#2
Moscow Times
July 21, 2015
Diabetes a Growing Problem in Russia
By Cesar Chelala
Dr. Cesar Chelala is an international public health consultant for several UN agencies and a winner of an Overseas Press Club of America award.

The prevalence of diabetes, particularly type 2 diabetes, is rapidly increasing in most countries in the world. The increase of cases in Russia is a cause for concern - one out of every two people does not know they have the disease, as initially it does not show any symptoms. Four million people have been diagnosed with diabetes in Russia, and almost 6 million people are unaware of their disease.

According to the International Diabetes Federation, there are 387 million people living with diabetes worldwide today, and it is estimated that by 2035, some 592 million people will be living with it. The burden on the economy is considerable. In Russia, the annual cost of caring for diabetic patients is $12.5 billion.

According to statistics from the World Health Organization (WHO,) there are 60 million people with diabetes in the European region, or about 10.3% of men and 9.6% of women aged 25 and over. In the U.S., 29 million people have diabetes, up from the previous estimate of 26 million in 2010.

Between 40 to 50 percent of newly diagnosed people have one or more complications. Kidney disease, one of diabetes' most common complications, may lead to kidney failure. Other complications are diabetic retinopathy, which affects blood vessels in the retina; damage of lower-extremity blood vessels, which may lead to gangrene and amputations; and arteriosclerotic changes of the major blood vessels, which increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes.

These complications are important not only from the point of view of people's health but also for their economic impact. More than 90 percent of diabetes expenditures are for the treatment of diabetes-related complications. Russia's Federal Targeted Program on Diabetes states that diagnosing diabetes and treating its complications earlier can result in significant savings.

If one takes into consideration the increase in the number of cases of diabetes and the increase in life expectancy, one can predict that there will also be a steady increase in the number of diabetes patients who have complications. This is particularly true in the case of people living in big cities, where the lifestyle is more sedentary, stress levels are higher, and there is greater consumption of foods rich in fast-absorbing carbohydrates.

These changes in lifestyle are probably the reason why diabetes is now being seen at earlier ages. Until recently, mostly people who were 50 years of age or older were diagnosed with the disease. However, more patients in their 30s and 40s now have diabetes, probably as a result of those unhealthy lifestyles. It is estimated that more than 66,000 people die from diabetes-related causes every year in Russia.

In recent years, several public health campaigns have been conducted to teach people some basic health lifestyle principles. However, more programs, particularly in smaller cities, are needed that specifically target diabetes awareness and prevention issues, since these are the most effective ways of addressing the disease.

Approximately 26 percent of the population over the age of 15 is obese in Russia. This figure will increase to 30 percent in 2030. Because being overweight or obese affects the body's ability to properly adjust blood sugar levels - thus increasing the risk of diabetes by up to 20 times - dealing with the issue of obesity is another way of keeping diabetes under control.

What is needed is a wide spectrum public health government-sponsored program that will 1) raise awareness about diabetes, 2) improve data collection and analysis, 3) increase access to knowledge about diabetes both among patients and also among doctors, particularly on how to deal with its complications, 4) facilitate screening of patients and accessibility to treatment, and 5) provide financial support for basic and applied research on diabetes. Diabetes in Russia today should be treated as the serious threat it really is.

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 #3
The National Interest
July 21, 2015
5 Things You Need to Know about Putin's Popularity in Russia
"Even if the West succeeds in further weakening Putin economically, it may up end up strengthening his position domestically."
By Dimitri A. Simes
Dimitri A. Simes is a staff member of the Center for the National Interest.

Since the crisis in Ukraine erupted, there has been a growing disconnect between how Russian president Vladimir Putin is perceived in the West and at home. In the former, policymakers and media commentators have been very vocal in denouncing the Russian leader's actions in Ukraine, and the opinion of the general public in those countries is similarly critical. By contrast, the reaction of Putin's domestic audience couldn't be anymore different and Putin appears quite popular. Here are five reason why this is the case:

1. Most Russians really do support Putin:

The latest numbers on Putin's popularity did not come from some Kremlin entity, which might, to put it delicately, have a conflict of interest. Rather, they came from the Levada Center, an independent and respected polling agency whose leadership has a contentious history with the government. The pollsters at Levada have no incentive to fabricate Putin's approval ratings to bolster the public image of the Kremlin.

While it is true that in authoritarian societies, even independent polls can overstate the leader's popularity due to citizens not wanting to dissent from the political climate, conformity can only account for so much. The magnitude of Putin's popularity means that even with this factor taken into account, he still would have the support of the overwhelming majority.

2. The Ukraine crisis provided a significant boost:

In January 2014, shortly before the start of the crisis, Vladimir Putin had a 65% approval rating. Since then, his approval rating has skyrocketed to a stunning 89%, even as Russia's economy is facing sanctions related difficulties. This is an all time high for him, with his previously highest approval rating being 88% in 2008, shortly after victory in the Russo-Georgian War.

3. Putin's personal popularity doesn't translate into support for the way Russia is ruled:

Comparing the support most Russians express for Vladimir Putin with their views about the Russian government as a whole, reveals a stark contrast. 58% of Russians say that government officials primarily seek to preserve and strengthen their own power and 60% say that government officials are not accountable to society. Russians are not over eager to spend quality time with government employees, with 69% of them trying to have minimal interaction with the government. Nor do Russians posses strong faith in the legal system, with 47% claiming not to feel protected by the law while only 41% saying they did. These numbers illustrate not only a lack of support, but an absence of trust for the Russian political system outside of Putin.

4. Sanctions may actually be helping Putin:

Some analysts have argued that once sanctions hurt the average citizens, Russians would lose enthusiasm for Putin's actions in Ukraine, and perhaps even protest like they did in 2011 and 2012, forcing Putin to chose between backing down on Ukraine or facing a potential revolution at home.

But this has not occurred. From September 2014 to June 2015, Russians who claimed to be "very seriously" or "somewhat seriously" affected by sanctions rose from 16% to 33%, whilst the number of people who claimed to have suffered no negative side effects from sanctions fell from 35% to 13%. During this same time period, Putin's popularity continued to grow. With 66% of Russians believing that Western sanctions are meant to "weaken and humiliate" Russia, many have rallied around the flag and embraced Putin as a "father protector" defending the country against foreign onslaught. Instead of blaming Putin for their economic woes, many Russians blame the West. Nearly half of all Russians say that sanctions are intended not only to cripple elite circles, but also to punish ordinary Russians. Many thus regard sanctions as assaults on them and their families, in addition to being an attack on their country.

While it is conceivable that this could change in the face of greater economic hardships, it would be reckless to assume that it will. If it does not, then Putin may find himself under pressure from the Russian public not to appear surrendering to the West, making it more difficult for him to make concessions.

5. On Ukraine, even some in the opposition support Putin:

While Putin's actions in Ukraine have undoubtedly further bolstered him in the eyes of his conservative base, his 89 percent approval rating would not be possible without broader support. In fact, several prominent opposition leaders have spoken up in favor of the current policy towards Ukraine, and in certain cases urged Russia to go beyond. Sergei Udaltsov, a key firebrand during the 2011 mass anti-Putin protests who was sentenced to 4.5 years in prison for his role in those protests, celebrated the result of the Crimean referendum, proclaiming, " I am a Soviet patriot, and consider the destruction of the USSR a great mistake and crime, so I regard the return of Crimea as a small but important step towards the rebirth of an updated Union." Likewise, Eduard Limonov, a longtime Putin foe who has spent time in jail for his political activities, called for military intervention not only in Eastern Ukraine, but also for the Black Sea Fleet to be sent to Odessa.

But left-wing nationalists are not the only members of the traditional anti-Putin coalition to hold such sentiments. In an interview with Snob magazine, liberal journalist Ksenia Kirillova bemoaned the endorsement by many in the middle class intelligentsia of Putin's stance on Ukraine, concluding, "Even if they did not believe in the 'Nazis in Ukraine', most of them sincerely believe in the hostility of the West." Admittedly, such views are not the consensus in opposition circles; however, these statements demonstrate that there isn't much prospect in a united front by the opposition against Putin's Ukraine policy. Furthermore, the growing prevalence of such sentiments even amongst the opposition has made liberal activists reluctant to advocate for ending the conflict on terms favorable to the West. For example, both popular blogger Alexei Navalny and oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky have asserted that they wouldn't support returning Crimea to Ukraine.

Taking all of this into account, even if the West succeeds in further weakening Putin economically, it may up end up strengthening his position domestically. Putin has an 89% approval rating not merely due to the populace's enthusiasm about his annexation of Crimea, but because Western sanctions have helped stoke nationalist fervor and inspire personal feelings of resentment towards the West. Rather than serving as a revitalizing spark for the opposition, the situation in Ukraine has further divided it, and may produce further polarization of it should relations with the West continue to deteriorate. Finally, the Ukraine crisis and the ensuing sanction has lead many to overlook the apparent flaws in the political system because of their grievances with the West. Whatever next step Western policymakers decide to take in dealing with Russia, it is important that they think hard about how punishing Moscow may affect Russians beyond Putin himself.

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 #4
Bloomberg
July 19, 2015
Russia's Beating the BRICS in 2015 on Turnaround Potential
by Maria Levitov

Which country would you invest in: a fast-growing economic powerhouse with a world-beating stock market or a tottering former superpower embroiled in a proxy war and heading for a recession?

If at the start of 2015 you had chosen the second, Russia, you would be walking away with risk-adjusted returns surpassing that of the first, China, and also every other BRICS country, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

While that looked counterintuitive at the time, as plunging oil prices and a currency slump weighed on Moscow's $456 billion market, the tables have turned in these seven months. Crude's rebound from a six-year low boosted the appeal of Russian assets, while concern about pricey stocks led to a $4 trillion rout in China. Russia has the lowest valuation among its peers and can extend gains if political risks ease further, investors from GAM U.K. Ltd. to Prosperity Capital Management say.

"Our models are telling us to buy Russia," Tim Love, a London-based investment manager at GAM, which oversees $130 billion of assets, said by phone on July 15. "There is a very strong turnaround potential. It's an increasingly difficult call to get right because of politics. I'd be happy to pull the trigger in the next two to three months."

In nominal terms, Russia's benchmark Micex Index has advanced 17 percent this year, 6 percentage points lower than the Shanghai Composite Index. Still, a record drop in Russian volatility, combined with an increase in Chinese price swings, left returns adjusted for such fluctuations superior for Moscow by a factor of 1 to China's 0.6, according to the data. That was also the best gain in the BRICS universe that includes the two countries, and Brazil, India and South Africa.

Mensis Horribilis

Russia's surge in fortunes presents a contrast with the events of December, when stocks tumbled almost 9 percent and the ruble sank to a record, prompting the central bank to raise interest rates to the highest in more than a decade. That marked the peak of turmoil that had begun with Russia's annexation of Crimea in March and crude oil's 48 percent annual plunge.

Since then, investors have calmed down about the country. Oil has stabilized above $55 a barrel and a cease-fire is holding, by and large, in eastern Ukraine since Valentine's Day. A measure of expected price swings, as signaled by options prices, has more than halved to 29 percent, the steepest drop since at least 2006, the earliest date records go back to.

Russia continued to beat China in July. Shanghai has sunk to the bottom of the riskless-returns table and stayed there through July 17, even after government intervention drove a rebound. Russia's volatility gauge dropped to a one-year low on Friday.

Cheapest Market

Even after the first-half rally, Russian stocks are valued at less than half of their BRICS peers. The Micex trades at 5.9 times the projected earnings of its members, compared with the second cheapest gauge, Brazil's Ibovespa, at 12.5. China, India and South Africa enjoy multiples of above 15.

"Most Russian stocks are fundamentally undervalued," Mattias Westman, the London-based founder of Prosperity Capital Management, which oversees about $2 billion in assets from former Soviet republics including Russia, said by phone Monday. "There is potential for further recovery."

Russia's economy, set to contract this year for the first time since 2009, may rebound 0.5 percent in 2016, a Bloomberg survey shows. European economic sanctions are also likely to be relaxed, as it won't be "easy to convince everyone to prolong them" next year, Westman said.

Lingering Risks

Still, even the most bullish investors aren't discounting the potential risks of investing in Russia amid President Vladimir Putin's continued standoff with Western powers over Ukraine and the pressure on oil prices from the imminent return of Iranian output to the oversupplied global market.

GAM's Love, who plans to increase his 3.5 percent Russia exposure by buying stocks dependent on consumer demand, is waiting to do so for want of clarity on how the Ukraine conflict will be resolved. Others are holding back for signs foreign investors are returning to the market.

"The easy gains are over," Anastasia Levashova, who helps manage about $350 million at Blackfriars Asset Management Ltd. in London, said by e-mail. "The volatility of the Russian market is low because its investor base and trading volumes have shrunk dramatically."

The competition from the rest of BRICS is intensifying. While China has unleashed $483 billion of stock-buying power to prop up its market, India has seen foreign investors turn net buyers for the first time since April. So, cheaper valuations remain the key argument in favor of Russia for now, with Love calling the market "a spring."

"You've got to continue pressing on the spring to keep the valuation low," Love said. "It's not where Russia should be."

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#5
www.rt.com
July 20, 2015
Money is main threat to democracy says Russian elections chief

The head of the Russian Central Elections Commission says big money is jeopardizing real democracy across the world and governments should ensure people have equality in politics.

"The facts confirm that a significant number of voters across the world still have an impression that the politicians are more concerned about money than representing the interests of their co-citizens," Vladimir Churov told a news conference in Moscow on Monday.

He added that lack of government regulation on the financing of political parties in any country could allow people to buy political influence and at the same time undermine society's trust in elections as a truly democratic procedure.

The Russian official said that creating really democratic bodies of power required significant financial expenditure, both on the part of organizers of the vote and on the part of its participants. This would create conditions of countering political corruption and at the same time will keep the principle of universal and equal voting rights intact.

Vladimir Churov has headed Russia's Central Elections Commission since 2007. Opposition activists have repeatedly targeted him in their criticism and sometimes mocked him, suggesting that Churov was personally responsible for the alleged violations in polls. They even gave him nicknames like "a wizard" and "a tale-teller," making fun of his long beard.

Sometimes Churov has joked in reply, but sometimes said that the criticism and mockery were only ways to disrupt elections and launch an undemocratic scenario of power change in the country.

In 2012 the Russian Elections chief said in an interview that the American electoral system was among the worst in the world, naming lack of transparency as its main flaw. This happened after OSCE monitors had been barred from entering polling stations even in the states where they may do so under US law. He also noted that electronic voting machines did not provide voters with receipts and were highly vulnerable to manipulation. He also blasted the very principle of the US polling process saying that it allowed the election of candidates into office without full popular support. "The president is elected by an electoral college of 280, not by all American citizens," Churov noted.

 #6
Moscow Times
July 21, 2015
Novaya Gazeta Could Face Closure After Second Government Warning
By Anna Dolgov

One of Russia's last independent newspapers, the Novaya Gazeta weekly, plans to appeal in court the second government warning it has received within a year - which crosses the threshold that allows the authorities to shut it down.

Media watchdog Roskomnadzor issued the latest warning for an expletive that supposedly appeared in an excerpt from literary fiction the newspaper published, the agency said in a statement Monday evening.

Several letters in the expletive were replaced with asterisks when Novaya Gazeta published the excerpt from a new novel by Vasily Avchenko, an author and the weekly's correspondent in the Far East, earlier this summer.

But Roskomnadzor spokesman Vadim Ampelonsky insisted that the offensive word "could clearly be read," Lenizdat.ru news portal reported.

Following Roskomnadzor's warning, the newspaper replaced the word - which generally means "inattentiveness" - with a similarly sounding synonym in brackets on its website.

A law signed by President Vladimir Putin this spring bans the use of several crude expletives in the media an in arts, including literature.

The ban affected Russia's Oscar-nominated film Leviathan - a tale about a provincial man's fight against a corrupt mayor and church officials - which struggled to obtain a screening permit in the country. The Culture Ministry finally rated the film as only acceptable for adult audiences, and ordered that its expletives be bleeped out.

Novaya Gazeta's editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov said his newspaper will contest the latest warning in court, arguing that literary works should be permitted some leeway, Interfax reported.

"We believe that in works of literature - we are not speaking about journalistic creations here - various deviations from the general norm are possible," Muratov was quoted as saying.

"If you read that text you will see that it is absolutely beautiful literature," Muratov said, adding that Roskomnadzor's warning serves as an "advertisement" for Avchenko's novel about the Sea of Japan and Russians living on its shores.

The book, entitled "Crystal in a Clear Setting," has been shortlisted for this year's National Bestseller award.

But Novaya Gazeta could face a shutdown by the government since it has received two warnings within a year.

Roskomnadzor's spokesman maintained, however, that his agency has not decided to start the procedure just yet, Interfax reported.

"Despite the fact that we do indeed have the right to turn to court with the demand that Novaya Gazeta's registration be terminated, we, as a controlling organ, naturally always use our rights sensibly," Ampelonstky was quoted as saying.

"In any event, the decision to turn to court has not been made," he added, Interfax reported.

The previous warning, which Novaya Gazeta received last October, was for an article by columnist and Ekho Moskvy radio host Yulia Latynina titled "If we are not the West, then who are we?" The media watchdog agency deemed her article "extremist."

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 #7
Starovoitova murder case taken to court

ST. PETERSBURG, July 20. /TASS/. The St. Petersburg prosecutor's office has approved the indictment in the case of the 1998 murder of Russian politician and human rights activist Galina Starovoitova, the lawyer of former member of Russia's State Duma Mikhail Glushchenko who is accused of the murder, told TASS on Monday.

"The criminal case with the confirmed bill of indictment will be handed over to Oktyabrsky district court for consideration tomorrow," Alexander Afanasyev said.

In June, a criminal case against Glushchenko was separated for considering it in a separate procedure. In March, he made a deal with the investigation, according to which he will give testimony against the person who ordered Starovoitova's murder. According to Afanasyev, during the interrogation in April 2014 Glushchenko confessed to complicity in Starovoitova's murder naming another perpetrator of the crime - Barsukov (Kumarin) - one of the leaders of the Tambov criminal gang that used to operate in St. Petersburg.

The investigation into the murder of Starovoitova was resumed by the FSB St.Petersburg branch in August 2013. The politician was shot dead overnight on November 21, 1998, in her apartment building in central St.Petersburg. According to investigators, the crime was politically motivated. The person who was behind the crime has not been found.

Glushchenko is serving an 8-year sentence in a high-security penal colony for extortion. He is also a suspect in the case of contract killing of St. Petersburg businessman Vyacheslav Shevchenko and two more Russians in Cyrprus in 2004.

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#8
Moscow Times
July 20, 2015
Putin Warns Russian Defense Industry Not to Fall Behind
By Matthew Bodner, Anna DolgovJ

Russia's military modernization drive is stalling this year under the weight of Western sanctions and the decay of the domestic defense industry, a deputy defense minister told President Vladimir Putin.

The defense industry is struggling to keep to schedule on government contracts under a decade-long 20 trillion ruble ($350 billion) rearmament campaign set to wrap up in 2020.

"The objective reasons for the failure to meet state defense procurement orders include restrictions on the supply of imported parts and materials in connection with sanctions, discontinuation of production and the loss of an array of technologies, insufficient production facilities," Deputy Defense Minister Yury Borisov told Putin during a video conference, according to a transcript released by the Kremlin on Thursday.

But he maintained that Russia's defense industries were adjusting to the setbacks and that so far, 38 percent of the government's defense purchases planned for this year have been completed.

"On the whole, one could say that an absolute majority of enterprises have acquired the necessary production pace, are fulfilling their obligations to the Defense Ministry," Borisov said.

Defense industries were the focus of the Soviet economy and are becoming increasingly important for Russia's. Putin said that work on military contracts was key to economic and technological development and providing employment during the country's current economic downturn.

"I will especially emphasize that those who are delaying production and supplies of military technologies, who are letting down related industries, must within a short term ... correct the situation," Putin said.

"And if that does not happen, the appropriate conclusions need to be made, including, if necessary, technological, organizational and personnel [changes]," he said.

Bureaucracy for Bureaucracy

Putin also said that he ordered the Defense Ministry to create a new system to control the implementation of the state defense order by the end of the year.

Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Moscow-based Center for the Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, said the decision to create a new bureaucratic structure to monitor defense expenditures was a typical Russian reaction to the problem.

What is needed is transparency, he said. "It is easy to misuse public funds under the auspice of secrecy if there is no public auditing. This is a big problem in Russia."

The first reflex of any Russian administration is to create another bureaucratic structure that they think will solve the problem by monitoring other structures, he said.

Delayed Procurements

Reshaping the Russian military into a modern, effective force has been one of Putin's most ambitious projects, and one that has seen some successes.

During a televised call-in show this spring, Putin said that despite some setbacks, "without a doubt, the [rearmament] program will be fulfilled."

"Our goal is to make sure that by that time, by 2020, the amount of new weapons and military technologies in our armed forces reaches no less than 70 percent," he said.

The share of modern weapons currently in service in the Russian military ranges, depending on the branch of the armed forces, from 30.5 percent to nearly 78 percent, according to military figures quoted by Putin during Thursday's video conference.

But Borisov told the president that government defense contracts that have fallen behind schedule include production of navy guard ships, Beriyev Be-200 amphibious aircraft, Vikhr anti-tank missiles, remote control and radio monitoring equipment for Igla surface-to-air missiles, and weapon launch systems for Tupolev-160 strategic bomber planes.

Russia's economic crisis and runaway inflation may hamper Russia's rearmament plans, Pukhov said, explaining that items are more expensive now than they were in 2011, when the program was designed.

"I am absolutely sure that in money terms the program will be filled, but the number of units they ordered was very optimistic at the time, and now they will get two times less [in terms] of tanks, missiles, corvettes and aircraft than they planed six to seven years ago," Pukhov concluded.

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 #9
Moscow Times
July 21, 2015
Economic Crisis Driving Foreigners Out of Russia - Experts
By Daria Litvinova

Foreigners that used to live and work in Russia are now fleeing en masse, the Federal Migration Service has revealed.

Since January 2014, 41 percent of Spanish nationals, 38 percent of British nationals, 36 percent of U.S. nationals and 31 percent of German nationals have left Russia, the Noviye Izvestia newspaper reported Monday.

The falling price of oil and several waves of sanctions imposed against Russia by the West in connection with the annexation of Crimea and the ongoing Ukraine conflict led the ruble to lose 40 percent of its value against the dollar in 2014, helping plunge the country into an economic crisis.

Many large international corporations have shut down their branches in Russia, or have culled their foreign specialists - who typically earn significantly more than their Russian counterparts - Noviye Izvestia reported.

Foreign specialists often earn 25-30 percent more than their similarly qualified colleagues from Russia, Ella Mikhailova, a consultant for Penny Lane Personnel recruiting agency, was cited as saying by Noviye Izvestia.

"In addition to that, expats often get perks - such as an apartment in the city center, a car, a gym membership, health insurance, compensation for plane tickets," which makes them even more expensive for businesses that have been hit hard by the economic crisis, she was quoted as saying.

Expats from Western countries are not the only ones who no longer benefit from working in Russia. By the start of this month, some 20 percent of Tajik nationals had left Russia, Vedomosti financial daily reported Monday.

In 2014, between 1.2 and 1.3 million Tajik citizens worked in Russia, the report stated. By July 1, only 1 million remained.

Sumangul Tagoizoda, Tajik minister of labor and migration, attributed the trend to Russia's economic crisis and stricter migration legislation, the Interfax news agency reported Monday.

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 #10
Chinese economy's woes unlikely to cause global upheavals in coming years
China's economic woes have intensified lately but their scope is frequently exaggerated in Western publications, Russian experts say
By Lyudmila Alexandrova

MOSCOW, July 20. /TASS/. China's economic woes have intensified lately but their scope is frequently exaggerated in Western publications, Russian experts say. They do not predict any serious upheavals for the global economy and economic cooperation with Russia in the coming years. However, a spillover from the Chinese stock market may create serious problems for China's economy, experts warn.

Following the recent collapse of the Chinese stock market, the news of China's enormous corporate debt caused uproar. International rating agency Standard & Poor's (S&P) released calculations on Sunday, showing that China's corporate debt hit $16.1 trillion or 160% of the country's GDP and might grow to $28.8 trillion in five years.

China's GDP grew by 7.4% in 2014, the worst indicator in the past twenty-five years. Year on year, China's GDP expanded by 7% in the first six months of 2015.

However, hardly any upheavals can be expected for the global economy from China's economic woes in the next two or three years, Senior Researcher at the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies Vladimir Blinkov said.

"As for the condition of the stock market, it has stabilized," the expert told TASS.

"Meanwhile, the debt problem is not new. After 2008, China started massive investments in the domestic economy and this measure helped maintain fairly high growth rates while all other countries were hit by a crisis. As a result, the corporate debt increased. Corporations in China are mostly state-owned businesses and debt settlement is a problem that has no relation to a market economy," the expert said.

The fears fuelled in the West are somewhat exaggerated, the expert said.

"They [in the West] like writing about China in negative terms recently. Social upheavals will allegedly start there, if the economy grows less than 7% But it would be great, if all of them had this 7% growth. The point is that no one can demonstrate double-digit growth rates all the time," the expert said.

The Chinese will start paying attention to the debt problem and resolving these woes gradually, although this may affect the economic growth rates, Blinkov said.

As for Russian-Chinese cooperation, China's economic problems will not have any effect on it "in a prospect of several years," the expert said.

"There is no sense in curtailing cooperation with China. On the contrary, it is more likely that the Chinese will behave more loyally amid difficulties compared with the current situation when they are holding quite tight positions. And, perhaps, we [Russians] will strengthen our positions in these conditions," the expert said.

"Despite periodic reports about difficulties experienced by the Chinese economy, China has demonstrated more than once its ability to cope with emerging economic problems," Senior Researcher at the Russia-China Center of the Institute of Far Eastern Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences Sergey Uyanayev told TASS.

"As an example, we can cite slower economic rates, which are mentioned today as a somewhat unexpected thing. However, the Chinese authorities highlighted this factor already 5-7 years as a problem that should be resolved. This is evidence of the fact that China does not hush up its problems and, importantly, is developing an effective strategy to resolve them," the expert said.

"The stock market crash is an essential factor but it is necessary to take into account the fact that the market showed strong growth before that," Associate Professor of the Chair of World Economy at the Higher School of Economics Pyotr Mozias told TASS.

"An imbalance existed between the state of the economy and an upsurge on the stock market: the Chinese economy has been slowing down in the past few years. What has happened is called a market correction. A bubble emerged on the stock market and it has started to burst in the past month and a half," the expert said.

Nothing terrible will occur, if the correction is limited to the stock market, the expert said.

But if it spills over to associated segments like the real estate and bond markets, then a chain reaction and a domino effect will follow, he added.

"In this case, bottlenecks will indeed start to emerge all across the Chinese economy, which has a lot of weak points," the expert said.

This will also exacerbate the corporate debt problem, he added.

"The corporate debt is very large - 160% of GDP while the dangerous threshold is considered at the level of 90% of GDP. This is the result of the anti-crisis policy they [the Chinese] carried out. They flooded the economy with money in 2008 and 2009 and got a time bomb in the form of the corporate debt amid a sharp slowdown in economic growth rates," the expert said.

Nothing terrible will happen, if China manages to localize the stock market problems, Mozias said.

"But if it comes to a chain reaction, then problems may emerge. In this case, this would affect both the entire world and Russian-Chinese cooperation because the demand for raw materials would fall," the expert said.

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 #11
Interfax
July 20, 2015
"Russian world" not political, wider than Russia, includes Ukraine - church head

Moscow, 20 July: Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia has expressed concern over attempts to politicize the notion of the Russian world.

"Unfortunately, our opponents use the words 'Russian world' as a kind of bogey, as a scarecrow, as they allege that it is a kind of doctrine which serves exclusively the interests of the Russian Federation's foreign policy," the patriarch told a reception in the Troitse-Sergiyeva [Trinity-Sergius] Lavra on a remembrance day in honour of St Sergiy of Radonezh, the patriarchal press service said on Monday [20 July].

As the primate underlined, nothing "could be further from the truth than to identify the Russian world exclusively with the Russian Federation".

"The Russian world is at the same time both the Ukrainian world and the Belarusian world. This is the world of all Rus. It is a world created through the Baptism of the Dnieper, it is the world of Prince Vladimir, it is a system of values that has penetrated into the culture, into the life of our people," he said.

"Despite the fact that the mere mention of the Russian world has become in Ukraine under the current political doctrine almost a crime, we will continue - quietly, calmly, but firmly - to bear witness to this truth, the truth of Kiev as that baptismal font, the creation by our ancestors of the entire East Slavic civilization which we conventionally call the Russian world," the patriarch said.

He mentioned the "Tale of Bygone Years", at the beginning of which are the words: "Which is where the Russian land came from."

"There is no mention of Ukraine, Russia, Belarus there - there is 'Russian land'. What right do we have in the interests of the political mood to abandon history, our ideals, our saints, our monasteries, our worship of God, our common language?" the patriarch said.

He noted that if the Russian role is weakened, "communication will become multiply more complicated" between Ukrainians, Russians, Belarusians and many other nations "because language is a natural way to maintain relations between people of the same cultural and spiritual community".

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 #12
U.S. global missile shield continues to expand - consultant to RVSN commander

MOSCOW. July 21 (Interfax-AVN) - The circle of participants of the United States global missile shield is expanding, Col. Gen. Viktor Yesin, a consultant to the Commander of the Russian Strategic Missile Forces (RVSN), told a press conference at the Interfax head office on Tuesday.

"Unfortunately, no one is going to withdraw from the deployment of the U.S. global missile shield, the number of its participants will only increase. At present, parts of the U.S. global missile defense system are deployed on the Danish island of Greenland, in Great Britain, Norway, Japan, Turkey, Spain, and will be soon in Romania and Poland. In the Far East: in Japan; also the addition of South Korea and the Philippines is not ruled out, given the North Korean threat. Australia, too, seems to be willing to deploy some systems," Yesin said.

"So far there has been no information that someone is going to discontinue their participation in the U.S. global missile defense system," he said.

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 #13
Christian Science Monitor
July 20, 2015
Will tensions with West shutter Russia's 'window on Europe'?
The Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, tucked between Poland and Lithuania, is proving a bellwether for the growing fortress mentality in Russia as relations with NATO cool.
By Fred Weir, Correspondent

KALININGRAD, RUSSIA - For most Russians, traveling between their homeland and the European Union is a long and tedious process. Not so for Andrei Kizersky.

Mr. Kizersky, a driver, travels to neighboring Poland about twice a month, sometimes with his whole family, thanks to a unique pilot project that grants virtually free entry for the approximately 1 million inhabitants of Russia's tiny Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad, which is sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania. It's more than 300 miles away from the nearest city in "mainland" Russia, across solidly EU and NATO-held territory.

The project is considered a success, and there is no talk of canceling it despite fast-deteriorating relations between Moscow and Europe. But it has nevertheless intensified a debate among Kaliningrad's enclave-dwellers. Is their proximity to the West a boon that can help mediate European ideas into the broader Russian mainstream? Or does Moscow's dominant conservatism and military designation of the region as a "forward operating base" doom them to remain a tiny island of Russianness amid a rapidly modernizing European sea?

The answer to that could very well depend on Kaliningraders' personal experiences with their neighbors, a relationship unique among Russians and potentially crucial to overcoming the disconnect between Moscow and the West.

"Our region's mission should be to introduce Europe to Russia, to be a bridge between the two," says Solomon Ginzberg, a liberal opposition deputy of the regional legislature. "And the influence of Europe is strong here, we do have some separate identity [from Russia]."

As evidence, Mr. Ginzberg cites the fact that more than 60 percent of Kaliningraders hold foreign passports, compared to an average 30 percent for all of Russia, and there is a growing popularity of learning foreign languages among the region's youths. As a practical example, he claims that the standard Western idea of pedestrian crosswalks was first introduced successfully in Kaliningrad more than a decade ago. He notes that it has been implemented much later, and with less success so far, in other parts of Russia.

On the other, he laments that most people here remain stubbornly resistant to serious change. "About 90 percent of the population here feel completely Russian and cannot imagine themselves separate from Russia, even though they do live physically apart. People watch Russian TV, and are deeply influenced by all this propaganda," especially during the current East-West crisis, he says.

But Alexei Milovanov, head of New Kaliningrad, the region's only independent news agency, notes that Kaliningraders' familiarity with their neighbors defangs the Kremlin line, by providing the sort of real-world experience of Europe that most Russians don't have.

"Some of the ugly things our TV broadcasts [from Moscow] says about Europeans just do not go down here," he says. "That's because we have much more opportunity to visit the EU. People go, relate to Europeans, see they are people much like us. So, we do share the geopolitical views of the majority of Russians, but we do not share these phobias."

Visa-free travel

Over the past decade Poland and Kaliningrad's neighbor to the north, Lithuania, have joined the EU and NATO and undergone thorough economic transformations; they've evolved toward European standards and ways in a multitude of less tangible ways as well.

Kaliningrad has changed a bit, too, but remains very much a heavily militarized, provincial, and economically challenged Russian region. About 5 million border crossings were reported last year, mostly Kaliningraders heading to the Polish cities like Gdansk which are within the 200 km (124 mile) depth they are permitted under the visa-free plan, and many of them report that the differences are dizzying.

"You really feel like you've gone abroad, even though it's just an hour or so away," says Kizersky. "The fields are orderly, the towns are clean and the roads are excellent. One gets the impression that the Poles must be workaholics. We could really learn from them."

Yet he admits, like most others, that he mostly just goes over there to shop. In the past year, he's bought most of the food and clothing his family uses, and even some furniture, in Poland. Even with the recent devaluation of the Russian ruble, prices are about 30 percent cheaper, he says.

Poles, taking advantage of the same visa-free rule, mostly just cross the border to fill up their tanks, since gasoline on the Russian side is also about a third cheaper.

Kaliningrad and 'Europe'

"In the center of Kaliningrad city there is a huge shopping mall called 'Europe.' And that is very symbolic, because that is just how we view Europe, as a place to buy stuff," says Mr. Milovanov of New Kaliningrad. "In this respect we are not a European region at all."

"Europe is about much more than cheap consumer goods, it's about living together in a certain way," Milovanov says. "It seems that we are not able to understand these values, to bring them home with us, even though we visit Europe constantly."

Kaliningrad's top-down and heavily stage-managed political system mirrors that in "mainland" Russia. Despite a long-running experiment with a regional "special economic zone," Kaliningrad has not attracted enough foreign investment to turn around its sluggish economy. Some foreigners are fleeing amid the crisis, while many of the benefits under the economic regime are set to expire next year.

Polls show that support for Russian policies such as the annexation of Crimea and defying Western sanctions closely track the attitudes of Russians elsewhere. Vladimir Putin's popularity rating in Kaliningrad is over 80 percent.

"At one time it was fashionable to talk about Kaliningrad 'separatism,' but nobody does anymore," says Mikhail Berendeyev, a political scientist with Baltic Federal University in Kaliningrad. "Now we still have hopes for our region to be Russia's 'window on Europe.' But with the crisis, even that is fading. There is a definite danger of our territory sliding back into its old role as Russia's military shield against Europe."

Business opportunity?

But Shaig Mamedov, who runs an agribusiness based on an old collective farm he's taken over, insists that there is an upside to the crisis, with its economic war of Western sanctions against Russia and counter-sanctions on European foodstuffs ordered by Moscow.

As a food producer, just starting up amid tough conditions, Mr. Mamedov says he hasn't been able to compete with cheap EU imports. But now, despite the fact that many Kaliningraders buy much of their produce in Poland, bulk imports are forbidden and new niches are opening up for local farmers like himself.

"We've found that we can produce strawberries that are just slightly more expensive than Polish ones, and by next year every farmer around here will be doing that," he says. "With this blockade on food imports, it really gives local producers an opportunity to develop."

But he adds that he doesn't like the crisis, or the political tensions that are souring Russia's relations with its neighbors.

"Your neighbor influences you a lot, and Kaliningraders need to become more like them. There are a lot of things we could learn. It is my sincere hope that we will catch up with them one day. I want that very much."

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 #14
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
July 20, 2015
Russia pivots again, this time to Saudi Arabia
The rapprochement of Russia and Saudi Arabia could mark a real turnabout in the Middle East, and one that is far more solid and potentially richer in dividends than Russia's pivot to China.
By Eugene Bai
Eugene Bai is an expert in USA, Latin America and international relations, a contributor to Politcom.ru, The New Times, World and Politics magazine.

Against the backdrop of the contentious agreement between Iran and the permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (the P5+1), the signing of a deal between Russia and Saudi Arabia under which Riyadh will invest $10 billion in the Russian economy was overlooked. But this agreement speaks of a major reversal in Russian policy, perhaps no less important than the much talked about pivot toward China.

At the very least, the 4-5 year arrangement struck with Saudi Arabia is more concrete than the ambitious projects to lay gas pipelines to China.

"The deal with Saudi Arabia represents Russia's biggest partnership and largest attraction of foreign capital in recent years," said the general director of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), Kirill Dmitriev. "Previously the largest investor in cooperation with the RDIF was the United Arab Emirates, which decided to invest $7 billion in the Russian economy."

"Arab investors are coming to Russia at a time when everyone else is turning away," writes Vedomosti, a respectful business daily. "Direct investments in Russia for 2014 amounted to $21 billion, and for the first time in many years the last two quarters recorded a net outflow."

According to Dmitriev, seven projects with the Saudis have been earmarked, and ten deals are expected to be signed by the end of this year. Riyadh is particularly interested in infrastructure, agriculture, retail, healthcare and real estate.

Investments and Iskanders

"Until now Saudi ministers have been wary of us. But the personal contact between Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman and President Vladimir Putin at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum had an effect on them," said Dmitriev. Other Russian experts concur that for the Arabs, private arrangements between leaders are extremely important.

Putin has since made several phone calls to bin Salman. At the time the Crown Prince's appearance in St Petersburg was a minor sensation. After all, Saudi Arabia is a key ally of the United States in the Middle East, and against the backdrop of continuing U.S. economic sanctions and the White House's personal dislike of Putin, the visit could have been perceived in Washington as a kind of diplomatic demarche.

All the more so given that the major investment deal between Moscow and Riyadh was accompanied by talks on deliveries to Saudi Arabia of Russian-built Iskander air defense systems.

Russia's readiness to supply Saudi Arabia with Iskander tactical missile systems was announced by Rosoboronexport Deputy General Director Igor Sevastyanov. In June a Saudi delegation visited the Army-2015 Forum in Moscow to negotiate their procurement. If Iskanders are indeed delivered to Saudi Arabia, it will throw down a gauntlet to Washington, which until now has enjoyed a monopoly on arms supplies to the kingdom.

Is Riyadh attempting to provoke America?

What lies behind these efforts to reenergize economic and political ties between the two countries? For a start, the Saudis are extremely displeased with the Iranian agreement, which U.S. President Barack Obama has so vehemently championed in defiance of critics inside the Republican-controlled Congress. It seems that in the not-too-distant future the Islamic Republic could turn from mortal enemy into major U.S. ally. No wonder Washington is keen to praise Tehran for confronting the Islamic State of Iraq and the Greater Syria (ISIS).

Meanwhile, the United States has totally opted out of the fight against the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen; Saudi Arabia is effectively in charge of the military operation, albeit on a rather ineffective and limited scale with no boots on the ground.

Riyadh's petroleum interests are also conducive to closer ties with Russia. The aim here is to solve the problem of low oil prices, but not in leaps and bounds: the Saudis want to achieve long-term growth and stabilization. And although there is no talk of any "conspiracy" between Saudi Arabia and Russia against U.S. production of shale oil, greater cooperation and coordination with Russia in the oil sector could one day theoretically result in the emergence of a robust union which, especially in light of Russia's observer status in OPEC, could resist a new U.S. monopoly in the oil market and lead to higher energy prices.

In expanding cooperation with Riyadh, Russia, too, is playing a long game. Of course, Moscow's primary interest is to break the shackles of global isolation and find new partners and allies to escape the vicious circle of international pariah-hood. But at the same time Russia, which has a long record of influence in the Arab world, seems ready to change its strategy in the Middle East. Not for nothing, say media reports, did President Putin himself phone his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama recently to discuss, first and foremost, Syria. No less remarkable was the reaction of the White House incumbent, who said that he was "heartened" by the call.

It is more than likely that the assumption amongst Western and Russian experts alike that Russia is ready to cooperate with the United States in the fight against Islamic fundamentalism is not pure fantasy. If indeed it is true, then this cooperation can be the force that pulls Russia and the West out of the vortex of a crisis that nobody needs. These expectations were strengthened by recent statements from Western politicians (including Obama himself) that, without Russia's involvement, a deal with Iran would have been impossible.

Pivot to the Middle East

Not all Russian experts are inclined to exaggerate the significance of the latest agreement with Saudi Arabia.

"To say that we have some kind of new alliance, that something is changing, is utter poppycock," Russia's top Orientalist Georgy Mirsky tells it in a straightforward manner. "It is as it always was. Russia has always enjoyed good relations in the Arab world, but never-at least since the departure from this world of figures like Gamal Abdel Nasser, Yasser Arafat and Hafez al-Assad-has there been reason to suppose that they could somehow give America the heave-ho in favor of Russia. That goes for others, too. They can't do without the Americans."

Nevertheless, the activation of ties with such a key regional power as Saudi Arabia should be seen as a positive development, especially considering the fact that Russia supports Iran and is ready to cooperate with the United States on Syria, although its potential abandonment of the Assad regime is still a moot point.

If Russia's actions pay off, this new strategy could mark a real turnabout in the Middle East, and one that is far more solid and potentially richer in economic and political dividends than the global Eurasian integration promoted by Kremlin propagandists that assumes closer ties between Russia and China.

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 #15
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
July 16, 2015
Revealing the post-Soviet identity complex in Transnistria
RD Interview: Matthew Dal Santo, a Danish Research Council post-doctoral fellow at the University of Copenhagen, met Transnistria's Deputy Foreign Minister Vitaly Ignatiev in Tiraspol, where they discussed the frozen conflict in Transnistria and post-Soviet Russian identity.

Frustrated with Russia's support for the eighteen-month-old separatist rebellion in Eastern Ukraine, a month ago U.S. President Barack Obama accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of pursuing "a wrong-headed desire to recreate the glories of the Soviet empire."

But the Donbas isn't the only part of the old U.S.S.R. where Russia's desire to preserve its influence has coincided with a desire among the local people for what they see as the reunion with Moscow.

As the U.S.S.R unravelled, the former Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldova declared Moldovan the country's sole official language. Authorities on the mainly Slav (ethnically Russian and Ukrainian) left bank of the River Dniester-Moldova's industrial heartland-rebelled with the help of the Soviet Union's locally based Fourteenth Army.

As in today's Donbas, the resulting 1992 war (which left around 1,000 dead) was characterized by an enduring local identification with the borders of a greater Soviet state and a desire to defend a Russian-speaking culture seen by the Kremlin as threatened.

A separatist victory resulted in a Russian-sponsored mini-state-some 250 miles long and, at its narrowest, only a few miles wide-called the Pridnestrian Moldovan Republic (population-500,000), but more widely known as Transnistria.

Transnistria's relations with Moldova have since swung between confrontation and pragmatic accommodation. But guaranteeing its de facto independence is the continuing presence of a thousand or so Russian soldiers in a peacekeeping capacity officially known as the Operational Group of Russian Forces.

Is it possible to speak of a single pro-Russian, separatist movement in post-Soviet Eastern Europe? Maybe.

After Russia's annexation of Crimea in March last year, there was speculation among many in Transnistria that it would be next. Acting on a 2006 referendum (rejected by Moldova) that saw 97.2 percent vote "yes" to "potential future integration into Russia," the Speaker of the Transnistrian parliament appealed to the Kremlin for incorporation into Russia.

Moscow turned it down, but there are still rumors the incorporation might happen sooner rather than later. Meanwhile, Transnistria appears a likely if, in most Western eyes, unsatisfactory model for the future of the Donbas: a frozen conflict that serves Russia's interests in keeping a toehold in-and NATO and the EU out of-Moscow's so-called "near abroad."

Earlier this year, I met Transnistria's Deputy Foreign Minister Vitaly Ignatiev in the Transnistrian capital of Tiraspol. I asked him what the future holds for Transnistria, its perspective on the European Union's role in the geopolitical contest unfolding in the region and the nature of Transnistria's relations with Russia. His reply is a window on Transnistria's separatist, pro-Russian world view.

Few in the West will sympathize with this. But understanding this worldview would appear inseparable from successful efforts to restore stability to the region.

Matthew Dal Santo: Transnistria has spent a long time negotiating with Moldova about its status. How does Transnistria envision its future relations with the Moldovan government in Chishinau?

Vitaly Ignatiev: To answer your question, it is first necessary to make a few general points. In accounts published in the foreign press by Western experts unfamiliar with the situation in Transnistria, it is possible to come across a number of assertions: that Transnistria's pursuit of independence and the Russian vector for our republic's development only serve the interests of certain political forces and that, allegedly, no real conflict actually exists, and so forth.

In this connection I must emphasize that the aspiration for independence is the will of Transnistria's people expressed more than once in a number of nationwide referenda. We want to be independent and are pursuing integration with Russia-as the people have decided-and the people's decision, as is well known, remains the most important thing in a democratic society.

Therefore, yes, Transnistria has consistently followed a course for legal recognition of its statehood and its convergence with Russia. In turn, we have proposed to Chishinau a "civilized divorce" and, further, a peaceful, mutually beneficial and open co-existence as sovereign and, I emphasize, friendly states. In Transnistria, we are convinced that precisely such a format of further relations will be the most effective from the point of view of both security and economic and political cooperation.

Concerning respect for Transnistria's distinctive culture by Moldova, I can say only one thing: for us Transnistrians, the greatest manifestation of such respect would be recognition by Moldova of our right to live in our own sovereign state.

MDS: Last year Chishinau signed an Association Agreement with the EU. Was Transnistria invited to participate in those negotiations and how does the Agreement affect Transnistria ?

V.I.: Transnistria was not a party to those negotiations. We have spoken out publicly about this on many occasions, drawing the attention of our international partners to the fact that the Association Agreement and the [Deep and Comprehensive] Agreement on Free Trade [with the EU] that it includes don't take into account, first of all, Transnistria's interests.

Secondly, they don't take into consideration the fact that Moldova is entering into an association with the EU despite remaining party to an unresolved conflict. Thus, the very situation has come about that we warned of in a number of different international fora: the Association Agreement has become for Moldova a new source of leverage over Transnistria.

Under the guise of international obligations undertaken under this agreement, today the Republic of Moldova has rolled out an unprecedented campaign of blockade directed at Transnistrian businesses. Our Moldovan colleagues have openly notified us that more than sixty Transnistrian firms are today under threat of closure.

In this respect, it's necessary to explain that in 2006 Moldova and Ukraine introduced for Transnistria a discriminatory regime of external economic activity: they obliged Transnistrian firms to register in Moldova in order to be able to export their products to external markets.

Thus, on the pretext of the requirements of the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement with the EU (DCFTA) Moldova simply refuses to issue the necessary documents to our firms and thus brings them to the brink of closure.

In addition to this, trade conditions with the EU are at risk of deterioration from 2016 [when the Association Agreement comes into effect] onwards.

Meanwhile, the EU market remains one of the most important for Transnistria's economy, which is mostly oriented towards imports. On this point, it's necessary to note that Transnistria maintains a systemic dialogue with the European Union, thanks to which a range of problems in relations between the EU, Moldova and Transnistria have been successfully resolved.

Nonetheless, the general situation hasn't changed: the Association Agreement has exerted a detrimental influence on Transnistria and, more generally, on the geopolitical situation in the region.

MDS: How would you describe relations between Transnistria and Russia?

V.I.: In brief: Ours are relations between a country, a civilization, a whole cultural and historical world on the one hand, and a part that has been artificially separated from it on the other. Transnistria remains an inseparable part of the Russian world. In the West, perhaps, this isn't fully understood, not least because the international media have created a slanted idea of Transnistria in people's minds.

Frankly, it would never occur to you that Denmark were not a part of Europe, would it? On both a geographical and a historical-cultural level Denmark is part of Europe. In the same way, Transnistria is part of Russia.

Transnistria preserves the memory of the renowned feats of Russian soldiers; the ancient fortress of Bendery remains a symbol of the mastery of Russian military commanders; Transnistria's capital was founded by the great [Russian] general Alexander Suvorov-these are facts that are impossible to deny.

Historically, Transnistria was not part of Moldova or Ukraine but of the Russian Empire. Indeed, [Russian Empress] Catherine II made significant efforts to develop our territory and, as a result, Transnistria always was a unique Russian territory, in which different peoples lived side by side in peace.

Today, the situation hasn't changed-the citizens of Transnistria associate themselves exclusively with Russia and the Russian world. They rejoice in its successes and share its tribulations.

And Russia, you understand, replies in kind:  It keeps the peace in Transnistria, supports our republic in every domain, helps build the future and is always ready to come to our assistance.

MDS: What is the most important thing for Westerners to understand about Transnistria's foreign policy?

V.I.: The most important thing for Westerners to understand is that in Transnistria people are the same as everywhere else-they are people with the right to free self-determination, the right to be prosperous, to defend their own rights and interests.

The world has to stop looking at Transnistria as some indeterminate territory, as if it were just a "fragment of the Soviet Union." Instead, the world has to see Transnistria as a state possessing lawful sovereignty, a state that has friends, partners and enemies in the global community, a state with its own economic and political connections, interests and goals.

If Transnistria's foreign policy were viewed as the foreign policy of any other modern state, everything would be in order and nothing would seem unusual. We have to avoid using double standards in evaluating developments in world politics.

MDS: Transnistria is famous for its Soviet monuments. And in Soviet times there was a conflict between the Church and the State. Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, for example, was a renowned atheist. Today, however, the centre of Tiraspol is full of churches. What is the nature of relations between the Russian Orthodox Church and the State in Transnistria? What role does Orthodoxy play in the republic?

V.I.: You probably noticed the fact that in Transnistria respect for the Soviet past sits peacefully and organically alongside Orthodoxy, which, as is well known, is the faith that the overwhelming majority of Transnistrians profess.

This situation is clear proof that Transnistrian society nowadays demonstrates a unique level of tolerance and stability. Don't forget that in the U.S.S.R. religion was, in fact, outlawed, and Transnistria was no exception in this respect. In schools they even taught atheism, and the older generation remembers this well. Nonetheless, it's clear that during this period Orthodoxy didn't lose its standing.

The point is that Transnistrians approach many different phenomena with understanding, and even philosophical acceptance, without setting them in conflict. This is, in fact, one of the distinguishing features of Orthodoxy as a religion and world view.

Perfectly constructive relations have been established between the Church and the government, despite the fact that Transnistria remains a secular state. The Orthodox Church and government authorities see eye to eye on the most pressing issues in domestic and foreign politics, share the same ideals and values, and are able to reach consensus on the problems that have arisen. Aren't these the signs of a mature, democratic and tolerant society?

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 #16
www.rt.com
July 21, 2015
How Armenians helped Victoria Nuland save her cookies
By Al Gurnov
Al Gurnov is a journalist, political analyst and broadcaster. He has presented the news for several Russian national TV channels, and writes for a number of major newspapers and magazines. In the 1990s Al Gurnov was the West European Bureau chief for Russian State TV & Radio (RTR) based in London. Later he hosted several successful TV and radio shows. Winner of numerous professional awards, he has been an RT presenter and TV host since the company was founded in 2005. Al Gurnov regularly appears as a political expert on prime time TV shows on major Russian and international channels. He is a member of the Russian and International Television Academies, and Professor at MGIMO University School of Journalism (Moscow).

With the first sign of political instability in Armenia at the beginning of the year, sparked by the opposition "Flourishing Armenia" party, US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland rushed to the Caucasus. But this time, something went wrong...

Victoria Nuland has become somewhat of a notorious figure after she was spotted in Kiev last year handing out buns and cookies to Ukrainian protesters in Maidan. Ahead of the latest episode of civil strife, this time in Armenia, Nuland gave her blessing to a new US Ambassador to Armenia, Richard M. Mills, Jr., former Deputy Chief of the US Mission in Beirut and also Senior Democracy Advisor at the US Embassy in Baghdad.

Washington apparently had good reason to change the head of their diplomatic mission in Yerevan: According to reports by several US envoys to the region, including Ms. Nuland, the US policy in Armenia in recent years has been much less successful than in other post-Soviet states, especially in Georgia and Ukraine, of course. Nuland brought along with her representatives of the Pentagon, whose mission was to undermine the Russian-Armenian agreement (according to which Armenia cannot host the infrastructure of third countries without the consent of Russia).

However, according to the State Department, Armenia has to seek weapons overseas. She also tried to teach Armenians the best way to counter corruption and, at the same time managed to effectively lobby the sale of the Vorotan hydroelectric power complex to the Americans.  This deal has great political significance since it pushed for the diversification of the Armenian energy sector, which is almost totally owned by Russian companies. Actually, it is the start of the entry of American influence into Armenia - much to the chagrin of Moscow.

But, like so many of Washington's foreign policy adventures, this one turned out to be pretty clumsy. Millions of American dollars benefited Armenian corruption, rather than the energy sector. Several months after the $180 million Vorotan deal a 16 percent hike in electricity prices was announced, which lead to massive protest in the capital city of Yerevan. This was a piece of cake for the creators of the so called 'colored revolutions'.

Armenians had been protesting over price hikes for decades, but this time all indications pointed to this scenario being written abroad. The slogans very quickly changed to political, the national flags above the heads of demonstrators to the starry-blue EU pennants. Remember: "Ukraina tse Europa!" - the famous Maidan slogan in Kiev last year that promised the Ukrainians paradise under the new US sponsored government.

Ambassador Mills too, didn't sit on his hands. As soon as thousands of angry demonstrators took to the streets of Yerevan, erected barricades and clashed with police, numerous US-funded NGOs started spreading the word that the main reason of all the troubles was Russia. Protests were trending under the social media hash tag #ElectricYerevan, which all of a sudden appeared to become almost as important in Armenia as Charles Aznavour!

At the same time, editors of major independent media, especially Russian-speaking ones, were called to visit the US and UK embassies, where they were lectured on how to report on the events properly! Political analysts immediately noted that the protests in the streets of the Armenian capital resemble the first stage of the 'color revolution' we've seen in the past in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. Head of the International Committee in Russia's upper house of parliament, Konstantin Kosachev said: "It's no use deluding yourself; all 'color revolutions' have developed along these lines."

Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan acted fast. All people arrested during clashes with the police were released within hours. But the US Embassy in Yerevan "expressed concern" about reports of excessive use of force by the police and urged the Armenian government to conduct a thorough investigation. Sargsyan ordered his government to compensate the price hike until a special commission investigated the situation in the national energy market. But the demonstrators were not ready to compromise. It was a decentralized networked protest that preferred ultimatums.

The protest did not have a political leader and was not even backed by political parties, but very quickly the political component become dominant, its target being the Armenian government.

Armenia was pushed to choose between East and West, North and South, between the Russian Federation and the European Union - the impossible choice that Ukraine - now being torn apart in a bloody civil war - was forced to choose. The "universal formula" effectively used by the Americans in Tbilisi and Kiev should have worked once again in the streets of Yerevan. But it did not.

The Armenian president appeared to be different: he could go on a hard but effective compromise with the opposition. The slogan "Armenia is ... something, other than Armenia (Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iran or Europe)" is totally unrealistic. Which is not understood in Washington, where the political elite today truly believes that the most cherished dream of any country in the world is to become another United State. This is wrong. And this is why American political and social technologies are not at all universal.

Even the "Little Steps" - their favorite know-how - didn't work in Yerevan: when the protesters came forward with an ultimatum to move their barricade forward a yard a day towards the Presidents palace, the police made a Big Step and simply dispersed the demonstration. And it proved to be quite a popular step in the neighborhood, sick and tired of the endless traffic jams of the last couple of weeks.

The Armenian government was smart enough to make its final move on the night, when all the Anglo-Saxon media was following the OXI referendum, forcing the US to choose their priority: Securing the NATO bases in Greece, or trying to get another one in the Caucasus. Or, maybe not... The foreign factor that during the events in Ukraine led the Orange Revolution to the "Twitter" top and made a global information trend, too, did not play into the hands of the opposition in Armenia. As a matter of fact, street protest has long been part of Armenian political culture. They hit the streets in 2008, unwilling to accept the election results, and later, trying to save the city parks from demolition. But they never went over the top, respecting the social laws and common sense.

The following comment by Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov seems to me the best assessment of what happened in Armenia this summer:

"Many are tempted to use the current developments in Armenia, in order to whip up anti-government sentiment, although the root of these events was purely economic," Lavrov said. "For some, apparently, it seems useful to go further and develop these processes in a political way."

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 #17
New York Times
July 21, 2015
Review: Walter Laqueur's 'Putinism' Dissects a Canny Russian Leader
By PETER BAKER

PUTINISM
Russia and Its Future With the West
By Walter Laqueur
271 pages. Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press. $27.99.

For Christmas in 2013, President Vladimir V. Putin sent three books to every regional governor and other senior officials in Russia. One of them was "Our Tasks," by Ivan Ilyin, an early-20th-century Russian philosopher who disdained Western-style democracy and argued for an authoritarian, though not totalitarian, state. In Mr. Ilyin's view, the government would not control all aspects of society, but in certain important areas would be "dictatorial in the scope of its powers."

Mr. Putin has developed something of a man crush on that exiled writer. He has quoted Mr. Ilyin in several national addresses, helped arrange for Mr. Ilyin's body to be returned to Russia from Switzerland for reburial, was reported to have personally paid for a new headstone and later traveled to a Moscow monastery to lay flowers on his grave.

This admiration contains clues to Mr. Putin's own, somewhat enigmatic philosophy, the venerable historian Walter Laqueur writes in "Putinism: Russia and Its Future With the West," an aptly timed and much needed look at the mercurial master of the Kremlin.

With Russia grabbing territory and sponsoring a separatist war in Ukraine, putting it once again at odds with the West, efforts to peer inside Mr. Putin's head have taken on profound significance. The White House has spent months on an interagency review trying to answer the question: What is Putinism anyway, and what should be done to counter it, beyond the immediate crisis in Ukraine?

Into this examination comes Mr. Laqueur, with trademark scholarly discipline deconstructing Mr. Putin, who in his 16 years as prime minister and president has defied the understanding of some of the world's best-informed leaders and best-financed intelligence agencies.

"What is Putinism?" Mr. Laqueur asks. "A great amount of mental energy has been devoted to finding an accurate definition, as so often happens when a new regime appears. But it has not been a very successful enterprise."

Mr. Laqueur, who has studied Russia for more than 60 years and has written more than 25 books, does not fall for the easy traps. While some in the United States see Mr. Putin as simply a revanchist Soviet, even a latter-day Stalin, Mr. Laqueur understands it is not so simple.

To be sure, Mr. Putin, a former K.G.B. officer raised with Soviet sensibilities, has paid homage to the old symbols and promoted nostalgia for a lost superpower. He has in some ways rehabilitated Stalin, in keeping with the views of a strikingly large share of Russia's populace. But Mr. Putin is not a Communist in the old sense. He does not talk of the dictatorship of the proletariat or the worker's paradise, nor does he export ideological revolution beyond his own neighborhood.

He came to power as the heir apparent to Boris N. Yeltsin, and many in the West wishfully thought he would stabilize Russia's shaky journey toward democracy. The signs, though, were there early for those who cared to notice: Mr. Putin took over independent television, punished defiant business tycoons, turned Parliament into a rubber stamp and eliminated the election of governors.

To the extent that he has defined a governing philosophy, Mr. Putin has made clear he favors the restoration of a strong state. At first, the ruling philosophy was called the "vertical of power" - in other words, a top-down system with him at the top. Later, amid criticism in the West that he had forsaken freedom, the phrase was recast as "sovereign democracy," with the emphasis on the sovereign.

But that seemed more of a brand, not an ideology. Mr. Putin's efforts at political definition have often felt more opportunistic than organized, the product of a leader playing the angles to preserve power and nervous about what he portrays as outsiders trying to take it from him.

Mr. Laqueur searches for the organizing principle. Putinism, he writes, seems to be state capitalism with elements of a liberal economic policy but significant state intervention - "almost total interference when important issues are concerned." Russia has the trappings of democracy - elections, a Parliament, news media - but that all increasingly seems to be for show. And "the most important component in the new ideology is nationalism accompanied by anti-Westernism."

In recent years Mr. Putin has tried to position himself as the champion of a Eurasian power, setting Russia as a counterpoint to Europe. Mr. Laqueur does not buy this, either. For all the talk of the Mongol influence on a country that stretches all the way to the Pacific, Mr. Laqueur notes that Russia remains much more tied to Europe in terms of culture, history, language and religion.

Mr. Putin's approach has always been rooted in resentment over at Russia's lost superpower status and his promise to restore the country's greatness. But where he once sought to validate that greatness through membership in the world's elite organizations, what was then the Group of 8, lately he has stoked anger at the West, presenting it as determined to keep Russia down. He is the self-appointed protector of Russians, even those living in other countries like Ukraine. Similarly, he has played to the longstanding dream of becoming the Third Rome, defining Russia as the savior of morality at a time of moral decay in the West that for him is typified by the rise of gay rights.

Mr. Ilyin has been a source of inspiration to the Kremlin in this project. In him, Mr. Laqueur writes, Mr. Putin and his circle "have found the prophet to present their much-needed new ideology."

The product of an upper-class Moscow family with ties to the army, Mr. Ilyin studied philosophy and did not last long once the Bolsheviks swept to power. Expelled from the Soviet Union in 1922, he wound up in Germany, where he worked for the Russian Scientific Institute, which Mr. Laqueur points out was part of Joseph Goebbels's Ministry of Propaganda. He was fired and fled again, this time to Switzerland, where he lived until his death in 1954. Once forgotten in Russia, nearly 30 of his books have been republished in his home country since the fall of the Soviet Union.

To some extent, Mr. Laqueur saw this coming. In his 1993 volume, "Black Hundred," issued as the rest of the world was still basking in the fall of the Soviet Union and foreseeing a new democratic Russia, he warned of the opposite.

"An authoritarian system based on some nationalist populism appears more probable," Mr. Laqueur wrote then.

More than 20 years later, he seems eerily and depressingly prescient.

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 #18
Huffington Post
July 13, 2015
Russia and the New Cold War in Historical Context: Part II of Conversations With Russia Scholar Stephen Cohen
By Dan Kovalik

This past May, the world celebrated the 70th Anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany by Allied Forces. Professor Cohen and I began our interview with a discussion about the increasing downplaying of Russia's critical role as an ally of the U.S. and Britain in this victory. As Cohen explains, popular films like Saving Private Ryan deceptively portray World II as being won by the U.S. with the invasion of Normandy in 1944, while ignoring the three years prior in which the USSR drove the Nazis from the heart of Russia back to Germany.

Cohen cites Winston Churchill for the proposition that it was the Red Army that "tore the guts out of the German Army." And, while Cohen is quick to acknowledge and condemn Stalin's many crimes and his exertion of control over Eastern Europe after World War II, he notes that it is a factual reality, which can't be denied, that the USSR played a historic role in liberating Europe from the Nazis. As Cohen relates:

"I always taught historically . . . and it was very clear to me . . . that the Soviet Union destroyed and defeated Nazi Germany. And the United States won the war in the Pacific against Japan. . . . I have a vivid memory of a man I knew who became one of the great Western scholars of the Soviet Union, telling me . . . of knowing a number of people of his generation who vividly told him, because it was a fateful moment of their lives, that when they weighed something like 70 pounds and were dying in the camps liberated by the Red Army, some strapping, tall, young Red Army solider lifting them up and carrying them off to the makeshift infirmary where they were saved, and all of them saying to him then, no matter what Stalin did after that or before that -- and I know it all -- the fact is, it was this young Red Army soldier that saved my life. . . ."

In my view, the downplaying of the good that Russia did during World II (and it did so at the sacrifice of approximately 27 million Soviet lives) is a necessary part of attempting to vilify and demonize that country now. After all, it is difficult to manipulate Americans into equating the current Russian leader with Hitler (as Hillary Clinton has attempted to do) if we are reminded that Russia did more than any other country to eliminate Hitler and that Russia celebrates this triumph as its most important secular holiday. I might also add that the attempts to compare Putin to Hitler appear to be transparent attempt to deflect attention from the fact that the U.S. has been training neo-Nazis in the Ukraine.

The other historical facts being wholly ignored are the promises the U.S. made to Mikhail Gorbachev during the waning years of the Soviet Union, and how the breaking of these promises have led us to the current international crisis. As Cohen explains, Gorbachev willingly allowed the Soviet Bloc countries to leave the Soviet orbit, and agreed to the reunification of Germany (over UK and French objections, he added) in return for certain assurances:

"Gorbachev was given these assurances . . . that if you agree to German reunification and a reunited Germany, one Germany, as a member of NATO, we promise you, to use Baker's words, "NATO will not move one inch to the east." . . . And the Russians do regard it as the first betrayal, predatel'stvo, in Russian . . . . The expansion of NATO from West Berlin all the way to the Baltics, hundreds of thousands of kilometers in the last 20 plus years, must be in history, in peacetime, the greatest expansion or inflation of a sphere of influence . . . . And of course, NATO is an American institution, so it's an expansion of the American sphere of influence. . . . So while we're expanding our sphere of influence, which by the way we tried to do in 2008 to Georgia along Russia's Caucasus border, as we are expanding our sphere of influence in an unprecedented way all the way to Russia's borders, we are sanctimoniously saying that Russia is in the wrong because it wants a sphere of influence."

As Cohen explains, we must attempt to see historic and current events as Russians see them in order to help us to turn back from our dangerous stand-off with Russia. And, the Russians see a world in which the U.S., while scolding Russia for its alleged violations of international law, seems to violate international law at nearly every turn:

"So, we say that the Russians violate this. I mean, we are the pace setters in the violation of international legality . . . . The Russians point out in answering about Crimea, we took Kosovo, we severed with bombers, airplanes in the air, killing a lot of people, we severed Kosovo from Serbia. And Putin repeatedly says nobody died during the [Crimean] referendum, while we never had a referendum in Kosovo or Serbia. Putin answers we had a peaceful democratic referendum and nobody died. It's sheer hypocrisy. . . .

"Well, there's no question that quantitatively in modern times we've become the most interventionist great power in the world. . . . We feel we have the right as the preeminent whatever to intervene anywhere in the world to the extent that we can to make things the way we think they should be. There's an explanation for that. I called it "Triumphalism," which took shape under Clinton after the Soviet Union ended . . . . You can imagine that we wake up tomorrow and we see that there's Chinese military bases . . . on our Canadian and Mexican borders. Washington would go crazy. Or that Mexico and Canada had signed some kind of exclusive trade arrangements with China, which is what the European Union asked Kiev to do in November 13. Putin had said there should be a tripartite relationship with Ukraine. Ukraine should trade with the European Union and with Russia because Russia is overwhelmingly its traditional and largest trading partner. But Europe said no, it's either with us or it's with Russia, you can't have both. Imagine if such an agreement had been offered to Mexico or Canada, what the reaction would have been. . . .

"American top officials . . . say to explain why we're resisting Russia in that part of the world is that Russia wants a sphere of influence, and they can't have one, not even on their own borders, and that that's a 19th century or 20th century concept that is no longer modern . . . . I don't think Russia is entitled to a sphere of influence in the old sense that they could control the policies of the countries in their sphere. What Russia is entitled to, just as we have always claimed [for ourselves], is a zone of national security on its borders. . . . And what it means is that no military bases of a foreign power will be located on their borders and that the countries on their borders will not be members of a hostile military alliance and NATO. That's what Russia has demanded. And I think it's a perfectly reasonable demand."

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 #19
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
http://carnegieendowment.org
July 20, 2015
Russia-A Different Kind of Threat
By Eugene Rumer
Rumer, a former national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the U.S. National Intelligence Council, is a senior associate and the director of Carnegie's Russia and Eurasia Program.

SUMMARY
Russia is a superpower in decline, and the challenge it poses to the United States is very different from that posed by the Soviet Union.

On July 13, 2015, the barracks of a unit of elite Russian airborne troops in Omsk, Siberia, collapsed, killing 23 servicemen. A day later, a long-range Tu-95 Bear bomber crashed in eastern Russia, the fifth Russian Air Force plane crash in a month. The entire Tu-95 fleet was grounded as a result. A few days earlier, though, two Bears were in the air, on a long-range patrol near the coast of Alaska, where they were intercepted by U.S. fighters.

In Washington, U.S. President Barack Obama's nominee to be the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joe Dunford, called Russia "the greatest threat" to the United States at his July 9 confirmation hearing. In an interview the day before, Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James made the same claim. The White House and State Department promptly distanced themselves from Dunford's comments, but they failed to smother the impression that Dunford may be on to something.

Russian aggression against Ukraine has revived the long-forgotten craft of marketing the Russian threat. Russia certainly is a problem, and the U.S. relationship with it is at its worst since before the Cold War ended. But a sober look at Russia reveals a superpower in decline. Its economy is stumbling; its military capabilities are no match for those of the United States and its allies; and its actions are in large measure driven by exaggerated threat perceptions and insecurity at home and abroad.

The revival of the Russian threat is probably welcome in Moscow despite official protestations. Russian elites were offended when President Obama put Russian aggression in second place behind the Ebola virus when he described top international threats in an address to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2014. The recent statements by U.S. officials may reassure Moscow that the United States finally takes Russia seriously as a peer competitor.

The reality is likely to be different. Russia is back as a major challenge for European security. But it is a challenge of a different kind than the challenge posed by the Soviet Union that exists in the West's fading memories of the Cold War.

The Economy

It is no secret that the economy remains Russia's weak spot. It had slowed to a crawl by the time the Ukraine crisis erupted in 2013. Western sanctions imposed since then have hurt, but not crippled, the economy, and growth will remain sluggish at best, even when Russia eventually recovers from the recession. In 2015, the slump is expected to reduce Russia's gross domestic product (GDP) by 4-5 percent. Former finance minister and leading economic liberal Alexei Kudrin estimates average growth of 1.5-2 percent for President Vladimir Putin's third term, from 2012 to 2018-a far cry from the glory days of his first two terms, when the Russian economy grew by as much as 8.5 percent.

What was the strength of the Russian economy during Putin's first two terms as president is now its weakness. Oil and gas revenues account for some 50 percent of the federal budget. When oil is expensive, Russia can afford to index pensions to inflation, build Olympic and World Cup stadiums, and modernize its defenses. When oil falls from $100 a barrel to $50 a barrel, the splurge is difficult to sustain. In a moment of remarkable candor in a June 2015 interview, the Kremlin chief of staff, Sergei Ivanov, referred to Russia's mineral wealth as a "curse" that had kept the country from diversifying its economy. Russia had no motivation to reform when "a golden rain" was pouring down on it, he said. Now low oil prices are crimping government spending and sanctions have cut Russia off from credit markets. The tough business climate and uncertainty about the future are choking off new investment and reducing prospects for growth.

Domestic Politics

Along with the economic troubles come the Kremlin's deep-seated fears of political instability. There is little, if any, domestic political opposition in Russia these days. What opposition there is has long suffered from internal discord and, since Putin's return to the presidency, has been decimated by the Kremlin's harsh measures. But that is likely to be of little comfort to Putin. Even his high approval ratings-almost 90 percent-could be misleading.

Ukraine's November 2013 popular uprising against then president Victor Yanukovych must have been a reminder to the Russian president that political fortunes can change quickly, especially if the elite and oligarchs conspire against you. Opinion polls showed no sign of the coming explosion, which was caused by Yanukovych's refusal to sign an association agreement with the European Union (EU) and the police's brutal handling of a small group of youthful, pro-EU demonstrators in Kyiv's main square.

In a nationwide poll conducted in Ukraine in September 2013, an economic union with Russia was favored by almost the same number of Ukrainians-37 percent-as an economic union with Europe-42 percent. The people of Ukraine showed little interest in politics; they were mistrustful of all politicians and overwhelmingly concerned about day-to-day survival issues. Fifty-five percent of respondents cited unemployment as their biggest concern; only 14 percent worried about political instability. And 50 percent disapproved of political protests without official permission.

Throughout 2013, Yanukovych had been accumulating ever more wealth, placing cronies in key government and law enforcement posts, and chipping away at the power of the oligarchs. The opposition was discredited by its failure to govern after the 2004 Orange Revolution and hampered by internal rivalries. There was no sign that the Yanukovych regime would collapse in a matter of weeks, abandoned by many in the ruling elite who quickly switched sides and supported the revolution.

The Kremlin's relentless quest for new and ever more elaborate tools to secure its control of Russian politics and eradicate all sources of hostile influence-domestic and external-is a sure sign of its nervousness. A ban on foreign ownership of media outlets, restrictions on nongovernmental organizations, the expulsion of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the stream of propaganda equating democracy with decadence, and warnings to the populace against the West's pernicious influence are just a few elements of the Kremlin's political offensive, which, no doubt, it sees as necessary self-defense. It never seems to be enough, and it probably isn't.

The Military

The Kremlin's insecurity manifests itself in the defense sphere as well. Operations in Crimea and eastern Ukraine have demonstrated that Russian military capabilities have improved since the desperate days of the 1990s, when the Russian military was practically written off. A far-reaching military reform implemented between 2008 and 2012 and a huge surge in resources for equipment, training, and personnel have resulted in a military organization that is capable of defeating or denying access to any adversary in the former Soviet space.

But the war waged by Russia against Ukraine in the summer of 2014 was, in the words of one prominent Russian military observer, a war fought by two 1991-vintage militaries, and the Russian military was simply better trained, equipped, and led than the Ukrainian military.

Russian military analysts have a decades-old concern that the West's technological superiority and capabilities could threaten the survival of the Russian state. The conventional superiority of the United States, both real and projected-its air and naval power, its precision-guided conventional weaponry, its global reach-has long been a source of both fascination and profound insecurity on the part of Russian military analysts. Worse yet, they fear that over time, U.S. missile defenses will erode Russia's ultimate deterrent-its strategic nuclear weapons-and enable the United States to act unilaterally with impunity.

Looking at future challenges, the prospect of U.S. nuclear and conventional long-range precision weapons combined with missile defenses, space weapons, and cyber capabilities that could disrupt Russian early warning and command and control systems must be the worst nightmare of Russian defense planners responsible for the survival of the country's nuclear deterrent. The United States may have no desire to launch a disarming first strike against Russia, but as NATO officials said during the Cold War, when they dismissed Soviet statements about peaceful intentions, it's the capability that counts.

Paradoxically, Russian military exploits in Ukraine have undermined Russian security. The prospect of renewed hostilities in eastern Ukraine and the Kremlin's blatant attempts to keep Kyiv on edge will force the Kremlin to maintain a sizeable contingent of combat-ready Russian forces tied up on the border with Ukraine. Estimates vary-from 10,000 to as many as 40,000, depending on the intensity of the crisis and the source. These figures do not include some 15,000 troops stationed in Crimea-in addition to the Black Sea fleet. There can be little doubt that a sizeable portion of Russia's roughly 260,000-strong army is tied up as a result of the Russian "victory" in Ukraine.1 The army's 32,000 elite airborne troops are deemed to be its best trained and equipped. Much of the rest of the force is generally judged to be of lesser quality and lower combat readiness.

There are of course other contingencies-the restive North Caucasus and the threat of instability in Central Asia, for which Russian military planners claim they have to be ready, not to mention the long (and vulnerable) border with China. However, the European theater has dominated Russian security policy since the crisis in Ukraine began.

As seen from Moscow, Europe does pose a challenge, if not an outright threat. Whether or not NATO leaders are willing to admit it, the alliance's expansion into the former Warsaw Pact and even the Soviet Union has resulted in a vastly different geopolitical balance in Europe, with Russia as the loser. Ukraine's Maidan Revolution promises to bring NATO's influence-if not its formal presence-to within 300 miles of Moscow. That is a hard prospect for Russian military planners to accept calmly.

NATO spends some $900 billion on defense each year, of which some $600 billion is U.S. defense spending. NATO member states' combined GDP is over $30 trillion. The exact amount of Russian defense spending is not publicly available. The published defense budget for 2015 was $81 billion. Assuming generously that Russia spends 5 percent of its roughly $2 trillion GDP on defense, the total comes to $100 billion. Its armed forces total some 770,000, compared with NATO's 3.3 million.

Ukraine-which presently is not a NATO member-must now be viewed by Russian military planners as hostile territory. Its leaders have declared their intent to join NATO, and Russian aggression against Ukraine and threats to the Baltic states have mobilized NATO to take steps it has not taken in many years. These include reinvigorated planning for war with Russia, forward deployments of U.S. and other allied military units along Russia's border, prepositioning of weapons and equipment in Eastern Europe, show-of-force exercises, and training of and deliveries of military hardware to the Ukrainian army, to name just some of the most visible elements of the new security environment on Russia's doorstep as a result of its actions in Ukraine.

Against this backdrop, Russian threats to deploy nuclear weapons to Kaliningrad, on the Baltic Sea, or to Crimea; long-range bomber patrols near the borders of the United States and its NATO allies; harassment of U.S. Navy ships in international waters; and other moves appear not as a sign of confidence, but as a sign of nervousness about NATO's military superiority. A government confident of its conventional military capabilities hardly needs to engage in nuclear scaremongering and threaten nuclear annihilation to neighbors contemplating legitimate self-defense measures on their territory.

The Russian Challenge

Russia's vast nuclear arsenal puts it in a special category as a threat to the United States. For the foreseeable future, the challenge Russia presents to the United States is twofold. It entails not only Russian strength but also Russian weakness and the lack of confidence on the part of the Russian leadership in the country's political system, its economy, and its military.

Notwithstanding the difficulties it is facing, Russia has considerable means at its disposal with which it can challenge the West. Information operations, cyber capabilities, intelligence and subversive operatives, financial resources, vast natural resources, trade sanctions, as well as a willingness to disregard completely international norms-all have been usefully deployed by the Russian state since the beginning of the crisis in Ukraine. Surrounded by weaker neighbors, Russia can intimidate them, violate their sovereignty, and meddle in their internal affairs in ways that are well short of a full-fledged military crisis, but nonetheless represent a major threat to U.S. allies and partners. This challenge calls for a different kind of defense and deterrence than mutually assured destruction-the promise of mutual annihilation in the event of a war-which was at the heart of U.S. and Soviet strategy during much of the Cold War.

Both the United States and Europe have to recognize that the present crisis is not a short-term phenomenon. This state of affairs will last a long time and requires a long-term commitment from them to address the post-post-Cold War challenge of dealing with Russia and securing Europe.

There is little new in the West's tool kit to deal with this challenge. The United States and its allies will have to rely on a mixture of diplomatic and military means, as they have already begun to do. This will require the United States to recognize that it is not "done" with European security, as it seemed earlier in this century, and that its commitment of military resources is essential for the continent's stability and security. This does not mean going back to Cold War-era levels of U.S. military presence in Europe, or the forward deployment, as some have suggested, of more modern tactical nuclear weapons. Rather, it calls for a vastly smaller force and a creative approach to deterrence and defense, taking advantage of a quarter century's worth of breathtaking technological change and unmatched U.S. military capabilities to signal to America's allies and to Russia the strength of the U.S. commitment.

For Europe, this will mean recognizing that war has not been banished from the continent and that military force is still relevant in the twenty-first century. It will require a major shift not only in terms of committing resources, but also conceptually. It is essential, however, because the United States will not defend and deter on behalf of Europe if Europe is not willing to contribute its fair share of the burden.

But reliance on force alone is not enough. The United States and Europe have to pursue the diplomatic track as well. The challenge there is bigger than in the military sphere. The crisis in Ukraine is a major milestone in European security affairs, but it is only a symptom of a larger problem-the failure of the United States and Europe to implement their post-Cold War security plan designed around the idea of twin-NATO and EU-enlargements with Russia as a reliable partner.

The crisis in Ukraine has demonstrated that Russia is not willing to be a part of that scheme and that a new arrangement is needed. Devising this new arrangement is a top challenge for the alliance. To be successful, the effort has to include Russia. At the height of the present crisis, this is counterintuitive. However, any arrangement to which it is not a party from the beginning has little, if any, chance of succeeding. Russia's insecurity and zero-sum approach to international relations mean that it will view any security arrangement in Europe in which it does not have a voice from the outset as a threat.

Considering the mistrust between Russia and the West, it is too early to take on the task of devising this arrangement. That is a task for the next U.S. administration. However, it is not too soon to begin laying the groundwork for it-taking the proper measure of what Russia is and the outlook for it over the next ten years; thinking through the United States' own foreign policy priorities and Russia's place among them; engaging the allies in a conversation about Russia and European security; and rebuilding channels of communication between U.S. and Russian foreign policy establishments, which are almost nonexistent at present, as a step toward restoring a measure of trust and understanding of each other's motives and actions. These are just a few obvious actions that can be undertaken now, without waiting for a new U.S. administration in 2016.

The failure of the post-Cold War security arrangement does not mean a return to the Cold War in Europe. Too much has changed in the past twenty-five years. Russia and Europe have become much more interdependent, the center of gravity in the world has shifted with the rise of China and the Asia-Pacific region, and U.S. interests have become much more diffuse and diverse. And Russia does not pose the challenge the Soviet Union once did. It is a smaller, weaker power, whose main challenge to the world and to U.S. interests lies not in its expansion, but in the reckless behavior that has become a key feature of its reduced presence on the world stage.

Notes
1 The 260,000 estimate includes ground forces and airborne troops.

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 #20
Zik (Kyiv)
http://zik.ua
July 20, 2015
Poroshenko has support of 14.6% of Ukrainians

If the presidential election was held in mid-July, Petro Porosheko would be the winner, says the poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, Ukrayinska pravda reports July 20.

Yulia Tymoshenko has the support of 13.9% of Ukrainians, with Anatoly Hrytsenko at 4.6%, Oleh Lyashko at 4.3%, Andry Sadovy at 3.8%, Dmytro Yarosh at 3.1% and Yury Bojko (former Regions member) at 2.4%.

13.6% of Ukrainians would not show up at the elections, with 23.9% undecided voters.

The poll was not held in Crimea and rebel-held territories of Donbas.

Since May, 2015, Pres Poroshenko has increased his support by one percentage point.

Poroshenko won the highest office on May 25, 2014 scoring 54.7% of the vote.

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 #21
Interfax
July 21, 2015
Over half of Ukrainians want conflict in Donbas to be resolved through negotiation - poll

Over half of all Ukrainians (56.8 percent) surveyed by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology believe the best solution to the military conflict in Donbass would be through further peace talks and a peaceful settlement on the basis of the Minsk agreements.

The poll shows that 28.3 percent of the respondents believe that the territory of Donbas should be liberated by the Ukrainian army, 13.7 percent could not answer the question, and 1.1 percent refused to answer it.

A total of 56.3 percent of the respondents agree that any agreements with the Russian Federation are not upheld and the Russian authorities will never fulfill them anyway, only 13.2 percent disagreed with that.

A total of 36.4 percent of the respondents agree that the territory of Ukraine can only be liberated using the Ukrainian army, and 25.7 percent disagree with that.

A total of 47.7 percent of the respondents said they are ready to give the Russian language the status of a state language to achieve peace in Ukraine (38 percent are not ready for that), 40.7 percent are not ready to enter NATO (41 percent are ready), 33.9 percent are ready to give up the European Union membership (48.8 percent are not ready), 33.3 percent are ready to agree to the separation of Crimea from Ukraine (50.6 percent are not ready), 28 percent are ready to enter the Customs Union (50.6 percent are not ready), 26,4 percent are ready to give autonomy to the DPR and the LPR (56.1 percent are not ready), 24.7 percent are ready for separatists to be given an amnesty (55.4 percent are not ready), 21 percent are ready to agree to the federalization of the entire Ukraine (59.1 percent are not ready).

A total of 18.7 percent of the respondents suggest recognizing the independence of the DNR and the LNR (63.8 percent are not ready for that), 15.3 percent believe the entire Donbass should be given to Russia (72.1 percent are not ready for that), and 5.8 percent believe Russia should get the entire Eastern and Southern Ukraine along the Dnieper line (83.7 percent are not ready for that).

Only 6 percent of the respondents believe it would be better for their region to separate from Ukraine and 83.2 percent do not think so.

A total of 22.9 percent of residents of the territories of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, controlled by Ukraine, believe it would be better for them to separate from Ukraine and 51.7 percent do not support this idea, the poll shows.

The poll was conducted by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology in the period between June 27 and July 9. It surveyed 2,044 respondents living in all regions of Ukraine except for the territories of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions not controlled by Ukraine.

The statistical margin of error does not exceed 3.3 percent for indicators close to 50 percent, 2.8 percent for indicators close to 25 percent, 2 percent for indicators close to 10 percent, and 1.4 percent for indicators close to 5 percent.

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 #22
Fort Russ
http://fortruss.blogspot.ru
July 21, 2015
Radio Liberty: "UAF are shelling Donetsk in response to rebels shelling Donetsk"
By Tatzhit
[Graphics here http://fortruss.blogspot.ru/2015/07/radio-liberty-uaf-are-shelling-donetsk.html]

Just let that headline sink in.
 
Here is the actual language: "The ATO* spokesmen [Major General Taran and colonel Sergei Galushko] have presented proof that Donetsk is being shelled by the rebels themselves, in order to provoke return fire from the UAF forces, and then blame them for shelling Donetsk." SOURCE [http://www.radiosvoboda.org/content/news/27136947.html]

So, here is the reality as presented by "Voice of Langley" in East Europe:

The rebels start randomly shelling their own families in Donetsk. UAF see it, get "provoked" by somebody else doing their job, and start indiscriminately shelling Donetsk as well.

Now we just wait for John Kerry and Co. to start parroting these claims...

The actual reality is slightly less insane than RFE/RL reporting, but only slightly:

Those conflicting claims were made by the two officers separately, i.e. Galushko claimed that the "rebels are shelling themselves", and Taran claimed that "rebels are provoking return fire at civilian areas of Donetsk", but those two officers were speaking about the same event and _sitting next to each other_ as they said these things.

Either way, both the RFE/RL reporting and the ATO briefing claims are completely out of touch with the real world:

God/evolution gave humans directional hearing - the locals can hear perfectly well which direction the shots fired from, and where are they landing. The only way for the rebels to fool the population as to who is firing would be to shell from frontline positions next to airport - but the ATO spokesmen, in their struggle against reality, always claim that the rebels are shelling from the complete opposite direction (south-east as opposed to north, in this specific case).

Same goes for "firing positions next to houses" - any time the rebels do this, it ends up on Youtube within a couple hours. Yes, there were some cases, but few and far between. Moreover, setting up artillery on asphalt is just inconvenient - whenever we do see those videos, it's usually Grad trucks in a city, or set up in city parks (a friend in Dzerdzhinsk recently told me UAF arty is set up in their town park, in the center).

It is worth noting that Galushko presented a "radio intercept recording" that supposedly supported his claims, but as usual with SBU pieces it was simply a mish-mash of isolated phrases cut out of half a dozen different conversations; moreover, it mentioned locations that were quite some distance from places being shelled. Sharii has an excellent video on the subject. Unfortunately, it is not subtitled yet (as of 4pm, July 20th), but his people usually add subs within a day.
 
Note:
*ATO= anti-terror operation. Kiev regime cannot call the civil war what it is, or else they won't get IMF loans the bankrupt government uses to finance said war, so they call it "ATO".

Ironically, this makes their actions both illegal (a lot of things they're doing, e.g. forced conscription, detention without trial, use of army within the country, etc. are only legal once war has been declared) and makes them the terrorists (indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas is terrorism by any definition).

** Also worth referencing my previous translation on RFE/RL, about how anti-Putin journalist Babitsky was RFE's darling when reporting on Russian war crimes in Chechnya - even US Secretary of State Albright supported him directly - but as soon as he happened to report a war crime by nationalist forces he has seen first-hand in the Donbass, he was instantly fired from RFE. "Liberty" on that radio has some very harsh limits, heh.

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 #23
Ukraine completes fortification construction on border with Donbas

KIEV, July 21. /TASS/. The construction of the fortification structures in the east of Ukraine has been completed, Ukrainian Regional Construction Minister Gennady Zubko twitted on Tuesday.

"The construction of fortification structures in the east of Ukraine has been 100% completed," he wrote. They have been built along the contact line in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions.

It has been reported that a total of 300 defensive works for 600 km of fortifications have been built with the use of 12,000 concrete structures. Three lines of defense have been built since the work started. Ukraine's 20 regions were involved in the construction of the fortification structures by efforts of 5,000 construction workers with the use of 35,000 wagons of building materials.

According to the Ukrainian government, the total cost of the construction of the line of defense in the Donbas region amounted to $45 million.

On March 9, Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko said Ukraine was reinforcing the system of defense in its eastern regions. "We are building a strong, deeply echeloned system of fortification structures in the east," he said. The press centre of the military operation said it was planned to build two defensive perimeters "to prevent enemy penetration into Ukraine's territory." According to the press service, it was planned to build about 1,500 kilometres of trenches and communication trenches, more than 8,000 entrenchments for heavy weapons, more than 4,000 bunkers and a 60-kilometre-long fence of passive obstacles.

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 #24
DPR makes process of weaponry withdrawal as open as possible - defense ministry

MOSCOW, July 21. /TASS/. The self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) has made the process of withdrawing weaponry of less than 100mm caliber as open as possible, DPR defense ministry spokesman Eduard Basurin said on Tuesday.

"OSCE [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe] observers arrived in Sanzharovka [settlement] to monitor weaponry withdrawal which the self-defense forces are completing unilaterally," the Donetsk News Agency said. "They [observers] were able to write down the numbers of withdrawn military equipment. A total of eight IFVs [infantry fighting vehicles] were withdrawn today from Sanzharovka," the agency added.

"We are purposefully making the process of weaponry withdrawal as open as possible, provide an opportunity to monitor the process at the site, write down numbers," the agency quoted Basurin as saying.

The defense ministry spokesman added that "withdrawn weaponry can leave new places of deployment, but it will remain as far as three kilometers from the contact line in any case."

Minsk agreements on Ukraine

Weaponry withdrawal is envisaged by the Minsk agreements on Ukraine. The Minsk accords were signed on February 12, after negotiations in the so-called "Normandy format" in the Belarusian capital Minsk, bringing together Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Francois Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. The talks lasted for around 14 hours. Simultaneously, a meeting of the Contact Group on Ukrainian settlement was held in Minsk.

The Minsk also envisage ceasefire, prisoner exchange, local elections in Donbas, constitutional reform in Ukraine and establishing working sub-groups on security, political, economy and humanitarian components of the Minsk accords.

The Ukrainian forces and the self-defense forces of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics have repeatedly accused each other of violating ceasefire and other points of the Minsk agreements.

On July 18, DPR and LPR announced the start of withdrawing tanks and armored vehicles of less than 100mm caliber from the contact line to at least 3 kilometers. Withdrawing weaponry of less than 100mm caliber has been discussed in Minsk for a long time, but the sides failed to reach an agreement. DPR and LPR decided to start the withdrawal unilaterally in the interests of establishing peace.

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#25
www.rt.com
July 21, 2015
'We see movement of military hardware away from contact line' - OSCE

OSCE Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine confirmed that it had seen weapons being withdrawn from the front line in eastern Ukraine on Monday. However, the mission needs "additional information" in order to verify the move, an OSCE official told RT.
Trends

"What we see at the moment is a movement of military hardware away from the contact line," Deputy Chief Monitor of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine Alexander Hug told RT on Monday.

To provide "an actual verification of a withdrawal," the monitors need "to be provided with additional baseline information, in order to be sure that weapons are not just being moved around, but are actually withdrawn, and remain withdrawn," he added.

Saying that it was "up to the sides to put action behind their words," Hug said that OSCE would welcome "a reciprocal action on both sides" of the conflict. "This type of disengagement is required in all of the hotspots," he added.

On Saturday, anti-government forces in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions in eastern Ukraine announced their unilateral decision to move lighter weapons, up to 100 mm caliber no less than three kilometers (almost two miles) from the front line. The OSCE-monitored withdrawal started on Sunday, with over half of such weapons having been pulled back by Monday evening, according to spokesperson of the Donetsk People's Republic (DNR) Eduard Basurin.

The rebel forces plan to completely fulfill such weapons and military machinery withdrawal from the front line by Tuesday, Basurin said.

At the same time, Kiev continues to build up armaments closer to the confrontation line, the DNR spokesperson said on Monday, citing information provided by its reconnaissance units.

"We have our doubts whether the forces from the Ukrainian side will be withdrawn the same way as the rebel side did it," former German deputy minister of defense and former OSCE deputy head Willy Wimmer told RT. Saying that the "overall atmosphere in the country is complicated," actions of its government and president Poroshenko "are totally counterproductive," he added.

"There is no need for warmongering in Europe," the German politician said.

On Saturday, the center of Donetsk was shelled by Ukrainian forces, with the attack hitting residential blocks and a hospital, injuring its patients. One civilian was killed in the shelling, which was said to be the worst launched at the city of Donetsk in recent times. Weapons over 120mm caliber were reported to have been used in the attack by Kiev army. According to Minsk agreements, such heavy weapons should have been withdrawn at least 50 kilometers from the front line.

"All type of weaponry was used. Tank fire was used - that is direct fire, and indirect fire from different calibers of artillery, up to very heavy artillery," OSCE's Alexander Hug told RT, adding that the monitors assessed the use of 152 mm weapons as well.
 

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 #26
Reuters
July 21, 2015
Specter of War Haunts Life in East Ukraine Despite Ceasefire

DONETSK - Natalya Brazhnikova goes to sell bread each day at a badly charred market on the outskirts of Donetsk in east Ukraine despite the risk of shelling and gunfire.

Since her husband lost his job when the local coalmine closed because of fighting between government forces and pro-Russian separatists, their family has depended on the money she makes to survive.

Many other residents of the Oktyabrsky district on the northwestern edge of separatist-held Donetsk have fled. Those who remain face a struggle to survive even though a ceasefire was agreed in east Ukraine in February.

Brazhnikova, who is in her 40s, counts herself lucky that her stand near a bus stop was not destroyed when the market was hit by shelling and caught fire.

"Windows were shattered - here are the bullet holes ... But it's good that they managed to put the fire out. It almost reached us here," she said from behind the counter.

"People have got used to shopping where the bus stops. It's convenient."

The journey on a Soviet-era bus brings passengers from central Donetsk to the market. Next to it lies the rubble of buildings hit by shells. Other buildings and roads are pock-marked by bullets or shells, and the bus stop has been damaged.

People in Donetsk, an industrial city of more than 1 million in peace time, are trying to make the most of the five-month-old ceasefire, a breathing space in a 15-month-old conflict that has killed more than 6,500 people.

But even when sitting in parks, going to the cinema, drinking coffee in cafes or strolling along the Kalmius River they are always mindful of where the nearest bomb shelter is in case they need to take cover.

There are daily casualties across east Ukraine and shells hit central Donetsk on Saturday for the first time since the truce was agreed. One civilian was killed.
Kiev last Wednesday reported that eight government soldiers had been killed in the previous 24 hours, one of the highest tolls in months over such a short period.

'Frozen Conflict'

With Russia and the rebels accusing Ukraine's leaders of not implementing all the terms of the ceasefire agreement, and Kiev and the West blaming the truce's fragility on Moscow and the rebels, it is an uneasy peace. Diplomacy involving France and Germany has failed to have much impact.

Steps yet to be fully implemented under the 13-point agreement reached in the Belarussian capital of Minsk include withdrawals of heavy weapons and moves to give the rebel-held eastern regions more autonomy.

President Vladimir Putin seems content, at least for now, to let the conflict remain "frozen" at a low level of fighting, despite Western economic sanctions imposed on Russia over its role in the crisis.

The Crimea peninsula has been seized back from Ukraine, the prospects of largely Russian-speaking east Ukraine also joining Russia have decreased and Ukraine's drive to join Europe's mainstream - and pulling further out of Moscow's orbit - is more complicated while the conflict continues.

Although Moscow denies providing the rebels with troops or weapons, it has sufficient influence with the rebels to cause further problems for Kiev's leaders and the West almost at will. Backing down over the conflict would be politically risky for Putin, who has used it to whip up support in Russia.

For the people of east Ukraine, months or years of uncertainty may lie ahead.

Living in Deprivation

In Oktyabrsky, the shooting and shelling usually resumes a few hours before sunset and during through the night.

"We've already got used to the machine guns. We're not afraid of them. They shoot and that's okay. But when this starts...," said former choreographer Yelena Degtyarenko, pointing at a crater at her backyard, hit by a shell last week.

The 44-year-old woman burst into tears as she described hiding from artillery fire in the cellar with her husband, two dogs and two kittens.

"No one knows when this will end," said her 62-year-old neighbor Galina Kryukova, showing the charred remains of her home.

"I'm homeless now. What did I live for? What did I work for? We spent six years building it and managed to live in it for just five."

The only resident of three nine-story apartment buildings built for miners several decades ago is a 75-year-old man called Mikhail. Some of the windows have no glass panes, some of the walls are scorched and pockmarked by holes, and the water, electricity and gas were cut off several months ago when the buildings were caught in the crossfire.

Mikhail, who declined to give his full name, said some of his neighbors return in the mornings to check whether their apartments are still standing and then quickly go away.

"Our house has already died. No one would stay here for the winter. Everything has been smashed. The boiler doesn't work. As long as they are shooting, the electricians won't come here to fix the electricity," he said.

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 #27
www.opendemocracy.net
July 16, 2015
(Un)solving Ukraine's conflict
What is exactly stopping a solution to the crisis in eastern Ukraine?
By Mikhail Molchanov
Mikhail A. Molchanov was born and raised in Ukraine, where he worked as Head of the Department of Public Administration at the National Academy of Public Administration under the President of Ukraine. He currently works as Professor of Political Science at St. Thomas University, Canada. He is the author of Political Culture and National Identity in Russian-Ukrainian Relations and co-author of Ukraine's Foreign and Security Policy.
 
By this time, it should be obvious that the west does not want a conflict in Ukraine to be resolved any time soon. If that were the case, it would apply pressure to both parties of the conflict: the government in Kiev and the separatists in Donbas. Instead, the west applies pressure to the third party: the Russian government, admittedly the separatists' best friend and supplier, but not the one that has direct stakes in the conflict at hand.

Let us recount those stakes. For Kiev: territorial integrity, full sovereignty over Donbas, and the right to determine its foreign policies independently from external influences (or so the government spokespersons in Kiev say).

For Donbas: linguistic and cultural autonomy, elements of a robust home rule, the right to preserve a privileged relationship with the Russian Federation, and amnesty to the local separatist leaders and militiamen.

Does Russia have stakes separate from any of these? Not that I know of. Putin keeps repeating the separatists' demands: an amnesty, local autonomy; full implementation of the Minsk agreements. In spite of what we hear so often in the west, there are no separate demands presumably infringing on Ukraine's sovereignty; Russia says nothing about whether Ukraine should or should not join the EU, should or should not claim Donbas as its own, should or should not be friendly with Russia itself. Yes, the Kremlin would be extremely disappointed were Ukraine to join NATO. Even so, the Kremlin has more than once assured the world it did not claim to have a veto over Ukraine's foreign policy choices.

All the same, demanding that Russia seal the border and stop the influx of volunteers into the conflict zone is extremely unrealistic. Putin staked his reputation on support of Russia's so-called compatriots in the near abroad; his abandoning those compatriots to the gallows would sink his presidency.

What is, then, the solution and is it even possible?

It seems the solution is possible, and it has been clearly defined in the Minsk agreements. The problem is, Kiev does not want to implement them, and therefore protracts the conflict.

Firstly, the promised amnesty to the separatists has never been announced. Ukraine's pundits are musing over who should be pardoned and who should not. Those with blood on their hands should not be pardoned, seems to be the common wisdom. Not a word about the blood of civilians in Donbas killed in the process of carrying out Kiev's so-called Anti-Terrorist Operation. With such an attitude, the choice facing the Donbas militia leaders seems to be simple: continue fighting or face imprisonment (or worse) at the hand of the Ukrainian authorities. Why are we surprised they keep fighting?

Secondly, the Minsk agreements called for extensive home rule provisions for Donbas, and for a requisite change in the Constitution of Ukraine.

None of this seems to be in the works. The latest proposal on changes to the Constitution of Ukraine, dated July 1, 2015, has nothing about a special status for the affected regions of Donbas beyond a fuzzy promise - in the law, not in the Constitution itself - that the 'special modalities of local governance in separate regions of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasti will be determined by a separate law'. This is not what the Government of Ukraine promised its partners when talking about the implementation of the Minsk Agreements.

Thirdly, the Minsk Agreements call for the 'linguistic self-definition' of the affected regions or, in short, the right to continue using Russian as the language of daily communication and local governance. Official Kiev keeps quiet on the issue.

Finally, according to the Minsk agreements, Ukraine should support social and economic development of the affected regions of Donetsk and Luhansk regions. In the meantime, since November 2014, no pensions have been paid to the retired Ukrainian citizens living in the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics.

Although Kiev has not begun implementing even the first basic point of the Minsk agreements (the 'immediate and comprehensive cease-fire' in Donbas), the west seems to be fully okay with that. Well, the separatists fire on Ukraine's positions, the Ukrainian army should return fire, so goes the conventional explanation.

What if the Ukrainian army didn't return fire? Would it risk losing an inch more territory? The answer is far from obvious, yet the the regular army continues using heavy artillery in densely populated civilian areas in Donbas (and killing unarmed civilians in the process). This fact alone should have moved Ukraine's western sponsors to an obvious course of action: press the Ukrainian government to stop abusing human rights of its own citizens in eastern Ukraine.

It is almost exactly a year since Human Rights Watch, in an open communication to President Poroshenko, lamented the actions of the Ukrainian army and the pro-government militias, in particular the shelling of a hospital in Krasny Liman and air strikes in the villages of Luhanskaya and Kondrashevka.

In January and February 2015, government forces (and the separatists) used widely banned cluster munitions to attack rebels; earlier, the use of incendiary weapons in densely populated areas was documented. By July 2015, more than 6,500 people have died as a result of the conflict; close to 3,500 of them civilians. More than 16,000 have been wounded; close to 1.4 million people internally displaced. At least 660,000 Ukrainian refugees came to Russia.

The civil war in Ukraine has generated a humanitarian catastrophe that can only be resolved with the joint efforts of all parties concerned, the USA and the EU included. It goes without saying, Kiev should be prepared to sit together at the same table with separatist leaders and offer them some concessions before any deal can be reached.

Instead, Kiev promises an amnesty after the elections, and a law on the status of territories after Ukraine's full control over its eastern borders is restored. To many an observer inside and outside, this must look like deceiving one's opponent and negotiating in bad faith. Yet western powers stand firm in their resolve to lay all the blame for the failure of the Minsk agreement at Russia's feet.

Last month, at the G-7 meeting in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, western powers agreed to keep sanctions against Russia in place until the Minsk agreements are implemented in full. The Canadian government went further than the rest of the G-7 nations, having decided not only to keep, but to expand the sanctions with the blacklisting of Gazprom, its oil subsidiary Gazprom Neft, Russia's state-owned Transneft and a major oil producer Surgutneftegaz. In addition, Canada decided to sanction a conservative nationalist philosopher Alexander Dugin and Eurasian Youth Union, a non-governmental organization known for its pro-Putin views.

All of this looks more than somewhat one-sided given a recent revelation that Canada's embassy in Kiev was used as a base for anti-government protesters to re-group and re-cuperate during the Maidan uprising that toppled former president Viktor Yanukovych.

As for Canada's big brother, the United States, it has publicly admitted spending $5.1 billion to support democracy-building programs in Ukraine since 1992. While western champions of democracy have proudly claimed their right to interfere in internal affairs of a sovereign country for the sake of a regime change when it suited their interests, they do surprisingly little to stop continuing human rights abuses committed by Ukraine government troops and far-right militias in the pro-Russian Donbas.

If the Minsk agreements are ever to be implemented in full, there is no other way but for all sides to follow the agreed-upon commitments.

This includes, first and foremost, the immediate cessation of artillery barrages targeting Donbas cities and villages; further, the unequivocal and unconditional declaration of an amnesty for the Donbas fighters; and finally, a provision for Donbas autonomy enshrined into the Constitution of Ukraine before - not after - any local elections will be allowed to happen.

Only such a range of measures will ensure full withdrawal of Russian volunteers from Donbas, and Russian regular forces from the Russo-Ukrainian borderlands.

Only such a gambit will restore peace and a hope of prosperity to the whole of Ukraine. It is not Moscow, or Donetsk, or Luhansk that should make a first move. It is fully up to Kiev to choose between war and peace in Ukraine's south east.

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 #28
Irrussianality
https://irrussianality.wordpress.com
July 19, 2015
Tele-bridge
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'

On Friday I participated in a 'Tele-bridge' which was broadcast by the online Ukrainian TV station, Channel 17. The idea was to promote dialogue between the warring parties in Ukraine by bringing together via Skype representatives of both sides along with outside commentators who could provide an alternative perspective. The 'Tele-bridge' participants included military personnel and civilians in Kiev (including a member of the Right Sector organization), representatives of the rebel Donetsk People's Republic, a journalist from Minsk (Aleksandr Feduta), and from Ottawa, the former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia James Bissett, Halyna Mokrushyna who is a PhD student at the University of Ottawa, and me.

Details of the Tele-bridge can be found on the website of Channel 17 here.[http://17tv.com.ua/] An abridged version containing only those parts in which the Canadian contingent participated is online here. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=13&v=zNsdk2tCLjs] I apologise for at one point continuing talking when the interviewer was trying to let somebody else have a word - the sound link with Kiev was poor, and I couldn't hear what was being said.

During the broadcast, I made the following points:

    Both sides are guilty of breaking the ceasefire mandated by the Minsk agreements. I felt it necessary to make this point because until then much of the programme had consisted of the people in Kiev and Donetsk trading accusations about who was responsible for ceasefire breaches, as if the continued hostilities were entirely each other's fault.
    If the warring parties are really interested in seeing the Minsk agreements work, and therefore in reaching a permanent ceasefire, then they should not respond to breaches of the ceasefire by the other side. I felt a bit uncomfortable saying this. It is very easy to sit in a safe room thousands of kilometres away and to tell people not to respond to provocations. It's much more difficult if you are the one being shelled and shot at. That said, distance has its advantages, one of which is the ability to look at events more dispassionately, and I think that what I said is valid. If - and it is a big if - a genuine ceasefire is a top priority, then military and political commanders have a duty to tell their subordinates not to fire back when fired upon, unless it is absolutely necessary for self-preservation (which as far as I can tell it generally isn't).
    This duty is all the more pressing when the responses have a tendency to kill innocent civilians. I expressed doubt as to whether the artillery fire which is responsible for so many civilian casualties is deliberately targeted at civilians - it is a charge which it is very hard to prove. But civilians have been killed so often that by now it should be clear to all involved that artillery fire in this war is generally extremely inaccurate. In these circumstances, responding to breaches of the ceasefire by firing one's own artillery, and thereby endangering civilians far more than the enemy's army, is often extremely irresponsible.
    On the issue of constitutional reform, the Ukrainian government is abiding by the strict wording of the Minsk II agreement but not with the good will which is required to produce a political settlement of the country's problems. In essence it is adopting a legalistic position which allows it to say that it is fulfilling its obligations while in fact it is undermining the political and moral sense of those obligations. Minsk II mandates Kiev to introduce constitutional amendments to decentralize the country, taking into account the special status of Donbass, and in consultation with the representatives of Donetsk and Lugansk regions. Strictly speaking, according to the exact words of the agreement, this doesn't oblige Kiev to formally give those regions special status in the constitution, nor does it oblige it to negotiate with the leaders of the rebellion (since the agreement doesn't specify who the representatives of Donetsk and Lugansk are). And Kiev hasn't. The amendments passed by the Ukrainian parliament last week merely enact a more general decentralization of power in the country and recognize the law on temporary special status for certain parts of Donetsk and Lugansk provinces. These amendments therefore fulfill Kiev's obligations but only in the most limited sense, while subverting the intent of Minsk II. The result is that the peace process has reached an impasse. I don't see any way out of this, unless there is a change of heart in Kiev and the Ukrainian government begins to approach the issue with a genuine good will to find solutions rather than make the minimum concessions possible.
    This requires the Ukrainian government to speak to the rebel Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics (DPR and LPR). Aleksandr Feduta argued that Ukraine is a unitary state whose constitution gives the President the right to decide who governs the country's regions. Only the president, therefore, can determine who represents the people of Donetsk and Lugansk. The leaders of the DPR and LPR, he said, have no right to claim that they are the legitimate representatives of their regions. Kiev, therefore, should not in his view negotiate with them. In response, I commented that this was unrealistic. What the Ukrainian constitution says, and who does or does not have legitimacy, are not the most important questions. What matters are the facts on the ground, and the facts are that the DPR and LPR exist, and that they have an army some 30-40,000 strong, equipped with tanks, artillery, and much more. This army isn't just going to disappear. If you want peace, you have to talk to the people with the guns, because they are the ones whom you have to persuade to stop fighting. So if Ukraine wants peace, it has to talk to the representatives of the DPR and LPR. Saying this is not an endorsement of the rebellion, it is simply a recognition of reality.

Overall, the impression I got from the Tele-bridge was that the participants were more interested in blaming each other than in finding mutual solutions. Although the broadcast was meant to encourage dialogue, there wasn't a lot of dialogue going on. The representatives of the DPR seemed at least willing to try, those from Kiev less so, particularly the member of Right Sector, who made it clear that his preference was to continue fighting till final victory. Perhaps the most perturbing comments, however, came from the Belorussian journalist Aleksandr Feduta in response to my remark that in order to preserve the ceasefire people on both sides should avoid responding to breaches. Feduta replied:

"In the Second World War Minsk was practically entirely destroyed not only because the Germans were firing on it, but also because it was fired on while being liberated. Nobody knows how to liberate a large town by military means without the civilian population suffering. Therefore I cannot understand or accept the indignation of the inhabitants of Donetsk about the fact that the Armed Forces of Ukraine are shelling Donetsk."

I found this statement rather chilling, and can only hope that Feduta's opinions are not widely held. The Tele-bridge was a start at encouraging some sort of dialogue in Ukraine, but there is still a long way to go.

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 #29
Washington Post
July 21, 2015
Kerry's next challenge
The secretary of state must take on the war party on Ukraine.
By Katrina vanden Heuvel  
Editor and publisher of The Nation magazine

The nuclear agreement with Iran provides ample proof of Secretary of State John F. Kerry's remarkable commitment and skill in waging diplomacy. In an era when the Pentagon dominates our foreign policy and military options are too often trotted out as first responses, he has resuscitated the United States' power to lead, pressure and negotiate, a capacity too often denigrated as "soft power."

No good deed goes unpunished. His reward for this is not only a pitched battle at home with hawks in both parties intent on torpedoing the Iran deal, but also what will be an even fiercer struggle with higher stakes: fending off those intent on escalating a face-off with Russia over Ukraine into a new Cold War. Once more, Kerry must preserve our real security interests from those recklessly brandishing America's military prowess.

The voices calling for a new Cold War - or worse - with Russia are growing louder. "If you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential threat to the United States, I'd have to point to Russia," said Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., at Senate hearings on his nomination to be the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Dunford listed Russia as "the greatest threat" to U.S. national security, which will surely startle those old enough to remember 9/11. Even as the United States announced that it was considering training Ukraine's regular forces, Dunford recommended shipping U.S. weapons to the Kiev regime, another step toward a proxy war with Russia that President Obama has thus far resisted.

Dunford was serving up red meat to what might best be termed the war party, a claque with adherents in Congress, the administration and the military, led by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and NATO Supreme Allied Commander Philip Breedlove. The war party has conjured up a Russian threat to Europe and pushed the president into ever more belligerent postures toward Moscow, with NATO launching military exercises and stationing, for the first time, tanks, troops and ordnance on Russia's western border.

Dunford deemed as "reasonable" the arming of Ukrainian forces - now notoriously revealed to include neo-Nazi "irregulars." But this would, as James Carden writes , virtually ensure an escalating conflagration, increase civilian casualties, upend the Minsk accords and quite likely provoke further Russian operations in the eastern part of the country.

Although focused on the Iranian negotiations, Kerry has tried sporadically to bring some light to all of this heat. State Department spokesman Mark Toner, responding to the Dunford testimony, told reporters: "Certainly we have disagreements with Russia...but we don't view it as an existential threat."

An ongoing Ukrainian civil conflict is rapidly being transformed into a NATO-Russia proxy war. Diplomatic exchange is supplanted by weapons deployment and military maneuvers. Cooperative relationships - from trade to arms control - are being dismantled. And the clamor for greater involvement drowns out any sensible assessment of our interests, the nature of the conflict within Ukraine and the reality of the increasingly authoritarian Kiev regime. The war party appears intent on turning all of Europe, up to the Russian border, into a U.S./NATO sphere of influence. The broader goal, trumpeted by some, is regime change in Russia itself.

That is folly. Russia may be an authoritarian state, but it does have nuclear weapons and a deep national pride. We have every reason, as Stephen F. Cohen has argued, to seek a new detente with Russia. Cohen is a founding board member of the American Committee for East-West Accord, whose members also include former senator Bill Bradley and Jack Matlock, former ambassador to the Soviet Union under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. The committee believes that U.S. interests are best served by integrating Russia into a peaceful Europe, not re-creating separate and hostile camps. The United States should want to ease tensions, continue to reduce nuclear arsenals and cooperate internationally. It should want to provide space for reformers, not reinforce the hard-liners inside the Kremlin. As the Iran deal, as well as the effort to rid Syria's Bashar al-Assad of chemical weapons, reveal, real U.S. national security interests - from nuclear proliferation and international terrorism to the Middle East and Afghanistan - are best served with a partner, not an adversary in Moscow.

Kerry is an old Washington hand. He knows how threats are inflated and military measures can escalate. He experienced personally the folly of misbegotten war. When the seven foreign ministers who negotiated the Iran deal met for the last time, each spoke briefly about the moment. Speaking last, Kerry recalled going off to Vietnam as a young naval officer. He returned committed, he said choking up, to using diplomacy to avoid the horrors of war.

Now he must act to counter the war party inside the administration and Congress and revive diplomacy to forestall an escalating conflict with Russia. That means implementing the Minsk accords that have been undermined on all sides. It means creating a process that can lead to an agreement about Ukraine , guaranteeing its independence territorially, politically and militarily, and providing real home rule for regions historically aligned with Russia or with the West. None of that is possible without recognizing that Russia has legitimate concerns about its neighbor, just as the United States has about Mexico. None of that is possible without a diplomatic offensive that is powerful enough to counter the currents now feeding the conflict.

Although the war party continues to howl at the moon, Kerry has forged an agreement that will keep Iran from developing the bomb for a decade or more. Now, even as he defends that agreement, he must wage diplomacy in an area where the stakes are even bigger.

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 #30
Sputnik
July 21, 2015
Ukraine Officials Claim Right Sector's Aid Needed to Resolve Conflict

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - On Sunday, Poroshenko stated that all illegal armed formations must be eliminated following a July 11 shootout between police officers and Right Sector militants that left three people dead and 13 injured.

"It seems to me that Petro Poroshenko tries to restore an order in Ukraine. I wish him good luck with that, it will not be an easy task. I talked to the Ukrainian officials in the European parliament and they clearly stated that they need Right Sector as a support for the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Eastern Ukraine, so they don't want to fight Right Sector in Zakarpattia," Korwin-Mikke said in an interview.

The Right Sector militant group played a major role in violent clashes with police that led to the February 2014 coup in Ukraine.

Since April 2014, the Ukrainian government has been fighting independence supporters in the country's southeastern regions. The United Nations estimates that more than 6,500 people have died in the clashes.

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 #31
Sputnik
July 21, 2015
Maidan Revolution in Ukraine Not Over Yet - Right Sector Leader

The future of the Ukrainian revolution will be discussed during a popular meeting which will be held by the Right Sector on Tuesday in Kiev, Dmitry Yarosh, leader of the movement, announced. He also said the Ukrainian government is incapable of carrying out real reforms.

A popular meeting which will be held in Kiev by the Ukrainian nationalist Right Sector movement on Tuesday should bring Ukrainians the prospect of further changes in their country, Dmitry Yarosh, leader of the organization, said.

Earlier, the Right Sector announced it would organize a meeting at Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in central Kiev on July 21.

"For us, the truth is that the maidan revolution has not yet ended. The recent events in Mukachevo revealed unfinished revolution processes," Yarosh stated on the official Facebook page of the Right Sector. "We're holding the popular meeting to give people an idea on the current state of revolution in the country. It is about the rule of the people as well as legitimization of volunteer activities, support for the volunteer movement, and reforms."

"The old team which is now in power is incapable of carrying out social reforms. I'm saying about the president as well as the government and parliament," he added.

On July 11, Right Sector members exchanged fire with local police. The incident left four people killed and 14 injured, including law enforcement officers. The attackers ran away and hid in the mountains.

Right Sector supporters staged numerous protests across Ukraine, including Kiev, over the Mukachevo shootout. Activists are demanding the resignation of country's Interior Minister Arsen Avakov and commanding police officers in the Zakarpattia Region.

Four people with Right Sector insignia have been arrested in the Mukachevo shootout case.

The Right Sector was formed as a coalition of nationalist and neo-Nazi organizations at the end of 2013. The organization has played a major role in violent clashes with police, and played a key role in escalating last year's violence in Kiev which culminated in the February 2014 coup.

In November 2014, Russia's Supreme Court blacklisted Right Sector as an extremist organization and banned its activity in Russia. Earlier, Russia launched a criminal case against Yarosh for public incitement of terrorism.

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 #32
Moscow Times
July 21, 2015
Ukraine Should Beware the Azov Extremists
By Josh Cohen
Josh Cohen is a former USAID project officer involved in managing economic reform projects in the former Soviet Union. He is a business development professional and also contributes to a number of foreign policy-focused media outlets.

Although Ukraine's revolution was overwhelmingly driven by liberal Ukrainians seeking to join Europe, the Maidan movement has included some troubling elements: a small but vocal collection of extreme Ukrainian nationalists. The United States has largely overlooked this to date - but that recently changed.

The U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed an amendment to the U.S. military budget prohibiting training and support for the extremist paramilitary Azov battalion. Congressman John Conyers did not mince words, stating, "I am grateful that the House of Representatives unanimously passed my amendments last night to ensure that our military does not train members of the repulsive neo-Nazi Azov Battalion."

Many Ukrainians cried foul at the House's action. The Azov issued a statement expressing "outrage" at the decision, while Anton Gerashchenko, an aide to Ukraine's Minister of the Interior Arsen Avakov, helpfully suggested that U.S. intelligence might want to look into Conyers' associations.

But Ukrainians should not be surprised at Congress' action. The Azov is the military wing of the Social-National Assembly of Ukraine (SNA), a party founded by avowed white supremacist Andriy Biletsky. Biletsky's views are troubling to say the least.

In a 2010 article, Biletsky himself outlined his beliefs, writing that "From the mass of individuals must arise the Nation; and from weak modern man, Superman. ... The historic mission of our Nation in this watershed century is to lead the White Races of the world in the final crusade for their survival: a crusade against Semite-led subhumanity."

The Azov's logo is an inverted Wolfsangel, which was a widely used symbol in Nazi Germany, and many members of its members appear in photographs with the Nazi swastika in the background while giving the Hitler salute.

You would imagine the post-Maidan government would disavow such a group - but you would be wrong. As if to rebuke Conyers, politician and businessman Arsen Avakov and Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Oleksandr Turchinov just awarded soldiers of the Azov medals in a 30-minute ceremony in the city of Mariupol.

Indeed, the Azov enjoys the enthusiastic sponsorship of Avakov himself, and he aggressively defended the Azov recently, describing the Wolfsangel as "part of the city emblem in many European cities," stating "anyone who's going to tell me that these guys preach Nazi views, wear the swastika and so on, are bare-faced liars and fools."

Avakov is not the only one to downplay the revolution's extremist elements. In their zeal to resist the Russian-sponsored war on Ukraine, even many Euromaidan activists overlook or play down nationalist elements within the Maidan movement. As Volodymyr Ischenko, deputy director of the Center for Social and Labor Research in Kiev noted in the Guardian newspaper, "what is striking is that far-right and neo-Nazi views and connections do not seem to be problematic for either Ukrainian officials or mainstream opinion."

The reaction to Western criticism of Ukraine's new law criminalizing criticism of two World War II-era nationalist organizations - the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) - which collaborated with the Nazis is a case in point. While the OUN-UPA fought both the Soviets and the Germans, they favored an ethnically homogenous greater Ukraine, and were involved in the Holocaust and the ethnic cleansing of Poles in western Ukraine. Unfortunately, despite overwhelming evidence documented by numerous historians regarding the OUN-UPA's involvement in pogroms and mass ethnic violence, many Ukrainians simply label this "Kremlin propaganda" on the assumption that if Moscow asserts something the opposite must be true.

To be clear, none of this justifies Russia's undermining of Ukraine's sovereignty. Whatever Ukraine's shortcomings, they are minor compared to the increasingly authoritarian regime in Moscow.

Moreover, the Russian-sponsored separatists are not exactly boy scouts either, and in many ways they are far worse. As the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group notes, many ties exist between the separatists and Russian fascist or neo-Nazi parties such as the Russian National Unity Party and Alexander Dugin's Eurasian Youth Union. There are also a large number of members of these parties among those fighting with the separatists.

Ukrainians, however, should resist the temptation to counter legitimate Western concerns with the "whataboutism" argument that Russia is worse. Unlike Kiev, Moscow has shown no desire to join Western institutions such as NATO and the European Union, and consequently Ukraine should not use Russia as its standard. The stubborn prevalence of extremist ideology and politicians within post-Maidan Ukraine is very real, and it is high time Maidan supporters of all stripes stop ignoring or downplaying this reality instead of decisively breaking away.

For the first time since Ukraine's independence a consensus to join the West exists. As the House just made clear though, extremists cannot be part of the equation.

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 #33
www.opendemocracy.net
July 20, 2015
Mukacheve puts Ukraine to the test
After a deadly fight between a volunteer battalion and local police over smuggling in the country's western borderlands, Ukraine finds itself at another critical juncture.
By Valery Kalnysh
Valery Kalnysh is deputy editor of Ukraine's Radio Vesti.

Last week's shoot-out in the sleepy Transcarpathian town of Mukacheve in western Ukraine has had a serious impact on the country's politics. In just one week, both the governor of Transcarpathia and top officials in the local security ministries have lost their jobs. Talk of a Third Maidan-even of a coup-has returned. With several Rada deputies organising an investigative commission into the events at Mukacheve, both the law enforcement agencies and parliamentarians are now investigating what took place. In the past three days, Ukraine's security services have searched 40 homes in the west of the country.

While Russian media has spoken of a 'second front' opening up in the conflict, Ukraine was discovering-to its shock-the scale of smuggling on its western border.

The first shot

Though the facts of this case are still being established, it seems that on 11 July, roughly 10 armed men from Right Sector, a prominent volunteer battalion, arrived at the Antares sports complex in Mukacheve to meet Mykhailo Lanyo, an MP from the Will of the People parliamentary group, and the owner of the sports complex. Viktor Baloga, another local MP, former political heavyweight and alleged funder of the local Right Sector group, was also supposedly present as a mediator (a fact Baloga has since denied).

As representatives of Right Sector and Lanyo spoke, a man, unconnected with either Right Sector or Lanyo (who is, allegedly, a local organised crime boss), was shot dead, and the Right Sector unit found itself in a stand-off with local police, who blocked off nearby roads suspiciously quickly.

Anton Gerashchenko (People's Front), a member of the temporary investigative commission and adviser to the Interior Ministry, wrote that 'according to Lanyo, the meeting with Roman Stoiko [Right Sector] lasted for 10 minutes before the fatal shot was heard. At the meeting with Stoiko, which was Lanyo's first, they had started to discuss the treatment of injured Right Sector fighters in Mukacheve's sanatoria, and the country's political situation in general. After the shot was fired, his [Lanyo's] assistant entered and said that one of the sports complex's clients had been shot in the head. In the presence of Lanyo, Stoiko received information from his team that a man in the sports complex had provoked one of the Right Sector fighters.'

Following this incident, the Right Sector group decided to exit the complex in their armoured jeeps. Despite attempts by the local police chief to calm the situation, Right Sector fought their way out of the town, taking refuge in the surrounding hills. Shortly afterwards, two Right Sector fighters handed themselves over to the authorities.

Right Sector's initial version of events put a fairly clear spin on what happened: 'Hundreds of bandits, belonging to the rapist Regionnaire [Party of Regions] drug dealer Mikhailo Lanyo, who had gone crazy with impunity, tried to annihalate Right Sector fighters in the Transcarpathian town of Mukacheve.

'Bandits wearing police uniforms also played an active role in this operation, their wages paid by the odious godfather to the chief enemy of all Ukrainians: [pro-Russian oligarch] Viktor Medvedchuk. After the fierce battle, two Right Sector fighters are dead, and four - wounded (two of them seriously). Having collected the dead and the wounded, the unit broke out of the bandits' encirclement and headed into the hills.'

At the time of writing, Ukrainian law enforcement agencies are still searching for the four missing Right Sector fighters. Sources in both Right Sector and the Interior Ministry have stated that the fighters are heading for the Slovakian border in the hope of crossing it. Though what really happened at Mukacheve is yet to be established,

Public officials, private interests

Several days after the firefight in Mukacheve, Petro Poroshenko appointed a new head of the Transcarpathian regional administration: Vasily Gubal was replaced by Gennady Moskal, former governor of Luhansk-a region dealing with its own problems of smuggling during wartime.

'I have had to take urgent measures to put out the fire in Transcarpathia,' said the president. 'I have been forced to take Gennady Gennadievich Moskal, one of the best regional administrators, and send him to Transcarpathia.'

This appointment initially appears strange. Are the situations in Luhansk and Transcarpathia comparable?

After all, Transcarpathia is not only far from the fighting, but borders four EU member states: Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. What has made events in Transcarpathia that much more terrifying? Has peace suddenly been announced in eastern Ukraine?

Unfortunately not. The east, of course, remains in open conflict, and the reason behind Moskal's appointment lies not in Transcarpathia, but the politicians who live there.

'Moskal has two principal enemies: Viktor Baloga and his family,' a people's deputy from Poroshenko Bloc tells me. 'With his two brothers Ivan and Pavel, they're all people's deputies now after being elected in local majoritarian constituencies. They have a cousin in parliament, Vasily Petyovka, who was also elected in Transcarpathia.'

Moskal, it should be said, is also no stranger to the region. Born in the neighbouring Chernivtsi, Moskal was head of the local Interior Ministry branch in 1997-1997, and later found himself in charge of the regional administration in 2001-2002. Indeed, Moskal and Baloga have a history: this is not the first time Moskal has replaced Baloga as governor.

Moskal has been a consistent critic of Baloga, particularly during the latter's reign as head of Viktor Yushchenko's Presidential Administration. 'People complain to me that Baloga and his relatives have occupied the territory and are now, in effect, ruling Transcarpathia,' said Moskal in 2008 during an attempt to unseat Baloga. 'They've already started calling themselves the Family. That is, the Family has made a decision, the Family has appointed that man, don't touch that business: the Family has decided that it belongs to them and so on. People ask me, where are we living, Ukraine or Sicily?'

Moskal is yet to say anything regarding the Baloga clan, though they have already made an advance statement: 'Everyone, including me, expects the new head of the regional administration to wage a real war against organised crime and smuggling. We need to clear out the local police, put people in prison. The former governor did not have the authority to take such measures. Only people sitting in Kiev can do this. Not the people who silently consent to smuggling, but those who receive real money from it. From every pack of cigarettes, from every illegal migrant trying to get into the European Union, the trail leads directly to the capital.'

The issue here, of course, is that Viktor Baloga is suspected of controlling the region's smuggling schemes, which run into the heart of the EU.

Border troubles

It is impossible to estimate the true scale of smuggling operations in Transcarpathia, which is home to some of Ukraine's most important smuggling routes. Impossible, at least, for those not engaged in it.

Everything is trafficked through Transcarpathia into the EU: amber, drugs, illegal migrants, tobacco.

As Konstantin Likarchuk, deputy head of the State Fiscal Service and the official in charge of customs issues, admits: 'Everything goes over the western border. No single item dominates. The heads of the Hungarian and Slovakian customs offices are shocked by what's going on with smuggling in Transcarpathia - we used to have a lot of collective projects. They're even going to make an appeal to Brussels on this issue.'

Indeed, before security was increased on the other side of Ukraine's western borders, contraband goods could enter the country almost officially - via hidden compartments or by paying off border guards and customs officials.

At the same time, an alternative means of delivering goods has also developed: tunnels, the entrances to which are often hidden under small shacks or storage sites. In 2012, Slovakian border guards found one tunnel 700m in length: there was even a small railway inside. Slovak Finance Minister Peter Kazimir suggested that, with this kind of tunnel, the amount of excise tax evasion could reach up to 50m euros annually.

Another means of trafficking goods (frequently illegal cigarettes)-inside tree trunks-is particularly popular. A hole is carved inside the tree and cigarette packets, wrapped in polythene, are placed inside.

The profit to be made on cigarettes is sizeable. In Ukraine, the base price of a packet of cigarettes is $1 (65p), whereas in Europe, cigarettes cost no less than €3 (£2). A 20-tonne truck can take 11m cigarettes, or 550,000 packets, over the border. The profit from one such trip could reach £1.2m.

A very patriotic coup

Indeed, it was control over illegal trafficking of cigarettes, rather than political demands or a desire for justice and order, which led to the firefight in Mukacheve.

At least, that's the theory of Mustafa Nayem, deputy head of Poroshenko Bloc in the Verkhovna Rada, and a popular journalist, who arrived in Mukacheve hours after the tragedy. Nayem spent several days there, trying to establish just what had happened.

'The main item of illegal export is cigarettes,' writes Nayem on his Facebook page. 'People take the cheapest to Germany and Italy. The profits are astounding. One truckload of cigarettes leaving Ukraine for Italy brings in €470,000, after the necessary bribes at all the borders. Three to five 10-tonne trucks cross the border in one week alone.'

'Local people tell me that the cigarette market is being re-divided. Some people are involved in organising, others get a cut for protection, and a third group guarantee the protection. The armed showdown happened because one party didn't want to pay their whack. Several representatives of Right Sector received up to four dollars per crate. At one point, one of the smugglers said that they "had an arrangement in Kiev".'

Gennady Moskal confirms Right Sector's involvement in smuggling schemes: 'I don't care who it is, Right Sector or Left Sector. As the president said yesterday, the pseudo-patriotic slogans they use to cover their criminal activities are merely for show, to be used as extenuating circumstances. Wrapping yourself in the Ukrainian flag while moving against your fellow citizens or law enforcement agencies, with a gun in your hands - that is no extenuating circumstance. I want to ask the military commissar why, when the mobilisation plan is only at 28%, these guys aren't fighting in the ATO [Anti-terrorist operation]?'

Naturally, Right Sector categorically denies any economic or criminal underpinning to their actions. They admit they have broken firearms laws, but cite the conflict in Ukraine's east and the lack of real results in fighting smuggling as justification. But the volunter battalions cannot boast of any achievements in this area either.

Once the embodiment of Maidan's final, crucial days, Right Sector are now losing popularity. The group cannot organise itself. Dmitro Yarosh, leader of Right Sector and the party of the same name, is concentrating on the fighting in eastern Ukraine. Yarosh is rarely seen in the Verkhovna Rada, and is not involved in legislative work despite being a member of parliament.

The lack of a clear chain-of-command has resulted in the appearance of militarised units who call themselves Right Sector, though they may have no relationship to the group. In the southern industrial region of Zaporizhya, for instance, three organisations simultaneously presented themselves as regional representatives of Right Sector.

The ideology and behaviour of Right Sector are radical. They are, it seems, the only political force which is ready to enter into direct armed conflict with President Poroshenko.

Cast your mind back to August 2014 when, after the police conducted searches of Right Sector activists, Dmitro Yarosh made serious threats: 'If our demands [personnel changes in the Interior Ministry] are not fulfilled in 48 hours, we will be forced to remove all of our units from the frontline, declare a general mobilisation of reserve battalions and march on Kiev to carry out "speedy reforms" in the Interior Ministry.' In those days, threats remained just that-threats. Nevertheless, Poroshenko continues to declare that he and the state are not in conflict with Right Sector.

There are grounds to believe that Right Sector will now come out with similar demands, and, perhaps, move from words to action. An urgent congress of Right Sector (and a people's rally on Independence Square) is planned for 21 July, during which, according to one of the group's leaders, 'we will make revolutionary decisions'.

Announcing the congress on 21 July, Yarosh made a highly unambiguous statement, calling on all of Ukraine's military services and voluntary battalions 'not to carry out the criminal orders of the speculators in power. While we spill our own blood defending the homeland, they make millions for themselves and do everything to make this war last as long as possible.

'Together, we will stop the office-bound traitors on Bankova Street [location of the Presidential Administration], who wish to destabilise the situation in the rear, surrender our territories to the enemy, and destroy the volunteer movements. Down with the traitors!'

If acted upon, these calls for rebellion could lead to disaster, with a government elected by the people being replaced by a government elected by force. There is some room for manoeuvre, though: according to surveys, only 3% of Ukrainian citizens share the radical views of Right Sector. Unfortunately, firearms can quickly compensate for a lack of popular support.

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 #34
Ukrainians Reject Federalization of Their Country by More than Two to One, Poll Shows
Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 21 - Even if such steps would bring peace, Ukrainians oppose giving special status to the Russian-controlled Donbas 56.1 percent to 26.4 percent and transforming their country into a federal state as a whole 59.1 percent to 21 percent, according to a new poll conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology.

            The agency surveyed 2044 people in 110 population points throughout Ukraine except in Russian-occupied Crimea and the Donbas. The margin of error, the sociologists said, does not exceed 3.3 percent (nr2.ru/News/Kiev_and_regions/Opros-Ukraincy-ne-gotovy-otdavat-Donbass-i-Krym-radi-mira-101844.html).

            In this way, Ukrainians have rejected the steps Moscow has pushed for, the West has promoted, and their president Petro Poroshenko has been pushing through as amendments to the Ukrainian Constitution. Their opinion should be determinative except for those who believe that decisions about Ukraine should be taken without reference to Ukraine.

          Ukrainians were also asked what other steps they might agree to in exchange for peace with Russia:

·         Exchanging Crimea for peace: 33.3 percent agree; 50.6 percent do not.

·         Handing over the Donbas to Russia for peace: 15.3 percent agree; 72.1 percent do not.

·         Recognizing "the People's Republics" for peace: 18.7 percent agree; 63.7 percent do not.

·         Giving Russia all the eastern and southern parts of Ukraine along the Dniepr for peace: 5.8 percent agree; 83.7 percent do not.

·         End the pursuit of European integration for the sake of peace: 33.9 percent agree; 48.8 percent do not.

·         Enter the Russian-dominated Customs Union to end the war: 28 percent agree; 50.6 percent do not.

·         End the pursuit of NATO membership for peace: 40.7 percent agree; 41 percent do not.

·         Offer the Russian language the status of a second state language: 47.7 percent agree; 38 percent do not.

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 #35
Sputnik
July 21, 2015
Relations Between Obama, Putin Show Clear Signs of Relaxation

The nuclear deal with Iran and the withdrawal of heavy weapons by militias in Eastern Ukraine are clear signs of a thaw in Russia-US relations. The EU has to develop its own strategy as soon as possible. Otherwise, European taxpayers will have to pay a heavy price for the chaos in Ukraine, DWN wrote.
Relations between the US and Russia show clear signs of relaxation, as the interview of President Barack Obama with Thomas Friedman of the New York Times demonstrated.

Only a few weeks ago US politicians labelled Russia as one of the most dangerous security challenges alongside with the Islamic State. Now Obama stated that the deal on Iran's nuclear program would be impossible without Russia's participation.

Obama praised the constructive role that Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian negotiating team had played in the talks with Iran almost in friendly words.

In contrast to his earlier statements, in which he constantly mentioned Russian "aggression" in Ukraine, he now spoke of "differences" in the assessment of the Ukrainian situation.

According to DWN, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and US Secretary of State John Kerry are trying to stabilize the situation in Ukraine. A visit by John Kerry to Moscow a few months ago signified the start of joint cooperative efforts in this direction, the newspaper wrote.

Donbass militias started withdrawal of heavy weapons from the front line on Saturday, a sign that the situation in Ukraine may finally deescalate.

However, improving relations between Moscow and Washington are alarming for EU countries. After months of confrontation with Putin, European leaders who blindly followed US instructions have now found themselves offside, DWN wrote.

First of all, EU countries have had to pay an enormous price for anti-Russian sanctions which have had a devastating impact on their economies.
Second, their hope to do business with Iran after the nuclear deal was reached could prove to be an illusion. Unlike Russia, the EU did not entertain any contacts with Iran during the sanctions.

And finally, the major problem for the EU is the situation in Ukraine. According to the newspaper, the "reckless" Association Agreement between the EU and Ukraine will be a burden to European taxpayers as the cost of the Ukrainian "rescue" will exceed those for Greece by many times.

To at least partially avoid the financial damage, the EU should lift anti-Russian sanctions as soon as possible. According to DWN, EU should take its own stance in international politics and act independently in light of the thaw in US-Russia relations. Otherwise, EU countries may pay a heavy price for their blind obedience to the US policy.

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 #36
Bloomberg
July 20, 2015
Ukrainians Suspect Obama-Putin Cooperation
By Leonid Bershidsky

It's rare that official representatives of the U.S. visit foreign parliaments to persuade lawmakers to vote a certain way on some piece of legislation. Yet last week, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland traveled to Kiev and did just that, as the Ukrainian parliament prepared to vote on amendments to the country's constitution.

Nuland was interested in just one line of the bill that President Petro Poroshenko submitted to the parliament, on page 7:

18. The particulars of local government in certain districts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions are determined by a special law.

It may sound like a bland provision, but it was worth Nuland's airfare, because the line was actually very controversial. Many legislators refused to vote for it. Mustafa Nayyem, a member of Poroshenko's parliamentary faction, explained that the "special law" might enable a future legislature to grant the rebellious, pro-Russian regions in eastern Ukraine powers amounting to legal secession. "I am convinced such a norm doesn't reflect the will of the Ukrainian people, which has already lost thousands of soldiers and continues to fight a bloody war to bring those regions back under Ukrainian jurisdiction," Nayyem wrote.

Nuland's job was to persuade Nayyem and like-minded legislators to change their minds. Before the vote, she invited the most recalcitrant of them for a meeting at the U.S. Embassy. One of the invitees, Leonid Yemets, said afterward that the American diplomat "insisted that this had to be a demonstration of Ukraine's compliance with the Minsk agreement," a cease-fire deal reached last February, which did indeed call for a special status for the rebel-held eastern areas, including the right to form their own militias. "It followed from her words that here we'd make a sacrifice and then we'd fight corruption in the rest of the country," another attendee of the meeting told Theinsider.ua.

But some of those who took part in the long conversation came away questioning Nuland's motives. "Why does the world want to impose on us a 'special status' for the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics?" Deputy Speaker Oksana Syroyid wrote on Facebook. "The world just wants this to become an 'internal conflict' because it's tired and it wants to get rid of this extremely uncomfortable topic."

It's true that Ukraine is off the front pages of global news media, and that's not good for a country that's dependent on Western aid and sympathy and, at the same time, coveted by Russian President Vladimir Putin as a satellite state or at least a buffer against further expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Some Ukrainian and anti-Putin Russian commentators saw Nuland's Kiev visit and her attempt to persuade the legislators as a sign that the U.S. is selling out Ukraine to Putin in exchange for his support for last week's nuclear deal with Iran.

"What exactly has Russia bought with its signature under the deal to close down Iran's nuclear program?" said former Ukrainian legislator Taras Stetskiv. "At least a special status for the Donbass in the constitution, and that's why Nuland came to control the vote." Andrei Illarionov, Putin's former advisor turned political foe, suggested that further Russian support on Syria and Iran was part of the deal "made without Ukraine's participation at Ukraine's expense."

Despite these warnings, last Thursday, the Ukrainian parliament voted to send the amendments as proposed by Poroshenko to the Constitutional Court for its anticipated approval. Poroshenko reacted angrily to his opponents' rhetoric. "I know a lot of patriotic poems and songs," the president said at one point, "and my wife says I'm a good singer." Then he launched into the national anthem. Nuland was there, as was U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, and she applauded when the vote went her way.

The Kremlin, for its part, has disparaged Poroshenko's constitutional proposals. Moscow and its proxies in eastern Ukraine wanted Ukraine's basic law to directly spell out a broad autonomy for the rebel-held regions. But that isn't evidence enough to quell the conspiracy theories. After all, the Ukrainian parliament would never vote for anything that Putin and his people support, so disapproving noises from Moscow only helped the legislation's passage.

Most likely, there was no such blatant deal. Yet it's not hard to believe that the U.S. and Russia might have the beginnings of a tacit understanding on Ukraine. Obama last week praised Putin for "compartmentalizing" helpfully on Iran. Putin, however, never gives anything away for free.

At the same time, Ukraine has overplayed its hand in demanding more international aid and sympathy. Russia's aggression in the east has stalled, yet Ukraine remains unruly, corrupt, economically supine and rife with armed groups. The ultranationalist organization Right Sector, which was active and useful in fending off the pro-Russian rebels, has recently started a mini-war to control cigarette smuggling in western Ukraine, something Poroshenko has struggled to extinguish. No wonder Nuland was dispatched to Kiev to protect the shaky Minsk cease-fire: Washington wants Ukraine to be stable. The Kremlin, for its part, is losing interest in the armed conflict it helped create: It wants to move on from military interference in Ukraine to quieter political destabilization.

When the big players' interests largely coincide, it doesn't take a conspiracy to get them to cooperate.

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 #37
Stratfor.com
July 21, 2015
U.S., Russia: The Case for Bilateral Talks

Phone calls between relatively low-level diplomats are normally not newsworthy. But Monday's conversation between U.S. Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin on the simmering conflict in Ukraine is an exception. The bilateral nature of the conversation and its timing amid mounting claims of cease-fire violations from the Ukrainian government and separatist forces makes it uniquely significant. Moreover, it reaffirms that the evolution of the Ukrainian conflict - whether toward a settlement or toward escalation - will be most strongly shaped not by Kiev but by the actions of and relationship between Moscow and Washington.

Since the Ukrainian crisis started nearly 18 months ago, two negotiation formats in particular stand out among numerous talks and meetings. The first is the Minsk talks between representatives from the Ukrainian government, the pro-Russia separatists and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which address the conflict on a tactical level. The other is the Normandy talks between representatives from Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France, which consider the conflict on a broader, political level. Notably absent from both talks, despite being a major political, economic and security player in Ukraine and the broader standoff between Russia and the West, is the United States. Washington has been diplomatically active in the conflict, but U.S. and Russian officials have met at various times only on an ad hoc basis.

However, this practice may have changed over the weekend, when Russian Presidential Chief of Staff Sergei Ivanov said in an interview that Russia and the United States had come to an agreement to set up a "special bilateral format" of talks between the two countries - talks that would involve Nuland and Karasin. In explaining the formal announcement, Ivanov said that expanding the Normandy format to include the United States would simply be too "risky," adding that the two countries would coordinate talks on Ukraine bilaterally "for the time being." Thus the phone call between Nuland and Karasin took place to discuss the implementation of the Minsk agreement and the constitutional reform process in Ukraine, with further discussions likely to follow.

The Ukraine conflict is at its core a conflict between two geopolitical imperatives. Russia wants to protect its interior by using its surrounding territories to establish a buffer. The United States wants to prevent the rise of regional powers that could potentially challenge U.S. hegemony. These imperatives collided in Ukraine, which of all the countries in the former Soviet periphery has the most strategic importance for modern Russia. If Ukraine supports Moscow, Russia becomes a regional power on the rise. If Ukraine supports the West, Russia becomes vulnerable from without and within. The Euromaidan movement of February 2014 reversed Russia's position from the former to the latter. Moscow responded by annexing Crimea and supporting the separatist insurgency in eastern Ukraine in a bid to undermine or neutralize Kiev's pro-Western government.

So far Russia's plan has been unsuccessful. Ukraine aligned itself even more closely with the West by pursuing greater economic and political integration with the European Union and greater security and military cooperation with NATO. Ukraine's close relationship with NATO is particularly worrisome for Russia, which has long feared the military alliance pushing up against its borders. Moscow has made multiple efforts to keep NATO's influence at bay, putting diplomatic pressure on Georgia in 2008 when Georgia declared its alliance with NATO, for example. It showed its concern about NATO even more dramatically in the conflict in eastern Ukraine. And of all the NATO countries, the United States has the strongest military and the most assertive policies challenging Russia throughout the former Soviet periphery.

Russia's long-held suspicion of U.S. influence in its periphery makes the decision to start regular bilateral talks a significant step. In some ways, these two countries wield more power to shape the political and military outcome in Ukraine than the Ukrainians and separatists themselves. But holding such talks does not necessarily indicate that a resolution or even a de-escalation of the conflict is imminent. Issues still divide the two sides, particularly what kind of autonomy Ukraine's central government should give the rebel regions.

All the major parties in the Ukrainian conflict support some level of decentralization, or the granting of greater powers to regional governments. The disagreement is over the timing and extent of the process. Russia sees decentralization as a way to maintain a buffer zone in the east outside of Ukraine's direct control, while Ukraine sees it as a way to compromise but still effectively retain control over the entire country. Ukraine wants to see separatists implement the Minsk agreement and lay down their arms before officials amend the national constitution to grant the eastern territories more regional autonomy. But separatists want the constitutional changes first, and they want a role in determining those changes. Only then, they say, can they fully implement the cease-fire.

Broadly speaking, the United States supports the Ukrainian position; Russia supports the separatists. However, during a recent visit to Ukraine and preceding her phone conversation with Karasin, Nuland weighed in on the Ukrainian legislature's debate over the constitutional amendment. Nuland urged Ukraine to give the country's eastern regions a controversial and highly debated "special status" under the law. Officials had not included the term in the constitutional amendment draft, but U.S. pressure to deliver more on the sensitive issue could be seen as a nod to Russia.

But Nuland's actions could also be a more nuanced effort to help Ukraine: The more substantial and unimpeachable Ukraine's constitutional reforms, the less room Moscow and the separatists have to criticize the changes and justify their own cease-fire violations. Washington has echoed Kiev in demanding that the separatists abide by the cease-fire, threatening Russia with more sanctions and - according to some leaked reports - restrictions on Moscow's access to credit, if separatists continue to violate the Minsk agreement.

Russia's reactions have also been mixed. The Kremlin has spoken somewhat positively of the reform process, but Russia is still influencing the Ukrainian battlefield while demanding more political concessions for the separatist territories. Russia is also seeking U.S. concessions on Ukraine for its help in facilitating the Iran nuclear agreement. Moscow and Washington are trying to reach an accommodation while keeping their threat options open as well. With more talks between Nuland and Karasin set to take place, the evolution of Ukraine's conflict and the political reform process will be the true test of the effectiveness of this new bilateral dialogue between the United States and Russia.

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 #38
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
July 20, 2015
Press Digest: Negotiating parties return to table for further Ukraine talks
RBTH presents a selection of views from leading Russian media on international events, featuring reports on the latest round of talks between negotiators on resolving the conflict in eastern Ukraine, amendments to the law that will bring new benefits for social NGOs, and the problems facing Ukrainian citizens in Russia who have fled the war in the Donbass.
Maria Karnaukhova, special to RBTH

Signs of progress as German and French leaders return to Ukraine peace talks

The Kommersant business daily reports that international mediators have made new efforts to resolve the conflict in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine within the terms of the agreement reached in Minsk in February. In their first telephone conversation since late April, the leaders of the four negotiating parties (Russia, France, Germany and Ukraine) urged the sides to the conflict to implement the agreed peace plan by the end of the year.

The surge in diplomatic activity over Ukraine comes against the backdrop of the historic nuclear deal reached on Iran, which has become a rare example of constructive cooperation between Russia and the West, writes the paper.

In addition, ahead of the talks, Ukraine's parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, approved draft constitutional amendments on decentralization of power proposed by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and lobbied by the West and submitted them to the country's Constitutional Court for assessment. This time, Moscow did not meet Kiev's new initiative with fierce criticism, though it condemned "what amounts to a blockade" of the parts of Donbass controlled by the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk "people's republics" (DNR and LNR).

During the talks, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande welcomed the fact that the Ukrainian parliament had adopted the constitutional amendments, describing it as a new phase in implementing the political part of the Minsk accords.

Alexander Gushchin, assistant professor with the Russian State Humanitarian University in Moscow, told Kommersant that the resumption of talks was "an attempt by Western partners to put the ball in Moscow's court, prompting Russia to achieve, on terms acceptable to all, more pliability from the leadership of the DNR and LNR."

"Having put pressure on Kiev, the West expects similar actions from Moscow in relation to the DNR and LNR. In this situation, Russia can, if not win in this game, then at least bring it to a draw, leaving Crimea out of the equation," said Gushchin.
 
Social NGOs to enjoy benefits offered to small businesses

The Vedomosti business daily reports that this week the Russian Public Chamber will be discussing amendments to the law on non-commercial organizations in order to clarify state support for socially-oriented NGOs.

The amendments will make it possible to equate socially-oriented NGOs with small and medium-sized businesses in terms of the state support opportunities open to them, in particular guarantees for attracting loans and interest-rate subsidy options, the head of the Russian Economic Development Ministry's department of social development and innovations, Artyom Shadrin, told Vedomosti. Specialized funds that provide support to small businesses, having received additional assistance from the budget, will be able to help NGOs too.  

The law is expected to come into force in 2016.
 
Federal Migration Service releases figures of Ukrainian 'refugees'

The centrist newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta reports, citing the Federal Migration Service, that some 900,000 Ukrainian citizens would like to remain in Russia. However, many of those who have sought shelter in Russia are encountering various problems: For example, they are increasingly being refused medical help because they do not have medical insurance. There are over a million Ukrainian citizens in Russia at the moment who have fled the fighting in the Donbass, according to the newspaper.

According to the head of the migration policy commission under the presidential human rights council, Yevgeny Bobrov, after long delays and red tape, a considerable number of Ukrainians manage to secure residential or other status in Russia. However, this cannot be said for Ukrainian nationals' applications for Russian citizenship: According to Bobrov, citizenship has so far been granted to just one in five of the 100,000 or so applicants. The recommendations that the presidential human rights council has issued for the authorities have been largely ignored: At the moment, Bobrov said, most Ukrainian citizens who have fled the conflict are living without information or social support from the state and their legal status is little different from that of labor migrants from Central Asia.

Currently most have to manage by themselves. "Only a small fraction of them are staying in temporary accommodation centers and are receiving benefits from the state. Some are staying with Russians, whose requests to receive some compensation for this assistance have even been rejected," said Bobrov.

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 #39
Moscow Times
July 21, 2015
Divisions Revealed as Kremlin Critic Moves to Work for Ukraine Government
By Ivan Nechepurenko

The outcry over prominent Russian Kremlin critic Maria Gaidar's decision to become a deputy to Mikheil Saakashvili, the current head of Ukraine's Odessa region, demonstrates the extent to which the ongoing conflict has divided the two countries, analysts told The Moscow Times on Monday.

Gaidar is the daughter of a former Russian prime minister, while Saakashvili was president of Georgia when it fought a brief but bitter war with Russia in 2008. The former Georgian leader is widely seen as the most vociferous opponent of President Vladimir Putin in the post-Soviet region.

In Russia, the announcement that Gaidar was going to work for Saakashvili prompted accusations of high treason, and her NGO was deprived of a presidential grant. In Ukraine, Gaidar, 32, was pushed to state her position on Russia's annexation of Crimea last year, and on the ongoing armed conflict in the country's east.

Speaking to journalists during a news conference in Kiev on Monday, Gaidar claimed that her choice to go and work in Ukraine was about values, not nationality.

"This is not just a local conflict between Russia and Ukraine, it is a conflict of values, a civilizational conflict between freedom, democracy, honesty, normal business and Soviet bureaucratic oligarchical gangsterism," said Gaidar, the daughter of Russia's reformist late prime minister Yegor Gaidar, who introduced sweeping market reforms in the country in 1992.

Gaidar has said she wants to retain her Russian citizenship. "In the future I hope that Russia will be a democratic country and it will be possible to go back and work there," she said at the conference, video footage of which was later uploaded to YouTube.

Dual citizenship is prohibited under Ukrainian law. And by law, public officials are required to be Ukrainian citizens.

Gaidar said Saturday in a Facebook post that she plans to receive Ukrainian citizenship, but perhaps anticipating the bureaucratic labyrinth that lies ahead, she added during the press conference Monday that she would be willing to serve on Saakashvili's team in any capacity - including as an adviser or volunteer. In the latter scenarios, she would not necessarily be obligated to give up her Russian passport.

By the time of publication, Gaidar had not responded to requests sent by The Moscow Times asking her to comment on the career move and the ensuing outcry.

Pressure in Russia

Russian lawmakers have rejected the idea that Gaidar will eventually be able to return to Russian politics.

"One has to hate Russia to go work for the Kiev regime - and for whom? For Saakashvili. After this, she has no future in Russian politics," Alexei Pushkov, head of the State Duma's foreign affairs committee, tweeted over the weekend.

In 2008, Russia and Georgia fought a five-day war over its breakaway region of South Ossetia, which together with another breakaway region, Abkhazia, is now recognized by Russia and a handful of other states as an independent nation.

Russia has blamed Saakashvili for initiating the violence, while a European Union investigation found that though Georgian forces did launch an attack, Russia's military response was disproportionate.

Putin and Saakashvili have not traditionally held back from hurling personal insults at one another, and Saakashvili is widely portrayed by the Russian media as an erratic and dangerous U.S. stooge who remains fixated on everything anti-Russian and anti-Putin.

Saakashvili himself described Gaidar's appointment in his Facebook account over the weekend as "an important symbol that there are Russians who are actively resisting Putin's aggression and are not enemies of Ukraine. Ukraine's success will bring important changes inside of Russia that will end Putin's regime."

In a later Facebook post, Saakashvili - who is wanted by Georgian authorities on suspicion of embezzlement of state funds and abuse of power - said that "the hysterical reaction of the Russian media to Gaidar's appointment suggests that it was the right decision."

In Russia, Social Demand - an NGO headed by Gaidar that advocates for improved social services in Russia - was deprived of a presidential grant it had been given earlier this year.

Russia's Presidential Human Rights Ombudsman Ella Pamfilova told Interfax on Sunday that the grant of nearly 3 million rubles ($52,700) would be frozen due to Gaidar's decision to become an official in a foreign state.

Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Interfax on Monday that he believed Pamfilova's position "would gain the support of the Kremlin."

According to Social Demand's spokeswoman Natalya Malysheva, Gaidar stepped down as the organization's head last week, Interfax reported. Malysheva added that she was confused by Pamfilova's statement, as the NGO had voluntarily and formally refused the presidential grant after Gaidar stepped down.

Vitaly Milonov, an outspoken regional lawmaker in St. Petersburg who has attained international notoriety for his role in spearheading the so-called "gay propaganda law," filed a request with the Investigative Committee, asking them to probe whether Gaidar's career move qualifies as high treason, claiming that working for Saakashvili is on par with working for "Russia's enemy," the BBC's Russian service reported Saturday.

Under Russian law, anyone convicted of high treason can face up to 20 years in prison.

Kirov region Governor Nikita Belykh, under whom Gaidar served as deputy for social policy in 2009-2011, wrote in a LiveJournal blog post Saturday that his former employee's decision was "wrong."

"To go and work for people whose relations toward our country and our people are known to be very negative ... she is pitting herself not only against the authorities, but also against all Russians," said Belykh, a former leader of the now-defunct opposition party Union of Right Forces (SPS).

Pressure in Ukraine

In her new home away from home, Gaidar immediately faced pressure from local reporters to declare her unequivocal support of Kiev amid its current standoff with Moscow.

Activists turned out to the regional administration building in Odessa on Monday demanding that Saakashvili revoke his decision to hire her, Ukrainian news agency UNIAN reported.

Each interview Gaidar has done with Ukrainian media since agreeing to serve under Saakashvili has begun with questions about her position on the ongoing conflict between pro-Russian rebels and Ukrainian forces in the country's turbulent east, and on Russia's annexation of Crimea.

And thus far she has consistently towed the party line.

She said at a news conference that "Russia is fighting a war with Ukraine."

Gaidar described Russia's annexation of Crimea as "immoral" and "illegal," and called for the peninsula "to be returned to Ukraine." In an interview with Ukrainian channel 112 on Monday, Gaidar claimed that the 2008 Russia-Georgia war was an act of "aggression provoked by Russia."

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Alexei Makarkin, deputy head of Moscow-based think tank the Center for Political Technologies, said that by moving to Odessa, Gaidar has made the first move in a risky game.

"It is clear that - regardless of their real views - influential people in Russia have had to respond negatively to her decision," said Makarkin in a phone interview.

"Likewise, those people who have endorsed her have no influence at all," he said.

Many Russian politicians and journalists suffering from a lack of opportunities in Russia have gone to Ukraine to advance their careers, Makarkin said.

"But the problem is, these people are also not completely accepted in Ukraine either," he said.

Over the past 15 years, a number of prominent Russian journalists and politicians moved to Ukraine. Following the Orange Revolution - a popular uprising that swept Ukraine in 2003-04 - Boris Nemtsov, an influential Russian opposition politician who was murdered in Moscow in February, went to work as an adviser to Ukraine's then-president Viktor Yushchenko, but he did not move to Kiev on any permanent basis.

In reality, the primary reaction among the Russian elites to Gaidar's decision was "bewilderment," according to Anatoly Gagarin, head of Yekaterinburg-based think tank the Institute of Systemic Political Studies and Humanitarian Projects.

"It is perceived as a lack of political foresight; this person had a chance to join the Russian political elite, but instead opted to work for Saakashvili, who is universally seen as an odious personality," Gagarin said in a phone interview.

"This decision will sever all paths forward for Gaidar in Russia, depriving her of the opportunity to make her own choices in the future," he said.

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 #40
Sputnik
July 21, 2015
Despite Attempts to Pursue Public Love, Saakashvili's Popularity Stays Low
[Photos here http://sputniknews.com/europe/20150721/1024878198.html]

Former president of Georgia and current governor of Ukraine's Odessa Region Mikheil Saakashvili has gone nuts, desperately trying to gain more popularity in Odessa, Radio France International (RFI) reported.

Saakashvili is literally all over the place. The governor is kissing babushkas in a local bazaar, taking selfies with young women on the streets, taking buses with regular folks and promising to build new roads in the region.

"We don't have time. We must show that here, in Ukraine, the country can be reformed, we need to get rid of corruption and put oligarchs back in their place. My strength is in people's support," Saakashvili said, as cited by RFI.

Despite all of his attempts, the majority of people in Odessa aren't buy into Saakashvili's promises, considering their governor nothing more than a laughing stock.

Earlier this month Odessans rallied demanding the resignation of Saakashvili. The protesters held banners reading "Saakashvili go home," and "Saakashvili is a war criminal."

Odessa should have a normal local governor that will protect the city's interests, not a "crazy war criminal," one of the rally's organizers said.  

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 #41
Reuters
July 20, 2015
Bypassing Ukraine Will Be Costly for Russia's Gazprom - Analysts

MOSCOW / PRAGUE - Russia's plans to drop Ukraine as a route for pumping natural gas to Europe will still leave state-run Gazprom facing about $1 billion in annual transit fees to Slovakia and Bulgaria for years to come, analysts and industry sources say.

Russia wants to circumnavigate Ukraine to pipe its gas to Europe because of pricing disagreements, which at times have led to disruptions in supplies to the European Union, but doing so will come at a cost which some analysts say is too high.

Billions of euros will be needed to build and expand alternative routes, and the route of the existing pipeline means transit fees to Slovakia and Bulgaria will have to be paid by Gazprom even if Russia manages to bypass Ukraine by 2020.

Under the contracts with the two countries, which ship gas on to western and southern Europe respectively, Gazprom will have to pay Slovakia until 2028 and Bulgaria until 2030 regardless of whether they actually ship any gas through them.

The route through Slovakia is key for gas flows to some of Gazprom's biggest clients, Italy and Germany.

"This is the biggest issue - no one knows what to do with this [Slovakia] contract," a Gazprom source said.

Slovakia's Eustream had revenues of 630 million euros ($695 million) last year, down from 697 million euros in 2013, and most of this came from Gazprom, the company's accounts and Reuters calculations show.

Another $100 million, about 90 million euros, was charged by Bulgaria, according to Bulgarian state company Bulgartransgaz. The combined transit fees of both countries were about the same as a quarter of Gazprom's net income last year.

Ukraine's state gas firm, Naftogaz, earned about $2 billion in transit fees from Gazprom last year, according to its reports, equal to about 6 percent of Ukraine's budget revenues.

Geopolitical Concerns

Gazprom's plans to avoid shipping gas through Ukraine - with whom relations have been strained by the overthrow of a Moscow-leaning president, Russia's annexation of Crimea and a separatist uprising in eastern Ukraine - center around building a pipeline to Turkey.

But Russia still has no firm agreement with Ankara on the Turkish Stream project, announced by President Vladimir Putin in December, and it faces opposition from the European Union.

Gazprom, which generates about 8 percent of Russia's gross domestic product, has put costs for the first line of the Turkish Stream at 3.3 billion euros. The pipeline should consist of four lines, each with an annual capacity 15.75 bcm.

Expansion of the Nord Stream pipeline, which goes beneath the Baltic Sea to Germany, agreed last month, is estimated at costing another 9.9 billion euros.

"It is obvious that from the economic point of view this [Turkish Stream and Nord Stream] is unlikely to be reasonable. But it may be viewed as a cost to lower transit risks," said Andrei Polischuk, an analyst with Raiffeisen bank.

Gas rows with Ukraine in the winters of 2005-06 and 2008-09 led to the interruption of Russian gas flows to Europe, Gazprom's key export market where it makes more than half its revenues.

Mikhail Korchemkin, head of East European Gas Analysis consultancy group, said Gazprom spent $43 to ship each 1,000 cubic meters via the Nord Stream last year compared to $33 via Ukraine.

"We think our transit route is the most direct and the cheapest," said Olyona Osmolovska, spokeswoman for Ukraine's Naftogaz.

Some analysts doubt Gazprom will succeed in completely bypassing Ukraine by 2020. It has not yet started laying pipes for Turkish Stream and has canceled a contract with Italy's Saipem to build a link to Turkey.

Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller said last month the company was ready for talks about continuing to use Ukraine as a supply route. Last year, Ukraine shipped almost 60 bcm of Russian gas to Europe - or 40 percent of Gazprom's exports.

"Totally bypassing Ukraine in the time that has been set is doubtful," said Valery Nesterov, an analyst with Sberbank CIB. "We believe that in 5 to 10 years relations with Ukraine will stabilize and some of the transit flows will remain."

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 #42
Transitions Online
www.tol.org
July 20, 2015
Poroshenko Takes His Message to the People
With his own TV station in decline, Ukraine's president looks for a way around the oligarchs who now dominate domestic television.
By Sergiy Rachinsky
Sergiy Rachinsky is a journalist and blogger in Kyiv and the founder of New Media in Ukraine, an online media consultancy.

As Russian media lose broadcasting rights and credibility in Ukraine, notions of what is happening in the country and around the world are now almost completely formed by Ukrainian media.
 
That might have created an opportunity for the country's media to champion fundamental reforms. Instead, combined with the shifting fortunes of Ukraine's oligarchs, it has created a vacuum into which politicians and tycoons have rushed, looking to settle scores and gain advantage. President Petro Poroshenko and his government might have seen off the Russian propaganda machine, but their efforts to win public support to virtually re-invent the country are increasingly at the mercy of powerful domestic media interests with agendas of their own.
 
WHIPPING BOYS
 
When the conflict in the east and legal challenges from Kyiv hobbled Rinat Akhmetov, a Donetsk coal, steel, and energy magnate who was once Ukraine's richest man, Poroshenko reportedly struck up alliances with billionairesand Dmytro Firtash, who between them have interests in metals, energy, airlines, banking, agriculture, and media.
 
Firtash, for instance, has said that at a time when he was under house arrest in Vienna, threatened with extradition to the United States to face corruption charges, he brokered a deal between Poroshenko and Vitali Klitschko, leader of the UDAR party, that helped to smooth the way for Poroshenko's election as presidency.
 
It was an embarrassing accusation, which both politicians have denied.  
 
For his part, Kolomoiskiy was key in Kyiv's early efforts to fight the rebels in the east, bankrolling volunteer battalions as well as buying gasoline and other supplies for the regular army. It was probably thanks to Kolomoiskiy that separatist and Russian troops did not make inroads into that region, and a grateful Poroshenko appointed him governor of Dnipropetrovsk.
 
But Kolomoiskiy used the position to try to further marginalize Akhmetov, and his accord with the president fell apart very publicly in March. After Kolomoiskiy sent armed men to seize two state-controlled energy companies in which he had a stake, he was fired as governor.

Firtash's and Kolomoiskiy's businesses, wealth, and political influence - they control the largest factions in parliament - would be enough make them formidable enemies. But they also control the country's two largest TV channels, Inter and 1+1, respectively.
 
The two men have unleashed an unprecedented "television war" on each other, releasing a flow of compromising information. At the same time, they both have trained their sights on Poroshenko.
 
Further compounding Poroshenko's media woes is the ascendance of 112 Ukraine, which has displaced the president's Channel 5 as the No. 1 news channel in the country.
 
Created in 2013, 112 Ukraine is often linked with former President Viktor Yanukovych's now-dissolved Party of Regions, although the station's self-professed owner, businessman Andrei Podschipkov, denies any relationship with the fugitive president and his circle. Ukrainian law does not require television stations to disclose their ownership, although a measure that would do so is before parliament.
 
The channel, which broadcasts only through cable and satellite systems, combines the latest technology with an editorial line that is defiantly independent of the government. It is the only national platform left to former Yanukovych allies and lawmakers from the Party of Regions' successor, the Opposition Bloc. 112 Ukraine also airs the country's most popular political talk show, hosted by Savik Shuster, where guests rarely mince words about the government or their political rivals.
 
112 Ukraine has come under fire from the state television regulator, which has threatened to revoke its license on the grounds that it had applied to show only movies, documentaries, and children's programming, and not news and commentary.
 
If the threat is a ploy by Poroshenko to neutralize a political and business competitor, it would likely backfire. Many Ukrainians suspect that his own Channel 5 has become a mouthpiece for his policies and are disappointed that Poroshenko has not sold the channel after promising to get rid of his business holdings if elected.
 
In recent polls, the government's approval ratings have been abysmal, and only 16 percent of those surveyed said they supported the president's political party - although that's better than the 3 percent who supported Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk's Popular Front.
 
A NEW MEGAPHONE
 
All of which has left the president casting about for a way to talk directly to Ukrainians just as he pushes forward with controversial changes to the country's laws and constitution.
 
Poroshenko has a difficult task to preserve the unitary state he promised while laying the constitutional foundation for deep decentralization, without which there is no chance of resolving the situation in the east and achieving long-term peace with the separatist Donbas region.
 
Further, as Ukrainians grow impatient with the slow pace of reforms, the administration is apparently trying to streamline the decision-making process.
 
In a recent interview with the LB.ua website, top presidential aide Boris Lozhkin said the current parliamentary-presidential system, in which parliament forms the government and the president holds rather limited powers over law enforcement agencies, "does not allow us to make decisions quickly."
 
But strengthening the powers of the president would require still more changes to the new constitution. That could dredge up memories of 2010, when legal maneuvering greatly enhanced the power of Poroshenko's reviled predecessor - a "usurpation" for which Yanukovych faces possible prosecution.
 
That is likely why Poroshenko hired Lozhkin - perhaps the country's most successful media baron and the president's former business partner - to head his administration. Poroshenko's task is to accelerate reforms and save the country from economic disaster, without being painted as a usurper of power in the process. He has very little time to make his case to the voters and cement his image as a peacemaker and a champion of European integration.
 
He got off to a bad start in January with the creation of the Ministry of Information Policy, which is tasked with combating propaganda and disinformation but was widely derided on social media as an Orwellian "Ministry of Truth." The new agency's "concept of information security" would require the passage of at least a dozen hotly contested laws.
 
But with so many more pressing issues, a strapped budget, and the new ministry's lack of credibility with civil society, it is not likely to survive. Its director, Poroshenko's friend Yuri Stets, has repeatedly said he would step down by the end of the year.
 
More crucial will likely be efforts to create a new public broadcaster to replace the low-rated Soviet-era holdover, which has long been more patronage program than serious media outlet. It will have two nationwide and 26 regional channels, which despite other moves toward decentralization will be required to have their programming and editorial policy approved in Kyiv.
 
Public TV director Zurab Alasania has already axed some programs and much of the staff, introduced new formats, and professionalized the news broadcasts, but the channel is losing its traditional older viewers without yet attracting younger ones.
 
He will have to perform a small miracle with a tiny budget. According to Alasania, of 147 million hryvnya ($6.6 million) allocated from the state budget this year, only 400,000 hryvnya will go to create new content, with the rest going for "maintenance of the state enterprise," which includes staffing.
 
Alasania, a Georgia-born former journalist and TV producer in Kharkiv, said he aims to make the channel independent of the state, although he acknowledges that "public service broadcasters will always pay more attention to state power, whatever it is."
 
The station's management expects it to be up to speed in two to three years. In the meantime, they have plans to launch a multimedia newsroom next year, created in collaboration with experts from Denmark.
 
The new station is designed to shore up Ukrainians' flagging trust in their domestic media.
 
"It's important to remember that the quality of Ukrainian journalism is lower than ever before due to lack of money and professionalism, following on poor education," said Diana Dutsik, director media watchdog group Telekritika. "Public TV could set up higher professional standards, but it's not going to happen anytime soon. It needs money, creative people, and freedom from political intervention."

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 #43
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
July 20, 2015
If Poroshenko Attacks His Days Are Numbered
By The Saker
"The Saker" is a pseudonym for a top level American military analyst who lives in Florida, the author of the leading blog covering the Ukraine crisis, The Vineyard of the Saker, which gets an astounding 50,000 page views per day. (August - September 2014).
[Video here http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/zakharchenko-deinego-and-pushilin-have-set-trap-poroshenko/ri8834]

-East Ukraine rebels are going out of their way to show their interest in peace even as they have never been militarily stronger
-This is done so that when the inevitable Ukraine attack demanded by nationalists and the US comes it will be impossible to blame the rebels
-After that the rebels stand a good chance of neutralizing Ukraine attack and moving on the counter-offensive
-At which point it is unlikely Poroshenko will be able to maintain power
-Question is, is he likely to be replaced by a pro-peace or an even more pro-war faction?

Top Novorussian officials from the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics (Zakharchenko, Deinego and Pushilin) have held a joint press conference and officially announced that they had taken the unilateral decision to withdraw at least 3km from the front line all their weapons up to a 100mm caliber (weapons of a heavier caliber were supposed to have already been withdrawn according to the Minsk-2 Agreement (M2A); the Novorussians complied, the junta in Kiev did not).

Before that, the Novorussians had already done a similar unilateral action by withdrawing all their forces by over 1km from the town of Shirokino. Predictably, the the government side did not follow suit and stayed on their positions (but did not dare enter Shirokino either, at least as far as I know).

This time around, the Ukraine sdie greeted the new "gesture of goodwill" of the Novorussians with an unprecedented barrage of artillery fire on the city of Donestsk which, again, was shelled all night long.

So what is going on here? Have the Novorussians suddenly gone crazy?

Far from it.

In fact, they have set a very elegant trap for Poroshenko and his western backers. Here is how it works.

Political level:

On a political level the Novorussians are bending over backwards to prove to anybody willing to listen that they are truly complying with all the provisions of M2A.

The problem, of course, is that nobody in the West is willing to listen. In response, the Novorussians are multiplying the initiatives to make it harder and harder for western leaders to ignore the facts on the ground which are simple: the junta has not even begun complying with M2A while the Novorussians have complied.

As soon as Zakharchenko, Deinego and Pushilin made their announcement, Lavrov called Steinmeier to stress that the Novorussians were doing everything they could and that the pressure should now be put on Poroshenko to follow suit.

Now, of course Lavrov knows that Steinmeier is a US puppets and takes his orders from Uncle Sam and, more importantly, Lavrov also knows that Poroshenko cannot implement M2A, but since M2A was signed, the Russians are now pretending as if the Ukrainians could abide by its terms and they make sure that they, and their BRICS/SCO allies, mantrically repeat that "the Minsk 2 Agreements are the only way to solve this conflict". In reality, of course, M2A is the best way to achieve regime change in the Ukraine. Why?

Because even though Poroshenko has not implemented any of the M2A points, he is already being openly attacked by the Right Sector and the various nationalist parties for not decisively fighting the oligarchs and the Novorussians.

The situation in the western Ukraine is now dead serious and Dmitri Yarosh has openly described the regime in Kiev "traitors" and called for the numerous Ukronazi deathsquads to rebel and disobey Poroshenko's orders.

Poroshenko would love to prove his patriotism by triggering yet another large scale attack on Novorussia, but the problem here is that this already failed the last two times around and the Novorussians are now even stronger than they used to be.

Military aspect:

Though only a full scale resumption of hostilities would actually test this hypothesis, there is very strong evidence that the Novorussians have successfully achieved their transition from a decentralized militia force to a unified regular army.

This means that they can potentially go from tactical victories to operational level counter-attacks posing a major risk for the regime in Kiev.

They clearly have enough men under arms and they openly admit that their equipment is "adequate". Hopefully, so is their command and control (which used to be terrible).

Even more telling is the fact that the Novorussian leaders are all clearly very confident about their ability not only to push back any Ukraine government attack, but to counter-attack and inflict major losses. Zakharchenko has openly said so many times. Time was always on the Novorussian side and now this is finally paying off.

The Novorussian confidence is best illustrated by the fact that even though Novorussian intelligence services have established that there are currently 70,000 junta soldiers backed by heavy armor and artillery all along the line of contact they still went ahead with their unilateral withdrawal.

Besides, the Novorussians have had plenty of time to carefully prepare the terrain along the likely axis of attack of the junta forces which, if they attack, will be carefully channeled into carefully prepared fire pockets and destroyed.

I also suppose that the Novorussians have dramatically improved their mobility and fire coordination which will make it much easier for them to engage any attacking force.

So the reality is this: the Novorussians are really not taking much of a risk with their unilateral actions. In fact, they have very nicely combined good political PR and sound military tactics.

Poroshenko's dilemma

Poroshenko is in a terrible situation. Ukrainian economy is basically dead. There is nothing left to salvage, nevermind turn the tide and overcome the crushing economic crisis.

The Right Sector is up in arms and very, very angry. Folks in the western Ukraine are already seriously considering demanding their own special autonomy status. As for Odessa with Saakashvili in charge and the daughter of Egor Gaidar as Deputy Governor, it will inevitably explode, especially since the USA officially pays their salaries.

When Poroshenko goes to the Rada he has to look "tough", i.e. say the exact opposite of what he committed to do according to M2A. But since even the White House has called the M2A the only solution, Poroshenko is put in the crazy situation of having to look like a peacemaker by day, and execute Nuland's crazy orders by night.

By now Poroshenko has probably already figured out that he is being used like both a pawn and a fall guy by the USA: when he will be forced to order an attack on Novorussia and this attack inevitably fails, he will be blamed for it all.

Why would the USA order Poroshenko to attack even though such an attack is sure to result in yet another defeat? For two reasons: the (now rather hypothetical) hope that Russia might intervene and because that is the perfect way to get rid of Poroshenko.

Unsurprisingly, Poroshenko has no desire to lose power and, most likely, die, so he is doing his best to avoid taking that dramatic step while continuing to shell Donetsk and the rest of the cities of the Donbass just to prove his "patriotism" and military "prowess".

The problem with that "solution" is that this kind of shelling does *nothing* to weaken the Novorussian armed forces but only serves to further enrage the people of Novorussia.

When the attack comes

So what will happen when the probably inevitable attack comes? My guess is that the Novorussians will rapidly and effectively counter it and mount an immediate counter offensive, probably towards Mariupol and/or Slaviansk.

At this point the junta will freak out again and beg its western patrons to stop the Novorussians (which is exactly what happened before Minsk 1 and 2).

Obama and Kerry will probably have the nerve to blame Russia for it all again, but in Europe the elites will be in full panic mode, not only because "their" guy clearly was the one to violate M2A and the one to have launched the attack, but also because they will be terrified of the possible depth of the Novorussian counter-attack (their biggest fear is a coastal corridor to the Crimean Peninsula).

Remember the Sarkozy trip to Moscow to beg the Russians not to enter Tbilissi in 2008? I would not be surprised if something similar happened again (with Merkel or Hollande in Sakozy's role).

And, again, Putin will probably order the Novorussians to stop , but the terrain they would seize would remain in their hands, like in Debaltsevo. Everybody would have to accept that, however reluctantly. At which point I would expect a complete collapse of the regime in Kiev. Who could replace it then?

Regime change sure! But for what?

I only see two options here. Option one is a military coup to "save the Ukraine" and "restore peace".

That would be a de-facto end of the entire Ukronazi experiment and a basic acceptance of the Putin plan: a de-centralized, unitary and neutral Ukraine with a right of self-determination guaranteed by the Constitution.

The other option is an openly Nazi regime of Bandera freaks à la Right Sector and the various death squads. The accession to power by bona fide Nazis will, of course, only re-start the process of breakup of the rump Ukraine which, form the Russian point of view, this is also a temporarily acceptable outcome.

Russia cannot accept having permanent and unitary russophobic "Banderastan" on her borders, but a breakup of the Ukraine into several "zones of control" by various Urkonazi gangs presents no danger to Russia at all.

I would argue that the worst regime for Russia (and Novorussia, of course) is what we have now: a unitary Ukraine ruled by a completely immoral and spineless oligarch in power, surrounded by Victoria Nuland's minions in all key positions, with the official recognition and support of the EU/IMF/WB/etc. This configuration clearly has the greatest potential to threaten Russia and it already actually murders people in Novorussia every day. But if the Ukraine follows the Libyan or Iraqi "democracy model" then it will be a much bigger problem for the EU than for Russia.

Putin and Zakharchenko have all the time in the world

The "Ukronazi Ukraine" has by now already acquired enough self-destructive momentum for Putin and Zakharchenko to sit back and wait.

They don't have to do anything right now other than to prepare for a very likely and desperate suicide-attack by the junta against Novorussia.

Should that happen, the Novorussian will be ready to counter-attack and fast and as deep as possible and then stop again and restart the mantra about "we support the territory integrity of the Ukraine" while thinking "but we can't help it if the damn thing falls apart".

Obama and Kerry will, of course, blame Russia for it all, but for who long can anybody blame somebody for doing absolutely *nothing*?

The people of Novorussia unfortunately don't

The toughest situation so far has been for the people of Novorussia who could take little comfort in the nice theory that time is on "their" side while shells are landing on their houses, schools and hospitals. For them, every minute of this horror was was an emergency which had to be stopped now. Things are now starting to get really ugly in the Nazi-occuppied Ukraine too. Check out this video of a famous Ukrainian blogger (in exile in Russia irrc) in which he reports how the "Ukrop" party (of Kolmoiskii and Yarosh) is trying to get votes by distributing food:

(please press 'cc' to see the English subtitles)

Scary no?

And it is only going to get worse, much worse. Politically, economically and socially the Ukraine is dead, even if the body is will warm.

Only a regime change followed by the inevitable de-Nazification, combined with a long term and major international stabilization and reconstruction program might, eventually and slowly, allow the Ukraine to return to some modicum of normalcy, and that only if Russia plays a major role in this effort.

Since such an outcome is absolutely unacceptable to the Empire, the Ukraine will continue to be a "black hole" like Kosovo, Libya or Somalia - a failed state with abject poverty ruled by thugs and Mafia dons. For this reason, a breakup of the country into several smaller entities is probably the least bad option for everybody, especially the Ukrainians themselves.

One big explosion or several smaller ones?

What if you were offered the choice to either be in the room A where 100g of TNT would be detonated at once, or in room B where 5 times 20g of TNT would be detonated sequentially, with some possibly not exploding at all? The choice is obvious, right? The same goes for the Ukraine.

There might be much less danger for the entire continent if the Ukraine was allowed to break up in several parts (Donbass, Central, Souther and Western for example) and this might be much better for the local population too.

For one thing some parts are far more viable than others. They are also very different. And since the Ukraine in its current borders is both a creation of Lenin and Stalin and has no basis in history anyway, a breakup might be a much safer and more natural process than desperate attempts to keep this artificial entity alive.

In ideological terms the Ukraine is a fantastic idea: a large virulently anti-Russian state 'protecting' the rest of Europe from the Russian hordes. Great! But as soon as one looks at the practicalities of such a project it becomes immediately clear that it is a crazy notion born in the sick minds of the rabidly russophobic western religious and political elites.

The only question is this: will the western plutocrats agree to give up on the monster they created? The future of Russian does not depend on the answer, but the future of Europe probably will.

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 #44
Diplomat: UN SC to try to bring together Malaysia's and Russia's approaches to MH17 crash

UNITED NATIONS, July 21. /TASS/. The United Nations Security Council will try to "find a common denominator" and bring together approaches advanced by Russia and Malaysia in their draft resolutions on the 2014 MH17 crash in eastern Ukraine, Russian Permanent Representative at the United Nations Vitaly Churkin said on Monday after a closed-door Security Council meeting called at Russia's initiative.

"No concrete results or agreements were reached, but, to my mind, it is important that we closed the meeting with a determination to try to find a common denominators and try to see how we can combine the approach offered by the Malaysian side and the approach advanced by us so that the Security Council could take another step," he said.

He said Russia suggested the role of the United Nations Secretary General in the investigations of the MH17 crash be enhanced. It also called to invite all the parties concerned to take part in this process. "We called to invigorate the role of the Secretary General, which is provided by resolution 2166. There are a number of proposals on more active involvement in the investigation of all parties concerned. No secret that we have some questions to the investigations," the Russian diplomat said, adding that some participants in the Security Council meeting had insisted the investigation was faultless.

"The most important thing for us is to see what useful role the Security Council can continue to play," Churkin said. As of now, in his words, no further consultations on the draft resolution had been appointed. He refrained from making any forecasts when this document could be discussed. "So far, it is necessary to absorb today's discussion," he said. "Let us wait and see."

The Boeing 777-200 of the Malaysia Airlines (MH17) en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur crashed on July 17 in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk Region, some 60 km (over 37 miles) from the Russian border, in the zone of combat operations between the Donetsk militia forces and the Ukrainian army. All the passengers and crewmembers onboard the aircraft - 298 people, citizens of 10 states - died. Most of the passengers - 196 people - were Dutch citizens. According to the key theory of the crash, the plane was shot down by a surface-to-air missile. The Ukrainian authorities and representatives of the self-proclaimed republics in Donetsk and Luhansk have been accusing each other of the crash. The United Nations Security Council on July 21, 2014 demanded a comprehensive and independent investigation. Russia's foreign ministry has repeatedly said Russia was not satisfied with how the investigation was being conducted.

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 #45
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
July 17, 2015
A year after MH17: The lessons for Russia
If Russia wants the world to view it as a great power, it needs to do a better job of assuming responsibility for its role in the MH17 disaster.
By Ivan Tsvetkov
Dr. Ivan Tsvetkov is an associate professor at the School of International Relations of St. Petersburg State University. He is an expert in U.S. policy in the Asia Pacific Region, U.S. history and contemporary U.S. society.

The twelve months since the Malaysia Airlines MH17 catastrophe in the skies over eastern Ukraine have shown that the price of political miscalculation in the modern world is far greater than it was decades or centuries ago.

The tragedy has not been forgotten. An international investigation closely monitored by the media is ongoing, and various options for bringing to justice those responsible for the death of the 298 passengers and crewmembers are being discussed. And that is despite the fact that almost no one remembers the hundreds or even thousands of victims of armed conflict across Africa or the Middle East, reports of which are a near daily occurrence.

To all appearances, it is not just that the victims of MH17 included many Europeans, Australians and citizens of other developed countries. The site of the tragedy, which until quite recently had been a peaceful, prosperous place, far from any known "hot spot," made what happened even more extraordinary.

The investigation into the incident, which has involved a variety of technical experts, journalists and politicians representing different sides of the Ukrainian conflict, has not only given rise to many versions of the tragedy, but also underlined one very unpleasant fact for Russia. Until the armed conflict on its borders dies down for good, with no sporadic flare-ups, it will be very difficult for the country to assert its international reputation as a great power.

The most important criterion for membership of today's club of "responsible great powers" is the ability to prevent armed conflict in one's immediate vicinity. Success in the 21st century is measured not only in terms of GDP per capita and level of technological development, but also the capacity to ensure stability and security in one's zone of responsibility (extending, in the case of the great powers, beyond state borders).

Russia's alleged involvement in the MH17 disaster has done serious damage to the country's international image over the past year. The accusation has not gone away despite the best efforts of counter-propaganda and public diplomacy. The catastrophe has been used as symbolic confirmation of Russia's informational support for separatists in Eastern Ukraine, not to mention political and military. In providing such assistance, Russia is undermining its international positions, making them weak and vulnerable.

Failure to "wash off" even the most tenuous link to a tragedy that cost the lives of several hundred innocent people can have extremely serious consequences in today's world. It can, figuratively speaking, demote a country to the "second division" of the global system, and no amount of past achievements, natural resources or nuclear potential can prevent it.

The reality of the threat is evinced by the extreme caution shown by international experts and politicians in their assessment of what happened. As yet no data from U.S. reconnaissance satellites have been made public - a fact often cited by Russian propagandists as proof of Ukraine's guilt, which the United States is allegedly intent on concealing.

But it is far more likely that by withholding vital information, the United States is covering not Ukraine, but Russia. In spite of everything, Washington does not want to utterly and decisively humiliate the Kremlin and drive Russia into a corner. Neither the United States nor Europe needs a gap in the global system the size of one-fifth of the Earth's land area.

The lesson that politicians need to draw from MH17 and its consequences is that military methods in the modern world cannot be used to resolve international and internal conflicts without the warring parties and their surroundings becoming "barbarized." It is foolish to hope that while heavy fighting rages in the towns and cities of eastern Ukraine, politicians just a few hundred kilometers west or east will feign adherence to the "European choice" or the "equitable multipolar world order." That's not how it is, and the victims of MH17 will long serve as a vivid reminder of that.

An honorable way out for Russia, as a great power, would be to stop the petty blame game with Ukraine and to openly admit its indirect culpability for what happened. Was it not Russia's political and diplomatic miscalculations that ultimately led to civil war and the shooting down of a civilian plane in a Russian-speaking area of a neighboring country?

Is it really worth pointing the finger of blame at the United States or some other external force for fomenting the Ukrainian crisis? After all, such incriminations confer a degree of omnipotence that the accused do not and cannot possibly possess.

On the occasion of the first anniversary of the MH17 disaster, the Russian authorities should think about some form of compensation for the families of the victims, even if it sets the treasury back hundreds of millions of dollars. It's possible that some of Russia's foes might consider such compensation as an admission of guilt, but in reality it would be confirmation of Russia's ability as a great power to assume responsibility for a tragedy that resulted partly from its insufficiently coherent policy in a region that even official government documents refer to as a "zone of foreign policy interests."

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 #46
Consortiumnews.com
July 17, 2015
MH-17 Mystery: A New Tonkin Gulf Case?
By Robert Parry
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.

Exclusive: In 1964, the Tonkin Gulf incident was used to justify the Vietnam War although U.S. intelligence quickly knew the facts were not what the U.S. government claimed. Now, the MH-17 case is being exploited to justify a new Cold War as U.S. intelligence again is silent about what it knows, writes Robert Parry.

One year ago, the world experienced what could become the Tonkin Gulf incident of World War III, the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine. As with the dubious naval clash off the coast of North Vietnam in 1964, which helped launch the Vietnam War, U.S. officials quickly seized on the MH-17 crash for its emotional and propaganda appeal - and used it to ratchet up tensions against Russia.

Shocked at the thought of 298 innocent people plunging to their deaths from 33,000 feet last July 17, the world recoiled in horror, a fury that was then focused on Russian President Vladimir Putin. With Putin's face emblazoned on magazine covers, the European Union got in line behind the U.S.-backed coup regime in Ukraine and endorsed economic sanctions to punish Russia.

In the year that has followed, the U.S. government has continued to escalate tensions with Russia, supporting the Ukrainian regime in its brutal "anti-terrorism operation" that has slaughtered thousands of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. The authorities in Kiev have even dispatched neo-Nazi and ultranationalist militias, supported by jihadists called "brothers" of the Islamic State, to act as the tip of the spear. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Ukraine Merges Nazis and Islamists."]

Raising world tensions even further, the Russians have made clear that they will not allow the ethnic Russian resistance to be annihilated, setting the stage for a potential escalation of hostilities and even a possible nuclear showdown between the United States and Russia.

But the propaganda linchpin to the West's extreme anger toward Russia remains the MH-17 shoot-down, which the United States and the West continue to pin on the Russian rebels - and by extension - Russia and Putin. The latest examples are media reports about the Dutch crash investigation suggesting that an anti-aircraft missile, allegedly involved in destroying MH-17, was fired from rebel-controlled territory.

Yet, the U.S. mainstream media remains stunningly disinterested in the "dog-not-barking" question of why the U.S. intelligence community has been so quiet about its MH-17 analysis since it released a sketchy report relying mostly on "social media" on July 22, 2014, just five days after the shoot-down. A source briefed by U.S. intelligence analysts told me that the reason for the intelligence community's silence is that more definitive analysis pointed to a rogue Ukrainian operation implicating one of the pro-regime oligarchs.

The source said that if this U.S. analysis were to see the light of day, the Ukrainian "narrative" that has supplied the international pressure on Russia would collapse. In other words, the Obama administration is giving a higher priority to keeping Putin on the defensive than to bringing the MH-17 killers to justice.

Like the Tonkin Gulf case, the evidence on the MH-17 case was shaky and contradictory from the start. But, in both cases, U.S. officials confidently pointed fingers at the "enemy." President Lyndon Johnson blamed North Vietnam in 1964 and Secretary of State John Kerry implicated ethnic Russian rebels and their backers in Moscow in 2014. In both cases, analysts in the U.S. intelligence community were less certain and even reached contrary conclusions once more evidence was available.

In both cases, those divergent assessments appear to have been suppressed so as not to interfere with what was regarded as a national security priority - confronting "North Vietnamese aggression" in 1964 and "Russian aggression" in 2014. To put out the contrary information would have undermined the government's policy and damaged "credibility." So the facts - or at least the conflicting judgments - were hidden.

The Price of Silence

In the case of the Tonkin Gulf, it took years for the truth to finally emerge and - in the meantime - tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers and millions of Vietnamese had lost their lives. Yet, much of the reality was known soon after the Tonkin Gulf incident on Aug. 4, 1964.

Daniel Ellsberg, who in 1964 was a young Defense Department official, recounts - in his 2002 book Secrets - how the Tonkin Gulf falsehoods took shape, first with the panicked cables from a U.S. Navy captain relaying confused sonar readings and then with that false storyline presented to the American people.

As Ellsberg describes, President Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara announced retaliatory airstrikes on Aug. 4, 1964, telling "the American public that the North Vietnamese, for the second time in two days, had attacked U.S. warships on 'routine patrol in international waters'; that this was clearly a 'deliberate' pattern of 'naked aggression'; that the evidence for the second attack, like the first, was 'unequivocal'; that the attack had been 'unprovoked'; and that the United States, by responding in order to deter any repetition, intended no wider war."

Ellsberg wrote: "By midnight on the fourth, or within a day or two, I knew that each one of those assurances was false." Yet, the White House made no effort to clarify the false or misleading statements. The falsehoods were left standing for several years while Johnson sharply escalated the war by dispatching a half million soldiers to Vietnam.

In the MH-17 case, we saw something similar. Within three days of the July 17, 2014 crash, Secretary Kerry rushed onto all five Sunday talk shows with his rush to judgment, citing evidence provided by the Ukrainian government through social media. On NBC's "Meet the Press," David Gregory asked, "Are you bottom-lining here that Russia provided the weapon?"

Kerry: "There's a story today confirming that, but we have not within the Administration made a determination. But it's pretty clear when - there's a build-up of extraordinary circumstantial evidence. I'm a former prosecutor. I've tried cases on circumstantial evidence; it's powerful here." [See Consortiumnews.com's "Kerry's Latest Reckless Rush to Judgment."]

Two days later, on July 22, the Director of National Intelligence authorized the release of a brief report essentially repeating Kerry's allegations. The DNI's report also cited "social media" as implicating the ethnic Russian rebels, but the report stopped short of claiming that the Russians gave the rebels the sophisticated Buk (or SA-11) surface-to-air missile that the report indicated was used to bring down the plane.

Instead, the report cited "an increasing amount of heavy weaponry crossing the border from Russia to separatist fighters in Ukraine"; it claimed that Russia "continues to provide training - including on air defense systems to separatist fighters at a facility in southwest Russia"; and its noted the rebels "have demonstrated proficiency with surface-to-air missile systems, downing more than a dozen aircraft in the months prior to the MH17 tragedy, including two large transport aircraft."

Yet, despite the insinuation of Russian guilt, what the public report didn't say - which is often more significant than what is said in these white papers - was that the rebels had previously only used short-range shoulder-fired missiles to bring down low-flying military planes, whereas MH-17 was flying at around 33,000 feet, far beyond the range of those weapons.

The assessment also didn't say that U.S. intelligence, which had been concentrating its attention on eastern Ukraine during those months, detected the delivery of a Buk missile battery from Russia, despite the fact that a battery consists of four 16-foot-long missiles that are hauled around by trucks or other large vehicles.

Rising Doubts

I was told that the absence of evidence of such a delivery injected the first doubts among U.S. analysts who also couldn't say for certain that the missile battery that was suspected of firing the fateful missile was manned by rebels. An early glimpse of that doubt was revealed in the DNI briefing for several mainstream news organizations when the July 22 assessment was released.

The Los Angeles Times reported, "U.S. intelligence agencies have so far been unable to determine the nationalities or identities of the crew that launched the missile. U.S. officials said it was possible the SA-11 was launched by a defector from the Ukrainian military who was trained to use similar missile systems." [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Mystery of a Ukrainian 'Defector.'"]

The Russians also challenged the rush to judgment against them, although the U.S. mainstream media largely ignored - or ridiculed - their presentation. But the Russians at least provided what appeared to be substantive data, including alleged radar readings showing the presence of a Ukrainian jetfighter "gaining height" as it closed to within three to five kilometers of MH-17.

Russian Lt. Gen. Andrey Kartopolov also called on the Ukrainian government to explain the movements of its Buk systems to sites in eastern Ukraine and why Kiev's Kupol-M19S18 radars, which coordinate the flight of Buk missiles, showed increased activity leading up to the July 17 shoot-down.

The Ukrainian government countered by asserting that it had "evidence that the missile which struck the plane was fired by terrorists, who received arms and specialists from the Russian Federation," according to Andrey Lysenko, spokesman for Ukraine's Security Council, using Kiev's preferred term for the rebels.

On July 29, amid this escalating rhetoric, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of mostly retired U.S. intelligence officials, called on President Barack Obama to release what evidence the U.S. government had, including satellite imagery.

"As intelligence professionals we are embarrassed by the unprofessional use of partial intelligence information," the group wrote. "As Americans, we find ourselves hoping that, if you indeed have more conclusive evidence, you will find a way to make it public without further delay. In charging Russia with being directly or indirectly responsible, Secretary of State John Kerry has been particularly definitive. Not so the evidence."

But the Obama administration failed to make public any intelligence information that would back up its earlier suppositions.

Then, in early August, I was told that some U.S. intelligence analysts had begun shifting away from the original scenario blaming the rebels and Russia to one focused more on the possibility that extremist elements of the Ukrainian government were responsible, funded by one of Ukraine's rabidly anti-Russian oligarchs. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Flight 17 Shoot-down Scenario Shifts"and "Was Putin Targeted for Mid-air Assassination?"]

Last October, Der Spiegel reported that the German intelligence service, the BND, also had concluded that Russia was not the source of the missile battery - that it had been captured from a Ukrainian military base - but the BND still blamed the rebels for firing it. The BND also concluded that photos supplied by the Ukrainian government about the MH-17 tragedy "have been manipulated," Der Spiegel reported.

And, the BND disputed Russian government claims that a Ukrainian fighter jet had been flying close to MH-17, the magazine said, reporting on the BND's briefing to a parliamentary committee on Oct. 8, 2014. But none of the BND's evidence was made public - and I was subsequently told by a European official that the evidence was not as conclusive as the magazine article depicted. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Germans Clear Russia in MH-17 Case."]

Dog Still Doesn't Bark

When the Dutch Safety Board investigating the crash issued an interim report in mid-October, it answered few questions, beyond confirming that MH-17 apparently was destroyed by "high-velocity objects that penetrated the aircraft from outside." The 34-page Dutch report was silent on the "dog-not-barking" issue of whether the U.S. government had satellite surveillance that revealed exactly where the supposed ground-to-air missile was launched and who fired it.

In January, when I re-contacted the source who had been briefed by the U.S. analysts, the source said their thinking had not changed, except that they believed the missile may have been less sophisticated than a Buk, possibly an SA-6, and that the attack may have also involved a Ukrainian jetfighter firing on MH-17.

Since then there have been occasional news accounts about witnesses reporting that they did see a Ukrainian fighter plane in the sky and others saying they saw a missile possibly fired from territory then supposedly controlled by the rebels (although the borders of the conflict zone at that time were very fluid and the Ukrainian military was known to have mobile anti-aircraft missile batteries only a few miles away).

But the larger dog-not-barking question is why the U.S. intelligence community has clammed up for nearly one year, even after I reported that I was being told that U.S. analysts had veered off in a different direction - from the initial blame-the-Russians approach - toward one focusing on a rogue Ukrainian attack.

For its part, the DNI's office has cited the need for secrecy even as it continues to refer to its July 22 report. But didn't DNI James Clapper waive any secrecy privilege when he rushed out a report five days after the MH-17 shoot-down? Why was secrecy asserted only after the U.S. intelligence community had time to thoroughly review its photographic and electronic intelligence?

Over the past 11 months, the DNI's office has offered no updates on the initial assessment, with a DNI spokeswoman even making the absurd claim that U.S. intelligence has made no refinements of its understanding about the tragedy since July 22, 2014.

If what I've been told is true, the reason for this silence would likely be that a reversal of the initial rush to judgment would be both embarrassing for the Obama administration and detrimental to an "information warfare" strategy designed to keep the Russians on the defensive.

But if that's the case, President Barack Obama may be acting even more recklessly than President Johnson did in 1964. As horrific as the Vietnam War was, a nuclear showdown with Russia could be even worse.

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 #47
CNBC.com
July 20, 2015
Ukraine extends creditor talks as threat of default looms
By Elaine Moore

Ukraine has extended hastily assembled talks with creditors amid predictions that the country could default as early as Friday if an agreement is not reached.
Kiev's desire to avoid the fate of Greece has encouraged both sides to tone down the combative rhetoric that has dogged negotiations over the past three months.

However a principal-to-principal meeting held in Washington last week failed to elicit a deal to restructure Ukraine's $70 billion debt burden, although a joint statement declared that progress had been made.

Bridging the gap between Ukraine and the international creditors who hold its sovereign debt will not be easy.

Following Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimean region and the conflict with pro-Russian separatists in the east that has wrecked its economy, Ukraine's debt is widely expected to top 100 per cent of GDP this year.

Kiev hopes for a 40 per cent debt writedown on bonds worth a little more than $15 billion in order to make the debt sustainable.

But a group of four creditors holding around $9 billion of Ukrainian bonds, led by US asset manager Franklin Templeton, disagree that a haircut is needed and have put forward an alternative proposal for maturity extensions and coupon reductions.

The only concrete example of progress so far has been the suggestion of swapping part of Ukraine's debt for GDP-linked bonds, which both sides support, and which would offer equity-like returns if the country's economy outperforms.

So far, Ukraine has met all of its debt obligations, including a $75 million coupon payment to Russia, and has successfully negotiated maturity extensions on a number of other payments.

However, Goldman Sachs has warned that default looks "likely" in July when a payment of $120 million comes due on a Ukrainian government bond.

Prices for the $2.6 billion bond maturing in 2017 sank below 40 cents on the dollar earlier this year as the escalating crisis encouraged investors to sell out. They have since recovered to a five-month high as investors register hope that a solution can still be found.

Vadim Khramov, an analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, cautions that things are still likely to get worse in Ukraine before they get better.

"A last-minute deal in September remains a likely possibility," he wrote. "However, the consensus is that risks of a moratorium and hard default have been increasing."

The International Monetary Fund has stated that it will stand by its bailout of Ukraine even if the country fails to reach an agreement on restructuring its private debt and Kiev is now waiting for the outcome of a review before it receives the next tranche of IMF funding.

Kiev was bailed out by the IMF last year in the wake of the removal of former president Viktor Yanukovich from office and received a fresh pledge this year as conflict with Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine's eastern districts worsened.

On Friday, Ukraine marked the one year anniversary of the MH17 air disaster, in which a passenger plane was shot down by pro-Russian Ukrainian rebels in eastern Ukraine as it flew from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.

"Hardly anyone can feel for the families of the victims of MH17 flight more than Ukrainians," said Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, reiterating the scale of destruction the country has suffered over the past year.

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 #48
Wall Street Journal
July 21, 2015
Crucial Weapons in the Defense of Ukraine
Without debt reduction and more aid, a young democracy could vanish.
By STEPHEN J. HADLEY And  ROBERT B. ZOELLICK
Mr. Hadley is a former national security adviser under President George W. Bush. Mr. Zoellick is a former president of the World Bank, U.S. Trade Representative and deputy secretary of state.

Russia's aggression against Ukraine is an assault on the vision that emerged from the end of the Cold War of a Europe whole, free and at peace. For that vision to be realized, the war against Ukraine must end, and its government must be able to offer its people a secure, prosperous and democratic future. If Ukraine-a country of more than 40 million people-becomes a failed state, the turmoil will spill into the European Union and likely fuel future conflict between Russia and the trans-Atlantic community.

Since Russia invaded and "annexed" Crimea in March 2014, the war has destroyed an estimated 20% of Ukraine's economic potential and displaced about one million people. If Ukraine's economy collapses-and if its democracy descends into recriminations and clashing factions-there can be no successful defense of its territory and independence.

The International Monetary Fund forecasts that Ukraine's economy will shrink by 9% this year after a drop of about 7% in 2014, and that inflation will reach almost 50%. But the IMF has also been impressed by the Ukrainian government's efforts to reform an opaque system that for too long fueled corruption not growth. This required great courage at a time when ordinary Ukrainians are suffering from rising prices and plummeting living standards.

Earlier this year, the Ukrainian parliament adopted a comprehensive reform program. Pensions were cut and taxes increased. Energy prices almost quadrupled. The number of public officials was cut by 28,000. The budget process was transformed so spending discipline can be enforced. The IMF recognized these efforts with a $17.5 billion loan package this year. But the fund estimates that Ukraine will need about $40 billion over four years. Russia doesn't have to conquer Ukraine; it can bleed its economy until the society and government collapse.

The U.S., EU and World Bank have each committed about $2 billion. Other donors are assisting. But this is a pittance compared with Greece. All should stretch to do more. If the Ukrainian patriots fail for lack of support, Europeans and Americans will pay the price for years through costs of insecurity, criminal networks and social breakdown.

The IMF also expects Ukraine to restructure its debt to achieve about $15 billion of savings. This is critical: Of the $3 billion of IMF support that the Ukrainian government has received this year, $2.4 billion has been used to service debt. It will be hard to increase support if the emergency money flows out the door to creditors.

No creditor wants to yield to a debt restructuring. Yet the bondholders' commercial interest argues for a serious adjustment that enables Ukraine's reforms to succeed so that the creditors can eventually get paid. Put simply, the IMF numbers-and the reformers' budgets-do not add up without debt reduction. About $3 billion of Ukraine's euro bonds are held by Russia, and we are not aware of any principle that a debtor must repay a country that invades it.

The IMF has stated it will continue to support Ukraine, in accordance with the fund's lending-into-arrears policy, even if Kiev halts payments to creditors. The Ukrainian government has suggested that it is willing to offer creditors increased returns in the future if the recovery succeeds beyond the expectations of the IMF program-analogous to GDP warrants. Yet the Ukrainian Parliament has also authorized the government's negotiators to default if the creditors fail to agree to a package that gives Ukrainian democracy a chance to survive.

Ukraine is not Argentina. Nor is it Greece. The country has been invaded. A young democracy threatened by war is taking reform steps reminiscent of the courageous Poles 25 years ago. The Poles changed European history; Ukrainians can, too. The Ukrainian government has announced plans for police and judicial reforms, international audits, tax simplification, laws to protect investors, privatizations and land reforms. The odds may be long, but the prize is great, and the trans-Atlantic community will never have a better chance to invest in Ukraine's success.

If Western governments do not stretch to assist-and creditors persist with short-term calculations-the likelihood is high that Ukraine will fall back to the post-Soviet world of authoritarian government and gangster capitalism. An open and prosperous Ukraine will allow opportunity and commerce to flourish, not just within its own borders, but also within the wider region. The vital interests of Ukrainians, other Europeans, Americans and global investors are one and the same. Now is the moment for the U.S. to lead in pressing all the parties to recognize that truth.

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