#2
Kremlin.ru
October 1, 2015
Meeting of Council for Civil Society and Human Rights. (further excerpts)

Vladimir Putin held a meeting of the Council for Civil Society and Human Rights.

(Regarding Syria) I dwelt in sufficient detail yesterday on what motivated our actions - other countries have been carrying out airstrikes on Syrian territory without a UN Security Council resolution or a corresponding request from the official Syrian authorities for over a year now. We have such a request and we intend to target terrorist organisations specifically.

As for media reports that civilians suffer, we are prepared for such information attacks. I would like to draw you attention to the fact that the first reports about civilian casualties appeared before our craft were airborne. This does not mean, however, that we should not pay heed to such information. This is exactly why we are establishing contacts between our special services and those of the US and between the Defence Ministry and the Pentagon. This work is underway. I hope it will result in the creation of some permanent mechanism. Meanwhile, we have set up another mechanism - and international one - in Baghdad, which involves several regional countries, and there is a constant information exchange underway there.
<...>
(Regarding human rights organisations, non-commercial organisations, and the law on foreign agents) An overwhelming majority of states, almost all in fact, have a rule that forbids funding internal political activities from foreign financial sources. What I do agree with is that the term 'political activity' should not be vague, or stretch like rubber, but it should have a uniform definition. If the term is not precisely defined, representatives of the authorities, the Justice Ministry or anyone else, should not try to make it cover anything they like. I agree that we need to consider this. Mr Volodin [First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office] here is saying that corresponding proposals will be made within the next three months.

Regarding the proposal that we should turn to our philanthropists, to financial organisations and to private businesses for support. Ms Alekseyeva [Chairwoman of the Moscow Helsinki Group] said that in the past, when they were only starting out, there were no other sources of funding but foreign ones, this is true and this is understandable. However, we cannot say that we do not have such sources today. This year we have allocated 5 billion rubles for these purposes. Of course, there is never enough money, and 10 or 25 would have been better, but we are doing what we can. Previously, as you may know, we did not allocate any money at all.

Now about the philanthropists and businesses. I fully support this call and believe that all of us together, and I personally should appeal to them right now publicly. I hope the media will spread this information. I am addressing all our citizens, all businesses and associations to assist non-commercial organisations, including human rights organisations in every way possible. This would definitely benefit the development of civil society.
<...>
(Responding to a statement by Yevgeny Yasin, Academic Supervisor of the National Research University Higher School of Economics). As for raising the role of the state in conditions of a crisis, we all know that even in the most developed markets, with market infrastructure and market economy, the role of the state during a crisis increases. It always happens. We observed it in 2008-2009. There were actually direct appeals for this from the parliaments. And not only appeals - the governments reacted to them.

Incidentally, we did not go for this during the 2008-2009 crisis. I believe you know this, but I will say it again. CEOs and owners of our major businesses would come to ask me to take their businesses for a ruble. Why? The responsibility was great. We did not do it; we offered them help and support, including buying out their debts to foreign creditors. We got everything back with a profit and retained private businesses and a market economy. We do not intend to nationalise anything now either and do not intend to create state capitalism. Moreover, we are even ready to make certain steps towards further privatisation of our major companies. This always raises the issue of not selling cheap. It is not even all about the money received, but about creating a certain economic structure

The most important thing we are trying to do now is to de-bureaucratise the economy and expand the free economic space, reduce all sorts of administrative pressure on the part of the state: legal, judicial pressure, any kind - to protect the entrepreneurs' rights. As you may know, we have set up a number of structures that are working efficiently, such as the Agency for Strategic Initiatives, and we work directly with business communities and work out all these decisions together. We may not be successful in everything, but in certain things we are, putting it mildly, successful and we are making certain progress.

As for Mr Guriyev, I do not know why he fled; nobody made any claims against him. I think he did not run anywhere; this is just because his wife works abroad, so he found a job abroad and left - they pay him better there, that is all. Besides, these things always look better when they come with some political stand; I think that is the reason. If he decides to return and work here, he is only welcome. He is a smart man and a very good expert - this is true, this is why he probably found a good job, it is also obvious.
<...>
(On compliance with the Minsk agreements) There are things that cannot be interpreted from the left or from the right. There are things that have a single definition. Suppose, one of the items of this agreement says: 30 days after the execution of this document a law on special status should take effect. The law is there, 30 days have long passed. The law is there, but it has not been enacted. All it takes is to sign the law on amnesty, it is there, it only needs to be signed by the president. There is no signature. The same goes for many other issues.

The key issue is a political settlement. What does that mean? The main component of the political settlement is amending the Constitution. This is a search for compromise, but what does it say? Upon agreement with Donbass. There is no agreement. The most pressing matter now is elections. What do the Minsk agreements say? Under Ukrainian law, but with agreement with Donbass. Donbass sent their proposals three times, there is no dialogue. The Rada passed the law, but the law says not to hold elections on the territories of the Lugansk and Donetsk people's republics. So what should they do? Now they say they will hold the elections on their own.

A solution to this crisis, unfortunately, is still far away, but there are things that let us hope that the crisis may be overcome and, most importantly, there is no shooting today. We will hope that the dialogue between these unrecognised republics and the Kiev authorities will be positive and the main condition for any compromise will be met, the main condition being direct dialogue. We will insist on this and count on the goodwill of both sides.
<...>
I would like to thank you all for the work you have done over the year. As I have said, Mr Fedotov and I have discussed all the areas you operate in. And you are doing it not because we meet here in the Kremlin every once in a while, but because this is what your conscience, your heart tells you to do. I would like to express my gratitude and wish you success.

Thank you very much.

[return to Contents] 

 #3
Kremlin.ru
September 30, 2015
Meeting with Government members

Vladimir Putin met with Government members to discuss measures to overcome economic recession in 2016. The situation in Syria and the fight against international terrorism were discussed separately.

Excerpts from transcript of meeting with Government members

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Good afternoon, colleagues,

We will start with an issue that will likely be the subject of much discussion today, namely, my request to the Federation Council on using Russia's Armed Forces beyond our country's borders. The Federation Council has examined this request and approved it.

Syria is the issue here. The only real way to fight international terrorism (and international terrorist groups are creating chaos in Syria and the territory of neighbouring countries right now) is to take the initiative and fight and destroy the terrorists in the territory they have already captured rather than waiting for them to arrive on our soil.

We all know that thousands of people from European countries, Russia, and the post-Soviet region have joined the ranks of the so-called Islamic State, a terrorist organisation that - I want to stress again - has nothing to do with genuine Islam. There is no need to be an expert to realise that if they succeed in Syria, they will inevitably return to their own countries, and this includes Russia.

We all know too that the Islamic State long since declared our country its enemy. Today, a number of countries, including the United States, Australia and France, are using their air forces to carry out air strikes against the Islamic State's positions in Syria.

We have always consistently supported the fight against international terrorism. At the same time, we believe that it must proceed strictly in accordance with international law, in other words, on the basis of UN Security Council resolutions or at the request of the country in need of military assistance. Our partners' operations in Syria have neither of these things as their basis, but we nonetheless think it possible and necessary to unite the efforts of all concerned countries in the fight against international terrorism and base this common effort on the UN Charter.

At this stage, I propose that all countries concerned, in particular the countries in the region, start taking part in the work of the international information and eventually coordination centre in Bagdad.

We have informed all of our partners about Russia's plans and actions in Syria. Let me repeat: Russia's involvement in the anti-terrorist operations in Syria is in accordance with international law and based on the official request from the President of the Syrian Arab Republic.

I want to stress the point though that the conflict in Syria has deep roots and is the result of many factors. This includes interstate and domestic political factors, and religious and interethnic differences, which have been exacerbated by unceremonious foreign intervention in the region's affairs.

Given these circumstances, we naturally have no intention of getting deeply entangled in this conflict. We will act strictly in accordance with our set mission. First, we will support the Syrian army only in its lawful fight against terrorist groups. Second, our support will be limited to airstrikes and will not involve ground operations. Third, our support will have a limited timeframe and will continue only while the Syrian army conducts its anti-terrorist offensive.

Our view is that a final and long-term solution to the situation in Syria is possible only on the basis of political reform and dialogue between all healthy forces in the country. I know that President al-Assad knows this and is ready for this process. We are counting on his active and flexible position and his readiness to make compromises for the sake of his country and people.

To finish with the military theme, let me congratulate our naval personnel, who today, for the first time in the history of the Russian and Soviet submarine fleet, travelled a long way beneath the Arctic ice from Severodvinsk to Kamchatka. The atomic submarine Alexander Nevsky has now begun its battle duty. This is a big event in the navy's life. I want to congratulate everyone - the sailors and the shipbuilders - on this successful work.

Colleagues, while security issues and military development are very important matters for our country's overall development, one of the key areas for ensuring Russia's growth is the economy, especially the social sector, industry, and agriculture.

Along with many of the Government members here today, I held a meeting recently in Rostov Region to review the results of the latest harvest campaign and discuss matters related to agriculture sector development. Yesterday, I discussed the microelectronics sector's development with my colleagues. This sector is also very important for the national economy. Today, we will look at issues of a broader nature, namely, how to address the signs of recession we see in some areas.

Let's begin by hearing from Mr Ulyukayev [Minister of Economic Development] on the work to develop socioeconomic priority development areas in single-industry towns. I know that the ministry has done the necessary work in this area and has already selected several projects.

<...>

Vladimir Putin: Has the final agreement been reached with our Ukrainian colleagues on gas? And incidentally, what is happening there with air services? Please share your comments.

Energy Minister Alexander Novak: Mr President,

In accordance with your instructions to continue consultations between ourselves, the European Union and Ukraine on the reliability of gas transit to Ukraine, as well as the Prime Minister's instructions, I held consultations with our partners on September 25. We were able to agree on the content of the protocol on cooperation in terms of gas supplies from the Russian Federation to Ukraine during the period from October 1, 2015 through March 31, 2015 - the so-called "winter package."

The main stipulations of this agreement are mutual obligations of all sides. First and foremost, obligations by the Ukrainian side to guarantee the continuation of reliable transit of Russian gas through Ukrainian territory to EU countries in the volume that Gazprom provides for transit under existing contracts.

In turn, the Russian side, the Government of the Russian Federation, will consider providing discounts on a quarterly basis based on demand, and will consider gas pricing for Ukraine on a competitive basis, at price levels offered to countries adjacent to Ukraine, such as Poland. I have briefed our partners that on September 24, the Prime Minister signed a corresponding resolution for the fourth quarter of this year.

For the first time, this protocol reflects the obligation of the European Union, the European Commission which represents the European Union, to organise financing for Ukraine's gas purchases through international financial institutions, including the allocation of the first $500 million tranche for Ukraine to purchase gas from Russia in October to fill its underground gas storage facilities and ensure safe passage during the winter period.

Vladimir Putin: How much money are the Europeans giving them?

Alexander Novak: The first tranche is $500 million. At the same time, we agreed that over the course of the entire winter period, they will help and raise funds for Ukraine, including through various financial institutions and banks, since Naftogaz is truly in a difficult position, as is the Ukrainian economy, and they cannot cope on their own.

Vladimir Putin: That's the issue. Because we can pump $500 million of gas into underground gas storage facilities, but they then need to pay for Russian gas supplies throughout the entire winter, and that's close to $3 billion. Where will they get this money without help from European nations? So it is fundamentally important that this agreement includes European obligations to ensure financing.

Alexander Novak: Mr President, it was fundamentally important to formalise this in the protocol.

For our part, we signed this protocol, as did the European Commission. We feel that we have created all the necessary conditions to get through the cold season during the winter period reliably.

Vladimir Putin: Thank you.

And what is happening with air transport services?

Transport Minister Maxim Sokolov: Mr President, this week, Ukraine's aviation authorities - the State Aviation Service - sent notifications to nine Russian airlines on banning their flights to Ukraine, in violation of our interstate agreement's provision on air traffic. This agreement has been in effect for over 20 years, and since 2013 we have full liberalisation in all areas and frequency of flights.

This year, five Russian and three Ukrainian airlines have been providing air transport services. In the first eight months of this year, the overall flow was nearly 700,000 passengers, of which nearly half, or 300,000, flew Aeroflot.

Of course, such actions by the Ukrainian authorities are not only against international law, but also illogical in terms of transport functioning, since 70% of the passengers using Aeroflot were Ukrainians, and 40% of them were simply passing through Moscow on their way to other airports in Europe or other countries. Thus, this measure first and foremost hurts Ukrainian citizens, reducing their air mobility and essentially isolating them from Europe and the rest of the world.

In response we were forced to apply adequate 'mirror' measures. The Russian Federal Air Transport Agency has already sent notifications to five Ukrainian airlines - all the airlines that currently fly to or have permission to fly to Russia - on banning the use of our airspace from October 25 - in other words, from the date stated in the notification from Ukraine's State Aviation Service. Naturally, in addition to the inconvenience to passengers - and I mean all of them - this will lead to significant losses not only for Ukrainian airlines, but first and foremost, Ukrainian airports. For our part, we have already begun to reroute these flows.

Vladimir Putin: We are trying to hold talks with the European Commission and Ukraine on our relations with regard to Ukraine's signing of the Association Agreement with the European Union and trying to find a way out of these rather complicated situations related to inconsistencies in this agreement and our mutual, Russian-Ukrainian obligations within the framework of the CIS free trade zone. Mr Ulyukayev, how will this reflect on the current process?

Economic Development Minister Alexei Ulyukayev: I think the chances of a positive result in this process are now becoming very slim. Of course, this is not the first unfriendly action. We have registered over forty acts by the Ukrainian Rada and Cabinet of Ministers aimed against Russian economic entities, creating discriminatory working conditions, but this, of course, is an extreme - a complete ban.

In our document, which we offered for trilateral discussion, we introduced a section on mandatory elimination of unilateral measures by Ukraine aimed against Russian businesses as a highly important part of the entire agreement. Because it is impossible to agree on improving customs procedures, improving work in terms of technical regulation, etc., while discriminating against our businesses. Now, following these latest events, I think the chances are quite pitiful.

Vladimir Putin: Mr Medvedev, I want to ask you to keep all these processes under control, as they are very important to us.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev: Yes, Mr President.

Naturally, we are in constant contact with our colleagues on this matter. I cannot but agree with the Economic Development Minister's comment. All this is making the chances of agreeing on issues under discussion during our dialogue with the European Commission and Ukraine ephemeral. Because this is not just a refusal to seriously discuss the challenges we all face in light of Ukraine's accession to the Association Agreement with the European Union, but also simply a set of unfriendly measures that are essentially directed against Ukrainian citizens.

Vladimir Putin: Ok.

Let's say at least a couple of words about more pleasant topics. We are preparing for Formula 1 Russian Grand Prix in Sochi. Mr Kozak, how is that work going?

Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak: Yes, indeed Mr President, Russia will be holding this most prestigious race in the world for the second time now. As you recall, the Formula 1 races are a leading event in terms of television viewership, next to the Olympic Games and the World Cup.

Last year, over 500 million viewers in 120 nations around the world watched our Formula 1 Grand Prix. This stage, the second stage in the history of Russian auto racing, will be held on October 9-11 in Sochi at the racing circuit that, I want to point out, was recognised the best race track in the world at the Professional MotorSport World Expo in Cologne, and Formula 1 itself, the race, received two prizes as the best track in the world in the Formula 1 2014 calendar.

This year, the approved plan of preparations for the race has been fully carried out. Interest among Russian and foreign viewers is high, and tickets are selling at the same rate as last year. We are absolutely certain that it will be a complete success.

We are currently negotiating extending the duration of the contract, which ends in 2020, and we're also making progress on negotiating rescheduling the races in Sochi from daytime to night-time.

We have noted a great deal of interest from Russian investors in getting involved in this race and financing the license fees we must pay every year to hold this race through non-budgetary funding.

Vladimir Putin: Night-time races?

Dmitry Kozak: Yes.

Vladimir Putin: But then it will be impossible to see anything.

Dmitry Kozak: On the contrary, they will be colourful. In Monaco and Singapore, the races are held at night, and are illuminated. We would start in 2017, because we will need to install additional lighting. TV viewership will also increase, because it will involve bright imagery; it is more beautiful at night than in the daylight.

Vladimir Putin: Very well. Thank you very much.

 [return to Contents] 

 #4
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
October 5, 2015
I Wasn't Really Wrong When I Said Putin Would Retire
Here's my rationalisation
By Patrick Armstrong
Patrick Armstrong received a PhD from Kings College, University of London, England in 1976 and retired in 2008 after 30 years as an analyst for the Canadian government, specializing in first the USSR and then Russia. He was a Political Counselor in the Canadian Embassy in Moscow from 1993 to 1996. He has been a frequent speaker at the Wilton Park conferences in the UK.

I did not expect Putin to return for a third term and on August 2011 I said he would not. In September (that's fast!!) I had to eat my words. But I wasn't happy to: while I thought Putin was a pretty effective leader - maybe the best Russia has ever had, in the last thousand years, anyway - every leader (and everything else) has a "best before" date. There's a time when a leader runs out of ideas and creativity, a time when the sycophants figure out what buttons to push ("I know you don't like flattery boss; that's one of the things I admire about you"), a time when subordinates start plotting, a time when the Old Guy's past it and it's time to think about our futures and so on. Putin's not there by a long shot, but it will come one day. Better to leave at the top of your game.

And, I have to admit, there was some personal embarrassment on my part - a US Congressman was ranting to me about how Putin was just power-hungry and I stopped him by saying: then why isn't he president right now? Well, the last laugh's on me, isn't it? He's president again and maybe he never really stopped being the real boss.

So why did he come back? Why does he risk becoming the Turkmenbashi of Russia?

I prefer to think that he's not just the power-crazed dictator that the US Congressman thinks he is. And so fearlessly risking another episode of logophagy, I offer another theory which allows me to preserve my August 2011 idea and pretend to have been right all along while actually having been wrong. (A bit like being an op-ed writer, in fact. It's nice to have a rolling memory that forgets when you were wrong. Take, for example, Der Spiegel, which now blames Merkel for the whole sorry mess in Ukraine without ever admitting its own responsibility for whipping up the hysteria. But I, unlike Official Journalists©, know that the Internet Never Forgets.)

So, why did Putin not take my advice and return to the presidency?

Libya, in a word. Consumers of Western media outlets who can still remember the dim, distant days of March 2011 will recall that Qaddafi "was bombing his own people". First appearing, I think, on Al Jazeera, the story spread everywhere and was amplified by the West's pet "human rights" N"G"Os. There doesn't appear to have been any evidence that he was - and a later report concluded that he wasn't - but this was the mantra. And, it's important to remember, "humanitarian bombing" episodes are always preceded by unanimity in the media; we've seen it in Kosovo and Syria and more recently in Ukraine - every news outlet saying exactly the same thing at exactly the same time.

"Bombing your own people" is a terrible, terrible thing and "something must be done". (or, rather, it was then: not so important today in Ukraine). The US and its allies went to the UN and secured a resolution to create a "no fly zone" so as to stop Libyan government aircraft from "bombing his own people". Russia (and China) abstained rather than veto.

To make a long story short, NATO paid no attention to the text of the resolution. They bombed everything, then they supplied weapons, then special forces trainers, then forward air controllers. At the end, after seven (seven!) months, Qaddafi was run to ground and brutally killed. Hillary Clinton's cackle should not be forgotten.

All appearances suggest that Washington and those NATO members who participated lied from start to finish: they never meant the "no fly zone" stuff and they always intended to overthrow Qaddafi. They played Moscow and Beijing for suckers.

Well, my guess is that Putin is tired of Russia being played for a sucker, tired of Washington & Co bombing everyone it wants to whatever pretext it invents (is Russia on the list?). My guess is that President Xi agrees with him (could China be on the list?) In fact he/they is/are thinking some unthinkable thoughts. I suspect they may be entertaining the notions that, under present management:

-Washington is a force for chaos in the world.
-Washington cannot be trusted.
-Agreements with Washington are worthless.
-Washington cannot be dealt with.
-There is no honour, no consistency, nothing to be trusted in Washington. And, worst of all, pace Palmerston, they don't even know their own interests (Stupidity is very frightening when combined with Washington's military power).
-Washington is, and will be, Russia's (and China's) enemy.

And that is why I think he came back. He foresaw, thanks to the US/NATO deception on Libya, that hard times were coming for Russia. Only he had the necessary muscle to both over-awe the contending factions in Russia and, at the same time, stand tough against the threats.

And the Ukraine nightmare has shown he was right. In the eleven month period from delaying the EU agreement (v2013) to delaying the EU agreement (v2014), Russia has been ceaselessly calumniated and provoked. Putin, leading and controlling his team, has proved cooler, calmer and cleverer than his enemies.

There is nothing about US actions in Syria that will make him think differently.

What did we hear in his 2014 address to the Russian parliament? - a speech, you may be sure, in which every word is tried out, tested and tasted.

Back then, we realised that the more ground we give and the more excuses we make, the more our opponents become brazen and the more cynical and aggressive their demeanour becomes.

Could anything be plainer than that? We tried, they rejected us; we tried again, they spat again. One last attempt... That's it. It's over.

He's come to the end, past the end, of the rope.

So, altogether, Putin read the tea leaves and I did not.

 [return to Contents]

 #5
The Guardian (UK)
October 1, 2015
Putin wants to preserve Syria - this is not about Russia-US relations
The risk of accidental clash is real, but Russia's first airstrikes signal the desire to be treated as a global player and to protect the Syrian state
By Mary Dejevsky
Mary Dejevsky is a writer and broadcaster. She is a former foreign correspondent in Moscow, Paris and Washington, and a special correspondent in China and many parts of Europe. She is a member of the Valdai Group, invited since 2004 to meet Russian leaders each autumn, and a member of the Chatham House thinktank. She is a past honorary research fellow at the University of Buckingham and contributed the introductory essay to The Britannica Guide to Russia

When the US and USSR were engaged in their proxy conflicts during the cold war - in Central America, in Africa, even in Afghanistan - there was always an ideological element and the forces of the two countries never confronted each other directly on the battlefield. The risk of a superpower conflagration was kept at one remove.

It is tempting to see the first Russian airstrikes in Syria and Russia's recently increased military presence in and around Latakia as an old-style proxy conflict, shorn of its ideological aspect and replayed as raw geopolitics. On the one side are the US and its allies, including the UK, who have the ultimate objective of removing Bashar al-Assad, to which they have added a mission to turn back Islamic State. On the other side is Russia, determined not to lose its last remaining foothold in the Middle East to the west, and using the fight against Isis as a cover to keep its ally, Assad, in power.

Such an interpretation may be too simplistic and misread Russia's motives. But it does not make the current situation, in the short-term at least, any less fraught with risk. On the contrary. Yesterday's airstrikes by Russia, of which Washington received an hour's notice via a Russian general in Baghdad, held out the very real possibility of an air clash by accident not design. No wonder the US swiftly agreed to top-level military talks with Russia about coordinating action in Syria.

Nor can it be excluded that this was one reason why president Vladimir Putin gave the order for the first airstrikes within 24 hours of the Russian parliament giving the political go-ahead. Russia wanted to show that it was an equal player with the US in the region, and that it was not going to fit into whatever Washington decreed. It wants a say.

If one interpretation of Russia's action is a concern to maintain national dignity and not be seen to take orders from Washington, another could well be Putin's desire for post-Soviet Russia to be treated as a state with global interests, not confined to a "mere" regional role in and around Ukraine. Russia's involvement in Syria is, to be sure, a convenient distraction for the Russian public at a time when Moscow may be looking to disengage from Ukraine. But it is not just that.

Russia's build-up in Syria has caused much bafflement abroad, with the favoured explanation being the hoary old one of "superpower" rivalry and the alliance with Assad. But statements by Russian military figures and by Putin himself, including in his speech to the UN general assembly earlier this week, suggest a slightly different rationale - and it is worth listening to what they actually say.

Putin indeed wants Russia to be seen as a global player, but as a player with interests that are not inimical, but which overlap to a degree with those of the US and others. He sees Syria as an opportunity to be part of a collaborative effort, and Isis as the same sort of cultural and terrorist threat to Russia as it is perceived by the west.

If anything, Putin sees the potential threat to Russia from Isis as bigger and more urgent, because of the number of Russians (many of them Chechens) thought to be fighting with Isis and the threat of jihadism in and around Chechnya. Russia's desire to combat Isis need not be seen as a pretext for protecting Assad; the converse may rather be true. In Russia's view, as Putin set out at the UN, the Assad government is all that stands in the way of complete victory for Isis and the de facto disappearance of the Syrian state.

For Putin, the priority is the preservation of the Syrian state. He looks at Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, and sees western interventions that have resulted in anarchy. He foresees the same for Syria if the west sees toppling Assad, rather than combating Isis, as the priority.

It was possible, after what both Barack Obama and Putin said at the UN, to divine some shifting towards a sliver of common ground. Obama said Russia (and Iran) could be involved and hinted at some flexibility about the timing of Assad's departure. Putin allowed that Assad might eventually go. Those verbal nuances have been lost in the sudden outbreak of competitive air strikes.

It is just possible that the US-Russia military talks, now agreed, and the small hints of convergence over Assad could produce a cooperative approach. The alternative - the risk of a US-Russia military clash over Syria by accident - cannot be what either Moscow or Washington wants.

 #6
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
October 4, 2015
Was Putin's UN speech a failure?
Western experts is still puzzled in understanding Russian foreign policy, as evidenced by initial reaction to Vladimir Putin's UN speech.
By Nikolay Pakhomov
Nikolay Pakhomov is a geopolitical risk consultant and an expert at the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC). He is a commentator in a number of Russian and international media outlets

There is no doubt that the first step towards normalizing relations between Russia and the West needs to be a clear understanding of each other's positions. But that is proving difficult on both sides.

Take, for example, a recent article of Russia Direct's contributor Paul Goble, "Putin tries to change the subject at the UN - and fails." This article - coming from a Western analyst with extensive experience in the U.S. foreign policy establishment - perfectly illustrates the problems that the U.S. expert community has in understanding Russia. [http://www.russia-direct.org/opinion/putin-tries-change-subject-un-and-fails]

Although Mr. Goble accuses Russian commentators and the Kremlin of failing to understand the realities, it is hard not to notice that the author presents his own "reality."

Analyzing what isn't there

Goble begins his article with an old lawyers' tale about raising one's voice when both the law and the facts are against you. What this has to do with Putin is not clear, since the Russian president is renowned for his calm political style.

Putin's UN speech promised to be a sensation, but turned out fairly routine - mild criticism of the West, but no bombastic statements. It was a far cry from, say, Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez's UN performance in which he called George W. Bush the devil, not to mention Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's shoe-banging diplomacy.

Of course, Putin's visit was steeped in symbolism. It was, after all, the 70th anniversary of the United Nations, which, despite all the criticism it receives, remains one of the foundations of modern international relations. However, on closer examination, it is difficult to escape the impression that the main purpose of Putin's trip was to meet with U.S. President Barack Obama.

Since the details of the talks are not in the public domain, Goble evidently attempts to divine the thoughts and intentions of the two men. Back in the real world, until the presidents publish their memoirs, the minutes are made public, and the relevant documents are declassified, the results of the meeting will be judged by the dynamics of the political steps taken by the two countries.

What about Ukraine?

Goble's analysis of Putin's speech was based on his assumption that the Russian president was trying to divert attention from Ukraine by promising to cooperate on Syria. Yet does attention really need to be diverted from Ukraine? And more to the point - Does Ukraine still command attention?

The fact is that the topic of Ukraine has gradually faded from the Sunday morning TV news agenda, which is still a fairly accurate barometer of U.S. politics. Today only Republican politicians remember Ukraine, and only then to criticize Obama, adding it to the list of his administration's foreign policy failures.

Hence, Putin hardly had need to fly to the United States for one day to deliver a speech for the purpose of diverting attention from Ukraine - the American public has enough on its plate as it is. And the Russian president is not so naive as to expect one speech to erase, or even ease, the economic sanctions against the Kremlin's policy in Ukraine.

Let's not forget that some Russian officials and experts firmly believe that they consider the Ukraine crisis to be nothing more than a pretext for Western sanctions aimed at weakening Russia. That would suggest that Moscow understands that sanctions are here to stay.

ISIS as the common enemy

What about the second part of Goble's thesis? Did Putin use his speech at the UN to try to win universal approval of Russia's position on Syria? Let's start with the fact that for the past twenty years one of the fundamental principles of Russian foreign policy (which appeared once again in Putin's New York address) is recognition of the right of every nation to define its own policy not just domestically, but internationally. Put simply, on Syria and other international issues, Moscow recognizes the right of every country to determine its own position.

Russia's position, for one, is very clear: Putin merely restated it at the UN, but in reality it is being put into practice by the Russian Air Force. Syria, Iraq and Iran, having been forced to clarify their stance by the harsh realities of the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), support Russia's actions and are cooperating with Moscow. As the Russian operation progresses, other states will be able to decide for themselves whether they support Russia.

From this point of view, it emerges that the main purpose of Putin's visit to the United States was not to recruit supporters for Russia's actions in Syria, but to talk with his U.S. counterpart. So were the negotiations successful?

Whatever Goble and other experts say, there is insufficient information in the public domain to answer this question properly. But as events unfold in the Middle East, information will appear, whereupon the question can be revisited.

In his article Goble touches upon the issue of Syrian refugees in Europe. To his credit, he did not repeat the mantra of the neocons and fans of U.S. military action, which states that the influx of refugees into Europe is final proof that Assad must go, since they are fleeing more from his regime than from ISIS.

U.S. neocons have always had a fickle relationship with facts, but anyone outside this group is welcome to browse official EU statistics, according to which in recent months the number of refugees from Syria is roughly equal to those from Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, where Assad is not present, but ISIS-allied terrorists are.

So it makes little sense to argue with Putin's assertion that the refugee problem is linked with the fight against international terrorism and the need to strengthen statehood in countries from which people are fleeing to Europe.

The realities and illusions of international relations

Clearly carried away by his analysis of Putin's speech, Goble doesn't mention some of the parameters of modern international relations, in particular, the fact that for more than eleven years, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia have been members of NATO. Therefore, in the event of Russian aggression against these countries (which Goble suspects to be Moscow's intention), Russia will find itself at war with NATO. There can be no winners in such a war, while the losers will include Mother Earth herself.

So does Goble believe that Russia's leaders have suicidal tendencies, or that they are willing to risk all to capture such a wonderful place as the Baltic region? In that case, the article fails to explain why the Kremlin has not already invaded, or why control over Ukraine is so important in the conquest of the Baltic countries, as he suggests it is.

Many such questions arise when reading the article. It is not the first and will hardly be the last example of a Western expert writing about Russia. For many authors, it is a fact-fudging exercise in which scraps of information are customized to fit a personal view, or whim, regarding Russian foreign policy.

It is to be hoped that the decision-makers in both Western and Eastern countries adopt a less illusory approach. Right now they have an opportunity to assess the extent to which Russia can assist those countries that have requested help in the fight against ISIS. Russia has responded to this request.

Putin's words about the need to fight terrorism match his deeds. President Obama, speaking at the UN that very same day, cannot boast of such consistency on the Middle East. His policy ranges from abandoning such a staunch ally as Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to demanding that Assad leave his post without having the capacity to force the Syrian leader to comply. In the Middle East, of all places, such things do not go unnoticed.

 [return to Contents]

 #7
Business New Europe
www.bne.eu
October 5, 2015
MOSCOW BLOG: Spelling out Putin's UN speech in a 'word cloud'
Ben Aris in Moscow

President Vladimir Putin's speech to the UN on September 28 - the first time he has personally appeared there for a decade and probably his most significant speech since 2007 - clearly shows the Kremlin's foreign policy goals and how it is trying to take control of the international debate and return Russia to the top table of international affairs.

Putin doesn't do anything without a good reason. So the first question to ask is, why did he turn up in New York at all? Having abandoned diplomacy (as US President Barack Obama pointed out) and taken the military option in first Ukraine and now Syria, his speech was designed to make the clearest statement of Russia's foreign policy since the president appeared in front of the world's collected policy wonks at the 2007 Munich Security Conference annual meeting. At that event, he told delegates that Russia was Europe's "natural partner", but that Europe had to meet Russia half way and respect its interests, as it was and still is a major European power.

Now the rhetoric about the need to "respect" Russia's interests is coupled with the threat of Russian soldiers destabilising countries until the West is forced to react.

That is not to say that the Kremlin wants to start a new Cold War, recreate the Soviet Union or destroy the West. If you want to know what the Kremlin wants, put aside the newspapers and simply listen to Putin's speech.

The positive takeaway is that for all the obvious barbs aimed at Washington, the speech was pretty mild. To separate the wheat from the politically charged chaff, international consultants Teneo Intelligence put together a 'word cloud' of the key words contained in Putin's speech. The most common word (appearing 15 times) was "UN".

UN - world policeman

Putin painted a picture of a world in chaos, under attack by Islamic terrorists, where an international coalition was the only way to reestablish harmony and Russia should play a key role in that. Putin criticised the US throughout the speech (which he avoided identifying by name), blaming it for destabilising the world, and proposed that the US hegemony give way to a world policed by the UN - in which Russia would also play a leading role. (He opened his speech by dismissing recent calls for the removal of the veto power of the permanent members of the UN Security Council, of which Russia is one.)

"President Vladimir Putin used his address to the United Nation's General Assembly on 28 September to present Russia as a constructive world power and a champion of global cooperation, while condemning US actions in the post-Cold War period," Otilia Dhand, senior vice president of Teneo Intelligence, said in a note. "Putin claimed that he would seek to form a broad international coalition to resolve the crisis in Syria and deep UNSC-led analysis of terrorist threats in the Middle East."

This is not a new message, and indeed Putin was criticised by Russia-watchers for his repetitiveness. But the Kremlin's insistence on a multi-polar approach to international affairs has hardened over the last few years. "The underlying message could be summarised as follows: the irresponsible unilateral breaches of established principles by the US has led to the deterioration of the international order; in contrast Russia stands by these principles as a constructive force for the future," Dhand wrote.

Putin suggested that cooperation between larger economic blocs (the Eurasian Economic Union, the EU and China's new Silk Road) was emerging, but that the US and the EU were breaking the principles of global economic cooperation by secretive Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations. According to this logic, Russia needs to both carve out a sphere of influence for itself and to secure a role in making such critical decisions.

This is an old story as far as Russia is concerned, but the new element is Syria, which has provided Putin with some real leverage over the West. The EU is trying to cope with millions of refugees arriving on its borders from the Middle East and so cannot ignore the problem any longer.

Putin's speech was a carrot-and-stick offer to the US. By threatening to further destabilise Syria for the foreseeable future (Syria had three references in his speech), Russia could allow Islamic State to not only run amok, but also take political control of a post-Assad regime (IS had six references). What Putin was suggesting is a nightmare scenario for Washington, and Russia's ongoing destabalising of eastern Ukraine means this is no idle threat. But with Russia's help (Russia had eight references), this could be avoided if the coordinated international action was conducted under the aegis of the UN (15 references).

The irony of this position was the mildness coupled with the suggestion that all major decisions be moved into the forum of the UN, as a global government is probably the closest Putin will get to a peace offering to Washington in the near future. But reports coming out of the meeting between Putin and Obama after Putin's speech suggest that little progress has been made and a prolonged sanctions regime and political standoff is the most likely scenario.

Frequency of the most used words in Putin's speech

UN 15
Russia 8
Islamic State 6
Middle East 5
Syria 3
International Law 3
Ukraine 2

Source: Teneo Intelligence

 [return to Contents]

#8
Interfax
October 2, 2015
Russian prime minister warns of tough financial situation, back to 3-year budget

The Russian government faces a difficult task in putting together a budget which will be very tough, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has said, privately-owned Russian news agency Interfax reported on 2 October.

"The economic situation in the country has changed a great deal in the last year; clearly, living in conditions of 50 dollars a barrel is after all a bit different from the situation with 110 dollars a barrel. For some it's a minus, for others it's a plus, including from the devaluation effect," he said, at a meeting with business leaders at the Sochi economic forum.

"It's clear that now the government faces the fairly difficult task of putting together a budget - there is only a week left to put it together, it needs to be ready in a week's time. It is a tough one, very tough, but at the same time adequate for the situation we're in," he said.

The government is trying to preserve the main macro-economic indicators, he said.

"You know, the fight against inflation remains a fairly essential one for the government, and not increasing the deficit, against those numbers which we set for ourselves as relatively dangerous. We consider that three per cent is a relatively dangerous figure, we won't drive the deficit up above this," he said.

Medvedev also promised business leaders that the government would not change the main "rules of the game" regarding the economy, Interfax said in a later report.

"Maintaining the rules of the game, this is what worries business most of all - will the government stick to the rules or somehow alter them. I want to say directly to you, we proceed from the supposition that we will observe those parameters which have been declared previously, including in the tax sphere and regulatory environment," he said.

Taxes will not rise for business, he said.. "In addition, I have decided (the government) will stop considering a series of non-tax payments from 1 January 2019," he said.

Medvedev's comments came as the Finance Minister, Anton Siluanov, announced that the ministry will return to the previous practice of calculating three-year budgets next year (2016), state-owned TASS news agency reported.

"One-year budgets are an extraordinary measure. So, next year we'll do everything necessary so that the budget will be in three-year format, so we'll be able to forecast on a longer perspective," he said.

[return to Contents] 

 #9
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
October 2, 2015
Medvedev: Russia must cut dependence on oil revenues
Speaking at a forum in Sochi, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has revealed that oil and gas revenues have provided for less than half of the federal Russian budget for the first time, and said the country must focus on reducing its dependence on oil through reforms, stimulating domestic manufacturing and cutting spending.
Alexei Lossan, RBTH

For the first time oil and gas revenues have provided for less than half of the federal Russian budget, said Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, speaking at the Sochi International Economic Forum.

In his words, the fall in oil prices and Russia's flexible monetary policy are responsible for the trend, but nevertheless it has to be supported even when oil prices return to high levels.

According to Medvedev, oil and gas revenues should not be the main source for replenishing the budget, while windfall profits from oil sales should be directed towards sovereign wealth funds.
 
A hostage to globalization

Medvedev noted that many changes have occurred in the world and in Russia's economy in the last year.

"Business must not divide countries but on the contrary unite them and such contacts connect governments better than any policy," he said.

In his opinion, growth rates in the world remain rather low, even in the U.S. they are lower than experts expected, while the EU is showing zero growth.

Medvedev added that the instability in the world economy and politics has had most impact on the positions of developing countries.

"The Russian economy is a hostage to and beneficiary of globalization. Russia cannot ignore global trends as it concentrates on its own development."

Moreover, in Medvedev's view, "for the last year and a half the Russian economy has had to face unprecedented sanctions from the West and in many cases the sphere of technology has been completely closed to the country."

However, the government had known of the consequences the sanctions would have, but still went ahead and made a conscious political decision that led to the EU and the U.S. imposing them.
 
Strategy for the future

Medvedev announced that Russia has begun involving the expert community to work on a development strategy for the country until 2030. The strategy will have four priorities: investment activity, import substitution, the quality of government administration, and budget policy.

According to Medvedev, the stimulation of investment activity will be one of the main directions in the strategy: "The objective is to remove the barriers that impede (private) money from entering the market," he said.

In the course of the last year several institutes for attracting private enterprises to the economy have been created in Russia. One of these is the Industrial Development Foundation, which was established to help enterprises in their early stages. The government has also made financial instruments accessible for a broader circle of investors.

According to Medvedev, so-called "import substitution" - replacing imported goods with domestically produced ones - is the most important element for structural reforms and competitive enterprises can make the economy more balanced.

"Returning Russian goods to the market is the first step and the ultimate objective is the creation of competitive production," he said.

In several sectors, for example, the food and pharmaceutical industries, products can be quickly brought onto the market, while in others, such as machinery, the investment cycle is longer.

Medvedev underlined that all countries that have taken a giant leap in development made governmental reforms. Furthermore, in the near future, the reduction of revenues and the fall in oil prices will make budget policy even harder.

"The 2016 budget is being prepared according to this principle and the only protected articles will be Russia's international obligations, security, agriculture and social policy," he said, adding that government spending would be reduced for the other fields

 [return to Contents] 

 #10
Moscow Times/Vedomosti
October 5, 2015
Who Benefits From Russia's Bankruptcy Law?
By Nikolai Epple
Nikolai Epple is a columnist at Vedomosti. This comment originally appeared in Vedomosti.

Russia's highly anticipated law on personal bankruptcy came into force on Oct. 1. The bill had been under discussion since 2008.

However, President Vladimir Putin only signed it into law in late 2014 and legislators pushed back its introduction from July to October so as to give arbitration courts time to prepare.

According to the new law, any person whose debt exceeds 500,000 rubles and who has missed payments for more than 90 days can be declared bankrupt.

Both debtors and creditors can initiate bankruptcy proceedings. The court must appoint a financial manager to help the debtor and creditor reach an agreement on restructuring the debt or selling off the debtor's property.

The law comes into force at a difficult time. Consumer debt currently totals 6 trillion rubles ($90.8 billion) and mortgage debt stands at 3 trillion rubles ($45.4 billion). Estimates vary of the number of debtors likely to file for bankruptcy.

Collection agencies anticipate 200,000 cases, while the Federal Bailiffs Service expects 400,000 people to file. In all, almost 600,000 Russians qualify for bankruptcy.

Both bankers and borrowers consider the law a necessary measure, but they differ in their assessments of who will benefit most.

Banks argue that the law makes it too easy for debtors to evade responsibility, while debtors hold that the threshold of 500,000 rubles and three months of arrears is inflated so as to protect banks.

According to Sequoia Credit Consolidation head Yelena Dokuchayeva, everything depends on how the new law will work in practice. It is unclear how the arbitration courts will cope with what might be a doubling of their current workload.

It is also unclear how financial managers will cope: Russia has only 1,000 such professionals and they generally work on higher profile and higher paying corporate cases. They might be unwilling to limit themselves to the 10,000 ruble cap imposed by the law for personal bankruptcy proceedings.

Russian debtors must cover the fee for the financial manager and all other costs of their bankruptcy proceedings.

However, in Germany, for example, the federal budget assumes that expense.

Declaring bankruptcy frees debtors from the claims of creditors, but it reflects negatively on their credit history.

Information about the bankruptcy is posted in the public domain and such individuals are barred from holding executive corporate positions for three years.

The key question is how the authorities will manage the financial recovery mechanisms that are designed to restore debtors' solvency. In the United States, this responsibility is handled by credit unions - interbank associations that share credit data and seek mutually beneficial resolutions to problems.

As a result, the U.S. has approximately 180,000 to 250,000 bankruptcies per year.

That is far more than in Europe, but relatively few compared to the size of the private sector debt load.

Apparently, the Russian law that was long in coming will now slowly gain in practical experience from its application.

 [return to Contents] 

 #11
Russia Insider/Expert
www.russia-insider.com
October 4, 2015
The Purges Begin - Secret Russian Police Unit SMERCH Nails Corrupt Officials
This time they are serious.  Russian security structures create a special unit tasked with a total sweep of regional elites
By Sergey Tikhonov (Expert)
http://expert.ru/expert/2015/40/hoteli-posadok/

This article originally appeared in Russian at Expert, an excellent and very authoritative Russian magazine and news site.  

The anti-corruption drive is for real

Public opinion works in amazing ways.

For a long time Russian society demanded the widespread jailing of thieving, corrupt officials, embezzlers and bribe-takers but now they dont react when systematic work in this direction actually begins.

Recent actions of security forces in Sakhalin oblast and Komi Republic were high-profile events but caused a surprisingly weak resonance with the public.

Experts and political analysts argued over who of the influential entities in the Federal Government and Oligarchy had crossed swords with the arrested governors.

Other popular theories as to what could be happening involve an intra-elite split in the Kremlin and a sharp increase in the powers of the security block [siloviki] and specifically Bastrykin Alexander, the chairman of the Investigative Committee of Russia who supposedly at his discretion decided to launch a reboot of power structures on the ground.

However, it seems that politics have nothing to do with this situation.

The very nature of law enforcement actions against regional bosses points to a systematic approach and an absence of meddling from local and federal elites. For the first time in the history of Russia current governors are being arrested, but most importantly - all the participants of the alleged criminal associations went "under the knife" including the top members of their power pyramids.

Mafioso officials are targeted

In Komi the accused are not only individuals but also members of organised crime syndicates. It is clear that these charges can be applied to Sayid Amirov, the former mayor of Makhachkala as well as to Alexander Horoshavin who was the former head of Sakhalin. Hundreds of less high-profile cases against administration officials, deputies and mayors not yet visible at a superficial glance from the federal level, suggest that the work is carried out systematically and that fewer people remain untouchable.

Our assumption was confirmed by an investigation.

We contacted representatives of the Investigative Committee who provided us with details of the anti-corruption campaign. According to them a secret structure with special powers was created inside "the system" which is not even accessible to the top members of the Investigative Committee. It has already been jokingly nicknamed SMERCH amongst its operatives - a reference to Stalin's infamous secret service which fought enemies with harsh and effective surgical techniques.

In order to secure an interview with operatives from this group we had to obtain high level security clearance. The faces and identities of the operatives were shielded because exposure would have made the venture pointless. Strict conditions of anonymity and non-disclosure of investigative secrets had to be adhered to. After all possible security checks of my humble person were performed we met over a cup of coffee in the little diner at the "Kiev" station in Moscow.

"Why all the secrecy?" I asked at first. "After all, even high-ranking chiefs of the FSB don't know about your existence?"  The reply came in an unexpected historical analogy.

"Think about it. This is done for the same reasons why investigative structures were created in the nineteen thirties and forties. At first it was due to the harsh necessity of having to sweep the elites before the looming onset of war (which was initially postponed for several years through skilful diplomacy) and then during the war itself. There were too many regional party tsars and former militants of the civil war who had to be put in their place. Thereafter local law enforcement authorities, as is the case today, tangled into one crony knot with these elites. Therefore any attempt to take down an influential mafia-boss stumbled on betrayal and destruction of evidence".

I was primarily interested to know who in the Governor's garden will be next for prosecution and how big this garden was. The anti-corruption agent did not disclose details of the case but gave a clear warning to all small-town elites: 12 governors are under investigation of which eight are "under the gun".

"The dig" has already begun, very deep and unbeknownst to the suspects themselves. Local investigators are not used so that suspects cannot cover their tracks and seek protection from their patrons in Moscow as has often happened before. In the past, criminal prosecutions were stopped after the intervention of certain influential figures. This happened in Sakhalin in 2012 when the FSB investigation team, acting on verified information from the audit of the Accounting Chamber, were ready to fly to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk for Mr Horoshavin's scalp. The case was hushed up due to the intervention of a very influential person (Moscow Patron) whose name I was asked not to mention.

"No one can contact us even through the generals of the Prosecutor General's Office. They, poor things, do not know to whom to turn" the young investigator smiled as he expressed ironic sympathy with the thieves. "We had to sweat a lot with Horoshavin - he was dug in deep. The schemes of kickbacks and bribes were so well thought out that we had to investigate for a year and a half and had to implant our own man (equipped with special surveillance equipment) into his team."

The operatives try to perform unceremonious arrests of regional criminal gangs on the same day so that their associates cannot hide or destroy evidence. Due to the extreme entanglement of criminal schemes in Sakhalin the investigative mission was extended for several months. At first the entire law enforcement structure was replaced. On March 11, 2014 the UMVD (Police) chief of the Sakhalin region Vladislav Belotserkovsky was detained. The prosecutor of the Sakhalin region and head of FSB, general-major, Igor Struchkov was sacked from office. Immediately thereafter the arrest of municipal officials commenced.

The mayor of Okha was taken into custody including several junior members of Horoshavin's team.

On March 4 of this year they took down the backbone of the crime ring namely the governor, his advisor Andrey Ikramov, assistant Boris Usachev and head of the secretariat Vyacheslav Gorbachev. They were flown under intelligence services supervision to Moscow for further investigative procedures. Arrests and detentions continued for two months. Today 18 people from Sakhalin are behind bars in Moscow including virtually the entire local government control structure and according to investigators this is not yet the end. At least another 12 officials and businessmen of  the region are under investigation.

According to my sources, "a special group" has direct access to the President and reports to him personally about the situation in different regions.

Putin's Popular Front involved in the drive

The network of the Popular Front (PF are a civic anti-corruption organization) plays a prominent role in this work. It has offices in each region and in some cases they are already quite effective. Additionally, the PF monitors the situation in different spheres on topics from housing to deforestation at Federal Level and regularly produces detailed reports and analyses.

Anti-corruption projects of the Popular Front starting with "For Fair Procurement" provide a lot of information which is useful for the public assessment of governmental institution and law enforcement agency work. Some of the information is widely publicized while some of it remains classified. This work is so significant that Alexander Brechalov, the co-chairman of the central headquarters of the Popular Front responsible for anti-corruption projects, has reportedly received very serious threats.

The choice of targets is not handed down from above as one might have thought. The group acts at their own discretion which is limited by only one conceptual requirement. "We were told to first take the fattest cats who have lost their heads from unchecked power," according to the major.  "Otherwise investigations would be impaired by corrupt local security forces."

For example, the Sakhalin "devil" wasn't shy to store entire potato sacks of money (acquired through operating protection rackets against local businesses) at his residence.  "Horoshavin took 30 percent kickbacks from State Contracts although even he cannot compete with Gaizer, who went up to 70%."

Unfinished work will continue

It is worth mentioning that in 2015, besides Sakhalin Governor Alexander Horoshavin and Komi Republic head Vyacheslav Gaizer, a number of other officials were arrested on suspicion of bribery, fraud and other corruption-related crimes.

On February 4th, Vice-Governor of Krasnodar Krai, Vadim Lukoyanov and former Kuban Vice-Governor, Alexander Ivanov.

On March 26 - the Vice-Governor of the Chelyabinsk area, Nikolay Sandakov.

On August 4th - the first Deputy Chairman of the government of the Ivanovo district, Andrey Kabanov.

On August 10 - Vice-Governor of Novgorod region, Viktor Nechaev.

Yuri Hamburg, the first Vice-Governor of the Omsk region has been imprisoned for over a year on suspicion of abuse of power.

Judging by the attitudes of the special "SMERCH" investigative unit the unfinished work will continue.

 [return to Contents] 

 #12
NTV (Moscow)
September 27, 2015
Talk show discusses corruption in Russia

Gazprom-owned Russian NTV broadcast a 75-minute evening talk show "Majority" on 27 September. The programme was presented by pro-Kremlin journalist and author Sergey Minayev and featured several speakers standing around the table in the studio, with several "experts" sitting separately and invited to answer questions from Minayev. At the end of the show the studio audience were asked to vote on the question discussed to decide which of the two opposing points the majority supported.

In the programme the question was: Will large-scale prosecutions stop the spread of corruption in Russia? The topic was selected after the head of the Komi Republic, Vyacheslav Gayzer, and the republic's most senior officials had been arrested recently on suspicion of involvement in an organized crime. The programme mostly discussed suggestions from "experts" on how to curb corruption in Russia.

The programme led with a studio interview with Russian-backed head of Crimea, Sergey Aksenov (Serhiy Aksyonov). Aksenov appeared to welcome the Russian government's move to fight corruption by prosecuting governor Gayzer. "If people commit a crime then they should bear a responsibility for their actions... There should not be untouchables in the country and we need to support our leader in this fight," he said.

Talking about corruption in Crimea before it "joined" Russia, Aksenov confirmed that nearly 60 officials of the Crimean government had been sacked due to their "inclination" to commit corruption-related crimes. "All the schemes to collect money for the heads of the [Crimean] republic and the Ukrainian government had been disclosed," Aksenov said, adding that those corrupt officials were seeking to "improve the welfare of their superior officers" in Kiev. The Ukrainian citizens used to be a part of this system but not any more, he emphasized. Preventing officials from communicating with their "potential investors" is a solution to the problem, Aksenov said. "There should be a balanced system in the country which will allow to take into account the correct information and timely respond to it and to punish those who consciously provide wrong information," he continued.

Aksenov also said that President Vladimir Putin "keeps all processes under personal control" in Crimea. "I try not to disturb the head of the state since he has a thousand tasks more to do and more responsibilities but sometimes we try to solve such problems with the authorities," he noted, adding that Putin is "always supportive and always assesses a situation correctly and can always take the only right decision which helps to implement all the scheduled projects".

In the second part of the programme a group of "experts" discussed the ways to curb corruption.

Federation Council member Yevgeniy Tarlo condemned the law-enforcement agencies for their reluctance to combat corruption in Komi. "Although solving the problem of corruption in Russia will not solve all the problems in Russia," he said.

Vadim Solovyev, the head of the legal service of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), said that today nearly 50 per cent of federal revenue was looted through corruption channels. "When we used to receive money from oil and gas industries there was enough to loot from... But now there is less money in the budget," and that is the reason why the government is now seeking to solve the problem, he said.

State Duma member Dmitriy Nosov said he was happy that the situation has been resolved with a comprehensive approach and 16 officials, and not just the governor alone, were being prosecuted. Nosov expressed hope that honest elections was a main countermeasure to corruption in Russia.

The head of the Moscow Union of Journalists and editor in chief of mass-circulation Russian newspaper Moskovskiy Komsomolets, Pavel Gusev, said that freedom of speech might help fight corruption in Russia. He said that the media were being oppressed in all parts of Russia. "Local authorities in Komi prevented Moskovskiy Komsomolets newspaper from functioning and eventually its branch was shut down," he said.

Globalization Problems Institute director Mikhail Delyagin said that corruption was the basis of the country's political system, which has been thriving since the collapse of the Soviet regime. The system and its policy should be changed, he added.

General director of the Centre of Political Information Aleksey Mukhin favoured the idea of combating corruption systematically rather than randomly. He also suggested imposing an arrest of property on a corrupt politician and their close family members.

Former Komi Sports Minister Valentin Ivanov expressed his support for Gayzer describing him as a "decent person". Ivanov said that when Gayzer came to power he had to put up with the corrupt system, which had existed in Komi. "He was not the mastermind behind the corrupt schemes," he said, adding that Gayzer had been simply betrayed by some underground ruling circles.

The result of the vote announced at the end of the show was that 67 per cent of the audience believed that large-scale prosecution like the one in Komi will not stop corruption from growing in Russia.

 [return to Contents] 

 #13
Will Russia's air strikes against IS stir domestic radicals into activity?
By Lyudmila Alexandrova

MOSCOW, October 2. /TASS/. Both Western and Russian mass media are brimming with speculations over whether the just-started air operation in Syria will trigger a surge in terrorist activities by radical Islamists in Russia. Law enforcers have for many years waged struggle against them and quite a few terrorist attacks have been prevented, experts recall. However, it is most essential now to launch an ideological counter-campaign to give a proper rebuff to IS recruiters and prevent them from luring Russian citizens in their web.

The number of Russian citizens and people born in other CIS countries who have joined the IS terrorists is growing by leaps and bounds; some of them have already returned home. Fast pre-emptive measures must be taken right away, the chief of Russia's presidential staff Sergey Ivanov has said.

"Such Russians already number thousands, and not tens or hundreds," he said, adding that one of the main aims of the decision to use the Russian air and space force planes in Syria was to prevent the proliferation of IS ideology.

"Most of them are militants from the North Caucasus, who have openly vowed allegiance to the Islamic State, accepted this brand name and are prepared to work for it," the Internet portal Sobesednik.ru quotes research fellow Vasily Ivanov, of the Volga Regional Centre of Ethno-Religious Studies as saying.

"What sort of work they will be doing is clear to all - terrorist attacks." Apart from the North Caucasus the Islamists have quite a few supporters in the Khanty-Mansi autonomous area, in Tyumen in Moscow and the Moscow Region and in the Volga River area, of course. How many of them there are in reality can be seen even in the groups in the social networks supportive of the Islamic State. Before they numbered up to 20,000. These days such groups begin to be actively blocked as soon as the membership approaches 1,000. But new pages are created virtually in no time. "True, far from all members of these groups are ready to go and kill now. Statistics look as follows: in Tatarstan there are about 3,000 advocates of radical Islam, while only 100 of them will agree to take up arms."

Terrorist attacks are not the only threat. Rank-and-file IS followers do not stop at armed robberies in order to spend the seized cash on jihad. Some of such jihadi-minded highwaymen have been detained in the Ulyanovsk Region, on the Volga River, and near Moscow.

Senior research fellow at the Russian institute of strategic studies (RISI), Galina Khizriyeva, foresees no dramatic change in the Islamists' activities in Russia after the country has launched an air operation in Syria, because Russian secret services have long expected they would grow increasingly active.

"We've long accumulated enough experience for countering this sort of threats. We were prepared for this struggle a long time ago. The number of terrorist attacks will most probably stay at the previous level, or may even decline somewhat. In Dagestan, Chechnya and other republics of the North Caucasus systemic efforts are underway. Before, nothing of the sort was done in the Tyumen Region. Complacency prevailed in Tatarstan, too, but now all related agencies have been alerted there."

The situation will remain under control "if the recruiters are denied an opportunity to brainwash people," Khizriyeva said.

The struggle against radical Islam has never ceased, she recalled. "It has been afoot ever since the 1990s, when the Islamic State's ideology of establishing a world Caliphate came to the fore."

"First, the Islamic State became ingrained in people's minds. All of us were able to see the Islamic State mentality spread about the North Caucasus. Successful struggle with it was conducted, though, in the media space, as well, and there is certain experience of armed struggle against militant groups."

"They committed quite a few terrorist attacks in the past, and they will commit more in the future," Khizriyeva said. She has no illusions on that score.

"They were doing that all the time, in particular, when they began to be financed and when emissaries from various countries of the Persian Gulf were visiting the region."

Professor Leonid Syukiyaynen, of the Higher School of Economics, points to the need for ideological struggle with the Islamists and for desacralizing their ideas.

"Success in a military operation can be achieved within a matter of days, while banishing wrong ideas would take much more time than just three days. But sweeping measures will be capable of minimizing the negative effects."

In other words, he explained, ideological struggle and preventive efforts by law enforcers must go hand in hand. "Ever more converts join the Islamic State. Clearly, there are some other factors that attract them. Finance and compulsion do not always decide everything. People go there despite resistance by law-enforcers. It remains to be seen why."

 [return to Contents] 

 #14
RIA Novosti
October 3, 2015
Syria air strikes intended to "protect Russians from terrorism" - PM

Russia's air strikes against targets in Syria are intended to protect Russians from the threat of terrorism, Prime Minister Dmitriy Medvedev has said in an interview to be shown in a primetime slot on state television later on 3 October.

"We're protecting the people of Russia from the threat of terrorism, because it's better to do that abroad than to fight terrorism inside the country," Medvedev told official state television channel Rossiya 1, one of Russia's three main TV channels. He added that Russia, "unfortunately, has a very painful experience of fighting terrorism".

Responding to claims that Russia's actions in Syria were motivated by a desire to protect its economic interests there, Medvedev said that such suggestions amounted to "a splendid conspiracy story". Russia "has no global economic interests in Syria", he said. "Yes, we deliver weapons there, but we're not talking about fantastic amounts of money, it might be hundreds of millions of dollars, and our entire order book is worth 15bn dollars," he added. "In other words," he continued, "we don't have any preternatural economic interests there. So this talk... it's all conspiracy theories, or propaganda, which, naturally, is being used in these types of situations by a whole series of other states."

Commenting on the cost of the Syria operation, Medvedev said: "We have not inconsiderable defence costs, these costs are justified, given our country's current position, and also given the need to reformat our armed forces. These lines of expenditure are also quite sufficient for us to carry out individual military assignments, such as the assignment currently being carried out by Russia's armed forces in Syria."

In terms of how the conflict in Syria might be ended, Medvedev said that "the main thing is for everything to be resolved through negotiations, for the opposition and the authorities to be able to sit down around one table and for them to draw up proposals on Syria's future".

Excerpts from Medvedev's interview have already been broadcast on Rossiya 1's sister channel, the Rossiya 24 news channel, and reported by state news agencies RIA Novosti and TASS and the privately-owned Interfax news agency. Rossiya 1 will be broadcasting a fuller version of the interview during its Saturday news roundup at 2000 Moscow time, 1700 gmt, hosted by Sergey Brilev, Medvedev's interviewer.

 [return to Contents] 

 #15
Government.ru
October 3, 2015
Dmitry Medvedev's interview with Rossiya 1 TV Channel

Dmitry Medvedev gave an interview to Sergei Brilev, host of the Vesti v Subbotu (Saturday News) programme

Excerpts from Dmitry Medvedev's interview:

Sergei Brilev:  There is certainly the Syrian direction. I would like to ask you about the economic underpinnings of the unfolding events. Because when Russian air force strikes against Syrian targets were launched, many ideas and conjectures emerged as to what lies behind it. One such theory is that Russia is defending not just international law and Syria's secular regime but also its own weapons market. Another hypothesis I read recently says that if Russia does not protect Assad, then Qatar will be able to lay a gas pipeline to the Mediterranean and overshadow Russian gas supplies to Europe. In part, Russia is conducting the operation for those reasons.

Dmitry Medvedev: A wonderful conspiracy theory.

Sergei Brilev: That's right, a conspiracy theory. But is there an economic motive behind Russian air force strikes against terrorist targets in Syria?

Dmitry Medvedev: The President gave a comprehensive account of the reasons for this decision. He explained what we are defending in this case. And it is us that we are defending: we are defending the people of Russia from the terrorist threat. Because it is better to do it abroad than to fight terrorism inside the country. That is why I can neither add nor take away anything from his account; it is exhaustive and absolutely accurate. Regarding the economic aspect, you see, we have economic relations with Syria and with Arab countries, but, how could I put it plainly... We have no crucial economic interests in Syria. We do sell weapons there but the amounts involved are not huge; several hundred million US dollars, maybe. And I am sure you know that the total portfolio of our [defence] contracts amounts to 15 billion US dollars. In other words, we do not have any extraordinary economic interests. This is why all that talk about keeping someone away from somewhere, which pipeline to annihilate, who to back where...

Sergei Brilev: Oh yes, Russian pilots are an armed unit of Russian oil and gas companies...

Dmitry Medvedev: Yes, all that is just a conspiracy theory or propaganda that is naturally being used in such a situation by a number of countries.

Sergei Brilev: The last thing I want to ask you. Just before the interview somebody asked me: You will probably have a question about Syria and additional expenses for the Russian budget? So, are there any extra expenses in Syria now?

Dmitry Medvedev: The Army of the Russian Federation has been properly provided for in the past years. Which makes it possible, as you know, to pay servicemen good salaries and, on the other hand, to re-arm the army. Our military-industrial complex is doing fairly well now, and our army is becoming ever more up-to-date. Those budget expenses, those items in the budget will suffice for special military missions, including the mission which is currently underway in Syria.

Sergei Brilev: Thank you, Mr Medvedev.

 [return to Contents] 

 #16
Valdai Discussion Club
http://valdaiclub.com
October 2, 2015
Russia is Returning to the Middle East
By Georgy Mirsky, Professor, Institute of World Economy and International Relation.

The Western media write that Vladimir Putin has surprised the world and made everyone wonder about his plans. What has he achieved by doing this?

First, he had to save Bashar al-Assad, whose government was becoming weaker every day. If Russia allowed him to fall, it would have been four years wasted on supporting a loser. It was unacceptable. It's clear now that al-Assad is safe, for the time being, and that Putin has not given up his partner. Whatever happens next, ISIS will not occupy Damascus, as Russia will supply al-Assad with everything he needs to defend his capital.

Second, ISIS has been denounced as a global threat, and now a leader has told the world that we need to join forces to defeat a common enemy. Who can reject such an offer? The West can, because it wants al-Assad to go, but history will take its revenge on those who missed the chance. The blame won't be on Russia.

Third, ISIS poses a threat to Russia in the long term. Hence, Russians will most likely support the proposal to fight it now. Of course, Russians won't approve of a land operation with its inevitable casualties - who would agree to send our boys to die helping some Arabs fight some other Arabs? But an air operation is quite acceptable.

The Arab countries see that Russia has returned to the Middle East after leaving it in the early 1970s. As for the world in general, it knows that disregarding Russia when dealing with serious international issues, or treating it as an outcast over Crimea and Donbass is a naïve and impractical policy.

The Syrian deadlock is unlikely to be resolved. Russia will not send its land forces in, and air strikes cannot win the war. The only positive result so far is that Putin has guaranteed the safety of the so-called Alawite bastion, that is, the territory al-Assad controls, and so has saved his government. But Putin also said that Russia would only deliver air strikes during a Syrian army offensive. Can al-Assad's army launch an offensive to liberate the ISIS-held part of Syria? This is a big question.

Moreover, the Syrian army is fighting not only and not so much ISIS but also other Islamic groups plus its own moderate opposition, which is supported by the West, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. If Russian aircraft start bombing their positions, Moscow will have more problems with the West and the Arab countries.

Next, there are almost always civilian casualties in air strikes delivered at terrorists, which will damage Russia's image in the Muslim world. In a worst-case scenario, ISIS will not be defeated, and so the only result for Moscow would be paying a very high price for saving al-Assad.

 [return to Contents] 

 #17
www.rt.com
October 5, 2015
Moscow ready for contact with Free Syrian Army - FM Lavrov

Russia is ready for contact with the Free Syrian Army, but it is now a 'phantom,' Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said at a news conference following talks with his Laos counterpart in Moscow.

"They tell us about the Free Syrian Army, but where is it?  It remains a phantom group, nothing is known about it," Lavrov said, adding that Russia has sent a request about the group to the United States.

"We will be ready to establish contact with it if it's really a capable military group of patriotic opposition consisting of Syrians. We do not hide this fact. But this structure is already a phantom. I have asked [State Secretary] John Kerry to provide us with information about the whereabouts of this Free Syrian Army and who commands it," said Lavrov.

"So far no one has told us where and how this Free Syrian Army operates or where and how other units of the so-called moderate opposition operate."

The minister also said that Moscow has asked the United States for details on the army.

Russia's top diplomat also said he knows of no US intentions to undermine Moscow's efforts in Syria.

"I haven't heard about the plans to undermine our work in Syria from the US side or from anyone else," Lavrov said at the news conference. He added that Russia had established contacts with the US on the Syrian situation at presidential level, as well as at defense and foreign minister levels.

Sergey Lavrov also warned of any attempts to topple Syrian President Assad.

"The overthrow of the ruling regime in Damascus would be a most violent breach of the UN Security Council resolution, which approved the Geneva communiqué of June 30, 2012. This communiqué sets out only peaceful political and diplomatic means to solve the Syrian crisis," he said. "That's why recent calls from several capitals for the conflict to be solved militarily are a breach of international law," the Russian foreign minister added.

 [return to Contents] 

 #18
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
October 3, 2015
The Kremlin's Syria gamble is risky, but could have a big payoff
Putin's decision to bomb ISIS in Syria is a calculated risk designed to break Russia's isolation from the West and prevent radical Islamic elements from further destabilizing the North Caucasus and Central Asia.
By Andrei Tsygankov
Andrei Tsygankov is Professor at the Departments of Political Science and International Relations at San Francisco State University. He teaches Russian/post-Soviet, comparative politics, and international politics. He is a graduate of Moscow State University (Candidate of Sciences, 1991) and University of Southern California (Ph.D., 2000). He has published widely in western and Russian academia and is the author of Russia's Foreign Policy: Change and Continuity in National Identity (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006) and Whose World Order? Russia 's Perception of American Ideas after the Cold War (University of Notre Dame Press , 2004), along with many articles.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's recent meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama and Russia's subsequent military intervention in Syria mark the Kremlin's new attempt to normalize relations with the West. For various international and domestic reasons, Putin wants to end the period of confrontation that began with the failure of the "reset" strategy and culminated with the devastating Ukrainian conflict.

Putin's long-standing objective has been to establish Russia as a nation that acts in accordance with formal and informal norms of traditional great power politics and is recognized as a major state by the outside world.

The norms of traditional power politics include a general agreement on major threats to the international system, multilateral diplomacy to solve disputes, and respect for both sovereignty and major powers' spheres of influence. Putin firmly believes that the West has violated these norms by breaking all existing rules and principles.

The problem is that he sincerely believes that the United States has introduced a radically different interpretation of major global threats, abandoned multilateral diplomacy, and violated principles of sovereignty and spheres of influence by intervening in Yugoslavia and Iraq and then launching a global policy of regime change.

In this climate, Putin could not cooperate with the West on Syrian President Bashir Assad's departure even though he earlier signaled that keeping Assad in power was not his number one priority. His cooperation proposal had to be advanced from the position of an independent, equally important power, not one prepared to serve as a junior member of the U.S.-centered coalition.

In Putin's mind, now is the time to repair the broken Russia-West relationship. The terrorist threat is again on the rise. However, U.S. attempts to make a difference by fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) and trying to unseat Assad simultaneously produced no results.

The EU is undergoing a major crisis that has recently resulted in a major influx of refugees from Syria. The Ukraine conflict, though still in a bitter struggle, is on track to move away from military confrontation - largely due to the willingness of the European powers and the United States to prevent Kiev from using force in eastern Ukraine and assist Russia in looking for a compromise settlement.

Domestically, Russia is in a deep crisis of its economic and political model exacerbated by the decline of oil prices, Western sanctions, and China's inability to replace the West a source of investment and technology.

There is a chance that Putin's efforts may work. By inviting the West to join the Russia-initiated anti-ISIS coalition, Putin not only tries to break out of Western isolation, but also moves Russia to the very center of the world's political attention.

Some European leaders have cautiously endorsed Russia's intervention in Syria provided that Putin concentrates on fighting ISIS, not the opposition to Assad. The White House is willing to postpone resolution of Assad's departure in the interests of defeating ISIS. And the Russian and American military are in the process of coordinating their efforts in Syria.

Although Putin's coalition in the Middle East remains largely Shia-based, a number of Arab and Middle Eastern leaders have indicated their tacit provisional support. At a minimum, Egypt, Israel, and Jordan will be benevolent observers by not creating any serious obstacles to Russia. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the Gulf States will remain critical of Putin's intervention, but may be restrained by the benevolent attitude of the U.S. toward Russia's actions and their own Shia minorities.

Despite these odds, Putin's U-turn is risky and faces a number of potentially serious obstacles - both abroad and at home. In the West, Putin is widely despised and mistrusted - partly due to his perceived efforts to undermine the West globally and attempts to centralize power on an anti-Western platform at home.

Putin himself is of a very low opinion of Western leaders and their self-centered actions may yet again turn him against them in Eurasia, Europe, or the Middle East. In the Middle East, the anti-ISIS coalition runs a risk of remaining Shia-based which may mean following the agenda of keeping Assad in power, strengthening Iran, and undermining Israel.

In the latter case, the West will quickly withdraw its tentative support and Putin will become globally isolated. Importantly, China and other non-Western powers are yet to clearly indicate where they stand on the issue.

Other serious risks are domestic. Given Russia's recent problems in the Northern Caucasus, the Kremlin has little choice of not fighting jihadist terrorism abroad. Staying on the offensive is designed as a way to prevent radicalization of Russia's own Muslims and the destabilization of Central Asia.

However, active military involvement in a Muslim region may instead contribute to such radicalization and destabilization. Russia's regional experts have long warned of a potential for such destabilization, should the Kremlin overplay its hand.

The latter may also undermine Putin's support at home. Russians remain skeptical of the military intervention in Syria with only 14 percent supportive of it. Although Putin promised no "boots on the ground," the trauma of the Soviet war in Afghanistan remains unhealed and will play against the involvement in the Middle East.

In the meantime, war has its own logic. Russians may experience casualties, or inadvertently hit civilian targets, or feel additional need to reinforce Assad's army. These developments may push the intervention in a very unfortunate direction by turning it from a limited and effective operation into a prolonged war.

Putin has taken a risk before when, following the events of 9/11, he went against the anti-Western elites and skeptical public at home by extending his support for the United States' "war on terror." Today's risk is arguably even greater given the high degree of radicalization in the Middle East, Russia's crippled economy and the nation's damaged international reputation.

The stakes and potential payoffs, however, are very considerable. If Russia and the West will learn to coordinate their actions in Syria, they may jointly strike a major blow to ISIS, and then emerge as important participants in defining the political future of the region.

At that point, a compromise solution on Syria's future government may be found. The issue of Ukraine and Russia's security in Europe and Eurasia may be revisited with a greater sensitivity to Russia's values and interests.

As an avid student of history, Putin knows that Russia has been always more effective in meeting its core objectives when these are not obstructed by the West.

 [return to Contents] 

 #19
The Guardian (UK)
October 4, 2015
In Assad's heartland, villagers see Russians as saviours
By Lindsey Hilsum
Lindsey Hilsum is international editor for Channel 4 News

The village of Jebleh is a good place for plane-spotters. Last week dozens of Russian fighter-bombers - Sukhoi Su-24s, 25s and 35s - took off from the Bassel al-Assad airbase less than a mile away, roaring through the cloudy autumn skies towards their targets in Syria's north and east.

Tupolev transport planes have been landing all week, bringing in men and equipment. Fifty miles to the south, at the port town of Tartus, Russian ships dock, loaded with ammunition and other supplies for Russia's new campaign to drive back the enemies of the Syrian government. Local people say the coast road is often closed at night so that weaponry can be transported from the Russian naval base to the airport. They have no complaints - no one cares that the Russians said they would target Islamic State (Isis) and then hit other rebel groups. In this area, all enemies of the government are regarded as terrorists.

The military airfield used by the Russians is named after President Bashar al-Assad's older brother. Their father, the late President Hafez al-Assad, tipped Bassel as his successor, but his eldest son died in a car crash, leaving Bashar next in line. Hafez and Bassel are buried in a giant, black marble-floored mausoleum a few miles further up the hill.

Portraits of Hafez, seen in this part of Syria as the patriarch not just of the family but of the country, are everywhere in the coastal regions of Latakia and Tartus, the heartland of the regime's support, and of their minority Alawite sect.

Here, people see the Russians as loyal friends who have supported the Assad dynasty for 45 years and who have finally, after four years of civil war, come to their aid.

"We reached the point where the Americans and the Saudis were against us, as well as the rebels, so we asked for help to bring an end to this war," said Munzer Abdullah, a civil servant, in Jebleh. "Our army and our high command are tired so we need help from the Russians to get rid of our enemies."
Advertisement

The war has not yet come to Tartus and Latakia, but the region's young men have gone to the war. The village of El Naguib, in the hills above Tartus, has lost 147 soldiers, while 52 have been seriously wounded. One evening last week families of the martyrs, as the dead are known, gathered to commemorate those who sacrificed their lives for the causes of nation and leader. All are loyal but some feel they have been asked for too much.

Zaina Tayan, who estimated her age at about 70, begged visiting journalists for help, saying that two of her sons had been killed. "Less than three months later, they took my last boy for the army. Can you get them to discharge him?" she wept. "We are all serving the country and the president but I would like my son back."

In July, Assad admitted that the army was suffering "a shortfall in human capacity". The military has lifted the ban on drafting men from families that have lost a son. Many of the young men fleeing Syria for Europe are escaping military service. Tours of duty are frequently extended.

"I was already at the end of my service but they didn't discharge me," said 25-year-old Khalil Fahim Yusuf, still in uniform and nursing his arm in a sling. "I was hit in the face by an explosion, but after I recovered they sent me back to my unit. Then I was wounded in the hand so they eventually sent me back to my village." Finally discharged, he now receives 45% of his military salary.

The Russians are the heroes of the hour. People greet the few foreigners who visit with a cheerful Russian "Dobry den!" and shout out their enthusiasm for President Putin, who they believe will deliver them from terrorism. Many think the west is supporting Isis, which they call by its Arabic acronym, Daesh.

"We can see that the Russians are determined to defeat Daesh and the terrorists, whereas by contrast the Americans and their coalition don't seem to have the same determination," said Safwan al-Saada, the governor of Tartus. "In the last year they said they were fighting terrorism, but Daesh grew stronger, not weaker, so we can say their coalition is not serious."

The Russian air campaign could dislodge the rebels around Hama and Homs who had begun to threaten the coastal belt. But the problem will be taking and holding territory. Syrian ground troops are boosted by al-Quds forces from Iran and Hezbollah from Lebanon, but Saudi Arabia has pledged to send more equipment to their opponents, increasing the chances of a widening and ever bloodier war.

In Latakia and Tartus, shielded from the reality of a conflict that has torn Syria apart, people have little idea of the hatred for Assad felt by those who live under the indiscriminate barrel bombs that the regime drops on rebel-held areas of Damascus, Idlib and Aleppo.

Craning their necks to see the fighter jets streaking overhead, they dare to hope against all evidence that the Russian air campaign marks the beginning of the end of the war.

 [return to Contents] 

 #20
Moscow Times/Chatham House
October 5, 2015
Russia and the West Must Compromise on Syria
By James Nixey and Xenia Wickett
James Nixey is head of the Russia and Eurasia Program at Chatham House. Xenia Wickett is the project director of the U.S. Project at Chatham House.

With 200,000 dead and 7 million displaced in Syria, with refugees flooding into Europe, it was hard to imagine that the situation in the country could get much worse. However, as Russian forces bombed rebel-held areas around Homs, the situation appears to be escalating into a proxy war between major powers. There is a scenario that could be win-win for all. But unless priorities can be reordered on both sides, we are only likely to see more destruction.

Every time Russia catches the attention of the global media, the question is always "what does Russia really want?" But the answer is always the same: recognition, respect, influence.

Only the finer detail of the motivations changes from misdemeanor to misdemeanor and from conflict to conflict.

In the case of Syria, Russia's specific intentions are to bask in the "glory" of spearheading a supposedly anti-Islamic State international coalition; a deflection of attention away from its prosecution of the war in Ukraine; the prevention of Western-enforced regime change in Damascus and commensurate retention of a useful patron-client relationship; and finally, relatively low down in the pecking order, acting on the realization that it ought to "do something" about the spread of fundamentalist forms of Islam.

One can quibble with the rankings above, but it is impossible to argue that Russia's motives are pure. Yet it is only if one understands this peculiar sense of priority that Russia's actions make sense.

After all, why, "logically," would a country buckling under the strain of a crippled economy and which has itself been a recent victim of extremist terror, open up a second front of military operations far away from its traditional theater of military engagement in the former Soviet space? And what else, other than ulterior motives to those officially stated, could explain Russia's targeting of Syrian groupings other than Islamic State strongholds?

The bottom line is that for the Kremlin, it is the perceived threat from (and supremacy of) the West, not the genuine threat from the Islamic State, that is the number one concern.

Until that perverse calculation changes - and it is unlikely to under the present leadership - meaningful cooperation between Russia and the West in the Middle East is all but impossible.

Meanwhile, Western interests are, in many respects, no less self-interested. The West's paramount concern is, as it always is, for its own people and their security. With regard to Syria, this translates into a priority of destroying the Islamic State and other terrorist groups that would take the battle to the West.

As we saw in the first few years of the Syria crisis, if the insecurity can be contained within the region, it is terrible, but manageable.

Unfortunately, as they have now discovered, the insecurity cannot be contained in Syria or even its surrounding neighbors. This leads to the second Western priority. The West would like to create a more stable environment within Syria such that the unrest and insecurity and the consequence of huge refugee flows stop.

Finally, the West's third objective in Syria, over the longer term, is a democratic nation. This is not just a moral statement by the West, but a very real analysis that democracies are more stable and have better development paths than authoritarian governments.

The West does care about the lives of Syrians - this should not be discounted - and the West is willing to put some resources behind this. But unfortunately, when measured against self-interest, it inevitably, not least for domestic political reasons, comes behind.

Although Russia and the West have overlapping interests in Syria and the broader Middle East, their priorities are different. As long as this remains the case it is unlikely that progress will be made.

There could be a win-win scenario for all parties if the primary goal were to bring peace to Syria through the creation of a new coalition government (including representatives from the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad as well as the rebels).

For this the West and Russia would need to work together - the West bringing rebels to the table and Russia, Assad.

If this could be achieved (a big ask even if everyone were to collaborate effectively), it might have knock-on effects of weakening the Islamic State, pushing back international terrorism and lowering refugee flows. With Russia playing a central role, Moscow would also achieve its objective of being at the top table, and being seen to be by its domestic as well as an international audience.

It would finally have the benefit for all parties of being more likely to succeed in achieving any of these objectives - opposing one another is likely to ensure that all fails. Unfortunately, at the moment, that is the path chosen.

The question to ask today is how can the calculations of one or another party (or both) be changed - from the clear failure that will occur if the current strategies continue, to the chance of success if a new collaborative strategy is pursued.

This comment originally appeared on Chatham House's website

 [return to Contents] 

 #21
The Independent (UK)
October 5, 2015
Syria crisis: Let's welcome Russia's entry into this war
In the second part of his series, our respected commentator says Vladimir Putin's military intervention could hasten the war's end
By Patrick Cockburn
Patrick Cockburn is an Irish journalist who has been a Middle East correspondent since 1979 for the Financial Times and, presently, The Independent. He was awarded Foreign Commentator of the Year at the 2013 Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards.

Russia's military intervention in Syria, although further internationalising the conflict, does however present opportunities, as well as complications. There are no simple solutions to this terrible war which has destroyed Syria. Out of a population of 22 million, four million Syrians are refugees abroad and seven million have been displaced inside the country.

I was recently in Kurdish-controlled north-east Syria, where the bomb-shattered ruins of Kobani look like pictures of Stalingrad after the battle. But equally significant is the fact that even in towns and villages from which Islamic State (Isis) has been driven, and where houses are largely undamaged, people are too terrified to return.

Syrians are right to be afraid. They know that what happens on the battlefield today may be reversed tomorrow. At this stage, the war is a toxic mix of half a dozen different confrontations and crises, involving players inside and outside the country. Intertwined struggles for power pit Assad against a popular uprising, Shia against Sunni, Kurd against Arab and Turk, Isis against everybody, Iran against Saudi Arabia and Russia against the US.

One of the many problems in ending, or even de-escalating these crises, is that these self-interested players are strong enough to fight their own corners, but too weak to ever checkmate their opponents. This is why the involvement of Moscow could have a positive impact: Russia is at least a heavy hitter, capable of shaping events by its own actions and strongly influencing the behaviour of its allies and proxies.

Barack Obama said at a news conference after the Russian airstrikes that "we're not going to make Syria into a proxy war between the United States and Russia". But the US-Soviet Cold War, and the global competition that went with it, had benefits for much of the world. Both superpowers sought to support their own allies and prevent political vacuums from developing which its opposite number might exploit. Crises did not fester in the way they do today, and Russians and Americans could see the dangers of them slipping wholly out of control and provoking an international crisis.  

This global balance of power ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and for the Middle East and North Africa this has meant more wars. There are currently eight armed conflicts raging, including Pakistan and Nigeria (the figure jumps to nine if one includes South Sudan, where the renewal of fighting since 2013 has produced 1.5 million displaced people). Without a superpower rival, the US, and its allies such as the UK and France, largely ceased to care what happened in these places and, when they did intervene, as in Libya and Iraq, it was to instal feeble client regimes. The enthusiasm which David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy showed in overthrowing Muammar Gaddafi contrasts with their indifference as Libya collapsed into criminalised anarchy.

Overall, it is better to have Russia fully involved in Syria than on the sidelines so it has the opportunity to help regain control over a situation that long ago spun out of control. It can keep Assad in power in Damascus, but the power to do so means that it can also modify his behaviour and force movement towards reducing violence, local ceasefires and sharing power regionally. It was always absurd for Washington and its allies to frame the problem as one of "Assad in or Assad out", when an end to the Assad leadership would lead either to the disintegration of the Syrian state, as in Iraq and Libya, or would have limited impact because participants in the Syrian civil war would simply go on fighting.

The intervention of Russia could be positive in de-escalating the war in Syria and Iraq, but reading the text of President Obama's press conference suggests only limited understanding of what is happening there. Syria is only one part of a general struggle between Shia and Sunni and, though there are far more Sunni than Shia in the world, this is not so in this region. Between Afghanistan and the Mediterranean - Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon - there are more than 100 million Shia and 30 million Sunni.

In political terms, the disparity is even greater because the militarily powerful Kurdish minorities in Iraq and Syria, though Sunni by religion, are more frightened of Isis and extreme Sunni Arab jihadis than they are of anybody else. Western powers thought Assad would go in 2011-12, and when he didn't they failed to devise a new policy.

Peace cannot return to Syria and Iraq until Isis is defeated, and this is not happening. The US-led air campaign against Isis has not worked. The Islamic militants have not collapsed under the weight of airstrikes, but, across the Syrian and Iraqi Kurdish regions, either hold the same ground or are expanding. There is something ludicrous about the debate in Britain about whether or not to join in an air campaign in Syria without mentioning that it has so far demonstrably failed in its objectives.

Going into combat against Isis means supporting, or at least talking to, those powers already fighting the extreme jihadis. For instance, the most effective opponents of Isis in Syria are the Syrian Kurds. They want to advance west across the Euphrates and capture Isis's last border crossing with Turkey at Jarabulus. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister of Turkey, said last week he would never accept such a "fait accompli", but it remains unclear if the US will give air support to its Kurdish allies and put pressure on Turkey not to invade northern Syria.

The Russians and Iranians should be integrated as far as possible into any talks about the future of Syria. But there should be an immediate price for this: such as insisting that if Assad is going to stay for the moment, then his forces must stop shelling and using barrel bombs against opposition-held civilian  areas. Local ceasefires have usually only happened in Syria because one side or the other is on the edge of defeat. But wider ceasefires could be arranged if local proxies are pressured by their outside backers.  

All these things more or less have to happen together. A problem is that the crises listed above have cross-infected each other. Regional powers such as Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies do have a strong measure of control over their local proxies. But these regional actors, caring nothing for the destruction of Syria and still dreaming of final victory, will only be forced into compromises by Washington and Moscow.

Russia and America need to be more fully engaged in Syria because, if they are not, the vacuum they leave will be filled by these regional powers with their sectarian and ethnic agendas. Britain could play a positive role here, but only if it stops taking part in "let's pretend" games whereby hard-line jihadis are re-labelled as moderates.  As with the Northern Ireland peace negotiations in the 1990s, an end to the wars in Syria depends on persuading those involved that they cannot win, but they can survive and get part of what they want. The US and Russia may not be the superpowers they once were, but only they have the power to pursue such agreements.

 [return to Contents] 

 #22
http://readrussia.com
October 5, 2015
Russia Isn't Going to Take Over the Middle East
By Mark Adomanis

I've written before in numerous different publications about my view that Russia's increasingly aggressive and interventionist foreign policy is ill-advised and far more likely than not to end in disaster.

Sometimes, of course, force is justified. It should always be a last resort, but blowing things up is sometimes a necessary part of statecraft. That's just the fallen world in which we live.

But Russia has clearly lowered the bar for the use of force to a much lower level, taking risks that in the not too distant past would have seemed reckless bordering on suicidal. For Americans getting involved in a foreign war is "normal," but Russia's air campaign in Syria really is unprecedented in its post-Soviet history.

Since Russian planes took to the skies over Syria, Putin has gotten a surprisingly large amount of credit for his "decisiveness" and "leadership," particularly from a lot of Western hawks who claim to loathe him. Life is never short of its entertaining little ironies, and over the past week the Weekly Standard The Washington Free Beacon and other conservative outlets has been even more lavish in their praise of Russia's intervention than Sputnik or RT.

It's still in its infancy (because we don't yet know how Russia's air campaign in Syria will actually play out) but a narrative is starting to form on the neoconservative right which says that, by virtue of his intervention to support Bashar Al-Assad, Putin has returned Russia to a position of leadership throughout the broader Middle East while also inflicting significant damage on a dithering and diffident United States. Taken to its extreme, this narrative suggests that Putin is currently on the road to comprehensively defeating NATO.

If this all sounds like a bit much, it's because it is. Despite its appeal to liberal internationalists and neoconservatives alike (Obama's administration is full of people like Samantha Power and Cynthia Rice who built their careers advocating for "good" wars) military force  an extremely blunt instrument, one that is, in the modern world, almost always ineffective at achieving desired political ends.

In case we somehow forgot, both Afghanistan and Iraq provide glaring lessons in the limited, almost non-existent, efficacy of military force in the broader Middle East. Despite the deployment of hundreds of thousands of combat troops and tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of airstrikes, actions which have cumulatively cost American taxpayers trillions of dollars, the United States was able to achieve almost none of its self-declared goals.  

Russia's intervention, of course, is orders of magnitude smaller than the American deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed Russia's supposedly "bold" intervention in Syria is orders of magnitude smaller than America's intervention in... Syria! As noted by Micah Zenko, a rare voice of moderation and restraint in the hyper-aggressive world of security studies, the Russians currently have roughly 30 planes carrying out airstrikes in the Syria while the US and its allies have about 400. That is not a typo: Russia's deployment is less than 10% the size of the US-led coalition's.

Consider another data point about the comparative size of Russian and Western interventions in Syria. On the first full day of its campaign, Russia carried out eight airstrikes on Syrian targets. As this piece was being written, the number of strikes had already reached somewhere between 40 and 50. Meanwhile, in the twelve months since its air campaign began, the United States has already carried out more than 2,400 airstrikes, an overage of roughly 6 a day.* With the dual assumptions that America's campaign continues at its prior pace and that the Russians carry out an average of 20 strikes a day (which should be noted is an extremely generous estimate given the condition of their planes and the state of their logistical network) it would take around six months for the number of Russian strikes to surpass the number of American.

And, as seems clear, America's air campaign has yielded it almost no practical on-the-ground influence. Bombing stuff from the air is comparatively easy. Building new political institutions, or even building alliances with existing institutions, is incredibly difficult. There is no reason to think that dropping bombs will magically improve Russia's practical influence over a Syrian polity that has dissolved into a Hobbesian struggle of all against all.

Objectively speaking, then, Russia's military campaign is modest not only in comparison to what would actually be necessary to "save Assad" but to the United States' own actions in Syria.

This doesn't make Russia's actions "good," it simply means we ought to all take a collective breath when trying to think about their actual impact. Russian airstrikes aren't a "game-changer," and they won't fundamentally alter the course of the Syrian civil war. All that they will do is marginally worsen an already catastrophic situation and lead to further needless suffering on the part of a beleaguered Syrian populace.

Nothing that Russia is doing, and nothing that it is capable of doing, alter the fundamental balance of power in the region.

*there has been quite a lot of criticism in certain circles over the slow pace of strikes and overly-strict rules of engagement. Should it choose to do so, the US could massively increase the number of strikes it is carrying out in Syria at virtually a moment's notice

 [return to Contents] 

 #23
The American Conservative
www.theamericanconservative.com
September 30, 2015
The Logic of Putin's Syria Campaign
Russia's president cuts through the Beltway groupthink in explaining his county's interests.
By Leon Hadar
Leon Hadar, senior analyst at Wikistrat, a geostrategic consulting group, is the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East.

When Vladimir Putin sat down with Charlie Rose of "60 Minutes" last Sunday, there was something refreshing about the Russian president's encounter with the American media. A world leader discussed the Middle East by using terms of Realpolitik such as the "national interest." There was little if any of the Wilsonian globaloney favored by members of our foreign policy establishment-Democrats and Republicans alike-who seem to share the belief that the only thing missing from the region today is American "leadership."

As Rose recycled all the clichés of the editorial page of the Washington Post (which he even quoted during the interview), he inquired whether the Russian leader agreed that the lack of U.S. leadership in the Middle East had helped create a "strategic vacuum," one that Moscow was now trying to fill. Putin replied by recalling that the last time the United States had tried to project its leadership in the region-by ousting Saddam Hussein and "liberating" Iraq (he apropos also mentioned Gaddafi and Libya)-things had not turned out so well. It did indeed create a huge void, which in addition to strengthening Iran, ignited a bloody civil war that spilled over into Syria, destabilizing the entire region.

Meanwhile, on other channels and programs, you can watch critics of President Obama's Syria policy (including presidential candidate Marco Rubio) bemoan Russia's involvement there. These parrots on speed go on and on about how he should have retained more U.S. troops in Iraq and provided assistance to "moderate" Syrian insurgents. The subtext of all these arguments-as well as the suggestion that Obama could have negotiated a "better" Iran nuclear deal-is that all these proposed policies would not have worked, and that the United States would have eventually been forced to deploy a large number of ground troops to fight the Islamic State in Iraq, topple Assad in Syria, and end Iran's nuclear program.

And as everyone knows, the majority of Americans do not want the United States to be drawn into a new war in the Middle East. The public does not care about achieving goals that do not seem to be in line with the nation's strategic and economic interests.

There is also an element of retro-strategic thinking, if not nostalgia for the Cold War, in the spectacle of American politicians and pundits warning us of Russian expansion into the Middle East. Last time I stepped back to look at world events, it seemed clear that we do not have a bi-polar international system, and that Moscow is not trying to export communism into the Middle East or harm the interests of the United States and its regional allies. In fact, since the end of the Cold War, it is the United States that has been trying to export its universal ideology of liberal democracy into the Middle East and oust regimes that used to be clients of the Soviet Union, including in Iraq and Syria.

When Rose pestered Putin repeatedly about why he was providing support to the ruthless and bloody Baath regime in Damascus, the Russian President reminded viewers that once upon a time, Washington provided assistance to the ruthless and bloody Baath regime in Baghdad. That was when Saddam Hussein was fighting the Ayatollahs in Iran (he could have mentioned our alliance with the Saudis who are planning to "crucify" a young human rights activist in the coming days).

You do not have to be a great strategic thinker-or an ardent Russophile who wants to recreate the Byzantine Empire-to agree that Russia has legitimate national security interests to protect in the Middle East. After all, the Greater Middle East is in Russia's strategic backyard and the current chaos in the region could spill over in the form of growing radicalization of its Muslim population. There is also the prospect of a regional war that could affect not only Russian interests, but also those of Germany and other European countries.

It should be noted that Russia is also helping the members of the Alawite minority in Syria, as well the endangered Christian communities under threat of being annihilated by the forces of the murderous Islamic State. Isn't that also a U.S. interest?

Unlike during the Cold War, relations between Moscow and U.S. allies in the Middle East-Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel-are quite friendly. Putin was the first world leader that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has met since his re-election early this year.

Many American policymakers have been programmed under the influence of the great ideological struggles of the 20th century, and view the international system as an arena where Good (the United States) fights Evil. So it is difficult for them to accept that the pursuit of U.S. interests sometimes requires partnering with those who do not share our dreams and aspirations. Not so long ago, we allied with Stalin to fight Hitler, and then partnered with Mao and Jihadists in Afghanistan to battle the Soviets. From that perspective, Putin does not look like Satan Incarnate.

Moreover, the notion that Russian military intervention in Syria amounts to a great win for the Russians (and therefore a big loss for Americans), assumes that Putin might actually succeed there. Yet the idea that Russia will bring stability, peace and prosperity to Syria-and turn average Syrians into Russia's best friends-runs contrary to the historic American and Soviet experience in the Middle East. The American misadventure in Iraq and attempt to remake the region, not to mention the close to half-century Israeli rule over the Palestinians, suggest that no one is going to come out as a winner from Russia's new intervention in the Levant.

 [return to Contents] 

 #24
Sputnik
October 5, 2015
Russia vs ISIL: Timeline of What the Media Got Right and Wrong
[Graphics here http://sputniknews.com/world/20151005/1028050622/russia-syria-military-operation-reports.html]

The ongoing Russian Aerospace Forces operation in Syria was preceded by a spate of related international media reports; however, some reports held absolutely no water.

Russia had been preparing its current air campaign in Syria for a long time, according to international media reports. However, these stories sometimes cited unverified information on the matter.

On August 16, the Turkish web portal BGN News reported on the alleged deployment of six Russian supersonic MiG-31 interceptor aircraft outside the Syrian capital Damascus. The information was never independently confirmed, but some experts insist that the deployment did take place for reconnaissance purposes ahead of a major air operation. In this regard, it would be irrelevant to suggest that the planes were MiG-31s, experts added.

August 31 saw a report by the new website Ynetnews, which touched upon the forthcoming Russian military operation against the Islamic State in Syria. According to Ynetnews, Russia's air campaign was allegedly in agreement with Washington and Tel Aviv. At the time, an Israeli military source told the Russian news website Lenta.ru that Russia was increasing its presence in Syria, and that Russia's air operations were based there. A month later, it becomes clear that the situation back then was in line with the Ynetnews report, Lenta.ru said.

On September 2, an increasing number of Ynetnews reposts prompted the Russian President's spokesman Dmitry Peskov to urge against believing in rumors about the involvement of Russian aircraft in fighting the Islamic State. The statement, it must be mentioned, was fully in line with the situation at the time.

Four days later, it was reported that the Russian civilian ferry Alexander Tkachenko had been spotted in the Black Sea bays, loaded with motor vehicles and fuel tanks. On the same day, Russia launched large-scale combat readiness drills in the country's Central Military District, which lasted until September 12. The exercises were followed with the Center-2015 strategic war games, which wrapped up on September 20. Later on, the Russian newspaper Kommersant quoted some sources as claiming that the Russian aircraft were covertly delivered to Syria under the guise of these drills.

On September 9, American and British media cited sources in the Pentagon as saying that Russia planned to build a new air base in Syria, near the port of Latakia. The sources declined to elaborate.  Later that day, the Russian Foreign Ministry said that Moscow has never made any secret of its military-technical cooperation with Damascus, including the supply of arms to Syria. The ministry pledged to consider the issue of Russia taking "additional measures in favor of increasing support for the fight against terrorism."

On September 18, the Western media published an array of photos of the Syrian airfield Hmeimim, which showed four Russian fighter jets Su-30SM deployed there. It was reported that early the following month, aircraft were to be delivered to Latakia on board an Il-76 military transport jet via the airspace of Azerbaijan, Iran and Iraq.

On September 22, the US military published new pictures of the Hmeimim airfield, where twelve Russian Su-25SM attack aircraft and twelve Russian Su-24M front-line bombers were seen stationed. The US alleged that the deployment took place between September 21 and September 22. In addition, Washington claimed that earlier, the airfield saw the deployment of fifteen Russian Mi-8 multi-purpose helicopters and Mi-24 attack helicopters.

On September 24, Russia announced its upcoming Navy drills in the eastern Mediterranean. The exercises were scheduled to start on September 30, a date that was to mark the beginning of Russia's air operation in Syria.

September 28 saw the publication of photos of Russian Su-34 bombers flying over Hmeimim airfield, the Caspian Sea, and the territory of Iran and Iraq. On the same day, Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke at the UN General Assembly and later met with his US counterpart President Barack Obama on the sidelines of the gathering. Importantly, the go-ahead for Russia's operation was given following the conclusion of the highest-level meetings, including those between Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his US and German colleagues John Kerry and Frank-Walter Steinmeier, respectively.

On September 29, the French broadcaster TF1 published fresh pictures of the Hmeimim airport, where the camouflaged Russian bombers Su-24 were clearly visible.  On the same day, the commander of NATO forces in Europe, General Breedlove, said that the alliance must properly rethink what is happening in Syria. According to him, Russia was allegedly using a so-called Anti-Access/Area Denial strategy in Syria, which stipulates the deployment of air defense systems and fighter interceptors there.

On September 30, more than fifty Russian aircraft and helicopters commenced precision airstrikes on Islamic State targets in Syria at the request of Syrian President Bashar Assad. Earlier that day, the Russian upper house of parliament unanimously supported President Vladimir Putin's request to deploy Russian Aerospace Force units abroad.

 [return to Contents] 

#25
New York Times
October 4, 2015
In Putin's Syria Intervention, Fear of a Weak Government Hand
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
 
On the night of Dec. 5, 1989, Vladimir V. Putin, then a lieutenant colonel in the K.G.B., watched with alarm as thousands of East Germans in Dresden swarmed the riverside compound of the dreaded secret police, the Stasi.

The Berlin Wall had been breached the month before, and the Communist government that had ruled East Germany since the end of World War II gasped its last breaths as protesters took to the streets across the country. The young officer and future Russian president, just 37 at the time, could only stand by helplessly at the K.G.B.'s Dresden outpost a few hundred feet away.

The takeover of the Stasi headquarters was relatively peaceful, but in Mr. Putin's mind the crowd was frenzied, deranged and dangerous, and the experience that night haunted him like nothing else in his mostly undistinguished career as an intelligence officer. "I felt it like a fault of my own," he told one of his oldest friends, Sergei Roldugin.

East Germany soon ceased to exist, as did the Soviet Union following the abortive putsch in August 1991, suffering from an affliction that Mr. Putin described as "a paralysis of power."

That diagnosis has been a driving force in his consolidation of political power, and it does much to explain Russia's forceful intervention last week to bolster the besieged government of Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad.

The specter of mass protest - of mob rule - is one that has haunted Mr. Putin throughout his political life, and that fear lies at the heart of his belief in the primacy of state authority above all else, both at home and abroad.

The East Germans considered their protests an expression of popular will, just as many Syrians did when protests against Mr. Assad's government began in 2011. But Mr. Putin viewed them as an unlawful usurpation of government authority. And that, in his mind, leads inexorably not to positive political change, but rather to chaos.

"Of course, political and social problems have been piling up for a long time in this region, and people there wanted change," Mr. Putin said at the United Nations on Monday, where he spoke for the first time in a decade. "But what was the actual outcome?"

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the chaos that followed darkened Mr. Putin's opinion of freewheeling democracy - and of the character of his own constituents. He was deeply ambivalent about the protests that hastened the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and as an obscure mayoral aide in St. Petersburg, cheered Boris N. Yeltsin's forceful response to the political uprising in the constitutional crisis of 1993, which culminated in the shelling of the Parliament.

In 1998, as the head of Mr. Yeltsin's security council, Mr. Putin had to mediate an electoral dispute in the southern region of Karachayevo-Cherkessia to prevent violence erupting between rival ethnic groups.

The lesson he said he learned was that only the strong hand of the state could avoid the economic and political chaos that consumed Russia in the 1990s. That belief is widely shared in Russia, and is one reason for Mr. Putin's genuine popularity at home.

"The Russian people are backward," he told a group of foreign academics in 2005, according to Marie Mendras's account in "Russian Politics: The Paradox of a Weak State." "They cannot adapt to democracy as they have done in your countries. They need time."

This distrust of popular will has been the justification for laws that have throttled dissent at home. With each election, the Kremlin has tightened the rules governing political parties and public gatherings. When tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets to protest fraud in the parliamentary election in 2011 and Mr. Putin's own re-election in 2012, the Kremlin responded forcefully to stanch the contagion.

The police arrested and convicted dozens of protesters over the next two years, while the authorities harassed the most prominent leaders of the opposition, like the anti-corruption crusader Aleksei Navalny.

And in February, Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister, was assassinated outside the Kremlin.

What is striking, though perhaps consistent, is how Mr. Putin's view of public protest has become the basis for an increasingly assertive foreign policy, one aimed at countering what he views as efforts by the United States and others to violate the sovereignty of nations by encouraging political change.

Mr. Putin considered United States support for the "color revolutions" that swept former Soviet republics - Georgia in 2002, Ukraine in 2004 and Kyrgyzstan in 2005 - as evidence of an American policy to topple governments in what had historically been Russia's sphere of influence.

And fear of the "color" contagion - color, as in the orange worn by supporters of Ukraine's president, Viktor A. Yushchenko - contributed to the deterioration of political freedoms in Russia. Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington noted in a report released on Friday that these popular uprisings have been studied by Russia's military commanders as "a new U.S. and European approach to warfare that focuses on creating destabilizing revolutions in other states as a means of serving their security interests at a low cost and with minimal casualties."

The civil war in Syria, in that view, is merely the latest in a series of messy conflicts that arise from the toppling or weakening of central authority through American aggression. Previous instances include the American war in Iraq that overthrew Saddam Hussein, and NATO's military intervention in Libya in 2011.

The events in Libya proved decisive in Mr. Putin's return to the presidency after stepping aside, at least formally, in accordance with the constitutional limit of two consecutive terms. With his protégé, Dmitri Medvedev, in the Kremlin at the time, Russia acquiesced to a United Nations Security Council resolution that authorized the use of force against the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

Milder than his mentor, and less suspicious of hidden motives, Mr. Medvedev had been far more amenable to cooperation with the West. He even expressed sympathy for the democratic aspirations of those who had taken to the streets in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, saying governments would "lose their real foundation" if they did not address protesters' grievances.

When the Qaddafi government violently repressed the protests in Libya, Mr. Medvedev was moved by the humanitarian appeals of his American and European counterparts. He instructed Russia's representative at the United Nations to abstain from the resolution, allowing the American and NATO air campaign that ultimately toppled Mr. Qaddafi.

Mr. Putin was furious, and said so, prompting the most public breach in the "tandem" of power that governed the country from 2008 to 2012. "It reminds me of a medieval call to crusade," he said of the resolution, denouncing the war as another manifestation of American hegemony that, left unchecked, would spread.

According to several officials close to the Kremlin, Mr. Medvedev's dangerous irresolution was a decisive factor in Mr. Putin's decision to return to the presidency, which he announced six months later. Since his return, Russia has blocked resolution after resolution against Syria's government, prompting criticism that its intransigence has only worsened the conflict.

By the time protests erupted again in Ukraine in the winter of 2013 and 2014, Mr. Putin was firmly back in the presidency. The upheaval seemed to him the continuation of an aggressive foreign incursion that was marching inexorably to the Kremlin itself. (That argument ignored the indigenous grievances that drew Ukrainians to the streets.)

"Any citizen has a right to express their opinion about the decisions made, but this must be kept within the law," he said when the protests began.

Last week at the United Nations, he said "the people's widespread frustration with the government was used for instigating a coup d'état from abroad."

Mr. Putin used the chaotic flight of Ukraine's president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, in February 2014 to justify annexation of Crimea and support of the armed rebellion in eastern Ukraine that has splintered the country and led to more than 7,000 deaths.

Many have variously interpreted Mr. Putin's intervention in Syria as a response to domestic pressures caused by an economy faltering with the drop in oil prices and sanctions imposed after Crimea; a desire to change the subject from Ukraine; or a reassertion of Russia's position in the Middle East.

All are perhaps factors, but at the heart of the airstrikes is Mr. Putin's defense of the principle that the state is all powerful and should be defended against the hordes, especially those encouraged from abroad. It is a warning about Russia, as much as Syria.

"Nations shouldn't be forced to all conform to the same development model that somebody has declared the only appropriate one," he declared at the United Nations. The Soviet Union, he said, had once sought to export "social experiments, pushing for changes in other countries for ideological reasons, and this often led to tragic consequences and caused degradation instead of progress."
 

 [return to Contents] 

 #26
Consortiumnews.com
October 4, 2015
The Hope Behind Putin's Syria Help
By Ray McGovern
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. During his 27-years as a CIA analyst, he served as chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch, and prepared and personally conducted early morning one-on-one briefings of the President's Daily Brief.  In January 2013, he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

Exclusive: President Obama insists on looking the gift horse of Russian military help for Syria's embattled government in the mouth. Rather than welcome assistance in blocking a Sunni extremist victory, Obama bends to the neocons and liberal hawks, as ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern explains.

Russia's airstrikes on rebel strongholds in Syria, now in their fifth day, are a game-changer. To borrow an aphorism from philosopher Yogi Berra, "The future ain't what it used to be." Yogi also warned, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."

What follows, then, will focus primarily on how and why the violence in Syria has reached this week's crescendo, the magnitude of the tipping point reached with direct Russian military intervention in support of Syria's government, and the self-inflicted dilemma confronting President Barack Obama and his hapless advisers who have been demanding "regime change" in Syria as the panacea to the bloody conflict.

Think of this piece as an attempted antidote to the adolescent analysis by Steven Lee Myers front-paged in Sunday's New York Times, and, for that matter, much else that's been written about Syria in the Times and other mainstream U.S. news outlets. Many articles, in accusing Russian President Vladimir Putin of bad faith, have willfully misrepresented his vow to strike at all "terrorist groups" as meaning only the Islamic State as if Al Qaeda's Nusra Front and other violent extremists don't qualify as "terrorists."

However, if Washington finally decides to face the real world - not remain in the land of make-believe that stretches from the White House and State Department through the neocon-dominated think tanks to the editorial pages of the mainstream media - it will confront a classic "devil-you-know" dilemma.

Does Washington really think that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, as demonized as he has been as a key player in a conflict blamed for killing more than 250,000, is worse than the beheaders of the Islamic State or the global-terrorism plotters of Al Qaeda? Does President Obama really think that some surgical "regime change" in Damascus can be executed without collapsing the Syrian government and clearing the way for an Islamic State/Al Qaeda victory? Is that a gamble worth taking?

President Obama needs to ask those questions to the State Department's neocons and liberal interventionists emplaced by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who - like Israel's leaders - positively lust for Assad's demise. "Regime change" in Syria has been on the Israeli/neocon to-do list since at least the mid-1990s and the neocon idea last decade was that Assad's overthrow would immediately follow the Iraq "regime change" in 2003, except the Iraq scheme didn't work out exactly as planned.

But there may be some reason to hope. After all, Obama showed courage in overcoming the strong resistance of the neocons to the recent nuclear deal with Iran. So, he may have the intelligence and stamina to face them down again, although you wouldn't know it from his recent rhetoric, which panders to the war hawks' arguments even as he resists their most dangerous action plans.

At his news conference on Friday, Obama said, "in my discussions with President Putin, I was very clear that the only way to solve the problem in Syria is to have a political transition that is inclusive - that keeps the state intact, that keeps the military intact, that maintains cohesion, but that is inclusive - and the only way to accomplish that is for Mr. Assad to transition [out], because you cannot rehabilitate him in the eyes of Syrians. This is not a judgment I'm making; it is a judgment that the overwhelming majority of Syrians make."

But Obama did not explain how he knew what "the overwhelming majority of Syrians" want. Many Syrians - especially the Christians, Alawites, Shiites and secular Sunnis - appear to see Assad and his military as their protectors, the last bulwark against the horror of a victory by the Islamic State or Al Qaeda's Nusra Front, which is a major player in the so-called "Army of Conquest," as both groups make major gains across Syria.

Obama's cavalier notion, as expressed at the news conference, that "regime changes" are neat and tidy, easily performed without unintended consequences, suggests a sophomoric understanding of the world that is stunning for a U.S. president in office for more than 6 ½ years, especially since he adopted a similar approach toward Libya, which now has descended into violent anarchy.

Obama must realize that the alternative to Assad is both risky and grim - and some of the suggestions coming from presidential candidate Clinton and other hawks for a U.S. imposition of a "no-fly zone" over parts of Syria would not only be a clear violation of international law but could create a direct military clash with nuclear-armed Russia. This time, the President may have to get down off his high horse and substitute a reality-based foreign policy for his rhetorical flourishes.

Yet, it is an open question whether Obama has become captive to his own propaganda, such as his obsession with Syria's use of "barrel bombs" in attacking rebel strongholds, as if this crude home-made weapon were some uniquely cruel device unlike the hundreds of thousands of tons of high explosives that the United States has dropped on Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and other countries in the last dozen years.

Does Obama really think that his "humanitarian" bombs - and those given to U.S. "allies" such as Saudi Arabia and Israel - don't kill innocents? In just the past week, a Saudi airstrike inside Yemen reportedly killed some 131 people at a wedding and an apparent U.S. attack in Kunduz, Afghanistan, blasted a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders, killing at least 22 people.

(By contrast, too, The New York Times treated the Kunduz atrocity gingerly, with the cautious headline, "US Is Blamed After Bombs Hit Afghan Hospital," noting that Defense Secretary Ashton Carter extended his "thoughts and prayers to everyone afflicted" and added that a full investigation is under way in coordination with Afghanistan's government to "determine exactly what happened." Surely, we can expect the slaughter to be dismissed as some unavoidable "accident" or a justifiable case of "collateral damage.")

With Obama, one cannot exclude the possibility that he has become so infatuated with his soaring words that he actually believes what he told the West Point graduating class on May 28, 2014; but if he does, someone needs to give him a quick reality check. He told the graduates:

"In fact, by most measures, America has rarely been stronger relative to the rest of the world. Those who argue otherwise ... are either misreading history or engaged in partisan politics. ... So the United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come."

How We Got Here

The world could have taken a very different direction after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the evaporation of the Warsaw Pact in February 1991, and the breakup of the Soviet Union in December 1991. Those developments left the United States in a virtually unchallenged position of power - and wise leaders might have seized the opportunity to wind down the world's excessive investment in military hardware and war-like solutions.

But the U.S. government chose a different course, one of "permanent" global hegemony with American troops as the world's "armed-up" policemen. Gulf War I, led by the United States in January-February 1991 to punish Iraq for invading Kuwait the previous summer, injected steroids into leading arrogant neocons like Paul Wolfowitz - already awash in hubris.

Shortly after that war, Gen. Wesley Clark recalled Wolfowitz (then Undersecretary of Defense for Policy) explaining the thinking: "We learned [from Gulf War I] that we can use our military in the region, in the Middle East, and the Soviets won't stop us. And we've got about five or ten years to clean up those old Soviet client regimes - Syria, Iran, Iraq before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us."

Clark highlighted this comment in an Oct. 3, 2007 speech, apparently thinking this might somehow enhance his credentials as a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination (see this highly instructive eight-minute excerpt).

Clark added that neocons like Bill Kristol and Richard Perle "could hardly wait to finish Iraq so they could move into Syria. ... It was a policy coup. ... Wolfowitz, [Vice President Dick] Cheney, [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld, and you could name a half-dozen other collaborators from the Project for a New American Century. They wanted us to destabilize the Middle East, turn it upside down, make it under our control." [See Consortiumnews.com's "Neocon 'Chaos Promotion' in the Mideast."]

The ideology of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was summarized in a 90-page report published in 2000 and titled, Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources For a New Century, which advocated a Pax Americana enforced by the "preeminence of U.S. military forces."

The report emphasized that the fall of the Soviet Union left the U.S. the world's preeminent superpower, adding that the U.S. must work hard, not only to maintain that position, but to spread its military might into geographic areas that are ideologically opposed to its influence, subduing countries that may stand in the way of U.S. global preeminence.

PNAC's dogma, in turn, had antecedents in "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," a study written in 1996 for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he was running for the election of his first government. That study was chaired by arch-neocon Richard Perle, who later served as Chair of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board (2001-2003); the majority of the study contributors were also prominent American neocons.

Here's what Perle and associates, many of whom later found influential posts in the Bush/Cheney administration, had to say on Syria: "Given the nature of the regime in Damascus, it is both natural and moral that Israel abandon the slogan 'comprehensive peace' and move to contain Syria, drawing attention to its weapons of mass destruction program [sic], and rejecting 'land for peace' deals on the Golan Heights. ...

"Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq - an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right - as a means of foiling Syria's regional ambitions."

Why Won't Assad Do What He's Told?

Given the hangover from the neocon binge during the Bush/Cheney years, one might say that President Obama was "under the influence" when he began calling for Assad to "step aside" in August 2011. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton chimed in, too, telling ABC, "Assad must go - the sooner the better for everyone concerned."

The violence in 2011 was the catalyst for the civil war - as Assad's forces cracked down on an "Arab Spring" uprising that while largely peaceful included extremist elements who killed police and ambushed troops. But the repeated unconditional-surrender demands from Secretary Clinton and other U.S. leaders that "Assad must go," plus "covert" U.S. support for rebels fighting against Syrian government forces, surely raised expectations that Assad would bow out, making the capture of Damascus a promising prize for a variety of Sunni militants.

Particularly pathetic has been Washington's benighted, keystone-cops support for so-called "moderate" rebels - an embarrassing fiasco if there ever was one. For a while, the "mainstream media" actually was taking note of this disaster within a disaster, after the Pentagon recently acknowledged that its $500 million project had produced only four or five fighters still in the field.

Even earlier, President Obama recognized the fallacy in this approach. In August 2014, he told New York Times' columnist Thomas Friedman that trust in rebel "moderates" was a "fantasy" that was "never in the cards" as a workable strategy. But Obama bent to political and media pressure to "do something."

As journalist Robert Parry pointed out, "Official Washington's most treasured 'fantasy' ... is the notion that a viable 'moderate opposition' exists in Syria or could somehow be created. That wish-upon-a-star belief was the centerpiece of congressional [approval in September 2014 of] a $500 million plan by President Barack Obama to train and arm these 'moderate' rebels."

Even Pentagon-friend Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies recently conceded that "what is very clearly not happening is there has not been any meaningful military action or success on the part of any of the rebels that we have trained."

Cordesman described the state of play in Syria as "convoluted," noting that "In addition to Iran's involvement in the conflict, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have all sponsored armed groups in Syria, making it a surreal proxy playground, even by Middle East standards."

Yet, this past week, the "moderate" Syrian rebels sprang back to prominence, at least in the mainstream U.S. media, when Russian planes began bombing targets associated with the Army of Conquest, a coalition which is dominated by Al Qaeda's Nusra Front. This militant coalition suddenly was redefined as "moderate," as part of the argument that Russia should only be attacking Islamic State targets.

The U.S. media also has downplayed where the Islamic State (also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh) came from. It was an outgrowth of the Sunni resistance to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 when the group was known as "Al Qaeda in Iraq." It later splintered off from Al Qaeda over a tactical dispute, whether a fundamentalist Sunni caliphate should be started now (the ISIS view) or whether the focus should be on mounting terror attacks against the West (Al Qaeda's view.)

Putin Chides US Failures

Putin reminded the world of this embarrassing history - and other damaging consequences of U.S. interventionism - during his Sept. 28 speech to the UN General Assembly when he noted: "The so-called Islamic State has tens of thousands of militants fighting for it, including former Iraqi soldiers who were left on the street after the 2003 invasion.

"Many recruits come from Libya whose statehood was destroyed as a result of a gross violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1973. And now radical groups are joined by members of the so-called 'moderate' Syrian opposition backed by the West. They get weapons and training, and then they defect and join the so-called Islamic State. ...

"I'd like to tell those who engage in this: Gentlemen, the people you are dealing with are cruel but they are not dumb. They are as smart as you are. So, it's a big question: who's playing whom here? The recent incident where the most 'moderate' opposition group handed over their weapons to terrorists is a vivid example of that."

The UN speech was not the first time Putin complained about the way U.S. officials have presented the factual circumstances of the Syrian conflict. On Sept. 5, 2013, he publicly accused Secretary of State John Kerry of lying to Congress in exaggerating the strength of "moderate" rebels in Syria.

Alluding to Kerry's congressional testimony, Putin said: "This was very unpleasant and surprising for me. We talk to them [the Americans], and we assume they are decent people, but he is lying and he knows that he is lying. This is sad." [See Consortiumnews.com's "Rebuilding the Obama-Putin Trust."]

But the pretense continues. Obama knows only too well the sorry state of the handful of intrepid "moderates" that may still be operating within Syria. By the same token, he does not need Putin to tell him of the danger from ISIS or Al Qaeda if these Sunni extremists (either separately or together) march into Damascus.

So the question becomes: Will Obama bring himself to see Soviet military intervention as a positive step toward stabilizing Syria and creating the chance for a political settlement or will he cling to the "Assad must go" precondition, rejecting Russia's help and risking an ISIS/Al Qaeda victory?

This Time the Russians Can Stop Us

There is another element here, creating an even graver risk. It is no longer 1991 when the triumphant neocons brushed aside hopes for global military de-escalation and instead pressed for worldwide U.S. military dominance. Under Putin, Russia has made clear that it will no longer sit back and let U.S. and NATO tighten a vise around Russia's borders.

Regarding its "front yard" in Ukraine, Putin has sharply admonished those in the West who "want the Ukrainian government to destroy ... all political opponents and adversaries [in eastern Ukraine]. Is that what you want? That's not what we want and we won't allow that to happen."

Putin's deployment of aircraft and other arms to Assad reflects a similar attitude toward events in Syria, which Russia considers part of its backyard. The message is clear: "Overthrow Assad with the prospect of a terrorist victory? We won't allow that to happen."

The risk here, however, is that the American neocons and liberal interventionists remain drunk on their dreams of a permanent U.S. global hegemony that doesn't broach any rivalry from Russia, China or any other potential challenger to America's "full-spectrum dominance." If these war hawks don't sober up - and if Obama remains their reluctant enabler - the chances that the crises in Ukraine or Syria could escalate into a nuclear showdown cannot be ignored.

Thus, Russia's move last week was truly a game-changer; and Putin is no longer playing games. One can only hope Obama can break free from the belligerent neocons and liberal war hawks.

 [return to Contents] 

 
#27
The National Interest
October 2, 2015
America and Russia in Syria: Superpower Showdown or Opportunity?
"We may be able to find a better path forward that eventually finds more points of accord than disagreement between Moscow and Washington..."
By Michael O'Hanlon
Michael O'Hanlon is a senior fellow at Brookings, member of the Africa Security Initiative there, and author of the new book, The Future of Land Warfare [5].

Reportedly, Washington and Moscow are working on ways to deconflict their tactical military operations within Syria [4] in the aftermath of the Russian military's arrival on the scene in recent weeks. That is good news. The last thing we need is to have two nuclear superpowers inadvertently, or even intentionally, shooting at each other in some quagmire in the Middle East.

But in another sense, of course, the two nations' strategies for Syria are nowhere near deconflicted.

President Putin declared that his goal in Syria was to fight ISIL. His more plausible goal, as reflected in his military's choice of initial bombing targets, is to uphold President Assad's shaky hold on power by attacking closeby insurgents even if they are relatively moderate and unaffiliated with ISIL or al-Nusra.  Putin wants to protect his own proxies, retain Russian access to the naval facility along the Mediterranean coast at Tartus, and-most likely-embarrass the United States while demonstrating Russia's global reach.  While undoubtedly concerned by ISIL at one level, he is unlikely to attempt to defeat it militarily, given the dangers and difficulties associated with any such mission.  He will leave that problem to us.  The fact that Assad has killed most of the quarter million who have died in this war to date, and caused most of the displacement and refugee flows as well, matters little to the callous Putin, who in any event probably blames American naivete more than any other factor for the fact that this war has dragged on for four and a half tragic years.

Yet Putin's cynicism about this war may not preclude U.S.-Russian collaboration on a practical path forward. If we envision some type of Bosnia model for what we are trying to achieve in Syria and work backwards, it is at least possible that Russian and American objectives can be largely reconciled-or, to employ the word of the day, at least deconflicted.

In terms of American interests, we need to defeat ISIL and ultimately unseat Assad, while mitigating the humanitarian disaster befalling the country as fast as possible. Putin needs the containment of ISIL before its offshoots wind up in Moscow, as previous groups of jihadis have done over the years. Beyond that, he also wants to exercise Russian leverage and influence on the Middle East stage in a way that enhances national prestige. I would submit that most if not all of these objectives are at least in principle compatible.

A future Syria could be a confederation of several sectors-one mainly Alawite and largely along the Mediterranean coast; another Kurdish and along the north and northeast corridors of the country near the border with Turkey; a third possibly Druse, in the southwest; at least one more made up primarily of Sunni Muslims; and then finally a central zone of intermixed groups in the country's main population belt from Damascus to Aleppo. The last zone would be difficult to stabilize but the others might not be so inherently problematic down the road.

With this arrangement, Assad would have to step down from power in Damascus eventually-but perhaps he could remain in the Alawite sector, as a compromise.  A weak central government would replace him, but most power and most of the country's future armed forces would reside within the individual autonomous sectors (and belong to the various regional governments). ISIL would be targeted collectively by everyone. The whole thing would surely require international peacekeepers to hold together, once a deal was struck down the road. Russian troops could help with this mission along the Alawite region's borders with other parts of the country, for example.

Getting to a point where such a deal was even possible would take time and great effort. Our training and equipping of moderate opposition forces would have to be expanded greatly.  Vetting standards would have to be relaxed in numerous ways.  Moreover, U.S. and other foreign trainers would need to deploy inside Syria to accelerate training where the would-be recruits actually live (and must stay, if they are to protect their families).

Those regions that could be accessed by international forces, starting perhaps with the Kurdish and Druse sectors, could receive humanitarian relief on a much expanded scale. Over time, the number of accessible regions would grow, as moderate opposition forces were strengthened.  This process could help reduce the scale of suffering, and refugee flows, right away-even if it would admittedly take a couple years for the overall strategy to have any real chance of succeeding.

But while it could take many months or years to achieve the outcome we want, articulation of this kind of vision now could provide a basis for working together with, or at least not working against, other key outside players in the conflict including Russia and Turkey and the Gulf states and Iraq. (I do not claim that it is realistic to collaborate with Iran-that would be a welcome surprise, but a major surprise, if it proved to be the case.)

Surely, the Russian intervention in this war was not well-motivated. In the short term, moreover, it has made things much more complicated. But if we use the occasion to recognize that current western strategy is inexorably failing in Syria, we may be able to find a better path forward that eventually finds more points of accord than disagreement between Moscow and Washington-and, more importantly, that meshes more realistically with current realities of power and politics inside this forlorn land.

 [return to Contents] 

 #28
Fort Russ
http://fortruss.blogspot.com
October 4, 2015
Donald Trump: "The Middle East would be safer with Saddam, Qaddafi and Assad" and "We are giving Syrian rebels billions of dollars, and they could be worse than Assad!" (CBS Video)
[Video here http://fortruss.blogspot.com/2015/10/donald-trump-middle-east-would-be-safer.html]

Chuck Todd: Let's move to Syria. You came across to me as if you welcomed Putin's involvement in Syria, you saw very little downside...Why?

Trump: Tell you why, I am somebody that, and you know I have been saying this to you for a long time ... I want our military to be beyond anything, no contest, and technologically most importantly, because now militaries have to be technologically advanced and we probably have a big advantage, we do have a big advantage, BUT ...

We are going to get bogged down in Syria... And if you look at what happened with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, that's when they went bankrupt! They went bankrupt! They were there for so long...

Todd: So you think Putin is going to be suckered in?

Trump: They are going to get bogged down, everybody who has touched the Middle East have gotten bogged down. Putin does not want ISIS, I know they haven't hit him as hard as they should be hitting him, because...

Todd: They are hitting the people we trained!

Trump: Excuse me, they are hitting people, we are talking about people that we don't even know ... the rebel group ... we have NO IDEA! I was taking to a general two days ago, and he said, we have no idea who these people are. We are training people we don't who they are, we are giving them billions of dollars to fight Assad. And you know what, it's very possible... And I am not saying Assad is a good guy, he is probably a bad guy, but I watched him interviewed many times,  and you can make a case... If you look at Lybia, look what we did there - it's a mess, if you look at Saddam Hussein with Iraq, look what we did there - it's a mess! It's going to be the same thing!

Todd: Do you think the Middle East would be better today if Saddam and Qaddafi where still there, and Assad was stronger?

Trump: It's not even a contest, Jack! It's not even a contest! Iraq is a disaster!

Todd: So it would be better if Saddam was in charge?

Trump: Look, ISIS came out of Iraq! It's the leftovers that weren't taken care of...

Todd: So you think if Saddam was in charge...

Trump: Of course, it would be! You wouldn't have had the Bengazi situation, which is one thing, which is just a terrible situation, but Lybia is not even a country anymore, nobody even knows what's going on over there!

Todd: So you welcome Putin's involvement?

Trump: I like that Putin is bombing the hell out of ISIS. And it's going to be ISIS. And I tell you why, Putin HAS to get rid of ISIS, because Putin doesn't want ISIS coming into his country!

Todd: Why do you trust him, when nobody else does?

Trump: I don't trust him at all, other that we both got good ratings the other night on 60 minutes, it was me and Putin, can you believe it? So did I get the ratings or did he? But the truth is, it's not even a question of trust... I don't want to see the United States... We've spent now 2 trillion in Iraq, probably a trillion in Afghanistan. We are destroying our country! We owe 19 trillion dollars. We are bogged down. Russia was bogged down in Afghanistan, meaning the Soviet Union, and it broke up the Soviet Union! They are going to get bogged down, you watch, and I am the one who said don't do Iraq...

Todd: You would pull out of what we are doing in Syria now?

Trump: I would sit back and this is not usually me talking, because I am very proactive, as you probably know, but I would sit back and see what's going on...

Here is the problem: we are fighting Assad, and we are fighting for people and helping people that we don't even know who they are, and they may be worse than Assad, they may be worse, ok? They may be worse!

And if Assad never happened,  if you didn't have a problem in Syria, You wouldn't have the migration, you wouldn't be talking about all of these countries, what's going on in Europe...  And now they are talking about taking 200 thousand people, that we don't even know who they are and bringing them into the United States? The whole thing is ridiculous! So, I am not justifying Putin, but you watch, he will get bogged down there, he will spend a fortune, he will be begging to get out!

 [return to Contents] 

 #29
Politico.com
October 2, 2015
The hotline to Moscow goes cold
By Bryan Bender

Deep inside the Pentagon, in the National Military Command Center, is the so-called red phone that has connected the U.S. and Russian high commands since after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

First a teletype, then a fax, and now a secure email and chat link, the emergency hotline was designed to prevent nuclear Armageddon. It is still tested regularly but seldom used - and not during the Ukraine or Syria crises, according to a Pentagon official.

"There's no real need to - there are so many avenues to talk with the Russians," said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly.

But the the reality is, according to interviews with other Pentagon and State Department officials and experts, those channels have long been silent. The lines once open in the form of meetings, exchanges and training exercises that were conducted between the former Cold War foes virtually all went dead after Russia invaded the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea early last year - and Washington-Moscow relations hit a post-Cold War low.

Now that the Russian Air Force is also bombing targets inside Syria, U.S. military leaders are struggling to find a new mechanism for regular communication to avoid a larger confrontation between superpowers in the air and on the ground, where the Syrian Army and a dizzying number of rebel and terrorist groups with competing and shifting alliances are operating - including U.S.-backed guerrillas dedicated to the overthrow of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, Moscow's chief Middle East ally.

They are virtually starting from scratch. Indeed, the most recent case of U.S. and Russian forces coordinating their operations in a war zone appears to be when their armies met at the Elbe River in Germany in 1944. And that was when they were both dedicated to defeating Germany in World War II.

"That is about the last time, on a tactical level, that we have been effective in talking to each other," said retired Air Force Gen. Gene Habiger, former chief of the Strategic Air Command. "At the strategic level we have done some things - military-to-military contacts and the red phone. But cooperation and coordination on targeting is a big deal. And given the past seven or eight years, especially with the current leadership team in place in Moscow, it will be very difficult if not impossible."

Habiger is the senior U.S. representative to the so-called Elbe Group, a collection of former U.S. and Russian military and intelligence leaders sponsored by Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government that will meet later this year in the Bahamas.

"We are rapidly in a declining state of confidence-building and trust - and we've got to change it," he added. "And I don't know how to change it."

The stakes are considered extremely high.

"This can escalate if someone shoots another one's plane down or if you are bombing the wrong place or the wrong airfield," said retired Army Gen. George Joulwan, the former commander of NATO who enlisted the Russian military in a historic partnership in the 1990s when the Western alliance sent peacekeeping forces into the Balkans.

The State Department lists several dozen fora for the two militaries to talk in recent years - including a video teleconference between the Joint Chiefs chairman and his counterpart, a "Colonels Working Group" that met in Moscow, and a variety of visits by naval commanders, top officers in the Asia-Pacific, and war college students.

But since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Washington has cut off many of those contacts and struggled to understand the intentions of the mercurial Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, whose aggressive moves in Ukraine prompted U.S. military assistance to the democratically-elected government in Kiev.

Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu asked Secretary of Defense Ash Carter last week to re-establish military talks to "de-conflict" operations in Syria after Russian combat forces began arriving inside the country at the invitation of Assad last month.

But they didn't take place before Russian jets started bombarding targets in northern Syria on Tuesday.

On the American side, the job to open some sort of dialogue fell the next day to Elissa Slotkin, the acting assistant secretary of defense for international affairs, and Vice Adm. Frank Pandolfe, the director of strategic plans and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The two talked via a secure video teleconference with their counterparts in Moscow in a discussion the Pentagon emphasized was "cordial" and "professional," but which didn't yield any final agreement.

Pentagon officials are trying to decide just how they might change their approach to incorporate the Russian air operations in Syria over the long term, according to several military officials who were not authorized to speak publicly about the internal deliberations.

There are three possibilities, officials told POLITICO.

The first is to simply draw up "sectors," which the U.S. and Russia would agree upon and keep their units within.

The second would be "procedural de-confliction," in which the two sides would agree to talk on a regular basis about where and when they planned to operate so they could respond accordingly.

The third option might be a full partnership in which Russia joined what the U.S. calls its "60-nation" coalition fighting ISIL in Syria and Iraq. A Russian liaison officer might join the other international officers posted to the Combined Air and Space Operations Center at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.

That command center, outside Doha, is what runs the daily U.S. and international air war in the Middle East, and writes each day's "air tasking order," which assigns missions to warplanes. Russia has so far resisted American calls to join the coalition and restrict its targeting in Syria only to the Islamic State, which has the been the focus of a yearlong U.S.-led air campaign in both Syria and Iraq.

What the Russians want, according to a person with knowledge of this week's secure teleconference between the Pentagon and Moscow, is for the U.S. to join their intelligence cell in Baghdad. Russian military and intelligence officers have opened an office there to share information with Iraqi, Iranian and Syrian representatives.

Moscow also invited the U.S. to send its own liaison officers to help with "de-confliction" in Syria, but Washington appears unlikely to agree; the U.S. does not want to deal with Iranian or Syrian intelligence officers and officials are already working to put up boundaries between the Americans and Russians in the Iraqi capital.

So far, the U.S. and Russia have confined their early discussions about how they'll operate in Syria to high-level considerations aimed mostly at the safety of air crews.

"One is to use particular international frequencies that can be used at a time of distress," Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook told reporters. "Second, a question has been raised about exactly how that conversation between aircraft - what language would it be in? Those are some of the questions that we're trying to address."

But some military experts believe it is naive to think there can be genuine coordination let alone cooperation with the Russian military inside Syria.

"Our position is that Assad has to go and their position is that Assad has to stay, and they have used military force," said Frederick Kagan, head of the Critical Threats Project at the hawkish American Enterprise Institute and a frequent adviser to the U.S. military.

"That is a situation where we cannot coordinate with them without fundamentally altering our objectives and partnerships, which would be foolish," he added. "They are trying to deny us a series of options for operating against Assad," including taking steps like setting up a no-fly zone to protect civilians against Assad's air force.

If the U.S. coordinates too much with the Russians, "there is a high likelihood they will pass along to the Syrians and Iranians," added Kagan, a former professor of military history at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point,

But others insist there is little choice.

"We have to stop and have an air coordination center [with the Russians] immediately over that area," believes Joulwan.

He said that even if the U.S. and Russia do not share all the same objectives, there is a common interest in defeating the Islamic State.

"Russia has more to fear from ISIS than us," he said, citing Muslim extremists inside Russia and along its vast borders. "Sure, Assad is an issue with us, but I think once you start cooperating military-to-military, at some point that part can be handled."

Michael Kofman is a defense analyst at CNA Corp., a federally funded research center formerly known as the Center for Naval Analysis. He previously coordinated exchanges between the two sides at the National Defense University, an arm of the Pentagon,. Those exchanges went into hibernation for a time after the Russian invasion of the Republic of Georgia in 2008 and then again after the Ukraine crisis.

Some sort of coordination will happen in Syria, he hopes, but it will take some shrewd leadership on both sides - and clear instructions to commanders in the region.

"We are largely running two separate operations."

 [return to Contents] 

 #30
Hidden Harmonies China Blog
http://blog.hiddenharmonies.org
October 2, 2015
The "follies" of Russia's pivot to China
By Mister Unknown
At the age of 10, Mr. Unknown immigrated to the US from China with his parents. He has had an unusual combination of experiences ever since - a 4-year enlistment in the US Army after high school, and a business development job in Russia after college. These experiences prompted him to reexamine the political dogmas that are pervasive in modern western societies. Mr. Unknown completed a dual masters program in business and environmental science, and currently works at a tech company. He hopes to advance his career in China and/or the former USSR in the near future.

Recently, there has been no shortage of highly pessimistic commentaries published & republished, pointing out the supposed "follies" of Russia's eastern pivot, by highlighting this year's decline in Sino-Russian trade, China's stock market volatility, and its supposed economic "weakness". The conclusion implied by these articles is clear: "Russia's economic pivot to China is failing, because increased economic cooperation has not mitigated Russia's recent economic woes, or the effect of sanctions. China cannot save Russia, and the latter must continue depending on the West."

This is essentially a straw-man conclusion. One thing should be plainly apparent through even a casual examination of Russia's biggest recent commercial agreements with China: most of these arrangements with China were NEVER INTENDED to offset the impact of Russia's current recession, but rather to position Russia's economy for greater long-term diversification and upward mobility on the global economic value chain.

The deal which draws the most frequent & recent use of this straw-man is the $400 billion Sino-Russian 'Power of Siberia' gas deal. What is often overlooked is the fact that implementation was not set to take place until 2018 in the earliest scenario, and more likely closer to 2020 given potential construction delays. Even then, this is a long-term arrangement that spans 30 years - which at best comes to about $13.4 billion of revenue per year. Bottom line, offsetting the immediate ('14-'16) economic pain of the recession and sanctions was NEVER the intent of this deal, and should not be a success metric.

Another deal that has come under plenty of media fanfare is China's involvement in the Moscow-Kazan high-speed rail. Again, the earliest completion date cited is 2018, meaning Russia's economy will not reap any productivity gains from faster transportation at least until then. From an investment point of view, the immediate economic impact is even more negligible. China will partially finance this HSR route, which could total $5 billion over the next 3 years; this means an addition of  $1.6-1.7 billion per year into Russia's economy, which amounts to a paltry ~0.084% of Russia's $2 trillion GDP.

A third attention-worthy agreement is the Sino-Russian joint-development of wide-body airliners, an endeavor that would usually take 8-20 years before bearing any fruit, if the Boeing 777 is an reasonable benchmark.

Finally, there is the Sino-Russian business incubator in Skolkovo, along with Russia's plan to establish a Skolkovo branch in Vladivostok. From a pure probability standpoint, this is an endeavor that may NEVER yield any direct benefits. 75-90% of all startups and small businesses are destined to fail, most of those that do not fail after 1-2 years will never have billion-dollar valuations or high-profiled IPOs; we should not expect startups from Skolkovo to perform differently.

Given that most strategic Sino-Russian initiatives will NOT bear fruit for many years, does that mean they are "failures", or should not be pursued? The answer to that question really depends on how Russians perceive their own strategic priorities and their own future. It is in Russia' interests to diversify its trade portfolio, and eventually move away from being Europe's resource appendage? Is it in Russia's interests to modernize its transportation infrastructure, so as to stimulate economic development in its eastern regions? Is it in Russia's interests to move up the international business value chain, from being solely a natural resources exporter to a competitor in high-tech, high-margin industries such as commercial aviation and robotics? Is it in Russia's interests to foster entrepreneurship and innovation in an increasingly knowledge-based global economy? Is it in Russia's interest to be an economically sovereign and independent country? If the answer to the questions above is 'yes', then there is NO DOUBT that Russia should continue these initiatives with China, and continue its eastern pivot strategy.

The harsh reality is that with the exception of a few situations, there is relatively little China can do to ease the pain of current low energy prices and economic sanctions. This is the inevitable consequence of Russia's 20-year+ over-reliance on resource exports to Europe for its economic development. In the face of this reality, Russia has two choices: instant gratification by acquiescing to the West in the hope of short-term relief, and continuing down the path of 'business-as-usual', or partner with China to diversify and modernize its economy. The latter involves far more hard work and risk-taking, but is also a far more viable way to move Russia on a path of genuine sovereignty and stable economic modernization.

 [return to Contents] 

 #31
Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs
October 2, 2015
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's interview with Venezuelan state television, Moscow. (excerpt)

Question: I have a personal question for you. What was the most challenging moment for you in all these years as Russian Foreign Minister, and what do you consider to be your greatest achievement?

Sergey Lavrov: I can hardly point to any challenging moments for the simple reason that life isn't easy for a diplomat these days, which makes one forget the difficulties and challenges. Highlighting achievements would also be immodest on my behalf. Let me briefly mention some instances that, in my opinion, can be viewed as examples of shared success.

There are people who accuse Russia of being capricious and stubborn in its approaches. They agree that justice should be respected but real politics is all about concessions. Russia has never been capricious or stubborn, and was always willing to compromise. I believe that the greatest success for any diplomat is reaching a multilateral agreement. Bilateral arrangements also count, but it is much harder to reach multilateral accords. Here are some facts: during my tenure as Foreign Minister BRIC was created and expanded into BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) developed substantially with the decision to launch procedures for India's and Pakistan's accession at the latest summit in Ufa. This is a major geopolitical event that will enhance SCO's influence, importance and profile. The fact that many other countries are asking to join this structure as members or observers is not a coincidence.

Let me also remind you that the BRICS group was established as a mechanism for like-minded countries seeking above all to promote justice and equality in international economic relations. In this sense, all BRICS countries that are on the G20 assert their approaches and abide by earlier agreements regarding global monetary and financial reform. And BRICS countries are not alone in this endeavour. Many Latin American, Asian and African nations support the BRICS approaches within the G20.

As for our global achievements, I can't fail to mention the agreement on Syria's chemical weapons disarmament at the initiative of Russian President Vladimir Putin. It was supported by US President Barack Obama and the whole international community. The UN Security Council adopted a resolution to this effect, and the whole project was implemented in record time, within a single year. Syria joined the Chemical Weapons Convention and proved to be an honest and proactive partner in all initiatives related to removing and destroying chemical arsenals.

I can also point to the agreement on the Iranian nuclear programme between Russia, the United States, the EU, China and, naturally, Iran, as another example of collective success. This agreement is already being implemented. The UN Security Council has also adopted a resolution to this effect, and concrete steps are being taken pursuant to the joint plan of action to settle this situation.

There are instances when we are ready to actively contribute to reaching similar compromises on extremely complex global issues, and it has to be said that the Iranian issue seemed to defy any kind of solution. However, our partners are sometimes unwilling to negotiate, which makes consensus hard to achieve. I can give you an example: the US plans to deploy a missile-defence system. Russia's President Vladimir Putin has been raising this issue on numerous occasions since 2007, back when George W. Bush was President of the United States, proposing various options for working together to address any risks in terms of missile defence that may arise due to missile proliferation. We were told that they are ready to work with us on this issue. But in the end of the day, the Americans came up with a plan that raised serious misgivings among the Russian military, since it was detrimental to our security and threatened Russia's nuclear deterrence system. We were told that this "plan addresses all the concerns you might have" and offered to use it as a blueprint for further cooperation. By all accounts, this was short of an ultimatum. Of course, we couldn't work together, but not because we didn't want to, but because the United States was not ready to balance the interests and insisted that its vision be accepted without any adjustments.

There are similar developments in other areas. For instance, combatting terrorism, including the IS, Jabhat al-Nusra and other extremists in the Middle East, is an issue we know all too well. Russia stands for creating a united front to fight this evil, which threatens everyone, through the UN Security Council, based on the international law and working together with the consent of all the countries that face terrorist threats in one way or another or are ready to contribute to overcoming these threats and risks. We'll see what comes of it. So far, the United States has a coalition of its own, and it hasn't asked the UN Security Council for a mandate. The United States simply announced it will deliver air strikes against terrorists in Iraq with Baghdad's consent; while claiming that it does not need any agreement from Damascus should it decide to bomb terrorists in Syria. You see, this is a unilateral approach that doesn't even imply any kind of discussion aimed at reaching a consensus to come up with common approaches and agreements. Let's wait and see. There seem to be some changes recently, we are making ourselves heard. At least they are listening to what we have to say. Maybe they even hear us. The UN General Assembly will hold its session in the next few days, where all world leaders will make statements. I'm confident that this will be one of the main topics. In my opinion, the opportunity to bring together approaches and make them viable in terms of international law is still there.

 [return to Contents] 

 #32
Moscow Times
October 5, 2015
Moscow Opera Season Preview: A Great Year
By Raymond Stults

The 2015-16 season of opera in Moscow enjoyed a rousing start last month when Novaya Opera Theater brought to its stage a new version of Richard Strauss' "Salome" that came as close to getting everything right - singing, conducting, orchestral playing and staging - as any local production of opera in post-Soviet times.

Still ahead at Moscow's five opera houses between now and next July are some 14 more major new productions that promise opera lovers a season of unusual diversity.

The Bolshoi Theater has five large-scale premieres on its agenda, beginning on Oct. 28 with Pyotr Tchaikovsky's very last opera, "Iolanta," and bringing with it the long-overdue Bolshoi debut of veteran conductor Vladimir Fedoseyev, who has long enjoyed great success leading opera abroad.

"Iolanta" was written simultaneously with the ballet "The Nutcracker," and the two works made their debut together at St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theater in 1892. While many might welcome a new production of "The Nutcracker" to accompany "Iolanta," the Bolshoi has instead chosen to precede it with just a suite of music from the ballet's score.

On Dec. 13, the Bolshoi takes first plunge into opera of the baroque era as performed in approximately authentic fashion, a co-production with the English National Opera of George Frideric Handel's "Rodelinda."

For its third new production, slated to premier on premiere Feb. 18, the Bolshoi has chosen "Katerina Ismailova," the somewhat tamed revision that Dmitry Shostakovich made of his "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District" in 1962, nearly three decades after the original version of the opera was banned from the Soviet stage. Directing "Katerina Ismailova" will be the Vakhtangov Theater's Rimas Tuminas. The conductor will be the Bolshoi's music director Tugan Sokhiev.

To stage its production of Gaetano Donizetti's tuneful comic opera "Don Pasquale" - premiering on April 19 - the Bolshoi has taken the bold and commendable step of inviting Timofei Kulyabin, whose radical staging of Richard Wagner's "Tannhauser" in Novosibirsk late last year caused a thoroughly unwarranted "scandal," provoked by the local head of the Russian Orthodox Church and compounded by dubious decisions on the part of the Russian Culture Ministry. "Don Pasquale," which concerns a rich old man outwitted in the pursuit of his capricious young ward, seems unlikely to give much scope for scandal.

Finally, the Bolshoi turns to French composer Hector Berlioz' "The Damnation of Faust," to premiere on July 22. This work is not really an opera in the traditional sense, but what Berlioz called a "dramatic legend." Filled with glorious music, but a difficult work to bring alive dramatically, its staging has been entrusted to the renowned German director Peter Stein, whose version of Giuseppe Verdi's "Aida" has graced the stage of the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko the past two seasons. Sokhiev is scheduled to conduct.

For this season, the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Theater is planning two major new productions: French composer Jules Massenet's lovely opera "Manon," long absent from the Moscow repertoire, in a staging by another well-regarded operatic specialist, Latvian director Andrejs Zagars. This premieres on Jan. 29. The second production is Sergei Prokofiev's "The Love for Three Oranges," led by the consistently brilliant former chief conductor of the Bolshoi, Alexander Lazarev, and staged by the theater's artistic director of opera, Alexander Titel.

Novaya Opera follows its stunning "Salome" with a new production, much needed on the local stage, of Giacomo Puccini's "La Boheme." The opera, which premiers on Dec. 4, is directed by the experienced and often quite imaginative, Georgy Isaakyan, the head of Moscow's Sats Children's Musical Theater.

Next month, Helikon returns from an eight-year exile in drab and unsuitable premises on Novy Arbat to its original home on Bolshaya Nikitskaya. The late 19th-century mansion that houses the theater has been totally renovated, and a brand-new 500-seat theater constructed in its former courtyard.

After an opening series of gala concerts, beginning on Nov. 2, on Nov. 10 Helikon founder and artistic director Dmitry Bertman presents his first staging in the new theater, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's "Sadko," an operatic epic of considerable length set in ancient Novgorod. Following soon after, on Dec. 23, will be a reconstruction of Konstantin Stanislavsky's legendary production of Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin," which held the stage in Moscow for some eight decades following its debut in the early 1920s. On June 22, Ruggero Leoncavallo's ever-popular "I Pagliacci" will premiere.

As usual, the Pokrovsky Chamber Musical Theater and its venerable music director Gennady Rozhdestvensky are preparing to offer an array of fascinating operatic fare unavailable at Moscow's other opera houses. Nov. 4 sees the premiere of a recently devised chamber version of Czech composer Leos Janacek's charming fairy tale for adults, "The Cunning Little Vixen," to be followed in April by the least known of Rimsky-Korsakov's 15 operas, his "Servilia." Near the end of the season next summer the theater will premier an operatic treat that local audiences have far too long been denied, Richard Strauss' delightful "Ariadne auf Naxos."

 [return to Contents] 

 #33
http://catherinebrown.org
October 2, 2015
Whataboutism in the Gulag
By Catherine Brown
Senior Lecturer and Convenor (Head of Department) of English at New College of the Humanities in London.

A couple of Sundays ago I was in the Gulag. Or, to be accurate, in a memorial on the site of a former Soviet kolonia. The 'colonies' were mini versions of the lagers which were administered by the Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei - Main Camp Administration, or GULAG.

Perm-36 operated on its current site - two hours' drive outside Perm in the Western Urals - between 1946 and 1987. As a forced labour logging camp, it was at its harshest before Stalin died. It interned regular criminals, but also became the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic's major camp for dissidents. In 1994 a history Professor at Perm State University, supported by the human rights group Memorial, successfully campaigned to make the camp a museum. Recently the camp has controversially been taken out of local and into central government control, so that the Professor - who was our guide - is no longer involved in its administration.

The night before this visit, the English party of which I was part gathered in the lobby of Perm's Ural Hotel to drink champanskoe to Jeremy Corbyn's victory. Earlier that day, we - Mary-Kay Wilmers, Jeremy Harding, Karen Hewitt, Alexander Mercouris, John McRae, David Edgar and myself - had gathered round my laptop to watch the Labour leadership election results live on Sky. Fortunately, our sentiments coincided.

But once our bottle was empty, our conversation turned to the next day. Since visiting Gulag sites is a rare thing to do, whereas visiting Nazi concentration camp sites is not, we discussed the former by analogy with the latter. And on this, it turned out, our views differed. One of us was strongly opposed to all visiting of concentration camps, but not of Gulag sites. Others of us put forward reasons for, and defended the permissibility of, visiting either.

I spoke from fourteen years' experience of taking American tourists on cultural tours of Europe. All of the tours which included Munich included Dachau KZ (Konzentrationslager). I had therefore had some time in which to develop my Dachau spiel. It had settled down to this.

I would summarise the history of the town of Dachau, and of its Nazi camp. I would try to shed light on the period by sharing the varied experiences of my German family members. Finally, I would say that it was wrong to visit Dachau if it did not make us ask ourselves 'what similar is happening today?' And 'what can I do to stop it?'. Otherwise, we would resemble German tourists visiting British Boer War concentration camp sites in the 1930s and bemoaning past, specifically British, evils. Since my guiding days included the worst days (to date) of the War on Terror, my final comments were pointed. I don't know if the points were felt, but they were never objected to.

The drive towards the camp, on a fine September day, lifted us out of Perm's plane to the West of the Urals into the hills themselves - gently rolling, forested, and sequined with little lakes. The camp itself is relatively small - partly decayed, partly neat with exhibitions, and partly, unexpectedly, up-to-the-instant with QR codes.

Over his four-hour tour, the Professor gave us much detail about the camp's former conditions and inmates. But there were some details that puzzled me. Or, rather, the mode in which they were presented and received puzzled me. We were shown the perimeter fences - variously barbed, electrified, and overwatched - and the visiting room, in which prisoners and their guests were separated by glass, and a guard was always present - and the post room, where all post to prisoners was opened before being passed on. I was struck that all these features characterise UK prisons today.

It may, of course, be wrong to have prisons. But if it is not, then these are necessary measures in running them properly - and we should not confuse the morality of prison conditions with the innocence or guilt of those who are interned.

Towards the end of our tour we passed a truck which had been used for transporting prisoners to the camp. It was explained to us that its hold had no windows, so that the prisoners would not be able to see where they were being transported. I couldn't help turning to David Edgar and saying: 'at least they didn't also tape their eyes shut, put eye masks and earphones on them, truss them up like chickens, and tie them to the bottom of an aeroplane'. (The Soviets, like Americans today, used the term 'extraordinary' to refer to their harshest modes of operation).

One of England's greatest playwrights, and a wise and wonderful man, turned to me in some irritation. 'There is a certain kind of whataboutism that I find sinister. Catherine, it was awful'.

I retracted and retreated. For a long time, in the solitary confinement hut, I digested this. And then I decided that I needed to respectfully spit it back out. On the dusty track from the hut to the exit I conceded to David that, had we been visiting a contemporary, and let's imagine appalling, Russian prison, then a comment about Guantanamo Bay might have constituted an inappropriate 'what about'. As it was, I stuck by what I had said the night before. Let none of us visit such places without thinking of what we can change. And on this, I'm glad to report that one of England's greatest political playwrights agreed.

 [return to Contents]