#2
Levada.ru
October 7, 2015
Russians split over trust in president, army and law enforcers - poll

The percentage of Russians who fully trust the president, armed forces, both houses of parliament and police is highest in the last three years, according to poll results published on Russian independent polling organization Levada Centre's website on 7 October.

The poll was conducted on 18-21 September 2015 among 1,600 respondents of age 18 and older in 134 settlements of 46 regions in Russia.

Majority of respondents, or 80 per cent, said Russia's president "fully deserves" their trust, the highest percentage since 2013 when this poll was started. The highest levels of trust since 2013 in the same category had also been revealed for the army (64 per cent), the security services (50 per cent), both houses of parliament (40 per cent each), courts (29 per cent) and police (29 per cent).

Less people, according to the poll, trusted the media: 34 per cent in 2015, down from 36 per cent a year earlier.

At the same time out of those polled 7 per cent said the president "entirely does not deserve" their trust, up from only 4 per cent in 2014. Some 17 per cent thought the same of the government, up from 10 per cent in 2014, while 11 per cent did not trust the security services, up from 9 per cent a year earlier. Also rising were percentages of those who did not trust lawmakers, political parties, courts, as well as local and regional authorities.

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 #3
Over 70% of Russians back Russia's air campaign against ISIL in Syria - poll

MOSCOW. Oct 8 (Interfax) - Seventy-two percent of Russian citizens interviewed by Levada Center sociologists have expressed their positive attitude toward Russia's air campaign against Islamic State (ISIL) targets in Syria.

Fourteen percent of respondents criticized these airstrikes and another 14% were unable to articulate their attitude to Russia's air force operation in Syria.

The survey was conducted in 46 Russian regions on October 2-5 and involved 1,600 people.

Its results show that 31% of Russians approve of their country's air campaign targeting ISIL positions in Syria, 14% of respondents are outraged by it, 25% of those polled neither approve nor disapprove of it, and another 22% said they do not know the situation well enough.

When commenting on the start of Russia's airstrikes in Syria, 47% of respondents said that Russia should support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's efforts to fight ISIL and Syrian opposition groups. Another 28% of those polled believe that Russia should not interfere in these military conflicts altogether.

At the same time, 8% of respondents suggest that "Russia ought to join the Western coalition fighting ISIL and the Assad regime", 8% admitted their lack of knowledge regarding this matter, and 21% of those polled were undecided.

Forty-nine percent of respondents said they are confident that "the U.S. and Western countries, on one hand, and Russia and Syria's current leadership, on the other, will be able to reach common ground on ways to settle the situation in Syria", 30% of those polled do not think that such an option is possible, and 21% were unable to answer the question.

Thirty-nine percent of respondents believe it is quite probable that Russia's military interference in the Syrian conflict could escalate into a 'new Afghanistan' for Russia, 7% of those polled expressed conviction that this would happen, 32% described such an option as unlikely, 6% ruled it out, and 13% were unable to answer the question.

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 #4
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
September 25, 2015
William Brumfield: 'We see things in Russia we never expected to see'
What Americans know about Russian architecture is mainly thanks to the work of one man, who has photographed the country since 1970.
Lara McCoy Roslof, RBTH

It's not easy to get William Brumfield to talk about himself. For Brumfield, 71, the foremost authority on Russian architecture in the U.S., the focus of any conversation is the work. And the work, first and foremost, is the photography.

"The photography has always been the fulcrum for me to convey this knowledge that I have about Russian culture and architecture," Brumfield said.

Although photography has defined Brumfield's career, he did not train as a photographer. He studied Slavic languages and literature at the University of California at Berkeley, receiving his PhD in 1973.  Perhaps fittingly, he first picked up a camera on his first trip to the Soviet Union in 1970.

The only time a conversation with Brumfield hints at anything personal is when he talks about the connection between the Russian North and his native American South.

Like the South, the Russian North is full of structures that tell the story of a culture clinging to its heritage while searching for a way forward.

"For all the losses, the trauma... there is an extraordinary wealth, much of it in a ruined state. But for the historian, the ruin is also important. This is something of extraordinary power. What created it? Because there's nothing visible sustaining it now."

Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, Brumfield did his undergraduate work at Tulane University in New Orleans, where he has also taught since 1980.

A tireless advocate for the recognition and preservation of Russian architecture, Brumfield has published countless articles in English and Russian as well as several major books, including "A History of Russian Architecture," (1993) widely used as a textbook in Russian studies courses and "Lost Russia," (1995) which Brumfield described as a book that tried to put Russian architecture into a familiar Western context, "this trope of the ruin as a point of meditation."  

His more recent work, including "Architecture at the End of the Earth," which was published in June, approaches Russian architecture more on its own terms, as an anomaly that doesn't fit into the traditional narrative of Western art and architectural history.

"It's interesting because it's Russia," he said, adding that in his view, "architecture is as much an expression of Russia as its music or literature. Although it's rare to find any of the great novelists talking about the architecture of a church, for example, that ambience is there."

He has received numerous accolades for his work over the years, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000, but he says he doesn't seek out these opportunities, rather they find their way to him.

When the National Gallery of Art approached him about creating an archive of his photographs in 1985, he says it was "not because of some abstract idea - we need to fill in Russia, there's a gap here - but because they saw an article of mine and my photographs."

The National Gallery archive led to connections at the Library of Congress, which supported other research trips, which in turn led to other grants.

"These linkages have been so unpredictable in my career, but the image has to be there," he said. "There's a higher logic here that goes beyond anything that I could have predicted, it's the power of the image - it never ceases to amaze me how people respond to that."

Brumfield's unique ability to create these powerful images of Russian architecture comes from his roots as a scholar of Russia itself, according to Blair Ruble, former director of the Kennan Institute in Washington, DC and a longtime friend of Brumfield. "His interests grew from his love of Russian culture, which makes his photography different from that of an architectural photographer.  No one - certainly no foreigner, and only a handful of Russians at most - have ever attempted as comprehensive a compendium of the Russian built environment as has Brumfield," Ruble said.

For now, Brumfield is focusing is on archiving the images that exist in pre-digital form - as well as taking more.

Last winter, he was invited to photograph the memorial to victims of the Gulag in Norilsk, a formerly closed city that even today requires an invitation to visit.

He has been approached about doing a book on Siberia, but is concerned about the time it would take to develop a unifying concept for such a vast area and make the trips to take the photographs. He would like to do a trip to the Russian south and photograph some cities he has never visited, including Krasnodar and Astrakhan. Such a trip would take him in the footsteps of early 20th century photographer Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky, whose early color photographs of imperial Russia prefigured Brumfield's own work.

"I'm whittling down this menu of options, but fate has a way of determining these journeys," he said.

"How much I'll be able to get done in my allotted span is very much an open question. I've become almost fatalistic about it now."

Although he says that he has spent more time in Russia than any American who doesn't live here, Brumfield has no desire to move to Russia and do photography full time, because that would mean giving up teaching.

"We're trying to create educated citizens and they need to know something about Russian culture," he said. "To the extent that my work can reach out to our students, that's good. I do my job and I have to believe that it's going to make a difference to someone, because I know that the people who started me on this journey were just dedicated teachers, not art historians."

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 #5
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
October 7, 2015
10 must-read books about Vladimir Putin
On the 63rd birthday of Russian President Vladimir Putin, we've assembled a list of the ten books that provide the greatest insights into his thoughts, ideas, and worldview.
By Anastasia Borik
Anastasia Borik is a Ph.D. student at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO-University). She has both journalist and diplomatic experience having worked as a Xinhua News Agency reporter (Moscow Bureau) and as a personal assistant of the Ambassador of the Russian Federation to the Republic of Colombia.

Oct. 7 marks the 63rd birthday of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and to mark that occasion, we have selected the top ten books that best reveal his persona.

1. "First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia's President Vladimir Putin," Nataliya Gevorkyan, Natalya Timakova, Andrei Kolesnikov. (2000, Public Affairs)

This book, which contains frank conversations with journalists at a time when Putin's political career was still on the rise, is probably the most extraordinary book about Russia's president. The numerous conversations reprinted in this book - about parents and children, youth, work and personal life, on friendship and betrayal - gives the reader an opportunity to look at Putin as an ordinary person, with personal weaknesses and interests.

2. "The Strongman: Vladimir Putin and the Struggle for Russia" by Angus Roxburgh. (2013, I.B. Tauris)

The European view of Putin is presented by Angus Roxburgh, a British journalist who worked in Russia and even consulted the Russian leadership on media policy. In his native Britain, Roxburgh has been criticized for his overly positive attitude towards Putin, even though in his book, the author demonstrates a desire to write about Russia's president as objectively as possible, showing his strengths and weaknesses, his mistakes and successes.

Mr. Roxburgh did not create a biography about Putin, but attempts to put a spotlight on his activities in domestic and foreign policy, to explain his motives and decisions since Russia-West relations are directly dependent on perceptions of the Russian leader.

3. "Putin: A Guide For Those Who Care" by Vladimir Solovyov. (2008, Eksmo)

Vladimir Solovyov is one of the best-known political journalists, broadcasters and political consultants in Russia. His book sheds light on the entire path of the leader, elaborating on specific key periods for Putin, for example, his struggle against the oligarchs in the early 2000s, which Solovyov believes became a kind of personal matter of the president. The author attempts to take a look on how Putin has changed since his rise to power, and recalls the ideological inspirers and teachers of the Russian leader.

4. "The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin" by Steven Lee Myers. (2015, Knopf)

A new book released in late September by New York Times journalist Steven Lee Myers, who worked for many years in Russia and observed the formation of Putin's regime first-hand, attracts attention, at the very least due to its provocative title.

However, this is not the only reason this book is remarkable - it is, in fact, the most complete up-to-date English-language biography of the Russian leader, which talks about his origins, his achievements and failures on the path to power. Furthermore, the author attempts to explain what really motivates Putin, which benchmarks he attaches the most importance to when making decisions, and how he sees the world.

5. "Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?" by Karen Dawisha. (2015, Simon & Schuster)

In September 2015, an updated version of the book "Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?" was released, which caused quite a stir as early as 2014, when it first hit the bookshelves. Dawisha, in analyzing Putin's path to the presidency, has come to a disappointing conclusion: The nature of the Russian leader's power lies in its greed and uncontrolled tendency to steal resources from his own people.

The author believes that Putin has surrounded himself with colleagues of the same ilk - kleptomaniacs - who are gradually destroying Russia. The special character of this book, according to the official release, consists in the huge amount of research carried out by Dawisha (her sources included Russian and Soviet archives, as well as articles written by journalists and insiders).

6. "Sex, Politics, and Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia" by Valerie Sperling. (2014, Oxford University Press)

The reader should not be misled by what appears to be such a frivolous study of the Russian leader. In actual fact, Sperling, for whom this is not the first work on gender and sexual topics in Russia, analyzes the image of a "macho man" that is constantly being formed around the Russian leader. She especially looks at the conservative attitudes of the country's population, in which Putin plays the role of a defender of traditional values in the fight against "homosexual" Western influence.

One can argue with the author's view as to how much Putin's desire to look like a "real man" influences the domestic and foreign policies of Russia, and yet due to its non-standard approach, we include this book in our Top 10 list.

7. "Putin Era" by Roy Medvedev. (2014, Vremya)

The Russian (and formerly Soviet) writer and historian Roy Medvedev has devoted more than just a book to Putin, as he has had many personal meetings with the president over the years, and remains on friendly terms with the country's leader. In a sense, Medvedev's works, including the "Putin Era," are a kind of an ode to the Russian leader, in which Putin appears as the savior of Russia and the Russian people, the real mastermind behind the development of the country, and its return as a major player in the foreign policy field.

However, we should also note the particular perspective of the material discussed in this book - this is the perspective of a publicist and historian, an expert on leaders such as Joseph Stalin and Yuri Andropov.

8. "Putin: His ideology" by Alexei Chadayev. (2006, Evropa)

In this book, the Russian public figure, publicist and politician Alexei Chadayev attempts to reconstruct the ideology that has guided Putin in his decision-making. The book focuses on numerous public statements made by the President, the texts of which the author analyzes in an effort to identify the "general rules" that paint the ideological picture of Putin.

Chadayev is a young and energetic politician, who has been a member of the opposition and has worked in the ruling political party as well. He has taken great pains in working on this text "to help the reader get a better grasp of the logic behind the activity and inactivity of the Russian authorities during the Putin Era."

9. "Vladimir Putin: Renaissance Man" by Kenneth Goddard. (2015, Stock & Brick)

This book is yet one more attempt by a Western author to solve the mystery that surrounds the persona of Vladimir Putin. Goddard offers the reader not only a diverse set of facts about the Russian leader, but also the author's own interpretation of these facts. The analyst strongly feels that the West too often paints a portrait of Putin in exclusively gloomy tones, calling him a dictator and an imperialist. Whereas in actual fact, the essence of Putin's activities is in striving to make Russia a strong and independent country, to achieve its "rebirth."

10. "The Putin Mystique" by Anna Arutunyan. (2014, Olive Branch Press)

A very specific look at Putin and "Putin's Russia" is given by the Russian-American author Anna Arutunyan. She was born in the U.S.S.R., but was educated and lived in the United States for many years, returning to Moscow as an adult. Arutunyan tries to grasp the origins of the Russian president's power, finding these in the culture and mentality of the Russian people.

 #6
The Unz Review
www.unz.com
October 7, 2015
Putin's IQ Is 130
By Anatoly Karlin

Pumpkin Person (PP), an up and coming IQ blogger, has estimated Putin's IQ to be about 127. [http://pumpkinperson.com/2015/10/03/estimating-the-iq-of-vladimir-putin/]

He derives this based on a z-factor analysis of Putin's status as the most powerful White person in the world (135), based on the 0.4 correlation between IQ and income (and presumably, power), minus an adjustment for his relatively dimunitive height (-8), based on the 0.24 correlation between IQ and height.

The method is of course questionable for any number of reasons. That said, for someone who openly admits to knowing "virtually nothing" about Putin, this is entirely understandable. Even people who know more about him will have a hard time making very good estimates because of the paucity of public records of Putin's academic performance.

That said, I think in general that is a fair estimate, not least because my own impression of Putin's IQ has also long been about 130.

Below I will be trying to substantiate this estimate with more detail.

First off, a little expounding on PP's argument

PP probably makes too much of the height thing. First of all, he uses an estimate of 63.5 inches (161cm), versus the official figure of 67 inches (170cm), on the basis that there is a conspiracy theory to inflate Putin's height. Second, he compares Putin's height with old American dudes (174cm), whereas the proper comparison would be with old Russian dudes (168-170cm as shown right). In fact, if we posit that there is no conspiracy to overstate Putin's height, and it really is 170cm, then he would be entirely typical of men of his generation. (This would make him similar to Napoleon, another very powerful man who was reputed to be short but was in fact entirely average in that respect for a late 18th century Corsican).

Of course these points are also rather moot in the sense that you'd also then have to adjust down for Flynn Effect, especially since this is the 1950s USSR you're talking about, i.e. still a semi-Third World country in socio-economic terms, with residual malnutrition. This would have almost the same exact effect of knocking 5-10 points off and getting 125-130.

(Another point raised by the commentator SFG is that another issue to consider is that shorter dudes face face extra headwinds to success due to purely social factors, so the IQ of a short person who manages to attain power nonetheless might be expected to be higher, if anything. PP argues that the correlation between height and money is actually very slight once adjusted for IQ. But I am not sure you can so cavalierly extend this from from money - which you can make without much in the way of social status - to power - where having status and a telegenic presence is a necessity).

Additional arguments for Putin having an IQ of 130

He got into Leningrad State, one of the USSR's elite universities (though not the most elite Moscow institutions - but then as far as I know he didn't apply to them anyway). His performance, though classified, was evidently good enough for him to be eventually accepted into the KGB's foreign espionage department. However, his career progression in the KGB was slow. He only began to rise fast after joining the world of 1990s Russian politics.

He is known for making witty rejoinders and having a very good grasp of facts, numbers, and statistics in discussions.

He is fully fluent in German. Since becoming President, he has also developed semi-fluency in the English language, despite an obviously crowded schedule. All this hints at a solid degree of intelligence.

According to insider accounts, his typical reading material consists of bulky historical tomes. That suggests high intelligence and discipline.

He is also genuinely religious, and religiosity has a negative correlation with IQ. His family are both working class; grandfather was a chef for Lenin and Stalin. But the Putin family is also surprisingly long-lived, especially by Russian standards - most of them tend to live into their late 80s and even 90s. Longevity is positively correlated with IQ.

Though I have trouble recalling any very specific examples, my general impression is that he is NOT at an elite level of intelligence (i.e. 145+). This loose impression is backed up by another commentator at PP's blog, Konstantin Surzhikov, who appears to be both Russian and familiar with psychometrics (he might be this guy with an IQ of 144).

"Hi there. I am blessed to know several persons with recorded IQ's from 123 to 142 (sd 15,age-addjasted western norms). So, I'd like to put my 50 cent here. Putin acts and talks as a person with IQ definitely lower than 137, but slightly higher than 125. My subjective impression that it can be a bit higher than 127, but all in all it fits your guess very well/ I understand clearly that this kind of approach can hardly be better than your calculation , but my only - but important - advantage is that I am a Russia citizen, a native Russian, watching that very active and talkative guy on TV here for years. Well done anyways!"

Could Putin's IQ be much higher than 130? The argument from geopolitics.

There is a well-established stereotype of Putin "outplaying" Obama on the world stage (see all the Putin playing chess while Obama plays checkers rhetoric floating around), which PP alludes to.

"One problem with estimating Putin's IQ at 127 is that there is reason to believe Obama's IQ is close to 140. Can Obama really be smarter than Putin when we keep seeing reports that Putin is always outsmarting Obama."

It has been found that IQ correlated postively with assessments of US Presidential leadership performance, so this is certainly worth bearing in mind.

However, there are two caveats to be borne in mind here.

First, we will only know how geopolitically successful (or not) Putin truly is not today, but in a decade's time or so. As I have covered on this very blog, the concept of mnogokhodovka - the concept that Putin is carrying out a long-term, very intelligent series of chess moves that will end up in the creation of Novorossiya and the defeat of the US empire that - is fast becoming a laughing stock amongst both liberals and anti-Kremlin nationalists. Even the pro-Kremlin nationalists who created this concept are now abandoning it.

Second, there are reasons to believe the correlation between IQ and leadership performance in Russia might not hold nearly as strongly in Russia as it does in the US. That is because the Russian elites are far less loyal to Russia than American elites are to the US. Some literally care more about having access to French cheese than the lives and wellbeing of their less privileged compatriots in Crimea. Much more exposed to Western influence thanks to their international contacts and English language proficiency, they tend to develop a cargo cult mentality towards the West, which expresses itself in cringing obeisance to Western foreign policy and the wholesale adoption of Western ways, and should the people object, they could always be dissolved and another elected (as per Bertolt Brecht). This is based on the idea that Western acculturation will reap great dividents and that the West itself has Russia's best interests at heart. Of course, neither has been true historically.

It is worth noting in particular that Gorbachev, possibly the USSR's most intelligent leader, was also the one who failed in the most singular, spectacular way: His country ceased to exist, and his approval ratings in Russia remain within polling margins of error to this day.

This does not just apply to the politicians, but to voters too. A map of voting patterns in Moscow shows the richest places displaying the highest support for liberal pro-Western figures like Navalny, with the very highest support for them registering in areas around elite universities. As such, supporters of patriotic and conservative currents in Russian politics (as opposed to liberal) suffer from a cruel bind - we are objectively dumber than the people who would have us kneel before the likes of Obama.

However, as the HBDsphere will know better than anyone else, this does not mean we are wrong.

"The media and academia are constantly promoting multiculturalism and these elites may make more of an effort to brainwash high IQ people because they're the future elites. Little effort is made to convince low IQ whites to embrace multiculturalism because it doesn't matter what they think; and indeed allowing low IQ whites to dwell in racialism further stigmatizes it as low class, which is exactly what the intelligentsia wants. Further, low IQ whites might be harder to brainwash anyway because they don't have enough brains to wash."

Ergo Russians and the Western media/political complex.

Could Putin's IQ be much lower than 130? The argument from plagiarism, aggression, corruption, and unwillingness to engage in debates.

Putin did have his PhD thesis written for him in the 1990s, but every Russian politician was doing the same thing. In Russia's context, that say's nothing about Putin's IQ.

Aggressiveness is negatively correlated with IQ. Probably so is corruption.

putin-vs-obama Putin is undoubtedly more "aggressive" than the average Western politician, as humorously documented by numerous Internet memes like the one on the right. In his series of 1999 interviews documented in the book From the First Person, Putin admitted to being involved in street fights and consorting with riffraff in his schoolboy days (though this may have motivated by a strategy to project an "everyman" image). Even so, no conclusions can be made from this on his intelligence. That is because Russian politics and business is systemically more aggressive than in Western countries. That's simply what you have to do to survive there.

For instance, take Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Thanks to a skilful and well-funded "rebranding" campaign and cultivation of ties with American neocons in the 2000s, he is primarily known in the West as a genteel Jewish intellectual of moderate social democratic views who got repressed by Putin for supporting corporate transparency and human rights. But in the long-forgotten 1990s, he had the reputation of a gangster who abused minority investors and had his business and political rivals whacked. And yet this very unscrupulous and possibly outright murderous man undoubtedly has a very high IQ.

And these examples can be extended almsot indefinitely so far as the Russian elites are concerned.

Ergo for corruption. Though it need hardly be said that everyone is still waiting for any evidence of his $70 billion offshore fortune.

One final observation is that Putin has studiously avoided debates with political rivals. Performance in debates correlates well with IQ, so if Putin's was low, he might feel afraid to take on his political challengers so directly. But this has a perfectly rational explanation. In all Presidential elections to date, his poll ratings have massively outstripped those of the Communist, nationalist, and liberal candidates. He is not obligated to debate any of them by law. Doing so would only introduce the chance of him making some costly rhetorical blunder and suffering a big blow in the polls. As such, to participate in them at all would be a mistake.

While he has not participated in debates, he does field unrehearsed questions from journalists and citizens on a somewhat regular basis. My observation is that for the most part, his answers tend to be lucid, erudite, and witty. This is a fair but not great indicator of IQ.

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 #7
Reuters
October 8, 2015
'Czar Putin': as secure as he seems?
By Guy Faulconbridge and Stephen Grey

Vladimir Putin turned 63 this week with his now traditional display of sporting prowess, and an announcement that Russian naval vessels had launched a wave of missiles against Islamic State in Syria.

The Russian leader has never appeared more confident and his grip on power never more secure. In the past two years he has outmaneuvered the West in Crimea, eastern Ukraine and Syria. Western sanctions have apparently failed to blunt his ambition.

But some of Putin's former allies, those who have fallen from grace during his 15 years in power, paint a different picture: Putin's position as Russian leader may be far less assured, they say.

"Putin is a hostage of his entourage," Sergei Pugachev, who once counted the Kremlin chief as a close family friend, told Reuters in an interview in Paris.

The animosity between Pugachev and the Russian government is well documented. Pugachev says his $15 billion business empire spanning shipbuilding, coal and real estate was expropriated by Kremlin rivals. He is suing Russia for $12 billion. Russia, meanwhile, is seeking Pugachev's arrest for embezzlement and misappropriation of assets, charges Pugachev denies.

Given the secrecy of Putin's Kremlin, it was impossible to confirm Pugachev's account. But interviews with other Russian businessmen and foreign diplomats painted a similar picture, albeit a partial one.

The descriptions may offer rare first-hand views of Putin's court and some clues about a question that has preoccupied oligarchs, Western governments and even Putin's advisers: How long will Putin remain as Russia's paramount leader?

For Pugachev, the keys to the puzzle are Putin's perceptions of his own personal safety, finding a successor and the clan battles over the spoils of a former superpower.

"Until he finds a path to an arrangement which secures his safety, he will remain in power," Pugachev said.

"He no longer has confidence in his closest circle and if I were in his place I would not trust them either: What they say to his face and what they say when he is not there is completely different."

When asked about Pugachev's comments, Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: "We see them as the words of a citizen who is on a wanted list."

CZAR PUTIN?

Since Putin was appointed acting president by Boris Yeltsin on Dec. 31, 1999, he has been cast, variously, as Czar, reformer, secret policeman and Russia's richest man.

In diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks in 2010, U.S. diplomats depicted Putin as Russia's "alpha-dog" autocrat who ruled by allowing corrupt officials and spies to steal. The Kremlin called that idea ridiculous.

Friends and enemies have cast Putin as a leader attempting to unite modern Russia with its Soviet superpower past and the mystical traditions of pre-revolutionary Orthodox Tsars.

The Kremlin has shown Putin grappling with a Siberian tiger while supporters this year unveiled a bust in his home town showing him as a modern Caesar. The New York Review of Books has written of "The Emperor Vladimir".

But Pugachev's description of a less secure leader chimes with the views of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man, who was arrested in 2003 before his YUKOS business empire was ripped apart and its main production units taken over by Gazprom and Rosneft.

"No matter what the PR machine and propaganda of the Kremlin might say, President Putin is no superman," Khodorkovsky, who was freed in 2013 after a decade in Russian jails, told an audience in London in February.

"The Russian business and ruling elite is becoming increasingly anxious in response to Putin's political course; even those who are loyal to him. It is obvious that autumn has arrived for Putin."

MOSCOW RULES

For Pugachev, the cruder interpretations of Putin's power miss the underlying instability of post-Soviet Russia: Putin must navigate the chaotic clan battle for wealth with care.

"These people, it is the way they are, will serve anyone who defends their venal interests," Pugachev, 52, said of the clans around Putin.

"These people are hostages to their crimes - basically the whole establishment - and they need someone who will at minimum represent their interests. If the situation changes and they consider Putin is not sufficiently defending their interests then I think anything could happen."

Behind the patriotic swagger of wealthy Muscovites, according to this analysis, there lies a danger for Putin: The fall in the oil price and Western sanctions for his war in Ukraine have reduced the profits of this moneyed class.

A Western diplomatic source said Putin was poorly informed and it was unclear how long he would remain in power given Russia's economic problems. The rouble has halved in value against the U.S. dollar since 2012, the year Putin was elected for a third term.

"In these situations, you see nothing and then all of a sudden it goes," the diplomat said.

An influential Russian businessman, speaking on condition of anonymity because of a Russian taboo on discussing Putin's future, said: "The economy is very bad."

"These situations are impossible to predict but they can change very fast. When it happens it goes very fast," the Russian said. He used the Russian word for 'brittle' to describe the current economic and political situation.

LEADER FOR LIFE?

Pugachev said Putin's shift toward confrontation with the West over Ukraine flowed from his reliance on the guidance of hardliners inside the Kremlin.

"He trusted the hawks and he has had a lack of success. He is not a leader of the hawks himself but over the 15 years he has migrated between the different circles," he said.

Another Russian businessman with knowledge of the Kremlin cast Putin as an isolated leader who understood he could never leave power.

"No one tells him the truth," said the Russian who spoke on condition on anonymity. "He cannot leave. He knows that. He believes in plots."

One Russian emigre, however, cautioned against overestimating internal opposition.

"Yes, Vladimir Putin has to take into account interests of various stakeholders," said Sergei Guriev, an economist who fled Russia in 2013 for France.

"However, in the current system - certainly, since the Yukos affair - nobody within the Russian elite could come even close to him in terms of power and authority. If he personally decides to do X, no clans or elite groups will be able to stop it."

So will Putin stay in power for life?

"It is difficult for me to say how it all ends," Pugachev said. "I think that stagnation is probably here to stay for a long time."

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 #8
Levada.ru
October 7, 2015
Less than 50 per cent of Russians would vote for ruling party - poll

Less than 50 per cent of Russians would vote for the ruling One Russia party if parliamentary elections were to be held next Sunday, a survey by the Russian independent pollster Levada Centre has shown, as published on its website on 7 October.

Of total respondents, 43 per cent would give their voice to One Russia, 11 per cent to the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), 5 per cent to the LDPR (formerly the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia) and 3 per cent to A Just Russia.

Of those who are ready to vote and have already made their choice, 63 per cent would vote for One Russia, 16 per cent for the CPRF, 8 per cent for the LDPR and 5 per cent for A Just Russia. Liberal opposition leader Aleksey Navalnyy's Progress Party would get 2 per cent of votes.

The poll was conducted amongst 1,600 people in 46 regions on 18-21 September.

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 #9
Moscow Times
October 8, 2015
Justice Ministry Refuses to Remove Elections Monitor Golos from 'Foreign Agents' List

Russia's Justice Ministry has refused to exclude independent elections watchdog Golos from the list of "foreign agents," the Vedomosti newspaper reported Wednesday.

Golos said on Twitter back in July that the ministry had begun the process of removing it from the list. Ruling that its inclusion was an "error," the ministry also refunded fines the NGO had paid for not registering as a "foreign agent," the Twitter statement said.

But during an inspection in July, ministry officials discovered that Roman Udot, a member of the organization's council, had received a payment last year from Lithuania's International Election Research Center, which was considered foreign funding, Vedomosti reported.

At the same time, the work of reporters at Grazhdansky Golos, a newspaper founded by Golos, was considered political activity, the report said. Under a law adopted in 2012, NGOs that receive foreign funding and are involved in vaguely defined political activities must register as "foreign agents."

"The Justice Ministry is making things up ... they consider Udot's author's fee, which has nothing to do with the association, to be foreign funding," Grigory Melkonyants, co-chair of Golos, told Vedomosti.

According to a political analyst Alexei Makarkin, the "foreign agent" law was adopted specifically to crack down on Golos, because the association monitored the elections of 2011, "purportedly de-legitimizing them."

"The organization was the main object [of the law,] it was written for this organization, the decision was to either shut it down or compromise it. Later this mechanism was used more widely," Makarkin was cited by Vedomosti as saying.

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 #10
www.rt.com
October 7, 2015
Opposition MPs call for all Russian media to report foreign funding

A fresh bill drafted jointly by all opposition parliamentary parties requires Russian media to inform the state watchdog about any money received from foreign sources, or face fines and closure.

According to popular business daily Kommersant, the bill provides for amendments to the Russian Law on Mass Media and the Administrative Code, and orders all companies registered as mass media outlets to report any financing from foreign sources within a 30-day period. Violation of this rule would lead to confiscation of the sum received from abroad and fines of between 30,000 and 50,000 roubles ($470-$780) levied on the top managers of the media company. Repeated violations would lead to a court ruling revoking the mass media license of the company.

The demands do not apply to money received for advertising.

"Currently, certain countries are increasing their pressure on the Russian mass media through economic leverage, oppressive agencies and so-called 'rulings of judicial bodies.' At the same time, we see attempts to directly influence the Russian information space through extending foreign grants to Russian mass media in order to cause biased reporting and create a distorted picture of political reality," the explanatory note attached to the draft bill says.

"If someone transfers money from abroad, our citizens must know about it. There is a lot of negative information about Russia right now. I am not against objective coverage, but when they start to inflate tensions it becomes bad," said one of the MPs who drafted the bill, Vadim Kharlov, of the center-left Fair Russia party.

Communist Party MP Aleksandr Yushchenko dismissed allegations that the new bill could become a censorship tool and noted that it was important to oppose the bias of certain lobbying groups that use money to attract journalists to their side. "Information is not just traded goods, it is a weapon and we must remember this," he said.

The new bill is similar to the Russian "Law on Foreign Agents" introduced in 2012, which orders all NGOs engaged in politics and receiving any funding from abroad to register as foreign agents or risk substantial fines. Groups with "foreign agent" status are banned from sponsoring Russian political parties, but otherwise their activities are not restricted.

The Foreign Agents Law caused a lot of controversy and protests since its preparatory stage. Russian and international NGOs have criticized the new law as discriminatory and contested it in Russian courts and in the European Court of Human Rights, but with no result. The sponsors of the act and top Russian officials have repeatedly emphasized that its main purpose was to provide better information for voters that would eventually benefit democracy.

Earlier this month, President Vladimir Putin allowed for some corrections to the NGO foreign agents law, but said that they would concern more precise definitions of the terms used in it with the general scheme left intact.

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 #11
AP
October 7, 2015
The Kremlin Cracks Down on Internet in Russia, But Sites Are Finding Loopholes

Galina Timchenko recalls how proud she felt when the Russian news website she edited reached 3 million users per day. When she reported the figures to the website's owner, he was horrified.

"At that moment something snapped inside and I understood that this is the end, because there cannot be such an influential resource that is not controlled by the Kremlin," Timchenko said.

A month later, she was fired and a more Kremlin-friendly editor was brought in to run the website, Lenta.ru.

The shakeup at Lenta.ru last year came as the government was pushing through a slew of new laws to strengthen its control over the Internet, which President Vladimir Putin has described as a "CIA project."

Some of the laws, including those giving the government broad leeway to block websites and blogs, have proven possible to get around.

"Putin and his people are sure that all things are constructed like a hierarchy, but the Internet is a net and everyone can participate in the process," said Irina Borogan, who co-authored a new book about the Russian Internet called "The Red Web."

Other measures may prove more formidable, including a law that came into force on Sept. 1 obliging companies to keep servers containing information on Russian citizens on Russian soil. Russian Internet companies also have been asked to provide information on users of social networks and online money-transfer services.

For years, it had been the televised image of Russia that counted for the Kremlin, since television is where most Russians get their news. Independent TV stations were taken under control or pushed off the air, but cyberspace was left alone.

This began to change after the Arab Spring revolutions toppled governments across the Middle East and anger at election fraud in Russia led to a wave of unprecedented protests against President Vladimir Putin in 2011-2012.

Then came the Ukraine crisis of early 2014, when pro-Western protests drove out the Russia-friendly president and Russia responded by quickly annexing Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula.

Timchenko was fired in March 2014, after running an interview with the leader of the Ukrainian far-right group Right Sector. Most of her staff walked out with her, and some of them have joined her at a new media project-in-exile called Meduza.

The site is based in Latvia because, Timchenko says, new Russian Internet legislation makes it impossible to predict when a media organization could come under pressure.

"It's a difficult situation because none of these laws are needed - all the laws that have been brought into force in the last one and a half years. Because terror is not when they get everyone all at once, but when they can get anyone at any moment for any reason," Timchenko said in an interview with The Associated Press.

In 2014, Putin signed a bill allowing authorities to ban any online content deemed "extremist." Critics of the law have said it is so loosely worded it is difficult to tell what content is actually deemed extremist and therefore is open to abuse by authorities simply seeking to ban content they don't like.

Another restrictive law passed in 2014 requires bloggers with more than 3,000 followers to register as media organizations.

Several opposition websites accused of extremism have been blocked altogether, including that of former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, a harsh critic of Putin now in exile.

The blog of opposition leader and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny also has been blocked, but his supporters have found ways to fight back.

"When the law came into force and Alexei Navalny's blog was blocked for the first time, we decided to get around the ban legally by creating various mirror sites of the blog," said Ruslan Leviev, an active blogger and opposition activist who has also monitored the conflict in Ukraine and Russia's military presence in Syria.

Leviev believes the government's attempts to control the Internet are failing. He describes the new measures as "fragile and faulty, and often having completely the opposite effect."

When Roskomnadzor, the federal agency that regulates the Internet, blocks an opposition website, it rises sharply in popularity because it has been blocked, Leviev said.

When the military conflict broke out in eastern Ukraine in April 2014, Russia deployed a new method to influence the flow of information on the Internet. In what has been dubbed a "hybrid war," new websites and social media accounts were set up to flood the Internet with information, blurring the lines between reality and fiction.

"Everyone was surprised how quickly the Kremlin changed tactics with this conflict," said Andrei Soldatov, the other co-author of "The Red Web," who has studied the Internet and the Russian security services for more than a decade.

"When Russia has faced problems with its neighbors in the past, different tactics were used: DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks against Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, and so on," he said. "Everyone expected something similar in Ukraine, but it never happened. Instead we got these attacks of trolls."

Also in April 2014, Pavel Durov, the founder of Vkontakte, Russia's most popular social network, was forced out after he refused to cooperate with Russian authorities when they demanded information on Ukrainian protesters.

The change of management at Vkontakte, which has 240 million registered users from across the Russian-speaking world, was seen as reminiscent of the earlier taming of Russia's national television channels and Timchenko's Lenta.ru.

Yet despite the crackdown, users continued to post material that was undesirable for the Kremlin: Russian soldiers posted accounts of the fighting in eastern Ukraine that contradicted Kremlin denials that troops had been sent to support the separatists, and relatives wrote posts about funerals of Russian servicemen who had died fighting there.

The information was shared by other users and ended up being widely covered in the international media.

An information war may be on, but the porous nature of the Internet makes it nearly impossible to impose a complete ban, Soldatov said.

It is too early yet to say if he is right. The Kremlin's campaign to restrict the Internet continues apace.

Apple and Booking.com are among those who have rented servers in Russia to comply with the law that went into force on Sept. 1. Twitter and Facebook, both favorite tools of the Russian opposition, have yet to say whether they will comply.

However, Roskomnadzor, the Internet regulator, said it would have no problem blocking these services if they proved to be problematic for Russia.

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 #12
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
October 8, 2015
Russia prepares for more economic belt-tightening in 2016
Experts believe that, barring a sudden collapse in oil prices, the 2016 budget will be tough but balanced.
By Dmitry Dokuchaev
Dmitry Dokuchaev is a Russian journalist and columnist, who deals with economic issues. He has extensive experience in different Russian media, including Izvestia, Moscow News, The New Times, The Echo of Planet.

By mid-October, the Russian government will most likely have approved the draft federal budget for 2016. In any case, this financial document must be submitted to the State Duma no later than Oct. 25, a change from the previous deadline of Oct. 1. Moreover, for the first time since 2008, there will be no three-year plan: the document covers 12 months, period.

Three for the price of one

"There's no behind-the-scenes intrigue. It makes sense to adopt a one-year budget for 2016 given the high economic uncertainty, taking into account the parameters for the following 24 months on a purely indicative basis," commented presidential aide Andrei Belousov.

In a climate of high uncertainty, volatility and limited reserves to soften the blow, the government wants to keep its hands untied, says Economic Expert Group head Yevsey Gurvich, adding that decisions will be taken step by step as the situation develops. As an example he cites the crisis in 2009, when the budget reality deviated from the forecast by a third, although in normal "quiet" years the forecast error does not exceed 2-3 percent.

The economic crisis in Russia is clearly to thank for the tightening of budgetary procedures. Having had their fingers burnt by last year's dip in oil prices, the collapse of the ruble and the manual reformatting of the budget in spring, number-crunching officials have become less bold in their predictions.

After all, if the reality turns out much worse than the forecast, the specter of sequestration will arise and painful cuts to public services could ensure. The advantage of this approach is the far greater rigidity and (hopefully) accuracy of budget structures.

Making ends meet

The parameters for the 2016 budget are not yet known, but the motto is already clear. It was formulated at a recent government meeting by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who called on his subordinates to "economize on all fronts." That rings in unison with the task set by President Vladimir Putin to keep the budget deficit to within 3 percent of GDP.

Recall that the growing budget hole at the start of the year prompted the authorities to reduce budget spending in real terms by 10 percent. Since then, Russia's economic woes have not diminished: oil prices have not risen, GDP continues to fall, and sanctions have not been lifted, which means that the policy of austerity is set to continue.

Nonetheless, despite the continuing economic downturn and the drop in real wages, coupled with the acute weakening of the ruble, the Russian authorities' main priority is budget stability.

The cuts will not be evenly spread, and the only question is which of the "fronts" will suffer the greatest losses. Most of the polled experts believe that investment projects and programs will take the brunt, while social spending in nominal terms can probably be maintained at the current level or perhaps slightly index-adjusted, but in real terms they will still decline due to high inflation.

"I think there will be some increase in spending in 2016 against this year. A level of 4-5 percent is probably a realistic scenario. Anything higher would signify that the government is somehow trying to stimulate the situation; a lower figure would mean tight budget policy and austerity," says Alfa Bank chief economist Natalia Orlova.

She notes that despite the talk of spending cuts in previous years, outlays continue to grow. "The growth that we observe more or less corresponds to the economic reality, i.e. it indicates that the government is indeed trying to preserve budget stability in the first instance, not increase spending," adds Orlova.

As for budget expenditures, they can be kept to a minimum in 2016, keeping the deficit at the required 3 percent level. This opinion was expressed by Russian Minister of Economic Development Alexei Ulyukayev. He believes that Russia can afford a deficit of 3 percent, as this is a "lesser evil" than budget sequestration. However, compared to what was planned in the three-year budget for 2015-2017, costs still need to be cut.

With regard to investment costs, the matter relates to reducing outlays on building new infrastructure and procurements of equipment, and on switching from expensive foreign equipment to more affordable domestic substitutes.

In addition, the government may change its priorities regarding permanent facilities, and simply cut costs or raise the limit on the participation of private business in construction projects at the federal level.

The key variable: global oil prices

Meanwhile, the Russian Ministry of Finance proposes to cut fiscal expenditure in the next year to 650 billion rubles (approximately $10.45 billion at today's ruble-dollar exchange rate). The resulting budget deficit, which to date exceeds 1 trillion rubles ($16 billion), will be covered by the government's so-called "rainy day fund" - the Reserve Fund.

But on top of the budget planning issues, the main uncertainty remains the price of oil over the coming year. As the experience of the past few years shows, predicting the dynamics is a fool's game; the figure can only be guessed at. But a great deal depends on this hypothetical number, since oil revenue accounts for around half the Russian budget. Therefore, the price of a wrong forecast is very high.

In any event, to hedge its bets, the Ministry of Economic Development has already included an "apocalyptic" scenario in its new macroeconomic forecast, which provides for an oil price even lower than today's $55 per barrel. If that were to happen, cheap oil could deprive next year's budget of about 2 trillion rubles ($32 billion), the dollar exchange rate could remain above 75 rubles, and the recession would probably last until 2017. Of course, this scenario is best avoided. But it is important for the government to consider all angles and not be caught off-guard.

Tighter belts all round

Most of the surveyed experts believe that, barring a sudden collapse in oil prices, the 2016 budget will be tough, but balanced.

"This budget will be much tighter than the current one. Social programs that were inflated by high oil prices will be slashed," said FBK Institute of Strategic Analysis head Igor Nikolaev. He says that a feature of the new budget will be that, unlike 2015, the cost cutting will hit the defense industry too, which was previously considered a "sacred cow."

As for the most problematic areas of the new draft budget, Nikolaev highlights the fact that the protracted fall in oil prices has seriously hit treasury revenue. As a result, pensions will not be index-linked to inflation, which last year was about 12 percent and is sure to be even higher this year. Most likely pensions will be indexed at 4-7 percent, which means a further decline in living standards.

The growing budget hole will have to be closed by the Reserve Fund, which can last for a maximum of one more year due to sanctions and restrictions on access to foreign financial markets. Overall, the budget is balanced, but the main risks stretch beyond 2016, believes Nikolaev.

The 2016 budget reflects the economic difficulties facing Russia," says Higher School of Economics academic director Yevgeny Yasin. In his opinion, the period of economic recovery based on high oil prices is over.

"The state used to be able to offer significant social guarantees, but now that's impossible. There is no way that the state can provide the same level of social protection as before. Sanctions and the growing budget deficit mean there will be lots of tighter belts in 2016," posits Yasin.

At the same time, he notes that the one-year budget, though tough, is probably realistic. This means that new shocks to the system - and mainly the wallets of the less well off - will probably be avoided.

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 #13
Business New Europe
www.bne.eu
October 8, 2015
Sberbank CIB Ivanov consumer confidence tracker shows mood blackens in Russia
Ben Aris in Moscow

WIth temperatures plunging more than 30C in a week, as an Indian summer gives rapidly away to snow, maybe it is no wonder the latest installment of Sberbank CIB's Ivanov Consumer Confidence Index shows Russian are feeling increasingly glum about their lives.

The thirteenth issue of the Ivanov index, that tracks spending and the mood of consumers in Russia found a "meaningful drop in the consumer confidence index from -14% in 2Q15 to -24% last quarter, as Ivanovs perceive no real macro improvements, while elevated inflation and stalling nominal wage growth are sapping household spending power and increasing price sensitivity."

Russia's economy appeared to stage a small recovery at the start of summer, but a fresh bout of oil price falls and more currency instability seems to have acted as a bucket of cold water for the average Russian.

"The country wealth index for the next 12 months returned to negative territory, from 5% in 2Q15 to -9% last quarter. Over the past 12 months, the national wealth indicator has plunged from -29% to -44%," Sberbank noted in their survey.

Confidence has been undermined by the wild swings in the currency and the number of Russians who describe the Russian economy as "shaky" is up to 85% in September versus 77% in the previous survey.

"We consider this to be a sobering effect after an artificially strong 2Q15, when Ivanovs were overly optimistic on personal and national welfare," Sberbank said.

The renewed pessimism is evident in "big ticket" purchases where the index tumbled to -34% after tentatively recovering to -29% in the second quarter of this year. Despite persistent record low unemployment which remains in single digits, clearly people are worried about their jobs and are putting off big purchases, especially after the orgy of buying that took place in December as consumers attempted to lock up their cash in tangible assets that would hold their value in a crisis.

Buy local, buy cheap

In the meantime, Russian shoppers are trading down to cheaper, locally-produced goods from the more expensive imported items: the share of Russians who now say they are more budget conscious when shopping is up to 69% in the third quarter from 63% in the second.

"For the first time since 3Q14, Ivanovs reduced the number of chains at which they shop from an average 2.9 in 2Q15 to 2.4 in 3Q15, in line with the 2014 average," Sberbank found. "This prompted a pickup in the number of visits per store from 1.07 weekly visits in 2Q15 to 1.29 last quarter. This indicates that customers are gradually returning to normal shopping patterns."

The bottom line is the exchange rate-savvy Russian population remains unsettled by the wild swings in the currency with eight out of ten Russians saying that "renewed ruble depreciation has had a negative impact on their spending, either via higher prices for certain items or via the generally gloomier economic outlook." Consumption is unlikely to pick up until some stability returns to the exchange rate regime.

However, Sberbank concluded the survey on an upbeat note saying that inflation has actually not added much to prices and that their panel's assessment may be overly pessimistic. "We expect a recovery in consumer sentiment once inflation risks prove to have been overstated. We assume that this will happen before the start of Christmas sales, which are critically important for the industry's full-year results."

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 #14
Business New Europe
www.bne.eu
October 7, 2015
The beginning of a resurrection for Russia's battered capital markets
Jason Corcoran in Moscow

Russian corporates locked out of international capital markets for the past 11 months due to the Kremlin's involvement in the Ukraine conflict can see light at the end of the tunnel.

A new agreement brokered in Paris on October 2 to hold elections in Eastern Ukraine, along with a ceasefire and a continuing withdrawal of weapons from the front lines, boosted hopes Russian companies will be allowed out of the funding purgatory imposed for President Vladimir Putin's annexation of Crimea and aggression in eastern Ukraine. The sovereign's credit default swap, which measures default risk, rallied by 29 basis points on Monday, October 5, after markets reopened. The ruble jumped 2% on the same day and is now at its highest since August 11 while Russia stocks rose as oil, the biggest revenue export earner, also advanced.

Norilsk Nickel, the world's biggest producer of Nickel, on October 7 sold $1bn in the first benchmark-sized Eurobond in a successful tilt to test the improved political temperature over Ukraine. The deal, which was the first bond issued by a Russian company in foreign currency since November, could over time open the floodgates for other issuers. Gazprom was this week roadshowing a possible euro-denominated bond in London, Frankfurt and Paris. Senior Moscow bankers told bne IntelliNews that Lukoil, the largest privately held Russian oil producer, is waiting in the wings with its own plans to test the bond market.

"The Paris deal over Ukraine could be a game-changer," the head of a foreign bank in Moscow told bne IntelliNews. "Other blue-chips may jump into the market if Gazprom can also swing it but I don't think it's compelling from an all-in perspective just yet as surely most would gag to pay junk levels when they are solid credits."

Some of Russia's largest companies can access ruble funding from the Central Bank at 3.5-4% and fund themselves more cheaply by swapping that into foreign currency rather than going straight to the dollar and euro markets. Issuers have been in the dog-house for a year and may now realise there is a premium to pay for that status.

Norilsk sold double what it was planning to and managed to secure a seven-year note yielding 6.625%, down from initial guidance of about 7%. That is the biggest deal from a Russian corporate since Gazprom sold a $700mn one-year bond last November. At the time, many issuers and bankers hoped Gazprom would crank open the market. Neither Gazprom nor Norilsk were sanctioned but both have been effectively smothered by a refusal of international lenders to take any Russia risk.

Benchmark deals are crucial for other companies seeking to refinance existing borrowings and to plan future capital expenditure programs in the midst of Russia's deepening recession.   

The placment could "open the door for issuance from other Russian corporates" considering various for refinancing short-term debt," according to an e-mailed note on October 7 from Sberbank CIB analysts. "The placement shows that international capital markets are not closed off for Russian corporate issuers, which is positive for the short-term outlook for Russia's current account," Sberbank CIB said.

This year alone, there was $16bn of euro and dollar Russian paper with a maturity date scheduled. Almost $4.5bn of that belongs to gas giant Gazprom while Rosneft, another state behemoth, must service or refinance $26bn in debt from the second half of this year till the end of 2016.

"An outright lifting of the sanctions can't be dialled back quickly," Tom Adshead, chief operating officer at Macro Advisory in Moscow, told bne IntelliNews. "What we could see is a marginal softening as Ukraine gears up to take control back of its borders. That would manifest itself in the banking sector first with a nod from the very top to compliance departments to start softening their internal guidance on how sanctions are interpreted."

The timing of a revival in Russia's capital market may seem strange as Putin moves his military toys off one lawn and onto another but the positive news flow from Ukraine seems to be outweighing developments in Syria - at least, for investors interested in Russia risk.

A ceasefire in eastern Ukraine in place since September continues to hold while the summit in Paris between heads of Russian, Ukrainian, German and French governments made progress on a new election law that involves special status for rebel-held areas of Ukraine.

!If Russia cooperates on Minsk 2 agreement, there is some talk that of some reward for Russia coming from the European side rather than the US," Adshead, whose firm advises international portfolio investors, said.

Some investors, however, remain to be convinced that Russia risk is back on the table.

Paul McNamara, who manages $4.5bn in emerging market assets at the investment firm GAM in London, pointed to tthe Norilsk deal being made up of mostly European banks. "There's no US banks in the syndicate, which is interesting for a US deal," McNamara told bne Intellinews. "If Paris is a game-changer, then I am the Pope."

Financial sanctions preventing some Russian entities from raising money in international capital markets have been far more effective than sectoral sanctions, asset freezes and visa restrictions. Even Russian companies not sanctioned are suffering from contagion as banks are unwilling to lend to any Russian company for fear of incurring the wrath of a US or UK regulator.

The inability of large companies like Rosneft to refinance their debts on the international market fuelled the collapse of the ruble and triggered a run on the banks in December. The oil giant sold a monster 625bn ruble bond, which intensified pressure on the currency as the market assumed it was to be used to buy dollars.

With equity and debt markets largely shut, the only limited activity in the past year has been through the syndicated loan market. Even there, only $3.2bn worth of deals have been made so far in a market, which historically was worth about $50bn a year.

Uralkali, Eurochem, Metalloinvest and Gazprom Marketing and Trading are some of the small band of companies that have managed to secure deals. Other names in the market now trying to close deals are coal miner SUEK  and steelmaker Novolipetsk Steel, which is struggling to close a deal worth $400mn following protracted haggling over pricing and "sanctions documentation", according to a senior banker working on the deal.

Putin's much-vaunted pivot to China has only resulted in piecemeal interest from Chinese and Asian banks in financing infrastructure projects of mutual interest.

Sanctions, the crash in commodity prices and the first recession since 2009 has decimated Moscow's investment banking community with many losing their jobs and the lucky few being relocated to London to work on other markets. Fees from mergers, bonds and equity deals for European banks dropped 61% to $42mn in the year to October 5, according to data provided to bne Intellinews by Freeman & Co in New York.  Fees earned by US banks plunged 90% to a paltry $9mn over the same period.

A reopening of Western debt markets could feed into the equity market and open the door to more deal-making. It could also lead to the lifting of informal bans on lending and new investments to Russian companies by international financial institutions such as the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development and the World Bank's IFC private equity arm, according to Adshead.

"Sanctions won't be lifted because they are formally linked to Crimea but we could see a loosening of the interpretation and that's all we need to get the show back on the road," said Adshead, a former EBRD banker.

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#15
Sputnik
October 7, 2015
The Syrian Campaign Nails Myths About the Size of Russia's Economy
By Alexander Mercouris

Anyone who reads Western media coverage of Russia's intervention in Syria will notice that a note of bafflement has crept in.

How can Russia, the country "that doesn't produce anything", whose economy is supposedly smaller than Britain's or even Spain's, and which is said to be economically on the ropes, able to conduct an air campaign in Syria?

The short - and obvious - answer is that Russia's economy is much bigger than Western political leaders and commentators imagine.

Not only would Britain or Spain be unable to mount the sort of air campaign the Russians are waging in Syria.

They cannot run a huge space programme, develop rockets like the Angara rockets, build a space centre like Vostochny, develop the Arctic, construct nuclear powered ice breakers, or feed themselves.

Nor can they build a bridge as rapidly as the one the Russians are building to Crimea.

Nor can they create alternatives to Google like Yandex, or alternatives to GPS like GLONASS, or  alternatives to SWIFT like the Russians have done in just a few months.

In military production, any idea any European state can simultaneously develop fifth generation fighters like the SU T50, tanks like the Armata, submarines like the Yasen and the Borei, or missiles like the Bulava and the Yars, is sheer fantasy.

Russia does all these things, and much else.

It does them without strain.  In the middle of a recession Russia's budget deficit is 3% of GDP - less than Britain's or Spain's; and roughly the same as the US.  Its balance of trade is in surplus.  So far from being financially exhausted, Russia has far lower levels of debt than any Western state.

Are the Russian people accepting lower living standards to pay for these things?

Hardly! Until this year living standards grew in Russia every year since 1998.  This year's fall in living standards is a one-off caused by the inflation that resulted from last year's devaluation of the rouble.  It has now run its course.

Based on my own necessarily subjective impressions, living standards in much of Russia, especially in Moscow, now compare favourably with the best in Europe.

What of the claim Russia can only do these things because of money it gets from energy sales?

Not only is this wildly exaggerated - the energy industry accounts for just 16% of Russia's GDP - but it treats the energy industry as if it was not a resource, which is absurd. Besides, saying this ignores the fact Russia is doing - not importing - the things it is doing.

Most people accept the conventional measure of Russia's GDP based on US dollars is wrong. The IMF and the World Bank prefer to estimate Russia's GDP on the basis of purchasing power parity.  On that basis Russia has the world's fifth biggest economy, roughly the size of Germany's.

Even that estimate in my opinion is wrong.  It is not that the statistics are wrong.  It is that what is being compared are sets of statistics rather than two totally different economies.

Through the ages the West has always felt a paramount (some might say desperate and certainly unhealthy) need for a real or a perceived enemy in order to thrive, Contra Magazin argues. At the moment it has chosen Russia to play this role.

I know Germany well.  I can confidently say that Russia's economy operates on a far bigger scale.  It is physically impossible for Germany to do many of the things Russia does without effort.  Conversely there is nothing Germany does that Russia cannot do if it commits itself to doing it.

The only economies that can match or surpass Russia's in technology and depth of resources - and can do all the things Russia does - are those of China and the US.

India, Germany and Japan can also do some of the things Russia does, but not all of them.

No other states come close.

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 #16
Forbes.com
October 7, 2015
Russia Turning The Corner On Sanctions
By Kenneth Rapoza

Russia has turned the corner, thanks in part to the recent candid, public appearances by its president, Vladimir Putin. The Sept. 29 interview with Charlie Rose in the suburbs of Moscow, his United Nations General Assembly speech about fighting terrorism in Syria, and Germany and France suddenly leaning more towards Russia on the Ukraine variable means Russia is looking less gnarly than it did a few months ago. For investors, this may be a time to start dipping into Russian stocks.

Politically speaking, it appears that Germany and France have grown tired of Ukraine's bitter divorce from Russia. Once in the middle, they are now picking sides. And it is Russia, they say, that is abiding by the Minsk II cease-fire agreement in east Ukraine and not the out-of-favor leaders in Kyiv. All of this bodes well for the lifting of sanctions perhaps as early as the first quarter, says Vladimir Signorelli, head of macro-research firm Bretton Woods LLC in Long Valley, NJ.

"There was news out of Russia on Friday that (German chancellor Angela) Merkel had basically acknowledged that Crimea would stay Russian. While I haven't seen any verification of that in the West, Crimea was never addressed in the Minsk II Accords. So if the rescission of sanctions on Russia simply requires adherence to Minsk II and given the popular discontent with the sanctions in Europe, I wouldn't be surprised to see pressure build against extending sanctions in January," he says. "An optimistic case might see the sanctions regime breaking down by March, certainly June 2016. And because markets are always keyed on the future, and this optimistic scenario looks increasingly likely, one could begin to position for this now."

One of the easiest trades into Russia is Van Eck's Market Vectors Russia (RSX) exchange traded fund.

On the economic front, Barclays Capital analyst Dan Hewitt said he expects inflation to collapse by 50% at least next year to 7%. That will give room for a rate cut by the Central Bank and give Russia's range-bound equities a bust, regardless of oil's direction.

Manufacturing PMI rose to 49.1 in September from 47.9 in August. This was the highest level since February and well ahead of expectations.

What's Changed?

Russian individuals were sanctioned immediately following the March 2014 annexation of Crimea. Sectoral sanctions began four months later, hitting Russia's most important companies - namely Rosneft, Gazprom, and Sberbank. Sanctions have been in place now for over a year. But this might be the beginning of the end.

On Friday, French president Fraçois Hollande, Merkel, Putin and Ukraine's president Poroshenko met to discuss a plan by French diplomat Pierre Morel to hold local elections within three months in rebel-held eastern Ukraine. Poroshenko is nervous about the idea, thinking the prospects of a future Crimea will bear fruit instead. Ethnic Russians there have set up self-proclaimed independent republics. Some have even begun converting to rubles. What's happening with the European mediators in this fight is they want a vote. They want nothing to do with Poroshenko's fears of autonomous republics seceding. Secession, by the way, is against the Minsk accords so Russia cannot agree to it. Merkel and Hollande want Poroshenko to work with Russia, get elections over with, and deal with the results. If Poroshenko fails to do this, it means Ukraine is in breach of the Minsk II accord, as Putin said on Charlie Rose in his charismatic plea for innocence.

Elections will unlikely go Kyiv's way. Poroshenko's support is less than 30% of the country. His Prime Minister, Washington backed Arseniy "Yats" Yatsenyuk, is in even worse shape. But if elections are not allowed within an 80 day time period, the Ukrainian government will be made to look like the bad guys. If they are held, the results will clearly be pro-Russian and we will have no reason for separatists to continue blowing things up.

While it is unclear if Ukraine will permit a pro-Russia Donetsk and Luhansk, fighting the rebels after the election will not look good for the Poroshenko government. Ethnic Russians, and Putin by default, could look oddly like victims allow Putin to press his case for a quick end to sanctions.

Poroshenko has little choice. The economy is in a shambles. Ending the civil strife in the east is their best foot forward, considering the region accounts for nearly a quarter of Ukraine's GDP. Moreover, such a move would give incentives to Europe to support Ukraine financially, seeing that Kyiv has been willing to play the tough democratic game of letting the people decide their own fate, even if it goes against the president.

Later this week, Ukraine and Russia Finance Ministers will meet to discuss a $3 billion debt owed to the Russian government. If Ukraine defaults, it will make the country's life harder in relation to its IMF terms. An agreement will be political (as everything in Russia is political), and may very well be subject to Ukraine's full adherance to Minsk II.

So Putin has Poroshenko by the "yaytsa".

Ending Sanctions Good For Ukraine

The country's new American-Ukrainian Finance Minister, Natalie Jaresko, recently contracted supply-side guru Arthur Laffer as a consultant. This is a country that is getting serious about its financial problems. Wars, rumors of wars, and defaults on Russian bonds is not where the path this country wants to tread.

The French plan to give Ukraine 80 days to hold elections in the eastern provinces its been battling for a year now provides a path for the rescission of sanctions. The end of sanctions opens the door again to better Russian-European relations. This is good for Russia and Russia-bound investors. But it is also good for European companies that have been sanctioned in retaliation by Russia, and it is good for Ukraine. No more war is good for Ukraine.

Ukraine may very well turn Westward. But Kyiv's lobbying efforts, depicting a war-torn Ukraine in Western Europe's backyard have had no real return on investment. Ukraine, for the time being, will have to live with Russia.

"This is an emerging win-win," Signorelli wrote in a note to clients on Tuesday. "It's positive for Russia and for Ukraine."

With Russia, there's always political risk involved. The government's involvement in bombing anti-Assad forces in Syria is ticking off Europe and Turkey, a country they need on their side if they want the Gazprom pipeline deal to go through.

"I think Russia's third quarter numbers from their oil exporters are going to be terrible," says Phil Davis, founder of PSW Investments. "If you trust Vladimir Putin - you simply haven't been paying attention. Bombing Syria and violating Turkey's airspace makes it less likely that sanctions will be lifted any time soon."

Maybe not, though, as sanctions on Russia have everything to do with Ukraine and nothing to do with Syria and Turkey. Russia investors won't be bullish, but in the months ahead, if the Ukraine variable settles down, we could see a move to neutral weight or even overweight on the hedge fund side.

RSX is up just 7% over the last month, underperforming the MSCI Emerging Markets Index by about 200 basis points.

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#17
Subject: How the Economist changed its map of the Syrian conflict to make it look like Russia is bombing moderate rebels rather than al-Nusra
Date: Thu, 8 Oct 2015
From: Antony Penaud <antonypenaud@yahoo.fr>

Antony Penaud completed his DPhil at the University of Oxford in 2000. His essays on Russia and Ukraine are on www/scribd.com/antonykharms. He is French and lives in London.

Russia started airstrikes in Syria on 30 September 2015 and has been accused by Western media and governments to target the rebels (portrayed as moderates) rather than the Islamic State.

The Economist published a map (1) of the airstrikes, as well as the areas controlled by the Islamic State, the Government, the Kurds and the Rebels.

On that map, 25 targets for the airstrikes are shown (it is not clear how many strikes correspond to each target).
7 targets fall in areas controlled by the Islamic State
2 targets fall in areas controlled by the Government.
16 targets fall in areas controlled by the Rebels.

However, a few days before the beginning of the strikes (on 26 September), the Economist published another map of the situation in Syria (2).

On that map, the areas controlled by al-Nusra (al Qaeda) were shown too (in the more recent map al-Nusra is not mentioned at all and the al-Nusra areas are controlled by the Rebels).

If we compare the areas of the Russian targets to the 26 September map, we see that out of the 16 strikes that fell in the Rebels controlled areas, 9 fell in al-Nusra controlled areas (3).

So, we now have 7 targets in Islamic State areas, 9 targets in al-Nusra areas,  2 targets in Government areas, and 7 targets in Rebels (as defined by the Economist before the Russian airstrikes) areas.

Furthermore, on 22 September Russian media reported the execution of gay men by the Islamic State (4).

Some of these executions took place in Rastan, just North of Homs.

According to both maps from the Economist, the Islamic State doesn't control any area near Rastan, and these areas are controlled by the Rebels and the Government.

Assuming that it is the 22 September news that is correct and looking at the targets' map, we reallocate the 2 Government targets against to the Islamic State, and 2 Rebels targets to the Islamic State.

We now have 11 targets in Islamic State areas, 9 targets in al-Nusra areas, and 5 targets in Rebels (as defined by the Economist before the Russian airstrikes) areas.

The 5 remaining targets in Rebels' areas are the ones in the North West of Syria.

According to Robert Fisk (5), "The first strikes - far from being aimed at the 'moderates' whom the US had long ago dismissed - were directed at the large number of Turkmen villages in the far north-west of Syria which have for many months been occupied by hundreds of Chechen fighters - the very same Chechens whom Putin had been trying to liquidate in Chechnya itself. These Chechen forces assaulted and destroyed Syria's strategic hilltop military Position 451 north of Latakia last year. No wonder Bashar's army put them on the target list. Other strikes were directed not at Isis but at Islamist Jaish al-Shams force targets in the same area."

So, finally, we have 11 targets in Islamic State areas, 9 targets in al-Nusra (al Qaeda) areas, and 5 targets in Chechen fighters/Jaish al-Sham areas.

In his article, Fisk (who is no friend of Assad or Putin), shows there are no moderates fighting in Syria: just different jihadist groups (and Kurds, and the Syrian army).

Following the Russian airstrikes, the Economist changed its map of the Syrian conflict: all of a sudden al-Nusra disappeared of the map.

In doing this, the Economist not only disrespected its readers by assuming they wouldn't remember the map they were presented the week before, but also decided that al-Nusra (al-Qaeda) was part of the imaginary moderate rebels ("the opposition") that the West (following Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey) were supporting.

Portraying extremists as moderates in order to demonise Russia - one cannot help but see a parallel with another crisis (6).

(1) https://espresso.economist.com/0511c74339446a24dd942bd10ec7581a
(2) http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21667947-russias-intervention-side-bashar-assad-just-might-increase-chances
(3) The airstrikes in between Idlib and Hama on the more recent map.
(4) https://news.vice.com/article/the-islamic-state-executes-9-men-and-a-boy-for-being-gay
(5) http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/syria-s-moderates-have-disappeared-and-there-are-no-good-guys-a6679406.html
(6) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3073478/Teen-girl-feted-Ukraine-s-Joan-Arc-fighting-against-Russian-rebels-revealed-nasty-neo-Nazi-views-arrested-killing-cops.html


 

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 #18
http://off-guardian.org
October 7, 2015
Putin: Russia ready to cooperate with moderate rebels in Syria - if they can be found

Today the official presidential website of Russia reports the statements Putin made following a working meeting with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, in which "the head of the defense department informed the President on the course of the operation of air and space forces of Russia in Syria":

Vladimir Putin: "We realize that conflicts of this kind must end in a political settlement. I discussed this matter just this morning with the Russian Foreign Minister. During my recent visit to Paris, the President of France, Mr Hollande, voiced an interesting idea that he thought is worth a try, namely, to have President Assad's government troops join forces with the Free Syrian Army. True, we do not know yet where this army is and who heads it, but if we take the view that these people are part of the healthy opposition, if it were possible to have them join in the fight against terrorist organizations such as ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra and others, this would help pave the way to a future political settlement in Syria."

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#19
www.rt.com
October 8, 2015
'Which side are you fighting for?' Russia blasts US for refusing to share intel on ISIS

Washington's failure to share data with Russian intelligence about terrorist positions in Syria makes one question the goals that Americans have in their anti-ISIS campaign in Syria and Iraq, a senior Russian diplomat has said.

The refusal to share intelligence on terrorists "just confirms once more what we knew from the very start, that the US goals in Syria have little to do with creating the conditions for a political process and national reconciliation," Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said Thursday.

"I would risk saying that by doing this the US and the countries that joined the US-led coalition are putting themselves in a politically dubious position. The question is: which side are you fighting for in this war?"

Earlier, the Russian military said they would welcome American intelligence on the forces of terrorist group Islamic State (formerly ISIS/ISIL) to help with Russia's bombing operation in Syria. But the US State Department said it would not be possible because Russia and the US do not share the same goals in Syria.

"I don't know how you can share intelligence when you don't share a basic, common objective inside Syria. We're not at that - we're nowhere near that point. There's no shared, common objective here about going after ISIL," said John Kirby, a State Department spokesman.

The US has accused Russia of failing to target ISIS and instead bombing moderate rebel forces, which Washington wants to replace the government of President Bashar Assad. Russia denies the allegations.

Ryabkov said that without US intelligence Russia would remain quite effective in the Syrian operation, considering that it has plenty of other sources.

"There are our own means of reconnaissance. We get intelligence from a number of other countries and coordinate its flow through the Baghdad information-sharing center," the Russian diplomat said, referring to a facility in the Iraqi capital that is used by Syria, Iraq, Iran and Russia to coordinate their efforts in fighting ISIS.

The US-led coalition has been bombing ISIS targets for over a year and provided supplies and assistance to forces such as Iraqi and Kurdish militias, which are fighting the terrorists on the ground. But it has refused to deal with either Damascus or its key regional ally Tehran, saying that the downfall of the government of President Assad is part of the solution to the crisis. Despite the coalition's efforts, ISIS has enlarged the territory under its control over the last year.

Senior Syrian and Iranian officials questioned America's determination to defeat ISIS, saying that the coalition airstrikes are more of a show and are not intended to actually harm the terrorists. Instead Washington is trying to get ISIS topple the Assad government, hoping to deal with them later.

Russia voiced similar concerns on Wednesday, after reporting that its week-long effort had done serious harm to the jihadists in Syria.

"The US Air Force and other parties has been conduction airstrikes for a year. We have reasons to believe that they don't often hit terrorist targets, or rather do so very rarely," said Igor Konashenkov, the spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry.

Meanwhile Russia's effort seems to have paid off, as on Tuesday the Syrian Army announced a major offensive against various terrorist groups. Commenting on what role Russia's support played in turning the tables on the jihadists, Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad said that Russia "has produced significant results in several days that greatly surpass those achieved by the [US-led anti-ISIS] coalition in over a year."

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 #20
Interfax
October 7, 2015
Russian incursion into Turkish airspace "embarrassing mistake" - Kremlin

Moscow, 7 October: The Kremlin considers the violation of Turkish airspace by Russian aircraft an embarrassing complication and confirms readiness to hold consultations between the military.

"I would like to recall yesterday's statement of the Russian Defence Ministry where the readiness to immediately begin consultations with the military, including the Turkish military, was voiced to clear up these embarrassing mistakes and organize coordination for the period of implementation of tasks by the Russian Air Force over Syrian territory in the future," Russian presidential spokesman Dmitriy Peskov told journalists today.

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 #21
AFP
October 7, 2015
Russia ramps up strikes as Syria army launches offensive
By Sara Hussein with Max Delany in Moscow

Beirut (AFP) - Russia dramatically escalated its air war in Syria, unleashing heavy bombardments and cruise missile strikes from the Caspian Sea as cover for a major Syrian army ground offensive.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow had begun synchronising its strikes with the army's ground movements against rebels, as the Kremlin voiced willingness to make contact with Western-backed fighters that Washington and its allies accuse it of targeting.

Putin, who turned 63 on Wednesday, said Russian warships had fired cruise missiles on Islamic State group positions in Syria for the first time.

A video map released by Russia's defence ministry showed the missiles launched from warships in the southern Caspian Sea and flying close to 1,500 kilometres (930 miles) through Iranian and Iraqi airspace before hitting targets in Syria.

A Syrian military source told AFP government troops had begun a broad ground operation near the village of Latmeen in Hama province, aided by Russian air cover.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported at least 40 Russian air strikes in Hama and neighbouring Idlib province, which is controlled by the powerful Army of Conquest alliance that includes Al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Nusra Front.

The alliance has sought to expand into Hama from Idlib and seize high ground to target the neighbouring regime stronghold of Latakia province.

The Britain-based Observatory said "many raids, believed to be from Russian warplanes, killed six people" including two children in Maraat al-Numan in Idlib.

Rebels targeted in Hama

A military source in Hama told AFP that "the Syrian army in its latest operations is working on cutting off the southern parts of Idlib province from the northern parts of Hama province."

He added that the operations were also intended to begin securing the major highway between Aleppo and Damascus.

Putin said Russian strikes would "be synchronised with the actions of the Syrian army on the ground" to support the regime's offensive operations.

AFP has concluded after a careful reading of Russia's video map that at least one cruise missile struck near the IS-held city of Al-Bab in Aleppo province, while several others appeared to head towards targets in Idlib.

Russia says its forces have hit 112 targets since its operations in Syria -- which it insists target IS and other "terrorist groups" -- began on September 30.

But Syrian rebels and their backers say a range of opposition fighters, not just jihadists, have been hit.

In Washington, State Department spokesman John Kirby said: "Greater than 90 percent of the (Russian) strikes that we've seen them take to date have not been against ISIL or Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists.

"They've been largely against opposition groups that want a better future for Syria and don't want to see the Assad regime stay in power."

'Fundamental mistake'

Adding to growing concern in the West about Russia's motives and actions in Syria, Turkey's Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu alleged that just two out of 57 Russian strikes examined by Turkish intelligence had hit IS.

The Russian campaign has particularly raised hackles in Ankara, which accuses Moscow of violating its airspace from Syria on at least two occasions over the weekend.

It also reported a violation by a MIG-29 jet of unknown nationality on Monday.

Turkey has protested the violations, backed by the NATO alliance to which it belongs, and warned Russia against losing its friendship with Ankara, which has been severely tested over Syria.

Tensions between Russia and the United States also escalated, with Defence Secretary Ashton Carter insisting that Washington is not cooperating with Russia over its air campaign.

"I have said before that we believed that Russia has the wrong strategy -- they continue to hit targets that are not ISIL. We believe this is a fundamental mistake," Carter told a press conference in Rome, referring to IS by an alternative acronym.

A Pentagon spokesman said US-led coalition aircraft had been re-routed on at least one occasion to avoid any confrontation with Russian warplanes over Syria.

Meanwhile, French President Francois Hollande warned that failure to act in Syria risked "total war" in the Middle East.

"If we leave these religious clashes between Sunnis and Shiites, they will grow. Don't think we will be sheltered, this will be a total war," he said in a speech to the European Parliament.

Putin said Hollande had proposed "to at least try to unite the efforts of the government troops of President Assad's army and the so-called (rebel) Free Syrian Army," but a member of Hollande's entourage quickly rebutted that claim.

Moscow's foreign ministry also said it was ready to make contact with the FSA, a group whose existence it previously questioned.

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 #22
www.mcclatchydc.com
October 2, 2015
U.S. Kurdish allies welcome Russian airstrikes in Syria
By Roy Gutman

ISTANBUL-Three days into its bombing campaign in Syria, Russia on Friday at last targeted Islamic State positions, striking at the defacto capital of the terror organization and at least one other site.

The Russian strikes at the Islamic State came after two days in which its aircraft attacked locations belonging to other fighting groups opposed to Syrian President Bashar Assad, including CIA-supported rebels, sparking calls for the Obama administration to do something to protect fighters it had trained and equipped.

But President Barack Obama made clear that the U.S. had no plans to deepen its role in Syria.

"We're not going to make Syria into a proxy war between the United States and Russia," Obama said at a White House press conference. "That would be bad strategy on our part."

He also rejected calls he should act to preserve U.S. credibility and influence.

"This is not some, you know, superpower chess board contest, and anybody who frames it in that way isn't paying very close attention to what's been happening on the chess board," he said.

But there were signs that U.S. influence over events in Syria was eroding, with the Kurdish militia that has been Washington's closest ally on the ground there extending a public welcome to Russia and offering to fight alongside Russia against the Islamic State. It also asked Moscow for weapons.

"We will fight alongside whoever fights Daesh," Salih Muslim, co-president of the Democratic Union Party, the Kurdish political party whose militia, the People's Protection Units, or YPG, have closely coordinated its operations with the United States, told the online magazine Al Monitor in an interview. Daesh is an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS and ISIL.

"We want Russia to provide us air support as well as weapons in our fight against the ISIL militants," a YPG commander, Sipan Hemo, was quoted as telling the Russian Sputnik news portal. "We can organize an effective cooperation with Russia on the issue."

The United States and the YPG have been close allies for the past year after their coordination broke an Islamic State siege of the Kurdish city of Kobani, and U.S. airstrikes are credited with helping the YPG seize an estimated 6,800 square miles of northern Syria from the Islamists in recent months. U.S. officials in recent weeks have pointed to the YPG as the most effective anti-Islamic State group in Syria.

But the YPG recently has slowed its offensive after Turkey, a U.S. NATO ally and bitter rival of the Kurds, objected to its success, and U.S. bombing missions over northern Syria have dropped precipitously.

Some analysts speculated that the YPG was interested in Russian support because Moscow was unlikely to respond to Turkey's worries that the Kurds' success would fuel a push for independence among its own Kurdish minority.

Russian involvement might also discourage Turkey from entering Syria to squelch any cooperation between the YPG and the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, whose guerrillas have been battling Turkish authorities for 30 years. On Friday Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, warned the YPG not to support the PKK offensive in Turkey. "If there is any leakages from Syria like in Iraq . . . we would not hesitate to strike at any group that poses a threat to our national security."

"The U.S. is active in the north. The Russians will not meddle in the north. But should Turkey attempt to intervene, they will," Muslim said. "They will prevent Turkish intervention, not to defend us but to defend Syria's border."

Ten Islamic State targets were struck Friday primarily in the wcountryside outside Raqqa, according to Sarmad Aljilany, an activist with the "Raqqa is being slaughtered silently" Internet portal.

There were no estimates of damages or deaths, but the Islamic State canceled Friday prayer services at the four main mosques in Raqqa - where attendance is usually obligatory.

The Syrian Opposition Coalition, the anti-Assad civilian political group, said Russian aircraft also bombed Islamic State positions in Qaryatain, a city in eastern Homs province that the Islamic State captured in August.

There were also reports of Russian attacks on locations where no Islamic State forces were present. Local activists said aircraft targeted the hospital in Latamneh, the headquarters for a CIA-backed unit known as the Al Izza Brigade in northern Hama province and also struck Maarat al Numan in Idlib province.

Syrian and American aircraft also undertook bombing runs. The Syrian air force conducted 15 airstrikes in the Islamic State-held town of Al Bab, hitting many civilian targets including the main market and a hospital, according to the Al Bab Local Coordination Committee, an anti-Assad group.

Meanwhile, U.S. aircraft carried out eight airstrikes against Islamic State targets in eastern Syria, well away from Russian and Syrian government aircraft. Six were carried out in Hasaka province, where the U.S. has worked closely with the YPG, and there was one each in Palmyra, an Islamic State-held city that dates back to Roman times, and Deir el Zour, another Islamic State bastion.

The YPG's embrace of the Russian intervention came as seven members of the U.S.-led anti-Islamic State coalition urged Russia to target the Islamic State and not other fighting groups in its attacks.

In a statement, the United States, France, Germany, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Britain expressed the "deepest concern" about the bombing of Hama, Homs and Idlib provinces "which led to civilian casualties and did not target Daesh."

"These actions constitute a further military escalation and will only fuel more extremism and further radicalization," the seven countries said.

Obama also struck that theme at his new conference.

"A military solution alone, an attempt by Russia and Iran to prop up Assad and try to pacify the population, is just going to get them stuck in a quagmire, and it won't work," Obama said he told Russian President Vladimir Putin when the two men met at the United Nations earlier this week.

His remarks came as Republicans looking to replace him have stepped up their criticism of his Syria policy. Even as his former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she would push for a no-fly zone and humanitarian corridors in the country.

But Obama dismissed much of the criticism as "half baked ideas" and "mumbo jumbo."

As for Clinton's suggestions, he said there was a difference between running for president and being president.

"The decisions that are being made and the discussions that I'm having with the Joint Chiefs become much more specific and require, I think, a different kind of judgment," he said.

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#23
Reuters
October 7, 2015
Iraq leans toward Russia in war on Islamic State
By Ahmed Rasheed and Saif Hameed

Iraq may request Russian air strikes against Islamic State on its soil soon and wants Moscow to have a bigger role than the United States in the war against the militant group, the head of parliament's defense and security committee said on Wednesday.

"In the upcoming few days or weeks, I think Iraq will be forced to ask Russia to launch air strikes, and that depends on their success in Syria," Hakim al-Zamili, a leading Shi'ite politician, told Reuters in an interview.

The comments were the clearest signal yet that Baghdad intends to lean on Russia in the war on Islamic State after U.S.-led coalition airstrikes produced limited results.

Russian military action in Iraq would deepen U.S. fears that it is losing more strategic ground to rivals in one of the world's most critical regions.

Russia is weighing in behind President Bashar al-Assad with air strikes in Syria while its ally Iran holds deep sway in Iraq, including military advisors who help direct the battle against Islamic State.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has said he would welcome Russian air strikes on Islamic State militants in Iraq and powerful Iranian-backed Shi'ite militias hope for a partnership with Russia to counter U.S. influence.

"We are seeking to see Russia have a bigger role in Iraq. ... Yes, definitely a bigger role than the Americans," Zamili said.

Shi'ite militias, long mistrustful of the United States, see Russia's intervention as an opportunity to turn the tables.

"The Russian intervention came at the right time and right place and we think it will change all rules of the game not only in Syria but in Iraq also," said Muen al-Kadhimi, an aide to Hadi al-Amiri, the most powerful Shi'ite militia leader.

"The government has been relying heavily on an untrustworthy ally, which is the United States, and this fault should be fixed."

MESSAGE TO WASHINGTON

Russia's drive for more clout in the Middle East includes a new security and intelligence-sharing agreement with Iran, Iraq and Syria with a command center in Baghdad.

"We believe that this center will develop in the near future to be a joint operation command to lead the war against Daesh in Iraq," said Zamili, using a derogatory Arabic acronym for Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS or ISIL.

Washington has been pressuring Abadi to rein in Shi'ite militias, angering forces seen as a bulwark against the ultra-hardline Sunni Islamic State, the biggest security threat to oil producer Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein since 2003.

"The sort of support for us, or all other resistance groups for that matter, should be on the level of training, providing weapons and also serious air support," said Jaafar Hussaini, spokesman of the Kata'ib Hezbollah Shi'ite force.

Abadi was frustrated by the U.S.-led coalition's performance against Islamic State, which has threatened to march on Baghdad and wants to redraw the map of the Middle East.

Military sources said army commanders complained in a letter sent to Abadi in early September of inadequate U.S. support in the battle for Iraq's biggest refinery near the town of Baiji, a focal point in the campaign to dislodge Islamic State.

Abadi was incensed by tough accusations by U.S. officials that Iraqi government troops lacked the will to fight the militants, government sources said.

Delayed delivery of U.S. arms was one of the factors that pushed Abadi to strike a security deal with Russia, the sources said.

"We are still losing lives and losing billions of dollars in oil revenues by purchasing arms from United States, but what we really got from them was only promises and dozens of delayed arms deals," said Zamili.

"After a whole year, Daesh is still growing and thousands of fighters are still flowing to both Iraq and Syria and it is controlling more areas. That's clear evidence the United States has no clear plan or a real strategy."

Baghdad-based analyst and former army general Jasim al-Bahadli said tensions with the United States were one of the reasons why Abadi turned to Moscow for help.

"Abadi, it seems, succeeded in sending a clear message to the American administration, which repeatedly blamed Abadi's forces for recent setbacks, that there is another alternative for Iraq to resort to in the fight against Daesh if you are not willing to show real support," he said.

"The United States has been worried by the growing influence of Iran in Iraq and worries should be doubled after the Russians took the lead in Iraq and Syria."

Despite his frustrations with Washington, Abadi risks becoming isolated by a new dynamic dominated by Russia.

He has depended heavily on U.S. support and is at odds with the militias and their Iranian backers.

But with Islamic State showing no signs of weakening, the priority will be finding a formula for stability and key players are embracing Russia.

"There's a need to create a new coalition and force that is actually effective on the ground and performs the actual goal of fighting Daesh," said Mohammed Naji, another aide to Amiri.

"There is a serious discussion and inquiry into requesting the Russian air forces to conduct air strikes against Daesh positions in Iraq."

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 #24
http://gordonhahn.com
October 7, 2015
Let's Get Syrious
By Gordon M. Hahn
Gordon M. Hahn is an Analyst and Advisory Board Member of the Geostrategic Forecasting Corporation. He is also Analyst/Consultant, Russia Other Points of View and Senior Researcher, Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group, San Jose, California.

Let's get serious about the mess in Syria. Western media and DC think tanks are still muddying the waters in order to spin the Russian military intervention and air campaign as some nefarious plot to rule the world. They pose a false either/or binary choice in doing so. Take this statement from the often reliable Institute for the Understanding of War (IUW): "The Russian air campaign in Syria appears to be largely focused on supporting the Syrian regime and its fight against the Syrian opposition, rather than combatting ISIS" (http://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-airstrikes-syria-september-30-october-3-2015). The problem with this claim is that it conflates the Syrian opposition into one conglomerate while excluding IS from the opposition. First, the word 'opposition' is itself misleading. We are dealing with Syrian revolutionary forces. Understanding this aspect of the revolutionary/civil war, IS is one of the Syrian opposition/revolutionary groups.

Second, the other revolutionary forces are almost solely jihadi groups - Jabhat al-Nusra (JN), Ahrar al-Sham (AS), the Islamic Front (JI), etc., etc. - which often fight side-by-side with that supposedly 'moderate' revolutionary force, the Free Syrian Army (FSA). In fact, the FSA is dominated by fighters tied to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Third, the non-IS jihadi groups and the FSA often conduct joint operations.

IUW was honest enough to report that there were at least two and perhaps three sorties that hit IS. What is often left out of this picture is that IS forces are in largely little-populated areas and/or far away from the the core of the Syrian state along the Mediterranean Sea. The other jihadi groups are attacking the Alawi corridor along the coast and in Idlib province, and they do so at times in alliance with the FSA, which is a weak, almost irrelevant force, the fecklessness of which is matched only by its patrons in the U.S. administration.

It is indeed instructive that in his congressional testimony on September 29th, the Senior Editor of the Long War Journal and Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Thomas Jocelyn, did not mention the Western-touted Syrian 'opposition' FSA even once in discussing the U.S. Syria strategy or lack thereof. It is mentioned in a caption below the photograph accompanying LWJ's posting of Jocelyn's testimony and posted above here. The caption reads: "Fighters from Ahrar al Sham, the Free Syrian Army, and Al Nusrah Front display their banners after a victory in Idlib province, Syria" (www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2015/09/us-counterterrorism-efforts-in-syria-a-winning-strategy.php). As I have noted numerous times on this site and as Jocelyn does in his testimony, Al Qaida-tied groups like Jabhat al-Nusra (Al Nusrah Front) and Ahrar al-Sham differ from IS only in their tactics and strategy, not their goal - the creation of a global caliphate. The photograph is a good representation of the difficulty, even the impossibility of discriminating between jihadi forces, on the one hand, and Islamist 'moderates' of the MB ilk, on the other.

Let's try some clear thinking. Putin stated openly to the American people and others willing to listen in his Charlie Rose interview that Russia's military intervention in Syria was about stabilizing and shoring up the Assad regime, so IS and other jihadi groups cannot come to power there. Russia has also said it supports negotiations on a transition from the Assad Baathist regime to another. One cannot stabilize the regime without fighting those who wish to overthrow it. A lesson Washington needs to learn, except it cannot because its main goal was and arguably remains the overthrow of the Assad regime not fighting IS.

It appears that the failure of the US-led coalition's campaign in Syria is that it has tried to destroy both Assad and IS; hence the other jihadists' gains in Idlib and elsewhere. The American Syria policy rests on two operational pillars. One is a CIA program designed to back rebels fighting the Assad regime. The other, now defunct, is a Defense Department train and equip program to build a rebel Syrian strike force that was intended to fight only ISIS. This means that there was no U.S. effort to target the tens of non-IS jihadi groups and tens of thousands of non-IS mujahedin fighting in Syria, giving them a free hand to overthrow Assad and terrorize the population, which they do only somewhat less brutally than IS.

This means that U.S. policy was simultaneously easing the threat to Assad and feeding it. On the most basic level, this self-contradictory policy means that the revolutionary/civil war continues leading to the inevitable civilian casualties - putting aside jihadi terrorism and 'cleansing' the population through Sharia law - and the flood of refugees into Turkey and Europe.

Newsflash: One cannot fight IS without improving the chances of the Assad regime's survival, and one cannot fight any of the revolutionary forces without doing so.

It seems that some in the West are rethinking matters in Syria. According to Putin, French President Francois Hollande proposed to him during their telephone conversation yesterday that it might be worthwhile trying to get the Free Syrian Army to join Assad's military in fighting the various jihadi forces. However, unrealistic this may be, it does signify a shift in one Western leader's approach to the conflict.  In addition, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reported to Putin that the Russian military has established direct contact and real-time coordination with the Turkish military regarding any Russian operations near Turkey's border. He also reported that the Russian military has agreed to a document drafted by the U.S. Defense Department, presumably, on 'deconflicting' their respective operations over Syria (www.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/50458). Egypt also chimed in with a different tone, supporting the Russian military intervention as a help in the war against jihadism but remaining uncommitted as to joining the fray (http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/10/03/uk-mideast-crisis-syria-egypt-idUKKCN0RX0VZ20151003).

It remains to be seen whether Russia, the West, and the Arabs can develop a joint military and political approach to the conflict.

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 #25
Reuters
October 5, 2015
Vladimir Putin's secret weapon for a Syrian end game? Diplomacy.
By Nicolay Kozhanov
Nikolay Kozhanov is a nonresident scholar at the Moscow Center of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a contributing scholar to the Moscow-based Institute of the Middle East. He worked for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs as an attache in the Political Section of the Russian Embassy in Tehran from 2006 to 2009.

Russia's rapidly expanding military presence in Syria is viewed by many as an attempt to bolster the regime of President Bashar al-Assad rather than attack Islamic State forces. There are strong indications, however, that Moscow is coming to grips with the idea that a political solution for the region would include a post-Assad Syria.

Russian officials have talked about the need to transform the current Syrian regime into an inclusive government, one built on a power-sharing deal between it and certain opposition elements. The Kremlin has even reconsidered its opposition to allowing anti-Assad Islamic groups to participate in a settlement. To this end, it has raised the possibility of early parliamentary elections.

The real question may turn out to be whether outside players can put aside their anger over Putin's in-your-face military moves and join forces with Moscow to finally end this tragedy.
Foreign Minister of Russia Sergey Lavrov speaks to media regarding the current situation in Syria at the United Nations in Manhattan, New York

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov answers questions about the current situation in Syria at the United Nations in New York, September 30, 2015. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly

Starting in May with his visit to Russian President Vladimir Putin's residence in Sochi, Secretary of State John Kerry has been at the forefront of a renewed Russian diplomatic push in Syria. Since then, the Obama administration has taken pains to note that the Kremlin's main intentions there remain unclear.

Mistrust of Putin's intentions is, of course, pervasive in the West and the Middle East. This could be one reason for the drumbeat of assertions that Moscow really only wants to prop up Assad's regime by providing him with game-changing military capabilities. Some critics suggest that even Russian authorities do not know which scenario their boss is planning to put into action.

Putin's Sept. 28 speech and his private meeting with President Barack Obama at the United Nations in New York were expected to reveal more about Moscow's intentions. Yet in his speech, the Russian president only repeated the general outlines of a plan already previewed by the Kremlin's foreign-policy worthies.

Putin talked about establishing an international coalition against Islamic State, pursuant to a U.N. Security Council resolution, with the participation of the Syrian army and regional Muslim states. He also discussed the launch of a new negotiation process between the Assad regime and elements of the opposition. Yet he provided few concrete details.

Even in its loosely articulated form, Putin's plan will hardly find a warm reception. First, though the civil war in Syria is in its fourth year, the warring factions seem far from ready to stop fighting. Plenty of outside actors are ready to battle to the last drop of Syrian blood.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin still strongly resists setting deadlines for Assad's removal from power as a precondition for beginning a national dialogue. In Russian eyes, Assad is still the only person capable of standing up to Islamic State and keeping the Syrian state from total collapse.

This vision drastically differs from that of the West and many Middle Eastern countries. They consider Assad the source of Syria's problems, rather than part of any possible solution. Moscow also has a narrow definition of which opposition forces it would accept as legitimate players. The Kremlin continues to grant exaggerated importance to a regime that, at best, controls only a quarter of Syria's territory.

Beneath the surface, however, Moscow's vision for the future of Syria is shifting. Both Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, for example, have stopped labelling all opposition forces as "terrorists," which suggests that some moderate groups on the ground might be recognized by Moscow as legitimate players. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs recently clarified this shift by announcing Moscow's readiness to deal with Syrians "who are interested in securing their interests in their own country."

Moscow also no longer excludes the option that Assad be replaced. The Kremlin sees the transformation of his regime as inevitable. The Russian military deployments to Syria can be viewed as a way to ensure that Moscow will have a major voice in any decisions about how the change occurs. The Kremlin is also concerned about protecting long-time Russian interests, such as the fate of Syria's Christian population.

Even the decision to launch air strikes in Syria is probably part of the broader Russian strategy aimed at resolving the Syrian conflict on Moscow's terms. Putin continues to insist on a peace settlement based on existing Syrian state structures and institutions.

To persuade the international community, the Kremlin has adopted a two-track approach. On the diplomatic front, Moscow is engaged in active dialogue with the West and Middle Eastern countries, particularly the Gulf States. Militarily, Russia's support is helping guarantee that the Assad regime can hold out long enough for the Kremlin to achieve a desirable breakthrough on the diplomatic track.

Putin may be able to use Russia's military actions in Syria as important leverage. The presence of Russian forces in Syria ensures that any decision on Syria's future cannot be made without Moscow's participation. It is not a coincidence that in the 48 hours since Russia launched its air raids in Syria, the intensity of diplomatic contacts between Moscow and the West have increased.

Yet if the West soundly rejects Putin's initiative - paltry though it may be - the outlook for Syria could become even grimmer. There are many interested parties in Moscow who see little upside in cooperation on Syria. They would be perfectly happy to focus on shoring up the Assad regime and increasing Russia's military support of it.

This may not save Damascus from falling. But it would prolong the conflict and raise the death toll on all sides.

The Russians have already signalled that they can raise the stakes in the Syrian game.  The meetings that began in New York are an opportunity to steer them on a more productive path.

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 #26
The National Interest
October 8, 2015
How Russia Could Win the Battle for Syria
By Dave Majumdar
Dave Majumdar is the defense editor for The National Interest. You can follow him on Twitter: @davemajumdar.

Some analysts expect that the Russian air strikes in Syria may be more effective than the U.S.-led air campaign for a simple reason, which is that Moscow enjoys close cooperation with the Syrian regime's ground forces. "The Western campaign against ISIS has failed because there is no human intelligence there," Royal United Services Institute analyst Kamal Alam said, speaking at an event held at the Center for the National Interest-which is the Washington D.C., foreign policy think-tank that publishes TNI-on Oct. 7. "The Russians are going to be more embedded with the Syrians."

The lack of ground forces to identify ground targets has palpably bedeviled the U.S. air campaign for over a year since it started in mid-2014. While the U.S. military has a variety of means to gather intelligence in Iraq and Syria-which includes satellites, airborne and other technical means for collecting of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) data-precise targeting in densely populated areas with civilians present often poses enormous challenges for analysts trying to differentiate between friend and foe. It's often a challenge compounded by the fact that U.S. intelligence assets have been stretched thin in recent years as demand far outstrips supply. But it must be noted that Moscow's forces have not shown  much regard for minimizing collateral damage in previous years-so it may not be as serious an issue for the Russian military.

Meanwhile, Iranian forces have been embedding themselves ever deeper with the Assad's forces, said American Enterprise Institute fellow Matthew McInnis, who also spoke at the event. Iranian forces provide much of the strategic leadership, tactical guidance and intelligence for the Syrian army even if they don't fight on the frontlines, he noted. It is unclear if the Iranians will help with coordinating Russian air strikes with the Syrians. The Syrian forces seem to resent Iranian control, McInnis said. Indeed, Russia's intervention might serve to undermine Iran's efforts even if they share similar goals for now, he said.

Last November during a visit to the U.S. Air Force's 480th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Wing at Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Hampton, Va., intelligence analysts described the challenges they face working without help from having U.S. boots on the ground. One analyst told me that in places like Syria and Iraq, it is very difficult to tell an ISIS militant apart from a Kurdish Peshmerga fighter or a member of an allied Iraqi or Syrian militia. "Ultimately, that's where additional intelligence comes in," she told reporters.

480th ISR Wing Commander Col. Tim Haugh noted that during the occupation of Iraq, U.S. Army units would have been in the area providing on-the-ground reports-and more. "The other things we get in addition to human intelligence is just the presence on the ground," he said. "So if we were looking at something on a street corner, and we were not sure what that was, there was a possibility at that time that there would have been an Army unit that had gone through that neighborhood."

With no ground units available, Air Force analysts typically rely on the local U.S. embassy in a targeted country. However, in Syria, there is no U.S. diplomatic presence in Syria to speak of while the U.S. embassy in Iraq is located in Baghdad-far away from ISIS-occupied territory. "You could have a dialogue with them to get context," Haugh said. "There is no [Army or Marine] captain on the ground to talk to."

There is no evidence that Russian special operations forces are on the ground providing targeting data, said Paul Saunders, executive director of the Center for the National Interest, who also spoke at the event. Instead, the Russian air force seems to be relying on Syrian troops for intelligence.

For the Russians, the cooperation with Syrian ground force helps with their targeting, but it also means that Russian forces are likely to engage immediate threats to the Assad's army first. "What they are saying is that they are unique because they have been invited by the Syrian government," Saunders said. "They think that their airstrikes are going to be more effective because they are coordinating with Syrian forces on the ground." Overall, the Russians appear to be positioning themselves to influence a negotiated end to the Syrian conflict once they are assured their interests are taken into account. "The Russian government is not going to commit enough forces to decide the conflict," Saunders said.

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 #27
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
October 7, 2015
What Russia and the West miss in the Syrian conflict
By personalizing the Syrian conflict around President Bashar Al-Assad, both Russia and the West have failed to recognize the real and most relevant aspect of the situation - the existential threat posed by ISIS to Syria's minority groups.
By Andrei Korobkov
Andrei Korobkov is a professor of Political Science at Middle Tennessee State University. He graduated from Moscow State University and received a Ph. D. in Economics from the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow, Russia) and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Alabama. He has previously worked as a Research Fellow at the Institute of International Economic and Political Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow and taught at the University of Alabama. Korobkov is the author of four monographs and more than 150 other academic works, published in the US, Russia, Turkey, Portugal, and the former Yugoslavia.

Western media continues to claim that Russia is stepping up its military presence in Syria, preparing for a ground operation by moving its artillery and rocket systems and heavy weaponry at Latakia, its Syrian airbase.

With the Kremlin refusing to comment on this speculation, many Russian pundits are now saying that Russia will use only air strikes to support Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad by bombing terrorist and radical organizations, including the Islamic State of Iraq and the Greater Syria (ISIS).

Up to now, Russia has framed its military intervention in terms of the risk posed by ISIS. Russia, unlike the U.S, sees a real urgency in striking now rather than later: ISIS is essentially on its borders, thousands of its citizens are fighting in the ranks of ISIS, and radical Islamist followers are coming to Russia in the flow of labor migrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus. In addition, Russia could become the next destination point for the Middle Eastern refugees currently flooding Europe.

However, there are increasing concerns about the response of Russia's Muslim population to the Kremlin's deeper military involvement in Syria. The fact that Russia has at least 16 million Muslims and their numbers and share in the overall Russian population is consistently growing due to both immigration and higher birth rates is exactly the reason explaining and justifying Russia's current involvement in Syria.

That means there could be political costs for the Kremlin. First of all, there is a relatively high probability of a new wave of terrorism developing on Russian territory. There might be serious tensions emerging in its relationships with governing authorities and political elites of Russia's predominantly Islamic political units.

The problem is that Russian media outlets, including the state-owned ones, have fallen into a trap designed in the West. This trap is based on the constant demonization of Assad and the personalization of this conflict to focus only on the Syrian leader. However, focusing too much on Assad overshadows the real essence of the conflict - a fierce struggle of the coalition of Alawis (essentially, Shias), Christians and some other minority groups for not simply retaining governmental control, but protecting their very physical existence.

The West has been thus far very reticent in mentioning this circumstance and discussing the political views and orientations of the Syrian Christians. From this perspective, the predominantly Sunni elites of Russian Muslims might also perceive Putin's current policies as being mostly anti-Sunni (and pro-Christian).

Still, it is necessary to explain this systemic aspect of the current crisis not only to Russians, but also to the West. ISIS currently represents an equal threat to Shias, Christians and Jews - and this justifies the formation of an alliance of those groups and their respective states.

Essentially, it means the necessity for both Russia and the West to forget earlier grievances and form an anti-ISIS coalition with Assad's Syria and Iran - and there is simply no other option. The Russian government understands this fairly well.

The signing of the Iran nuclear deal indicates that Obama himself also realizes that - but he cannot acknowledge this publicly for both foreign and domestic policy considerations. For the U.S., accepting the legitimacy and righteousness of the policies of Iran and Syria (who were treated as enemies for the last 36 and 45 years, respectively) and even Russia seems to be unbearable - it would be de facto recognition of a total failure of its policies and strategic designs.

And thus we will continue to witness an incredible inconsistency of Western actions in the region.

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 #28
Sputnik
October 8, 2015
Ex-Head of MI6 Calls for Pragmatism and Talks Over Syria

The former head of the British intelligence service MI6, Sir John Sawers, has called for pragmatism to prevail over Syria and for the major players - including Russia, Iran, The US and the UK - to form a contact group to find a political solution to the Syrian crisis.

Sir John, was the head of the Secret Intelligence service from 2009 until 2014 and, as Director General for Political Affairs at the UK Foreign Office, was particularly closely involved in policy on Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans.

He told the Today radio program Thursday that the conflict in Syria could not be resolved by military action and that the West should take a pragmatic view and find a diplomatic solution to the crisis. He said Russia had moved in to support a legitimate ally in the Middle East.

"The Russians have made their move to support [President Bashar al-Assad,] because they saw their principal ally in the Middle East coming under real pressure. The center of power of the Assad regime were becoming within reach of the opposition forces who genuinely wanted to break Assad down.

"This isn't the Islamic State [ISIL], these are the forces that have been supported by the Arabs and the Turks and the West."

At a United Nations press conference in New York last week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reiterated Russia's position and the decision to take military action in Syria:

"For more than one year, the [US-led] coalition has been bombing Syria without the consent of the Syrian government, without an 'OK' from the Security Council, without informing anyone... We, indeed, are interested in cooperation with the coalition. We cannot be part of the coalition, which operates without the Security Council mandate and without request from one of the countries on whose territory they operate."

"We cannot forget about the political process, but we cannot condition fighting ISIL [Islamic State] by changing the political system in Syria."

"We believe that, first of all, fighting terrorism must be a priority, but parallel with this, not after, but parallel with this, many things could be done on the political front."    

In 2013, Sawers was one of the team that drew up plans to train and equip a Syrian rebel army of 100,000 to overthrow Assad, but the plans were rejected as too ambitious and were thrown out completely when the UK parliament voted against strikes against the Syrian Government.

He said the fact that the US and Russia were using the same airspace over Syria meant that there was a need for de-confliction at a military level and that military co-operation was inevitable.

"It's going to be quite hard to continue this campaign unless there's a degree of military co-ordination between the Russians and the West. There have been some early talks between the Americans and the Russians on it. You can't really have two air forces fighting different campaigns with different objectives over the same territory without a real risk of a clash," said Sawers.

Western Reticence

He said vacillation by the West had left a vacuum which Russia had stepped into. "The reticence of the West in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan - understandably - to deploy military power has left a space into which Putin has inserted himself," he said.

Sawers said that the real risk of Syria falling apart as a state was inevitable and that all the players should take a pragmatic view of the reality on the ground.

"It has already broken up into different areas and [ISIL] effectively controls the east of the country, the Kurds have a strip along the north and there's an alawite heartland in the north-west. I think what the Assad regime - backed by Russia and Iran - wants to do is to re-establish control of the central spine of Syria, from Aleppo, Hama, Homs down to Damascus and all areas to the west of that," he said.

Asked whether this would also suit the US and its western allies, Sawers replied: "I do think there's a demand for pragmatism here. [The West has] called for four years for Assad to go. I don't think he's going to go immediately. I don't think it's credible that Assad could become a long-standing president of a reunified Syria, because it just wouldn't happen.

"I think the one thing that's lacking in this - we talk a lot about the military aspects and the terrorist threat - is, there's no political process around Syria. I remember in the height of the Balkans crisis, back in the early 90s when the Americans were supporting the Muslims, the Russians were supporting the Serbs, the Germans were supporting the Croats, the British and French were trying to deliver humanitarian aid on the ground - we brought together a contact group, bringing all these countries together," he said.

"We need to do the same on Syria so that the external powers - the P5 [China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States] plus Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia - sitting around the same table and exchanging analysis, understanding where each other is coming from and, as far as possible, building some common ground on what the future of Syria is going to look like."

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 #29
The National Interest
October 7, 2015
This Is What Russia REALLY Fears in Syria
"Putin has been extremely concerned about the expansion of radical Salafism and Wahhabism into Russian heartland, potentially affecting the ideology of the growing number of Russian Muslims."
By Robert G. Rabil
Robert G. Rabil is professor of political science at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author most recently of Salafism in Lebanon: From Apoliticism to Transnational Jihadism (Georgetown University Press, 2014).

The ongoing Russian air strikes against mainly Syrian opposition groups not affiliated with the Islamic State have not only taken the United States off-guard, but also elicited a number of well-argued analyses on the causal factors of Russian actions. This debate, with few exceptions, underscores the irony and emptiness of Russian President Vladimir Putin's assertion that he is fighting the Islamic State. In reality, his targets comprised almost all Syrian opposition groups. One argument contends that Russian actions are meant to prop up the shaky Syrian regime. Concurrently, some analysts argue that Putin's view of the political landscape in Syria rests on dividing the country into two camps: one formal camp, led by the Syrian regime, and the other, a terrorist camp, led by a motley Syrian opposition groups, at the forefront of which is the Islamic State. In other words, Putin has painted all opposition groups in the terrorist corner, while at the same time acknowledging the legitimate rule of the Assad regime.

How persuasive are such arguments? No doubt the Russian military buildup in Syria, especially in the Alawi region of Latakia and Tartus, and recent Russian military involvement in the Syrian conflict are intended to prop up the Syrian regime. Since March 2015, the regime has lost significant territories consequent upon concerted attacks by a reconfigured Salafi-jihadist axis, funded and armed with sophisticated weapons mainly by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar. As I argued on these pages in May 2015, the al-Nusra Front-led alliance, under the name of Army of Conquest seized control of the Syrian city of Idlib in late March 2015, a major urban center with a population of around 165,000 people. Idlib is considered to be the second provincial capital to fall into opposition hands after Raqa, now a stronghold of the Islamic State. No less significant, this alliance united anew with another Salafi-jihadist organization Ahrar al-Sham and waged a battle for Jisr al-Shaghour under the name "Battle for Victory." By taking the geostrategic town, the Salafi-jihadists have edged closer to the coastal province of Latakia, President Assad's stronghold, and they are now a short distance from villages loyal to the government near the coast.

Meanwhile, the Army of Islam (Jaysh al-Islam), led by the Saudi Arabian-supported Zahran Alloush, along with other armed factions grouped together under the name of the East Gouta Council, have waged constant attacks against the regime from Gouta in Damascus countryside. At the same time, al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State waged a battle against the regime's ally Hezbollah in al-Qalamoun and al-Zabadani areas adjacent to the Lebanese border. Although Hezbollah has been able to fend off the attacks by al-Nusra and the Islamic State, it has not been able to impose its complete control over these areas. Significantly, Hezbollah has lost a significant number of its fighters in this war of attrition, which the Shi'a Islamist party aspired to settle swiftly.

This apparent concerted effort to wage an ongoing multi-pronged attack on the regime is what made both the Iranians and Russians worry about the near future viability of Assad rule. In fact, by June 2015, the intelligence and political rumor mill in Beirut buzzed with news that the battle for Damascus, supported by Saudi Arabia and Turkey, has neared a conclusive end. During my visit there in June and July, I came across the palpable feeling of the much exalted prospective victory over Damascus. The military setbacks suffered by the regime and the inconclusive effort of Hezbollah to control the approaches both to the Syrian capital and Lebanese border appeared to confirm the pro-Saudi and Turkish hopes. Paralleling this development, a new reality has finally dawned on some governments. The actual number of foreign jihadi fighters in Syria has remarkably belied the low estimates put out by many governments, including that of United States. And, no less significant, the chronic shortage of Syrian recruits in the army of the Assad regime, together with mounting cynicism over Hezbollah's intervention in Syria by some of its members and their parents, have even convinced the skeptics that the defeat of the Assad regime has become a matter of time.

Undoubtedly, this plausible analysis raised the wishful thinking of some regional and international governments and observers alike. But what this analysis left out was the extent to which Russia and Iran have been strategically dedicated to the survival of the Assad regime. This serious flaw in the analysis obfuscated Russian readiness for military intervention in Syria, which clearly took the United States, among other nations, by surprise.

Washington should not be taken off guard again as to the unfolding actions of the concerted Russian and Iranian strategy. On one end of the spectrum, being the last bastion of Russian influence in the Middle East, Syria commands a geostrategic and geopolitical dimension in the calculus of Putin's strategic thinking. Syria offers Russia an important outlet to the Eastern Mediterranean putting southern Turkey, Arab coastal states, Cyprus and Israel in Moscow's potential sphere of influence. Syria also offers a theatre of operations in which radical Muslims, a significant number of whom are from the Caucasus, can be fought. Putin has been extremely concerned about the expansion of radical Salafism and Wahhabism into Russian heartland, potentially affecting the ideology of the growing number of Russian Muslims. No less significant, Syria offers Putin a leverage with which he can face off Western actions in relation to Ukraine, Crimea, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Russia, by militarily inserting itself in Syria, has become both part of the problem and solution of the Syrian crisis, which the West can no longer afford to ignore.

On the other end of the spectrum, Putin has been moved by two factors, which analysts and observers of the Syrian crisis have either underestimated or ignored. Putin has positioned himself as the protector of the minorities in the greater Middle East. The Islamic State has deepened sectarian divides and impulses to levels not seen before in the history of the modern Middle East. A significant number of Christians, Yezidis, Ismailis, Druzes, Shi'ites and Alawis have virtually lost their faith in Western determination to protect them. They have been left behind to the merciless claws of totalitarianism and radical Islam. Fears of past and historical life under Sunni serfdom and occasional persecution have been put on display by the Islamic State's unprecedented use of violence in the name of orthodox Islam. Gone are the days of French, British and American resolve to protect vulnerable minorities. I have been scornfully reminded of this fact by many members of these minorities, whose feelings of betrayal by and distrust towards the West have become viscerally deep. Not only did Putin fathom, unlike many in the Western world, the deep crisis into which the Sunni world finds itself; but also realize the reliability of minorities as both a foil to Sunni radicalism and a bridge to Russian influence.

Significantly, Russia and Iran have come to see eye to eye the importance of shaping a new regional order in the Middle East not bounded by Western and Sunni dictates. Herein lies the determining factor of Russian strategic decision to get militarily involved in Syria. Putin's fight to protect the Assad regime is part and integral to his strategy of creating a sphere of influence in the greater Middle East. His is a strategic vision that coincided with Iranian strategic desire to have an uninterrupted land access from Tehran to the Mediterranean ports of Tartus, Beirut and Tyre. This is what Alexander the Great had done by defeating the Persian capital of Persepolis and forcing the surrender of the Persian fleet following his successful siege of Tyre. History dies hard in that part of the world.

In fact, this strategy of bringing about what King Abdullah of Jordan called the Shi'a crescent has been actively pursued by Iran. But it was easily planned than carried out. The recent military setbacks suffered by the Assad regime at the hands of an energized Salafi-jihadist movement, supported by an Islamist government in Ankara and a Saudi-Wahhabi leadership, have threatened the very essence of this strategy. Moreover, rarely a Middle Eastern power has been able to extend its influence throughout the region without the support of a world power. This explains the conflation of Russian and Iranian national interests into a common strategy, whose significance has been enhanced by Iran's nuclear deal with the international community and the expected reentry of Tehran into the world economy.

Based on this analysis and past Russian actions in Chechnya and Ukraine, Washington must realize that Putin will strike indiscriminately at all Syrian opposition groups posing a threat to the gateways of the future minoritarian state whose borders would include the Alawi heartland (Latakia and Tartus) and the major urban centers and their countryside in the Northeast (Aleppo and Hama), the center (Homs) and the southeast (Daraa and Suwayda). Most importantly, as Moscow carries out its plan to try to mercilessly bomb into submission the various Syrian opposition groups, at the forefront of which are the Islamic State, al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham and Jaysh al-Islam, Washington should expect a push by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Iraq's Shi'a popular mobilization units into the Sunni heartland of Iraq towards the Salafi-jihadist hub border city of Abu-Kamal in preparation to creating a corridor linking Baghdad with Homs, the future capital of this minoritarian state. Making Homs the capital of an Alawi state had been the objective of the Ba'thi state following an attempt to dislodge it in 1964 by Arab Sunni nationalists. Put simply, while Russia disrupts and destroys the command and control centers of Syrian opposition groups, Iran, under the flag of its proxy forces in Iraq, would most likely forge its way from Baghdad towards Homs (and not Mosul). This is what makes the agreement of sharing intelligence among Iran, Iraq and Syria strategically sensible.

Only in this way can both Iran fulfill its historic ambition of having an outlet to the Mediterranean, and Russia acquire a sphere of influence deserving of a resurgent world power, projecting itself as the protector of minorities. No doubt, this strategy is ambitious and fraught with danger. Nevertheless, it is the duplicity, hypocrisy, impotence, and selfishness of Arab Sunni leadership that will mostly underwrite this strategy. The question is what United States is going to do about it? Creating red lines in both Iraq and Syria and enforcing them as part of a strategy cognizant of Russian and Iranian ambitions are past due for Washington.

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 #30
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
October 7, 2015
Is Moscow planning ground operations in Syria?
The Kremlin has declined to comment on a CNN report on the Russian Federation's possible preparations for a ground operation in Syria. However, Russian observers interviewed by RBTH assert that Moscow will not want to get involved too deeply in the conflict and will limit itself to air strikes.
Nikolay Surkov, RBTH

Russian observers have dismissed rumors in Western media that Moscow is making plans to launch ground operations in Syria to prop up its embattled leader Bashar al Assad, following a CNN report about the transfer of Russian-made artillery systems from the Russian air base in the coastal city of Latakia further into Syria.

The Kremlin has denied the report, with presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov telling journalists on Oct. 6 that "CNN could have got it wrong. They even confuse Putin with Yeltsin."

However, earlier, on Sept. 30, the head of Russia's presidential administration, Sergei Ivanov, said that Russia intends to use only its air force, which is acting at the request of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
 
Ground operations 'not required' at present

An expert with the Russian Council on International Affairs, Nikita Mendkovich, told RBTH that Russia is not considering the possibility of a ground operation in Syria at the moment, since it is not required by the current level of problems in the region.

"Russia's goal is to reduce the threat of ISIS by supporting the war effort of the legitimate government of Syria. The experience of the first days of the operation showed that the use of the air forces led to significant tactical successes and allowed [government forces] to stabilize the front line after the summer crisis," said Mendkovich.

With regard to CNN's reports, he said that the shipment being moved from Latakia "is likely to be weaponry supplied to the Syrian army as part of military contracts. This is Syrian artillery, not ours. "
 
No resources for ground intervention

Leonid Isayev, an orientalist and professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, told RBTH, that defeating ISIS without a ground operation is impossible.

"Support from the air helps the government forces to hold the territory that they control anyway," he said.

"The Syrian army has suffered large losses in previous years and does not have the strength to do much else. To get more, you need to send ground troops into Syria."

But, according to Isayev, Russia does not have enough resources for a ground intervention. "Moreover, we may harm Assad, because the larger our presence in Syria, the stronger the reaction of the West, Saudi Arabia and Turkey," he added.

The main thing, according to Isayev, lies in the fact that the Kremlin does not want to repeat the mistakes of the Soviet Union.

"It is expected that at some point Russia will curtail air operations and will not allow itself to be drawn deeper into the Syrian conflict," he said.

Vasily Belozerov, co-chairman of the Association of Military Political Scientists, stressed in a conversation with RBTH that the "degree of presence of our forces in Syrian airspace is such that it is causing serious damage to ISIS, and that's enough."

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#31
Moskovskiy Komsomolets
October 5, 2015
Experts advise Russia against anti-IS operation in Iraq
For What Reason Would Russia Bomb Iraq in the Wake of Syria? Experts Discuss Whether We Are Up To a War on Two Fronts

Iraqi Premier Haydar al-Abadi said on Monday that he has no objection to Russia inflicting air strikes against ISIL positions in Iraq. The corresponding request had already been sent to Moscow. MK attempted to ascertain from experts what turn events in the Middle East could take were this issue to be reconciled with all the stakeholders. Does it make any sense getting mixed up in a war on two fronts.

Clearly, a decision on this matter for the Russians would not be easy. Were the Iraqis' request to be met, it is possible that the Russian Federation would be pulled up to the hilt "into the Mideast cauldron," extending the timeframe of the air operation indefinitely.

Military expert Viktor Murakhovskiy, chief editor of the journal Arsenal Otechestva, believes that this request is more of a political-declaratory nature.

"Iraq is at this time wholly 'under' the Americans, and all decisions on military matters would in any event be coordinated in the 'Washington Obkom'," the expert is convinced. "This request has most likely been made to spur the United States to more decisive operations on Iraqi territory."

If it is simply hypothetically assumed that Russia will consent to the Iraqis' invitation, one further air group would have to be formed in Iraq and the strength of the fleet of aircraft fighting in the Middle East would have to be increased several times over. Whether Russia could manage this at this time is unclear.

Military expert Mikhail Khodarenok is convinced that we must politely turn down this invitation. It is unclear from what he says whether we have sufficient men and equipment, whether we would not be exposing the defence capability of the state here, after all, we do not have that many forces.

"We should not open the 'Iraqi' question without having closed out the 'Syrian question,' we might well be unable to cut it," Khodarenok believes. "Moreover, the Middle East countries are attempting flat-out to pull us into their 'score-settling' and make use of us to the utmost, is this what we need," the expert asks. Were we to form one further air group, we would become completely stuck in the Mideast cauldron, with a far from clear outcome."

He says that our air group in Syria, despite all the triumphant reports, has not yet even begun the performance of combat missions in earnest, and for how long the presence of the pilots there will drag on is for the time being an open question.

"We are currently seeing that aviation is simply bombing ISIL storage depots and bunkers, but the most important stage, the Syrian Army's switch to the offensive, is continually being put off. I personally explain this by the fact that the Syrian Army's performance capability at this time leaves much to be desired. And President al-Asad's troops are not  desperately keen to die for their native land," the expert is convinced. What need we have additionally now of Iraq, with troops which are even less performance-capable than the Syrians is not clear."

In turn, military expert Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technology, believes that from the military perspective such a proposal is valid. "When terrorists cross borders, this always creates problems. And an attack on them from two fronts would facilitate appreciably the accomplishment of the military objective of the elimination of ISIL," the expert believes. In addition, he says that such a request means, of course, enormous Iraqi trust in Russia. "The Iraqis would not authorize just anyone to fight on their territory," Pukhov believes. "Such a message from the Iraqis is a big political victory for the Russian leadership." At the same time, the expert calls for there to be no illusions that were Russia to join in the conflict with ISIL additionally from the Iraqi side, this could resolve all the region's problems. It is clear that the region is rapidly becoming mired in chaos and that this slide will hardly be halted. In addition, Pukhov observed that the Russian Federation is currently fighting in the Middle East practically on its own, and it is understandable that there will be a certain overstrain of its forces, and this needs to be recognized.

 

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 #32
Carnegie Corporation of New York
www.carnegie.org
Should the U.S. Cooperate with Russia on Syria and ISIS?
BY MULTIPLE CONTRIBUTORS
[Full text of contributors here https://www.carnegie.org/news/articles/carnegie-forum-us-russia-and-syria/]

Carnegie Corporation, long committed to improving U.S.-Russia relations, has invited experts to weigh in on this key question.

SHOULD THE UNITED STATES COOPERATE WITH RUSSIA ON THE SYRIAN CONFLICT AND ISIS?

Much has been said about Russia's intensified military involvement in Syria and its call for building an international coalition to confront ISIS. As usual, opinions have varied. Some have viewed this as an opportunity to seek a solution to Syria's intractable conflict; others have voiced alarms about Russia's actions and motivations and cautioned against cooperation. And, as usual, the reasons and context for both positions and those in between are complicated, nuanced, and everchanging.

Carnegie Corporation of New York asked a number of leading Russia experts to weigh in on this urgent debate. Do Russia and the United States have a shared objective concerning Syria? If so, how can they settle the most divisive element in their current positions, which is the future of Syria's president Bashar al-Assad? And Is it possible for the United States and Russia to cooperate in ending conflict in Syria and defeating ISIS and, if yes, what are the necessary steps toward it?

-Deana Arsenian, Vice President, International Program and Program Director, Russia and Eurasia, Carnegie Corporation of New York

Read and respond to these expert opinions, and explore their other writings on this and related topics.

RAJ MENON
Professor of Political Science, City College of New York/City University of New York and Senior Research Scholar, Columbia University

What's truly surprising about the Kremlin's latest military moves in Syria is that anyone who has paid the slightest attention to Soviet and Russian policy in the Middle East should find them the least bit surprising. Moscow has a long history with Syria, based on multiple modes of cooperation that preceded Bashar al-Assad, and even his wily, pitiless and long-reigning father, Hafez (prime minister from 1970-71, president from 1971-2000).

The Damascus-Moscow alignment has endured for various reasons. During the Cold War, the Kremlin regarded Syria's Ba'ath Party, whose ideology is a mélange of pan-Arab nationalism and socialism, as a "progressive force." This assessment was reinforced by the Syrian government's refusal to participate in Washington's Containment strategy. Furthermore, Syria is geopolitically significant. When the civil war began in 2011, its population was 23 million, making it the eighth most populous Arab country. It has a long Mediterranean coast and good ports. Its military has relied almost completely on Soviet and Russian armaments, the cumulative tally of its purchases totaling billions of dollars. Its leaders have been willing to provide Russia (and the USSR before it) access to naval bases and airfields.

As a result, Moscow has what economists call substantial "sunk costs" in Syria: interests acquired, political contacts cultivated, markets (for arms and trade) nurtured and access to strategic installations-above all the naval facility at Tartus-gained.

Read "Why Russia's Actions in Syria Are No Shocker" by Rajan Menon in The National Interest

STEVEN PIFER
Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution's Center on the United States and Europe, and Director of Brookings' Arms Control Initiative

The United States and Russia have a common interest in defeating ISIS and promoting an end to the conflict and chaos in Syria, and the U.S. and Russian militaries have a specific interest in cooperating to deconflict their respective military operations in and over Syria.  But finding a path to broader cooperation will prove a challenge.

Washington and Moscow hold very different views regarding the future of Bashar al-Assad.  The United States sees no place for Assad, given the violence he has committed against his own people.  Russia is not ready to simply throw him under the bus.  That difference poses an obstacle to broader cooperation.  A second question concerns the conduct of military operations.  The U.S. military is targeting ISIS, but Russian forces may well target a wider spectrum of opposition groups.  Coming to terms on which groups they are fighting could pose a second obstacle.

Even if broad cooperation proves elusive, it makes sense for Washington and Moscow to stay in touch on Syria and ISIS, and try to manage their differences.  The bilateral agenda does not need another big problem issue at the moment.

Follow on Twitter @steven_pifer

JEFFREY MANKOFF
Senior Fellow and Deputy Director, Russia & Eurasia Program
Center for Strategic and International Studies

If Atlanticists were back in charge of Russia's foreign policy, or if U.S. decision-makers were possessed by the spirits of Talleyrand and Metternich, movement in one direction or another might be possible. But at present, unless ISIS becomes such a threat that Assad is seen as a lesser evil, or Russia's ability to sustain its policy in the region is compromised, there will be little basis for common action.

Given Russia's military deployments to Syria and efforts to establish a new coalition, the United States has little choice but to engage. Washington's current strategy of conducting airstrikes and supporting moderate rebel groups has utterly failed to stem the advancing tide of the Islamic State or bring peace to Syria. This failure has damaged Washington's credibility in the region, creating an opening for Russia and others to insert themselves into the conflict. Whether Washington likes it or not, Russia is an increasingly important player in Syria, and any political solution will have to take account of its equities.

Russia of course has its own agenda, which largely centers on maintaining Syria as a strategic partner, keeping its naval base on the Mediterranean coast at Tartus, checking the continued advance of extremist forces, and using its intervention to establish Russia as a regional power broker. Both publicly and privately Russian officials have said they do not see the maintenance of Bashar al-Assad's rule as a core interest. Moscow cares more about preserving the Syrian state structure-which it argues the U.S. failed to do in Iraq and Libya-along with Russian influence in Damascus. It also seeks to take Western (and domestic) attention off the conflict in Ukraine, which threatens to become more and more of an albatross for the Kremlin. The U.S. should have no illusions about Russia's intentions, but with Russian forces present in Syria, Moscow has already established that is going to be part of the conflict's next phase. Washington has little choice but to accommodate itself to that reality, and should explore whether a basis exists for cooperation that could improve the chances for a political solution to the Syrian conflict.

NIKOLAS GVOSDEV
Professor, National Security Affairs, U.S. Naval War College

U.S.-Russia cooperation on Syria can only occur when both countries share a similar assessment of the threat and its causes and come to an agreement about how best to remedy the situation. The fact that the United States, Europe, and Russia are all menaced by the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria is, in itself, not a sufficient basis for joint action. As long as Washington maintains that the regime of Bashar al-Assad is the cause of the Syrian crisis, and that its removal from power is the only way to move to a solution-while Moscow insists the exact opposite-there is no basis for anything other than limited, short-term tactical cooperation. The dialogue initiated between Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, and the direct meeting between Presidents Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin show no signs of narrowing these gaps.

Unlike in the aftermath of 9/11, both sides, at present, see the price of cooperation as higher than the projected rewards. Moscow sees nothing on offer from the United States that would cause the Kremlin to abandon its support of its partner in Damascus (or scale back its efforts in Ukraine) in order to help the United States salvage its Middle East policy by facilitating Assad's departure. In Washington, there is little enthusiasm for forging a partnership on Syria if it means conceding a de facto sphere of Russian and Iranian influence in the region and accepting a continuing role for Assad in determining Syria's future given that U.S. policy remains committed to his complete departure from power.

Read Moscow's War in the Air: Russia Sends a Message in Syria in The National Interest.

PAUL SAUNDERS
Executive Director, Center for the National interest

Russian President Vladimir Putin has demonstrated though action that it will be quite difficult if not impossible to find a political settlement to the Syrian civil war without some form of U.S.-Russia cooperation. Indeed, Moscow may be positioning its new bases to allow for ongoing support to the Syrian government even if Damascus should fall. At the same time, facts on the ground have demonstrated that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has much more support, and is much more resilient, than most Western observers apparently expected.

This presents the Obama administration with a clear choice: continue to support relatively weak opposition forces fighting both Assad and the Islamic State, with support from key regional allies but at cross-purposes with Russia and Iran (which are supporting Assad against the Islamic State and others), or work together with Moscow to try to build a unified coalition to fight the Islamic State and give less priority to ousting Assad. In practical terms, this means moving away from previous U.S. insistence that Assad's departure should be a precondition for any negotiations toward a political settlement. The current policy approach has not yet succeeded after four years and few expect dramatic changes in the foreseeable future. The alternative would force the administration to confront significant political opposition inside the United States and likely from some U.S. allies. And it would not be easy to find a common approach with Moscow.

That said, successful U.S.-Russia cooperation could substantially alter the dynamics of the fight against the Islamic State and, hopefully, accelerate its defeat. This cooperation could include some form of coordination of international air strikes with ground operations as well as joint U.S.-Russia efforts to persuade other regional states to participate in the fight and to facilitate talks between the Syrian government and non-Islamic State opposition forces.

Read "The Politics Behind Russia's Support for Syria" by Paul Saunders at the Tokyo Foundation

Follow on Twitter @1796farewell

DANIEL TREISMAN
Professor of Political Science at UCLA and Director of the Russia Political Insight project

The US and Russia share an interest in limiting and ultimately defeating ISIS. They also share an interest in a return to stability in Syria, but they differ fundamentally on what that stability would look like. However, Russia's interests in Syria and even with regard to ISIS are not the most salient objectives for Putin at the moment. The central goal of Russian actions-both military and diplomatic--is to reduce Russia's international isolation and achieve victories on the international stage that can be used domestically for propaganda purposes. The almost seamless segue from the conflict in Ukraine to the conflict in Syria observed in both the Russian Foreign Ministry and the Russian media was revealing.

In such circumstances, the US should be ready to explore any possibilities for coordination (cooperation is probably too much to expect) with Russia on ISIS and Syria-but at an appropriate level. Conversations should continue between Secretary Lavrov and Secretary Kerry and between the military leadership of the two countries. Meetings between presidents should only occur when significant agreements have already been negotiated at a lower level and should be arranged in such a way as to minimize the potential for Russian media to exploit these for propaganda purposes. Any attempt to "change the subject" from Ukraine should be resisted. And the policy of economic sanctions, which has over time been bearing fruit, needs to be sustained.

Follow on Twitter @dtreisman

HENRY HALE
Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, Elliott School of International Affairs

The current leadership of both the US and Russia agree on the need to combat ISIL. This provides grounds for cooperation. Complicating cooperation are: (a) that the leaderships disagree on what an acceptable alternative to ISIL is and (b) whether cooperation itself is undesirable because it could bolster Putin's international and domestic standing less than two years after Russia grossly violated the European security order by annexing Crimea. For Russia, therefore, the question is whether defeating ISIL is worth giving up Assad. For the US, the key question is whether Russian support would make the decisive difference in defeating ISIL. If not, then why risk throwing Putin a political lifeline and ending its punishment of Russia over Crimea? Not to mention effectively acquiescing to Assad, which could mean either new massacres of the opposition or continued civil war. It seems to me that Russia could be decisive for the anti-ISIL coalition only if its leadership is willing essentially to give up Assad, forcing him to come to the table for a compromise with the non-ISIL opposition to pose a united front against ISIL. But this is possible only if the non-ISIL opposition can be forced to agree to something other than the complete ouster of people Assad represents, and it is far from clear that the US can credibly deliver that, in which case support from other countries will be crucial as well. In short, what is needed is a grand diplomatic bargain that is unlikely to happen but that policymakers should strive for with energy and creativity. While Putin now appears to think defeating ISIL is not worth giving up on Assad, his public does not support a Syrian military adventure, giving him at least some incentive to consider a compromise in addition to other realities of Syrian politics. From the American perspective, including Putin in such a bargain would not enhance his international or domestic status enough to outweigh the potential benefits. Putin would of course spin it in a way that makes him look good, but then again, he spins everything that happens in the world that way.

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#33
Moscow Times
October 7, 2015
West Must Play It Cool With Putin
By Mark Galeotti
Mark Galeotti is professor of global affairs at New York University.

One minute President Vladimir Putin is on the ropes, isolated and mistrusted, then a few bombs later, he's again the grandmaster of geopolitical chess, the man who outsmarted the U.S. The truth of the matter is that he was and is neither, and the sooner the West stops veering wildly from one extreme perception to the other, the better - and the less powerful Putin will be.

Russia, after all, has its strengths and is capable of sending a few dozen bombers into Syria, while stirring up trouble on its borders. These should not be overplayed, though.

Talks of the risk of a "new Afghanistan" fail to appreciate just how much of a difference it makes being able to send troops across a common land border rather than having to ship or fly every soldier, liter of jet fuel or ration pack. More to the point, they fail to appreciate the order of magnitude difference between Soviet and Russian military capabilities. The Soviets kept more than 100,000 troops in Afghanistan at any one time for 10 years. The challenge of keeping at most 10,000 troops in the Donbass all but exhausted Russia's best formations.

Of course there is ample scope for Russia to be sucked deeper into the Syrian quagmire. In war, things always go wrong: there could be defections from the regime, a truck bombing on the Russian base at Latakia, Saudi Arabia could start equipping "its" rebels with surface-to-air missiles. When that happens, Moscow will face the usual dilemma: cut and run, or up the stakes and hope that everything works out for the best.

At present, though, a relatively small force is launching air strikes against a carefully undiscriminating mix of targets, both Islamic State and the anti-government forces Washington loves to call "moderate insurgents." The Americans, needless to say, are unhappy.

But the bottom line is that however deeply unpleasant, the regime in Damascus is still the legitimate government and it is clearly both delighted to see the Russians bomb with abandon and also eager to see more immediate threats addressed before distant ones.

Irksome and embarrassing for the U.S., yes, but not a game changer. The Russian attacks will at best delay, not in the long term reverse, the slow defeat of the Bashar Assad regime. And even if only some of their attacks hit the Islamic State, every little bit helps, no?

But Washington's response appears driven by pique and frustration as much as cool logic. In some ways, Moscow's greatest weapon is not the Su-24 bombers currently flying over Syria, nor the Spetsnaz special forces commandos who took Crimea, not even the nuclear submarines cruising beneath the polar ice floes. Rather, it its ability to irritate, to provoke and to surprise.

This seems to be the West's curse: Whenever Russia acts, it seems to feel it must react. Sometimes, of course, that is both appropriate and necessary. The annexation of Crimea demanded a punitive response, for example.

Often, though, the West does not really think through quite why it does what it does, beyond it being, well, what it always has done.

So Russia sends Tu-95 bombers flying around NATO airspace? At present what this means is that interceptor jets are scrambled, at ridiculous expense. (Keeping a Eurofighter Typhoon in the air, factoring in everything from fuel to maintenance, costs some $18,000 per hour.) But why bother? It is not as if those planes are going to launch an attack otherwise, so let Moscow waste its aviation fuel and wear out its bombers, as the tempo of such operations takes its toll.

So Putin threatens to send nuclear weapons to Kaliningrad? Big deal. Unless we expect a war with NATO - inconceivable at present - then it doesn't matter where they are. So far, he has been able to push Western buttons with the n-word - nuclear - but why give him the satisfaction?

So suddenly Russia is in Syria? It is not as if it wasn't there before, supplying weapons, running intelligence stations and coordination operations. Now they are giving the regime more fire support, but in a mission as much as anything designed precisely to make the West feel it has to play nice with Moscow. Let them join this messy little war, find out how much fun it is to tangle with the Islamic State, and see how long they are willing to underwrite Assad with Russian lives and hardware once it becomes clear the West isn't ready to take the bait.

The fundamental point is this: The more the West lets itself be shocked into responses by Putin, the more power it gives him, the more reason he has to continue to goad and needle. A more relaxed, positively comatose response might not feel right to leaders conditioned in the modern "fire fighting" school of governance, and certainly will not appeal to the more shrill commentators and back-seat drivers. But it might help wrench the political initiative from Putin.

In short, we might help prevent a cold war by being a little more cool.

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 #34
New York Times
October 8, 2015
Putin's Boldness, Syria's Misery
By JEREMY SHAPIRO
Jeremy Shapiro is a fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution.

The Russian intervention in Syria begins a new and even more dangerous phase in the continuing nightmare of the Syrian civil war. Obama administration critics often portray the incident as a test in comparative presidential masculinity. As The New York Post would have it, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia wants to "humiliate" President Obama or, as Senator John McCain informed us, Mr. Putin has exploited Mr. Obama's "weakness."

Clearly, this sort of policy by machismo is good politics in both the United States and in Russia. American presidents like to look tough, and the Russian president has demonstrated that riding around bare-chested on horses and tagging tigers on camera can improve one's domestic approval rating.

But foreign policy rarely favors the bold, even if headline writers do. The Russian move into Syria is indeed daring, but it will not end the Syrian civil war or counter the threat of terrorism and extremism. The various militias on the ground in Syria and their supporters abroad don't care how Mr. Putin looks on a horse. They will plot a response and kill Russians.

Over all, the Russian efforts will worsen the violence, inflame terrorism and risk dragging the Russians into a quagmire. The consequences are likely to be bad for Russia, for the United States and, worst of all, for Syria and its neighbors.

It would be the height of folly for the United States to respond to Russia's foray into Syria with a similarly bold but unwise countermove. The many proposals coming from the presidential candidates, from imposing no-fly zones to sending in United States forces to fight the regime of President Bashar al-Assad directly, all have the virtue of appearing strong and responsive to the Russian challenge. But they all lack an even vaguely plausible theory of how they would actually improve the situation on the ground in Syria. The basic concept is to do something bold and decisive, and then peace and democracy will simply follow. Unfortunately, the George W. Bush administration already tested that idea in Iraq.

Instead, Western policy makers should pause, exercise some unpopular caution, and reflect on what fuels the violence in Syria and why the Russians felt the need to engage in such a potentially costly escalation. Both the Assad regime and the various factions of the opposition have survived this long in the civil war because of substantial external assistance. When one faction suffers setbacks, its external supporters reliably rush in to prop it back up. This is a familiar pattern from the bad old days of the Cold War, when proxy civil wars in such diverse locations as Angola, Guatemala and Vietnam thrived for decades on United States-Soviet escalation and counterescalation.

Even without a Cold War, the pattern of proxy wars holds. The Assad regime, in fact, has suffered several setbacks in recent months, including the Islamic State's advance through central Syria and opposition victories in Idlib Province. These setbacks resulted in part from increased and improved foreign assistance from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, and even to some extent the United States.

Russia noticed, and escalated in Syria so that it could, in the classic formulation, negotiate with the United States and its allies from "a position of strength." This means shoring up the shaky Assad regime.

This strategy is a mirror image of the equally flawed American plan for Syria. American policy similarly holds that ending the Syrian civil war requires changing the balance of power sufficiently to convince Mr. Assad's external supporters that his regime has no future and to enter into a negotiation on opposition terms.

And so external supporters on both sides have simply doubled down in an attempt to create their own facts on the ground. But the result is a seesaw effect in which no side will ever keep its position of strength for long or produce its desired negotiation. To the contrary, the likely consequence of Russia's escalation is that supporters of the Syrian opposition - not just the United States, but even more Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey - are more likely to counterescalate.

Both the United States and the Syrian people would be better off if we simply skipped the next step in Syria and instead looked for a way to break out of the destructive cycle.

The necessary compromise to ending the cycle is not that far from the one stated in the Geneva Communiqué that the United States and Russia signed in 2012. It would involve real concessions, particularly from the United States and its partners, on Mr. Assad, in which they would support a political transition that contained no guarantee that Mr. Assad would leave power, while the regime and its supporters agreed to share power in Damascus.

The recent Russian escalation and American posturing have made that compromise even more difficult to achieve. The regional powers, particularly Iran and Saudi Arabia, seem even further away from compromise than the United States and Russia. At the moment, the regional powers still hope for victory and would prefer to fight the war to the last Syrian.

In the meantime, American efforts should focus on the vast suffering that is overflowing into neighboring countries and into Europe. The refugee crisis, as many have noted, is a symptom of the disease that is the Syrian civil war.

The United States, and the international community as a whole, have often seemed so focused on curing an incurable disease that they have given the symptoms - which in this case are refugees - short shrift.

We can provide greater assistance to the refugees, and we can make greater efforts to integrate them into the neighboring countries. That's not a solution to the civil war, but sometimes the boldest thing to do is recognize the limits of your power.

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 #35
Interfax
October 7, 2015
Russia, U.S. slow down pace of strategic weapons reduction under START Treaty

The United States and Russia shared the data on the condition of strategic offensive weapons according to the 2010 START Treaty, ex-chief of the General Staff of the Russian Strategic Missile Forces Col. Viktor Yesin told Interfax-AVN on Oct. 7.

"The information published by the U.S. State Department, it's a pity that it was not the Russian Defense Ministry, concerning the condition of strategic offensive weapons in the U.S. and Russia on the results of data exchange as of September 1, 2015 particularly said that as compared with the previous years, the pace of putting excessive weapons out of combat order was slowed down," the expert said.

The U.S. State Department said that by September 1 the U.S. had 898 deployed and non-deployed launchers of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-based ballistic missiles and heavy bombers. This indicator makes up 877 units in Russia. Including 762 U.S. deployed delivery vehicles, 526 - in Russia. The number of nuclear warheads on deployed delivery vehicles in the U.S. is 1,538, in Russia - 1,648.

"Over the past calendar year starting from September 1, 2014, the U.S. has put 14 launchers of missiles and heavy bombers out of combat order, Russia - 34 units. This number is lower than in the previous years," Yesin said.

To meet the START Treaty parameters the U.S. should put 98 pieces of strategic offensive weapons out of combat order, Russia - 77 pieces within the next 2.5 years until February 5, 2018, he said.

"Meanwhile, the U.S. will have to reduce 62 deployed delivery vehicles, Russia will not need to do so, because the country continues to have a real 'lack' in the number of deployed delivery vehicles regarding the limit of 700 units set under the START Treaty. Today the country has 526 deployed delivery vehicles," the expert said.

Meanwhile, he said that as to the number of warheads on deployed delivery vehicles "Russia surpasses the limit of 1,550 warheads by 98 units set in the Treaty." The U.S. has a 'lack' of 12 units of such warheads.

"Here I do not see any problems, because the excessive number of warheads are easily removed from deployed ICBMs and submarine-based ballistic missiles and are stored. The lacking warheads can be mounted on deployed delivery vehicles in the same easy way if necessary, because their stocks allow doing so," the expert said.

Russia and the U.S. "will honor their obligations under the 2010 START Treaty" by February 5, 2018, he said. "By this deadline Russia is expected not to reach the level of 700 deployed delivery vehicles permitted by the treaty. I believe that the country will have about 600 such delivery vehicles. However, it is not critical, because Russia will not cede to the U.S. in the number of warheads on deployed delivery vehicles, and this is the most important thing. As these are warheads, not delivery vehicles which hit the objects," Yesin said.

Russia will be also behind the U.S. in the so-called breakout potential, so, delivery vehicles and warheads, which are being stored and may be brought back in combat service. "But the U.S. will not be able to make use of this advantage, keeping within the framework of the Treaty, which is in effect until February 5, 2021," the expert said.

"We are confident that by the expiration of the effect of the 2010 START Treaty Russia will make up for a deficit in the number of delivery vehicles and will equalize with the U.S.".

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 #36
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
October 7, 2015
Russia and Syria Have Become a Hot Issue in US Presidential Elections
The two upstart front runners favor cooperation with Russia in the Middle East, while the entrenched old guard push for confrontation
By Edward Lozansky
Dr. Edward Lozansky is the President and Founder of the American University in Moscow. He also founded the U.S.-Russia Forum, an annual event held in the U.S. Congress since 1981 that features leading American and Russian political and business leaders, scholars and foreign policy experts.

According to Senator John McCain, the U.S. is now engaged in a proxy war with Russia in Syria, as a result of "an abdication of American leadership" on the part of the Obama White House.

I am afraid this time he is right, but it might help if McCain clarified who the American proxies are. Are they the so-called "moderate" Syrian rebels, some of whom have been trained at a high cost to American taxpayers, only to switch sides and become not-so-moderate but radical enough to join the ISIS? Or does he have in mind the Al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Nusra, which is also fighting on the side of "pro-Western, pro-democracy" Syrians?

It would be interesting to know if McCain (or for that matter other Members of Congress) or those in charge of US foreign policy clearly understand the complexity of the Middle East quagmire, with so many players that do not see eye to eye. There are Turks, Kurds, Saudis, Qataris, Iranians, and Israelis, as well as numerous splinter groups which do not report to anyone. On top of this there is a Sunni-Shia war which has been going on for centuries.

One would think that given this enormous complexity the need for close US-Russia cooperation is absolutely essential. However, so far, all of us who expected that after last week's Putin-Obama summit in New York we would see the beginning of a joint US-Russia effort to defeat the ISIS were proved pretty naive. The way things stand now there is little chance we will see the emergence of something resembling their anti-Hitler coalition because the goals and objectives of the two countries do not coincide.

Since the collapse of the U.S.S.R. the United States, instead of doing its best to integrate Russia with the West, has undertaken a global democracy promotion crusade to oust regimes that do not follow the Washington line in international affairs.

Russian president Putin is one of the worst recalcitrants, who has the unheard-of impudence to declare Russia's own security interests that do not necessarily coincide with those of the most hawkish Western democracy promoters. In their opinion, such outrageous behavior is absolutely inadmissible and definitely qualifies him for the top of the list of candidates for ouster.

However, Russia's pretty impressive arsenal of nuclear weapons requires different and slightly more nuanced approaches -  like NATO expansion -  a missile defense system close to Russian borders - or color revolutions, economic sanctions, removal of military bases outside of Russian territory, and most likely covert actions.

Not so long ago there were only two such Russian bases (compared with some 800 US bases in more than 70 countries and territories abroad): one in the Crimea, which until recently was part of Ukraine, and the other in Syria. Therefore both leaders of these countries had to be removed and replaced with "pro-democracy" leaders.

The Ukrainian president was indeed removed through a coup, but Putin gambled and took over the Crimea before the Russian base was thrown out from the peninsula. Now it is the Syrian ruler's turn, but Putin is not ready to let that happen.

So, where do we go from here? One thing for sure is that besides a proxy war there is a huge risk that the U.S. and Russia may engage militarily either by accident or by design; and judging from the statements by what is known as the foreign policy establishment we are slowly but surely moving in this direction of engagement or outright confrontation.

However, is this something that the American people want? According to the polls the majority of Americans do not want the United States to be drawn into a new war in the Middle East. As for war with Russia, the overwhelming majority of Americans resent the idea. They are smart enough to understand that Washington's current foreign policy has nothing to do with the nation's strategic and economic interests.

So far we see only two presidential candidates who see the Syrian picture more or less clearly.

One is Donald Trump who told NBC that the removal of Assad would be another tragic mistake similar to those in Iraq and Libya after the fall of Saddam Hussein and Moammar Gaddafi. "You can make the case, if you look at Libya, look at what we did there, it's a mess," Trump said. "If you look at Saddam Hussein with Iraq, look what we did there, it's a mess." In Syria, he said, "It's going to be the same thing." Asked if the Middle East would be more stable with Gaddafi and Saddam in power, Trump said: "Of course it would be."

On the democratic side Bernie Sanders whose ratings are now comparable or in some states even higher than Hillary Clinton's, says: "at this point I oppose a unilateral American no-fly zone in Syria (suggested by Hillary) which could get us more deeply involved in that horrible civil war and lead to a never-ending U.S. entanglement in that region."

Judging from the high ratings of both Trump and Sanders it is absolutely clear that the majority of American people share their views.  As Pat Buchanan is saying: "perhaps it is time we climbed off our ideological high horse and started respecting the vital interests of other sovereign nations, even as we protect and defend our own."

Will anyone listen in Washington before we have another war under Nobel Peace Laureate leadership?

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 #37
Washington Post
October 8, 2015
Russia's Syria intervention may force choice on Obama: Act or yield
By Karen DeYoung
Karen DeYoung is associate editor and senior national security correspondent for the Washington Post.

Russia's military moves in Syria are fundamentally changing the face of the country's civil war, putting President Bashar al-Assad back on his feet, and may complicate the Obama administration's plans to expand its air operations against the Islamic State.

So far, the administration has not budged in its twofold strategy - direct airstrikes against the Islamic State and significant aid for those fighting against it, and a push for negotiations to end what has been the largely separate Syrian civil war.

Senior administration officials acknowledge that Russia has already made some tactical gains in the civil war, even as they insist President Vladi­mir Putin will ultimately pay for what they describe as a strategic blunder that will undercut his already tenuous reputation in the world and encourage the spread of the militants.

If Putin's goal was "to get attention," one senior official said, "then it was brilliant....If it was to end the fighting in Syria, that's where we think it's a strategic error." At the same time, the official said, "Russia is now going to be viewed as being anti-Sunni...attracting the ire of extremist groups," including the Islamic State.

But others within the administration, and many outside experts, are increasingly worried that if President Obama does not take decisive action - such as quickly moving to claim the airspace over northwestern Syria and the Turkish border, where Russian jets are already operating - it is the United States that will suffer significant damage to both its reputation and its foreign policy and counterterrorism goals.

Putin has said he does not intend to launch military ground operations in Syria, and senior administration officials said Wednesday that they see no evidence of any ground combat units there. But the Russian deployments include sophisticated electronics, some of them designed to jam aviation electronics. Other than Russia and the Syrian government, only the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State is flying planes in Syria.

The current internal administration debate is largely the same one that has kept the administration out of significant intervention in Syria's civil war for the past four years. On one side, Russia's involvement has strengthened the winning argument that the United States should avoid direct involvement in yet another Middle East conflict and should continue directing its resources toward countering forces such as the Islamic State that pose a direct threat to U.S. national security.

On the other side, the argument is that it makes no strategic sense for the United States to concede Russian dominance of the situation: If Russia succeeds in keeping Assad in power, the problems in the West caused by both the Syrian war and militant expansion will only get worse.

Putin's strategy is that "you accept our terms" on Assad "and then we step back and let you solve your own problems" in Syria, said Igor Sutyagin, a Russian-studies expert at London's Royal United Services Institute. "If you don't, we create a complete mess ...increasing the influx of refugees into Europe, and your life gets more difficult."

The administration has said that the civil war can be solved only through negotiations and that there can be no solution that leaves Assad in power. Until the middle of last month, the opposition - a wide assortment of groups ranging from CIA-trained rebels to non-Islamic State extremists - appeared to be turning the tide against the Syrian military, taking territory in Idlib and Aleppo provinces in the northwest and on the southern front near the Jordanian border.

"The only viable future for a unified Syria is one that unites the moderate elements and what remains of the regime after Assad is pushed out," a U.S. intelligence official said Wednesday. But "Russia's actions have directly threatened that prospect."

Recent efforts by the United Nations and others to organize new negotiations, beginning with localized cease-fires, have already begun to fall apart under Russian bombardment that is likely to change Assad's calculus. Some see the Kremlin's goal as maintaining Assad's control over a rump Syrian state, in western population centers away from areas of Islamic State dominion, an objective that would also ensure Russia's continued foothold in the Middle East.

"If [the possibility of negotiations] existed until one or two weeks ago, we definitely find ourselves today...in a completely different place," said one international official who has long been involved in the effort. "We've been completely blown out of the water."

A cease-fire reached with Iran and Hezbollah to allow aid and evacuation of civilians from Zabadani, west of Damascus near the Lebanese border, has now unraveled "because of Russian action," the international official said. Although coordinates had been shared with Russia and plans were in place for U.N. officials to enter the area Saturday, it has been bombed three times, said the official, who like other U.S. and international officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Russia has said that its purpose is to strike the Islamic State. But the vast majority of its targets have been in areas of opposition control in western Syria and are seen as paving the way for Assad's forces to take territory lost to the rebels or never contested. The strategy is much the same as the one the administration has followed against the Islamic State in both Syria and Iraq, where air power is designed to weaken the militants and allow local forces to move in and hold ground.

Assad's military, also backed by Russian and Iranian supplies and intelligence, and new influxes of Iranian and Hezbollah fighters, appear to stand a good chance of regaining the initiative against the Syrian rebels, many of whom say they fear they are being abandoned by the United States.

"The growing involvement of Russia in the Syrian conflict is likely to lead to even greater civilian displacement and further complicates delivery of lifesaving humanitarian assistance," Mercy Corps said in a statement Wednesday.

"People are increasingly moving closer to the border with Turkey so they can cross if things get too bad," said Michael Bowers, vice president of the aid organization.

An alternative nightmare scenario has already begun to play out, as CIA-armed rebels have begun fighting against Syrian troops moving into Russian-bombed areas, part of the U.S.-Russia "proxy war" that Obama has vowed to avoid.

As rebel forces reposition themselves farther south in Idlib and Hama provinces, the Islamic State is likely to gain a stronger foothold in the northwest region along the Turkish border to the north of Aleppo, Syria's second-largest city.

That region has been under discussion between the United States and Turkey as a possible protected area where rebels can regroup and refugees can gather. Last week, Obama approved "shaping operations," including some airstrikes, to prepare for a proposed major increase in anti-Islamic State airstrikes by U.S. and coalition planes flying from Turkish bases.

But Russian operations in the area may complicate those plans and push the administration toward a decision to confront Moscow - one that it has so far not wanted to make. Turkey, and NATO, have already warned Russia after at least two incursions of Turkish airspace.

"They are sending planes and messages to Turkey and NATO," said Sutyagin, once a military policy expert for the Russian government. The message, he said, is that "this area, where you want to establish safe zones..is not safe because we are approaching there, entering your airspace, and there might be clashes."

Greg Miller and Thomas Gibbons-Neff contributed to this report.

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 #38
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
October 6, 2015
Ukraine crisis: Is there a light at the end of the tunnel?
De-escalation measures have begun in eastern Ukraine as the sides start to withdraw light weaponry from the frontlines - a move expected to be accompanied by political steps in accordance with the Minsk peace agreements signed in February. But are the parties to the conflict ready for this?
Alexey Timofeychev, RBTH

Hopes are growing that the ceasefire between government forces and pro-Russian rebels in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine may be moving toward a lasting peace, as both sides begin withdrawing weaponry from the line of contact.

The self-proclaimed Lugansk People's Republic (LNR), one of two breakaway entities in the Donbass, confirmed on Oct. 5 the withdrawal by the Ukrainian military of weapons with a caliber of less than 100 mm from the line of contact, which began the same day.

The LNR itself began the removal of light weapons as early as Oct. 3. These measures were agreed upon at a meeting between the leaders of Russia, Ukraine Germany, and France in Paris on Oct. 2, which mainly confirmed the lack of options other than the implementation of the Minsk peace agreements signed back in February.

The Paris arrangements, according to the meeting's participants, require concessions from both parties to the conflict. This primarily concerns the issue of the upcoming local elections, which the Donbass is still planning to hold separately from Ukrainian general elections (which will take place on Oct. 25).

In Paris, the self-proclaimed DNR (Donetsk People's Republic) and LNR were advised to review these plans and to organize elections in accordance with Ukrainian legislation.

In turn, Kiev was recommended to adopt a special law on elections in the Donbass in consultation with the breakaway regions' leadership, pass a constitutional amendment allowing for a special status for the Donbass and grant amnesty to all combatants.
 
A question of stability

However, are the parties are willing to implement these arrangements, which in fact have only confirmed, once again, the importance of the Minsk agreements?
Russian observers say these concerns mainly relate to the Ukrainian authorities, since, according to analysts, it is easier for the DNR and LNR to organize the elections in a timely and effective manner.

"It is easier for the Donbass to fulfill the political part of the agreements, including the rescheduling of the elections, than for Kiev. <...> For Kiev, it is a question of stability of the political regime, the internal stability of the country," Maxim Bratevsky from the Center for European Studies at Moscow's Higher School of Economics told RBTH.

At the same time, as Yevgeny Minchenko, head of the International Institute of Political Expertise, points out, as far as elections are concerned, a compromise is fully possible. They can be held in the Donbass in single-mandate constituencies, rather than with the participation of Ukrainian and regional political parties.
 
Is the West refusing to support Poroshenko?

Russian observers say that Kiev, represented by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, does not have much room for maneuver in relation to the situation in the Donbass.

"There is an assumption that Poroshenko failed to receive 100-percent support from [his] Western partners [at the meeting in Paris]. Apparently, it was pointed out to him that breaking the Minsk agreements into parts <...> and implementing some agreements while not implementing the others, without engaging in the political process, will not work," said Bratevsky.

According to Minchenko, "from unconditional support for Poroshenko, they [Europeans] have moved toward a rather critical perception and to the [understanding] that they should put pressure on him so that he fulfill his promises."

The expert attributes this "major change" in Europe's position to "objective reasons": "The man [Poroshenko] always promises, but does not do anything."
 
Poroshenko and the political crisis in Kiev

Ukrainian analyst Andriy Yermolayev, director of the New Ukraine Institute for Strategic Studies, agrees that this state of affairs is now coming to an end.
He stresses that Europe is forcing Poroshenko to act "even at the cost of significant perturbations in Ukraine itself." According to him, the implementation of the Paris plan could lead to a "more or less sustainable ceasefire and a decrease in the physical presence of Russia in the Donbass."

However, this does not remove the process of the further "autonomization" of the Donbass from the agenda.

"Not all members of the current ruling coalition are interested in the peace process, even if difficult and painful - there is a "party of war" and there are supporters of a "smaller Ukraine" (Ukraine without the Donbass)," said Yermolayev.

"The president himself - who, unfortunately, does not show consistency or have a clear platform on the issue of the Donbass - is in a difficult position."

But despite these problems reaching a peaceful settlement, Yermolayev believes - just like his Russian counterparts - that despite all this, a resumption of hostilities in eastern Ukraine is still not to be expected.

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 #39
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
October 6, 2915
The ghost of Syria haunts the Normandy Four talks on Ukraine
The fact that not a single decision made during the Normandy Four talks in Paris was committed to paper allows the parties involved to freely interpret the results and frame their own context.
By Petr Kopka
Petr Kopka is the head of research programs at the Center for Operational Strategic Analysis (COSA). In 2003, he was the acting head of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine and founder of the Analytical Division of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine. From 2004 to 2010, he was the first deputy director of the Institute for National Security under the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine. He is also a major general in the Reserve.

Oct. 2 in Paris saw the latest meeting of the leaders of the Normandy Four - France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine - with the participation of foreign ministers. The main topic of the meeting was the implementation and prospects of the Minsk agreements, the deadline for which expires at the end of the year.

New realities influencing perceptions of the Minsk agreements

The last time the Normandy Four met for top-level talks was in February 2015 in Minsk. Since then, the situation has changed dramatically in the conflict zones and in Ukraine in general. So, too, has the international climate.

Many experts attribute the abatement of military activity in recent months in eastern Ukraine to Russia's change of strategy. Unable to achieve the upper hand through force, Moscow is trying to channel the implementation of the Minsk agreements toward the gradual erosion of Ukrainian statehood by destabilizing the country internally, using the Donbas settlement process as the main tool.

Decentralization of power is in full swing in Ukraine, and the changes should be facilitated by the impending local elections. Particular attention needs to be paid to improving the combat capability of Ukraine's armed forces, reforming the judicial system, and cleansing the courts and prosecutor's office of persons caught up in corruption schemes. All of this is happening, albeit slowly and not always smoothly.

Since the meeting in Minsk, Ukraine has joined in the international sanctions against individuals and legal entities in Russia accused of destabilizing the situation in the country or violating the rules of international law by operating in areas temporarily beyond Kiev's control.

But it is the external background that has changed most of all. Whereas the Minsk negotiators were able to focus on a single issue - resolving the conflict in eastern Ukraine through 17 hours of talks, in Paris there were other no less important items on the agenda for Germany and France, above all the refugee crisis and the related problem of terrorism, as well as Russia's bombing campaign in Syria.

Although the events in the Middle East are seemingly unrelated to Ukraine, the "ghost of Syria" also had a seat at the table in Paris.

Ahead of the Normandy Four meeting, Vladimir Putin, Francois Hollande and Angela Merkel held talks with each other to discuss the recent events in Syria.

That same day, Oct. 2, the governments of France, Germany, Britain, Turkey, the United States, Saudi Arabia and Qatar issued a joint statement calling on Russia to immediately halt its air strikes in Syria, since they are allegedly killing civilians, not ISIS terrorists.

The different objectives of the Normandy Four

The parties to the meeting had a range of objectives. Ukraine, for instance, was determined to scrap the elections in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, which are beyond its control. These elections threaten to undermine the Minsk agreements and, ultimately, cause a frozen conflict. That, in turn, would not assist the internal political reforms currently in progress.

Russia's primary aim was to prevent the tightening of existing sanctions and the introduction of new ones. Moreover, the Russian side seems to have been gauging the reaction of its European colleagues to the latest developments in Syria.

The goal of the French president and the German chancellor was to show the international community (primarily Europe and their own electorates) that despite the skepticism surrounding the Minsk process, significant results have been achieved. Chief among them is the outline of a future plan on the further settlement of the conflict.

Results of the latest Normandy Four talks

The talks produced a number of agreements. In particular, the parties agreed on a ceasefire - or rather the start of the withdrawal of light weapons (below 100 mm caliber). The withdrawal process is set to last around 40 days, starting Oct. 3.

The parties also agreed to strengthen the OSCE mission and grant the organization access to all territories beyond official Kiev control. Some agreements were also struck on humanitarian, hostage and amnesty-related issues. Russia, for its part, stated that elections in the uncontrolled areas of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics, slated for Oct. 18 and Nov. 1, respectively, would not go ahead.

As a result of the four-hour item-by-item talks, it was decided that the Minsk agreements must be implemented in full, which in turn will require additional time.

At the joint final press conference, the French and German leaders expounded a common vision of the future of the Minsk process, noting, in particular, the decision to prolong it until 2016. That was necessitated by two interrelated problems: the holding of elections in territories not under official Kiev control, and the resumption of Ukrainian control over individual sections of the Ukrainian-Russian border.

Putting agreements into action will be difficult

It seems to follow from the above that the Minsk agreements will be slightly supplemented and adjusted as a result of the Paris talks with a view to relaxing the time constraints and giving the parties additional scope to fulfill all their obligations. How these oral amendments will be woven into the context of the written and signed Minsk agreements is not clear. It is known only that the ideas expressed during the meeting will be submitted to ad hoc working groups for "fine-tuning."

Moreover, the fact that not a single decision made during the Normandy Four talks in Paris was committed to paper allows the parties to freely interpret the results and frame their own context, giving rise at times to wishful thinking. That will undoubtedly strike a discordant note during the deliberations of the working groups, and also at the meeting of the relevant foreign ministers scheduled for November this year.

Therefore, as the German chancellor carefully pointed out, despite having achieved some "fairly good" agreements under the Normandy format, it remains to be seen whether they can be put into action.

The practical implementation of what was struck in Paris is where the major problems lie. Despite the fact that Ukraine has achieved (at least verbally) the abolition of the elections in the self-proclaimed DPR and the LPR, Kiev has so far been unable to utilize the Minsk arrangements for the benefit of its own national interests. As experience shows, the only party to the process it can truly rely on is itself. Berlin and Paris have once again demonstrated the aloofness of arbitrators.

Much will depend on Russia. Having retained its strong influence over the leadership of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics (DPR and LPR), Moscow can now turn the implementation of the Paris arrangements into a constructive or destructive process as it sees fit.

Russia could extract even more wiggle room from its engagement in the armed conflict in Syria. Despite Merkel's statements that she sees no link between Ukraine and Syria, it is unlikely that Moscow has not considered exploiting any one of these factors if the situation does not develop to its advantage.

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 #40
Irrussianality
https://irrussianality.wordpress.com
October 6, 2015
HOLDING KIEV TO ACCOUNT
By Paul Robinson
Univerity of Ottawa

From the start of the crisis in Ukraine, I have regularly pointed out that it is not all Russia's fault. My purpose has not been to deny all Russian responsibility - Russia does share the blame for what has happened - but merely to point out that others are to blame too, most notably those who currently govern Ukraine. The talks last week in Paris between the so-called 'Normandy Four' (Russia, Ukraine, Germany, and France) indicate that the West, or at least part of it, is beginning to realize this.

In the past few weeks, the main roadblock to the implementation of the Minsk-2 peace settlement has been proposed local elections in Donbass. Kiev has been insisting that such elections be held on 25 October in accordance with Ukrainian law. The rebels in Donbass had announced that they would hold elections on different dates and under their own laws. If the rebels had agreed to the Ukrainian demand, it would have amounted to something close to surrender. If they went ahead with their own plan, it would be a major step on the way towards forming independent states, and would constitute a formal break with Minsk-2.

In Paris, the Normandy Four agreed to a compromise, referred to as the 'Morel plan' after Pierre Morel, the French diplomat who proposed it. The rebel Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics (LPR & LPR) would cancel their own elections and instead hold elections under Ukrainian law, but not until 2016 after Ukraine has brought in a new electoral law, which is to be drawn up in consultation with the rebel leaders, and after Ukraine has legislated an amnesty for the rebels, so that they can stand as candidates in these elections. Russia's president Vladimir Putin promised to ask the rebels to cancel their elections, and today the DPR and LPR announced that they would indeed postpone them until the new year, on condition that the Ukrainian government provides the promised amnesty, enters into negotiation with them about a new electoral law, and grants Donbass 'special status' in the Ukrainian constitution.

By asking the rebels to cancel their elections, Putin has shown yet again that he is not interested in annexing Donbass or in seeing the DPR and LPR become semi-independent states like Abkhazia or South Ossetia. Rather, Russia remains committed to making Minsk-2 work, and that means re-integrating Donbass into Ukraine. But, it is equally clear that the Russian government believes that the only way that this can be done is by direct negotiation between Kiev and the DPR/LPR, leading to a constitutional 'special status' and to new electoral laws which the latter find acceptable. According to Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov:

Besides the timing of local elections, of key importance are issues such as guaranteeing the special status of Donbass ... And, according to the agreement, this special status will be guaranteed permanently, not for a year, not for two, not for three. This is written in black and white in the Minsk agreements. ... All this work [to change the constitution and carry out elections] must be agreed with the particular regions of Donetsk and Lugansk regions, that is to say with the current leaders of Donbass.

Lavrov is on solid ground here. Contrary to what Kiev claims, the Minsk-2 agreement did not actually state that Donbass had to hold local elections on a specified date under Ukrainian law, merely that 'dialogue is to start on modalities of conducting local elections in accordance with the Ukrainian legislation and the Law of Ukraine "On temporary Order of Local Self-Governance in Particular Districts of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts," and also about the future of these districts based on the above-mentioned law.' The agreement also says that, 'questions related to local elections will be discussed and agreed upon with representatives of particular districts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in the framework of the Trilateral Contact Group.'

No such 'dialogue' has taken place, nor have the elections been 'discussed and agreed upon with representatives of particular districts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts', for the simple reason that Kiev refuses to recognise the rebel leaders as being the 'representatives' in question. By insisting that the local elections are dependent upon Kiev engaging in dialogue with the DPR and LPR, the French and Germans are doing nothing more than demanding that the Ukrainian government carry out its obligations under the Minsk-2 agreement.

This is not popular in Kiev. According to Deutsche Welle, 'In Ukraine, the "Morel Plan" is seen as an ultimatum.' As a Ukrainian source told the Russian newspaper Nezavisimaia Gazeta:

They [France and Germany] are demanding that we do not prosecute them [the rebels], that we allow them to participate in elections, that is to say that we recognize that the leaders of the DPR and LPR represent the people of Donbass, and that we must speak with them, and not with Russia. This is a complicated and dangerous moment. Russia is achieving what it wanted - Ukrainian recognition of the DPR and LPR.

If this attitude prevails, and Kiev continues to refuse to speak to the rebels, it will be in clear breach of last week's agreement, and there will be no progress towards a final peace settlement. This is not inevitable, but at present it looks likely. As Leonid Bershidsky writes, 'It's almost politically impossible for [Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko] to push a Moscow-approved election bill through Ukraine's parliament.'

Indeed, Poroshenko is already backtracking on the commitments he gave in Paris. There was no Morel Plan, he told Ukrainian television, just 'some proposals, some of which can be taken into consideration, and others of which certainly not.' Local elections in Donbass, he added, could only take place when there were guarantees of security, in other words after 'the withdrawal of all foreign forces, volunteers, arms, and equipment.' Since the Ukrainian government considers most of the rebels' forces and their weapons to be 'foreign', this pretty much rules out any elections until such time as the rebels have disarmed.

What will France and Germany do if Kiev doesn't fulfil its side of the bargain? Will they finally hold the Ukrainian authorities to account? In the past, when they have felt that Moscow wasn't fulfilling its obligations, they have taken a tough line. In the interests of peace, they now need to take an equally tough line with Kiev.

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 #41
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
October 8, 2015
Further progress in Ukraine as Donbass agrees to postpone elections
The governments of the self-proclaimed republics in eastern Ukraine have agreed to postpose their local elections, thus fulfilling the wishes expressed by the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France Normandy at talks in Paris on Oct. 2.
Alexey Timofeychev, RBTH
 
The unrecognized Donetsk and Lugansk "people's republics" (DNR and LNR) in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine have responded to calls to postpone local elections, paving the way for the possibility of further progress in restoring peace to the region, where a conflict between government troops and Russian-backed rebels remains

The two republics, which had previously slated local elections for Oct. 18 (DNR) and Nov. 1 (LNR) have moved the votes to Feb. 21, 2016 following a meeting in Paris on Oct. 2 between the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France at which the parties called on the Donbass to cancel these elections.

The desire of the DNR and LNR to hold elections independent of Ukraine's general elections had impeded the implementation of the peace agreements signed in Minsk in February, which stated that elections must be held in accordance with Ukrainian law, i.e. on the same day as elections throughout the country. Ukrainian local elections are scheduled for Oct. 25.

Kiev had stated that the DNR and LNR's autonomous organization of local elections would have led to their failure, and EU figures had inferred that further sanctions against Russia could follow if Moscow did not apply pressure to the pro-Russian rebel republics to cancel the elections.

Announcing the postponement, the representatives of the rebel regions said that the departure from the initial dates of the local elections is linked to "Kiev's complete implementation of Minsk-2's political points."

The republics expect that Kiev will be ready "to assign the Donbass a special status, prevent the prosecution and punishment of participants of the events on the territories of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, and introduce amendments to the constitution, giving it a new version, one that takes us into consideration."
 
Postponement of voting 'opens the door'

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko announced that Donetsk and Lugansk's agreement to postpone their elections "opens the door for Ukraine's return to the Donbass with the help of elections held according to Ukrainian legislature and OSCE standards."

However, speaking in front of parliament on Oct. 7, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavel Klimkin called the move by the DNR and LNR "a dirty game," insisting that at the meeting in Paris the parties had agreed on the complete cancelation of elections, not their postponement.

He also said that, "nature does not have a special status for the Donbass," and that elections can be held only after "the removal of foreign troops" - a reference to the Russian forces that are widely believed to be supporting the two breakaway republics - and that amnesty can be granted only after the elections have taken place.
 
Moscow's reaction

Moscow welcomed the decision by the self-proclaimed republics. "This is another example of the flexible and constructive approach towards realizing the Minsk agreements," said presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov.

Pavel Svyatenkov, collaborator at the independent Institute of National Strategy, called the decision by the DNR and LNR a "unilateral concession" to Kiev.

"Ukraine has promised to realize the Minsk agreements on many occasions - grant amnesty, adopt a law for local self-government in Donetsk and Lugansk, introduce amendments in the constitution and so on, but nothing of the sort has been done yet," he said, underlining that he does see any signs of Kiev changing its position.

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 #42
Russian foreign ministry says postponement of DPR/LPR elections to make parties find common grounds, draw their positions closer

MOSCOW. Oct 8 (Interfax) - Russia's foreign ministry hopes that the move to postpone the elections in the self-proclaimed republics in Donbas will create favorable conditions for further discussions on the matter of political settlement of the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

"The crucial point was the statement of Donetsk and Luhansk on the shifting of the dates of the local elections in Donbas to sometime in February 2016," Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova told a briefing on Thursday.

"We expect that such a step will create a favorable atmosphere for the resumption of the discussions that started on the key issues of the political settlement, which will ultimately allow the parties to the conflict to find common grounds and bring their positions together so that they can reach reciprocally acceptable solutions to the existing problems," Zakharova said.

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 #43
Moscow Times
October 8, 2015
Non-Battle Casualties Make Up Third of Ukraine Military Deaths

Nearly a third of Ukraine's military losses over the past two years were non-battle casualties, according to the country's Defense Ministry figures cited by news reports.

In total, 2,027 servicemen deaths have been recorded in 2014-2015 so far, according to the Defense Ministry report released Wednesday. Among them, 597 were non-battle casualties, the ministry said, Ukrainian newspaper Ukrainska Pravda reported Wednesday.

The leading causes of non-battle deaths included suicide, with 171 cases, and road accidents, with 112, the report said.

Another 87 deaths were attributed to soldiers neglecting safety guidelines, including 66 cases of careless handling of weapons and munitions, Ukrainska Pravda reported.

There were 64 soldiers killed by fellow servicemen, and 26 soldiers killed by civilians, as well as 39 cases of accidental poisoning and 33 drownings, the report said.

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#44
www.rt.com
October 7, 2015
Top Ukraine official backs idea 'to help ISIS take revenge on Russian soldiers in Syria'
[Graphics here https://www.rt.com/news/317849-ukrainian-russia-isis-revenge/]

Russian prosecutors have charged a prominent Ukrainian politician with inciting terrorism, after he called for Islamic State to attack Russian pilots involved in the campaign against ISIS in Syria.

Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, shared a message from a Facebook "friend" who wants to help ISIS militants take revenge against Russian forces in Syria "in accordance with Sharia law."

Gerashchenko said he received a message on Facebook which said that "Russian propaganda channels" and Russian army in almost every report "show off" their military personnel in Syria.

The post, as well as Gerashchenko's Facebook page, were unavailable for several hours. But later the post, as well as Gerashchenko's page, reappeared. An image of the post can be viewed, however, thanks to a screenshot.

"I think that their faces [on TV] will be enough, so that Islamic State militants and their supporters in Russia, the majority of whom are in the Caucasus region, could then find them and take revenge [on them] under Sharia law," the Facebook user wrote to Gerashchenko.

Gerashchenko, who also attached an RT video showing Russian military jets in Syria in his post, seemed to be inspired by the idea. He urged everyone who has any information about Russian servicemen fighting ISIS in Syria to report the data on the volunteer-made Mirotvorec (Peacekeeper) website. For such information, there would be a special section, entitled "Putin's crimes in Syria and Middle East."

The majority of Gerashchenko's Facebook friends supported the idea, calling it "brilliant" and "effective." However, not everyone got motivated by such a call.

"Anton [Gerashchenko] is already supporting Islamic State?" "Has Ukraine already solved its own problems" "Anton Gerashchenko, are you nuts?" asked users in the comments under the post.

The Mirotvorec (Peacekeeper) website, which is supported by Gerashchenko, posts very thorough data on anyone who oppose the current Kiev authorities - journalists, activists, MPs and, of course, self-defense forces fighting against the government in eastern Ukraine. They are all labeled "terrorists" or "supporters of federalization."

The personal information include their addresses, social media account links, a substantial biography and any mentions in the Ukrainian press. It has its own social media account, which frequently tweets cryptic messages of "successful missions."

Several of those mentioned on the website, with the most high-profile ones like opposition politician Oleg Kalashnikov and opposition journalist Oles Buzina, were killed shortly after their personal details turned up on the website.

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 #45
Kyiv Post
October 8, 2015
Experts: Declaring Ukraine in partial default, Fitch 'just stated a fact'
By Alyona Zhuk and Olena Gordiienko

Fitch Ratings' downgrading of Ukraine's foreign-currency rating to "restricted default" was an expected move that won't affect the state's economic and social life, experts say.

Fitch on Oct. 6 declared Ukraine to be in partial default on $500 million in eurobond obligations after the country missed a payment scheduled for Sept. 23. The announcement came a week before Ukraine's scheduled negotiations with international creditors.

"The 10-day grace period on Ukraine's $ 500 million eurobond maturing on Sept.23, 2015 has elapsed without payment being made. Fitch therefore judges Ukraine to be in default on its sovereign eurobond obligations," the agency stated.

In August, Ukraine sealed a deal with international creditors on restructuring the government's $18 billion debt, which was later approved by parliament on Sept. 17 with more than 300 lawmakers voting in favor. The deal will save Ukraine at least $3.6 billion, based on a 20 percent write-down of Ukraine's Eurobonds. It also postpones until 2019 Ukraine's debt repayments to a group of foreign bondholders led by U.S. asset manager Franklin Templeton, who hold over $7 billion worth of Ukraine's bonds.

Restructuring foresees an exchange of old bonds for newly issued ones, with higher interest of 7.75 percent and maturity dates starting from 2019.

According to Oleksandr Paraschiy, an analyst at Concorde Capital, what Fitch called default was indeed a non-payment, but it had been planned and negotiated with the majority of the parties.

Fitch just "stated a fact," Paraschiy said.

"And the fact is that the long-term papers are in factual default. A moratorium has been set on any payments, as the procedure of debt restructuring is ongoing," Paraschiy told the Kyiv Post.

Nomura International economist Timothy Ash agreed: "This was more or less as expected after Ukraine moved to restructure its private sector external debt liabilities."

"It is a default, so will count against Ukraine going forward - people will remember that ultimately it did not pay, and its credit rating will suffer as a result. However, I think there are 'hard' and 'soft' defaults/restructurings. This is a 'soft' default/restructuring," Ash told the Kyiv Post.

A "hard" version of default could have happened if Kyiv had unilaterally applied a moratorium on external payments, according to Yegor Perelygin, the head of the strategic planning department in UniCredit Bank Ukraine.

"But a full-scale default didn't happen, and we really did manage to avoid the worst scenario," Perelygin told the Kyiv Post. So Fitch's announcement won't influence either the exchange rate or the lives of Ukrainians, he said.

According to Ash, "the period of the default could prove short lived."

"Once the restructuring is completed, I think that Ukraine's ratings could move back quite quickly to say a CCC rating, and then gradually move higher," he told the Kyiv Post.

As was stated in Fitch's report, "Ukraine's ratings will be upgraded shortly after Fitch determines that the exchange has been successful. The new rating will be consistent with Ukraine's prospective credit profile and debt structure."

However, not all foreign creditors are happy with the conditions. Russia, second largest Ukraine's bondholder with $3 billion in bonds, did not take part in months of debt restructuring talks, and has refused to accept the general terms reached by negotiators. Ukraine, in turn, sees no reason to apply any special conditions to the Russian credit.

The Russian government insists that the bonds it bought from Ukraine in 2013 are a sovereign, not a private debt, therefore Russia refuses to accept the general conditions Ukraine has negotiated with other bond holders, Paraschiy said.

"The IMF can't keep providing loans to countries that failed to pay the state debt," he told the Kyiv Post. "However, the position of IMF isn't clear yet, as it hasn't confirmed that this is Ukraine's state debt.

"This is a political issue. Clearly, Russia will be pressuring the IMF. Much will depend on the IMF."

Nikolay Gueorguiev, the chief of the IMF mission in Ukraine, on Oct.2 encouraged the broad participation of eurobond holders in the debt exchange, which the fund believes will ensure that public debt is sustainable with high probability and that the IMF program remains fully financed.

Represented by international law firm Shearman & Sterling, a group of investors owning at least 25 percent of the $500 million Ukrainian Eurobond issue that expired Sept. 23 has long been seeking better conditions, and at various points threatened to block the whole deal.

Ukraine's Finance Ministry will meet all creditors in London on Oct.14 for negotiations, when final consensus on conditions and technicalities is to be reached.

Illya Neskhodovsky of the Reanimation Package of Reform, a civic platform for non-governmental organizations and experts, told the Kyiv Post if the negotiations reach a dead end, Ukraine might face bankruptcy. However, he added, the risk of this is low.

"(The international creditors) understand Ukraine's proposals, and realize that the start of bankruptcy procedures would only worsen the situation with their bonds, so they will have to accept (Ukraine's conditions)."

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 #46
Business New Europe
www.bne.eu
October 7, 2015
Ukraine 'breadbasket' prepares for its next heyday
Benjamin Rahr in London

Despite Ukraine's 18-month old civil war and the loss of territories in the east of the country, it has impressively maintained its status as one of the world's leading exporters of agricultural products. Now the pro-European government in Kyiv hopes that its agribusiness, bolstered by a bumper 35mn tonne grain harvest, will act as the green shoots of a general economic recovery.

In order to attract large-scale international investment, Ukrainian Minister for Agrarian Policy and Food Olexiy Pavlenko has been mulling a controversial land reform draft that critics say will allow a handful of multi-nationals and domestic oligarchs to live off the fat of the land while leaving local farmers out in the cold.

Although Ukraine has undergone - to quote the US State Department - "an historic transformation since 2014, which has laid the foundation for a dramatically improved investment climate in the future", the country narrowly avoided bankruptcy earlier this year and remains in desperate need of foreign money.

Most of Ukraine's heavy industry is located in its eastern regions and so has been crippled by the 18-month conflict with pro-Russian separatists. Last year, exports from the historically strong metallurgical branch dropped by one sixth. And while the country's 2014 GDP shrank by 7%, agriculture became Ukraine's beacon of hope as the only economic sector showing a positive performance - albeit at a mere 3%.

According to Gilles Mettetal, Director for Agribusiness at the London-based European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), Ukraine's economy might be battered but its agriculture is enjoying a period of record exports, defying geopolitical challenges and the fighting in the East.

"Ukraine has already become the world's third largest exporter of grain and they still have even more potential to improve the yield, cultivate more land and add value to the export," Mettetal told bne IntelliNews. "So, there is potential. The fundamentals are right: the land is good - it's probably the best land in the world or among the best in the world, the companies are good, the private sector has received very little support but has nonetheless developed a very efficient operation. They are very competitive, probably one of the most competitive in Europe."

Despite Russia's annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and subsequent loss of control over parts of the eastern Donbas region, Ukraine has remained the world's leading exporter of sunflower oil. Once known as the "breadbasket of the Soviet Union", it has lived up to its former fame: its agriculture has shown steady overall growth over the past 15 years and is valued today at $13.5bn.

Off to pastures greener

The "plan is to use all opportunities to double our production by 2020", minister Pavlenko tells bne IntelliNews on the fringes of a conference jointly staged by his ministry and the EBRD in London with the aim of attracting foreign investment. "Agribusiness in Ukraine has 30% of the whole world's black-soil, very good moisture, also people, skills, port facilities, infrastructure, and we see huge potential to increase not only exports but also production."

Pavlenko pointed to the fact that the post-Maidan government has implemented reform measures and fulfilled International Monetary Fund (IMF) requirements to secure a new loan. While a year ago foreign exchange reserves were down to $5bn, the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) now has $13bn in reserves, enough to stabilise the national banking sector.

"We can see a very big difference between the stage we had one year ago and the current situation," adds Pavlenko. "First of all, in terms of stabilising the currency, agribusiness plays a very vital, a key role: 37% of total export is coming from agribusiness. At this moment, the total export is at the level of 34.6mn tonnes of grain - we had record figures last year, amounting to $15bn. We are the number three exporter after the USA and the European Union."

But there are still not enough investors, despite the great potential. "In our estimate, up to $8bn [in] potential projects are currently available for investments, including irrigation projects, in machinery, in leasing, in dryers, in seeders, in planters," says the minister.

You can lead a horse to water...

The country's chief banker Valeria Gontareva says that over the next months Ukraine will suffer one of the deepest recessions in years as its economy struggles to regain momentum. The NBU predicts a 7.5% GDP contraction this year. At the same time, inflation is expected to remain high at 25% and will recede only marginally to 17-18% in 2016.

Private foreign capital has almost completely vanished, and for now Ukraine has to rely on international institutions. Since 2011, the EBRD has pumped €200mn annually into Ukrainian agriculture. "Over the past five years we have invested more than €1bn but this is a drop in the ocean," said Mettetal.

So it is no surprise that the bank's focus is on getting more investors on board. While Ukraine will be facing huge challenges for the foreseeable future, the government is committed to accelerating reforms, cutting through red tape, fighting corruption and creating the right environment for businesses to operate. Kyiv hopes that its reform efforts will soon bear fruit, even while taking heavy flak for the lack of fast visible progress.

"Together with the EBRD, the IFC and the World Bank, we are trying to show investors where to invest," said Pavlenko. "We have twenty-four different reform groups, covering twenty-four different sectors, from land reform to tax issues, food safety, deregulation, state-owned enterprises and many other sectors, which are really vital and key for the investors."

Serious investors need a stable legal environment and a degree of certainty that they will reap a decent return on their capital. So far, it looks promising in Ukraine, says EBRD's Mettetal: "We have asked 14 large companies how much they would be prepared to invest in the next few years, and it amounted to more than €2bn."

"Agribusiness is one of the major sectors that takes the loans," adds Pavlenko. "There is a higher rate of growth where the banks put capital." But as long as Ukraine is viewed as a high-risk country, foreign loans remain very expensive at annual rates of up to 30%, "which is very high - but still, it is the most interesting sector to finance".

Chinese hand on the plough

Despite being set against a background of political instability, financial risk and economic weakness, the country's economic potential caught the eye of a new investor who has never set foot on Ukraine's fertile soil before - China.

Today, Ukraine has overtaken the US as China's largest grain supplier, while the Asian economic superpower announced plans to lease and work up to 5% of Ukraine's farmland. Since the outbreak of the Ukrainian turmoil in late 2013, the agricultural partnership between Kyiv and Beijing has gradually intensified. But the People's Republic is not the only country that is now tilling the black soil fields.

"We see big interest from Asian countries as well as from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Europe," said Pavlenko. European businesses and very big European funds from Germany, from France, from UK and from the USA are interested as well."

To further intensify the war on corruption, the government is now preparing an extensive privatisation programme. "We are sure that putting up state-owned companies for privatisation as soon as possible will bring in capital investors and also help to eradicate corruption in those enterprises," said Pavlenko.

Breaking the land lock

Another major stumbling block that has kept many investors away from Ukrainian agribusiness is the ban on sales of farmland to large investors. Pressured by the World Bank and the IMF, but wary of domestic resistance, the government is drafting a land reform that might lift those restrictions. Given that less than a quarter of the population supports foreign land sales, according to the minister, "you need to educate the people telling them that land sometimes must be a commodity. It must be a viable instrument to track financing."

Selling Ukraine's "fields of gold" to international investors and conglomerates is expected to create a backlash from the rural community, which the minister says is canny enough not to "buy a pig in a poke". Although the government estimates that $10bn could easily be attracted very fast to the land and to the market within a very short period of time, critics fear that it would hand over control of the breadbasket to domestic and foreign oligarchs, since local farmers would not be able to raise the requisite capital to take part in the auctions.

Therefore, the majority of Ukrainians favour the existing model of long-term agreements with small holders and hope that the authorities will simplify the legislation of land leases, provide realistic finance options to local farmers and open up new export markets.

However, faced with ever-growing economic problems and a huge mountain of debt, Kyiv is dependent on money from the international community, which is the main sponsor of the proposed land reform. Who the government will listen to in the end, the citizens or international institutions, remains to be seen. Ultimately, whatever the government decides, it will reap what it sows.

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 #47
http://newcoldwar.org
October 7, 2015
Selective blacklisting in Euromaidan Ukraine
By Ivan Katchanovski, published on his Facebook page, Oct 7, 2015

Karl Marx, VI Lenin among the 500 names to be torn from public spaces and from any other official recognition

The Ukrainian Institute of National Memory has issued a list [http://www.memory.gov.ua/publication/spisok-osib-yaki-pidpadayut-pid-zakon-pro-dekomunizatsiyu] of more than 500 Ukrainian and foreign historical personalities to be blacklisted because of Ukraine's 'decommunization' law and "crimes." The list is titled, 'List of persons subject to the law of decommunization'.

The majority of names are officials of the Communist and Soviet era, but the list also includes Karl Marx, several writers, such as Henri Barbusse, female cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova [first woman to fly in space, in 1963], fictional hero Korchagin, Soviet World War II partisan commanders, etc. All streets and other places named after them have to be renamed by next month.

In contrast, such ex-Communist and Soviet officials as those in the current government or connected to the current government, including Oleksandr Turchynov, former presidents Leonid Kuchma and Leonid Kravchuk, and the father of Yuri Lutsenko [the latter is former Ukraine minister of the interior of Ukraine and current leader of the 'Petro Poroshenko Bloc' political machine] are not blacklisted.

The new blacklist is another attempt of instituting a state-imposed history, and it would limit academic research concerning these historical personalities.

Background:

Other names on the Ukrainian Institute of Memory blacklist are: Rosa Luxembourg, Klara Zetkin, Friedrich Engels, Ernst Thaelman, Alexandra Kollontai, Karl Liebknecht, Dolores Ibarruri, Ukrainian antifascist partisan leaders S. Kovpak, Saburov and Fedorov, anarchist sailor Zheleznyakov, the leaders of the 1918 workers' uprising in the Kiev factory Arsenal, and Ukrainian-Jewish poet Ivan Kulik.

The list may be expanded, reports the Kyiv news outlet LB.ua.

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 #48
Human Rights in Ukraine
http://khpg.org
October 8, 2015
Armed Right Sector & Azov fighters are discrediting Crimea Blockade
By Halya Coynash
 
Reportedly the work of Right Sector fighters after the Russian owners of this Porsche tried to get through the blockade after being stopped (the Blockade is of trucks, not cars)

Update:  There were further reports on Wednesday of lawlessness by Right Sector activists on the roads leading into Crimea.  Andriy Krutsenko complained of having had two windows of his minivan smashed after he ignored demands to dump vegetables that he and his fellow passengers were clearly taking to Crimea for himself.   He recounted seeing an elderly lady forced to get rid of around 5 kilograms of vegetables, with the activists claiming that only 2 kilograms could be carried across.  The reports led to further denials from Right Sector, but also to a statement from Ilya Kiva, Deputy Head of the Kherson Regional Police.  He told Hromadske Radio that a decision had been taken that all cars at the roadblock will now be checked together with a police officer.   How likely this is to stop the problem can be questioned, but it is a welcome acknowledgement that something must be done.

Initial concern over the involvement of the ultranationalist Right Sector in the Crimean Tatar-initiated Blockade of Russian-occupied Crimea has been compounded by a report from the Crimean Human Rights Group finding multiple infringements.

After receiving many complaints about the behaviour of "the paramilitary formations" taking part in the Blockade, well-known human rights activists Olha Skrypnyk and Vissarion Aseyev set out to investigate.  After spending Oct 6 monitoring the Chonhar crossing between the Kherson oblast and Crimea, they report that "Right Sector fighters are flagrantly violating human rights on the border with Crimea".

They found, for example, that people armed with weapons, including firearms, who identified themselves as members of Right Sector had organized their own roadblock not far from the border crossing.  The rights activists say that as well as Right Sector, they saw people with the insignia of the Azov, Donbas and other volunteer battalions.  

Armed men who were not from the police were stopping and searching ordinary cars, demanding that their drivers open the border and show their documents. The activists point out that the Right Sector fighters tried to stop them recording such infringements.

The activists were told that the Right Sector had been holding two men for a couple of days, but were not allowed to talk to them.  Right Sector alleges that the men are "separatists, and that they found drugs on them". They claimed that the police and SBU [Security Service] had been informed and that they were waiting for the SBU to collect the men.  The police denied any knowledge of this.

A video posted on YouTube on Oct 5 shows Azov fighters interrogating a man who has very clearly been beaten and looks frightened.  The Azov members had found and demonstrate to the camera a Russian passport and a Kerch address.  The man admits to being an ensign in the Ukrainian emergency service, and repeatedly insists that he did not betray his oath, with this presumably having served as the excuse for the obvious blow(s) to the head.

"The Crimean Human Rights Group considers these actions to be a flagrant violation of freedom of movement and the right to liberty and personal security. They stress that it is unacceptable for volunteer battalions to assume the functions of the law enforcement agencies".

As reported, Crimean Tatar leaders first announced plans for a 'civic blockade' of Crimea on Sept 8, which was to last until Russia released its Ukrainian political prisoners, removed all restrictions on Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian media and put an end to other rights abuses.   They called on other Ukrainians to join the blockade aimed at preventing Ukrainian goods from getting through to Crimea.  There could be no business as usual with an occupation regime so infringing the rights of Crimean Tatars and other Ukrainians in Crimea.  

It transpired on Sept 20, the first day of the Blockade, that a contingent of Right Sector activists, members of other civic organizations, as well as fighters from various volunteer battalions had joined the Blockade.  The aims of the Blockade soon broadened, with activists vowing to continue until Crimea was freed from Russian occupation.

It was stated from the outset that only trucks would be stopped, not individual cars.  The situation with weapons was supposed to be just as unequivocal.  Ilya Kiva, Deputy Head of the Kherson Regional Police, was present on Sept 20 and stated that more than 100 police officers had been deployed.  He was adamant that only the Kherson Battalion had the right to bear weapons. It was not necessarily clear whether this was at Kiva's initiative or an Interior Ministry decision.

Neither the promises regarding private vehicles nor the restrictions on weapons appear to have been kept, at least not by Right Sector and Azov members.  Or, if one is to believe a recent statement from Right Sector, by people pretending to be their members.  The statement was issued on Oct 2 following allegations that Right Sector was involved in extortion in the areas where the blockade is underway.  The statement asserts that Right Sector members are not involved and that there is severe punishment for any such incidents.  It claims that there are special groups within the organization with "the authority to react hard to incidents that discredit Right Sector and do damage to our fellow citizens".

That any such incidents discredit Right Sector is undeniable. It is less clear how imposters near the border crossing could continue to engage in extortion if Right Sector members really had nothing to do with it.   There has also been no denial from Azov of involvement in the above-mentioned video clip which its members presumably do not understand does them no credit.

The denials have also, unfortunately, been heard too many times before, and often clash with reports from Ukrainian and international NGOs monitoring rights violations in Donbas, as well as of criminal activities in Mukacheve.  The authorities have taken efforts to react where members of volunteer battalions are believed to be engaged either in criminal activities, or have detained and ill-treated alleged separatists. The reaction is not, unfortunately, always warranted, as for example, with the detention of Yury Hukov, journalist and Kharkiv Human Rights Group employee.  Inept prosecutions only increase the likelihood that a part of the population will assume that any allegations are unjust, and that the government is wrongly targeting those really protecting Ukraine.  Right Sector has cultivated this view and with success,  judging by the latest opinion polls, If elections were held now, Right Sector would have a good chance of crossing the 5% threshold and entering parliament as a party. This is in stark contrast to its pitiful performance in the 2014 elections, and to the fate of the far-right Svoboda Party which has continued its downward trend.

The allegations from highly reputable Crimean rights activists cannot be simply dismissed as provocation or Russian propaganda.  It is frustrating that, through its controversial law on a so-called "free economic zone" in Crimea, Ukraine's leaders have hindered, rather than helped those most directly affected by Russian occupation.  Crimean Tatar leaders felt compelled to begin this blockade because the government was not doing enough, and it is galling that those purportedly supporting them, are acting in a way that can only sabotage the initiative.

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