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Putin on the Couch
Washington is infuriated, outwitted and just plain befuddled by him, so we asked America's leading Putinologists to get inside the head of the Kremlin strongman.
By Susan B. Glasser
Susan Glasser is editor of POLITICO Magazine. Glasser worked for a decade at The Washington Post, where she was a foreign correspondent, editor and political reporter. She and her husband, New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker, spent four years as co-chiefs of the Post's Moscow Bureau, throughout President Vladimir Putin's first term. Their book, Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution, was published in 2005.

He's crazy, calculating and somehow capricious all at the same time. A playground bully who'll wilt at the first sign of resistance. Or perhaps he just wants us to think he is, and he's really a master strategist, a latter-day Metternich moving countries and armies around the chessboard of Eastern Europe with a steely determination and an autocrat's free hand.

Why are we so utterly perplexed by Vladimir Putin?

From the moment he became president of Russia in a surprise handover from the ailing Boris Yeltsin on New Year's Eve at the turn of the new millennium, Putin has by turns confused, infuriated, outwitted and just plain befuddled the West. And never more so than in recent days, as Russia has invaded neighboring Ukraine and taken over the Crimean peninsula in the prelude to what could be a full-scale annexation of the territory on the Black Sea, the first time such a maneuver has been pulled in Europe since the blood-soaked end of World War II.

Immediately, however, this much became clear: Putin had shocked everyone by his lightning-fast takeover, and with his small inner circle, KGB officer's penchant for secrecy and near-complete power, managing the crisis would come down to what we make of Russia's pugnacious president. Which is why we are once again finding our geopolitics laced with psychoanalysis: This is a crisis whose resolution depends very much on one man.

And, it must be said, when it comes to understanding Vladimir Putin, Washington's been getting him wrong as often as right for more than a decade now.

Not long after I arrived in Moscow at the beginning of 2001 as a correspondent for the Washington Post, I attended the very first presidential interview Putin gave to the American press, a small roundtable at the Kremlin after his first summit meeting with President George W. Bush (the one where Bush looked in his soul). Putin kept us waiting for several hours, then proceeded to impress by reeling off facts and figures from his briefing book; he wasn't friendly, but he maintained a brisk professionalism until we got about two-thirds of the way around the table. The question of the war in the Russian breakaway republic of Chechnya still hadn't come up, and I felt obliged to ask about the brutal mayhem and rampant human rights violations in the conflict that had launched Putin on his unlikely path to the presidency the year before. His demeanor quickly changed, and while he didn't curse or vow to "rub them out in the outhouse" as he had done previously when asked about the Chechen rebels, it was as if an entirely different person was speaking. The modern technocrat of a few minutes earlier vanished, replaced by the threatening tough guy.

But at the time Washington saw mostly the reforming technocrat, a misreading of the man the White House calls VVP-Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin-that would persist in various forms for years. While Vice President Dick Cheney immediately took a strong view of Putin-"KGB, KGB, KGB," he told one visitor who asked what to make of the onetime Soviet spy-that was not the prevailing analysis in the Bush National Security Council, which forcefully pushed the view of Putin as a liberal economic modernizer out to undo the damage of Russia's chaotic 1990s. This was when top U.S. officials believed, or at least wanted to, that Putin was there to create a new capitalist Russia, which required ignoring or minimizing that other Putin, the one who ruled with a small cadre of fellow KGB veterans, spoke in messianic terms of Russia's greatness and fervently-and publicly-expressed the view that democracy was an insidious foreign transplant unsuited for Russian soil. "We still had too many illusions that Putin had been chosen by Yeltsin and was fundamentally an extension of Yeltsin," recalled one senior U.S. official who dealt with Russia in this period. "We were wrong."

But already some U.S. diplomats on the ground took a different view, and once Putin began dismantling democratic institutions, cracking down on the media and, eventually, jailing Russia's richest man for defying him, a sense of Putin as "one cold dude," as Bush privately told British Prime Minister Tony Blair, became established wisdom. Internal battles still raged for years, though, over what to do about him. When Putin publicly bemoaned the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century," some analysts insisted we should take him seriously, that Putin really meant to restore what he could of the Russian empire; others saw it as mere rhetoric from a calculating realist with whom America could do business.

"There were all kinds of misreadings," recalled Fiona Hill, who would serve as the top intelligence analyst for Russia at the National Intelligence Council under Bush and later co-wrote the book Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin. "A lot of wishful thinking that Russia has changed."

By 2008, Bush and Putin were barely on speaking terms in the wake of Russia's invasion of its tiny neighbor Georgia. But as he won the presidency later that year, Barack Obama again adopted the pragmatist's view and looked for ways to engage Russia. His "reset" benefited as well from Putin's temporary hiatus from the Kremlin; unwilling to change the constitution to allow himself to rule for life, he simply traded places with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev for a few years, allowing Obama a more congenial if unempowered interlocutor. When Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili warned a visiting top U.S. official that "he expected Russia to follow its 2008 invasion of Georgia with intervention in Crimea," as the secret State Department cable recounting the meeting drily noted, no one really took it seriously, and indeed we only know about Saakashvili's prescient analysis because it was made public with the vast trove of WikiLeaks documents.

Still, even then, Washington's debates raged on over the direction-and effectiveness-of Obama's new course, always circling back to the question of what to make of Putin himself: Did we misread him? Was the "reset" a clever tactical move-or an accommodationist nod to a threatening bully? Do we understand what he's up to-and how far he's willing to go?

Which, of course, is exactly the debate that has erupted once again over the last few weeks as Putin, unbidden, has swooped into Crimea: German Chancellor Angela Merkel reportedly pronounced the Russian "in another world," while Washington pols have accusingly pointed at Obama-and Bush, for that matter-wondering whether the perpetual American problem with Russia comes from having a Russian president we just don't get.

Not surprisingly, aides to both Bush and Obama in recent days have been adamant that their boss had no illusions whatsoever about Putin. "I hear people say we were naïve about Putin and that the president didn't understand Putin," said one top Obama administration official. "No. We had a very sober, very steely-eyed realist assessment of Putin."

Then the conversation turned, as it inevitably seems to, right back to putting Putin on the couch. "It comes down to a debate going on in his own head," posited the Obama adviser. "He does impulsive, or dare I say irrational, things. I don't think he's the realist grand strategist that some people admiringly ascribe to him."

We probably won't settle that debate here and now, but we asked more than a dozen of America's most experienced Putin watchers to share their insights and analysis with Politico Magazine. The conversation that follows here makes for a fascinating exercise in reading Russia's volatile leader at this crucial moment in a crisis largely of his personal making. Is he unhinged? Overreaching and insecure? Arrogant and ignorant? A deluded conspiracy theorist, or a very shrewd gambler who took the West's measure and found it wanting? All these Putins, and more, are in these 22 fascinating contributions. As for Crimea, stay tuned.

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Rational But Rash
David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, covered the collapse of the Soviet Union for the Washington Post.

Who is Vladimir Putin? Let's limit it to the current crisis and state of affairs, and let's avoid the too-easy clichés about the KGB. Putin is an authoritarian leader-sometimes shrewd, often brutal, always obsessed with the resumption and projection of Russian stature in the region and in the world, one full generation after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The narrative of "crazy Putin" is absurd. He is, in his context, in his specific mental and political universe, rational. In his terms, he is, in Ukraine, rationally responding to a generation's worth of collapse, humiliation, Western triumphalism and weakness. To him, everything from the collapse of the USSR to the expansion of NATO and, now, the drift of Ukraine from Russia's grasp, is an intolerable historical trend. And to stop it--to stand athwart history and cry "Stop!" as William F. Buckley once described conservatism--he has cracked down on Ukraine (as if it were his to crack down on), on dissident voices at home and on dissenting media. At the same time, he has cobbled together a kind of Russian neoconservatism out of elements of traditional nationalism, the Russian Orthodox Church and anti-Western moralisms.

I honestly think he has overreached in Ukraine. And while he may go further still, even pressing east or, God forbid, teasing Ukraine into a shooting war (or a brief skirmish), I think he has improvised, acted rashly and foolishly, even on his own terms. And while he controls state media and can artificially pump up his popularity and get paid workers out on the streets of Moscow to support him, Russians do not want to fight Ukrainians. Russia, modern Russia, needs to live in the global economy, and this could cause great damage and ultimately undermine Putin's political prestige-not among the liberal elites (he lost them long ago), but among his base constituencies.

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A Genius? No Way.
Stephen Sestanovich-professor of international diplomacy at Columbia University, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Maximalist: America in the World from Truman to Obama-was U.S. ambassador-at-large to the former Soviet Union from 1997 to 2001.

Vladimir Putin as strategic genius? I'm having some trouble with this idea. Let's remember what he was trying to do in Ukraine. The original objective was to bring the entire country into the fold of the Eurasian customs union. Putin had his own man in the saddle in Kyiv, his $15 billion loan offer had a real economic logic to it, the Maidan crowds were often confused and demoralized and Western governments didn't know what to do next. How did Putin blow it? By badgering ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych to crack down, by calling everyone who opposed him a fascist, by trying to show who was boss by grabbing a piece of territory that he already commanded. This week, a new Ukrainian leader just visited Washington, an American president with little interest in foreign policy is leading the charge against Russian aggression and the German chancellor-once Putin's best friend in Europe-muses that he's "in another world."

This is not high-quality statecraft. It's bad judgment, emotional decision-making, petty score-settling with little care for long-term consequences. But it's vintage Putin. We have developed a picture in our minds of the coolly calculating Kremlin leader who uses his intelligence-officer training to outfox us. Privately, Russians who know him describe a different guy altogether-indecisive, easily swayed by poor information, driven by the passions of moment.

It didn't have to be this way. With Russia's wealth and power, Putin could by now have made himself into the senior statesman of Europe, the dean of the G-8, an international wise man. I'm reminded of a comment I once heard another post-Soviet leader make-that the KGB was an organization committed to a life-or-death struggle with imaginary enemies. If you work at it, of course, you can usually turn imaginary enemies into real ones. That's Putin's achievement.

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Russia's Restorer
Angela Stent-director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian & East European Studies at Georgetown University and author of The Limits of Partnership: U.S.-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century-served as the national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council from 2004 to 2006.

For the past decade, I have attended an annual dinner with Vladimir Putin where a group of foreign Russia experts engages him in a conversation about Russia and the world. In these gatherings, he talks for several hours, is in full command of his facts and exudes self-confidence and occasional humor and sarcasm. His message has been consistent: Russia was on the brink of disintegration when he came to power, and he has restored Russia to its rightful place in the world, where it offers a unique civilizational model that differs from-but is equally valid to-that of the West. Before the Russo-Georgia war in 2008, he repeatedly said that if Georgia could leave the Soviet Union, Abkhazia and South Ossetia could leave Georgia. And over the years Putin has stressed that Ukraine has special ties to Russia and hinted at what he told President George W. Bush explicitly in 2008-that Ukraine is an artificial country, the greater part of which historically belonged to Russia.

It is clear in these meetings that Putin's understanding of facts differs from that of many of his guests. In 2014, Putin believes that, although he has saved Russia, the West is still trying to weaken it and possibly to promote regime change. He believed he had a deal with Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych not to sign an agreement with the European Union, and that deal collapsed when the interim Kyiv government took over and Yanukovych fled. Putin's main goal is to prevent all of Ukraine from moving closer to the West. Reincorporating Crimea into Russia is the minimum goal. The endgame is the full restoration of Russian influence in the post-Soviet space and recognition by the West that this is indeed Russia's rightful "sphere of privileged interests."

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A Conspiracy Theorist
Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution, served in the State Department from 1993 to 2001, first as U.S. ambassador-at-large to the former Soviet Union and then as deputy secretary of state.

Three things to keep in mind about Putin as he prepares to annex Crimea: 1) He's committed to his own version of rollback-i.e., not just stopping but reversing what he sees as the across-the-board capitulation of Russia to the West going back to the late Mikhail Gorbachev period; 2) When assessing a crisis, his instinct is to believe and react to the most extreme conspiracy theory that his advisers and intelligence services tell him about the actions and motives of the West; and 3) As the flipside of No. 2, he believes in the best case of what his bold and/or stealthy actions will produce (e.g., that the Russian speakers of eastern Ukraine would welcome Putin's invasion and are in favor of returning to the bosom of Mother Russia).

As for the endgame, it's not just replacing the Ukrainian flag with the Russian tricolor over the government buildings in Crimea-it's to use Crimea as a beachhead to destabilize as much of the rump state of Ukraine as possible and, very likely, also to apply the Crimean precedent to the Russian-majority Transnistria region in Moldova.

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Russia at Its Worst
Edward Lucas, senior editor at the Economist, was its Moscow bureau chief from 1998 to 2002.

Putin exemplifies modern Russia: corrupt, authoritarian, xenophobic and vengeful. His regime is a mafia-KGB hybrid, which uses business, energy and finance to divide, penetrate and constrain the West. It's bad for Russia but works pretty well for him and his cronies.

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The One and Only
Dimitri Simes is president of the Center for National Interest and publisher and CEO of the National Interest.

Vladimir Putin is a man of formidable intellect, and after almost 15 years in charge, he is the most experienced leader of a major world power. He feels nostalgia for the Russian/Soviet Empire, but is sufficiently pragmatic not to allow it to dictate policy. Putin is not anti-Western, but unlike his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, he is unsentimental toward the West. The downside of Putin's experience in international affairs is that there are few to whom he will turn to for advice; he likewise has no interest in moral guidance from Western leaders, whom he considers hypocritical in attempting to force Russia to play according to rules they don't follow.

Putin is a strong Russian patriot who sees the state as a key driver of society. He does not view democracy as an end, but rather as a means of government under appropriate circumstances. Putin has a record of twisting facts, though some Western leaders share this habit. What is different is that Putin does not expect to be accountable, at least not inside Russia.

In Ukraine, Putin has been ruthless and calculating. He struggled for influence in Ukraine and appeared to have lost. The parliament's removal of Yanukovych without following Ukraine's constitutional procedures offered Putin an opportunity to take over Crimea. This will be hard to reverse without concessions affecting how Ukraine's national government operates. Putin does not take pressure well and will be creative in fighting back. He expects to weather any probable Western response and might even benefit politically by standing tall.

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A Reactionary
Dmitri Trenin, director of the Moscow Center of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, served in the Soviet and Russian armed forces from 1972 to 1993.

Vladimir Putin used to be many things to many people. An economic liberal and a moderate nationalist; an advocate of a Greater Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok and a promoter of a Eurasian Union; a practicing Christian and a ruthless, if enlightened, autocrat. For many years, even as Russia's president, he was still a work in progress. Pragmatism was the hallmark of Putin's first decade in power. He is still pragmatic in many ways, but he has markedly changed. Today, Putin reveals a sense of an historic mission bestowed on him. That mission is to restore Russia to what he sees as its rightful place as one of the world's great powers. This means adopting a set of traditional values rooted in established religions, above all, Orthodox Christianity; reviving Russian patriotism with its emphasis on a strong state; pursuing an active policy of nation-building; integrating eastern Slavs (Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians) in a "civilizational union" of central Eurasia, in an alliance with Muslim Turkic peoples also living there; and protecting Russia's strategic independence from its geopolitical rivals-above all, the United States and the European Union.

Putin's endgame in Ukraine is securing Crimea as part of the Russian Federation, following the results of the March 16 referendum; making sure that the rest of Ukraine is federalized to give Russian speakers in the eastern and southern regions a high degree of linguistic, cultural and economic autonomy; and preventing the central government in Kyiv from seeking NATO membership. Over time, he would like to see central Ukraine, with Kyiv, join with the eastern and southern regions of the country in a compact aligned with Russia. If this means that western Ukraine breaks away and declares independence, so be it. To Putin, its inclusion into the Soviet Union was probably Stalin's mistake; it does not belong with the rest of Ukraine. He has no illusion, of course, as to how difficult the next few years will be for Russia and for him, and he is no doubt bracing for intense competition, even confrontation-which to him are normal, if unpleasant, elements of international relations.

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A Lonely Pessimist
Thomas de Waal, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has reported from across Russia and the Caucasus.

I believe Vladimir Putin's motto is extreme self-reliance-that you can trust no one but yourself and a few people close to you.

He served a state, the Soviet Union, that came crashing down round his ears, but managed to pick himself up. He served a president, Boris Yeltsin, whose wayward behavior, he believes, almost destroyed Russia a second time.

He believed that the economic successes and stabilization of his early years in power had a lot to do with himself personally. He gets angry when the power vertical in Russia does not deliver the results he wants-and it rarely does.

He believes that the whole world lives by varying degrees of "double standards" and that talk of "values" is just a smokescreen for asserting realpolitik interests by other means. He despises almost every other foreign head of state, though perhaps he has a grudging respect for Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev and Turkish Prime Minister Reccep Tayip Erdogan.

Like too many Russian leaders, he finds himself surrounded by courtiers who want to give him only good news. That makes him lonely. He was not formerly an ideas man, but now, after 14 years at the top, he is looking for ideas that will crown his legacy.

Finally, like many other leaders in Russia, and not only in Russia, he spends too much of his time tending and repairing an inherently unstable political system. He does not know how it is going to end, but he knows he needs some base of public support to keep it going.

Putin's triumphalism in Ukraine hides a deep pessimism. He believes he has found a smart move in Crimea in the middle of a losing game. He will look for other moves, but may not find them.

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Paranoid
Angus Roxburgh, a former BBC correspondent in Moscow who worked as a public relations adviser for the Kremlin from 2006 to 2009, is author of The Strongman: Vladimir Putin and the Struggle for Russia.

Journalists probably shouldn't bandy about medical terms to describe politicians, but I think Putin exhibits more and more signs of paranoia. In Ukraine there are both personal and strategic elements to this. Firstly, he appears to be terrified of popular revolutions, knowing that the streets of Moscow could be the next venue, and he claims to see Western hands at play in almost all such revolutions. This is why he has so vigorously opposed Western actions in Iraq, Libya and Syria-refusing to condone regime change brought about by external powers. When it comes so close to home as Ukraine, the paranoia mounts, and I believe (and his advisers say this openly) he regards the Ukrainian revolution as a blueprint for the next one, at the walls of the Kremlin.

Secondly, he believes the West is trying to build its own security at Russia's expense. In 2008, NATO promised that Ukraine "will" join the alliance, and I think Putin sees the abrupt westward turn in Kyiv (orchestrated, as he sees it, by Washington) as the first step toward this. This is an absolute no-go area for Putin. It would bring NATO right up to Russia's borders and place his Black Sea Fleet base in enemy hands. Hence his total determination to preempt such a move by getting Crimea out of Ukraine right now. His own words, and the hysteria of the state-run media, strongly suggest that the population is being prepared for annexation and, if Ukraine resists, war. Putin is angry and utterly contemptuous of American politicians who dare to lecture him about intervening abroad, when for years it is he who has lectured them about this. He is in absolutely no mood to compromise.

Putin once memorably described the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the last century. He didn't mean he regretted the end of communism, but he did regret the end of a huge multinational state, and the fact that 25 million Russians ended up outside their own country's borders. What we see now in his vow to "protect Russians" in Ukraine is the corollary of that. God forbid if he decides Russians in Latvia and Estonia also require "help."

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A KGB Agent
Gregory Feifer, former NPR correspondent in Moscow,is author of Russians: The People Behind the Power.

Far from an unknown entity, Vladimir Putin has been remarkably consistent from his first days in office. He has steadily consolidated power by marginalizing and prosecuting his opponents and taking control of his country's natural resources economy. He has done that by resuscitating Russia's traditional political culture, according to which bluffing and façades obscure decision-making behind the Kremlin's high walls.

His foreign policy serves chiefly to shore up his popularity at home by painting him as a restorer of Russian greatness whose stoking of an imaginary conflict with the West plays on nostalgia for the good old days of the Cold War. Putin sees the world largely as a KGB officer would: a stage for zero-sum games of subterfuge. Although he probably has no endgame in Ukraine, he would rather have civil war break out than see the country join the European Union, which would provide an example for Russians for how to rid themselves of their authoritarian leader. Invading Crimea was a screw-you statement to Ukraine's new authorities and the West. Putin's unchecked success would encourage him to do more of the same, perhaps in Moldova next.

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A Man on a Mission
Leon Aron, director of Russian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, is author of Roads to the Temple: Truth, Memory, Ideas and Ideals in the Making of the Russian Revolution, 1987-1991.

Vladimir Putin is a man who sees his mission as the Russian state's recovery of political, economic, social, cultural and geostrategic assets that were lost in the Soviet collapse-this mission I've dubbed the "Putin doctrine." Domestically, it means re-establishing the state's control over (and maybe even ownership of) politics, Russia's legal system, the economy's "commanding heights" (first and foremost, oil and gas) and the national cultural narrative.

In foreign policy, the Putin doctrine means more muscular, more assertive, at times even aggressive, policies with respect to the geostrategic triad essential to Russia's national identity: nuclear superpowership, defined by Putin as incompatible with strategic missile defense anywhere near Russian borders; Russia as a great power, which he interprets largely in opposition to the West and, especially, the United States; and dominance, even hegemony, in the post-Soviet space (minus the Baltics), specifically a veto over former satellites' foreign and defense policies and alliances.

This vision of Russia's geostrategy explains why a Europe-bound Ukraine is such a sharp and deep setback for the Putin regime and why it necessitated such a swift response. Defined by Putin from the very beginning as a contest within the greater West vs. Russia competition, the Ukrainian revolution has struck body blows not at one, but at two elements at the heart of Russia's geopolitical objectives as defined by Putin: a world great power and the regional hegemon. As a result, containment, destabilization and, if possible, derailment of the new, pro-Western Ukraine has become (and will continue to be) a key domestic political issue for Putin, whose legitimacy is being threatened by Ukraine's exit from Russia's sphere of influence.

As for Putin's next moves, they will be defined solely by a cross calculation of the two sets of constantly updated political metrics in his head: his sense of regaining the initiative and recovering Russia's status on the one hand, and the costs inflicted by the West's sanctions on the other.

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A Pragmatist, Unhinged
Andrew Kuchins is director of the Russia and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic & International Studies.

My read on Putin over his decade and a half in power is that he is a brutally cold, calculating pragmatist in foreign and security policy, combining pursuit of his perception of Russian national interests, which almost always correspond with Russian public opinion, along with his main goal of preserving his political power. My deep concern, however, is that the Putin we have seen since the stealth Russian military occupation of Crimea has become unhinged; that his deeply rooted anger at the West coupled with his failing Ukraine policy led him to a decision on Crimea that defies logic.

If the goal is influencing any Ukrainian government to be more pro-Russian, this move has backfired. He has done more to promote Ukrainian national identity in the past several days than any Ukrainian politician ever could. If the goal is to advance his pet post-Soviet integration project, I am afraid that the impact on capitals from Baku to Astana and everyplace in between has been to scare the daylights out of political elites to run from rather than run to Moscow. If somehow this is to enhance Russia's overall geopolitical position in the world, Putin is weakening his options rather than strengthening them. I will not even bother to spend time on the near- and longer-term economic impact, but prosperity is the principal reason he has been popular with Russians over his long tenure, not bare-chested machismo.

The frightening thing is that he appears to believe his own propaganda and lies. Official Russian positions about justifying Crimea have absolutely no legal basis. Right now, any diplomatic solution seems impossible when Putin says black is white and vice versa. More dangerously, he seems to be operating on a mistaken and outdated perception of Ukrainian nationhood. While there are deep political cleavages in Ukraine broadly between east and west, the country has been independent for more than 20 years. Even those in the more Russian east and south do not seem to be clamoring for breaking up Ukraine. Putin's miscalculation has led us very dangerously to the reality of a war between Ukraine and Russia that will have disastrous consequences for all of us, and especially Ukrainians and Russians. I can only hope that Putin is more stubbornly persistent than self-deluded at this point, but his seeming willingness to bet the house could be catastrophic for European security, with global collateral fallout as well.

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Deeply Insecure
David J. Kramer, president of Freedom House, served as deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs from 2005 to 2008 and as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor from 2008 to 2009.

Vladimir Putin possesses a paradoxical, if not dangerous, combination of arrogance and self-assuredness added to paranoia, insecurity and hyper-sensitivity. His paranoia increased-and with it his assault against civil society in Russia-following the "Color Revolutions" in Georgia and Ukraine in 2003-2004, which scared him into thinking that Russia was next on the list. His insecurities were fed by developments in the Arab world in 2011, when he watched like-minded leaders in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya fall from power as a result of popular movements. Fast forward to November 2013, when Ukrainians turned out in the streets again, eventually forcing out President Viktor Yanukovych, and Putin's suspiciousness again intensified. To prevent a genuine popular, democratic movement from taking root in Ukraine, he invaded Crimea, fabricating the justification that he was protecting the rights of fellow Russians. He undoubtedly hopes that a Ukraine politically and ethnically divided, further hobbled with a disputed territory, will be too damaged for the West to maintain interest.

Reflecting his zero-sum thinking, Putin views efforts by Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova and other neighbors to Westernize and democratize as a threat to Russia's "zone of special interests" and to the political model he has created in Russia, leading him to support authoritarian regimes, whether in Kyiv under Yanukovych or Damascus under Bashar al-Assad. On one hand, Putin apparently believes he can get away with an invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea; on the other, he has Russian forces remove any insignia identifying them as Russian, so that he can avoid accusations that he has violated Ukraine's territorial integrity. Even though there was no real threat to Russians in Ukraine, Putin cited the need to come to their aid; the irony is that Putin shows scant interest in the welfare of Russians living inside Russia itself. After major protests against him in December 2011 and spring 2012 that again fed his insecurity about a popular movement unfolding inside Russia, Putin launched the harshest crackdown against human rights since the breakup of the Soviet Union. At home and abroad, Putin tries to strike the pose of a confident, assertive leader. In reality, his actions reflect a deeply worried authoritarian willing to resort to any means necessary to stay in power.

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A Ruthless Realist
Eugene Rumer, director of the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the U.S. National Intelligence Council from 2010 to 2014.

The Ukraine crisis is only the latest episode that sheds light on the hard, unsentimental view of the world underlying Vladimir Putin's foreign policy: might is right, the weak get crushed. That was Russia's fate in the 1990s, when the West pushed deep into Russia's former empire, waged wars in the Balkans and interfered in Russian domestic affairs. Then Russia recovered, pushed back and restored balance to its relations with the West. The Georgia war was a signal to the West to keep out of Russia's sphere of influence, and to its neighbors to remember that Russia again had the means and the will to patrol its neighborhood.

Putin's view of Ukraine is apparently similar to Zbigniew Brzezinski's argument that, without Ukraine, Russia cannot be an empire. What Brzezinski wants to prevent, Putin seems determined to achieve. He is prepared to pay the price of keeping Ukraine in Russia's orbit. Putin the realist almost certainly is aware of the toll his actions have taken on Ukrainian attitudes toward him and Russia. But tethering Ukraine to Russia is more important than Ukrainian public opinion. Putin has probably calculated that the West's military option is off the table, that its sanctions will be more bark than bite, and that after a cooling-off period there will be a new "reset." He is poised to annex Crimea, and, with that new reality in hand, he will look for an opening in Kyiv. After all, much of the new team there looks like the old team, and Putin probably thinks he can find a common language with them just fine. How successful will he be?

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A Neo-Soviet
Steven Pifer, director of the Brookings Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative, was special assistant to the president and senior director for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia on the National Security Council from 1996 to 1997 and U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 1998 to 2000.

Gaining control of Crimea is not Putin's principal objective. His main goal is to destabilize the new Ukrainian government and keep it from drawing closer to the European Union. In this effort, Crimea is part of the destabilization game. Should Putin nevertheless "lose" Ukraine to Europe, Crimea will make a great consolation prize.

Several factors motivate the Russian president. First, rebuilding a Soviet-era sphere of influence is a key element of his vision of Moscow as a great power. A Ukraine tied to the European Union punches a big hole in that vision. Second, pulling Ukraine (or, at least, Crimea) back toward Russia plays very well with Putin's conservative political base. Third, Putin may actually buy into some of the Russian narrative on Ukraine-i.e., that a U.S.-directed and funded cabal of neo-fascists overthrew the Yanukovych government and is now bent on terrorizing ethnic Russians-just as he saw the 2004 Orange Revolution as orchestrated from abroad. This last point is worrisome. It suggests the Kremlin does not understand what is going on in Ukraine, and bad analysis can produce bad policy.

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A Man Alone
Andrew S. Weiss, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was director for Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian affairs on the National Security Council staff from 1998 to 2001.

All roads in the Ukraine crisis lead back to one man: Vladimir Putin. Unfortunately, our ability to understand just what is driving him or what he actually wants to achieve is far weaker than it should be. A big part of the problem is that Putin has retreated into a war cabinet that, by design, lacks connectivity to the outside world.

Putin is also far more isolated from major foreign counterparts than at any point in his tenure. After nearly 15 years at the helm and lately at the center of the world's attention, Putin sees himself as a giant among weaklings who don't measure up to him and can't compete with him. While attention has focused on Angela Merkel's dogged attempts to broker a solution on Crimea, her relationship with Putin has none of the coziness that other German chancellors enjoyed in the recent past. And it's practically impossible to imagine U.S. President Barack Obama showing Putin the kind of hospitality that George W. Bush did at his Texas ranch and the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport.

Where does that leave us? Western leaders from Obama on down have relied on calling Putin at regular intervals in the hope of deescalating the crisis. But at practically every turn, Putin has responded to these entreaties by escalating the situation and demonstrating his knack for throwing Western leaders off-balance.

In the absence of meaningful diplomatic channels, Western governments have resorted to a far less effective tool-megaphone diplomacy. Anyone who reads the endless series of press releases issued after presidential-level phone calls, let alone the line in the sand drawn by G-7 heads of state on March 12 about Moscow's possible annexation of Crimea, is struck by two things. First, there is the repetitive tone and the endless articulation of "core principles" (e.g., respect for Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity) that clearly have gone out the window. Then, there is Moscow's public line, which is equally strident in response and suggests that there is practically zero ground for compromise.

The immediate challenge for Western officials is not to spend more time pleading on the phone with Putin or banging out yet another press statement. Better to craft a long-term strategy that reckons with the immense challenge of deterring further overreach or provocative moves by Moscow in eastern Ukraine and beyond; patiently narrows the differences between the United States and Europe on sanctions and other punitive measures; and shores up the rickety interim government in Kyiv.

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An Authoritarian Kleptocrat
Anders Aslund, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute,, was an economic adviser to the governments of Russia from 1991 to 1994 and Ukraine from 1994 to 1997.

After Russia's military aggression against Ukraine, the question "Who is Vladimir Putin?" can easily be answered: He is an authoritarian kleptocrat. Not a single one of Putin's allegations about Ukraine has been true. There was no "armed coup" in Kyiv, but mass defection to the opposition from Viktor Yanukovich's party. The process was constitutional, with the 2004 constitution being reinstated with a constitutional majority of 310 votes out of 450 seats in parliament. Yanukovich was legally impeached with 328 votes. There are no fascists or Nazis in Kyiv. Putin is lying about literally everything.

This makes his real reasons all the more evident. First, Putin is afraid of the democratic breakthrough in Ukraine because it exposes his own lack of legitimacy. Second, being possibly the greatest kleptocrat in the world, Putin gets really frightened by popular criticism of thieving leaders. Third, Ukraine's turn toward European integration ruins his protectionist, neo-imperialist Eurasian Union. In a seemingly desperate act of aggression, Putin has opted for the annexation of Crimea, which Russians consider their holiday paradise lost. In addition, he wants Ukraine to fail politically and economically to show the Russian people that democracy is bad for Eastern Slavs.

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Stuck in the Past
Mark Galeotti, professor of global affairs at New York University, is a specialist in Russian security and transnational organized crime.

Putin, like most leaders, was a product of a particular moment, with the skills, instincts and will to take fullest advantage of it, yet unable truly to adapt as that moment passes. His glory years were the 2000s, in which he could capitalize on Russian dismay at the anarchy of the 1990s, a preoccupied West and buoyant hydrocarbon revenues to build a regime that was part tsarist, part Soviet, part liberal democracy. A central aspect of his talent was in managing Russia's elites and ensuring that while he allowed them to enrich themselves, he also kept the masses happy with not just bread and circuses, but also stability and real economic opportunity.

The trouble is that those days are passing. The budget is getting tighter, poor past investment decisions are starting to become evident, the Russian population is more varied in its interests and aspirations and the elite are increasingly arrogant and unruly. Putin, a man who in the past was actually very cautious behind his macho demeanor, appears not really to know what to do. In a classic response, he has looked abroad both to reassert his sense of potency and also to distract his people. He has had some apparent successes there. But these temporary diversions often come with serious long-term price tags, from crystallizing Russia's reputation as a dictator's friend to potentially driving Europe into embracing Ukraine militarily and economically in a way it otherwise never would. Furthermore, they underscore the extent to which Putin overtime has cut himself off from those allies and advisers willing to disagree and tell him hard truths. His apparent inability to understand Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych's vulnerability and the likely long-term outcomes of seizing the Crimea are evidence of this. Whatever German Chancellor Angela Merkel may say, Putin is not in "another world"-he is of another time.

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Not Scared of the West
Ben Judah is author of Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In And Out Of Love with Vladimir Putin.

Vladimir Putin repeats incessantly: "We were humiliated. We the Russian have been humiliated at the hands of the West." This is complete rubbish. The Russian elite are in living a life of luxury in Western Europe. The city the Kremlin know best is London, where Russia's rulers own houses in London's most expensive districts and hire out Britain's most prestigious bankers and lawyers. And the Kremlin clique has come to love Her Majesty's treasure islands: They launder their fortunes in Britain's empire of overseas sovereign territories-tax havens-from the Caribbean to the Channel Islands.

Putin has made a bet: that these new British elite (not to mention the other ruling classes of Western Europe) will put their banks ahead of stopping his tanks. He has made a bet that the members of the British ruling class are merely valets to Arab and Russian oligarchs-estate agents, investment bankers, lawyers, management consultants, art dealers-who now live primarily off the presence of foreign oligarchs. Putin has listened to David Cameron's crude new slogan for the UK-"Britain is open for business" -and so fears no sanctions from this man.

It could be otherwise. Iran-style banking sanctions imposed by London-the hub of the Russian fortune-could stop the Kremlin annexing Crimea by punishing the oligarchs and making them pull Putin back from his adventurism. Washington should fret: London and the lesser European states are now dragging their feet. Cameron is only contemplating cosmetic mini-sanctions, not big banking hits. He is weak, but what else could the leader of the ruling Conservative Party-forever the Rottweiler of the City of London-even propose? Putin knows this. That's why he's not scared of the West, not scared of annexing Crimea, perhaps not scared of invading Eastern Ukraine. And the longer nothing hits, the more confident he gets.

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Powerful-But Isolated
Matthew Rojansky is director of the Wilson Center's Kennan Institute.

Fifteen years ago, Boris Yeltsin elevated Vladimir Putin, a little-known mid-ranking official and former spy, to the highest levels of power in Russia. At that time, Putin promised recovery from the country's post-Soviet misery in every sense-economic, social, political and in terms of personal and national dignity. He even put forward significant legal and market reforms to bring Russia far more into the global economy, and he was largely responsible for ending the mafia's reign over all aspects of business and daily life.

Even to many of his early supporters, Putin in 2014 stands for something quite different. He is now more isolated, sitting atop a power vertical he himself erected. Putin doubtless knows the statistics about Russia's flagging economic growth, and privately he may even take responsibility for the failure of his previous efforts at reform; yet his primary focus has now shifted. Since his return to the presidency in 2012, Putin's overwhelming concern has been to sustain the primacy of the Russian state, and with it his own personal power and security. Integral to this endeavor has been Putin's promotion of "Eurasianism" as an alternative to European and Euro-Atlantic integration and Western liberal democracy.

The Ukrainian contest is vitally important to both these aims. A central objective of Putin's intervention there was to underscore his warning to Russians that a Euro-Maidan style revolution would not be tolerated in Moscow, and that a new government brought to power in this way could not be legitimate. Having failed so far to provoke a violent response from the Ukrainian side, Putin must shift his focus to a second major goal: using Crimean separatism and trumped-up fears of discrimination against ethnic Russians to block Ukraine's progress toward integration with Western political, economic and security structures. Success for Putin in Ukraine can come in a variety of forms, but the central requirements are that Ukrainian politics remain dysfunctional, the economy stays mired in corruption and the West, disappointed, succumbs to "Ukraine fatigue" as it did after the 2004-2005 Orange Revolution. Despite an abundance of new voices and faces entering Ukrainian politics, and despite the Maidan's still smoldering reminders of the costs of failure, Putin's aspirations for Ukraine are still quite likely to be fulfilled.

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A Shrewd Strategist
Jill Dougherty, Shorenstein fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, was CNN's foreign affairs correspondent and Moscow bureau chief.

Vladimir Putin once described himself as a "pure and utterly successful product of Soviet education," and his life has been scarred by Russia's traumatic history. He was born in Leningrad just eight years after the Nazi siege of the city. As many as a million civilians perished of disease or starvation, including his brother. Less than five decades later he watched as the Soviet Union collapsed.

Now, as Russia's president, he is intent on ensuring that Russia never again will be vulnerable to attack or invasion. His aim is to restore Russia's greatness as a world power. He feels it personally; as a short, skinny kid he was forced to defend himself from bigger boys and found refuge in judo, a sport in which strategy is paramount. For this career KGB officer, trust is not an element of his belief system. He approaches others with caution and cynicism. A Soviet lawyer by education, he often cites the legality-or illegality-of an issue. When faced with criticism of his actions, he does not apologize or explain. Putin thinks the West has the nerve to accuse Russia of fomenting regime change; he points to the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia and the 2004 Orange Revolution in Kyiv, both instigated, he charges, by Washington.

Since his reelection as Russia's president in 2012, he has grown even more proudly "conservative," as he told me in a news conference in Russia last December. Europe, Putin believes, is weak, economically and morally. The United States, as he sees it, is not far behind, content to let Europe do its thinking on how to deal with Ukraine.

Although Putin's actions in Crimea appear to have a certain ad hoc elements, there is growing indication that he has a longer-term agenda in mind. He responds to Western threats of sanctions by threatening to confiscate Western assets in Russia. Plus, by "pacifying" Crimea he undermines Ukraine's territorial integrity and, with it, the country's chances of integration with the West. Not to mention that Putin's justification for his military incursion-protecting Russian speakers-opens a Pandora's box of possible future Russian incursions into countries with large Russian populations that used to be part of the Soviet Union.

Putin's actions in Ukraine are his warning to that country's new government, to the West and to Russians who protested on the streets of Moscow in late 2012, that he will take any steps he deems necessary to protect the Kremlin's strategic interests. Putin will not retreat on Crimea. Effectively, it's already under his control. Rejecting all criticism, along with the West's "double standards," Vladimir Putin now is making his own rules.

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A Russian Imperialist
Alexander Cooley, professor of political science at Barnard College, is author of Great Games, Local Rules: The New Great Power Contest in Central Asia.

Vladimir Putin has long viewed the international political orientation of the post-Soviet space as a zero-sum struggle. In this worldview, the West employs a diverse array of political actors, institutions and integration processes to exert its influence, making Western-funded NGOs just as threatening to Russia's regional influence as NATO's expansion. Indeed, the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine taught the Kremlin that pro-Western democracy advocates might be even more politically potent. So when Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, Moscow's ally and client, fell to the Euromaidan-led protests, this was more than a political change in a neighboring state-it constituted the highest-order geopolitical threat to the Kremlin. The current unfolding plan to carve up and intervene in Ukraine may well have been a Russian calculation that it could no longer effectively pressure Kyiv with the blunt economic instruments (cheap gas and bond buying) that it successfully used last year. For Putin, the very lines of this contested geopolitical terrain now have to be literally redrawn to maintain and consolidate Russian influence.

Crimea's annexation and incorporation as the 84th constituent republic of the Russian Federation under the pretext of protecting local rights and the right of self-determination now appears all but foregone. Formally annexing the region would allow Moscow to permanently station its Black Sea Fleet. In 2010, Yanukovych was sharply criticized by the Ukrainian opposition for extending the Russian Navy's lease until 2042, in exchange for gas discounts from Moscow. Moscow will no longer have to worry about a future Ukrainian government breaking the lease or questioning the legal status of Russian forces.

But Putin also needs to ensure that the remainder of Ukraine does not formally turn toward the West. This is especially pressing given that without Crimea's mostly ethnic Russian voters, national pro-Russian parties will have less support. The pretext of upholding the rights of Russian citizens can now be invoked, possibly backed by force, to force Kyiv to adopt a new constitution or power-sharing arrangement that would grant the east further autonomy and, more importantly, give it and Moscow a veto over any future moves to orient Ukraine's foreign policy toward the European Union or even NATO.

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 #3
Wall Street Journal
October 6, 2015
Russia's Snarling Stuntman
Russia is declining, with talent and capital in full flight. Yet despite this wretched hand, Vladimir Putin is trumping the West.
By STEPHEN KOTKIN
Mr. Kotkin, author of " Stalin," is a Princeton professor and a Hoover Institution fellow at Stanford.

THE NEW TSAR
By Steven Lee Myers
Knopf, 572 pages, $32.50

Russia's decline continues. Beneath the bluster, elites are jittery. The populace is prideful but miserable. Talent-not just capital-is in full flight. The regime has no strategy beyond its own survival, and Vladimir Putin has become a snarling stuntman with a surgically enhanced appearance and a propaganda-enhanced approval rating.

Yet despite this wretched hand, Russia's autocrat has been trumping the West. Just last week, after President Obama gave a speech at the United Nations, Mr. Putin began bombing the political opponents of the Syrian butcher Bashar al-Assad in the name of combating "terrorism."

Steven Lee Myers's "The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin" provides a comprehensive look at Russia's would-be savior and America's nemesis. Much of the account is familiar: the Putin family's shabby communal apartment in post-World War II Leningrad; young Vladimir as an indifferent student and courtyard ruffian; the sudden discipline instilled by martial arts; his obsession with the popular film series "Shield and Sword" (1968), which inspired a dream to join the KGB. The tap on the shoulder that fulfilled that dream came while he was a law student at Leningrad State University. Next up was spy school, a career policing thought in Leningrad and then a foreign assignment in an East German backwater.

Mr. Myers, who spent seven years as a New York Times correspondent in Moscow, digs through an impressively wide range of materials, gathering revealing quotes from lifelong loyalists as well as insiders who broke ranks. Unlike so many other authors who take on Mr. Putin, he refuses to cherry pick anecdotes or indulge in dippy conspiracy theories. His reliable, wealth-of-details approach captures the zigs and zags of Mr. Putin's evolution.

The implosion of the Eastern Bloc and then of the Soviet Union in 1989-91 meant a new life for Mr. Putin as top deputy to the democratically elected mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak. The KGB operative tried to make Russia's version of democracy work: When rivals deployed dirty tricks to foil Sobchak's re-election campaign in the mid-1990s, Mr. Putin indignantly wrote to Moscow demanding that the Kremlin take "decisive action to end the use of the law-enforcement authorities for political purposes."

His naive appeal fell flat, but connections soon catapulted him into the presidential administration in Moscow, and in 1998 a promotion by Boris Yeltsin made Mr. Putin the head of the KGB's successor agency. His ascent to the presidency is its own sordid tale.

President Putin's first term (2000-04) brimmed with hope and economic growth. When and why he abandoned his efforts at structural reform remains a matter of controversy.

Mr. Myers approvingly quotes a letter written by the imprisoned oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2004, in which he said that Mr. Putin "is probably neither a liberal nor a democrat, but he is still more liberal and democratic than 70 percent of our country's population." But this assertion remains unsubstantiated because Mr. Myers's biography doesn't examine Russian society. The author also seems to lend some support to the popular narrative within Russia of "Western betrayal," pointing out that Mr. Putin held four meetings with President George W. Bush in 2001, and all he got was a week's notice when Washington unilaterally abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. But what of the experience of rebuilding state power in shaping Mr. Putin's truculence? What of the perennial conundrum of confronting the West's abiding superiority and Russia's weakness?

Few people who have had a brush with Mr. Putin come off well here. After his re-election to a second term in 2004, the investor Bill Browder told a journalist that "people will forget in six months that Khodorkovsky is still sitting in jail"-and he and others continued to invest in the country. Similarly, John Browne, then CEO of BP, is heard dismissing the Putin regime's annihilation of Mr. Khodorkovsky's private oil company Yukos with the comment: "No country has come so far in such a short space of time." (BP later partnered with Rosneft, the company that stole Yukos.)

Mr. Myers lays bare the hash of George W. Bush's look-into-Mr. Putin's-soul Russia policy, which culminated in the consolidation of the partition of Georgia in 2008. He then recounts the blowup of President Barack Obama's reset Russia policy.

The author reminds us that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned in December 2012 that Mr. Putin's proposed "Eurasian Union" sought to subjugate its former possessions and added that "we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it." Mr. Putin sabotaged it for her in 2014, when he seized Crimea from Ukraine, consolidating a strong pro-Europe majority in Kiev and sending chills through the capitals of Belarus and Kazakhstan. But Ukraine is now dismembered.

Countless secondary characters are introduced knowledgeably here, but none come to full-blooded life. Even the protagonist can seem elusive. Contra Mr. Myers, Mr. Putin is not a "tsar." The ambiguity of any succession is potentially the most debilitating aspect of his rule, as it is for all authoritarian regimes. Still, Mr. Myers's portrait-with malice as Mr. Putin's defining attribute-is devastating precisely because it is judiciously drawn.

Ultimately, Mr. Putin's tactical coups cannot conceal his failure to revive Russia as a genuine great power. At one point, Mr. Myers shows, Mr. Putin himself knew better. "It seems to all of us-and I will admit, to me sometimes as well-that by imposing strict order with an iron fist, we will all begin to live better, more comfortably, more securely," Mr. Putin observed in 2002. "In actual fact that comfort would very quickly pass because that iron fist would very quickly begin to strangle us."

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 #4
The Interpreter
www.interpretermag.com
August 6, 0215
It's Time to Recall Kennan's Long Telegram and Forget His Later Optimism about Change in Russia
By Paul Goble

Staunton, October 3 - George Kennan's famous "long telegram" of February 1946 was written to explain to Western leaders something they found difficult to understand: how Moscow could turn from being a wartime ally into an implacable enemy, a problem that some Western leaders are again finding it difficult to understand.

hat makes rereading Kennan's telegram now especially important, according to Aleksandr Goldfarb, the head of the Litvinenko Foundation in London, especially since as Irina Pavlova, a Russian analyst based in the US, points out, some remain inclined to accept Kennan's later, more optimistic and fundamentally mistaken views.

In a blog post October 3, Goldfarb describes the atmosphere in which Kennan wrote and its all too disturbing parallels with today's. Just before the American diplomat penned his cable, President Franklin Roosevelt articulated what was a widespread view among American officials and analysts.

FDR said "I think that Stalin doesn't want anything except security for his own country. If I give him everything that he wants, then noblesse oblige, he will begin to work for the good of democracy and peace." On the basis of that assumption, the American president handed over to Stalin all of Eastern Europe.

But in his telegram, Kennan addressed the fundamental error of such assumptions: "Underlying the Kremlin's neurotic ideas about world politics lies a traditional and instinctive feeling of uncertainty in itself and a fear before more competent, strong and better organized societies."

"Russian rulers have always felt that their power cannot stand comparison with the political systems of Western countries," he continued. Thus, Moscow's aggressiveness had nothing to do with what their Western partners did but reflected "an immemorial Russian complex of incompleteness," something that could not be addressed by "good will gestures."

Kennan's argument became the foundation of containment, which was "based on the understanding that Russian power in principle and by its very nature is not capable of a rapprochement with the free world because it views it as an existential threat to itself precisely because it is free," Goldfarb writes.

That marked the beginning of the Cold War, a conflict the London-based analyst points out, that in contrast to most wars, did not arise from a single specific act on the part of one side or the other but rather by "an unexpected rethinking of the situation, the destruction of a mistaken picture, and the recognition of reality."

"So it is today," Goldfarb argues.

"Over the course of 15 years, the designers of American policy were prisoners of an illusion that Putin, despite all his specific characteristics, could be integrated into the new world system that arose after the Cold War because just like Stalin in the eyes of Roosevelt, he 'doesn't want anything except security for his own country.'"

Those who asserted otherwise be they in Russia or the West were dismissed as disturbers of the peace, Goldfarb continues.

As in 1946 so now too, he argues, understanding of Russian realities "arrived unexpectedly and quickly," a pattern that is shown by the very different reaction of the West to Russia's invasion of Georgia in 2008 and its response to Ukraine now. The former was viewed as an aberration to be overcome; the latter is increasingly seen as an unpleasant fact of life.

Ever more Western leaders - but of course not all, again like in 1946 - see in front of them a leader and a system which "fears them and hates them" that can only be contained until it can be destroyed.

"If the current situation in Syria had arisen two years ago, then American would have sought points of agreement and mutual profit with Russia," Goldfarb says. Today, however, Washington recognizes at least in part that "for Putin, [the United States] is enemy number one, just as it was for Stalin."

Senior American diplomats have confessed as much, the Russian analyst says. "We didn't fully understand how the Kremlin thought," one of their number said recently. "We didn't understand this even during the Cold War. But nonetheless we all the same won that conflict!" May it be so again.

Unfortunately, there is one more obstacle to a return to the insights Kennan offered in 1946 and that is to be found in some of Kennan's subsequent statements. As Irina Pavlova points out, some of those reflected a baseless optimism in Russia's ability to change, something the earlier Kennan had rejected.

In response to a question from US Senator Claiborne Pell about whether Russia could ever return to Stalinism, she recalls, Kennan said that he thought that "in this regard, events are irreversible. Today, it is practically impossible to return the country even to Brezhnev's times" let alone to those of Stalin's.

"I have no doubt that Mr. Gorbachev will not achieve everything that he wants to achieve. There could be retreats. However, on the whole, he has made progress" which has made almost impossible a return to the past.

Kennan's point in the late 1980s is indisputable. Gorbachev did make a Russian return to Stalinism "almost impossible." But the key word here is "almost," although all too many in the West ignored that - and now Putin has accomplished that, an "achievement" that reflects the underlying realities Kennan himself pointed to in 1946.

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 #5
Tabula
www.tabula.ge
October 6, 2015
Putin's Ascendency
The biggest mistake we can make in dealing with Vladimir Putin is to believe that he thinks the way we do.
By Edward Lucas
Edward Lucas writes for the Economist. He is also senior vice-president at the Center for European Policy Analysis, a think-tank in Warsaw and Washington DC.

Seen from outside, Russia is in a dire state and the Russian president is to blame. He has failed to diversify the economy away from natural resources, to modernise the state, or to integrate the country into the outside world. He launched a costly and unsuccessful war in Ukraine, which has turned Russia's biggest friendly neighbour into a wounded and resentful foe. Now he is starting a new military adventure in Syria, sending east-west relations into the deep freeze and attracting the ire of Sunni Muslims across the world.

His personal reputation for truthfulness and even sanity is in shreds. Angela Merkel, the German leader, says he inhabits another world. His diplomatic isolation at international gatherings is palpable. Even Russians privately roll their eyes at the personality cult stoked by the fawning official media. Meanwhile the European Union has brought a snarling Gazprom to heel, sanctions are biting, the low oil price is taking its toll, and NATO is mustering a decisive military response to the Kremlin's sabre-rattling towards the frontline states.

In short, time is on our side. Sooner or later he will be toppled or be forced to change course. Russia will then become a country we can do business with. We need strategic patience and a dose of containment, but there is no need to panic. If he does anything really bad we will cut him off from the SWIFT international financial-transactions system, bringing Russia's economy to a grinding halt.

All this is true, but the real picture is different. Mr Putin does not judge himself by Western standards, but by those of his alma mater, the KGB. The only rule is to exercise power by finding other people's weaknesses and exploiting them. Setbacks can be blamed on someone else, endured or simply ignored. Reality is something you create in other people's minds with fear and lies.

His first target is always Russian public opinion. The soap opera in Ukraine is over, at least for the current season. The heroic separatists, their evil fascist foes, and the cynical Western meddlers have been retired. The new entertainment is a thrilling and exotic epic set in Syria, with the Assad regime as the heroic defenders of civilised values, Russian their valiant allies, and the West as the defenders of jihadist barbarians. The most important thing is to reduce the conflict to a binary choice between the regime and ISIS, in which the West will inevitably be forced to side with Russia.

His second target is the West. He does not want to destroy it (his money is there). Nor can he afford a full-scale confrontation. But he can divide us, influence us and outmanoeuvre us. He sees the fault-lines-between countries and inside them-more clearly than we do. We assume our political, economic and security systems are fundamentally resilient and that despite problems we will muddle through as we always do. He thinks the era of Western ascendency is over; time is on his side.

Some moves by the West would give him real problems: the widespread withdrawal of visas from the Russian elite, and their spouses, siblings, parents and offspring, for example. Asset freezes and money-laundering investigations would hurt even more, especially if the bankers, lawyers and accountants concerned could be induced to switch sides and explain how and where the money is hidden.

But he knows the West will not do this. He thinks we are ruled by greed, not principle. Perhaps he is right.

 #6
Euromaidan Press
http://euromaidanpress.com
October 5, 2015
Seven strategies of domestic Russian propaganda
By Kseniya Kirillova
Kseniya Kirillova is a Russian journalist that focuses on analyzing Russian society, political processes in modern Russia and the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. She writes for Radio Liberty and other outlets and is an expert of the Center for Army, conversion, and disarmament studies and the Free Russia foundation.

An important attribute of Russia's modern policy has been the growth in military hysteria and the constant need for both internal and external enemies. The increase in aggression and belligerence among the population was also not implemented in one fell swoop: rather, it was cultivated over a period of several years, although its apogee was reached with the advent of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.

Here follows an overview of the main strategies and methods with which Russian propaganda obtains its desired results:

1) To weaken critical thinking

The most cynical means are used to achieve this result. Propaganda employs methods of psychological manipulation which are designed to reduce dramatically, if not to block entirely, the ability of critical thinking on the part of the viewer or listener through an appeal to his or her feelings. Hatred is not necessarily always the feeling sought.  Propaganda actively exploits the feeling of pity: in so doing, it plays not only on the worst but also on the best human instincts. It does so, for example, by showing ruined residential buildings in the Donbass, or children who are suffering from the effects of war. In propaganda, there is no hesitation to resort to open lies: it is sufficient to recall the story about "crucified boys," purportedly macerated by the Ukrainian army, and other similar subjects.

The characteristic that distinguishes propaganda from regular reporting is that the person who is experiencing feelings of pity, pain, fear or "righteous anger" is not given the opportunity to think rationally about the subject that has elicited such feelings. He or she is given a prepared response, and a prepared image of the enemy - "punishers," a "junta" and the Americans who back it, "destroyers of the civilian population." More often than not, Russians are slipped a veritable cocktail of emotions intended to block the very ability to think during the time it takes to process the information. Examples are the horror of war, pity for the victims, fear that can reach proportions of panic, and the dread of an impending military threat.

2) To create an image of the enemy

When a person has been mentally prepared, he or she is then given an answer to the internal unspoken and not yet understood question about who is responsible for the pain and fear into which he or she has been plunged. The image of the enemy in Russian propaganda is not distinguished by its originality, and has been forming in varying degrees of intensity over the past few years. Of course, it is the USA, and those who the propagandists call "American puppets," beginning with the Ukrainian authorities and ending with the whole of Western and Eastern Europe.

3) To link all internal problems to external factors

As noted above,  by adopting the official foreign policy rhetoric, the average person compensates for his or her own helplessness through the illusion of involvement in historical events and a link to the abstraction called "Russia." Understanding the essence of foreign problems is far more complicated for the average person than understanding domestic issues. More often than not, such Russians have never been abroad, and do not know the actual attitudes of western countries. For this reason, such Russians are easily subject to manipulation, in this case leading them to blame external enemies for their own problems.

4) To emphasize the consolidation of society in the face of a military threat

Once again, this is done at different levels and with different connotations, ranging from aggressive calls to fight against the "national traitors" to constructive attempts to unite people in order to solve problems, but only in the case of their total approval of the foreign policy of the authorities.

5) To create the image of Vladimir Putin as the only leader capable of withstanding the military threat

I don't think any further explanation is needed here: much has been said and written about the contemporary cult of personality surrounding Putin. Its apogee is represented by the film "President."

6) To prepare for the inevitable hardships of "wartime"

Plunging the consciousness of the population into an endless militaristic hell and frightened them with the constant specter of imminent war (including  nuclear war) makes it possible to justify any hardship or deterioration in the economic situation in the eyes of the population. The threat of an impending nightmare will make people accept any other deprivation as a "lesser evil," or as a sacrifice that must be made to avoid war.

7) To create an image for the West of a united Russia ready for war

This is a technique worth noting separately. Of course, the work of influencing a foreign audience is left to specialized media such as RT or "Sputnik," though "domestic" propaganda can have this as a secondary aim.

These processes yield a number of consequences for Russian society. In particular, there is more than ever a high need for "enemies," both for justifying the hardships that are being experienced, and in order that people may take part in immoral activity simply through passively approving of it.

In fact, war is the main element which provides the opportunity for the authorities to influence society in contemporary Russia. It is the horrors of war that are capable of undermining critical thinking on the part of individuals, and it is with the help of war that the image of the enemy is being created and that a cult of personality is forming around Putin: it is war that underpins the consolidation of Russian society, and it is war that explains the hardships which are only destined to grow given the Russian economic crisis. This means that the Kremlin has finally found itself caught in a trap: it cannot stop the war, nor can it turn off the destructive television channel.

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#7
Defensenews.com
October 6, 2015
US: Russia Building 'Arc Of Steel' From Arctic To Med
Improving Russian naval power is aimed at challenging NATO, top admiral says
By Christoper P. Cavas

WASHINGTON - A resurgent Russia is creating an "arc of steel" meant to challenge and confront NATO, a top US naval officer warned Tuesday.

"We are observing the manifestation of a more aggressive, more capable Russian Navy," Adm. Mark Ferguson, commander of US Naval Forces Europe and commander of the Allied Joint Force Command in Naples, said in Washington. "It is naval capability focused directly on addressing the perceived advantages of NATO navies. And they are signaling us and warning us that the maritime domain is contested."

Speaking at the Atlantic Council, Ferguson described a revived Russian military that is expanding its capabilities from Cold War days.

"Responsiveness is a new element, as we have seen that Russian actions have fully integrated the elements of speed and strategic surprise," he said, adding that "the language coming from the Russian military reflects the mindset and actions characteristic of direct challenge and confrontation with NATO."

Earlier this year, Ferguson noted, Russia unveiled a new maritime strategy placing "greater emphasis on the seas surrounding Russia, [amid] talks of projection into the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.

"They have talked about establishing a permanent presence in the Mediterranean and in breaking out from their perceived military encirclement by NATO military structures, economic sanctions and political isolation."

Ferguson described Russian activity on multiple fronts - reactivating Cold War military bases in the Arctic, reviving capabilities in the Baltic, and the recent deployment of ground, air and sea forces to Syria.

"This remilitarization of Russian security policy is evident by the construction of an arc of steel from the Arctic to the Mediterranean," Ferguson said. "Starting in their new Arctic bases, to Leningrad in the Baltic and Crimea in the Black Sea, Russia has introduced advanced air defense, cruise missile systems and new platforms.

"It is also building the capability to project power in the maritime domain. Their base in Syria now gives them the opportunity to do so in the Eastern Mediterranean.

"This is a sea denial strategy focused on NATO maritime forces. Their intent is to have the ability to hold at risk the maritime forces operating in these areas and thus deter NATO operations."

On land Russia could confront Black Sea countries, Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic nations of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. The sea frontiers form flanking areas that would support operations on the ground.

"Their Arctic bases and their $2.4 billion investment in the Black Sea fleet expansion by 2020 demonstrates their commitment to develop their military infrastructure on the flanks," Ferguson pointed out.

He also noted the dramatic rise in new submarine capabilities.

"They are also expanding the reach of assets to project power from this arc, specifically the proficiency and operational tempo of the Russian submarine force is increasing. According to Russian Navy chief Admiral [Viktor] Chirkov, the intensity of Russian submarine patrols has risen by almost 50 percent over the last year. Russia has increased their operational tempo with this force to levels not seen in over a decade," Ferguson said.

"Russia has also introduced new capabilities, such as newer and more stealthy nuclear-powered attack and ballistic missile defense submarines," he added. "They are also expanding the reach of their submarines with advanced cruise missiles. Just last month the first Caliber [cruiser missile]-equipped Kilo [diesel-electric] submarine transited from the Northern Fleet to the Black Sea - the first of six - bringing within its range the eastern half of Europe."

Russian tactics using deception and ambiguity are combined with new abilities in cyber and electronic warfare, Ferguson told the Atlantic Council audience.

"Russia is also integrating asymmetric capabilities fully into their conventional military actions. This involves the use of space, cyber, information warfare and hybrid warfare designed to cripple the decision-making cycle of the [NATO] alliance," Ferguson said.

"Their capabilities are focused on the creation of ambiguity. On land, Russia exploits ethnic and religious divisions, makes use of an aggressive information campaign, and extensively uses misinformation and deception to de-legitimize the forces under attack while confusing the attribution of their actions. At sea they are focused on disrupting decision cycles."

Across the Russian services, there has also been a significant increase in "snap" drills, where units are given little or no notice to get underway or take to the air.

"They are also centralizing their national and military decision-making," Ferguson said. "We are seeing more frequent snap exercises focused on rapid mobilization and movement directed by a central headquarters, to include their naval forces. We have seen large numbers of ships get underway with little or no notice."

To meet these challenges, Ferguson said NATO and US forces should have three priorities.

"We must invest in our navies in three areas to be a credible deterrent in the maritime domain," he said.

"First, we must in training at the high end of warfighting skill. Second, forces must be on call for real world operations.

"And third, we must invest to pace the growing Russian capabilities."
 

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 #8
Moscow Times
October 7, 2015
Kashin's Putin Letter Shows the Power of Words
By Natalia Antonova
Natalia Antonova is an American playwright and journalist.

Journalist Oleg Kashin - victim of a violent 2010 attack that nearly killed him - has made waves in Russia by penning a scathing open letter to President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.

The crime against Kashin appears to be solved, you see. But the man accused of ordering the attack is also the governor of an entire Russian region - Pskov, to be precise. And now Kashin says that the investigator on the case has admitted that there is no political will to actually charge the governor, Andrei Turchak, with the crime. And it is political will - as opposed to the notion of equality before the law - that makes or breaks cases such as this one.

Kashin's letter to the Russian leaders is as thunderous as it is devastating. In it, he directly accuses Putin and Medvedev of fostering a climate of utter cynicism and lawlessness in Russia.

"Don't flatter yourself about your 15 years [of rule]," Kashin wrote, "It was not a time of Russia's rebirth, or of Russia getting up off of its knees, but it was a time of the greatest moral catastrophe our generation has lived through. You are personally responsible for this catastrophe."

Kashin also points out that a morally degraded populace inevitably turns on its leaders. This, perhaps, is the most chilling aspect of an already chilling essay.

I would argue that Kashin's letter needs to be treated as more than a brilliantly written, bitter accusation - though it certainly works well in the emotional sense.

Ultimately though, Kashin's letter is a historical document. By calling it a "Letter to the Russian Leaders," he has channeled Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "Letter to the Soviet leaders," and though some may argue that Kashin is flattering himself by adopting Solzhenitsyn's methods, the truth is, Kashin is right to appeal to history and adopt a classical dissident style.

Plenty of people, including prominent members of the opposition, have already chided Kashin for even bothering to address what they see as "an absolute evil."

Yet Russia, more so than other countries, I would argue, is the sort of place where words can come to matter more than actions.

It's a strange paradox, of course. As writer Peter Pomerantsev argued in his book, "Nothing is True and Everything is Possible," words have lost much of their meaning in Putin's Russia. Up is down, black is white. Morality has been replaced by whataboutism. Any righteous outcry against injustice perpetrated on Russian soil is met with "But American cops shoot black people, so whatever." Television channels Orwell while the courts channel Kafka. All is lost.

The question is - what to do with all of that now? Some hope for the fires of revolution. Other critics, especially those abroad, frequently express the hope that Russia will simply cease to exist (as if the disintegration of the world's largest, territorially speaking, country will not be a cataclysm - both for the country in question and for its many neighbors).

I would, foolishly perhaps, hope that the written word will change and redeem Russia.

Of course, I have no illusions when it comes to Russian infrastructure, legislation, economy, or general bureaucracy. No great turn of phrase can pierce the darkness of those particular labyrinths.

But if Russia is to begin grasping for morality again - and I don't mean the kind of TV-sanctioned, saccharine "morality" that dictates that dancing in a cathedral should earn you two years in jail, while religious extremists who attack art exhibitions get off scot-free, but actual morality - it should turn to writers and thinkers to guide it.

Kashin's letter is as good of a start as any. First of all, it draws a clear line between right and wrong, for a change. Covering up the misdeeds of powerful officials because such misdeeds may indict the entire system of government is wrong, for example. Transparency and accountability are right. The Russian state can stick with the former - and lose, in the end, much more than its moral legitimacy, or it can begin the painful, awkward, drawn out, and often thankless process of attaining the latter.

Precisely because transformation is painful, Russia needs its Kashins - its fiery, unapologetic, righteous, even desperate thinkers - more than ever. One of the reasons as to why the chaos of the 1990s was so easy to transform into an excuse for pseudo-authoritarianism today, I would argue, is because the most powerful thinkers of the age had frequently blended into the scenery and were not heard as far and wide as they should have been. There wasn't that sense of clarity, of pure outrage. But now, times have changed.

If I was one of the leaders addressed in Kashin's letter, I would study it carefully. I would ask myself if a system that would make me look "weak" for responding to it, or even doing as little as reflecting upon it, is such a great system after all. I would consider the letter's implications - the possibility that the nation's moral compass is irrevocably broken - and what that would mean for me, and for everyone else, down the line.

The great thing about words is that they are sometimes more alive than people are. People can be maimed, killed, jailed, "disappeared." Words live on. Even after they are twisted and perverted beyond all recognition, words roar back, like thunderbirds in Sylvia Plath's proverbial spring. If the word was at the beginning, the end is silence.

Kashin was beaten precisely because the man who ordered his attack understood that words have power. And ironically and beautifully enough, the horrific violence perpetuated against Kashin only made his words that much more powerful.

There is a lesson in there for all of Russia to learn. Not just its leaders. Though it would be great if the learning process could begin with them.

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 #9
The Guardian (UK)
October 6, 2015
'Look what you've done': an open letter to Vladimir Putin
In a searing indictment of Russian leaders, journalist claims government is failing to prosecute those responsible for an attack that nearly killed him
By Oleg Kashin

Introduction by Shaun Walker. Translation by Kevin Rothrock for Global Voices online

Oleg Kashin's open letter to president Vladimir Putin and prime minister Dmitry Medvedev is both a personalised cry of anguish about the failure to arrest the man he believes responsible for an attack that nearly killed him, and a searing indictment of the current Russian political system.

The attack on the journalist in 2010 left him with a broken jaw, fractured skull, broken leg and broken fingers, one of which had to be amputated. None of his valuables were taken.

When the attack took place, there were any number of potential suspects: as one of Russia's most prominent independent journalists, Kashin had offended a lot of people.

A few months later, while Kashin was recuperating in an Israeli hospital, he was visited in person by the then-president, Dmitry Medvedev, who wished him a speedy recovery and promised that the case would be solved.

There have been a number of high-profile murders or attacks on journalists in Russia, with few of them solved. Even when the direct assailants are put on trial, as in the case of Anna Politkovskaya, the trail stops before it reaches those who ordered the attack; critics allege because if government officials are involved, they are untouchable.

Last month, Kashin named the men he believed were responsible for the attack, including the governor of Pskov region, Andrei Turchak. Kashin had criticised the politician in a blog post two months before the attack.

He claimed that while the men who allegedly carried out the attack had been arrested, the fact that their testimony appears to implicate Turchak meant the case was too politically sensitive.

Turchak has not commented on the allegations against him, while one of his deputies denied the allegations in an interview with the BBC.

In a statement released on Monday, Putin's spokesman reportedly confirmed the president's office had read the letter, but that no comment would be made on the allegations. Medvedev has not responded.

In the letter below, Kashin elaborates on those claims, in an angry tirade against Putin and the system he has built over the past 15 years.
--

Dear Mr Putin and Mr Medvedev,

My colleagues have already written you open letters about my case. You haven't responded (and, more importantly, neither has your Investigative Committee), though this actually makes perfect sense: you were asked to "sort it out" but there's no need for anything like that.

I understand perfectly well that you "sorted it out" a long time ago, and you've known for just as long that it was your little Governor Turchak who was behind this crime against me. My case was solved a long time ago. You know this and I know this. And I see no reason to pretend that the problem here is that you still need to "sort it out". Your decision not to act is clear.

You've decided to side with your Governor Turchak; you're protecting him and his gang of thugs and murderers. It would make sense for somebody like me - a victim of this gang - to be outraged about all this and tell you that it's dishonest and unjust, but I understand that such words would only make you laugh.

You have complete and absolute control over the adoption and implementation of laws in Russia, and yet you still live like criminals. Consider Inspector Vadim Sotskov, who's been handed my case.

Sotskov put it elegantly when he said recently: "There's the law, but there's also the man in charge, and the will of the boss is always stronger than any law."

Put bluntly: he's right and that's reality. Your will in Russia is stronger than any law.

I've known Sotskov for over a year now. He and I belong to the same generation. At one time, he was even a journalist at Narodnoe Radio. I can easily imagine him in his first year of law school, studying Roman law, still full of enthusiasm, honesty and dreams about changing the world. And what's become of him now? He's a terrified bureaucrat, dreaming about keeping his job long enough to earn a pension. Who made him this way? It was you.

For some reason, we weigh the last 15 years of your reign purely in certain materialist terms. Oil costs so much, the dollar is worth so much, GDP rose so many percentiles, and so on.

But it's not about oil or GDP. History will judge these 15 years precisely on the fate of men like Sotskov.

It was you who turned an enthusiastic young man - someone who hurried to the studio from lectures to read the news on an opposition radio station - into a uniformed cynic, who admits openly that the will of his superiors is more important than any law.

But don't flatter yourself: the last 15 years haven't been a revival for Russia, and the country hasn't risen from its knees. This time has been a monumental moral catastrophe for our generation. And both of you, Mr Putin and Mr Medvedev, are personally responsible for it.

In Russian society today, even obvious questions about good and evil have become impossible. Is it OK to steal? Is it OK to cheat? Is murder ethical? With each of these questions, it's become customary in Russia now to answer that things aren't so simple. All your good works have left the nation demoralised and disoriented.

But you carry on, managing your problems without even realising that you're digging the hole yourselves. "Things aren't so simple" is what the angry crowd will tell you in unison, when it comes time for you to run away. I suspect that you're afraid of this crowd, but just remember that it was you who created it, and you've got nobody to blame but yourselves.

Having cut yourselves and your elites off from society, you've also cut yourselves off from reality. There's a wall separating you from the rest of us, and everyone on our side shudders each time the next one of your goons decides to show what a thinker he is by stepping up to a podium and talking about how the population is being controlled by computer chips, about the "Euro-Atlantic conspiracy," or about how the Americans are weaponising cellular research.

Anti-Soviet joke

Whoever comes after you will have to create Russia all over again, from scratch. This is your only service to history- what you've spent 15 years achieving. Your favourite justification for all this (the only one, there are no others) are the troubles of the 1990s, but it's important to understand that you preserved and strengthened everything about this period that we've come to hate today. You didn't fix anything. You only made it all worse.

You like to think of yourselves as the heirs to two empires, Tsarist and Soviet. You take pride in your neo-Soviet militarism, but if anybody told Dmitriy Ustinov [who created the USSR's military-industrial complex] that a man was beaten with steel pipes and it was paid for with official state funding [according to evidence presented in court proceedings in St Petersburg], Ustinov would have thought he was hearing a nasty anti-Soviet joke.

Veterans of Turchak's factory told me that, 20 years ago, the young future governor would ride around the grounds in a black Volga, firing from a pistol at stray cats. The portrait of your era and your elites will be full of details like this, and you've got no reason to expect anything more.

Your main problem is that you simply don't love Russia. You treat it like another disposable resource that's fallen into your lap.

In recent days, I've heard many times that all the noise around my case is getting kicked up thanks to some war among the factions who surround you. This is another feature of the system you've imposed: nothing just happens, someone is behind everything, and there are conspiracies everywhere.

As a participant in this so-called conspiracy, I can say that a battle among the factions is certainly raging, but the shared goal of all the factions [appears to be] to save your Governor Turchak and his associates from criminal prosecution. I suspect this battle is won.

I can see perfectly well that the worst thing Turchak faces now is a quiet resignation, timed long after any developments in my case. This is the only justice citizens can expect, and it means that your system isn't capable of any kind of justice at all.

You do what you want, but I wonder how comfortable life can be, when you know that you yourselves won't be able to count on justice or the law, sooner or later.

Oleg Kashin

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 #10
The Interpreter
www.interpretermag.com
September 25, 2015
Russia's Market Mythology
By Stephen Blank
Dr. Stephen Blank is a Senior Fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, www.afpc.org. From 1989-2013 he was a Professor of Russian National Security Studies at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania. Dr. Blank has been Professor of National Security Affairs at the Strategic Studies Institute since 1989. In 1998-2001 he was Douglas MacArthur Professor of Research at the War College. He has published over 1000 articles and monographs on Soviet/Russian, U.S., Asian, and European military and foreign policies, testified frequently before Congress on Russia, China, and Central Asia, consulted for the CIA, major think tanks and foundations, chaired major international conferences in the USA and abroad In Florence, Prague, and London, and has been a commentator on foreign affairs in the media in the United States and abroad. He has also advised major corporations on investing in Russia and is a consultant for the Gerson Lehrmann Group

Samuel Johnson famously advised James Boswell and his circle to "clear your mind of cant." This is equally sound advice for students and commentators about Russia but it is not always followed. As a result much of contemporary writing about Russia falls prey to various mythologies. One of the pervasive and most stubborn of these is that Russia, unlike its Soviet predecessor, has a market economy and is therefore less vulnerable to economic crises that could undermine the system. This myth, however, is belied by the facts and as Khrushchev reminded his colleagues, "facts are stubborn things."

Undoubtedly observers are misled because Russia seems to possess many of the institutions of a market economy: corporations, banks, a stock exchange, etc. But none of these factors constitute what is essential for the existence of a market economy and the advent of capitalism, whatever its form. These factors are private ownership of the means of production, as secured by law, and the sanctity of contracts. Neither of these exists in Russia or is likely to emerge anytime soon. In an age of mixed public-private enterprises throughout all the major Western economies there is, of course, no such thing in reality as pure capitalism, although it exists in theory. Nevertheless for a capitalist economy - i.e. one where there is a market that more or less governs economic trends, activities and developments - to exist, there are certain basic necessities that Russia not only lacks but also that its government is determined to uproot or supplant and replace with the state.

First of all there is no right to private property in law. This means that nobody in Russia can actually securely own property. Regardless of what is written on paper, every property owner knows that it can be taken away (or alienated) from him anytime the government wants to do so. In a true market economy this cannot be done, except by force of a legitimate law democratically legislated and adjudicated. In Russia - as the Khodorkovsky, Browder-Magnitsky and Yakunin cases show for all their differences - when Mr. Putin decides he wants to remove the owner of a property either from power or from liberty, or from Russia, he and his officials who are also equally complicit in these deeds do so unceremoniously. Indeed, as Peter Baker and Susan Glasser long ago showed, even high-ranking officials who own major state corporations and direct them serve and own these properties merely as a condition of their utility and service to Putin. Once that service is over or their utility as servitors fully compromised Putin removes them. The same was true under Communism for the Nomenklatura , or ruling class. They had rank, access to privileges, etc. but when their usefulness ended, if they were lucky they were retired or, if worse, exiled to the Gulag or shot along with their families.

Tsarist rule too was no different, although towards the end it was much more humane. Indeed many scholars, including, among others, this author and his teacher, the late Richard Hellie (a noted specialist in medieval Russian history), accurately described Russia ten years ago as being built along the same lines as the Tsarist service state. Thus these state corporations which are owned by the people who govern and rule Russia perfectly manifest the ongoing feudal principle that property and power are fused and that all property belongs to the state, or more accurately to Vladimir Putin who can do with it as he pleases. Observers should remember that in 2011 Putin and Medvedev's so called "castling" move (Rokirovka in Russian) demonstrated for all to see that in their eyes the entire state belongs to Vladimir Putin as his personal property and he can do with it or its component parts as he pleases. This patrimonial ownership of the state is the essence of state power in Russia and precludes the emergence of any secure property rights in law or of a market economy. And the ensuing corollary of this patrimonialism is the service state. Moreover the absence of private property rights compromises the ability to agitate for civil, human, and political rights, and as Richard Pipes observed years ago, lies at the heart of the continuing patrimonial autocracy of Putin.

Second, because there are no rights in law to property and no civil, human, or political rights, there is no concept of the rule of law - and thus the sanctity of contracts among free legal entities. Equally importantly, there can be no accountability of the Tsar (or President) to law or any legally constituted authority. This is not only a case of the Russian proverb quoted by Stalin that paper endures whatever is written on it. Rather this condition is another defining attribute of the Russian state. Economic activity at all time takes place under the sufferance of state authorities and indeed, state authorities own at least half if not more of the Russian economy, and numerous cases show that "private businessmen," even if they possess or possessed good contacts with the Kremlin, own their empires and properties merely at the tolerance of those authorities.

Under such conditions there may be individual markets in goods and services, and Russia is clearly in many (albeit often distorted) ways vulnerable to the vagaries of the global marketplace. But under no circumstances can we say that Russia is a market economy. Similarly this kind of economy, despite the ingrained corruption, does not preclude growth, but as Angus Madison demonstrated, growth over the long term is invariably inferior to that of true market economies. Thus the continuation of Putinism consigns Russia to eternal backwardness if not wholesale corruption. In no way are such tendencies or prognoses consistent with a market economy.

We would all be better off if authors writing about Russia relearned some basic aspects of what used to be called political economy or "Economics 101" rather than succumbing to the lazy mythology of Russian studies. Whatever others may write; the stubborn reality remains that Russia today is still what it always has been, namely a patrimonial autocracy and service state.

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 #11
Moscow Times
October 6, 2015
Syrian Adventure Will Cost Russians Dearly
By Vladimir Ryzhkov
Vladimir Ryzhkov, a State Duma deputy from 1993 to 2007, is a political analyst.

"Has the country run out of poor people?" is a fitting question to today's Russian leaders who, not having ended the geopolitical and military conflict in eastern Ukraine, have unhesitatingly thrown the country into a new one, jumping straight from the fire into the hellish frying pan of the Middle East.

Without any discussion and at the first call from the authorities, the Federation Council immediately authorized "the use of the armed forces of the Russian Federation outside the territory of the Russian Federation." What's more, it set no time limit or reference to a particular country or even region of the world. Thus, as of Sept. 30, President Vladimir Putin has the legal right to use Russian troops anywhere, in any manner, whenever and for however long he wants.

Of course, when presidential administration chief Sergei Ivanov presented his boss' request to parliament, he spoke only of using air strikes against the Islamic State in Syria and categorically denied that ground forces would be involved. However, Russians need no reminding that the war in Afghanistan, which began with an unofficial decision by Soviet politicians Leonid Brezhnev, Yury Andropov and Dmitry Ustinov in December 1979, was originally planned as only a short-term local war. However, war has its own logic - that of a whirlpool pulling everyone inward and downward against their will.

The inflamed imagination of Russia television viewers has already made the switch from the simmering ruins of the Donetsk airport to the burning desert of Homs as a new front opens in Russia's struggle for greatness. The Defense Ministry unveiled footage of Russian aircraft bombing unidentified "Islamist" positions that looked suspiciously like the standard chronicles of U.S. air strikes shown on CNN. Russian military commanders apparently took their inspiration from the U.S. forces that they dream of emulating.

By jumping midstream from a Ukrainian to a Syrian mount, the Kremlin horsemen continue their practice begun 18 months ago with the annexation of Crimea of substituting their foreign policy agenda for even a mention of a domestic agenda.

For a year and a half, they have fed the Russian people a steady diet of news from Donetsk, Luhansk and Debaltseve. Now the viewers of state-controlled television must memorize the names of Aleppo, Homs and Hama. The same outspoken television talk shows that tirelessly discussed Ukraine every night now go on endlessly and excitedly about the slightest developments at the front in Latakia and Al-Hasakah.

How will this new Syrian campaign affect domestic politics - or rather, the shadow of a domestic agenda that the Kremlin has tried but failed to completely eliminate from the public mind?

In contrast to the "fight against the fascist junta in Kiev," the Russian people understand much less about the war in Syria and why those Arabs are killing each other over there.

A recent survey by the Levada Center pollster revealed that 69 percent of the population does not support the use of Russian troops in Syria and only 14 percent are in favor. Russians don't mind sending weapons and ammunition to Damascus, but they completely oppose putting live Russian soldiers in the path of Arab bullets.

Reports have already surfaced on the Internet of Russian contract soldiers refusing to fight in Syria.

Meanwhile, the number of Russians now living below the poverty line is increasing in tandem with the number of Russian air strikes in Syria. Deputy Prime Minister Olga Golodets acknowledged that since the beginning of the year, the number of poor has increased by 3.1 million people to a total of 22.9 million. That is more than one in every five adult Russians. The steady negative trends in the national economy, federal budget, investment and household incomes will force even more Russians into poverty in the months ahead.

Moscow is financing its military buildup and operations through cuts to the already woefully underfunded sectors of education, health care and infrastructure. Many Russian municipalities have simply run out of money and cannot provide even the most basic social services.

For example, in the Siberian region of Altai, local utilities companies cited outstanding payments from the city and, on Sept. 29, refused to turn on their boilers to provide heat to dozens of public buildings, including schools and kindergartens. Governor Alexander Karlin proposed lowering the thermostats in schools and kindergartens on weekends and holidays as a cost-saving measure.

According to the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), 25 Russian regions cut spending on education and 11 made cuts to health care in the first half of 2015. Across the country, the authorities are implementing a policy of "optimization" - that is, reducing the number of schools, hospitals, teachers and doctors.

Against the backdrop of high inflation, officials are preparing to stop indexing pensions to inflation and, for the third year in a row, want to declare a moratorium on the funded component of pensions - that is, to draw on money set aside for future retirees in order to fund current budgetary expenditures as government coffers continue to shrink.

All social surveys indicate that uneasiness in society is growing, and RANEPA reports that 70 percent of the residents in large cities are already feeling the effects of the crisis.

Like the war in Afghanistan, the war in Syria cannot be popular with the Russian people. Putin is overstretching his imperial ambitions even as the national economy continues to decline. The country's foreign agenda is increasingly in conflict with the situation at home. If, one year from now, the opposition loudly calls out  - "Has the country run out of poor people?" - it will succeed.

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 #12
The International New York Times
October 8, 2015
Is Vladimir Putin Trying to Teach the West a Lesson in Syria?
By Ivan Krastev
Ivan Krastev is the chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria, and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.

SOFIA, Bulgaria - Last week, after Russian planes bombed antigovernment forces near the Syrian town of Homs, a senior American official complained to me: "What Russia is doing in Syria is not an effort to fight the Islamic State; it is not old-fashioned realpolitik. It is not even a cynical attempt to make us forget about Ukraine. Putin simply wants to hurt us."

This notion of Russia as a "spoiling power" is a popular sentiment today in Washington. But what does this spoiling power actually want? Is Russia in Syria simply for the sport of watching a humiliated President Obama? Is damaging the value of American power the only purpose of Russia's "spoiling"?

It's more accurate to say that the Kremlin is in Syria for pedagogical reasons: It wants to teach Americans a lesson, and a valuable one. It wants to show that America should either be prepared to intervene in any civil war that follows a troubled revolution inspired by its lofty rhetoric, or it should quit goading people to revolt. "Do you realize, what you have done?" was the most memorable line of President Vladimir Putin's speech at the United Nations General Assembly.

The situation in Syria may have an element of realpolitik to it, but it is also about two worldviews. Indeed, the differences between Mr. Putin and Mr. Obama can be boiled down to opposing theories about the sources of the current global instability. America sees global instability primarily as the result of authoritarians' desperate attempts to preserve a doomed status quo, while Moscow blames Washington's obsession with democracy.

If the Soviets appealed to proletarians of the world to unite, the Kremlin today appeals to governments of the world to unite - all kind of governments. History is indeed "irony on the move." Russia, the successor of the revolutionary Soviet Union, has given up on the power of the people.

Most of the popular history books on the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 you can find in Moscow bookstores today tell the story of Lenin and his comrades not as a popular uprising, but as a coup d'état, engineered by - and here you have a choice - the German general staff or British intelligence agents. Any time and any place when people demand power, the situation gets worse. Loyalty and stability are at the center of the Kremlin's universe, a universe dominated by insecurity and fear of the future.

And what is on Kremlin's mind is not Syria, or even Ukraine, but Central Asia, a part of the post-Soviet space in which authoritarian leaders are aging, economies are stagnating, millions of restless young people are unemployed and eager to emigrate, and radical Islam is on the rise. Russia sees itself as the guarantor of stability in the region, but it fears instability coming. Central Asia today reminds the Kremlin of the Middle East a decade ago. Could Syria teach America to watch its words and mind its business when the next crisis comes?

President Putin wants to teach America a lesson, but he also speaks to a Europe flooded by a million refugees and haunted by the specters of radical Islam and demographic anxiety. Yesterday the European Union hoped to transform its neighbors; today it sees itself as a hostage. Mr. Putin wants to persuade Europe that, as brutal a dictator as Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya was, he was willing and able to protect the borders of Europe, something the new democracies could not do.

Is a badly shaken Europe prepared for this message?

Yes and no. Most European leaders hope for U.S.-Russian cooperation in Syria as the only way to end the conflict. They want Moscow on their side. Many blame the hyperactivity of George W. Bush and the inaction of Barack Obama for the turmoil in the Middle East. They hope for the return to the days of Soviet-American détente, when, as the historian Jeremi Suri has written, "Leaders abandoned their hopes for political change in order to smother the challenges they faced at home."

That, at least, is "Putin's hypothesis" - that Europe will accept a more powerful Russia as a guarantor of stability, even at the cost of a European retreat from its values and ambitions.

But can Mr. Putin deliver? His call for absolute stability is emotionally attractive but impractical. If in the straitjacket of the Cold War it was enough for the Soviet Union and the West to cut a deal for instability to recede, this is no longer the case. The world is no longer defined by East-West dynamics: Social, demographic, cultural and technological changes have made world stability a much more complicated puzzle. We live in the age of disruption.

And though Russia is right to argue that what we see in Syria today is not a clash between a repressive government and its freedom-loving people, it is also not a clash between legitimate government and a bunch of extremists, as Moscow insists. It is worth remembering that the vast majority of refugees in Europe are running not from the Islamic State, but from the Assad regime, and its hold on power means that they could stay in Europe forever.

In other words, Mr. Putin's pedagogy is appealing, but it is not, ultimately, persuasive. It will take more than a change in American policy for people to stop revolting against ugly governments.

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 #13
New York Times
October 7, 2015
Editorial
Mr. Putin's Motives in Syria

Why President Vladimir Putin is sending "volunteer" ground forces into Syria is not entirely clear. It may be to protect the Russian base near Latakia from which Russia has begun flying bombing missions against Syrian rebel groups, or it may be because Russia's Syrian ally, President Bashar al-Assad, is in such danger of falling that Russian ground troops will actually enter the fray against the innumerable insurgent groups fighting him.

What is clear is that these "volunteers" are there about as voluntarily as were the Russian soldiers ordered into Crimea or eastern Ukraine. Russians might want to ask why young Russians are being sent to face mortal danger in the Middle East in service of Mr. Putin's very dangerous gamble.

Propping up a flailing ally is only one of Mr. Putin's probable motives. He no doubt wants to flex his muscles (again) before a Russian public increasingly feeling the pain of a mismanaged economy and to deflect attention from the stalemate in Ukraine. But he may not be strutting for long.

Syria is the proverbial quagmire. If the United States and its allies have failed either to create a viable opposition front or to eradicate the Islamic State, it is not only because of the limited effort but also because the tangle of insurgent groups, with their ever-shifting alliances, offer only an array of bad choices.

By sending warplanes to bomb rebels, including those the United States has tried to shape into some semblance of an opposition, and now by sending in Russian soldiers, Mr. Putin stands to make matters far more complex. There is no assurance that his move will bring an end to the fighting any sooner.

If Mr. Putin had ever been eager for peace, he could have exerted pressure on the Assad government before it stoked the civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians, driven millions from their homes and destroyed vast stretches of the country.

Instead, he supported Mr. Assad and his brutal reprisals against civilians and the opposition, which opened up space for extremists to operate and expand, turning this war into a threat to the entire region. Even now, Mr. Putin could help by coordinating his actions with the West, but he seems entranced by the lure of making a grandstand play.

It may not be too late for Mr. Putin to reconsider. The United States and its allies are in need of help and might well be open to cooperating with Russia on finding a combination of military and diplomatic measures that could curb the Islamic State and, more important, impose cease-fires that would give civilians some respite from the violence. That, ultimately, should be the priority for both the West and Russia. And it would certainly be a better way for Mr. Putin to satisfy his need for respect and a role in the Middle East.

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 #14
Wall Street Journal
October 5, 2015
Congress Can Respond to Putin With More Sanctions
Obama complains about Putin but does nothing. Here's another way to squeeze him back home.
By PAULA J. DOBRIANSKY and DAVID B. RIVKIN JR.
Ms. Dobriansky is a former undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs in the George W. Bush administration. Mr. Rivkin is a constitutional lawyer who served in the Justice Department under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

From Ukraine to Syria, the Obama administration has consistently misread Russian President Vladimir Putin's objectives and the implications of cooperating with him. This has led to costly failures, but the administration is unlikely to change its approach. Congress need not sit idle too. By enacting new sanctions on Russia, U.S. lawmakers can send a strong signal to Moscow that its continued aggression against Ukraine and growing complicity in a genocidal war in Syria will come at a heavy price.

After Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimea in 2014, the Obama administration and many U.S. allies imposed sanctions on Russian businesses and individuals. But those measures clearly haven't been effective in discouraging Mr. Putin's quest to exert Russian power and influence.

In Ukraine, despite the supposed cease-fire effected by the Minsk Accords negotiated by Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia, Moscow-supported aggression continues in the contested east. Russian troops remain in the region, as an extensive Sept. 14 report from the Atlantic Council documents, and Reuters has reported that new Russian military bases are being built.

In Syria, Mr. Putin, under the guise of fighting Islamic State, supports the Bashar Assad regime, which has used barrel bombs and chemical weapons in slaughtering tens of thousands of civilians, mostly Sunni Muslims-making Russia complicit in, and legally accountable for, these actions. The Obama administration over the past week has hinted that it might cooperate with Russia's anti-ISIS campaign.

The danger of association with an aggressor like Mr. Putin, who is also working with Iraq and Iran, can be seen in Russian airstrikes over the past few days directed not at ISIS but at other opponents of the Assad regime. The Obama administration's initial seeming openness to working with Mr. Putin in Syria has already compromised the White House's ability to hold Moscow accountable on any front, including for its aggression in Ukraine.

Under the U.S. Constitution, the president has formidable authority for conducting foreign policy, but there are several steps-practical and symbolic-that Congress can take that would demonstrate a resolve toward Russia that hasn't been forthcoming from the Obama administration.

On the symbolic side, Congress can legislate a finding, based on ample evidence, that the Russian military has committed war crimes in Ukraine, and is aiding and abetting the Assad regime's genocide and Iran's terrorism-sponsoring activities. Using the congressional bully pulpit can help drive the public debate, especially during the 2016 presidential election campaign.

Congress can also enact new sanctions that will have an immediate and profound effect-starting with the Russian oil-refining industry.

Despite Mr. Putin's far-reaching strategic aspirations, Russia is punching well above its weight. The Russian economy continues to shrink, buffeted by falling oil prices and Western sanctions, and 2014 capital flight has exceeded $150 billion. Hundreds of Russian casualties in Ukraine are causing discontent, with Russian media reporting how Russian contract soldiers-in the part-volunteer, part-draftee military-are refusing to deploy to Ukraine or Syria. According to the Moscow-based independent polling organization Levada, fewer than 14% of Russians support military intervention in Syria.

Russia's greatest vulnerability may be its refineries. While Russia is one of the world's top energy producers, its refining facilities are antiquated, with low product quality, no spare capacity, and infrastructure in desperate need of significant investment. The refining infrastructure is so weak that Russia ran out of gasoline in 2011, precipitating shortages and substantial popular discontent. Russian media reported that the head of the majority-government-owned Rosneft oil company, Igor Sechin, sent Mr. Putin a letter on July 15 warning of a major shortfall in refined products by 2016-17 unless the refining sector gets emergency financial assistance.

Most of Russia's approximately 50 major refineries date to the Soviet period. According to a 2014 report prepared for Russia's parliament, the refiners also require a steady supply of Western, particularly American, equipment. Current U.S. sanctions apply only to new Russian oil and gas production projects. But an embargo-even if only a unilateral one by the U.S.-on exports of refinery pumps, compressors, control equipment and catalytic agents would cause widespread shortages of refined products, putting tremendous pressure on Russia's civilian economy and Moscow's ability to carry out military operations. The Putin regime would suffer major political damage.

President Obama might veto such refinery sanctions legislation because of its potentially drastic effect, but as Russia's behavior becomes ever more outrageous, he might not be able to summon Democratic support as readily as he did for the Iranian nuclear deal. In any case, Congress would do well to make U.S. policy toward Russia a matter for serious discussion during an election year-and to remind Mr. Putin that with the Obama administration's days dwindling, a significant course correction in U.S. foreign policy could be on the horizon.

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 #15
Time.com
October 5, 2015
Russian Propaganda Struggles To Find Good Reasons For Bombing Syria
By Simon Shuster

The challenge for Kremlin spin doctors came just as Ukraine ceased to be "the kind of information narcotic" that could captivate Russian viewers

On Sunday night, during an appearance on a prime-time political talk show, the Russian lawmaker Semyon Bagdasarov offered a curious interpretation of his nation's history. The roots of Russian civilization, he suggested, trace all the way back to Syria, without which Russia would never have existed in the first place. "This is our land," he said of the Arab Republic. "These are our holy places!" Urged along by the prompters in the studio, the audience gave him a round of applause, while the host of the show had this reaction: "I think we have a new slogan!"

Over the past week, as Russian jets have flown dozens of bombing raids against rebel positions in Syria, the search for a slogan that might justify this military effort has strained even the flimsy principles of Kremlin propaganda, not to mention the credulity of its consumers. Compared to the war in neighboring Ukraine, which Moscow had little trouble casting as a defense of "indigenously Russian lands," the Syrian entanglement is shaping up to be a much more difficult sell.

A nationwide poll taken in late September, about a week before the Russian bombing raids began, suggested that Russians would have no stomach for a war on such a distant front. Nearly 70% of respondents in the survey, which was published on Sept. 28, said Russia should not provide direct military support to its Syrian allies, and only 14% said they would approve of such an intervention.

Two days later, when that intervention began, few in the Kremlin would have lost much sleep over the question of popular support. The approval ratings of President Vladimir Putin still stand above 80% in all the major polls, and he has total control of nearly all the mass media in Russia. So the men in his circle tend to take it for granted that they can shape public opinion as expediency dictates. "The national mission can change in three days flat," one of Putin's advisers told me this spring during an off-the-record briefing in Moscow. "All you need to do is change the propaganda and offer some arguments."
 
But solid arguments have been hard to find in the Kremlin's domestic messaging on Syria so far. Most of the spin has derived from Putin's claim at U.N. General Assembly last week that the terrorist threat from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is similar to the threat that Nazi Germany posed 75 years ago. Such invocations of the fascist menace served Russia well during its invasion of Ukraine last year, as Putin managed to convince many of his countrymen that ethnic Russians in Ukraine were under threat from "neo-Nazis and anti-Semites."

On Sunday evening, this point came up again during the weekly monologue of anchorman Dmitry Kiselyov, who said the ISIS-Nazi comparison offers a "very precise" rationale for the Russian bombing of Syria. Then he tried to push it further. "What this means is that Russia is saving Europe from enslavement and barbarism for the fourth time," he declared. "Let's count! The Mongols, Napoleon, Hitler, and now ISIS." His list ignored the fact that Ghengis Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler all invaded Russia first, whereas no attacks on Russian soil have yet been attributed to ISIS.

Nor is there any ethnic Russian minority in Syria for Putin to defend, and the idea of intervening in the affairs of an Arab nation also sounds deeply hypocritical coming from Moscow, which has spent more than a decade deriding the U.S. and its allies for such meddling. In a manifesto on foreign policy that he published in 2012, Putin specifically urged the U.S. and its allies not to get involved in Syria. "I just can't understand where this militaristic itch comes from," he lamented. "Why can't they find the patience to work out a balanced and collective approach?"

Judging by events in Ukraine and Syria, it did not take Putin long to contract that itch from his Western counterparts. But the reason is not some war-loving turn in the Russian mentality. On the question of foreign entanglements, Russians tend to be insular and pragmatic, with domestic issues like poverty, inflation and corruption consistently topping questions of international affairs in the list of the public's concerns. In late August, when the Levada Center asked respondents to name Putin's greatest achievements, the two top answers were economic development and improvements in the standard of living.

On these two fronts, however, Putin has lately had little to brag about. The country is in the middle of a deep recession, thanks largely to a sharp drop in the oil price and the Western sanctions imposed against Russia over its harassment of Ukraine. The value of the national currency, the ruble, has meanwhile dropped by half since Russian annexed the region of Crimea, and inflation has shot up to almost 16%.

The daily images of carnage and destruction in eastern Ukraine have helped the Kremlin's TV networks distract Russians from the awful state of their economy over the past year and a half. But this spell had begun to wear off, and Putin's ratings had started to suffer, falling in September to 84% from a peak of 89% in Levada's latest polls.

Valery Fyodorov, one of the Kremlin's leading sociologists, even acknowledged during a TV appearance on Friday that only about a quarter of Russians are still paying close attention to the conflict in Ukraine. "It's no longer the kind of information narcotic that you can't go a day without," he said. But before he could finish his segment, the broadcast cut to some crisp footage of Russian warplanes dropping bombs over Syria. They looked intoxicating enough, even without a good explanation, for many viewers to get hooked.

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 #16
The American Interest
www.the-american-interest.com
October 5, 2015
Ukraine & Syria
Putin's Pianos
The largest audience for Putin's Syrian concerto isn't in the Middle East or the U.S. but in Europe.
By Andrew A. Michta
Andrew A. Michta is professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Views expressed here are his own.

Though Russian jets streak over Syria, dispersing ordnance against the remnants of the U.S. trained anti-Assad resistance forces, Putin's main strategic target lies outside the MENA region. In immediate terms, Putin's play in Syria is about the survival of the Assad regime and the positioning of Russia to play a key role in the final settlement in Syria. But the score for his "Syrian Concerto" is intended to be played on several pianos at once. Although his audiences in MENA and Washington are important, Putin's primary audience and his largest concert hall are in Europe. Through his actions, Putin has linked Syria to Ukraine and raised exponentially the stakes for the Europeans. Putin's message is that the European Union should make a deal on Ukraine, for if it seeks to continue isolating Russia and opposes the lifting of sanctions, he can further destabilize the Middle East.
By striking into Syria, Putin has made his position clear that there can be no resolution in the Middle East without Russia, and that to achieve this goal Moscow is prepared to brush aside Washington's objections. He has directly inserted Russian power into an issue that is now at the heart of the increasingly troubled EU project: the flood of migrants entering Europe from the Middle East driven by the war. Even if Putin ultimately fails to save Assad in Syria, he has already accomplished a major gain: Although no European official will say so publicly, Putin has established a linkage between Syria and Ukraine, having just secured at the Normandy Group meeting the de facto endorsement by Germany and France of his goal to change Ukraine's constitution by federalizing the country's East. He is now positioned to extract further concessions from the EU when the sanctions against Russia come up for review.

The most significant deliverable from Putin's latest visits to New York and Paris is that he has broken out of international isolation, or rather, that the purported isolation of Russia-notwithstanding the public ostracism of Putin-was largely a lark. This is about much more than Putin's speech-making in the UN, his brief handshake with President Obama, or his interview with Charlie Rose. Having been repeatedly condemned, shunned, and ridiculed by the West, with economic sanctions cutting deeply into his bottom line, Putin has turned the tables on his critics, defiant in his tone and action, and confident that his adversaries in the West will break before the Russian people turn against him. Instead of caving in to the West on Ukraine, as many have been predicting, Putin has linked Syria and the larger MENA crisis to a settlement on Ukraine along largely Russian terms. By abruptly challenging the United States in Syria and leaving the Obama administration to scramble for a response, Putin has again seized the initiative and rendered further talk of Russia's isolation largely a moot point. The most enduring impact of Putin's Syria gamble will be felt in Europe. The Europeans are being sent a message that if a solution to the migrant flows into Europe is to be found, Russia must have a say in the matter (read: if you are in Kiev, think long and hard about what the "final settlement" of the Donbas crisis will look like).

Russia is positioning itself again as a global player, either as an enabler or as an obstructionist power. Sounding like a 21st-century version of Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, who used to proudly declare that nothing in the world could be decided without the Soviet Union taking a position on the issue, Putin has confronted the United States directly, sending a message to the states in the Middle East and to Europe that Russia's priorities as a great power must be factored into any decision. To appreciate the effectiveness of his approach, one need only look at the attention he has been getting, from Israel through Saudi Arabia to Iran, Berlin, and Paris. His message to the United States is that Russia is back as a great power, and that it will continue to assert itself at the United Nation or elsewhere, unafraid to move militarily against U.S. proxy forces in Syria.

The danger of Russia's campaign in Syria, notwithstanding the attendant risk that it will spiral out of control, lies with his timing. Putin has been betting on America's intervention fatigue, and thus far his calculation seems to add up. Even more importantly, he has gauged the deepening crisis in Europe, which had already been shocked by his Ukraine venture, shaken to the core by the Eurozone crisis, and now is being rocked by waves of migration from the Middle East that it cannot control or even manage effectively.

Last but not least, Putin has again dealt a blow to U.S. credibility. If there ever was a classic "in your face" foreign policy, Putin's actions against American interests in MENA are just that, with the goal of further undermining U.S. influence with its allies. For Moscow, Syria and Ukraine are parts of the same strategic design: to target the Transatlantic security link, to undermine U.S. influence in Europe, and ultimately to dismantle the NATO alliance.For Moscow, Syria and Ukraine are parts of the same strategic design: to target the Transatlantic security link, to undermine U.S. influence in Europe, and ultimately to dismantle the NATO alliance. Regardless of whether the Russians will ultimately succeed in saving Assad, Putin's decisive move into Syria against rebels trained and supported by the U.S. has delivered a powerful message to the Europeans: America lacks the resolve to act, even in areas as important to its global position as the Middle East. The Europeans, especially the allies along the northeastern flank of NATO, will not miss this lesson.

There is a larger point to be made as the Obama Administration considers its options in Syria. The United States' risk aversion has become an important variable in Putin's strategy. The lesson the White House has drawn from the past decade of American intervention has been to minimize the risk of negative outcomes emblematic of Iraq and Afghanistan-that is, events that would fit the famous line by Colin Powell on Iraq: "You break it, you own it." But Putin's gamble in Syria is predicated on the assumption that, while there is indeed always the risk that an outcome may turn out badly, there is also another side to Powell's dictum, namely that the payoff of a forward-leaning if admittedly risky policy can be substantial.

It is time we appreciate the larger stakes of the war in Syria for the future of U.S. influence in the Middle East, our relations with Europe and the cohesion of the NATO alliance. It is time we make sure Putin's piano is not the only one to sound a tune in Syria.

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 #17
Reuters
October 7, 2015
Putin rehashes Ukraine rhetoric on Syria, but Nazi comparisons fail to convince
By Ian Bateson
Ian Bateson is an independent correspondent in Ukraine. He has written for Reuters, VICE, Al Jazeera and die Zeit Online, among others. He is also co-host of the Sunday Show on Hromadske International. Follow him on Twitter @ianbateson

It took only one sitting for Russia's upper house of parliament to fall into line, and approve Russian military action in Syria - just like it had done a year before in the Ukraine. The Russian Orthodox Church was equally quick to declare President Vladimir Putin's fight against "terrorism" in Syria "holy," adding spiritual to governmental blessing of Putin's military adventure in Syria.

Before bombing started, nearly 70 percent of Russians opposed direct Russian military involvement in Syria. Since then, Putin has relied on a holy trinity of the parliament, Church and media to help make his appetite for war more palatable to his people. But Syria is not Ukraine, and talk of Nazis and protecting the "Russian world" are less plausible to justify military action in Syria. Though opposition is scant, Putin's rhetoric - combined with imperial overreach into the Middle East - risks shaking the hold on power that made it easy for him to send troops to Syria in the first place.

Since the start of his third term, Putin has fostered a close alliance with the Church, relying on it to champion his decisions in overwhelmingly Orthodox-identifying Russia. Religious justifications for actions have become an increasingly important part of Putin's propaganda strategy at home. Last year Putin justified annexing Crimea by declaring it "sacred" and "like the Temple Mount in Jerusalem for Muslims and Jews" - despite the fact it was only incorporated into the Russian Empire in 1783.

Russian media has been adding to the religious connection by applying the same arguments it used to support separatists in Ukraine. The loosely-defined "Russian world" that the Russian media claimed to include parts of Ukraine has now been expanded to make room for Syria. On a Russian debate program a member of Russian parliament, Semyon Bagdasarov, argued that there was "no Orthodoxy or Russia without Syria" and that the historical tradition of Orthodoxy in now-Muslim-majority Syria makes it a "holy land" for Russians and "their" land.

In his weekly televised monologue Dmitry Kiselyov, head of the government-owned news agency Rossiya Segodnya, linked Russia's military actions in Syria to the Soviet's Union's fight against Nazi Germany. He has made similar comparisons before, accusing Ukraine's pro-Western government of being a fascist junta that needed to be opposed like Hitler's Germany. This time he referred to Putin's claim that the Islamic State posed a Nazi-like threat and required a similar coalition of opponents, calling it a "very precise" rationale for bombing Syria.

Russian media, however, seemed to reach new levels of absurdity when one anchor gave a weather report for Syria, emphasizing that the low winds and minimal precipitation had made October an ideal time for Russian airstrikes. The message seemed to be that even the weather was cooperating with Russian military intervention in Syria.

Many of the people justifying Russia's involvement in Syria are playing to a system that requires and rewards supporting Putin's actions once he has declared them. As Putin has re-centralized power in Russia, most governmental, media and civil society organizations function first and foremost to support him.

"There is no political elite," said Mikhail Fishman, Editor-in-Chief of Slon magazine in an interview for Internet news network Hromadske International. "There is just one decision, and when the decision is made the political elite just stand behind it." They are all "branches of the same political organism called Putin or the Kremlin," Fishman said.

To consolidate his power, Putin has worked to hollow out government and civil society organizations. In doing so, he has made Russia a closed circuit that does not accept feedback and does not tolerate dissent. The centralization of power allows for swift displays of military force - like the rolling out of troops and airstrikes in days - and is frightening because of its ability to justify military action anywhere in the world.

But the centralization of power has also made the state structure extremely brittle. The one-way flow of information prevents feedback about what is not working. Putin may be using many of the same arguments in Syria he used a year ago in Ukraine, but Russia is no longer the same country. Russians continues to be unenthusiastic about military involvement in Syria, the Russian economy is in recession with nearly 16 percent inflation, and Putin has been paying for these wars by taking money from pension funds. The institutions that now only function to rubber stamp Putin's decisions cannot address these problems, and conjuring Nazis and tracing Russian society back to Syria won't make these facts go away.

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 #18
www.foreignpolicy.com
October 2, 2015
Putin Aims at Syria - and Strikes Europe
Take note, Europe: By bombing Syria, Putin has finally put Russia back at the center of the world.
By Benjamin Haddad and Hannah Thoburn
Benjamin Haddad is a research fellow at the Hudson Institute. Hannah Thoburn is an Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute and served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Dzhankoy, Crimea.

On Sept. 30, Russian jets began airstrikes on rebel-held territories in the Syrian cities of Hama, Homs, and Latakia. This should have come as no surprise. During his speech at the U.N. General Assembly on Monday, Vladimir Putin laid out his plan for a "genuinely broad international coalition against terrorism," a catch-all term that now appears to include the Islamic State, al-Nusra Front, and the Free Syrian Army - anyone and everyone who opposes Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The bombings followed weeks of military buildup in Syria and years of verbal and lethal support for Russia's ally Assad.

Much has been written about the multiplicity of potential motives behind Putin's military buildup in Syria: defending his interests in the Middle East, shoring up Assad's regime, making Russia the power broker in the Syrian conflict, sustaining his power at home, and filling a power vacuum left by U.S. disinterest. These are all correct, to varying degrees. But they underestimate the geographic extent of that power vacuum. Beyond the Middle East, Putin's move in Syria could also strengthen him on a second front: Europe.

Dividing and disrupting the post-Cold War European security architecture has always been one of Putin's major strategic goals. While this may not be the driving force behind his moves in Syria, it certainly has the potential to be one of its side effects. Unlike European leaders themselves, the Russian president takes the EU's transformative power seriously, especially in his neighborhood. Why else would he have spent so much effort fighting Ukraine's 2013 attempt to negotiate a simple trade agreement with the EU?

For Moscow, a Europe united behind the auspices of the EU or NATO represents a dangerous potential opponent - and a threat to its corrupt autocracy. No wonder, then, that the Kremlin has begun to finance and promote nationalist and anti-EU political parties, extend its propaganda enterprise into Europe, and pursue energy projects to pit European nations against each other. A strong transatlantic alliance is likewise undesirable for the Kremlin. As the ties that bind it fray, Russia's relative power in the region grows stronger. Putin's decision to act in Syria, coupled with American vacillation, has offered him yet another opportunity to drive a wedge between Europeans and Americans.

In recent months, Europe has begun to feel the collateral damage from the conflict in Syria. As its governments struggle to find a way forward with the refugee crisis and as the terrorist threat from European-born jihadis returning from the Middle East increases, public pressure to formulate a response to the Syrian crisis has intensified. Polls show that a large majority of the French favor intervention against the Islamic State in Syria. There is even increasing support for "boots on the ground" among war-weary Britons. On Sept. 27, France announced its first airstrike against an Islamic State training camp in Deir al-Zor, Syria, claiming "self-defense" against attacks being prepared on European soil. France had previously refrained from strikes on Syrian soil over concerns that they would reinforce Assad's regime.

The few European leaders still holding a strong line on the necessity of Assad's ouster appear increasingly isolated. At the General Assembly, French President François Hollande spoke unambiguously of the connection between Assad's repression and the rise of the Islamic State, calling the leader the "the origin of this problem [who] cannot be part of the solution." In principle, Britain's prime minister, David Cameron, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel also see Assad's ouster as a requirement for a solution to the Syrian crisis. In an interview on Sept. 29, Cameron said he agrees with the U.S. position that Assad could play a role in a transitional government, but he resisted the notion of working with the Syrian president to defeat the Islamic State and backs his departure. Merkel, similarly, has called for talks with Assad. For his part, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi seems to back Russia's support of Assad, saying, "It is impossible to achieve peace without Russia involved."

Doubtless, the portion of Putin's visit to Paris on Oct. 2 that dealt with Syria was designed to move Hollande away from the American stance and into line with the Kremlin. At this point, that remains unlikely.

For Europeans, joining Putin's "coalition" to save Assad would be akin to sanctioning bombing runs that will only exacerbate the refugee crisis and increase the number of strikes targeting Western-backed rebels and civilians.

But while the French government has called out the Russians for their hypocrisy, Washington appears much more hesitant to confront Moscow. How long can the United States expect its allies to support a line it barely cares to defend? Its failure to intervene after Syria crossed the "red line" on the use of chemical weapons, leaving its partners hanging, had already eroded its credibility. Washington then turned down its allies' calls for more robust involvement, from enforcing no-fly zones to providing wider support for moderate rebels. The new facts on the ground created by Russia will soon render all those previous options obsolete.

Should Russia's narrative on Syria carry the day, the consequences will test the reliability of U.S. leadership. European governments that have spent political capital supporting Washington's position from the start of the Syrian crisis, now pressured to prioritize the fight against the Islamic State instead of ousting Assad, are left to ponder if Putin has been right all along. Is he a more reliable ally than Washington? In any case, Russia's move is less of an enigma to European policymakers than it is to the White House. "If I [were] Russia and Iran, I would act exactly the same way," a senior European diplomat told Foreign Policy.

But, more dangerously, this goes beyond Syria. Russian involvement in Syria is inextricably linked to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

Miraculously, Russian-backed violence in eastern Ukraine died down at the very same time that the Russian military began expanding its presence in Syria. Despite the relative quiet in eastern Ukraine, the bloodshed continues, and OSCE monitors believe that the Russian-backed separatists grow stronger by the day. Should the Ukrainian situation remain calm, European leaders will have a hard time explaining why they must maintain sanctions on the very country they're counting on to solve the Syrian problem. Generating such confusion is surely one of Putin's goals.

Sanctions don't come cheap for European economies. The European Commission projects that Ukraine-related sanctions cost European economies 0.3 GDP points in 2014 and 2015 - a non-negligible cut, when eurozone GDP is only expected to grow by 1.5 percent in 2015. In short, the sanctions regime is expensive, divisive, and European leaders are beginning to make noise about their desire to rebuild trade relations with Russia. Their business communities demand it, and Europe's attention span for the conflict in Ukraine is waning.

Weakened European resolve on sanctions plays right into Putin's hands: The removal of sanctions would both aid his reentry into polite international society and remove the heavy pressure on his economy. In essence, he is asking Europe and the United States to forget about Ukraine, creating a de facto frozen conflict, in exchange for his assistance with the Syrian conflagration. It is already in motion. In Paris, the Russian president discussed both issues with his European counterparts amid diplomatic rumors of new plans that would further weaken the requirements that Russia and its proxies in eastern Ukraine agreed to in the Minsk II protocols.

Although Peter Altmaier, Merkel's chief of staff, has rejected the idea that cooperation with Russia on Syria would change Berlin's position on sanctions, this has already been proposed by Sigmar Gabriel, Merkel's coalition partner and economy minister. The EU's sanctions regime comes up for renewal in January 2016; countries like Hungary, Greece, and Slovakia have already expressed their opinion that sanctions are unproductive.

Even more worrisome for the future of European liberal polities, Putin's moves in Syria will only embolden the voices that turn to Moscow as an alternative to Washington and Brussels. The populist, nativist, and anti-EU political parties that have gained in popularity in the past years have actively digested and relayed Russian propaganda to their followings.

Putin's Syria ploy will provide fuel to those who have criticized the confrontation with Russia that has animated European chancelleries since the annexation of Crimea in March 2014. Relations with Russia, as well as Putin's polarizing persona, have increasingly become a domestic political issue in many European countries. Leaders like Britain's Nigel Farage or France's Marine Le Pen have long called for an alliance with Putin against Islamic terrorism. Putin has gleefully egged all this on, arguing that Europe stands for nothing but nihilism and decadence and that its national values and sovereignty are being undermined. In a Europe wracked by self-doubt, this message is starting to resonate.

As tempting as it could be for Washington to outsource the resolution of external crises to nations like Russia that it sees as more directly affected by the issue, these decisions cannot be viewed in isolation from one another. After his recent move, Vladimir Putin seems like a more coherent, reliable player than Washington. But the cost of American restraint is expanding beyond the Middle East and may damage European and transatlantic unity for many years to come.

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 #19
www.foreignpolicy.com
October 5, 2015
Putin's Realpolitik, For The Win
Did the Russian president just checkmate Obama?
BY PAUL BONICELLIO
Paul J. Bonicelli is the Executive Vice President at Regent University, and served as the Assistant Administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean of the United States Agency for International Development.
 
The last two weeks of September 2015 mark a watershed for the presidency of Barack Obama. The events that unfolded in the Middle East are so damaging to the administration's statecraft that his foreign policy legacy cannot recover no matter what he does. If he does nothing to counter Vladimir Putin, he will be confirmed as the loser in what is effectively a new Cold War, or at least a "coldish" war. If he accepts Putin's invitation to join his alliance, he's embracing a most unsavory collection of states. And if Obama decides to challenge Putin with force, he very likely will be the first president in a generation to risk, if not outright provoke, a hot war with Russia.

What is the current state of affairs?

It is worth noting exactly what the world looks like as we near the end of Obama's term in office. In Eastern Europe, Russia has taken Crimea and has troops in eastern Ukraine supporting separatists. Putin wants it to be a neutered buffer state and he's succeeding. Russia is also harassing the Baltics and it has flown provocatively around NATO members' territories and assets.

In the Middle East, Putin has built up sea, land, and air forces in Syria and is making good on his determination to fight the Islamic State and to do so in alliance with Syria's Bashar al Assad. At the U.N. last week, Obama and Putin discussed Syria and how to defeat the Islamic State. In that meeting, Putin gave Obama no warning that he was going to launch airstrikes; that warning came one hour before they were launched in a surprise and unusually terse demarche delivered in Baghdad. Then Putin launched those strikes but not against the Islamic State; rather, he is attacking the secular moderate Syrian forces opposing Assad that the United States has been training.

Russia is back on the ground in the Middle East and in alliance with Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah; the Iraqi government is a de facto member of that alliance. Lest we forget, one of the great achievements of U.S. foreign policy 40 years ago was to engineer the ouster of the Soviet Union from Egypt. So it is one of the greatest failures of Obama's foreign policy that Russia is back in the Middle East with troops on the ground and engaged in an active shooting war with moderate forces attempting to overthrow Assad and replace him with a pro-Western regime. How rich is it that Putin called from the dais of the General Assembly last week for a resolution codifying his actions in Syria?

How did we get here?

We got here because Obama's big foreign policy idea is that, in the new era, diplomacy alone will bring about peace. But more than that, his idea is that U.S. goals can be achieved by the withdrawal of the United States from leadership. He refuses to contemplate that other powers with different goals will meet his faculty lounge musings with raw power. They'll even use international organizations for their own interests. The faculty lounge reference is not just sarcasm; when the president and the secretaries of defense and state repeatedly respond to Putin's actions with incredulity and rebuke him for being "unprofessional" and misperceiving where the arc of history is headed, there is no other way to characterize them. They think and talk like professors who can never quite grasp reality because they are so wedded to their idealistic theories of how the world should work.

Putin took charge easily enough; he read Obama like a book early on. Once Putin learned Obama's view of the world and what role he wanted the United States to play in it, the Russian leader's strategy was set and it has been rewarded handsomely. It is an old trope but an accurate one: Russians play chess, not checkers, and they play to win, not for participation trophies. It's costing Putin something in troop deployments and sanctions but the return on the investment makes the cost worthwhile. In year seven of the Obama administration, Putin has consistently been in the driver's seat and all Obama can do is react - and he might not even be willing to do that.

Imagine being able to see the world through Vladimir Putin's eyes as he observes Obama in action over the years. As Putin made clear long ago, his number one priority is the return of Russia to global power status - that is both the highest domestic policy goal and foreign policy goal because they are essentially the same thing for an authoritarian trying to stay in power.

Here is what Putin must have observed:

-Most of Obama's staff appointments and certainly his liberal internationalist rhetoric signaled a determination to reduce the U.S. footprint in the world and abandon leadership of it. Putin counted up his opportunities to reassert Russia's influence. And what a boon it was for Putin that a live microphone caught Obama in conversation with then President Dmitry Medvedev saying that Putin just needed to give Obama time to get re-elected and then he'd show more flexibility regarding Putin's wishes in international affairs.

-Obama's determination to withdraw from Iraq spoke volumes to Putin about American commitment to stabilize the Middle East, prevent Iranian expansion and intimidate terrorist groups. Any junior military or foreign service officer could have told Obama that he was risking a power vacuum in the most dangerous part of the world that would be filled with our greatest enemies. Hearing Obama call the Islamic State a "jayvee team" must have both astounded and amused Putin.

-Putin watched as Obama caved on his Syria red lines and then asked Russia to help strip the Syrian regime of its chemical weapons. In effect, he saw Obama utter an ultimatum he had no intention of enforcing against a Russian ally, only to then ask Russia to pull his chestnuts out of the fire. He saw a U.S. president with no strategy or foresight, and feckless enough to try to blame his own Congress for his failings.

-Putin has paid a price for what he is doing in the Crimea and east Ukraine, but not a price high enough to make him quit the project. And he still holds the energy cards as the United States has done nothing to counter his advantage there.

-Putin has heard the president and Secretary Kerry double and triple down on their assertion that climate change is the number one American national security issue.
Putin has watched as Obama allowed China to claim and militarize the South China Sea while at the same time hacking into some of the United States' most sensitive government computer systems. And the only punishment for these deeds is that the Chinese leader had to sit through a 21-gun salute and a state dinner.

-The Iran nuclear deal speaks for itself: the administration caved on every U.S. demand - demands codified in U.N. resolutions no less - and all because the president was unwilling to truly challenge the Iranian regime.

-Russia's longtime thorn in the American side, the Castro regime, got a sweetheart deal of its own. Once again, the U.S. demanded nothing and acceded to everything it could within the executive's authority - all while the Putin and Castro plan to reopen the SIGINT base in Lourdes.

What is likely to happen over the next 15 months?

In his press conferences last week, the president appears to have already decided how to respond: he will keep denying reality and scolding Putin for acting out of "weakness" and being clueless as to how the world works now that we have left the past behind with all its power politics ugliness.

But it is the president who appears clueless: little has changed about how the world works since Thucydides first taught us our lessons. Thanks to Immanuel Kant, Hedley Bull, and a whole lot of globalization, there is a bit more community and a little less anarchy. But only a little more and only a little less. At the end of the day, power still arbitrates if a single capable aggressor or change agent is willing to act.

Furthermore, the president misses the point of what Putin both wants and needs. Putin wants to fulfill Russia's destiny and that means he must counter U.S. influence in the regions that matter most. And Putin doesn't need to establish peace so avoiding a quagmire is not his concern. Being on the ground in the Middle East leading an alliance of Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah is perfect for his strategy of countering the United States and establishing Russian leadership. Unless he is challenged, Putin can exercise significant and growing influence over every country in the Middle East by either actually leading some of them in allied efforts, or wooing others into partnership or acquiescence. The worst-case scenario for Putin is that he simply remains present, disrupting any threat to his interests. Russia is back; just note how many pilgrimages to Moscow have been made and will be made by regional leaders.

It did not have to be this way, but the current state of affairs was inevitable with a leader like Obama. Past presidents have demonstrated more understanding of how the world works and had the resolve to follow through. Truman, Ike, Kennedy, and of course Reagan, come to mind. With no illusions as to what the Russians intended or what their interests were, they strategized accordingly. Most importantly, they knew that diplomacy would achieve little unless it was backed by force and facts on the ground.

Putin knows that, too.

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 #20
CNN.com
October 5, 2015
Putin's playbook in Syria draws on Ukraine and loathing for revolution
By Tim Lister, CNN

(CNN)Did his experience in Ukraine tempt Vladimir Putin to begin Russia's Syrian expedition? Are they both examples of the Kremlin taking advantage of Western hesitation or caution? Or are they two episodes (with more to come) of Russia taking revenge for previous humiliations (Kosovo, Iraq, Libya, etc.) and reasserting itself as a Great Power?

Do we yet have any idea what the Russian President's endgame is? Is he a master strategist or a cunning magician disguising Russia's relative decline? Russia's sudden and forceful intervention in the four-year Syrian conflict poses plenty of questions.

Comparisons of events in Ukraine and Syria should not be overdone. The circumstances and the geography are different. In Syria, the Russians were invited in by a government; in Ukraine most certainly not. In Syria, Russia is projecting power and trying to influence the shape of the Middle East; in Ukraine, it is acting in its backyard. Last year, Putin even asserted of Ukraine: "We are one people. Kiev is the mother of Russian cities."

In Syria, the intervention is overt and trumpeted as Russia deploys the best of its air force; in Ukraine, it is denied with a shrug as Moscow relies on surrogates with varying degrees of discipline.

Obscure intentions

Even so, Russian intentions in Syria and Ukraine do seem part of a pattern. Russia is trying to help allies strengthen their bargaining position while being less than clear about its own role and ends. In Syria, for example, Putin has spoken about the war against ISIS, but Russia's target list clearly includes any of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's opponents that threaten the regime's heartland.

At the United Nations, Putin waxed lyrical about taking on the threat of ISIS. On Sunday, Russian officials spoke of hitting ISIS positions in the province of Idlib, where ISIS has no presence.

And it's not clear yet whether Russia's priority is to help the Syrian regime go on the counterattack or guarantee access to the Mediterranean for its military in a post-Assad chunk of Syria on the coast.

In Ukraine, Moscow is sustaining the rebels with equipment and supplies to enable them to hold big chunks of the Donbass, while denying that it is involved in their revolt. Some see the ultimate aim as annexation (de facto or formal) of eastern Ukraine and its heavy industry; others a sort of collar to be tugged anytime President Petro Poroshenko cozies up to the European Union or NATO.

For now, that second aim seems more likely. Putin seems reluctant to invite more U.S. and European sanctions by upping the ante, and he said last week there was hope the Ukrainian crisis "can be dealt with." Some rebel leaders in eastern Ukraine are suggesting eastern Ukraine might fall into some sort of limbo, like Russian enclaves in Georgia and Moldova.

Moving on

To some analysts, it's no accident that the arrival of the Russian air force in Latakia coincides with much quieter times in eastern Ukraine, where a ceasefire is holding. Maybe it was time to change the sheets or, as Edward Lucas of the Center for European Policy Analysis puts it, end the soap opera in Ukraine.

"The heroic separatists, their evil fascist foes, and the cynical Western meddlers have been retired," to be replaced by "a thrilling and exotic epic set in Syria," he writes in Politico.

To Ulrich Schmid, a professor of Russian history at St Gallen University, Putin's appeal to Russian patriotism needed a shot in the arm. "Putin wants to refill the tank of national pride with new fuel," he told CNN.

The tank was last full in March 2014, as the Russian flag was raised in Crimea. Putin told the Russian parliament that "it was only when Crimea ended up as part of a different country (in 1992) that Russia realized that it was not simply robbed, it was plundered."

He recalled NATO's expansion into the Baltic states. "They kept telling us the same thing: 'Well, this does not concern you.' That's easy to say," he said to rapturous applause.

It was a theme he returned to at the U.N. General Assembly last week, saying that those who created "this Middle East situation ... have never abandoned their policy, which is based on arrogance, exceptionalism and impunity."

Putin nurses a sense of historical grievance. He complained last year that the United States and its allies "act as they please: Here and there, they use force against sovereign states, building coalitions based on the principle 'If you are not with us, you are against us.' "

As a KGB officer in Dresden in 1989, Putin saw the East German state overthrown. He saw Russia's ally in Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, flee in the face of the Maidan protests. He had a visceral loathing of the "color-coded" revolutions, which he saw as stirred up by the West. To Putin, the Maidan protesters were "terrorists." To al-Assad, all the rebels in Syria are "terrorists." So when al-Assad told a Russian diplomat last year that he was no Yanukovych and would be sticking around, it may have struck a chord in the Kremlin.

To put in crudely, this is payback. When Putin was Prime Minister in 2011, he fulminated against the West's no-fly zone in Libya, which started as a humanitarian mission but later turned the tide against the Gadhafi regime. He mocked it as "a medieval call for a crusade."

Today, the deployment of Russian anti-air missiles and Su-30 interdiction fighters in Latakia demolishes any chance the coalition has of enforcing a no-fly zone in northern Syria free from al-Assad's barrel bombs. It would just be too dangerous.

The Kremlin opportunist

Some analysts see Putin as an opportunist, aware of Russian military and economic shortcomings but willing to take advantage of a vacuum or others' hesitation. Before moving to take Crimea, he knew the Ukrainian military was in a dire state and Kiev almost bankrupt. He was confident the United States and NATO would huff and puff but not dare to challenge him. The stakes were not high enough.

The same calculation applied to the rebellion in eastern Ukraine. Talk in Western capitals of arming the Ukrainians with offensive weapons such as missiles capable of taking out separatists' Russian tanks came to nothing. Sanctions were the preferred option -- cautious but eventually damaging.

Similarly, the failure of the West to stand up moderate opposition to al-Assad, its reluctance to engage capable Islamist groups such as Ahrar al Sham and help them take the battle to the regime, provided Russia with an opportunity to reshape the battlefield. Again, Putin calculated the West would and could not resist Russia's intervention. Was the U.S. likely to bomb the runway at Latakia?

The downside

However, some observers predict that Russia's expedition in Syria could become the sort of messy and indecisive commitment that Ukraine has become, without a timetable or resolution.

Some Russian politicians have predicted that the bombing campaign will last three or four months, with the aim of ensuring the Assad government has a contiguous belt of territory linking Damascus and Alawite strongholds on the coast.

Easier said than done: Al Nusra and its allies are used to dealing with aerial bombardment, and the weather will deteriorate as winter approaches, making airstrikes more difficult. The closest rebel positions are barely 25 kilometers (16 miles) from Latakia.

The Russian presence will be enticing to Chechen fighters already in their hundreds in Syria; if Russian facilities suffer suicide bombings, does the Kremlin double down or withdraw? In that respect, the risks are greater in Syria than in Ukraine.

Russian overreach?

The optimists (and some cynics) among Western analysts and officials even welcome the Russian expedition in Syria and compare it to its inconclusive support for the separatists in Ukraine. They argue that both are expensive (especially for a country in deep recession) and beyond Russia's capacity to win. Russia will end up weaker, not stronger. And eventually, they say, a post-Putin Russia will be more realistic about the use of military means to achieve Moscow's goals.

In other words: "Let him get on with it, and he'll see how tough it is." This argument sees Russia already stuck with subsidizing eastern Ukraine, which would otherwise be bankrupt, and propping it up with bureaucrats drafted from Moscow. All the while, reforms introduced in Kiev, supervised by the International Monetary Fund and supported by the U.S. and European Union, will eventually put Ukraine back on its feet.

The optimistic argument continues that Putin can play the tough, decisive leader and "refuel" Russian patriotism, but can't make Russia's underlying rot go away. The oil price has collapsed, investment is at its lowest in two decades, and real incomes have declined 10% in the last year, according to the Russian Federal Statistics Service. Putin is more the magician than the strategist.

Others think this is too rosy a perspective.

Swift and ruthless

Putin "does not worry about Russia's long-term economic health," writes Edward Lucas.

"He sees politics as a ruthless zero-sum game in which victory goes to the player with the strongest nerves and fastest movements."

The Russian President can move fast because he has absolute control of the political process. The Upper House of the Duma is guaranteed to rubber-stamp the Kremlin's use of military forces (it has for Crimea and Syria). By contrast, the Washington interagency bureaucracy and powerful voices in Congress restrain an already cautious President.

As veteran Russia-watcher Mark Galeotti put it weeks after Crimea was seized, Putin "is listening to fewer dissenting voices, allowing less informed discussion of policy options, deliberately narrowing his circle of counselors.

The process is opaque to the point of invisible.

So there is one way in which Russian actions in Ukraine and Syria are identical. In neither case can we guess what the goal is.

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 #21
Brookings/Vox
October 1, 2015
Interview
Putin's deafness on Syria
By Jeremy Shapiro and Amanda Taub

It would be easy to get the impression from media coverage that Putin's decision to intervene militarily in Syria is some kind of genius strategic move - a bold and brilliant gambit that will weaken the US in the Middle East, or at least dramatically limit its influence in the region. Headlines this week have blared that Putin has "blindsided" Obama, that Putin is now "controlling the game" in Syria, and that Obama is "humiliated" as Putin "resets the Middle East."

But as Jeremy Shapiro, a senior fellow in the Brookings Institution's Project on International Order and Strategy, explained to me, the truth is far different. If Russia did manage to "blindside" the Obama administration, he argues, that's only because the Russian intervention is so incredibly stupid that it took the US by surprise that Putin would actually do it. And while Putin's actions may be bold, that doesn't mean they'll be effective, much less worth their costs.

In fact, Shapiro argues, if the US is going to take a cue on its Syria policy from a despotic foreign leader, it shouldn't be Putin, but Napoleon, who once famously warned, "When your enemy is making a mistake, do not interrupt him."

Below, Shapiro explains why Putin is making a mistake in Syria, why the US should refuse to be drawn into a "pissing contest" on foreign policy, and what would really need to happen to bring Syria's civil war to a close.

Amanda Taub: There's been a lot of commentary worrying that this means the U.S. is losing the Middle East to Russia, or that the U.S. will lose influence because Putin is willing to act more boldly. Do you think those concerns are warranted?

Jeremy Shapiro: A Russian intervention in Syria is a significant thing. It's going to have an impact, certainly on the Syrian civil war and on U.S.-Russian relations. So a certain amount of wroughtness is warranted.

Nonetheless, it's a little bit troubling that everything gets framed in terms of sort of "boldness" and "machismo" and "stolen a march." You know, these headlines in the Washington Post that Putin is "surprising" the Americans and "wrong-footing" them and all these things.

Well, I think that certainly the Americans have been surprised-but the reason they've been surprised is that this is incredibly stupid stuff, and we had not understood that the Russians were this self-destructive.

The Russians have made a serious mistake, I think, for Russia, for Syria, and for the region. We shouldn't be glad about that, because it's going to make life more difficult for the United States, too, and certainly for Syria.

It's a little bit depressing that on both sides we've gotten into this kind of machismo foreign policy, where we think that whoever appears strongest and most macho is winning. As if that has any meaning in international relations. This is not a pissing contest. Boldness rarely has benefits in international relations, particularly for status quo states like the United States. Caution is a good thing, and boldness is rarely rewarded.

Amanda Taub: Why do you consider this intervention a mistake for Putin? What makes it so "stupid"?

Jeremy Shapiro: I think they've made a mistake because they're banking on coercing the United States and its regional allies into accepting that [Syrian President Bashar] Assad has to be part of any eventual solution because he has too much backing to be overthrown.

So what they're attempting to do is to change the situation on the ground in order to negotiate from a position of strength. They're attempting to get the United States, but also what they view as its proxies-Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the UAE, and Qatar-to come together with them and Iran and create a sort of Taif settlement [the 1989 accords on ending Lebanon's civil war] that involves Assad.

The United States, by the way, has the exact same but opposite strategy: to change the situation on the ground so that Assad and his backers understand they can't survive militarily and they have to get into a negotiation.

And that strategy didn't work for the United States because, essentially, the Russians and the Iranians escalated, rather than allowing themselves to negotiate from a position of weakness. And I think the Russians are just contributing to that cycle.

This is a very, very familiar proxy war cycle from the bad old days of the Cold War, and it's incredibly damaging to the country in question. That's obviously who suffers the most. So this is the worst news for Syria, but it's not great news for the supporters, either. Russia could get themselves into some sort of quagmire without any very good options.

I don't know what the Russian domestic politics looks like when one of their Sukhoi fighters falls out of the sky-which happens, from time to time, with Russian airplanes-or gets shot out of the sky, and some pilot gets burned alive on video, so they have to escalate beyond where they wanted to go.

So, you know, it's a nightmare.

Amanda Taub: It seems like Russia has less capacity to engage in this kind of proxy war; its military is smaller than America's, and it's a poorer country that has been suffering economically. You said Russia's strategy in Syria is similar to ours, but does that mean this is going to have negative ramifications for Russia more quickly than it is for the United States?

Jeremy Shapiro: I do. It's worse for Russia than it is for the United States. What they're doing is trying to demonstrate a strength that they don't quite have, whereas what we're doing is trying to demonstrate a strength that we have but don't want to use.

But they don't even have it, so it's even worse. They're going to have difficulty supporting their forces, they're going to have difficulty escalating beyond where they already are. That's not the kind of thing we're going to see in a couple of weeks. But they must be banking on this idea that they're going to bring us around, and I don't think they are. And they're certainly not going to bring the Saudis around.

Amanda Taub: So what does an eventual solution or compromise look like?

Jeremy Shapiro: I think it's actually pretty easy to envision a solution or compromise here. It's not that far from the Geneva Communique that they signed in 2012 [calling on the parties of the Syrian war to find a political agreement to end the conflict]. It does involve a real compromise on Assad, particularly from the United States, in which we say, "Look, we're going to design a political process, and we're not going to demand a guarantee that Assad will not come out the other end of it."

But again, it's a little bit harder for the regional countries, the Iranians and Saudis, particularly. They're actually the key piece. If the United States and the Russians had the interest and were willing to force those two to compromise with each other, then that's the critical route. It's hard to do, and I don't think either side is actually interested in it. They'd prefer to fight this war to the last Syrian-and I think they're getting there.

Amanda Taub: We're heading into an election year, and can anticipate a lot more of what you referred to as "macho" posturing on foreign policy. What are the political implications of that, or the policy implications?

Jeremy Shapiro: The truth is that everybody's critical of the Obama policy in Syria, and nobody has a better alternative. I've never f***ing heard one. And if you heard something that even resembles a good idea on Syria in the Republican debate I would eat my head.

There is a lot of pressure in U.S. politics, particularly under a presidential campaign, to "do something," to look tough. And one of the advantages of being a powerful country is that you can do stupid things for a long time and it won't affect you that dramatically.

So we have a history in this country of doing things that aren't good for us, but we don't suffer on the scale that some countries experience. So the Vietnam War, we survived it pretty well-the Iraq War, ditto. We have the possibility of doing that again [in Syria]. It won't be the fall of the American empire if we do, but how many times can you make these kinds of mistakes?

As a great sage said not too long ago, "Don't do stupid sh**." And I think you might amend that with, "Don't do stupid sh** just because your enemy is doing stupid sh**."

And another aphorism, that I think is attributable to Napoleon, is, "When your enemy is in the process of making a mistake, do not interrupt him."

Amanda Taub: Seems like good advice.

Jeremy Shapiro: Yes. But I think the part that doesn't work is the humanitarian part of it. What we're talking about here is incredible suffering, and it's already overflowing not just into neighboring countries, but into Europe. The United States and Europe have an urgent need for a humanitarian solution. So I think that does put some pressure on us.

Amanda Taub: Is it possible to find an effective humanitarian solution if there's no end in sight to the war?

Jeremy Shapiro: It depends on what you mean by effective. I think the disease is the civil war, and the symptom is the refugee crisis. And as long as the disease continues, the symptom will continue.

But even if you can't cure a disease, you should treat the symptoms. And we can treat the symptoms much better than we have been, particularly in the neighboring countries, in terms of assistance to them, but also in terms of pressure on them to do more in terms of integration.

I think basically every country in the world has shirked its responsibilities in this regard, except the neighboring countries, and needs to step up. And the United States is certainly one of them. I think that we can do more here in bearing our share of the burden, not just monetarily but also in terms of refugees.

That's not a solution to the civil war, but I would say that we need to stop focusing on curing the disease and start focusing on the symptoms. Because, actually, we don't have the cure. We don't know what to do.

This interview was originally published by Vox.

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 #22
Politico.com
October 1, 2015
What Is Putin Really Up To in Syria?
14 top Putinologists weigh in.
By POLITICO Magazine

Vladimir Putin kicked this week off with a speech at the United Nations calling the West's refusal to back Syrian President Bashar Assad an "enormous mistake." Days later, when Russian bombs began to drop on targets within Syria, many analysts warned that Putin was making a sizable mistake himself by inserting Russia into the middle of Syria's intractable civil war. Other experts have labeled Putin a strategic grandmaster running circles around his Western counterparts.

Though Russian Defense Ministry Sergey Lavrov said on Thursday that Russia and the United States see "eye-to-eye" on combating the Islamic State in Syria, U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter proclaimed Wednesday that the Russian strikes "were in areas where there probably were not ISIL forces." He was far from the only U.S. official to raise concerns that Russia is saying one thing about its actions in Syria but doing another. Russia may be using the pretense of combating the Islamic State to justify its airstrikes, but its true objectives are up for debate.

To help readers get a handle on the situation, Politico Magazine asked some of America's best-informed Kremlinologists what Putin is trying to achieve in Syria. Is Putin just flexing his muscles at the United States? Simply attempting to shore-up Assad? Earnestly trying to destroy ISIL? Or are the motives of the erratic Russian autocrat beyond our comprehension?

***

'In [Putin's] terms, he is winning. And on our terms we are losing.'
By Edward Lucas, writer for the Economist and senior vice president at the Center for European Policy Analysis, a think tank in Warsaw and Washington, D.C.

Russia has won. That is the bleak conclusion facing the front-line states of Europe after a catastrophic week for Western diplomacy and American leadership.

The week began with Vladimir Putin's triumph at the U.N. General Assembly. He spoke as a leader with a real interest in power. He berated the West for its weakness and recklessness, and feigned sympathy for the victims of ISIL. But his words were backed by a menacing willingness to break rules, take risks and endure pain. President Barack Obama was at his waffly worst: a leader who treats rhetoric as a substitute for policy.

The same day brought another triumph for Mr. Putin-a face-to-face meeting with Mr. Obama. Russia's official media trumpeted this as evidence that the era of diplomatic isolation, supposedly a punishment for the war in Ukraine, was over.

Next came Russia's move on Syria. The weapons that Russia is sending there are not an attempt to settle the conflict. They are there to protect the Assad regime, which is its cause. Moreover, ISIL does not have warplanes: Russia's air defense missiles are in Syria for a different purpose.

This became clear on Wednesday, when America was given less than an hour's warning that the Kremlin was imposing, in effect, a no-fly zone in Syria. With this, the Russians not only mounted a direct challenge to American authority. They also ripped up the rulebook of military diplomacy. America was aghast but had no response.

The first target in all this is Russian public opinion. The soap opera in Ukraine is over. The heroic separatists, their evil fascist foes, and the cynical Western meddlers have been retired. The new entertainment is a thrilling and exotic epic set in Syria, with the Assad regime as the heroic defenders of civilized values, Russian their valiant allies and the West as the defenders of jihadist barbarians.

Like most soap operas, this plot bears little relation to reality. A peace deal in Syria is possible-but Russia cannot broker or enforce it. Its central element would be a new deal for Sunni Arabs-echoing the one which ended the insurgency in Iraq in 2007. It would need the support of the Qataris and Saudis, cooperation from the Turks, and Iranian and Russian pressure on the Assad regime. The only country which could conceivably make that happen is the United States.

That won't happen, so in the meantime Syria bleeds, Europe quails at the seemingly unstoppable influx of migrants, and Mr. Putin chuckles.

His second aim is achieved, too. For all its military, diplomatic and economic weakness, Russia has re-established itself as an indispensable power, with which the West must deal-and on Russia's terms.

The chances of real success are slender to negligible. But the West's blunders in Syria have been so great that Mr. Putin now looks like a responsible statesman, to whom we turn in desperation for help.

The most shocking aspect of this is that the West does not realize what is happening. Experts still believe that Mr. Putin's adventure in Syria is a dreadful mistake-another Afghanistan. They believe that sanctions are biting, that he has lost the war in Ukraine, and is now looking for a return to normality.

This thinking misunderstands Mr. Putin's mindset. He does not worry about Russia's long-term economic health. He sees politics as a ruthless zero-sum game in which victory goes to the player with the strongest nerves and fastest movements. In his terms, he is winning. And on our terms we are losing.

Now he can exact his price. What will it be?

***

'Russia's presence [in Syria] is a bargaining chip.'
By Alec Luhn, freelance journalist and Politico contributor, Moscow

I think it's worthwhile to remember that, for the Kremlin, Ukraine remains the number one concern. In the short term, Vladimir Putin's air offensive in Syria will help Bashar Assad retain power. But in the long term, it seems Russia's presence there is a bargaining chip. Putin has already ended Russia's diplomatic isolation over Ukraine and scored a meeting with Barack Obama. What's being discussed behind the scenes? Tacit recognition of Russia's interests in Ukraine? An end date for sanctions? It's all suddenly on the table now.

***

'Even the best informed Western intelligence has only limited understanding of who is advising the Russian leader and what is in briefing papers.'
By Ben Judah, contributing writer for Politico Europe and author of Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In And Out Of Love With Vladimir Putin

Anyone who tells you he knows what Vladimir Putin is really thinking is lying. The Kremlin is more cut off from Western diplomats, journalists and analysts than at any point since Leonid Brezhnev was in charge. That's why it's so scary. Even the best informed Western intelligence has only limited understanding of who is advising the Russian leader and what is in briefing papers.

Here's the little we know. Vladimir Putin is both isolated and acting recklessly, taking little heed of the vicious complexities of the Middle East. Crimea, Donbas, Syria-these are all seen as on the same front. Pushback against a weakening West. Kremlin voices suggest Vladimir Putin might be willing to trade his terrain on one front for another: taming his actions on Syria in exchange for concessions on Ukraine and the lifting of Western sanctions on Russia. This hints that this action could be as much one of weakness as of strength-a bold gambit, to release Russian from financial sanctions as the pinch from the falling oil price sets in. The scary thing here is: We just can't be sure.

***

'The basic message is: You will listen to us, you will not exclude us from the conversation.'
By Masha Gessen, Russian-American journalist and author of The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

I think Putin's primary motive is to assert Russia's role as a superpower. He is using the old Soviet playbook of muscle and blackmail. The basic message is: You will listen to us, you will not exclude us from the conversation. The message is addressed squarely and solely to the United States. Put even more plainly, it reads, "I came to your country to give you a chance. I was willing to talk nicely. You rejected my premise that Assad must stay in power-well, let's see what you say now."

There is a secondary motive, too, which makes Assad more than an abstraction in this conversation. In Putin's world, the United States caused the current bloodshed in Syria by supporting the protesters-the same way the United States caused the current "civil war" in Ukraine by supporting the protests there. And he is convinced the Americans supported the protests in Russia in 2011-12 and only Putin's firm hand averted disaster. So there is a deep identification with Assad at play here, if not personal sympathy.

***

'I doubt very much that Putin is thinking two or three moves ahead.'
By Andrew S. Weiss, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, director for Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian affairs on the National Security Council staff from 1998 to 2001

People around the world give Putin way too much credit as a master strategist. He's an improviser and an opportunist of the highest order. It's true that he's trying to fill some of the vacuum in the Middle East and Syria as the United States scales back our military involvement in the region. At the same time, I doubt very much that Putin is thinking two or three moves ahead. The war in Syria is about to get a lot worse, and he's plunging Russia right into the middle of it. It's also only a matter of time before we see a surge of jihadist activity targeting Russians, both inside Syria and, I fear, on the streets of Moscow. Russia's move is going to embolden the Assad regime and motivate the forces of global jihadism.

We've seen this pattern already: Putin's aggression against Ukraine has by all accounts been a debacle. The Syria adventure has all the makings of a similar tragedy and tells us a great deal about the impulsive and erratic nature of the Kremlin's decision-making efforts on national security. I'm also concerned that Putin has plowed ahead and started engaging in so-called kinetic activity in the very complicated battlefield that is Syria without having a serious conversation about de-confliction with the Pentagon or other members of the U.S.-led anti-ISIL coalition. The de-confliction effort is still in its infancy. He's courting danger and unintended contact between his military and others operating there.

***

'[Putin's] overriding objective is ... to open some cracks in the wall of economic and diplomatic isolation around Russia'
By Mark Galeotti, professor of global affairs at New York University specialist in Russian security and transnational organized crime

Putin has three objectives in Syria, and fighting ISIL is the least important of the three. The very fact that their first, heavy-handed military operation was targeted not against ISIL but the more immediate Free Syrian Army threat to the regime, is gratuitous proof of that. He also wants to shore up the Assad regime, or at least give it a breathing space to regroup, and in the process ensure that Moscow has a say in the country's future and any potential post-Assad regime. But Syria itself is not that important to him: His overriding objective is a wider one, to open some cracks in the wall of economic and diplomatic isolation around Russia. In a signature Putin move, he stirs up greater chaos and then offers the West a choice: deal with him in the hope he can and will help fix the problem, or watch him stir up even greater chaos.

Of course, in an equally signature way for Putin, this is good tactics but bad strategy. For the moment, he has forced Washington to talk to him, softened some of the language on how Assad ought to go, and generally enjoyed springing another surprise on the West. But Moscow simply cannot deploy the kind of forces to Syria that could meaningfully change the arithmetic of the war and save the regime. It also means the Russians are now vulnerable: When something goes wrong, as it always will in war, they will face the terrible choice of pulling back and looking weak or doubling down and getting sucked deeper and deeper into this bloody vortex of factionalism, repression, jihad and revolution.

***

'The West is not likely to be kinder to Russia because of its adventurous policy.'
By Anders Aslund, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, was an economic adviser to the government of Russia from 1991 to 1994 and Ukraine from 1994 to 1997

President Putin appears to have multiple objectives with his military offensive in Syria. For the past year, he has been looking for a possible short victorious war after his war in Donbas turned out to be neither victorious nor short. He needed a diversionary maneuver to downplay the failure of the war in eastern Ukraine, so that he can let it slow down. After a lot of trial and error, he seems to have settled on Syria, which has many advantages. The United States has no clear policy, and Europe cannot even think of a policy while being flooded with Syrian refugees. Assad is Russia's oldest and closest ally. Together with Iran, Russia can shore him up. A Russian-Shiite alliance with Iraq and Iran embarrasses the United States. Putin can bomb the at least 2,500 Russian citizens who fight with ISIL. Putin can thus push the United States and Europe to closer interaction with Russia.

But this tactic has serious shortcomings. The West is not likely to be kinder to Russia because of its adventurous policy, which contains the risk of direct military conflict with U.S. forces. The West will certainly not give up its sanctions against Russia because of this adventurism. A war in Syria with modern arms is likely to be quite expensive, and Russia's GDP is set to fall by at least 4 percent this year, and Crimea and Donbas are very expensive. The price of oil and the ruble have fallen by half in a bit more than a year, and so has Russia's GDP in current U.S. dollars. Russians do not want to fight in the Middle East. There is no obvious end to this tragedy. Thus, Putin's new Syria policy looks dangerous and may be outright destabilizing in Russia.

***

'[Putin] is, as the Russian expression goes, combining the pleasant with the beneficial.'
By Keith Gessen, Russian-born novelist, journalist and co-editor of n+1

Putinist Russia is like a bad funhouse mirror for Western politics: many of the same actions, but cruder and without the elaborate justifications. So to answer the not so difficult question of what Putin is up to in Syria, it might be worth asking first what we are "up to" in Syria. What are we up to in Syria? In order to bring about peace we are dropping thousands of bombs; in order to help the Syrian people gain freedom we are arming their men to kill. An administration that came to power promising that it would unwind the disastrous wars of the previous regime has found another one for us to join.

As for Putin, he is, as the Russian expression goes, combining the pleasant with the beneficial. It is pleasant to foil the United States' poorly laid plans; it is beneficial to save one of Russia's few allies from collapse. Like us, he is bombing from the sky, hoping to murder enough people that his friends can get on with their lives. What is Putin up to in Syria? Nothing good. And nothing new.

***

'Putin's overarching aim is to boost his public approval ratings'
By Gregory Feifer is author of "Russians: The People Behind the Power"

Russia wants the opposite of resolution in Syria. Its main interest is to complicate the situation on the ground in order to take international center stage. Propping up Assad, Moscow's sole Middle East ally, forces Western countries to seek to divine the Kremlin's motives and some even to believe Russia has become indispensable for peace in the Middle East.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Vladimir Putin's overarching aim is to boost his public approval ratings by sticking it to Washington and its allies, which is what passes for restoring Moscow's Cold War power these days. That's crucial for propping up his corrupt authoritarian regime when Russians are suffering isolation and economic recession. Claiming to fight ISIL while actually bombing US-supported rebels and other rivals is classic Putin, whose taunting subterfuge represents a KGB officer's vision of foreign policy. Although he's a wily political tactician when it comes to the interests of his kleptocratic regime in the short term, Putin will go down as a geostrategic failure because he's ultimately eroding Russia's power and prosperity.

***

'Russian television just changed the subject from Ukraine to Syria.'
By Timothy Snyder, Housum professor of History at Yale

(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.

***

'Russia wants to be sure that it's not ignored if and when the West succeeds in implementing a broader, more effective solution to the Syria-Iraq-ISIL problem'
By William Courtney, adjunct senior fellow at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation, a former U.S. ambassador to Georgia and Kazakhstan, and special assistant to the president for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia

In deploying its warplanes over northern Syria, Russia may well be pursuing parallel goals of seeking new relevance in the region with a show of power, while at the same time weakening the enemies of the Bashar -Assad regime. If the attacks can be portrayed as contributions to the U.S.-led coalition's fight against the Islamic State, all the better.

Russia seeks most of all to buttress central, secular authority in Syria. This is why it struck targets in Homs, a traditional area of opposition to the Assad regime, not an Islamic State stronghold. Moscow has signaled for some months that it recognizes that Assad is gradually losing legitimacy and power.

Moscow is leaving it to the United States and its allies to conduct the real fight against the Islamic State, even though in his United Nations General Assembly address earlier this week Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke as if countering ISIL was Moscow's top priority. Russia lacks the military punch to make much difference in this fight.

Russia wants to be sure that it's not ignored if and when the West succeeds in implementing a broader, more effective solution to the Syria-Iraq-ISIL problem. This is a task far beyond Russia's capabilities, but one that America, the West, and regional powers may be able to accomplish.

***

'Military involvement in Syria carries big risks.'
By Steven Pifer, director of the Brookings Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative, was special assistant to the president and senior director for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia on the National Security Council from 1996 to 1997 and U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 1998 to 2000

Vladimir Putin's decision to engage militarily in Syria is driven by a mix of motives. He wants to bolster the Assad regime. Russia has long had a relationship with Damascus, one of Moscow's few international allies and its main foothold in the Middle East, and he does not want to see the Syrian government collapse. Mr. Putin also wants to show that Russia is a major player on the world stage and can challenge the United States.

Whether or not Washington and Moscow can cooperate on Syria remains to be seen, but given differences over Assad and whom to target, the question may be less one of can they cooperate than can they avoid Syria growing into an even bigger problem on the U.S.-Russia agenda?

Finally, Mr. Putin appears to calculate that the image of a strong Russia taking a leading role on international crises will play well domestically. Perhaps, but military involvement in Syria carries big risks: Russia could get pulled into a quagmire, and a recent Levada poll shows that 69 percent of Russians oppose sending troops to Syria.

***

'This looks more like short-term showmanship than long-term strategy.'
By Thomas de Waal, senior associate, Carnegie Europe Center

Vladimir Putin has as many reasons for wanting to get involved in Syria as Barack Obama does for staying out.

The current Russian regime sees in Assad's Syria its truest friend in the Middle East and its own reflection, a secular one-party autocracy fighting domestic dissent and Sunni extremism. Active support for Assad reinforces two of Putin's long-held credos: the need to pursue with extreme force the "war on terror" (an idea he cherished before George W. Bush) and an anathema of regime change. So the operation both recalls Putin's beginning as Russian president, propelled by the 1999 war in Chechnya, and reveals his fear of an end.

Putin's Russia is also an "information-based dictatorship," which draws its legitimacy from the support of the television-watching public. As intervention in Ukraine has deteriorated into a nasty intractable mess, "The War on ISIL" is meant to be a new popular TV series in which Russia again bravely fights terrorists and outwits the West. As ever with Putin, this looks more like short-term showmanship than long-term strategy.

***

'Where does Mr. Putin go from here? He probably doesn't know yet.'
By Eugene Rumer, director of the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the U.S. National Intelligence Council from 2010 to 2014

By launching his own bombing campaign in Syria, Mr. Putin has proved that Russia too can do its part to contribute to havoc in the Middle East. Other than that, he is probably pursuing several goals, none of them mutually exclusive: support for Assad by destroying his enemies-various opposition groups and maybe even ISIL; some of these groups reportedly include fighters from Russia, which provides Mr. Putin with a collateral benefit. He has successfully redirected the conversation from his aggression in Ukraine-another side benefit of involvement in Syria. He has positioned himself as a power broker in the Syrian war-he can't deliver a solution there, but nobody can do it now without him, either. He has asserted himself at the expense of the United States, as U.S. officals complain, but the United States can do little about Russian airstrikes targeting U.S.-backed militias opposed to Assad.

He has once again proved the pundits wrong when they said he was crippled by Western sanctions and falling oil prices. Where does Mr. Putin go from here? He probably doesn't know yet. He'll adapt his tactics to the situation as it changes. It is not clear there is a strategy behind it. To paraphrase the late Yogi Berra, if he doesn't know where he is going, he'll end up someplace else.

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 #23
Washington Post
October 7, 2015
Here's why Putin wants to topple Ukraine's government, not to engineer a 'frozen conflict'
By Robert Person
Robert Person is an assistant professor of international relations and comparative politics at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He specializes in the foreign and domestic politics of Russia and the post-Soviet states.

Is Russian President Vladimir Putin trying to engineer a frozen conflict in Eastern Ukraine? That's what some observers argue: that the main goal of sending troops there is to create permafrost, much like what Russia has going in Transdnistria, Moldova, and Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia.

Those conflicts have been described as "a string of nasty small wars [that] have been settled not through peace deals but simply by freezing each side's positions." Neither side can win a decisive victory. And so the nasty little war eventually freezes into long-term suspended animation: The dispute remains but fighting ceases.

But that's not what Russia wants in Ukraine. A frozen conflict would harm, not help, its strategic interests there. It's far more likely that the conflict will keep burning, despite formal cease-fire agreements.

Putin wants to topple the Ukrainian government. Here's why.  

A little more than a month ago, here at the Monkey Cage, Samuel Ramani put the conventional wisdom this way: "Putin wants a frozen conflict. It costs less and threatens more."

But that analysis conflates means and ends. Since Viktor Yanukovych fled his palatial estate in Kiev in February 2014, Putin's goal has been to destabilize and topple the pro-Western government that took over Ukraine. Russia has taken advantage of unexpected opportunities since then, including reclaiming Crimea. But Russia will not allow equilibrium in Ukraine until Petro Poroshenko's government leaves power and is replaced by one that keeps Ukraine firmly in Moscow's orbit.

Harvard scholar Mark Kramer offers a compelling explanation of the Kremlin's worry about revolution at home and abroad, which dates from the electoral protests in Russia in 2011-2012. That's when tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets to protest alleged electoral fraud. Although the demonstrations never seriously threatened Putin's government, scholars agree that that was the moment Putin recognized he could no longer count on the passive consent of the Russian masses as he crafted a political system around his own power.

Russia scholar Lilia Shevtsova has dubbed the protests the "end to the post-communist status quo." Suddenly Putin could picture mass resistance to his rule. Of course, even 60,000 Russians in the streets were a tiny minority of Russia's population of 142 million. But Putin could look over at the Orange revolution in Ukraine and the Rose revolution in Georgia, in which peaceful protesters overthrew their governments, to see that vocal minorities could quickly become powerful.

With this as background, Kiev's Maidan revolution presented a dual threat to the Kremlin. Some international relations scholars such as John Mearsheimer have argued that the Kremlin considered the prospect of losing Ukraine to the West a disastrous external security threat, especially if Ukraine were offered NATO membership someday.

But that wasn't the only threat. As Kramer writes:

"This unexpected [overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych] alarmed the Putin administration, raising fears that the Ukrainian revolution might inspire forces in Russia to think about doing the same. ... At a minimum, the Russian authorities wanted to use the opportunity to seize Crimea and to adopt measures that would destabilize and humiliate the new Ukrainian government, making clear to the Russian public the undesirability and high costs of mass upheavals."

Initially, annexing Crimea and intervening militarily in Eastern Ukraine looked promising as a way to destabilize and topple the Kyiv government. Russia's actions threatened Kiev with the humiliation of an unchallenged land grab in Crimea; the loss of territory to separatists in the East; the demoralizing military defeats by rebels and unmarked Russian troops; and the Kiev government's inability to solve its massive domestic challenges.

Combined, these could potentially spark an elite or mass-led backlash against the young government - and thereby bring down the Ukrainian government without a massive Russian invasion.

Russia wants change, not a stalemate.

It didn't work. Eighteen months after Russian soldiers first appeared in Crimea, Poroshenko's government in Kiev still stands. Predictions of its collapse call to mind Mark Twain's famous quip that "reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated."

Russia has failed to achieve its key strategic objective in Ukraine. It has not replaced the post-Maidan government with one willing to grant Russia significant influence in Ukrainian policymaking. And a "frozen conflict" won't help.

A frozen conflict, like those in Moldova and Georgia, implies that Poroshenko's government has lost control over the territories in question. But that may actually help Kiev. In excising themselves from Ukraine proper, the breakaway regions in the East and their Russian backers are walled off from national politics. They're quarantined, unable to influence and destabilize the government directly.

Furthermore, a truly frozen conflict is just that: frozen, a relatively stable stalemate. Neither side can change the status quo. Separatists cannot seize new territory; the central government cannot recapture control of the disputed territories.

Scholars recognize that such conflicts can flare up unexpectedly. But once these disputes "freeze," they do not usually lapse back into large-scale fighting. That's a problem for Moscow. Major combat might threaten the stability of the Ukrainian government. By contrast, a frozen conflict allows Kiev to turn its attention and resources toward urgent domestic reforms.

A truly frozen conflict would actually increase the Ukrainian government's chances of survival, despite the tremendous territorial cost.

Russia cannot risk a full-scale hot war in Ukraine.

Russia's strategic interests in Ukraine require not a frozen conflict but an active one. A frozen conflict in Ukraine, would be a major failure of Russian foreign policy. Which means that the reestablished cease-fire in Ukraine on Sept. 1 should be seen skeptically. Fighting between Ukrainian forces and the Russian-backed rebels will almost certainly return.

But it probably won't be large-scale fighting in Eastern Ukraine. This summer, many expected that an impending Russian-backed offensive by the separatists would reignite the war. That didn't happen. Western sanctions, combined with low oil prices and Russia's economic troubles, may be restraining Russia.

Apparently, Russia's leaders realized that completely abandoning the cease-fire negotiated in Minsk and resuming a hot war would result in deeper sanctions, stiffer Western opposition and further isolation from international financial networks - just when foreign capital is crucial for Russia's economic recovery.

In short, reigniting a hot war in Ukraine would be extremely costly for Russia, both directly, through the cost of waging war, and indirectly, through additional sanctions.

The future is not war or peace, but a continuing simmer.

If neither war nor peace are likely, then what will the future look like in Eastern Ukraine? For now, it will probably look much like the summer of 2015: ongoing low-level conflict with casualties on both sides, but no major offensive that could tip the balance. Unable to return the situation to what it was before, the Ukrainian government is unlikely to risk losing its next-best alternative, a stable frozen conflict. And Russia won't be likely to risk a military offensive.

Instead, the Kremlin probably will carefully calibrate its actions in Eastern Ukraine, dialing its intervention up or down as needed.  Russia has proved remarkably adept at scaling the intensity of fighting as needed, and will probably keep doing so. Today, the Kremlin requires fighting that's just hot enough to keep the conflict simmering and to distract Kiev from domestic concerns - but not so hot that war boils over.

Putin is unlikely to be satisfied until Kiev has a pliable pro-Russian government. Until then, Russia will keep using all the diplomatic, political, economic, social and military means it can to throw Kiev off balance.

This new status quo will be anything but stable, and anything but "frozen."   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Defense Department or the U.S. government.

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 #24
USAToday.com
October 7, 2015
Lviv becomes a model for development in Ukraine
By Hal Foster, Special for USA TODAY

LVIV, Ukraine - Even as the conflict between the national government and separatists in eastern Ukraine continues, this city of 750,000 in the west is engineering a renaissance that could be a model for the rest of the country's development.

Its makeover includes a new airport, soccer stadium, Ukraine's first combination shopping-and-entertainment center, a new industrial park anchored by Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, new roads and tram lines, renovation of historic landmarks and Western European-style bike paths.

Spearheading the transformation is Mayor Andriy Sadovyi, who has not only attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in public-works financing but whose campaign against local government corruption has led to fewer demands on businesses to pay bribes to government bureaucrats.

Under Sadovyi's nine-year tenure, Lviv has expanded its world-class, information-technology sector to 15,000 workers. Other businesses also are thriving, including tram manufacturer Electron, Lviv Handmade Chocolate and companies that make clothes for the European brands Hugo Boss and Zara.

"Lviv's example shows that all of Ukraine can be successful" if it puts its mind to it and tackles corruption, Sadovyi said in an interview.

Sadovyi said he has personally lobbied several Ukrainian presidents and prime ministers, European governments and development banks for financing to transform his city. "In politics, some people talk and some people do," he said. "When there's a problem, a mayor must solve it - not just pass it on."

A major payoff of the infrastructure-building is a doubling of tourism - from 1 million visitors a year before the European Football Championships in 2012 to a projected 2 million this year. The games were split between Poland and Ukraine, with Lviv one of the host cities.

Lviv has sparkling attractions, from castles and forts dating to the 1500s to an opera house that many say is the second most splendid in Europe, behind the Vienna Opera House.
Ukrainian supporters react during the Euro 2016 qualifying

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which has financed much of Lviv's turnaround, is so enthused about the progress that it has opened its second Ukraine office in the city. The other is in the capital, Kiev.

Lviv, a lovely Austro-Hungarian Empire city with buildings dating to medieval times, has long considered itself European. Its residents deeply resented the Soviet occupation of the city from the end of World War II until the Soviet Union's breakup in 1991.

It is not surprising, then, that Lviv has been one of the strongest voices in favor of Ukraine joining the European Union rather than aligning itself with Russia - and that its model for development has been its neighbor Poland, which has prospered under EU membership.

But closer ties between Ukraine and the EU have been on hold since last year, when efforts by a new pro-Western government in Kiev to seek agreements with the EU resulted in Russia's seizure of Ukraine's Crimea Province and the start of a rebellion by Russian-backed separatists in the east.

Despite tensions with Russia, Lviv continues to establish links to the West. One of the leaders of the city's IT sector is Eleks, which does 98% of its work for companies outside Ukraine, according to Chairman Oleksiy Skrypnyk. Its projects include special effects for Sony Pictures' James Bond and Spiderman films and other Hollywood studios.

The 900-employee company's other clients are in such fields as cellphones, medicine, financial services, insurance, enterprise and quality assurance.

Eleks is also doing work for the Ukrainian military, much of it without charge to support the war effort, said Skrypnyk, who is a member of parliament. With Russian drones providing reconnaissance and weapons-targeting information to separatists, "the question of Ukrainian drones became very critical," he said.

Eleks is not only building components for aerial drones, but is also developing a ground drone to help foot soldiers. The prototype looks like a small tank.

Another Lviv high flyer, Electron, made television sets during Soviet times, but after Ukraine's independence, it switched to heaters and air conditioners, exporting many to Europe.

Two years ago, Electron started making mass-transit vehicles to help Ukraine replace 80% of its dilapidated Soviet-era fleet.

"We have already sold seven electric trams to the city of Lviv and seven to Kiev," Electron President Yuriy Bubes said.

Electron's trams cost 40% less to make than those manufactured in Western Europe. The company is building them to European Union standards so it can export there.

Electron, whose workforce has been as high as 3,000 in recent years, also makes electric trolleybuses, diesel and electric buses and ambulances.
Chocolate figurines depicting Russian President Vladimir

Lviv Handmade Chocolate's business has soared since Andriy Khudo founded it six years ago.

Khudo has capitalized on Lviv's chocolate-making renown with a new business model: franchised chocolate-based restaurants and gift shops. The outlets are in 30 Ukrainian cities and Krakow, Poland.

Part of the 630-employee company's appeal is being hip. In a country where Russian President Vladimir Putin is widely despised, it has rolled out a chocolate figurine of him in a prisoner's uniform. It also produces a chocolate Kama Sutra figurine.

Khudo credits Lviv's tourism boom with his ability to open four chocolate restaurants in the city. "We are in the center" of the Lviv surge, he enthused.

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#25
Kyiv Post
October 4, 2015
Hostages of Putin's regime
By Yuliana Romanyshyn

Ukrainians Nadiya Savchenko and Oleg Sentsov are the most high-profile hostages of the Kremlin regime to be caught up in Russia's war against Ukraine.

The show trials of military pilot Savchenko and filmmaker Sentsov have received media coverage worldwide, and both have had top lawyers defending them, although that didn't stop Senstov being sentenced to 20 years in prison on sham terrorism charges. Savchenko, the subject of the long-running #FreeSavchenko Twitter campaign, could face a life sentence if convicted under the murder case trumped up against her by Russian prosecutors.

While in custody, Sentsov and Savchenko have even published books: "Short Stories" by Sentsov and "A Strong Name - Nadiya" by Savchenko.

But at least 10 other Ukrainian hostages are being held by the Kremlin, activists say, and they don't get nearly as much attention.

And those 10 are only the ones whose names are known to activists, coordinator of the EuroMaidan SOS initiative and co-founder of the Let My People Go campaign, Oleksandra Matviychuk says.

"We don't know exactly how many people were arrested in Russia as civilians or captured as military servicemen in the Donbas," she says.

The 10 known hostages were arrested in Crimea, eastern Ukraine, on the Russian border, or in Russia while conducting business trips. Over 18 months the Russian security services have released only one Ukrainian, Yuriy Yatsenko, who spent a year in jail suffering torture and threats.

Ukrainian human rights activists, when another case of hostage taking becomes known, keep abreast of the investigation and search for lawyers in Russia, and for money to pay them. They also contact relatives and collect evidence of ill-treatment of Ukrainian hostages.

The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry also tries to free the hostages. "We know of their existence, their stories, and give protection to them," says ministry spokesman Dmytro Kuleba.

Kuleba said that this protection involves setting up contacts between prisoners and Ukrainian consuls in Russia, and raising awareness of these cases at the international political and public level. One ministry initiative was to have Sentsov's movie "Gamer" shown in 30 countries. Another was to help pay the lawyer fees of imprisoned Ukrainians.

Sentsov was detained by Kremlin security agents in May 2014, along with Oleksandr Kolchenko, Oleksiy Chirniy, and Henadiy Afanasiev. All were charged with being members of the Ukrainian ultranationalist organization Right Sector and plotting terror attacks in Crimea.

Kolchenko, a pro-Ukrainian and antifascist activist in Crimea, was tried with Sentsov and sentenced to 10 years. Chirniy and Afanasiev pleaded guilty and were each convicted to seven years in jail.

Afanasiev was the first of the Crimean four to be tried - in December 2014, seven months after being kidnapped in Simferopol on May 9, 2014. After 10 days of brutal mistreatment and torture following his capture, he was transferred to Moscow. He pleaded guilty and gave evidence against Sentsov and the other activists.

His attorney Alexander Popkov told the Kyiv Post that Afanasiev remembers the faces of all of his torturers. Besides being beaten, Afanasiev was exposed to constant psychological pressure. "He was threatened with reprisals against his mother," Popkov said. "He was told 'We will bring your mother to the next room, and you will hear us doing the same to her.'"

But at Sentsov's trial, Afanasiev suddenly withdrew his testimony, saying he had confessed under duress. "I decided to do it, if there was a chance it to save innocent people," Afanasiev told his attorney Popkov. "I can't live with not telling the truth."

The second hostage, Chirniy, got the same sentence in April after he plea bargained with investigators. His lawyer, Ilya Novikov, who also defends Savchenko, said Chirniy was tortured just after his arrest.

According to Novikov, Chirniy pleaded guilty to avoid the 12-year sentence demanded by prosecutors. He was accused of setting fire to the office door of the Party of Regions offices (renamed as the United Russia Party after Russia annexed Crimea), with an intent to intimidate citizens, which the court deemed a terrorist act, Novikov said.

"He did not believe that Ukraine or human rights activist could help him, and decided not to break the deal, so as to 'not make it worse,'" Novikov wrote on his Facebook page after the verdict.

Matviychuk believes that Ukrainians should support even those who confessed to crimes and testified against others. "You say anything they want under torture," she said.

Caucasian cases

Mykola Karpiuk was kidnapped on the Russian border in March 2014, his relatives say. The Ukrainian consul, and seven lawyers had been attempting to visit Karpiuk for 18 months of detention, but only the last lawyer succeeded, in mid-September. Karpiuk is facing a possible life sentence on charges of heading an armed gang that participated in conflicts in Chechnya from 1994 to 2000, and killing Russian servicemen.

Karpiuk's case is complicated by the fact that he was a member of Right Sector and the UNA-UNSO (Ukrainian National Assembly - Ukrainian People's Self-Defence) political party when he was captured in May 2014. At least two of his associates from Right Sector, Oleksandr Muzychko, aka Sasha Bilyi, and Ihor Mazur, aka Topolia, indeed fought in Chechnya.

Another Ukrainian, Stanislav Klykh, who was captured in August 2014, faces the same prison term as Karpiuk. According to Russian propaganda TV channel LifeNews, Russia's absurd claim that Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk fought in Chechnya is based on evidence allegedly obtained from Klykh and Karpiuk against him.

Karpiuk was cruelly tortured to get that testimony, according to his attorney Marina Dubrovina. He said nothing, but was forced to sign documents written by investigators, Dubrovina said. "He was tortured - if he said something they didn't want - they electrocuted him. He could hardly hold a pen because he had been hanged by his wrists."

Dubrovina says the cases of Karpiuk and Klykh differ because Klykh wasn't an active participant in radical organizations. Klykh "is an intellectual with two university degrees," and has never been to Chechnya, she says.

"The only one positive thing in their cases that there will be a jury trial, and perhaps that gives some hope for objectivity," Matviychuk hopes.

So-called spies

73-year-old Yuriy Soloshenko was on a business trip to Russia when he was arrested and charged with buying "secret state equipment." Soloshenko used to work as a director of the Znamia defense company in Poltava, and had made many business trips to Russia.

His son Oleksandr says the trial will be closed, and there is little chance of an acquittal. Soloshenko faces 20 years in prison for espionage, which at his age is effectively a death sentence.

Oleksandr said he had to find a lawyer himself, as the Foreign Ministry provided no help, only promises. "He (Soloshenko) was told that the consul doesn't want to see him, while the consul was actually not allowed to see him," Matviychuk said.

The relatives of another alleged spy, Valentyn Vuhivskiy, have not released information about him. EuroMaidan SOS activist Maria Tomak says Vuhivskiy was captured in Crimea in September 2014. After being tortured at the former SBU security service department in Simferopol, Vuhivskiy was transferred to Moscow. Facing 20 years in jail, Vuhivskiy also plea bargained.

Viktor Shur's case is distinct from others because technically he has Russian citizenship, but lived in Chernihiv. He got a Russian passport when he worked for an oil company in Russia, but on retiring, Shur returned to his hometown.

While in Russia, Shur took a picture of cows grazing at an abandoned military airport in Bryansk. He was charged with high treason and faces up to 20 years behind bars.

Complete fabrication

Serhiy Lytvynov from Luhansk Oblast was captured in a Russian hospital near the border in August 2014. It is still unclear under why he crossed the border. According to Russian propaganda channel Russia 1, Lytvynov is charged with the mass murder of women and children in the Donbas.

"All of these cases are fabricated, but his case simply falls apart," Matviychuk says. Lytvynov was accused of committing the murders while he was in the Dnipro-1 volunteer battalion, but he was never actually a member. According to investigators, Lytvynov participated in mass rapes, but the named victims and even the buildings where the alleged rapes took place do not exist.

He is now awaiting trial in Rostov-on-Don, and faces 20 years in prison. Matviychuk says Lytvynov's trial is a sham. "We look at these cases, and discover violations that show they're politically motivated and fabricated," she says.

Matviychuk says the Ukrainian hostages differ in age, experience, and even their politics - while some actively support independence, others are indifferent. "But they are united by the fact that the Russian propaganda machine is trying to portray Ukrainians as the enemy, coming to Russia to commit arson and acts of terrorism," she says.

Hostages in Crimea

Khaiser Dzhemilev, the son of Crimean Tatar leader Mustafa Dzhemilev, was sentenced for murder in Crimea, but illegally transferred to Russia and given a three-and-a-half year sentence there for the same crime. "This is a case of direct pressure on Mustafa Dzhemilev," Matviychuk says.

Khaiser Dzhemilev's lawyer Nikolay Polozov said Dzhemilev was taken from Armavir in Krasnodar Krai in Russia to Astrahan Oblast on Sept. 26. "Khaiser Dzhemilev's location is unknown at the moment," Polozov told the Ukrinform information agency. "Obviously, his illegal transportation is linked to the political activities of his father - (namely) the blockade of Crimea."

Apart from Dzhemilev, the Russian occupation authorities in Crimea have imprisoned eight people, mostly Crimean Tatars, for opposing Crimea's annexation, taking part in the EuroMaidan Revolution, and alleged terrorism.

Muslim Crimean Tatars Ruslan Zeitullaev, Nuri Primov, Rustem Vaitov, Ahtem Chyihos, Ali Asanov, and Mustafa Dehermendzhy face 10 years in prison for rioting.

Also in Crimea, EuroMaidan activists Oleksandr Kostenko and Yuriy Ilchenko are accused of inciting conflict.
 

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