Johnson's Russia List
2015-#156
12 August 2015
[email protected]
A project sponsored through the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES) at The George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs*
www.ieres.org
JRL homepage: www.russialist.org
Constant Contact JRL archive:
 http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs053/1102820649387/archive/1102911694293.html
JRL on Facebook: www.facebook.com/russialist
JRL on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnsonRussiaLi
Support JRL: http://russialist.org/funding.php
Your source for news and analysis since 1996n0
*Support for JRL is provided in part by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Foundations to the George Washington University and by voluntary contributions from readers. The contents do not necessarily represent the views of IERES or the George Washington University.

"We don't see things as they are, but as we are"

"Don't believe everything you think"

In this issue
 
  #1
Moscow Times
August 11, 2015
Russia Is Feeling Under Attack From the West
By Jonathan Power
Jonathan Power was a foreign affairs columnist for the International Herald Tribune for 17 years.

Despite the current tension, the U.S. and Russia remain close. There is cooperation in space, not least the International Space Station. The U.S. regularly hires Russian rockets to launch its crews to the station and to launch satellites. Russia sells advanced rocket engines to the U.S. Russia allows war materiel en route to Afghanistan to pass through its territory on Russian trains.

Russia worked hand in glove with the U.S. to successfully remove large stocks of chemical weapons possessed by Syria. It shares intelligence on Muslim extremists including the Islamic State.

Recently Russia stood side by side with the U.S. and the EU as they forged an agreement with Iran on its nuclear industry. At the United Nations Security Council, Russia and the U.S. voted together for a resolution approving the agreement.

U.S. diplomats are now beginning to concede that Russia's concerns about far-right groups in Ukraine were well founded, as it becomes increasingly clear that such groups operate outside the control of the Ukrainian government.

When the Russian, French and German foreign ministers hammered out an agreement with the support of Ukraine's parliamentary opposition for former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych to step down at the next election, the West "forgot" about it in the next few days as they supported the Maidan demonstrators, who drove Yanukovych into exile. The West supported the "democratic revolution" rather than demanding the fulfillment of the agreement. No wonder Putin was livid.

What is needed now in Western capitals is an acknowledgement that they have not always got Russia and Putin right. Today many Western observers believe that the degree of Russia's intervention in the Donbass in eastern Ukraine is grossly overstated. Not long ago NATO Supreme Allied Commander Philip Breedlove warned that Russia was about to invade Ukraine, an ill-informed viewpoint that was quickly shot down by the head of French intelligence.

NATO's bombing of Belgrade in 1999 went against international law, and led to an independent Kosovo. Russia voted against this campaign at the UN, arguing that changing a country's boundaries by force was illegal. If the West had not waged its Kosovo campaign it is probable that Russia would never have annexed Crimea.

Russian paranoia was understandable when the second Chechen war broke out in August 1999. Many powerful Washington insiders ignored the jihadi nature of the Chechen invasion of neighboring Dagestan, focusing only on Russian violations of human rights. Yet today, a number of emirs in the region have declared their loyalty to the Islamic State.

In 2011 Russia abstained on a resolution at the UN Security Council which authorized a Western initiative to use its air forces in order to save civilians from being massacred in Muammar Gaddafi's Libya. In fact the Western powers went far beyond their UN mandate and fought to bring down Gaddafi. This led to the present chaos in Libya which seems to have no end in sight.

Gordon Hahn, a former senior associate at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote that "All this demonstrates again the utter futility in expanding NATO into Russia's sphere of influence. It undermines Western security in two respects. It has alienated Russia and transformed it into the West's "greatest geopolitical foe." Second, it runs directly contrary to the requirements of an effective global fight in the war against jihadism, which must include all major powers in a robustly institutionalized alliance."

Of course Putin on occasion is heavy-handed but it is no surprise that he has overwhelming domestic support in his confrontation with the West. Russia responds to the actions of the West. It is always the West that makes the first move on the chessboard.
 #2
Times Literary Supplement (UK)
www.the-tls.co.uk
February 14, 2015
Book review
Is Russia really a kleptocracy?
By RICHARD SAKWA
Richard Sakwa is Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent and an Associate Fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House. His books, Putin and the Oligarch: The Khodorkovsky - Yukos Affair and Putin Redux: Power and contradiction in contemporary Russia, appeared last year. His Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the borderlands has recently been published.

Karen Dawisha
PUTIN'S KLEPTOCRACY
Who owns Russia?
464pp. Simon and Schuster. $30.

Vladimir Putin's regime, Karen Dawisha argues in her important new book, is a manifestation of hidden processes dating from the final years of the Soviet order. In the late 1980s, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) began to divert funds abroad and into secret accounts at home to provide the resources that would make possible the covert takeover of the successor state. This, Dawisha implies, was brilliantly achieved by the security apparatus in league with other revanchist forces. The result is a self-serving, parasitic elite that undermines not only the rule of law at home but also Western institutions.

This is a powerful argument, which effectively delegitimizes the current Russian government in its entirety, and justifies the personal demonization of Putin. If it is correct, then any means, one might claim, would be appropriate to overthrow such a monstrous system. Dawisha is too careful a scholar to take the logic of her argument so far and does not prescribe such drastic remedies. Instead, she has compiled an extraordinary dossier of malfeasance and political corruption on an epic scale. Much of her analysis is so incendiary that the original intended publisher, Cambridge University Press, decided not to take it on (probably wisely in the light of Britain's libel laws, even though recently amended) and the book is not available for sale in the UK. The story of the Party's gold has gained the stature of a myth, but Dawisha is the first Western author to have pieced together all the relevant material and convincingly argues that this shift of resources to banks and other institutions outside and within the Soviet Union really did take place.

This is where Putin comes in. As an officer of the KGB who served in Dresden from 1985 to early 1990, Putin was a dyed-in-the-wool member of what later came to be known as the siloviki (or "force-men"): those with a security or military service background. There is no question that the siloviki have exercised a powerful hold on Russian politics since the very beginning of the country's emergence as an independent state in 1991. Putin himself was traumatized by witnessing at first hand the collapse of Soviet power in the German Democratic Republic, following the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. He returned to what was soon to become St Petersburg again, and hitched his star to the "democratic" mayor of the city, Anatoly Sobchak. From late 1991, as the city faced drastic food shortages, he figured in one of the most resonant scandals of the era. St Petersburg was licensed to export raw materials in exchange for food and essential medication. Instead, the oil and metals were exported, but very little returned in exchange. Sobchak himself, as Dawisha shows, turned out to be rather partial to the acquisition of real estate, which led, with Putin's help, to his hurried exit from the country in November 1997, having lost immunity from prosecution when he failed to be re-elected in 1996.

The story thereafter is of Putin's vertiginous climb up various greasy poles, his nomination for president by the ailing Boris Yeltsin in December 1999, and his systematic consolidation of power. Dawisha draws on a remarkable document drawn up in the Kremlin just before Putin's inauguration in May 2000 that outlined how the new authorities would rule, including the management of the media and the public sphere. Above all, she charts the extraordinary accumulation of wealth and power by Putin's associates and friends over a period of two decades. Among the beneficiaries were the Rotenberg brothers (Arkady and Boris) at the head of numerous construction, banking and investment companies, Yury Kovalchuk at the head of Bank Rossiya, Gennady Timchenko in the energy transport and production sector, Vladimir Yakunin at the head of Russian Railways, and the "grey cardinal" who has been at Putin's side since the beginning, Igor Sechin, now head of the Rosneft oil company. Putin himself also appears to have gained from some of their dealings. One of his former associates, Sergei Kolesnikov, has given insider details on how money was diverted to build "Putin's palace" in Gelendzhik on the Black Sea coast. Putin is also credited with the ownership of several yachts. The fundamental picture that emerges is of a Russia that has been hijacked by an elite that quite consciously set out from the beginning of its rule to increase its wealth, and needed to take over full political control to safeguard this process.

Dawisha has done us all a service in her meticulous account of all the publicly available material on the various businesses and enterprises Putin and his associates have been involved with since the early stages of Putin's career. But what her model gains in elegance, it loses in obscuring complexity and counter-trends. That Putin and his close colleagues have enriched themselves is now effectively proven; but the essential relationship between the accumulation of wealth and the operation of power is left unexplored. The former may equally be seen as behaviour typical of nouveaux riches throughout the ages, although of course it has massive deleterious consequences, notably the encouragement of corruption.

The question arises: is Russia really a "kleptocracy" (a term which is never given theoretical grounding in Dawisha's book)? If such a system is defined as one where the government exists purely to increase the personal wealth and political power of its officials and the ruling class more broadly, then the power system under Vladimir Putin has kleptocratic features (as in many other countries), but it is not a kleptocracy tout court. The administration fulfils many other functions, including maintaining domestic stability, asserting its role in the world, and above all, pursuing a dirigiste developmental vision that may not be the most efficient economic model available but is nevertheless a variety of capitalism with a respectable pedigree that meets the basic needs of the Russian people. Russia is not like Nigeria under General Sani Abacha, where oil revenues soon found their way to Switzerland; instead, tax revenues have been invested in public projects or else squirrelled away in various sovereign wealth funds for a rainy day. That rainy day has now come with a vengeance, with the precipitous decline in oil revenues exacerbated by the effects of Western sanctions concentrated precisely on "Putin's cronies", targeting his closest associates in an attempt to hit him personally. The idea, one assumes, is that his associates, deprived of the ability to travel to the United States and/or Europe, would turn against the leader and force a change of policy. This is as wrong-headed as it is futile. A policy designed to hurt a small group in the elite is now affecting the whole population in a form of collective punishment. Not surprisingly, the elite have rallied around the leader and the people have rallied around the flag.

More specifically, there are at least four problems with the approach to contemporary Russia pursued by Dawisha and assiduously recycled by the "liberal" opposition to Putin and its supporters in the West. First, the case is far from incontrovertible. Much of it consists of investigative reporting, published mostly in the press. Some brave journalists and politicians have risked their lives to report their findings. Nevertheless, the evidence is often circumstantial, conjectural and partial. It would not stand questioning in court.

Second, it is not clear when the kleptocracy was established and the precise form that it takes. Dawisha has provided powerful evidence of the convergence of former Party resources and the elements of what in other contexts is called the "deep state": in this case the coming together of former and active security officials with the power system. But the various elements identified by Dawisha do not necessarily cohere to create a dominant force. At certain times and on certain issues, notably with the expropriation of Mikhail Khodorkovsky's Yukos oil company from 2003, the siloviki were given their head to create a powerful state-owned oil company, Rosneft. We also know that the security services were used in the early Putin years to tackle organized crime, but this does not mean that ex-security officials became in turn a new mafia. Too many security officials were placed in important positions in state enterprises, undermining their transformation into more competitive and liberal bodies, but even within these bodies there is a constant struggle to achieve at least a modicum of good corporate governance. The sanctions will now precisely weaken the forces that have tried to make advanced sectors of the Russian economy internationally competitive.

Third, the relationship between the alleged "kleptocracy" and the formulation of policy is far from clear. The much-vaunted stability of the Putin regime has, after all, delivered significant public goods. Fiscal policy and economic management in general have followed neo-classical liberal nostrums, notably under the management of another of Putin's friends, the relatively liberal Alexei Kudrin, who maintained strict macroeconomic discipline for eleven years, allowing Russia to weather the economic crisis in 2008-09. The purse strings were loosened from 2011 to invest in some major infrastructural projects, including the Sochi Winter Olympics, the modernization of the Trans-Siberian Railway and the Baikal-Amur Mainline, building stadiums for the 2018 World Cup, a new ring road round Moscow, and some high-speed rail lines. In other words, the regime has a developmental dynamic. Above all, the country has embarked on a major rearmament programme that seeks to create a modern, well-equipped armed force by 2020. At the same time, until the recent sanctions began to hit, standards of living have risen faster than at any other time in Russia's history. This does not look like the policies of a kleptocracy, although of course without the diversion of wealth to the elite and misguided dirigisme the economy might have become more dynamic and diverse.

Fourth, Dawisha's argument appears to operate in a geopolitical vacuum. One corollary of it is that foreign policy must also be shaped by the elite's narrow corporate interests, but this is far from demonstrated. The broad shape of Russian foreign policy is based on a deep social consensus on its aims and purposes. At its base is a vision of Russia as a great power, an equal partner of the West, something that the latter finds hard to accept. Russia's annexation of Crimea in March 2014 enjoyed overwhelming public support, although views are far more fragmented over policy in the Donbas.

For all its strengths, Putin's Kleptocracy is one of many books that contribute to a misleading paradigm of how Russia actually works. The Putin system comprises many layers and competing networks. Policy is not usually made by one faction across all the policy areas, in which case there would be greater consistency and coherence than we actually see. Instead, the system, as Alena Ledeneva has argued in Can Russia Modernise? (see the TLS, November 8, 2013), is surprisingly segmented and made up of a series of cross-cutting obligations. It can be understood through a number of shifting prisms, each reflecting specific concerns but thereby presenting only a partial picture of the whole. There is no doubt that Putin is supremely pre-eminent, but his power derives from his unique ability to articulate popular aspirations and to draw on the strength of disparate factions. Any mechanical attempt to reduce the system's operation to one plane thereby obscures the others. Putin's Kleptocracy is a courageous and scrupulously judicious investigation into the sinews of wealth and power in Vladimir Putin's Russia; but when it comes to shaping policy towards Russia, it is a deeply deceptive guide.

 
#3
Moscow Times
August 12, 2015
8 Facts to Celebrate 100 Starbucks in Russia
By Ilaria Parogni

American coffeehouse chain Starbucks Coffee celebrated the opening of his 100th Russian branch in Tuesday. The new venue is located inside the shopping center Galereya in St. Petersburg, the company announced on social media.

Starbucks is currently holding celebrations at the new location and at the company's flagship store on Moscow's Arbat. Jazz bands are due to perform, and master classes devoted to the secrets of coffee brewing will be held throughout the week.

Whether you are a fan of the brand or a coffee snob, it's hard to downplay Starbuck's role on the global market. The company's net income in the third quarter of 2015 increased 22 percent, with total revenue climbed to $4.88 billion, Bloomberg reported in July. The Moscow Times shares a few interesting facts about the company's presence in Russia.

1. The first Russian branch opened in Moscow in 2007

Starbuck Russia is a relatively young player on the Russian market. The company opened its first store inside the Russian capital's shopping center Mega Khimki in September 2007. Three months later the second branch was unveiled on Arbat.

2. A trademark squatter prevented them from entering the market for three years

The reason behind Starbuck's tardy arrival in Russia was a legal battle with Russian lawyer Sergei A. Zuykov. As The New York Times reported in 2005, Zuykov had been hoarding brand names in Russia with the sole intent of exorting money from the companies holding the original trademark in their own countries. Starbucks became one of his targets in 2002, with Zuykov saying that he would abandon his registration in exchange for $600,000. The coffehouse chain refused to pay and took Zuykov to court, where the squatter was defeated in 2005, The Moscow Times reported at the time.

3. Starbucks branches currently operate in 9 Russian cities

You can find Starbucks in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Rostov-on-Don, Krasnodar, Sochi, Yaroslavl, Ekaterinburg, Tyumen and Samara, according to the company's Facebook page.

4. Sochi housed a secret Starbucks during the 2014 Winter Olympics

NBC employees at the Olympic media center in the Russian city of Sochi, on the Black Sea, were able to purchase Starbucks drinks from a private 24-hour kiosk set up by the American media outlet during the 2014 Winter Olympic Games. The secret stand offered a limited menu of specialty espressos and chai drinks, The Los Angeles Times reported at the time.

5. Starbucks was one of the pioneers of banning smoking in public places in Russia

Way before a smoking ban in public places was introduced in Russia in 2014, Starbucks was one of the few establishments to take a hard line on cigarettes, forbidding them on its premises. The reason had little to do with health and environmental concerns, The Moscow Times reported in 2011.. "Coffee beans are very porous," a company's spokesperson was quoted as saying. "They suck in the smoke, which affects the taste."

6. A Starbucks espresso in Russia is twice as expensive as one in New York

As of Aug. 6., a Tall Americano in a Starbucks branch in Moscow was 180 rubles ($2.84), while the drink cost $2.65 in a store in New York, data collected by The Moscow Times show. A Tall Latte and Single Espresso cost 240 and 110 rubles respectively ($3.25 and $1.73) in Moscow, while the same beverages could be purchased in New York for $3.25 and $0.80 respectively.

7. The Starbucks Russia menu is tailored to the Russian taste

Raspberry and white chocolate cheesecake and focaccia sandwiches with chicken breast, ham, mushrooms and mozzarella cheese are among the options offered by Starbucks in Russia, according to the company's website. Starbucks in Russia also offer the cheese curd pancakes called syrniki, and the cookies sold in Moscow are made by a local company.

8. Moscow is home to the first Starbucks inside a bank

The first Starbucks-bank hybrid (Starbank?) debuted in Moscow in 2015, Russian newspaper Vedomosti reported. A joint initiative of the coffeehouse and financial group Otkrytiye, the open-plan venue offers customers the opportunity to fill out papers for credit cards and open a bank account in a cozy environment, while savoring a cappuccino or two. "You usually go to the bank out of necessity," Project Director Khoren Morozov was quoted as saying. "While coming here is enjoyable."

 
 #4
The Guardian (UK)
August 10, 2015
Dill with it: Russia's obsession with the spindly herb menace
It's everywhere - on pizzas and sushi, in soups and hummus. Is there any food it cannot ruin?
By Shaun Walker

People often ask if Moscow is a difficult place to live, and I tell them it's great: exciting, vibrant, and with rapidly improving quality of life in recent years. There is one thing, however, that makes living in Russia a terrifying experience on a day-to-day basis; one pitfall of life that strikes terror into the heart of almost every expat. And no, it's not the ruthless winter temperatures, nor is it the stifling political climate. It's not even the lack of cheese on the shelves since Russia's recent counter-sanctions were imposed. It's dill.

Dill is everywhere in Russia. It's the national herb, smuggled on to every plate as if it were merely seasoning, rather than a ruthlessly aggressive flavour capable of sabotaging any dish with just a few of its spindly fronds. A Reuters investigation once found that the average Russian eats enough dill each year to fill a large suitcase.

It's one thing when dill blankets traditional Russian dishes like the emptied contents of a lawnmower bag, but quite another when it shows up on pizza, sushi, quiches: occasions when you naively hadn't even thought to request a dill-free meal from the waiter. It is a sabotage apparently borne of a grotesque, atavistic culinary longing, like some deranged Brit on the Costa del Sol lacing a paella with brown sauce.

I know what you're thinking: gravadlax. Yes, yes. I am willing to accept that there may be a parallel reality in which the taste of smoked salmon is beautifully augmented by dill. But after all these years of dill, you see, I just can't imagine it. Like a maltreated circus monkey, cowering in the corner every time it sees a human, however well-intentioned, I have been ruined by all the years of dill abuse. You wouldn't foist a crisp glass of dry white wine on a recovering alcoholic, so leave me alone with your dilled smoked salmon, please.

Russians themselves have become so immune to the taste that when the dill plague beneath their noses is pointed out, many react according to the first three stages of the K�bler-Ross scale for dealing with loss. First comes denial: "Dill? No, not really, I guess we use a bit, but it's certainly not everywhere!" Next comes anger: "What is your problem, anyway, if you don't like it, why don't you leave Russia? And I know the kind of muck you eat in England, anyway, you make pies out of kidneys, you porridge-munching freaks!" Third comes bargaining: "OK, so we do eat a lot of dill, but we also eat parsley! And anyway, surely you agree that dill is great?"

But dill is not great. And dill is everywhere. It comes in different forms, and it is hard to know what is worse: the vivacious, triffid-like full fronds which look as though they might spring from the plate and constrict fatefully around your throat, or the thinly chopped flecks, visually innocuous, but impossible to remove from the food.

It's not just the taste of dill that I find an affront, though that is bad enough. It's the attitude. It ruins every hue of flavour it comes into contact with, clambering over all the other tastes and overpowering them with terrifying ease.

Every herb has a personality: I think of rosemary and thyme as warm, generous friends, sitting by the fireplace in knitted jumpers and giving you relationship advice. Parsley is probably a fairly boring acquaintance who sits in the corner chattering away, telling long stories you can easily tune out of, while coriander is an exotic and sultry lover. Dill, however, is the culinary equivalent of Francis Begbie from Trainspotting. It has walked in, unleashed a string of obscenities, and glassed you in the face before you even knew what was happening.

The only country that eats even more dill than Russia is Ukraine. I've even seen a dill fajita in Kiev. And the war has bought a surprising new twist to the dill story. The pro-Russia rebels nicknamed the Ukrainians "dill" (Ukraine and the Russian for dill, ukrop, share the same first three letters). The Ukrainians responded by reclaiming the name and setting up "dill battalions" of paramilitaries, who go into battle with dill logos sewn into their combat fatigues. Dill armies: it's like something from a feverish dystopian nightmare I might have had a few years ago.

But while Russia might be fighting Ukrainian "dill brigades" on the battlefield, the war against the actual herb is as hopeless as ever: dill sushi, dill hummus, dill pizzas and dill gazpacho are all recent sightings. True, central Moscow over the past decade has taken enormous culinary strides. Gone are many of the Soviet-style stolovaya cafes; in their place have sprung up hipster coffee bars and Brooklyn-style brunch joints. But even here, the dill monster is never far away. Take Brix, a delightful bistro near Patriarch's Ponds - the most affluent and pleasant part of central Moscow, which serves grilled octopus and other exquisite Mediterranean treats. Oh, but hang on, what's that greenish hue to the steak tartare? Yes, of course, it has been laced with enough dill to feed a family of 12.

At Twins, a Moscow restaurant that is, in general, to be commended for its innovative use of local products and exciting haute cuisine Russe, the evil weed is an omnipresent menace. On a recent visit I selected an intriguing looking salad of new potatoes, grapefruit and omul, a fish from the waters of lake Baikal.

"I'm not sure if it's got dill on it, but if so, could I have it without dill, please," I said when ordering. The waitress looked at me in disgust.

"But dill is the whole point of the dish. No you can't."

She was serious, and so I ordered something else. It came with dill, obviously.
 
 5
Irrussianality
https://irrussianality.wordpress.com
August 11, 2015
A BUM RAP
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'

Things are so bad in Russia that people are reduced to stealing toilet paper, writes Paul Goble in an absorbing article in The Interpreter. Referring to the case of a 21-year old man who was arrested in Petrozavodsk after stealing a roll of toilet paper from the city's Lotos Plaza shopping centre. Goble says that the incident indicates how 'Russia's poor are driven to despair by deteriorating economic conditions [and are] seeking to take care of themselves and their families by turning to crime.' He cites Sergei Smirnov of the Higher School of Economics as suggesting that the situation is not yet so terrible as to cause social unrest, as many Russians still have money in reserve, but counters that 'at a time when some Russians are forced to steal toilet paper, that may not be as much a reserve as Smirnov suggests.' [http://www.interpretermag.com/how-bad-are-things-for-russias-poor-some-are-now-stealing-toilet-paper/]

The Interpreter regularly plumbs the depths of Russophobia, and with this article hits rock bottom. It calls for a little bit of freshening 'whataboutism'. A ten-second search for comparisons with other countries indicates that swiping a bit of loo roll is, as the British might say, a fairly 'bog standard' crime.

Take, for instance, the case of David Pinkham of Massachusetts, who 'was caught out when police spotted him leaving Lawrence City Hall with a case of unused toilet paper. ... Further investigations revealed he had even more about his person, with six rolls hidden down his pants. A police report stated that he "pulled six tightly folded toilet paper rolls from his buttocks and groin area" at the police station.' And Pinkham is far from alone. Toilet paper stealing is in fact so common that many dispensers have anti-theft devices built into them. The problem got so acute at a Trenton, New Jersey, library that in 2013 it began rationing paper.

According to a newspaper report, 'the rising cost of living' was the most likely cause of Pinkham's crime. And yet nobody has seen fit to turn his actions, or those of others, into an article entitled 'How Bad Are Things for America's Poor? Some Are Now Stealing Toilet Paper', let alone suggest that the United States is on the brink of political revolution. Goble suggests that the Russian government's policies are flushing the Russian economy rapidly down the drain. Maybe they are, but you can't draw that conclusion from a single incident of petty thieving.
 
 #6
Journalitico
http://journalitico.com
August 8, 2015
Thoughts on Russia's decision to burn contraband Western produce
By Danielle Ryan
Danielle Ryan is an Irish journalist and blogger. She has a degree in Business and German from Trinity College Dublin and studied political reporting at the Washington Center for Politics and Journalism in Washington, DC.

This week Russian authorities began destroying products that fall under its embargo on Western food imports.

A decree for the destruction of the products was signed by Putin on July 29 and will apply to countries that have introduced sanctions against Russia over the situation in Ukraine.

Those sanctions are a form of economic warfare, and are in my opinion, wrong.

But incinerating good food is also wrong.

The reaction from Russian people has been mixed. Some are in favour of destroying illegally imported produce, arguing (correctly) that the destruction of contraband or surplus produce is not uncommon in many developed countries, that Russia needs to reduce its own reliance on food imports (also correct - and the embargo has indeed had the positive side effect of helping domestic producers).

They also argued that destroying the contraband will discourage further smuggling (not a guarantee).

Others, even prominent pro-Kremlin figures, have been outraged by the decision. They believe that the red tape could have been worked around, that the food could have been distributed to orphanages, the homeless, or even sent to eastern Ukraine, where people are literally starving.

I'm in their camp.

The pro-destruction side however, said no, the government couldn't guarantee the safety of illegal produce with no official documentation and others said they wouldn't eat it. The anti-destruction faction countered that by saying that in fact it would only increase corruption by creating a black market in confiscated goods.

The Kremlin, to be fair, was in a tricky situation.

Another group of people, who are generally pro-Kremlin, have refrained from saying anything at all about the issue. One can only assume it is too much of an unappetizing thought (pardon the pun) to provide more fodder (and that one) to Western media who in general, don't cover Russia with much objectivity.

But not everything needs to be about "Western media". If they didn't want to see gleeful headlines about starving Russians and videos about food being "Russia's latest victim" then this was a bad idea.

I've been tweeting about it over the last couple of days and the response to my disapproval of the government's decision has mostly been along the lines of "but other countries do it too" (correct) and "the media didn't make a scene out of it when the EU destroyed food meant for Russia" (also correct).

But that is not really the point - and here's why.

First of all, "they do it too" is a cop-out in this instance. That is 'whataboutism' in its most useless form (and yes, there are varying degrees of usefulness when it comes to whataboutism).

But, more importantly, there is a good reason why this is getting more coverage.

The destruction of the food, according to the presidential decree, is to take place immediately after it has been seized, and the incineration/bulldozing/whatever will be documented on video. Authorities will also search warehouses and food stores around the country for banned products. Fats, cheeses, fruit and vegetables will be burned in furnaces.

That has, predictably, resulted in what looks to me like a PR nightmare.

It is one thing to say we have no choice but to destroy this food and then to go ahead and quietly do it. It's quite another thing to decide to make such a public circus of it.

The showy, public element to all of this is basically intended to be the equivalent of giving the middle finger to the West by sending the produce up in flames on national TV.

It's a 'fu-k you' to the sanctions. It is also, of course, for the visual benefit of some Russians who, angered by the economic warfare being waged against them, would greatly enjoy that spectacle.

As for the Western coverage; true, you could make the valid argument that there would have been ridiculous over-the-top headlines either way - but honestly, they probably would have been marginally less dramatic had there not been so much visual evidence to go with them.

News channels have been showing footage of bulldozers crushing mountains of cheese and rolling over crates of apples. A group of girls wearing "Eat Russian" t-shirts have been going around Moscow searching stores for banned goods and slapping "sanctioned" stickers on them.

On the other side, homeless charities have called the destruction "inhumane" and unnecessarily wasteful.

Putin's spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, did manage to admit that "visually, it probably doesn't look very nice" (no shit!) but told people they shouldn't "over-dramatize" the situation.

Online petitions have been launched, seeking to have the decree overturned and the destruction stopped.

The Kremlin then, in another idiotic move, decided that rather than addressing the concerns or even pretending to reconsider, they would instead "investigate" to see whether all the signatures on the petitions were authentic.

Talk about a waste of time, and a bit of an over-dramatization in itself.

Natalya Shagaida at the Center for Agricultural and Food Policy at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (that's mouthful, pardon another pun), told Russia Beyond The Headlines that she personally had an "extremely negative attitude" to the whole thing. She said:

"In general, Russians have quite a reverent attitude to food, to the work of those who produce it. A large part of the population sees the burning [and] destruction of benign products as blasphemous."

Valery Panyushkin, a St. Petersburg journalist, used his online column to ask how Putin, the son of a woman who barely survived the Siege of Leningrad, the son of a man who was injured in one of the deadliest fights to break the blockade, and the brother of a child who died there, could be in favour of incinerating food.

That is, of course, an emotional argument, and doesn't take all factors facing the Kremlin into account, but it's a question that was inevitably going to be raised.

It's possible that distributing the food to orphanages, schools or the homeless could have, in Putin's mind, contributed to another PR disaster as reporters from Western outlets ran around taking pictures of 'starving' Russians receiving contraband Western products. But if PR was even part of the decision-making equation, maybe they should have considered the inevitable surfacing of pictures of Russians rummaging through piles of semi-destroyed Western goods in landfills?

To avoid both kinds of PR disaster then, why not send the food to eastern Ukraine? Russia is already doing more than any other country in terms of delivering aid to Donbass, so it seems to me a missed opportunity that they couldn't figure out a way to use this food for good.

Another common reaction to my tweets on the topic has been to ask me, if the food couldn't be sold and for some reason could not be distributed to the needy, then what do I suggest? Well, let's see: I am not an expert in food waste management or agricultural supply chains, so why would I have any great suggestions? Not having a solution doesn't preclude one from voicing an opinion.

I do know this, though. This is not a Kremlin problem. What's happening in Russia right now is the tip of a far worse iceberg.

-the EU Commission estimates that 90 million tonnes of food meant for consumption is lost along the supply chain in the EU (about 180kg per person)
-every UK family wastes an estimated �700 a year throwing away good food
-almost half of the food produced in the world (about 2 billion tonnes) is thrown away every year
-about 60% of the world's total food loss comes from the US and Europe

It is unrealistic to think food waste can ever be fully - or even nearly - eliminated. Given the amount we produce and waste, it is an epic challenge.

But it's a cop-out to see bulldozers rolling over crates of apples and for your only reaction to be well, there's no other option, or to claim (purely) for political reasons that it's the "right" thing to do.

It's not right. And there are always other options.
 #7
http://readrussia.com
August 11, 2015
No, Siberia Is Not Going Secede
By Mark Adomanis

In my wanderings on the internet I recently stumbled across a truly bizarre article that postulated the growing threat of something about which I had never previously heard: "Siberian separatism." And, sure enough, only a week or two later, strikingly similar claims were advanced by The Economist in its latest entry in an ongoing series on Russia's imminent collapse.

The idea that Siberia is going to go its own separate way is the type of seemingly plausible theory that could only be advanced by someone who lacks any grounding in, or specific knowledge about, the Russian Federation. Why do I say that? Well because for a piece ostensibly about "separatism" the piece doesn't seem to understand what that term actually means in the context of real-world Russian politics.

So, first, some definitions. What do we usually mean when we talk about "separatism" in the Russian Federation? Well in literally every book and article that I have read the traditional fear is that the non-Russian ethnic minorities will rebel against what they see as a vehicle of Russian ethnic chauvinism and national repression, i.e. the central government. In other words, minority groups will follow a well-established playbook and attempt to establish states in which they are the majority. So Chechens would fight to create an independent, sovereign Chechnya, Tatars would do the same in Tatarstan, etc.

These fears are of varying degrees of plausibility: not all "national minorities" are created equal. Some groups, particularly in the North Caucasus, have essentially never reconciled themselves to Russian domination. Other ethnic groups have a long history of loyal service to the Russian state and seem to present no significant challenge to Moscow. It would take a pretty active imagination, for example, to imagine a relatively wealthy, well-educated area like Tatarstan falling in thrall to separatism.

But the idea that non-Russian groups might, at some point, rebel against "foreign" imposition is all too reasonable: history has not been overly kind to multi-ethnic federations and it's entirely possible, if still rather unlikely, that Russia could one day follow the path of Yugoslavia.

In recent years I have also heard increasingly plausible theories in which Russian ethnic nationalists force Moscow to abandon control of non-ethnically-Russian territories. Alexey Navalny's famous slogan "stop feeding the Caucasus" is one example of a growing trend of anti-minority sentiment. If left unchecked, it is also easy to imagine how these political forces could force the Russian Federation to shrink, to become something more akin to a European nation state than a land empire.

But what no one ever had in mind when talking about "separatism" was the idea that areas dominated by ethnic Russians would rebel against Moscow to carve out their own independent territories. Until I read that Newsweek article I had literally never heard anyone make that argument because....well, because it just doesn't make any sense.

What is the idea, that Russian nationalists are going to rebel against themselves? I've heard of "Russia for the Russians." It's a scary slogan, but an intelligible one. Ethnic nationalism is a potent force.

But what on earth would the slogan in Siberia be: "we need another Russia for the Russians who happen to live in this particular area and who are different from the ethnic Russians in other regions?" What historical parallel is there for that, for a part of the country that is overwhelmingly inhabited by the dominant ethnicity to rebel against the national government?

On a demographic basis Siberia is the most Russian of any part of the country! National minorities and "guest workers" from Central Asia make up a smaller percentage of the population there than virtually anywhere else. If there is any region that is unlikely to secede from the Russian Federation it would have to be Siberia because the ethnic bases for separatism are not present.

This is not to diminish the very real and very serious threat of separatism in today's Russian Federation. There are very substantial parts of Russia where the emergence of full-fledged separatist movements isn't some kind of abstract hypothetical but an already lived reality: Russian troops have died fighting separatists in the North Caucasus on-and-off for the past twenty odd years. Baring divine intervention, the low-level conflict in the Caucasus between separatists and Federal forces seems likely to continue for as long as anyone can forecast.

But when talking about separatism you need to have an awareness of the particulars of the Russian Federation in 2015, and particularly the ethnic makeup of the population. Areas where Russians are a small and dwindling minority are likely hotspots of separatist sentiment. Areas where Russians constitute an overwhelming majority of the population are not.
 #8
Business New Europe
www.bne.eu
August 11, 2015
BOOK REVIEW: "We are in power; that is democracy"
By Chris Weafer in Moscow

"Boris Yeltsin was able to have a constitution adopted in a referendum that guaranteed him broad powers and an almost complete lack of checks and balances - the first major step toward the poisoning of Russia's political institutions and guaranteeing the transition to Vladimir Putin". That is a statement likely to infuriate many who view Yeltsin as the saviour of democracy in Russia and Putin as the leader who rolled it back to authoritarianism. To those who hold such a simplistic view, I encourage they read "Authoritarian Russia: Analysing post-Soviet regime changes", written by Vladimir Gel'Man, a professor of political science at the University of St Petersburg. It has not been published with the fanfare and publicity afforded to many books which are critical of Russia but, for those who really want to understand modern Russia and get an unbiased view of the political evolution, this book fits right into that category.

"Authoritarian Russia: Analysing post-Soviet regime changes" is a book about how and why Russia failed to become a democracy after the collapse of Communism, and about the "causes and consequences of its trajectory of regime changes toward authoritarianism after 1991". Basically it explains how Russia got from communism to the current political system and also offers some guidance on what could happen next.

The author examines the decisions taken by Gorbachev and shows how they combined to steer Russia away from the path taken by former Soviet states in eastern Europe and towards a path which led to Yeltsin and then to Putin. He explains the key difference is that Russian political leaders set out to maximise their power and, in so doing, faced much weaker institutions and very few political restraints. That was not the case in the east European countries.

Specifically, Gel'Man states that the Russian political system of the early nineties developed as it did because A) there was no meaningful external influence (as was clearly the case in other Soviet states); B) the public remained largely passive and undemanding in the crucial early years; C) the so-called elites (ex-communist and security force leaders) played each other to a zero-sum game; and D) ideology played a very small role.

In those critical early years the author says that expectations about how Russia should develop, ie. similar to a Western model, were almost all held by those outside of the country rather than by the important players inside. The book explains how even those who notionally pursued a democratic course, in reality were simply consolidating their own power and the position of those around them. In other words, democracy was never eliminated from the process but was, and continues to be, used as a sort of smokescreen for the building of authoritarian regimes. Gel'Man quotes Anatoly Sobchak, the former mayor of St Petersburg and one of those credited with trying to bring democracy to Russia. Sobchak said when asked about what he intended to do to further advance the political process: "we are in power; that is democracy".

Yeltsin's first term as president is widely viewed as having been the most democratic period in Russia's history. Gel'Man points out that through his actions in that period Yeltsin actually consolidated the authoritarian nature of the regime and grabbed even greater power for the presidency. He cites specific examples of how Yeltsin's team effectively eliminated all rivals who had little or no public support, and adopted a new constitution that killed off all executive accountability to the legislature. In that respect, Yeltsin held exactly the same position as Sobchak and is quoted by the author as saying, when asked about the lack of accountability in the Kremlin: "To put it bluntly, somebody had to be the boss in the country; that's all there was to it".

There is a lot of debate and relatively little clarity as to exactly how Vladimir Putin came to be in the position where he would be appointed Yeltsin's successor. The list of those claiming credit for promoting him grows by the month. But one factor is very clear: Putin's path to the presidency would have been much less easy had Boris Yeltsin not given him his blessing as successor. That he did on New Year's Eve 1999. Yeltsin, having built up unaccountable powers as leader of the country, chose to transfer all of those powers to Putin. In return, the new president's very first action was to grant guarantees of immunity to Yeltsin and to members of his family.

The author then considers how Putin has been able to build on the considerable authoritarian powers inherited from Yeltsin to greatly enhance his position. In particular the book sets out the sometimes elaborate, often very simple, system of positives and negatives, ie. carrots and sticks, which Putin created to ensure loyalty from the elite. Putin has been able to create a much more elaborate and effective scheme than Yeltsin because of the huge amount of hydrocarbon export revenue - approximately $3 trillion - which has come into the state coffers since 2000. But broadly it is the same plan according to the author.  

The future

So, what happens next? Gel'Man highlights the reasons why Putin's position has been safe thus far. These include A) there is a prohibitively high entry barrier for non-aligned parties and candidates to challenge the incumbents; B) there is one-sided media coverage in favour of the incumbents; C) the use of direct and indirect state funding of the incumbent's political campaigns; and D) more often than not the biased resolution of election disputes in favour of the incumbents. To put in simply, the author claims that the longer the current status quo regime is maintained, the more costly it is to overcome it.

But Gel'Man is not pessimistic about the possibility of regime change. His conclusion is that this is a question of "when" and by "what means" rather than "if". In that respect the book ends in a more hopeful note (to those who wish real political rather than just nominal regime change). He says: "from a historical perspective Russia deserves to be judged as a slow developer, not as an outlier of political regime change".

As to how this may happen? On the one hand, history shows that the "only real incentives for political actors to effect changes are genuine threats to their political survival". In other words, when there is no other choice. But Gel'Man's work also cites examples of change that came as a result of the poor choices and actions of authoritarian leaders, which led to unplanned and spontaneous actions by the opposition and by the people. The demonstrations of December 2011, which resulted from clumsy vote-rigging in the Duma elections, can be put into that category. It can be said that Putin's response to those demonstrations was effective, albeit very expensive.

It also explains why the economy matters a great deal to the Kremlin. History shows that people are never too bothered about politics so long as their disposable income and way of life is improving. Choosing geopolitical adventures over the wellbeing of the domestic economy is one of those mis-steps that the Kremlin seems presently to be very aware of. Its survival may depend on how well it manages a post-recession recovery.

"Authoritarian Russia: Analyzing Post-Soviet Regime Changes" is published by the University of Pittsburgh Press
 #9
Moscow Times
August 12, 2015
15 Years on, Russians Less Inclined to Cast Blame for Kursk Submarine Tragedy
By Daria Litvinova

Fifteen years after one of the worst disasters in Russian naval history - the sinking of the Kursk submarine in the Barents Sea in which all 118 crew members died - the number of Russians who blame the authorities for not doing enough to rescue the sailors has dropped.

The tragedy occurred on Aug. 12, 2000, making it one of the first serious challenges faced by Russia's new president Vladimir Putin. While at the time and in the immediate aftermath, the president's actions were criticized, a poll published Monday by the independent pollster Levada Center showed that 40 percent of Russians thought the authorities did everything possible to save the crew - compared to 34 percent in 2010 and 23 percent in August 2000.

At the time, Russia's rejection of offers of help from other countries elicited outrage among some members of the public. Attitudes to that position also appear to have softened: If five years ago, only 21 percent of respondents considered it the right decision, this year, 28 percent of people agreed with it.

'It Sank'

In a fateful moment that would be remembered and criticized for years to come, Putin told CNN's Larry King: "It sank" - and appeared to smirk - when answering a question about what had happened to the submarine during an interview on the television channel a month after the tragedy.

This laconic answer and the president's demeanor were slammed as being cynical, indifferent and inappropriate for years to come, and further enraged those who already believed the government could have saved some of the sailors.

On Aug. 12, the Kursk, a nuclear submarine and one of the largest attack submarines ever built, was taking part in naval exercises in the Barents Sea. As the results of an official investigation later showed, one of the torpedoes the Kursk was carrying went off accidentally at around 11:28 a.m., followed by another explosion minutes later, after which the submarine sank.

Military officials only registered that an incident had taken place at 11:30 p.m., after failing to contact the crew numerous times.

The vessel was reportedly located at 4:30 a.m. the next day more than 100 meters below the surface. Attempts to rescue any possible survivors gripped the world's attention for more than a week, but were ultimately unsuccessful: By the time Norwegian rescuers managed to open the submarine's hatch on Aug. 21, everyone inside it was dead. Twenty-three sailors are now believed to have survived the initial blast for several hours before their oxygen ran out.

Blame Game

Putin's administration was criticized for a lot of things - for waiting too long to start the rescue operation, for refusing assistance from other countries, and for the apparent lack of concern shown by Putin himself: The president only terminated his vacation in Sochi five days after the tragedy struck.

"They should have raised the alarm immediately. In only doing so at 11:30 [p.m.], they were several hours late," Boris Kuznetsov, a lawyer who represented 55 families of the deceased sailors, told the Voice of America radio station last year.

Kuznetsov, who is now in his 70s, moved to the U.S. in 2007, fearing arrest after having published a book called "It Sank" that decried the authorities' failure to save the survivors of the blasts.

The lawyer claimed that the explosion on the Kursk was recorded by a cruiser named the Pyotr Veliky (Peter the Great) that was nearby at the time. The cruiser's crew also heard and recorded what sounded like the submarine crew banging on its walls, which sailors do in extreme situations to attract attention, the lawyer said.

The banging, Kuznetsov told Voice of America, continued until Aug. 14, so the experts' conclusion that everyone had died from lack of oxygen eight hours after the tragedy, and that by the time the submarine was located there was no one to save, was deliberately falsified, because the authorities didn't want to admit they were helpless.

"The U.K. sent an airplane with rescue apparatus, but it was prohibited from entering Russian air space. The Norwegians offered help. Everything was rejected. The real reason was fear of showing total inability to rescue people during extreme situations," Kuznetsov was cited by Voice of America as saying.

Unhappy Ending

In 2001, the hull of the submarine was raised from the bottom of the sea. A year later the official investigation concluded, naming the accidental torpedo detonation as the cause of the disaster.

That conclusion eliminated all the other versions - the submarine being attacked by foreign naval forces, a World War II-era underwater mine explosion, the submarine colliding with something in the sea - that had been circulating in the media for two years.

Not everyone accepted the results of the investigation. Some insisted that the Kursk had been attacked by a U.S. submarine and Putin had deliberately concealed it in order to avoid an international conflict.

Nevertheless, the case was closed and declared classified.

The bodies of 115 sailors were recovered and identified, several military officials were fired and all the crew members were posthumously awarded Orders of Courage. Their families received a total of up to 23 million rubles (about $700,000 at the time) in compensation from the authorities, the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper reported in 2003.
 
 #10
Moscow Times
August 11, 2015
Kremlin Forms NGO Expert Group

The Kremlin has announced the creation of an expert group to consider changes to a controversial law that labels NGOs receiving funding from abroad as "foreign agents," the RBC news agency reported Monday, citing deputy presidential chief of staff Vyacheslav Volodin.

The group will work within the presidential administration and will consist of parliamentary deputies, officials and members of the Civic Chamber, RBC reported.

The law on foreign agents has been broadly criticized for failing to adequately define the "political activity" that is required to qualify for the label, and for stigmatizing NGOs and evoking a Stalin-era spy mania. In June, President Vladimir Putin told the Civic Chamber that the law required "additional correction."

The expert group, which will begin its work in September, will decide whether there is any need for legislative changes, Volodin told a conference for NGO employees held in the town of Klyazma in Russia's central Vladimir region over the weekend, according to RBC.

The decision to create the group was taken in response to a request from the Presidential Human Rights Council seeking clarification about the foreign agent law, RBC reported Monday, citing Yelena Topoleva-Soldunova, a member of both the Civic Chamber and the Human Rights Council.

Dozens of Russian NGOs have been labeled foreign agents since the law came into force in 2012, and several prominent organizations including human rights group the Committee Against Torture and the Dynasty science foundation have closed their doors rather than accept the label.

Volodin, a Kremlin heavyweight in charge of domestic politics, told the conference that Russia's NGO sector employs 670,000 people and is developing positively, the TASS news agency reported.
 
 #11
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
August 11, 2015
Andrei Kozyrev in the New York Times: On Treason, Defections and Other Ancient Russian Traditions
Russian 'liberals' are hailed as heroes in the West. In Russia, they're widely viewed as traitors
By Gilbert Doctorow
Gilbert Doctorow is the European Coordinator of The American Committee for East-West Accord

Over the past month, the chattering classes in Moscow have had some saucy news to digest, much of it about the bizarre career choice of Maria Gaidar. Masha, as she is generally known, is a third generation member of Kremlin elites best known as the daughter of the reforming prime minister of President Boris Yeltsin whose neo-liberal economic policies broke up what remained of the Soviet command economy without succeeding in replacing it with a functional market economy. The net result of her father's work was to give Liberal politicians and democracy promotion a bad name in Russia for at least a generation. Notwithstanding that legacy of her father, in public life, Masha Gaidar has been a torch-bearer of the Liberal Opposition to the Putin 'regime.'

In mid-July, Gaidar left behind her NGO in Moscow for a new job in Ukraine as deputy governor of the Odessa region, where her immediate boss is the Kremlin's arch-enemy Mikhel Saakashvili. That breaking news was followed shortly by the revelation that she had accepted a Ukrainian passport in keeping with her new official position. And finally the delicious detail emerged that she has written to the Russian authorities asking to be relieved of her Russian citizenship.

A defection in the full sense of the word!

In the past week, some further red meat was thrown to the chattering classes. Another 'princess,' Ksenia Sobchak, daughter of Leningrad/St Petersburg's first post-Communist freedom fighting mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, turned up on Ukrainian television, where she has accepted a star position with a channel financed by the local oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, another b�te noire of the Kremlin. Kolomoisky is widely assumed to be financing the neo-fascist Pravy Sektor thugs who have been wreaking havoc in the Donbass in a no-holds-barred war on the Russian-speaking population.

Sobchak claims that the redirection of her career was in response to her being frozen out of Russian television, where she had been a very successful presenter before going into politics. When she was still enjoying the Moscow limelight, Sobchak was a socialite, a kind of Russian Paris Hilton. Then in December 2011 she came out on behalf of the 'non-systemic opposition' that emerged from protests over the Duma elections.

It will be interesting to see how long Sobchak can continue her balancing act of Moscow residency and open work for the enemy in Kiev. Given the incarceration she narrowly escaped a couple of years ago over charges of acting as go-between, moving substantial sums of U.S. dollars to the seditious movement she embraced, it is not hard to imagine Sobchak's choosing resettlement and a new identity in Ukraine over a prison term in Russia.

These cases serve as a reminder that 'dashes' or 'leaps for freedom' such as brought Kirov ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev to the front page of U.S. newspapers back in 1961 have continued unabated in post-Communist Russia. The cases above have in common two elements: politics and money. More commonly, the real driver is just money. The usual escapees to London or Paris these days are business people who are merely staying one step ahead of Russian state prosecutors investigating embezzlement, false bankruptcies and other forms of theft. Such cases cropped up this summer as well when officers of the Skolkovo science and technology center and of Rosnano chose flight to the West over responding to charges of felonies in Moscow.

Very often what is blown up by Western media as 'civilizational choices' between Russia and the West in the context of current testy relations actually form part of a hoary tradition. For those of us who studied Russian history and even dipped into its medieval past, the issue appeared full-blown already in the 16th century with the defection to Lithuania of a boyar in Ivan the Terrible's retinue, Prince Andrei Kurbsky, who was disappointed at his own career setbacks in the tsar's service. Russia's first 'political �migr�,' entered our history courses as a polemicist in a series of letters exchanged with the tsar from his new military command in the Polish state.

At the time, Russian diplomacy was less mealy-mouthed than today. The following denunciation of Kurbsky was given to the Russian ambassador for delivery in April 1581 at the court of Polish king Stefan Batory:

"He [Kurbsky] became a traitor not because he was forced into it but of his own free will. While still in Muscovy he did not wish the state well but left his country for the enemy and fought against the Orthodox lands, and having become a traitor he wrote a rude letter to the Sovereign."

These words bring us to another Opposition figure in today's Russia, former Minister of Foreign Affairs under Boris Yeltsin, Andrei Kozyrev. In a moment I will address the question of whether Kozyrev has been wishing his country well going back to the years of his service in the cabinet. First let us consider his latest of several 'rude letters to the Sovereign.'

On 20 July, The New York Times published an op-ed essay by Kozyrev entitled "Russia's Coming Regime Change." In it Kozyrev used a sleight-of-hand that is commonplace among his fellow Russian freedom-fighters, describing a catastrophic eventuality that he formally distances himself from but actually is inciting day after day by his political activities, regime change.

I call this advocacy catastrophic, because under circumstances of the overwhelming popularity of the current Russian president, regime change can only occur by assassination or other violence perpetrated by a small group of conspirators likely in the pay of a foreign power.

In the best of circumstances and with greatest likelihood, regime change would bring to power someone from the Kremlin's inner circle. Regime change might spark civil disturbances and political instability generally. The outcome of the power struggle would be totally unforeseeable. And we are talking about a nuclear superpower, whose rulers literally can decide the fate of mankind. Most of the obvious candidates to succeed to the presidency are far less experienced, far less prudent than the incumbent.

What is the justification for Kozyrev's courting sedition? His allegations include "15 years of authoritarian rule," a "K.G.B.-style state security and propaganda apparatus" that "holds the general population in its custody." He tells us that "the nation is truly on its knees" economically because it is "hostage to the capricious price of oil and a gluttonous military-security complex."

Obviously Kozyrev has not taken note of what $50/barrel of oil has done to the highly advanced Western economy of Norway. Nor has he noted that the 4.5% of GDP which Russia spends on its military is roughly the same percentage as the USA spends.

I remind readers that in the year leading up to his removal from office, Kozyrev suffered a mental breakdown which was widely commented upon at the time. His observations on today's Russia in his op-ed in the New York Times are once again delusional.

This was not a one-off appearance in the American media by Kozyrev. Back in March, following the murder of Opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, Kozyrev was given the op-ed page of The Washington Post to sound off about the evils of his native country: "The West has a duty to stand up for human rights in Russia."

Here he cited the usual suspects from among his comrades in arms, the likes of eternal presidential hopeful Grigory Yavlinsky of Yabloko and radio host Yulia Latynina (Ekho Moskvy) in their wholly irresponsible statements putting the murder at Vladimir Putin's door. Kozyrev presents Russia as violent and aggressive. While careful to say that the West "cannot and should not interfere in Russian domestic affairs," he is calling on the West to stand up to Russia, to pursue a hard line and to view his country through his eyes, as a threat to the peace. If this is not what we used to call in US politics 'giving comfort to the enemy' and playing up to the John McCain's of the American political establishment, then what is? Is this pandering to outside powers the behavior of someone who genuinely wishes his native country well?

At the time of his removal from office, Andrei Kozyrev had become an embarrassment even to his American handlers at the U.S. State Department because of his volatility and unpredictability, notwithstanding his accommodating response to most every U.S. demand on Russian foreign policy orientation. Nonetheless, his replacement by Yevgeny Primakov, who was made of sterner stuff, was regretted in Washington because it spelled the end of America's one-way bet on a supine Russia.

With the passage of time, the inconvenient peculiarities of Kozyrev have been forgotten in the United States and he is remembered as a valued member of the group of Liberals headed by Yegor Gaidar whom Yeltsin brought into the cabinet. Kozyrev's English language entry in Wikipedia takes this line, telling us that Kozyrev "was viewed by many as one of the most important voices for liberalism and democracy in post-communist Russia." Presumably those "many" are folks living within the Beltway.

It is interesting that the Russian language entry for Kozyrev tells a different story, highlighting the serious questions Russians have had about his patriotism and common sense. In what is otherwise a very sketchy outline of his career in the Ministry, the commentators considered it relevant to point out that Kozyrev was called "Mr. Da" by one and all in contrast to his long-serving Soviet predecessor, Andrei Gromyko, known as "Mr. Nyet." His was the "yes" to every American initiative in his pursuit of acceptance of Russia as an ally. The conclusion of this analysis in Russian Wikipedia carries the essentials of the controversy surrounding Kozyrev in his homeland: "...notwithstanding all the efforts of Kozyrev, who was accused by his opponents of betraying the national interests, Russia did not become part of the Western world."

Andrei Kozyrev is not a heroic figure. The fact that this modern day Kurbsky has not felt the need to move out, to defect in the full sense, gives the lie to his attacks on Vladimir Putin for running a police state.
 
 #12
Fort Russ
July 31, 2015
Russian universities are a battleground for Russia's future
By Mikhail Delyagin
http://delyagin.ru/articles/87718-vospitanie-vrazhdebnogo-otnosheniya-k-rossii-imeet-yekonomicheskuyu-podopleku.html
Translated by Kristina Rus

The other day there was an article online about the scandal with admissions to the school of journalism at Moscow State University. Grades are lowered, it is practically impossible to get a fair resolution, but the main bombshell is - applicants are tested for political loyalty. And the examiners consider trustworthy not the supporters of the current political course, but the opposite - those who adhere to explicitly oppositional views.

Personally, having once attended a School of Young Journalist at the MGU school of journalism, it was a shock to learn that it has become a pipeline for instilling hostility towards Russia under the guise of "journalistic professionalism". While great people are teaching there, who genuinely suffer from the destruction of education during the liberal reforms and from the need to teach students the high school curricula during the first year.

I think the root of the problem in the understanding of journalistic professionalism as the a priori hostility to the government. Many of my colleagues drew attention to the fact that the MGU school of journalism, as in many other places (especially the Higher School of Economics, where the notorious Albats used to be a professor), students have been persistently hammered into their heads: if you want to be journalists, you must be in opposition. If a student suddenly notices something good done by the current government, you hear a wild outcry: "get out of the profession." And they talk about "government" in general, but in fact refer specifically to the Russian government.

The well-known American maxim that "everyone is entitled to their own opinion but nobody is entitled to their own facts" is completely shattered. For the sake of nurturing hatred to your own state and native country the students are taught to deny reality and to create "their own facts".

Thus, the journalists, tomorrow's masters of public opinion, from the start are turned into enemies of not a particular state with all of its vices, but the Russian statehood as such.

Such education once again reveals the focus of the liberal clan on a systematic destruction of Russia. Because hostility of a critically important part of the youth towards the foundation of the existence of Russian society, which is the state, simply deprives our country of the future.

The position of the liberals is based on the position of global business, which they serve. And which bet on the destruction of Russia for the sake of reducing expenses, on its demolition according to the Libya model, in order to negotiate about the access to oil not with the government and not with a state company, but with a scared and dreaming about a green card mayor of an oil town.

I believe a drastic rehabilitation of all public universities is imperative, particularly those associated with the formation of mass consciousness. Such a rehabilitation should, in my opinion, begin with the schools of journalism of Moscow State University and the Higher School of Economics.
--
DELYAGIN Mikhail Gennadievich  

One of the well-known Russian economists. For a long period of time was the youngest Doctor of Science, Economics (1998).Professor emeritus (2000) of Jilin university (China). Research professor, MGIMO (2003). Academician of Russian Academy of Natural Sciences (2004).

Member of Council for External and Defense Policies (1999), Executive Committee of All-Russian Union of Commodity Producers (2001), Supervisory Council of Worldwide Anti-criminal Antiterrorism Forum (2001), deputy Chairman of the Russian Union of Taxpayers (2003), member of the Presidium of National Investment Council (2005), Russian society of Oxford (2011).

Author of more than 900 articles in Russia, USA, Germany, France, Finland, China, India, etc., author of 12 monographs, the most famous among them being Economy of Non-payments (1997), Ideology of Renaissance (2000), World Crisis. General theory of Globalization (2003), Russia after Putin. Is Orange-Green Revolution Inevitable in Russia? (2005), Mankind drive (2008), Mankind Crisis. Whether Russia in a non-russian distemper will survive? (2010). Head of the writing team of the book, Practice of Globalization: Games and Rules of a New Era (2000), in the co-authorship from V.Shejanovym has written the book, World inside out. As the economic crisis for Russia will end (2009)
 
 #13
www.opendemocracy.net/Colta.ru
August 11, 2015
'Is your mum a foreign agent?'
Russian NGOs, large and small, are facing closure after the blacklisting of their foreign funders. Colta.ru speaks to some of the organisations affected.
By EKATERINA SELIVANOVA, NADEZHDA KONOBEYEVSKAYA, and YAKOV KAPITONOV
Ekaterina Selivanova is a Moscow-based journalist. She writes for Colta.ru and The New Times. Nadezhda Konobeyevskaya is an independent journalist, and writes for Novaya Gazeta and Expert.ru. Yakov Kapitonov writes for Colta.ru

At the end of May, Nadezhda Kutepova, the CEO of Planet of Hopes, an NGO in Ozyorsk, a 'closed' town in the southern Urals, received an anonymous text message reading: 'I saw the report where they called you a traitor'. The message referred to a story broadcast on Rossiya 1, a popular state news channel. Standing in front of the town's barbed wire perimeter fence, the channel's correspondent, Olga Skobeyeva, declared that the NGO's ostensible support for pregnant women was just a front for its true role: 'carrying out industrial espionage in return for American cash'.

The Soviet Union established closed towns and cities, with stringent residence and travel regulations, during the 1940s-usually because they were the location of sensitive military, industrial, or scientific facilities, such as arms plants or nuclear research sites. Their number was much reduced in the 1990s, but Ozyorsk remains a closed town because of its proximity to the Mayak plant, a source of plutonium during the Cold War and now a facility for processing nuclear waste and recycling materials from decommissioned nuclear weapons.

Rossiya 1's claims of 'treachery' evidently alluded to statements made by the NGO's staff that the closed town system contravened their residents' human rights.

Skobeyeva also claimed, however, that Planet of Hopes' work in the Urals area, 'Russia's largest concentration of mining, and iron and steel industries', was aimed at promoting the interests of the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED), from which the organisation received much of its funding.

On the same day, the regional branch of the Ministry of Justice fined the NGO 300,000 roubles (�3,010) for refusing to register itself as a 'foreign agent'.

Planet of Hopes

Planet of Hopes was set up in 2000 to raise awareness and knowledge of legal issues among the residents of Ozyorsk. 'It was an uphill task from the start', says Kutepova. 'Closed towns have their own ways of working that have developed over the years, and any kind of civil activism is crushed.

'But people started bringing complaints to us: the fact that you can't bring your husband or wife to live in a closed town, for example, or if you've served a prison sentence you can't return home if you previously lived in one.'

Over time, Planet of Hopes began to focus on two issues: support for victims of the Kyshtym disaster at the Mayak plant in 1957, the third most serious nuclear accident in history after Chernobyl and Fukushima (kept secret by the Soviet government for 30 years), and campaigning for the rights of people living in closed towns. In 2003, the NGO set up a community access project at the regional ombudsman's office and ran seminars for people living in other closed towns facing the same problems and dealing with the same obstacles to solving them.

A month before the TV attack on Nadezhda Kutepova, the regional branch of the Ministry of Justice added Planet of Hopes to the register of 'foreign agents' after Kutepova had spoken in an interview about the laws relating to closed towns and the lack of legal rights for people affected by nuclear radiation. The Ministry regarded this as proof of 'political activity' on the part of the NGO (a criterion for registration): calling it 'an attempt to influence public opinion about an alleged defect in current legislation'.

Planet of Hopes has six paid employees, and has always been dependent on funding from outside Russia. According to the regional Ministry of Justice, in 2014 the NGO received a total of about two million roubles (�20,065) from the NED (which is now on the new patriotic stop-list of 'undesirable organisations', from which Russian NGOs are banned from receiving funding). and the Russian branch of the Heinrich B�ll Foundation.

At the beginning of June, another documentary about Ozyorsk and Planet of Hopes, made by local journalist Maksim Rumyantsev, appeared on the internet. It was entitled 'Russia's Nuclear Heart'. 'It says that I closed down a nuclear reactor and that I want to create chaos in the country', says Kutepova.

The reactor in question was the South Ural nuclear power station, whose construction was halted in 1991 after a public referendum in which 76% of residents of the city of Chelyabinsk voted against it. Kutepova points out that she only became active several years later and could have had no influence on the decision.

'In the last few months there have been three separate reports about us on TV, all of them calling us "enemies"' she says. 'After that I started getting threats; and my children's classmates were asking them if their mum was a foreign agent. At the beginning of July, I packed my bags and left Ozyorsk with my kids. I was too scared to stay in this small closed town after they showed my front door on TV'.

Kutepova also closed down Planet of Hopes. An appeal against the fine failed; the Ministry of Justice confirmed the local court's decision that the organisation was a threat to Russia's security.

The 'foreign agents' lose their funders

The German-based Heinrich B�ll Foundation, which funded several Planet of Hopes projects to help victims of the Kyshtym disaster, has been working in Russia for 25 years.

The foundation's Russian branch is registered with the Russian Federation Ministry of Justice and regularly submits its accounts to the Ministry and other government bodies, as required by law. It has had links with several dozen Russian NGOs, as well as official structures. Half of the foundation's current projects are solely funded by it, the other half funded in partnership with other grant-giving bodies. Its grant-giving programme focuses on a number of issues: the environment, gender democracy, human rights and funding for research - it works, for example, with the Centre for Independent Social Research (CISR) in St Petersburg.

On 22 June this year, CISR was declared a 'foreign agent'. It does not hide the fact that it has always received a significant part of its funding from outside Russia, and that this now accounts for 80% of running costs. Foreign grants are essential to the Centre, as the issues it investigates include many inimical to the Russian government's promotion of conservative values. You only have to look at the titles of its reports: 'Legal wounds: a deconstruction of the values behind gay and lesbian rights in the Russian legal discourse'; 'Collective action and social politics: the struggle for authority between citizens and the bureaucracy'; 'Racism in the language of education'.

CISR does not refuse government funding - in 2014 it even received a grant of 1,152,000 roubles (�11,700) from the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Socio-Political Research. This does not, however, have much effect on official negative attitudes to the Centre. 'There is no money for NGOs to carry out serious sociological research, as opposed to commercial public opinion surveys', says CISR's CEO Oksana Karpenko. 'It all goes to the big universities or the Academy of Sciences'.

Now CISR is losing its funders as well. It has been receiving grants from the MacArthur Foundation for about 20 years and in 2009 won a prestigious 'MacArthur Award for Creative & Effective Institutions' - a serious distinction for sociological researchers as well as a welcome $350,000 (�224,000) to launch its website and a scientific journal, Laboratorium. But on 22 July, the Macarthur Foundation announced the closure of its Russian branch after it was included in the patriotic stop-list.

As 'foreign agents', CISR's managers will now face even greater problems. There will be a lot more paperwork, more frequent inspections and a higher risk of fines. It is also possible that state universities will no longer accept students' work placements at the organisation as counting towards their degrees. And doing actual research will be more difficult as well.

'Many public sector bodies will be practically closed to us', says Viktor Voronkov, the centre's director. 'If you want to look at a school, hospital or some other state institution, for example, you need to get official permission. But now the bureaucrats will stop all contact with us, and businesses won't want to risk it either.'

'These days, trying to prove that you are not involved in any political activity or oiling the wheels of global imperialism is pretty much a lost cause,' concludes Oksana Karpenko.

Can NGOs survive on Russian funding?

There are now 78 NGOs on the 'foreign agents' list. At least 43 of them are involved in education, awareness raising or research. Twenty organisations of this type were added to the list in 2014, and 23 more have been added in 2015. Five NGOs have also been taken off the list - four of them closed down; the fifth changed its profile.

Until the recent creation of the patriotic stop-list, Russian NGOs had five major foreign sources of funding: The Norwegian Helsinki Committee, The MacArthur Foundation, the NED, the European Commission and the Open Society Foundations (OSF), also known as the Soros Foundations. These five, funded 27 out of the 43 educational, awareness raising and research organisations on the foreign agents register. Among other sources of funding were foreign embassies, including those of the Netherlands, the UK and Germany.

Here is what has happened to three of them since their funders have had to withdraw.

The Committee for the Prevention of Torture

The Committee for the Prevention of Torture, added to the 'foreign agents' register in January 2015, was funded by OSF and MacArthur Foundation, and the Swiss-based Oak Foundation. Since 2013, it has applied for Russian government grants four times, and has been successful three times out of the four, receiving awards of over five million roubles (�51,000) in total. Of the three successful projects, two were focused on the prevention of torture and the third on ensuring public access to justice through free legal centres and public lectures.

The Committee needs 60-80m roubles (�602,000-803,000) a year to continue its work, not allowing for any expansion in the regions - 60m to cover core costs and the rest for extra projects and medical care for victims of torture. In 2014, foreign funding covered 90% of the costs, Russian sources 10%. On 24 July, the members of the organisation voted to close it down, refusing to continue working with the status of 'foreign agents'.

Golos

Golos, literally 'voice' or 'vote', was declared a 'foreign agent' in July 2014. It was previously funded by USAID (until 2012) and the European Commission. Established in 2000 to protect the electoral rights of citizens and to foster civil society, Golos is Russia's only independent election watchdog.

It previously received $700,000 (�448,000) for each election cycle, but since the passing of the 'foreign agents' law it has had to give up its foreign funding (70% of its budget) because as a 'foreign agent' it would be unable to observe elections. According to its CEO Grigori Melkonyants, the most the organisation can hope to receive from the Russian government is 5m roubles (�51,000) - nowhere near enough to survive.

On 23 July, the Ministry of Justice returned 400,000 roubles (�4,069) to Golos, the fine it had had to pay for refusing to register as a 'foreign agent' - in September 2014, the Moscow city court ruled that the decision to add the organisation to the register was unfounded. The NGO's name, however, has still not been removed from the list.

St Petersburg Soldiers' Mothers

This NGO was included in the register in August 2014: its funders were the European Commission's Directorate-General for Budget, NED and the UN Office at Geneva. It voluntarily gave up its foreign funding in July 2014 after receiving a Russian presidential grant of around 7m roubles (�71,200) but was nonetheless registered as a 'foreign agent'.

This year the organisation applied for another presidential grant, but was turned down. Its current grant runs out in August, and the next application can only be made in October. The Soldiers' Mothers used to receive about 4-5m roubles (�50,900- �61,000) annually from foreign donors, but do not plan to apply for any more.

This article originally appeared in Russian on Colta.ru as part of the School of Civic Journalism initiative. oDR is grateful for Colta's permission to translate and re-publish this article here.
 
 #14
www.rt.com
August 12, 2015
'Foreign Agents' discredited elections monitoring in Russia, top official claims

The deputy head of Russia's Central Elections Committee says that foreign-sponsored groups that had monitored polls in the country had completely discredited the very idea of public control, but allowed for future improvement of the situation.

"The organizations that used to conduct the allegedly professional monitoring have completely discredited themselves. They have also discredited monitoring as an institution but we hope that the situation will improve with time," Leonid Ivlev said at the committee's session Wednesday.

He added that many NGOs were changing to adapt to new Russian laws by changing their names and legal structure, but in essence they remained foreign agents.

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

Several Russian and international NGOs criticized the new law as discriminatory and contested it in Russian courts and in the European Court of Human Rights, but with no result. The sponsors of the act and top Russian officials have repeatedly emphasized that its main purpose was providing better information for voters that would eventually benefit democracy.

In June, President Vladimir Putin admitted the possibility of amendments to the Foreign Agents Law, but added that in general the law is fit for purpose.

Putin's statement was made after the Society for Protecting Consumers' Rights warned Russian citizens against visiting Crimea without agreeing their trips with Ukrainian authorities, adding that those who fail to follow this procedure could be denied visas to Schengen states. The claim was almost immediately dismissed by Russian officials and many people doubted that it was technically possible for European embassies to monitor the movement of Russian citizens on Russian territory. The NGO's representatives, however, insisted that this was possible in theory and impossible to prove as embassies usually don't explain the reasons behind visa refusals.

"The recent events with the organization that supposedly looked after consumers and started to issue recommendations on how our tourists should behave in Crimea and how citizens should approach real estate issues in Crimea... What was this? Were they looking after Russian citizens? No, they service the interests of foreign states regarding Russia," Putin said. He also noted that it was a very good example of a situation that the Foreign Agents Law was designed to combat.
 
 #15
Moscow Times
August 11, 2015
Direct Elections Won't Help Russia's Opposition
By Vladimir Ryzhkov
Vladimir Ryzhkov, a State Duma deputy from 1993 to 2007, is a political analyst.

One of the few things the mass protests in the winter of 2011-12 achieved was the return of direct elections for State Duma deputies representing single-member districts. They will be held in September 2016, and half of the parliamentary deputies (225) will, for the first time in 13 years, be elected by specific cities and regions. The winners in each of these 225 districts will be the candidates who receive more votes than any of their opponents.

Parliamentary parties, non-parliamentary opposition groups and the Kremlin are already hard at work in preparation for these elections. A foundation with ties to the Kremlin, the Institute for Socio-Economic and Political Research (ISEPR), recently released its forecast for the elections, working from the current composition of the Duma.

This ISEPR report ("Acting State Duma Deputies in their Districts - 2016") is important and noteworthy, not only as an expert study, but as a formative one. The parties, candidates and regional elites themselves, knowing ISEPR's relationship with the presidential administration, will reach practical conclusions about the current internal political path of the federal government, and about what directives will be given to the governors regarding the Duma elections of the coming year.

It's interesting, first, that the Kremlin is preparing for a significant change in the body of the Duma. According to ISEPR, there are no obvious favorites from among acting deputies in about 40-50 percent of the single-member districts, and this means that 100 or more new politicians may be elected to the Duma in these districts.

The institute predicts that only 148 of the 450 current deputies have the authority and connections necessary to achieve victory in these territories. All the rest will try to get into the Duma the easier way - through a place on a party list. But taking into account this unavoidable turnover, even the remaining Duma seats chosen through party voting could lose up to 200 acting deputies, and go to new members.

The parliament saw this kind of significant change in the last elections of December 2011 (202 new deputies, or about 45 percent). This major rotation of seats is beneficial to the Kremlin, helping to ensure that parliamentarians are more loyal to and dependent on the executive branch. It also lowers the political status and weakens the political influence of the Duma, which always sees political newcomers prevailing as a result of major turnover.

Second, it's clear from the report that the Kremlin is quite satisfied with the current loyal, four-party structure of the Duma. All four received equally high ratings in the report (in addition to United Russia, the ruling party, those are the Communist Party, LDPR, and A Just Russia.) The authors foresee excellent chances for each to form a faction in the seventh Duma, as well as to get a number of candidates elected in single-member districts.

They have a total of 148 promising deputy candidates, including 81 from United Russia, 26 from the Communist Party, 25 from A Just Russia, and 12 from LDPR. This assessment sends a clear signal to regional authorities: they will need to create favorable conditions for the four parliamentary parties and their candidates. What is more, these 148 candidates are named in the report, so the governors don't get them mixed up, and know whom they should support, or, at the very least, not oppose.

Third, the objective of legitimizing Duma elections and the future Duma will be achieved in part through wins by representatives from non-parliamentary parties in single-member districts, including some current deputies. ISEPR found 10 deputies who, were they to return to the Duma through direct election, could represent such parties as The Workers' Party of Russia, Rodina (Motherland), Automotive Russia, National Liberation Movement, Russian Party of Pensioners for Justice, and others.

So formally, the new parliament may not consist of four parties, but of 10 or 11, and can be said to have increased "democracy and pluralism."

Fourth, the report practically recommends that the four parliamentary parties reach a coalition agreement to divide the single-member districts among themselves, to prevent the accidental victory of a dark horse or "third force." The experience of recent years leaves little doubt that the presidential administration itself will take on the role of intermediary and leader in brokering this "package deal," to reduce the risk of unsanctioned victories and defeats as much as possible.

Fifth, ISEPR expects an increase in the total number of seats held by the ruling United Russia party (today, it has 238 deputies, or a little more than 50 percent of seats). This is due to the current high popularity enjoyed by President Vladimir Putin and the party itself.

This prediction will also send a signal to governors that they should use all their political and administrative abilities to avoid ending up "worse than their neighbors" after the votes are counted. Most likely, as before, the governors will receive an unofficial "target number" of votes for United Russia - probably in the region of 55 percent, as well as an approved list of expected (desirable) winners in single-member districts.

The parliament in place today, working from a foundation of loyalty to Putin and the nationalistic-paternalistic consensus, suits the Kremlin perfectly. Therefore, the coming elections will be no less under the management and control of the authorities than previous ones.

The strong resistance that opposition candidates from outside the system encountered in regional elections this year (for example, the refusal to register the Parnas opposition party in Novosibirsk elections), vividly attests to this policy.

Despite the return of direct elections in single-member districts and the promise of competitive and legitimate elections, it will be no easier than in previous years for true opposition candidates to achieve victory.
 
 #16
Bloomberg
August 11, 2015
Putin's Other War? Russians' Binge Drinking
By Peter R. Orszag
Peter R. Orszag is a Bloomberg View columnist. Now vice chairman of corporate and investment banking and chairman of the financial strategy and solutions group at Citigroup, he was previously director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Russian President Vladimir Putin may be undermining global peace and civic rights, but he's doing this much well: extending his compatriots' lives. In 2013, Russian life expectancy at birth was 71 years, which is less than the worst state in the United States (Mississippi) and almost a decade below the developed-country average. That year, in typically imperious fashion, Putin ordered the government to raise life expectancy to 74 years by 2018. And while that goal may well not be reached, it is remarkable how much progress is being made in cutting back on alcohol use and smoking in Russia.

Alcohol consumption has been linked to a large share of deaths for those ages 15 to 54 in Russia -- as much as half, according to one study. Tobacco use also contributes substantially to premature deaths, with the result that smoking and alcohol use combined accounted for an estimated 1 million Russian deaths a year.

In 2006, the government began a more aggressive effort to discourage smoking and drinking, including licensing and sales restrictions and higher taxes. Companies producing ethanol (a potent form of alcohol that some Russians drink) were required to pay a significant registration fee, track production on their premises, pay a higher excise tax, and in many cases to add substances to render the product undrinkable. And regional governments were allowed to restrict the hours during which hard alcohol could be sold. Although cheating undoubtedly occurs, the regulations seem to be having an effect.

The government also moved to curtail smoking. Advertising was banned, warning labels were imposed, and smoking was prohibited in public places and workplaces. In addition, the government raised taxes on tobacco and increased funding for prevention programs, including those aimed at discouraging children from beginning the habit.

The anecdotal signs of progress were clear during a recent trip to St. Petersburg. My wife, who emigrated from Moldova (part of the former Soviet Union), was shocked to see so few examples of the traditional Russian combination of heavy smoking and binge drinking.

I was curious to see whether these impressions were, in effect, a Potemkin village, but the data show substantial declines in alcohol and tobacco use among Russians. The share of Russian females who smoke daily declined from 15 percent in 2004 to 8 percent in 2014, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. For men, the share declined from 61 percent to 41 percent -- still much too high, but the trend is encouraging. These data, like any, are subject to various flaws, but the underlying downward trend is visible across a variety of sources, including from data on cigarette sales.

Average alcohol consumption has declined somewhat less dramatically, from an average of 12.3 liters per capita in 2007 to 11.2 in 2012, but that overall average misses an important change in the composition of what Russians drink. The amount of beer drunk per capita roughly doubled between 2000 and 2010, but the consumption of hard liquor fell by almost half during the same period. The available evidence suggests binge drinking, which causes particular harm, is down.

All of this is encouraging, but more clearly needs to be done. Evidence clearly shows that price matters in lowering smoking and drinking rates, and cigarettes are still relatively cheap in Russia -- less than a third the cost, after taxes, than in the U. S. The pattern of sales restrictions on alcohol across different regions within Russia, furthermore, shows that areas that clamped down on the hours during which hard alcohol can be sold had bigger declines in consumption. That suggests regions that still have high alcohol consumption could reduce drinking further by following the example of their neighbors.

With aggressive increases in cigarette prices and further effort to discourage binge drinking, the goal in Putin's decree may be met after all. And that in turn shows that even in a country with deeply ingrained habits, good policy can make a big difference.
 
 #17
www.rt.com
August 11, 2015
Russia in recession on back of cheap oil, sanctions

Russia's economy suffered a 4.6-percent fall in GDP in the second quarter of 2015 against the same period last year, the worst performance in six years, according to official statistics. A collapse in oil prices and Western sanctions were largely to blame, however improvement is forecast in 3Q of 2015.
The sharp GDP quarterly decline more than doubled the 2.2 percent year-on-year contraction recorded in the previous three months, Russia's Federal Statistics Service said Monday. The government had previously predicted a Q2 decline of 4.4 percent.

The slump sees the Russian economy officially enter recession for only the second time in the past 15 years. Russia was hit hard by the global financial crisis and recession of 2008-2009 as a result of its integration into the world economy.

However, the situation may improve by the end of the year according to Minister of Economic Development Alexey Ulyukayev, who says Russia's GDP will not drop by more than 2.6-2.8 percent annually.

Retail sales fell by 9.4 percent in Q2 compared with the same period last year as the national currency depreciated by more than 40 percent against the dollar in the past 12 months.

The ruble, which had been the world's best-performing currency at the beginning of 2015, plunged to a six-month low last week, hitting 64 against the US dollar and 70 against the euro. The Central Bank of Russia (CBR) made this year's fifth consecutive cut of the key rate on July 31, choosing to support economic growth instead of stabilization of the currency. Earlier, CBR said it stopped buying foreign currency due to the ruble's intensified deterioration.

The Russian currency was weakened by sliding oil prices which in the beginning of August hit a six-month low, with Brent trading at $49.67 per barrel.

Western sanctions have also had a damaging effect on the Russian economy. They were first imposed on August 1, 2014 over the conflict in Ukraine and Crimean reunification. Russia responded with counter-measures, banning imports from the EU, US and others.

In June, Moscow extended its embargo on food imports from Western countries until August 2016 due to the prolonged anti-Russia sanctions.
 
 #18
RIA Novosti
August 11, 2015
Food spending taking up most of Russian household budgets - poll

Food items are becoming the largest part of the household budget, particularly meat and chicken, according to a poll commissioned for the Bank of Russia by the Infom company, RIA Novosti (part of the state-owned International News Agency Rossiya Segodnya) reported on 11 August.

"The main items Russians are cutting back on are groceries, primarily meat and chicken, fish and sea-food, cheeses and sausages, fruit and vegetables. However, the number cutting back on these things has fallen a bit since April, and noticeably for fruit and vegetables - almost by half, which is due to seasonal factors," the Bank of Russia report said.

Almost half of those questioned in the poll in the last three months said they had had to cut spending on something they had planned previously, while in July the number of such people had risen noticeably since the last measurement in April 2015, the poll said according to RIA Novosti.

Almost two-thirds of respondents were cutting back on various foods, goods and services, although compared to the previous poll, the number had slightly fallen. Respondents also less often said that they had to cut back more than a year ago, however, that proportion remains quite large and is almost half of those polled, the report said.

The poll questioned 2,000 respondents aged 18 and above from 16-19 July 2015 in 55 Russian regions
 
#19
Moscow Times
August 11, 2015
Russians Named Europe's Least Productive Workers

The productivity of the Russian workforce is the lowest among European countries, according to a report issued Monday by the France-based international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD.

In Russia, labor productivity - measured by the gross domestic product valued in U.S. dollars divided by the total number of hours worked by the country's workforce - stood at 25.9 in 2014. This is the lowest rate among all the European countries, worse than even crisis-hit Greece where the productivity rate stood at 36.2.

Russia's level of labor productivity is just over half the average European rate of 50. In the United States, the productivity level was 64 per hour last year, according to the OECD estimates. Luxembourg fared the best of all the surveyed countries with an estimated 95.9 per hour.

Last year the Russian government developed a four-year plan aimed at realizing an inaugural order of President Vladimir Putin to boost the labor productivity of Russians by 50 percent by 2018.

The measures include stimulating investment in production modernization, creating conditions for the professional development of employees, getting rid of inefficient jobs and increasing mobility in the labor market.

 
 #20
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
August 11, 2015
Gazprom: What's wrong with Russia's energy giant?
With the United States adding one of Gazprom's biggest gas fields to its Russian sanctions blacklist, the Russian gas giant's woes have been aggravated. The future of its numerous global pipeline projects could be in limbo.
By Ben McPherson
Ben McPherson is an energy policy analyst working for the Brussels Energy Club and the Energy Charter Secretariat. He focuses on the northern Middle East and Russian spheres, researching and writing on conflict and energy relations in the South Caucasus, Turkey, and Russia. Mr McPherson has years of experience with natural gas pipelines all over the United States, primarily involving environmental regulation. Motivated by a great interest in analysis and the EU political system, he transitioned his career to Europe in 2011.

Russia's largest gas company Gazprom continues to face economic woes. And last Friday's sanctions imposed by the U.S. on Gazprom's biggest gas field Yuzhno-Kirinskoye on Sakhalin Island in the Pacific (a project known as Sakhalin-3) only exacerbate the company's plight. The U.S. government warned against transferring technology and equipment to the Yuzhno-Kirinskoye field.

The immediate impact of such a move is already clear - it might upset the agreement between Gazprom and Royal Dutch Shell, an Anglo-Dutch multinational energy giant, which was signed during the 2015 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. That agreement was an attempt by Gazprom to foster a strategic alliance in the gas sector, including exploration, production and sales.

In other discouraging news, recent reports from the Russian Economy Ministry give estimates that Gazprom's production in the first half of 2015 fell by 13 percent year-on-year, and will hit only 414 billion cubic metres for the full year. This will represent the lowest output in the entire post-Soviet era, and a drop of 20 percent from a forecast made in May. Though Gazprom just announced a 71 percent rise in first-quarter profits compared to 2014, this is largely a result of the weak ruble. Analysts predict that the production decline, as well as drops in oil and gas prices, could lead to a 27 percent fall in Gazprom's overall 2015 revenue, to $106 billion.

The causes for these bleak forecasts are varied, with some Russian experts pointing to top-level strategic failures in Gazprom's management. They argue that Gazprom has overinvested in production and transit capacity in light of predictable declines in demand, particularly due to the shale revolution in the U.S. and slow growth in the EU. The result is that currently Gazprom has 610-615 billion cubic meters (bcm) of production capacity, a third of it unused, and has plans to continue to expand to some 670-680 bcm by 2020.

On the other hand, Gazprom has also been hit by a storm of factors outside its control. A prime example is the Ukraine conflict, which has made one of Gazprom's bigger customers look elsewhere. Ukraine is doing everything in its power to source gas from the EU in reverse-flow schemes, and Gazprom's share in the Ukrainian market is down sharply.

A slowing China also took many by surprise. When Russian and Chinese officials triumphantly announced a landmark agreement in May 2014, it was heralded as a game-changer, securing a massive new market for Gazprom. Chinese demand would be satisfied by a new pipeline (the "Power of Siberia") and newly developed fields in Eastern Siberia.

The deal was followed by a Memorandum on a second pipeline (the "Altai pipeline" or "Power of Siberia 2") that would have allowed Gazprom to connect its established fields in the west with the Chinese market. Unfortunately, since then China has been on an extended downturn and there have been recent reports that PetroChina has backed out of the western plan entirely, scrapping the Altai line. Though the "Power of Siberia" will go on, this means that Gazprom cannot use existing fields in the west for Chinese supply and, thus, requires heavy investment in new eastern capacities.

Finally, oversupply and sluggish demand around the world have sent the oil price into a tailspin since mid-2014. Though it recovered somewhat in May and June of this year, since July it has been falling again and the Brent benchmark is currently hitting new lows under $50. Unfortunately for Gazprom, oil-indexed prices are the traditional way it sets up gas supply contracts and these low prices will continue to hurt revenues.

With these assorted problems weighing down Gazprom's fortunes, what can we make of the company's strategy going forward? It is a strategy that many see as increasingly erratic, perhaps due to the clash between the continued desire by some leaders to use pipelines and energy as tools to influence geopolitics and the economic realities that limit these projects. Since May 2014, when Gazprom and China announced their Power of Siberia pipeline and deal, we have seen the following developments:

�         Gas delivery fights with Ukraine, most notably in June 2014, with Gazprom resolving to completely exclude Ukraine from transit by 2019, when the current transit contract expires;
�         The November 2014 announcement of a second line to China, the reportedly now-abandoned Altai pipeline;
�         The December 2014 bombshell announcement that Gazprom was abandoning the long fought-over South Stream project, and would instead build a new four-line, 63 bcm/year capacity pipeline project to Turkey (Turkish Stream);
�         The January 2015 announcement that Gazprom was abandoning plans, started in 2012, to expand Nord Stream (Nord Stream II);
�         A June 2015 announcement that Nord Stream II was not actually abandoned, and that Gazprom had instead signed a Memorandum of Intent to build third and fourth lines in that project with E.ON, Shell, and OMV; and
�         The July 2015 announcements that Gazprom was still considering transiting gas through Ukraine after 2019, and was having ongoing difficulties with their Turkish counterparts, leaving Turkish Stream uncertain and perhaps going forward with only two lines.

Many of these projects are mutually exclusive. Given EU demand forecasts and efforts to diversify suppliers, it is likely that just one of the Russian routes above will sate their demand for the near future. This could be Nord Stream II, Turkish Stream, or existing infrastructure in Ukraine-but it is doubtful that the economics support all three.

Starting projects, even just the initial stages, costs significant amounts of money for a company with already discouraging financials. Russian sources report that Gazprom has spent $40 billion in costs on currently dead projects.

This includes things such as paying an offshore pipe-laying vessel to wait in Bulgaria for months for construction to start, buying out South Stream partners, or constructing the expensive infrastructure needed to bring gas to Russia's Black Sea coast for the now-imperilled Turkish Stream.

Stopping transit in Ukraine past 2019 would be similarly wasteful-the route requires Gazprom to have contracts with Slovakia and Bulgaria, and those contracts last until 2028 and 2030 respectively. If Gazprom cuts Ukraine out, the company would be wasting some $800 million per year until 2028 in transit fees to those other countries.

As low oil prices and gas demand continue, economic pressures will continue in the near to mid-term for Gazprom. With this in mind, it becomes increasingly apparent that all the above projects are not feasible in the near future, and perhaps never unless substantial economic factors change.

This may have interesting geopolitical implications on Gazprom's negotiations with its EU, Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian, and other partners, with the most likely outcome being that economics wins out and only the most viable projects remain.

At the moment, the most viable project would appear to be the Power of Siberia deal with the Chinese, and, if Ukrainian tensions do not reignite, continued EU transit through Ukraine. If tensions do reignite, Gazprom will probably try to bypass Ukraine with a combination of Turkish and Nord Streams, but on a more limited basis.


 
 #21
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
August 11, 2015
Recent Declines in Ruble Will not Derail Russia's Recovery
Figures from the Central Bank show that Russian corporates' foreign debt position has strengthened since last year whilst the latest fall in the Ruble is unlikely to add appreciably to inflation.
By Alexander Mercouris

The ruble's fall over recent weeks - apart from the odd scaremongering piece - has so far produced less of the overheated commentary that its similar fall did a year ago.

This is probably because the widely anticipated collapse of the Russian economy following last year's fall failed to materialise, making Western commentators more careful about their predictions this time round.

The ruble has fallen this year for the same reason it fell last year - because of the fall in oil prices.  This is connected to the fact that energy (oil and gas) is Russia's biggest export.  

According to the Central Bank Russian corporates have already assembled $135 billion in liquid assets.  The Central Bank estimates total debt repayments in the period September to December 2015 at just $35 billion, which is around half the debt payments that fell due in the same period last year.  

This year's fall in the ruble should not therefore result in any significant debt payment difficulties for Russian corporates.

Unlike last year's fall, this year's ruble fall is unlikely to have a dramatic impact on inflation.  

Prices rose sharply in the first half of the year largely because last year's ruble fall drove up import prices.

Those price increases have now been factored in.  There is no reason why they should increase further because the ruble is once again trading at the levels it reached in the winter.   Even if the ruble falls below those levels it is unlikely it will cause prices to rise much more, if only because import volumes have fallen so much this year.

Whilst the fall in inflation that was already becoming established may slow, it is unlikely to be reversed entirely.  As of the time of writing the weekly growth in prices has fallen to zero.

Provided the ruble falls in lockstep with the fall in the oil price, the Russian authorities have little cause for concern.  On the contrary, as we have discussed many times, the ruble's fall acts as a form of protectionism for domestic manufacturing and agriculture - precisely the two sectors whose growth the Russian government wants to encourage.

The ruble has so far fallen in lock-step with the oil price.  Since May the oil price has fallen by 28% and the ruble by 32%.  The slightly greater fall in the ruble is the result of a certain degree of overshooting, and possibly of extra downward pressure on the ruble - shared by other non-Western currencies - caused by rumours of pending increases in US interest rates, which have been causing money to flow out of emerging market economies to the US.

The major uncertainty is how far oil will fall and for how long.  

As I have discussed previously, the claim that last year's oil price fall was the result of an anti-Russian plot agreed by John Kerry with the Saudis at a semi-secret meeting on 11th September 2014 is almost certainly wrong.  With the Saudis now busy investing $10 billion from their sovereign wealth fund in the Russian economy and some even talking (wrongly in my opinion) of a Russian-Saudi alliance, the theory of the oil price fall as an anti-Russian US-Saudi plot is becoming increasingly untenable.

The key factor in causing last year's oil price fall was the tightening of the previously excessively loose monetary policy of the US, which caused funds previously invested in oil-based securities to shift back to the dollar.  The fall was then deepened - but not caused - by Saudi determination to maintain production at previous levels in order to shake out US shale producers.  Russia and the ruble were never the Saudis' target but were caught in the crossfire.

As anyone who has studied the history of oil prices knows, attempts to predict their course is a mug's game, with scarcely anyone at the start of 2014 predicting that oil would now be trading below $50 a barrel.  

A reasonable guess however is that despite certain heroic attempts to argue the contrary, a shakeout amongst US shale producers cannot be long in coming if oil prices remain at their present levels, and that this will be accompanied by production cutbacks by other weaker producers once the usual period of stepped up production that follows a supply glut has run its course.  At that point oil prices should rebound, more than off-setting the effect of any additional production from Iran, which is anyway likely to increase only gradually.

Even if - contrary to my expectations - oil prices do not recover in the short to medium term, the Russian economy - and the ruble - will adjust to the lower prices, and are in fact already doing so.  

Russia is itself a major consumer - as well as producer - of energy.  A prolonged period of lower oil prices - and the cheaper ruble that would go with them - would benefit some of the more productive sectors of Russia's economy once the period of adjustment in the country's financial and budget system had been completed.  These sectors would not only benefit directly from lower energy prices but from the increase in investment - previously focused on the energy sector - and the reduced competition from imports that the cheaper ruble would bring in its wake.  The experience of 2015 shows this adjustment would be neither as difficult nor as protracted as is commonly supposed.

In the meantime Gazprom's latest report shows how the fall in the ruble has helped Russia offset the effect of the oil price fall.  Gazprom's ruble-denominated profits rose 71% in the first quarter of 2015 despite the oil price fall.  Since it is in rubles that Gazprom pays the bulk of its costs and the taxes it pays to the Russian state, the ruble's fall means it has no difficulty doing so, protecting both Gazprom and the Russian budget from the effect of the oil price fall.

In time oil prices will recover.  What is happening in the meantime, with Russian corporates rapidly deleveraging on their foreign debt, a new interbank payment system, card system and ratings agency being created, and with the manufacturing and agricultural sectors of Russia's economy being given time and space to build themselves up, means that when that recovery comes Russia's economy will be in a much stronger position to benefit from it than previously.
 
 #22
Stratfor.com
August 11, 2015
Conversation: Russia's Perfect Economic Storm
Video Transcript

Ben Sheen: Hello and thank you for joining us. My name is Ben Sheen, I'm a managing editor here at Stratfor, and with me today is Stratfor's senior Eurasia analyst, Lauren Goodrich, who will be talking to me about the state of the Russian economy.

So Lauren, Russia is struggling at the moment. It's back in recession, its economy is really struggling, they're having financial problems. What is the root cause of all this?

Lauren Goodrich: Well, quite a few things. I always like to say that Russia is within the perfect storm of an economic crisis. So, the Russian economy started stagnating in 2013. It was never really able to recover after the 2008-2009 recession, and in 2013 the economy really started to slow down. It's just grinding to almost a halt outside of energy. And so that was the very start of it. Then we had 2014 happen. The situation between the West and Russia over Ukraine eventually, of course, led to sanctions. And then, at the same time as sanctions against Russia, we had oil prices pretty much fall in half. And so it was multiple items put together, in which you had the Russian economy just take a nosedive over the past year and a half.

Ben: It really sounds like an economic perfect storm, and we've seen this manifested in the most recent budget by the Kremlin, where they've cut back in most areas.

Lauren: Yes, the Russian government has cut back 10 percent across the board, except for defense of course, and they've also cut many social programs. They've cut even their funding for World Cup coming up for 2018.

Ben: And that's a big, you know, that's a big publicity piece for Russia. So how else is this starting to manifest? Are we seeing these crises localized, or are they starting to spread out from Moscow itself?

Lauren: Well, it seems that the media has really been focusing on the really big picture of the recession inside of Russia. However, there is a growing, even more dangerous issue economically, in that the Russian regions are really getting further and further into crisis. The Russian regions were already in crisis even before 2014. Their debts since 2010 keep on doubling and doubling and doubling, and now we've had close to 100 to 150 percent rise in debts within the Russian regions, just over the past few years. That's astonishing when you think of Russia having 83 regions. Now, the Russian economic minister has suggested that possibly 60 of those 83 regions are in crisis mode at this time, and there's even speculation that 20 of them are already defaulting on their debt, even though the government itself doesn't want to make it really public yet.

Ben: So this is a huge problem for Putin. Do you have any idea what Russia might actually try and do to mitigate this crisis?

Lauren: We haven't seen anything out of the Kremlin yet. It kind of seems like the Kremlin is allowing the regions to just kind of fester in their crisis mode until they can come up with a better plan. The Kremlin has the cash, it's just that it would literally drain them of the majority of what they have in reserves, if they're going to be bailing out the regions. I mean, it's 83 regions. And so it would really take a lot for the Kremlin to be able to step up and help the regions out. However, Putin of all leaders knows that keeping control within the Russian regions is top priority. And so we're seeing the Kremlin take different types of steps, such as stepping up its security apparatuses within the regions, stepping up its control within the governors and within the mayors. And so there's a much more political, security element rather than a financial or economic bailout, as far as moves coming out of the Kremlin.

Ben: Now that seems like a shrewd move, because we're seeing this growing dissent within the regions themselves, most recently over the food shortages and the issues with the countersanctions. How important is it for Putin to really keep this under control, if there's this rising tide of unrest?

Lauren: Very much so. Remember that Russia is a country that is not a united country. It is a very regionalized, localized country, in which it's almost like 83 different countries that are all put together. That's why it is a true federation. And having dissent within the regions has always been one of the root causes that collapses Russia eventually. And Putin of everyone knows this. So he's going to ensure that those specific regions that are the most resistant to rule from Moscow are going to be taken care of first. And then those regions that are a little bit more Russified are the ones that he's going to allow to fester within their economic crisis.

Ben: So it seems like something of a controversial move, at a time when Russia is already hurting, that you start to impose these controls, especially on food. What is his real motivation for that?

Lauren: Well, Putin is trying to prove a point. He's trying to prove a point to the West that he can isolate Russia from the West, from Western foods, and keep Russia Russia. The problem is that in doing this, he is actually hurting the Russian people. Putin came into power with a social contract with the Russian people, on "you will always receive your paychecks; I will keep the economy growing; I will quadruple - pretty much - standard of living; you will have Western-style foods and goods inside of Russia." And now we're seeing Putin having to step back from that social contract that has kept his popularity so high for the past 15 years, just in order to counter what is happening with the standoff with the West. So Putin is pretty much struggling between two crises: Does he want to counter the West, or does he want to ensure that his social contract with the Russian people remains intact?

Ben: So in your opinion then, Lauren, do you think this is a tipping point for the Kremlin, or is this something they continue to fight through?

Lauren: They can fight through for a few more years. The problem is that it's going to start to atrophy the popularity of Putin. In other words, the Russian people are now seeing that Putin is choosing the sanctions against the West and hurting the Russian people, instead of choosing the Russian people and just finding other means to buck against the West.

Ben: Well, Lauren, thank you so much for sharing this with us today. It's been a real insight into what's going on in Russia and in the Kremlin itself. For more analyses on Russia and the growing economic crisis, please continue to read Stratfor.com.
 
 #23
Moscow Times
August 11, 2015
Russia, U.S. Bicker Over Missile Defense Shield After Iran Agreement
By Matthew Bodner

With an international resolution on Iran's nuclear program in the bag, Russia is pushing the U.S. to honor an alleged 2009 promise by President Barack Obama to scrap plans to deploy a missile defense system in Europe to shield against Iranian missiles.

"President Obama in 2009 publicly said that if the Iranian nuclear issue was resolved, there would be no need for missile defense in Europe, but it seems that he was not telling the truth," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in an interview with Channel NewsAsia last week.

But the U.S. State Department quickly responded to the allegation, claiming that Lavrov had twisted Obama's words - a point echoed by U.S. foreign policy analysts polled by The Moscow Times.

On the first day of her job as the Russian Foreign Ministry's official spokesperson, Maria Zakharova on Monday denied that Lavrov had taken Obama's words out of context, speaking to Russian state television station Rossiya 24.

"The Russian foreign minister quoted the American president. No one forced [Obama] to raise the issue, he said it himself several years ago - that solving the issue of Iran's nuclear program would allow the plans to deploy missile defense systems in Europe to be reviewed," Zakharova said.

Russia has always been bitterly opposed to U.S. ambitions to develop an effective ballistic missile defense system. Since at least 2009, Washington has responded to Russian criticisms of plans to field a missile shield in Europe by pointing to the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear program.

Moscow military planners view missile defense as a threat to Russia's nuclear forces - the cornerstone of that country's national security strategy - and its capacity to retaliate against a U.S. nuclear strike. This in turn emboldens Washington's brazen foreign policy, Russia argues.

But, in the case of the 2009 promise, "Mr. Lavrov misquoted President Obama and almost certainly knows it," said Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and now a foreign policy expert at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington.

In 2009, amid Obama's reset in relations with Russia under then-President Dmitry Medvedev, the U.S. president said in a speech in Prague that "Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile activity poses a real threat, not just to the U.S., but to Iran's neighbors and our allies."

"As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward with a missile defense system that is cost-effective and proven. If the Iranian threat is eliminated, we will have a stronger basis for security, and the driving force for missile defense construction in Europe will be removed," he said.

A Bad Deal?

The latest episode in the ongoing U.S.-Russia missile defense debate centers on the nature of the Iranian threat to the U.S. and its allies in Europe, and whether the Iran nuclear deal satisfies the conditions to abandon missile defense laid out in Obama's 2009 Prague speech.

According to U.S. analysts, the Iran deal in its final form most certainly doesn't end the Iranian missile threat, since it has no provisions forbidding or even curtailing Iranian work on a ballistic missile, which can be armed with conventional, non-nuclear warheads.

"If the Iran nuclear deal is implemented, it changes the nature of the Iranian ballistic missile threat to Europe ... but when Lavrov claims that the U.S. is misleading people on the reason for U.S. missile defense in Europe, he is misleading people about what Obama actually said," Pifer said.

Ilan Berman, a Russia and Iran expert at the Washington-based American Foreign Policy Council, told The Moscow Times that "when nuclear negotiations with Iran started the ballistic missiles were never supposed to be off the table."

"The State Department took ballistic missiles off the table in pursuit of a more circumscribed deal, and frankly the Russians helped facilitate this more limited deal. So you ended up with a situation where all of the conditions that empower missile defense in the first place still exist," said Berman.

Though the nuclear deal effectively prevents Iran from developing a bomb in the next decade, Washington still sees some threat in the Iranian ballistic missile program.

Although ballistic missiles have limited use armed with conventional weapons, Berman argued that Iran could spend the next decade perfecting missiles as a nuclear delivery system, and then after the agreement expires turn them into a nuclear-armed delivery system in short order.

Berman also pointed to the $150 billion in frozen Iranian assets that will be freed under the nuclear deal, arguing that some of this money is likely to trickle into dormant military-industrial programs.

"So, one of the unintended consequences from all this is that the ballistic missile threat - not the nuclear missile threat - as a result of this deal could actually accelerate," he concluded.

Arms Race?

Although disagreements and suspicions over the intended purpose of U.S. missile defenses in Eastern Europe are nothing new to the increasingly strained U.S.-Russia relationship, Russia will likely use the continued pursuit of a missile shield to justify its nuclear missile modernization drive.

Under President Vladimir Putin, Russia will spend 20 trillion rubles ($620 billion when the plan was announced in 2010) on new military hardware through 2020. This rearmament program will reportedly see all of Russia's nuclear missiles replaced by newer systems.

Failure for the two sides to come to terms on the issue may further fuel an arms race. Retired Russian General Yevgeny Buzhinsky told The Moscow Times that if the U.S. continues to push the issue, Russia will find asymmetrical means of responding to the anti-missile system.
 
 #24
Moscow Times
August 12, 2015
Russian Bear Should Be More Cuddly, Less Snarly
By Mark Galeotti
Mark Galeotti is professor of global affairs at New York University.

The most recent Pew Research global survey of attitudes to Russia has seen the country's standing nosedive like - just to pluck a metaphor out of nowhere - a civilian passenger plane hit by a surface-to-air missile. Only Vietnam, Ghana and (barely) China showed overall a positive perception of Russia.

To be sure, thanks to an extraordinarily active and well-funded foreign information campaign Russia has been able to undermine some of the West's narrative. But what it has demonstrated is that it is one thing to throw sand into the eyes and into the gears of the international system. It is quite another to actually accrue soft power, to get people to respect, like and want to support and emulate you.

If anything, recent high-profile debacles from the destruction of confiscated food to presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov's now-infamous watch suggest that in detail as well as the big picture, Moscow is losing ground.

So just as the West is currently engaged in often-overblown debates about how to "fight the information war" - a dangerous and probably counterproductive metaphor - how could Russia perhaps reverse its manifest failure in the realm of soft power?

For a start, not invading a neighboring country would help. Likewise not shooting an airliner down - or seeing your proxies do it - and then maintaining a crass and unrepentant stonewall over the matter.

Given that the art of spin is usually one of making the best out of unpromising situations, though, what could Russia do to try and look less like a Western hawk's dream "evil empire"?

Maybe get more people to see and above all experience the diversities of Russian life? Many pundits, news editors and miscellaneous opinion formers have never been to Russia or last saw it in the miserable 1990s.

Rather than setting up sock puppet think tanks or carefully staged efforts to woo people such as the annual Valdai Discussion Club jamboree, why not simply seek to influence through unmediated experience?

Invite some of the Russia-watchers who haven't experienced today's Moscow for a long weekend, give them a troika travel card and a guide book, and turn them loose. No press minders, no formal presentations, no staged program of happy, shiny Putinistas. Just a dynamic, glitzy and exciting city ready to show them a good time and demonstrate a diversity of opinion and experience that makes it a true world city.

It will not guarantee they will end up liking the Kremlin any more, but may help break down some of the crass stereotypes and out-of-date oversimplifications of the sort that lead to headlines about a "medieval" Russia "sliding back into totalitarianism."

In general, this means more, not less interconnection with the West. Where is the Russian equivalent of the British Council, Confucius centers or the Goethe institutes? Doesn't the Kremlin believe that encouraging people to study Russian language and culture might be worth the price of a few Armata tanks (up to $8 million a pop)?

Indeed, rather than holding it back for a tit-for-tat deal that at the moment seems far, far away, why not implement visa-free travel for Westerners? Or at least relax pointless and irksome residence registration rules? Russia would look welcoming and may even shame the West into reciprocal visa deals that it has not up to now been able to browbeat them into.

For that matter, stop engaging in counterproductive tit-for-tats in general, especially where Moscow lacks the muscle to make them anything more than symbolic acts of pique. From expelling diplomats when its spies are caught, to banning Western products (perhaps even condoms!), it does enough to look petty, spiteful or downright childish, not enough actually to force the West into a change of policy.

Meanwhile, reverse the processes which have made RT an increasingly blatant propaganda network and make it a source of real news and diverse opinion. So long as Russia's voice to the world is strident, blatantly one-sided and too often mouthed by conspiracy theorists and shrill propagandists, it makes the country look insecure.

Confidence is contagious; Moscow will appear more trustworthy if it looks comfortable facing the same scrutiny it - rightly - encourages toward the West.

Russians have the wit, intelligence and subtlety to make friends and make their points at once. Think how the Sochi closing ceremony winningly played off the technical problems with the opening. The kind of snarky humor evident in propagandistic T-shirts could be put to much better use.

Until fundamental issues such as interference in Ukraine are solved, there are limits to what can be achieved. But as serious new challenges approach, from regional debt crises to shale gas, and the gap between its aspirations and capacities become ever more evident, the bear may well be better served by being a little less snarling, and a little more cuddly.
 
 #25
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
August 10, 2015
How to re-brand Russian soft power
Room for debate: While the current era of Russian soft power may be over, there are still different approaches for implementing Russian soft power that focus more on the global appeal of Russian culture. (Part 3 of 3)
By Natalia Ivanova
Natalia Ivanova is a researcher and graduate student of global political processes at MGIMO-University. Her dissertation topic is "Opportunities and limitations of Russian soft power in relation to the Baltic countries." She is the author of academic publications and the monograph "Opportunities for deploying Russian soft power in relation to the Baltic countries." Since February 2013 she has been an employee of the press service of the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC) and since June 2015 deputy head of the EEC communication technologies section.

The Ukraine crisis and the incorporation of Crimea have greatly affected Russia's image, opening up a Pandora's box and giving rise to a stream of negative metaphors about Russia.

The deterioration of Russia's image abroad marks the end of an era in the promotion of Russian soft power. And it seems that a new one has not yet begun.
However, any discussion of Russian soft power should not take place within the framework of the legitimacy, fairness and international lawfulness of Russia's behavior in Crimea. (Let that be the subject of UN talks, TV debates and conferences for top decision-makers.)

It would be more appropriate here to talk about the problems of Russian soft power in terms of the sudden and widespread deterioration of the country's image.

Despite the fact that Russia did not feature in the Soft Power 30 Global Ranking, there is a salient point that gets overlooked: Russia is permanent headline news. And if there is a link between a country's soft power (i.e. attractiveness) and its ability to get the world talking about it, Russia can be said to have achieved something.

Unfortunately, every silver lining has a cloud: Moscow's behavior is not being interpreted as the Kremlin or the Russian public would like. And it is the interpretation of current events and Kremlin policy that is set to go down in recent history, perhaps morphing later into what are known as "historical facts."

In this regard, the collective monograph entitled "The different faces of 'soft power': The Baltic States and Eastern Neighborhood between Russia and the EU" is revealing.

Prepared in 2015 by the Latvian Institute of International Affairs for the Eastern Partnership Summit in Riga, the report examines the soft power tools available to Russia in relation to the Baltic States and Eastern Europe, articulates how these countries perceive the objectives and implementation methods of Russian soft power, and compares them with the goals and methods of the European Union. Crimea is once more cited as a textbook example.

But closest attention should be paid to the conclusions. First, the authors suggest that Russian soft power is merely a prelude to the use of hard power (if Russia lacks sufficient quantities of the former to achieve its goals).

Second, Russia's neighbors fear its soft power no less than its hard power.

Third, the EU's soft power is understood to be a "nearly imperceptible form of communication between people and societies," while the Russian authorities perceive soft power to be a "set of state tools to disseminate official messages."

At the same time, despite the fact that Russia's image has taken a blow in the West, the picture should not be oversimplified.

Indeed, some Eastern European countries, former Soviet republics, BRICS nations and Latin American nations harbor a far more favorable image of Russia than the West does, largely due to positive experiences in the past and economic pragmatism in the present.

One important caveat: Popularity and reputation are radically different concepts. In today's global world of almost universal access to technology, it is enough to post and promote a shock video on YouTube to become famous.

But to earn a reputation and the recognition of others requires years of good deeds performed without fanfare or overt self-centeredness, but with sincerity, wisdom and patience, all the while waiting for onlookers to take note of such good deeds that are coming from one and the same country.
Then, proud of their discovery, those selfsame onlookers will draw the world's attention to the benefactor.

Therefore, if we understand the term "soft power" to be a resource based upon a country's appeal, prestige and untarnished reputation, combined with a dynamic credible brand and national charisma in the form of world-renowned politicians, musicians, athletes, etc., then Russia today really does have problems.

But that's not the whole story: Russia has tremendous soft power potential. But to realize it, the country's leadership needs to adjust the approaches to implementing its soft power strategy, or rather, adjust the strategy itself.

In what way? The issue is complex.

To answer this question, let's start by recalling the story of a famous jewelry company founded in 1842 in the Russian Empire: the House of Faberg�.
The imperial family, when receiving ambassadors in St. Petersburg or traveling around the world, presented luxurious Faberg� items. Such jewelry knick-knacks, pregnant with emotion and the personal touch of the donor, never failed to achieve their diplomatic purpose.

Faberg�'s talent manifested itself not in the precious materials, but in the integrity and absolutely flawless nature of the artistic design. To hold such an item in the hand was to be in contact with perfect unity of form and content, and at the same time, to understand that this was a uniquely Russian achievement.

Can Russian citizens today outside the presidential administration offer anything remotely similar to foreign audiences and guests?

Recent examples have caused slight bewilderment and suggest that today there is no understanding of which brands represent Russia. Suffice it to recall the news that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov recently presented U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry with a Victory Day T-shirt and some tomatoes and potatoes from Krasnodar.

However, positive examples do exist, for instance, Russian ballet or the works of renowned Russian artist Nikas Safronov. His paintings are an example of the untapped potential of Russian soft power. He remarks that the Kremlin sometimes turns to him for paintings on the eve of presidential trips abroad.

A 2011 visit by then President Dmitry Medvedev to Azerbaijan is one such example. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev added several landscapes of his country to his art collection on that occasion. Incidentally, Safronov has repeatedly stated that he wants his portraits to tell the world about what kind, beautiful people live in Russia.

However, such master brands - instantly recognizable and improbably attractive, which the country could be proud of - are in short supply in modern Russia.
Today it is geniuses, who through talent and perseverance, cannot fail to make a mark. They include pianist Denis Matsuev, opera singers Anna Netrebko and Dmitri Hvorostovsky (who, incidentally, does not live in Russia), and conductor Valery Gergiev, the first to reveal the genius of the composers Stravinsky and Borodin to the world, as well as other virtuoso enthusiasts like him who never cease to adore their homeland.

Today, looking at Russia's renowned cultural heritage, which has always had a positive influence on the country's image, one is alarmed to discover that its cultural present is not recognized internationally. The reason is that Russia has little to offer, not enough top-quality brands.

Soft power is always something that society chooses for itself in the knowledge that the choice is voluntary and appealing. Soft power is not built by decree from on high, but takes shape naturally and over a period of many years. In the choice between a point of no return and a turning point in the realization of potential, the latter looks more constructive and promising.
 
 #26
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
August 12, 2015
Just how effective are sanctions as a tool of foreign policy?
On August 10, the U.S. extended economic sanctions against additional Russian officials and companies. It is high time to consider the impact of sanctions on Russia over the past year as well as on other countries throughout history.
By Michael Gorodiloff
Michael Gorodiloff is a 2nd year Master student at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London, specializing in "Economy and Business." He is going to spend his 2nd year in Charles University (Prague) as a part of academic exchange in UCL. Since 2013 Michael writes on international affairs and geopolitical topics.

On August 10, new economic sanctions against Russian officials and companies came into force. Amidst the ongoing sanctions war between Russia and the West, it is important to assess to what extent these sanctions have had an impact on Russia over the past year, as well as to consider the impact of economic sanctions on other countries throughout history.

Economic sanctions of various types have often been used over the past few centuries to discourage wars, to solve disputes and intervene in humanitarian crises. The U.S. alone used trade sanctions in 117 cases just in the period 1972-1998.

But are sanctions effective as a tool of foreign policy?

To answer that question, it's first important to consider the different types of sanctions. Among them is the boycott-the voluntary act of stopping communication or business with someone, like excluding Russia from the G8. There are also embargoes, which are trade restrictions that can be partial (as in the case of Russia), or full (as in the blockade of Iran).

The sanctions artillery also includes financial sanctions, which limit the ability of a state or individual to conduct financial operations, and so-called "smart sanctions," which are intended to target individual representatives of a ruling regime with the purpose of making it change its policies.

In the case of Russia, it took approximately six months and four rounds of sanctions to implement more or less serious measures, which targeted high-ranking officials, important state-owned companies and business moguls with close ties to the Kremlin.

Initially, EU countries were far more reluctant to hurt the Russian economy as hard as the U.S., which can be explained by the fact that EU-Russia bilateral trade ($410 billion) is much bigger than U.S.-Russia trade ($29 billion). However, after the MH17 tragedy inflamed tensions over Ukraine, the EU initiated a tougher stance towards Russia.

In the case of Iran, the U.S. imposed the first sanctions in 1979 and for the following three decades, the U.S. State Department took steps to increase pressure on the Iranian economy. In 2006 the UN Security Council passed resolution 1696, which was followed by seven other resolutions. Combined, these resolutions formed a legal framework for an economic blockade against Iran, which took place in 2012, right after the EU joined this sanctions regime.

How the Russian economy has responded to Western sanctions

In Russia, the effect of sanctions was felt almost immediately, since two highly important energy projects depended on the sophisticated technologies of extraction and the significant experience of European and American partners in shale exploration.

The first one is the Universitetskaya-1 project, a joint venture of Russia's Rosneft, America's Exxon Mobil and North Atlantic, a Norwegian daughter company of the British offshore drilling company Seadrill. This project has 13 billion tons of oil and 8.5 trillion cubic meters of gas.

The second one is the Bazhenov formation, a joint venture of France's Total and Russia's Lukoil, with its 11 billion tons of oil. This is more than was extracted in Western Siberia during the last 50 years.

The real income of the Russian population fell for the first time in five years: in August and September 2014, people earned on average 1 percent less than in the same period in 2013. Sanctions touched a small group of banks, which altogether control 70 percent of the banking sector in Russia. This, in turn, contributed to the currency crisis. How much will Russian GDP decrease this year? No one knows for sure, but figures range from 1 percent to 5 percent.

We should keep in mind, however, that the bulk of all Russian sanctions belong to the group of "smart sanctions" and cannot be compared with the almost total embargo endured by the Iranian economy (which led to a contraction in Iran's economy by 5.4 percent from 2011 to 2013 and a rise in unemployment to the 28 percent level).

In Iran, the devastating effect of the sanctions, which were primarily aimed at oil, the top source of income for the regime in Tehran, is clearly visible.
Regarding Russia, sanctions have contributed to the unprecedented fall of the Russian ruble by 50 percent since June 2014. This currency slide still threatens the economic stability of the state. In fact, it gave rise to a recession, which initially cost the Russian economy about 2 percent of GDP. According to recent reports, Russia's GDP plummeted by 4.6 percent in the second quarter of 2015.

But it's important to keep in mind that what happens with the ruble is rather a product of the Russian economic development model and the global economic situation.

In January and February of 2014, the ruble fell by 10 percent after the U.S. Federal Reserve System stopped its program of quantitative easing (QE). As a result of QE, large amounts of U.S. dollars were invested in the emerging markets, because these economies were growing faster than the U.S. After the first rumors about plans for stopping the program, money was pulled out by investors. This had negative consequences for national currencies of emerging markets throughout the world.

By June 2014, the ruble had returned to its previous positions, but for the next six months, the currency followed the trajectory of oil. The price of Brent crude fell from $114 per barrel to $62 per barrel. Since the Russian economy is hugely dependent on oil and gas exports, there can be little doubt that a decisive blow was delivered by lower oil prices. These prices, of course, have no direct connection with sanctions.

However, sanctions have limited the ability of major Russian companies and banks to lend and borrow money in the West and added to the risk of capital flight, a traditional problem of the Russian economy.

It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the recession would have started in any case because of huge economic misbalances in Russia. In January 2014, for example, Russian industrial output fell by 0.1 percent without sanctions of any sort. Of course, prices on goods and food have risen, but mostly due to the aforementioned currency crisis.

However, due to the combination of sanctions and worsening economic conditions, the first 8 months after Crimea's accession resulted in the richest people of Russia losing $62 billion. And that was just in the final eight months of 2014. Taking into account that almost all of them are closely connected to the Kremlin, it would be reasonable to conclude that Putin's "inner circle" was hurt.

How international sanctions have fared throughout history

Sanctions imposed through international institutions like the UN have a greater effect than ones imposed unilaterally. It explains, in part, why the U.S. failed to organize a full blockade of Russia since the latter is a member of the UN Security Council. However, it is questionable that sanctions can deliver their expected results.

For example, a full economic blockade did nothing to change the Iranian foreign policy and priorities and, even more, helped to radicalize it. As for Russia and Ukraine, the situation is even more difficult and confusing. So, sanctions are hardly likely to change the Kremlin's foreign policy in Ukraine and resolve the Ukrainian crisis.

Thus, economic sanctions seem to be ineffective in resolving foreign policy challenges, because they don't help to bring internal conflicts to an end. On the contrary, they can cause a backlash by fuelling the radicalization of the population of the sanctioned countries, due to the serious negative implications on public health and human rights.

Sometimes, sanctions can do more harm than good, like in the case of Congo, when American sanctions on the diamond industry failed to stop a civil war, but caused a major disruption of economic activity in this country.

Back in the 1990s, economic sanctions did little to hurt former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's regime, but damaged the country's middle class and left it at the mercy of the ruling Ba'ath party.

Meanwhile, one possible negative effect of sanctions may be the rise to power of the more radical elements of the country - a possible scenario for Russia, where internal demand for more aggressive foreign policy, in fact, is very high.

The whole idea of coercing a state to accept specific terms is compromised by the fact that most of the sanctioned countries are not well-functioning democracies, in which ruling elites have to take into account the opinions of the governed population. In practice, in non-democratic societies that are subject to economic sanctions, ruling elites have almost no incentives to make changes. On the contrary, they tend to tighten their grip on the economy. This happened in Iran, where giant holding company Sedat, which belongs to Ayatollah Khamenei, controls a number of assets with a combined value about $95 billion.

These assets were easy to obtain because of deteriorating economic conditions inside the country. In any case, it is important to remember that a non-democratic regime may always try to compensate its losses at the expense of its own citizens.

The Cuban regime remained intact after more than 50 years of an economic blockade enforced by the U.S., but the positive developments and changes started only after Washington lifted some restrictions.

However, it doesn't mean that economic weapons such as sanctions don't work at all. The fall in oil prices, which happened in large part due to the increase of oil production in the U.S., has placed the Russian economy on the brink of collapse and made the Russian government abandon its plans of federalizing Ukraine.

As a result, exploiting the natural weaknesses of a targeted country's economy may help to achieve greater results than a full embargo, which has too many negative side effects, most notably in the humanitarian area.
 
 #27
Moscow Times
August 12, 2015
Who'll Blink First in Russia Sanctions Standoff?
By Sarah Lain
Sarah Lain is a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think tank.

The IMF recently stated that, as a result of sanctions, the Russian economy lost between 1 and 1.5 percent of its gross domestic product, but could potentially lose 9 percent of its GDP over the next few years.

As the IMF noted, defining the exact effect of sanctions in isolation is a challenge, particularly given that the drop in the price of oil and collapse of the ruble in 2014 were key factors in Russia's economic downturn; a downturn which began even before the collapse of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych's government.

However, it is clear that sanctions are having an effect on Russia's economy. But is this the intended effect desired by those imposing them?

Many have commented that sanctions are not having the "intended" effect on Putin, meaning that they are not a big enough threat to force Putin to cease supporting the separatists in eastern Ukraine.

However, this makes assumptions as to what in reality sanctions hoped to, and could, achieve. Western policymakers are not naive enough to think that the threat of sanctions alone would be enough to instantaneously deter Putin from getting more involved in Ukraine, or encourage him to return Crimea. Sanctions are part of a longer-term tool that take time to have serious impact.

This impact is predominantly economic pain and a slow-down in a country's ability to develop. Historically, sanctions have rarely encouraged policymakers within the targeted governments to change their approach and require negotiations with a new government.

Putin quickly and clearly showed that his government was not going to respond by backing down on Ukraine in response to sanctions. Sanctions thus become a waiting game of who will crack under the pressure first.

Defining this "pressure" has been important for the Russian media narrative. The original EU and U.S. sanctions tactic was to target individuals who when pressured, would hopefully pressure Putin.

However, it appears there is not a clear enough understanding of the complete inner workings of Putin's circle's business interests to have a significant impact.

Moreover, the idea that the instruments of these sanctioned individuals' wealth would be publicly identifiable, and be under their full registered control, reflects a lack of awareness of the opaque beneficial ownership structures and proxies used in Russian business.

This has been reflected in the most recent U.S. sanction iteration issued in July 2015. These include entities, some of which are registered in Cyprus, and individuals who are being used to evade the sanctions by providing "material support" to already sanctioned members of Putin's inner circle.

To go further and simply sanction a wider group of Russian oligarchs and prominent business people with ties to the state would be legally difficult and ethically dubious.

The most visible impact for Russia has been from the broader sectoral sanctions on the banking, energy and technology sectors.

It appears to Russia that the actual impact, and thus intent, behind Western-imposed sanctions is to damage the economy as a whole, creating a collective punishment to the population.

Although in reality even these sectoral sanctions were carefully targeted, this has lent itself to the Russian narrative that the West wishes to see Russia collapse and also regime change, so much so that it warranted an updated military doctrine that highlighted "color revolutions" as a priority concern.

Cracks are being seen in the unity of Russian society as economic hardship increases, and Russia's blaming of the West for its economic state may become harder to justify to the nation.

However, the economic collapse of Russia and/or accompanying regime change is not necessarily what Western policymakers were hoping, at least publicly, to achieve in this situation. The lack of any alternative to Putin who would be more willing to engage with the West points to the potential Pandora's box of regime change.

Sanctions were instead pitched as a principled protest against Russia's illegal military intervention into a neighboring sovereign state, delivering non-military punishment for Russia's aggression in a bid to get Putin to back down.

Given the West's relatively low interest in Ukraine prior to the Maidan protests, Russia dismissed this as Western hypocrisy in choosing when to intervene in other jurisdictions. However, it seems the only way sanctions can "work" in this context is to weaken a state that has expressed complete unwillingness to compromise on Ukraine until it is forced to crack.

Part of the difficulty in considering any eventual end to sanctions is that, as the objective of sanctions on Russia is vague, so are the conditions on which they can be lifted.

Fulfillment of the conditions set out in the Minsk II agreement in February is the barometer by which Russia's behavior will be measured.

However, how does one define Russia's involvement in implementing the Minsk agreement, if Russia continues to deny it has anything to do with the issues that the Minsk agreement addresses?

The agreement does not explicitly indicate where Russia, even as a third party, could assist. The subtext is that Russia should withdraw its "volunteers," the equipment it supplied and pressure the rebels into complying. But to prove it has done this, it would have to admit it was involved to this extent in the first place.

Although this vagueness gives some flexibility to the sanctions-imposers, in the short term it has played in Russia's favor for its own narrative. Given that the West has committed to sanctions, it now has no real choice but to keep them in place if it wants them to take real effect.


 
 #28
www.rt.com
August 11, 2015
'West's aggressive stance pushes Russia to China, threatens Western dominance'

The West's hardline towards Russia is driving Russia closer to China, with deepening Sino-Russian relations posing a strong challenge to global Western hegemony, founding partner at Prosperity Capital Management Mattias Westman told RT.

RT: The latest protest by EU farmers is one of many. We've seen rallies mounting since Russia adopted its EU food embargo last year. How badly is the embargo, which was in response to Western sanctions on Russia, hurting Europe's economy?

Mattias Westman: Well, I think on the overall European economy it has limited impact, but of course some of the more vulnerable groups, in farming communities and also particularly in the south and south-east of Europe are suffering more than others.

RT: Key Western leaders have also promoted the extension of sanctions on Russia on numerous occasions. Do you consider sanctions an appropriate way to deal with Moscow?

MW: Well, in a recent article I published in a German magazine I tried to sort this question out from a more usefulness point of view. I would say it's very difficult to see how these sanctions could have any beneficial effect on Russia or on the situation in Ukraine.

RT: US President Barack Obama has also been weighing in again on numerous occasions. He said that Western sanctions have clearly damaged the Russian economy. Do you agree with that sentiment?

MW: Well, I think it's not entirely correct. I mean, of course the sanctions have had some negative impact, but the slowdown we've seen in Russia in the last year, I think has a lot more to do with the price of commodities; the price of oil has fallen by 50 percent, which inevitably was going to have an effect on the Russian economy, particularly on the ruble. And I think the Central Bank did the right thing in terms of allowing the ruble to fluctuate and to decline with the terms of trade in order to preserve the margins and the competitiveness of the Russian industry.

RT: In your article, you said that the Western approach towards Russia over Ukraine was kind of an 'own goal' of historic proportions. What do you mean by that?

MW: Well, I think that there is a lot of talk in the West about Russia being a threat to the global system or the global security. But I think the real challenge to the global balance of power, as it is, is really China, which is a rapidly rising power. And by taking this aggressive stance against Russia, a confrontational stance I should say, you have the effect of Russia and China cooperating further and that only strengthens this more serious threat to the global dominance of the West - of course, if that is a beneficial thing.

RT: You just mentioned China. Amid the sanctions, we saw Russia signing a record trillion dollar deal with the Chinese. Do you think the West is losing a key economic partner?

MW: Well, I think this process is to some extent inevitable because the Chinese and Russian economies are very compatible and there are many benefits from trade between the countries, but I think that this try to politicize the relationships, and driving a conflict, is speeding up that process. And I think seeing Russia and China as strategic allies is not really in their interests, but that's the effect of the policies that they are pursuing.

RT: What are your predictions for the future? And in terms of sanctions what needs to actually happen for them to be lifted on both sides?

MW: Well, it's two different things here. The USA is unlikely to lift sanctions anytime soon; it is politically inconvenient to do so - to look weak against Russia and so on. The situation in Europe is quite different. First of all, it requires unanimous decisions to prolong the sanctions when they come up to you again in January, I think. And already in the summer, now, when they were prolonged for six months, there are lot countries who didn't want to do it. As far as I understand there were about seven hawks who wanted to prolong them, seven doves who wanted to lift them, and the rest were somewhere in the middle. And I think each time it will become harder and harder to bully the countries who want to lift the sanctions. So, of course, the current situation, where things are, after all, calming down a little bit in Ukraine, and you see that the reverse sanctions biting a bit in the south of Europe - I think that increases the likelihood of lifting sanctions. And I also think they (America) probably might not want to spend so much political capital on bullying their countries into agreeing on prolongation very much longer.

RT: Just finally, Russia denies being involved in the military conflict in Ukraine, yet it's being sanctioned for its alleged role in the war, while Kiev does enjoy a lot of support from the West. What are your thoughts on that overall picture?

MW: Well, of course, it is a very complex question, but I think is unfortunate that the West has taken such a strong side for one part of an internal conflict in Ukraine. And I think there's a lack of understanding of what the causes of this conflict are. Hopefully - and I have seen some signs of it - that some more awareness is coming on that this is not as simple as it might have looked from the beginning.
 
 #29
New York Times
August 12, 2015
New Diplomacy Seen on U.S.-Russian Efforts to End Syrian Civil War
By ANNE BARNARD

BEIRUT, Lebanon - With President Bashar al-Assad of Syria facing battlefield setbacks, diplomats from Russia, the United States and several Middle Eastern powers are engaged in a burst of diplomatic activity, trying to head off a deeper collapse of the country that could further strengthen the militant group Islamic State.

Russia, Mr. Assad's most powerful backer, has built new ties with Saudi Arabia, a fervent opponent, and even brokered a meeting between high-ranking Saudi and Syrian intelligence officials. On Tuesday, the Saudi foreign minister, Adel al-Jubeir, met with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, in Moscow, wrangling over the fate of Mr. Assad.

Unusual meetings have come in quick succession. Last week, the top Russian, American and Saudi envoys held their first three-way meeting on Syria; Russian officials briefed Syria's foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem. He then met officials in Oman, whose ties to both Saudi Arabia and Iran raised the prospect of talks between those archrivals. Russia stopped blocking an international inquiry into who has used chemical weapons in Syria, a longstanding American priority.

The flurry of diplomacy suggests that Russia and the United States, whose differences have long jammed efforts to resolve the conflict, are making newly concerted strides toward goals they have long claimed to share: a political solution to Syria's multisided civil war and better strategies to fight the Islamic State.

Russia has played the most prominent public role so far in the new diplomacy. Some analysts say that the discussion reflects a softening of the Obama administration's long-held position that "Assad must go," and a fear, shared with Russia, that the Islamic State could be the primary beneficiary if Mr. Assad's government continues to weaken, as they expect, or even to collapse entirely, which they view as less likely but increasingly possible.

The Syrian government has been jarred by a series of defeats on the battlefield and difficulty recruiting for its forces, even among members of Mr. Assad's minority Alawite sect. Having lost large sections of the country to the Islamic State and various rebel forces, it is concentrating its remaining military strength in the capital, Damascus, and other crucial cities in western Syria.

Mr. Assad's opponents, too, have reason to reassess strategy; American efforts to build a proxy force in Syria have largely failed, insurgent groups have their own attrition problems, and Saudi Arabia and Turkey face political and security blowback at home.

As the military situation continues to deteriorate, the major powers are growing increasingly nervous. Emile Hokayem, a Middle East analyst with the International Institute for Strategic Studies and a vociferous critic of Mr. Assad, said the United States was letting Russia take the lead because "they don't want to own this." If anything, Mr. Hokayem added, "it's the United States that has moved closer to Russia's position" that Mr. Assad could be part of the transitional government that is the stated goal of any negotiations.

Regional news outlets have attributed the outburst of diplomatic activity to the aftermath of the tentative nuclear deal with Iran, which has "has thrown a great stone into the region's waters," as the Jordanian newspaper Al Ghad put it. The pan-Arab daily Rai al-Youm went so far as to declare that "a political resolution is taking shape with notable speed."

But analysts in the region, across the political spectrum, strongly caution that no breakthroughs can be expected soon. Fundamental disconnects remain, and in the diplomatic dance, each side claims that its adversaries are coming around to its point of view.

Russian and Iranian officials suggest that Saudi Arabia, the United States and allies like Turkey are coming to realize that fighting terrorism is more important than ousting Mr. Assad, though Mr. Jubeir insisted after his meeting with Mr. Lavrov that "there is no place for Assad in the future of Syria." Conversely, American and Turkish officials, who contend that his rule drives radicalism, say that Russia has grown more willing to see him replaced.

And even if real consensus can be reached, any agreement would have little meaning right now, when many forces on the ground still believe they can gain by fighting. Any deal that emerges would be likely to cover only the government-held western spine of Syria and parts of the south, where relatively moderate insurgents are strongest. It is virtually inconceivable that the Islamic State, entrenched in eastern Syria, or the Nusra Front, Al Qaeda's arm in Syria and a powerful force in the northwest, would be included.

What is nonetheless taking place internationally is a shift in tone, a sense of movement below the surface. That alone is notable in a context of divides that can seem unbridgeable, after four and a half years of fighting that has killed at least a quarter-million people and driven the worst refugee crisis in a generation.

Of all the recent diplomatic exchanges and openings, none is more important than the apparent new spirit of cooperation between Russia and the United States. Fyodor Lukyanov, chairman of a council that advises the Kremlin on foreign policy, said that conversations were returning to the topic of Syria after a year of exclusive focus on the Iran deal, with each side a bit "less firm" in its position.

"Saudi still believes that Assad should go, but now they are a little less sure that the alternative will be better," he said in a recent interview with The New York Times. "Russia still believes he should stay, but cannot ignore that the general situation is changing, that the strategic position for Syria is much worse now than before."

Senior American officials say Russian officials have appeared to be more open in recent weeks to discussions about replacing Mr. Assad. These officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatic deliberations, say Moscow is increasingly worried about Mr. Assad's precarious position and the rise of extremist groups, which have recruited several thousand Russian citizens to fight in Syria.

But the discussions are tentative, and the officials said that if Russia someday agreed to broker a deal to move Mr. Assad aside, it would almost certainly insist on another Alawite, a member of Mr. Assad's minority sect.

"It's encouraging, but we're still a long ways off," said one senior American official.

Russian officials strongly deny their position has changed.

Mr. Hokayem and other analysts note the Obama administration has recently echoed some Russian positions, treating extremist groups as a more urgent threat than Mr. Assad, and saying that Iran, Syria's close ally, would have to buy into any political solution.

That is how Syria's government has framed the new diplomacy, with the deputy foreign minister, Fayssal al-Mekdad, calling it "a clear and explicit recognition from the countries leading the war on Syria that they have erred and must step back and take responsibility in this regard."

There have been subtle shifts of diplomatic language that suggest the United States and its allies could even be backing off one of their main demands - that Mr. Assad step down as a prerequisite for forming a transitional government.

That has been the critical difference in how Russia and the United States interpret the internationally agreed Geneva framework, which calls for the transfer of power to a transitional government acceptable to all sides but does not specify whether Mr. Assad can be part of it. The United States and its allies have long said no; Russia says yes, adding that Mr. Assad's departure cannot be a precondition for talks.

The pro-government newspaper Al Watan noted that at last week's three-way meeting in Qatar, Secretary of State John Kerry did not repeat the American demand that Mr. Assad step aside. He declared only that the Syrian leader had "lost his legitimacy."

And even the Saudi newspaper Al Watan - no connection to the Syrian one - used a notable phrase, saying that while Mr. Assad's government was to blame for Syria's troubles, a solution could come " either by reforming it, or by removing it immediately, or in stages."

Such shifts have driven an emerging theory about the outlines of an eventual compromise - albeit one that could take years to achieve.

The gist is that a new government would be formed including elements of the current government - perhaps including Mr. Assad for a finite period - and moderate Syrian opposition figures. The army would absorb some insurgents from relatively moderate groups. Alawites and majority Sunnis would both be represented.

Then, as the Syrian analyst Ibrahim Hamidi put it in the Saudi-owned pan-Arab newspaper Al Hayat, "the government and army will have the necessary political legitimacy and sectarian representation to 'unite against terrorism.' "

That scenario fits in with a plan that Iran put forward amid last week's flurry of meetings, calling for an immediate cease-fire, the formation of a national unity government, a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the rights of all Syria's ethnic and religious groups, and internationally supervised elections.

But how that would actually look would undoubtedly be hard to agree on.

As the Jordanian newspaper al-Ghad concluded, with grudges "dug deep over half a decade, with all the blood spilled and hatred that has been spread," ending conflict among entrenched armed groups will mean "offering concessions and dealing in details, each one of which contains a thousand devils!"
 
 #30
http://saradzhyan.livejournal.com
August 10, 2015
Putin's Change of Heart on Assad Could Pave Way for Cooperation against ISIL
By Simon Saradzhyan
[Simon Saradzhyan is assistant director of the U.S.-Russia Initiative to Prevent Nuclear Terrorism and a fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center.]

There have emerged multiple signs this summer that Russia's Vladimir Putin may be reconsidering expediency of continued support for Syria's Bashir Al-Assad. If these signs do reflect a shift in the Russian leader's position on Syria, then it would enhance chances of finding a compromise solution on transition of power in Damascus in what would strengthen multilateral efforts to stabilize this country and rout the Islamic State.

Several signs that Putin may have had a change of heart on Assad have emerged this summer. First, Russia was reported to have pulled as many 100 of these advisors from Syria. Then Saudi Arabian defence minister Mohammed bin Salman visited Moscow in June to sign agreements on cooperation on oil, space and peaceful nuclear energy and on co-investment of $10 billion into Russian economy. Russia's decision to clinch these deals was all the more significant, given that the Russians rejected a previous offer that the Saudis made behind the closed doors to trade support for Assad for lucrative deals among other things. Then July saw representatives of the Syrian National Coalition claim to have discussed Assad's political fate with Russian officials for the first time. Most recently, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced in early August that his recent meeting with Putin has left him with an impression that the Russian leader soon "give up on" Assad. Finally, U.S. President Barack Obama stated this past weekend that "what I have been encouraged by is that the Russians are now more interested in discussions around what a political transition - or at least framework for talks - would look like inside of Syria."
The main reason why Putin may be reassessing wisdom of continuing support for the Assad regime is that the latter has been losing control of territory at such a pace that the Syrian government now controls only one-sixth of the country. There is, therefore, an increasing real possibility that Assad might lose the war and flee to Iran while the future of his country will be decided without Russia's participation.

One potential way to stop the bloody Syrian civil war now in a way -- that would accommodate Russia's interests -- would be for Russia and other countries to mediate negotiations between on formation of a coalition government, which would include representatives of moderate factions within the anti-Assad forces and the Alawites (at least guarantee the latter's security and accommodate their reasonable interests), while excluding the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and al-Qaeda. A lot, of course, will depend on the position of Iran, which remains the principal backer of the Assad regime. Should both Teheran Moscow concede, however, to a transition of power in Syria and convince Assad to do so too,  then that would increase chances that Syria would avoid a formal partition and that the next rulers of this country will be open to accommodating Iranian and Russian interests in Levant.

If there is one important security interest vis-�-vis Syria that not only Russia and Iran, but also Western countries share, then it is defeating ISIL in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere.  ISIL's Sunni militants view Shia Iran as bastion of heresy and Teheran has dispatched fighters to combat ISIL in Iraq.  Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Security Council secretary Nikolai Patrushev describe this organization as Russia's main enemy and main threat to global security respectively. That should come as no surprise, given that ISIL has recently announced creation of a "vilayat" in the North Caucasus and attracted thousands of Russian citizens to its ranks. Washington is also very concerned about ISIL's rise. FBI's director James Comey has recently been quoted as saying that ISIL poses the greatest danger to U.S. homeland, though there is no consensus in the U.S. leadership on whether and what terrorist organization represents the top threat to U.S. national security

That Moscow and Washington are interested in cooperation against ISIL, in spite of their stand-off over Ukraine, is clear from recent visits of Russian and U.S. security officials to U.S. and Russia respectively.  First President Putin sent director of the Federal Security Service Alexander Bortnikov to participate in a conference on Islamic extremism organized by the Barack Obama administration in Washington, DC, in February. Then the U.S. government sent a delegation of officials from CIA, FBI and National Counterterrorism Center to a gathering of representatives from security services of 64 countries that FSB hosted in Yaroslavl in July. A number of America's NATO allies, including Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Spain, and Netherlands also sent their delegations to Yaroslavl, as did Israel, Iran and Saudi Arabia, to discuss cooperation against ISIL among other issues.

Many common Russians would support Russia's participation in international efforts to rout ISIL. The share of Russians who think Russia should fight ISIL is more than twice as large (36%) as the share of those who hold the opposite view (15%). Moreover, two-thirds of those who believe Russia should fight ISIL also think their countries should do so in cooperation with Western countries, according to a recent poll by Russia's Public Opinion Foundation.

The governments of Russia, the United States and their allies should utilize the positive momentum, which their cooperation in securing an agreement between P5+1 and Iran has created, to help negotiate a compromise solution for transition of power in Syria. That could pave way for coordination of efforts by U.S., E.U. Russia, and even, maybe, Iran in supporting efforts of those state and non-state actors who are fighting ISIL not only in Syria, but also in Iraq.

An active U.S.-Russian cooperation on transition of power in Syria, then in combatting against ISIL will not only greatly advance international efforts to defeat this terrorist organization, but would also help to stop the slide towards a new Cold War between West and Russia in the wake of the Ukraine crisis.
 
 #31
The Guardian (UK)
August 11, 2015
Russia and Nato war games increase risk of real clash, report says
By Julian Borger Diplomatic editor

Russia and Nato have been conducting increasingly large-scale military exercises to prepare for a possible conflict with each other, but the war games themselves are making a clash more likely, a new report warns.

The report by the European Leadership Network (ELN) thinktank calls on both sides to communicate more and to improve the transparency of their military activities. It also encourages them to wind down the scale of their war games while starting work on a new treaty that would limit the sort of weaponry allowed along their borders.

"Each exercise is seen as provocative by the other side and feeding a dynamic of distrust and unpredictability," Ian Kearns, ELN's director, said. "Everyone is focusing on the deterrent value of big exercises, but there is a downside and that is the risk factor. Politicians have to show political judgment and restraint about when is the right time to scale down what could be a spiralling sequence of exercises."

The ELN report is titled Preparing for the worst: are Russian and Nato military exercises making war in Europe more likely? It analyses two recent mass war games: a Russian 'snap exercise' in March involving 80,000 military personal from bases all across the country, and Nato's Allied Shield set of war games conducted on air, land and sea in June, and drawing in 15,000 personnel from 22 countries.

"Both exercises show that each side is training with the other side's capabilities and most likely war plans in mind," the report said. "Whilst spokespeople may maintain that these operations are targeted against hypothetical opponents, the nature and scale of them indicate otherwise: Russia is preparing for a conflict with Nato, and Nato is preparing for a possible confrontation with Russia."

The Russian exercise in March started in the far north and spread across the federation in order to mimic a rapidly escalating conflict. Troops were deployed to reinforce vulnerable outlying regions like the Kola peninsula, islands in the Arctic, the Kaliningrad enclave, Crimea and the north Pacific island of Sakhalin. As well as the huge number of elite forces and conscripts, the exercise involved 12,000 pieces of heavy equipment, 65 warships, 15 submarines and 220 aircraft.

Nato's exercises in June comprised a naval action in the Baltic with a focus on amphibious operations in Sweden and Poland; a conventional-force exercise focused on Poland and the Baltic states that included airborne and tank clashes; and the first deployment of a joint task force set up specifically to address fears among Baltic states of Russian infiltration and the use of irregular fighters, as witnessed in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

Each exercise led to close military encounters as each side approached the other's war games to assess their capability and hardware. The ELN report said that the Russian practice of not giving notice of its exercises added to the risk of unintended clashes and contributed to the general level of tension.

"It is vitally important to increase Nato-Russia communication with regards to the schedule of exercises," the ELN report recommended, adding that the two sides should use the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe to pass on details of war exercises in advance. The report also called on each side to weigh the costs and benefits of intensive exercises in border areas, and to show restraint in their scale.

Lastly, the thinktank - which brings together former defence ministers and senior ex-officials from Europe and Russia - appealed for work to begin on "a new treaty introducing reciprocal territorial limitations on deployment of specific categories of weapons, backed by robust inspections".
 
 #32
Sputnik
August 12, 2015
NATO Blasts Report Warning of Risk of War With Russia

NATO responded to a report analyzing the impact of NATO and Russian military exercises in Europe by using the same logic as described in the report.

The publication of a report about the dangers of escalating military exercises from the European Leadership Institute think tank prompted an angry reaction at NATO, whose spokeswoman Carmen Romero blamed Russia for obstructing cooperation.

The report analyzes Russia's March 2015 snap exercise and the NATO June 2015 "Allied Shield" exercise. According to the report, while both sides focus on their "most exposed areas" geographically the exercises nevertheless creates a risk of conflict. NATO blasted the report, saying that it "misleadingly puts NATO and Russian exercises on par," which one of the authors of the reports denied.

"[W]hile one side may aim its actions at strengthening deterrence and preparing for defensive actions, the other side perceives the same exercises as provocative and deliberate aggravation of the crisis. In the current climate of mistrust, the exercises can feed uncertainty in an almost classic illustration of the 'security dilemma' written about by many scholars of international affairs," the report said.

In its response, NATO nearly telegraphed the logic expressed in the report, which warns why using such logic may be dangerous and could eventually lead to war. NATO Deputy Secretary General Alexander Vershbow also tweeted that that NATO exercises do not create any risks.

"Both NATO and Russia are keen to emphasise that their exercises are defensive in nature. This may well be true. Nevertheless, the worsening political relationship between NATO and Russia now appears to be bringing with it an action-reaction cycle in terms of military exercises," the report said.

Even though the report did not accuse NATO of anything, the organization also felt the need to accuse Russia of holding exercises that are "unpredictable and bring instability."

NATO also claimed that its exercises are transparent, giving a link to what appears to be a partial list of exercises which are conducted by NATO and some of its members. The total number of exercises is unclear, as only some national exercises are included and the list focuses on drills conducted by NATO as an alliance rather than individual member states.

NATO also claimed that it "has already taken new initiatives to keep political and military channels of communication with Russia open." Russia and NATO previously communicated through the NATO-Russia council, but the organization suspended meetings in June 2014.
 
 #33
New York Times
August 12, 2015
What the West Gets Wrong About Russia
Contributing Op-Ed Writer
By IVAN KRASTEV
Ivan Krastev is the chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and a contributing opinion writer.

SOFIA, Bulgaria - WHEN George Kennan wrote his famous "Long Telegram," his 1946 letter to Secretary of State James F. Byrnes that laid the foundation for America's containment policy against the Soviet Union, he mentioned Joseph Stalin just three times - despite the fact that, by then, the Russian leader ran his country like an emperor.

Seven decades on, Stalin's current heir, Vladimir V. Putin, finds his name emblazoned on nearly every page of the myriad memos and papers struggling to understand the mind-set driving Russia's strategic behavior. To understand Mr. Putin, the thinking goes, is to understand Russia. But is that quite right?

In the heady days of the Cold War, Americans tended to view Soviet decision making as a black box: You know what goes in, you know what comes out, but you are clueless about what is happening inside. Soviet policy was thus believed to be both enigmatic and strategic. There was little room for personality or personal philosophy; understanding the system was the only way.

According to Gleb Pavlovsky, Mr. Putin's former spin doctor extraordinaire, these days the Kremlin is still enigmatic, but no longer strategic. For Mr. Pavlovsky, Kremlin policy is fashioned rather like the music of a jazz group; its continuing improvisation is an attempt to survive the latest crisis.

Mr. Pavlovsky may not be a household name in the West, but he's worth listening to. An erstwhile Soviet dissident trained as a historian who transformed himself into one of the interior designers of Mr. Putin's regime, he performed in the Kremlin's "jazz band" for over a decade. This year he published "The System of the Russian Federation," which relies heavily on Mr. Kennan's ideas to offer a timely critique of the West's assumptions about Mr. Putin's Russia (for now, it's available only in Russian).

Contrary to conventional wisdom, Mr. Pavlovsky insists, after Mr. Putin took personal responsibility for the annexation of Crimea and won the support of more than 80 percent of the population, he lost interest in day-to-day decision making. He wants to be informed about everything, but is reluctant to play national housekeeper.

Ministers, Mr. Pavlovsky writes, spend endless hours waiting by Mr. Putin's office to take orders, but in the end he doesn't order, he only listens. What runs the Kremlin today is not Mr. Putin's will but his ambiguity. Wars among different power factions, as a result, have escalated.

In Mr. Pavlovsky's reading, Russia today is neither an ideological warrior seeking to remake the world order nor a hard-nosed realist desperately defending its sphere of influence. Far from grand strategy, what animates Mr. Putin's Kremlin is the assertion of its right to break international rules. In fact, breaking the rules without being punished is the Kremlin's peculiar definition of being a great power.

Russia, to Mr. Pavlovsky, is driven not by a search for external power but by internal weakness - a lack of vision for its impending post-Putin existence. Mr. Putin has successfully made any political alternative unthinkable, and his entire country is now trapped by his success. In other words, Mr. Putin's enormous popular support is a weakness, not a strength - and Russia's leaders know it.

The Kremlin's deputy chief of staff, Vyacheslav Volodin, concisely summed things up when he explained to international analysts at a private forum in Valdai last year, "There is no Russia today if there is no Putin." The Russian political system implicitly functions on the assumption that its president is immortal.

But while Mr. Putin may be a czar, Russia is no monarchy. His daughters will not succeed him in the Kremlin. Mr. Putin is a popularly elected president whose political system has destroyed the legitimacy of elections as an instrument for the peaceful change of power. His United Russia party is a valuable instrument for winning rigged elections, but unlike the Chinese Communist Party, it lacks the autonomy and ideological coherence needed for securing power succession.

Deprived of a vision for the future, Russian elites are tempted by conspiracy theories and apocalyptic pronouncements. As Aleksandr A. Prokhanov, a writer and leading voice of Russian imperial nationalists, lamented, the elites know that if they attempt a Perestroika II, they will fail. Better, he said, to provoke another world war than try to dismantle Mr. Putin's designs.

Reading Mr. Pavlovsky's book, one realizes that what is totally absent in the Western analyses of today's Russia is this "end of the world" mentality among Mr. Putin's political and intellectual elites. In Mr. Pavlovsky's view, the experience of the catastrophic collapse of the Soviet Union, rather than geopolitical interests or values, is the key for understanding Russia's strategic behavior and the inner logic of Mr. Putin's regime.

The Kremlin is populated not by mere survivors of the post-Soviet transition but by survivalists, people who think in terms of worst-case scenarios, who believe that the next disaster is just around the corner, who thrive on crises, who are addicted to extraordinary situations and no-rules politics.

That complex and unpredictable context, rather than the vagaries of Mr. Putin's mind alone, is the key to understanding contemporary Russian politics.
 
 #34
Wall Street Journal
August 12, 2015
Editorial
Putin's Tailspin Economy
The weak ruble is all pain and no gain as Russia enters a recession.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is on a winning streak abroad as his invasions of Ukraine meet weak resistance. His home front is another matter. Economic data released this week suggest that what started last autumn as an oil-price-induced exchange-rate plunge has now become a full-blown Russian recession.

The economy contracted 4.6% year-on-year in the second quarter, Moscow's official statistics agency said Monday. These preliminary data add up to the worst quarter for the Russian economy in six years, deepening a contraction that was 2.2% in the first three months of the year.

This is the latest development in a slide that began last year when falling global oil prices and Western financial sanctions sent the ruble into a tailspin, to a low of 70 against the dollar this spring from around 35 at the start of 2014. After a brief recovery, it has begun to sink again and now is around 64 to the dollar.

If analysts inside or outside the Kremlin are surprised by the recession, it's because they've consistently overstated the benefits of a weaker ruble while understating the consequences of Mr. Putin's long-running economic mismanagement. Some argued that at least the cheaper currency would boost exports and encourage Russians to buy more locally produced goods. That hasn't happened.

Instead, a sharp recent decline in industrial production contributed to the slump. This exacerbates the drag that higher ruble-denominated import prices are placing on growth. Cronyism, corruption, weak rule of law and general overregulation all have made the economy less resilient in the face of what would have been a serious shock under the best of circumstances. Western sanctions have also hurt, limiting the availability of foreign liquidity in Russia and complicating the Kremlin's attempts to keep the exchange rate from plunging again.

Another recession won't on its own lead to Mr. Putin's downfall, but clearly he recognizes a threat. He's playing the nationalism card with a high-profile campaign against "illegal" foreign food imported from countries the Kremlin is embargoing in retaliation for their sanctions on Russia. Pictures of bulldozers crushing alien cheeses may play well in some corners of a domestic audience conditioned by local media to see Russia as a victim of Western imperialism. But it's also a political risk to be taking items off grocery-store shelves when food prices already are rising.

Mr. Putin's economic mismanagement is among his greatest vulnerabilities. All the more reason not to let up on sanctions, but to squeeze him harder.
 
 #35
Bloomberg
August 10, 2015
Hillary Clinton's Role in Losing Russia
By Leonid Bershidsky

Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, and the Russia expert Kathryn Stoner say U.S. foreign policy has had a relatively neutral effect in determining Russia's course. In an article published last week, they argued that President Vladimir Putin's virulent anti-Americanism was driven by domestic, tactical considerations, allowing us to put to rest any concern the U.S. was doing too little or too much vis-a-vis Russia.

It's an appealing theory, but it's probably wrong. Although Russia always has been quick to blame external enemies, the U.S. provoked Putin by appeasing him and then abruptly reversing course. The damage won't be easily undone.

Here's the story as McFaul and Stoner tell it. The U.S.-Russian relationship was fine during the so-called reset (pushed by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and McFaul himself as ambassador), when President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev, collaborated on a broad international agenda. Russia didn't object to the West's use of military force against Muammar Qaddafi's regime in Libya, and the U.S. helped Russia join the World Trade Organization. Visa rules between the countries were eased, there was increased cooperation in oil and gas, and Russia had all but stopped griping about North Atlantic Treaty Organization expansion.

Putin, who served as prime minister under Medvedev, began to feel his power slipping away. In September 2011, when Putin announced his intention to run for president again, his support dropped to 63 percent, the lowest since 2000. The economy was no longer expanding as fast because oil price growth slowed. Then the pro-Putin United Russian party barely managed to eke out a victory in parliamentary elections,  despite widespread falsification, and popular protests erupted in Moscow.  

"To counter this new wave of social mobilization, Putin revived an old Soviet-era argument as his new source of legitimacy -- defense of the motherland against the evil West, and especially the imperial, conniving, threatening United States," McFaul and Stoner wrote. "In particular, Putin argued that the United States was seeking to topple his regime."

In other words, Putin needed an external enemy to lift his popularity, and the U.S. fit the bill. Russia's aggressive actions in Ukraine are part of this policy aimed at showing Russians that their country is at war with the West, particularly with the U.S. There's nothing the U.S. can do about it -- just stay the course of "neo-containment, selective engagement," maintain economic sanctions, support Ukraine and wait. "Containment -- a policy now celebrated as strategic wisdom -- did not produce results a year after its adoption, or even a decade later, or even several decades later," McFaul and Stoner noted.

This view, however, ignores the (probably unwitting but decisive) U.S. role in Putin's domestically motivated shift.

The "reset" was effectively an appeasement policy. The West, including the U.S., let Russia get away with invading Georgia in 2008. It tolerated the internationalization of Russian corruption, which spread to Europe via London. It overlooked rigged elections, as well as the growing influence of state-enterprises (McFaul and Stoner cite negotiations on a potential link-up between one of them, Rosneft, and Exxon Mobil as one of the reset's most promising aspects). The U.S., and the West as a whole, was willing to let Putin's team govern Russia and rule the neighborhood as it pleased. In return, it got cooperation on Libya and the military operation in Afghanistan.

Then, when Russians protested against the rigged parliamentary vote in 2011, Clinton suddenly was no longer willing to appease Putin, though, as McFaul and Stoner noted, "the extent of falsification was probably no more than previous Russian elections." She expressed "serious concerns about the conduct of the elections" and called for a "full investigation of all reports of fraud and intimidation." Putin reacted vehemently, accusing the secretary of state of fomenting the protests.  

The U.S. could have kept silent, and it could have privately sought to convince Putin it had nothing to do with the protests (which I, as a participant, know to be true). It chose a different tack: Clinton stood by her remarks, adding, "We are supportive of the rights and aspirations of the Russian people to be able to make progress and realize a better future for themselves." That only made Putin more certain that Western leaders had been leading on Russia, lulling it into complacency, while planning regime change. Trust evaporated, and when the Ukraine crisis began in 2013, Putin was convinced the U.S. was fomenting the protests that led to the downfall of the regime in Kiev.

Now, the distrust has developed into full-blown paranoia. Consider this article by Sergei Naryshkin, speaker of the Russian parliament's lower house, in the Sunday edition of the government-owned Rossiyskaya Gazeta:

You will ask what goal the U.S. is pursuing? The answer is the same as before: their external debt is huge, and ruining other countries is their customary method. Even ownership of the global 'printing press' is no longer helping. Nor is full control over NATO, the surveillance and blackmail of the European Union's upper echelon. None of that if enough for the 21st century colonizers. They don't just need to preserve the dollar as the only global currency but also to get their hands on the economic wealth of other large powers and regions.

This sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it's also an expression of personal hurt. Naryshkin is subject to both U.S. and EU sanctions because of the Ukraine crisis, and he has been denied entry to Bulgaria and Finland. He sees that as hostility toward both himself and his country. Putin and his entourage are calculating politicians, but their shift away from the West was born of deep, personal emotions -- which they have been able to convey to ordinary Russians.

The emotion stems from the inconsistency of U.S. policy. Had there been no reset, had corrupt Russian businessmen and state companies been shunned in the West, had sanctions been imposed after the war with Georgia, there would have been no surprises. The U.S. and Russia probably would have returned to Cold War-era protocols designed to prevent military incidents, which would have made both sides more careful about a potential conflict in Ukraine. Bloodshed and the annexation of Crimea might have been prevented.

On the other hand, had the U.S. proved willing to continue appeasing Putin after 2011, he and his men wouldn't have grown as paranoid about U.S. conspiracies. They would have been allowed to subdue Ukraine, and a cynical West would have accepted it.

Either option -- cynical acquiescence or a stand-off with teeth bared -- would have meant more clarity and stability. The abrupt shift from one to the other engendered a psychosis in Russia. Medvedev, who gets praise from McFaul and Stoner for his role in the reset, is now one of the harshest critics of the U.S. The Russian government is now contaminated by a stronger mistrust of the West than the Soviet elite was under Mikhail Gorbachev. Maybe that's because the current leaders once experienced the benefits of coexistence.
 

 #36
The Daily Signal
http://dailysignal.com
August 10, 2015
How a Swedish Sniper Found Redemption in the Ukraine War
By Nolan Peterson
Nolan Peterson, a former special operations pilot and a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, is The Daily Signal's foreign correspondent based in Ukraine.

KYIV, Ukraine-This was supposed to be a routine reconnaissance mission, but suddenly it became complicated.

They had been crawling in the woods to stay concealed when the jeep with four separatists inside pulled up and parked along the road a few hundred meters away. They had two options: Start running, or the other thing.

Mikael Skillt laid a reassuring hand on his Smith & Wesson knife.

They would wait until dark.

Skillt was unusually anxious. Normally before combat he went into what he called "work mode," shutting off all unnecessary thoughts and emotions. He felt that way now too, behind separatist lines in Ilovaisk in eastern Ukraine.

But he also could feel his heart pumping, which was unfamiliar.

Skillt, a Swede, had killed many men in combat, yet this time would be different. Typically he saw the enemy through a riflescope. His enemy's death was registered by the faster-than-gravity way that dead men fall to the earth.

And, in Skillt's experience, a balaclava normally concealed the enemy's face. Not that he looked at the faces. That's what they teach you in sniper school: Never look at the faces.

When night fell, it was time. The separatists remained parked at the same spot. They had rolled down the windows of the jeep and had been smoking and drinking vodka for a while. They were probably drunk, Skillt thought.

Creeping up to the vehicle, Skillt took the driver's side. His friend, another Swede who had joined the Azov Battalion to fight for Ukraine, took the passenger's side.

The man in the driver's seat was asleep and hanging halfway out the window. Skillt put the knife in and pulled it out.

The doomed man made a few gurgling sounds and looked at Skillt in terror. He flailed his arms a little bit, but didn't put up much of a fight. He was gone in 15 or 20 seconds.

On the passenger side of the jeep, Skillt's friend did his job.

The back door on the driver's side opened and a man spilt out. He tried to run, but slipped. Skillt lunged. He was a little nervous and slipped too, but he found his mark. He stabbed the man in the eye, breaking off the knife's blade in the act.

Skillt noticed the copper smell of blood.

He and his friend dragged the bodies into the woods and took up positions to hide. The next morning, another car pulled up. The men inside got out, looked at the tableau of the jeep, which was swimming in blood, then fled.

"There are times when I can hear that nasty sound," Skillt, 38,  says in his Swedish accent, almost a year later.

"The blood going down the windpipe. It's a very nasty sound," he says. "Sometimes when I go to sleep, I can hear the sound and smell the blood. If there's one thing I wish I could be without, it would be that."

Identity Crisis

Skillt sits in a plywood hut at the Azov Battalion's barracks in an abandoned industrial park on the outskirts of Kyiv.

Outside is the sound of hammering as civilian volunteers and troops build a classroom and finish a CrossFit workout area. They are constructing, from scratch, a military training facility for the unit's more than 1,400 soldiers.

Periodically, a soldier will open the door to the small room. Seeing Skillt inside, he lowers his head deferentially and apologizes for interrupting.

"The myth is more exciting than reality," Skillt says with a sheepish smile. "But when you're in heavy fire, it feels like all the guns in the world are pointed at your position. So when I, as a sniper, can make the firing stop for a guy, it makes me their hero."

In a series of interviews, including visits to the locations of some of the battles in which he participated, The Daily Signal spoke with Skillt to gain an understanding of how his experiences in the Ukraine war have affected him.

Descriptions of the battles are based on his recollections as well as news reports and interviews with other Azov Battalion soldiers.

Skillt has close-cropped, reddish-blond hair and a beard. He has an easygoing demeanor and matter-of-fact way of speaking. He is quick to make a self-deprecating joke. But he rarely breaks eye contact while talking.

He wears U.S. MultiCam fatigues with a Ukrainian army sniper badge pinned to his left breast. He looks a little softer now than in some of the pictures of him on the front lines, the result of the more sedentary life of an instructor at Azov Battalion's base in downtown Kyiv-and, he says, of the cooking of his girlfriend, Anna.

"Ukrainian women don't like skinny men," he explains.

"This may not be the most exciting thing I've done," Skillt adds, "but it's the most important. I was on the front for nine months, and I have a lot of things I can pass down."

'Some Things Were Black and White'

Later, walking through the halls of Azov's base, just a few hundred meters from Maidan Nezalezhnosti, or Independence Square, Skillt's prestige among the soldiers is apparent.

In a unit that eschews traditional military rank and protocol, the men treat Skillt like a commanding officer. Soldiers stand up when he enters a room and pull to the side of the hallway as he passes. Almost everyone greets him with the Azov handshake: Hands grasp forearms and voices intone, "Slava Ukrayini," which means "Glory to Ukraine."

Skillt bear-hugs a tall, tattooed soldier nicknamed Spider. He throws a few lighthearted jabs making fun of Spider's dating habits.

"He's fearless in combat," Skillt says later. "Absolutely afraid of nothing."

Seventeen months ago, Mikael Skillt's current life would have been unthinkable.

Skillt, who had served as a sniper in the Swedish National Home Guard, was a member of Sweden's far right and a spokesman for several neo-Nazi groups. Before the Ukraine war, he was in and out of jail and working a job in construction.

Skillt doesn't shy away from discussing his neo-Nazi past, but talks about it openly, referring to his earlier beliefs as "misguided" and "idiotic." He claims his service in the Ukraine war shattered his previously held stereotypes and spurred him to abandon National Socialism.

"I'm not a Nazi, and I don't believe in National Socialism," Skillt says. "When I got to Ukraine 17 months ago, I was a real bastard. I had stereotypes against Jews, blacks, Arabs. But I've fought with them, and now they are like brothers. Before, some things were black and white. But now I know nothing is certain. Good and bad people come in all colors. The world is very gray.

"You know," he adds, "the Mikael from 17 months ago would pick a fight with the Mikael from now. But the Mikael from now would win."

Whether because of battlefield compromises necessary for victory or a genuine change of heart, to stand up the Azov Battalion's training program Skillt also has worked with governments around the world, including Israel, the U.S., and his native Sweden.

He has helped build the unit from a civilian volunteer battalion with about 100 soldiers into a Ukrainian National Guard battalion sanctioned by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, with personnel topping 1,400 and bases throughout Ukraine.

Despite the unit's growth, many of the soldiers Skillt trains receive only two weeks of formal instruction before deploying to the front lines. Skillt has studied the training programs of various Western militaries, making hard choices to condense into two weeks a syllabus that usually covers nine months.

"We focus on weeding out those who will freeze or panic under fire," he says.

A Neo-Nazi Minority

The Azov Battalion has played a key role in the Ukraine war. However, the unit was excluded from Fearless Guardian, a U.S. training mission in Yavoriv, Ukraine, because of  a congressional amendment singling it out for an alleged neo-Nazi ideology.

As proof, Russian and some Western media outlets, as well as several U.S. lawmakers, point to the symbol of the Azov Battalion, which closely resembles the Nazi Wolfsangel.

Battalion soldiers disagree. They say their symbol stands for "idea of the nation," which refers to Ukrainian nationalism. In the Ukrainian language, "idea of the nation" is phonetically pronounced "ideya natsiyi," sometimes spurring what the soldiers claim are misguided Nazi comparisons because of mistranslation.

Within the Azov Battalion, however, are a minority of soldiers with far-right, neo-Nazi persuasions. And those soldiers do little to hide their beliefs.

Some have tattoos of the Nazi swastika and SS symbols. Others wear jewelry with Nazi symbols and read Adolf Hitler's book, "Mein Kampf," at night in their bunks.

But the overwhelming majority of Azov soldiers say they're fighting for Ukraine's sovereignty and to repel what they call a "Russian invasion" of their homeland. Those with far-right convictions live and fight side-by-side soldiers from 22 countries and various backgrounds, including Arabs, Russians, and Americans-as well as Christians, Muslims, and Jews.

"Young men often have extreme views," Skillt says. "But they want to pick the raisins out of the cake. This part is good and that part is bad." He adds:

In any army there is always a little bit of bad meat. For example, when I was in the Swedish army, I was that little percentage of bad meat. But is a man's desire to die for his country or a cause any less heroic if he is a nationalist?

Skillt says he isn't a national socialist. He believes in nationalism, he says, and is fighting to defend Ukraine's sovereignty and to stop Russian aggression. He distances himself from the Swedish far right, which, he says, is focused on Muslim immigration into Europe.

Skillt's self-proclaimed ideological evolution has left him a pariah among neo-Nazi groups in Sweden. That country's far-right movement, which largely celebrates Russian President Vladimir Putin for his conservatism and hard line against homosexuality and immigration, frequently accuses Skillt of being on the wrong side of the Ukraine war.

A July 8 article posted by Nordfront, an online news site for the Swedish Resistance Movement (a militant, neo-Nazi group for which Skillt was a regional commander), provides an example.

"Skillt," it says, "has long taken an active part in the U.S.-created civil wars that occurred in Ukraine after the U.S.-sponsored coup d'�tat in late February last year ousted the democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych."

The article is one in a series in which the Swedish Resistance Movement criticizes Skillt for supporting a "Jewish coup regime" in Kyiv.

Nordfront also takes issue with the Azov Battalion, claiming "criminal Jewish billionaire" Igor Kolomoisky finances the unit.

"Russia calls me a Nazi bastard, and my old friends in Sweden call me a Jew-lackey," Skillt says. "I'm having an identity crisis."

Prelude to War

In February 2014, Skillt's life finally seemed to be going in the right direction. He had a steady job with a decent paycheck, a girlfriend, a house in a Stockholm suburb. He was staying out of trouble.

In 2009, the same year he left the Swedish military, Skillt  was arrested for assault. He landed in jail for two months and spent six weeks in solitary confinement after attacking another inmate.

In 2011, Skillt ran into trouble with the law again. He confronted an undercover police officer who he says was beating up a drunken hooligan at a soccer game. "I told him I'd shove the baton down his throat if he hit the guy again," Skillt recalls.

Because the officer failed to identify himself, Skillt spent only two days in jail. He was sentenced to three months of community service. The arrests made it hard to find work, though. So did his role as a spokesman for Sweden's most infamous far-right groups.

"I was the representative of evil," he says.

Skillt had joined the Swedish Resistance Movement in 2003, when he was 26. He rose quickly through the ranks of the neo-Nazi group, becoming the equivalent of a regional commander after one year. He left the group to join the National Democrats for a year, then jumped to the Party of the Swedes-a neo-Nazi political party that dissolved in May.

Frustration with the Swedish political system drew Skillt to the far right, he says, adding that he eventually became disillusioned with the movement because of those it attracted. He says:

"I realized I was not a national socialist. Many of the people in the nationalistic movements were idiots, and did not behave properly. We attracted a lot of idiots."

Skillt's time in the far-right movement overlapped his service in the Swedish National Guard from 2004 to 2009. He was a sniper, but never deployed or saw combat.

He says he turned down opportunities to go on U.N. peacekeeping missions, which were voluntary, because he found the rules of engagement too restrictive. So his military experience left him with unanswered questions.

"I think almost all guys who go into the military want to see combat sometime," Skillt says. "I was always seeking adventure, no matter what."

In 2011, Skillt says, he was approached by a Jordanian doctor who was traveling throughout Europe recruiting mercenaries for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Lured by the paycheck and adventure, Skillt seriously considered the offer.

"I would have done it, but the guy just vanished," he says. "But now I'm very glad I didn't go."

Skillt landed a minimum-wage job with a construction contractor. He wanted to prove himself and move up. By February 2014, he was making about $32,700 (30,000 euros)  a year, and was on track to make about $65,400.  He had a stable life and a future.

And then Ukraine happened.

Unexpected Purpose

Cowards. That's what Skillt thought as he pored over photos and YouTube videos of the carnage playing out on Maidan Nezalezhnosti, or Independence Square, in central Kyiv.

The snipers bothered him the most. Why don't they just shoot the protesters in the leg? he thought. And why shoot protesters at all, anyway? What threat did a man in a motorcycle helmet and a metal shield pose to police in riot gear?

Civilians were dying. And here he was, working construction. Out of the action. Useless.

Watching the videos of snipers murdering protesters, Skillt was angry. He considered them cowards.

Let's see if they have any counter-sniper training, he thought. Let's see if they can survive me.

"Something woke up in me," he says. "Maybe it was the warrior mentality."

Skillt bought a one-way ticket to Kyiv for Feb. 28, 2014. He told his boss he'd be gone for a few days and he tried to explain to his girlfriend why he had to go to Ukraine.

"Our relationship went from not the best in the world to the worst," he says, chuckling. "And that was the end of it."

Skillt had a friend in Ukraine who said he had a Saiga 7.62�39 assault rifle waiting for him. But Viktor Yanukovych, then the Ukraine president, fled Feb. 21. By Feb. 25, the revolution was over.

When Skillt arrived in Kyiv three days later, he had "missed the whole shebang."

In March, Russia annexed Crimea. A separatist movement took hold in eastern Ukraine and there was talk of war. Protest groups born on Independence Square began to morph into paramilitary units.

"We could see something bad was going to happen," Skillt says. "The only reason we didn't go to Crimea is because we had no guns."

'Work Mode'

"What's the worst that can happen?" the Azov Battalion commander asked Skillt before they left for the front lines. "We all die in battle?"

A separatist movement had swept across the Donbas-Ukraine's southeastern territory on the border with Russia-and cities were falling like dominoes. Ukraine, many worried, could be split in two.

The regular Ukrainian army had been caught off guard by the firepower and organization of the separatist forces, which received training, equipment, and weapons from Russia.

Skillt decided to join the newly formed Azov Battalion to fight in eastern Ukraine. He already was involved with pro-Ukrainian groups. He had been in street fights in Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, which in April 2014 saw violent clashes between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian forces.

As the situation in the Donbas deteriorated from street fights into a war, Skillt looked for a way to join the fight.

"Ukraine gave me purpose," Skillt says, "and I think a man needs a purpose."

The Azov Battalion was one of two dozen civilian volunteer battalions formed in the early days of the Ukraine conflict. These civilian combat units, along with ad hoc ones formed from Ukraine's police and intelligence services, joined the overwhelmed and outgunned regular army to stop the separatist advance.

Ukraine's oligarchs financed some of these paramilitary groups; others received most of their money from online fundraising campaigns and private donations. Initially, weapons were mostly small arms handed down from local police units.

The first time Skillt saw combat was in Mariupol, an industrial port city of 500,000 on the coast of the Sea of Azov.  Separatists had taken it over in the opening weeks of the war.

Skillt had been in plenty of fights, but true combat was an unknown. For him, experiencing war was as necessary as food, water and air.

How will I act when the time comes? he wondered. Will I be brave? Will I turn and run, or will I face the danger head on?

Skillt found the answers at a road crossing in Mariupol that June. Separatists shot at him with a 50-caliber machine gun, and he took cover behind an armored personnel carrier.

"The enemy drew first blood," he recalls. "I froze, and I thought, 'This is how it's going to end.' "

He was paralyzed. Not by fear, but by overwhelming sensory overload. He snapped out of it, experiencing for the first time what he later referred to as "work mode."

Thoughts, emotions, and sensations that weren't necessary to his survival fell away. He was immersed in the anesthesia of hyperfocus, everything reduced to the singularity of here and now.

"All the things that kind of make Mikael, Mikael-those things go away. The speaking, the laughing," he says, adding:

"Normally I can't run for six hours, but when I go into 'work mode,' I can. I can jump higher. I react much quicker. I don't speak very much at all. Everything just zooms out. I don't know what's happening. You peel off what's human to become some sort of robot."

Skillt and a comrade crossed the road under heavy fire. He could feel the bullets whizzing by, miniature sonic booms popping. On his legs, he felt the ricochets of shattering asphalt. He started to scream and laugh.

On the other side of the road, he saw a man pop up in the third-floor window of a schoolhouse. In one unthinking motion, Skillt's gun was up. The man was in his scope, the man fell. Skillt thought nothing; he didn't have time.

A short while later, once the battle had ebbed, Skillt and some others entered the schoolhouse. He climbed to that third-floor room, looking for the man he had shot. But it was empty.

Had he missed? Had he let the enemy escape? Skillt felt disappointed and useless.

"I was so upset I wanted to kill myself," he says.

As he stood there, dejected, Skillt's commander approached and congratulated him. For what? he thought. I'm a failure.

The commander told Skillt they had found his man dead on the street. Shot through the lung, he had managed to crawl for a distance before dying.

"I actually thought it would feel really, really bad," Skillt says. "But in the end, I didn't feel much. I wish I never had to kill a man, because once you do it, you cross a big moral line. But I know if I don't do it, this guy might kill my friends."

Skillt had survived his first battle, killed for the first time.

"Ten hours of fighting and not a scratch," he says:

"Now I knew I could react. I could survive and I could work good. It was a big boost to know I was not useless. Because you never know how it's going to be. You really don't know."

Full Circle

It's 2 a.m. at an underground night club in Mariupol, more than a year after Skillt's first battle. The walls, covered in multicolored lighted tiles, flicker with the heavy bass notes of the Russian techno the DJ is spinning.

Despite the war, a 20-minute drive away in Shyrokyne, the dance floor is crowded.

Skillt is sharing a bottle of cheap vodka and some Red Bulls with Jonas Nilsson, a Swedish army sergeant and friend of more than 10 years.

Nilsson and Skillt used to be roommates. They worked for the same construction contractor in Sweden, and Skillt used to help out with the event-planning business Nilsson ran.

Nilsson has an eclectic background. He's a former French Foreign Legion soldier and a mixed martial arts fighter who has written a book on gender roles in the modern family. And, like Skillt, he's a former member of the Swedish Resistance Movement.

Now Nilsson is an outcast, criticized for his libertarian writings as a freelance journalist on subjects such as social issues and immigration-and for  expressing support for Ukraine in its war with Russia.

A student at the Swedish Defense University, Nilsson is in Ukraine researching Azov and other volunteer battalions. Sweden has so far shied away from allowing similar groups to exist, but concerns over Russian aggression have spurred the historically neutral Scandinavian state to reexamine how its military is organized and even consider the possibility of joining NATO.

As the night drags on, Nilsson and Skillt trade stories about their time with Sweden's far right. Skillt talks about his experiences in the Ukraine war, explaining how the transition back to civilian life in Kyiv has left him feeling out of place.

"He has always been a very confident man in his nature, almost to the grade that one might think that he believes he can fight the gods himself," Nilsson says later:

"This is where I find the change in him during this war to be the greatest. He still has his confidence, but he is more humble. Everything isn't black and white as it maybe once was."

Earlier in the day in Mariupol, Skillt takes Nilsson to the scene of his first battle. They wear multi-cam uniforms and carry water bottles. It is a hot, cloudless summer afternoon in the seaside city.

Bullet holes in trees and the sides of buildings, and burn marks on the asphalt, are the only evidence of the combat that took place more than a year ago. Skillt indicates the windows where he had set up his sniper rifle; one is still shattered from the return fire of a separatist's machine gun.

The friends walk through a courtyard, dense with foliage, where Skillt says the separatists had planted booby traps. They were mostly untrained fighters who holed up in a few poorly defended buildings. But, he admits, the booby traps were sophisticated and would have required professional military training to set up.

Skillt walks up the street he had dodged bullets to cross the previous spring. A mother pushes a stroller on the opposite side as light traffic moves along the road.

Skillt pauses beneath the schoolhouse. It is mostly repaired, painted pink, although bullet holes dot parts of the exterior. He points to a window on the upper floor.

"That's where he was," Skillt says. "He just popped up, and I pulled the trigger. I didn't even think about it."

Nilsson says nothing.

"After everything else I've been through," Skillt adds, "this first battle was a walk in the park."

His Regret

It was on the retreat from Ilovaisk. Three white cars drove into a field. Skillt had the driver of one car in his scope.

It was a chaotic time. Ukrainian forces had launched an offensive to take back the town in eastern Ukraine. Now, surrounded and outgunned, they were suffering heavy losses as they attempted a retreat.

Skillt was about to pull the trigger, but hesitated. It was the white color of the cars that threw him off. Something didn't feel right. He made a radio call to ask for confirmation to take the shot. He kept the driver in his scope and his finger on the cold metal trigger.

The fate of the man in his crosshair depended on about seven pounds of pressure.

Skillt was told not to shoot. The door to one car opened, and a man stepped out with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. The man fired and the RPG skipped off the ground, ricocheted, and exploded over a position where Azov troops were hunkered down, killing one.

"I only have one regret," Skillt recalls. "I didn't take that one shot. And that bothers me so much."

On Aug. 7, 2014, the Azov Battalion joined the Ukrainian regular army and other volunteer battalions in the offensive to take Ilovaisk.

"Every mission we went on was successful," Skillt says. "Until Ilovaisk."

By Aug. 18, Ukrainian forces had pushed into the town but were forced to fall back when combined Russian-separatist fighters surrounded them. Although the exact numbers are disputed, about 360 Ukrainian soldiers died and about 550 were taken prisoner in the retreat. It remains one of the bloodiest and costliest battles of the war.

When he arrived Aug. 7, Skillt immediately sensed something wasn't right. He was under heavy artillery fire on his first scouting mission.

"I understood this was going to be the mother of all battles," he says. "We were ordered to attack, and we saw we were going to do a head-on attack on a fortified position. And, of course, it ended very badly."

In the days leading up to the main assault, Skillt became bold, sometimes crawling within shouting distance of the separatist lines. He began taking as many as 50 or 60 shots from one place, knowing he was giving away his position.

"It was good practice at least," he says.

Four days before the retreat, Skillt's commander sent him about 10 kilometers behind separatist lines. A Ukrainian armored reconnaissance unit had dug in there, with 60 soldiers, one tank, two armored personnel carriers, and a mortar.

Bullet holes and shrapnel marks speckled almost every vertical surface. The outhouse, one of the separatists' favorite targets, was riddled with bullet holes.

Skillt got his mission: He and another soldier were going to cross a field 400 meters wide to climb a rise from which they could fire on a separatist camp. Normally, Skillt wouldn't cross an open field in daylight, but he had his orders.

They crossed the field and Skillt set up his rifle. He looked through his scope at the camp, scanning for targets. He saw a man in the front seat of a supply truck. Skillt's spotter measured the distance with a laser range finder and it came back at 1,410 meters-4,626 feet.

Skillt's eyes locked on the target through the scope of his Remington Model 700 sniper rifle. His cheek on the rifle stock, he controlled his breathing and focused on his heartbeat. There was nothing except him and the target. Everything else was gone. He was in work mode.

He pulled the trigger and felt the recoil. An instant later, he heard the impact of the bullet on glass. The door opened and the man got out. I missed, Skillt thought. Then he saw the blood on the seat. The man staggered and dropped to the ground.

It was Skillt's longest kill, and he enjoyed it.

Four days later, two friends from the 51st Mechanized Division, the guys he "liked the most," were surrounded with no chance of escape. Rather than surrender, they pulled the pin on a grenade.

"Ilovaisk was hell on earth," Skillt says, pausing for a moment. "And it was the best time of my life."

No Man's Land

There is a moral cost to war that reveals itself in the way a soldier lives in peace.

Months after leaving the front lines, Skillt was out to dinner with his girlfriend. Outside the restaurant, he saw a man hit a dog. Without thinking, Skillt was up, moving to the man, his hand on his knife.

Skillt's actions were no more under his conscious control than a balloon in the wind. Only his girlfriend's scream brought him back.

The war is still there, but Skillt doesn't go to it any more. And in many ways, life in peace is more complicated. The black-and-white, kill-or-be-killed simplicity of battlefield morality doesn't exist.

In war, a soldier temporarily is relieved of the moral consequences of his or her actions by the necessity of duty.

"I saw the movie 'American Sniper,' and I never had to make the kind of choices he did," Skillt says of the biopic about Chris Kyle, the late Iraq war hero. "It was very simple: them or my friends."

"But on the other hand," he adds, "I passed a moral line that is not good."

Despite the ease with which he did it, Skillt says the killing was never personal.

"I would never treat an enemy badly," he says. "I have given first aid to enemies on the field. But as long as they shot at my friends, it wasn't hard to shoot at them."

When duty is a memory, however, soldiers can question the things they've done. The line between right and wrong no longer is blurred. "Work mode," the protective cloak that shuts off the emotional hesitation to do what is necessary, no longer exists.

The stripped-away layers of humanity begin to reform. In addition to his changed attitude toward blacks, Jews and Arabs with whom he served, Skillt's relationship with his enemies also evolved off the battlefield.

Last fall, Skillt started receiving Twitter messages from Dimitri, a separatist fighter. Dimitri had been on the opposite side of the line from Skillt in several battles in eastern Ukraine.

Casual emails eventually developed into "quite a good relationship," Skillt says. They agreed that if they were to ever see each other in real life, however, they would try to kill each other.

Their online exchanges grew to the point that Dimitri warned Skillt of an imminent attack on Shyrokyne, the small town just outside Mariupol where Skillt was deployed.

"There will be a big assault soon," Dimitri wrote. "You should leave."

Dimitri was killed in fighting near Mariupol, but he wasn't the only one from the other side to reach out to Skillt.

Current and former separatist fighters living throughout Europe continue to communicate with the sniper.  In the emails, which The Daily Signal reviewed, they complain about their suffering in combat and how their Russian handlers have abandoned them after they returned from the war.

"It's easier to speak to me, someone who has been in the same situation in the same battlefield, than to a friend who has never been in battle," Skillt says, adding:

"You can't explain those things to your wife. And you can't explain those things to civilian friends. They are disappointed, those who contact me. And they know I've seen the same horrible things they have."

Skillt compares his online relationships with the enemy to the "Christmas Truce" of 1914, during which French and German troops in World War I left their trenches on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day to exchange gifts, sing carols, and play soccer.

"It doesn't matter if you're Russian or Ukrainian," he says. "Every soldier experiences the same things, no matter what side of the battle he's on."

'War Made Me a Better Person'

Skillt sits with a former French special forces soldier in the outdoor, tented terrace of  a bar in downtown Kyiv. A vegetarian, Skillt is eating a pizza, smoking a cigarette, and sipping an Americano coffee.

A soccer game is on TV. Dnipro, a Ukrainian team, is playing Napoli in the Europa League semi-final match. It's raining outside and getting late. But Azov soldiers in the stadium at the game are going to unfurl an enormous Ukrainian flag.

Skillt is texting them. He doesn't want to leave the bar until he sees the flag on TV. As he watches the game he tells war stories, casually laughing off details of life-and-death drama.

Interrupting the conversation, a young Azov soldier walks up to Skillt's table and shakes his hand. In his broken, limited Russian, Skillt returns the greeting. He politely declines to join the soldier and his friends for a beer, explaining that he has to be up early the next morning to train new recruits.

Most nights, Skillt sleeps in a bunk in one of the camp's plywood huts. He could sleep at his girlfriend's place, but he feels like he needs to be close to the men. He worries that every minute he misses with the trainees might be a lost opportunity to keep them alive.

Skillt doesn't go to the war anymore, but he never truly left it. Over pizza and coffee he talks about combat and "work mode."

He also talks about Ukraine's future, linking it to his own. He plans to run for parliament in 2019 to help Ukraine "find its own way."

"Ukraine has the possibility to build something good," he says. "If only Russia would leave it be."

The bar erupts in celebration when penalty time runs out and Dnipro wins the game, 1-0. The TV screens show Azov's enormous Ukrainian flag waving in the stands. You can't hear over the sounds of laughter and cheers in the bar. A breeze carries in the clean smell of rain.

"War can bring a man to destruction or help him to reach new heights," Skillt says. "War peels off every layer of your humanity. But, in the end, war made me into a much better person."
 
 #37
Vice.com
August 11, 2015
Meet 'Muslim': The Chechen Commander Battling Russia With Some Unlikely Allies
By Jack Losh

The knowledge that the toffee-and-poppy-seed cake had been made by a group of local volunteers was enough to reassure the Chechen militia commander that he would not be poisoned over afternoon tea. "For anything else," he said, handing over a small cardboard box containing a Geiger counter, "I always scan for radiation."

Clad in combat fatigues and sporting an impressive black and white beard, the exile goes by the nom de guerre of "Muslim." Many of his associates were poisoned by the Russian security services, he said, and he was not prepared to meet the same fate. He has survived to reach his mid-40s despite two devastating Chechen wars with Russia in the 1990s, a decade living as a guerrilla in the remote mountains of the North Caucasus, and now 12 months fighting the Kremlin-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.

The commander's "Sheikh Mansur" battalion - named after an 18th century Chechen resistance fighter - is among three volunteer Islamic battalions fighting alongside Kiev government forces in eastern Ukraine. An unconventional splinter group, it highlights one of the conflict's messier dimensions: Chechen versus Chechen.

On one side are those who fight for Ukraine, said to number around 100. Moscow denies Western accusations that it has sent regular troops into eastern Ukraine but, as far as these Chechens are concerned, this is the same conflict on a different front.

On the other side, several hundred Chechens loyal to strongman Ramzan Kadyrov support the pro-Russia separatists. In 2004, President Vladimir Putin entrusted the young warlord Kadyrov to extinguish the local insurgency in Chechnya and allowed him to rule the previously war-torn state with impunity.

Amid this bitter feud, Muslim's unit offers a further twist. While Western Europeans may typically associate right-wing groups with Islamophobia, the Sheikh Mansur battalion has forged an unlikely alliance with Right Sector, a Ukrainian far-right paramilitary movement. Elsewhere they may have been natural enemies but here, their coalition is born of a shared nemesis and fuelled by a common hatred of Russia.

Right Sector, estimated to have between 1,000 and 5,000 men, grew during 2014's Euromaidan protests in Kiev from half-a-dozen nationalist fringe groups. Its agenda has long stoked Russian propaganda about Kiev's so-called "invading fascists." The organization refuses to be absorbed into the command structure of Ukraine's armed forces and increasingly poses an internal threat to the country, shown by last month's deadly shootout with police in the western city of Mukachevo or their vociferous calls for the impeachment of President Petro Poroshenko.

The Sheikh Mansur group also fight alongside the Azov Battalion, a pro-Kiev force whose alleged neo-Nazi views led the US to ban American soldiers from training and arming its members. The group denies having an extremist agenda, despite adopting a symbol almost identical to the Wolfsangel emblem associated with Nazi Germany. And Muslim insists Ukraine's disparate militias are fully united.

"We have a very good relationship with the volunteer battalions, including Azov," he told VICE News. "We fight together on the front, share many friendships, and never argue about ethnicity or religion.

"There is nothing surprising about our alliance - we have a common enemy who doesn't care about us or our lands. The men in my unit are just simple Muslims and have no interest in making anyone else follow our religion."

Out of all Ukraine's volunteer battalions, Muslim spoke most fondly of Right Sector. "They exist outside the system and only fight for their land, not for money," he added. "We share this cause. Those within the system are a little different from us. As far as we are concerned, Right Sector fighters can do whatever they like - we are here only to fight Russia."

In Sheikh Mansur and Right Sector's shared compound, around an hour's drive from the front line, a shirtless Right Sector fighter lolled in the afternoon heat behind camouflage netting. He expressed a similar level of faith in the alliance, but didn't put too fine a point on it. "Chechens, Right Sector," said Vyjak, punching his right hand into the palm of his left: "Putin kaput."

Sergiy Vasilovich, head of Right Sector's political wing in Donbass, adopted a similar stance when asked about the group's relationship with Sheikh Mansur. "The volunteer battalions are like a tight fist, fully united in patriotism," he told VICE News.

"Our objectives are to liberate Ukrainian territory up to the Russian border. We can do it now that Russia's economy is suffering but we cannot win by defending the front line alone."

Back at base, Muslim described how, as a young man, his national service in Chechnya morphed into a life of full-blown insurrection. After his republic declared independence and the Russian tanks rolled in, he went on to witness the horrors of the war first-hand in Grozny, a city annihilated by Moscow's forces.

"I have buried two brothers, several cousins and many friends," he said. "War is not a good thing. Russia wanted to take us back to the Stone Age."

Following a second war in 1999-2000, Moscow crushed the bulk of Chechen resistance and established a puppet state in the form of the Kadyrov dynasty as the underground resistance resorted to increasingly violent and extreme measures, such as assassinations, hostage-taking, sabotage, and suicide bombings.

Muslim said he was forced into hiding in the mountains and eventually left the country in 2007. "I was not scared but our forces were too weak," he said, his sleeve bearing a colorful insignia of the sun rising over a Chechen mountain. "I miss everything there. It is the most beautiful place in the world. For a Muslim, Mecca is the holiest place in the world. But as a man, Chechnya is my home."
 
Following seven years as an exile, apparently living in France and Ukraine, Muslim in 2014 went to meet another Chechen rebel, General Isa Munayev - a key figure among all Chechens fighting in Ukraine. Munayev had been injured in 2006 during a counter-insurgency strike in Chechnya and was smuggled to Europe to seek treatment. He was granted political asylum in Denmark where he ran a group campaigning for Chechen independence, until events in Ukraine provided the perfect opportunity to resume his struggle against Russia.

He headed to Ukraine last spring where he was received by Kiev's military officers desperate for experienced fighters. Furnished with arms, Munayev formed the Dzhokhar Dudayev battalion, named after the late Chechen president and independence leader. It bristled with his compatriots - including Muslim, who went on to form the Sheikh Mansur battalion several months later - as well as Azeris, Georgians, Ingush, and Tatars.

In February, Munayev was killed fighting alongside the Ukrainian army during the vicious battle for Debaltseve. Adam Osmayev, a British-educated Chechen, replaced him, and Muslim has continued to operate with his own cohort.

Chechens are a martial tribe, renowned and feared on the battlefield where many of them fight without protective gear. "I have never worn a helmet or body armor," Muslim said. "And neither have my fellow fighters. We're not used to it, it's not in our tradition. For a start, it's very heavy - far better to carry an extra 15 kilos (33lbs) of ammunition or weapons.

"There is a prescribed time for us to die, we believe in that final point. I've been fighting for more than 20 years - I know this to be absolutely true."

The Chechens on either side are prime candidates for executing dangerous raids and reconnaissance missions behind enemy lines, tactics honed during combat with Russia. "My men are good at that," Muslim said. "We have learned a lot about mountain and urban guerrilla warfare fighting Russia. Ukraine now wants to use our knowledge."

He claimed that his men had stolen military vehicles from separatist lines and even dragged a Russian soldier back last month. "We handed him to the SBU (Security Service of Ukraine)," he added, without going into further detail.

Among its ranks, Sheikh Mansur reputedly counts men who have fought in anti-government forces in Syria. "They left and came here because it got so complicated." Muslim explained. "Initially it was just rebels versus Assad, but then there were too many groups.

"My first and eternal enemy is Russia so I will never fight in Syria. I cannot leave my personal enemy for them. If my house is on fire, I will not leave to extinguish another fire I see on the horizon. Here I see my enemy and no one can make me believe that Russia is otherwise. It is so simple for me."

When asked about the opposing Chechens fighting along with the separatists, the commander showed a surprising lack of rancor; he saves that for Putin. "We wouldn't call all of them traitors, some are just deceived," said Muslim. "Rather, I pity them, they are just trapped. I don't want us to fight - after our wars of independence, there aren't many of us left.

"Russia must be saved from Putin's gang. There is a lot of evil in the wider world because of that man. He is like a robot with only one setting. It's impossible to reason with a zombie."

Towards the end of the interview, a further possible motivation for his decision to fight in this foreign land became apparent. From 1932-33, Ukraine was ravaged by the Holodomor. A cataclysmic famine, the Holomodor was unleashed by Stalin to crush Ukrainian nationalism and collectivize farming across the USSR. Millions died amid forced grain seizures in a country famed for its fertile black earth, supposedly the breadbasket of the Soviet Union.

While some of those affected tried to reach neighboring Romania or Poland, others headed east to find food and refuge in Chechnya and Muslim's mountain village became one such a sanctuary.

"There were many elderly women in my village who had fled from Ukraine as young girls," he recalled, sipping his black tea. "I grew up with their stories of starvation. We know what happened to them. Chechens have shared Ukraine's tragedy."
 
 #38
The National Interest
August 12, 2015
Beware Ukraine's Rising Right Sector
"With ample weapons and new recruits, Right Sector is not likely to disappear soon."
By Julia Embody
Julia Embody is a program associate at the Center for the National Interest.

As tensions continue to rise under the fragile ceasefire in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, the central government must now redirect its energy to a domestic issue in the west.

On July 11, violence broke out in Mukachevo, just east of the Slovakian and Romanian borders. The dispute began when local police accused the ultranationalist Right Sector group of smuggling cigarettes. Right Sector members are no ordinary citizens-they have military-grade weapons and serve independently on the front lines against Russian-backed rebels. The conflict remains unresolved, with Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh accusing Kiev of attacking its own, rather than focusing on the war in the east. As Right Sector surfaces once again, it is helpful to revisit the group's origins to examine the impact the group may have on the conflict in the Donbas.

In February 2014, after a month of violent protests in which ultranationalist groups played an active role, Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych faced impeachment and ultimately chose to flee the country. The ouster followed Yanukovych's controversial decision to renegotiate Ukraine's potential membership in the EU. As he responded to protests with draconian legislation and violent reprisals, momentum grew not just among moderate nationalists, but also increasingly within the far right. Extremist and outright fascist organizations, such as the "Patriots of Ukraine" and "Trident," united under the name "Right Sector." As conditions grew more violent, Ukrainians overlooked ideological differences and joined forces with Right Sector against the pro-Russian government as a common enemy. As their numbers swelled, Right Sector became the catalyzing force that eventually helped to remove Yanukovych from power. Following the revolution, Right Sector formed a political party, which is now represented in Ukraine's parliament, the Verkhovna Rada.

Since the Maidan Revolution, Right Sector has maintained only marginal public support. Currently, the party holds just one seat in the parliament of 422. Recently, however, as the group has become more outspoken against the current Petro Poroshenko administration, its numbers have risen. From 1.8 percent in October, the group's popular support now stands at 5.4 percent. Dmytro Yarosh addressed a crowd of over 5,000 on July 21, calling for a nationwide no-confidence referendum against President Poroshenko, who, along with his prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, is steadily losing public support. There is little traction for the referendum, but it still calls to mind the former success of Right Sector to help unseat President Yanukovych through sheer force and persistence.

Despite having minimal representation in the Verkhovna Rada, let alone influence, Right Sector has played a significant role in providing paramilitary support for Ukrainian troops in the Donbas. The group is the last militia force to operate in the east independent of the government-controlled army. Right Sector militants fight for their own doctrine, one of ultranationalism and conservative values. Over the past year, Right Sector battalions have earned the respect and support of Ukrainian soldiers in the Donbas. Their assistance is important for government troops who often find themselves ill prepared for battle, due to the inefficiencies and economic burdens of the central government.

With ample weapons and new recruits, Right Sector is not likely to disappear soon.

Though many perceive them as extremists, they represent a bloc of anti-Russian hardliners that regard any concessions in the east as a defeat for the Ukrainian nation-state. The small but consistent foothold that Right Sector occupies in Ukraine should make its allies apprehensive. The Ukrainian government is reliant on the military support of a controversial right-wing group. Right Sector officially rejects xenophobia and fascism, claiming to be open to anyone that supports the Ukrainian State. However, Russian media exploits the group's rhetoric, exaggerating and outright fabricating evidence to the contrary. For Russia, amplifying and embellishing Right Sector's rhetoric and influence provides justification to protect ethnic Russians in the Donbas. Beyond issues posed by Right Sector's misrepresentation in Russian media, violence in Mukacheve and resulting standoffs with Kiev suggest a more critical issue at stake for the Donbas conflict.

Ambiguity in the Minsk II protocol, coupled with differing objectives of Ukrainian and pro-Russian forces, continues to stall a lasting ceasefire or meaningful reforms in the Donbas. As contact groups continue to negotiate implementation challenges, it is more important than ever to ensure that the marginal progress achieved so far is preserved. Right Sector has serious potential to derail a moderate resolution to the conflict in Ukraine, but not necessarily because of its ideology. The group poses a threat to conflict resolution because it combines radical ideas with a highly functional militia outside of government control. Right Sector is useful to Kiev, but only as far as its goals align. This can potentially pose a major dilemma for U.S. objectives in the region.

For the United States, making the Minsk II protocol of February 2015 work remains the surest way to avoid escalation of the regional conflict. As the product of compromise after a successful rebel offensive in January 2015, the Minsk II protocol is no doubt an imperfect framework. However, the alternative to working within the framework of Minsk II is a renewed conflict that Ukraine may well lose. This situation would put Ukraine's allies in NATO, particularly the United States, under pressure to respond. Meaningful support may entail steps that no one in the administration or Congress is prepared to advocate. Boots on the ground or facing off with Russian air forces would put the United States at risk for unpredictable consequences, jeopardizing national-security interests. This imperfect alternative is precisely why the Minsk II protocol is widely accepted in the United States and Europe as the best solution for the Ukrainian conflict.

Since Ukraine is a victim of Russian intervention, there is understandable reluctance in the United States to be critical of any military forces fighting Moscow and its clients. Exaggerated Russian claims about supposed Ukrainian fascism do not make an objective discussion of Right Sector any easier. It is no surprise that there is hesitation in Washington to focus on the group as a threat. They are the supposed allies of our allies and the target of Russian propaganda attacks. Many Americans would interpret apprehension toward Right Sector as sympathy for Russian objectives, or even worse, susceptibility to Russian propaganda.

Currently, the United States can easily dismiss the group as a benign nuisance, overblown by Russian media to justify continued aggression. From a sober examination, however, Right Sector could pose a serious threat not just to the Russian-backed rebels, but also to the Ukrainian government supported by the United States. Even though the military aims of the central government currently align with Right Sector's (at least where Minsk II is concerned), these radicals will not support any concessions made by Kiev.

Regardless of how media outlets portray Right Sector, even a conservative reading of its doctrine shows its unwillingness to compromise. Without meaningful negotiation between the central government and the Russian-backed rebels, Minsk II will fail and full-scale conflict will resume. A renewed conflict will put Ukraine's sovereignty in even greater peril, pressuring the United States and NATO to intervene. As Poroshenko's popularity declines, Right Sector has an opening to derail U.S. objectives in the region, ultimately and ironically helping President Putin protect Russian interests. The United States-despite its distaste for Russian foreign policy-must acknowledge that in order to effectively support Ukraine, it must be wary of Right Sector's growing presence.
 
 
#39
Kyiv Must Work to Isolate Moscow Rather than Negotiate with It, Yeremenko Says
Paul Goble

Staunton, August 11 - Up to now, Ukraine has made "a serious error" by trying to negotiate with Russia about the Donbas, Bogdan Yeremenko says. What it should be doing is devoting all its efforts to isolating Russia internationally.  That will have far more impact on Moscow's behavior than any talks Ukraine might have with it.

Yeremenko, a former Ukrainian diplomat and a frequent commentator on foreign policy, argues that at a time when Russia is increasing its military activity in Ukraine, Kyiv cannot win by seeking talks, however much some other countries may see that as its salvation (apostrophe.com.ua/article/politics/2015-08-11/pobedit-rossiyu-i-prekratit-voynu-kakuyu-oshibku-nujno-ispravit-ukraine/2084).

Up to now, Russia has acted more effectively than Ukraine by "imposing its will and taking the initiative both on the battlefield and at the negotiating table."  Ukraine in contrast "has held fast to a disastrous strategy responding with diplomacy to armed aggression and reducing the opportunities of its own Armed Forces."

"One can conduct talks with anyone, but one must understand why one is doing so. So far, it is difficult to believe that Ukraine correctly understands the role of diplomacy in this war." In any conflict during its "'hot' phase, the role of diplomacy is secondary, designed to support defense."

But "Ukraine has tried to stop the attack of hostile forces with diplomacy," Yeremenko says. "This is a path to defeat. Therefore what matters are not the formats of talks but a correct definition of the role and basic tasks of diplomacy at each stage of the conflict." From his perspective, Ukraine doesn't appear to have done that.

"We first must seize the initiative on the battlefield," he argues. "Another possibility is to wait for the exhaustion of Russian resources for the conduct of war." Until one of these things happens, "diplomatic efforts out to be concentrated not on talks with Russia but on the creation for it of an uncomfortable foreign policy environment and the resolution of practical issues of securing the defense capacity of the country."

Yeremenko continues: "the weakness of Russia diplomacy is its lack of allies and of clear strategic goals."  Therefore, he insists, "although this is not only as a result of those problems, Russia is condemned to defeat."
           
"It is difficult to make predictions relative to the length of the conflict because this depends not so much on Ukraine as on the actions of the US, the EU countries and Russia itself.  Now, Ukraine by its own actions is not able to secure the rapid resolution of end of the conflict." But Kyiv's diplomatic approach so far is only giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
 
 #40
Interfax
August 11, 2015
Russian official warns of Kiev's plans for "long-term confrontation" with Moscow

Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolay Patrushev has said that Ukraine's national security strategy for the period until 2020 is directed at a long-term confrontation with Russia, privately-owned Russian news agency Interfax reported on 11 August.

"According to our specialists, the Ukrainian national security strategy is directed at a long-term confrontation with Russia, which cannot fail to worry us," Patrushev told journalists.

"It is obvious that the document serves as a basis for furthering the militarization policy; it does not take into consideration the needs and aspirations of the country's population, it provides the USA and NATO with the opportunity to use Ukraine's resource base and provokes further escalation of the conflict in the southeast of the country," he said, adding that Ukraine had also labelled Russia as an "aggressor" and the "main external threat" to its security, while the USA had been called its sole strategic partner.

"The document set objectives of abandoning non-aligned status and adjusting the country's armed forces and military industry to meet NATO standards. The goal of raising Ukraine's youth in the spirit of hatred towards Russia has also been noted," Patrushev said.

"At the same time, the real state of affairs in Ukraine is hidden beneath a contrived threat. What we can see is an attempt to put off resolving long-standing problems in the economy and the social sphere," Patrushev said.
 
 #41
More than 1,200 people held prisoner by Kiev - DPR human rights ombudsperson

MOSCOW, August 11. /TASS/. The number of captives held by the Ukrainian side exceeds 1,200, the human rights commissioner of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic said on Tuesday.

"These are the people whose fate has been ascertained, while more than 400 people remain unaccounted for," the Donetsk News Agency quoted Darya Morozova as saying.

"We are now engaged in negotiations on their exchange, including at talks in Minsk. We are waiting for Kiev to pass the law On Amnesty to proceed from the stage of negotiations to practical moves," the ombudsman of the troubled region in eastern Ukraine said.

DPR's official representative in the Contact Group for Ukraine settlement, Denis Pushilin, said on August 4 that a total of 45 Ukrainian captives were held in the two self-proclaimed republics. Within the framework of official prisoner swap, militias of the Donetsk and Luhansk people's republics have handed to Kiev 317 prisoners, while the Ukrainian side released 287 people.

The "all for all" prisoner swap is one of the key points in the Package of Measures on implementation of the September 2014 Minsk agreements, signed in Minsk on February 12.

The package in particular included an agreement on cessation of fire from February 15, withdrawal of heavy armaments, as well as measures on long-term political settlement of the situation in Ukraine, including enforcement of a special self-rule status for certain districts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
 
 #42
Donetsk republic does not rule out resumption of full-scale military actions in Donbas

MOSCOW, August 12. /TASS/. Return to full-scale military action may happen at any time since the number of shellings by Ukrainian forces already stands at 60-80 times per day, the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) envoy to Contact Group Denis Pushilin told a roundtable in TASS on Wednesday.

"The number of shellings during full-scale military actions is 150-180 times per day, with the average number of shellings during the main time fluctuating from 10 to 30 times," Pushilin said. "Now we register from 60 to 80 shellings per day. The situation is as follows: full-scale military actions can be resumed at any moment."

"Going from 60 to 150 shellings can happen in a few hours. These concerns are strengthened by military equipment drawn to the contact line by Ukrainian forces, as well as by shellings of residential areas," the envoy noted. "Along with that, we see that Kiev does not officially withdraw from Minsk-2. Kiev probably understands as well that if Minsk-2 ceases to exist, then the only alternative is war," he concluded.
 
 #43
Bloomberg
August 12, 2015
Ukraine Says Attacks on Troops Intensify as Unrest Worsens
By Daryna Krasnolutska

Ukraine said pro-Russian militants intensified attacks on government troops overnight in a bid to win ground, a sign the recent surge in fighting is worsening.

Tensions in the 16-month conflict rose this week as the army reported renewed assaults on a village in the Donetsk region, an accusation the separatists deny. That prompted Ukraine to redeploy heavy artillery there that was removed under a February peace accord. The rebels, who control large swathes of the former Soviet republic's easternmost regions, are trying to advance again toward the village, located near the port of Mariupol, military spokesman Andriy Lysenko said.

"The main reason for the escalation is that we see a standstill in the peace process," Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Penta research institute in Kiev, said by phone on Wednesday. "But I don't think there's a risk of a serious new conflict."

The conflict, which the United Nations estimates has killed more than 6,700 people, has threatened to boil over several times as Ukraine, Russia and the separatists jostle over implementing the peace pact brokered by Germany and France in Minsk, Belarus. German and French officials have discussed the recent unrest with Ukraine's government, while the U.S. tightened sanctions against Russia last week. President Vladimir Putin denies Russia is stoking the conflict.

New Sanctions

The insurgents "shamelessly violate the truce accords," Lysenko said Wednesday by phone. He said they're using arms that include mobile rocket systems banned under the cease-fire. One soldier died in the past day, the military reported.

Ukraine, which adopted the European Union's penalties against Russia, will send a "second package of sanctions" to the National Defense and Security Council on Wednesday following the U.S. decision, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk told the weekly government meeting without elaborating.

The year-end deadline for fulfilling the Minsk agreement should be extended into 2016, Denis Pushilin, chief negotiator for the rebels' self-declared Donetsk People's Republic, told a meeting in Moscow on Wednesday. Ukraine isn't complying with the terms of the deal and war is the only alternative to the accords, he said.

Ukraine sticks to the Minsk accords while forming "active defense" by reinforcing its military with new weapons and equipment, Oleksandr Turchynov, head of the security council, said in an e-mailed statement Wednesday as he visited the conflict zone.

Conflict, Creditors

"New and already deployed artillery is kept at a distance agreed in the Minsk protocol," Turchynov said. "However, active defense envisages fast and effective reaction to any enemy provocations."

The military escalation comes as Ukrainian Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko visits creditors in California to try to reach an agreement to restructure $19 billion of foreign debt. The government is in an economic bind with gross domestic product plunging more than 16 percent in the first half and the hryvnia this year's second-worst performer globally against the dollar.

Lysenko also accused the insurgents of trying to scare away observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, who're stationed in eastern Ukraine to monitor the cease-fire.

The OSCE has said in recent days that it believes civilian protests against it in rebel-held territory were orchestrated by the separatists. It said three of its vehicles were destroyed and four more were damaged in an Aug. 9 arson attack in Donetsk, the conflict zone's biggest city.

"That was the people's fury," deputy rebel commander Eduard Basurin said by phone from Donetsk. "People don't understand that the OSCE doesn't have a mandate to defend but only to observe. The OSCE should explain that."
 
 #44
Ukraine's ban on books by modern Russian authors arouses surprise, irony in Russia
By Lyudmila Alexandrova

MOSCOW, August 12. /TASS/. Kiev's decision to blacklist 38 books by Russian authors, historians and journalists for being anti-Ukrainian and to prohibit them from being brought into the country has drawn a wave of surprise and irony in Russia. On the notorious list compiled at the initiative of the state committee for television and radio broadcasting one finds the names of Eduard Limonov, Sergey Dorenko, Sergey Glaziev and Nikolay Starikov. The authors, just as many of their readers in Russia, find Kiev's idea ridiculous and senseless in the Internet era.

This is not the first "black list" the Ukrainian authorities have drawn up of late. On August 8 the Ukrainian Culture Ministry named those Russian culture workers who were prohibited from entering Ukraine. Also, a ban was imposed on the showing of some Russian films and television serials. Over less than a year Ukraine's state committee for cinematography annulled or denied screening licenses to nearly 400 films and TV productions from Russia.

Russian Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky has expressed his attitude to this rather peculiar attitude of the authorities in Kiev to matters of culture. "I haven't yet seen a single feature film produced at the request of Ukraine's current Ministry of Culture," he told the Russian government-published Rossiiskaya Gazeta in an interview. "Regrettably, I haven't been fortunate enough to see any festivals or stage productions or hear the music people there like to listen to. But I keep hearing all the time something has been banned again."

Medinsky believes that "such actions can be laughed at or ignored, but there is no chance of regarding them as well-considered moves."

"I laughed my heart out," one of the banned authors, Eduard Limonov, has told TASS. "On the one hand, this is natural, for I am their enemy. I've kept saying since I don't know when that Ukraine will fall apart. I spent the first 23 years of my life in Ukraine. I know the Ukrainian language and literature. I do know what Ukraine was made of under Soviet government."

Purely Ukrainian, says Limonov, are only nine regions in the centre, while "all other territories are a gift of fortune." Many lands were once controlled by Poland. "I said this and many other things in my book called Kiev Kaputt and in my posts in the Live Journal from November 2013 through January 2015. Of course, the Ukrainian authorities cannot be happy about all that, although my book is written in very polite terms. You won't find a single strong word in it. Everything is based on my first-hand experience and historical evidence."

The custom of banning books has existed and still exists in many countries.

"There have always been such things. But Ukrainians are very funny people. They are living through their own petty local revolution. A belated one. Their state of mind is that of collective psychosis," Limonov said.

The head of the Russian presidential council for human rights, Mikhail Fedotov, believes that the authors of prohibited books should be grateful to Kiev for this advertising trick, which is bound to have the reverse effect to foment interest.

"In the Internet era it is just laughable. It would have been far easier to impose an Internet blackout," he remarked.

In the meantime, the Ukrainian daily Vesti has said that its journalists staged an experiment at one of Ukraine's book markets. There they saw that some vendors display the banned books at some prominent place, next to writings authored by the chief of Ukraine's National Defense and Security Council, Oleksandr Turchinov.
 
 #45
www.rt.com
August 12, 2015
Culture Minister rules out tit-for-tat reaction after Kiev bans Russian authors

Russia will not ban any Ukrainian authors or works because the two peoples' literary legacies are so intertwined that they have practically become one, Russian Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky has said.

"We will never have any 'black' or 'white' lists," Medinsky told the Russian government daily Rossiiskaya Gazeta. "Moreover, we are demonstrating as long as our abilities allow us that our culture cannot be torn apart. Genetically we are one people, this cannot be questioned. Everything else is politicians' fantasies."

The minister added that the memorial to 19th century Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko remains in Moscow in front of the government's building and said that only recently the two countries worked on joint projects such as the "Battle for Sevastopol" film sponsored together by Kiev and Moscow.

Medinsky also doubted the effectiveness of Ukrainian bans and said that such moves could be ridiculed or ignored, but it was impossible to take them seriously. "You cannot ban an artist by issuing an entry ban. You cannot ban books and authors with a ban on imports. What will they do next? Start fires?" he said.  

The minister's comment came a few days after the Ukrainian Culture Ministry published a blacklist of 38 books by Russian authors, prohibiting their import into the country. The banned works included one on political science and philosophy, as well as fiction. Ukrainian officials also promised that the list of banned Russian books would be expanded. The order did not detail the punishment for those who violate the ban.

Another blacklist released by Kiev included 38 artists and public figures, from pop singers and film actors to economists and politicians. This list also included French movie star Gerard Depardieu, who also has Russian citizenship and is known for his pro-Russian sentiments.

The new spokesperson of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, condemned the Kiev move in a Facebook post, suggesting that the procedure was simply illegal. "This was apparently done without any kind of judicial process," she wrote.
 
 #46
Interfax
August 12, 2015
Netherlands: Investigators so far don't confirm finding Buk parts on MH17 crash site in Donbass

The international group of investigators conducting the criminal investigation into the circumstances surrounding the Malaysian Boeing crash in Donbas does not confirm finding fragments of a surface-to-air missile Buk on the crash site in Donbass, the Dutch National Public Prosecutor's Office reported.

It is now too early to draw conclusions that the found fragments are related to the Buk system, spokesman for the Dutch National Public Prosecutor's Office Wim de Bruin told Interfax on Aug. 12.

The Dutch prosecutors continue the investigation, he added.

The investigators have yet to determine whether these fragments belong to the Buk system and from where exactly the missile was launched, he said.

According to earlier reports, the Dutch Safety Board said the international group of specialists, in charge of the criminal investigation into the July 2014 crash of the Malaysian Boeing in eastern Ukraine, is studying some details that may be related to the missile fired from a surface-to-air missile system Buk.
 
 #47
www.rt.com
August 12, 2015
'So it WAS Putin?' Fleet Street again twists MH17 coverage
By Bryan MacDonald
Bryan MacDonald is a journalist. He began his career in journalism aged 15 in his home town of Carlow, Ireland, with the Nationalist & Leinster Times, while still a schoolboy. Later he studied journalism in Dublin and worked for the Weekender in Navan before joining the Irish Independent. Following a period in London, he joined Ireland On Sunday, later re-named the Irish Mail on Sunday. He was theater critic of the Daily Mail for a period and also worked in news, features and was a regular op-ed writer. He has also frequently appeared on RTE and Newstalk in Ireland as well as RT.

Once again, the British press has decided to become judge, jury and executioner in the MH17 catastrophe. A role they first appointed themselves to in July of 2014. Back then, the Sun's infamous front page headline "Putin's Missile" led the charge.

"So it WAS Putin?" says London's Daily Express now, following the release of a statement by the Joint Investigation Team saying that it is investigating "several parts, possibly originating from a Buk surface-air-missile system."

The Guardian goes with "Flight MH17: fragments from site could be Russian-made missile, say Dutch prosecutors." Meanwhile, the BBC exclaims: "MH17: 'Russian missile parts' at Ukraine crash site.""Russian missile shrapnel in MH17 wreckage," bellows the London Times.

Just over a year after 'Fleet Street' disgraced itself in a post-MH17 tabloid frenzy, editors have learned nothing. Little wonder that UK newspaper sales are in free-fall.

While that could have been partially excused in the heat of the moment, this new misinformation campaign is less reactionary and more organized.

A short report

The Onderzoeksraad Voor Veiligheid (Dutch Safety Board) is responsible for the Dutch MH17 investigation. At no stage in Tuesday's brief news update did the DSB imply that Russia shot down MH17. In fact, their four-paragraph notification never mentioned Russia at all. Nor did it cite the East Ukrainian rebels or reference the Kiev government, for that matter. In fact, it didn't name anyone.

What the DSB did say was that "several parts, possibly originating from a Buk surface-air-missile-system... have been secured during a previous recovery-mission in Eastern Ukraine and are in [the] possession of the criminal investigation team [responsible for] MH17 and the Dutch Safety Board."

In a clear attempt to heed off misinterpretation of their statement, the DSB added: "At present the conclusion cannot be drawn that there is a causal connection between the discovered parts and the crash of flight MH17."

In other words, the DSB is saying that it's POSSIBLE that parts from a Buk missile launcher in Eastern Ukraine are now in their custody. There is no guarantee that they are (a) in anyway related to the shoot-down of MH17 or (b) even Buk parts at all.

Double Dutch

Despite the best efforts of the DSB, the UK media has essentially laughed in their faces and twisted their words. The British public are being fed a massive onslaught of pure propaganda. This is almost as bad as when, earlier this year, The Daily Mail reported that "Vladimir Putin ordered Russian special forces to steal MH370 and secretly landed it at huge space port in Kazakhstan."

MH370 was the other unfortunate Malaysia Airlines flight of 2014. Last week we learned that parts of its fuselage may have washed up in the French Indian Ocean island of Reunion. Reunion is approximately 7,700 kilometers (4,785 miles) from Kazakhstan, about the same distance as New York is from Rio de Janeiro. The Daily Mail based its ridiculous story on the comments of a CNN pundit. CNN is to serious analysis what Justin Bieber is to John Lennon.  

While UK newspapers tried to outdo each other in a race to the bottom, the main US outlets were somewhat more careful on Tuesday. MSNBC and CBS merely spoke of "Russian-made missiles." However, Washington's propaganda bullhorn RFE/RL went for "Evidence Of Possible Russian Missiles In MH17 Tragedy."

About those missiles. Yes, Buk missiles are made in Russia. In much the same way that Toyota cars hail from Japan and BMW is German. If, god forbid, a jaywalker was killed by a Prius driver, would the tabloids exclaim "Japanese car mows down pedestrian?" Of course, they wouldn't. Yet, they feel emboldened to use suggestions of Buk fragments in East Ukraine as sufficient proof to blame Russia - and its President personally - for the MH17 disaster. Standards are now that low.

Arms Exports

Buk missiles, unwieldy Cold War relics, are used all around the world. India, Finland, China and Russia are among the countries operating them. Another is Ukraine. MH17 was, of course, shot down over Ukraine. Thus, even if the DSB establishes that they have discovered proof that Buks were present in East Ukraine, it doesn't mean that they were Russian-operated.

Between them, Russia and the US are responsible for 58% of global arms exports (31% and 27% respectively). Hence, whenever a weapon is fired anywhere in the world, there's a better than even money chance that it was made in one of the planet's two military superpowers.

The UK media knew that the Dutch Safety Board hadn't confirmed that the Buk was Russian. Indeed, they were aware that the DSB was not 100 percent sure it had a Buk. They also know that Ukraine has Russian-made missiles.

Instead of delivering balanced coverage to their dwindling band of readers, they went for high-impact headlines. In doing so, they chipped away at more of the veneer of fair-play that was once a British hallmark. They also further increased Russia's - well founded - anger at how it is portrayed in the West.

The UK media is fond of describing RT as a 'Kremlin propaganda tool.' This comes with varying degrees of menace and indignation. As the latest MH17 newspaper headlines show, if they are looking for propaganda, they need only look closer to home.
 
 #48
Risk of large-scale armed conflict in Transdniestria is not very high
By Lyudmila Alexanderova

MOSCOW, August 11. /TASS/. The risk of a large-scale armed conflict in the self-proclaimed republic of Transdniestria, sandwiched between Moldova and Ukraine, is not very high at this point, although some surprises are possible, Russian experts agree with the Council of Europe's Secretary-General, Thorbjorn Jagland. The authorities in Kiev are interested in fanning tensions over Transdniestria more than anyone else, they say. In principle, analysts do not rule out the breakaway territory's reintegration with Moldova on acceptable terms.

At this point any large-scale armed conflict in Transdniestria is unlikely, but even a casual clash may cause the situation to go out of control, the Council of Europe's Secretary-General Thorbjorn Jagland said in an article published by the New York Times on Monday.

Transdniestria's economic blockade by Moldova and Ukraine has added fuel to the economic crisis in the self-proclaimed republic of late. In July, plans were unveiled for creating joint Moldovan-Ukrainian checkpoints on the border between Transdniestria and Ukraine. Transdniestria believes that the situation is getting catastrophic for the economy and jeopardizes the life and security of the population on the left bank of the Dniester.

Moldova's newly-appointed prime minister, Valeriu Strelet, said just recently that Chisinau was going to draw up a timetable for Transdniestria's re-integration with Moldova and to present it to the Transdniestrian authorities.

"I am going to meet with Tiraspol's leader Yevgeny Shevchuk and to persuade him Transdniestria may acquire a special status," Strelets said.

"The situation is no easy, indeed," the deputy director of the CIS Studies Institute, Vladimir Zharikhin, has told TASS. "The Ukrainian authorities tried to take a harder line only to draw no active support from the Moldovan authorities, contrary to original expectations. Moldova is well aware that full-scale combat operations may be the eventual outcome, which is highly undesirable. The more so, since the current sentiment in Moldova is strongly pro-Russian, in defiance of hostile propaganda and the votes cast for euro-integration supporters in elections."

Zharikhin agrees with Jagland in that the risk of Transdniestria being turned into another trouble spot is not high, but provocations capable of triggering an uncontrolled march of events should not be ruled out.

"Kiev is interested in shaking the situation loose more than anyone else," the expert said. "That would distract attention from its policies in Donbass. But certainly a US hand has been at work here. Washington is interested in destabilizing the situation in Europe in principle," he said.

Nevertheless, Zharikhin believes, in principle there do exist good chances of achieving an agreement between Chisinau and Tiraspol on Transdniestria's re-integration. "It should be remembered that at a certain point both parties agreed to a confederative structure of a common state. It was external pressure that upset the settlement."

Besides, there are no factors that usually impair reintegration. "There are no refugees or disputed properties, contrary to what can be seen in Cyprus or Abkhazia, the ethnic composition is very similar and there are no religious problems."

Alexander Gushchin, a political scientist at the Russian Council for International Affairs, agrees with the way Jagland sees the current state of affairs. He, too, emphasizes Kiev role in fanning tensions. "In case of an aggravation in the southeast of Ukraine they can use that factor for destabilization," he told TASS. "A provocation may take place, but only if the general situation in the south east gets worse. I don't expect an early full-scale war."

In his opinion, the door to Transdniestria's reintegration with Moldova remains open in principle, although for Moldova's unionists (advocates of unification with Romania) that would be the least welcome option. "Theoretically, at some future date the possibility of wide autonomy close to confederation or wide federation may be discussed. For the time being it is hard to expect that in the context of strained relations between Russia and Europe they would be able to devise a common stance on the issue." But the situation "is drifting in this direction."

In the distant future, if there is an easing of tensions, Gushchin says, "the general vector in support of a wider federation may gain greater support, including that from Moscow."
 
 #49
The Vineyard of the Saker
http://thesaker.is
August 11, 2015
Saakashvili's Silk Road Delusion
By Mister Unknown
[Graphic here http://thesaker.is/saakashvilis-silk-road-delusion/]

Recently Saakashvili made a rather  comical statement  on  Ukrainian TV , which reinforced my perception of him as someone "with a tendency for miscalculation", to put it euphemistically.

"Our plans now include the New Silk Road. Now logistics take 30 days if transported via Russia, but it will take up to nine days via Illichivsk [port]. Everything is available there. And large flows need to be attracted. And it's possible to attract. A flow will go if a highway heading for Reni, i.e. the European Union, is built. Then a large bridge across the Dniester Firth needs to be built for no one could cut Bessarabia away. We're already working on this..."

A few "little" problems with Saakashvili's statement:

1.  Existing  rail routes - starting in Chongqing, running through Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, & arriving in Duisburg, takes 14-16 days, NOT 30 days (see schedule below from a  Chinese company  that actually operates on this route).

Even an extended route - the China-Europe Block Train,  spanning from Eastern China to Spain  would take only 21 days.

2. How did Saakashvili dream up "9 days" via Illichivsk? Who knows... but, here is the reality: if Chinese companies were looking for the shortest, fastest way to transport goods to the EU, making a stop in Illichivsk makes no business sense in most circumstances. If the goods were destined for Northern Europe (e.g. Germany, Scandinavia, France, etc.), a far more direct route would be through Russia (and the Baltic states if needed). In that case Ukraine would be an unnecessary southern diversion. If the destination was Southern EU states (Romania, Italy, Spain, etc.), direct maritime routes, offloading in  Constanta (Romania) ,  Piraeus (Greece) , or  Genova (Italy)  would have similar (or slightly shorter) shipping times relative to  Illichivsk , but have the added advantage of being inside EU territory, thus foregoing the need for one additional customs inspection. In fact, I'd imagine that's one of the reasons that COSCO - a Chinese state-owned shipping company - is  pursuing a stake  in Piraeus.

3. If China wants a purely non-maritime trade route with the EU, 3 basic options exist:
- Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus
- Pakistan, Iran, Turkey
- Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Iran, Turkey

In all cases, Ukraine would be an unnecessary transit point that adds no business value, especially since Belarus is already positioning itself as China's optimal Silk Road transit partner, through a joint venture to build an  industrial park  to streamline logistics.

The only scenario in which Ukraine could potentially add some value as a transit country for Chinese goods to the EU is if Ukraine joined either the Eurasian Union or the European Union, which would at least ease customs & entry processes, but neither is politically realistic at this point.

If Saakashvili ACTUALLY thinks diverting the Silk Road away from Russia to Ukraine is a possibility - as his statement suggests - then he is in for some disappointment when reality kicks in.