#2
The Independent (UK)
July 21, 2015
Editorial
Containing the bear: Major European nations have no appetite for conflict with Russia - diplomacy is still the best guarantor of peace
    
Mikheil Saakashvili - former President of Georgia and now Governor of the Ukrainian province of Odessa - has a warning for the West. He claims that if Vladimir Putin is not stopped in Ukraine he will "revisit" Georgia, where a nasty little war was fought in 2008, Azerbaijan, and, most alarmingly, the Baltic republics. According to Mr Saakashvili, Mr Putin will go after Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, all part of the USSR until 1991, if the Russians suspect Nato won't put up a fight.

Mr Saakashvili is not, however, an objective observer of events. As former President of a country that came into conflict with Russia, he is a sworn enemy of Mr Putin, with a reputation to improve and uphold. He is also, according to his many critics, something akin to an American puppet. Regardless of his credentials, or lack thereof, is he right about Russia? Mr Putin is no fool. He does not start wars he doesn't believe he can win. He does his homework, as  one might expect from a former high-ranking KGB officer. Strategically, he is very clear; and tactically he has proved himself adroit. He grabs what he can, when he can; the rest can await a fresh opportunity.

But what does the West want? In the final analysis the European powers closest to the Russian threat - Germany and France - have demonstrated they are not prepared to go to war over Ukraine. UN sanctions have been imposed, and that's about it. Mr Putin, it is thought, doesn't regard Ukraine as a proper country, and certainly not the  Crimean peninsula he annexed in March 2014. He got away with it. For the Baltic republics to be truly secure we in Nato and the EU must do three things.

First, by stationing forces there and conducting exercises, show that these republics are defended as full Nato members (as Georgia and Ukraine were not). Second, we need to talk to Russia, without prejudice and without conceding any point of principle, about Ukraine and other adventures. There is never harm in dialogue when it is from a position of strength. When Presidents Nixon and Reagan respectively met Mr Putin's predecessors to thaw relations and bring an end to the Cold War they did not do so with a view to bolstering Russia. Diplomatic contact doesn't mean we should relax sanctions; it is to show the Russians we mean what we say. It is also to show the Russians that the inferiority complex they seem to have acquired is quite misplaced.

Third, the West needs to respond to legitimate Russian concerns. If it's the case that Russian minorities are badly treated in the former Soviet republics, then we should move to protect them. The rights and cultural identity of the Russian communities in the Baltic republics were not always respected as they should have been in the years after the Cold War. They should be. Mr Putin knows full well this is the best excuse he has for rattling Nato's cage once again. There is no excuse for handing it to him.

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 #3
The Guardian
July 22, 2015
I have no illusions about Russia, but the sanctions must stop
Not being on speaking terms - let alone trading terms - with a country as influential as Russia is not practical in a world crying out for global co-operation
By Daniel Kawczynski
Daniel Kawczynski is Conservative MP for Shrewsbury & Atcham and an author. He serves as chairman of the Saudi Arabia all-party parliamentary group. His latest book is Seeking Gaddafi

As the only British MP to have been born in a Communist-occupied country, I have no illusions about the Russian bear. In the spring of 1983, when I first returned to Poland after the lifting of martial law, it broke my heart to see the country I loved struggling to survive under the Soviet-imposed regime. Everything was rationed, including petrol, meat and sugar. It was a life of almost interminable queuing, appalling indignities for the elderly and vulnerable and, for members of the generation growing into maturity during that period, little hope of ever achieving their dreams.

Late at night, behind locked doors in my grandfather's house, I recall listening with him to the BBC World Service - a station that it was illegal ever to tune in to under the oppressive regime of General Wojciech Jaruzelski. All of this misery for an entire nation because the old guard at the Kremlin had decreed that there had to be a series of buffer states between themselves and the west.

I remember how moved I had been when my classmates at school in England had clubbed together to send food parcels to Poland, but how I wished, too, it hadn't been necessary. If only more could have been done after the war to save the central and eastern European countries from this disastrous occupation. A more hardline approach then could have improved the lot of millions of people.

For all that, I believe we might now be antagonising the Russian bear too much. These are words I could never have imagined writing in my wildest dreams as a young man. This month, however, I have submitted a written question in the Commons asking for an estimate of the lost revenue to the UK from the sanctions we have imposed against Russia both in terms of lost foreign direct investment and a loss of British exports.

This may raise eyebrows. The consensus in the House of Commons up until now has been that Russia is an aggressor that must at all costs be isolated and contained and few, if any dissenting voices have been raised in the chamber about this policy. It has, however, been arrived at as a reaction to events, rather than ever being carefully thought through.

There are significant figures in the military establishment - including Lord Richards, the former chief of the defence staff - who believe, given the strength of Moscow's convictions and its historical propensity to accept pain in the perceived national interest, that an increased escalation will not work and could indeed be more damaging to Great Britain than to Russia.

It is important, of course, that militarily we always carry as big a stick as possible when it comes to Russia, but the other part of Theodore Roosevelt's old dictum we seem to forget - the "speaking softly".

Chancellor Merkel - rightly representing her country's business interests - has been more effective at that than we have been. She has invested a huge amount of time in trying to build a personal relationship with Vladimir Putin. How canny this looks when old hands in the City tell me that it may well be Russia that will eventually bail out Greece, with all of the political and financial ramifications that would entail.

Of course we must always show solidarity with our central and eastern European Nato allies during what is obviously a challenging time for them. Our proactive involvement in the Nato "tip of the spear" force is an example of that. At the same time we need a dialogue in the region with all the neighbouring countries and we need to ensure that they all have voices.

Still, not being on speaking terms - let alone trading terms - with a country as large and influential as Russia is simply not practical in a world that is crying out for global co-operation. On issues such as terrorism, we simply cannot afford not to stand united as fellow members of the UN security council.

We need to ensure, too, that Ukraine is protected from any further escalation of fighting in its eastern region. We must do this with cross-country talks between the UK, France, Germany, Belarus, Poland, Ukraine and Russia at the earliest opportunity in a neutral country to be agreed by all sides. The Minsk I and Minsk II talks have not yet produced any meaningful progress towards a long-term peaceful solution, but the fact that the UK has not participated in them may appear bizarre to some.

Our sanctions against Russia are of course understandable but they come at a huge cost to us. At this difficult time in the financial markets, with such instability in the eurozone, we have to ask how much longer we can afford to block British companies from trading with Russia. The prime minister may have set a target of £1 trillion exports by 2020, but the outgoing UK trade and investment minister Lord Green told me two years ago that we would be doing very well to reach 80% of that target. It is hard honestly to see how we are going to fill this £200bn black hole in the exports target unless we start trading normally again with the Russian bear.

It is not, however, just about money. My grandparents' generation cared so much about a united Europe precisely because they had lived through the second world war. The lessons of history too often seem lost on their children and grandchildren. The time has come to look to the future, not the past.

This article was originally published on ConservativeHome, part of the Guardian Comment Network

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 #4
Moscow Times
July 22, 2015
Russians Can't Decide Between Economic Development and Military Power

Russians are divided between focusing the nation's efforts on rejuvenating its military power and developing a strong economy, according to a survey published Tuesday by the Levada Center, an independent polling center.

Russia is halfway through a decade-long 20 trillion ruble ($350 billion) military rearmament and modernization campaign that critics say is diverting resources away from more productive sectors. And with Russia's economy in recession, the government is being forced to cut spending heavily in other areas to allow the defense budget to continue to expand. Russians are divided on how federal funds should be spent, the Levada poll showed.

Fifty-eight percent of respondents said they either fully agreed or mostly agreed with the statement "It is more important for Russia to be an economic rather than military power," while 33 percent disagreed.

But 53 percent of respondents said they either fully agreed or mostly agreed that "Russia should spend more on defense even if it creates problems for Russia's economic development," with 34 percent saying they disagreed.

Prioritizing defense spending over economic development was a hallmark of the Soviet-era economy. Defense spending fell sharply after the collapse of communism, but the Russian government begun to ramp up expenditure in recent years.

Russia spent 4.5 percent of its gross domestic product on defense last year, according to the World Bank. The U.S. spent 3.5 percent in 2014, the bank's data showed.

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#5
Moscow Times
July 22, 2015
Gorbachev Urges Renewed Ties With West
By Anna Dolgov

Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev said that problems inherited from previous eras are holding Russia back and urged Western leaders to restore ties with Moscow instead of trying to "provoke" it during a book presentation Tuesday, Russian media reports said.

"Many are trying to provoke Russia now," Gorbachev said at the presentation, Russian News Service reported. "A rich country, but can't unfold [its abilities]. But it's because it still cannot resolve the inheritance that it has receive from previous times."

Speaking in the wake of a recent nuclear deal with Iran that earned Russia praise for its role in the negotiations from U.S. President Barack Obama and other Western leaders, Gorbachev said it was "important to not miss the moment, to return to the position of trust," the report said.

Gorbachev has previously blamed the "mistakes" of the Soviet era for the crisis in Ukraine, which has soured Moscow's relations with the West, saying that leaders of former Soviet republics should have reached a stronger agreement on borders when the U.S.S.R. collapsed in 1991.

After Moscow's annexation of Crimea, Gorbachev spoke out in favor of the peninsula's "joining" Russia. But he also owns a stake in one of Russia's last independent newspapers, Novaya Gazeta weekly, which has harshly criticized President Vladimir Putin's policies.

#6
www.rt.com
July 22, 2015
PM Medvedev to lead United Russia list in 2016 parliamentary polls - report

United Russia will be led during elections by its current leader Dmitry Medvedev. Party officials said this would help make the president a non-partisan figure, but assured reporters that Vladimir Putin will always remain their "moral leader."

Mass circulation daily Izvestia quoted unnamed sources in United Russia as saying the elections policy change would be officially announced at the next party congress, but refused to give an exact date. Most likely the event will take place at the beginning of 2016, the sources suggested.

The centrist United Russia conservative party was initially built as a pro-Putin political project and even described its program as "Putin's course." In 2007, Putin agreed to lead United Russia's list in parliamentary polls even though he wasn't a party member at the time.

In the 2011 elections, United Russia confirmed then-president Dmitry Medvedev at the head of the elections list. After the polls (which gave United Russia the majority of seats in the Lower House) Medvedev swapped with Putin and became prime minister.

The head of United Russia's General Council, Sergey Neverov, said the break in tradition, according to which the party was always led in polls by the head of state, was due to the desire to alter the current political configuration and make the Russian president a figure above any party allegiances.

"It is usual when the party chairman personally heads the list. Vladimir Putin remains our moral leader and the founder of United Russia. In the president's post he determines the strategy and course for the country's development. And Dmitry Medvedev who heads United Russia is directing the party into the realization of these tasks," Neverov told reporters.

Some Russian political experts noted that the place on top of the elections list could be a kind of a guarantee that Medvedev will keep his post as the chairman of the government until the 2016 elections are over. The signal is important against the background of the opposition calling for the government's dismissal, they said.

The RBC news agency quoted a source "close to the presidential administration" as saying that the Kremlin didn't expect a sharp decrease in United Russia ratings due to the move. "Both Dmitry Medvedev and United Russia are carrying Vladimir Putin's rating by definition, high presidential rating boosts their popularity as well, but they are inside this rating and 20 percent of Putin's supporters vote for other political forces" the source told the agency.

RBC also cited first deputy head of the Russian presidential administration, Vyacheslav Volodin, as saying the Kremlin expected United Russia to get about 70 percent of votes at the next federal parliamentary polls.

Presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov told RBC that he considered it inappropriate to ask questions about the possible decisions of United Russia's elections congress before they were made.

Currently, United Russia holds 238 of 450 seats in the State Duma.

 

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 #7
Al Jazeera
www.aljazeera.com
July 22, 2015
Despite animosity, Moscow's Muslims change the city
At least 1.5 million Muslims in Russia's capital form the fastest growing and most ethnically diverse demographic group.
By Mansur Mirovalev

Moscow, Russia - Surrounded by movable metal fences and police, they placed their prayer rugs and shreds of wallpaper on the cold asphalt along the tram tracks.

Then they planted their feet and exhaled "God is great!" They bent, knelt, and prostrated in front of the golden-domed Sobornaya mosque despite the bewildered and scared faces of passersby and baton-wielding police officers around them.

More than 60,000 Muslims gathered at the square and five temporarily blocked streets around Moscow's main mosque, with an additional 180,000 gathering at five other mosques and three dozen temporary sites in Moscow and the greater Moscow region, to mark the end of this year's holy month of Ramadan, police said.

Each person had to pass through a metal detector and undergo an identification check.

Some Muslims were indignant about the treatment they faced on one of the year's holiest days.

"You want to pray at a mosque, you have to enter a cage," Murad Abdullaev, a full-bearded 29-year-old from Derbent, Russia's southernmost city in the restive province of Dagestan, told Al Jazeera.

"You pray at work, you get reprimanded, but when your colleagues show up hungover or take long cigarette breaks, it's OK," he said describing his colleagues at a construction company in southern Moscow.

Some Muscovites are also unhappy about the inconveniences they face during the celebration of the two major Muslim religious holidays Eid al-Fitr - the breaking of the fast festival at the end of Ramadan, and Eid al-Adha - the festival of sacrifice.

"Again, [some] streets are full of praying people, again the adjoining streets are blocked, [there are] tensions with police," popular blogger Ilya Varlamov wrote.

"For many years, this has been the picture in Moscow twice a year. And each time, everyone is surprised," the blogger said.

On days like these, Moscow seems quite a hostile place for the Muslims that now live here and form the fastest growing and most ethnically diverse sector of the population.

With an official population of 12.5 million, Russia's capital is now home to at least 1.5 million Muslims, according to political analyst Alexei Malashenko. This is by far more than the Muslim population of any other European city where the local population is not predominantly Muslim.

"Moscow is slowly adapting to being Europe's largest Muslim city, and Muslims are gradually adapting to it," Malashenko told Al Jazeera.

Moscow's Muslims

Russia's identity was forged during centuries-long confrontation, coexistence and cooperation with Muslim neighbours. The tiny principality of Moscow slowly defeated the Golden Horde, a powerful Mongol-Tatar khanate, and then waged countless wars in and against Ottoman Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and the Caucasus.

The Muslims who now live in Moscow are mostly the descendants of this historical legacy. Ethnic Tatars, Russia's third largest ethnic group after Slavic Russians and Ukrainians, have lived here for centuries; Azeris settled here in the 1990s after fleeing the Armenian-Azeri war.

They were followed by an ever-growing number of natives of Russia's Caucasus - a multiethnic and heavily subsidised region plagued by insurgency and violence.

Since the early 2000s, millions of labour migrants from ex-Soviet Central Asia have flooded into Russia, mostly seeking low-paid labour jobs. There is also a visible presence of Muslims from sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and the Middle East.

Yet, whether Russian-born or immigrant, secular or practising, Muslims don't feel welcome here. This is partly due to the fact that many Russians feel threatened by this influx of Muslims. The attacks carried out by Chechen fighters and female suicide bombers since the early 2000s also still frighten many.

Although there are no separate polls available for Moscow, a 2013 survey by VTsIOM, a state-owned pollster has found that almost one in seven Russians don't want to have Muslim neighbours, one-fourth do not want to live near a Caucasus native, and 28 percent don't want Central Asians next door. Some 45 percent of Russians support the nationalist slogan of "Russia for ethnic Russians", the poll found.

Making inroads

Moscow has only six mosques, and attempts to build new ones are met with protests and rallies.

Women wearing hijabs walk next to ladies who wear mini-skirts and provocative clothing even in sub-zero winter temperatures. Police routinely stop Muslim men for document checks based on their appearance - their skin colour, beards and clothing.

There are only two halal hotels in the city that sees millions of visitors a year. The city's only Muslim gym and health clinic closed down shortly after opening.

There are only a handful of Muslim kindergartens or schools. "They are far to get to and there are too few of them," Jannat Babakhanova of Limpopo, a small network of Muslim kindergartens, told Al Jazeera.

However, countless bakeries, cafes and restaurants have sprouted throughout Moscow selling Central Asian flat bread and samosas, pilaf and kebabs.

Halal food has become a profitable business - and many non-Muslims frightened by the low quality of foodstuff produced in Russia, have switched to halal meat.

"The market was untouched, and it was easy to fill it," Venera Kaderova of Halal Ash, a small producer of halal meat products, told Al Jazeera about the company's launch in the early 2000s.

"These days, the market is competitive," Kaderova said.

But the profitability of halal foods also triggered production of knock-off halal - and the emergence of such oddities as "halal" eggs, mineral water, and even snacks to go with beer.

The presence of Muslims in Moscow prompted another trend - the growing number of ethnic Russians who convert to Islam.

Anastasiya Korchagina changed her first name to Aisha after converting to Islam almost five years ago and now wears a vivid headscarf and conservative attire.

"I hear many compliments about how I am dressed and how beautiful it looks," Korchagina told Al Jazeera. "I've never faced bad attitude. It's just not there."

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#8
Bloomberg
July 22, 2015
Russia Braces for Longest Recession in Decades With $50 Oil
by Olga Tanas

For an economy that lives and dies by crude prices, the latest downturn in the world oil market means Russia's recession may stretch into next year for the longest slump in two decades.

Russia's first economic slump since 2009 looked like it would plateau as oil gained 40 percent from a six-month low in January. Crude's recovery has faltered in recent weeks, raising questions about government assurances that the economy will return to growth in 2016 and further squeezing a budget already on course for its widest deficit in five years.

Oil jitters will test the optimism of President Vladimir Putin, who's declared that Russia had put the worst of the economic crisis behind it, and heap pressure on his regime before early parliamentary elections in September next year. Russia, which ING Bank NV estimates needs oil at $80 a barrel to balance its budget, will endure a two-year economic contraction if crude prices remain at $60 through 2016, according to the central bank.

"Russia will face a recession or stagnation next year" if oil is near $50, Dmitry Polevoy, a Moscow-based economist at ING, said by e-mail. "It will likely be necessary to cut spending more, to postpone a part of military spending and to use what remains in the Reserve Fund."

Ruble, Sanctions

Reeling from a currency collapse last year and sanctions over Ukraine, the government has already cut budget outlays by 10 percent and dipped into one of its sovereign wealth funds, the Reserve Fund, to help cover the shortfall. Lower oil prices mean that Russia may potentially need financing from its other wealth fund, the National Wellbeing Fund, according to Polevoy.

The most severe stress test conducted by the central bank, which assumed oil at $40 and an economic slump of 7 percent, found that 187 lenders may face a capital shortage of 0.6 trillion rubles ($11 billion) while the share of non-performing loans more than doubles to 17.7 percent. The economy will contract for a third year in 2017 if oil remains at $40, the central bank said in June.

The government predicts economic growth at 2.3 percent in 2016 after improving this year's forecast to a 2.8 percent drop from a previously projected decline of 3 percent. Growth averaged 7 percent during Putin's first two terms as president in 2000-2008.

Exacerbate, Prolong

"Another oil price shock may exacerbate the recession and/or prolong it," Tatiana Orlova, the chief Russia economist for Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc in London, said in a report last week. "Although we currently expect the economy to post very modest growth of 0.5 percent in 2016, we think the economy may remain in recession throughout next year if the average Brent oil price remains below $60."

Brent crude, used to price about half of the world's oil including Russia's main export blend Urals, lost 0.7 percent to $56.64 as of 12:34 p.m. in Moscow. It's averaged about $59 this year.

The ruble, which plunged 46 percent against the dollar last year, weakened 0.2 percent to 57.0750 against the U.S. currency. It's the second-worst performer in the past month among 24 emerging-market currencies tracked by Bloomberg. Still, its price swings have stabilized, with one-month historical volatility subsiding to 13.6, the lowest level since October.

Later Exit

The government drafted next year's budget based on Urals averaging $60 a barrel, with a plan to narrow the deficit to 2.4 percent of gross domestic product in 2016 from the 3.7 percent projected for 2015.

Urals may average $55 a barrel in 2016, which would doom Russia to another year of falling consumption, according to a report published on Monday by OAO Sberbank, the country's biggest bank.

"An exit from the recession is postponed until 2017," Sberbank analysts led by Julia Tsepliaeva said in the report.

 

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 #9
AP
July 20, 2015
Russian scientists squeezed by sanctions, Kremlin policies
By NATALIYA VASILYEVA

NOVOSIBIRSK - Artur Bilsky's Institute of Thermophysics recently sought to buy equipment from a Japanese company that was a routine purchase a few years ago. The request was turned down "categorically," said Bilsky, a researcher at the institute.

Hundreds of other Russian scientists are reporting similar experiences of being refused sale of scientific equipment from abroad, or seeing research papers curtly turned down by Western publications. The reason, they believe, is a combination of sanctions against Russia over its actions in Ukraine and rising hostility to Russia in the West seeping into the scientific community.

Since Russia annexed Crimea last year, it has become almost impossible for scientists in Russia to buy anything in the United States or Japan that has a dual purpose, said physicist Alexander Shilov, who works in the Institute of Laser Physics in Russia's scientific hub of Akademgorodok ("Academy Town") part of Russia's third-largest city of Novosibirsk.

"Due to the sanctions" or "the conflict in Ukraine" are the most common explanations Shilov hears for refusing orders from Russia. "When they sell a piece of glass, how do they know whether we will use it in a military laser or a medical one?" he said.

The U.S. and EU sanctions were designed to halt exports to the Russian defense sector. When announcing a new round of sanctions in July 2014, the European Union noted specifically that they "should not affect the exports of dual-use goods and technology" to Russia for "non-military use." In reality, many Western companies were so spooked by the sanctions and the penalties they could face for violating them that the door was shut completely, the scientists say.

An American scholar who works with Russian universities - and asked to be unnamed because he was not authorized to speak on his university's behalf - confirmed that his Russian counterparts are having difficulties with Western companies. In some cases, he said, companies are saying they fear that the equipment might get slapped with sanctions while it is being delivered, or that they no longer have support staff in Russia to service it.

What's more, foreign-made equipment is now less affordable for Russian scientists because of the depreciation in the Russian ruble, which lost nearly half of its value since the Crimean annexation.

Kremlin Crackdown

The scientists' plight has been compounded by the Kremlin's own crackdown on Russian private funding of science, stemming from suspicions of Western influence. The government this year labeled the Dynasty Foundation, Russia's largest source of private funding for science, a "foreign agent" - which makes the group vulnerable to an array of surprise checks and audits. It is a Cold War term that carries connotations of spying. The foundation fell afoul of officialdom because its Russian founder funds the organization from money transferred from his foreign bank accounts.

"If Dynasty was named a foreign agent, then everyone who had contracts with Dynasty is an accomplice of a foreign agent," said Shilov. "We are all spies now."

The government has become increasingly suspicious of foreign-funded nongovernmental organizations, seeing them as potential agents of a hostile West. Russia has brushed off the sanctions imposed by the United States and European Union, saying that Russia has plenty of resources to replace banned imports with its own production.

The Russian government denied the scandal involving Dynasty is aimed at persecuting Russian scientists. Justice Minister Alexander Konovalov said Dynasty was receiving funds from abroad and therefore should be listed as a foreign agent.

But the sanctions have taken a toll, especially on scientists whose research hinges on access to Western-made materials and high-tech equipment. And several scientists told The Associated Press that since the March 2014 annexation of Crimea, publication of their articles in Western journals has either been delayed or turned down, with no explanation.

Editors and publishers at several U.S.-based scientific journals told The AP that they assess articles without any bias related to the geographic location of authors, or geopolitical concerns. They added that they have seen no evidence among their editors or reviewers to support the Russian scientists' claims.

"All papers are treated the same regardless of the nation they were submitted from," said William Kearney at the Washington-based National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which publishes the PNAS journal.

Back to the '90s

Scientists who have lived or worked in Akademgorodok for more than 15 years are particularly distressed because life had been getting better for them recently, after years of struggling with almost no funding after the chaotic 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union. They recall how the cash-strapped Russian government in the 1990s largely left its world-class scientists to their own devices: Some packed their bags for university jobs abroad, and some had to sell goods at the market or grow vegetables to survive the long Siberian winter, with wages regularly delayed for months.

Young men fled Akademgorodok for better paid jobs elsewhere, leaving the scientific hub in the hands of scientists close to retirement age who had few prospects of alternative employment.

"When I graduated 10 years ago, a significant number of my classmates went abroad, a significant number opened their own businesses and about 20 percent of graduates, at best, stayed to work in research," said Shilov.

Gone are the days when the scientists of Akademgorodok, which was built in a Siberian forest clearing in 1957, were forced to take jobs as bus drivers or market sellers to eke out a living. Over the past 15 years, Russia's federal spending on scientific research increased 20-fold to 350 billion rubles ($6.3 billion) this year. Bilsky, 38, who has worked at his institute since 1997, has witnessed the transformation.

"If you stand at the entrance here and see who comes in and comes out, you'll see there will be a lot of young employees. Many young scientists can afford a car and vacation," he said.

The average monthly salary of scientists across Russia rose from 2,700 rubles in 2000 to 32,600 rubles last year, now worth about $600 after the sharp fall of the ruble. The relative rise in fortunes has turned Akademgorodok into a charming suburb filled with 30-somethings, where young women push children in prams and smart coffee houses cater to a younger generation.

Political Interference

Now politics is again clouding the scientific horizon. Dynasty was planning to distribute nearly $8 million this year in grants and scholarships. But after the Justice Ministry ordered it to register as a foreign agent, founder Dmitry Zimin and its board decided this month to shut it down in protest over the stigma.

President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said he was sorry to hear that the foundation was closing down but insisted that no one forced it to do so.

The onslaught on the foundation has enraged many in Akademgorodok who have relied on its funding. Andrei Shchetnikov, who coaches the national youth physics team, said Dynasty has been covering half of the 1 million ruble budget for the annual Tournament of Young Physicists in Novosibirsk.

"For the projects that Dynasty supported, it was often the only steady financing they were getting," Shchetnikov said.

While confident that he'll find other sources of funding, he said more than money was at stake.

"What Dynasty has been doing ought to make the country proud," Shchetnikov said. "We have citizens who have made a fortune and understand that you need to support education projects - and that it's the future of Russia."

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 #10
Interfax
July 22, 2015
Human rights NGOs hope to prove they are not foreign agents after Justice Ministry warning

Leading Russian human rights organizations that have received warnings from the Justice Ministry intend to go to court to seek their removal from the register of NGOS classed as foreign agents.

"We disagree with being entered on this register. We will go to court," Svetlana Gannushkina, the head of the committee Civil Assistance, told Interfax on July 22.

"We have already filed a lawsuit, and because we believe it was wrong to include us in the register of foreign agents then there is nothing to warn us about," he said.

The Justice Ministry earlier reported that the ministry had issued warnings to 12 NGOs included in the register of NGOs classed as foreign agents, warning them about the liability for violating the legislation. Among the organizations warned by the Justice Ministry are the Civil Assistance, the center Memorial, the movement For Human Rights, the Committee Against Torture, and others.

Gannushkina said her organization had posted on its website information on its inclusion in the register of foreign agents. "We are also publishing photos of the people because of whom we are considered foreign agents: these people are children we are helping," she said.

Lev Ponomaryov, leader of the movement For Human Rights, told Interfax on Wednesday his organization will file a lawsuit to contest the warning issued by the Justice Ministry. "This warning contains some nonsense," he said.

Ponomaryov said his organization went to court to seek its removal from the register of foreign agents, but lost the lawsuit.

"We also have a collective claim with the European Court of Human Rights. We are complaining about the current situation and the law on foreign agents.

Additionally, we are now undergoing a procedure to leave the register of foreign agents, but it has turned out to be a very difficult thing to do. We have filed documents to be removed from the register, but our request was declined because one of our regional organizations received a foreign tranche less than one year ago. We need to wait until May 2016," Ponomaryov said.

Alexander Cherkasov, the head of the human rights center Memorial, told Interfax on July 22 his organization will also react to the Justice Ministry's warning.

"We will react to the different demands made by the Justice Ministry differently. We disagree with the inclusion of Memorial in the register of foreign agents. It's wrong and it's insulting. We are like bees: bees work and they have a stinger and we will contest. Not all our previous complaints have been considered by courts," Cherkasov said.

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 #11
www.opendemocracy.net
July 22, 2015
Will the patriotic stop list kill Russia's NGOs?
Since 2012, Russian NGOs receiving funding from abroad have had to register as 'foreign agents'. A new patriotic 'stop list' might shut this funding off forever.
By Vyacheslav Kozlov
Vyacheslav Kozlov is a journalist for daily newspaper Kommersant. He writes on international relations, nationalism, extremism, narco-politics, the Russian opposition and the problems facing Russia's NGOs. He has at various times worked for Vremya Novostei, Moskovskiye Novosti and the online publication Gazeta.ru. His work has also appeared in Novaya Gazeta and Lenta.ru.

On 8 July, two of Russia's largest NGOs-the Committee against Torture (KPP), which investigates police violence and abuse of power, and one of the country's most active voluntary organisations, and Dynasty, a charitable foundation funding educational and scientific projects-announced that they were closing down.

The reason? Earlier that day, Russia's Federation Council finally published a list of 12 organisations, whose activities were to be investigated by the General Prosecutor's Office, Foreign and Justice Ministries regarding their compliance with Russian law.

'Foreign agents'

As organisations receiving funding from abroad, KPP and Dynasty had been recently added to the official register of 'foreign agents'; and both decided that they could no longer work under such conditions.

KPP, founded in 2000, has not yet decided on its future, and may split into four or more smaller organisations, each with a separate remit. It will take the decision in the next month, but it is already clear that it will be difficult to continue its human rights 'flying squad' project. This project was set up in 2009 after KPP decided to look closely into crimes committed by the police and local authorities in Chechnya; and now has more than 230 cases of alleged torture under investigation, and another 100 at a preliminary stage.

Dynasty, which was set up by Dmitry Zimin, founder of the Russian mobile telecommunications giant VimpelCom, has also not yet announced any plans for the future.

KPP and Dynasty announced their closure on the day the Federation Council, Russia's upper legislative chamber, made public its so-called 'patriotic stop list': a list of 12 foreign NGOs that will probably be declared 'undesirable' in Russia.

The list includes such big players as Open Society Foundations (financed by George Soros), the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the MacArthur Foundation, The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and Freedom House, all US based, as well as the Education for Democracy Foundation and East European Democratic Centre (both based in Poland), the Ukrainian World Congress, Ukrainian World Coordination Council and the Crimean Field Mission on Human Rights.

This list was forwarded to the Ministries of Justice and Foreign Affairs, and the Prosecutor General's Office. If the organisations on it are indeed declared undesirable, they will be banned from working in Russia, and anyone working with them will risk a fine or even criminal charges.

In other words, Russian NGOs will be cut off from at least half of their funding, as over the last few years, US and British NGOs have become an important source of support for Russian rights organisations.

Turning the screws

The 'Stop list' bill, signed into law by President Putin at the end of May, is the latest turn of the government screws on Russia's NGO sector. The clampdown began two years ago, when officials started carrying out inspections of organisations under the 'foreign agents' law that applies to all NGOs receiving foreign funding that engage in 'political activity' (which can include, for example, environmental groups).

In practice, the maximum penalty for breaking the 'foreign agents' law is a fine of up to 600,000 roubles (£6,775), a hefty sum, but not a fatal one for large organisations.

The new undesirable organisations law imposes much more serious sanctions: a foreign or international NGO can be declared 'undesirable' if it 'represents a threat to the basis of Russia's constitutional order, its defence capability or the safety of the state'.

The law gives the Prosecutor General and his representatives almost unlimited powers: with the agreement of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs they can ban organisations from carrying out any programmes or projects on Russian territory, which basically means they can just stop NGOs working in Russia.

The law also introduces practical obstacles to Russian NGOs' receiving grants from abroad: banks and other financial institutions must refuse to carry out financial or other property transactions with an organisation that has been declared undesirable. And the fact of the refusal has to be registered and forwarded to the Federal Financial Monitoring Service, which will then forward it to the Prosecutor General's Office and the Ministry of Justice.

Meanwhile, anyone attempting to work for an undesirable organisation in Russia can be fined between 5,000 and 100,000 roubles (£56-£1,128), depending on their level of responsibility within the organisation, and if they are fined twice in any given year they can be charged with a criminal offence and fined 300,000-500,000 roubles (£3,385-£5,642)-around a year's salary for the average Russian.

Courts can also impose community service of up to 360 hours or a prison sentence of two to six years, and the law gives no guidance as to when one or other penalty is appropriate - judges must evidently decide for themselves whether to impose a fine or a prison term.

Closing down

As yet, the Federation Council's list of organisations has no actual force in law, but the chances are that they will be declared undesirable and will be unable to operate any further. Russian NGOs will then be forced to freeze all contacts with the bodies in question. 'Nobody wants to go to jail', says Yelena Topoleva-Soldunova, a member of the Presidential Council for Human Rights. 'So the chances are that not only will our NGOs stop working with undesirable organisations, but the foreign funders themselves will not risk contact with their previous Russian beneficiaries.'

The disappearance of these funding organisations will inevitably lead to the closure of many social and human rights projects in Russia. On 21 July, the MacArthur Foundation announced the closure of its Moscow office. Its parting statement summarises very well the sense of regret, and also what is being lost.

Topoleva-Soldunova gives me just one telling example. 'The Mott Foundation has been involved over the last 15 years in the community foundation movement', she says.

The first community foundation was set up in 1914 in Cleveland, Ohio, and they now exist across the world. They are designed to pool donations into a coordinated investment and grant-making facility to improve a given town or region, as decided by the local community, and are an important means of fostering the development of civil society at a local and regional level. 'There are about 50 foundations now in Russia', Yelena tells me.

'They not only collect and distribute money from individuals and businesses, but attract government funding as well, while grants are awarded on a competitive basis. And the Mott Foundation was the first organisation to support this scheme in Russia.'

But not any longer; the Mott Foundation is, of course, included in the list of undesirable organisations.

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 #12
The International New York Times
July 23, 2015
Russia's Scientists Fall Silent
By HARLEY D. BALZER
Harley D. Balzer is associate professor of government and international affairs at Georgetown University, former executive director of the International Science Foundation, and served on the governing council of MacArthur Foundation's BRHE program.

Moscow has released an initial list of "undesirable organizations" that constitute a "threat to the foundations of the constitutional system of the Russian Federation, its defense capabilities and its national security." Along with the Open Society Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute and International Republican Institute, the list includes the MacArthur Foundation.

The move, part of Vladimir Putin's campaign to stifle civil society in Russia, comes as no surprise. What is surprising and depressing, though, has been the overall reaction of Western NGOs and Russian academics to the Kremlin's action. As one who has been closely involved in efforts to improve ties between Russian and American scientists for more than two decades, I've seen few signs of serious protest against Moscow's campaign to end a long and fruitful era of cooperation. Most people have responded in the same way: Keep your head down and hope that you are not a victim.

In the early 1990s, I served as executive director of George Soros's International Science Foundation for the former Soviet Union and Baltic States. We helped tens of thousands of scientists remain in the profession by giving them emergency support grants to feed their families. We spent nearly $70 million on the region's first peer-reviewed research grant competition. And we induced Mr. Soros to allocate another $100 million to establish Internet centers at Russian universities.

After Mr. Soros shifted his focus and curtailed his support for the foundation in 1995, Victor Rabinowitch of the MacArthur Foundation asked several people who had been involved to devise a program to advance research in the natural sciences in the Russian education system. Gerson Sher, who had worked for decades at the National Science Foundation, Loren Graham, a prominent historian of science at M.I.T., and I developed a proposal to establish centers combining research and education at Russian universities - a shift from the Soviet model, in which universities emphasized teaching while the Academy of Sciences and industry institutes conducted research.

In 1997, we refined the proposal at a conference at Georgetown University with several Russian colleagues. When we presented the program to the education minister, Alexander Tikhonov, in March 1998, he was enthusiastic, stating that his ministry would match every dollar that MacArthur and its partner in the project, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, contributed.

That August Russia was hit by an economic crisis, but we were able to keep our programs going. We established a governing council with seven Russian and seven foreign members that made all decisions by consensus. We selected 16 Russian universities to receive grants of $1 million over three years. We also established the first technology transfer offices at Russian universities, helped Russian scientists learn how to deal with equipment suppliers, and provided funding to attend international conferences. These efforts were based on the conviction that we could help a country with an outstanding scientific tradition to continue to contribute to the international community.

Andrei Fursenko, the minister of education and science from 2004 to 2012, was a strong supporter. As MacArthur Foundation funding began to taper off, he asked for our help in developing four more research and education centers to be funded by his ministry, which subsequently established many more of these centers. Mr. Putin, campaigning to reclaim the presidency in 2012, praised them as a "Russian and international model of combining science and education" and proposed establishing them at 10 of the military's institutions of higher education.

In June 2014 I met with Mr. Fursenko in Moscow. He expressed concern about Russian scientists refusing to revise their articles to respond to criticisms and suggestions from peer reviewers - a major reason behind their declining share of publications in international journals.

Earlier this month, I saw Mr. Fursenko again. I expressed my concerns over the Kremlin's recent actions. He told me bluntly that things have changed. He said that this was because "America cannot tolerate any partner who does not behave as an obedient child listening to a parent's strictures." Russia, he said, is tired of this.

What produced this dramatic shift? Some might point to Russian revanchism, the seizure of Crimea and the conflict in Ukraine. But these are symptoms of a broader reversal. The Kremlin, suspicious of the West's democratic values and what they might bring, now finds the risks of cooperation to be too great.

Pushback, though feeble, is not entirely dead. After Kendrick White, an American entrepreneur and innovator who had been working with Nizhnyi Novgorod University for many years, was dismissed late last month for actions that were "harmful" to Russia, the National Association of Business Angels demanded an investigation. When the Kremlin designated the Dynasty Foundation - the one Russian family foundation supporting scientific research - as a foreign agent, some Russian scientists and ordinary citizens protested. Unfortunately, Dynasty's board has voted to end its activities.

The United States government, understandably, is wary of reinforcing Kremlin claims that American NGOs are being used by Washington to establish a fifth column in Russia. Its response has been measured. But this is a battle the Russian academic community and other professional groups must fight. It is up to Russian scholars and foreign NGOs to defend their work, loudly and clearly.

Rather than hushing up after its assistant director was turned away at Moscow's international airport, the Kennan Institute should be encouraging its Russian alumni association to mount a vigorous protest. The MacArthur Foundation's grantees number in the thousands. Banded together they would represent a powerful voice.

If proponents of cooperation keep silent, the damage to Russia's scientific establishment - and to the country's future prosperity - will be even more extensive.

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 #13
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
July 21, 2015
Press Digest: Russian ruble may face further turmoil in coming months
RBTH presents a selection of views from leading Russian media on international events, featuring reports on the possibility of more turbulence ahead for the Russian ruble, attempts by regional authorities in Russia to increase voter turnout at elections, and the threats to Russian business posed by the new American law on tax compliance, or FATCA.
Yekaterina Sinelschikova, RBTH

New currency shock to hit Russia - Sberbank experts

The dollar may jump again up to nearly 70 rubles and more, writes the Russian daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta, citing a review of experts from the Sberbank Center for Macroeconomic Research.

They do not rule out a new exchange rate shock because of falling oil prices, which may occur after the influx of Iranian oil to the market and a decrease in demand from China.

At the same time, according to Sberbank's analysts, economic isolation even plays into the hands of Russia in this case - without it, things could have been worse. In their view, it reduces the country's vulnerability to external shocks. Now, the analysts say, the exit from the crisis will take longer, but "no catastrophic scenarios can be seen."

However, director of the FBK Institute of Strategic Analysis, Igor Nikolayev, told Nezavisimaya Gazeta that the economy is not isolated enough to prevent the weakening of the ruble. Therefore, he expects a strong depreciation of up to 75 rubles per dollar by the fall.

Alexander Potavin, chief analyst at savings management company Upravleniye Sberezheniyami, is pessimistic too: The lifting of sanctions on Iran, a rise in U.S. Federal Reserve System interest rates closer to the end of the year and large foreign currency payments on foreign debt in December 2015 all pose potential risks for the ruble, he believes.
 
Authorities try to mobilize voters to increase legitimacy of regional elections

The lack of serious competition for incumbent governors and, as a consequence, the lack of voter interest in regional elections are forcing official candidates to resort to mobilization techniques, the business daily Vedomosti reports, citing a report by Golos, a public movement in defense of the rights of voters.

Golos' experts note the increase in "ceremonial activity" by candidates (the number of trips to the regions has been increased), the growth of the role of election campaigns (which, however, are characterized by the use of administrative resources and the inequality of candidates in their access to the media, the report says) and operations to discredit opposition parties.

However, as political analyst Konstantin Kalachyov told Vedomosti, it is not necessary to encourage voter participation; what is most important for the authorities is to have the elections pass without scandal, as there will be a 40-percent voter turnout in any case.

According to him, Golos is simply exaggerating. Nobody has done away with counter-propaganda, said Kalachyov, it is clear that the authorities will try to discredit the opposition. "Although it is infighting that creates more problems for the opposition," he added.
 
U.S. law on tax compliance threatens Russian business

Non-adherence to the U.S. law on tax compliance, or FATCA (Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act) poses real risks for Russian business, writes business daily Kommersant.

The non-banking financial sector was first to suffer. Fearing sanctions from Western counterparts, Russian banks and non-bank credit organizations began to demand that fellow financiers from related sectors register with the U.S. tax authorities, threatening them with a "deterioration of the operating environment" -from more stringent control to the closure of accounts. Eliminating risks by adhering to the FATCA will cost MFIs (monetary financial institutions), non-state pension funds, brokers, insurers and others dearly; the costs of complying with the legislation are estimated at tens of millions of rubles per player.

The problem with the divergence in the understanding of whom FATCA applies to emerges not for the first time, according to Dmitry Chistov, an independent expert in the field of compliance and combating money laundering and the financing of terrorism, who says this is connected with the fact that the American law contains only general descriptions of the activities of financial institutions.

"The so-called gray areas, where it is unclear whether or not to classify, for example, MFIs as financial institutions, existed from the very beginning," Chistov told Kommersant.

"If the U.S. and Russia had signed the intercountry agreement (this fell through in spring 2014), the countries could agree on what categories of individual are not considered financial institutions under the FATCA," said PwC Legal CIS partner Maxim Kandyba.

In such a situation, the problem with MFIs is just the tip of the iceberg, experts say. According to Kandyba, as of now, 20-30 percent of the banks' client bases may be recognized as non-aligned financial institutions.

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 #14
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
July 22, 2015
MacArthur Foundation to close office in Russia over restrictive new laws
The U.S.-based MacArthur Foundation has announced that it is to cease its work in Russia in connection with new legislation that seeks to limit the activities of foreign organizations seen as a threat to national security. The MacArthur NGO, which receives no funding from the state, has awarded $172 million to Russian higher education, human rights and campaigns to limit nuclear weapons proliferation since 1992.
Anna Sorokina, RBTH, combined report

The MacArthur Foundation, an American fund recently included on a list of foreign organizations whose work in Russia was seen as a threat to national security by senators of Russia's Federation Council, has decided to close its branch in Moscow.

"It is with regret, but with confidence that it is the right decision, that we share the news that the MacArthur Foundation will close its branch office in Moscow," the foundation has said in a statement posted on its website.

The organization notes that this decision was made because of two new Russian laws that impede the operation of foreign organizations in the country: a law requiring Russian NGOs to register as foreign agents if they receive foreign funding and engage in "political activities" and a law allowing authorities to declare the activities of international organizations "undesirable" if they present "a threat to the foundations of the constitutional order of the Russian Federation, the defense capability of the country or the security of the state."

"These laws, public statements by Russian legislators, and the vote by the Federation Council to include MacArthur on a 'patriotic stop-list' of organizations recommended for designation as 'undesirable' make it clear that the Russian government regards MacArthur's continued presence as unwelcome," the statement says.

The MacArthur Foundation noted that the organization's activities in Russia have always had charitable aims.

"We are entirely independent of the United States government and receive no funding from it," reads the statement. "We have never supported political activities or other actions that could reasonably be construed as meeting the definition of 'undesirable.'"

"In the process of closing our office, the fund promises to take all reasonable steps in accordance with law to ensure the safety and well-being of the staff and to work with its grantees to minimize disruption and harm to them."

According to the statement, since the fund was established its office in 1992, it has awarded more than $173 million in grants to further higher education in Russia, advance human rights, and limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Russia's Federation Council unveiled the so-called "patriotic stop-list," comprising 12 foreign organizations whom senators suspect of activities detrimental to national interests, on July 8. The list consists of eight American, three Ukrainian and one Polish organization, and includes well-known bodies such as Freedom House, the MacArthur Foundation, the Soros Foundation and others.

According to Russian human rights movement veteran and Moscow Helsinki Group leader Lyudmila Alexeyeva, the departure of MacArthur Foundation from Russia is a loss for Russian civil society.

"It is a pity. This is a loss for civil society, of people living in Russia. It is clear why they have decided to leave - they are simply unable to work here," Alexeyeva told the Interfax news agency on July 22.

The foundation was engaged in education projects in Russia and financed Moscow Helsinki Group's human rights school for years, she said.

"The foundation heads visited Moscow several months ago; they came to me and asked what they could do for Russian civil society. I told them they could do nothing because they would not be allowed to work here. I advised that they shift to Ukraine the effort and money they had been investing in very important work in Russia," said Alexeyeva.

"This is just the kind of situation, when the law [on "undesirable organizations"] has yet to begin functioning, but its consequences are already present," Tatyana Lokshina, program director at Human Rights Watch in Russia told Russian business daily Kommersant. "This is one of the mechanisms that is plunging Russian civil society and NGOs into increasing isolation and is cutting Russia off from full international cooperation."

According to Lokshina, "the very fact" that the "patriotic stop-list" was released is keeping "international organizations in Russia on edge": "As a result some will decide to leave by themselves. This will inflict enormous damage to Russian NGOs above all," she said.

The Kremlin, meanwhile, has refused to comment on the decision by the MacArthur Foundation to end its activities in Russia. "It's not the Kremlin's agenda," said presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov in response to questions from journalists about the American fund and its relationship to the "patriotic stop list."

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 #15
Christian Science Monitor
July 21, 2015
Iran nuke deal gives Russia a boost - for now
After years of supporting Iran in its efforts to reach a deal on its nuclear program, Russia comes away as a big winner in last week's accord. But that isn't likely to continue if and when Iran rejoins the global economy.
By Fred Weir, Correspondent

MOSCOW-After years of hard lobbying for a nuclear deal between Iran and the big powers, Russia looks at first glance like one of the big winners from the agreement finally reached last week. And in the short run, Moscow may indeed benefit greatly, experts say.

But in the longer haul, assuming the accord holds, Russia is likely to see only limited economic gains as Iran emerges from years of harsh sanctions and begins doing business with the world once again.

In immediate political terms, the deal looks like a major win for Russian diplomacy. In his remarks about the agreement, President Obama went out of his way to praise the constructive role played by Russia as negotiations came down to the wire last week. In a phone conversation between Mr. Obama and Vladimir Putin, the two reportedly stressed the desirability of extending such cooperation to other vexing problems such as Ukraine and Syria.

"There is a strong feeling in Moscow that we can capitalize on this," says Sergei Strokan, foreign affairs columnist for the pro-business Moscow daily Kommersant. "It's not just about Iran, but it could be a turning point in our whole relationship with the West. At the very least, those rare words of praise from Obama demonstrate that we are not a pariah state; it must have meant a great deal to Putin to hear that.

"But there's also a belief that we can turn the positive energy generated from working together on Iran into real progress in other areas," he adds.

Some observers say they can already detect signs of new US-Russian cooperation in efforts to implement the Minsk-II cease-fire accord in Ukraine.

In the economic gold rush that's expected when Iran's frozen assets are released and the oil-and-gas rich country resumes full-scale exports to the world, Russia appears poised to try and take advantage of its (largely rhetorical) support for Iran during its long and acrimonious standoff with the West.

Russia has already tentatively contracted to sell up to eight new civilian atomic reactors to Iran, and recently announced that it will go ahead with a long-stalled sale of sophisticated S-300 air defense systems.

Russian oil and gas companies are rushing to get in on the  expected development boom as Iran starts to ramp up its hydrocarbon exports after years of sanctions-induced slump.

But the potential benefits for Russia probably end there.

Iran's expected return to global hydrocarbon markets will likely depress prices, and deliver another blow to the oil-and-gas dependent Russian economy. Iran, which has the world's  second-largest reserves of natural gas, might even threaten Russia's place as the biggest exporter of gas to the European market.

Other than nuclear technology, arms, and some engineering expertise, Russia has little to offer a country whose appetite for just about everything is bound to be voracious as it emerges from the deep-freeze of sanctions.

"The Iranian market is potentially very big. And we can already see German, French, and Japanese businesses gearing up to jump in. There are few areas in which we can compete with any of them," says Mr. Strokan.

"So, we may bask in the feeling that we won the diplomatic battle, and earned some leverage. But, if we speak about the economic race that's about to be launched, it's already ordained that others are going to come out on top."

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 #16
Valdai Discussion Club
http://valdaiclub.com
July 21, 2015
Pentagon's New Cold War Strategy
By Viktor Litovkin
Viktor Litovkin is TASS military analyst.

A recent meeting of Russia's Security Council discussed ways to protect national interests in conditions of anti-Russian restrictions introduced by several countries, primarily the United States and its NATO allies and the EU. The reason for their pressure is clear: Moscow pursues an independent foreign policy and does not trade in sovereignty, which infuriates some foreign leaders, especially those who fully depend on Washington and Brussels. This also angers those who have grown used to dominating the world and believe in their exceptionalism and even their "messianic" destiny. This explains their search for any pretext to accuse Russia of all the sins they can think of, and more.

It makes sense that the 2015 National Military Strategy (2015 NMS) of the Joint Chiefs of Staff implies that Russia is challenging international norms; that is, the norms that suit the US and NATO and that can be described as Pax Americana.

The 24-page document published on the official website of the Joint Chiefs of Staff begins with a description of today's strategic environment. According to US generals, its complexity and rapid change are driven by globalization, the diffusion of technology, and demographic shifts: populations in Europe and across northern Asia are set to decline and get older, while youth populations are rapidly growing in Africa and the Middle East. Global problems have not diminished, the US generals say, pointing to violent extremist organizations and revisionist states. The generals don't explain what they mean by "revisionism" but that group includes, very logically, Russia, Iran, North Korea and China.

At the same time, the 2015 NMS says that "most states today - led by the United States, its allies, and partners - support the established institutions and processes dedicated to preventing conflict, respecting sovereignty, and furthering human rights. Some states, however, are attempting to revise key aspects of the international order and are acting in a manner that threatens our national security interests."

This is how 2015 NMS describes today's strategic environment.

According to this document, Russia does not respect the sovereignty of its neighbors and is willing to use force to achieve its goals. It claims that Russia's military actions are undermining regional security directly and through proxy forces and violate numerous agreements in which it pledged to act in accordance with international norms, including the UN Charter, Helsinki Accords, Russia-NATO Founding Act, Budapest Memorandum, and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

Washington has used this propaganda trick very often to accuse Moscow of its own actions, regardless of the fact that informed people could cite numerous US violations of the UN Charter, the Helsinki Accords, the Russia-NATO Founding Act and the INF Treaty.

They include the aggression against Yugoslavia (1999), during which Serbia lost a large province (Kosovo and Metohija), two Iraq wars (1990 and 2003-2011), the Afghan war (2001-2014), the infamous war in Somalia (1993) and the bombing of Libya in 1986 and its invasion in 2011. The US has been supporting the Syrian armed opposition against the country's legitimate president, Bashar al-Assad (since 2012), and has deployed 5,000 troops and 250 tanks in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, in gross violation of the Russia-NATO Founding Act (1997). It has violated the INF Treaty by using missile drones to test its ballistic missile defense systems, interfered in the internal affairs of sovereign states, and orchestrated "color" revolutions across a vast area from Tunis, Egypt and Georgia to Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine.  

There are many more such examples, but I think the above is enough to see that it is the United States and its NATO allies that do not respect international institutions, democratic norms and human rights. But Washington continues to accuse Russia of all manner of sins, including the use of hybrid war methods, which consist of military forces assuming a non-state identity and asymmetric threats. According to the 2015 NMS, this is what Russia did in Crimea.

But a hybrid conflict is more than "polite people" assuming a non-state identity, as any respectable military expert will tell you. The key element of a hybrid conflict is an integrated combination of political, diplomatic, economic, financial, information and psychological measures of pressure on the opponent (rival) aimed at forcing him to change his foreign and domestic policies. This is what the EU, its financial institutions and the IMF have been doing to Greece in the past few weeks. Military action is only taken at the end of a hybrid conflict - usually after a color revolution - or in its place. The military joke is that generals are like surgeons: they step in when all other methods have failed.

It's no joke that the Pentagon's new strategy, which outlines possible military actions against revisionist states and violent extremist organizations and incudes complaints about Iran, North Korea, China and terrorist organizations such as the "Islamic State", is actually a proclamation of a new cold war against Russia.

According to Sergei Rogov, director of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute for the US and Canadian Studies, "over the past year, Russia-US relations have seriously soured and have reached a level of confrontation that many analysts describe as a new stage of the Cold War." Ideological differences have been settled since the first stage of the Cold War, which was marked by the global confrontation of two rival systems. But the sides still have weapons for waging such a war, including a new arms race, economic sanctions and propaganda attacks. "Half a year ago, the Obama Administration approved a new National Security Strategy, which mentioned 'Russian aggression' over a dozen times. The Pentagon's 2015 National Military Strategy is clearly based on the US fundamental national security doctrine, according to which Russia's policy is challenging the international norms imposed by the US. Russia is described as a revisionist state that does not respect the sovereignty of its neighbors and is willing to use force to achieve its goals. According to this document, the US needs to counter aggression from revisionist states and to deter, deny and defeat potential state adversaries," Rogov said.

According to the 2015 NMS, although Russia has contributed in select security areas, such as counter-narcotics and counterterrorism, the US military policy is focused on confrontation with Russia. This is probably because Russia has not and does not intend to adjust its policy to the US leadership mentioned in the new US military strategy.

In this situation, Russia should calmly and consistently implement its independent foreign and domestic policy, irrespective of what its partners over the ocean may say. President Vladimir Putin has said on more than one occasion that Russia does not intend to threaten any country. "We do not have - and cannot have - any aggressive plans. We don't threaten anyone and we try to resolve all conflicts by political means only, with respect for international law and the interests of other nations," the Russian president said at a reception in honor of graduates of military academies in late June. "Russia is a nation that is open to the world, a country that advocates strengthening cooperation and partnership with everyone who is ready to do so," he said.

"Attempts to split and divide our society, play on our problems, and seek out our vulnerable spots and weak links have not produced the results hoped for by those who imposed these restrictive measures on our country and continue to support them," Putin said at a recent meeting of Russia's Security Council at the Kremlin.

The president believes recent events show that we cannot hope that some of our geopolitical opponents will change their hostile course anytime in the foreseeable future. In this situation, "we must make a rapid analysis of all the potential challenges and risks we face - political, economic, information risks and others. Based on this analysis, we then need to make adjustments to our National Security Strategy," Putin said. "At the same time, our strategic course in the foreign policy area remains unchanged. We are open for equal cooperation and collective work on key issues on the international agenda. We will continue to build relations with our partners based on the principles of respect and mutual consideration of each other's interests, so long as this does not harm our own sovereignty and national security, of course."

Russia is not going to join a new arms race. It's a vain hope that the West can ruin Russia through an arms race, just as it did to the Soviet Union. Russia's armed forces will have the weapons to remind some hot heads that it's better to have Russia as a friend than as an enemy, better to cooperate with it on equal terms.

As for the Pentagon's new Cold War concept, it's not the first and it won't be the last. It's only good for US Senators and generals, but it won't frighten Russia.

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 #17
Russia Insider/Katehon
www.russia-insider.com
July 22, 2015
Russia's Sanctioned Conservative Philosopher Calls for Crusade Against Liberalism and Globalism (Dugin)
Russia's conservative Enfant Terrible says we are entering a post-modern age of theology and tradition. It's all explained is his imaginatively titled "Fourth Political Theory"

Oh Dear, Wikipedia, that swamp of neo-con intellectual sewage, is trying to scare us again. Here they are on Alexander Dugin:  "a Russian political scientist known for his fascist views[3] who calls to hasten the "end of times" with all-out war. ... seen as the driving conceptual force behind ... the annexation of Crimea  ...  proposed in 2014 to strip all dissidents  ...  of citizenship and deport them from the country."

Well here he is explaining his views in the publication of Katehon, the newly founded European Christian conservative think tank backed by, among others, Konstantin Malofeev, the Christian oligarch who was sanctioned for, as far as we can tell, being an activist against the homosexual lobby in the US.

See for yourself how frightening Mr. Dugin is...

This article originally appeared at Katehon [http://katehon.com/toppriority/1061-the-fourth-political-theory.html]

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The Fourth Political Theory is concerned with the new rebirth of the old enemy. It disputes liberalism as did the Second and Third Political Theories of old, but it disputes it in a new condition.

End of the 20th Century - The End of the Epoch of Modernity

The 20th century ended, but we're only now beginning to realize that. The 20th century was the century of ideology. If in the previous century religions, dynasties, aristocracies and nation-states played a big role in the life of peoples and societies, then in the 20th century politics redeployed into a strictly ideological region, reshaping the map of the world, ethnic groups and civilizations in a new mould. In part, political ideologies embodied in themselves previous, deeper civilizational tendencies; in part they were absolutely innovative. All the political ideologies, having reached the peak of their dissemination and influence in the 20th century, were the outcome of "the new time" [i.e. the Modern Era]; and embodied, although differently and by different signs, the soul of Modernity. Today we are freeing ourselves from this epoch in leaps and bounds. Thus, everyone speaks more and more often of "the crisis of ideology", even of "the end of ideology" . (Thus, in the constitution of the Russian Federation the existence of a government ideology is directly denied.) It is high time to occupy ourselves with this question more attentively.

The Three Main Political Theories and Their Fate in the 20th Century

The three foundational ideologies of the 20th century were:

* Liberalism (right and left)
* Communism (including together with Marxism both socialism and social-democracy)
* Fascism (including National-Socialism and other variants of the "Third Way", the National Syndicalism of Franco, Justicialism of Peron, the regime of Salazar, etc.)

They fought amongst themselves to the death, forming along the way the whole dramatic, bloody political history of the 20th century. It is logical to assign to these ideologies (political theories) ordinal numbers according both to their meanings and to the order of their appearances, as was done above.

The first political theory is liberalism. It appeared first (back in the 18th century) and turned out to be the most stable and successful, having beaten its opponents in the historical battle at last. By means of this victory it proved along the way its claim to the full inheritance of the Enlightenment. Today it is clear: precisely liberalism more exactly than any another political theory conforms to the epoch of modernity. Although, earlier, this was contested (for that matter, dramatically, actively, and sometimes convincingly) - by communism.

It is fair to call communism (together with socialism in all its variations) the second political theory. It appeared after liberalism, as a critical reaction to the establishment of the bourgeois-capitalist system, the ideological expression of which was liberalism.

And, finally, fascism is the third political theory. Laying claim to its interpretation of the soul of modernity (many researchers, in particular Hannah Arendt, rightly see totalitarianism as one of the political forms of modernity) fascism turned together also to the ideas and symbols of traditional society. In some instances this resulted in eclecticism; in others, in the striving of conservatives to head a revolution rather than resisting it and bringing society into the opposite direction (Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, D. Merezhkovsky, etc.).

Fascism appeared after the other major political theories and disappeared before them. The alliance of the first political theory and the second political theory and the suicidal geopolitical calculations of Hitler defeated it at take-off. The third political theory died a violent death, not having seen old age and natural decomposition (in contrast to the USSR). That's why this bloody, vampirical spectre, shaded with the aura of "world evil", is so magnetically appealing for the decadent tastes of post-modernity and why it is still so scary to humanity.

Fascism, having disappeared, freed up space for a battle of the first political theory with the second. This took place in the form of the "Cold War" and threw up the strategic geometry of the "bi-polar world", which lasted almost half a century. In 1991 the first political theory (liberalism) defeated the second (socialism). That was the decline of world communism.

And so, at the end of the 20th century, of the three political theories capable of mobilizing many millions of masses in all areas of the planet, only one remained - liberalism. But when it was left alone, everyone in unison started speaking of "the end of ideology." Why?

The End of Liberalism and Post-Liberalism

It happened that the victory of liberalism (the first political theory) coincided with its end. But this paradox is only apparent. Liberalism initially showed itself forth as an ideology; not as dogmatic as Marxism, but no less philosophical, well built and precise. It was ideologically opposed to Marxism and fascism, waging with them not only a technological war for survival, but also defending its right to a monopolistic formation of the way of the future. While other concurrent ideologies were alive, liberalism remained and grew stronger particularly as an ideology; that is, a totality of ideas, opinions, and projects peculiar to a historical subject. Each of the three political theories had its own subject.

The subject of communism was the class; the subject of fascism was the State (in the Italian fascism of Mussolini) or the race (in Hitler's National-Socialism). In liberalism the subject was the individual, freed from all forms of collective identity, from all kinds of "attachments" (l'appartenance).

While the ideological fight had formal antagonists, entire narodi and societies (at least theoretically) could select which subject to address themselves to; to the class-based, the racial (Statist), or the individual. The victory of liberalism answered that question: the normative subject at the limits of all humanity became the individual.

And soon appears the phenomenon of globalization, the model of a post-industrial society, the beginning of the epoch of post-modernity. From now on the individual subject is no more the result of a choice but some kind of compulsory given. A man is freed from "attachments", the ideology of "human rights" becomes standard (at least in theory) and, in fact, compulsory.

Mankind, composed of individuals, is naturally drawn to universalism, becomes global and integrated. Thus is born the project of "world government" and "world rule" (globalism).

The new level of technological development allows people to reach independence from the class structures of industrial societies (post-industrialism).

The values of rationalism, science and positivism are recognized as "disguised forms of totalitarian repressive strategies" (big narratives) and are exposed to criticism - with a parallel glorification of complete freedom and independence of individual from any restraining factors, for that matter from reason, morality, identities (social, ethnic, even gender), discipline, and so on (post-modernism).

At this stage liberalism stops being the first political theory, but becomes the only political practice. "The end of history" comes; politics is replaced by economics (by the global market); government and nations are drawn into the melting pot of world globalization.

Having won, liberalism disappears, transforming into something entirely different: post-liberalism. It no longer has a political dimension; it is not a matter of free choice but becomes a peculiar kind of "fate" (from which comes the thesis of post-industrial society: "economics is fate").

And so the start of the 21st century coincides with the moment of the end of ideology, of all three ideologies. They all had various endings: the third political theory was destroyed in the period of its "youth", the second died of decrepitude, the first was reborn as something entirely different, as post-liberalism, as a "global market society". But in any case in that state in which the three political theories existed during the 20th century they are no longer available, suitable or relevant. They explain nothing and do not help us understand what's happening or to respond to the global challenge. From this statement there follows the necessity of moving to a Fourth Political Theory.

The Fourth Political Theory as Opposition to the Status-Quo

The Fourth Political Theory will not happen by itself. It might appear, but it might not. The premise of its appearing is disagreement: disagreement with post-liberalism as a universal practice, with globalization, with post-modernity, with "the end of history", with the status quo, with the inertial development of the cardinal civilizational processes at the start of the 21st century.

The status quo and inertia presuppose no political theories at all. The global world must operate with only economic laws and the universal morality of "the rights of man". All political decisions are replaced by technological ones. Technique and technology displace all else (the French philosopher Alain de Benoist calls this "la gouvernance", "governance"). Instead of politicians, who make historical decisions, come managers and technicians, optimizing the logistics of administrative leadership. Masses of people are compared to the mass of individual objects. Thus, the post-liberal reality (more precisely, virtuality, more and more displacing reality from itself) leads straight to the abolition of politics.

It could be objected that liberals "lie" when they speak of "the end of ideology", that "in fact" they remain believers in their ideology and merely refuse the right of all others to exist. This is not entirely so. When liberalism from an ideological preference becomes the only content of the available social and technological reality, it is no longer "ideology"; it is a fact of life, an "objective" order of things, which to call into question is not only difficult but absurd. In the epoch of post-modernity, liberalism is transposed from the sphere of the subject to the sphere of the object. This, seen in perspective, will amount to the complete replacement of reality with virtuality.

The Fourth Political Theory is conceived of as an alternative to Post-Liberalism; not like an ideological attitude in relation to another ideological attitude, but like an idea set against material, like the possible, coming into conflict with the actual, like a not yet existing or being undertaken assault against the already existing.

At the same time, The Fourth Political Theory cannot be a continuation of the Second or Third one. The end of fascism, as well as the end of communism, was not simply an accidental misunderstanding, but the expression of the clear logic of history. They challenged the spirit of Modernity (fascism almost openly, communism in a veiled manner-see the studies of the Soviet period as a particular "eschatological" version of the traditional society in Agursky , or Kara-Murza ) and lost.

That means that the war with the post-modern metamorphosis of liberalism in the form of post-modernism and globalism must be qualitatively different, must be based on different principles and must offer new strategies.

Moreover, the starting point of this ideology - the possible one, but not guaranteed, not fated, not predetermined; issuing from the free will of man, from his soul, but not from impersonal historical processes - is precisely a rejection of the very essence of post-modernity.

However, this essence (as with the discovery of the earlier, unknown, hidden motives of Modernity itself, which so fully realized its content that it drained its inner possibilities and went over into a routine of the ironic recycling of prior stages) is something entirely new, previously unknown, and only intuitively and in part guessed at during the earlier stages of ideological history and the ideological struggle.

The Fourth Political Theory is a "Crusade" against:

Post-modernity
The post-industrial society
Liberal thought realized in practice
Globalism and its logistical and technological bases.

If the Third Political Theory criticized capitalism from the right, and the Second from the left, then in the new stage this old political topography no longer exists: in relation to post-liberalism it is impossible to determine where the left is and where the right. There are only two positions: agreement (centre) and disagreement (periphery). Both one and the other are global.

The Fourth Political Theory is a concentration in a common project and common impulse of everything that turned out to have been thrown away, toppled and degraded on the way to the erection of the "spectacle-society" (Post-Modernity). "The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone" (Mark 12:10). The philosopher Alexander Sekatsky rightly points out the importance of "marginalia" for the formation of a new philosophical zone, offering as a metaphor the expression "the metaphysics of garbage".

The Battle for Post-Modernity

The Fourth Political Theory is concerned with the new rebirth of the old enemy. It disputes liberalism as did the Second and Third Political Theories of old, but it disputes it in a new condition. The principal novelty of this condition consists in the fact that, of the three great political ideologies, only liberalism won the right to the legacy of the soul of modernity and received the right to form "the end of history" on the basis of its premises.

The end of history could theoretically have been a different one: "the planetary Reich" (in the case of the victory of the Nazis), "world communism" (if the communists had been right). But "the end of history" turned out to be namely liberal (a fact that the philosopher Kojeve was one of the first to assess correctly , though his idea was later used by Fukuyama ). But since it turned out to be liberal, then any appeals to modernity and its variants, which in one or another degree the representatives of the Second (mostly) and Third political theories urged, lose their relevance. They lost the battle for modernity (the liberals won that). Therefore the theme of modernity (as, by the way, of modernization), is no longer the topic of the day. Now begins the battle for post-modernity.

And it is here that new perspectives open up for the Fourth Political Theory. That post-modernity, which today is realized in practice (post-liberal post-modernity), itself annuls the strict logic of modernity - after the goal has been reached, the steps toward it lose their meaning. The pressure of the ideological corpus becomes less harsh. The dictatorship of ideas is replaced by the dictatorship of things, "login-passwords", bar codes. New holes are appearing in the fabric of post-modern reality.

As in their time the Third political theory and the Second political theory (understood as eschatological version of traditionalism) tried "to settle modernity" in its battle with liberalism (the first political theory), today there is a chance to complete something analogical with post-modernity, using precisely these "new holes".

Against the straightforward ideological alternatives, liberalism worked out perfectly functioning means on which its victory was based. But precisely that carries in itself the greatest risk for liberalism. It is necessary only to find these new points of danger for the new global system, to decipher the access codes, to break the system. At least, to try. The events of 9/11 in New York demonstrate that this is possible even technologically. The network society can give something even to its convinced opponents. In any case it is necessary, first of all, to understand Post-modernity and the new situation not less deeply than Marx understood the structure of industrial capitalism.

In post-modernity, in the abolition of the Enlightenment program and the attack of the society of simulacra, the Fourth Political Theory must draw on its "personal enthusiasm", understanding this as a stimulus to battle, but not as a fatalistic given. From that one can make a few practical inferences relating to the structure of the Fourth Political Theory.

Reconsideration of the Past and of Those Who Lost

The second and third political theories positioned themselves as contenders for the expression of the soul of modernity. And these contentions fell to pieces. Everything connected with these unwarranted intentions in the previous ideological theories is least interesting to the founders of the fourth political theory. But the very fact that they lost is worth attributing sooner to their virtues than to their vices. Since they lost, they proved by that very loss that they do not belong to the soul of modernity, which, in its turn, transformed into a post-liberal matrix. And precisely in that are their good qualities. Furthermore, this signifies that the representatives of the Second and Third political theories - consciously or unconsciously - stood on the side of traditionalism, although they did not make from this the necessary conclusions or were not admitting it at all.

It is necessary to rethink the Second and Third political theories, setting aside what should be thrown away, and what has some worth in itself. As finished ideologies, insisting on themselves literally, they are useless, both theoretically and practically - but some marginal elements, as a rule unrealized and remaining on the periphery or in the shade (reminding ourselves again of the "metaphysics of garbage"), can turn up unexpectedly as incredibly valuable and saturated with meaning and intuitions.

But in any case the Second and Third political theories must be rethought in a new key, from new positions, and only after the refusal to believe those ideological constructs on which were held their "orthodoxy". Their orthodoxy - that is the most uninteresting and useless in them. A more productive approach would be a combined reading: "Marx through the positive views from the right" or "Evola through the positive views from the Left". But such an engaging "National-Bolshevik" beginning (in the spirit of N. Ustryalov or E. Niekisch) is not enough by itself, since the mechanical joining of the Second political theory and Third political theory won't get us anywhere by itself. Only retrospectively will we be able to delineate their common area, which was harshly opposed to liberalism. This methodological event is healthy as a warm-up before the full working out of the Fourth Political Theory.

Truly, the important and decisive reading of the Second and Third political theories is possible only on the basis of the already existing Fourth Political Theory, where the most important - although radically rejected as a value! - object is Post-modernity and its conditions: a global world, governance, the market society, the universalism of the rights of man, "the real domination of capital", and so on.

A Return to Tradition and Theology

Tradition (religion, hierarchy, the family) and its values were overthrown with the dawn of modernity. Strictly speaking, all three political theories were thought of as the artificial ideological constructs of people, reflecting (in different ways) on "the death of God" (Nietzsche), "the demystification of the world" (Weber), and "the end of the sacred". The heart of the modernity consisted in this: in the place of God came man; in the place of religion: philosophy and science; in the place of Revelation: rational, volitional, and technological constructs.

But if in post-modernity modernity is exhausted, then together with that ends the period of "theomachy". To post-modern people, religion is not inimical but indifferent. Moreover, specific aspects of religion, as a rule, relating to the regions of hell (the demonic textures of the post-modern philosophers) are rather attractive. In any case, the epoch of the persecution of tradition has ended, although following the very logic of post-liberalism this will most likely result in the making of a new world pseudo-religion, founded on disconnected fragments of syncretic cults, unrestrained chaotic ecumenism and "tolerance". And although such a turn of events is in some ways more frightening than straightforward and simple atheism and dogmatic materialism, the weakening of persecutions of faith has a chance if the carriers of the Fourth Political Theory will be consistent and uncompromising in defence of the ideals and values of tradition.

That which was put beyond the laws of the modern epoch one can bravely assert today in a political program. And this will no longer be seen as so ridiculous and absurd as it once was. Although that is perhaps because generally everyone in post-modernity looks ridiculous and absurd, including the most "glamorous" sides: it is no accident that the heroes of post-modernity are "freaks", "monsters", "transvestites"; this is a law of style. Against the background of world clowns, nothing and no one will look "too archaic", even people of tradition, ignoring the imperatives of modern life. The justice of this arrangement shows not only the serious successes of Islamic Fundamentalism but also the revival of the influence of extremely archaic Protestant sects (Dispensationalists, Mormons, and so on) on the politics of the USA (Bush started the war in Iraq because, in his words, "God told me 'Strike Iraq!'" - entirely in line with the soul of his Protestant teacher-Methodists).

Thus the Fourth Political Theory can calmly appeal to what preceded modernity and draw therefrom its inspiration. The acknowledgement of "the death of God" stops being "a categorical imperative" for those who want to remain relevant. The people of post-modernity are already so reconciled to these events that they can no longer understand: "Who, who do you say has died?" But for the developers of the Fourth Political Theory it is possible in the very same way to forget about these "events": "We believe in God, but ignore those who teach of his death as we ignore the ramblings of madmen."

Thus returns theology. And it becomes the most important element of the Fourth Political Theory. But when it returns, post-modernity (globalization, post-liberalism, the post-industrial society) is easily recognized as "the kingdom of the anti-Christ" (or its analogy in other religions - "Dadjal" for the Muslims, "Erev Rav" for the Jews, the "Kali-Yuga" for Hindus, and so on). And now this is mobilizing a mass of metaphors; this - the religious fact, the fact of the Apocalypse.

Myth and Archaics in the Fourth Political Theory

If for the Fourth Political Theory the atheism of the modern age stops being something obligatory, then also the theology of the monotheistic religions, which displaced in its own time other sacred cults, will also not be the truth in the final instance (more exactly: maybe, but maybe not). Theoretically, nothing limits the depths of the attention to ancient archaic values, which, correctly discerned and considered, can occupy a definite place in the new ideological construct. Free from the necessity of having to develop theology under the rationalism of modernity, the carriers of the Fourth Political Theory can neglect entirely those theological and dogmatic elements, which in monotheistic societies (especially in their late stages) were touched by rationalism, which, by the way, led to the ruin of Christian culture in Europe first in deism, and later in atheism and materialism, in the course of a phased development of the programs of the modern age.

Not only the highest and wisest symbols of faith can be taken up anew as a shield, but also those irrational moments of cults, rituals and legends, which confused divines in previous eras. If we dispose of progress as an idea characteristic of the modern epoch (which, as we see, has ended), then everything more ancient acquires for us a value and persuasiveness by the mere fact of being more ancient. More ancient means better. And the more ancient, the better.

The most ancient creation is heaven. The carriers of the Fourth Political Theory must strive to its new discovery in the future.

Heidegger and "the Event"

At last we can mark the deepest - ontological! - foundation of the Fourth Political Theory. Here it is recommended to turn not to theology and mythology, but to the depths of the philosophical experience of the thinker who made a unique attempt to build a fundamental ontology - the most summarizing, paradoxical, profound and piercing teaching about being. I am speaking of Martin Heidegger.

Heidegger's conception, in short, is this. At the dawn of philosophical thinking, people (more exactly: Europeans; even more exactly: Greeks) put the question of being at the centre of their attention. But thematizing it, they risk being confused by the nuances of the difficult relationship between being and thinking, between pure being (Seyn) and its expression in things (Seiende), between human being (Dasein) and being in itself (Sein). This error occurs already in the teaching of Heraclitus about physis and logos; later it is seen clearly with Parmenides, and at last, with Plato, who put ideas between man and things, and who determined truth as correspondence (the referential theory of knowledge), it reaches its culmination. From here is born alienation, which gradually leads to the emergence of "calculating reason", and later to the development of technology. Little by little man loses pure being from view and turns to the path of nihilism. The essence of technology (based on the technological relation to the world) expresses this constantly accumulating nihilism. In the modern age this tendency reaches its culmination; technological development (Gestell) finally displaces being and elevates "nothing" to the throne. Heidegger despised liberalism ferociously, reckoning it the expression of "the calculating beginning", which lay at the base of "Western nihilism".

Post-modernity, which Heidegger did not live to see, is in every sense the final oblivion of being, "midnight", where nothing (nihilism) begins to ooze from every fissure. But his philosophy was not despairingly pessimistic. He supposed that nothingness itself is the opposite side of the purest being, which - in such a paradoxical manner! - reminds humanity of itself. And if the logic of the development of being is correctly deciphered, then thinking humanity can save itself, and with lightening speed, at that, in the very moment when the risk will be maximal. "There, where the risk is greatest, there lies salvation" quotes Heidegger from Hölderlin.

Heidegger calls this sudden return of being by a special term "Ereignis", "the Event". It occurs exactly in the middle of world midnight, in the darkest point of history. Heidegger himself constantly vacillated regarding the question of whether that point had been reached or "not quite yet". The eternal "not quite yet".

For the Fourth Political Theory, the philosophy of Heidegger can turn up as the most important axis on which everything else will be strung, from the rethinking of the Second and Third Political Theories to the return of theology and mythology.

In this way, at the centre of the Fourth Political Theory, as its magnetic centre, is placed the vector of approach to "Ereignis" ("The Event") in which is embodied the triumphal return of being precisely in that moment when mankind finally and irreversibly will forget about it; yes, even as the last traces of it disappear.

The Fourth Political Theory and Russia

Today, many guess intuitively that there is no room for Russia in the "brave new world" of world globalism, post-modernity and post-liberalism. Never mind that world government and world administration are constantly countermanding all national governments. The problem is that all of Russian history is a dialectical argument with the West and Western culture, a battle for the assertion (sometimes grasped only intuitively) of its own Russian truth, its messianic idea, its version of "the end of history", however that would express itself - through Muscovite Orthodoxy, the secular empire of Peter, or the world communist revolution. The best Russian minds saw clearly that the West is moving to an abyss, and today, looking at where neoliberal economics and the culture of post-modernity have brought the world, we can be entirely sure that that intuition, pushing a generation of Russian people into a search for alternatives, was absolutely well-founded.

Today's world economic crisis - this is only the beginning. The worst is yet to come. The inertia of post-liberal processes is such that it is impossible to change course; "emancipated technology" (Spengler) will seek for the salvation of the West all the more effective but purely technical, technological means. This is a new stage of the dawn of Gestell, the spreading of the nihilistic spots of the world market over the entire planet. Going from crisis to crisis, from bubble to bubble (thousands of Americans demonstrate during the crisis with signs that read frankly: "give us another bubble!") the globalized economy and the structure of post-industrial society make the night of mankind more and more black; so black that we gradually forget that it's night. "What is light?" people ask themselves, never having seen it.

It is clear that Russia has to go another way. It's own way. But just here there is a question. To diverge from the logic of post-modernity in one "separately taken country" cannot easily succeed. The Soviet model collapsed. After that the ideological situation changed irreversibly, as did the strategic balance of power. In order for Russia to be able to save herself and others, it is not enough to think up some technical means or dishonest gimmicks. World history has its own logic. And "the end of ideology" is not an accidental falling-out-of-step, but the beginning of a new stage; by all signs, of the last stage.

In such a situation, the future of Russia depends directly on our efforts at working out the Fourth Political Theory. While locally looking over variants which a globalized regime offers us with but a superficial correction of the status quo, we will not go far; we will only lose time. The challenge of post-modernity is extraordinarily serious: it is rooted in the logic of the oblivion of being, in the retreat of man from his being-related (ontological) and soul-related (theological) sources. To respond to it with hat-throwing initiatives and PR substitutes is impossible. Consequently, in order to decide urgent problems - the global economic crisis, resistance to the unipolar world, the preserving and conserving of sovereignty, and so on - we must turn our attention to the philosophical bases of history, must make a metaphysical effort.

It is difficult to say how the process of working out this theory will unfold. Only one thing is obvious: this cannot be an individual matter or the undertaking of a limited circle of people. It must be a universal, collective effort. We can be helped greatly in this question by representatives of other cultures and peoples (both European and Asian), who also sharply perceive the eschatological tension of the present moment and who also seek desperately an escape from the global dead-end.

But first we can affirm that the Fourth Political Theory, founded on the rejection of the status-quo in its practical and theoretical dimensions, in its Russian version will be oriented to the "Russian Ereignis", to that "Event", sole and unrepeatable, which many generations of Russian people lived for and waited for from the beginnings of our people to the arrival of the last days.

 [return to Contents] 

 #18
BBC
July 22, 2015
Ukrainians struggling as their economy shrinks
By David Stern BBC News, Kiev

Many Ukrainians are feeling the effects of their country's severe recession. Fuelled partly by the debilitating war in the east with Russian-supported militants, Ukraine's economy is shrinking.

The country may also be on the verge of defaulting on some of its international debts.

This week, Ukraine's Prime Minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, has been in the United States to reassure Washington that the government is making progress in tackling the troubled economy, cracking down on corruption and dealing with the shaky cease-fire with Russia.

But for many ordinary Ukrainians, life is hard. On the outskirts of Kiev husband and wife team Andrei and Yulia Burda run a speech therapy centre, a non-profit organization they founded for children with special needs.

It's a modest operation occupying just two small rooms in the corner of a school, and Andrei and Yulia make do with contributions from the 20 families whose children they help.

With this they pay the rent and buy some basic, inexpensive items to assist them in their work - as well as a Bassett Hound puppy named Bobby.

At home they are equally frugal. With their two daughters and Andrei's mother, they rent a small one-bedroom flat near Kiev's centre. Together they make plaster of Paris figures and cloth dolls that they sell at a local art fair. Andrei also provides a dog grooming service for Yorkshire terriers.

But for all this penny-pinching, Yulia says they're just getting by.

"We can't afford to go to places with our children - to the shopping mall, the zoo or the circus - because it's so expensive," she says.
"What you paid for sausage or cheese for one kilogramme before, now buys 100 grams," says Yulia

With the collapse in the value of the national currency, the hryvnia, after the central bank signalled it would no longer intervene to support it, and rocketing inflation - Yulia says they face tough choices over what to buy.

"We can't afford medicines that we need. Because if we buy medicine, then for a period of time we can't buy food.

"Whenever you go into a store or to the market, you can't believe your eyes. Because what you paid for sausage or cheese for one kilogramme before, now buys 100 grams."

Default risk

The difficulties Yulia and her family are experiencing are mirrored across Ukraine, the economy is in the grip of a severe recession.

Gross domestic product is predicted to drop by 10% this year, after a 7.5% fall in 2014. Inflation is running at 57%, the world's third highest by some estimates after Venezuela and South Sudan.

On top of this, Ukraine is facing a day of reckoning with international creditors in just a few days - earning it comparisons with the situation in Greece.

24 July is the deadline for President Petro Poroshenko's government to pay an interest payment of $120m on its international loans. If officials fail to do this, Ukraine will default.

Kiev is currently in negotiations with a consortium of international lenders who hold some $9bn out of Ukraine's outstanding debts of $19bn.

Ukraine is proposing a 40% reduction or "haircut" on this amount. The consortium, led by the US-based Franklin Templeton, is resisting any discount, and instead is offering to prolong the period of re-payment.

While the $120m sum is not huge, Ukraine would prefer not to pay it to avoid any depletion of its already precipitously low hard currency reserves, and so not to show any weakness in the negotiations.

To this end, Ukraine's parliament voted in May to give the government authorisation to impose a "moratorium" on all international payments, if necessary.

What will happen if Ukraine defaults on its loans is unclear. Natalie Jaresko, Ukraine's Finance Minister, says the impact on the economy would be minimal, and could in fact help the debt talks.

"It's my belief that if we were to use this tool, that it would be temporary, and that it would only be used to continue and accelerate the discussions, and not for any other reasons," she says.

Ms Jaresko also plays down any comparisons to Greece.

"I'm glad we're not Greece. I'm glad our situation is completely different. In Greece it has more to do with their rejection of reforms."

Indeed, Ukraine's parliament passed a series of laws last week that the International Monetary Fund required, before it would release a $1.7bn tranche of a $17bn bail-out programme.

'The economy is falling apart'

But with a deteriorating economy, there is rising anger among the population. A recent opinion poll by one of Ukraine's leading research companies suggests that discontent with President Petro Poroshenko and his prime minister has sharply increased.

Ms Jaresko says she recognizes the difficulties that many people are experiencing and the pain some of the reforms are causing - such as raising the price of utilities - but she maintains this is temporary.

"When the average citizen says typically that they don't see the effect of these reforms, that's not untrue. But it's not unexpected, the result from the reforms will show up in their pocketbooks six, nine, twelve months from now."
A recent opinion poll suggests discontent with President Petro Poroshenko (centre) and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk (right) has sharply increased

But for some, three months is a long time.

Yulia Nogina is the director at Uke-Pol a Kiev company that produces flavoured gelatin. Because of the economic situation demand for some of its products has dropped by 70% - and for others, disappeared completely.

In their place her team has come up with cheaper products, which have so far filled the gap. But if prices continue to rise - forcing customers to focus more on purchasing the basics and stop buying even its less expensive products - then the company would be forced to close, she says.

"We're hoping that all these huge jumps and changes will be for the better, but right now I'm not happy because there's a war in the country, the economy is falling apart," says Yulia.

"So far, there's nothing good happening."

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 #19
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
July 21, 2015
From Maidan to Mukachevo: Evolution of the Ukraine crisis
The recent controversy surrounding the nationalist political party Right Sector is further evidence of the weakened political standing of the government in Kiev.
By Nicolai Petro
Nicolai N. Petro is a professor of political science at the University of Rhode Island specializing in Russia and its neighboring states. He has previously served in the Office of Soviet Union Affairs in the U.S. Department of State and at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, and has held fellowships at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars. He is the author of several books on Russian democratic development and foreign policy and has published in The American Interest, The New York Times, The Nation, The National Interest, The Wilson Quarterly and elsewhere. He has just returned from a year-long State Department sponsored Fulbright Research Fellowship in Ukraine. His professional web site is www.npetro.net.

The firefight on July 11 in the Transcarpathian town of Mukachevo has emerged as the most serious crisis in Ukrainian political life since the beginning of the "antiterrorist operation" in Eastern Ukraine in April 2014.

According to press reports, the conflict began when local members of the Right Sector, a nationalist political party with a paramilitary structure that rose to national prominence during the 2014 Maidan, demanded a more lucrative cut from the cigarette contraband operations being run by local police and politicians. They went to the home of a local politician to press their demands armed with machine guns and a grenade launcher. When the latter called the local police, the result was four dead and ten injured.

Since then, authorities have deployed special forces to the region and demanded the surrender of the Right Sector fighters. In response, two did eventually surrender to police, but at least ten others withdrew to the hills, vowing not to surrender unless ordered to by their national leader, and current member of the Ukrainian parliament, Dmytro Yarosh.

Yarosh, meanwhile, has called for a nationwide mobilization of all Right Sector fighters across Ukraine (some seventeen reserve divisions), and has ostensibly withdrawn his active forces from the front lines of the campaign in Eastern Ukraine. Protest rallies have been held in more than a dozen major Ukrainian cities, with calls to remove Interior Minister Arsen Avakov and ensure that the veterans of Right Sector and other volunteer battalions recently accused of torture and corruption (Tornado, Aidar, Azov) receive fair treatment.

The Ukrainian government is trying to portray this as nothing more than a gangland confrontation gone awry, but the involvement of the Right Sector, and their use of weapons that should have been relinquished at the end of their military service, have turned the incident into a national drama. At the heart of the conflict lies an unresolved controversy over ownership of the Maidan revolution of February 2014.

It is commonly acknowledged that the initial gatherings on Kiev's Maidan Square in early December 2013 were the result of popular frustration with corruption and a desire for more rapid integration into the European Union. These two issues united many Ukrainians who describe themselves as supporters of Western and European values.

But by mid-January 2014, as a careful study by Kiev based sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko shows, the initiative among the street protesters had shifted away from the urban middle class, to radical nationalists who were descending on Kiev from western Ukraine.

They were already in control of most Western regions of the country and, having seized large stockpiles of weapons from local police and military garrisons, were moving them to the capital in preparation for a showdown with the government of Ukraine's ousted President Viktor Yanukovych.

"The Maidan," Ishchenko concludes, "was indeed an armed uprising, responding to sporadic government violence with a violence of its own, heavily skewed in regional support, and with a significant far right presence."

When the critical phase of the Maidan erupted in February, the radicals of Svoboda and the Right Sector were ready to enforce Yanukovych's ouster.

When Arseny Yatseniuk, Vitaly Klitschko, and Oleksandr Turchinov emerged as the politically acceptable faces of the coup, sidelining the leader of the nationalistic Svoboda Party, Oleh Tyanhybok, many nationalists saw this as a defeat and warned that the revolution was being hijacked. Among them, the leader (providnyk) of the Right Sector, Dmytro Yarosh, has been among the most uncompromising, continuing to set up independent military units to "safeguard the revolution." When its members periodically get in trouble with local police the Right Sector routinely threaten to bring down the government.

In one well known incident last August, Yarosh demanded that the Interior Ministry release his fighters from prison and cease all ongoing investigations within 48 hours, or the Right Sector would march on Kiev. The very next day he called off the march saying his demands had been met.

In the current crisis, Yarosh argues that the Right Sector's mandate comes from the "will of the Ukrainian people" which transcends that of any government. Asked to explain why members of the Right Sector retain their weapons despite current law, Yarosh explains that his soldiers obtained their weapons before the law was passed, and that, in any case, since the laws of Ukraine are not being enforced, his personnel have every right to ignore them and to defend themselves.

Responding to President Petro Poroshenko's pledge that "no political force will be allowed to have its own military," the official press spokesman for the Right Sector, Artyom Skoropadsky, explained that the president was only referring to "illegal military formations." Since the Right Sector is not illegal, his words obviously do not apply.

Having numerous times declared that it does not acknowledge the authority of the commander of the Ukrainian armed forces, and is ready to march on Kiev to fulfill the promise of the Maidan revolt, it is worth asking: Who would win in the event of a direct confrontation between the current Ukrainian government and the Right Sector?

The first line of defense for the government would be the Ministry of Interior, whose head, Arsen Avakov, has been a prime target of the Right Sector since the shooting death of radical political activist Alexander Muzychko (Sashko Bilyi). Avakov is probably best known for his massive firings of internal security forces and highway patrols. Given the summary treatment they received from him, there is little reason to expect that they would fight on his behalf. As for the National Guard, formed from the remnants of same radical groups that fought on the Maidan, pitting them against their former colleagues would be a risky test of their loyalty.    

The second line of defense would be the forces attached to the National Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). Last month, this agency was cast into turmoil by the firing of its head, Valentin Nalivaichenko. At the time Nalivaichenko said he was tackling corruption in the highest ranks of the State Prosecutor's Office and, when thwarted, he threatened to reveal embarrassing details about then candidate Petro Poroshenko's secret meeting in Vienna with businessman Dmytro Firtash to law agencies in other countries, in particular, the United States. In his parting interview, he threatened to tell all about the nefarious dealings of his superiors.

Meanwhile, his successor has been busily cleansing the agency of more than forty "agents of Moscow" newly discovered in their ranks. It is hard to imagine that there is much love lost for the current government in this agency.

The final line of defense against a right wing coup would be the Ukrainian military, whose commanders are routinely accused of treason by the Right Sector and other military volunteers. In June, Ukraine's chief military prosecutor, Anatoly Matios, added insult to injury by accusing the volunteer battalion Tornado of torture and pedophilia in Eastern Ukraine.

Given the incessant friction between the Ukrainian military and the volunteer battalions, it is not clear how much the current government can rely on the military for support. In any case, the Ukrainian media reports that soldiers sent to contain the rebel Right Sectors fighters that had fled the scene in Mukachevo apparently issued a statement that they would refuse any order to shoot at them. As of July 14, what remains of the platoon has "disappeared."
In other words, for anyone planning a coup, the timing could hardly be better.

President Poroshenko has stated the obvious. For Ukraine to survive, its government must establish a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Just as importantly, for democracy to survive, that force must have some semblance of being conducted in accordance with the rule of law.

Alas, many "pro-Western" Ukrainian political figures have spent years undermining the legitimacy of every legal and official institution in post-Soviet Ukraine. They have done so not just under Yanukovych, but also under all five presidents, and all five versions of the constitution. The lingering legacy of nihilism now makes it exceedingly difficult for people to put their trust in anything that the government says or does.

Here is but one recent example of many. On its evening newscast of July 17, one of the country's most popular television channels, Inter, broadcast the results of its weekly online survey. In answer to the question: "What do [Rada] deputies deserve for their accomplishments this session?" it received the following responses:   "A bonus" (2 percent),  "A vacation" (2 percent), "New elections" (22 percent) and "Criminal charges" (75 percent).

It is this total absence of governmental moral authority that is eroding the foundations of Ukrainian statehood even more than its disjointed efforts at reform. Indeed, as well intentioned as its efforts may be, the government is caught in a Catch-22 situation. While draconian economic reforms erode what little confidence the poor retain in public institutions, the firings of tens of thousands of civil servants, who once earned a decent middle class salary for their service, seems designed to eliminate the very function of government.

The result is predictable -chaos, disillusionment, and paralysis. Ukraine's reformers seem to have forgotten that when Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter spoke of the "perennial gale of creative destruction" in the economy, he saw governmental stability as an essential and necessary anchor in the storm.

In his press conference after Mukachevo, Yarosh restates his view that the present government has betrayed the hopes of the Maidan and that a new revolution "of the people" is now imperative. Although he says he hopes the revolution can be peaceful, his official press spokesman added this chilling warning: "In the event of a new revolution, Ukrainian president Poroshenko and his associates will not be able to flee the country as the former president did. They can expect nothing but execution in some dark cellar, conducted by young Ukrainian military man or members of the National Guard."

This week Yarosh plans to hold a national assembly of the Right Sector in Kiev. He expects it to be an impressive and intimidating show of force, just a stone's throw from all major government buildings. If efforts to capture the Right Sector forces hiding in the hills Transcarpathia turn bloody, anything might ensue in Kiev.

But if circumstances nationwide continue on their present course, it is not hard to imagine that a nationalist movement that vows to prevent the country from careening into total chaos, and to sweep away corruption with an iron fist, at the expense of a few troublesome minorities, might one day even seem like a blessing to many Ukrainians.

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#20
Sputnik
July 22, 2015
Tensions Between Kiev, Right Sector Harm President Poroshenko's Authority

The latest tensions between the Ukrainian government and the nationalist Right Sector group, including the incident in the western Ukrainian town of Mukacheve, seriously damaged the reputation of Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko, experts told Sputnik.

MOSCOW (Sputnik), Alexander Mosesov, Svetlana Alexandrova - A July 11 shootout between police officers and Right Sector militants in the Zakarpattia region left three people dead and 13 injured. Right Sector's leader Dmytro Yarosh called for its members to hold protests in main Ukrainian cities until policemen, who opened fire against the movement's members in Mukacheve are detained and Interior Minister of Ukraine Arsen Avakov is dismissed.

On July 17, in reaction to President Petro Poroshenko calling the Right Sector members who opened fire in Mukacheve "terrorists", Yarosh stated that Poroshenko is no longer fit for his role as the country's leader. It comes as an opinion poll by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology revealed Monday that 55.4 percent of Ukrainians are not happy with the performance of the president.

Alexander Domrin, the professor at the Moscow's Higher School of Economics, told Sputnik that the situation at the moment is critical for the Ukrainian government.

"It is not good news for Poroshenko since he tries to present himself as more or less civilized European politician whereas there is also a growing group of people around Dmytro Yarosh who basically proclaimed an establishment of a new movement to remove Poroshenko and his government from power."

He added that a number of people in Europe, "who have a realistic view on what is going on in Ukraine," continues to grow because the worst expectations that "semi-fascists, semi-Nazis in the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian elite" pose real threat not only to the ethnic Russians in the Eastern part of the country but also to the Hungarians in the western Ukraine.

"Even though, most likely, Poroshenko will stay, he will be going through tough times."

Balazs Jarabik, a Carnegie Endowment of International Peace scholar, also believes that the current Ukrainian government will survive the crisis triggered by Right Sector despite the population's dissatisfaction with Poroshenko's governance.

"Right Sector mobilization effort to protest showed that the organization misses any serious basis (no masses) and that Ukraine society desires no 3rd Maidan, even though they are not satisfied with Kiev performance."

According to the expert, Right Sector militants "have weapons and are challenging authorities over the monopoly of using weapons," but this challenge is exaggerated and does not correspond to the attention Right Sector gets.

The Right Sector is a Ukrainian association of radical, ultranationist organizations that took an active part in the anti-government protests that led to the ousting of former President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014.

The group was declared an extremist organization in Russia in November 2014 and subsequently banned.

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 #21
Irrussianality
https://irrussianality.wordpress.com
July 22, 2015
DENY, DENY, DENY (re shelling claims)
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'

One thing which struck me during the 'tele-bridge' which I described in my last post was the refusal of all concerned to take responsibility for their own actions - everything which went wrong was always the fault of the other party. Another example of this attitude appeared in Monday's Kyiv Post - an article blaming separatist forces for the shelling of downtown Donetsk on 18 July. According to the Kyiv Post:

"At a briefing on July 19, Major General Andriy Taran, the head of the Ukrainian side of the Joint Center for Control and Coordination (JCCC), said separatist forces had driven out of the city to fire upon the center of it before returning and firing on Ukrainian positions as if in retaliation. The shelling was done specifically to be able to accuse Ukrainian forces of breaking the ceasefire and firing on civilians, Taran said."

Similar claims have been made many times before. For instance, Colonel Andrei Lysenko, spokesman for the Ukrainian National Security and Defence Council, has declared that, 'We have a strict order, the president's demand [not to fire on residential areas]. The Ukrainian military has repeatedly stated that the militants fire into residential areas in cities near where the government forces are located in order to discredit us.'

This is, of course, nonsense. Ukrainian artillery has hit residential areas of Donetsk, Lugansk, and other towns time and time again. Large numbers of people have died as a result. The Ukrainian government's refusal to accept responsibility for this is a serious moral failing on its part.

Rebel forces have had less need to engage in such denial, because for most of the war they have had less artillery at their disposal and have been defending urban areas rather than attacking them. Firing out of a city tends to be less damaging than firing into it. But when they have killed civilians, the rebels have been equally unwilling to admit it. An example was the shelling of a bus in Volnovakha on 13 January 2015, which resulted in the deaths of 12 people. Given that the bus was well behind Ukrainian lines, rebel artillery was almost certainly responsible, but rebel leaders have never admitted this. Nor has anybody ever confessed to the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines flight MH-17 in July 2014.

The inclination to avoid responsibility is widespread and understandable. What is perhaps surprising is the willingness of outsiders to let people get away with it. Neither Russia nor the West have shown any notable inclination to force their proxies to be more honest. Rather they seem to encourage the tendency to claim that others are at fault. It seems that the desire to maintain an ally's image outweighs the desire for the truth.

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#22
More than half of Ukrainians negative about PM's and president's policy - opinion poll

KIEV, July 20. /TASS/. More than a half of Ukrainians are negative about the activities of the country's Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and President Petro Poroshenko, according to an opinion poll conducted by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology made public on Monday.

"As many as 55.4% of respondents older than 18 assessed the work of President Petro Poroshenko negatively. A total of 66.7% said they were negative about the work of Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk," the poll results said.

Among the questions asked was the one about possible ways to settle the conflict in Donbas. According to the poll results, a total of 56.8% of Ukrainians said the best path to a lasting settlement was further peace talks on the basis of the Minsk agreements.

The poll was conducted in all of Ukraine's regions but for territories that are not controlled by the Kiev government. It involved 2,044 respondents in 110 populated localities. The poll was organized in the wake of the incident in Mukachevo and after the Verkhovna Rada (parliament) had referred to the Constitutional Court draft amendments to the constitution concerning decentralization of power.
 

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 #23
www.rt.com
July 21, 2015
Thousands of Ukraine ultranationalists gather on Maidan, announce 'new revolution'
[Video here http://www.rt.com/news/310396-ukraine-right-sector-revolution/]

Up to 6,000 supporters of Ukraine's ultranationalist Right Sector movement gathered in central Kiev on Tuesday, calling on authorities to resign. The rally marks a "new stage of Ukrainian revolution," the extremists' leader Dmitry Yarosh announced.

The radicals marched through the center of the Ukrainian capital on Tuesday evening, gathering on Maidan (Independence Square). The rally largely consisted of people wearing camouflage clothes, waving the red and black flags of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). They were chanting "death to enemies," TASS reported.

Speaking on Maidan, Right Sector (Pravy Sektor) leader Dmitry Yarosh said that the group is "showing that we are a disciplined revolutionary force," opening a "new stage of Ukrainian revolution" with the Tuesday rally.

Ahead of the rally, Yarosh has said that the gathering would be "peaceful" in nature.

The ultranationalist group announced its plans to initiate a referendum on a vote of no-confidence in the Ukrainian authorities. At the rally, protesters demanded the resignation of Ukraine's Interior Minister Arsen Avakov.

Field offices will be organized in all regions of Ukraine to work on the referendum starting from Wednesday, Yarosh announced at the rally, saying that those Right Sector centers will also act as "revolutionary committees." Imposing martial law on the territory of Ukraine should also be put on the vote, he said.

"People must voice their attitude to what's happening in the country ... the government should know that if the people are not pleased with it, then it must go," Yarosh said, as quoted by TASS. If the movement is not given the right to organize the referendum, then they will create their own election committee and "will vote independently on the whole territory of Ukraine," he added.

Average working people also joined the Tuesday rally, being displeased with poor living standards in the country under the Poroshenko government, RT's correspondent Murad Gazdiev reported from Ukraine.

"Ukraine is in absolutely terrible state at the moment, the economic situation is much worse than it was two years ago under Yanukovich," journalist and broadcaster from London Neil Clark told RT. "It's quite predictable" that people have taken to the streets, he added.

"The situation is going to get worse, because ordinary people are saying 'what was all that about?'" Clark said, adding that ultranationalists might contribute to destabilizing the situation, as President Poroshenko is now "attacking the very people who helped bring him to power."

Right Sector radicals participated in Ukraine's previous revolution, and have since been fighting in the in eastern Ukraine conflict. The heavily-armed battalions, who have previously denounced the Minsk ceasefire, made calls "to blockade Donbass" during the Tuesday rally.

On Sunday, the Ukrainian capital saw a large march of approximately 2,000 people who took to the streets of Kiev to protest high housing and public utilities prices. Some of the Sunday march banners read "where are the reforms?" and "we are dying of hunger." A similar rally happened in the city of Dnepropetrovsk in central Ukraine, where dozens of demonstrators, mainly people of older age, blocked one of the roads in the city, demanding the resignation of President Poroshenko.

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#24
Interfax-Ukraine
July 22, 2015
Poroshenko orders signing deal on 30-km buffer zone in Donbas, withdrawal of tanks, artillery
 
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has instructed the Ukrainian delegation to the Trilateral Contact Group to sign an agreement on a buffer zone along the line of contact in Donbas.

"I have instructed the Ukrainian representatives in the Trilateral Contact Group to immediately sign an agreement with the OSCE and the Russian side, which is a party to the Trilateral Contact Group, to guarantee the establishment of a 30-kilometer buffer zone along the line of contact and to withdraw artillery that is still left there, withdraw tanks, and withdraw mortars, making the constant shelling impossible," Poroshenko said when introducing the new head of the Luhansk regional administration in Severodonetsk on Wednesday.

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 #25
DPR completes withdrawal of weaponry of less than 100mm caliber from contact line

MOSCOW, July 22. /TASS/. The self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Repubic (DPR) has completed withdrawal of weaponry of less than 100mm caliber from the contact line in Donbas, DPR defense ministry said on Wednesday.

"The unilateral withdrawal of weaponry from calm areas on the front line for three kilometers has been completed in DPR," the Donetsk News Agency quoted DPR defense ministry spokesperson as saying.

The defense ministry stressed that tanks and armored vehicles will remain on positions in "hot spots" to the north of Donetsk and in Debaltseve.

On July 18, the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics (DPR and LPR) announced their plans to unilaterally withdraw heavy weaponry from the contact line. LPR also completed the withdrawal of weaponry from the contact line, leaving tanks and armored vehicles on positions only near the Schastye settlement.

On Tuesday, the Contact Group on Ukrainian settlement reached an agreement on gradual withdrawal of weaponry of less than 100mm caliber by both sides.

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 accords 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.

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 #26
Ukraine-style privatization: hypermarket with separate entrance 'For Foreigners Only'
By Lyudmila Alexandrova

MOSCOW, July 21. /TASS/. Ukraine is creating privileged conditions for Western countries to participate in the upcoming privatization and has actually excluded both national and Russian capital from it. This is the price paid for the support of the current regime, which may cause grave consequences for the country, experts warn.

"We're beginning transparent and honest privatization and, therefore, we want exclusively qualitative foreign investors and not former Ukrainian oligarchs to take part in it," Ukraine's Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said in a televised address cited by Ukrainskaya pravda and other Ukrainian media.

In the Ukrainian government's opinion, the involvement of foreign specialists is the sole and effective method to defeat corruption.

Ukrainian Economic Development and Trade Minister Aivaras Abromavicius earlier said Russian investors would also be barred from Ukraine's privatization. According to him, non-admission of the "aggressor-state" to privatization will be prescribed in legislation.

The Ukrainian government has already approved the list of enterprises slated for privatization. The list includes Tsentrenergo state-owned power utility, a number of thermal power plants, about 30 coalmines, and also chemical, transport and industrial companies. Overall, slightly over 300 state companies are expected to be privatized.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian prime minister said on July 17 that privatization must cover all state companies, except facilities related to national security and some infrastructural enterprises.

"Foreign investors are interested only selectively in Ukrainian assets to include ports, land and the remaining part of the military and industrial complex," Svobodnaya Pressa web portal cited political scientist Viktor Pirozhenko as saying.

"They are interested in the assets, which are important from the viewpoint of securing the West's geo-strategic control of Ukraine and its presence on this territory rather than in the assets that generate profits. First of all, this refers to land, and then to ports in the Odessa region and on the Danube," the expert said.

"This is not just bad. This is disastrous for Ukraine. If Western capital comes here, it will try to fit Ukraine into the labor division system on discriminatory terms from the very outset. This will be an agrarian and raw material appendage or, at best, a country for the cheap assembly of items," he added.

"This is actually the price paid for the support from some large Western countries like the United States, Germany and France," Deputy Dean of the Faculty of World Economy and World Politics at the Higher School of Economics Andrei Suzdaltsev told TASS.

"Some sort of a privatization hypermarket with a separate entrance is being created for them. This is the payment made to masters using the Ukrainian people's riches and assets," the expert said.

"The Ukrainian government believes it will restructure the country's entire economy with the support of Western capital and make it innovative while all the existing structures have to be destroyed because production is energy-intensive and, therefore, depends on Russia," he added.

Deindustrialization is already in full swing in Ukraine, the expert said.

It is far from obvious that large foreign companies will take the risk of coming to Ukraine, Professor of the Higher School of Economics Ivan Rodionov said.
"Speculators may come with the intention to resell this property afterwards and this is dangerous," he told TASS.

"In principle, Western capital is interested in transport infrastructure, coal and metals, several hi-tech production facilities and, of course, land," the expert said.

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 #27
The Guardian (UK)
July 21, 2015
Oligarchs nouveaux? Why some say Ukraine is still in thrall to an elite
The corrupt power enjoyed by a wealthy clique sparked the country's Maidan revolution, but the transparent governance promised by Ukraine's new leaders is proving difficult to deliver
By Shaun Walker in Kiev

In Ukraine, government supporters, western diplomats and opposition figures tend to reply to inquiries about how the process of "de-oligarchisation" is proceeding in the country with exactly the same response: hearty laughter.

Unlike in Russia, where the term "oligarch" has been a misnomer since Vladimir Putin stripped them of real political clout more than 10 years ago, Ukraine has been an oligarchy in the true sense, with a few extremely wealthy men wielding huge power and influence.

The Maidan revolution in February last year was largely prompted by the obscene corruption of Viktor Yanukovych and his close associates. Many protesters wanted a new type of society, one that was not run by an oligarchic class that has been so influential in Ukraine ever since independence.

Petro Poroshenko, the president elected a year ago, promised a new style of politics. Although a billionaire who has built up a successful chocolate empire, Poroshenko promised open and transparent governance. Parliamentary elections returned a new generation of young, idealistic figures who promised that Ukraine would never again be run in the interests of a few extremely rich people.

In a comment piece for the Guardian in April, Poroshenko said he was determined to battle the oligarchs and "prevent the inappropriate influence of private interests on the state". It was with this goal in mind, he said, that he had sacked Ihor Kolomoisky, a powerful figure who had run the Dnipropetrovsk region in central Ukraine.

But Poroshenko is from the oligarch class and critics say he has failed to introduce a new kind of politics.

"There is a conflict there, between a genuine reform agenda and using the old-style administrative pressure to achieve these objectives," said a source close to one of the country's leading businessmen, who did not want to be identified because of the sensitivity of the situation.

Victoria Voytsitska, an MP who sits on the parliament's energy committee, said: "A year ago there were such high hopes for change, it's all a bit upsetting. There is a class of what I would call oligarchs nouveaux: they survived, just about, under Yanukovych and now want a piece of the action."

Those who flourished under Yanukovych are now under the cosh. Ironically, said Voytsitska, the government's proposal for a new energy regulator was deeply flawed, while the best proposal had come from the Opposition Bloc, a group of MPs believed to have ties to Rinat Akhmetov, the richest man in Ukraine and the most influential businessman under Yanukovych.

Akhmetov, who paid £136m for an apartment in One Hyde Park in London in 2011, was widely seen as benefitting from his closeness to Yanukovych, and has come under pressure from the new government.

"Akhmetov used to be the lion in the jungle," said Voytsitska. "Now that he understands he needs to survive in the new system, he's advocating for everyone

According to Voytsitska, international investors are unwilling to invest in Ukraine because they see the level of corruption as similar to that in Russia, but the market is smaller and the political risk higher because of the Russian invasion. She said the very fact that MPs and society were complaining about corrupt schemes, and catching them before they were implemented, represented progress from the Yanukovych era.

Some believe Ukraine needs time to transform, given the huge challenges, and the war in the east of the country. Over the past year, there has been some legislative reform, as well as a number of high-publicity appointments, such as that of the former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili's as the governor of the port city of Odessa. He has been tasked with rooting out organised corruption. Another former Georgian official, Eka Zguladze, is the deputy interior minister. She has just finished "rebranding" the Kiev police force.

Mustafa Nayyem, a former journalist whose Facebook post formed the initial basis for the Maidan protests, is now an MP in Poroshenko's bloc. He is critical of western politicians and business leaders who say they will not invest in Ukraine until large-scale reforms are made: "They are telling us they aren't going to invest here because we are corrupt. So why are they investing in Russia? They helped Yanukovych even though everyone told them he was a corrupt dictator."

He added:"We don't have systemic corruption as a system of government any more." However, he could not not see the "will of politicians" for reform, and said it would take at least five to seven years to create a new system.

As well as pressure from Europe and his own MPs, Poroshenko also faces a more radical opposition in the form of many of the volunteer battalions who have been fighting Russian and separatist forces in the east of the country. While some of these battalions are oligarch-funded, others demand more radical political change. Earlier in July, gun and grenade battles between police and members of the nationalist Right Sector left at least two dead in the east of the country.

Some say that in calls for speedy de-oligarchisation, western leaders and idealists simply do not realise how entrenched the current system is.

"Poroshenko says what the western politicians want to hear, and for some reason they believe him, but they don't understand how impossible de-oligarchisation is in our system, how deep this post-Soviet legacy runs," said Irina Vereshchuk, the former mayor of Rava-Ruska, a town in western Ukraine. "The oligarchs are like the blood and organs of the system, and we have nothing yet to transplant them with."

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 #28
Sputnik
July 19, 2015
Saakashvili's New Deputy Fails Ukrainian Litmus Test, Gets Cool Reception

Ukrainian media and political figures gave the Russian liberal political figure a cool reception upon her appointment as Saakashvili's deputy after she was unable to answer a journalist's question about who Ukraine is at war with.

The new deputy governor of Ukraine's Odessa region, the Russian liberal political figure Maria Gaidar got a cool reception upon her appointment after she refused to comply with the standard Ukrainian political narrative that Ukraine is at war with Russia.

Maria Gaidar was appointed to be the deputy of former Georgian president and current Odessa region governor Mikheil Saakashvili on Friday. Gaidar previously worked in Moscow at a non-profit which dealt with the city's social services and took part in liberal opposition movements alongside her business activities. She is the daughter of the late former Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, who is considered one of the architects of the controversial economic policies that came to characterize Russia's radical "shock therapy" transition to capitalism during the early 1990s.

Ukrainian parliament member and former deputy governor of Dnepropetrovsk Borys Filatov, famous for his "we will hang them later" line regarding Crimeans seeking independence from Ukraine, responded harshly to Gaidar's stance.

"They simply don't give a **** about our country. They are making money here. Or are fulfilling their sick ambitions. Or are training themselves 'on cats.' Choose the option for their motivation yourself," Filatov posted on Facebook.

Gaidar refused to answer when a Ukrainian television journalist asked her three times, "Who is Ukraine at war with?" The question is a sort of litmus test in Ukrainian politics, where media coverage and political discourse appears to hinge on the idea that Ukraine is at war with Russia, rather than fighting an internal civil war. Ukraine's parliament is currently considering a law which would issue prison terms of up to ten years for "denying Russian aggression." After passing six committee hearings, it is awaiting a floor vote.

Poroshenko Bloc leader Yuriy Lutsenko was more careful in his statement, saying that Gaidar would simply be a spokeswoman for Saakashvili. As a deputy to the governor of Odessa region, Gaidar occupies an executive, rather than a representative position.

"She will be the spokeswoman for Saakashvili's team for those who wish to 'hear' in Russian. Such is his logic," Lutsenko told Ukrainian television.

Gaidar later wrote on her Facebook that she has always been a supporter of Ukraine's territorial integrity, against Crimea's "annexation", and against the war in eastern Ukraine.

Andrei Illarionov, Russian President Vladimir Putin's former advisor, recently most known for expressing views critical of Putin in the Western media, wrote that Gaidar's position mirrors that of both Putin and Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny.

Activists in the city of Ukrainian port city of Odessa are continuing their protest campaign against newly appointed Governor Mikheil Saakashvili, this time launching a giant red balloon featuring his image and the phrase 'Mishko Go Home!', complete with a large red necktie dangling from his mouth. Photo:

"To clarify the resulting collision, Gaidar must: 1. immediately provide society all examples of her 'repeated voicing' of the position 'for Ukraine's territorial integrity, against the annexation of Crimea' which took place before June 2015, before her coming to Odessa to meet Saakashvili. 2. Refute her word on Crimea and agreement with Navalny," Illarionov wrote in his blog, adding that otherwise her statement must be considered a lie.

Members of Russia's liberal political establishment were also critical of Gaidar, with Kirov region governor Nikita Belykh, who Gaidar also worked under as a deputy governor, saying that he does not support her decision.

"Going to work for the people whose relationship to our country and our people is known and is sharply negative is perceived as a contraposition of yourself to not only the government, but to all Russians," Belykh wrote.

In her statement to Ukrainian television, Gaidar also said that Ukrainians and Russians are brotherly people, which received the ire of some Ukrainian social media users, but not politicians.

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 #29
AFP
July 22, 2015
Interpol takes deposed Ukraine leader off wanted list
By Olga Shylenko

Ukraine vowed to fight on Wednesday to ensure the return and trial of its exiled Russian-backed president after his name was unexpectedly removed from Interpol's international most wanted list.

The former Soviet state's leader Viktor Yanukovych was toppled by a wave of bloody protests and fled to Russia with the help of Kremlin security agents in February 2014.

Yanukovych was originally accused by Kiev's new pro-Western leaders of ordering police to open fire on the demonstrators in the waning hours of his rule. More than 100 people -- many of them unarmed -- died in the carnage.

But Interpol in January placed Yanukovych on its "red notice" list for "misappropriation, embezzlement or conversion of property by malversation" in January because it lacked the criminal authority to open the more severe charges sought by Ukraine.

The international police organisation removed Yanukovych's name from its website on Tuesday after his lawyers filed an appeal that is due to come up for a hearing in September.

An Interpol spokesman said in emailed comments that the "suspension means that the Red Notice is not accessible to any member country searching Interpol's databases, and has been removed from the "wanted persons" section on the Interpol website for the duration of the review".

Defence attorneys at London's Joseph Hage Aaronson law firm said Interpol's decision was made "on the basis that criminal charges brought by the new regime in Ukraine against president Yanukovych were part of a pattern of political persecution of him".

The decision means Ukraine must now submit further evidence to the organisation, which is based in the French city of Lyon, to substantiate its case.

'Exclusively political'

Prosecutors and senior officials vowed to redouble their efforts despite doubts that Russia -- already forced to deny charges of orchestrating Ukraine's eastern separatist crisis in revenge for Yanukovych?s ouster -- will ever return him to Kiev.

"He can hire 300 attorneys to drag out this process," Ukrainian defence ministry advisor and top lawmaker Anton Gerashchenko told AFP.

"Our goal now is to compile a set of documents, to present evidence that will make everything immediately clear to the fair and just French court."

The prosecutor general's office said on Tuesday that it would "insist on the re-establishment of the international search" for the war-torn country's most wanted man.

Yanukovych himself has repeatedly denied issuing orders for his crack forces to shoot at the pro-European crowds that occupied parts of central Kiev in the winter of 2013-2014.

He also rejects accusations of having embezzled state property or diverted vast federal budget sums to outfit a dazzling mansion -- now open to the public as a testament to past corruption -- with ostentatious decorations and gold.

An unnamed senior Moscow official told the Interfax news agency that "Russia from the very start... had insisted the criminal proceedings by Kiev's new authorities against the old leadership were exclusively political in nature".

An Interpol red notice requires member states to "seek the location and arrest of wanted persons with a view to extradition or similar lawful action".

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 #30
Moscow Times
July 22, 2015
Why Russia Opposed the MH17 Tribunal
By Georgy Bovt
Georgy Bovt is a political analyst.

The anniversary of the tragic downing of flight MH17 over the Donbass on July 17, 2014 that killed all 298 on board caused another surge of debate over who committed this crime. Fueling that debate is a draft resolution before the UN Security Council calling for the establishment of an international tribunal to punish those responsible. Russia quickly said it would veto the measure. China also criticized the initiative, urging the Security Council to fulfill Resolution 2166, adopted last year, which calls for a comprehensive investigation into the incident and to punish those responsible. Moscow obviously found few supporters for its position. After all, if Russia is blocking the tribunal, it must have something to hide.

A small, highly politicized minority in Russia would like to see this "bloody regime pilloried" by the forces of international justice. Having lost faith in the Russian justice system for its servility before the ruling authorities, they sincerely believe that only foreign powers can "bring this regime to justice." However, I think that path is a dead end: outside forces cannot cure Russia's internal illness. It is also wrong to compare modern Russia with Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan, criminal regimes accused of mass war crimes and crimes against humanity following the end of World War II.

Even a finding that places blame squarely with the regime of President Vladimir Putin would not increase anti-Putin sentiment at home. Most Russians already accept that Donbass separatists shot down the plane, but that they did so unintentionally, just as Ukrainian air defense forces in training inadvertently shot down a Russian passenger plane flying from Israel to Novosibirsk in 2001. The vast majority of Russians view the incident as an "episode of war," as "collateral damage" roughly equivalent to the Ukrainian forces' indiscriminate shelling of civilians in the Donbass - a crime of which state-controlled television constantly reminds them.

There are no generally recognized provisions for the creation of such a tribunal. The initiators based the resolution on Chapter VII of the UN Charter that refers to actions in response to a threat to peace. It was necessary to characterize the air crash as a "threat to international peace and security" to justify the creation of a tribunal. By contrast, last year's Resolution 2166 makes no such claim, even though most already believed at that time that pro-Russian separatists had shot down the aircraft.

In order to form such a tribunal, the UN Security Council would also have to work out its charter and select judges - as was done for the tribunals created to examine the situations in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. (In fact, the international community has created only four such tribunals since World War II.) Agreement from all five permanent Security Council members is required to form a tribunal, although it is theoretically possible to circumvent that body with the help of Resolution 377 that requires support from two-thirds of the General Assembly - that is, from 129 countries. The United Nations has invoked that resolution only 12 times in its history. To get some perspective, only 100 countries voted in March 2014 to condemn Russia for its annexation of Crimea. What's more, it is entirely possible that other permanent Security Council members beside Russia do not want to create a precedent by convening an international tribunal. That might unlock a Pandora's Box.

There are no precedents for creating an international tribunal in response to individual crimes - even those as terrible as the downing of a civilian aircraft. All four UN tribunals addressed mass and systemic war crimes. Russia felt the tribunal on Yugoslavia was too politicized and that its "disappointing" findings reflected an anti-Serbian bias: of 155 individuals charged, 92 were Serbs. They were considered "the guiltiest" in the interethnic war there.

Beyond rejecting the idea of a tribunal for the downing of an aircraft, Russian politicians are openly disappointed with what they increasingly refer to as "so-called" international law. As one example, Russia's Constitutional Court recently ruled that decisions made by the European Court of Human Rights would have limited application in Russia if they contradict this country's Constitution - even though the Constitution clearly recognizes the supremacy of international law. The Kremlin sincerely believes that "so-called international law" is essentially a set of rules favoring Washington and other Western capitals, and has made it clear that it is fed up with such "law." Moscow also sees political motivations behind the ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague concerning the Yukos case - another act of "international law." It held the same view of the earlier decision of the International Court of Justice that justified Kosovo's declaration of independence in violation of Serbian law, and without Kosovo even holding a referendum. The Kremlin expects the same treatment if a tribunal is established over the downing of flight MH17 - especially since Western media have already concluded that "Putin shot it down."

However, it remains doubtful that the separatists are alone to blame for the downing of the plane. I personally believe that the separatists did shoot it down after mistaking it for a Ukrainian military transport aircraft, and that the international investigation will confirm this. However, even if that is true, Ukraine needs to shed light on the activities of its military that day. Kiev has never responded to Moscow's demands that it divulge the flight plans of its air force, a listing of missiles fired that day and the transcripts of its air traffic controllers. If Ukraine has nothing to hide, why hasn't it been more forthcoming? Is Ukraine really so "squeaky clean" that it has nothing to fear from the claims of the victims' relatives?

And I believe that the fate of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi continues to play a major role in the Kremlin's thinking concerning all "color revolutions," including last year's in Ukraine, and very possibly prompted Putin's return to the Kremlin. Gaddafi had so thoroughly let his guard down before the West that he not only admitted that Libya's secret service had shot down the Pan Am passenger flight over Lockerbie, but even paid $2 billion in compensation to the victims' families. And where did that get him? Six feet under, that's where.

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 #31
Wall Street Journal
July 22, 2015
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 Crash Illustrates Different Realities in Russia vs. West
Russian media generates variety of theories, all blaming Ukraine
By ALAN CULLISON

MOSCOW-For the West, the downing one year ago of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 underlined the brutality of Moscow's hybrid intervention in eastern Ukraine. In Russia, the downing is still living large on television screens, blamed squarely on the Ukrainians-with the possible connivance of Western secret services.

Within hours of the crash on July 17, 2014, Russian state television began to spew a jumble of explanations for the tragedy, all of which fingered Kiev and absolved Russia and pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine of guilt.

Theories included an attack from a Ukrainian fighter jet, a Ukrainian surface-to-air missile, or a botched attempt to kill President Vladimir Putin, whose presidential plane had passed near Ukraine hours earlier. Such stories still abound, with some embellishments.

"Everyone believes that Ukraine is responsible, and that has not changed," said Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin political commentator based in Moscow who has lately proposed that the U.S. helped plan the shoot down. That is why, he says, no U.S. citizens were on board. "In the U.S. they know the truth, but they will never tell it."

In fact, there was one American among the 298 crash victims.

The ability of Russians and Westerners to see such different realities over the Malaysia Airlines catastrophe exposes a fallacy of U.S. policy toward Russia since the end of the Cold War.

After the rise of the Internet and the fall of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago, the West assumed that Russians and Westerners would naturally come to believe the same things. Free access to information would, like the free hand of capitalism, "propel the world toward common beliefs and ways of life," said Sam Greene, director of the Russian Institute at King's College London.

"Now we're finding out that's not quite true," Mr. Greene said. "There's a whole reassessment going on now about what to do about it."

Russia hasn't censored its Internet nearly as much as China, so Russians still enjoy mostly unfettered access to information from outside the country, albeit often not in their native language.

How Mr. Putin got Russians to ignore those sources and believe a state-run media that has a tradition of mendacity says a lot about how little Russia has changed since the end of the Cold War-and how some primitive Soviet-era propaganda strategies remain effective.

It also serves as a warning to the West that relations with Russia, now at a post-Cold-War nadir, could stay that way for some time. Boris Nemtsov, a Putin critic and former deputy prime minister who was gunned down outside the Kremlin early this year, said in an interview before his death that anti-American myths and resentment are widespread and would likely linger even if Mr. Putin steps down after his current term expires in 2018, or the term after that, in 2024.

"Putin has eaten the brains of a whole generation of Russians," he said. "I think it will remain this way at least until he leaves."

After the CEO of France's Total oil company-a rare ally of Russia in a time of multiplying economic sanctions and international isolation-was killed when his plane slammed into a snowplow operated by a drunken driver at a Moscow airport, Kremlin commentators suggested the CIA had assassinated him.

In the U.S. and Europe, officials are discussing possible counter-propaganda strategies, but none look easy as Mr. Putin has taken control of all major television and newspapers since his rise to power.

The Kremlin has meanwhile selectively blocked some websites and funds a host of others, making the search for objective Russian news confusing. In the past year Moscow opposition news services have revealed how the government pays beehives of bloggers-so-called trolls-who write under numerous Facebook accounts and identities on newspaper message boards.

Their comments don't support the Kremlin line as much as attack Western news reporting as biased, suggesting that the truth is unknowable. The mélange of misinformation and conspiracy theory makes any conclusion about world events seem questionable or a matter of opinion.

Television, meanwhile, is a more-focused instrument for persuasion, said Mr. Greene at King's College. Last year public opinion polls showed that fewer than 5% of Russians thought that Russia or Russian-backed rebels had shot down the Malaysia Airlines flight. The vast majority blamed the Ukraine military.

The rest of the world has largely assigned blame to Russia or Russia-backed rebels.

The putative assassination of Mr. Putin was one of the first theories circulated over Russia's main state-controlled television station, the First Channel. A commentator explained that Mr. Putin, who was flying home that day from a summit in South America, had flown near the Polish capital of Warsaw about 45 minutes before the doomed Malaysian flight.

The Ukraine military appeared to mix the planes up, shooting down the Malaysia flight by accident, said the commentator, citing a confidential source in Russia's Federal Transport Agency. Mr. Putin landed safely.

Simultaneously, the same channel put forward another theory, suggesting a poorly trained Ukrainian missile crew shot down the airliner by mistake-as had happened in 2001, when a Russian passenger plane exploded over the Black Sea, killing all 78 on board.

First Channel ran old footage from that catastrophe, showing a Ukrainian leader at the time falsely denying responsibility. [Kiev admitted days later that one of its errant missiles was probably to blame.]

The network also interviewed a supposed military expert as saying pro-Russian rebels today didn't have a missile that could reach a passenger airliner at cruising altitude.

"Only Ukrainian troops could have destroyed the civilian airliner," Igor Korotchenko, a Russian defense commentator, pronounced the day of the crash on First Channel.

Today the main debate in Russia is whether a Ukrainian missile shot down the airliner or a Ukrainian fighter jet. The day after the downing, state television aired a Russia Defense Department briefing in which a senior officer suggested that a Ukrainian Su-25 shot down the flight. Ukraine denied it, and pointed out that the Su-25, which was designed to destroy tanks, was built with an unpressurized cockpit and cannot fly high enough to have reached the airliner.

The next day, the managers of Russia's Wikipedia said there was a flurry of attempts to edit its article about the Su-25, trying to change it to say that the plane could fly at higher altitudes.

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 #32
http://readrussia.com
July 21, 2015
Kiev Needs Self-Criticism and Tough Love
By Mark Galeotti
Mark Galeotti is Professor of Global Affairs at the SCPS Center for Global Affairs, New York University, who writes the blog In Moscow's Shadows

Whoever fired the first shot in Mukacheve, eastern Ukraine, last week's confrontation between gunmen of the ultranationalist Right Sector movement and the police illustrated a number of worrying characteristics of today's Ukraine. They also pose a challenge to Kiev's western well-wishers: does a good friend overlook his mate's failings, accepting that "he's going through a rough patch" and hope he snaps out of it, or does he tell some tough truths?

"Master In Your Own Home"

One of the definitions characteristic of a working state is that it has a monopoly of legitimate force. Sure, it can subcontract that out to suitable providers, from mercenaries to privateers, security guards to proxy warlords. But the key point is that it gets to decide who can use force, what kind, and what are the rules under which they must operate.

In the immediate aftermath of the Maidan, when part of the state was virtually disintegrating, and when Yanukovych had been toppled by force of revolutionary muscle, it was perhaps inevitable that the militias would at first have a life of their own. In the early weeks and months of the Donbas war, when the regular military chain of command was mistrusted by its political masters and frankly in questionable shape, it was perhaps understandable that Kiev would gratefully turn to militias from nationalists to the private armies raised by oligarchs.

But that was then. In the interim, the military has been reformed to a degree at least. Even such units as the notorious Azov Battalion have come into the fold, finding a place within the formal military or Interior Ministry chain of command. However, Right Sector still operates virtually autonomously. Indeed, its response when some of its men tangled with the police was to back its own and challenge the authorities. The longer such a situation lasts, the harder it is to address and the more delegitimating it is. And that applies to the wider question of the private armies, as much as the specific Mukacheve fracas.

Kiev needs to prove that it is in charge - and if that means using force, so be it. Revolutions can be messy, and sometimes revolutions actually have to devour some of their children. Encouragingly, President Poroshenko has since said that "no faction will have armed units, not armed criminal formations... No one is allowed to give patriotic chevrons to bandits" and we will have to see if he follows through.

"Hands Out Of The Cookie Jar"

Ukraine has a plethora of problems. Many of them the result of economic, historic or geopolitical misfortune, but others definitely its own responsibility. One that Mukacheve appears to illustrate - Right Sector claims they were attacked by corrupt cops - and which to me is a particularly serious one is criminality and corruption.

The latest Transparency International Corruption Perception Index suggests - sadly, rightly - that Ukraine is even more corrupt that Russia, which is an accolade that Kiev can hardly enjoy. This is a particular problem within the law enforcement bodies (making the suggestion that Mukacheve was about a struggle between Right Sector and corrupt officials over local smuggling routes rather more credible). The trouble is that this is being addressed in showy and visible reforms at the bottom of the system rather than at the top. Much was made recently of the swearing in of a new crop of allegedly photogenic new police officers for Kiev in brand new uniforms. Well and good; bringing in a new generation is often a great way to begin changing the culture of an institution, especially if - as in this case - they have been through a new training curriculum emphasizing values and probity.

However, this may bring change in a generation. Meanwhile, too many of the old guard remain in key positions, and this is the kind of expensive, media-friendly exercise unlikely to be replicated across the country. Besides which, corruption is more about entrenched control of legal and illegal business ventures rather than the quaint, bespoke extortion of a fake speeding fine here, a payoff there.

Allegations that the Mukacheve firefight was actually over control of the illegal cigarette smuggling business in this border region are all too credible. While the flow of illegal cigarettes into Europe from Ukraine has actually fallen over the past year (probably because the factories producing them were in the Donbas), there is am embarrassment of other goods to make up any shortfall, from timber going west to stolen cars still coming east.

Meanwhile, the magnates - oligarch is such a benign term for virtual independent wielders of not just economic and political but often military and criminal might - remain untouchable by the law, and with them their clients, agents, allies and stooges. Even Ihor Kolomoysky, who sent armed men to seize Ukrnafta offices over a dispute with the government, was simply sacked from his position as governor of Dnepropetrovsk - and given the face-saving consolation of being able to say he had resigned.

How far does this matter? It matters. It matters in practice: according to the then-health minister last year, for example, 30-40% of the budget for medicines is stolen, while an estimated 44% of economic output is in the underground - and thus untaxed - sector. It also matters in terms of the morale and legitimacy of the nation. Transparency International estimate that up to 50% of all Ukrainians have had to pay a bribe.

A National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption is being formed, but even this is already mired in controversy, with a series of anti-corruption NGOs challenging the basis on which its members will be selected. While there is the potential for this agency, and other reforms which have been enacted, to begin to make a real difference, unless and until the law can be seen to be applicable even to the most powerful figures in the country, Ukrainians will be cynical. After all, they have good historical reasons to be.

"Take Responsibility"

Predictably, explanations for the explosion of violence in Mukacheve acted as a litmus test for deeply-held beliefs. To some, for example, any attempt to present Right Sector as an out-of-control militia also involved in criminal operations was a vile slur on upright and honorable patriots. But amidst the chaos, retrospective justifications and mutual recriminations, it was also striking how quickly a particular line emerged: the Russians done it. Somehow, when Ukrainian police and militia fight it out at pretty much the most western end of the country, one could put the blame on Moscow.

This piece from RFE/RL, for example, channels a pervasive theme in Ukrainian discussions about the incident. While doing a good job of outlining the rival explanations, it then cites a Ukrainian analyst that "The FSB has successfully picked up the [KGB's] baton... For Russia, Transcarpathia and its surroundings remain an important region. Taking into account the blurred identity and ethnic diversity of the local population, the field of activities for these agents is quite fertile."

I'm never a fan of the oblique implication; to be blunt, it's a very Russian style, the whole "can it be a coincidence?" approach that Kiselev so favors. But the essence is clearly that this could not have happened without Russian machination.

Indeed President Poroshenko told an emergency meeting of the National Security Council that renewed tensions in Donbas "have been mysteriously synchronized with an attempt to destabilize the situation in the rear - and not just any rear, but in a place 1,000 kilometers away from the front line." Again with the oblique implication.

Of course the Russians have been stirring the pot as assiduously as possible, including organizing a terrorist campaign inside Ukraine. And the Mukacheve mayhem is indeed a gift to Moscow's propagandists, as a story that manages to combine right-wing violence with tales of corruption and incompetence within the Ukrainian administration.

But where is there any hint of evidence to back up the "Russian connection" story? If it has been an open secret for ages that Right Sector has been penetrated by Moscow's agents, is it not a terrible indictment that the SBU security service has been so unable to catch a single one - and has not even said anything about these suspicions, even though it is usually pretty outspoken? And can one simply dismiss as "cover story" the way that Moscow has formally labeled Right Sector as a "terrorist organization" and reported arresting members planning attacks in Crimea?

My particular concern is that a very real enemy - Moscow - also becomes a convenient, catch-all excuse for both Ukraine and its friends abroad. No serious efforts to address corruption? Well, that's impossible while fighting the Russians. Some terrible military decisions? Well, the chain of command is full of Russian agents. Economy in shambles? That's Russian terrorism and energy politics. Armed clashes in the west of the country? Nothing to do with endemic local corruption and state weakness, just Russian plots.

Ultimately, Ukraine cannot and will not win this war on purely military terms. It is building up a significant (and expensive, but that's another matter) armed force, and unless Moscow is willing to deploy extensive further forces, ripping away what tatters of deniability it maintains, Kiev should be able to block any major rebel offensives. But by the same token, a reconquest of the Donbas really depends on Russia being willing not to escalate.

As much as a military conflict, this is a war of governance: of will, legitimacy, political maturity, and economic endurance. Kiev will need to demonstrate that it can govern honestly, effectively and inclusively - especially if it is ever to reassimilate the citizens of the Donbas. And addressing the culture of corruption, embezzlement and oligopoly that has developed in the past twenty - or maybe two hundred - years will be crucial not just to get the crippled Ukrainian economy on track, but also to allow real and serious state building.

"We Need To Talk About Kiev"

Let's be clear: the new government elected after the Maidan faced an epic series of challenges. Some things they did and have done well enough. There has been significant reform in the economic sector, for example, especially in trying to address the budget deficit, and clean up the banking and energy sectors.

Other things, not so much. It is an interesting, if ultimately arid exercise to speculate how different things might have been without the war to drain their coffers, distract their attention and militarize their policies.

And also, to be honest, make the West feel it has to be nice to them. Ukraine was hardly high on their list of priorities beforehand. One could question how far it really is now. But one of the pernicious outcomes of the Donbas war and Crimean land-grab has been that somehow to speak ill of Kiev is now all too often interpreted as provide aid and comfort to Moscow.

This is infantilizing the Ukrainians, who need to be encouraged to build their country afresh and not given excuses. It is noteworthy, for example, how many of the very real reforms being applied within the economy can, in part, at least, be ascribed to pressure from the IMF, never the most sentimental of institutions, which has been a notable exception in its preparedness to talk tough and set strict conditions for its assistance. When you have a $17.5 B stick to wave, people listen.

The more general resistance to pushing Kiev is also damaging efforts to help it, though, because Western allies and donors, not being imbeciles, know the problems at work. So, while mouthing warm words, they sometimes hang back from providing the kind of concrete assistance, from cash to shared intelligence, that Kiev needs. Unwilling to see their secrets leaked to the Russians (after all, real progress in reforming the SBU is questionable, despite former chief Nalyvaichenko's optimistic claims of progress), or their aid wasted or spirited off to Swiss bank accounts, they quietly hold back. I've encountered many officials in both the USA and Europe, who freely admit that while they will continue to try to keep Kiev on life support as long as it is not too expensive so as to deny Moscow the satisfaction of outlasting it, they have all but written off any early hopes that Ukraine was finally going to break out of its cycle of partial-but-inadequate reform followed by a descent back into corruption and cronyism.

So Kiev needs to get its act together. And Kiev's Western friends need to be the right kind of friends, the ones willing and able to call Kiev out when it screws up, but equally willing to hold out a hand to help it up when it does stumble.

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 #33
Sputnik
July 22, 2015
Russia's All for Team Work But Does US Want to Help Solve Ukrainian Crisis?

The political and military outcome of the Ukrainian crisis will largely be decided by the United States and Russia not Kiev or anyone else involved in the peace talks, stated American think-tank Stratfor, adding that a newly-minted bilateral format might be instrumental in this.

"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," Stratfor noted.

The geopolitical intelligence firm frames the Ukrainian crisis as essentially a clash between two conflicting geopolitical imperatives with long-term implications.

"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 US hegemony," Stratfor explained.

Western attempts to drag Ukraine (and other post-Soviet countries) into its sphere of influence through greater involvement both with the EU and NATO and disregard for Moscow's concerns and interests are apparently in line with this thinking.

Not surprisingly then, Russia has been wary of the US activities in Europe: Washington plans to deploy more military hardware to Eastern Europe and the Baltics and pushes for more war-games, involving NATO members and partner nations, close to Russia's borders.

Of all NATO member states, "the United States has the strongest military and the most assertive policies challenging Russia throughout the former Soviet periphery," Stratfor pointed out. In the end, these "assertive policies" targeting but unprovoked by Russia might undermine the fragile European security.

Although both countries are of particular significance for the resolution of the Ukrainian conflict, only one of them has been directly involved in the peace process, Russia. The United States, whom Stratfor calls "a major political, economic and security player in Ukraine and the broader standoff between Russia and the West," is not taking part in the two primary negotiations formats.

The first format comprises Kiev authorities, self-defense forces and representatives of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) looking for solutions for tactical issues.

The second one is known as the Normandy format. Within its framework, Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France are pushing for a permanent solution to the Ukrainian crisis through the full implementation of the Minsk accords. Among other things this agreement involves autonomy for the Donbass region.

Although Washington will not be invited to participate in the Normandy peace process, it has become part of a "special bilateral format" of talks on Ukraine, announced by Russian Presidential Chief of Staff Sergei Ivanov earlier this week.

As part of this new trend US Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin discussed the implementation of the Minsk agreements and the constitutional reform process during a recent phone call.

A new format makes great sense, according to Stratfor, since "in some ways, these two countries wield more power to shape the political and military outcome in Ukraine" than Kiev authorities and independence supporters.

The geopolitical intelligence firm warned that it might be too early to celebrate the end of the Ukrainian crisis yet.

"Issues still divide the two sides, particularly what kind of autonomy Ukraine's central government should give the rebel regions," Stratfor said. Although all parties to the conflict support the idea of decentralization, this remains a major point of contention in terms of timing and the scale.

Kiev wants to provide less autonomy and is ready to amend the constitution after self-defense forces disarm, while independence supporters are seeking greater autonomy and are ready to lay down arms only after appropriate changes are introduced and Kiev fulfills all its promises.

The United States largely supports Kiev's stance but it might have become more flexible on the issue.

Recently, Nuland urged Kiev authorities to grant "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 US pressure to deliver more on the sensitive issue could be seen as a nod to Russia," the think tank asserted.

Time will tell if Kiev acts on the US advice and whether Washington truly wants to solve the Ukrainian crisis. Meanwhile, Washington and Moscow will be engaged in more talks as part of the newly-devised bilateral format.

"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," Stratfor concluded.

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 #34
RFE/RL
July 21, 2015
How Do You Solve A Problem Like The Donbas?
by Brian Whitmore

Just one sentence, inserted into a complex piece of legislation, caused some to wonder whether Kyiv has been sold out by its Western allies.

One sentence that was too much for many Ukrainians. One sentence that was not enough for the Kremlin. One sentence that the United States reportedly lobbied heavily for to assure that Kyiv was holding up its end of the Minsk cease-fire.

The sentence: "The particulars of local government in certain districts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions are to be determined by a special law."

This controversy over that one sentence in amendments to the Ukrainian Constitution aimed at devolving some power to the regions is the latest step in the delicate, duplicitous, and dangerous dance between Ukraine and Russia in the twilight of the Donbas war.

From the moment the ink dried on the Minsk cease-fire back in February, it was obvious that the thorniest problem to solve would be how the separatist-held areas of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts would ultimately be reintegrated into Ukraine.

War is politics by other means and the Kremlin's goals in Donbas are ultimately political.

Vladimir Putin may have once dreamed of seizing all of what his propagandists call Novorossia -- the strip of land from Kharkiv to Odesa -- and establishing a land bridge to Crimea.

But that's off the table now and he is clearly not interested in annexing the war-ravaged and economically devastated enclaves his separatists currently hold.

"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," political commentator Leonid Bershidsky wrote in Bloomberg View.

The Autonomy Dance

Russia is seeking to have the rebel-held areas enjoy broad autonomy inside Ukraine -- a status similar to that enjoyed by Republika Srpska in Bosnia-Herzegovina. And Moscow wants this status enshrined in Ukraine's constitution. A Ukraine decentralized to the point of dysfunction, after all, would make it all the easier for Moscow to meddle in Kyiv's affairs.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko is no fool. He knows this is Russia's game. And when he presented his proposals for constitutional reform last month -- a decentralization plan for all of Ukraine -- it made no specific mention of any special status for Donetsk and Luhansk.

But the fact that the version of the law now before parliament does -- and the fact that U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland traveled to Kyiv and met with lawmakers on the day they voted for its first reading -- has made many in the Ukrainian capital nervous.

"Has the United States sold out Ukraine in exchange for Iran and Syria?" asked a headline in gordonua.com.

Likewise, in an interview with that same publication, Taras Stetskiv, a former member of the Ukrainian parliament, asked: "What exactly has Russia bought with its signature under the deal to close down Iran's nuclear program? At least a special status for the Donbas in the constitution, and that's why Nuland came to control the vote."

But while Ukrainians like Stetskiv may be suspicious that they have been sold out to Moscow, the Kremlin and its surrogates were unsatisfied.

"Poroshenko's amendments to the draft constitution are a far cry from the Minsk agreements and close only to the political whims of Poroshenko himself," Aleksei Pushkov, chairman of the State Duma's Foreign Affairs Committee, tweeted.

Kicking The Can

Political analyst Vladimir Socor wrote that "many Western officials are fearful that failure to wrap up a political settlement" on the status of Donetsk and Luhansk by the end of 2015, as stipulated by the Minsk agreement, "could free Russia to 'escalate' again the military hostilities."

As a result, Socor wrote, Ukraine's Western allies are pressuring it into fulfilling these political provisions of the ceasefire despite Moscow's failure to fulfil its end on the military side by ceasing military operations and pulling back heavy weapons.

What Poroshenko effectively did is kick the can down the road a bit.

The legislation that will ultimately determine how much autonomy the rebel held areas will be granted -- the one referenced in the constitutional amendments -- won't be drafted and debated until the autumn, when lawmakers return from their summer recess.

So Kyiv hasn't given Moscow what it wants, enshrining a special status for Donetsk and Luhansk in the constitution -- at least not yet. But it did just enough to satisfy Western powers who are eager to demonstrate that Ukraine is adhering to the Minsk agreement.

It's a clever tactic. But one has to wonder if there is a strategy.

Because what eventually happens with the rebel-held areas of Donbas is crucial to Ukraine's future.

If they are reintegrated the way Moscow wants them to be -- with broad autonomy and the separatist forces legitimized as their political elite and police force -- then Ukraine's sovereignty will be severely curtailed. Integration with the West will be off the table.

If you want to see Ukraine's future under this scenario, just look at Bosnia.

Some observers, most notably Alexander Motyl of Rutgers University, have argued strenuously that it is in Kyiv's best interests to just let the territories go.

"If Kyiv were bold, it would countenance giving the occupied territories the independence that its separatist leaders say they want or have," Motyl wrote recently.

"Think about it. If Kyiv took the initiative, it could, in one fell swoop, establish clarity in its east. If the enclave were independent, all talk of 'civil war,' autonomy, and 'economic blockades' would cease, and the only issue would be the Russian war against Ukraine proper."

Motyl acknowledges that such a move "would outrage Ukraine's hyper-patriots and the pro-Kyiv eastern Ukrainians who've been fighting for their homeland in the Donbas" and is therefore unlikely.

Instead, the best worst option for Kyiv would be to "freeze the conflict and let the enclave drift away."

Which, by kicking the can down the road a bit, might be exactly what Poroshenko is doing.

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 #35
News Junkie Post
http://newsjunkiepost.com
July 20, 2015
What the Left Should Learn about Ukraine
By John Goss
John Goss is an Editor of News Junkie Post and an authority on 18th century English novelist Robert Bage.
[Photos and links here http://newsjunkiepost.com/2015/07/20/what-the-left-should-learn-about-ukraine/]

History of the Ukrainian civil war, February 2014 - February 2015

Prior to what became known as Euromaidan, there were several attempts by the West at regime change in Ukraine. These were known as color revolutions and put into power corrupt right-wing politicians like Yulia Tymoshenko, who was in prison prior to the takeover. Previously these regime changes took place at the ballot box. Euromaidan was a mass protest on Maidan Square in Kiev against the austere policies of the elected President Viktor Yanukovich who, like all heads of state, was living in luxury while ordinary people were suffering. Ukraine looked towards the West, and the majority wanted closer ties and even inclusion in the Euro-zone.

The protest was genuine but there were Western-funded elements who used it as a means to create regime change without an election, in other words a coup d'etat. It is well-known today that Victoria Nuland had hand picked the replacement prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, whom the West had been sponsoring via his rather misleadingly named foundation, Open Ukraine. Since before the coup, its partners included the NATO information and documentation center, Chatham House, the United States State Department, and other organizations through which money can be channeled tax-free.[1]

Elections were due to take place in March 2015. Protests were largely peaceful until on February 18, 2014, when a number of shooters opened fire on a crowd. This triggered further events in which Yanukovich fled in fear for his life. The Western mainstream media covered the Maidan Square protests in some detail, an important fact considering such sparse coverage of the genocide which has taken place in its aftermath, further indicating that our media was, and is, a complicit servant in the overthrow and installation of an illegal regime. According to a leaked telephone conversation between Urmas Paet, the Estonian Foreign Minister, and Catherine Ashton, then Vice President of the European Commission, the gunmen who opened fire in Maidan Square were firing on both sides and were not from the Yanukovich government. Channel 4 did pick up on this.[2] Neither Paet nor Ashton has denied that the intercepted phone call was genuine.

On May 2, 2014, at least 46 people were killed in an organized massacre where many were locked in a Trade Union building which was then set on fire. Kiev has made no serious effort to find out who the perpetrators of this massacre were, because it is quite certain this leads to the very top of government. Professor Marcello Ferrada de Noli knows about fascist regimes and illegally installed dictatorships, having been imprisoned under General Pinochet. He now lives in Sweden and has followed the Ukrainian civil war from the start. Some of the pictures posted on his blog are not for the squeamish but show the reality of brutal forces in a formerly peaceful country. It was pro-junta forces who had been massacring their own people.[3]

Odessa, which has a large populace of Russian speakers, was targeted because, like the people of Donbas many do not wish to be governed by the puppet regime installed by the US in Kiev. Since coming to power, Communism has been banned and Communists cannot stand for election to the Verkhovna Rada (Kiev parliament). There has been a ban on Russian-language programs, and cable companies do not carry Russian channels, which has led to a five-fold increase in the sales of satellite dishes. This pushed a Kiev member of parliament (MP) to instruct the police to smash all the satellite dishes.[4] The murder, or murder made to look like suicide, of opposition politicians and journalists is almost pandemic.[5]

Eric Draitser was born in the United States, but he has a special connection with Ukraine considering that his father emigrated from Odessa to the US. He has advice for those of us on the left. "The question facing leftists internationally is no longer whether they believe there are fascists in Ukraine, or whether they are an important part of the political establishment in the country; this is now impossible to refute. Rather, the challenge before the international left is whether it can overcome its deep-seated mistrust of Russia, and consequent inability to separate fact from fiction, and unwaveringly defend its comrades in Ukraine with the conviction and aplomb of its historical antecedents."[6]

This message from Eric Draitser cannot be underestimated. There are good thinking people on the left who have been so conditioned in the UK that they do not know what kind of government the West has brought to power in Kiev. Lack of mainstream media coverage of what is actually going on is one problem. The other is the continuous vilification of Russia, Vladimir Putin, and all things Russian without any justification. Some people believe to impose sanctions on Russia was the right decision. Some even believe Russia caused the civil war. This is what Draitser calls this deep-seated mistrust, and it seriously needs to be addressed.

The civil war that followed the deposing of Yanukovich was escalated as soon as Petro Poroshenko became president. Before coming to power he promised to bring peace to Eastern Ukraine. Pravy Sector and Azov forces, many of whose fighters are openly fascist and openly deify the fascist Stepan Bandera, have spearheaded the Kiev government's attack on its own people living in the East. In this conflict, at least 6,500 people have been killed including many women and children (more than twice as many as were killed in Palestine in another genocide that went on in the same period). Prior to this, there had not been a civil war in Ukraine since the Russian Civil War of 1922.

Poroshenko, a chocolate, and now media, oligarch cannot be trusted. He said he would sell his chocolate concern, Roshen, to concentrate on politics when he became president but failed to do so. He signed the Minsk 1 and Minsk 2 protocols but failed to adhere to their conditions. Not very long after Minsk 2, he was stating openly that it was a pseudo agreement and the fighting would not stop until the self-declared people's republics of Donetsk and Lugansk were controlled by Kiev and they would fight till the last drop of blood was spilled - he did not mention his own blood. Different interpretations were put on what he said by East and West media.[7] His signature on the foot of an agreement is as worthless in terms of honesty and integrity as that of Herr Adolph Hitler. Thanks to a Wikileaks document it is known that Poroshenko has long been a puppet of the US: at least since 2006 when he accused Tymoshenko of being unprincipled, which is really only a euphemism for her true character.[8] Poroshenko is just as bad and, in another leaked cable from the US, it is shown that the Americans knew that their man in Ukraine was corrupt too. "In response to questions about the logic of making Poroshenko Rada speaker, Bezsmertny said there was no other way to create an Orange coalition. Poroshenko's reputation was tainted by serious corruption allegations, but he wielded significant influence within Our Ukraine, and his interests had to be accommodated  - it was as simple as that, Bezsmertny emphasized."[9]

In early 2015, President Barack Obama finally admitted that the US had organized regime change, and Victoria Nuland, some fifteen months previously, told a press conference that the US had invested $5 billion over the last 20 years to assist Ukraine in its goals to become supposedly democratic. This was after Yanukovich failed to sign up to a Greece-type austerity deal with Europe, preferring to continue trading with its Russian partner.[10] The plans for regime change had already been started at least a month earlier when the then Ukrainian MP, Oleg Tsarnov, revealed that US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, was running the non-governmental organization (NGO) Techcamp from the US embassy. The purpose of Techcamp was to train Ukrainians on how to use the media for misinformation while they prepared for a civil war. Throughout Tsarnov's speech, the fascist parliamentarians are heard chanting abuse, trying to drown out the message.[11] Oleg Tsarnov's fellow Party of Regions MP, Oleg Kalashnikov, was murdered on April 15, 2015 outside his home after receiving threats from an extreme right-wing group Mirotvoretz ('Peacekeeper') due to his anti-fascist outspokenness. Mirotvoretz is supported by Ihor Gerashchenko, a senior advisor to the internal ministry of Ukraine.[12]

What the civil war has economically cost the people of Ukraine

In all wars, it is rarely those who start them who get killed in them. The NATO countries have a terrible record in bombing and occupying formerly peaceful countries like Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, to relieve them of their natural resources and leave them as failed states. More recently US support has been for proxy wars waged by Ukraine on its own people, Israel on Palestine and Saudi Arabia on Yemen. The aim has always been the same, regime change to impose a puppet or pliable government, or alternatively to create conditions of perpetual war until whoever eventually comes to power ends up in dollar debt to financial institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) in order to rebuild their countries. During the Ukraine civil war, for the first time in its history, the IMF, under the directorship of Christine Lagarde made loans to a country at war. Just as the war was starting, in response to a question asking if strict monetary decisions might push Ukraine into the arms of Russia, Lagarde told Judy Woodruff:

"You are right about qualification, meaning that IMF money doesn't come free.

"IMF - the IMF lends financing to countries, provided that countries do for themselves what they need to do to restore the economy to be able to finance themselves without our support. So, we lend money, and the country takes a road to recovery, makes the hard choices, decides for itself what its economic future will be.

"And it includes what you said, dealing with corruption, restoring the governance, dealing with the right price of energy, restoring the fiscal situation, and making structural reforms that will help Ukraine get back on a solid track."[13]

In other words the IMF lends to a country in order to create austerity deliberately for its residents, while enriching the suspect banking fraternity. The National Bank of Ukraine, which is the country's lender of last resort, is run by a governor and a council of seven members from the Rada plus a further seven chosen by the president. In June 2015 Christine Lagarde made a statement on the progress of the IMF's ongoing loans to Ukraine which suggests this structure is about to change. She welcomes a parliamentary decision "to strengthen the National Bank of Ukraine's independence . . ." This is part of the 'far-reaching and structural reforms' imposed by the IMF as part of the deal to create growth.[14] The Ukraine economy has all the makings of another Greece.

Since the civil war started, the Ukrainian currency, the Hryvnia, has sunk in value, its purchasing power being half what it was before the start of the conflict. At the height of the fighting it was only one third of its former value. What makes it even more arduous for ordinary people is that utility bills have risen and 28 percent of families could not afford to pay their energy bills last winter.[15] Kiev has defaulted on its due payments to Russia for gas. There are protests against the current government not reported in our media. Known as Financial Maidan, longstanding demonstrations have been going on since December 2014.[16] This continues, with protestors calling for Yatsenyuk to resign.[17]

The real reason for the US proxy civil war was to get Russia involved. As such, multiple media attacks on Putin and his policies made daily reading and viewing, while our media was simultaneously bogged down with reports of Russia having government troops and tanks in Ukraine fighting against Kiev's armies.[18] These reports have been discredited time and again. Not one creditable photograph of these supposed Russian military columns has ever been produced. Earlier in 2015, President Putin went on state television discussing Crimea and the Ukraine civil war. He said if there were Russian troops in Ukraine the conflict would have been over in days. Here is an interview Pravda's Inna Novokova conducted with Franz Klintsevich, first deputy head of the Russian Faction at the Russian parliament, which puts the Moscow point of view regarding Ukraine. He describes in disturbing detail what would happen to the US if it declared war on Russia and why he thinks Russia will have to clear up the mess after Ukraine collapses.[19] The US is only a fair-weather friend and may already be holding much of Ukraine's gold.[20]

Vladimir Putin's popularity has never been so high at home and abroad. He was one of  Time Magazine's 100 most influential figures in the world for 2015.[21] Due to the civil war in Ukraine, Russians have rallied around Putin. Open Ukraine, as previously mentioned, is funded by the West. Another Western-funded opposition party called Open Russia had already virtually disintegrated before the assassination of its leader Boris Nemtsov, an assassination which leaves a number of open questions beyond the scope of this article. The civil war in Ukraine has had exactly the opposite effect from what the West hoped to achieve: regime change in Russia. The cost to Ukrainians has been devastating.

More importantly, while our media has been drumming up the idea that Putin is a warmonger and everything he does is bad, he is actually a peacemaker. Sanctions have hurt Russia, and they have hurt Europe too. European countries were doing good trade with Russia before dollar diplomacy took control. It was Putin's initiative to get Angela Merkel, François Hollande and Petro Poroshenko round the table to negotiate the Minsk agreements. What also seems to be forgotten is that Putin, although having a short KGB involvement, is a capitalist. Russia is an advanced capitalist country and has been for nearly 25 years. It is no longer the old Soviet Union. Indeed Putin could be a friend to Europe, but the West has chosen to try to alienate him and Russia in its pursuit of global hegemony.

Russia is not the threat though, make no mistake, it would defend itself, were it attacked. There is however an enemy. The Warsaw Pact alliance was set up as a response to the NATO alliance. With the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Warsaw Pact alliance was disbanded. There was no longer any need for NATO's existence. Instead of winding down its resources, as might be done with munitions factories after a war, it has expanded its scope, swamping up almost all the former Warsaw Pact countries. This expansion is a big threat to Russia and to the countries with NATO bases. Ukraine was one of the last hurdles in a real-world global expansion reminiscent of the politically incorrect board-game Risk. Nearly all the modern large-scale wars have the jackboot footprint of NATO on them.

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#36
Novaya Gazeta
July 8, 2015
Ukraine conflict jeopardizes Russia's strategic nuclear potential - daily
Article by candidate of mathematical and physical sciences Vladimir Marakhonov: "So who among us favours strong Russia? Conflict with Ukraine has cost our country half its nuclear potential"

Not approving of Russian-Ukrainian events over the past 18 months and not concealing my attitude towards this, I constantly encounter the following reaction from supporters of these events. "So," they say, "are you opposed to Russia's imperial grandeur? Do you want Russia not to get up off its knees and to be an American doormat, and do you want anyone who feels like it to wipe their feet on us? Do you want Russia to be weak?" I see with amazement how many opponents of the war in Ukraine suddenly for some reason start to hesitate somehow shyly, get cold feet, and mutter indistinctly that, in general, even if Russia is not a strong country, on the other hand it will be warm and fuzzy and that, when choosing between military might and world harmony, it is better to plump for world harmony, even at the cost of one's own belittlement. This undoubtedly elicits a scornfully derisive reaction from keen admirers of the annexation of new territories.

I find all of this somewhat bewildering. Above all, because a most primitive analysis of the influence of recent events upon the country's actual defence capability must, in my view, give serious food for thought to any Russian citizen who is at all responsible.

Let us try to make such an analysis. Let us take as our basis the position of supporters of the war and of "Crimea is ours" - that we are opposed not at all to the "Banderites" but to Anglo-Saxon imperialists and to contemptible Europe. This, in actual fact, is an entirely appropriate reflection of the reality: We really have set ourselves up in opposition to everyone now, and to America above all, with its considerable nuclear might. This nuclear might used to be counterbalanced by the corresponding might of the nuclear triad of the USSR (and subsequently of Russia), and the system of treaties on the limitation of strategic offensive arms inherited from the Soviet Union made it possible to maintain nuclear parity between Russia and the United States. It is believed that by the second half of 2014 this parity, which had been upset in the process of the USSR's break-up, had been fully restored.

Since the contents of the strategic offensive arms treaties and other similar documents are not secret, any interested Internet user can easily find information about the composition of the units of Russia's nuclear triad. This composition appeared as follows for 2014-2015.

The Strategic Missile Troops

Different sources provide somewhat differing yet close figures for various moments of 2014-2015. We will cite recent approximate data for the number of warheads installed on various classes of missiles at the beginning of 2015:

The R-36M and R-36M2, Voyevoda (NATO classification SS-18 Satan). The most powerful liquid-fuel missile with 10 independently targeted warheads and 460 nuclear charges.

The UR-100N (NATO classification SS-19 Stiletto). A liquid-fuel missile with six independently targeted warheads and 320 nuclear charges.

The RT-2PM and RT-2PM2, Topol, mobile and silo-based (NATO classification SS-25 and SS-27 Sickle) - a solid-fuel missile with one warhead and 150 nuclear charges.

The R-24 Yars (NATO classification SS-27 mod 2) - a solid-fuel missile with four independently targeted warheads. The most recent development, 236 nuclear charges.

In all, the number of charges on deployed carriers in the Russian Strategic Missile Troops, according to these data, stands at 1,166 units. Percentage-wise, 39 per cent of the charges are on the Voyevoda, 28 per cent on the UR-100N, 13 per cent on the Topol, and 20 per cent on the Yars.

These missiles are on alert duty. Nonworking hardware, like a car that has stood a long time in a garage, is likely to produce various unpleasant surprises when made to work after a lengthy break. To prevent this from happening, a whole slew of measures is carried out, including periodic checks, operational jobs, running repairs, replacement of components, and other operations. A number of these measures are carried out only with the most direct participation of representatives of the product's manufacturer, because the hardware is very complex, and only the manufacturer can picture all the nuances. Let us take a look at how things stand with the manufacturers in our country.

The Voyevoda missile - developer the Yuzhnoye Design Bureau, manufacturer the Proizvodstvennoye Obyedineniye "Yuzhnyy Mashinostroitelnyy Zavod" imeni A.M. Makarova [A.M. Makarov Southern Machine-Building Plant Production Association] (Yuzhmash). Both are in the city of Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine. The developer and manufacturer of the control system is the "Elektropribor" NPO [Science and Production Association], city of Kharkiv, Ukraine.

The UR-100N missile - head developer, thank God, the Machine-Building NPO, the former Chelomey Design Bureau in Reutov, although the control system is the aforementioned "Elektropribor" NPO, city of Kharkiv, Ukraine.

The Topol missile - the "Moskovskiy Institut Teplotekhniki" [Moscow Institute of Thermal Technology] Corporation.

The Yars missile - the Moscow Institute of Thermal Technology Corporation.

Thus, practically all the liquid-fuel carriers in the Strategic Missile Troops prove to be dependent on cooperation with Ukrainian military-industrial complex enterprises. The Voyevoda missile - the most powerful one, with 10 independently targeted charges and 40 false targets to penetrate missile defences - is entirely dependent, in terms both of the power unit and of the control system. The UR-100N missile - the second most powerful one, also equipped with a powerful system for penetrating missile defences - is dependent in terms of the control and guidance system. Let us point out that these missiles have the maximum number of warheads, and a problem with one missile deprives us not of one charge but of 10 or six at once. The solid-fuel missiles, thank God, are not tied to Ukrainian components and manufacturers - at least, not to such a degree.

I believe that everyone understands the prospects for military cooperation with Ukraine following the annexation of Crimea. Poroshenko recently issued an edict simply prohibiting the Ukrainian military-industrial complex entirely from cooperating with Russia. In this way more than 60 per cent of the nuclear potential of Russia's Strategic Missile Troops has been jeopardized. Think on this, gentlemen.

Strategic Aviation

The nuclear potential of Russia's strategic aviation is overwhelmingly made up of Kh-55 cruise missiles - an analogue of the American Tomahawk. It is these that are installed on the Tu-95 bombers, created in 1952, with which Russia is now so assiduously frightening Western Europe. As in the case of the Strategic Missile Troops, there are certain nuances here. This missile's flight to the target is ensured by an R95-300 ducted-fan turbojet engine mounted on a special pillar in the tail section of the missile. Without it, after launch, the missile would move in free fall.

So, at least through the end of 2014 this engine was being manufactured at the Motor-Sich Association in the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhya and delivered from there to Russia. In November 2014 Boris Obnosov, general director of the Tactical Missile Armament Corporation, reported the suspension of cooperation. On paper, a joint venture with Motor-Sich for the manufacture of these engines was to have operated in the city of Dubna from 2012. I do not know the present state of this programme, but even if implemented successfully, this venture will be tied to Ukrainian subassemblies. Thus, serious risks are arising for 100 per cent of the carriers in this part of the Russian nuclear triad.

In addition to these engines, the Motor-Sich Association was also supplying about 30 per cent of the engines for the Russian helicopter industry - in particular, engines for the most modern Mi-24 and Mi-28 (Nochnoy Okhotnik [Night Hunter], alias Havoc) combat helicopters, Ka-31 helicopters, and others. But compared with the nuclear triad, these are trifles.

It is thought that the number of Kh-55 missiles at the disposal of Russia's strategic aviation stands at 544, carrying one charge each. This is a practically full load for all the bomb compartments of the Tu-95 and Tu-160 bombers in the arsenal.

The Maritime Strategic Forces

Somehow we have not managed too well with missile-carrying strategic submarines since the submarine Kursk "sank." Now we had fires on submarines, now the Bulava missile did not fly the way we would have liked and to the wrong place. However, the missile armament, at least with regard to the older R-29 missiles of the Makeyev Design Bureau, which make up the majority of the carriers (Sineva, Layner, and others), did not elicit great complaints and were not noted for disreputable ties with the Ukrainian military-industrial complex. Therefore, until recently this part of the Russian nuclear triad did not cause me particular concern. However, the recent instance with the United Shipbuilding Corporation, when it was not possible to launch Russian frigates without the gas turbine engines manufactured in the Ukrainian city of Mykolayiv and an imported replacement was modestly promised for 2017-2018, made me have serious concerns for this part as well. God knows which components of missile-carrying submarines themselves, whose refusal may result in the boat just not putting to sea, were being manufactured by the Ukrainian military-industrial complex.

If we count the doubtful Bulava, the number of charges on carriers of the maritime strategic forces may stand at 512.

If we sum up the data for all parts of the nuclear triad cited above, it will turn out that the break with the Ukrainian military-industrial complex is causing more than half of Russia's nuclear potential, at least, to be jeopardized. Since the US arms that had been ensuring parity in this sphere through 2014 are manufactured not in problem-hit Ukraine and have not gone anywhere, Russia, having cut its reliable nuclear potential in half at a single stroke, has presented the United States with more than twofold superiority. I am not sure that, were something to happen, Zaldostanov [Russian biker leader] would be able to close up the breach that has been formed in the country's defences with his broad chest and the front wheel of his Harley.

Of course, the break with the Ukrainian military-industrial complex will have an extremely negative impact on the Ukrainian military-industrial complex itself as well. Of course, we can take comfort from this. But this is very similar to Siamese twins, one of whom decided to kill the other and, having done so, died himself from a blood infection.

The cheery reports now being issued on the future provision of imported replacements for products of the Ukrainian military-industrial complex and on developments of new wonder weapons cause people who are in any way familiar with the state of affairs in the Russian military-industrial complex to produce a nervous smile. Given that the average age of employees is over 60 and the leadership is totally corrupt, as revealed in recent days, for example, to judge from statements by Dmitriy Rogozin, this is unlikely, to put it mildly, in the military space industrial complex, which is probably little different in this sense from other sectors. In addition, any complex production requires the existence of hundreds of manufacturers of good-quality components and subassemblies - something that is sadly greatly lacking in Russia. This is clearly shown by the state of affairs with the localization of production of subassemblies for the motor vehicle industry. This industry entails less complex production than missile building, but foreign motor manufacturers are still unable to resolve this task.

As for idiotic statements to the effect that we have hidden in the boundless Siberian taiga secret production facilities that are unknown to the accursed Americans and they will now show themselves, they bring to mind only an anecdote that was popular in the military-industrial complex in [Soviet leader Leonid] Brezhnev's time. A nuclear war has started, God forbid, between the United States and the USSR. All the missiles have been fired off, and the Americans are left with just one. The Politburo is sitting in anguish, discussing an American proposal to surrender. Suddenly the joyful defence minister runs in and shouts: "Hooray, they've discovered Warrant Officer Sidorenko's stash in Missile Unit N - three unrecorded silos with missiles!" Tumultuous rapture, Brezhnev picks up the telephone, calls Nixon, and with his characteristic diction says: "Mr Nixon! Surrender yourself, for we have found three unrecorded missiles. In general, as long as there is chaos in our country, we are invincible!" But that is just an anecdote, and I fear that the reality will be far less positive.

All of the aforesaid related to changes that have occurred in the sphere of equipment. There is, however, a no less serious aspect and possibly even a more serious one associated with the human resource. Since the time of the Vietnam war, when attempting to organize military operations somewhere in the interests of the United States, the Americans have constantly encountered considerable difficulties connected with the following circumstance. Since the American government still cannot succeed (a wild people) in resolving the problem of keeping military losses in peacetime secret, coffins arriving home containing American citizens at once start to elicit a stormy reaction from the public. This reaction leads to the result that the campaign has to be quickly curtailed, and then they have to spend a long time justifying themselves to the Congress, the media, and various other "national traitors." However, this problem can be neatly resolved by finding a sufficient number of non-American citizens whose own interests coincide with America's. And who are prepared to fight and die for these interests. Their death, even en masse, will not elicit a stormy reaction from the American public and will not result in the campaign being curtailed.

There is a tough yet quite effective teaching method that is called "putting in the death zone." In this the trainee is placed under conditions where he must either do what is necessary or quit the game, undergoing as a result all sorts of unpleasantness of varying degrees, and ultimately death. So, the Ukrainian Army and the Ukrainian Government have now been placed by Russia in a perfectly real "death zone." To be fair, it should be pointed out that past Ukrainian governments had no less of a hand in this, only it is not they but Russia that will be blamed for this. There now, in Ukraine, there is the army and the economy ruined by corruption, a coming default, and a Russia that has shown its intentions in Crimea and the Donetsk Basin. Ukraine may perfectly well die. Or it may survive. Instil order in its economy and in supplying the army, throw out its corrupt generals, and organize a real fighting brotherhood on the basis of its volunteer battalions, not a horde disunited by hazing.

The population of Ukraine now stands at approximately 43 million. Calculate for yourself what proportion is made up of young men of draft age. In the event of a positive outcome for Ukraine, you will get several million people who have learned to fight and who feel a wide range of negative emotions with regard to Russia. A range extending from contemptuous estrangement in the majority to personal hatred in those people whose near ones have died in the present war. If corruption in the country is vanquished and these people can be given modern lethal weapons, without being afraid, like now, that half of these weapons will end up with IS tomorrow for a moderate payment, then I do not even want to fantasize further on what successes the accursed Americans may achieve if they want to.

I would gladly decorate myself somewhere with a Saint George's ribbon and join the regular columns of the present president's supporters. Supporting the regime of one's own country is a far more comfortable occupation in both the moral and the material sense than being in opposition to the authorities. But, forgive me, being aware of all the aforesaid, I just cannot do this precisely because I am in favour of my country being a strong country. Modern international relations have, unfortunately, not yet reached the state of an entirely healthful climate, and I want to live in a country that is capable, if necessary, of really standing up for itself. Not in a country that, in a vacuum, is fast losing the defence potential that its fathers earned for the sake of absurd aspirations to the role of the local bully who despises the neighbouring peoples and is despised by them but is not capable of giving his own people prosperity and security.

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 #37
The Vineyard of the Saker
http://thesaker.is
June 26, 2015
The Dark Side: "We should never be like them" [Donbass videos]
By Dagmar Henn
["The author runs the German edition of Vineyard of the Saker, an excellent website which covers the Ukraine conflict closely. Previously she was a city council member for the left-wing Linke party in Munich Germany."]  
[Discussed videos and links here http://thesaker.is/the-dark-side-we-should-never-be-like-them/]
(Thanks to Anja and Riema for their help with the translation!)

This is a long text, and I don't know how many readers are really willing to get involved. This is not about geopolitical considerations or rendering diagnoses. I have tried to grasp the inner nucleus of the struggle and to turn it transparent on the level of ethics and morality, to explain why I (as an atheist, to be honest) perceive in this Donbass war the very struggle between good and evil, which concerns us all and is of global impact, although its consequences might not be felt everywhere with the same acuteness.

Many of the videos which serve as examples and evidences in this text are very hard to look at. Whoever is really ready to confront this story should take enough time and make breaks whenever necessary. I haven't seen them all at once. A human being capable of doing so, must be completely cold-hearted.

But it is important to go down into great depth, in order to grasp what fascism and anti-fascism really mean. Quite a lot of people don't know it, while many others only have a superficial notion, buried under stereotypical discourses. In order to really identify and grasp fascism you have to know both sides: the cool and prosaic interests of economic power and the genuine barbarism, utter inhumanity. Only the understanding of both sides provides the base of real resistance.

The infamous video

The way in which the video which presented Givi and the war prisoners at Donetsk airport was used for propaganda, especially for demonizing the militia in German media met all expectations. BILD created the title: " That's the way separatists torture Ukrainian soldiers " and added their own shortened video version (containing an only incomplete translation - as usual). Since then they have referred repeatedly to these shown sequences.

Here you can see first the video the article is about (as well as the article about Givi in the ZEIT ). Here is the Russian version without any blackened parts, for everybody who is keen to see all anatomic details (my honest advice: leave them out. They do not really contribute much to your understanding, but might cause a considerable amount of disgust.)

Now some background knowledge about the presented scenes: It is not difficult to perceive that at the beginning of the video Givi and his "Somalis" have just left the battlefield. The context is - as it can be concluded from the prisoners' statements -a further attempt to storm Donetsk airport. In that case Ukrainian troops were lured into the battle under false pretences. They were told they had to fetch wounded soldiers. It's no wonder that this finally resulted rather in a massacre than an ordinary battle.

That the ordinary soldiers had no idea what they were supposed to do becomes quite obvious in this video: At 8:09 the prisoner says that they had been lied to "so that we didn't know where we went to. We have often refused attacks, if we had known what would have happened, where we would have to go... we would not have gone there either."

The Arrest

It seems quite obvious that Givi has returned from a situation in which he and his battalion have rather played the part of executioners instead of soldiers, thanks to the honorable strategy of this Ukrainian commander. It can be imagined that the soldiers feel abused and are even more enraged than usual. Additionally, that morning a bus had been hit in Donetsk, (the very bus even our media reported on). One of the places the prisoners had been led to was exactly the mentioned bus stop. The Ukrainian commander arrives there at the time when the car is still burning in the street (18:18) and the corpses of the victims have not even been removed. Probably Givi's battalion knew about the terror attack .

The captured commander is no unknown person. He was third on the electoral register of the Right Sector. Presumably Givi thought at that time that he dealt with a regular army officer. But this man, in fact, if you want to judge his position and ideological frame on a scale adapted to World War 2 categories, he could be compared to an SS-Obersturmbannführer. He is not only a member, but a leader in a criminal organisation. (On the original homepage of the Saker there is an article about him under the title " Givi Nets a Big Fish ".)

Despite of this extreme situation, which definitely goes beyond an "ordinary" arrest after an "ordinary" battle (but implies the terror against Donetsk and the abuse of adversarial soldiers as canon fodder), Givi does exactly two things: He stuffs the Ukrainian military insignia into some of the soldiers' mouths and he slaps the commanding fascist.

Here it has to be taken into consideration that this is not only the situation of Givi + his battalion/the prisoners, but additionally the Situation of Givi/his battalion. For everybody involved in the course of the battle, the situation is supposed to be extremely disgusting. They are all highly enraged. And Givi can not deal with it, simply by ignoring the circumstances. If he did so, the risk that they might take the right into their own hands would be enormous. (In the background, translated as well in the subtitles, though so quickly that it is hardly perceptible, you may hear remarks like "shoot them all".) There are indeed good reasons why he has to voice his rage. By doing so, he gives relief to his troops. Even if he seems to step off the path of "ideal" behavior here, he does so in a way that releases emotional pressure, but doesn't lead to permanent damages. All in all his reaction is not only controlled, but even wise.

Dealing with the dead

If one carefully listens to the passages which have been translated in the BILD with "Here is your glorious Ukraine. Be happy!", one can realize that the tone is not sneering here, but rather sad. Further statements of that kind, which are quoted in that scene, are intended as well to mask the men's horror .

To everybody who - quite reasonably - abstains from watching the original version: Here the deceased Ukrainian soldiers are shown in a close-up view. They arrive in an estate car and are unloaded.

What is not shown in the video, but has to be integrated into the chain of events, is the fact that the dead are laid in coffins and after a religious ceremony are shifted in lorries by the survivors and afterwards handed over to the Ukrainian army. The video footage shows nothing less than a disrespectful treatment of the corpses. Nobody will seriously believe that dead soldiers will be carried away from the battlefield and driven off in a hearse, as long as the shooting is still going on.

And nobody should assume that those who thus show respect even to fallen enemies perform this transport in a cheerful, affectionate or even exceedingly dignified way. What they transport here is nothing but tattered flesh, whose human traits they need to ignore at that moment, as they are the ones that have turned human beings into these remainders. If the transported elements will ever regain their human qualities in their eyes again, depends on the further proceedings. Only after perceiving them one might judge whether they have acted respectfully or not.

Here is the video of the hand-over (do not ask me why it starts with the sequence showing the mortar.)

At 5:04 in the video Zakharchenko shows his outrage that no Ukrainian representatives has shown up at the ceremony. The Ukrainian military has often left their dead just behind...

The Prisoners' March

Zakharchenko asks the prisoners in the second video "if you have no conscience, you see? If you can't understand who you are fighting against and who are the real beasts, if your officers don't want to collect your deceased comrades back...".

These are the reasons why the prisoners are "displayed". Many prisoners had explained to him they had been told that they would fight against Russian invaders and had to free the citizens. They don't know (or suppress the knowledge) what their artillery has done to the Donbass cities.

An evidence for that can be found in the first video at 12:10. The prisoner is asked by a female passenger: "Say, what have you come here for?", and he answers: "We were told a completely different story." Similar utterances can be heard in various other videos about Ukrainian war prisoners, such as in my favourite video which shows the interrogation of a Ukrainian artillerist from Gorlowka.

Of course our domestic media comments tend to interpret the procedure in which the perpetrators are confronted with the consequences of their deeds - as an act of humiliation. In Donbass they proceed like that again and again. Imprisoned pilots were led through the towns and villages they had thrown bombs on, artillerists and ordinary soldiers through the cities they had fired on. There they had to meet their victims' family members.

But here we can find historic examples from World War II, too. The procedure resembles far less the parade of German war prisoners through Moscow in 1944 than the "visits" the citizens of Weimar and Jena were "persuaded" by US-troops to pay to Buchenwald, not really on a voluntary base, but quite effectively under an educational point of view.

All in all, the enterprise these troops have been involved in is an ongoing war crime, as artillery attacks against residential areas are a far worse breach of the Geneva convention than Givi's slapping enemies, even if they might have occurred a dozen or a hundred times. The list of Ukrainian war crimes is long, it contained nearly every item after the battle of Slaviansk and even today only two war crimes are missing: the use of nuclear and biological weapons (phosphor bombs have been used repeatedly; they are not only disgustingly inflaming, but because of their highly poisonous vapours they have to be regarded as chemical weapons). None of these war crimes is mentioned in the German press, or even if they are mentioned, "trivial" details, such as that this conduct of war has to be called highly criminal, are cautiously left out (sole exception: the fragmentation bomb that hit a Red Cross station in Donetsk, but only because it killed a Swiss citizen....)

That means: All prisoners were involved in one vast crime. Despite of that they are generally treated in a very respectful way. And this respect lies in the very procedure that has been named "humiliating", because they are treated as human beings who are capable of learning and recognition. As if one could rightfully assume that they wouldn't have done what they did, had they been aware that they attacked their brothers and sisters with all available instruments of elimination.

Exactly that attitude characterises the video from Gorlovka. It is especially interesting and credible, because it was published with a completely different intention - as both prisoners state here that they have been prevented from participating in the Ukrainian election. This video was not placed in the internet to give testimony of the way prisoners of war are treated. But I have hardly ever seen an interview that was conducted with similar subtlety. One of the two artillerists is very close to a nervous breakdown. But this breakdown is due to the recognition of what he was involved into, and he gains that recognition without any pressure, just because he is given space and time to understand. He is not treated as if he was an evil person, just as the Ukrainian side deals with their prisoners. But he is talked to like a reasonable human being, capable of understanding, with calm and respect, in the midst of a town which even then had to suffer continuous artillery attacks and had to mourn victims of war on a daily basis.

If one compares the recording of the large troops of prisoners and of the imprisoned commander, one can see the difference. The largest part of the group seems to be honestly shocked. They couldn't imagine being sworn at by the population and they didn't reckon with the devastating amount of destruction. Other recordings like that of Zakharchenko's press conference prove that they have really grasped and learnt something.

There is a further video showing detailed recordings of that fascist at the bus stop in Donetsk. A close observation shows a complete lack of empathy or shock. Quite the opposite, for a short moment he even exposes something like triumph. To the question "Who has done this?" the fascist commander does not answer with "us", as most captured soldiers do. First he does not answer at all, then he says: "The artillery." Finally, when the militia is pushing him into a car in order to save him from the population of Donetsk, one of them quotes him: "He said that the f*cking specops did it or the Russians" (1:21).

Like the Ukrainian pilot Sawtshenko, who has been presented as a case of human rights' violation, he can not be convinced of having done something wrong. He shows the same cold and contemptuous glance like Sawtshenko and their historic ideals. Just look at the pictures you can find under the keyword Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan in order to see what I mean. She was the main accused in the Majdanek trial and her arrogant coldness could even be felt in front of a TV-set.

The real abyss

The images of the bombed cities are probably known. And everybody reading this text knows already how closely this war repeats the Nazi war of annihilation.

But it is far less known how deep these analogies reach. It was quite late that the first reports shone up from those who had been Ukrainian prisoners. In relevant quantity this started after the beginning of the POW exchange during the ceasefire of Minsk 1.

Here I want to show some videos illustrating this point, that enable you to form your own opinion. I tried to choose videos that enable everyone to evalute their credibility.

The first one is a report of Komsomolskaia Pravda from a POW exchange. The prisoners are interviewed immediately after their exchange, and not all of them had any relation to the militia. Watch it:

Another early report is an interview with the brother of Matros (one of Motorola´s commanders). Matros had desperately searched for his brother, who got caught by the Ukies. The video puts the focus mainly on the meeting of the two brothers, but the younger one tells as well how he was treated by the Ukrainian troops:

Later, after the larger exchanges, reports like this one came up:

All this reports imply that torture nowadays is a normal procedure in the treatment of prisoners (no matter where and for what). But the first reports gave the impression that those ending up in "regular" prisons, in the hands of the "regular" state power, f.e. the SBU, are a bit safer than those falling into the hands of the national guard or even the fascist battalions.

Later it became visible that this is just some type of division of labour. An example for that is the following interview by Graham Philips with the widow of a man who got murdered :

There are too many reports about systematic torture to dismiss them easily. And note: we are not talking about infringements or excessive violence that always can happen in a state of war. We don´t talk either about a situation between an old and a new state, that you find in Donetsk and Lugansk, where the normal institutions of a state don´t exist any longer or not yet and therefore inevitably open violence replaces structural one. We talk about a state with all institutions, with courts, jails and police, that turns torture into a regular procedure and accepts the assassination of prisoners or even encourages it. Nowhere this is expressed more clearly than in reports stating that prisoners who are destined for execution still get tortured before, as a principle. Even the pretence of the intent to investigate, as the US use to legitimate torture, is absent. This is nothing else but an inebriation of violence organised by the state, an orgy of annihilation, nothing else but - fascism.

The tip of the iceberg

Even though there is an impressive quantity of reports about atrocities, the real amount of crime will only be visible after the junta is defeated. There are only fragments known about what happens in places like Slaviansk, Kramatorsk or Mariupol that are under Ukrainian occupation; it is very hard to evaluate what is is rumour and what is fact. Just through some civilians that got in captivity somewhere, somehow, for any reason and got exchanged there are some more or less reliable reports about what is happening there. Meanwhile the Russian Foundation for the Study of Democracy published it´s second report about war crimes in Ukraine that collected a lot of these reports and shows the systematic procedure behind it, and there is a new website called Warleaks that collects and publishes such information.

Some perhaps know already the short indications about life under Ukrainian occupation in a video about Debaltsevo I posted some time ago. This Interview with a mother out of a village formerly occupied by Ukrainian troops short after liberation is much more detailed and quite hard to stand (for me this is one of the most horrible between many horrible videos from this war):

It is necessary to give some background for this video that clarifies that there is no accidental action in this case, no assault against single persons, for what reason ever. The mother tells her son had been tortured for several days and then was thrown into a mine. This is a planned staging of a well known story from WW II. It is told in the novel "The Young Guard ", an obligatory reading in soviet schools. The historical events also took place in Donbas, not far from the place of their second staging.

Meanwhile there are rumours about secret jails on the Ukrainian side and talks about unknown numbers of disappeared people. Involuntarily even Amnesty International recently confirmed these fears:

"Vasiliy Budik an advisor to the Ukrainian Deputy Minister of Defence, told Amnesty International that the separatist forces presented a list of some 1,000 persons whom they wanted to have exchanged for the prisoners they were holding, which was later reduced to less than 200 because, according to him, people on the original list did not exist or were held in Ukrainian prisons since before the conflict started (Vasiliy Budik, in interview with Amnesty International, Kyiv, 2 April 2015)."

Budik, who is presented as an official by Amnesty, is actually founder of the battalion "Donbass" and a close friend of Dmitri Iarosh, the head of Right Sector. You don´t need a lot of imagination to decipher what it means, when this guy says "people did not exist". For sure they got on the list because they existed.

But one shouldn't dismiss tales that can´t be proven at the moment. End of February last years some informations circulated about an assault against anti-maidan-marchers at Korsun. For several months only a few lines could be found about it, f.e. in the appeal of the antifascist headquarters from 7.3.2014. It was impossible to evaluate from afar whether these reports were true or exaggerated. Only in summer a longer video came up that interviewed the victims of this event and clarified that this bits of information were not only true, they even underestimated the facts.

The same happens over and over again. Therefore there are serious reasons to fear that what´s really going on under fascist rule in Ukraine tops our expectations by far. Until now we just see the tip of the iceberg.

A balance of terror?

It seems that media adapt to the fact that Kiew atrocities can´t any longer be hidden completely. So they shift to the strategy to declare that both sides are evil, but the "separatists" are more evil. The report of Amnesty International that I quoted above can serve as example (btw, it mentions videos, but doesn´t link them, and it refers to sources like Kijv Post that turn the wildest tabloid into fountains of truth). Meanwhile not only Givi, but Motorola too get turned into scarecrows.

Let´s look at the relevant questions unemotional.

Are there wars without atrocities? You might wish it, but the idea isn´t realistic. When the taboo of killing broke down (and that is the inevitable consequence of any war), then all the weaker moral limits are at least in serious danger. Exactly that is the reason why punishment delivered to uphold discipline inside the troops tends to be very harsh. To believe the members of the militas don´t commit any atrocities equals the belief in Santa Claus.

There is just a single option to prevent such a development - don´t wage a war. But Donbass people didn´t have this choice, this was visible latest with the events in Odessa on May 2. last year. They only had the choice between defenceless surrender (including their families) or armed resistance. Even though nearly nobody seems to have expected a war at the beginning of the uprising (it is confirmed in this interview with Zakharchenko from May), the decision for armed resistance was legitimate and right.

The differences in warfare should be known. Ukrainian troops act like an enemy force, not like troops on their own territory; it isn´t their only goal (or not even their primary one), to win against the opposing forces, but to deliver the largest possible damage, aiming at the population as much as at the infrastructure. Here the conflict is extremely asymmetric. Donbass doesn´t have the possibility to cut off Kiev from food deliveries, to deny Ukrainian retirees their pensions or to transform West Ukrainian villages into heaps of rubble. But perhaps history will grant us the proof whether Novorossian troops will behave like that f.e. in Lvov...

This type of behaviour indicates that the junta expected to lose this conflict. Even the Nazis, with all their bestial treatment of soviet population, didn´t destroy the infrastructure before they were forced to retreat. Before that they had expected to use it themselves. The Ukrainian rhetoric about "liberating" these areas gets strongly contradicted by he manic shelling of cities with heavy artillery and intentional heightening of risks for the civilian population (like by sabotaging water infrastructure, as it happened in Slaviansk). In case of success this strategy creates a zone that´s useless even for the victor.

This kind of warfare is a crime in itself. And this balance is clear.

There are claims from Novorossia that certain troops will not be captured. This is stated mainly regarding the volunteer battalions, especially those from Right Sector. Is that criminal? Red Army as much as it´s Western allies rarely captured SS members.

But it is surprising that the Ukrainian soldiers Amnesty quotes in it´s report as testimonies of atrocities or executions nearly all belong to two categories - they are either members of one of those volunteer battalions (and it´s funny to observe how Amnesty wriggles around stating that fact) or members of elite units of the Ukrainian army. In both cases people who generally are not captured, following official statements. Not only the fascist "leading actor" of the first video above survived against the officially proclaimed rules, but also those men Amnesty talked with (the former is even soon to be exchanged).

The thin line

Even if we assume that all of the accusations above were true, still there would be a decisive difference left which makes it possible to identify the last thin line between good and evil in an environment soaked with violence . This difference is made clear through the videos filmed by members of Right Sector.

There is a whole series of videos showing supposed or real executions. The first of these videos circulated before the events of Odessa. Recently it was a video of a crucifixion and the last one was a video showing how two captives were hung, which according to the public prosecutor of Lugansk was found on the cellphone of a member of a Ukrainian sabotage squad.

Each of these videos was followed by a debate concerning the authenticity of the respective video. This debate is in fact futile and rather serves as a measure of self-protection; after all, why should someone who knows he will get away with murder unpunished and who most probably has done so before take the effort and bear the costs of faking such a video? Here too Odessa has set the standards; there are hours of video material available with most of them enabling an easy identification of the perpetrators, but without any consequences for them. These circumstances support the assumption that even the most horrific pictures are in fact authentic; and here as well the Ukrainian fascists act exactly as their historic role models who loved to proudly pose next to their victims too.

But here a completely different subject is crucial and this has been proven through the simple fact that such videos exist. This kind of violence is not only not being punished; not only is it not hidden; it is being publicly glorified instead. For the persons involved it is no reason for shame but rather for pride, and should one of the videos be fake, then the reason for it´s existence is that claiming responsible for such deeds results in a higher status.

And how should a state machinery which allows massacres as the in Odessa or even encourages them in any way be able to act against the perpetrators? Which accusation can it bring against those that acted upon the presidential claim that hundreds of "separatists" will have to pay with their lives for every dead Ukrainian soldier?  After the recent decision of the Ukrainian parliament to suspend the declaration of human rights in Donbass, any kind of prosecution of any kind of atrocity against members of the militias or even civilians in the Donbass region has become completely unimaginable. Through this decision they have simply been deprived of their humanity.

As difficult as it may be in many cases to enforce discipline in an army formed out of loose militias and as likely as it might be that, with this kind of warfare and the proven brutality of the opponent, atrocities do happen, on the side of Novorossia there are not only proven efforts to stop and prosecute encroachments but there also is a distinct moral discourse.

In the first video it can be found at minute  13:50 :"We should never be like them." Here you find the most covert and deepest battle of this war. Exactly here the Red Army achieved its greatest victory in World War II. The Red Army did not retaliate. Had it done so,nothing would have been left of Germany.

In midst of the omnipresent violence this is a continuous struggle which is not necessarily always victorious. But it´s recognition is important, and that it isn´t supplanted by a glorification of violence. This interview with a militia commander whose son was murdered by the fascists is one example.

There are variations of this discourse. It will be held in different ways in the communist units and in the orthodox ones. But it is essential that it exists and that it is promoted actively ( this is one of the tasks of the political sections which according to my knowledge are part of all units of Novorossia). The following video gives you an idea on how this is being done:

Good and Evil

At this point - whether and how humanity can be preserved or if it disappears or is even destroyed systematically - the fight in Donbass is a repetition of WW II and the fight against European fascism. The true heart of antifascism can be found at exactly this point, in the continuous struggle for one's own humanity in the face of darkness.

Historic documents reflect this as much as the reports of the present; you just have to remember the " Vow of Buchenwald " or the " Dachau song ". Antifascism is not "we are the good guys, you are the bad guys"-  a game that can be played if needed in the streets of each and every city. It is the fierce fight against the darkest form of imperialist rule, which can only succeed along with this inner battle.

How far this knowledge has already been lost is visible not only in the "antideutschen" variancy which regards itself as anti fascist but totally denies the fact anti fascism never treated the people and the fascist power as one and the same. It can also be seen in an recent article written by the secretary of VVN titled "alte Assoziationen" ( old associations, antifa January/February 2015) where he supposedly indulges in polemics against Niekisch and his national Bolshevism but actually accuses him for his sympathy for the Soviet Union and his rejection of liberalism...and thereby duplicates the alleged "Theory of Extremism", the assertion that there was no difference between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Ultimately and casually the true antifascist tradition in Germany is declared null and void, and humanism is replaced by liberalism, the so called package of "western values".

Reality though is different, as shows us Ukraine.There is no clear border between liberalism and fascism; we can see that everyday in the mainstream media or in the affectionate flirting of the Green Party elite with Ukrainian fascists. And how could it be otherwise when it is the ideological expression of one form of the rule of capital , while fascist ideology is the expression of the other. Exactly where the deepest difference is marked between antifascism and fascism, when it comes to humanity, human sympathy, liberalism offers - nothing.

Like in a lens we witness the struggle for the future of mankind in Donbass. On the one unrestrained glorification of power and violence, on the other hard-headed but decisive resistance. And above all it gigantic illuminated letters say"coming soon to a theatre close by". While the majority of the German Left is, full of servility to general opinion trying to lay off the last ideological protection.

In order to regain a morale which allows real resistance against fascism (which is of utmost urgency since Ukraine may be the first European country where the beast raises its head, but it is unlikely the last) we don't have to reinvent the wheel. It should suffice to remember. Even in German it was stated clearly and often enough.

English translation of the poem:

http://harpers.org/blog/2008/01/brecht-to-those-who-follow-in-our-wake/

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