#2
AFP
September 18, 2015
Russia kicks off 1,000-day countdown to 2018 FIFA World Cup
By Alexandre Fedorets and Olga Rotenberg

Moscow (AFP) - Moscow's Red Square was transformed Friday into a football pitch as Russia launched its 1,000-day countdown to the 2018 FIFA World Cup it will host in 11 cities.

Attended by high-ranking officials and football stars, the celebrations come as world football's governing body is embroiled in a corruption scandal, partly over the awarding of the 2018 tournament to Russia.

On Thursday, FIFA secretary general Jerome Valcke was abruptly relieved of his duties over his alleged involvement in a ticketing scam.

"Preparations for the World Cup in 11 cities of our country [..] are in full swing," President Vladimir Putin said by video link from Sochi, the host city of the 2014 Winter Olympics.

"Everything will be done to suitably host the planet's leading 32 national squads.

"We are always happy to see guests and promise to organise grand celebrations in Russia, which will make history in the world of sport and football."

The Kremlin has said that the country honestly participated in the bidding process and that its status as host country should not be called into question.

The culmination of the ceremony came at 13:23 Moscow time (10:23 GMT) when former World Cup winners Lothar Matthaus of Germany and Italy's Gianluca Zambrotta along with Spain's former football great Fernando Hierro and Russia's international keeper Igor Akinfeyev pressed the red button launching the countdown.

Russia's first deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov, the country's sports minister Vitaly Mutko, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin also took part in the ceremony.

"Only 1,000 days remain before the World Cup start and a plenty of work still awaits us," Shuvalov said.

"It doesn't mean that we have not done anything before this moment.

"We all will do our best to make our president's promises come true. To present the great football occasion to all the game lovers."

Friendly matches among the under-16 national squads of Russia, Italy, Germany and Spain were played on the pitch set up on Red Square near the walls of the Kremlin.

Some football fans and youth club teams travelled a long way to take part in the celebrations.

"My wife and I came specially for this," said 50-year-old Alexander Krisenko, from the far eastern city of Khabarovsk.

"The World Cup is important, it will stimulate the development of youth football, there will be lots of stadiums and we will be able to watch games in person."

Grassroots football coach Alexander Ossipov, who runs a sports academy in the city of Dmitrov, north of Moscow, said he and his players had come to support Russia's under-16 national team.

Similar events are taking place in more than 30 cities, including the host cities of Saint Petersburg and Kazan.

The 2018 World Cup opening match will take place at Moscow's Luzhniki Stadium on June 14, 2018.

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 #3
Running for Office in Siberia: And the winner is.....
Last in a series covering the District #35 Novosibirsk City Council election.
September 17, 2015
By Sarah Lindemann-Komarova
[Founder, Siberian Civic Initiatives Support Center 1995 - 2014. Helped to establish this as the hub for the first civil society development support network in the former Soviet Union.]

Article with pictures:
https://medium.com/@ECHOSiberia/running-for-office-in-siberia-and-the-winner-is-980b2b069ccb

Earlier episodes:
https://medium.com/@ECHOSiberia

Election Day: The glorious days of 30 degree Siberian Indian Summer sunshine were over.  It was six degrees and raining, the weather you do not want if your chances of winning depend on a large turnout.  This was the case with Natalia Pinus in District #35.  Nikita Galitarov, her major opponent, aggressively targeted pensioners, the certain voters in Russia. She was counting on inspiring a new group to become active.  The big dare. A chance to prove the potential of grassroots democracy in Russia and build on the legacy of this community. Akademgorodok, the place where perestroika was born at the Institute of Economics across the street from the coffee shop that would serve as Election Day headquarters for Natalia's campaign. Two posters stuck on the wall were the only indication this was not your ordinary café. One was a sign, "Headquarters for Natalia Pinus supporters". The other, a chart, listed polling places and time intervals.   Natalia was there along with Alla, her good friend, who was in charge of registering the voter count reported by observers every 2 hours from each of the 15 stations.  Another man was hunkered down in the corner.  Galitarov's guy, he looked exactly like a thug sent by a construction company to intimidate you should look. At least in Russia because he was drinking tea and playing with a fancy phone and computer.  Worlds were colliding at Headquarters highlighting the stakes.  Was it possible a 29 year old candidate, who did not live or work here, whose only distinguishing characteristics were a pile of money and masterful dirty trick skills, could end up representing this community in the City Council?   The only certainty was the weather and it was raining. For an election that had morphed from an eight- person race to a mythical battle between good and evil, this was not good.

Initially, the polling stations had more official personnel than voters (election commission members, observers, police and doctors).  If anything was really off, it would be noticed by allot of people. By 10 AM, the Galitarov people had plastered a new batch of posters on my building, a clear violation of the rules.  I got a call from a friend just as it started to hail.  She was emphatic several days ago, "never for Natalia". Now, she was outraged, "What is going on?  What ugliness!  A NIGHTMARE is happening!" She was going out to vote for Natalia.  Maybe they had taken the step too far, not in this community, the Akademgorodok wagons were circling.  

Hypothetically, anything over the official 24% turnout estimate would be in Natalia's favor.  The 2PM count was good with 18.99%.   Bets had been placed and Danil, a supportive presence throughout the campaign, took the high- end position with 31%. Natalia was talking to the no chance, but nice guy, candidate from the democratic socialist A Just Russia party.  They compared notes about the cell phone terrorism their teams experienced this morning.  Supporters were playing a building block tower game. The objective was to remove a wooden piece without causing the structure to collapse.  The perfect way to kill time, practicing the strategy and discipline that kept Natalia's campaign from collapsing when she said "no" to United Russia after winning the primary.   The Galitarov thug was gone when the tower fell.  This reminded me of a quote by the recently elected, first female Mayor in Barcelona.  "In the story of humanity, everything is impossible until it becomes possible".   Just like the building game, you will not know if you got the balance right until the block is completely removed.     

By 6PM turnout was 27.3%.  Natalia was out voting and delivering dinners to volunteers throughout the district.  Leonid, campaign coordinator, is in charge talking to volunteers in the field and scanning the Internet for news. A 30 year old physicist at the Nuclear Physics Institute, politics is his hobby.  Meanwhile, a man I never saw before was holding court. He described how a Professor in Tomsk sold his vote and then outsmarted the buyer.  He organized two pieces of black thread to look like a checkmark on the ballot, took the confirmation picture and then removed them.  Since this man seemed to know everything about elections I asked, "What's the deal with Galitarov?  Why is this man so intent on representing Akademgorodok? "   According to Akadem's version of Deep Throat, United Russia was really interested in Natalia's primary performance.  Nobody votes in primaries so they were impressed with the tiny number of votes she turned out (204), and even more with the gap between her and second place (65).   Then, Natalia politely declined. In her account, the Party representative took the news calmly and wished her well.  In Deep Throat's account, that was it for her.  They told Galitarov to take the 18 million rubles he was planning to spend in another district and use it to defeat Natalia.  He estimates that Natalia's surprising staying power forced the final cost of his campaign to 20 million.   

Polls closed at eight but City Council votes are the last of four races counted. Sometime after midnight the official winner would be declared.   Headquarters was staying open tracking results until the café closed at midnight.  Natalia was busy on the phone getting updates.   Alla occupied the corner seat formerly held by the thug.  She filled in charts drawn on Xerox paper using a magnifying glass to see. The first result was from a school located in Natalia's base territory.  The news was promising, the size of the win significant.  It gave her a 40 vote cushion to make up for losses elsewhere.  I asked one of her supporters what he thought was going to happen. He said any attempt to influence the vote would happen before the ballots are counted because Novosibirsk doesn't have a "system".  He defined a "system" as no accepted hierarchy with power to intervene.  Breaking an election law procedure is a criminal offense. If there isn't a "system", no one will risk doing it.   I asked how you know if there is a "system"?  A friend of his was an observer in a neighboring region. A police officer ordered him to stand three meters away in a corner while they counted the votes.  They would arrest him if he ignored the police order. That is a "system".  It was possible to make small adjustments during the count.  Legally the commission is required to hold up each ballot and announce the name before placing it on a pile (think chads in 2000).  Sometimes, experienced commission members speed up the process. They make piles first and then count the ballots but he expected an honest count tonight.

At 11:30 PM Alla was perched over her sheets, magnifying glass in hand, counting.  Results from Galitarov territory were surprisingly good for Natalia. Losses were only by a few votes.  In other news, Communist Party wins in territories Natalia carried as Deputy demonstrated the confused nature of Russian politics.   Andre, the Director of Academ.info and Akadem TV, was there. He pledged to shave his beard and share what looked like water in a beautiful corked glass bottle if she won.    Closing time,   Andre grabbed the mysterious bottle and invited everyone to continue the vigil at his office.  Natalia went shopping for snacks.  There was no sense of excitement, just time to move on. Out on the street Andre revealed the bottle was his personal recipe samogon (Russian moonshine), 50 proof.  "You never had anything like it, no headache".  

There is a unique atmosphere created when you switch on office lights in the middle of the night. That florescent intensity applies to whatever is going on because otherwise you would be home sleeping like everyone else. Alla was the first to settle in spreading her charts across the best desk and claiming the best chair.  Natalia arrived and laid out a spread of delicacies that constitute the secret to Russians capacity to sop up alcohol (fish and meat, pickles and eggplant rolls, almonds and pistachios). They are also disciplined drinkers. There is a ritual to it.  Nothing gets uncorked until there is something to toast, victory or defeat.  The results already in should have been good enough to inspire giddy confidence among the campaign staff.  There was none. I was sure they all knew what I learned tonight, 20 million rubles spent to defeat her. Someone must have a trick up their sleeve. Natalia worked the phones, Alla counted and recounted, the coordinator collected signed official tallies from observers while the rest made small talk.  I wondered, if not the count, what will be the signal it is ok to start drinking?  

Natalia's phone rang.  Whoever was on the other side was doing most of the talking. Natalia uttered short, somber replies ending with "Thank you" before clicking off.  The gang stared at her waiting until someone finally asked, "who was that?"  Natalia answered "Galitarov", again silence until she added, "he congratulated me".  No one whooped, it was so anti-climatic I forgot to capture the moment on film.  Andre started to uncork the champagne, the only one with a smile, as Alla said something about a missing signature and Natalia started to eat pistachios before returning to look at what she was working on.   This was actually it. I turned on the camera and got a business as usual scene while Andre worked on the cork so I decided to prompt.

Me:  Natalia, who was just on the phone?  
Natalia:  My opponent.
Andre (laughing):  MAIN opponent.
Natalia (slight smile on her face as she continues to pick at the pistachios) : Yes, main opponent, Galitarov.
Me: And what did he say?
Natalia: He said I congratulate you for the honest win and then some kind of thoughts about things I had charged him with...

She shifted focus back to Alla mumbling, " I don't remember accusing him of anything".  Andre emptied the entire bottle filling seven water glasses.  Natalia turned around and asked, "Why did you do that?"  I assumed she disapproved of the portions because she wanted to pace the drinking.  It turned out she wanted just a sip of champagne for the traditional first toast. Then, move on to the samagon without risking a 50 proof headache.  I continued to wait for behavior I associated with an electoral fairy tale ending.  Was it exhaustion, shock, Russian pessimism ever triumphing over victory?  No, no one knew how to react. There was no precedent for this.  The response to this victory should be different.  Barbra Streisand's version of FDRs rousing up-tempo victory song.  "Happy Days are Here Again" as a contemplative, defiant ballad that acknowledges the fight is not over yet.  The third toast and I get the triumphant sound bite.  A synchronized clinking of glasses, "To the FIRST victory!" and everyone laughs.

Epilogue

In the end, after all the promises, Galitarov's "I do it now", Heating/KGB Man's "Warmth in your home", Science man's "Continue the work of Lavrentev the towns founder", it was Natalia's simple, "I love Gorodok", that took the politics out of it and won. Another major factor, the Galitarov campaign strategists misjudged this community.  Of the 31% of eligible voters who participated in Akademgorodok, 26.13% supported Natalia.  Galitarov squeaked out second place with 16.77% to Science man's 16.27%.  The A Just Russia nice guy came in fourth and the invisible United Russia candidate fifth.  

Emotional Facebook messages made clear the meaning of her victory.  They also appreciated its source, an honest campaign, many describing it as beautiful. The techniques she used are well known, easy to understand, can be taught and replicated.    More problematic, the qualities Natalia displayed as a candidate. They are rare, hard to understand and impossible to teach. Like trying to catch lightning in a bottle, but that is what makes them so powerful when they appear.  She will need all of them, and then some, as a Deputy if she is going to achieve anything at all.  The new 50 member Novosibirsk City Council met for the first time three days after the election. The Party count is: 32 United Russia, 12 Communist Party, 2 right-wing ultra nationalist LDPR, 1 social democratic A Just Russia, 1 neo-liberal (but who really knows) Civic Platform Party and two independents (including Natalia).   I am confident of only three things.  Natalia will try her hardest to get the results she campaigned for, it will be interesting to see what happens and for, it will be interesting to see what happens and the shoreline of cynicism has receded.... at least in Akademgorodok.

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 #4
Carnegie Moscow Center
September 18, 2015
Russia's Paralysed Party System
By Tatyana Stanovaya
Tatyana Stanovaya is director of the analytical department of the Center of Political Technologies in Moscow.

Russia's local elections, held on September 13, again delivered an overwhelming victory to the ruling party, United Russia, giving the impression that nothing has changed and the same results are assured in next year's parliamentary elections.

Yet the election had several curious features which suggest that these could be the last polls to follow a familiar script.

In voting for most of Russia's regional assemblies, the pro-Kremlin party United Russia again won a strong first-place finish. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation cemented its status as the nation's second party. "A Just Russia" and the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) took their customary place as the other two key forces. The unofficial opposition was allowed to take part but given less space than in 2013.

This comfortable picture conceals some details that should worry the Kremlin.

First, despite being the first successful "party of power" in post-Soviet Russia, United Russia is in long-term crisis. It has always had the problem that decisions are taken inside the Kremlin, not inside the party. The party cannot have an ideology or an independent leader. Its only source of legitimacy is the high level of support for a political actor outside the party itself, Vladimir Putin.

As long as Putin has an 86 percent approval rating, United Russia can win 45 or 50 percent of the vote, simply by showing his portrait. But is Putin more important for the party or the party for Putin? If one fine day the party starts to drag down Putin's ratings, a rescue mission will be mounted to save Putin--but not United Russia. The party will be subjected to a public execution.

The death sentence may not be carried out immediately. Before the 2016 parliamentary elections the Kremlin may consider merging United Russia into a "coalition of patriots" with parties such as the newly formed All-Russia People's Front (ONF), whose members will be rebranded as the most loyal Putinists.

The second potential source of danger for the Kremlin is the ambiguous status of Gennady Zyuganov and his Communist Party. Everyone has got used to them being the partners of the Kremlin, willing to play by its rules. The Kremlin has allowed the Communist Party to keep its core electorate, anticipating that it was dying out by natural causes.

However, a leopard cannot change its spots and the Communist Party remains a full-fledged political party with loyal voters and a clear ideology. For all its cooperation with the authorities, the party will not abandon its claim to be Russia's strongest opposition force. If socio-economic discontent moves on to the streets, the Communists may join the side of the protesters.

Thirdly, Russia's party system cannot survive in the long term. An apparently stable configuration has formed in which United Russia gets around 60 percent of the vote, the Communist Party 15 percent, the LDPR 10 percent and Just Russia five percent. But this arrangement cannot last forever.

In the mid-2000s there was an initiative to end the Communist Party's role as the main opposition force. There would be a two-party system with A Just Russia as the center-leftists, United Russia as the center-right party, and the Kremlin standing above the fray in the role of monarch.

The rationale was that it would be impossible to ensure that United Russia always got 60 percent of the vote. However, United Russia became irreplaceable and this scenario did not come to pass.

Another weakness of the current Russian regime is that its relationship with voters is essentially an informal labor contract. Citizens do not support the ruling party by direct edict. Rather, voters pay a kind of political tithe for the guarantee that they will keep their jobs and their salaries will be paid on time.

There is no real ideological connection between the voter and the party in power. The voter who gets on the bus, travels to the polling station and puts his cross in the right box on the ballot paper is, deep down, an unknown quantity.

We know what kind of media environment  the voter exists in and how he votes post factum. But no sociologist can tell us how exactly he will behave at the critical moment in the polling station. If the country falls into crisis, his behavior may change. In this regard, it is important to note a fall in electoral turnout in several places in last Sunday's election, which suggests that electoral behavior in Russia may be becoming less predictable.

One final feature of the elections was that the "non-systemic" opposition is still left on the outside. PARNAS, a party of liberal protest, was the only genuine opposition party allowed to take part. It was only permitted to field candidates in one place,  the town of Kostroma.

PARNAS's participation in one regional poll was the exception that proved the rule, confirming that the opposition must get only two percent of the vote. Even if PARNAS is allowed to run in next year's Duma elections, it will be the same story. If it threatens to get five percent of the national vote it will be shut out of the election.

The local elections confirmed that the Russian political system is strongly averse to change. Ever since Putin came to power, the Kremlin has been able to deliver the right results in every election. But continuing success also depends on the financial and economic capacity of the regime. That means it would be more appropriate to make predictions about the 2016 Duma elections on the basis of economic data from Russia's State Statistics Service than on the recent local election results.

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 #5
Interfax
September 17, 2015
Putin sees non-parliamentary parties taking part in 2016 Duma polls

The regional elections that took place on 13 September in Russia were a fair and competitive fight, and many non-parliamentary parties will take part in the 2016 State Duma election, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said, as reported by Russian news agencies on 17 September.

"The election campaign took place in conditions of an open and honest, sometimes very acute, competitive fight," privately-owned Russian news agency Interfax quoted Putin as saying at a meeting of newly elected heads of regions.

Putin said that although rivalry had hotted up, the legitimacy both of the voting mechanism and the results of the elections are confirmed by all parties that took part in the elections. And this "once again indicates that a multiparty system is developing in Russia, and political culture is growing", Putin said.

On the State Duma elections scheduled for September 2016, Putin said: "In the upcoming election campaign for the State Duma, it is important to work on public consolidation to unite all constructive forces to resolve key tasks to develop the country," RIA Novosti (part of the Russian state-owned International News Agency Rossiya Segodnya) quoted him as saying.

Putin also said the competitiveness and legitimacy of the 2016 elections must be ensured and that many representatives of non-parliamentary parties would take part, Interfax reported.

"Non-parliamentary parties have become more and more noticeable. During the past [election] campaign they took an active part in elections at various levels," Putin said.

"I note also that many strong candidates, your rivals in the current elections, next year will probably become candidates in the State Duma elections, including in single-seat constituencies," Putin told the governors.

"I've said that not only parliamentary, but also nonparliamentary parties took an active part. That indicates that twice the number of political parties will take part in the State Duma elections than last time," Putin said.

 #6
Kremlin.ru
September 17, 2015
Meeting with newly elected regional heads

Vladimir Putin met with heads of 22 Russian Federation regions elected on the single election day on September 13, 2015. The meeting discussed the results of the election campaign and plans for the future as regards the development of the Russian regions.

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Colleagues,

The election campaign is over, and the single election day in Russia saw elections in virtually all of the regions. The competition was for more than 90,000 regional and local authority mandates.

Everyone who took part in this process did a lot of work, and I want to specially thank those people who were in charge of preparing and holding the elections - representatives of political parties, public organisations, and observers who were controlling the voting.

I want to note that the voter turnout has increased: our citizens voted more actively, voicing their positions and expressing interest in the way their village, city or region will develop.

I believe it is important that the citizens support those political forces that back the country's progressive development and consolidation of its sovereignty, support those candidates who are closer to people, whom the people see, know and understand what these candidates competing for various posts want to achieve, first of all, for their voters.

The election campaign was open, honest and sometimes quite fierce. As regards the election of regional heads, in some regions the fight was for every vote, and in one region, as you know, the second round will need to be held to determine the winning candidate, and I think that on the whole this is not bad, because this proves that the competition was open, honest and transparent. And the people there are worthy, I mean, both candidates.

Despite the intensity of the competition, all the parties that participated in the elections have confirmed the legitimacy of the voting mechanism and the results themselves, which once again shows that Russia is developing a mature multi-party system, and our political culture is growing. The set standards for holding truly open, competitive and legitimate election procedures should certainly be ensured in the upcoming 2016 State Duma elections as well.

This election campaign once again confirmed that the parliamentary parties play a key, system-forming role in our nation's political life. Incidentally, their representatives were the main competitors in this gubernatorial election. Meanwhile, the non-parliamentary parties are drawing increasing attention; they actively participated in the last election at many different levels.

I will also note that many strong candidates - your opponents in these elections - will likely be State Duma candidates next year, including in single-mandate constituencies from your regions. And it's good to see such prominent individuals who enjoy public esteem.

I just noted that both parliamentary and non-parliamentary parties participated actively in the elections. Incidentally, my colleagues and I were just saying that we will have twice as many political parties participating in the 2016 State Duma elections as last time: ten non-parliamentary parties have the right to participate directly in the elections, plus four parliamentary parties. We had only seven parties participating in the last State Duma elections, but this time, we will have 14.

I am confident that serious competition will help bring to the federal parliament those political forces that will prove their ability to resolve the most pressing issues that concern people through their actions, not just words.

Colleagues, the support you received from citizens means exactly one thing: you must work with greater impact, with even more concerted effort. This is true of you and your teams.

We need to constantly give attention to people, regardless of the political calendar, and we must do this without resorting to current difficulties, without shying away from problems. And friends, what's most important is that if you have come into power, if you have been elected, if the people have entrusted you with such high offices, then you must work honestly and ensure your full dedication; otherwise, you should not have campaigned to be elected. It would seem as if I'm talking about basic things, but practice shows that not everyone and not everywhere always knows these basic things. But we should never forget about them.

And, of course, given the upcoming State Duma election, it is important to work to bring the public together, to unite all the constructive forces to resolve key challenges in our nation's development.

I expect that you all understand the level of responsibility and are ready to engage in serious practical work.

Thank you for your attention.

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 #7
Putin: import substitution is "not some kind of fetish" for Russia

SOCHI, September 18. /TASS/. Import substitution is not a kind of fetish for Russia, meaning the most important technologies that should be nevertheless developed domestically, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday at the Russia-Belarus forum in Sochi.

The import substitution program provides for launching about 2,500 projects in actually all sectors of the economy, the head of state said.

"I want to point out at the same time that the so-called import substitution is not some kind of fetish for us; it primarily means critical technologies, dual-purpose technologies," the president said.

Import substitution for Russia is domestic development of high-technology production facilities, Putin said. "We have to deal with it any case; we should do so. We will simply do it now in an accelerated way and with double effect," the president said.

The new industrial policy law provides for benefits and other kinds of support for investors, Putin said. "The Russian government plans to allocate 2.5 trillion rubles ($38 bln) in total for these purposes," the head of state added. Furthermore, the Russian industry development fund is working successfully, the president said.

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 #8
Moscow Times
September 18, 2015
Russians' Incomes Fall at Fastest Pace in 8 Months

Russians' wages fell in August at their fastest pace since the start of the year, according to official data published Thursday that also showed a continuing slump in capital investment, industrial output and retail spending.

Russia's economy has been shaken by a collapse in the price of oil since summer 2014 and sanctions imposed over the Ukraine crisis that have restricted trade and cross-border financial flows.

Data for August published by the Rosstat federal statistics agency showed that average wages dropped by 6 percent compared to July - the steepest monthly decline since January - to 31,870 rubles ($485) per month. Adjusted for inflation, which is running at 15.8 percent, the average wage in August was worth 9.8 percent less than in the same month in 2014.

Official unemployment in August remained unchanged from July at 4.1 million people, or 5.3 percent of the working population. Rather than laying off workers, many companies have responded to the economic crisis by cutting the hours and pay of their staff, emerging markets analysts Capital Economics said in a report earlier this week.

Average total incomes, which include pensions and other state payouts that better track inflation, were almost unchanged from July, but worth 4.9 less than a year ago.

With less money in consumers' pockets, retail sales were 9.1 percent lower in August than in the same month a year ago, according to Rosstat. Industrial output was down 4.3 percent and capital investment was 6.8 percent lower than in August 2014.

The International Monetary Fund said in May that it expects Russia's economy to shrink by 3.4 percent this year.

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 #9
Bloomberg
September 17, 2015
Russian Consumer Rot Worsens as Wages Decline More Than Forecast
By Anna Andrianova

A slump in Russian consumption showed no letup last month while a drop in investment stretched into the longest in two decades, highlighting the toll on the economy from lower oil prices and the latest wave of ruble depreciation.

Real wages declined 9.8 percent from a year earlier after a 9.2 percent drop in July, the Federal Statistics Service in Moscow said Thursday. Retail sales tumbled 9.1 percent on an annual basis, matching a revised 9.1 percent plunge a month earlier. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg forecast decreases of 9 percent and 8.9 percent. Fixed-capital investment shrank 6.8 percent, dropping for a 20th month. That's the longest stretch of declines since at least 1995, when Bloomberg started compiling the data.

Caught between the twin challenges of reeling consumption and companies choked by sanctions and high borrowing costs, Russia is bracing for the longest recession of President Vladimir Putin's 15 years in power. The central bank kept its key interest rate unchanged last week after five cuts this year following the ruble's tumble stoked price growth.

"The underlying trend in economic activity remains weak, with retail sales and investment staying deep in contraction territory amid still relatively tight monetary policy," Piotr Matys, a foreign-exchange strategist at Rabobank in London, said by e-mail before the data release.

The ruble has lost almost 42 percent against the dollar in the past 12 months, the worst performer worldwide among currencies tracked by Bloomberg. It traded 0.8 percent weaker at 65.8660 versus the dollar as of 4:03 p.m. in Moscow.

Deeper Recession

The ruble's depreciation added about 7 percentage points to inflation in August, while a contraction in demand reduced price growth by about 1 percentage point, according to the central bank. Annual inflation, which accelerated to 15.8 percent in August, will subside to 7 percent next September, it estimates. The economy may shrink as much as 4.4 percent in 2015, the Bank of Russia said last week.

August's decline in investment was less than the median of 18 forecasts for a 9 percent drop and compares with an 8.5 percent slide in July. Disposable incomes fell 4.9 percent after a drop of 2 percent a month earlier. The unemployment rate remained at 5.3 percent.

"Russian private consumers are hurting as their purchasing power is miserably low," Vladimir Miklashevsky, a strategist at Danske Bank A/S in Helsinki, said before the release. "The third quarter may turn out to be the bottom for the ongoing recession."

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 #10
Russian Energy Strategy includes giving independent companies access to export pipelines

MOSCOW, September 18. /TASS/. Russian Energy Strategy until 2035 includes giving independent gas producers access to export of pipeline gas, First Deputy Minister of Energy Alexey Teksler said Friday.

"In terms of access of independent producers to export sales firstly we expected at the first strage to liberalize and develop the LNG production, and at the second stage - provide independent exporters access on a competitive basis to a single channel of pipeline gas export," he said.

Teksler also confirmed plans for transition to market formation of domestic gas prices after 2020.

Russia's Energy Ministry Alexander Novak said it was possible to grant access to independent gas producers to the Power of Siberia pipeline.

Besides that, the ministry wants independent companies to have an opportunity to sell gas to Gazprom on a competitive price, which is close to the export price, he said.

"The president gave an order following the letter from Rosneft [to allow the company to use the Power of Siberia pipeline for gas exports - TASS], we informed the government about our position on that matter. The government is now discussing the issue," Novak said.

Earlier the Energy Ministry said that independent gas producers, including state oil company Rosneft, may receive access to gas exports via the Power of Siberia pipeline in 2020-2025.

Later on, Novak said that the increase of Russian gas supplies to China which is being discussed with the Chinese partners might be reached by using the gas volumes of independent gas producers, in particular gas produced at oil and condensate oil fields.

The Power of Siberia is a gas transportation system to deliver gas the Yakutsk and Irkutsk gas production centers in Siberia to Russia's Far East and China. Its planned capacity is 61 billion cubic meters per year. The pipe's total length is 3,968 km. The estimated construction cost is $21.3 bln. The pipeline route will run along the existing route of the Eastern Siberia - Pacific Ocean oil pipeline.

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 #11
Business New Europe
www.bne.eu
September 18, 2015
Deutsche Bank confirms its retreat from Russia
Jason Corcoran in Moscow

Deutsche Bank, a lender whose ties with Russia span 134 years, will exit its investment banking business in Moscow by the end of year following allegations its bankers laundered money on behalf of its clients, it was confirmed on September 18.

The German bank's corporate finance and markets business will relocate to international hubs, expectedly in London and Frankfurt.

The decision was taken "in order to reduce complexity, costs, risks, and capital consumption," according to a statement published on the bank's website. The statement was sent to the website briefly on September 17 before being removed and then posted again the following day.

bne IntelliNews reported earlier that a trading scandal may force the bank to cut the lion's share of its 1,300 workforce in Russia. The Frankfurt-based lender on September 18 confirmed it would exit its investment banking and custody businesses but didn't shed any light on its huge IT centre. The statement said Deutsche will carry on serving wealth management clients but will "consolidate administration and booking offshore."

The bank, which had been the biggest and most profitable investment bank in Moscow over the past two decades, said it will continue to offer prices in Russian securities to clients but using third parties for local execution.

In a first Russian reaction to the development, the central bank's first deputy chairman Sergei Shvetsov said the Deutsche Bank withdrawal will not damage Russia's investment climate.
 
"It will have no effect as the volume of business is defined not by the number of intermediate parties but by the number of investors," TASS quoted Shvetsov as saying on the sidelines of the Finnopolis 2015 conference in Kazan.

Mirror trade bombshell

Tim Wiswell, a senior employee until August, is at the centre of a probe into possible money laundering involving about $6bn of transactions over more than four years. Wiswell is believed to have left Russia and is currently in retreat at his US home in Connecticut.

Regulators and the bank itself are examining so-called "mirror-trades" whereby Russian clients might have bought stocks in rubles via Deutsche Bank, and simultaneously made trades through London in which the bank purchased the same stocks at similar amounts in US dollars. Such transactions could have enabled Russians to move money offshore without telling the authorities.

Deutsche Bank's new co-CEO John Cryan said in a July memo that the bank "has been damaged by instances of serious misconduct".

End of meteoric rise in Russia

The bank set up its Moscow business in April 1998 just four months before Russia defaulted on its debt. Five years later, the lender bought 40% of a local broker UFG for $70mn rather than try to continue growing organically. They bought the remaining 60% from US banker Charlie Ryan and former Yeltsin minister Boris Fedorov in 2006 for $600mn.

The two-step deal gave Deutsche Bank the platform it coveted and within a year it established an unassailable lead in domestic equity and debt capital market league tables. The bank lost ground in 2008 after the Russian state-controlled VTB bank raided over 100 bankers to set up their own investment banking start-up. A combination of sanctions, falling commodity prices a deepending recession and this trading scandal has now forced the Germans to retreat.

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 #12
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
September 18, 2015
Unhappy with one in a 100, Russia goes for 5
Project 5-100, launched by presidential decree two years ago, sets the ambitious goal of getting five Russian universities in the world's top 100 by 2020.
Gleb Fedorov, RBTH

Since 2013, Russia has invested millions of dollars in an attempt to drive up the position of its universities in international rankings.

According to its official mandate, Project 5-100 is focused on increasing the competitiveness of Russian universities in the international marketplace. Fifteen universities were selected for the program, whose name comes from the overall goal of having five Russian universities in the top 100 of three world rankings: Times Higher Education World University Rankings, QS World University Rankings and Academic Ranking of World Universities.

Currently only two Russian universities appear in these rankings at all - Moscow State University and St. Petersburg State University - and only MSU in the top 100 of the ARWU. Moscow State University's another good showing is 108th out of 700 schools in the 2015 QS World University Rankings.

According to Irina Abankina, director of the Institute of Education Development at the Higher School of Economics, with Project 5-100, the Ministry of Education and Science intends to separate out the Russian universities with the most potential, and give them the financing needed to help them achieve their goals. In 2015 the Project 5-100 universities will receive a total of 10.1 billion rubles ($148 million).

In interview with Times Higher Education, Alexander Polvalko, deputy minister of science and education, said that the program was not just about improving Russian university rankings, but making long-lasting changes in Russian higher education - which will in turn result in better rankings.

"This transformation has three key objectives," Polvako said. "We want to change the university environment, upgrading it to a world-class level by creating a large choice of international educational programs. Second, we want to reform our university research - to join in partnership with leading international research teams and to increase our presence in highly cited international research journals. Third, we want to increase the attractiveness of our universities in order to recruit talented international faculty and students."

Since the start of Project 5-100, Russian universities have indeed become more noticeable on the international education market, said editor-in-chief of Times Higher Education, Phil Baty, although he noted that the most noticeable school is Moscow State University, which is not part of Project 5-100.

"Moscow State University has been making impressive strides up the rankings recently. I predict it will see further good news when we publish the world university rankings for 2015-2016 on Oct. 1," Baty said.

Abankina says that two universities that are in the program, Novosibirsk State University and the National Research Nuclear University, have also been moving up the rankings and are two schools to watch in the future.

Experts are skeptical about the program's potential for success, however. Alex Usher, the president of Higher Education Associates in Canada, said that there are fundamental problems with Russia higher education that cannot be solved quickly.

"The management of universities which are very successful in rankings is much more 'bottom-up,'" Usher wrote in a recent article for Higher Education in Russia and Beyond. "Russian universities, on the other hand, are very much 'top-down'. University cultures change very slowly, so no one should expect Russian universities to suddenly become free-wheeling havens of progressive academic practice."

According to Baty, the program will only be successful if it is a long-term commitment. "The biggest challenge is whether or not the reform and investment program goes far enough," Baty said. The project is focused on the period up to 2020. What happens after that is anyone's guess.

Baty does point out one aspect of Project 5-100 that might contribute to its long-term success.

"The most exciting aspect of the reform program is internationalization. Russia must work hard to attract and retain leading global talent from across the world. Too many great Russian scholars in the past left Russia to pursue their careers elsewhere. This must change. The reforms recognize this," Baty said.

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#13
www.rt.com
September 18, 2015
Senators seek to soften law that restricts Russian bloggers

Two Russian senators have proposed not to make owners of social networks responsible for users' posts and to introduce stricter definitions into the "law on bloggers" that brackets popular internet authors with mass media.

In the explanatory note attached to the bill, lawmakers Konstantin Dobrynin and Vladimir Tyulpanov said it was wrong to make administrators of social networks responsible for the activities of other people - the popular users of these networks.

The senators also propose to legally define the terms "social network", "profile", "account", "blog", "blogger" and the like. This would prevent controversies in understanding of the already approved norms, they note.

In August last year, Russia introduced a law ordering all blogs having 3,000 daily readers or more to follow many of the rules that exist in conventional mass media, such as tougher control on published information and banning bad language.

Popular bloggers, or those whose internet pages attract at least 3,000 unique readers every day have to register with the state watchdog Roskomnadzor, disclose their real identity and follow the same rules as journalists working in conventional state-registered mass media.

The restrictions include the demand to verify information before publishing it and abstain from releasing reports containing slander, hate speech, extremist calls or other banned information such as advice on suicide. Also, the law bans popular bloggers from using obscene language, drawing heavy criticism and mockery from the online community.

Watchdog officials stressed earlier that the web authors' physical location makes no difference - everyone writing in Russian and targeting a Russian audience must comply or access to their content would be blocked in Russia.

Violation of the new rules is punished with fines between 10,000 and 30,000 rubles ($150 - $450 at current rate), and in cases when popular blogs are maintained by legal entities fines can reach 500,000 rubles (over $7,600).

Russian internet companies and human rights advocates protested against the new rules and the head of the Presidential Human Rights Council, Mikhail Fedotov, requested senators didn't approve it. The bill was nevertheless passed, but the upper house agreed to create a special monitoring group comprised of rights activists and industry experts that would monitor its implementation and propose further corrections.

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 #14
Russian state exhibits to US on hold for next few years - culture envoy

MOSCOW, September 16. /TASS/. In the coming few years, American nationals may be deprived of an opportunity to see state exhibits from Russia over the disputed Schneerson Library collection and the YUKOS case, Russian president's envoy for international cultural cooperation, Mikhail Shvydkoi, told a news conference on Wednesday.

"It is obvious that we won't be able to organize any inter-museum state exhibitions with Americans. That is why, we are trying to find some options in which Russian art could be presented in the US by private collectors," he said.

Russian-American museum exchange stopped completely following the dispute over the so-called Schneerson Library collection. In late July 2011, the US court ordered return of about 12,000 books and 50 rare documents from the Schneerson collection, started by Rabbi Joseph Schneerson in the Russian city of Lyubavichi. Part of the collection was nationalized by Soviet Russia as there were no legal heirs in the Schneerson family.

Schneerson managed to take the other part of the collection out of the Soviet Union while emigrating in the 1930s. About 25,000 pages of manuscripts from the collection were later seized by the Nazis, then were regained by the Red Army and handed over to the Russian State Military Archive.

Chabad-Lubavitch, an Orthodox Jewish movement headquarted in New York, seeks the handover of the Schneerson collection, as collected by the early rabbinic leaders of Chabad.

"We believed from the very beginning that the American court could not decide on the property of the Russian Federation that has never left Russia, the Schneerson Library. We see this lawsuit as insignificant," Shvydkoi said.

"Nevertheless the collision is in the judge's passing the verdict despite a recommendation of the Department of State which said this decision would damage relations between the United States and Russia," he continued. The court disregarded it, passing the verdict that Russia was to pay a fine of about 43 million dollars, he continued.

"This does not mean that they will end the process if we pay. It is supposed that after the fine is paid, the Schneerson Library must be returned," Shvydkoi explained. He said the decision of the American court created major problems, especially for Russian assets that were not protected by legal immunity.

"As for cultural values and exchanges, we are now engaged in negotiations with our partners, and insist that when major exhibitions are held, it should be fixed apart from legal guarantees that there could be no claims on Russian cultural values," he said. He said Russia insisted on fixing the Yukos case that is not connected with cultural exhibits.

In July 2014, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague said Russia should pay almost $50 billion to companies affiliated with former shareholders of YUKOS. Russia responded with a categorical disagreement.

Several days earlier, bailiffs in Belgium and France were trying to use the Russian property for satisfying the claim from Yukos Universal Limited.

Following this, Russia's Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky feared some Western countries could try arresting Russian cultural objects in their countries.

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 #15
Moscow Times
September 18, 2015
News of Closure of American Center in Moscow Rattles Muscovites
By Daria Litvinova and Anna Dolgov
 
News of the possible shutting down of an American culture center sponsored by the U.S. Embassy in Moscow after 22 years of operation rattled Muscovites on Wednesday.

Ambassador John Tefft was the first to break the news in a statement published on the embassy's website, warning that the Kremlin was eroding ties that the two countries had managed to preserve even during the Cold War.

"The U.S. Embassy in Moscow deeply regrets the Russian government's unilateral decision to close the embassy's American Center at M. Rudomino All-Russia State Library of Foreign Literature in Moscow," Tefft said.

"These latest unilateral steps further call into question the Russian government's commitment to maintaining people-to-people ties between the Russian and American people, which continued even during the Cold War and other complicated moments in our countries' long history," the ambassador added.

Both experts and ordinary Muscovites who had used the center's services expressed unanimous concern about the move, which many suggested was political.

The administration of the Library of Foreign Literature says that the center will continue to work, and insists that voiding the agreement with the embassy is just a technicality and that a new contract will be agreed. But embassy officials claim that reshaping the way the center functions is aimed at squeezing the Americans out.

Giving Notice

The American Center in Moscow is the largest and oldest institution devoted to U.S. culture in Russia, according to its website. It was financed by U.S. Embassy funds and had a U.S. national as its director.

The center received a notice from the foreign-language library saying the library's agreement with the U.S. Embassy had been terminated and that the center's director would be replaced, as the library was taking "full control of all of the center's activities," Tefft's statement read.

The library portrayed the move as targeting the U.S. Embassy's financing of the center, rather than its activities.

Library director Vadim Duda said in his own statement Wednesday that the library administration wanted the American Center to continue its work, all its employees to keep their jobs, the center to retain the offices and facilities it had been leasing, and to preserve all of its programs.

"But we must put our cooperation in compliance with the demands of Russian law," Duda said. "A state-run federal library cannot maintain the current agreement on the financing of the American Center, which, in effect, is the lease of facilities."

The library has offered the Americans the chance to work out a "new scheme of contract relations," Duda said, adding that the library was "willing to support [the center's] activity even without financing from the American side."

The center's employees expressed dismay at the decision to shut down the American Center "as you know it."

"We are all heartbroken by the news," the center said in a statement, adding: "Many questions and details are still being resolved."

The programs scheduled for September remain in effect, but the prospects of future operations were in limbo, the center said.

No Americans?

Replacing the American director of the center with a Russian employee and announcing the library's intention of taking full control of any activities happening in the space that the American Center formerly occupied is an attempt to squeeze the Americans out of the American center, Will Stevens, a spokesman for the embassy, told The Moscow Times.

"[They] are calling this space a new 'North American Division' of the library. While we welcome the library's apparent intention to continue offering access to the former American Center's resources, they are essentially attempting to maintain a so-called American Center without any Americans," he said in written comments Thursday.

Duda, the library director, disagreed and insisted that the center will not only continue to operate, but will preserve its ties with the embassy.

"We're not planning to destroy ties [with the embassy], we're currently in contact with our American colleagues," he told The Moscow Times on Thursday. "I'm sure that when this question becomes one of business and not politics, together with our American colleagues we will immediately find a way out," he said.

The previous agreement with the embassy, according to Duda, violated Russian legislation on leasing facilities, though he did not specify how, saying only that: "The current agreement that outlined the grant [from the U.S. Embassy] had some clauses that violated legislation relevant to the matter," he said.

Duda said that the library's administration would do everything in its power to reach a new formal relationship with the embassy. "For example, [it could be] a grant for carrying out events and programs," he told The Moscow Times.

He neither confirmed nor denied replacing the center's director.

Shadow of Politics

The attempt to reshape the work of the American Center comes at a time of souring relations between Russia and the West over the crises in Ukraine and Syria.

Moscow has curtailed Western programs in the country, forced Russian nongovernmental organizations that receive funding from abroad to register as "foreign agents" and passed a law banning foreign organizations that Russia deems "undesirable."

The U.S.-based National Endowment for Democracy was the first organization to get axed under that Russian law, when Moscow proclaimed the group "undesirable" this summer.

The move against the U.S. cultural center also comes a year after Russia shut down the largest student exchange program with the U.S. - the Future Leaders Exchange Program, or FLEX.

"It's very bad and shortsighted to destroy the infrastructure of academic and civil contacts. Those who are making these decisions are obviously motivated by some symbolic views [under which] 'America' today is bad in every context," said Ivan Kurilla, a professor at the European University in St. Petersburg.

"[The library's late director] Yekaterina Geniyeva who passed away deserved great respect: She was able to preserve the situation [regardless of political influences]," he told The Moscow Times in written comments Thursday. "Today we are seeing just how much can be done by certain people," he said.

Geniyeva, the renowned and respected director of the library from 1993 until 2015, said in an interview published shortly before her death this summer that Culture Ministry officials had asked her to close down the American Center.

She said she had responded that the authorities could do as they pleased, but had demanded a written order stating that the authorities were closing down the center "in connection with tense relations between the two states [U.S. and Russia]," she told the Meduza news portal.

Duda, the current director, insists the decision to terminate the agreement had nothing to do with the Culture Ministry. "This matter didn't surface just now or recently," he told The Moscow Times. "We decided for ourselves it was time to have a new agreement on cooperation [with the embassy]," he said.

Spokespeople for the Culture Ministry also said the initiative had come from the library's management. "The decision was made by the new administration of the library," they told The Moscow Times in written comments Thursday.

"The contract between the library and the embassy (or the U.S. State Department, to be more exact) - its structure, phrasing and conditions - are not in accordance with current Russian legislation that regulates the leasing of space. It should be brought in sync with the civil laws of the Russian Federation," the ministry said.

Much-Loved Space

The American Center received more than 50,000 Russian visitors and held more than 400 cultural and educational events over the past year alone, and hosted scores of prominent American speakers, including astronauts, actors, athletes, academics, politicians and authors, Tefft said in his statement.

Muscovites polled by The Moscow Times said the center was a unique facility providing a lot of useful services completely free of charge.

"I discovered the center in 2001, when I moved to Moscow. I didn't have the money to buy good books, but I did have the desire to continue my studies," Oksana Maksimovich, a frequent visitor to the facility, told The Moscow Times on Thursday.

"The center had a great selection of literature and online access to bigger library resources," as well as friendly staff members always ready to help, she said.

To use the center's services, it was enough to simply register at the library. "It was permitted to take books home from the center," Alexandra Bazhenova-Sorokina, a philologist who also used the center, told The Moscow Times.

"I often recommended events at the center to my students. It was nice to know that in the very center of Moscow a space like that existed, and it felt right to have it in the foreign language library," she said.

"I really like the center; we will try to keep it for our readers," said Duda, the library director.

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 #16
CNN.com
September 17, 2015
Putin becomes a political punching bag in White House race
By Stephen Collinson, CNN

Washington (CNN)Every good story needs a villain and in Vladimir Putin, candidates in the 2016 White House race have found the perfect foil.

The Russian President -- with his expansionist worldview, Cold War-style mindset, KGB roots, tough-guy stunts and implacable anti-Americanism -- makes the quintessential campaign trail scoundrel.

Putin's walk-on role in the 2016 campaign was on display at the CNN Republican presidential debates on Wednesday, perhaps inevitably, since echoes of the Cold War were everywhere. The back-to-back showdowns were hosted by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, which honors a man who helped hasten the end of the Soviet Union by famously saying in Berlin, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

Candidates, Republicans in particular, seem eager to drop his name and take a stance that makes them look strong, President Barack Obama look weak and that does not require much policy detail. But their harsh talk could end up further straining the U.S.-Russia relationship and handing the next president an even bigger foreign policy challenge.

Putin's name came up 18 times Wednesday night, recalling previous eras when Soviet bashing was a staple of U.S. presidential campaigns.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who touted his foreign policy credentials throughout the debate and says Putin is nothing more than a "gangster," warned that the Russian leader was trying to reverse the collapse of the Soviet Union and wanted to "destroy NATO."

And the breakout star of the debate, Carly Fiorina, took the Putin cold shoulder a step farther.

The former Hewlett-Packard CEO picked a fight with Russia to portray herself as a potential commander in chief.

"Having met Vladimir Putin, I wouldn't talk to him at all. We've talked way too much to him," she said.

"What I would do, immediately, is begin rebuilding the Sixth Fleet, I would begin rebuilding the missile defense program in Poland, I would conduct regular, aggressive military exercises in the Baltic states," she continued. "I'd probably send a few thousand more troops into Germany. Vladimir Putin would get the message."

Talk is one thing ...

If elected president, Fiorina would feel under pressure to live up to her threat to shun him, but not every vow made on the campaign trail ends up translating into administration policy.

And while ignoring Putin might make a strong statement at the start of a presidency, Russia's global influence, its position on the U.N. Security Council and its capacity to thwart U.S. foreign priorities would likely eventually force a President Fiorina to conduct a dialogue with the Russian leader.

Front-runner Donald Trump, meanwhile, sees the Putin problem as less of a geopolitical conundrum and more of a character issue, vowing that the Russian leader will change his tune once a strong personality is back in the Oval Office.

"I will get along with him," said Trump, with typical self-confidence.

But Trump's certainty appears to fly in the face of events. Putin has shown no affection for billionaire businessmen who disagree with him. Several in his country have been thrown in jail during his tenure. Others have fled abroad. Oligarchs close to Putin, on the other hand, benefit from the spoils of Russia's energy riches.

One of Trump's rivals, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, used the image of a Machiavellian Putin to cast doubt on Trump's qualifications to be president.

"Do we want someone with that kind of character, that kind of careless language, to be negotiating with Putin?" Paul asked.

In the debate for second-tier candidates, Sen. Lindsey Graham played the Reagan card.

"Do you think Putin would be in the Ukraine or Syria today if Ronald Reagan were president?" he asked. "No. This is what happens when you have a weak, unqualified commander in chief."

Graham's point, however, ignored the fact that Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union when Reagan was in office, and that Moscow maintained a port in Tartus, Syria, for much of the Cold War.

Putin seems unlikely to blink

While Republican candidates play to the gallery of grassroots hawks nostalgic for the Reagan era, it's unclear just how effective their strategy of tougher talk and further isolation of the Russian leader would be.

The recent history of both Republican and Democratic administrations suggests Russia may believe threatening U.S. oratory is rarely backed up by action, and that Washington has no desire to raise military tensions with Moscow. That could change under a new U.S. administration, but it seems unlikely.

Republicans tend to skip over the fact that Russian troops invaded Georgia in 2008 under the watch of Republican President George W. Bush, who offered a less robust response than the sanctions imposed by Obama over Moscow's annexation of Crimea and incursions into Ukraine.

And Putin -- who has proven himself to be a ruthless operator atop a Russian state apparatus and who, experts say, often makes national security calculations based on a desire to thwart Washington -- is unlikely to be fazed by GOP threats.

After all, Putin puts muscle behind his tough-guy persona.

The State Department says the Russian government presides over harsh restrictions on freedom of expression, harassing and imprisoning dissidents, crushing media freedoms, suppressing gay rights and rigging elections and hassling NGOs. Russian security services are accused of murdering Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko in London by radioactive poisoning in 2006.

But while Republicans might be guilty of cheap talk on Russia, the Obama administration's record has hardly been stellar. Indeed, one of the reasons why Putin is such a useful adversary for GOP candidates is that his rule underscores the struggles of the current White House.

Obama, with Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, pursued a mixed "reset" strategy with Moscow starting in 2009.

It did initially yield some results -- including a nuclear arms reduction treaty, an agreement for Moscow to join international sanctions on Iran that lead to the recent nuclear deal with Tehran and talks opening a transit route for U.S. supplies into Afghanistan. But the progress came while Putin was behind the scenes as prime minister and Dmitry Medvedev served as president.

With Putin's return to the presidency in 2012, relations quickly dipped into the worst freeze since the Cold War, with the annexation of Crimea leading to U.S. sanctions and Russia being kicked out of the G8 club of wealthy nations.

Russian planes and ships are now testing the frontiers of NATO states, experts say espionage by Moscow is at Cold War levels and the Kremlin is sending troops and equipment to Syria, apparently seeking to shore up Middle Eastern ally President Bashar al-Assad, whom the United States has said must leave power.

Russian hackers have been accused of infiltrating Pentagon email systems and Moscow has granted refuge to Edward Snowden, the fugitive intelligence contractor blamed for one of the most stunning breaches of U.S. intelligence data.

Even Clinton -- perhaps wary of the failure of the "reset" on her own foreign policy reputation -- has taken to bashing Putin. She's compared him to Adolf Hitler and complained earlier this year that Europe was being too "wimpy" toward the Russian leader, according to London Mayor Boris Johnson.

'Echo chamber on the American side'

Some foreign policy professionals are becoming increasingly worried about the impact of the campaign debate on already fractious U.S.-Russia ties.

"The biggest problem we have is that there is only one side to this conversation," said Matthew Rojansky, a Russian scholar at the Wilson Center. "It is an echo chamber on the American side. It is not a serious foreign policy discussion."

Anti-Russian rhetoric on the campaign trail also risks handing Putin a propaganda coup -- and making the situation for the next president that much more fraught -- because it risks exacerbating anti-U.S. prejudice in Russia that the former KGB agent has stoked to shore up his own regime during tough economic times.

"The problem is that anything that is said that is hostile towards Russia on the campaign trail is viewed as confirmation of what Putin has said all along and that Russians believe ... that America wants to destroy Russia," said Rojansky. "That is what justifies the whole Putin system today."

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 #17
Business New Europe
www.bne.eu
September 18, 2015
Snowman warms to Russia as Western stars seek new home
If you can right hook or roundhouse with the best of them, or rattle off 100 uses for a giant nose, then the door to Russia and the Kremlin may be wide open to you.
Nick Allen in Warsaw

What is it with international martial arts, boxing and wrestling stars and Russia? A growing number of accomplished 'heavies' have been caught in the country's tractor beam, with a wave of movie and music stars close behind them. Some even took Russian citizenship, earning the wrath of Ukraine in the process.

President Vladimir Putin personally just accelerated the issue of a Russian passport to legendary US boxer Roy Jones Jnr. "If you plan to link a large part of your life with activity in Russia, then of course we will be glad, and we will with pleasure grant your request regarding Russian citizenship," Putin told Jones at a meeting in August (pictured below). Within days the boxer became a fellow countryman.

Putin will also have the deciding word in fast-track citizenship now sought by 44-year-old American mixed martial arts fighter Jeff Monson, nicknamed the Snowman. As well as a shared passion for physical training and combat (Putin is a judo black belt and has watched Monson fight from the ringside), the celeb's body art may also help his case: His many tattoos include two in Russian saying svoboda (freedom) and solidarnost (solidarity), a Soviet hammer and sickle, and the latest addition done earlier this year in a Moscow salon - a tattoo running up his thigh depicting the giant "The Motherland Calls" monument in the Russian city of Volgograd, which commemorates the Soviet victory at the WWII Battle of Stalingrad. Plus the Minnesotan says he feels "Russian in spirit".

Meanwhile, "Taxi" French movie star Samy Naceri is another who has said he wouldn't mind a Russian passport.

Taxbusters

Russia's liberal tax regime is obviously one big draw. While the subject is not discussed much in public, it shimmers behind the compliments the big names heap on the country and Kremlin boss in equal measure.

French actor Gerard Depardieu received Russian citizenship in 2013 after fleeing France in protest at proposals for a 75% tax rate there. Although most Russians pay a flat tax rate of 13%, Depardieu reportedly pays a special 6% rate that applies to entrepreneurs with an annual income of less than €1.73mn. Other famous Western recipients of Russian citizenship would likely land the same bonus, since most will have business interests as well as a cabinet full of sporting or acting trophies.

"I am sick and tired of France's tax system. I don't live in France but I keep paying taxes. I think I'll now make the decision to sell all my property in this country, including my house and restaurants," Depardieu, 65, said in a recent interview with France's TV Magazine weekly, adding that he felt "betrayed" in his native homeland.

Keep it light

Celebrity Russophiles also wisely tend to avoid the topic of politics and especially the Ukraine crisis, instead extolling the beauty of Russia's landscapes, the warmth of its people and their strong sense of identity, and the generous welcome they get here.

Others like US heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson have been dropping in for years, in his case often as an honoured guest of controversial Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, who is also a keen boxer and a lavish host (he gave Depardieu a large apartment in Grozny to entice him into spending more time there). And actor Mickey Rourke decided Moscow was just the place to reprise his own boxing past in 2014, wearing red trunks with a Russian flag to win his first match in 20 years at age 62. He has met Putin and wears a T-shirt with the president's face on it.

Those who combine fighting skills and big screen success seem to fare best of all. Aikido master and action movie star Steven Seagal is another pal of Putin's (and Kadyrov's), occasionally appearing with the president at martial arts events, and popping up to exchange warm greetings at the recent Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok.

Not that he intends to apply for citizenship, he stresses, although he is of Jewish Russian ancestry. In March last year, as the world was reeling at Russia's Crimea snatch, Seagal issued an urgent press statement to clarify his views on the Russian leader. "I have never said that President Putin was the 'World's Greatest Leader', what I DID say was that President Putin was ONE of the World's Great Leaders," he emphasised.

Everything galore

"What brings them [Western stars] to kneel before Putin?" asks Artemy Troitsky, a Russian music and entertainment promoter, who helped bring such performers as David Bowie to Russia over the years and is now bemused by the glitzy procession of names arriving in Moscow. "Forget ideology - if there is ideology in Russia right now, it's only severe anti-Americanism, which shouldn't fit even boxers or Hollywood has-beens - it's only money and corruption," Troitsky, a staunch Putin critic, tells bne IntelliNews. "By corruption I mean all kinds of red carpet treatment on the state budget, from hookers, vodka, caviar galore, to gift apartments, and cars and glamour they've probably never seen. And by money I mean tax exile, [a] laundering haven, plus enormous fees for nothing."

So what's in it for Russia, apart from the evident kick the president gets while hanging out with the big boys of the dojo, boxing ring or film set? "For Russians - the most stupid of them - this is reassuring evidence of how great we are, but most don't give a [hoot]," Troitsky concludes.

Maybe the Russia obsession is partly Chuck Norris's fault. The 75-year-old US karate king and movie star was a regular visitor to Moscow in the 1990s, when he launched the now defunct "Beverly Hills" night club to plenty of media attention. (In January, Norris announced he would open a chain of burger restaurants in Russia by the end of 2015.) And Arnold Schwarzenegger must carry at least some of the blame: the 1988 movie "Red Heat" in which he plays a Soviet cop was a superlative action portrayal of blundering West meets rock-hard Wild East and learns a thing or two. And he brought Planet Hollywood to Moscow - even if it didn't last much longer than Chuck's joint.

Beverly Hills 3?

Despite the Western sanctions over Ukraine and the current economic recession, Russia is still a pretty cool place to have free rein of, especially if you are friends with the president. And you aren't stuck shivering in eternal winter either, despite the preconceptions. Putin's meetings with Western stars, fighters or other often take place at his villa in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, complete with palm trees and jet skis. Hop across the water and you are in Crimea, which is now also courting big names to make a new home there among its stunning scenery and vineyards.

Crimea head Sergey Aksyonov in September invited celebrities from around the world to come to the peninsular and make their home - or one of their homes - there. "If honoured stars wish to settle in Crimea, they are absolutely welcome," Izvestia newspaper quoted Aksyonov as saying. "We shall encourage the rise of a new Beverly Hills in Crimea."

Showbiz stars, athletes, actors and such will face no administrative or other obstacles if they decide to buy real estate on the peninsular, move for permanent residence or come for a vacation, the official pledged. "We will happily provide assistance to scope out convenient places on the coast, either in the mountains, unique woods or plains - in any case in the midst of great nature and a marvellous climate."

Aksyonov also reminded that Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst is another suitor for Russian citizenship. But he drew the line at a proposal from a member of the Russian parliament to put Depardieu in charge of Crimea's wine production, saying: "I respect Gerard Depardieu as a professional actor, but unfortunately I don't know anything about his winemaking experience."

Red card, not Green

It's just as well Crimea is open to Depardieu and Seagal, because the rest of Ukraine is now off bounds to both. In July, the unlikely pairing was added to the list of people who Kyiv regards as a "threat to national security".

But if the warm welcome in Russia ever cools, other ex-Soviet republics are bound to reach out. In fact, "proud to be Russian" Depardieu has stated his intention to now live next door in Belarus after visiting President Alexander Lukashenko at his country home, declaring: "I currently live in Italy, but soon I'll settle in Belarus, among peasants."

Compared to the opulent reception he gets in Russia, far less frills would seem to go with that arrangement, if it materialises: According to Lukashenko's press service, during the actor's visit the president "showed him some models of Belarusian agricultural machines and even taught Depardieu some [grass] mowing skills".

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 #18
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
September 17, 2015
TROIKA REPORT: EU sanctions against Russia: a bitter harvest
RBTH presents its weekly analytical program TROIKA REPORT, featuring a look at three of the most high-profile recent developments in international affairs.
By Sergey Strokan and Vladimir Mikheev

1. Engaging the West
EU sanctions against Russia: a bitter harvest
 
Dark clouds hang over Europe's agribusiness as it calculates the direct and collateral fallout from Moscow's likely retaliation to the EU's six-month extension of sanctions against Russia, intended to punish the Kremlin for what Brussels sees as its continuing failure to implement the peace agreements on the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

As the harvest season reaches its peak there has been a new wave of protests by income-starved European farmers. Amid mounting pressure, France in particular is considering abandoning the punitive embargo as a concession to local farmers distressed by nose-diving revenues and missed opportunities.

Overshadowed by the acute phase of the refugee crisis and the reemergence of Syria as a hot spot on global radars, the accumulating frustration of European exporters has gone almost unnoticed. Yet while this trend has been largely ignored by the media, this extra headache for export-oriented European companies, deprived of access to the vast Russian market, is a factor in its own right.

In fact, the street protests by French and Belgian farmers in Paris and Brussels in early September were mainly aimed at the EU's overregulation policies. These guidelines offer the most favorable conditions to huge agricultural holdings, impose inflexible standardization norms, and favor mediocre producers rather than those who excel in their trade.

However, the frustration of the French farmers has also roots in the losses incurred as a result of the temporary closure of one of their lucrative markets, Russia.

Just for the record, the ban on pork exports to Russia is costing French farmers 100 million euros a year, but weighed against the depressed prices that have resulted from the ensuing oversupply, the actual losses are 400 million euros. Fruit and vegetable growers have lost some 50 million euros and dairy producers are looking at losses of 109 million euros.

"Sanctions against Russia are hitting some important sectors of the French domestic agriculture," said French National Assembly lawmaker Nicolas Dhuicq.

In turn, Bertrand Venteau, former chairman of the French Rural Coordination, made the following statement: "Since Moscow closed its market to European farmers they are having to sell their products at a loss. Some of them have gone broke. There is a serious threat to the pork and apple markets in France."

Will the frustration of the farmers be translated into a more vigorous political campaign to put an end to the sanctions and counter-sanctions that are hurting both sides? Kirill Koktysh, a political scientist and assistant professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, told Troika Report that while the lobbying efforts of the European agricultural business should not be discounted, they should not be overestimated:

"European farmers, under the present circumstances, tend to be allies of Russia. First of all, they are protecting their markets because they are losing their income due to the counter-sanctions. Secondly, they are objecting to the proposed free trade agreement with the United States because it would kill their business. That is why the farmers are trying to influence the EU policy toward Russia."

- Could the dissatisfaction of the farmers have an impact on EU policy?

"Naturally, they have become a factor of political life, but not an especially strong one. Will they be strong enough this year? It's doubtful. It might just be one more step on the way to rethinking the European policy, with the chances being 50:50."

So, with time, will the agricultural business become more proactive in engaging the authorities of the EU in the debate on the practicality of the sanctions? Pekka Vilyakainen, a Finnish millionaire who is currently advisor to the president of the Skolkovo Foundation in Moscow, has a more optimistic forecast, which he shared with Troika Report:

"I am absolutely sure that over time European business has been lobbying the EU over the sanctions. In fact, I would not call it 'lobbying.' 'Making an impact' would be a better word... The problem is that not enough people are interested in the situation. Right now Europe is talking about Syrian refugees, which is a massively big problem. Politicians have their focus somewhere else. And this is slowing down the process of getting the sanctions away."

"All the European people would be extremely happy to drop the sanctions. I do not believe that there is any person in Europe, politician or ordinary person, who thinks it is right to have this situation frozen for a long period of time. It would benefit nobody."

Meanwhile, the BBC noted that the street riots may have had a political impact, with French President Francois Hollande having made upbeat comments on the modest progress seen in the implementation of the Minsk peace agreements on Ukraine, in particular the ceasefire in the Donbass, and has expressed hopes "of seeing the end of sanctions against Russia."

All things considered, the slogan of the day of the disgruntled farmers could be "Better farm than harm!"
 
2. Globally speaking
Syria: Will Moscow deploy ground troops to fight ISIS?
 
Intense speculations around the alleged build-up of Russian troops on the ground in Syria have now moved the issue of fighting the expansion of Islamic State (ISIS) to the top of the political agenda. In the coming weeks, various and conflicting methods of doing battle with the radical militant group will be reportedly discussed at the UN General Assembly and at the G20 summit in Antalya.

The divide between Russia and Iran on one side and the United States and its allies, namely, the Gulf monarchies, on the other, remains for the moment as acute as at the beginning of the civil war in Syria, now in its fourth year. The stumbling block is the disagreement on whether to unseat Assad's regime or incorporate it into the collective efforts to defeat ISIS.

Moscow has pegged its strategy on convincing the U.S. and its allies that for the time being Assad and his army is the most effective means of fighting this formidable foe. The logic is that a wider anti-ISIS coalition, including Assad's regime, would be instrumental for victory on the ground.

In order to facilitate the fight for the common cause, Russian diplomacy has engaged leading stakeholders. Apart from U.S. President Barack Obama, Moscow has conducted talks with the leaders of Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. According to Moscow sources, modest progress was recorded.

For example, there is more understanding among the interested parties that, as Russian President Vladimir Putin phrased it, "the fight against terrorism must go hand in hand with a political process in Syria." The regime in Damascus seems to be trying to meet other regional actors half-way. Assad is ready to hold early parliamentary elections, engage the moderate opposition in dialogue and offer them government posts.

However, this may not be enough to kick-start the political process of a settlement because intensive fighting is still going on in the vicinity of the Syrian capital -cause to believe that Assad's days are indeed numbered. Yet these are the very same hopes the opposition nurtured four years ago, and especially this spring.

The very possibility of Moscow upping the stakes and boosting its military involvement in the conflict in Syria is intriguing for everyone. Is this even likely?

Grigory Kosach, an expert on the politics of the Arab world and professor at The Russian State University for the Humanities, provided this comment for Troika Report:

"It is unrealistic to assume that Russia would immediately get involved in a confrontation with ISIS. In practical terms, I do not see how Russian military personnel now stationed in Syria could possibly come into combat contact with ISIS because they are separated by a vast buffer zone where different militant groups are fighting each other. How would they define the ISIS targets? Definitely, it would require a lot of preparatory work if the decision to get involved is taken at some point in time.

"It should be noted that at present, as many experts assert, Moscow is focused on creating a stronghold for Bashar al-Assad, that is, in Latakia and in the Alawite mountains around it where the Syrian president, in the worst-case scenario, would be able to find an adequate refuge."

- What are the chances that the United States will adjust its rigid stance on the Syrian crisis, namely the fate of Bashar al-Assad?

"As for the position of the United States, it is not carved in stone. It is changing. After all, the U.S. has already conceded that it is essential to preserve government structures [in Syria], meaning the army and the security services. That is the result of the Americans accommodating the lesson they learned in Iraq, where government agencies were dismantled, paving the way for the emergence of ISIS.

"So, anything can happen, although I do not expect the U.S. to accept the preservation of Assad in any form, in particular due to the pressure applied by the Gulf States, led by Saudi Arabia, which put forward as an unconditional prerequisite the departure of the current Syrian president. Having said that, it is evident that even Saudi Arabia would not want all of the government institutions in Syria to crumble, since it would lead to even more chaos."

The flurry of diplomatic talks and statements is a clear sign that something is in the making. The major actors are weighing up the possible solutions that would best serve their interests in the settlement of the two major crises: the Syrian civil war and the continuing expansion of ISIS, now the prime target on the world's "most wanted" hit list.
 
3. Going Eastward
Instability in Tajikistan rouses concerns in Moscow
 
Right after ambiguous reports of an aborted coup d'état in Tajikistan, Moscow has signaled the probability of fortifying the Central Asian nation's borders with Afghanistan with Russian troops. Moscow's statement coincided with a summit of the Russia-led six nation Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) held in the Tajik capital Dushanbe amid enhanced concerns over infiltration of the region by terrorists from the Islamic State (ISIS) radical militant group.

General Abduhalim Nazarzoda, until recently deputy defense minister, attacked security forces with his supporters before fleeing to a nearby gorge. Conflicting reports about Nazarzoda, whose home was found to be hiding a secret cache of weapons, provide more questions than answers. The only plausible interpretation focuses on the close relations between Nazarzoda and the only legally registered Islamic party in all of Central Asia, the now banned Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan.

Of no less concern were the military units under the command of General Nazarzoda, which included fighters belonging to the Tajik opposition. They laid down their weapons after the five-year civil war that ended in 1997 and were incorporated into government armed forces in accordance with the painstakingly hammered out peace treaty which ended the internal strife. Yet the loyalty of these soldiers, former insurgents, remains as dubious as their track records.

So, what is going on? What are the stakes for Moscow in the painful evolution of Tajikistan toward a stable and predictable state? Arkady Dubnov, a political analyst and expert in Central Asia affairs, provided his view to Troika Report:

"Many define the events in Tajikistan on Sept. 4 as an aborted coup d'état. I utterly disagree. In my opinion, this is testimony to the instability of the regime, where internal controversies are brewing and threatening the overthrow of [President Emomali] Rahmon, who has been at the top for the last 21 years.

"Russia traditionally pursues the policy of supporting the incumbent leaders of the CIS countries based on the premises that such a leader is in control of the situation. This is even more true of Tajikistan, which is the 'weak link' among the Central Asian republics bordering Afghanistan, which represents the main danger as the source of infiltration by radical Islamist militants. Moscow will continue to regard Rahmon's regime as 'friendly' and will provide it with assistance until the situation escapes the control of both Dushanbe and Moscow and sets the course toward a regime change."

- Does Moscow have any leverage to influence the course of events in Dushanbe? In this respect, how effective is the mechanism of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO)?

"The CSTO has the power to intervene in case there is a threat of external aggression for any of the six member states, pending an official request for assistance. For the moment, the situation in Tajikistan is not viewed as a security threat from the CSTO perspective.

"However, Moscow has the largest military base outside its borders located in Tajikistan, with some 7,000 soldiers deployed in three locations across the country. This is a serious factor in the support for the ruling regime as well as an instrument of containment of possible aggression from the outside."

Despite a strong military contingent on the ground, the CSTO has never been tested under fire. Is its role in maintaining security in the region not being overestimated? Vadim Kozyulin, an expert with the Center for Policy Studies, a Moscow-based independent think tank, answered this question for Troika Report:

"Tajikistan is one of the most vulnerable members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization. That is why it is the focus of CSTO attention. The vulnerability derives from the presence of groups of militants on the other side of the border, in Afghanistan. Tajikistan is a mountainous country. Many regions are inaccessible to the central government. People in these remote areas are uncertain whether the government in Dushanbe would be able to provide them assistance in case of an emergency in the border zone."

- Is that the reason why the CSTO recently held large-scale maneuvers in Tajikistan?

"Yes, it is important to demonstrate to Afghanistan's neighbors that the CSTO is capable of rapid reaction and provision of assistance on the ground."
Regular reports from the region confirm the assumption that Islamic State is recruiting new converts among ethnic Tajiks in Afghanistan, who could be channeled upward to penetrate Central Asia. There is hardly any doubt that ISIS jihadists, emboldened by their success in Iraq and Syria, could thoroughly destabilize the whole region, which has not yet overcome the syndromes of a transitional and, in many cases, post-conflict stage of development.

Moscow views this trend, punctuated by the spread of ISIS-linked jihadists, with due apprehension. Until 2005, Russian border guards provided Tajikistan with relative impregnability; since then they have been replaced by Tajik counterparts.

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently expressed concerns over the deteriorating security environment in Afghanistan - a statement could indicate that Moscow is seriously considering a build-up of security arrangements to protect Tajikistan, the 'soft underbelly' of Central Asia, and, subsequently, of Russia as well.

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 #19
www.project-syndicate.org
September 16, 2015
A Eurasian Solution for Europe's Crises
By Sergei Karaganov
Sergei Karaganov is Dean of the School of International Economics and Foreign Affairs of the National Research University Higher School of Economics and a member of the OSCE's Panel of Eminent Persons on European Security as a Common Project.

MOSCOW - More than 18 months after former President Viktor Yanukovych was driven from power (and into exile), the crisis in Ukraine is at a stalemate. Crimea has been reabsorbed by Russia (in what many consider an annexation); much of eastern Ukraine is held by pro-Russia rebels; and relations between the West and Russia are more tense than at any time since the early days of the Cold War.

But can anyone claim an advantage? Those who wanted to see Ukraine anchored in the West, or imagined that sanctions on Russia would incite regime change in the Kremlin, by palace coup or popular uprising, have seen their hopes dashed: President Vladimir Putin's popularity is as high as ever. In Russia, those who predicted the immediate collapse of Ukraine and the establishment in its eastern and southern provinces of a pro-Russian "Novorossia" have been similarly disappointed.

The tragedy is that the price of these illusions has been extraordinarily high in human terms - the ceasefire-defying death toll in eastern Ukraine has risen to more than 6,000 since April 2014 - and dangerously high in geostrategic terms as well. It looks like both sides are ready to fight "to the last Ukrainian."

As I have long argued, Russia was never likely to yield. After being pushed to the wall by more than two decades of Western expansion - be it European Union or NATO enlargement - into a part of Europe that it considers vital to its national security, Russians believe that they have the moral high ground in defending their interests.

The danger now, with both sides trading accusations in an atmosphere of mutual distrust, is that the current stalemate will lead to a much deeper crisis between Russia and the West. Both sides need to find a solution; yet, despite emerging victorious from the Cold War, the West seems not only to have lost the peace, but is on the verge of re-dividing Europe. And this is occurring at a time when the entire continent, including Russia and many other Eurasian states, is facing the threat of Islamic extremism.

It is also happening at a time when both parts of Europe are in search of a new geopolitical, or even spiritual, identity. While the EU wrestles with problems of migration and integration, Russia is drifting away from a Eurocentric cultural and economic course toward a Eurasian alternative. And the United States - at least under President Barack Obama - has retreated into a kind of semi-isolation, leaving behind troubling zones of instability and unresolved crises.

So what will happen next? With both Western and Eastern Europe beset by political conflict and economic stagnation, the five centuries of European global dominance are drawing to an end. The reality now, following the end of the bipolar supremacy of the US and the Soviet Union and a brief "unipolar" phase following the Soviet Union's collapse, is that we are now in a "multipolar" world.

This, too, may prove temporary as two new geopolitical macro-blocs gain strength in the twenty-first century. One centers on the US and its ambition to conclude the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

The second macro-bloc is "Greater Eurasia," featuring China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Iran, and possibly India. Strong foundations for this project were established with the May 2015 agreement between Russia and China to coordinate the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) with President Xi Jinping's "Silk Road" initiative, which aims to bind Central Asia's economies and those farther to the west closer to China's.

The question is whether this Greater Eurasia can help Europe find a way through its current security impasse. Some in Europe will doubtless prefer to strengthen the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe - but the truth is that the OSCE, burdened by its Cold War history and its failure to secure the post-Cold War peace, is too tarnished to play a decisive role.

An alternative might be a dialogue between the EU and the EEU, but that would be tricky as the EEU pursues a closer relationship with China and its Silk Road allies. A better approach would be to invite - sooner rather than later - China and Eurasian states to create over time a common economic space from Shanghai to Lisbon. There is obvious potential for the EU to engage constructively with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (created in 2001 by China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, with India and Pakistan set to join next year). The failure of the old framework demands an effort to create a new one, beginning with a dialogue on Eurasian development cooperation and security that involves China and both Eurasian and European countries.

None of this will render the OSCE or NATO redundant, and that should be no one's goal. What matters in resolving today's conflicts, be they active or supposedly "frozen," is to build a broader framework of cooperation and dialogue between the EU and what I term Greater Eurasia.

The remaining question in such a scenario concerns the role of the US. Does it really want to remain in semi-isolation, hoping to be called back to center stage at some unlikely "unipolar moment" in the future? Let us hope for an America ready to act as a responsible player in a fairer world.

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 #20
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
September 18, 2015
Britain's Labor Party could be ready to change the nation's Russia policy
With the election of Jeremy Corbyn as the new leader of the British Labor Party, there are signs that the longstanding foreign policy consensus in Britain could be changing in Russia's favor.
By Ruslan Kostyuk
Ruslan Kostyuk, Professor at St. Petersburg State University, Doctor of Historical Sciences

Last week the British Labor Party announced its new leader after a lengthy selection process. The winner was 66-year-old veteran politician Jeremy Corbyn. He overcame three other competitors, all of whom are proponents of the New Labor establishment and members of the party's shadow government.

Corbyn's victory was nothing short of a landslide. In all three of the party's "electoral colleges" - Labor MPs, trade union-affiliated members and registered party supporters - Corbyn won convincingly. The new "one member, one vote" system handed him 59.6 percent of the vote (251,000 people). According to Professor Philippe Marliere of University College London, "What is remarkable is that Jeremy Corbyn owes his rise to new supporters (especially the young) and former activists who left the party during the period of Blairism."

The dominance of social liberalism inside the Labor Party, which began under Tony Blair, seemed unstoppable. But clearly that is not the case. After the Labor Party's defeat in the May elections, most British political analysts expected the party to swing once again to the right, away from the foggy social reformism of the former leadership. But no, for the first time since the 1980s, the party faithful entrusted the leadership to a true leftist.

Corbyn stands for a world free of aggression and imperialism

Back in the 1980s Corbyn stood out as an unswerving campaigner against all forms of imperialism and militarism, winning a reputation for his participation in demonstrations and protests against apartheid in South Africa and the Pinochet regime in Chile. Moreover, Labor MPs are generally known for speaking up for Palestinians' right to statehood, supporting calls for a boycott against Israel.

Corbyn has long been involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and wants to scrap Britain's Trident nuclear submarine program. Corbyn favors general disarmament and a "radically different policy," which, in his opinion, should be based exclusively on the principles of peace, solidarity and internationalism.

Unlike past leaders of the Labor Party, Corbyn is an outspoken critic of the "special relationship" between London and Washington. At the turn of the new millennium, he took an active part in the mass anti-war demonstrations against U.S. (and British) military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq. Corbyn was fiercely critical of what he saw as America's highly unconstructive position on the Middle East, Iran and the Palestinian-Israeli settlement.

It is no coincidence that one of the first to congratulate the new leader of the Labor Party on his stunning victory was Argentine President Christina Fernandez de Kirchner. More than 30 years ago, Corbyn openly opposed sending the British armada to the Falkland Islands. To this day, he supports Argentina's historical right to the Islas Malvinas, as they are known in Spanish. Moreover, Corbyn has long enjoyed amicable relations with the leaders of Venezuela, having repeatedly stated that he sympathizes with the Bolivarian model of "21st century socialism."

Corbyn and Russia: Friendly criticism

As a politician with a left-socialist leaning, Corbyn is certainly not one of those European politicians who take delight in criticizing the "Russian model." Like other Labor left-wingers, he did not hide his deep affection for the Soviet Union, and his public addresses have repeatedly stressed the heroic contribution of the Red Army and the Soviet people in the victory over Nazism.

At the same time, he is known for his criticism of Russia's policies in Chechnya and the country's record on human rights, with particular regard to the LGBT community, which the democratic socialist Corbyn staunchly supports.

"I am not an admirer or supporter of Putin's foreign policy, or of Russian or anybody else's expansion," Corbyn stressed.

But it was no accident that immediately after the results of the Labor leadership contest were announced, incumbent Prime Minister David Cameron tweeted: "The Labor Party is now a threat to national security..."

This might be an exaggeration, but, nevertheless, it might also show how much Cameron fears that the many-decades-long consensus among Britain's major parties on foreign policy and security could be now in play.

Also on Russia, it is no secret that the former leadership of the Labor Party actively supported the policy of sanctions on the Kremlin, accusing the Kremlin of aggression in Ukraine. Corbyn and his radical supporters inside the Labor Party consider the "U.S.-European" policy of sanctions ineffective and futile. He also believes that NATO, the United States and Western European countries bear a large share of responsibility for the course of events in Ukraine.

As Corbyn suggests, the West largely provoked Moscow into taking action in eastern Ukraine through its policy of NATO expansion eastwards, which he has denounced on numerous occasions. In the MP's own words, "NATO expansion and Russian expansion - one leads to the other, and one reflects the other."

Corbyn believes that Europe should instead pursue cooperation, for which reason he advocates full-fledged economic, cultural and scientific ties between Britain and Russia, focusing on coordinated action in the humanitarian sphere and the work of NGOs. All told, there are real grounds to suppose that the period of foreign policy consensus in British politics could be over.

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 #21
Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Ambassador-at-large Grigoriy Berdennikov's interview with Rossiya Segodnya, 11 September 2015. (excerpt re nuclear talks with US)

Nuclear disarmament talks with USA

Question: The Foreign Ministry has said that there was no reason to continue nuclear disarmament talks with the United States. Has Washington heard Moscow on this issue?

Grigoriy Berdennikov: As you know, the United States unilaterally suspended talks with Russia on strategic issues some time ago. Now we are beginning to receive signals through various channels that the US seems to be willing to resume disarmament talks. However, they intend to proceed without regard for factors that underpin strategic stability around the world. This means marginalising issues that directly affect international security, and for that reason are of special importance to Russia. First and foremost, this is related to efforts by the US to unilaterally deploy a global missile defence system, the development of a prompt global strike concept, the threat of arms deployment in outer space, etc. We believe such logic to be flawed, and make no secret of it in our contacts with the US. Whether or not they understand our arguments, only they can say.

In addition, as we have stated many times, nuclear disarmament has reached a point in which further steps can only be undertaken in a multilateral setting, involving all nuclear states, not just the five official nuclear-weapon states under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), but also those who are not parties to this treaty.

Question: Regarding the five nuclear-weapon states, when will a meeting of its representatives take place?

Grigoriy Berdennikov: The last meeting was held in February 2015 in London. We went there in a positive mood, hoping that the 2015 NPT Review Conference in New York would be a success. But it didn't happen that way. As you know, three delegations (the US, Great Britain and Canada) thwarted the adoption of a final document. It was a severe blow to the treaty and the non-proliferation regime it regulates. There is no doubt that this will and already is negatively affecting the general atmosphere in this area. Specifically, efforts to convene a conference on the creation of a nuclear-weapon-free-zone (NWFZ) in the Middle East were stalled. What next? There is currently no mechanism in place for moving forward on this issue, although the resolution of the 1995 NPT Review Conference on this issue is still in force.

There is also uncertainty about the prospects for the next meeting of the five states. In July, Paris hosted a preliminary meeting. Russia put forward a programme aimed at streamlining joint efforts by the five countries, but this initiative is in its early stages and needs to be further discussed, if our partners are willing to maintain this framework as we are.

Question: Are there any consultations going on between Russia and the United States on the INF Treaty?

Grigoriy Berdennikov: By definition, the word "consultation" implies a comprehensive and professional dialogue, in which the parties have a detailed discussion on issues that they may have. The US clearly prefers "megaphone diplomacy" when it comes to the INF Treaty. It could be the case that such an approach relieves them from the need to specify accusations against Russia and provide any kind of evidence. More importantly, acting this way frees the US from the obligation to respond to counter claims regarding its actions that are inconsistent with the treaty. First and foremost, this concerns designing, making and testing so-called target-missiles that are similar, if not identical, to the banned intermediate-range ballistic missiles. In our view, by its nature and scope the work in this area goes far beyond the stated objective of testing the missile defence system. The US has and continues to make active use of Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles (UCAV), which are regarded as intermediate-range ground-launched cruise missiles as per the INF Treaty. Finally, preparations are under way to deploy at missile defence facilities in Poland and Romania ground-based Mk-41 launchers that are used by the US Navy for launching interceptor, as well as Tomahawk cruise missiles. The treaty unambiguously bans the use of launchers of this kind on land.

The US does not seem to have any serious arguments to justify these violations. In any case, they are not willing to discuss them. I'll leave it up to you to decide whether "serious consultations" is an appropriate way to describe the current state of affairs.

Question: Is the current START Treaty in jeopardy in a situation where dialogue with the United States in many areas has been effectively frozen?

Grigoriy Berdennikov: We honour and will continue to honour the new START Treaty. We act on the assumption that the United States is determined to do the same.

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 #22
RFE/RL
September 16, 2015
Impasse Over U.S.-Russia Nuclear Treaty Hardens As Washington Threatens 'Countermeasures'
by Mike Eckel

WASHINGTON -- Russia risks provoking "military and economic countermeasures" if it continues to stonewall over a U.S. accusation that it violated a bedrock of nuclear arms control, the United States' lead arms-control negotiator says.

The comments by Rose Gottemoeller, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, highlight the seriousness that the U.S. administration has attached to the alleged violations of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. Last year Washington formally accused Moscow of being "in violation of its obligations."

Gottemoeller told RFE/RL in an interview that Russia had been engaged in a "fishing expedition" to learn "what precisely we know and how we obtained that information" instead of trying to resolve the dispute.

"We don't make determinations on arms-control violations lightly," Gottemoeller said. "So I want to make clear that this violation is not a technicality or a mistake as some have suggested. We are talking about a missile that has been flight-tested as a ground-launched cruise-missile system to these ranges that are banned under this treaty."

Russia has denied the accusation, and in turn said Washington was at fault for missile-defense projects in Eastern Europe.

The INF treaty, the first to outlaw an entire category of already-deployed weaponry and allow for physical on-site inspections, is considered by many historians as a pivotal event in European security and arguably the life of the Soviet Union.

Its fraying comes with relations between Russia and the West at post-Cold War lows, marked by tensions over Moscow's forcible annexation of Crimea and other actions in Ukraine and U.S. concern at apparent efforts by Russia to strengthen its foothold in Syria. Russia has also raised the profile of its military activities in and around Europe, while the United States has announced the deployment of advanced fighter jets and heavy weaponry to Central and Eastern Europe.

No Will To Confront Moscow?

Like many agreements, the INF treaty spells out a dispute-resolution procedure, called the Special Verification Commission (SVC).

But since Washington first formally leveled its accusations, there has been no meeting of the commission; the last time it convened was October 2003. More perplexing, or even worrisome in the eyes of many experts, some with long government experience, is that there has been no effort to convene it.

"The United States isn't making a huge issue about it because it doesn't know what to do about it," says James Acton, a physicist and head of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"The willingness to go toe to toe with the Russians seems like something the White House doesn't want to do," says Thomas Karako, a former staff member of the U.S. House Armed Services Committee, now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Russians don't think we're serious. They think they're going to get away with it."

Long-Running Concerns

The way the U.S. administration sees it, there is little doubt about the facts.

"Despite providing the Russian government with extensive points on these matters, it's more than enough information in our view for the Russian government to pinpoint the missile system of concern," Gottemoeller said. "The Russian Federation repeatedly asks for additional information. In our view, they're seeking to find out what precisely we know and how we obtained that information. It's a fishing expedition."

The 1987 agreement, signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, eliminated an entire class of missiles: nearly 2,700 intermediate-range ballistic and cruise missiles, the majority of them Russian. It also was the first to allow for intrusive on-site inspections.

The deal did not concern sea- or air-launched intermediate-range missiles.

According to two arms control experts, U.S. intelligence began detecting what the administration says were indications of treaty violations as far as back as 2010, and possibly earlier, and began raising the issue with Moscow in 2013, quietly, but at high levels.

U.S. officials also began briefing some European allies, though it was the annual U.S. compliance report published in July 2014 that set off alarm bells in many European capitals.

In the report, the State Department said Russia was in violation of its obligations "not to possess, produce, or flight-test a ground-launched cruise missile (GLCM) with a range capability of 500 kilometers to 5,500 kilometers, or to possess or produce launchers of such missiles." This year's report repeated the same language.

Those ranges essentially cover the entire European continent, and much of Russia west of the Ural Mountains.

"What's important is that Russia doesn't pursue an INF-prohibited missile and we don't give them an opening or excuse to do so," says Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a Washington advocacy group.

Among analysts outside of government, there is disagreement about the type of weapon the United States has identified as being in violation. The U.S. administration has released no data publicly to back up its allegations, and the Russians have rejected the data provided to them as unconvincing.

Moscow, meanwhile, has accused Washington itself of being in violation of the treaty by utilizing advanced Aegis radar systems and ship-based Mark 41 launch systems that, according to Moscow, could be used as part of missile systems banned by the INF.

U.S. officials have raised the issue repeatedly since May 2013, including "senior-level discussions" in Moscow in September 2014, according to congressional testimony from Brian McKeon, a senior Pentagon policy official.

Gottemoeller said the dispute had been discussed by the two countries' top diplomats and others. She declined to confirm that U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin had also discussed the issue.

"It's a little strange because when you make such a strong allegation in public internationally, you should have something to show for it," says Hans Kristensen, who runs the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, a Washington research group.

Many experts accept the U.S. position that the violation concerns a new weapon altogether: a ground-launched cruise missile.

"If there was some real ambiguity, [the Americans] would have kept it quiet, dealt with it through back channels," says Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. "They don't want the treaty to break down, but they saw a violation they thought they had to raise."

A New Weapon?

Among those with alternative theories is Pavel Podvig, a Geneva-based researcher and widely read arms-control blogger. He speculated that the weapon in question may be a submarine-launched cruise missile that was tested at a ground facility -- which is allowable under the INF -- but tested using a mobile launcher -- which may violate the agreement.

"It's in the interest of the U.S. to release more information on the alleged violations," Podvig says. "Release something to show that we are on the verge of the massive Russian deployment, which is possible but unlikely."

"If it were a dedicated, ground-launched cruise missile, then the question is: 'So what? What comes next?'" Kristensen says. "If you have to call the Russians on it, you can't go around saying: 'You cheated. We don't want to play with you anymore.'"

"They're forced to continue with this effort, to get Russia to return to compliance to the treaty," he adds.

Another theory that has gained traction is that the weapon in question is the RS-26, or Rubezh, a longer-range ballistic missile, which would fall under the New START treaty. Some experts believe the Russians may be planning to deploy the Rubezh for intermediate ranges, and that is what U.S. intelligence has focused on. Russian news reports said U.S. inspectors have been invited to visit the Votinsk test site east of Moscow this fall to view the missile.

But the missile in question was not the RS-26, Gottemoeller said, nor another that analysts have focused on: the R-500 cruise missile, which uses a modified launch system called the Iskander-K.

"At issue is a ground-launched cruise missile with a range capability of 500-5,500 kilometers," Gottemoeller said. "We are confident that the Russian government is aware of the missile to which we are referring."

The SVC, spelled out in the treaty, is the technical commission of scientists and experts that meets to hash out these exact concerns. But there's been no move -- by either Washington or Moscow -- to convene the commission.

The reason, Gottemoeller suggested, is that it would be pointless. "When one side categorically denies the very existence of a ground-launched cruise missile that violates the treaty, then there's little prospect that an SVC request [would] result in a desired outcome," she said.

But just convening the verification commission would serve its own purpose, argues Thomas Moore, a former longtime staffer of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee.

No matter how little might be accomplished in such a commission meeting, he says, at least "afterward you can you can go out and say, 'Russia has refused to acknowledge the violation. The U.S. is going take countermeasures. Thank you very much.' That'll get people's attention."

Now What?

The INF dispute is one more symptom of the growing acrimony between Washington and Moscow. Russia has sent fighters, bombers, and submarines farther afield and in closer proximity to NATO countries than it used to. Meanwhile, the United States has deployed advanced F-22 fighters to Eastern Europe and is moving to position tanks and other heavy weaponry in the Baltics and nearby countries.

"What's important is that Russia doesn't pursue an INF-prohibited missile," says Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a Washington advocacy group, "and we don't give them an opening or excuse to do so."

A Pentagon report detailing possible U.S. responses to Russia's position that was leaked to the AP was said to have been considering several options, including "weapons the U.S. could develop and deploy if freed from INF treaty constraints." Some members of Congress have called on the White House to release the full report.

Gottemoeller declined to detail specific responses under consideration. "We are also pursuing the potential for military as well as economic countermeasures, and I think it's important to emphasize both the diplomacy and also the potential for countermeasures," Gottemoeller said.

"In other words, should the Russians proceed to deploy these systems in a way that would in any way affect the security of the United States or our allies, we do not want them to be under the impression that they would derive any military benefit from that deployment," she said. "We must be ready with judicious countermeasures should that become necessary."

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 #23
TASS
September 17, 2015
Russia helps Syrian state against ISIS, not Asad's regime - Foreign Ministry

Moscow, 17 September: Moscow's support is not for Bashar al-Asad's regime but for Syria itself in its fight against the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mariya Zakharova said today.

"We would like to tell our American partners that above all we back Syria in its fight against Islamic State. We are trying to avert a total catastrophe in the region. Our main task is not support for the regime, for personalities, but support for the Syrian state in its confrontation with Islamic State, with terrorist organizations which pose a threat to Russia's own national security," Zakharova stressed.

["We have the unfortunate example of the situation in Libya, the situation in other neighbouring countries, and we realize that if the scenario in Syria develops in the same way, it will be a total catastrophe," privately-owned Russian news agency Interfax also quoted Zakharova saying.]

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 #24
Russia Beyond the Headlines/Gazeta.ru
September 17, 2015
Creating a defensive 'island' in Syria against ISIS
World must stop Damascus falling to the Islamic State.
By Fyodor Lukyanov, Gazeta.ru
The author is the editor in chief of Russia in Global Affairs and chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, a non-governmental think tank.

When protests erupted in Syria in 2011 against the authoritarian rule of a religious minority led by President Bashar al-Assad, opinions about what awaited the country were divided.

Commentators in the West, Turkey and the Gulf expected an imminent collapse of the regime in Damascus along either Tunisian or Libyan lines - internal revolt or via outside interference. Observers in Russia pointed out that the Syrian case was different from the others: a religiously mixed population, an effective army, a unified ruling class, and powerful support from Iran spelled a different trajectory.

Events that followed showed that Moscow had a better understanding of Syria's nuances. The position adopted by Russia (unwavering support for official Damascus and opposition to any outside interference) turned out if not advantageous, then at least the most consistent.

Between 2011 and 2015, the situation in the country, of course, deteriorated but still ran counter to the forecasts of an inevitable revolutionary upheaval. Developments took many twists and turns, including coming close to a US war against Syria, a surprisingly smooth operation to remove and destroy chemical weapons, and endless attempts to unite the opposition and find a common platform between Assad's opponents and supporters.
 
The ISIS effect

All of that is now in the past. The explosive emergence of Islamic State (ISIS) has utterly changed the rules. The old Syria no longer exists and it still remains to be seen whether it will be preserved at all in any shape or form.

Indirect evidence that Moscow has stepped up its military assistance to Damascus allows one to conclude that Russia has decided to take a far more active part in the crisis. The situation on the ground is confusing: all the actors are involved in multi-faceted conflicts. Assad's forces are opposed to ISIS and what is traditionally described as the moderate opposition. ISIS is fighting Assad and the opposition. The opposition sees everyone else as enemies. None of this takes into account the Kurds, who are waging a war of their own against Turkey, which under the guise of fighting ISIS is trying to resolve the Kurdish issue.
 
Hopeless divisions

To expect this fractured mess to offer hopes of a Syrian settlement is utterly unrealistic - particularly since the international community is hopelessly divided on options for resolving the crisis.

In Syria, as in the Middle East as a whole, there can now be no "victory". Russian diplomats always insisted that this was not about Assad but about the principle - "hands off, do no harm" - and that the main objective was to protect the status quo. This policy has not worked: there is no longer any status quo in Syria.

The Western view is that because of that procrastination, the door has been opened to ISIS, which ironically now represents the only effective force opposing Assad. The Russian view is that Western stubbornness has undermined the chances of a soft transformation of the Syrian authorities. In any event, the question now is whether it will be possible to prevent ISIS from entering Damascus, which would have a most powerful propaganda effect.

Damascus is one of the cultural and historical capitals of the Arab world, part of European civilization's heritage. Its surrender would symbolize an irreversible retreat of modernity from the Middle East. Tens and now hundreds of thousands of refugees from the region that have flooded Europe have realized this: where the future is painted in ISIS colors, there is no place for modern and forward-looking people.
 
'Alawite Israel'

In what case could Russian efforts be considered a success? Realistically speaking, only if a de-facto equivalent of an "Alawite Israel" is created, an enclave that - with outside support - would be capable of self-defense and that would serve as an obstacle to an uncontrolled spread of ISIS. The comparison is, of course, a very loose one but the mechanism is similar.

Numerous diplomatic contacts that took place in the summer, when Moscow received a string of visitors from the Middle East, lead one to conclude that the current busy activity on Russia's part should come as no surprise. Moscow's readiness to undertake risks for the sake of preserving an "Alawite Israel" is in the interests of everybody except ISIS.

Still, Western leaders voice dissatisfaction and concern at an increased Russian military presence in Syria, while calling for a decisive intervention in order to defeat ISIS, as British prime minster, David Cameron did recently.

If one believed that Islamic State could be defeated and that after it there would start yet another struggle for control over Syria, then Western concerns would be justified: they really would not want Russia to have a claim for a serious role in a future Syria. However, a far more realistic scenario is that ISIS will not be defeated by the international coalition and that Syria will not be resurrected on new foundations but that the Islamists' opponents will create a stronghold in limited territories and will continue to fight for their survival.

In that case, it would make sense for the West not to hinder Russia's actions but to assist them, if possible. However, the whole of the Middle East's recent history and the attitude outside forces have to the region suggest the West has all but lost the ability to analyze what is happening without investing it with ideological bias and personal feelings.

First published in Russian in Gazeta.ru.

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 #25
Komsomolskaya Pravda
September 16, 2015
Russian Defence Ministry officer details Moscow's intentions in Syria
Interview with unnamed Russian Defence Ministry officer by Viktor Baranets: Answers to seven burning questions about what Russian military are doing in Syria

Komsomolskaya Pravda's military observer Viktor Baranets spoke anonymously with a Russian Defence Ministry officer who is in charge of the Middle East strategic sector.

1. [Baranets] What was the reason for Russia's sudden and massive push into Syria? I am referring to the deliveries of weapons and humanitarian cargoes and also the presence of a technical experts and marines...

[Defence Ministry officer] There are several reasons here. The main one is the sharp increase in the activity of the Islamic State group (ISIL, a terrorist organization banned in Russia - editor's note). The only force that can stop ISIL is the Syrian army. But during the years of the war it has been through seriously "bad times" - almost 30 per cent of its armoured equipment has been put out of service. This is why it was decided to expedite deliveries of Russian weapons under previously signed contracts. And at the same time to send to Syria our experts, who will train their Syrian colleagues and work on combat equipment and tactics.

Everything needed to be done quickly so the Syrian army can protect areas into which ISIL is surging and where there is the biggest flood of refugees. Incidentally, it is precisely for the refugees in Syria that Russia is transporting humanitarian cargoes by air and sea. Otherwise the flood of them into Europe would be even greater.

As regards our marines in Syria, they have been set strictly the tasks of protecting the training centre and land-based and coastal military facilities, including airfields.

2. [Baranets] Why has this operation triggered frenzied annoyance on the part of the USA, NATO and some states neighbouring Syria?

[Defence Ministry officer] I get the impression that these countries were waiting for the so-called "moderate opposition", which they are supplying with weapons, to smash the Syrian army and treat President Bashar al-Asad in the same way as Libyans treated Al-Qadhafi. But the ISIL offensive wrecked the scenario for ousting Al-Asad for the USA and its vassals. The obscene American missile pummelling of "presumed" concentrations of ISIL forces produced no result. The Americans no longer knew what to do - removing Al-Asad is not working and ISIL is pushing on.

The USA apparently dreamed up a way to encourage European countries to participate in the Syrian war. They landed them with refugees....

But time moved on. The "ISIL contagion" spread. And then Russia selected its own plan: to fight with actions - deliveries of weapons and humanitarian cargoes - in order to quell new waves of refugees. We have shown the entire world that we have a much more promising and pragmatic plan for combating ISIL.

And this is a resounding slap in the face for the USA, NATO and Syria's enemies in the region alike. For them the most important thing is to remove Al-Asad, whereas for Russia the most important thing is to return Syria to a peaceful life and rout the ISIL hordes at the hands of the Syrians themselves.

3. [Baranets] Where did foreign media get the story that there are now "thousands of Russian soldiers" in Syria?

[Defence Ministry officer] This is of course garbage, which is being fuelled most strongly and insidiously by Israel, which "traditionally" plants such "canards" in the press. Israel spawned the lie that Moscow is now allegedly haggling with Washington over how best to oust Al-Asad. Precisely such information appeared on one of the websites belonging to that country.

Israel is very afraid of a stronger Syria as a regional rival. Especially in tandem with Iran. But the United States and Britain are supporting the Israeli media provocations. Russia is concerned about a normal life throughout Syria, while the opponents of its actions in that country are dreaming solely about how to install a "tame" regime in Damascus instead of Al-Asad. The world is very familiar with this scheme from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. And even from Ukraine. It worked there. But it is not working here. And so they are spluttering.

4. [Baranets] Is there some formula for the Russian military presence in Syria already in existence?

[Defence Ministry officer] Yes, it has been in existence for a long time. It includes both the Syrian army, which is 90-per-cent equipped with our combat hardware, and also the ship servicing depot at Tartus. And now both training centres and an aircraft reception depot. And joint naval manoeuvres. Indeed, they are already taking place in the Eastern Mediterranean, approximately 70 km from Tartus. There are also other plans, but right now is not the time to divulge them. Everything will depend on the situation....

5. [Baranets] What areas of Syria might become centres for Russian military assistance?

[Defence Ministry officer] Troops loyal to Al-Asad are concentrated in the Syrian provinces of Tartus, Latakia, Hamah, Hims, and Damascus. This is also where most Syrians who do not currently intend to flee to Europe live.

These provinces are popularly known as Little Syria or Alawistan - because it is there that almost all of the country's Alawi community is concentrated. Russia came to Latakia to prevent the genocide of Syrian Alawis - this is also one of Moscow's most important objectives in Syria. Otherwise ISIL will perpetrate such carnage there that all previous horrors of the Syrian war will pale in comparison.

6. [Baranets] Why has Russia's appeal for the creation of a united front of struggle against ISIL not been supported by the United States, NATO, and the Arab League?

[Defence Ministry Officer] Because the United States and its "partners" are obsessed with the idea of ousting Al-Asad in accordance with their own plan and still cannot make up their minds about how to combat ISIL. Plus they do not want to see Russia as one of the leading world players.

7. [Baranets] The United States and its allies are gradually retargeting their military potential from Iraq to Syria. Britain and France are in tandem with them. Will the presence of Russian experts and marines in Syria not lead to armed clashes between Russia and NATO?

[Defence Ministry officer] Russia has already called on many occasions for the coordination of efforts in the struggle against ISIL in order to avoid this criminal organization being hit with "splayed fingers". Without coordination anything can happen....

Instead of coordinating, the United States is "advising" Russia to "refrain from active moves in the region". Attempts are being made to simply distance Moscow and Tehran from Syria. But right now the United States itself is not being very successful in crushing ISIL. And without the creation of an international military coalition it will not succeed. This is a challenge for the whole of mankind, and the only possible successful response to it is a "world effort." There is no other way out.

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 #26
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
September 17, 2015
Will Russia contribute to solving Syria's refugee crisis?
With Europe facing its biggest refugee crisis in recent history, both refugees and the organizations aiding them are asking the question of whether Russia should play a greater role in alleviating the problem.
By Pavel Koshkin
Pavel Koshkin is Executive Editor of Russia Direct and a contributing writer to Russia Beyond The Headlines (RBTH). He also contributed to a number of Russian and foreign media outlets, including Russia Profile, Kommersant and the BBC.

East or West, home is best. This proverb seems to have lost its relevance and allure for many Syrian refugees flowing to Europe and, particularly, for Ahmad, 40, a robust and stout Syrian and Shia Muslim, who - after the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011 - found himself living legally in a cozy apartment in the southwest of Moscow.

When he witnessed how bombs flew over "their heads, houses, schools and killed peaceful civilians," in no time he decided to flee to save his family - a wife and two children.

"I didn't care about myself, but I did care about my family and wanted to find them a safer place," he told Russia Direct. "So, we came to Moscow. We applied to the United Nations [Refugee Agency] and it gave recommendation letters."

In Syria, before the civil war started, he lived in the town of Al-Malihah, about six kilometers from Damascus. He had been involved with clothing and poultry businesses and owned a chicken company, while his wife worked as a teacher in Damascus.

As result of political instability, bombings and shootings that started in 2011, his poultry shop was destroyed, with the property confiscated by radicals who viewed him as infidel. He had to move to Damascus, but then the bombings started.

Ahmad fled to Russia in 2013 via a tourist visa, received temporary asylum and worked like a normal citizen at a Moscow restaurant. However, in 2014, Russia's Federal Migration Service refused to prolong his status, probably, because Russia had to counter the huge flow of refugees from Eastern Ukraine, which came to Russia after the Donbas conflict started.

He is now waiting on a court decision on his status, and continues to live legally within Russia. Ahmad and his wife assimilated with Russians very easily, because "they are very nice and friendly people, who respect ordinary Syrians and I respect Russians very much."

Likewise, his children have been successfully adjusting to life in Russia. Although they have been living in Moscow for two years, they speak Russian very well, almost without an accent. They can attend school and talk to their Russian peers as well as play with the Russian children of their neighbors.

"Me and my wife don't speak Russian well, so our children talk in Russian with each other as a tactic to play jokes on us," laughs Ahmad. "I wanted my kids to study Russian. Maybe, we will here forever."

The primary trouble Ahmad is having in Russia is the problem with documents. With his status of refugee in limbo, his documents are not completed. That's why he can't move freely in Moscow or find a reliable, stable job just to be on his own.  Recently, Ahmad found a job in a Russian city in a good restaurant, but he couldn't work there. The Moscow office of the UN Refugee Agency warned him against doing any business in Russia without documentation. The risk of being arrested is very high.

Currently, he relies on the help of his Syrian friends based in Moscow.  But what he does care about most is stability, independence and the future of his children.

"My documents are a big problem for me," he said. "I want to get all the documentation, be independent, so that I can live here like a normal person. I just need stability, do business here, open a coffee shop and provide safety and a decent future for my children. But without documentation, there is no certainty. I even can't get medical assistance if I have problems with my health."

Unpredictability with his status is psychologically difficult to overcome, he confesses.  "I hope one day I will get these documents to move and work freely," he said.

The sense of feeling unsecure haunts Ahmad and will haunt him as long as his status of refugee is in limbo. If he could get asylum in Europe or elsewhere, he would happily leave Moscow for the United Kingdom just to find a stable and reliable income and, most importantly, confidence in the future. After all, previously, he lived and worked in London and had a lot of friends there.

The risk of being deported from Russia makes him very puzzled and a bit discouraged. It cannot be otherwise, because in the case of deportation he and his family would lose a safe and comfortable ground: His children will lose a secure place and have to adjust to a new life once again.

And Ahmad's fears seem not to be unfounded. Another Syrian citizen, Hassan, 40, has a less inspiring example. As he told Russia Direct in a telephone call, after his woes in Russia he was going to travel to Europe through Turkey, but was trapped in the transit zone of a Russian airport, because no one country wanted to take him. He has spent more than one month in a Russian airport, he claims.

Syrians in Russia: Another side of the coin

Muez Abu Al-Jadael, a Syrian journalist for the Open Dialogue media outlet and human rights activist, looks at the refugee crisis from a different angle. He himself is a political refugee who got shelter in Sweden. He graduated from the Russian University for People's Friendship and tried to get asylum in Russia several times, but failed.

Now, as he claims, he helps Syrians to assimilate and adjust to the life in Russia and, particularly, to life in the Moscow region by giving legal assistance to his compatriots.  He contributes to resolving this humanitarian tragedy through such human rights organizations and NGOs such as the Moscow-based Civil Assistant Charity Committee.

"Before the civil war most Syrians were just migrants in Russia or elsewhere, but since the onset of the war, we all became refugees," he told Russia Direct.

According to him, one of the most difficult challenges for refugees is getting temporary asylum. It does have a very high price that has been changing since 2012. For example, in 2012 it was required to pay between 70,000 and 100,000 rubles to get asylum. In 2013-2014, Russia's Federal Migration Service issued the order to accept Syrian refugees and the price for sanctuary plummeted to 20,000 rubles in 2014.

However, after the rumors that Russia wouldn't accept refugees anymore, the prices increased once again. In 2015, refugees have to pay between 10,000 and 15,000 rubles just to register with Russia's Federal Migration Service.  The cost for getting temporary asylum increased to as high as 40,000 rubles, Abu Al-Jadael claims.

Two of the major challenges he faced were corruption and bureaucracy. In addition, there's the risk of human rights abuses of Syrian refugees, who, according to him, might be exploited by some employers in Russia. What he does is try to talk more to Syrians about the Russian immigration legislation, so that they could easily adjust to living in Russia and avoid trouble.

"Not only does Russian bureaucracy have a pressure on refugees, but they themselves are having a negative experience in Russia. They are in another cultural atmosphere, which some see as hostile because of their encounters [with locals and employees]," Abu Al-Jadael said. "What does matter is the lack of cultural and civil code of the Syrians, so they don't even know their own rights and the rules of behavior. This lead to misleading interpretation and misunderstanding that Russia is against them."

That's the reason why Syrians are not eager to stay in Russia, said Abu Al-Jadael. To this extent, they can only compare Russia with the Syrian regime, because their expectations didn't come true. They tried to find a safe shelter and save their families from famine and the civil war, but finally got a cold rejection or humiliating negligence.  

In fact, refugees prefer to use Russia as a transit point to Europe and, in particular, Finland or Norway.  They chose Russia because going through St. Petersburg to Northern Europe is cheaper and sometimes safer than reaching Europe through Turkey, Greece or Belarus and Ukraine.

"Russia's experience is not in demand in Europe," said Dmitry Polikanov, a board member of the PIR Center think tank and political analyst. "Again, the refugees themselves hardly seek shelter - they seek good living standards and benefits of being in Europe, so they don't need other destinations."

And the official statistic from Russia's Federal Migration Service seems to confirm this trend: In 2015, 7,103 Syrians have come to Russia, while 7,162 left the country.

Legal issues for Syrians in Russia

Elena Burtina, deputy head of the Civil Assistance Committee on Refugees, argues that the current Russian legislation is favorable to refugees and can help them to get asylum for humanitarian purposes.

In fact, the migration agencies can grant the status of political refugee because of various reasons, including domestic and international conflicts, famine, epidemic, man-made catastrophes or any threat to health. So, according to Burtina, Russia is reluctant to accept refugees not because of ineffective laws, but because of its policy.
 
"It is not a matter of the law, it is just a matter of governmental policy why Russia doesn't accept refugees," she told Russia Direct.

Regarding the new law on refugees that is expected to be discussed by authorities soon, Burtina has mixed feelings about it. According to her, it has both advantages and disadvantages, like any law. But she warns that the new law might complicate the life of refugees in Russia.

For example, it will be much more difficult to get temporary asylum because only those who face the risk of torture, death or other human rights abuses will be able to get the status of political refugee. In addition, refugees find it more challenging to find housing and will have fewer opportunities to appeal any court decision that turns down the refugee request for asylum.

Why is Russia reluctant to take Syrians?

Today there are almost 4.1 million Syrian refugees scattered around the world, with about 430,000 applications submitted to Europe between 2011 and 2015. According to the UN Refugee Agency forecast, the upcoming two years will see a two-fold increase in a number of Syrian refugees in Europe to 850,000 refugees. Most of them will settle down in Germany and other European countries that accept the greatest share of the refugee burden.

According to Russia's Federal Migration Service, 12,000 people have arrived to Russia from Syria since 2011. But only 2,000 of them managed to receive temporary asylum in Russia.

In fact, this is a drop in the ocean in comparison with other European countries that receive requests from refugees and consider them from April 2011 to August 2015 - Germany (more than 100,000 refugees), Sweden (about 65,000), France (about 7,000), the UK (over 7,000), Denmark (more than 12,000) and Hungary (about 54,000).

Meanwhile, in Russia, less than a dozen received actual refugee status, which allows for tangible benefits, argues Tanya Lokshina, the Russia program director and a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, based in Moscow.

"Russia could really do so much more to help those fleeing from Syria - and to alleviate the European burden - but it appears to be reluctant to do so," she told Russia Direct. "Also and most importantly, Russia should've long contributed to the resolution of the Syria crisis by stopping to block the UN Security Council from taking meaning action, by stopping to provide weapons to the Syrian government and by exercising its significant leverage with Assad to put an end to the use of barrel bombs, an infamously indiscriminate destructive weapon, in densely populated areas."

Huseyin Oruc, vice president of the Turkey-based Human Development Foundation (IHH), an agency that has extensive and diverse experience in providing humanitarian relief to refugees, echoes Lokshina.

"The Syria problem is not only a problem of Syrians, it is a problem of the whole world," he said. "The refugee problem is a result of the political and armed conflict in Syria. Russia is one of the important actors for a political solution. If Russia works for peace in Syria, it is best for the refugee problem."

Likewise, Amnesty International, a non-governmental organization, calls on Russia to be more vigorous in accepting refugees from Syria and other Middle East countries. The head of the Russian branch of the organization, Sergei Nikitin, told Russian media that Russia should be more active as a one of the important global players. He is discouraged by the fact that Russian courts are reluctant to provide a shelter to refugees.

Robert Legvold, professor emeritus of Columbia University, is very doubtful that Russia will begin receiving "the flows of migrants that are coming out Syria and North Africa." However, he believes that, "It is the responsibility of most of the major developed countries, not only in Western Europe," but also the United States, which agreed to take a small number of refugees: 10,000.

"It is a matter of ethics and principles," he told Russia Direct. ""It would be very good if Russia was able to assist what is [called] an international migration crisis. It is not just a Western European crisis, it is a human crisis; and any country that is able to assist, they should."

Although Russia can's accept as many refugees as European countries do, Moscow can share its experience of dealing with Ukrainian refugees, since "the country was extremely efficient and quick in accommodating a large flow of them and within a short period of time," argues Polikanov. At the same time, Russia has its own practice of coping with people who come from Central Asia and dealing with Muslims from that region.

Misleading exaggeration about the scope of the Syrian problem?

Meanwhile, Deputy Head of Russia's Federal Migration Service Nikolai Smorodin says that the claims about Russia turning down Syrian refugees' requests in large scale is misleading.

"There hasn't been any toughening of the Federal Migration Service's position in providing asylum to Syrian citizens in Russia," he told the Interfax news agency, adding that Russia is ready receive Syrians taking into account the situation in their own country.

Russia's Federal Migration Service claims that the number of Syrian refuges coming to Russia is exaggerated. It states the requests come from primarily those who are married to Russian citizens and retuned to Syria after the war started.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin's spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said that Syrian refugees can use Russian territory as a transit point, but the question about accepting refugees is irrelevant for Russia because he believes the burden of the current humanitarian crisis should be shouldered by those countries whose policy led to the civil war in Syria and what he calls "the catastrophic situation."  Another argument he uses against accepting the Syrian refugees is the risk that terrorists from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Greater Syria (ISIS) might come to Russia under the guise of refugees.

Some Russian experts, like Alexei Grishin, the president of the Russian think tank Religion and Society, agree. "ISIS has been actively using the migration flows for their own purposes," Grishin told Russia Direct during his Sept. 16 speech at Carnegie Moscow Center.

According to him, extremists could do recurring harm in a host country or secretly conduct informational campaigns. The fact that many refugees come with about $3,000-4,000 in their pockets looks very suspicious to him.

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 #27
International Business Times
www.ibtimes.com
September 18, 2015
Syrian Civil War: Russian Refugee Tent Camp In Syria Is Country's First, Will Accommodate Thousands
By Christopher Harress

Russia recently built a tent camp for Syrian refugees in the western part of Syria. Pictured: A Syrian migrant walked in front of tents as migrants rest while making their way towards the Greek border, on a road near Edirne, Turkey, Sept. 15, 2015. REUTERS/Osman Orsal

Russian engineers have erected the first tent camp inside Syria that will house thousands of refugees fleeing violence in the east of the country, according to a report by Russia Today. Since the war began in 2011, more than four million people have become displaced, causing Europe to experience one of the biggest refugee crises since the end of the World War II.

The camp is located on a racetrack inside the city of Hama, around 40 kilometers from the nearest conflict zone. Despite forces of Syria's authoritarian president Bashar Assad having suffered defeats at the hands of the Islamic State militant group and other insurgent fighters in recent months, the city is thought to be safer now after Russian forces began arriving in the country.

"We appreciate Russia's help in delivering all the necessary equipment and setting up a camp. With the given situation, Syria is in great need for camps like this to accommodate displaced citizens leaving provinces with active warfare ongoing," said Hama Governor Ghassan Khalaf to Russia Today.

The camp is made up of about 25 large military tents that can accommodate around 500 total refugees. It has a field kitchen, a canteen, showers, two mobile power generators and a water-storage facility. The tents have furnace hearing for cold weather.

The camp is equipped to double in size should more refugees come to the city.

"I learnt how to operate a Russian field kitchen really quickly and have already cooked some Russian cereal. The camp's kitchen is capable of cooking food for 200 people at a time," said Red Crescent Society volunteer Anan Musri told RT. "When we run out of food stock, our organization will continue supplying provision s and assist the refugees."

All the supplies needed to set up the camp were delivered to Latakia Airport last week by an Antonov An-124 Ruslan jet. The flight also brought 15 tons of provisions which will feed 50 people for 30 days, and 50,000 sets of disposable tableware.

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 #28
Interfax
September 18, 2015
Moscow can neither confirm nor deny US special forces "on ground" in Syria

The Russian Foreign Ministry has not been able to either confirm or deny information that US special forces are present in Syria but it condemns coalition actions that have not been agreed with Damascus.

"I cannot either confirm or deny this information but I can indeed say that all actions by the so-called coalition have not been agreed with Damascus which is in violation of international law," Mariya Zakharova, official spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry, told a briefing in Moscow on 17 September.

She was replying to a request from a journalist to comment on a statement made by Commander of United States Central Command Lloyd Austin to the effect that US special forces are involved "on the ground" on Syrian territory on the side of one of the opposition groups.

"Even when reports appear about people 'on the ground', this is all part of the same theme," Zakharova said.

According to her, participants in the coalition should coordinate their actions with Damascus.

"One needs not just to enlist support but to ask Damascus for permission to carry out some actions, moreover military operations, on Syrian territory," she said.

At the same time Zakharova lamented that, while the US authorities admit that their special forces are present 'on the ground' in Syria, concern has been raised regarding Russia's humanitarian supplies to the country which, allegedly, are not in line with some common principles agreed by western countries.

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 #29
Antiwar.com
September 18, 2015
Putin: Friend or Foe in Syria?
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World.

What Vladimir Putin is up to in Syria makes far more sense than what Barack Obama and John Kerry appear to be up to in Syria.

The Russians are flying transports bringing tanks and troops to an air base near the coastal city of Latakia to create a supply chain to provide a steady flow of weapons and munitions to the Syrian army.

Syrian President Bashar Assad, an ally of Russia, has lost half his country to ISIS and the Nusra Front, a branch of al-Qaida.

Putin fears that if Assad falls, Russia's toehold in Syria and the Mediterranean will be lost, ISIS and al-Qaida will be in Damascus, and Islamic terrorism will have achieved its greatest victory.

Is he wrong?

Winston Churchill famously said in 1939: "I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest."

Exactly. Putin is looking out for Russian national interests.

And who do we Americans think will wind up in Damascus if Assad falls? A collapse of that regime, not out of the question, would result in a terrorist takeover, the massacre of thousands of Alawite Shiites and Syrian Christians, and the flight of millions more refugees into Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey - and thence on to Europe.

Putin wants to prevent that. Don't we?

Why then are we spurning his offer to work with us?

Are we still so miffed that when we helped to dump over the pro-Russian regime in Kiev, Putin countered by annexing Crimea?

Get over it.

Understandably, there is going to be friction between the two greatest military powers. Yet both of us have a vital interest in avoiding war with each other and a critical interest in seeing ISIS degraded and defeated.

And if we consult those interests rather than respond to a reflexive Russophobia that passes for thought in the think tanks, we should be able to see our way clear to collaborate in Syria.

Indeed, the problem in Syria is not so much with the Russians - or Iran, Hezbollah and Assad, all of whom see the Syrian civil war correctly as a fight to the finish against Sunni jihadis.

Our problem has been that we have let our friends - the Turks, Israelis, Saudis and Gulf Arabs - convince us that no victory over ISIS can be achieved unless and until we bring down Assad.

Once we get rid of Assad, they tell us, a grand U.S.-led coalition of Arabs and Turks can form up and march in to dispatch ISIS.

This is neocon nonsense.

Those giving us this advice are the same "cakewalk war" crowd who told us how Iraq would become a democratic model for the Middle East once Saddam Hussein was overthrown and how Moammar Gadhafi's demise would mean the rise of a pro-Western Libya.

When have these people ever been right?

What is the brutal reality in this Syrian civil war, which has cost 250,000 lives and made refugees of half the population, with 4 million having fled the country?

After four years of sectarian and ethnic slaughter, Syria will most likely never again be reconstituted along the century-old map lines of Sykes-Picot. Partition appears inevitable.

And though Assad may survive for a time, his family's days of ruling Syria are coming to a close.

Yet it is in America's interest not to have Assad fall - if his fall means the demoralization and collapse of his army, leaving no strong military force standing between ISIS and Damascus.

Indeed, if Assad falls now, the beneficiary is not going to be those pro-American rebels who have defected or been routed every time they have seen combat and who are now virtually extinct.

The victors will be ISIS and the Nusra Front, which control most of Syria between the Kurds in the northeast and the Assad regime in the southwest.

Syria could swiftly become a strategic base camp and sanctuary of the Islamic State from which to pursue the battle for Baghdad, plot strikes against America and launch terror attacks across the region and around the world.

Prediction: If Assad falls and ISIS rises in Damascus, a clamor will come - and not only from the Lindsey Grahams and John McCains - to send a U.S. army to invade and drive ISIS out, while the neocons go scrounging around to find a Syrian Ahmed Chalabi in northern Virginia.

Then this nation will be convulsed in a great war debate over whether to send that U.S. army to invade Syria and destroy ISIS.

And while our Middle Eastern and European allies sit on the sidelines and cheer on the American intervention, this country will face an antiwar movement the likes of which have not been seen since Col. Lindbergh spoke for America First.

In making ISIS, not Assad, public enemy No. 1, Putin has it right.

It is we Americans who are the mystery inside an enigma now.

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 #30
Washington Post
September 18, 2015
Senior U.S., Russian defense officials talk to defuse tensions over Syria
By Carol Morello

BREAKING: Senior U.S., Russian defense officials talk to defuse tensions over Syria. The phone conversation was the first between any U.S. defense secretary and the Russian defense minister in more than a year.

LONDON - Secretary of State John F. Kerry said Friday he hopes to open talks soon between Russian and U.S. military officials on confronting the Islamic State and ways to resolve five years of conflict in Syria.

Moscow proposed the meetings earlier this week, and the White House on Friday said the administration was open to "tactical, practical discussions" with Russia over how to combat Islamic State militants in Syria.

Kerry, in London on the first stop of a swing through Europe, said the United States continues to believe Syrian President Bashar Assad - a key Moscow ally - must relinquish power.

Russia has stepped up its military presence in Syria, claiming its intentions are to help the Syrian army battle the Islamic State. But administration officials fear the recent deployment of Russian troops, tanks, helicopters and artillery to Syria is meant to prop up the Assad government,

"Obviously, our focus remains on destroying ISIL," Kerry said, using an acronym for the Islamic State, "and also on a political settlement with respect to Syria, which we believe cannot be achieved with the long term presence of Assad. We are looking for ways in which to try and find a common ground."

Kerry said he hopes talks with commence "very shortly, and it will help to define some of the different options that are available to us as we consider next steps in Syria."

Kerry plans to meet Saturday British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond and later with German Foreign Secretary Frank-Walter Steinmeier, primarily to discuss the Syrian conflict and the flood of Syrian refugees streaming into Europe.

"Our hope is to find a diplomatic way forward," Kerry said. "But this crisis has to be solved. I think everybody is seized by the urgency. We have been all along. But the migration levels, the continued destruction, the d anger of potential augmentation by any unilateral moves really puts a high premium on diplomacy at this moment."

Kerry spoke to reporters just before he began a meeting with the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates, Abdullah bin Zayed.

Arab countries, in particular the wealthy Gulf states, have been criticized for failing to take in any Syrian refugees, but bin Zayed said that the criticism was unfairly directed at the UAE.

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#31
Business New Europe
www.bne.eu
September 17, 2015
Kazakh, Uzbek leaders reignite talk of succession
Naubet Bisenov in Almaty and Olim Abdullayev in Tashkent

The issue of succession has become topical again in Central Asia's largest countries - Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan - after the Kazakh leader appointed his daughter as deputy prime minister, while the Uzbek president was reported to have openly nominated his second daughter as his successor.

Local observers say that authorities deliberately reignite the discussion of this topic in order to distract attention from other problems, and that being tipped for the top doesn't necessarily increase the chances of the fancied successors and can actually harm their ambitions.

Seeking a smooth transition

Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev on September 11 appointed his eldest daughter Dariga Nazarbayeva to the post of deputy prime minister. The move will be pored over by those devoted to speculating about who will eventually succeed the 75-year-old Nazarbayev, who has ruled Kazakhstan since it gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

Dariga Nazarbayeva, 52, is deputy speaker of the Kazakh parliament's lower chamber, the Mazhilis, and has often been tipped to succeed her ageing father, though critics have pointed to her lack of executive experience as the main hurdle to her leading the country.

Following the early presidential election in April, in which Nazarbayev was re-elected with nearly 98% of the vote on a 95% turnout, Dariga had been rumoured to be in line to become governor of the western oil-rich Aktobe Region, the governor of which was said to be in danger of the sack as punishment for delivering one of the lowest "yes" votes out of all regions. This would have provided her with the missing experience in governing.

Dariga's prospects for succeeding her father were also seen harmed by her former husband Rakhat Aliyev, one of the most hated figures in the Kazakh establishment. But his suicide earlier this year in an Austrian prison paved the way for Nazarbayev to consider Dariga as well as her eldest son Nurali, who is a deputy mayor of Astana, as potential successors.

The prospect of keeping the presidency in the Nazarbayev family will likely be welcomed by the country's elite groups, who would prefer a smooth transition of power from Nazarbayev to either his daughter or grandson. The designation of a member of one elite group as successor over others, Kazakhstan watchers fear, could lead to a behind-the-scene or even an open fight between rival groups, which would destabilise the political situation in the country and lead to a redistribution of wealth and business interests.

Questionable credentials

Kazakhstan watchers don't see anything extraordinary in the catapulting of a person without any experience in government to such a high post and point out that such an appointment is not even unprecedented.

"I wouldn't say her appointment is unprecedented because this also concerns her superior Karim Massimov who was also appointed at quite a young age and without sufficient experience to head the Cabinet of Ministers. Also look at the appointment of [Bauyrzhan] Baybek as mayor of the country's largest city, Almaty," Almaty-based political analyst Rasul Zhumaly tells bne IntelliNews. Dariga's new boss, Prime Minister Karim Massimov, was first appointed deputy prime minister aged 36 in 2001 after a short spell as transport minister, while Baybek, 41, was appointed mayor of Almaty in August after working as deputy head of the ruling Nur Otan party for two and a half years.

Like Baybek, Dariga has dubious experience as a leader of the Asar Party, which later merged with Nur Otan, but she also set up and managed the Khabar media group. During her tenure in parliament she acted as a constructive critic of the government and, given her political ambitions she has now been given an opportunity to work in government in the complex sphere of social affairs, Zhumaly says.

"Time will tell how she manages this job but I doubt she will achieve impressive results not because of her personal qualities but because of chronic problems in the executive. I think the Kazakh government has a systemic problem and it is not about Dariga or Massimov but a crisis in the system of governance," the analyst says. "There is nothing sensational in Dariga being a relative of the president and it is in line with a practice of regular rotations of apparatchiks. These endless rotations have had no significant impact on the development of the country or solving certain problems."

There are two possible explanations for the appointment, Aidos Sarym, another Almaty-based independent political analyst, suggests: First, "the president is fulfilling his personal obligations before his family because there were complicated processes when Dariga was asked to tame her political ambitions and show understanding when Rakhat Aliyev fell out of grace and now it is time the president fulfilled his part of the contract," he explains. "Second, there is need to badger the prime minister whose performance has deteriorated and is showing signs of fatigue. There are no people other than a member of the family to assume this role."

Dariga Nazarbayeva will be responsible for the so-called social block, which includes social protection, health, education and culture. "This is a less promising area to gain political points; on the contrary, it is easier to gain political black marks. In my opinion it is a certain ceiling for Dariga Nazarbayeva beyond which her career will hardly grow," Zhumaly says.

Her appointment to mediate the social sphere is hugely ironical as she once called disabled people "freaks", and observers question her ability to act as a mediator. Dariga lacks ability to achieve agreement with people and she is not the best mediator out of all those available, Sarym believes.

"During her appointment neither her father who appointed her nor the prime minister who solicited the appointment explained why her appointment was important and why it is better than the appointment of any other citizen of Kazakhstan," he complains. "In her previous capacity Dariga Nazarbayeva had always been a bad mediator who called disabled people 'freaks' and so on."

Discussion is a tool of distraction

The analysts don't think Nazarbayeva's appointment qualifies her to put forward succession claims, although she does cherish ambitions that she has demonstrated from time to time in the past.

Zhumaly suggests that authorities deliberately provoke the discussion of the issue of succession from time to time in order to distract the public's attention from topical issues such as the devaluation and the economic crisis. "In reality the incumbent president does not consider real scenarios of succession by definition and he has repeatedly said that he is not going to retire any time soon. Neither Dariga nor other figures are seriously being considered as potential successors at the moment," he said.

Sarym shares Zhumaly's sentiment: "My understanding is that Nursultan Nazarbayev has not tightened his grip on power over these past 25 years in order to give it away to someone. He believes he will live for a long time and he's got strong health," he says. "Power is sacred in our country and we have a personality cult and governance is linked to one specific man, so the emergence of any other person will shatter the state apparatus."

Words and deeds

During his re-election campaign in March, President Nazarbayev criticised the state apparatus he himself created as nepotistic "teams consisting of relatives and friends employed along the principle of regionalism not professionalism". Now the spokesman for Nazarbayev, Dauren Abayev, defends Dariga's appointment as "fulfilling meritocratic principles".

"This is not first time we observe the discrepancy between what Nazarbayev is saying and what is happening in reality. For example, the devaluation and the statements Nazarbayev made that Kazakhstan would not give up its interests in the [Russian-dominated] Customs Union and that it would only benefit from the union, but we can see what has happened in reality. The same is with the situation about nepotism," Zhumaly says.

"By this appointment the president voided all his criticism of nepotism and corruption in the civil service and national companies. We have put an end to meritocracy and to a system which is supposed to foster cadres," agrees Sarym. "The appointment shows fighting nepotism has stopped being a priority. It means that he was not serious when he spoke about it."

Behing-the-scenes game

While observers in Kazakhstan are still guessing what Nazarbayev's succession plans are, observers in Uzbekistan have started openly talking about President Islam Karimov's second daughter as his designated successor. One such observer claims that the ageing Karimov, 77, gathered his closest lieutenants in April and announced that "by the next presidential election he will transfer his post to a new, younger and energetic successor who will satisfy all parties concerned" and that "I believe you won't be against if during my last term we will gradually prepare Lola for this mission".

He writes under the mysterious pseudonym "Usman Khaknazarov" - a name popular in Uzbekistan in the early noughties for exposing government corruption - which has been resurrected on the opposition People's Movement of Uzbekistan's website, run by Muhamad Solih, Karimov's Islamist rival in the 1991 presidential election.

Lola Karimova-Tillyayeva is Karimov's second daughter and Uzbekistan's permanent delegate to Unesco in Paris. "In contrast to [Gulnara], she possesses diplomatic restraint and modesty, and in international circles she has a positive image," Karimov was quoted as saying by Khaknazarov.

Apart from Karimov, the meeting was apparently attended by the Chief of the National Security Service (SNB), Interior Minister Adkham Akhmedbayev, Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyayev, and Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Rustam Azimov, according to Khaknazarov. This means that the leak and the exact quotes come from one of Karimov's most trusted associates.

"This sort of story that she has been chosen as a successor is invented in order to ruin all her chances," an Uzbek observer living abroad, who requested complete anonymity, tells bne IntelliNews. "This shows that some forces are trying to make sure that she doesn't become a successor."

The observer also questions whether Karimov, while still remaining a nominal president, retains any power in the "mafia" system he has developed in Uzbekistan during his quarter-century-long rule. "In Uzbekistan there is a mafia-style system with Karimov and some other bosses who control their spheres of interest. It is a big question how much power Karimov enjoys now," the observer says. "There is some balance between elite groups and they need him because he is part of the system and they support him in order to prevent the crash of the system."

The observer suggested that a behind-the-scenes game is now being played by these elite groups not to allow one of the daughters to succeed Karimov. Gulnara, the president's disgraced eldest daughter, who is believed to be under house arrest since February 2014, has been removed from the competition after she fell out first with his mother and sister Lola and later with her father.

"They are now trying to remove Lola, too," the observer suggests. "Only a person who is already part of the system and who enjoys sufficient influence in the system and who will be able to establish himself after Karimov's departure will be able to become a successor."

Unlike in Kazakhstan, where elite groups will be likely to rally behind a neutral figure from the presidential family in order to ensure stability after the eventual departure of Nazarbayev, in Uzbekistan elites groups will not accept Lola as a figurehead because she doesn't fit into the system, even though her businessman husband Timur Tillyayev and his family will stand behind her, the observer believes. "Elite groups understand that if they install Lola as head of state they will install her husband's clan, which is why it will hard for them to accept her."

"Instead of casting light on the future of the country, this leak shows that the situation in Uzbekistan remains unpredictable and volatile," the observer concludes.

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 #32
www.rt.com
September 18, 2015
The BBC's (Funded by the Kremlin Downing Street) Three-Step Guide to Making Boring Propaganda
By Murad Gazdiev
Murad Gazdiev, RT correspondent who has reported from a number of hot spots around the globe, including from the Syria-Turkish border, Yemen and Eastern Ukraine. He has also covered major international events, including Davos and the St. Petersburg economic forums, and even made a tour of duty with the crew of the Russian destroyer class Admiral Levchenko as it carried a military unit from the core base of Russia's Northern Fleet in Severomorsk to an unused former-Soviet base in the White Sea.
[Graphic elements here http://www.rt.com/op-edge/315830-bbcs-kremlin-news-journalism/]

Just two decades ago - you could count the number of international TV news networks on one hand. Today, there's a virtual buffet of opinionated global news outlets to suit almost any appetite... pick your prejudice, and you've likely got a channel that's just tailored to your bias.

Most don't make much of a secret of it - but one has stood apart. The BBC. Impartial, unbiased and reliable.

Its style has always been cold, hard news; delivered in laconic, no-frills reports filled with facts, attributions and - well...not much else.

On air - voiced always in an almost-drawling presenters voice, lacking any emotion or expression. Indeed, BBC reports, or 'packages' as they're called have a particular brand to them. Reporters speak slowly, drag things out and enunciate random vowels seemingly just for the hell of it.

The intent is simple: get the facts across with minimal personal input. And that is what earned the BBC a stellar reputation world-wide over the years.

A reputation that the BBC of today seems to be decidedly set on demolishing, and judging by how quickly they're blowing the charges on the pillars of the BBC's reputation: the senior management appears to have set a no-nonsense deadline.

What really pushed me to start looking into the whole thing was an article published on the BBC - after reading which I had to double-check the URL to make sure I wasn't on some spoof site. [http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34248178]

Turns out I wasn't. I had stumbled upon, by all appearances, a crude hatchet job. What's worse - it was bad. The only thing worse than finding outright propaganda on the BBC is finding bad outright propaganda.

Go ahead, have a read and come back.

Back? Then let's get to it.

First off, the very phrase "information war" is pathetic - no matter how often CNN, BBC and assorted internet joints stuff that click-bait phrase into their headlines. You don't call a friendly argument between two mates in the pub a "banter war". You don't call a debate between two politicians a "political views deliberation war". Why then call coverage by opposing broadcasters an "information war"?

Was there a declaration of information war? What are the casualties? Is Sally from the translators department recovering from that horrific incident where she broke a nail while typing out Merkel's speech about the Ukrainian civil war?

The article opens by stating that "the Kremlin has been busily striving to win hearts and minds around the world mainly through its flagship international broadcaster RT."

And what better way to win "hearts and minds" than by launching a global news network that focuses on controversial issues that are bound to alienate a major part, if not the majority of the mainstream audience (Libya intervention criticism), covering issues that aren't popular or particularly interesting (fracking), giving air time to underdogs and "outcasts" (Jeremy Corbyn, Yanis Varoufakis).

Come to think of it, that's sounds like a hell of a strategy to annoy hearts and minds.

The article went on to say that in 2015 "Russia significantly increased its spending on RT. The channel's budget rose 75 percent, to 20.8 billion rubles (around £202 million; $300 million)."

First off, that's misleading to the point of deception.

RT broadcasts abroad. That means we don't pay for our spot on Britain's Sky Cable in rubles. We pay in the pounds sterling - and that got a lot more expensive with the rubles collapse.

In fact, 80 percent of RT's expenditure is in foreign currency. In dollars, RT's budget has decreased from ~$400 million (average 2014 exchange rate), to $300 million in 2015 (as of today's exchange rate) despite the funding bump.

It's actually more complicated thanks to the rubles roller-coaster adventures, but accounting tells me that all-in-all our budget is down almost a quarter in dollars.

In effect, RT's real, practical budget - has fallen, not risen.

You'd think that might be worth mentioning in a section dedicated to RT's funding, right? I think there's even a word for it: balance.

And still, it gets better... or worse, depending on how seriously you take the article...

"More than any of the other big international broadcasters, RT depends for its large number of views on disaster/novelty videos with little or no input from its journalists," the BBC article declares.

When comparing RT to "other big international broadcasters," Stephen Ennis would be advised to actually check what "other big international broadcasters" post.

CNN's YouTube account for example seems to place its bet on cat videos, Obama bloopers and celebrity shenanigans. As well as disaster videos. With little to no input from its journalists. Oops.

The BBC itself isn't far behind. Its top ten videos feature such fine examples of hard-hitting journalism as: a spider crawling around on a camera lens, a go-pro strapped to an eagle and an in depth package showing Justin Bieber and Elmo going through the ice-bucket challenge.

But since we're talking about it: The BBC's radio and online budget alone is bigger than RT's entire annual budget. And still, the BBC is eating dust on YouTube.

I hope by this stage the reader appreciates how pathetic this looks: global news outlets trawling through each others YouTube accounts in an effort to belittle their achievements. "Information War" indeed. More like a teenage penis measuring contest.

Ennis goes on to say that "Only a handful of its top 100 videos can even loosely be described as "political" and none of them refers to the crisis in Ukraine."

Now that was just lazy, Steve. Here it is, right there in our top 100.

And here is the description: Disturbing footage from Ukraine shows violence spiraling out of control during anti-government protests, with rioters attacking and capturing policemen standing their ground. The Interior Ministry has hinted at a tough response if the unrest continues.

At RT, we don't believe in supervising every video with agenda-driven commentary. There's enough of that around. Some videos are self-explanatory, and the viewer is free to make up his own mind.

The BBC article goes on to say that "Latvia and Lithuania have responded to the challenge posed by Russian TV by tightening media regulations and even temporarily banning some channels."

Of everything in the article - it's the language in this bit that irked me the most. It exemplifies how far BBC standards on impartiality have fallen.

When Latvia and Lithuania - both EU states - ban Russian news channels and expel Russian journalists - they're said to be "responding to the challenge."

Now, just imagine: Russia kicks out a Western news channel. It expels journalists by force. You don't need to be clairvoyant to guess at the headlines. One thing's for sure: it wouldn't be "Russia responding to the challenge."

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 #33
Interfax
September 18, 2015
UN: War in Donbass takes 8,000 lives

At least 8,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in the hostilities in eastern Ukraine, Christof Heyns, UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary execution, has said.

Eight thousand people have died, and according to the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission, most of them have been civilians. Artillery shelling incidents are observed on both sides, and shells hit civilian areas, Heyns said at a press briefing in Kyiv on Friday. He expressed concern about the deployment of military hardware and artillery of the warring sides in populated localities, which caused multiple casualties.

In the opinion of Heyns, attention given to relations between the servicemen and the civilian population was insufficient.

There is no system to protect people from artillery fire, he said, noting that the ceasefire had been on for several weeks and that was an inspiring factor yet a way to protect the civilian population in the case the hostilities resumed needed to be found.

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 #34
AP
September 18, 2015
OSCE Warns of Breakdown of Central Heating in East Ukraine

MOSCOW - The Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe is raising the alarm about a potential breakdown of central heating systems across war-torn eastern Ukraine.

A military conflict there has killed over 8,000 people and damaged crucial infrastructure including water works.

The OSCE said in a report released Friday that water shortages in the conflict-affected areas "could leave civilians bitterly cold throughout the coming winter" as central heating systems there rely on water. The group said the situation is particularly deplorable since the infrastructure there badly needed repairs even before the war began and hostilities have prevented further repair works.

The latest cease-fire has largely held since it was announced Sept. 1, and leaders of Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France are meeting in Paris next month to discuss a political settlement.

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 #35
www.opendemocracy.net
September 18, 2015
Ukraine and the postcolonial condition
What does the debate over Ukraine's postcolonial status reveal about the future of the country's domestic and international politics?
By Richard Sakwa
Richard Sakwa is professor of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent, England. Among his books are Putin: Russia's Choice (Routledge, 2nd edition, 2007) and Russian Politics and Society (Routledge, 4th edition, 2008), Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands (IB Tauris, 1st edition, 2014) and Putin Redux (Routledge, 2nd edition, 2014).
 
The question of whether Ukraine is postcolonial may seem an abstruse matter, one best left to scholars. Yet it raises some fundamental issues about the nature of Ukrainian politics.

These issues include Ukraine's self-identity and its relationship with Europe, its potential relationship with Russia, as well as Russia's own relationship with Europe - as a subaltern, as the core of an alternative 'Eurasian' identity, or as part of a new more plural postcolonial identity.

This in turn raises a host of theoretical questions, since postcoloniality is neither spatial nor territorial, but establishes a condition that shapes a whole web of cultural and political relationships. If Ukraine is to be considered postcolonial, then so should Russia, and indeed the whole post-communist region would share in this condition. This in effect is the position of David Chioni Moore, who, in a seminal essay on the subject, effectively subsumed the notion of the 'post-Soviet' into the postcolonial, or more accurately, the Soviet into the colonial. But is this right?

Post-Soviet, postcolonial?

Postcolonial theory is becoming an increasingly popular way of explaining current developments in the post-Soviet space. It shifts discussion away from classical debates over economic transition and democratisation towards broader cultural debates over the subaltern, orientalism, and other patterns of development.

More specifically, we are dealing with the nature of Russian imperial, and the nominally Soviet post-imperial, relationship with the Ukrainian proto-state. The dominant Ukrainian state-building narrative is that Russia, in its various guises since 1243 (the date considered the breaking point of old Kievan Rus' under the impact of the Mongol invasion) imposed a colonial pattern of domination over Ukraine. The Soviet Union, despite periods encouraging indigenisation, notably in the 1920s, perpetuated this colonialism in new forms.

Thus it was only appropriate that, after the incorporation of eastern Galicia into the USSR during the Second World War, Stepan Bandera and his associates in the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists redirected their struggle from the old colonial power, Poland, to the new imperial force, the Soviet Union.

In 1991, this version of Ukrainian development reached its apotheosis with the potential, for the first time, to create an effective and sustainable national state.

Blurred boundaries

Theories of colonialism are very different from postcolonial theory, but in the Ukrainian case, there is a tendency for the two to be merged.

From the post-colonial perspective, the historical plasticity of Ukraine's borders is irrelevant, and is not qualitatively different from any other borders in the post-Soviet space, and indeed in most modern nation states.

The space that is now Ukraine needs to be 'Ukrainianised', and the legacy of past colonial oppression extirpated. This post-colonial political programme is reinforced by the cultural critique drawn from postcolonial theory, whereby the very sense of identity of the Ukrainian people needs to be purged of its subaltern status vis-à-vis Russia, to allow some sort of primordial Ukrainian culture to emerge.

In this reading, postcolonial theory reinforces the arguments of contemporary Ukrainianisers that the country's culture and society is autochthonous, and thus strengthens the hand of those who deny the commonality of Russian and Ukrainian culture.

The combination of post-colonial and postcolonial arguments is applied by numerous Ukrainian specialists and scholars studying Ukraine; along with much western media.

The logical corollary is that the Ukrainian nation state can only develop by shedding its dependency on Russia. Taras Kuzio, for example, considers Ukraine part of the 'post-Soviet colonial space', in which national self-affirmation inevitably finds itself at odds with attempts to retain an economic and cultural role for Russia in the region. This position is based on the view that the historical relationship with Russia was a colonial one.

The political consequences of such a view are stark and irreconcilable. The decolonisation model sustains monist (as opposed to pluralist) Ukrainianising forms of national development.

For monist Ukrainianisers, the fundamental challenge is to 'de-sovietise' as quickly as possible, including dismantling the Soviet social security system, economic links and bureaucratic traditions, in favour of what are considered to be more progressive European models.

On this basis, the 'Ukrainianisers' currently in power in Kiev are working hard not only to 'de-sovietise' the country, as in the notorious package of four de-communisation laws of May 2015, but also to de-Russify the media, education and other spheres.

'Ukrainianisation' undermines attempts to provide a constitutional basis for the country's pluralism, and even the liberal toleration of diversity is condemned, since all that would do, as Paul D'Anieri summarises the argument, is to freeze 'in place the results of past Russification efforts [and] to reward oppression and to ensure its success. On the contrary, it is argued, historical justice requires that the oppression be reversed.'  

Thus for Kuzio and others, all modern nation states have at some point engaged in the promotion of some sort of homogeneous national identity, often accompanied by violence, and thus Ukraine is doing now what its counterparts in western Europe did in the nineteenth century.

Postcolonial theory in this context is reduced to little more than an anti-colonial struggle against subjugation. Postcolonialism becomes another weapon in the armoury of Eastern European nationalists, and in effect gives theoretical respectability to traditional Russophobia.

One could argue that this 'decolonising' nation-building impetus inhibits a 'civilised' relationship with Moscow, condemning the region to endless contestation. In the Ukrainian case, the attempt to impose a monist model onto an inherently pluralist one threatens the unity and territorial integrity of the country.

Master and servant

The political consequences of applying the combined post-colonial and postcolonial models are clear, but this does not negate the very real postcolonial condition in which Ukraine finds itself.

While the simplistic application of the post-colonial model may be contested, with all of its deleterious consequences, the cultural hybridity of Ukrainian identity renders it a classic case of the postcolonial condition.

One of the more sophisticated applications of postcolonial theory has been undertaken by Mykola Riabchuk, a well-known Ukrainian public intellectual.

While Kuzio and others stress the alleged post-colonial situation in Ukraine, and thus outline a programme of anti-colonial rectification, Riabchuk is rather more subtle and locates his thinking in a more sophisticated postcolonial problematic-the more complex cultural interchanges between master and servant, imperial power and the subaltern are what's at stake here.

Riabchuk stresses the continuing prevalence of Russian language and culture in Ukraine, which means that the endless post-communist ambiguities in state and national development since independence in 1991 are homologous to the broader postcolonial condition. He conceptualises this as the Ukrainian Creole state, 'that is, a state that belongs primarily to the descendants of Russian settlers as well as to those indigenes who had eventually assimilated into the dominant (Russophone) culture'.

In Riabchuk's view, the Ukrainian case is very different from the traditional Creole state in the Americas, Australia and elsewhere, because the culture and language of the settlers is 'unusually proximate to those of indigenes', accompanied by the unusual capacity of the indigenes to compete against the culture of the colonisers in terms of culture, language and various modern arts.

His policy response is not dissimilar to that of the anti-colonialists, namely a gradual but consistent and determined Ukrainianisation, a state-led affirmative action programme to enhance the status of the Ukrainian language and culture. In his view, 'The Ukrainian state will remain dysfunctional as long as it remains Creole, that is, neither Ukrainian nor Russian but, rather, Soviet'.

By contrast with this monist view, the pluralists would argue that the very proximity of the two cultures means that they have grown together and both are legitimate inheritors of the modern Ukrainian state. Pluralists would argue that the very idea of 'indigenes' and 'settlers' are reified concepts, and instead argue that nation building in post-communist Ukraine should recognise the diversity of paths that its constituent peoples have taken to join the modern state, and thus the ethnonym 'Ukrainian' should be primarily civic. Ukraine from this perspective is a state of all its peoples, and not the property of so-called 'indigenes'.

By contrast, the monist application of postcolonial theory is based on a restitutive model of national development. This assumes some sort of primordial and enduring character to the Ukrainian nation, which has finally found a political state in which to develop. The restitutive model of statehood was also applied in Estonia and Latvia after independence, with the attendant problem of the 'dis-integration' of the Russophone 'settler' population.

The restitutive model is a powerful one, based on myths of endurance and resilience in the face of centuries of adversity and subordination, and sustains the monist approach to post-communist national development. Not surprisingly, there is a powerful nationalistic charge embedded in this model, reflecting the accumulated frustrations across the centuries.

The theoretical implications of our discussion are as stark as the political consequences. In practical terms, postcolonialism is not so different from post-colonialism. Postcolonial theory asks whether the subaltern can speak, and if so, in what language, and what should they say?

Monist Ukrainianisers argue that the state language should be Ukrainian, with Ukraine becoming emancipated from colonial subjugation as the country joins 'Europe'. Pluralists suggest that Russia and Ukraine share a common modernity, whereas those who condemn Ukraine's apparent post-colonial condition argue that Russia, as the leading Eurasian power, represents something inalienably regressive, backward and despotic. The escape to 'the west', of course, in postcolonial theory would precisely be condemned as 'Eurocentric' and a symptom of being the subaltern rather than its repudiation.

In other words, postcolonial theory appears to endorse conservative and exclusive positions, privileging a particular culture and inhibiting the forging of cross-cultural political solutions.

Beyond the postcolonial

I argue there is another narrative, of a pluralistic and multicultural Ukraine, which is obscured by postcolonial discourse.

After 1991, Ukraine remained a pluralistic society, and even today remains overwhelmingly tolerant of cultural and linguistic diversity. What has been lacking is the ability to articulate this pluralism in terms that do not privilege the existing imbalances while giving constitutional substance to that pluralism.

The rich experience of bilingual countries such as Wales, Canada and Finland, let alone Belgium, is ignored. Instead, a stripped down postcolonial discourse, even in its more sophisticated manifestations (i.e. Riabchuk), reduces the problem to an anti-colonial struggle against the legacy of colonial oppression.

Independent Ukraine developed as a hesitant and contradictory nationalising state, seeking to ensure the predominance of the Ukrainian language in official and educational institutions, yet tolerant until recently of cultural and linguistic diversity.

Ukrainian was enshrined as the single state language in the 1996 constitution, although state monolingualism was tempered by the widespread use of Russian in the mass media and personal exchanges. In constitutional terms, this was a residual rather than an enshrined right, and it is for this reason that the pluralists in Ukraine call for a more capacious constitutional settlement that would give legal right to cultural and linguistic pluralism.

This is more than a defence of the botched and partisan 2012 Kivalov/Kolesnichenko language law, which stipulated that any of the 18 regional and minority languages spoken by 10 per cent or more of the people in an administrative region could be used as an official language alongside Ukrainian.

The law was not an instance of genuine bilingualism, since in those regions (predominantly Russian) where it was applied the development of Ukrainian was neglected. Wales, a far smaller country, has adopted a far more enlightened and progressive approach, in which citizens are enjoined to learn Welsh and mostly do so with alacrity and enthusiasm, but English (after all, the language of the coloniser) is recognised as a foundational element of the culture that has developed over 800 years of interaction.

In a genuinely multilingual Ukraine, the development of Ukrainian at all levels would be mandatory while allowing other languages to flourish. Instead, a bureaucratic and divisive quasi-solution was imposed, in part because of the entrenched failure to conduct a genuine national dialogue over what substantive bilingualism would mean. The failure to achieve such a fruitful dialogue is in part a consequence of the tyranny of post (-) colonial representations of the Ukrainian condition.

From a comparative politics perspective, the application of bilingualism makes sense. For scholars such as Will Kymlicka, drawing on the Canadian experience of managing a multi-lingual community, the granting of timely concessions has drawn the sting from the secessionist impulse.

The granting of extensive devolved powers to South Tyrol ended the persistent violence there, and today the Italian region of Alto Adige is a model of what accommodation to the legitimate demands of minority cultures can achieve. In Wales the incremental development of bilingualism has satisfied the nationalists and put an end to the earlier militancy.

 The problem in Ukraine and the Baltic region is that it is not the comparative politics approach which has traction but the postcolonial (which is interpreted as post-colonial).

From this perspective, the demand for 'pluralism' is itself an emanation of the classical imperial mentality. It is a new way to re-impose the cultural hegemony of the traditional imperial master and to inhibit the creative development of formerly subaltern nations.

Postcoloniality is a condition characterised by the struggle for autonomy by peoples enduring a history of dependence. This 'heroic' reading of postcolonial theory has been very much taken to heart by the monist nationalisers in Ukraine, Estonia and Latvia, but it leaves out of account the other side of postcolonial condition, the enduring hybridity of the postcolonial subject.

The struggle to escape from colonised situations is typically couched in the language and cultural norms imparted by the former colonial power, the logical trap that is at the heart of much debate over postcolonialism.

Towards a more complex understanding of postcoloniality

The peculiarity of Ukraine and the Baltic states is that the former imperial overlord was itself in part a subaltern. On the one side, this means that the non-Russian post-Soviet states can bypass Russia and gain a direct referent in the form of 'Europe' or 'the West' as the instrument of liberation from colonial dependence.

This is why 'Europe' in the Ukrainian monist philosophy gains such a passionate cultural weight, although the actual Europe of the European Union and its painful legalism, pedantic regulations and hesitant embrace comes as something of a shock.

The postcolonial condition in Ukraine assumes a double hybridity. First, Ukraine shared in the cultural project of Soviet 'imperialism', even while at the same time suffering from it. It was Soviet imperialism that made the modern Ukrainian nation, endowed it with its extensive territory, and urbanised, educated and industrialised the society and economy.

The peoples now condemning Soviet colonialism were shaped by that colonialism, and thus Ukraine differs little from any number of other new states of our era in their engagement with the postcolonial condition, as legatees of transformations that provide the conditions for their challenge to the pathologies created by the transformations.

It is the second hybridity that endows the situation with its explosive character. Monist Ukrainian nationalism engages with 'Europe' as an escape from dependence on Russia, but thereby reproduces a new condition of subaltern dependence. The language and tropes of 'Europeanisation' are reified, and at their worst entail simply breaking all social, economic and cultural ties with Russia.

The ex-colonial power is thus paradoxically re-endowed with disproportionate weight, characterised as the 'other' against which the modern Ukrainian nation is shaped. At the same time, the new dependence on Europe stymies the development of an autochthonous Ukrainian identity that can transcend the postcolonial condition; instead it is reinforced from both directions.

Thus Ukraine is postcolonial, but of a very specific sort that leads to a double entrapment-an aversion to Russia and the mimicry of what are taken to be European standards, thus reinforcing the hybridity of the country. After independence, this situation provoked the endless tacking between Russia and the west, the two constitutive others, with all of the deleterious consequences that we now see.

The multi-vectorism of Leonid Kuchma's presidency (July 1994 - January 2005) may well have been conceived as a pragmatic response to the problems of a trapped and 'cleft' state (to use Samuel Huntington's term), but it inevitably only reinforced patterns of dependence and lack of autonomy.

The 2014 Maidan revolution was in part an attempt to escape this dilemma, by making a decisive turn to Europe, but this once again only reinforced new forms of dependence.

Thus a more profound reading of the postcolonial condition is required. The heroic reading reduces postcolonialism to post-colonialism, where the hyphen indicates a straightforward struggle for independence and liberation from the former colonial overlord, whereas the absence of the hyphen indicates a qualitatively different set of relationships but can equally fall prey to new forms of the subaltern relationship.

These contradictions are explored in Russia's Postcolonial Identity: A Subaltern Empire in a Eurocentric World, a brilliant new work by Viatcheslav Morozov. While this is not the place to engage substantively with this challenging and provocative work, its central argument is that Russia represents a 'subaltern empire', precisely capturing the complex and contradictory character of Russia as both master and slave.

Russia is an extreme hybrid, both enmeshed in the postcolonial syndrome while acting as an empire. It is subaltern because its vision of modernity is ultimately derivative, generated by Europe, with whom it has traditionally had an ambivalent relationship; but its self-image as a great power perpetuates the imperial dimension, with profound consequences for its domestic and international policies. Russia has been fully Europeanised, and can thus offer no vision of an alternative modernity; but it claims to be a more authentic version of that modernity to which it aspires - the 'true' Europe that was already articulated in the nineteenth century.

The subaltern relationship means that the hegemonic social order does not allow Russia's voice to be heard; but the imperial self-identity insists that its voice is heard, hence the endless tensions, crises and contradictions of our time.

If Russia is a subaltern empire, then this entails a fundamental rethinking of its relationship with its post-Soviet neighbours. Russia has long been characterised as both victim and perpetrator, but seen from this reframed postcolonial perspective, Russia is engaged in much the same endeavour as Ukraine: to find an appropriate mode of engagement with Europe and a model of modernity that captures the contradictory and hybrid histories of the two countries. The difference, of course, is that Ukraine is only a subaltern, whereas Russia is both subaltern and an empire. The Morozov argument suggests that in different ways they are both dependent.

This offers a route to escape from the present impasse. Instead of a rather essentialised model of culture (a common failing of postcolonial discourse), Ukraine can embrace multiple identities that are both postcolonial and post-colonial, and recognise that the subaltern condition is a broader and shared problem for all post-communist countries, including Russia.

At the continental level, the political stalemate can be broken by transcending the narrow localisms - including that of the European Union - by combining the challenge of creating a new European modernity, pluralistic and diverse with multiple sources of sovereignty, with a new geopolitics that moves away from the stale Atlanticism of the Cold War era.

The idea of a Greater Europe, drawing on Gaullist ideas of a Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok, and now articulated by defenders of various forms of Gorbachev's Common European Home, is more than a spatial construct but part of the search for a genuinely European Europe.

In other words, if we extend the argument to suggest that, in the post-war era, Europe itself has endured elements of the postcolonial condition, then a rethinking of the multiple hybridities would suggest that a new form of postcolonial rationality, less axiological (refuting the idea that all the problems of history have been resolved by the European vision itself), would open up space for a substantive pluralism which recognises multiple identities within and between countries.

The common frame is the challenge to be European in a world that is increasingly becoming non-western. The subaltern has spoken, and it is a language that Europe itself needs to learn.

Editor's note: we are currently preparing a response to this article, and welcome further responses.

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 #36
Bloomberg
September 17, 2015
Putin Tightens Reins on Ukraine Rebels, Putting Conflict on Ice
By Ilya Arkhipov and Stepan Kravchenko

Ukrainian separatist leaders say their hopes of full integration with Russia or greater independence are fading as the Kremlin tightens the reins on their rebellion.

Russian President Vladimir Putin appears unwilling to risk broadening his conflict with the U.S. and European Union over Ukraine, senior separatist officials said in interviews this month, meaning the rebel regions' future is more likely to resemble Transnistria, the Russian-backed breakaway area of Moldova, whose fate is still unresolved more than two decades after fighting subsided.

"Everything is gradually, steadily heading toward a localization of this territory," Alexander Khodakovsky, a top rebel security official, said in his office in the separatist capital of Donetsk. "What I see is the formation of a second Transnistria."

Khodakovsky and other rebel leaders said their backers in the Kremlin are sending the clearest signals in months that they don't want the conflict to escalate, at least for the moment. Instead, they are leaning on the separatists to limit cease-fire violations and focus on turning their makeshift administration into a functioning government -- with the help of Moscow-trained bureaucrats.

Separatist Limbo

Rebel leaders and people close to the Kremlin said Moscow is aiming to freeze the uneasy status quo, avoiding a major escalation while a resolution to the conflict seems remote. That's likely to ease the pressure on Russia's recession-wracked economy- and provide some respite for Ukraine, as well - as Russia tries to shift the focus to the fighting in Syria.
 
That leaves the separatists in limbo, having broken with Ukraine but short of their goals. Already, with the cease-fire holding better in recent weeks than ever before, signs of war are slowly vanishing, with many road checkpoints now abandoned.

Freezing the conflict amounts to an admission by the Kremlin that international pressure and Ukrainian resistance have made backing further separatist advances too costly. Instead, Moscow is aiming to use the rebel regions to keep the pressure on Ukraine.

For the U.S. and Europe, a stalemate is short of their aims of restoration of Ukrainian control. Still, such an outcome would reflect at least a measure of success for the policy of sanctions as a means to pressure the Kremlin, Western diplomats said. Kremlin insiders say avoiding any major increase in those restrictions is now a prime goal for Putin.

'Minimal Losses'

"It's important for Putin to get out of this situation with minimal losses," said Alexei Chesnakov, a former Kremlin official who still advises top officials on strategy for the Ukraine conflict.

The tenuous cease-fire agreement reached in February in Minsk will probably be extended beyond its year-end deadline amid slow progress toward a political settlement, according to diplomats and others close to the talks.

"Both sides are trying to buy time," said Chesnakov, referring to Russia and Ukraine.

Many in the separatist regions haven't given up hope that Russia could annex their territory as it did Crimea last year. Putin faced chants of "take us with you" from some Donetsk region residents when he visited Crimea last week. He responded with a stiff smile. Asked about the episode the next day, Putin said: "It's not a question to be decided in the street."

Local residents show some skepticism about the future of the self-declared republics, going to Ukrainian-controlled territory to register weddings and legal documents.

There's no sign Moscow is backing down. People familiar with Russia's position say that if Moscow saw a threat to the survival of the separatist enclaves, it would likely dispatch troops to protect them as senior rebel officials now admit Russia did in the summer of 2014. Russia denies sending forces.

Fighting Subsides

For the moment, the orders are to strictly limit firing, Khodakovsky said.

Separatist leader Alexander Zakharchenko, has toned down his rhetoric and now says he aims to take the strategic port city of Mariupol by political means, not forcibly.

The separatists have little choice. Russia, always a dominant force in the region, has methodically tightened its grip on all key aspects of the breakaway regions.

Political leaders who didn't fall into line have been replaced with Moscow-backed candidates. Military commanders who defied instructions from Moscow have been removed or killed in mysterious incidents. Economically, the war-ravaged regions rely almost entirely on largely clandestine subsidies from Russia, separatist officials said.

Publicly, Russian officials say the rebel governments are independent and deny any military intervention. They say support is limited to humanitarian aid.

Election Tension

Moscow's control could face a test in the coming weeks before local elections in the regions that the U.S. and E.U. say amount to a violation of the Minsk deal and should be canceled. Zakharchenko said the poll will go ahead.

Separatist leaders said the edicts from Moscow not to shoot rankle local fighters.

"When the guys come to me and ask how are we supposed to react" to fire from Ukrainian positions, "I have to explain to them that there's a very strict order to observe the cease-fire," Khodakovsky said.

Discipline isn't ironclad, he said. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has reported that violations of the cease-fire have come from both the rebel and Ukrainian sides.

The relative truce has led volunteers from Russia to return home in the last few months, bringing their numbers to about 1,500 now from a peak of 4,000 last year, Zakharchenko said.

Instead, Moscow is dispatching dozens of trained bureaucrats to help shore up the separatist governments, which are now staffed largely by amateurs, a rebel official said.

Ruined Economy

Their economies in ruins, the statelets also depend almost entirely on Moscow for funding, separatist officials said.

Khodakovsky said the Kremlin insists the aid be kept low-profile, however, to avoid provoking criticism from the U.S. and Europe.

"If we don't talk about this openly," he said, "the population gets the feeling that Russia has turned away from us and is just playing some kind of game, hoping to get out of this as easily as possible."

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 #37
AFP
September 17, 2015
Shells silent, stressed Ukraine fighters face alcohol threat
By Yulia Silina

Mariupol (Ukraine) (AFP) - Some Ukrainian troops play hours of football while others take dips in the sea as they try to adjust to a sudden drop in fighting following a fresh ceasefire deal.

Kiev's war commanders are ready to allow almost anything to save soldiers from the gravest danger facing them during the current tentative truce -- booze.

Tens of thousands of Ukrainians have spent the past 17 months fighting pro-Russian insurgents across the former Soviet republic's separatist industrial east.

Now, yet another in a failed series of ceasefires, agreed on September 1, appears to be mostly holding.

And troops who have learned to take out their anger on the insurgents by manning tanks and firing rockets are now struggling to deal with their emotions in the current lull.

"Many drink a lot," said a 30-year-old soldier who prefers to be called "Hunter".

"Our army is still a little Soviet," he said shortly after finishing a boxing workout in this government-held outpost on the Sea of Azov.

"The elite US units constantly do sports to relieve post-combat stress," says Hunter. "Alcohol and drugs are not the solution. They only make matters worse."

Post-traumatic stress disorder

The Mariupol battalion's sole psychologist says she likes taking agitated soldiers out for relaxing walks in the park or along the sandy beach while trying to soothe their problems.

"They have been coming to see me a lot more during the ceasefire," Yelena Trubetskaya says.

She describes the classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder -- the same problem suffered by US soldiers after fighting for two decades in Vietnam as well as the Soviet troops in the wake of their 1980s misadventure in Afghanistan.

"Soldiers feel during combat like they are performing their duty by defending the motherland. But they lose sight of what they are doing when things turn quiet," Trubetskaya explains.

"They suffer from sleep disorders, a loss of appetite and bursts of aggression."

One Ukrainian defence ministry adviser told the Novoye Vremya weekly that up to 20 percent of those involved in battles had sought psychological help.

There are no official figures about how many actually took part in combat because of both draft dodgers and volunteers who formed their own units at the front, but officials polled by AFP believe that at least 100,000 Ukrainians have fought the separatists.

Independent psychologists cited by the publication said the number of those who suffer from shell shock may be as high as 80 percent.

'All for nought'

The top brass in Mariupol are clearly worried and trying hard to keep the restless fighters engaged.

The battalion's deputy leader both encourages and -- in some cases -- requires his charges to do tactic training and play sports.

The outpost at times resembles a peculiar summer camp as young men roll around in the sand and kick balls not far from spots where shells obliterated everything around them just a few weeks ago.

"I can say from experience that when you return from warfare, you become maladapted," commander "Sedoi" (Grizzled) says.

The 54-year-old believes symptoms are most prevalent among conscripts who went to the front for a few months' duty but were forced to stay much longer because so many Ukrainians were skirting the draft.

"If you fail to rotate soldiers and change combat missions of the ones you have, they can simply break down. And we all know that breakdowns are treated here with alcohol."

Vodka and beer had been available throughout the field of battle and consumed by both sides in the war.

Yet many Ukrainian units -- especially ones made up of volunteers -- had strict rules about liquor consumption and severe punishments for those who disobeyed.

AFP teams in the war zone saw some drinkers put in solitary confinement for days at a time.

And endless battles kept even the most undisciplined soldiers too busy to hit the bottle too much.

Now many are not only restless but also upset that Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has signed up to a truce deal that lets rebels keep land under their control.

"The guys watch the news and wonder what all that fighting was for -- whether it was all for nought," commander Sedoi laments.

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 #38
AFP
September 17, 2015
'All in all, it wasn't a bad week. I didn't die,' writes mystery diarist in Ukraine
By Anna Malpas

Moscow (AFP) - "All in all, it wasn't a bad week. I didn't die," a mystery diarist writes from an undisclosed location in eastern Ukraine.

"Donbass Diary", which chronicles civilian life in the midst of the separatist conflict there, is among the first to do so from a personal vantage point.

Laced with dark humour, vivid accounts of nights spent in cellars and intermittent power and water shutoffs, the book has won critical acclaim in Russia, where it was published last month.

"These entries are still fresh, but they already breathe a sense of history," wrote the Trud daily.

"Donbass Diary is a book without anything made up, leaving no doubt of its truthfulness, a document of special significance," wrote the weekly Argumenty Nedeli.

The diarist's identity is a mystery, as she used the pen name Yana Kovich (apparently a play on the name of Ukraine's toppled pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovich).

She names her town only as Y., but it seems to be Yenakiyeve, just outside the main rebel-controlled city, Donetsk.

In a message sent to AFP via the publisher, Limbus Press of St Petersburg, the writer declined to answer questions, saying: "All that I can say and want to say, I said in the book."

The intensely personal book stands out among an avalanche of titles on the Ukraine conflict coming out in Russia, most of them ideological tracts.

Several accounts of the conflict published in Kiev include the recent "Airport", a novel based on the battle for Donetsk airport by Los Angeles Times correspondent Sergei Loiko, who spent time embedded with Ukrainian troops.

'We won't leave'

The book -- whose cover is stylised as a taped-up window -- explores the change in values brought about by the conflict in Donbass, a gritty coal mining region once also known for international footballers and flashy nightclubs.

"I don't dream about getting a Land Cruiser any more. They burn up just as quick as a Lada when they're hit by a shell," reads one entry.

"It's not cool anymore to have a flat, a car, or a nice phone -- it's cool to have a cellar."

Other entries talk about the new normal in a conflict zone -- such as how identifying weapons from the sounds they make has become second nature.

"If you hear vzhikh-vzhikh-vzhikh, that's only a Grad (rocket). If it's "u-ukh", a shell just flew over your house."

The book is clearly anti-Kiev.

"The 'Ukrs' really want to blow up all our systems to get rid of the inhabitants, but we won't leave. Here's a big fat 'up yours' from our cellar!" says one entry, using a derogatory term for Ukrainian troops.

It describes people left to fend for themselves in war conditions, risking death by simply staying put.

"You will have Grad rockets aimed at you, but don't let that scare you: it's just a tactic: they're here to protect you," reads one ironic entry.

While some 2,000 Ukrainian troops have died, the death toll among separatist fighters and civilians in the region is around 5,000.

The diary runs from August 1 last year to March 3, just before the Minsk peace deal brought in a much-breached ceasefire.

"When the war ends, I'll walk round the town and hug people, trees, buildings..." another entry reads.

Ukraine books trending

In a sense the author's identity is not crucial since the book is not a standard diary but a sort of scrapbook of the war experience for everyone around her.

"It's a kind of accumulation of information that the author simply collected -- from ads on the street, from conversations in social networking forums," said Pavel Krusanov, editor-in-chief of Limbus Press.

"The town itself is speaking, through its inhabitants, through the atmosphere... It burns with a very powerful force."

At the Moscow International Book Fair last weekend, books on the Ukraine conflict were clearly a publishing trend.

Moscow publisher Knizhny Mir displayed books including one titled "The Bloody Crimes of Bandera's Junta", referring to Ukrainian nationalist figurehead Stepan Bandera. Its cover shows a child's doll scattered with debris.

"When they are killing children in Donbass, the author of the book thinks it's a crime, and it's hard not to agree with him," said the director of the publishing house, Dmitry Lobanov.

Yet some said they were shocked at the lack of diversity of opinion on offer.

"There are no books here that present the position of the Maidan," said philosopher and writer Igor Chubais, referring to the pro-Western movement in Ukraine.

"This literature is on the verge of extremism," said another visitor, Maria Savelyeva.

"All the books... somehow justify Russian aggression, which is contributing to the conflict in Ukraine."

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 #39
Huffingtonpost.com
September 10, 2015
Kiev Right Wing Violence: Time for Poroshenko to Look in the Mirror?
By Nikolas Kozloff
Nikolas Kozloff is a New York-based writer who conducted a research trip to Ukraine last year.

Amidst the emergence of politically-right-wing forces in Kiev, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko claims to be shocked and outraged by recent violence. Speaking in reference to an explosion which killed three members of the national guard outside parliament and left another officer in a coma, Poroshenko called the attack "an anti-Ukrainian action" and demanded that "all organizers, all representatives of political forces... must carry full responsibility." More than a whopping 140 were also wounded in the attack, which was apparently caused by a grenade. All three guardsmen were young, in their twenties.

The incident occurred in the midst of a demonstration against a plan to provide more autonomy to separatist enclaves in the Ukrainian east where Russian-backed rebels hold sway. Authorities have blamed the explosion on a fighter in the so-called Sich volunteer battalion, which is linked in turn to far right-wing Svoboda or Freedom Party [in Ukraine, "Sich" refers to historic Cossack homelands. Though Cossack is a loaded term and carries unpleasant historic meaning for some, nationalists recently revived the word by referring to a protest area in Kiev which launched the 2013-14 EuroMaidan revolution as a "Cossack Sich." Svoboda meanwhile loves "Cossack rock" music]. Rather questionably, the government itself has ties to the Sich battalion which falls under the official control of the Ministry of the Interior.

Svoboda's Role

Svoboda was highly represented at the demonstration outside of parliament, and most protesters participating in subsequent violence and clashes with the police were Svoboda members. Later, the Minister of the Interior claimed that that party was "directly" responsible for clashes and the government has charged senior Svoboda members with rioting. Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk has declared that right wing-nationalists were "worse" than Russian-backed separatists in the east, because they were "trying to open another front" in Ukraine "under the guise of patriotism."

Svoboda on the other hand denies any responsibility and claims the authorities are out on a witch hunt to deface the party. Whatever the case, it's a little odd that the authorities have only now woken up to the ominous threat of right wing groups. Indeed, the attack in front of the parliament building follows close on the heels of another incident in south-west Ukraine, in which members of Right Sektor battalion got into a shootout with local police. Perhaps, high-ups at the Ministry of Interior and elsewhere are finally paying the price for coddling the nationalist right and its backward political and social agenda.

Waking Up to Far Right

It's only now, when extremists pose a threat to the government itself, that the international media has woken up to the rise of the political right. For years now, however, the nationalist right has posed a risk to independent leftists on the ground. Denis Pilash, one such activist who I interviewed in Kiev, is no stranger to Svoboda. Even before the EuroMaidan revolution which toppled Viktor Yanukovych from power, Pilash observed Svoboda trying to stir up "anti-migrant hysteria" by holding hostile rallies. Eventually, however, Svoboda and the right may have realized that anti-immigrant messaging wasn't resonating so well, so they turned to opposing anarchists, feminists, and the LGBT community.

As if such developments weren't concerning enough, Svoboda also has a peculiar habit of resuscitating dubious World War II icons. Svoboda leaders, in fact, admire "proto-Nazis" such as Ernst Jünger, and are "understanding" of Goebbels. They moreover talk about "purity of blood" and refer to Ukraine as "one race, one nation, one fatherland." Svoboda meanwhile idolizes the Ukrainian Insurgent Army or UPA, an outfit which fought against the Soviets in World War II but also collaborated with the Nazis at one point. During unrest at Maidan square, Svoboda brandished the traditional UPA flag. In addition, Svoboda has defended extremists' right to brandish this flag at local soccer matches.

Problematic Police

Pilash adds that rightists dress up in military-style outfits with red and black insignia and some paramilitaries are "linked to the most notorious figures in Svoboda." Pilash is particularly disturbed by one case last year in which Vasyl Cherepanyn, a lecturer at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and editor of leftist Political Critique magazine, was brazenly attacked in broad daylight in crowded Kontraktova Square. Cherepanyn was assaulted by a group of men dressed in camouflage paramilitary uniforms. As they proceeded to pummel their victim, the thugs shouted "communist" and "separatist." Unfortunately, police arrived late to the scene and failed to catch the assailants. Pilash says the attackers had no clear insignia on their uniforms, but he suspects they may have belonged to local battalions which assist the police.

There are other disturbing indications that the police may have been penetrated by right wing zealots. Azov Battalion is a military outfit fighting Russian separatists in the east which advocates right-wing nationalism and anti-Semitism. One infamous Azov commander is Andriy Biletsky, who has been promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the police. The military figure has openly admitted that some men in his unit "are interested in their historical roots," though this may be difficult to understand for more modern, "uprooted" nations such as the United States.

Looking the Other Way?

As if it wasn't disturbing enough that bad apples are caught up in the police, high up politicians have also gotten into the habit of appeasing the far right. To be sure, Petro Poroshenko is a far cry from such violent street toughs. Unfortunately, however, the authorities have either turned the other way or sought to incorporate far right messaging, thus perpetuating a chilling climate in which fringe ideas are allowed to thrive.

Take, for example, Poroshenko's comment that the "timing is good" to define the status of the UPA. The politician then signed a decree establishing a "Day of Ukrainian Defenders" on October 14. The date is significant as it marks the anniversary of the UPA's formation. Taking to Twitter, Poroshenko added "UPA soldiers - an example of heroism and patriotism to Ukraine."

Then, for good measure, Poroshenko provided a Ukrainian passport to a Belarusian neo-Nazi. The man, Serhiy Korotkykh, served as a fighter in the eastern conflict zone and helped to defend Donetsk airport from Russian separatists. During a ceremony, Poroshenko awarded a medal to Korotkykh and praised the Belarusian as "courageous and selfless." Experts however claim that Korotkykh was a founder of a neo-Nazi group in Russia and point out the Belarusian had been charged for involvement in a Moscow bombing and was also detained in Minsk for allegedly stabbing an anti-fascist organizer. Needless to say, top Ukrainian authorities reject such claims as defamatory. Like Biletsky, Korotkykh is a member of the Azov Battalion.

As if all of this wasn't enough already, Poroshenko has also praised Andrey Sheptytsky, a priest who worked in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. Though Sheptytsky harbored some Jews during World War II, he initially supported the Nazis during their invasion of Ukraine, favored the UPA and endorsed the creation of a Ukrainian division with the Nazi SS. Rather questionably, Poroshenko recently unveiled a monument to Sheptytsky in the western city of Lviv where Svoboda and the political right enjoy a degree of popularity. During a ceremony attended by 10,000 people, Poroshenko praised the priest.

The Ricochet Effect

Terrified at the prospect of being overrun by separatists or even that the nation itself might implode or collapse, Poroshenko and the political establishment have engaged in a kind of Faustian bargain with the far right. This mindset is at least partially due to Poroshenko's nervousness about upcoming local elections in the fall and the prospect of being overwhelmed by radical populists. Such firebrand politics could shock the establishment, which has failed to revive the economy or even break the power of the oligarchs for that matter. Reportedly, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk's party has plummeted in popularity to such a degree that he is now joining forces with Poroshenko so as to avoid an electoral rout.

Tying one's sails to the far right, however, has constituted a serious mistake. While extreme nationalists still might not command an electoral majority, the Ukrainian political class has historically displayed an alarmingly high level of tolerance and acquiescence towards right wing antics. Though certainly horrific, recent riots in Kiev will hopefully serve to highlight the real danger of the far right and the need to take a firm stand against such elements.

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 #40
Kyiv Post
September 17, 2015
Bandits of Ukraine, keep stealing with impunity
By Brian Bonner
Chief editor

Bandits of Ukraine, keep stealing with impunity. Nobody in authority is going to stop you - especially if you're rich, powerful or able to pay hefty bribes to the right person.

That's my conclusion after listening to panel discussions at the 12th annual Yalta European Strategy from Sept. 10-12, taking place for the second year in Kyiv since Crimea's Yalta remains under Russian occupation.

I have been in Ukraine for a long time. But I can still appreciate the sad irony of a conference run by a billionaire oligarch, Victor Pinchuk, with another billionaire oligarch, Rinat Akhmetov's DTEK, as a special partner, organizing a round-table talk called: "Rule of Law, De-Oligarchization, Fighting Corruption: Any News?"

Let me answer the question: No. There is no news. There is no de-oligarchization campaign and there is no fight against corruption under way - at least not one from people in the institutions that should be waging it: judges, prosecutors and police.

Ukraine has 18,000 prosecutors and they are all so worthless or corrupt or both that they cannot make a single big criminal case stick in a nation that is swimming in corruption.
How bad is the situation?

It is so bad that Davit Sakvarelidze, a new deputy prosecutor general, is hiring hundreds of new prosecutors to replace the useless ones in power.

It is so bad that there is nobody to investigate the prosecutors, especially the long-running and unanswered accusations that the nation's former prosecutor generals, including Oleh Makhnitsky and Vitaly Yarema, continued the practice of soliciting bribes to open and close criminal cases.

It is so bad that Artem Sytnyk, the head of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, has no idea when or if his agency will be running because only now are lawmakers and prosecutors getting around to appointing a commission to appoint an anti-corruption prosecutor. Let me cut to the chase about why the foot-dragging: Politicians and prosecutors have no intention of appointing truly independent and effective persons to prosecutorial posts, because it would surrender their control of the institution.

To say this situation is ridiculous is to state the obvious: All 18,000 of the nation's prosecutors should be anti-corruption prosecutors.

The longer this goes on, the more the National Anti-Corruption Bureau will look like mere window dressing to create the harmful illusion that something is happening in the corruption fight.

Speaking of cosmetic, let's look at the new police force - more than 3,000 new uniformed patrol officers in four cities, an innovation led by the photogenic and articulate Deputy Interior Minister Eka Zguladze-Glucksmann. I agree it's an improvement. But the nation has 150,000 law enforcement personnel. What are they doing? Nothing in the way of investigating white-collar or organized crime, which should be the nation's priority.

Yuriy Lutsenko, ex-interior minister and current lawmaker with the president's dominant faction, told the Kyiv Post that Interior Minister Arsen Avakov is blocking the hiring of more new police officers and investigators, charges denied on Sept. 13 by a ministry spokesperson.

And the courts, well, nothing has changed there - the same old corrupt judges, the same opaque procedures, the same lack of jury trials.

Of course, the two people most deserving of blame are President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk.

Poroshenko deserves blame for not firing Prosecutor General Victor Shokin and, as one of his bloc's lawmakers Sergii Leshchenko said at the YES conference, for taking an evolutionary approach to reform rather than a revolutionary one. "The evolutionary approach isn't working," Leshchenko said at YES as the government becomes more unpopular.

But there is a war on, so Ukrainians are still reluctant to be hard on their commander-in-chief. But Poroshenko will have a lot of answer for when the stalled and impotent anti-corruption drive becomes the public's focus again instead of the war. Unfortunately, three of the most honest and toughest anti-corruption lawmakers - Leshchenko, Svitlana Zalishchuk and Mustafa Nayem - are in the presidential faction, and I fear they will pull their punches when it comes to criticism of Poroshenko.
If Leshchenko is right, half the parliament still consists of corrupt lawmakers or representatives of oligarchs.

If the anti-corruption drive doesn't get going soon, Poroshenko will be on his way to a one-term presidency, ala ex-President Viktor ("Bandits to Jail") Yushchenko.

Meanwhile, Yatsenyuk is going the way of one of his predecessors and a former political ally, Yulia Tymoshenko, in the blame game. He said he was only able to name three people to the Cabinet of Ministers and has only 80 members of the 423-seat parliament from his People's Front party.

Yatsenyuk's hawkish and popular stance against Russia's war got most of the media attention from from his speech and interview with moderator Stephen Sackur at the YES conference. But the prime minister essentially blamed everyone else for the nation's stillborn corruption fight.

"I am not responsible for the prosecutors office...nor for judiciary. I am doing my jobs: to fix the economy, to be back on track in terms of reforms, to provide energy efficiency reform, to provide financial resources for the Ukrainian military, to improve corporate governance for state-owned enterprises, " Yatsenyuk said. "I would be happy to be both prime minister, chief justice, general prosecutor and chief of the anti-corruption bureau ... Everyone is to make its own job."

I've got news for Yatsenyuk - all his reforms in other areas will be for naught if there is no rule of law or functioning, independent judicial system.

Yatsenyuk also blamed attacks on him for pressure he has put on oligarchs who own televison stations, although Sackur said people think the opposite is true - that he continues to safeguard the interests of the oligarchic and bureaucratic system.

This is reminiscent of the the Yushchenko-Tymoshenko dysfunctional rule, but also a reflection of Ukraine's confusing division of powers between the president and prime minister, a recipe for conflict, as American economist Roger Myerson has noted.

"You name me one big, big fish in this particular sea who has been held to account, put through the courts and brought to justice for criminal corruption," Sackur challenged. Yatsenyuk could not.
Not only that, Leshchenko told the YES conference that Ukraine is not helping Switzerland's authorities with requested information regarding corruption allegations they are investigating against a main ally of Yatsenyuk, lawmaker Mykola Martynenko. Martynenko denies the charges.

While the discussion at YES was useful, the nation's top law enforcement officials - general prosecutor, interior minister and Security Service of Ukraine chief - did not speak at the conference. Perhaps they had nothing to say. The best advice came from Anders Aslund, the Swedish author on Ukrainian politics, who told the YES conference that the top leadership of all law enforcement bodies should be removed and replaced by people who will make the institutions truly independent.

The longer the delay, the more the stealing will take place in an atmosphere of impunity and the less likely that Ukraine will recover any of its stolen billions or bring to justice those who robbed its people.

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 #41
www.foreignpolicy.com
September 17, 2015
The World's Biggest Work in Progress
Why Ukraine's effort to curb corruption is a Sisyphean task. A situation report.
By Frank Brown
Frank Brown is a senior program officer at the Center for International Private Enterprise.

Valentina Stoikova is no revolutionary - yet she now finds herself on the front lines of change in her home country of Ukraine. A 57-year-old former aeronautics factory worker, she's spent the past 14 years running an organization called the Fund for the Support of Entrepreneurship in her hometown, the city of Izmail on the Danube River. So when a maverick governor championing anti-corruption shock therapy asked Stoikova (who was, at the time, a partner of my organization, the Center for International Private Enterprise) to take over the local regional administration a few weeks ago, she had to think a bit. "For years I had complained that the government doesn't let business do business," she says. "So joining the government was not a simple decision to make. But I made it." In the coming months, Stoikova's mandate will be a challenging one. She aims to fire up to half of the local government's 90 civil servants, to open up to public scrutiny the process by which lucrative local fishing rights are allotted, and to work with local law enforcement to crack down on corruption.

This is all a perfect fit with the plans of her boss, the governor of the Odessa region, of which Izmail is a part. The city of Odessa, at the region's heart, is a seaport notorious throughout Eurasia for its smuggling, racketeering, and general air of lawlessness. The new governor is none other than Mikheil Saakashvili, the former president of Georgia, who is now leading a second life as Ukraine's most prominent anti-corruption crusader. Using a model that he applied successfully in Georgia in the mid-2000s, Saakashvili is traveling frenetically across the province, meeting with anti-corruption activists like Stoikova, firing officials suspected of malfeasance, and listening to the corruption complaints of citizens on live TV. Since President Petro Poroshenko granted him Ukrainian citizenship and appointed him to the governorship in June,

Saakashvili has personified the national campaign against corruption and won material and rhetorical support from Ukraine's friends abroad.

Saakashvili is a figure of intense controversy. In his Georgian homeland, he is currently wanted on charges of abuse of power. Saakashvili denies the allegations, which he dismisses as a ploy of his political rivals; critics insist that his government violated the rights of many Georgians, often in the name of anti-corruption. A year ago, Saakashvili was the subject of a gently mocking New York Times profile detailing his life in exile in Brooklyn. Now he is the most prominent member of a large contingent of former Georgian officials appointed to key positions in Ukraine. As of early September, Saakashvili has been highly visible on the national stage, attacking the prime minister's handling of reforms on television and attracting 26,000 signatures on a petition to have him named prime minister.

Some seasoned Ukraine-watchers dismiss it all as so much theater. "Saakashvili in Odessa is a sideshow because Odessa is not Kiev," says the Washington-based economist Anders Aslund. "The key is whether the top politicians really want to limit corruption, and there are obvious doubts about that in Ukraine." Aslund has a point. All the anti-corruption laws, negotiations for bailout packages, and pushy Western ambassadors calling for less rhetoric and more arrests are centered in the capital. Others argue that Ukraine's reformist government needs some quick anti-corruption wins to boost its legitimacy with voters and international lenders. If those wins are credited to a swashbuckling Georgian with a complicated past, so be it.

Ukraine is a unitary state of 45 million people. The political, legal, and financial power to tackle the country's environment of corruption lies overwhelmingly in Kiev. President Poroshenko, a billionaire businessman elected on a pro-reform platform in May 2014, has a strong voice in the composition of various anti-corruption bodies. Most significantly, Poroshenko nominates the head of the Office of the General Prosecutor, an entity that one long-time Western observer of Ukraine corruption describes as "the largest organized crime structure in the country."

Nearly two years ago, peaceful street protests broke out in the heart of Kiev - the Maidan - over then-President Viktor Yanukovych's abrupt decision not to pursue closer ties with the European Union. The protests escalated, turned violent, and spread nationally, simultaneously destabilizing the country and empowering citizens. Many of the most diehard protesters were particularly angry about corruption, whether expressed by the state capture of entire industries, the predatory police, or bribe-seeking kindergarten directors.

Now, with the dust settled, Ukraine has a reformist, Western-facing president and parliament. They have declared reducing corruption a top priority. Prominent Maidan leaders are either in elected office or leading the non-government organizations that are busy holding government accountable to its promises of reform. Western donors have pledged to help fulfill those promises.

But the costs are high and the distractions many. Ukraine has lost both the Crimea and control of a chunk of its industrial heartland, the Donbas, that had accounted for 20 percent of GDP. The Donbas appears to be in the early, violent stage of what could become a long, frozen conflict with Russia, a familiar pattern in the former Soviet Union. 1.4 million people have been displaced. 7,800 soldiers and civilians are dead. The economy is in free fall: forecasts predict negative growth of 9 percent for this year along with a 46 percent rate of inflation. An estimated $27 billion in foreign support will be necessary in 2015 to avoid systemic collapse.

Has it been worth it? EU accession is many, many years away, if ever. Peace in eastern Ukraine depends on the whims of an unpredictable neighbor with vastly superior resources. A dramatic economic turnaround will not happen without painful austerity measures, higher home energy prices, and the reduction of workforces at inefficient government-owned factories that employ tens of thousands.

In the near term, the one area where the government can begin to deliver tangible, positive results to the population is the battle against corruption.

Nearly a year ago the president signed a set of anti-corruption laws based largely on international best practices and designed with citizen oversight in mind. Despite tremendous demand from the populace and constant entreaties from Western governments, two of the three key anti-corruption institutions have yet to start functioning. According to a recent report from Transparency International Ukraine, the biggest brakes to progress are the oligarchs' capture of political parties and the government's slowness in actually creating the independent anti-corruption bodies as required by law.

Now, after months of dithering and haggling, some progress is visible. The government has quickly moved to establish its credentials with a few, easy-to-implement populist moves on the Georgian model. Education officials are piloting an online admissions process aimed at eliminating the need to bribe officials in charge of state-run kindergartens. The Interior Ministry has overseen the mass firing of longtime traffic police officers and their replacement with deployed or soon-to-be-deployed, newly trained, Western-style cops by the thousands in Kiev and a number of other cities.

Less visible to the average Ukrainian, but fundamental to reducing corruption, is the reform of government procurement systems. A joint program between ProZorro, a Ukrainian alliance of dozens of private and public sector bodies, and the Washington-based Open Contracting Partnership, is yielding results in the Ministry of Defense and other government institutions that are now saving up to 12 percent on contracts. Contracts are now awarded based on their objective merits, rather than on opaque personal connections. The results of the procurement pilot project are expected to inform a sweeping draft law "On Public Procurement," under consideration by Parliament.

For business, revamped customs procedures are designed to simplify a process long exploited as a revenue source for corrupt offices.

So far, the new customs regime is getting mixed reviews: some smaller importers are seeing more paperwork, not less. In Odessa, the gateway for 70 percent of Ukraine's marine imports, the man coordinating anti-corruption reforms, Zurab Adeishvili, is focused on reducing customs clearance times as key to both reducing corruption and boosting investment. "Our target is to clear goods within 15 minutes for the green corridor and about an hour for the red corridor," says Adeishvili, a former Minister of Justice in Georgia, who, like his current and former boss Saakashvili, faces charges in his native country stemming from his own time in office.

While such initiatives undoubtedly have their value, larger systemic issues that would really demonstrate progress remain to be tackled. For a sense of how the overall anti-corruption fight is faring, scrutiny must focus on the high-profile constellation of efforts in Kiev, home to the anti-corruption infrastructure of interlocking government institutions, reformist elected officials, watchdog NGOs, and investigative journalists.

An anti-corruption unit of the Office of the General Prosecutor that is still being formed is, many believe, the most vulnerable element of Ukraine's emerging anti-corruption machinery. With years' worth of files implicating the country's elites and the discretion to either pursue an investigation or let it languish, this office, in the eyes of watchdog organizations, has the power to upend the status quo - or not.

Another important player in the anti-corruption fight is Prime Minister Arsenii Yatsenyuk, who is elected by parliament and presides over the Cabinet of Ministers, a body that plays a key role in implementing anti-corruption reforms, especially the low-profile but essential work involved in reorienting 300,000 bureaucrats from venality to integrity. Like Poroshenko, Yatsenyuk has proven deft at translating the anti-corruption demands of international lenders into concrete laws and structures. Those anti-corruption reforms require the approval of Ukraine's parliament, the Verhovna Rada, a rambunctious body long known for its fistfights and for attracting legislators more interested in gaining immunity from prosecution than in serving their constituents. (The photo above shows a parliamentary brawl last December after one group of lawmakers accused others of accepting bribes.)

But a new Rada elected in October 2014 has a critical mass of reformers, many of them prominent veterans of the Maidan movement. One of the new Rada's first orders of business a year ago was to approve three pieces of anti-corruption legislation demanded by civic activists, the international community, and the president's office. Those laws, based upon international standards that have proven effective in countries ranging from Croatia to Indonesia, offer a strategy for shifting Ukraine out of its long-standing place as one of the world's most corrupt states. (It ranks 142 out of 175 countries in Transparency International's most recent Corruption Perceptions Index.)

In the year since then, progress in implementing these new laws has been steady but slow. The negative bottom line: pre-Maidan officials with a strong taint of corruption have avoided investigation; the number of high-level convictions has been precisely zero. As a result, citizens are increasingly indignant - despite the recent passage of the populist measures described above. That frustration with corruption is palpable.

Answers to three questions from a July 2015 poll of 1,200 Ukrainians by the International Republican Institute are especially telling. First, a majority of respondents believe that the fight against corruption is going less well under the current government than under the previous government of Viktor Yanukovych. Second, the poll found that Ukrainians believe corruption to be the biggest issue facing the country after the war in the East. Finally, approval ratings for Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk are low, at 24 percent and 11 percent respectively. Another poll, this one by the Kiev-based Razumkov Center in May 2015, captures the primal rage many feel towards venal politicians. Asked whether they would "support the implementation of the death penalty for officials who are guilty of corruption," respondents were evenly split.

If the stakes are so high for Ukraine's elected leaders, why the sluggish progress? Observers offer several explanations. The war in the East is one. "Conflict just adds to the opportunities for non-transparency. It makes corruption easier," says Oleh Havrylyshyn, a Canadian academic who worked as Ukraine' deputy finance minister in 1992 and later with the International Monetary Fund. Based partly on conclusions drawn from his experience of conflict-torn countries in Africa, Havrylyshyn observes that "if the leaders who talk about corruption are not actually that serious, the war effort provides a diversion from other social and political problems."

Robert Orttung, a professor at George Washington University and assistant director of its Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, agrees that Ukraine's entrenched political and economic elites are slowing down the fight against corruption. And yet, he adds, "the good thing is that you have a whole coalition of groups like Transparency International that are pressuring the government." Orttung, who spent several weeks on the ground in Ukraine earlier this year assessing the corruption environment, notes that "civil society is mobilized," which helps to maintain the momentum.

On the national level, that pressure is relentless and effective. In the month of August alone, anti-corruption activists stepped in twice to foil what they saw as attempts to thwart the implementation of the new laws.

First, Transparency International asked a court to intervene in what it said was the Cabinet of Ministers' non-transparent choice of dubious "puppet" civil society groups to oversee the operation of the National Corruption Prevention Agency. Before the court ruled, the Cabinet of Ministers reversed itself, promising a do-over.

Later in the month, the Kiev-based Anticorruption Action Center launched a public campaign to challenge General Prosecutor Viktor Shokin over appointments to key anti-corruption positions. One of the men in question was the supervisor of the so-called "diamond prosecutor," an official who has been accused of accepting bribes in the form of 104 uncut diamonds. Daria Koleniuk, the Action Center's Executive Director, saw Shokin's move as a potentially ominous effort to undermine the anti-corruption prosecutor's work before it even starts. With allies in the Rada and a following among anti-corruption experts worldwide, Koleniuk, known for her uncompromising voice, is one to be reckoned with. In the summer of 2014 in Prague, she attended a buttoned-down, international anti-corruption conference sponsored by the Brookings Institution sporting a t-shirt emblazoned with "Fuck Corruption."

Putting Ukraine's anti-corruption infrastructure into place is an extremely delicate affair, requiring actions that gain the public's confidence but avoid politicization. Ultimate success requires creating a culture of transparency and trust, two values that were antithetical to Ukraine's Soviet-era modus operandi. Although Estonia, Georgia, and Lithuania are held out as post-Soviet success stories, the comparisons with Ukraine are weak, especially given Ukraine's ten-times greater multi-ethnic population and the war in the East.

Institutionally, three elements need to work in harmony to win a corruption conviction: the investigators at the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NAB), the anti-corruption prosecutor lodged within the Office of the General Prosecutor, and a judiciary trained in hearing such cases. Of these three entities, the NAB is the point of the spear.

The NAB came into being this April. When it comes to showing Ukrainians that the government means business about fighting corruption, the NAB is the most important institution, charged with investigating high-level (deputy minister and above) and high-value (bribes over $20,000) corruption cases. It began with a six-person team headed by a previously unknown prosecutor and the usual Georgian in the number two spot. One staffer donated a coffee machine. By late summer, the coffee machine had been joined by a copier and two truckloads of used furniture given by the Canadian Embassy.

Working in a run-down government building in an unfashionable neighborhood of Kiev, the NAB staff has expanded to 30 people with plans to hire 70 investigators in early fall. According to Donald Bowser, a Canadian who serves as NAB's Capacity and Institutional Building Advisor, 2,752 people have applied for position as investigators. "We pay more than any other law enforcement agency in Ukraine," he explains. "It works out to about $600 a month."

Meanwhile, NAB head Artyom Sytnyk is growing into his role, judging by his 40-minute interview on a leading Kiev radio station in late August. In it, he deflects questions about those government anti-corruption efforts over which he has no control, explains that his wife covered her own expenses during a recent official trip to London, and describes in tantalizing terms two recent tips received by his bureau.

Elsewhere around the city, the NAB's prophylactic counterpart, the National Corruption Prevention Agency (NCPA), is off to a delayed and bumpy start as the aforementioned coalition of anti-corruption NGOs objects to the process by which NCPA leaders will be chosen. Over at the Office of the General Prosecutor, where a special unit is needed to actually prosecute the yet-to-be developed NAB cases, staffers are being trained but no leadership is in place. Under the Ukrainian legal system, prosecutors must take action before nascent cases unearthed by investigators can move forward.

The ongoing turmoil at the General Prosecutor's Office, as well as President Poroshenko's inability or unwillingness to take action, thus put NAB staff in a tricky position. "If there is a corrupt prosecutor's office, it's going to be difficult for us to do our job," says Bowser. "The prosecutor's office needs to be cleaned up. It is the key to every reform. The war between the reformers and the non-reformers within the prosecutor's office is ongoing. It is very public."

Watching all this is yet another corruption-monitoring body, the National Reforms Council (NRC), housed within the Presidential Administration, which monitors and rates progress being made in easy-to-follow charts. Throw in international development banks keeping a close eye on how their billions of dollars in government loans are being spent, foreign law enforcement bodies working to recover billions of dollars in state assets stripped by the previous regime, and a trickle of investors keen to clarify beneficial ownership, and you have a level of scrutiny of corruption issues that Ukraine has never before experienced. One of the more accessible tools is the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Ukraine Reform Monitor memo, put together by a team of Ukraine-based scholars.

With so many institutions and experts in play, it is possible to lose sight of the big picture. Bowser, who has completed a doctoral dissertation on post-Soviet corruption at Australia's University of Melbourne, offers some perspective. "This is the last stage of de-Sovietization.

The question is: How does Ukraine escape its past?" It's not fundamentally different, he notes, from the challenge faced by many anti-corruption agencies elsewhere. "The state needs to be allowed to do its job after a period when private interests had become more important than public interests. You had absolute state capture."

Ultimately, any long-term improvement of Ukraine's corruption environment will depend on changing the public's acceptance of what, today, is an accepted (if resented) part of life. Key to that process is altering the behavior of the hundreds of thousands of government workers who can deny, provide, or enhance services based on opaque incentives.

For Drago Kos, a Slovenian lawyer who chairs the OECD's Working Group on Bribery, training officials on the mechanics of ethical behavior is a specialty. It is something he has done in 12 post-communist European countries (as well as Afghanistan). In Ukraine, where Kos is training Presidential Administration staff, changing mindsets is the biggest challenge of all. (Disclosure: Kos is doing this work for a project run by my organization, CIPE, with funding from the United States Agency for International Development.) "The majority of people, including decision-makers, still think that fighting corruption and enhancing integrity is the exclusive task of specialized state anti-corruption institutions," says Kos. "Therefore, they even don't understand the need for integrity training of the whole civil service as a very useful and effective anti-corruption preventive measure."

Kos knows of what he speaks. In various capacities, he has been working in Ukraine on anti-corruption issues for 20 years. While this is certainly a time of tremendous opportunity, Kos cautions, "The single biggest challenge in changing the 'culture of corruption' in Ukrainian public institutions for the moment is the very visible and almost absolute impunity of all the biggest corruption perpetrators.

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 #42
Fort Russ
http://fortruss.blogspot.com
September 17, 2015
Ukraine Multiplied by Zero on the Eve of Maidan Squared
Andre Vadjra
http://andreyvadjra.livejournal.com/487215.html

Chief editor of the Ukrainian information-analytical website "Alternative". Born in 1971, Lives in Kiev. Worked as an analyst for Ukrainian government. Founder and former chief editor of "Ruskaya Pravda". Author of a book "The Path of Evil. West: the Matrix of Global Hegemony", and a series of analytical articles "Decay" and "UKRAINE: From Myth to Disaster".

Translated by Kristina Rus

Ukraine. All towards one goal. All for one. Amazing unanimity of direction and sequence of events. Nothing happens beyond the general trend. And especially, there is nothing that could contradict it.

Ukraine as a huge ship, which is wall to wall full of people. These people have their own life. Business. Plans. Dreams. But all this is in brackets. Outside the brackets is a ZERO. And the math function "multiply". All these human to do lists, plans, dreams and so on are already multiplied by zero.

No matter what happens on the ship, which has a giant hole, and it is rapidly disappearing under the water...

Jaresko has finally admitted that Ukraine is in a state of technical default. Hand grenades are exploding across the country. The masses, transfixed, are waiting for the utility bills. In Donbass the ATO heroes crush civilians with armored vehicles, shoot each other with machine guns and ambush volunteers in the fight for control of the contraband traffic. The polio epidemic is growing. Unemployment and prices are growing at a record pace. There are not enough reserves of coal and gas. The country is chocking in the smoke of fires...

And over it all hangs the heavy layer of sticky, dirty hate. It's not easy to understand who hates who and for what. There is an impression that now everyone hates everyone. Yesterday I talked with a friend from Kiev. The sweetest and kindest man. Used to be. Because he is ready to kill. The government. And indiscriminately. It is revealing that he is not alone in his desire. He supported the first Maidan. Was horrified by the second. Now ready to go to the third to... Says, he is unable to flee the country. Personal circumstances. So he is preparing to face the oncoming $%^& in Kiev. His words convey a grim determination to die, but taking with him one of the objects of his hate. And what will happen next - F%ck it! This mental state is very similar to the "heroic pessimism" of Nietzsche.

Faster then the polio epidemic in Ukraine grows the epidemic of fierce hatred towards the authorities. The people have mentally ripened for the excesses. Just need a good reason for the explosion. The pleas of the zombie-box [TV] are no longer effective on the bulk of the population. At least on the part of Poroshenko, Yatsenyuk and Co's innocence. Not only the ratings of individual politicians are at zero, but of all state institutions of Ukraine.

The air smells of the sacramental: "I will stab all the nobles"...

The feeling is reminiscent of the eve of Maidan. But now the critical mass of the chain reaction is several times greater. On its background Maidan is a firecracker.

And ahead is the fall, winter and a lot of very interesting events...

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 #43
Christian Science Monitor
September 17, 2015
Ukraine president blacklists journalists as 'threat to national interests'
The list of around 400 individuals and entities includes about 40 journalists, though six Western media employees, including three from the BBC, were later removed from it.
By Fred Weir, Correspondent

MOSCOW - Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko has banned about 40 journalists and bloggers from 15 countries as potential "threats to national interests," although he later agreed to remove six Western journalists, including three Moscow-based employees of the BBC, from the list.

The journalists are included in an extensive blacklist issued by Mr. Poroshenko's office, which prohibits 400 individuals and 90 "entities" from setting foot in Ukraine for a year. The President's decree suggests the crackdown is in response to upcoming elections in the rebel-held territories of Donetsk and Luhansk, which Kiev views as "illegal" and a threat to the Minsk-II peace process.

Ukraine is set to hold nationwide regional elections on Oct. 25, but the rebels have announced they will hold their own two-stage polls beginning a week earlier. The Minsk-II agreement stipulates that any elections must be held "under Ukrainian law," which the rebel plan takes no account of. Nevertheless, there is likely to be considerable pressure on Poroshenko to accept the results of the polls, and move on to direct negotiations with the rebel representatives, a Minsk-II condition Kiev has so far ignored.

It is not clear what logic lies behind the banning of the individuals, who include people from Germany, Israel, Spain, Italy, Russia, Bulgaria, Serbia, the US, and Switzerland. Some Ukrainian experts say the common denominator in all cases may have been entering Crimea or rebel-held territory via an unsanctioned border-crossing. But others suggest it's a preemptive strike in the "information war" aimed at preventing election observers or journalists from covering the rebel voting next month.

"Ukraine feels that it has been the loser in the information war, and so now it's changing information tactics," says Vladimir Panchenko, an analyst with the International Center for Political Studies in Kiev. "The logic is clear: Ukraine wants journalists to be journalists, not propagandists."

Andreas Umland, a Swedish economist who has long worked with the Ukrainian government, took to his Facebook page Thursday to compare Poroshenko's decree to other Ukrainian laws that mandate sweeping "decommunization" and to designate controversial World War II partisans as "heroes of Ukraine."

"With an officially pro-Western government and parliamentary coalition in power, these anti-Western policies do not make sense," Mr. Umland writes. "It is frustrating to note how low the Ukrainian government's expertise on the basics of international affairs and cultural diplomacy is."

Kiev has also cracked down on domestic journalists who give the appearance of rebel sympathies, or who criticize the draft. Two such journalists currently face charges of treason, which could bring up to 15 years in prison.

After the BBC complained Thursday, Poroshenko's office announced that the broadcaster's three-person team, including its Moscow-based correspondent and producer, would be removed from the list of those who are banned.

"All Kiev's efforts are focused on maintaining and extending sanctions, mainly against Russia. It seems like we have no other instruments in this hybrid war," says Vadim Karasyov, director of the independent Institute of Global Strategies in Kiev.

"There may be some excesses in this campaign. Perhaps people got onto the list by saying or doing the wrong thing. And it can't be denied, in this case, that sanctions against journalists look like censorship."

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 #44
Bloomberg
September 17, 2015
Ukraine Bond Deal at Risk Again as Rebel Investors Demand Change
By Natasha Doff and Marton Eder

A group of investors in Ukraine's shortest-dated bonds stepped up pressure on Franklin Templeton to adjust the terms of an $18 billion restructuring agreement they argue is biased against them, saying they have the power to block the deal.

Holders of the $500 million Eurobond due on Sept. 23 have a so-called blocking stake in the security, Shearman & Sterling LLP, the law firm representing them, said in an e-mailed statement on Thursday. That means they own the 25 percent needed to potentially thwart a vote on the agreement finalized last month with a committee of some of Ukraine's biggest bondholders.

Holdouts may threaten a ratification process that's behind schedule due to delayed sign-off on the deal by the eastern European nation's parliament. The war-ravaged country needs to restructure its external debt to qualify for a $17.5 billion International Monetary Fund loan, which is already at risk because of Russia's insistence on being repaid in full for a bond due in December.

"The question is how hard they are willing to negotiate, and are they willing to bring the entire deal down for the sake of a fairer deal," Tim Ash, the head of Europe, Middle East and Africa emerging-markets credit strategy at Nomura Holdings Inc. in London, said Thursday in e-mailed comments. "There is still a lot of work to be undertaken to put this particular deal to bed."

Holdout Risk

The accord includes a 20 percent writedown to the face value of the bonds, higher average interest payments and warrants tied to economic growth. Ukraine would issue nine new bonds of equal size maturing annually from 2019 to 2027, giving all holders a share of each security. The bond due next week climbed 0.68 cent to 78.23 cents on the dollar on Friday, near the highest level this year.

The dissenting investors argue the distribution isn't fair to the owners of notes due this month and Oct. 13 since their investments are delayed for more years than everyone else. A spokesman for the main four-member creditor committee, led by Franklin Templeton, declined to comment when contacted by Bloomberg on Thursday.

This latest threat comes after Ukraine's parliament passed the accord on Thursday, dispelling concern that a revolt by lawmakers would scupper the deal and jeopardize the flow of bailout funds. Russia's Finance Ministry stepped up pressure on Ukraine shortly after the vote passed, issuing a statement on its website saying it was in Kiev's interest to settle the $3 billion bond it owes "immediately, since defaulting on these obligations would cost it much more" in legal costs and late-payment penalties.

Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko said Sept. 11 that the group of potential holdouts were in discussions with the main creditor committee. She said she didn't expect they would "have any influence" on the deal's implementation.

Changing Allocations

"To the contrary, the Franklin group has not responded to our clients' request to engage," Shearman & Sterling said in the statement, without naming the members it's representing. "Our clients believe that the only thing standing in the way of this sensible resolution is the refusal of the Franklin group to engage with them."

While the dissenters aren't opposed to overall terms, they want allocation of the new notes to give them bigger portions of the earlier securities to even out the average maturity extension to approximately four years, Shearman & Sterling said last week.

Ukraine aims to start the voting process on Monday, six days later than targeted. Bondholders must be given at least 21 days notice before a vote can be called, and 75 percent of the investors need to vote in favor at a meeting in which two thirds of the creditors are represented. The Franklin Templeton group also has a blocking stake in the Sept. 23 note, a source with knowledge of the holdings said in July.

The heads of terms agreement, a legal document accompanying the restructuring deal, does specify that Ukraine and the creditor group can adjust allocations to shorter-dated notes in order to push through approvals.

The strategy of the dissenting group is "designed to increase pressure on the ad-hoc committee to come to the table," Michael Roche, an emerging-market strategist at Seaport Global Holdings LLC in New York, said by phone. "It's not over yet. There are some deadlines that are coming up that should help get a conclusion: either the acquiescence by the dissenting group to the status quo or a negotiated solution between the two."

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 #45
Experts: Crimean Tatar activists' threats to blockade Crimea nothing but PR campaign
By Lyudmila Alexandrova

MOSCOW, September 17. /TASS/. Recent threats to "blockade" Crimea, uttered by Ukrainian legislators Refat Chubarov and Mustafa Dzhemilev, who position themselves as heads of the Mejlis (assembly) of the Crimean Tatar people in Ukraine, are nothing but a PR campaign that first thing harms Ukraine, and not Crimea, Russian experts say, adding both men are desperate to persuade Kiev they still enjoy authority at a time when their popularity with the Crimean Tatars has been dwindling.

Chubarov and Dzhemilev have declared that their followers will soon appear on all roads leading to Crimea to stop trucks carrying foods to Ukrainian supermarket chains in the peninsula, adding that the picketing campaign would be a long-term one.

Ukraine's extremist group Right Sector has said it would provide support for the campaign. Earlier, Dzhemilev said he had discussed the Crimean Tatars' idea of blocking the administrative border between Ukraine and Crimea with Ukraine's president and prime minister to have allegedly obtained approval for staging the action. Interior Minister Arsen Avakov has promised the protesters will enjoy police protection. At the same time the activists have not yet received official permission to block the roads.

Both Dzhemilev and Chubarov made a very aggressive response to Crimea's re-unification with Russia. The Mejlis of the Crimean Tatars has never enjoyed official registration in Ukraine, because its Charter contained clauses contradicting the Ukrainian Constitution. The inter-regional conference of the non-governmental movement Crimea, which brought together more than 200 delegates from 20 non-governmental organizations of Crimean Tatars, declared that Dzhemilev's and Chubarov's activities were destructive and unacceptable.

The Crimean authorities have slammed the plans for a road blockade as a destructive step and promised they were prepared to provide alternatives for the import of Ukrainian products. They are certain the blockade, should it ever be established, will have no considerable effect.

"The plan on the Ukrainian side looks not like a real plan but as an information warfare tool," the portal Svobodnaya Pressa (Free Press) quotes Professor Andrey Manoilo, of the Moscow State University's political sciences department as saying. "When Crimea reunited with Russia, Dzhemilev found himself on the sidelines, largely due to the stance he had preferred to take. These days he is being abandoned even by former supporters, who remained on his side at the early phases. But the regime in Kiev does need provocateurs like this. This explains why he has been trying to emphasize his importance and role and voicing underground sabotage and blockade threats.

He is certain that the blockade will hit the Ukrainian producers first thing. "The Ukrainians bring their produce to Crimea and market it there at rather high prices to garner hefty profits from this business," he said.

The dean of the sociology and political sciences department at the University of Finance, Aleksandr Shatilov, does not believe a prolonged blockade of Crimea is possible. "Everything that Dzhemilev has been saying should be taken with a large pinch of salt. At the moment he is barred from his electorate.

His status is uncertain, so he is desperate to address the public with repeated reminders to ensure he is not forgotten altogether. In the meantime, the Crimean Tatars are witnessing the rise of new leaders, while Chubarov and Dzhemilev are both discarded figures."

"Ukrainian legislators Dzhemilev and Chubarov throughout the years Crimea remained inside independent Ukraine were parasitizing on the interests of their people. They literally made gains on people's misfortunes. That they have now been pushed to the sidelines is their own choice," the director of the CIS Studies Institute, Konstantin Zatulin, told TASS. "They are determined to invigorate interest towards their personalities and, of course, they have met with support from Ukraine's current authorities. They are now trying to play the Crimean Tatar card."

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 #46
Dances With Bears
http://johnhelmer.net
MH17 - THE LIE TO END ALL TRUTHS, AND THE NEW EVIDENCE
By John Helmer. Moscow
[Links, footnotes and photos here: http://johnhelmer.net/?p=14153]
[Earlier parts of the MH17 series here http://johnhelmer.net/?p=14084 and here http://johnhelmer.net/?p=14117]

Presidents Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama have on file three pieces of evidence showing both of them knew what had caused the crash of Malaysian Airlines MH17, and of the deaths of all 298 souls on board. They knew it little more than two hours after the crash had occurred in eastern Ukraine. They also knew each other knew it, because they discussed what had happened in a telephone call which took place before 19:45 Moscow time, 11:45 Washington time, on Thursday, July 17. MH17 was downed that day at 16:20 Ukraine time, 17:20 Moscow time, 09:20 Washington time.

The first piece of evidence is the agenda paper for the telephone call. This had been negotiated and formalized by the Russian Foreign Ministry, the Russian Embassy in Washington, the State Department and the White House before July 17. The second piece of evidence is the tape of the Putin-Obama conversation, as recorded by the Kremlin. The third piece of evidence is the tape of the Obama-Putin conversation, as recorded by the White House.

This evidence establishes that Putin believed, and Obama believed Putin would announce, not that a ground-to-air missile had brought MH17 down, but that other weapons had done so. The story that a Russian-made Buk missile had caused the disaster began after Obama had spoken to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko at about 19:00 Kiev time, 20:00 Moscow time, 12 noon Washington time.

Take away that story, because Obama knew it to be false when he had spoken earlier to Putin, and what do you have? A war crime by two governments. How to prove innocence and guilt? The tapes at the Kremlin and the White House.

According to the Kremlin statement [1] dated July 17, 2014 at 20.30 hours: "In line with a previous agreement, Vladimir Putin had a telephone conversation with President of the United States Barack Obama. The parties had a detailed discussion of the crisis in Ukraine... The Russia leader informed the US President of the report received from air traffic controllers immediately prior to their conversation about the crash of a Malaysian airplane over the Ukrainian territory."

Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, was asked yesterday to clarify what the time stamp on the release meant. He was also asked to explain the phrase in the opening line, "a previous agreement." He has responded, identifying 2030 as the time when the release was posted; the telephone call of the presidents had already taken place. The agreement for the call, Peskov confirmed, including the agenda and the issues for discussion, had been negotiated through diplomatic channels of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and formalized in writing before July 17.

Until now, the precise timing and sequence of telephone calls which Obama made on the morning and afternoon of the fateful day have not been understood as evidence for the cause of the MH17 disaster. Precise timing is possible because of this record of Obama's flight from Washington to Delaware, his time of landing at Delaware, and his time of takeoff from Delaware [2] to New York. The White House press secretary Josh Earnest also made a public record at the time that Obama and Putin had completed their call at the White House [3], before 1230 local time.

Two additional pieces of evidence on what Putin and Obama said have taken a year to surface. One comes from the Dutch police officer and state prosecutor leading the MH17 case investigation, Fred Westerbeke.

A year ago, on September 12, 2014, Westerbeke announced publicly that 25 pieces of metal had been recovered. This count hasn't improved In the 14-month long investigation of the crash, of the aircraft debris, and of the remains of those killed. For Westerbeke's statements to Dutch, British and German press, read this [4].

Westerbeke's testimony is, he admits himself, ambiguous. He acknowledges that he doesn't (didn't) know, or isn't (wasn't) certain, what the origin of the metal had been.

The second piece of evidence, which reveals what Westerbeke meant by his disclosure, came weeks later from the Coroners Court of Victoria, an active participant in the multinational post-mortem investigation of the MH17 victims.

Three Australians - pathology professor David Ranson; deputy Victorian state coroner Iain West, and Victorian state coroner Ian Gray - released the evidence they had gathered and verified with the Dutch and the five-state Joint Investigation Team [5] at the Hilversum military base, near Amsterdam. This evidence became public in November and December of last year. It was classified secret last week. For the detailed documentation which has been preserved of this evidence, click to read here [4]. A Coroners Court spokesman refuses to say when the evidence was officially classified, or on whose order.

According to the Australian coronial evidence, there was almost no metal in the bodies or body parts of the MH17 victims. According to Westerbeke, just 25 particles had been found. Before the Australian coroners had seen the metal assay evidence, they ruled [6] that "causes of death from explosive decompression - similar to the pressure wave from a bomb - included hypothermia, hypoxia, massive internal organ injury, embolism and heart attack. Exposure to very low temperatures, airflow buffeting and low oxygen at 30,000 feet would also result in death in seconds." Detonation, lethal explosion, and breakup of aircraft had occurred, the Australians have reported - but with insufficient traces of shrapnel to confirm that a Buk missile warhead had been cause.

Coroner Gray is responsible for the blackout of evidence he and his subordinates had painstakingly made public last year, for the benefit and comfort, they said at the time, of the families of the victims. Ranson, the most talkative of the Australian official investigators, has been obliged this week, not only to keep silent on what he has already published, but to contradict what he has already said. The Australian Federal Police (AFP), Westerbeke's counterparts in the joint international investigation process, are withholding all evidence papers compiled by the pathologists, and the evidence summary file they continue to discuss with the investigators.

The AFP was headed by Tony Negus (above, left) at the time of the MH17 crash. He was replaced by his deputy, Andrew Colvin (right), on October 1, 2014. The evidence release is irreversible, however. The Dutch and Australian records make the Buk story impossible as cause of death.

The Kremlin statement, following the presidents' conversation of July 17, 2014, ends with this disclosure. "The Russia leader informed the US President of the report received from air traffic controllers immediately prior to their conversation about the crash of a Malaysian airplane over the Ukrainian territory." The Kremlin summary expressly identifies "air traffic controllers" (ATC). It doesn't say whether they were civilian or military. Since both were at work monitoring Ukrainian airspace, using different equipment in parallel, the identification is a pointer whose significance hasn't been appreciated before; that is, until in retrospect the Dutch and Australian evidence is understood as ruling out a Buk ground-to-air missile attack on MH17.

Putin made his sources of evidence explicit to Obama. Why was the ATC reference made public? Answer: because Putin told Obama the lethal explosion which killed MH17 and everything in it originated from the air, not from the ground.

In retrospect today, the Dutch and Australian evidence corroborates what Obama heard from Putin that the ATC evidence (radio and radar) was showing an air-to-air attack against MH17. Obama, and his advisors listening in to the call or to the tape afterwards, had their own reasons to believe what the Kremlin announced curtly but publicly not long after. The Russian explanation for cause of crash and for cause of death was an aerial cause, not a terrestrial one. Obama and the US Government were bound to anticipate that after the telephone conversation more details of the Russian evidence would follow.

That was high noon for the White House. While Obama was on the presidential jet flying between Andrews airbase and New Castle airport, Delaware - a half-hour interval between 11:45 local time and 12:17 local time - he telephoned Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Najib Razak. This is the White House version, released [7] more than six hours after the event.

What the US, Ukrainian and Malaysian communication records show is that in his calls to Poroshenko and Najib, there was a discussion of how to respond to Putin's claim of cause, liability, responsibility. Their media releases of what was said report "the United States has offered immediate assistance to support a prompt international investigation."

The US media records [8] also indicate that between 15:30 and 16:00 local time (23:30 and midnight in Moscow) Obama followed from a ground location in New York with conference calls, first with Secretary of State John Kerry, and then with "with senior members of his national security team".

Kerry's spokesman at the State Department briefed the press, starting at 13:27, while Obama was still in Delaware and before Obama spoke with Kerry from New York. "At this point," according to Jen Psaki, "we do not have any confirmed information about casualties, the cause, or additional details." Her briefing, lasting 58 minutes, can be followed here [9]. The transcript [10] records she concluded at 14:25.

A press question early in the State Department session reveals the Buk story as the official position of the Foreign Ministry in Kiev:

"QUESTION: ...the Ukrainians' foreign ministry is saying that they have reason to believe this - not just a guess, but based on their assessment - that this was a Russian-made Buk missile that is in the hands of the Russian separatists. You also have kind of chatter on Twitter about some of the separatists saying that they did shoot down a plane. Has your team on the ground spoken to the Ukrainians? Have they told you that this is your assessment - that this is their assessment and you just want to get your own confirmation? I mean, where are you at this point?

MS. PSAKI: As I mentioned, we're in touch with Ukrainian authorities on this incident.

QUESTION: So they've obviously shared this assessment with you?

MS. PSAKI: I'm not - I don't have further readouts, but I think it's a safe assumption that we're discussing reports and, obviously, a range of comments that have been out there. We don't have our own confirmation of details. I can't predict for you if and when we will."

The first record of the Ukrainian Government's claims for cause of death can be read here [11].

In Kuala Lumpur Najib's public response [12] to the Obama telephone call indicated no acceptance by the Malaysian government of an American or a Ukrainian analysis of cause of death.

"We will find out what happened to the plane. If it was indeed shot down, we will press for the culprit to be brought to book. The Ukraine government believes the plane was shot down. However, at this stage, Malaysia has yet to identify the cause of the tragedy. If it transpires that the plane was indeed shot down, we insist that the perpetrators must swiftly be brought to justice. Emergency operations centres have been established. In the last few hours, Malaysian officials have been in constant contact with their counterparts in Ukraine and elsewhere. Obama and I agreed that the investigation will not be hidden and the international teams have to be given access to the crash scene."

Najib was intent on not becoming a hostage himself to the Ukrainian conflict, and draw voter blame for the loss of the Malaysian lives and aircraft, as he and his ministers had suffered four months earlier, in March, after the loss of Malaysian Airlines MH370 in the Indian Ocean. For more on the domestic politics influencing Najib at the time, read this [13].

The deaths of the 43 Malaysians on board MH17 were also personal for the prime minister. His step-grandmother [14] Puan Sri Siti Amirah, 83, was killed in seat 21A.

CT scans, X-rays, autopsy sections, and spectroscopic testing of metals, which have now been conducted in The Netherlands and verified in Australia, make the Buk story impossible. This evidence cannot go further to identify the sources of the fatal damage to aircraft and passengers. To do that requires a return to the evidence of the Putin-Obama tapes, and the reinterpretation of what was said then in light of what is known now.

Initially, Obama's public statements after he had spoken to Putin did not suggest a cause for the downing of MH17. That came from other officials, led by Vice President Joe Biden.

During the conference calls which took place from New York in the afternoon of July 17, did they decide that if the evidence Putin gave Obama that morning were to be published and then believed, the responsibility for what had happened would be clear around the world - the Ukrainian Government had committed a war crime. That afternoon in New York, did the US Government decide it should defend and save the Ukrainian Government? Did Obama, Biden, Kerry, and the others decide that if holding their nose was what they had to do in the circumstances, pre-empting Putin's evidence with evidence of their own was required. And quickly.

The official responsible for presenting the Buk story as the official US Government "assessment" was the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power. Here [15] she is doing it, at the emergency session of the UN Security Council called the next day, July 18:

The Buk story has now failed because of the Dutch and Australian evidence. All that is required to corroborate this is the tape recording of what Putin and Obama said to each other. It doesn't matter whether the tape comes from the Kremlin, or from the White House. So long as they are the same.

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 #47
Fort Russ
http://fortruss.blogspot.ru
September 14, 2015
CIA in 1948: Ukraine is inseparable from Russia and incapable of independence
Kristina Rus

Source: NSC 20/1: "US objectives with respect to Russia"

US National Security Council, August 18, 1948

Records of the National Security Council at the Modern Military Records Branch, National Archives, Washington. D.C.

Original

Below is section 4 of the NSC 20/1, written in 1948. This section of US strategy towards Russia deals with the Ukrainian issue. We have posted this earlier as part of the entire text of NSC 20/1 [http://fortruss.blogspot.com/2015/09/nsc-201-us-objectives-with-respect-to.html] which is rather lengthy to read, and we feel it needs to be highlighted on it's own. In fact, the United States intelligence shows remarkable knowledge of the intricacies in the Russian-Ukrainian relations (which is what you would not derive from the US State Department briefings), arriving at the conclusion that Russia and Ukraine are inseparable, that the attempt to separate them may result in violence, but nevertheless that such attempt will be desirable for the US. For more background on the strategy to break up Russia please refer to the rest of the NSC 20/1 report.

Wiki: The National Security Council was created in 1947 by the National Security Act. It was created because policymakers felt that the diplomacy of the State Department was no longer adequate to contain the USSR in light of the tension between the Soviet Union and the United States.[1] The intent was to ensure coordination and concurrence among the Navy, Marine Corps, Army, Air Force and other instruments of national security policy such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), also created in the National Security Act.

4. PARTITION VS. NATIONAL UNITY (1948)

First of all, would it be our desire, in such a case, that the present territories of the Soviet Union remain united under a single regime or that they be partitioned? And if they are to remain united, at least to a large extent, then what degree of federalism should be observed in a future Russian government? What about the major minority groups, in particular the Ukraine?

We have already taken note of the problem of the Baltic states. The Baltic states should not be compelled to remain under any communist authority in the aftermath of another war. Should the territory adjacent to the Baltic states be controlled by a Russian authority other than a communist authority, we should be guided by the wishes of the Baltic peoples and by the degree of moderation which that Russian authority is inclined to exhibit with respect to them.

In the case of the Ukraine, we have a different problem. The Ukrainians are the most advanced of the peoples who have been under Russian rule in modern times. They have generally resented Russian domination; and their nationalistic organizations have been active and vocal abroad. It would be easy to jump to the conclusion that they should be freed, at last, from Russian rule and permitted to set themselves up as an independent slate.

We would do well to beware of this conclusion. US very simplicity condemns it in terms of eastern European realities.

It is true that the Ukrainians have been unhappy under Russian rule and that something should be done to protect their position in future. But there are certain basic fads which must not be lost sight of.

While the Ukrainians have been an important and specific element in the Russian empire,

-they have shown no signs of being a "nation" capable of bearing successfully the responsibilities of independence in the face of great Russian opposition.

-The Ukraine is not a clearly defined ethnical or geographic concept.

-In general, the Ukrainian population made up of originally in large measure out of refugees from Russian or Polish despotism shades off imperceptibly into the Russian or Polish nationalities.

-There is no clear dividing line between Russia and the Ukraine, and it would be impossible to establish one.

-The cities in Ukrainian territory have been predominantly Russian and Jewish.

-The real basis of "Ukrainianism" is the feeling of "difference" produced by a specific peasant dialect and by minor differences of custom and folklore throughout the country districts.

-The political agitation on the surface is largely the work of a few romantic intellectuals, who have little concept of the responsibilities of government.
 
-The economy of the Ukraine is inextricably intertwined with that of Russia as a whole.

-There has never been any economic separation since the territory was conquered from the nomadic Tatars and developed for purposes of a sedentary population.

-To attempt to carve it out of the Russian economy and to set it up as something separate would be as artificial and as destructive as an attempt to separate the Corn Belt, including the Great Lakes industrial area, from the economy of the United States.

Furthermore, the people who speak the Ukrainian dialect have been split, like those who speak the White Russian dialect, by a division which in eastern Europe has always been the real mark of nationality: namely, religion- if any real border can be drawn in the Ukraine, it should logically be the border between the areas which traditionally give religious allegiance to the Eastern Church and those which give it to the Church of Rome.

Finally, we cannot be indifferent to the feelings of the Great Russians themselves. They were the strongest national element in the Russian Empire, as they now are in the Soviet Union. They will continue to be the strongest national element in that general area, under any status. Any long-term U.S. policy must be based on their acceptance and their cooperation. The Ukrainian territory is as much a part of their national heritage as the Middle West is of ours, and they are conscious of that fact. A solution which attempts to separate the Ukraine entirely from the rest of Russia is bound TO incur their resentment and opposition, and can be maintained, in the last analysis, only by force.

There is a reasonable chance that the Great Russians could be induced to tolerate the renewed independence of the Baltic states. They tolerated the freedom of those territories from Russian rule for long periods in the past; and they recognize, subconsciously if not otherwise, that the respective peoples are capable of independence. With respect to the Ukrainians, things are different. They are too close to the Russians to be able to set themselves up successfully as something wholly different. For better or for worse, they will have to work out their destiny in some sort of special relationship to the Great Russian people.

It seems clear that this relationship can be at best a federal one, under which the Ukraine would enjoy a considerable measure of political and cultural autonomy but would not be economically or militarily independent. Such a relationship would be entirely just to the requirements of the Great Russians themselves, it would seem, therefore, to be along these lines that U.S. objectives with respect to the Ukraine should be framed.

It should be noted that this question has far more than just a distant future significance. Ukrainian and Great Russian elements among the Russian emigre-opposition groups are already competing vigorously for U.S. support. The manner in which we receive their competing claims may have an important influence on the development and success of the movement for political freedom among the Russians. It is essential, therefore, that we make our decision now and adhere to it consistently. And that decision should be neither a pro-Russian one nor a pro-Ukrainian one, but one which recognizes the historical geographic and economic realities involved and seeks for the Ukrainians a decent and acceptable place in the family of the traditional Russian Empire, of which they form an inextricable part.

It should be added that while, as stated above, we would not deliberately encourage Ukrainian separatism, nevertheless if an independent regime were to come into being on the territory of the Ukraine through no doing of ours, we should not oppose it outright. To do so would be to undertake an undesirable responsibility for internal Russian developments. Such a regime would be bound to be challenged eventually from the Russian side.

If it were to maintain itself successfully, that would be proof that the above analysis was wrong and that the Ukraine does have the capacity for, and the moral right to, independent status.

Our policy in the first instance should be to maintain an outward neutrality, as long as our own interests-military or otherwise-were not immediately affected. And only if it became clear that an undesirable deadlock was developing, we would encourage a composing of the differences along the lines of a reasonable federalism. The same would apply to any other efforts at the achievement of an independent status on the part of other Russian minorities.

It is not likely that any of the other minorities could successfully maintain real independence for any length of time.

However, should they attempt it (and it is quite possible that the Caucasian minorities would do this), our attitude should be the same as in the case of the Ukraine. We should be careful not to place ourselves in a position of open opposition to such attempts, which would cause us to lose permanently the sympathy of the minority in question. On the other hand, we should not commit ourselves to their support to a line of action which in the long run could probably be maintained only with our military assistance.

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