#2
Kremlin.ru
October 12, 2015
Interview to Vladimir Solovyov
Sochi

Vladimir Putin gave an interview to Rossiya-1 television channel presenter Vladimir Solovyov. The interview was recorded on October 10.

Rossiya-1 presenter Vladimir Solovyov: Mr President, we are living in troubled times, as can be seen by the terrorist attack in Turkey that has left many dead and wounded. What conclusions can we draw and what can we do to stop this wave of terror?

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: We need to make a joint effort to combat this scourge. Let me take this opportunity to express my condolences to the Turkish people and the Turkish President. What happened there of course is an insolent terrorist attack, a crime that has caused many victims.

This is an attempt to destabilise the situation in Turkey, our neighbour and Russia's friend. The fact that this has happened during an election campaign is a sign of a clearly provocative act. But we will be effective in combating terrorism only if we fight this evil together.

Vladimir Solovyov: We did try to fight it together with the international community, but the international community does not wish to listen to us. Now everyone is busy raising a storm about the fact that we are in Syria. What are our real goals in Syria, and what are the criteria for success there?

Vladimir Putin: First, let me confirm what is already known, namely, that we informed our partners of our plans beforehand. We informed our American partners and many others, especially the countries in the region concerned, of our plans and intentions.

Some say that we left this too late, but let me point out that others, when planning and commencing their operations, never inform us, but we informed them.

Vladimir Solovyev: As a sign of good will?

Vladimir Putin: Yes, as a sign of our good will, and because we think this was the best course and we wanted to show that we are open to cooperation. Let me say again that we are acting in full compliance with international law - at the request of the Syrian Arab Republic's official government.

All other countries that have so far taken part in operations in Syria are acting unlawfully, because there is no UN Security Council resolution on these operations, and no official request from the Syrian authorities.

Let me note that when we began our operation, 11 countries were already taking part in one form or another in various strikes against Syrian territory. This has been going on for more than a year now. Realising and understanding this situation, we informed our partners of our plans and proposed that we work together.

Simplest of all would have been for them to join our efforts and in this way bring their own operations on Syrian soil within the law at the same time. After all, if we have a mandate to act from the Syrian authorities, the simplest solution would be for others to join us and work within this same mandate. Unfortunately, we have not been able to reach any such agreement so far with our partners and colleagues, but we do not lose hope that this might yet be possible.

Some progress has been made. We are setting up the forerunners for working groups with the Israelis and the Americans, and are moving in this same direction with our Turkish partners. We have received proposals from the Americans on how to organise things at the military technology level so as to avoid incidents. This is a first step at least and better than nothing at all.

Our specialists have received requests and proposals from the Americans, set out their vision of our possible cooperation, and sent it to the Pentagon. I hope that this will lead to the next step, which is essential for resolving the situation: the start of joint efforts to find a political solution.

Looking at the purely military dimension, we have heard reproach from others, who say that our airstrikes are hitting not ISIS and other terrorist organisations like Jabhat al-Nusra and suchlike, but forces belonging to the healthy opposition. In this situation, we say to our partners, if they know the situation on the ground better than us and have already been there for more than a year - unlawfully, true, but present nevertheless - if they know better than us (and I doubt this is the case, but let's assume it is possible), they should give us information on targets and we will work against these targets.

Vladimir Solovyev: They refused?

Vladimir Putin: Yes, they said they are not prepared to work at that level. I cannot see why, after all, if they really know the situation better and want to fight terrorism, they could share with us concrete locations where the terrorists are hiding out and have their command posts and arms and equipment depots.

What would be simpler than to give us targets? Sadly, our work together has not reached this point yet, but I say again that the first steps towards organising contacts at the military level have already been taken.

Vladimir Solovyov: The Syrian army has now gone on the offensive. What is their likelihood of success?

Vladimir Putin: This depends above all on the Syrian army itself and on the Syrian authorities. We cannot commit ourselves to more than is reasonable and never have done so. I said from the start that our active operations on Syrian soil will be limited in time to the Syrian army's offensive. Coming back to your earlier question, our task is to stabilise the legitimate government and establish conditions that will make it possible to look for political compromise.

Vladimir Solovyov: Stabilisation through military means?

Vladimir Putin: Yes, through military means, of course. When you have ISIS and other such groups of international terrorists right next to the capital, who is going to want to look for a settlement with the Syrian authorities, sitting practically under siege right in their own capital?

On the contrary, if the Syrian army demonstrates its viability and, most important, its readiness to fight terrorism, and if it shows that the authorities can achieve this, this opens up much greater possibilities for reaching political compromises.

Vladimir Solovyov: Does this mean that you are considering the possibility of using Russia's armed forces in ground operations in Syria?

Vladimir Putin: No, this is out of the question.

Vladimir Solovyov: No matter what turn developments take?

Vladimir Putin: That's right. We have no such plans and our Syrian friends know this.

Vladimir Solovyov: Our airstrikes' accuracy and the Defence Ministry's reports show that it seems we have a better grasp of the situation than the American-led coalition. Where is our information coming from?

Vladimir Putin: We prepared for these operations. We carried out preliminary work that involved concentrating sufficient forces, resources and equipment in the right place at the right time. We did a lot of close, long-term intelligence gathering from space and from the air, and then we analysed all of the information obtained through various channels.

Our General Staff specialists, working in coordination with our Syrian partners and other countries in the region have established an information centre in Baghdad, as you know. The data exchanged through this centre has added to our overall information. Thus, everything that is taking place in the air or on the ground is not spontaneous action, but the implementation of plans prepared in advance.

Vladimir Solovyov: What happened on October 7 made a big impression of course, including on the military experts: no one was expecting that the Caspian flotilla would launch strikes, with missiles crossing two countries to hit targets in a third. Had American intelligence stopped working?

Vladimir Putin: I think they were working away. Their intelligence is one of the best in the world. Let's not start throwing criticism their way. They have one of the world's biggest intelligence services, but even they cannot know everything, and should not know everything.

Vladimir Solovyov: What were the missiles used in this operation?

Vladimir Putin: They were Kalibr missiles. We started commissioning these missiles not so long ago, in 2012. They have a range of 1,500 kilometres, as has already been noted. They are cutting-edge high-precision weapons. We plan to re-arm our armed forces not just with missiles of this sort, but also with the latest generation ground and aviation equipment. These are all sophisticated weapons systems that have proven their great effectiveness in practice.

Vladimir Solovyov: What course did the missiles follow?

Vladimir Putin: You just said yourself that they crossed two countries. They made 147 turns along the route and flew at a height of between 80 and 1,300 metres.

Vladimir Solovyov: Is their speed a military secret?

Vladimir Putin: No, it's not a secret. They travel at around the same speed as a jet aircraft. This is well known and is not at all secret information. All of our partners, at the expert level at least, know that Russia has weapons of this sort.

But it is one thing for the experts to be aware that Russia supposedly has these weapons, and another thing for them to see for the first time that they really do exist, that our defence industry is making them, that they are of high quality, and that we have well trained people who can put them to effective use. They have seen too now that Russia is ready to use them if this is in the interests of our country and people.

Vladimir Solovyov: Are the Western equivalents better or worse? Do they have anything to fear?

Vladimir Putin: They are the same. I might be wrong, but I think the Americans produce similar sea-launched missiles with a range of up to around 4,500 kilometres. We have similar systems, but air-based, and also with a range of 4,500 kilometres.

Vladimir Solovyov: This means that we can launch airstrikes from our own airspace?

Vladimir Putin: Yes, that's right.

Vladimir Solovyov: Are we talking about an arms race here?

Vladimir Putin: No, this is not about an arms race, but about the fact that modern weapon systems and delivery systems are always evolving and improving, and this is happening even quicker in other countries than in Russia. We therefore have no choice but to keep up with them for a start, and then you have to remember too that we planned our armed forces modernisation programme several years ago, when the international situation was not in the tense state it is in today.

We drafted and started carrying out this programme not because we were preparing for aggressive action, but simply because the main attack systems our armed forces had at their disposal were gradually becoming obsolete and it was time to replace them. These were timely decisions on our part.

Vladimir Solovyov: Barack Obama thinks that you are acting solely out of vanity and a desire to put Russia back on the global political map, but at the same time, you are 'driving the Russian economy into the ground'. Can we afford this rearmament programme? Can we afford this kind of foreign policy?

Vladimir Putin: This isn't a foreign policy issue. Russia has a peaceful foreign policy, and this is no exaggeration. If you look at the political map of the world and Russia's place on it, it is obvious that we have no need for others' territory or natural resources. We have enough resources of our own and we have no need for war or conflict with anyone else.

What's more, in 1990, it was Russia that started the divorce process between the republics making up the former Soviet Union. We showed good will and gave these countries their independence. This happened not as a result of civil war or conflict, but was a consensus decision, and Russia's stance played a central role in this decision.

We therefore have no desire to restore the empire or rebuild the Soviet Union, but we do have a duty to defend Russia's independence and sovereignty. This is what we have been doing and will continue to do.

As for the economic dimension, coming back to what I said before, we drew up the plans to modernise and rearm our country's armed forces with the most up-to-date systems several years ago. It was 10 years ago now that we started working on these plans and formulating the tasks ahead. Let me say again that this was all about natural replacement of aging weapon systems..

Another circumstance I want to note in this respect is that all of this work involves advanced technology, and the tasks we are carrying out in the defence industry will push us into developing not just applied but also fundamental science and will have benefits for the entire economy.

Let me say a few words about import replacement in this respect. We purchased abroad many of the components we were using in the defence industry. But it was always clear that importing more sensitive components and technology and even spare parts for the defence industry was not a very far-sighted policy, to put it mildly.

Having petrodollars made it easy to buy things abroad of course, but we need to develop science and industry here in Russia. In this sense, the import replacement that our partners' actions have pushed us into is actually precisely what our country needs. We are therefore not creating problems for our economy, but on the contrary, are raising it to new levels of technological progress.

Vladimir Solovyov: In other words, the defence industry will drive growth.

Vladimir Putin: Yes, that's right. This is the way things work all around the world - in the United States, Europe, China and India. We built the BrahMos missile together with our Indian partners, for example, and developed a whole new sector in Indian industry. India's scientists worked very actively. This was a real step towards developing a high-tech production sector in India. Our Indian partners are very happy and have proposed developing this programme further, and we intend to do so.

Vladimir Solovyov: The terrorist attack in Turkey raises questions that many are asking themselves now in Russia. We are fighting terrorism, which threatens our country too, and are trying to stop it before it reaches our borders. But are we ready here at home to resist attempts to once again bring suffering and death to our soil?

Vladimir Putin: If you think about it, we have already become used to hearing of a terrorist attack here, a terrorist attack there. Unfortunately, we have not yet got rid of this threat. Back at the time when I took the decision to launch operations against international terrorist groups following the attack on Dagestan, many people said to me that we cannot do this for all sorts of reasons, said there is a risk the terrorists will do this, try that.

I came to the conclusion that if we fear that the terrorists will so something, they will definitely do it. We must take pre-emptive action. Of course, there are risks, but let me say that these risks existed anyway, even before we began our operations in Syria.

If we just stood by and let Syria get gobbled up, thousands of people running around there now with Kalashnikovs would end up on our territory, and so we are helping President Assad fight this threat before it reaches our borders.

Vladimir Solovyov: But the message we are getting from outside is that we have joined this war on the side of the Shiites and against the Sunnis.

Vladimir Putin: This is a false message and wrong argument. We make no difference between Shiites and Sunnis. A sizeable part of Russia's population - 10 percent - is Muslim. I have said many times that they are every bit as much citizens of Russia as Christians or Jews, and we make no difference between people.

We have absolutely no desire to get entangled in inter-religious conflicts of any sort in Syria. Our only goal is to support the lawful government and create conditions for a political settlement. This was our original aim, and this remains the guideline for our actions now.

We are fortunate to have very good relations with the Muslim countries where a majority of the population are Shiites, and we also have very good relations with the Sunnis. We value these relations and want to develop them further.

Vladimir Solovyov: Mr President, have you had any support from the leaders of Sunni countries?

Vladimir Putin: Yes, I think there is support.

Vladimir Solovyov: Their leaders have called you and expressed support for our involvement?

Vladimir Putin: It is not just a question of phone calls. We are in constant contact with people and we know what they think. Moreover, if all I heard were the usual propaganda clichés coming from the media and did not know what various countries' leaders really think, we would perhaps not have decided to get involved in Syria.

Vladimir Solovyov: Do we have the support of our friends in Egypt?

Vladimir Putin: It's not a matter of Egypt alone.

Vladimir Solovyov: Others support us too?

Vladimir Putin: Let me remind you that the terrorist threat dangles over many of the region's countries. The leader of one of the region's countries said to me on one occasion that the Middle East countries, the Muslim countries, are terrorism's prime victims, and this is indeed the case. We want to fight terrorism and are ready to do so.

I do not understand some of our colleagues in Europe and the United States though, when they say they are fighting terrorism, but we see no real results. What's more, it's a well-known fact that the Americans have shut down the programme to train the Free Syrian Army.

They started out with plans to train 12,000 people, then said they would train 6,000, and then they trained only 60 people, and it turned out in the end that only 4-5 people are actually out there fighting ISIS. They spent $500 million on this.

They would have done better to give $500 million to us, and we would have put it to better use in terms of fighting international terrorism, that's for sure. In any case, we need to try to get our work together to the level of full-fledged intelligence information sharing, as I said.

Vladimir Solovyov: Thank you, Mr President.

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 #3
The National Interest
October 12, 2015
Lowdown: Making Sense of Russia's Syria Strategy
A view from Moscow on Russia's strategy behind its Syrian move.
By Andrey Sushentsov
Andrey Sushentsov - associate professor at Moscow State Institute of International Affairs, director of programs at the Valdai club.

Russians are once again proving to be cold-blooded strategists. The Kremlin's recent move in Syria has caught off guard not only ISIS, but also most Western intelligence services and analysts. Russia's ability to alter the strategic situation on the ground with minimum efforts and maximum maskirovka deserves appreciation. However, Moscow fights ISIS not out of noble consideration. It is a practical issue of Russian national security.

Russian security connection with Syria

Russia was weighing its involvement at least since 2013 when it first proposed to replace outgoing Austrian peacekeepers with Russians at the Golan Heights. Since 2013, Moscow took a major role in disarming Syria of chemical weapons - and the first serious contacts with Damascus on battling Islamists started then. Parallel to this Russia engaged in a strategic military dialogue with Iraq, reaching a 4,2 billion USD weapon deal with Baghdad in 2012 and supplying much needed Su-25 fighters in 2014. In July 2015 Russia reach agreement with Iran to joint efforts in securing victory for Syria in the battle against ISIS. From that time question of assaulting ISIS was not "if", but "when" and "how." The Ukraine crisis did not change the calculus, but postponed the move.        

Security interests at stake motivated Russian agitation. Allowing ISIS to consolidate its control in Syria and Iraq would mean that in 5 years a new spurt of well-prepared terrorists would return to the North Caucasus and Central Asia. By Russian estimates, out of 70,000 ISIS fighters up to 5000 are Russian and CIS natives. Thinking strategically, the effort of battling them in the Middle East will deliver bigger long-term gains at a relatively low-cost then facing them off at home.

Limited involvement strategy

Russian strategy in Syria has two scenarios. The first one is limited in scope and posture. Its advantage is that by applying minimum resources and keeping the bar low, Moscow still gets a lot.

First, Russia can disrupt the terrorist infrastructure and prevent it from holding ground without the necessity of defeating it completely. North Caucasian terrorists are eliminated at home, but in Syria's "no man's land" they can rebuild training facilities and launch the export of terror to Russia - as they did in Afghanistan under Taliban.

Second, Moscow seeks to sustain a friendly regime in Syria.  Russia can invest in its first major military naval facility in Mediterranean and secure primacy in gas extraction projects on the Syrian, Cyprus and Israel shelf.

Third, Russia is asserting itself as a leading Middle East power capable of effective expeditionary military operations. Before that, no one else besides the U.S. could have projected power so far from its borders. In Syria Russia has displayed its renewed ability to affect events in far-away regions and thus significantly changed calculus in the Middle Eastern capitals. By hitting ISIS in Syria with cruise missiles launched from the Caspian Sea, Russia also cemented its presence in that region.

Lastly, Syrian operation is an exhibition of Russian armament, satellite communication and geolocation system GLONASS - its deadly effectiveness, high-preciousness and reliability. This show is staged primarily for the customers of the biggest and growing weapon market in the world - Middle Eastern countries. However, it also certifies that Russia maintains full sovereignty in matters of the 21-st century war.          

Shifting attention from Ukraine to Syria was not among the Moscow's top aims, but since it is happening as a consequence of recent events, we can also consider this as Russia's gain.

Extensive involvement possibility

The above-mentioned goals are the minimum achievements Russia can accomplish, provided its bombing campaign go smoothly. The high bar of the second strategy is bigger - and riskier - than this. And it promises less.

With assistance from Syria, Iraq and Iran, Russia can aspire to defeat and eliminate ISIS in the region including its CIS fighters. If attained, this monumental achievement would pave the way for a restoration of the traditional borders of Syria and Iraq and secure their allegiance to Russia for the future. Bringing stability to Syria and Iraq will mean fostering conditions to normalize life there. This will relieve the refugee Syrian crisis in the region and the European Union.

However, these challenges can be realistically tackled only by applying much more formidable resources and in coordination with a broader coalition, which should include Western powers and Arab states of the Persian Gulf. In the absence of the latter, the second scenario benchmarks are bigger than Moscow's current plan.

Resource management for the war with ISIS

Does Russia have sufficient resources to go its way in Syria?

Moscow secured full support of Syria, Iraq and Iran and can now act independently from the West. Russian allies are vitally interested in battling ISIS and were doing so prior to Moscow's engagement. It seems that by numbers Russia is the least involved partner in this coalition, yet its participation is decisive.

Russia's military resources are sufficient to maintain an effective long-term commitment in Syria. Critics forget, that Russia has been deeply involved in conflict management in Georgia, Moldova, and Tajikistan in the 1990s when Russian economy was particularly weak.

Most importantly, at home, the Russian Sunni community (approx. 14 million people) leaders support Kremlin's move and defy ISIS ideology. In September, Russia opened the biggest European Sunni Mosque in Moscow, strengthening support from Muslim clergy. Attending the opening ceremony Vladimir Putin expressed confidence that the mosque would help disseminate the "humanistic ideas and true values of Islam" in Russia and accused "so-called Islamic State" of "compromising a great world religion of Islam".

The risks of the involvement

The gains from the Syrian move seem to be solid for Russia. So are the risks. The path into Syria was marvelous, but the way out can be more difficult.

First, Russia risks deteriorating ties with an important regional partner - Turkey. Ankara is interested in having Assad go, and using the fight against ISIS to suppress Kurds militia on the Syrian part of the border. Despite claims that politics does not interfere with economic relations between the countries, that start of an ambitious "Turkish stream" gas pipeline was rescheduled for 2017. This is not the first time Russia and Turkey have differences on regional issues, but they managed to avoid confrontation in the past.

Second, Russia can get stuck in Syria, as did the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. That is why Moscow acting after careful considerations, with viable local allies and a clear exit strategy. Having had both the Afghanistan and Chechnya experience, Russia is well prepared for a low-intensity war dynamic.

Most important risk, though, is that Russia can be dragged into a regional Sunni-Shia conflict on the Shia side. Having a Sunni majority inside Russia, Moscow should be particularly careful. Critics say that fighting in ISIS Russia is bound to confront all Sunnis in the region. This would essentially mean that all Sunnis support ISIS - and that is not true.

This issue is taking us to the point that is currently lacking in Russia's Syrian strategy - viable Sunni opposition to ISIS. Well-aware of its Chechen conflict experience, Russia would search for a resolution to the Syrian civil war by allying with a potent local Sunni leaders who would join the battle against terrorists. If such a Sunni potentate emerges triumphant, he would eventually fill the power vacuum left by ISIS much as did Ramzan Kadyrov in Chechnya.  

Applying the Chechen scenario in Syria is very tricky, but it the only way to reach a deep and comprehensive settlement in that war-torn country. That is the reason why Russia thinks that a French proposal - uniting Syrian government efforts with a "healthy opposition" in the Free Syrian Army - is an "interesting idea that is worth a try".

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 #4
http://therealnews.com
October 9, 2015
A Syria Without Assad?
Journalist Patrick Cockburn, who just returned from Syria, speaks about the impact of the Russian airstrikes in Syria and whether it can play a role in bringing the civil war to an end

Patrick Cockburn is an Irish journalist who has been a Middle East correspondent since 1979 for the Financial Times and, presently, The Independent. Among the most experienced commentators on Iraq, he has written four books on the country's recent history. Cockburn's latest book is The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution.

SHARMINI PERIES, EXEC. PRODUCER, TRNN: This is the Real News Network. I'm Sharmini Peries coming to you from Baltimore.
Just back from Syria we are joined by Patrick Cockburn. He's a correspondent for the Independent, and was awarded Foreign Reporter of the Year at the 2015 Press Awards. He is the author of The Rise of the Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution. Patrick, good to have you back safely.

PATRICK COCKBURN: Thank you.

PERIES: Patrick, first give us your observations on the ground while you were there.

COCKBURN: Well you know, Syria is mostly destroyed now as a country. There are 22 million Syrians and 4 million of them are refugees outside the country, and 7 million are displaced within the country. I was in the northeast, which is in the--most recently, which is Kurdish controlled, and stretches a long way along the southern border of Turkey. This is meant to be one of the safer areas of Syria.

But it's really very--[if you only compare to] Khobani, the town that the Islamic State tried to capture, the siege of four and a half months, about 70 percent of the town is destroyed. Just enormous heaps of pulverized concrete everywhere. But even in other villages, you know, one town I was going through that--[inaud.] which is meant to be pretty quiet. But just after I got into a town I saw on the road ahead suddenly there was a, I heard what I thought were gunshots initially, but then I saw a big plume of smoke and it turned out to have been a suicide bomber. I think it's three people were killed. Then shortly afterwards there was a bang behind us, and the entrance to the town which we'd just passed through, another suicide bomber on a motorcycle blew himself up. Didn't kill anybody.

This is meant to have been a fairly safe town. And other places, even where there's no destruction--I was in some Syrian Christian villages near a city called Hasaka. And there isn't much destruction, in that one town I was in. But everybody's fled, 90 percent of the population has fled. It's all empty, you see, and shops boarded up. Gardens with overgrown trees, and you know, very few people around. And there's a sort of atmosphere of terror.

PERIES: And where are they going, Patrick?

COCKBURN: Some within the country, you know, what they deem safer areas. In those particular areas, a town called Tell Tamer, I was in, with a lot of Christians, a lot of them, you know, they'd gone to Germany, they go to Sweden, they go up to Turkey. I talked to the mayor of one of the villages there who said he thought they should come back. But then it turned out that he was planning to go to Germany, himself. So it's kind of a mass exodus. The thing is that an area may be quiet today, but something may happen tomorrow. And I noticed a couple of days ago--sorry, today, that the Islamic State had executed three Syrian Christians who they'd taken prisoner earlier in the year. These sort of things sort of spread terror everywhere. People talk about sleeper cells everywhere in Arab villages. Some of this is true. I think most of it's probably paranoia.

Going to one village, suddenly there were lots of soldiers on the road. These are Kurdish soldiers saying they'd heard that Daesh, as they call the Islamic State fighters, [ahead] in the village they were looking for them. Another place, I was driving through another town called Tell Abyad, which was one of the border crossings to Turkey that the Kurds captured earlier in the year. Suddenly a woman ran out in front of our car. I was going up to the border crossing to have a look at it. There was a police car sort of guiding me. Anyway, she ran in front of the police car and said there's a Daesh, an Islamic State guy, has just run through my garden. And then the police got out, and--and decided yeah, there were some, a lot of abandoned houses that had Islamic, maybe some Islamic State fighters had been hiding there.

So always, these are so little incidents, but they all create an atmosphere of fear.

PERIES: And what kind of comments are there in terms of the Assad government and the role that the state is playing at the moment?

COCKBURN: Well, this is a Kurdish area, but it's an important one because they claim they've got 50,000 soldiers, fighters. Maybe it's not that big, but that's what they claim. And they've been very effective in fighting the Islamic State, partly because they're very well disciplined and well organized, and committed, and partly because they have the support of U.S. air strikes.

I was talking to the president of this area, about 2-3 million people in it. And he said, you know, yeah. Assad government pretty bad. But Islamic State, ISIS, even worse. He said, you know, we just can't sleep easy. So long as one of those guys are, is alive. So for the Kurds--you know, [inaud.] a lot more marginalized of the Assad government for decades, but even so they think if the Islamic State comes they'll be driven out, they'll all be turned into refugees.

PERIES: Patrick, two days ago you wrote Russia and Syria, Russian radar locks on to Turkish fighter jets as Moscow steps up air strikes against opposition targets. This was the title of the article you wrote in the Independent. The Russians have been attacking, and air strikes and now from the sea, that they have also been trying to I think take out opposition to Assad. But is there any indication that they are actually fighting ISIS here?

COCKBURN: Yeah, there have been a lot of air strikes around Palmyra, and I think that the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which [is pro-opposition], I think yesterday they said there have been 34 strikes there. And to the west of there. There seem to be a lot of strikes there.

It's fairly clear that the Russians are attacking ISIS and they're also attacking Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham, which are--Jabhat al-Nusra is the Al-Qaeda representative. Ahrar al-Sham is not much different. These are all from some, in the Western media, described as [moderates]. I don't know why, because they really are not. They're very much the same ideology as the Islamic State. A lot of their commanders are former Islamic [State], ISIS people. So they're really very much the same. And they're seen by the Kurds in where I was, and in Damascus, as being the same.

PERIES: And Patrick, the Turkish opposition to using their air space and the recent criticism against Russia launched both--also by Erdogan as well as NATO. What do you make of the comments, and how is all this going to evolve over the next little while in a very tumultuous war zone?

COCKBURN: It's a great big mess, which is getting messier by the day. Obviously the Turks don't like Russian aircraft and missiles sort of getting very close to their frontier. On the other hand, the Turks have been fairly openly assisting some of the extreme organizations operating in northern Syria. So they're not in a great place to, position to protest about people crossing their frontier. Question is, is there much they can do about it. It sort of looks not very much at the moment. But we'll see. But you know, this whole area now is getting sort of extraordinarily confused. Because you have the Russians getting involved, the Syrian army attacking, the Turks are involved. And the Syrian Kurds, who probably have the most--not the largest, but the most effective army in Syria, want to attack west and close the last border crossing that Islamic State uses into Turkey. That again would upset the Turks.

So you know, it's, it's an extraordinary situation. You know, it's like, somebody compared it to three-dimensional chess, with nine players and no rules. And so it's, it's basically unpredictable.

PERIES: And the most contentious point all around seems to be still the Assad factor. And I noticed that you wrote, there are no easy solutions to Syria, as it is being torn apart by a genuine multi-layered civil war with a multitude of self-interested players inside and outside the country. You wrote, if Assad dropped dead tomorrow, Syrians in his corner would not stop fighting, knowing as they do that the success of an opposition movement dominated by ISIS or Al-Qaeda clones such as [Jabhat] al-Nusra would mean death or fight for their livelihood. Now, what--given this description, if Assad is not in the picture and if the Russians are actually successful in what they want to achieve, at least what they're saying they want to achieve, which is to hold up the Syrian state in order to not create a vacuum, which is what Putin had said at the United Nations last week. What are, then--if, let's say, Assad is no longer a factor, is there a way in which a political solution can be imagined at this point? And I say imagined only because we are such a long way from it.

COCKBURN: It's difficult to do so. You know, people say Assad there, Assad not there. It's really a way of saying could power be shared. This is a genuine civil war. There are people on both sides who are going to fight to the end, whether it's on Assad's side or the opposition's side. You know, it's a--I think all these sort of interpretations of what politicians say, treating it as something which isn't a civil war just is completely unrealistic.

How could this be, peace be returned. It's very difficult to see how it could be done without defeating the Islamic State. Because [inaud.] the Islamic State has no plans to negotiate with anybody. It wants to kill them. And so it's difficult to see peace coming without the war first escalating against the Islamic State. Could power be shared in the long term? I suspect it will, but probably in a very unsatisfactory way that will have different parts of Syria with different warlords ruling them. We'll have power shared geographically. But we won't have power shared at the center.

If Assad goes, would the Syrian state fall apart, as happened in Iraq in 2003 after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. And as everybody recalls, the U.S. dissolved the Syrian army. But the Iraqi state was already falling apart. Would that happen in Syria as well, you would have a vacuum that would be filled, essentially, by ISIS and other extreme fundamentalist organizations like that.

It's difficult to see peace coming. I mean, the only slight hope I have is that the U.S. have stood on the sidelines, the Russians likewise. Now that they're both involved there may be more international engagement in setting up real negotiations to bring some sort of peace. Previously we had negotiations, meetings. But they were never going to get anywhere, and neither the U.S. nor the Russians were trying that hard to deliver their local allies to have real talks.

PERIES: Now, it seems clear to me that the Americans at this point is only interested in continuing to, continuing the havoc the country is in and continuing to bomb under the auspices of trying to attack the IS. But the Russians are on a different end game, it seems to me, to hold up and strengthen what exists of the state of Syria. Now, are there any hopes of them coming together and coming to some negotiated terms, in terms of their coordination and the objective here to fight back the IS and not the state?

COCKBURN: It's difficult to see it happening at the moment. We'll have to see how it plays out in the next few weeks. I mean, lots of things could happen. If the Kurds attack and capture more of the frontier then there's the possibility of Turkey intervening. Will Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies give more support to their local allies in the north. Things like that. It also just depends what happens on the battlefield. Does the Syrian army make gains this time around, or do we have the same stalemate continually.

You know, I think that--what I'd like to see would be some concentration on ending this terrible situation. You know, this is the destruction of a whole country. This sort of thing just doesn't happen very often. You had it in Cambodia in sort of the late '70s. The--but this sort of complete destruction that we see in Syria, which you know, which used to have a pretty reasonable standard of living, is an extraordinary event. And you know, the world is really sat by and not really done anything about it.

PERIES: Now, it's clear that the Russians have actually stepped in in order to bring about some solution, obviously, to what's going on. But wouldn't Russia be able to bring some of the parties to the table if they were to take the Assad leadership out of the negotiations?

COCKBURN: [I don't] think they can get rid of Assad just like that. You know, it's, you know--there's a Western attitude towards Assad which is contradictory, which is first of all to treat him as the demon king who controls everything in his areas. And then treat him as someone who's going to be easily removed by the Russians. You know, these things contradict each other. I don't think the Russians could remove him just like that. And I [inaud.] just like that. But at the same time, his government, his regime is very dependent on them. So he'll have to, up to a certain point, do what they ask.

PERIES: And because of that dependency isn't he able to perhaps negotiate with the military, still meet the objective of upholding the state and keeping the structure of the state intact, including the military, and still put Assad's leadership on the table for negotiation?

COCKBURN: Well yeah, but I mean, that might happen in the very long term, but I can't see it happening immediately because nobody quite knows if Assad goes, does the military dissolve? The state is rather built around the Assad family. So the idea that you could keep the state but get rid of Assad, well, in theory maybe. But can it be done in practice, over what period could it be done. Because after all, he has no plans to go quietly. And he represents a certain constituency in Syria.

I think that with the Russians more heavily involved, yeah, they have more influence in Damascus. If they're interested in negotiations then they may be able to get Assad to genuinely talk during negotiations. We had negotiations at Geneva some time back. But--and the U.S. and Russia put pressure on their local allies to turn up. Which they did, but they basically didn't want to agree to anything. Each side was, at that point, was hoping for military victory. Now, maybe we have negotiations again, we have greater pressure from Moscow and Washington, there would be real talks and we might begin to have some substantive agreements.

PERIES: Very well, Patrick. We will be watching this as I'm sure you will be, and hope to have you back very soon again.

COCKBURN: Thank you.

PERIES: And thank you for joining us on the Real News Network.

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 #5
Prospect (UK)
www.prospectmagazine.co.uk
October 9, 2015
Putin's plan for Syria
Only Russia has a clear goal-we should join it or stay out
By Rachel Polonsky    
Rachel Polonsky is a Fellow of Murray Edwards College at the University of Cambridge and an Affiliated Lecturer in Slavonic Studies there. Her most recent book is Molotov's Magic Lantern: A Journey in Russian History. (July 2015)

As David Cameron prepares the way for a vote on bombing in Syria, Britain faces an ugly choice: whether to back Russia in targeting Islamic State, if that also means propping up President Bashar al-Assad-see James Harkin's July 2013 cover story and Bronwen Maddox's piece "Which side is Britain on?". That is clearly Russia's goal, and its deployment of aircraft and other forces gives it the upper hand. Rachel Polonsky argues here that this is the best course. Many would disagree, and see backing Russia-and Assad, whose military has killed so many Syrians-as a false answer and the fuel for civil war or for the country splitting. But many will agree, too, that the west has to talk to Russia-and that it has no clear plan of its own.

After Vladimir Putin's meeting with Barack Obama at the United Nations on 28th September, the Russian Foreign Ministry's spokesperson Maria Zakharova was relayed live from New York to the Moscow studio of Special Correspondent, a popular talk show on Russia-1, the state-owned television channel. The theme was the end of the unipolar world order-of the west's ability to shape the world as it would like, above all the Middle East. "We would prefer not to have been right," Zakharova said, with the more-in-sorrow-than-anger tone of an exasperated schoolteacher.

If in the Middle East, she continued, we saw a single example of a developing democratic state with flourishing citizens of the kind that the advocates of the unipolar world promised their methods would bring, perhaps we might trust the west's proposals. Instead, we see nothing but poverty, ruin and terrorism, and an evil spreading across continents, threatening Europe and our own country. Quoting the most resonant line in President Putin's speech to the UN General Assembly-"Do you, at least, realise what you've done?"-she lamented that there were still actors on the world stage who seemed not to grasp that it was time to collaborate on a logical strategy to defeat Islamic State (IS).

The United States and Britain are still hesitant about that collaboration. But the unpalatable truth is that the west does not have a coherent plan for Syria. In my view, it is time either to join Russia, which does have a coherent plan, or to stay out.

Zakharova embodies the communications strategy that has played an integral part in Russian foreign policy during this new phase of the Syrian civil war. Young and articulate, she is fluent in English and Chinese. Her manner is urgent and sincere. Her appointment in August was part of Russia's preparation for war, a response to Jennifer Psaki, the former US State Department spokesperson whose briefings became the target of mockery on Russian state television during the Ukraine crisis in 2014. Dmitry Kiselyov, a pundit dubbed the Kremlin's "propaganda chief," claimed that a new buzzword had appeared on social media: "psaking," a metaphor for "low-quality American diplomacy."

Over the years of Nato expansion and western-backed regime change in the Middle East (and, as most Russians see it, in Ukraine), anti-Americanism in Russian state media has become feverish. Over Syria, in which the west has taken part in a civil war without having decided which side it wants to win, the tone towards America has shifted and become, at times, pitying. Margarita Simonyan, the 35-year-old Editor-in-Chief of the news network RT (formerly Russia Today), summed up the new attitude recently: "The eternal question is: do they have a far-reaching plan, which we don't understand, or are they just making stupid mistakes because they're not properly informed?"

The logistical skill and speed of Russia's intervention in Syria left western leaders humiliated and confused. Over the summer, the State Department and Foreign and Commonwealth Office believed they were collaborating with Russia on a transition plan for the removal of President Bashar al-Assad. If this was a ruse, they should not have been fooled. Perhaps they were just not listening. Regime change in Syria was never on Moscow's agenda.

The overt phase of the Russian intervention was timed to coincide with the UN General Assembly. A first sign of Russian matériel on the move was picked up in late August, when a warship from the Black Sea Fleet sailed through Istanbul with armoured personnel carriers on deck. In early September, pictures were leaked on social media of Russian special forces in Syria. The US asked Bulgaria and Greece to block Russian military flights. By the time the General Assembly's 70th session opened, SU-30 fighter-jets were visible on the runway of al-Assad airport at Latakia.

Putin, meanwhile, was receiving guests. Between late August and late September, the leaders of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan, Qatar, Kuwait, Israel and Turkey went to Moscow. On 21st September, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, arrived with the Chief of Staff of the Israeli army and his head of military intelligence and left satisfied that Russia would not compromise Israel's strategic interests. As for Assad, "we are neither for nor against," Netanyahu said. A day later Putin welcomed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for the opening of a vast new mosque (Moscow is home to at least two million Muslims). Turkey and Russia are at odds over Assad. The news Erdoğan had received about a Russian military build-up was "not pleasant," he said. Turkey has pressed for a no-fly zone in northern Syria. For Moscow, though, no-fly zones portend a repeat of Libya in October 2011, in which Nato airstrikes led to the capture and killing of Muammar Gaddafi in Sirte, a Mediterranean port now held by IS.

On 25th September US Central Command tweeted: "We urge the Russians to be transparent about their activities in Syria." Two days later, Putin appeared on US network television with the talkshow host Charlie Rose. "Others say that you're trying to save the Assad administration because they've been losing-ah-ground," Rose ventured, "and the war has not been going well for them and you're there to rescue them." "Yes, that's right," Putin replied.

Having ordered the US to leave the airspace over Syria, Russia made its first strikes the day after Putin left New York. Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, remained in the company of world leaders and the media. For days, he was photographed with John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, coming in and out of meetings, shaking hands. As Zakharova put it on Russia-1: "Our aim is simple, to defeat [IS] together, not unilaterally." As soon as the bombing started, an information war flared up over Russia's targeting of non-IS fighters. Senator John McCain (who, after the fall of Gaddafi in 2011, had tweeted, "Dear Vlad, The #ArabSpring is coming to a neighbourhood near you") was enraged, calling the Russian targeting of US-trained rebels "the ultimate disrespect." Whatever the tactical worth of the targets on the ground, Russia was making a point. The US has been training and arming an assortment of groups to fight both IS and Assad. In a press conference broadcast live on CNN, Lavrov quipped: "If it looks like a terrorist, walks like a terrorist, if it fights like a terrorist, it's a terrorist, right?"

In trying to discern what Putin's government has up its sleeve, western intelligence services would do well to pay closer attention to Russian state television discussion shows, which have become instruments for preparing the public for new policies; in this case, a tough war. They also reveal how attentively Russia observes the west, and how deeply it knows the east.

On 13th September, the anchorman Vladimir Solovyov began his show saying: "Obama has admitted he has no strategy for defeating IS... so why can't the west lay Cold War ghosts to rest and work with Russia for a solution, instead of seeing Russia as a threat and the cause of all the world's ills?" The veteran political showman Vladimir Zhirinovsky then declared himself an orientalist by birth (he was born in Central Asia, served in the Caucasus and speaks Arabic). He took off on a high-energy flight of conspiracy theory: Americans are gangsters, IS was created to destroy Russia by lowering the oil price and so on. Andrei Kokoshin, Dean of the Faculty of World Politics at Moscow State University, urged dialogue, explaining that US policy had reached a dead end because it was guided by "a sacred faith in democracy, and the illusion that all democracies will naturally be US allies."

Solovyov followed up with a radio talk show devoted to the proposition that "Syria is our border, which we must not surrender." He asked: "Barack Husseinovich Obama is always trying to convince us that if we give up Assad, everything will be ok-let's say, there's no Assad, what happens then?"

"Chaos," replied his guest, Semyon Bagdasarov, a member of the Russian Parliament, and an Uzbek-born Armenian. Bagdasarov argued that in the urban centres still under Assad's control-Damascus, Latakia and Tartus-with Alawite majorities and many Christians, there would be a massacre. "Genocide?" Solovyov asked. "Yes, genocide," Bagdasarov replied.

They also criticised Turkey for using its bombing of IS as a cover for its war against the Kurds, who have become allies of Russia. Kobani, a city in northern Syria, was besieged by IS a year ago, and liberated by fighters of the Kurdish YPG with aerial support from the US. The YPG, now allied with Assad's forces, have continued to defend the city in the face of IS massacres, in which the Kurds and Syria accuse Turkey of colluding. They feel betrayed by the US.

More unexpected allies have appeared in Russian state media broadcasts. One television programme visited northern Afghanistan, near the Tajik border (which is guarded by Russian troops), where Nato and US special forces have joined the fight over the city of Kunduz, while IS runs a recruitment drive among the Taliban. For Russia, the impending US withdrawal from Afghanistan represents a grave threat. Abdul Rashid Dostum, the Afghan Vice-President, flanked by dwarf bodyguards, received the Russian reporters with ceremony. An ethnic Uzbek, Dostum was a general in the Afghan army during the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, battling US-backed mujahideen from whose ranks Osama bin Laden later emerged. His men speak Russian. In September, Dostum, who has been fighting IS in northern and eastern Afghanistan, appealed to Russia to provide Afghan security forces with military hardware, including aircraft. "The Daesh [IS] plan is the Caucasus Mountains, Russia and Central Asia," he said. "You are watching Syria and Iraq being destroyed, and they want to destabilise Central Asia."

One talk show featured a Daily Mirror spread from August, a map of the world as IS would like to see it in 2020. Swathes of Russia appeared in black, renamed "Qoqzaz" and "Khurasan." Repeatedly, the subject returned to the west's simulation of a fight against IS and its refusal to become Russia's ally in a common cause.

Russia's engagement with IS summons traumatic memories of former wars: the 10-year Afghan war, which precipitated the fall of the USSR's empire, and the Chechen wars of the 1990s, in which Russian conscripts were beheaded. The intervention in Syria is yet another Chechen war for Russia, but on a vastly expanded front. There are thousands of Russian-speakers in IS, including its toughest commanders, like the red-bearded Tarkhan Batirashvili, also known as Abu Omar al-Shishani. Having excelled in a US training programme for Georgian special forces, he fought in the Russia-Georgia war in South Ossetia in 2008, before leaving for Istanbul in 2010. He has recruited fighters for IS from Chechnya, Dagestan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan. A year ago, IS sent a video message to Putin on the internet, announcing its plan to invade the Caucasus and southern Russia.

Judging by the discussions on television and radio, Russia plans to help the Syrian Army retake the city of Palmyra, from where a strategic highway leads north to the IS capital, Raqqa. IS took Palmyra in May. The jihadists made children execute captured Syrian soldiers in the ancient ruins. In August, they beheaded Palmyra's retired museum director, 82-year-old archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad, and hung his body on a post. Then they blew up the Temple of Bel. One of the city's treasures, the Palmyra Tariff, a five-metre-wide marble slab inscribed in Greek and Aramaic, is preserved in the Hermitage in St Petersburg, a city that has been known since the 18th century as the "Palmyra of the North." The director of the Hermitage, Mikhail Piotrovsky, wrote an obituary of his murdered colleague and spoke on television about the destruction of Palmyra. "When they destroy Palmyra," he said, "the columns of Petersburg shake; when Christianity is destroyed in the Middle East, where it began, it harms Christianity here." Palmyra could have been saved, Piotrovsky said: "The Islamists took a long time getting there... They crossed the desert and no one bombed them, because it would have been considered assistance to the Syrian government, to President Assad."

"Russia's claim that its forces are only there to target Islamic State should be taken with a large grain of salt," Charles Lister wrote on the website of the BBC in late September. Lister is a fellow at the Brookings Doha Center, which is funded by Qatar. "Moscow is well known for viewing Syria's entire armed opposition as uniformly Islamist and a danger to international security... Such sweeping assessments are patently false." This is an odd statement, given that Lister made a similar assessment himself in March: "While rarely acknowledged explicitly in public, the vast majority of the Syrian insurgency has coordinated closely with al-Qaeda since mid-2012." It is time the UK government acknowledged explicitly in public what it knows about the Islamists we have armed and trained to fight Assad and, for that matter, about how much IS funding comes from Qatar.

Russia does not claim that it is in Syria only to target IS. As Putin told Charlie Rose more than once during their interview, Russia is supporting the Syrian government in its fight against all who threaten the survival of the Syrian state. Russia also intends to destroy IS, which is at least as grave a threat to Russian national security as it is to the security of Europe.

David Cameron argues that Assad must be overthrown because he is an Alawite Shia ruling over a Sunni majority, and a recruiting sergeant for Sunni terror groups because of the number of Syrians his military has killed. The argument is also made by Sunni Arab states such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia which have a stake in his fall. In fact, notwithstanding support from Iran and Russia, the Assad regime would not have survived years of civil war without the active support of a large section of the Syrian population, including many genuinely moderate Sunnis and Ismailis, who would rather live in a secular state than under the jihadists who will seize power if Syria falls apart.

Though Assad, whose wife is a Sunni, has bombed enemy territory brutally in his fight for survival, until now many more Syrians have fled to the relative safety of regime-held areas than have fled beyond the border. Many former opponents of Assad have become regime supporters, particularly in Aleppo and Damascus. The Ismaili town of Salamieh in Hama, once a place of peaceful anti-Assad protest, is now a bastion of support for the regime, and has come under heavy indiscriminate shelling from western-backed rebels.

Millions more Syrian refugees will flee to Europe if Assad falls. No one can expect a happy ending for this vicious crisis-but there is a way of slowing down the slaughter and the frenzy of Islamist expansion from its Syrian base. The only hope of a way out of this conflict is a negotiated political settlement with the Assad regime. According to Martti Ahtisaari, the former Finnish President, Vitaly Churkin, Russia's ambassador to the UN, proposed a plan to the US, Britain and France in 2012, which included an "elegant way for Assad to step aside." The three powers were so convinced that Assad was about to fall that they walked away. "It was an opportunity lost," Ahtisaari says. Since then the death toll has risen from 7,500 to almost a quarter of a million.

If we cannot support Russia in its mission now, or even define our own, we should stand aside. No good has come from our policy of regime change. The UK government's position on Syria is neither logical nor honest.

The most interesting passage in Putin's UN speech was his reflection on his own country's mistakes: "We remember...when the Soviet Union exported social experiments, pushing for changes in other countries for ideological reasons, and this often led to tragic consequences and caused degradation instead of progress." In his speech, Obama declared that for nations, "the measure of strength is no longer defined by the control of territory," but rather by "the success of their people--their knowledge..."

One thing that both IS and Russia understand is that control of territory is everything. Palmyra is territory, and territory has meaning, which it takes knowledge--of geography, history, languages, religions, cultures and the nature of one's enemies-to understand. John McCain calls Russia a "gas station masquerading as a country." He should read War and Peace.

 #6
Huffingtonpost.com
October 9, 2015
Russia's Aim in Syria Is to Strategically Defeat ISIS and Al Qaeda
By Alastair Crooke
Fmr. MI-6 agent; Author, 'Resistance: The Essence of Islamic Revolution'

BEIRUT -- As soon as Russia launched the first stages of its military campaign in Syria, world media erupted with epic slights on President Vladimir Putin and the deprecation of Russia's strategic motives in Syria. Is this information operation simply a recrudescence of Cold War neuralgia, or is there something more profound at work here?

One can see, too, that the U.S. administration's response to Russia's initiative has oscillated uncertainly. Initially, Washington took a "business as usual approach," suggesting that it and its allies' air campaign would proceed unchanged. But the administration then seemed blindsided by the speed and extent of the Russian action. Last week, a Russian official arrived at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad to announce the immediate start to the Russian air operation in Syria, and to insist that the U.S. keep its aircraft (and personnel) out of Syrian airspace altogether that day. Since then, the Russian tempo of air attacks has been impressive, leaving little or no space to others.

Clearly, "business as usual" in these circumstance was impractical (if some calamitous air incident in the Syrian skies was to be avoided). And President Obama's opponents immediately pounced: Putin was wrong-footing America (again). Secretary of State John Kerry hotly demanded military coordination that would at least keep the U.S. coalition flying -- and in the game.

The second approach has been to try wrest at least the political initiative back into American hands -- by conceding to Russia its military role -- whilst trying to set parameters (essentially President Bashar al-Assad's removal), that would require a major reworking of the Syrian leadership, in which America would have a major say. (Britain and France similarly lifted a leg, to mark their territory of having a claim in any final outcome, too.)

During all these maneuvers and rhetorical skirmishing, however, the U.S. has also been quietly re-positioning itself towards the political settlement which it now sees as coming somewhat into focus. In London and Berlin, Secretary Kerry modified the U.S.'s initial absolute objection to President Assad remaining in office: Now, he said, Assad might remain for a transitional phase, however long that might be, "or whatever," adding that ultimately this was for the Syrian people to determine (see our last Weekly Comment). On Wednesday, Kerry went further, and said something equally significant: Exiting his discussions with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Kerry said that Syria must remain "united ... [and] be secular." This represents a huge (if barely remarked) shift: It cuts the ground from under the Muslim Brotherhood as well as the jihadists -- in fact, from all Islamists who cannot accept a secular state, which, to be clear, effectively removes pretty well all the Gulf protégés from having any significant slice of the cake.

No doubt, Lavrov had made it plain to Kerry that Assad has told the Russians that he is open to political change and to reform (and that Russia believes him). But perhaps Lavrov also explained why the particular historical circumstances of Syria voided any prospect of a Brotherhood insertion into government being a workable prospect. In any event, Kerry changed tune.

The third U.S. tactic seems to be "containment" -- that old standby: a massive information war is underway to suggest that the Russians committed themselves only to attack ISIS, and nobody else (when Russia never made any such undertaking). Lavrov is explicit: Russia is targeting ISIS and "other terrorist groups," as they had always "said they would do." Nonetheless, the info war campaign continues in order to put pressure on Russia, and to contain its military campaign. American officials have been on record saying that "moderates" turned out to be as rare as mythical unicorns amongst the Syrian armed opposition, and that only "four or five" were in the field now -- and yet suddenly it seems that there are all these "moderate CIA trainees" under attack now. In fact, there are no "moderate jihadists." The term is an oxymoron: there are only jihadists who are more -- or less -- close to ISIS or al Qaeda. It is a parsing of definitions that simply does not interest Russia.

Tom Friedman puts a somewhat different gloss on events from his well-briefed perspective: Let Putin and his allies have a go at defeating ISIS (and good luck to them). But when they fail, and find the Sunni world has turned against them, then they (the Russians) will need a ladder out of the tree, which only Washington will be able to lend, to help Putin recover from his strategic mistake. This is too reductive. Putin well understands the difference between traditional Sunni Islam in the Levant and the very recent blow-in of militant Gulf Wahhabism, which is at odds with this traditional Sunni Islam of Syria and Iraq. He knows, too, that many Sunnis still hold to the notion of citizenship within a secular, or non-sectarian state; and that Syria and Iraq are both inheritors to venerable, old civilizations (Greater Syria and Mesopotamia); each with their own political cultures and visions. The fight against contemporary orientations of Wahhabism has never been the reductive struggle between a Shia minority (the Alawites) and a Sunni majority; it is as much a struggle to preserve the Levantine tradition against a foreign (Gulf) culture, Wahhabism, floated into the region on a tide of petrodollars.

Why should President Putin understand this cultural war better than Western leaders? It is because Orthodox Christianity (of Russia) never entertained the Western binary opposition between the Roman Christianity and Islam. Orthodox Christianity and traditional Sunni Islam share many attributes together, and have a history of close relations.

So what are the Russians doing? Firstly, they are running through a "bank" of "terrorist" targets assembled by Syrian, Russian, Iranian and Hezbollah intelligence services. It is unlikely that this phase will last long -- and then, the mode will smartly change. With the primary targets destroyed, the ground offensive will begin, led by the Syrian army (with direct support from Hezbollah, and with advice from Russian and Iranian officers). What will be different now, however, is that the ground forces will have the benefit of all-weather and nighttime air support, plus real-time imagery. Whilst Russian soldiers will not be directly involved in boots-on-the-ground operations in support of the Syrian army, Russian forces will be directly involved in securing a safe area around their air base near Latakia. To the extent that this keeps Latakia secure, it will as a byproduct, free up the Syrian army from the need to station troops there, thus making them available for other tasks.

For now, the Russians seem (as evidenced by their airstrikes) to be intent firstly on eliminating any hostile threats adjacent to their forces in the area of Latakia (the Russian air base is located some 20 miles south of Latakia). This is standard military modus operandi. Their secondary and tertiary objectives seem to be to secure the M4 highway between Latakia and Aleppo (targeting pockets of insurgent forces adjacent to the highway), and in striking insurgent-held areas along the M5 highway.

There is nothing political behind such strikes -- in the sense of strengthening one insurgent group in opposition to any other. It seems, rather, very clear that the Russians are preparing for the subsequent ground sweep by the Syrian army: the Russian air force is securing lines of logistic support to the Syrian army, and concomitantly denying those same lines to the jihadists. It is, in short, all rather military -- and in line with what Russia says are its objectives.

So, why this flood tide of snide commentary, disinformation and claims of a covert, "underhand" Russian strategy? What is it that so irks the West? Well, of course, one part of it is that Putin has put Washington on the spot, and made the West's claims to have been fighting ISIS for the last year to appear hollow. But there may be more to it than this.

For the past few decades, NATO effectively made all the decisions about war and peace. It faced no opposition and no rival. Matters of war were effectively a solely internal debate within NATO -- about whether to proceed or not, and in what way. That was it. It didn't matter much about what others thought or did. Those on the receiving end simply had to endure it. But whilst its destructive powers were evident, its strategic benefits have been far from evident -- especially across the Middle East.

What probably irks the West most is that Russia has unfolded -- and begun -- a sophisticated military campaign in the flash of an eye. NATO bumbles along much more slowly with its complicated structures. Iraqis have long complained that in military terms, assistance promised by the NATO powers takes (literally) years to materialize, whereas requests to Russia and Iran are expeditiously met. So Tom Friedman's condescension towards the Russian military intervention does have more than a whiff of orientalism to it.

But all the hoo-ha probably stems also from the sense that this Russian initiative could mark the coming into birth of something more serious -- of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as a putative military alliance. Admittedly, the "4+1 alliance" -- Russia, Iran, Syria and Iraq, plus Hezbollah -- is not branded as SCO (and the coalition partners do not overlap with SCO membership), but the 4+1 alliance venture might well yet prove to be a "pilot" in non-Western, successful coalition-operating. Furthermore, its objective is precisely to preempt NATO-style regime change projects -- a prime SCO concern. This prospect certainly would irk the Western security establishment -- and would potentially change many an existing NATO calculus.

Not surprisingly, then, it might be seen in some Western quarters as hugely important to set a narrative of failure for the 4+1 alliance, and to denigrate any sense that its military example might have strategic importance for the non-Western world.

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#7
The National Interest
October 9, 2015
Why Russia Needs an Exit Strategy in Syria
A Russia defense expert analyzes the Syria conflict.
By Mikhail Barabanov
Mikhail Barabanov is editor-in-chief of the Moscow Defense Brief.

Russia's intervention in Syria is the most remarkable military and political campaign of Putin's era, the first post-Soviet substantial military foray beyond the borders of the former USSR. For historical purposes, Russia's intervention in Syria, more than anything else, marks its return to the global arena as a player with whom other powers--led as they are by the United States--must contend, albeit reluctantly.

Clearly, the decision to dispatch a Russian military contingent to Syria was a very risky step in military, foreign policy, and domestic policy terms. The military intent whereby the operation would be limited solely to aerial bombardment and support of an ally fighting on the ground appears reasonable and moderate; however, one might recall that, in the early days in Vietnam, the Americans pursued a similar course, and look how things turned out. Internationally, Russia is plunging headfirst into the boiling cauldron of Middle East politics, complete with endless contradictory relations and links, and, by doing so, risks multiplying the ranks of its foes. Finally, the Russian public does not approve of any substantial costs (let alone in servicemen's lives) of something that most Russians view as an "Arab turf scuffle". Therefore, domestic support of Russia's military involvement in Syria, which relies solely on emotion-driven chauvinism and yearning for a great power status can only survive as long as the campaign does not turn into a burden or cause serious losses.

No doubt, strategically, Russia's decision to intervene in Syria should be viewed in the context of a broad global game between Moscow and the United States, as a strong move designed to set the stage for righting the boat of Russia-US relations, heavily tilted by the events of 2014-2015, on a broad range of issues, including Ukraine. To a certain extent, these tactics have worked as the USA has been forced to urgently reinstate military contacts with Russia, which the Americans have made an ostentatious show of boycotting since early 2014.

The core problem of the Russian military operation in Syria is its presumed dual nature. On the one hand, the campaign's officially stated objective is to combat the extremist and barbaric Islamic State (IS) that arose in the flames of the Syrian and Iraqi civil wars, is threatening to change the map of the entire Middle East, and has evolved into an openly-run terrorist state never before seen in human history. On the other hand, falling just short of being goal number one of the Russian intervention, is the support to the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad. If the regime's military situation cannot be radically improved (which is unlikely), then at the very least its military and territorial positions could be consolidated to facilitate a peaceful settlement in Syria--while removing the issue of Assad's ouster as a precondition.   

The rationale is simple and obvious: if Assad's regime remains and acts as a legitimate party to the process of intra-Syrian peaceful settlement, the regime would automatically become the strongest key party to such settlement (especially in the presence of direct Russian military support). Therefore, in addition to securing the survival of the Damascus regime, it would also guarantee a "controlling stake" in deciding the future of all of Syria.

It has become obvious that the Kremlin's decision to intervene in Syria militarily was largely prompted by plans for a Syrian "no fly zone" that Western nations have been discussing behind closed doors in recent months. Such a zone was intended to protect the forces of Syria's "moderate opposition" from the Syrian Government Army (Syrian Arab Army, a.k.a. SAA). It is perfectly clear that such a "no-fly zone," one intended to replicate the 2011 Libya scenario, would actually have meant a transition to a large-scale air campaign directly waged by Western nations (along with Turkey and the Gulf Arab states) against Assad's ground force. This would have dramatically undermined the latter's already precarious military situation.     

Any decision on a "no fly zone," which the West had all but agreed upon by September, has been torpedoed by Russia's resolute deployment under the banner of fighting the IS. The question is how long--and how efficiently--the Russians will be able to fly that banner.

While Russia's air campaign in Syria has been accompanied by a tsunami of PR and propaganda that is unprecedented for its Ministry of Defense, a fair amount of caution is advised in assessing the overall effectiveness of the Russian air strikes. In the first six days of the operation (between September 30 and October 5), the Latakia-based group comprising 30 strike aircraft (12 Su-24Ms, 12 Su-25s, and six Su-34s) of Russia's Airspace Forces (ASF) flew approximately 120 attack missions hitting 51 targets.

For comparison's sake, between June 14, 2014 and September 29, 2015, as part of the Inherent Resolve operation against IS within Iraq and Syria, the US and allies flew 56,819 sorties (admittedly, that number includes support flights) and delivered 7,162 air strikes (of which 2,579 in Syria). It would be mistaken to suggest that they had any radical impact on the IS forces' activities, let alone achieved the Caliphate's destruction. Notably, the Western coalition has almost exclusively relied on precision air munitions (whereas the Russian group also makes heavy use of old-fashioned gravity bombs); it possesses much more efficient reconnaissance, target selection, and targeting facilities (suffice it to mention the extensive use of relevant under-wing pods, which the Russian ASF has exactly zero of); and generally has much vaster and virtually non-stop 25-year experience of deployment and combat operations in the region, complete with well-oiled mechanisms for interaction and air force combat operations.

Therefore, the Russian air strikes have had (and likely will have) a limited and, probably, largely moral significance in terms of impact on ISIS forces proper. At the same time, Russian ASF actions could have much more substantial sub-strategic impact on the situation at the frontline of the SAA's fight against other rebel groups, whether "moderates" supported by the West or radical Islamists, such as Al-Nusra.

The Russian intervention in Syria occurred at a time when the situation of Assad's forces somewhat stabilized. Notably, the Russians refrained from intervening in July and early August 2015, when the SAA suffered substantial blows at the hands of its opponents (first and foremost, radical Islamists). By September, Assad had managed to restore the frontline's integrity, while the Islamist assault had lost its steam. This once again demonstrates that, in making its decision to intervene in Syria, Moscow gave more consideration to external factors (such as the threat of Western intervention) than to internal Syrian aspects.

By now, pro-Assad forces have managed to build up certain reserves, which include Iranian forces deployed in Syria and comprise extensive deliveries of Iranian and Russian weaponry. Apparently, in the near future (October), the SAA and its Shiite allies intend to mount an offensive operation with Russian air support.

A major problem for the pro-Assad forces has been created by large Islamist enclaves (mostly in Homs and Rastan) on territory under their control; the enclaves tie up a sizable proportion of SAA forces. The top priority for the Assad loyalists is to eliminate those enclaves. To the extent one can tell, a sizable share of Russian air strikes is currently de facto meant to assist an onslaught on those enclaves.

Should the enclaves be liquidated, Assad forces' subsequent objectives would be to completely sanitize the area around Aleppo, stabilize their positions in the south of Syria and, preferably, recapture the major communication hub of Palmyra from IS, driving the latter into the Syrian desert. If those objectives are achieved, the Assad regime's military and political position would significantly improve, and the regime's survival would no longer be at stake.

However, the opposition forces (both moderates and Islamists) likewise are building up their potential for warfare. The US and allies have been supplying the "moderate" opposition with massive amounts of weaponry, and it looks like the Russian intervention in Syria has only put this process in higher gear. In December or January, the opposition forces of all hues could be expected to undertake a large-scale offensive along key directions. Rebuffing the offensive would be a crucial task for both SAA and the Russian air group. The very existence of the Russian group could be a serious factor delaying the opposition's offensive, for instance until January, which would benefit the government forces. In Syria, the period from February to April is taken up by the Khamsin (sandstorm) season; it largely rules out active operations of the parties.

Therefore, should Damascus and Moscow see their best-case scenario pan out, a situation might evolve by the spring of 2016 that would lay ground for negotiations on Syria's potential future with the participation of Assad's regime, the "moderate" opposition, both parties' sponsors and, potentially, a moderate section of Islamists (other than IS or Nusra).

Here, the fundamental remaining issue would be the very existence of Syria within its present-day borders, given that the Kurdish regions have effectively undergone self-determination. In addition, it appears that a complete military victory over ISIS remains impossible in the foreseeable future, and the Caliphate will keep large areas of Syria and Iraq under its control.

Although the USA currently intends to intensify its campaign against IS all the way to a potential offensive by Kurdish and "moderate" opposition forces on Raqqa, the IS capital in Syria, such enterprise, it would seem, will probably fail. In my opinion, the Caliphate could only be destroyed through a large-scale military intervention of Western ground forces led by the USA, which is unlikely to be feasible in the next few years. On the other hand, given this situation, the Russian forces in Syria are able to only partially engage IS, leaving the principal goals of the anti-IS fight to the Americans, while Russia can devote itself to wearing out other anti-Assad groups.

Meanwhile, a more active involvement of the US and their allies in the fight against ISIS while simultaneously providing greater support to "moderate" Syrian opposition lays the ground for a further souring of the Russia-US relations.

In this light, the worst-case (yet quite realistic) scenario for the Russian side would involve Assad's forces inability to radically improve the situation even despite Russian air support. At the same time, incidents between Russian and Western militaries could escalate, and the West could partially implement "no-go zones" above certain parts of Syria. The above sets the stage for a direct military confrontation between Russian and Western air forces in Syria, unavoidably making the civil war more intense and ruthless.   

An even less favorable development would be for Moscow to attempt to radically "double down" or try a quick turnaround in the Syrian conflict by putting boots on the ground in Syria. This threatens Russia with a quagmire of a "hopeless" war in a strange land that cannot be won, followed by further deterioration of its relations with the Western nations as the latter seek to bleed the Russian forces in Syria through extensive support for the Syrian opposition and Islamists along the lines of the Afghanistan scenario.

Therefore, the potential success of Russia's actions in Syria is predicated on its ability to perform a political high wire act of sorts, i.e., to strengthen Assad's military and political positions while avoiding any deterioration (and, preferably,  even bringing about an improvement) in its relations with the US and the West going forward. Whether proclamations announcing a joint fight against the Islamic State would suffice to achieve that end remains unclear.

In any case, even though the deployment of the Russian air group in Syria will last many months, it is very important for Russia to avoid getting drawn into a protracted air war, to minimize its own losses in any possible way, to thoroughly and flexibly select "political" targets for air strikes, to avoid military confrontation with the Western forces in the region and, above all, to exit the campaign in a timely fashion.  

Editor's Note: This piece was translated from the original Russian-language version.

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#8
http://gordonhahn.com
October 11, 2015
Putin's Syria Intervention and Shi'a-Sunni Dilemma
By Gordon M. Hahn
Gordon M. Hahn is an Analyst and Advisory Board Member of the Geostrategic Forecasting Corporation, Chicago, Illinois; Senior Researcher, Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group, San Jose, California Analyst/Consultant, Russia Other Points of View - Russia Media Watch; and Senior Researcher and Adjunct Professor, MonTREP, Monterey, California.
[Footnotes and links here http://gordonhahn.com/2015/10/11/putins-syria-intervention-and-shia-sunni-dilemma/]

Russian President Vladimir Putin's decision to intervene militarily in the Syrian civil war could be a fateful one for Russia's jihadist threat both at home and abroad. Russia seeks to preserve the Syrian state and at least temporarily the Assad regime by means of a Shi'a-dominated alliance. This has the potential to alienate some of Russia's largely Sunni Muslim population and mobilize against Russia old and new radical elements in and out of the corridors of power in the Sunni Muslim world, especially in its non-secular or least secular states and societies. This, in turn, could strengthen the global jihadi revolutionary movement both inside and outside of Russia and thus negate some or all of the gains against the global jihad made by Russia's Syria intervention.

The Russian-Shiite Coalition

Having little choice, Putin has initiated his effort to rescue the Syrian state and the Assad regime by means of a Shi'a-dominated alliance in the Levant consisting of Iran, Iraq, and Hezbollah and Shi'a and secular Baathist Syrian Alawi regime allies abroad. Some might argue the Syrian civil war is more than a Shi'a-Sunni confrontation. To be sure, the Alawis are more secular than they are Shiite Muslim and have some support among Syria's Christian minority. The conflict also involves sub-conflicts, including an intra-Sunni conflict between jihadists, Islamists (Muslim Brotherhood), and a few moderate and secular Muslim groups. It also involves a Kurdish national separatist movement.  Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the Levant's and Persian Gulf's Shi'a-dominated and Sunni-dominated states had lined up on opposite sides in the conflict, making it a de facto Shi'a-Sunni proxy war, with the West allied with the Sunnis and Russia with the Shi'a. There have been proxy conflicts elsewhere in the region in Bahrain two years ago, in Yemen, and more recently in southeast Saudi Arabia.

Putin's Sunni Vector

Since Putin's arrival to the Russian presidency, he has conducted a multi-vectoral foreign policy targeting every region of the world as a strategy for achieving his goal of building a multipolar world in place of the American-Western unipolar structure. More recently, the Russian president has carried out a clever diplomatic offensive among the Sunni states of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Egypt and others in order to impress upon them Moscow's seriousness about being a player in the region and the trade and defense benefits that ties with Moscow can afford those willing to make compromises. This diplomatic campaign now has the veneer of preparing the diplomatic battlefield for Russia's forward role in Syria if not its military intervention. However, it remains unclear whether that diplomatic offensive can contain Sunni angst inside, near and outside the corridors of power in Sunni-dominated Islamic states.

The Levant-Gulf Sunni states cannot ignore Moscow's growing ties to Iran and policies that protect Tehran's interests to the detriment of Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states. We know that Saudi elements close to the ruling family have been involved in financing and even coordinating the organization of Al Qa`ida (AQ) attacks in the past, including 9/11 and the aborted 2000 Frankfurt Airport plane hijacking plot, involving AQ in Afghanistan and jihadists within the Chechen Republic of Ichkeriya, now defunct and replaced by the AQ-allied Caucasus Emirate mujahedin (CE) (Gordon M. Hahn, "Chechnya-Caucasus Cells in Europe are Two Decades Old: The Chechen Republic and the 2000 AQ Frankfurt Airline Hijacking Plot," Geostrategic Forecasting Corporation, 2013, http://gordonhahn.com/2015/02/03/chechnyacaucasus-cells-in-europe-are-two-decades-old-the-chechen-republic-of-ichkeriya-and-the-2000-aq-frankfurt-airline-hijacking-plot/). It is very likely that such elements will be energized to counter Russia as a result of Moscow's military intervention in Syria. Countering Russia can be undertaken by stepping up support for IS and/or AQ forces in Syria and Iraq and/or hitting Russia at home. Given the backing of a number of Gulf States or elements within for IS and/or other jihadi groups against Syria and Iraq, the possibility of similar support against Russia can in no way be excluded or ignored.

The Home Front

Hitting Russia at home through jihadi proxies based in the North Caucasus would be an option for angered Sunnis. There are now two global jihadi revolutionary organizations operating in Russia after the defection of some 70-80 percent of the CE amirs and mujahedin to the Islamic State (IS or variously ISIS, ISIL, and Daesh). This summer they officially founded the 'Caucasus Vilaiyat (Governate) of the Islamic State (CVIS), giving IS a direct affiliate inside Russia in Russia's North Caucasus. The CVIS's amir is the Dagestani Avar, 'Abu Mukhammad' Rustam Asildarov, who was the amir of the CE's powerful Dagestan Republic network, the so-called Dagestan Vilaiyat. Thus, Dagestan is one place the CVIS is most likely to begin striking. The other is Chechnya, from where several powerful IS operatives hail - most notably 'Umar al-Shishani' Tarkhan Batirashvili, the amir of IS's Northern Front where IS's Syrian capitol is located -  sent to Syria by the CE in 2012 and then having moved on to IS in 2013-14. Also, the bulk of the CE's Chechnya network, the so-called Nokchicho Vilaiyat, has also switched its allegiance to CVIS and IS. Asildarov and his CVIS remain in the North Caucasus, and IS's Batirashvili and his associates have always maintained they plan to return to there in order to continue the jihad at home.

With CE and CVIS/IS plots in Russia surely in the works and recruiting efforts continuing, Putin's intervention in Syria has the potential to alienate some of Russia's 17 million-strong Muslim population, which is 95 percent Sunni. This could improve the recruiting prospects for the CE and CVIS in Russia, with the caveat that the sharp reduction in the number of jihadi attacks in Russia - by some 90 percent from 2010 to 2014 - is largely a result of a mass exodus of Islamists and jihadists to Syria and Iraq beginning in late 2011. Thus, in addition to, or instead of successful CE and/or CVIS recruitment within Russia, Putin's Syria intervention is sure to increase the number of extremists heading from Russia and other places in Russia to the Levant to join IS or the CE's allies in Syria, including not just AQ's ally Jabhat al-Nusra (JN), but also numerous other groups, including the Caucasus Emirate in the Levant (Sham) or CEL (CES). Moreover, Russia's air strikes against IS, JN, and other jihadi groups in Syria (and soon perhaps in Iraq) are sure to increase the number of jihadists willing to travel north to join the CE or CVIS and attack targets in Russia.

Exit Routes

Russia's stated support for talks between Assad and elements of the 'rational opposition' and stated openness to the possibility of Assad stepping down at some point in the future once the Syrian state and regime are reintegrated and re-stabilized, respectively, holds a key to an exit routes out of Putin's Shi-a-Sunni dilemma. Moscow should be willing to support one of two possible political compromises that would assuage Sunni concerns. First, it could support a coalition government that would include Sunni Arabs and Kurds as well as Alawi Shi'a and Baathists. In lieu of any viability for the survival of a united Syrian state, Moscow could back a partitioning of the state that would leave Assad in power in a rump Alawi Baatthist state encompassing much of central and perhaps southern western Syria and create separate Sunni and Kurd states in central eastern and northern Syria, respectively - granted there will be difficulties with Turkey regarding the latter. The survival of some form of Assad regime would be vital for Moscow, since one of the few positive sides of the Baathists is their protection of the Christian minority which is at risk of genocide should the jihadis gain the upper hand in Syria's civil war.

In the meantime as operations continue and political ducks are gotten in row (or not), Moscow will need to step up its diplomatic offensive with Sunni-dominated countries to an unprecedented level both at home and abroad. It will need to build on such measures as the building of the new central mosque in Moscow which holds 10,000 worshippers and is the largest mosque in Europe surpassing the recently built central mosque for Grozny, Chechnya. Public diplomacy such as Putin's attendance and speech at the new Moscow mosque's opening and the invitation and acceptance of Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan at the ceremony need to be matched. Russia's official Islamic clergy will need to mobilize. Ravil Gainutdin, perhaps Russia's most influential official Muslim cleric and chief mufti of the Council of Russia's Muslims, one of the largest Muslim umbrella structures in Russia, recently condemned attempts to view the conflict in Syria as a Sunni-Shi'a clash. Such arguments will need to be made repeatedly by Russia's Muslim clergy on an ongoing basis.

Implications

Russia' military intervention in Syria puts Moscow directly at odds with theocratic-oriented Sunni Muslim states, risking growing increased Shia'-Sunni conflict in the Levant and Persian Gulf regions and between Moscow and the Sunni world both inside and outside its borders. Should any of the Sunni theocratic states or Sunni-dominated states with secular regimes such as Egypt enter the Syrian conflict or worse still should a region-wide Shi'a-Sunni war develop involving Saudi Arabia, Egypt and/or others, then Moscow will come under even greater threat. This has implications not just Russia's political stability and the war against jihadism, but it also potentially even greater implications for nuclear, chemical, biological, and radiological proliferation, given Russia's possession of the largest stockpiles of these weapons and materials in the world. To this supply, the jihadi demand is now about to increase. Add in the recent reports of four interdicted attempts by a former FSB colonel to sell Cezium on the black market since 2010, and we have a recipe for disaster.

Many have commented that Putin's intervention in Syria has imparted a tectonic shift in global geopolitics, and this is no doubt true if he can register something that looks like success. However, one side of this shift involves several sub-texts of potential threat and destabilization for the Levant and Persian Gulf regions, Russia and Eurasia, and Europe as well as in the functional area of non-proliferation and mass destruction terrorism.

The new configuration in the Levant has implications across Eurasia, in Azerbaijan and South and Central Asia in particular, where Iran and Sunni-dominated states compete for influence. In Azerbaijan, of the 90 percent of the population that is Muslim, 85 percent are Shiite, and only 15 percent are Sunni. The Sunnis are concentrated among the ethnic Lezgin population that straddles the border between northern Azerbaijan and southern Dagestan. CVIS amir Asildarov was involved in the CE's foiled 2012 plot to attack the Eurovision music festival in Baku, which would have involved an attack on the concert hall, truck bomb attacks at hotels, and the assassination of President Ilham Aliev.  There are Azerbaijanis fighting for IS (www.facebook.com/803638119690873/videos/871839199537431/). Thus, Azeri and Russian secret services should be on the lookout for CVIS activity in Azerbaijan which also is a transit point for mujahedin traveling between Russia and the Levant.

In Central Asia, the Western withdrawal from Afghanistan and the rise of IS in the region pose a new and heightened threat matrix. In that matrix, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan are now most directly under the mounting jihadi threat from across their southern borders. Farsi-speaking Tajikistan is especially threatened, given the Taliban's recent move into Kunduz just over 40 miles from the Tajik border and is a focus of Iranian ambition in the region. Therefore, Russia can also be expected to be involved in these regions as well, perhaps in coalition with Iran and China through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which has become increasingly 'securitized' in recent years.

It would be better if Russia, the West, and Eurasia writ large (including China) - perhaps NATO, SCO, and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) -  were to join efforts so that that a broad alliance, rather then competing coalitions, acts in concert to prevent these potential worst case scenarios from becoming all too 'kinetic.'
 

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 #9
New York Times
October 12, 2015
Shiites in Iraq Hailing Putin for Syria Push
By MICHAEL R. GORDON

NAJAF, Iraq - One of the most popular Facebook posts in Iraq's Shiite heartland is a Photoshopped image of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia dressed in the robe of a southern tribal sheikh.

It was the American-led invasion in 2003 that toppled Saddam Hussein and empowered Iraq's long-repressed Shiite majority. The United States also took the lead more than a year ago to assemble a coalition to conduct airstrikes in Syria and Iraq against the Sunni militants of the Islamic State.

But with the struggle against the Islamic State largely stalemated, it is the naked display of Russian military power in neighboring Syria, as well as the leadership of "Sheikh Putin," that is being applauded by residents of this Shiite power center. Russian planes continued to hit targets in Syria on Sunday, the Russian Defense Ministry said.

"What the people in the street care about is how to get Daesh out of Iraq," Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum, a member of Iraq's Parliament, said, using an Arabic name for the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. "Now they feel Russia is more serious than the United States."

As if to underscore that point, one widely viewed YouTube video shows Mr. Putin striding purposefully to the sounds of a patriotic Iraqi song, which hails him as a leader with the vision and determination to bring stability to Iraq.

"We don't have to say his name; he knows himself well," the singer belts out in the video, which ends with a clip of Mr. Putin conferring with President Hassan Rouhani of Iran.

Much of the popular fascination here with "Sheikh Putin" stems from the projection of sectarian politics onto the international stage.

Russia's intervention in Syria has outraged Sunni Arabs in the region who see President Bashar al-Assad as a brutal oppressor of Syria's Sunni majority. But many Iraqi Shiites see Mr. Assad's Alawite-dominated government as a bulwark against Sunni extremism and are heartened that Russia has joined forces with Iran and the Syrian government.

Further fueling Shiites' concerns is the perception that the American-backed campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq is moving too slowly and that the United States is no longer interested in being the dominant military power in the Middle East.

At a seminar of journalists and civic leaders here last week, Faris Hammam, the leader of the local writers' union, asked how many attendees were glad the Russian military was carrying out airstrikes in Syria. Most shot up their hands.

"The Russian intervention is welcomed, not because they like intervention but because of the American failure," Mr. Hammam said.

Few Iraqis are aware of the United States' assertion that most of the Russian strikes in Syria have been directed at opponents of Mr. Assad, not at the Islamic State. Those details have been overshadowed by the dramatic images of Russian planes blasting their targets below.

"In the Middle East, what often counts is strength - or at least the illusion of it," said Hayder al-Khoei, an associate fellow at Chatham House, a London-based international affairs research group.

Najaf, 100 miles south of Baghdad, is not on the front lines. But the war with the Islamic State does not seem very far away. It was in Najaf that Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the spiritual leader of Iraq's Shiites, called in June 2014 for the Iraqi people to take up arms against the Islamic State after the Iraqi Army abandoned Mosul.

At the Imam Ali Shrine, a golden-domed religious complex that draws millions of pilgrims a year, militia fighters fresh from their battles with the Islamic State to the north carry the wooden coffins of their slain comrades. Displaced Iraqi families from Falluja, Mosul and Ramadi - cities now firmly under the grip of the Islamic State - live in makeshift housing along the highway outside Najaf.

The Imam Hussain Shrine in nearby Karbala was recently visited by Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the head of Iran's paramilitary Quds force. American officials say General Suleimani went to Moscow in late July in an apparent effort to coordinate on the Russian offensive in Syria, and he is also spearheading the Iranian effort to assist Iraqi militias.

Many Iraqis are uneager for the United States to send large numbers of ground troops back to their country, and the effort to rebuild the Iraqi Army has been hampered by Iraq's failure to recruit more volunteers. But an array of factors have shaped the perception of Russia's role.

While sectarian tensions are clearly one element, many Iraqis also harbor resentment at the extravagant and unfulfilled expectations that the American occupation should have rebuilt Iraq. Steeped in conspiracy theories, some say that the Islamic State's persistence on the battlefield can only be a grand design of Washington.

"The Americans have the technology to spot water on Mars," said Ahmed Naji, a professor at Kufa University. "So why can't they defeat ISIS?"

For Iraqis who recall the American military juggernaut that toppled Mr. Hussein, the progress produced by the airstrikes and the effort by the United States to advise and train the Iraqi Army seem inexplicably slow.

Wary of being caught up in the fighting, the Obama administration has limited the mission of the approximately 3,500 American advisers and other military personnel in the country. The advisers, for example, do not go on the battlefield to call airstrikes for Iraqi troops - a restriction a former United States commander in Iraq, David H. Petraeus, recently told Congress should be eased.

Unhappy with the Islamic State's ability to control much of northern and western Iraq, some Iraqis would like the United States to strengthen its military effort by increasing the number of advisers, broadening their role and cracking down on the militants' supply lines from Turkey.

"We have to put pressure on the United States to change their attitude and make more actions to help the Iraqi people," Mr. Bahr al-Ulum, the Iraqi Parliament member, said.

Mohammed Hussain Hakim, a prominent Shiite cleric, said that Moscow's new cachet said more about Iraqis' frustration with the pace of the joint American, allied and Iraqi campaign against the Islamic State than about support for Mr. Putin. "The war against ISIS was slow," Mr. Hakim said in an interview. "The Iraqi street wants effective, practical engagement against ISIS," he added. "It is not about Russian military intervention per se."

Still, the groundswell of Shiite support for Russia's actions already appears to be influencing Iraq's Shiite-dominated government. The Russian transport planes that ferried weapons and equipment to the Kremlin's new base in Latakia, Syria, passed through Iraqi airspace without complaint from the Iraqi authorities. And the Iraqi military announced last month that it had joined a working group to share intelligence with the Russian, Iranian and Syrian governments.

But there appear to be limits to Russian-Iraqi military cooperation. While Hakim al-Zamili, the leader of Parliament's defense and security committee, has gone so far as to suggest that the Russian-led coalition might one day supplant the American-led one in Iraq, there is nothing to suggest the government has such a plan.

Still, with his eye on his public and possibly Russia's Iranian ally, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi of Iraq has been careful not to slam the door on cooperation with Moscow.

"Inside Iraq, there are very dangerous guys, so I think to have the Russians on board will help me," Mr. Abadi told PBS NewsHour this month.

The Russian Defense Ministry reported Sunday that the country's jets flew 64 sorties over Syria in the past day, indicating that the pace of the bombing runs was increasing. In the first week, the military announced around 30 sorties per day from the Latakia base. The military reported destroying what it called a terrorist safe house, five off-road vehicles, mortar positions, three terrorist training camps, seven ammunition depots and other targets.

Omar Al-Jawoshy contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Andrew E. Kramer from Moscow.

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 #10
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
October 12, 2015
Russia's Security Council: The Committee That Runs Russia
Russia's Security Council is the key institutional body in Russia's government, coordinating and deciding policy
By Alexander Mercouris

On 10th October 2015 Russia's Security Council held another meeting.

One of the tropes of Western commentary about Russia is that its political system is highly personalised around Putin.

Putin supposedly runs everything himself, making all important decisions, consulting only his cronies, with his officials and ministers mere servants of his will.

To the extent that policy debate within Russia's political system takes place at all, it is purely faction fights between oligarchs or 'clans', battling for Putin's favour.

This has no connection to reality.  

A brief perusal of Russia's Presidential website - which is or should be the primary source of information about Russia's government - shows that policy making in Russia is far more collegial and consensual - and far less focused on the person of the President - than it is in the US.

Though Putin is obviously the main decision maker, Russia's Presidential website shows that it is Russia's Security Council - not Putin alone - which makes the key decisions.

That this is so is proved time and again by the fact the Security Council always meets before important decisions are taken.

It is a far more powerful body, meeting far more often and far more regularly, and engaging far more actively in the process of decision making, than is the far more loosely organised National Security Council in the US.

Moreover though the Security Council's name implies that it is concerned mainly with foreign and security policy, its remit actually extends much further, and it deals with social and economic policy as well.  

The report of its latest meeting for example says that 'there was also an exchange on current domestic socioeconomic matters.'

Putin as President chairs the Security Council and chooses the topics for discussion. However its membership is stable, the Presidential website shows it meets regularly and often, and there is no doubt its meetings involve full and frank discussions with contributions from all its members.

In some respects the Security Council resembles - in membership, function, organisation and power - the Soviet Politburo, with the Presidential administration providing administrative support, just as the Central Committee's Secretariat once provided administrative support to the Politburo - and with the Council of Ministers tasked with carrying out the Security Council's decisions, just as it once carried out the Politburo's decisions.

This is not entirely surprising since the Security Council is the legal successor of the USSR's Defence Council, which was essentially the Politburo meeting to discuss defence and security policy.

It is the Security Council's senior or "permanent" members - those who attend all its meetings - not the oligarchs or the "siloviki" - who are Russia's key decision makers, and who are the most powerful people in the country.

Following every Security Council meeting the Presidential website carefully lists who those people are.  Apart from Putin himself they are:

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev
Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko
State Duma Speaker Sergei Naryshkin
Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office Sergei Ivanov
Secretary of the Security Council Nikolai Patrushev
Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov
Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu
Director of the Federal Security Service Alexander Bortnikov
Director of the Foreign Intelligence Service Mikhail Fradkov
Deputy Secretary of the Security Council Rashid Nurgaliyev and
Permanent member of the Security Council Boris Gryzlov

Other officials with "ordinary" as opposed to "permanent" membership, and who regularly attend meetings, include Chief of the Armed Forces General Staff General Valery Gerasimov, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, Mayor of Moscow Sergei Sobyanin, Justice Minister Alexander Konovalov and Procurator General Yury Chaika.

Medvedev is the permanent member who represents the government. Other government officials - such as Deputy Prime Ministers Shuvalov, Rogozin and Dvorkovitch - attend when needed.

Russia's Security Council is not exactly analogous to the Soviet Politburo.

Members of the Politburo were elected by the Soviet Communist Party's Central Committee. Members of the Security Council are appointed by Putin himself.

Putin is therefore in a far more powerful position relative to the Security Council than any Soviet General Secretary was relative to the Politburo. It would be impossible for the Security Council to remove Putin from office, as the Politburo once removed Khrushchev from office.

Putin cannot however just appoint to the Security Council anyone he chooses. He is clearly limited to the senior officials who run the country's government, parliament and senior ministries.  

Since the nature of their jobs means that these have to be experienced and capable people, in choosing the Security Council's members Putin must choose people who are already amongst the most powerful and capable people in the country.

Shellbank has recently written for Russia Insider an interesting piece contrasting the far greater competence of Russia's government compared to that of the US.

The reason for this is that decisions in Russia, far from being made by Putin on the hoof as popular wisdom imagines, are carefully weighed and discussed in advance before they are made by the powerful and experienced people who meet in the Security Council.

Contrast this with the chaotic way policy is made in Washington, with all key decisions made alone by the "POTUS", who must contend with the unending struggle of his perpetually quarrelling advisers and bureaucracy for his ear.

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 #11
Moscow Times
October 12, 2015
Russia Sees First Capital Inflow in 5 Years
By Peter Hobson

Russia has recorded its first quarterly net capital inflow in five years, with $5.3 billion flowing into the country from July to September, according to preliminary Central Bank data published Friday.

The inflow reverses a period of record capital flight following last year's sharp fall in the price of oil - Russia's most important export - and financial sanctions imposed over the Ukraine crisis.

But while the third quarter figure suggests financial conditions have stabilized, $45 billion has still left the country during the first nine months of the year, the Central Bank data showed, compared with an outflow of $76.8 billion in the same period last year.

Outflows are also expected to resume in the fourth quarter, with Economic Development Minister Alexei Ulyukayev predicting Friday that full-year capital flight would be $87 billion, according to the TASS news agency.

Capital flight skyrocketed after Russia's seizure of Crimea from Ukraine in March last year and subsequent support for separatists fighting in eastern Ukraine. Western sanctions imposed over the conflict limited the access of Russian companies and banks to international capital markets, leaving them with foreign loans worth tens of billions of dollars that they had to repay.

A sharp devaluation of the ruble also prompted companies and individuals to buy and hold foreign currency, while the risk of increased sanctions and Russia's worsening economy discouraged investors.

But these processes seem to be unwinding. In a statement on Friday, the Central Bank said a reduction in stashes of foreign assets had helped achieve the third quarter inflow.

"Foreign debt repayments were almost completely financed by banks and companies using foreign-currency assets they had accumulated," Oleg Kuzmin, an economist at Renaissance Capital, told Reuters. "That allowed for a significant improvement in indicators on the financial account."

The third quarter also saw overseas lenders grant more loans to Russian companies, with firms such as Eurochem and Metalloinvest agreeing deals worth $750 million each with groups of international banks.

The inflow may also reflect growing stability in eastern Ukraine, where violence has cooled in recent months.

Russia last saw a capital inflow - of $4.1 billion - in the second quarter of 2010. Since then, according to Central Bank statistics, almost $416 billion has flooded out of the economy - almost as much as the entire annual economic output of Austria.

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 #12
Moscow Times
October 9, 2015
Where Is the Ruble Going Next?
By Chris Weafer
Chris Weafer is a senior partner with Macro Advisory, a consultancy advising international companies and investors working in Russia and across the Eurasia region.

It is an easy bet to make that among the topics which persistently preoccupy a majority of people in Russia are inflation and the ruble. That is hardly surprising given the recent memory of last winter's big jump in prices, food prices in particular, and the continued volatility in the ruble exchange rate.

I last wrote about this subject in an August column, and while the gap may seem too small to justify an update, the questions "Where is the ruble headed?" and the even more specific "Should I pay for my New Year's trip now or wait?" do.

Let us combine the monetary troika and ask, "When will the cost of debt servicing fall again?" "When will the rate of inflation fall below 10 percent?" and "What will be the ruble exchange rate in three and six months?" To quote Lenin, "Everything is linked to everything else" and in this case that is absolutely correct. But before addressing these three topics one must first address the most basic question - the oil price. That remains the key determining factor for monetary decisions and trends in Russia.

The price of Brent crude was over $100 per barrel (p/bbl) at the start of August last year, fell to $56 p/bbl at the start of this year and reached a low of $42.7 p/bbl in August before recently rallying to $52.7 p/bbl. The reason for the volatility is mainly traders reacting to various speculations but the underlying cause of the downward trend is that there is simply far too much oil being produced. That excess supply is estimated at between 1.5 and 2 million bbl/d and until either the excess is cut or demand rises to use that supply, the price of oil will remain weak.

Recently the concern over Syria has provided some support for oil, but that will be short lived. Syria is not a major oil producer and has no transit routes across or close to its territory. The price rally is again an opportunistic trader's move.

There has also been some speculation that Russia may finally start to engage with OPEC with a view to cutting supply so as to balance the market. For reasons which are beyond the scope of this article I do not believe that will ever happen. There are far too many sound political, ownership and, probably, technical reasons why it has never happened. All of which suggests that unless there is a cut in production from OPEC producers or from the U.S. shale industry, the price of crude is more likely to remain weak and vulnerable to downward moves.

As we now know, the Russian Central Bank (CBR) has abandoned its efforts to support the ruble and, from earlier this year, has allowed it to free-float with the oil price. As a result the ruble exchange rate against the U.S. dollar has been as high as 49.5 in mid-May and as low as 69.5 in mid-August as the oil price also dipped. The weak ruble is now a mantra linked to the government's import substitution and improved manufacturing competitiveness recovery and growth strategies.

The weak ruble also means that the Finance Ministry converts dollar-based tax revenue at a better rate and can contain the deficit easier. If we assume an average ruble-dollar exchange rate at 65 then the 2015 budget would balance with an average oil price not far off $75. That is down from $113 for 2013 and leaves Russia much better placed to ride out a prolonged period of low oil than most OPEC producers because of their dollar-pegged currencies.

While the current ruble strategy is clear enough, the unanswered questions are "Will the Central Bank remain inactive if the price of oil dips back to $40 p/bbl or lower?" and "Will it intervene to stop the ruble rallying to 50, or better, if the price of oil was to (miraculously) jump to $100?" The former would risk undermining current fragile stability while the latter would destroy the push for competitiveness. For now it seems neither decision is imminent.

This week's rally is entirely about oil and Syria. Given the assumption that the oil price is more vulnerable to the downside between now and year-end, the prudent advice is to convert one's New Year's holiday rubles into foreign currency during this period of strength. Forget about the economic indicators, watch the news from Syria.

The spike in the rate of inflation, to just below 17 percent at the end of March, was directly related to the ruble weakness of late last year and January. Food prices, which were rising by more than 25 percent on an annualized basis at the end of the first quarter, had the added kicker of the sanctions shortages.

Despite the rally in the ruble in the February-May period there was little positive pass-through to inflation. That was because of the rise in utility tariffs and the sanctions effect. At the end of September the annualized rate was at 15.7 percent and that is a big factor why real disposable incomes and household spending are so negative.

But, it is still realistic to assume that the annualized rate of inflation will be close to the Central Bank's target of 12 percent by the end of the year and down to approximately 7 percent before summer next. Weekly inflation has now normalized as tariff increases have been passed through and new sources of sanctioned food have helped moderate prices. The base effect kicks in from January and that will allow for a rapid reduction in the annualized rate in the first quarter.

So what does that mean for interest rates and the cost of servicing debt? Just before the announcement of the referendum in Crimea in early March last year the Central Bank's benchmark interest rate was 5.5 percent. It had already risen to 11.5 percent before the emergency rate hike to 17 percent on Dec. 16. That means that individuals, households and corporations of all sizes, but especially those in the small and medium sized category, have been paying more for debt over the past 18 months. That has squeezed out other spending and contributed to the decline in the economy.

This year the Central Bank has removed the December emergency spike in a series of rate cuts and the benchmark rate is today at 11 percent. But starting to address the 2014 rate increases will have to wait. The Central Bank has made clear that it is not prepared to make any additional cuts until the rate of inflation gets down toward 12 or 11 percent.

That means watching the ruble exchange rate, the oil price and either the fallout from Russia's Syria actions or U.S. shale oil output. Only then will you know whether it is better to pay for that foreign holiday early or to wait. It seems that Lenin was right after all.

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 #13
Russian government approves challenging budget for 2016
By Lyudmila Alexandrova

MOSCOW, October 9. /TASS/. Challenging, recessionary but workable - that's how Russian economists estimate draft budget for 2016, which was approved by government on Thursday.

At the final stage of its consideration 2016 budget was only updated by increasing defense expenditures by 170 bln rubles ($2.7 bln), according to Vedomosti business daily. Thus, budget deficit rose from 2.8% planned earlier to 3% of GDP, which is the ceiling allowed by Russian President. Total budget expenditures increased to 15.94 trillion rubles ($258 bln). Initially, the budget implied $60 per barrel oil price but due to downgrade of crude forecast to $50 per barrel the budget lost 900 bln rubles ($14.5 bln), and the Finance Ministry planned to cut expenditures by almost 600 bln rubles ($9.7 bln). Instead, revenues were increased by the same 600 bln rubles ($9.7 bln) as taxation of oil and gas sector and extension of freeze of accumulative pension contributions served as additional source.

The ill effect of the decision to transfer 342 bln rubles ($5.5 bln) worth of accumulative pension contributions to the budget will be mitigated by allocating those funds to a special purpose fund, which will be spent on particular decision of President or Prime Minister.

All in all, according to the data provided by the Finance Ministry, budget deficit will stand at 2.36 trillion rubles ($38.2 bln), which will be covered by 2.14 trillion rubles ($34.6 bln) worth of finances from the Reserve Fund, where 1.25 trillion rubles ($20.2 bln) will be left. Almost all resources of the Government House, excluding National Wealth Fund, which has already been partially invested in the Russian economy and is the last economic reserve, are engaged in the budget.

In 2016, out of each 100 rubles the federal treasury will spend 19.2 rubles on defense, 12.7 rubles - on police officers, 27.6 rubles - on social protection, 15.9 rubles - on backing economy, 3 rubles - on healthcare, 3.6 rubles - on education, according to Vedomosti daily. Earlier the plan was to reduce the Defense Ministry's budget by 227 bln rubles ($3.6 bln), First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov said, though later the decision was made to send back 170 bln rubles ($2.7 bln).

One peculiarity of 2016 budget is that has again become 1-year, Director of the Center for Regional Reform Studies at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration /RANEPA/ Alexander Deryugin told TASS. "When it was 3-year it was implied that for next 2-3 years earlier approved figures will not be changed. Now we can forget about the figures implied in 2015-2017 budget law for 2016. The return to 1-year budget means it will hardly be possible to structure mid-term budget policy amid current environment. We're shifting to life from day to day and we'll solve problems one thing at a time with fewer opportunities to make plans for future development," Deryugin said.

As for budget parameters the expert said they are not at all groundbreaking. "Expenditures have decreased and the reserve fund has been largely depleted so the government took the only possible track - to cut expenditures and minimize budget deficit," he said.

"Everything has gradually moved down compared with last year. Social expenditures, expenses on education and healthcare were substantially reduced in 2014-2015. Now this drop has stabilized as a long-term trend. Thus on the one hand we can't say something changed drastically in the budget, but on the other hand it's clear that reduction of social spending and increase of defense spending are a long-term trend," Deryugin said.

"This is a defense-oriented recessionary budget," a leading researcher at the Center for Development at the Higher School of Economics Andrey Cherniavsky told TASS. "The budget is challenging as there are less resources, expenditures should be measured further on as well as we won't be able to have such a deficit for long: 3% of GDP is a serious deficit for Russia," the expert said.

However, this view is not shared by Lecturer at RANEPA Vladislav Ginko. "Deficit is still less than in some developed countries such as the United States or France. Budget deficit could be even boosted but we want to keep triggers for economic growth," he added.

"Those who criticize budget should realize that it's very easy just to increase borrowing inside the economy, to switch on printing presses but the government refused to do so," Ginko said, adding that the government is pursuing "a tough monetary policy, which is not related to groundless increase of cash."

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 #14
Sputnik
October 10, 2015
Money-Losing Business: West Loses Faith in 'Project Ukraine'

Eighteen months after the Maidan "revolution" in Ukraine, the West is getting increasingly worried by the rampant corruption in Kiev's corridors of power and the price it has to pay for the money-hungry Ukrainian bureaucracy.

US Vice President Joe Biden is "extremely worried" about the scale of corruption in Ukraine. He warned Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk that if the situation doesn't change the United States will stop bankrolling the country, Ukraine's Novoe Vremya reported.

Bloomberg Business took interest in the foreign bank accounts of Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and, with some help from its sources at the US Treasury Department in Washington, found out that the main transactions there coincided with the arrival of new loan installments provided to Ukraine by the IMF and other international donors.

The sums arriving at the Premier's bank accounts were in stark contrast with his monthly salary of just $200.

Ukraine's Western sponsors also want to know the whereabouts of the $150 million earmarked for the construction of the so-called "European Rampart" or "The Wall" along the Ukrainian-Russian border.

All Mr. Yatsenyuk could serve up were just 200 meters of barbed wire on concrete posts...

Arseniy Yatsenyuk is not the only one suspect in the hard-hitting corruption scandal.

Boris Lozhkin, a presidential deputy chief of staff, has found himself in the midst of a corruption investigation being conducted by Austrian police, and Interior Minister Arsen Avakov is suspected of stealing tens of millions of dollars of taxpayers' money.

The information to this effect was published by Serhiy Leshchenko, a Verhovna Rada deputy who many say is also in the employ of the US embassy in Kiev.

This means that the incriminating information was made public with the full knowledge of US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt...

Speaking at a financial forum in Odessa, Mr. Pyatt described the Ukrainian Prosecutor General's office as a pillar of Ukrainian corruption.

With the country's top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin being a longtime friend of President Petro Poroshenko and reporting directly to him, Ukraine's Western sponsors apparently believe that the government, the presidential administration and the MPs are all parts of a single corrupt whole and that pumping more money into such a regime simply makes no sense.

And that its end may not be too far off now...

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 #15
Kyiv Post
October 12, 2015
Oligarchy needs to be dismantled to rebuild economy, public trust in business, experts say
By Ilya Timtchenko

While reform talk in Ukraine often focuses on changing the Constitution and the judiciary, the way that the nation does business also needs to be shaken up to make Ukraine an economic success, experts say.

Ukraine's oligarch system, through which a few wealthy individuals wield disproportionate influence on the nation's political and economic policies, is still firmly in place.

Ukraine's top five richest, according to Forbes, - Rinat Akhmetov, Victor Pinchuk, Ihor Kolomoisky, Henadiy Boholyubov and Yuriy Kosiuk - are the most prominent of the oligarchs, but there are many more people in Ukraine who have amassed huge fortunes and seized control of key businesses as the country's economy has atrophied.

This hasn't just made Ukraine an unattractive place to do business, it's severely damaged the economy, Dmytro Bondarenko, director of news agency LigaBusinessInform, said during the Kyiv International Economic Forum on Oct. 8.

"An oligarch is not a businessman, an oligarch does not contribute added value," Bondarenko said. "He sucks budget resources into his own pocket, at the same time he uses, breeds and maintains the system we see today - corruption, and the desire to influence the masses through media, political propaganda and populist decisions and promises."

In his own sphere, the media, Bondarenko said he finds it hard to compete in an environment where the country's main news sources are owned by oligarchs or political parties.

"Business cannot exist and compete with businesses whose goal is not to make money, but to be a lobbyist for individual interests," Bondarenko said. "This is doing huge damage to our country."

Much of that damage is due to the currency of the oligarchs being corruption - they amassed their wealth through it and operate their businesses with it, tainting the entire business environment in the process.

Andy Hunder, president of the United States Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine, says that 97 percent of AmCham's more than 600 members find corruption to be the number one barrier to doing business in Ukraine.

And while over the past year business has had much more dialogue with the government than before, Hunder says that on the issue of corruption "the government hears, but doesn't always listen."

Businesses, however, still need to use the opportunity presented by last year's revolution to deliver messages to Ukraine's government. One way to do this is for businesses to create a better reputation, disassociating themselves from the oligarchic system, Hunder says.

"As in other countries, businesspeople can take advantage of having a good reputation," Hunder says. For example, British billionaire Richard Branson has a great reputation, the Am-Cham's director says. "For Ukraine, the time is such that Ukrainian businesspeople can become authorities that gain respect from society for what they are doing."

And according to Harry Jacobs, chief executive officer of the World Academy of Art and Science, Ukraine's oligarch system will start changing once business is not only speaking with the government, but when it is seen to be taking care of society as well.

"All the data shows that the more committed business is to the real well-being of society, and when it really takes on that responsibility, the more effective the economy will be," Jacobs says.

Businesses will then be trusted by society, he says.

Economist Bohdan Hawrylyshyn agrees, saying that businesses must be "honest and responsible" in order to achieve the goal of rebuilding the economy.

But the responsibility is not only on businesses' shoulders, Hawrylyshyn says. The government must establish clear property rights, providing grounds for long-term planning, while society has a responsibility as well.

"(Society) must accept business as a great instrument for producing wealth for the people of the country, Hawrylyshyn says. "They need to stop seeing business as just an oligarch (system). If society understands that business is necessary, then it will be much easier for business to work."

But for there to be public trust in business and businesspeople, there has to be a solid legal system for calling wrongdoers to account. As yet, it's not in place.

Ukraine's business ombudsman, Algirdas Semeta, says that the rule of law in Ukraine is still not functioning because the prosecution services remain "completely Soviet-style." Law enforcement, judiciary reform, and the tax and customs authorities must all be reformed, the ombudsman said.

"If we are talking about businesses, if Ukraine is capable of fixing problems with the tax authorities, customs authorities, law enforcement agencies and pass the anti-corruption package of laws, I think that could serve as a good precondition for the functioning of the rule of law in Ukraine," Semeta said.

Moreover, recovering public trust in business is only part of the battle to boost the economy. Business also has to rebuild its trust in the government.

To achieve that, one of the first steps should be the punishment of corrupt officials, which is still not happening in Ukraine says the American Chamber of Commerce's Hunder.

"Until we see people going to jail for corruption, then I think the trust of business in the government will remain at a very low level," Hunder said.

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#16
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
October 12, 2015
End Game in Ukraine - Russia Wins
We told you this would happen.  Normandy Four Talks seal Russia's victory.
By Alexander Mercouris
Alexander Mercouris is a writer on international affairs with a special interest in Russia and law.  He has written extensively on the legal aspects of NSA spying and events in Ukraine in terms of human rights, constitutionality and international law.  He worked for 12 years in the Royal Courts of Justice in London as a lawyer, specializing in human rights and constitutional law. His family has been prominent in Greek politics for several generations.  He is a frequent commentator on television and speaker at conferences.  He resides in London.

At the time of the negotiation of the Minsk Agreement in February we said that the international part of the Ukrainian crisis appeared to be past its peak.  

Our precise words were:

"The conflict in Ukraine itself will grind on, probably until the government currently in power in Kiev falls, which will surely happen sooner or later.

However, as a crisis in international relations, following the talks in Moscow and Minsk, it appears its peak has passed."

That this was so became clearer in May, when the Russians disclosed the Europeans were prepared to discuss changes to Ukraine's association agreement with the EU, which had caused the original crisis.

What we said in the first months of the year, is now the general consensus.

It is now widely recognised, since the last Normandy Four meeting in Paris, that the Ukrainian crisis is winding down.

Before discussing this in detail, it is necessary to correct a false account of recent events that is being spread by some parts of the Western media.

According to this account "Putin" has "tired of his Ukrainian adventure", and is winding the conflict down, as he looks for ways to extricate himself from "the Ukrainian quagmire".

According to some over-heated commentary, Russia's military intervention in Syria is part of a cunning plan by "Putin" to "divert attention" from Ukraine and end his "pariah status".

This stands reality on its head.   The Russians have always sought a negotiated solution to the Ukrainian conflict.  

They pressed for this in discussions with the US in the spring of 2014, directly following the Maidan coup, obtaining apparent US agreement in the form of the 17th April 2014 Geneva Statement.

They pressed for this in discussions with Angela Merkel that began with the first Normandy Four meeting in June 2014, which led to the setting up of the Contact Group and the Berlin Declaration of 3rd July 2014, which called for an unconditional ceasefire.

They dictated the terms of the Minsk Protocol of September 2014, which brought the first round of fighting to an end, and which set out a road map for a peace settlement.

They also dictated the terms of the Minsk Agreement of February 2014, which everyone now pretends to be following.

It is the Ukrainians who - egged on by their Western backers - have repeatedly sought war.

Ignoring the Geneva Statement of April 2014, they first tried to crush resistance with what they called an "anti-terrorist operation".  When that failed they doubled down, launching a full-scale military offensive on 30th June 2014, which ended in disaster.

They then reneged on the terms of the Minsk Protocol, and launched another offensive in January 2015. When that too ended in disaster they agreed - under pressure from Merkel - the Agreement that was reached in Minsk in February 2015.

So far from the Europeans acting as a force for restraint throughout all this, they blatantly took sides, backing the Ukrainians to the hilt even as the Ukrainians repeatedly reneged on promises they had made.

In July 2014, shortly after the Ukrainians began their offensive, the Europeans - using the MH17 tragedy as cover - imposed sectoral sanctions on Russia.  In September 2014, after the Minsk Protocol was agreed, they tightened the sanctions even more.  In June 2015, despite the Ukrainians reneging on the Minsk Agreement, they extended the sanctions until the end of the year

In light of this, to say that it is the Russians who are "calling off their aggression" in Ukraine to extricate themselves from a "quagmire", is not merely false; it is absurd.

Patrick Armstrong, that most insightful of commentators of Russian affairs, predicted at the start of the Ukrainian crisis that (1) Ukraine as it existed in the summer of 2013 is gone forever; and (2) when the failure of their adventure in Ukraine became clear, Western governments would declare victory and withdraw.

He is proving right on both counts.

So what did happen in Paris a week ago?

The starting point is the agreement that was reached in Minsk in February.

That agreement required direct negotiations between the two sides to amend the Ukrainian constitution so as to provide a broad measure of autonomy to the people of the Donbass.  In the interim, until the constitutional changes were agreed, the two sides were supposed to agree an interim law granting special status to the two territories of the two people's republics.  An annex to the Minsk agreement set out the minimum requirements to be met by that law.

The Ukrainians reneged on this agreement.

They refused to negotiate directly with the leaders of the two people's republics.  They did not agree with them a law granting the territories of the two people's republics special status, or discuss with them the constitutional changes.

Instead they sought to enact unilaterally proposals that would have actually increased rather than reduced the Ukrainian Presidency's control of the regions.

In public comments Poroshenko has gone further still, saying he intends to remove all references to "special status" from the Ukrainian constitution, abolishing a legal status that in Minsk in February he agreed to grant to the territories of the two people's republics.

At the same time the Ukrainians continue to call the leaders of the people's republics "terrorists", and have refused to enact an amnesty law, as they had also agreed to do.

Though the Minsk Agreement envisages the disarming of the various volunteer militias that have proliferated in Ukraine since the Maidan coup (save for a security force the two people's republics would be allowed to keep), no attempt to do so has been made.

One small militia group, the so-called "Tornado" force, has been dispersed - apparently as a result of an intra oligarch factional quarrel.

The others have simply been given official status by being formally incorporated in Ukraine's security structures or - as in the case of Right Sector - have been left alone to rampage as before.

Instead of carrying out the provisions of the Minsk Agreement, as it was required to do, the Ukrainian government used the break in the fighting to rebuild its army through repeated conscription drives.  By the start of August it claimed to have 90,000 men under arms.

All the indications at the start of August pointed to an imminent Ukrainian offensive.

Heavy weapons that were supposed to have been withdrawn were brought back to the front line.  Shelling of the Donbass resumed with a vengeance (it had never ceased completely).  Probing attacks were launched on militia positions.

Poroshenko meanwhile made increasingly belligerent speeches - including one that spoke of war without end.

In the event the Ukrainian offensive never happened.

The reasons for this were two.

Firstly, the militia - which has grown significantly in strength and organisation - had no difficulty repulsing the Ukrainian attacks.  

Secondly  - and for the first time in the conflict - Merkel acted decisively to prevent it.

At a meeting with Poroshenko at the end of August, she told him to stick to the Minsk Agreement, and warned him off an offensive.

Given the extent to which Ukraine depends on European support, Poroshenko had no choice but to agree.

The result is the quietest period Donbass has known since the start of the conflict in April 2014.  Though sporadic clashes still happen, shelling has largely stopped, and for the first time it is possible to talk about a genuine ceasefire.

It is important to say that the reason Merkel acted in August to prevent the Ukrainian offensive taking place is not because she has suddenly become converted to the justice of the Donbass's cause.

It is because Merkel knows that another Ukrainian offensive will result in another Ukrainian defeat.

That might put the whole existence of the Ukrainian state in jeopardy, and lead to demands on the part of its Western backers for greater escalation.  

With her sanctions policy visibly failing, and German public opinion strongly opposing calls for further escalation, this is a situation Merkel wants to avoid at all costs.

As for the Ukrainians, if their gamble was that the prospect of defeat would firm up Western support to the point of delivering them victory, then they miscalculated badly and have lost.

The proof of that has been what has happened since.

Both at the summit in August and at the Normandy Four meeting in Paris the Europeans have made clear that Kiev must stick to the Minsk Agreement and strictly adhere to its terms.

Ukrainian suggestions that the Minsk Agreement be ditched and a new agreement reflecting their positions be substituted in its place have been firmly rebuffed.  

Instead the deadlines for carrying out the terms of the Minsk Agreement have been extended into 2016, with the Ukrainians being told that this time they must adhere to them, with a French drafted timetable for their implementation that would lead to elections in the people's republics in March 2016 in accordance with a law granting the people's republics special status, as originally envisaged in the Agreement agreed in February 2015 in Minsk.

Ominously for the Ukrainians, in comments made after the Paris meeting and undoubtedly agreed in advance with Merkel, Hollande repeatedly used the words "special status" - the status Poroshenko says he wants to abolish.

Reports of the private discussions between Putin and Merkel in Paris say Merkel agreed that Crimea is and will remain Russian, and that the main topic was not Ukraine at all, but Syria.

The dynamic of the Paris negotiations is shown clearly in the photographs of the plenary meeting.  

They show Putin sitting directly across the table from Merkel, flanked by Lavrov on his right and Hollande on his left - almost as if Hollande was part of Putin's negotiating team.

Poroshenko sits opposite Hollande, to Merkel's right, with German foreign minister Steinmeier sitting to Merkel's left.

It is as if Poroshenko has been relegated to a part in Merkel's negotiating team, even though it is the fate of his country which is being discussed.

To those who say that I am reading too much into these seating arrangements, the short answer is that in diplomatic negotiations seating arrangements are extremely important and are always agreed (sometimes after lengthy discussions) in advance.

If it were intended to give Poroshenko equal status to the other three, a round or oval table would have been used, as has happened before and as was used in the less formal non-plenary sessions, or Poroshenko would have been positioned directly opposite Putin, which would be logical, since this is supposed to be a Russian Ukrainian conflict and it is the fate of Ukraine - the country Poroshenko leads - which is being discussed.

In all the photographs Poroshenko looks unhappy and distracted - as he also did at the UN General Assembly session held shortly before in New York.  

Poroshenko's sombre appearance led to some catty stories in the Russian press that he was stopped from boarding a plane to Moscow because he was blind drunk.  That is certainly untrue.

Did the Russians make any concessions?

They did agree that the local elections the two people's republics had called for the end of October and the beginning of November should be called off.

Those elections were called because of Ukraine's failure to agree a law on special status as agreed in the Minsk Agreement.  That law was supposed to be followed by elections, the terms of which were to be set out in the law.

Since the Ukrainians never negotiated or agreed the terms of the law - as the Minsk Agreement required them to do - the leaders of the two people's republics said they would go ahead with elections by themselves

These elections were called by the people's republics in agreement with Moscow to put pressure on the Europeans.  

The Europeans were in effect told that if the Ukrainians did not abide by the terms of the Minsk Agreement and agree with the leaders of the people's republics a law for the special status of the territories of their republics, then the people's republics would go their own way, holding elections without reference to Kiev, and starting the process of secession from Ukraine and union with Russia.  

Stories that circulated of a referendum being planned in the people's republics on Crimean lines for secession from Ukraine and union with Russia drove the point home.

Since this is for the Europeans the nightmare scenario, which would not only reignite the international aspect of the crisis - which they are desperate to end - but which would also expose in the most humiliating way the total failure of their sanctions policy, they responded by piling on the pressure on Poroshenko to go back to what was agreed in Minsk.

The result is that the Ukrainians have not only been told to do what they promised to do in February in Minsk, but the failure to do it previously is now being blamed on them.

Agreeing to postpone the elections in the Donbass was therefore for the Russians no concession at all.  It was a diplomatic play that worked.

As the Europeans have moved to close down the international aspect of the Ukrainian crisis, they are also taking steps to mend their relations with Russia.

That this is so is made clear by the steps the Europeans have taken to settle the two issues that are key for Russia: sanctions and gas supplies.

As German exports - especially of engineering goods - have contracted, the German business community has increasingly signalled its wish to see the sanctions ended.

The call has been taken up by no less a person than Germany's Economics Minister and Vice Chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, who is also the leader of the SDP, and who undoubtedly has ambitions to become Chancellor one day.

Support for sanctions elsewhere in Europe is melting away.  In France they are deeply unpopular with the powerful agricultural lobby, whilst the French government for its part found an elegant solution to the Mistral debacle by paying the Russians a refund and selling the ships with Russia's agreement to Russia's ally Egypt.

As to the gas conflict, recent developments have been more interesting still.

The threat Russia might increasingly redirect its gas supplies away from Europe caused dismay in Germany, whose industry has come to rely increasingly on Russian gas.

The result was negotiations leading to the announcement of the North Stream 2 pipeline, essentially replacing South Stream, and reducing Russia's interest in Turk Stream, which is therefore being scaled down.

It goes without saying that North Stream 2 could only have been agreed with the approval of the German government.  It includes an asset swap whereby Gazprom has finally achieved its ambition to acquire significant ownership of pipeline assets downstream within the European pipeline network - something the Europeans have previously resisted.

Meanwhile, in order to secure their supplies through Ukraine this winter, the Europeans have also agreed to do something they have always resisted doing previously, which is agree to pay Russia for Ukraine's gas.

The Europeans appeared to agree to this last winter, with talk of a comfort letter being given to the Ukrainians guaranteeing that the Europeans would pay for their gas imports from Russia.  

In the event the comfort letter never materialised, and the Ukrainians were left to pay for their gas and clear their arrears to Russia by themselves.  That almost exhausted their foreign currency reserves, provoking a crash of their currency, leading to capital controls, which are still in place.

This time the Europeans have provided the Russians with a formal protocol, agreeing to pay the Russians $500 million for gas they will supply to Ukraine, thereby removing any incentive to Ukraine to siphon off gas intended for Europe.

That almost certainly will not be enough, but it establishes an important principle, and means the Europeans and the Russians are now negotiating directly with each other over gas supplies, with the Ukrainians once again relegated to a secondary role.

Negotiations are also underway to settle the anti-trust case the European Commission has brought against Gazprom.

The Financial Times has sought to portray these moves to settle the various gas conflicts as concessions by Russia and Gazprom to save their position in the European gas market (as for example: "Gazprom seeks peace after long fight with Brussels").

That once again stands reality on its head.  

Germany's agreement to North Stream 2, which increases Europe's dependence on Russian gas, is a victory for Russia not a defeat.

It brings forward the day when Ukraine finally loses its position as a gas transit state, a fact of which the Ukrainians are fully aware, as shown by the way they have angrily denounced North Stream 2 as a "betrayal".

The proposal the Europeans pay the bill for Ukraine's gas has been made repeatedly by the Russians ever since the first Russian Ukrainian gas war in 2006.  It is the Europeans who have resisted it.

There is no evidence the Russians have made any substantive concessions in return.

Importantly, the Financial Times has omitted mention of the single biggest concession the Europeans have made: their agreement to pay the Russians the bill for Ukraine's gas.

As for the issue where the Financial Times claims Gazprom is making concessions - its supposed "dogmatic insistence" in linking gas prices to oil prices - the link is made by the market, not Gazprom, because of the weight of the oil price in determining the price of energy products like gas, and nothing the EU Commission or Gazprom pretend to agree with each other will change it.  The reality anyway is that it is unlikely Gazprom has actually made any significant concessions on this issue.

Here once again we see another example of Patrick Armstrong's prediction coming true: the West beats a retreat at the same time as its media declares victory.

It is not all plain sailing.  The Ukrainians have successfully wrecked the European and Russian attempt to renegotiate the association agreement.

They did this by slapping a huge number of sanctions on Russian companies, essentially closing Ukraine off from Russian companies, and ending the trade links between the two countries.

That the purpose of the Ukrainian sanctions was to kill the renegotiation of the association agreement was pointed out by Russian Economics Minister Ulyukaev, though it is a fact that seems otherwise to have gone unnoticed.

A cynic's response is that since the Europeans no longer care about Ukraine, they are no longer concerned to help Ukraine's economy by preserving its access to the Russian market, whilst the Russians realised some time ago that preserving their trade relationship with Ukraine is impossible so long as the present government remains in power.

Since both sides are now working to remove Ukraine as an issue of contention between them, with the Europeans abandoning their geopolitical play to attach Ukraine to the West, the association agreement has lost its relevance, with the Ukrainian people once more being left to pay the price as their country's economy loses its preferential position in the Russian market.

It is perhaps not a coincidence that as this has happened the credit ratings agencies, despite the recent debt restructuring agreement, have downgraded Ukraine to a state of technical default, effectively closing off its access to capital markets.

As steps are taken to bring Europe's relations with Russia back on an even keel, statements calling for a rapprochement are coming from both sides.

The first was the call for the lifting of sanctions by German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel.

This was followed by a call from former Soviet President Gorbachev - made almost certainly with the agreement of the Russian government - for a Russian German alliance.  The Russian authorities know that Gorbachev is still popular in Germany, and they sometimes use him to make such calls.

The clearest call of all has however come from an unexpected quarter, from European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.  On 9th October 2015 he was reported as saying:

"We must make efforts towards a practical relationship with Russia. It is not sexy but that must be the case, we can't go on like this..... Russia must be treated decently ... We can't let our relationship with Russia be dictated by Washington."

Not only is this a call for a rapprochement with Russia.  It is the strongest and most public criticism of Washington's anti-Russian policy made by a senior European official to date.  

In summary, the signs that the international aspect of the Ukrainian crisis is ending - which still looked tentative in the spring - are now unmistakable.

It would now require a major effort by the hardliners in Washington to put all this into reverse, and doing so would risk a serious crisis in relations between Europe and the US.

A further thaw in relations, and a probable lifting of sanctions at some point in the next few months, now looks a virtual certainty.

In return the Russians have conceded nothing, and they look set to achieve in Ukraine their objectives: autonomy for the people of the people of the Donbass together with the exclusion of Ukraine from NATO and the EU.

In saying this however it is important to reiterate a point we have made before.

The end of the international aspect of the Ukrainian crisis does not mean the end of the crisis in Ukraine.  

There things continue to go from bad to worse.

The economic situation continues to worsen, with the IMF downgrading its forecasts for Ukraine, and predicting an even worse recession this year than it had forecast before.

It remains a virtual certainty that Ukraine will default in December on the $3 billion debt it owes Russia.

There is no evidence - and no possibility - that the hardliners in the Maidan movement will ever reconcile themselves to the Minsk Agreement, or will agree to grant the territories of the two people's republics the sort of autonomy that the Minsk Agreement envisages.

The government's popularity continues to plunge, and the stand-off with Right Sector shows its uncertain grip on the internal situation.

If the international aspect of the Ukrainian crisis is drawing to a close, the internal crisis has barely begun.

 [return to Contents] 

 #17
Counterpunch.org
October 9, 2015
On Ukraine's 'Incorrect' Past
By Halyna Mokrushyna
Halyna Mokrushyna is currently enrolled in the PhD program in Sociology at the University of Ottawa and a part-time professor. She holds a doctorate in linguistics and MA degree in communication. Her academic interests include: transitional justice; collective memory; ethnic studies; dissent movement in Ukraine; history of Ukraine; sociological thought.  Her doctoral project deals with the memory of Stalinist purges in Ukraine. In the summer of 2013 she travelled to Lviv, Kyiv, Kharkiv and Donetsk to conduct her field research. She is currently working on completing her thesis. She can be reached at halouwins@gmail.com.

The video of a young Georgian "reformer", Ilo Glonti, appearing before the deputies of the Uzhgorod city council in Zakarpattia in Western Ukraine remains engraved in my memory since I saw it in April 2015. It is a striking example of how foreign advisors try to educate Ukrainian politicians in the art of neo-liberal transformation.

In the video, the 23-year old revolutionary explains to the deputies, who I presume are at least several years older than him, the reason why the heroes of the Euromaidan protests and "tens of thousands" of Ukrainians, Georgians and even Russians died in the civil war on the Eastern front in Ukraine.

They died for freedom, he says in the video, in particular, for freedom from the Soviet past, from 'Sovok', the slang term for those Ukrainians who have a nostalgic appreciation of the past of Soviet Ukraine.

At the beginning of the lecture, there are 28 deputies present, out of 60. One can hear talking and noise in the background. The lecturer does not seem to have the undivided attention of his audience. The number of deputies present continues to fall as the speaker arrives to ask a rhetorical question: "How is this session different from a session of 1970? You have smart phones in your pockets, you are driving around in Jeeps. But have you become more open to the people?

"Personally, I do not see it. You are discussing questions important for you-how to distribute the budget. But what to do with the bureaucracy in which you live? What to do with the corruption in which you live? You are here not to distribute a budget. The country is facing a different challenge. Your task today is to kill corruption, to kill bureaucracy, to kill the past, to kill Sovok. Not to continue it.

"I do not know you personally, neither your personal corruption scandals nor what you are busy with, but I am asking you to do the following: to attract investments, to fight corruption, to fight bureaucracy. You can discuss the distribution of money from the budget when the budget is normal. Do you understand this? Only when it is normal can you redistribute this.

"There have been several proposals on privatization. How many buildings have you privatized so far?" And someone replies from the audience: "The people will not allow us."

The lecturer on neo-liberal reforms continues unabashed: "You will ask me: what is this Soviet Union? The Soviet Union is the redistribution of state property by bureaucrats. This state property does not exist, even in theory, in countries that Ukrainians on Euromaidan fought to emulate -those of the European Union, and the United States. What state property, what investments can you attract? When have you privatized something recently?"

"What have we built recently?" asks somebody from the audience, which begins to rumble. The speaker has to raise his voice, he almost shouts: "Who will build anything here, with all the corruption and bureaucracy?"

The ambiance heats up. The chair intervenes to call to order, with no effect. People are discontent. The lecturer has no choice but to finish his enlightening speech with a wish for Euromaidan to achieve its goals: against corruption, against bureaucracy, and against stealing of other people's property. By the end of the young Georgian's talk, only 12 deputies remain in the hall.

What do I see in this short episode? A clear reluctance of Uzhgorod elected officials to listen to the speaker of Euromaidan ideology, the bearer of the mantra of Westernizers: 'You are bad, you are corrupt, you have too much bureaucracy, you are stuck in your Soviet past. Get rid of it! Privatize! Attract investments! Stop stealing somebody else's property!'

It is not clear from Ivo Glonti's speech exactly whose property the people's deputies are stealing, but it does not matter. In his opinion, the deputies are not doing their job properly, and he came to explain to them what Euromaidan was all about. How would these deputies know otherwise? All they do all day is redistribute money from the budget, exactly as their Soviet predecessors did 50 years ago.

The young Georgian revolutionary seems to be a great expert on the Soviet past. He learned how to assess it from his mentor - the Georgian Kakha Bendukidze, a libertarian, the author of liberal reforms in Georgia. Bendukidze advised Glonti to read Friedrich von Hayek's 'Road to Serfdom', an influential and popular exposition of principles of classical liberalism.

According to Hayek, the central planning of economies by governments will inevitably result in totalitarianism because economic freedom is the basis of all other freedoms of an individual, including the political one. The national socialism of the German Nazis and the socialism of the Soviet Union were a logical end result of the domination of collectivism over individualism, which leads nowhere else but to serfdom.

Where else could a young Georgian libertarian revolutionary end up today if not in Ukraine, where the Euromaidan brought to power neoliberal "reformers" who are surely and efficiently destroying Ukrainian industry and its economy and are impoverishing the population? Georgians who have succeeded in the implementation of the neoliberal Western recipes of free markets and transparent governance are in demand in Ukraine. Former Georgian President Mikhail (Misha) Saakashvili is now the appointed governor of Odessa. Apparently, Ukraine's new leaders decided there are no qualified, non-corrupted politicians in Ukraine capable of carrying out reforms in Odessa. Ukraine needs homing pigeons to complete the tasks of Herculean proportion, which Ukrainian reformers have failed to accomplish.

Ukraine has been living in reforms for the whole period of its independence. After Euromaidan, its rulers decided they need help. Let us bring on board foreign experts, they said, let them take direct charge of Ukrainian reforms.

The young Glonti used to be a personal assistant of Misha Saakashvili who, in spite of his "impressive" record of transforming Georgia into a showcase of reforms, is wanted in Georgia for embezzlement, abuse of power and politically motivated attacks. Glonti has been in demand in Ukraine, working with several groups on reforms in various ministries. He leads the Club of Young Reformers. He is giving presentations in various cities explaining to seasoned Ukrainian elected officials and bureaucrats how to get rid of the Soviet past which keeps Ukraine stuck in corruption. Except, they seem not that interested in his advice, judging by the video which I described earlier.

I would probably react in the same manner if a person half my age and who does not know me would launch into a conversation with me by saying that whatever I have done so far is not good and that from now on, I have to follow his/her advice.

How does he/she know what I have done and how I have done it? Who is this person to give me haughty advice? A young revolutionary speaking in the name of Euromaidan who is calling on me to shed my 'Sovok' past and to carry out the cause of the "revolution" which I did not necessarily support? What if I do not want to condemn my 'Sovok' past because I see good in it, not just evil? What if I want to preserve from that past a social state and a social security network? What if I believe that I actually have been doing my work as a people's deputy and I have served my constituency? I did not just "redistribute" the budget as this young revolutionary expert is telling me.

This is what I see in this video. I see the resistance of non-Euromaidan Ukraine to the passionate call of Euromaidan to destroy the past and to build a whole new neoliberal world. I see the frustration of Euromaidan revolutionaries with this slow, inert post-Soviet Ukraine and its bureaucracy.

Here is another example: a 25-year old Yulia Marushevska, a deputy of Governor Saakashvili, after working for a few months in Odessa's regional administration, says to a Western journalist: "I feel like sitting down and rewriting this country from scratch".

Yulia was an active participant of Euromaidan. She is one of the faces of Euromaidan - she recorded a video "address" in English from the demonstrations in Kyiv and posted it on YouTube. The video drew eight million views. Now Yulia is frustrated. This country is so bad that it needs to be rewritten, redone completely. A total remake. Nothing good, nothing. Everything should go to the scrap yard of history, as an old communist adagio goes.

It is so difficult to reform this country, the neo-liberals bemoan. They view the Ukrainian citizen as someone stuck in his/her corrupted old ways. Bribes, kickbacks, black markets, shadow economy. Nothing, nothing good. The whole country needs to be reeducated.

And it is not only the legacy of the Soviet past that the neo-liberals castigate. It is also the legacy of the Byzantine-Orthodox past, which is much more difficult to overcome, as Igor Shevchenko, a Harvard historian and philologist of Ukrainian origin, once said, as reported by the Ukrainian historian Yaroslav Hrytsak. Hrytsak believes that these two pasts are related: "Communism is only flowers, sickening and murderous, but still flowers on a tree, rooted in a more distant past. And this tree can be uprooted solely through deep reforms".

Hrytsak notes that it is much more important in this regard to institute independent judges than to ban Soviet symbols. In Ukraine, they are doing exactly the opposite: they started with banning the Soviet past and they are not advancing in reforms, while in the countries which have overcome the Communist past, such as Poland, Estonia, and Lithuania, the order of actions was correct: first - the overcoming of the past itself, and then - of its surface manifestations (ibid).

Rewriting, uprooting, reforming... in order to free Ukraine from its Soviet past. The Soviet past is bad. It is totalitarian, it is repressive, it is bureaucratic, it is mendacious. This is how it looks in the Western perspective. But it was also egalitarian, collectivistic, social, idealistic. This is how it looks from the perspective of many who lived in that past or who look to it today for inspiration.

The Donetsk and Lugansk uprisings are to a large extent rooted in that past, as I have written in previous articles. If you tell these people that all that they did so far is bad, that they and their parents lived a lie, they will not understand nor accept what you are saying. You cannot live a normal life if you believe that your past is worth nothing and consists only of pain and suffering.

Russia and Ukraine have gone through dealing with the Soviet past during the glasnost of the 1980s. Truth about the dark side of the Soviet period was revealed, the assessment done. Lenin monuments were toppled in many Russian cities. Many people became saturated with horrifying stories of gulags, famines, and NKVD murders. In Russia, the catastrophic failure of neoliberal reforms under Yeltsin during the 1990s left the vast majority of people impoverished and deeply unsatisfied. And then Vladimir Putin emerged as the answer to this dissatisfaction. The Soviet past, as reflected under Putin, is incorporated into Russia's present-day, collective identity.

In Ukraine, dealing with the Soviet past was and is more complicated. Ukraine is not Lithuania or Poland. But it is not Russia either. In Ukraine, the duality passes not only through the Europe-Russia cultural and political orientation. It also passes through the attitude towards this Soviet past. For Western Ukraine, integrated into an Eastern European cultural space, the Soviets were invaders and anti-Ukrainian. For Eastern Ukraine, the Soviets were...well, Eastern Ukrainians are Soviets. Of course, this is a simplification. No clear cut demarcation among masses of people exists in reality. Not all of Western Ukrainians condemn the Soviet past, in the same way as not all Eastern Ukrainians want to be part of Russia. But it is legitimate to speak about the majority in both cases. And I am referring not only to the geographical division but also to the symbolical division among Ukrainians.

For Russia, neoliberal reforms were an economic and social disaster. For Poland, they were a success for many. Ukraine is stuck somewhere in the middle. Even with a powerful impulse from the young generation of Ukrainians who have nothing to do with the Soviet past, reforms are stalling. The majority (72%) of Ukrainians after the Euromaidan revolution think that things are going in the wrong direction in the country, according to the national survey conducted in August of 2015 by the Ukrainian Sociological Group "Rating". The survey was commissioned by the International Republican Institute and funded by USAID. Over 60% of Ukrainians think that the economic situation in Ukraine has worsened significantly and 28% think that it has worsened somewhat (slide 19).

40% of Ukrainians believe that nothing is changing in Ukraine and 32% believe that changes are too slow. An absolute majority of Ukrainians are dissatisfied with the Verkhovna Rada: 49% percent of Ukrainians do not approve at all of its activities. This dissatisfaction is one percent short of the dissatisfaction with the Verkhovna Rada of February 2014, when it was considered to be anti-Maidan, while 35% are "rather dissatisfied" (slide 42).

Prime-Minister Yatseniuk and his Cabinet of Ministers score even worse: 52% of Ukrainians do not approve of them at all while 32% rather do not approve (slide 41). As for President Petro Poroshenko, 33% do not approve his actions at all while 34% "rather do not approve" (slide 40). Overall, Ukrainians are deeply dissatisfied with the state of current affairs and with the country's governance.

Another interesting set of data pertains to a hypothetical preference of democracy over a prosperous economy. For 13% of Ukrainians, democracy is more important without doubt, and a further 20 % say it is rather important. For 34%, a prosperous economy is rather more important than democracy and for 18% it is definitely more important than democracy (slide 21). Only in Western Ukraine is democracy more important for over half of the respondents, while in the rest of the regions it does not reach even 30% (slide 22). The majority of Ukrainians are not willing to suffer some short term difficulties (such as increase of prices and power rates) so that their life improves only in the long term: 34% are categorically against it and 24% are rather against it, while 26% are rather ready and only 5% are definitely ready (slide 5).

The most recent survey of Ukrainians, conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in September of this year, confirms the clear trend of the discontent of ordinary Ukrainians with their political elite: 58.6% assess negatively the work of President Poroshenko against 27.2% who give a positive assessment. Prime Minister Yatseniuk scores even worse: 71.3% of Ukrainians assess him negatively and only 17.3% positively.

The picture that emerges from this data is clear: Ukrainians are dissatisfied with the government, with the president, with the economy, with the reforms, with their own economic situation. The euphoria of Euromaidan is over for many.

The "Revolution of Dignity" of February 2014, as with any revolution, did not involve the majority of the population. A sociological survey, conducted jointly in October of 2014 by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology and Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Fund, shows that only 20% of the population of Ukraine took part in the protest actions of November 2013-February 2014 in Kyiv (Euromaidan). The biggest participation occurred in Western Ukraine, where roughly half of the population was involved in different ways: 7% of its population participated directly in the events on Independence (Maidan) Square in Kyiv, 26% took part in protests in other cities and villages, while 29.5 % helped the protesters.

In the central regions, the participation was much lower: 9.5% took part in protests in Kyiv and 2% in other cities and villages. The participation of Ukrainians from other regions was significantly lower: 2% in the southern regions; 3% in the eastern regions, and 3% in Donbas. The data of non-participation is as follows: western regions - 46.9%; central regions - 80.9%; southern regions - 96.6%; eastern regions - 95.1%; Donbas region - 97.1%. The national level non-participation of Ukrainians in Euromaidan was 81.9%.

After their Euromaidan revolution won (as the officials and media in Ukraine claim), one fifth of 'revolutionary' Ukraine started to reform the remaining four fifths. Who are this one fifth? Earlier, I gave an example of the young Yulia. The Euromaidan revolution started from protests of young people against President Yanukovych's decision to postpone signing of an economic agreement with the European Union. Let us reflect that a new generation of Ukrainians grew up in independent Ukraine. They were educated in Western values and in Ukrainian, not Soviet, history and ideology. They interpret the Soviet past from the point of view, dominant in the West, of it being a totalitarian, repressive regime.

Another example, which I quoted at the beginning of the article, is that of Yaroslav Hrytsak, a prominent Ukrainian historian, who also wants to implement deep reforms in Ukraine in order to get rid of its Soviet past. Most of the leaders of the Ukrainian intelligentsia (at least those who are the most vocal) supported the Euromaidan as a people's uprising against the usurpation of power and the encroachment on their human rights, for democratization, and for a European choice. In Kyiv, the middle class (many of them businessmen and office workers) supported the Euromaidan by participating directly in the protests on weekends by bringing food, donating money, etc. But it was the political opposition parties of Svoboda, Batkivschyna, and Udar, as well as right-wing paramilitary groups such as Pravyi Sektor, who were the driving force behind the protests and who succeeded in transforming them from spontaneous demonstrations into sustainable, two-month long actions. The flame of people's dissatisfaction would have been extinguished by itself if these political forces did not maintain the infrastructure on Independence Square in Kyiv.

Now the winners of this revolution are trying hard to strip Ukraine of its Soviet past. Communist ideology has been declared illegal, the streets are being renamed and monuments to Lenin have been falling since the spectacular destruction in December 2013 of the main monument in Kyiv to V.I. Lenin, in front of the Bessarabka market. In the meantime, Ukraine's economy is in freefall. More and more Ukrainians live under the poverty line while their president feeds them promises of visa-free entry to the European Union and their Prime Minister explains that their lives will not be harmed by a default of the government's debt, which has effectively already taken place.

Amidst the anti-Soviet hysteria, Ukraine is destroying itself, because the Soviet period is part and parcel of what Ukraine is. Yes, there were peasants' revolts against the Red Army, there were famines, there were executions of Ukrainian intelligentsia. But there was also victory in the Great Patriotic War, there was the Dnipro Hydro Electric Power Plant, there were lead Soviet rocket engineer and spacecraft designers Koroliov and Antonov, world-renowned film director and writer Mykola Dovzhenko and Ukrainian and Soviet writer and public figure Oles Honchar. By denying the complexity of the past, Ukraine denies a great part of itself. And it hurts to watch this self-destructing Ukraine.

It is a very difficult task to find a way to reconcile Ukraine in one national project-a Ukraine that values the Soviet past, a collectivistic Ukraine, close to Russia; and a Ukraine that hates this past, a Ukraine that wants to be part of European neoliberal democracy. Throughout the years of independence since 1991, Ukraine has been split on the issue of political orientation. Only after Euromaidan, after a continuous barrage of official propaganda on Russian aggression, did the balance shift towards joining the European Union and NATO.

Western-oriented Ukraine would gladly shed the eastern, Russia-oriented Ukraine which shackles European-aspiring Ukraine to its Soviet past. And the frustration of Ukrainian intellectuals over the undesirable Byzantine and Soviet history of Ukraine reminds me of the disappointment of the Russian liberal intelligentsia over Russians' supposedly servile love of Vladimir Putin.

Ukraine and Russia are similar in many regards. Not because Russia had "occupied" Ukraine since 1654, when hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky signed the Pereiaslav Treaty with the emissaries of the Russian Tsar Alexi. It is because they share a common origin and history, and because a large part of the modern Ukrainian nation is very close to Russia in mentality and religion. Russians have tried Western recipes of constructing an economy and society. It turned into disaster. Russians also learned that the West has no interest in helping them. The West will trade with them and invest in their economy. But the West does not want or need Russia as an equal. This is the main lesson of neoliberal reforms, learned by Russia.

Ukraine is trying now to follow the same Western neoliberal recipes, and we see the painful results.

Ukraine is not Poland, neither is it Russia. Precisely because of this civilizational duality it is now torn apart. Neo-liberal individualism goes against the collectivistic values of Byzantine and Soviet Ukraine. But the majorities in each of Western-oriented and Eastern-oriented Ukraine aspire to have a strong and just state which would ensure social protection, clear rules of conducting business, a democratic governance and a culture which would preserve both the positive achievements of the Soviet period and of the national liberation movement.

Neo-liberal reforms will never be implemented fully and successfully in Ukraine because this country still remembers the principles and achievements of Soviet socialism. The Ukrainian political elite should listen to its own people and find a way to reconcile these contradictions. Without the solution of this fundamental problem, no national unity will be achieved, no matter how many times politicians sing the national anthem in the Verkhovna Rada and no matter how many hundreds or thousands of Ukrainians march in embroidered shirts and shout "Glory to Ukraine".

 [return to Contents] 

 #18
5 Kanal TV (Kyiv)
October 11, 2015
Ukraine needs unity to stop Russian aggression, president tells nation

Ukraine needs internal unity in order to win its war against Russia, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has said in a pre-recorded video address to the nation broadcast by the rolling news TV channel 5 Kanal on 11 October. Poroshenko also said that a portion of Ukrainian politicians were playing into the Kremlin's hands by alleging that the country's government was engaged in shady diplomatic affairs.

Poroshenko said: "Dear compatriots!

"Following a number of important international visits, which were devoted to discussing ways to reach peace in Ukraine, I have finally landed at Kiev. As I may see, there are many arguing, for various reasons, that white is black, misleading and deceiving people. I feel the need to set the record straight. So allow me to take several minutes of your Sunday evening in order to brief you on our military and diplomatic work."

Cease-fire reached

Poroshenko continued: "The most obvious result is the cease-fire that has continued in Donbass [parts of Ukraine's Donetsk and Luhansk regions] over the past week despite individual militant acts of provocation. For the first time in 1.5 years, most of the days no shots have been fired, even from pistols.

"Is this long enough? Indeed, is this any sort of achievement at all? Let us ask the mothers and wives of our soldiers. Let us ask our women, who are having sleepless nights across Ukraine, fearing lest they. God forbid, should receive a letter of condolence in the morning.

"For me, the days when no fatalities are reported are festive days. We are saving the lives of both servicemen and civilians - our fellow countrymen in Luhansk and Donetsk regions. This is the most important thing.

"The bilateral cease-fire was introduced back on 29 September. However, this cease-fire became continuous only thanks to the Paris meeting [on 2 October in the Normandy Four format]. We managed to force the enemy to agree to the withdrawal of weapons from the contact line.

"Incidentally, rest assured that we are moving our weapons and hardware in accordance with a special thorough plan, which allows for their instant return to the positions should the Russians and their mercenaries choose to breach the cease-fire. We have previously repeatedly demonstrated our ability to promptly react to such challenges - near Maryinka, in Starohnativka, and in other places."

On elections in occupied districts

Poroshenko also said: "Thanks to our joint coordinated efforts with our partners, primarily with the USA, as well as with Germany and France, which represent the EU, we finally made Russia promise not to hold quasi-elections in the occupied districts on 18 October and 1 November. Together with the cease-fire and the achievement of truce, this fact not just gives us a chance to continue our political and diplomatic settlement efforts. It also allows for avoiding a military escalation. I will remind those who may have forgotten that last year's quasi-elections provoked full-scale resumption of the hostilities.

"Of extreme importance is the agreement to boost the OSCE mission. From now on, it is to get guaranteed access not just to the occupied territories adjacent to the line of contact but to their entire depth. It is the first time the OSCE monitoring mission will also be granted access to the Ukrainian-Russian border. Incidentally, this is the first step towards returning that border under Ukrainian control.

"[German Chancellor] Angela Merkel, [French President] Francois Hollande, [US President] Barack Obama and myself made it clear to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin in no uncertain terms that any elections on the occupied territories may only take place in accordance with Ukrainian laws. Such a campaign is directly dependent on the withdrawal of the Russian troops and military equipment, the disarmament of militants and the restoration of Ukrainian control over Ukraine's state border with Russia.

"We have no right, forgive me this tautology, to strip those Ukrainians who have become refugees through the Russian aggression of their right to elect local authorities in Donbass. Similarly, we need to ensure the participation of Ukrainian parties [in elections in Donbass] and restoration, in their entirety, of Ukrainian TV and radio broadcasts to the occupied territories.

"As you may see, the organization of elections is an extremely complex process. In the meantime, it would appear that some of our politicians fail to realize that the situation cannot return to the state in which it was before 1 March 2014, that reintegrating the [occupied] territories would require special wisdom and vision on the part on Ukraine. Reclaiming people's hearts and mind would be even harder than returning the territory.

"I, as the president, require the Ukrainian parliament's understanding and support, just as I did when [parliament] approved the draft amendments to the constitution and the law on the peculiarities of local self-administration in certain districts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions. It was only because these changes had been adopted that the long-awaited truce became possible now, and a prospect of peace emerged."

On importance of territorial integrity

He went on to say: "There will be no elections without the Supreme Council [parliament]. Without elections on the occupied territories, the political settlement process will reach an impasse. Still, some Ukrainian politicians do not conceal that they want exactly this scenario. This is why they are proposing to encircle, block and isolate, and also cut off and give away. However, this simple, primitive solution requires neither intellectual powers, nor the political will to restore the country's integrity, nor diplomatic skills. Therefore, this scenery is not for me. Nor is it for the majority of the Ukrainians, who aspire for both peace and the country's reunification.

"If we lose our chance to return Donetsk and Luhansk regions, whoever in the world will discuss the return of Crimea with a country that squanders its territory? Donbass is also our motherland. Frittering away one's motherland is not done. My goal is different: I aim to preserve the country."

Sanctions, military might key to stopping Russian aggression

Poroshenko also said: "Both in New York and in Paris, Russia, which is greedy for others' property, was warned that the sanctions may be continued and strengthened. These are not my words: these are the statements of our European and EU partners.

"This is exactly why we set up a global coalition, whose task it is to continue applying pressure to the aggressor until the last Russian occupier has left Ukraine, until they have left Donbass and Crimea.

"The key to peace is the unity of the democratic world with regard to the sanctions against Russia, which are strongly affecting the aggressor's economy, as well as in the international solidarity in supporting Ukraine and in our ability to protect ourselves.

"The only guarantee of the truce and peace is the reliability of Ukrainian defences. It is true that we support peace, but we are no pacifists. Our military are ready and able to repeal an aggression at any time. Over the past year we have created a new army, and we will continue to strengthen the country's defensive capacity. Next year's budget will have a significantly greater sum allocated for defence."

More US military assistance on its way

Poroshenko continued: "During my visit to New York I agreed with the US administration about deliveries of non-lethal weapons to Ukraine, namely advanced counter-battery warfare. They allow for precision acquisition of enemy firing positions from tens of kilometres away from the front-line, and for destroying these positions.

"Also thanks to our efforts, US Congress this week approved the allocation of significant finances in 2016 for providing military assistance to Ukraine. In November, the USA will launch a unique multi-million[-dollar] training programme for the Ukrainian Armed Forces and special detachments.

"All these steps taken by the White House prove that the current portion of gossip about treason, about Ukraine being exchanged for Syria is nothing but fantasies originating in Moscow and its cronies."

Domestic unity paramount in face of Kremlin

Poroshenko concluded by saying: "Dear compatriots!

"Having encountered resistance on the front-line, the Kremlin is now attempting to bring confrontation to the centre of Ukraine. Unfortunately, some Ukrainian politicians are operating under Lenin's slogan 'The defeat of one's own government in the [Imperialist] war'.

"In the time when the entire world has united around Ukraine, we especially need internal unity, since only consolidation of society will allow us to defeat our external enemy.

"Only this way will we achieve victory.

"Glory to Ukraine!"

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 #19
www.rt.com
October 12, 2015
Russian evidence on MH17 crash ignored - Peskov

A number of facts presented by Russia regarding last year's crash of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine are being ignored, Vladimir Putin's spokesman said, a day ahead of the Dutch Safety Board presenting its final technical report on the catastrophe.

"There are facts delivered by the Russian side that for unclear reasons are being apparently ignored," the Russian president's press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, told journalists.

Peskov said that the Russian side has "repeatedly expressed its disappointment over the lack of proper level of cooperation and engagement of the Russian experts into the investigation."

The spokesperson noted that certain leaks from the report that emerged earlier could not be verified and proved authentic.

Peskov called on the media to wait for the official report's release and promised that the document is going to be "most thoroughly examined" by Russian experts.

According to a report in the Malaysian media, Russia's Roasaviation flight authority handed over to the Netherlands some "serious remarks" in response to the abstract of the final report on the reasons for the MH17 crash on July 17, 2014, which killed all 298 passengers and crew members onboard.

Malaysian newspaper New Straits Time cited the deputy head of Roasaviation, Oleg Storchevoy, who wrote a letter to the International Civil Aviation Association (ICAA), accusing the Dutch-led joint investigation group of ignoring "comprehensive information delivered by Russia."

In particular, Moscow emphasized concern over the Dutch Safety Board ignoring a "basic principle of investigating air incidents - sequence of conclusions."

According to Storchevoy, instead of examining the damage caused to the crashed Boeing's nose and fuselage and then making logical interpretations, the Dutch investigative group "immediately jumped to conclusions and blamed a BUK missile complex of shooting down the MH17 flight," also positioning it in accordance with the initial reports, without explaining how the BUK's alleged position was calculated.

On top of all, conclusions were made even before the characteristics of the striking elements that hit the crashed Boeing were established, Storchevoy noted.

The Dutch Safety Board is preparing to present the final report on the MH17 catastrophe on Tuesday, October 13.

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 #20
Moscow Times
October 12, 2015
Lukashenko Victory Set to Stoke EU Rapprochement, Moscow Unease
By Howard Amos

Autocratic Belarussian leader Alexander Lukashenko looked set to win a fifth term as president Sunday in a largely uncontested and protest-free election that is likely to pave the way for a thaw in relations with European countries and a possible confrontation with neighboring Russia, traditionally a staunch ally.

Exit polls conducted by a committee of youth groups gave Lukashenko, famously described as Europe's last dictator, 84.1 percent of the vote late Sunday, TASS news agency reported. Tatyana Korotkevich, the only opposition candidate, had an estimated 4.9 percent, with largely unknown pro-government candidates Siarhei Haidukevich and Mikalai Ulakhovich on 5.2 percent and 1.4 percent, the report said.

Criticized as predictable from the outset, the election was marred by credible accusations of pressure on independent journalists, fraud and massive official backing for the incumbent.

But the lack of a protest movement and government crackdown means that Western countries are now almost certain to lift sanctions on Belarus and seek to boost economic ties, a trend certain to fuel concern in Moscow that another former Soviet country on its western border is slipping out of its orbit.

"These developments make Russia a bit nervous," said Artyom Shraibman, a Minsk-based political commentator for the Belarussian tut.by news website.

Rebuffing the Kremlin

The EU will lift asset freezes and travel bans against Belarussian officials including Lukashenko for four months following the election, unless any eleventh-hour violations are recorded, Reuters cited diplomatic sources as saying Friday.

"The consensus is finally there and now it is just a formal decision to be taken toward the end of October, assuming Lukashenko doesn't organize a clampdown on political dissent after the elections," Reuters cited an unidentified senior EU diplomat as saying.

Reports that sanctions could be lifted first circulated shortly after Lukashenko pardoned and released several political prisoners in August.

But while cozying up to Europe, Lukashenko has appeared to distance himself from Moscow.

Last week, the Belarussian leader said his country would not host a Russian military base, despite President Vladimir Putin ordering Russian officials to sign such an agreement in September.

"I don't know anything about this. The person who should be taking this decision - me - doesn't know anything about it," Lukashenko said Tuesday, the state-controlled BELTA news agency reported. "Maybe they [Moscow] are worried that we are leaving for the West, and raised this topic so that the West starts to ask, or doubt, whether we want to normalize relations."

Lukashenko's announcement followed a protest attended by hundreds of people in Minsk against the base, which has been under discussion between Russian and Belarussian officials for at least a year.

The apparent turn away from Moscow - whose military has been more aggressive since the Ukraine crisis began last year - is the latest in a series of such moves by Lukashenko. Earlier this year, he joined most Western leaders in not showing up for set-piece celebrations in Moscow to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II.

Winning From Ukraine

The rapid deterioration of ties between Russia and the West triggered by Moscow's annexation of Crimea and support for rebels fighting Kiev troops in eastern Ukraine has also given Lukashenko the opportunity to position himself as a peacemaker and portray himself in a more positive light to the West.

Last year, the Belarussian leader said that Putin's recent foreign policy could mean Lukashenko losing the title of Europe's last dictator, bestowed on him by U.S. officials.

"I told Putin that after the Crimea annexation, people might no longer call me Europe's last dictator," he said in an interview to Ukrainian television in March 2014.

Lukashenko has used the Ukraine crisis to play a mediator role. Peace talks hosted in Minsk and attended by Putin as well as French President Francois Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko eventually led to a cease-fire in eastern Ukraine.

Belarussian business has also sought to capitalize on the crisis.

Belarussian companies have used Russia's tit-for-tat Western food import ban as an opportunity, re-packaging Western foods - including fish and tropical fruit - and shipping them across the border. The country's national airline, Belavia, announced it would boost regional flights last month after Kiev banned Russian airlines from its airspace and Moscow reciprocated in kind.

Poroshenko has been a de facto ambassador for Belarus in the West and has worked to rehabilitate Lukashenko, according to Dmitry Bolkunets, an expert on Belarus at Moscow's Higher School of Economics, who also compared the friendship to Lukashenko's brief association with Georgia's then-President Mikheil Saakashvili after Russia and Georgia fought a brief war in 2008.

Economic Doldrums

A key transit nation for goods flowing in and out of Russia, the Belarussian economy is very closely integrated with Russia's and Minsk is part of a Moscow-led customs union.

The close ties meant that the Belarussian economy suffered a sharp contraction and its currency collapsed this year, in sync with Russia, where low oil prices and Western sanctions have caused economic woes and a sharp devaluation of the ruble.

Belarus lost nearly $3 billion due to economic turmoil in Russia following Moscow's annexation of Crimea, Lukashenko said in June.

The Belarussian economy could contract by up to 4 percent by the end of the year, according to experts.

Minsk is expected to seek Western loans and investment if sanctions are lifted, and exploit European money markets. During a visit to New York last month for the United Nations General Assembly, Lukashenko gave International Monetary Fund head Christine Lagarde a bunch of flowers.

'Small Steps'

Few expect any dramatic shift in Minsk's allegiances - and some analysts see Lukashenko's apparent re-orientation toward the EU as a tactic to extort financial help from Moscow, which has traditionally helped its smaller neighbor stay afloat through loans and subsidized energy exports.

"Belarus' main strategic partner is, and will remain, Russia," said expert Bolkunets.

Soon to enter his 22nd year in power, Lukashenko is widely known among his supporters as "Batka" - father - and appears to be grooming his 11-year-old son Nikolai to be his successor. Nikolai accompanied his father and the official Belarus delegation to New York last month, and also escorted Lukashenko to the polling station Sunday, dressed in an identical suit and tie to his father.

The political opposition in Belarus appears to be weak at the moment because it is fractured and fears street protests because of the recent violent power transition in neighboring Ukraine.

Experts also point to the 2010 presidential election, which began in a surprisingly free atmosphere but ended in violence, with the dispersing of a rally in Minsk on election night and the arrest of 700 people.

"This will not be a radical turn toward Europe because it's too dangerous," said political commentator Shraibman. "But we will see small steps and signs."

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#21
Moscow Times
October 10, 2015
The Artistic Triumph of Svetlana Alexievich
By Michele A. Berdy

Svetlana Alexievich, the Belorussian author who just won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, might be the greatest writer people don't want to read.

Russians may be pleased that for the first time in almost 30 years - and for only the fifth time in history - an author who writes in Russian has won the highest literary award in the world. But that doesn't mean they're all eager to read Alexievich's works.

That is not to say that Alexievich is not well-known in Russia. She is the author of five books, three plays and over 20 screenplays for documentary films. She is the laureate of eight major foreign and six Russian awards, including the Leninsky Komsomol Prize in 1986 for her first book, "The War's Unwomanly Face," about the experiences of women in the Great Patriotic War. Although it was originally censured for its grim and less than heroic stories about the war, it was more highly regarded when glasnost became state policy under Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. By the end of the 1980s, almost 2 million copies of the book had been printed.

That book, like her later books, was written in a style that blurs the boundary between fiction and non-fiction. John O'Brien, director of the U.S. office of Dalkey Archive Press, the publisher of Alexievich's book "Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster," described her style in an email to The Moscow Times, "Fiction? Non-fiction? Let's say that she writes non-fiction while taking advantage of the devices available to a fiction writer."

Alexievich interviews people, transcribes their interviews, and then arranges and rearranges passages to form prose that reads more like a short story or novel than a documentary account. "Because of her method of interviewing people, then editing, then getting approval from the people she has interviewed, Svetlana adopts a very colloquial style that makes her work quite accessible," O'Brien said. "Her method is to make these non-fiction pieces into what might almost pass as short stories, while still remaining completely faithful to the facts and tone of the people being interviewed."
5714-12-alexievich Front cover - Voices.jpg
Dalkey Archive Press
Voices from Chernobyl was first published in Russian in 1997. The English translation was awarded the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award for general non-fiction.
Although the stories may be more accessible than a traditional non-fiction history, they are not easy reading. As journalist Alexander Minkin wrote in his blog, "They are really difficult books. They are hard to read. It's like taking care of someone who is extremely ill - duty makes you do it, but there is no pleasure in it."

Natasha Perova, publisher of GLAS New Russian Writing, who published excerpts of a book about love that Alexievich is still writing, told The Moscow Times that her first book "was an eye-opener; it was shattering and heart-rending. Her books are certainly not to be missed by thinking, honest people, although reading them is a traumatic experience. She did, indeed, create a monument to human suffering and courage."

Alexievich's other books are also about what Perova calls the "ulcers of Soviet society": "The Last Witnesses," tales of WWII told by people who were children during the war; "Boys in Zinc" about the Soviet-Afghan war; "Enchanted with Death," about people who committed suicide rather than live in the post-Soviet world; and "Second-Hand Time" about living through the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Her book about the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, translated by Keith Gessen, is her best-known work in the English-speaking world and won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the U.S.

Alexievich's subject matter and criticism of the current Russian leadership and policies, particularly the annexation of Crimea, have kept official response to the Nobel prize muted. But the Russian literary world is delighted. Dmitry Bykov, Russia's most prolific writer and literary critic, told the radio station Ekho Moskvy that Alexievich's work represented the "Russian World - only not that Russian World that is trumpeted on television. Not the world of aggression, lies and chauvinism, but the world of the struggle for truth, the world that is kind and humane, the world of humanity."

He said that Alexievich's "fictional non-fiction" is part of a Belorussian literary tradition described by writer Ales Adamovich as "polyphony, a powerful tragic choir of various voices, where the author almost takes himself out of the book." Bykov said that Adamovich considered it blasphemous to write fiction about the horrors of the 20th century. "It's wrong to make things up. You have to tell the truth, the way it is. You must completely remove your own voice and let others tell the story. In that sense, Alexievich's contribution is very great indeed."

A sample of Svetlana Alexievich's writing can be found here:
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/arts_n_ideas/article/selected-writing-by-svetlana-alexiyevich/537999.html
 

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 #22
The Unz Review
www.unz.com
October 11, 2015
Why Svetlana Alexievich Won the Nobel Prize in Literature
By Anatoly Karlin
[Links and graphics here http://www.unz.com/akarlin/nobel-prize-of-alexievich/]

I don't make any claims to being some kind of hifalutin literatus. To the extent I read any fiction at all it is almost inevitably either sci-fi or fantasy. I am woefully uncultured when it comes to "Big L" Literature, and looking at the postmodernist dreck that seems to dominate the modern scene, I am frankly content to continue wallowing in my ignorance.

So I was not very surprised to find myself completely ignorant of Svetlana Alexievich when she was announced the winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature. What was more surprising is that this ignorance was widely shared amongst my Russian acquaintances. It is not particularly the case that my acquaintances are cultural troglodytes. As Western journalists have recently confirmed, she really is pretty unknown in the Russosphere.

    "The pathos of Alexievich's situation is that, while some of her books have been successful-War's Unwomanly Face reportedly sold two million copies-today, the humanist writer is nearly unknown in her dehumanizing homeland, and is of little interest to its people. Her print runs are modest. There are virtually no comments or votes on her books on Ozon.ru (link in Russian), Russia's answer to Amazon.com, and most of the books are not even in stock. By contrast, the previous five Russian-language winners of the literature Nobel-Ivan Bunin, Boris Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Mikhail Sholokhov, and Joseph Brodsky-are all still household names."

Below is a graph I compiled using Google Trends comparing online chatter about her compared to some other prominent Russian language writers from multiple genres and sides of the political spectrum. The graph runs from 2004 to September 2015, to avoid the artificial spike coinciding with the announcement of Alexievich's Nobel Prize this October.

Dmitry Bykov is a poet and essayist, Viktor Pelevin is a postmodernist but does some truly original and profound things with it, and Boris Akunin is a bestselling historical detective fiction writer. Perhaps more importantly to the sorts of people who decide on whom to give awards to, all three are strongly anti-Putin and pro-Maidan. The exception here is Sergey Lukyanenko, whose urban fantasies have probably made him into modern Russia's internationally best known writer.

What all four of them have in common though is that not in a single month have they had their names mentioned online less often Svetlana Alexievich. As one can see from the bar graph, any one of them is an order of magnitude more popular. None of them would have been an unworthy Nobel Prize winner. There are dozens of other Russian language writers well ahead of her, to say nothing of the rest of the world. So her Nobel Prize certainly couldn't have been the result of prominence and popular acclaim.

Was she then selected on the basis of the Swedish Nobel committee's deep level of understanding and appreciation of Russian literature? Was she the diamond in the dirt that ain't been found, the underground queen that ain't been crowned?

Fortunately, blogger (and one of my regular commentators) Lazy Glossophiliac looked into this question in some detail, doing the work that lazier journalists wouldn't. The book he looked at was The Chernobyl Prayer: Chronicles of the Future (published in 2006), which is available online in Russian here: http://www.lib.ru/NEWPROZA/ALEKSIEWICH/chernobyl.txt

Even for a non-literary kind of person - Lazy Glossophiliac is a technical person - it quickly becomes obvious her work is second rate.

She has a blithe indifference to facts. Numerous bold claims are made that are either unsubstantiated or flat out statistically false. Some are pretty minor (she says Belarus is a majority rural county; in reality, it stopped being so in the mid-1970s). Others are cardinal, such as her remarkable claim that radiation from Chernobyl was the most important reason for Belarus' demographic decline. In reality, it was not the first or even tenth most important reason. In Belarus as in Russia and the wider USSR, mortality remained relatively low thoughout the late 1980s - recall that Chernobyl blew up in 1986 - due to Gorbachev's anti-alcohol campaign. In Belarus as in Russia and the wider USSR, it soared after 1991 - that is, 1991 - 1986 = 5 years after Chernobyl - as the economy collapsed and the state lost its former monopoly over vodka production.

Such sins might be forgiven for a truly "literary" writer, but she was an expressly nonfiction writer. The first such, for that matter, to be awarded a Nobel Prize since Winston Churchill in 1953, who got his Nobel Prize in Literature for, amongst other things, his "mastery of historical and biographical description." I haven't read Churchill but I would imagine he got his basic historical facts right.

Perhaps she made up for it with beautiful, sublime prose?

Here is Lazy Glossophiliac on that. [http://lazyglossophiliac.blogspot.com/2015/10/a-look-at-one-of-svetlana-alexievichs.html]


    At the start of the next section Alexievich tells us that the Chernobyl accident was "the main event of the 20th century, in spite of all the terrible wars and revolutions for which that century will be remembered". I'm chalking that up to chick logic. A certain quantity of pseudo-profound nonsense follows. I'm finally up against this year's Nobel prize winner's own voice. It's boring and pompous: "Chernobyl is a secret which we will still have to uncover. An unread sign. Perhaps a mystery for the twenty-first century. A challenge to it." Of course she's not talking about anything technical here - it's all hot air.

    "The facts were simply not enough anymore, one was drawn to look beyond the facts, to get into the meaning of what was happening." Oh really? The carelessness she showed with the "facts" which she quoted at the start of this book suggests that she's simply bored by them instead.

    She says that Chernobyl left everyone confused because throughout the ages the measure of horror was war. "We are in a new history, a history of catastrophes has begun." She is utterly devoid of any sense of historical perspective. Floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, epidemics - never happened. She goes on and on about the revolutionary newness of radiation's invisibility, but viruses have always been invisible too, and much more deadly.


No Brodsky, Pasternak, or Solzhenitsyn is she. They might have been anti-Soviet, and justifiably so, but all of them produced real literary masterpieces (well, just One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, in Solzhenitsyn's case, but even that is still one more than I am aware of Alexievich ever writing).

Also... HOW MANY ELLIPSES DOES SHE USE?... a Ctrl-F reveals 4,196 of them... out of 78,000 words... I can't even!... that is like... MORE THAN ONCE EVERY TWENTY WORDS!

As I said, I do not pretend to be any sort of expert on the sense of style. In fact, I am downright awful at it. (Just look at that weasel phrase at the beginning of the last sentence. And putting this in brackets. And starting sentences with "and").

Even so, should I ever find myself peppering my texts with an ellipse or two every other sentence, I will take it as a cue to wrap up my writing forays and spare the world any more of my inchoate ramblings.

But perhaps she got her Nobel Prize not on the basis of popularity or even style but on account of the, erm, human truths - telling truth to power - living not by lies - insert Soviet dissident slogan of your choice - that she revealed in her writing.

That is what Keith Gessen, her translator (and brother of Masha Gessen, of "Je suis fromage" fame), ventures in his panegyric of her for Human Rights Watch:

    "But although her work is often hot with the passion and outrage of independent witness, it is wonderfully free of any polemical or activist agenda. She serves no ideology, only an ideal: to listen closely enough to the ordinary voices of her time to orchestrate them into extraordinary books."

This is a message that was echoed by the Nobel committee itself. Ostensibly, she was rewarded for "her polyphonic writing, a monument to suffering and courage in our time."

In literature, polyphony as defined by Mikhail Bakhtin refers to a style of prose in which the author refrains from making his characters sockpuppets for some idea or ideology. Instead, he makes them vie for power and influence in a world where the only truth is that there is no truth. Dostoevsky was the primary example for Bakhtin's definition of polyphony. Who can say which Karamazov brother was right: Ivan or Alyosha? George R. R. Martin would be a good modern popular example, in which the principle heroes and heroines tend to represent distinct moral codes and values, none of which are obviously superior to that of any other except to the extent that they are blessed with varying amounts of luck, dragons, and shadowbabies.

You have to have very high social intelligence and psychological astuteness to be able to convincingly write this kind of prose.

But there is no indication whatsoever that this describes Alexievich.

To the contrary, there is a clear polemical agenda at the very start of the book that we decided to analyze. My translation of its second opening paragraph:

    "For little Belarus (population: 10 million), Chernobyl was a national catastrophe, even though the Belorussians themselves don't have a single nuclear power station. This is still an agrarian country, with a mostly rural population. During the years of the Great Patriotic War,the German fascists destroyed 619 Belorussian villages together with their inhabitants. After Chernobyl, the country lost 485 villages and settlements... In the war, every fourth Belorussian died; today, every fifth Belorussian lives on contaminated land."

Relativizing the unique horrors of the Nazi occupation bymaking flimsy and hyperbolic comparisons to the Soviet record is a favored approach of the post-Soviet intelligentsia, but very few Russians (and Belorussians) buy into it because of its inherent selectiveness and dishonesty. And probably not so much because:

    "The powers that be behave themselves as if I don't exist. I don't get printed in the state publications, I am not allowed on the radio or TV, I am only published in the opposition media."

Published in the opposition media? No wonder she came back to live in Belarus in 2013, after a decade of sojourning about Europe where no media - that is, neither state nor opposition - seem to have cared about her writings.

Indeed, a perusal of her interviews and speeches (aggregated here and here), in particular their polemical and activist agenda, is actually the single biggest clue as to why she got her Nobel Prize. Far from creating any sort of literary polyphony, she comes off as a proficient recycler of 1970s-80s Soviet dissident stock of tropes about Russia that nobody there apart from a tiny self-styled intelligentsia in the capital cares the least about. In short, she is a marginally saner and much less entertaining version of the late Valeriya Novodvorskaya.

    "I recently returned from Moscow, having partaken of the May festivities there. For a whole week the air was filled with the rumbling of tanks and orchestras. I felt that I was not in Moscow, but in North Korea."

Hysterical Russophobia? Check.

    "One Italian restaurant owner advertised that Russians are not welcome at his establishment. This is a good metaphor. Today, the world once again begins to fear what is in that hole, that abyss, which combines in itself nuclear weapons, mad geopolitical ideas, and lack of respect for international law. I live with a sense of defeat."

One is tempted to wisecrack on whether she is describing the US here, but that will certainly not improve your chances of getting a Nobel.

    "We have to preserve this fragile peace established after the last war. We are talking about the Russian man, who in the past 200 years has spent 150 years of them at war. And never lived well. For him, human life is worthless, and his conception of greatness is not in the sense that people should live well, but that the state should be great and armed to the teeth with rockets. This gargantuan post-Soviet landscape, especially in Russia and Belarus, where the people were first lied to for 70 years, then looted for the next 20, has bred very aggressive people, who are very dangerous for the entire world."

I do so wonder why Russians and Belorussians aren't rushing to buy her books! It must be the little Putin in all of them...

    "Of course Russian TV corrupts you. What the Russian media says today - they simply have to be prosecuted for it. For what they say about Europe, about Donbass, about Ukrainians... But this isn't all. The problem is that people actually want to hear this. We can talk today about a collective Putin, because there is a Putin sitting in all Russians. The Red Empire has vanished, but its people have remained."

And, naturally, this people of vatniks and sovoks has to be dissolved, and another elected, as per Bertolt Brecht and the time-honored Russian liberal tradition of taking him so very literally.

The Nobel Prize is one of our world's equivalents of dragons and shadowbabies.

As an ethnic Ukrainian with Belarussian citizenship writing in the Russian language, whose output mainly seems to consist of poorly disguised political polemics, she is an ideal tool to project Western soft power into the Russian world. Not just Russia itself, but also Ukraine and Belarus, the latter of which - quite coincidentally, surely - is having its Presidential elections a mere several days after the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature. From this perspective, she is in fact a very good candidate.

With a Nobel under her belt, a formerly second rate journalist and polemicist will be able to pontificate on her favorite themes with the authority of a secular prophetress.

There is nothing to be done about this, since neither Russia nor any other non-Western power has the soft power or cultural autonomy to offer a credible alternative to the Nobel Prize. It does however confirm that, much like the Peace Prize, the Literature Prize can be definitively ticked off as having anything to do with real human accomplishment in that sphere and instead be seen for what it is: As just another tool of Western political influence.

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 #23
http://ericmargolis.com
October 10, 2015
FAR FAR OFF KAZAKHSTAN
By Eric Margolis
Eric S. Margolis is an award-winning, internationally syndicated columnist. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune the Los Angeles Times, Times of London, the Gulf Times, the Khaleej Times, Nation - Pakistan, Hurriyet, - Turkey, Sun Times Malaysia and other news sites in Asia.

ALMATY, KAZAKHSTAN - "We need a new name," a senior official in Kazakhstan  told me.  "People keep confusing us with all the other crazy "stans."  We are not like them.

Quite right.  Compared to neighboring Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan is an island of tranquility and quiet development.  

Kazakhstan is the world's 9th largest nation in size, some 2.7 million sq. kilometers, but has only a modest population of some 18 million people spread from the Caspian Sea in the west (from where Russia just launched missile strikes at Syria) to the border of China in the east.  To its north is Siberia and to the south, India and Pakistan.  Snow-capped mountains border the old capitol, Almaty, known in Soviet days as Alma-Ata.

The Kazakhs, unlike their neighbors,  have been fortunate to have good government.  Former senior Communist Party official Nursultan Nazarbeyev became leader of Kazakhstan in 1991 after the break-up of the Soviet Union and has ruled it ever since.

Interestingly, I recall when covering Moscow in 1990-91 that the widely admired Nazarbayev was called the best political leader of any Soviet republic and expected to succeed his friend, Mikhail Gorbachev. But the Union collapsed before Nazarbeyev could take charge.  Instead, he held on to the USSR for as long as possible, then became the last republic to leave and go independent.

Ever since, the wily Nazarbeyev, known as "the leader," has ruled his nation with a firm hand and wise head.  He has kept on good terms with Moscow and Washington and even his unruly neighbors.  Money from the nation's moderate oil reserves has gone into infrastructure development, education, modernization and the glitzy new-built capitol, Astana.

The leader routinely wins theatrical elections by more than 95%.  Unlike his neighboring rulers, he is actually quite popular among Kazakhs as a sort of national father figure.  He is equally popular among the nation's ethnic Russians, 20% of the population.

Russian remains the lingua franca of business. Kazakhs are happy to speak both languages.  I saw no evidence of linguistic or religious tensions.  The border with Russia barely exists as the two nations are much closer than, say, the US and Canada.

But like too many other strong rulers, the 75-year old Nazarbeyev has not allowed a new generation of leaders to grow up around him.  The youthful prime minister, Karim Massimov, is capable and popular, but lacks deep roots among the nation's tribal society or urban elite.  As Kazakhstan seeks large amounts of foreign investment the troublesome question remains, "what will happen after Nazarbeyev departs the scene?"  No one knows. This makes foreign investors very nervous.

Kazakhs can look south at Turkmenistan, long ruled by the late Sapurmurat Niyazov, one of my favorite nutty dictators, who had gold statues of him erected across the country and proclaimed him a demi-deity.  To war-torn Afghanistan.  To scary, US-backed Uzbekistan where political opponents are boiled to death. To tiny Kyrgyzstan, which has been rent by civil war for two decades. And to Iranian-speaking Tajikistan, the main opium and heroin corridor to the north.

The US, India, China and Russia all vie for influence in this vast Central Asian region where once the fabled  Silk Road ran from China to the Black Sea.
 
It's hard to believe that out of these endless kilometers of emptiness came the closest thing the world has ever seen to nuclear war: Genghis Khan and  the great Mongol invasions of the 13th century that extended from the Great Wall of China to Germany and Gaza.

Two tribes of the Kazakh steppe, the Cumans and Kipchaks, combined and joined the Mongol horde that terrified and ravaged Europe and the Muslim world.   Today, there is no overt sign of the nomads who terrified the globe. Today's Kazakhs are invariably kind, friendly and often charming as I found after days in a nomad camp in a yurt.  But they still have a hard core that makes them a formidable people.

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#24
Kremlin turns opinion over Syria with U.S.-style 'shock and awe' media blitz
By Andrew Osborn

MOSCOW, Oct 9 (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin and his circle have spent years criticising what they said was Washington's calamitous 2003 military intervention in Iraq and its pernicious habit of meddling in the Middle East.

But faced with marketing their own foray into the region for the first time since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan -- in Syria -- the Kremlin is borrowing U.S. government and broadcast tactics to replicate the media campaign that George W. Bush used to win American hearts and minds.

Be it in Chechnya, Georgia or Ukraine, the Russian military has traditionally been cagey about its campaigns. But in Syria, the Russian defence ministry has turned itself into a 24-hour news station, pumping out slick TV footage of cruise missile and air strikes complete with animated graphics.

With post 9/11 Afghanistan, Bush declared a war on terror. In Russia, Moscow's Syria intervention is being similarly sold. Only this time the enemy is Islamic State militants who the Kremlin says could come to Russia once done with Syria.

Weathering a worsening economic downturn and weary of hearing about the travails of Kremlin-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine, many Russians appear to be enjoying the show and buying into the Kremlin's message that its intervention is evidence of the country's military and diplomatic renaissance.

The propaganda push, which has even extended to a TV weather presenter describing the climatic conditions for air strikes, seems, from a Kremlin viewpoint, to be working so far.

Less than two weeks ago, just 14 percent of Russians said they backed direct military intervention in Syria. This week, a similar poll, by the same Levada pollster, showed that 72 percent had a broadly positive opinion of Russian air strikes.

"There was a sharp change (in opinion)," said Stepan Goncharov, of the Levada Center. "Before, the conflict was regarded as someone else's. But the media were able to present it in such a way that it came to be viewed as an essential intervention by Russia in the region."

As the first snow of the winter falls in Moscow, he said the Syria conflict was proving a helpful distraction for some Russians who did not want to spend their evenings thinking about rising prices, Western sanctions, and shrinking family budgets.

"Foreign policy is viewed as a spectacle here," said Goncharov. "People turn on the TV and what is important for them is a show. The attacks, the bombing, the shoot-ups are all elements of the show."

TV DOMINANT

Despite the Internet, TV news remains paramount in Russia with an estimated 90 percent of the population using it to follow current affairs. The three main Internet news aggregators also base their choice of stories on the TV news schedule, Goncharov said.

Since Sept. 30, when Russia first launched its air campaign in Syria, TV viewers have been treated to movie-like images of Russian jets bombing targets, to palls of smoke rising in their wake, and to Russian warships based in the Caspian Sea firing cruise missiles across Iran and Iraq to hit Syria.

"That we carried this out from the Caspian Sea at a distance of around 1,500 kilometres (932.06 miles), with high-precision weapons and hit all our targets, reflects of course the good preparation of our military," Putin told his defence minister, in images broadcast on the evening news on the same day as the Russian leader marked his 63rd birthday.

Under Putin, Russia has brought back the Soviet-era Red Square parades of military might and embarked upon an ambitious military modernisation programme. Images of Russian rockets and planes in action swell national pride and may even boost arms sales.

Peter Pomerantsev, author of "Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible", a book which looks at Kremlin propaganda techniques, said the TV campaign sent another message too.

"The message here is 'Look if we can launch missiles at Syria we can definitely crush any protests so don't even think about it,'" he told Reuters.

Using social media, the defence ministry has been swift to distribute its videos and images. The tone of its commentary, in press releases and in briefings, has been triumphant.

James Rodgers, a senior journalism lecturer at London's City University, said the Russians had watched how the U.S. government and media had presented Washington's Middle East wars and tried to follow suit.

"They are unquestionably trying to imitate it," Rodgers told Reuters, saying images of missiles being launched from the sea and cockpit videos were reminiscent of previous U.S. campaigns.

"It is a definite attempt to say to the United States that Russia has got a policy where it believes Washington does not and what's more we are going to borrow and adapt your media techniques to show that to the world."

Samuel Greene, the director of the Russia Institute at London's King's College, said the Russians were also borrowing U.S. rhetoric from the Iraq war to shore up the legitimacy of what they were doing.

"From the very beginning, this has been couched in language that is almost identical to the language that the United States used in justifying domestically its intervention in Iraq," said Greene.

SAVIOUR OF THE WORLD

Images of Russia projecting force so far beyond its borders while showcasing its military and technological prowess were, at least for now while everything seemed to be going to plan, giving Russians "a warm and fuzzy feeling," said Greene.

But if something went wrong, such as a Russian plane being downed, most analysts believe public opinion could sour.

Memories of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and the heavy price it exacted in blood and treasure remain strong and the same Levada poll which showed solid public support for air strikes also showed that almost half of those asked thought the Syria foray could turn into another Afghanistan.

Igor Yakovenko, a popular blogger and journalist who is critical of the Kremlin, points out important differences however between the U.S. campaign in Iraq and Russia's intervention in Syria.

"In Iraq, the Americans toppled a dictator, " he told Reuters. "In Syria, Russia is supporting a dictator."

A regular commentator on how the media operates in Russia, Yakovenko said the Kremlin had successfully used Syria, like other episodes before it, to fuel its preferred domestic narrative of Putin as the leader of the modern world.

"The main message being pushed here is that the United States took fright and could not achieve anything despite bombing Syria for years, that it got down on its knees to ask Putin to help, and he did and destroyed the terrorists," he said.

"The main idea here is of Russia as saviour of the world. First we saved the world from the Mongols, then from Napoleon, then from Hitler, and now from Islamic State."

 

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 #25
Business New Europe
www.bne.eu
October 12, 2015
The limits of the Russian 'patriotic mobilization'
By Mark Galeotti
Mark Galeotti is Professor of Global Affairs at the SPS Center for Global Affairs, New York University and Director of its Initiative for the Study of Emerging Threats. He writes the blog In Moscow's Shadows (http://inmoscowsshadows.wordpress.com/) and tweets as @MarkGaleotti.

Has Putin's Russia become a mobilization regime? A common assumption is that the Kremlin is becoming or has become dependent on a heady mix of paranoia, militarism and public spectacle, and war is a great way of supplying it. There is some truth in this, and certainly the Kremlin is pushing a nationalist line for all it is worth. However, we should not assume the Russians are wholly taken in by it, let alone that this means Putin needs to manufacture crisis after crisis to keep his action show topping the ratings.

The war will be televised

Of course, Moscow is making much of its latest adventure. However, the black and white cockpit camera footage of bombs hitting targets, the to-camera pieces shouted over the scream of jet engines, the shots of cruise missiles streaking from warship launchers, are all long-established staples of techno-war. They could as easily be drone footage from US operations in Afghanistan, or reportage from Balad Air Base in Iraq as American F-16s headed off for another mission. What modern war is not turned into a blockbuster, especially in the early days, before friction, fate, and the ingenuity of the perfidious enemy bring to an end illusions that it can be managed and choreographed?

Meanwhile, the cast of nationalist ideologues and propagandists continue to ply their trade, smoothly pivoting from Ukraine to the Middle East. Veteran writer Alexander Prokhanov - who first hit the big time in the 1980s with hearty accounts of Soviet heroism in Afghanistan - is now telling young Russians to stop watching TV game shows and undertake their own "personal mobilization" for a clash of civilizations. And when not noting the "ideal" conditions for bombing in its weather forecasts, television news is delivering a stream of accounts of successful missions and grateful Syrians.

However, there is a world beyond Perviy Kanal news and Rossiya 24, and one has to ask just to what extent ordinary Russians really feel mobilized or respond to such PR blitzes. According to a recent Levada Center poll, 72% of Russians are supportive of the air campaign against Islamic State, but that does not equate to any blanket approval of a wider military operation.

An earlier survey had found 69% opposing direct military action, and while a combination of wall-to-wall media coverage and the inevitable initial appeal of what seems a "nice, victorious little war" explains this apparent flip-flop, the underlying concerns are unlikely to go away. It is noteworthy how often the spectre of the Soviet war in Afghanistan - a "six month" and "limited" deployment that ended up lasting ten years and costing more than 15,000 Soviet lives - crops up even in the more supportive media.

Moderately quiet on the eastern front

Besides which, Russians are no more simplistic in their perspectives on the world than anyone else. They can be excited by the thought that their country is again shaping global events; some of them at least can enjoy the videogame pyrotechnics as jihadists and rebels are hammered by the might of the Russian military. But that does not mean they cannot keep that in context, that they want to see their boys coming home as "cargo 200" casualties. It also does not mean that they need to hold these feelings especially deeply, or indeed that they are not also savvy enough to know what responses are expected of them when surveyed.

For that matter, just how mobilized do Russians feel? Life has become harder - salaries have dropped in real terms for the last ten months - but most have adapted. Finland, for example, is suffering because the Russians who tended to come to shop now spend only two-thirds of what they did before the current crisis. But this is only in part because they are buying less overall, and in part reflects a shift to cheaper online suppliers instead of coming to Finland to buy in a bricks-and-mortar shop.

Meanwhile, Russians continue to live their lives largely in blissful ignorance that they are supposedly locked in economic and geopolitical conflict with the West. Airliners, trains and buses still shuttle back and forth across the notional front line, and while the numbers travelling abroad look set to fall by 40% this year, surveys show this is a product of the ruble's decline, not any disinclination to visit the outside world. On a personal level, Russians seem to respond more with sorrow than anger when discussing the crisis with Westerners.

More generally, much of the outside world's coverage of Russian hyper-patriotism comes from Moscow, a city admittedly festooned in St George's ribbons and wallpapered in nationalist billboards. But how universal is this? A trip to St Petersburg this summer, for example, revealed a city far less burdened by all the paraphernalia of mobilization. How far is it really the case that Moscow is the face of a Potemkin patriotism as much as anything else driven by an apparent eager to present its lords and masters - how many of the movers and shakers of today's Russia venture far outside the A107 ring road? - with what they want to see?

Neither master nor captive, but bit of both

Patriotic mobilization is used in a bid to distract Russians from their current troubles and delegitimize any efforts to pin blame on the Kremlin. In some cases, actively dissenting voices are persecuted as backsliders, even traitors, but this is the rarity, not the norm. Instead, it is rather that quieter voices of uncertainty and misgiving are drowned out by the official clamour.

For now, at least. Being 72% comfortable with the current arm's-length operation is one thing, especially when Putin reassures his people that the government has been able to fund it out of the military's existing budgets. However, this is based on consumption of an official narrative that presents the Syrian adventure as having three crucial virtues: as highly successful (hundreds of Islamic State "mercenaries" are fleeing the war zone, according to the official accounts); wholly safe for Russians; and well received everywhere but in the White house.

This will not last. If Moscow wants to change the ground truths of this war, it will take a lot more than 30 aircraft and some cruise missile strikes: brigades of combat troops, not a few "volunteers" and technical advisers will be required. In due course, there will be casualties, whether to accident or enemy action, and the risk of an upsurge in terrorism at home cannot be discounted considering that many North Caucasus cells have pledged their loyalty to Islamic State. And the operation is unlikely to win any long-term plaudits other than from Tehran and Baghdad, and is already complicating relations with Ankara, a potential regional ally.

So the shine will soon dull and if anything the Kremlin - as with Ukraine - may well find itself the hostage of its triumphalist propaganda. However, that does not mean that it will have to pick some new war with which to replace it. Given that the present patriotic mobilization is actually rather less powerful and pervasive than might seem at first glance, with Russians not quite so quick to be taken in, it also means, mercifully, that its failure is going to be less critical for the regime, and Putin is unlikely to feel an imminent need to pick another fight.

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 #26
Wall Street Journal
October 11, 2015
Analyzing Putin's Game
A transcript of the weekend's program on FOX News Channel. (excerpt with Garry Kasparov)

Gigot: Welcome to "The Journal Editorial Report." I'm Paul Gigot.

Russia dramatically escalated its military campaign in Syria this week, firing long-range cruise missiles from warships in the Caspian Sea to support a land offensive by the regime of Bashar Assad. The missile launches follow two incursions into Turkish airspace by Russian jets and come as Vladimir Putin says he's ready to restart diplomatic negotiations over Syria's future, claiming Wednesday that the conflict must end with a, quote, "political solution."

Joining us, Garry Kasparov, former world chess champion, who is chairman of the Human Rights Foundation and author of the forthcoming book "Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped."

So, Garry Kasparov, welcome back to the program.

Kasparov: Thanks for inviting me.

Gigot: Great to have you here. What do you think Putin is trying to achieve in Syria?

Kasparov: It's global plan to sort of destroy the world order and the stability, because dictator always benefits from chaos. The economy in Russia is not in a good shape and Putin knows it will not get better. He has to provide a legitimate reason-the Russian public-why he's staying in power so many years and is planning to stay there forever. And of course, for an aggression, it becomes the main-

Gigot: It's domestic purposes?

Kasparov: Yes, for dictators like Putin-foreign policy is an extension of his domestic campaign.

Gigot: And he says we're running against these foreign enemies, principally the United States?

Kasparov: Oh, absolutely. The U.S. is a great state, not only for Iran and Russians, it's the No. 1 enemy. But in general, this is a free world. This is the values, the free market, the democracy. Those are the values that must be rejected by Russia because Russia, according to Putin's propaganda, is the fortress of good surrounded by the sort of evil empire.

Gigot: We see the domestic purpose. You mentioned a global plan. Where does Syria fit into that global plan?

Kasparov: After his advance in Ukraine stalled, and I thought that it would be too expensive for Putin to continue his assault, because too many body bags-

Gigot: Wait a minute, many people thought he was going-smart people thought he was going to accelerate that campaign in Ukraine in the summer and he didn't. You're saying that because-

Kasparov: Price too high-

Gigot: Too high?

Kasparov: Ukraine proved to be much tougher than he expected. He thought ethnic Russians in southeast Ukraine would embrace Russian gangs.

Gigot: They haven't?

Kasparov: No. Most of them subscribe to Ukraine army and what we saw in east Ukraine was more or less a civil war between pro-European Russians that made the majority between the army and Putin force. So too much for Putin to push forward.

Gigot: Open up another front in Syria.

Kasparov: I thought about the south, Georgia, but Putin actually went through the south. And I have to say that it was a good move, because here-look for a spot on the map that was a vacuum and also with more opportunities to create chaos and affect the reputation of the United States and bring it further down. And also, we can use, because one of the side effects of Putin's attacks in Syria and his support for Bashar al Assad, of his regime, is a wave of refugees. There are hundreds of thousands, now potentially millions, of refugees fleeing into Europe.

Gigot: He's putting pressure on Europe?

Kasparov: Yes, on Europe

Gigot: What happens in Europe?

Kasparov: With more refugees there, you can see the ultra-right-wing nationalist parties gaining ground, and they are all allies of Vladimir Putin and eventually, when in March of 2016 the EU has to decide on sort of sanctions, whether to prolong them or to leave them, Putin expects the allies in Europe will help him to get rid of sanctions.

Gigot: He'll whisper and say: Look-to Europe-I'll help you here with the refugee flow. You just have to do one thing here, lift those things.

Kasparov: Exactly. Absolutely. Also, it's an important message that if you stick with me, Putin's message: I'm with you, America betrays all the allies and look at what I do, I don't put-even with my army, because you were my friend and I'll not let you down.

Gigot: What does he get-and is doing this, forming an alliance, not only with Syria but Iran.

Kasparov: That was there forever.

Gigot: It's been there for a long time. But what does he get out of it now?

Kasparov: Again, it's very important that it boosts the international credentials. He looks strong. That's why it helps him to win battles elsewhere. But also there's still hope that Russian presence there and combined assault with Russian, Iranians, Assad's forces could create sort of a major war in the Middle East. Because for Putin to influence oil prices, which are vital for-

Gigot: He wants high oil prices.

Kasparov: Absolutely. He must put oil prices up, because with $50 a barrel, maybe for two years, but Russian economy will go bankrupt.

Gigot: But isn't he also taking a risk? He's aligning with the Shiites-Iranians-and the Alawites in Syria. He's picking a fight with the Sunnis in the rest of the Middle East. Isn't it possible he could create more jihad inside Russia?

Kasparov: Absolutely. But that's-we should not make one mistake by judging Putin's actions. Dictators-strong, successful dictators-they do not play games. It's all about survival. Putin thinks one or maximum two moves ahead. I have to survive today. I have to win this battle. We'll see what happens the next day.

That's why he needs instability, because in the situation in which unstable, without rules, so he always dominates the game because he doesn't have to go to the Congress, the parliament; he doesn't care about public opinions. He has an advantage of moving swiftly.

Gigot: Quickly here, 16 or 15 months left in the Obama administration, what do you think Putin's next move is to take advantage of the weakness perceived in the U.S. president?

Kasparov: Unfortunately, everybody knows this time frame. And I think Putin, the Iranians, they all will try to gain maximum ground as long as Obama is in office.

Gigot: What are you worried about? Where?

Kasparov: They know the next administration will be very different, and they know they have to gain as much as they can now to negotiate or to fight from the position of strength.

Gigot: Elsewhere in Europe, or elsewhere in the Middle East?

Kasparov: I think he'll come back to Ukraine. If oil goes down to $20, I would not be surprised if he cross into NATO borders in Estonia, Latvia. But I would watch another destination. Look at Putin's preferences-oil, deep water ports, chaos, instability, Benghazi. That's another possible-

Gigot: In Libya, which is a big oil exporter.

Kasparov: But also refugees go to Europe. The way Putin thinks, I think Benghazi is probably one of the spots on the map that is just bringing his attention.

Gigot: All right, Garry Kasparov. Thanks so much for being here, Garry Kasparov.

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 #27
CNSNews.com
October 12, 2015
In '60 Minutes' Interview, Obama Muddles Facts on Ukraine
By Patrick Goodenough

(CNSNews.com) - Defending himself against accusations that Russian President Vladimir Putin is challenging American leadership, President Obama erroneously told CBS's "60 Minutes" that when he took office Ukraine was ruled by a Putin "stooge."

Questioning the premise that Putin's foreign policy was succeeding, Obama cited the situations in Ukraine and Syria.

"When I came into office, Ukraine was governed by a corrupt ruler who was a stooge of Mr. Putin," he told interviewer Steve Kroft. "Syria was Russia's only ally in the region."

Today, Putin is no longer able to count on those allies' support, Obama continued, adding that the Russian leader instead was having to deploy his military "just to barely hold together by a thread his sole ally" - Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The implication was that having lost one ally and at risk of losing another, Putin's international position had in fact been weakened during the Obama administration, rather than the opposite as many Obama critics contend.

The president was incorrect, however, in his citing of the situation in Ukraine when he entered the White House.

The Putin-backed "stooge" he referred to, Viktor Yanukovich, only became president in Kiev in February 2010, more than a year after Obama's own inauguration.

When Obama became president, his counterpart in Ukraine was not Yanukovich but Viktor Yushchenko, a pro-Western leader who, during his five years at the helm, had angered the Kremlin by seeking European Union and NATO membership.

(The Russian-backed Yanukovich had sought the presidency in 2004, but amid accusations of vote-rigging that bid was foiled by the "Orange Revolution," which brought Yushchenko to power instead.)

Yushchenko's policies were a major challenge to Moscow, which fretted about losing influence over a strategically-located country which, after Russia itself, was the biggest of the Soviet Union successor states.

Ukraine's Crimea region was home to Russia's Black Sea Fleet, based at the Soviet-era Sevastopol naval base under a long-term lease. Yushchenko's call for Russian ships and personnel to leave when the lease expired in 2017 was another serious concern for the Kremlin.

Looking to Washington for support, Yushchenko found it from the Bush administration. President Bush visited Kiev in 2008, en route to a NATO summit where the U.S. backed membership plans for both Ukraine and Georgia. (In the end the issue was shelved, because some European NATO members were loath to antagonize Russia.)

The last year of Yushchenko's presidency overlapped with the first year of Obama's. During that period - from Jan. 2009 to February 2010 - Obama traveled to Europe six times, but did not visit Ukraine.

At the time, the new administration in Washington was pursuing a "reset" in relations with Moscow, prompting prominent figures in eastern and central Europe to express concern that Obama's attempts to improved ties could result in the U.S. making "the wrong concessions to Russia."

Vice President Joe Biden did visit Ukraine and Georgia in July 2009, and reiterated U.S. support for their NATO aspirations.

Campaigning for Ukraine's presidential election in early 2010, Putin ally Yanukovich pledged to return Kiev to Moscow's fold. After he won - an outcome viewed as a significant victory for Putin - he shelved Ukraine's NATO application process and extended the Crimea lease for the Black Sea Fleet for at least another 25 years.

Yanukovich remained in power until February 2014, when he fled Kiev amid huge anti-government protests and sought shelter in Russia.  Moscow backed an armed separatist movement in eastern Ukraine, and after a referendum not recognized by the West, annexed Crimea.

Russia's intervention prompted U.S. and E.U. sanctions. But the situation in Ukraine is unresolved and, despite the West's refusal to recognize it, Crimea remains part of the Russian Federation.

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 #28
CBSNews.com
October 11, 2015
60 Minutes
Steve Kroft questions President Obama. (excerpt re Russia)

teve Kroft: One of the key players now is Russia.

President Barack Obama: Yeah.

Steve Kroft: A year ago when we did this interview, there was some saber-rattling between the United States and Russia on the Ukrainian border. Now it's also going on in Syria. You said a year ago that the United States-- America leads. We're the indispensible nation. Mr. Putin seems to be challenging that leadership.

President Barack Obama: In what way? Let-- let's think about this-- let-- let--

Steve Kroft: Well, he's moved troops into Syria, for one. He's got people on the ground. Two, the Russians are conducting military operations in the Middle East for the first time since World War II--

President Barack Obama: So that's--

Steve Kroft: --bombing the people-- that we are supporting.

President Barack Obama: So that's leading, Steve? Let me ask you this question. When I came into office, Ukraine was governed by a corrupt ruler who was a stooge of Mr. Putin. Syria was Russia's only ally in the region. And today, rather than being able to count on their support and maintain the base they had in Syria, which they've had for a long time, Mr. Putin now is devoting his own troops, his own military, just to barely hold together by a thread his sole ally. And in Ukraine--

Steve Kroft: He's challenging your leadership, Mr. President. He's challenging your leadership--

President Barack Obama: Well Steve, I got to tell you, if you think that running your economy into the ground and having to send troops in in order to prop up your only ally is leadership, then we've got a different definition of leadership. My definition of leadership would be leading on climate change, an international accord that potentially we'll get in Paris. My definition of leadership is mobilizing the entire world community to make sure that Iran doesn't get a nuclear weapon. And with respect to the Middle East, we've got a 60-country coalition that isn't suddenly lining up around Russia's strategy. To the contrary, they are arguing that, in fact, that strategy will not work.

Steve Kroft: My point is-- was not that he was leading, my point is that he was challenging your leadership. And he has very much involved himself in the situation. Can you imagine anything happening in Syria of any significance at all without the Russians now being involved in it and having a part of it?

President Barack Obama: But that was true before. Keep in mind that for the last five years, the Russians have provided arms, provided financing, as have the Iranians, as has Hezbollah.

Steve Kroft: But they haven't been bombing and they haven't had troops on the ground--

President Barack Obama: And the fact that they had to do this is not an indication of strength, it's an indication that their strategy did not work.

Steve Kroft: You don't think--

President Barack Obama: You don't think that Mr. Putin would've preferred having Mr. Assad be able to solve this problem without him having to send a bunch of pilots and money that they don't have?

Steve Kroft: Did you know he was going to do all this when you met with him in New York?

President Barack Obama: Well, we had seen-- we had pretty good intelligence. We watch--

Steve Kroft: So you knew he was planning to do it.

President Barack Obama: We knew that he was planning to provide the military assistance that Assad was needing because they were nervous about a potential imminent collapse of the regime.

Steve Kroft: You say he's doing this out of weakness. There is a perception in the Middle East among our adversaries, certainly and even among some of our allies that the United States is in retreat, that we pulled our troops out of Iraq and ISIS has moved in and taken over much of that territory. The situation in Afghanistan is very precarious and the Taliban is on the march again. And ISIS controls a large part of Syria.

President Barack Obama: I think it's fair to say, Steve, that if--

Steve Kroft: It's-- they-- let me just finish the thought. They say your--

President Barack Obama: You're--

Steve Kroft: --they say you're projecting a weakness, not a strength--

President Barack Obama: --you're saying "they," but you're not citing too many folks. But here--

Steve Kroft: No, I'll cite-- I'll cite if you want me, too.

President Barack Obama: --here-- yes. Here--

Steve Kroft: I'd say the Saudis. I'd say the Israelis. I'd say a lot of our friends in the Middle East. I'd say everybody in the Republican party. Well, you want me to keep going?

President Barack Obama: Yeah. The-- the-- if you are-- if you're citing the Republican party, I think it's fair to say that there is nothing I've done right over the last seven and a half years. And I think that's right. It-- and-- I also think what is true is that these are the same folks who were making an argument for us to go into Iraq and who, in some cases, still have difficulty acknowledging that it was a mistake. And Steve, I guarantee you that there are factions inside of the Middle East, and I guess factions inside the Republican party who think that we should send endless numbers of troops into the Middle East, that the only measure of strength is us sending back several hundred thousand troops, that we are going to impose a peace, police the region, and-- that the fact that we might have more deaths of U.S. troops, thousands of troops killed, thousands of troops injured, spend another trillion dollars, they would have no problem with that. There are people who would like to see us do that. And unless we do that, they'll suggest we're in retreat.

Steve Kroft: They'll say you're throwing in the towel--

President Barack Obama: No. Steve, we have an enormous presence in the Middle East. We have bases and we have aircraft carriers. And our pilots are flying through those skies. And we are currently supporting Iraq as it tries to continue to build up its forces. But the problem that I think a lot of these critics never answered is what's in the interest of the United States of America and at what point do we say that, "Here are the things we can do well to protect America. But here are the things that we also have to do in order to make sure that America leads and America is strong and stays number one." And if in fact the only measure is for us to send another 100,000 or 200,000 troops into Syria or back into Iraq, or perhaps into Libya, or perhaps into Yemen, and our goal somehow is that we are now going to be, not just the police, but the governors of this region. That would be a bad strategy Steve. And I think that if we make that mistake again, then shame on us.

Steve Kroft: Do you think the world's a safer place?

President Barack Obama: America is a safer place. I think that there are places, obviously, like Syria that are not safer than when I came into office. But, in terms of us protecting ourselves against terrorism, in terms of us making sure that we are strengthening our alliances, in terms of our reputation around the world, absolutely we're stronger.

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 #29
Washington Post
October 12, 2015
Putin's model of success
Chechnya foreshadows his Syria policy.
By Jackson Diehl
Deputy editorial page editor  

Western officials who pronounce themselves puzzled about Vladi­mir Putin's intentions in Syria are missing some big clues. There is a clear model for the campaign Russia is pursuing on behalf of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, a legacy that is Putin's pride: Chechnya.

The Muslim republic in the North Caucasus and the decade-long war that Putin launched there in September 1999 have mostly been forgotten by the outside world since the dictator installed there by Putin, Ramzan Kadyrov, consolidated control in the late 2000s. But the Kremlin regards it as a "good, unique example in history of [the] combat of terrorism," as Dmitry Medvedev, Putin's prime minister, put it. Chechnya, Medvedev said last year, is "one of the business cards of Russia."

What are the components of this winning formula? First, define all opposition to the prevailing regime as terrorist, indistinguishable from the most extreme jihadists. That enables a fundamental political aim: to eliminate alternatives. In Syria today, moderate and secular opposition forces arguably are getting harder to find. That wasn't the case in Chechnya in 1999. The country's nationalist president, Aslan Maskhadov, had won a democratic election, defeating an Islamist opponent by 59 to 23 percent. His predecessor, Dzhokhar Dudayev, was so secularized that he was unaware how many times a day Muslims pray.

Russia killed them both, along with every other moderate Chechen leader it could find, both at home and abroad. One was murdered in Vienna; another in Dubai. When Western leaders pressed Putin to negotiate with Maskhadov and other secular moderates, he invariably responded angrily. "Would you invite Osama bin Laden to the White House...and let him dictate what he wants?" he demanded of one group of Western visitors.

It should be no surprise that Russia's first Syria bombings have been aimed at the remnants of the moderate opposition. It's not just that they are backed by the United States; they represent a viable alternative to the Assad regime, and so, under Chechnya rules, must be eliminated. "He doesn't distinguish between [the Islamic State] and a moderate Sunni opposition that wants to see Mr. Assad go," President Obama said after meeting Putin at the United Nations. "From their perspective, they're all terrorists."

The first stages of the Russian military campaign in northern Syria have followed a familiar pattern. Heavy bombing and shelling of civilian areas preceded scorched-earth sweeps, just as in Chechnya. According to a report on Chechnya by the International Crisis Group, "war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by [Russian] troops" included "indiscriminate shelling and bombing, secret prisons, enforced disappearances, mass graves and death squads." One common tactic, the report said, was "taking insurgents' relatives as hostages, subjecting them to torture or summary execution and burning their homes."

In short, Assad's forces and their Lebanese and Iranian allies may have to step up their already-notorious brutality to match Putin's tactics in Chechnya. But they may have expert help: Kadyrov has asked Putin to send his 20,000-member personal army, known as the "kadyrovtsy," to Syria. The state propaganda outlet Russia Today quoted him as saying he wanted "to go there and participate in special operations."

Kadyrov and his relationship with Putin offer another lesson to those wondering whether Putin is prepared to dispose of Assad - a prospect that Obama has repeatedly bet on. The Chechen strongman is, if anything, more sinister than the soft-spoken Assad; Kadyrov is known to do his own killing and torturing on occasion. He has solidified a cult of personality in Chechnya, extorts tribute from every business and citizen, and brazenly orders hits on his critics, from journalists and human rights activists to Russian politicians. Many believe him responsible for the murder of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, gunned down near Red Square last winter.

Putin's response has been to offer Kadyrov not just tolerance but full protection. The Crisis Group reports that senior Russian security officials tried to undermine the Chechen by arresting his gunmen for the Nemtsov murder. Putin rebuffed them, awarding Kadyrov a medal immediately after the hit. "Unless President Putin's reputation is seriously damaged by his protégé, the rules of the game are unlikely to change," concluded the report. The same rules will apply to Assad.

Obama's principal response to Putin's new offensive has been to predict that the result will be "a quagmire." But Putin has heard that before. For years Western leaders warned him that the war in Chechnya was unwinnable, that the only solution was political. Putin nevertheless persisted through a decade and more of bloody fighting that cost Russia at least 6,000 military casualties and Chechnya uncounted tens of thousands. The result was the pacification he now trumpets as a "calling card." Don't expect him to give up anytime soon on a similar result in Syria.

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 #30
October 8, 2015
Has Russia Gone Rogue?
Prepared statement by
Stephen Sestanovich, George F. Kennan Senior Fellow for Russian and Eurasian Studies Council on Foreign Relations
Before the Committee on Armed Services
United States Senate
Hearing on Russian Strategy and Military Operation

Chairman McCain, Senator Reed, Members of the Committee:

Thank you for the opportunity to join your discussion today on Russian policy in Europe and the Middle East, especially actions taken by Russian military units in Syria in the last few days. These Russian steps are not only unprecedented in the post-Cold War era, they have few antecedents in the Cold War itself. They call for careful analysis and an equally careful policy response.

Members of this committee surely remember how General Joe Dunford, the new JCS Chairman, described Russian policy in his confirmation testimony. "Alarming," he called it, and I completely agree. I don't, however, agree with the other thing General Dunford said. He described Russia as an "existential threat" to the United States.

Let me explain why I disagree.

First, in using this language we mislead ourselves. No matter how alarmed we are by Russia's current behavior, we use the term "existential threat" only because of its large strategic nuclear arsenal. Its many nuclear weapon are a potential threat whether our relations with Russia are good or bad, whether Russian behavior is reckless or wise. Russia has acted recklessly of late, but that has not really increased the "existential threat" General Dunford spoke of.

Second, this language also misleads the Russians. It feeds a public mood in Russia that borders on national hysteria. These days senior Russian officials often say things about the United States that are bizarre and incomprehensible. Unfortunately, hearing that we see Russia as an "existential threat"-pretty extreme language, after all-tells many Russians that our countries are on a collision course to war. Worse, it is understood by some to mean that America's leaders are preparing for this future conflict. I urge the members of this Committee to take a different approach-to challenge responsible Russians to see how strange their country's policy looks to the outside world, not to make ourselves seem equally strange.

Now, a few words about Russian policy itself. As I have said, it is both alarming and strange. We need to appreciate just how alarming it is, but we should not think it comes out of nowhere.

First, Russian actions in the Middle East reflect the doubling (and more) of their defense budget in the past 10 years. This program of modernization is still unfolding; the biggest procurement projects are ahead. As Russia's capabilities have increased, so has its anti-Western rhetoric. The official military doctrine adopted late last year identifies both NATO and the United States as threats to Russia.

Second, Russian actions reflect the new nationalism of Russian public opinion. The seizure of Crimea and continuing attempts to fragment eastern Ukraine have given this nationalist mood an angrier, more embattled tone. Russian decision-makers surely feel they can count on popular support for more assertive displays of national power, but they cannot be any surer of this than we can. There are in fact reasons to believe that Russian leaders worry about operations that might bring casualties down the road. (How else to explain the steadfast lying about the presence of Russian military personnel in Ukraine or the claim that in Syria only "volunteers" will take part in ground operations?)

Third, Russia's actions are a response, as President Obama has noted, to the weakness of the Assad regime in Syria, Russia's oldest (and now only) real ally in the region. As President Putin has made clear in Ukraine, he is prepared to make a significant military commitment to save embattled clients, no matter how shaky and illegitimate their position. But Putin acts this way in part because he thinks circumstances allow it. In Syria, several years of policy confusion by the United States and Europe have encouraged him. Had the United States imposed a no-fly zone in Syria three years ago, there would be no Russian intervention today.

Fourth, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter may well be right that Russian policy is "doomed to fail." But even in the course of failing it may do a great deal of damage, both in Syria and beyond. It should therefore be a goal of the United States and its allies to limit Russia's intervention. Continued confusion- including calls for Russia to focus its actions on defeating ISIS-will not achieve this aim.

Fifth, anyone responsible for the national security of the United States-and I certainly include the members of this Committee-should worry about where Russia's reckless behavior will lead next. We should not by any means conclude that we face an endless, never-cresting wave of activism. If anything, what Putin is doing now in Syria probably reduces the risk of near-term military provocations in Europe, especially against our NATO allies. (If I were a Baltic defense minister, I'd be sleeping slightly better these days.) But we have to remember that most of us have been wrong in anticipating Russian actions of the past couple of years. Just when we thought Putin had finally realized that he had acted foolishly, he acted even more foolishly. Today the ingredients of some future confrontation may already be coming together. After what we've seen of Russian behavior, we can't afford to be unprepared.

Mr. Chairman, let me close as I began-by urging realism about the problems Russian policy creates without making those problems worse than they have to be. Many Russians understand that President Putin is damaging his own country's security as well as others. They should hear from us-and from you. They should understand that the United States will protect itself, its allies, and its interests. They should also understand that there can be a place for them in this effort if they want it.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I look forward to our discussion.

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 #31
Salon.com
October 7, 2015
"Putin is the only major leader to utter a few simple truths about the role of the United States in the world today"
Perry Anderson on foreign policy: America's problem is it's a global hegemon without global ideology legitimacy
By Patrick L. Smith
Patrick Smith is Salon's foreign affairs columnist. A longtime correspondent abroad, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune and The New Yorker, he is also an essayist, critic and editor. His most recent books are "Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century" (Yale, 2013) and Somebody Else's Century: East and West in a Post-Western World (Pantheon, 2010). Follow him @thefloutist. His web site is patricklawrence.us.

Part two of our conversation with Perry Anderson. Find part one here:
http://www.salon.com/2015/09/23/how_america_built_its_empire_the_real_history_of_american_foreign_policy_that_the_media_wont_tell_you/]

Fifteen years ago, in the distant universe we now know as pre-September 11, Perry Anderson oversaw a renovation of New Left Review, the magazine he had long edited and brought to prominence from the mid-1960s onward. The Soviet Union was no more, life with "the sole superpower" had commenced. Things had to be rethought. "Capital has comprehensively beaten back all threats to its rule," Anderson wrote in that first issue of the redone journal. "No collective agency able to match the power of capital is yet on the horizon."

Those sentences-the whole essay, indeed-landed like a sledgehammer atop my admittedly damnable American optimism. It is part of the reason I leapt to the telephone when Verso, N.L.R.'s book imprint, published Anderson's "American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers" a few months ago. What did he think now?

"The striking fact remains that the neoliberal consensus-what the French call la pensée unique-has not so far really been shaken," Anderson says in the following interview, Part 2 of a long conversation conducted this past summer.

It would be easy enough to assume Anderson's vigilant dedication to realistic perspectives makes him an enemy of all optimism. But this is would be a mistake. It is better to recognize him as a rare kind of intellectual: A Briton, he has lived, lectured and written in Santa Monica since 1989. He sees with two sets of eyes-all four having clear, cold sight. Optimism or pessimism, as he explains below, are simply the wrong axis by which to judge the validity of one's views. "In the desert of neoliberalism, there are now plenty of wells of promise," he also said.

Before we got to optimism and its perils, Anderson offered an expansive exploration of American primacy, U.S.-Russian relations and specifically Vladimir Putin's exchanges with various American presidents, including the White House's current occupant. The timing is fortuitous, given Obama's encounter with the Russian leader at the U.N. last week. Anderson's remarks make a perfectly germane guide to the subtext.

Anderson gave me most of an afternoon. Of necessity, this concluding portion of the transcript has been edited down somewhat, the intent being to preserve all of Anderson's larger points.

Q: Let's turn to Russia, which you've just written about extensively in N.L.R. How do you judge Putin? In a conversation with me [published in Salon April 16 and April 23], Stephen Cohen [the noted Russianist] remarked that the current demonization of him doesn't amount to a policy. I agree. But what's the sin Putin commits?

Q: Putin has resisted the idea that Russia should become an imitation of the West, insisting on a historically rooted form of statist capitalism he holds more natural to the country. How important do you think this difference is? I've made something of his idea of "sovereign democracy"-your term-in my columns, because it seems a strike against neoliberal hegemony. At least it establishes a principle of self-determination within its encompassing system. That may be "alternative" enough for now. And this is his sin, in my view. But you seem to dismiss this side of Putin's outlook as a delusion.  

Politically, Stephen Cohen has been very courageous, and his interview with you is a good expression of that courage. I do, however, have a significant difference with his interpretation of the end of the Cold War, one which is not exclusive to him but is to be found quite widely. In this narrative, the Cold War ended because two far-sighted statesman, Gorbachev and Reagan, saw there was no point in continuing it and to the credit of both of them wound it up. The conflict ended, so to speak, by mutual agreement. Soon afterward, communism collapsed and the Soviet Union with it. That was an internal development, unrelated to the achievement of Gorbachev and Reagan.

I believe, on the other hand, that the Cold War was a true war and that the United States won it as decisively as the Pacific War. The victory wasn't military as such, though military pressure-an arms race that crippled growth in the USSR and with which, in the end, it couldn't keep up-was decisive in winning it. The victory was economic, political and ideological, and it was as complete as if the U.S. had conquered and occupied its adversary.

Russia under Yeltsin found itself in a position structurally analogous to Japan or West Germany after 1945, with two differences. On the one hand, there were no American troops, nor a MacArthur or Clay on the spot to administer the reconstruction of the country. On the other hand, also unlike Germany and Japan, you suddenly had an entire political class not only welcoming the West, but eager of its own accord to do America's bidding. Many wanted to be even more thoroughgoing capitalists than their models, and in practice were indeed often more radical, privatizing the country's wealth at a speed and on a scale that would not have been possible anywhere in the West. This was never popular among the Russian people, and to stay in power Yeltsin's regime required force and fraud, supported by the West. Such was the baseline for subsequent developments.

From Clinton onward, the underlying American attitude to Russia was that since these people have been defeated and are grateful to us for having defeated them, we are going to tell them what to do, and if they don't like it-some of the actions we take may go against the grain-they will have to swallow it. Victoria Nuland, then an aide to Clinton's henchman, Strobe Talbott, and today a Obama's assistant secretary for European affairs, could not have been more explicit. After telling Yeltsin's foreign minister that he should sign onto an impending American operation in Bosnia, she remarked to Talbott-as if the Russians were recalcitrant children-"They have to eat their spinach."

Obama is no different. He could publicly tell reporters, "Putin reminds me of a sulky teenager in the back of the classroom." Not an American eyebrow was raised, yet imagine if Putin had said something comparable about Obama: The sky would have fallen in. The casual condescension and contempt is palpable. This was the attitude that lay behind the expansion of NATO to Russia's borders. The elder Bush promised Gorbachev that NATO would not be extended into Eastern Europe? Who cares? It wasn't written down, we'll go ahead. Within a month of its expansion into Hungary comes the NATO attack on Yugoslavia. This from a supposedly defensive treaty organization.

Q: But you can't say the arrival of Putin made no difference to Russian attitudes toward America.

At first, there was no more than a modulation. The Yeltsin decade ended in a complete debacle, with the economic collapse of 1998. Putin came to power as his anointed successor. With a devaluation of the ruble [in September 1998] came a recovery, allowing Putin to restore order to the system he inherited, amid a widespread revulsion against the Yeltsin experience and a shift in the outlook of the Russian elites, to which Putin gave confident expression: Capitalism is fine, but we need our own version of it, in which the state is going to be playing a much more important part. Russia is still a great power, and we are going to become partners, not just dependents like Yeltsin, of the United States-genuine partners-and we'll take the initiative to show our sincerity about this.

So what did Putin do at the outset of his tenure? Without even being pressed, he made every gesture of good will he could. He shut down Moscow's outposts in Cuba. He closed its bases in Vietnam. When September 11th occurred, he was the first to call Bush offering every possible help and solidarity. Soon U.S. aircraft were overflying Russia for the attack on Afghanistan-later they got even landing rights in Russia-and U.S. bases were being set up in Central Asia. Putin thought: We're going to help the West and in return they will respect us, not like the Soviet Union, but like the Czarist empire of the pre-1914 world.

Q: Interesting. It's not hard to read these expectations into the sense of "betrayal" he expresses in some of his major speeches.

It was a fundamental miscalculation. In the eyes of American policy planners, Russia was a diminished country. Its population was smaller than that of Bangladesh, its industry was rusting, its nuclear arsenal dilapidated, its only real resources were gas and oil. We don't have to take it that seriously. China we do. But Russia, why should we bother? They are handing us most of what we want of their own accord anyway, giving a green light to virtually every resolution we require in the Security Council.

There came, however, a limit to Putin's accommodation, once the West started to penetrate the soft underbelly of Russian's "near abroad" around the Black Sea. Trouble started in Georgia [in 2008], when a regime feted in the West for the Rose Revolution, which brought it to power, launched an offensive against an enclave [South Ossetia, in August 2008] along its border with Russia, bringing down a sharp counter-attack from Moscow. Then came the Western operation in Libya, where Russia once again waved through a U.S. resolution at the U.N., this one authorizing the protection of civilians-Obama disavowing any intention of "regime change"-that became weeks of massive bombing, blatantly employed to achieve regime change, leaving Russia fooled and humiliated. Finally, the worm turned over Ukraine, when a popular uprising overthrew the incumbent oligarch and a government to Western liking-members picked by Victoria Nuland and the U.S. envoy in Kiev [Geoffrey Pyatt]-came to power.

Putin was bound to react to this. Most Russians regarded the separation of Ukraine from Russia in 1991 as a historically arbitrary, artificial affair. They weren't right in this, but from any point of view the two countries were closely interconnected. The Ukraine that emerged after independence was a weak successor state, with low levels of internal coherence and legitimacy, that soon became a classic power vacuum, drawing in Russian encroachment on one side and Euro-American on the other, each contending for superior influence. Since the fate of the country was of much more vital interest to Russia than to the West, but the West had much greater resources at its disposal than Russia, tensions were bound to arise.

The conflict that exploded in 2013-14 was not, however, inevitable. It was open to Obama and his European partners to say to Putin: "We realize you have a very large interest in this country and we will guarantee not extend NATO to it. You should not interfere so much in its domestic politics, because that invites us to do so. But strategically we can agree on a mutual hands-off, like the Austrian Neutrality Treaty [the Austrian Independence Treaty, signed by the Western allies and the Soviet Union in 1955]. Austria flourished after that. Why not Ukraine? The mentality of the hegemon precluded this.

On his side, Putin doesn't have any kind of coherent or sustainable policy in Ukraine, either. His first reaction to the toppling of the government in Kiev was to take Crimea as a reprisal. By the ordinary criteria of self-determination, this was scarcely an outrage, since if given a choice the majority of the population regarded themselves as Russians rather than Ukrainians, and all Russians regard the attachment of Crimea to the Ukraine by Khrushchev [in 1954] as a bureaucratic accident. But recovery of Crimea could not be ring-fenced, as irredentist risings broke out in Donbass [Ukraine's eastern industrial region]-initially encouraged and subsequently assisted, but never fully controlled, by Moscow.

The result is an inextricable disaster all round. The Ukrainian economy is in steep decline because it is highly dependent on Donbass-which is not viable on its own and is in an even worse condition-and Moscow is no position to bail it out. For the whole of Ukraine, the conflict has been catastrophe, while Russia now finds itself under siege from Western sanctions, and in severe economic crisis.

Q: Russia's response to what I've called Washington's "accelerated assertiveness" has been very activist. After the sanctions were imposed, Putin rolled out a remarkable agenda of state visits. Certain non-Western alliances seem to be forming or re-forming or intensifying : Moscow-Beijing, Moscow-Tehran, Moscow-Delhi, etc. Bilateral ties with Latin America have been developing. Will all this prove to be of some importance?

For 20 years after the Cold War, it is striking that the balancing process traditional realist theory would have expected to see failed to emerge. According to this, if one great power becomes too dominant, other powers will band together to form a counterbalance to it. But this is not what happened. If you looked at China, Russia, the E.U. or India-let alone Japan-in this period, in each case their relation to the U.S. was more important than relations among themselves. There was no formation of a set of balancers.

Rather the diplomatic scene resembled a hub-and-spokes system around Washington. In the Security Council, unanimity under American leadership was the rule, which was seldom infringed. That's beginning to change, though how far is still unclear. Paradoxically, however, it's not the most powerful of potential rivals to the United States, as realist theory would expect, that has broken ranks first. It's the weaker of the two former adversaries of the high Cold War-not China but Russia.

Q: The difference in U.S. relations with Russia and with China is night and day.

Yes. American policy planners have to treat China with a certain circumspection, which they don't feel necessary with Russia. But there is also a difference on the other side of the relationship, too. Traditionally, the Middle Kingdom was at the centre of its own universe, with lesser realms organized in a tributary system around it. Imperial China had no sense of operating within an inter-state system of the European type. So in modern times, China developed what would elsewhere be regarded as a foreign policy very late.

Russia, on the other hand, was a leading power on the European stage, with a sophisticated diplomacy and highly active foreign policy, from the 18th century onward. It has a much deeper memory as a major player in an inter-state system and a stronger sense of what kind of moves this typically involves. The country is accustomed to being treated as an imperial peer among peers. So its sudden demotion rankles.

In China there is a widespread narrative-official and popular-of past humiliation at the hands of foreign powers, contrasted with pride in the rise of the country today. In Russia, humiliation is not an experience of the past, but an acute sensation in the present. It's this combination-of a long diplomatic tradition as a great power, and sudden brusque mistreatment as a diminished power-that makes Russia the most outspoken political stumbling-block for Washington today, rather than the P.R.C.

Q: Going back to an earlier question, isn't this Russian resistance a highly welcome development?

Obviously, it's a good thing that there be some pushback against an overweening American ascendancy. Putin is the only major leader to utter a few simple truths about the role of the United States in the world today. Whatever his current domestic record, he's no fool in that sense. But so far as actual resistance to the hegemon goes, it remains quite limited. Russia is now suffering from very serious and damaging sanctions, affecting its financial system. So what does the regime do? It imposes retaliatory bans on Spanish tomatoes and French cheese-petty pin-pricks. Any serious counter-blows are off the table.

It was perfectly open to Moscow to say: "Sanctions on us? Then forget about our help with sanctions on Iran. Supply lines and landing rights for Afghanistan? No dice, until you lift the pressure." Nothing like this was or is prospect. Rather, there is still the hope that the Americans can be persuaded to be reasonable, and treat Russia on equal terms. The illusion is naïve: Does anyone believe Russian planes could land in the States en route to military operations in Latin America?

That said, it's clear there's a bit more consultation between Russia and China than in the past, though such balancing is still quite tentative and irresolute. In both countries, however, there is a public opinion critical of concessions made by each regime to the West. The two situations are not symmetrical. Until the crisis in the Ukraine, opinion polls showed that Putin enjoyed more support from pro-Western than anti-Western sections of the population. Since then, the government has played the nationalist card very heavily and crudely for internal consumption. In China the government also plays also it, more discreetly. There, unlike in Russia, popular nationalism can outrun the official version, especially among the young, occasioning clashes-anti-Japanese outbursts and the like-with it. That's a big change from the '90s, when there was a widespread infatuation among Chinese youth with everything American, taken as the gold standard of modern living.

Q: Still, you aren't claiming that we are stuck in a world of unquestioned U.S. primacy. I think there's been some advance beyond that.

There has. But discourses are one thing, deeds another. Chinese and Russian official statements insist that there can be no global hegemon, that the world of today is multipolar. You can also find voices in the foreign policy elite of the U.S. saying that, of course, we are entering this world and Americans must welcome it and adjust to it. There's a polite set of tropes along these lines. But they don't yet correspond to diplomatic realities. There, you can take the current American success in corralling all other powers into preserving Israel's nuclear monopoly in the Middle East for a good while yet-this is what sanctions on Iran, to which they humbly signed up, have achieved-as a benchmark.

Q: The second half of "American Foreign Policy" deals with our foreign policy thinkers, and it's rewarding for a number of reasons. It includes individual critiques and classifications of these people as representing different lines of thought. You write of their "fantastical constructions"-splendid phrase. How do you explain the fact that nothing of consequence or use emerges from this country's supposedly elevated strategists?

I don't entirely go along with your way of looking at this. I wouldn't have taken as much time and trouble going through the range of different thinkers I discuss if I thought that they were intellectually negligible. That's not my view. Of course, I'm critical of all of them in one way or another. But when I started studying their work, I was struck by the difference between the output of the foreign policy establishment and the best American domestic political science.

Somewhat earlier, I had to write a piece on internal U.S. politics from Roosevelt to Obama, looking at changes in the political sociology of the country. American political science is a sophisticated discipline when it discusses its own country, and I learned a lot from going through the literature it produces. But this remains quite narrow. It's technically competent, but most of it lacks much historical depth or comparative width. In that sense, it's less interesting than the body of writing on American grand strategy.

I suspect the reason for the difference comes down to the fact that the domestic political system is so immobile. The degree of variation in it is very small. You have this rigid constitution handed down from the 18th century and treated as a sacred text, and a frozen two-party system, in which rhetorical antagonism can be great but, if you look carefully at the record since the New Deal, the area of practical dispute is not that large. In a sense there is not a great deal to engage restless or imaginative minds.

On the other hand, the American empire is a totally different matter. There the whole world is your mental arena, and the empire is not uneventful at all. There's drama galore-surprises and crises of every sort, without end. At home there's a certain sense of powerlessness. Presidents can't do all that much, unless-a rarity-their party controls both houses of the legislature. Mostly, they just muddle through. But abroad the executive is unconstrained. Presidents can do virtually anything they want, other than ratify treaties or declare war-though now, of course, they avoid signing treaties and go to war without declaring it: You reach an "agreement" that is not a treaty, and you unleash "kinetic action" which is not a war; no need for permission from the Senate.

It is this freedom of action, across a vast stage, that attracts a different kind of mind to foreign policy, conceived as grand strategy. Not radical minds certainly, but analysts who have a broader and more historical outlook than most writers about domestic politics.

Q: But is this so special to America?

I think it is. If you cross the Atlantic, you realize that there is no equivalent discourse in Europe. You get books that are critical or laudatory of the American empire, but no grand strategy. The last two thinkers who could be accounted such were Raymond Aron in the '60s and Regis Débray in the '80s. Not by accident, two Frenchman. Since then, it's as if Europeans have nothing to say. Russia produces a line in geopolitics, but most of it's crude, chauvinist stuff. The Chinese are only beginning. The Japanese have never started. So this kind of thinking is virtually an American monopoly.

I have some respect for it. It needs to be taken seriously as a body of thought. It's true, of course, that it often yields the fantastical constructions you mention, as I make clear. But that doesn't mean it is all fantastical construction. The extravagant side emerges in assorted recipes for the future. The American imperial system confronts a quite new set of difficulties today. The United States still believes it is "the indispensable nation" and continues to be the global hegemon, but it no longer enjoys either the degree of material predominance or ideological legitimacy it once possessed. These are problems the current batch of strategists try to grapple with. They often come up with very improbable solutions.

Q: I'm going to turn to other things. Can I ask you about the essay entitled "Renewals," which you published in N.L.R. back in 2000, in the first issue of a new series of the journal ? I reread it before meeting you. To me and many others, it was a considerable occasion. "Capital has comprehensively beaten back all threats to its rule," you wrote. "No collective agency able to match the power of capital is yet on the horizon." These sentences alone were enough to bring one to a certain sobriety. What are your thoughts 15 years later?

I doubt whether anyone can write about politics without making mistakes of analysis or prediction. I certainly can't. But I have no reason to repent of anything I wrote in that piece. At the time, I said that neoliberalism had become the most successful ideology in world history. Many people objected to that, and it s true, of course, that as a system of economic beliefs it has nothing like the depth of the major world religions. But it had become more universal than any previous doctrine, because there was virtually no country where it wasn't taken as an ideological baseline. That was true even of countries like Russia and China, where state policy didn't, of course, in practice conform to its prescriptions. But the consensus of economists around it was overwhelming.
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Thatcher's slogan, TINA-"There is no alternative"-had become the common sense of the age. That was my judgment then.

Q: And since?

In 2008, the first really big crisis of the financialized and deregulated model of capitalism created during the Thatcher and Reagan years broke out. In some countries, the immediate effects were more drastic even than in the Great Depression. The underlying causes of the crisis have not been resolved. It broke out when the credit bubble that had been sustaining growth, albeit at an ever decreasing pace, across the advanced capitalist countries since the '70s finally burst. What has been remedy since? In the United States, in Japan, in the E.U. and now in China, too, "quantitative easing"-i.e., massive injections of easy money to prop up asset values, in yet another round of what led the crisis in the first place. The system is being given pain-killers, not remedies, and faces another bout of disorders right now. But the striking fact remains that the neoliberal consensus-what the French call la pensée unique-has not so far really been shaken. The same core doctrine is virtually as prevalent today as it was 15 years ago. In some cases-look at what the European Union is like now, in social terms a regime of tough disciplinarian austerity more stringent than anything in 2000, leave alone its original period-the neoliberal grip is tighter than ever before. As for less central versions of capitalism, think of the economic order over which the A.N.C.[the African National Congress, the governing party] is presiding in South Africa. Or take Brazil, which departed from orthodoxy for a dozen years. What's the headline news in the financial press from São Paulo today? Privatization of infrastructure and cuts in social spending. Neoliberalism is an ideological expression of capital unbound, no longer restrained by fear of communism, powerful trade unions, modest social-democratic reforms or peripheral nationalism. It has yet to be dislodged.

Q: One of the things that comes through in your work is a vigilant attitude against Polyanna views that exaggerate or idealize the short-term prospects for structural change. Though back in 2000 you also spoke with cautious respect-or was it irony?-of those who believe that "capitalism may eventually prove soluble in the waters of profounder kinds of equality, sustainability and self-determination." How would you describe your own outlook?

In that editorial, I remarked that when you're in an objectively weak position, especially after a defeat or a set of defeats, there's an instinctive temptation to look for silver linings or consolations to raise people's spirits. If you are a leader or an activist in a political movement, I think that's understandable and forgivable-perhaps virtually inevitable. But if you're an intellectual, I believe you have a duty to resist that and to try to state the facts as you see them.

Q; Well, let me put my question more pointedly. I once went around India for nine months and in my interviews I would say: "Sir, I'd like to end our conversation this way. Are you an optimist or a pessimist?" I had all kinds of answers, every one interesting. The best of them came from Shiv Visvanathan, a sociologist in Gandhinagar and one of Indian's more interesting minds. "You have to ask? It goes without saying I'm an optimist," he replied. "If a critic's not an optimist, why would he bother?" Optimism, thus, is implicit in all critique. What about you?

Hold on. Can one say optimism is implicit in all critique? There's a very powerful strain of Kulturkritik from the 19th century onward that is deeply pessimistic in outlook.

Q: Isn't there a subtext implicit in even pessimistic critiques that we could do better than this? Things could be otherwise? I tend to think there is this impulse at the bottom of every critical effort.

Wouldn't that virtually rule out the possibility of pessimism as such? On those grounds, nobody would be a pessimist. But if you look at the mainstream of Kulturkritik from the second half of the 19th century onward, you see that the form it typically took was a diagnosis of Western decadence, without remedy. This wasn't just a European phenomenon. You find the same thing in Henry Adams-history as entropy, humanity as decadence. It's quite possible to be extremely critical of the world and extremely pessimistic about it at the same time. Visions of decadence don't, of course, require any absolute pessimism-they can propose steps to salvation from it. In the second part of "American Policy and its Thinkers," there's an analysis of Brzezinski's later work, which excoriates the U.S. as a decadent society in classic Kulturkritik style, but also offers a program for reversing this fall.

Q: But where do you place yourself?

If you're on the left, I believe fortitude is a better value than either optimism or pessimism. It doesn't exclude either, in any given conjuncture. But since history is always capable of surprises, an a priori stance of either optimism or pessimism makes little sense-it's always liable to discomfiture.

I emphasized very strongly a moment ago the continued hegemony of neoliberalism as set of obligatory ideas about the only way any contemporary economy can be run. But though this orthodoxy has not yet been shaken, it's also true that new movements and media have arisen against it. These are movements of popular energy and incipiently movements of counter-ideas.

Over the past couple of years, New Left Review has been running a series entitled "New Masses/ New Media," which I recommend to you and to readers of Salon. Kicking it off is a survey by the great Swedish sociologist Göran Therborn of the prospects for resistance to the order of capital at a global level. There he lays out a commanding inventory of the different social groups and forces across the world that are either actual or potential sources of opposition to it. The series has since included detailed accounts of the huge social protests in Brazil at the time of the World Cup, the big clashes in Istanbul, the landmark demonstrations in Hong Kong, the rise of Podemos in Spain, with articles on water protests in Ireland, the Common Man's Party in India and more to come, alongside another set of pieces on new oppositional forms of expression, print and electronic, and proposals for democratic control of big data on the internet. The U.S. has been no laggard on either score, as Occupy Wall Street and periodicals such as Jacobin and n+1 are there to show.

In the desert of neoliberalism, there are now plenty of wells of promise. In taking the measure of this contemporary landscape, however, neither optimism nor pessimism are helpful guides. Needed, rather, is accurate calculation of the balance of forces in conflict, and the course of its changes.

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 #32
www.rt.com
October 10, 2015
How Churchill attempted to crack the 'riddle' of Russia
By Gabriel Gorodetsky
Gabriel Gorodetsky is Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and emeritus professor of history at Tel Aviv University. He has held visiting fellowships at St Antony's College, Oxford, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington DC, the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and the Rockefeller Bellagio Research Center. In 2010 he received an honorary doctorate from the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow. Among his books are Stafford Cripps' Mission to Moscow, 1940-1942 (1984), Russia between East and West: Russian Foreign Policy on the threshold of the 21st Century (2003), and Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia (1999).

From Gabriel Gorodetsky's The Maisky Diaries, Red Ambassador to the Court of St James's, 1932-1943.

After the signing of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, the Soviet ambassador to London Ivan Maisky had few friends who grasped Russia's motives. Churchill, as Maisky revealed in his diaries, published by Oxford historian Prof. Gabriel Gorodetsky, knew better.

Shortly after the outbreak of the war, Churchill, who had been a vociferous opponent of Chamberlain's appeasement policy, was appointed as the First Lord of the Admiralty. On 1 October, 1939, in one of his early broadcasts, he made the now famous reference to Russia: "I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma."

This sentence has since been often employed to describe Russia's sinister and incomprehensible policies. But Churchill did not stop there (as most historians do). He in fact cracked the riddle: "but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest. It cannot be in accordance with the interest of the safety of Russia that Germany should plant itself upon the shores of the Black Sea or that it should overrun the Balkan States and subjugate the Slavonic peoples of south Eastern Europe. That would be contrary to the historic life-interests of Russia."

Maisky, who since the signing of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact had become a pariah in London, his survival hanging by a thread, did not fail to see the chance of amending relations with Britain. He was determined to help Churchill find the key. He therefore was quick off the mark seeking a meeting with Churchill.

6 October 1939

Churchill's secretary called and asked me to come to see him at the Admiralty at 10pm. Not exactly the ordinary hour for receiving ambassadors in England, but the present situation is far from ordinary, and the man who invited me is also far from ordinary!

It's dark and misty tonight. The clouds are low and gloomy. It's pitch-dark on the streets. I reached Horse Parade [sic], where the Admiralty is located, with some difficulty. We had to stop the car frequently to check our bearings. We eventually arrived. The familiar square seemed quite unfamiliar. The Admiralty building rose darkly out of the swirling fog like a fairy tale fortress. Not a single light or human being in sight. I knocked and rang at the various doors and gates - silence. Were they all asleep in there? Or had this huge institution, which governed the movement of the British navy all over the globe, 24 hours a day, given up the ghost?... I was beginning to lose my patience. At last I saw a pale ray of light in the archway of the gates, and behind it there appeared a sleepy watchman. I explained my business. A few minutes later I was already sitting in the office of the First Lord of the Admiralty.

Churchill greeted me with a welcoming smile. The walls of his office are covered with a collection of the most varied maps of every corner of the world, thickly overlaid with sea routes. A lamp with a broad, dark shade hangs from the ceiling, giving a very pleasant soft light. Churchill nodded to the lamp and, pouring whisky and soda, said with satisfaction: "The lamp was here 25 years ago, when I was naval minister for the first time. Then it was removed. Now they've put it up again."

How very English!

Then Churchill led me over to a wide, folding door in the wall and opened it. In the deep niche I saw a map of Europe with old, faded small flags pinned onto it in various places.

"It's a map of the movements of the German navy in the last war. Every morning, on receiving the naval reconnaissance information, the flags were moved, meaning that we knew the location of each German ship at any given moment. I ordered this map 25 years ago. It's still in good condition. Now we will need it again. We just have to bring the flags up to date."

I looked at Churchill with a smile and said: "So, history repeats itself."

"Yes, it repeats itself, and I'd be only too happy to philosophize about the peculiar romance of my returning to this room after a quarter of a century, were it not for the devilish task at hand of destroying ships and human lives."

We returned to the present and I asked: "What do you think about Hitler's peace proposals?"

Churchill sprang to his feet and, quite abruptly, began pacing the room: "I've just looked them through and haven't had time to exchange views with my colleagues in the Cabinet. Personally, I find them absolutely unacceptable. These are the terms of a conqueror! But we are not yet conquered! No, no, we are not yet conquered!"

Churchill once again set about pacing the room in vexation.

"Some of my Conservative friends," he continued, "advise peace. They fear that Germany will turn Bolshevik during the war. But I'm all for war to the end. Hitler must be destroyed. Nazism must be crushed once and for all. Let Germany become Bolshevik. That doesn't scare me. Better communism than Nazism."

But all this was just an opening flourish. The main story which Churchill wanted to discuss with me so late at night was the state of Anglo-Soviet relations.

Churchill asked me how we define the present state of our relations. I repeated to him what I had told Halifax on 27 September. Churchill listened to me attentively and then spent nearly an hour relating to me the British Government's view of Anglo-Soviet relations. The essence of this view is as follows.

Anglo-Soviet relations have always been poisoned by the venom of mutual suspicion, today more than ever before. What are these suspicions? Britain suspects the USSR of having concluded a military alliance with Germany and that it will openly come out, one fine day, on Hitler's side against the Western powers.

Churchill himself does not believe this, but many (including some in government circles) do. This circumstance cannot but affect the general tone of Britain's attitude to the USSR. On the other hand, the USSR suspects Britain of pursuing a hostile policy against the USSR and of various machinations against it in the Baltic, Turkey, the Balkans and elsewhere. This condition cannot but affect the general tone of the Soviet attitude to Britain.

Churchill understands why our suspicions are especially acute today. The Anglo-Franco-Soviet Pact negotiations were conducted in a repulsive way (I know his view on this matter) and have left bad memories in Moscow's mind. But let the dead bury the dead. The present and the future are more important than the past. And the present and the future are precisely what Churchill wants to talk about.

His starting point is that the basic interests of Britain and the USSR do not collide anywhere. I know this to have been his view in the past, as it is in the present. It follows that there is no reason why our relations should be poor or unsatisfactory... We should not take too much to heart the criticism and indignation with which the Soviet-German non-aggression pact and the subsequent moves of the Soviet Government have been met in Britain. This was due to their unexpectedness. The initial shock, however, has now passed, and people are beginning to see things in a more accurate perspective.

The Baltic States. The Soviet Union is going to be master of the eastern part of the Baltic Sea. Is this good or bad from the point of view of British interests? It is good... In essence, the Soviet Government's latest actions in the Baltic correspond to British interests, for they diminish Hitler's potential Lebensraum. If the Baltic countries have to lose their independence, it is better for them to be brought into the Soviet state system rather than the German one...

We parted 'like friends'. Churchill asked me to keep in close touch and to turn to him without ceremony whenever the need arose. I'll keep this in mind...

Translated by Oliver Ready and Tatiana Sorokina

Read more extracts from Gabriel Gorodetsky's The Maisky Diaries, Red Ambassador to the Court of St James's, 1932-1943:
https://www.rt.com/op-edge/authors/ambassador-gorodetsky-maisky-ww2/

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