#2
Putin's job approval rating exceeds 80% - poll

MOSCOW. Aug 26 (Interfax) - The job approval rating of Russian President Vladimir Putin stands at 83% in August, Levada Center sociologists told Interfax on Wednesday following this month's survey.

Seventeen percent of respondents of the center's latest poll were dissatisfied with Putin's work as Russian president.

In June the approval rate was 89%, in April-May - 86% and in January - 85%.

"The approval of the president, which exceeded the 80% mark against the backdrop of the 'Crimean campaign', has stabilized and its fluctuations actually fit the limits of statistical errors of polls, which does not permit speaking of a drop in the rating at the present moment," the Levada Center said.

The job approval rating of Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev stands at 61%, while his work received negative assessments from 38% of those polled.

Fifty-four percent of respondents approved of the Russian government's performance, while 44% of those polled disapproved of it.

The work of the State Duma received positive assessments from 47% of respondents and negative assessments from 51%.

Furthermore, 60% of those polled spoke positively of the work of governors of their territories, including the Moscow mayor, and 38% took the opposite view.

Respondents were also asked to name five or six Russian political figures whom they trust most.

President Putin was mentioned by 58% of those polled; Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu came second with 25%. Prime Minister Medvedev and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov shared third place with 19% each.

They were followed by Liberal Democratic Party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky (11%), Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov (9%), head of the Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill (6%), Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin (5%), leader of A Just Russia party Sergei Mironov (4%) and Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko (3%).

Meanwhile, 12% of respondents said they do not trust any Russian political figures today, and 13% of those polled said that they are not interested in politics.

Additionally, 55%, the same as in January, believe that Russia is moving in the right direction, 29% of those polled expressed the opposite opinion, and 17% were undecided.

The survey was conducted in 134 communities in 46 Russian regions on August 21-24 and involved 1,600 people.

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 #3
Vedomosti
August 20, 2015
Economic reality fails to dent Putin's approval ratings - daily
Editorial by Andrey Sinitsyn, Pride in the country does not depend on reality. Why empty pocketbooks are not affecting the president's rating

The continuing worsening of the economic situation, fall in incomes, and price hikes are having an increasing impact on Russians. VTsIOM [All-Russia Centre for the Study of Public Opinion] yesterday published figures for how consumer behaviour is changing. In comparison with January, July saw a strong increase in the proportion of respondents who have been buying cheaper food products and goods for six months or more (up from 38 to 53 per cent) and have been refraining from certain essential purchases for six months or more (up from 39 to 52 per cent).

But the new phase of rouble devaluation combined with falling oil prices is not causing Russians great agitation. According to VTsIOM's figures, only 10 per cent are making savings in foreign currency. According to data from the Public Opinion Foundation, 35 per cent of respondents have savings, but 92 per cent of them hold their savings in roubles. The population prefers roubles both when they have savings and when they do not. And although the December devaluation and subsequent worsening of the situation is nevertheless impacting on Russians' financial awareness, the majority continue to react not to the oil price or the rouble exchange rate but to store prices and housing and municipal services bills. The response is in line with this: Reduced consumption and stockpiling. That is to say, normal individual survival strategies.

And indeed, how can citizens affect the oil price? Or the Kremlin's policy, which makes the economy dependent on the oil price? And indeed they do not need to do so long as there is a pride in the country that does not depend on reality.

The latest Levada Centre poll on trust in the regime showed that only 4 per cent are certain that officials always tell the truth, 13 per cent believe that as a rule they do not lie, 34 per cent feel that they "sometimes tell the truth and sometimes lie," and 40 per cent believe that they almost always lie.

Okay, that is what ordinary citizens feel. The president does not know the truth.

Putin does not receive complete and reliable information from his entourage, in the opinion of 56 per cent of respondents (31 per cent are confident that he does). Admittedly this is a classic "good czar, bad boyars" situation. Admittedly pollsters have been recording such results for a long time. The surprising thing is how the "good czar's" rating has soared despite the persisting opinion about "bad boyars." As the citizens see it, Vladimir Putin is raising Russia from its knees and restoring its status as a great power while also being ignorant of half of the truth about what is happening in this power. He is practically blindfolded.

Aleksey Levinson, head of the Levada Centre Department of Socio-Cultural Research, says that the president's record-high confidence ratings in fact demonstrate a loyalty to Russia and the president is a symbol of this. And a symbol is not obliged to be informed. Per se a stance "for Russia!" does not correspond to any reality, and so it cannot be influenced by any rational things, whether it be opinions about how the boyars lie and steal or an awareness of the economic crisis.

But the important thing is that the citizens are psychologically prepared for a crisis - either, along with the president, they are hoping for a "rapid bounce back," as in 2009, or because today they really have something to lose, unlike in 1991 or 1998.

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#4
Moskovskiy Komsomolets
August 19, 2015
Open Russia coordinator interviewed on return to work after suspected poisoning

Interview with Open Russia coordinator Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr by Valeriya Markova: "Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr gives his first interview after being poisoned. 'I will return to Moscow as soon as the doctors allow it"

In his 33 years Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr has managed to graduate from Cambridge University, instigate the dissident Vladimir Bukovkiy's nomination for president, test his mettle in State Duma elections, and participate in the For Honest Elections movement. And also to become a close friend of Boris Nemtsov and work with former Yukos boss Mikhail Khodorkovskiy, who recently announced Vladimir Kara-Murza's return to work in Open Russia (in May the oppositionist was hospitalized with severe poisoning, was in a coma for several days, and then flew to the United States to recuperate). For the first time since his illness Vladimir Kara-Murza spoke with Moskovskiy Komsomolets.

[Markova] I cannot fail to ask your opinion about the reasons for your illness. Several theories were articulated in the media - including incompatible medicines, deliberate poisoning, the possibility that you might have been a chance victim....

[Kara-Murza] The diagnosis given to me was a high level of toxicity, but they did not manage to specifically identify the cause. It is hard for me to believe that it was a coincidence, because I am healthy person for all my organs to suddenly shut down one after another.... But I cannot allege anything, because when I was in the First City Hospital in Moscow the doctors - I am boundlessly grateful to them - literally brought me back from the dead: When I was admitted, experts gave me a 5-per-cent chance of survival, but ascertaining the cause was not the priority. And when I went to the United States to recuperate, too much time had passed for tests to show anything definite.

[Markova] Let us talk about more pleasant things. On Friday evening [14 August] Khodorkovskiy announced that you are returning to work. What have you managed to do so far in these three days?

[Kara-Murza] Mikhail Borisovich has tasked me with handling the Open Elections monitoring project, which was only launched this summer and will be fine-tuned by combined voting day on 13 September. We ate taking two regions - Kostroma Region, where we are naturally counting on close interaction with the Parnas campaign staff, although, that said, it is important to stress that we are open to cooperation with all participants in the elections - and also Novosibirsk Region, where Parnas has not been allowed to participate in the elections, but we are going to monitor the situation there anyway. Our main objective is not just to record but also to prevent rigging, and it is specifically on this that we will be focusing our volunteers. Their training will begin in the very near future.

We are of course building Open Elections with a view to the 2016 Duma campaign. Right now this is a trial run to ensure  that the project works properly next year.

[Markova] But how technically can violations be prevented?

[Kara-Murza] With your permission, I am not yet going to divulge the details because we are only just launching this project. We want to place the emphasis on prevention so that we do not just end up saying with a sad expression at the end of stolen elections that such and such violations occurred and everything is terrible but try to catch these vote riggers red-handed in the process. In the past there have been instances of an observer managing to prevent ballot stuffing, carousel voting, and rewriting of election returns, and we want to get this going and systematize it.

We will of course cooperate with Golos, Sonar, and Grazhdanskiy Nablyudatel [Civil Observer] - with all civil organizations that already have many years of work experience. Ours is not a rival project in any circumstances. But again our priority regions are Kostroma and Novosibirsk regions.

[Markova] As I understand it, right now you are working on line from abroad?

[Kara-Murza] Yes, right now I am continuing to recuperate. Thank God, my brain is working. My handshake is strong. And modern means of communications make it possible to be totally involved in the process. I will return to Moscow, straight back to my job, as soon as the doctors allow it.

[Markova] Will that be in the autumn?

[Kara-Murza] Most likely yes. As yet I do not want to say, because it does not depend on me. As soon as the doctors give me the "green light."

[Markova] I also wanted to talk to you about the Democratic Coalition. It has been allowed to participate in the elections in only one region - with Yegor Savin in Novosibirsk. Why do you think this has happened? And whose decision was it?

[Kara-Murza] It is absolutely obvious that this is being done in accordance with an order. Because the regime understands very well that it does not have any mythical 86 per cent. That all of this will collapse in one fine instant as soon as people start seeing some kind of real alternative. A regime that disqualifies an alternative from elections is a regime that is not strong, not popular, and not self-confident. The political arena is yet again being purged of opponents, and yet again the regime is exposing its weakness. Its position is by no means as strong as it would like to imagine. Particularly in these regions - Novosibirsk and Kostroma. We know their electoral history; One Russia's position there is not of the strongest.

[Markova] And how do you assess Parnas's chances in the regional elections?

[Kara-Murza] As Open Russia coordinator I can say that the result will depend to a large extent on the presence or absence of rigging. All other things being equal, I believe that the democratic opposition will achieve a significant result.

[Markova] What plans in politics do you personally have in  the immediate future and the long term?

[Kara-Murza] In the immediate future - running the Open Elections project. I remain the Open Russia coordinator and we will continue what we have been doing over the last year - that includes social projects, discussion platforms and lectures, and educational and enlightenment events alike.

I have currently been out of the process for a couple of months, but nevertheless my colleagues are continuing to work and all events of continuing to happen.

[Markova] You have also become a Parnas deputy chairman - that also constitutes a political resource....

[Kara-Murza] Yes, I wear two hats, so to speak. I believe that it is still premature to talk about the 2016 elections. You know, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson once said that a week is a long time in politics. And there is still a year until the Duma elections - and how much water will have flowed under the bridge in a year. Right now it is not worth looking so far ahead: There are immediate plans are linked  to what we are doing in Open Russia.


 

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 #5
The Quarterly Review
http://www.quarterly-review.org
August 4, 2015
Hold the Heart
Gregory Slysz considers the causes of Russo-Western antagonism
Dr. GREGORY SLYSZ lectures in history in London UK, specializing in Russian and Eastern European affairs. He is a PhD of the University of Kent in England. His PhD thesis was titled 'Soviet nationality policy and the politics of self-determination, 1963-1991'.
[Footnotes here http://www.quarterly-review.org/hold-the-heart/]

Introduction

'The direct consequences of a war with Russia,' wrote the British weekly The Economist, 'we look upon with no apprehension, at least under existing circumstances. It may be costly; it may be troublesome; if Russia be obstinate when defeated it may be longer than we expect; but we cannot pretend to entertain the smallest doubt of the triumphant success of the allied arms both on sea and land'. [1] The belligerence of The Economist is unmistaken. A little more surprising, however, to anyone who considers events in 1945 or 1917 as harbouring the roots of Russo-Western antagonism is that this editorial was written on 25 March,1854, in the middle of the Crimean War. 161 years on, and the tone and language from the same publication has changed little. Writing on the current Ukrainian conflict, it noted that 'Mr Putin sets himself up as a patriot, but he is a threat-to international norms, to his neighbours and to the Russians themselves, who are intoxicated by his hysterical brand of anti-Western propaganda. The world needs to face the danger Mr. Putin poses. If it does not stand up to him today, worse will follow'. [2]

The intention here is not to present a digest of Western scary stories that seek to brand Russia and its leader as a threat to world peace. Rather, it is to challenge the common perception of the causes and nature of Russo-West relations that are stoked by incessant propaganda campaigns waged by Western governments in collaboration with 'embedded' media sources. For evidence of this one needs to look no further than to the revelation in 2014 by Udo Ulfkotte, a former editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in his best-selling book, Gekaufte Journalisten (Bought journalism), that stories in the German press are essentially planted at the request of the CIA. [3] A year later Tom Harper of the British Sunday Times admitted in an CNN interview in June 2015 [4] that his front page investigation published in the paper a few days earlier on the effects on British spies in Russia and China of the Snowden revelations, [5] contained nothing but 'the position of the British government at the moment'. His confession merely confirmed a trend of collaboration between the media and respective governments that appears to be on the rise.

For all their pronouncements on the 'Russian threat', Western commentators have generally approached the current crisis without recourse to history and certainly not to any before 1945. In truth, the 'new Cold War', has its roots far beyond the 'old Cold War' which in itself contained little that was fundamentally novel in Russo-Western relations. Consequently, to understand the determinants of current relations it is crucial not to look to recent history but to a much deeper past. In so doing what will be revealed is a fundamental clash of both values and geo-political agenda that over centuries have sought control of the vast Eurasian landmass which Halford Mackinder termed in 1904 as 'The Geographical Pivot of History'. [6]

Understanding Russia

Western geopolitical analyses have generally tended to view Russia's actions as menacing, rooted in the contrariness of its leaders who are out of touch with reality and who refuse to abandon the memories and tactics of the Soviet past [7] which in some way they seek to recreate. In this way, such analysis views the world purely in terms of Western hegemonic power, deviation from which is considered to be errant.

Commenting on the current Ukrainian crisis, the neo-conservative strategist John Bolton, America's representative to the United Nations during the George W. Bush administration, recycled an old quote from Vladimir Putin's annual address to the Russian Parliament in April 2005, to try to explain Russia's annexation of Crimea. 'I think Putin ... gave us notice of his strategy seven or eight years ago when he said, 'The breakup of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century.'' [8] In reality Putin, a one-time middle ranking administrator in the KGB, is a far cry from the Bond villain that he is often portrayed as and has never exhibited any nostalgia for the USSR. He is above all a Russian nationalist, with a small 'n', for whom the collapse of the Soviet Union was a 'disaster' insomuch as it saddled Russia with the legacies of Soviet imperialism - management of the huge Russian diaspora, economic chaos, financial instability, the oligarch run institutions to name but a few of which he cited in the aforementioned address. In the same speech he also outlined his plans for a democratic political system and an efficient market economy though one founded, he stressed, on 'our own path' and not on external values. [9] It is a narrative that Putin was to reiterate on many occasions.

For Putin, certainly, the West's current policy of 'containment' of Russia is not novel but forms part of a continuum that 'has been carried out against our country for many years ... if not centuries', as he noted in his State of the Nation Address in December 2014. 'In short', he continued, 'whenever someone thinks that Russia has become too strong or independent, these tools are quickly put into place.' [10] The result of all this, as he noted at the 43rd Munich Security Conference on February 10, 2007, is nothing other than the creation of a 'uni-polar' world [which means] one single centre of power, one single centre of force [and] one single master." [11] And for Putin that 'single master' is unmistakably 'first and foremost the United States, [which] has overstepped its national borders in every way'. [12] This it has done, he declared at in his annual Valdai Club speech in 24 October 2014 in the Russian city of Sochi, by 'unilateral diktat imposing one's own models', which instead of buttressing 'sovereign and stable states' has led to the 'growing spread of chaos, and instead of democracy there is support for a very dubious public ranging from open neo-fascists to Islamic radicals'. [13]

Putin was to call time on the "uni-polar world" following Nato's action in Libya in 2011 which Russia did not veto at the UN, expecting in return a relationship based on equal terms. When none was forthcoming Russia's patience expired. Two years later Western plans in Syria to remove from office President Bashar al-Assad, a repeat offender against Western interests in the region, were blocked by a Russian (and Chinese) veto of UN Security Council resolutions authorising a Libya-like Nato bombing campaign. Realising Russia's new determination to oppose the West's hegemony, Western leaders, in collusion with their respective media outlets, went into overdrive with an unprecedented anti-Russian propaganda campaign that had no parallel even at the height of the so-called Cold War. The Ukrainian crisis which commenced in 2013 with the ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 by Western backed popular forces, many of which such as the Right Sector avowing openly Nazis sympathies, [14] created a climate of mutual sanctions and recriminations that represented the most serious episode of Russo-Western antagonism since the end of detente in the late 1970s.

An international relations continuum

Relations between Russia and the West over at least the past century and a half have indeed followed a consistent pattern. The general cordial Russo-US relations during the century or so after the American War of Independence that were based on realist considerations to keep a balance the power vis-à-vis European and Pacific empires [15] gradually expired in the wake of America's embrace of expansionist ambitions which its rapid industrialisation allowed and demanded. In the tradition of the Monroe Doctrine of 1824 and the Roosevelt Corollary of 1904, America arrogated for itself an entitlement to intervene essentially anywhere in the world where it felt its vital interests were threatened, moral particularism acting as a pretext for such intervention. It was a policy that it would apply with growing vigour after 1945, returning to the realism of by-gone years only when it felt overwhelmed by its international commitments. It is this national exceptionalism which Vladimir Putin has so consciously sought to counter, reminding President Barak Obama in an article in the New York Times in November 2013 of its dangers to democracy and its contravention of God's intentions for all nations, big or small. [16]

Although the process of converging and diverging interests was more pronounced in the eventful arena of European politics as states would find themselves in alliances one day and in opposition the next, evidenced for instance in 1914 by the virtual reversal of the anti-Russian Crimean alliance, a fundamental undercurrent of mutual mistrust between Western European powers and Russia was ever-present. This would continue into the post Second World War period, whose determining forces were much more complex than the popular image of the so-called 'Cold War' of a conflict between two opposing ideologies - Communism and Capitalism - that commenced in 1945. The term 'Cold War' itself was journalistic and sought to simplify what was a highly complex set of relations which involved not only the two superpowers and their satellites but also a variety of so-called 'non-aligned' nations and in which ideology was often sacrificed for geo-political gain as demonstrated, for instance, by the Soviet Union's courting of India and its shunning of China and America's betrayal of Britain during the Suez Crisis. Notwithstanding the set of post - (Second World) War circumstances, the Cold War had deep historical roots, harbouring much continuity linking post and pre-war periods in terms of the strategic, military and economic ambitions of both Russia/USSR and the US as well as other protagonists like Britain and France. Apart from the presence of the nuclear deterrent, there is little to distinguish this period from any other.

Cultural determinism

Even wider causes can be identified that defined the conflict in terms of a 'we -they' divide that was rooted to centuries' old cultural, psychological and religious differences with collectively nurtured mutual suspicions and fears. So dominated are histories of international relations from both Left and Right perspectives with materialistic analyses that cultural determinants are almost ignored.

In the West, Russia characteristically has been viewed as barbaric and alien. In the 17th century the English physician Samuel Collins's was struck by the way Russian nobles ate 'peas and carrots like swine, shells and all' and whose visual arts were 'flat and ugly ... no better than gilded gingerbread'. [17] Russia, in the words of a 19th century British journalist, was 'the most monstrous empire, in extent, that ever spread over the face of the earth', [18] while Thomas Mann's depiction in his 1920s novel The Magic Mountain of Russian holidaymakers as 'barbarously rich' [19] retains resonance for observers of modern day Russians. [20] These were opinions that were prevalent amongst many Europhile liberal minded Russians like the 19th century philosopher Pyotr Chaadayev, for whom Russia's Western outlook was purely superficial, largely devoid of its moral values and ideas. So incendiary were his views that they could not be published in Russia amidst a Slavophile reaction that was taking root there, championed by the likes of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy who took upon themselves a messianic Christian mission to save what they regarded as the decadent and corrupt West. The West's rejection of Russia as an equal ensured that this trend would triumph, forming the basis of a new Russian nationalism. A warped atheistic version survived during Soviet times only to remerge in modified form in the post-Soviet era.

For all the superficial similarities between Russia and the West, a deep cultural chasm exists between an increasingly conservative and Christian Russia and an increasingly liberal and atheist West that fuels mutual antagonism and suspicion, most vividly highlighted by the reaction in many Western quarters to Russia's anti-abortion stance [21] and its legislation of June 2013 banning distribution of 'propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations among minors'. [22]

 Control of the 'Heartland'

Notwithstanding memorable headlines and captivating periodisation, what has determined Russo-West encounters over the centuries has not been 'cold wars', old or new, but conventional power politics. Here Mackinder's 'heartland' theory of 'the great geographical pivot of history' remains as applicable today as it is to the Hunnic invasions of the 5th century or Germany's invasion of the 20th. It was clear to all ambitious conquerors that whichever power controlled the vast resource-rich Eurasian landmass it possessed an unassailable geopolitical position. [23] As such it has been incumbent on those powers threatened by the hegemon of the east to contain and ultimately defeat it.

For at least the past two centuries Russia has attempted, not always successfully, to assert itself on the international stage as an equal to the Western powers. However, other than at times of mutual convenience, this, as has been noted, has not been welcomed by Western powers which have sought either to contain Russia and exclude it from European affairs as during the Crimean War of the 1850s and during the post Second World War period or simply to destroy it as with the German invasion of 1941. Seen in this context, the current march to the east by Western powers which commenced with Western, mainly US intervention in the Soviet-Mujahidin war of the 1980s follows a well-trodden path. In the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse, the Pentagon was quick to re-formulate its strategy noting in 1992 in a document that 'Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a rival that poses a threat on the territory of the former Soviet Union [and] to endeavour to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. [24] A pro-active policy by the US to de-couple the former Soviet republics from Russia's influence reflected the grand scheme of Richard Cheney, the vice president in the George W. Bush administration and former CEO of the energy giant, Halliburton that was presented in 2001 to secure America's long-term energy demands. Cheney targeted both errant leaders in the Middle East, notably Saddam Hussein and the Caspian Basin which he identified as a 'rapidly growing new area of supply'. [25] In the EU, which was determined to spread its 'democratic values' and whose energy supplies were also vulnerable, the US acquired an ally in containing Russia's influence in Eurasia. And so proceeded Nato's encirclement of Russia along its western and southern borders and the engineering of the so-called colour revolutions in former Soviet republics, most recently in Ukraine, that replaced incumbent corrupt leaders with equally corrupt West-leaning place men.

Russia wants war

Russia's response first to Western provocations in Georgia in 2008 and secondly in Crimea in 2014, in both episodes reacting to the West's attempts to draw former Soviet republics into Nato, was in turn taken by Western powers as justification for further Nato expansion. It has been this crude self-fulfilling prophecy that has largely governed Russo-Western relations over the past two decades and provided the fuel for the current Ukrainian crisis.

Conclusion

Although Russo-Western relations have played out on many levels, they have harboured a centuries-old continuum. Citing ideologies and events as determinants of relations may aid its understanding but it serves little purpose without proper historical and cultural contextualisation. Without this, the big picture is lost and all that remains are headlines. The current state of relations harbours little novelty. As such, talk of new 'cold wars' obscures understanding of the broader picture in the same way as reference to old 'cold wars' does. The West's zero-sum strategy not only has failed to deliver the desired killer blow against Russia but has also strengthened Russia's resolve to reassert its hegemonic role in Eurasia as well as compelling it both to reform internally and reinforce its alliances, particularly with China. In failing to respect Russia's legitimate security needs the Western powers have succeeded in creating deadlock. And so the cyclical process of Eurasian geopolitics continues.

Quarterly Review was founded in 1809. It was revived in 2007 under the aegis of former Conservative MP Sir Richard Body, who is Chairman of the Editorial Board. It appeared as a print journal between Spring 2007 and Autumn 2011. Like many other journals, it has migrated to the internet.

#6
Bloomberg
August 25, 2015
Russia Won't Suffer the Soviet Union's Fate
By Leonid Bershidsky

If you believe low oil prices killed the Soviet Union, it seems reasonable to wonder whether the current commodities bust will topple President Vladimir Putin or even break up Russia.

Cheap oil, however, didn't destroy the Soviet empire: Communism did. Putin's Russia is more oil-dependent than its predecessor, but it isn't bound by ideology or principle, and that may help the regime stay in power.

The Soviet Union was a strange kind of petrostate. In 1985, fuel accounted for 52.7 percent of its exports. But only 24.7 percent of the exported crude, 61.6 percent of oil products and 45 percent of natural gas were sold for hard currency, in other words, at market prices. The rest was supplied to Comecon countries for "transfer rubles," the Soviet Bloc's common currency, or was bartered to other nations within the Soviet orbit. Satellite countries were able to obtain oil and gas in exchange for goods the Soviet Union didn't particularly need. This was, in effect, a system of subsidies.

Much of the hard currency earned by exports to the capitalist world was used to purchase grain. The collectivization of farming under Stalin and the subsequent decline of Soviet agriculture turned Russia from the No. 1 grain exporter into the biggest importer. Yegor Gaidar, who implemented the radical post-Soviet reforms in Russia in the early 1990s, wrote in 2007 that after Saudi Arabia stopped supporting oil prices in 1985, the Soviet leadership was faced with a stark choice:

"There were three options -- or a combination of three options -- available to the Soviet leadership. First, dissolve the Eastern European empire and effectively stop barter trade in oil and gas with the Socialist bloc countries, and start charging hard currency for the hydrocarbons. This choice, however, involved convincing the Soviet leadership in 1985 to negate completely the results of World War II. In reality, the leader who proposed this idea at the CPSU Central Committee meeting at that time risked losing his position as general secretary. Second, drastically reduce Soviet food imports by $20 billion, the amount the Soviet Union lost when oil prices collapsed. But in practical terms, this option meant the introduction of food rationing at rates similar to those used during World War II. The Soviet leadership understood the consequences: the Soviet system would not survive for even one month. This idea was never seriously discussed. Third, implement radical cuts in the military-industrial complex. With this option, however, the Soviet leadership risked serious conflict with regional and industrial elites, since a large number of Soviet cities depended solely on the military-industrial complex."

All the options were politically unacceptable, so, according to Gaidar, the Communist Party Central Committee simply decided to ignore the problem and borrow from Western banks while the Soviet Union's credit ratings were still high.

The rest is history. Yes, the oil price collapse contributed to the Soviet Union's demise, but it merely catalyzed the dissolution of a system that put ideology ahead of economics.

Putin's Russia has a worse case of oil dependence than the Soviet Union ever did. Oil and gas now make up about two-thirds of Russia's exports. Andrei Movchan, a former asset manager who runs the economic policy program at Moscow Carnegie Center, argues that as much as 70 percent of Russia's gross domestic product today is "oil-dependent" (that includes government expenditures, which are 60 percent financed with oil taxes, imports bought with hydrocarbon export revenue and the consumption and investment generated by oil and gas beneficiaries). Most Russian economic fundamentals -- international reserves, currency exchange rates, government revenue, the GDP itself -- are highly correlated with oil prices.

Russia now has a much sturdier economic system, however. Despite Putin's recent embrace of an imperial, deeply conservative ideology, it is a capitalist country.

The country is the fourth wheat exporter and, unlike the USSR, it can feed its people. Imported food made up 32 percent of the Russian food market in the first quarter of 2015, but these products mainly served to provide variety.

And modern Russia hasn't been able to reconstitute the bygone empire. Perhaps it is a blessing that commodity prices are likely to remain low because the revenue crunch could prevent Putin from grabbing more territory or buying more allies. Russia's subsidies to its few satellites such as Belarus and a few other post-Soviet states are only a fraction of what the USSR dispensed. And though defense spending has increased in recent years, Russia is not engaged in a full-scale arms race with the U.S.

The two big drains on modern Russia's oil revenue are social spending, greatly increased under Putin to create a loyal electoral core, and catastrophic corruption in the big state companies that form the core of the Russian economy. Putin has shown he could change his mind about both.

Putin embraced devaluation as a way to keep Russia afloat almost immediately after oil prices started to fall. The inflation tax that imposed on Putin's loyal voters has been harsh. At the same time, the government has been slashing costs in health care and education. The cuts may be small given the magnitude of the oil slump, but they show Putin is willing to transfer some of the hydrocarbon-related pain to the Russian people. It's a risky tactic, but it's better than the Soviet leaders' denial mode.

The regime cronies who run the state companies seemed untouchable until recently. But last week, Putin fired his friend Vladimir Yakunin, head of the Russian railroad monopoly, apparently fed up with incessant demands for more subsidies to hide glaring mismanagement at the company. And Rosneft, the largest oil producer, which is run by Putin's longtime associate Igor Sechin, has been refused funding for four of the five projects it submitted to Russia's National Welfare Fund, which forms part of the country's international reserves.

Putin has demonstrated he can be pragmatic, and his response to the crisis, while flawed in many ways, should help Russia weather this storm.

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 #7
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
August 25, 2015
'Black Monday' inflicts further damage on Russian markets
Amid turmoil on global financial markets, the Russian ruble fell to a historic low against the U.S. dollar on Aug. 24, while the key stock market index, the RTS, dropped 6 percent. Russian analysts say that there is little room for optimism while oil prices remain low.
By Alexei Lossan

As the shockwaves from the meltdown on the Chinese markets reverberate around the world, the Russian ruble has fallen to an all-time low against the U.S. dollar, while Moscow's key stock market index, the RTS, shed nearly 6 percent on the news of the ruble's plunge and falling oil prices in a day already described as a "Black Monday" for the Russian markets.

The sell-off on the Russian market was preceded by a panic on the world's key trading floors. The Shanghai Composite closed 8.5 percent down, while the Dow Jones went down 6.08 percent, or 1001.24 points, setting an unwelcome new record: Before then it had never fallen more than 800 points in a single day.

However, overall, the plunge suffered by the Russian market turned out to be more significant than in most other countries.

"Since the start of the summer, the U.S. dollar rate has grown by 35 percent, and the euro by 41 percent," said TeleTrade analyst Alexander Yegorov.

Experts agree that the main reason behind the devaluation of the ruble is the Russian economy's dependence on the price of oil. On Aug. 24, 2015, Brent crude was trading at $43.54 a barrel, the lowest since the global financial crisis of 2009.
 
Main causes

BSK Express expert Ivan Kopeykin said the ruble's sharp drop against the dollar and the euro at the beginning of the week was due to "yet another plunge on the Chinese stock market and falling oil prices."

Even the decision taken by Beijing on Aug. 23 to allow some pension funds in China to invest up to 30 percent of their assets, estimated at $100 billion, in equities did not help the situation, he said.

Igor Kovalyov, an analyst with InstaForex, described the Russian markets as "in a nosedive" and laid the blame for the collapse on "the news of falling oil prices and instability generated by the situation on the Chinese stock market."

According to Kovalyov, one of the reasons pushing oil prices further down was a statement from Iranian Petroleum Minister Bijan Namdar Zangeneh: "We will be raising our oil production at any cost and we have no other alternative. If Iran's oil production hike is not done promptly, we will be losing our market share permanently," he told Bloomberg.

Before sanctions against it were introduced in July 2012, Iran was the second biggest oil producer in OPEC. Some oil companies, including BP and Shell, have already expressed an interest in developing oilfields in Iran. At the same time, according to the International Energy Agency, global oil surplus already amounts to 3 million barrels a day.
 
Forecasts for the future

Russian analysts were pessimistic about the prospects for the immediate future, pointing out that with oil prices set to stay low, the road to recovery is blocked for now.
"It is important to note that the Russian budget is based on the price of oil of $50 per barrel. In the current conditions, there are no grounds to expect a recovery of optimism, therefore we estimate that the negative dynamic on the Russian stock market will continue," said Igor Kovalyov.

According to Alexander Yegorov, "the probability that oil prices may fall to the 2008-2009 minimums is quite high and so far there are no objective reasons to expect a price hike, at least not until the end of the year".

Furthermore, on Aug. 24, Russian Economic Development Minister Alexei Ulyukayev said oil prices may fall below $40 per barrel, echoing a similar forecast voiced earlier by the president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who said that in the coming several years, oil was expected to trade at $30-40.

Freedom Finance's head of operations on the Russian stock market Georgy Vashchenko is more optimistic, however: "There is a panic on the markets, but there are no grounds to be speaking of a crisis yet. A sell-off allows long-term investors to buy good assets on the cheap."

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 #8
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
August 25, 2015
Will the freefalling Chinese market take Russia with it?
Russia looks exceedingly vulnerable to further dramatic swings in China's financial markets and any weakening in Chinese demand for Russian energy.
By Christopher Hartwell
Christopher Hartwell is President of CASE - Center for Social and Economic Research and Associate Professor, Kozminski University (both in Warsaw, Poland), and Visiting Professor at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA). Formerly Head of Global Markets and Institutional Research at the Institute for Emerging Market Studies (based at the Moscow School of Management - SKOLKOVO), Senior Investment Climate Advisor at the World Bank Group, and International Economist at the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
[Figures here http://www.russia-direct.org/opinion/will-freefalling-chinese-market-take-russia-it]

This week has been a brutal one already for global equity markets, but none have fared as badly as China's. As of the end of trading on August 25, the Shanghai Composite Index had fallen to a level previously seen in December 2014, with no sign of a halt in its trajectory.

While the stock market plummet has been developing over the past month in waves, it was given new life on the heels of China's three percent devaluation of its currency on August 11. Whether China's devaluation has set in motion events similar to the last time China had such a devaluation (1994), or whether this is merely a correction from a particularly severe bubble, the severity of the decline is dangerous for a fragile global economy. At the very least, China's fall back to earth will have serious ramifications for its neighbors and all emerging markets, including the Russian market.

The downward trajectory of the Chinese stock market

China's economy has been moving at a breakneck pace almost continuously since the decentralization reforms of Deng Xiaoping took hold in 1978, with accelerating growth after the fall of Communism everywhere else in the world in 1991. Averaging just over 9 percent since 2005, China also appeared to bully its way through the global financial crisis with a fiscal stimulus package that consumed 20 percent of China's GDP.

However, China's structural reforms have struggled to keep pace with this growth: Property rights are still routinely trampled, corruption is a feature (and not a flaw) of the system, and, most importantly, the financial sector has been at once both super-sized yet incredibly fragile.

This steep decline in the equity markets looks like a mild correction when looked at, Krugman-like, solely from the point of view of performance in 2015 (Figure 1). However, the run-up in 2015 was a stratospheric rise that can only be described as a bubble when seen in historical perspective, a rise that in fact was only surpassed by the bubble preceding the Global Financial Crisis in 2006-07 (Figure 2).

This previous bubble took nearly three years to inflate and then burst, with the inflation occurring from approximately October 2005 to October 2007. The current bubble in China was compressed in a much shorter time period, from trough to peak taking just under a year (June 2014 to June 2015), which may also account for the rapid crash since June of this year.

From the point of view of global markets, there are two major risks that come with China's rapid equity market inflation and deflation. The first is that this summer's turmoil also comes at a very fragile time for the global economy, with the Eurozone crisis not resolved and growth in the U.S. incredibly soft (and also volatile).

Just a few weeks ago, the world was entranced by the idea of "Grexit," or Greece's exit from the euro, and even though a bailout was just agreed to, Greece's woes are far from over. Across the pond, the U.S. Federal Reserve has been hinting all summer that interest rates might begin their inevitable (and necessary) rise in the U.S. from their current bargain-basement levels.

But this appears to be suddenly off the table, as policymakers around the world are realizing that the global monetary bubble, so strong since the financial crisis, may require more inflation. Much as the currency wars of the 1930s penalized those who showed rectitude and remained on the gold standard, so, too, is today's environment penalizing those who would have interest rates accurately reflect reality. China's collapse would require, by this thinking, even more asset inflation to give the appearance of prosperity.

And it is this reality, that governments have been propping up the world's economy with paper and promises for seven years, that is the most troubling aspect of the Chinese implosion. In China's case, a sustained decline may reveal that the Emperor has no clothes, and that the Chinese government is out of tools to salvage the economy. As mentioned earlier, China was able to power through the global financial crisis via a vast redistribution of wealth from taxpayers to capital holders.

This time around, the government's moves are proving less effective, with even draconian measures as prohibitions on stock sales and allocating huge amounts of government monies to purchase stocks not having the desired effect. This does not mean that the government has given up, as on August 25 the Chinese Central Bank cut its policy interest rate by 0.25 points and lowered reserve requirements, in an attempt to re-inflate the stock market. But while this move heartened the developed economies in Europe and the U.S., it is less likely to help the emerging markets that already are feeling China's slowdown.

China's impact on emerging markets

Indeed, the effects of China's currency movements and its concurrent plummet in the stock market have already washed over its neighbors. Kazakhstan's tenge was unleashed from its fetters last week in a move to a floating exchange rate, immediately losing 26.2 percent of its value.

While the move from the Kazakh Central Bank was a correct one, as it brings Kazakhstan a shift to an inflation-targeting regime instead of obsessing about the currency, the short-term damage may be immense. In particular, the volatility issuing forth from China has also struck global commodity markets, and Kazakh dependence on oil revenues is a major source of worry for the landlocked nation.

Similarly, Kazakhstan's partner in the Eurasian Economic Union, Russia, is exceedingly vulnerable to China's fluctuations. In the wake of sanctions after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Putin openly pivoted towards China as a counterbalance to what he perceives as the monolithic West. While China is more than willing to discard Russia when it suits China, the fact that China is on the verge of a meltdown does not bode well for Russia free-riding off of China in the short-term (nor, indeed, does it say much for Russian President Vladimir Putin's prognostication abilities).

Even if Putin had not been actively trying to bring Russia closer to its neighbor, the country was already hurting from its own internal weakness and external adventurism: The ruble, hitting new lows for 2015 against the dollar and euro in the wake of China's Black Monday, was already on the road to becoming rubble due to declining oil prices. With China's woes dragging oil lower, the Kremlin has to contemplate what life will be like in a world of $40 oil.

In reality, Russia will be incredibly hard-pressed to keep the same state-led development model it has been following for years, as mega-projects will suddenly become too dear for the government to finance. At the same time, Moscow's increasing penchant for military intervention will also be a victim of the faltering economy, as one can only acquire so many economic basket cases (Crimea, Abkhazia, Transnistria) before the cost becomes far too high.

Across other emerging markets, the outlook also remains gloomy, as even the largest economies in this group have been on a downward spiral for some time. In fact, the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) group of countries, once touted as possessing some mystical alternative to Western capitalism, has been the hardest hit: Apart from China and Russia, Brazil is in a recession that threatens to get worse due to an incipient political crisis, while South Africa's GDP contracted in the second quarter at an annualized rate of 1.3 percent.

Of this grouping, only India, which has actually undergone some liberalization of its economy, continues to grow, projected at 7.5 percent this year by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In fact, India might be the country to gain from China's collapse, as India's ravenous appetite for Chinese capital goods will be satisfied at a lower cost.
What lessons can Russia learn from this crisis?

India points the way to a crucial lesson for Kazakhstan and Russia, and indeed, for all emerging markets. Stronger economies weather financial volatility better than weaker ones, so the groundwork that needed to be put in place in Moscow and Astana needed to be there two years ago, not today.

Both Russia and Kazakhstan have surprisingly been forward-thinking in their monetary policies, with the shift to inflation targeting a welcome and needed change. Unfortunately, the move towards exchange rate flexibility at this juncture, combined with the structural flaws still inherent in both economies and China's tumble, will likely mean that things are going to get much worse before they get better.

The descending dragon will not go quietly, and risks scorching everything nearby on its way down. The only hope is that the lessons of this crisis do not go unheeded in Moscow, to better prepare the economy for the next one.

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 #9
Deutsche Welle
August 25, 2015
Employers skeptical about Russia sanctions

A German-Russian trade organization has called for sanctions against Moscow to be ended, calling them politically ineffective. Business leaders had complained about shrinking trade and investment opportunities.

German and Russian business leaders said they wanted to see a speedy end to sanctions imposed by the West on Russia as a result of the Kremlin's perceived role in the Ukraine conflict. They also called for Russia to end the sanctions on imports from Europe that the Kremlin had imposed in response.

A poll among members of the German-Russian Chamber of Foreign Trade (AHK) showed Tuesday that roughly two-thirds of respondents viewed the sanctions in place as "politically ineffective."

Almost half of those polled said the sanctions - especially financial market sactions - hampered their business activities.

"We strongly appeal to policymakers to avoid getting sucked in deeper into the sanctions spiral," said AHK President Rainer Seele.

Trade volumes no big deal

German exports to Russia accounted for only 1.76 percent of overall shipments abroad, down from 3.28 percent before the start of the Ukraine conflict in 2013. Over the same period, imports from Russia dropped from 4.59 percent to 3.27 percent of the total value of goods purchased abroad.
 
"We'd seen a certain decline before the crisis started," Seele said, but the sanctions greatly accelerated the process.

Only 15 percent of respondents called Russia's economy stable at present, with assessments reaching their lowest level in ten years. Every third German company among the survey respondents said it was likely to cut jobs in Russia, should there be no major economic improvements this year.

Seele said a recovery of the Russian economy would not be seen before the middle of next year.

In a further turn of the sanctions spiral, in Moscow on Tuesday, Russia's consumer protection agency announced a ban on imports and sales of some European detergent brands, alleging contraventions of harmful substances regulations and increased complaints about allergic reactions by Russian consumers.

Russia earlier this month prolonged a ban on numerous categories of food imports from the West, a measure it had introduced a year ago in retaliation for Western sanctions against Russia.

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 #10
Business New Europe
www.bne.eu
August 25, 2015
Russian poll on nationalism and xenophobia produces worrying results
Henry Kirby in London

More Russians than ever (41%) believe that illegal immigrants from neighbouring countries should be granted legal status in Russia and given the chance to assimilate, although 43% still want them to be expelled from the country.

According to a survey published by independent polling company Levada Center, nearly seven in 10 Russians believe the government should introduce measures to limit the arrival of migrants into the country.

While some areas showed signs of Russians becoming more tolerant in their approach to foreigners, many of the questions asked revealed a strong nationalistic and sometimes hostile undertone to respondents' views of other nationalities.

32% of respondents said that they felt either hostility or irritation towards "natives of southern republics living in [their] city or district" - a euphemism for immigrants from either the Caucasus or Central Asia.

This figure was much lower than the high of 55% who expressed the same negative views towards southern immigrants in October 2013. Oddly, the lowest figure for these answers (28%) came in December 2008, only four months after the short-lived Russo-Georgian War.

The results of the poll included a nod to Russian exceptionalism in the 40% of respondents who believed that Russians are a "special people" - up from 33% 15 years ago.

More worrying is the 55% who had favourable views of the slogan "Russia for Russians", and the 7% of respondents who favoured limiting the number of Jews who move to Russia.

Despite this, 64% of Russians perceived the word "nationalism" in a negative light, compared with the 20% who viewed it positively.

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 #11
Levada.ru
August 25, 2015
Poll tracks change in Russians' take on ethnic conflict, racial groups

Around two-thirds of Russians believe that mass clashes on ethnic grounds are currently impossible in Russia, the opposite of the situation two years ago, according to the Russian independent polling organization Levada Centre.[1]

More see ethnic strife as impossible

According to an opinion poll published on the pollster's website on 25 August, 65 per cent of Russians believe that mass interethnic conflict is now probably or definitely impossible in Russia, while 25 per cent believe it is probably or definitely possible.

A similar poll conducted in October 2013 indicated that only 29 per cent thought interethnic conflict probably or definitely impossible in the country, compared with 62 per cent who thought it possible.

Changing views of ethnic groups

Asked which ethnic groups should be subject to restrictions on residence in Russia (several answers permitted),

- 29 per cent said "people from the Caucasus";

- 29 per cent, "people from former Central Asian republics of the USSR";

- 24 per cent, Chinese;

- 22 per cent, Romani;

- 22 per cent Vietnamese;

- 14 per cent, Ukrainians; and

- 7 per cent, Jews.

In a poll in July 2014, the figures for the same question were rather different:

- 38 per cent said "people from the Caucasus";

- 29 per cent, "people from former Central Asian republics of the USSR";

- 33 per cent, Chinese;

- 23 per cent, Romani;

- 27 per cent Vietnamese;

- 8 per cent, Ukrainians; and

- 8 per cent, Jews.

Conclusion

The report said the decline in xenophobic attitudes to other ethnic groups was attributable to two factors.

First, there have been fewer high-profile interethnic incidents and less coverage of migration issues by TV and other media.

Second, the traditional object of xenophobic attacks, "people from the southern republics", have been partly replaced by new categories (or old, revived ones) in reaction to the external political situation: "fascists" and the "American threat" in eastern Ukraine.

"Despite the obvious stabilization of the situation in the sphere of interethnic relations," Levada concludes, "isolationist attitudes persist, and enmity towards the 'other' has switched to dormant indifference."

The latest poll was carried out on 7-10 August among 1,600 people in 134 places in 46 regions of Russia.

[1] http://www.levada.ru/25-08-2015/ksenofobiya-i-natsionalizm

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 #12
Russians More Optimistic about Ethnic Problems at Home But Have Little Reason to Be, Experts Say
Paul Goble

Staunton, August 26 - The shares of Russians who say that ethnic conflicts in their country are "likely" or "more likely than not" have declined from 17 and 45 percent respectively in October 2013 to five and 20 percent now, according to the findings of a new Levada Center poll.

But Mikhail Remizov of the Moscow Institute of National Strategy says they lack an objective basis for this new optimism because nothing has changed in Russian society over this period to reduce the probability of the appearance and escalation of ethnic conflicts in the country (vestikavkaza.ru/news/Rossiyane-ne-zhdut-natsionalnykh-konfliktov-opros.html).

And both he and journalist Maksim Shevchenko, a member of the Presidential Council on Inter-Ethnic Relations, agree that the change in popular attitudes reflects what is being reported in the media with fewer stories about domestic problems even though they continue to exist and overwhelming coverage of the war in Ukraine which produces "patriotic" attitudes.

The Levada Center poll also found that Russians were more optimistic now than two years ago about the possibility of conflicts in their own hometowns, less hostile to non-Russians than they had been, and more ready to legalize illegal workers rather than expel them from the country compared to their views in 2013.

In commenting on these findings, Remizov said they reflected the decline in media coverage of ethnic problems within Russia and the refocusing of the media on Ukraine. Thus, he argues, the findings "do not testify to qualitative changes in the situation" but rather to the impact of media coverage on what Russians will tell pollsters.

At the same time, he acknowledges that "events in the Donbas and in Crimea have somewhat united society and, if one speaks about Crimea, raised the authority of Russians in the eyes of the Caucasian peoples." At the same time, "the participation for example of Osetians and Chechens in the volunteer movement in the Donbas, which has been treated in the mass media has improved the attitude of Russians to representatives of the Caucasus peoples."

What will happen in the future depends, Remizov concludes, will depend on how the domestic and foreign policy situations develop. "If confrontation with the West grows, then inter-ethnic relations inside the country will improve because this will promote the rallying of various communities."

At the same time, he implies but doesn't say, if the economic conditions inside the country get worse, that could have exactly the opposite effect.

Shevchenko agrees with this, but he adds that Moscow has taken some steps that may have led Russians to conclude that the situation at home with regard to ethnic relations has in fact improved or at least is now under the control of the authorities.
           
Among these are efforts to control immigration, expanded work with diasporas, tighter control over Internet communities, and the formation of the Federal Agency for Nationality Affairs, as well as a general tightening of government control over society and the economy.

That last, he suggests, is especially important because in his view many inter-ethnic conflicts in Russia "are the result of a struggle for local, regional or federal markets." Consequently, to the extent Moscow cracks down on oligarchs or businesses in general, such struggles may become less significant.

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 #13
Izvestia
August 10, 2015
Russian daily reports on research into online media consumption
Vladimir Zykov, Analysts Outline Portrait of Russian Online Media Audience. The Poorest Read Kp.ru, while the Most Sober Read Gazeta.ru

The analysis company Data Centric Alliance (DCA) has studied the sociodemographic characteristics of readers of Russian Internet publications in Medialogiya's Top 30. This has made it possible to determine which publications men prefer, and which women prefer, what citizens who are looking on the Internet for ways of overcoming alcoholism read, and what theatre lovers, the rich, and the poor read.

"From the total number of users whose data we have available (over 60 million), 5 per cent indicated precisely that they are male either in some kind of online testing or on social networks, for instance. We take all the data about these 5 per cent and bring to light their characteristic behaviour - from enquiries about potency to soccer news. Then people with the same behaviour are recorded in the database as men. We have the same system for women. After this there remains a small percentage of people who are unascertained," Anton Shestakov, a representative of Data Centric Alliance, told Izvestiya.

According to him, the same principle (it is called look alike) lies at the heart of determining the level of prosperity. There is a certain percentage of users who are precisely known to be "well-off" - from information from sociological polls or the commodities that they look for and buy. Their characteristic traits (sites visited and so forth) are "imposed" on the whole group to determine other well-off people.

In order to find audiences with alcohol dependency, users were found who in the past two months had visited sites of the following categories: clinics treating alcoholism, pages with consultations with drugs counsellors on alcohol problems, and information resources on the dangers of alcoholism. Theatre-goers, sports players, and other categories were determined in the same way.

Over 35 suppliers give the DCA impersonal information about audiences - this means various statistics services, companies that group together social network buttons into a toolbar for sites, and so on. Thirty Internet resources that were most cited in May 2015 according to Medialogiya were taken for analysis purposes.

It emerged that the least well-off strata of the population (for Moscow this means an income of under 60,000 roubles [R] a month) read Kp.ru, Gazeta.ru, and M24.ru. The most well-off people (in Moscow this means over R130,000) read Kommersant.ru, Meduza.io, Inosmi.ru, Slon.ru, and RBC.ru.

E1.ru, LifeNews.ru, Rg.ru, Kp.ru, and Izvestia.ru are most popular among single people. For readers with families, the most popular are M24.ru, Newkaliningrad.ru, Russia.rt.com, Gazeta.ru, and Kommersant.ru.

Sports people (people interested in fitness, sports nutrition, and so on) prefer Izvestia.ru, Russia.rt.com, Kommersant.ru, Slon.ru, and RBC.ru. The M24, Newkaliningrad.ru, Rbc.ru, Izvestia.ru, and Rg.ru sites are popular with theatre-goers.

The most read publications among gamblers have turned out to be the regional portals Business-gazeta.ru, M24.ru, Newkaliningrad.ru, Kavkaz-uzel.ru, and Russian.tr.com. People who are most indifferent to gambling games read E1.ru, RBC.ru, Echo.msk.ru, Vesti.ru, and Polit.ru.

People who are interested in rehabilitation from alcohol dependency choose 47news.ru (news portal of Leningradskaya Oblast), Kommersant.ru, Euromag.ru (which specializes in European news), RBC.ru, and Vesti.ru. Gazeta.ru, Izvestia.ru, Echo.msk.ru, Lenta.ru, and Chita.ru have the lowest proportion of readers interested in such matters.

According to the person Izvestiya was speaking to on the Internet statistics market, information about audiences today is a basic value on the Internet. A lot of companies collect it from various sites, and then resell it. If a site administrator puts someone else's code on their site, for example, to demonstrate a set of "share" buttons from social networks, then the information about the behaviour of users on the site may find its way to the creators of this code. In total, information from many sites makes it possible to track the behaviour of one and the same user.

The Ministry of Economic Development has partially already gotten involved in this problem. It will be forbidden to use Google Analytics, Piwik, and other foreign counters of website traffic on official sites of state structures. The draft of the relevant order has been prepared by the Ministry of Economic Development, and the document is now going through coordination with other departments.

According to Vladimir Filippov, president of the Russian Academy of Advertising, the more accurate the grasp of the audience, the more effective the advertisement will be.

"There are over 1,000 systems for the segmentation of the consumer in the world. Any commodity producer must outline the portrait of his customer. The basic minimum parameters are sex, age, financial circumstances, and income," the expert said. "For example, there are producers who advertise in the segment of economic output. And there are products for the most well-off audience. Or there are brands that manufacture products for, say, single people. This could be something quick to prepare, for example ravioli."

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 #14
Moscow Times
August 26, 2015
By Blocking Wikipedia, Russian Government Shows its Power Over Web
By Ivan Nechepurenko

After blocking a Wikipedia article for less than than 18 hours, the Russian media watchdog Roskomnadzor removed it from a list of banned webpages on Tuesday in a move that reflects the power the Russian state wields over the Internet, pundits told The Moscow Times.

At the end of July, a local court in the southern Astrakhan region declared that a Wikipedia article on charas - a form of hashish - violated the Russian law that forbids dissemination of information on how to make, buy or use drugs.

On Thursday, Roskomnadzor warned Wikipedia that unless the article be amended and the forbidden content removed, it would have to block the entire online encyclopedia due to its use of a secure communications protocol, which does not allow censors to block webpages selectively.

On Friday, Roskonadzor issued another warning, saying that it seemed "the website's administrators want to be blocked."

Finally, on Monday the agency declared that it had ordered Internet providers to block the article's webpage. The move provoked outrage among the Internet community that claimed the Russian government was prepared to block a popular international website, used by many ordinary Russians on a regular basis.

According to Stanislav Kozlovsky, one of Wikipedia's administrators and executive director of the  HYPERLINK "http://Wikimedia.ru/"Wikimedia.ru website that oversees the Russian segment of the encyclopedia, the article on charas was changed multiple times in order to adhere to the law.

"On the first day when Roskomnadzor voiced its complaints, the article was changed," said Kozlovsky in a phone interview.

Moreover, according to Kozlovsky, the agency banned not the charas article, but the disambiguation page for the word 'charas.' On Monday night, Kozlovsky received complaints from people throughout Russia claiming they could not access Wikipedia altogether.

But on Tuesday Roskomnadzor abruptly removed the article from the list of banned resources, saying that the altered article complied with the law.

Roskomnadzor's spokesman could not immediately explain why it had blocked a webpage only to restore access to it less than a day later. During that time the webpage has undergone only minor changes, according to the encyclopedia's records available online.

During the consequent media storm, Roskomnadzor's own Wikipedia entry was translated into new languages such as Spanish and Catalan, according to the encyclopedia's records. The number of Russians visiting the Russian Wikipedia entry on charas reached 100,000 on Monday, a sharp increase from the meager few previously visiting the webpage daily.

Roskomnadzor did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication. In its online statement, the watchdog said that the decision was made after experts of the Federal Drugs Control Service (FSKN) ruled that the charas article does not violate the law.

According to Artyom Kozlyuk, head of independent online freedom watchdog Roskomsvoboda, authorities in Roskomnadzor, as well as more senior agencies have realized that blocking Wikipedia  differs from blocking opposition blogs and news websites.

"On the one hand they realize that blocking Wikipedia will damage Russia's image, on the other, they had to fulfill their earlier threats in order to save face," said Kozlyuk in a phone interview.

"Everybody understands that the government can block anything at any point," he said.

The worrying sign is that this is the first time a court rather than a government agency, ruled to block a webpage, Kozlyuk said.

Vasily Gatov, a visiting fellow at the University of Southern California's Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy, has offered a more complex theory.

He said that while Roskomnadzor has demonstrated that it will fulfill orders from its superior commanders in the Kremlin, it still understands that blocking such websites does more harm than good.

"Roskomnadzor has sent a signal to all these officials in the presidential administration that they are essentially idiots," he said in written comments

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 #15
Interfax
August 25, 2015
Russian ombudsman slams ex-Defence Ministry official's parole as "elite" justice

Russian human rights ombudsman Ella Pamfilova has strongly condemned a court decision to release on parole Yevgeniya Vasilyeva, a key figure in the Oboronservis case, suggesting the move amounted to "elite" justice, privately-owned Russian news agency Interfax reported on 25 August.

Earlier on 25 August, a court in Vladimir Region granted Vasilyeva parole after she had served three months in prison. Vasilyeva was sentenced to five years for embezzlement in May.

Wants Putin to act

In a statement on her official website that evening, Pamfilova said she intended to request that President Vladimir Putin instruct the Russian Security Council to "carefully analyze the actions of all officials and [legal ] authorities who have taken decisions in the Oboronservis case, as a result of which high-level offenders managed to evade responsibility".

Pamfilova explained why.

"Dividing investigations and court proceedings into two levels - 'elite' and 'for the rest of the people' - strikes at the authority of the judicial and law-enforcement system and undermines the trust of the country's citizens in justice," she said.

She went on: "This appeared most graphically and tellingly in the so-called Oboronservis case, in which the broad public still has more questions than answers. It does not raise the fighting spirit of officers in Russian army either that Mr [former Defence Minister Anatoliy] Serdyukov, living in the shadows of a woman, evaded responsibility for the unsavoury facts that came to light in the process of the investigation and inflicted huge moral damage on the Russian Armed Forces".

What is Oboronservis?

Initiated in October 2012, the Oboronservis case refers to a series of criminal cases over the alleged embezzlement of about R3bn (currently about 43m dollars) from property sales at the Defence Ministry-controlled holding company Oboronservis.

Vasilyeva was head of the ministry's property department, and media reports suggested she was having an affair with the then defence minister, Anatoliy Serdyukov.

Sacked by Putin in an anti-corruption drive in November 2012, Serdyukov was only questioned as a witness regarding Oboronservis, but was later charged with negligence in a separate case, though subsequently amnestied.

Many in Russia consider top officials to be immune from criminal prosecution, and they regard the Oboronservis and Serdyukov cases as a test of how serious the authorities are about tackling corruption.

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 #16
Moscow Times
August 26, 2015
Museums Show Russia's Big Security Problem
By Mark Galeotti
Mark Galeotti is professor of global affairs at New York University.

Russia's museums are unexpectedly at the heart of a growing problem with Russia's policing and security in society.

The police's Extra-Departmental Guard (VO) hires out officers to provide security to a range of clients, from bank cash vans to sports venues. They are by no means the cheapest providers of private security, but are considered to be the best. After all, their officers are all sworn law enforcement personnel - with all the powers, firepower and duties that entails.

Of course, that also makes them more expensive than many private security firms, known generically by the acronym ChOP. For some institutions, like many federal museums, this was not a factor: the police provided security for a relatively nominal fee.

However, austerity is biting everywhere, even in the formidable Interior Ministry (MVD). A 10 percent cut in its payroll will see it shed at least 100,000 staff. In some cases, currently vacant positions will simply be closed or frozen: hiring was suspended in February. As far as possible, the ministry will also try to make efficiency savings and dispense with administrative, "back office" posts.

Ultimately, though, it will also mean cutting some regular police. Given that Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev is determined to try and protect front-line services - during a recent trip to Irkutsk he said that it was a "position of principle" to try and avoid losing even a single street police officer - then something has to give.

The Extra-Departmental Guard is one area where the ministry spies scope for economies, with perhaps 40,000 positions in play. According to head of the department of cultural heritage at the Culture Ministry, Mikhail Bryzgalov, from Nov. 1, of the 46 federal museums currently getting a police guard, 29 will lose them, including even the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.

Unable in the main to pay the VO's commercial rates, museums are instead having to turn to the still expensive ChOPs, even though their officers have no power of arrest and have often proven to be unprofessional or downright criminal themselves.

This may seem relatively trivial. Most museums around the world, after all, make do with private guards or their own, unarmed security, and there are ChOPs with good records and competent and honest staff.

However, what this does do is illustrate some wider issues relating to policing and security in Russia.

First of all, the crisis is real. This is not a regime which lightly shrinks any element of its security apparatus (although apparently the more muscular OMON riot police and Interior Troops are being protected), and yet the 10 percent cut is being applied even to the Federal Security Service.

Second, this is not a heavily policed state. There is a commonly-reported statistic that Russia has one of the highest police-to-population ratios in the world, but this is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the MVD, counting as street cops administrators wearing uniforms but in jobs done by civilians in most countries.

Instead, Russia's ratio is around that of the Netherlands, hardly anyone's idea of an oppressive police state. Considering the size of the country and the range of challenges they face, this is a thinly-stretched force.

The cuts may help slim down a bloated MVD bureaucracy and excessive paperwork demands on officers. However, despite Kolokoltsev's best efforts, it is inevitable that they will also have an impact on the ground, potentially undermining some of the good work done in recent years. After all, since reforms in 2011, trust in the police has risen from 32.9 to 47.2 percent and satisfaction with their work from 32.8 to 46.3 percent.

In that context, is Russia facing a slide back to the kind of reliance on individual, local, or collective self-defense that was such a feature of the 1990s? Let's be clear: there is no suggestion or likelihood of a return to the kind of anarchic lawlessness of that miserable decade. However, if the state continues to retrench in a way which protects its own interests, but not those of wider society, then this is inevitable.

A growing market for private security, with demands they get more powers and bigger guns? Since the start of 2015, the industry is one of the few in Russia continuing to register growth.

A renewed interest in vigilantism? Perhaps just as a PR stunt, but in May United Russia announced a 'Safe Capital' initiative in Moscow with volunteers patrolling high-crime neighborhoods once a week.

Following a recent attack on an exhibit in Moscow's Manezh by a gang of Orthodox extremist vigilantes, Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky called for museums "immediately to organize in-house training on protecting the state of their exhibitions." Ticket sellers and docents ought to be able to spot and tackle criminals and vandals. Other museums are in talks with ChOPs to hire security officers, even armed ones.

Are Russia's museums pointing the way for society as a whole?

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 #17
BLoomberg
August 25, 2015
Russia Faces Reality With Prediction of Deeper Economic Slump
By Anna Andrianova and Olga Tanas

Russia's government is starting to face reality.

While insisting the worst of its recession was over, it cut its economic forecasts for this year and next amid the renewed plunge in energy prices and persistent sanctions over Ukraine. Economists said the revisions fell short of their estimates predicting an even deeper contraction.

Gross domestic product in the world's largest energy exporter will fall 3.3 percent in 2015, down from an earlier projection of a 2.8 percent decline, Economy Minister Alexei Ulyukayev said Tuesday in Kuala Lumpur, according to the Interfax news service. After hitting a "fragile bottom" in July, the economy will rebound by as much as 2 percent in 2016, from an earlier estimate of 2.3 percent growth, he said.

The earlier forecast "was from some other reality," Olga Lapshina, head of research at Bank Saint-Petersburg PJSC, said by phone. "The Economy Ministry always tries to find something positive, even in the worst situation. They often have more a positive forecast than the market average."

Mired in its first recession in six years, Russia is battling a new wave of oil-price weakness that's sent the ruble to its lowest level against the dollar in seven months. Adding to the pain, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Monday that U.S. and European sanctions over the conflict in Ukraine will stay in place for a "very long" time. Ulyukayev said penalties will remain through 2018.

Intermediate Forecast

The new forecasts came after a scheduled review that happens each August before the government submits the budget draft for next three years to the state Duma. It's the second time this year the Economy Ministry has cut its outlook.

Ulyukayev's outlook is more optimistic than the median forecast of of 40 economists in a Bloomberg survey, which predicts a 3.6 percent contraction this year and 0.5 percent growth in 2016. The ministry may have to downgrade its outlook again, said Oleg Kouzmin, an economist at Renaissance Capital in Moscow.

"I can't rule out that the Economy Ministry may cut its forecast one more time, closer to a 4 percent contraction," he said by phone. "The current forecast looks optimistic, taking into account that oil prices resumed falling."

Brent crude, used to price Russia's main export blend Urals, gained $1.25 to $43.94 a barrel at 2:46 p.m. on Tuesday. With oil languishing near a six-year low, the ruble is the world's worst-performing currency in the past 12 months, dropping 48 percent, data compiled by Bloomberg show. That's stoking inflation, which accelerated to a 13-year high of 16.9 percent in March before slowing to 15.6 percent last month.

Fourth Quarter

Consumer-price growth will ease to somewhere above 11 percent on an annual basis by year-end, Ulyukayev said. Oil prices may fall to less than $40 a barrel in the short term before rising to an average of about $55 next year, he added.

Following the "fragile bottom," Russia's economy will improve in the fourth quarter, and GDP probably increased 0.1 percent in July from a month earlier he said.

"I don't think we'll go any lower, but it's hard to say when we'll see significant growth," he said.

The Bank of Russia said that in a stress-case scenario, with Urals reaching $40 a barrel in the fourth quarter and remaining close to that level through 2018, the recession will last three years, the longest in two decades. GDP may contract 5.7 percent in 2015 under that scenario, the regulator said.

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 #18
Sberbank CEO Gref does not expect oil to drop below $40 per barrel

ZHUKOVSKY (Moscow Region) August 26. /TASS/ Sberbank CEO German Gref does not expect the oil price to fall below $ 40 per barrel, he told journalists on Wednesday at the international aerospace show MAKS-2015.

"We are not pessimists and we do not support the forecast that the oil prices will be at $20 or even $40 per barrel. But it is obvious that the price will not be very high," he said.

Gref also stressed that the he expects the movement of oil prices in the $50-$60 per barrel range.

"The price below $50 in the next year is possible scenario. But it is a matter of chance, and there are less chances that the price will decline," he emphasized.

However, Gref said that he was "not so optimistic" about the economic growth in 2016. "Everything will depend on a number of circumstances, including on what the price of oil will be like," concluded he.

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 #19
Oilprice.com
August 25, 2015
A Winter Of Discontent For Russia
By Colin Chilcoat

Winters are the stuff of legend in Russia and - despite a fair bit of warming - winter 2015/16 is shaping up to be one of the harshest, and most formative, in recent memory.

After a brief period of respite - and muted acceptance of the "new normal" - to start the year, Putin and company again face a colossal economic mess. From worst to first and back again, the Russian ruble continues its volatile post-Crimea journey. It's surprise run as the world's number one performing major currency is long gone and the ruble has collapsed nearly 25 percent since the end of May, and 11 percent alone in August. For optimists and pessimists alike, speculation on the ruble's future is an exercise in futility. To be sure - on its current path - it's not a very fun activity either.

On a micro level, the ripple effects have hit hard. Real wages, or purchasing power, fell 4.8 percent in July and dropped 9.2 percent compared with the same period a year ago. Disposable income is also down 2.9 percent on the year. Unemployment remained steady, but an increasing number of workers are not getting paid; the amount of salary in arrears climbed 6.2 percent in July. Further, there is talk of delinking pension hikes from inflation, a move that would condemn a growing number of the population to abject poverty should the economic trends continue.

More broadly, the recession is in full swing. Russia's gross domestic product slipped 4.6 percent year-on-year in the second quarter - a fall that makes it the worst performing mid-sized economy in the world, ahead of Iraq and Venezuela. Negative growth in 2016 is looking more and more possible and Bank of Russia economists estimate that western sanctions have lowered the GDP ceiling by as much as 0.6 percent this year.

Energy export revenues have obviously tanked, but longer-term sources of growth are also proving elusive in the current climate. Capital expenditures in industrial production and infrastructure are down and continue to fall. Conversely, capital flight may reach $90 billion by year's end.

It's quite apparent that a business-as-usual approach spells trouble for Russia; minus some budgetary magic, or a swift oil price turnaround, the reserve fund may dry up within a year. The solutions are not abundantly clear, but, for the first time in a long time, the costs of changing an inefficient status quo - Russia's institutional trap - may finally outweigh the benefits of its existence.

Grumblings of discontent at the top have been quick to surface. President of the struggling Russian Railways Vladimir Yakunin is out - apparently of his own volition - and other CEOs, Rosneft's Sechin and Gazprom's Miller included, may see their tenures cut short in the name of greater efficiency.
America in 2017: Warren Buffett's Bold Prediction

Bailout legislation currently in the works aims to reduce the strain on nationally significant companies, but the list of suitors far exceeds the available capital. It is unclear whether or not Gazprom and Rosneft are among the early applicants for aid, but Putin has promised that current and future supply projects, and foreign contracts, will not be threatened.

Toward this end, a push for technological and operational independence has been prioritized. Baker Hughes has entered into a partnership with Novosibirsk State University on the modeling of oil fields; GazpromNeft is developing its own forecasting software; and the government is working to provide import-substituting producers with the appropriate financial levers for success. Still, both cost- and time-intensive, this is a long-term contingency plan that few can count on.

For its part, foreign experience will continue to play a major role. Halliburton's Sperry Drilling, C.A.T.Oil AG, and Schlumberger are just some of the companies taking advantage of the increased demand for horizontal drilling in conventional plays. Rosneft will look for its newest acquisition, Trican Well Service, to provide similar, production enhancing, services.

Further, a draft bill seeks to open up large deposits of oil and gas for exploration - a tacit admission that the old, and oft-changing, mineral regime did little to spur greenfield development. However, interest in the blocks, previously off-limits to foreign producers, is hardly encouraging.

Maintaining output and market share amid low demand and low prices remains the goal du jour. And, to be sure, the oil and gas will keep flowing - there's no other option. But, for the people at the top, and the people on the ground, it's going to be a long winter.

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 #20
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
August 25, 2015
Why Criticism of Gazprom and the Chinese Pipeline Deals Is Wrong
Contrary to Western media reports Gazprom is in pretty good shape and Russia's two big gas deals with China both make political and economic sense
By Alexander Mercouris

There has been a recent spate of articles once again implying that Russia's gas deals with China are uneconomic and bad for Russia and for Gazprom.

These articles tend to link to the separate question of Gazprom's market valuation.   The insinuation is that Gazprom's low current valuation is somehow related to these deals.

To assess these claims some background is needed.

Before the 2008 financial crash, Gazprom had an estimated market value of $360 billion - leading to a reckless prediction from its chairman Aleksey Miller that it would rise to $1 trillion.

In the event, Gazprom's market value fell sharply during the financial crisis.  It then recovered on the back of higher oil prices, though not to the level it enjoyed before 2008.  

The collapse in oil prices has dragged Gazprom's value back down again.  It presently stands at no more than $50 billion.

This contraction in Gazprom's value is commonly blamed on Putin, who supposedly misuses Gazprom as a political tool to serve Russia's geopolitical interests.  

It is insinuated that the two pipeline deals to China are both uneconomic projects foisted by Putin on Gazprom.  This supposedly is also true of Gazprom's various European pipeline projects: North Stream, the now cancelled South Stream and Turk Stream (which has replaced South Stream).

Most Western articles on the subject say that instead of investing in these European pipelines Gazprom should continue to send the bulk of the gas it exports to Europe through the existing Ukrainian pipelines, as it has up to now being doing.

As for the pipeline deals to China, it is said that the fall in the price of oil has rendered them uneconomic, the implication being that Gazprom should pull out of them.

These claims do not just appear in the western media.  They are widely repeated in the Russian liberal media as well.

What however is the truth of these claims?

Turning first to Gazprom and its market value, the initial collapse in Gazprom's market value - from which it has never really recovered - took place in 2008, well before the two Chinese pipeline deals were agreed.  

North Stream was first discussed in 1997 and was formally launched in 2002, well before Gazprom's value peaked.  

South Stream was launched in 2007 - as Gazprom's market value was climbing and approaching its peak - which it did some months later.  

Preliminary agreement for Turk Stream happened in autumn 2014 - long after the peak in Gazprom's market value had passed.  

It is impossible to see any direct correlation between any of these projects and the rise or fall of Gazprom's market value or share price.

By contrast - and as one would expect given that it is an energy exporter - Gazprom's share price has closely tracked the price of its product, which is natural gas.  

Since the price of gas is linked to the oil price, that means that Gazprom's value has moved in line with the oil price.

Until the first half of 2008 oil prices were spiralling upwards.  They peaked at $150 a barrel in 2008, with Miller predicting they would reach $250 a barrel.  Gazprom's market value zoomed up in unison, with its share price peaking at around $30 a share

Expectations of further indefinite oil price increases undoubtedly added to the sentiment and influenced the level of Gazprom's share price.   It was in this euphoric atmosphere that Miller made his prediction of Gazprom's value reaching £1 trillion.

In 2008 the oil price collapsed and Gazprom's share price collapsed with it, falling to $6.50 a share.  

It then recovered with the oil price.  

Oil prices have however never recovered to the level they hit in the first half of 2008, and with sentiment about oil prices being much more negative after 2008, Gazprom's share price never recovered to its pre-crisis level, peaking at $16.80 a share in April 2011.

Subsequently, the oil price has fallen again, and Gazprom's value has gone down with it, with its share price falling to just $6 a share.

The point is sometimes made that Western energy companies do not suffer from anything like the same falls in value when the oil price falls.  

That however says less about Gazprom than it does about the state of Russia's financial system, which - as we have discussed many times - is too small.  This means that Gazprom does not have the great mass of small and institutional Russian shareholders to support its share price in bad times that western energy companies typically do.

If we put aside the question the size of Gazprom's market value - something that ultimately depends heavily on sentiment - and look at how well Gazprom actually is doing, then the picture becomes far more favourable.  It turns out that Gazprom is profitable, has an exceptionally strong asset basis, and that its financial position is also strong.

The instability in Gazprom's market value and its small size relative to the giant scale of its operations is not therefore ultimately a comment on Gazprom - still less on Putin.  It is a comment on the small size of Russia's financial system, which is too small for Russia's economy causing it to struggle to cope with a company the size of Gazprom's.  

The result is that the Russian financial system finds it impossible to price an energy giant of Gazprom's size properly, which is why Gazprom's market value is so much smaller than - based on its profitability, financial solvency, asset base and the scale of its operations - it should be.

What then about the economic viability of the two Chinese pipeline projects?

Basically, the two points made by critics are (1) that the fall in the gas price no longer justifies the investment in these projects, with the implication that Gazprom cannot really afford these projects; and (2) that the projects do not make economic sense because Gazprom could sell the gas at a higher price in Europe.

The dollar price of gas has indeed fallen dramatically over the last year. However what critics of the two pipeline projects fail to mention is that as the projects are being built in Russia their cost will be mainly in roubles not dollars.  

The devaluation of the rouble in lockstep with the fall in the dollar price of oil has mitigated the effect on Gazprom's profit in roubles of its sale of gas priced in dollars.  Gazprom's reported profit in roubles in the first half of 2015 in fact surged.

Of course some of the equipment that will be used for the pipelines is imported. However most of the cost - including critically the cost of labour - will be in roubles.  

The rouble's devaluation therefore means that the cost-benefit dynamic of the two projects has been far less affected by the oil price fall than the critics seem to realise, whilst the level of Gazprom's profit in roubles means that its ability to fund these projects is not unduly affected.

What of the argument that the projects do not make economic sense because Gazprom can sell its gas instead to Europe for a higher price?

The price the Chinese have agreed to pay for the gas for the first project is not in fact significantly out of line with the price the Europeans pay for their gas.  

However this argument misses the point. Even if the Europeans were paying much more for their gas than the Chinese are prepared to do, that would still not necessarily make the two Chinese projects a bad bargain.

As I have said many times, price is only one factor in a commercial relationship.  

Gazprom is choosing to work with a new partner (China) with which it has a civil if tough-minded relationship, in place of an old partner (Europe) which has imposed sanctions on it, is busy bringing an anti-trust claim against it and which is constantly looking for alternative suppliers.  

It is not surprising that Gazprom prefers its new partner to its old one, even if the new partner will pay a lower price.

What much of the hostile commentary about these two projects anyway misses is any real appreciation of what Gazprom actually is.

Gazprom is not just an energy company. It is the gas export arm of the Russian state, with a legally enshrined monopoly on the export of natural gas from Russia.

The Russian government is Gazprom's majority shareholder. Government officials - including Alexander Novak - the  country's Energy Minister - sit on its board.  Gazprom itself was originally a government ministry - the USSR's Ministry of Gas Industry - a fact confirmed by its name: a contraction of "Gazovaya Promyshlennost" - "gas industry".

Gas supply agreements made between Gazprom and its customers - including those agreed with China - are not therefore just contracts. They are agreements the Russian government often has a hand in making. They therefore have the status of interstate agreements.

A contract between Gazprom and China to supply China with gas is not just a commercial contract. It is an agreement between Russia and China agreed at the highest level of their governments as part of the strategic relationship they have forged between them.

That does not of course mean that negotiations between Russia and China always happen smoothly or easily.  

Both the Russians and the Chinese are tough hard-headed negotiators who aim for the best possible deal for their countries.  

Neither side will allow itself in negotiating such complex agreements to be boxed in by arbitrary deadlines or by artificial determinations of price intended to benefit disproportionately one side at the expense of the other.  

If nonetheless the two sides decide that it is in their countries' national interest to come to an agreement, then an agreement will be reached, and the pipelines will be built.

The terms of the first pipeline deal from Russia to China have been agreed, and unless there is a fundamental change in their relationship or a total transformation of the world energy market, it will almost certainty be built.  In fact work has already started.

The terms of the second pipeline deal have not yet been fully agreed. The Russians - in what looks like an opening bid - apparently asked for a very high price for the gas from this pipeline, justified by the supposedly high cost of building it. The Chinese are expected to refuse, and will no doubt in time make a counter-offer.

It is likely that because of the ongoing oil price fall final agreement on this issue will be put back until oil prices have settled so that a proper price formula can be agreed based on actual data -  though it is just possible that agreement could be reached during Putin's forthcoming visit to Beijing in September. In either case it is unlikely that final agreement will be reached without the two countries' political leaders becoming involved.

The mere fact that oil prices are currently low will not however stop the two countries from going ahead with the projects.  

As the Russians and the Chinese know - but Western critics of the projects apparently don't - oil prices that go down one day are certain to go up again some other day.  

Projects of this scale are for the long term. The Russians and the Chinese are not going to be put off building them simply because of short-term fluctuations in the oil price.

Ultimately what Gazprom's critics and the critics of Gazprom's Chinese pipeline projects are saying is that Gazprom should content itself with the way things are.  

It should continue to pump nearly all its gas to Europe even as the Europeans sanction it and bring legal proceedings against it and look to replace it with alternative suppliers.  

It should also continue to send its gas to Europe through Ukraine, despite Ukraine having twice interrupted supplies - in 2006 and 2009 - and having threatened to do so again during the gas talks last year.

It is understandable why - writing from a purely Western point of view - Western commentators want this.

It is equally understandable why the Russians and Gazprom don't want it and won't accept it and why they are forging ahead instead with their Chinese and other projects.  

If the Europeans feel they have a right to look for alternative suppliers at a higher cost than the Russians will charge, then the Russians have an equal right to look for alternative customers at a lower price than the Europeans will pay.

That this is happening is a consequence of the breakdown in the relationship between Europe and Russia. Ultimately it was the Europeans who - by dragging Gazprom into their disputes with Russia - brought this about. If the Europeans are unhappy with the result, then they have no one to blame for it but themselves.  

In the meantime mendacious commentary that says it is in Russia's and Gazprom's interests to act in Europe's - and Ukraine's - interests should be seen for the straightforward propaganda masquerading as business analysis that it actually is.

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 #21
Russia's biggest air show hurt by economic crisis, sanctions
By Gleb Stolyarov

ZHUKOVSKY, Russia, Aug 25 (Reuters) - Russian civil aviation companies face a disappointing week at the country's largest air show that opened on Tuesday as economic crisis and Western sanctions take a heavy toll on order books and scare away many foreign firms.

By contrast, demand for Russian military aircraft is booming and the biennial MAKS air show is increasingly being used to showcase the country's military might. According to Russian media, Russia and Iran will sign a $1 billion deal during the three-day show for S-300 missiles.

Two years ago -- just before the Ukraine crisis plunged relations between Russia and the West to their worst level since the Cold War -- the MAKS air show generated some $21 billion in deals, a figure civil aviation firms can only dream of today.

"The reasons why the number of deals is falling is very simple - the Russian aviation market is shrinking because of a steep rouble devaluation as people's purchasing power declines and they travel less abroad," said Andrei Rozhkov, infrastructure analyst from Metropol brokerage.

"Russian companies have not only stopped purchasing new planes, they are postponing delivery under old contracts."

A collapse in global oil prices has led to a steep rouble devaluation that has forced Russians to tighten their belts and cut down on non-essential spending, including foreign travel which has fallen by about 40 percent this year.

President Vladimir Putin shrugged off such concerns at Tuesday's opening ceremony, saying: "I'm convinced that, regardless of the current political environment, MAKS will serve - as before - as an efficient platform for experts' discussions, development of industrial cooperation and finding new partners".

However, state-owned United Aircraft Corporation (UAC), which has consolidated most Russian private aircraft builders over the past decade, is now subject to European Union sanctions -- imposed over Moscow's role in the Ukraine crisis -- and this means it can no longer raise long-term debt on global markets.

CONTRACTS

On Tuesday UAC signed a deal to supply 32 Sukhoi Superjet 100 aircraft for the Russian State Transport Leasing Company, effectively rubber-stamping a contract announced last year and financed with a Russian state loan. The deal's value has been previously estimated at $1.1 billion.

Aircraft builder Irkut, which is also part of UAC and is developing the short- and medium-range jet MC-21, could also sign a deal to deliver 20 planes to the leasing unit of state bank Sberbank, according to industry sources.

A spokeswoman for Irkut said contracts were possible but declined further comments.

Back in 2013, UAC signed deals to deliver as many as 96 Superjets and 82 MC-21 planes worth a total of $9 billion. Several Russian leasing companies also signed deals to buy as many as 100 Bombardier Q400 NextGen worth $3.4 billion.

Following Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea region and the imposition of Western sanctions, however, hopes for large exports of Russian makes such as the Superjets have faded, with Moscow struggling to provide financing to prospective buyers.

The number of participants and exhibits will probably shrink this year, too. More than 1,000 companies attended MAKS 2013, which exhibited 287 foreign pieces of hardware from 44 countries, including 49 aircraft.

This year, Japanese Yokohama Rubber Company is the only official foreign sponsor of the show.

"Boeing, Airbus, Siemens - they are all participating again but of course in a rather reduced format," said one UAC source.

On Tuesday, Airbus was the only foreign company exhibiting its A350 model at the show, which was otherwise dominated by military equipment.

Putin said recently Russia is the world's second biggest supplier of weapons after the United States, with a global market share of 27 percent and annual deals worth $14 billion.

As well as the Iranian deal -- which follows the signing of a landmark deal last month between Tehran and world powers including Russia that aims to curb Iran's nuclear programme -- UAC may also agree this week to deliver 50 SU-35 fighters jets to the Russian Defence Ministry.

"In the past two years the Russian army has received around 300 military aircraft as part of rising state purchases," said Konstantin Makiyenko, deputy director of the Moscow-based Center for Strategies and Technologies Analysis.

But he added that state purchases would soon begin to decline because the fleet of aircraft had been well renovated and the state budget is now suffering from low oil prices.

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 #22
Interfax
August 26, 2015
Diplomat: Rise in NATO activity in Europe near Russian borders is provocative

Moscow has branded provocative the rise in NATO military activity in the areas bordering Russia but does not see a threat of a direct military confrontation, Russian Foreign Ministry European Cooperation Department Director Ivan Soltanovsky told Interfax in an interview on August 26.

"We have a negative attitude to the mounting military activity of NATO in the areas bordering our country and are observing a growth in the number and the scope of exercises which are being held under the NATO aegis, and bilaterally under the supervision of particular allies," Soltanovsky said, commenting on the large-scale exercises of the North Atlantic Alliance held in Europe since the middle of August.

"The enhancement of this military presence and infrastructures near our borders has an obvious provocative nature," the senior diplomat said.

As to whether a direct military confrontation between the alliance and Russia could be expected in the context of the ongoing exercises, Soltanovsky said, "The fact that these exercises are being held on a rotation basis does not lift our concern about the true goals of the variability of forward-based hardware and the rotation presence."

"On the other hand, I would not say there is a risk of a major military clash," the diplomat said.

NATO military exercises, Immediate Response 2015, are being held in Europe from August 15-September 13.

The drills assessed by the U.S. command as the largest joint exercises of airborne forces on the continent since the end of the Cold War involve about 5,000 servicemen from eleven countries: Bulgaria, the UK, Germany, Greece, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, the United States and France.

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 #23
Reuters
August 26, 2015
Russia, NATO need new rules to cut risk of war, ex-ministers say
By Robin Emmott

BRUSSELS, Aug 26 (Reuters) - Russia and NATO must agree common rules to handle unexpected military encounters to reduce the risk of inadvertently triggering a war between Moscow and the West, a group of former foreign and defence ministers said on Wednesday.

With both Russia and NATO intensifying military exercises because of the crisis in Ukraine, incidents such as mid-air face-offs between rival military jets are on the increase.

Calling for a high-level NATO-Russia meeting, the group of 14 -- including former Russian foreign minister Igor Ivanov, ex-German defence minister Volker Ruehe and colleagues from Britain, France, Spain and Turkey -- said rules for communication at sea and in the air were paramount.

"The situation is ripe with potential for either dangerous miscalculation or an accident that could trigger a worsening of the crisis or even a direct military confrontation," they said in a report published by the European Leadership Network.

The London-based think-tank, which this month said both sides were training for the possibility of war, said it had recorded 66 "close military encounters" between Russian and NATO military forces, and between Russia and neutral Sweden and Finland, which NATO counts as partners.

It has been keeping count since March 2014, when Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine. The following month, a separatist war broke out in eastern Ukraine between pro-Russian rebels and government forces.

NATO rejected any suggestion that its military exercises make war in Europe more likely and said even before any new agreements were made, Russia could take steps to ease tensions.

"Russia has many tools already available to avoid unintentional conflict, to reduce tensions and to increase transparency, ranging from arms control agreements to voluntary measures," NATO's chief spokesperson Oana Lungescu said. "It should ... focus on implementing its existing commitments."

Russia denies its exercises pose any hazard.

The group of former ministers said an agreement, possibly based on a similar pact between the United States and China, would set out actions to avoid, such as attack simulations near the other side's military vessels and aircraft.

If such exercises or live weapons-firing did take place, there should be timely warnings and agreed radio frequencies and signals vocabulary.

NATO has suspended all practical and military cooperation with Russia but can still convene political meetings.

Russian snap exercises in March were one of the Kremlin's biggest shows of force since the start of the Ukraine crisis. It put the navy's Northern Fleet on full combat readiness in Russia's Arctic North, close to Norway, a NATO member.

NATO has also held exercises -- not on the same scale -- mainly in eastern Europe and the Baltics. Along with its partners, the 28-nation alliance will hold its biggest military exercise in more than a decade from October, although they are taking place in Italy, Spain and Portugal and with a focus also any potential threat along NATO's southern flank.

The report said an "action-reaction cycle" was now under way between NATO and Russia that could be hard to stop.

"History is littered with examples of international crises and tensions that developed a momentum of their own and resulted in conflict even when no one side intended it," it said.

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 #24
RIA Novosti
August 19, 2015
Russian deputy foreign minister interviewed on Middle East

In an interview for RIA Novosti, Mikhail Bogdanov, the Russian Federation president's special representative for the Middle East and African countries and deputy head of the Russian Federation Foreign Ministry, talked about the Russian initiative to form a coalition to combat Islamic State [IS, also known as ISIS or ISIL] and Moscow's plans to host further inter-Syrian and inter-Palestinian meetings.

The Russian initiative to form a coalition to combat Islamic State enjoys broad support both in the countries of the Middle East and also in the West. The pooling of antiterrorist efforts would make it possible to avoid a scenario whereby Syria might disappear as an integral and sovereign state as a result of ISIL attacks. Mikhail Bogdanov, the Russian Federation president's special representative for the Middle East and African countries and deputy head of the Russian Federation Foreign Ministry, talked about this and also about Moscow's plans to host further inter-Syrian and inter-Palestinian meetings in an interview with RIA Novosti special correspondent Natalya Kurganova.

Confronting Islamic State

[Kurganova] Was the subject of including Tehran in the fight against IS discussed during the 17 August talks between the head of the Russian and Iranian foreign ministries?

[Bogdanov] We have regular discussions with our Iranian partners about common threats emanating from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and other terrorist groupings affiliated with Al-Qa'idah. And close bilateral coordination on the subject of countering terrorism has been maintained for many years now. Because a long time ago now - long before the emergence of ISIL - Al-Qa'idah started threatening the region's security. Our interaction on the subject of Afghanistan, in particular, is developing in this context. It is a question of our shared interests, as Islamic extremism and terrorism represent a most serious challenge for both us and the Iranians. So the corresponding set of problems is always present on the agenda for Russian-Ukrainian contracts at various levels.

[Kurganova] Was this subject raised in the context of Russian President Vladimir Putin's proposal for the creation of an international counterterrorist coalition?

[Bogdanov] Naturally. On the whole we can see broad support for the Russian Federation president's initiative for the formation of an international counterterrorist front to combat ISIL and other terrorist organizations. Given Tehran's regional clout and its special relationship with Syria, Iraq, and part of the Lebanese political establishment, it is objectively necessary to take account of Iran's position on the processes taking place in the Middle East. Correspondingly we are maintaining active contacts with various foreign partners, trying to persuade them of the advisability of including Iran in our common efforts so that the struggle against terrorism is maximally effective and coordinated and based on an international legal foundation that is clear to all.

As recent experience demonstrates, the aerial strikes being launched against extremists' positions by the coalition headed by the United States are not producing decisive success in the confrontation with ISIL. What is required is coordination among all the forces that are on the ground and have a real interest in combating Islamic State. We feel that effectiveness in countering the terrorist threat can be achieved only through the pooling of efforts. As the Russian leadership has stressed, it is not a question of creating some kind of joint armed forces or a single command, identifying a commander in chief, and so forth. The task that is envisioned is to organize exchanges of information, ensure the coordination of approaches, and allocate roles in our common struggle against the supremely dangerous challenge emanating from ISIL.

[Kurganova] How, in your opinion, is it possible to get Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Syria, and Iraq to "sit on the same bus"?

[Bogdanov] We realize that this is a difficult task, of course. We are maintaining intensive contacts with all the above-mentioned parties and other partners of ours in the region and the international arena, including the Americans. We proceed from the premise that, despite the well-known differences and contradictions between some of the above-mentioned regional players, established contacts exist between them and reciprocal visits and trips by officials and representatives of the security services are taking place. So in one way or another, formats for interaction already exist.

Of course this is not enough; we are trying to help them to strengthen mutual understanding, especially since, in our view, a basis for this - an extremely dangerous common enemy - is in evidence. Correspondingly, the efforts to combat it must also be consolidated.

[Kurganova] Have there already been any results?

[Bogdanov] While attempting to ensure that there are more meetings, we of course note that an absence or manifest shortage of trust can be seen between certain regional parties. But we proceed from the premise that in accordance with the laws of physics sooner or later there is a transition from quantity to quality. So the more contacts and opportunities for exchanging opinions there are, the greater the chances of achieving more concrete and substantive mutual understandings and agreements. In this connection, I repeat, we always advocate that partners should communicate with each other as often as possible and try to find a common denominator in their approaches.

Missile systems for Iran

[Kurganova] Were deliveries of S-300 systems to Tehran discussed during the talks with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif?

[Bogdanov] We proceed on the basis that as of today this issue is closed. For us there is total clarity with the Iranian partners on this score. The matter has been resolved in principle, and everything else consists of technical details.

Syria talks

[Kurganova] Last week there was a s series of contacts with Syrian opposition representatives in Moscow. Is there an understanding about holding new Moscow-3 inter-Syrian consultations?

[Bogdanov] One might say that what is happening now is Moscow-2.5, bearing in mind that intensive contacts have taken place in the Russian capital with a whole number of representatives of Syrian opposition groups from both the internal and the external opposition. There are also close contacts with official Damascus, and we meet regularly with the Syrian ambassador to Moscow.

We have developed a positive dialogue with all Syrians. We tell them that if they so wish we can organize a new round of inter-Syrian consultations in Moscow. As is known, as a result of Moscow-2 a number of opposition representatives created a committee to monitor the fulfilment of the Moscow meetings' decisions. An appeal to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on certain aspects of a Syrian settlement was signed. We are ready to respond to a wish for a session of this monitoring committee to be held in Moscow. I believe that such a meeting could take place within the next few days as an important element in continuing the "Moscow process."

But in addition to the "Moscow track" there is the promotion of dialogue between Syrian opposition representatives in other capitals too. In particular, there have been productive and meaningful meetings in Cairo and contacts in Brussels and Astana. An idea that has now emerged is to combine these dialogue processes and find a place and time for the participants in the said meetings to be able to meet together, taking as a basis a discussion of the ideas from Moscow and Cairo. The task envisioned here involves attempting to consolidate all influential opposition forces on a constructive platform that would fully reflect the opinion of broad opposition circles and simultaneously chime with the main  objective - the fulfilment of the Geneva communique of 30 June 2012. That is to say, such a platform needs to be manifested as a joint opposition approach in future negotiations with the Syrian Government within the framework of Geneva-3. Here it has to be understood that Geneva-3 is not just a one-off event; it is also a process of negotiation demanding political will, restraint, and time. It seems to us that the holding of such a conference deserves support, and we have started practical work with regard to preparing for Geneva-3.

Returning to the inter-Syrian meetings in Moscow, I would like to emphasize that they were unique, as we were offering a platform for opposition contacts with a Syrian Government delegation. Admittedly there was not a unified opposition delegation at these meetings. There were something like 30 people representing various opposition groupings. They had not come to an agreement about speaking in a single voice in the dialogue with the Syrian Government and expressed their own opinion in the course of a frank polemic.

It is now possible to talk about a qualitatively new element - we have agreed in principle to work actively and jointly with our partners in the interests of promoting the consolidation of an opposition negotiating platform and forming a single opposition delegation with a view to convening Geneva-3. We are conducting corresponding intensive consultations with colleagues from the United States, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Qatar, and the United Nations. If such a representative opposition meeting is convened, the next inter-Syrian negotiating process also needs to be accompanied by powerful and consolidated support from the international community.

[Kurganova] So is the international contact group going to work on unifying the Syrian opposition?

[Bogdanov] No. The contact group needs to promote the progress of the inter-Syrian negotiations between a single opposition delegation, if it should be formed, and a Syrian Government delegation. Plus it is important in this context not to forget about the Russian proposal with regard to creating a broad antiterrorist front. If nothing is done to consolidate antiterrorist efforts, it might all end with Syria disappearing as an integral and sovereign state under blows from ISIL.

In addition to this, in the interests of imparting greater dynamism to the process of a Syrian settlement we supported the proposal from Staffan de Mistura, the UN secretary general's special envoy for Syria - incidentally, this is also a long-standing idea of ours - to structure the inter-Syrian negotiations in such a way that there is a clear system of negotiating practice in terms of format and content. It is important that de Mistura's approaches along these lines received consolidated support from the UN Security Council in the form of the 17 August 2015 statement to this effect by the Council President. It is a question of forming inter-Syrian working groups for four key areas - political issues, humanitarian issues, security issues (here the task of combating terrorism has been clearly specified on our insistence), and issues relating to the preservation of Syrian state institutions so that chaos does not ensue in the country and the institutions of state government do not totally disintegrate. The important thing now is to create the above-mentioned working groups without delay. We assessed positively Staffan de Mistura's idea of involving in their work professional Syrian experts in various fields and also experts from the United Nations. Subsequently the practical expert ideas from thinking talk these groups could become the subject of full-format negotiations between representatives of the Syrian Government and the united opposition.

[Kurganova] So are the ideas of creating a contact group on Syria and for inter-Syrian working groups currently being worked on?

[Bogdanov] Yes. The contact group is a group of international players that can contribute to the sustainability of negotiations among the Syrians themselves. We are currently discussing these problems with all potential participants in such a structure, bearing in mind that there is a definite linkage here to the entry into force of the agreement reached in Vienna on the Iranian nuclear programme. As you know, discussions about this are currently taking place in the Iranian parliament and the US Congress. So some of our partners are expressing the view that the contact group could be launched in October this year, for example. Here we realize that a formalistic approach needs to be avoided here and that the work can proceed in various formats - through contacts via certain channels, exchanges of letters, or face-to-face meetings, although not necessarily with a full complement of participants. The important thing here is flexibility and promptness in agreeing positions, which needs to be directed at exerting a positive and constructive influence on the participants in the inter-Syrian negotiations.

As for the working groups, they could apparently convene very soon and start working  on specific issues in the said areas. Then, as I have already said, the results of their work can be submitted to the main negotiations between the Syrian Government and opposition delegations.

[Kurganova] Will the result of all of this work be the holding of Geneva-3?

[Bogdanov] Not the result but, rather, a new start in the Syrian settlement process, which is based on the Geneva communique of 30 June 2012.

[Kurganova] Did you say that the working groups could be created in the very near future?

[Bogdanov] We hope so. Staffan de Mistura and his team are currently working specifically on this. We are prepared to support these efforts. And, I repeat, the consolidated approach demonstrated by the UN Security Council, which is intended to be a powerful motivational signal for all Syrians, is very important here.

Yemen

[Kurganova] What is the situation in Yemen? Are there plans to continue the evacuation of Russian citizens from that country?

[Bogdanov] We are of course watching the development of the situation in Yemen with great concern. The military actions are bringing only distress and suffering to ordinary people, and the humanitarian situation is close to catastrophic. The country is being destroyed, and the Yemeni people's historical and cultural monuments are being destroyed.

We have long-standing traditionally friendly links with Yemen. We maintained positive relations with both North and South Yemen and welcomed their unification in 1990. Throughout these years we have developed multifaceted mutually advantageous cooperation. So what is currently happening in that country is giving rise to feelings of great concern and sincere pain and compassion on our part.

We proceed on the basis that a resolution of the Yemeni crisis needs to be based on an inclusive national dialogue involving all Yemeni sociopolitical forces. You know that intertribal relationships in Yemen are strong as a result of historical circumstances and so representatives of various regions need to participate in the dialogue process. It has to be said that in recent years we and the European Union have been brokering national dialogue in the Republic of Yemen and good results have been achieved in this area. It would be a pity if they were to be nullified as a result of continuing armed conflict, which has already severely complicated their implementation.

Ismail Ahmed, the UN secretary general's special representative for Yemen, is working actively at this time. We support the efforts that he has been making, including the inter-Yemeni meeting in Geneva that he hosted in June this year. We hope that such contacts will be continued.

Of course we have repeatedly called for a cease-fire in the Republic of Yemen and for the declaration of humanitarian timeouts. We hoped that these temporary humanitarian timeouts would acquire a permanent nature and could be utilized to provide essential humanitarian assistance to the population, which is acutely in need of medical supplies, food, drinking water, fuel, and so forth.

I repeat, a political process is vitally important in Yemen. It is at this that our efforts are aimed and with this that our hopes are linked.

As you know, we were forced to close the Consulate General in Aden because vicious fighting was raging there. The evacuation of its staffers was carried out successfully. During the period of the Yemeni conflict we have helped to evacuate from Yemen many of our fellow citizens who are permanently resident in the country and also citizens of a whole number of foreign countries. If necessary we are prepared to continue corresponding evacuation measures.

[Kurganova] Are there still Russian citizens in Yemen? Are we not planning to evacuate our embassy from Sanaa?

[Bogdanov] The embassy is continuing to function with a skeleton staff. We hope that the situation in the country will change for the better. But we develop scenarios for all eventualities in life, and so our diplomatic mission naturally has appropriate mobilization and evacuation plans. Of course the embassy in Sanaa, like our diplomatic missions abroad in general, has well-organized contacts with the Russian community in the host country. It is only a pity that not all Russian citizens register with the consulate, which would make it significantly easier to main contact with them in terms of helping them to leave the country. We do not always know where these people are, and they do not always have the opportunity to promptly make themselves known. But on the whole we of course help those who express a wish to leave Yemen for security reasons.

Libya

[Kurganova] With regard to our evacuated embassy in Libya, do we intend to reinstate it in the country?

[Bogdanov] I would like to mention that the Russian Embassy in Libya was evacuated from Tripoli and temporarily relocated to Tunis after it was subjected to an armed attack, when most foreign diplomatic missions left against the backdrop of the serious deterioration of the security situation in the country. If the situation in Libya was to be successfully normalized and if safe conditions for our diplomats' life and work were to be created, the embassy would of course return to Tripoli. But, as in other crisis areas, this requires a political determination on the part of the warring parties to settle the conflict by peaceful means at the negotiating table within the framework of a broad national dialogue.

Israel and the Palestinians

[Kurganova] On the subject of Palestinian-Israeli relations - are there any prospects of their being resumed?

[Bogdanov] We have always advocated the promotion of negotiations between the Palestinians and Israelis on a generally accepted international legal basis. As you know, corresponding UN Security Council resolutions, a road map, decisions by the Quartet of international mediators, and an Arab peace initiative have been adopted. All of this constitutes a positive international legal basis for substantive negotiations. But unfortunately the negotiating process currently finds itself deadlocked, which causes us great concern.

We maintain active contacts with both the Israeli and the Palestinian leadership on a bilateral basis. They are aimed at supporting the vigorous activity of the Near East Quartet of international intermediaries comprising Russia, the United States, the United Nations, and the European Union. The Quartet's special representatives visited Jordan and Egypt recently, and a trip to Saudi Arabia is planned. The aim of such contacts is to seek ways to resume the peace process. You know that for a long time now we have been advocating the building of closer interaction between the Quartet and a number of Arab states, including Egypt and Jordan, and the Arab League. We hope that such a format will lend greater dynamism to our efforts to promote a Palestinian-Israeli and, in general, Arab-Israeli settlement.

[Kurganova] Are there plans to hold the traditional meeting of the Quartet within the framework of the UN General Assembly?

[Bogdanov] We have always advocated more frequent meetings of the Quartet at a ministerial level to formulate agreed moves and collective initiatives to promote a Near East settlement. The experience of recent years testifies that it is extremely difficult to solve such a large-scale and chronic problem as the Palestinian problem single-handed. Consolidated efforts and joint work are needed so that our combined voice carries more weight with the protagonists of this process. It is no secret that the continuing lack of a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict is fuelling extremist sentiments in the region and serving as a nutrient medium for terrorist organizations to recruit new supporters into their ranks.

Proceeding from this, we are of course hoping that another ministerial session of the Quartet will be held in New York on the margins of the UN General Assembly session in September this year.

[Kurganova] Information that Khalid Mish'al, chairman of the Palestinian Hamas movement political bureau, is to visit Russia appeared recently. Is this true?

[Bogdanov] Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met with Khalid Mish'al in Doha on 3 August. In our assessment, it was a meaningful and useful conversation, in the course of which Mish'al reaffirmed Hamas's determination to restore the unity of Palestinian ranks, including in the interests of achieving a just Palestinian-Israeli settlement. We consider that intra-Palestinian unity on the PLO's political platform is extremely necessary.

[Kurganova] When might Mish'al's visit to Russia take place?

[Bogdanov] In the spring of 2011 we hosted representatives of various Palestinian organizations near Moscow. We might repeat this useful experience with the participation of the leaders of all the Palestinian factions - Fatah, Hamas, the Popular and Democratic Fronts, and others in the interests of the speediest restoration of Palestinian national Concorde.

You know that a whole number of Palestinian representatives have visited us recently. Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas has visited Russia on numerous occasions. It is perfectly natural that a Hamas delegation could also be in this company. As for the prospects for organizing the broad inter-Palestinian event that I mentioned, this depends on the readiness of both Hamas and also other Palestinian organizations. If and when an interest in this is shown, we will happily offer Moscow as a platform for such inter-Palestinian contacts.

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#25
New York Observer
http://observer.com
August 25, 2015
Anti-American Sentiment Surges in Russia as US Officer Taunts From Perch at Fox News
Retired General who called for US to 'start killing Russians' says he bought a polonium detector
By Mikhail Klikushin
Mikhail Klikushin attended Novosibirsk State University, and received a graduate degree in Russian history before emigrating to the United States.

Since the beginning of the year, Putin's propaganda industry, feeling the economic crisis, has had to tighten its belt. The Russian Information Agency TASS announced a 25 percent staff reduction and 20 percent salary cut for its employees. Rossiyskaya Gazeta, which holds the monopoly on the official publications of new laws and government decrees, fired 10% of its staff. Similar examples are innumerable, as Bloomberg reported in January.

Despite all the economizing, the level of anti-Americanism in Russia has reached its all-time high, fluctuating from 70 percent to 73 percent of negative and strongly negative feelings towards the US this year, according to the respected polling institution Levada-Center.

The possible explanation-somebody else is doing all the heavy-lifting for the Kremlin propaganda machine, helping it to save millions and outsource the humongous task of proving to the Russians that the West started the final, doomed-from-the-start crusade against Mother Russia.

One of the big helpers has been the Fox News channel and a handful of its analysts. (Yes, one can watch Fox News in Russia, as well as CNN, EuroNews and unlimited number of other TV channels the world knows).

This year, Fox News analyst retired US Major General Robert H. Scales saved a lot of money for the Kremlin propaganda machine. And now he's saving even more.

Back in March, Maj. Gen. Scales infuriated the Russian public with his solution on how to help Ukraine regain control over the territories that have fallen into the arms of pro-Russia insurgents. "The only way the United States can have any effect in this region and turn the tide," Mr. Scales said, "is to start killing Russians ... killing so many Russians that even Putin's media can't hide the fact that Russians are returning to the motherland in body bags. But, given the [small] amount of support we've given to the Ukrainians, given the ability of the Ukrainians themselves to counter-attack against these, what? 12,000 Russians camped in their country ... eh...sadly, it's not gonna likely to happen".

This gift from Fox News was eagerly accepted by the Kremlin propaganda machine and Russian media bit into the story like a pitbull.

Russian Ministry for Foreign Affairs reacted with angry statement and its official representative Alexander Lukashevich called the retired general's remarks "disgusting." "No less disgusting was the fact that the calls for the killings of our fellow citizens-of you and me-were made live by one of the leading national channels, during the prime-time, aiming at the maximum audience possible. This is exactly how the country's mainstream media forms the atmosphere of hatred towards Russia in American society."

The representative of the Russian Investigative Committee, Vladimir Markin, reacted with less political correctness, Tweeting the following: "We thought that, at the arrival of the spring, only maniacs, schizophrenics and pedophiles become more active, but it turns out, American retired generals also. We will keep this fact in mind."

The US State Department, when asked for explanation, shrugged off the whole thing, stating that they didn't comment on the views expressed by retired military personnel.

Russian media immediately made an anti-celebrity out of Mr. Scales, the main argument being "What if a Russian retired general would have gone on a major Russian TV channel and called for killing Americans in Ukraine? How would the State Department have reacted?"

As the scandal was growing, Mr. Scales was surprised to discover that Russians watch Fox News in addition to the "official propaganda" TV channels. "Isn't it funny they watch us?" He said during his next interview on Fox. "I got emails today from people in Russia I've never heard of before. I didn't know that the Fox News was watched in Russia but I'll tell you this-Fox is not Vladimir Putin's favorite network because ... we are trying to tell the truth about what's going on in places like Ukraine."

He was even more surprised to discover that his statement launched a criminal case against him under the Russian Criminal Code Article 354 "Public calls to start aggressive war, made with the use of mass media" whose punishment varies from 500,000 rubles (or the criminal's income of three years) to five-years jail term. According to the argument of the Russian Criminal Investigation team, "taking part in the live show of one of the TV channels, retired general of the US Army Robert Scales called on the highest political and military leadership of the USA, American citizens to conduct the military operations on the territory of Ukraine and to killing of the citizens of the Russian Federation, and, also, Russian-speaking people."

In addition, Russia's Investigative Committee stated that the retired general's calls to "kill Russians" broke international norms, including Article 20 of the International Pact on Civil and Political Rights of 1966, which prohibits any war propaganda and any incitement to discrimination, animosity and violence.

"No vodka and no borsch for me" was the retired general's public reaction to the investigation, expressed live on Fox News again. "If we don't help the Ukrainians do something to take back lost territories in the east, if we don't give the Ukrainians the weapons they need ... The Russian military is in disarray. ... Only military actions by the Ukrainians that we support will turn the tide," he added.

Mr. Scales was not concerned "at all" about the criminal investigation that Russians launched against him, although he stated that his wish to vacation in Russia "is not gonna happen".

According to Mr. Scales, the attack on him by the Russians was an attack on the First Amendment in the US and an attempt to intimidate the free press. Despite all the bravado, he abruptly canceled plans a cruise to the Baltics, being careful about the long arms of Russian Femida.

The Russian media didn't let Mr. Scales off the hook without reaching more general conclusions.

One of the papers wrote: "All the meaning of American politics is hidden, which is based on the unlimited egoism and egocentrism. It turns out that, according to the US general, to call for mass murder of the citizens of a particular ethnicity in front of multi-million audience - that is within the framework of things, it is allowed to him, but to call him to justice is an attack on western media and freedom of speech!"

Mr. Scales' public statement that he had to buy the polonium detector as a precaution against the evil Russians most likely already plotting against him-an obvious referral to the mysterious murder of the ex-KGB Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006-again hit the headlines in Russia, adding gasoline to the fire.

"How many diapers does he use in a day?" asked the representative of the Russian Investigative Committee Vladimir Markin via Twitter. "And the spring is still ahead of us!" Vice-Prime Minister in charge of the Russia's military-industrial complex Dmitry Rogozin echo-also on Twitter-"He [ret. Maj. Gen.] is a real cuckoo! Let's send him a diaper!"

"US general was prescribed diapers" was the least vicious of the newspaper headlines.

Nobody knows if the Russians in fact did send Mr. Scales a package of diapers or if he used his new detector to check it for polonium poisoning upon its arrival, but definitely the Russians have been on alert for his every word ever since.

Take my word for it-in Russia people don't usually pay attention to San Diego Union-Tribune or to the opinions expressed in it-unless the opinion belongs to the retired major-general Robert H. Scales.

The very title of his piece, published on August 15, "The Army is broken," was music to the ears of Russia's hawks and America-haters.

On the day after Mr. Scales' opinion appeared, Russian news media giant RIA Novosti published a story with the sensational headline, "The General Who Said 'Kill Russians' Complains about the Decline of the US Army." Shrugging off the general's intimate emotions expressed in the piece, the Kremlin media machine provided a dry summary of Mr. Scales' outcry.

"The US army is destroyed for the third time since the mid-20th century-this time, by the reduction of the army and defense budget cuts by 'ahistorical and strategically tone-deaf leadership in Washington.' The US army is broken by the lack of training and antiquated equipment. Low morale, alcoholism, hard drug abuse by soldiers, domestic violence and suicides among US troops led to the decline in 'military spirit.' Young army leaders are voting with their feet."

In other words, implied RIA Novosti, the US army is not as strong an adversary as it looks. It cannot be otherwise, since no less a celebrity Russophobe than retired major-general Robert H. Scales said so, the one who is wanted by Russian police for calling for the killing of Russian citizens.

There were no mocking Tweets this time, nobody offered to send diapers to America for Mr. Scales.

While retired US army general's story was unfolding in Russia, the US State Department announced the renewal of its crusade against what it called "Russian propaganda," heralding the increase in spending on the program, including a $500,000 grant to train journalists to fight "Moscow lies" in the Baltic states alone. If the point is to counter Russian rhetoric, the State Department might do better to spend its half million keeping General Scales away from microphones and keyboards.

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 #26
Washington Post
August 26, 2015
The danger of 'Foreign Policy by Bumper Sticker'
By Katrina vanden Heuvel  
Katrina vanden Heuvel writes a weekly column for The Post. She is the editor and publisher of The Nation magazine and writes the "Editor's Cut" blog there.

Appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1966, George F. Kennan, the legendary Cold War diplomat often called "the father of containment," criticized the escalation of the war in Vietnam. The United States, he said, should not "jump around like an elephant frightened by a mouse."

Kennan's "frightened elephant" is a strangely apt metaphor for the situation in which we find ourselves nearly a half-century later. In the GOP primary, the candidates are calling for a foreign policy defined by fear-mongering and senseless aggression. Their agenda includes plans to reverse President Obama's nuclear agreement with Iran, abandon renewed diplomatic ties with Cuba, escalate tensions with Russia and deploy U.S. troops in Syria. Much like Kennan's agitated elephant, the Republicans candidates see threats in Iran, Vladimir Putin's Russia, Bashar al-Assad's Syria and in the Islamic State and other Islamic extremist groups that are far out of proportion to any real harm they could ever inflict on U.S. interests. They are so out of touch with reality that even admitting the folly of the Iraq war has become a sign of weakness. The far greater danger, though, is the combination of paranoia and hubris that characterizes the foreign policies of the Republican candidates leading us into yet another self-inflicted foreign policy disaster. Once again, they would have us rush to embrace unnecessarily militaristic responses to otherwise manageable foreign policy challenges, bringing yet more chaos to the Middle East and Eastern Europe while costing the nation even more in lost lives and treasure.

Editor and publisher of the Nation magazine, vanden Heuvel writes a weekly column for The Post. View Archive
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In the latest issue of the National Interest, Richard Burt and Dimitri Simes provide a corrective to foreign policy recklessness. "[T]he debate over international affairs is now badly debased," they declare in the lead editorial, titled "Foreign Policy by Bumper Sticker." "The quality of America's foreign-policy discussion has demonstrably deteriorated over the last thirty years." Remarking on the GOP primary in particular, the authors noted that "the very warrior intellectuals who were directly responsible for today's state of affairs" in Iraq and the Middle East "dominate the foreign-policy advisory groups of nearly all the Republican candidates."

Founded in 1985 by the late Irving Kristol, one of the original leaders in neoconservative thinking, the National Interest served as a forum for vigorous debate among conservative intellectuals and policymakers until the George W. Bush administration, when editorials critical of the Iraq war led to the departure of several of the magazine's most prominent neoconservative voices. Today the journal is one of the last bastions of "realist" foreign policy thinking, or the belief that U.S. vital interests should trump ideology in our approach to international affairs. Meanwhile, three decades after the National Interest's inception, the assumptions governing U.S. foreign policy are the antithesis of sensible realism. With few exceptions, the political and media elite have accepted as a given the principle that the United States has the right and the responsibility to police the world - to make and enforce the rules by which other nations must abide, even if we don't. In the words of former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, "We are the indispensable nation."

As Burt and Simes write, "America's new foreign-policy establishment has adopted a simplistic, moralistic and triumphalist mind-set." And while Democratic leaders in some cases have embraced diplomacy as an alternative to military force and intimidation - namely in Cuba and more recently toward Iran - the party remains dominated by liberal interventionists who share the neoconservative penchant for triumphalism, as evidenced by much of the party's misguided positions on Ukraine and Syria and support for the military intervention in Libya.

In 2010, for example, Hillary Clinton delivered what the New York Times described as a "an unalloyed statement of American might." Pronouncing the arrival of a "new American moment," Clinton declared, "let me say it clearly: The United States can, must, and will lead in this new century." More recently, a group of Senate Democrats led by Chris Murphy (Conn.) outlined their vision for a progressive approach to foreign policy - and while the statement included some useful markers, it took a similar view of America's global role. "The new world order demands that the United States think anew about the tools that it will use to lead the world," they argued.

Reconsidering the tools at the United States' disposal, and ensuring that military action is used only as a last resort, is a welcome start. However, our public discourse should also include a robust debate about not the means but the ends of our foreign policy. What should be our goals and priorities - and how do we reconcile these goals and priorities with those of other powers? As author James Mann wrote last year, "We seem unable to acknowledge to ourselves that other nations of the world do not always need us as a leader in exactly the same way they did in 1945 or 1989. Moreover, in resolving international crises, other nations have become indispensable to the United States, too-far more than they were in the recent past." The Iran deal - a U.S. priority that would not have been possible without the cooperation of Russia and China - perfectly illustrates Mann's point.

But without facing meaningful consequences for reckless triumphalism, politicians have little incentive to break with the prevailing orthodoxy, especially when questioning America's "indispensable" role inevitably results in attacks on their patriotism. The unfortunate reality, as Burt and Simes observed, is that many policymakers "accept this form of intimidation by interventionists who substitute chest-thumping for coherent and serious, historically grounded arguments," while much of the media simply "lacks the interest and the expertise" to present alternative views.

As editor of the Nation, a magazine with a long history of adopting alternative views and unpopular stances on foreign policy (that were later viewed as common sense), I appreciate the importance of challenging the conventional wisdom. I'm also acutely aware of how difficult it has become in today's toxic media environment to speak out on certain issues. As Burt and Simes noted, "Prominent voices dismiss those raising" concerns about "costly international interventions when vital national interests are not at stake" as "cynical realists, isolationists or, more recently, unpatriotic Putin apologists." This is a form of neo-McCarthyism that deforms our discourse.

So it's heartening that establishment figures such as Robert Legvold, former director of Columbia University's Harriman Institute, are now rightly noting that "degrading the discourse in the United States and coarsening the way the discussion is conducted are clearly not in the country's interest. One would hope," he adds, that "responsible parts of the media will begin speaking out against these trends."

There are indeed challenges that require U.S. action. From chaos in the Middle East to a new Cold War to the great transformation that is beginning in China, the world is only getting more complicated. But we need to separate the mice from the real challenges, and that requires a more thoughtful discourse. In 2016, and beyond, we need a foreign policy discussion as serious as the challenges we face, not as agitated as the crises we have helped manufacture.

 [return to Contents] 

 #27
Washington Times
August 24, 2015
A Russian In Search of Western Values
By Edward Lozansky
Edward Lozansky is President of the American University in Moscow.

The intensity of the Ukrainian conflict continues to rise. There's a non-stop flow of statements by high-level U.S. government officials suggesting Russia is the top threat to American national security or portraying Vladimir Putin as Saddam Hussein, Moammar Gadhafi and Osama bin Laden all rolled into one. (Some like Hillary Clinton also add Hitler to this pack.)  And Russian bombers buzz American airspace with growing frequency.

For those of us who lived through the hardships of the Cold War, there is an uneasy feeling that the United States and Russia are quickly edging towards direct military confrontation.

This is why it is important to make brief historical excursion into the not-so-distant past.

Those who witnessed - and especially those who helped bring about - the momentous changes in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and in Russia in the early 1990s, remember only too well the overwhelming euphoria of those times.

The dark years of totalitarian communism were receding into the past, and the Russian people were ready and eager to join the great family of Western civilization and enjoy its basic values like human rights, the rule of law, democracy, freedom, a market economy and other real or imaginary benefits associated with them.

That was the time when fresh from the yoke of communism, the Russians were eager to embrace all of these ideals, and confidently expected them to materialize with the help, first and foremost, of the United States.

Instead Russia's economy crashed worse than in World War II. Millions lost their jobs and the means of earning a livelihood. The freedom of pursuing economic prosperity morphed into the freedom of bandit capitalism which became the prevailing economic order.

It was not only the Russians who believed that the West actually abetted this state of affairs with its numerous advisors and IMF officials. Many Americans, too, including members of Congress, felt the same way as this was clearly portrayed in the 2000 Congressional report, "Russia's Road to Corruption," commissioned by then-House Speaker Dennis Hastert.

When it comes to foreign affairs, the Russians - not just the elite, but the citizenry as well - watched with amazement and shock at the methods used by the West to promote its "values."

It's important to remember that the new post-communist Russian leaders, who are now praised as being pro-Western and pro-democracy, were going out of their way to please America. Then-Russian president Boris Yeltsin even gave Washington a map of the electronic bugs in the U.S. embassy in Moscow as a sign of friendship and trust.

But NATO, which during the Cold War had just 12 member states to contain the real Soviet threat, went on an expansion spree to add 16 more countries (plus several still on the waiting list) to face a threat that did not exist any more.

Mr. Putin started his term in 2001 by continuing Mr. Yeltsin's trend when he offered America more help in defeating the Taliban than all our NATO allies combined. I recall that at that time during our regular U.S.- Russia Forums on Capitol Hill one Member of Congress after another praised Mr. Putin as "our man in the Kremlin."

Beyond NATO expansion, a big "thank you" note to Moscow came from Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama in the form of the bombing of Belgrade; unilateral abrogation of an ABM treaty; a democracy promotion crusade to oust legally elected governments on post-Soviet space through "color" revolutions.  At the same time the world witnesses the assaults on Iraq, Libya, and Syria; the "Arab Spring" - all leaving a bloody trail of countless dead, chaos, ruin, hatred and strife and, of course, all this was done strictly for the sake of promoting democracy and Western values.

"The reason we promote democracy around the world is that democratic countries do not start wars", said George W. Bush many times before and after invading Iraq.

But It took his brother, Jeb, some time and effort to finally admit during the recent Fox News debates that his brother was wrong to do that.

How long will we have to wait to hear that Mr. Obama's Libya and Syria policies were also a huge mistake? The result was not only utter misery and devastation in those countries, but also an enormous flow of African and Middle-Eastern refugees to Europe, not to mention the rise of ISIS - a new generation of terrorists who easily put Al-Qaida to shame.

In Ukraine, we are also told that the overthrow of the legitimate president and bringing this country into association with EU had nothing to do with geopolitics but rather the further promotion of democracy and Western values.

But the reality is the idea behind this EU association scheme was not only to weaken the Russian economy by breaking its strong commercial ties with Ukraine but also to bring Ukraine into NATO through the back door since the majority of Ukrainians did not want their country to join this bloc.

The Ukrainian crisis can be resolved immediately if Washington and Brussels put pressure on Kiev to accept the two pretty modest demands of the separatists: the country's federalization and acknowledging Russian as the second language. Last time I checked, Canada is a federation with two official languages, while Switzerland is a federation with four. Incidentally, isn't the United States a federation as well? And while Spanish is not the official language de-jure, it definitely is so de-facto.

Let us be realistic. The chances for Washington to change its stand on Ukraine with the current administration are close to zero. European poodles, as Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland or Vice-President Joe Biden rightly observed, do not count. That means that the probability of direct military collision between America and Russia is growing on a daily basis.

Of course, we can always wait on aliens, who according to the former astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon, are coming to Earth to stop this war,

But the question nevertheless remains: what are the Western values and who is promoting them these days?

 [return to Contents] 

 #28
Subject: Dom Knigi: Quotes from a bookshop, what people read, what people believe, and the Guardian
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2015 20:24:33 +0100
From: Antony Penaud <antonypenaud@yahoo.fr>

Quotes from a bookshop, what people read, what people believe, and the Guardian

Antony Penaud received his DPhil (University of Oxford) in 2000. He is French and lives in London.

A friendly pdf version of this essay (to download or to read by scrolling down) can be found on https://www.scribd.com/doc/275944943
His other essays are on www.scribd.com/antonykharms

INTRODUCTION

The subhead of a recent Guardian article (1) is "Conspiracies abound in the Dom Knigi store's non-fiction section, but what is truly unknown is the extent to which Russians believe what is written".

But the article that follows doesn't prove anything: it consists of a few quotes from some books, a couple of comments by a "political analyst", and no attempt is made to prove that Russians believe those quotes.

Imagine a journalist walking into Waterstone's in London, quoting a few carefully chosen books, and then claiming that this is what British people believe.

In this essay we reproduce some polls conducted in different countries about different conspiracies, list the current best selling books, and discuss the Guardian article.

PLAN

1. Conspiracies (polls and comments)
2. What do Russians, Brits and Americans read?
Conclusion
Appendix A. Conspiracies in the Ukraine crisis
Appendix B. The first main quote in the Guardian article (Starikov)
Appendix C. The second main quote in the Guardian article (Prokopenko)

1. CONSPIRACIES

1.1. Some polls

9/11 (2008):

Let's look at the results of a poll (2) conducted in 2008 in different countries re 9/11. The question was "Who do you think was behind the 9/11 attacks?".
Below we only report the percentages for a few countries of interest (we include the country that gives the maximum percentages for each of the first three answers).
Below, the five percentages below correspond to the following answers: AQ, US,  Israel , other perpetrator, don't know:
 
Turkey:  39, 36, 3,  1,  21
Ukraine:  42, 15, 1, 5, 39
Italy: 56, 15, 1, 7, 21
Russia: 57, 15, 2, 6, 19
GB: 57, 5, 1, 12, 26
France: 63, 8, 0, 7, 23
Germany: 64, 23, 1, 2, 9
Egypt: 16, 12, 43, 11, 18

9/11 (2011):
According to a BBC poll conducted in 2011 (3) "14% of people questioned in the UK and 15% in the US did not believe the official explanation that al-Qaeda was responsible, and instead believed the US government was involved in a wider conspiracy. Among 16 to 24-year-olds that belief rises to around one in four."

France:
Following the DSK (Strauss-Kahn) scandal, a poll was conducted in France (4): 57% believed it was a conspiracy. Note that as far as we know the poll didn't specify what their theory was.

UK:
According to a 2013 yougov poll (5), 38% of Brits believe Diana's death was not an accident (41% believe it was an accident, 21% don't know).

US:
Public Pollicy Polling conducted some polls in the US in 2013 (6): it came out that
51% of voters say a larger conspiracy was at work in the JFK assassination
7% of voters think the moon landing was faked
5% of voters believe that Paul McCartney actually died in 1966
6% of voters believe Osama bin Laden is still alive
15% of voters think the medical industry and the pharmaceutical industry 'invent' new diseases to make money
28% of voters believe secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government, or New World Order" .

While some of these high numbers might be partly caused by mistrust of the media or of the government (Watergate, Iran-Contra, Iraq war), some clearly false conspiracies have been actually generated by the media and the government: 28% of voters believe Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks.

Finance:
We tried to find some polls about finance related conspiracies (creation of money, central banks, Goldman Sachs), but unfortunately couldn't find any.

1.2. Le Monde Diplomatique article

Le Monde Diplomatique had a very long article about conspiracies in June 2015. For non subscribers, Robert Fisk mentioned the article at length in The Independent (7).

1.2.1 True false flags

Fisk: "that inestimable French journal Le Monde Diplomatique this month carries a wodge of articles under the title 'Did you say conspiracy?', painfully dissecting how many false-flag stories turned out to be true.
There's the Mukden incident, for example, a 1931 Chinese attack on imperial Japan which turned out to be a Japanese attack on China and led to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the Rape of Nanking, et al.
Then there's the 1933 burning of the Reichstag which might have been started by the Nazis rather than the communists;
the successful - and real - CIA-MI5 plot to overthrow Iran's elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, in which bombs were supposedly planted by (yet again) communists;
Israel's 1954 'Operation Susannah' in which Israeli-organised attacks on UK and US buildings in Cairo were blamed on Egyptian nationalists;
and the 1964 Tonkin incident, when America reported totally imaginary North Vietnamese attacks on a US warship,
which led to the very real launching of the Vietnam War.
Interestingly, Latin America provides even more proof of real US plots: Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua, Cuba, you name it.

The French monthly also carries a very fair critique of those who believe George W and his chums engineered the 9/11 attacks - as if a US president who screwed up everything he ever did in the Middle East was capable of bringing down the World Trade Centre - and of the Arab world's obsession with Western conspiracies that allow dictators and nations to duck their own responsibility for terrible events."

1.2.2. Disqualifying critical thought

Le Monde Diplomatique: "The accusation [of conspiracy] enjoys success in the media, where it often aims to disqualify critical thought

1.3. Comments

Below are the conclusions we draw:
- Russia doesn't stand out in the only available poll in which we can compare countries.
- It seems that beliefs in conspiracies are a global phenomenon.
- People tend to blame unfriendly countries (or political opponents) rather than allies.
- Some false-flag stories turn out to be true.
- "The accusation enjoys success in the media, where it often aims to disqualify critical thought".

Scepticism and rational thinking being the ideal to reach, we too often observe the two following extremes:
- Irrational questioning (eg people who believe that McCartney died in 1966 or that Elvis is alive).
- No questioning (eg people who believed unquestionably the propaganda in the run up to the Iraq war).

The second category also includes journalists (eg David Rose (9) from the Guardian's sister paper, see Nick Davies's book "Flat Earth News" for a comprehensive examination of propaganda before the Iraq war, and much more about journalism).

2. What Russians, Brits and Americans read

The lists below correspond to the best selling books on a particular week (or on an even shorter time period for the amazon lists).
A recently released book might be high in the list but might not stay in the list for very long. But still, there is some information in these lists, and we give the number of days (or weeks) the book has been in the list when they are available.

2.1. Russians

Since the Guardian specifically mentioned the bookstore Dom Knigi on Novy Arbat, we checked on their website what books were selling best. Here is what we found on 22 August 2015:
1. a thriller by Boris Akunin.
2. a sci fi book based on a video game (Metro 2035).
3. Secret Garden by Scottish author Johana Besford (a book of illustration that has been a worldwide bestseller).
4. A book by John Green, an "American author of young adult fiction" according to wikipedia.
5. A book by Primakov (PM in the late 90s who died recently).
6. A book by Jojo Moyes, a British journalist and romance novelist.
7. The Civil code.
8. 1984 by George Orwell.
9. A book by Polyakova (she seems to write about fitness but also fiction).
10. Another book by Jojo Moyes.

The above list is for 'all categories' and we couldn't find more granular information.

We also checked the list for Moskva (9), the other large Moscow bookshop. The list is this time a top 100 and contains all categories.
There was at number 12 "Power", Starikov's new book (new entry in the top 100). Note that at number 16 was a book by Stephen Fry (not a new entry).

We found a website (10) that combined the sales of 11 bookshops (it is not clear which bookshops) to generate rankings. That top 100 for non fiction that was dated 05 August 2015 (the approximate date at which the Guardian article was written) did not contain any book by Starikov. The top 10 was quite close to the Dom Knigi top 10, apart from a book on Salinger by Beigbeder which was at number 2. Stephen Fry was at number 13.

2.2. Brits

We asked Waterstone's on Piccadilly if they published a chart and they said no. So, to have an idea of what Brits read we checked the 'non fiction' bestsellers on amazon.co.uk. This is how it looked like on 20 August 2015:
1. River of Time by Jon Swain, 1 day in the top 100
2. The Scandalous Lady W by Hallie Rubenhold, 1 day in the top 100
3. 17 Carnations: The Windsors, The Nazis and The Cover-Up by Andrew Morton, 126 days in the top 100.

Note that in the US that book is called "17 Carnations: The Windsors, The Nazis and The Biggest Cover-Up in History", the title was probably toned down for the UK.

2.3. Americans

2.3.1 Amazon

On amazon.com, the chart for 'all books' best sellers was (on 20 August 2015):
1 The Rabbit who want to fall asleep by Carl-Johan Forssen Ehrlin
2 It is about Islam: Exposing the Truth by Glenn Beck

According to Wikipedia, Beck is a host on Fox News, "his critics contend he promotes conspiracy theories and employs incendiary rhetoric for ratings" and he once said "There is more proof for the resurrection of Jesus than man-made climate change.".

A huffingtonpost article called "The Top 9 Glenn Beck Conspiracy Theories" (11) includes his view that there was a cover-up regarding a Saudi national at the Boston bombing.

2.3.2. NYT

The number 1 (for the week of 23 August when it was a new entry and for the week 30 August too) of the NYT best sellers in the 'hardback non fiction' category is a book called Plunder and Deceit, by Mark Levin.

The NYT description of the book is "The talk-radio host urges young Americans to resist the statist masterminds who he says are burdening them with debt, inferior education and illegal immigration.".

In February 2015, he said in his talk show: "You know what Obama's doing today? He is building the Iranian Islamo-nazi caliphate." (12).

2.4. Number of copies sold

According to Wikipedia, Starikov has written 14 books. Most books have been printed at around 5,000 copies (it is not clear how many were sold). The one that was most printed was printed at 40,000.
In 2010, Glenn Beck had sold 5 million copies of his books in the US (13).
Levin has sold over 1 million copies of his book "Liberty and Tiranny" (see Wikipedia).

CONCLUSION

A Guardian article states some conspiracies and claims that Russians believe them, on the grounds that some books could be found in bookstores.

We have studied some polls on conspiracy theories and in those polls Russia doesn't stand out. We have found that some conspiracy theories are popular in the US, UK and France, but we have no reason to believe that their popularity is restricted to those countries.

We have looked at the current bestselling books in Russia, the UK and the US and found that some conspiracy related books sold well in the US, and also in the UK. Unlike the Guardian, we do not mock the entire population of these countries nor do we assume that the buyers of these books believe all that is in them.

One of the two most "outlandish" conspiracies mocked by the Guardian turns out to be true (the Prokopenko quote, see the BBC article quoted in Appendix C).

This poorly argumented Guardian article, which is more interested in demonising Russians than in trying to inform its readers, is - sadly - just one of many that one can read in Western media nowadays.

APPENDIX A: Conspiracies in the Ukraine crisis

The Ukraine crisis offers a good example of what we observed in the 9/11 polls per country: people tend to blame their political opponent.

The Maidan snipers

In a leaked conversation (14)  between Catherine Ashton (Vice-President of the EU and High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy for the EU) and Urmas Paet (15) (Minister of Foreign Affairs for Estonia), Paet said "And second, what was quite disturbing, this same Olga [Bogomolets, a doctor who helped the wounded] told as well that all the evidence shows that the people who were killed by snipers from both sides, among policemen and then people from the streets, that they were the same snipers killing people from both sides (...) And it's really disturbing that the new coalition they don't want to investigate what exactly happened, so that there is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovich, but it was somebody from the new
coalition.".

The German TV channel ARD was one of the few Western media not ignoring (or mocking (16)) it. They screened their independent investigation about what happened that day and their conclusion was in line with the leaked conversation.

One year after the events the BBC also casted doubt about the official version (17), and a late 2014 Reuters investigation exposed "serious flaws" in the Ukrainian probe (18).

Research by Ottawa academic Ivan Katchanovski (19) was largely ignored by Western media. However, re MH17, blogger Eliot Higins was quoted by most Western media as a serious expert despite the fact he had no expertise and was described by Postol (MIT Professor of Science, Technology, and International Security) in these terms: "As far as his analysis, it's so lacking any analytical foundation it's clear he has no idea what he's talking about." (20).

"Yats is the guy"

In the infamous "f*ck the EU" leaked conversation between Nuland (Assistant Secretary of State) and Pyatt (US Ambassador to Ukraine), the two officials discussed who should be in the next Ukrainian government (21).

In particular Nuland said that Klitshko shouldn't go into government and that "Yats is the guy".

When a new government was formed shortly after this conversation, Klitshko didn't go into government and Yatsenyuk became Prime Minister.

MH17

Here the natural scenario is that the airplane was shot down by rebels by accident.

However some US intelligence veterans are not convinced and have written an open letter to Obama asking to release evidence, if he had any (22).

Regardless of who shot the airplane down, we know that the rebels had shot down a Ukrainian military plane flying at a high altitude a few days before the MH17 tragedy.
One could therefore argue that the people responsible for keeping sending airliners (without the passengers knowing) in the rebel-held area should share responsibility.

MH370: On CNN, Jeff Wise, "a private pilot and science writer" explained that Putin had ordered Russian special forces to hijack Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 and fly it to a spaceport in Kazakhstan. "Maybe he wanted to demonstrate to the United States, which had imposed the first punitive sanctions on Russia the day before, that he could hurt the West and its allies anywhere in the world," he wrote in New York Magazine. "Maybe what he was really after were the secrets of one of the plane's passengers. Maybe there was something strategically crucial in the hold. Or maybe he wanted the plane to show up unexpectedly somewhere someday, packed with explosives. There's no way to know." (23)

Nemtsov

In this case the conspiracy became the natural theory for Western media and no effort was spared to find Putin some motives: Nemtsov was presented like a popular politician when only 1% of Russians trusted him (24) and it was claimed that Nemtsov was about to release a report (about the involvement of Russian troops in Ukraine) that would damage Putin immensely. It didn't cross the mind of these journalists that his collaborators would be in possession of the report too. Nemtsov's collaborators released the report a couple of months after Nemtsov's murder (25), and it had no impact on Putin's approval ratings.

APPENDIX B: The Starikov quote

Let's now have a closer look at the two quotes that are the most shocking for the Guardian.

The quote

"Washington and London need fools to fight for them, because they don't like to fight themselves. This is why they brought Adolf Hitler to power in Germany in 1933. You need the person who will start the war, who will not flinch from committing crimes and shedding blood... It's the same today. They need a madman who will start a new world war in order to save the dollar.".

Comments

"Washington and London need fools to fight for them"

In a 1998 interview, Brzezinski (US National Security Advisor in 1980) said "According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Soviets into the Afghan trap(...). The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially "We now have the opportunity of giving to the Soviet Union its Vietnam War"." (26).

"This is why they brought Adolf Hitler to power in Germany in 1933"

We have found online a Starikov article related to this view (27).

OSCE:

The article starts with "A recent resolution by the parliamentary assembly of the OSCE declared that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany held equal roles in unleashing WWII".
When reading this we first thought that Starikov made up that OSCE declaration. But we checked, and it is true: the OSCE did make such a resolution in the Summer of 2009 (was this rather late resolution connected to diplomatic tensions following the 2008 Georgian war?).

In all cases we share Starikov's indignation on this. We could ask ourselves many questions: was Versailles too harsh (see Keynes)? Should Germany have been dismantled like Austria-Hungary? Should France and Britain have started a war earlier? Should the Allies have gone to Berlin in 1918 (some in the German Army felt they hadn't lost the war since the Allies didn't enter Germany and that they had therefore been "stabbed in the back", others like Chevenement see the 1918 German armistice as a tactical pause (28))? Was appeasement (Munich) a good idea (note that Poland and Hungary also annexed territories after Munich)? Was it wise for France and Britain to refuse a peace treaty with the Soviet Union in 1939 (and therefore pushing Stalin to do a pact with Germany) (29)?

These questions are valid questions, but France, Britain and other countries are not responsible for Germany starting WW2.

Conspiracy:

Back to Starikov: his article is indeed conspirationist (e.g. he claims that the 1929 crisis was unleashed to ensure that the Nazis would rise to power!).
In 2004 the Guardian ran an article called "How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power" (30). But claiming that the people who funded the Nazis did so on orders of foreign governments so that Germany starts a war against the Soviet Union is a conspiracy theory on more than one level.

Tit for tat?

Would Starikov have written all this if the OSCE hadn't made that declaration (this OSCE declaration is part of a trend that blames Russia for much: many Western media now insinuate that Russia started the 2008 Georgian war when a 2009 EU report blamed Georgia (31), and Ukrainian PM Yatseniuk declared in early 2015 "we all remember very well the Soviet invasion of Ukraine and Germany")?

We could see Starikov's conspiracy theory as a tit for tat (conscious or not?) response: ridiculous claims blaming Moscow are countered by ridiculous claims blaming Washington and London.

One should however note the difference: Starikov is only a writer, while the OSCE is an official European organisation.

"They need a madman who will start a new world war in order to save the dollar."

Ron Paul

Ron Paul (32), former US congressman: "In November 2000 Saddam Hussein demanded Euros for his oil. His arrogance was a threat to the dollar; his lack of any military might was never a threat. At the first cabinet meeting with the new administration in 2001, as reported by Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, the major topic was how we would get rid of Saddam Hussein - though there was no evidence whatsoever he posed a threat to us. This deep concern for Saddam Hussein surprised and shocked O'Neill.

It now is common knowledge that the immediate reaction of the administration after 9/11 revolved around how they could connect Saddam Hussein to the attacks, to justify an invasion and overthrow of his government. Even with no evidence of any connection to 9/11, or evidence of weapons of mass destruction, public and congressional support was generated through distortions and flat out misrepresentation of the facts to justify overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

There was no public talk of removing Saddam Hussein because of his attack on the integrity of the dollar as a reserve currency by selling oil in Euros. Many believe this was the real reason for our obsession with Iraq. I doubt it was the only reason, but it may well have played a significant role in our motivation to wage war. Within a very short period after the military victory, all Iraqi oil sales were carried out in dollars. The Euro was abandoned."

Although Ron Paul's view is more nuanced than Starikov (Paul doesn't think it was the only factor), he claims that many share the same view as Starikov.
Our point is to show that some US politicians have a view close to Starikov on this.

Causes?

Note also that arguing (like many politicians and journalists) as if morality was the sole factor when deciding for an intervention is absurd (see Chomsky, but also realists like Mearscheimer for example).

There are clearly different factors when deciding for an intervention, and one would be very naive to believe that economic factors (eg oil and gas) have little importance.

Finally, the will of the BRICS to change the world financial system has been a source of tension between Russia and the US for some time.

APPENDIX C: The Prokopenko quote

The second quote is described in the Guardian as "even more outlandish".

The quote

"Recent scientific studies have shown that females will soon be able to take the male role in reproduction, with no external interference. The first cases of self-fertilisation have already been registered. Biologists say that without men, women will not die out immediately, but will instead slowly change their form, in a reverse process of evolution(...).".

Comments

From a recent BBC article (33): "Ten years ago, Japanese researchers unveiled a mouse that had two mothers but no father (...) Should several female komodo dragons wash up on a virgin island, they'll be able produce males and kick start a brand new colony. Likewise, parthenogenesis in sharks came to light after several incidents in which lone females kept in aquariums inexplicably fell pregnant". The BBC article speculates that the same could apply to humans, but that it wouldn't be a good idea because of the lack of genetic diversity it would generate in future generations.

Reference:

The Guardian mocks Prokopenko for his lack of "external reference", when a simple google search would have found the BBC article.

An innocent error?  

Furthermore, the Guardian totally transforms Prokopenko's quote, saying mockingly that "women have evolved to be capable of reproducing without the need of sperm". Prokopenko doesn't say that at all, he says "the first cases of self-fertilisation have already been registred": he is not talking about humans nor is he saying it has occured by evolution (it has happened in the laboratory). Besides, Prokopenko saying "females will soon be able to take the male role in reproduction" clearly implies that it hasn't happened (and Prokopenko refers to other animals, not humans).

The Guardian concludes with patronising comments about Russian people: distortion of facts and demonisation of Russians is the recipe for many of its articles.

(1) http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/14/hitler-was-an-anglo-american-stooge-the-tall-tales-in-a-moscow-bookshop
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polls_about_9/11_conspiracy_theories
(3) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14572054
(4) http://archives-lepost.huffingtonpost.fr/article/2011/05/18/2498419_dsk-le-sondage-qui-fout-la-trouille.html
(5) https://yougov.co.uk/news/2013/09/17/38-brits-princess-dianas-death-was-not-accident/
(6) http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2013/04/conspiracy-theory-poll-results-.html
(7) http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/america-siding-with-terrorists-like-alnusra-its-not-a-conspiracy-theory-10319370.html
(8) As far as we understand he has, unlike others, become much more sceptical now.
(9) http://www.moscowbooks.ru/catalog/bestsellers.asp
(10) http://pro-books.ru/raiting/nehud
(11) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/the-top-9-glenn-beck-cons_b_3361097.html
(12) http://www.cnsnews.com/blog/michael-w-chapman/mark-levin-obama-building-iranian-islamo-nazi-caliphate
 (13) http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/06/29/glenn-beck-the-publishing-industrys-biggest-hope/
In the Guardian article a bookseller says he's not sure that Russians read more conspiracies than Americans, but the Guardian dismisses him as "playing down the influence of these books"
(14) The conversation was leaked on 6 March. It can be found on youtube.
(15) Both Ashton and Paet went to Kiev to support the protest.
(16) Some media at first didn't report the leaked conversation. When they finally reported it (possibly because of its large spread on social media), they mocked it.
(17) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-31359021
(18) http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/10/us-ukraine-killings-probe-special-report-idUSKCN0HZ0UH20141010
(19) http://uottawa.academia.edu/IvanKatchanovski
(20) The Postol quote is in relation to his blogs on Syria. His blogs on MH17 have also been criticised by professionals: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/expert-criticizes-allegations-of-russian-mh17-manipulation-a-1037125.html
(21) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-32695098
(22) https://consortiumnews.com/2015/07/22/obama-should-release-mh-17-intel
(23) http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/flight-mh370-wreckage-the-14-conspiracy-theories-that-could-explain-where-the-plane-is--and-what-happened-to-it-10425327.html
(24) http://www.levada.ru/07-02-2014/uznavaemost-oppozitsionnykh-politikov
(25) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-32705610
(26) http://dgibbs.faculty.arizona.edu/brzezinski_interview
(27) http://www.sott.net/article/298259-The-Americans-who-funded-Hitler-Nazis-German-economic-miracle-and-World-War-II
(28) http://www.chevenement.fr/1914-2014
(29) For example http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=3875
(30) http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar
(31) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/georgia/6247620/EU-blames-Georgia-for-starting-war-with-Russia.html
(32) https://www.lewrockwell.com/2006/02/ron-paul/why-the-us-hates-iraq-iran-and-venezuela/
(33) http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140530-do-we-need-sex-to-reproduce

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 #29
World Affairs
www.worldaffairsjournal.org
15 February 2013
Preparing for Russia's Upcoming Collapse
By Alexander J. Motyl
ALEXANDER J. MOTYL is professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark, as well as a writer and painter.

A just-published report by Russia's premier political analyst, Lilia Shevtsova, has important implications for the post-Soviet states in general and Ukraine in particular. Titled "Russia XXI: The Logic of Suicide and Rebirth," the report was released by the Moscow Carnegie Center in January 2013. Shevtsova, who together with democratic reformer Grigory Yavlinsky shares the distinction of having been born and raised in the West Ukrainian city of Lviv, chairs the center's Russian Domestic Politics and Political Institutions Program and is the author of, among many other books, Putin's Russia and Russia-Lost in Transition. When Shevtsova speaks, Western policymakers and academics listen-and post-Soviet dictators should listen.

The "Russia XXI" report has good news for democrats and well-wishers of Russia: Vladimir Putin's days as Russia's dictator are numbered. According to Shevtsova, "The Russian system is beginning to decay. It cannot sustain the crumbling status quo, nor can it be certain of finding a new incarnation for itself. The only real questions are what stage of decay the system is in, whether the agony of its demise has already started, and, if so, how long it will last. To be sure, the system still has some resources, if not to revive itself, then to draw out its death, and that survival instinct could take a nasty, even bloody, form."

That last sentence suggests that the demise of Putin's fascistoid regime could take on nasty forms with profoundly deleterious consequences for Russia and Russians:

"The system no longer has adequate resources to manage society through means of mass coercion and force; the resources required for that are being quickly depleted. By opting for harsher management instruments, the regime will significantly truncate its own support base. By suppressing the relatively moderate opposition, which is trying to express itself openly and constitutionally, and by rejecting constitutional rights and freedoms, the Kremlin itself will breed a radical and destructive opposition that will act clandestinely and opt for violent methods. It is the Kremlin that is shoving these differences of opinion and opposing viewpoints into a revolutionary niche.

"In its attack on pluralism, the regime is not only radicalizing the conflict and accelerating the political cycle, it is also reducing the chances of reaching an agreement between the opposition and a part of the ruling elite. As it tries to shift responsibility for the use of force to all of the elite, the Kremlin impairs the chances for the formation of a pragmatic wing ready for a peaceful exit from the Russian system.

"No less serious is the fact that the current ruling elite, feeling that is has been cornered and apparently beginning to understand the nature of the challenges, has started to consciously pursue a policy that will deepen the degradation of society, preserve its atomization, and provoke ethnic and social hatreds. This is the goal of the Kremlin's propaganda and policy: to prevent society's consolidation against the authorities and to provoke conflicts and tensions that make the authorities the arbitrator. If this policy is successful, Russia is doomed."

In order to forestall such a dire outcome, says Shevtsova, it is imperative for the democratic opposition to get its act together as soon as possible:

"The agenda for the upcoming political season contains a few objectives. One of them is consolidating the opposition and formulating an agenda that is responsive to the challenges posed by a more repressive regime. Another objective is integrating political and socioeconomic demands. Yet another is uniting all of the opposition factions and the moderates within the system ready for change under the banner of universal democratic demands and the peaceful transformation of the system.

"The fast-paced events of the day and the degradation of the system may call for some ad hoc changes to the agenda, but one objective remains paramount under any circumstances: the pledge by all participants in the political process to renounce personalized power and to step down from positions of power in case of electoral defeat. This has never happened in Russian history. If Russia finally manages to do it, it will have reached its "end of history" and the beginning of a new one."

Note that Shevtsova's analysis could be applied, word for word, to Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and a number of other dysfunctional post-Soviet authoritarian regimes. Just as these regimes emerged from similar political and economic circumstances that may loosely be termed the "Soviet and post-Soviet legacy," so, too, these regimes are likely to break down, collapse, or crack up for the same reasons, the primary one being their systemic unsustainability. Moreover, just as these regimes emerged pretty much at the same time, so, too, they are likely to vanish at the same time. Indeed, one can easily imagine that the collapse of any one of them-and especially of Putin's regime-will immediately have spillover effects in the others, producing a chain reaction of regime breakdowns similar to the collapse of communism that swept East Central Europe in the course of six months in 1989. Domino theory redux, anyone?

As Shevtsova warns us, Russia's collapse could be peaceful and lead to democratic consolidation or it could be bloody and spell Russia's doom. Exactly the same outcomes face post-Yanukovych Ukraine, post-Lukashenko Belarus, and post-Nazarbayev Kazakhstan. It is conceivable that we'll witness, within the next five or so years, a wave of democratic transitions in the entire post-Soviet space or a wave of bloody breakdowns. The former scenario would be wonderful, but, as Shevtsova says, it can happen if and only if the democrats prepare for it accordingly. The latter scenario-breakdown-would be a disaster for everyone concerned. Its consequences-instability, economic collapse, refugees, bloodshed-would definitely spill over into East Central Europe and, despite the iron curtain set up by the Schengen-zone countries, into the core of the European Union as well. Smart Western policymakers might consider asking themselves whether they're doing enough to prevent that doomsday scenario from happening. The wrong way to proceed is to try to prop up doomed regimes, even if they export gas. The right way is to start working with the democratic oppositions in preparation for the day the dictators disappear.

It's too late for the regimes in Russia, Belarus, and, probably, Kazakhstan to change: they've been around for too long and they're too entrenched. It may not be too late for the significantly younger and less entrenched Yanukovych regime to try to change its spots and avoid an ignominious end. All Yanukovych need do is free Yulia Tymoshenko and Yuri Lutsenko, sell his palatial estates outside Kyiv, tell his son Sasha to go back to dentistry, fire the thuggish Minister of Education Dmitri Tabachnik, and retire before the 2015 presidential elections. Oh, and read Shevtsova's excellent report now, when he could learn a thing or two about survival-and not several years from now, when he's in the slammer or on the lam.

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 #30
Al Jazeera
www.aljazeera.com
Ukraine: Going underground to escape the conflict
Short on funds and wary of looters, many are sheltering in basements in the warzone - and paying an emotional price.
By Filip Warwick
[Photos here http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/08/ukraine-underground-escape-conflict-150823073216323.html]

Donetsk, Ukraine - On the front lines of war-ravaged eastern Ukraine, Svetlana Alexandrovna, 64, has spent the last 12 months sheltering in the basement of her home on the outskirts of Donetsk.

Life is tough underground with poor ventilation, and the constant artillery shelling above is nerve-wracking. But with not enough money to start a new life elsewhere, Alexandrovna cannot leave her house, and she said she wouldn't move even if she could.

"This is my little heaven on Earth," she told Al Jazeera.

The government has offered alternate accommodation in Donetsk's city centre for people such as Alexandrovna, and her youngest daughter lives in relative safety there. But her eldest child has remained also to live down below. Both are fearful of their home being looted if they left.

"Near the front line, people roam around abandoned properties, buildings looking to loot goods to sell. Unemployment is high, food is very expensive," Alexandrovna said.

The house of a neighbour was looted a day after that family left - the front door kicked-in, Alexandrovna recalled. She said locals were responsible; they know who is in or out of town.

But there's a price to pay for those who have remained in the conflict area to protect their property.

When the fighting started last year, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) recognised the need to send psychologists to provide mental health support for the traumatised population.

Psychologist Tatiana Nalesiova has worked in the region for the past 10 months.

Nalesiova explained that people need help to process their emotions, and mental trauma in a warzone is normal given the abnormal circumstances of their daily lives.

When MSF came to visit his basement shelter, Sergei Petrovich asked for psychological help for his wife.

Petrovich has lived underground with his wife and daughter for the past seven months and shares the basement with eight other families.

There are locals who believe they can deal physically as well as emotionally with the constant shelling in this part of the city, Petrovich said.

But, "it's not about being a tough man or a tough women, it's about getting professional help", he said.

Petrovich's wife has suffered psychological trauma because of the constant shelling. "She's been unable to sleep the last couple of months... She is suffering from insomnia," he said.

The situation has also changed children living underground, Petrovich said. "My daughter was once full of life. Now she stays indoors most of the time and goes to the toilet more often than before."

MSF's Nalesiova said the organisation has "observed how living conditions and the current situation have affected children living in basements".

The longer the children stay there, the probability of long term mental issues increases, Nalesiova said, adding often parents do not realise their child's behavioural patterns are linked explicitly to the conflict environment.

Local volunteer Olga Kosse - who works for the grassroots NGO Responsible Citizens - said many people here yearn for a return to a life that is now part of their past.

"I think the first step for these people is psychological help so they can accept that the war has closed a chapter of their lives, and a new one has started since the conflict began," Kosse said.

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 #31
AFP
August 26, 2015
EU-Russia ties at new low ahead of Ukraine talks
By Alix Rijckaert

Ties between the EU and Russia remain at their lowest ebb over the conflict in Ukraine, ahead of a series of key talks including a visit by President Petro Poroshenko to Brussels on Thursday.

Renewed fighting in eastern Ukraine between pro-Moscow rebels and Kiev's government forces has made a mockery of a February ceasefire, while the European Union has renewed tough sanctions against Russia.

Poroshenko is set to call for renewed support from the European Union when he travels to Brussels, days after meeting German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande in Berlin.

Poroshenko will meet European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker and European Council President Donald Tusk for talks centering on the "implementation of the Minsk agreement" that led to the ceasefire, the Commission said last week.

At the same time, the EU is due to restart stalled three-way talks with Kiev and Moscow on Russian gas supplies to Ukraine, and on a landmark EU-Ukraine free-trade deal accord that Moscow says will harm its economy.

"These are the only two dossiers that the Russians agree to discuss with the EU," said Pierre Vimont, former secretary-general of the EU diplomatic service and now researcher for the Carnegie Institute.

"These talks are never easy. The Russians are difficult, and for their part the Ukrainians stick to their ground too."

The EU's condemnation on Tuesday of a jail sentence handed down by a Russian court to Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov for "terrorism" added to the bad blood ahead of the meetings.

Gas war?

The EU wants at all costs to avoid a "gas war" with Russia as winter looms, with any stand-off threatening supplies to Europe, around half of which pass through Ukraine.
Experts say a deal is needed by October to avoid shortages.

Maros Sefcovic, the EU's Vice President in charge of Energy Union, will on the sidelines of a western Balkans summit in Vienna on Thursday relaunch talks with the Ukrainian side, which has not been supplied by Russian giant Gazprom for several months.

A meeting with Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak is also scheduled for the start of September.

The trade talks are less urgent but cover highly sensitive ground, as the trade deal was originally the key part of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement that then-president Viktor Yanukovych backed out of signing in November 2013.

That led to the pro-EU Maidan movement which toppled him, and which was followed by Russia's annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and the fighting in eastern Ukraine which has claimed 6,800 lives.

EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstroem is due to bring the relevant parties in the trade talks together in Brussels on September 7.

"But trade negotiations are difficult, the Russians have taken a stand on principle, and we have never been able to go into the details and negotiate on concrete matters," Vimont said.

Some Kiev politicians accuse Moscow of planning a new rebel offensive that could rattle the Ukrainian leadership enough to reverse its plans to implement the landmark trade treaty with the European Union at the start of next year.

Russia has already threatened to expand its list of banned Ukrainian food imports should the agreement go into effect.

Yet Poroshenko has said that he and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker have agreed by telephone that the "free trade zone should be strengthened as of January 1."
The sanctions that the EU imposed after Crimea were renewed in July, and still poison relations with Moscow.

Putin -- who persistently denies any Kremlin involvement in the crisis and calls Russian soldiers discovered in the war zone "volunteers" -- was notably omitted from the round of meetings between Poroshenko, Hollande and Merkel, despite having been instrumental in arranging the Minsk ceasefire.

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 #32
Forbes.com
August 25, 2015
Left Wing Economic Views Are Alive And Well In Ukraine
By Mark Adomanis
[Chart here http://www.forbes.com/sites/markadomanis/2015/08/25/left-wing-economic-views-are-alive-and-well-in-ukraine/]

Over the past year and a half, the International Republican Institute (IRI) has done positively invaluable work tracking public opinion in Ukraine. I'm not aware of any organization that has commissioned a wider and more in-depth series of polls, polls that have helped quantify some dramatic shifts in Ukrainian attitudes towards, Europe, Russia, NATO, and other topics. You don't have to agree with the IRI's institutional views to understand how incredibly important it is to get real data about Ukrainian opinion.

From my perspective, however, the IRI's latest poll might very well be the most interesting yet published. Why? Because it shows that, beneath the surface of growing public support for "European integration," there are some severe and totally unresolved tensions between the requirements of that process and what Ukrainians actually think.

As perhaps the most glaring example, consider Ukrainian attitudes towards privatization. Among experts and regional analysts, privatization is almost universally acknowledged to be a cornerstone of the integration process and as something that Ukraine desperately needs to do. Indeed, in the West privatization genuinely isn't an issue: you need to go out to the extreme fringes of the left (like the soon to be leader of the labor party Jeremy Corbyn) to find anyone who argues that the state should own more than a small handful of companies. Whether you're left right or center, almost everyone in the US and Europe agrees that it's just a really bad idea for the state to actively run companies.

The problem is that the Ukrainian public hasn't gotten that memo. When asked what they want to happen to Ukraine's four thousand state-owned enterprises, here's what Ukrainians said:

Does that look to you like a country that is ready to embrace liberalizing shock-therapy? Roughly half of the population doesn't want there to be any liberalization at all! They want the state to continue owning and running a significant chunk of the economy.

Please note that I am not personally supporting or defending this point of view. Speaking personally, it seems clear to me that the state is not a particularly effective steward of commercial enterprises. But I don't represent the median Ukrainian voter, and it seems worth pointing out that most Ukrainians do not support the supposedly "obvious" choice of privatization.

Now perhaps privatization will get rammed through anyway. The 1990's provide a very clear  historical precedent. Back then, public opinion polls also showed that privatization was broadly unpopular. But the authorities were unmoved, said "there is no choice," and implemented mass privatizations anyway despite a huge public outcry. If you consider the enormous damage that an analogous process of privatizations did to public perceptions of democracy in Russia, you might be a bit wary about just where Ukraine will head if the government decides to ignore public opinion and privatize anyway.

In some important ways Ukraine appears to be genuinely coalescing around broadly pro-Western positions. Public support for entering the Russia-led Customs Union, which as recently as September 2012 was as high as 42%, has withered down to a mere 14%. But while public support for the idea of "Europe" is clearly growing, support for the actual policies that would need to be enacted as part of an EU integration process has not.

Perhaps that will change. Maybe a year from now another IRI poll will show that Ukrainians have turned into huge fans of privatization. But as things stand there is surprisingly little enthusiasm for many of the "inevitable" economic reforms that Ukraine needs to make.

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 #33
Transitions Online/Slon.ru
www.tol.org
August 20, 2015
The Right Sector Phenomenon: Between Patriotism and Banditry
Nationalist militias are the government side's best fighters in the Donbas war. On the home front, they could also become its greatest liability. From Slon.
by Taras Bogdan
Taras Bogdan is a Ukrainian political consultant.

For the last 20 years of independence Ukrainians have witnessed many criminal shootouts, killings, bombings, and unsolved crimes. It seems that nothing can surprise them anymore. But more and more new chapters keep being added to the story.
 
Western Ukraine is an example of this. Mukacheve and the whole region of western Ukraine these days is literally "a state within a state" with its own laws, where gang clashes can be compared to the Wild West era.
 
Everyone has heard stories about smuggling in western Ukraine, involving local police and town halls as well as major criminals. But these days, volunteer battalions are taking the stage. Their role deserves special attention.
 
Right Sector is an organization listed as extremist in Russia. However, it hadn't been involved in any major criminal incident until last spring. [TOL editor's note: Oleksandr Muzychko, a Right Sector leader in western Ukraine, died in a shootout with police in March 2014.]
 
Originally Right Sector seemed to be a closed community of extreme nationalists. For a long time there wasn't enough information about "those rightists." That's why they had the reputation which Russian media created for them, and why nobody really knew what exactly Right Sector was before the war in Donbas started. There were many rumors. Some said they were pro-American puppets controlled by former Ukrainian security service head Valentyn Nalyvaichenko. Others argued that Right Sector was the personal army of the oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky. There were even theories that the group was created by Russia's security service to defame the Ukrainian "Revolution of Dignity."
 
When the war in eastern Ukraine broke out, the little-known Right Sector came into the open and became a legitimate political organization by taking part in the elections. On the front line they proved themselves as one of the bravest military units. Ukrainian soldiers and officers have repeatedly stressed that Right Sector's impact on the fighting was crucial.
 
Right Sector figures eventually became frequent guests on TV as experts on the war. Their part in the storming of Avdiivka and Krasnohorivka together with Ukrainian regular forces and the battle for the Donetsk airport gave Right Sector fighters the status of heroes.
 
The group's leader, Dmytro Yarosh, has used the support of the Ukrainian media and scorn from Russia, where he faces prosecution for extremism, to present himself as a humble and intelligent fighter for Ukraine's future. In real life he doesn't match the image of the angry nationalist ghoul drawn by Russian television.
 
The personality of the group's leader raises even more questions. Dmytro Yarosh's name was not widely known before the Euromaidan protests. Despite the fact that Right Sector has managed to establish a good relationship with the Ukrainian army, it's always had its own opinion on what the Ukrainian government did. The organization has repeatedly expressed skepticism over Kyiv's diplomatic moves in the Donbas conflict, sometimes agreeing only with amendments. For instance, on 13 February, two days after the second Minsk agreement, Yarosh announced that the Right Sector volunteer corps had the right not to obey orders by the Ukrainian armed forces and would use its sole discretion to decide whether to continue fighting. Two days later he said the organization would adhere to the truce, even though they didn't believe in it and were willing to continue the fight to liberate Ukrainian territory.
 
Such self-sufficiency and self-confidence on the part of heavily armed volunteer military units got on the government's nerves, especially when Right Sector turned its ire on that government. The volunteer battalions were angry at the fact that they were giving up their lives for Ukraine's integrity in the war zone, while corruption in Kyiv got worse than during the Yanukovych era. Many of the volunteer fighters took part in the Euromaidan protest, while regular soldiers on the front line survive mostly thanks to these units and those demobilized don't receive financial compensation promised by the state. The government's reluctance to change anything called up righteous anger. This anger makes people think of another Maidan revolution, even though they know that any coup during the war will kill Ukraine as a state.
 
That's why during the Mukacheve events Yarosh had negotiate with the police. He was trying to restrain the violence. It was even harder since the dialogue with the state authorities had a negative impact on his own credibility within Right Sector. Moreover, the part of society that is disgusted by corruption in the country shows its sympathy to the volunteer battalions and pushes them to take radical moves, seeing them as modern Robin Hoods.
 
Yarosh appears to have gotten into serious trouble. He is probably no longer in control of his organization, which has recently become quite large and less uniform. Or perhaps the temptation to cash in on the war has infected even the strongest patriots.
 
The truth is somewhere in between. Yarosh was probably not privy to the details of the negotiations between Right Sector in western Ukraine and the parliamentarian Mykhailo Lanyo. And it's even more doubtful that he was the one to approve the shootout in this peaceful town.
 
THE RIGHT SECTOR BRAND
 
More and more, Ukrainian observers are using the word "franchise" in relation to the Mukacheve incident. Right Sector has a chance to become a brand and to use that status to perform any outrage in the rear with the excuse that it's being done for the benefit of Ukraine. Its status as a member of the ATO (Anti-Terrorist Operation), fighting to defend Ukraine's integrity, gives the group immunity from prosecution, including possible criminal investigations.
 
Thus during the fighting in Mukacheve Right Sector members who hid in the forests called their conflict with Lanyo a consequence of their fight against state banditry. People familiar with the situation in the region say the parliamentarian and Right Sector failed to agree on divvying up the smuggling trade. More and more suggestions are heard that local Right Sector members are under the protection of the parliamentary deputy for the area, Viktor Baloha, who in turn has tense relations with Lanyo. Several interviews with Baloha on the Mukacheve events, and his role of intermediary between the authorities and Right Sector members hidden in the forest, make his involvement in the situation even more obvious.
 
It doesn't even matter who is right. It's more important that there are clashes in completely peaceful towns, located thousands of kilometers from the front line. Right Sector representatives claim they only use trophy weapons, but it's not clear if this complies with Ukrainian law on possessing firearms. Especially when you consider that the western Ukrainian Right Sector battalion uses large-caliber arms and anti-tank weapons.
 
President Petro Poroshenko had to react to Right Sector's moves. During a meeting with Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council he said, "Right Sector slanders Ukraine's true patriots. There is no political force in the country that is allowed to have weaponry. No political organization should own criminal gangs."
 
Right Sector has its own vision of the use of weapons. Yarosh himself defended members' right to use guns as a necessity to protect themselves from bandits.
 
It's important to note that on 17 August 2014, Yarosh issued a decree to the group, ordering members not to bring weapons, ammunition, or explosives from the conflict zone. But recently he said it's acceptable for his militants to own guns they possessed before the ban was issued.
 
Right Sector's people are doing their best to preserve their honor in the Mukacheve story. Major Ukrainian cities saw marches to support them. However, only volunteers themselves and their supporters attended. An average march in a major city gathered no more than a hundred people.
 
Numerous press secretaries of the organization said the reserve battalions are ready to support their fellow volunteers. For instance, Right Sector representative Dmitry Savchenko said the 5th Right Sector battalion was moving from Donetsk airport towards Kyiv to participate in a protest at the Presidential Administration building. Even though the rumor was proved false, the situation remains tense.
 
There was a reaction in a completely different direction as well. Forty fighters from the 7th Right Sector battalion along with their commander, Ruslan Kamchala, decided to join the Azov battalion, a former volunteer force that is now a part of the National Guard. In a comment on the decision, Kamchala said, "During the time we've been fighting, Right Sector has become corrupt and gone beyond the law. That's why we all decided to leave. I left Right Sector a long time ago, but didn't announce it officially. Now we're going to join the official military unit but will stay on the same positions."
 
And the more the conflict spreads, the more the difference between Right Sector on the front line and Right Sector in the rear can be seen.
 
THE SECOND FRONT
 
The situation in Mukacheve has exposed a number of problems in the country, and the main one is the threat on the domestic front. In the aftermath of the shootout in the west, shelling of Ukrainian army positions picked up on the eastern front. Later the mayor of Mukacheve was hailed by separatists' representatives for establishing a Transcarpathian People's Republic. Both sides of the conflict, President Poroshenko and Dmytro Yarosh, are in hot water because of the situation.
 
However, the authorities are still doing too little for volunteer soldiers who come back from the conflict zone feeling the need for change. The state's inability to cope with corruption makes it even worse as the volunteers are becoming angrier and sometimes turn into a headache for the authorities.
 
The volunteers themselves provoke the government as well. Serious criminal charges have been leveled at the former head of the Aidar volunteer battalion, Serhiy Melnychuk, now a member of parliament. There's also the story of the Tornado battalion which literally established its own rules on the territory they were supposed to protect.
 
Now it's the turn of Right Sector. The problem that Poroshenko and his team face is that any attempt to keep the volunteer battalions under control is taken by patriots as an outrage against brave nationalists and a sop to the Kremlin's interests, smuggling oligarchs and so on. Society echoes these views.
 
It's hard to understand which point of view is closer to reality. The sides have completely opposite opinions - the ineffective state vs. the patriots who are ready to fight it.
 
But this fight may cost a lot. And the price may be the existence of Ukraine itself.
 
This article originally appeared on the Russian news website Slon on 15 July. Tranlated by Evgeny Deulin.

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 #34
Kyiv Post
August 20, 2015
Editorial
Khaki lies

When the Ukrainian military reported on Aug. 10 that it had not only repelled Russian-separatist forces near the town of Starohnativka in Donetsk Oblast, but advanced to take control of territory held by separatists, many in Ukraine rejoiced.

This, after all, was supposedly the first time Ukraine had regained control of any of its territory since February's failed Minsk II accords were signed.

But it wasn't true.

According to a Vice News report of Aug. 17, soldiers on both sides of the front line said that while there had been a battle and that Ukraine had moved forward, the troops had withdrawn again and now the lines are back in the same places that they were before the battle.

But we shouldn't be too surprised if the Ukrainian military doesn't always tell the whole truth. Deception is a powerful weapon in the arsenal of war, and has been used since the first days of armed conflict.

"In war, practice dissimulation, and you will succeed... All warfare is based on deception," the great Chinese general Sun Tzu wrote in the late sixth century B.C. in his book "The Art of War"- a text that is studied in military colleges to this day.

And 75 years ago, as the Royal Air Force battled the Luftwaffe over the skies of southern Britain, the British explained the uncanny ability of their pilots to zero in on attacking German planes as being due to their having keen night vision from eating carrots. That jolly British lie was told to conceal from the Germans the effectiveness of the British radar air defense system. Some people still believe it.

The motive for the military telling a lie is the important thing: A good general lies to save his country, while a bad general lies to save his own skin. If Ukrainian generals are lying not to deceive the enemy, but to cover up for their own incompetence, then there is no military benefit. Indeed, such lies will only harm the war effort by eroding the trust of the media and larger public as well as the soldiers' confidence in their own leadership.

The Ukrainian military lied about the fall of Donetsk airport and Debaltseve last winter. They lied about the "taking of ground" at Starohnativka. In each case, the military lied to deceive the public and not the enemy, who knew the true state of affairs.

When Sun Tzu made his comment about all warfare being based on deception, it wasn't this kind of deception he had in mind. Ukraine's generals would do well to remember it.

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#35
UNIAN (Kyiv)
August 26, 2015
Rada investigative commission: About 1,000 soldiers killed in Ilovaisk battle

The death toll of Ukrainian military and law enforcement personnel killed in action in the battle near the town of Ilovaisk in Donetsk region last year may amount to 1,000 people, Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada's interim investigative commission Andriy Senchenko said at a conference on Wednesday, Ukrainian news Web portal OstroV has reported.

"To honestly answer the question about the losses, we should find answers to the following questions in the context of each force structure, which took part in those events: KIA's in all episodes, DOW's in hospital, [deaths] from wounds received in all events in Ilovaisk, and MIA's. Our commission could only indirectly estimate the death toll in all episodes in Ilovaisk. The number is nearing 1,000 men in total," he said.

According to Senchenko, the cause behind the rough estimates of the losses is military authorities' unwillingness to facilitate the investigation.

"When Ilovaisk was surrounded by about 3,500-3,600 Russian regular military units, reinforced by 500 militants, a squadron and a tactical group of the 51st [Ukrainian] brigade were sent to unblock the siege of Ilovaisk, and they were sent to fight to death," he said.

As UNIAN reported earlier, according to official data, 366 troops were killed, while another 429 were wounded.

At the same time, according to MP from the Popular Front Party Anton Herashchenko, more than 1,000 Ukrainian soldiers were killed in the so-called Ilovaisk pocket in Donetsk region.

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 #36
DPR claims 30 truce violations by Ukrainian army, says large calibers being used

DONETSK. Aug 26 (Interfax) - The Defense Ministry of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) has observed 30 incidents of shelling from the Ukrainian side over the past day, a ministry representative said on Wednesday.

"The Ukrainian army has committed 30 ceasefire violations over the past day. Some 113 82mm and 120mm mines, 85 152mm artillery shells and 15 tank projectiles were fired on the territory of the republic," the Donetsk news agency has cited him as saying.

Donetsk (the Petrovskyi district and the airport terminal), Telmanove, Zhabycheve, Vasylivka, Oktyabrskyi, Nova Marivka, Bila Kamyanka, Spartak and Zaichenko came under attack.

The DPR Defense Ministry reported fire from Pisky, Vodyane, Starohnativka, Opytne, Hranitne, Avdiivka, Kominternove and Novoselivka.

Eduard Basurin, senior official of the DPR Defense Ministry, said DPR intelligence continued to observe the movement of Ukrainian troops and weapons towards the contact line.

"A group of up to 4,000 hostiles, including two armor battalions with up to 60 tanks, has arrived in Chasiv Yar, and howitzers, D-30 guns and Grad rocket launchers have been moved to Verkhnotoretske. Six armored personnel carriers, five infantry combat vehicles and five tank trucks came from Zhelanne to Novoselivka-1, while Buk M1 air defense systems were deployed to Mykolaivka," he said.

Artillery of the 72nd separate mechanized brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces was seen moving three to five kilometers away from the contact line two days ago, Basurin said. The brigade is armed with weapons outlawed by the Minsk agreements, namely 152mm howitzers and 120mm mortars.

"Already last night intense fire conducted from those positions hit the Donetsk Petrovskyi district, Novalaspa and Bila Kamyanka. Luckily, civilian casualties were avoided. Several homes were destroyed," he said.

In turn, the Ukrainian army operation press center alleged on Wednesday that 92 attacks of the militia on Ukrainian army positions, including nine by use of artillery, 37 by use of mortars and 19 by use of grenade launchers.

The militia fired 120mm mortars on a Ukrainian stronghold in Pisky and twice attacked Opytne, while army positions in Avdiivka came under attack from 122mm artillery, the press center wrote on Facebook.

The militia's 152mm artillery and grenade launchers shelled Ukrainian defense lines in Troitske and 122mm artillery attacked Maryinka at about 9 p.m., it said, adding that artillery hit army positions in Druha Novoselivka in the evening. The militia's armored personnel carriers attacked army positions in Opytne and Krasnohorivka at about midnight.

The Ukrainian army observed three attacks on its positions by the militia's mortars in Starohnativka at around 7 p.m. and a clash near Novotroitske at 7:50 p.m.

Stanytsia Luhanska found itself in the epicenter of the confrontations in the Luhansk region in the evening. Ukrainian positions came under several attacks from the militia's grenade launchers, mortars and large-caliber machine guns.

The Luhansk region military-civilian administration said that a low-pressure gas pipeline and a power line were damaged in the shelling of Stanytsia Luhanska.

The gas pipeline was repaired by the morning, the administration wrote on Facebook.

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#37
Russia's 37th Donbas aid convoy to include textbooks, foodstuffs

MOSCOW, August 24. /TASS/. Russia's Emergencies Ministry said on Monday it has started preparing the 37th humanitarian aid convoy for Donbas that will deliver textbooks for the new school year in war-torn region in Ukraine's south-east.

On Monday morning, some of the vehicles that will be part of the next convoy left the Noginsk rescue center, in the Moscow region, and are heading to the Rostov region, in southern Russia, a spokesperson for the Emergencies Ministry told TASS.

The humanitarian aid convoy "will consist of more than 40 trucks that carry around 700 tons of textbooks provided by Russia's Ministry of Education for the pupils and students of Donbas," the spokesperson said.

The vehicles from other Russian regions will join the trucks from Noginsk in the Donskoy rescue center of the Russian Emergencies Ministry, in the Rostov region, the ministry said.

"The next convoy of the Emergencies Ministry is due to deliver more than 1,200 tons of humanitarian cargos. Besides the textbooks and furniture for the preschool facilities of Donbas, the cargo will include over 500 tons of foodstuffs - grains, flour, tea and canned goods," the ministry said.

Since mid-August last year, a total of 36 convoys of Russia's Emergencies Ministry have delivered more than 44,000 tons of humanitarian cargos for the citizens of the self-proclaimed Luhansk and Donetsk regions.

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 #38
Huffington Post
August 25, 2015
Ukraine: The Consequences of Far Right World War II Revisionism
By Nikolas Kozloff
Nikolas Kozloff is a New York-based writer who conducted a research trip to Ukraine last year.

Beset with military conflict in the form of Russian-backed separatists, Ukraine has sought to cultivate crucial foreign and diplomatic support for its cause. To be sure, Kiev seeks tactical military advantage over its adversaries though a no less significant public relations war has also assumed key importance. Within the high stakes propaganda realm, proving one's moral purity and claims on victimhood has become absolutely essential, and Ukraine has spared no effort in pointing to Moscow's many historic crimes and depredations. Having previously suffered immeasurably under Russian rule, Ukraine sees the present conflict with separatists in the east as a logical extension of such earlier history.

But while Kiev's suspicions of Kremlin intentions are certainly understandable, Ukraine also risks falling into chauvinism and even far right historical revisionism in its drive to create a new national mythology. If left unchecked, such backward and retrograde impulses might even compromise Kiev's campaign to recruit foreign support within the current and highly charged political milieu.

Though numerically rather insignificant, the Ukrainian far right has played an influential role on the eastern front where many fighters have joined volunteer battalions. Enthralled by controversial iconography, some of these battalions even sport Nazi insignia harking back to the Second World War, when some Ukrainians collaborated with the Germans while fighting off the Soviets. Perhaps worst of all, mainstream politicians seem more intent on capitalizing or even embracing extreme nationalism rather than condemning such tendencies.

Poland and Inconvenient Truths

Ukraine's wartime record -- as well as the political right's efforts to airbrush history while overlooking inconvenient truths -- could complicate moves to foster key diplomatic ties. Take, for example, contentious historic relations between Ukraine and neighboring Poland. In 1941, when the Germans invaded western Ukraine, local anti-Soviet partisans associated with controversial Stepan Bandera pressed for an independent state. The following year, the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) created the UPA or Ukrainian Insurgent Army. In the name of fighting for independence, the UPA fought against Polish, Soviet and Nazi forces at different times.

Eager to avenge past Polish wrongs, the UPA carried out a series of massacres in 1943-44 in eastern Galicia and the disputed Volhynia or Volyn region in Nazi-occupied southeastern Poland [currently, Volhynia is located within the borders of western Ukraine]. Anticipating the creation of an independent Ukrainian state after the war and the implementation of a possible plebiscite, the UPA hoped to wipe the slate clean by carrying out ethnic cleansing. In an effort to drive out the Polish minority of Volhynia, the OUN and UPA killed tens of thousands of Poles in a brutal scorched earth campaign [the UPA also killed Jews and Soviet officers who had imposed collectivized agriculture]. Reportedly, the UPA massacred 60,000 Poles in Volhynia and up to 40,000 more in Eastern Galicia. Throughout the atrocities, Ukrainian partisans seized Polish lands and redistributed them to ethnic Ukrainians.

The casualties included men but also women, children and the elderly. In grisly fashion, the UPA hacked Polish victims to death and drowned others in local wells. At one point during the atrocities, the UPA wiped out a whopping 10,000 people in one day. Ukrainian brutality provoked fierce Polish countermeasures, with partisans of the anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet Home Army (AK) killing 20,000 Ukrainians. Today, there are still some Poles living in Western Ukraine but in very few numbers. Indeed, in the wake of World War II most Poles moved out of Ukraine while Ukrainians followed suit by departing Poland. In all, the violence displaced some 1.5 million people.

Burying the Hatchet?

On the surface at least, Poland seems prepared to bury the hatchet and forget about the Volhynia massacres. Like Ukraine, Warsaw has suffered at the hands of Moscow and is eager to make common cause with Kiev in its war with Russian-backed separatists. The political solidarity goes back even further, however: in 1989 Poles gained democracy and cheered two years later when Ukraine gained independence from the Soviet Union. Not surprisingly, Poles also supported Kiev's EuroMaidan movement of 2013-14 which toppled the unpopular, pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych.

During my own trip to Kiev last year, I saw throngs of Ukrainians lined up at the Polish Consulate to receive work visas. Indeed, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are already living and working in neighboring Poland, and the expat community has been growing steadily since the start of hostilities with rebel separatists. Reportedly, working class migrants are not so much fleeing the war itself but rather the economic fallout from military conflict. The new arrivals have taken up jobs which have been left by Poles who in turn have departed for Western Europe.

On the diplomatic front too, Poland has been one of Ukraine's most steadfast supporters within the European Union. Last year Prime Minister Donald Tusk of the center-right market-oriented Civic Platform remarked that NATO should increase its readiness in response to the Ukraine crisis. More recently, newly elected President Andrzej Duda has gone out of his way to back up Ukraine in its fight against Russia. Indeed, Duda has gone even farther than Tusk, pursuing an aggressive foreign policy which may pivot Poland away from the Brussels-Berlin axis while moving toward closer ties with Baltic nations and Ukraine to the east.

Persistence of Historic Wounds

Despite such outward embraces of friendship, deep historic frictions continue to fester. The Guardian of London remarks, "Relations between Ukrainians and Poles have not always been so cordial, and memories of massacres and forced deportations during and after the Second World War linger in some parts." Radio Free Europe adds that Warsaw and Kiev have no real political or economic disagreements, though history remains a key obstacle which could make reconciliation somewhat "tricky." To this day, Ukrainians refer to Volhynia as a "tragedy," while Poles call it a massacre. Poles meanwhile hold a somewhat idealistic view of their eastern borderlands or Kresy, which included Volhynia. Supposedly, the Kresy was historically comprised of quaint villages where ethnic minorities lived in harmony. This was disturbed, however, by "the axes and pitchforks" of Ukrainian nationalists.

Despite such painful memories, Poland has sought to come to terms with wartime crimes in an effort to build lasting ties with Ukraine. The Polish parliament, for example, has stopped short of labeling the UPA massacre of Poles as "genocide." Moreover, former Polish President Bronisław Komorowski tried to avoid confrontation with Kiev over the Volhynia massacres. Both countries should address Volhynia, he argued, but should not resort to recrimination. "We cannot and must not forget about it," Komorowski remarked. "However, it is not our intention to remember it against anyone; we should not remember it against our Ukrainian brothers." Historian Tomasz Nalecz, who also served as Komorowski's personal aide, meanwhile bent over backwards to understand the Ukrainian psyche. "We Poles must try to understand what conditions Ukrainian memories," he said, adding that unlike Poland, Ukraine failed to secure independence in the first half of the twentieth century.

Ukraine Fails to Reciprocate

Unfortunately, Ukraine hasn't exactly reciprocated or moved to ameliorate Polish grievances or concerns. Though former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma traveled to Volhynia to commemorate a memorial to ethnic Poles who had been murdered by the UPA, he refused to issue a formal apology for wartime massacres. Another Ukrainian President, Viktor Yushchenko, was little better: in 2010, he awarded wartime nationalist leader Stepan Bandera the title of "Hero of Ukraine." Critics charge that Yuschenko successor Viktor Yanukovych was little better and turned a blind eye to historic injustices.

Then, for good measure, a Ukrainian man smeared Komorowski with a broken egg when the Polish President visited Volhynia in 2013. The move coincided with the electoral rise of Svoboda or Freedom, a political party in Ukraine espousing nationalist views. The outfit, critics charged, supported xenophobic policies and helped to justify historic amnesia on the Volhynia massacres. Reportedly, Ukrainian public opinion at the time was split on the UPA. The problem, experts explain, is that Ukrainians have little knowledge of the Volhynia massacres since the issue was blocked out by post-war Soviet propaganda.

EuroMaidan to the Present

If anything, the recent EuroMaidan movement which toppled Yanukovych has only served to bring the far right out of the shadows. Though still rather numerically small, rightists played a visible role on Maidan square while brandishing red and black UPA flags. Just like before, mainstream politicians serve to legitimate the far right and most recently President Petro Poroshenko passed laws which would make it illegal to express "public contempt" against UPA veterans. Dozens of scholars on Ukraine protested the measures, remarking that the legislation would make it "a crime to question the legitimacy of an organization (UPA) that slaughtered tens of thousands of Poles in one of the most heinous acts of ethnic cleansing in the history of Ukraine."

Bolstered by such mainstream support, the far right seems to have become emboldened. On the eastern front, one volunteer unit fighting Russian-backed separatists calls itself the OUN Battalion. Needless to say, the Ukrainian Diaspora has been reportedly supporting rightist volunteer battalions whilst offering up historic wartime apologetics. From New York, the former head of the Ukrainian World Congress lambasted a critical historical piece appearing in Politico. "Journalists who take on history venture into delicate territory and are often prone to historical inaccuracy," writes Askold S. Lozynskyj. "Killing those representatives of the Polish regime responsible for the occupation of your homeland on your own land was a liberation struggle," he writes, adding for good measure that Ukraine should honor its veterans while safeguarding Poroshenko's "history laws."

The Ricochet Effect

Predictably, such antics have hardly helped Ukraine in the court of public opinion. The OSCE (or Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) has grown concerned about the Ukrainian far right. Recently, the group expressed alarm as local politicians declared they would set up a monument to Stepan Bandera in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. Moreover, if left unchecked Ukraine's failure to stand up to the far right could jeopardize or damage relations with Western European countries which are intent on doing business with an ostensibly modern partner.

Perversely, Ukraine might even wind up alienating one of its staunchest diplomatic partners. Though Poland has been Kiev's steadfast supporter, not everyone is so pleased with political developments across the border. Recently elected President Andrzej Duda is a hawk on foreign policy, but even he may lose patience with Kiev. Indeed, Duda has been very critical of Ukrainian politicians who portray the UPA as anti-Soviet liberators while glossing over massacres in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. Some observers remark that Duda's conservative nationalist party, the PiS or Law and Justice, is none too pleased with Ukraine's romantic obsession with its wartime past.

How extreme will politics have to get before the Ukrainian establishment stands up to the far right? If the political mainstream doesn't act soon, Kiev's relationships with key diplomatic partners and even Poland could be severely tarnished.

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#39
http://newcoldwar.org
August 24, 2015
Letter From Alexander Mercouris: 'Changing the government in Ukraine is the only way to save Ukraine'

The following letter was received by New Cold War.org from Alexander Mercouris, foreign affairs writer at Russia Insider. The letter elaborates further on his article published on August 25, 'In Aug 22 speech, Poroshenko dooms Ukraine to endless war'. We had offered to Alexander our views of the Committee for the Salvation of Ukraine of which he writes in his article. His letter is reprinted here with permission.-New Cold War.org editors
--

I do not think a popular uprising in Ukraine is round the corner.  I certainly do not believe that the Committee for National Salvation is remotely capable of leading such an uprising.  Someone less like a revolutionary leader than Azarov it would be hard to imagine.  Nor do I think that the Kremlin is seriously intending to impose the Committee for National Salvation on Ukraine, or that it sees it as some sort of government in waiting (the expression I used is "government in exile" - which is something different).

If you read my piece carefully you will see that the point I was making is a different one - that the Committee of National Salvation has been set up - undoubtedly with the Kremlin's support - in order to strengthen the Kremlin's hand when the moment comes for the Russians to broach the question of a reconstruction of the Ukrainian government as part of the negotiations that will take place once Ukraine has been defeated again.

In other words, it is purely a card in the Kremlin's diplomatic hand. It helps the Russians in diplomatic negotiations when this question is broached to point to a group of seasoned technocrats the EU has worked with in the past who are there waiting in the wings.

Once the question of a reconstruction of the government in Kiev is conceded, the Committee of National Salvation will no doubt be wound up even if it is possible - and even likely - that one or two of its members might be included in the sort of transitional government the Russians have in mind.

It goes without saying that what we would be looking at would be a purely transitional government whose role would be to sign a peace agreement with the Novorossians, agree the terms of a new constitution and administer proper elections as part of an overall peace settlement.  Once it had served its purpose, it would go.

Certainly, I don't think anyone in the Kremlin for a moment thinks of the Committee for National Salvation as a permanent future government, or as a regime that would replace the present one, or seriously imagines that it would be capable of ruling Ukraine for the long term, or entertains any idea of trying to impose it.

This I am sure is the Kremlin's strategy.  It is another matter whether it is practical and can succeed.

My own longstanding view is that the situation in Ukraine is so profoundly polarised that the kind of engineered solution the Kremlin is working towards - much like the similar solution the Kremlin is trying to engineer in Syria - is almost certainly unworkable.

In my piece I said that changing the government in Ukraine is the only way to save Ukraine if Ukraine is to be saved. My own view is that Ukraine is beyond saving, and after what has happened over the last two years I will shed no tears to see it go.

That is, however, a far more complex point which I will discuss fully and properly in a piece I have been intending to write about the Kremlin's Ukraine policy, which I have been planning for some time but which I have never got down to writing.

Anyway I hope this clarifies the position.
 

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 #40
www.foreignpolicy.com
August 25, 2015
Money Still Rules Ukraine
President Poroshenko talks big about reform - but he's missing what may be his only chance to break the power of the oligarchs.
BY TARAS KUZIO
Taras Kuzio is a senior fellow at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies.

A few weeks ago, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko published an article in the Wall Street Journal trumpeting his achievements in office. First and foremost among them was his claim that his government has made progress in combating the legacy of "more than 20 years of Soviet-style governance, endemic corruption, cronyism and inefficient policy." He cited efforts to launch a new police force that will, it is hoped, be free of entrenched corruption. He described efforts to reform the judiciary, long riddled with graft, and boasted about his success in recruiting "young reformers" from outside the country to bring "new faces" into the government.

Above all, he proclaimed a new approach to governance, one, he claimed, that embraces openness and accountability to its citizens. "Today, following free, fair and internationally praised elections," he wrote, "the Ukrainian leadership is transparent and accountable as never before."

It all sounded wonderful - so wonderful, in fact, that I decided to take the president up on his promises. I was particularly intrigued by his claim that, "[o]ver the past year, 2,702 former officials have been convicted of corruption." If this were true, surely there would be no reason for his government to conceal the details. Such an amazing track record would be a remarkable achievement. (And it's worth noting that criminal trials in Ukraine, as in most countries, are generally open to the public.)

And yet, when I asked the presidential administration for a list of those prosecuted, they refused. When I wanted to know why, they said only that the names are "confidential." So much for the much-touted new transparency of post-Euromaidan Ukraine.

Sadly, this unwillingness to allow closer scrutiny of Poroshenko's much-ballyhooed reform effort is indicative. The president is under intense pressure from Washington, Brussels, international financial institutions and of course Ukrainian citizens to deliver on his promises of reform and reducing corruption. Yet changing the name of Ukraine's main law enforcement body from "militia" to "police" does not, in itself, entail a dramatic transformation of the bloated, corrupt, and incompetent Ministry of Interior. Similarly, all the positive headlines can't conceal the fact that the president's campaign against corruption is stalling, with 72 percent of Ukrainians believing Ukraine is heading in the wrong direction, citing the conflict with pro-Russian separatists in the east and corruption as the two main issues facing the country.

The grim reality is that the real rot within the Ukrainian state has always begun at the top, from a corrupt and cynical nexus of high-ranking politicians and business magnates - and it is precisely here that Poroshenko's efforts are failing to gain traction. Ukraine's reforms are not threatened by the kind of petty bribery common to many countries, but by high-level corruption on a scale so great that only three out of 15 countries in the former USSR have worse records, according to the anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International.

The central problem is the president's failure to follow through on his promises to combat the pervasive influence of the oligarchs - politically well-connected business tycoons whose domination of key sectors of the economy is amplified by their ownership of influential media assets. Discontent with the oligarchs was one of the drivers of the Euromaidan movement that swept away former President Viktor Yanukovych, who was regarded as the epitome of the oligarchic system. Ironically, though, the elections that followed his overthrow brought to power none other than the billionaire-cum-politician Poroshenko (who once held a senior government position under Yanukovych). In his new book, Ukraine: What Went Wrong and How to Fix It, Anders Aslund writes that "big businessmen have captured the state in Ukraine, more than any other post-communist country," and warns that "the power of the oligarchs has to be broken" if reforms are to be successful.

Knowing that efforts to reform the system will be credible only if the power of the tycoons is curtailed, Poroshenko has made "deoligarchization" one of the planks of his anti-corruption campaign. He created an enormous stir a few months ago when he fired Ihor Kolomoisky, one of the country's most powerful businessmen, from his position as governor of the Dnepropetrovsk region. In June, a National Anti-Corruption Bureau was established. Parliament adopted a tough "lustration law" designed to weed out Soviet-era officials (and, presumably, the associated mindsets). Poroshenko has also appointed a high-profile outsider, former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, as governor of the notoriously corrupt Odessa region.

But Ukrainians aren't buying it. A recently released poll by the International Republican Institute found that 40 percent of Ukrainians see no changes taking place, while 32 percent believe changes are taking place too slowly. Critics contend that the few high-profile arrests of officials are "cheap spectacle" and "a Potemkin village of empty crackdowns." Only last month, Ukraine's leading civil society organizations called on the president to "unblock" his stalled anti-corruption efforts.

They are reacting to Poroshenko's failure to curb the power of the oligarchs, who still control the country's economy and its main television channels. Ukraine's ruling elites have always had de facto immunity from prosecution and they continue to be above the law, untouched by the "deoligarchization campaign." Some have been permitted to flee Ukraine to escape civil society's demands for criminal prosecution. Despite his removal as governor, Kolomoisky continues to control the country's largest bank as well as one of its most influential television networks. Perhaps most bizarrely of all, the business empires of Yanukovych's allies, including his eldest son Oleksandr, are still in place in eastern Ukraine, and they continue to profit from them.

Any effort to declaw Ukraine's oligarchs has to start with the country's notoriously corrupt energy sector, which has sucked billions from the budget. Perhaps the most visible of the country's energy tycoons is Dmytro Firtash, who began trading gas in the 1990s with the support (as he admitted to the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine) of mafia don Semyon Mogilevych, who is wanted by the FBI. Firtash and the other members of what has been called the "gas lobby" have successfully cultivated mutually profitable ties with all of Ukraine's presidents (including Poroshenko), the prosecutors' office, and the security services. Indeed, U.S. diplomatic cables from Ukraine leaked to Wikileaks showed more detailed knowledge of corruption in the energy sector than that possessed by Ukrainian presidents or law enforcement, who have continually denied close links between Firtash and themselves.

In fact, Poroshenko has a long record of collaborating with Firtash that goes back to Leonid Kuchma's presidency prior to the 2004 Orange Revolution. Less than a month after the Euromaidan revolution, Poroshenko travelled to Vienna with boxing champion (and now mayor of Kiev) Vitaliy Klitschko to seek political support from Firtash, who was awaiting trial there over U.S. demands to extradite him to face corruption charges. While they were in Vienna, Poroshenko and Klitschko struck a deal granting the leaders of the "gas lobby" (Firtash, former Energy Minister Yuriy Boyko, and Yanukovych's Chief of Staff Serhiy Lyovochkin) immunity from prosecution in exchange for the oligarchs' support - in the form of money, media, and connections - for their political ambitions. "We got what we wanted - Poroshenko as president and Klitschko as mayor," Firtash bragged to the Viennese court. It would have been impossible for the Yanukovych regime to carry out its corrupt schemes without Lyovochkin's involvement - but today he is untouchable because of the Vienna immunity deal that he helped to broker.

In agreeing to give immunity to the "gas lobby" in a political bargain, Poroshenko is not only breaking his promises to rid Ukraine of its oligarchs - he may be sowing the seeds of a future counter-revolution. Lyovochkin and former Energy Minister Boyko are leaders of the Opposition Bloc party in parliament, which is comprised of former Yanukovych supporters and holds extreme pro-Russian positions at odds with Poroshenko's declared course of European integration.

Even aside from his cynical political maneuvering, Poroshenko has hamstrung his own efforts to prosecute wrongdoing by mishandling reforms and appointments of senior law enforcement officials. The prosecutor's office, massively over-manned and itself corrupt to the core, has remained virtually untouched. Poroshenko has compounded the problem by appointing incompetent and corrupt chief prosecutors who quickly discredited themselves through inaction or by defending their corrupt colleagues. This has served to perpetuate an all-encompassing culture of selective justice: ruling elites and oligarchs are never prosecuted (unless they happen to run afoul of law enforcement in other countries), while regular citizens are almost automatically declared guilty, as evidenced by a 99 percent conviction rate.

Vitaliy Yarema, the general prosecutor appointed after the Euromaidan, left office in disgrace after only a year after failing to prosecute a single member of the Yanukovych regime for murder and grand corruption that brought Ukraine to the verge of bankruptcy. In mid-July, parliament began procedures to remove his replacement, Viktor Shokin, after only six months in the position. Ukraine's civil society groups have burned effigies of Shokin in protest of his obstruction of investigations into high-level corruption and the murders of unarmed Euromaidan protesters.

Poroshenko touting 2,702 officials convicted for corruption is a very poor attempt at misleading Ukrainians and the West. The recent IRI poll shows that his lack of political will to confront corruption is being noticed by an increasingly discontented citizenry. His failure to meaningfully address the problem will rule out his chance for a second presidential term, as it did for the Orange Revolution's victor, President Yushchenko, who received only five percent of support in 2010 and opened the door to Yanukovych's counter-revolution.

As the second anniversary of the Euromaidan protests approaches in November, Ukrainians are growing increasingly disillusioned, nationalist populists are gaining popularity and calling for Poroshenko's ouster, and pro-Russian forces and oligarchs are untouched by Ukraine's corrupt judicial system and remain as powerful as before. Poroshenko needs to follow through on his promises. If, as it seems, he will not, Ukraine's European integration will grind to a halt - and the Euromaidan revolution will be remembered in the same inglorious way as the Orange Revolution a decade ago.

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#41
Vice.com
August 25, 2015
Meet the European Fighters Who Have Gone to War in Ukraine
By Christopher Allen
[Photos here http://www.vice.com/read/european-british-fighters-in-ukraine-920]

There are European soldiers fighting amid the rubble of Shyrokyne in Eastern Ukraine. They shoot from half-destroyed hotels and sleep in the basements of war-ravaged homes. Artillery fire colors the hill behind the town black, and darkens the sky with gray smoke. Machine guns sputter day and night, and there is occasionally the crack of a sniper rifle as soldiers dart between abandoned houses, hotels, apartment buildings, and trenches.

The pro-Ukrainian Azov Regiment and the group of Europeans fighting with them have clashed almost continuously with separatists in and around the small village of Shyrokne for months, turning this once peaceful place by the Azov Sea into a decimated frontline. The detritus of war litters the streets, as do the relics of the civilian world that once existed here-children's bicycles, beach toys, garden furniture, an old football that a soldier kicks around during a lull in the fighting.

Katty, a paramedic from Right Sector, a pro-Ukrainian paramilitary group also fighting here, says she has tired of the soldiers in her battalion making the same joke: inviting her for a walk and a drink on the village's sandy beach. But in the late evening, during the quiet moments in between artillery barrages, it's not difficult to imagine the world that used to exist in Shyrokyne: lovers walking on the beach, children playing in the streets.

But it's here that the squad of European soldiers fight. On one shoulder, they wear Azov's bright blue and yellow insignia; on the other, they wear their own: "Mors Venit Velociter" or, "Death Comes Quickly."

"I spent all day with a pistol in one hand and a grenade in the other, wondering how I was going to kill myself and how many [separatists] I could take with me," said Chris "Swampy" Garrett, a British citizen and a member of the squad of Europeans fighting in Eastern Ukraine for Azov Regiment.

Garrett had just returned to Kiev after a failed mission behind enemy lines in the small village of Shyrokyne. His team had been surrounded and cut off from Ukrainian positions before the men fled. He spent over 14 hours trapped behind an enemy advance, fighting in close quarters and taking shelter from friendly artillery fire, before sneaking out of the village under the cover of darkness.

For Garrett, who has served in the British army and done humanitarian de-mining work in the Karen State on the Thai/Myanmar border, the decision to join the Azov Battalion was a simple one: "One day they posted up on the [Azov Battalion] Facebook site, asking, 'We need people who have any kind of knowledge with first aid, volunteering, with basic military skills, de-mining, anything. If you have any skills at all, to any level, can you come and help?' So I kind of saw that as my route in, even if I didn't stay with the [Azov] Battalion. [It was] my surest way to get into the country-get into the east and then be able to see the bigger picture from there."

For most of the Europeans here, while getting to the fight was simple, their motivations for joining the war effort are more complex.

"It was just seeing the aggression coming from [Russians and pro-Russian separatists]," Garrett said of his motives. "I mean, you know, obviously coming from a small island [the UK], if someone came and invaded, I would hope that some people would turn up and help to get rid of them. To me, every country-it doesn't matter if it's landlocked-every country is an island in that sense. If someone invades it, obviously you want to get rid of them."

Garrett is not the only member of the group of European soldiers who came to defend Ukrainian sovereignty. But while some came to protect Ukraine, others here came to fight for conservative and nationalist politics in Ukraine's relatively open political space. For Harley, a 42-year-old from France who served in the French navy and later in the private security industry, involvement was two-sided: he came "to help Ukraine against Russia" and wears a "Fuck U Putin" bracelet on his wrist, but joined Azov because its politics were similar to his own: "Azov," he said, propagated a political agenda that "was closer to my idea."

Azov's politics have drawn fire for being far-right to the point of neo-Nazism; "If you want to find Nazis, [Azov] is the place to come," one soldier told me on the way to the frontline. And yet, the political reality of Azov is much more complicated than that. One soldier in the European group told me he estimates that around 20 percent of the battalion could be considered neo-Nazis, while David Eriksson-a 48-year-old Swede who owns real estate and marketing businesses-said: "I think almost 100 percent of foreigners-it used to be maybe 90 percent of foreigners-are not Nazis. They are here to fight."

While the regiment was originally founded as a far-right paramilitary group by Andriy Biletsky, a current member of the Ukrainian parliament and founder of the Social National Assembly and Patriot of Ukraine groups (both also far-right), it has changed over time as this rag-tag paramilitary organization became a fully mechanized regiment closely affiliated with the Ukrainian government. While some of these Europeans-especially those who joined at the beginning of the conflict-came to fight for a fascist political agenda, many are uncomfortable with the political roots of the group.

As the conflict has evolved, political leanings have been lost in the quagmire of war. Most of these men seem more preoccupied with the fight to defend Europe and the battle against Russia than they are about the sovereignty or political future of Ukraine itself. "[The focus] changed maybe [during] my second tour," said Eriksson. "Now, it's more [about fighting] against Russia than for Ukraine."

Furthermore, for many of these European soldiers, joining the Azov Regiment had nothing to do with politics; it was simply the easiest way to get to the conflict. The regiment actively solicits international recruits through its Facebook page, and English is one of its official languages. Almost all of the Europeans here are former professional soldiers and have served in their respective national armies or in the French Foreign Legion, and are chasing the kind of experiences they've had in conflict elsewhere.

According to "The Greek," a 33-year-old former soldier in the Greek army and French Foreign Legion, the group is primarily composed of "ex-professional soldiers that just liked their job and wanted to do their job... [but] every foreigner here, they're not ordinary representatives of their own societies." They all have a "restless" character and "adventuring spirit," he told me, which draws them to advocate for their politics or practice their trade in one of the most dangerous places in the world. Some of these men even considered joining the separatists before deciding to join the pro-Ukrainian Azov Regiment.

"The Greek" is one of those who came to practice his trade. He decided to fight, not for a specific political agenda, but instead for the act of war itself. "You fight for the war. It's a science; it's an art," he told me at the group's base in Yurivka. "The army itself is a science. This is what matters."

There are very few places left in the world for those with a restless spirit to explore; very few places in which risk-real risk that cannot be mitigated by satellite phones and emergency helicopter rescue, and the stimulation that comes with this uncertainty-can be found. "I like getting shot at," claimed Steve, a former soldier in the Finnish army and the French Foreign Legion.

Life on the frontline is an existence lived on the edge of death; with the proximity of one's own mortality seems to come the climax of many of life's most stimulating experiences-fraternity, adrenaline, adventure, survival, purpose. For those soldiers who have found such feelings in combat before, the chance to become involved in another war is an exciting prospect. While these men "are not ordinary representatives of their own society," they are not so un-ordinary either. They have actualized our own very normal fascination with war, one that most satisfy by joining national militaries-or, more passively, through video games and movies-but which, once experienced in real life, cannot be simulated in a training camp, in the cinema, or on a PlayStation.

Eriksson originally came for his politics, to fight Russia and defend Europe, but stayed for the friendship and excitement of the front. "It's the friends, you know, coming back to The Greek and other guys I love. I love those guys," he said. "Also, you feel like you're a traitor if you don't take part in the fight. It would be like you're at home, just as The Greek said, 'living my white middle class life,' you know? So [it's partly because] I want to do something. But it's also because you get hooked on it-you get hooked on the adrenaline and stuff, and it's a good life."

The ideological motivation to take part in a conflict becomes inseparable from the experience of war itself; the two distinct motivations-ideological activism and the desire to fight-exist together, but are not always developed at the same moment. Some here came with an appreciation for combat and developed their political motivations over time, while others who came to fight for their politics learned to appreciate the experience of war. Those fighting in Shyrokyne are part of volunteer paramilitary groups. These men have chosen to come to the frontline, even as many of their peers stay at home: "People that come here in Shyrokyne, they want fighting," argued Stanislav, a former history teacher in Crimea, now fighting for Azov Battalion.

"I'm sure one day they will try and put us up against the wall-you know, for what we've apparently done here," Garrett said late one night before heading back to the frontline, speaking of his and other foreigners' involvement in a war that doesn't belong to them. But despite their various motivations for coming, and the furrowed brows their presence elicits, these men have come to the frontline for their own reasons and have tried to distance themselves from the controversy surrounding their engagement in this foreign war.

"Looking to the east on this cold crisp morning," Garrett wrote in an Instagram post in January [all sic], "I feel nothing but pain. That those back home sit in their nice comfy homes have nothing better to do than bad mouth the fact that i saw a problem and i am addressing it in a way that I know how. I dont believe that people should agree with how I chose to live my life. I believe that if you dont like it, stay out of it. Forget me, save yourself the time to moan about me. I do what i do because i feel compelled to do it. Is that not the essence of free will, to do what we believe in?

"So today i look to the east of ukraine. Do yourself a favour, look the other way... Through the cold, hunger and sorrow of this place we strive to do what we believe is right. At the same [time], I respect that only I can see my world through my own eyes and base my beliefs accordingly. Thats all... i have to say except love to you all, friend or foe."

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 #42
Sputnik
August 26, 2015
Don't Allow Kiev to Rewrite the Holocaust, Warns Israeli Publicist

In an exclusive interview with Radio Sputnik, Israeli publicist Avigdor Eskin explains how history is in danger of repeating, as Kiev is allowed to rewrite the history of the Holocaust, and the lessons of the Second World War are being forgotten.

Q: How strong are neo-nationalist sentiments within present-day Ukrainian society?

On the day of Ukrainian independence, the British Daily Mail newspaper carried an article about the Holocaust, about what the Ukrainian nationalists, those who followed Bandera and Shukhevych, what Ukrainian Nazis did during the war, and this is something which is going to be discussed now more and more, I believe.

We have questions about how the West looked at the current Ukrainian conflict, and now we see that there is a new angle which we are going to take into consideration as well, don't you think?

Q: I take that you mean that the neo-nationalist sentiments inside Ukraine are being exemplified by the Azov Battalion, and the Right Sector, and people can see it, if they really want to?

Eskin: Well I would rather put the emphasis on something else. The truth is, that you can see some Nazi ideology, racist ideology, anti-Semitism, you can see that in places like Britain especially. There is a discrimination campaign against Israel, which is unacceptable. But this is [limited to] private, little, tiny groups usually, who carry Nazi ideology, and you can see them in Russia.

But in Russia and in other civilized countries, the Nazi ideology is suppressed. People are put on trial and isolated from society if they preach Nazism.

But in Ukraine today, what happened is that not just certain military groups such as you have mentioned, but the president of Ukraine speaks openly about Bandera and Shukhevych being the heroes of the Ukrainian nation.

He claimed officially that the ideology of Ukraine today is Nazi ideology.

The parliament of Ukraine voted for a law which makes all the fighters, who fought on the side of the Nazis, on a par during the war, they made them heroes.

We are not talking about just a few anti-Semitic neo-Nazis or racists or nationalist or ultra-nationalist battalions. We are talking about the ideology which comes from the president, from the parliament, and this is what makes Ukraine very different.

I want to insist upon this point of importance. When we face today this Ukrainian system, we ask what will be the precedent for it, how can we deal with it, because nothing like this happened for the last 70 years, since the Second World War.

And you know, at the Nuremberg trials, one of the defendants there was Julius Streicher. Now, Julius Streicher, who, by the way, was sentenced to death, was not a killer like Himmler, he didn't torture anybody, he wasn't violent. He was nothing more than the head of the Nazi propaganda machine, and he spread hatred and a criminal ideology.

So, the international court and the Nuremberg trials stated that there is such a thing as criminal ideology. And the criminal ideology of Julius Streicher was the cause of his death sentence.

Now, talking about Ukraine today and when the president and the state parliament declare that Nazism is their ideology, how should we treat Ukraine today?

Q: You've touched upon something that I'd really like to discuss, you mentioned that inside the Rada they are making the followers of Stepan Bandera heroes. Do you think that Kiev is trying to rewrite the history of the Holocaust?

Eskin: Well, Bandera is exactly what Julius Streicher was. These are people who were behind mass murder.

The Mail wrote that there were 1.6 million Jews murdered in Ukraine due to the ideology of Julius Streicher, and Stepan Bandera.

Stepan Bandera gave the reason for Ukrainian nationalists to be as murderous as they were, and even in some places, they started murdering innocent people, Jews, Poles, Russians, before the Germans actually took over. Especially the Lviv pogrom at the beginning of the war with the Soviet Union, they just killed thousands of people before the Germans gave them any instructions or orders, before the final solution decision on the German side.

When we face something like this, in Kiev today, we have to ask ourselves, "what is the legitimacy of this government, no matter what they do?"  

No matter what they do today, the moment they announce that their ideology is rewriting history, which of course is one of their goals, and making the worst criminals of the war their heroes, they cease to be a part of any civilized society.

I don't see sanctions against Ukraine, and I wonder why.

Q: How can other Europeans look to Ukraine as someone to have a serious dialogue with?

Eskin: How could the Europeans make peace with Hitler in 1938? How could Mr. Chamberlain in 1938 and 1939 become a close friend of his German counterpart Mr. Ribbentrop. How could the West betray the people during these years, pre-Second World War.

If the West hadn't agreed to the partition of Poland, if the West hadn't agreed to this aggression against Czechoslovakia before, if the West hadn't agreed to all that it agreed with Ribbentrop and with Hitler, probably the Second World War could have been prevented.

Let's begin from that, this appeasement ideology.

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