Johnson's Russia List
2015-#194
6 October 2015
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"We don't see things as they are, but as we are"

"Don't believe everything you think"

You see what you expect to see 

In this issue
 
  #1
Time.com
October 5, 2015
How to Parent Like a Russian
By Donna Gorman
Donna Scaramastra Gorman is the author of Am I Going to Starve to Death?: A Survival Guide for the Foreign Service Spouse. She, her husband and their four kids have been posted in Russia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, China, Jordan and the U.S. They are currently living in Moscow.

Bedtime? What's bedtime?

I've lived in Russia, on and off, for four years, and I've noticed my neighbors take a different approach to parenting than I do. Here in Moscow, it takes a village to raise a child - and you're part of that village whether or not you want to be. Every time my family walks out the door, we're being evaluated, and we frequently fail to meet Russian standards. It turns out we disagree on bigger issues than whether sour cream is an acceptable sauce for vegetables. Here are some of the ways to parent like a Russian:

Get the week's most essential parenting news, without any of the boring obvious stuff, in the Time for Parents newsletter. Sign up here.

There's No Such Thing as Overdressed: Woe unto the American parent who lets her small child go out in shorts and a t-shirt on a breezy mid-60s day. You will get scolded by a babushka or two as you make your way around town. The way I figure it, if my kid is cold, she'll put on a sweater. If not, she won't. Her choice, right?

Not according to Russians, who bundle their children up against the cold before the rest of us have even registered the change in seasons. My Russian friends all insist that if you don't dress warmly, you'll catch a cold. So their children wear snowcaps to school while mine are still in their summer shorts.

Don't Freeze Your Eggs, Freeze Your Babies: Russians have an unusual relationship with the cold. Here in Moscow, don't ask for a cold drink on a cold day. And don't ever sit on a cold stone step. These things are just plain dangerous, and you shouldn't need to ask why. (In case you do: if you do the former, you'll get sick. Doing the latter will freeze your ovaries.) Yet tiny Russian babies are routinely dressed in snowsuits, placed in strollers, and then put outside by themselves on porches and balconies to nap, even on the coldest winter days. They need fresh air, you see, so their parents bundle them up against the elements and plop them outside to breathe it all in.

When asked why they do this, my friends shrug and reply: it's tradition. My American friends are always looking for ways to do things better, differently. My Russian friends are more often content to do things the way they've always been done. They've been dealing with cold for 1000 years, so maybe they know something.

Dance Like Everyone is Watching My daughters wanted to put on frilly pink tutus and spin in circles during ballet class. Their Russian ballet teacher had other plans, including leg lifts, stomach crunches and forced stretching. He told them-and the other students, all under the age of 8-not to eat before class, because it made their stomach stick out and it "doesn't look nice." It didn't take long for my girls to realize ballet wasn't all fun and games. They quit. The Russian students weren't given that option.

Again, there's the tradition: children study ballet because everyone else is taking ballet, and they always have. Americans tend to believe that we rule the world in pop culture; we take pride in leading the way in cinema and music. Russians take pride in their past-they teach their children about the artists and writers who are part of their cultural heritage. They want their children to grow up well-versed in ballet and other outward signifiers of culture, such as poetry, theater and music.

Even preschool-aged children are expected to be able to sit through full-length theater performances, many of which are high-quality productions tailored specifically to children. We took our children to a puppet theater one night and were surprised to find a full house-at 7pm on a school night. Parents brought their children, dressed in their fanciest outfits, beribboned or wearing neckties (Rule 1 applies in more ways than one, apparently), because good theater is more important to them than a regular bedtime routine.

Bedtime? What's Bedtime? And speaking of bedtime: Russian children go to bed late. A colleague of mine told me her 3-year-old stays up past 11p.m. each night, making up for it with a two-hour nap each day at detskii sad -Russian kindergarten. "You Americans get time to yourselves after your kids go to bed," she told me wistfully. "By the time my kids go to bed, there's only enough time to do some housework before I fall asleep."

The late bedtime applies to children of all ages. Russian elementary students at my kids' school often get home after 10p.m. - they're kept busy with after-school language classes and sports until late in the evening. And they're still expected to finish all of their homework before they go to bed. Russians prize education, not as a means to an end, but as the end itself. And frankly, I think they're a little bit intimidated by the teachers. Teachers are typically held in high regard here, and no parent wants to get summoned to the school because their kid isn't doing the work.

Parenting is a Group Activity Just hop on the Moscow metro and you'll see it in action. As a pregnant mom of a toddler back in Washington D.C., I could count on one hand the number of times someone offered me or my child a seat on the metro. Here in Moscow, no child will ever have to stand on a subway car-every adult in the car will move to make space for children (and their moms). That's the positive side of the Russian village.

The downside? If a babushka, a Russian grandma, sees you or your kids doing something she doesn't like, she won't hesitate to tell you exactly what she thinks of your parenting. She'll chew you out as loudly as she can, right there in front of everyone else in the station. That's when I opt out of the village, smiling broadly like the foreigner I am, pretending I don't understand a word she's saying to me.

We American parents second-guess ourselves constantly, always making adjustments on the fly. Sometimes I think it'd be nice to make more decisions based on the way my parents and their parents did things. Here in Moscow, though, I'm making up my own traditions, stealing some ideas from my own childhood, going with my gut at other times, and borrowing just enough from Russian parents to keep me safely within the boundaries of my new village.


 #2
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
October 6, 2015
Putin at the U.N., Russia in Syria: 10 Days That Shook the World
By Gilbert Doctorow
Gilbert Doctorow is the European Coordinator, American Committee for East West Accord, Ltd.

"Mr. Putin had to go into Syria not out of strength but out of weakness because his client Mr. Assad was crumbling." President Obama, Friday, 2 October 2015

"I will tell you that, in terms of leadership, [Putin] is getting an 'A' and our president is not doing so well...They did not look good together." Donald Trump, 29 September 2015

During the week beginning Monday, 28 September, changing and dramatic international news rushed by with the speed last reached at the onset of the Russian-Ukraine conflict in the spring of 2014. Journalists have been mustered by all media to follow events of the first order, from the 70th anniversary opening of the UN General Assembly in New York on Monday, where Presidents Obama and Putin were awaited with great anticipation, through the releases of Russian footage of their bombing raids in Syria beginning on Wednesday, and closing with the summit in Paris of the Normandy Four - Putin, Merkel, Hollande and Poroshenko - summoned to examine implementation of the Minsk-2 accords and plot the way forward.

During much of this time, as in the preceding week or so, Western officials were wrong-footed by the Russians who rolled out very consequential initiatives of military and diplomatic nature without the famously intrusive American intelligence ever having gotten a whiff of what was coming in advance. This left both the White House and the worldwide pool of journalists dependent on 'heads up' from Washington in a state of permanent confusion, scrambling to find a comeback. In this context, Obama's response to questioning in a news conference at the week's end was emblematic, that Putin's latest moves in Syria come from weakness; like the reduction of all Russian-related affairs to the personality of Vladimir Putin, denigration of Russia has been the consistent commentary from the White House whatever the news development of the day.

However, among the politically astute there was some appreciation for what the Russians were achieving. Donald Trump, who had initially sought to differentiate himself from both the Administration and from fellow Republican candidates by insisting that he could cut deals with Putin, then flip-flopped a couple of weeks ago to insist that he would be much tougher on the Russians than Obama, has returned to his starting position. On Tuesday, the Associated Press quoted him as saying with a backward glance at the General Assembly session the day before: "I will tell you that, in terms of leadership, [Putin's getting an 'A,' and our president is not doing so well... They did not look good together."

Some leading foreign policy professionals had essentially the same view. For example, the dean of the John Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, Vali Nasr, no friend of Putin or the Russians generally, wrote an appreciation published by politico.com on 28 September: "No matter how this ends, for now Russia has changed the dynamics of the Syria crisis and opened up new possibilities....This could create a path out of the current impasse in Syria which would be welcome news."

Nonetheless, nearly all commentary, both lay and professional, has tended to miss the 'elephant in the room' aspects of what has transpired this past week. In this essay my effort will be not so much to summarize what has occurred in the week gone by but to open up new dimensions of interpretation. Then I will conclude with remarks on what all of this may contribute to our conceptualization of the New World Order that has been very much on the mind of International Relations theorists ever since Russian action in Crimea changed the Post-Cold War mold.

The Prelude

On Friday, 25 September, President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping appeared before journalists in the Rose Garden by the White House, to present the conclusions of their talks on this state visit. Obama explained to reporters that they had reached agreement on the major issue for discussion, alleged Chinese hacking into US company computer systems for purposes of industrial espionage. In characteristically undiplomatic, simply rude language in the presence of the Chinese president, he went on to say that now the US would be monitoring to see that China's good words were followed by good deeds.

In the case of President Putin's address to the General Assembly on Monday, 28 September, we see that the Russians are practicing an inverted order: their game-changing deeds preceded Mr. Putin's words over the course of the several weeks running up to the speech. They executed closely coordinated actions of their diplomatic and military services that imply a beehive of activity in Moscow.

During that period, they began moving large amounts of munitions and materiel into Syria at their naval base at Tartus and war planes with support crews to the nearby Latakia air base. These moves created considerable speculation in the Western media about Russian intentions. Such logistical moves are, by the way, precisely what the Russians did not do in the summer of 2014 when US and European media, led by Kiev, accused Moscow of invading Donbass.

Russian activities in Syria during September got press attention chiefly because of the U.S. obstacles that were put in their way: the orchestrated denial of overflight rights to Russian planes carrying freight to Syria through the Balkans, the most obvious route for such missions. Firstly the refusal came from Bulgaria, then from Greece. However, the Russians proceeded with their plans, re-routing to the East, and reaching Syria through Iran and Iraq, which turned down American requests in the matter. That cooperative stance by the Tehran and Baghdad administrations should have been the first indication that something serious was up, but the clue was not pursued by journalists.

Meanwhile in the week before the appearance of Obama and Putin in the United Nations, Russian diplomacy went into overdrive. On Monday, Benjamin Netanyahu flew to Moscow with a team of top security and intelligence officials for meetings with their Russian counterparts. The Israelis' stated concern was to avoid crossing paths with the Russians over interdiction of alleged transit of military materiel by Hezbollah across Syria now that Russia was intervening and closing Syrian air space to third parties, which had included the Israelis. The visit was quick and to all appearances successful. Russia's key role in the region now had Jerusalem's public acquiescence.

On Wednesday,23 September, for the opening of the newly completed Cathedral Mosque in Moscow, Europe's largest, accommodating 10,000 worshipers, both President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey were present and used the opportunity to meet with Vladimir Putin. The Turks were there to find a modus vivendi over Syria now that the Russians were moving in and the West's option of imposing a 'no fly zone' on northern Syria, long advocated by Erdogan, was no longer viable. It now appeared as well that Erdogan's insistence on the immediate removal of Assad from power was withdrawn. For his part, Abbas, whose presence was explained by his large personal financial contribution to the building of the mosque, welcomed the Russian initiative in Syria. Even at this early point, it was obvious that Russia was changing the game on the ground and in the air to frustrate those who had hoped to bring down Assad, namely the US and EU, the Gulf kingdoms and Turkey.

The rising tide of news about Russia's activities in and around Syria peaked on Sunday, 27 September, the day before the General Assembly speech of Vladimir Putin. First through a leak on Sunday, then by official announcement later in the day, we learned that the Russians had reached agreement with the governments of Syria, Iran and Iraq to set up a jointly managed coordination center in Baghdad with revolving leadership for sharing intelligence about the Islamic State in a common mission to fight jihadism. The ability of the Russians to pull off such a diplomatic coup in complete secrecy from the 3,000 or so American military advisers in Baghdad was in itself a remarkable tribute to the New Russia. The 'Old Russia,' by which I mean the USSR, was known to professionals for its 'loose lips.'

The release of information about this regional cooperation with the Russians over combating ISIS raised the level of expectations in Western, and also in Russian media with respect to Vladimir Putin's planned speech to the UN General Assembly on Monday enormously. It was speculated that the speech would be devoted to Russia's plans for an anti-terror campaign. The Russian leader's motives were said to be to draw attention away from Russia's fiasco in Ukraine and also to seek an early end to Western sanctions as reward for any measures to combat the Islamic State.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin leadership kept its cards close to its chest, saying only that the President would use the speech to give Russia's views of all the key issues now facing the international community.

And in speaking of the Russians' warm-up of Western anticipation about the speech, one must also mention the interview which Putin gave to Bloomberg's Charlie Rose on Sunday. Putin made effective use of the shocking revelations during Congressional testimony the previous week showing that the Pentagon's $500 million program to train and equip "moderate Syrian opposition to Assad" had been a fiasco, with most of the trainees subsequently defecting to ISIS with their gear, and with just 5 trained opposition soldiers remaining true to the mission.

The Speech

By his own standards as a public speaker, Putin's address to the UN General Assembly on 28 September was a mediocre speech devoid of sparkle. It was read out more as a necessity than a pleasure. Putin made no pauses to collect applause that other speakers before the General Assembly, most notably Barack Obama, had exercised.

There was good reason for restraint: Putin would be meeting with Obama for their first face-to-face talks in almost two years and he did not want to do anything that might compromise the success of those talks. He used coded language rather than the open accusations that Obama directed at Russia in general and Putin in particular in his speech delivered before the Russian President's arrival in New York. For his jabs at Uncle Sam, Putin wore boxing gloves rather than brass knuckles. But he landed body blows nonetheless, as I will set out below.

By the emphasis which the world media gave to Putin's remarks in the speech on setting up a grand coalition against the Islamic State, one might think that this single issue was all the speech was about. However, that is a false analysis. His words about Syria and fighting the jihadists together accounted for 2.pages in a speech 10 typed pages long. As he had promised in advance, Putin covered a number of different issues whose commonality was the responsibility of the United States and its allies for backing the wrong side through their egoism and hubris, with lamentable consequences for the rest of the world.

Putin's speech was well constructed, as usual. He opened by directing attention to the reason why he and so many other heads of state had come for this particular session whereas they had skipped previous years. They were there to mark 70 years since the ground work was done to create this organization in Yalta, in his country (no opportunity to highlight Russia's historic rights to Crimea is overlooked by the Russian leader). His words were not empty and abstract. Putin used the opportunity to remind the Assembly that disagreements between the major powers sitting on the Security Council had been a feature of the institution from the very beginning, and that nonetheless as the most authoritative and legitimate institution representing all of world opinion it had been a major contributor to global stability.

From this he moved to the issue of the right of veto by the Permanent Members of the Security Council, which of late has been politicized in an effort to strip Russia of its weight in the institution by depriving it of the veto. And from there he went straight to the question of how some powers (meaning the United States) have been undermining the UN by using the gridlock at the Security Council as grounds for assembling coalitions and waging military interventions in violation of the principles of the United Nations. Here we see his thinly veiled criticism of the US, identified by the code word 'exceptionalism,' used to justify violations of international law, a theme that appeared in many of his major addresses since his talk to the Munich Security Conference in February 2007. Indeed Putin's denunciation of values-based or idealist foreign policy and his defense of Westphalian principles of equality of sovereign nation-states take up 1.5 pages in the 10 page speech.

The underlying concept of this World Order upheld by most nations but dismissed by Washington and Brussels he identified as real freedom - the freedom to pursue a unique national course of development without tutelage and interference. Not to criticize others from on high, Putin made reference to the Soviet experience of trying to impose its preferred social models on others which led to disasters. This he likened to the current aggressive policies of regime change by foreign (meaning Western) intervention that have created havoc and misery in North Africa and the Middle East. His line of argumentation ended in Putin's direct challenge to the West: "Do you begin to understand now what you created?' to which he added: "... I fear this question is left hanging in the air, because they have not turned away from a policy based on smugness, conviction in one's exceptionalism and impunity."

Other international issues Putin loaded into this speech included his condemnation of NATO expansion and the perpetuation of Cold War policies by the West; condemnation of the role of the West in Ukraine, where in his view it provoked the armed coup d'etat which led to the civil war. Then he introduced a new element in his litany of Western violations of the global institutions the West itself had crafted, now in the area of trade. He insisted it was the WTO principles were trampled by the unilateral imposition of trade sanctions against Russia in connection with developments in Ukraine. From there to the more general violation of WTO in the attempts to create large and exclusive trading blocs, meaning the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TIPP) and the Trans Pacific Partnership being promoted by Washington. He pointed out, correctly I might add, that the negotiations relating to these new trade pacts are being held in secrecy from the populations of the respective partners, not to mention third countries that will be negatively impacted by the emerging mega-blocs.

Now let us take a brief look at his appeal for a grand coalition to combat the Islamic State. Putin's vision of what lay behind this phenomenon did not mince words: it was the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and the subsequent decision to throw into the street Saddam Hussein's decommissioned officers; it was the violent overthrow of Gaddafi and the ill-considered support for the armed opposition in Syria.

And he exposed the hypocrisy of those who say they are fighting against Islamic terrorism but do nothing to cut its flow of revenue, including from trade in oil and arms. As we soon were to learn, upon entering its fight in Syria, Russia would move precisely on this issue.

In the manner of a skilled orator, Putin closed his speech by returning to the role which the United Nations is expected to continue to play in preventing confrontations and laying down cooperation in world affairs.

Meeting with Obama and the Start of the Russian Armed Intervention in Syria

Obama's private meeting with Putin which came a few hours after the latter's speech was characterized by spokesmen close to the talks as "frank and constructive," words usually used to describe sharp disagreement. However, it went on 1.5 hours, half an hour more than projected, which suggests that the accent may indeed have been on the 'constructive' side. Likely they reviewed what has to be done to ensure that Russian and US coalition forces in Syria do not clash accidentally or otherwise.

It was clear from the start that there would be no agreement leading to Russians joining the American coalition and subordinating themselves to US military leadership. After all, that very concept had been a bone of contention in the immediate post-Soviet period during the American led intervention in the Balkans of the 1990s. Moreover, the war aims of Russians and Americans are at loggerheads. The Russians openly claim they are defending their national interests in seeing the Assad regime survive and in crushing the Islamic State. The Americans insist the removal of Assad is a precondition for the fight against ISIS to be successful.

The United States reiterated its satisfaction that it held all the cards in coalition making. As Obama said on Friday, 60 nations stand behind its coalition, whereas the Russians could only muster Iran and Iraq. Of course, the relevance of having one or two sorties over Syria from Australian or Belgian fighter planes directed by the American command is subject to question, while the active support Russia has for its initiative from the neighboring regional powers who have the intelligence and, in the case of Iran, the manpower available to deliver a devastating blow on the ground to the Islamic State is quite a different matter.

The onset of Russian bombing raids in Syria on Wednesday, 30 September just after the upper house of the Russian legislature, the Federation Council, voted to authorize the use of Russian armed forces outside the country came like a thunder clap.

Once again, world media were wrong-footed and confusion reigned among the early comments from government leaders. UK Prime Minister Cameron and Obama grudgingly issued comments of support for Russia taking up the hard work of fighting the Islamic State. The sheer decisiveness and speed of the shift from words to new deeds could not fail to impress.

Finally, when the details of the initial missions came in, the Russia-baiters found their footing and began to claim that the Russians were attacking not ISIS but the moderate opposition to Assad's regime. Cries of foul reached an hysterical crescendo in McCain's call for the US to go head to head with its military forces in the Middle East and force the Russians from the skies.

For his part, on Friday at a meeting with journalists in Washington, Obama struck a conciliatory pose, that of peacemaker who insisted the US would not allow its forces to cross the Russians. Instead it would let the Russians enter a quagmire in Syria of their own making.. He said that by hitting not only Islamic State forces but opponents of Assad the Russians were pouring oil on the flames of the Syrian civil war. The regime's opponents would go underground. The inevitable civilian casualties would inflame the passions of Islamists and end up recruiting for the jihad.

However, events on the ground in the Middle East on Friday, were not kind to purveyors of the Washington narrative. Reports surfaced from Kunduz, Afghanistan that US fighter jets there had likely been responsible for bombing a well-documented hospital run by the French NGO M�decins sans Fronti�res, killing 19 (now raised to 22) of their staff and civilians including children. Ban Ki- Moon called for an investigation. Others have condemned what they say may constitute a war crime. And the entire Washington narrative about the Russians in Syria causing collateral damage was swept into the dust bin, at least for a few days until some new line of attack on the Russian presence can be fabricated.

For their part, the Russian reports on their bombing raids in days two and three of the campaign showed graphically that Islamic State targets were being taken out. And reports from the ground indicated that towns held by IS for the past two years are now being evacuated, that many terrorists were killed and others are on the run. The Russians took credit for bombing oil pipelines used by the Islamic State to deliver oil from Syrian oil fields under their control to Jordan and Turkey, bringing in more than a million euros a day to their war chest. The question as to why such targeting was not done by US forces over the course of the past year of their sorties emerged center stage. Russian military spokesmen responding to charges that they were only defending Assad came up with a better response than the usual irrelevant 'what-about-ism' that so often predominates in propaganda exchanges: "what do you expect to hear from Americans who for the past year have only been bombing desert sands."

In this back and forth of pleasantries, all sides have omitted mention of what I would call the most significant reality: that by its actions in Syria this week, Russia has done a great deal to restore its image as a world power because of the unique technical preconditions which made the bombing raids possible.

This has been achieved in a way that penetrates the mind of the world public, whereas Russia's costly muscle flexing over the past year through very frequent and massive troop readiness drills and war games have not been appreciated outside the country by anyone other than military intelligence officers, or have only driven public fear of rather than respect for Russia.

European powers that have participated in the US coalition against the Islamic State also have advanced jet fighters and smart bombs. But apart from the United States, only Russia has the complete satellite-based intelligence gathering as well as drone coverage of the air space to operate command and control of forces over the combat zone that combine with smart munitions to deal punishing blows on the enemy with minimal risk to themselves. This is an incredible leap forward of the military capabilities of Russian forces since when they last were engaged in warfare in the Muslim world, during the time of their occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. It matches the change in diplomacy, where today Russia has the explicit backing for its actions by the key regional Islamic states - Iran and Iraq.

The Russian military prowess is being presented to the public in what is a mirror image of US 'shock and awe' videos going back to the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. We now see on Russian state television each day and in re-broadcasts on the BBC and Euronews real-time video documentation of the targeting and destruction confirmed by Russian drones over Syrian airspace. The general viewer in the USA or Europe may be forgiven for not appreciating how unique such capability is in the world outside the USA. That our professional experts remain silent on this point is one more proof of their reluctance to admit Russia into the clubhouse. Meanwhile the Russians have been saying sotte voce that they can deliver this type of blow now anywhere in the world. In this light, President Obama's unending attempts to position Russian behavior in the context of inherent weakness sound more pitiful and unserious with each passing day.

Postscript - the Normandy Four in Paris

Against the background of the stunning news earlier in the week coming from the UN in New York and from the Middle East over developments in Syria, the meeting of the heads of state of the Normandy Four in Paris on Friday was anti-climactic. The major television news channels interrupted their programming from time to time to show their reporters standing outside the building where the talks were proceeding. The vigil to hear from the principals on what was decided was prolonged as the meeting went on substantially longer than anticipated. And in the end the harvest of news from the press conference called by Chancellor Merkel and President Hollande was very meager. Both Poroshenko and Putin were absent, and the Western leaders related only of what they had said, not of what, if anything, had been agreed.

It was announced that further elaboration of key issues under discussion such as how and when elections would be held in the Donbass or when the Russians would turn over control of the border to Ukrainian authorities would continue at the level of working groups. The can was being kicked further down the road, and in the meantime disengagement of the warring parties in southeastern Ukraine from the front lines would proceed. For the residents of the area, this de-escalation will bring a respite. From all appearances a frozen conflict is emerging, which suits Russian interests very nicely but makes a mockery of Kiev's expectations of a military solution to the conflict.

A good many commentators have noted how the emergence of the Syrian civil war as a proxy war between Russia and the West has eclipsed the Ukraine conflict. 'Yesterday's cock of the row, today's feather duster' is how one colorfully described Ukrainian President Poroshenko's descent from Western hero of the day to the status of a public nuisance.

However, we would do well to consider how much more dangerous for world peace is the new battleground in Syria where both Russian and US-led military forces are engaged in close space. Compared to Ukraine, which is a territory of existential importance for Russia and only marginally important to the national interests of the USA-EU, Syria and the surrounding Middle East region are of equally high value to both sides in the contest. The region is a powder keg, and there are all together too many firebrands in this party.

Theoretical implications: conceptualizing the New World Order

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world became unipolar for an interval of uncertain duration, rallying behind the sole remaining superpower, the United States. Defenders of this reality found support for the belief in its permanence in the tight argumentation of Francis Fukuyama's End of History. But from the very beginning there were voices seeing other possibilities. In his 1994 book Diplomacy, Kissinger already argued for a return of the world to the status quo before WWI, namely multipolarity, with five or six major powers combining and recombining alliances to achieve a balance of power in which there was no dominant hegemon.

In response to that vision of the future, some International Relations theorists argued that multipolar world orders are inherently unstable and dangerous. Moreover, states were said to be losing their sovereignty, worn down by globalism and the rise of non-state international institutions. As we saw in the 1998 global financial crisis and then again in 2008, in the absence of currency controls global flows of money, flight capital, could bring nation states to their knees.

Nonetheless, the Concert of Powers idea remained fashionable in some circles. I heard this promoted by a bellwether political scientist from Moscow, Sergei Karaganov, as recently as this spring at a conference in Germany, where it attracted favorable comment. As I noted in my review a week ago of Kissinger's latest major work World Order, he is still promoting it. However, as I go on to say in my critique , the notion that there are 5 or 6 world powers in competition over a balance has been overturned in the past couple of years. Four of these powers are now solidly linked, two by two: the US and EU, Russia and China. The rest of the world is divided between them. Through BRICS, Russia has effectively picked up the leadership of what was once a third force of Developing or Non-aligned Nations, forming a geopolitical bloc that has well over half of the world's population and maybe 40% of its GDP, rising all the time.

It was thought by Fukuyama first and by many others later that the absence of any ideological divides, given that the whole world has signed on to free markets and democracy, meant such a polar division is impossible. However, a new fissure line opened up: for and against the Westphalian model of the sovereign nation-state, for and against values-driven foreign policy.

This is precisely the divide that has now moved on from the Ukraine crisis to the Syrian crisis. Russia's expansion of influence in the Middle East, which is enhanced by its latest move to form a coalition of regional powers, is one further important step in the formation of the two opposing blocs.

The question is: does this new bipolar condition mean a return to global stability because small players are once again under the control of two major blocs? or does the end of fluidity in realignment of balance of power mean restoration of the fatal conditions of world order that Kissinger says brought on WWI?
 
 #3
www.thedailybeast.com
October 4, 2015
Russia's Propaganda Blitzkrieg
The propaganda war propping up Putin and his cronies has reached new heights with the bombing campaign in Syria.
By Michael Weiss
Michael Weiss is a Senior Editor at The Daily Beast and co-author of the New York Times bestseller ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror. He also edits The Interpreter, an online translation and analysis journal devoted to all things Russian and Ukrainian.

When Vladimir Putin spoke before the UN General Assembly last week, he proclaimed the need for an international coalition to destroy ISIS. But when Putin then went to war in Syria, his fighter jets began by rocketing everyone opposed to the regime of Bashar al-Assad except ISIS. At a superficial level, this discrepancy is explained by Moscow as follows: There is no such thing as a moderate opposition in Syria and that includes the U.S.-backed rebels. In fact, as Putin darkly insinuated at the General Assembly, ISIS was "initially forged as a tool against undesirable secular regimes," and the unnamed smith here was not terribly hard to discern.

The jihadist army rampaging through the Middle East was therefore America's Frankenstein monster and it was now up to a confident Russia, a year into a failed U.S.-led coalition campaign, to deliver this reanimated corpse unto eternity. Anyone not willing to join with Russia, Assad, Iran, and Hezbollah was a "terrorist" or a covert sponsor of terrorism, who'd do well to get out of Putin's way. He arrogated to himself a very broad martial remit to bomb whenever and whomever he pleased, which is precisely what he did a mere 48 hours later, hitting several Free Syrian Army targets, including those which have received advanced U.S. weaponry courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency.

We've seen this movie before-a mere 18 months ago. When the Euromaidan protests rocked Kiev in response for the Ukrainian government's failure to sign an association agreement with the European Union, it was announced on Russia state television that those demanding the resignation of Viktor Yanukovych were neo-Nazis in the pay of the U.S. State Department or the CIA. They, too, were rampaging through Ukraine and perpetrating pogroms against embattled Jewish and ethnic Russian minorities, who demanded Moscow's fraternal assistance. That these minorities demanded no such thing didn't matter.

Although it would not be acknowledged until much later, or simply not at all, the seizure of Crimea and the "separatist" war in the Donbas were framed as Putin's sole resistance to America's other Frankenstein monster-its sinister, covert plot to suborn fascism in the breadbasket of Europe. That actual fascists on the continent celebrated and certified Putin's annexation of Crimea and his invasion of the Donbas was an ignorable detail.

The reductio ad Hitlerum looms large in Putin's rhetoric landscape, and in his blitzkrieg on any semblance of objectivity or truth. Not for nothing did he invoke the Allies's united front against the Third Reich in his General Assembly speech, conveniently eliding the Soviet Union's initial role in inaugurating the Second World War by carving up Romania, Poland and the Baltics-as an ally of Hitler. Where once Russia faced U.S.-backed "Banderites" in Kiev, Donetsk and Lugansk, now it powders U.S.-backed "ISIS" in Homs, Hama and Idlib-provinces where ISIS does not exist. But so what?

Lenin wrote that "there is no more erroneous or more harmful idea than the separation of foreign from internal policy." Moscow, famously, has two audiences to which its caters: the domestic and the foreign. The former matters more for keeping Putin in office, alive, and out of the dock. It's also designed to position Russia as a bulwark against sinister American and NATO designs, through the application of soft and hard power. SA-22 anti-aircraft missiles and advanced fighter jets equipped with air-to-air missiles are not in Syria to deter Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's flying carpet.

Domestic propaganda is a negative definition of national greatness, with Russia set against an external conspiracy and all the mightier for having fended it off while rising from the state of a demoralized and defeated ex-superpower.

The collapse of the Soviet Union, as Putin notoriously said, was the 20th century's greatest tragedy, but not because it put an end to world communism but to imperial grandeur and self-respect. He is an derzhavnik, an ideologist of great power, and seeks to restore Russia as a dominant force in geopolitics (always the puncher, never the counterpuncher) but one politically promiscuous enough to allow Alexis Tspiras to Marine Le Pen and Pat Buchanan to all find something to favor.

To feed this manic triumphalism, then, the domestic gaze has to be directed outward, onto the international scene because internally Russia's present and future are bleak. It is bleeding money and brainpower and ever more resembling Upper Volga with sanctions. Look here but not there.

The historian Timothy Snyder explains it well in a recent, Spinozan essay of logical propositions: "(1) President Putin's popularity depends upon television. (2) Russian television news is devoted to events beyond Russia. (3) This means the president's triumphs against American hegemony, etc.  (4) In Ukraine, a weak Ukrainian army and limited EU sanctions hindered Russia. (5) Point #4 must not be noticed inside Russia. (6) Russian television just changed the subject from Ukraine to Syria."

Peter Pomeranzev, author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, a remarkable book that explains contemporary Russia as a kind of mass public relations experiment run by lunatics and merry pranksters, Putin's Syria messaging is so far characteristic. It is also just the beginning.

"Syria is an exercise in narrative escalation dominance," Pomeranzev says. "It's setting the agenda, making the U.S. look weak and putting Putin center stage-whether good or bad is irrelevant because for the Kremlin any publicity is good publicity. The exact, on-the-ground aims can be interchangeable. 'Terrorists' in Syria are just as vague as the 'fascists' in Ukraine, and it doesn't really matter whether it's true, as long as the story keeps moving and the U.S. is kept off-balance, distracted and dismayed."

RIA Novosti was disbanded in 2013 along with Voice of Russia and Moscow News when the Kremlin reorganized its state propaganda system into a holding company called Rossiya Segodnya ("Russia Today")  headed by Dmitry Kisilyev which now controls a domestic wire service still using the name "RIA Novosti". One article published by that service argues that U.S. airstrikes against ISIS are in fact part of an anti-Russian conspiracy designed to push the terror army toward the coastal provinces of Latakia and Tartus, where the resources are greater and Russia has new and old military installations.

One article published recently by Rossiya Segodnya, the successor to RIA Novosti, argues that U.S. airstrikes against ISIS are in fact part of an anti-Russian conspiracy designed to push the terror army toward the coastal provinces of Latakia and Tartus, where the resources are greater and Russia has new and old military installations.

Though even this dread accounting for CENTCOM's lackluster campaign in Raqqa is a dramatic improvement on the earlier insistence by government relays that Russia wasn't about to go to war in Syria at all. On September 10, Konstantin Kosachev, the head of Russia's Foreign Affairs Committee of the Federation Council (the upper chamber of parliament), flat-out denied Russian military buildup in Syria and accused the U.S. of hypocrisy and the spokesperson for the U.S. embassy in Moscow of unprofessional behavior by calling attention to the obvious buildup. "No one in diplomacy is allowed to criticize the policy of the country where he stationed," Kosachev thundered to Rossiya Segodnya, lamenting that Russia was only backing Assad politically and not with direct military intervention. On October 2, however, Kosachev was complaining in the same outlet that the U.S. was now irresponsibly accusing Russia of striking non-ISIS targets in a war whose inevitability he disclaimed three weeks ago.

"Putin and the Russian military didn't really want to communicate their intentions to the news organs," according to Gatov, who says that this accounts for the abrupt 180 in party line swapping.  In some cases, even high-level Russian officials don't seem to know what the current line is.

In the space of a single news cycle, Putin's own press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, doubted that the Free Syrian Army (FSA), the catchall name to describe moderate or nationalist rebels, even exists anymore, saying Thursday, "Haven't most of them switched to IS group? It existed but whether it does now nobody knows for sure, it's a relative concept." But Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov certified the FSA's existence that same day and even called those rebels necessary interlocutors with Russia for solving the Syrian crisis. "We don't consider Free Syrian Army a terrorist group, and believe [it] should be part of the political process," Lavrov told reporters in New York. As his air force bombed the FSA.

Another, paradoxical, theme is Putin's indispensability to the United States-the nemesis of his worldview, but against which he is determined to wage peace. "Something I see on the Russian talk shows and in the newspapers, which I poisoned myself with watching and reading, is that the West simply cannot wait for Putin to die or retire but it must deal with him in his present form," Gatov says. "This opens the door for dealing with him on Crimea, Ukraine and sanctions." It also engenders the sort of speculation in Russia that puts Putin at the centre of all international decision-making.

Indeed, when he was photographed clinking rose glasses with Obama during an awkward UN dinner last week, the impression given to many Russians was that of a deal in the offing. To nationalists, wary that Putin isn't quite the imperialist he plays at by Anschlussing his way through Europe, this scene of forced comity constituted "a moment of truth," as Dmitry Bobrov wrote on his blog. "Now we'll see if the national-betrayer, Putin, is ready to flush down the toilet all Russians in Novorossiya," referring to the aspirational blood-and-soil Russian imperium that was to have started in the Donbas and fanned out from there.

The Kremlin's foreign media outlets are simply click-bait conduits for "active measures," an old Soviet intelligence technique by which Moscow tries to manipulate foreign societies, usually against their own governments, using furtive and transparent methods of persuasion. For this, Putin relies on his English-language portals, chiefly Sputnik and RT, which have had a slightly trickier go of adapting to new Middle Eastern realities, or pseudo-realities.

As The Daily Beast reported a month ago, RT lies not only about world events or concocts batshit "alternative" explanations for quotidian or self-evident phenomena (the pope is a space alien, the CIA invented Ebola as a bio-weapon, 9/11 was an inside job), but it also inflates its global ratings to justify a ridiculously high annual budget, prospectively set to be close to half a billion dollars this year, if RT's editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan gets her way (and she may not).

But because the channel doesn't just fabricate the "news" but reacts in real time to Western reporting, it's pivot on Syria has been more cumbrous, shrill and imaginative than its domestic counterparts. For instance, its website had earlier run several items denying and mocking allegations of any Russian military buildup in western Syria-in one case, even trolling The Daily Beast, which reported on it in early September. Now, with nary a hint of contradiction or irony, RT has accelerated straight past the buildup, into full-on war propaganda mode, offering jingoistic rah-rahs for Putin's Top Gunnery, falsely characterized, of course, as anti-ISIS in nature.

Still, that doesn't stop the basic facts from being falsified or fudged. Take, for instance, "US Can't Find 9 CIA Trained Rebels in Syria, but McCain Claims Russia Did," which suggests that Sen. John McCain, who accused Russia of bombing CIA-backed rebels in Syria, can't have been correct since the Pentagon had earlier stated that its rebel proxies had gone "missing" in country. "If only nine out of these US-trained rebels are actually fighting ISIL," the article read, "while the rest are 'missing' somewhere in the Syrian desert, and even worse have joined [al Qaeda franchise] al-Nusra or perhaps other jihadist groups, including ISIL, then the US government is doing an awful and counterproductive job, to say the least."

CIA-backed rebels never went missing. There are, in fact, two separate U.S. programs, one run by the clandestine service and the other by the Department of Defense. They differ in remit in that the CIA program was designed to help rebels fight the Assad regime, whereas the Pentagon's train and equip program (now abandoned due to myriad problems, which even Sputnik can have exploited without the bullshit) was intended to create a rebel counterterrorism strike force to only fight ISIS, not the regime. Sputnik has conflated two policies as one to argue, disingenuously, that U.S. officials are falsely accusing Russia of killing the proxies Washington supposedly can't find.

In truth, active measures and disinformation don't have to work very hard to sow skepticism, doubt and confusion among Americans. Given the schizophrenic nature of U.S. policy in Syria, most Americans will already have a hard enough time deciding why they should care about what Putin's Sukhois are annihilating. Yesterday, President Obama said all of these things all at once by way of acquiescing to Russia's war on U.S. proxies: "We are going to continue to go after ISIL. We are going to continue to reach out to a moderate opposition... We're not going to make Syria into a proxy war between the United States and Russia. That would be a bad strategy on our part. This is a battle between Russia, Iran, and Assad against the overwhelming majority of the Syrian people. Our battle is with ISIL."

If the commander-in-chief believes that he can reach out to a moderate opposition while casting the overwhelming majority of the Syrian people to its fate against three different militiaries, then who needs RT and Sputnik to keep the United States off-balance, distracted and dismayed?

With additional reporting by Anna Nemtsova.
 
 #4
The Independent (UK)
October 4, 2015
Syria's 'moderates' have disappeared... and there are no good guys
Western confusion reigns while the Russians go for the jugular
By Robert Fisk
Robert Fisk is The Independent's multiple award-winning Middle East correspondent, based in Beirut

The Russian air force in Syria has flown straight into the West's fantasy air space. The Russians, we are now informed, are bombing the "moderates" in Syria - "moderates" whom even the Americans admitted two months ago, no longer existed.

It's rather like the Isis fighters who left Europe to fight for the "Caliphate".Remember them? Scarcely two months ago, our political leaders - and leader writers - were warning us all of the enormous danger posed by "home-grown" Islamists who were leaving Britain and other European countries and America to fight for the monsters of Isis. Then the hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees began trekking up the Balkans towards Europe after risking death in the Mediterranean - and we were all told by the same political leaders to be fearful that Isis killers were among them.

It's amazing how European Muslim fighters fly to Turkey to join Isis, and a few weeks later, they're drowning in leaky boats or tramping back again and taking trains from Hungary to Germany. But if this nonsense was true, where did they get the time for all the terrorist training they need in order to attack us when they get back to Europe?

It is possible, of course, that this was mere storytelling. By contrast, the chorus of horror that has accompanied Russia's cruel air strikes this past week has gone beyond sanity.

Let's start with a reality check. The Russian military are killers who go for the jugular. They slaughtered the innocent of Chechnya to crush the Islamist uprising there, and they will cut down the innocent of Syria as they try to crush a new army of Islamists and save the ruthless regime of Bashar al-Assad. The Syrian army, some of whose members are war criminals, have struggled ferociously to preserve the state - and used barrel bombs to do it. They have also fought to the death.

"American officials" - those creatures beloved of The New York Times - claim that the Syrian army does not fight Isis. If true, who on earth killed the 56,000 Syrian soldiers - the statistic an official secret, but nonetheless true - who have so far died in the Syrian war? The preposterous Free Syrian Army (FSA)?

This rubbish has reached its crescendo in the on-again off-again saga of the Syrian "moderates".  These men were originally military defectors to the FSA, which America and European countries regarded as a possible pro-Western force to be used against the Syrian government army. But the FSA fell to pieces, corrupted, and the "moderates" defected all over again, this time to the Islamist Nusrah Front or to Isis, selling their American-supplied weapons to the highest bidder or merely retiring quietly - and wisely - to the countryside where they maintained a few scattered checkpoints.

Washington admitted their disappearance, bemoaned their fate, concluded that new "moderates" were required, persuaded the CIA to arm and train 70 fighters, and this summer packed them off across the Turkish border to fight - whereupon all but 10 were captured by Nusrah and at least two of them were executed by their captors. Just two weeks ago, I heard in person one of the most senior ex-US officers in Iraq - David Petraeus's former No 2 in Baghdad - announce that the "moderates" had collapsed long ago. Now you see them - now you don't.

But within hours of Russia's air assaults last weekend, Washington, The New York Times, CNN, the poor old BBC and just about every newspaper in the Western world resurrected these ghosts and told us that the Russkies were bombing the brave "moderates" fighting Bashar's army in Syria - the very "moderates" who, according to the same storyline from the very same sources a few weeks earlier, no longer existed. Our finest commentators and experts - always a dodgy phrase - joined in the same chorus line.  

So now a few harsh factoids. The Syrian army are drawing up the operational target lists for the Russian air force. But Vladimir Putin has his own enemies in Syria.

The first strikes - far from being aimed at the "moderates" whom the US had long ago dismissed - were directed at the large number of Turkmen villages in the far north-west of Syria which have for many months been occupied by hundreds of Chechen fighters - the very same Chechens whom Putin had been trying to liquidate in Chechnya itself. These Chechen forces assaulted and destroyed Syria's strategic hilltop military Position 451 north of Latakia last year. No wonder Bashar's army put them on the target list.

Other strikes were directed not at Isis but at Islamist Jaish al-Shams force targets in the same area. But in the first 24 hours, Russian bombs were also dropped on the Isis supply line through the mountains above Palmyra.

The Russians specifically attacked desert roads around the town of Salamia - the same tracks used by Isis suicide convoys to defeat Syrian troops in the ancient Roman city of Palmyra last May.

They also bombed areas around Hassakeh and the Isis-held Raqqa air base where Syrian troops have fought Islamists over  the past year (and were beheaded when  they surrendered).

Russian ground troops, however, are in Syria only to guard their bases. These are symbolic boots on the ground - but the idea that those boots are there to fight Isis is a lie. The Russians intend to let the Syrian ground troops do the dying for them.

No, there are no good guys and bad guys in the Syrian war. The Russians don't care about the innocents they kill any more than do the Syrian army or Nato. Any movie of the Syrian war should be entitled War Criminals Galore!

But for heaven's sake, let's stop fantasising. A few days ago, a White House spokesman even told us that Russian bombing "drives moderate elements... into the hands  of extremists".  

Who's writing this fiction? "Moderate elements" indeed...


 
 #5
Moon of Alabama
www.moonofalabama.org
October 5, 2015
Russia "Violated" Turkish Airspace Because Turkey "Moved" Its Border

Russian planes in Syria "violated Turkish air space" the news agency currently tell us. But an earlier report shows that this claim may well be wrong and that the U.S. pushes Turkey to release such propaganda.

Reuters (Mon Oct 5, 2015 7:54am BST): Turkey says Russian warplane violated its airspace

"A Russian warplane violated Turkish airspace near the Syrian border on Saturday, prompting the Air Force to scramble two F-16 jets to intercept it, the Foreign Ministry said on Monday.

"The Foreign Ministry summoned Moscow's ambassador to protest the violation, according to an e-mailed statement. Turkey urged Russia to avoid repeating such a violation, or it would be held "responsible for any undesired incident that may occur."

AFP (10:20am � 5 Oct 2015): Turkey 'intercepts' Russian jet violating its air space

Turkey said on Monday its F-16 jets had at the weekend intercepted a Russian fighter plane which violated Turkish air space near the Syrian border, forcing the aircraft to turn back.
...
Turkey said on Monday its F-16 jets had at the weekend intercepted a Russian fighter plane which violated Turkish air space near the Syrian border, forcing the aircraft to turn back.

Here now what McClatchy reported on these air space violations in a longer piece several hours before Reuters and AFP reported the Turkish claim:

ISTANBUL - A Russian warplane on a bombing run in Syria flew within five miles of the Turkish border and may have crossed into Turkey's air space, Turkish and U.S. officials said Sunday.
...
A Turkish security official said Turkish radar locked onto the Russian aircraft as it was bombing early Friday in al Yamdiyyah, a Syrian village directly on the Turkish border. He said Turkish fighter jets would have attacked had it crossed into Turkish airspace.
But a U.S. military official suggested the incident had come close to sparking an armed confrontation. Reading from a report, he said the Russian aircraft had violated Turkish air space by five miles and that Turkish jets had scrambled, but that the Russian aircraft had returned to Syrian airspace before they could respond.

The Turkish security official said he could not confirm that account.

So it is the U.S., not Turkey, which was first pushing the claims of air space violation and of scrambling fighters. The Turkish source would not confirm that.

But how could it be a real air space violation when Russian planes "flew within five miles of the Turkish border and may have crossed into Turkey's air space". The Russian planes were flying in Syrian airspace. They "may have crossed" is like saying that the earth "may be flat". Well maybe it is, right?

Fact is the Russians fly very near to the border and bomb position of some anti-Syrian fighters Turkey supports. They have good reasons to do so:

"The town, in a mountainous region of northern Latakia province, has been a prime route for smuggling people and goods between Turkey and Syria and reportedly has functioned as a key entry for weapons shipped to Syrian rebels by the U.S.-led Friends of Syria group of Western and Middle Eastern countries."

One Russian plane may even indeed have slightly crossed the border while maneuvering. But the real reason why the U.S. military official and Turkey claim the above "violations" is because Turkey unilaterally "moved" the Turkish-Syrian border five miles south:

"Turkey has maintained a buffer zone five miles inside Syria since June 2012, when a Syrian air defense missile shot down a Turkish fighter plane that had strayed into Syrian airspace. Under revised rules of engagement put in effect then, the Turkish air force would evaluate any target coming within five miles of the Turkish border as an enemy and act accordingly."

If Syrian rules of engagement would "move" its northern border up to the Black Sea would any plane in eastern Turkey be in violation of Syrian air space? No one would accept such nonsense and that is why no one should accept the U.S.-Turkish bullshit here. Russian planes should not respect the "new" Turkish defined border but only the legitimate one.

It would also be no good reason to start a NATO-Russia war just because such a plane might at times slightly intrude on the Turkish side due to an emergency or other accidental circumstances. Do we have to mention that the U.S., France, Britain and Jordan regularly violate Syrian airspace for their pretended ISIS bombing? That Turkey is bombing the PKK in north Iraq without the permission of the Iraqi government? What about Israels regular air space violations over Lebanon?

But what is this all really about? Germany, the Netherlands and the U.S. stationed some Patriot air defense systems in Turkey to defend Turkey and its Islamist storm troops in north-Syria. These systems were announced to leave or have already left. Are these claims about air-space violation now an attempt to get these systems back into Turkey? For what real purpose?


 
 #6
Russian aircraft briefly entered Turkish airspace due to bad weather - defense ministry

MOSCOW, October 5. /TASS/. The Russian Defense Ministry said on Monday that a Russian military aircraft had briefly entered Turkish airspace because of bad weather conditions.

"On Saturday, October 3, a Russian Sukhoi-30 combat aircraft briefly, for a few seconds, entered Turkish airspace as it was making a maneuver over mountain-woody forest terrain to return to Hmeymim airfield after a planned combat flight," the major-general told a briefing.

"After checking and analyzing data of objective control, the command of the air group of the Russian Aerospace Forces in Syria has taken necessary measures to prevent such incidents in the future," he said.

"As you can see on the map, Hmeymim airfield is situated about 30 kilometers from the Syrian-Turkish border. Under certain weather conditions, approach to the airfield is made from the north," ministry's spokesman Igor Konashenkov told a briefing.

"That is why, the incident occurred because of unfavourable weather conditions in that area," he said, warning against attempts to find some conspiracy motives behind the incident.


 #7
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
October 6, 2015
We Know What Putin Wants; We Haven't a Clue What He Wants
By Patrick Armstrong

Something I have noticed with some amusement is the conjunction in utterances by Western talking heads of the conviction that they know exactly what Putin wants with the admission that they haven't a clue what he wants.

Reading what he says and watching what he does is apparently out of the question.

Here's NATO commander Breedlove in April as an example. Just for fun I invite you all to read through thickets of impenetrable prose to find more examples of we know but we don't know. http://www.defense.gov/News/News-Transcripts/Transcript-View/Article/607046/department-of-defense-press-briefing-by-general-breedlove-in-the-pentagon-brief

He knows what Putin wants

-We also know that Putin only responds to strength and seeks opportunities in weakness.
-You know, I believe that Mr. Putin very much wants in a very simple way, he wants the West out of Ukraine, and he wants Ukraine out of the West.
-Mr. Putin wants Ukraine as a part of his sphere of influence.

He doesn't know what Putin wants

-We cannot fully be certain what Russia will do next, and we cannot fully grasp Putin's intent.
-So we can't know what Mr. Putin has in mind.
-We don't know what Mr. Putin's objectives are.

Poor old Breedlove, wakes up to find Russia's locked down Syria while he busy was keeping it out of Estonia.

PS if he can't bear to read what Putin actually says, here's a piece in Newsweek (of all places) from last December that might have helped him be less surprised "The rise of ISIS confirms what Moscow has long said to the West: Backing Assad's opponents will lead to state collapse and jihadism."
http://www.newsweek.com/syrian-conflict-according-putin-291372
 
#8
Bellona.org
October 5, 2015
Russian Rights Council leader defends environmental and human rights groups to Putin
Mikhail Fedotov, the head of the Presidential Council on Civil Society Development and Human Rights, blasted in a meeting with Vladimir Putin the reach of Moscow's NGO, or "foreign agent" law, which he said has tarred too many necessary organizations, the official Tass newswire reported.
By Charles Digges    

Mikhail Fedotov, the head of the Presidential Council on Civil Society  and Human Rights, blasted in a meeting with Vladimir Putin the reach of Moscow's NGO, or "foreign agent" law, which he said has tarred too many necessary organizations, the official Tass newswire reported.

The controversial NGO law that took effect in November 2012 requires non-profit organizations operating in Russia that received foreign funding and engaged in vaguely defined "political activity" to voluntarily announce themselves as "foreign agents" to the Russian Justice Ministry, and to apply the moniker to all their publications.

Apparently unimpressed by the number of NGOs who signed up to be called foreign agents - a term associated in Russian with treason - Putin in June 2014 granted the Justice Ministry sweeping powers to name foreign agents on its own. The list immediately began to grow.

Illegal false claims and mendacity

Last week Fedotov told Putin in an open session that environmental and human rights groups were disproportionately forced onto the Justice Ministry's foreign agent list, and said that in numerous cases, their inclusion on the roster was, in fact, illegal.

"The attitude of several government structures to human rights groups more and more recalls a witch hunt, accompanied by false claims and mendacity," said Fedotov in some of the strongest terms he has used to express his reservations about the NGO law to date.

His words are all the more striking, as members of the Presidential Council on Human Rights are hand selected by the president himself.

"It sufficient to glance at the roster of so-called 'foreign agents,' which currently already contains some 94 organizations," continued Fedotov according to the Tass transcript. "The absolute majority of them are human rights and environmental organizations."

Environmental groups protected by Russia's highest court

Fedotov noted that the NGO legislation was specially written to exclude as "political activity" the labors of groups working in the defense of nature and wildlife.

Wildlife and nature preservation groups were exempted from the "political activity" clause of the NGO law by Russia's Constitutional Court in 2014.

"I have no issues with the Ministry of Justice, they are running the roster the way it is prescribed in the law," Fedotov told Putin. "And this proves yet again that a well-written law is a precision weapon that strikes its target dead on the mark, and a poorly written law, a law written by guesswork, is a weapon of mass destruction."

Nils B�hmer, Bellona's executive director, was hopeful Fedotov's forceful critique might spur a change in the Kremlin's tack toward Russia's non-profit sector.

"We could hope that this is a start of a process that could make the situation easier for NGO's attacked by Kremlin in recent years," said B�hmer. "Fedotov has some good arguments especially when referring to the Constitutional Court's defense of nature conservancy."

Absurdities that land groups on the list

Fedotov specifically cited two recent inclusions on the foreign agent list - Sakhalin Environmental Watch and the Committee for the Prevention of Torture.

The Justice Ministry tarred the Committee for the Prevention of Torture was designated a foreign agent label for so-called political activity, said Fedotov. The political activity in question? The committee's chairman Igor Kalyapin - like dozens of other NGO chairmen - sits on Putin's own Presidential Human Rights Council.

Sakhalin Environmental Watch was also included on the list for alleged political activities - which included the reposting to its own social media site a petition written by another group to Vladimir Putin asking him to protect the Arctic from oil spills. A further political activity committed by Sakhalin Environmental Watch was an op-ed piece written for a small paper urging regional authorities to plant more trees.

Both were seen by the Justice Ministry as attempts to interfere with the course of Russian politics.

Fedotov's examples were trenchant but far from exhaustive. Other environmental groups have been forcibly included on the foreign agent list for equally dubious political reasons include Bellona Murmansk, Ecodefense, and Planeta Nadezhd.

Bellona Murmansk managed to plead down the 300,000 ruble fine (or $4,400 by current exchange rates) levied against it. But why was the group deemed a foreign agent?

"The Ministry of Justice thinks we are political because we've written that current [Russian] legislation makes it more profitable for industry to pay fines for pollution than putting in place environmental measures" to prevent pollution, said the group's Anna Kireeva.

Ecodefense's co-chair Vladimir Slivyak said the Justice Ministry designated his group as a foreign agent for protesting the construction of a nuclear power plant - something the Justice Ministry said was tantamount to protesting the state itself.

Instead of fighting the fines and the foreign agent designation in court, Slivyak told Bellona his group has simply chosen to refuse the demands of Russian officialdom and continue its business. So far, the civil disobedience has worked.

More ominous is the case of Planeta Nadezhd, whose director Nadezhda Kutepova was force to flee Russia with her three children when it became apparent Moscow might charge her with treason.

Her group worked to protect the rights of victims of radiation accidents in her small closed nuclear town, Ozersk, where Russia's notorious Mayak Chemical Combine is located. Planeta Nadezhd was forced onto the foreign agent list in June for receiving a foreign grant in 2008 - four years before the NGO law took effect.

She was further targeted for remarks she made in a June 2014 interview with Bellona's Russian-language news pages in which she presented the radiation dangers still facing residents of the Chelyabinsk Region, where Ozersk is located.

Kutepova began dissolving it rather than pay fines she couldn't afford. She is the first representative of an NGO called a foreign agent who has been forced to flee Russia. She is seeking political asylum in France.

Financed or not, human rights groups are needed

In his remarks to Putin, Fedotov took up the issue of foreign financing as well.

"Some NGOs have been excluded from the foreign agent list, but what has changed in their work after they began refusing foreign funding?," he said. "Well, nothing unless we consider reduced staff and salaries for their employees."

Fedotov said that "for real human rights advocates, foreign grants are not the end, but rather the means for fulfilling their missions - if there are domestic grants, then thank you - NGOs will continue their work on Russian funding, and if there's no funding at all, they'll continue to function on a volunteer basis."

Fedotov went further, saying those charged with monitoring NGOs do so "by their own yardstick" and "when they find they have nothing in common with them, demonize them."

"In fact, human rights advocates," said Fedotov, "are the foremost helpers to those in power in the business of building a rights-based government."
 #9
RIA Novosti
Ex-finance minister forecasts more mass layoffs, fall in incomes in Russia

Moscow, 4 October: Former Russian Finance Minister Aleksey Kudrin believes that the situation on the labour market in the Russian Federation is not improving so far and forecasts that the period of layoffs will continue for some time.

"It has now become clear that the situation is not improving, and mass layoffs are starting in the autumn. The period of layoffs will continue for some time. This is why our real incomes will be falling, and social wellbeing indicators will not be good," Kudrin said in an interview to Business FM radio on Sunday [4 October].

He forecasts that the number of those out of work in Russia may rise in 2016.

"Unemployment will probably even rise a little. What is the most unpleasant in this crisis though, in contrast to 2008-2009, is a serious drop in the real incomes of the population. They will fall by nearly 7 per cent. Wages [will fall] by 10 per cent in real terms," Kudrin forecast.

[Passage omitted: Deputy Prime Minister Olga Golodets said earlier the labour market was in good shape but warned of emerging problems of wage arrears and underemployment. See "Deputy PM says 'negative trends' on Russia's labour market on the rise", released on 2 October.

A separate RIA Novosti report quoted Kudrin saying in the same interview that he regarded Putin's actions in Syria as "quite justified" because the Islamic State group was "a threat to the whole world".]
 
 #10
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
October 5, 2015
Strategy 2030: A new economic vision for Russia
During the International Investment Forum Sochi-2015, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev announced new economic priorities for Russia and set long-term development goals for the nation's economy.
By Alexey Khlebnikov

On Oct. 2-3, the Olympic city of Sochi hosted the 14th International Investment Forum Sochi-2015, which is considered to be one of the leading annual economic events in Russia. Traditionally the forum is attended by senior government officials and ministers, including Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.

This year's forum was marked by an important milestone of sorts for the Russian economy - a year under economic sanctions that were imposed on Russia in 2014 by Western countries due to the Ukrainian crisis and Russia's role in it.

As a result, the forum's agenda was concentrated around several main topics that reflect issues of living in a new economic reality: fulfilling Russia's export potential, implementing import substitution programs, developing Russia's financial markets and transforming the structure of the Russian economy.

The unveiling of Strategy 2030

The main event of the Sochi-2015 Forum was a plenary session attended by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. In his address to the participants of the forum, he highlighted the main trends and issues that the world and Russia currently face and set up new development goals.

Medvedev stated that the last year was very important not only to Russia, which faced a sharp national currency depreciation, unprecedented sanctions and a contracting GDP, but also to the whole world. As he pointed out, global economic growth rates are slowing down, Europe is struggling with a euro zone crisis and a refugee crisis, and China is experiencing slowing foreign trade and a declining value of its national currency, the renminbi.

All of these, argued Medvedev, contribute to "the emergence of the new reality," which is making the country's leadership review its strategic vision for the future.

As part of this strategic vision, Medvedev announced that Russia has begun working jointly with the expert community on an extended strategy of socioeconomic development, the so-called Strategy 2030. The strategy will concentrate on four priorities: investment activity, import substitution, the quality of state governance, and budgetary policy.

The four strategic priorities for the Russian economy

"Stimulating investment activity is of crucial importance," stated Medvedev. Creating more favorable conditions for investments, both domestic and foreign, is given a high priority. "Our aim is to remove barriers that prevent private money from entering the market," he said.

Within the last year, the government created a number of institutions and mechanisms to attract more private investment into the Russian economy. For example, the newly established Industry Development Fund provides assistance to companies in need of early stage investment. A corporation for the development of small and medium-size enterprises will provide financial and credit support for such enterprises. On the regional level, local authorities now are given a right to provide a two-year tax break.

Oleg Buklemishev, director of the Economic Policy Research Center, agrees that these are logical next steps, "The issue of investment in Russia is a key economic problem which has to be solved in the first place."

However he argues that, "The main impediment for further investment progress is the state itself, the state is a bad investor: how it operates, how it creates an environment for the private sector and how it behaves in the investment sphere." That is why he suggested that "investment incentives must be restored and state investment money should be given directly to private companies."

The second priority - import substitution - has already become a mantra for the Russian state and the nation's economists. It is also an essential element of structural reform, argued Medvedev. "It is competitive Russian businesses that make the economy more balanced and more resilient to crises," he said.

By returning Russian goods to the market and increasing their quality (typically with the help of the state), it is possible to increase their competitiveness both in Russia and beyond. "The import substitution policy does not imply Russia's isolation or building some artificial barriers; it is aimed at making Russian non-commodity products competitive on global markets," concluded Medvedev.

The two remaining priorities, governance effectiveness and budgetary policy, serve as a pre-condition for achieving the first two goals. This is why Medvedev claimed that there are going to be reductions in the number of government officials and in government spending in order to increase governance and budget efficiency.

"This is the underlying principle of the next year budget, which we have almost finished drafting," said Medvedev. The only protected items will be Russia's international commitments, defense and security, agriculture and social obligations.

Asked by Russia Direct about positive changes in the Russian economy over the last year, Oleg Buklemishev noted the changing mindset within Russia: "I can consider one change as a positive - growing understanding of what's going on in the Russian economy which, in my opinion, is very important. A lot of people started to understand where we are."

It seems that the Russian authorities have also realized the complexity of the economic situation in the country and started to find ways out of it. A new extended strategy of socioeconomic development of the country until 2030 that involves the input of the expert community is a good start for creating a new strategic thinking.
 
 #11
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
October 5, 2015
Russian media weighs the risks of Russia's Syria campaign
Russia Direct presents a roundup of Russian media, with the focus on Russia's airstrikes against ISIS in Syria and the Normandy Four meeting in Paris.
By Anastasia Borik

Last week, the Russian media actively discussed the nation's military operation in Syria, frequently citing the various risks associated with Russia's anti-terror campaign. Russia's entry into the war against ISIS in Syria is also related to the second most discussed topic of the week: How might the terrorists respond to Russia's involvement?

The first Russian air strikes on ISIS positions in Syria

On Sept. 30 the Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian parliament, unanimously granted President Vladimir Putin permission to deploy troops abroad. That coincided with an official request from Syria for Russian military assistance.

The first air strikes on ISIS positions in Syria followed swiftly (the Federation Council approved only the use of the Russian Air Force, ruling out a ground-based operation).

Business daily Vedomosti believes the operation in Syria is not a noble cause, but an element of propaganda to distract the Russian public. Russia's leaders, says the newspaper, are trying to wage a "warless war," thereby diverting attention away from the country's pressing economic problems and the conflict in Ukraine to a "short triumphant war" designed to improve the Kremlin's ratings.

Independent Slon points out that the Kremlin's declaration of war against ISIS has an ulterior motive. The first air strikes were in fact inflicted against Islamist groups fighting against Assad's army. The publication suggests that Russia's real purpose is to preserve the Assad regime and avoid a "Libyan scenario" in Syria and the humiliation of losing a major ally in the region. In this sense, the counter-terrorism operation is secondary.

Opposition paper Novaya Gazeta describes the operation in Syria as "alarming," noting the negative reaction from Russia's European and American partners. Western countries are in no hurry to recognize Russia's good intentions, believing that Moscow's primary concern is to save its "prot�g� Assad," and secure a role as a key player in the Middle East. According to the paper, it will not improve relations between Russia and the West, but, on the contrary, threaten an escalation.

Meanwhile, pro-government Rossiyskaya Gazeta states that air strikes by Russian fighters have "undermined the morale of the terrorists." The publication interviewed a Russian Defense Ministry spokesperson, who told in detail exactly which terrorist-controlled facilities were destroyed, which planes were deployed, and which bombs and missiles were used.

The head of the Main Operations Directorate of the General Staff Colonel-General, Andrei Kartapolov, announced that the Russian Air Force had carried out more than 60 sorties to destroy more than 50 infrastructure facilities in terrorist hands. He also said that panic and desertion were now widespread among the militants, and that about 600 mercenaries had left their positions and were trying to get to Europe.

Is Russia threatened by terrorist retaliatory measures?

Novaya Gazeta believes that ISIS terrorists could threaten Russia, and not only the Russian military in Syria, but also people inside Russia itself. The publication suggests that such a well-organized and armed terrorist organization like ISIS could attack Russia not only with explosives, but also chemical and biological weapons.

For Russia, it is a frightening prospect. The country has only recently stopped trembling from domestic terror attacks. That point was made by renowned Middle East expert Georgy Mirsky on Echo of Moscow. He believes that although ISIS is unlikely to be able to threaten Russia directly (its geographical range is not sufficient at present), it could energize its allies in the region to strike Russia.

Above all, says Mirsky, there will be more attempts to recruit and entice young people in Russia's Islamic regions to join radical groups. That will be followed by inevitable terror attacks.

Vedomosti looks at the issue more broadly. Besides possible terrorist activities inside Russia, the operation in Syria carries a more global threat, with the conflict potentially spilling over far beyond the Middle East. In this sense, Russia finds itself in a very awkward situation: it has "shaken the Syrian beehive" and incurred the wrath of the terrorists, not to mention the possibility of getting bogged down in Syria, just like the Soviet Union did in Afghanistan.

The Normandy Four meeting

On Oct. 2 in Paris, Francois Hollande, Angela Merkel, Vladimir Putin and Petro Poroshenko met to discuss Ukraine and the implementation of the Minsk agreements. Russian media opinion on the results was divided.

Russian tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets was skeptical about the outcome of the "quartet" negotiations, pointing to Putin's unwillingness to participate in the press conference and the lack of any significant statements by Hollande and Merkel.

According to the paper, the talks are deadlocked over the issue of local elections in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) and Luhansk People's Republic (LPR) scheduled for Oct. 18, which run counter to the Minsk agreements and Ukrainian law.

Novaya Gazeta is not so pessimistic and considers the most important achievement of the meeting to be the arrangement to continue the demilitarization of the conflict and maintain the ceasefire. The publication also believes that some agreement was reached on the elections in the Donbas, but that domestically it will be a thorn in Poroshenko's side for a long time to come, since a significant portion of the Ukrainian elite views the matter differently (in particular, the issue of amnesty for DPR and LPR leaders).In any event, says Novaya Gazeta, the Paris meeting represents a big step towards resolving the conflict in the Donbas.

Rossiyskaya Gazeta positively assesses the outcome of the talks. The publication says that the meeting not only made progress in the implementation of the Minsk agreements, but also confirmed the lack of an alternative to the "Minsk process," which provides an opportunity to settle the conflict during the lull in fighting.

Transaero bankruptcy

In the first days of October, news broke of the impending bankruptcy of one of Russia's largest Russian airlines, Transaero. The news took many analysts by surprise, since as recently as early September it was reported that the company's debt problems would be solved through an asset purchase by Russia's main airline Aeroflot.

It was even reported that the deal had been closed with Aeroflot paying the symbolic sum of one ruble. But on Oct. 1 Aeroflot rejected the deal, and a convened government commission decided not to rescue Transaero, stating that bankruptcy was the only option for the private company.

Slon interviewed economist Sergei Aleksashenko, who stressed that bankruptcy was the only option. The economist is adamant that the government should put an end to the unsound practice of saving private companies and banks, especially in the case of Transaero, whose unprofitability and inefficiency are legendary (total company debt as of June amounted to 260 billion rubles, or about $3.9 billion).

Rossiyskaya Gazeta urges Transaero passengers not to panic, since Aeroflot, Sibir and UTair could step in to fulfill the company's obligations to ticket holders. The publication notes that the government will not allow passengers with tickets to be inconvenienced.

Novaya Gazeta believes that a loss-making company on the scale of Transaero could exist for such a long time (and as Russia's second largest airline at that) only through administrative leverage. The publication mentions the ties between the company's management and top politicians.

Novaya Gazeta argues that the main victim of the Transaero saga will in fact be its main competitor Aeroflot, which will be forced to spend considerable resources on fulfilling Transfer's obligations to passengers (since Aeroflot's majority shareholder is the state, for which reason the company must act on "orders from above").

Feedback on the Obama-Putin meeting in New York

On Sept. 28 the 70th anniversary session of the UN General Assembly saw the long-awaited meeting between Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin. The leaders had not talked face-to-face since 2013, and the meeting promised to deliver a lot. However, Russian reporters were mostly disappointed.

Vedomosti talks about the dubious practical outcome of the meeting, since the positions of the two countries were clearly no closer afterwards. The only tangible result was the meeting itself, which improved the Russian leader's "handshakability," which is of no small importance to the Kremlin.

Novaya Gazeta writes that no one expected the talks to achieve a breakthrough, and that the full-fledged meeting itself was a success for big diplomacy. The author stresses how important it was for the parties not only to swap views on current affairs, but also to state their interpretation of events to the opposing side, which is precisely what happened in New York.

Moskovsky Komsomolets believes that the interchange of opinions was successful, and cites Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who stated that on Ukraine, "The American side had no arguments to challenge the reasoning of our president."

Quotes of the week:

Dmitry Medvedev on the air strikes on ISIS in Syria: "It is better to fight terrorism abroad than at home."

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov on the Putin-Obama talks on Ukraine: "The biggest talking point is that... the American side had no arguments to challenge the reasoning of our president."

Iyad Shamse, leader of an FSA Syrian rebel group, the Asala and Tanmieh Front: "There is no Islamic State in this area. The Russians are applying great pressure on the revolution. This will strengthen terrorism, everyone will head towards extremism. Any support for Assad in this way is strengthening terrorism."


 
 #12
Sputnik
October 6, 2015
What is Russia's Most 'Selfish' Reason for Engaging in Syria?

With the Russian air campaign in Syria against ISIL entering its sixth day, much has been written about the reasons for Russia's intervention. However, apart from its loftier goals, Moscow also has at least one 'selfish' reason for fighting Islamic radicalism abroad - namely, to prevent it from coming home to roost in Russia's own neighborhood.

Much has been said about the Russian campaign of airstrikes aimed at assisting the Syrian Arab Army in its war against ISIL, from the commitment to supporting a close Russian ally, to the strategic goal of supporting a secular Arab government in the face of extremism, to the dividends gained by joining directly in the international military effort to fight the terror group.

However, it seems that in all the commotion, the issue of Russia's self-interest in joining the war has been set aside.

Speaking to journalists immediately following the announcement that the Russian senate had approved the use of the military to support the Syrian government, Kremlin Chief of Staff Sergei Ivanov clarified that the Russian leadership had made its decision based on two criteria: assisting its ally, and protecting Russia's "national interests."

But what are Russia's national interests? In a recent article for business magazine Expert, journalist Gevorg Mirzayan challenged the claim made by some Russian commentators that Russia had foolishly taken on the onerous responsibility of fixing a colossal mess created by others. According to the analyst, "in fact the situation is much simpler. Moscow really is 'pulling chestnuts out of the fire,' but for itself," and in its own interest.

Mirzayan notes that while the Russian operation is naturally fraught with risks and dangers, "the consequences of ignoring the terrorist threat in Syria through the principle that it's 'no concern of mine' is much more dangerous." The reality, Mirzayan suggests, is that "once Assad's hut burns down, the fire will spread to Russia's house as well, either immediately, or, more likely, after some additional steps."

Mirzayan recalls that at the moment, several thousand radicals from Russia and across the former Soviet Union have joined ISIL's ranks. Last month, the Russian internal affairs ministry estimated that about 1,800 Russian citizens to have joined the terror group.

"After the fighting is over, they will go home," the expert explains. "But while they had left for [for Syria and Iraq] as ordinary radicals and marginal elements, they will return with professional training in explosives and sabotage, gaining useful contacts and channels of financing," he adds.

"And if the Russian Security Service is competent in catching and jailing those who return to the North Caucasus, Crimea or Tatarstan, the security services of other post-Soviet states do not have the same skills, finances, organizational capabilities and operational experience," Mirzayan warns.

"Thousands of militants will return to Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan." According to the analyst, Tajikistan at present is particularly vulnerable, given its population's heavy dependence on falling remittances from Russia, the devaluation of the ruble, and the government's recent crackdown on the Islamic opposition. In case of conflict, if some part of the Tajik population were to fall under the influence of ISIL propaganda, it could destabilize both Tajikistan and neighboring Kyrgyzstan, which controls a part of the Ferghana Valley, which Mirzayan recalls is a hotbed of radical Islam in Central Asia.

"As a result, in the best case scenario, Russia would receive a flow of hundreds of thousands of refugees. At worst, we would get a huge zone of instability around the perimeter of Russia's southern border, which would require billions of rubles, thousands of Russian lives and decades-worth of time to stabilize. And with this task Moscow could not expect to get any special assistance from anyone, apart from China."

Subsequently Mirzayan explains, "it is much faster and more inexpensive to solve the problem now -on foreign soil and together with the forces of an international coalition."

These realities seem to be something that the Russian leadership has taken to heart in its calculation to intervene in the conflict. Speaking to his cabinet on the day the airstrikes began, President Putin emphasized that "the only true way to combat international terrorism -and those fighting in Syria and its neighboring countries are just that, international terrorists - is through preemption, and fighting and destroying insurgents in territories that are already occupied, instead of waiting for them to come to our house."

Putin's words were echoed by everyone from Chief of Staff Ivanov to Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev. It is a sentiment which Russians, who have not forgotten the bitter legacy of Islamist terrorism and its effects both on their own country and on other countries in the former USSR, are likely to share.

According to Mirzayan, in Syria, "Russia is destroying its future enemies, with the help of Syrian, Iraqi and Iranian hands, nations for whom the problems which could face Russia tomorrow are already being faced today. They are the ones who bear the main financial and human losses of this war, their soldiers are the ones fighting on the ground and conducting real offensive operations. All they need now from Russia is technical assistance, intelligence and airstrikes. And all this Moscow has provided."


 
 #13
www.rt.com
October 6, 2015
Moscow's red lines were crossed - ex US intel chief on Russian military op in Syria
[Video interview here https://www.rt.com/news/317710-russia-red-lines-flynn/]

Americans must understand that Russia also has a foreign policy and a national security strategy, and that Moscow launched the campaign against ISIS in Syria after its "unstated red lines were crossed," retired US Lieutenant General Michael Flynn told RT.

Russia and the US have to work together in their fight against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL), and an international coalition needs to be brought together to facilitate this, said Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

Flynn said that he strongly believes that "Russia and the United States working together and trying to work with the other partners that we all have in this region can come up with some other solutions."

"We have to understand as Americans that Russia also has foreign policy; Russia also has a national security strategy. And I think that we failed to understand what that is," said the former DIA chief.

Commenting on Russia's decision to go into Syria, Flynn said the he believes that Moscow's "unstated red lines were crossed."

"And I think that those unstated red lines was the size and the scale of those radical Islamists that came out of the Russian Federation to fight inside of Syria in this Islamic State," he explained.

"We can't have two great nations like Russia and the US diving into this very complex situation...you could end up bumping into each other and causing something very different," he said, calling Russia's military action a "huge, huge step in the complexity of this situation."

Flynn added that "we have to go after these radical elements wherever they exist, instead of allowing them to come back and roost in our own countries. So I'm not opposed to what Russia is doing in terms of going after these radical elements...so if that is an objective of Mr. Putin's goals, to fight them in the areas where they currently exist, I don't think that's such a bad goal."
No opposition ready to lead Syria

In terms of the opposition, the question needs to be whether there is a "coherent, solid, political movement with leaders who can be respected at an international forum that actually could lead the country of Syria," Flynn said.

"I can't sit here today and tell you who those leaders are. Do they exist?"

He also said that a decision has to be made internationally on whether President Bashar Assad of Syria can stay in power. He stated that he believes Assad will eventually "have to go," adding that he doesn't think that belief is a "disconnect" from the way Putin looks at Syria.

Meanwhile, the retired lieutenant general admitted that he "didn't have any words to describe" Washington's training program aimed at tackling ISIS, which came at a cost of $500 million and has resulted in just a handful of fighters still on the ground.


 
 
#14
The National Interest
October 5, 2015
Russia Could Fly 96 Sorties a Day over Syria
By Dave Majumdar

The Russian expeditionary force in Syria could generate as many as ninety-six fixed-wing combat aircraft sorties per day, assuming they have well-oiled logistics and properly trained maintenance crews. But that is a best-case scenario during a "combat surge"; more realistically, the thirty-two Russian jets at Latakia might be able to generate only twenty sorties per day.

"With thirty-two on the ramp, I think they'll probably be able to fly twenty-four jets per day," one recently retired U.S. Air Force fighter pilot told me. "Depending on sortie duration and whether they're flying at night, they may get between two and four sorties per jet, per day. So I think the range is probably between forty-eight and ninety-six sorties per day."

But while the Russians might be able to generate as many as ninety-six sorties in a day during a surge, they might not be able to sustain that pace for long. "Whether or not they'll be able to sustain a pace like that will be interesting to watch," stated the retired fighter pilot.

Another current U.S. Air Force official agreed with the assessment. "That's about right," the second Air Force official said. "There are a lot of variables though-number of aircrew and maintainers, aerial refueling, distance from airfield to target and the amount of intel on deliberate targets. Some could be flying on-call CAPs [combat air patrols] waiting for targets and flying longer missions while others takeoff on deliberate missions where they take off with pre-designated targets."

But other U.S. Air Force officials are dubious-given the Russians' relatively anemic logistical train and the diverse types of aircraft that they have fielded. "I think those numbers are really optimistic," said a third senior U.S. Air Force official. "If I had thirty-two airplanes and they were all different I think we could-with good logistics-get a four-turn-four from the Su-24s, a four-turn-four from the Su-25s, and two-turn-twos from the Su-30s and Su-34s.... So that's twenty-four sorties a day."

Moreover, the Russian aircraft have not been observed flying at night-which cuts down on their sortie generation rate. That has led other Air Force and Marine officials to conclude that the Russians might be flying as few as 20 twenty sorties per day-mostly in pairs and with sporadic support from the four air superiority oriented Su-30SM Flankers. Only some Russian aircraft have been observed carrying KAB-500 satellite-guided bombs or Kh-29 laser-guided missiles. That means that most Russian aircraft have to flying during the day when dropping unguided munitions. "I don't see them flying at night especially since they're dropping dumb bombs," the third official said.

However, the Su-25s might be able generate more sorties than the other aircraft types present at Latakia because they operate differently from typical fighter aircraft. "The Frogfoot would have a whole different operating construct - shorter sorties and ordnance loading requirements," said a fourth senior U.S. Air Force official. "Perhaps seventy-five percent tail availability, three sorties per day is reasonable."

U.S. forces are typically able to maintain about seventy percent mission availability during combat surges-but the Russians are not likely to be able to match that. One U.S. Air Force commander said that he was able to keep four F-15C Eagles aloft twenty-four hours a day with twelve deployed aircraft during Operation Iraqi Freedom. The F-15Cs had to fly for six hours per day during those sorties. "With hard work and good logistics, this was comfortable," the U.S. Air Force official said. "Can the Russians do that? I don't know - their jets are rugged, but like I said, I'm skeptical about logistics."

U.S. Navy officials offered similar assessments. "We recently took seven top-of-the-line Super Hornets to [Naval Air Station] Fallon [Nevada] for a det," a senior naval aviator said. "You can safely assuming that a part of the time the seventh jet will be undergoing maintenance, so I suspect the Russians have eight to ten [out of each 12 aircraft detachment of Su-24s and Su-25s] available at any time."

Like the Air Force officials, U.S. Navy officials questioned how many sorties the Russian forces would be able to fly. "We also flew a five-turn-five-turn-five schedule for fifteen sorties a day," the naval aviator said. "This was relatively aggressive from a resource standpoint. We're talking jets, but how many pilots did they bring? What is their maintenance footprint?"

The problem for the Russians is that they have not deployed overseas since the collapse of the Soviet Union. "Russian logistics will probably be the long pole in the tent," the fourth Air Force official said. It's a problem further compounded by Russia's use of conscript troops rather than professionals. "They are not used to this like we are. Our maintainers are smart... Not conscripts. They're motivated and they know the business well," the third official said. "I don't think the Russians are dumb, but they're not Americans."

The difficulty in gauging the Russians' sortie generation capability is complex because there are a lot of unknowns. Factors like maintenance efficiency, fuel and weapons availability, parts logistics reach back, and general pilot and maintainer proficiency during surge operations are just a few of the factors that can have a drastic effect impact on sortie generation. The U.S. Air Force has developed its methods after a lot of trial and error-and a lot of practice. "The USAF has a complex method of ensuring it has enough jets and pilots to maintain surge operations, and it relies on bringing enough of these things together in sufficient quantity with well trained operators to implement them," said a fifth Air Force official. "That's what makes us so good. The synergy between man and machine to endure for the long haul."


 
 #15
Logic of events may spread Russia's operation against IS from Syria to Iraq
By Tamara Zamyatina

MOSCOW, October 5. /TASS/. The logic of events in the Middle East as it is, it should not be ruled out that the anti-terrorist operation involving Russia against the Islamic State may spread from Syria to Iraq, polled experts have told TASS.

Iraqi Prime Minister Heidar al-Abadi said on Saturday he would have nothing against if Russia's air and space forces dealt strikes against positions of the terrorist organization Islamic State in the Iraqi territory. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Monday that Moscow had not yet received an official notification on that score.

One of Russia's leading specialists on oriental affairs, Georgy Mirsky, believes that successful strikes by Russian aircraft against the Islamic State's command posts and weapons depots are already driving the militants out of Syria into the territory of neighboring Iraq. "It is from Iraq that the terrorists had come to Syria. Their 'family nest' is there. When President Vladimir Putin says that Islamic State terrorists must be eliminated 'there', away from Russia, the word 'there' means both Syria and Iraq. It is still the very same war. Under pressure from Russia's air strikes and the Syrian army's offensive on the ground the Islamic State militants are gathering in Iraq, where they should be finished off. That's a question of time," Mirsky told TASS. "I do not rule out that Baghdad may follow in Damascus's footsteps to ask Moscow to attack IS targets inside Iraq."

Mirsky believes that the Russian leadership's hypothetical consent to an air operation in Iraq will depend on how far Moscow's aims reach. "If the point at issue is preserving Syrian statehood on 20% of Syria's territory under the control of Bashar Assad's army, then any expansion of Russia's air operation against militants' positions in Iraq may prove unnecessary. But if the ultimate goal is to wipe the Islamic State from the face of the earth, then its citadels in Iraq will have to be bombed," Mirsky warns.

The president of the Middle East Institute, Yevgeny Satanovsky, is articulate, as usual. "If the real purpose of Russia and its allies in the anti-terrorist coalition (Syria, Iraq and Iran) is to suppress the Islamic State, then they should fight to the bitter end and to bomb the militants not only in Syria, but also in Iraq. It is not accidental that the allies' coordination center is in Baghdad. But if someone has the wish to preserve a handful of terrorists just in case, then there will be no operation against the Islamic State in Iraq. In this war the question is to be decided by those who have the power," he told TASS.

A member of the presidential Council for Interaction with Religious Organizations, Alexander Ignatenko, agrees with Satanovsky and Mirsky. "If Russia receives Iraq's request to deal air strikes against Islamic State militants, it should respond in the same way it responded to the request from Syria's President Bashar Assad," Ignatenko told TASS.

According to the analyst, since the moment Russia's air operation against the Islamic State in Syria began thousands of militants have migrated to neighbouring Jordan and Iraq. "This is precisely what happened when the United States attacked terrorists' positions in Iraq. They moved to Syria. The logic of military tactics implies the enemy must be attacked wherever it may be hiding," Ignatenko said.


 
#16
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
October 5, 2015
Is there a way to reconcile interests of the US, Russia in Syria?
Five high-profile experts discuss the implications of the Kremlin's Syria gamble, including the potential impact on the U.S.-Russia relationship and the potential for a new peace deal for Syria.
By Pavel Koshkin

Russia's military involvement in Syria and its airstrikes against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Greater Syria (ISIS) have met with mixed reactions in both the Western and Russian expert community.

On the one hand, Russia's campaign against ISIS is seen as a calculated risk, a responsible move, and Russia's sincere effort to normalize its relations with the West and play a greater role in solving global international challenges.

On the other hand, some skeptics interpret this stance either as an attempt to divert the world from the Ukraine crisis or as a move to back up Syrian President Bashar Assad and undermine the forces of opposition rebels supported by the West. Moreover, some experts and respected media sources draw negative parallels between Russia's Syria 2015 and Afghanistan 1979 campaigns.

However, both sides seem to agree that the Kremlin's direct participation will bring about more chaos and instability in the Middle East, already a turbulent region. And the recent case of the Turkish F-16 fighter jets, which intercepted a Russian warplane as it violated Turkey's air space, is a not a good sign for the situation in the region.

This incident indicates that the gloomy warnings of Russian jets colliding with Western ones might come true. This, in turn, might aggravate the unhealthy situation in U.S.-Russia relations that resulted from their ongoing differences over Ukraine, a relationship that some experts now describe as a new Cold War.

Russia Direct interviewed Russian and foreign experts to figure out what the real implications for Russia are as it attempts to create its own anti-ISIS coalition. In addition, they discussed the impact of Russia's participation in the Syria military campaign on Russia and its relations with the United States. Finally, they share their thoughts on the reasons why the Kremlin decided to step up its military involvement in the region.

Robert Legvold, professor emeritus, Department of Political Science and the Harriman Institute, Columbia University:

Syria is a four-dimensional civil war that we all are losing, except for ISIS. One dimension is government versus anti-government. A second is Sunni versus Shia. A third is primarily within the Sunni community, radicals versus moderates. And the fourth is tribal, generating dozens and dozens of crosscutting tensions and conflicts.

The reason for U.S. policy failures to this point and Russian foreign policy failures to come is that each is focused on only one dimension-the government versus anti-government dimension, to which they then add the war against ISIS, creating a two-dimensional response to a multi-dimensional problem.

Not just the United States, but an effective coalition of the United States, France, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and, for some purposes, Turkey, are failing because they are in no position to ensure the success of moderate or secular opposition forces fighting the Assad government. These are, in fact, losing their position and influence to the more radical elements in or close to the Nusra Front.

Russia now enters this ugly fray with its military power and a coalition of Iran, Hezbollah, and Syria. The first-order objective is to ensure the Assad government is not militarily destroyed and, if possible, that its position is strengthened in any (unlikely) effort to negotiate a political settlement.

Russia has very real reasons to fear the success of ISIS, not least because more than 2,000 Russians, Azerbaijanis, and Central Asians have joined ISIS, and will at some point come home on a mission. But striking ISIS comes second for the Russian military to salvaging the Assad regime's military position, and, given the immediate threat to that, this means attacking the opposition forces, including those supported by the United States, Saudi Arabia, and the others.

Unless the United States and Russia can find a way to make their positions on a political settlement of the Syrian civil war more compatible, there is little chance that they can really cooperate in addressing what is the genuine common interest they have in defeating ISIS.

Perhaps there is some hope they can move in this direction, because the Obama Administration has dropped the precondition that Assad must go before anything else, and now proposes a "managed transition" that would leave the government in place during negotiations among all parties.

And Russia has made plain that it does not insist that Assad remain in power, if alternative arrangements could be worked out by all parties. But it seems far-fetched that the warring parties can be brought to the negotiating table. And the Russian proposal for all to join in a "grand coalition" to fight ISIS - that is, to join Russia's coalition with Iran, Hezbollah, and Syria - has about as much chance succeeding as if the United States proposed a "grand coalition" where Russia is invited to join forces with it, France, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the Syrian opposition.

Russia will almost surely succeed in the short run in shoring up the military position of the Assad government. But then what? Is it prepared to maintain Assad's forces (and the 20 percent of the country they control, with 80 percent of the country against them) for as long as this interminable civil war-now four years old-continues?

Or, worse, are the Russians willing to allow themselves to be drawn deeper in this civil war, attempting somehow to ensure victory for the forces they favor? If so, the somber, agonizing results of the Afghanistan wars, the Iraq war, and Libya war await them.

Michael E. O'Hanlon, senior fellow and director of research, Foreign Policy Department, Brookings Institution:

Russia's intervention in Syria is not as surprising to me as to some people. Moscow clearly wishes to support a traditional ally, Assad, and retain influence and port access in the future Syria.

Its interest in defeating ISIS is, to my mind, not the first motivation (based on Russia's own actions and choices of targets so far). But I am sure President Putin would like to weaken ISIS too. He also senses that Western policy is in disarray in Syria and U.S. commitment there is limited in strength and scope.

I am worried, however. First, we have to work hard to de-conflict our respective roles, most of all airstrikes. Second, we should not be attacking the moderate opposition forces. Third, we all need a framework/vision for the future Syria towards which we can work cooperatively. Right now, that is lacking. I would suggest a "Bosnia model," with autonomous zones and a weak post-Assad central government.

This confederation would include Kurdish, Alawite, Druse, and Sunni sectors and a central multi-sectarian sector of the country as well (where Damascus would be located). An international peacekeeping force would be needed to uphold such a deal and both Russia and the United States would be needed in such a force-and would need to collaborate.

Russia, for example, might focus on the Alawite sector, the Mediterranean coastal region, and parts of the central/intermixed sector, once we get to the point where a deal is possible.

All of us would work to weaken and defeat ISIS.  That is my vision-and I believe it could work to reconcile Russian and American interests.

Andrei Tsygankov, professor of Department of Political Science and International Relations at San Francisco State University:

Russia's involvement in a military conflict in Syria is a major decision that carries both serious potential and risks. Ideally, Putin's decision will contribute to stabilization of Syria and the Middle East, improve relations with the West, and prevent radicalization of Muslims at home and in Central Asia.

However, the practical risks include Russia's inability to widen the so far largely Shia-based coalition in the region, alienation of major powers outside the region, and decline of 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 needs 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.

Steven Pifer, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and Brookings Senior Fellow at Center on the United States and Europe:

The Kremlin presumably has a logic for its military intervention in Syria, but it is difficult to discern. It is not clear what military capabilities Russia can bring to bear-particularly if it limits itself to air strikes, not ground troops-that would dramatically change the situation on the ground.

The U.S. and other militaries have for some time tried to use air power to degrade ISIS, with limited effect. And if the Russian intervention does not succeed, will Moscow escalate? What happens if ISIS or some other Syrian opposition group mounts an attack on a Russian base that produces a serious number of Russian casualties? The Kremlin may launched its air operations last week expecting to limit its role, but it could find itself pulled in deeper and deeper.

U.S. and Russian military forces presumably will find a way to deconflict their respective military operations in and over Syria. This weekend's incident, where Turkish F-16s intercepted a Russian aircraft that strayed into Turkish airspace, illustrates the potential problem. Both sides should wish to avoid that.

Broader cooperation between the United States and Russia regarding Syria, however, is likely to be limited. There are two main obstacles to such cooperation. First, The United States, as well as Europe, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Arab states, believe that Assad needs to go, given what he has done to his own people. The Russian intervention, on the other hand, appears designed to bolster Assad.

Second, U.S. military operations are targeted on ISIS. While a few Russian air strikes appear to have been targeted at ISIS, the bulk of the Russian air operations are aimed at other groups, far away from ISIS-controlled territory, including some groups that the West regards as moderate and potential participants in any political transition process in Syria. This difference in targets poses a second major obstacle to cooperation.

The challenge for Washington and Moscow may not be how to cooperate on Syria, but how to avoid that country becoming an even bigger problem on the bilateral agenda.

Jeffrey Mankoff,deputy director and fellow, Center for Strategic International Studies (CSIS) Russia and Eurasia Program:

The risks for U.S.-Russia relations from [Russia's direct involvement into Syria] exist, but can be overstated, because relations are already pretty bad.

There are real concerns, which deal with several things.

One, of course, is the potential for some kind of accident where U.S. and Russian planes might interact with each other. An accidental exchange of fire between U.S. and Russian forces might also happen and it is very dangerous. Military leadership of both sides are trying to minimize the risks.

The second issue has to deal with the fate of Syria itself, the future of Assad and his potential role. This issue is going to come up again when one starts thinking about the longer-term vision of Syria's future, and here pretty substantial differences of opinion between the U.S. and Russia exist.

Are U.S. and Russian political objectives in Syria compatible? Maybe, in a limited way, but not fully. For instance, if Russian airstrike are actually targeting ISIS in coordination with the U.S.-led coalition partners, that is one thing. If they are being conducted against other rebels that are important for the U.S. as partners, that is a different thing.

Third is if Russia starts suffering casualties because of military engagements with the rebels, ISIS or otherwise, does Russia, or do some Russian people start blaming the United States for those [casualties]? Does that contribute to increased difficulties [in U.S.-Russia relations]?

There may be the fourth point that deals with the regional issue. Russia seems to be trying to prevent arms that are going Syria from getting into hands of, let's say, Hezbollah. There is a possibility that this might happen. Should Russian weaponry finds its way to Hezbollah, it might use this weaponry against Israel, which could create a bigger problem, including with the U.S.

So, for all these reasons there is a potential for problems to arise. However, at the same time, U.S.-Russia relations are not in the best shape: in terms of that specific danger [for bilateral relations], I do not think it is the greatest concern that Russia's intervention creates.

Gordon Hahn, advisory board member at Geostrategic Forecasting Corporation, adjunct professor at Middlebury Institute for International Studies at Monterey:

There are now two jihadi organizations based in Russia's North Caucasus at present: Caucasus Emirate, allied with Al-Qaeda and Jabhat al-Nusra, and the Caucasus Province of the Islamic State, a direct affiliate and part of ISIS. The latter is expected to continue to make extraordinary efforts to begin a campaign of suicide attacks and other forms of attack in the North Caucasus and Russia in general.

The geopolitical implications are profound potentially. Russia has "returned" to the Middle East in a major way not seen since the Cold War, though it has completely different goals now. Those goals are to protect the Assad regime as much as possible either in staying in power or being eased out, to establish Russia as a power to be reckoned with in the region and to weaken the global jihadi revolutionary movement which threatens Russian national security and that of its neighbors, especially but not only Central Asia and Azerbaijan.

The major risks for Russia include falling into the temptation to expand Russian efforts, including supplying advisors and special forces operations, leading to Russian casualties and further temptation drawing Russia into a quagmire.

In addition, the financial burden on the country could be considerable and combined with continuing low oil process and sanctions and a possible re-starting of the Ukrainian war this could overwhelm the Russian treasury, creating domestic problems for the "Putin elite" and destabilizing the regime.

Another issue is what the response of a new U.S. administration will be 16 months from now. The likely Republican president will not be a semi-isolationist like Rand Paul or a maverick like Donald Trump but, rather, an anti-Russian hawk. Another Bush administration is also unlikely to be very tolerant of Putin's proactive foreign policy. So, we can expect even worse U.S.-Russian and Western-Russian relations in about a year and a half, with unforeseeable and potentially far-reaching consequences.

I do not see the Russian air campaign being effective unless it is willing to undertake a major effort to train, equip, inform with intelligence, and organize a ground war coalition combining the Syrian and Iraqi militaries, Iranian forces, and the Kurdish Peshmerga forces. The latter is ripe for stealing away from its Western allies, who are so beholden to Turkey, which has actually been assisting ISIS and other jihadi groups.

Putin's effort could also expose the inadvertent Western and intentional Arab assistance from Qatar and Saudi Arabia going to ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra and other jihadi groups in Syria. Could Russia win over members of the Western coalition? Possibly.


 
 
 #17
Moskovskiy Komsomolets
October 2, 2015
Moscow, Washington must combine efforts to settle Syrian crisis - Russian pundit
Mikhail Rostovskiy, What Russia can and cannot achieve in Syria. And why a compromise with America is necessary

"Hey, you, evil Russians! You are bombing the wrong people!" "Why no, you scatterbrained Americans, we are bombing precisely the people who should be bombed!" "The wrong people, the wrong people, the wrong people!", This political and diplomatic burlesque against the background of Russia's air strikes in Syria is simultaneously both something natural and expected, and a cause for deep alarm.

Natural, because acute disagreements remain between the Russian Federation and the United States on the subject of the fate of President [Bashar] Al-Asad. And the cause for alarm I see in the following: A real chance for Syria to cease to be ready to blow up at any moment like a "powder keg" on a world scale will appear only in one case. In the event that Moscow and Washington temporarily set aside their disagreements and begin to act in a united front.

"The falling out of lovers is the renewal of love" - this expression is usually by no means applicable to relations between Russia and America. We do not "quarrel" as lovers. We "quarrel" as great powers that regard one another as accursed rivals, each of which craves to "burn" its opposite number more than anything on earth. The current Russian-American slanging-match over Moscow's military action in Syria is a kind of exception against this familiar background.

Yes, the usual angry and critical words from Washington are being levelled at the Kremlin. But in this torrent of American "cussing," a traditional element like total moral and political unambiguity is absent. Within a very short while, everything could change. But at the moment, the position of official America with regard to Russia's actions in Syria can best of all be defined with the aid of the phrase "We condemn them, of course, but..."

And now I wish to take a big risk - to make a forecast on the subject of the situation in Syria, a state of affairs that is, in principle, so unpredictable. If in the coming days, weeks, and months this word "but" increases in size and is gradually transformed into some kind of unwilling, but pragmatic, Russian-American mutual understanding, the concepts "Syria" and "global nightmare" still have a chance of not becoming synonyms. If, on the other hand, the word "but" disappears from the American position, there are no such chances.

Why is the entire West, combining in a single impulse, yelling at the top of its voice at Russia: You are bombing in the wrong places? Because with the aid of its air strikes, Moscow is completely wrecking America's political game in Syria. "War is the continuation of politics by other means" - I apologize for using, not for the first time in my texts, this quotation from the famous 19th century Prussian military theoretician, General Carl von Clausewitz. But I have very weighty grounds for the repetition: Right now, Russia is illustrating in practice in Syria precisely what the renowned German military strategist had in mind.

Having exhausted the stock of purely political methods of supporting its traditional partner, Al-Asad, Russia is now supporting him with so a weighty "political argument" as military force. And this is inducing a certain state of internal dualism in the Americans. America was right on the verge of swallowing its old enemy, Al-Asad, and hanging his portrait in the gallery of "overthrown villains" already adorned with the images of [Libyan and Iraqi leaders] Mu'ammar al-Qadhafi and Saddam Hussayn. And suddenly, wham - the "game" is suddenly given an opportunity to make a dash away from the already gaping American mouth.

The Americans, of course, are overjoyed and pleased that Russia has got involved in the Syrian war. For Washington, this opens up a "horizon of opportunities" of a kind of which it could not even have dreamed only recently. But this joy is thickly intermixed with anger: The Americans do not like the fact that Moscow is forcing them to take a position in Syria that they stubbornly do not wish to take.

The English language has the following pithy phrase: "Live with it!" - "live with this, resign yourself to the inevitability of something that you do not like, and go on with your existence in tranquillity!" America has more than once said to Russia: "Live with it!" So it was, for example, in the case of NATO's eastward expansion, in the case of the 2014 coup d'etat in Ukraine, and in the case of the creation of a missile defence system in Europe. Today, with the aid of military aviation, Russia is saying the same phrase to America: You will not manage to gobble up Al-Asad, because we will not allow it! Live with it!

Is the game worth the candle for us? If it were a question of sentimental attachment to Al-Asad on the part of the denizens of the Kremlin, I would answer this question unequivocally: No, of course not. But if anyone's position on Syria is indeed distinguished by an excess of sentiment, it is by no means a fact that this position is Russia's. It seems to me that in Syria, America is repeating its own mistakes from the times of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. By overthrowing Saddam and disbanding the Iraqi Army, the United States also simultaneously shattered the backbone of the Iraqi state.

Today, America is proposing in Syria the very same idea that was bottled in Iraq: Let us first destroy everything, and then begin to build something new together on the "shards of autocracy." But such an approach does not work in the Near East. America should take a more pragmatic stance with regard to Al-Asad. The United States - in no small measure under the influence of Russia - has already begun to shift in the correct direction. This movement must be continued.

But compromise entails concessions by both sides. The Syrian crisis is no exception. At a time when the Americans are modifying their position, Russia should also demonstrate its readiness for compromise decisions. Even in the best-case scenario, the Syrian political system is doomed to profound changes. The restoration of the prewar status quo is absolutely impossible.

The regime of the Al-Asads - father and son - was always the rule of a minority. As I have already written, the majority of the Syrian population are followers of the Sunni tendency of Islam. The Al-Asad family are representatives of the comparatively small Shi'i religious community of the Alawis.

In the course of a little more than 40 years - from the coup d'etat organized in 1970 by Hafez Al-Asad, at that time the minister of defence, until the moment that the civil war in Syria began in 2011 - , this regime kept control over the country more or less successfully. But now control has been lost. And it is unlikely ever to be restored. Russia can help the forces that stand behind Al-Asad - the Alawis and others - to avoid total physical annihilation. But to restore them to power over the entire Syrian state - I simply do not believe that this is within our power. And I doubt that this is necessary for us, anyway.

What difference does it make to ordinary Russian citizens what the name of the Syrian president is and what religious community he specifically represents? We should not set ourselves the goal of "saving" the presidential status of "Private Al-Asad" at any price. Russia's interests are by no means identical with the interests of Al-Asad.

Whey then is it precisely Al-Asad who is the bone of contention between Moscow and Washington right now? I think that it is because the United States has gone too far in its hatred for Al-Asad. America has become confused, and, for the sake of ridding Syria of a "dictator," it is pushing it into a state of total chaos.

In trying to bring America back to "commonsense territory," however, we ourselves should not lose our bearings in the political area. Russia has the right to pursue its political and military game in Syria. But we do not have the right to lose ourselves in the game. The Russian Federation's goal in Syria should be not "victory" over the United States, but agreement with the United States.

 
 #18
Moskovskiy Komsomolets
October 5, 2015
Moscow's main aim in Syria is to support Al-Asad, says Russian pundit
Interview with Aleksey Malashenko, head of the Religion, Society, and Security Programme at the Carnegie Moscow Centre, by Andrey Kamakin: Expert: Aim of Russian operation in Syria is to strengthen Al-Asad's position. And not to combat Islamic State.

The Russian military are reporting successes in the operation in Syria: One after another the terrorists' bases, command centres, and strong points are being destroyed. Furthermore, representatives of the General Staff assert that panic has begun in the ranks of the radical Islamists: Many of them are leaving their camps and trying to get to Europe. Orientalist Aleksey Malashenko, head of the Religion, Society, and Security Programme at the Carnegie Moscow Centre, shared his assessment of the military dispatches and the prospects for the resolution of the crisis with Moskovskiy Komsomolets.

[Kamakin] Aleksey Vsevolodovich, do the Russian military's victory reports inspire you with optimism?

[Malashenko] No, absolutely not. I do not believe that it would be possible to change the situation in three days. Islamic State has been bombed and bombed, but then all of a sudden the Russian wonder pilots turn up and the enemies flee in panic... These dispatches remind me of the dispatches of the Soviet Information Bureau in 1941, according to which we had only successes, whereas in actual fact the reverse was true. To put it simply, I have no faith in these reports.

[Kamakin] The information about precisely whom we are bombing there is also rather contradictory. In this connection the recent statement by the president's press secretary is rather disturbing: It is not clear, he said, how the moderate opposition in Syria differs from the non-moderate opposition.

[Malashenko] Let us tell the truth: Russia's main aim is not to combat Islamic State but to support [Syrian President] Bashar al-Asad. That absolutely does not mean that no attempts are being made to bomb ISIL. Of course there are such attempts, but you know yourself: Dropping bombs on the Syrian opposition is much easier, because you know where they are. But Islamic State is a dark matter.

[Kamakin] Is ISIL not Al-Asad's main opponent?

[Malashenko] Of course not. If you look at the map it is not hard to see that directly contiguous to the Syrian government army there are opposition-controlled regions. ISIL is quite a long way away.

[Kamakin] What do you think are the specific goals of the operation?

[Malashenko] First, it must be admitted that Moscow, whatever one's view of its actions, is behaving quite consistently on this matter. Having set about defending Bashar al-Asad, we are defending him to the end. And I see a perfectly clear logic here. If we do not defend him we will be showing weakness. Not only to our Western colleagues but, even more important, to Middle Eastern countries. If we surrender one person today, then tomorrow, it turns out, we might surrender someone else. But for Russia it is crucial to retain its presence in the Middle East. In order to show that we are not simply a regional power whose national interests are limited to the post-Soviet space, that we also have a more distant goal. Well, that is what we are now showing.

[Kamakin] But it follows from this that the final goal of our involvement in the conflict is to restore control of the country's entire territory to the Al-Asad regime.

[Malashenko] Paradoxical as it may seem, no. I think Moscow understands perfectly well that sooner or later Bashar al-Asad must go. That some kind of compromise is needed. In the ideal scenario that compromise is the formation of a large, diverse opposition that would initially include Bashar. He would be given a certain amount of time to reach an agreement on the terms for handing over power, perhaps to retain some representatives in the future government. In this case both Bashar himself, and the opposition, and Russia, and the West would save face. And everyone would be happy, everyone would say they had won. If we and the Americans can succeed, by pooling our efforts, in putting pressure on the parties to the conflict and "driving" them into talks, then that result will be achieved. Otherwise we are doomed to go around in circles.

[Kamakin] It somehow does not seem that we have found a common language with the Americans on this issue. Only very recently, after the New York meeting between Putin and Obama, it appeared that the West supported our actions in Syria. But now the United States and its allies are demanding that we stop the air strikes. What happened, do you think?

[Malashenko] From the West's viewpoint, Russia broke the rules of the game.

[Kamakin] What form did this take?

[Malashenko] Deception. If you have said you are going to make war on Islamic State, then make war on it. But our people are, so to speak, "cheekily" shooting at the opposition and even reporting our successes. That is obvious. Incidentally, I do not seem to have heard any statements yet from Islamic State indicating that it has sustained any damage. God forbid that any of our people are shot down, taken prisoner, and it is not ISIL doing it. Unfortunately that turn of events cannot be ruled out.

[Kamakin] How great is the danger that our intervention on the side of the Shi'i president will turn the Sunni world against Russia and something will happen along the lines of what the USSR came up against in Afghanistan?

[Malashenko] No, I see no great danger here. Of course it would be quite interesting if an Iranian-Russian military alliance were to emerge in the course of the development of the conflict. I would not be surprised if, in that event, the term "Orthodox-Shi'i coalition against Sunnis" were to emerge. But I do not think any Sunni politician would seriously play this card. Maybe perhaps the Saudis, who have a very difficult relationship with the Iranians. But who else? Egypt, where we are planning to build a nuclear power station and to which we are selling weapons? Of course not. Jordan? Not on your life. The same can be said for Turkey, and I am not even going to mention Algeria. Nonetheless it really is necessary to act more cautiously and subtly than we are currently doing. Otherwise it would be easy to come unstuck.

[Kamakin] So what will become of Islamic State? The compromise scenario for resolving the conflict that you describe does not by any means guarantee its defeat.

[Malashenko] As of today Islamic State is invincible. You cannot bomb it to bits, and nobody is going to conduct a ground operation.

[Kamakin] So all this is for the long term?

[Malashenko] Unfortunately it is forever. Remember the Islamic Revolution in Iran: Back then, many people said it would not last long, that Khomeyni was a psycho and would be removed in six months. The Taleban's prospects were assessed in approximately the same way at one time, but they also did not go away. Moreover there is also Nigeria, where Boko Haram is active, there is Somalia... Islamic State is only one form of radical Islamism, albeit a special form that came as a surprise to everyone. Even if it can be squeezed out of Syria, that will not put an end to the problem. Islamism as a phenomenon will remain. We have to live with it.

[Kamakin] Incidentally, the Islamists have already announced that in response to Russia's operations in Syria they intend to take the war to our country's territory. Are they bluffing?

[Malashenko] No, I believe this is a serious threat.

[Kamakin] So we should expect more explosions on the subway and hostage taking?

[Malashenko] Well, I am not a colonel in the FSB [Federal Security Service] and I do not know how or where this will be manifested. But I think we should be ready for anything.
 
#19
Journalitco
http://journalitico.com
October 2, 2015
Western spin machines functioning at full capacity on Syria
By Danielle Ryan
Danielle Ryan is an Irish journalist and blogger. She has a degree in Business and German from Trinity College Dublin and studied political reporting at the Washington Center for Politics and Journalism in Washington, DC.
[Graphics here http://journalitico.com/2015/10/02/western-spin-machines-functioning-at-full-capacity-on-syria/]

Well the 'US good, Russia bad' propaganda drive has reached full-blown hysteria mode this week. My sincerest compliments to the usual suspects, you are absolutely playing a blinder.

I'm especially impressed by how quickly you all became such staunch humanitarians and tallied up the civilian casualties from the handful of Russian strikes mere moments after the bombs were dropped. That's dedication.

And hey, don't worry about totting up the civilians casualties from the 20,000 bombs the US has dropped on Syria and Iraq for the past year. That's yesterday's news.

Russia's airstrikes in Syria began on Wednesday.  They appear to be targeting both ISIS and other terrorist factions, including Al Qaeda and Al Nusra. There are reports that the strikes have also hit CIA-trained 'rebel' camps.

The interesting thing about this is that until this week, Western media had been dutifully telling everyone that the US only really had about 'four or five' serious rebels in Syria and that the White House hadn't really put much muscle into this whole 'train the rebels' thing. Then Russia strikes, and BAM, American-trained rebels as far as the eye can see. They're everywhere. Russia is bombing them. No one can stop it. Oh, the horror. We must act! Our "rebel friends" need us.

By Thursday, tireless warmonger John McCain had appeared on Fox News with Neil Cavuto who demanded to know "what the heck" was going on with Russia thinking it could just willy-nilly bring its warplanes into Syria (note: permission granted from Damascus is not important).

Cavuto was terribly agitated to realize that the US was essentially being told by another power that there was something it couldn't do. *Gasp!* ...what audacity! The Russians have been "demanding that we get out of Syria" he told a nodding McCain, before handing over the floor.

As ever, McCain proceeded to spit forth a flurry of wonderful and coherent suggestions, including the fantastic idea that the US should help the so-called 'moderate' anti-Assad rebels shoot the Russian planes out of the sky - a move which of course would invite no repercussions whatsoever. If I was a cynic, I would think it was almost like McCain has been doing everything he could possibly think of to create the conditions for all-out nuclear war.

Next up was asylum escapee and US Senator Tom Cotton who spoke in the Senate for five minutes in an apparent attempt to outdo even McCain, presenting a litany of suggestions to counter Russia's moves in Syria. If you have just eaten and would prefer to keep your lunch confined to your stomach, I'd advise you to skip this next bit.

Cotton's suggestions include: 1.) arming Ukraine 2.) shooting down Russian planes over Syria 3.) shooting down Russian planes in "the vicinity" of NATO countries, and 4.) threatening Iran with "termination" of the nuclear deal - not termination of Iran in general, although that may still be somewhere in Cotton's pipeline of handy suggestions, too.

Finally, he also wanted the world to know that the US must be allowed to fly "where we want, when we want" ...no questions asked, of course.

By Friday, Hillary Clinton had come out in support of a no-fly zone over Syria. Presumably, this would be not dissimilar to the no-fly zone which was a total failure in Libya and helped to propel the conflict forward, ultimately leading to the violent overthrow of Gaddafi and the destruction of the state.

The publicly-stated rationale for the no-fly zone of course is to "stop the carnage" and protect civilians. The real rationale however, has little to do with civilians and everything to do with weakening Assad, strengthening the US position on Syria, making Russia irrelevant and gaining the upper hand in the conflict.

But politicians are one thing. The media is another. At least it's supposed to be. We're supposed to be able to rely on journalists to retain at least a modicum of decency and skepticism in these matters, rather than just simply spouting out talking points from the White House and State Department.

I really do rack my brains over this. The last three days have been a perfect example of our media's stunning lack of self-awareness. Irony truly is dead. Headlines like this are one example.

This is after years - almost a decade in fact - of US efforts (both covert and overt) to destabilize Syria, which have done more harm - and promoted more extremism - than the Russians could ever hope to. As I've said before, this is not conspiracy theory or conjecture. It is documented fact.

But let's just ignore all of that and focus on the last three days.

Another popular 'Russia bad, US good' talking point this week has been: Russia is not really targeting ISIS.

This line has been trotted out alongside maps and diagrams which "prove" that Russia is targeting only the US-trained rebels (who, remember, barely existed last week).

Headline after headline claimed that Russia hadn't targeted ISIS, because you see, we were told, there just are no ISIS guys in the locations the Russians dropped their bombs. Except, the thing is, before last week there were plenty of Western reports on ISIS's gains in said areas.

And as a quick by-the-way: Who ever thought we'd see the day when bombing Al Qaeda could be construed by the US and its media as a 'bad' thing?

Then we have the sudden concern for civilian casualties, which if by the way, was sincere, we'd be seeing a lot more reporting from Yemen - where the US is supporting Saudi Arabia in pummeling civilians with bombs, to the point where the country has been left on the verge of famine and total collapse, according to the UN. The same UN, by the way, where the Saudis have just managed to sink a war crimes probe suggested by the Netherlands, while the US stayed silent.

And if you were wondering whether the British government is any better, turn your attention to the fact that the UK engaged in a secret vote-trading deal with Saudi Arabia in order to secure the Saudi kingdom a place on the UN Human Rights Council. Yes, the same Saudi Arabia that has beheaded more than 100 people this year alone. Let that sink in.

Now, you probably assume that because I am severely critical of the Western reporting on Syria - and of US policy in general - that I therefore support the Russian strikes. That's not necessarily true. Nor is it necessarily untrue.

The war in Syria is too complicated to ascribe 'simple' solutions or to propagate any kind of linear analysis. Not that this appears to have stopped anyone, so here's my personal take:

In general, I support the Russian position that Assad must not be violently overthrown and that existing institutions must be supported. I believe Assad's overthrow would open up a power vacuum that would lead not to stability or 'freedom and democracy' but instead would see only an escalation of violence and terror, perhaps on an even worse scale. Why? Because this has happened time and again everywhere the US has attempted to forcefully install democracy and spread its ideology.

I believe we need to remember what kind of country Syria was a decade ago, and what kind of country it could become if Assad is thrown out and replaced with some 'moderate' regime hand-picked by Washington. Syria, before its civil war was a secular and vibrant country. A country with a rich history and culture. Women were not required to wear the hijab, although many did. All religions were represented. Mixed marriages were not entirely uncommon. Education was prized. People watched American TV shows. They traveled. They were aware however, that their situation was still far from perfect, and many held deep grievances with the country's leadership. But the potential was there for Syria to move in a positive, progressive direction.

The road US policy is leading this country down is now a very, very different one. Today, ISIS - a horror that has grown out of the chaos in Iraq and Libya - has run rampant over their land, destroying everything in its path.  According to Washington, the only 'legitimate' solution to the crisis is the removal of Assad and the installment of a US-friendly government. This has nothing to do with the well-being of the Syrian people and its outcome could be truly dire.

Russian support has allowed Assad to remain in power. Now Russian bombs will attempt to do the same. Immediately this has upped the ante and created the conditions for an even bigger clash between the US and Russia.

But are Russian bombs really going to solve anything?

We've seen a lot of Putin's going to save the world! stuff from Russian media this week - and someone should really tell them that jingoism is unattractive, regardless of nationality. If you were concerned that US bombs wouldn't work in Syria, you should probably also have some concerns about Russian bombs.

There is no guarantee that this military venture will be a success. There is no guarantee that Russia can save Assad. It's an incredibly risky (and expensive) move on Russia's part. Moscow risks getting bogged down in a gamble that may never pay off. For its part, the US will do everything in its power to prevent the impression being formulated in minds that Russia has played a positive role in any of this. That in itself will limit the effectiveness of anything Russia does. Not to mention, the likelihood of backlash inside Russia has also consequently increased. These risks (and the alternatives) have all been carefully weighed by Moscow, but they are risks nonetheless.

Russia and the US are in Syria for very different reasons - and for the most part, those motivations are entirely incompatible with one another.

That, in turn, is incompatible with building peace and stabilizing the state. The US presents its reasons as "humanitarian" when they are anything but, while Russia readily admits its actions are done in its "national" interests - many of which are entirely legitimate, given Russia's domestic concerns. US interests on the other hand, are almost purely hegemonic and imperialist. And yet, we've been inundated with reports about Russia's ulterior motives, which exist, to be sure - but why aren't we hearing the same about Washington?

Furthermore, the US intervention is illegal under international law. The Russian one is legal. Not that legality matters to any civilians who have been or will be caught under the bombs, but the point is worth mentioning.

Putin has thrown a spanner in the works for US imperialism in the Middle East. Whether his gamble will 'work' or not is anyone's guess.

But one thing is obvious: The spin machine is now functioning at top speed. Western media is scrambling. Politicians and officials are scrambling. But they are scrambling because they are losing. And they are losing because they are wrong.
 
 #20
Izvestia
October 2, 2015
Sergey Markov, Great cooperation of continents?

The enormous attention that politicians, experts and global mass media outlets have riveted on Syria is to be explained not by Syria itself and not even by ISIL, but by the possible revival of Russia as a great power that is taking place in Syria. For the past quarter of a century, Russia has been mainly occupied with its own affairs and only now has it become an active participant in the resolution of key world problems, including those connected with the Middle East "global filling station".

What does Russia specifically intend to do?

From the military point of view, it has four areas of activity. Our servicemen will inflict air strikes, provide technical intelligence and act as advisers to help the Syrian army to master new weapons prototypes, and they will also be guarding Russia's military facilities in Syria, which are situated, by the way, in the safest region of Syria - in Latakia, in the rear of the Syrian government army. At the same time, the Russian leadership has clearly stated that it does not plan any ground operation by Russian military forces. The participation of conscripts is absolutely ruled out.

Why is this necessary and what Russian interests can be realized in the framework of the military-political operation that has just begun? Above all, we must eliminate on the distant approaches the threat of the spread of ISIL, which, in the event of its seizure of Syria and Iraq, could begin a war in the North Caucasus, the Volga region and Central Asia. In addition, Russia is helping the Syrian people, with whom we are linked by decades of friendly relations, to emerge from a monstrous civil war. In the event of the routing of ISIL, a real chance for a political settlement of the Syrian crisis will appear, with the creation of a government of national trust with the participation of all the political forces taking part in the struggle against ISIL.

Only then will it become possible to carry out a reset of state power via a general election, which could be held under international supervision with the participation of all the political leaders, including Bashar al-Asad, who has very good chances of victory. This is the main political part of the plan.

In the event that ISIL is smashed by the forces of a coalition created by Russia, the latter obtains the possibility of carrying out a reset of relations with the West, and on this basis of reaching a peaceful solution to the Ukrainian crisis that would fully take account of the interests of the Russian-speaking population, not only of the Donets Basin, but also of other parts of Ukraine, in order to restore to Ukrainian citizens the political rights and freedoms that have been seriously restricted by the current repressive Kiev regime. And also to secure from the West an end to the sanctions war.

Apart from this, by strengthening its political presence, Russia creates magnificent prerequisites for economic contracts and the development of the economy. With a high degree of probability, Russian weapons, aircraft and nuclear power stations would be bought for tens of billions of dollars and this would enable a great leap forward to be achieved in a number of high-tech production processes inside the Russian economy.

It is necessary to bear in mind that helping Syria is only a small part of Russia's political plan.

Above all, Moscow is ensuring the formation of all-round collaboration between those forces that really are participating in combat operations against ISIL. Russia is acting particularly energetically here, creating a coordinating information centre in whose work both Syrian and Iraqi government forces and also Kurdish military detachments and, possibly, Iran, are participating.

Next, Russia is bringing about, through intensive diplomatic negotiations, the relatively favourable attitude of the key regional and global players to a Syrian-Iraqi-Kurdish anti-ISIL coalition. As a result of Russia's diplomatic activity, it can be expected that neither the USA, nor France, nor Saudi Arabia, nor Turkey, nor Israel will offer opposition to launch an attack on ISIL by a coalition formed by Russia. Iran will offer it active assistance and even China will possibly support it. The achievement of this task is assisted by the style of Putin, who prefers not to sever relations because of problems that arise, but on the contrary, prefers to strengthen ties and to stubbornly seek and find ways of acting together.

The realization of the Russian scenario of the resolution of the crisis became possible after the important talks between Putin and Obama, in which both leaders showed a readiness for cooperation, despite the obvious difference in their approaches. To give Obama his due, he is capable, albeit not publicly, of admitting his mistakes. Obama is, without a doubt, a representative of the moderate wing of the American establishment that prevented the hawks from turning the existing cold war against Russia into a hotter and more intense phase.

Collaboration between Russia and the USA on the Syrian agenda will allow them to reach compromises on other questions as well. The USA and Russia are by no means doomed to eternal conflict. True, for this the American elite still needs to learn to respect Russian interests and Russian peculiarities.

The Pentagon spokesman's statement on the resignation of Evelyn Farkas - a key adviser on the Russian direction who was a supporter of a hard line against Moscow - and also the Pentagon's decision to establish a hotline between the American and Russian military on the Syrian question, attest that the USA is renouncing the policy of reckless opposition to Russia in Syria. This is also attested by Washington's orders to Kiev to agree to the withdrawal of weapons in the Donets Basin. The USA has agreed to collaborate with Moscow, just as they collaborated during the process of eliminating chemical weapons in Syria. We saw that it was precisely the American president who was the initiator of the modification of the USA's foreign policy course.


 
 #21
Sputnik
October 5, 2015
Free Syrian Army Command Asks Russia for Help Against ISIL

The representative of the Euphrates Volcano command of the FSA and the Kurdish YPG told Sputnik that the command supports Russia's operation against ISIL and requests military help.

The Eurphrates Volcano (Burqan al-Furat) command of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) supports Russia's military operation in Syria and for help in battling ISIL, the command's official spokesman Servan Devrish told Sputnik.

Euphrates Volcano is the joint command of the FSA and the Kurdish YPG (People's Protection Units) operating in northern Syria, primarily against the Islamic State. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov previously said that Russia is willing to make contacts with the Syrian armed opposition Free Syrian Army, but requested further information on it from the United States, referring to the FSA's "phantom nature."

"The Islamic State is a large-scale organization which presents an enormous threat for all, because of this only a comprehensive and well-prepared operation can be effective. We support Russia's anti-terrorist operation against ISIL and consider it an extremely important step for eliminating this threat," Euphrates Volcano spokesman Servan Devrish told Sputnik.

Devrish added that it is impossible to destroy ISIL with airstrikes alone, and that Euphrates Volcano as well as Kurdish Peshmerga units have been most effective at fighting ISIL with aid from airstrikes delivered by the anti-ISIL coalition.

"We ask Russia to help us with weaponry in the fight against ISIL. By uniting our forces in the framework of an aerial and ground operation, we can carry out shattering strikes against ISIL," Devrish told Sputnik.

The Eurphates Volcano command previously fought ISIL in several large-scale battles, including the siege of Kobani, where it successfully retook the city from ISIL.

Also on Monday, several Syrian rebel groups called on regional states to ally against Russia and Iran in Syria, Reuters reported. The groups who signed on to the statement included the Ahrar Al-Sham Islamist rebel group, as well as some groups "under the umbrella of the Free Syrian Army," according to Reuters.


 
 #22
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
October 6, 2015
Syrian rebels ask U.S. for arms to defend against Russian strikes
Representatives of "moderate" rebel groups in Syria opposed to the regime of Bashar al-Assad have asked the U.S. to supply them with surface-to-air missiles to counter Russian air strikes, American media have reported. Russian observers say this is unlikely but caution that arms may be supplied by the key regional sponsors of Syria's opposition, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.
Alexey Timofeychev, RBTH

As accusations that Russia is bombing "moderate" opposition in Syria instead of ISIS targets continue to mount, the Washington Post reported on Oct. 2 that several rebel Syrian groups had asked the U.S. to supply them with air defense systems to counter Russian aircraft, which have been bombarding their positions.

However, should Washington or its allies take this step, it would be a throwback to Cold War times, when the U.S. supplied arms to Afghanistan's mujahideen warriors for their fight against the Soviet army, and could further whip up tensions in the West's relations with Moscow.

Not only this, but there is a risk that any weapons given to rebel forces in Syria may later end up being used against American interests. After Soviet soldiers withdrew from Afghanistan, the U.S. authorities had to buy Stinger portable surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems back from the mujahideen in the fear that they could be used against U.S. military or civilian aircraft.
 
U.S. and allies 'do not want further deterioration in relations with Moscow'

Andrei Sushentsov, a managing partner with the Foreign Policy agency, told RBTH that the U.S. and its allies would not be supplying Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's opponents with portable surface-to-air missiles or any other air defense systems because "they do not want a further deterioration in relations with Moscow over Syria," which is secondary in their plans.

"The moderate opposition will not be given Stingers because in that case Assad would get S-300 systems [from Russia]," said Sushentsov.

Dmitry Ofitserov-Belsky, an assistant professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, told RBTH that, as a rule, arms supplies are not widely publicized and suggested that "the Washington Post article is most probably a deliberate leak intended to 'test' the reaction both inside the U.S. and the reaction in Russia."

"Syrian militants may be somewhat exaggerating the United States' readiness to start a confrontation with Russia in the Syrian conflict and are trying to revive relevant fears in Moscow," said Ofitserov-Belsky.

There is also another theory, which he described as unlikely, that part of the U.S. establishment may be not interested in stepping up confrontation with Russia and is thus trying to foil secret supplies of portable SAM (surface-to-air missile) systems or other military hardware to the "moderate" opposition in Syria.
 
Opposition may receive weapons from regional players

Ofitserov-Belsky went on to add that Saudi Arabia and Turkey had already supplied Syrian Islamists with portable SAM systems. In addition, a certain number of these weapons may have been captured in Libya and Iraq, although they are not very efficient against modern strike aircraft like the Su-34.

"The most probable scenario is that the opposition will continue to be supplied with anti-tank and other systems that can do no damage to Russian aircraft but that could strengthen resistance to the upcoming offensive of the Syrian troops and an Iranian expeditionary force," he said.

Meanwhile, Vladimir Avatkov, head of the Center for Oriental Studies, International Relations and Public Diplomacy, did not rule out the possibility that the Syrian opposition may receive air defense systems from Turkey, saying that Ankara "may make surprise anti-Russian moves, including providing physical support to the Syrian opposition.

"After his return from Moscow, [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan made a public statement for the first time allowing for a possible transition period with Assad remaining in power. However, the other day he made another statement in which he stressed that Russia was making a serious mistake and may end up in isolation because of its policy."

"Turkey is bargaining and is looking for an optimal position for itself. This has to do with the foreign policy environment and the situation inside the country, where disagreements between the main political forces are growing," said Avatkov.

"Unfortunately, the economy cannot save Moscow and Ankara from geopolitical disagreements that require an urgent solution. Otherwise, we risk losing Turkey," he said.
 
 #23
www.rt.com
October 6, 2015
From Day 1 of Russian anti-ISIS op in Syria MSM launched anti-Moscow information campaign - FM

The global media are intentionally distorting the objectives of the Russian air operation in Syria, said Maria Zakharova, spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry.

"From the very beginning of the military part of the Russia's counter-terror operation in Syria, which was initiated after the official request of the government of that country, international media launched a powerful anti-Russian campaign," Zakharova said.

The main accusations voiced by the global media against Russia are of the alleged illegality, irrationality and ambiguity of its actions in Syria.

"We face various accusations, namely securing primarily Russian interests in the region, allegedly disguised with fighting Islamic State and other terror groups," Zakharova said.

Almost immediately Russia was slammed for alleged civilian victims and children's deaths, the Foreign Ministry's spokesperson said.

"The claims are illustrated with photos and videos that actually either are outdated or have no relation to the subject or the region," she pointed out.

Maria Zakharova recalled Moscow's reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US, pointing out that Russia was one of the first countries that offered Washington help.

"We perceived the pain of the American people as our own. When Washington declared there was a challenge to their national security, we, knowing what terrorism really is, we supported the US in all ways without posing questions whether those terrorists were bad or good," the spokeswoman said.

She urged all countries to maintain direct contact with Moscow to avoid any ambiguities or uncertainties about Russia's operations in Syria.

"When it is 'possibly, probably or it seems,' you can always pick up the phone and make it clear with us," Zakharova said, adding that Moscow is open to have consultations at "any moment."

Russia is not planning to join the US-led antiterrorist coalition, as it views its actions as illegitimate since neither the UN Security Council nor the Syrian government have given their approval for military actions inside the country, Zakharova also said.

"We cannot take part in unlawful operations. We stood the same ground 10 years ago, at the time of the Iraqi campaign - and we were proved right," Zakharova said. "Our stance remains unaltered: we won't take part in unlawful campaigns. With both the UNSC's decision and Damascus consent's missing - we are staying out of this."

Russia has launched its air operation in Syria to protect its national security interests, the Foreign Ministry's spokeswoman stressed.

"It is a true matter of national security for us. We have lived through this [terror] and we do not want the situation with international terrorism to repeat [in Russia], it's too painful for us," Zakharova said.

The Russian Defense Ministry is demonstrating an unprecedented level of openness lately, particularly when it comes to the operation in Syria, the spokesperson noted.

"We're open to contacts of military experts and in case there are any concerns - we're ready to look into them," Maria Zakharova said.

The spokesperson ruled out any possibility of a ground operation of the Russian military in Syria.


 
 #24
Moscow Times
October 6, 2015
Syria Air Strikes Raise Risk of Terror Attack in Russia, Experts Warn
By Eva Hartog

According to textbooks on political violence, a terrorist attack requires the following key components: a target, an actor or actors, and motivations.

The Kremlin's decision to launch air strikes in Syria could raise the risk of terrorist attacks on Russian soil, security analysts said, as the move increases the motivation of Russia-related supporters of the Islamic State to retaliate against Moscow.

As its forces waged security sweeps and real combat operations in the Northern Caucasus during the past two decades, Russia has been targeted by terrorists many times, but in the past 18 months the security forces have managed to contain them, at least from committing massive acts of deadly violence.

"Islamists, jihadis and extreme Muslims are, to put it mildly, not pleased with Russia's interference in Syria and they will be prepared in some way to answer what is happening at the moment," Sergei Goncharov, a terrorism expert who heads an organization for veterans of Alpha, a Russian special forces unit, told The Moscow Times.

Russia's Defense Ministry said Monday in an online statement that its planes had flown 25 sorties in Syria in the past 24 hours and had hit nine Islamic State targets.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 14 fighters, most of whom belonged to the Islamic State, had been killed since Russia launched its air offensive on Wednesday, Reuters reported Saturday.

The threat of retaliation is not a new one: Even before Russia's massive buildup of arms in Syria over the last month, Islamic State counted Russia among its enemies.

In September last year, after claiming to have seized a Russian-made MiG fighter jet at a military base in the Syrian province of Raqqa, IS militants for the first time openly declared war on Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"This message is for you, Vladimir Putin! These are the aircraft you sent to [Syrian President] Bashar [Assad], and we're going to send them to you. Remember that!" a militant could be heard saying in a video uploaded to YouTube at the time.

But the decision to launch air strikes in Syria could be a trigger to translate words into actions, experts said.

Homegrown Danger

Around 2,400 Russians - mainly natives of Russia's southern predominantly Muslim-populated regions of Chechnya and Dagestan - are fighting together with Islamic State militants in Syria, Sergei Smirnov, first deputy director of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), said last month.

Nearly all major terrorist attacks in Moscow, from the Nord Ost theater hostage crisis in 2002 to the twin metro bombings in 2010, were perpetrated by natives of these regions.

While those people are fighting in the Middle East, Russia is safer, said Simon Saradzhyan, a research fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, a Harvard University policy think tank.

"As long as they are there, the threat [of terrorism in] Russia has actually diminished," he said. "The more [militants] Russia annihilates on the ground [in Syria], the fewer will come back."

But according to Alexei Malashenko, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank, the real number of fighters from Russia and Central Asia who have joined the Islamic State is closer to 7,000, and hundreds of them have already returned to Russian soil.

The Russian government stepped up security at home after launching the air strikes in Syria.

Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday that the county's National Anti-Terrorism Committee, special security forces and FSB were on alert.

"They are constantly taking measures to prevent [terrorist attacks]," Peskov was cited as saying by state-run news agency RIA Novosti.

Terrorists strive to hit symbolic targets and generate as strong a media storm as possible. In Russia, they have taken hundreds of hostages, including children, sent teams of female suicide bombers on coordinated missions, and targeted Moscow. The concentration of the media - including international outlets - is the highest in the capital, which is the most targeted Russian city outside the North Caucasus.

"The likeliness of a terrorist attack is very high, and it will probably take place in a large city like Moscow, to make a political point. But we cannot know when," said Malashenko.

No Negotiations

Previous attacks were primarily aimed at forcing Russia's hand in the North Caucasus, not abroad, and proved unsuccessful in pressuring the Russian government to change its policies with regard to Chechen separatists and the radical Muslim underground in the North Caucasus.

But terrorist organizations have often hit targets abroad in order to force foreign policy change, such as the 2004 bombing of commuter trains in Madrid by an al-Qaida-inspired terrorist group when Spanish troops were supporting the U.S. military campaign in Iraq.

Russia has a mixed record on negotiating with terrorists - the hostage taking in the Stavropol region city of Budyonnovsk in 1995 was widely seen as a turning point in the first Chechen War by forcing the Kremlin to return to the negotiating table with Chechen rebels.

But since Putin took the helm in 2000, there has been an unbending policy of non-negotiation with terrorists, said Saradzhyan.

Putin stood firm in refusing to give in to Chechen separatists even after the 2004 Beslan school hostage taking that shocked the world, in which over 350 people were killed, more than half of them children.

"Even if the Islamic State manages to stage successful attacks on Russian soil, it will not change Russian policy [in Syria]," Saradzhyan said.

Prolonged Threat

Most analysts said the air strikes were unlikely to translate into immediate terrorist attacks. However, the danger will grow if Russia is drawn into a long conflict.

"The question is whether the Kremlin gets seduced into the pattern, so often visible when countries embark on interventions abroad, of thinking one more push, one more expansion of forces will make a difference," Mark Galeotti, an expert in Russian security services and a professor at New York University, told The Moscow Times in written comments.

And while Moscow's air strikes could eliminate some of its enemies, it could also sprout new ones.

Western leaders have repeatedly expressed concern that Russia is targeting not only the Islamic State, but also U.S.-backed groups like the Free Syrian Army.

Broadening its line of fire to include moderate groups will not win Russia new friends and could sow the seeds for a new wave of violence, Saradzhyan said.

"Inevitably, these groups will develop grievances vis a vis Russia and will try to avenge," he said.

More immediately threatened could be Russians based in Syria: both military specialists and "ordinary Russians who reside in Damascus and other cities," said Yury Barmin, a Middle East expert.

"I also think that Russia's involvement in Syria may be risky for Orthodox Christians who live in Syria's coastal region," he added.

The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, publicly backed the air strikes last week, and Vsevolod Chaplin, a spokesman for the Moscow Patriarchate, called the fight against terrorism in Syria "a holy war."

"The endorsement of the Syria operation by the Russian Orthodox Church gives extra impetus to the extremists," Theodore Karasik, a senior adviser for Gulf State Analytics, a consultancy, told The Moscow Times.


 
 #25
The Nation
October 5, 2015
'The Washington Post' Finally Finds a War It Won't Cheer
The Post is coming down hard against Russia's operations in Syria.
By James Carden
James W. Carden is a contributing writer at The Nation and the executive editor for the American Committee for East-West Accord's EastWestAccord.com.
 
Since Russia commenced its bombing campaign over Syria last Wednesday a number of reports have claimed, among other things, that Russia's air strikes have solely focused on targeting the so-called Syrian "moderates" in lieu of targeting the territory held by the Islamic State. Worse still, these stories claim, Russia's involvement will only worsen the situation on the ground; and yet, paradoxically, Russia's military doesn't have the wherewithal to see their operation through.

Two stories that advance this confused narrative appeared in the news pages of The Washington Post on October 2 and 3, and not on its editorial pages, where one would normally expect to encounter such fare. The first indication that readers were to be confronted with an anti-Russian spin is that both stories were co-authored by the Post's young neoconservative fellow traveller Andrew Roth, who has lately churned out such hard-hitting reports as "Live from New York: It's Putin Speech Bingo."

Alongside both "news" stories, Roth and his editors feature maps provided from none other than the Institute for the Study of War. For those lucky enough to be unfamiliar with the work of this militaristic think tank, some background may be in order. The Institute is run by arch-neoconservatives Frederick and Kimberly Kagan, and was instrumental in promoting the career of a serial fabricator by the name of Elizabeth O'Bagy who spent much of 2013-alongside the Russian oligarch-funded pundit Michael Weiss-clamoring for an American-led war against Assad.

Trafficking in little more than nonsense, they wrote in The Atlantic in June 2013 that "Eliminating the flow of men and materiel to Syria would not only hinder Assad's chances for survival but also disrupt the Iranian mullahs' takeover of the Levant."

O'Bagy and Weiss will be granted no credit for prescience on that front. The real threat of a "takeover" of the Levant came-and continues to come-not from the Iranian "mullahs" but rather from the the sworn enemies of the Iranians, the Sunni Islamic State, which itself receives financial backing from the other Sunni Gulf state tyrannies: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, and Bahrain.

Iranian-backed Shia forces such as Hezbollah are fighting the very same enemies as the secular, Christian, and Alawite Assad forces. What Russia is now doing is flying air sorties in support of Assad's army, which has had its back pushed up against the wall by ISIS for the past several months.

Russia has been rather upfront about what it is they are up to. In an interview which aired last Sunday on 60 Minutes, Charlie Rose told the Russian President that some "believe...that you are trying to save President al-Assad's administration...and you are there to rescue them," to which Putin replied, "That's right, that's how it is."

This is not to say that The Washington Post has been alone in presenting a disingenuous picture of what is occurring on the ground in Syria. According to Yale's David Bromwich, The New York Times, in a report published on October 2, castigated Russia for having the temerity to bomb US-backed "independent Islamists."

Bromwich can hardly be the only one wondering: What exactly is an "independent Islamist?"

In any event, the Times and the Post aren't alone among those pursing that particular narrative. On October 1, the UK's Independent accused the Russians of unleashing bombing raids on what were said to be "terrorist targets but which, on early evidence, seemed to have included at least one CIA-backed rebel group."

With due respect to the American Intelligence Community, are "CIA-backed rebel groups" and "terrorists" known to be-in all places and at all times-mutually exclusive designations? Even cursory knowledge of the history of America's involvement in Latin America and Afghanistan in the 1980s, to take but two examples, would suggest not.

Which brings us back to The Washington Post report of October 2, the point of which was to inform readers that Putin, let off the leash by the international community, is breaking his word in focusing his wrath on the US-backed Syrian innocents who comprise the "moderate opposition."

Roth and Post reporter Liz Sly report that the general impression that the US-backed rebels are far outnumbered and outgunned by both Assad and the IS Group is, in fact, all wrong, and that they had been making much (until now, it must be said, unheralded) progress in their fight against Assad.

Assad, it is worth repeating, is himself being targeted by the same forces that attacked Lower Manhattan on 9/11. That the enemies of Assad are-and will remain-our enemies too often gets lost in the reporting and analysis.

Yet, according to Roth and Sly, the CIA has launched a covert operation that has been "widely credited with having helped rebel advances over the past six months in the areas now being targeted by the Russians." By whom this heretofore little-known CIA success story has been "widely credited" is left unmentioned by the authors.

Further, we are informed that "continued airstrikes Friday suggested that Russia's main priority remains the anti-Assad rebellion in northern and western Syria, which poses a greater threat to the regime's control over Damascus, the capital, than the forces of the Islamic State, concentrated in the far north and east of the country."

This is a rather masterful insinuation of Russian malfeasance where none exists. The airstrikes don't merely "suggest" that that is Russia's "main priority": saving Damascus and ensuring the survival of the Assad regime has been Russia's stated goal from the start.

The problem with the Post's report is that it is undergirded by an assumption that only exists in Roth and Sly's imaginations: If Russia would focus its firepower solely on ISIS, then the US-backed moderates would be able to swoop in to Damascus, peacefully overthrow Assad, and all shall be well.

The problem with this fantasy is that the moderates themselves are not "moderates" in any meaningful sense of the word, and Russia is not going to let Assad fall to them, to ISIS, or to anyone else.

But for the reporters at the Post, hope for a Russian failure springs eternal, and so the following day, October 3, Roth returned with a new co-author, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, to tell us that the Russian bear, which had seemed to be doing so much harm to our "moderate" Syrian allies, is actually little more than a paper tiger.

What, they ask, "can a limited deployment of Russian air power actually accomplish?"

According to the analysts Roth and Gibbons-Neff claimed to have spoken to, "unless it is significantly strengthened, Moscow's contribution is unlikely to be decisive in the war." Which analysts? Nobody knows, as the reporters don't say.

Roth and Gibbons-Neff continue: "Russia faces several limitations in what it can accomplish with its forces in Syria. One is the age of its equipment." So, perhaps, just maybe the Russians will fail in its mission to save a largely secular, multi-sectarian-and, yes, brutal-government from the hands of radical religious fundamentalists, leaving in its wake what the US-backed Sunni tyrannies of the Persian Gulf have so long desired: a Sunni-controlled Syria.

And it is then-when a radical Sunni fundamentalist state controls the entirety of Syria-that the real problems will begin.   

 
 #26
Politico.com
October 5, 2015
Brzezinski: Obama should retaliate if Russia doesn't stop attacking U.S. assets
By Nick Gass

The United States should threaten to retaliate if Russia does not stop attacking U.S. assets in Syria, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in a Financial Times op-ed published Sunday, urging "strategic boldness," with American credibility in the Middle East and the region itself at stake.

Moscow's apparent decision to strike non-Islamic State targets and those of Syrian rebels backed by the Central Intelligence Agency "at best" reflects "Russian military incompetence," and worst, "evidence of a dangerous desire to highlight American political impotence," wrote Brzezinski, the national security adviser for former President Jimmy Carter and a strong supporter of current President Barack Obama.

And if Russia continues to pursue non-ISIL targets, the U.S. should retaliate, he added.

"In these rapidly unfolding circumstances the U.S. has only one real option if it is to protect its wider stakes in the region: to convey to Moscow the demand that it cease and desist from military actions that directly affect American assets," he said.

"The Russian naval and air presences in Syria are vulnerable, isolated geographically from their homeland," Brzezinski noted. "They could be 'disarmed' if they persist in provoking the US."

The problem in the Middle East is bigger than Syria, Brzezinski wrote, and it would behoove Russia to cooperate with the U.S., who cannot as it did in the past, rely upon the United Kingdom and France to play a "decisive role" in the region.

"But, better still, Russia might be persuaded to act with the U.S. in seeking a wider accommodation to a regional problem that transcends the interests of a single state," he added.

Instead of what he calls a "new form of neocolonial domination," the United States, along with China and Russia, must act in concert to protect their mutual interests, he warned.

"China would doubtless prefer to stay on the sidelines. It might calculate that it will then be in a better position to pick up the pieces. But the regional chaos could easily spread northeastward, eventually engulfing central and northeastern Asia. Both Russia and then China could be adversely affected. But American interests and America's friends - not to mention regional stability - would also suffer. It is time, therefore, for strategic boldness," he conclude
 
 #27
Huffingtonpost.com
October 5, 2015
Russia versus the United States in Syria
By Ivan Eland
Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty, The Independent Institute

The villainous Vladimir Putin is pretending to hit ISIS targets in Syria, but instead has his aircraft striking other opposition groups in that country, including what U.S.-supported "moderate" rebels still exist, according to the Obama administration. Apparently, the administration is aghast that Russia would act in its own interests in Syria, even though U.S. interests diverge from those of Russia, although they shouldn't necessarily.

For the Russians, saving the sinking Assad regime in Syria, a long-time Soviet/Russian client in the Middle East and Russia's last foothold there, is their top priority. Because ISIS is one of the groups opposed to Assad's government, the Russians, always leery of radical Islam that can be a threat even within Russia, are opposed to the group, but killing it is only their secondary priority. In contrast, killing ISIS appears to be the first priority of the United States, even over its contradictory goal of getting rid of Assad. If anything, the U.S. goals of getting rid of both ISIS and Assad, two nasty opponents of each other, are at cross-purposes and too grandiose, since both now look unlikely.

In the Russian mind, the United States and its coalition are attacking ISIS by air, so Russia, to save Assad, should attack other opposition groups--two other radical Islamist groups, including al Nusra, the Al Qaeda affiliate, and U.S.-trained "moderate" rebels. Instead, the United States wants to get rid of the thuggish, but secular, Assad and continues to hold the fantasy that replacing him will miraculously lead to the rise of moderates in Syria or a settlement in which all the radical Islamic opposition groups just give up their efforts to institute Islamic law there and accept a post-Assad coalition government.

Unbelievably, Obama has learned nothing from the recent disastrous overthrow of secular dictators in Iraq (during the George W. Bush administration) and Libya (its own foible). Also, war is an evolutionary hothouse in which the most ruthless people usually prevail, so the much-beleaguered moderate opposition in Syria is most likely to be eventually exterminated by the more militarily effective militant Islamists. For example, the first very small group of U.S.-trained moderates was wiped out by al Nusra and the second small group abandoned its advance weapons to the radicals and ran.

Although Assad is a thuggish autocrat and only controls a part of Syria (the 20-25% figure often heard is misleading because much of Syria is desert), he is better than the radical Islamists of all stripes. What is needed to effectively fight such radicalism--and which is in dire shortage--is secular (not moderate or democratic) local ground forces; the Kurds and the remnants of Assad's Syrian army are the only game in town. Therefore, in order to have any prayer at all in combating ISIS, Obama should abandon his goal of getting rid of Assad and quietly accept him. This would bring U.S. and Russian goals closer together. Despite Obama's idealized vision, it essentially comes down to Assad versus radical Islamists of all stripes--which both Russia and the United States oppose. (However, it would still not prevent the two powers from jockeying for position in the last bastion of Russian influence in the Middle East.)

However, ISIS will not be defeated in Syria by either U.S. or Russian air power alone. In my book, The Failure of Counterinsurgency, I note that if a great power is fighting guerrillas with air power in lieu of substantial and knowledgeable local forces on the ground, it is likely to fail. Fighting such radical groups from the air usually inadvertently or carelessly kills civilians, thus inflaming hostility and creating more terrorists. For example, in Syria, since the U.S. bombing started, ISIS has grown from 15,000 to 30,000 fighters and this is likely why.

If the United States, as the global cop, insists on using the Syrian civil war to challenge Russia's attempt to shore up its long-time and eroding client government in Syria, perhaps it should think twice. Russia's provision of air power to back up the Assad regime only increases the chances that it will be enmeshed in the Syrian tar pit, as it was when it invaded and occupied Afghanistan in the late 1970s and 1980s. In this conflict, Russia is putting its prestige on the line by committing air power. Nevertheless, if Assad's fortunes keep declining, that hit to the Russian pride may require a deeper involvement in the conflict.

Unfortunately, Obama's strategy in Syria is not as sophisticated as Jimmy Carter's and Ronald Reagan's when they lured Russia into a quagmire in Afghanistan years ago. Obama committed U.S. prestige to fighting ISIS--mainly a threat only to the Middle East region--even before Russia did. Obama should have stayed out of Syria and let three bitter U.S. foes annihilate each other--the Assad government, ISIS, and al Nusra. As noted before, Obama's effort from the air has failed. Predictably, he is now funneling more weapons to the Kurds and other selected Syrian opposition groups on the ground--even though that strategy has failed previously in fighting ISIS in both Syria and Iraq.

What's next? To preserve U.S. prestige, will Obama or his successor commit U.S. ground forces to Syria (and increase those countering ISIS in Iraq)? Russian air power will likely also fail. For the same reason, the Russians may also be faced with a decision to either let Assad fall or insert Russian ground forces to prevent that from happening. Enmeshing the Russians in a quagmire might ordinarily be a good U.S. policy, but this time, they may just join a United States already in the bog.
 
 #28
Moscow Times
October 6, 2015
Ex-U.K. Ambassador a Lonely Friend of Russia
By Howard Amos

As the United Kingdom's ambassador to Russia from 2004 to 2008, Anthony Brenton was one of the first Western diplomats to be systematically hounded by pro-Kremlin youth groups.

But he said Russian officials told him not to take it personally - and he hasn't.

With relations between Russia and the West at a post-Cold War low because of the Ukraine crisis, Brenton has taken up an increasingly lonely position among Western experts, slamming the effectiveness of sanctions and urging negotiations with Moscow.

Since retiring from the U.K. Foreign Office, Brenton, 65, has been appointed to a position at Oxford University and has become a prominent commentator on Russian affairs. He is writing two books on Russian history.

In a recent interview with The Moscow Times, Brenton said that a pragmatic approach should be taken with the Kremlin over Syria, where Russia has recently launched a series of air strikes.

Better Assad Than IS

Russian officials have a real fear of the spread of militant Islam, according to Brenton, who said this could be a point of cooperation with the United States in Syria.

Most Western countries have called on Moscow to halt its bombing campaign.

"For Russia, Islamic terrorism is a real domestic threat in a way that the West does not appreciate," said Brenton. "The Putin I met will take a certain wry pleasure in seizing the initiative on this one, but his reasoning is that the West has made a mess of it."

While President Vladimir Putin maintains Russia is targeting Islamic State positions in Syria, there is a growing body of evidence to suggest that Russian aircraft are also attacking moderate Syrian insurgent groups to bolster the position of the Syrian army.

Syrian President Bashar Assad is a close Russian ally in the region and said over the weekend that Russia, Syria, Iran and Iraq had formed a coalition to fight rebels in the country.

Brenton maintained that there is actually little love lost for Assad in Moscow.

"I don't think they particularly like Assad, talking privately to Russians they know exactly what he is and he's a major embarrassment for them," said Brenton.

"The Russians have concluded that Assad may be bad, but that IS is worse."

Syrian Deal?

Assad's military is accused of using indiscriminate violence during Syria's bloody four-year civil war that has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths and fueled the rise of Islamic State.

Brenton, who worked at the Foreign Office for 30 years, admitted there are "hideous barriers" to a deal between Putin and the West involving a Russian-brokered power transition in Syria, but he said it might be possible.

"One can imagine a process under which Assad, with his arm twisted up behind his back by the Russians, says that he will begin to talk to the opposition about some sort of broader political process in Syria leading to elections," Brenton said. "It's going to require an awful lot of suspension of disbelief on everyone's part but stranger processes have worked diplomatically in the past."

While Brenton's position on Syria may raise eyebrows among the circles of diplomats, experts and officials in which he moves, his views on the Ukraine crisis have been even more controversial.

Failed Sanctions

Brenton said U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron's comparison of Putin with Hitler in September last year at the height of the Ukraine crisis was foolish, and added that there was a great deal of ignorance - and lack of interest - about Russia among the British political elite.

His biggest bugbear, however, are the sanctions that Western countries imposed on Russia in three waves last year, beginning when Moscow annexed Crimea from Ukraine in March 2014.

Putin has used Western sanctions to strengthen his domestic position and negate the political fallout from low oil prices by blaming the failing economy entirely on the West, according to Brenton.

"They have had exactly the opposite effect from that they were intended to have," said Brenton.

"The West has imposed economic sanctions on Russia or the Soviet Union eight times since the end of World War II and they have never worked."

Brenton joined the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in 1975, and his first posting to Moscow was in 1994 as an economic, aid and scientific counselor. After leaving Moscow in 1998, he worked as the director of global affairs at the FCO before leaving for Washington in 2001 for a three-year posting as deputy head of the mission. He returned to Russia as ambassador in 2004.

Brenton's stint as ambassador in Moscow coincided with the London murder of former Russian intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko and a sharp deterioration in relations between the U.K. and Russia that included the expulsion of diplomats. He said that while sanctions against Russia were inevitable last year, the West should have restricted itself to more targeted measures.

Who Wants Estonia?

Brenton dismissed talk of a new Cold War, which he labeled a "wild and indefensible narrative," and said Russia was more interested in peace in Ukraine than many Western diplomats believed.

While Brenton said he supported a decision by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, to deploy new troops in Eastern Europe as a response to a Russian military assertiveness, he rejected as unfounded fears that Moscow has significant territorial aspirations in Eastern Europe.

"One of the really depressing phenomena that the Ukrainian crisis has brought forward has been all these old Cold War warriors coming out of their cupboards," Brenton said.

"The story has been that the bear is on the prowl again: that they want to grab eastern Ukraine, which of course they don't; they want to grab [the southern Ukrainian port city of] Mariupol, which of course they never did; they want to grab Estonia, but who wants Estonia?"


 
 #29
Reuters
October 6, 2015
Russia, U.S. move to resume talks on air-to-air conduct over Syria
By Phil Stewart

Russia moved on Tuesday to resume military talks with the United States aimed at setting rules for air-to-air conduct over Syria, a U.S. official said, as the former Cold War foes carry out parallel, uncoordinated campaigns of air strikes.

The discussions on ways to keep the U.S. and Russian aircraft from clashing over Syria, launched last week, have gained urgency after the United States and NATO denounced Russia for violating Turkish airspace.

Turkey, a NATO ally, threatened to respond, raising the prospect of direct confrontation.

During a trip to Europe, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter described the need to resume talks as urgent, and condemned Russia's "seriously irresponsible and unprofessional" violation of Turkish airspace.

Hours later, a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told reporters Moscow had indicated it was willing to resume talks but no date had been set.

Russia's deputy defense minister, Anatoly Antonov, was quoted by the Tass news agency on Tuesday as saying the Russian military agreed in principle with the proposals made by the United States on coordinating military flights.

But he was quoted as saying differences remained, that the potential for collaboration was "much wider" than what Washington was offering, and that Russia had made its own proposals, though he did not specify what they were.

"To our regret, the Americans are for now saying that our co-operation should be limited to technical questions concerning our pilots when they carry our their missions," said Antonov.

"The Americans have handed us a document, which we are working on. The general staff supports the document in principle."

"STRATEGIC CONFUSION"

He said the two countries would hold a second joint video conference on the subject in the "coming days".

"But it would be better if our (U.S.) colleagues came to see us at the Defense Ministry so we could talk face to face about all the problems we face," Antonov was quoted as saying.

The U.S. proposal includes basic safety protocols, such as maintaining a safe distance between U.S. and Russian aircraft and using common radio frequencies for distress calls, officials say, adding they would be similar to civil aviation.

Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said the United States awaited a formal response from Russia on the U.S. proposals.

"We stand ready to meet again to continue our earlier discussion as soon as possible," Cook told reporters traveling with U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter in Italy, declining to offer further details.

Carter expressed frustration that Russia, after calling for talks with the United States, had let so much time elapse before getting back in touch on the U.S. proposals for air conduct.

"That may be a further sign of their strategic confusion, I don't know," he said, speaking to reporters earlier in Spain.

The United States and Russia say they have the same enemies - the Islamic State group of Sunni Muslim militants who have proclaimed a caliphate across eastern Syria and northern Iraq.

But United States fiercely opposes Moscow's support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and accuses Moscow of mainly targeting other insurgents who oppose Assad, rather than Islamic State.

Carter said Moscow's strategy of bolstering Assad would backfire. "In Syria, they are going to be checked in the first instance by the backlash that they're going to get on account of siding with Assad against everyone else," Carter said.
 
#30
Militarytimes.com
October 4, 2015
U.S. vs. Russia: What a war would look like between the world's most fearsome militaries
Vladimir Putin's brazen moves in Syria and Ukraine raise new questions about America's contingency plans
Russia has big ambitions, growing capabilities
By Andrew Tilghman and Oriana Pawlyk, Staff writers

Early on the morning of Sept. 30, a Russian three-star general approached the American embassy in Baghdad, walked past a wall of well-armed Marines, to deliver face-to-face a diplomatic demarche to the United States. His statement was blunt: The Russia military would begin air strikes in neighboring Syria within the hour - and the American military should clear the area immediately.

It was a bout of brinksmanship between two nuclear-armed giants that the world has not seen in decades, and it has revived Cold War levels of suspicion, antagonism and gamesmanship.

With the launch of airstrikes in Syria, Russian President Vladimir Putin instigated a proxy war with the U.S., putting those nation's powerful militaries in support of opposing sides of the multipolar conflict. And it's a huge gamble for Moscow, experts say. "This is really quite difficult for them. It's logistically complex. The Russians don't have much in the way of long-range power projection capability," said Mark Galeotti, a Russian security expert at New York University.

Moscow's military campaign in Syria is relying on supply lines that require air corridors through both Iranian and Iraqi air space. The only alternatives are naval supply lines running from Crimea, requiring a passage of up to 10 days round-trip. How long that can be sustained is unclear.

That and other questions about Russian military capabilities and objectives are taking center stage as Putin shows a relentless willingness to use military force in a heavy-handed foreign policy aimed at restoring his nation's stature as a world power. In that quest, he has raised the specter of resurgent Russian military might - from Ukraine to the Baltics, from Syria to the broader Middle East.

Russia's increasingly aggressive posture has sparked a sweeping review among U.S. defense strategists of America's military policies and contingency plans in the event of a conflict with the former Soviet state. Indeed, the Pentagon's senior leaders are asking questions that have been set aside for more than 20 years:

    -How much are the Russians truly capable of?
    -Where precisely might a conflict with Russia occur?
    -What would a war with Russia look like today?

Make no mistake: Experts agree that the U.S. military's globe-spanning force would clobber the Russian military in any toe-to-toe conventional fight. But modern wars are not toe-to-toe conventional fights; geography, politics and terrain inevitably give one side an advantage.

Today, the U.S. spends nearly 10 times more than Russia on national defense. The U.S. operates 10 aircraft carriers; Russia has just one. And the U.S. military maintains a broad technological edge and a vastly superior ability to project power around the world.

Russia remains weak, according to many traditional criteria. But it is now developing some key technologies, new fighting tactics and a brazen geopolitical strategy that is aggressively undermining America's 25-year claim to being the only truly global superpower. The result: Russia is unexpectedly re-emerging as America's chief military rival.

As U.S. officials watch that unfold, they are "clearly motivated by concerns that at least locally, Russia has the potential to generate superior forces," said David Ochmanek, a former Pentagon official who is now a defense analyst at the RAND Corp. And looming over the entire U.S.-Russian relationship are their nuclear arsenals. Russia has preserved, even modernized, its own "triad" with nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles, a large fleet of long-range strike aircraft and increasingly sophisticated nuclear-armed submarines.

"The Russian defense industry is being rebuilt from ruins," said Vadim Kozyulin, a military expert at the Moscow-based PIR Center, a think tank. "The military balance can only be ensured by Russia's nuclear might, which isn't as expensive to maintain as many people think."
Russia's conventional forces are less impressive than

But while Russia's conventional forces are less impressive than its nuclear forces, there are specific conventional areas where the Russians excel - among them aircraft, air defenses, submarines, and electronic warfare.

The Soviet-era weapons design bureaus remain prominent internationally. Russia's aerospace industry, for example, has benefited greatly from international exports to non-Western nations, which go to Russia to buy effective fighter jets that are cheaper than their Western variants. China today spends more on defense annually than Russia, but still imports platforms and advanced weaponry from Russia.

Attempting a side-by-side comparisons of the U.S. and Russian militaries is a bit like comparing apples to oranges, many experts say; the Russians have distinctly different strategic goals, and their military structure reflects that. Russia views itself as a land-based power, exerting influence in a sphere expanding outward from its Eurasian heartland into Eastern Europe, Central Asia and possibly the Middle East and Pacific rim. It is well suited for relying on a particular set of capabilities known as "anti-access and area denial."

"The United States and Russia are going for different things," Galeotti said. "What the Russians are looking for is not to take on and compete on equal terms with us. It's denial." For example, he said, "one can look at the U.S. Navy as massively superior to the Russian navy. Most of them are legacy Soviet ships. But in a way, that doesn't matter, because Russia does not plan to send its forces all across the world's oceans."
Russia's military strategy is focused on access denial.

That's reflected in the fact that Russia maintains a lone aircraft carrier while the U.S. Navy's 10-carrier fleet operates on a continuing global deployment cycle. Instead of carriers designed for offensive power projection at sea, the Russians are investing in an expanding fleet of submarines that can supplement their nuclear force and, conventionally, threaten an enemy surface fleet in nearby waters such as the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea or the Mediterranean Sea.

Its airspace also is heavily fortified. The quality of Russia's stealth aircraft is far weaker than those of the U.S., but Russia has cutting-edge anti-stealth systems, and also has invested heavily in robust surface-to-air missile systems and arrayed its forces domestically to protect its border regions. "The static airpower picture would favor the Russians because they have a lot of capability in terms of air defense and a variety of tactical and cruise and ballistic missiles," said Paul Schwartz, a Russian military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Russia's electronic warfare capability is also daunting to Pentagon military planners; left unclear is the extent to which Russia could jam the radars and signals intelligence that forms the foundation of the U.S.'s advanced air power. Any attempt by the U.S. and its allies to infiltrate Russian air space "would not necessarily be easy," Schwartz said. "It would be a contested environment. But over time I think we would be able to degrade it. The problem is, with a nuclear power, you try to avoid a full-scale fighting."

Meanwhile, the Russian army, still predominantly a conscripted force, is being transitioned to an American-style professional force. In effect, Russia has two armies: About two thirds of the roughly 800,000-man force remains filled with unmotivated and poorly trained draftees, but about one third is not - and those are the units outfitted with top-notch gear, including the Armata T-14 Main Battle Tanks.

In sum, the Russian military is not the equal of the U.S. military. But the gap has narrowed in recent years.
 
 
 #31
www.rt.com
October 6, 2015
Hitler invades Russia: Soviet ambassador Maisky's view from London: Red Ambassador's London Diaries: 1930s to WWII
By Gabriel Gorodetsky
Gabriel Gorodetsky is Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and emeritus professor of history at Tel Aviv University. He has held visiting fellowships at St Antony's College, Oxford, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington DC, the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and the Rockefeller Bellagio Research Center. In 2010 he received an honorary doctorate from the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow. Among his books are Stafford Cripps' Mission to Moscow, 1940-1942 (1984), Russia between East and West: Russian Foreign Policy on the threshold of the 21st Century (2003), and Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia (1999).

Stalin's disastrous miscalculation of Hitler led to the shock German invasion of Russia in 1941. In his diaries, published by Israeli-born Oxford historian Prof. Gabriel Gorodetsky, Soviet ambassador to London Ivan Maisky describes receiving the news.

Well into the morning of 22 June, Stalin did not exclude the possibility that Russia was being intimidated into political submission by the Germans. Stalin's miscalculation hinged on the belief that Hitler would attack only if he succeeded in reaching a peace agreement with Britain. This explains the ominous silence and confusion which engulfed Maisky in the early days of the war. It is indeed most revealing that when Maisky met Eden on the day of the invasion, he was entirely haunted by the likelihood of an imminent Anglo-German peace: "could the Soviet government be assured that our war effort would not slacken?" Maisky urged Churchill to dispel the rumors of peace (which had been so prominent since Hess's arrival in Britain) in his radio speech to the nation which was scheduled for the evening.

Britain was no better prepared for the new reality of an alliance of sorts. The Ribbentrop- Molotov Pact had entrenched a fatalistic political concept, meticulously cultivated at the Foreign Office, that the Soviet Union was "a potential enemy rather than a potential ally." Once war became almost a certainty (a mere week before the German attack) the chiefs of staff evaluated that the Wehrmacht would cut through Russia "like a hot knife through butter" within 3-6 weeks, leading to the capture of Moscow. The British Government's gloomy prognosis of Soviet prospects, which at best afforded Britain a breathing space and allowed her to pursue the peripheral strategy, did not encompass a full-blooded alliance, but rather, as Eden put it, "a rapprochement of some sort ... automatically forced upon us."
--

War!

I was woken at 8am by a telephone call from the embassy. In a breathless, agitated voice, Novikov informed me that Hitler had declared war on the USSR and that German troops had crossed our border at 4am.

I woke up Agniya. There was, of course, no question of going back to sleep. We dressed quickly and went down to hear the nine o'clock news on English radio. Novikov had called for the second time a few minutes earlier: Eden wished to see me at 11.30.

We had a hasty breakfast, listened to the nine o'clock news, which added nothing to what we already knew, and set off for London. In the embassy we encountered a crowd of people, noise, commotion and general excitement. It resembled a disturbed beehive.

When I was getting into the car to drive to Eden's office, I was told that Comrade Molotov would be going on the air at 11.30. I asked Eden to postpone our meeting by half an hour so that I could listen to the people's commissar. Eden willingly agreed. Sitting next to the radio, pencil in hand, I listened to what Comrade Molotov had to say and took down a few notes.

I arrived at the Foreign Office at midday. I was led into Eden's office. This was without doubt a major, serious and historical moment. One might have been forgiven for thinking, had one closed one's eyes, that everything should be somehow unusual, solemn and majestic at such a moment. The reality was otherwise. Eden rose from his armchair as usual, and with an affable expression took a few steps towards me. He was wearing a plain grey suit, a plain soft tie, and his left hand had been hastily bound with a white rag of some sort. He must have cut his palm with something. The rag kept sliding off, and Eden kept adjusting it while we talked. Eden's countenance, his suit, his tie, and especially that white piece of cloth entirely removed from our meeting any trace of the 'historical'. That modest dose of solemnity which I felt in my heart on crossing the threshold of Eden's office quite evaporated at the sight of that rag. Everything became rather simple, ordinary and prosaic. This impression was further enhanced when Eden began our conversation by asking me in the most humdrum fashion about the events at the front and the content of Comrade Molotov's speech. This 'humdrum' tone was sustained for our entire meeting. I couldn't help but recall the sitting of Parliament on 3 September 1939, when Chamberlain informed the House about the outbreak of the war. At the time that sitting also struck me as being too simple and ordinary, lacking the appropriate 'historical solemnity'. In real life, it seems, everything is far more straightforward than it is in novels and history books.

... At 9pm I listened to Churchill's broadcast with bated breath. A forceful speech! A fine performance! The prime minister had to play it safe, of course, in all that concerned communism - whether for the sake of America or his own party. But these are mere details. On the whole, Churchill's speech was bellicose and resolute: no compromises or agreements! War to the bitter end! Precisely what is most needed today.

At the same time, the response came through from Moscow to the question posed by Cripps yesterday: the Soviet Government is prepared to cooperate with England and has no objection to the arrival of British missions in the USSR.

I called Eden and asked him to communicate to Churchill my complete satisfaction with his speech. I also agreed to meet Eden the next morning.

So, it's war! Is Hitler really seeking his own death?

We did not want war; we did not want it at all. We did all we could to avoid it. But now that German fascism has imposed war on us, we shall give no quarter. We shall fight hard, resolutely, and stubbornly to the end, as befits Bolsheviks. Against German fascism first of all; later, we will see.

Translated by Oliver Ready and Tatiana Sorokina

Read more extracts from Gabriel Gorodetsky's The Maisky Diaries, Red Ambassador to the Court of St James's:
https://www.rt.com/op-edge/authors/ambassador-gorodetsky-maisky-ww2/
 

 #32
Reuters
October 6, 2015
West, Ukraine, hail rebel decision to postpone disputed elections
By Natalia Zinets and Pavel Polityuk

A decision by pro-Russian separatists to postpone local elections that Ukraine had said were illegitimate was welcomed on Tuesday by Kiev, the European Union and Moscow - the rebels' patron - as a sign of progress in the faltering peace process.

The separatists said the elections, which they had set for Oct. 18 and Nov. 1 in two regions they control, would now take place next February, potentially giving time for a compromise to be worked out that would suit all sides.

The concession by the separatists comes at a time when Russia has adopted a more constructive tone in talks over Ukraine, according to diplomats involved in the discussion who say Russia has influence over the rebels.

Together with a pull-back of light weapons by both sides and signs the ceasefire is holding, the rebels' decision appeared to raise cautious optimism that genuine efforts were being made to give the troubled Minsk peace deal a chance.

"Moscow has actually delivered," a German government source said in a reaction.

Under the terms of a peace agreement reached in Minsk, Belarus, in February, Kiev-organized local elections were meant to be held on Oct. 25 in those two regions, along with the rest of the country.

While denouncing rebels' plans to hold their own ballot as illegitimate, Kiev also acknowledged it would not be able to conduct its own elections there since parts of the two regions were beyond their control.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko welcomed the rebels' decision as enhancing the prospect for a Ukraine-organized vote to be held in rebel regions at some stage in the future.

"It opens the way for the return of Ukraine to the Donbass (east Ukraine) via elections conducted according to Ukrainian legislation, OSCE standards and of course without occupying forces," he said in a statement on Facebook.

PUTIN PROMISE

Poroshenko said this weekend that Russian leader Vladimir Putin had promised to ask separatists to cancel the disputed elections.

The European Union said the rebels' decision offered "renewed hope for a sustainable political settlement of the conflict." Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia welcomed the move which followed talks last week between the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany on the crisis.

At the meeting French President Francois Hollande said it would take time to organize elections in the east that respect international standards and as a result, the so-called Minsk peace process would run beyond its deadline, into next year.

Apart from local elections being held, the Minsk agreement also envisaged the withdrawal of Russian forces and equipment from Ukraine and the return of the joint border to Ukraine control by the end of the year. Moscow denies it has any forces in Ukraine.

After street protests last year toppled Ukraine's Moscow-leaning leader and installed a pro-Western administration, Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimea region and separatist rebellions broke out in Donetsk and Luhansk region.

More than 8,000 people were killed in the conflict between Ukraine's forces and the separatists who, Kiev and its Western allies alleged, were backed by Moscow. The Kremlin denies giving military support to the rebels.

Western countries responded by imposing sanctions on Russia which, among other things, blocked Russia's access to Western debt markets.

Some economists say Russia is complying with the peace process because it needs to start borrowing internationally again to plug the holes in its budget left by low prices for oil, its main source of revenue.


 
 #33
Interfax
October 5, 2015
OSCE SMM reports weapons pullback in Donbass in line with Minsk accords

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Special Monitoring Mission (OSCE SMM) reports the process of pulling back weapons from the dividing line in Donbass in compliance with the Minsk agreements.

In the districts controlled by the self-proclaimed Lugansk People's Republic (LNR) the monitors have noticed the withdrawal of 30 main combat tanks (T-64 and T-72) from three districts, on three routes to two storages, as it was earlier announced to the mission, the OSCE SMM said in the Oct. 4 report released by the OSCE press service on Oct.5.

Also on Oct.4 in the LNR combat training area near the settlement of Uspenka, 23 kilometers southwest of Lugansk, the OSCE SMM spotted 12 self-propelled howitzers (122mm 2S1 Gvozdika), the deployment of which corresponds to the pullback line. Meanwhile, at the LNR-controlled firing range near the settlement of Kruglik, 31 kilometers away from Lugansk, where the exercises were being held without a live fire drill, the monitors have spotted 17 tanks (T-64) on the same day.
 
Meanwhile, on Oct. 4, the Ukrainian Armed Forces informed the OSCE SMM on the details of the route for the pullback of tanks in addition to the earlier provided information about arms depots, as well as weaponry which will be withdrawn under the Minsk agreements.

It was also reported that the OSCE SMM monitors have examined three places storing heavy weapons of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, the location of which corresponded to the pullback line.

The monitors said that all previously spotted weapons were located in one area, several weapons were absent in two other areas.

Meanwhile, on the same day the OSCE SMM repeatedly visited two sites with heavy weapons of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DNR). Despite the fact that at both sites the number and types of weapons corresponded to the SMM data, the monitors found that a self-propelled artillery system (Gvozdika) was replaced with another one, the number of which did not correspond to the previously reported data.

Meanwhile, the SMM said that on Oct. 4 a mission patrol was denied access to a storage site of DNR heavy weapons.


 
 #34
LPR promises to pull back artillery guns after OSCE confirms Ukrainian tanks withdrawal

MOSCOW. Oct 6 (Interfax) - The militia of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic will begin the pullback of artillery systems immediately after the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) confirms the end of the pullback of tanks by the Ukrainian military, the LPR people's militsiya headquarters told Interfax on Tuesday.

"It is needed to wait until the Ukrainian Armed Forces complete the first stage of the pullback. This fact should be confirmed by the OSCE and the Joint Control and Coordination Center. Then we will start the second stage which envisions the withdrawal of artillery," the source said.

For his part, senior official of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic's Defense Ministry Eduard Basurin told Interfax that the terms for the start of the tanks pullback in the DPR remain unchanged.

"We are still oriented on October 18 as the date for the start of the pullback," Basurin said.


 
 #35
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
October 5, 2015
8 out of 9 Ukrainians Want a Negotiated Solution to War in Donbass
Just 1 out of 9 favor a military solution

http://www.kiis.com.ua/?lang=ukr&cat=reports&id=548&page=1

New poll by Kiev International Institute of Sociology reveals 78% of Ukrainians want a negotiated solution to the war in Donbass. Just 13% want for the war to continue until complete victory for Kiev.

Moreover negotiations are favored over all of Ukraine, west as well as east. Negotiations are favored by 70 to 20 percent in the west, 73 to 12 percent in the center, 87 percent to 7 percent in the south and 94 to 1 percent in the east.

Of those who want negotiations 12 percent wants direct talks with rebels, 21 percent direct talks with Russia, 20 percent continuation of current talks with participation of Germany, Russia and France, and 37 percent want talks with the participation of the United States and Poland.


 
 #36
http://newcoldwar.org
October 5, 2015
New survey of Ukrainians shows high support for end to civil war, low support for political leaders in Kyiv
KIIS survey: Socio-political situation in Ukraine in September 2015
[Complete extensive text here http://newcoldwar.org/new-survey-of-ukrainians-shows-high-support-for-end-to-civil-war-low-support-for-political-leaders-in-kyiv/]

Seventy eight per cent of respondents want Kyiv to negotiate an end to its civil war in the east of the country. Only 12 per cent want a continuation of war.

Survey published by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology, October 5, 2015. Original press release and survey results published here in Ukrainian. The following is a slightly-edited Google translation. The Kiev International Institute of Sociology conducts sociological and marketing research.
http://www.kiis.com.ua/?lang=ukr&cat=reports&id=548&page=1

Introductory note by New Cold War.org:

This survey by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) is the latest in a steady string of such surveys by the institute. The past surveys of KIIS have been ignored by Western mainstream media. This latest one will likely suffer the same fate. That's because the survey results consistently contradict the narrative of Western mainstream media and governments as well as the NATO military alliance, all of which argue that the conflict and civil war in Ukraine is caused by an alleged economic and military "aggression by Russia" and that the population of Ukraine supports the civil war course of the governing regime in Kyiv. For now, the argument which challenges that official 'group think'-that a neo-conservative government in Kyiv as well as the European Union are intent on imposing by violence Greece-style austerity in Ukraine-is not allowed into the pages of Western media nor into the mainstream political discourse.

Published surveys of the people of Crimea in late 2014 and early 2015 showing widespread satisfaction with the March 2014 decision to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation have similarly been ignored by Western media, governments and mainstream political parties.

Main results:  

-'Petro Poroshenko Bloc' and 'Fatherland' party leaders are rated in the top were elections to be held to the Verkhovna Rada and local authorities, followed by 'Self Reliance' and 'Opposition Bloc'.
-After the Rada election in October 2014, the party whose rating has dropped the most is the 'Popular Front' of Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. The 'Petro Poroshenko Bloc' and 'Self Reliance' electoral machines showed some growth but then suffered slight declines and a return to levels of the election. The 'Fatherland' party has declined compared with July 2015 but is significantly higher in comparison with the elections of 2014.
-Poroshenko is the leader in the presidential rating (25%), second place is occupied by Yulia Tymoshenko (20%), other candidates receive less than 9%.
-Most people negatively assess the activity of Petro Poroshenko as President and Arseniy Yatsenyuk as Prime Minister.

To the question 'What is the way out of the current military conflict in the Donbas region which you consider the most appropriate?', 78.0% of respondents answered "the continuation of negotiations and a peaceful settlement". The option of 'Revitalization of military actions and war to the liberation of Donbas' was supported by only 12.6% of respondents. Another 9.5% of respondents could not answer the question.

From 17 to 27 September 2015, Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) conducted a commissioned, nationwide poll. The survey interviewed 2041 respondents residing in 110 localities in all regions of Ukraine (except Crimea) on four levels of degrees random sample with quota selection at the final stage, which is representative for the population of Ukraine over 18 years. In Luhansk and Donetsk region, the survey was conducted only on the territory controlled by the Ukrainian authorities. Statistical sampling error (with probability 0.95, design effect 1.5) does not exceed: 3.3% for figures close to 50%, 2.8% - for the indicators close to 25%, 2.0% - for the indicators close to 10% 1.4% - for the indicators close to 5%....


 

#37
Normandy Quartet's Paris summit made long stride towards settlement in Ukraine
By Lyudmila Alexandrova

MOSCOW, October 5. /TASS/. Last Friday's summit of the Normandy Quartet in Paris, which brought together the leaders of Russia, France, Germany and Ukraine, was an important stride towards achieving a settlement in Ukraine, polled experts agree. There were mutual concessions and there was pressure by the West European countries on Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. Once unconditionally supportive of Kiev, they have been stepping up demands for compliance with the Minsk Accords not only towards Russia, but also towards Ukraine. Russia's European partners have in fact agreed to extend the deadline for compliance with the Minsk deal, expiring at the end of this year. Some say Syria has pushed the Ukrainian crisis into the background, while others suspect that Europe is "bored" with Ukraine.

"The summit has reaffirmed that the Minsk Accords are a great compromise between Western Europe, on the one hand, and Russia, on the other," the deputy director of the CIS Studies Institute, Vladimir Zharikhin, told TASS. "It implies the right of either side to have its own zone of influence and proceeds from the understanding that Ukraine has its own specifics. There is no other country where political priorities are split as strongly along geographic lines: in one half of the country 95% vote one way, and in the other half, as many cast ballots for something entirely different. So a decision has been made to leave it in peace: we don't have it, but you don't have it, either. The country is so special that the moment someone starts pulling it either way, it shows signs of falling apart and creates problems. So may it remain somewhere in the middle." Zharikhin believes that the summit confirmed the compromise is still effective and the parties will be seeking a settlement.

In the current situation it is hard to imagine that all items of the Minsk Accords will be implemented to the letter, though. "It will not be a final reintegration of the Donetsk and Lugansk republics with Ukraine. Most probably the conflict will be frozen with only some of its aspects settled. It remains to be seen who will be blamed for incomplete implementation. I reckon this is the focal point of the current dispute," he said.

Leading research fellow Sergey Bespalov, of the presidential academy RANEPA, believes that European leaders "just forced President Poroshenko to take action to implement the Minsk Accords and real changes for the better began only after that." "They exerted pressures on Ukraine, and in a situation where the country is critically dependent on Western assistance the Ukrainian leadership could not afford to ignore such influence," Bespalov told TASS.

He believes that the Paris summit saw some mutual concessions made. "On the one hand, both the Donetsk and Luhansk republics dropped the intention to hold local elections in Donbas they themselves had called earlier. In the meantime Kiev will be obliged to maintain ceasefire and pull back armaments."

In Paris it was agreed that the autumn elections in both the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics will be held not on October 18 and November 1, contrary to the original intention, but later and in conformity with Ukrainian laws. President Poroshenko is to persuade the Ukrainian parliament members to vote for bills (both extremely unpopular among legislators) on the special status of "some districts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, on the rules of elections in these territories, and on declaring amnesty."

"It goes without saying that the West is getting bored with Ukraine and the public opinion is gradually changing. Economic assistance to Ukraine is getting ever more burdensome," Bespalov believes. "In the meantime, the outlook for at least halting the economic recession in that country is ever more vague."
A frozen conflict looks the most realistic scenario, he predicts. "Even if the elections in the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics are held on the basis of Ukrainian legislation, the forces that are by no means oriented towards Kiev are destined to emerge the winners, and no one will ever agree to dismantle the bodies of power that have taken shape there over the eighteen months of actual independence."

Professor Igor Kuznetsov, of the Moscow State University's department of political sciences, agrees that the events in Syria did cause certain, albeit indirect, effects on the Paris summit. "Of course, the intensity of the conflict in Syria is far more noticeable and the attention is now focused on Syria first and foremost, although one cannot say that one conflict has taken another's place," Kuznetsov told TASS.

The main result of the Normandy Quartet's summit, he believes, is the armistice process is going on, while it is hard to tell what the process will eventually result in. "The summit has raised the hope for a real settlement of the conflict, but this hope is still a fragile one. The conflict is likely to be frozen, but what pattern it will follow - Bosnian, Kosovan or Trans-Dniestrian - remains an open question. Also, it should be remembered that a frozen conflict may be unfrozen again any moment." Kuznetsov believes that if Poroshenko begins to systematically implement the assumed commitments, the conflict between extreme and moderate nationalists in Ukraine may go into high gear and put him out of office.


 
 
 #38
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
October 6, 2015
Russia's double track: Escaping the impasse on Ukraine and Syria
Are there any chances that putting the Donbass crisis on the back burner and achieving a modest military success in Syria could set the stage for a more meaningful cooperation with some Western powers?
Sergey Strokan, Vladimir Mikheev

Russia's air strikes on what it says are ISIS targets inside Syria have raised the stakes in Moscow's policy of engaging the West in what it claims is a joint fight against Islamic terrorists. The move has also sent confusing signals over the possibility of re-engaging the West in multi-faceted cooperation, from political dialogue to trade, a partnership ruptured by the war of sanctions over Moscow's role in the Ukraine conflict.

However, the heating up of the situation in Syria comes at the same time as the cooling of hostilities in Eastern Ukraine, which appears to be the product of concerted diplomatic efforts by the leaders of Ukraine, Germany, France and Russia to ensure the implementation of the Minsk peace accords signed back in February.

The summit of the four nations, which took place in Paris at the end of last week, was remarkably devoid of name-and-blame rhetoric, with few if any accusations targeting Moscow as the apparent protector of the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk.

The discourse of the four leaders could be summed up in two observations: "None of the articles of Minsk have been respected completely" (Angela Merkel) and the admission that some progress has been made on the military aspects of the Minsk accords (Francois Hollande).

But the key message of the Paris summit hangs on the premise that there is no sign of advancement on the crucial element of the agreement, political reform. In essence, the reforms amount to amending the Ukrainian constitution to accommodate the insistence of Donetsk and Lugansk on a special status with guarantees of the observance of human rights, e.g. the rights of ethnic - Russian -minorities.

Besides, Germany and France have said the timeline for the implementation of the Minsk agreements can be extended, which gives all sides a little more breathing space.

The link between the cautious progress on the Ukrainian front and Russia's air strikes on targets in Syria is found in the roots of the refugee deluge flooding Europe. The sudden surge of thousands of frustrated Syrian and Iraqi citizens is a result of the crumbling security environment and law and order in these two countries, which now see one third of their territories under the control of militants from the Islamic State (ISIS) radical group.

Are there any chances that putting the Donbass crisis on the back burner and achieving a modest military success in Syria could set the stage for a more meaningful cooperation with some Western powers? This is dismissed as wishful thinking by Vladimir Bruter, an expert from the Moscow-based International Institute of Humanitarian and Political Studies, who spoke to Troika Report:

"It's a premature even to consider such an option. The softer approach to the Syrian crisis by the continental European powers is not matched by their role in decision-making. The stance certain governments in Europe will take is conditional on the preliminary results of the Russian military operation in Syria.

"If the results are positive, it will be taken into account in Europe. If the operation does not bear fruit in the near future, and becomes a protracted campaign, there will hardly be any changes in the foreign policy of European nations, with the likelihood that it will lean towards more rigidness, yet relative rigidness.

"As for the United States, its position on the Ukrainian crisis is not likely to change at all, not in an election year, and will still amount to 'keeping it burning' while not inflaming it more.

"In more general terms, the Paris summit has shown that Germany, France and Russia prefer to freeze the conflict in Eastern Ukraine so that it will not have the potential to erupt into hostilities. For Germany in particular, the refugee influx is of paramount importance and pushes the Ukrainian issue to the sidelines."

Supposedly, the discrepancy in the approach of the Anglo-Saxon nations and continental Europe is due to the way the Syrian crisis affects their interests. Might this help to precipitate the dismantling of the EU sanctions regime and abandonment of attempts to isolate Russia on the Western front, at least in Europe? Political analyst and public figure Sergei Stankevich, a senior expert with the Anatoly Sobchak Foundation, provided his view for Troika Report:

"If Russia shows readiness for a full political settlement in Syria, the West could accept her as a partner in this respect. If Russia limits its activity to military strikes, neglecting political dialogue, I'm afraid it could bring more tension in Russia-West relations."

- If we witness, hopefully, some positive moves leading to normalization in Ukraine, meaning around the Donbass, and the weakening of ISIS in Syria as a result of Russia's military actions, could we expect the re-emergence of areas of cooperation with the West?

"Definitely. Two problems connected with the Ukrainian crisis were resolved at the Paris meeting: The Minsk agreements will not expire and will be in force for the next year, and the elections scheduled by separatists in Donetsk and Lugansk will not take place. The elections will be held only on the basis of a special law that President Poroshenko must now press through his parliament."

"The next year we might see a "de-escalation" of sanctions against Russia."

Moscow's double-track policy seems to be aimed at slowly pressing for a political settlement in Ukraine by making the central authorities in Kiev start talking directly to the insurgents in the Donbass, and concurrently setting the stage for a similar conclusion of the civil war in Syria, but with preservation of the Alawite regime in Damascus, with Bashar al-Assad at its head or not.

However, on the Syrian track, Moscow's offer to form a wide coalition was not welcomed. It looks like the West finds itself at the same initial stage as it was in April 2014, when the Ukrainian army launched its offensive against the self-proclaimed republics in the Donbass. At that time, the Minsk agreements and, in general, cooperation between Berlin, Paris and Moscow was still a distant prospect.

Nevertheless, the two conflicts, Eastern Ukraine and Syria, despite their apparent differences, offer Moscow's diplomacy a chance to engage the West. Whether this gamble succeed or not is the multi-billion dollar question.


 
 #39
Ukrayina TV (Kyiv)
October 5, 2015
Ukrainian president's party rejects special status for Donbass in electioncast

The Ukrainian president's Petro Poroshenko Bloc Solidarity party has said in an electioncast that "special statuses" for Donbass "have no future".

The electioncast was broadcast by Ukrayina TV, a leading Ukrainian channel which belongs to formerly Donetsk-based tycoon Rinat Akhmetov, at 1650 gmt on Sunday, 4 October, right after the channel's weekly analytical programme Sobytiya Nedeli and before Poroshenko's interview with Ukrayina TV and two other major TV channels.

In the electioncast, video shows Donbass's destroyed infrastructure, houses and people standing in lines outside shops, with a male voice-over reading: "Donbass has been promised a better life in the DPR and LPR [self-proclaimed rebel republics]. All they got was ruin. Now you are being promised the moon again, but your vote may be used for splitting the country and stirring new conflicts to the aggressor's delight. Special statuses, radical sentiment, populist promises have no future. ! Save the country! The Petro Poroshenko Bloc Solidarity."

According to media reports, the issue of special status for Donbass was discussed by the leaders of Ukraine, France, Germany and Russia at the 2 October Normandy Four summit in Paris.

Commenting on the outcome of the summit in the interview shown after the electioncast, Poroshenko confirmed that the rebel-controlled territories would be granted this status before the day of the local elections should they be held there in line with the Ukrainian law.

Poroshenko added that the Ukrainian parliament would have to amend the existing law on special status for Donbass and pass a separate law on local elections in the region. Asked whether he believed that the incumbent parliament would do this, Poroshenko said: "I have no doubt."


 
 #40
In Moscow's Shadows
https://inmoscowsshadows.wordpress.com
October 5, 2015
Is Ukraine being thrown off the bus? Not really, but France and Germany are right
By Mark Galeotti
Professor of Global Affairs at the Center for Global Affairs of New York University's School of Professional Studies

Poroshenko was in bullish form at the UN General Assembly but was apparently very worried about the Putin-Obama handshake, worrying that Washington would make some deal over Syria at Ukraine's expense. Perhaps he should have been looking at Europe, instead. The ever-perceptive Leonid Bershidsky has an interesting piece in Bloomberg where he suggests that France and Germany have in effect told Ukrainian President Poroshenko that he has to make peace with the separatists, through pushing through a new election law for the Donbas and an amnesty for separatist leaders to allow them to contest the vote:

"The way Merkel and Hollande see it, Poroshenko should be interested in working to reintegrate the rebel-held areas into Ukraine, which would mean contesting the election and, in case of an almost certain defeat, working with the winners. That's the European way of doing things; trying to enlist outside support to defeat the separatists is not, especially when Europe has plenty of problems of its own."

Inevitably, Kiev's partisans will see this as a betrayal and playing into Putin's hands, as the new plan puts the onus on Poroshenko to get the law through his recalcitrant legislature. In the process, what seemed almost certain - that at year's end, while Kiev comes into for some criticism, Moscow and the Donbas rebels get the lion's share of the blame for the (inevitable) failure of Minsk-2 - now looks much less clear. After all, the burden is on Poroshenko and Minsk-2 implicitly just history.

If the conflict is viewed primarily in moral terms, in not allowing an aggressor to get away with intruding into a neighbour's sovereignty, then fair enough. However, while Kiev has a right to reimpose its authority over a rebellious/occupied region, it is not the EU's job to encourage a conflict that, frankly, shows no sign of ending soon. In those circumstances, surely the humanitarian option but also the pragmatic option is to try and end the war as soon as possible, which means a political settlement. Realistically, this means a Donbas which is going, at least for one political generation, to be dominated by local oligarchs and the remnants of local strongmen. However, regaining control of the border and the Donbas are a pre-requisite for any serious nation-rebuilding - and also allowing the displaced population to return home. This displaced population, after all, will probably be the best allies of Kiev there in the future.

As Bershidsky notes, Kiev has failed to win friends through relying largely on playing the victim: "Poroshenko can count on meaningful support only if he shows a commitment to do difficult things that would bring Ukraine closer to Western governance models: Achieve tough political compromises and implement painful reforms. So far, the Ukrainian president hasn't delivered on either front." Kiev at present doesn't look likely either to be strong and determined enough to reconquer the Donbas any day soon, nor willing and able to reform adequately at home. When does political and humanitarian support simply become enabling a government to avoid painful but necessary measures?

This may look like a cynical Franco-German ploy to make life easier for Europe. But actually I would suggest that the best, most honest measures are often ruthlessly to recognize facts on the ground and act accordingly. The discussion as to whether time was on Moscow's or Kiev's side ignores one basic point: not Ukraine, not Russia, let alone the people of the Donbas, were "winning" and after a certain point such talk becomes meaningless. Even under probably-hokey new election laws, the Donbas will neither become a Muscovite puppet, nor an outlier in Ukrainian politics. Local elites in the future - as now - will be thoroughly self-interested, and only entertain Moscow's blandishments when it is in their interests, which is as it has always been. Ukrainian politics remains corrupt, oligarch-dominated, and the Donbas will be no different.

But let me re-emphasize that reuniting the country, regaining control of the border, ending the fighting, getting Russian troops and auxiliaries out of the Donbas and re-establishing unitary government are all preconditions for real progress. Unless Kiev is willing simply to eject Donbas from Ukraine, and there is no evidence that it is, then the sooner it can regain it, by whatever means, the better.

Washington's drip-feeding of weapons and support avoids tough decisions but is enough to keep the government fighting but not enough to win the war, let alone win the peace at home. France and Germany, by contrast, are not happy to facilitate this messy and unstable status quo, but feel that it is better to force some kind of resolution, however imperfect.

It lacks heroic appeal, feels shabby and almost appeasing, but I would suggest it actually combines realism with courage.
 
 #41
Fort Russ
http://fortruss.blogspot.com
October 5, 2015
16 Thousand Deserters roam with guns in Ukraine
http://antifashist.com/item/po-ukraine-brodit-16-tysyach-dezertirov-s-oruzhiem.html
By Gwinplane for Antifashist -
Translated for Fort Russ by Soviet Bear

Sometimes, to understand the problem better, the figure we should be using is something more descriptive than just a number. Now, according to the chief military Prosecutor of Ukraine Anantoly Matios, a little less than ten  armed regiments, by the standards of the regiment since my service in the Soviet Army, are not adhering to the oath regiments roam the Ukrainian territory freely.

"About 16 thousand Ukrainian soldiers defected from the zone of military operation in the Donbas, most of them are armed with weapons."

This was reported to journalists by the chief military Prosecutor Anatoly Matios, reports TASS.

"We investigated 16 thousand criminal cases concerning deserters who left the area of military operations, and a significant part of them armed with weapons. The interior Ministry has said that there are not more than a thousand persons who left the ranks of the UAF during the year"", - he said.

Ten regiments - are only those soldiers who have passed on records of the Ministry and were mobilized or called to be personnel of the military units. Nobody know the exact figure of armed thugs roaming Ukraine. Because before they got caught and entered into the ranks of the UAF, nobody kept records and statistics for members of the "volunteer battalions" who left the ATO zone with weapons in their hands. They are very difficult even to identify - hello to revolutionary "Balaclavas"!

No one really knows how many weapons from the ATO zone were evacuated by the volunteers and those who finished their service or went into the rotation. Judging by the numerous notes about the seizure of weapons transported to Ukraine from the ATO zone- it went and continues to go there by stream. Thus, ten regiments can be out of control. In the current Ukrainian realities, you can easily guess where it will be used this weapon in the struggle for survival and food.

The situation can be resolved and Kiev junta is doing this according to their capabilities, which are not very large - the demoralized army and unprofessional police. Gangs of local "self-defense" which should be classified as "wild" regiments.

But judging from the figures provided by the chief military Prosecutor - "not more than a thousand detainees", we can easily calculate that at this pace, Ukraine will get rid of these regiments at least in the next fifteen years given that the economic situation in the country as a whole will "improve". But so far, there is no prerequisites to it, the "wild" shelves will be replenished with new and new people.


 
 #42
Kyiv Post
October 6, 2015
Candidates find new ways of bribing voters at local elections
By Isobel Koshiw and Oksana Grytsenko

On Sept. 30, residents of the village of Khrystynivka in central Ukraines's Cherkasy Oblast were given bags containing a kilo of buckwheat, a bottle of sunflower oil and a copy of President Petro Poroshenko's Solidarnist party newspaper.

The paid election campaigners who distributed the bags claimed the packages were presents to mark Elderly People's Day, while the recipients said they "didn't know" why a copy of the party's newspaper had been included in the bag. But activists who filmed the incident and shared it on YouTube argue this was a classic case bribing of voters ahead of Ukraine's local elections, which are scheduled for Oct. 25.

Unfortunately, (handing out) buckwheat is cheaper than carrying out a quality election campaign," Oleksey Koshel, head of the Committee of Voters of Ukraine, said at a press conference on Sept. 7.It's definitely cheap bribery and not particularly effective, as candidates have no assurance that voters will cast their ballots "the right way"on Election Day.

Sometimes candidates who offer bribes try to guarantee that the voters cast ballots for them. At a mayoral by-election in the city of Chernihiv in July, for instance, residents received text messages that offered Hr 2,000 ($94) to anyone who took pictures of their ballot to prove that they had votedfor a particular candidate.

Despite Ukraine's EuroMaidan Revolution against corruption and misrule in Ukraine, buckwheat and sunflower oil are still widely used by candidates from both the ruling coalition and the opposition to bribe voters.

Speaking in parliament on July 28 about "the brutal and cynical distribution of buckwheat," in another election, Poroshenko called on members of parliament to increase the punishment for bribing voters. But just two months later, Poroshenko's party newspaper, with his portrait on the front page, was handed out with packets of buckwheat in Khrystynivka.

Social media and civil society activists have recorded dozens of candidates from all of the major political parties employing traditional election bribery tactics, including handing out buckwheat; organizing free concerts; giving out free medicine, money, and random gifts; renovating publicspaces and providing free or discounted medical examinations and legal advice.

This year, however, a few of the candidates have tried to be a little more inventive.

Samopomich party has paid for 200 free WiFi points to be installed in Zhytomyr, perhaps in an attempt to attract a younger generation of voters.

Sailing down the Dnipro River has become a tradition for Rukh za Reformi. And can you really imagine anything better?" political party Rukh za Reformi asks readers of its party newspaper. The party has offered Dnipropetrovsk residents free boat rides.

Several candidates running for mayor of Dnipropetrovsk have set up bus services costing Hr 1 - a third or a quarter of a normal bus fare. One of them, Borys Filatov, a millionaire businessman running for mayor for the United Ukrainian Patriots (UKROP) party,has called his bus service the Ukrop Bus. The derogatory term "Ukrop" used by Russians to describe Ukrainians has been appropriated by some Ukrainians in an act of defiance.

Part of the problem lies with the public's tolerance for politicians' unethical election behavior.

The majority of Dnipropetrovsk residents questioned by Espreso TV said they couldn't see how the free or discounted buses could be considered bribery. One man said that bribery happened during all elections, but at least during that period the authorities were doing something for the city. So it seems that election bribery will remain in Ukraine as long as the elite continues to profit at the public's expense. As things stand,Ukrainians use elections as an opportunity to get something back from their politicians, many of whom live like kings compared to most of the public.

However, Olga Aivazovska, the head of the OPORA election watchdog, told the Kyiv Post that the candidates and election campaigners have been more cautious since parliament made amendments to the Criminal Code in 2014, which made bribing voters a criminal offense.

According to the new law, those found guilty of accepting a bribe can face fines of from 100 to 300 times the national minimum wage, or two years imprisonment. Candidates who promise unfair advantages in exchange for votes face three years in jail, and those found guilty of influencing an electoral commission facing between five and 10 years.

But since only two out of numerous cases of giving bribes during the parliament elections in 2014 ended up with convictions, which were just fines of some Hr 6,000, selling votes has become widespread again.

"We are regressing in this sense," Aivazovska said.


 
 #43
Ulyukayev: EU proposals on Ukraine association agreement fall short

ISTANBUL. Oct 6 (Interfax) - EU proposals aimed at eliminating Russian concerns over the EU association agreement with Ukraine are unsatisfactory to Russia, Economic Development Minister Alexei Ulyukayev told journalists in Istanbul on Tuesday following a meeting with European Commissioner for Trade Cecilia Malmstrom at the G20 trade ministers summit.

"Tomorrow we have a meeting of experts of the three sides: Russia-Ukraine-EU in Brussels. The last time we met in Brussels at a ministerial meeting [in early September], we agreed that the colleagues would propose their alternatives to the draft document that we prepared back in June, which, from our standpoint, makes it possible to allay our concerns and the risks that are emerging. They sent us a draft that does not satisfy us."

"We discussed this with Ms. Malmstrom, how our experts could work with maximum intensity," he said.

The document was presented by the EU, Ulyukayev said, adding that he didn't know if Ukraine subscribed to its provisions.

"We only received this document yesterday. It was prepared for tomorrow's meeting of experts, but we wanted to discuss this problem at today's meeting, so that the experts have a sort of mandate for further work," he said.

Asked whether the issue of Ukrainian sanctions against Russian companies had been raised at the meeting, Ulyukayev said: "This is a topic for our bilateral relations with Ukraine, but I defined it as a problem."

Last week, Ulyukayev said that given Ukraine's imposition of airspace restrictions on Russian airlines, the chances of reaching an agreement addressing Russian concerns before the EU-Ukraine association agreement takes effect on January 1, 2016 are minimal. If no agreement is reached, Ukraine will be included in Russia's food product embargo regime and will revert to being an ordinary trade zone, rather than a free trade zone.


 
 #44
Bloomberg
October 5, 2015
Ukraine Sees IMF Bailout Continuing Even With Russia Bond Unpaid
By Natasha Doff and Lyubov Pronina

Ukrainian Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko said she's optimistic the International Monetary Fund will continue its aid program even if the war-torn nation breaches the lender's policy by going into arrears on payment of a $3 billion bond owed to Russia.

Support from the Group of Seven industrialized nations is strong enough to prevent the IMF from halting its $17.5 billion aid program for Ukraine over the debt due to Russia in December, Jaresko said in an interview in London on Monday. She has ruled out repaying the bond when it comes due Dec. 20, and Russia has refused to negotiate the bond it bought from the regime of former President Viktor Yanukovych shortly before his ouster and President Vladimir Putin's annexation of Crimea.

"I'm confident that if we stay on our reform program, we'll be able to get through any potential decisions that occur," Jaresko said. "The G-7 would not want to see Ukraine be pushed out of an IMF program which we are otherwise fully complying with simply because of this."
Ukraine risks losing IMF financing if the country misses payment on the Russian debt because the fund's policy dictates it can't lend to countries in arrears to sovereign creditors. While the government in Kiev has insisted that all bondholders, including Russia, should be treated equally in its $18 billion debt restructuring to meet IMF conditions, Russia has warned it will seek legal action and question the validity of the IMF program if the bond isn't paid back in full.

Creditors, including Russia, are being asked to vote by Oct. 14 on the deal, which includes a 20 percent principal writedown, higher average coupons and warrants tied to gross domestic product growth. Ukraine is seeking to cut its debt burden to meet IMF terms for a bailout that is propping up the country's economy after a conflict with pro-Russian separatists in its easternmost regions drained reserves and plunged it into a recession.

The crisis lender will only decide if it thinks the bond is official debt after Ukraine has gone into arrears, according to Nikolay Gueorguiev, the IMF Mission Chief to Ukraine. The preliminary view by staff is that the bond should be classified as official debt, a person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg in June.

Jaresko is due to meet Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov on the sidelines of the G-20 meeting in Lima, Peru, on Friday. The two sides will discuss the terms of the debt-restructuring deal agreed between Ukraine and a Franklin Templeton-led creditor committee in August, Jaresko said. The meeting will be the first time Jaresko has held talks with her Russian counterpart since Ukraine announced plans in January to restructure its international debt.

Ukraine's Eurobonds have rallied about 23 cents on the dollar to more than 78 cents since a better-than-expected agreement with the Templeton led creditor group was announced in August and the notes handed investors a 57 percent return in the three months ending September, the best performance in the Bloomberg USD Emerging Market Sovereign Bond Index.

Bondholder View

Investors want to see the standoff over the $3 billion bond resolved so that Ukraine can move on to focus on economic growth, according to Pierre-Yves Bareau, who oversees $43 billion in investments, including Ukrainian bonds as the head of the emerging-market debt at JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s asset-management unit.

"Bondholders will have a preference for that debt to be restructured," Bareau said in an interview on Monday. "But I think what matters more is to make sure you can put that bond behind you and start to move forward."

Ukraine has "multiple options" for dealing with holdouts, Jaresko said. The bond exchange terms make clear that holdouts will not be given more favorable terms and any investor who doesn't accept the deal may face a moratorium.

"We have plan B, plan C, plan D, but right now we're focused on plan A," Jaresko said. "We might have to default on all holdouts after the deal and then deal with them individually. It depends how many there are and in which series."


 
 #45
Ukrainian gas transit: Europe leaves issue unaddressed
By Lyudmila Alexandrova

MOSCOW, October 6. /TASS/. Steady flow of Russian gas to Europe across Ukraine during the coming winter is in question again, as it happened on many occasions in the past. Kiev's stance is largely to blame. The risk Ukraine may start siphoning off transit gas remains high, experts warn. Both Russia and Europe are pretty bored with Ukrainian transit problems, but Europeans nevertheless are in no hurry to welcome alternative solutions Moscow has been pressing for.

Although Russia, Ukraine and the European Union back on September 25 initialed a trilateral protocol on Russian gas supplies to Ukraine, the final agreement has not been effected to this day. Moscow and Brussels have already put signatures to the arrangement, but Ukraine looks in no hurry to do so. Nor has it begun to import gas, though the heating season starts on October 15.

Russia, the European Union and Ukraine agreed that Kiev would import no less than two billion cubic meters of gas in the fourth quarter of 2015 at a price calculated on the basis of the 2009 contract. The Russian government has approved of a $24.6 discount off each 1,000 cubic meters of Russian gas. In the last three months of this year Kiev is to purchase gas from Gazprom at about $227.4 per 1,000 cubic meters. To guarantee the purchases several international institutions, such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the European Investment Bank promised to give Ukraine $500 million.

Kiev is in no hurry to sign the deal probably because it is not quite happy with the amount of money the European Union has agreed to provide, the on-line portal Svobodnaya Pressa (Free Press) quotes the director of the Energy Development Fund, Sergey Pikin, as saying. "Kiev has already achieved the disbursement of $0.5 billion. But this is not a very big amount of money at all. It is just enough to purchase two billion cubic meters of gas, which will satisfy Ukraine's demand only for short period of time. It should not be ruled out that Kiev may try to make tensions white-hot in order to make the Europeans provide much more."

"Europe has agreed to give Ukraine precisely the amount of money it will need to live through the winter. What will happen if the weather gets really cold is anyone's guess," the leading research fellow at the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies, Vladimir Blinkov, has told TASS. He believes that Kiev's reluctance to sign the papers right away is a means of pressure not so much for more money as for firmer guarantees the promised cash will be provided in the end. "They wish very firm guarantees from Europe they will have the money. Kiev would like to transform all arrangements into an inter-government agreement. If so, the agreement is to be concluded by the Russian and Ukrainian presidents and the EU leadership - the Council of Europe, and not the European Commission. This will take more time."

"If the winter is warm, the two billion cubic meters will be precisely the amount that will help them make ends meet. But if the weather is cold, problems may develop in late February or early March with both meeting the retail demand and with transit. Technologically the gas pipeline system can operate normally only at a certain pressure."

Blinkov recalls that Ukraine had asked Russia for a loan in payment for future gas transit, but Moscow refused.

"If Europe feels it's too cold, Russia might deliver gas via a different route - Nord Stream - which is operating at 60% of its capacity. But in exchange Europe is to let Moscow use the Opal pipeline 100%, and not at today's rate of 50%. Besides, there is the Yamal-Western Europe pipeline through Belarus. It might be used to a greater extent, too," Blinkin said.

Both Russia and Europe are very bored with the Ukrainian gas transit saga, Blinkin said. "But for the time being the Europeans hope that gas consumption will remain on the decline with the growing use of renewable power sources, and that the United States will continue to provide gas to Europe. Russia's proposals for laying more gas pipelines with the ultimate aim of curtailing Ukrainian gas transit altogether after 2019 arouse no enthusiasm in Europe."

Blinkin said he was referring to two extra lines of Nord Stream and three lines of the Turkish Stream to Europe. "Negotiations are in progress, but the Europeans insist that Ukrainian transit should go on. The reason is clear: in that case the costs of supporting Ukraine will soar."

Laying more pipelines will require consent from the European Commission, which, as everybody knows, already upset Russia's South Stream project, Blinkin recalled.


 
 #46
Atlantic Council
October 5, 2015
How to Fight Corruption in Ukraine
BY ANDERS �SLUND
Anders �slund is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and author of the book "Ukraine: What Went Wrong and How to Fix It."   

On September 24, US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt complained in Odesa about the failure "of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine to successful fight internal corruption. Rather than supporting Ukraine's reform and working to root out corruption, corrupt actors within the Prosecutor General's office are making things worse by openly and aggressively undermining reform." Credit: US Embassy Kyiv Ukraine Facebook

We all agree: The greatest threat facing Ukraine, after its war with Russia, is corruption. But few agree how to do so, though it should not be that difficult.

In 1998, Ukraine's main gas importer, Ihor Bakai, stated that "all rich people in Ukraine made their money on Russian gas." The technique was simple. A Ukrainian trader would receive monopoly rights to buy cheap gas from Russia's Gazprom-often financed with Russian credits-then sell it at a much higher price in Ukraine. In return, that trader was supposed to buy Ukraine's rulers to the Kremlin's benefit. After Ukraine's 2004 Orange Revolution, Bakai fled to Russia, but that trade continued.

In 2013, energy subsidies cost Ukraine 8 percent of its GDP. But with the stroke of a pen, the Ukrainian government can abolish this key source of corruption by unifying all energy prices. Kyiv took care of two-thirds of that on April 1, 2015. The government should finish the job by April 1, 2016.

State-owned enterprises that have not yet been privatized constitute another source of corruption. Ukraine's 1,833 state companies generate no profits-but instead huge losses-for the Ukrainian government. The national budget would benefit if the state would just give these companies away, because they allow powerful people to "sit on the pipe." Such operators tap into the revenues of state enterprises via transfer pricing and procurement through their personal trading companies. Ukraine ought to sell off poor, unprofitable companies as soon as possible through open auctions with a minimum of conditions. Yet, dozens of energy and infrastructure companies are actually valuable and should be nurtured through improved corporate governance.

A small number of "gray cardinals" in parliament control these valuable state companies. Each party has one or two such gray cardinals, whose task is to collect money to finance expensive party election campaigns and pay the underpaid parliamentarians. These secretive men are now being exposed, which will likely lead to their sacking from parliament. New laws are supposed to limit political parties to public financing only, while forcing lawmakers to reveal their true wealth and income.

Yet the ultimate problem is Ukraine's pervasively corrupt law enforcement. Ukraine has 18,000 prosecutors and 10,000 judges-all but a few of them are likely to be corrupt. The former KGB, now known as the Security Services of Ukraine, has 4,000 officers supposed to be fighting corruption, but instead they appear to thrive on it.

On September 24, US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt complained in Odesa about the failure "of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine to successful fight internal corruption. Rather than supporting Ukraine's reform and working to root out corruption, corrupt actors within the Prosecutor General's office are making things worse by openly and aggressively undermining reform."

All these prosecutors, judges, and SBU officers should be sacked. This is what successful reformers like Estonia and East Germany did. Their number is also excessive. By international comparison, one quarter would be enough. Then the salaries of the new officers could be quadrupled without any additional cost.

Ukrainians understand the scope of the problem. In September 2014, the Ukrainian parliament adopted a lustration law, but the West opposes this approach, complaining about collective justice and ignoring lessons from the European Union. Tellingly, their main allies in Ukraine are incumbent judges and prosecutors.

Instead of lustration, Western governments have pushed hard for the creation of three anti-corruption bodies, none of which is likely to gain any strength or even size. In relatively law-abiding Latvia, the corresponding body has tried to prosecute that country's main oligarch since 2006 without success. If it has failed in Latvia, it cannot possibly work in far more corrupt Ukraine.

The ultimate joke is the new traffic police. Tourists like taking selfies with the new recruits, one-third of whom are women. Some 2,000 started at the bottom of the pyramid in a hierarchy of 152,000 police officers; within two months, 28 of them had resigned.

Serious reform must start from the top. Corruption has to be fought by doing away with price discrepancies, unacceptable state subsidies, harmful red tape, and corrupt political financing. Ukraine's law enforcement needs to be properly cleansed, lustrated and purged, and repopulated with new professionals. Brussels should look at the success of some of the EU's newest member states rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.


 
 #47
Mother of correspondent Voloshin killed in Donbas dies

DONETSK, Rostov region. Oct 6 (Interfax) - A judge hearing the case against the Ukrainian military pilot Nadiya Savchenko in the city of Donetsk in Russia's Rostov Region has announced the death of the mother of Igor Voloshin, one of the two journalists whose killing Savchenko is being charged with.

"The court has received a report about the death of Irina Voloshina," the judge said before the session began on Tuesday.

Voloshina was treated as a victim in the Savchenko case. Last week prosecutors petitioned for her questioning to be cancelled because she was seriously ill and being treated at a hospital in Moscow.

Savchenko is charged with murder and attempted murder.

According to the inquiry, on June 17, 2014 the Ukrainian armed forces officer N. Savchenko was at an Aidar battalion base near the village of Metalist in the Slovianoserbsk district of the Luhansk region. There she was conducting secret surveillance and artillery-fire correction against a section of a militia outpost in the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic, where civilians, including three Russian correspondents of the Russian VGTRK channel, were located. As a result of shelling, two of them, Igor Kornelyuk and Anton Voloshin, were killed.

Savchenko has pleaded not guilty. In a sign of protest against her arrest and charges the Ukrainian woman announced has a hunger strike several times.
 
 #48
The Daily Telegraph (UK)
October 1, 2015
Crimea's charms uncovered Crimea may be mired in negative press, but for John Simpson this controversial place is thoroughly worth the trip
By John Simpson

There are moments in international affairs when the clouds part, and the sun illumines an area which has been murky for years. They have recently parted over the magical peninsula of Crimea; and my advice is, take advantage of it.

That engaging old crook Nikita Khrushchev was born in Russia, near the Ukrainian border, and as the boss of the Soviet Union, he handed over Crimea, which had been part of Russia since 1783, to the Soviet government of Ukraine as a present. This didn't matter much while it was just another part of the USSR, but when the big split came in 1991 and Ukraine and Russia went their separate ways, Ukraine hung on to Crimea. It wasn't until 2014 that Russia, by foul means, grabbed it back.

Now you can get there only through Russia. Because of international sanctions against Moscow, no cruise ships stop there any more, and there's no legal access from anywhere else. As a journalist, I need special permission to go to Crimea, but tourists can do it easily. It's thoroughly worth the trip.

Crimea is full of pleasant little towns with whitewashed 19th-century Russian buildings, and in places like Balaclava and Sevastopol you feel you're just about to bump into Anton Chekhov, looking for the lady with the little dog. In the Livadia Palace at Yalta , the chairs where Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin argued in 1945 are still exactly as they were. Upstairs, the bedrooms of Tsar Nicholas II  are untouched; even the Tsarina's hairbrush is still on the dressing table.

But for Brits in particular there's another draw: the Crimean War battlefields. For most of the 20th century, it was extremely difficult to reach Crimea. Sevastopol was a top-secret nuclear submarine base, and even Russians needed special permission to visit. Many historians tried and failed, which is why, when you read books about, say, the Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava, it's difficult to understand exactly what happened on the ground.

There's a famous picture, taken by the pioneering war photographer Roger Fenton , of a rocky valley whose floor is littered with cannonballs after the Charge. That has given thousands of us, over the years, the idea that the battle of Balaclava was fought out over rough, mountainous territory. Tennyson's line about the "Valley of Death" reinforces this idea, though of course he only read about the charge in the newspaper. True, there's a famous engraving by a war artist of the battle as it really was, on an open agricultural plain near the sea; but photographs, even from the 1850s, seem more reliable than drawings, somehow.

You get a magnificent panorama of the battlefield of Balaclava from a monument on Causeway Heights. When it happened, there was only one smallish vineyard in the valley, but now most of the area is given over to vines and a cavalry battle would be impossible. You can understand why the perennially unlucky Lord Raglan could see clearly that the Russians were trying to haul some British guns away and wanted the Light Brigade to stop them, while the awful Lord Cardigan and his equally appalling brother-in-law Lord Lucan couldn't see anything of the sort and assumed that Raglan was ordering them to charge at the massed Russian artillery. A bugle sounded the charge - and on YouTube you can hear a recording of it from 1890, just as it sounded on October 25 1854; heart-stirring, despite the hisses and crackles.

At home I have a little wooden block on which are displayed a couple of broken British clay pipes and several Russian, British and French bullets. I bought it from a junk shop in Sevastopol, and the objects were found on the battlefield at Balaclava. Presumably the soldiers had a quick smoke while they dodged the bullets. What you don't hear much about, certainly from British history books, is that everyone on all sides felt so depressed after watching the British light cavalrymen being mown down that they just packed up and called it a day. We think the battle was a draw; the Russians said it was a victory.

Go there if you can, while you can; the Russians plan to base long-range bombers there and could easily block the whole peninsula again. There are various pleasant hotels in Balaclava, Sevastopol and the capital Simferapol, and some stunning harbourside fish restaurants. The locals are so amazed to find tourists that they're charming. Why not download the trumpet call from YouTube and play it there for the first time in 161 years as you plod across the pleasant battlefield?

Just don't wait too long...

Though access to Crimea is possible, British nationals intending to visit should be aware that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office currently advises against travelling to the region. FCO updates are available here:
https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/ukraine#nf
 
 
#49
Dances With Bears
http://johnhelmer.net
October 6, 2015
WHAT AMBULANCE-CHASING LAWYERS REVEAL ABOUT THE MH17 SHOOT-DOWN - THERE IS INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE FOR CRIMINAL PROSECUTION IN ANY NATIONAL OR INTERNATIONAL COURT
By John Helmer, Moscow
[Footnotes, links and photos here http://johnhelmer.net/?p=14270]

A fight over fees by Australian lawyers claiming to launch a compensation claim on behalf of one of the victims of the MH17 shoot-down revealed last week in an Australian state court that the top officials of the Australian Government are unable to confirm evidence of what crime was committed, or who committed it when the aircraft was destroyed, and its 298 crew and passengers, including 38 Australians and 196 Dutch, killed on July 17, 2014.

In the Netherlands, meanwhile, a lawyer who has claimed to be representing Dutch kin in pursuing criminal and civil court suits on behalf of the victims, has declared: "Our government must clearly express that it is an illusion to believe that any study ever could lead to prosecution of the individual offenders."

A secret file by the Australian Attorney-General to the Prime Minister, setting out the admissibility of evidence for prosecuting the crime, has recommended against a public declaration by the Government of what happened, and who is responsible. The disclosure of the file, though not of the secret evidence or of the internal Australian Government debate over its contents, comes just days before the Dutch Safety Board (DSB) is due to issue its final report on the causes of the crash.

The Australian Government revelations are indirect. They appear in the text [1] of a judgement issued on October 1 by Judge John Bond of the Queensland Supreme Court. Following a hearing on September 9 and 10, and written submissions a week later, Bond decided that Shine Lawyers, a firm specializing in accident and injury compensation, were not entitled to withhold a case file it had compiled for advising Werner Lupker until he paid up fees and charges totalling $20,643.50 (US$14,690). A Dutch citizen and resident of Australia, Lupker (below, left) was the spouse of Dafne Nieveen (right), a Dutch language teacher who was killed on board MH17 [2].

She and Lupker had lived and worked in Perth, Western Australia, for four years. Lupker had retained a Brisbane, Queensland, lawyer, who claims to be an aviation specialist, to represent him. This lawyer's name is Joseph Wheeler (below).

According to the text of Bond's judgement, when Wheeler recently decided to resign from the Shine firm and set up an office for himself, Shine demanded that Lupker pay fees and charges for the work the firm claims to have done. Unless Lupker paid, he was told in August, Shine would not release the case file. Wheeler, meanwhile, had arranged with Maurice Blackburn, another company of accident and injury litigators, to start legal action. "The applicant [Lupker] followed the solicitor [Wheeler] who had had the conduct of his file from one firm to the other," said the judge.

In the case file, which Bond has now ordered Shine to hand over, there was correspondence from a Dutch lawyer named Antoinette Collignon [4], with whom Shine had announced a partnership to pursue court cases for MH17 victims. The Shine announcement came on August 27, 2014 [5], a month after the crash. Collignon (below, left), who is a partner at the Dutch law firm, LegalTree, and two Swedish lawyers, Stefan Eriksson [6] (centre) and Urban Olson (right), were reportedly engaged together "to assist as advocates for the rights of European and Australasian families of flight MH 17 passengers and will continue to add suitably and appropriately experienced and qualified international partners to supplement the considerable international efforts required to demand both criminal justice and civil compensation from all potentially liable parties."

In the Australian court, Nieveen's name wasn't identified, nor were any details of court claims which Wheeler, Collignon. or the Swedes have started. In fact, when asked directly, they can substantiate no court action, neither in Australia, nor in The Netherlands. Each of the lawyers refuses to answer questions about the Lupker case, or any other claim they are working on for MH17 victims. Point blank, they will not say they have MH17 case clients, nor what individuals or governments they are suing for what cause.

Wheeler, whose website [7] says he obtained a certificate in aviation law from a university in Montreal, Canada, practises out of a Brisbane apartment which appears to be his home. He claims to be selling "aviation legal, research, and strategic legal and policy consulting solutions to provide advice on effective legal public and private aviation priorities and infrastructure projects, as well as discrete aviation legal applications worldwide (IALPG Consult)." A partner Wheeler claims to to have in Rostov-on-Don, in Russia, turns out to be based in Montreal.

Asked to clarify what he believes the evidence shows for a criminal or civil law claim in the MH17 case, Wheeler said by telephone that he won't answer questions on the matter. He gave no reason.
.
The Bond judgement is limited to ordering the handover of the Lupker case file from Shine to Wheeler and Maurice Blackburn, with the proviso that if in the future, Lupker wins compensation from a court case, the amount claimed by Shine would be repaid. In his judgement, Bond read into the record the terms which Lupker had agreed with Wheeler when they signed a legal representation agreement. These provide that Lupker would be liable to pay the lawyers a maximum of 23% of whatever compensation award he received from a court case. The amount of his compensation subject to repayment to Shine would not include "my USD$50,000 advance compensation payment, nor my Australian Government Department of Human Services 'Australian Victim of Terrorism Overseas Payment' of (up to) AUD$75,000, should the MH17 attack be declared by the Australian Prime Minister and I receive such a payment before the resolution of my Montreal Convention claim."

The $50,000 advance payment has been decided by Malaysian Airlines, along with its insurers. The calculation of the amount and the final payout depend on official determinations of the cause of the crash, according to the rules of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) [8], and the 1999 Montreal Convention; this limits airline liability and compensation. Comparable $50,000 advance payments have been made by Malaysian Airlines to survivors of passengers lost on the MH370 flight of March 2014 [9].

The disclosure of the terms for payment of A$75,000 for Australian victims of overseas terrorism is more sensitive, and politically very significant. This is because, to date, the Australian Prime Minister and government have refused to issue a declaration that under the applicable Australia law the shoot-down of MH17 was a terrorist act. The statute of 2012 [10] created a government-funded compensation scheme for victims provided that "the Prime Minister... declare that a relevant overseas terrorist incident is one to which the Scheme applies." It also established "eligibility criteria so that payments can be made to either long-term Australian residents who are victims of a relevant overseas terrorist act, or in the event of the death of a victim, close family members."

In 2013 then Prime Minister Tony Abbott (right) authorized this outline of the scheme [11]. The government ministry responsible confirms [12] that just 8 acts have been declared by the Prime Minister to qualify. They include the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York; bombings in Bali, Indonesia, in 2002; and in
2013 shooting attacks on a shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya. The MH17 event has not been declared a terrorist act by the Australian Government.

One week after the event, Abbott was reported [13] by the Australian state radio as saying the MH17 case might qualify. "Obviously," he said, "it was one of the very early measures of the new government to put in place the Australian Victim of Terrorism Overseas Payment system and I have sought advice on that." Abbott was referring to a report requested from the Australian Attorney-General, George Brandis (below, left).

Don Rothwell (right), a professor of international law at the Australian National University, was reported as commenting: "The fact that the Prime Minister made this observation a few days ago, and we've yet to see any government action on it, would suggest to me the Government is getting carefully considered legal advice as to how to respond to this issue. There is a live legal question at the moment as to whether what has occurred is a war crime, a crime against humanity or an act of terror."

This week, according to Rothwell, there has been no legal advice from Brandis and no declaration by the prime minister that the cause of the MH17 crash and the cause of death were a terrorist act. "MH17 has yet to be declared an overseas terrorist act," Rothwell now says, "though that does not mean that such a declaration could not be made in the future. If legal advice had been received by the government (which I suspect that it has), then the PM of the day retains options as to how they proceed. Australia would have been keen not to make a declaration that may have been seen to prejudge the outcome of international investigations into the loss of MH17 (including that of the Netherlands)." Rothwell adds that the Attorney-General's brief "is kept strictly confidential unless the government chooses to release it; this legal advice is also not subject to FOI [Freedom of ~Information] requests." The Australian Parliament also has no legal right to intervene, ask for a copy of the Attorney-General's paper, or publicly question state officials about it.

Abbott, who was replaced last month as prime minister by Malcolm Turnbull, publicly claimed [14] in November of 2014 that he knew what had caused the MH17 crash, and who had been responsible. "We were given very strong security advice in the days following the atrocity as to the type of weapon, as to the place from where the weapon was fired and as to the likely prominence of the weapon and there's been nothing since then to question that original security advice." By "prominence" Abbott meant provenance, and Russia. Abbott's claims referred back to the US Government statement in the United Nations Security Council on July 18, 2014, that a Buk ground-to-air missile, fired by separatists in eastern Ukraine under Russian command and control, had caused the crash. For that statement by Ambassador Samantha Power (left) , following meetings with President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry, read this [15].

For the sequence of events leading to the Power statement, see [16].

Fifteen weeks later, by the time Abbott spoke in November, he had been briefed on the evidence gathered by Australian pathologists and the Victorian State Coroner from the bodies of MH17 victims. No evidence of shrapnel from a Buk missile warhead had been found. For that story, read on [17].

Since last month the Australian government has ordered the coronial evidence - despite open publication last November and December - classified as secret. If not a Buk missile, what and who had caused the crash have been debated among Australian government officials, while publicly Abbott and the foreign minister, Julie Bishop, have continued to claim a Buk missile was the cause of the crash, and the Russian Government in Moscow responsible.

The refusal of the Australian officials to make the statutory declaration that they have the evidence under Australian law to declare a terrorist act suggests they don't have the evidence at all. Until now, noone has noticed the convergence of the Australian autopsy evidence in the Coroners Court in Melbourne, and the revelation in the Brisbane court that the government is refusing to declare a terrorist act.

Rothwell believes that whether or not the conflict in eastern Ukraine is regarded as terrorism by the government in Kiev, or civil war by the Novorussian side, attacking a civil airliner is a war crime. "The status of the conflict and whether it was an international or non-international armed conflict would not be determinative as this is a war crime in either state or conflict."

Prosecuting the crime, and those responsible for committing it, would be, according to Rothwell, open to Australia, The Netherlands, Malaysia, the US, or any of the signatories to the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court [18] (ICC) at The Hague.

"As Australia is a party to the Rome Statute," says [19] Rothwell, "it is required to have domestic laws in place to prosecute persons responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity. As both of these crimes are ones over which universal jurisdiction applies, it is possible under Australian law to prosecute non-nationals for such crimes. Given there is a connection between the loss of MH17 and Australia, there would also be an incentive to prosecute under the Act."

"There have been no prosecutions under Australian law since this legislation was modified at the time Australia became a party to the Rome Statute, or post 9/11 for a foreign terrorist act by a non-national. So any MH17-related prosecution would create fresh precedent for Australia. My view is that while it is technically possible to prosecute under Australian law, Australia would much prefer any prosecutions to take place before an International Court or Tribunal, or for another directly affected country to commence prosecutions (Netherlands/Malaysia). Two reasons immediately come to mind: 1) difficulty in getting an accused before an Australian court 2) difficulty of gathering the evidence together for a prosecution in Australia."

Dutch lawyers working on the evidence for the deaths of the Dutch nationals on board MH17 include a large number advertising their expertise in pursuing compensation claims in air crashes, like Collignon for LegalTree. Reviewing the Dutch media and also other lawyers and prosecutors working on the MH17 case, a total of 8 Dutch lawyers have identified themselves or been named as actively engaged.

They include Gertrude van Wassenaer and Evert Wytema [20]; Peter Langstraat of Moree Gelderbloom; Jeroen Bosch [21]; Rene Hebly [22] of SAP; and Jeroen Kuyper of Beer. On the Beer website it is claimed [23]: "Beer advocaten has a special aviation team. Where necessary, we work together with specialised law firms abroad....[Beer] currently represents surviving relatives of the passengers who died in the MH17 crash." Each of these lawyers was asked to confirm the names of the MH17 families they represent; the court or courts in which they are proceeding; and the target and cause of their litigation.

None was willing to substantiate their advertisements. Van Wassenaer wrote to say: "My colleague Evert Wytema, who is working on this case with the MH17 team of lawyers, is currently on holiday." He hasn't returned. Langstraat was identified by Kuyper as the official spokesman for the group, but when asked to substantiate that he, his firm, or the group have been retained by MH17 clients, he replied: "I am sorry but I cannot give you this information at this moment."

Another Dutch lawyer, Bob van der Goen, announced last December that on behalf of a group of MH17 victims' families, he had written to the Dutch Government, claiming [24] it "has completely botched" the fact-finding investigation and the legal framework of the case. "Nobody knows who is doing what. There is no coordination, there is no leadership whatsoever [by] Holland."

This week, when van der Goen was asked to confirm what MH17 victims had engaged him to represent them, in what court he was suing, and against whom, he refused to say. "We are not allowed to communicate to you such information as names of victims, etc.," he replied.

A month ago, describing himself as a former lawyer who has "also been involved in previous air disasters", van der Goen (right) wrote in a Dutch newspaper that litigating on behalf of the MH17 victims is now impossible. "Our government needs to stop selling tubers for lemons to them [kin of victims]. Instead, [the government] must clearly express that it is an illusion to believe that any study ever could lead to prosecution of individual offenders." According to van der Goen, the Dutch officials had made "blunder on blunder...and a laundry list of other mistakes." The evidence for prosecution of crime, or litigating for civil compensation, has disappeared.

For the Dutch Government's compilation of its official statements on the the MH17 crash, open this file [25]. According to van der Goen, none of the investigating countries has legitimate authority to prosecute, "if only because the Netherlands and the other countries mentioned are possible suspects themselves - and they refuse to see this. So the case will be endlessly shelved. Eventually, it will be adopted at a parliamentary inquiry that mistakes were made, but then noone will still be awake. Excellent solution."

Rothwell notes that the ICC has no jurisdiction to consider an act of terrorism, and there would be problems for national courts of "getting an accused person before a domestic court. Seeking to extradite someone from Russia (for example) to the Netherlands/Malaysia/Australia would be legally and politically very complex without the active cooperation of the Russian government... That is why having a special court/tribunal with the backing of a UN Security Council resolution assist to circumvent those difficulties as UN member states would be under an obligation to cooperate."

How to understand the legal reasoning for a UN tribunal created by an alliance of like-minded states, if they are, in Van Der Goen's assessment, suspects themselves? Rothwell declines to comment.