between Russia and the Vatican, since the two states see eye to eye on many global issues.

"Both are highly critical of the processes of political, economic and moral globalization that are erasing the diversity of humanity and imposing a uniform, standardized model of existence on all peoples and all states,"the analyst said. "Neither looks favorably on the 'one-sidedness'of US policy, and both oppose the international consequences of it.

Both consider it necessary to revise the current world order in favor of multipolarity, taking into account the political and economic realities of the BRICS and other rapidly emerging countries. The key point is that both recognize the importance of traditional values and the precedence of family, national identity and Christian principles as the bedrock of modern society."

Vladimir Degoev of MGIMO-University argues that Putin's visit to Italy demonstrates the "effectiveness of bilateral relations."The analyst said that "Russia needs to develop this format of relations with member countries of the European Union, since it could ultimately split the bureaucratic euro-monolith engaged in 'sanctions war'against Moscow.

Changes in the political and bureaucratic elites of Europe, and the very logic of international relations, give hope that this monolith will not stand firm for much longer. At least these factors are working against the sanctions."

Russia-West relations

Russia-West relations were again top of mind for Russian experts. This time the discussion shifted slightly towards how tensions with the West are pushing Russia into the arms of the East.

Dmitry Trenin, Carnegie Moscow Center, and Andrei Kortunov, RIAC, published a joint article on the problem of relations between Russia and the West. The article argued that America views Russia as a "third-order country,"not as a potentially equal partner.

Russia in this sense is bundled with North Korea and ISIS, which is not to the Kremlin's liking. Russia is leaning towards partnership with China, believing that this will help equalize relations. But Trenin urged the Kremlin to tread carefully, lest China swallow Russia whole, especially in light of China's economic power.

Kortunov, meanwhile, posited that Russia should stop "confining itself to a geographical choice [between Europe and China],"since the country "risks losing out."The expert said that "in the modern world geography means little.

That is a fundamental difference between today and last century."He asserted that no matter what direction Russia takes, the country must learn to compete in sectors other than raw materials, whereupon there is no shame in learning from other emergent economies -South Korea, for example.

Alexander Lukin, MGIMO-University, suggested that the West's aversion to Russia is pushing the latter into ever closer intimacy with the East, especially China, with which Russia shares many values and beliefs. The expert explained that "China and Russia are not offering their model to other countries of the world, let alone imposing it."

"That is the preserve of the West, which uses the ideology of 'democratism'to conceal the old idea of superiority over other races, peoples and civilizations,"he continued. "But Moscow and Beijing flatly reject Western dictates."

Unlike his MGIMO-University colleagues, CFDP head Fyodor Lukyanov said that in principle there is no choice between East and West, since "in the interests of balanced development Russia needs both."The expert explains that in the light of tensions with the West, "Russia's pivot to the east is an objective necessity."Thereupon, Lukyanov is adamant that Russia must not give up on the western vector, but strive to adopt a balanced position that unites East and West

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 #20
Irrussianality
https://irrussianality.wordpress.com
SANCTIONING EURASIANISM
By Paul Robinson
Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, and the author of numerous books on Russia and Soviet history, including 'Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich: Supreme Commander of the Russian Army'

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm not a great fan of the theory of Eurasianism. I also think that its philosophical influence on modern Russia is exaggerated. The Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development (DFATD) seems to disagree, for this week Eurasianism became the latest target of Canadian sanctions against Russia.

On Monday (29 June), DFATD announced that since 'the actions of the Russian Federation constitute a grave breach of international peace and security that has resulted or is likely to result in a serious international crisis', the Governor General, 'on the recommendation of the Minister of Foreign Affairs' had added three individuals and 14 organizations to the list of those sanctioned by Canada. The three individuals are Eurasianist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, and two of the leaders of the Eurasian Youth Union, Pavel Kanishchev and Aleksandr Kovalenko. The same Eurasian Youth Union then leads the list of newly sanctioned organizations.

So what has Canada got against Eurasianism?

The first mystery is the timing of the sanctions. Nothing special has happened in Russia or Ukraine in the past few weeks, so there doesn't seem any obvious reason to impose more sanctions on Russia right now. The only explanation I can come up with is domestic politics. Strange though it may seem, there are at present some rumblings of disapproval in the Canadian Ukrainian diaspora about Canadian government weakness vis-à-vis Russia. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has not approved sending weapons to Ukraine, and he has also resisted throwing Russia out of the SWIFT bank transfer system. Opposition Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, by comparison, has said that if his party wins October's election he will support the expulsion of Russia from SWIFT. Perhaps Harper feels a need to shore up his support among Canadian Ukrainians.

But even if this is so, why pick on the Eurasianists? Dugin, his Eurasian Party and its youth wing, the Eurasian Youth Union, are on the nutty fringes of Russian politics, and enjoy a tiny, tiny percentage of popular support (well below one percent - too low to register in opinion polls). Sanctioning the Eurasianists isn't going to induce anybody in the Russian government to change its policy towards Ukraine, or its policy on anything, quite frankly. It is a particularly futile act.

I imagine that the policy making process went something like this: Prime Minister Harper summoned Foreign Minister Robert Nicholson and told him to find some new names to add to the sanctions list; Nicholson then summoned a senior bureaucrat and told him to recommend something; senior bureaucrat asked junior underling for some ideas; junior underling did some research, and made the mistake of reading works like Anton Barbashin and Hannah Thoburn's Foreign Affairs article 'Putin's Brain: Alexander Dugin and the Philosophy Behind Putin's Invasion of Crimea', which among other things contends that, Dugin's brand of Eurasianism 'is proving to be a strong contender for the role of Russia's chief ideology.'

There has been a lot of this sort of stuff in the past couple of years. For instance, as well as 'Putin's Brain', Dugin has been described as 'Putin's Rasputin'. According to the Center for Security Policy, 'The influence of Dugin on Russia geopolitics and military strategy is self-evident ... it is clear that the Russian government has taken his Foundations of Geopolitics as a blueprint for their foreign policy.' This is, I think it is safe to say, an enormous exaggeration. As Gordon Hahn has pointed out, 'Dugin's aggressively political, imperialistic and neo-fascist Eurasianism is a far cry from Putin's purely economic project of creating a united free trade and customs union under the "Eurasian Economic Union." Thus, in June Dugin was fired from his position as chair of the Department of the Sociology of International Relations in the International Relations Department at MSU [Moscow State University], effective and implemented in September. Moreover, Dugin is not an advisor to Putin.'

Still, it is not altogether impossible that our junior underling, not being very well versed in Russian philosophy, didn't understand this, and just went with what he'd read in Foreign Affairs. Deciding on this basis that the Eurasianists really were a powerful force in Russia, he wrote a little memo to the senior bureaucrat suggesting their names. Senior bureaucrat then recommended them to the minister who, probably not having the slightest clue who they are (apart from the fact that they are obviously bad people) signed on the dotted line.

There is, though, an alternative, simpler explanation. Junior underling looked up American sanctions against Russia and discovered that the United States had listed Dugin, his fellow Eurasianists, and the Eurasian Youth Union back in March of this year. On the principle that what is good enough for America is good enough for Canada, he proposed them as targets.

One can debate whether Canadian sanctions against Russia are a good idea, but at least everybody ought to agree that if Canada is going to take action it should be action which is effective. That means if we are going to impose sanctions, we should aim them at people and organizations who are actually important, and against whom pressure might actually have some desirable impact.

Mind you, if the desired effect doesn't have anything to do with changing Russian policy, and is only about appeasing domestic voters by appearing to 'Do Something' while actually doing very little, then, as the saying goes, 'Mission Accomplished'.

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 #21
AP
July 3, 2015
Analysis: Root of tattered US-Russia ties date back decades
By STEVEN R. HURST
EDITOR'S NOTE - Steven R. Hurst reported from Moscow for 12 years and is the international political reporter for The Associated Press.

WASHINGTON (AP) - The stumbles and policy chaos that have sent increasingly frosty U.S.-Russia relations into what many now call a new Cold War might have been inevitable.

The fundamental hopes and fears lurk in the collective minds of the Russian and American nations despite the collapse of the Soviet Union nearly a quarter-century ago. That puts their world views at odds, with the crisis over Ukraine the latest and biggest confrontation.

That dismal relationship more often than not can be linked to the eastward expansion of the NATO alliance and Moscow's refusal to believe America's promises that it does not threaten Russia. There's also Russian President Vladimir Putin's anger over his country's loss of superpower status.

Back in friendlier days, after agreement on the NATO-Russia Founding Act in 1997, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said she saw the trouble brewing.

Albright, writing in Foreign Policy about the late former Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov, recalled her friend as a flexible realist, but she also cited differences already evident.

"From the first time we sat at the same table at a NATO meeting, it became clear that no matter what was signed, we would see that key agreement differently," Albright wrote.

The Russians were understandably concerned about NATO. The U.S.-led Western alliance was created in 1949 to blunt feared Soviet expansionism in Europe. Russia, its Soviet empire vanished, worried that Washington would push alliance boundaries right to the Russian border. Russia is now virtually surrounded on its western and southern borders by NATO member nations.

"The Russian sense of having been played falsely, not just once, not just twice, but on a number of occasions is fairly deep," said Wayne Merry of the American Foreign Policy Council and a former U.S. diplomat in Moscow.

During and after World War II, Soviet troops occupied countries of Eastern and Central Europe and made them Soviet republics or Soviet-dominated satellites in the Warsaw Pact. Josef Stalin was acting out of the centuries-old Russian fear of invasion. Germany already had done it twice in the 20th century.

Those buffer countries, newly independent once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, obviously looked for protection from a repeat of their own history and eventually scrambled for NATO membership. The enticement? The promise that every alliance member would come to the aid of any other member that was attacked.

But that was deeply unsettling to Russia.

After pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was forced to flee the country last year following protests, Putin responded by annexing Ukraine's strategic Crimean peninsula, where the population is largely Russian. The Kremlin also fomented an armed uprising by the largely Russian population in eastern Ukraine.

The United States and the European hit Moscow with punishing economic and travel sanctions in response. So far, fighting between Ukrainian forces and rebel forces continues at a simmer despite two cease-fire agreements. NATO is stationing heavy armor in the Baltic states and has sent hundreds of military trainers to Ukraine. To this point, Washington has dispatched no arms for the Ukrainian army.

Putin has shown no sign of backing down. He has repeatedly said the United States was trying to subjugate Russia, accusing Washington of stoking protests against him.

"I don't think the United States ever fully appreciated how deeply the Russians believe the color revolutions were instigated by the United States," said Jessica Matthews, distinguished fellow and former president of the Carnegie Endowment, referring to uprisings that ousted Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze and Yanukovych for a first time in Ukraine. The Kremlin likewise saw America's hand in Yanukovych's second ouster.

While Russia's behavior in Ukraine, Crimea and a 2008 war with Georgia has earned the Kremlin western outrage, Putin's motives are built of a deep Russian suspicion of the world around it. And Putin, like his Soviet forbearers, is using anti-Western propaganda to distract his people.

Still, Putin called Obama at the end of June for the first time in four months. The White House said they discussed the Iran nuclear negotiations, the civil war in Syria and efforts to counter Islamic State. Moscow has been helpful in U.S.-Iranian nuclear negotiations.

Matthews said there needs to be much more communication between Washington and Moscow.

"I think what could turn it around is clarity about NATO's intentions about Ukraine, and I think those can only be delivered in person, and personally and quietly," she said.

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 #22
CNN.com
July 3, 2015
Russian rocket takes off to resupply ISS after 2 previous missions failed
By Ben Brumfield and Amanda Barnett

(CNN)Resupply missions to the International Space Station rarely fail -- let alone twice in row, like the last two did.

That may make the arrival of the Russian cargo spacecraft that launched Friday all the more welcome -- even if the ISS does keep a large backlog of supplies on board.

The crewless ProgressM-28M lifted from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan just before 8:00 a.m. local time (12:00 a.m. ET / 5:00 a.m. GMT) and cut a clean path through a clear blue sky en route to a low-Earth orbit.

Minutes later, the Soyuz-U cargo vehicle successfully separated from the rest of the rocket, according to the Russian Federal Space Agency, also called Roscosmos.

And it was on course to deliver 5,249 pounds (2,381 kilograms) of supplies to the ISS on Sunday. They include food, water, oxygen, fuel and scientific apparatuses.

Mission fails

Missions like this are fairly routine, but three spacecraft bound for the ISS with tons of supplies have been lost since last October -- including the two most recent.

This past Sunday, one blew to pieces shortly after liftoff.

The SpaceX Falcon9 rocket was boosting a Dragon supply capsule stocked with a spacesuit, water filtration equipment, food, water, and experiments submitted by students. It also carried a docking adapter which was to allow people to arrive aboard America's first crewed spacecraft since the space shuttle.

All was lost.

On April 28, the last Russian rocket that launched on a resupply mission went out of control and ended up in an orbit incompatible with that of the ISS. It eventually burned up in Earth's atmosphere along with clothing, spacewalk hardware, propellant, oxygen, water, spare parts, supplies and experiments.

And in October 2014, a rocket on a resupply mission had to be detonated, when its launch went awry right after liftoff. The Antares, made by the Orbital Space Sciences Corporation, was carrying provisions, experiments and equipment.

"We've always assumed we would lose a vehicle every so often," said Michael Suffredini, manager of the International Space Station Program for NASA. "Having three this close together is not what we'd hoped for."

But the ISS was prepared. Even after the SpaceX Falcon9 exploded on Sunday, it had enough supplies to last the crew until October, at least.

Life on the ISS

The station orbits about 248 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth. It circles the planet every 90 minutes.

NASA says more than 200 people from 15 countries have visited it since November 2000.

The ISS measures 357 feet end-to-end and has more space than a six-bedroom house.

What do the astronauts do up there? Mostly, they conduct experiments. But they also exercise to offset the effects of near-zero gravity.

If you want to see it with your own eyes, NASA can tell you when it will be flying right over your hometown. It looks like a high-flying airplane tracing a beeline across the sky.

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 #23
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
July 2, 2015
Russia and NATO's relationship on the rocks; can a coalition be formed against the Islamic State (ISIS)?; Iran not likely to join Shanghai Cooperation Organization any time soon
RBTH presents its weekly analytical program TROIKA REPORT, featuring a look at three of the most high-profile recent developments in international affairs.
Sergey Strokan and Vladimir Mikheev

1. Engaging the West
NATO and Russia cooperation breaks down

NATO-Russia cooperation has largely ceased after the twin decision concerning the most substantial Western military build-up since the end of Cold war. NATO claimed it was a response to Russia's "aggressive actions" and in order to reassure some of Russia's neighbours, including those in the Baltic States. Moscow reacted with disappointment warning that there would be an adequate response to these measures, yet left the door open for the resumption of dialogue in the future.

The first of the two decisions was the announcement by U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter during a week-long tour of Europe that the United States would place 250 tanks, Bradley infantry fighting vehicles and self-propelled howitzer tanks and other military equipment in Eastern and Central Europe.

Secondly, ministers of defense of the alliance approved the decision to triple rapid reaction forces and create six coordinating headquarters in Baltic countries, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria at a meeting in Brussels by the end of 2015.

What impact could the military build-up in Eastern Europe have on US-Russia relations? William Dunkerley, a media business analyst that specializes in working with Russia and post-communist countries, and principal at William Dunkerley Publishing Consultants, and whose thinking tends to align with the Kremlin's version of events in Ukraine, explained his point of view to Troika Report:

" The U.S. view is that it sends weapons like tanks and howitzers into the bordering areas at the request of the countries there. They are responding to fears of an invasion from Russia. There are politicians in the United States who have been stoking these fears and reinforced the idea that Russia is a threatening nation and that it is a potentially existential threat for these countries. The basis for all of that, as far as I can see, has been fabricated."

Earlier, Carter sent a strong signal that the U.S. would not abandon its allies, implying it would go to any length in providing arms, in particular, to Poland and the Baltic States. Will it lead to lowering the threshold of an outbreak of hostilities in Europe? Not necessarily. This view is shared by Sergei Oznobishev, director of the Institute of Strategic Assessment, a Moscow-based independent think tank, who made the following comment for Troika Report:
"The problem is that we seem to be living in different dimensions. We fear each other and do not trust each other.

"What we see now is the demonstration of the decisiveness of NATO and the United States to render massive support if something happens. This is a kind of a deterrence aimed at Russia. It is a signal but nothing more. Another signal was the telephone call by President Putin to President Obama which came after a long pause. The Kremlin demonstrates the geopolitical character of the crisis in Ukraine and shows a willingness to work together with Washington to find a peaceful settlement. Hopefully, this will modernize the system of security in Europe and globally."

The term "deterrence" was also used by Russia's Permanent Representative to NATO, Alexander Grushko, who said that "NATO is switching from partnership to deterrence in relations with Russia."

As such, deterrence is not necessarily a bellicose stance. The more sensitive issue is the planned expansion of the powers of the military chief of NATO forces in Europe who will be able to put troops on full alert without waiting for approval from the political leadership. Basically, it means that NATO military command assumes the right of a decision-maker that can choose between war and peace. NATO has stated that the new measures are purely defensive and were taken in order to speed up its response to crises.

On the sidelines of the Brussels' meeting, NATO ministers dismissed assumptions they were against cooperative relations with Russia. However, they stated that they could see no possible way to increase joint actions in the context of the ongoing Ukrainian crisis. The Russian Ambassador to NATO also admitted that there is still a chance of cooperation with the alliance if it reviews its role in international relations.
 
2. Globally speaking
The Islamic State (ISIS): the year that shook the world

One year ago the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) - at that time a poorly understood terrorist group - unveiled its ambitious global project of the restoration of a Caliphate state. What looked like sheer religious madness turned into a sinister reality: the robust growth of ISIS across the globe, from Bangladesh to France and Britain shows that the real divisive line is not between East and West but between ISIS and the rest of the world.

This has been proved by recent violent attacks by ISIS on Westerners and new territorial gains (fighting in the suburbs of Damascus), with Russia and the West failing to form a united front.

The slaughter of Western citizens in Tunisia, the beheading of a French executive, the bomb attack on a mosque in Kuwait with 27 killed and 200 injured, were followed by another series of assaults. This week the Islamic State claimed responsibility for a car bomb attack on two Huthi rebel leaders in Sanaa in Yemen, killing 28 people including eight women. The next day, ISIS beheaded two women in Syria: it was the first time that this group has decapitated female civilians.

Actually, the whole year was marked by an unprecedented onslaught by this well-organized and ideologically motivated religious extremist group that slaughters "unbelievers" in the hope of earning a one-way ticket to an exclusive paradise for the truly faithful.

ISIS is the new ominous threat overlapping all existing divisive lines. Alexander Rytov, an expert at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO University) and the deputy head of the Black Sea-Mediterranean Research Institute at the Institute of Europe, assessed the level of alarm that should ring across the continents for the Troika Report:

"No doubt the Islamic State is a great danger for the whole world, and first of all, for the Islamic world. The Islamic State represents a radical form of Islam, which is rejected by traditional Islam. What is going on in Iraq and Syria is a return to medieval Islamic radicalism.

"It is a danger not only for the Westerners, for the 'crusaders,' and for the 'Big Satan,' but for the apostates as well, which in the gradation of Islamic enemies are the local 'traitors' that have betrayed the 'authentic' Islam. The real Islam, the real Quran are based on tolerance and have nothing to do with the violence spread by the Islamic State."

- What then makes ISIS so attractive to new recruits coming from both impoverished Bangladesh and much wealthier France?

"The revolutionary movement, the revolutionary mentality is part of our world. It is rooted in the principle of equality. Unlike Christianity, Islam has no hierarchy in its nature. Islam looks like a democratic religion that has about one billion followers. This kind of radicalism attracts people who want to fight inequality and that is a repetition, a reproduction of the passionate revolutionary mood that existed 100 years ago. It is infectious for young minds, for the young people that want justice and see their chance in the actions of the radicals to make the world simpler. History seems to repeat itself."

This opinion is shared by Vladimir Sotnikov, a senior research fellow at the Center for International Security at the Moscow-based Institute of World Economy and International Relations, who sees ISIS as a global phenomenon:

"I had a feeling after the recent almost simultaneous terrorist attacks in the three countries, which left about 100 people dead and several hundred wounded, that the world is now divided into two parts: the Islamic State and everybody else. This is the gravest danger for global security. It should be a high priority for Russia and the U.S. to put aside their differences over the Ukrainian crisis and unite their efforts to fight the Islamic State and rally other allies to this fight."

Moscow's official position is that it sees no alternative but to unite all stakeholders in combating terrorism. The Islamic State group and Al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra have been banned in Russia by a court ruling.

The ISIS factor was high on the agenda during the recent visit to Moscow by Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem, who met with President Putin. This was probably the first time that Moscow has made such a clear call to forge a united front to fight ISIS.

Putin was quoted as saying that his contacts with the leaders of Turkey and Saudi Arabia "show that everyone wants to contribute to fight this evil." He also linked the fate of the crumbling regime in Damascus with further deterioration in the region. "If the Assad regime falls, then the Islamic State's next goal will be Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states," said Putin.

There is no point in simply stating out loud that ISIS is a "cult," because only an immediate and coordinated effort could curtail the spread and expansion of these violent militants. After the 9/11 tragedy President Putin was the first to call President Bush. Today, it does not matter who picks up the telephone first. The most important thing is that this long overdue call is made.
 
3. Going Eastward
Iran and the SCO: uneasy bedfellows

Hopes to strike a nuclear deal between Iran and the six world powers before the June 30 deadline faded away with all negotiators in Vienna claiming that more time is needed to resolve contentious issues over the country's nuclear program.

In the meantime, the impasse could have an unexpected negative impact on Iran's relations with Russia, which traditionally played the role of "good cop" in the Big Six grouping. Troika sources close to the Iranian Foreign Ministry suggest that Tehran is getting increasingly weary over the decision to shelve Iran's full membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) until sanctions are lifted.

Initially, Tehran expected to be formally welcomed at the upcoming SCO summit in the Russian city of Ufa on July 8-9. Now, according to Troika Report sources, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's presence at the Ufa summit is very questionable.

Moscow has de facto frozen Iran's full membership bid, setting the reaching of the Vienna agreement on its controversial nuclear program, as a precondition for joining. Iran's nuclear program is suspected of either already having or is in a position to soon acquire a military component. Until the issue is resolved, Russia and its allies are unwilling to upgrade Iran's status.

Tehran considers this approach obsolete and that SCO membership should not be held hostage to the outcome of the Vienna talks. Tehran seems to want their membership card now with no preconditions.

It is not surprising that the delay has been likened to "humiliation" by the pro-Tehran Moscow-based Iran.ru website. A recent editorial stated that, "in the Iranian expert community the view dominates that until a final decision on membership in the SCO is made, the presence of President Hassan Rouhani in the activities of the organization are not appropriate and could even cause damage to the credibility of the country."

Should President Rouhani shun the SCO summit, "the domestic anti-Iranian lobby would have an excellent opportunity to expand the awareness campaign, focusing on the 'cunning and unpredictability of the Iranian side'" the media outlet states.

Will Iran's prolonged stay on the "waiting list" cast a shadow over bilateral relations? Is it an artificial obstacle or a natural impediment when it comes to relations with Iran because it is an almost self-sufficient and introverted civilization in its own right? Professor Vladimir Sazhin, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, provided his view to the Troika Report:

"First of all, make no mistake, the SCO is not a Russia-led organization. A number of member states were against elevating the status of Iran to full membership. Back in 2009 a decision was made not to accept countries subject to international sanctions. Second, the internal politics in Iran are complicated. President Rouhani is a liberal by local standards and his team is pursuing a policy to lift sanctions, which is a priority, on many fronts, targeting Moscow, Brussels and Washington. Actually, Tehran is quite successful in this respect given the declared intention of many European nations to restart business dealings with Iran."

- After sanctions are eventually lifted, will Russia find Iran to be a difficult and often disagreeable partner?

"Iran is using the SCO as a tool to achieve its primary goal, which is the cancellation of the sanction regime. If the sanctions were lifted [it would hope] to get access to foreign investments and high-tech [infrastructure]. Iran will most probably become a SCO member, but not at the expense of its restored relations with the European Union. Iran is a like a 'Cat That Walked by Himself.' Iran never had close friends and allies.

"For the moment, Iran is pursuing a political game and the SCO is part of it. The public displeasure of not being admitted to full membership at the Ufa Summit is aimed partially at a domestic audience."

Professor Sazhin is echoed by Vladimir Sotnikov, a senior research fellow at the Center for International Security at the Moscow-based Institute of World Economy and International Relations. Here is his assessment of the intricacies in dealing with Iran:

"Iran is not an easy partner for Russia. It is both a possible strategic partner and a problematic partner.

"There was one case in 2006 when Russia almost persuaded Iran in relation to its nuclear program. President Putin suggested to the Iranian leadership to send its enriched uranium to a nuclear plant in the Russian city of Angarsk. The agreement was about to be inked but at the very last minute the Iranians changed their mind. Iranian diplomacy skillfully plays on the differences between Russia and its Western counterparts. In that sense, they are very skillful."

To sum up, Iran is flexing muscles virtually to signal its dissatisfaction of being kept on the threshold of SCO for 11 years. It could be simply an emotional reaction or a sign of hard times lying ahead for Moscow in terms of dealing with this new emerging power broker in the wider Middle East.

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 #24
Fort Russ
http://fortruss.blogspot.ru
July 2, 2015
The Russian "No"
By Dennis Gorobets
http://cont.ws/post/98018
Translated from Russian by J.Hawk

There is no room for personal sympathies in big politics. But there is always room for assessing individuals or their actions. One can like or dislike one's opponent, but still regard their strategy favorably.

That's the case with Lavrov. The minister everyone "loves to hate" is respected for his diplomatic prowess.

For example, in Foreign Policy interview the foreign minister of a developing country who preferred to remain anonymous, named Lavrov as one of the most effective foreign ministers today.

1. Good.

Generally speaking, in the West Lavrov is characterized as a "negative hero." He is working with his fourth US Secretary of State, each of whom suffered at Lavrov's hands. Only Madeleine Albright remembers him fondly, but she was "fortunate" not to have to work with Lavrov. The best impression of Lavrov comes from Ursula Plassnik, the former foreign minister of Austria. She was met by Sergey Viktorovich with a big bouquet of yellow flowers near the legendary Kafe Pushkin restaurant. Ursula subsequently and frequenly referred to Lavrov as "one of the smartest, best-informed, and most-respected foreign policy players on the world stage."

2. Bad

Condoleezza Rice probably can't find too many reasons to wish Lavrov well on his birthday. Lavrov often exploits his opponent's weak spots. Rice's was her irritability. The press usually had loud headlines describing their encounters: "Lavrov outplayed Rice" (Washington Post), "Lavrov-Rice meeting ended without a scandal" (BBC), "Lavrov and Rice exchanged views" (Kommersant). The two literally had to be separated at a G8 summit in 2008.

He used the same tactic on Hillary Clinton. Madam secretary demonstratively departed from a UN session before Lavrov's appearance in order not to have to hear his response to the US position on the Syrian conflict and not to succumb to own emotions.

3. Angry.

Lavrov, too can sometimes be unrestrained. He earned a reputation of an emotional politician already as Russia's UN ambassador. He could be heard saying "undiplomatic" things in the relaxed atmosphere of the "smoking room" at he UN. As a minister he is also not known for sugar-coating things. He was very expressive in telling the British minister David Milliband how he was fed up Britain's position on the Georgia conflict. Retelling the conversation, Lavrov expressed doubts in Milliband's competence and knowledge of world history, especially Russia's.

4. Cunning.

Lavrov is known for his stubbornness.

His insistent manner during the Georgia conflict nearly led Sarkozy to fisticuffs. At a confidential meeting, in response to Lavrov's denial of accusations that Russia hasn't withdrawn its troops from Georgia, France's president literally threw himself at Lavrov, grabbed him by the lapels and called him a liar. That was reported by Wikileaks citing leaked diplomatic documents.

Incidentally, speaking of Lavrov's persistence, the US diplomat Averell Harriman noted that "negotiating with the Russians is like buying the same horse twice."

5. Troll

"It's funny, but I'm not seeing Senator McCain in Ferguson, calling for supporting the people's desire for freedom and justice."

"Nobody trolls like Lavrov", reported the Voice of Russia on November 28, 2013 citing US reporter Max Fisher. Diplomacy in general is famous for "refined humor" and colorful expressions. And Lavrov is famous for his refined trolling. Washington Post even referred to Lavrov as a "geopolitical troll."

Shortly after the six-party agreement on Iran's nuclear program, Lavrov noted that, to America's relief, it now won't have to build an ABM system in Europe.

During the recent events in Ukraine when a NATO delegation visited the Maidan, the EU Commissioner Catherine Ashton gave out cookies to the protesters. During a later meeting Lavrov politely offered her tea with cookies. "Not like on the Maidan, but still." Ashton refused by saying she doesn't like cookies.

6. One of us.

Lavrov likes active sports, plays soccer, does white water rafting.

According to RBK, when nominated for the post of minister he accepted it from Putin under the condition that he can go on leave once a year and go off into nature with friends and without bodyguards. During the hike the minister is in charge of the fire. Lavrov also composes poems and songs, one of which even became the MGIMO (Moscow State Institute of Foreign Affairs) anthem.

In general, Lavrov as an off-duty role model is consistent with the nature hike traditions of Soviet-era students. He's definitely one of us.

7. Macho

While working at the UN, Lavrov became a big fan of Scotch whiskey and frequented the Delegate Lounge (the UNSC bar), where he sipped scotch and smoked, thus totally ignoring Kofi Annan's ban on smoking. How was he able to do that? Very simply. Lavrov reminded Annan that the General Secretary is merely the presiding official, and that the UN building belongs to its members.

Western colleagues call him "Minister No", the press condemns his excessive pragmatism, but everyone acknowledges the effectiveness of his refined diplomatic game. Foreign Policy editor Susan Glassen asked Aleksandr Lukashevich, the head of MFA press service, why Sergey Lavrov has been in this position for such a long time, after all other foreign ministries have changed their heads more than once.

"He is ideal. He is the ideal individual for that position," Lukashevich said.

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 #25
Moscow Times
July 3, 2015
Why Isn't Russia Part of Europe?
By Pyotr Romanov
Pyotr Romanov is a journalist and historian.

It is no secret that many Western Europeans do not consider Russia a part of Europe. And they are right. They sometimes follow that statement with the atavistic idea that Russia is a country to both scorn and fear. However justified or debatable those ideas might be today, they are completely absurd from a historical perspective.

But that is how people are made: they tend to see only what is happening right now. They forget the past and cannot predict the future. And, of course, many ideas that gain currency are later relegated to the dust heap of history.

Who can say why and when Russia ceased to be part of Europe, or by what happenstance Western Europeans did not become Eurasians as Russians did? I'll tell you when it happened: the 13th century. It began with the Mongol invasion of ancient Rus, then Eastern Europe and, finally, Western Europe.

Both Rus and Europe were in a similar condition. Although Rus had once been a unified state, by that time it had split into warring principalities and was incapable of mounting a resistance to what was then the best army in the world. The Mongols had carried out military reforms. They had talented commanders, strict discipline, a brilliant cavalry, incredible archers and the world's most advanced siege machinery that they had borrowed from the Chinese.

And the same thing was happening in the rest of Europe. Centralized states were disintegrating. The Pope and the German emperor, the main power centers in Europe, were hostile to one another.

And the ponderous and poorly disciplined European army was no better than the Russian forces. In fact, despite its many shortcomings, the Russian army was at least able to regularly beat back the Teutonic Knights.

Knowing that Europe was incapable of putting up serious resistance, the Mongol leader Batu Khan, after subjugating Rus, split his army by continuing himself to Hungary while dispatching Baidar to Poland. The Hungarian Kingdom fell after a single battle. The same fate befell the Polish-German army.

After successfully completing the first phase of the campaign, the Mongols settled down to rest. Their plan was to transform the whole of Europe into an extension of Asia in one year's time.

Judging by the fact that all the calls for the unification of European forces produced no tangible results - as had happened earlier in Rus - Western Europe would undoubtedly have become Eurasia, if not for one chance event. Far to the east, the Great Ogedei Khan died, sparking a struggle for the throne. For that reason alone, Batu Khan cut short his European campaign and took his army home. Western Europeans simply lucked out.

By the way, Novgorod and Pskov in northern Rus also got lucky because the local spring thaw, forests and swamps kept the Mongols out. The Mongols preferred to travel through such places on frozen rivers in winter.

The fact that the Mongols never reached that region can be seen from the local gene pool and the faces of the people that differ from those in other parts of the country.

In fact, Rus - which the Mongols conquered early on and which was geographically closer to their homeland - long remained part of the Asian empire, gradually becoming a half-breed in every sense: from genetic to cultural.

And that trend only continued when Rus expanded eastward after it reestablished a strong state and threw off its dependence on the Mongols. In this way, Russia developed its peculiar European outlook with an Asian twist.

However, this mixture of peoples also produced many advantages. According to the liberal writer Boris Akunin: "It would be misleading to consider the 'Asian' component an intractable disease or a birth trauma to Russia. From the historical perspective, this, our genetic characteristic, has not only created problems, but also given us bonuses.

''First, without this 'Asian' component, Russia would not have the many hues of culture and spirituality that it has. Second, the primacy of the 'state' and this 'communal' mass consciousness have repeatedly helped Russia survive grave upheavals that purely European states could not, and did not survive.

''And so it was later, when Russia turned out to be stronger than two of the most powerful military empires - first Napoleon's, and then Hitler's. That ruggedness, ability to come together during times of tests, those huge reserves of strength, the willingness to sacrifice, the famous readiness to 'pay the price' - all of that is Asian, not European."

Useful bits of information occasionally emerge from today's constant flow. Experts predict that by 2034, white people will become the minority in the United States.

The only question is whether blacks or Hispanics will take their place as the majority. At some point, China will also make its weighty contribution to this emerging world picture.

The lord uses time, history and life itself to add and mix together new ingredients in the pliant "dough" of humanity.

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 #26
Washington Post
July 3, 2015
Despite past quarrels with Russia, Georgians are returning to its orbit
By Michael Birnbaum
 
TBILISI, Georgia - In this fiercely pro-Western nation that fought a brief war with Russia in 2008, few thought the Kremlin could ever regain a toehold. But with the West backing away from Georgia's path to E.U. and NATO membership after a year of conflict in Ukraine, pro-Russian sentiments are on the rise.

The former Soviet nation's leaders are warning that Russia may yet prevail if Georgia is shut out from Western clubs. Wary of further provoking Russia, Western politicians have quashed talk of NATO and the European Union expanding eastward any time soon. Russia has stepped into the vacuum, increasing its presence by opening Georgian-language outlets of its state-owned news network and deepening investments in the energy industry and other key sectors.

Similar movements are happening in other former Eastern bloc nations trapped between Russia and the West, in a tug-of-war that has deep Cold War resonance.

"Stability and security cannot be maintained with this paradigm, with Russia's paradigm of having special rights towards other countries," said Georgian President Giorgi Margvelashvili, in an interview in the presidential palace on a bluff overlooking the old city of Tbilisi. The blue-and-gold E.U. flag flies outside of the building, as it does at most Georgian governmental buildings, as an emblem of the nation's aspirations.

"Russia is working pretty actively, not only in Georgia, but all around the world," to expand its influence, he said. Despite the growing Russian presence, Georgia remains unshakably committed to eventual membership in NATO and the E.U., he said. As a token of its devotion, Georgia has sent more soldiers to Afghanistan to fight alongside U.S. troops in recent years than many nations already in NATO.

The germ of the present conflict between Russia and the West lies in an E.U. offer of closer ties to Ukraine and Russian President Vladimir Putin's infuriated reaction. E.U. membership for Ukraine was always a long shot - but it has become even less likely after fighting that has killed more than 6,400 people, according to U.N. estimates.

E.U. leaders squabbled at a summit last month about whether to offer even the faintest prospects for membership to Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova, which have said they want to join. The E.U. leaders decided against it, and they also delayed plans to ease visa rules for Georgian travelers, a bitter disappointment for Georgia's leaders. The E.U. caution stemmed from a desire not to inspire backlash from Russia, diplomats involved in the discussions say.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has taken the role of the lead European interlocutor with Putin, has played down expansion prospects. So has President Obama.

"Neither Ukraine or Georgia are currently on a path to NATO membership. And there has not been any immediate plans for expansion of NATO's membership," Obama said last year.

Now support for pro-Russian politicians in Moldova and Georgia is growing, while Ukraine is so consumed by conflict that it has made little progress in instituting reforms necessary for westward integration. Armenia, a fourth post-Soviet country that had been in talks with E.U. leaders about a trade deal, last year abandoned the discussions altogether, allying itself with the Russian camp.

Many here say that Russia has skillfully outmaneuvered the West.

"The Russians are working to dominate this part of the world. They calculate, they plan, and they know this region much better than the Europeans and Americans," said Tedo Japaridze, the chairman of the Georgian parliament's foreign relations committee.

The United States has tried to offer some consolation measures. U.S. troops did training exercises with Georgian soldiers in May, and Georgia's leaders present an upbeat face about their westward efforts.

"We don't have time to be disappointed," said David Bakradze, the state minister on European and Euro-Atlantic Integration. "Our aspirations are irreversible."

But some Georgians feel they have little to show for their long westward push. Some of those sacrifices have been made in blood in grueling deployments to Afghanistan, where they have been one of the top contributors of soldiers to the battle efforts per capita, even though they are not NATO members.

"More and more Georgians are feeling they haven't gotten anything tangible from the West," said Shorena Shaverdashvili, a prominent Georgian journalist. "There isn't more love for Putin and Russia. It's just a realization that we're left face-to-face with Russia and we have to deal with it."

Spurned by the West, Georgians are starting to look elsewhere. Support for signing the E.U. trade agreement is down to 68 percent in April polls from the National Democratic Institute, down from 80 percent immediately before the Ukraine crisis started. Support for Georgia's joining the Russian-dominated Eurasian Economic Union, meanwhile, is up to 31 percent.

Part of the shift inside Georgia came with the ousting of President Mikheil Saakashvili, the Western-trained lawyer who ruled the country for a decade starting in 2003. Passionately anti-Russian and close to U.S. leaders, Saakashvili rarely missed a chance to jab at the Kremlin. The biggest eruption came in August 2008, when Georgian soldiers attacked Russian soldiers who were amassing in greater numbers on breakaway territories of Georgia.

The ensuing five-day war decimated Georgia's military and led to Russia's recognizing the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. By 2012, many Georgians were ready to embrace the leadership of their nation's wealthiest man, Bidzina Ivanishvili, who promised to improve relations with Russia while maintaining ties to the West.

The payoff for Georgia was swift. Russia lifted a ban on imports of Georgian wine in 2013, and trade spiked.

"Those people who are trying to help us, we just want to tell them, 'Stop meddling with Russia,'" said Jemal Veliashvili, who works in a seed and fertilizer shop in Georgia's Kakheti wine-growing region, in the green shadow of the Caucasus Mountains that form the border with Russia. He said his business had tripled since the ban was lifted.

Even though diplomatic relations with the Kremlin remain tense, Russia's presence inside Georgia is strengthening. Just last month, Russia's Sputnik news agency opened new offices here and started both a Georgian and Russian-language Georgian news service.

"Georgia should be neutral, and it should be militarily free," said Archil Chkoidze, the leader of Georgia's Eurasian Choice, a coalition of pro-Russian groups that says it has nearly 16,000 members. Among the warnings about Europe that he passes to his members, he said, was that E.U. leaders are more concerned with cultural issues such as gay rights - deeply unpopular in a socially conservative nation - rather than the everyday lives of Georgian citizens.

Those arguments have growing resonance, particularly as Georgia's economy has been battered in tandem with Russia's. Pro-Russian parties are expected to make gains in parliamentary elections next year.

For now, even some of Georgia's most committed pro-Western politicians say that their best hope is to hold tight to their goals but to expect little from their partners for now.

"No one told us it was going to be easy," said Irakli Alasania, the leader of the opposition Free Democrats. Alasania was defense minister until November, when he was ousted for being too pro-West, he says. The possibility of joining NATO "will only open up after Putin," he said.

Putin is widely expected to remain Russia's leader until at least 2024.

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 #27
Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs
www.carnegiecouncil.org
July 2, 2015
U.S.-Russia Relations: Critical and Unstable
By David C. Speedie  

In October 2014, the Council posted an article titled "Needs Work: A Troubled U.S.-Russia Relationship," in which we noted somberly that "if there is one point of agreement between pundits in Moscow and Washington these days, it is that U.S.-Russia relations are at a post-Cold War nadir."

Eight months on, what was a troubled relationship is now on life support, and the deterioration has taken place in the most existentially perilous area of arms control, specifically nuclear weapons. "NATO reviews nuclear deterrent after Russian rhetoric hardens" was the headline in an article in the Financial Times of June 25. While denying that there are plans to place new nuclear weapons in Europe-a plan that would not find favor among many European members-NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is reportedly concerned that Russia is now "using nuclear rhetoric and more nuclear exercises as part of their defense posturing." U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter has joined the harsh condemnation, describing Russian President Vladimir Putin as "out of tune with the times and the way responsible leaders have conducted themselves [on the nuclear threat]." The reasons for concern include Russia's proposal to add some 40 intercontinetal ballistic missiles to its arsenal, increase flights of nuclear-capable bombers over NATO's eastern flank countries, and deploy missile launchers in Russia's westernmost enclave of Kaliningrad, with the potential to reach Baltic and Eastern European capitals.

Sobering stuff, indeed, but, as always, this is not the whole story. It takes two to ratchet up the pace of the lethal race, and from Moscow's point of view these are defensive measures necessitated by a strategic series of moves to virtually encircle Russia's western flank. These may be cataloged under a list of Strangelovian NATO maneuvers:

    BALTOPS, an annual military exercise in the Baltic Sea, this year involving 5,600 troops, 50 warships, 60 aircraft and landing craft; and Exercise Saber Strike, with 7,000 troops conducting drills in Lithuania, Latvia, as well as Poland
    In Eastern Europe, Exercise Noble Jump simulates a deployment of 1,500 troops from 11 countries
    In the Black Sea, U.S., Canadian, and German ships comprising the Black Sea Rotational Force conduct war games with the navies of Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey (An ironic footnote here is that in early May, Bulgarian Defense Minister Nicolai Nenchev observed that Bulgaria, while in NATO, was almost 100 percent dependent on Russia for its military equipment.)

These constitute a significant stepping-up of NATO force activity in the extended region over recent years. All in all, as the Financial Times reported on June 10:

"So far this year, more than 20,000 NATO troops have taken part in exercises in the region and 30,000 more have been put on standby, in what Jens Stoltenberg, NATO's secretary general, has described as "the biggest adaptation of force structures since the end of the Cold War.'"

The upshot of all this bilateral saber rattling is chronicled by the Carnegie Moscow Center's Alexei Arbatov in a June 2015 report, "An Unnoticed Crisis: The End of History for Nuclear Arms Control?" Arbatov lists a litany of wounds, perhaps mortal, to the various multilateral and bilateral U.S.-Russia treaties designed to curb the nuclear threat:

"The crisis of arms control is both multifaceted and comprehensive. The United States has abandoned the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty [ABM] and no longer accepts any restrictions on its missile defense deployments. It has not ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty [CTBT] almost two decades after negotiations concluded. For the foreseeable future, there is little prospect of the United States accepting new obligations. At the same time, the United States has accused Russia of violating the [Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces] INF Treaty. As a result, Republicans in the U.S. Congress have argued for retaliating by renouncing the treaty and even by withdrawing from New START. Russian officials, for their part, have openly questioned the value of the INF Treaty and also raised the possibility of withdrawing from it. At the same time, nongovernmental political and strategic analysts in Russia have discussed the possibility of abandoning New START and the CTBT. The most radical voices among them have gone so far as to propose that Russia withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty [NPT] in order to sell and service nuclear weapons abroad."

To summarize: two pillars of nuclear arms control have been shelved-and here it should be noted that U.S. policy on CTBT and ABM long predate the current iciness of relations with Russia-and all others are under severe stress. Arbatov concludes thus: "The history of nuclear arms control has endured periods of stagnation and setbacks before, and some of these were quite lengthy . . . But the current period of disintegration is unprecedented, with literally every channel of negotiation deadlocked and the entire system of existing arms control agreements under threat." [my italics]

There's the rub: channels of dialogue, let alone negotiation, on critical issues have dried up; the horn-locking over weaponry is a metaphor for the current state of U.S.-Russia relations. There is less in the way of constructive engagement than during the latter days of the Cold War, let alone what the sage Russian scholar, Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, has gloomily described as the "inter-Cold War period" of 1991-2014. Instead, we have an environment in which President Barack Obama has listed Russia along with the Ebola virus and the Islamic State as the major global threats; in which the U.S. National Security Strategy spoke of the need to "deter" Russia; in which President Putin is a figure of lampoon and ridicule in the Western press; in which Russia is totally denied any legitimate security interests whatsoever; and in which according to Russia's most prestigious polling institution, the Levada Center, more than 80 percent of Russians believe that the West, led by the United States, is a threat to Russia (and, correspondingly, Putin's approval rating approaches 90 percent, even in times of sanctions-driven economic hardship). We may indeed, as Trenin says, be in a back-to-a-Cold War future.

Amid the prevailing doom and gloom of engagement deprivation, there has been a welcome recent development, with the formation of the American Committee for East-West Accord. This diverse group includes such leading figures as former U.S. Senator Bill Bradley, NYU emeritus professor of Russian studies Stephen F. Cohen, former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock, and former CEO of the Procter & Gamble Co. John Pepper. In seeking to revive constructive dialogue between Moscow and Washington, the Committee lists five initial proposals:

    The Obama administration should formally join the "Normandy Four"-France, Germany, Ukraine, and Russia; a group that meets periodically to discuss regional relations (It is named the Normandy Four after meeting for the first time last June in Normandy, France.)
    The United States, NATO, and Russia should reactivate the NATO-Russia Council
    Washington and Moscow should restore the provisions of the 1991 Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program
    Moscow and Washington should take all necessary steps to preserve the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty
    Washington and Moscow should protect educational and related exchange programs.

These eminently sensible recommendations speak to the most important particular (arms control) and general (dialogue, engagement) lacunae in the relationship.

And finally, it is clearly not a case of dialogue for dialogue's sake. Put another way, blanket condemnation or neglect of Russia is simply not in American national interest, for several obvious reasons: first, the issue of the 5,000+ nuclear arsenals on each side, as already discussed above; second, the fact that Russia's vast territory borders on just about every dangerous neighborhood on the planet, from North Korea to the Middle East; third, given that both the United States and Russia have been targets of Islamic extremism in the 21st century, U.S.-Russia cooperation on international terrorism is mutually essential; fourth, in chronic hotspots such as Ukraine and Syria, both the United States and Russia have an interest in seeking resolution and stability; and fifth, it is indisputable that there are forces in Russia more inimical to harmonious bilateral relations, and more disposed to pursue a militarily aggressive Russia, than Vladimir Putin.

Given the stakes, it's surely time to move from zero-sum to the restart of constructive engagement.

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 #28
Salon.com/TomDispatch
July 2, 2015
The next Cold War is here: China, Russia and the ghosts of Dwight Eisenhower
As America lurches from crisis to crisis, our foreign policy elites can't even agree on our principal adversary
By Michael T. Klare
Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author of Resource Wars and Blood and Oil.
This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.

America's grand strategy, its long-term blueprint for advancing national interests and countering major adversaries, is in total disarray. Top officials lurch from crisis to crisis, improvising strategies as they go, but rarely pursuing a consistent set of policies. Some blame this indecisiveness on a lack of resolve at the White House, but the real reason lies deeper. It lurks in a disagreement among foreign policy elites over whether Russia or China constitutes America's principal great-power adversary.

Knowing one's enemy is usually considered the essence of strategic planning. During the Cold War, enemy number one was, of course, unquestioned: it was the Soviet Union, and everything Washington did was aimed at diminishing Moscow's reach and power. When the USSR imploded and disappeared, all that was left to challenge U.S. dominance were a few "rogue states." In the wake of 9/11, however, President Bush declared a "global war on terror," envisioning a decades-long campaign against Islamic extremists and their allies everywhere on the planet. From then on, with every country said to be either with us or against us, the chaos set in. Invasions, occupations, raids, drone wars ensued - all of it, in the end, disastrous - while China used its economic clout to gain new influence abroad and Russia began to menace its neighbors.

Among Obama administration policymakers and their Republican opponents, the disarray in strategic thinking is striking. There is general agreement on the need to crush the Islamic State (ISIS), deny Iran the bomb, and give Israel all the weapons it wants, but not much else. There is certainly no agreement on how to allocate America's strategic resources, including its military ones, even in relation to ISIS and Iran. Most crucially, there is no agreement on the question of whether a resurgent Russia or an ever more self-assured China should head Washington's enemies list. Lacking such a consensus, it has become increasingly difficult to forge long-term strategic plans. And yet, while it is easy to decry the current lack of consensus on this point, there is no reason to assume that the anointment of a common enemy - a new Soviet Union - will make this country and the world any safer than it is today.

Choosing the Enemy

For some Washington strategists, including many prominent Republicans, Russia under the helm of Vladimir Putin represents the single most potent threat to America's global interests, and so deserves the focus of U.S. attention. "Who can doubt that Russia will do what it pleases if its aggression goes unanswered?" Jeb Bush asserted on June 9th in Berlin during his first trip abroad as a potential presidential contender. In countering Putin, he noted, "our alliance [NATO], our solidarity, and our actions are essential if we want to preserve the fundamental principles of our international order, an order that free nations have sacrificed so much to build."

For many in the Obama administration, however, it is not Russia but China that poses the greatest threat to American interests. They feel that its containment should take priority over other considerations. If the U.S. fails to enact a new trade pact with its Pacific allies, Obama declared in April, "China, the 800-pound gorilla in Asia, will create its own set of rules," further enriching Chinese companies and reducing U.S. access "in the fastest-growing, most dynamic economic part of the world."

In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the military strategists of a seemingly all-powerful United States - the unchallenged "hyperpower" of the immediate post-Cold War era - imagined the country being capable of fighting full-scale conflicts on two (or even three fronts) at once. The shock of the twenty-first century in Washington has been the discovery that the U.S. is not all-powerful and that it can't successfully take on two major adversaries simultaneously (if it ever could). It can, of course, take relatively modest steps to parry the initiatives of both Moscow and Beijing while also fighting ISIS and other localized threats, as the Obama administration is indeed attempting to do. However, it cannot also pursue a consistent, long-range strategy aimed at neutralizing a major adversary as in the Cold War. Hence a decision to focus on either Russia or China as enemy number one would have significant implications for U.S. policy and the general tenor of world affairs.

Choosing Russia as the primary enemy, for example, would inevitably result in a further buildup of NATO forces in Eastern Europe and the delivery of major weapons systems to Ukraine. The Obama administration has consistently opposed such deliveries, claiming that they would only inflame the ongoing conflict and sabotage peace talks. For those who view Russia as the greatest threat, however, such reluctance only encourages Putin to escalate his Ukrainian intervention and poses a long-term threat to U.S. interests. In light of Putin's ruthlessness, said Senator John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a major advocate of a Russia-centric posture, the president's unwillingness to better arm the Ukrainians "is one of the most shameful and dishonorable acts I have seen in my life."

On the other hand, choosing China as America's principal adversary means a relatively restrained stance on the Ukrainian front coupled with a more vigorous response to Chinese claims and base building in the South China Sea. This was the message delivered to Chinese leaders by Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter in late May at U.S. Pacific Command headquarters in Honolulu. Claiming that Chinese efforts to establish bases in the South China Sea were "out of step" with international norms, he warned of military action in response to any Chinese efforts to impede U.S. operations in the region. "There should be... no mistake about this - the United States will fly, sail, and operate wherever international law allows."

If you happen to be a Republican (other than Rand Paul) running for president, it's easy enough to pursue an all-of-the-above strategy, calling for full-throttle campaigns against China, Russia, Iran, Syria, ISIS, and any other adversary that comes to mind. This, however, is rhetoric, not strategy. Eventually, one or another approach is likely to emerge as the winner and the course of history will be set.

The "Pivot" to Asia

The Obama administration's fixation on the "800-pound gorilla" that is China came into focus sometime in 2010-2011. Plans were then being made for what was assumed to be the final withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq and the winding down of the American military presence in Afghanistan. At the time, the administration's top officials conducted a systematic review of America's long-term strategic interests and came to a consensus that could be summed up in three points: Asia and the Pacific Ocean had become the key global theater of international competition; China had taken advantage of a U.S. preoccupation with Iraq and Afghanistan to bolster its presence there; and to remain the world's number one power, the United States would have toprevent China from gaining more ground.

This posture, spelled out in a series of statements by President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and other top administration officials, was initially called the "pivot to Asia" and has since been relabeled a "rebalancing" to that region. Laying out the new strategy in 2011, Clintonnoted, "The Asia-Pacific has become a key driver of global politics.  Stretching from the Indian subcontinent to the western shores of the Americas... it boasts almost half of the world's population [and] includes many of the key engines of the global economy." As the U.S. withdrew from its wars in the Middle East, "one of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will therefore be to lock in substantially increased investment - diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise - in the Asia-Pacific region."

This strategy, administration officials claimed then and still insist, was never specifically aimed at containing the rise of China, but that, of course, was a diplomatic fig leaf on what was meant to be a full-scale challenge to a rising power. It was obvious that any strengthened American presence in the Pacific would indeed pose a direct challenge to Beijing's regional aspirations. "My guidance is clear," Obama told the Australian parliament that same November. "As we plan and budget for the future, we will allocate the resources necessary to maintain our strong military presence in this region. We will preserve our unique ability to project power and deter threats to peace."

Implementation of the pivot, Obama and Clinton explained, would include support for or cooperation with a set of countries that ring China, including increased military aid to Japan and the Philippines, diplomatic outreach to Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and other nations in Beijing's economic orbit, military overtures to India, and the conclusion of a major trade arrangement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), that would conveniently include most countries in the region but exclude China.

Many in Washington have commented on how much more limited the administration's actions in the Pacific have proven to be than the initial publicity suggested. Of course, Washington soon found itself re-embroiled in the Greater Middle East and shuttling many of its military resources back into that region, leaving less than expected available for a rebalancing to Asia. Still, the White House continues to pursue a strategic blueprint aimed at bolstering America's encirclement of China. "No matter how many hotspots emerge elsewhere, we will continue to deepen our enduring commitment to this critical region," National Security Adviser Susan Rice declared in November 2013.

For Obama and his top officials, despite the challenge of ISIS and of disintegrating states like Yemen and Libya wracked with extremist violence, China remains the sole adversary capable of taking over as the world's top power.  (Its economy already officially has.) To them, this translates into a simple message: China must be restrained through all means available. This does not mean, they claim, ignoring Russia and other potential foes. The White House has, for example, signaled that it will begin storing heavy weaponry, including tanks, in Eastern Europe for future use by any U.S. troops rotated into the region to counter Russian pressure against countries that were once part of the Soviet Union. And, of course, the Obama administration is continuing to up the ante against ISIS, most recentlydispatching yet more U.S. military advisers to Iraq. They insist, however, that none of these concerns will deflect the administration from the primary task of containing China.

Countering the Resurgent Russian Bear

Not everyone in Washington shares this China-centric outlook. While most policymakers agree that China poses a potential long-term challenge to U.S. interests, an oppositional crew of them sees that threat as neither acute nor immediate. After all, China remains America's second-leading trading partner (after Canada) and its largest supplier of imported goods. Many U.S. companies do extensive business in China, and so favor a cooperative relationship. Though the leadership in Beijing is clearly trying to secure what it sees as its interests in Asian waters, its focus remains primarily economic and its leaders seek to maintain friendly relations with the U.S., while regularly engaging in high-level diplomatic exchanges. Its president, Xi Jinping, is expected to visit Washington in September.

Vladimir Putin's Russia, on the other hand, looks far more threatening to many U.S. strategists. Its annexation of Crimea and its ongoing support for separatist forces in eastern Ukraine are viewed as direct and visceral threatson the Eurasian mainland to what they see as a U.S.-dominated world order. President Putin, moreover, has made no secret of his contempt for the West and his determination to pursue Russian national interests wherever they might lead. For many who remember the Cold War era - and that includes most senior U.S. policymakers - this looks a lot like the menacing behavior of the former Soviet Union; for them, Russia appears to be posing an existential threat to the U.S. in a way that China does not.

Among those who are most representative of this dark, eerily familiar, and retrograde outlook is Senator McCain. Recently, offering an overview of the threats facing America and the West, he put Russia at the top of the list:

"In the heart of Europe, we see Russia emboldened by a significant modernization of its military, resurrecting old imperial ambitions, and intent on conquest once again. For the first time in seven decades on this continent, a sovereign nation has been invaded and its territory annexed by force. Worse still, from central Europe to the Caucuses, people sense Russia's shadow looming larger, and in the darkness, liberal values, democratic sovereignty, and open economies are being undermined."

For McCain and others who share his approach, there is no question about how the U.S. should respond: by bolstering NATO, providing major weapons systems to the Ukrainians, and countering Putin in every conceivable venue. In addition, like many Republicans, McCain favors increased production via hydro-fracking of domestic shale gas for export as liquefied natural gas to reduce the European Union's reliance on Russian gas supplies.

McCain's views are shared by many of the Republican candidates for president. Jeb Bush, for instance, described Putin as "a ruthless pragmatist who will push until someone pushes back." Senator Ted Cruz, when asked on Fox News what he would do to counter Putin, typically replied, "One, we need vigorous sanctions... Two, we should immediately reinstate the antiballistic missile batteries in Eastern Europe that President Obama canceled in 2009 in an effort to appease Russia. And three, we need to open up the export of liquid natural gas, which will help liberate Ukraine and Eastern Europe." Similar comments from other candidates and potential candidates are commonplace.

As the 2016 election season looms, expect the anti-Russian rhetoric to heat up. Many of the Republican candidates are likely to attack Hillary Clinton, the presumed Democratic candidate, for her role in the Obama administration's 2009 "reset" of ties with Moscow, an attempted warming of relations that is now largely considered a failure. "She's the one that literally brought the reset button to the Kremlin," said former Texas Governor Rick Perry in April.

If any of the Republican candidates other than Paul prevails in 2016, anti-Russianism is likely to become the centerpiece of foreign policy with far-reaching consequences. "No leader abroad draws more Republican criticism than Putin does," a conservative website noted in June. "The candidates' message is clear: If any of them are elected president, U.S. relations with Russia will turn even more negative."

The Long View

Whoever wins in 2016, what Yale historian Paul Kennedy has termed "imperial overstretch" will surely continue to be an overwhelming reality for Washington. Nonetheless, count on a greater focus of attention and resources on one of those two contenders for the top place on Washington's enemies list. A Democratic victory spearheaded by Hillary Clinton is likely to result in a more effectively focused emphasis on China as the country's greatest long-term threat, while a Republican victory would undoubtedly sanctify Russia as enemy number one.

For those of us residing outside Washington, this choice may appear to have few immediate consequences. The defense budget will rise in either case; troops will, as now, be shuttled desperately around the hot spots of the planet, and so on. Over the long run, however, don't think for a second that the choice won't matter.

A stepped-up drive to counter Russia will inevitably produce a grim, unpredictable Cold War-like atmosphere of suspicion, muscle-flexing, and periodic crises. More U.S. troops will be deployed to Europe; American nuclear weapons may return there; and saber rattling, nuclear or otherwise, will increase. (Note that Moscow recently announced a decision to add another 40 intercontinental ballistic missiles to its already impressive nuclear arsenal and recall Senator Cruz's proposal for deploying U.S. anti-missile batteries in Eastern Europe.) For those of us who can remember the actual Cold War, this is hardly an appealing prospect.

A renewed focus on China would undoubtedly prove no less unnerving. It would involve the deployment of additional U.S. naval and air forces to the Pacific and an attendant risk of armed confrontation over China's expanded military presence in the East and South China Seas. Cooperation on trade and the climate would be imperiled, along with the health of the global economy, while the flow of ideas and people between East and West would be further constricted. (In a sign of the times, China recently announced new curbs on the operations of foreign nongovernmental organizations.) Although that country possesses far fewer nuclear weapons than Russia, it is modernizingits arsenal and the risk of nuclear confrontation would undoubtedly increase as well.

In short, the options for American global policy, post-2016, might be characterized as either grim and chaotic or even grimmer, if more focused. Most of us will fare equally badly under either of those outcomes, though defense contractors and others in what President Dwight Eisenhower first dubbed the "military-industrial complex" will have a field day. Domestic needs like health, education, infrastructure, and the environment will suffer either way, while prospects for peace and climate stability will recede.

A country without a coherent plan for advancing its national interests is a sorry thing. Worse yet, however, as we may find out in the years to come, would be a country forever on the brink of crisis and conflict with a beleaguered, nuclear-armed rival.

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 #29
Consortiumnews.com
July 1, 2015
Toward a Rational US Strategy (Part 2)
By William R. Polk
William R. Polk is a veteran foreign policy consultant, author and professor who taught Middle Eastern studies at Harvard. President John F. Kennedy appointed Polk to the State Department's Policy Planning Council where he served during the Cuban Missile Crisis. His books include: Violent Politics: Insurgency and Terrorism; Understanding Iraq; Understanding Iran; Personal History: Living in Interesting Times; Distant Thunder: Reflections on the Dangers of Our Times; and Humpty Dumpty: The Fate of Regime Change.

Special Report: The ultimate madness of today's U.S. foreign policy is Official Washington's eager embrace of a new Cold War against Russia with the potential for nuclear annihilation. A rational strategy would seek alternatives to this return to big-power confrontation, writes ex-U.S. diplomat William R. Polk.

In Part One, I dealt at length with America's relationship with "Lesser" or "Third World" powers because that is where we have been most active since the Second World War. I now turn to America's postwar rivalry with the other "Great" power, the Soviet Union, and offer some thoughts on our growing relationship with China.

For more than half a century, we and the Soviet Union were locked in the Cold War. During that time we were often on the brink of Hot War. We organized ourselves to fight it if necessary but we also created political alliances, economies and politico-military structures with the announced aim of avoiding war.

Thus we built such organizations as NATO, CENTO and SEATO, stationed much of our army abroad and manned thousands of bases around the world. We also recast much of our economy into the "military-industrial complex" to supply our overseas ventures.

Inevitably our efforts in foreign affairs upset traditional balances within our society. It is beyond my purpose here to describe the growth of "the National Security State" since the 1947 acts that established the governmental organs and profoundly altered universities, businesses and civic groups.  Here I focus on the strategy that grew out of the Cold War and which is now returning to dominate our thought and action on China and shaping our action on the emerging alliance of China and Russia.

With shows of military force adjacent to major Russian bases, we have returned to the confrontation that marked the most dangerous Cold War episodes. [See The New York Times, Eric Schmitt & Steven Myers, "U.S. Is Poised to Put Heavy Weaponry in Eastern Europe," and The Guardian, Ewen MacAskill, "Nato shows its teeth to Russia with elaborate Baltic training exercise."].

The Cold War divided as much of the world as either the U.S. or USSR could control into what Nineteenth Century statesmen called "spheres of influence." Both great powers used their military, financial, commercial, diplomatic and ideological power to dominate their "blocs." Since neither side could establish precise and stable frontiers, each power built real or notional "walls" around its sphere, each probed into the sphere of the other and both competed for the favor of the uncommitted.

Spheres of influence, as earlier statesmen had discovered, require careful maintenance, are unstable and do not preclude hostilities. They are not a substitute for peace or security, but sometimes they have seemed to statesmen the most advantageous ways to manage foreign relations. It was the attempt to make the Soviet-American "frontier" more stable and lessen the chance of war that was the contribution of the preëminent American strategist, George Kennan.

Hedgehog vs. Fox

George Kennan personified the hedgehog in an ancient Greek poem on the difference between the wise hedgehog and the cunning fox. Like the hedgehog, Kennan had one big idea - "containment," the strategy of the Cold War - while all around him the "foxes" were chasing and arguing over tactics.

Kennan's idea was that the Soviet drive for aggrandizement could be contained long enough that the state could evolve. Most of the foxes thought that the USSR should be "rolled back" and devised military means to do it. Some of them were prepared to go to nuclear war to accomplish that objective.

These were obviously major differences, but what is less obvious is that both Kennan and his critics thought of what they were doing as war: Kennan wanted it to be "colder" than the foxes, but he was prepared to engage in (and indeed personally designed and helped to implement) a variety of espionage "dirty tricks" that pushed relations between the U.S. and USSR close to "hot" war. Both he and the foxes aimed at American dominance.

When Kennan elaborated his ideas on containment rather than military conflict first in his 1946 Secret "Long Telegram" from Moscow and then anonymously in "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs, they were considered heresy.  The then "dean" of Washington columnists, Walter Lippmann, wrote a series of articles attacking them. [Originally in New York Herald Tribune, his articles then appeared in book form as The Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy (1947).]

Lippmann and the growing number of "big bomb" enthusiasts in government-funded "think tanks," thought Kennan failed to understand the fundamental evil of the Soviet system and so was gambling with American security. The only answer, they felt, was military superiority.

Military superiority was the central idea in what became a long series of U.S. national policy statements. (The latest being the February 2015 "National Security Strategy" of President Obama.) The first, and most influential, statement of it was "NSC 68" which  was written by Kennan's successor as director of the Policy Planning Staff (as it was then known), Paul Nitze, and adopted by President Harry Truman as official policy. It called for a massive build-up of both conventional and nuclear arms.

Nitze castigated Kennan, writing, "Without superior aggregate military strength, in being and readily mobilizable, a policy of 'containment' - which is in effect a policy of calculated and gradual coercion - is no more than a policy of bluff."

McGeorge Bundy later commented in Danger and Survival, "NSC 68 took the gloomiest possible view of the prospect of any agreed and verifiable bilateral limitation" on weapons. It also "explicitly considered and rejected the proposal that George Kennan had put forward ... for a policy [of] no first use of nuclear weapons." [On Kennan's and Nitze's complex relationship - reminiscent of that of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton - see Nicholas Thompson's The Hawk and the Dove (2009).]

NSC 68 provoked a massive Soviet nuclear weapons development. It also set off a limited (but then muted) debate within the American government. Willard Thorp, a noted government economist who had helped draft the Marshall Plan, pointed out that as measured by such criteria as the production of steel the total strength of the U.S. was about four times that of the USSR and that the current "gap is widening in our favor." In effect, he was saying the Cold War was mostly hype. [Willard Thorp. Memorandum to the Secretary of State: "Draft Report to the President," April 5, 1950].

Threatening War

More wide-ranging was the critique of William Schaub, a senior official in the Bureau of the Budget. In a memorandum to the NSC, dated May 8, 1950, he pointed out that the almost exclusive military emphasis of NSC 68 would "be tantamount to notifying Russia that we intended to press war in the near future."

Moreover, he wrote, the policy "vastly underplays the role of economic and social change as a factor in the 'the underlying conflict." And, as a result of our focus on the Soviet threat, "We are being increasingly forced into associations [with Third World regimes] which are exceedingly strange for a people of our heritage and ideals."

So it was that Kennan, Lippmann, Nitze, Thorp and Schaub opened the door on the issue that would engage policymakers for the next half century.  And dozens of would-be strategists rushed to enter.

But, before NSC 68 could be seriously discussed, on June 25, 1950, North Korean military forces crossed the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea. As Secretary of State Dean Acheson later remarked, Korea preëmpted discussion on American strategy. The argument over containment and superiority never ceased.

Discussion on American strategy, actually, had already been preëmpted. America had the bomb and most of the "Wise Men" (a term coined by McGeorge Bundy for the Cold War foreign policy "Establishment") in the upper reaches of government thought that threat of its use was the bedrock of American security because, as the American army faded away in 1945, it was evident that the Russians had overwhelming power in conventional forces. In military terms, the Cold War was already staked out.

The Cold War created a "need" for intelligence. From 1946, the U.S. Air Force was monitoring the borders of the USSR and its satellites. At first the Joint Chiefs of Staff opposed mounting probes, and the Soviet Union protested them. A compromise was reached with an implicit U.S.-USSR "gentleman's agreement" that restricted flights to no closer than 40 miles from borders.

Then in 1949 the Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear device and in November 1950 Chinese forces entered Korea. On Dec. 16, 1950, President Truman declared a state of National Emergency. Suddenly, gathering intelligence on Soviet capabilities, particularly on the presumed ability of the Soviet air force to attack the United States across Alaska, became insistent.

Truman immediately approved aerial penetrations of Siberia. The US had just acquired a new relatively fast, high-flying bomber, the B-47, that could be modified for the task. That was the first step in a lengthy game in which both Russian and American fighter planes intercepted, followed, photographed but usually did not attempt to shoot down each other's reconnaissance aircraft.

Usually, but not always. The first armed clash came, apparently, in 1949. In the following 11 years a dozen or more U.S. aircraft were shot down or crashed in or near the USSR.  Neither side admitted their existence. Keen on "deniability," and so to avoid serious conflict, President Eisenhower asked the British to perform the mission.

But finally, the CIA ordered a new aircraft, the Lockheed jet-powered glider, the U-2, and had it flown by CIA pilots. It was the CIA contract pilot Gary Powers who flew the U-2 that was brought down over the USSR on May 1, 1960.

It was because of the U-2 and related communications intelligence that the United States developed its close relationships with Turkey and Pakistan.  The relationship with Pakistan set the conditions for American aid and incidentally determined the relationship with India.  Without Congressional authorization, the CIA had entered into a deal with the government of Pakistan to create a base for the U-2 to overfly the USSR. [The National Security Archive, August 15, 2013, Jeffrey T. Richelson (ed.), "The Secret History of the U-2 - and Area 51."]

Each Side's Fears  

At the time, Cold War strategy came into focus at the junction of Russian mass and American technology. Each side feared what the other side had and sought to counter it:  the Russians pushed their powerful land forces up to the line in Europe while the Americans built sophisticated weapons like the ICBM and multiple warheads.

Few then believed that a balance could be reached short of the capacity to obliterate the world. All eyes were on military issues. And, at least on the American side, the aim was to achieve security by military superiority. That was the strategic advice of such cold warriors" as Thomas Schelling, Henry Kissinger, Albert Wohlstetter and Herman Kahn. [For their writings at the center of the Cold War period, see Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (1960), Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (1960), Henry Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (1969), Albert Wohlstetter, "The Delicate Balance of Terror," Foreign Affairs 37, January 1959].

It took the Cuban Missile Crisis and the analyses of it that followed within the U.S. government to challenge the strategy of the Cold War. The crisis made clear that the quest for military superiority had reached a dead end. Pressing ahead with actions to overawe the Soviet Union were likely to destroy the entire world.

I have spelled out elsewhere the consequences of conflict, but since this is so important in any attempt to understand a conceivable American strategy and is, I fear, receding in memory, I will just mention here the key points:

Even the great advocate of thermonuclear weapons, Edward Teller, admitted that their use would "endanger the survival of man[kind]." The Russian nuclear scientist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Andrei Sakharov, laid out a view of the consequences in the Summer 1983 issue of Foreign Affairs as "a calamity of indescribable proportions."

More detail was assembled by a scientific study group convened by Carl Sagan and reviewed by 100 scientists.  A graphic summary of their findings was published in the Winter 1983 issue of Foreign Affairs. Sagan pointed out that since both major nuclear powers had targeted cities, casualties could reasonably be estimated at between "several hundred million to 1.1 billion people" with an additional 1.1 billion people seriously injured.

Those figures related to the 1980s. Today, the cities have grown so the numbers would be far larger. Massive fires set off by the bombs would carry soot into the atmosphere, causing temperatures to fall to a level that would freeze ground to a depth of about 3 feet. Planting crops would be impossible and such food as was stored would probably be contaminated so the few survivors would starve.

The hundreds of millions of bodies of the dead could not be buried and would spread contagion. As the soot settled and the sun again became again visible, the destruction of the ozone layer would remove the protection from ultraviolet rays and so promote the mutation of pyrotoxins.

Diseases against which there were no immunities would spread. These would overwhelm not only the human survivors but, in the opinion of the expert panel of 40 distinguished biologists, would cause "species extinction" among both plants and animals. Indeed, there was a distinct possibility that "there might be no human survivors in the Northern Hemisphere ... and the possibility of the extinction of Homo sapiens..."

The Missile Crisis solidified my disagreements on strategy with both Kennan and Nitze. From my participation in the crisis as one of the three members of the Crisis Management Committee, I became convinced that the "option" of military confrontation in the age of nuclear weapons and ICBMs was not realistic. Armed confrontation was suicide. And, the "strategy of conflict," as laid out by Schelling, Kissinger, Wohlstetter and Kahn, was likely to cause it. That was the first conclusion.

My second conclusion was that both the "hedgehog" and the "foxes" - that is both Kennan and the military-oriented strategists led by Nitze - had misunderstood what caused war to actually break out. Because this may be absolutely crucial to avoiding stumbling into war, let me explain.

Basic to the American Cold War strategy was the belief that, regardless of the intelligence, politics or desire of whatever government it then had, in armed conflict America would be forced to fire its nuclear weapons because it did not have conventional forces adequate to stop an invading Russian army.

Knowing this, sensible Soviet leaders would "back off" from determined American challenges because they would realize that, as Schelling put it, "the option of nonfulfillment no longer exists." Moreover, Schelling and the Cold Warriors believed that because the Russians knew that even a limited retaliation would lead to their destruction, America could engage in "limited" nuclear strikes. In the war game Schelling designed, this was the assumption.

All-Out Nuclear War

In Schelling's war game (to test what he had written in The Strategy of Conflict on limited war and reprisal) that was played out with access to all information the U.S. government had and involved only senior American officers, I was the political member of "Red Team." The game was played in the Pentagon and was classified Top Secret. It was taken very seriously, as it should have been, by our senior officials.

In Schelling's scenario, in a hypothecated crisis (following a coup in Iran) "Blue Team" obliterated Baku, killing about 200,000 people. How would Red Team respond? The chairman of our team, the then Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Anderson, playing Chairman Khrushchev, asked me to recommend our response.

I replied that I saw three options: first, play tit-for-tat, destroying, say, Dallas. Limited nuclear war enthusiasts would presumably then expect the American president to go on television and say, "Fellow Americans, I am sorry to have to report to you that if you had relatives in Dallas ... they are gone. The Russians retaliated because we incinerated one of their cities. So now we're even. Now we'll just go back to the normal Cold War.'"

The team agreed that this was ridiculous. America would "re-retaliate"; the USSR would re-re-retaliate also and war would quickly become general. There was no stopping in a "limited war."

The second option was to do nothing. Was this feasible? We agreed that it would certainly have led to a military coup d'état in which the Soviet leadership would have been shot as traitors. Knowing this, they would have been unlikely to adopt that move. Even if they did, and were overthrown, that would not stop retaliation: the coup leaders would strike back.

So there remained only one option:  general war. And only one feasible move: striking first with everything we had in the hope that we could disable our opponent. We signaled that we "fired" as many of Red Team's notional 27,000 nuclear weapons as we could deliver.

Schelling was shocked. He stopped the game and scheduled a post-mortem to discuss how we had "misplayed." The issue was serious, he said: if we were correct, he would have to give up the theory of deterrence, the very bedrock of the strategy of the Cold War. Why had we made such a foolish move?

In our meeting, I repeated our team's analysis: I emphasized that the fault in his (and America's) limited war strategy was that it failed to differentiate "interest of state" from "interest of government." Schelling and American military planners assumed that they were the same. They were not.

It was obviously better for the Soviet Union not to engage in a nuclear exchange, but to appear to knuckle under to an American threat would be suicide for the leaders. Nikita Khrushchev's backing down in the Missile Crisis was a rare and nearly fatal act of statesmanship. He could afford it for two key reasons: first, no missiles or other air strikes happened so that no Russians had to be avenged and, second, the Soviet civilian and military leaders all agreed (as they later confirmed to me when I lectured at the Institute of World Economy and International Affairs of the Soviet Academy) that they accepted the geostrategic reality: Cuba was in the American "zone." They had gone too far.

Still they did not forgive. His body was not buried in the Kremlin Wall as was done for other leaders. The reverse would also be true for our leaders.

My conclusion was that the idea of limited nuclear war was a recipe for general war; that the quest for supremacy was likely to lead to war; and, therefore, that the policy underlying the Cold War was unrealistic.

Obviously, those in a position to make the decisions did not agree. While limited and sporadic moves were made to ameliorate the U.S.-USSR relationship, particularly in the area of nuclear weapons, we continued to seek weapons superiority and political dominance.

Reagan's Escalation

President Ronald Reagan escalated American weapons production with the aim of bankrupting the Soviet Union. Initially, the policy seemed to work. When the Soviet Union "imploded," Reagan was given the credit. His policy seemed to vindicate the hard-line policy proposed 40 years earlier by Paul Nitze in NSC 68.

We now know that the Soviet collapse was caused mainly by its "Vietnam," its disastrous nine-year war in Afghanistan that coincided with the Reagan administration. [This was the conclusion of British Ambassador to Russia Sir Rodric Braithwaite in Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-1989 (2010).] That cause was largely overlooked.

So the wrong lesson was taken into the administration of Reagan's successor, President George H.W. Bush. His advisers concluded that since the quest for military superiority worked, an even greater emphasis on it could be expected to work even better.

That assumption led to a far more radical approach to American foreign policy than had ever been contemplated. It was the program set out under the auspices of Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. (While it became known as the "Wolfowitz Doctrine," the "Defense Planning Guidance of 1992" was written by Wolfowitz's fellow neoconservative, the Afghan-American Zalmay Khalilzad, with the help of neoconservatives Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Richard Perle and Albert Wohlstetter.)

The "Wolfowitz Doctrine," slightly toned down by Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell, set the tone for American policy for the next 20 years.

Taking advantage of Soviet weakness, the Wolfowitz Doctrine sought "to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival" and "to preclude any hostile power from dominating a region critical to our interests" and to "discourage them [our European allies] from challenging our leadership."

If any of these challenges arose, the United States would preëmpt the challenge. It would intervene whenever and wherever it thought necessary. It particularly threatened the Russian government if it attempted to reintegrate such newly independent republics as Ukraine.

The Wolfowitz Doctrine, repackaged as the "National Security Strategy of the United States" was published on Sept. 20, 2002.  It justified President George W. Bush's invasions of Afghanistan (for harboring Osama bin Laden) and Iraq (for allegedly building nuclear weapons). And, although it was not, of course, cited by the Obama administration, it laid the foundation for its policy toward Russia in Ukraine and explains some of the emerging policy of the American government toward China.

The attempt to use China against Russia, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's ploy, seemed to work, for a while, but has faded because both Russia and China realized that their immediate challenge came not from one another but from America.

Despite accommodations (as in Hong Kong), China is determined to realize at sea (in the southwest Pacific) and in international finance (with its establishment of a rival to the America-dominated World Bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank), its historic self-image as a major - or even the central (Mandarin: Zhongguo) - world power.

The Chinese policy confronts America with two choices: recognize and gradually accommodate the Chinese thrust into what it regards as its sphere of influence or try to thwart it. Early moves suggest that America will try, even militarily, to continue its established policy of blocking Chinese outward moves.

In short, it seems that we are at the beginning of a replay of the Soviet-American Cold War. But since history never exactly repeats, I will briefly consider the changes that are taking us into this new world.

The Arena of World Affairs

The modern and future arena of international affairs is the whole world; so the template of international affairs is and will be composed of and interplay of geography, climate, resources, technology and population. Changes in each are unprecedented. Today, we are at the onset of a new revolution. The revolution is already creating a new world in which older concepts of strategy are becoming irrelevant.

While we are still powered by coal and oil, we are in a race to make the transition to wind and solar power before we do irreparable damage to the planet. Lester R. Brown et al, point out in The Great Transition (2015) that solar and wind power costs are falling rapidly so that they are becoming competitive with coal and that, among other costs of fossil fuels, the rise of sea levels already has dramatic effects on agriculture in Asia. Many scientists believe we may be too late and that we will suffer catastrophic changes in our climate.

Avoiding that fate has not yet led to effective international cooperation, but as rising seas and deteriorating climate become increasingly severe, and prevent us from producing food as readily and economically, states will be forced to cooperate. Population is also being altered in size and in kind.

People today are more politicized than ever before but are also more susceptible to manipulation by the increasingly controlled and concentrated media (in America, not only is the media increasingly concentrated under a few major corporations whose profits depend on advertising - with the exception of National Public Radio - but there is increasing evidence of self- and outside censorship. For one instance, see The Nation, James Carden, "The crusade to ban Russia policy critics.").

Populations of the advanced industrial states are aging while those of poorer areas are multiplying. Migrations of people from poorer areas are inevitable but are increasingly bitterly opposed in America and elsewhere.

Spread of disease by movement of peoples has been predicted to lead to pandemics. So far, advances in medicine and availability health care facilities have avoided the worst, but several diseases, including malaria, are still major killers in poorer areas and, in mutated form, could spread to even the rich North.

Our most critical resource, fresh water, is increasingly deficient. Drought already affects America, and attempts to overcome water shortage are flash points in relationships among countries in Africa and Asia.

Damming rivers in Central Asia as China is doing and in Kashmir as India is doing could be flashpoints for international conflict, while buying relatively well-watered lands in Africa, often corruptly, and evicting the inhabitants, as China and other countries are doing are likely to lead to popular resistance or guerrilla warfare.

What television began a generation ago has been multiplied by new forms of distribution of information. Even relatively poor people in remote areas have access beyond the imagination of even the rich and powerful a generation ago. Retrieval of information also allows far greater intrusion into the privacy of citizens and potentially control of them by governments. Cyberwar, a concept that hardly existed a few years ago, is a new arena of conflict among nations.

Projection of power is taking new forms. Armies are changing shape: large formations are passé and are being replaced by elite squads or special forces. Indeed, soldiers are being replaced by robots.

Spreading Nukes

Nuclear weapons, once an American monopoly, seem likely to spread in the coming decade beyond the nine states known to have them, nations to the "nth country." As the war game I described above showed, any temptation to use them in "limited war" would be devastating for the whole world.

Particularly between Pakistan and India this is a clear and present danger. Elsewhere, especially in eastern Europe, the chances of accidents or "miscalculations" are ever present and perhaps rising. [See The Guardian, Ewen MacAskill, "Nato to review nuclear weapon policy as attitude to Russia hardens."]

International trade will continue to grow but is likely to be increasingly controlled by governments; particularly in food grains, which are becoming harder to grow, governments cannot afford to allow market forces to control their ability to feed their citizens.

Monetary policy appears to be moving in the opposite direction. As the American economy is increasingly removed from supervision, concentration of wealth will continue and both the middle class and the poor will suffer. Cutbacks in social services and public works will increase the danger of a major turndown or even a depression. This could also affect foreign policy: it was, after all, the shift to a war economy that ended the Great Depression.

Under these pressures and trends, it seems to me likely that the need for more intelligent formulation of policy and more modest relations among peoples will become more urgent. The world of the future will arrive faster than we expect. Change is inevitable but a wise policy will seek to make it as smooth as possible.

So, in this perhaps not so brave new world, what do we really want?

Fundamental Objectives of U.S. Foreign Policy

The fundamental objective of American policy was clearly set out in the Foreword to the Constitution: "Establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure The Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity."

Put in less elegant terms, I suggest that the foreign affairs component of this fundamental objective is to achieve affordable world security in which we can pursue the good life and the "Blessings of Liberty."

When our Founding Fathers gathered in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, they were motivated and guided by fears of anarchy and tyranny. They sought a path between them in the Constitution they wrote: the Federal Government was to be strong enough to hold the Union together, but not so strong as to tyrannize the states that composed it. They regarded the United States as an experiment to find whether or not we could remain free and responsible participants in the management of our lives.

Since they assumed and hoped that we would live in a republic where the opinion of citizens has some ability to control government decision making, they believed, that to have a chance to combine liberty and responsibility, citizens needed to be educated. Enhancing the intellectual quality of our citizenry thus became essential in securing of "The Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity."

(By way of contrast, in Britain, the ignorance of the public made little difference since the aristocracy and the monarch made the decisions; in dictatorships like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, the public had even less influence. The danger in a democracy is manipulation of the public through control of the media, unlimited financial intervention in politics and the belief that it has lost control. Despite bouts of public "activism," this sense is growing.)

Impressively well read in history, the authors of the Constitution saw militarism as the mother of tyranny. Their discussions make clear their fear of the ambition of leaders and manipulation of public sentiment. They wanted, above all, to prevent American government from copying European despots in the game of war. Thus, they specified that only in an actual attack on the United States was the president allowed to act independently. Otherwise, the legislature, speaking with multiple voices and representing diverse local issues, had to be convinced of the need for military action.

The delegates recognized that foreign military adventures were the biggest threats to the republic they were founding. This was because war would create such insecurity at home as to undermine our way of life, diminish our sense of trust in one another, denigrate our civil liberties,  undercut our respect for our social contract, the Constitution, and divert the fruit of our labor from "the general Welfare."

Operational Steps Toward Achieving Objectives

Experience has shown that the Founding Fathers were right: it is in our foreign relations where the greatest danger to our overall objectives lies. So it is in foreign affairs where the need for a well-informed citizenry is greatest. But experience also shows that the public is subject to surges of emotion or "war fever" in which reason is overwhelmed. Faulty perception of danger has triggered moves that have threatened our "Domestic Tranquility."

So, a fundamental challenge is posed for us: how can we, the citizens, acquire sufficient reliable information, trustworthy analysis and objective opinion on which to form our judgment of government decisions.

Citizens need help in addressing such fundamental questions as 1) is there a sufficiently serious threat to American security that requires American response? 2) what are the kinds of response (diplomatic, military, legal, economic) that could be implemented? 3) how likely to be effective are the various possible responses? 4) how costly would each of those responses be? 5) are there alternative, non-American, means of solving the problem we identify? 6) does whatever seems  to be the correct answer move toward a more secure, peaceful and productive world environment in which America participates?

For most citizens such questions are inscrutable. Not only do they lack knowledge and experience but they are not able to devote sufficient time to finding answers.  Consequently, they are apt to answer with incomplete or biased information or by emotion.

In his farewell address, George Washington pointed to this danger. As he wrote, by allowing passion rather than knowledge or logic to set policy, "The peace often, sometimes perhaps the Liberty, of Nations has been the victim."

But, we have both personal and political experience in finding sensible answers. Whenever we face difficult problems, most of us seek advice. In matters of health and finance, for example, we seek the opinions of specialists who have the training and experience, and we try to guard against their having conflicts of interest.

Concrete Proposals

Here I suggest a way to apply our daily experience to public policy. It is to create a sort of foreign affairs ombudsman - a council to provide information and advice for the public. There is precedent for this suggestion. Much of what I propose already exists:

Existing governmental information and analytical resources in foreign affairs are extensive. For over a century (since 1914), the American Congress has been advised by the Congressional Research Service. The CRS is an independent organization situated in the Library of Congress and is staffed by approximately 600 scholars who are recognized as expert in their various fields.

The President is advised on economic matters by the Council of Economic Advisers and on sundry other matters by the Office of Management and Budget whose predecessor organization was formed in 1921. It has a staff today of about 550.

The Secretary of State is advised by the Department's small but highly regarded Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Finally, the director of Central Intelligence is provided with an analysis of the "product" or "take" of the 17 American intelligence agencies by the National Intelligence Council which grew out of the Office of National Estimates that was founded in 1950.

What I propose is the creation of an independent institution, a National Commission, composed of a council of perhaps a dozen senior officers and a staff of perhaps 50 men and women who are expert in the various fields related to foreign affairs. Both groups would be chosen by carefully crafted criteria after a "peer review" and on the basis of their credentials.

They would be obligated by contract not to go to or return to business, law or professions related to foreign affairs but would be given some form of tenure and generous retirement and other benefits. The aim would be to assure their lack of any conflict of interest.

Their task would be to study and report in the public domain upon the fundamental questions on which citizens should be informed. So they would be empowered to demand information without delay or hindrance from all government sources, authorized to hold symposia, conferences and seminars and to commission outside studies and reports. They would also be afforded adequate means of reaching the public through, for example, National Public Radio, press releases, magazine articles, pamphlets and books.

Of course, it is probable that much of the public will not read these materials. That is the worst case; the more likely result would be that they would set a standard which the Executive Branch, the Congress and the media would feel obliged to emulate; and the best case would be that the public education program would raise the level of citizen participation in matters of national importance.

Such an institution is not likely to be warmly welcomed by government officers, some of whom will see it as an intrusion on their "turf." Congressmen, however, will at least verbally approve it since many of their constituents will welcome its reports. And the media or at least working journalists will find it a source to be tapped and so a welcome aid to their work.

The experience of the Congressional Research Service and the Bureau of Management and Budget suggest that in proper political circumstances creation of such an organization is not impossible.

In addition to the National Commission, we should resurrect a modern version of the educational programs that were begun just after the Second World War. Undertaking them was spurred by a recognition that we needed both to know more about the world outside our frontiers and before our lifetimes.

Programs in General Education were organized at Harvard (under James Conant) and Chicago (under Robert Hutchins), gave birth to publications (inspired by Sumner Wells) and funded by the major foundations. They were partly followed by subsidies given to universities for teaching exotic languages. Some of these efforts need to be revived and better focused on national needs.

Do and Don't

I turn now briefly to a few major points on what we should not do: We should not attempt to force other societies or nations to transform themselves into our image of ourselves; we should not impose upon other nations puppet regimes.

While we have a legitimate need for intelligence, we should ban espionage which has proven to be so detrimental to our national image and purpose. That is, we should not engage in "regime change" or "nation building" as is currently practiced.

And, we should not sell arms abroad.  While we cannot suddenly abolish the military industrial complex, we can and should redirect the activities of our industry toward such domestic activities as fixing the thousands of dangerous and dilapidated bridges spanning our rivers, cleaning up our cities, engaging in massive reforestation, repairing or building schools, hospitals and other public facilities, repairing our roads and recreating a national high-speed rail network.

There is much to be done and we have the skills required to do it.

Lastly, I suggest a few points on what we should do: It is both in our long-term interests and in accord with our heritage to join and support the international legal system; we should financially support but generally not engage our troops in peace-seeking operations; we should continue our efforts to cut back, bilaterally, with Russia, nuclear weapons development and deployment and encourage other nations to move toward denuclearization; and we should support both American private and UN aid programs in the Third World.

In conclusion, we must come to terms with the reality that we live in a multicultural, multinational world. Our assertion of uniqueness, of unipower domination and of military power has been enormously expensive and has created a world reaction against us; in the period ahead it will become unsustainable and is likely to lead precisely to what we should not want to happen - armed conflict.

Moderation, peace-seeking and open-mindedness need to become our national mottos.

 [return to Contents] 

 #30
Washington Post
July 3, 2015
Editorial
Seeing conspiracies in Armenia where none exist

LAST MONTH, Armenia's electricity monopoly, which is owned by a Russian conglomerate headed by one of Vladi­mir Putin's cronies, was granted a big price increase by a government commission. Protesters took to the streets, chanting "no to plunder"; when they were attacked by riot police with water cannons, a much bigger crowd took over Yerevan's main avenue. They are still there. Mostly young and leaderless, the demonstrators haven't articulated a political agenda, and Western governments have kept their distance. The U.S. embassy in Yerevan limited itself to a tweet urging "peaceful restrained behavior."

Mr. Putin's propaganda apparatus, however, has been quick to draw conclusions. Russian media said the U.S. embassy had orchestrated the protests to replicate last year's popular revolution in Ukraine. "You know how the color revolutions, and the Maidan in Ukraine started," said Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. That was a reference to the Kremlin's favorite conspiracy theory: that the popular uprisings in Kiev and other Eurasian capitals were not spontaneous but meticulously fomented by the CIA.

What's most remarkable about this deluded reaction is that it is not mere bombast. Consumed by cynicism and paranoia, Mr. Putin and the circle around him appear to regard any manifestation of unrest within Russia or the neighboring states it aspires to dominate as the product of secret plots. The possibility that Armenians, an impoverished people whose leaders have sold most of their economy to Russia, might be genuinely aggrieved at a 17 percent electricity price increase imposed by an opaque, Moscow-based cartel is dismissed within the Kremlin as naive.

Armenian President Serge Sarkisian, though a Russian client, is not quite so out of touch. While publicly rejecting the idea that the protests were anti-Russian, Mr. Sarkisian did his best to defuse them after the police attack failed. He said that the state would cover the cost of the price increase while the electricity monopoly was subjected to an audit, and hinted that the company might be nationalized or resold. He also extracted $200 million in fresh military aid from Moscow, as well as a promise that a Russian soldier accused of murdering an Armenian family would be turned over to the local justice system.

That failed to end the protests, and Mr. Sarkisian's decision to align his government with the Putin regime is looking shortsighted. Armenia last year became just the third country, after Belarus and Kazakhstan, to join the Eurasian Economic Union, Mr. Putin's attempt to create a Moscow-dominated bloc. During a visit to Washington in May, Mr. Sarkisian told us the decision was pragmatic: Armenians working in Russia provide a fifth of the country's gross domestic product, and Russia is its sole energy supplier. "Armenian cognac can't really be sold in Paris," he added.

Now, however, Armenia and other clients are suffering from Russia's economic crash. The decline of the ruble has dragged down Armenia's currency, while the plummeting profits of energy conglomerate Inter RAO UES, chaired by U.S. sanctions target Igor Sechin, have pushed it to extract more revenue from its Armenian subsidiary. In short, Armenians don't need American prompting to revolt; Mr. Putin and his gang are providing plenty of impetus.

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 #31
RFE/RL
July 3, 2015
Jews Are Fleeing Russia Because Of Putin
by Roman Super and Claire Bigg

Just a year ago, Russian journalist Vladimir Yakovlev was one of Moscow's most influential media figures.

Today, he lives a quiet life in Tel Aviv and has swapped his Russian passport for an Israeli one.

Yakovlev, the founder of the respected Kommersant publishing house and the Snob magazine, belongs to a new wave of disillusioned Russian Jews deserting their country for the relative stability of Israel.

"The big problem with Russia, and the main reason why I left, is the fact that our value system was destroyed," he says. "Life in Russia has turned into Russian roulette. Every morning you turn the roulette wheel, you never know what is going to happen to you."

Spooked by Russia's actions in Ukraine and by the increasingly stringent punishments for anyone deemed critical of the Kremlin, Russians of Jewish descent have been fleeing in droves over the past 18 months.

Surge From Eastern Europe

According to Israeli authorities, as many as 4,685 Russian citizens relocated to Israel in 2014 -- more than double than in any of the previous 16 years.
And the trend seems to be accelerating.

The nongovernmental Jewish Agency for Israel has released figures showing a 40-percent surge in immigration to the country between January and March of this year, compared to the same period in 2014.

The study suggests that while the majority of immigrants still come from Western Europe, Russians and Ukrainians are responsible for this increase. The number of Jews migrating from Western Europe has remained largely the same.

Yakovlev, however, doesn't  consider himself a simple immigrant. He is, in his own words, a refugee.

"People usually emigrate due to domestic circumstances," he says. "People are now leaving because they are scared to stay where they would like to live. They are running from Russia."

Zeyev Khanin, an official at Israel's Immigrant Absorption Ministry, says the average Russian immigrant has changed dramatically since the last mass exodus of Jews from Russia ebbed in the late 1990s.

He says newcomers from Russia are significantly younger, more educated, and, as a rule, hail from Moscow or St. Petersburg.

"The average education level is on the rise and the number of people with degrees in humanities has increased massively," he tells RFE/RL. "Today's repatriates are mostly the creative intelligentsia."

Mikhail Kaluzhsky was among the 4,685 Russians who moved to Israel last year.

A journalist and playwright from Moscow, he is typical of the new wave of Russian immigrants described by Khanin.

Kaluzhsky says his decision to leave Russia is "directly linked to politics."

In January 2014, he traveled to Ukraine to witness the Maidan pro-democracy protests that toppled Russia-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych.

He says the unwavering determination of Maidan protesters left a deep impression on him, together with an uncomfortable realization that Russian antigovernment activists lag far behind their Ukrainian counterparts.

"I understood that our protests were worthless," he says. "After the Bolotnaya protests [in Moscow in 2012] in our country, demonstrators went to the restaurant. Activists on Maidan did not go anywhere, they stayed until victory."

Then, Kaluzhsky lost his job with the Sakharov human rights organization as a result of Russia's new "foreign agent" law.

The controversial law, signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2012, forces NGOs that receive foreign funding and are deemed to carry out political activities to register as "foreign agents."

"The center's financial situation deteriorated as soon as talk about foreign agents started in Russia," says Kaluzhsky. "Western foundations said they could no longer fund initiatives that may be shut down tomorrow."

In fall 2014, the Sakharov Center was forced to scrap its theater projects, to which Kaluzhsky had actively contributed.

Crimea Seizure

Russia's annexation of Crimea from Ukraine was the last straw.

"After Crimea, our family decided to distance itself from all of this, most of all from the government, " he says.

The Kaluzhskys now live in the outskirts of Tel Aviv. Their son attends a local Jewish pre-school and already speaks good Hebrew.

They have sold all their belonging in Russia and do not plan to return.

Vladimir Yakovlev, too, sees his future in Israel.

He and his wife have settled in downtown Tel Aviv, in a bright flat with a balcony full of flowers.

Most of their friends are other Russian intellectuals, and many of these friendships date back from their life in Moscow.

Yakovlev says Israel offers the best of both worlds -- a sunny, friendly climate and the same circle of liberal, educated Muscovites that surrounded him in Russia.

"My group of friends here is almost the same as I had in Moscow," he says. "We live in the same house as friends from Moscow, and I keep meeting people in the streets whom I regularly spent time with in Moscow."
 
"No one," he adds, "should be forced to spend their life dealing with this Russian nonsense."

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