#2
Kiev to impose martial law if situation in Donbas aggravates - security official

KIEV, August 14. /TASS/. Ukraine will impose martial law if the situation in Donbas aggravates, head of the National Security Council Oleksandr Turchynov said on Friday.

"If Russia fails the Minsk agreements, no doubt, we shall respond according to the challenges the country will be facing," he told reporters during a visit to training grounds near Kiev.

"We shall have to impose the martial law and to have a bigger mobilization of the entire potential in the country," he said.

On August 11, Moscow called on Kiev to demonstrate restraint and not to violate the implementation of the Minsk agreements in the sphere of security by irresponsible actions.

"The recent days have been marked by the worsening situation along the line of contact separating the parties to conflict in south-eastern Ukraine," the Russian Foreign Ministry said. "Reports have been made on increased shelling of populated localities, destruction, victims and peaceful civilians hurt in the Donbas conflict."

"Regrettably, Kiev's militant rhetoric has also increased," the Russian Foreign Ministry said. "The Ukrainian side refused to sign the practically finished and agreed document on pulling out tanks and weapons with calibre under 100 mm and mortars under 120 mm to 15 kilometres away from the front line during the last Contact Group meeting in Minsk on August 3-4," the ministry went on to say.

The move, according to the Russian Foreign Ministry, was supposed to de-escalate confrontation in the region but the Ukrainian authorities, peremptorily referring to some threats and provocations, have started saying they will return Ukraine's heavy weapons and artillery systems withdrawn to the rear positions under the February 12 package of measures to implement the Minsk agreements (Minsk-2) to their previous combat positions," the Russian Foreign Ministry said. "We are calling on the Ukrainian side to demonstrate restraint and not to violate the implementation of the Minsk agreements in the sphere of security by irresponsible actions," the Russian Foreign Ministry stressed.

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 #3
The National Interest
August 14, 2015
Pulling Russia and Ukraine Back from the Brink of War
The West needs to proactively broker an agreement.
By Michael Kofman
Michael Kofman is a Public Policy Scholar at the Kennan Institute, Wilson Center and Research Scientist at CNA. The views expressed in this piece are the author's own.

The simmering fighting in Ukraine has led to a false sense of complacency in the West that this conflict might be drifting into a frozen state. It is far from intractable, but the past several months have imposed a fog of cognitive dissonance that will be rudely pulled back, either when Moscow loses patience, or perhaps worse, control. If the West does not return its attention to Ukraine and take an active role in managing the conflict, a resumption of the war is likely. Prognosticating when and where is less important than understanding why this is inevitable.

A dangerous game

The first instinct would be to point to recent fighting in Eastern Ukraine, but this escalation is more in the realm of information war than actual war. Artillery exchanges intensified, though evidence of a separatist ground attack remains elusive. It seems on August 10th Ukraine launched a limited, but successful, offensive operation against a small separatist unit in the town of Novolaspa. The 72nd mechanized brigade with auxiliary support assaulted the town, forced out the separatists, and then retreated to occupy nearby strategic heights.

This action was a minor victory for a military that usually finds itself on the defensive (although the casualties are unknown). It represents a calculated risk by Kiev that Russia will choose not to retaliate disproportionately and restrain the separatists to artillery fire. In response, separatist forces have gone on alert and are mobilizing. Both sides are taking out heavy artillery and MLRS systems in preparation for an artillery duel. Russia's ability to control the separatist forces will be tested in the coming weeks. Ukraine's intentions behind this action are unclear; domestic politics might be at work, the military might be seeking to test its capabilities, or Ukraine might be trying to regain the West's drifting attention. The victory is certainly a morale booster, but the consequences could prove costly.

Origins of an unsustainable situation

Where this incident takes Ukraine is difficult to foresee, but the arc is clearly bending towards war and has been since March. Russia appeared to have attained what it wanted in the Minsk II agreement, except that no political clause of that deal has been implemented since. Fighting had died down to a low boil, with occasional flare ups, but the political process has gone nowhere. Instead, Ukraine has severed the occupied portion of the Donbas, installed an economic blockade, and the new de facto international border is the current line of control between the separatists and Ukrainian forces. Russia's intention to have this territory become a strategic hook in Ukraine was predicated on the notion that ultimately Kiev would want it back, and could be pressured to reintegrate it. Those assumptions proved incorrect.

The mechanism for returning the Donbas was to be elections, but Ukraine's Rada effectively abrogated this component of the Minsk deal back in March, stating that said elections will only be held once Russia withdraws and capitulates. Subsequent meetings in Minsk have been fruitless, and an irrelevant sideshow to the conflict. Behind Ukraine's stubbornness lies a policy that has been thought through, but one that leaves Russia with few non-military options. Ukraine has little interest in seeing the occupied half of the Donbas returned. That may not be official policy but it is apparent reality to even a casual observer of this conflict. Even if Russia withdrew today, the tattered land is economically ruinous to reintegrate, and Ukraine is already in dire financial straits.

Now cut off, the only natural course for the Donbas is to become a part of Russia in everything but name. Russia's currency is already taking it over. Unlike Transnistria, which is geographically distant, there is no way for Russia to keep the Donbas away. The best case scenario is that it becomes a large and expensive Abkhazia, but even this is optimistic. Not only does the current scenario fail to achieve Russia's objectives, but its natural trajectory is intolerable for Moscow. It is only a matter of time before Russia imposes a course correction. Vladimir Putin has consistently doubled down and used force.

There is no alternative plan

If local elections are held across Ukraine on October 25th, excluding the occupied regions, that could prove a trigger for the resumption of combat. The West has been sleepwalking on this path, chained to events as the clock on the Minsk deal steadily runs out. The United States and EU have no alternative to Minsk prepared. Ukraine falsely hopes that there is another option, a Plan B once Minsk is certified as a dead end. A scenario where it achieves a freezing of the conflict without paying a substantial political price for it. This is unlikely. There is no alternative Western plan for settling this conflict, and therefore the agreement will not be officially declared as "failed" even if fighting resumes. In the event of military escalation, all parties will call for a return to the Minsk framework, and Kiev will find itself having walked a painful path only to arrive at the point of origin.

The problem with the plan to sever and contain the Donbas, as tantalizing as it may seem, is that Russia's army can change the facts on the ground in Ukraine. Moscow's direct costs have steadily declined during each offensive. Russia has been turning the separatists into a miniature version of its army, with enough conventional firepower that even fewer of its soldiers are likely to be needed in the future.

Conversely, Ukraine's sixth mobilization wave has come up 50 percent short of the men it sought to conscript, officially, and probably worse unofficially. Ukraine's army overall is in better shape than it was in the winter, but it is too small for the territory it has to defend, and too many of its assets are on paper. Its prospects for resisting a Russian assault are poor and its ability to sustain combat operations is limited. The public is tired of the war and rightly perceives that the national leadership has no discernible plan for settling this conflict. The situation on the ground today is not dissimilar to that of December 2014, a calm before the storm.

Why expect another round of fighting?

After the last offensive in February both sides believed that time was on their side. Ukraine pointed to the enormous economic pressure levied on Russia. Oil prices are once again in decline, its GDP contracted 4.6 percent in the last quarter, and the currency is depreciating. Some in Ukraine believe, optimistically, that the Kremlin's collapse is not far off and that Russia is in no position to withstand another round of sanctions. That may seem paradoxical, given Ukraine's economic situation is decidedly worse, but it can lean back on the West. Russia has no good answers for refinancing corporate debt, and despite shouts about economic resiliency, nobody in Moscow knows whether they will be able to manage another crisis.

Moscow too observes fitful progress on reforms in Ukraine, the resilience of oligarchs, and the growing disillusionment of the population. Russian leaders believe a large portion of Ukraine's unreformed elite, still in charge, would be suitable partners in time. Meanwhile the West's financial commitment to Ukraine has been meager and security assistance is noncommittal. From Russia's perspective, it is difficult to see how these inputs get Ukraine from where it is to a democratic system and a functioning economy. Russia is banking that Ukraine will remain a halfway house and the West will get tired of the project.

Both sides assumed time might be on their side, and chose to wait these past several months while quietly building up military capabilities. Moscow hoped it could pressure Ukraine into lifting the blockade and agreeing to the reintegration of the Donbas without use of force. However, Ukraine's domestic politics have not been permissive for any national leader to make such a compromise.

In general, public expectations on Ukraine's prospects of avoiding hard compromises are unrealistic, and the West has not been able to convince Kiev otherwise. Publically Western leaders have been applauding Ukraine, while privately frustration is growing in Europe with Kiev's position. The United States sends mixed signals depending on which branch of government, agency, or senior official is speaking.

The need for proactive Western intervention

Western leaders need to continuously keep abreast of this situation instead of glancing back every time fighting heats up, as it will this week. A compromise is possible, and Ukraine's leaders might be willing to pay political costs to achieve it. The West needs to help foster an agreement and politically support Ukrainian leaders who embrace it. As things stand, Ukraine has the option to drive recklessly, and blame Russia for all of it, relying on unconditional Western support with sanctions and eventually lethal weapons. Russia's policy in Ukraine is stuck in a ditch with no sensible way out. Schadenfreude aside, the West needs to get serious about what happens next. This may sound like a Russian problem, but it will be the West's problem soon as it was in August 2014 and February 2015. The closer Russian policy gets to defeat, the more precarious Ukraine's position becomes.

Russia is not going to wait for a death by a thousand cuts and its ability to restrain separatist machinations cannot be continued indefinitely. We've been here before in January of 2015. Russia needs a resolution soon, much more so than Ukraine. Moscow may try to modulate the violence to threaten the collapse of Ukraine's front line without taking substantial territory so as to avoid further sanctions, but war is an unpredictable business. A better option is for the West to set Russia and Ukraine on a path towards elections in the occupied region and lifting of the blockade. This is possible, it is just not currently being done. This would give Russia an alternative to another desperate but crushing attack on Ukraine's military. Kiev itself needs a realistic plan for dealing with Moscow other than the current war of attrition.

Ukraine has the advantage, but its situation is hardly rosy. While American perceptions of Russia as a threat have been growing, European views of Ukraine have been regressing back to what they were before the Maidan. If Russia attacks again, Ukraine may be promised lethal aid by the United States. That debate is sure to reignite, and the proponents could win the next round. This will not represent a U.S. commitment to participate in a proxy war against Russia and therefore fundamentally changes nothing. In Europe, Ukraine will receive lukewarm support. It is doubtful whether Germany will be willing to invest its political capital again to negotiate new terms for Kiev. Instead it will politely point back to the terms of Minsk II. The West would do better trying to prevent this chain of events now instead of reacting to them after another cycle of bloodshed.

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 #4
The Nation
www.thenation.com
August 13, 2015
How Ukraine's New Memory Commissar Is Controlling the Nation's Past
Volodymyr Viatrovych was the driving force behind new laws that restrict free speech and regulate how history is written.
By Jared McBride
JARED MCBRIDE Jared McBride was recently a visiting assistant professor in the history department at Columbia University. He is currently a Title VIII Summer Research Scholar at the Kennan Institute. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.

Since the Maidan uprising and the subsequent attacks on Ukraine's sovereignty and territory by Russia and Russian-backed rebels, there has been intense debate on how to interpret not only Ukraine's dramatic present, but also its complex and difficult past. Against the background of military and diplomatic struggles, the representation of Ukraine's history is also embattled, especially the period of World War II. Russian elites have labeled anything and everything they do not like about past and present Ukraine as "fascist." Partly this is a reflex due to the memory of right-wing Ukrainian nationalism during the first half of the twentieth century; partly this is the result of a failure to find any better way to express anger at Ukraine's turn to the West. There has been no shortage of Western commentators attacking this crude propaganda.

However, among representatives of Kiev's new post-revolutionary elites, unbiased engagement with Ukraine's past has also been a challenge. But while the West is pillorying Russian distortions, it is much less at ease criticizing Ukrainian ones: Few Western observers feel sympathy for Putin's involvement in Ukraine (I myself have none). There are many, however, who seem to welcome any historical narrative ruffling Russia's feathers or appearing "pro-Ukrainian" or "national" (in reality, quite often nationalist), as the nation is facing outside aggression and domestic crisis. Yet this form of "support" is a disservice-to Ukraine and also to the West's public and decision-makers. It is alarming that some Western journalists, scholars, and policy-makers are embracing a nationalist version of Ukrainian history that resonates only with part of Ukrainian society and not at all with serious academic discourse in Europe and North America.

Front and center in the efforts to produce a nationalist version of Ukrainian history is the former director of the country's secret-police archives (SBU) and new director of the Institute of National Memory (or UINP) under the current government of President Petro Poroshenko: Volodymyr Viatrovych. Viatrovych (born 1977), from the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, first stepped onto the national scene when he was put in charge of the archive section of the newly created Institute of National Memory in 2008 and then head of the SBU archives later that year. In these influential positions, he helped in the effort to "exonerate" a key World War II Ukrainian nationalist leader of any complicity in the Holocaust; presented the nationalist Ukrainian Insurgent Army as a democratic organization open to Jewish members; and focused heavily on Ukrainian victimization during the famine of the 1930s (while, interestingly, also blaming Jews as perpetrators).

Viatrovych has made a name for himself as a political activist by instrumentalizing his scholarly credentials. Both before and after his secret-service archive tenure, he was the head of the Center for the Study of the Liberation Movement (or Tsentr Doslidzhen' Vyzvol'noho Rukhu, TsDVR) in Lviv. The research center is funded by private money from Ukrainian groups abroad that have helped shape its research agenda. The unambiguous goal of the center is to paint the Ukrainian nationalists, in particular the OUN and UPA (two of the most important Ukrainian nationalist organizations from the interwar and World War II period), as "liberators" from Soviet, Polish, and German oppression. Radical right-wing Ukrainian nationalists are depicted as nothing but tragic freedom fighters, occasionally forced to don Nazi uniforms to struggle for independence, liberty, and Western values. This is the party line at the center, one largely shaped by Viatrovych.

Viatrovych's own "scholarly" output echoes the goals of his center. In a number of publications he has covered a laundry list of flashpoints in 20th-century Ukrainian history, from the vicious anti-Jewish pogroms of World War I through Ukrainian-Polish violence during and after World War II. What unifies his approach is a relentless drive to exculpate Ukrainians of any wrongdoing, no matter the facts. For example, concerning Ukrainian nationalist involvement in the Holocaust, in Viatrovych's world, collaboration never happened or was coerced and, at any rate, can't be blamed on nationalism; all evidence to the contrary is blithely assigned to Soviet lies. On the nationalist ethnic cleansing of Poles in 1943-44, Viatrovych lets us know that that was a sort of tragic but symmetrical warfare. And as we all know, war is cruel and bad things happen. When confronted with the fact that the head of UPA, Roman Shukhevych, served the Nazis until 1943 as commander of a mobile police battalion that murdered thousands of civilians in Belarus, Viatrovych responded: "Is it possible to consider Poles or Belarusians a peaceful population, if, during the day, they work as ordinary villagers, only to arm themselves in the evening and attack the village?" In other words, civilians are fair targets, especially for "heroes" of Ukraine in the service of Nazis.

In the academic world, such tactics have their limits. But when confronted with solid archival evidence contrary to his stories, such as orders from OUN-UPA leadership to cleanse the Polish population of Volhynia, Viatrovych simply claims that documents are Soviet forgeries or that scholars challenging him are serving sinister propaganda purposes. Selectivity rules: If there is no smoking-gun document for nationalist crimes, it's exculpatory; when there is no smoking-gun document for premeditated Soviet genocide against Ukrainians, it's a result of KGB cunning. Viatrovych deals with video testimonial archives and the integration of witness testimony into history with bravado, simply ignoring them (and especially Jewish voices) altogether when he dislikes what they have to tell us. This abysmal ethical and methodological approach has been challenged by scholars from Poland, Scandinavia, Germany, Canada, and the United States, in addition to a few brave Ukrainian ones. These scholars have written excoriating reviews of his works. Unlike his writings, these reviews were published in peer-reviewed journals.

There are no career repercussions for poor scholarship when you are a political activist. Thanks to his credentials as "former SBU archive director," director of a prominent "research" institute, and a brief stint as a research fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI), which show up in every bio-blurb possible, Viatrovych is cited frequently in the Ukrainian media. Ironically, as he has gained more negative attention from scholars, he has traversed a different arc in Ukraine-increasingly trusted as a voice of wisdom, a young, fresh force promising to defend and promote Ukraine's history, here understood as the glorious record of Ukrainian nationalism. It was no surprise when in late 2014 President Poroshenko chose him as head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, a government body originally created by then President Yushchenko to support research and forge a national memory policy.

Viatrovych wasted little time after this appointment. He became the driving force behind the so-called de-communization laws that were put on the books this spring. In reality, these laws regulate how history should be written and place restrictions on free speech, and thus are deeply at odds with Kiev's claims to Western values. Law No. 2538-1, "On the legal status and honoring of fighters for Ukraine's independence in the 20th century," states that "the public denial of...the just cause of the fighters for Ukrainian independence in the 20th century insults the dignity of the Ukrainian people and is illegal." The fighters for Ukrainian independence explicitly include the World War II nationalists of the OUN and UPA. In essence, this law makes it at least very risky to criticize them or point out the crimes in which they participated. As with similar Putinist legislation in Russia-namely Article 354.1, which criminalizes any deviations from the Kremlin's version of World War II and was passed by the Russian Duma in 2014-the very vagueness of phrasing is a handy weapon of potential repression: it is a disturbing mystery how the state or other accusers are going to determine who insulted the dignity of violent ethnic cleansers and happy authoritarians or how the courts are going to prosecute those guilty of such thought crimes. Law No. 2540, "On access to the archives of repressive organizations of the communist totalitarian regime from 1917-1991," puts all secret-police archives under the control of the National Memory Institute in Kiev, headed by Viatrovych.
 
These new laws have been criticized in a number of journals and magazines. Why they are deeply flawed should be obvious to anybody committed to even elementary principles of free speech and democracy. The reaction to the laws was predictable: first, there was a response from the Western academic community. Seventy leading scholars, including some from Eastern Europe, signed an open letter protesting the laws. Other organizations, such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum warned of their dangers. Foreign media outlets also took notice. Yet, despite the outcry, except for a few articles by Western scholars, there has been little discussion of Viatrovych's personal role in making the laws or the larger backdrop of aggressive history politics, going back to 2005.

A few of the most prominent Ukrainian intellectuals provided commentary that half-heartedly condemned a crackdown on free speech, but they focused on questioning the attitude of Western scholars protesting against the laws. Other Ukrainian commentators have provided rather muted criticism of the laws, less because of the politicization of history and more due to issues of financial and privacy concerns. Only a few Ukrainian commentators did condemn the laws on principled grounds related to academic freedom and historical revisionism.

Sadly, the Ukrainian-diaspora scholarly community in North America has often supported these restrictive laws. Regarding Viatrovych, they see no problem with having a partisan political activist in charge of the country's secret-police archives; rather the foreign scholars and their "insensitive research" agendas that discuss the dark spots of Ukraine's history are the real problem for Ukraine. In a recent roundtable interview with two well-known scholars and one member of the Ukrainian-American community, Western scholars were described as "neo-Soviet" and their response as "quasi-hysterical." In a misplaced "post-colonial" twist, the "propriety or authority of foreigners to instruct Ukraine's elected representatives as to whom they wish to acknowledge or memorialize and why" was questioned. The laws were praised as the answer to outside tampering in Ukraine's history. On the issue of free speech, there was hedging. In an Orwellian key, Alexander Motyl, a political scientist at Rutgers University-Newark, went as far as to compare Ukraine's history regulation laws to civil rights laws, women's rights, and laws protecting the gay community in the United States. This is not the first time Motyl's analogies to US history have caused shock in various scholarly communities.

There has been little controversy in the West about putting Ukraine's secret-police archives in Viatrovych's hands: the responses from Ukrainian intelligentsia have ranged from joy to muted concerns about privacy issues. Motyl excitedly called the archives law a "coup for freedom and justice"-unsurprisingly, given that he is perhaps the only scholar to have praised Viatrovych's recent book. Outside of perceptive pieces in Ukrainian by Vasyl Rasevych, a historian and writer, and Stanislav Serhiienko, an activist and writer, about the dangers of archive tampering, few commenters, including those in the West, seem to worry about the potential manipulation of the archives. The dialectics of national liberalism aside, Motyl's term "coup" is an apposite Freudian slip. We might ask ourselves why a nation's most politically sensitive document collection should be entrusted with a political activist interested in one and only one version of the past, rather than putting them under the auspices of the central state archive administration. A while ago, when a Communist was director of Ukraine's archival administration, Western observers were worried. The failure to worry when a nationalist defending the record of right-wing authoritarians takes over the national memory project and the secret-police files is disturbing.

If the response from the diaspora-oriented scholarly community to the laws and Viatrovych's appointment has been scandalous, the naïveté with which some Western observers have embraced the nationalist narrative is even more troubling. Following the Maidan revolution, Viatrovych is now cited as a voice of knowledge in the Ukrainian and Western media. The Christian Science Monitor has quoted him in an article about Ukraine's past, where he explained that to dispel "myths" Ukraine should "create an open, national dialogue." With no acknowledgment (or, probably, knowledge) of Viatrovych's background as a myth-maker-in-chief himself, the article uncritically presents him as a voice for the future.

Even more egregious was the article "Is There a Future for Ukraine?" by Peter Pomerantsev, a journalist and producer who writes frequently on Russia, which appeared in The Atlantic in July 2014. Pomerantsev interviewed and profiled Viatrovych as a carrier of hope for Ukraine's future. Pomerantsev has managed to recognize in Viatrovych "a liberal nationalist," working to "create a Ukrainian identity"-strange praise for a man claiming to be a scholar, a profession usually engaged in open-ended inquiry, not identity building. Pomerantsev tells his readers that Viatrovych is "best known for his work on reformatting Ukraine's relationship to the Second World War," which is both an understatement and a horribly revealing choice of terms. In his mostly uncritical portrayal, he writes that Viatrovych "believes he can help bridge these divisions [in Ukrainian society] and create a story that is at once nationalist and integrationist." When asked about a positive unifying message, Viatrovych matter-of-factly tells him that Russians want "tyranny" and Ukrainians want "freedom." Pomerantsev swallows this bigoted statement of frank stereotype about large populations with no response, since compared to the overtly racist Ukrainian nationalist he interviewed in the first part of the same article, Viatrovych comes across as less brutal. But perhaps also because "we" in the West now consider it good form to cut a Ukrainian nationalist more slack than a Russian.

The commentary by Viatrovych himself on the laws he helped make is perhaps the most illuminating and troubling aspect of the entire debate. On May 1, he reacted to criticism with a statement packed with paradox. On the issue of academic freedom, he writes that the "laws...will not in any way influence academic discourse." He adds that the laws will serve as a "powerful incentive for the de-politicization of the history of the OUN and the UPA" and "reanimate academic discussion." How banning critical views of radical right-wing ethno-nationalists and their violent deeds represents a depoliticization of historical topics or supports academic discussion is beyond comprehension. In response to critics' references to the crimes of Ukrainian nationalists during World War II, Viatrovych maintains that "this is only one of the opinions that have the right to exist." He goes on to argue for the importance of nationalism in current Ukrainian culture because "partisan folklore includes hundreds of folk songs and is one of its richest among folklore sources." These are the priorities of Ukraine's new memory manager-in-chief: preserving folk songs (which, he may fail to realize, are not likely to all be genuinely "folk" or "traditional") at the expense of difficult discussions about war crimes, the very existence of which is reduced to "opinions." As for Viatrovych's promise that the laws would not be used to intervene in academic debate, it only took about two weeks for the laws to be used to intimidate Ukrainian scholars: the education minister disseminated a letter to "patriotic" scholars of Ukraine, alerting them that it is necessary to respond to the allegedly Kremlin-directed Western scholars' letter on the new laws.

To be sure, the Russian aggression against Ukraine has forced scholars and other onlookers to take sides. Many Western observers, including this author, support Ukraine's struggle for democracy and sovereignty. What parts of the Western media, academia, and public-policy world have failed to grasp is that supporting partisan political operatives self-spinning as "national liberals" and objective scholars will do nothing to further Ukraine's cause. One would think we had learned a key lesson of the Cold War: that the crude calculus of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" is wrong-headed. As for academic freedom, Ukrainians should have the opportunity to struggle with, write about, and argue over their own history in all of its glory and all its darker sides without threats, implicit or explicit. Part of this freedom would include cooperation and debate among scholars from many nations. Ukrainians do not need any more commissars to tell them what they are allowed to say or think, neither in the name of Communism, as in the bad old days, nor of nationalism. Moving forward includes leaving that paternalistic model behind for good.  

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 #5
Huffingtonpost.com
August 13, 2015
Ukraine: In the Midst of War, Debate Swirls Around Soviet-Era Famine
By Nikolas Kozloff
Nikolas Kozloff is a New York-based writer who conducted a research trip to Ukraine last year.

Even as the conflict with Russian-backed separatists smolders, Kiev has ratcheted up a no less ferocious public relations war. Hoping to bolster its case against Moscow, Ukraine as well as the country's foreign Diaspora have zeroed in on the so-called Holodomor or Stalinist-induced famine of 1932-33. In an effort to force Ukrainian peasants to join collective farms, Stalin commandeered their grain and other foodstuffs. The result was disastrous as millions of Ukrainians starved and perished. In some regions, the death rate reached one-third of the population with entire villages laid waste.

Within the currently hyper-charged political milieu, the Holodomor has become a source of great controversy. On the one hand, Ukrainians argue that the famine constitutes genocide since the Holodomor targeted ethnic Ukrainians and was a direct result of Stalin's forced collectivization and massive grain exports. According to historians, the famine reflected Stalin's drive to stamp out Ukrainian nationalism which had earlier come to the fore during the country's civil war. Experts believe that Stalin could have spared Ukraine if had he re-directed grain exports to feed the peasants. On the other hand, the Kremlin claims the famine was not organized along strictly ethnic lines. In this version, the Holodomor wasn't deliberate genocide but rather the simple result of a poor crop season and Soviet inability to harvest grain.

Politicizing the Past

Eager to prosecute the public relations war, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has compared the Holodomor with the current day conflict with Russian-backed separatists. Not surprisingly, Kiev observes the Holodomor every year on November 22, the official day of commemoration. Olga Bielkova, a member of the Ukrainian parliament, has also made historical comparisons between Soviet famine and Putin's undeclared war. Writing in the Huffington Post, she remarks "a justification offered by Stalin at the time was the need for rapid industrialization at all cost, but what really bothered him about Ukraine was our unbending desire for self-determination."

The Kremlin, she adds, "is still denying [the] Holodomor. Many Russians influenced by the propaganda pedaled by the state-run TV stations genuinely believe that Ukraine is not an independent state, that [the] breakup of the Soviet Union is a mistake and Putin is the one to correct it, that Ukrainian is not a language but rather a dialect of Russian and that dreams of Ukrainians therefore deserve no attention."

Not surprisingly, pro-Russian rebels have struck back with their own version of historical events. Within the Donetsk People's Republic in the east, teachers have been forced to trash their old history textbooks and to teach Ukrainian history in accordance with new guidelines stipulating that the Holodomor wasn't genocide but rather a "tragedy" which afflicted the entire Soviet Union.

Role of Ukrainian Diaspora

Within such a politically charged environment, the Ukrainian Diaspora has played a key role. Currently, there are more than 20 million Ukrainians living abroad. One large expat community resides in the U.S. and numbers nearly 1 million. In the New York metropolitan area alone, Ukrainians number almost 200,000 people. Canada meanwhile has a very sizable Ukrainian Diaspora community numbering 1.2 million people. Many Ukrainian-Canadians had parents or grandparents who left Ukraine following the Holodomor.

During the recent conflict with Russian-backed separatists, the Ukrainian Diaspora has provided humanitarian relief and even hosted displaced refugees in its own homes. In Chicago, the 2014 Miss Ukrainian Diaspora beauty pageant even offered a certificate for purchasing body armor for Ukrainian soldiers as a grand prize [in the same city, a local Ukrainian museum offers an exhibit about the Holodomor].

Canadian Diaspora and the Holodomor

According to the Globe and Mail, the Ukrainian lobby in Canada is politically powerful and has pressured Ottawa to aid President Poroshenko in Kiev. In contrast to the Ukrainian expat community in the U.S., which focuses on donating clothes and toys for the families of soldiers, the Canadian-Ukrainians provide a greater share of military supplies. Canadian volunteers have bought parts for sniper rifles and tripwire detonators, for example, and have even shipped home-grown surveillance drones to the front.

Not surprisingly perhaps, Canada became the first country to recognize the Holodomor genocide back in 2008. In Winnipeg, one of Canada's largest centers of the Ukrainian Diaspora, local expats observe "National Holodomor Awareness Week." Moreover, Ottawa has allotted funds toward an educational project designed to encourage historical awareness about the famine. At the University of Ottawa meanwhile, the Holodomor has assumed current day political significance. Recently, students organized a screening of a film dealing with Stalinist famine. Addressing the audience, one organizer remarked, "Genocide against Ukraine continues today as we speak."

Holodomor and "Victimization Narratives"

While no one would deny the sheer brutality and suffering inflicted through the Holodomor, some have questioned Ukraine's incessant victimization mentality. According to John-Paul Himka, a historian at the University of Alberta, Ukrainians have proved to be expertly adept at fostering so-called "victimization narratives." To be sure, Himka writes, Stalinist-induced famine of the 1930s or other episodes of Ukrainian victimization are perfectly legitimate topics of historical research.

On the other hand, Himka adds, "I object to instrumentalizing this memory with the aim of generating political and moral capital, particularly when it is linked to an exclusion from historical research and reflection of events in which Ukrainians figured as perpetrators not victims, and when 'our own' evil is kept invisible and the memory of the others' dead is not held sacred."

Himka notes that Ukrainians of the Diaspora latch on to the 1932-33 famine in Soviet Ukraine but "there persists a deafening silence about, as well as reluctance to confront, even well-documented war crimes, such as the mass murder of Poles in Volhynia [during World War II] by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and the cooperation of the Ukrainian auxiliary police in the execution of the Jews."

Holodomor vs. Holocaust

To the outside observer, such debates may seem outlandish or even arcane. Yet in the present political context, history has become a flashpoint. Indeed, the Kremlin constantly harks on Ukraine's World War II record, some of which isn't particularly flattering. The rise of far right Ukrainian nationalism, which employs Nazi symbolism and insignia, plays into such narratives and hasn't made Kiev's public relations efforts any easier.

Himka notes that the Holodomor has taken on practically mythological proportions. "In the diaspora," he writes, "one frequently encounters a double standard in discussing war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by Ukrainians as opposed to those perpetrated against Ukrainians. Memoirs and eyewitness accounts, for example, are considered untrustworthy evidence for the former, but trustworthy for the latter; that is, Jewish or Polish first-hand accounts of Ukrainian war crimes are dismissed as biased, while an important Ukrainian victimization narrative, the famine of 1932-33, has relied primarily on just such eyewitness accounts."

Uncovering yet more evidence of double standards, Himka adds "The argument is made that no order has ever been discovered instructing the UPA to kill Polish civilians in Volhynia. On the other hand, that the famine of 1932-33 was the result of deliberate policy is never questioned, even though this too remains without its 'smoking gun' (as of course does the Jewish Holocaust). The crimes of Polish police in Nazi service are taken to provide some measure of explanation or justification for the attack on Polish villages in Volhynia, but never do Ukrainian diaspora authors suggest that Ukrainians should be held collectively responsible for the crimes of the Ukrainian police in German service."

Ukrainian Defensiveness

Taking its historical victimization to soaring new heights, the Ukrainian Diaspora has even opposed the creation of a Canadian museum devoted exclusively to the memory of the Holocaust. No funding should be allotted, organizers argued, unless the museum also agreed to showcase Stalinist oppression of Ukraine and the famine of 1932-33. Meanwhile, some academics have sought to draw a moral equivalence between Jewish-born Communists participating in the Soviet collectivization of agriculture --- which subsequently led to the Holodomor --- and Ukrainian participation in the Holocaust.

Such contorted debates about victimization were recently placed on vivid display when the Simon Wiesenthal Center criticized Ukrainian legislation which would criminalize the denial of both the Holocaust and the Holodomor. Under the proposed law, guilty offenders would be subject to fines or even imprisonment. One Nazi hunter at the Wiesenthal Center remarked that the legislation would cheapen the memory of Germany's victims. To compare the Holodomor and the Holocaust, he declared, constituted "a gross distortion of the history of the Holocaust typical of the efforts to equate other tragedies which are not the same as the Holocaust with the crimes of the Nazis."

Just who has a monopoly on suffering and victimization? Judging from recent developments, Ukraine will spare no effort to press its own historical claims. If Kiev's war with the Kremlin heats up further, it would not be a surprise if Ukraine and its Diaspora continued to engage in testy debates which are now assuming larger than life importance.

#6
The Daily Mail (UK)
August 13, 2015
Shocking pictures from inside neo-Nazi military camp reveal recruits as young as SIX are being taught how to fire weapons (even though there's a ceasefire)
Azov battalion, the far-right militia defending the port city of Mariupol, eastern Ukraine, runs the course for children
During the week-long course, they teach so-called 'Azovets' how to fire weapons and survive in a conflict zone
Camp comes under command of Andriy Biletsky, who once admitted that the battalion 'do not like ceasefire at all'
Conflict broke out in April 2014, when separatists rebelled against rule of Kiev's new Western-looking government
By STEPH COCKROFT
[Photos here http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3195711/Now-CHILDREN-taking-arms-Shocking-pictures-inside-Ukraine-s-neo-Nazi-military-camp-recruits-young-six-learn-fire-weapons-s-ceasefire.html]

They're the ultra-Nationalist swastika-loving battalion which is openly against the ceasefire agreed with pro-Russian separatists.

Now extremists from the Azov unit, a far-right neo-Nazi militia defending the port city of Mariupol in southeastern Ukraine, are teaching children as young as six how to fire guns in an attempt to entice them into the country's bloody conflict.

Disturbing pictures have emerged from a military summer camp held on the outskirts of Kiev which show members of the voluntary group teaching so-called 'Azovets' how to behave as young fighters.

The children - which include girls and boys, some as young as six - are seen loading their guns, before taking part in exercises in which they crawl along the ground and fire at the enemy.

The camp comes under the command of Andriy Biletsky, who once admitted that the battalion 'do not like ceasefire at all'. The Azov men use the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel (Wolf's Hook) symbol on their banner and several members are white supremacists or anti-Semites.

The conflict broke out in April last year, when separatists rebelled in eastern Ukraine against the rule of Kiev's new Western-looking government.

Since April 2014, more than 6,500 people have been killed in the war-torn country with experts warning the crisis could carry on for years, despite a peace deal being brokered in the Belarus capital Minsk in February....  


 

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 #7
Interfax-Ukraine
August 13, 2015
Ukrainian prosecutor says 8,000 law enforcers, servicemen defected to rebels

Kiev, 13 August: About 5,000 law-enforcement officers and 3,000 servicemen have switched sides to join the adversary, a deputy prosecutor-general and chief military prosecutor of Ukraine, Anatoliy Matios, has said.

"At the moment, we have lists and we are collecting evidence regarding those 5,000 law enforcers and about 3,000 servicemen who switched sides to join the enemy," he said at a briefing in Kiev on Thursday [13 August].

Matios explained that among the traitors were those who stayed in annexed Crimea.

"All these data will be accumulated into one case, both with regard to the unleashing of a military conflict on Ukraine's territory and the carrying out of military aggression by the Russian Federation. This serves as the ground for submitting the evidence base to international institutions," the chief military prosecutor said.

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 #8
Interfax-Ukraine
August 14, 2015
Ukrainian shadow economy reaches 47% of GDP in Q1, 2015 - Economy Ministry
 
The level of the shadow economy in Ukraine in the first quarter of 2015 increased by 5 percentage points compared to the corresponding period in 2014, to 47% of official GDP, the Economic Development and Trade Ministry has reported on its website.

"The loss of economic entities' trust in the improvement of the economic and political situation in the near future forced them to actively use schemes for concealing income, including such as expansion of losses and non-payments," the report said.

The ministry experts added that the increase in the shadow economy was stimulated by price and devaluation shocks, the escalation of the military conflict in the east of the country and the influence of external negative processes: a further aggravation of political relations with Russia and the reduction of economic ties with the country.

The ministry noted that the last time the decline in the shadow economy in Ukraine was registered in 2011 from 38% to 34% of GDP, being followed by a year of stability, and then began to rise: in 2013 to 35%, in 2014 to 41%, which accounted for the record high since 2007.

At the same time, economic growth in 2012 slowed to 0.2%, in 2013 to zero, in 2014 the economy fell by 6.8%, while in the first quarter of 2015 by 17.2%.

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 #9
Counterpunch.org
August 12, 2015
Ukrainians are Voting With Their Feet Against War and Economic Disaster
By Roger Annis
Roger Annis is an editor of the website The New Cold War: Ukraine and beyond. On June 12, he gave a talk in Vancouver, Canada reporting on his visit to Donetsk, eastern Ukraine in April 2015 as part of a media tour group.

The people of Ukraine are finding new and innovative ways to avoid compulsory military service and the vigilante military recruiters who enforce it. Deepening resistance to the draconian measure is now a significant impediment to the very prosecution of the war.

Battle over public spaces

Recruiters are routinely raiding public spaces to hunt down and grab men of conscription age (20-26) who fail to answer the call to war. They block exits to shopping centers, transit vehicles, parks and other public spaces and then conduct identification checks. Those found to have dodged service or whose call-up dates are approaching are hauled away or given strict instructions of when and where to report for duty.

Vesti.com reports on the new phenomenon by Ukrainians of creating online maps to mark the public places where recruiters commonly hunt. Men and their families use the maps as a guide to public spaces to avoid.

The first map appeared in the city of Dniepropetrovsk, reports Vesti. The phenomenon has quickly spread across the country. The maps are constantly updated. One such project uses Google Maps and calls itself "Hot Dances".

"Before you go to a local shop, first check whether there is a patrol on your way, otherwise you may soon find yourself in the trenches of Donbass," reads the instruction accompanying one of the regional maps.

Vesti also reports that people are using online social networks to inform on the locations and activities of the recruiters. It cites several such reports from Dniepetropetrovsk.

"They captured young men at the entrance to the Orbit supermarket near the UMZ machine-building factory," says one report. "Twice they blocked the exits from the Caravan shopping center," reports another.

One report has triggered a wave of jokes in Ukraine about the 'yellow submarine' being employed by the military. Referring to the famous song by The Beatles of the same name, the joke was sparked by a social network report that announced, "On July 23, they arrived at a local beach on a yellow catamaran and began to hand out military draft call-up notices."

Mass evasion of compulsory military service

Several months after a neo-conservative regime, allied with extreme-right parties and militias, seized power in Kyiv in February 2014, it launched what it calls an 'anti-terrorist operation' against regions of the country where militant resistance to its coup erupted. These included the regions of Odessa in the south and Kharkiv and Donbas (Donetsk and Lugansk) in the east.

Crimeans dodged a bullet, so to speak, by seceding from the new, extreme-nationalist Ukraine in early March 2014, before a Kyiv-sponsored civil war could arrive on their territory. Donbas gained precious weeks to organize its defense thanks to its geographical distance from Kyiv and to the fact that the new regime had its hands full in regions closer to Kyiv. The regime created new paramilitary forces from among extreme-right and neo-fascist movements because most of the soldiers of the volunteer Ukrainian army proved unwilling to follow orders to fire upon their fellow citizens.

Among the measures accompanying the 'ATO' (as the regime abbreviates the name for its civil war) was the introduction of military conscription. Compulsory military service in Ukraine was abolished in 2013 by President Yanukovych, the same president overthrown in February 2014.

As the example of the online maps cited above shows, resistance to the war or to military conscription is taking very innovative forms.

The most significant opposition is in the form of the tens of thousands, quite likely hundreds of thousands, of men of military age who have quit the country.

Many have gone to Russia. A special program of the Russian immigration service welcomes them and allows them to stay and work in the country. Others have fled to neighbouring countries in eastern Europe or farther afield in western Europe. There, many live quasi-legally as precarious workers.

On June 19, the Ukrainian government and military embarked upon their sixth wave of military conscription since April 2014. A feature article in the July 24 edition of Novoye Vremya (The New Time) magazine reports that the results of the previous conscription drive were bad and results for the newest one will be worse.

Vladimir Kydon, military commissioner for Kyiv, stays up late worrying about the situation, the magazine reports. "The mobilization is difficult," he admits. "It's summer, people are on vacation."

Stanislav Gurak, Deputy Head of the Defense and Security Policy Center think tank in Kyiv, explains to the magazine, "People do not see the point of this war and do not want to risk their lives."

"Unfortunately, we have very poor motivation. It is frustrating for people-it's not clear what we are fighting or against whom we are fighting."

The magazine reports that on average, out of 1,000 conscription notices sent, a few hundred recipients answer the call. Of those, half are typically disqualified for medical reasons.

Because of this, says Novoye Vremya, the draft boards take any zabrivaya [referring to the shaved heads of military conscripts] they can, "even alcoholics". The solution could be a professional army, but for that, Ukraine would need to pay higher salaries and the government would have to commit to that.

Ukraine is aiming to have a standing army of 250,000 soldiers, says Novoye Vremya, up from 184,000 in 2013. It asked military officials for the results of the fifth conscription drive, of April-May 2015. They replied that "more than 90 per cent" of their recruitment goal was reached. But the magazine says its own research suggests the figure is 70 per cent.

In June, Segodnya news reported that during the fifth drive, only one in 12 recipients who received their conscription notice appeared at the recruitment office. (See footnote below.)

The Novoye Vremya report publishes a map showing the results across all of Ukraine of the recruitment goals that were set for the fifth drive. The article was headlined, 'It's the central regions of Ukraine that are sending soldiers to the front.' Results of 50 per cent or lower were scored in the west, south and center-east of the country. Zakarpattia, Ivano-Frankivsk and Chernivtsi regions scored less than half of the set goals, while in Transcarpathia, in the far southwest, it was less than 30 per cent.

Even these figures understate the problem because the goals for these regions were already set lower, proportionately, than the more "patriotic" regions in the center of the country, for example in Kyiv.

Vesti reports on August 3, "Military commissioners recognize that the sixth wave of conscription is faltering." It reports the conscription service in Kyiv as reporting results of only 23 per cent in the city.

The newspaper also reports very bad results in Cherkassy (center) region and , again, in the west of the country."In Cherkassy, half of those who could potentially be conscripted are hiding in Belarus while the other half is hiding in Kyiv."

The sixth conscription drive ends on Aug. 17.

Stanislav Gurak explains that western Ukraine is far away from the war and its inhabitants do not understand why they should die for the Donbas region in the east. As well, he notes, in Kharkiv region in eastern Ukraine (the city of the same name is the second largest in Ukraine) and in the south of the country, "pro-Russian sentiments remain strong".

Vladimir Kydon says the worst problem the military recruiters face is not the people who refuse to show up once their call to service is issued. No, the biggest headache of all is now the young men who are opting to "disappear" from the eyes of the government. They change their address and refuse to inform any branch of government. He says the phenomenon is now universal in large and small urban centers in Ukraine.

Economic migration

Even larger numbers of Ukrainians are fleeing the economic disaster which the civil war policy has deepened in the country.

Ukraine's total population today is approximately 42 million. That's down by ten million from 1991, the year that Ukraine seceded from the Soviet Union and a proposed, successor country.

There have been several million additional emigrants leaving Ukraine in the most recent years, further testament to the failure, nay disaster, of the economic policies of the new, capitalist elite which has come to own and control the capitalist economy of post-Soviet Ukraine.

A 2012 study pegged the number of Ukrainians living abroad at 5.3 million. The majority of those were living in Russia. Several million were living elsewhere in Europe, many as precarious workers.

Living standards for workers in Ukraine prior to 2014 were already significantly lower than in neighbouring countries, leave alone those in western Europe. That gap has increased sharply since the pro-austerity, Euromaidan government came to power in Kyiv last year.

Poland acts as an important "gateway" to western Europe. A report by Reuters in December 2014 explained, "According to Eurostat, 236,700 Ukrainians were granted residency permits by EU states last year, and 171,800 of those permits were granted in Poland, one of the main routes for Ukrainians to travel to western Europe."

"With the correct documents, a Ukrainian living in the European Union could legally seek work, pay tax, open a bank account and travel home.

"Without the correct documents, migrants in Europe are forced to work around the law. As a result, many spend years apart from their children who benefit from their earnings but not their presence."

The June 2014 issue (Vol. 3, #1) of Central and Eastern Europe Migration Review was devoted to Ukraine and reported there were as many as 635,000 Ukrainians living legally in Europe. (The introductory essay to that issue of the review is here.)

According to a new survey commissioned by the International Organisation for Migration, eight per cent of Ukrainians-some 3.5 million people-are hoping to leave the country and work abroad. The IOM survey also reports a sharp rise in the proportion of Ukrainians working abroad who are doing so illegally. The proportion has risen from 28 per cent in 2011 to 44 per cent today.

According to several reports received by New Cold War.org, many Ukrainian men, joined by their spouses in some cases, have taken refuge in the two regions which the Kyiv regime's 'ATO' has failed to conquer-Crimea and Donbas. This is ironic because many of these people are strident, pro-Maidan nationalists who supported the February 2014 coup.

Crimea is a preferred destination over Russia for nationalists to flee for a variety of reasons.

For one, it is relatively easy to flee there. Apart from very lengthy queues, there are no formal barriers to entry to Crimea from Ukraine.

Two, nationalists can console themselves that, according to their myths and beliefs, and according to official Ukrainian government policy, they have not left Ukraine at all. Crimea is considered by them as "Ukrainian" territory. No doubt, many of those fleeing to Crimea also hope that the myth of Crimea as Ukrainian territory will shield from the wrath of their fellow nationalists and the wrath of whatever government is in power when and if they return home.

Thirdly, and this will come as a surprise to those who take Western media propaganda as good coin, pro-Ukrainian nationalists have freedom of expression in Crimea. Here is a part of a report received by New Cold War.org from a correspondent in Ukraine who recently returned from Crimea:

"A lot of Maidan nationalists (especially of the middle class) write and post from Thailand, India, Turkey and other countries, calling upon Ukrainians at home to "defend the country" while they live comfortably abroad.

"As for the children of our rich businessmen and officials living abroad, there are a lot of jokes circulating on social media and in online media in Ukraine of how these "volunteer battalions" abroad are bravely defending Ukraine from "Russian aggression"... as they write from Paris and London. The brave writers have trouble pointing to evidence of Russian soldiers in their midst, but they soldier on in defending Europe from the Russian threat they say exists.

"In Crimea, I met many Ukrainian nationalists who come from western Ukraine and Kyiv. They wear symbolic Ukrainian dress and carry national flags and badges. No one touches them so long as they don't provoke the local people.

"I noted in speaking to some of them that they are angry with Petro Poroshenko. According to them, the "lost territories" (Crimea and Donbas) should be retaken (and the local populations deported to Russia). But not by themselves, they explain, because they say they are the "national elite" that is needed for the future resurrection of Ukraine." (End report citation.)

Mass avoidance of military conscription as well as rising economic emigration are glaring signs that the policies of the right-wing government in power in Kyiv, backed by the governments of the NATO military alliance, are deeply unpopular.

Many Ukrainian citizens are thus acting in their own ways, within their means, to oppose the policies of war and economic austerity of the Kyiv government that are causing so much harm and misery to their fellow citizens in the east of the country. The rise of the nationalist, extreme-right in Ukraine is a threat to all of Europe. Antiwar and anti-austerity Ukrainians deserve a much broader international hearing and solidarity than what they are receiving to date.

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 #10
Fort Russ/Boulevard Voltaire
http://fortruss.blogspot.com
August 13, 2015
Ukraine and the road to the fate of Yugoslavia
Ronald Zonca in Boulevard Voltaire
[http://www.bvoltaire.fr/ronaldzonca/lukraine-chemin-drame-yougoslave,199275?utm_source=La+Gazette+de+Boulevard+Voltaire&utm_campaign=5b902d5b47-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_71d6b02183-5b902d5b47-30598537&mc_cid=5b902d5b47&mc_eid=87d435d2c7]
Translated from French by Tom Winter

Le Figaro has just been echoing the declarations of Petro Poroshenko, President of Ukraine: he is requesting the creation of a peacekeeping force for peace in the east because .... "Putin wants all of Europe."

Out of the mouth of the Ukrainian President, we learn that Russia's ultimate goal is to conquer Europe! Nothing less. And the script is already written, with Finland and the Baltic countries for appetizers.

Fortunately, Super Petro 'Bros' Poroshenko saw it coming.

However, he does not see that the conflict against Donbass is maintained by nationalist elements that he no longer controls.

He does not see the mass emigration of young people out of his country.

He does not see that he has put its economy at a standstill by not securing European markets before shutting off the Russian ones.

He does not see that ethnic and religious divisions are getting more important every day.

He does not see that regions, harassed by the corruption and the looting orchestrated by the oligarchs in Kiev, want more autonomy.

He does not see that Ukraine should be a bridge between Eurasia and western Europe rather than a wall between the two.

As for the American-inspired rhetoric that would have "The President" as the shield for those values of freedom, democracy, and security in Europe, I think he did not understand that the European Union has nothing to do with such values. The Greek example is there to remind us.

I suggest that the Ukrainian President reflect on the history of how a European country got torn into pieces. It began with the establishment of ethnic and religious hatred. When the killings started, the blue helmets came in, and next, NATO to finish ruining the country -- and to take control of the ruins.

In the end, Yugoslavia disappeared, with the added bonus of creating a mafia state that serves as a base for all traffic in Europe, not to mention the US military base.

As a convinced European, he should think about Poland and Slovakia and whether a new Kosovo is aborning in Galicia.

The Ukrainian people deserve to resolve their problems themselves, without agents from outside adding an extra layer of corruption and plunder.

Mr. President, you are shouting to your people that you are working for the unity of Ukraine. In fact, you are putting Ukraine on the path of the break-up. The onset of the Blue Helmets will just be the first step. Knowing the fate of Yugoslavia, states will appear such as Galicia, the Republic of the Carpathians, Novorossia, and Kievia out of the former Ukraine.

Rather than inventing for yourself the grandiose destiny of a shield for Europe against an imaginary flood of Slavic hordes, be a bit more modest, and think of your country and not the interests of the US and NATO. A multi-ethnic, multi-confessional Ukraine that applies the principles of freedom, democracy and security, with an integral government, already seems to me to be a very heavy task for your shoulders.

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#11
www.rt.com
August 7, 2015
Ukrainian uranium: 'Nightmare' situation brewing

A nightmare scenario is that a dirty bomb could end up in the Middle East in the hands of terrorists, because great powers are not in control of nuclear weapons anymore, historian and political analyst Martin McCauley told RT.

According to Ukraine's security forces, they have seized nuclear material from a criminal gang that was trying to sell it. The substance is said to be Uranium-238, which can be used to create a so-called 'dirty bomb'

RT:There's little information about this seizure of uranium - no details have been revealed about those who tried to sell it, or their client. Do you have any thoughts on who could be behind it?

Martin McCauley: Well, there are various possibilities, because there are those in Ukraine who don't accept President [Petro] Poroshenko as president, they don't see him as legitimate - they would like to remove him. If one of those militias had a dirty bomb, it would be a very powerful weapon, and they could in fact blackmail a president. That's one option. The other option is that there might be a terrorist organization. One can name a lot of terrorist organizations starting with IS, which would like a dirty bomb. If they could get their hands on it, they can do a lot of damage. So in the present very dangerous environment in Ukraine, there is risk that this in fact could happen, because uranium can, as you say, be enriched so it becomes plutonium. Plutonium goes into a nuclear bomb.

RT: Uranium can be used to make a dirty bomb - a threat increasingly discussed by officials in the UK, where you are. What does the fact that it's being sold on the black market in Ukraine tell us about the security situation in the country?

MM: It tells that the security is very insecure, that it's very fragile, because plutonium should be locked up or anything which could in fact make a dirty bomb should be under lock and key and guarded by the military. It should be a state-controlled operation. It appears now, if this is accurate, that somebody has entered one of these garrisons and obtained this very dangerous element so that he can make money out of it. Perhaps he did have a person on the inside and therefore, you have to look then at a very dangerous and fragile security environment in Ukraine, where one can say that the military is not really in control of the country.

RT:Ukrainian officials said the amounts of seized uranium were small. How real is the threat of a dirty bomb, both to the Ukraine and to other countries?

MM: Yes, because you start up with uranium and you enrich it and it becomes plutonium and then you proceed to a bomb. On the black market there are plenty of people who know what to do and how to make a bomb, because making a nuclear bomb is no longer difficult - a lot of people understand physics.

The difficulty is for those who are trying to control the spread of nuclear weapons; it is extremely difficult to do so. Even though they may have got hold of a very small portion of uranium, you then add that to another piece of uranium, and so on. One of the nightmares is that a dirty bomb will end up in the Middle East in the hands of a terrorist organization, which would then be a disaster. Therefore, this is very bad news that makes everyone more nervous than before. Everyone has said that a nuclear bomb can be made. It is not really the great powers, it's not really Russia, China, France, Britain and the US, Pakistan, Israel, India who control nuclear weapons now. Other countries can make them. And Ukraine after all was a nuclear power until the early 1990s. So the expertise and the knowledge must be there. Ukraine had a former nuclear weapons industry in places like Dnepropetrovsk before. So the knowledge, the expertise, and so on is within Ukraine. Let's hope it doesn't really escalate into a dirty bomb.

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 #12
Facebook
August 12, 2015
New Striking Revelations in the Maidan Massacre Trial are Again Ignored
By Ivan Katchanovski
School of Political Studies & Department of Communication, University of Ottawa, Canada
https://www.facebook.com/ivan.katchanovski/posts/1075861679110384

New striking revelations in the Maidan massacre trial are again not reported by the Ukrainian and Western media and ignored by governments in the West. Like it was the case with similar revelations during previous trial sessions, the court hearings held on August 3d after another long break revealed more evidence supporting my study findings that the protesters were massacred from the Maidan-controlled locations, such as the Hotel Ukraina, as a part of a false flag operation and that the government investigation was falsified for this reason. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f45Fj3Y0Gec
http://russialist.org/facebook-ivan-katchanovski-unreporte.../

Lawyers representing two Berkut policemen, who are charged with the killings of 39 protesters, stated in court on August 3d that the prosecution case was falsified and that relatives of victims should ask Andrii Parubii and Petro Poroshenko about those who gave an order to massacre the protesters (3h02m; 3h40m. The new posted version of the video is 7 minutes shorter than the one cited in this post). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f45Fj3Y0Gec Parubii was the leader of neo-Nazi Patriot of Ukraine in the 1990s and the head of the Maidan Self-Defence during the "Euromaidan," and he is presently the first deputy head of the Ukrainian parliament. Poroshenko, who is currently president of Ukraine, was one of "Euromaidan" leaders.

As an example of a falsification of the prosecution case, a defence lawyer revealed that several investigative case documents mention an eyewitness, who repeatedly stated that he saw a sniper shooting from the second floor of the Hotel Ukraina and killing Serhii Kemsky a few meters away from him. But the prosecution and its on-site reconstruction report simply ignored his testimony and a medical expert report in the case and stated without any justification or any other witnesses provided that Kemsky was killed by the Berkut police. This medical expert report found that Kemsky was shot in an upper right side of his body and that this bullet exited on a lower left side of his body. (3h06-12). A Belgian TV video, which was filmed from the Hotel Ukraina, shows that Kemsky at the moment of his killing had the right side of his body facing the hotel (4:36). http://nieuws.vtm.be/video?page=1298&aid=81088 This video corroborates the eyewitness testimony and the direction of the wounds which all point to shooters from this Maidan-controlled hotel and not from Berkut barricades in front of the advancing protesters on the Instytutska Street.

Synchronization of this Belgian video with a time-stamped video compilation and other videos shows that Kemsky was shot dead at 9:28:33am. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYjEp1C4hzI Mykola Dziavulsky was shot in his heart a meter away within 20 seconds afterwards. This photo shows him in a military-style camouflage already on the ground when Kemsky had been carried away nearby. https://www.facebook.com/maydan18february/photos/pb.607486945998805.-2207520000.1438834689./686025454811620/?type=3&theater
A Ukrainian TV report a day after the massacre showed the Dziavulsky's passport punctured with a bullet hole. The bullet hole angle indicated that he was shot from a top right direction from the Hotel Ukraina; and a protester in the video stated this (16:03) https://youtu.be/fEQth3CVMGU?t=16m3s

Another grainy video shows that Anatolii Korneev in a green helmet was killed near the same spot at 9:29:25am when he tried to back away (0:32). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRPvUIOhxlI His wife in her testimony during the trial on August 3d revealed that based on a medical expert report of his wounds he was also shot from a right to the left direction (1h51). This direction and his apparent position at the moment of shooting point towards the Hotel Ukraina. The same video shows Oleksander Shcherbaniuk being shot a few meters away in 16 seconds (0:48 or 9:29:41am). His apparent positions when he was shot twice and his wounds, which based on their description during the trial and in photos were first to the upper right chest area and then to his heart, are also consistent with "snipers" at the Hotel Ukraina. https://www.facebook.com/maydan18february/photos/pcb.686025491478283/686025398144959/?type=1&theater

Other protesters were killed in the same area when they were behind the advancing protesters. Nazar Voitovych, who was 17 years old, was killed there at 9:27am. Reported direction of his entry wound in his face and an exit wound in the back of his torso points to a shooter from a high position. This indicates the Hotel Ukraina. A description by an eyewitness among the protesters about a guy killed in his head from the Hotel Ukraina matches the circumstances, place, and time of the Voitovych killing. https://youtu.be/lMJcGip5yio?t=6m58s

The same eyewitness said that he saw four protesters killed in that area of Instytutska Street and two others killed near a stairway leading to Zhovtnevyi Palace. In another interview, he stated that the protesters were mostly shot from high positions, such as the Hotel Ukraina. https://youtu.be/vRC2WcT9U9E?t=3m39s
Other witnesses, specifically a Maidan protester wounded there at 9:24am, confirm that they were shot by "snipers" from the hotel. In his interview to "Vesti newspaper, Oleh Sukhynsky said that he saw that he was shot from the Hotel Ukraina. His wound on the right thigh coincided with the position of advancing protesters and the shot from the direction of the hotel.

My study found that at least 11 Maidan protesters were killed in the same area within four minutes before and four minutes after the killing of Kemsky. Serhii Baidovsky was shot dead there at 9:24/9:25am, Andrii Movchan at 9:27am, Ihor Kostenko at 9:28am, Serhii Bondarchuk at 9:29am, Valerii Opanasiuk at 9:31am, and Ivan Bliock at 9:32/9:33am. The trial revealed that the prosecution charged Berkut members with killing all of them but it did not even determine the exact time and place of many of these killings. This concerns nearly half of the 39 protesters.

The trial proceedings revealed that the relatives of the victims, the prosecution, and the defence during their deliberations in court about circumstances of killings of the protesters relied on widely publicized videos, which were filmed by Maidan activists and had moments of the killings and "snipers" at the Hotel Ukraina edited out or not filmed. The Belgian TV video, which showed the moment of the killing of Kemsky, and the Ruptly broadcast, which showed the moments of killings of Korneev and Shcherbaniuk, were never acknowledged during the trial.

A recently posted video, filmed from 9:28:41am till 9:32:04am when many of these protesters were killed and wounded, shows that at least some of the protesters in the rear of the advancing group also noticed gunshots from the hotel in their direction. First references to the shots from the hotel in the video were made a dozen seconds after Kemsky was killed, and they were repeated a few more times when other protesters, specifically Kostenko, were shot dead in this area. The video zoomed to specific open windows on the 12th and 9th floor of the hotel, which is another indication that there were multiple "snipers" there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akVXLbkJsX0

A ballistic expert examination of a bullet found in his body did not determine a precise weapon used to kill Kemsky. It concluded that he could have been shot from some twenty different types of weapons, including rifles and Kalashnikov assault rifles. However, the sounds of gunshots in the specific moments when Kemsky and other protesters in the area were killed indicate use of rifles or shotguns, because these shots resembled sounds of whips and not shorter sounds of AK assault rifles that the special company of the Berkut was shooting from. One of the main reasons that the Maidan massacre was attributed to snipers is because protesters and journalists with firearms experience distinguished such rifle shots from AK shots by their sound. But the Council of Europe report noted that the Ukrainian government investigation failed even with help of specialized equipment to distinguish rifle and AK shots heard in videos. The government investigation claimed that the problem was poor sound quality in videos of the massacre. The Prosecutor General of Ukraine from the far right Svoboda party stated in June 2014 that he gave videos of the Maidan massacre to the FBI to enhance their quality. But it is noteworthy that results of such an involvement of the FBI in the Maidan massacre investigation have not been made public. http://lb.ua/.../06/13/269720_gpu_peredala_fbr_video_mest.html

There were many journalists present during the trial on August 3d. But the trial revelations were not reported by any Ukrainian and Western media. The Radio Svoboda previously devoted a story to the killing of Kemsky, but their report from the trial omitted even the revelations about his killing from the Maidan-controlled Hotel Ukraina.
http://ua.krymr.com/content/article/26705168.html
http://www.radiosvoboda.org/content/news/27167241.html

The killing of Shcherbaniuk and the presence of the Right Sector during his funeral were mentioned in at least dozen stories in major British, Israeli, Scandinavian, and US media as an evidence of the diversity of the protesters, their massacre by the government snipers, and relatively tolerant or marginal nature of the Right Sector. For instance, such stories were run by the BBC, the Guardian, the New Republic, and the New York Review of Books. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/.../ukraines-neonazis-jewish_... http://www.nybooks.com/.../20.../mar/01/ukraine-haze-propaganda/ An estimated tenfold overrepresentation of minorities, such as this Jewish protestor, among the victims suggested immediately after the massacre that a probability of this happening by chance was close to zero. My study found various evidence of the involvement of the Right Sector, a bloc of radical nationalist and neo-Nazi organizations, in the Maidan massacre. https://www.academia.edu/.../The_Snipers_Massacre_on_the_Maid... Recently, its former member publicly admitted the involvement of a neo-Nazi faction of the Right Sector in killings of policemen with live ammunition on the Maidan.

Not only revelations from the trial but also various evidence and academic research pointing to the Maidan massacre as a false flag operation, which involved the far right and oligarchic parties, continue to be deliberately ignored or dismissed with rare exceptions by the mainstream media in both Ukraine and the West for political reasons. These revelations and the new evidence would be included in an updated and revised version of my Maidan snipers' massacre paper prepared for the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association.

Засідання від 03 08 2015 у справі про «Вбивства 39 людей 20 02 2014 під час Євромайдану»
Онлайн трансляція засідання «Вбивства 39 людей 20.02.2014 під час Євромайдану»

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#13
AFP
August 13, 2015
Ukraine bid to shut out Russia with border 'wall' falters
By Dmytro Gorshkov

Senkivka (Ukraine) (AFP) - A freshly-dug anti-tank ditch running along a short stretch of metal fence topped with barbed wire marks the start of a new border defence that Ukraine hopes will protect it from Russia.

Dubbed the "wall", the ambitious project to seal up Ukraine's porous 2,000-kilometre (1,200-mile) frontier with its ex-Soviet neighbour was announced in March 2014 after Moscow seized the Crimea peninsula from Kiev.

But over a year later, only a small fraction of the $250-million (225-million-euro) project that Kiev hopes could help withstand a Russian invasion has been built.

At the Senkivka border post around 200 kilometres north of Kiev, just a few hundred metres (yards) of newly-built wire mesh barriers have been erected.

Emblazoned with a large trident, the national emblem, the small checkpoint only saw a dozen or so trucks pass through it in the course of an hour, an AFP correspondent noted in July.

Despite its name, the "wall" is not intended to be a monolithic concrete barrier but instead a highly sophisticated system, combining defence measures with modern electronic surveillance tools.

State border service chief Viktor Nazarenko said that the work on the northern section of the fence is scheduled to be completed by 2018.

"In three years, this section of the border will be fully equipped to make it impossible to cross the border illegally, either for separate groups of people and vehicles or for armed forces," he said.

The border between Ukraine and Russia covers 1,974 kilometres.

Since the start of the pro-Russian insurgency in east Ukraine after the ouster last year of a Russian-backed president in Kiev, Ukraine has lost control of some 410 kilometres of its frontier in the east.

More than 7,000 people have been killed in the fighting.

Kiev's pro-Western government accuses Russia of pouring arms and troops across the rebel-held part of the frontier to fuel the conflict and insists it will never be secure until its border is back under its thumb.

The project will include "some combat systems to be able to destroy the enemy's military vehicles and manpower", Nazarenko said.

"It is necessary to keep building the hi-tech border to prevent terrorists, arms and drugs coming in from the Russian side," Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk told border service officials last month.

Budget slashed

Ukraine began work on the barrier in September last year but the project has been delayed by its enormous cost to the cash-strapped state.

Drained by the war in the east, the economy of the country of around 40 million contracted by nearly seven percent last year and is projected to do even worse in 2015.

Initially estimated at $1 billion, Kiev was forced to slash the budget for the border fence by 75 percent.

Even then, the funding did not arrive on time, leaving some of the construction companies involved in the project out of pocket.

Bureaucratic problems common in post-Soviet Ukraine -- in this instance about which state body should oversee the work -- have added to the setbacks, with the border service eventually put in charge.

"I ask you to continue to work on the European Rampart project," Yatsenyuk told the border officials.

But analysts have expressed doubts as to whether Ukraine can see the project through.

"In the short term, this project will be difficult to implement primarily for economic reasons," said Volodymyr Fesenko of Kiev's Penta think-tank.

"It needs huge amounts of money that right now Ukraine doesn't have."

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 #14
Kyiv Post
August 14, 2015
Ukraine allows seven Crimean athletes to compete for Russia
By Veronika Melkozerova

The Federation of Track and Field Athletics of Ukraine has officially given permission to seven Crimean athletes to represent Russia in international competitions. In return, Ukraine received $170,000 in compensation.

The former Ukrainian athletes include: ex-javelin champion of Europe, Vira Rebryk, and her colleague Rustem Dremdgy; Olexiy Sokyrsky (hammer throw); Valeria Mara (a runner); Ruslan Perestyuk (a sprinter); Yevhen Semenenko (a jumper); and Olena Belyakova (discus throw).

They have received Russian citizenship and asked shortly after the Kremlin's annexation of Crimea in March 2014 to be able to represent Russia."We calculated what the state spent on their athletic training. The compensation is, in fact, 50 percent of the sum Ukraine spent on them," explained Olexandr Danylenko, spokesperson of the Federation of Track and Field Athletics of Ukraine to the Kyiv Post.

Some of that money will support the newly created Federation of Track and Field Athletics of Crimea."We've recreated that organization for other Crimean athletes, who kept Ukrainian citizenship, left Crimea for the mainland and wanted to represent it in the Ukrainian championships," Danylenko said.

According to him, there are still more than 2,000 athletes from the peninsula who want to compete for Ukraine.

More than seven Crimean athletes have changed citizenship to Russian.

Ukrainian pentathlete Hanna Buryak also became Russian in September 2014.

A month earlier Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a Russian passport to chess champion Kateryna Lagno from Lviv.

"It is a common situation, without regard to Crimea annexation. Athletes often change citizenship and teams. But in field athletics one can't do it quickly, as in soccer for example. Before starting to compete for a new country an athlete needs to be banned from competition for three years. That means he is not allowed taking part in championships," said Danylenko.

According to him, the ban period could be shortened only by the request of state organization. And the All-Russia Athletic Federation made such request to Ukraine in the beginning of 2015 but payed the indemnity only in August. The process of negotiation was temporized because at first Ukraine demanded $150,000 for Vira Rebryk only, and Russian side could not afford to pay such compensation for an athlete. But then Ukraine brought down the price.

All Ukrainian athletes who became Russian citizens and want to compete for Russia at the 2016 Olympics in Beijing still need to get special permission from the National Olympic Committee of Ukraine.

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 #15
Sputnik
August 13, 2015
'Yeltsin Never Gave a Damn About Accepting Crimea Back Into Russia'

Those who continue to call Crimea's reunification with Russia an "annexation", apparently aren't aware of the fact that back in 1991, while signing the Belovezhskaya accord on the dissolution of the USSR, then-Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk almost gave up the Peninsula to Russia, but former Russian President Yeltsin did not want to accept it.

Crimea's first and only President, Yuri Meshkov, has revealed that Crimea could have become part of Russia long ago.

Unfortunately for the predominantly Russian-speaking, ethnically Russian population living there at the time, the first President of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, "did not give a damn" about Crimea.

In an interview with the Russian online newspaper Lenta.ru, Meshkov recalled what the first President of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, said to him once about the status of the peninsula.

Back in December 1991, while signing the Belovezhskaya accord on the dissolution of the USSR and creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States, Kravchuk was ready to give up Crimea with "all its Tatar problems".

Then-president Yeltsin, however did not care much about the area, and did not move a finger to accept the gift.

Moreover, in May 1992 the Supreme Soviet of Russia declared the 1954 transfer of Crimea had "no legal force", because it was adopted "in violation of the Constitution (Fundamental Law) of the Russian SFSR and legislative process".

However, Yeltsin once again showed no interest in the event.

Yuri Meshkov also recalled that Crimea had wanted to be part of Russia ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In May 1992, what was then called the Supreme Council of Crimea and is now known as the State Council of Crimea, declared its conditional independence from Ukraine, dependent on a referendum that was planned for August of the same year.

However, the Ukrainian Parliament then ruled that the declaration was illegal, and gave the Supreme Council a deadline of 20 May to rescind it. Although the Supreme Council complied with the order on 22 May, the referendum was merely postponed rather than cancelled.

The referendum idea was resurrected in 1994 after Yuriy Meshkov was elected President of Crimea in January.

Voters however were not questioned "Are you for an independent Republic of Crimea in union with other states?", as was planned in 1992, but rather whether they were in favor of greater autonomy within Ukraine, whether residents could have dual Russian and Ukrainian citizenship, and whether presidential decrees should have the status of laws.

All three proposals were approved.

The President of the Republic of Crimea was the head of the Republic of Crimea, Ukraine from February 16, 1994 until the time of its liquidation on March 17, 1995. The post was abolished because it contradicted the Constitution of Ukraine.

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 #16
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
August 13, 2015
Three historical principles of Russian foreign policy for Washington
History has shown countless times that Moscow will not observe any economic or security arrangement that the U.S. or its European allies craft without the participation of Russia. As a result, Washington should take greater steps to integrate, rather than isolate, Moscow.
By Nikolay Shevchenko
Nikolay Shevchenko is a Ph.D. student at Doshisha University in Japan, researching Russian foreign and security policy. He holds degrees in international relations and international journalism. He is a contributing member of the Atlantic Community, a founding editor of The Gadfly, and a guest editor at the Global Ethics Network. You can tweet him at @nickolaysh.

Contemporary Russian foreign policy is a product of colossal disasters and titanic triumphs. Consider that the Russian Empire almost singlehandedly thwarted Napoleon's relentless expansion only to suffer a humiliating loss soon after in the Crimean War. Russia witnessed the tragedy of the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution only to break Germany's advanced war machine during the Second World War and come to dominate the world scene just two decades later.

In addition, the history of Russian foreign policy shows how contradictory it has been from one era to the next. For example, in 1815 Tsar Alexander I established the Holy Alliance that incorporated the courts of Russia, Austria and Prussia into a bastion of autocracy and conservatism amidst revolutionary Europe. Yet, a century later, a new Soviet leadership declared its intention to spread the Bolshevik Revolution beyond the Soviet Union's borders.

This historical rollercoaster means that Russian foreign policy has developed a certain character that still guides it today. Acknowledging the unique features of Russian foreign policy may save other countries the trouble of antagonizing the Russian nation. Today, a few principles passed down by history may help the U.S. to avoid facing a truculent and bullying Russia. Designing its strategy towards Russia in accordance with those principles may significantly improve the image of the U.S. inside Russia, too.

Russia views itself as a European power

The most fundamental principle that ought to be recognized by policymakers is that Russia sees itself as a full-fledged European power. Letting Russia out of the European orbit is bound to hurt other states.

The post-Versailles years demonstrate the recklessness of negligent disregard for Russia's non-participation in European affairs. On March 3, 1918 a new Bolshevik government had signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk that ended Russia's participation in World War I on disastrous terms. Later, Leon Trotsky, the first People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs, virtually renounced the very institution of foreign policy, save for periodic calls for world revolution.
A former European powerhouse shrunk and sealed itself off from European tides. But the political vacuum did not last long and by April 1922, Russia had been dragged back into a precarious state of affairs in Europe.

In 1922, British Prime Minister Lloyd George gathered European powers at the Genoa Conference to discuss the post-war economic order. On the agenda was the subject of reparations to be paid by a defeated Germany. Soviet delegates arrived fearing other participants would propose the Soviet Union to acknowledge a tsarist debt and pay it off by sharing part of the German reparations.

Had the proposition been voiced, it would have put the weakened and virtually friendless Soviet Union into an unfavorable position of confronting Germany. Dedicated to avoiding the emergence of a hostile Germany by all means, Georgi Chicherin, the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, secretly met with his German counterpart on April 16 to draft an agreement that would establish favorable diplomatic relations between the two European pariahs. Through neglect and disdain, the war victors unknowingly gave momentum to a fatal friendship between the two revisionist powers that eventually culminated in the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.

Today, the European policy of the U.S. would be much more constructive if it acknowledged the Russian claim of being a European power. According to the Russian psyche, Moscow earned its place in the top tier of Europe's great powers when Russian troops marched through the heart of Europe in 1812. Since then, no major European settlement has come about without direct Russian participation. And if it did, the results were highly dubious, as the example above demonstrates.

What it practically means for Russia-U.S. relations today is that Moscow will not observe any economic or security arrangement that the U.S. and its European allies craft singlehandedly. If its interests are not accommodated, Russia will work to spoil any arrangement even if it brings self-inflicted harm. Labeling Russia a "European outcast" will only instigate further truculent behavior.

Bluntly put, the current enmity between Russia and the U.S. is caused by what Moscow considers an unlawful encroachment of an outside power into the European sphere. Russia sees active U.S. engagement in European affairs as a distortion of a natural balance-of-power in the region that would have otherwise assumed a different form. Moscow feels that the U.S. presence in Europe comes at Russia's expanse.

To prevent the further alienation of Moscow, Washington ought to refine its European strategy for it to fully accommodate Russia. This will allow the U.S. to safely preserve the current European order intact while greatly diminishing Russia's opposition to U.S. interests in other strategically important parts of the globe.

Russia has difficulty forming alliances with non-European powers

The second principle passed down by history is that Russia does not easily build genuine and lasting alliances with non-European states. Nevertheless, thwarting all Russian maneuvers on the European continent will push Russia to develop an Asian vector of its foreign policy more actively. The U.S. must avoid this scenario by all means.

With a wise U.S. foreign policy, a genuine alliance between Russia and China is unlikely to spring forth in the coming decades. Russia has historically been unwilling to forge an alliance of equals with any Asian power, however colossal its capabilities were. As Russia views the world, a European power must not compromise its status in the European league of powers by binding itself into a permanent alliance with an Asian power. The deep distrust of a fellow Communist regime in China that developed among the people of the Soviet Union (with the blessing of its political elite) illustrates just how individualist Russians are in the design and practice of foreign policy.

For Russia, Asian states count as long as they advance the interests of European players in their confined playing field. Russia will be all too eager to exploit any opportunity to undermine the current position of the U.S. in Asia, especially if it helps to divert the attention of the U.S. away from European affairs. Since some of Beijing's recent moves in East Asia are already troublesome enough for the United States, U.S. interests may soon dictate that Washington take a tougher stance on China's expansionist tendencies in the region.

If this scenario plays out and Russia's Asian vector is not checked, the U.S. will be forced to deal with a coalition of a benign expansionist and a vocal facilitator. Containing China would be a lot harder goal to achieve if Beijing has a valuable ally, however artificial - an ally, by the way, which has never failed to demonstrate its contempt for the global leadership role of the U.S.

Confronting two powers with veto authority in the UN Security Council simultaneously may well undermine the ability of the U.S. to effectively manage affairs of the East Asian region. The worst-case scenario in this regard is the failure of the U.S. to stand by Japan, Taiwan, or any other of its East Asian allies in their game of chicken with China. Should this happen, history would credit Russia with facilitating a "Chinese crack" in the global leadership era of the U.S.-a fracture that is most likely to spring in the turbulent East Asian region.

The Sino-Soviet clash occurred in 1969. In 1972, Richard Nixon capitalized on growing antagonism between China and the Soviet Union by visiting the People's Republic of China in an attempt to normalize relations with Beijing and rebalance the geopolitics of the Cold War. Today, substituting "Nixon goes to China" with "Obama goes to Russia" might help the White House normalize relations with Russia.

Russia values realism - not idealism - in foreign policy

The third historical principle concerns the language of foreign policy practice. Moscow will comprehend Washington only if it speaks to Russia in Teddy Roosevelt's language ("Speak softly, and carry a big stick"), not in Woodrow Wilson's language. While the U.S. willingly accepts the Wilsonian rejection of systemic causes of international conflicts and criticizes individual violators of international norms, Moscow continuously highlights structural roots of international quarrels.

The Kremlin rarely mocks the U.S. for aggressive currents in its foreign policy, but it persistently accuses Washington of undermining a systemic balance, be it via NATO's eastward expansion or via humanitarian intervention into Third World countries.

For Russia, powerful states are more Roosevelt's giants "engaged in a death wrestle," rather than Wilsonian liberty-loving commonwealths. However genuine Wilsonian language might sound to the American ear, Russians will inevitably dismiss it as perfidious cant-a disguise for American attempts at systemic domination.

To be fair, Russia has appeared to resort to idealism in its foreign policy at times. There was a reason Roosevelt compared Tsar Alexander I of Russia to Woodrow Wilson and the Emperor's conservative Holy Alliance designed to preserve autocracy in Europe to Wilson's League of Nations proclaimed to spread liberty and peace. However different the ends might appear, the means could have hardly been any more uniform.

Decades later, the Soviet Union had revived the idealist tradition in its foreign policy, but only on the surface. Material, quite often military, support to various countries in Africa and Latin America came under the banner of helping ideologically friendly regimes all over the world. However, a hallmark of American idealist foreign policy, as opposed to Russian idealist foreign policy, is the degree of popular support this philosophy enjoys in the States.

Many in the U.S. may genuinely believe that the spread of democracy diminishes outbreaks of international conflicts. To the Russian ear, this proposition doesn't ring true. Few deluded themselves that the Soviets supported Cuba out of warm feelings to a brotherly Communist regime and not out of its vital geopolitical location. A popular Soviet anecdote about a Congolese independence leader is telling in this regard:

"Tell me honestly, do you like Lumumba?" a Soviet ambassador was asked during a reception organized by a leader of a new regime in an African country.
"Yes, I like him!" replies the Ambassador, a dedicated Communist.
"Then eat one more piece."

With centuries of lies and deceptions, the Russian people have developed an appropriate level of historical cynicism and skepticism about domestic and international politics. American idealism is ridiculed quite often by Russians, both by ordinary citizens and members of the political elite. This is why a quintessentially American remark about a request to extradite the former agent of National Security Agnecy (NSA), Edward Snowden, - "Russia is not a country that extradites human rights activists!" - sounded so mocking when it came out of Russian President Vladimir Putin's mouth.

Russia does not believe in idealism in international affairs. Practically, this means that any superfluous language of foreign policy should be dropped and that a genuine agreement with Russia must be formulated in a straightforward language of power that Moscow respects. Swapping Russian support of a matter particularly critical for U.S. interests for carte blanche in an area critical to Russia's concerns will facilitate the Russia-U.S. dialogue. An operational expression of this U.S. strategy would be to abandon attempts to secure Russian collaboration in any institutional framework and instead cultivate bilateral communication channels that could yield much more constructive results.

The history of Russian foreign policy is chaotic. Throughout the centuries self-contradictions have been the most representative feature of Russia's international behavior. This, however, must not perplex contemporaries struggling to understand causes that drive Russia today. Even if those appear well hidden, it is possible to derive a few principles passed down by history that determine Russia's international behavior today.

At a minimum, one ought to remember that Russia views itself as a full-fledged European power that fails to easily build lasting alliances with non-European states and rejects an overly idealistic approach to international politics. Observing these three principles might well save the U.S. and its allies the trouble of facing a truculent Russia.

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 #17
Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs
www.carnegiecouncil.org
July 30, 2015
"Soft Power": The Values that Shape Russian Foreign Policy
By DAVID C. SPEEDIE
Director, U.S. Global Engagement Program, Senior Fellow

This article is in anticipation of an upcoming Carnegie Council project on Russian "soft power" and values that shape foreign policy.
Registration information is available online at: http://www.carnegiecouncil.org/calendar/data/0582.html

In the increasingly frigid environment of U.S.-Russia relations, much attention is given to what may be seen as Russia's strategic "interests." (Of course, much of the policymaking class in the West seems to suggest that Russia is entitled to no "interests" whatsoever.) Of at least equal significance for understanding Russian attitudes, however, is a grasp of the values, the moral framework for Russia's foreign policy.

A valuable resource for this understanding is found in a recent article, "Russia's Orthodox Soft Power," by the University of Rhode Island scholar Nicolai Petro, who explores the "symphonic relationship" between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian state and the manner in which they both utilize the term Russky mir, or Russian World. For the discussion herein of what this entails, we are indebted to Professor Petro.

As Petro observes, the term Russky mir has been wrongly interpreted by some Western analysts as the "perverse intersection" between the Russian state and the Russian Orthodox Church; in reality, the term is employed differently by each party. Where the state uses it as a tool for expanding Russia's cultural and political influence, the Church views it as a spiritual concept linked to God's objective for the rebuilding of a Holy Rus. The relationship between the two provides a popular and definable framework for Russian foreign policy. Values play a significant role in policy formulation and, throughout modern history, three constants dictate how Russia responds to Western actions: sovereignty, capability to defend that sovereignty, and loyalty to those who share Russia's sense of honor. (The 2014 conflict Ukraine exacerbated the perceived values gap between the West and Russia, yet Russia claims it occupies the higher moral ground by defending its core values of honor in the context of the unique historical, religious, and cultural bonds with Ukraine.)

In summary: The significance of religion in Russian life allows the state to garner huge social capital from having the blessing of the Orthodox Church, and likewise the Church benefits from the relationship by disseminating its message of Christianity worldwide via Russian foreign policy. For the state, Russky Mir is a political/cultural tool for strengthening domestic stability, worldwide status, and influence in neighboring states. For the Church, it is a religious foundation essential for reversing the secularization of society (which it sees as an unwelcome evolution already well underway in the West).

Under President Vladimir V. Putin we have seen a renewed foreign policy assertiveness-castigated in the West, but welcomed in Russia as a renewal of national honor. Yet it was not until the Valdai Club meeting in 2013 that Putin presented a much more sophisticated vision of Russia, as a 21st century Orthodox power. In his speech, Putin claimed that Western leaders have caused a loss of human dignity by promoting a secular worldview and rejecting Christianity. He highlighted Russia's "unique experience" of mutual enrichment of diverse cultures within its borders and urged its citizens to feel a common identity.

The exercise of soft power is self-evidently at work in the state's imperative to build Russia's status and influence abroad, and it is this one aspect, rather than the religious, that we shall briefly elaborate here. While Russia's growing estrangement from the West and Western institutions has resulted in a number of Eastward-facing economic and political alternatives-the Eurasian Economic Union, the economic and military overtures to China, robust support for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, for example-Russia has by no means "pivoted" (to use the term of choice in Washington these days) completely from the West. In a recent edited volume, Eurasianism and the European Far Right: Reshaping the Europe-Russia Relationship, (ed. Marlene Laruelle, Lexington Books 2015), we make note of "Russia's rising soft power among European parties and countries that feel victims of the European Union 'technocracy'" (Speedie, foreword p.viii). Most recently and obviously, there has been warmth in the Russia-Greece dialogue, where President Putin has won approval both from the leftist Syriza government and from the far-right ANEL, or "Independent Greeks" party. A similar spectrum of approval appears in Hungary, from both the Orban administration and (regrettably, some would say) the far-right Jobbik party. Indeed, with the predictable exception of Poland, Russia is doing pretty well in the court of policymaking opinion in the Visegrad countries-the Czech Republic, Slovakia, as well as Hungary are opposed to further European sanctions against Russia. And it is not merely in Europe's East that Russia is enjoying positive relations. Marine Le Pen and her far-right Front Nationale movement (FN) in France are perhaps the most forceful of the Western European parties in opposition to both the national and EU establishments. It is by no means beyond the bounds of possibility that Ms. Le Pen may be elected next president of France in 2016. As part of this anti-Western establishment message, Le Pen has embraced the FN's "common values" with Putin's Russia; "These are the values of European civilization," she has said, calling for "an advanced strategic alliance" with Moscow.

There are three important conclusions to be drawn from this brief overview of Russian soft power and burgeoning influence to her east and west, namely:

The notion that Russia, as a result of the war in Ukraine, is "totally isolated," as the Obama administration has repeatedly claimed, is simply false.
The directions in which Russia now looks for economic, security, and political alliances are not the first choices of post-Soviet Russia. Both presidents Yeltsin and Putin floated the request for EU and NATO membership, and were rebuffed. (A wise Russian policy expert warned this writer some 20 years ago that Russia did not wish to "get into bed with" China, but that U.S.-led Western policy might render this the only bedfellow option.)

The frigidity of Russia-West relations have already fostered a spirit of comity with individuals and movements-as, for example, with the far-right movements in Europe described above-that we may see as a regrettable version of the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" syndrome.

Finally, all this was manifestly avoidable; this is surely the conclusion to be drawn from the observation by several Russia-watchers that the dialogue, or lack thereof, is at a level below that which applied even in the darker days of the Cold War. Is it reversible? Perhaps, if we pay heed to such initiatives as the recently established American Committee for East-West Accord, headed by former Senator Bill Bradley. The committee's recommendations fall into two broad categories: protecting and preserving critical arms control agreements, such as the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty; and, perhaps most immediately crucial, reopening channels of dialogue and communication, such as the NATO-Russia Council, and taking advantage of new fora such as the regional discussion group, "Normandy Four."  The committee's suggestions are sensible and selective; let us hope they find attention, and traction, in Washington.

The author wishes to thank research assistant Lindsey Macdonald.

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 #18
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
August 13, 2015
TROIKA REPORT: Food cremation is symbol of Moscow's defiance of the West
RBTH presents its weekly analytical program TROIKA REPORT, featuring a look at three of the most high-profile recent developments in international affairs.
By Sergey Strokan and Vladimir Mikheev
 
1. Engaging the West
Food cremation: Symbol of Moscow's defiance of the West
 
Russia's standoff with the West took another twist last week when a controversial move by the government to crack down on illegal food imports awoke heated debate in Russian society. The destruction by bulldozer of more than 300 tons of illegally imported Western food by Russian authorities last week raised eyebrows and even indignation, while experts queried by Troika Report also see a political message in this act of defiance amid the war of sanctions.
Moscow's motives seem to be manifold. The products condemned to being burned, crushed or buried apparently arrived with documents describing them as concrete mixture or chewing gum, in what clearly amounts to a smuggling operation. The legality of these imports is dubious at least.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesperson Dmitry Peskov defined the destroyed food products as "pure contraband without any kind of certification whatsoever."

"No one will take the responsibility to guarantee that the food, which may even look appetizing, is not dangerous for a person's health," he said.

In accordance with the ruling of Rosselkhoznadzor, the state agricultural watchdog, the smuggled products will be either burned or buried, while meat is to be processed into fodder for livestock. However, the decision to dispose of uncertified imports was considered by many citizens as controversial if not sacrilegious, given that food in Russia has an added value due to the legacy of the "lean years" of the late Soviet period, let alone events such as the Siege of Leningrad.

The contentious character of this act and the symbolism of food destruction were not missed by the expert community. A known critic of the Kremlin, Alexander Goltz, who is deputy editor-in-chief of the opposition publication Yezhednevny Zhurnal's website, had this to say to Troika Report:

"There is no doubt for me that this is some kind of symbolic act. To be honest, the Russian authorities are testing our nation: How far they can go? Recently, they initiated a public vote on the restoration of the monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret service, one of the bloodiest secret services in the world, in my view.

"Here comes the symbolic act of burning food. Our nation was starving several times in the last century. My generation can remember the lack and shortages of very simple food such as butter, meat, bread, and everything. Destruction of food in these circumstances shows that Russian authorities are testing our nation on its tolerance, its readiness to accept everything it is being proposed."

- Does this "symbolic act," as you say, have not only a domestic but an international audience?

"I agree one hundred percent. Another side of the story is to show to the West that the Russian people are ready to sacrifice everything for the status of a great power."

True enough, foreign policy driven by national interest manifests itself in various forms, often with theatrical gestures. Symbolism is part of the art of diplomacy. The delicate balance of political and moral aspects of the issue in Russia has been explained to Troika Report by Maxim Suchkov, an expert with the Russian International Affairs Council:

"There are several facets to the problem. From a legal standpoint, banned goods should be considered as contraband, As such, their delivery to the needy would be illegal and not safe. Politically, this is a strong message to Russia's foreign suppliers. Now that the food has been destroyed under the cameras and the issue is being debated by the public, it demonstrates that the stakes have increased and the government is serious about its commitment to counter-sanctions.

"However, the PR side of the problem, in my opinion, has not been well thought out and articulated. In a country which has survived through hunger, seeing a massive amount of food being destroyed, the ethical aspects prevail over the political objectives. I think it should have been calculated better."

Even if the contentious decision had been packaged in a more convincing and appealing PR coating, it would still leave questions on the practicability of food destruction. One Russian parliamentarian suggested it would be more morally acceptable and practical to send the food with false documents, after checking its expiry dates, to the people in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine as humanitarian aid.

Anyway, the signal sent by Moscow to the West cannot be dismissed: Despite the sanctions, Russia is in no mood to backtrack and bow to outside pressure.
 
2. Globally speaking
Atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: A lesson unlearned?
 
Last week's solemn commemoration of the destruction of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs dropped by the U.S. in August 1945 once again raised to a global level the issue of whether humanity is mature enough to destroy weapons of mass destruction and create a nuclear free world.
The horrifying consequences of the only case of nuclear bombing are appalling: The two bombs, nicknamed "Little Boy" and "Fat Man," instantaneously wiped out more than 210,000 people, while thousands more were to suffer from radiation-related diseases caused by the "black rain" of radioactive particles which followed.

What are the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as viewed from Moscow? Dmitry Streltsov, Head of Department of Afro-Asian Studies at MGIMO University, made this comment for Troika Report:

"There are several lessons to be learned from that catastrophe. First of all, there is the moral aspect. The U.S. president made the decision to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima on the pretext of saving the lives of American soldiers prior to the invasion of Japan."

"There were almost 200,000 victims of the bombing. Even the American military establishment after the WWII admitted this slaughter was not necessary. Among them was General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander in the Southwest Pacific Area back in 1945.

"Chairman of the wartime Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William D. Leahy also conceded this mistake: 'It is my opinion that the use of the barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender...' By atom bombing Japan the United States subscribed to the moral norms of Genghis Khan."

- Japan has called on world powers to abandon nuclear weapons totally. Is this viable today? What are the chances of creating of a non-violent and nuclear free world given that effort to sustain non-proliferation have been not fully successful?

"Japan has a foot in two camps. On the one hand, Japan is the only victim of atomic bombing and has the moral right to claim leadership of the movement for a non-nuclear world. On the other hand, Japan relies on the so-called 'nuclear umbrella' of the United States, which is written into its military doctrine. This is sort of an ambiguous position. As for NGOs and public organizations promoting the concept of a nuclear free world, they have the moral right to do it."

The atomic bombing which took place 70 years ago was described by the mayor of Hiroshima as "the absolute evil and ultimate inhumanity," but the lessons of this atrocity, unfortunately, were not learned in order to make the world a safer place to live in.

Balancing on the brink of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War produced a sobering, albeit limited effect. The Non-Proliferation Treaty, signed in 1968, demanded that the five nuclear powers conduct disarmament negotiations while other nations committed themselves not to acquire nuclear bombs. Attempts to curb the spread and build-up of nuclear arsenals followed.

Despite some progress in cutting the number of nuclear warheads and delivery vehicles, the overall result was disappointing. India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea all developed nuclear weapons without permission, in doing so violating the letter and spirit of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Moreover, the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty failed to acquire a legally binding force.

In a passionate but strictly rational article in The Irish Examiner, former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency Hans Blix made a sound point: "It has been said that Hiroshima and Nagasaki created a taboo against any further use of nuclear weapons," he said "Let us hope so, but let us also demand that the taboo be made legally binding."

For now, the human race has to live side by side with almost 20,000 nuclear weapons with enough destructive power to obliterate it several times over. Public awareness of this insecure environment is good but not good enough. Neither are the legal frameworks that supposedly prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction. The only way is the development of a comprehensive system of conflict resolution to eliminate the slightest casus belli and bring nations to live not by the sword but by the law. But that may just be wishful thinking.
 
3. Going Eastward
Can Russia break into China-U.S.-ASEAN trade triangle?

With the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, steadily evolving into the fourth-largest market after the EU, U.S. and China by 2030, Moscow is attempting to put its act together and position itself as one of the top trade partners and target for investments. This could expand the China-U.S.-ASEAN trio into a quartet if Russia joins in, but it would mean a long and uphill battle.

The charm offensive undertaken by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the 48th ASEAN Foreign Ministers' Meeting (AMM) held in Kuala Lumpur from Aug. 1-6 was testimony on its own that Moscow is determined to reap all possible benefits from the new long-term strategy of a "pivot to Asia" it has adopted in the face of the sanctions imposed on Moscow by the West over Russia's role in the Ukrainian conflict.

Until recently, the ASEAN did not feature prominently in the upper half of the Russian priority list of trade and economic partners. Turnover has reached a modest level of $21 billion, although it is gaining momentum: A few years ago the figure was twice as low. Still, Russia is already among the ASEAN's top 10 trading partners.

Later in August, a special joint committee on economic, scientific and technical cooperation is expected to be set up, while concurrently a delegation of Russian entrepreneurs representing 20 companies will engage in talks with their counterparts in Malaysia and Brunei on potential interaction in fields such as oil exploration and production, agricultural business, IT technologies, and transportation.

At the moment, the Asia-Pacific Region is witnessing the development of a rivalry with strong geopolitical overtones between China and the U.S. Washington has urged Beijing, which is involved in territorial disputes in the South China Sea, to introduce a moratorium on any activities on all of the islands that are a bone of contention between China, Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, Brunei and the Philippines. Beijing has defied this demand, stating that players from outside the region have no right to meddle in the internal affairs of Asian nations.

Moscow is well aware of the investment potential of the steadily growing economies of the ASEAN, and would like to capitalize on its geographical proximity by inviting local entrepreneurs to make commitments to the various projects in the Russian Far East. The offer to make use of the Vladivostok free port zone as a transcontinental hub is the cherry on top.

The new vistas of cooperation, as viewed from Moscow, cannot but be appealing. The free trade zone agreement signed in May between the Eurasian Economic Community (EEU) and Vietnam is being presented as a sample of a productive model of interaction between the two regional alliances. As Lavrov emphasized, "we're ready to make it a pilot project for a general liberalization (of trade and investment) between the EEU and ASEAN."

Gleb Ivashentsov, a former ambassador and now member of the Russian International Affairs Council, has been named one of the "council of the wise" formed to promote Russia-ASEAN dialogue. Some say Russia has been lagging behind other major nations and it has missed many opportunities in Southeast Asia, with the ASEAN being the arena of competition between China and the U.S. Talking to Troika Report, Ivashentsov dismissed this assumption:

"Asia has a polycentric configuration. We should talk not only about China, the United States and the ASEAN, but also about Russia and Japan. It is much bigger than a triangle."

"I think Russia will play a significant role in Southeast Asia."

"There is a memory in Southeast Asia of Russia supporting national liberation movements in Vietnam, in Indonesia, and some other countries."

"The rise of Russia as a new modern state will bring new possibilities for economic, scientific technological and energy cooperation with Southeast Asia."

However, this upbeat assessment is disputed by Dmitry Mosyakov, an expert in regional affairs and deputy director of the Institute of Oriental Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences. Mosyakov rules out the chances of the existing China-ASEAN-U.S. triangle being transformed by the addition of Russia:

"Russia has not taken sides in the territorial disputes in the South China Sea. Moscow distances itself from this controversy for fear of alienating its partners, be it Vietnam or China. On top of this, Moscow is used to developing substantial cooperation not with ASEAN as an alliance but with separate countries on a bilateral basis."

In this case, would any other country, apart from Vietnam, care to establish privileged relations with the Eurasian Economic Union? Gleb Ivashentsov believes this is possible, placing the emphasis not only on the provision of energy or sales of military hardware, but on the flow of capital and joint production.

Despite the evident fact that Russia is also a Pacific Rim country, the underdeveloped regions of Siberia and the Russian Far East do not have much to offer those seeking an immediate return on capital and a high rate of return in general. Like it or not, Russia is a relevant newcomer to the ASEAN and Asia-Pacific Region markets, where it has to compete with not one, but two formidable trade superpowers.

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 #19
Valdai Discussion Club
http://valdaiclub.com
August 14, 2015
Cuba and US: Relations Resumed. What Next?
By Alexei Mukhin

In December 2014, Cuba and the US declared resumption of diplomatic relations. US Secretary of State John Kerry will visit Cuba on August 14 to attend the solemn ceremony of the opening of the American embassy in Havana. The embassy officially opened on July 20, simultaneously with the Cuban embassy in Washington. The restoration of diplomatic relations with Cuba is one of the biggest achievements of the incumbent US administration in foreign politics.

Alexei Mukhin, Director General of the Center for Political Information, expert of the Valdai Discussion Club, and other political analysts have recently attended a round-table conference entitled "Cuba and US: Relations Resumed. What Next?"

The expert noted that Obama had given very many promises throughout the two presidential terms, yet failed to keep most of them. It appears that the declaration to resume relations between Cuba and the US would not entail any further progress. The US Congress dominated by the Republicans will try to hamper restoration of relations with Cuba, and Obama lacks any serious political weight to overcome their pressure. Americans will not withdraw from Guantanamo hands down. The base is a subject of too many scandals. Lifting of sanctions in the near future is not likely either. The reciprocal intransigence will continue for years.

Cuba itself is ready for resumption of relations. According to Mr. Mukhin, the idea of socialist revolution died, and Cuba is standing at the very beginning of the path towards a consumer society. People have grown tired of the revolution, and the transition of power from Fidel Castro to his brother Raul is an opportunity to alter the dominating ideological concept.

Alexei Mukhin believes that Cuba will use its geopolitical position as a "chip for bargaining" with Russia, US and other countries. The expert paid special attention to the factor of Cuban expats. Not all emigrants will return to the island, but their emissaries will be setting new game rules with the help of Americans. It should be borne in mind that revanchist sentiments of the expats would hinder development of the America-Cuba relations.

In the expert's opinion, the US administration was over-irritated by the recent rapid rapprochement between Cuba and Russia. Russia wrote off Cuban debts, it is actively developing cooperation in the sectors of commerce and energy. The US is trying to keep up with Russia and revive the shattered relations with countries Russia sets its eyes upon. Americans are exceptionally sensitive to the prospects of Russia's establishing outposts in Cuba and other Latin American states.

Eduard Belyi, expert of the Russian International Affairs Council, disagreed with Mr.Mukhin's viewpoint that the idea of socialist revolution was dead in Cuba. Just as people of China and Vietnam, Cubans are capable of adopting the market economy, but the nation had been absorbing socialistic ideas for decades. Euromaidans and colour revolutions will not happen in Cuba. A Chinese-Vietnamese scenario is more likely. The sanctions were imposed in retaliation to the expropriation of American property. Americans have clear principles, and they stick to them. Property must never be embezzled. Paying compensations could lead to a consensus, but Cubans are out of money. Americans will keep pressing on Cubans into recognizing the expropriation as an unlawful act, eventually reaching a modus vivendi.

Alexei Martynov, Director of the International Institute for New States, emphasized at the round-table conference that Cuba had withstood in a struggle against the biggest regional state, the US, for 50 years. Cubans possess a strength margin, including ideological endurance, but it is impossible for a country to develop in the modern world without ties with the key state. The opening of the embassies is the only stepping stone thus far.

The expert noted that China was solidly established in Cuba. The island's trade turnover with Russia is only half of the China-Cuba trade volumes. Regarding the US, Washington has already formed a system of relations with Latin American states. Nothing would probably change after the restoration of ties with Cuba. Cuba remains in the US sphere of influence in any case. Russia is exasperated by Americans' interference in Ukraine. Washington is naturally feeling the same about Russia's presence in Cuba. The US will try to shut the Latin American doors for Russia as much as possible.

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 #20
RFE/RL
August 13, 2015
Panic In The Kremlin
by Brian Whitmore

You know things are getting really bad when Sergei Lavrov blows his cool.

The Russian foreign minister is usually smooth as silk in public, shamelessly and effortlessly twisting, spinning, distorting, and lying on behalf of Vladimir Putin's regime.

But this week, Lavrov was caught on camera -- and on mic -- sputtering a string of expletives during a joint press conference with Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir.

It's unclear what sparked Lavrov's odd outburst -- and it doesn't really matter. The fact that it happened is a sign of the times.

The past couple weeks have witnessed a series of incidents that suggest that all is not well in the Kremlin elite.

Russian customs and health officials have staged quasi-ritualistic burnings of European cheese and other foodstuffs, as well as of Dutch flowers.

Its parliamentary speaker, Sergei Naryshkin, has penned an article in the official government daily Rossiiskaya Gazeta accusing the United States of "zombifying" its European allies and plotting a major provocation against Moscow.

Naryshkin has also called for an international tribunal on the United States' use of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

And Russia has submitted a formal claim to the North Pole at the United Nations.

Did I miss anything? Perhaps. The weird and wacky has been so fast and furious lately that it would be easy to do so.

"There is panic at the top of the Kremlin," political analyst Andrei Piontkovsky wrote in a recent article in Apostrof. "This is evident in Naryshkin's article, in the burning of foodstuffs at the border, and in Lavrov's behavior at the press conference with Saudi officials."

In recent years, it's been fashionable and tempting to view Vladimir Putin as the man with a plan, the master of the universe, the spinner of vast conspiracies.

While that may have once been the case, an increasing number of Kremlin watchers are coming to the conclusion that the wheels are coming off the Putin machine.

Moscow-based commentator Igor Yakovenko wrote recently that the system is "running amok."

And in an op-ed in The New York Times, political analyst Ivan Krastev noted, citing former Kremlin insider Gleb Pavlovsky, that Putin has been increasingly disengaged from day-to-day decision making. Krastev added that the policymaking process resembles "the music of a jazz group; its continuing improvisation is an attempt to survive the latest crisis."

At the heart of the crisis gripping the elite is a paradox: They can't live with Putin. And they can't live without him.

Increasing numbers of Russia's ruling class -- or at least its smarter members -- understand that the Putin system has reached the end of its usefulness. It's hit the point of diminishing returns.

Putin has boxed himself into a corner in Ukraine. He has run the economy into the ground. And he has isolated Russia from the world. And there don't appear to be any more rabbits he can pull out of his hat.

If the status quo continues, Piontkovsky wrote, the elite "understands perfectly well that this will lead to their loss of billions of dollars" and could eventually cause "the fall of the regime."

And this appears to be paralyzing Putin himself.

The Kremlin leader has been behaving oddly for awhile. Recall his strange -- and still unexplained -- disappearance from public view back in March following the assassination of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov; and his peculiar gestures and facial expressions during a press conference in Minsk last summer.

A withdrawn Putin is a big problem because the system has no direction -- and tends to go haywire -- without his hand guiding it.

"Putin has successfully made any political alternative unthinkable, and his entire country is now trapped by his success," Krastev wrote.

"In other words, Mr. Putin's enormous popular support is a weakness, not a strength -- and Russia's leaders know it."

Which, he added, leads to a sense of eschatology among his inner circle as they worry how they will live with Putin -- and if they can live without him.

"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," Krastev wrote.

"That complex and unpredictable context, rather than the vagaries of Mr. Putin's mind alone, is the key to understanding contemporary Russian politics."

And this all makes the coming months a dangerous period indeed.

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 #21
Justice Ministry: 12 NGOs classed as foreign agents still have time to correct breaches

MOSCOW. Aug 14 (Interfax) - Twelve non-government organizations (NGOs) classed as foreign agents, which the Justice Ministry warned about administrative liability for breaching the federal legislation in July, have 1,5 weeks to report on the elimination of these breaches, the ministry press service has reported.

"Documents confirming the elimination of the breaches are to be sent [by the NGOs] to the Russian Justice Ministry by August 26," the press service said in a report received by Interfax on Friday.

On July 21, the Justice Ministry said warnings about the liability for violating the legislation had been issued to 12 NGOs classed as foreign agents.

Specifically, directives have been sent to NGOs such as Civil Assistance, Memorial, the Sakharov Center, For Human Rights, the information and education center Memorial, Transparency International-R, Committee against Torture, the Press development Institute - Siberia, Bellona-Murmansk, Maximum (Murmansk), Civil Control (St. Petersburg) and Resource Human Rights Center.

The agency then said NGOs that are classed as foreign agents are required to state their status when they publish and disseminate materials in the mass media and the Internet, which the said NGOs did not do.

Under Article 19.34 of the Russian Code of Administrative Violations, the publication by an NGO fulfilling the functions of a foreign agent of materials and their dissemination, including through the mass media and using the Internet, without stating that these materials have been published and disseminated by an NGO that is a foreign agent is punishable by a fine of 100,000 rubles to 300,000 rubles for officials and 300,000 rubles to 500,000 rubles for legal entities.

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 #22
Institute of Modern Russia
http://imrussia.org
August 12, 2015
Georgy Satarov: 'The Opposition Needs to Put the Authorities in Zugzwang'
 
As part of the Institute of Modern Russia's ongoing interview series with Russian and Western experts, imrussia.org editor-in-chief Olga Khvostunova sat down with INDEM Foundation president Georgy Satarov to talk about social discontent, the consequences of the law on ''undesirable organizations,'' the principle of simplification in Putin's politics, and the chances for a real opposition to emerge in Russia.
 
Olga Khostunova: Last week, it became known that the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was leaving Russia. The Justice Ministry has declared it an ''undesirable organization.'' What do you make of this decision?

Georgy Satarov: This is not the first example of an international foundation leaving Russia. Four years ago, before the laws on ''foreign agents'' and ''undesirable organizations'' appeared, the Ford Foundation saw where the general trend was going and left Russia. It was one of our main partners at the time, if not the most important. So, this trend is not new.

OK: Then why was the law on "undesirable organizations" adopted now?

GS: The authorities' current goal is to limit autonomy and independence in all areas to the greatest extent possible: in media, business, society, intellectual life, and so on. The authorities' actions against public organizations-human rights groups, think tanks such as INDEM, and others-began about 10 years ago. But because society is stronger than any regime, and more tenacious, it does not want to surrender. Society is simply structured differently, and this is a tragedy for any regime. They tell society, "Obey, fall in line," but it doesn't obey and doesn't fall in line. The authorities' reaction is quite natural: they intensify the legislative pressure, and, in essence, the repression of society. The law on "undesirable organizations," which serves as an instrument for circumscribing society's activism, its contacts, and its sources of financing, is the regime's latest move toward imposing such limitations.

OK: Some in Russia and even in the West criticize the presence of foundations like NED in Russia on the grounds that there are no Russian foundations in the U.S. with as much funding as NED, and that if there were, the U.S. would behave just like Russia is behaving now. In your view, does this argument justify the actions of the Russian government?

GS: Those are strange statements, because there were such organizations in the U.S.-for example, Andranik Migranyan's Institute for Democracy and Cooperation. The whole time that he was working in the U.S., those critics were silent.

OK: What consequences will there be from the law on ''undesirable organizations'' and the departure from Russia of foundations like NED? Will the number of public organizations and expert centers decrease, or will they find Russian sources of financing?

GS: Russian financing is not a real possibility. First, if we are talking about the government as a source of funding, it will only fund its own people to carry out specific tasks. It creates or tames organizations and funds them. We tried to apply for a grant from the government, which makes a certain pool of funds available to NGOs, but we didn't get the grant. Someone even whispered to one of our colleagues, "Your application was the best, but you surely understand-we couldn't give you money." They couldn't, because we aren't among those who fall into line at the drop of a hat. And secondly, the government is rapidly getting poorer and has other things on its mind. The budgets for public organizations will be reduced.

OK: What about getting funding from private business?

GS: The private sector is extremely intimidated. For 10 years now, it has been useless trying to reach out to it or to count on its ability to freely choose projects to fund. So, we don't expect to find any alternative sources of funding, but we will survive anyway.

OK: But how do you envision that happening? Will you reduce your staff, or decrease the number of programs you run? Or do something else?

GS: In comparison with the prosperous times of 10 years ago, we have already reduced a lot of things. We will seek other, less simple ways of obtaining financing in order to carry out our programs.

OK: At the end of June, you wrote an article for Project Syndicate about the development of the political system in Russia. You said one of the fundamental principles guiding Putin was the pursuit of simplicity. According to this logic, it can be assumed that sooner or later the system will face a task that it cannot cope with...

GS: That point has long since passed.

OK: When did that happen?

GS: Initially, in the dawn of Putin's presidency, the goal of the system was to start a wave of liberalism while limiting democracy. This goal was the product of a kind of social consensus. The second half of this slogan is actually saying: "We know what to do-the most important thing is not to interfere with us." Who did they want to keep from interfering? The opposition, critics, and so on. But in about 2003, the people in power became convinced that they were not going to be successful. There is a proverbial management principle that says the complexity of a system of control must correspond to the complexity of the system being controlled. Well, it turned out that the managerial resources the authorities wanted to use to solve this task were insufficient to handle the task's complexity. Modern society and its economy are very complex systems, and it's impossible to manage them through primitive means. Once this became apparent, the authorities discarded the idea of a liberal wave and did not consider it again.

OK: Do you mean that there are insufficient resources on the intellectual level, or is it a systematic problem of the people in power?

GS: It's the system. The authorities thought that the task itself and the resources for solving it were simple-something like, say, the maneuvers of an army regiment. And it couldn't cope, because it was impossible to solve the assigned task with the chosen resources.

The regime in Russia, being a social animal of sorts, is in a mentally disturbed condition, so it is rather difficult to predict its actions. But the opposition does have a chance in elections. The approval ratings of the regime have nothing to do with reality.
OK: In the Western press, as well as in the Russian media, of course, Putin is sometimes portrayed as a highly clever, impressive, cunning, and unpredictable politician. There is even a degree of admiration for him in these portrayals, especially in comparison to many Western leaders, who have supposedly lost their luster. How do these portrayals align with your theory that Putin strives for simplicity? Is the Russian president simply not well understood?

GS: His guile and his way of thinking are probably beyond the West's customary understanding of the world. Everything is set up differently there. They have never encountered a world leader who in fact is a little street hooligan beset by complexes. One who is able to pretend, to puff out his cheeks, to grit his teeth, and to say some smart things by rote. They have seen dictators and scoundrels, but they haven't seen petty St. Petersburg hooligans. They had a hard time understanding it, which is why for the first 10 years, Putin just seemed unpredictable to them. Now it has become more acceptable to talk about his unpredictability, because being in power for 15 years has deformed his personality to an extent. But this happens with a lot of people-there's nothing surprising about it.

OK: How do you envision the future of Putin's presidency? Will he stay in power or will he name a successor once again?

GS: I think he will try to remain in power forever, in his own specific way. It isn't important what position he holds-a person like Putin is satisfied with schemes that have been used before and were successful. But the extent to which he will be able to do this is a much tougher question, which is why he alone does not get to determine the length of time he remains in power.

OK: What circumstances could get in his way?

GS: Social discontent, and discontent among the people around him-that is to say, within the Putinist elite.

OK: Which is more important-social discontent or that among the elite?

GS: I think social discontent is more important. A serious, illegitimate change in leadership-that is, a change that takes place not as a result of elections-is possible only if two forces emerge simultaneously: a strong internal opposition and a consolidated external opposition. At present, there is already some discontent within the Putin establishment, but so far there is not a strong, authoritative, consolidated external opposition.

OK: You say there is no strong external opposition, but right now, for example, registration is under way for regional elections in September, and in practically every region and city, opposition candidates from the democratic coalition are being subjected to various restrictions. How can the opposition become strong under such conditions?

GS: The opposition is making serious efforts, learning and beginning to understand how to act extremely carefully, so that, from a legal point of view, the regime cannot find fault with it. In the end, the regime is forced to use methods that are extremely immoral and illegal. The things that have happened in Novosibirsk and Kostroma are unprecedented.

OK: Will the authorities let the opposition candidates run for office or will all their attempts be nipped in the bud?

GS: The regime in Russia, being a social animal of sorts, is in a somewhat mentally disturbed condition, so it is rather difficult to predict its actions. But the opposition does have a chance in elections. Once again, I emphasize that the approval ratings of the regime have nothing to do with reality. As a result, the opposition needs to try to participate in the elections-this will put the authorities in zugzwang. If the authorities act in a straightforward and at least somewhat lawful manner, they will have to give the opposition a chance. If they do not, they will need to rip off all the masks, and then other galvanizing forces will begin to function in society, as happened in late 2011.

OK: Speaking of societal discontent, how do you evaluate the record levels of support for Putin? Is this the result of patriotic mobilization?

GS: I don't evaluate it at all-it is sociological fraud.

OK: In other words, you believe that a rating above 80% doesn't count for anything?

GS: These figures, of course, have nothing to do with the reality in society. They are published by the same old three polling organizations and don't reflect real attitudes.

OK: In your view, will the effects of the current economic crisis provoke social discontent? And, even more important, will this discontent be directed against the authorities and not against the ''external enemy'' represented by the Western governments that have imposed sanctions on Russia?

GS: You used the correct phrase: "Will it be?" The unpleasant consequences of the economic crisis and of the decisions the authorities are making in these circumstances will begin to be felt only in the fall. And these decisions include, of course, those which cannot be blamed on the sanctions. Therefore, yes-the consequences of the economic crisis will begin to have effects.

OK: In your view, how quickly will this discontent mount before some movement begins within the society?

GS: I think in a year or a year-and-a-half. In other words, by the time of parliamentary elections [in September 2016], the social situation may very well be different.

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 #23
www.thedailybeast.com
August 13, 2015
American Paratroopers in Ukraine Have Putin Rattled
The Kremlin is worried about not just what the American troops are teaching the Ukrainians, but what they may be learning from them and the Donbas battlefield.
By Anna Nemtsova

YAVORIV, Ukraine - The clatter of rifle fire, the thud of mortars, and the thunder of grenades echoed across this military training ground near the Polish border.

It was nothing that many of the Ukrainian soldiers arriving here hadn't heard before in the eastern regions of their country, and it was familiar music, as well, to the Americans who have come here to try to make them even better fighters.

The Ukrainians brought stories from the front about the enemy, the arms, and the firepower used against Ukrainian troops. For American soldiers, listening to these members of former Soviet forces talking about their adversaries, also from the former Soviet army, this has been an education. It has given them a chance to study in granular detail a great deal about the evolution of Russian combat forces in the last quarter-century.

Indeed, U.S. troops and Ukrainian troops learning from each other seems to be just the kind of thing that Russian President Vladimir Putin was worrying about when he called an emergency meeting of his security council on Wednesday.

As the pace of fighting in eastern Ukraine picks up (with each side blaming the other, as usual), one of Moscow's stated concerns is about Ukraine's new defense doctrine, officially released this week.

Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev told journalists it "provides the United States and NATO with an opportunity to use Ukraine's resource base and provokes further escalation in the southeast of the country." Kiev's doctrine includes major military reforms and names Russia as the most dangerous enemy. The U.S., British, Polish, Canadian, and other NATO military forces drilling with Ukrainian forces this summer are a strong signal for Putin and his closest circle that the West is ready to be involved in a military conflict. They may also give him a pretext to raise the stakes in Ukraine's eastern region, known as Donbas.

Rival exercises in other areas by NATO and the Russians represent the biggest buildup in military tensions with Moscow since the Cold War, according to many analysts. And Putin seems to relish the confrontation, even when his security cabinet recommends caution.

"The situation is very tense and concerning," independent analyst and former Kremlin adviser Stanislav Belkovsky told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. "Putin is ready to fight with NATO, as he seriously believes that the U.S. wants to occupy Russia."

Among the 10 members of his Security Council, "Putin is the only one who is convinced that all of his men are ready to die for him; so far he can see that with the death toll of Russian recruits growing in Donbas, Russians have not been out protesting against the war," Belkovsky said.

Russian opposition leader and former KGB officer Gennady Gudkov told The Daily Beast, "Unfortunately, I believe that an escalation of the conflict and clashes between Russian- and Western-supported forces are possible."

When the Russian independent radio station Echo of Moscow conducted a survey after Putin's security council meeting asking whether the station's listeners believed there could be a direct military conflict between Russia and the West, 43 percent of the audience said, "Yes."

Here at Yavoriv, in the shade of a military vehicle, two veterans of wars in the Middle East, Zachary Savarie, 28, from New York state, and Allen Porter, 33, from Missouri, were discussing the challenges Ukrainian soldiers were facing in Donbas. What would they do if their units were surrounded with Russian-made tanks and Russian-backed forces? The traps and encirclements in which Ukrainian soldiers have suffered major losses have occurred at least twice in the past year, in Ilovaysk and in Debaltseve, battles known as closed "kettles" in Russian military parlance.

"Let me think for a moment, that is a difficult one," said Porter, who served three tours in Iraq and two in Afghanistan. "Whenever you are surrounded, it's a bad day," he told The Daily Beast.

For the U.S. military, this is "a mission of high responsibility to train soldiers to fight for their country's sovereignty," Savarie said. Since April 2014, the Ukrainian military has lost more than 2,495 soldiers, killed by Russian-backed rebel forces. "We have never had such bad casualties in one year," said Savarie, a veteran of two tours in Afghanistan up against the Taliban. "We rarely or never saw massive forces backing our enemy, we have not faced numerical superiority, so we can take lessons from Ukrainians, ask them how they apply skills in different situations."

The U.S. military is drawing on its own experiences to teach the Ukrainians how best to survive under heavy artillery barrages, tank and sniper attacks, how to defend their positions with the resources they have, and many other useful skills, some of them excruciatingly obvious. (One basic lesson: Don't kick what may be improvised explosive devices found on the ground.)

The Ukrainian soldiers are grateful, especially for the equipment the U.S. military has provided, including long-range radars, drones, and night vision equipment, Ukrainian National Guards officer Vadim Perepichka told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. "The most useful experience I had during my two months with the U.S. Army's 173rd Airborne Brigade was the night program, when we learned to conduct special operations wearing night vision goggles," Perepichka said as he headed back to the front lines.

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), meanwhile, reported an escalation of the fighting outside Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. Kiev reported attacks by about 400 rebels supported by tanks in Starokhnativka village outside Mariupol, a strategic port on the Sea of Azov. Rebel leaders denied the attacks.

By the end of the program about 500 Ukrainian National Guards are to be trained by the U.S. military. British Defense Minister Michael Fallon also said Tuesday that British veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were planning to train more than 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers by the end of this year.

The soldier students of Yaroviv are not under the Ukrainian Defense Ministry's regular army but from units of the National Guards, some professional, some volunteers or drafted soldiers without any proper military training. But their motivation is impressive, they are eager to learn new skills, and they ask every day for new challenges.

Beginning this week, U.S. paratroopers are preparing to teach their students to conduct squad maneuvers in live-fire exercises in order to proceed with Fearless Guardian, a military training program approved by the U.S. Congress and run by both the State Department and the Pentagon. The mission and the program of instruction come at the request of the Ukrainian government. The paratroopers are in Ukraine for the second of three rotations scheduled to last through November.

Moscow has complained frequently about the "provocative" presence of the U.S. paratroopers in Yavoriv, blaming Washington for threatening the peace. "With a smokescreen of claims about an alleged presence of Russian troops in Donbas, Washington is trying to divert the international community's attention from its military deployment in Ukraine," the Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Alexander Lukashevich, said in a statement last April. "It's obvious that the U.S. troops on Ukrainian soil won't bring it peace."

By July the number of foreign military on Ukraine's soil had increased to 1,800 soldiers. The exercises were organized by International Peacekeeping and Security Center in the Lviv region and focused on defensive operations as well as integrated command posts for units from 18 countries.

Once again Moscow was angry: "The military drills involving NATO members and Ukraine's army that started in Lviv region under U.S. command are a clear demonstration of NATO's provocative policy to unequivocally support the policies of the current Kiev authorities in eastern Ukraine," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Both for Ukrainian society and the professional military, it is important that the world has pulled together to support their country, Ukrainian Defense Ministry spokesman Oleksandr Poronyuk told The Daily Beast. "Russian leadership knows perfectly well that we have had joint military exercises with NATO for 20 years here outside Lviv. This is the biggest training field in Europe; it can be useful for any NATO member, and for our military it is important to develop from the army of the fifth generation, like the Russian army, to the army of the seventh generation, like they have in the U.S," Poronyuk said.

During the Cold War, Colonel Poronyuk joined the Soviet military and for over a decade served in Russia without the slightest idea that one day his home city of Lviv would host U.S. paratroopers training Ukrainian soldiers.

For the U.S. military, the changes in relationships with Russia in the past few years are dramatic, as well. Only two years ago, in 2013, Porter was involved in bilateral military exercises with Russian airborne troops. "Just one year later, in 2014, I was based in Estonia waiting for Russia to attack, and this year we are here training to fight a Russian enemy," he said.

"The enemy is not just one thing-they dress different, they look different-we need to be flexible, ready for anything, ready to go anywhere and do anything," Savarie added.

And how does it strike you, after years fighting Iraqis and Afghans, that your enemy now is just as blue-eyed and blond as you? "We heard from the Ukrainian military that sometimes a brother has to fight against a brother in the east of their country. That just blows your mind," Porter said.

There are many lessons to be learned on Ukraine's battlefield-for all sides.

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 #24
www.thedailybeast.com
August 12, 2015
Ukraine Debt: Putin's Trump Card
American retirees are inadvertently doing the Russian president's dirty work.
By Andrea Chalupa

The lavish lifestyle of Putin ally and deposed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was opulent even by kleptocrat standards. There was the private zoo complete with an African eland that gave milk Yanukovych allegedly believed could enhance his libido. Other perks of treating Ukraine's budget like a personal ATM included a private casino on a galleon (a small ship); classic and high-tech car collections; and a sprawling marble-columned mansion on privatized national parkland. In all, it's believed that Yanukovych and his cronies fled Ukraine with an estimated $70 billion in state funds.

Stealing over the years after coming to power in 2010, the Yanukovych government also borrowed billions from the American firm Franklin Templeton Investments. Their debt deal continues to bleed the country's budget, leading one group of Ukrainian and Russian civic activists to launch a White House petition that called on the Obama administration to investigate corruption tied to the bonds.

"I really feel this huge difference in economic stability before and after [the] revolution," says Andrii Chepurnyi, a software developer in Kiev. Unhappy with the Yanukovych regime, Chepurnyi volunteered on Maidan, Kiev's Independence Square, helping build the barricades and donating food and medicine in the revolution. He lost one friend to the violence of Yanukovych's riot police, and three of his friends were killed defending against Russia's intensifying invasion of the east.

"Yanukovych and his team have stolen a lot from Ukraine's treasury and now we have huge problems with paying our loans," says Chepurnyi.

The problems compound a perfect storm, which includes a collapsed currency-the third worst performing in the world. Inflation is now around 55.3 percent. Ukraine's average monthly salary has plummeted to $186. Pensions have been cut and taxes raised. While earning exceedingly less, Ukrainians are paying 450 percent more on household energy bills. The poverty rate hovers around 33 percent. What's more, a fifth of the country's productive capacity has been ravaged by the war and Russian trade sanctions.  

The financial burdens will only increase. The war has created more than 2 million refugees and left more than 5 million people in need of humanitarian aid like health services and medicines. There are also the costs of reconciliation and rehabilitation programs, and PTSD services for veterans, as well as for widows and orphans. Rebuilding areas destroyed by the war could cost an estimated $1.5 billion or more.

In April, Ukraine received a $17 billion bailout from the IMF, but some of that money went to creditors, including Franklin Templeton. The asset management and mutual fund company owns more than $7 billion of the $9 billion of Ukraine's public debt represented by an ad-hoc committee of creditors. Ukraine's total public debt is now at $75 billion.

Michael Hasenstab, the superstar bond portfolio manager with Franklin Templeton, has earned a reputation taking high-risk, high-reward gambles. His bets on Irish and Hungarian debt paid off when the struggling EU countries received massive bailouts. Hasenstab placed a bet on Ukraine in 2010 when Yanukovych became president; so far his gamble has lost $3 billion. Having climbed Mount Everest and earning an average return of 10.2 percent since taking over his fund in 2002, Hasenstab doesn't seem like the kind of guy who likes to lose. Considering that Ukraine isn't going to get a bailout anywhere close to the billions pumped into Ireland and Hungary, he may have to. At least that's what the IMF, U.S. Treasury, and leading economic experts want the creditors to do to help Ukraine limp onto the road to stability.

But the debt restructuring negotiations have ground to a stalemate with very little time remaining. Ukraine is faced with restructuring its debt to find $15.3 billion in savings over the next four years as part of a $40 billion IMF package. Being IMF-compliant provides a major seal of approval to reassure and attract foreign investments to help the country work toward stability. A deal has to be struck by the middle of August in order for Ukraine to avoid having to pay more than $500 million on September 23 on a maturing Eurobond; writing this check would mean Ukraine can't make the savings targets required by the IMF. A deal means Ukraine avoids default that would drive up the cost of borrowing.

"Agreeing on a deal will be beneficial for the economy for the middle and long term," Andy Hunder, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine, told The Daily Beast. "The economy can have much more clarity and predictability. I think predictability is what investors want so that the economy can move forward."

The creditors refused a government proposal to take a significant haircut: a 40 percent loss on the principal. Doing so would give Ukraine breathing room and put money back into much-needed services. It is believed that the creditors consider the haircut to be based on 2020 forecasts that they see as impossible to predict, especially given that the IMF has already been forced to revise its outlook in just three months.

On Wednesday, Natalie Jaresko, Ukraine's minister of finance, will meet with Franklin Templeton and other representatives of the ad-hoc Committee of Bondholders to Ukraine. The meeting will take place in San Francisco, 20 miles from Franklin Templeton's San Mateo, California, headquarters. In addition to Franklin Templeton, the committee is made up of the financial giants BTG Pactual, TCW, and T. Rowe Price, which together hold about $9 billion of Ukraine's public debt, with Franklin Templeton owning the majority at more than $7 billion.

"Ukraine finally has a government in place focusing on values of democracy and a free market. This is a very important time in Ukraine's history," said Hunder. "It's about understanding the realities and the complexities of the country when these agreements were signed and where the country is today."

Frustration with the slow pace of reforms that many Ukrainians gave their lives for on Maidan and in east Ukraine can lead to more political unrest. "Restructuring debt would buy Ukrainians more time for reforms," Olena Tregub, director, International Technical Assistance Coordination and Cooperation with IFIs Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, wrote in a message. "There are no visible results yet, at the same time the mounting debt and looming default together with never ending war keep Ukrainians under pressure. There is a risk of radical forces and populists taking power with an unrealistic promise to change things overnight."

The overthrown Yanukovych won the presidential election by running a populist campaign. The IMF knows that this is a critical moment, which is why managing director Christine Lagarde has made it clear that the IMF will continue to lend to Ukraine even if the country has to default. Besides the country's economic hardships, 50,000 Russian troops and 30,000 militants are reportedly amassed at its border; the threat of a full-scale Russian invasion remains.

"Russia does not want to see Ukraine succeed," said Hunder. He calls an economically strong Ukraine essential to Western security in the region.

Hasenstab has a controversial history of buying up bonds from governments with abysmal human-rights records, frustrating State Department officials. In response to one of many recent op-eds calling on the creditors to accept a deal that takes Ukraine's crises into account, Hasenstab wrote a letter to the editor of The Washington Post that pointed out: "The majority of the private debt in the region is held by mutual funds that invest on behalf of millions of working Americans and retirees."

A deal is also in the interest of Franklin Templeton, whose mom-and-pop customers would likely not support further weakening a country already severely weakened by Russia. A recent Pew poll found that nearly 70 percent of Americans view Russia unfavorably. Given that it has been widely reported that Putin seeks to keep Ukraine destabilized, it's not difficult to imagine that Franklin Templeton's pensioners would not want to assist Putin in his mission.

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 #25
Sputnik
August 13, 2015
Donald Trump Named as Kremlin Agent by Ukrainian 'Enemy List'
[http://sputniknews.com/politics/20150813/1025712968/ukraine-trump-kremlin-agent.html]

A Ukrainian website has created a comprehensive list of Ukraine's supposed 'enemies'. The eclectic list naturally includes a slew of Ukrainian and Russian statesmen and public personalities, but also, more surprisingly, nearly two dozen foreign figures, from Xi Jinping and Nicolas Sarkozy to Steven Seagal and even Donald Trump.

After quickly gaining widespread media attention in Ukraine, the highly stylized website, which had a kyiv.ua domain, was quietly taken down, but not before internet archive Wayback Machine managed to index some of its content. [http://web.archive.org/web/20150812232234/http://zlochinec.kyiv.ua/category/agents/]

Ukrainian media reported that the comprehensive list was prepared on the basis of an anonymous survey of nearly three dozen Ukrainian sociologists and political scientists, adding that the Ukrainian Security Service also participated in the selection, ostensibly in the interests of "maintaining national security."

With user convenience in mind, the 'enemies list' was divided into several sections, including "Enemies," "Traitors," "Separatists," and "Agents of the Kremlin Worldwide," and featured a 10 point "threat level" scale.

The 'Kremlin agents' list included political and social figures deemed to have taken a 'pro-Russian' stance in world affairs. The list of 21 names includes everyone from French politician Marine Le Pen, to Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, to Czech President Milos Zeman.

In a comedic twist to the already absurd list, American billionaire and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump came in at number 9 on the list. Trump is described as being 'Ukraine's enemy' for "believing that as US president, he would become friends with Vladimir Putin, for sympathizing with him," and for "criticizing the US's policy in relation to Ukraine."

Others to make the list of 'agents of the Kremlin' include Chinese leader Xi Jinping, for serving as "Russia's ally in the struggle with Europe and the United States," and former French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, for his "support of Putin's policy regarding Crimea and Ukraine." The list also includes former French President Nicolas Sarkozy and former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, German Linke Party MP Sahra Wagenknecht, and American and European celebrities Steven Seagal and Gérard Depardieu.

The French actor was described as a "Russian citizen with French roots, who considers himself a personal friend of Putin, supporting his pursuit of 'traditional' values, supporting the annexation of Crimea (he's planning to grow vineyards there), and condemning the EU's policy toward Russia."

Topping the list of the country's Russian 'Enemies' which, unsurprisingly featured nearly five dozen names, were famed Kremlin ideologist Vladislav Surkov, Chechen Republic head Ramzan Kadyrov, and Surkov deputy Inal Ardzinba. It did not get past the attention of the Ukrainian media that the list was "topped by representatives of Caucasian nationality."

Another screen from the 'Criminal' website, with Surkov, Kadyrov and Ardzinba making the top three among the Russian 'Enemies' list. The subtitle reads 'The List of Ukraine's Enemies - They Await a Tribunal!'

Surkov, who served as the First Deputy Chief of the Russian Presidential Administration throughout the 2000s, was absurdly charged with developing "projects to destabilize Ukraine," and for "organizing the shooting of people on Maidan." Incidentally, Kiev has yet to carry out an investigation of the events of February 2014, which saw the killings of both protesters and pro-Yanukovych riot police by sniper fire. Kadyrov made the top three for his "infinite loyalty to Putin," and for his off the cuff boast last year that Chechen forces could "take Kiev in three hours flat." Ardzinba, listed at number 9, ostensibly made the list for being Surkov's assistant in Kiev's destabilization.

Also making the top ten list were Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitri Rogozin, journalist and Rossiya Segodnya head Dmitri Kiselyov, and Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill. Kirill was accused of "working to split Ukrainian society through manipulations based on the religious feelings of the Orthodox believers of Ukraine," and of using the Church's resources to "assist terrorists in Donbass." Kiselyov, meanwhile, was accused of being a "militant propagandist and provocateur," and "a key actor in the information war against Ukraine."

The Russian 'Enemies' list also included a slew of famous personalities, from 'Soviet Frank Sinatra' Joseph Kobzon (a Ukrainian by birth), actor and director Ivan Okhlobystin, political satirist Mikhail Zadornov, political talk show host Vladimir Solovyev, RT and Rossiya Segodnya editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan, Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, Liberal Democratic Party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and others.

Naturally, the list also included Crimean Prosecutor Natalya Poklonskaya, whose description noted that she is "known on the internet as 'nyash-myash', connived in the annexation of Crimea," and was "one of the first to swear allegiance to the Kremlin."

Ukrainian politicians have been known for their impulsiveness and willingness to get their point across by throwing a perfectly-timed right cross at their opponent's face.

The 'Separatists' section naturally included the leaders and key political and military figures of the self-proclaimed Donbass republics, while 'Traitors' included former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, former Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, former MP Oleg Tsarev, and famous blogger Anatoliy Shariy, who was accused of "impudently speaking out against Ukrainian authorities.

The page noted that the enemies of Ukraine "await a tribunal," calling on visitors to "be vigilant" and to "find and denounce enemies" in social media.

For some odd reason, President Putin himself did not make the list.

 [return to Contents] 

 #26
www.politifact.com
August 12, 2015
George Will describes Bernie Sanders' Soviet Union honeymoon
By Will Cabaniss

For most couples, the ideal honeymoon getaway might entail a week of unwinding at a beach resort or a stay in a secluded mountainside cabin.

Not Bernie Sanders. He chose a colder route. Sanders and his wife, Jane Sanders, spent their first days as newlyweds in the Soviet Union, claims George Will in a recent Washington Post column.

Will's Aug. 7 column focused mostly on the legacy of Robert Conquest, who died Aug. 3 at age 98, and whose writings on Soviet prisons documented the atrocities of the Stalin regime. A reader asked us to look into the accuracy of the final paragraph of Will's column, which invoked Sanders' "honeymoon."

It reads:

"Conquest lived to see a current U.S. presidential candidate, a senator, who had chosen, surely as an ideological gesture, to spend his honeymoon in the Soviet Union in 1988. Gulags still functioned, probably including some of the 'cold Auschwitzes' in Siberia, described in Conquest's 'Kolyma.' The honeymooner did not mind that in 1988 political prisoners were - as may still be the case - being tortured in psychiatric 'hospitals.' Thanks to the unblinking honesty of people like Conquest, the Soviet Union now is such a receding memory that Bernie Sanders's moral obtuseness - the obverse of Conquest's character - is considered an amusing eccentricity."

We wanted to see if Sanders actually honeymooned on the turf of the United States' former adversary during the final years of the Cold War.

Sister cities

The trip took place while Sanders was mayor of Burlington, Vt., from 1981 to 1989. Toward the end of his mayoral tenure, the small city on Lake Champlain launched a sister-city program with Yaroslavl, located 160 miles northeast of Moscow.

The program, which is still operating today, has facilitated exchanges between the two cities involving "mayors, business people, firefighters, jazz musicians, youth orchestras, mural painters, high school students, medical students, nurses, librarians and the (Yaroslavl) ice-hockey team," according to its website.

Along with sister-city relationships with Bethlehem in the West Bank and Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, the Yaroslavl program was part of Sanders' unorthodox attempt to take on international issues from a small city in New England. Sanders also actively pursued his agenda outside of the country, writing letters to world leaders and even traveling to Cuba to meet with the mayor of Havana.

"Burlington had a foreign policy," he wrote in his 1997 book Outsider in the House, "because, as progressives, we understood that we all live in one world."

The bond between Burlington and Yaroslavl solidified when Sanders and his wife, as members of a 12-person delegation from Burlington, paid their Soviet counterparts a visit in 1988.

The timing of the trip was unusual. Bernie and Jane were married May 28, 1988. The delegation left Burlington the next day.

"Trust me," Sanders writes in the book. "It was a very strange honeymoon."

When reached for comment, Sanders' campaign said that the dates for the trip had already been set, and the couple "set their wedding date to coincide with that trip because they didn't want to take more time off."

In a 2007 interview, Jane Sanders also recalled the peculiar timing: "The day after we got married, we marched in a Memorial Day parade, and then we took off in a plane to start the sister city project with Yaroslavl with 10 other people on my honeymoon."

Bernie Sanders also refers to the trip sarcastically as "quiet and romantic" in his book.

The "honeymoon" was dotted with meetings, interviews and diplomatic functions. A June 2015 profile in The Guardian described the former mayor's meeting with Yaroslavl city officials:

"After receiving a rundown of central planning, Soviet-style, from Yaroslavl's mayor, Alexander Riabkov, Sanders notes how the quality of both housing and health care in America appeared to be 'significantly better' than in the communist state. 'However,' he added, 'the cost of both services is much, much, higher in the United States.' "

An education in central planning probably wasn't the only item on Sanders' itinerary. Yaroslavl is home to historic churches and buildings, and the Sanderses would have been in for some good sightseeing, said Ariel Cohen, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

Will made it sound as if Sanders was visiting to condone Soviet torture practices, but the Burlington trip was more of a dialogue-building exchange program. The Vermont weekly newspaper Seven Days reported in 2009 that the sister-city relationship "helped local residents who sought to ease tensions between the United States and Soviet Union by initiating citizen-to-citizen exchanges with a Russian city."

Also, the Soviet Union was barely intact at the time of the trip.

Negotiations had opened up between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev a few years earlier. "It was at the beginning of perestroika," said Michael Briggs, a spokesman for the Sanders campaign, referring to the restructuring policy Gorbachev instituted in the mid 1980s.

Gulags still existed and political prisoners were still held in 1988, said Ariel Cohen, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. But a watershed moment came when Gorbachev allowed physicist Andrei Sakharov to return from internal exile two years earlier.

"The power of the Communist Party was being questioned and the confrontation with the West was winding down through negotiations," Cohen said.

In 1987, Reagan and Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and in 1988, Reagan himself spoke in Moscow's Red Square. One year later brought the fall of the Berlin Wall. Three years later, the Soviet Union collapsed.

Participation in the Burlington-Yaroslavl program has waned over the years, though it was viewed as a "glamorous endeavor" by many in Burlington at the time, program leader Howard Seaver said in 2009.

Will could not be reached for comment through his researcher.

Our ruling

Will wrote that Sanders chose "to spend his honeymoon in the Soviet Union in 1988."

Sanders and his wife did travel to Yaroslavl, a city in the Soviet Union, after their wedding in 1988. In the sense that the trip came after the couple were married, the trip was a honeymoon. The two have also referred to the trip that way, albeit sarcastically at times.

But it was an unusual honeymoon, to say the least. The trip's primary purpose was diplomacy, not leisure, and included about 10 extra guests.

Will's claim is accurate but is missing context about the trip's underlying purpose. We rate his claim Mostly True.

 [return to Contents] 

 #27
Newsweek.com
August 11, 2015
Putin's News Network of Lies Is Just the Start
BY ANNE APPLEBAUM AND EDWARD LUCAS
Anne Applebaum is a senior adjunct fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, where she co-leads a major initiative aimed at countering Russian disinformation in Central and Eastern Europe. Edward Lucas is a senior vice president at CEPA and energy, commodities and natural resources editor at The Economist.

When the Berlin Wall fell, the Western world stopped thinking about how to explain and promote its political system in Russia and around the world. Neither offense nor defense, it seemed, was necessary any more.

The Soviet bloc's long-standing use of propaganda and disinformation was in disrepute even at home. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev himself joked at a press conference that there was no need to answer a question from the BBC "because you know everything already."

Journalists in Russia and other ex-Communist countries scrambled to copy Western media models. In the post-Soviet world, the Western media were no longer the hyenas of bourgeois nationalism but the epitome of fairness, decency and truth. Western journalists happily concurred.

But the golden age of post-Communist media was over almost before it began. In countries such as Belarus and the republics of ex-Soviet central Asia, the authorities simply took over all of the media that mattered. In Russia, pluralism survived for a decade, although corruption and proprietorial interference first tainted and then obliterated the ideals of the early 1990s.

Vladimir Putin perhaps rightly objected to oligarchic control of the media. But his solution-bringing all mainstream media under the control of the state, or its cronies, made things worse not better.

None of that troubled the outside world, any more than Putin's onslaught on the Russian constitution or his capture of the commanding heights of the Russian economy. Nor did most Westerners worry about the fragility of the media in the nations of what we used to call Eastern Europe.

Lacking a strong commercial base, much of the media in countries such as Poland, the Czech Republic and the Baltic states began to suffer from the same commercial pressures and cynicism that affected their counterparts in the former Soviet Union.

Even while this was happening, the idea that the Putin regime could wage an effective propaganda war against the West aroused incredulity, among both policymakers and media professionals. What could the Kremlin conceivably say that would make an impact among seasoned Western media consumers or even less seasoned Central Europeans? Why would anyone even listen to state-sponsored foreign propaganda channels, let alone believe what they broadcast?

The first part of the answer to that is in just two letters: RT. Initially mocked for its clumsy pro-Kremlin line, the station once known as Russia Today has morphed into a sophisticated, multilingual channel that focuses not on eulogizing the Putin regime but in decrying the West. Its motto is "Question more," though a more accurate version would add the words "except where Russia is concerned."

RT looks on the surface like any other television channel. Its presenters speak English and the other languages it broadcasts in (such as German) flawlessly. The content is a lively mix of scandal and polemic.

Taken individually, most RT items would not look out of place on Western television: Scare stories about disease outbreaks and disasters; "exposés" of hypocrisy, corruption and abuse of power; and terrifyingly negative reports about the prospects for the world economy.

But RT is highly selective. It reports scandals but not the efforts made to deal with them. It omits in its coverage the most essential feature of Western democracies: contestability.

Things go wrong all the time, but in the Western system of government you have a chance to put them right. You can complain to your elected representatives, sue the people who have wronged you (including the government), launch public campaigns, set up pressure groups, fulminate in the media and, if necessary, use the electoral system to make your case.

Of course the Western system isn't perfect, but it does contain checks and balances, independent courts and elected officials. None of these things exist in Putin's Russia.

By systematically highlighting the woes of the West and ignoring the far greater shortcomings at home, RT helps spread the idea that Western criticism of Russia is selective and unfair. It strenuously promotes the idea that truth is relative and facts are elastic.

But RT is only one small part of Russia's disinformation empire. The second pillar is the system of "troll factories," memorably exposed in a recent New York Times article.

On September 11 last year, hundreds of Twitter accounts began "reporting" news of a major chemical explosion in St. Mary Parish, Louisiana. Nothing of the kind had occurred, but the abundance of "eyewitness" reports gave the accident a War of the Worlds-like credibility. As the Times reported

    "A powerful explosion heard from miles away happened at a chemical plant in Centerville, Louisiana #ColumbianChemicals," a man named Jon Merritt tweeted. The #ColumbianChemicals hashtag was full of eyewitness accounts of the horror in Centerville. @AnnRussela shared an image of flames engulfing the plant. @Ksarah12 posted a video of surveillance footage from a local gas station, capturing the flash of the explosion. Others shared a video in which thick black smoke rose in the distance.

This was not an elaborate prank. It was a carefully planned exercise involving cloned websites, spurious text messages, a faked YouTube video, doctored screen shots and hundreds of social media accounts run by the Kremlin's "trolls." Other hoaxes, involving an Ebola outbreak and a police shooting, followed in subsequent weeks.

Of course these were one-off stunts, but they prove that the Kremlin is building its capabilities in this sphere, practicing for bigger tasks.

This kind of disinformation is already a central part of what military analysts call "hybrid war"-the use of nonmilitary means to erode the adversary's willpower, confuse and constrain his decision making and undermine his public support, so that victory can be attained without a shot being fired. This is how Russia operated in Ukraine. Now it is trying it on the West, both in the front-line states of central Europe as well as the supposedly impregnable countries of Western Europe and North America.

So far, the fake stories, fake websites and bogus "experts" are a fringe phenomenon in larger Western countries. But in smaller countries where the media are weak and easily manipulated, they are already beginning to help shape public opinion and change the outcome of elections.

The current Czech president was elected with the help of Russian money-it came directly from Lukoil, a Russian company-as well as pro-Russian websites. In Bulgaria, a Russian oligarch is attempting to purchase a major television station. Even in France, Russian financial support for Marine Le Pen's far-right National Front party is part of a concerted effort to change the outcome of elections in a major European country.

Belatedly, Western governments are beginning to come to grips with this. NATO has a center of excellence for "strategic communications" (i.e., information warfare) in Riga, the Latvian capital. NATO's own communication efforts in Brussels have finally acquired a much sharper edge, with punchy infographics blasting Russian "myths" about Western encirclement.

Britain has revived its military propaganda efforts with a new unit, the 77th Brigade, comprising 1,500 soldiers with expertise in social media. The United States is beefing up its vestigial Soviet-era efforts against disinformation within the State Department.

But these efforts are tiny in the face of what is only going to become a greater challenge with time, not only from Russia but from China, Iran and others that seek to take advantage of the West's open media space in order to manipulate Western public opinion.

In a world where social media can become a weapon of disinformation and journalists can be hoodwinked by phony "experts," we need new methods not just of combating disinformation but of identifying it, explaining it and understanding how it works. In the coming months, the Center for European Policy Analysis hopes to begin this long process.

 [return to Contents] 

 #28
www.rt.com
August 12, 2015
'His face was totally burned': Kursk submariner's widow speaks with RT
[Video here http://www.rt.com/news/312260-families-crew-kursk-submarine/]

The day the nuclear submarine 'Kursk' sank in the Barents Sea during a maritime exercise in August 2000 became a drama for the whole nation. And the world. RT spoke to the widow of one of the sailors who perished in the tragedy.

August 12, 2000, the Russian Oscar-class submarine K-141 Kursk was conducting naval exercise in the Barents Sea off Russia's northern coast. At the time of the tragedy, 118 sailors and officers were on board. Most of the crewmembers were under 30 years of age.
One of the sailors who perished on board the nuclear sub was a 22-year-old Sergey Erakhtin. His wife, who was left alone with a 19-month-old daughter, told RT that she went through a total nightmare when she learned the tragic news.

"I saw the body lying on the bunk bed [in the morgue] covered by a white sheet," Natalya Erakhtina told RT. She said she was determined to identify the body no matter how difficult it was for her.

Natalia said she had a fit of hysterics when the doctors in the morgue opened the sheet which covered her husband's face.

"His face wasn't preserved. It was totally burned. But the expression on his face showed that he felt pain," she said with tears in her eyes. "I was staring at empty eye-sockets of my husband."

The doctors asked her not to look at her husband's eyes, but she couldn't stop staring at them and repeating "This is not him. This is not my husband."

"[The doctors] opened one more sheet. And when I saw his body, saw his tattoo on his hand, I understood at once that the worst had happened."

Natalia didn't want to tell her daughter Kristina that her father had died, but the child sensed that something was wrong with her Dad anyway.

"We were watching the news, and little Kristina came over to the TV set as the submarine was being shown, saying 'Daddy, daddy is there.' I suppose the child sensed that something terrible had happened," Natalia said.

Fifteen years later, Kristina recalled a few memories of her father who used to play with her. She was six when she learned by chance about her father's fate. Kristina found a box with newspaper articles about Kursk tragedy. And her mother told her everything.

"He always remains a hero for me. I have had this sense of pride since early childhood [while watching] the picture of the father in military uniform. I still believe that he is still somewhere nearby and [he] is guarding me," Kristina told RT.

Kristina says that when she is alone she imagines that her father is standing next to her and she tells him everything that happened with her during the day.

"I believe that he is listening to me and I am telling him everything... I would have told him all my secrets, everything that a child tells her Dad that she hasn't seen for a long time."

International rescue efforts for the sunken sub lasted for 10 days, but failed to save anyone on board. The men were trapped in a watery grave, with divers who entered the sub a week after the tragedy discovering only dead bodies.

Kursk submarine was lifted from the seabed a year after. One hundred and fifteen bodies were removed from the wreck and buried in Russia, but three navy officers were never found. The investigators also found letters the sailors had written in their final hours to their dearest.

"It's too dark to write, but I will try to do it by touch. It seems there's no chance. Maybe 10 or 20 percent. We hope that at least somebody will read this. Here is a list of the personnel by section. Those in the ninth section, they'll be trying to get out. Greetings to all, there's no need to despair," 27-year-old Captain-Lieutenant Dmitry Kolesnikov wrote.

One more crew member, Andrey Borisov, addressed his last words to his wife and son.

"My dear Natasha and Sasha!!! If you're reading this letter it means that I'm gone. I love you both so much. Natasha, forgive me for everything. Sasha, become a real man. Loving, kisses," he wrote.

One more sailor described the last moments of his life on the sub, how the men were struggling to survive, but the chances were decreasing each second.

"We're feeling bad. We've been weakened by the carbon monoxide, we're struggling to survive. We won't survive decompression when we resurface. We can hold on for no more than a day."

The Kursk tragedy is widely regarded as one of the biggest national dramas during Vladimir Putin's time as president. It occurred early in his first term, merely three months after he was elected, and became a real challenge.

The failed rescue efforts not only caused anger and frustration among the perished sailors' families, but cause a big stir nationally and worldwide.

Journalist Andrey Kolesnikov who was present at the conference when Putin spoke to the public he never felt such an atmosphere in his entire life.

"I honestly thought they would tear him apart... There was such a heavy atmosphere there, such a clot of hatred, and despair, and pain... I never felt anything like it anywhere in my entire life... All the questions were aimed at this single man..." he said in the documentary 'President'. The film, dedicated to Vladimir Putin's 15 years in power, was released in April.

The relatives were shouting, one woman even fell unconscious, Kolesnikov said, but then Putin started speaking and managed to quiet the storm.

"If it was up to me I would have dived in myself, if I could, I already did once - you know that. Neither ours nor international specialists could reach Section Eight [of the sub]. I could just come here, 'tell you a bunch of lies' and quickly leave... Instead I'm telling you everything as it is," he said.

And Kolesnikov felt that everyone in the room "crossed over with him."

"Crossed over this line that separated the lives of their husbands from death."

 [return to Contents] 

 #29
http://gordonhahn.com
August 12, 2015
WORKING PAPER - Violence, Coercion and Escalation in the Ukrainian Crisis and Civil War, Escalation Point 8 - ATO: Civil War or Putin's War?
By Gordon M. Hahn

The war in Ukraine is regarded by the Maidan regime and the West as 'Putin's war' - a war provoked entirely by Russian incitement and invasion. In this view, the opposition to the Maidan's seizure of power was minimal and largely artificial inspired by outside agitators, guerilla fighters, and Russian intelligence and military personnel intervention. In this view, neither does the Donbass population support the Donbass resistance fighters and their political project, nor are those resistance fighters largely from the Donbass. In this view, the noted Girkin-Strelkov and several other Russia-dispatched acting Russian intelligence and military operatives started the war and were only able to sustain it by virtue of Moscow's direct intervention including the supply of regular Russian troops, weapons, and ammunition.

For its part Russia and the Donbass fighters have insisted the war was not their choice but rather Kiev's. In their view, they are freedom fighters or at least fighters for regional autonomy and against the threat of neo-fascism emanating from the radicals within Maidan. In this view, Donbass's Donetsk Peoples's Republic (DNR) and Luhansk (Lugansk) People's Republic (LNR) are popularly rooted and legitimate, and any official and unofficial Russian assistance has not been crucial either for the start or continuation of the war. The evidence suggests that the Russian/Donbass view is closer to the truth, despite significant but restrained, targeted, and often belated support from both Moscow and ordinary Russians. However, Russian military intervention clearly occurred after the ATO had been decared and began by Kiev's hand.

Kiev declared an 'anti-terrorist' operation (ATO) against the Donbass (DNR and LNR combined) resistance on 14 April 2014 and began operations the next day. Before that date there had been no organized armed resistance to the Maidan takeover of power in Kiev. Moreover, the Maidan authorities began to discuss the declaration of an ATO against Donbass in March days after Putin's stealth occupation of Crimea, when acting president Turchynov convened the Ukrainian Defense and Security Council to discuss measures to address the threat of separatism in the country's southeastern oblasts. On April 14-15, the Ukrainian military deployed troops, aircraft and armoured carriers in eastern Ukraine in a declared "anti-terrorist operation."

The SBU itself observed, or within days subsequently received information to the effect, that the Russian monarchist Girkin-Strelkov had arrived in Donetsk on April 12th for the purpose of "realizing a coercive scenario of hidden aggression" by Russia after leaving Crimea for Russia on April 8th by the Kerch ferry and entering Ukraine through Russia's Rostov-na-Donu. The pro-Russian monarchist Strelkov-Girkin himself claimed he had initiated the violence in Donbass, but this is clearly untrue and an attempt to bolster his supposed credentials as a national hero of the resistance to the Maidan revolt. Strelkov-Girkin was not a player at this point. He had played a minor role in the Crimea takeover, as I noted elsewhere, and the SBU reported his presence in Donbass two days after the April 14th declaration of the ATO against Donbass.[1] His arrival was hardly a legitimate casus belli for starting a civil war against a still non-violent, if increasingly assertive and potentially coercive opposition in Donbass.

The only events to which the ATO could have been a response also were not legitimate casus belli for massive military operations. the peaceful anti-Maidan demonstrations, the seizure of several arms depots, and threats of forceful seizures of power in the region made by local resistance leaders. In late January, as revolt spread across the country, including in Donbass's Luhanks and Donetsk Oblasts, native anti-Maidan Luhansk "partisans", responding to Right Sector assertiveness in the region emerged and subsequently captured Artemevsk and Slavyansk weapons depots. These installations warehoused enormous amounts of former Soviet weapons and ammunition.

In addition, local oligarchs such as Rinat Akhmedov and Sergei Levochkin initially and generously financed the Donbass opposition to Maidan, including anti-Maidan demonstrations and then the initial local resistance forces in order to protect their assets from raids by the western and local ultra-nationalists who were beginning to grab assets on behalf of western Ukrainian oligarchs such as Ihor Kolomiskii and Dmitry Firtash. Oddly, Levochkin was demoted from his post as head of Yanukovich's presidential administration to the position of advisor of the president on January 17th. The same day the Chief of the General Staff of Ukraine's Ground Forces was fired.[2] Could Yanukovich have been pursuing the possibility of declaring martial law with deployment of the army, prompting their resignations - or at least dissension - and consequently Yanukovich's distrust? In conditions of crisis politics, coup politics follow close behind.

At any rate, Eastern Ukraine's peaceful, political resistance to the Maidan revolt began long before Grikin-Strelkov's arrival in Donetsk. Already on the day after Yanukovich's removal - anti-Maidan forces in eastern and southern Ukraine began rejecting the Maidan's overthrow of Yanukovich and threatening separatism. The February 21st Kharkiv congress of PR southeastern oblasts' deputies declared that their regional governments would "take upon themselves responsibility for guaranteeing the constitutional legal order and citizens' rights" until these were restored in Kiev. This meant that Crimea, Sevastopol and other regions in the south and east were refusing to recognize the Maidan regime in Kiev. Soon anti-Maidan demonstrations began on squares before the oblast administration buildings across much of Donbass and in other cities in southeastern Ukraine from Kherson to Dnepropetrovsk, sometimes met with pro-Maidan protests. The urgency of the Donbass and other regions' resistance elements could only have been piqued when the pro-Maidan rump majority in the Supreme Rada - the pro-Yanukovich and pro-Russia deputies of which were under intimidation and threats from ultra-nationalist deputies and their allied armed revolutionaries - adopted well-known amendments to the law repealing the status of Russian as a state language in regions with large ethnic Russian and Russophone minorities or pluralities. Although the amendments were themselves repealed the next day under Western pressure, the Maidan revolution's clearly ethno-nationalistic instincts reinforced fears in the east that the revolution was ultra-nationalist and even fascist rather than democratic and that their rights had only just begun to be eradicated.

Anti-Maidan rallies mounted in the east and in some southern and central Ukrainian provincial capitols through March. In the early morning hours of April 6th - a day before Right Sector activists in Kiev stormed the Supreme Court and ejected and humiliated its judges[3] - a group of anti-Maidan demonstrators, protesting "nationalism and other forms of Nazism," seized the oblast administration in Donetsk and later the SBU's headquarters, declaring a 'Donetsk People's Republic." However, by nightfall Ukrainian Special Forces (Spetsnaz) had taken the SBU building back under control and soon took the OGA, and the local prosecutor's office charged the detained anti-Maidan protesters with attempting to overthrow Ukraine's constitutional order. These protesters were already being referred to as 'separatists' and within days would regard them as terrorists.[4] Initial takeovers by anti-Maidan elements that occurred on April 7th in several other oblasts were successfully overturned by special forces.[5] Lugansk government facilities and some in Donetsk also were lost to security forces and had to be re-taken.[6] Again, all this occurred before Girkin-Strelkov or any other possibly non-volunteer Russian forces had entered Donetsk and Lugansk.

The Donetsk and Lugansk OGAs were taken again by the anti-Maidan forces on April 14th assisted this time by Russian volunteers, not Russian forces, even recently released conscripts as would happen later.[7] On April 16th, a local activist, Aleksandr Zakharchenko, and his organization 'Oplot' seized Donetsk city hall. Zakharchenko would become a leading field commander in the civil war and leader of the DNR.[8] But these takeovers of power came when the ATO had already been under discussion for more than a week and on the same day that the ATO was declared and Kiev's tanks and planes had already begun to move. So Maidan Kiev's civil war or 'ATO' was not a reaction to a Russian invasion or intervention or even to Donbass rebel violence. Rather, it was a deliberate policy to refuse to negotiate with, and deny the anti-Maidan forces the very same tactics they, the Maidan forces, had used to seize power in Kiev and much of the rest of Ukraine. Kiev Maidan preferred to reject talks, much as its radicals did on February 21st. Instead, it sent regular forces and neofascist-led volunteer battalions to the southeastern Donetsk and Lugansk regions immediately after Donbass locals refused to submit to the country's new, coup-imposed authorities in lieu of talks on autonomy for their region.

Moreover, even the Maidan regime's strategic communications and propaganda efforts rarely claimed that there was a Russian presence in eastern Ukraine before Girkin-Strelkov, who was a retired, not active Russian intelligence officer, before 2014. When they did make that claim, they were immediately exposed as disinformation. Under the Maidan regime Ukraine's SBU and its director Valentin Nalyvaichenko issued all sorts of false propaganda reports in 2014-15. Early Maidan SBU disinformation usually included photographs captured from social networking sites taken who knows when and who knows where; audio tapes made who knows where and who knows when; incorrect claims that the uniforms and equipment used by the pro-Russian groups in Donetsk and Lugansk were Russian army-issue when in fact they could be purchased in army surplus, hunting, even souvenir stores or on the black market; and claims that those forces must be Russian soldiers and/or special forces because of their professional demeanor. They ignored the fact that interviews with them and journalist who have spoken with them indicated that they are former Afghan war veterans, former Ukrainian, Russian and Soviet servicemen, local police and private security guards.

Numerous such SBU reports and statements were not only not credible; they were actually discredited rather quickly and easily by anyone willing to examine them with an objective eye. The first piece of disinformation attempted to show a significant Russian presence in Donbass already in April 2014. On 20 April 2014, a set of photos of an alleged GRU agent were provided by the SBU to NATO, Western governments, and the New York Times were ostensibly taken in Georgia, Russia, and eastern Ukraine and purported to unmask a bearded GRU special forces operative who has been allegedly dispatched by Moscow to Georgia and now six years later to eastern Ukraine. Three photographs allegedly showed one and the same Russian GRU agent in Russia, 2008 Georgia, and April 2014 Ukraine. NATO's Atlantic Council and the New York Times publicized the photographs, touting them as evidence of Russia's inclursion into Donbass.[9] The SBU's 'evidence' of this alleged GRU agent's presence in Ukraine was exposed immediately as fake.[10] The New York Times and NATO's Atlantic Council backed off their claims.[11] Simon Saradzhyan of Harvard's Belfer Center noted that the photo labeled to have been taken in Georgia shows Khamzat Gairbekov, commander of the Chechen Vostok (East) Battalion controlled by Russia's GRU and Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, sent to fight in Georgia in 2008, and since disbanded.[12] Moreover, the photographer of the photo taken supposedly in Russia said that the picture was actually taken in Ukraine and was used without his permission and that the person in the photograph taken in Ukraine was not the GRU agent Gairbekov but a private Russian citizen named Alexander Mozhaev, who had served in the Russian army in the 1990s.[13]

At the same time, Ukraine's SBU claimed to have captured 20 GRU agents but never presented them to television cameras and never provided audio, pictures of them or any identity papers. Weeks later the SBU reduced the number of its 'captured' GRU agents to 10 and days after that to 3 in its falsified report to NATO's Atlantic Council. It seemed such incontrovertible proof of a significant GRU presence beyond the routine should have been paraded before television cameras. This would have been a real propaganda coup against the Kremlin, but a 'perp walk' never came. If it had, then it would have been incumbent upon those seeing clear evidence to acknowledge that Putin had sent forces into Ukraine to orchestrate the east Ukrainian uprisings. Presenting conclusive evidence of a clandestine Russian incursion into eastern Ukraine therefore would have helped to mobilize support for a tougher military response than did the falsified photographs did. It is perhaps for this reason that the Obama White House, U.S. State Department, NATO, its Atlantic Council, US European Command chief General Phillip Breedlove, and the New York Times touted this as 'evidence' of Russian forces in eastern Ukraine. Only the last retracted the 'evidence' after it was exposed as false. From the Kremlin's point of view, false reports of a Russian presence in Ukraine and Western connivance in their proselytization were added to the Western-backed Maidan revolt and the beginning of ground and air operations against Donbass without a word of criticism or even caution rgarding Kiev's ATO from either Washington or Brussels.

False SBU reports continued through the ATO even after there was reliable evidence that some officially-sponsored Russian incursions had begun in June-July 2014. In February 2015, as the Donbass rebels, with significant Russian military support, were encircling and about to rout Ukrainian forces near Debaltsevo, Ukraine's SBU passed photographs of Russian tanks allegedly in Ukraine to a US Senator who showed them in a presentation on the floor of the Senate only to have them exposed as fakes. Burned already by the SBU's sloppy stratcomm, the New York Times exposed the deception by showing that the photographs were from the 2008 South Ossetiya war.[14] In February 2015 SBU chief Nalyvaichenko claimed the SBU had evidence that Putin aide Vladislav Surkov had organized and commanded from an SBU base the alleged police sniper attacks that killed tens of civilians on 20 February 2014. Nalyvaichenko presented none of the evidence allegedly possessed by the SBU; he simply said it had such evidence.[15] As documented elsewhere, the preponderance of proof ever since the first days after those events shows that in fact neo-fascist elements within the Maidan protest movement initiated and were behind many if not most of the sniper shootings, which targeted both police and demonstrators.

By April, a Rada deputy from President Petro Poroshenko's party (the Petro Poroshenko Bloc or PPB) revealed that Surkov arrived in Kiev on the evening of the 20th, five hours after the shooting was over.[16] Nalyvaichenko suddenly toned down his story. Testifying at a hearing of the Anti-Corruption Committee in mid-April, he was much more circumscribed in his claims about Surkov. He stated that Surkov was reportedly seen in the company of then SBU chief Oleksandr Yakimenko and visited the presidential administration. Nalyvaichenko made no mention of Surkov coordinating the sniper attacks at the hearings.[17] When the neo-fascist Right Sector group killed several police in Mukachevo in July 2015, the already former SBU chief supported Right Sector's position, suggesting that he might have had a role along with the group in organizing the sniper attacks and was seeking to cover this up by pinning the crime on Surkov and the Kremlin. In June 2015, Nalyvaichenko was fired from his position as SBU chief allegedly for failing to fight corruption agressively. This would not stop Nalyvaichenko from speaking out, including about alleged Russian incursions into Donbass. In July, the earliest official Russian military or intelligence presence in Ukraine he could point to was in May 2014. This was based on information gathered from two GRU agents that Kiev's forces actually did capture in April 2015 and did parade before television cameras unlike a year earlier.[18]

In addition to the false claims, Kiev's more credible disclosures regarding an official Russian military or intelligence presence Ukraine (outside Crimea) never claimed to show, no less did they demonstrate such a presence existed before the 14 April 2014 start of the ATO. Thus, when the opposition Russian newspaper Novaya gazeta consulted the Ukrainian military on Kiev's and NATO's claims that there are 13,000 Russian troops fighting in Ukraine and that, according to Kiev, at least 4,500 have been killed as of February 2014, the earliest time for which evidence of a Russian intervention, according to Ukraine's military, was August 2014, not June or July, no less April. Yet Kiev and NATO were claiming in June that Russia had 'invaded' Ukraine. Novaya gazeta concluded that the numerical data for the number of Russian troops and Russian military casualties in Donbass trumpeted by Kiev were not realistic.[19] To this date no evidence of a Russian military intervention or even a significant GRU intelligence-gathering infiltration has been presented. This means that Kiev started the war and that the war is fundamentally a civil war. It is as much and, very arguably more Turchynov's war, Nalyvaichenko's war, Avakov's war, and Maidan Kiev's war than it is 'Putin's war' or 'Russia's war.'

Without an exhaustive attempt to avoid war through negotiations, Kiev was initiating a civil war against a portion of its population. Facing a very similar, indeed far more threatening situation in 1991 in Chechnya, Moscow negotiated for three years before starting its anti-terrorist operation in December 1994. By contrast, Kiev started its ATO almost immediately and with full Western backing. This means that along with Moscow - whose Crimea intervention surely had sown panic and potential for overreaction in Kiev, Washington and Brussels - the West, in particular the Barack Obama administration, and Kiev also bear responsibility for the war as the do for the original crisis that brought us the the Ukrainian civil war and the threat of larger conflagration in Europe for the first time in 75 years.

______________________

FOOTNOTES

[1] "SBU: Yanukovicha kontroliruet rossiiskaya voennaya razvedka," Ukrainskaya pravda, 16 April 2014, http://www.pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2014/04/16/7022681/.

[2] "Yanukovich uvolil konaduyshchego Sukhoputnymi voiskami," Ukrainskaya pravda, 17 January 2014, http://www.pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2014/01/17/7009861/.

[3] "Pravyi Sektor vzyal shturmom Verkhovnyi Sud Ukrainy - Chrezvychainyie novosti - 07.04," YouTube, 7 April 2014, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jitMYO-xCc8.

[4] "Kak v Donetske, zakhvatyvali OGA - Chrezvychainyie novosti, 07.04," YouTube, 7 April 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=C12ewZOQxAM; "Kak prorossiiskie separatisty segodnya zakhvatyvali zdanie Donetskoi OGA (VIDEO)," Munitsipal'naya gazeta, 6 April 2014, http://mungaz.net/main/11622-kak-prorossiyskie-separatisty-segodnya-zahvatyvali-zdanie-doneckoy-oga-video.html; "Spetsnaz osvobodil zakhvachennoe separatistami zdanie SBU v Donetske," Ukrainskaya pravda, 16 April 2014, www.pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2014/04/7/7021678/; and "Ukraine crisis: Protesters declare Donetsk 'republic'," BBC World Service, 7 April 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26919928.

[5] For Kharkiv (Kharkov), see "V Khar'kove osvobodili OGA, no popytalis' zakhvatit televyshku," Ukrainskaya pravda, 7 April 2014, www.pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2014/04/7/7021681/. For Nikolaev, see "V Nikolaev stolknulis' storonniki Maidana i separtisty. Lyubitelei Putina zastavili uiti," Ukrainskaya pravda, 7 April 2014, http://www.pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2014/04/7/7021682/.

[6] "Lugansk vo vlasti separatistov: kak zakhvatyvaly OGA, militsiyu, prokuraturu i sud," BigMir.net, 29 April 2014, http://news.bigmir.net/ukraine/812829-Lugansk-vo-vlasti-separatistov-kak-zahvatyvali-OGA-miliciju-prokuraturu-i-sud.

[7] "Kak zakhvatyvali OGA i prokuraturu v Luganske," BBC Russian Service, 14 April 2014, http://www.bbc.com/ukrainian/multimedia_russian/2014/04/140430_ru_gallery_lugansk.

[8] The Guardian, 15 April 2014.

[9] Andrew Higgins, Michael R. Gordon, and Andrew E. Kramer, "Photos Link Masked Men in East Ukraine to Russia," New York Times, 20 April 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/21/world/europe/photos-link-masked-men-in-east-ukraine-to-russia.html?_r=1.

[10] From the photos it was immediately clear that they were anything but; they were hazy and could very well be showing two different men. Moreover, it seemed strange that a special forces agent would consistently wear a tell-tale beard in a clandestine operation rather than shave it off or shorten it so as to avoid detection, given the ubiquity of mobile phone cameras and CCTV nowadays? See my post and another by Harvard University Kennedy School of Government scholar Sergei Saradzhyan in Johnson's Russia List, No. 94, 24 April 2014, http://russialist.org/russia-ukraine-jrl-2014-94-contents-with-links-thursday-24-april-2014/.

[11] Michael R. Gordon and Andrew E. Kramer, "Scrutiny of Photos Said to Tie Russian Units to Ukraine," New York Times, 22 April 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/world/europe/scrutiny-over-photos-said-to-tie-russia-units-to-ukraine.html?action=click&contentCollection=Europe&module=RelatedCoverage®ion=Marginalia&pgtype=article.

[12] Sergei Saradzhyan, "No Smoking Spetsnaz Gun in E. Ukraine or Why Khamzat of GRU's Vostok Wouldn't Pose As Donetsk Native," Saradzhyan: From From the Global Tank - Live Journal, 22 April 2014, http://saradzhyan.livejournal.com/34407.html.

[13] Simon Shuster, "Exclusive: Meet the Pro-Russian Separatists of Eastern Ukraine," Time, 23 April 2014, http://time.com/74405/exclusive-pro-russian-separatists-eastern-ukraine/.

[14] Robert Mackey, "Shifting Ukrainian Fact from Ukrainian Fiction," New York Times, 13 February 2015, http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/02/14/world/europe/sifting-ukrainian-fact-from-ukrainian-fiction.html?referrer&_r=1.

[15] "Nalyvaichenko obvinil sovetnika Putina v organizatsii rasstrelov na Maidane," Vesti Ukraina, 20 February 2015, http://vesti-ukr.com/kiev/89706-nalivajchenko-obvinil-sovetnika-putina-v-organizacii-rasstrelov-na-majdane and "Nalyvaichenko: Surkov keruvav snaiperami - inozemtsyami na Maidani," Ukrainskaya pravda, 19 February 2015, http://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2015/02/19/7059184/.

[16] "Pochemu possorilis' Porosheno i Nalyvaichenko," Vesti Ukraina, 15 June 2015, http://vesti-ukr.com/strana/103514-pochemu-possorilis-poroshenko-i-nalivajchenko.

[17] Serhiy Leschenko, "Nalyvaichenko protiv Surkova - stsenariy dlya Medvedchuka,"Ukrainskaya pravda, 16 April 2015, http://blogs.pravda.com.ua/authors/leschenko/552ee534b5a10/.

[18] Mark Snowiss, "Ex-Ukrainian Spy Chief: Russian Camps Spreading Chaos," Voice of America, 24 July 2015, http://www.voanews.com/content/ex-ukrainian-spy-chief-russian-camps-spreading-chaos/2877981.html.

[19] The article "War. Feedback" consists of a response from the Ukrainian Defense Ministry to Novaya gazeta queries on this and other issues the paper sent to the ministry. The paper then subjected the Ukrainian Defense Ministry's claims to analysis by a Russian General Staff expert and one of its own military experts. Ivan Zhilin, "Voina. Obratnaya svyaz'," Novaya gazeta, No. 21, 2 March 2015, http://www.novayagazeta.ru/politics/67467.html.

Gordon M. Hahn is an Analyst and Advisory Board Member of the Geostrategic Forecasting Corporation. He is also Analyst/Consultant, Russia Other Points of View and Senior Researcher, Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group, San Jose, California. Dr Hahn is author of three well-received books, Russia's Revolution From Above (Transaction, 2002), Russia's Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007), which was named an outstanding title of 2007 by Choice magazine, and The 'Caucasus Emirate' Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia's North Caucasus and Beyond (McFarland Publishers, 2014). He also has authored hundreds of articles in scholarly journals and other publications on Russian, Eurasian and international politics and publishes the Islam, Islamism, and Politics in Eurasia Report (IIPER) at CSIS at http://csis.org/program/russia-and-eurasia-program. Dr. Hahn has been a visiting scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. (2011-2013), the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. (1995 and 2005), and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He has taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, San Francisco State, and St. Petersburg State (Russia) Universities.

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