Johnson's Russia List
2015-#205
21 October 2015
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"We don't see things as they are, but as we are"

"Don't believe everything you think"

You see what you expect to see 

In this issue
 
#1
Moscow Times
October 21, 2015
West Has Lost the Right to Lecture Putin
By Mark Galeotti
Mark Galeotti is professor of global affairs at New York University.

While at home, President Vladimir Putin is the world-bestriding colossus, wise tsar and benevolent father of the nation, abroad he is once again facing a familiar vilification, as warmonger, kleptocrat and tyrant. Yes, corruption is deeply embedded in Russia's economic and political systems, and the Kremlin regards military force as an instrument of national interest. But the West needs to avoid simple and misleading stereotypes if it is to construct effective policies to deal with Russia, especially when it comes to its Syrian gambit.

Of course, Russia's involvement in Syria embarrassed above all Washington. So far Russia's air strikes have established Moscow's claims to be taken seriously as a global power, and done so in a way demonstrating not just military power but also ruthless will.

But Western complaints about Russian actions - above all Putin's - also reveal a dangerous hypocrisy.

"Russia has no mandate to be in Syria." However unpleasant, Bashar Assad's is still the internationally recognized government of Syria - with an embassy in Washington - and they invited Russian assistance. If anything it is Turkey, the U.S. and the other belligerents who actually have no mandate, and it would be a stretch to portray their actions as directly humanitarian.

To be sure, if the Assad regime fell it might be replaced by one less brutal and more legitimate. But then again, experiences of other military regime changes in North Africa and the Middle East suggest that the result could just as easily be chaos and extremist terror.

"The Russians are bombing the 'wrong' rebels." Apart from the fact that many of the "moderate rebels" touted as Syria's great hope are not that moderate, Moscow makes no bones about the fact that it is trying to preserve the Assad regime, one of its few allies. Islamic State forces are more heavily concentrated in the northeast of the country, the regime in the west and the south. No wonder most of the air strikes target the rebels posing a direct and immediate threat to Damascus.

"Moscow is acting 'dangerously,' potentially bringing Russian and Western jets into close proximity." Yes, there is a faint risk, especially as the Russians are more aggressive than Syrian pilots. For example, even if their incursions into Turkish airspace were indeed accidental, as they claimed, then they certainly must have been pretty close for such a mistake to happen. But given that U.S. and allied aircraft have less legal right to be in Syrian airspace, is the onus not on them to "deconflict"?

Of course the Russians are in Syria for the most self-interested of reasons, not to protect Syrian civilians, nor primarily an ally, but to distract a domestic audience from stalemate in the Donbass and force the West to deal with them. The Syrian regime is brutal to the point of evil, and just because the Islamic State may be worse, Putin has no serious moral justification.

But since when has self-interest been a novelty in geopolitics?

How does fueling a lengthy and vicious proxy war against both Assad and the Islamic State help ordinary Syrians, though, especially when so many of the West's allies in this campaign, from Turkey to Saudi Arabia, have serious human rights problems of their own?

This is not simple "whataboutism," that classic trick of deflecting criticism through raising the other side's real or alleged flaws. Rather it is to note that Washington is currently seeking to have its cake and eat it. It can choose to base its foreign policy on strict moral principles or geopolitical pragmatism.

At present, it seems happy to act pragmatically but think morally. Thus it genuinely considers Putin not simply an antagonist, but an immoral one.

This is dangerous and foolish. Just as Putin's Russia cannot simply be written off as a kleptocracy - roads are still being built, universities funded, and so forth, even while some plunder - so too it is not some uniquely aggressive "rogue state." Castigating it on moral grounds, without behaving in an unimpeachably moral way, is simply going to alienate Moscow, undermine Western credibility, and create a wholly false series of assumptions on which to base policy.

The uncomfortable truth is that in Syria, as in so many other ways, Putin is simply ruthlessly exploiting and expanding precedents already set by the West.


 
 #2
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
October 21, 2015
No common ground for Russia and U.S. on ISIS
Three weeks after Russia began bombing runs in Syria, American and Russian officials continue their disagreement about the goals of the campaign.
Ilya Krol, Yekaterina Sinelschikova, RBTH

On Sept. 30, Russia's air force began bombing targets in Syria. Since that day, Russian planes have made hundreds of sorties dropping bombs on  targets Russia's Defense Ministry maintains are ISIS-related. American officials have expressed doubts, however. Speaking to reporters on Oct. 13, Pentagon spokesman U.S. Army Col. Steve Warren called the Russian airstrikes "reckless and indiscriminate," adding that the U.S. believes "only a fraction" of Russian airstrikes have targeted ISIS.

The aims of Russia's mission in Syria are as big a question for the United States as its targets. "If anyone had a tiny amount of hope after Vladimir Putin's meeting with Barack Obama in New York that Russian-American relations would somehow improve, it is now safe to say that this has been erased," said Georgy Bovt, a political analyst and member of the Russian Council for Foreign and Defense Policy. According to Bovt, even on the issue of fighting ISIS, where it should be easy to find common ground, the U.S. and Russia have instead found ways to disagree.

At a U.N. conference on counterterrorism the same day that strikes began, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said "We have ... made clear that we would have grave concerns should Russia strike areas where ISIL and al Qaeda-affiliated targets are not operating. Strikes of that kind would question Russia's real intentions fighting ISIL or protecting the Assad regime."

Russia does not deny its support for Assad, but says that striking all anti-government groups is part of its strategy for stopping the momentum of the Islamic State. "Russia's goal is to reduce the threat of ISIS by supporting the war effort of the legitimate government of Syria," Nikita Mendkovich, an expert at the Russian Council on International Affairs, told RBTH.
 
Proxy war?

Speaking on CNN on Oct. 1, U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) called the actions in Syria a "proxy war" between the U.S. and Russia, with the sides in the conflict fighting with weapons provided by foreign partners as was done during the Cold War.

Russian experts say that there are Russian-made weapons being used by Syrian government forces, but this should come as no surprise considering that Syria has long been a major client of Russian arms manufacturers.

"The Russian technology there is mostly the legacy of the Soviet era," said Alexander Khramchikhin, deputy director of the Institute of Political and Military Analysis in Moscow. "This is what the Syrian army has had for many years."

And it's no secret that American military technology is being used by the opposition in Syria. "The Americans supply light weapons to the so-called moderate opposition. The problem is that in the end, some of it gets in the hands of ISIS," said Dmitry Kornev, editor in chief of web portal Military Russia.

Sergei Karaganov, chairman of Russia's Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, said that calling the conflict a proxy war based on what weapons were being used is "nonsense," considering that there are a myriad of groups fighting with a variety of weapons. "There are plenty of different weapons in Syria!" he exclaimed.

Keep calm and fight ISIS

Russian experts say that Russia and the U.S. should focus on their common goals in Syria, not their differences on how these goals should be fulfilled. "In the Syrian conflict, there are a lot of players. But we [Moscow and Washington] have one common aim - to destroy Islamic militarism," said Karaganov.

Political leaders, however, seem content to continue posturing. At the investment forum Russia Calling! on Oct. 13, Russian President Vladimir Putin said "At the military level, we asked them [the U.S.] to give us the information regarding the targets that they believe are 100 percent belonging to terrorists, and what we received as an answer was that they weren't going to do that," Putin said. "The first thing we hear right now is that they're not ready to cooperate with us and that we're attacking the wrong targets."

Three days later, at a press conference announcing a communication agreement between the U.S. and Russian militaries to avoid running into each other in Syria, President Barack Obama said, "we've arrived at an understanding and some channels for communication. Where we will continue to differ is in the basic set of principles and strategies we're pursuing inside of Syria."

How these differences in principles and strategies will affect the power of ISIS remains to be seen.

For the moment, according to Robert Legvold, professor emeritus of political science at Columbia University, "Syria is a four-dimensional civil war that we all are losing - except for ISIS."
 
 #3
The National Interest
October 21, 2015
Looking West from Russia: The Eurasianist Folly
Eurasianists who see Russia's soul in raiders from the eastern steppes have always led their nation to danger and decay. Progress and prosperity have come under leaders who looked West.
By Vladimir Lukin
Vladimir Lukin is a research professor at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow. He was Russia's ambassador to the United States in 1992-1994, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Supreme Soviet (1990-1992) and the State Duma (1994-2000), Deputy Chairman of the State Duma (2000-2004) and Commissioner for Human Rights in the Russian Federation (2004-2014).

KARL MARX once described a situation where the weapon of criticism gives way to criticism by weapon. It's a remark that captures the latest round of tensions between the West and Russia quite well. Are we witnessing a collision between two different systems of values-or one between two different interpretations of a common system of values?

If we are about to launch yet another "crusade" and our outlooks are fundamentally different, then the conflict admits of no solution other than that there can be just a more or less prolonged "peaceful coexistence" as a prelude to an eventual head-on collision. If Carthage is innately and essentially vicious, it must be destroyed. The question is who is Carthage and who is Rome. And that question is really not very difficult to answer: Rome survives. All the rest is a matter of tactics and methods. The possibility for maneuver and resourcefulness is locked within this narrow alley.

That is precisely what both Moscow's and Washington's approaches looked like throughout a greater part of the classical Cold War. The zero-sum game was played best in the limelight of ideological irreconcilability at the most acute moments of political confrontation (in Berlin in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Cuba in 1962, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Afghanistan in 1979-1989). Meanwhile, as the Soviet model continued to corrode, certain ideas pushed their way to the surface. First, they gained a niche for themselves within the domain of the official Marxist-Leninist ideology, then pushed the latter away and replaced it with values and concepts that were very unusual for that time.

A more or less similar process, naturally with certain allowances for the pluralistic nature of the Euro-Atlantic ideological universe, proceeded in the camp of the antagonists of the Soviet-Communist bloc. Very soon these processes brought into being the term "convergence," understood first and foremost as a mutual penetration and interweaving of values and principles underlying the socio-political systems of capitalism and socialism (as interpreted in the Soviet Union).

Inside one bloc, the free market economy began to be mentioned ever more frequently as the sole way of overcoming chronic economic problems (by no means canceling socialism but, on the contrary, making it stronger). In China and Vietnam, this ideological ploy, masking a fast-tracked transition to a fundamentally new mode of life, is still deployed by the authorities. In the meantime, the West suddenly remembered that the system of communist ideological formulas was a direct descendant of the great Western ideas that took shape in the era of the Renaissance. Much later, those ideas took root in Eastern Europe and Asia, where local radical fanatics adjusted the life's work of two bearded German thinkers to the practical needs of attaining, at last, the ultimate and resolute truth-first in their own haven, and then the world over.

The advent of perestroika, or "new political thinking," was a direct outcome of convergence. Moreover, it was a foreign-policy offshoot of that concept. Incidentally, all that graphically manifested itself in the heritage left to us by our outstanding contemporary, Andrei Sakharov. Many believe that the father of the "new political thinking" was Mikhail Gorbachev. Indeed, that phrase was one of the former Soviet president's hobbyhorses. But the roots of that outlook can be traced back to the 1970s, when a group of ambitious and talented people at the administrative staffs of the Soviet Communist Party's Central Committee, at the Foreign Ministry and at the Soviet Academy of Sciences' think tanks succeeded in their efforts to push through to the high-ranking officials the idea of a fundamentally new approach to European identity and security. That idea took the shape of the Helsinki Process. In the most general terms, Helsinki was a certain common understanding of the priorities and values of a future long-term pan-European sociopolitical development.

For nearly twenty years, these common values existed in some sort of clandestine form. At the turn of the 1990s, they were adopted officially by the heads of state and enshrined in the Paris Charter, which proclaimed a strategic goal of building a united Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok. But alongside this process, a movement in other conceptual directions started gaining momentum. It would be appropriate to mention the most significant of them-the concept of the split of Europe and the concept of Europe's dissolution.

A very large party of the Bourbon persuasion-"They had learned nothing and forgotten nothing," per Talleyrand's alleged quip-was campaigning for a split of Europe. By tradition, Europe had always had a strong Russophobic line of thought. The followers of this trend professed this emotional and intellectual negativism towards Russia mostly because Russia was a strong and vast country and for that sole reason immanently dangerous. In that sense, tsarist autarchy and Communist totalitarianism did not make much difference. Only such factors as strength and geopolitics mattered. Russia began to be liked only when, after December 1991, its traditional, historical image collapsed and the above-mentioned factors diminished into insignificance. It was in that period that a majority of the European public at large (including the Russophobic wing) eagerly recognized Russia's right to share common values with Europe-even though President Boris Yeltsin's use of "common values" in practice in the autumn of 1993 bred some very strong doubts among rather large groups of quite democratically-minded Russian society.

Yet most significant was the belief that the more smaller "Russias" that exist, the more easily they are recognized as being "democratic." This reminds me of a remark made by Fran�ois Mauriac: "I love Germany so much that I am glad there are two of them." In our case, the feeling of happiness would be directly proportional to the number of newly emerged states.

As Russia started showing signs of revival, debates over common values grew ever more vigorous. Those debates were tightly linked to day-to-day political realities and priorities, which became especially evident during the Yugoslav crisis.

In the meantime, the real discussion of pan-European values has proceeded and is still going on, not along the border between Russia and the rest of Europe but inside each individual country of Greater Europe. For instance, there is a discussion of the cultural and civilizational sources of Europeanism-it is worth recalling the fate of the European Constitution, which was dismissed because it was impossible to achieve consensus on inclusion of a provision about the leading role of Christianity in the formation of European identity.

Meanwhile, the U.S. fears that a powerful and long-standing opponent may emerge in Europe not just to U.S. geopolitical leadership, but also to a far more important cultural and civilizational one. Many in the United States are perfectly aware that whatever material wealth may be amassed in North America-and however superior U.S. science and education may be-a united Europe has an immeasurably greater quality impact on people's minds and hearts by virtue of its very special historical and cultural heritage. That heritage can offer an effective, worthy competition to U.S. "soft power" better than anything else.

Thus the attempts to "dissolve" Europe in a vague and uncertain Euro-Atlantic space, stretching everywhere and nowhere, but invariably governed from Washington. This policy has met with active support from the "New Europe" group of countries between new, united Germany and new, segmented Russia. Those who may find this assumption of mine questionable should recall the rifts between "old" and "new" Europe that have taken place until recently.

Clearly, the wish to keep the EU core under control is the United States' underlying motive. As for "New Europe," it remains under a pall of historical fear over Russia's "imperial genes." True, efforts to heal those fears were not exactly the strongest side of Russia's foreign and cultural policy lately. Subconscious fears are to be cured and not cultivated. This is the only correct way to address the strategic tasks facing Russia in the twenty-first century, a time when the factor of territory does not really matter. It is far inferior to such a factor as time gained or time lost.

The point at issue is a debate among Europeans inside Russia and outside of it about the degree of common and distinguishing features in the concept of Europeanism. Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote: "The more nationalist we are, the greater Europeans ('universal humans') we will become." Russia's Slavophiles, those wonderful disciples and followers of German and, consequently, European romanticism, dedicated themselves mostly to Russian folklore, culture, customs and historical skills of self-government. (Those skills, incidentally, were very similar in type and moment of emergence to many European socioadministrative entities, in particular, Eastern European ones.) The Slavophiles were essentially quite European, as they saw the Russian sociocultural phenomenon as a very bright and distinctive part of the pan-European trend.

MANY RUSSIAN Westernizers, however, interpreted Russia's Europeanism in a far more mechanical and one-dimensional fashion. Very important for them were superficial similarities, while dissimilarities were often interpreted as negative and even disgraceful traits of backwardness and savageness. In some respects, the Westernizers were quite fair (for instance, as regards serfdom); in others, very wrong. But the problem is that even serfdom in Russia looked pretty much like European phenomena observed in earlier historical periods. In the meantime, many European thinkers (and Russians too) were trying to put up an intellectual Great Wall between Russia and Europe, proposing no end of strongly biased ideological concepts and going to great lengths to prop up that wall with historical arguments they had selected arbitrarily or torn from historical context.

Among such helpful concepts was Karl Marx's theory of "the Asiatic mode of production," which some of his followers would transplant to Russia. According to that theory Russia was destined to always remain a despotic, clique-ruled Asiatic society, with its very special social system based on state ownership of natural resources. This concept helped achieve the desired ideological aim: Russia, contrary to all basic historical and social parameters, was at bottom not European. A strong barrier was created that provided the fundamental, almost metaphysical separation of eternally reactionary and static Russia from eternally dynamic and progressive Europe. That theory opened up vast opportunities for the Western European Russophobic trend, and many politicians on the left and the right are still using it today. Heraclitus said: "The counterthrust brings together, and from tones at variance comes perfect harmony." In this particular case, harmony occurred between the advocates of the "Asiatic mode of production" and the seemingly conflicting concept of Eurasianism.

CONCEIVED AS anti-Marxist, Eurasianism emerged mostly on Russian soil and was expected to explain the disaster that happened in 1917. It proceeded from the rejection of Russia's Europeanism on ostensibly very different grounds. To a large extent this outlandish construct still fills, completely or partially, the vacuum that has developed in the proto-Marxist-Leninist minds of contemporary Russia's half-educated establishment with the lifting of the haze of historical materialism.

The Eurasianists accepted many of the ideas of their predecessors, whose morphological understanding of Russian identity relied on the works of their predecessors, starting from Vladimir Odoyevsky, the Slavophiles and, later, Nikolai Danilevsky and Konstantin Leontiev, who caused a noticeable impact on the minds and hearts of Russia's intellectual elite in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It will not be an exaggeration to say that Vladimir Odoyevsky's historical constructs were welcomed and developed by his contemporary Alexander Herzen. Herzen maintained that the West (to be more precise, Europe) had walked a long and glorious way, but had entered (already then!) the organic phase of disgraceful senility. Precisely for that reason, it invariably stumbles whenever it comes to doing the last historical job-translating the socialist dream into reality. Capable of this is only a new generation, the young and energetic type possessing a unique territory-the Slavdom in general and Russia in particular. Russia without Europe and, to a certain extent, against Europe.

On the whole, the Eurasianists are persistent in their efforts to collect and emphasize the elements of Russian distinctiveness and denial of historical similarities at the European and world levels. They meticulously collected the facts of Russia's unique geographic features and of the ethnic composition of its population, stressing its kinship with the indigenous people inhabiting the Asian steppe, and keeping in sight even the aspects of race. Remarkably, priority in their studies is attached not so much to the people, as to the territory. It is this basic principle that some "place-development" concept is derived from as an absolute value. Nonlocal features are not utterly ignored, but they are always made subordinate to the local center of attraction and invariably cloaked in local garb. The reverse action of magnetism is practically ignored. The local flavor is transferred to the religious domain. Religion's merger with territory results in the opposition of Orthodoxy to other branches of Christianity, and inside Orthodoxy itself the Eurasianists are particularly enthusiastic about proto-Orthodox religious phenomena, including various forms of paganism, which had ostensibly prepared the soil for Orthodoxy. The main antagonist of the "Russian religion" is seen not in paganism, and not even in Islam or Buddhism, but rather in Catholicism and other Christian confessions.

While the Slavophiles never claimed that Europe was alien to Russia, the Eurasianists postulate precisely that. In Eurasianist writings, one can invariably taste disgust towards Europe and emotional attraction to Asia. Eurasianists invariably get emotional and enthusiastic whenever they mention kinship, including spiritual kinship, with Asia, and both Russian and Orthodox factors get drowned in this feeling. In Soviet reality, beneath the veil of internationalism, the Eurasianists saw (in the words of Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy, a founding Eurasianist) a "spontaneous, ethnic identity and non-European, semi-Asian face of Russia-Eurasia"; they discovered "not an invented 'Slavic' or 'Slavo-Varangian' Russia, but the real Russo-Turanian Russia-Eurasia, heir to the great legacy of Genghis Khan." In that sense the Eurasian constructs are in stark contrast with the ideas of the so-called Russian World (of course, if the term "Russian" is not applied to the Turanian peoples of the steppe), let alone of "Slavic unity."

This transformation of the image of real Russia into that of the direct heir of the Genghis Khan's empire is accompanied by the worship of the state, which has the "natural right" to infinite and limitless violence over an individual and any sociocultural and religious institutions. As Georges Florovsky wrote,

the Russian fate turns again into the history of the state, not only Russian, but Eurasianist, and the very essence of Russian historical existence is confined to "domesticating place-development" and to formalizing its statehood on an ever wider basis.

It is very clear that such official maximalism in combination with the rejection of European Russia and the exaggeration of its Turanian-Genghis-Khanian pseudoroots is an exact replica of propaganda products of late Stalinism. Only Stalin's profile is missing. But profiles come and go, while the Eurasianist dreams remain. It is quite obvious that in the twenty-first century, in the age of growing interdependence, the doctrines described above are doomed. Attempts at implementing truly Genghis-Khanian plans for creating giant superstate structures, based on the territorial and ethnic "place-development" fantasies in the entire space of Eurasia, or a greater part of it, have been made more than once. They've all failed.

Among those attempts was the Napoleonic project to create a France-led, united Europe (incorporating a considerable part of Eurasia); Hitler's Third Reich project that ended with the defeat of Nazism and its theories, which in some significant respects were very much reminiscent of the Eurasianist ones; and the Stalinist project of "socialist Eurasia," which ended with the relatively peaceful collapse of the empire. There are enough reasons to postulate that the chances of Genghis Khan's remote descendants look no better than those of his near descendants. And if the specter of Eurasianism still haunts Europe and its environs, the odds of it taking material shape are close to nought.

As for the possibility of creating a pan-European "center of power" over decades to come, I believe that speculations on that score are not utterly groundless. True, amid the Ukrainian crisis, when, according to Matthew (6:34), "today's trouble is enough for today," it is hard to foresee fundamental long-term trends of Europe's future development. And yet, without forgetting the past and at the same time looking into the future, one cannot but recognize that the boldest and most successful steps in building Russia as a great and influential power were taken by Western-oriented rulers-Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Alexander I and Alexander II. As for major isolationist projects (Nicholas I and the Stalinist version of the Soviet system), they ended either in military failures or in decay. Resumed attempts at translating into reality the dreams of global greatness with no resources beyond willpower are strategically deficient.

NO LESS faulty is the eupeptic hope that Russia may dissolve in featureless and one-dimensional globalism. Between the growing mutual dependence and the dissolution of big countries and cultures in that process, there lies at least a whole historical era. Only naive provincial neophytes and advocates of the utterly irrelevant "new political thinking" concept can ignore this.

So what do we have left? Russia is not part of some world center other than Europe. Only together with Europe could Russia form a center that deserves to be called "the center of power."

Currently we are witnessing Europe's attempts to shape its own long-term foreign policy proceeding from cooperation between "Old Europe" and the United States, while weakening and isolating Russia. This policy is strategically hopeless. None of Europe's major actors, except for Britain, may like it. Such a configuration is a rudiment of the era where there were two large blocs plus the nonaligned movement, which is already a matter of history. The United States has existed all by itself all the way and it will continue this way; it finds NATO quite enough. And NATO has one voice, and the voice's tone color is unmistakably American.

In that connection of tremendous importance was the attempt by the German and French leaders to play their own active role in settling the current Ukrainian crisis. Their visit to Moscow and further contacts in the trilateral format may have good prospects, circumstances permitting. How good the prospects will be largely depends on Russia-on our sense of proportion and diplomatic flexibility.

Russia's skillful and competent assistance to the process of reaching an accommodation over Ukraine would create the chance to eventually turn into efforts toward a pan-European center of power on three legs: Paris, Berlin and Moscow. If the movement in this direction proceeds (though it will be a long, painful and twisted path), the problem of Ukraine's admission to united Europe might be strongly adjusted, in terms of content and pace, to the formation of a future European "center of power" and, consequently, the creation of a united Europe from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Before long, we shall have to get back to the idea of a "Helsinki II" discussion over charting a new road map, showing the path towards a united Europe. Of course, this is still just a possibility, not an inevitability. But it is far more realistic than nostalgic, neoimperial dreams of Russian grandeur.
 
 History News Network
http://historynewsnetwork.org
October 20, 2015
The Surprising Consensus on What Experts Say about Putin
By Walter G. Moss
Walter G. Moss is a professor emeritus of history at Eastern Michigan University and Contributing Editor of HNN. He is the author of A History of Russia, Vol. I and Vol. II. For a list of his recent books and online publications http://people.emich.edu/wmoss/pub.htm
[Links here http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/160928]

Putinology, or the pundits' practice of trying to figure out what drives Putin, is an ongoing exercise. The latest example: What's he up to with his recently launched Syrian bombing? Surprisingly, a survey of a few dozen "Putinologists" reveals that despite many differences among them, including how to react to his policies, there is substantial consensus (note: not unanimity) about him and his main motives.

The chief Putin pundits vary widely, both in terms of background and in their approach to Russia and international relations generally. Seven of them have written books on Putin, which are linked to their names as follows: Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, Masha Gessen, Walter Laqueur, Steven Lee Myers, Angus Roxburgh, and Richard Sakwa. Others, like Angela Stent, who has written on U.S.-Russian relations in the twenty-first century, have dealt with Putin less directly or extensively. Many of them have opined on Putin in pieces from various times and sources but then reposted on Johnson's Russia List (JRL), which remains the best single source for daily coverage of Russia and Putin.

Two examples are recent repostings from Politico Magazine, both appearing in the 7 October JRL issue.The first had previously appeared on JRL on 14 March 2014. It consisted of brief opinions regarding Putin by 22 of "America's leading Putinologists." Among them, are a few of the seven mentioned above, plus the following who will be quoted below: Andrew S. Weiss, David Remnick, Strobe Talbott, Dimitri Simes, Dmitri Trenin, Thomas de Waal, Leon Aron, Andrew Kuchins, Eugene Rumer, and Matthew Rojansky. The second JRL reposting of a Politico piece was "What Is Putin Really Up to in Syria?" by "14 top Putinologists," some of them being the same as on the previous list of 22.

In his original comment on the 22 experts, David Johnson noted that most of them were JRL subscribers, but he lamented that their views reflected too much Putin "Demonology" and that the group did not include Stephen Cohen, whom Johnson believes has been falsely labelled a "Putin apologist." JRL frequently reprints Cohen's views, and I have occasionally mentioned them (see, e.g., here), and will do so in the present essay. Also not included among the 22 are several others who are quite knowledgeable about Russia and Putin and will be cited below. They include Gordon Hahn; Nicolai N. Petro; former ambassador to Russia Jack Matlock; and former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who received his Ph.D. in Russian and Soviet history from Georgetown University.

Considering all these experts' opinions, here is their consensus about Putin and what drives him.

He is an intelligent and capable leader, but he trusts very few people. David Remnick states that talk "of 'crazy Putin' is absurd. He is, in his context, in his specific mental and political universe, rational." Dimitri Simes writes that he "is a man of formidable intellect, and after almost 15 years in charge, he is the most experienced leader of a major world power." For the past decade, Angela Stent has attended annual dinners with Putin and foreign Russia experts. "In these gatherings," she relates, "he talks for several hours, is in full command of his facts and exudes self-confidence and occasional humor and sarcasm." Thomas de Waal believes that "Putin's motto is extreme self-reliance-that you can trust no one but yourself and a few people close to you." One expert, Roxburgh, goes further than others in writing (in March 2014) that "Putin exhibits more and more signs of paranoia." But that extreme view is not the consensus.

In the words of Hill and Gaddy, "Putin is a pragmatist, not an ideologue. In setting up his system of governance, he did not follow any specific model that can be captured by a description in the abstract. . . . It is not an intentionally designed, well-formulated system. Rather, it is piecemeal and ad hoc. . . . It has evolved to fit the circumstances." Putin has "not tried to twist some fixed orthodoxy of ideas or ideology to pursue his goals." Andrew Kuchins, Eugene Rumer, Andrew Weiss, and others state a similar point, but put it more negatively. Kuchins writes that Putin "is a brutally cold, calculating pragmatist in foreign and security policy." Rumer calls Putin "a ruthless realist," and Weiss, "an improviser and an opportunist of the highest order." (See here for more on Putin's pragmatism/opportunism.)

Despite not being an ideologue, Putin is influenced by certain basic beliefs.Dmitri Trenin, whom Stent refers to as "one of Russia's most astute foreign policy observers," agrees that "pragmatism was the hallmark of Putin's first decade in power" and that "he is still pragmatic in many ways, but he has markedly changed. Today, Putin reveals a sense of an historic mission bestowed on him. That mission is to restore Russia to what he sees as its rightful place as one of the world's great powers. This means adopting a set of traditional values rooted in established religions, above all, Orthodox Christianity; reviving Russian patriotism with its emphasis on a strong state; pursuing an active policy of nation-building; integrating eastern Slavs (Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians) in a "civilizational union" of central Eurasia, in an alliance with Muslim Turkic peoples also living there; and protecting Russia's strategic independence from its geopolitical rivals-above all the United States and the European Union."

Laqueur emphasizes even more than Trenin the increasing influence of a conservative nationalist viewpoint on Putin, one that mixes patriotism, Russian Orthodoxy, Eurasianism, anti-Westernism, and the search for a unique Russian developmental path. Gessen thinks that "Putin's primary motive is to assert Russia's role as a superpower."

Putin distrusts democracy and believes that Russia and many other countries require a strong state government. Simes writes that Putin "is a strong Russian patriot who sees the state as a key driver of society. He does not view democracy as an end, but rather as a means of government under appropriate circumstances." Aron states that "Putin is a man who sees his mission as the Russian state's recovery of political, economic, social, cultural and geostrategic assets that were lost in the Soviet collapse." Roxburgh believes that Putin "appears to be terrified of popular revolutions, knowing that the streets of Moscow could be the next venue." Myers thinks that "the collapse of the Soviet Union and the chaos that followed darkened Mr. Putin's opinion of freewheeling democracy-and of the character of his own constituents," and that one of his prime beliefs is "in the primacy of state authority above all else, both at home and abroad." Hill and Gaddy state that "the first key to Vladimir Putin's personality is his view of himself as a man of the state, his identity as a statist. . . . The ideas he expresses about the state, as well as the society subordinated to it, belong to a clearly identifiable and long-established body of Russian conservative political thought." Rojansky claims that since Putin's return to the presidency in 2012, his "overwhelming concern has been to sustain the primacy of the Russian state, and with it his own personal power and security."

In the words of Stent, Putin believes that Russia "offers a unique civilizational model that differs from-but is equally valid to-that of the West." Rojansky thinks that to Putin's mind Eurasianism offers "an alternative to European and Euro-Atlantic integration and Western liberal democracy." Myers has quoted Putin's recent words at the United Nations, where he said: "We are all different, and we should respect that. Nations shouldn't be forced to all conform to the same development model that somebody has declared the only appropriate one." Nicolai Petro makes a similar point when he states that although "post-Soviet Russia has no guiding ideology, it does argue that certain values, if adopted as shared principles of behavior, are more congenial to international order than others. Russia hopes that such principles of behavior will be more widely adopted by states. But, cognizant that each nation's cultural development is unique, it opposes efforts to promote any one set of ethical values beyond its borders. Hence, the only time that the international community may legitimately appeal to transnational ethical norms is when these are sanctioned by the United Nations."

Putin is deeply distrustful of the United States and NATO. A 2015 essay, "The American Education of Vladimir Putin," by Hill and Gaddy, and comment on that essay by Hahn, provide the best summary of why Putin is so suspicious of U.S. policies. In a previous essay I have detailed the criticism of Cohen, Matlock, Gates, and Stent of U.S. post-Soviet Russian policy for not being more understanding of Putin's fear and distrust of NATO expansion in eastern Europe. Matlock, for example has stated that he thinks that expansion and talk of bringing Ukraine into NATO has been "Putin's main concern" and that such talk has been "irresponsible." Stent thinks that Putin believes that "the West is still trying to weaken it [Russia] and possibly to promote regime change," i.e., get rid of Putin. And Talbott writes that "when assessing a crisis, his [Putin's] instinct is to believe and react to the most extreme conspiracy theory that his advisers and intelligence services tell him about the actions and motives of the West."

Putin's motives for sending Russian planes in recent weeks to bomb the Islamic State (IS), and other rebel Syrian targets and support the Assad regime follow from the preceding analysis. Myers, for example, writes that "at the heart of the airstrikes is Mr. Putin's defense of the principle that the state is all powerful and should be defended against the hordes, especially those encouraged from abroad." Hahn's blog article "Explaining Putin's Counter-Jihadi Coalition Proposal," reposted on JRL, provides a good summary of Putin's probable reasons for Russia's Syrian intervention:

"In terms of domestic security, it is absolutely incumbent for Putin to combat the growing threat to Russia from the global jihadi revolutionary movement [including IS] spread along a great arc stretching across southern Eurasia just below Russia's southern borders from Syria in the west to Central and South Asia in the east. The global jihad poses a greater danger to Russia and its sphere of influence and interests in Eurasia than to the U.S. and other regions of the world, with the possible exception of Europe." IS has "allies or affiliates in Russia's North Caucasus which threaten to spread to other regions of Russia." In addition, Assad's fall "would be another disastrous blow to Russian power and prestige. It would mean the loss of years of investment in the Assad regime and its only, albeit rather small, naval base in the Mediterranean Sea." But the Russian intervention also "fits into his [Putin's] larger projects of making Russia central Eurasia's superpower, a global power to be reckoned with beyond Eurasia, and a bridge between the Western, Eurasian, Confucian, and Islamic civilizations."

The most sophisticated Putinologists realize that there is much more to Russian foreign policy than just Putin. As I have pointed out in an earlier essay, his policies generally have broad Russian support. Laqueur even writes that "it seems obvious to predict that Putin's successor will conduct the same or similar policies, domestically and abroad. It is unlikely that he will be more moderate." Furthermore, understanding Putin's motives provides no easy path to deciding how to deal with his foreign policies. Nevertheless, it's an essential beginning.
 
 #5
Putin to attend Valdai Club's final plenary session on October 22

MOSCOW. Oct 21 (Interfax) - Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday will attend the final plenary session of the twelfth annual session of the Valdai International Discussion Club in Sochi, the Kremlin has said.

The topic of this year's Valdai conference is "Societies Between War and Peace: Overcoming the Logic of Conflict in Tomorrow's World," the Kremlin press office said.

Attendees will spend three days holding separate sessions to discuss various aspects of perceptions of peace and war both in the public consciousness and in international relations, religion and international economic cooperation.

Hence the breakdown of the current Valdai conference into economic, diplomatic and military-political sessions. A separate session will focus on the role of the mass media in the formation of perceptions of the global standoff.

The global conflicts picture would be incomplete without what is happening now in the Middle East, the events in that region will be the topic of the club's special session.

This year the Valdai conference is attended by over 130 (including 90 foreign) experts and political scientists from 30 countries.
 
 #6
Brookings Institution
www.brookings.edu
October 20, 2015
Really, actually avoiding a new Cold War
By Jeremy Shapiro and Samuel Charap
Jeremy Shapiro, Fellow, Project on International Order and Strategy and the Center on the United States and Europe, Foreign Policy Program, The Brookings Institution. Samuel Charap Senior Fellow for Russia and Eurasia, International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS)

Any interesting argument on foreign policy can be attacked from many, even opposing angles. So it is with enormous gratification that we see that our argument about the possibility and need to avoid a new Cold War with Russia has drawn fierce criticism from both Moscow and Washington. First, from Russia (with if not love than at least respect), Professors Andrej Krickovic and Yuval Weber took the view that a new Cold War is inevitable because neither the United States nor Russia can pull off a negotiation to avoid one. When we countered that this level of fatalism is unwarranted, our colleague Steve Pifer replied, with perhaps even greater affection, that such a negotiation is unnecessary and even immoral.

Steve believes that the United States can continue the current level of confrontation with Russia more or less indefinitely and avoid the kind of danger that the original Cold War posed. He further suggests that even to attempt a negotiation with Russia over the issues that led to the Ukraine crisis and the general deterioration in U.S.-Russia relations would constitute a sell-out of Ukraine and, worse, might well produce a hot war.

The question of whether the current U.S. confrontation with Russia can be managed indefinitely without a major conflagration is clearly a matter for debate. But on recent evidence-the continuing Russian aggression in Ukraine and Western sanctions in response, the frightening proxy confrontation over Syria in which U.S. weapons could well be killing Russian soldiers, and the steadily increasing stream of provocations and invective from both sides-the trends are not good at all. The U.S. presidential campaign will not make management of these tensions any easier. In short, without a major shift in policy, a prolonged confrontation with Russia-a new Cold War-seems highly probable.

Even were such a confrontation to materialize, Steve believes it would not entail the same costs and risks of the first one. We agree that a new Cold War would be quite distinct and perhaps of lesser scale than the last one. But given the enormous costs-financial, political, moral, and humanitarian-of that conflict, this is hardly a comforting thought.

Elsewhere we have described the specific consequences of this new confrontation and they are not small: instability and tensions throughout Eastern Europe; paralysis of multilateral diplomacy; and outright Russian spoiling of U.S. efforts to address global challenges (e.g., in Syria). A new Cold War would also dramatically raise the risk of thermonuclear annihilation, which however unlikely is a very bad outcome indeed. If our society has, in its post-Cold War comfort, forgotten this possibility and the sense of terror this threat conveyed on a daily basis, that is all to the good. But we remember that we lived under this threat as children, and it is not something we want for our children.

In addition to downplaying the implications of a new Cold War, Steve offers an impassioned plea to protect Ukrainian interests and independence from Russian depredations. Steve's commitment to the country to which he was once ambassador speaks well of him as a diplomat and a human being. And we join his denunciation of Russia's actions. But it is Ukraine that will suffer most from a new Cold War. So long as a new Cold War continues, Ukraine will remain a violent and perennially destabilized economic basket case, a Sudan on the Dnipro. We find it counterintuitive, therefore, that efforts to avoid this outcome could possibly come at Ukraine's expense.

And contrary to the implication in Steve's piece, the United States has no commitments to defend Ukraine. There is no such obligation in the Budapest Memorandum. As then Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott (now president of Brookings), who led the negotiations on the memorandum, said at the time: "This [memorandum] does not mean the U.S. is willing to come to the defense of Ukraine if it is attacked militarily" (Agence France Presse, November 18, 1994). Any side offer of such a commitment made to the Ukrainians by U.S. diplomats and not notified to Congress has no standing.

But beyond this technical legal point, we would note that the principle that every country should have the freedom to make its own choices applies equally to the United States as it does to Ukraine. There is nothing in international law, U.S. treaty commitments, or the Ten Commandments that obligates the United States to fight a new Cold War in order to defend Ukraine's right to choose alliances. Ukraine, of course, can and should do whatever it feels is in the interests of its people, but the United States has the choice about whether and how to support its decisions, particularly if such support has the potential to do grievous harm to U.S. interests. More to the point, the NATO alliance is not prepared to grant Ukraine's choice for membership and we should stop pretending otherwise.

We see little reason to believe that a negotiation that succeeded in creating an inclusive regional order, ensuring stability and security in non-NATO/EU Europe, could lead to a hot war between Russia and NATO, as per the ominous conclusion to Steve's piece. In fact, evidence from the past 18 months suggests precisely the opposite: The escalation in tensions between Russia and the West could lead to a hot war. The series of close-calls in the air, provocations on the sea, and incendiary rhetoric all began after the Ukraine crisis. In any case, pursuing a negotiated settlement to the crisis can go hand-in-hand with a robust reassurance and deterrence posture for NATO allies in Eastern and Central Europe. After all, the United States does have an obligation to come to their defense.

In the end, Steve, Yuval, Andrej and we all seem to agree that some sort of new Cold War is possible, even likely. For Steve, it is not so bad; for Andrej and Yuval, it is inevitable; for us, it is an avoidable tragedy. But even we have to admit, that in part on the evidence of Steve's argument, the United States is not likely to engage in the kind of negotiation needed to avoid a new Cold War. Frankly, we are sorry to have found this level of agreement with our critics on such an unfortunate outcome.
 #7
www.rt.com
October 21, 2015
St Pete Lawmaker wants Russia to forget 1917 Bolshevik Revolution

A lawmaker from the Leningrad Region is asking the government to institute a Memorial Day for the Romanov Dynasty, to fall on November 7. It would replace the anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, which the MP denounces as a "negative event."

"November 7 must become the day of memory of the tsar's family and all victims of the revolutionary events of 1917-1922. We must admit to a large extent that the October Revolution was one of the most destructive events since the fall of the Roman Empire or Byzantium," Vladimir Petrov said in his interview with Izvestia daily.

The lawmaker also claimed that the possibility of Romanovs' return to Russia was broadly discussed in the community, as well as the idea to grant a special legal status to imperial heirs. He also said that "the whole country was closely watching" the new round of the reburial of the Nicolas II and his family.

Petrov also said that the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 had no positive effect on Russia's development and emphasized that the killing of the last tsar and his family and entourage was not a legitimate act. The politician expressed hope that instituting the Romanov Memorial Day would promote the civil dialogue in the country and eventually lead to overcoming of numerous political and historical contradictions.

Vladimir Petrov is a member of the legislative assembly of the Leningrad Region - the territory around the country's second-largest city of St. Petersburg, which was called Leningrad during the Soviet period, but regained its historical name after the fall of Communism.

This is not the first monarchy-related initiative put forward by Petrov. In June this year, he addressed the heads of the two remaining branches of the Romanov Imperial House with a request to return to Russia, promising them special legal status and residence in one of the historic palaces in Crimea or St. Petersburg. He also promised that he and his colleagues from the Leningrad regional legislature would very soon develop and draft a bill "On the special status of representatives of the tsars' family" that would give some guarantees to the returning Romanovs to Russian soil.

Representatives of the Russian Imperial House reacted to the initiative by saying that some representatives of the dynasty were ready to move to Russia, but such a move had to be decent and solemn.

At the same time, opinion polls do not confirm Petrov's claims that Russian society was eager to see the tsars back. Research conducted in 2013 in connection with the 400th anniversary of the Romanov royal house showed that 28 percent of Russian citizens would agree to the rule of tsars, but only 6 percent said that this modern monarch must be from the Romanov dynasty. About 13 percent maintain that a contemporary Russian politician could become a new tsar and suggested a nationwide referendum to decide on the candidate.

The majority - 67 percent - said that Russia should leave the monarchy in the past and remain a democracy.
 #8
Interfax
October 20, 2015
Russian deputy prime minister says no plans to raise pension age

Moscow, 20 October: Deputy Prime Minister Olga Golodets has said that the Russian government is not yet planning to raise the pension age.

"We are not planning this over the period of time we use for planning. No, we are not," Golodets told journalists on Tuesday [20 October] when asked when the government was planning to resume discussions about a rise in the pension age.

At the same time, she neither confirmed nor denied media reports, quoting anonymous sources, that the government commission on legislation has approved the Russian Labour Ministry's proposals for a stage-by-stage increase in the pension age to 65 for officials and municipal employees.

A day earlier, Russian Economic Development Minister Aleksey Ulyukayev expressed the view that there is no alternative to raising the pension age and that he proposes that it should rise to 63 for both men and women.

Meanwhile, the head of the Duma labour committee, Olga Batalina, said on Tue! sday that it did not make sense to argue about a possible rise in the pension age.

"The president and the prime minister have said repeatedly that Russia is not currently ready to raise the pension because life expectancy is not high. I consider other discussions on this theme to be pointless," Batalina told journalists.


 #9
Moscow Times
October 21, 2015
Russia's Sole Sexual Assault Center Struggles to Make Ends Meet
By Vasily Kolotilov

Russia has only one organization that exists specifically to help victims of sexual assault, and today, its fate hangs in the balance.

The Sisters sexual assault recovery center in Moscow is eking out an existence, depending on modest donations and barely able to cover the rent and phone bill for Russia's only dedicated helpline for victims of rape.

"We were close to shutting the center down several months ago," Maria Mokhova, the center's director, told The Moscow Times in a recent interview.

"No one was being paid, and only a few of us were still working. If anyone had come and told us to leave the office, we would have left. We had no more strength to fight."

In 2014, Russia's courts convicted 4,720 people of rape and sexual assault charges, according to Supreme Court statistics.

But the official statistics are far from reality, said Mokhova, as only 5 percent of sexual assault victims who call the center take their cases to court.

The Sisters center was opened in 1994 by women's rights advocates who realized that the psychological trauma caused by sexual assault had not been treated properly for decades under Soviet rule.

It occupies a small office in an ordinary high-rise apartment building on the northern outskirts of Moscow. It has a room for the helpline operator and another containing several armchairs that is used for individual counseling.

The office walls are covered with social ads and drawings done as part of therapy by those who come to the center for help.

Mokhova, a microbiologist by training, joined the center in 1996. She saw an advertisement in a newspaper, showed up at a volunteer training course and ended up staying, she said.

"There's no word like 'woman' in the center's name because it is clear that sexual assault can be committed against a woman or a man or a child," the director said. She declined to say how often men and children turn to the center for help.

A Phone Call Away

Today, the center's main activity is the helpline for sexual assault victims.

The center has run many different projects during its existence, but the helpline is the only one that endures, said Mokhova. It receives calls from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day.

"As soon as there is a single possible case of sexual assault, we have to be on the line to provide help," she said.

The center's helpline is operated by women only: Social research and Sisters' experience have shown that it is psychologically easier for callers to share their experience with a woman, regardless of the caller's gender.

The helpline operators are volunteers who work two five-hour shifts a week or more, depending on how many volunteers are available at any given time. Every center employee has to help staff the helpline, except for the male lawyers.

Seven people were working at the center during the visit of a reporter from The Moscow Times earlier this month. Sisters' core team is 25 people who have worked at the center from time to time through the years, Mokhova said.

Calls to the helpline are strictly confidential and anonymous, and are not recorded. No journalists are allowed into the room where the helpline operator works.

The approach is based on more than simply keeping the clients anonymous. Sexual assault trauma issues in part from the attacker's wish to gain total control over the victim, said Mokhova. Afterward, the victim feels a dramatic lack of control over their life and the world around them.

"We allow the caller to regain ownership of their life. They call, we pick up the phone. The callers tell us their names, we listen. But we don't record the conversation, we have no right to interfere in their personal life. We have to show them that they are in charge of their lives and actions," said Mokhova.

The helpline operators do not invite callers to visit the center for personal consultations, it has to be the caller's own decision. And that decision is a leap in a person's therapy: By doing so they get their life back in their own hands, said the director.

A Friendly Voice

"It takes courage to call, courage to admit what has happened, and even more courage to come here," Svetlana, one of the center's psychologists, told The Moscow Times. Svetlana asked for her second name to be withheld, citing security concerns.

In her opinion, the most important part of the job during the phone sessions or personal meetings is to convince the sexual assault victim that what happened was not their fault.

"They blame themselves for what happened. Moreover, others blame them too. Doctors and police officers blame them and laugh at them, but it's never the victim's fault. The attacker is responsible," says Svetlana. "Sometimes we just need to tell people that to make them feel much better."

Along with the phone conversations, she helps the center's clients in person. Six years ago, a friend of hers invited her to join the volunteer training. She had always been interested in practical psychologist's work so she stayed.

"It may seem very specific, but psychologists work with this kind of trauma in the same way as with any other. There's no difference," said Svetlana.

She has never taken a break, although it is common among the staff here, and when a volunteer wants a change of scene and a rest, the center lets them go.

All volunteers regularly participate in group training sessions to prevent emotional burnout.  

"To help people who call, I have to wear my professional hat. I won't be able to help if I associate myself with them, if I simply listen to them as another human being," said Svetlana.

Running on Fumes

For many years Sisters was financed largely by international charities, including the Soros Foundation, Ford Foundation and MacArthur Foundation, Mokhova said.

"What is happening now is the shutting down of the donors market, with donors leaving Russia," she said.

In December 2014, Sisters was on the verge of collapse. It owed 300,000 rubles ($4,800) for office rent and utility payments.

For the whole of that year, the center had survived solely thanks to employees' enthusiasm, said Mokhova.

Help finally came from the Yabloko liberal party, which started an online petition in April calling for help for Sisters. The petition was signed by 45,000 people in two months. Seeing this and realizing what the scale of support for the center was, its leadership decided to carry on.

The center organized a social media campaign, and soon after a prominent charity foundation, Nuzhna Pomoshch, contacted Sisters and offered to put the center's request for donations on their site and promote it.

Currently the center only receives private donations, said Mokhova. This year, Sisters applied for two presidential grants for NGOs, but to no avail. It plans to apply for another one in November set up by the Economy Ministry.

Sisters is the only center in Russia that specializes in helping sexual assault victims, the director of the ANNA National Center for Violence Prevention, Marina Pisklakova-Parker, told The Moscow Times.

There are many different crisis centers for women in Russia, both private and state-run, including shelters for women in difficult situations where people can stay for several weeks. But these establishments are generally geared toward victims of domestic violence. Sexual violence is considered part of that, but most of the centers' employees do not know how to treat it specifically.

"We don't have a government-sponsored help system for sexual assault victims in Russia," said Pisklakova-Parker.

"It's widely acknowledged that people should see a psychologist after an assault. But usually the victim has to do it on their own," she said.
 
 #10
http://readrussia.com
October 21, 2015
How to Be a Sexist Jerk Without People Caring
By Marina Pustilnik

I would like to make a small suggestion to the American politicians: the next time you decide to speak out for the "beleaguered" Russian "liberals", remember that you are speaking out for a group of sexists who would fail any decent political correctness test and who would create a real shitstorm in the media were they allowed to make pronouncement on anything other than the awfulness of Putin regime.

I've been meaning to write about the sense of self-righteousness that pervades the "liberal" camp in Russia (Notice how I'm always using quotation marks around this word? Well, it's because for the greater part the Russian "liberals" have nothing to do with true liberalism) for quite a while, but this week the story presented itself. The story stars a "liberal journalist" Sergei Parkhomenko, a buxom presenter from the regional affiliate of the "liberal" Echo of Moscow radio station and a whole assortment of Parkhomenko's readers. Here goes.

A few days ago Mr. Parkhomenko discovered the Facebook page of a woman named Erica Ever. Both her userpic and her cover photo present a well-endowed lady wearing a bright red dress with a plunging neckline. Her information says that she works as an "author and anchor" at Echo of Moscow. Judging from the latest public post that was grabbed by the screenshot, she has a penchant for bad poetry. Those three things allowed Mr. Parkhomenko to pass a quick judgment and to post the screenshot of the Facebook page along with the snarky commentary stating "We are all in safe hands now." He also tagged a number of female Echo staffers in the first comment telling them that now they will learn "how [bad] the things can be" and how the new anchor will make them cry and remember the previous Echo boogie-woman Lesya Ryabtseva with fondness. The post was shared 101 times, with only a small share of reposters critical of Parkhomenko's sexist approach. The comments in the original post also provide a good insight into the psyche of a Russian "liberal." Of course, there were a number of people who tried to shame the journalist for his misogynic views, but the majority of the commentators enjoyed the opportunity to make all sorts of lewd and raunchy jokes and decry the falling standards of the radio station whose journalists and anchors, it seems, all have to be buttoned-up spinstresses and liberal machos. Mr. Parkhomenko's "I'm-so-full-of-myself-but-you-can't-really-accuse-me-of-anything" commentary was expanded and expounded by Denis Dragunsky, another "liberal", but this time a writer, not a journalist. In his Facebook post Mr. Dragunsky basically said that Ms. Ever has no one else to blame for the reaction that she produced, because her self-representation is simply "not adequate" to the position that she holds. Once again, it seems, that these people believe that a news-and-talk-show "liberal" radio station can only be staffed by people who hide their looks for fear of distracting the listeners.

Reading the comments under Mr. Parkhomenko and Mr. Dragunsky's posts I couldn't help but be reminded of a recent photo project that was published at the Russian equivalent of Facebook, VKontakte. There, a young woman named Lena Klimova published a photo album titled "Beautiful people and things that they write to me." Klimova is the founder of online project "Children-404" created in support of LGBT teens who in Russia have no safety net and no support, online or offline. The project drew ire of the local "moral crusaders" and a lot of young people have written to Klimova accusing her of immorality and threatening her with violence. The majority of these young men and women are good-looking and we all know of the bug in our systems that makes us view beautiful people as inherently good, an appraisal that often leads to much unhappiness because it is wrong. It's difficult to reconcile the pictures and the words and Klimova's project has been duly publicized in the "liberal" media. But the posts and comments about Ms. Ever are nothing more than the other side of the coin that is the pervasive bigotry in Russia. These "beautiful people" are different because they respect gay rights and sympathize with LGBT teens, but in the end they are also bigots, albeit of a different kind, because they judge a woman by her boobs, not by her work, and they do it with a feeling of self-righteousness that I referenced in the beginning of this text.

Reaction produced by Donald Trump for his misogynic statements about Carly Fiorina gives a pretty good idea of the controversy that such statements would have created in the US. But such statements will do nothing to mar the great liberal standing of Mr. Parkhomenko both in the eyes of his fans in Russia and of his possible partners outside of it. The greater problem is that there is no such thing as the institute of reputation in Russia. People change allegiances and positions so often and the attention span of the audience is so short now that the same person who was vilified for the dismantling of the original NTV channel with its "unique group of journalists" is now praised as the one of the staunchest Putin critics. The smaller, but no less important problem, is the ability of the Russian "liberals"/creative class to compartmentalize. With the "liberals", the most important thing is to be rukopozhatny, handshake-worthy. In today's Russia this primarily means the unyielding criticism of the existing "bloody" regime. As long as this is something that you do, all of your possible shortcomings will be forgiven. So what if you're an asshole? You are our kind of asshole. With the creative class, the most important thing is to be a "good guy." As long as you are that, you can be mean to some other people, swindle others of large sums of money, fail at everything you do. You are the "good guy" and people will forgive you. But that's another story, waiting to be told.

Getting back to that advice in the first paragraph. In Russia, people are pretty much split between those who believe that the United States is the devil incarnate (thank you, TV propaganda) and those (the "liberals", of course) who see the US as doing nothing more than spreading human rights and transparency standards all over the world. The truth, as usual, is somewhere in between, but it would be great if for once the American politicians would practice what they preach and try to send some "Sensitivity Training for Dummies" our way. Women's rights are no less important than LGBT rights or freedom of speech. It would be great if the Russian "liberals" learned to pay at least some lip service to this notion instead of behaving like a bunch of sexist jerks.  
 
 #11
Reuters
October 20, 2015
Investment tide may have turned for crisis-hit Russia
By Sujata Rao and Jason Bush

With among the highest bond yields in the world and fears of corporate debt defaults receding, Russia is luring back some investors who seem to agree with President Vladimir Putin that the crisis-hit economy is over the worst.

Putin said last week Russia may have reached the peak of an economic crisis worsened by last year's oil price fall and Western sanctions imposed to punish the Kremlin over its role in the conflict in east Ukraine.

Fears of economic collapse drove a record $150 billion (97 billion pound)-plus in capital outflow last year, with the rouble falling 40 percent and bond yields spiralling.

But with oil and the rouble having stabilised somewhat, the tide may have turned, even if the bullishness is mostly short-term bargain hunting rather than based on firm conviction.

Sergei Strigo, head of emerging debt at Amundi has added Russia exposure, buying more rouble bonds as well as dollar-denominated sovereign and corporate issues.

That is despite his belief that recovery remains distant - data this week belies Putin's confidence, showing the economy shrinking 4.3 percent in the third quarter. Retail sales slipped last month by a tenth, the biggest monthly fall since 1999.

Growth in 2016 will flatline at best after contracting 4 percent this year and some investors expect economic stagnation to last for years.

But investors' worst fears - economic collapse and a spate of defaults by companies cut off from bond markets - have not materialised, according to Strigo.

"It's difficult to have a bullish view on the Russian economy, we just have to be content with the fact it has performed better than people expected," he said. "It's a high yielding market and as long as things don't go badly wrong you are compensated for risks."

REWARDS

Others may share that view - foreign holdings of rouble-denominated government bonds stood at 20 percent by Aug. 1, according to the latest available official data, from a 17.9 percent low in March.

Those who held their nerve on rouble bonds after last year's rout have been rewarded handsomely, with dollar returns of 12 percent this year, thanks to interest rate cuts. The underlying GBI-EM debt index in contrast, displays double-digit losses.

Dollar bond returns are a sparkling 20 percent and on corporate bonds, where investor fears mostly centered, yield premia versus Treasuries have almost halved since January.

Not all companies will survive but 70 percent of non-financial companies can repay debt from cash flow, ratings agency Moody's said last week.

Russia's debt picture, already one of the strongest in the world, has improved further as a result of sanctions; shut out of bond markets, companies have dipped into their coffers to repay or buy back debt.

Headline external debt has fallen by $80 billion this year, according to end-September central bank data. Russia also saw net capital inflows in the third quarter, after many quarters of negative flows.

"Russia has rallied because it has a fundamental underpinning, with very low debt-GDP. For a default you need to make some very serious assumptions," said Salman Ahmed, global fixed income strategist at Lombard Odier.

Noting $370 billion in hard currency reserves and an improving balance of payments surplus, Ahmed said: "From a terms of trade point of view or on geopolitics, I'd agree with Putin that the worst is probably over."

On a fundamentals-based strategy, Ahmed has a 10 percent allocation to Russian bonds, more than double its GBI-EM weight.

RELIANCE ON CASH HOARD

Equities too are luring value-focused investors who believe that beaten-down share prices adequately reflect the economy's dim outlook. Shares trade at less than 5 times forward earnings, cheaper even than turbulent markets such as Nigeria or Pakistan.

"These are shockingly low valuations... Russia has negative aspects but in our mind it has one of the best valuation profiles in emerging markets," said Michael Loukas at U.S. fund Wavefront Capital, which has raised Russia to overweight versus its share in equity indexes.

Most of these trades are tactical, however - bonds for instance have probably benefited from allocation away from troubled Brazil. With sanctions remaining in place, investors may shrink from increasing exposure.

Wavefront's Loukas says his Russia holding is smaller than investment models suggest, because geopolitical risks mean there are "too many balls up in the air".

Investors are also mindful that with oil unlikely to rise much and sanctions in place, Russia is reliant on its cash hoard. Financing next year's budget deficit alone will require taking 2.136 trillion roubles ($34.32 billion) from the Reserve Fund - almost half its current value.

The rate at which Moscow is running down the fund is causing concern about funding future deficits - without a rebound in oil or sharp spending cuts, coffers will empty in a couple of years.

TD Securities' strategist Cristian Maggio says Russia's economy and politics may have overcome the worst of market turmoil but will remain in a twilight zone.

"What you see in Brazil is a democratic process and institutions trying to deal with crisis. In Russia there is no driver for improvement, this is an economy that will stagnate for the next few years," he added.
 
 
#12
Russian authorities know how to take inflation under control, to reach plan by yearend - Shuvalov

MOSCOW. Oct 21 (Interfax) - The Russian authorities know how to take inflation under control; by the end of 2015 it will reach planned levels, Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov said at the State Duma on Wednesday.

"I can say that in terms of growth rates and inflation - which concerned us most of all within the macro framework - we are now approaching the parameters that the government announced at the end of last year-the start of this year," Shuvalov said. He said that by the end of this year, inflation will reach the planned levels.

Shuvalov said a wide range of forecasts for Russia's economy had been voiced.

"You know, we received the most varied forecasts about how the economy would behave, not just from our foreign friends, our so-called friends, but even from economists in Russia. It is no secret that they forecast a steep drop, a decline in GDP of up to 10% and some said in effect that the Russian economy was heading for collapse and hyperinflation," Shuvalov said.

"They told us that the Russian economy faced such a scenario or something similar, but also said that the global economy would grow, would experience some expansion," he said.

"But we see that neither the one nor the other came true. The Russian economy is not in tatters, as some of our partners are saying. But it is true that I can't say it is doing well," Shuvalov said.
 
 #13
Sputnik
October 21, 2015
Russian Crisis Over, Reforms Needed for Economic Growth

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - The economic crisis in Russia is over and the government now must initiate structural reforms to restore economic growth, Russian Deputy Finance Minister Maksim Oreshkin said Wednesday.

"The crisis itself has ended, but we are in a new reality, and the new reality means a need for further structural changes," Oreshkin said, speaking at the RussiaTALK investment forum.

According to the politician, the economy is stable but a question of how to "move forward, to strengthen the tendencies of growth in the Russian economy" remains.

Russia's economic performance experienced a slowdown since mid-2014, due to a fall in global oil prices, a depreciation of the national currency and several rounds of anti-Russia sanctions imposed by the West over Moscow's alleged involvement in Ukraine's internal conflict. The latter accusation is denied by Moscow.

In January, the Russian government unveiled an anti-crisis plan to stabilize and improve the country's economy by 2017.

In late September, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the country's budget deficit would not exceed 3 percent of GDP in 2016.


 
 #14
Business New Europe
www.bne.eu
October 21, 2015
The ABR (Anywhere But Russia) crew of fund veterans now punting in Pakistan, Iraq and Iran
Jason Corcoran in Moscow

Dedicated-Russia funds have become a rare species in the years following the 2008-2009 economic crisis. The country's subsequent low growth, its current recession along with tumbling commodity prices and political isolation over Ukraine have almost led to their extinction.

But what has become of these fund managers? Many have left the industry, some have retired to spend the handsome returns they milked in the glory years from 1998-2008, while others are now applying their skills to investing in Pakistan, Iraq, Iran and other far-flung frontier markets, to form what can be described as the ABR (Anywhere But Russia) crew.

The trail of casualties over the past four years is long, with either the firm going bust or the specialist fund being wound down. The list includes Pharos Financial Group, Third Millennium Russia Fund, Vostok Nafta, Sito Capital, Spectrum Partners, Hermitage Capital's flagship Russia Fund, Wermuth Asset Management Russia Deep Value funds, Franklin Templeton Investments Russia and East European Fund, East Capital Russia Domestic Growth Fund and Morgan Stanley's Eastern European Fund.

Johan Elmquist, portfolio manager and partner at Swedish investment firm Tundra Fonder, is spending more time in Pakistan's capital of Karachi than Moscow over the past four years following two decades of investing in Russia.

"Russia has been a very good training ground to be very alert on not taking the companies' numbers or statements at face value," Elmquist, who previously ran over $2bn in Russian assets at Swedbank tells bne Intellinews in an interview. "We will always find ways to check the numbers through suppliers or customers, or to find a way to check what they are saying is reasonable."

Emerging markets like Russia have struggled to match the performance of developed markets since 2008, when the global economic crisis triggered a flight to safety. BNP Paribas estimated investors pulled out at least $290bn from Russia, the world's biggest energy exporter, from August 2008 to February 2009 as the economy sank into its worst financial crisis since the government's 1998 default on $40bn of domestic debt.

Investors have pulled about $60bn out of emerging market equity funds in the first nine months of this year as people prefer the sanctuary of steadier returns in US or European markets, or the potential outperformance in frontier markets. While frontier funds have not been immune to outflows, many portfolio managers are taking long-term bets that reforms in places like Iran, Pakistan and Vietnam have created unstoppable momentum for growth.   

The MSCI Frontier Emerging Markets Index has posted a 20.3% return over the past three years compared with a negative 32% return for the MSCI Russia Index, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Sweden's Vostok Nafta, another cornerstone investor in Russia for two decades, is also busy chasing higher returns in exotic places. Vostok Nafta, which exited its Russian stock market bets in 2012, is now fishing in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, as well as retaining several private equity bets in Russia.

Paul Collison, a former managing director at Farallon Capital Management, set up the Moscow-based 55 North Capital Partners in 2009 as a long/short hedge fund focused on Emerging Europe. The firm turned away from Russia in recent years and Farallon and his partners Thomas Gochenour and Julia Brookes now run the Iraq Phoenix Fund, a Cayman Islands-based investment fund. Neither Collison nor Brookes returned calls or emails seeking comment.

Gemsstock was set up in late in 2013 by Al Breach and his former colleagues from UBS in Moscow to run multi-asset global funds. A source close to the firm said Russia didn't feature at all in its initial portfolios.

Atanas Bostandjiev, former head of VTB Capital's international business, launched Gemcorp a year ago with €500mn raised from its investors. All of its initial activity has been focused in Angola and Sub-Saharan Africa.

The pace of Russian fund closures has accelerated this year as recession and sanctions have gripped the economy and led to the country's further isolation from international capital markets. Capital outflows from the country could reach $90bn in 2015 after last year's record of more than $150n, according to Russia's economy ministry.

BNP Paribas exited its €3bn fund management venture in Russia in July. And Franklin Templeton Investments said on October 9 it will soon vote on a plan to liquidate its 20-year-old regional fund, citing a lack of investor interest and trading limitations imposed by the sanctions

Meanwhile, Sweden's East Capital shuttered its €10mn Russian domestic growth fund in September in a move away from publicly-traded assets. "The liquidation of East Capital Russia Domestic Growth Fund supports our communicated shift from public equity to private equity and real estate," Mia Jurke, CEO of East Capital Explorer, said in a statement.

Since the firm's initial investment in September 2012, the annualized fund return is minus 23% to the end of August this year.

Peter Halloran, who helped organize Russia's first IPO, wound down his Soros-backed hedge fund last year to invest in shale oil and gas in Texas.

Halloran, who first came to Russia in 1995, boasted that Pharos Financial's flagship fund had delivered annualized returns of about 25% in the last decade by stock-picking in Russia and the former Soviet Union. "If you look at Russian capital markets, the trend is pretty clear," he says. "It's a smaller and smaller pond for asset management and, while I love the volatility, it became too hard to grow assets.''

Fund redemptions and a collapse in asset values has led to a decimation in Russia-focused investors. Those who remain standing include East Capital, Prosperity Capital, Verno Capital, Altera, Halycon along with the Russian lenders with asset management units.

The main transferrable skill that can be taken from Russia to frontier markets is the assumption you can take nothing for granted, according to Tom Adshead, chief operating officer at Macro-Advisory in Moscow. "You can't assume people will obey the law," Adshead, former head of research at the now-defunct Sito Capital, tells bne Intellinews. "You learn in Russia to acquire a certain suspicion insofar as you don't take everything the government says as gospel, and to be very circumspect at what management says."

The only Russian specialist to truly make it elsewhere and to go global is Richard Dietz, according to Adshead.

Dietz, a founding partner of Renaissance Capital, has built a distressed debt manager with offices in Moscow, New York, Dubai and Buenos Aires. VR Capital has earned recognition for its world beating fund performance and has about $1.6bn in funds under management.

In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece last year, Dietz lectured Argentinian President Cristina Kircher by telling her to tone down her rhethoric and strike a deal with the nation's creditors.

"If you have done well in Russia, you will have a good rolodex of people who are willing to give you money and that's half the battle," says Adshead. "But the other things that make a good Russian specialist doesn't necessarily make a good Iran specialist. If you don't understand Farsi or the cultural idioms, then you will may very well struggle."

For Tundra Fonder's Elmquist, whose firm has opened a research office in Karachi, the punt in frontier markets is already paying off. The firm has grown its assets in four years from zero to about $200mn, of which the Russia fund represents just $2mn. Its Pakistan fund has risen 184% since inception compared with 105% for the benchmark. The Russia fund is down 16% since its inception four years ago. "I can't at this stage make a pitch for Russia, as event risk is just too high," he says. "Even if the markets bounces and even if we see new inflows, it will take a while for current managers and new managers to launch new products. It will create opportunities for those who survive."
 
 #15
Forbes.com
October 19, 2015
Russian Production Improving, But Locals Losing Money Fast
By Kenneth Rapoza

Investors have been getting carried away with Russian equities lately. The best performing of the big four emerging markets this year has been approaching over-bought status, so Monday's sharp decline in comparison to its peers should come as no surprise.

All of emerging markets are in decline Monday morning, tracking global equities in general. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was off by nearly 1% mid-morning, while the hotly traded Market Vectors Russia (RSX) exchange traded fund was down by over 2.3%, roughly 125 basis points lower than the MSCI Emerging Markets.

There's good news and bad news on the ground there.

September economic indicators provide some encouragement on the margin. Production indicators suggest a decline may have hit bottom. However, a dip on consumer spending again means further downside risks remain, Barclays Capital analyst Daniel Hewitt said in a note to clients today.

The Good News

On the optimistic side, the decline in industrial production lessened to -3.7% on an annualized basis. This was the fourth monthly improvement from the peak decline in May of -5.5%. Seasonally adjusted data has improved from its recent lows as well.

"This suggests that the industrial production decline has abated and there may be no further drop, although it is too soon to conclude that industrial production is ready to start increasing," Hewitt told clients.
 
 #16
www.rt.com
October 21, 2015
Russia becomes China's top crude supplier

Russia exported a record amount of oil to China in September, Chinese customs data showed. For the second time this year Russia has overtaken Saudi Arabia to become China's biggest supplier.

Beijing bought 4.042 million tons of crude oil from Russia last month, which is almost 1 million barrels per day. The volume is up 42 percent compared with the previous year.

Imports from Saudi Arabia dropped 16.5 percent on year at 961,710 barrels per day (bpd). The fall was blamed on a hike in Saudi official selling price and the closure of several large Chinese refineries for planned overhauls.

China's Russian oil imports grew 30 percent on year to about 810,000 bpd in the first nine months of 2015, according to data released.

Oman was China's third-biggest supplier (3.165 million tons) while Angola slipped to fourth place (2.9233 million tons) from second in the previous month.

In May, Russia became Beijing's top crude supplier for the first time since October 2005. China then imported a record 3.92 million tons from Russia while Saudi Arabia's deliveries stood at 3.05 million tons.

Moscow and Beijing have increased energy cooperation in recent years, and the two countries have a wide range of multibillion dollar joint projects. Two years ago Rosneft and CNPC signed a 25-year oil deal worth $270 billion under which the Russian company is expected to supply 360.3 million tons of crude to China.

Last month during President Putin's visit to China, Rosneft inked agreements with Beijing worth a potential $30 billion. Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin later said the energy deals between the company and Chinese partners will be worth more than $500 billion in the next 20 years.

The sides were negotiating an increase in Russian oil supplies to China, the chairman of the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) Wang Yilin said.
 
 #17
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
October 21, 2015
Assad pays surprise visit to Moscow for Syria talks with Putin
Syrian president thanks Russian leader for assistance in fight against 'terrorists'.
Igor Rozin, RBTH

Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad made an unexpected visit to Russia on Oct. 20 to negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov revealed on Oct. 21.

"The negotiations were rather long and their topics were rather clear," he said, adding that Assad had thanked Putin for his assistance in the fight against terrorists in Syria.

"First of all, I would like to express profound gratitude to the entire administration of the Russian Federation and the Russian people for the assistance they have been rendering to Syria. We are grateful for their backing of Syria's unity and independence. Most importantly, all this is being done within the framework of international laws," the Kremlin press service quoted al-Assad as saying.

"The political steps the Russian Federation has taken since the beginning of the crisis were the primary reason that prevented the development of Syrian events into a more tragic scenario," he said, emphasizing that the campaign of air strikes being carried out by the Russian air force was a necessary step in fighting terrorism, which he described as "a real impediment to political settlement."

He once again thanked the Russian people "for the assistance they have been giving to our country" and expressed the hope that "we will be victorious in the fight against terrorism and will continue to act together for the restoration of the country from the economic point of view, the political point of view and the point of view of everyone's peaceful coexistence."

In turn, Vladimir Putin said that a lasting solution to the crisis in Syria "can ultimately be achieved through a political process, with all political forces and ethnic and religious groups involved," adding that "in the long run, the final say should definitely rest exclusively with the Syrian people."

"We are ready to make as considerable a contribution as we can not only in the course of combat actions against terrorism but also in the course of a political process," Putin said.

Moscow is willing to do this "certainly in close contact with other world powers and with regional countries interested in the peaceful resolution of the conflict," he continued.

He went on to state that Moscow would not tolerate a situation in which its citizens or citizens of former Soviet republics could appear in its territory after fighting for Islamic State in Syria - a scenario that frightens Russia, which has large Muslim populations in regions like Tatarstan and the Caucasus, as well as substantial migrant communities from Muslim former Soviet republics such as Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

"Unfortunately, people from the republics of the former Soviet Union are among those fighting in Syria with weapons in their hands against government forces, and there are at least 4,000 of them. And, certainly, we cannot allow them to appear in Russian territory after gaining combat experience and undergoing ideological indoctrination," Putin said.

Like other countries, Russia is concerned about terrorist activities in the region, he said.

"International terrorism's attempts to take significant territories in the Middle East under their control and destabilize the situation in the region are causing legitimate concerns in a lot of countries. This also concerns us, Russia," Putin said.

"The Syrian people have offered resistance and have been combating international terrorism virtually on their own for several years, and while they have sustained considerable losses, they have also achieved considerable positive results in this fight of late," he said.
 
 #18
What brought Assad to Moscow?
By Tamara Zamyatina

MOSCOW, October 21. /TASS/. Syrian President Bashar Assad's sensational visit to Moscow on Tuesday evening was clear evidence of Russia's leading role in the struggle against the Islamic State, whose defeat, Damascus hopes, will entail a political settlement in the country, polled analysts have told TASS.

As Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday morning, Syrian President Bashar Assad paid a brief working visit to Moscow on Tuesday evening for narrow and wide format talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin. As follows from an official statement posted on the Kremlin's website, Assad thanked Putin "for the political steps that Russia has been taking since the beginning of the crisis and that did not let the events in Syria follow a more tragic scenario." Russia's air group in Syria joined the operation against Islamic State militants in Syria on September 30.

The president of the Middle East Institute, Yevgeny Satanovsky, believes that Assad's brief visit to Moscow showed to all of his neighbors that the Syrian president should by no means be ignored in shaping Syria's future political system. "This is a hard fact. It does not depend on his visit to Moscow. His was a brave move by the leader of a country waging a war on terrorists. Assad, in contrast to his father Hafez Assad, who had been a career military pilot, is an eye doctor by profession. At the same time he is the commander-in-chief of Syria's armed forces and a man of great personal courage," Satanovsky told TASS.

"Bashar Assad has for 15 years led a country that during the past four years been exposed to aggression fueled by support from the United States, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey. He is the sole head of state in the region that has been standing firm against western plans for deposing him alongside other Middle East and North Africa leaders in a series of 'Arab Spring' revolts that swept countries from Tunisia to Egypt. There can be no doubts that Assad will be one of the key figures in the real political process, which is about to be launched in Syria and for which Moscow has been exerting active diplomatic efforts," Satanovsky said.

He avoided saying anything about the technical details of Assad's arrival from Damascus or Latakia to Moscow.

"This question may be of interest only to those who might be planning a terrorist attack against the Syrian president's flight," he said.

Russia's veteran expert on oriental affairs, Georgy Mirsky, has brushed off speculations the news of Bashar Assad's visit to Moscow was disclosed post factum to ward of the risks of a terrorist attack. "Firstly, Islamic State militants do not have surface-to-air missiles. Secondly, over the four years of the war there has been not a single attempt on Assad's life," Mirsky said.

"The Syrian president's visit to Moscow was expected to demonstrate to the whole world a meeting of two military allies - Vladimir Putin and Bashar Assad - who are fighting against terrorism together. Military plans are not to be discussed by telephone. By meeting in Moscow the two leaders demonstrated that their alliance in the struggle against the Islamic State is really robust," the analyst said.

"As far as the content of talks between Russian and Syrian presidents are concerned, I believe that Assad hardly asked Putin for more military support. The Syrian army has enough tanks, planes and artillery. Russia's air group is providing effective support for Assad's army in its ground offensive against the Islamic State positions. But the operation is proceeding slower than expected," Mirsky said.

"If I were Putin, I would ask Assad if he had confidence in his army, if there was a chance to recapture Syria's entire territory from the terrorists and how much time that might take. Or: does Assad think that Putin will be bombing IS positions for a year? I believe that Assad and Putin at their meeting identified the 20% of Syria's territory that Assad would surely retain under control - from Damascus to Homs and Latakia. It is pretty certain the militants will never seize this area. Putin and Assad may have discussed measures to protect the regained territory and likely supplies of defensive weapons, too. Of course, these are only my guesses, because the information about the Putin-Assad meeting was very scarce," Mirsky said.

"As for the main question 'What brought Assad to Moscow?' I would answer it in this way. The visit was to drive the message home: the Western politicians should forget about the possibility the Russian president might turn his back on Assad. Putin showed that he does not have the slightest intention of doing so," he believes.]
 
 #19
Kremlin.ru
October 21, 2015
Meeting with President of Syria Bashar Assad

President of Syria Bashar Assad made a working visit to Moscow on October 20. Russian-Syrian talks in narrow and expanded format with top Russian officials took place at the Kremlin.

Vladimir Putin: Mr President,

Let me wish you a warm welcome to Moscow. Despite the dramatic situation in your country, you have responded to our request and come here to Russia, and we thank you for this.

We took the decision upon your request to provide effective aid to the Syrian people in fighting the international terrorists who have unleashed a genuine war against Syria. The Syrian people has been practically alone in putting up resistance and fighting these international terrorists for several years now, and has suffered great losses. Lately though, there have been some major positive results in this fight.

The attempts by international terrorists to bring whole swathes of territory in the Middle East under their control and destabilise the situation in the region raise legitimate concerns in many countries around the world. This is a matter of concern for Russia too, given that sadly, people from the former Soviet Union, around 4,000 people at least, have taken up arms and are fighting on Syrian territory against the government forces. Of course, we cannot let these people gain combat experience and go through ideological indoctrination and then return to Russia.

On the question of a settlement in Syria, our position is that positive results in military operations will lay the base for then working out a long-term settlement based on a political process that involves all political forces, ethnic and religious groups. Ultimately, it is the Syrian people alone who must have the deciding voice here.

Syria is Russia's friend and we are ready to make our contribution not only to the military operations and the fight against terrorism, but also to the political process. We would do this, of course, in close contact with the other global powers and with the countries in the region that want to see a peaceful settlement to this conflict.

Once again, I wish you welcome, Mr President.

President of Syria Bashar al-Assad (retranslated): Thank you very much, Mr President.

First of all, I want to express our tremendous gratitude to the Russian leadership and people for the help they are providing Syria. Thank you for supporting Syria's unity and independence. Most important of all is that this is being done within the framework of international law.

I must say that the political steps the Russian Federation has been taking since the start of the crisis made it possible to prevent events in Syria from taking an even more tragic turn. If it were not for your actions and decisions, the terrorism that is spreading through the region now would have made even greater gains and spread to even wider territories. You have confirmed your course of action by joining in the military operations as part of a common front in the fight against terrorism.

Of course, we all know that any military action must be followed by political steps. Of course, our common goal is to bring about the vision the Syrian people have of their own country's future.

We must be particularly aware that military strikes against the terrorists are essential above all because we must fight terrorism, and also because terrorism is a real obstacle on the road to reaching a political settlement. Of course, the entire nation wants to take part in deciding the country's fate, and not just the government.

I want to thank the Russian people once more for the help you are giving Syria and express the hope that we will vanquish terrorism and continue working together to rebuild our country economically and politically and ensure peaceful life for everyone.
<...>

 
 #20
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
October 20, 2015
Is Moscow looking to make Syria's opposition a deal?
A recent meeting between a Russian presidential envoy and a Syrian opposition leader in Cairo has sparked much rumor and speculation. RBTH has polled Russian observers for their views on the reasons behind the meeting with opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Nadezhda Ustinova, Yekaterina Sinelschikova, RBTH

Speculation of a possible move by Russia to win support from the Syrian opposition is growing following a recent meeting between Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov and Ahmad Al-Jarba, one of the leaders of the movement to oust Syria's leader Bashar al-Assad.

Little is known about the outcomes of the meeting which took place in Cairo on Oct. 17. Yet observers suggest that Russia may be acting as an intermediary in talks between the Assad government and the moderate opposition to unite against a common enemy.
 
Assad forced to become more flexible

According to Vyacheslav Igrunov, head of the Institute of Humanitarian and Political Studies, Damascus can no longer ignore the Syrian opposition and is in no position to destroy it.

"It is too weak to fight wars on several fronts at the same time, while the war with the opposition is making it difficult to build a single front against Islamic State," he said.

Furthermore, the opposition enjoys the support of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the U.S., which makes tensions even higher. In this situation, it would be sensible to join forces against a common enemy, but to do that, first agreement on the status of the Syrian opposition has to be reached, said Igrunov, adding that Russia is ready to act as a key intermediary.

The main problem continues to lie in the sides' lack of readiness for a compromise. According to Igrunov, Assad has turned out to be more flexible, as he has - allegedly - announced that he is prepared to back down, which cannot be said of the opposition forces.

"From them, we have not heard such sensible statements about the possibility of fighting ISIS together," said Igrunov.
 
'If you are not terrorists, then show initiative'

In fact, Russian diplomats have already had meetings with representatives of the Syrian opposition in different formats. According to Leonid Syukiyainen, a professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and an expert in Islamic law, "the only thing that has changed now is the situation on the ground in Syria. But the goal remains the same: to establish dialogue."

However, there is still no uniform opinion as to who this moderate opposition is. While there is little disagreement between Russia and the West that ISIS is the enemy, attitudes to the various rebel groups fighting against the Assad regime are rather more complex and far from uniform in regard to who is seen as a terrorist and who is not.

"The meeting may have discussed exactly this: that there are structures and organizations that do not consider themselves terrorists, while Russia, on the contrary, does," said Syukiyainen.

It is quite possible, he added, that Russia put the issue point-blank: "If you are not terrorists, then show initiative in the political settlement of the conflict." If they are indeed guided by Syria's interests rather than instructions from abroad, they will agree to a compromise, he said. If not, they are not patriots of Syria.

"This is the objective behind the meetings our high-ranking diplomats are having," said another Oriental Studies expert, Konstantin Dudarev.
 
Moderates or terrorists?

Moscow's efforts to involve moderate Syrian opposition figures in the peace process have been going on for a long time, according to Andrei Fedorchenko, head of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies under the Moscow State Institute of International Relations.

"Since the start of the year, Moscow has already conducted two consultative intra-Syrian meetings, while in April it came up with eight points for the Moscow platform with proposals for getting out of the crisis. It contains an appeal to put more pressure on regional and international players to stop any actions supporting terrorists and an appeal to free occupied territories. That declaration was adopted by the moderate Syrian opposition," he said.

All that is happening now is an attempt to create a broad anti-terrorist coalition involving regional players and various Syrian forces - though how realistic this is remains an open question, according to Vyacheslav Igrunov.

"The thing is that the Syrian opposition will not run counter to its main sponsor, Saudi Arabia. And Saudi Arabia is so far not ready for a compromise with the Assad regime. Without Saudi Arabia, Russia will not succeed. So there are some tough negotiations ahead," he said.
 
 #21
President Assad's visit to Moscow may launch new dialogue in Syria - Russian expert

SOCHI, October 21 /TASS/. A visit by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to Moscow shows that Russia has managed to stabilize the situation in Syria making it possible for Damascus to discuss the post-war setup of the Syrian state, Vitaly Naumkin, director of the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Oriental Studies, told TASS on Wednesday on the sidelines of the 2015 Valdai International Discussion Club which is meeting in Sochi.

"This visit is symbolic. It shows that Russia has managed to radically stabilize the situation and succeed in what its western partners have failed to achieve over their yearlong military operation," Naumkin said adding it was the first foreign trip by the Syrian president since 2011.

"It shows that we can afford doing that and that we are working with the legitimate government rather than with some groups, which do not represent anybody," the Russian expert went on to say.

He said the agenda of the Russian-Syrian talks, which took place in the Kremlin earlier on Wednesday, included a wide range of issues linked to counteraction to terrorism and the political process in Syria.

"Naturally, a vision of Syria's future and the international situation in the light of the Syrian crisis were supposed to be part of agenda. A very important question today is what other countries, including Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar that are really supporting the opposition groups that are waging the war in Syria, are going to do under these circumstances," the Russian expert stressed.

"If the Syrian territory is cleared of terrorists - hopefully, the operation is going to be successful - we will demonstrate to the whole world that we can do it. The next question is how this territory should be run and restored and how a possibility to decide their own future should be guaranteed to the Syrian people. The question of Russia's role in this process is very important. It's clear that this role is great," Naumkin stressed.

Speaking about concrete ways of the Syrian settlement, Naumkin said that now that Russia's military operation had made Damascus much more confident, an opportunity emerged to establish contacts with the Free Syrian Army for joint struggle against terrorists. "Russia could act as an intermediary or even a guarantor in this dialogue," the Russian expert stressed.
 
 #22
Interfax
October 20, 2015
Communication, mutual aid channels to be established once agreement with U.S. Defense Department takes effect

A memorandum on flight safety in Syria, which was signed between Russia and the United States on Oct. 20, regulates all aircraft and drone flights in the Syrian airspace and aims to ensure flight safety, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov has said.

"We consider it a positive step that the Russian Defense Ministry and the U.S. Defense Department have signed a memorandum of understanding on incident prevention and aviation flight safety during the operation in the Syrian Arab Republic," he said.

"The document is of important practical significance" as it regulates the operation of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles in the Syrian airspace, he said.

"The memorandum contains a set of rules and restrictions aimed at preventing incidents between Russian and U.S. aviation," Antonov said. Once the agreement comes into effect, 24/7 communication channels will be established "between the relevant Russian and U.S. military command bodies and a cooperation mechanism determined, including the provision of mutual assistance in critical situations," the deputy minister said.

"The U.S. undertook to deliver the agreed-upon rules to all the members of its anti-ISIS coalition, whose pilots will be guided by these agreements," the Russian defense official said.

Experts from both sides drafted the memorandum "within the shortest period of time," Antonov said. "Its conclusion is testament to the high potential for Russian-U.S. cooperation, including in fighting terrorism, which we are ready to broaden and deepen," the deputy minister said.

"The memorandum is purely military-technical," Antonov said. "Its signing does not change Russia's principled position. Our armed forces are operating in Syria in accordance with international law, at the request of the legitimate government, whereas the United States and its anti-ISIS coalition are using force in Syria without its government's consent and in the absence of a UN Security Council resolution," the deputy minister said.
 
 #23
TASS
October 20, 2015
Russian defence official hails Syria flight safety memo signed with USA

Moscow, 20 October: The memorandum on flight safety in Syria signed by Russia and the USA today regulates the actions of all [manned] aircraft and drones in the airspace of the Syrian Arab Republic and is designed to ensure flight safety, Russian Deputy Defence Minister Anatoliy Antonov said today.

"We regard the signing of the memorandum of understanding between the Russian Defence Ministry and the US Defence Department on the prevention of incidents and ensuring air flight safety in the course of the operation in the Syrian Arab Republic as a positive step," the deputy minister said. "The document has great practical importance" because it regulates the actions of manned and unmanned aircraft in the airspace over Syria, he said.

"The memorandum contains a set of rules and restrictions with the aim of preventing incidents from arising between Russian and US aircraft," Antonov noted.

Once it has come into force, channels of round-the-clock operational communications will be established "between the relevant Russian and US military command bodies, a mechanism of interaction will be defined, including mutual assistance in the event of crises," he said.

"The Americans have agreed to communicate the agreed rules to all the members of the anti-ISIS coalition that they lead, whose pilots will be guided by these accords," the Russian Defence Ministry official stressed. He noted that the memorandum had been drawn up by the two sides' experts "in the shortest time possible".

"Its conclusion shows the high potential of cooperation between Russia and the USA, not least in the fight against terrorism, which we are willing to expand and deepen," the deputy minister said.

Antonov stressed that "the nature of the memorandum is purely military-technical". "Its signing does not alter Russia's fundamental position. Our Armed Forces operate in Syria in accordance with international law, at the request of the legitimate authorities, whereas the United States and the anti-ISIS coalition that it heads use force in Syria without the consent of its government or a UN Security Council decision," Antonov said in conclusion.
 
 #24
Vedomosti
October 19, 2015
Paper mulls likelihood of Russia's creating permanent military base in Syria
Aleksey Nikolskiy and Petr Kozlov, Russia does not plan to set up a permanent military base in Syria. It makes no sense to conclude long-term agreements with Damascus, expert believes

Answering the question as to whether it is possible today "to talk about the creation of two full-fledged Russian bases in Syria - a land base near Latakia and a naval base in Tartus" in an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda on Friday, Colonel General Andrey Kartapolov, chief of the General Staff Main Operational Directorate, stated: "There will be one base, which will include several components - sea, air, and land." "We more than welcome any desire on the part of Russia to create bases in Syria," Riyad Haddad, the Syrian ambassador in Moscow, told Interfax on the same day. He says that he is unaware either of the time scale for the creation of the base, or its possible location, but he gave assurances that it will be set up "where the Russian side will indicate, and this will serve the interests of Russia and Syria simultaneously."

The Russian president's press secretary stated in response to a question from Vedomosti as to whether Moscow is holding talks with Damascus on the creation of a permanent military base that "this is a topic for the Defence Ministry; these are military details, after all." Mariya Zakharova, director of the Russian Foreign Ministry Department for Information and the Press, also told Vedomosti that this question is within the jurisdiction of the Defence Ministry.

There have never been Soviet or Russian bases in Syria. A logistical support base consisting of a moorage and a floating workshop has been located in Tartus since the beginning of the eighties and a radio reconnaissance post was situated in Southern Syria until the beginning of the civil war. The difference between a base and a logistical support centre is that at a base, troop units and combined formations are stationed on a permanent basis and it possesses capabilities for their comprehensive support. In its entire postwar history, the USSR had only three foreign naval bases - in China (Port Arthur), Finland (Porkkala Udd), and Albania (Vlera) - which were closed as long ago as in the 1950s.

Currently, Russia has four land bases (equivalent to motorized rifle brigades) abroad - the 4th base in Abkhazia, the 7th base in South Ossetia, the 102d base in Armenia, and the 201st base in Tajikistan - and also an air base in Kyrgyzstan's Kant. All these facilities, a person close to the Russian Defence Ministry explains, function on the basis of long-term interstate treaties that include provisions on the legal status of servicemen, their supply, and so forth. Nothing of the kind is planned in the case of Syria, Vedomosti's interlocutor believes - if only because this country's political future has not been determined, and it makes no sense to conclude long-term agreements in such a situation. In his words, Gen. Kartapolov had in mind that a temporary operational base with the participation of fleet forces, ground troops, and aviation has already been set up in Syria, but its purpose is merely to carry out a specific operation aimed at supporting the Syrian Army's offensive.

The creation in Syria of a naval base, at the very least, should not be ruled out, Irina Zvyagelskaya, chief research assistant at the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Oriental Studies, believes. "A base is perfectly logical and is indispensable if our fleet enters the Mediterranean Sea." And this has no connection with the operation in Syria, the expert stresses. "If Russia wants to create a modern navy, that navy cannot sit in the Black Sea, which is a puddle."
 
 #25
http://gordonhahn.com
October 20, 2015
REPORT: An Anatomy of North Caucasus-Tied Jihadi Groups in Syria and Iraq
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.
[Complete text with tables and notes here http://gordonhahn.com/2015/10/20/report-an-anatomy-of-north-caucasus-tied-jihadi-groups-in-syria-and-iraq/]

Introduction

One of the reasons Russia has intervened in the Syrian revolutionary civil war is that jihadists from Russia and elsewhere in the former USSR play a key leadership role in a host of leading jihadi groups in Syria as well as in the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq. Moreover, jihadi groups based in Russia's North Caucasus and seeking to create networks across Russia maintain strong ties to these and other groups in Syria and Iraq. The distinction between jihadi groups in Syria and Iraq is somewhat artificial, since IS straddles the border between the two countries and maintains a powerful fighting force in both. What follows is an anatomy of the North Caucasus-related groups and key airs fighting in Syria and Iraq and the two jihadi organizations competing for control of the jihadi movement in Russia's North Caucasus.

JIHADI GROUPS AND THEIR LEADERSHIPS IN RUSSIA'S NORTH CAUCASUS

The first purely jihadist organization formed in Russia's North Caucasus was the Imarat Kavkaz (Caucasus Emirate) or IK founded in October 2007. It is the partial successor organization to the Chechen Republic of Ichkeriya (ChRI), which declared its secession from Russia in 1991 and fought two wars against post-Soviet Russia. By the mid-1990s it was being infiltrated by Al Qaida (AQ) and by the late 1990s there was a strong pro-jihadi wing inside the ChRI which started the second post-Soviet Chechen war in July 1999 by invading Dagestan and delaring an Islamist state there. After their defeat and Russia's re-ccupation of Chechnya, the jihadi element began to dominate within the ChRI.

In 2007 the ChRI was dissolved by the jihadists and the Imarat Kavkaz was declared by amir 'Abu Usman' Doku Umarov.  It became purely jihadist in its goals (the caliphate), ideology (extreme fundamentalism, takfirism, and martyrdom), strategy (expanding jihad across Russia and networking abroad), and tactics (suicide bombings, etc.). It gradually increased its insurgency and terrorist capacity through 2011. Since its founding in October 2007, IK operatives have carried out 55 suicide bombings and nearly 3,000 attacks overall, peaking in 2010 and 2011 with 583 and 546 attacks, respectively.

In 2010 the IK was involved in its first foreign plot. In autumn of that year, a Shariah4Belgium-led plot was uncovered involving Chechens and Morrocans in Belgium and Germany planning attacks on NATO targets and raising money and recruits for the IK. In 2011, a cell tied to the IK's Dagestan network, the Dagestan Vilaiyat (DV), was uncovered in the Czeck Republic planning an attck in an unidentified third country and raising funds and fighters for the IK. In 2012, the DV organized a large-scale, multi-pronged Mumbai-style plot to attack the May 2012 Eurovision music festival in Baku, Azerbaijan. The IK has inspired if not been operationally involved in several other foreign plots. These include: Lors Dukaev's 2011 plot to blow up the offices of the Copenhagen newspaper that published the infamous Muhammad cartoons that sparked demonstrations across the Muslim world; the summer 2012 plot by two Chechen and one Turkish AQ operatives to attack targets on Gibraltar during the London Olympic Games and targets elsewhere in Europe later; and the April 2013 Boston Marathon attacks that killed four and wounded more than 200.

With the exodus or 'hijra' of mujahedin and potential recruits to Syria beginning in 2012, the IK's capacity began to steadily decline, falling below 100 attacks last year. The damage done by the hijra was compounded by Russian security service successes, in particular the killing in rapid succession of the IK top amir - Umarov in September 2013, Ali Abu Mukhammad (born Aliaskhab Kebekov) in April 2015, and Abu Usman al-Gimravii (born Magomed Suleimanov) in August. Instability at the top has left the IK in bad straits, evidenced by the failure of a new amir to emerge for almost three months since Gimravii's demise in early August. This is also a consequence of the mass defections to IS this past year discussed below. Thus, the top leadership of the IK and its four vilaiyats - from what is known after the mass exodus to Syria, IK amir deaths, and defections to IS - is as shown in the table below.

Table 1. IMARAT KAVKAZ TOP STRUCTURE AND LEADERSHIP, as of 25 July 2015

Just before he was killed IK amir Gimravii appointed a veteran of the jihad in Syria as his successor as the amir of the Mountain Sector of the IK's Dagestan Vilaiyat (DV) Abu Dujan Mukhammad al-Gimrinskii. He will likely succed Gimravii as the IK's amir if and when an announcement comes.

According to the brief biography provided by VDagestan.com, the DV's official website, Gimrinskii studied "Shariah science" and Arabic in Syria in 2003 and graduated from the Shariah law institute 'Tahzib va Taalim' in 2007. Returning to Dagestan he engaged in proselytizing Islam and returned to northern Syria in 2013. There, he trained in the 'Sheikh Suleiman' training camp and fought in the 'liberation' of Maarat al-Artyk as well as in Kafa al-Harma, Hubbul va Zahra, Mayer and elsewhere. After acquiring "sufficient combat experience", he returned to Dagestan to "continue jihad." The announcement comes with two photographs, at least one of which shows Gimrinskii in Syria. The same photo also has one mujahedin in the background smudged out in order, apparently, to make him unidentifiable (http://vd.ag/muxiammad-abu-dudzhana-gimrinskij-amir-gs-vd.djihad). That a top leadership position has gone to a veteran of the Syrian jihad suggests the importance the Syrian jihad has for the IK.  The appointment put the IK a slightly better position to compete in terms of connections to and resources from the larger global jihadi revolutionary movement with the Islamic State's affiliate in the North Caucasus, the Caucasus Vilaiyat of the Ilsamic State (Vilaiyat Kavkaz Islamskogo Gosudarstvo), formed in recent months. The remnants of the IK remain on the side of AQ, Jabhat al-Nusrah (JN), and other jihadi groups opposed to the Islamic State's declaration of the Caliphate (http://gordonhahn.com/2015/03/10/the-islamic-state-al-qaida-tussle-over-the-caucasus-emirate-continues/). The IK's tribulations are sure to be further compounded by the rise of a competitor on its territory - the Islamic State.

Kavkaz Vilaiyat Islamskogo Gosudarstvo

The Islamic State's 'Kavkaz Vilaiyat Islamskogo Gosudarstvo' (The Caucasus Governate/Province of the Islamic State) or KVIG emerged from the IK this year, as groups of mujahedin first from Dagestan and then Chechnya and Ingushetiya defected to IS. The so-called 'Caucasus Vilaiyat of the Islamic State' (CVIS) emerged this year when some 70-80 percent of the IK's amirs and mujahedin broke away and declared the Islamic loyalty oath or 'bayat' to IS and its self-declared 'caliph' Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The bleeding to IS in the North Caucasus began in November 2014, a small DV cell or 'jamaat' from Aukhovskii village took the bayat to IS's Baghdadi. On December 19, a more damaging defection occurred when the the amir of the IK's largest network - its Dagestan network or the 'Dagestan Vilaiyat' (DV) - Abu Muhammad al-Kadarskii (born Rustam Asildarov) and the amir of a key DV sector covering Dagestan's capitol, Makhachkala, issued an announcement that they had taken the Islamic loyalty oath or "bayat" to IS and Baghdadi (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/254364/). Days later, amir Markhan, the amir of the Eastern Front under the IK's Chechnya network, the Nokchicho Vilaiyat (NV), followed suit. Since there are only two fronts under the NV, Markhan could have be taken half of the NV mujahedin with him already at that time (www.kavkazcenter.com/russ/content/2014/12/25/107471.shtml). Overall the previous IK defectors must have 'taken' already hundreds of IK mujahedeen and thousands of potential recruits to IS, though it remains unclear whether they plan to go to the Levant. The DV and NV Eastern Front alone could comprise as much as 80 percent of the IK's already dwindling forces. These defections were already a severe blow to the IK, which has seen its capacity diminish since 2011, following the surge in emigration to Syria since 2012.

On 15 June 2015 a videotape from amir of the IK's declining Chechnya network, the Nokchichi Vilaiyat (NV), and the amir of the IK's Ingushetiya network, the Galgaiche Vilaiyat (GV), was published on the NV's 'InfoChechen' site. In the video NV amir 'Khamzat' Aslan Byutukaev and GV amir Abdurakhim declared the bayat to the Islamic State (IS, ISIS, ISIL, Daesh) and its 'caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (http://infochechen.com/tribuna/310-podtverzhdaetsya-prisyaga-amirov-vilayata-nokhchicho-i-vilayata-g1alg1ajche-khalifu-abu-bakru-al-bagdadi.html). With NV amir Khamzat and GV amir Abdurakhim going to IS, the IK was left with a few DV and NV amirs and the weak OVKBK which has carried out only a handful of minor attacks in the last year or more and small remnants of the other three vilaiyats, which have not done much better, excluding the major NV attack in Grozny in December of last year. This nearly completed the process of the IK's full integration into IS.

The IK's full integration was completed in late June or early July. In early July videos and audios emerged documenting Asildarov's loyalty oath the IS 'caliph' Abubakr al-Baghdadi and IS's announcement of its incorporation of the KVIG into IS (http://gordonhahn.com/2015/07/03/the-caucasus-vilaiyat-of-the-islamic-state/).

Table 2. Imarat Kavkaz Islamskogo Gosudarstvo's Top Leadership

Thus, IS now has a direct affiliate in Russia's North Caucasus. It consists of some 70-80 percent of the IK's former amirs and kujahedin now with IS. DV amir Asikladarov's defection was crucial in likely bringing all or almost all of the Dagestan network which comprised some 60-70 percent of the IK in recent years. It is likely that the VKIG mujahedin remain in the North Caucasus though we can expect perhaps some of them to travel to Iraq and Syria for training and to elsewhere in Russia and Eurasia to organize jamaats for carrying out terrorist attacks and perhaps insurgency groups in isolated landscapes of jihad.

VKIG groups and operatives are already active in Russia and Europe. Last week Russian security organs uncovered a 12-man cell plotting to carry out bombings - apparently suicide bombings - targeting Moscow transport, like the Moscow subway system, famously hit by two female Dagestani female suicide bombers of the wives of two top amirs in the IK's DV in March 2010. Several of the jihadists in the new Moscow plot were said to been from Syria, most were from the North Caucasus, some were Chechens, and several were said to have trained in IS camps in Syria and come to Russia before Putin's military intervention (www.mk.ru/incident/2015/10/12/podgotovka-terakta-v-moskve-diversanty-byli-dvoynymi-agentami.html and https://tvrain.ru/articles/mk_zhena_vladeltsa_kvartiry_gde_nashli_vzryvchatku_nazvala_kvartiranta_polkovnikom_gru-396160/).

Also last week, a reported IS recruiter and well-known propagandist from Dagestan, serving as the imam of a mosque in Berlin was arrested in Berlin on charges of recruiting personnel and buying combat equipment, such as night vision devices and telescopic sights, and weapons for transport to Syria and use by IS forces. He is a 30-year old Russian citizen named Gadzhimurad K. or Murat Atayev and was arrested on October 14th (www.dw.com/ru/%D0%B2-%D0%B1%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B5-%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD-%D0%B8%D0%BC%D0%B0%D0%BC-%D0%B2%D1%8B%D1%85%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%B5%D1%86-%D0%B8%D0%B7-%D1%80%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%B8/a-18786043; http://ria.ru/world/20151015/1302589303.html; and www.berlin.de/polizei/polizeimeldungen/pressemitteilung.385921.php).

North Caucasus-Tied Jihadist Groups in Syria

In 2012 the CE's founding amir, 'Abu Usman' Doku Umarov, dispatched and for some time financed an official emissary and several local amirs to make contact with the Syrian jihadists so North Caucasian fighters could go there, receive training, fighting experience, network with other global jihadists and then return to the Caucasus with new skills, connection, perhaops access to funding for the IK's benefit. Those sent included Salahuddin al-Shishani, who was the IK's emissary to Syrian jihadists and is now the amir of the group 'Imarat Kavkaz in Sham (the Levant), and 'Umar al-Shishani' Tarkhan Batrishvili amir of IS's Northern Front, among several others, some of whom have been killed.

They became the leaders of the army of foreign mujahedin, Jeish al-Muhajirin wal-Ansar (the Army of Emigrants and Partisan Helpers) or the JMA, aligned with Jabhat al-Nusra (JN). Salahiddin became the amir of the JMA as well as a sub-group within it, Imarat Kavkaz Shama (the Caucasus Emirate in the Levant) or IKSh, a name that was sometimes apllied to the JMA as well. A series of other groups, many of the led by mujahedin from the IK or the North Caucasus, also emered in Syria, and some of those amirs have been killed and their jamaats become defunct or folded into other groups. The list of groups with North Caucasus or former IK amirs or large numbers of North Caucasian or former IK fighters can be found in Table 3 below.

Table 3. Groups Fighting in Syria with North Caucasus and/or Former IK Amirs and/or a Large Cohort of IK and/or North Caucasian Mujahedin

Until several months ago the JMA was still led by the IK's envoy to Syria, Salahuddin al-Shishani, continued to be the air of the JMA and the Crimean Tatar from Crimea, Abdur Rakhim al-Krymkii, remained its amir. However, a dispute led to their expulsion from the JMA. They now have established their own organization, the Caucasus Emirate in Sham (Levant) as an independent jamaat. Most of the Chechens left the JMA with Salahuddin North Caucasian mujahedin remain in the JMA and other groups aligned with JN. The JMA is now led by a Saudi but his military amir is a Dagistani. The JMA recently took the loyalty oath to Jabhat al-Nusra amir al-Jolani, and it remains the largest unit of foreign mujahedin and retains a large number from the former USSR, including Tatars, Uzbeks, Tajiks, etc.

Jund al-Sham JS, led by the Muslim Margoshvili, has been an independent jamaat for several years. Margoshivili is an ethnic Chechen Kist from Georgia's Pankisi Gorge, like Batirashvili, but lacks the severity of Tarkhan. Maroshvili attempted to go to Chechnya through Dagestan but could not get there, engaged in some fighting under the IK in Dagestan, and then left for Syria in 2012. Many of the Chechens left the JS in 2013 and joined Batirashvili in IS. Margoshvili has considerable charisma and has now survived more than three years of jihadi at main fronts in Syria. The JS operates in and around the city of Jisr al-Shughur in Idlib province.

Another key North Caucasus-tied group is Ajnad al-Kavkaz (AK), the amir of which is Abdul-Khakim Shishani (born Rustam Azhiyev). It operates in Latakia and Idlib provinces and is part of Ansar al-Sham (Partisans of the Levant) or AS, which includes other North Caucasus fighters. The AS was part of al-Jabhat al-Islamiyya al-Suriyya (Islamic Front of Syria) or JIS, then belonged to al-Jabhat al-Islamiyya or the Islamic Front, and is now part of Jaysh al-Fateh (Army of Conquerors) or JF. This demonstrates the constantly shifting sands of the Syrian jihad's organizational landscape that the Russian, like the Syrians and other before them, will have to sort it. Another of the larger Chechen-led jamaats is amir Musa's Ansar al-Sham (Partisans of the Levant) or AS, and it also operates in Idlib and Latakia.

There are several other small North Caucasus-tied jihadi groups fighting in and around Idlib. The most interesting in terms of looking at the networking and travels of IK mujahedin is Tarkhan's Jamaat, which is led by amir 'Mansur' Tarkhan Gaziev and consists mostly of Chechens. Gaziev was a long-time member of first the ChRI and the IK and rose to the position of amir of the Southwestern Front of the IK's Chechnya network, the Nokchicho Vilaiyat (NV). Gaziev also was a major player in the famous August 2010 split within the IK that saw Gaziev and several other top amirs of the IK's Chechen NV reject then IK amir Umarov's leadership and breakaway to form their own independent IK. Gaziev was named naib to the independent IK's amir Hussein Gakayev (http://gordonhahn.com/2010/10/30/islam-islamism-and-politics-in-eurasia-report-28/). Gaziev recently was added to the U.S.State Depaertment's list of international terrorists.

The JN and the groups discussed above fighting in and around the JN at the moment actually pose together a greater threat to the Assad regime than does IS. They carry out operations with other jihadi groups in and around Aleppo, Iblid, and even near Damascus. It is coincidence that Russian air strikes have been focused particularly on Idlib. These jihadist groups also carry out operations near Latakia, not far from which sits the Russian naval base and the small though growing contingent of Russian marines and military equipment now being sent to bolster Assad.

Other important IK operatives, such as former amir Umarov's brothers, operate out of Turkey and reportedly help transport Caucasus Emirate fighters to and from non-IS groups Syria.

Caucasus Mujahedin In Iraq's IS

When in 2012 then CE amir Umarov - poisoned to death by Russian intelligence in September 2013 - dispatched the group of amirs to Syria, some of them soon began to drift towards the extreme radical orientation of IS. The most infamous of these amirs is Tarkhan Batirashvili, nom de guerre Abu Umar al-Shishani. Batirashvili joined IS's ranks in 2013 and became the amir of IS's northern front, which carries out combat and terrorist operations in northern Iraq and Syria along the borders with Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan. He is said to have led IS's conquest of Anbar Province, which enabled amir Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to declare the Islamic State or Caliphate. Some reports a while back indicated that Batirashvili may have been promoted be Islamic State's overall military amir. Tarkhan's older brother Tamaz, according to their father, has always been the leader of the two. He is reported to be running IS's Syrian financial operations and to be extremely secretive even as as Islamic State leaders go. He is likely funneling the funds that finance his brother's operations.

Table 4. North Caucasus Amirs in IS (in Iraq mostly)

Tarkhan has always expressed an intent to return to the Caucasus and continue jihad against Russia. Now, with IS's VKIG there, Batirashvili need not to return in order to orchestrate IS operations there. Table 4's list of IS Russian-language media, all created before Putin's Syria intervention, indicates that IS has already been focused on expanding its jihad to Russia and Eurasia (http://gordonhahn.com/2015/06/03/jihadi-target-eurasia-the-islamic-states-new-russian-language-journals/).

Therefore, it can be expected that under the Batirashvilis' influence, IS will devote some significant resources to building up the VKIG's capacity to carry out operation not just in Russia's North Caucasus but deep inside Russia. Saudi Arabian ulema have issued a fatwa calling for jihad against Russia, and both IS and AQ have called for attacks on Russia in retaliation for Moscow's Syria intervention. In sum, we are likely to see in the very near future an uptick in the number of arrests of jihadis, jihadi attacks, and jihadi-relayed violent incidents in Russia and the former USSR, particularly in Azerbaijan and Central Asia.


 
 #26
Washington Post
October 21, 2015
Team Russia: World Police
By David Ignatius, Opinion Writer

The godfather of Russia's military intervention in Syria is Yevgeny Primakov, a former prime minister and intelligence chief and for decades his nation's leading Arabist. A hint of Primakov's influence on Russian President Vladimir Putin came in the unusual eulogy that Putin delivered at his friend's funeral in Moscow four months ago.

"Primakov had global vision and was open and bold in his thinking," Putin told mourners. By asserting Russia's interests and power, Primakov "got the country through a very serious crisis" after the fall of the Soviet Union. His understanding of the Middle East was "tremendous," and his influence beyond Russia was "undeniable," Putin said.

"Many spoke with him, sought his advice, shared with him their plans and actions," Putin said. "I can say that this applies in full measure to myself, too."

Putin is moving with a determination that Primakov would have admired - but might also have seen as risky. By sending Russian warplanes, troops and tanks to Syria, Putin has launched one of Russia's boldest military moves since 1945. He has begun to restore Primakov's dream of Russian influence in the Arab world, but at a cost of assuming the burden of fighting Muslim extremism, an effort that has been so draining for the United States.

Primakov symbolized the idea that Russian power was not dead in the post-Soviet era, and that Moscow was not a permanent junior partner to Washington. His defining moment came in 1999, when as prime minister he turned around his plane on the way to the United States and flew home after learning that NATO would be intervening militarily in Kosovo, against Russian wishes.

Russians called the mid-Atlantic course reversal "Primakov's loop." The message was that Russia might be too weak to stop U.S. military action, but it wouldn't meekly submit to U.S. dictation.

The newspaper Izvestia published a eulogy for Primakov in July that stressed his role in asserting Russia's independence and dignity in those days of national despair: "He managed to stop this humiliating slide of Russia toward the status of a country 'in receivership,' and to reformat our foreign policy, restoring honor and decency."

Primakov's specialty was the Arab world. He was Russia's premier handler of its two chief Arab clients, the Assad regime in Syria and Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Over Primakov's career, when U.S. power in the Middle East, anchored by Israel, was on the rise, a moribund Russia lost one ally after another. This started with its expulsion from Egypt in 1972 and continued as regimes in Iraq and Libya were toppled.

Putin decided to stand his ground in Syria, as Primakov probably counseled. Russia's intervention there has been advancing in slow motion for months, but U.S. analysts seem to have missed its military dimension and consequences. President Obama and Secretary of State John F. Kerry welcomed greater Russian diplomatic involvement in the region after Moscow's generally helpful role in the Iran nuclear talks. They apparently didn't anticipate that Russia would seek to bolster Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on the battlefield as a prelude to any diplomacy.

Putin was hardly ambiguous about his intentions. He said in a Sept. 28 speech to the United Nations: "It is now obvious that the power vacuum created in some countries of the Middle East and North Africa led to emergence of anarchy areas....We think it is an enormous mistake to refuse to cooperate with the Syrian government and its armed forces, who are valiantly fighting terrorism face-to-face."

For the United States, military intervention in Iraq was a "war of choice." But in Putin's mind, fighting the Islamic State seems to be an existential matter, for a Russia with a large and growing Muslim population.

If Russia really means to be the enforcer against the Islamic State, this could mean a fundamental change in power relations in the Middle East - with Russia bidding to become protector not just of Assad but of a Europe that is frightened about terrorism, refugees and energy supplies.

At the United Nations in September, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi asked Putin if he was serious about taking on the jihadists. According to an Iraqi official, Putin answered that he was serious about dealing with the threat posed by 2,000 Russians who have joined the Islamic State.

Primakov dreamed about reviving Russian power in the Middle East and globally. Putin is now doing it, and it's a change, fraught with danger for Russia and the United States both, that could alter the balance of power in the region and beyond.
 
 #27
Moscow Times
October 21, 2015
Calculating the Cost of Russia's War in Syria
By Peter Hobson

Russian air strikes in Syria are costing Moscow up to $4 million per day, data collated for The Moscow Times by a defense think tank showed.

The figures by IHS Jane's show that bombing raids, supply runs, infrastructure and ground personnel - along with a salvo of cruise missiles fired into the conflict zone - have cost Russia $80 million-$115 million since strikes began on Sept. 30.

Compared to Russia's 3.1 trillion ruble ($50 billion) defense budget this year, that is small change. But the Kremlin could see its costs and commitments grow. Analysts warn that the conflict in Syria could drag on for years, and if soldiers die, Russian involvement could dramatically escalate.

Flying out of an airbase in territory controlled by Syrian President Bashar Assad, some 36 Russian warplanes and 20 attack helicopters have flown around 40 sorties per day for the past three weeks, according to the Defense Ministry, strafing targets belonging to rebel groups and the jihadists of the Islamic State.

Precise data is scarce, but media reports say servicing and protecting the air force are around 1,500-2,000 personnel on the ground, supplied via naval and air transport through the Black Sea and Iranian and Iraqi airspace. A handful of warships in the eastern Mediterranean adds extra reinforcement.

Each warplane costs $12,000 per hour to fly, and each helicopter $3,000 per hour, according to IHS. With the tempo of bombing runs keeping the planes in the sky for 90 minutes a day on average and choppers flying one hour per day, Moscow is spending around $710,000 every 24 hours, IHS said. Each day, they drop around $750,000 worth of munitions.

The military personnel cost around $440,000 per day to support, IHS estimates. Keeping the ships in the Mediterranean requires a further $200,000. Other supporting costs, such as logistics, intelligence gathering, communications and engineering, add $250,000 per day.

That means the minimum cost of keeping this operation going is $2.4 million per day. Those price estimations are conservative, said Ben Moores, a senior analyst at IHS, and the real cost could be close to twice as high.

The estimates do not factor in a ramping up of bombing raids, such as those seen in the second week of Russian air strikes, or use of ground-based weapons. They are far less than what the U.S. and Britain spent on their deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is partly because Russia has less distance to cover to reach Syria, and also due to lower wages and cheaper supplies in Russia.

The estimates also exclude a cruise missile assault launched on Oct. 7 - President Vladimir Putin's birthday. Each Kaliber missile launched from Russia's Caspian flotilla cost $1.2 million, according to IHS. If the price of four missiles that the U.S. said crashed in Iran is added to the 26 that hit Syria, the salvo cost $36 million.

The Russian Defense Ministry did not respond to a request to comment on the cost of its operations in Syria.

What Are They Buying?

To an extent, Russia's intervention has been done on the cheap. Compared with the U.S.-led coalition, which has been bombing targets in Syria for more than a year, the Russian contingent is tiny. The operation is smaller than some of the war games practiced by the Russian armed forces in recent months.

Despite boasts that Russia is waging a high-tech precision warfare presented as in no way technically inferior to the U.S. campaign, few expensive weapons have been used. Aside from the cruise missile strike, most of the ordnance dropped in the country has been Soviet-made unguided bombs, of which Russia has plentiful stores.

The money spent has also been an investment. It has been a powerful propaganda tool, buying coverage in the world's media of the return of a global superpower.

It has allowed Russia to test new equipment in battle, and given its soldiers operational experience that will increase their battlefield capability.

And it has provided a vivid demonstration of Russian military equipment for prospective overseas buyers. Russia last year exported defense equipment worth $15.5 billion. A 1 percent increase in sales would be the equivalent of a month of spending on bombing Syria.

But these benefits are greatest early in a campaign, and become less relevant as the conflict drags on, said Vadim Kozulin, a military analyst at the PIR Center, a defense think tank in Moscow.

Is It Sustainable?

Although Russian officials have said their involvement in Syria is temporary, it is not clear how Moscow will extract itself from the four-year-old conflict.

Russian air strikes halted the slow weakening of the Syrian army by rebels and Islamic State fighters, but it is not clear whether Assad's government would be able to hold territory without Moscow's continued support.

What's more, Russia's intervention and the strengthening of its bases in Syria has raised the cost to Moscow of allowing Assad to lose.

The Islamic State has almost unlimited manpower, said Moores. "You can't defeat something that has an infinite pool of reserves ... Every year, there are more and more young people in the Middle East [who will join up]."

"You're going to be doing almost daily air strikes for years, just to keep it balanced the way it is," he said. "A military victory is impossible."

So far, Russia's intervention has been loss-free. But Russian involvement in the conflict could easily escalate if servicemen are killed, or if planes or helicopters - themselves worth tens of millions of dollars - are shot down.

A drone worth $240,000 was downed by Turkey last week, and though Moscow has denied it, it almost certainly belonged to Russia, according to IHS Jane's.

Hard Times

Some analysts have drawn comparisons to the Soviet war in Afghanistan. But the Soviet Union had cash to spare when it sent its army into Afghanistan in 1979. Oil prices were high, and plentiful export revenues from crude could be funneled into the conflict.

Russia's intervention in Syria comes at the opposite end of the cycle. The price of oil is at its lowest in more than a decade, and the country is in a fiscal crisis.

The move also comes amid a wider increase in Russian deployments abroad. Moscow is expanding its bases in Syria, the Arctic and former Soviet republics, particularly in Central Asia, where it warns of a rising threat of terrorism spilling over from Afghanistan.

The Kremlin has said the money for the Syria campaign is coming out of the existing defense budget - one of the few departments to escape sweeping cuts this year - but the real source of funding is opaque, said Pyotr Topychkanov, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, a think tank.

It is a paradox, he said: Russia has mimicked U.S.-style publicity for its Syrian offensive, blitzing the press with glossy images and film of missile launches and bomb strikes and posting daily updates on Facebook and Twitter in multiple languages. But on the money issue, officials have been silent.

Social spending, in the meantime, is being reined in. The government is poised to abandon a pledge to raise pensions in line with inflation: Prices are set to rise by about 12 percent this year, but the Finance Ministry says it can afford to raise pensions by only 4 percent.

Finance Minster Anton Siluanov was quoted by the BBC as saying last month that every 1 percent increase in pension payouts costs 70 billion rubles ($1.1 billion) annually - roughly what Russia would spend in a year in Syria if its intervention continued at its current scale.

Responding to U.S. President Barack Obama's accusation to CBS News that Putin was "running Russia's economy into the ground," the Russian president said in a television interview on Sunday: "The tasks we are carrying out in the defense industry will push us into developing not just applied but also fundamental science and will have benefits for the entire economy."

New orders would be good for Russia's military-industrial complex, coming on top of 20 trillion rubles ($320 billion) being pumped into a state rearmament drive this decade.

But Russia has not yet seen the kind of military-commercial cross fertilization that led to the development of inventions like the Internet in the U.S., and with 20 percent of state spending going to defense, some analysts have said an unproductive military sector is squandering too many resources that should be invested in education and health care.

More immediately, cuts to pension payouts and public sector wages will also only exacerbate a slump in consumer spending that is contracting the economy.

So far, thanks to jingoistic coverage of the bombing raids in the state media, there is little sign that Russians are upset about any of this.

And anyway, cost is not an argument for the Kremlin, said Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST), a Moscow defense think tank.

"As we say in Russia, showing off is worth more than money," he said.
 
 #28
Reuters
October 21, 2015
Upstaged NATO searches for '360-degree' response to Russia
By Robin Emmott

The brass band played, the flags waved and Western generals delivered speeches brimming with resolve as NATO began big war games in the central Mediterranean this week.

But the military display seemed faintly unreal while Russian warplanes were bombing Syrian rebels a few hundred kilometers (miles) to the east in a coordinated action with President Bashar al-Assad's armed forces and Iran's Revolutionary Guards.

NATO, which waged an air campaign to help Libyan rebels oust Muammar Gaddafi, then left that country to descend into anarchy, is not a player in Syria and is watching uncomfortably as its former Cold War adversary Russia widens its role there.

The speed and scope of Moscow's intervention in Syria's four-year-old civil war, coming after Russia's seizure of Crimea and support for pro-Kremlin rebels in eastern Ukraine last year, wrong-footed the U.S.-led alliance and has heightened soul-searching about its future.

"The West has been tactically surprised. I don't think they anticipated what (Russian President Vladimir) Putin would get up to," said Nick Witney, a former European Defence Agency chief now at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

NATO last year set in motion its biggest modernization since the Cold War. But the alliance's political and military elite now see the need for a broader plan that goes beyond deterring Russia in the east. They call it thinking "360 degrees".

"We need to develop a strategy for all kinds of crises, at 360 degrees," said Gen. Denis Mercier, the Frenchman who heads NATO's command focused on future threats. "We need to react in the south, in the east, the north, all around."

NATO's problem is that such a strategy is still embryonic while developments in Europe's neighborhood are moving faster than the ponderous approach of the 28-nation defense pact, created in 1949 to deter the Soviet threat.

From the Baltics, where Russia has a naval base in Kaliningrad, through the Black Sea and annexed Crimea, to Syria, Moscow has stationed anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles able to cover huge areas.

NATO officials see the emergence of a strategy of defensive zones of influence, with surface-to-air missile batteries and anti-ship missiles that could disrupt NATO moving across air, land and sea or deny it access to some areas.

Unconventional warfare techniques are part of the equation, ranging from unidentified troops - the so-called "green men" without insignia on their uniforms seen in Crimea and eastern Ukraine - to disinformation operations and cyber attacks.

OVERESTIMATING RUSSIA?

NATO also faces failing states, war, Islamist militancy and a refugee crisis at Europe's borders. That is partly a result of the European Union's inability to stabilize its neighborhood economically.

But critics say it is also due to U.S. President Barack Obama's aversion to entanglement in Middle East wars in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. That has led to a decline in Washington's influence across the region.

While NATO is drawing up a multi-layered deterrence plan, officials acknowledge a risk that Russia might again move faster to pre-empt Western action. For instance, it could move warships from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Libyan coast to hamper any possible NATO effort to support a government of national unity in the future.

Still, some say NATO has been here before and any talk of a lack of preparedness is overblown. Past bouts of questioning of the alliance's relevance led to operations in the Balkans and in Afghanistan - a significant departure from 40 years of Cold War deterrence in which NATO forces never operated "out of area".

A NATO official rejected any suggestion the alliance was passively watching Russia's military build-up in Syria, noting that three allies - the United States, France and Turkey - were involved individually in the coalition waging air strikes against Islamic State rebels in Syria and Iraq.

Some experts see a danger of overestimating Putin, who oversees an economy weakened by Western sanctions and lower oil prices and cannot match NATO military power over the long term.

"We should be under no illusions about Putin's hostility to the West but also be very careful not to over react to what a damaged Russian economy can produce in the way of military capability," said Witney, a former British defense planner.

LOOKING TO AMAZON, DHL

NATO's public response is to test its new spearhead force of 5,000 troops, ready to move within a few days. Over the next five weeks, the alliance is carrying out its biggest military exercises since 2002, with 36,000 troops, 230 military units, 140 aircraft and more than 60 ships, to certify the force.

Such measures, agreed at a NATO summit in Wales last year following Russia's annexation of Crimea, are aimed chiefly at reassuring eastern allies that Russia will not be able to invade them too. There is still debate about whether the spearhead force could be used in North Africa or beyond.

Small command posts with NATO flags from Estonia to Bulgaria and the spearhead force are ready. But one NATO diplomat called such measures "the minimum necessary", and Gen. Mercier said the so-called Readiness Action Plan was "just a first step".

"We have worked on reassuring our allies," said Gen. Philip Breedlove, NATO's supreme commander in Europe. "We are not exactly sure what it will take to work in the future," he said when asked what NATO's modern deterrents might look like.

The next NATO summit next July in Warsaw is the target date for proposals for more modern, agile deterrents.

Such ideas include setting up NATO-flagged command posts on the southern flank and adapting the spearhead force for maritime and air operations.

They could also feature a permanent naval force to patrol the Mediterranean and work more closely with the European Union and the United Nations in stabilizing fragile states.

Another idea involves including a nuclear deterrent in training exercises, something Britain supports but others, such as Germany, worry would be seen as a provocation by Russia.

NATO's Gen. Mercier even suggested looking to companies such as courier DHL Worldwide Express and online retailer Amazon.com to improve NATO's deployment speed.

"The question is how to have new ideas to make deployments easier. We should look at what the civilian world does, to DHL and Amazon. How do they improve their logistics?" Mercier said.
 
 #29
Wall Street Journal
October 21, 2015
Americans See Russia, Syria as Looming Threats - WSJ/NBC Poll
By REID J. EPSTEIN

Americans don't think Russia and Syria are a threat to the U.S. now, but believe they will be in the future, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

The poll found 56% of those surveyed said Syria likely will be a threat to the U.S. "soon." Another 23% said Syria is an immediate threat. Only 16% said Syria poses no threat.

With Russia, 60% said is poses a "long-term military threat" and 14% said it is an "immediate" military threat. Just 23% said Russia is not a military threat.

The poll results help explain the hawkish foreign policy positions being articulated on the 2016 presidential campaign trail. Republicans, with the exception of the struggling Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), have pledged a tougher stance against both Russia and the Islamic State, which is operating in Syria and Iraq. Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton last month said President Barack Obama's policy to train Syrian rebels failed.

The poll found most Americans agree with Mrs. Clinton about the president's Syrian stance. Only 34% said they approve of Mr. Obama's handling of the Syrian conflict, compared to 54% who disagree. Among Democrats, 59% approve of Mr. Obama on Syria, while 28% disapprove. Republicans disapprove by an 81% to 10% clip.

Agreement on the long-term Russian and Syrian threats cut across party lines. For both Democrats and Republicans, 60% said Russia poses a long-term threat. Democrats were more likely to say Russia doesn't pose a threat and Republicans more likely to say it poses an immediate threat.

With Syria, 56% of Democrats said it poses a long-term threat, compared to 55% of Republicans. But here, twice as many Republicans (35%) than Democrats (15%) believe Syria is an immediate threat, while far more Democrats (25%) than Republicans (6%) believe Syria poses no threat.

The WSJ/NBC poll of 1,000 adults was conducted from Oct. 15-18. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
 
 #30
Russia Insider/Telepolis
www.russia-insider.com
October 21, 2015
Renowned German Journalist Breaks Ranks, Slams Media Portrayal of Russia
'It is not in the US interest that a prosperous, cooperative relationship between Russia and the EU exist'
By Stephan Korinth,Telepolis)

Gabriele Krone-Schmalz is a German broadcast journalist and author with an academic background in Eastern European history and political science. She is the author of several books on Russia and today works as a freelance journalist.

This article originally appeared at Telepolis. Translated from German by Hugo Chavez

At a recent launch in Hanover of her book, "Understanding Russia - The battle for the Ukraine and the arrogance of the West", Gabriele Krone-Schmalz, the former Moscow correspondent at the German ARD broadcaster, raised the topic of Russia's never-ending demonisation in the German media and signalled a warning about the increasing loss of democratic values in the German media industry.

Krone-Schmalz pointed out how rare it has become to find reports which are not extremely critical of Russia and argued in favour of a more moderate and understanding position on the country. She also called for higher professional journalistic standards in Germany.

There is now such a significant gap between public and published opinion in Germany that she has become seriously concerned about its democratic institutions. She received vocal public support and applause during the sold-out lecture being held at the Decius book store.

"Increasing numbers of people no longer see their views represented in the pluralist media landscape", Krone-Schmalz criticised. This leads to frustration and stokes extremism. "Should it remain like this we'll soon be reduced to viewing our system in a museum." The journalist was especially critical about the coverage of international topics.

Extreme black or white Russian themes

The German media has, for years, demonised Russia through the use of extreme black or white themes. Double standards are often used, she explained during the lecture from her book, "Understanding Russia", that has also been available in the Russian language since September.

German media regularly complained about "armed Russians standing around everywhere" during the Crimea Referendum in March 2014. "What are we then supposed to make of voting decisions in the Kiev Parliament, subsequent to it being stormed and taken over by armed gangs?" This topic was never discussed.

Russia is criticised when Ukrainian broadcasts are taken off the air in the Crimea yet at the same time the German media mostly ignores it when Russian broadcasters are switched off in Ukraine. This and many more such examples show that countless top-journalists only feel themselves bound to (impartial, journalist - Ed.) "values" when it suits them. "The Odessa massacre story had the potential for a 'ARD Focus' or 'Today Special' broadcast", said Krone-Schmalz. Yet, no special programs were made because it was politically inconvenient for the West to show the responsible perpetrators, namely Ukrainian Nationalists.

"What kind of impression does this create on people in Russia and the Ukraine?", asked the Eastern Europe historian. In Russia, this one-sided attitude from the German media is widely recognised. She is often asked why Germany allows itself to be used as an instrument of US foreign policy.

During subsequent conversations with Russian interviewees of German media programming, Krone-Schmalz often heard how upset they were upon seeing how their contributions were edited and reconstructed.

Manipulation of words

Krone-Schmalz explained that the German media makes use of manipulative and misleading language when dealing with Russian topics. After former Ukrainian President Yanukovych was deposed by the Maidan coup, Turchinov, his successor, was named as the "interim president" while the new head of government in the Crimea was described as an "illegitimate prime minister".

Even though it was not known who had shot down flight MH-17, media headlines screamed that a "Russian BUK" was responsible. The combination of many such deceptive subtleties have an impact, the journalist summarized.

Every week a new demonisation or misleading article about Russia might appear in the German media. She personally experienced how interviews in which she participated were blocked from appearing in German newspapers by media executives and how her contributions to TV-reports were cut from programming. "It then always annoys me how people here in Germany complain about the supposed lack of press freedom in Russia", Krone-Schmalz said.

It is unpleasant that propaganda-coloured news is presented in Russia, yet, over there one also finds live-broadcasts in which journalists ask extremely critical questions of high-placed politicians, Krone-Schmalz explained.

"Something like this would be scarcely imaginable in Germany."

Correspondents judge more than they report

"Today, German foreign correspondents often spend more time judging instead of reporting", the former Moscow correspondent criticised during a follow-up conversation with Telepolis. "Due to technical advances they can now, unlike in the past, produce fast and unsophisticated contributions. Unfortunately there is now less time to conduct thorough research and interview people. It is insufficient to only conduct research on Google", she emphasized. Journalists dare not only rely on press agency reports. "I also miss hearing critical questions from colleagues. Many questions are simply not being asked any longer."

Krone-Schmalz is very critical of the media's obsession with perpetuating personality cults. "We moved very quickly from Gorby-euphoria to Putin-phobia. The demonisation of the current Russian President has a lot more to do with playing politics than it has to do with explaining politics. The German media wants to collectively present a one-dimensional picture of Russia, they criticise it to maintain an image of a Cold War enemy," she explained.

Cooperation with Russia is necessary

The global state of political affairs makes cooperation with Russia even more urgent. "All the corners of the world are burning. It would be intelligent to involve Russia internationally. The war in Eastern Ukraine could have been prevented had Moscow been consulted early on", believes Krone-Schmalz. "Instead we now have a Western sanctions regime in place against Russia in which the German government is complicit."

Previous Federal German Republic politicians such as Konrad Adenauer (visited Moscow in 1955) or Willy Brandt and Egon Bahr (change through rapprochement) did not cave in to Western pressure and acted in the German national interest.

After Germany's re-unification, Russian politicians harboured hopes that Germany would advocate in Russia's favour inside the EU, particularly considering the Russo-phobic views which exist for historical reasons amongst certain EU members. Whilst Chancellor Merkel has dismissed some of the more trivial anti-Russian decisions, she has generally towed the NATO line.

"The EU urgently needs Russia as a partner, otherwise Europe will be crushed between the major world powers", Krone-Schmalz emphasized. "However, it is not in the US interest that a prosperous, cooperative relationship between Russia and the EU exists. The US makes no secret of this fact, it is written in their official documents."

We need a thaw in political relations. Unfortunately it is now very difficult because Russia has been thrown out of many institutions such as the G8. The NATO-Russia Council was suspended. "Just how many things have been broken?", she asks. "The media have quite an opportunity to mend relations again. For example, in Russia there are many politicians who are doing their best for their regions and who unceremoniously fulfil their tasks. It would be worthwhile for the German media to sometimes recognise and support the work of these people but unfortunately they are not as telegenic (and sensational - Ed.) as Pussy Riot."
 
 #31
The Blog Mire
www.theblogmire.com
October 14, 2015
Reclaiming the Media Narrative After Russian Intervention in Syria - by Russell O'Phobe
Rob Slane

For urgent and immediate distribution to the foreign affairs departments of all mainstream media organisations. From Russell O'Phobe.

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

You will recall that I wrote to you back in September with my Primer on the art of writing Russian scare stories. I had felt it necessary to write back then in order to make sure that you were all on-message, and to give you the confidence and the tools you need to maintain the narrative that many of us have been working hard to get across over the last couple of years or so.

And no mistake, much has been accomplished. I know that many of you have been labouring hard to ensure your readers are fed a steady diet of reports on "Russian aggression" and "Russian invasions". And so long as the Russians didn't actually invade anywhere - be it Ukraine or the Baltics or anywhere else for that matter -, we were free to tell the world as often as we liked that they had either invaded Ukraine or would shortly be starting on Lithuania or Poland. It was fun while it lasted. My department kept a tally going to see which major paper could come up with the most Ukrainian invasions in one year, and I know I really shouldn't boast, but we came out on top with a total of 57.

But of course things have changed dramatically over the past three weeks, perhaps in ways that none of us could have envisaged. Frankly, things aren't quite so whimsical now. I think I'm right in saying that for much of those three weeks, we have been in danger of losing the narrative completely, and - forgive me if I'm wrong - it seems to me that there is genuine confusion out there as to how exactly we should spin things. Entirely understandable. I mean, it is one thing scaring readers by writing about "Russian aggression" when the Russian military isn't actually doing anything, but what on earth are you supposed to do when they actually start successfully bombing the living daylights out of a terrorist organisation that we are supposed to have been bombing the living daylights out of for the past year, but to no effect?

This is why I say that if circulating something a month ago was necessary, it is doubly - no triply - vital now. Forgive my nervousness, but the stakes are high, and quite honestly for the last three weeks the Kremlin Gremlin has been making an Assad out of us all.

Before coming on to some positive things we could be doing, let me just sound a note of caution. I trust that what I'm about to say is obvious, but I think it best to be on the safe side and say it anyway. Please, please, please let's have no more stories about invasions of Ukraine. The narrative worked fine for the last year and a half whilst there was no invasion, but now that the world has seen what things actually look like when the Russian military get into action, I'm afraid nobody is going to buy the 58th invasion of Ukraine story right now. Don't even go there.

So how do we proceed, given that the blighters are going after ISIS like there's no tomorrow and our side are in danger of looking really rather foolish? Well, whilst I have some suggestions for the longer term, which I will come on to in a moment, I do want to urge you all in the short term to keep level heads and to continue doing the basics well.

Many of you have been doing this, and I'm thankful to you for doing so. For example, the use of totally unverified claims, which are then quietly forgotten, has been used to good effect in the last few weeks. I'm talking about things like the claim of civilian casualties, which was reported on within moments of the first Russian air strikes. I know some of you are still a little queasy about making such claims, but really there is no need to be. The truth or falsehood of this sort of thing quickly gets lost in the fog of war, so there is no need to worry about accountability. On the other hand, the impression such stories sow in the minds of your readers will have a tendency to linger long after they have been shown by the other side to be false, so please don't be afraid to be innovative and creative with these stories.

Casting doubts on motives is also good practice, and I've been glad to see many of you repeating the claim that the Russians are not really targeting ISIS at all. That being said, I'm not sure how long we can get away with peddling that if they do continue to target ISIS.

We've also had some textbook examples of the use of quotation marks, which is especially cheering for me personally since I very much encouraged it in my Primer. For instance, a recent BBC article ran with the following headline: Syria crisis: Russian Caspian missiles 'fell in Iran'. Wonderful use of speech marks that. They really are your Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card, leaving you free to write pretty much anything you want, but if perchance someone should call your report into question you can just hold your hands up and say, "Don't shoot the Messenger, guv. I was just quoting, that's all."

That article was also noteworthy for its eloquent use of spurious sources, with the opening line running as follows:

    Four Russian cruise missiles fired at Syria from the Caspian Sea landed in Iran, unnamed US officials say [my italics]. It was unclear whether the missiles caused any damage, they said.

Isn't that masterful? Unnamed US officials! Love it! Doesn't say where they happen to be officials or what they are officials of. Could be the Pentagon. Then again, they could be officials in the district council of a small town in Wisconsin for all we know. And they can't tell you where the missiles fell or what they fell on, these unnamed sources. But what does that matter? Whoever wrote this piece is savvy enough to know that there are still a lot of people out there for whom a phrase like "US officials say" carries a lot of clout, and who will come away actually believing that four Russian missiles did actually hit Iran. And that's a great narrative, isn't it, since it performs the double whammy of making readers believe not only that Russian technology is Soviet-era junk circa 1955, but also that they inadvertently managed to whack Iran.

Just one more thing before moving on to the longer term, please, please, please can I urge any of you covering the Syrian crisis not to start trying to provide too much explanation. I say this because in doing so we put ourselves in great danger of alerting the more discerning reader to what is really going on. I came across this in another BBC article and I'm afraid it provides a perfect example of how not to cover events:

    A senior commander of the al-Nusra Front, the al-Qaeda affiliate which has forces in the area, has issued a call to all the rebel groups to unify and launch a co-ordinated counter-attack on all fronts. He said if the rebels lost the initiative to the regime and the Russians, they would suffer a series of collapses and their future would be bleak.

For pity's sake. Does this writer have any clue what narrative the BBC is meant to be peddling? Look, ever since the Russians started bombing, our message has been that they are bombing the "moderate rebels", right? Now you and I know that there are no "moderate rebels" and that the "moderate rebels" the CIA has been training have all just happened to end up either in ISIS or al-Nusra. Right? But do we really need to start using the term "al-Qaeda affiliate" to describe the "rebels"? I doubt whether your average reader out there knows the difference between al-Assad, al-Nusra and Al Gore for that matter. But they have heard of al-Qaeda because they've had it rammed down their throats for 20 years that al-Qaeda is our deadly enemy. Now what do you suppose will happen if we start to let on that one of the rebel groups is an "al-Qaeda" affiliate? I'll tell you: even the dimmest of readers is going to start scratching their heads and wondering why on earth we are supposed to have such a problem with Russia bombing guys who we've been warned about for two decades! This sort of careless use of words just has to stop, or else the whole narrative will just implode on us and we'll all be out of jobs.

So what of the longer term strategy? Actually, there was something in the first BBC piece I mentioned above that caught my eye, which I think we ought to be making good use of. They quoted our man in Kiev, Poroshenko, as saying, "Russia wants to create a belt of instability from Syria to Ukraine". You know I find this quite challenging as a journalist that this came from a politician. Really, we shouldn't be leaving it to the politicians to feed us great narratives - we are meant to be feeding them. However, really Mr Poroshenko has done us all a great service with this idea and especially the use of the wonderful phrase "belt of instability".

In the long term, this has got to be the way to go. We need to be playing the "instability" card and the "destabilisation" card constantly. We cannot have our readers thinking that Russia is going in there to stabilise the mess made by the West. I know some of you might object to this and tell me that this is a difficult one to pull off since it was NATO and not Russia that has been messing around in the Middle East. True, but memories are short and if we can hammer home the "belt of instability" meme, along with maybe the "arc of destabilisation", I think we can really get ourselves out of the hole we're in and get the world blaming the Russians for all the problems caused by us.

Part of me - and yes I know this is a high risk strategy - wonders whether we could begin to circulate rumours from "unnamed officials" that the Russians were secretly responsible for the false intelligence information that "forced" the Americans and their allies to go to war in Iraq. There's a good old-fashioned espionage story in there if someone has the bottle to write it, and if we're clever we could end up pinning the blame on them for the lot: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria (maybe even the Native American Indians?). Perhaps I can leave that with you to give it some thought?

I want to leave you with one other idea for a long term narrative, which is the theme of Empire. We need to use this more. I came across this from the Kremlin Gremlin in an interview the other day:

    "Russia has no intention of creating an empire or reconstructing of the Soviet Union, yet we must defend our independence and sovereignty. We've done it before, we are going to do it in future."

I was immediately struck by how his denial could - with a little tweak - easily be made to look like the exact opposite of what he actually said. All it takes is the use of the inverted comma, which I've done in the headline for my latest piece:

    Putin: "Russia has 'no intention' of reconstructing the Soviet Union"

You see what the addition of those two little marks does? Not only does the reader now believe that his intention is to reconstruct the Soviet Union, but it gives me carte blanche to speculate in the article - which I do via a number of "unnamed US officials" - on how he plans to first create a "belt of instability" from Ukraine to Syria, before going on to recreate the Soviet Union, this time from Dublin to Vladivostok.

So let's keep up the good work. Don't forget the basics. Don't let the narrative slip. And let's start seeing some of those longer term themes appearing in your pieces shortly.

Best wishes,
Russell
 
 #32
Moscow Times
October 21, 2015
The Sakharov Center's Direct View on Real Life
By Guido de Boer
[Photos here http://www.themoscowtimes.com/arts_n_ideas/article/the-sakharov-centers-direct-view-on-real-life/540002.html]

With all the big exhibitions that opened this autumn as part of the 6th Moscow Biennale or as museum season openers, one small but interesting show might have been overlooked. It is an exhibition of photographs at the Sakharov Center called "Direct View."

The 11 series of photographs on display were all winners in an international competition designed to support and highlight the work of independent journalists and photojournalists. All of the series examine the relationship between the individual and society or between the individual and the state. And, perhaps most important for this center of human rights, they portray their subjects with dignity and respect for their human and civil rights.

The photographers were asked to show some of the most urgent problems in society and possible ways of reconciliation and resolution. There were three broad subject categories: "Problem'" where issues, friction and disagreements between society and people are central. The second category, "Conflict," was for photographs that showed efforts to solve these issues between people and society, civic institutions and state. And the third category, "Compromise," focused on conflict resolution through dialogue, social change and reform.

The current situation in Ukraine and gay rights in Russia, both topics that have dominated the international media over the past year, were prominent subjects for the photographers. But Occupy Wall Street was also portrayed in a series, as were more intimate issues, like a family in Russia who adopted a special needs child.

Andrei Polikanov, director of photography for Russian Reporter magazine and a member of the competition jury, told The Moscow Times that he'd been involved in such projects for over 20 years. He said, "All the themes and topics represented here are very important to me. For two decades I've been looking at the problems in Ukraine, gay rights and disabled people. I wish we could have showed more photographs here - the ones that made it on to the shortlist - because they would give more perspective about the idea behind the competition and its meaning."

One of the series, called "The Hunt," which won third prize in the "Conflict" category, was shot by Ramil Sitdikov over two months during the summer of 2014. It covered the dramatic story of a citizen's group that banded together to protect themselves and find the murderer - or band of murderers - who had killed at least 14 drivers on the well-traveled M4 highway outside Moscow.

Sitdikov began his career in IT and economics but quickly switched to photography. Since 2012 he has been a staff photographer at the RIA Novosti news agency. The Moscow Times was able to speak to Sitdikov during the exhibition.

Q: Are you glad to be part of this exhibition?

A: I know almost all photographers at this exhibition and their works, and for me it is an honor to be among them. The exhibition is really interesting. The photographs are quite diverse and cover important problems in our society.

Q: What was the most challenging part of your two-month journey?

A: I work in a news agency, and every day I shoot different subjects - sports, politics, press conferences and so on. Unlike freelance photographers, agency photographers usually don't have time to work on one story for a long period. So it was really a challenge to simply find the time to do the story. The guys would go hunting only at night, so I would go out with them all night and then have to go to my day job in the morning. That was tough.

Q: Did the competition help you develop your photography?

A: This story was so important to me because it was the first story I did myself from beginning to end. I doubted that I could do more than I do every day, but now I know that I can. So I think I'm developing, even if it's not as fast as I'd like.

Q: The majority of photographers focused on subjects such as Ukraine and gay rights that have been in the news over the past years. Did you consider these subjects as well? If so, why did you choose differently?

A: Those are interesting subjects and I did consider them. But in the end, I decided not to do a series on those topics, mainly due to my inexperience. When you pick such a big and difficult subject as gay rights you have to know exactly what you want to tell with your story. First you have the idea, the message, and only then come the photographs. I don't know what message I want to convey yet. There are a great many interesting subjects, like refugees in Europe, but you can't cover everything you want. You have to choose.

"Direct View" will be on display until Sunday at the Sakharov Center. 57 Ulitsa Zemlyanoi Val, Bldg. 6. Metro Kurskaya, Chkalovskaya, Taganskaya. 495-623-4401. Open Wed. to Sun., 1 to 8 p.m.
 
 #33
Komsomolskaya Pravda
October 16, 2015
Russian general interviewed on Syria campaign
Interview with Andrey Kartapolov, deputy chief of the Russian Armed Forces General Staff and head of the General Staff's Main Operations Directorate, by Viktor Baranets:  Col-Gen Andrey Kartapolov: Russian Military Base May Appear in Syria. It Will Have Naval, Air, and Ground Components

Our military commentator Viktor Baranets has spoken with the head of the Main Operations Directorate of the General Staff, who is in charge of the operation in Syria.

Almost 90 years ago Martial of the Soviet Union Boris Shaposhnikov, an outstanding military theorist and practitioner, figuratively called the General Staff "the brain of the army." The Main Operations Directorate of the General Staff has always been and still is the main centre of this "brain." All that is currently happening in our military - from building it up to using it, as well as operational training, redeployment of troops, exercises, firing sessions, naval sailings, and aircraft flights - all of this is done at the behest of the Main Operations Directorate and under its close supervision. This includes the planning and conduct of strategic operations as well as the operations our Aerospace Forces are currently conducting in Syria.

How were they prepared? What was their plan? Why was it decided to use only airplanes and helicopters? What role is being played by our warships that are carrying out assignments in the eastern part of Mediterranean? I have asked Col-General Andrey Kartapolov, deputy chief of the General Staff, to answer these and many other questions.

The general spoke with me in his office. Our conversation was repeatedly interrupted by telephone calls: Andrey Valeryevich [Kartapolov] kept receiving reports on how our aircraft were carrying out their combat mission in Syria, listened to instructions from the chief of the General Staff, and issued orders to his subordinates: One of the subordinates was told to urgently discuss the operational situation with a Syrian military commander, another one was told to fly out to Istanbul for talks with the Turkish military, and a third one was told to get ready for another tele-session with the Pentagon on "the rules of conduct" of our and American pilots in the skies over Syria. The constant high-voltage tension of combat operations taking place many thousand kilometres away from Moscow was literally "sending sparks" through the general's handset. He answered my questions with General Staff-style strictness, measuring every word like a sniper (operatives do not like waxing lyrical). Some of my questions he left completely unanswered as his replies may have divulged the secrets of combat operations and may have been outside the remit of the Main Operations Directorate head. Let me introduce him:

Resume

Kartapolov, Andrey Valeryevich. Born 1963 in Weimar (GDR). Education - a secondary school, the Moscow Higher Military Command School, the Frunze Military Academy, the Military Academy of the General Staff. Since 2014, head of the Main Operations Directorate of the General Staff. Awards - Order for Services to the Fatherland, 4th class, with swords; Order of Courage; Order for Military Services; a large number of departmental medals.

"Intelligence knows everything"

[Baranets] When exactly was the decision made to start sending our military equipment to Syria?

[Kartapolov] Next question.

[Baranets] What did the General Staff's work on Syrian developments start with?

[Kartapolov] We did not stop working on Syrian developments for a minute. We constantly monitored the situation there because Syria is our long-standing partner and ally. Our advisers have worked there all the time. But since the start of the antigovernment demonstrations, which later developed into the well-known situation, we have been monitoring the situation in Syria practically round the clock. We always know what is happening there and how it is happening.

[Baranets] Still, what was the "first step" of the Russian General Staff even before our aircraft started being used in Syria?

[Kartapolov] We were setting up the coordinating committee, which is now operating in Baghdad. That is the issue we dealt with from the very start. We wanted to make sure that this committee started working.

[Baranets] What prompted the decision to set up this coordinating committee? What is the idea?

[Kartapolov] We realized that the operations of the so-called international coalition led by the United States, which only bombs sites from the air, would not destroy ISIL (terrorist organization banned in Russia). This can only be done by carrying out assignments on the ground. But there is no one to fight on the ground except the Army of the Syrian Arab Republic. That is why we started precisely with that. And in order to coordinate activities, we needed to combine the efforts of the countries and forces fighting ISIL on the ground.

[Baranets] Did you invite American representatives to this coordinating committee?

[Kartapolov] We did from the very start. While in Baghdad, I waited for almost 24 hours for our American colleagues to establish contact. But I waited in vain, so I left by air.

[Baranets Why did they refuse to do this?

[Kartapolov] They have a whole number of reasons why they do not want to do this. They consider it humiliating to admit that without Russia they are unable to achieve their objective, which they declared a year ago.

They do not want anyone to say that they, in any way, cooperate with [Syrian President Bashar] Al-Asad, whom they have been demonizing in recent years. One more thing: It is indeed unlikely that they have the necessary amount of information about ISIL sites, which is what their strikes in fact suggest. They have a vague idea about the militants' actual sites, which they appear to be ashamed to admit.

[Baranets] What did the Main Operations Directorate start the preparations in Syria with?

[Kartapolov] With the assessment of the situation and the preparation for our leadership of proposals for achieving various objectives.

[Baranets] For the leadership of the Ministry of Defence and the General Staff?

[Kartapolov] Of course.

Secrets of Tactics

[Baranets] And what was the Main Operations Directorate's main task in the period immediately preceding the operation?

[Kartapolov] We needed, as fully as possible, to use all our available capabilities to transfer equipment, arms, and material supplies to Syria as quickly as possible.

[Baranets] How did you manage to achieve this objective quickly and discreetly?

[Kartapolov] We used a whole variety of methods of a technical, informational, and tactical nature. You know the result.

[Baranets] But Obama claims that American intelligence "saw everything...."

[Kartapolov] If it had indeed "seen" this, it is unlikely that Obama would have kept silent....

[Baranets] But still, did you get information that the United States had somehow figured out that we were on the move?

[Kartapolov] We definitely had this information. However, we could see that they did not understand the essence of our work and could not see what it was aimed at? That is why they did not stand in our way.

[Baranets] Perhaps they simply got muddled up in your combinations and failed to appreciate their essence?

[Kartapolov] I would not want to offend our American colleagues. What they thought, let us leave it to them.

[Baranets] What methods did the General Staff use to obtain information about the location of ISIL units?

[Kartapolov] We deployed a whole system of reconnaissance assets, which is in constant operation. That is why we practically do not have any secrets in this respect....

[Baranets] Can you say what exactly this system includes? Is it space, is it airplanes, is it drones, is it signals intelligence, and, finally, is it field reconnaissance?

[Kartapolov] I did tell you that a whole system of reconnaissance capabilities and assets is involved.... And it is in constant operation mode. Except for troop-unit reconnaissance because we did not conduct troop-unit reconnaissance there, in the field. Because we do not have ground units there.

"Who is on whose side?"

[Baranets] How would you assess the operational tactics of ISIL units and their armaments? Do the terrorists have man-portable air defence systems (MANPADS)?

[Kartapolov] We have information about the presence of MANPADS there, but we have not yet seen them being used in practice. Therefore, the appearance of such arms among the militants now could suggest that someone has adopted an unwise [Russian: neblagorazumnyy] approach to dealing with this issue....

[Baranets] Are you hinting at possible supplies of American Stinger-type MANPADS to the militants?

[Kartapolov] Possibly. Let us move on. As for the militants' tactics, ISIL has in its ranks quite a few former officers who served in the Saddam Husayn-era Iraqi Army. And they joined it [ISIL] only because the Americans, having defeated Iraq, occupied it, so they, being their country's patriots (it is possible to call them even this), decided to fight that. Of course, it was a mistake that they decided to fight by joining ISIL, but that is their choice. These officers have sufficiently high skills and expertise and are capable of both organizing and training people. That is why some units are fairly well trained. In addition, they have seized a large amount of weapons at Iraqi Army depots and, in fact, Syrian Army units as well. These are precisely the weapons our American partners actively supplied to Iraq. They include M1 Abrams tanks, armoured personnel carriers, artillery systems, and much more. That is why, when talking about ISIL, you should not think that these are ordinary thugs, the riffraff, armed with machine guns and long daggers, and that all they know is how to cut people's heads off. They know how to fight. They have perfected various tactical methods they developed while fighting the Iraqi Army and the Syrian Army. And they sometimes use these methods quite successfully.

[Baranets] How many gunmen are currently in ISIL's armed units?

[Kartapolov] According to various estimates, between 30,000 and 80,000. Since the truth, as usual, is somewhere in between, let us say 40,000-50,000.

[Baranets] The US-led coalition has been bombing ISIL positions for more than a year. However, ISIS-controlled Syrian territory has grown and almost reached 75 per cent [of the country's total area]. What can you say about this?

[Kartapolov] The US-led coalition has been delivering air strikes against ISIL infrastructure facilities such as bridges, overpasses, electrical substations, heating systems, and water pressure and water pump stations. This makes people's lives unbearable. This does not make it difficult for ISIL to conduct operations as much as it makes it very difficult for the government troops of President Al-Asad to conduct its operations. Therefore, while declaring another thing, they were in fact reducing the combat capability of the Syrian Armed Forces. As a result of this, they ceded more and more positions because it was difficult to send supplies to them as there was no water, heat, or food. But ISIL does not need this because they were able to buy food in various neighbouring countries. They were supplied with that (we know who did it, but let us not yet talk about these organizations and countries). Hence the result we have.

[Baranets] How would you assess the combat capability and the armaments of the so-called "moderate opposition"?

[Kartapolov] It is the West that refers to a "moderate opposition," but we have so far been unable to see it in Syria. You can refer to it in different ways - moderate or non-moderate opposition - but how moderate is a person who has taken up arms to fight a lawful government? Various countries have supplied arms to many ISIL units. Over there, some units are supported and supplied by one country, other units are supported by another country, and yet more units are supported by a third country. This way, everybody is sending money there and everybody is sending arms there. These guys are involved in banditry, looting, and the division of spheres of influence among themselves. When they need more money, they say that they are the most active fighters against the Al-Asad regime. They are given money, after which they start using it as they see fit. And we have asked, you know whom, to show us this "moderate opposition...."

"American sham"

[Baranets] Why did the General Staff come to the conclusion that aircraft would have to be used?

[Kartapolov] Because we could see that everything the US-led coalition is doing is a sham.... It is an imitation of strikes....

[Baranets] Are the Air Forces of Syria, Iraq, and Iran taking part in the air operation together with you?

[Kartapolov] They are carrying out tasks according to their plan.

[Baranets] But they coordinate their plans with ours, right?

[Kartapolov] Of course.

[Baranets] How do you monitor the accuracy of our strikes on ISIL?

[Kartapolov] From the moment we choose a target, we do at least a triple confirmation of accuracy, [and] the importance and characteristics of the site.

[Baranets] By what means?

[Kartapolov] I have already spoken about this. The entire system is in operation - space-based, aerial, radio and radio-technical reconnaissance.

[Baranets] And drones?

[Kartapolov] Drones, of course. We, naturally, also use data we receive as part of the information committee in Baghdad, from our partners, the intelligence services of Iraq, Syria, and Iran.

[Baranets] Does this include significant data that is taken into account when carrying out missile and bomb attacks?

[Kartapolov] They have quite a lot of information, but we check all information. And, naturally, the choice is ours when it comes to delivering a strike.

[Baranets] Why has the United States refused to give us data on the positions of the so-called Syrian Free Army and the positions of ISIL? Are they now giving us this information or they are not?

[Kartapolov] They are not giving us this information. We have repeatedly approached them directly and have repeatedly spoken about this in the media. The reason for such a stance is still not clear to us. Either they do not have such data or, if they do, they are hiding it from us, which means that they do not want us to deliver strikes against actual ISIL positions..

[Baranets] Have ISIL's operational tactics changed since our missile and bomb attacks?

[Kartapolov] The terrorists are abandoning their positions, moving deep inside, and trying to hide in remote areas, various caves, and rock excavations. They are also trying to hide in mosques and hospitals. But the way, we have broadcast a clip on television clearly showing all this. They are also trying to disperse by blending into the civilian population.

[Baranets] Did the Syrian Army start its ground operation too early? Is it ready? What are the results?

[Kartapolov] You know, it is hard for me to judge to what extent the Syrian Army was ready for an offensive operation. I can only draw one conclusion: If the Syrian Army, even in the state it is in, has managed to go on the offensive, it means that our strikes have significantly reduced the enemy's combat capability. In the first few days of the offensive, more than 10 populated localities have been liberated. Another large populated locality, called Achan, which the militants controlled for a long time, was captured today. During the first 24 hours of the offensive operation, around 90 square kilometres was liberated. That is why I think that Syrian commanders are in a better position to judge, and they have decided that they are able to go on the offensive.

Strike from the Caspian

[Baranets] What was the need for our missile strikes from the Caspian? Was this agreed with Iran and Iraq?

[Kartapolov] Yes, it was. I have discussed this at a briefing. We agreed in advance with our partners on the coordinating committee, which includes not just Syria, but also Iran and Iraq, that our missiles would fly through [Russian: prolet nashikh raket]. As for the need, on 5 and 6 October we discovered several very important sites that were to be hit in pinpoint strikes. Our aircraft had been assigned to other sites identified through reconnaissance earlier. So, it was decided that the strikes would be delivered with cruise missiles.

[Baranets] The Pentagon claims that four of the missiles either exploded or fell in the wrong place. What is your view of this information?

[Kartapolov] The Pentagon can claim whatever it wants. They should produce at least something. All our missiles hit the target.

[Baranets] Can the group of our ships in the Mediterranean also, if necessary, be used in Syria?

[Kartapolov] Of course.

[Baranets] What does this group look like today?

[Kartapolov] Our group in the Mediterranean primarily supports the delivery of material supplies. In order to make sure than this is unhindered, a group has been deployed there. It also includes attack ships. In addition, this group guarantees the air defence of our base. We do not in any way aim these air defences against coalition countries.

[Baranets] What if the General Staff reaches the conclusion that missile strikes need to be delivered against ISIL urgently, right now, from our ships? Can this be done?

[Kartapolov] It can.

[Baranets] Can we today talk about the establishment of two full-fledged Russian bases in Syria, the ground one near Latakia and the naval one at Tartus?

[Kartapolov] I would rather speak of the establishment of one Russian military base. It will be one base that includes several components - naval, air, and ground ones.

[Baranets] Syria's armed "moderate" opposition has been sending signals about its readiness to take part in the fight against ISIL. What is your view of such signals?

[Kartapolov] We are ready for joint work with them. Or they can come to Baghdad and take part in the coordinating committee.

[Baranets] And if such an offer were to be accepted, would this lead to a major overhaul of the tactic of coalition troop operations? Would this change the nature of the war against ISIL?

[Kartapolov] If they stop fighting government troops and start fighting ISIL, this could change it. But if, while declaring that they are fighting ISIL, they continue to fight government troops, then nothing will change.

[Baranets] You have just said that ISIL units have changed their tactic and are going into hospitals, mosques, and populated localities, and are dispersing. Is this causing both the General Staff and the Syrian Army to realize that they need to change their tactic in order to flush out the terrorists from there in a more subtle way? And that they need to choose new "instruments"?

[Kartapolov] We have a fairly wide array of capabilities and methods to impact ISIL while taking account of that tactic, and without touching mosques, hospitals, or the civilian population in any way.

"Pentagon is trying to frighten us, but we are not afraid"

[Baranets] A few days ago the US secretary of defence tried to frighten us by saying that the Russian group will suffer heavy losses. Is he trying to frighten us with Stinger deliveries? How do you read this statement, which looks like a threat?

[Kartapolov] We read this statement as a manifestation of the utter lack of professionalism. How can a politician of this level allow himself to make such remarks, especially as this involves allies who defeated Hitler in the Second World War (I would like to remind him this). As for what he had in mind, let this be on his conscience. Remember how Leo Tolstoy answered Leonid Andreyev [19-20th century Russian novelist]? "He is trying to frighten me, but I am not afraid."

[Baranets] Can the situation develop in such a way that we will still have to send ground units into Syria to take part in combat operations?

[Kartapolov] This can be ruled out. Under no circumstances will our ground units take part in a ground operation. By the way, the president has said this.

[Baranets] If you find out that ISIL or the so-called Free Syrian Army has American Stinger MANPADS, what will be your reaction?

[Kartapolov] I think that this question should be asked in the UN Security Council, so that it examines it.

[Baranets] Are our aircraft attacking ISIL units in Iraq?

[Kartapolov] No, we are operating in Syria because the Syrian president has requested assistance in the fight against ISIL on his country's territory. If a similar request comes from the Iraqi leadership, we will wait for the decision of our country's leadership.

[Baranets] They say that apparently the Iraqi request has already arrived?

[Kartapolov] I have already answered this question.

[Baranets] How is coordination taking place between our Aerospace Forces, our officers, and the Syrian Army? Are there our officers in the ranks of the Syrian Army, or are there not?

[Kartapolov] No, our group is operating on its own. And at our headquarters in Syria there is a small task force from the Syrian Armed Forces carrying out coordination with Syrian Air Force flights and giving us accurate data on the location of the forward line of government troops.

[Baranets] What is the current situation on the Syrian front? What are we doing, and what are the Syrians doing?

[Kartapolov] We are continuing to carry out our tasks. Since the start of the operation, our aircraft have made more than 600 sorties.

[Baranets] That is since 30 September?

[Kartapolov] Yes, since 30 September. We have delivered strikes against more than 380 ISIL sites. According to various data, the ISIL gangs have suffered very serious losses. We have recorded cases of panic. We have recorded cases of positions being abandoned. This also suggests something. Naturally, this encourages government troops, who have gone on the offensive. As one of the Syrian generals said, the operations of the Russian Air Force have brought smiles back to the faces of Syrian children.

"Objective is to defeat ISIL"

[Baranets] Are the Americans trying to establish contact with the Russian Ministry of Defence, with the General Staff?

[Kartapolov] They are forced to do this. They have asked us to organize a video conference with them?

[Baranets] Will they be in Washington while you are in Moscow?

[Kartapolov] We agreed. We are ready to work with them everywhere, at any level, in any part of the world. If it is more convenient for them to work from Washington, we will work from Moscow.

[Baranets] How do you see the ultimate goal of our operations in Syria?

[Kartapolov] This, of course, is to destroy the ISIL units and steer the Syrian crisis onto a political path.

[Baranets] If the need arises to deliver missile and bomb strikes against ISIL on Iraqi territory, will Russia respond to such a request?

[Kartapolov] This is the decision of the supreme commander in chief. But we have all the technical capabilities for that.

[Baranets] The Americans and the French are currently delivering strikes against ISIL positions....

[Kartapolov] The Americans are delivering strikes against sites on ISIL-controlled territory.

[Baranets] There has been a report that French aircraft have made a couple of bombing sorties. Do you have such information?

[Kartapolov] We have such information, but we do not know precisely which sites French aircraft targeted.

[Baranets] Were you unable to see this using the capabilities you have at your disposal?

[Kartapolov] We did not set ourselves such a task.

[Baranets] Do you have a feeling that the Americans are starting to realize that ISIL needs to be attacked in a joint operation? And that is why they are starting to pace nervously up and down our waiting room?

[Kartapolov] You know, the Americans are very pragmatic people, but they find it very hard to admit their own miscalculations. Once they are ripe enough to admit that they have miscalculated, then, I hope, they will make a well-justified decision.

[Baranets] Let us assume that they eventually agree to operate with us in a single coalition. What is needed for that?

[Kartapolov] Their desire.

[Baranets] Why did the United States react so sarcastically to the launch of our Kalibr missiles from the Caspian Sea?

[Kartapolov] Because they completely missed the multiple launch of sea-based cruise missiles.

[Baranets] But why?

[Kartapolov] Because all their capabilities, which they tout as boundless, are a children's tale.

[Baranets] Two personal questions: Since the start of our air operation, how many nights have you spent in the back room of your office. One of your aides has admitted that around....

[Kartapolov] Next question.

[Baranets] There are many icons behind you. Why are they here?

[Kartapolov] I am a believer. Some of the icons are gifts, and others I bought myself while visiting various places. And I also believe that we are doing the right thing....
 

 #34
New York Times
October 21, 2015
Sounds of War Recede to Background in an Eastern Ukraine City
By RICK LYMANO

MARIUPOL, Ukraine - While his children played a popular Russian card game called "Fool" on a sand-flecked blanket, the towering cranes of the port pushing above the unseasonably warm beachfront beside a razor-wire fence warning "Do Not Enter - Mines," Sergei Sovyak reflected on what has become of his battered, seaside city.

"These days, the war is happening on a kind of political chessboard," said Mr. Sovyak, a metallurgist. "It has become a conflict in the mind. In reality, in everyday life, there is no war anymore."

There is no doubt that life has changed considerably in this rusting industrial port on the Sea of Azov. Earlier this year, a fierce separatist offensive, backed by Moscow, threatened to overrun the city and create a land bridge connecting Russia with the Crimean Peninsula it seized last year.

The city was in a panic. Emergency meetings discussed air raid sirens and evacuation plans. One Grad rocket attack killed 31 people in a crowded Saturday market on the city's northeast side.

First-year students at School 68 in Mariupol arrived for a welcoming assembly in September on the first day of the school year. Credit Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
But now, with shelling reduced to a distant annoyance for most residents, fewer Russian soldiers in evidence in the separatist-controlled areas and Moscow more intent on Syria than Ukraine, a weird kind of normalcy has overtaken the city.

"Despite the fact the city is pretty much surrounded, life goes on, the city works," said Tatiana Lomakina, vice mayor in charge of refugee issues. "The main plants all function. The seaport is open. Schools are operating. Cultural and social life continues."

"Yes, it is true, one can become used to war," said Sergei Fillipov, vice commander of the volunteer Donbas Battalion, which like other volunteer militias has been removed from front-line duty in recent months, replaced by fresh Ukrainian regulars. "It is how it goes."

Fears that Russian-backed troops would come swarming over the eastern horizon have all but vanished. Now, if anything, there is widespread doubt here and in Kiev, the capital, that the separatists have anywhere near the numbers needed for such an attack.

"There are many fewer Russian troops in the separatist zone than during the heavy fighting early this year," said Yaroslav Chepurniy, a spokesman for Ukrainian military forces in the conflict area. "And, according to our intelligence, even fewer of them are regular Russian troops. They are mostly mercenaries."

So the war has devolved into a low-level skirmish of nightly shelling on the city's edges, barely affecting daily life. Shops are open and full of goods. Parks and beaches are crowded on warm days. Reservations at the best seaside restaurants can be difficult on the weekend.

"There was a panic a year ago, because there was a real threat," said Andrei Fedoy, the secretary of the City Council and a lifelong Mariupol resident. "A lot of people left the city. Now, people have calmed down and a lot of them have come back. People are just tired of being afraid."

Mariupol, founded in 1778 on the site of an old Cossack encampment and settled initially by Greek refugees, grew into an industrial powerhouse during the decades it was part of the Soviet Union, built on steel and metallurgy.

When the separatists seized much of the surrounding Donbas region, including the provincial capital of Donetsk, Mariupol was named the temporary capital. In May of last year, the city was briefly seized by the separatists, and then retaken in June.

A fresh assault in August came within 10 miles of the city limits and another fierce round of fighting in January and February rattled residents' nerves and seemed to presage an attack that never came. Many predicted a new summer offensive.

Instead, despite a brief increase in shellings in August, the conflict held at a low simmer, officials said. So, hobbled by the stubborn conflict and Ukraine's flailing economy, Mariupol stumbles along on the strength of its industry, its port, its debris-flecked beaches, and its population of a half-million has been bolstered by tens of thousands of the war's refugees.

"It is a natural psychological reaction to block out the war after a while," said Maxim Borodin, 38, who runs a local group advocating anti-corruption and environmental issues. "There are people who say we should shut all the bars and cafes, to force people to focus on the war. But people can't think about war all the time."

Until this summer, so-called volunteer battalions that cooperated with the Ukrainian military took many front-line positions around Mariupol. But then, to the surprise of the battalion leaders and many residents, the volunteer groups like the right-wing Azov Battalion and the religion-inspired St. Mary's Battalion were pulled back and replaced by Ukrainian regulars.

"This is as close as we get now to the front lines," Andrei Zorka, acting spokesman for the Azov volunteers, said sadly from their shabby compound not far from the city center. "We came here to fight, to protect this land. But it is a very strange and scary thing. People seem to have gotten used to hearing the shelling. They don't even pay attention to it anymore."

In the small storefront that acts as Mariupol headquarters for Right Sector, another right-wing group of volunteers, Serhiy Chiryn, the regional political officer, picked at a plate of sugar cookies and sipped steaming tea from a dainty, flowered cup. Like many in Mariupol, he tries to read the mind of Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin.

"I think the conflict will be frozen this winter," he said. "Ukraine has become just one little card in a new geopolitical game Putin is playing that includes Syria, Iran and China."

Officials and many local residents believe the region is slowly moving toward a situation similar to Transnistria in Moldova or Ossetia in Georgia, where Russian-leaning enclaves operate independently from the central government.

"It seems to us to be the best decision," said Mr. Chepurniy, the military spokesman. "If we are going to liberate the whole area taken by the separatists, we know we will face regular Russian Army forces and we are not ready for them."

Even on the city's outskirts, where the shelling is a more immediate danger, a kind of normalcy prevails.

"You go out now to these areas and you still see people growing potatoes, sending their children to school," Mr. Chepurniy said. "There is no panic anymore. There is no chaos."

But there is still a persistent tension.

"For now, life goes on and there is enough to sell in the shops," said Galina Dodysheva, 52, who runs a small grocery in the suburban village of Talakovka, just a few miles from the separatist front lines. "But we are still nervous. There is shelling almost every day somewhere nearby."

Oleksandr, a Ukrainian sentry at the checkpoint on the village's eastern edge, who declined to give his last name, wiped the sleep from his eyes after a brief afternoon nap and kicked the mud from his rubber spa sandals.

"It is like they have a schedule," he said. "The shelling begins at 9 p.m. and lasts about an hour." Some nights there are a handful of shells, other nights a bit more. But he is not worried.

"Here, in fact, we are not at war," he said. "We are just waiting for the politicians to negotiate a solution."


 
 #35
Reuters
October 21, 2015
Ukraine ceasefire helps volunteers bring dead soldiers home
By Mikhail Moskalenko

A ceasefire in eastern Ukraine means more work for the volunteer group Black Tulip, which can now collect remains of Ukrainian soldiers killed in action without the risk of being caught in crossfire between rebels and government troops.

The group used to locate and rebury soldiers killed in World War Two, but when hundreds of Ukrainian troops were killed in the battle of Ilovaisk last year, the volunteers decided their skills could help more recent victims of conflict.

They renamed themselves after the planes that carried the bodies of Soviet soldiers home from the Afghan war and since last August have brought back over 600 bodies from the frontline, often straying into separatist-held territory that the Ukrainian military cannot reach to retrieve the dead.

The guns have been mostly silent since early September, raising hopes for the fragile peace process and granting Black Tulip safer access to the no-man's land between Ukrainian and separatist positions.

Volunteers have been able to search painstakingly through the rubble and twisted metal remains of Donetsk airport, the scene of some of the fiercest battles in the sixteen months of fighting between Ukrainian troops and pro-Russian separatists seeking independence from Kiev.

Sometimes all they'll find is a fragment of bone, but everything gets bagged up and sent back to the city of Dnipropetrovsk for DNA testing.

Identifying remains can bring closure for families waiting for news on soldiers missing in action, but it also means the dreaded confirmation of their death.

"When a man is unidentified, it's one thing. When he has his name, relatives and everything else, then you feel the pain of this family. When you find this man, they lose any hope," said the head of Black Tulip, Alexander Guz.

With the passing of time, the work of Black Tulip has become more complicated.

Graves hastily dug by soldiers under fire and marked with crosses made of sticks have become overgrown and disappear. The group often relies on locals on the Ukrainian or rebel sides to point them to places where bodies of soldiers were left behind.

Around 2,100 Ukrainian servicemen have been killed since fighting broke out in April 2014, according to Ukrainian estimates, although many believe the number to be much higher. A further 300 are missing in action, a military spokesman said in August.
 
 #36
UNIAN (Kyiv)
October 21, 2015
Odesa SBU blast has "Russian trace": SBU chief

Head of the Security Service of Ukraine, Vasyl Hrytsak, reported to President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko on a "Russian trace" in the terrorist attack outside the headquarters of Odesa regional division of the SBU, and on solving the crime, according to the SBU press center.

"We took it as a challenge and have made every effort to solve the case. Today, I can report - crime has been solved in a short period of time. Three executants have been detained, 22 searches have been conducted. We also have information about those who ordered the crime, who sent guidance to a criminal group from the territory of Russia and Crimea, and they will be brought to justice sooner or later," said the head of the SBU.

The exposed and disarmed sabotage and reconnaissance group, controlled by the Russian special services, is also suspected of complicity in a series of explosions of the administrative buildings and offices of non-governmental organizations in Odessa and Mykolaiv regions.

On October 19, three residents of Odessa were detained. Activists of the local pro-Russian non-governmental organizations, they were aware of conspiracy tactics, had call signs, used advanced computer technology.

The crime was plotted in the territory of Russia. The person who planted the explosive device, had earlier passed a special commando training at a military center in the Russian Federation.

A clandestine laboratory where radio-controlled IEDs were manufactured had been set up by the attackers in one of the multistory residential buildings in Odesa. Given the real danger to the life of residents of the apartment building, they were evacuated prior to the raid.

During searches, evidence of illegal activities of the detained individuals, firearms and ammunition was discovered. In particular, the search team has found elements of an IED similar to that used in an attack outside SBU building. A large number of separatist-related paraphernalia and anti-Ukrainian materials were seized.

The investigation continues. The suspects are detained.

"I appeal to the older generation, to the young people - if you notice individuals behaving suspiciously in public places, on the streets, in public transport, be sure to call the SBU hotline! We will respond immediately and check your information," said the head of the SBU.

The SBU hotline 0800501482 operates 24/7.


 
 #37
Popularity of Ukraine's ruling parties falls, right-wing radicals score points
By Lyudmila Alexandrova

MOSCOW, October 20. /TASS/. As the standard of living in Ukraine keeps rolling downhill, the people's confidence in the authorities, political parties and their leaders is wearing thin. If a parliamentary election were to be held now, the Ukrainians would be voting far differently from the way they did a year ago, sociologists have found. Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk's party would have meager chances of winning anything at all, while the presidential Petro Poroshenko Bloc would lose to a trio of ultra-right parties. Society is getting more radicalized and in a hypothetical parliament that might be elected today there would be far more populist politicians of all sorts, Russian analysts believe.

One more telling trend: the Batkivshchyna party is on the rise again, but its leader Yulia Tymoshenko has few chances of staging a comeback.

In the October 2014 election Arseny Yatsenyuk's Popular Front and Petro Poroshenko Bloc shared first place, getting 22.14% and 21.82% accordingly. The other parties that managed to form parliamentary factions were Lvov-based Samopomoshch (Self-Help) - 11%, Oppositional Bloc - 9.4%, Oleh Lyashko-led Radical Party - 7.4%, and Batkivshchyna - 5.7%. Oleh Tyahnybok's Freedom failed to clear the election hurdle.

Now, according to a poll held by the group Rating, says Russia's Nezavisimaya Gazeta, the lineup of forces in parliament would look fundamentally different. The Popular Front would collect no more than 1% of the votes and the Petro Poroshenko Bloc - 13% - less than a combination of the three ultra-radical parties: Lyashko's party (7%), Right Sector (6%) and Freedom (5%).

Batkivshchyna would rise from last place to the leading positions with 11% of the votes - as many would be cast for Samopomoshch and the Oppositional Bloc.

Personality ratings look as follows: President Poroshenko enjoys 27% support, while 68% are critical of him. Yatsenyuk's ratio is 13% against 82% and Tymoshenko's - 24% against 68%.

As many as 82% of Ukrainians say the economic situation has got worse. A year ago 51% said that the developments were moving in the wrong direction. Last July the share of skeptics was already as high as 72%.

The Ukrainians' standard of living has slumped, an expert at the Centre for Political Technologies, Georgy Chizhov, has told TASS. "The rating of Yatsenyuk's Popular Front is close to naught. The Front even proposed no candidates in the October 25 local elections. In fact, it would be right to say that such a political force no longer exists, although it has a large faction in the Ukrainian parliament," he said. If the elections were held now, the Poroshenko-led party would still place ahead of all, but it would find it extremely hard to form a coalition, because several parties from different parts of the political spectrum would have about 10% of the votes, too.

A large share of the population supports those who promise simple solutions and prompt results. If early elections are called after all, the group of radicals in the Verkhovna Rada will get far bigger. "Populist politicians of all sorts are on the rise. All of the right-wing parties use populist slogans. There are no classical left-of-centre parties in Ukraine these days. The country is disillusioned in them, and the Ukrainian Communists are generally seen as an anti-patriotic force. The Batkivshchyna party, which has been gaining popularity again, might be rather listed as a left-wing, socialist type of party. Its criticism is focused on high tariffs and the low level of social protection."

Last year political scientists hurried to say that Tymoshenko was doomed to leave Ukrainian politics never to return. "Today it is obvious that Batkivshchina may well context second place after Poroshenko's party. Tymoshenko is a populist politician of genius. Her ability to sense public sentiment is remarkable. Her party today may well contest part of the classical left-wing electorate."

Chizhov believes, though, that as a politician Tymoshenko has exhausted her credibility resource and it would be very hard to imagine her return to the seat of the president of the prime minister. "What I do believe in is that for several years to come she will be exercising considerable influence on Ukrainian politics and may largely determine who will take the prime minister's seat."

That the popularity of the ruling parties and their leaders has slumped is easy to explain, the deputy dean of the world economics and world politics department at the Higher School of Economics, Andrey Suzdaltsev, told TASS. "They have stabilized the situation in the country only in that they secured foreign loans and foreign aid. No reforms have followed. No investors have shown up. The economic situation keeps getting worse: they are in default, although they have not said so yet. The issue of the debt to Russia will have to be decided in December. And the housing and utility bills are sky-high."

The rating of Yatsenyuk's party is not even 1%, it is zero, he believes. "But there will be no election as long as he remains prime minister. And when the election is held, the political lineup may be quite different," he speculated.

Suzdaltsev is skeptical about Tymoshenko's chances in politics. "The country's leaders are appointed in Washington and in Europe. Tymoshenko enjoys no support there. She is seen as a symbol of corruption."


 
 #38
Kyiv Post
October 21, 2015
Campaigns getting dirtier ahead of Oct. 25 vote
By Isobel Koshiw

DNIPROPETROVSK, Ukraine - On Dnipropetrovsk's main street, a series of movable billboards are advertising a thrice-weekly TV program on the local Channel 9: "Dnipropetrovsk People's Republic: Who led our city to war and in whose interest?"

This is the way the channel's owner, billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, tries to persuade people that former Governor Oleksandr Vilkul backed separatism in the city - just another example of the intensifying battle for the mayoral post waged between Kolomoisky's nominee, Borys Filatov, and Vilkul.

Vilkul was a high-ranking ally of the ousted President Viktor Yanukovych. Many in the eastern industrial provincial center of 1 million people believe in the city he sponsored Russia's war in Donbas. An online petition to have him removed from the mayoral race has collected almost 9,000 signatures.

Whether Vilkul is a victim of black PR, or they are legitimate accusations, is not clear but what's clear is that candidates are mounting attacks - including some below the belt - ahead of the nationwide Oct. 25 local elections.

Underhanded tactics have shown that Ukraine's political elite refuse to change the hardball tactics, even though voters are turned off by such campaigning.

The idea is to discredit an opponent in the eyes of the voters by spreading unpleasant truths or lies. The strategies are designed by contracted teams of political technologists, similar to spin doctors, who are usually recruited by businesspeople looking to secure their interests through politics.

There are a few things that political parties in Ukraine no longer want to be associated with: the former ruling Party of Regions and disgraced president Viktor Yanukovych; the Kremlin-backed separatists and Russia, excessive wealth and, of course, corruption.

In the run-up to Election Day, hundreds of leaflets, newspapers, "documents," TV programs and websites suddenly appear.

Similarly in Dnipropetrovsk, fliers were distributed with the Opposition Bloc's logo which featured a picture of Yanukovych and the slogan "We'll win!" The text below reads: "'I am doing everything I can to hasten my return to my people, so that I can once again build a happy and rich Ukraine,' Viktor Yanukovych."

Small print at the bottom of the leaflets asserts that 500,000 copies were printed.

The Opposition Bloc, a party that was created as the main successor to Viktor Yanukovych's Party of Regions, called the leaflets a "provocation." But political analyst Yuriy Romanenko is not so sure. He told Novy Region news agency that the Opposition Bloc itself may be promoting its association with Yanukovych.

In Kyiv, the newly founded Party of Decisive Citizen, led by former Right Sector spokesperson Boryslav Bereza, has dedicated some of its election material to smearing billionaire oligarch Rinat Akhmetov.

A front page headline of an issue of its party paper distributed in Kyiv on Oct. 10 reads: "Boryslav Bereza: Kyivenergo (a utility company co-owned by Akhmetov) should work for Kyiv and not for Akhmetov."

In Ivano-Frankivsk, residents received phone calls from an organization that called itself The European Center Against Corruption. According to a local news website Vikna.ua, the questions focused on the nationalist Svoboda Party only. People reported being asked a series of similar questions including:

"Have you heard about the fact that Oleh Harkot (head of the department of architecture and urban planning on the Ivano-Frankivsk City Council) was arrested while taking a bribe of $30,000 from representatives of Svoboda? This corruption incident involved the leader of the Svoboda fraction in the City Council, Roman Onufriya and the former council secretary Ruslan Martsinkiv."

In the city of Uzhgorod in western Ukraine, fake posters of President Petro Poroshenko's party candidate Yaroslav Kyrlyk and the president were glued across residential areas.

Produced with the same branding as the presidential party's election material, a typical component of black PR, these posters mocked both Poroshenko and Kyrlyk.

"A victory in the east in a few hours," reads the caption under the portrait of Poroshenko, country's commander in chief, who is being blamed by many for the big losses of Ukrainian army in Donbas.

"I stole land from a school," reads the caption under Kyrlyk's portrait and a picture of a school.

But the money and time spent on black PR during elections are usually wasted, political experts and election observers say.

Black PR has a negative effect on voters and they are put off, said Denys Davydov of OPORA, a civil society organization which monitors elections. Davydov gave the example of the recent by-election in Chernihiv in northern Ukraine, where the campaign was by all accounts dirty. The abundance of black PR caused a critically low turnout of only 36 percent and discredited the election results. Nevertheless, the results weren't cancelled, and the elected lawmaker, backed by the president's party, took his seat in the parliament.

"The attempts to make people believe that there are only two candidates, that no one else is running or they're all the same and there's no point because they're all dirty is a very bad message for people," Davydov said.


 
 #39
Fitch forecasts Ukraine's GDP to contract by 10% in 2015

LONDON, October 21. /TASS/. Fitch Ratings forecasts Ukraine's GDP will contract by 10% by the end of the year, the agency said in a press release on Wednesday.

"Fitch forecasts GDP to contract by 10% in 2015, following contraction of 6.8% in 2014. Recovery prospects are highly dependent on macro-economic improvement but the operating environment is particularly weak," the report said.

An International Monetary Fund /IMF/ mission, which visited Kyiv during September 22 - October 2, projected an 11% decline of the country's GDP. "Following a deep recession, macroeconomic stabilization is gradually taking hold. The exchange rate has been broadly stable, hryvnia deposits are rising, and inflation is receding. Gross international reserves, have increased to $12.6 billion at end-August, and will be further boosted by a recently agreed swap arrangement with Sweden's Riksbank for $500 million," the IMF reported. It added though that "despite these positive developments, in view of the larger than expected economic decline in the first half of the year, the mission revised down growth projections for 2015 to - 11% Growth is expected to reach 2% in 2016, supported by recovering consumer and investor confidence, improved export performance, and a gradual easing of credit conditions," the report said.

On September 22, the World Bank (WB) announced its estimates of Ukraine's economic situation as it projected the economy to contract by 12% in 2015. The WB projected minus 7.5% GDP growth for Ukraine in April and minus 2.3% GDP growth in January.
 
 
#40
Interfax
October 20, 2015
Ukrainian energy minister plans to prolong electricity contract with Russia

Ukrainian Energy Minister Volodymyr Demchyshyn is planning to prolong the electricity import contract with Russia that expires on 31 December 2015, the Interfax-Ukraine news agency reported on 20 October.

"We are planning to prolong the contract. Everything depends on further talks and contract conditions," he said. Ukraine will need Russian electricity to meet peak demand for power, he explained.

Demchyshyn said it was inexpedient to stop electricity supply to Crimea from mainland Ukraine, Interfax-Ukraine said in another report on the same day.

"I believe that currently it is, perhaps, not entirely correct to suspend the power supply (to Crimea - Interfax)," he said.

A decision to do this could be made only "at the highest political level", he said.

Demchyshyn also confirmed that the price of Ukrainian electricity suppplied to Crimea was increased to 3.95 roubles per kWh.

Speaking about cooperation with Russia on the construction of a nuclear power fuel plant in Kirovohrad Region, Demchyshyn said that the contract with Russia on its construction would be discontinued, Interafx-Ukraine said in another report on the same day.

Ukraine has "questions regarding the contract, the format of cooperation and the licensing conditions", Demchyshyn said. Russia does not meet its obligations, just as in the case of construction of the third and fourth generating sets at the Khmelnytskyy nuclear power plant, Interfax-Ukraine quoted Demchyshyn as saying.
 
 #41
www.foreignpolicy.com
October 20, 2015
How Putin's Ukrainian Dream Turned Into a Nightmare
Kiev and the West are winning. Now is not the time to let Moscow off the hook.
By Adrian Karatnycky and Alexander J. Motyl
Adrian Karatnycky is Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council. Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey.

Whatever the larger goal of Russian President Vladimir Putin's armed intervention in Syria, it has succeeded in distracting the world's attention from his ongoing aggression in eastern Ukraine. In his half-hour speech at the United Nations earlier this month timed to reach a prime-time Russian audience, he spent only a minute on the Ukrainian conflict, focusing instead on Russia's constructive role in the Middle East.

Putin's rhetorical redirection is not surprising. The Kremlin's war in Ukraine is turning into a quagmire. Militarily, it is a stalemate - which, given the vast imbalance between Russian and Ukrainian capabilities, amounts to a Ukrainian victory. Ideologically, the war is a bust, as the Kremlin's hopes of converting southeastern Ukraine into "New Russia" have been effectively, and perhaps permanently, shattered. Economically, the war and occupation of both Crimea and the Donbas have imposed ruinous costs on Russia, whose economy has already been battered by declining global commodity prices and Western sanctions. Socially, both regions are on the verge of a humanitarian catastrophe for which Russia would be blamed. In sum, Putin's plans of weakening Ukraine have backfired. Ukraine is slowly getting stronger, while Russia is getting weaker.

Time is, therefore, on the side of Ukraine and the West. They should avoid offering Putin any relief as long as Russian and proxy troops continue to occupy Ukrainian territory: on the contrary, they can and should press for additional concessions. Given Ukraine's strengthened military and the threat of further sanctions, Putin will be unable to escalate the confrontation. Ironically, Putin's self-defeating aggression in eastern Ukraine is now limiting his scope of action more effectively than anything the West could have devised.

Much of Putin's authority at home rests on his ability to deliver steadily improving living standards as the upside of his authoritarian rule. But Russians of all income classes are tightening their belts. The sanctions have already cost the Russian economy 9 percent of GDP, according to the IMF. Since Russia's invasion of Crimea in February 2014, the ruble has lost 50 percent of its value. In dollar-denominated terms, Russia's GDP has fallen from $2.1 trillion in 2013 to an anticipated $1.2 trillion by the end of 2015. In dollar terms, the country's economy has dropped from ninth in the world to 13th. Many Russian professionals are leaving the country, frustrated by its authoritarianism, corruption, and lack of interest in modernization.

Meanwhile, social and economic problems in the Russia-occupied Donbass enclave are mounting. Many of the territory's economic links with Ukraine have been disrupted. Its GDP has contracted by over 80 percent. Much of its infrastructure and its banking and administrative systems are in ruins. Large swathes of the territory suffer from shortages of gas, water, and electricity shortages. Though it's hard to know precise figures, unemployment is huge. A large proportion of the region's skilled workers and professionals are internally displaced or in exile, mostly in Ukraine. Unsurprisingly, inflation is high and poverty is growing.

In eastern Ukraine, Putin now has responsibility for a large population of about three million under de facto Russian occupation who are increasingly looking to Moscow to meet basic social needs. He must also cope with a rising criminal class in the self-styled Donetsk and Luhansk Peoples' Republics. A parasitical conglomeration of local political bosses, powerful oligarchs, and criminal elements with roots in Soviet times have traditionally misruled this part of the Donbas. These elements are still around. At the same time, the collapsing economy has made contraband and smuggling, from Russia and Ukraine, one of the most lucrative and stable sources of income, thereby giving rise to new criminal entrepreneurs centered in the power structures of the republics. This development threatens to spread crime and instability into neighboring Russian regions. Statistics from Russia's Ministry of Justice show a spike in the crime rate in parts of the country bordering on the occupied Donbas.

Adding to this litany of problems is the risk of further economic costs resulting from Russia's aggression. In September, protesters belonging to Crimea's beleaguered Tatar minority imposed a blockade on all trucks carrying goods to and from the occupied peninsula. On September 22, Ukraine announced it would launch aggressive international litigation, seeking $50 billion in compensation for the Russian takeover of property and assets in Crimea, and the damage inflicted by Russian weapons and fighters. As successful litigation by investors in the bankrupt oil company Yukos has shown, international courts have the ability to impose economic costs on Russia.

While Western pressure to facilitate a durable peaceful solution should remain a top priority for the European Union and the United States, forcing Ukraine into deep concessions to secure peace at any cost is a mistake. While Putin has dug himself and Russia into a hole, Ukraine is making steady, if unspectacular, progress toward reforming its economy, society, and political system, while retaining its democratic institutions, a free press, and a vigorous civil society. The banking sector is being fixed, energy subsidies have been reduced, and GDP growth is expected to be positive in 2016 - an enormous achievement after a contraction of over 20 percent in 2014-2015. Higher education and the police are being reformed. Government decentralization is being sharply debated and may soon be introduced. Corruption and the courts remain huge problems, but here, too, some inroads are likely to be made once a new National Anti-Corruption Bureau and Prosecutor get to work in late 2015. If the Prosecutor is genuinely independent, progress may be substantial.

The most serious counter-argument against maintaining the sanctions regime and continuing to insist on Russian concessions is that Putin would respond to a tough Western stance by escalating the war in Ukraine, creating additional global mayhem.

But all evidence points in the opposite direction. A ground offensive would be hard-pressed to succeed in the face of an increasingly strong Ukrainian fighting force. Today, 40,000 well-supplied forces, led by officers proven in combat, defend Ukraine's front line with the Donbas enclave. Ukraine has also arrayed 350 tanks and hundreds of pieces of heavy artillery in the region. It has developed its own drone industry for better intelligence and surveillance. In short, the country is ready to withstand an offensive from the East, and any territorial gains would result in thousands of casualties among the Russians and their proxies. There are also reports of declining morale among the proxy forces as it becomes increasingly clear that they are stuck in a long-term frozen conflict. The time for Putin to have invaded Ukraine was in the spring of 2014, when Ukraine's government and armed forces were in disarray. Now, short of a major invasion, Russia is stuck.

An all-out Russian invasion, entailing bombardment of Ukrainian cities and forces,would, however, trigger major new Western sanctions as well as embroil Russia in a second war. Hybrid war is one thing; the open use of the Russian air power and massive deployment of Russian forces is another. Russia could expect not only international condemnation, but also economic isolation, including its likely removal from the international SWIFT banking system.

This last measure, which would devastate the Russian economy, has been the subject of Western policy discussions and is thus perfectly possible. And Putin could expect a backlash at home. While Russian public opinion supports the separatist cause in the Donbas, it opposes by a stable majority direct Russian military intervention in Ukraine. Unsurprisingly, Putin's propaganda machine has assiduously hidden the fact of a Russian military presence in Ukraine, and of substantial Russian troop losses, from citizens. Putin's legitimacy among and support by the Russian policy elite would also suffer. Hard-line nationalists already regard his abandonment of the New Russia project as a betrayal of Russian interests.

In sum, Putin's adventure in eastern Ukraine is now dragging him down. The temporary upside for his popularity is outweighed by the economic burdens of the occupation and the costs of further expansion. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Putin may be losing interest in the Ukraine project. A person party to the Sept. 2 phone conversation between French President Francois Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, and Putin said that the Russian president appeared unengaged and was not in command of the nuanced details of the discussion. Instead, he was more interested in complaining that Ukraine was not buying Russian gas at a cheaper price than it gets from European and other international sources.

For the West, Putin's quagmire in eastern Ukraine and his dangerous recent intervention in Syria are excellent news. Russia's foreign policy rests on an eroding economic and political foundation, and the West need only sustain Russia's Donbas mess for the Kremlin to become more pliant and amenable to compromise. It is as if Putin has himself contained Russia. The West need do little more than maintain the status quo.

The West should pursue two aims. First, it should keep Ukraine sovereign and stable and promote its reform process - which is exactly what the West has been and is doing anyway. Second, the West should maintain strong sanctions on Russia until all its forces and heavy weapons are withdrawn from occupied Ukrainian territory.

Just as importantly, the United States and Europe should clearly and unequivocally label Russia the occupying power in the Donbas and press Russia to provide adequate socioeconomic assistance to the three million Ukrainian citizens under its control. At the same time, the leaders in Kiev must make clear to its citizens in the Donbas that they will be ready to help them, but if and only if the Russian occupation ends. Until that time, Ukraine and the West must do all they can to press Russia to compensate Donbas residents for the damage it has inflicted upon them.

Western policy also should refrain from pressuring Ukraine to absorb the economic burden for rebuilding the Donbas, even if Russia withdraws all its forces, weapons, and bases. The costs must be shared between Russia, which caused most of the destruction, Ukraine, the victim of Russia's aggression, and the international community. Russia's cost sharing can be pitched as a face-saving humanitarian gesture by the Kremlin to rebuild the Donbas and save its population from disaster.

For the first time since Putin invaded Crimea, the West and Ukraine have the upper hand. They should play it and force Putin to agree to a genuine peace in Ukraine. He could do it. He started the war in 2014. He forced the separatists to accept a ceasefire on September 1, 2015. If confronted with a tough Western stance, he just might draw the right conclusion and actually end the war with Ukraine.

 
 #42
Consortiumnews.com
October 20, 2015
MH-17 Case: 'Old' Journalism vs. 'New'
By Robert Parry
[Photos here https://consortiumnews.com/2015/10/20/mh-17-case-old-journalism-vs-new/]

Exclusive: For skilled intelligence operatives, the Internet can be a devil's playground, a place to circulate doctored photos, audio and documents, making investigations based on "social media" and such sources particularly risky, a point worth recalling in the mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, says Robert Parry.

The first thing any thinking person learns about the Internet is not to trust everything you see there. While you can find much well-researched and reliable material, you'll also encounter disinformation, spoofs, doctored photographs and crazy conspiracy theories. That would seem to be a basic rule of the Web - caveat emptor and be careful what you do with the information - unless you're following a preferred neocon narrative. Then, nothing to worry about.

A devil-may-care approach to Internet-sourced material has been particularly striking when it comes to the case of the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014. It has now become de rigueur on the part of the West's mainstream news outlets to tout the dubious work of a British Internet outlet called Bellingcat, which bases its research on photographs and other stuff pulled off the Internet.

Bellingcat's founder Eliot Higgins also has made journalistic errors that would have ended the careers of many true professionals, yet he continues to be cited and hailed by the likes of The New York Times and The Washington Post, which have historically turned up their noses about Internet-based journalism.

The secret to Higgins's success seems to be that he reinforces what the U.S. government's propagandists want people to believe but lack the credibility to sell. It's a great business model, marketing yourself as a hip "citizen journalist" who just happens to advance Official Washington's "group thinks."

We saw similar opportunism among many wannabe media stars in 2002-03 when U.S. commentators across the political spectrum expressed certitude about Iraq's hidden stockpiles of WMD. Even the catastrophic consequences of that falsehood did little to dent the career advancements of the Iraq-WMD promoters. There was almost no accountability, proving that there truly is safety in numbers. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Through the US Media Lens Darkly."]

New Recruits

But there's always room for new recruits. Blogger Higgins made his first splash by purporting to prove the accuracy of U.S. government claims about the Syrian government firing rockets carrying sarin gas that killed hundreds of civilians on Aug. 21, 2013, outside Damascus, an incident that came close to precipitating a major U.S. bombing campaign against the Syrian military.

Those of us who noted the startling lack of evidence in the Syria-sarin case - much as we had questioned the Iraq-WMD claims in 2002-03 - were brushed aside by Big Media which rushed to embrace Higgins who claimed to have proved the U.S. government's charges. Even The New York Times clambered onboard the Higgins bandwagon.

Higgins and others mocked legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh when he cited intelligence sources indicating that the attack appeared to be a provocation staged by Sunni extremists to draw the U.S. military into the war, not an attack by the Syrian military.

Despite Hersh's long record for breaking major stories - including the My Lai massacre from the Vietnam War, the "Family Jewels" secrets of the CIA in the 1970s, and the Abu Ghraib torture during the Iraq War - The New Yorker and The Washington Post refused to run his articles, forcing Hersh to publish in the London Review of Books.

Hersh was then treated like the crazy uncle in the attic, while Higgins - an unemployed British bureaucrat operating from his home in Leicester, England - was the new golden boy. While Higgins was applauded, Hersh was shunned.

But Hersh's work was buttressed by the findings of top aeronautical scientists who studied the one rocket that carried sarin into the Damascus suburb of Ghouta and concluded that it could have traveled only about two kilometers, far less distance than was assumed by Official Washington's "group think," which had traced the firing position to about nine kilometers away at a Syrian military base near the presidential palace of Bashar al-Assad.

"It's clear and unambiguous this munition could not have come from Syrian government-controlled areas as the White House claimed," Theodore Postol, a professor in the Science, Technology, and Global Security Working Group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told MintPress News.

Postol published "Possible Implications of Faulty US Technical Intelligence in the Damascus Nerve Agent Attack of August 21st, 2013" in January 2014 along with Richard Lloyd, an analyst at the military contractor Tesla Laboratories who was a United Nations weapons inspector and has to his credit two books, 40 patents and more than 75 academic papers on weapons technology.

Postol added in the MintPress interview that Higgins "has done a very nice job collecting information on a website. As far as his analysis, it's so lacking any analytical foundation it's clear he has no idea what he's talking about."

In the wake of the Postol-Lloyd report, The New York Times ran what amounted to a grudging retraction of its earlier claims. Yet, to this day, the Obama administration has failed to withdraw  its rush-to-judgment charges against the Syrian government or present any verifiable evidence to support them.

This unwillingness of the Obama administration to fess up has served Higgins well, in that there is still uncertainty regarding the facts of the case. After all, once a good propaganda club is forged for bludgeoning an adversary, it's not something Official Washington lays down easily. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Collapsing Syria-Sarin Case."]

The MH-17 Mystery

So, Higgins and Bellingcat moved on to the mystery surrounding MH-17, where again the Obama administration rushed to a judgment, pinning the blame on the Russians and ethnic Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine who were fighting the U.S.-backed regime in Kiev.

Though again hard evidence was lacking - at least publicly - Official Washington and its many minions around the world formed a new "group think" - Russia's President Vladimir Putin was responsible for the 298 deaths.

On July 20, 2014, just three days after the MH-17 shoot-down in an article with the definitive title "U.S. official: Russia gave systems," The Washington Post reported that an anonymous U.S. official said the U.S. government had "confirmed that Russia supplied sophisticated missile launchers to separatists in eastern Ukraine and that attempts were made to move them back across the Russian border."

This official told the Post that there wasn't just one Buk battery, but three. The supposed existence of these Buk systems in the rebels' hands was central to the case blaming Putin, who indeed would have been highly irresponsible if he had delivered such powerful weapons - capable of hitting a commercial airliner flying at 33,000 feet as MH-17 was - to a ragtag rebel force of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.

But there were problems with this version, including the fact that - as reflected in a "government assessment" from the Director of National Intelligence released on July 22, 2014, (or five days after the crash) - U.S. intelligence listed other weapons allegedly provided by the Russians to the ethnic Russian rebels but not a Buk anti-aircraft missile system.

In other words, two days after the Post cited a U.S. official claiming that the Russians had given the rebels the Buks, the DNI's "government assessment" made no reference to a delivery of one, let alone three powerful Buk batteries.

And that absence of evidence came in the context of the DNI larding the report with every possible innuendo to implicate the Russians, including references to "social media" entries. But there was no mention of a Buk delivery.

The significance of this missing link is hard to overstate. At the time eastern Ukraine was the focus of extraordinary U.S. intelligence collection because of the potential for the crisis to spin out of control and start World War III. Plus, a Buk missile battery is large and difficult to conceal. The missiles themselves are 16-feet-long and are usually pulled around by truck.

U.S. spy satellites, which supposedly can let you read a license plate in Moscow, surely would have picked up these images. And, if - for some inexplicable reason - a Buk battery was missed before July 17, 2014, it would surely have been spotted on an after-action review of the satellite imagery. But the U.S. government has released nothing of the kind - not three, not two, not one.

Different Account

Instead, in the days after the MH-17 crash, I was told by a source that U.S. intelligence had spotted Buk systems in the area but they appeared to be under Ukrainian government control. The source who had been briefed by U.S. intelligence analysts said the likely missile battery that launched the fateful missile was manned by troops dressed in what looked like Ukrainian uniforms.

At that point in time, the source said CIA analysts were still not ruling out the possibility that the troops were actually eastern Ukrainian rebels in similar uniforms but the initial assessment was that the troops were Ukrainian soldiers. There also was the suggestion that the soldiers involved were undisciplined and possibly drunk, since the imagery showed what looked like beer bottles scattered around the site, the source said. [See Consortiumnews.com's "What Did US Spy Satellites See in Ukraine?"]

Subsequently, the source said, these analysts reviewed other intelligence data, including recorded phone intercepts, and concluded that the shoot-down was carried out by a rogue element of the Ukrainian government, working with a rabidly anti-Russian oligarch, but that senior Ukrainian leaders, such as President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, were not implicated. However, I have not been able to determine if this assessment was a dissident opinion or a consensus within U.S. intelligence circles.

Another intelligence source told me that CIA analysts did brief Dutch authorities during the preparation of the Dutch Safety Board's report but that the U.S. information remained classified and unavailable for public release. In the Dutch report, there is no reference to U.S.-supplied information although the report reflects sensitive details about Russian-made weapons systems, secrets declassified by Moscow for the investigation.

Into this propaganda-laced controversy stepped Eliot Higgins and Bellingcat with their "citizen journalism" and Internet-based investigation. The core of their project was to scour the Internet for images purportedly of a Buk missile system rumbling through the eastern Ukrainian countryside in the days before the MH-17 crash. After finding several such images, Bellingcat insistently linked the Buk missiles to the Russians and the rebels.

Supposedly, this investigative approach is better than what we traditional journalists do in such cases, which is to find sources with vetted intelligence information and get them to share it with us, while also testing it out against verifiable facts and the views of outside experts. Our approach is far from perfect - and often requires some gutsy whistle-blowing by honest officials - but it is how many important secrets have been revealed.

A central flaw in the Internet-based approach is that it is very easy for a skilled propagandist in a government dirty-tricks office or just some clever jerk with Photoshop software to manufacture realistic-looking images or documents and palm them off either directly to gullible people or through propaganda fronts that appear as non-governmental entities but are really bought-and-paid-for conduits of disinformation.

This idea of filtering propaganda through supposedly disinterested - and thus more credible - outlets has been part of the intelligence community's playbook for many years. I was once told by Gen. Edward Lansdale, one of the pioneers of CIA psychological operations, that his preference always was to plant propaganda in news agencies that were perceived as objective, that way people were more believing.

Lost Credibility

After the Pentagon Papers and Watergate scandals of the 1970s, when the American people were suspicious of whatever they heard from the U.S. government, the Reagan administration in the 1980s organized inter-agency task forces to apply CIA-style techniques to manage the perceptions of the U.S. public about foreign events. The architect was the CIA's top propaganda specialist, Walter Raymond Jr., who was transferred to the National Security Council staff to skirt legal prohibitions against the CIA manipulating Americans.

Raymond, who counseled his subordinates in the art of gluing black hats on U.S. adversaries and white hats on U.S. friends, recommended that U.S. propaganda be funneled through organizations that had "credibility in the political center." Among his favorite outlets were Freedom House, a non-governmental "human rights" group that was discreetly funded by the U.S. government, and the Atlantic Council, a think tank led by former senior U.S. government officials and promoting strong NATO ties. [For more background, see "How Reagan's Propaganda Succeeded."]

The same process continues to this day with some of the same trusted outlets, such as Freedom House and Atlantic Council, but requiring some new fronts that have yet to be identified as propaganda conduits. Many receive discreet or backdoor funding from the U.S. government through the National Endowment for Democracy or other U.S. entities.

For instance, the U.S. Agency for International Development (along with billionaire George Soros's Open Society Institute) funds the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, which targets governments that have fallen into U.S. disfavor and which are then undermined by reporting that hypes alleged ties to organized crime and corruption. The USAID/Soros-funded OCCRP also collaborates with Bellingcat.

Higgins has become a favorite, too, of the Atlantic Council, which has partnered with him for a report about Russian involvement in the Ukraine conflict, and he wins praise from the Soros-financed Human Rights Watch, which has lobbied for U.S. military intervention against the Assad government in Syria. (Like Higgins, Human Rights Watch pushed discredited theories about where Syrian sarin-gas attack originated.)

Yet, because Higgins's claims dovetail so neatly with U.S. government propaganda and neoconservative narratives, he is treated like an oracle by credulous journalists, the Oracle of Leicester. For instance, Australia's "60 Minutes" dispatched a crew to Higgins's house to get the supposed coordinates for where the so-called "Buk getaway video" was filmed - another curious scene that appeared mysteriously on the Internet.

When "60 Minutes" got to the spot near Luhansk in eastern Ukraine where Higgins sent them, the location did not match up with the video. Although there were some billboards in the video and at the site in Luhansk, they were different shapes and all the other landmarks were off, too. Still, the Australian news crew pretended that it was at the right place, using some video sleight-of-hand to snooker the viewers.

However, when I published screen grabs of the getaway video and the Luhansk location, it was clear to anyone that the scenes didn't match up.

Yet, instead of simply admitting that they were in error, the "60 Minutes" host did a follow-up insulting me, asserting that he had gone to the place identified by Higgins and claiming that there was a utility pole in the video that looked something like a utility pole in Luhansk.

At this point, the Australian program went from committing an embarrassing error to engaging in journalistic fraud. Beyond the fact that utility poles tend to look alike, nothing else matched up and, indeed, the landmarks around the utility poles were markedly different, too. A house next to the pole in the video didn't appear in the scene filmed by the Australian crew. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "A Reckless Stand-upper on MH-17."]

An Enduring Aura

But Higgins's aura was such that objective reality and logic no longer seemed to matter. That two utility poles looked somewhat alike when nothing else in a video matched up at all somehow proved you were at the right location simply because the Oracle of Leicester had sent you there.

I've known many excellent journalists who saw their careers ended because they were accused of minor slip-ups on difficult stories when they were clearly correct on the big picture. Think, for instance, of the harsh treatment meted out to Gary Webb on Nicaraguan Contra drug trafficking and Mary Mapes on George W. Bush's shirking his National Guard duty. But different rules clearly apply if you make serious errors in line with U.S. propaganda. For example, think of virtually the entire mainstream news media buying into the false Iraq-WMD claims and facing almost no accountability at all.

The second set of rules apparently applies to Higgins and Bellingcat, who have the mainstream U.S. media on bended knee despite a record of journalistic misfeasance or malfeasance. In editorials about the Dutch Safety Board report last week , both The New York Times and The Washington Post hailed Bellingcat - as if they were recognizing that the old mainstream media had to rub shoulders with supposedly "new media" to have any credibility. It was a moment that would have made the CIA's Lansdale and Raymond smile.

The Post's neocon editorial writers, who have backed "regime change" in Iraq, Syria and other targeted countries, viewed the Dutch Safety Board report as vindicating the initial rush to judgment blaming the Russians and praised the work of Bellingcat - although the Dutch report pointedly did not say who was responsible or even where the fatal missile was launched.

"More forensic investigation will be necessary to identify precisely where the missile came from, but the safety board identified a 123-square-mile area mostly held by the separatists," the Post wrote, although a different way of saying the same thing would be to note that the launch area identified by the report could suggest the firing by either Ukrainian forces or the rebels.

The Post did observe what has been one of my repeated complaints - that the Obama administration is withholding the U.S. intelligence evidence that Secretary of State John Kerry claimed three days after the shoot-down had identified the precise location of the launch.

Yet, the subsequent U.S. silence on that point has been the dog not barking. Why would the U.S. government, which has been trying to pin the shoot-down on the Russians, hide such crucial evidence - unless perhaps it doesn't corroborate the desired anti-Putin propaganda theme?

Yet, the Post sought to turn this otherwise inexplicable U.S. silence into further condemnation of Putin, writing: "A Dutch criminal investigation is underway that may identify the individuals who ordered and carried out the shootdown. We hope the prosecutors will have access to precise data scooped up by U.S. technical means at the time of the shootdown, which made clear the responsibility of Russian-backed forces."

So, the Post sees nothing suspicious about the U.S. government's sudden reticence after its initial loud rush-to-judgment. Note also the Post's lack of skepticism about what these "technical means" had scooped up. Though the U.S. government has refused to release this evidence - in effect, giving those responsible for the shoot-down a 15-month head start to get away and cover their tracks - the Post simply takes the official word that the Russians are responsible.

Then comes the praise for Bellingcat: "Already, outside investigations based on open sources and social media, such as by the citizen journalist group Bellingcat, have shown the Buk launcher was probably wheeled into Ukraine in June from the Russian 53rd Air Defense Brigade, based outside Kursk. The criminal probe should aim to determine whether Russian servicemen were operating the unit when it was fired or helping the separatists fire it."

No Skepticism

Again, the Post shows little skepticism about this version of events, leaving only the question of whether Russian soldiers fired the missile themselves or helped the rebels fire it. But there are obvious problems with this narrative. If, indeed, the one, two or three Russian Buk batteries were rumbling around eastern Ukraine the month before the shoot-down, why did neither U.S. intelligence nor Ukrainian intelligence notice this?

And, we know from the Dutch report that the Ukrainians were insisting up until the shoot-down that the rebels had no surface-to-air missiles that could threaten commercial airliners at 33,000 feet. However, the Ukrainians did have Buk systems that they were positioning toward the east, presumably to defend against possible Russian air incursions.

On July 16, 2014, one day before MH-17 was hit, a Ukrainian Su-25 fighter-jet was shot down by what Ukrainian authorities said was an air-to-air missile, according to the Dutch report. Presumably the missile was fired by a Russian fighter patrolling the nearby border.

So, if the Ukrainians already believed that Russian warplanes were attacking along the border, it would make sense that Ukrainian air defense units would be on a hair-trigger about shooting down Russian jets entering or leaving Ukrainian airspace.

Even if you don't want to believe what I was told about U.S. intelligence analysts suspecting that a rogue Ukrainian military operation targeted MH-17, doesn't it make sense that an undisciplined Ukrainian anti-aircraft battery might have mistakenly identified MH-17 as a Russian military aircraft leaving Ukrainian airspace? The Ukrainians had the means and the opportunity and possibly a motive - after the shoot-down of the SU-25 just one day earlier.

The Dutch Safety Board report is silent, too, on the question raised by Russian officials as to why the Ukrainians had turned on their radar used to guide Buk missiles in the days before MH-17 was shot down. That allegation is neither confirmed nor denied.

Regarding Bellingcat's reliance on Internet-based photos to support its theories, there is the additional problem of Der Spiegel's report last October revealing that the German intelligence agency, the BND, challenged some of the images provided by the Ukrainian government as "manipulated." According to Der Spiegel, the BND blamed the rebels for firing the fateful Buk but said the missile battery came not from the Russians but from Ukrainian government stockpiles. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Germans Clear Russia in MH-17 Case."]

However, a European source told me that the BND's information was not as categorical as Der Spiegel reported. And, according to the Dutch report, the Ukrainian government reported that a Buk system that the rebels captured from a Ukrainian air base was not operational, a point where the rebels are in agreement. They also say they had no working Buks.

Yet, even without the BND's warning, great caution should be shown when using evidence deposited often anonymously on the Internet. The idea of "crowd-sourcing" these investigations also raises the possibility that a skillful disinformationist could phony up a photograph and then direct an unwitting or collaborating reporter to the image.

Though I am no expert in the art of doctoring photographs, my journalism training has taught me to approach every possible flaw in the evidence skeptically. That's especially true when some anonymous blogger directs you to an image or article whose bona fides cannot be established.

One of the strengths of old-fashioned journalism was that you could generally count on the professional integrity of the news agencies distributing photographs. Even then, however, there have been infamous cases of misrepresentations and hoaxes. Those possibilities multiply when images of dubious provenance pop up on the Internet.

In the case of MH-17, some photo analysts have raised specific questions about the authenticity of images used by Bellingcat and others among the "Russia-did-it" true-believers. We have already seen in the case of the "Buk-getaway video" how Higgins sent a reporting team from Australia's "60 Minutes" halfway around the world to end up at the wrong spot (but then to use video fakery to deceive the viewers).

So, the chances of getting duped must be taken into account when dealing with unverifiable sources of information, a risk that rises exponentially when there's also the possibility of clever intelligence operatives salting the Internet with disinformation. For the likes of psy-ops innovator Lansdale and propaganda specialist Raymond, the Internet would have been a devil's playground.

Which is one more reason why President Barack Obama should release as much of the intelligence evidence as he can that pinpoints where the fateful MH-17 missile was fired and who fired it. [For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com's "NYT Plays Games with MH-17 Tragedy."]

 
 #43
Dances With Bears
http://johnhelmer.net
October 19, 2015
IS THERE A WAR CRIME IN WHAT LORD HEH-HEH, TJIBBE JOUSTRA OF THE DUTCH SAFETY BOARD, IS BROADCASTING?
By John Helmer, Moscow
[Footnotes, links, and footnotes here http://johnhelmer.net/?p=14356]

Tjibbe Joustra (lead image, right), chairman of the Dutch Safety Board, wants it to be very clear that Russia is criminally responsible for the destruction of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 on July 17, 2014; that a Russian-supplied ground-to-air missile, fired on Russian orders from territory under Russian control, exploded lethally to break up the MH17 aircraft in the air, killing everyone on board; and that Russian objections to these conclusions are no more than cover-up and dissimulation for the guilty.

Joustra also wants to make sure that no direct evidence for what he says can be tested, not in the report which his agency issued last week; nor in the three Dutch government organs which prepared and analysed the evidence of the victims' bodies, the aircraft remains, and the missile parts on contract to the Dutch Safety Board (DSB) - the Dutch National Aerospace Laboratory (NLR), the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research ( TNO), and the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI). So Joustra began broadcasting his version of what he says happened before the release of the DSB report. He then continued in an anteroom of the Gilze-Rijen airbase, where the DSB report was presented to the press; in a Dutch television studio; and on the pages of the Dutch newspapers.

But when he and his spokesman were asked today for the evidence for what Joustra has been broadcasting, they insisted that if the evidence isn't to be found in the DSB report, Joustra's evidence cannot be released. So, if the evidence for Joustra's claims cannot be found in the NLR, TMO and NFI reports either, what exactly is Joustra doing - is he telling the truth? Is he broadcasting propaganda? Is he lying? Is he covering up for a crime?

In the absence of the evidence required to substantiate what the DSB chairman is broadcasting, is the likelihood that Joustra is concealing who perpetrated the crime equal to the probability that he is telling the truth? And if there is such a chance that Joustra is concealing or covering up, is this evidence that Joustra may be committing a crime himself? In English law, that may be the crime of perverting the course of justice. In US law, it might be the crime of obstruction of justice. In German law, it might be the crime of Vort�uschung einer Straftat. By the standard of World War II, Joustra's crime might be propagandizing for the losing side, that's to say the enemy of the winning side.

When William Joyce (lead image, left, centre), an Anglo-American broadcaster on German radio during the war and known as Lord Haw-Haw, was prosecuted in London in 1945, he was convicted of treason and hanged. The treason indictment said he "did aid and assist the enemies of the King by broadcasting to the King's subjects propaganda on behalf of the King's enemies." The legality of this indictment and the conviction was upheld by the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords.

By the customary civilized standard, Joustra must be considered innocent of any crime of broadcasting unless he's proven guilty. And the proof of such a crime would require evidence admissible in court, acceptable to a judge or jury beyond reasonable doubt. Of course, such a standard of Joustra's innocence will be the standard by which his public statements must also be judged. But if Joustra lacks the evidence for what he is claiming in his broadcasts then perhaps the evidence is also lacking for his innocence of crime.

Joustra, 64, has served most of his career as a Dutch government apparatchik, first at the Ministry of Agriculture; then at the agency for unemployment benefits; then coordinator of anti-terrorism operations; and since February 2011 at the DSB. Last Tuesday, after presenting the DSB report to the press, but not allowing questions, Joustra spoke [1] briefly to Dutch reporters. He told them what had not been reported in several hundred pages of the DSB's report and appendixes - that he has pinpointed the launch area for the Buk missile, and that it "was controlled by separatists at the time. The area that we designate as launch location is located within this area." "So they [separatists] are responsible?" the reporter asked. "We can't answer this question. It's not for the DSB to do this." The reporter asked: "One plus one equals two, doesn't it?" "Yes, that's true," Joustra said. "Sometimes another person needs to make this calculation."

A little later Joustra gave an interview to the Dutch newspaper Volkskrant, which published [2] the text of his remarks on October 16. Joustra told the newspaper the evidence of the Buk missile was "irrefutable". He was "certain", he added, that the firing position was from what the newspaper described as "pro-Russian rebel held territory." Joustra told the reporters to look closely at the DSB document for the evidence. "I thought it was clear." He claimed his saying-so was "factual, not a slip".

Joustra went further, dismissing criticism of the DSB's evidence and conclusions. "Every time the Russians come up with different stories and different speakers," Joustra told Volkskrant. "I've got the impression that they are trying to take the report back and it does not matter what argument." Russia is trying to protect the guilty, he added. "How did that Buk battery get there - where did it come from exactly? Who ordered it to do so? I expect that it is possible to make that clear." To Joustra it was already clear. Russia is protecting the guilty. "Several countries are not eager to deliver [suspected] people at all," he told Volkskrant, which added that he meant Russia, and believed that Russian suspects have already been identified in the Dutch investigation.

Joustra said today through spokesman, Sara Vernooij, that he had been accurately quoted in Volkskrant. When he spoke of meetings with Russians, Vernooij says Joustra was referring to meetings held this year on February 17-20; May 6-7; and August 11-12. He refuses to identify the Russians by name "due to privacy reasons."

For evidence of his "certainty" and for the " irrefutability" of the evidence of missile and warhead, Joustra replied that he is relying on "appendix X the NLR report, appendix Y TNO report, appendix Z TNO report. Data that are not mentioned in the reports or appedicces [sic] will not be released."

These reports, Joustra and Vernooij were then asked, "do not refer to direct evidence. They refer to computer simulations based on parameters of missile and warhead which originated from the Dutch Ministry of Defence; are classified; and are not disclosed in the TNO documents. The direct evidence available is that the missile model and the warhead type cannot be fired together. A computer simulation is not evidence that they were. Is there any other evidence on which Mr Joustra relies for his certainty and irrefutability?"

"I have nothing to add to the final report", Joustra and Vernooij have replied.

For more details on what the DSB, the NLR and TMO reports call evidence, and the conclusions they draw, read this [3] and this [4]. For the DSB's summary of the Russian evidence and Russian objections to what the Dutch call evidence, see Appendix V [5].

Additional physical evidence of Joustra's claims about the missile and warhead are residues of the explosive from the warhead, and paint from the missile traces or parts which have been found, according to the DSB, in the aircraft wreckage and on the ground. The DSB says it relied for analysis of this evidence on the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI). The NFI [6] is an agency of the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security. It has publicly acknowledged participating in the MH17 case by analyzing DNA samples from victims during the identification phase of the examination of bodies in August of 2014. Here is the NFI's release of August 28, 2014 [7].

Not since then has the NFI admitted to doing anything more on the MH17 case. But it did do chemical analysis of explosive residues and paint samples, NFI spokesman Suzan Demirhan said today. "That's correct, we did." Asked to say when the analysis was commenced, and when the NFI report was delivered to DSB, Demirhan said: "We are not allowed to discuss this. The Public Prosecutor [Service] ordered [the study]. I cannot confirm [the details]. We are not allowed to bring anything to the public. You have to ask your question to the Ministry of Justice and Security."

According to the DSB [8] (page 35), analyses of explosive and paint residues "were performed by the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) at the request of the Public Prosecution Service and shared with the Dutch Safety Board". The Ukrainian Government in Kiev had refused to cooperate in this part of the investigation, the DSB has also reported (same page). "The Dutch Safety Board attempted to obtain reference material of the suspected weapon in order to further substantiate the origin of the fragments. The objective was to establish that the chemical composition of the fragments was consistent with that of the suspected weapon. This was not achieved, so this verification could not take place."

Jean Fransman, spokesman for the Justice Ministry, was asked to address these DSB disclosures about the source of the evidence in the NFI report, and say where, if not the Ukraine or Russia, the evidence came from. He replied he cannot answer. "This is all part of the independent investigation of the DSB. We as a ministry have no say or involvement in this investigation. The NFI has done its work for the DSB investigation and for them only." When it was pointed out that the NFI claims it was up to Fransman to respond as the ministry had "coordinated" the evidence-gathering, analysis and reporting, Fransman insisted he can say nothing at all. "And thank you for your friendly and non-insinuating questions."


 
 #44
Subject: To Post: ASN 2016 World Convention Call for Papers (Deadline Reminder: 29 October)
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2015 00:30:09 +0000
From: Dominique Arel <[email protected]>
To: [email protected] <[email protected]>

Dear David: could you post this Deadline Reminder on JRL? Thanks,
Dominique

[A PDF of this announcement can be accessed at
http://nationalities.org/uploads/documents/ASN16_Call_for_Papers.pdf]

Call for Papers 21st Annual World Convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN)*

International Affairs Building,
Columbia University, NY
Sponsored by the Harriman Institute
14-16 April 2016
www.nationalities.org

Proposal Deadline Reminder: 29 October 2015

Contact information:

proposals must be submitted to:
[email protected] [email protected]

Over 150 PANELS in nine sections:
Nationalism Studies
Migration & Diasporas
Balkans
Russia
Ukraine (and Belarus)
Central Europe (including Baltics & Moldova)
Eurasia (including Central Asia & China)
Caucasus (North and South)
Turkey and Greece (and Cyprus)

THEMATIC Panels on
The Conflict in Ukraine
Refugees and Migrants
Insurgency, Self-Determination and the State
Memory Politics

Screening of NEW DOCUMENTARIES

BOOK PANELS

AWARDS for Best Doctoral Student Papers,

ASN Harriman Joseph Rothschild Book Prize

The /Nationalities Papers/ Opening Reception

The ASN Convention, the largest international and inter-disciplinary
scholarly gathering of its kind, welcomes proposals on a wide range of
topics related to nationalism, ethnicity, ethnic conflict and national
identity in regional sections on the Balkans, Central Europe, Russia,
Ukraine, Eurasia, the Caucasus, and Turkey/Greece, as well as thematic
sections on Nationalism and Migration/Diasporas. Disciplines represented
include political science, history, anthropology, sociology,
international studies, security studies, geopolitics, area studies,
economics, geography, sociolinguistics, literature, psychology, and
related fields.

The Convention is also inviting paper, panel, roundtable, or special
presentation proposals related to:

*"Insurgency and the State," on the rise of ISIS, the resumption of
conflict in Turkey, civil wars, self-determination, international law;

*"The Conflict in Ukraine," on the events/international
crisis unleashed by "Maidan," the fall of a regime, the war in Donbas,
Russia's role, NATO;

*"Refugees and Migrants," the refugee crisis in Europe, the rise of the
far right, labour migration (/gastarbeiters/), securitization of
borders, migration and civil rights;

*"Memory Politics," on the construction and contestation of the memory
of historical events in sites, symbols, discourse and research;

Prospective applicants can get a sense of the large thematic scope of
ASN Convention papers by looking at the 2015 Final Program, which can be
accessed at

http://nationalities.org/uploads/documents/ASN_Final_Program_2015.pdf.

Popular topics have also included ethnic violence, language politics,
religion and politics, EU integration, nation-building, energy politics,
and post-conflict reconstruction.

/Nationalities Papers/, the ASN flagship journal, will present the
consistently popular roundtable "How To Get Your Article Published",
which features the editors of some of the leading journals in the field.
It will also sponsor the opening reception.

For several years, the ASN Convention has acknowledged excellence in
graduate studies research by offering Awards for Best Doctoral Student
Papers. The ASN 2015 Doctoral Student Awards were given to:

Aleksandra Zdeb (Political Science, Jagiellonian U, Poland) and Jelena
Dureinovic (Art History, Justus Liebig U, Germany), Balkans

Kyle L. Marquardt (Political Science, U of Wisconsin Madison, US),
Central Europe

David R. Stroup (Political Science, U of Oklahoma, US),
Caucasus/Eurasia/Turkey

Scott Weiner (Political Science, George Washington U, US), Nationalism

Maria Tagangaeva (Sociology, U of St. Gallen, Switzerland), Russia

Daria Mattingly (Slavonic Studies, U of Cambridge, UK), Ukraine

http://nationalities.org/prizes/doctoral-student-awards/2015-best-doctoral-student-papers-awards

Doctoral student applicants whose proposals are accepted for the 2016
Convention, who will not have defended their dissertation by 1 November
2015, and whose papers are delivered by the deadline, will automatically
be considered for the awards. Each award comes with a certificate and a
cash prize.

In 2010 the ASN Convention inaugurated an annual ASN Harriman Book
Prize-the /Joseph Rothschild Prize in Nationalism and Ethnic Studies/.
At the 2015 ASN Convention, the prize was awarded to Madeleine Reeves
for /Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia
/(Cornell University Press, 2014).

http://nationalities.org/conventions/book-panels/books-2015/border-work

An honorable mention was given to Willard Sunderland for /The Baron's
Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution /(Cornell
University Press, 2013). The award comes with a certificate and a cash
prize. For information on how to have a book considered for the ASN 2016
Convention Book Prize, please contact Dmitry Gorenburg at
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>, or go to
http://www.nationalities.org/prizes/Rothschild.asp.

The Convention is also inviting submissions for new documentaries
available in mp4 or DVD format (NTSC or PAL). The documentaries selected
will be screened during regular panel slots and, in several cases, will
be followed by a discussion with the filmmaker. The full 2015 film
lineup can be accessed at
http://nationalities.org/conventions/film-presentations/2015-film-presentations.

/Proposal Information/

The ASN 2016 Convention invites proposals for /individual papers/ or
/panels/. A panel includes a chair, three or four presentations based on
written papers, and a discussant.

The Convention is also welcoming offers to serve as /discussant /on a
panel to be created by the Program Committee from individual paper
proposals. The application to be considered as discussant can be
self-standing, or accompanied by an individual paper proposal.

In order to submit proposals to the Convention, /the three mandatory
items indicated below (contact information, abstract, biographical
statement) must be included in a single Word document (PDF documents
will not be accepted) attached to a single email message/.

Each applicant - single or multiple authors on individual proposals,
every member of a panel proposal - must also fill out a Fact Sheet
online that can be accessed at
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ASN2016_survey.

IMPORTANT: Applicants can only send one paper proposal -- whether as an
individual proposal, or as a paper part of a panel proposal. The Program
will not consider more than one paper proposal from the same applicant.
At the Convention, each panelist can only appear on a maximum of TWO
panels, only one of which can be in the capacity of a paper presenter.
For example, a panelist can chair a panel and present a paper on
another, or chair a panel and be discussant or another, and so forth.
This rule applies to co-authored papers, thus a co-authored paper
presentation counts as one appearance. This means that /applicants can
appear on a maximum of two proposals sent to the Convention, only one of
which can be in the capacity of a paper-giver/.

Individual paper proposals/ must include four items:

*Contact information: the name, email, postal address and academic
affiliation of the applicant.

*A 300- to 500-word abstract (shorter abstracts will not be considered)
that includes the title of the paper.

*A 100-word biographical statement, /in narrative form/ (a text with the
length of one paragraph). /Standard CVs will not be considered/.

Individual proposals featuring more than one author (joint proposal)
must include the contact information and biographical statement of all
authors /and specify who among the co-authors intend to attend the
Convention/. Only joint presenters attending the Convention will have
their names in the official program.

*A Fact Sheet, to be filled out online (see above). In the case of
co-authors, only those intending to attend the Convention must send a
Fact Sheet. /The Word document proposal must indicate that the Fact
Sheet has been filled out online./

/Panel proposals/ must include four items:

*Contact information (see above) of all proposed panelists.

*The title of the panel and a 200- to 300-word abstract of each paper.

*A 100-word biographical statement (see above) for each proposed
panelist. /Statements in standard CV format will not be considered/. The
rules on joint proposals are the same as with individual proposals (see
above).

*A Fact Sheet, to be filled out online (see above), for each panelist
attached to the proposal. /The Word document proposal must indicate that
all panelists have filled out their Fact Sheet online/.

Proposals can also be sent for /roundtables/ and /book panels/.
Roundtables include a chair, four presenters, but no discussant, since
the presentations, unlike regular panels, are not based on written
papers. Roundtable proposals include the same four items as a panel
proposal, except that the 200- to 300-word abstracts are presentation
abstracts, rather than paper abstracts.

The Convention is also inviting /proposals for Book Panels/, based on
books published between January 2015 and February 2016. The proposal
must include the Chair, three discussants, as well as the author. A Book
Panel proposal must include the same four items as a panel proposal,
except that the abstract is limited to a 200- to 300-word abstract of
the book. The discussants need not submit an abstract.

/Proposals for documentaries/ must include four items:

*Contact information (see above)

*A 300- to 500-word abstract of the documentary

*A 100-word biographical statement (see above). /CVs will not be
considered./

*A Fact Sheet filled out online (see above).

*A streaming link for reviewing purposes.

Proposals for a roundtable following the screening of a film are
especially encouraged. In these cases, the requirements of a panel
proposal apply, in addition to the 300- to 500-word abstract of the film.

/Proposals to serve as a discussant/ must include four items:

*Contact information (see above)

*A 100-word statement about your areas of expertise

*A 100-word biographical statement (see above). /CVs will not be
considered./

*A Fact Sheet filled out online (see above)

Proposals for applicants already included in an individual paper or
panel proposal need only include the 100-word statement on areas of
expertise.

IMPORTANT: All proposals must be sent in /a single email message/, with
an attached proposal in a Word document (PDFs will not be accepted)
containing contact information, an abstract, a biographical statement,
as well as a confirmation that the Fact Sheet has been filled out online
(or multiple Fact Sheets, in the case of co-authors and/or panel
proposals). Proposals including contact information, the abstract and
the bio statement in separate attachments, or over several email
messages, will not be considered. *The proposals must be sent to
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> AND [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>*.

The receipt of all proposals will be promptly acknowledged
electronically, with some delay during deadline week, due to the high
volume of proposals.

IMPORTANT: Participants are responsible for covering all travel and
accommodation costs. /Unfortunately,/ /ASN has no funding available for
panelists/.

An international Program Committee will be entrusted with the selection
of proposals. Applicants will be notified by January 2016 at the latest.
Information regarding registration costs and other logistical questions
will be communicated afterwards.

The full list of panels from /last year's convention/ can be accessed at
http://nationalities.org/uploads/documents/ASN_Final_Program_2015.pdf.

The programs from past conventions, going back to 2001, are also
available online at http://nationalities.org/conventions/world/

Several dozen publishers and companies have had exhibits and/or
advertised in the Convention Program in past years. Due to
considerations of space, advertisers and exhibitors are encouraged to
place their order early. For information, please contact ASN Executive
Director Ryan Kreider ([email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>).

The ASN Facebook page will post regular updates on the ASN 2016
Convention. To become a follower of ASN on Facebook, go to
https://www.facebook.com/Nationalities

and click on the "Like" option.

We very much look forward to hearing from you and receiving your proposal!

Dominique Arel, ASN Convention Director
Ceren Belge, ASN Convention Associate Director
Evgeny Finkel, ASN Convention Associate Director
Sherrill Stroschein, ASN Program Chair

On behalf of the ASN Convention Program

*/Deadline for proposals: 29 October 2015 (to be sent to both
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> AND [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>)/*

To communicate with the ASN Convention's headquarters:

Ryan Kreider
Assistant Director
The Harriman Institute
ASN Executive Director
Columbia University
420 W. 118th St., Room 1218, MC 3345
New York, NY 10027
212 851 2174 tel
212 666 3481 fax

[email protected]