#2
Reuters
August 21, 2015
'Putin the Polite,' chilling hero of Russian souvenirs

He may be in charge of an economy in crisis, but if mobile phone covers and souvenir mugs are a barometer of popularity, Russian President Vladimir Putin need not fear for his political future.

In fact, Moscow's annexation of Crimea from Ukraine last year has given the memorabilia makers even more material to glorify a president whose image as a champion of Russian national interests in a hostile world is barely challenged in his own country.

And while plenty of the souvenirs are standard tourist kitsch playing to the action-man image Putin has cultivated since coming to power, others seem to revel, without irony, in the darker side of a former spy who has suppressed political dissent and admitted to plotting in secret to seize Crimea.

Tourists who visited the city of Kazan for this month's world swimming championships would have found Putin-face wall clocks and monster fridge magnets with the president in various heroic poses - as bare-chested action man, naval commander ("We will not abandon our own!") or historic "Volodya (Vladimir) the Brave". One recurring motif even has him cuddling a puppy.

But there is also a glossily finished decorative china plate bearing the inscription "Crimea is Ours!" over a map of the peninsula, a Russian flag, and a picture of Putin clenching his fist.

From there, it's a small step to the t-shirts sold outside the Kremlin showing Putin delivering a karate kick to the throat of U.S. President Barack Obama, accused by many ordinary Russians of trying to foment anti-Russian feeling in Ukraine.

And there is more than a hint of admiration on display for some of the darker arts employed by a president whose personal popularity rating regularly tops 80 percent.

The "Anyavanya" brand carried by upmarket online shop Aizel.Ru, which says it has "made the patriotism of the fashionable Russian public into a trend", displays smartphone covers of Putin, in camouflage coat, labeled "The most polite of people".

"Polite people" was the knowing term quickly coined in Russia for the troops in unmarked uniforms who took control of Crimea without firing a shot - and who Putin later openly admitted, after months of denials, were Russian forces acting on a plan he had hatched with his commanders.

One of the most popular images adorning t-shirts and smartphone covers is a simple photo portrait of Putin looking remote and inscrutable behind dark glasses.

"I can read your mind" reads one of the captions on a phone cover in Kazan. Another seems to want to throw the West's criticism of Putin's methods back in its face. It simply reads, in English: "Russian Mafia".

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 #3
Reuters
August 23, 2015
A $620,000 watch tells what time it is in Vladimir Putin's Russia
By Greg Feifer
Gregory Feifer is author of "Russians: The People behind the Power." A former NPR Moscow correspondent who reported from Russia for almost a decade, he is currently working on a book about anti-Americanism.

Fall comes suddenly to Russia in mid-August, a dose of harsh reality that ends summer's brief respite with a foreshadowing of the legendary winter that shapes the Russian psyche. With temperatures near record-lows, last week was no exception.

August is a special time for another reason: It has revealed something about the state's failures thanks to an uncanny string of disasters since Vladimir Putin's rise to the presidency. From the sinking of the Kursk submarine 15 years ago to a series of wildfires that swept the country more recently, they exposed problems that were either man-made or made significantly worse by human mismanagement.

His handling of the public-relations disasters provides a window into one of the most important aspects of Putin's presidency: the crucial facades obscuring his kleptocratic system. So what to make of the muted reaction to what should have been the latest public relations disaster for Putin's regime?

The opposition leader Alexei Navalny revealed this week that Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov was in Sardinia, spending his honeymoon on a yacht costing more than $420,000 a week - three times the annual salary of someone who has worked only as a civil servant. Even more surprising was the timing: Social media are still circulating memes about the $620,000 watch Peskov was spotted wearing during his marriage ceremony. Many believed he would follow by lying low.

The revelations come when Russians are confronting what is now officially a recession after the economy declined 4.6 percent in the second quarter compared to last year. Real wages are steadily declining - by almost 10 percent in July - along with living standards for the first time since Putin came to power in 2000.

The Kremlin has responded not with actions aimed at alleviating or countering the decline, but showing itself to be fighting Western sanctions with its counter-ban on Western products - that is further eroding Russians' quality of life. State television broadcast images of bulldozers destroying illegal European food, squashing frozen geese and pulverizing vast piles of cheese. Contraband clothing is said to be next on the list, along with the threat of a ban on Wikipedia.

Tens of thousands signed a petition protesting the food destruction in a country of widespread poverty haunted by memories of mass famine. But that's a tiny minority of mostly liberal-minded dissenters. Why aren't more ordinary Russians outraged about being forced to support Putin's cold war by eating Russian kasha when his own trusted spokesman was living like an oligarch in the Mediterranean? Why didn't they back Navalny's demands for investigating how Peskov funds his extravagant lifestyle? Or at least a public censure?

More to the point, how does Putin continue to enjoy near-90 percent public approval ratings? Why is it that what seems starkly obvious to Westerners about the hardship, isolation and corruption his rule has brought doesn't seem to be sinking in among Russians?

The answer lies in their different expectations. Although rising living standards helped boost Putin's popularity for a decade, his presidency has really been about something else from the beginning: restoring Russia's traditional political system.

Peskov is a perfect symbol of how it functions. Although his apparent riches can't possibly be legal, they're a legitimate reflection of the informal structure of personal loyalty that really governs Russia under Putin. Unlike the 17th-century French nobleman Nicolas Fouquet, who hosted a party so lavish it gave Louis XIV an excuse to arrest him, the faithful presidential aide is simply enjoying the just rewards of his hard labor.

The resignation of the railways minister this week provided another case in point. Vladimir Yakunin's official post never adequately reflected his real importance as one of Putin's closest cronies. Now some believe his departure for a more ceremonial post in the upper house of parliament doesn't reflect a diminishment of power as much as the simple fact that recession means less state cash in the massive railway infrastructure to channel or pilfer.

As the fortunes of Yakunin and other billionaires remain hale, the Kremlin is selling privation to ordinary Russians as their way of contributing to the fight against what it presents as the real common enemy: the West. Indeed, the worse their suffering, the more likely an envious society will buy that line. Like Stalin during World War Two, Putin is playing on Russian and Soviet history to help inspire their patriotism.

Fantastic as it may seem to some in the West, the scheme is working well. Although Putin has engineered Russia's newest cold war to help empower a kleptocratic regime that enriches a small elite, the masses paying the price for it feel he's protecting them.

His fearless, unapologetic persona is a crucial asset in that effort. The president was shoring it up with his usual public relations antics this week, this time on a vacation in his conquest Crimea, where he took a ride in a cool-looking minisub, audacious if only for coinciding with the 15th anniversary of the Kursk's sinking. It's no surprise that tensions are on the rise in eastern Ukraine again. That conflict's ebb and flow is going well for stoking Putin's ruthless image, with the rest of Ukraine playing its part by teetering on the edge of economic crisis.

Over the decade and a half of Putin's tenure, any one of the August catastrophes would have been enough to end the career of a Western leader. He has weathered them with flying colors because his virtuoso ability to blame others - hapless ministers, greedy oligarchs, power-hungry Western leaders - has helped sustain his presidency.

Although there seems to be no way in sight out of Russia's current economic trouble - with all-important oil prices sinking to new lows this week - this August's bread and circuses are showing that rather than any correction, we should expect more of the same. The sickening show trials of foreigners, including military and border guard officers abducted from Ukraine and Estonia, represents a further display of confidence that comes from a sense of stability.

None of which means that Western policy toward Russia is to blame. Rather than a sign of fundamental failure, ordinary Russians' support for Putin must be taken as evidence that his challenge will probably remain long-term. But just because Putin has everything to lose by toning down his displays doesn't mean his actions are sustainable or that support for his authoritarian rule is anything but brittle. That's why his choice to confront the West must be met with far clearer signs that it will ultimately not work. Western countries should make them by doing more to advance their values and interests. More serious military and financial support for Ukrainians on Europe's front lines would be a good start.

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 #4
Bloomberg
August 23, 2015
Brussels Break-In Shines Light on Putin's European Mischief
By Henry Meyer and Jeremy Hodges

It was an unusual delivery at the European Parliament by a pair of native Russians.

They broke into the third-floor mailroom and deposited for the 751 legislators English-language copies of "Red Dalia," a scathing biography of Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite, according to a parliamentary probe. The book, published after she accused Vladimir Putin of running a "terrorist state," alleged that she collaborated with the KGB during the Soviet era.

While no link to Putin has been established, critics such as Lithuanian lawmaker Antanas Guoga and defense analyst Jonathan Eyal, say the December episode represents an example of the Russian leader's mischief-making in Europe. It's part of a toolkit used by the KGB's 21st century successors combining propaganda and influence-peddling with more traditional tradecraft, they say.

"In Soviet intelligence, the goal was to destroy the western world and achieve global communism," Oleg Kalugin, 80, who ran a KGB spy network in the U.S. during the Cold War, said in an interview in Washington, where he's lived for two decades. "Russia now wants to be a military and economic power, but it has no desire to conquer the world."

Russian Interests

Russia's interests in Brussels, represented by the 64 diplomats at its permanent mission, involve energy policy, pipeline politics and antitrust regulation, in addition to preventing a unified anti-Putin front within the 28-nation bloc and keeping tabs on NATO.

In the Brussels intrusion, the Russians gained access to the main part of the Altiero Spinelli building as guests of an employee of the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy group of anti-EU members of the parliament, according to a confidential report by the legislature's security directorate, a copy of which was obtained by Bloomberg.

"This smells very strongly of a Russian smear campaign," said Joerg Forbrig, a senior program director at the German Marshall Fund of the U.S. in Berlin.

Officials at Russia's permanent mission to the EU said they hadn't heard about the incident and declined to comment further. The EFDD said in a statement the break-in happened without the group's approval and that and the person responsible is no longer employed by them. The parliament's press service declined to comment.

Moscow Backing

Four European parties from the far right to the radical left -- France's National Front, the U.K. Independence Party, the Danish People's party and Greece's Syriza -- have expressed sympathy for Putin while finishing first in their national elections to the European Parliament last year.

Putin has worked to build bridges to governments in Greece, Cyprus and Hungary. One of Budapest's lawmakers in the EU Parliament, Bela Kovacs, is accused by Hungarian prosecutors of being a Russian spy, which he denies.

"If you look at almost every far-left or far-right organization in Europe today, the one unifying theme is that they all look up to Mr. Putin as a role model," Eyal, director of the London-based Royal United Services Institute for defense studies, or RUSI, said in an interview in London.

Putin has built an "enormous apparatus" across Europe in part because of the huge sums of money he's been showering on the spy services, according to Oleg Gordievsky, a former KGB colonel who spied for the U.K. from 1974 to 1985, when he was smuggled into Finland in the trunk of a car.

Defense, national security and law enforcement now eat up 34 percent of Russia's budget, more than double the level in 2010. The share of spending that's black -- authorized but not itemized -- has doubled in the period to 21 percent, or 3.2 trillion rubles ($50 billion), according to the Gaidar Institute, an independent research group in Moscow.

With more money and manpower, Russian operatives are becoming increasingly brazen, EU intelligence agencies say.

Sweden Vulnerable

Sweden's service, SAPO, says that Russia has deployed "hundreds" of spies on missions around Europe, including Stockholm, and that they operate across "a series of platforms," including consulting, media and travel.

Sweden is particularly vulnerable because it's not a member of NATO and so doesn't share in the alliance's mutual-defense pact. Russia warned the Scandinavian country against joining NATO in June, saying there'd be military "consequences." The country is one of at least six in Europe, along with Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Lithuania and Estonia, that has either arrested or expelled suspected Russian spies in the past 18 months.

The Czech Security Information Service, or BIS, said last October that Russia had sent an "extremely high" number of agents to Prague in search of information related to the EU, energy and NATO.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, formed by the U.S. and its allies in 1949 to keep Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in check, in April cut the number of Russian officials accredited to its Brussels headquarters in half, to 30, to limit their spying capabilities. That same month, U.S. Air Force General Philip Breedlove, NATO's top commander, told a Senate hearing that Russia's covert military intervention in eastern Ukraine underscored "critical gaps" in Western intelligence.

Europe should be alarmed, said Guoga, the Lithuanian whose complaint sparked the "Red Dalia" probe. "The Russians have influence on the right and left," Guoga said in a phone interview. "They have people everywhere. It's incredible."

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 #5
Kyiv Post
August 24, 2015
Russia's cancerous organs
By Alexei Bayer
Alexei Bayer, a native Muscovite, lives in New York. His detective novel "Murder at the Dacha" was published by Russian Life Books in 2013.

Russian workers throw peaches off a truck outside the city of Novozybkov, about 600 km from Moscow, on August 7, 2015. Russian officials on August 6 steamrollered tonnes of cheese as they began a controversial drive to destroy Western food smuggled into the crisis-hit country despite a public outcry. President Vladimir Putin last week signed a decree ordering the trashing of all food -- from gourmet cheeses to fruit and vegetables -- that breaches a year-old embargo on Western imports imposed in retaliation to sanctions over the Ukraine crisis. AFP PHOTO / ONLINER.BY
© AFP

One of the chapters in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago" is titled "The Archipelago Metastasizes". For the past year and a half, the world has watched in horrified fascination how Russia was convulsed by a cancer-like disease. More specifically, the organs of state security, created by Vladimir Lenin in the early day of Bolshevik rule, greatly expanded by Joseph Stalin and came to power with the ascent of Vladimir Putin, have been systematically destroying the Russian economy and society.

Just like a malignant tumor attacking a living organism, the ChK-GPU-NKVD-KGB-FSB, as those organs were known at different times of Soviet and Russian history, will perish along with their host. But it's a small consolation for the relatively small number of normal people who still remain in Russia - as well as for the rest of the world which may be impacted by the demise of its largest country and second most powerful nuclear power.

The Bolsheviks believed in Marx's theory of historical development. In the 18th century, the Age of Reason laid foundations for scientific analysis, and Marx applied the newly developed methods to the study of history as though it was one of the natural sciences. He came up with a number of supposedly "objective laws" by which social, economic and political development of mankind is occurring. Like all scientific theories, his laws of history were supposed to explain the past and predict the future. According to him, the natural future of mankind was going to be communist society.

By today's standards of scientific research Marx's analysis was rubbish. His were not testable theories - at least not at the level of knowledge we now possess - and historical data he was working with was extremely subjective and vague. To conclude based on this kind of data that social development was at an end and that its ultimate goal - the establishment of communism - was within reach was preposterous. However, in the 19th century, such methods were universally accepted, and Charles Darwin, for one, came up with his theory of evolution pretty much by the same mental process. The only difference was that his conclusions were later supported by practical experiments, at least as far as simpler organism were concerned. There are still no tests to check Marx's "objective laws" of history, and by the look of it they're plain wrong.

Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks believed that communism will replace capitalism just as a century and a half before capitalism had replaced the feudal system. Since it was going to be a natural change, there was no real need to prepare for economic or social aspects of communism. All they needed to do was to overthrow the power of the bourgeoisie, confiscate their factories and make them the property of the people - and the communist economy and society will spontaneously emerge. Just as capitalism was a more economically efficient than feudalism, communism would be infinitely more productive than capitalism.

So they focused on making the revolution - which they did successfully in November 1917. They also needed to hold on to power and to purge the "parasitic classes" of the old regime who stood in the way of the bright communist future. For this purpose they created their first political police entity, the Emergency Committee - or the dreaded ChK.

It turned out, however, that communism didn't quite dawn naturally once Lenin and his buddies set up shop in the Kremlin. World Revolution failed to materialize and in Russia early experiments with communism quickly led to a bona fide famine. Peasants refused to surrender grain without pay, out of the goodness of their heart, and workers in the cities were too hungry to work.

Since marxism-leninism could not have been at fault, it was clear that the reason for communism's economic failure was the presence of wreckers, saboteurs, spies, capitalist agents and class enemies. The political police began shearing layer after layer of social classes in Russia, purging the country to its proletarian core. Since it didn't help, the repressive apparatus eventually got into the economic sphere directly, becoming the supplier of slave labor for Stalin's white elephant canal digging and dam building projects, as well for the extraction of natural resources in Siberia and the Far North.

The organs of state security thus became a malignant tumor on the body of the country. They ran a huge slave empire and were used to keep the communist party in power. In fact, Stalin turned them into a tool for personal control over the party, intimidating everyone and eliminating his enemies, real and imagined.

After Stalin's death, the NKVD economic empire was dismantled while the security organs were put under close party supervision. Soviet leaders liked the repressive function performed by the KGB, as the agency was now called, because it helped them maintain power. They just didn't want themselves to be periodically fed down its insatiable maw.

However, since the communist economy remained shambolic - and in the absence slave labor it began to deteriorate alarmingly - the KGB started to edge back into the economy. Yury Andropov, the long-time head of the political police, became the country's supreme leader in 1982, and by the time he died only a few months later he managed to introduce a bunch of draconian measure to boost workplace discipline.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 seemed to spell the end of the KGB as well. The statue of ChK founder Felix Dzerzhinsky was toppled at the Lubyanka Square and former spooks went to work as security guards for the new oligarchs, or swelled the ranks of organized crime.

Under Putin, not only the organs were miraculously reconstituted but, for the first time ever, they actually gained full control over the country. There was suddenly no need to pay lip service to the communist ideology and there was no one watching over their shoulders.

The only problem is that this organization is incapable of building or creating. It was set up for the sole purpose of safeguarding communist party rule and exterminating other human beings. Once they were in control, they stole trillions of dollars worth of public money and mismanaged the economy. Then, when the country's economy started to deteriorate, they felt they needed to mobilize the population with some kind of an ideology. What they came up with is extremely unoriginal: a toxic brew of the worst feature of Imperial Russia - nationalism, imperialism and the greedy, ignorant Orthodox Church - combined with populist slogans of the Soviet era.

For all their supposed analytical skills and knowledge of the West, Putin and company managed to alienate the entire civilized world and to become a pariah state. What they didn't understand was that after a century of misguided experimentations and deliberate destruction, today's Russia is an economic dwarf, completely dependent on the global financial and commercial system. The new ideology - and actions that guided it - have been terribly destructive.

In fact, the tumor metaphor is very apt. Like a neglected malignancy, the organs of state security have first sucked the vitality of the Russian economy and then, having metastasized into the brain, blinded the country to the very real economic peril it has found itself in.

 #6
Kyiv Post
August 24, 2015
Russia's challenge to the Western mind
By Simas Čelutka
Simas Čelutka is a postgraduate student at University College London/Queen Mary, studying for a master's in history of political thought and intellectual history.

In her seminal book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Hannah Arendt suggested that the ideal subjects of totalitarian rule are not the convinced Nazis or Communists, but rather "people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist."

These all-important distinctions are once again put under a sustained and vicious attack by today's Russia.

Although post-Soviet Russia no longer subscribes to a communist ideology, the nature of the regime has not changed substantially since the end of the Cold War, retaining its core characteristics, including personalistic rule, a cult of the leader, cronyism, systemic corruption, stifling bureaucracy, contempt for civic participation and human rights, and lawlessness.

Since, as the late Robert Conquest argued in The Great Terror (1968), the dominant aspect of the Soviet regime was terror rather than ideology, we may observe a striking continuity between the two regimes, which is also corroborated by Putin's official endorsement of Stalin as an "effective manager."

Nevertheless, the present regime is novel in certain aspects, especially in the way it has increased the level of brainwashing by taking control of all main television channels, relentlessly bombarding the viewers with the most outrageous lies and fictions.

As maintained by Anne Applebaum, the Vladimir Putin regime has erected a propaganda machine that is "far more sophisticated than the Soviet version ever was." It is designed to confuse the thought and paralyze the response mechanisms of the Western elites and wider audiences, and it has already reaped some fruits.

Paradoxically, a lack of clearly defined ideological doctrine has helped create a much more cunning type of propaganda. Nowadays, Kremlin-funded media outlets such as the RT (formerly Russia Today) communicate different messages to different audiences: the far-Left is lured by Russia's "anti-hegemonic" opposition to the US, the far-right is attracted by Putin's embrace of "traditional values" and anti-LGBT rhetoric, while Putin's musings about the "multipolar world" and "legitimate spheres of influence" gain support among the so-called "realists."

Putin and his cronies do not care about ideas or the ideological coherence of their beliefs; the only thing Putin wishes for is to stay in power indefinitely, while his oligarch friends hope to secure and/or increase their wealth. If these trivial wishes are the guiding standards of Putin's actions, it should come as no surprise that Russian propaganda machine simultaneously appeals to extremely diverse, often incompatible sets of beliefs. The imperative "stay in power" does not entail any specific content, enabling one to employ any rhetorical manuever that could prove useful.

In his fascinating book "Nothing is Real and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia" (2014), Peter Pomerantsev expounds that the blurring of lines between fact and fiction, truth and lie has become integral to the whole Russian society.

Supermodels, prostitutes, gangsters, TV producers, politicians, judges, businessmen, bureaucrats, religious authorities - all Russian citizens live in a surreal world where one's identity is unstable, values and beliefs are constantly changing, life has become utterly unpredictable.

Social life in Russia is orchestrated as a peculiar kind of reality show by the so-called "political technologists", whose key motto proclaim that "everything is PR". Putin's government has succeeded in mingling show business and propaganda, reality TV and brutal dictatorship. In Pomerantsev's memorable formulation, life in Moscow may feel like an "oligarchy in the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner and a totalitarian state by bedtime."

For the outsiders, such a life understandably seems surreal, but for the insiders, it is the only means of survival, a certain psychological strategy to calm oneself by assuming that it is the "public self" that bends to Putin, that gives or takes bribes, that puts one's business rival in jail, that does not protest about an absolutely unnecessary destruction of food. It is the conformist illusion that one's "inner self" remains untouched by these public deeds or inaction that keeps the system running.

The West's misapprehensions

Since the Kremlin's annexation of the Crimean peninsula in March 2014, Russia's ideological pronouncements became more stringent and slightly more coherent.

If in 2010 or 2011 one could still hear Putin's ideologues, including his chief political operator Vladislav Surkov, talk about "modernization" and "innovations," after the EuroMaidan Revolution it was decided to portray Russia as a bastion of "traditional values," "religion," and "conservatism."

Russia sees itself now as a civilisational alternative to the "decadent" West and its embrace of human rights, liberty, democracy, and secularism. Nevertheless, Russian propaganda's targeted reach into the ranks of various seemingly incompatible ideological camps continues and often proves disturbingly successful.

Significant sections of the Western political elites and media buy into the Russian "interpretations" of the ongoing war in Ukraine.

Jeremy Corbyn, a radical left-winger and a likely winner of the UK Labour Party's leadership contest, is only the last among the so-called "useful idiots" who uncritically accept the Kremlin's lies and promote Moscow's interests. Despite the fact that Russia and its "separatist" proxies in the Donbas region have done nothing to implement the Minsk agreements, Corbyn advocates the idea of closer ties with the Kremlin, contending that NATO "provoked" the mass protests in Kyiv (without, of course, providing any evidence of this claim).

Corbyn also praised RT as an "objective," reliable news source.

On the other side of the Atlantic, a Republican congressman John Conyers has recently proposed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act which would prevent the US from aiding Ukraine's volunteer Azov Batallion. This amendment is based on a Moscow's ficticious portrayal of this unit as a "neo-Nazi" organization. Such an "interpretation" blatantly ignores the fact that the batallion has a selective screening program designed to check the background of applicants, and also the fact that suspicious people with fascist leanings are rejected.

These are only a few of the more recent examples. One could also refer to Kremlin's ties to Europe's numerous companies (particularly in the energy sector), warm relationships with Germany's influential ex-Prime Minister Gerhard Schröeder and Italy's Silvio Berlusconi, its connections with Europe's left-wing parties such as Syriza as well as far-right parties, most notably France's National Front led by Marine Le Pen, a party that borrowed a substantial sum of money from a Russian bank.

An increasingly greater presence of extreme right-wing parties in the European Parliament is highly appreciated in the Kremlin, since their opposition to the "mainstream" European political parties and institutions disrupts EU's unity.

Remarkably, quite a few pundits and analysts, including an authoritative international relations expert John Mearsheimer, agree with the Kremlin's geopolitical worldview by succumbing to the notion of "spheres of influence" as well as the unsupported claims about NATO's "promises" in 1991 not to expand eastwards.

Such considerations are disconcerting as they ignore the will of the Ukrainians who died or put their lives in danger (both on Maidan Square and in eastern Ukraine's frontline) in the name of liberty, democracy and the idea of Europe.

Timothy Snyder argues that the EuroMaidan Revolution is a testament to an existential choice Ukrainians made for European universalism against a Russian provincialism, but "realists" ignore the reality of Ukrainians' political will and their heroic struggle. By implication, such line of reasoning should have denied the right of self-determination to the Baltic States and former Warsaw Pact countries who have eventually become European Union and NATO members.

In such a worldview, only the interests of big powers matter, whilst the collective decisions of smaller nations are deemed irrelevant; the citizens of Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and other "near abroad" countries are treated merely as objects, not as autonomous subjects. Those in the West who subscribe to such thinking are directly or indirectly supporting the Kremlin's worldview.

Responding to Russia's challenge to the West

It is extremely hard to find an adequate way of dealing with such a cynical, chameleon-like adversary as the present-day Russia. The three-level sanctions regime imposed on Putin's cronies and businesses is a necessary instrument, to be implemented until Russia completely withdraws its troops from Eastern Ukraine and stops supporting the local "separatists", or even to be strengthened if Russia decides to raise the stakes by launching new military offensive. Ukraine's economy should also be financially boosted and army equipped to defend itself effectively; Barack Obama's visit to Kiev would be symbolically significant.

Western media could do more in countering Russian propaganda and shaming those engaged in disinformation.

In an important report "The Menace of Unreality: How the Kremlin Weaponizes Information, Culture and Money," Peter Pomerantsev and Michael Weiss recommend a number of measures, including the creation of a nongovernmental organization that would establish an internationally recognized ratings system for disinformation, an adoption of a "code of honor" among journalists and online influencers that would exclude media organisations engaged in willful deception, investigations into offshore companies to track the money laundering schemes devised by Russian oligarchs and officials.

Most pertinently, it is crucial to understand the nature of Putin's regime and to escape the trap of its skillful rhetorical lure. Conservatives should not take in all the talk about "traditional family values" or "religion". Russia's counter-sanctions of EU's food ban and recently televised food destruction indicate that the financial lot of a traditional Russian family is not a priority for Putin. There is no connection whatsoever between the well-being of traditional families and a totally unnecessary war in Ukraine; instead, the latter is effectively ruining the former, which is indicated by all key economic parameters.

Religion is manipulated no less cynically than traditionalism. Russian Orthodox Church, headed by an ex-KGB agent Patriarch Kirill, was gradually converted into a mere puppet, a soft power arm of the Kremlin. It is thus a corrupt and hypocritical organisation, fully dependent on Putin and militantly supportive of his combat with the "decadent", "libertine" West. Since it directs its "spiritual power" against the West as a radically alien civilisation, it is unreasonable for the West's religious conservatives to support it. Historically, the Western Church stands for a clear separation of state and church, which is an antidote to the present-day Orthodox Church's subordination to Putin. As Anna Arutunyan argues in her important new book The Putin Mystique, the Western observers tend to misunderstand the nature of state-church relationships in Russia, forgetting the fact that the Orthodox Church is "an institution largely subjugated by the government, and had been for hundreds of years. It was part of a tradition of caesaropapism, where temporal and spiritual power converged in the head of state." The latest chapter of these relationships is marked by staggering corruption; Patriarch Kirill's cynical conformism should be regarded by Western Catholics and Protestants as nothing less than a sacrilege.

Even more importantly, the conservatives in the Western countries should realize that though Putin sometimes pronounces dearly-sounding statements about tradition, family or relativism, such pronouncements are used purely instrumentally. The true nature of the Putin regime is the exact opposite of what Western conservatives hold sacred. Putin abhors the principle of rule of law and judiciary's independence; he views civil society initiatives and NGOs as a threat to his domination, and therefore as enemies; he does not support meritocracy and equal economic competition, instead favouring his cronies and brutally suppressing his rivals; he hates democracy and views Russians merely as subjects, not as citizens to whom he is ultimately accountable; he detests parliamentarism and a party-system with a healthy opposition; he is an opponent of Western liberties such as freedom of speech, freedom of expression and freedom of association; he grounds his rule in fear, deception, propaganda, elimination of his opponents (e.g., Alexandr Litvinenko), and prison mores; his dearest institutions are secret security services and the police, rather than families, neighbourhoods and religious communities, those "little platoons" of society that Alexis de Tocqueville and Edmund Burke famously stood for.

The Western left's support for Putin is equally illogical.

Many leftists turn a blind eye to Putin's crimes because their main enemy is always the US. Such a way of choosing friends is manifestly false. The fact that the US has made mistakes does not mean that its adversaries are by implication better. Western leftists should recall Israeli writer Amos Oz's notion of the "grades of evil": although there are no absolutely perfect political regimes, some are obviously and objectively better than others. The US has done and will make a lot of mistakes in the future, but it is still a liberal democracy and an incomparably better political system than the one established by Putin. The zero-sum logic is precisely the type of thinking that Putin's propaganda strives to imbue; according to this logic, if the US or the UK or Germany are not perfectly ideal states, then there is no point in criticising Russia, since all regimes are pretty much the same. Honest leftists should reject such reasoning and appreciate the substantial, structural superiority of Western liberal democracies vis-à-vis Putin's tyranny.

Despite being a postmodern, elastic, "posh" authoritarianism, Putin's political system is still a classical tyranny at its core, with increasingly totalitarian leanings. In the West, consistent conservatives, sincere liberals and mature leftists simply cannot endorse Putin's regime, as it posits itself in a systematic opposition to the fundamental Western values. We may have meaningful internal debates between different ideologies in the West, but when it comes to Putin's Russia, any internal distinctions become irrelevant since we are facing an adversary of a completely different nature. Russia might change one day and we must cautiously support Russia's opposition, but now we are dealing with a pure opposite.

That it not to say that we should abandon all contacts with the members of Russian opposition; on the contrary, we must wholeheartedly support and endorse them, since they strive for the same - the collapse of Putin's regime and the creation of free, democratic Russia. However, at the present moment Russia is overwhelmingly dominated by nationalism, authoritarianism, and anti-Western paranoia.

Alas, Putin is much more representative of the current Russia than a brilliant Kremlin critic Andrey Piontkovsky, we must have no illusions about that.

Angela Merkel's assertion that Putin lives in "another world" is indeed strikingly accurate - the West and Russia certainly live in different worlds now. The point is not to mistake one for another and not to succumb to what Pomerantsev calls an "easy relativism" prevalent in the ranks of Russia's ruling class as well as broad segments of society.

Russia's recent actions and decisions do not represent "just another point of view," as RT tries to inculcate in its viewers. Many of those actions, including Crimea's annexation, military intervention in Eastern Ukraine and the downing of MH17, are unambiguously wrong, unjust, and evil. The West should feel legitimately proud of being politically and morally superior to Putin's Russia.

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#7
Euromaidan Press
http://euromaidanpress.com
August 24, 2015
Russia's policy: ignore citizens and intimidate neighbors
By Vitaliy Portnikov
Vitaliy Portnikov is a Ukrainian editor and journalist.

What does the deterioration of the life of the average Russian citizen matter to the Kremlin if "Crimea is ours" and now the Kuril Islands as well.

What should the leadership of a country do when the fall of the national currency is beating all records, the economy stalls, and relations with the outside world grow progressively worse? Naturally, seek ways to overcome the crisis, establish new contacts, persuade neighbors of the absence of aggressive intentions. All this would be quite logical - only not when dealing with Russia.

In recent days, President Vladimir Putin, together with his co-ruler Dmitry Medvedev, visited Crimea and delivered another militant speech to the residents of the occupied peninsula. Now Medvedev has gone to the Kuril Islands.

Of course, the status of Crimea cannot be compared to that of the Kuril Islands for the simple reason that in the eyes of the entire world, the peninsula is occupied while the issue of the Kuril Islands is primarily a question of Russian-Japanese dialogue. But, just as it is impossible to normalize relations between Kyiv and Moscow without solving the problems of Crimea, it is impossible to normalize relations between Moscow and Tokyo without settling the question of the Kuril Islands. And in Moscow they are fully aware of this reality. Then why irritate the Japanese especially at a time when preparations are being made for the visits of the Japanese foreign minister to Russia and President Putin to Japan?

This is because in the Kremlin they do not know of any other way to respond to economic and political challenges than by militarizing society. What does the deterioration of the lives of ordinary Russians matter if "Crimea is ours" and the Kuril Islands as well. The Russian government is not very interested in the fact that the occupation of Crimea has led to a final break with Ukraine and the deterioration of Russia's relations with the civilized world. Or that the absence of normal relations with Japan actually paralyzes the development of the Russian Far East.

And such a reaction to reality is not only a question for Putin and Medvedev but for all of Russian society.

If it is more important for Russia's citizens to prove their ability to insult and frighten their neighbors than to ensure the normal development of their own country, this means that Russia will remain on the margins of history and progress - with or without Putin. Because for continued development you need to realize the importance of civilized dialogue with the world and not to build a world where you are hated and feared.

Translated by: Anna Mostovych
Source: Radio Svoboda
 

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 #8
RFE/RL
August 23, 2015
'Mass Murder:' Russian Patients Brace For Ban On Medical Imports
by Claire Bigg

When Yulia Koptseva heard about a Russian government plan to ban a range of foreign-made medical goods, she had a single, urgent thought: "I want my daughter to live."
That was also the poignant comment she left on an online petition that has gathered almost 10,000 signatures against the proposal, unveiled earlier this month by Russia's Industry and Trade Ministry.

Koptseva's 6-year-old daughter Anastasia suffers from epidermolysis bullosa, a rare and painful condition that causes the skin to blister and tear at the slightest touch.  
If the ban is adopted, Koptseva fears Anastasia will no longer have access to the high-quality German bandages that have helped ease her pain, prevent extensive skin trauma, and lower the constant risk that she will develop life-threatening infections.

"This amounts to mass murder," says Koptseva, a former Moscow university teacher who quit her job to care for her daughter. "They might as well shoot people who need such supplies."

The proposed ban has sparked dismay in Russia, where many hospitals are woefully underequipped and patients often struggle against a host of barriers - from bureaucracy to indifference and ineptitude -- to receive even basic treatment.

Health experts say the ban, which targets more than 100 kinds of foreign-made medical goods and equipment, would deal a devastating blow to Russia's most vulnerable citizens.
Under the proposal, state-funded facilities would no longer be allowed to import items such as ventilators, MRI scanners, X-ray and ultrasound machines, defibrillators, and incubators for newborns.

The list of supplies that would be subject to restrictions also includes prosthetic devices, sterile bandages, orthopedic hospital mattresses, walking frames, and even condoms.
Private enterprises would not be affected, a detail that critics say would only widen the gap between the quality of care available to the rich and the poor in Russia.

"This won't influence our fund directly, we will still be able to purchase foreign goods," says Aliona Kuratova, who runs BELA, a medical charity that helps children with epidermolysis bullosa.  "But those children who currently receive state-funded treatment will be at risk."

'Butterfly Children'

An estimated 1,500 people in Russia suffer from the incurable genetic disease. Sufferers, who have a limited life span, are sometimes called "butterfly children" as their skin is as easily damaged as an insect's wings.

Many of them, like Anastasia, rely on state programs to obtain imported bandages, plasters, and antiseptics required to dress their skin.

Koptseva says the proposed ban, which would affect these items, will inflict unspeakable suffering upon butterfly children and expose them to severe infections.

"When we remove ordinary bandages from our children's bodies, the skin peels off, too," she says. "If these products are not purchased this year, we are doomed. I'm very scared."

BELA, together with a handful of Russian medical NGOs, sent a letter to Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev last week urging him not to push ahead with the proposed ban.

The letter warned that the measure "could lead of a sharp drop in the quality of medical care" and called on authorities to first conduct a detailed review of all medical goods manufactured in Russia.

Much of Russia's medical production falls behind international standards, the letter charged, citing the example of bandages that leave threads in patients' wounds and cause infections.

Public discussions on the proposal, scheduled to end on August 17, have been extended for another 60 days due to the emotional debate it has sparked in Russia.  

Officially, the measure is aimed at bolstering domestic companies that produce medical supplies.

The proposal, however, is widely seen as politically motivated -- just like the prohibitions Russia slapped on many Western foods last year in retaliation for sanctions imposed by the European Union, the United States, and other countries over Moscow's interference in Ukraine.

In the past year, Medvedev and President Vladimir Putin have held countless meetings dedicated to 'importozameshcheniye,' a 'Made in Russia' push to replace imported goods with domestically produced equivalents -- and support Russian industry into the bargain.

'Jingoism'

Coming amid controversy over Putin's decree to destroy illegally imported food -- and the frenzy of burning and bulldozing that ensued -- the threat of a ban has added fodder for accusations that the Kremlin is sacrificing the welfare of Russians for the sake of patriotic propaganda.

Critics say Russia just isn't ready.

Many companies that manufactured medical supplies in the Soviet era either collapsed or severely cut back their production after the disintegration of the U.S.S.R. in 1991, and Russia has since made little progress in supplanting foreign suppliers.

According to Vademecum, a group that analyses the Russian market for medical supplies, Russian health professionals rely heavily on imports.

For instance, Vademecum says that only 5 percent of Russia's MRI scanners, often used to diagnose cancer, are made in the country. In dentistry, this figure drops to 3 percent.

"We [Russia] don't really produce medical equipment," says Aleksei Maschan, a surgical oncologist at a Moscow hospital. "And whenever we produce something, it's absolutely appalling."

"When we bought equipment for our facility, we looked, just for a laugh, at what was available in Russia," he said. "Nothing. Less than 5 percent."

Renat Akchurin, a veteran Russian cardiac surgeon who performed a quintuple bypass operation on President Boris Yeltsin in 1996, has harsh words for Russian medical goods.
The only Russian-made item used in his Moscow clinic, Akchurin told RFE/RL, are bottles of saline solution.

"The entire medical industry should not be driven by jingoism or patriotism but by the desire to provide the highest-level facilities and equipment, like the Americans do," he said.
Koptseva says she loves her country. As a university student, she wrote her thesis on Russian patriotism.

When authorities banned her favorite Italian parmesan last year, she dutifully switched to Russian cheese.

But with her daughter's life on the line, she is reaching her limit.

"I'm a genuine patriot," she said. "But I'm not going to tell my daughter that, out of love for the motherland, we will now wrap her up with bandages that will enter her wounds and rip her skin off."

Vadim Kondakov contributed to this report from Moscow.

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 #9
RFE/RL
August 22, 2015
Shopping Spray: Loutish Russian's Beer-Biting Patriotism
By Anna Shamanska
[Video here http://www.rferl.mobi/a/27201881.html]

Stas Baretsky is foaming at the mouth about banned Western goods in Russia.

As the food-destruction craze over banned Western goods continues in Russia, the St. Petersburg Orthodox Union of Cossacks and a very large former band member have joined in.

The group went to a local store of the French supermarket chain Auchan -- which was recently targeted by Russian authorities for "systematic" inspections -- in search of prohibited imported goods. The resulting spectacle, accompanied by a gaggle of reporters and captured on video, looks like performance art.

The star of the video is Stas Baretsky, a former member of rock band Leningrad who is notorious for his oversized red sportcoat and outrageous combativeness on live television.

In it, he claims he is a newly appointed minister of culture for the Cossacks Union. Strolling through the shop, he asks an employee why a foreign brand of beer is "on the most visible display." Baretsky then bites into the can and tears it in two, spraying beer all over the place:

"This is not PR," he says, "It's -- well, it is PR."

He later repeats the can stunt at the request of journalists.

"Alcohol is bad. Look at me," he laughs as he stares into the camera.

Baretsky, sporting his trademark sportcoat, searches the aisles for goods banned under Russia's sanctions, which are aimed at punishing the West for its punitive measures over Moscow's forcible annexation of Crimea and other actions in Ukraine. Any labeling in a foreign language arouses Baretsky's suspicion.

"Goldfish. Is that a Russian firm? Doesn't seem like it," he says, studying canned fish.

"All this is Spanish," Baretsky says at another point, pointing at a shelf of cooking oils. "What did they do for us? Lifted the visa regime? No, they'll be taking our fingerprints as if we were the last you-know-who."

At the end of the video, resting on the supermarket bench, Baretsky shows the remains of at least three cans he has destroyed.

He pays for everything. In fact, the Cossacks buy all the foreign goods they can find before asking management for documents.

"We are in a state of Cold War with the European Union," says Cossack ataman Andrei Poliakov. "Why does Europe cause us troubles, and we have to feed it by buying its goods?"

Auchen management later assures the Cossack visitors that all the goods sold at the supermarket are legal and of proper quality.

Russia's agricultural oversight agency, Rosselkhoznadzor, has recently publicized authorities' destruction of tons of contraband food. It claimed that, as of August 21, the country had destroyed 555 tons of banned goods.

The policy, criticized both in Russia and abroad, has spawned a growing genre of food-destruction videos in the country.

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 #10
The New Yorker
August 21, 2015
The Dearly Departed Return to Russia
BY MASHA GESSEN

Russia's minister of culture, Vladimir Medinsky, wants to exhume the remains of composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, which have rested for over seventy years at Kensico cemetery, in Valhalla, New York, and re-inter them in Russia. "The greatest of the Russian geniuses, Sergei Rachmaninoff, has been portrayed in an utterly wrong way in the West recently," said the minister. "Americans have the gall to privatize Rachmaninoff's name," he said, explaining that the composer, who left Russia in 1917, at the age of forty-four, is considered by Americans to be an American.

In the last quarter century, Russia has repeatedly attempted to reclaim the ashes of its émigrés and bring them home, after they have been silent for decades. On a few occasions, it has succeeded-and these successes have been loudly celebrated in Russia as victories in the battleground of history. In this way the reburials are not unlike President Putin's repeated diving expeditions for ancient amphorae: they are staged ceremonial events intended to show that Russia owns its own history, and all the Russians in it.

A recent propaganda film called "President," a two-and-a-half-hour review of the victories Putin has won for Russia, included the exhumation and reburial, in 2005, of White Guard general Anton Denikin, (who died in Ann Arbor in 1947), nationalist philosopher Ivan Ilyin (who was exiled from Russia on Lenin's orders in 1922, and died in Switzerland in 1954), and their wives. Putin himself laid flowers at their new Moscow graves for the cameras. For the propaganda movie, the country's most successful film director, Nikita Mikhalkov, explained that the reburials were the "real end of the civil war" that had followed the Bolshevik Revolution.

Russia's latest version of history doesn't actually aim to end that civil war - it attempts to obliterate it. The new story is seamless, from Peter the Great to Joseph Stalin to Vladimir Putin, a succession of great leaders with nary a revolution nor an abdication between them. This was why the grandson of another White Guard leader, General Pyotr Wrangel, declined to allow his grandfather's remains to be transferred to Moscow from Belgrade, where they have rested since 1928. "He believed that Bolshevism is absolute evil," wrote the grandson, Peter Basilevsky, in 2007. "Many changes have occurred in the last twenty years . . . But one thing has not happened: the state has not yet condemned the evil." This was one family that had not forgiven and forgotten-so the Kremlin backed off its plans to exhume General Wrangel.

The exhumation craze began even before the Soviet Union collapsed. Back in 1984, the bass Feodor Chaliapin was dug up in Paris, where he had died in 1938, to be re-interred in Moscow. Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, then a recent exile in Paris himself, wrote an article for a Russian-language émigré paper, blasting the Soviet Union for seeking to leech legitimacy from long-cold corpses. Rostropovich spent the last thirty years of his life in the West, primarily in Paris, but died in Moscow in 2007. He now lies in the same cemetery as Chaliapin.

Moving ashes around is not the only way Russia has been capitalizing on its dead classics, heroes, and generals. In November, 2013, the Kremlin hosted a bizarre gathering of the descendants of poets and writers including Tolstoy and Pushkin. In February, 2014, it paraded the virtual images of its cultural icons-including Vladimir Nabokov, who lived and died in exile-during the dream-sequence opening ceremony of the Sochi Olympics. Most inventively, Russian media have been publishing interviews from beyond the grave. In June, the nineteenth-century poet Mikhail Lermontov spoke out in favor of the Russian war effort in Ukraine. In April, the ministry of culture's official newspaper, Kultura, published an interview with nineteenth-century composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, in which he re-asserted his love of Russia and denounced his love of men. "I am sometimes overcome by the crazy desire to be loved by a woman's touch," the late no-longer-gay composer said, in conclusion of his imaginary interview.

The smartest of the great Russians know to take precautions against being co-opted by the Kremlin after death. When the ballerina Maya Plisetskaya died in Germany, in May, official Moscow shifted into high ceremonial gear, but then Plisetskaya's widower, the composer Rodion Shchedrin, released his and Plisetskaya's joint will. It turned out to preclude any burial ceremony, now or later: "Our bodies shall be burned after death, and when there comes the sad hour of passing of that one of us who lived longer, or in the event that we die at the same time, both our ashes shall be mixed together and scattered over Russia." The will further prohibited any public event connected with Plisetskaya's death, so the hastily announced plans were scrapped. That may not, however, protect the great ballet dancer from being interviewed by some Russian newspaper down the road.

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 #11
NBCNews.com
August 23, 2015
Russia's Space Program in Crisis After Decades of Brain Drain, Neglect
By ALEXEY EREMENKO

MOSCOW - It might be the only country that can rocket humans into space, but Russia's once-great space program is being dragged back to Earth by decades of brain drain and financial hardship.

"The Russian space industry is in an obvious state of crisis," said Asif Siddiqi, a professor at Fordham University in New York and an expert on Russia's space program.

The latest sign that that the Kremlin's space program was creaking came on May 7, when a Progress M-27M unmanned spacecraft burned on re-entry over the Pacific.

The incident put the International Space Station (ISS) at risk of being cut-off from Earth. The failure was not the worst in recent years: Russia has lost 15 spacecraft since 2010, with assembly mistakes blamed in most cases.

It hasn't always been this way.

One of the biggest shocks the United States endured during the Cold War came when the Soviet Union sent Yuri Gagarin into space in 1961, winning the race to put a man into Earth's orbit.

Russia still launches more rockets than any other nation, and its engines are in demand even with NASA, but it lags on innovative research programs like NASA's New Horizon mission to Pluto.

"We've fallen behind on science program ... We've forgotten how to make and fly unmanned probes," said Igor Marinin, head of industry publication Novosti Kosmonavtiki.

Space probes take years to reach their destination - but Russia does not have a single one making its way through space. Its latest successful probe wrapped operations in 1986.

Part of the problem is that while Russia boosted space spending from $960 million in 2005 to $4.1 billion last year, this is still dwarfed by NASA, which spent $17.6 billion in 2014.

A brain drain is also hobbling the sector. The Russian space industry was depleted of manpower after the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991 and many experts fled to better-paying jobs in the West. This, in turn, caused a generation gap, particularly in crucial research and development.

"The 40-somethings that are supposed to be taking up top jobs in the industry should have started in the 1990s - and they didn't," Marinin said.

And while salaries have improved over the last two decades, they still haven't reached anything close to parity with the West: A Russian cosmonaut made just $26,000 a year in 2012, compared to $63,000 to $139,000 at NASA, according to state agency RIA Novosti.

Money problems aren't going away. Falling oil prices and Western sanctions could see billions stripped from Russia's space program over the coming years, experts say. This is money that Russia's Federal Space Agency, the Roscosmos, can hardly afford to lose. (Roscosmos did not respond to a request for comment on this story).

So Russia's state-dominated space industry is set to continue struggling to outperform its Western counterparts. Meanwhile, existing companies are plagued by lack of quality control and expert oversight. In 2013, a Proton rocket was lost because a worker installed a sensor upside down - and hammered it in to fit.

Added to this, economic sanctions mean certain spaceship components can no longer be imported and must now be reinvented in Russia.

There are moves to clean up and streamline the sector, to make it more efficient and productive. And Roscosmos is about to be revamped as a commercial holding which should, in theory, make it more competitive.

Siddiqi did not hold out much hope that the reforms would make a big difference.

"None of the long-term plans proposed in the past 15 years have been completely achieved on time. And there is no reason to believe that this one will be achieved either," he said.

And this will only accelerate current declines, said Alexei Kaltushkin, the head of Lin Industrial, a private space company.

"If the space reform stalls and private sector ... does not grow, then Russia's lag [in the space race] will increase," he said.

The fact that space exploration continues is one of the few bright spots in Russian-Western relations at the moment.

"The tensions that exist here on earth, we leave them behind," European Space Agency astronaut Andreas Mogensen told NBC News during a pre-launch press conference in Star City outside Moscow last week.

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 #12
Moscow Times
August 21, 2015
Russia Is Drifting Into the Great Unknown
By Ivan Sukhov
Ivan Sukhov is a journalist who has covered conflicts in Russia and the CIS for the past 15 years.

Even while senior officials try to comfort television viewers by claiming that the Russian economy has already hit bottom and is moving toward recovery, the rolling captions at the bottom of the screen that show the ruble's continuing decline tell a very different story.

The ruble is once again approaching the record low it hit in the middle of last winter. The refinancing of banks - one of the main causes of the ruble's collapse back then - is an imminent concern. The average Russian now has less buying power and purchases fewer foods and of lower quality than before.

Clumsy apocalyptic propaganda reports of tractors crushing banned foreign cheese imports only serve to show how quickly the rules of supply and demand can change in Russia. That new reality hits home when shoppers find only Russian cheeses with unpleasant flavors and textures in place of their favorite imported brands on market shelves - the result of the government's acclaimed program of "import substitution."

Worse, that example illustrates how quickly the same could happen to home electronics, automobiles and even medicines. Unlike a block of cheese or the latest iPhone, having access to the right medicines can mean the difference between life and death.

Today, those medicines remain available on pharmacy shelves and those who need them can hold onto life. But tomorrow this or that sanction could remove them from the Russian market or the ruble's sharp fall could make them too costly - with the result that people die. There is no mechanism in place to prevent that scenario from playing out. There is no "bottom" to hit.

Limiting imports really could spur domestic production. If, for example, Russia has been unable to produce suitable medicines to combat high blood pressure, or if the imported variety has become too expensive for the domestic market, why not produce them here?

But to do that, the government would have to place a major order for the meds and offer tax breaks and other incentives to Russian producers - and do so before a ban takes effect and leaves hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions of people who are dependent on those drugs face to face with death.

Unfortunately, that approach is virtually impossible. North Korea offers the only example of a closed economy in the modern world. Russians are accustomed to believing that several layers of checks and balances are in place to prevent this country from degenerating into another North Korea.

But it turns out that it takes little effort for leaders to remove those protections altogether. That is exactly what is happening now, and it would take systemic reforms to reverse the trend.

What would happen if the current - or even the next - Kremlin administration suddenly reversed course on Ukraine? The West would probably end or ease its current sanctions and imports of foreign products would resume, eliminating the need to artificially ramp up domestic production.

However, that alone might not prompt investors to return to Russia. The great sums of money that have fled Russia in recent months will return only when clearly defined and fair rules of the game are in place. It is not enough for a Russian president to simply declare a change in foreign policy and military priorities. Russia would also need an independent judicial system and a different system of government.

But who will form that other system?

Those who are currently in power, regardless of their job title, have no interest in reform. And if they do bring in an "architect of reform," that person would quickly conclude that he must fire his own boss to make any progress. Instead, he would lose his own job.

To carry out the painful reorganization of the current system of government - and to possibly imprison those who abused their positions of power to create and maintain that system over the last 20 years - would require a charismatic politician even more ambitious than former President Boris Yeltsin.

Although Yeltsin managed to harbor and protect what he believed was the reformist cabinet of former Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar for several months, he ultimately buckled under pressure. Is anyone of that magnitude evident now on the political horizon?

Perhaps such a person already walks the corridors of the Kremlin or White House. If so, it will come as a great surprise to everyone when he suddenly takes center stage. There is no way to even imagine what political program that person might have, the names of his like-minded associates or what form of political system he envisions creating.

And, of course, that arrangement offers not even a hint of democratic elections between public candidates with clearly defined political platforms. This is more like blind faith: you can choose to believe or not believe that such a person exists. And both options give little hope of a better future.

What about the opposition? In fact, there is no organized opposition in modern Russia. Yes, there are several truly talented and hard-working opposition figures whom the authorities have managed to marginalize politically and keep out of the mass media and there is a rather long list of people who have, at different periods, personified the acme of the Russian democratic movement.

Unfortunately, both groups commit the mistake of overestimating their own importance and potential by failing to recognize that the ruling regime has successfully cast them as practically the main enemies of the state. Their belief that they can influence public opinion simply by changing the content of Russia's two largest national television channels makes them seem less like opponents of the ruling regime and more like adepts of the current system.

As for Russia's so-called "think tanks" or research centers, most people who were serious about analyzing the situation in the country and recommending a remedy have been forced to emigrate or switch professions. Those centers are now staffed by individuals who began their careers during the final years of the Soviet Union and hit their stride in the 1990s and 2000s when their top priority was to attract government funding and take expensive trips abroad.

These are precisely the people who, when the order comes to draft reforms to the system, will gladly pocket the money while politely refraining from telling the Kremlin that its policies are the main source of the current problems.

And yet, a new system will eventually emerge, if for no other reason than the current one so obviously does not work anymore.

The resignation of former Russian Railways head Vladimir Yakunin made headlines in recent days and probably does indicate a reshuffling within the powerful inner circle of the ruling elite - an intensifying "backroom scuffle among bulldogs" as some observers have termed it. And while that skirmish might destabilize the current system to some extent, it does nothing to shed light on what future awaits this country.

The Russian people have no idea toward which port the ship of state is sailing, much less whether it is a worthwhile destination. This is a fairly typical situation for the so-called "post-Soviet period of transition" - a condition in which both the point of origin and the ultimate destination remain obscure.

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 #13
Moscow Times
August 24, 2015
For Russians, Loyalty to Putin Is Loyalty to State
By Andrei Sinitsyn
Andrei Sinitsyn is a correspondent and op-ed contributor for Vedomosti. This comment originally appeared in Vedomosti.

The continuing deterioration of the economic situation, falling incomes and rising prices are increasingly affecting Russians. A new survey released by state-run pollster VTsIOM reveals recent changes in consumer behavior. The number of respondents in July who have switched to buying less expensive foods and products has risen sharply from 38 percent in January 2015 to 53 percent in July, and the number of those foregoing needed purchases has climbed from 39 percent to 52 percent over the same period.

However, the continued devaluation of the ruble coupled with the drop in oil prices has not led to a serious backlash among the people. According to VTsIOM, only 10 percent of Russians hold their savings in foreign currency.

And according to the Public Opinion Foundation, of the 35 percent of Russians who have any savings at all, 92 percent keep them in rubles. The Russian people prefer using rubles, whether or not they have savings.

And although last December's devaluation of the ruble and the subsequent worsening of the situation drove home a basic lesson in economics, most Russians still react not to the price of oil or the ruble exchange rate, but to the prices in stores and the cost of basic utilities. They act accordingly, by reducing consumption and stocking up on reserves of inexpensive staple foods. In other words, they switch into "survival mode."

After all, how can ordinary citizens influence the price of oil or the policies of an administration that places the country's economy at the mercy of world oil prices? The Russian people have little concern for those things as long as they feel a pride in their country that is not based on reality.

The latest Levada Center poll concerning the credibility of the authorities shows that only 4 percent of Russians believe that government officials always tell the truth, 13 percent that they generally tell the truth, 34 percent that "they sometimes tell the truth and sometimes lie" and 41 percent that they almost always lie.

However, it is one thing if ordinary citizens are not receiving factual information, but it is quite another if the president has no access to the truth.

Fully 56 percent of respondents believe that President Vladimir Putin does not receive complete and factual information from his advisors, while only 31 percent hold that he does. This is the classic "good tsar, bad boyars" phenomenon that sociologists have long observed. What is amazing is how the "good tsar's" ratings have skyrocketed even while the "bad boyars" remain widely unpopular.

According to this logic, Vladimir Putin has raised Russia from its knees and restored its status as a great power without even knowing half of what is actually going on in the country. It turns out that he is practically working blind.

Levada Center social and cultural research department head Alexei Levinson explains that Putin enjoys record popularity ratings because the people are actually expressing their loyalty to Russia, of which he is the symbol.

That symbol, or figurehead, does not need to be informed. And because the attitude "I am for Russia!" does not correspond to any particular reality, no rational factor such as lying boyars or the realization that the country is in the midst of an economic crisis can influence it.

But what is important is that citizens are psychologically prepared for the crisis - either because they, like the president, are hoping for a "quick recovery" as happened in 2009, or now have something for which they are willing to sacrifice - in contrast to the situation in 1991 or 1998.

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 #14
New York Times
August 24, 2015
A Russian Soldier Story
By Andrew Boryga
[Photos here http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/24/a-russian-solider-story/?_r=0]

After the Ukrainian revolution and Russia's annexation of Crimea, Pavel Volkov wondered how young Russian Army conscripts felt about becoming part of the turmoil they - and the rest of the world - saw play out on television and in newspapers. Mr. Volkov traveled for eight months around military bases in Russia, taking photographs and asking questions. The resulting body of work is a portrait of Russian youth with mixed feelings.

"The youth are divided," Mr. Volkov said through an interpreter. "Their opinions are divided."

While some of the men stationed in barracks in nondescript Russian provinces seemed eager to serve their country, Mr. Volkov said others found Russia's decision to stake a claim in Crimea and oppose Ukraine inherently wrong. Perhaps most interesting to him, though, were those who initially supported Russia but had a change of heart now that they themselves might be caught in the cross hairs.

"It was interesting to understand how their opinions have changed," he said.

Mr. Volkov visited bases throughout Russia, with varying access. Sometimes he was allowed to stay for a couple of days and see the everyday lives of soldiers. Other times he had only a few hours. Then, of course, there were the officers and base commanders who reviewed - and often deleted - his photographs. One reason was that the men pictured were part of a top-secret force, so their faces had to be concealed.

Mr. Volkov's photographs that were not deleted are in stark contrast to his previous work, which showcased bruised faces and flying limbs. These photographs are subtle and quiet. The young men, ranging in age from 18 to 27, are solemn, baby-faced, and their expressions oscillate between fright, uncertainty and manufactured bravado that hides their fear. Each must serve a year in the army (there are exceptions for students and men with young children). Mr. Volkov said most spent their time in specialized training, pressed into action only during tense situations.

One fresh-faced youth in a photograph hikes his pants onto his waist in a white tent where young soldiers sleep while on base. He looks hurried and anxious, as if he is late for a drill and knows full well the repercussions.

While part of Mr. Volkov's aim was to get a sense of what the young men in the Russian Army felt about their nation's trajectory, another goal was to make images of military service that he said Russians don't often see.

"In Russia there is this stereotype that the army is something cool," he said. "That it's just like what you might see in a movie. But in reality, when I got to these military bases, I saw young men taken from homes. Many of them were scared and many of them were frightened."

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#15
The Atlantic Council
August 17, 2015
"We want Ukraine to be a European country, not a Putin country," Says Ukrainian MP
BY DIANE M. FRANCIS

"Putin wants all of Ukraine," said Ukrainian MP Dmytro Lubinets, a Russian-speaking politician from eastern Ukraine who believes the Russians are gearing up for an all-out invasion of Ukraine as early as this fall. He lives twenty miles from the current front and one-third of his constituency is in occupied lands.

World attention focuses on ISIS and Iran, with its half an atomic weapon. But the biggest geopolitical issue is Vladimir Putin, backed by thousands of nuclear weapons, who is gradually conquering Ukraine, a democracy with 45 million people the size of Germany and Poland combined.

In just over a year, Russia has seized 9 percent of Ukraine, killed 6,200, wounded 30,000, displaced 1.38 million people, and shot down a commercial airliner with 298 people aboard.

Even so, European and American retaliation has been soft, and ineffective. The Russians have ignored a February ceasefire agreement and captured another 28 towns and villages, 250 square kilometers, and killed 200 Ukrainians. It's also moving tanks, artillery, troops, and equipment into Ukraine by the trainload.

"The struggle in Ukraine is more serious than ISIS," said John Herbst in an interview. He's a former US ambassador to Ukraine and Director of the Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council in Washington. "It's very simple. Any military thinker looks at a threat-what is the [possible] damage? Putin wants to change the peace established in 1991 and after World War II."

So far, diplomacy and economic weapons haven't stopped Putin. He grabbed one-third of Georgia in 2008 using the same tactics and despite hideous publicity worldwide is riding high in Russian polls. But slowly, in Washington, bipartisan support builds to provide defensive weapons to the Ukrainian army as soon as possible to halt the Russian creep. Canada's Defense Minister Jason Kenney has stated boldly that Canada supports supplying Ukrainians with weapons but cannot do so unilaterally.

"Putin wants all of Ukraine," said Ukrainian MP Dmytro Lubinets, a Russian-speaking politician from eastern Ukraine who believes the Russians are gearing up for an all-out invasion of Ukraine as early as this fall. He lives twenty miles from the current front and one-third of his constituency is in occupied lands. In January, he led a gigantic peace march in Kyiv after Russian artillery blew up a civilian bus in his town killing 15 civilians.

"The question is not whether the offense will occur but when," he said in an interview in New York City. "There are tens of thousands of men and 1,000 tanks. Tanks are not for defense. They are for an attack. We do not even have anti-tank missiles."

He dismisses Putin's claims that Russian military is not involved, that this is not an occupation, and the spontaneous effort by Ukrainian residents of Russian descent who want liberation and to rejoin Russia.

"It's just not true. 90 percent of the people in Donbas do not want to be under Russian rule. I am Russian speaking and part Russian and I identify as Ukrainian," he said. "This is not a war between two nations, Ukraine and Russia. It is a struggle between two worldviews-Europe and Moscow. We want Ukraine to be a European country, not a Putin country."

"This is why 1.2 million people have fled the occupied areas. They haven't fled Ukraine for the Russian areas," he said. "I meet and speak with people who still live there and who have fled. The main message is 'we never would split or separate from Ukraine.'"

Refugees are a financial burden for the country and many have moved in with relatives and friends. For instance, his hometown of Volnovakha, near the 130-kilometer long front, had a population before the war of 25,000 and now has 35,000 residents and 5,000 soldiers stationed there.

He said that Ukraine is carefully checking those entering from the east in fear that Russian agitators will try to destabilize Ukraine in order to create a pretext for an invasion.

"It was really simple. Buses came from the Russian Federation. Two thousand Russian citizens went to Donetsk [in the Donbas] to a separatist rally. They march downtown or to the city hall, pulling out tricolor Russian flags and waving them. They tear down the Ukrainian flag at administrative buildings, put up the Russian flag, and get the television cameras to provide an image to the rest of the world," he said. "Then they hold a fake referendum."

Using that strategy, he said, they will create trouble in Kyiv on the Maidan [Kyiv's main square]. "Another [violent situation on the] Maidan and the Russians will occupy the country," he said.

His wife, children, and extended family remain in their village, but the family has an evacuation plan to stay with relatives in western Ukraine if the Russian tanks roll westward.

In the face of the well-equipped Russian onslaught, the Ukrainian military is trying to rebuild quickly after being dismantled by the Moscow-controlled former President who fled last year. He looted the country financially and also appointed a Russian as defense minister who sold off the military's best equipment to foreign dictators for personal gain.

The country conscripted 50,000 men for military service this summer and United States, Canada, and Britain are supplying hundreds of military trainers and non-combat equipment. There is political support to stand up to Putin, but not enough yet.

Few members of the public know where Ukraine is much less its size and strategic importance. The country is the third most educated populace in the world, with thriving software, aeronautical, pharmaceutical, and agribusiness sectors. It also has one-third of the world's most productive farmland.

"One US Senator asked me why he should care and I said in 1938, when Germany annexed part of Czechoslovakia to liberate Germans you didn't care. When it annexed Austria you didn't care, then Poland. But then you did care and 400,000 Americans died. It's the Donbas and nobody cares. But the US will wake up when the Russian Federation attacks a NATO country," he said.

This will happen, he speculates, unless Ukraine is saved. If not, the occupation will spread and casualties will too.

"Ukraine will win," he said defiantly. "The only question is how many will have to die. Now it's thousands. If left alone and defenseless this will total millions. But no matter the price, Ukraine will win."

Diane M. Francis is Editor at Large with the National Post in Canada, a Distinguished Professor at Ryerson University's Ted Rogers School of Management, and author of 10 books.
 

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 #16
Wall Street Journal
August 19, 2015
Putin Creates a Fantasyland
In Russia, history isn't a matter of facts and figures, but of propaganda, to be rewritten by the regime.
By MICHAEL KHODARKOVSKY
Mr. Khodarkovsky grew up in the Soviet Union and is a history professor at Loyola University in Chicago.

'Where is Garry Kasparov?" asked many Russians recently, when they discovered that the famed chess player was missing from the new edition of a book celebrating the achievements of Russia's largest athletic association, Spartak-of which Mr. Kasparov was a member. It turns out that an article about Mr. Kasparov had been removed at the last minute. The message was clear: No achievement can trump political loyalty, and for Mr. Kasparov, a harsh critic of the Kremlin, the doors to the Russian version of the sports hall of fame are currently closed.

Erasing dissidents from history was a standard practice of Soviet disinformation. I recall how one day in the mid-1970s at my university library in Elista, a small city between the Black and Caspian seas, I could not locate a book by a well-known Soviet literary critic, Efim Etkind. When I asked the librarian, she looked at me as if evaluating whether my question was a provocation or simply a result of naiveté. Concluding the latter, she sternly replied that the book was no longer available because the author was a dissident and had emigrated to Israel. The book's title was "A Conversation About Poetry," and it had nothing to do with politics.

I thought of this last week when the zealous authorities in Sverdlovsk Oblast ordered the books of two British military historians, Antony Beevor and John Keegan, taken from library shelves. These classic books about the battles of Stalingrad and Berlin reveal the Soviet generals' disregard for casualties and soldiers' mass rape of German women in 1945, taboo topics seen as undermining Russia's glorious victory. The authorities insisted that the books present "a mistaken representation" of World War II and "Nazi propaganda stereotypes."

The short-lived outburst of freedom after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991 was followed by a slow return to Soviet values. After assuming the presidency again in May 2012, Mr. Putin appointed as minister of culture Vladimir Medinsky, a man widely considered to be a crude propagandist and henchman. The appointment came as a shock to the Russian intelligentsia and marked a new aggressiveness by Mr. Putin toward reshaping the cultural and ideological landscape. Mr. Medinsky has regularly denounced regime critics as Russophobes, Russian liberals as national traitors, gays as products of Western decadence, and modern artists and writers as blasphemous.

Mr. Medinsky has suggested that there was no anti-Semitism in the Russian empire, that the reign of Ivan the Terrible was not so terrible after all, and that Stalin's purges were necessary. When accused of falsifying history, Mr. Medinsky responded that history is solely a matter of interpretation and mass propaganda.

Last month he defended a popular legend of 28 soldiers of the Panfilov division who lost their lives bravely defending Moscow from the Nazis in November 1941. Even in the face of the fact that some of these men proved to be alive after the war and the story was shown to have been concocted by the editor of the Red Star newspaper, Mr. Medinsky dismissed the critics of this tale of Soviet heroism. "The only thing I can say to them is: It would be good if we had a time machine and could send you, poking your dirty, greasy fingers into the history of 1941, into a trench armed with just a grenade against a fascist tank," he said.

In early 2013, Mr. Putin proposed the introduction of a single history textbook for all Russian middle schoolers, and Mr. Medinsky promoted the idea. "One should not create pluralism in school children's heads," he was quoted as saying, as he expressed support for a single textbook with a clearly defined pantheon of Russian heroes to serve as models of the country's greatness. In the end the government decided against a single version of the textbook, probably realizing that what could rouse patriotism in central Russia might do the opposite in Chechnya or other regions. Nonetheless, a basic textbook that follows an approved government blueprint is supposed to be out this fall.

This rewriting of history sometimes puts the government at odds with the Orthodox Church. Mr. Putin has burnished Stalin's image, presenting him as a shrewd leader faced with hard choices-much the same way Stalin once ordered Sergei Eisenstein to make a film about Ivan the Terrible, with whom Stalin identified. Yet this rehabilitation of Stalin does not sit well with the church, which was destroyed during Stalin's rule but now is one of Mr. Putin's most reliable supporters.

More surprising was Mr. Putin's claim that Crimea is an ancient and sacred Russian land, where Grand Prince Vladimir was baptized in 988 and from which he brought Christianity to Russia. Yet neither Russia nor Moscow existed in the 10th century, and Prince Vladimir ruled in Kiev, now the capital of Ukraine. Even at the height of Russian nationalism in the 19th century, emperors never disputed the link between Prince Vladimir and Kiev, where the imperial authorities constructed St. Vladimir University, St. Vladimir Cathedral and St. Vladimir Monument, depicting the prince, cross in hand, looking over the Dnieper River.

Now Mr. Putin wants to claim Prince Vladimir for his own. An 80-foot monument of the saint will be erected on a hill in Moscow this fall. The goal, of course, is to legitimize Mr. Putin's annexation of Crimea and delegitimize the sovereignty of Ukraine.

To impose the state's version of history, Russia's government is using both carrots and sticks. Those who do not toe the line are denied government grants and have difficulty finding publishers for their books or venues for their performances. Critics who are particularly vocal are hounded out: The departures of two prominent economists, Sergei Guriev to France and Konstantin Sonin to the U.S., and the firing of history professor Andrey Zubov from the Moscow Institute of International Relations drew headlines. Yet few noticed when the historian Vladimir Khamutayev was forced to flee the country after arguing that his native region of Buryatia, which borders Mongolia, was "Russia's silent colony."

That Russia should be taking such steps now is particularly striking. In the past three years, the Dutch government apologized for the mass killings in Indonesia in the 1940s, the British for the colonial abuse in Kenya in the 1950s, the French for the injustice in Algeria in the 1950s-60s, and the Japanese for their actions during World War II.

But Russia marches backward to its own drummer. One can only hope that some day a different set of Russian leaders will realize that history is not simply fodder for mass propaganda, to be rewritten and disseminated by the state.

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 #17
Euromaidan Press
http://euromaidanpress.com
August 22, 2015
Ukraine's Constitution and the "experts"
By Oksana Syroyid

Oksana Syroyid, deputy speaker of the Verkhovna Rada and director of the Ukrainian Legal Foundation, had repeatedly expressed her opposition to the proposed amendments to the Constitution of Ukraine that would grant special status or privileges to the occupied Donetsk and Luhansk territories. In her most recent Facebook posting, she writes of Russia's manipulations designed to force the changes through Ukraine's Parliament.

Earlier this week the Russian Foreign Minister expressed his wish to discuss OUR Constitution in the "Normandy format." The expected response from Ukraine should have been a statement on the order of "hands off the Constitution of Ukraine" expressed in beautiful diplomatic language.

Instead something quite the opposite happened. On (Thursday, August 20) in Germany, Russia "proposed amendments" to our Constitution, or, as reported by the media, "experts are analyzing the conformity of the Constitution of Ukraine with the Minsk agreements."

Where did these experts come from and who has given them the authority to negotiate? The draft of the Constitution is currently under consideration in the Verkhovna Rada (Ukraine's Parliament). After the decision of the Constitutional Court, only the parliament can adopt any decision on it. The Verkhovna Rada has not empowered any experts to carry out any negotiations regarding our Constitution with anyone, especially not with the aggressor country.

The cynicism of this situation does not even lie in the fact that Russia is not ashamed to declare publicly its intention to discuss our Constitution. What is humiliating is that Ukraine immediately agrees to it. And it is worrisome that this has not caused any concern among our international partners. I would like to ask Madame Merkel and Mr. Hollande if they would perhaps like to use this opportunity to discuss the constitutions of Germany and France with Russia as well? In any case, this suddenly also sparked the interest of Mr. Lavrov.

After consideration, why has Russia embarked on this process?

It was Russia that in the Minsk agreements insisted on making amendments to Ukraine's Constitution by the end of 2015. The only way to "meet" this deadline is to adopt the draft amendments in the first reading by end of August and then in the second reading in a subsequent session of the Verkhovna Rada. In the event there are any changes, the draft Constitution has to go back to the Constitutional Court. Therefore, any changes automatically make the adoption of the amendments impossible by the end of 2015.

So, Russia is interested in the "changes" least of all. Moreover, in the draft for the amendments Russia had obtained everything it wanted, namely the "special status of the Donbas" covered with the fig leaf of "peculiarities of local self-government."

Then why this farce?

This is to create an additional "artificial" argument "for" adopting the amendments on the order of "you see, Russia is against it." They want to convince us to support the amendments to the Constitution, and label those "against" as "Kremlin's agents."

PS: In this situation one thing pleases me personally: so much effort has been expended to "force" these changes that it is becoming obvious that Russia must be uncertain about the level of support in Ukraine's parliament for the draft amendments to the Constitution. I hope it will remain Ukrainian. At least by a third - that is the number of votes needed to reject the changes.

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 #18
Human Rights in Ukraine
http://khpg.org
August 24, 2015
"We are faced with a threat to the very existence of the Crimean Tatar People »

Refat Chubarov, Head of the Crimean Tatar Mejlis, or representative assembly, has addressed an appeal to German Chancellor Angela Merkel; French President Francois Hollande and Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko who are meeting in Berlin on Aug 24.

Refat Chubarov writes that the leaders' meeting will take place 542 days after the beginning of Russia's special military operation against Ukraine that resulted in the occupation of Crimea and the bloody military conflict in the Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts.

Russia has effectively been waging war with Ukraine for 542 days with thousands of soldiers and civilians killed; tens of thousands injured, and over one and a half million people forced from their homes.

In Russian-occupied Crimea, the Head of the Mejlis writes, the Crimean Tatars, the indigenous population of Crimea, are facing a direct threat to their very existence.  The Crimean Tatars held mass demonstrations and protests in Feb-March 2014 against Russia's invasion and they continue to support the UN General Assembly's March 27, 2014 Resolution on Ukraine's territorial integrity.

Chubarov points out that this Resolution, as well as numerous other calls by the UN, the EU, the Council of Europe and the OSCE, have been ignored by Russia which continues its unlawful occupation.

The tragic position of the Crimean Tatar is worsening from day to day.  Crimean Tatar leaders Mustafa Dzhemiliev and Refat Chubarov, civic activist Sinaver Kadyrov and Ismet Yuksel have all been banned from Crimea and the Deputy Head of the Mejlis, Akhtem Chiygoz remains in detention, together with Crimean Tatars Ali Asanov and Mustafa Degermendzhy.    Dozens of young Crimean Tatars have been abducted or disappeared, with some later found murdered. There is still no trace of others.  Hundreds of activists of the Crimean Tatar national movement have been subjected to repression by the occupation regime's punitive organs.

Refat Chubarov addresses the three leaders, saying that history has placed on them, and the leaders of other sovereign states a huge responsibility not only for the fate of their own people and countries, but - without any exaggeration or pathos - for the future of all humanity.

Human civilization which in the twentieth century endured the mortal threats posed by the fascist and communist regimes must not be held hostage to the irresponsible actions of Russia's rulers who have violated all norms of international law and ignored the right of people to freedom and peace.

No country or people should be sacrificed to please an aggressor.  The Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar people who endured Holodomor and the Deportation have the right to receive full support and assistance from the international community.

Refat Chubarov ends by asking the leaders to take effective measures during their meeting aimed at restoring Ukraine's territorial integrity within internationally recognized borders and ensuring Ukraine's sovereignty over its entire territory, including Crimea.

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#19
National Public Radio (NPR)
August 22, 2015
Russia's War On Western Food: Detaining Cheese, Crushing Frozen Geese

SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Frozen geese and bootleg cheese are just some of the newest items added to the list of condemned foods in Russia. Authorities there continue to crush, burn and bury Western products as part of the ban on some foods from the European Union, the United States and other nations that have sanctioned Moscow for its aggression in Ukraine. NPR's Corey Flintoff reports.

COREY FLINTOFF, BYLINE: Throughout the week, Russians have been watching scenes like this on the evening news.

(SOUNDBITE OF ITEMS FALLING)

FLINTOFF: A truck dumps hundreds of big loaves and wheels of cheese into the dirt, where they're duly pulverized by a highway rolling machine.

(SOUNDBITE OF VEHICLE BEEPING IN REVERSE)

FLINTOFF: By week's end, more than 900,000 tons of allegedly contraband food had been marked for destruction. The annihilation highlighted just how ineffective Russia's year-long ban on Western foods has been. Agriculture Minister Alexander Tkachyov admitted as much last month, when he asked President Putin to approve the destruction program.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MINISTER OF AGRICULTURE ALEXANDER TKACHYOV: (Speaking Russian).

FLINTOFF: Tkachyov said that third countries were shipping banned products into Russia under fake certificates that disguised their origin. Several hundred thousand people signed an online petition expressing outrage at the destruction of food and asking that it be given to the needy. But many people, such as Natalya Gulyayeva, accepted the government's explanation that since the food was falsely labeled, there could be no guarantee that it was safe.

NATALYA GULYAYEVA: (Through interpreter) Because those products were shipped into our country illegally, they might contain forbidden ingredients. So maybe it's a question of safety for our citizens.

FLINTOFF: Gulyayeva says she's been able to buy some banned items, such as cheese and meat, although it's no longer possible to find her favorite Brie. For many Russians, the campaign against foreign foods reached a peak of absurdity when officials in the Russian Republic of Tatarstan released a video of officials destroying frozen poultry believed to have been illegally imported from Hungary.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Speaking Russian).

FLINTOFF: The video showed a policewoman in a small grocery reading out the charges against the three packaged frozen geese in the presence of witnesses.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Speaking Russian).

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Speaking Russian).

FLINTOFF: The geese were then taken to a landfill, where they were lined up and ceremoniously run over by the track of a bulldozer. Even people who weren't bothered by the destruction of food were irate that so many government resources were being used in the operation. This is Alexei Borisov, a 30-year-old logistic specialist.

ALEXEI BORISOV: (Through interpreter) I think it's nonsense. Recently, there was a TV report that they detained a large lot of cheeses. Some people got awards for that. There was a huge operation. So they're not fighting criminals. It's not cocaine. It's not drugs but cheese, ordinary cheese.

FLINTOFF: But the fight is far from over. On Tuesday, police in the Moscow region announced that they had cracked a $30 million ring that was smuggling illegal foreign rennet and using it to make bootleg cheese. They say they seized 470 tons of the stuff and nabbed six suspects. The crackdown will only get rougher. On Thursday, Russia's Federal Customs Service proposed a bill that would categorize banned foreign foods as strategically important. That could place smuggled tomatoes on roughly the same footing as radioactive materials and explosives. In fact, it would allow officials to bring criminal charges against food smugglers with penalties of up to seven years in prison. Corey Flintoff, NPR News, Moscow.

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 #20
NCBNews.com
August 22, 2015
Russia's Sanctions War Against the West Explained
By ALEXEY EREMENKO

Russia has taken on the United States and Europe in a sanctions war, which has recently spilled into some decidedly odd public stunts: bulldozed cheese, burned fruit, even euthanized ducklings.

NBC News' Moscow-based producer Alexey Eremenko explains what's behind the food crusade and looks at 10 stunning stories that it's produced.

Why does Russia destroy food?

The Kremlin has embargoed imports of most foodstuffs from Western countries since 2014 in retaliation for Western sanctions against Russia.

The counter-sanctions are supposed to hit agriculture in the offending nations while boosting domestic production.

But why the Western sanctions?

The sanctions were a response to Russia's decision to annex Ukraine's Crimea peninsula at gunpoint in 2014, as well as Moscow's support of pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

The West has blacklisted dozens of President Vladimir Putin's affiliates and limited Russia's access to foreign capital and state-of-the-art technologies.

What countries were blacklisted by Russia?
The United States, all 28 EU members, Australia, Albania, Canada, Iceland, Lichtenstein, Montenegro, Norway and Ukraine - though the ban for Ukraine was suspended until 2016.

What has Russia banned?

Meat (except mutton), fish, shrimp, oysters, dairy products, fruits and vegetables.

Caviar, chocolate, coffee, pastry, spaghetti and alcohol are exempt; you can still get your Snickers and Jack Daniels in Moscow.

Has it worked?

EU farmers have lost an estimated 5.5 billion euro ($6 billion) due to Russia's embargo, but that pales in comparison to Russia's losses from the Western sanctions - a staggering $50 billion and counting, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov told CNBC earlier this year.

Russia has no food shortages, but food selection has dwindled and prices have gone up almost 30 percent since early 2014.

Is it the first time Russia has lashed out like this?

Far from it. The country spent most of 2000s in puny trade wars with its post-Soviet neighbors, banning things like Moldovan wine, Georgian mineral water and Estonian fish.

But it is the first time Russia has taken on most of the developed world.

Why destroy sanctioned food?

Many Russians are asking the same question and have lobbied to give contraband food to the poor, which number 23 million in Russia.

But Russian officials say smuggled foodstuffs have no health certificates and can be dangerous. Besides, officials would likely to steal food during redistribution, Agriculture Minister Alexander Tkachyov admitted.

Is Russia the only country to burn food?

Nope. Smuggled food is routinely destroyed throughout the world - the U.S., Britain and Australia also do it. But only Moscow makes a publicity stunt out of it.

Geese vs. bulldozer

More than 600 tons of food have been destroyed so far, from apples and cheeses to kiwi and pig hearts. Most are destroyed in bulk, but in Tatarstan, 10 officials took a whole day to destroy three grilled geese from Hungary with a bulldozer.

Even the Kremlin acknowledged it was not the most efficient use of civil servants' time, so the officials were reprimanded.

Food hunts

Pro-Kremlin activists embraced sanctions with the enthusiasm and began combing supermarkets for banned food.

It didn't work out well: the West-bashing activists touted Western smartphones and could not distinguish between sanctioned and friendly countries. And it may get worse: Russian Cossacks, a pro-Kremlin quasi-militant group with a culture of violence, pledged to join the raids.

Bootlegged cheese

The sanctions have created a thriving smuggling economy - Western food is simply re-labeled as coming from friendly countries and sent to supermarkets.

Officials in Moscow tried to crack down on the smugglers and busted six men who made $30 million from bootlegged cheese. About 470 tons of cheese was seized and is pending a bulldozer.

Tomato break

Some smugglers resort to desperate measures. Consider a man in Pskov region, whose vehicle carrying a truckload of tomatoes from Belarus was stopped at the Russian border. The smuggler, who was not detained, later stole the truck under the cover of darkness and made a heroic break back to the border, saving 1.5 tons of veggies from imminent doom.

50 dead ducklings

Not everyone was as lucky as Belarussian tomatoes. In the southern Belgorod region in June, officials stopped a man who bought 50 live ducklings in Ukraine - a common across-the-border trade in those parts.

The ducklings were seized and incinerated. Officials said they were at least put to sleep beforehand.

Tulips-for-children

Last week, Russia has also banned flower imports from the Netherlands, which lost 193 people when Flight MH17 was shot down, and has lobbied for an international tribunal on the jet's destruction.

The Kremlin denied the ban was punishment for the move, but few inside the country believe it.

Gluten galore

Bans have also hit people with special dietary requirements. Autistic children, those intolerant to gluten and even athletes are struggling to maintain their respective diets, deviations from which can be harmful.

The hidden feasts

Strangely, officials haven't been affected by the scandals: state agencies, including police and the Defense Ministry, keep on posting tenders for official events with menus that specifically require forbidden foodstuffs, such as shrimp and Parmesan cheese.

Somehow, it has gone below the radar of contraband-hunting Cossacks.

Space hunger

Even in space, you are not safe from sanctions. In January, Russian customs seized America-made food intended for those aboard the International Space Station.

Interestingly, Russian space officials said it was the Russian cosmonauts, not the Americans, who had asked for it.

Moonshine

The Kremlin may be tough, but Russia's people are finding ways around the measures. As bulldozers rumble and officials rejoice, ordinary Russians are reportedly carrying home sacks of food snatched from under bulldozer tracks.

Sanctioned peaches produce the best moonshine, a Smolensk region resident told local media - and now they are free.

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 #21
Newsweek.com
August 23, 2015
Rich Russian Poachers Are Stripping the Land of Wildlife
BY CARLO MASSIMO

Hunting is an ancient tradition in Russia, celebrated by Tolstoy and Turgenev, practiced with gusto by everyone from the czars to the Bolsheviks. But lately it's been in decline: Fewer Russians than ever, it seems, are interested in the sport.

Or, at least, fewer than ever are applying for game permits. Poaching, on the other hand, has never been more popular. Russia's Ministry of Natural Resources found that in 2012, poachers made off with 18 billion rubles' worth of game, 2 billion more than the legal harvest.

Most of this poaching is carried out by organized crime, black market traffickers who prowl the forests of Russia's remote Amur and Kamchatka east. It's as lucrative a business as it is destructive: tiger pelts, illegal caviar and bear bile, the latter used for traditional Chinese medicine, fetch enormous prices abroad.

But the black marketeers are not Russia's only poachers, and poaching is more than an ecological disaster. It's the embodiment of civil society in Putin-era Russia, where the cities thrive as the country decays, and where limitless power and desperate poverty stand side by side.

As Kathleen Braden explains in Eurasian Geography and Economics, the most visible poachers in Russia belong to a "VIP" elite: people with the money or political clout to poach with impunity. They may be major statesmen or local policemen or wealthy urbanites; whatever their background, they are the most flagrant breakers of the game laws.

In 2009, the presidential envoy to parliament, a Moscow CEO and several local officials crashed their (Gazprom-owned) helicopter on a poaching foray. Other examples abound, and few result in prosecution, much less conviction.

The VIPs, for all the press they get, make up only about five percent of poachers; between a quarter and a third, on the other hand, are ordinary rural Russians. These poachers are almost exclusively blue-collar, typically low-income and often unemployed. They do not make the headlines. And when caught, they go to jail.

The ordinary, invisible poachers have, by and large, resorted to their crime out of desperation. Of course, some go in for the thrill of outwitting game wardens, as poachers do in every country. But many more are simply frustrated hunters who cannot understand the regulations, or cannot afford a license.

In Soviet times, state-sponsored shooting clubs kept hunting well regulated and affordable; since all land was public, there was no shortage of space or game. Today, the game laws have become so byzantine, and so inconsistent in their balancing of regional and federal regulations, that many hunters simply ignore them.

Hunting land, too, is increasingly ending up in private hands, making hunters into trespassers and thus into poachers. And licensing fees cost up to a half-month's salary for many rural Russians, an impossible expense.

And for some of these Russians, hunting is far more than sport. Food is increasingly in short supply in the provinces, where unemployment and lack of infrastructure mean empty shelves at the grocery store. A handful of rifle cartridges costs less than butcher's meat-an important consideration for the unemployed.

Russian poachers are divided along the same class lines as the rest of the country: one small, urban, incredibly wealthy class flaunts its position above the law, while a huge, rural class is left to rot. The country is following two opposite trajectories, equal only in intensity.

The same class that makes up most of Russia's VIP poachers, and which undergirds President Vladimir Putin's government, emerged immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union, swelling in power with the privatization of oil and gas. They were, and remain, men of the city, uninterested in agriculture and the countryside.

Since 1991, 13,000 villages in Russia have simply ceased to exist. The ones that remain face widespread unemployment, indifferent schooling and rampant alcoholism.

The new titans of the 21st century-Brazil, Russia, China, India and the Gulf states-all share this disparity. The city streets teem with Maseratis and luxury high-rises; in the country, even drinking water can be scarce. The lavish stadiums that Brazil built for the 2014 FIFA World Cup, now empty and decaying, symbolize the situation neatly.

Luxury hunting is part of this equation, just as much as the flashy cars and dazzling architecture. Saudi Arabia's elites, for instance, are currently drivingthe houbara bustard, a large game bird, into extinction in Pakistan, a country where open sewers are common and electricity is scarce.

And in Russia, hunting has particular resonance beyond War and Peace. Putin has made rural sports like hunting, as well as his own rugged pectoral demonstrations, into icons of a strong, defiant Russia. The freedom to defy the law, particularly with a rifle in hand, fits remarkably well with the myth of the shirtless, hairy-chested maverick, facing down the world.

Poaching, in a perverse way, has become vaguely patriotic. At least, for Russia's VIPs.

This article first appeared in the Wilson Quarterly.

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 #22
Putin's 'New People' are the Black Hundreds of Today, Golts Says
Paul Goble

Staunton, August 22 - Vladimir Putin's "new people," the lumpen who are prepared to take the law into their own hands in the name of advancing the goals of the Kremlin leader that they think are being undermined by the bureaucracy and oligarchs, are the exact equivalent of the Black Hundreds that carried out pogroms a century ago, according to Aleksandr Golts.

In "Yezhednevny zhurnal" yesterday, he writes that despite all the media coverage given to Putin's visit to Crimea and his archaeological discoveries there and the increasing repression of government opponents, the most important development of the past week was "the desire of certain citizens to support the powers in their wild initiatives" (ej.ru/?a=note&id=28442).

"The pogrom of the exhibit at the Manezh by 'Orthodox' fundamentalists was a completely logical continuation of official church obscurantism," he writes. And the way in which both the authorities reacted by releasing those who carried it out and the pogromshchiki who said they should remain unpunished because they were "defending the feelings of believers - shows which side the regime is on.

Equally indicative of the direction things are going, Golts says, was the action of the St. Petersburg Cossacks who declared that they would search the stores of the northern capital for any prohibited food imports that somehow had gotten past the government structures with their "mobile crematoria."

Both the one and the other, the Moscow commentator continues, represent the appearance of "contemporary analogues of 'the Black Hundreds,' volunteers who want to do any dirty work for the powers that be."

Finally, there was a third development, one that should not pass unnoticed: "Izvestiya" last Monday carried an article by Andrey Chadayev, a pro-Kremlin analyst, who argued that "the movement of the Putin regime toward ever greater authoritarianism [is] the natural development of feudalism" with its divided powers "toward absolutism" (izvestia.ru/news/590146).

That notion, Golts says, isn't new, but another comment of Chadayev is: In his article, he talked about "'the new people' who came in place of the disintegrating aristocracy," lumpen peasants and workers who Chadayev says are "close to the simple people and know how to organize work of dying enterprises and bring water and gas to distant villages."

History and life itself have hardly confirmed "this theory," Golts says. Such "new people" are capable of prohibiting, destroying and "cleansing."  But they have little or no ability to do anything constructive. Indeed, he writes, they are little different from bandits except that they enjoy support from one high.

(It is indicative, Golts says, that St. Petersburg's Cossacks say they are working for the regime and have issued their own money with Putin's picture on it. See "As Ruble Collapses, Russia's Cossacks Issue Their Own Currency - with Putin's Picture on It," August 12, 2015, at http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2015/08/as-ruble-collapses-russias-cossacks.html.)

Golts concludes: Putin's "'new people' can exist only in conditions of pogroms and prohibitions, when the population is forcibly condemned to local cheese and the reading of 'Izvestiya.'" But those conditions are emerging, and they do not bode well for the intelligent, educated, or dissenting, as the Black Hundreds showed in the last years of stardom.

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#23
Los Angeles Times
August 22, 2015
White supremacist gathering underscores Russia's nationalist trend
By MANSUR MIROVALEV
 
The protesters, several thousand strong and surrounded by hundreds of armed police, chanted nationalist slogans and racial slurs, occasionally raising their right hands in a Nazi salute.

It was the 10th annual gathering of white supremacists, neo-Nazis and far-right nationalists, held in Moscow in November.

"Nationalism has a bright future in Russia," said co-organizer Dmitri Demushkin, 36, a former skinhead and ex-leader of the Slavic Union, a banned group whose Russian initials, SS, intentionally mimic those of the Nazi paramilitaries. "We will either win or the Russian people will die."

The very existence of homebred neo-Nazis and racists, made graphically clear each year in what is known as the Russian March, is still shocking to many in Russia, a multiethnic country that once professed to be building an internationalist, communist utopia and still prides itself on the victory over Nazi Germany in World War II.

Yet Russia's far right isn't limited to a few marginal figures. It is a vortex of militant gangs, movements and political parties that enlist tens of thousands of members who are also among those most loudly applauding President Vladimir Putin and his strong-arm policies against Ukraine and other former Soviet republics.

The Kremlin cracked down on right-wing radicals who emerged after the 1991 Soviet collapse and mushroomed in the 2000s in response to Islamist terrorism attacks and the influx of millions of migrants from Central Asia and Russia's mostly Muslim Caucasus region, where two wars in Chechnya fueled racism and unrest.

In 2006, a neo-Nazi group organized seven bombings across Moscow, one of which killed 14 people at an outdoor market, including two children. Most of the victims were foreign labor migrants.

At the peak of racially motivated violence in 2008, at least 110 people were killed and 487 wounded, according to Sova, a Moscow-based hate crimes watchdog organization.

Such crimes have declined sharply since a crackdown on ultranationalists began about five years ago. In the first half of this year, four people died and 37 were wounded in racial violence, Sova reports.

But even as the Kremlin sought to rein in the violent right, it also incorporated elements of the nationalist agenda as part of its anti-Western and isolationist ideology that praises the "unique Russian civilization" devoid of "decadent" liberalism.

Officially tolerated expressions of racism such as the Russian March have nurtured the growing xenophobia and intolerance gripping Russia today. Some 54% of Russians support the idea of "Russia for ethnic Russians," and more than a third would welcome the expulsion of Caucasus and Central Asian Muslims, according to the latest poll on the matter, a July 2014 survey by the independent Levada Center.

"The current government partially declares the imperial slogans we declared almost 25 years ago," said Eduard Limonov, a novelist and leader of the now-banned National Bolshevik party.

In the 1990s, the National Bolsheviks - whose red flag is modeled on a Nazi banner with a hammer and a sickle replacing the swastika - advocated armed revolts to carve out regions of Ukraine, Latvia and Kazakhstan that are largely populated by ethnic Russians.

That scenario has played out in eastern Ukraine for the last 14 months, with Moscow-backed separatists occupying the predominantly Russian-speaking regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Far-right nationalists have been polarized in the Ukraine conflict, with some fighting on each side, Sova reports.

"They all are doing military training, all of them. It has become very trendy," Sova director Alexander Vekhovsky said. "All the time, trainings, musters, camps. And this is very concerning, because it's not going to end well."

The conservative and immensely powerful Russian Orthodox Church, resurgent czarist-era paramilitary Cossacks, and right-wing parties represent the largest players in the field of official, Kremlin-sanctioned nationalism.

Its superstar is Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a veteran politician who served as a deputy speaker of the State Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament, and heads the LDPR party that holds 56 of the 450 Duma seats.

The flamboyant 69-year-old ran for president five times, campaigning on promises to expel non-Russians, install barbed wire around Chechnya and Dagestan, Russia's violence-plagued Muslim provinces, and "return" Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states to the Russian empire.

But his pledges and party are widely seen as pseudo-opposition, a Kremlin tool to "sterilize nationalist voices," says Andrey Kolesnikov, a political analyst with the Moscow Carnegie Center think tank.

"Just because the state wants to preserve its monopoly on nationalism - and this is one of the most important political aims because such ideology is popular and it, among other [factors], keeps Putin's ratings high - it responds very harshly to any manifestations of nationalist extremism," Kolesnikov said.

The two sides of Russian nationalism - banned and co-opted - often converge.

Half a dozen pro-Kremlin youth movements emerged after the 2005 pro-West "Orange Revolution" in Ukraine. Created to counter opposition street rallies in Russia, they recruited racist soccer fans and ultranationalists and used their slogans, according to rights groups, anti-Nazi bloggers and Russian media.

The founder of a brutal neo-Nazi gang recently claimed to have "cooperated" with two such groups.

Ilya Goryachev was sentenced to life to prison in Russia in late July after a jury found him guilty of establishing BORN, or the Military Organization of Russian Nationalists.

Unlike other neo-Nazi gangs that preyed on dark-skinned non-Russians, the group mostly targeted "traitors of race," or ethnic Russians who stood up to the far-right ideology, and planned to seize power to turn Russia into a neo-Nazi "Fourth Reich."

From 2008 to 2010, BORN militants killed 10 people, including a federal judge who had sentenced several ultranationalists to jail, a human rights lawyer, a journalist and three anti-Nazi activists. Its militants also killed a Muay Thai world champion and a Tajik man whose severed head was planted in a government office with a note promising more killings.

Several BORN activists have already been sentenced to lengthy jail terms or life. Goryachev testified against them, pleading not guilty at his own trial and claiming he was merely a publicist.

He told the court last month, "I was talking about the things that are now broadcast on the Russia television channel," a state-run national network.

Mirovalev is a special correspondent.

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 #24
UNIAN (Kyiv)
August 20, 2015
Russia on the brink
By Roman Rukomeda

Russia has come close the important crossroads in history: the way it is going to move on will determine its fate in the coming decades. Russian political elite and those of the few Russian citizens, whose minds were not burned out by propaganda napalm, perceive the forthcoming resolution of the story quite differently.

For example, Russian President Vladimir Putin proves his behavior linear during his visit to the annexed Crimea by saying that the subject on Crimea is closed forever. Putin's finale will be staged either in the Hague Tribunal, or in the Kremlin where he will fall victim to the "palace coup," or elsewhere - due to health-related early retirement. Both Russia and its top authorities have little time left.

On the other hand, Vladimir Yakovlev, founder of the Kommersant newspaper, urges his fellow citizens to temporarily leave the country due to a turmoil soon to come, a new "putsch" [Soviet-style coup d'état] of sorts, able to incite bloody internal conflict. Yuriy Ryzhov, of the Russian Academy of Sciences, recently projected a similar scenario.

It is obvious that the deep systemic crisis caused by Putin's long-term reign will inevitably lead to the most serious consequences and challenges since 1991.
Many Russian experts claim that the resolution of this story will be much more painful than back in 1991.

The end of the "Putin era" is near, and the image of the Russian Federation may change drastically whenever it's over. We are witnessing signals sent by Putin's entourage, suggesting that this end is approaching.

It is extremely important to note that Sergei Ivanov, head of the Russian presidential administration, in his June interview with the Financial Times said that the military assets of NATO and Russia are "incomparable." We're talking about an elephant and a pug," said Ivanov. The main line of the interview, actually, was assuring that the Kremlin believes unleashing war with NATO would be "suicidal." Many experts interpreted Ivanov's signal as the willingness of Russia's political elite (except Putin) to find a way out of this crisis. Ivanov himself is tipped to succeed Putin.

In our opinion, this scenario is possible in case Russia is softly formatted by the international community. This can happen even during Barack Obama's presidency (before autumn of 2016). The visible part of the iceberg would be Putin's early resignation, Russia's withdrawal from Donbas, Crimea's return under Ukrainian control. Russia would also lose part of its territory (Kaliningrad, the Kuril Islands, part of the Far East and Siberia) and be forced to retreat from the North Caucasus. Russian authorities would compensate Ukraine the damage and losses caused by the Russian Federation. The Kremlin would also have to pay over $50 billion in the Yukos case. One of the focal points in this scenario would be Russia's renunciation of weapons of mass destruction (primarily, nuclear weapons) in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions and isolation, new investment programs and the country's full integration into the global economy.

Another important signal is the approaching resignation of Vladimir Yakunin (head of the state-owned Russian Railways) agreed with Putin, and taking the office of governor of the Kaliningrad region.

It is worth noting that Yakunin is part of Putin's inner circle. His sharp career turn means the beginning of the large-scale staff reshuffle in Russia's ruling group, mostly due to the almost complete exhaustion of assets for their further syphoning from Russia. Because of sanctions, the financial state of the Russian Railways has deteriorated so sharp, that it reached the point when Vladimir Putin rejected Yakunin's yet another request for a new support package from the National Welfare Fund. By the way, similar request by Rosneft headed by Igor Sechin was also rejected by the Russian president. It is possible that Putin tries to save his key figures from the major blow, with their gradual transfer to the less primary positions.

Shrinking financial resources and, therefore, a "safety cushion" are also accelerating systemic crisis in Russia. National Welfare Fund is in a difficult condition, with half of its money frozen in illiquid forms while the other part (about RUR 2 trillion) is "laid by for a rainy day." According to the Higher School of Economics of the Russian Federation, 20 of the country's 85 regions are on the brink of default. This year, Russia will lose at least 4-5% of its GDP, and even more the next year. For Russia, the international economic situation is catastrophic: the price of oil fell below $50 a barrel with the trend of further drop in the next year or two. The sale of energy resources is bringing less money to the state budget due to the narrowing of external markets.

Many countries, especially the major Western, took a firm line toward the sharp decline in consumption of Russian energy resources. As Iran is expected to pour its oil and gas to the world markets in November-December of this year, and the US - in 2016-2017, Gazprom and Rosneft will be forced to curtail many of their projects and reduce production levels, drastically reducing their influence as the world's major exporters of hydrocarbons. In addition, in September - October of this year, the Russian corporate sector is to pay more than a $100 billion of debt. It is a big question, where to find all this money in Russia's current harsh reality.

There are many other critical points in the Russian economy, energy sector and social life can still go on, but there is one thing far more important.

Russia has no allies left, who would be ready to support it in a suicidal standoff with the West.

Neither Belarus, nor Kazakhstan, nor China agree to be complicit in Putin's geopolitical defeat, which has actually already taken place. The longer Putin continues with his aggression against Ukraine, the worse will be the consequences for Russia and its people after Putin's forthcoming fall.

For Ukraine, the moment of the collapse of Putin's authority is very important. But even more important is to have an action plan for the day it happens. It is today when the Ukrainian government, together with the West, must work out a new geopolitical reality for the moment when post-Putin Russia will be transformed. It is today when we must see for ourselves and translate into reality the new Ukraine of the nearest future and form its influence on the neighboring states.

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 #25
Forbes.com
August 20, 2015
Is A Slow Putsch Against Putin Under Way?
By Paul Roderick Gregory

A quarter century after the fall of the USSR, Kremlinologists sense a putsch in the air, despite Vladimir Putin's overwhelming approval ratings. The tea leaves say that the Kremlin elite, dubbed by some as Politburo 2.0, is currently deciding whether Putin should go before he makes a bad situation worse. The founder of the respected daily Kommersant predicts that a dramatic change is about to take place and advises Russians who have the means to leave the country for a month or so and take their children with them.

The Politburo 2.0 must ask itself: What is Putin's next step, and can we afford to go along? (Alexei Nikolsky/RIA-Novosti, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Putin's failures are becoming more evident on a daily basis. No one denies that Russia is a kleptocratic state whose leaders have stolen much of the national wealth. But Russia has also become a pariah that breaks rules of the international order, engages in official lies, and owes huge damages in international courts. Putin's Kremlin promotes and supports a view of the world that causes world leaders to scratch their heads in dismay.

Putin's economic policies are a disaster. Despite promises of diversification, Russia remains a petro state at the mercy of the price of oil. Struck by a perfect storm of falling oil prices, international sanctions and self-imposed embargoes, the Russian economy is in its sixth quarter of recession with only miserly growth in sight. Living standards are falling despite Putin's promises of stability and prosperity. The investment collapse has served to mortgage Russia's economic future. Only Putin's bureaucracy seems to be surviving unscathed. The vaunted reserve funds are close to being depleted. Little is left for a rainy day, and Putin's handouts are ceasing even to his friends.

What have the Russian people gotten in return? They have gained Crimea, which many Russians believe belongs to Mother Russia. Putin's saber-rattling has garnered attention and fear. His plans to return Russia to superpower status please those shamed by the USSR's collapse. Many Russians are an easy mark for Putin's propaganda that the West covets its resources and plans to attack, with the Ukraine conflict being the first step in its evil plan. They believe transcripts of two alleged CIA agents plotting (in thinly disguised Russian accents) to shoot down MH17 in one of the most sinister and complicated plots in history. (Listen to tape here.) Russian parents and spouses must secretly bury their loved ones killed on the Ukrainian field of battle.

Unlike the Russian people, Russia's Politburo 2.0 understands the true state of  the economy, including that Russia's economists, contrary to earlier claims, are no Houdinis. The Russian economy, which stopped growing well before Crimea, will be mired in recession until oil prices recover, possibly many years hence. Russia's highly indebted companies cannot borrow, and China will not and cannot come to their rescue. The Kremlin embargo of food imports raised inflation above 15%, more than triple any indexation of wages and pensions. In his annual direct line with the Russian people, Putin could only express hope for a recovery of the world economy but that they should not worry, his economic team has everything under control.

Nor can the Politburo 2.0 find much positive in Putin's foreign policy. It did annex Crimea without firing a shot, but Crimea costs billions of dollars and is sinking into a swamp of corruption. Although Western support for Ukraine has been less than effective, the West has not abandoned Ukraine and seems willing to supply it with funds to keep it going. Putin's war has at long last created a united Ukraine that will hate Russia for generations to come.

The war in southeast Ukraine has solidified the positions of pro-Russian rebels who want independence rather than the Kremlin's disrupting Ukrainian politics from within. As the Kremlin arms separatist forces, it is risking a heavily armed and unpredictable force on its own border. In the so-called lull following the Minsk 2 accords, the Ukrainian army has strengthened its forces, so there is no assurance that the pro-Russian rebels could defeat them even were they to be unleashed.

The Politburo 2.0 must therefore ask itself: What is Mr. Putin's next step, and can we afford to go along?

None of Putin's options are good. If he pulls weapons, troops and support from the pro-Russian rebels, Ukraine will retake the Donbass, and Putin and his Politburo 2.0 will be labeled losers. If he approves a new offensive against Mariupol or to gain a land bridge to Crimea, the West will impose sanctions that will demolish the moribund economy and put the assets of the members of Politburo 2.0 at risk. Sanctions may include the "nuclear option" of expelling Russia from the SWIFT banking transfer system and bring Russian financial transactions to a standstill. Those who benefited from Putin's kleptocracy would face ruin.

Many predict the eventual end of the Putin regime, but it remains unclear how this could come about. As the nominally elected president, Putin would have to either resign or cease to exist. Indicators suggest that the process would begin with an assault on Putin's closest associates, which appears underway.

First, Putin's press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, was outed by opposition blogger Alexei Navalny for renting a yacht in Sicily for $500,000 a week. Peskov's denial was shot down by photos on social media. Navalny's scandal reportings are often ignored, but this story went viral on Russian mainstream media sites, including RBC, Pravda.ru and others. Peskov was already under attack by Vedemosti for owning a $620,000 watch on his civil servant's salary.

Second, Putin insider and target of Western sanctions, Vladimir Yakunin, in the first year of a five-year contract, announced he was resigning as head of the Russian railroad monopoly to become a senator for Kalingrad province. According to a source for Forbes Russia, "If the resignation is really taking place, this means that something very serious has taken place in the last few days." Russian press reports emphasize that Yakunin has refused to disclose the sources of his income because such matters are not discussed in polite company. Anti-corruption blogger Navalny has filled in the blanks with a 14 page inventory of Yakunin's properties, including his castle.

Third, "longtime (Putin) acquaintance (from childhood) businessman Gennady Timchenko" is the subject of a vicious hit job in the semiofficial newspaper Vedemosti. The article reports that Timchenko, "isolated from the Western world by sanctions," can no longer visit his villa on the shores of Lake Geneva" in his Gulfstream G650 and has been reduced to living in the residence of former head of state Nikita Khrushchev. The Vedemosti article then runs through a long list of shady business partners doing business through nontransparent trading companies with Russian giants such Rosneft, Surgutneft and Transneft with which one "cannot deal without good relations at the highest levels." The oil trading colossus Gunvor, half owned by Timchenko before the sanctions were imposed, plays a recurring role in the narrative. Notably, Putin's clandestine ownership of Gunvor is purported to be the main source of his billions of dollars of wealth. Open discussions of Timchenko and Gunvor have previously been out of bounds in the mainstream Russian press.

Fourth, Putin's former personal body guard and head of internal troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Victor Zolotov, has been subject to a media attack entitled "All Garbage in One Hut," by a publication with strong ties to the security services. As in other cases, Zolotov's extensive land, apartments, and other forms of wealth are disclosed in painful detail. The article ends with what is close to an indictment of his boss, Vladimir Putin:

"If Putin's former bodyguard managed to get rich in the civil service by more than a billion, what can we say about whom he was guarding? This is the case when silence-is gold."

Note that it is the internal affairs troops that would be in charge of putting down riots and street demonstrations - a rather critical post, one can say.

Some analysts explain these events as Putin's tiring of his cronies and wanting to revamp his inner circle. Such an explanation is unlikely. With a collapsing economy and at a dead-end in Ukraine, Putin needs all his friends, especially those under attack for corruption who may know the details of his own corruption. Dictators do not stay in power by abandoning their allies, especially during hard times.

At a minimum, some kind of power struggle is going on that seems to have Putin as its target. The pattern of attack is classic: bring down the big guy's supporters first.

Although some argue that any new leadership coming from Politburo 2.0 would be as bad as Putin, Russian commentator Andrei Piontovsky begs to differ. He makes the claim that members of the Russian elite have been sending signals to the West that "everything will be resolved in the coming weeks."

We have had false alarms before. This may be another one, but at least we can now see a path to the end of the Putin regime. We should note that Putin spent the anniversary of the August 19 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in Crimea. It is also worthy of note that he took with him the four key members of his government who would likely choose his successor. Remember: Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

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 #26
www.thedailybeast.com
August 23, 2015
Russia's Playing a Double Game With Islamic Terror
Even as America touts its counterterrorism partnerships with Russia, evidence points to the FSB directly feeding Dagestanis to ISIS.
By Michael Weiss
Michael Weiss is a Senior Editor at The Daily Beast and co-author of the New York Times bestseller ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror. He also edits The Interpreter, an online translation and analysis journal devoted to all things Russian and Ukrainian.

It is an article of faith among the many critics of the current Russian government that, however unpleasant Vladimir Putin may be, he is still a necessary partner in one crucial field of U.S. foreign policy: cooperation in the war on Islamic terrorism.

Proof, if it were needed, for how valued this cooperation is among U.S. policymakers came in the conspicuous absence of Alexander Bortnikov, the director of the Federal Security Service (FSB), Russia's domestic intelligence agency, from sanctions levied by the Treasury Department against Russian officials. The sanctions targeted bureaucrats involved in both the invasion and occupation of Crimea and the unacknowledged maskirovka war that Moscow is still waging in eastern Ukraine-a war that has drawn amply on the resources of the FSB and has included several "former" FSB officers on the battlefield. Not only was Bortnikov not sanctioned, he was invited by the White House last February as a guest to President Obama's three-day conference on "countering violent extremism," whereas the current FBI director, James Comey, was not.

That conference was held principally because of the international threat posed by ISIS and the coalition war against it in Syria and Iraq, not to mention the Chechen identity of the Tsarnaev brothers, perpetrators of the 2013 Boston marathon bombings. Bortnikov's presence was a mutual recognition by the U.S. and Russia that fighting jihadism is a shared challenge between two countries now embroiled in a pitched stand-off over the fate of Europe and much else.

Yet a recent investigation conducted by Novaya Gazeta, one of the few independent newspapers left in Russia, complicates this cozy tale of counterterrorist cooperation. Based on extensive fieldwork in one village in the North Caucasus, reporter Elena Milashina has concluded that the "Russian special services have controlled" the flow of jihadists into Syria, where they have lately joined up not only with ISIS but other radical Islamist factions. In other words, Russian officials are added to the ranks of terrorists which the Russian government has deemed a collective threat to the security and longevity of its dictatorial ally on the Mediterranean, Bashar al-Assad.

It may sound paradoxical-helping the enemy of your friend-but the logic is actually straightforward: Better the terrorists go abroad and fight in Syria than blow things up in Russia. Penetrating and co-opting terrorism also has a long, well-attested history in the annals of Chekist tradecraft.

Milashina makes her case study the village of Novosasitili in Dagestan's Khasavyurt district. Since 2011, nearly 1 percent of the total population of Novosasitili has gone to Syria-22 out of 2,500 residents. Of that figure, five were killed and five have returned home. But they didn't leave Russia, a country notoriously difficult to enter and exit, without outside help. The FSB established a "green corridor" to allow them to migrate first to Turkey, and then to Syria. (Russians, including those living in the North Caucasus, can catch any of the daily non-stop flights to Istanbul and visit Turkey without a visa.)

"I know someone who has been at war for 15 years," Akhyad Abdullaev, head of the village, tells Milashina. "He fought in Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now in Syria. He surely cannot live peacefully. If such people go off to war, it's no loss. In our village there is a person, a negotiator. He, together with the FSB, brought several leaders out of the underground and sent them off abroad on jihad. The underground resistance has been weakened, we're well off. They want to fight-let them fight, just not here."

Milashina next interviews the "negotiator" Abdullaev mentions. He tells her of his role as an intermediary between the FSB and local militants in arranging the latter's departure to the Levant. In 2012, for instance, he helped arrange for a man known as the "emir of the northern sector"-a "very dangerous man," believed by the FSB to have been behind several terrorist bombings-to go to Turkey if he agreed to quit jihadism in Dagestan. The FSB gave the emir a passport and acted as his travel agent. The condition was that he'd deal exclusively with the FSB and not inform any of his confederates of his true sponsor. The emir has since been killed in Syria, but the "negotiator" tells the journalist that he's subsequently brought another five militants to the FSB who benefited from the same quid pro quo arrangement. "This was in 2012," he says. "Just before the Syrian path opened up. More precisely, [the FSB] opened it."

So far the tactic of encouraging hijrah, or jihadist emigration, has appeared to help the Russian government pacify its decades-long insurgency in the North Caucasus. Akhmet Yarlya, a researcher at Moscow State Institute of International Relations's Center of the Problems of the Caucasus and Regional Security, a group attached to Russia's Foreign Ministry, has estimated that between two and three thousand Islamic militants have joined ISIS in the Middle East. By all accounts, the result has been great for counterterrorism officials, who are now able to claim direct credit for seeing terrorist violence in the region halve since the Syria crisis kicked off.

Tanya Lokshina, the Russia program director and a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, told The Daily Beast that while she can neither confirm nor deny the allegations put forward in Novaya Gazeta, "It is also evident that [Russian] law enforcement and security agencies are proud of the fact that the number of casualties in armed clashes between insurgent forces and security has declined very significantly by some 50 percent. Officials attribute it to the success of the government in fighting the insurgency; in reality, it seems the drop derives from the fact that all the aggressive, competent fighters are no longer fighting in Dagestan but are in Syria as part of ISIS."

Mike Rogers, a former U.S. representative and the chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told The Daily Beast that the FSB might be turning a "blind eye" to jihadist outflow to Syria. "The only reason I say that is that they could alert Assad's folks to get them once they're in Syria," Rogers said. "But for me, the idea of getting them out of town doesn't make sense because they know they get combat training and come back home."

However, a former CIA operative who has liaised with the FSB in Tajikistan told The Daily Beast that such concerns wouldn't necessarily stop a clandestine conveyor belt of extremists out of Russia, which is hardly unique to Putin's regime. "It's perfectly conceivable that the FSB would take their most violent types and say, 'Yeah, you want your caliphate? Go set it up in Raqqa.' The Saudis did this in the '80s with the Afghans. It's sort of tried and true. We could do the same thing. Of course, we're not."

"What's the most significant policy decision we made to bring down the Soviet Union?" asks Glen Howard, the president of the Jamestown Foundation and a specialist on the Caucasus and Central Asia. "Us sending foreign fighters into Afghanistan. This is the perfect form of payback. Create a quagmire in Syria, get us bogged down-all the while, offer your cooperation in helping to root out terrorism."

There's also the issue of how the Russian government, while it doesn't kill or capture militants, encourages them to run away through a systematic campaign of harassment. Suspects are put on Salafist watch lists, interrogated, photographed, and fingerprinted repeatedly. Some have to submit DNA samples. "All the ones I spoke to," Lokshina said, "say that once you're on the watch-list, you no longer have a normal life. It's as if law enforcement and the security officials are trying to push them out into the forest." One man in his forties, Lokshina remembers, who didn't support violence, was stopped in Dagestan and taken into custody by an official who asked him, "Hey, how come you're not in the woods yet? Your cousin is already with the insurgents, all these people you know are with them and yet how come you're not?"

If there is indeed a cynical FSB plot to push jihadists into ISIS, then Lokshina thinks it's occurring at the local rather than national level, as a way for field agents in the North Caucasus to impress their higher-ups back in Moscow with improved security quotas. "This is something members of the police force told me off the record: If you have 10 people registered this month, then there is pressure for you to register 12 next month. It's all about numbers."

Andrei Soldatov, a journalist specializing in the Russian security services, agrees. "To me, it looks like a desperate attempt in Dagestan where the FSB tried everything to support radical Islamists to try and pacify the situation," Soldatov said. "It doesn't look like a well-thought-out campaign to steer trouble away from the North Caucasus into Syria."

Nevertheless, trouble has been conveniently steered away from Russia and into the Middle East, leaving many analysts to wonder at how even well-known clerics under 24-hour surveillance managed to slip the watchful eye of the FSB.

Joanna Paraszczuk is a journalist with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty who covers the Russian contingent of ISIS fighters, which she believes is in the "hundreds" not thousands, based on documentary evidence she has examined including videos and social media usage. "Many are youngish boys who get recruited in Russia or Dagestan and then go to Istanbul. Then they get taken to ISIS territory, usually Raqqa. Are they on watch lists? How'd they get passports to leave the country? Here's the weird thing: Some of the radical preachers from Dagestan are turning up in the 'caliphate,' too."

One of these is Nadir Abu Khalid, who was under house arrest in Dagestan but has suddenly "popped up" in Iraq with another insurgent called Abu Jihad, a close friend of Abu Umar al-Shishani, the Chechen field commander for ISIS in Aleppo. "What we have right now is a growing number of Dagestani preachers who are forming the core group of recruiters in Iraq," Paraszczuk said.

And for all Putin's bellicose tough-on-terror rhetoric, this displacement actually suits his interests quite nicely. In June, the Caucasus Emirate, the leading radical insurgency in Russia, pledged allegiance to ISIS, giving Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's terror army a nominal affiliate in a major Eurasian country. That fact ought to be terrifying to Moscow. Except that it isn't. "Russia is very happy about this because it means that it can now blame the local insurgency on ISIS-'an international group created by the West'-rather than on local problems in the Caucasus," Paraszczuk said.

In July, Chechnya's warlord "president" Ramzan Kadyrov took to his favorite social media platform, Instagram, to claim that ISIS was an invention of "Western intelligence agencies... Everyone knows that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is also fed by the USA CIA, and was recruited by Gen. David Petraeus during al-Baghdadi's time as a POW in Camp Bucca in Iraq."

Jamestown's Glen Howard agrees that Moscow is using the terror army to feed the monster of anti-American conspiracies in the Muslim world: "I was in Baghdad a year and a half ago. At the al-Rasheed Hotel I saw all sorts of Russians running around with the Iraqi government officials. Iraqis kept repeating to me conspiracy theories about how America created ISIS. Did anyone in Washington ever stop to ask if maybe the Russians are helping that conspiracy theory along in Iraq?"

Oleg Kalugin, a former KGB general who once headed Moscow's counterintelligence First Chief Directorate, told The Daily Beast that not only is the Novaya Gazeta story plausible, it's likely. "I'm pretty sure that what has been reported did in fact happen," he said. Kalugin noted that Russian intelligence has a long, ignominious history of "pushing forward the more extremist elements and use their facilities to do the most damage to a local population."

This was the strategy, after all, during the First and Second Chechen Wars when jihadist-warlords such as Shamil Basayev were co-opted by Russia's military intelligence (GRU) in order to vitiate the secular or democratic Chechen movement. Basayev was a useful tool for the Kremlin-at least until the FSB (probably) assassinated him in 2006-because he wasn't really interested in secession from the Russian Federation; he wanted to establish an "emirate" in the Caucasus. His carnage accomplished two things at once: It cast a pall on the legitimate separatist struggle and offered a wag-the-dog national security justification for a scorched-earth Russian counterinsurgency, which did nothing short of level Grozny.

Anatoly Kulikov, the former chairman of the Russian Interior Ministry and a former deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin, told the weekly newspaper Argumenty i Fakty in 2002 that he had a "great deal of evidence" to suggest that Boris Berezovsky, then the most powerful oligarch in Russia and a key political advisor to the Yeltsin administration, was using the Russian Security Council to finance Chechen extremists, Basayev included. Much of the money paid was to buy back hostages taken by Basyev's forces, including journalists who worked for Berezovsky's media empire. Many observers of this period say that there was an ulterior motive of trying to split the opposition and strengthen the extremist Chechen elements at the expense of moderates.

Even one of Berezovsky's closest friends and allies, Alex Goldfarb, conceded that by 1999, the goal in Moscow had become even more subversive than that: to prompt a guerrilla incursion into Dagestan, which would then green-light a short but popular Russian invasion of the top third of Chechnya, down to the Terek River. A state of emergency would then be declared and national elections in Russia would be postponed in the wake of a cataclysmic financial crash.

In the Russian intelligence playbook, such a gambit is known as provokatsiya. As former NSA analyst John Schindler defines it, the technique "simply means taking control of your enemies in secret and encouraging them to do things that discredit them and help you." The czar's Okhrana used it against the Bolsheviks and other revolutionary socialist factions; Lenin and Stalin's intelligence services used it against the West; and Putin has used it to remarkable effect in Ukraine.

Berezovsky would later be granted asylum in London and would turn into one the most prominent exiled critics of Putin, whose rise to power he was largely responsible for. Even before he left Russia, Berezovsky had used his ORT television network to report honestly on the horrors of the Second Chechen War. Putin retaliated by taking ORT away from the oligarch and turning it into a state-run channel. From London, Berezovsky later denounced Putin for working with Chechen extremists-an allegation thrown right back at him by the new master of the Kremlin.

Whatever the truth, there is no denying that Chechnya is indeed ruled in blood-brutal fashion by a former insurgent, Kadyrov, who excels beyond the standards of most post-Soviet dictators by personally torturing his victims. Kadyrov has his own intelligence service and his own guerrilla paramilitary, so-called Kadyrovtsky, battalions of which he has copped to dispatching to the Donbas to fight on behalf of the anti-Kiev (and Moscow-backed) rebellion in Ukraine. There is also widespread suspicion of how his regime both monitors and works with Islamic extremists. Some of Kadyrov's musclebound henchmen, who have been accused of murder and rape in Moscow, have been arrested only to be let go-on the orders of the FSB brass, and much to the chagrin of subordinate investigating officers.

"Kadyrov is getting money from two sources: the Kremlin and Arab countries," said Yuri Felshtinsky, a historian who writes about the Russian security services. "The Chechen Republic for all practical purposes is an Islamist republic. What we have there is what we had in Afghanistan; it started with a fight against Russian occupation and ended with extremists taking power." The problem, according to Felshtinsky, is that it is near impossible to say just how localized any funny business is between jihadism and the intelligence organs; does it begin and end with Kadyrov, who runs his fief semi-autonomously, or does it extend all the way back to Moscow?

Soldatov believes that the FSB relies on Kadyrov for actionable intelligence as to the whereabouts and goings-on of Caucasian jihadists-including those who've run off to Syria. "All my contacts inside the FSB and Interior Ministry tell me that it's extremely difficult to penetrate militant groups. In the mid-2000s, they set up big detention centers in Chechnya to process as many Chechens as possible, to recruit them in prison and release them as informants. We had only a few real examples of successful penetration." The eventual killing of Basyev, he said, was done by using agents recruited by the FSB.

By 2005, after an attack on state security buildings in Nalchik, in the Kabardino-Balkar Republic in southern Russia, the FSB began cultivating diasporas to establish contact with Islamist militants abroad. "They had a diaspora of Circassians they used to try to make contact with Zarqawi," Soldatov said, referring to the founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq, ISIS's first incarnation. "Well, the first thing they needed to start with was a list of those who trained and studied Islam abroad. But the FSB didn't have such a list. So this raised the profile of Kadyrov; he was able to use his connections inside Chechnya and among the diaspora to become indispensable to Moscow."

For other analysts, however, it beggars belief that the central Russian government is unaware of this dirty nexus between the regional officialdom and the state's most radical opponents. "The Russian government has several aims and they're mixed together and it's very difficult to say which one applies in any particular case," Paul Goble, an expert on Russia's ethnic minorities and a former advisor to both the U.S. State Department and the CIA, told The Daily Beast. "First, the Russians are not idiots. They've thoroughly penetrated militant groups in the North Caucasus. These aren't 'controlled' by Moscow, but they're wholly penetrated. The easiest way to garner intelligence is to get these militants to go to Syria posing as freedom fighters. Second, Moscow is running out of money to buy off the North Caucasus and needs a new way to oppress the opposition there. Well, the best way to oppress it is to exile it. Better that they should be fighting the U.S.-led coalition in Syria and Iraq than fighting Russian government in Dagestan or Ingushetia.

"It's like Victor Serge's Comrade Tulayev," Goble said, referring to the famous 1948 novel based on the assassination of a Stalinist official Sergei Kirov and the consequent dragnet of paranoiac purges that swept the Soviet Union. "Moscow comes up with a broad prescription and you get all sorts of people coming up with ways to implement it."

David Satter has written extensively on Russian security organs' double-game with terrorism and, just before the Sochi Winter Olympics last year, became the first American journalist to be banned from Russia since the end of the Cold War. "No sooner did Chechnya emerge as a quasi-independent state than there appeared Islamists who demanded that the population only submit to the laws of Allah and not to the government," he said. "This is something people in the West have a very hard time understanding. Russian authorities and particularly the FSB don't react to acts of terror with the horror that people in the West do. They just see it as one more tactic that can be used by a regime to advance its aims. It can be used against foreigners and it can be used against its own people."

Satter's Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State deals at length with the September 1999 apartment bombings in Moscow, Buinaksk, in Dagestan, and Volgodonsk, in Rostov, which collectively killed 300 Russian civilians and wounded hundreds more. Today, a bevy of credible observers, both within and without Russia, believe that these operations were actually orchestrated by the FSB and blamed on Chechen jihadists as a pretext for launching the retaliatory invasion which, in the event, got underway three weeks later. "They also served to propel a little-known retired lieutenant colonel in the secret police, who had been appointed by President Yeltsin to the post of acting prime minister a month previously, into the Russian presidency," in the words of John B. Dunlop, a senior fellow at the Stanford University-based Hoover Institution, who has published his own monograph on the mysterious apartment immolations. "Three-and-a-half months after the Moscow bombings took place," Dunlop wrote, "Putin was elected president of the country in March of 2000."

Putin had served as FSB director right up until the bombings when he was appointed prime minister in August 1999. This more or less coincided with an Islamist militant incursion into western Dagestan from Chechnya, led by Basayev-an incursion many believe was quietly planned and unwritten by the Kremlin as the ultimate form of provokatsiya. A week and a half after the second apartment bombing, of a building on the Kashirskoye Highway in Moscow, Putin used a locution that would be remembered both for its borrowing from the Russian criminal argot and for catapulting him, a once obscure Yeltsin silovik, into national prominence and power. "We will pursue the terrorists everywhere," he declared. "If they are in an airport, then, in an airport, and, forgive me, if we catch them in the toilet, then we'll rub them out in the crapper in the final analysis."

The strongest evidence to date that the agency Putin had headed just weeks earlier was in fact behind the attacks he vowed ultimate vengeance for-attacks which would have required months of planning-is the bomb that failed to go off.

Not long after 9 p.m. on September 22, 1999, residents of an apartment building in Ryazan, a city southeast of Moscow, reported three suspicious people leaving their basement and driving off in the same car. They went into the basement and discovered several large sacks typically used to carry sugar rigged with wiring and an electrical device. Ryazan police were called; the head of the local bomb squad declared the sacks were in fact a "live bomb." They also tested positive for hexogen, a highly combustible agent that is both extremely difficult to obtain in Russia given its status as regulated by Russia's "power ministries" (i.e., the police, intelligence, and military). It was also the same substance used in the previous apartment bombings. The detonator for the Ryazan bomb was set to activate at 5:30 a.m. Had it gone off, all 250 residents of the building would have likely been killed.

On September 23, a day later, an operator connected a call to Moscow from a public telephone designed for inter-city communication and said that the voice on the receiving end told the caller: "Split up and each of you make your own way out." The operator alerted the police who traced the number and found that it belonged to the FSB. "A short time later," Satter wrote (PDF), "with the help of tips from the population, the police arrested two terrorists. They produced identification from the FSB and were released on orders from Moscow."

On September 24, a day and a half after the abortive attack, Nikolai Patrushev, Putin's successor as FSB director, claimed that the Ryazan bomb had been a fake and the entire plot nothing more than a "training exercise" designed to test the vigilance of local communities in detecting terrorist activity. The stuff tested positively as hexogen? It was just sugar, according to Patrushev, contradicting what every Ryazan first-responder had claimed, not to mention Putin and Interior Minister Vladimir Rushailo, both of whom were on record in deeming the explosive all too real.

If it was just a training exercise, then why were some 30,000 residents of the city made to stand out on the street all night when the nothing-to-see-here reality of the operation could have been disclosed immediately? The sapper who defused it months later told Pavel Voloshin, a reporter with with Novaya Gazeta, that the detonator had been military-grade and clearly designed by a professional.

Subsequent efforts for a parliamentary inquiry were blocked by Unity, the pro-Kremlin party under whose banner Putin would run for, and win, the presidency shortly before the party was dissolved in 2001. As journalist Maxim Glinkin observed in 2002, reflecting on the terrible spate of atrocities that led to Putin's political ascendance, "The authorities are conducting themselves like criminals in an Agatha Christie novel who have been almost caught out by Hercule Poirot."

And Then There Were None certainly seemed a subplot for anyone in Russia trying to uncover the truth about these grim events.

Among those who at least share the theory that the FSB was behind the bombings were two former FSB agents, both of whom became targets after airing their allegations. One was Mikhail Trepashkin, like Putin a former lieutenant colonel, assigned to the Protection Administration of the FSB, which is tasked with keeping fellow officers and their families safe. Trepashkin had in the mid-'90s uncovered evidence that Russian law enforcement, including the FSB, had connived with Chechen extremists and criminal elements in Moscow. He would even be awarded a medal of valor for his efforts but was later marginalized in the Protection Administration after clashing with its then-commander-Nikolai Patrushev.

Trepashkin claimed to have uncovered the "Mohammed Atta" of the Moscow apartment bombings, a man called Vladimir Romanovich, who was both an FSB agent and a mob boss-hardly a redundancy after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He was arrested in 2003 on the charge of possession of illegal weapons he insists were planted in his car. Trepashkin was sentenced to four years of hard labor on a second count of disclosing a state secret. Amnesty International found the entire case against him had been politicized, using fabricated evidence. He was released from prison in November 2007 after suffering an extreme illness, for which he was never properly treated. (The Daily Beast tried unsuccessfully to reach him for comment on this story.)

The other FSB officer to accuse his employer of perpetrating state terrorism against the Russian people was Alexander Litvinenko, who had worked for the economic crimes division of the service and had exposed the collusion between law enforcement and organized crime. Litvinenko fled Russia for London in 2000 and became an informant and spy for the British security services, briefing EU countries on the infiltration of Russian gangsters (and Russian intelligence assets) on their soil. Along with Yuri Felshtinsky, he wrote Blowing Up Russia: Terror from Within, arguing that the apartment bombings were false flag operations intended to precipitate the Second Chechen War and therefore platform the grey blur that was Vladimir Putin as Yeltsin's successor. Litvinenko was poisoned to death at a London hotel in 2006 after Polonium-210, a radioactive isotope, was poured into his tea. The perpetrators of that assassination, according to Scotland Yard, are almost certainly Dmitri Kovtun, a former Soviet army officer, and Andrei Lugovoi, a former FSB officer and now a much be-medalled Duma deputy. The Russian state, the British government has concluded, "is likely to have been the sponsor of this plot" because of its desire to see Litvinenko silenced for good.

In 2011, to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of the apartment bombings, journalist Anton Orekh called them "a key moment in our most recent history. Because if those bombings were not accidental in the sequence of events which followed: if, to put it bluntly, they were the work of our authorities-then everything will once and forever take its proper place. Then there is not and cannot be an iota of illusion about the [nature of] those who rule us. Then those people are not minor or large-scale swindlers and thieves. Then they are among the most terrible criminals."

Following the Boston Marathon bombing, American counterterrorism officials queried the failure to follow up on a lead provided by the FSB about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder of the two terrorists responsible for the attack, which was sent first to the FBI and then to the CIA. In April 2014, an unclassified summary of a 168-page classified assessment prepared on the marathon bombings by the Inspectors General for the CIA, Department of Justice, and Department of Homeland Security was released to the public. It found that in March 2011, the FSB sent a memo, in Russian, to the FBI Legal Attache in Moscow concerning Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva.

"According to the English translation used by the FBI," the unclassified summary read, "the memorandum alleged that both were adherents of radical Islam, and that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was preparing to travel to Russia to join unspecified 'bandit underground groups' in Dagestan and Chechnya and had considered changing his last name to 'Tsarni.' The Russian authorities provided personal information about both Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, including their telephone numbers and e-mail addresses, and requested that the FBI provide the FSB with specific information about them, including possible travel by Tsarnaev to Russia."

The FSB memorandum gave two incorrect birthdates for Tamerlan: October 21, 1987, and the same calendar date in 1988. Also, because of likely owing to the variability of transliteration from Cyrillic into English, the surnames were spelled differently-Tsarnayev and Tsarnayeva-from how Tamerlan and Zubeidat spelled them in America (minus the "y"). The FBI Legal Attache replied to the FSB acknowledging receipt of the memorandum and "requesting that it keep the bureau informed of any details it developed" on mother and son. Whether or not any additional details were ever dispatched to the FBI is not disclosed in the unclassified summary. All that is mentioned is that in September 2011, the FSB sent a near-identical memorandum to the CIA.

Most of the Inspector Generals' assessment of the bombing focused on the FBI-led Boston Joint Terrorism Task Force's failure to query Tamerlan about his travel plans to Russia when it interviewed him and his parents, and on its failure to respond to an alert it was sent once he flew from New York to Moscow in January 2012, a year after he'd been added to a terrorism watchlist. Tamerlan returned to New York from Moscow around six months later, in July 2012. Yet, the assessment found that all U.S. agencies under scrutiny had "followed procedures appropriately" given the information available to them at the time.

Nevertheless, Massachusetts Rep. Bill Keating, who sits on the House Homeland Security Committee, was scathing about the lack of forthrightness shown after the marathon attacks by American law enforcement. "I got more information from Russia than I did from our own FBI," Keating told Boston Public Radio in August 2013.

Did the FSB really try to help the U.S. in surveilling or apprehending a dangerous jihadist? "On the Tsarnaev brothers, they did tell us once, and then they stopped," said Mike Rogers, the former chair of the House Intelligence Committee. "When the FBI made further inquiries, they stopped cooperating. I thought that was really interesting because clearly they knew the Tsarnaevs were being radicalized."

There is evidence that the FSB also sat on more than it had disclosed in its dual memoranda to the two U.S. agencies. It had intercepted telephone calls made by and between Tamerlan and Zubeidat. In one, the son discussed jihad and the possibility of going to Palestine. In another, the mother spoke to someone in the Caucasus who was under FBI investigation. But how did Tamerlan manage to arrive unmolested at Moscow's Sheremetevo Airport in January 2012, then proceed to Dagestan, after the FSB was obviously aware of his purported plans to join "bandit underground groups"?

Still another Novaya Gazeta reporter, Irina Gordienko, found that Tamerlan had in fact tried to join the Caucasian underground and that officials from the Republic of Dagestan Center for Combating Extremism (RDCCE), a body run out of the Russian Interior Ministry, had put him on a surveillance list after he caught their attention in April 2012, four months after his trip to Russia. He'd been associating with Makhmud Mansur Nidal, an 18-year-old suspected of acting as a jihadist recruiter.

Gordienko found that Tamerlan had only stayed in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, where his father lived, save for a brief trip to Chechnya in March 2012. Yet in May, Russian special forces killed Nidal in a raid in Makhachkala, after which Tamerlan moved out of his father's apartment and stayed with other relatives in the city.

In her investigation, Gordienko also disclosed that in 2011, the FSB requested information from the FBI on Tamerlan because his name had come up after the detention and interrogation (which likely involved torture) of William Plotnikov, a 21-year-old Russian-Canadian convert to Islam, who traveled to Dagestan. Plotnikov had reportedly been in touch with Tamerlan via Islamic social media outlets. Plotnikov was released due to a lack of criminal evidence; then in July 2012, he, too, was killed in another raid, this one near the village of Utamysh in Kayakent District.

After the death of his second jihadist contact, Tamerlan apparently disappeared from the Russian authorities' sight. "The police came to visit his father, but the father claimed that everything was fine, that his son had returned to the USA," Gordienko wrote. "They didn't believe his father, and supposed that Tsarnaev had gone off to the forest. They were made cautious by the fact that Tamerlan left without waiting to pick up his passport, the documents for which he had submitted at the end of June 2012." The FSB then sent a second inquiry, this one to the CIA, seeking more information on the elder Tsarnaev brother. That one never got answered either.

In 2013, Dagestan's police chief denied that Tamerlan was recruited to the "bandit underground" or had any contact with members of it; although the same police chief also (erroneously) insisted that Tamerlan was in Makhachkala for only a few days, relying on testimony from the boy's father. So assuming Gordienko's reporting is accurate, the questions arise: How did Tamerlan get from Makhachkala to Moscow, then board a plane back to New York, if he was wanted for questioning by the Russian security services? And did the FSB, in seeking information from the CIA, ever alert it to the fact that Tamerlan had now vanished from its purview in a hotbed of fundamentalist insurgency?

It was not the first time a terrorist had gone into the wind in Dagestan. In 1996, Ayman al-Zawahiri, today the leader of al-Qaeda, was arrested in Dagestan where he'd gone to scout Chechnya as a possible safe haven for Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the terrorist organization he headed before joining bin Laden's franchise and which was made world-famous for its role in assassinating Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981. Zawahiri posed as a Sudanese businessman named Abdullah Imam Mohammed Amin who claimed to work for an Azeri trading firm and carried with him $6,400 in cash, in multiple foreign currencies, a laptop, and other communication devices. He traveled with two Islamic Jihad members, who also used phony names and passports. They were grabbed by Russian police within hours of reaching Dagestan, interrogated, then moved to a remote prison near Makhachkala.

The FSB sent Zawahiri's laptop to Moscow for analysis. Even still, the Russians claimed that they never knew who they had in their midst and were dumbfounded by the outpouring of Muslim and Islamist support for the three "businessmen." At their trial, Zawahiri told the judge, "We wanted to find out the price of leather, medicine and other goods." (He'd later write that "God blinded them to our identities.")

The three jihadists ended up doing six months in jail, at the end of which they got their laptop back. Had the FSB, which hardly lacks for expert Arabic speakers, not gone through the files it contained, or did "Mr. Amin" and company cover their tracks digitally, too? More than 20 years on, the history of this bizarre interlude in the curriculum vitae of one of the world's most wanted terrorists has never been established.

Once released, Zawahiri spent another 10 days meeting Islamists in Dagestan before repairing to Afghanistan. "Every Ivan Ivanovich KGB and GRU officer who served in Egypt in the late '70s and 1980s knew who Zawahiri was because of his involvement in the Sadat assassination," said Jamestown's Glen Howard. "They'd have seen his pictures on Egyptian TV in a massive cage broadcast live following his arrest and trial. So for Moscow to arrest him in Dagestan in 1996 and hold him for six months in a Dagestani jail cell and claim they never knew who he was-well, this is pure nonsense."

Howard and Satter both believe that the FSB is likely sitting on more than it will ever share with the Americans about Tamerlan Tsarnaev's half-year in Dagestan, too. Though both are keen to also note that the Kremlin has used every opportunity to exploit the Boston atrocity in two contradictory ways.

First, it has amplified the importance of counterterrorism cooperation between two post-Cold War rivals, now at odds again. Bortnikov's RSVP to Obama's summit on violent extremism was a major propaganda coup for the FSB, as was his sudden stature boost in the U.S. intelligence establishment following the marathon bombings. "Bortnikov has been playing up for three years his raised international profile," said Soldatov. "For him, this is a huge success because it's kept him off the U.S. sanctions list."

Second, while proffering the hand of friendship in Washington, the siloviki have wasted no effort slandering their intelligence counterparts in the CIA for creating the very terrorism unleashed on American soil, chiefly by propagating all manner of conspiracy theories as to how Tamerlan became radicalized. And here, Howard's own organization has been conscripted in a hysterical propaganda campaign.

In April 2013, two months after the Boston attacks, Russia's state-owned newspaper Izvestiya ran an article alleging that while he lived in Dagestan, Tamerlan had attended "events and seminars" put on jointly by the Caucasian Fund, a Georgian NGO, and the Jamestown Foundation. "Izvestia has obtained some documents from the Georgian Interior Ministry's Department of Counter-intelligence which confirms that the Georgian organization Caucasian Fund is collaborating with the American non-profit organization Jamestown Foundation (Zbigniew Brzezinski, U.S. foreign policy ideologue, was formerly on Jamestown's board of directors)," the piece stated, laying it on with a trowel, "and has been recruiting residents of the North Caucasus to work in the interests of the United States in Georgia." Russians are apparently "recruited at these seminars and trained for terrorist attacks."

The Jamestown Foundation rejected the allegation as absurd. The Georgian Ministry of the Interior added that the Georgian Col. Grigor Chanturia, the lynchpin of Izvestia's supposed reporting, wasn't a real person. No matter. The Kremlin's English-language propaganda mill RT picked up the story uncritically, as did InfoWars.com, the feverish website run by Alex Jones, which has not yet encountered a conspiracy theory it didn't like.

In general, counterterrorism cooperation between Russia and the U.S. is more a comforting legend of the post-Cold War order, something mouthed perfunctorily by both sides while being given little credence by the intelligence professionals whose job it is to talk to foreign counterparts. Kalugin, the former KGB counterintelligence official, thinks there is "lots of talk but little action" when it comes to constructing a mutual bulwark against Islamic terrorism. The former CIA operative who liaised with the FSB in Tajikistan remembers the Russians sharing nothing of substance with him. "They never talked about the Tajik opposition or the pre-al-Qaeda types coming across. They never discussed the politics of Central Asia, the roots of terrorism. It was always generalities."

Several analysts consulted for this story also pointed out that even if the FSB wanted to work in good faith with the U.S., systemic corruption and incompetence in the ranks, the sort of dysfunction bred of an authoritarian regime that promotes loyalists and cronies at the expense of adept professionals, would hamper any attempt at bilateral rehabilitation. "You want to stamp out bearded nut jobs together, OK-first Russia has to stamp out bribery which lets them slip in and out of the country or board planes to blow them up," said one analyst.

There's another problem in ushering in a new dawn of transnational police work. Despite the happy talk, America and Russia just don't trust each other. "To say that Russia is our partner is a significant overstatement," Mike Rogers, the former Congressman and House Intelligence Committee chair, said. "There are some relationships, but the FSB doesn't like to cooperate with the FBI and the FBI has a natural suspicion of the FSB. Principally this is because the FBI is also busy trying to catch Russian spies in America. They're not our friends and they're not our partners."

"At the political level, the White House will say we're cooperating on terrorism, but that doesn't mean anything," the former CIA operative groused. "So if the FSB is now sending jihadists to Syria so that they can die at the hands of the Americans rather than the Russians, should we be surprised? We're just so goddamn ignorant.

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 #27
The National Interest
August 22, 2015
Russia's Blast from the Past: Beware the Tu-95 Bear Strategic Bomber
By Paul Richard Huard

At first glance, the Russian Tu-95 Bear strategic bomber looks like a 59-year-old flying anachronism, a Cold War leftover that has outlived its usefulness in a century when stealth is king.

The Bear is showing signs of its age. In recent months, two Tu-95 crashes led to the grounding of the entire fleet of more than 50 aircraft to resolve mechanical issues. Besides, there is nothing stealthy about the Bear.


Even when the bomber is in top-notch shape, the turboprop-powered Tu-95 is loud ... really loud. In fact, it's so noisy that listening devices on submerged U.S. submarines can hear a Bear flying overhead.

Furthermore, it has the radar signature of a flying big-box store. The plane is huge.

Photos of lumbering Bear-H bombers intercepted by sleek U.S. or NATO warplanes as they flew toward protected airspace are some of the most recognizable images of the East-West nuclear stand-off during the 1970s and '80s.

But Cold War aviation genius Andrei Tupolev was no fool. He designed an adaptable plane that can carry one Hell of a load-out when it comes to bombs and missiles, fly thousands of miles from bases in Russia, loiter on the edges of enemy airspace, and deliver megatons of nuclear destruction.

As recently as July 4, multiple Bear bombers flew into U.S. air defense identification zones off California and Alaska. In fact, some of the Bears flew within 40 miles off the California coastline.

Technically, the bombers were still within international airspace. But call it Cold War 2.0 - the Kremlin is sending the same message the bomber has always sent.

"The current missions being flown by the Tu-95 are absolutely designed and principally intended to appeal to Russian pride and national identity," said Scott Palmer, professor of history at Western Illinois University and author of Dictatorship of the Air: Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia.

In 1956, the Soviet Military Air Forces wanted a replacement for the Tu-4 Bull, the USSR's first nuclear-capable bomber. The Bull was a copy of the B-29 - Tupolev used crashed and interned examples of the B-29 as the basis of his reverse-engineered design.

But even though it was a clone of the same kind of aircraft that dropped the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear weapons, the Bull did not have the range necessary to strike targets within the United States if it was flown from Russia.

The new Soviet bomber would need to have a range of at least 5,000 miles and carry a nine-ton bomb load.

Tupolev's new design was big even by contemporary standards. The Bear's narrow fuselage is more than 150 feet long with a 164-foot wingspan. What's more, the wings are swept back at a 35-degree angle to reduce drag.

In addition, the Bear possesses a 9,000-mile range without refueling. Because it was originally designed to carry 1950s nuclear gravity bombs, it has a large bomb bay and plenty of room on its wings to accommodate newly added hard points.

Today, that means the modified Tu-95MS can carry 16 AS-15 Kent cruise missiles - six internally in an MKU 5-6 rotary launcher, and 10 on external wing pylons. Each missile is capable carrying a 200-kiloton nuclear warhead, a yield roughly equal to 10 times the atomic bomb that destroyed Nagasaki.

Last year, Russia upgraded eight Tu-95s to cruise missile-carrying MS status with 10 more modified Bears scheduled for deployment by 2016.

During the 1950s, the real technical innovation was the Bear's 14,000 horsepower turboprop engines. The four Kuznetsov NK-12M engines each with two contra-rotating propellers are the most powerful turboprop engines in the world.

In fact, the engines are so powerful the tips of the 20-foot long propeller blades break the sound barrier when the pilot throttles up - one of the reasons the aircraft is so deafeningly loud.

Noisy as it is, the Bear's seven-man crew can fly a number of Tu-95 variants configured not only for strategic bombing but also for maritime patrol and photo intelligence. There was even a version used as a passenger aircraft, and a specially modified Bear dropped the Tsar Bomba - the world's most powerful nuclear bomb ever exploded - during its 1961 Soviet test detonation.

Despite its drawbacks, what explains the Bear's longevity? Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project for the Federation of American Scientists, told War Is Boring the Russian Federation doesn't have much choice.

The Russian defense industry fell into disarray after the collapse of the Soviet Union and has not recovered enough to sustain a new bomber program, Kristensen said. The Russians are developing a next-generation jet bomber that is expected to start test flights in the early 2020s, but it remains to be seen what they can build and how soon it can be deployed.

"Generally, airplanes can fly for a very long time, as long as spare parts are available," he said. "Propeller engines are generally speaking less complex to operate than jet engines and many modern aircraft types also use propellers."

"Moreover, although a Bear would not last long against a modern air defense system, it is equipped with long-range cruise missiles that provide considerable stand-off capability. So for now, the Bear serves Russia's needs for standoff air-delivered weapons, signaling and national prestige."

It may be flawed, but the Bear bomber will be going strong as both a weapons platform and a symbol of Russian might for years to come. Even with plans to build a jet-powered bomber during the next decade, upgrades will allow the Cold War giant to keep flying through the 2040s.

It's old, it's obvious and it has mechanical problems - facts hard to ignore while the Tu-95 plays a key role in a highly orchestrated and much exaggerated effort by the Kremlin to impress its foreign rivals.

But it's equally hard to ignore a bomber that can fly within miles of your shoreline armed to the teeth with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.

"The Tu-95 is a flying anachronism," Palmer said, "though one that remains an essential component of the Russian strategic air arm."

This piece first appeared in War Is Boring here.

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 #28
How Next Round of Russia's Disintegration May Begin
Paul Goble

Staunton, August 24 - In his poem, "The Fall of Rome," W.H. Auden wrote that it could be signaled not by some dramatic event but rather by "a bored official" scribbling a note and leaving his office to go home, a reminder that enormous tectonic shifts often begin with small things that most dismiss at the time but that later prove to be the start of something big.

Today brings a report of one of those possible triggers of such great events.  Andrey Nechayev, an economist and head of the Civic Initiative Party, reports that the Russian government's grain purchase planned for August 20 did not happen because farmers no longer want to take rubles for their grain (echo.msk.ru/blog/nechaev/1608922-echo/).

Instead, he writes, because the devaluation of the ruble has the potential to boost grain exports, Russian farmers would rather sell their production abroad for dollars than to accept the prices Moscow offers in ever-weakening rubles, an "unexpected" blowback from the devaluation of the rule.

And then Nechayev underscores why this may matter more than many expect: "Something in part similar happened at the twilight of the USSR when then-collective farms refused to supply grain to centralized funds" and demanded that they be paid not in Soviet rubles but in then-rare hard currency.

The government didn't; instead, it resorted to "deception."  But "everything ended with colossal problems for the supply of food to major cities and at the end in the disintegration of the country, since a majority of republics considered that they could resolve the food supply problem better individually than collectively."

That, the economist says, should be "a serious lesson" for today.

The prospects for the disintegration of the Russian Federation are attracting more attention in the wake of an interview former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger gave to "The National Interest" in which he suggested that the United States was mistakenly pursuing a policy intended to split Russia apart.

In today's "Nezavisimaya gazeta," Mikhail Sergeyev, that Moscow paper's economics specialist, considers Kissinger's words, as well as the comments of several Russian experts, and concludes that "signs of default separatism" of the kind Russia faced in 1998 "are not yet being observed" (ng.ru/economics/2015-08-24/4_defolt.html).

After summarizing Kissinger's arguments, Sergeyev points out that "the Russian Federation and the USSR have already demonstrated a tendency toward disintegration," with the country having fallen apart "at least twice," in 1917 and 1991.  And at the time of the 1998 crisis, "numerous signs of economic separatism appeared."

"The clearest examples of economic separatism," he continues, were "the attempts at issuing regional currencies, the creation of oblast gold and hard currency reserves, and a refusal to pay taxes to the federal budget."  These were all serious, but Moscow was capable of suppressing them.

The "Nezavisimaya gazeta" analyst cites Emil Pain, a leading specialist on ethnicity and a former advisor to the Russian president on what happened 17 years ago.  Pain notes that "after the federal center declared default, almost all the regions began to take measures of economic self-defense."

By September 1998, for example, 79 regions had introduced price and export controls on food." The greatest threat from that time, one "even stronger" than the regionalist movements in the early 1990s, came from the separating out of regional financial systems, Pain says; and Moscow had to work hard to bring the regions back into line.

Russian experts, Sergeyev says, point to differences between the current crisis and the 1998 default and "also to the difference in the approaches of the West to Russia today" as compared to "the time of default."

Aleksey Arbatov, an IMEMO expert on foreign policy, says the 1998 default was the result of macro-economic miscalculations by the Russian government. The current crisis reflects the export-raw materials model having reached "a systemic dead end." At the same time, he points out that "far from all politicians in the US seek the splitting up of Russia."

"The majority of Americans understand that the dismemberment of the Russian Federation could have catastrophic consequences for the US. The remnants of Russia" might end up part of ISIS or China, and "the disintegration of the country with nuclear potential, atomic energy and numerous dangerous forms of production creates risks of a most serious catastrophe."

Fyodor Lukyanov, head of the Russian Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, says it is "incorrect" to consider Kissinger's comments as pointing to "possible means and methods of splitting Russia."  What the former secretary of state is talking about, he argues, is the choice by the US "after the cold war to adopt a policy of domination without taking the interests of our country into account."

And he says that "the crises of the 1990s were generated by the incapacity of the Center. Then the regional authorities simply prepared themselves to survive independently. When the threat of the deepening of the crisis passed, the local bureaucrats forgot about economic separatism."

Lukyanov says that he "does not foresee in the current conditions that things will develop toward a repetition of the scenarios of the 1990s."  At the same time, however, neither he nor Arbatov acknowledge that the arguments they are making now resemble all too closely the arguments the defenders of an integral Soviet Union may 25 years ago.

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 #29
Kyiv Post
August 23, 2015
Ukraine approaches Independence Day on Aug. 24 with warnings of new Russian-led attacks
By Brian Bonner
[Videos here http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/ukraine-approaches-independence-day-on-aug-24-with-warnings-of-new-russian-led-attacks-396374.html]

As congratulations came in from international leaders ahead of Ukraine's Independence Day on Aug. 24, the Ukrainian military warned that Russian-backed militants may don Ukrainian military uniforms and fire on civilians in residential areas they control in Donetsk and elsewhere in the Donbas.

The aim of the attacks, according to Ukrainian military spokesman Col. Andriy Lysenko, would be to discredit the Ukrainian military and create a pretext for Russian-separatist forces to launch new attacks on Ukrainian positions.

Lysenko, according to the Ukraine Crisis Media Center, said Kremlin-separatist leaders are "spreading false information about an allegedly forthcoming Ukrainian offensive. The militants are going to wear Ukrainian military uniforms. They are preparing to fire at peaceful districts of militant-controlled towns in order to discredit the Ukrainian Army and create an appropriate picture for the Russian media, hence creating a pretext for their own offensive on the Ukrainian positions."

Lysenko said that separatist leader Alexander Zakharchenko has left Russian-occupied Donetsk, a departure that paves the way for attacks on residential districts. Lysenko called on Ukrainians to stay vigilant and not to fall for Russian propaganda. "Residents of militant-controlled towns should be ready to find shelter in case of attacks of Russian-backed insurgents," he said.

It follows a report by Col. Oleksandr Motuzyanyk, who speaks for the Presidential Administration on the war, as saying that Russia-backed militants used heavy artillery to attack Ukrainian positions east of Ukrainian-controlled Mariupol.

The latest warnings came on Aug. 23 as Ukraine celebrates Flag Day.

President Petro Poroshenko and his family kicked off the holiday in a ceremony on St. Michael's Square and later went to Institutska Street near Independence Square to pay their respects to the Heavenly Hundred, the 100 demonstrators killed during the EuroMaidan Revolution that prompted President Viktor Yanukovych to flee for Russia last year.

"Our flag was born from primordial dreams of freedom. Gold color is a symbol of heavy crop and blue one is a sign of clear and peaceful sky over Ukraine, Poroshenko said. "Combination of blue and yellow is a dream about peaceful and prosperous life."

Poroshenko also called for national unity to take priority over political disagreements.

"Ukraine has undergone many difficulties. It has withstood the hardest year in its history and is ready now to move forward. Once again, I call for the unity. One and only national banner is more valuable than hundreds of political banners. It is my direct address to all political forces, first of all, to the members of the parliamentary coalition. Let us unite for the sake of Ukraine."

Ukraine celebrates its 24th year of independence with a 10 a.m. parade on Khreshchatyk Street. Other events are here.

U.S. President Barack Obama was among world leaders who congratulated Ukraine.

"Over the past year Ukraine has made significant steps to achieve the goal it has set for itself since independence in 1991. Despite numerous challenges, the people of Ukraine approached more than ever the fulfillment of its common vision of free, democratic and prosperous country firmly integrated into the heart of Europe," Obama said in a statement.

The U.S. Embassy in Ukraine also released a congratulatory video.

The U.S. Embassy in Ukraine releases a two-minute video with cameo spots by notable people, including U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, wishing Ukraine a Happy Independence Day on Aug. 24.

Great Britain also sent its congratulations through a 35-second video featuring UK Ambassador to Ukraine Simon Smith, who leaves his assignment on Sept. 1, and others.

The British Embassy in Ukraine sends its Independence Day greetings.

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#30
The Conversation
https://theconversation.com
August 19, 2015
Bad news for Putin as support for war flags beyond Russia's 'troll farms'
By Ivan Kozachenko
Honorary Research Fellow at University of Aberdeen

Eastern Ukraine has recently seen its worst period of attacks by Russian-backed separatists since they captured the town of Debaltseve in February. It had fallen in the days after the two sides reached the Minsk-2 ceasefire agreement. Ukraine, Russia and the West have repeatedly underlined the importance of Minsk 2, but whether it has been implemented remains questionable. The latest conflict has coincided with a period of Russian military escalation that recently prompted UK defence secretary Michael Fallon to suggest that Moscow was preparing for war with NATO and the West.

The battle to control public opinion is taking place in parallel, as we have seen most recently with the case of Lyudmila Savchuk, a Russian journalist who went undercover in a Kremlin-backed agency whose staff were tasked with pushing pro-Putin views online. This has helped back up efforts by Russia in the traditional media to portray the heroic struggle of the self-proclaimed republics in Donetsk (DNR) and Luhansk (LNR) against the "Kiev Nazi Junta", for example, while constantly denying any Russian military involvement.

Rhetoric from Russian hardliners has meanwhile become increasingly aggressive as Western sanctions and the low oil price have undermined the Russian economy. Speakers on popular TV shows have repeatedly called for full-scale offensives against Ukraine and even Europe. A good example was a debate on the Vladimir Solovyov show in June featuring Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the far-right Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. Zhirinovsky said:

"Someone can start bombing Kiev. We do not know who this would be but this can happen. A half of Kiev will be burned ... Why do we have to wait? We have to start the offensive and to push them [the Ukrainian army] behind Kiev. We have to threaten Brussels, Warsaw and Vilnius and to make them dig trenches over there."

Kremlin critics have been vocal too. The political writer Andrey Piontkovsky has said that the Putin regime would even go as far as nuclear war to stay in power, for instance.

When it comes to Russian broadcast journalism, you see two different categories. English-speaking channels such as Russia Today never go especially far, but the domestic channels routinely have debates about a full-scale war with the West. The self-explanatory screenshot below, from the Time Will Show news programme on state-owned Channel One in June, is a typical example.

The war online

Which brings us to social media. As I have argued here before, chatrooms and Facebook pages played a pivotal role in sparking pro-Russian uprisings in eastern Ukraine more than a year ago. Pro-Russian online groups such as Anti-Maidan drew on neo-Soviet ideological clichés about World War II in their portrayals of Ukraine's Euromaidan movement and the pro-European government led by Petro Poroshenko that came to power in 2014.

The narrative remains that a "Kiev Nazi Junta" is at the forefront of a new offensive against Russia by an imagined fascist Europe. You see liberal use of Russian tanks and other WWII imagery, and calls for unity and readiness for "all Russian people" to repel these forces, garnering thousands of likes. The symbol below has been popular not only online but also on car windows in Russia. The words beneath the logo read, "1941-1945 we can repeat".

Anti-Maidan was publishing calls last summer for the Russian authorities to be more supportive towards separatists in eastern Ukraine and help it follow the path of Crimea and become integrated with Russia. Sites like this provided a forum for the discussions of conspiracy theorists after the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 near Donetsk last July. The majority of online contributors seemed quite confident that one of these theories about an inside job by pro-Western actors was true.

But while you saw fresh rises in military enthusiasm on these sites at the time of pro-Russian advances in February and last August, generally the membership numbers have not been increasing and the number of comments has been falling. The fall in comments can be explained by tough administrators constantly banning commentators that are pro-Ukrainian or sceptical.

At the same time, online journalists have been challenging past distortions. For example citizen investigative journalism site Bellingcat recently reproduced and studied social media reaction at the time of the MH17 attack to challenge the conspiracy theories. In a similar vein, Vice news correspondent Simon Ostrovsky has tracked the activities of a Russian soldier on social media to leave little doubt that regular Russian troops were involved in the February offensive on Debaltseve.

By this summer, the pro-Russian online groups have been much more devoted to simply reposting news from news agencies without sparking much discussion. There have been growing signs of dissent too. When Russia vetoed a UN resolution to set up an international tribunal to look at the MH17 attack last month, numerous previously loyal group members expressed doubts. One said: "We should not have vetoed it. If Ukrainians did this, what would be the problem to charge them in the tribunal?"

There has since also been controversy over Russian moves to publicly destroy food that has been imported from EU - all EU food imports were banned in response to the sanctions. A typical comment reads, "We have many people starving in our country. As for me, this is just stupid."

The Lyudmila Savchuk story does highlight the efforts to which the Kremlin has gone to maintain bogus online sentiment using "troll farms". Yet it doesn't hide the sense of malaise on the pro-Russian side online - it is not difficult to spot the fake profiles. The suspicion is that ordinary Russians may be tiring of this conflict with the West. Reports of growing Russian casualties in Ukraine will not be helping - they gradually undermine the idea of a fast and victorious war.

This doesn't mean that the risks of the conflict escalating have passed, but it cannot be good news for Putin. It certainly suggests that the "we can repeat" mood cannot hold forever.

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 #31
Moscow Times
August 20, 2015
NATO Is Unprepared for Conflict With Russia
By Judy Dempsey
Judy Dempsey is senior associate and editor-in-chief of Strategic Europe at Carnegie Europe.

Russia is preparing for a conflict with NATO and NATO is preparing for a possible confrontation with Russia." These are provocative words from the European Leadership Network, a British think tank. The think tank argues that the recent spate of exercises conducted by NATO and Russia is increasing tensions between both sides. They are threatening European security.

Europe's security architecture was completely undermined when Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014. Since then, Russian-backed separatists have destabilized large parts of eastern Ukraine.

The result is that Europe's post-Cold War security architecture has lost any kind of predictability. Russia's violation of internationally recognized borders has led to a certain kind of insecurity in Europe, with growing fears by the Baltic states and other NATO members about Russia's long-term intentions along NATO's eastern and northern flanks.

That is why over the past few months NATO has been conducting exercises in the region. The largest, held in June, consisted of 15,000 troops. Belatedly, NATO has agreed to boost the defenses of the Baltic states, Poland and the Alliance's southern flank in order to reassure its allies.

Such reassurances fall short of permanently deploying NATO forces in any of these countries. There is neither the political will nor the military capabilities to do so. Germany, for one, opposes any such permanent deployment among NATO's eastern members.

Furthermore, the majority of NATO countries have no intention of spending more on defense. Any chance that NATO members will each meet the target of spending 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense that was agreed in principle during the NATO summit in Cardiff, Wales last year, is slight to say the least.

For all that, Russia continues to goad NATO.

Its 'snap exercise' held last March consisted of 80,000 military personnel. Russia has repeatedly skirted the airspace of several NATO countries.

The kidnapping nearly a year ago of Eston Kohver, a counter-intelligence officer in Estonia's security agency shows how far Russia is willing to go to rattle small NATO member states. Kohver was sentenced yesterday by a Russian court to 15 years in prison.

On a bigger scale, Russia is also trying to carve out its own sphere of influence in the Arctic region, moves that both NATO members (Denmark, Iceland and Norway) and non-NATO members, Sweden and Finland are particularly worried about.

Indeed, along with Poland and the Baltic states, it is this group of countries that see Russia as a major threat to their security and not just because of what Russia is doing in Ukraine.

Just as Ukraine has become a competition over values between Russia and the European Union, the Arctic region and Ukraine are becoming new sources of strategic competition between Russia and the West.

Despite its military exercises and decision to boost the defenses of the Baltic States, NATO is wholly unprepared for this kind of competition.

Its 28 members still do not share a common threat perception. The southern members, particularly Spain, Italy, Greece and Turkey are understandably more worried about the turmoil engulfing the Middle East than what Russia is doing in Ukraine.

NATO countries are also divided over any future enlargement of the Alliance. The small Western Balkan country of Montenegro is lobbying hard to be admitted to NATO at its next summit that will be held in Warsaw, Poland. Even at that, it is not certain that Montenegro's efforts will be rewarded.

As for Macedonia that has met all of NATO's criteria for membership, Greece will continue to block its entry because of disagreements over what name Macedonia - cumbersomely called the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia - should be called.

There is absolutely no appetite by several big NATO countries to even offer Georgia the Membership Action Plan that would put it firmly on the path toward NATO membership. Several NATO countries said they don't want to provoke Russia or send the wrong signal to Russia. In reality, this view amounts to Russia having a veto over further NATO enlargement.

Most European members of NATO are woefully unprepared to compensate for the American pivot to Asia and its gradual withdrawal from Europe. The U.S. is NATO's security guarantee for the Western alliance.

That security guarantee has been consistently taken for granted by the Europeans. A poll conducted by the Pew Research Center concluded that it would be the U.S. and Canada, not the Europeans, that would defend any ally attacked by Russia. So much for NATO's collective defense doctrine and its commitment to Article 5 that obliges a member to assist any other member that is attacked.

The longer the Europeans refuse to understand the changing dynamics of the transatlantic relationship the more Russia will try and exploit to its advantage the weaknesses of the Alliance. That is exactly what Russia is trying to do in Ukraine, its ambitions in the Arctic and its big military exercises.

NATO's response and resolve will only be really tested if Russia moves the conflict to an Alliance member.

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 #32
Washington Times
August 21, 2015
East Ukraine could be annexed soon
By L. Todd Wood

Much has been made in the media in recent weeks about the increased violence in East Ukraine between Ukrainian government forces and pro-Russia rebels of the Donetsk People's Republic, or DPR. Scores of civilians and military alike have been killed in recent artillery duels as heavy weapons have again appeared on the frontlines as the Minsk peace accords collapse. It goes without saying, but it doesn't look like this will end well.

The violence comes with reports of an increased Russian military presence on the border and a heightened level of chaos within Ukraine as nationalist forces challenge the Poroshenko government for power. All the while, Ukraine struggles to avoid default and combat the rampant corruption within its society, a legacy of Soviet rule.

However, one news item did not receive much attention in the mainstream press, although it was picked up by several blogs. Earlier in the week, Xinhau, the Chinese state news agency, reported that the rebels in Donetsk are preparing to hold another referendum to succeed from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation. The reporting from Xinhau was curious as it comes amid close cooperation between Russia and China militarily as the two nations hold their largest ever naval drills in the South China Sea.

The Ukrainian press also picked up the Donetsk announcement quoting the leader of the DPR, Zakharchenko, "Russian President Vladimir Putin once again stressed during his 'direct line' [telephone call-in show] that there is no alternative to a political settlement of the situation in the Donbas. He stressed that the residents of Donbas should be given the right to decide how they live, and with whom, and under what conditions."

With increased shelling around the strategically important port city of Mariupol, the main barrier preventing a Russian land bridge to the previously annexed Crimean Peninsula, it seems possible that Mr. Putin has decided to go all-in regarding Russian control of East Ukraine.

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 Ottawa Citizen (Canada)
August 21, 2015
The coming war with Russia
By David Pugliese, Ottawa Citizen

A couple of months before he retired in July, the head of Canada's air force provided a blunt assessment of what might emerge from the current military mission to Ukraine.

"We pray that our ongoing NATO mission isn't accompanied by the escalation of deadly force and the shedding of blood," Lt.-Gen. Yvan Blondin wrote in the magazine RCAF Today. "We have everything to lose and nothing to gain through a show-down with our former Eastern Bloc foes."

It was an unusual and candid observation from a veteran Canadian officer about the increased tensions and worsening situation in Ukraine. But Blondin's warning also reflects an increasing concern among some in the United States and Europe about the possibility that the standoff in eastern Europe between Russia and the West could somehow end in war.

Political and military analysts don't believe that either side would deliberately start such a war. But with large numbers of military forces operating in such close proximity, anything could happen, they warn.

Bloodshed could be spurred by something as simple as miscommunication between military units, for instance.

Or it could involve an accident, such as what almost happened in April when a Russian SU-27 fighter jet came within an estimated three to six metres of a U.S. military surveillance plane over the Baltic Sea. (The Pentagon complained to the Russians about the pilot's aggressive flying but the Russians countered that the U.S. spy plane was flying towards their border with its identification transponder turned off.)

Over the last year, tensions have increased to the point where Latvian Foreign Affairs Minister Edgars Rinkevics warned that Russian-Western relations had sunk to their lowest level since the Cuban missile crisis of the early 1960s.

NATO vessels, including Canadian frigates, now regularly patrol the Black Sea, closely monitored by Russian warships. American, Canadian and other NATO troops are training on Russia's doorstep. In October, NATO will launch one of its biggest exercises in years, with up to 36,000 personnel involved in war games designed to send a message to Russia that the alliance is ready to respond militarily if required. Some 1,600 Canadian military personnel, along with aircraft and five warships, will take part.

NATO has given much publicity to the exercise because it doesn't want any misunderstandings with the Russians that could lead to a confrontation. NATO hopes Russia will do the same for its own training exercises but so far that hasn't happened.

In March, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg raised concerns that the tensions have hurt communications with the Russians, who have launched a series of unscheduled, large-scale military exercises in eastern Europe. He worried the result could be miscommunication, sparking an incident between Russian and NATO forces that could spiral out of control.

The tense situation hasn't been helped by inaccurate claims from the alliance's commander, U.S. Gen. Philip Breedlove. When the crisis first started in 2014, Breedlove made the stunning announcement that Russia had assembled 40,000 troops on Ukraine's frontier, and he warned that an invasion was imminent. Months later, he claimed that more than 1,000 combat vehicles, as well as Russian forces, had crossed into Ukraine.

Breedlove's statements rattled officials in German Chancellor Angela Merkel's office. German intelligence agencies, which had good sources in the region, were reporting that there was no invasion. Merkel's officials dismissed Breedlove's claims as dangerous. The general didn't retreat on his statements.

But this past April, Breedlove surprised U.S. senators by acknowledging just how little NATO and the U.S. knew about Russia's activities.

He admitted he first learned from social media about a massive Russian exercise that unfolded in March across Eastern Europe. "Some Russian military exercises have caught us by surprise, and our textured feel for Russia's involvement on the ground in Ukraine has been quite limited," he told the senators.

Canada has its own concerns about war with Russia but the official line is that the situation can be contained.

"There is no doubt that (Russian President Vladimir) Putin's aggression in Ukraine is not an isolated concern," said Lauren Armstrong, spokeswoman for Defence Minister Jason Kenney. "We believe that a message of resolve and deterrence, in concert with our allies, is the best way to prevent a miscalculation on the part of Mr. Putin."

Others are not so sure. The lack of "textured feel" that Breedlove talked about has prompted former military officers in both Russia and the U.S. to call on their countries for new safeguards on the use of nuclear missiles.

Despite the end of the Cold War, the system governing the launching of such nuclear weapons is still geared towards crews firing those missiles within minutes of receiving their orders. In addition, Russian military doctrine calls for the use of nuclear weapons even in a conventional conflict if it believes its forces will be overwhelmed by the enemy.

In April, retired U.S. Gen. James Cartwright, who had commanded American nuclear forces, and retired Russian Maj. Gen. Vladimir Dvorkin, who headed the research institute of Russia's Strategic Rocket Forces, warned that both countries were at increased risk of an accidental war as the situation in Ukraine deteriorated.

Putin has already raised the spectre of nuclear war. Early on in the Ukraine crisis, he sent a less-than-subtle message. "It's best not to mess with us," he told a gathering of Russian youths in August 2014. "Thank God, I think no one is thinking of unleashing a large-scale conflict with Russia. I want to remind you that Russia is one of the leading nuclear powers."

Months later, Putin confirmed that he had contemplated whether nuclear weapons would be needed in the showdown with the West over the Crimea, acknowledging that he was ready to bring his country's nuclear weapons to a high state of alert.

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev also sounded warnings. He is critical of Putin's actions in Ukraine but he also blamed NATO for significantly increasing tensions as it expanded the alliance towards Russia's borders. "It could all blow up at any moment if we don't take action," he told the German magazine Der Spiegel in January 2015. "Moscow does not believe the West, and the West does not believe Moscow.

"Such a war today would probably lead inevitably to nuclear war," he added. "But the statements and propaganda on both sides make me fear the worst."

A slower march to war - rather than a miscalculation - is another scenario that has raised concerns. The former Soviet republics of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, all with populations of ethnic Russians, are now members of NATO. Under the NATO agreement, alliance countries are obliged to come to the aid of fellow members if they are under attack.

But what would NATO do if Russia acted in Latvia, Estonia or Lithuania, claiming it needed to protect the interests of those ethnic Russians? How would NATO forces, training in Latvia or Estonia, handle an incursion of covert Russian forces - troops wearing unmarked uniforms, which happened in some disputed areas in Ukraine?

"It is not difficult to imagine scenarios in which either U.S. or Russian action could set in motion a chain of events at the end of which American and Russian troops would be killing each other," wrote Graham Allison, former assistant U.S. secretary of defence, and Dimitri Simes, publisher of the National Interest, a U.S. foreign policy magazine.

Their April 2015 article in the National Interest, titled "Russia and America: Stumbling to War," also highlighted the willingness of Russian hard-liners to use nuclear weapons if a conventional conflict got out of hand. "In these debates, many ask whether President Obama would risk losing Chicago, New York and Washington to protect Riga, Tallinn and Vilnius," the authors wrote.

"It is a troubling question. If you want to either dumbfound or silence a table next to you in a restaurant in Washington or Boston, ask your fellow diners what they think."

For now, Americans and Canadians say they would support a military response - at least in theory.

In June, the Pew Research Centre, based in Washington, conducted a survey in 10 nations to gauge views on the Ukraine crisis. The majority of Canadians and Americans interviewed responded that their nations should act militarily if a NATO nation was attacked. Almost half of those surveyed in the United Kingdom, Poland, and Spain also agreed.

There was a split, however, among the populations of some other NATO nations. "At least half of Germans, French and Italians say their country should not use military force to defend a NATO ally if attacked by Russia," the centre noted. (The survey was based on 11,116 interviews in NATO nations, Ukraine and Russia.)

Another scenario, short of war, that could also have serious consequences centres on the unintended effects of ongoing economic sanctions against Russia. The result, some analysts worry, could be widespread chaos, eventually leading to the fracturing of Russia into uncontrollable nuclear armed mini-states.

The sanctions are supposed to force Putin to back down on Ukraine and the Crimea. Yet he has shown no desire to reverse course. In fact, the economic sanctions have further shored up his support among the Russian people, who blame the West for their troubles, according to Pew researchers. Meanwhile, Russia's economic situation has significantly worsened with the steep drop in oil prices.

Canada's Conservative government has called for even more sanctions against the Russians but European nations, in particular Germany, have been leery. Tougher sanctions would further destabilize Russia, an outcome that is in no one's best interest, German vice-chancellor Sigmar Gabriel warned.

It might, however, be too late to stave off such an outcome. Earlier this year Stratfor, a private intelligence firm with ties to the U.S. military and CIA, predicted economic sanctions, combined with low oil prices, could lead to the eventual collapse of Russia. Out of that would emerge smaller, poorer and potentially uncontrollable states.

Russia's central government would no longer have control over the country's 8,000 nuclear weapons - a situation Stratfor termed "the greatest crisis of the next decade.

"Russia is the site of a massive nuclear strike force distributed throughout the hinterlands," Stratfor explained. "The decline of Moscow's power will open the question of who controls those missiles and how their non-use can be guaranteed."

The tension between Russia and the West isn't expected to get better anytime soon. On both sides, attitudes seem to be hardening.

Some of Putin's advisers see NATO's ultimate goal as crippling Russia to the point where it cannot challenge the West, either militarily or economically. "The full financial force of the West is concentrated on attacking us," Nikolai Starikov, a popular Russian pundit with links to the Putin regime, told a seminar in Russia in December. "What they are doing is smashing the foundations of a great geopolitical construction that will become their competitor."

Last month, meanwhile, U.S. air force secretary Deborah James told American lawmakers that Russia was the biggest threat facing the country today. Gen. Joseph Dunford, slated to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, echoed that view. And U.S. Air Force Gen. Paul Selva, who is to become American's number two military officer, said Russia has overtaken the Islamic State as the greatest threat to the U.S. homeland.

Earlier this year, Canada's Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander voiced similar views. He said that while the war in Iraq and Syria is an important issue, the number one threat to world security is the crisis in Ukraine. Alexander called on all countries to come together to drive the Russians out of Crimea and Ukraine.

"There is absolutely no scenario going into the future that leads to peace and security for this world, that leads to prosperity in Europe globally that does not include a full international effort to give Ukraine the tools it needs to drive Russian forces from their borders and to secure its borders for good," he told Ukrainian Canadians in a speech in Toronto Feb. 22.

Less than a month later, U.S. Army Maj.-Gen. Robert Scales, former commandant of the U.S. Army War College, outlined a similar solution to the crisis but in blunter language. "The only way (the U.S.) can turn the tide is start killing Russians, killing so many Russians that even Putin's media can't hide the fact that Russians are returning to their motherland in body bags," the retired officer said.

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 #34
The Daily Caller
http://dailycaller.com
August 20, 2015
McCain On Putin: 'He Wants To Restore The Russian Empire'
By Jonah Bennett

Republican Sen. John McCain said Wednesday during his trip to Sweden that Russian President Vladimir Putin is trying to "restore the Russian Empire."

The purpose of the trip, made along with Sens. John Barrasso and Sheldon Whitehouse, is to reiterate concerns regarding Russia's aggressive military build-up and other threatening activities, The Local reports.

McCain favors a much more active response to Russia, which has included supplying arms to Ukraine, a point McCain has hammered home at the various Senate Armed Service Committee nomination hearings over the past couple of months. For McCain, even sending millions in non-lethal aid isn't enough to force the Russian side to shift tactics.

"I think what Putin does now is that he sorts of calibrates about how far he can go without triggering some kind of real opposition," McCain said at the Hudson Institute in July. "We are arguing now over when and how to raise the sanctions. Nobody talks about Crimea, nobody talks about the Malaysia Airliner that we know was shot down with Russian equipment and probably with Russian(s) manning it. There's no discussion of it."

In June, the Center for European Policy Analysis stated the Russian military held an exercise simulating a takeover of Norway, Finland, Sweden and Denmark, using 33,000 troops. The scenario posited that Western powers were supporting an uprising in Moscow to unseat Putin, and in response, Russia launched an assault against the four bordering countries.

"If carried out successfully, control of those territories would make it all but impossible for Nato allies to reinforce the Baltic states," Edward Lucas, the senior vice-president of the Centre for European Policy Analysis, wrote in the report.

Sweden seems to agree that Russia presents a major threat.

The country's security service noted that the biggest intelligence threat in 2014 came from Russia, where agents have been illegally gaining access to information about Sweden's defense capabilities, as well as aggressively recruiting new spies in Sweden from the Russian expatriate community.

Last September, two SU-24 bombers reportedly entered Swedish airspace for about 30 seconds, prompting Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt to harshly criticize the Russian ambassador.

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 #35
The White House
June 26, 2015
Remarks by Celeste Wallander, Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russia and Central Asia on U.S. Policy on Russia

U.S. Policy on Russia
CNAS Annual Conference
June 26 2015
Celeste A. Wallander
Special Assistant to the President
And Senior Director for Russia and Central Asia National Security Council

I am especially grateful that CNAS and all of you are interested in understanding U.S. policy on Russia directly from the source.  As we've all seen, the truth can sometimes be muddied, and the current Russian leadership has spun a tale in which the United States has sought to disregard, weaken, and exploit the Russian Federation.

In fact, the United States has long sought a robust and constructive relationship with Russia.  And this is why, for 25 years, the U.S. bipartisan core strategy has been to integrate Russia by facilitating investment and trade, by supporting Russia's assumption of a strong role in global institutions, and by deepening our partnership in security cooperation to reinforce the foundations of stability and predictability.

Let me note some key examples. The United States recognized Russia as the sole legal successor state to the Soviet Union, which enabled Russia to take the Soviet Union's seat as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, with all the rights, privileges, and responsibilities that status carries.  The United States has also recognized Russia's successor role in treaties and agreements governing nuclear weapons possession and stewardship, and concluded a new strategic nuclear reductions treaty with the Russian Federation that entered into force in early 2011.  The United States worked for many years to achieve - and the Obama Administration brought to success - Russia's accession to the World Trade Organization. And through persistent efforts in the NATO-Russia Council and Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the United States has consistently sought to engage Russia on some of the toughest European security issues of our time.

U.S. policy on Russia has long held that we - and Europe and indeed the broader global community - would be more secure, prosperous, and capable of tackling global challenges if Russia is secure, prosperous, and integrated in global and regional institutions as a constructive stakeholder in the international system.

That assessment has not changed.  What has changed since President Putin came back to power in 2012 is that the Russian leadership no longer appears to accept the rules and institutions that Russia signed on to at the end of the Cold War and after - rules and institutions from which Russia has benefitted.  Although there were worrying signs that the Russian leadership sought to evade those rules in previous years - in its problematic "suspension" of the CFE Treaty, in its invasion and occupation of Georgia in 2008 and its creeping annexation of sovereign Georgian territory since then - it was Russia's unilateral use of military force to acquire territory with the attempted annexation of Crimea that revealed the true scope of the Russian leadership's rejection of the rules that constitute the fundamentals of global and European order.  And since then, Russia's military intervention in eastern Ukraine and its use of coercion to attempt what it decries elsewhere as unacceptable -interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign country- has fully revealed the depth of this Russian leadership's rejection of the bedrock principles of European and global security.

So, we can and still do hope for a Russia that is secure, prosperous, integrated, and on a track to provide a better future for its citizens.  But meanwhile, we have to face the challenge of the Russia we face, not the Russia we wish to see.  U.S. policy toward Russia leaves open the potential for Russia's return to the global community as a constructive stakeholder if Russia's citizens choose it in future, and we hope that the Russian leadership will pursue a path that will make that a reality. And as always, the United States will leave open the door to maintain our historically strong ties with Russian society, investing in people-to-people programs, scientific and education exchanges, and opportunities for private investment, innovation, and trade.

The United States continues to cooperate with Russia in those areas where we share pragmatic common interests in tackling pressing global challenges, including nonproliferation, nuclear and other WMD security, preventing atrocities and humanitarian crises, and combatting violent extremism and terrorism.  In fact, even amidst what outside analysts have deemed the most severe worsening of U.S.-Russian relations since the Cold War, the United States has worked with Russia to remove Syria's declared chemical weapons, to secure an agreement to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, and to implement the New START treaty.

But Russia has now clearly demonstrated its willingness to use aggressive tactics, through conventional and unconventional means, to achieve its diplomatic objectives, so the United States must also defend itself and its allies against Russian coercion and aggression, and work to ensure that Russia's coercion against its neighbors does not succeed.  NATO has already taken important strides in this respect by implementing the commitments made at last fall's Wales Summit, including the development of NATO's Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (VJTF), which deployed for the first time this month for a NATO exercise in Poland.  And as Secretary Carter announced in Estonia in June 2015, the United States intends - in coordination with Allies - to temporarily place approximately 250 tanks, armored vehicles, and associated equipment in Baltic and Central European countries to reinforce the U.S. commitment to NATO and collective defense, and promote Allied interoperability through a variety of training exercises.  While strengthening our defenses, we are also working on reducing our vulnerabilities and those of allies and partners who respect our common rules and principles.  To make our partners more resilient against Russian tactics, the United States is focused on areas such as the elimination of corruption, strengthening of democratic institutions - including independent and unbiased media - and diversifying energy supplies.   President Obama said in Tallinn that "we are stronger because we are democracies...we're stronger because we embrace open economies... and we are stronger because we stand together."  The strength of U.S.-European unity in the face of Russian aggression - as demonstrated in the rollover of EU sectoral sanctions in June 2015 - has proven the resilience of U.S. security relationships during a very difficult couple of years.

There is a Russian joke that goes "We hoped for the best, but it turned out like always."  In national security policy, we do not have the luxury of mere hope, but neither do we have the easy but irresponsible escape of hopelessness.  Realism requires us to deal with the Russia we face, not merely the Russia so many - including Russians - hoped for.  But realism also requires us to re-commit to the values, commitments, and long-term strategic objectives that make the United States, our allies, and our partners, secure and prosperous.  Our policy leaves open the opportunity for Russia's positive potential while firmly coping with the dangers that Russia's leadership has posed to its neighbors, to Europe, and to the global community.

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