#2
Financial Times
October 22, 2015
Behind the gloss Moscow is a sad city
Falling oil prices and western sanctions mean life is hard in the Russian capital, writes Guy Chazan
By Guy Chazan

The first indication I had that change had come to Moscow was when I gingerly stepped out on to a zebra crossing and the cars actually stopped for me. In the old days the drivers would accelerate, and I would run for my life.

This outbreak of courtesy proved to be just one of many subtle changes that, when taken together, add up to a wholesale transformation.

I was in Moscow on a work trip, my first since leaving Russia in 2007. Back then, the city seemed chaotic at best, and sometimes downright dangerous. Walking down the street you dodged packs of feral dogs, huge puddles black as pitch, and haphazardly parked SUVs that were the size of small houses.

All that is gone. A strict system of paid parking, introduced two years ago, has cleared cars from pavements and many drivers from the roads. This has unclogged the city's main arteries as residents instead turn to public transport. Moscow is now only the fourth most congested city in the world, according to navigation company TomTom. In 2012 and 2013, it ranked first.

Moscow's outward appearance has changed, too. It used to be smothered in tacky neon signs, creating the impression of a vast, cheap fairground. Many of them are gone, as are the massive advertising hoardings that obscured whole 10-storey buildings. Everything looks smarter.

Some of the public spaces that once stood as weed-infested symbols of decay have been reinvented. Gorky Park boasts bike lanes, fountains and a new waterfront. Red October, a famous chocolate factory just south of the Kremlin, is home to a clutch of hipster bars and a design institute.

Likewise, Moscow has become a great place to eat out. When I first visited the city in the early 1990s, the only fast food you could buy was boiled Siberian dumplings that tasted of wallpaper paste. Now there are flat whites, pumpkin spice lattes and macaroons galore.

I dined with an old colleague at a restaurant called Twins, where chefs Ivan and Sergei Berezutsky have made a virtue of Russia's ban on western imported food by making stunning dishes, such as veal cheeks with pumpkin and roasted plums, almost entirely from local ingredients.
"The popular euphoria that accompanied Russia's annexation of Crimea last year has faded, leaving a bitter hangover"

After dinner I did not flag down a clapped-out and unlicensed Lada cab to return to my hotel the way I used to, but clicked on Yandex Taxi, one of the city's car-hailing apps. A spanking new Hyundai arrived in minutes. It was a further sign of how the old, anarchic Moscow was becoming a sophisticated European capital.

Yet there are some things about this megalopolis of 12m people that never change. Beneath the surface gloss lies a deep-seated sadness that at times shades into hopelessness.

The popular euphoria that accompanied Russia's annexation of Crimea last year has faded, leaving a bitter hangover.

The country is in a deep recession, floored by a plunge in the oil price and western sanctions. Many people have lost their jobs. Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, claimed last week that the crisis had reached its nadir. Few of those I spoke to believe him.

I spent a wistful evening with one of my oldest Russian friends - I will call her Lena. She is a designer and has seen commissions dry up. The plummeting rouble has hit her hard: in dollar terms, she earns half what she did two years ago.

I was reminded of a meeting with her in 1999, a year after the rouble crisis, when the government defaulted on its debt and devalued Russia's currency. Then, too, she had seen her dollar income plunge. But in the ensuing years, Russia had dragged itself out of the slump, buoyed by a rising oil price. Lena had become (relatively) rich.

Now, she said, it was back to square one. In 1999 she was younger and better able to adapt to changing circumstances. Now she is just tired. "Nothing will ever change for the better in this country," she said. These were hard words from someone like Lena, a self-confessed patriot who loves Russia.

That conversation made me realise just how fragile - and superficial - Moscow's transformation has been. The outward gloss may impress but it hides a hard city that still, after all these years, seems just a few short steps away from chaos.

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 #3
Christian Science Monitor
October 21, 2015
Inside the Kremlin's velvet grip, Russia's civil society struggles to survive
Workers at Memorial, Russia's leading human rights monitor, live under constant, unyielding pressure from the government, which is trying to stymie dissent.
By Fred Weir, Correspondent

MOSCOW - All seems perfectly normal on the busy downtown corner where Memorial, Russia's largest grassroots human rights monitor, maintains its sprawling Moscow headquarters. On most days the building is a hub of activity: people come and go, and even police officers stroll by without so much as a sideways glance.

Yet enter the building and spend a while with the people who tend its vast archives, run seminars, and manage its campaigns, and the feeling of a grinding siege becomes palpable. Among the workers here there is a mounting mood of despair. Some say their nerves are near to snapping, and few believe Memorial can survive much longer.

Welcome to the Vladimir Putin era, where the Soviet-style goal of stamping out politically disobedient civil activity is executed without police boots through the door or night-time transports to the gulag.

Instead, it's being gradually but thoroughly implemented via a law passed three years ago requiring groups like Memorial to wear the label "foreign agent" - which connotes "spy" in Russian - on all their literature if they receive any amount of foreign funding and engage in any activity authorities deem "political."

Like most of the nearly 100 organizations singled out by the law, Memorial has refused to accept the label, which it regards as tantamount to swallowing a poison pill. But after years of legal battles, official warnings, and escalating fines, activists say they have almost no space left to maneuver.

"The fact that Russia's biggest human rights group is on the brink of closure, but there's no visible drama about it, made it feel even more scary to me," says Ariella Katz, a US university student of Russian extraction who recently completed an internship with Memorial in Moscow. "I was working in an atmosphere of intense psychological pressure. People all around me were showing very real signs of stress, and I was feeling it too."

'Right at the center of it'

Ms. Katz worked in the group's Moscow office for about a month, translating press releases into English, and growing increasingly disheartened as its troubles mounted. She says it frustrated her watching the slow demise of Russia's only organization that works to expose past political repressions, as well as current power abuses. It gets almost no media attention, she says, because the means of driving Memorial out of existence is a mundane daily drip-drip of tightening legal constraints, inspections, demands for documents, and suffocating fines.

"I really think it's important to strip away that facade of normalcy and look at the reality. It's not about some law. It's really all about crushing this group, making it impossible for these people to do their work," she says.

Memorial was born amid the explosive social opening of the late 1980s, when Soviet people were questioning everything, especially their history. A group of activists came together to lobby for building a central memorial to the victims of Stalinist terror - a demand that has yet to be fully addressed. And they went on to work for individual justice in thousands of unresolved Soviet cases.

With the collapse of the USSR came brutal little wars around the periphery, including two horrific conflicts in Chechnya, and a fresh wave of injustices to be documented and addressed. Memorial activists all around the country have been targets of official reprisals and a couple, such as Chechen human rights monitor Natalya Estimirova, have paid with their lives.

"We found it was not possible to focus just on historical wrongs without addressing current ones," says Alexander Cherkasov, director of Memorial's human rights center in Moscow. "After the end of the Soviet Union, political repressions mostly stopped for some time, and we learned to deal with these new problems of wars and waves of refugees. Now, it seems we're into a new era of political repressions. It's different of course, and we find ourselves right at the center of it."

Memorial has received funding from a variety of Western institutions, such as the Ford and MacArthur foundations, but even its leaders don't know what "political activity" it was allegedly involved in. The organization takes no partisan stance in elections or other overt political processes.

One likely reason authorities decided to go after Memorial, Mr. Cherkasov says, is its active scrutiny of Russian criminal cases to find evidence of authorities bending the law to prosecute people whose real offense was to challenge power in some political way. Memorial's list of "political prisoners" in Russia now runs to 43 names, but activists say there are probably at least 200.

"In the times of Stalin, the means of crushing real and imagined political enemies was open, massive, and brutal," says Sergei Davidis, a human rights lawyer who works on the campaign. "Of course the situation today cannot be compared with that."

"Now," he says, "it isn't about suppressing all opposition, but it's mostly aimed at selected people who are in the way of the authorities. A lot of this takes place out in distant Russian regions, where it is extremely hard even to obtain information, much less help people."

The velvet vise

That's where the "foreign agent" label helps authorities to slow down Memorial's work, even short of completely extinguishing it. Huge amounts of the organization's resources and efforts have been diverted over the past three years in court battles, constant wrestling with bureaucracy, and defending its reputation before the public.

"I have a full slate of work on my desk, but the Ministry of Justice [which oversees the "foreign agent" law] calls me up and demands that I present a long list of documents," says Cherkasov. "So, I have to drop everything else and collect all these papers for them. sometimes I sleep in my office because I have no time to go home. I still don't get everything done."

Official organizations like the police, the FSB security organization, and courts may also cite the "foreign agent" label as a reason not to give Memorial access even to information that ought to be publicly available. In the growing number of cases that involve "treason" or "political extremism," they clam up entirely, says Mr. Davidov.

"You can't call someone a 'political prisoner' if you haven't examined the case thoroughly. But that just keeps getting harder to do," he says.

"We're shutting down a lot of our operations. Under pressure, our sponsors are deserting us. Even those still helping us are looking over their shoulders at the state policy," says Olga Bochvar, a Memorial worker. "Our track record still gives us a good public reputation; people keep turning to us for help rather than trust state organizations. We're still fighting, but there is the feeling that we are being slowly strangled."

A 'manageable accident'?

Ms. Katz says she has no interest in fanning "cold war narratives," nor as casting Russia as a land of "hopeless evil." Rather, she simply wants to save the institution.

"I just feel that if Memorial disappears, one of the basic ways that Russians can make their country a better place will go with it," she says. "That should matter to everyone."

In the next few weeks Memorial faces two crippling fines totaling about $10,000, money the organization will have difficulty coming up with. It has already reached the point, in its refusal to accept the "foreign agent" tag, where it's out of legal options and the Justice Ministry can order it completely shut down.

"The situation looks grim," says Cherkasov, a former nuclear engineer. "But you know, three years ago, when that law was passed, none of us thought we'd still be around today."

"I'm an optimist, and the way I look at it is we're living through something like what atomic power workers call a 'manageable accident,'" he says. "It's a state of constant, nerve-wracking crisis, for sure. But the main task, every single minute, is to limit the damage. Here we still are, and that's what we're doing."

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 #4
www.rt.com
October 22, 1015
Putin's approval rating hits new historic high of almost 90%

The approval rating of President Vladimir Putin is now higher than ever at 89.9 percent and pollsters say the fresh surge in the Russian leader's popularity is due to the successful anti-terrorist operation in Syria.

"Vladimir Putin's approval rating has set a new record at 89.9 percent refreshing the previous maximum set in June 2015 when it's average monthly value was 89.1 percent," reads the release of the VTSIOM all-Russian public opinion research center circulated on Thursday.

The VTSIOM experts also wrote in their message that the high levels of approval of Putin's work must be linked with recent events in Syria, where the Russian Air Force is conducting a successful campaign against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS).

In the same poll 26 percent of Russians said the Syrian airstrikes were the most important events of the past week. Other developments that the Russian public deemed as important were various sports events and the continuing crisis in Ukraine.

Putin's approval rating first exceeded 80 percent about 18 months ago, after the accession of the Crimean Republic into the Russian Federation. Its average in March 2014 was 76.2, in April it was already 82.2 and in May it was 86.2.

In late June 2015, independent pollster the Levada Center reported that according to their data the share of Russians who are happy with Vladimir Putin's work as president had reached 89 percent. Sixty-four percent think the current policies of the Russian authorities are correct - also the highest in history. The proportion of Russians who expressed dissatisfaction with Putin's work was 10 percent.

In early October, Levada Center released the results of the poll that showed that 72 percent of Russians were positive about the airstrikes on IS positions in Syria. Fourteen percent were negative toward the operation, while the same share of people said they had no opinion on the subject.

In addition, 47 percent of respondents said that Russia should support Syrian President Bashar Assad in his fight against both Islamic State and the armed opposition. Twenty-eight percent said that it would be better for Russia to stay out of the Syrian conflict, while 8 percent said Russia should join the Western coalition and begin fighting against IS and the Syrian government.

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 #5
The Guardian
October 22, 2015
The main problem with understanding Putin? The language barrier
The difficulty of learning Russian is an obstacle to dealing with the Kremlin. There can be serious ramifications if the political will is not there to truly understand
By Angus Roxburgh
Angus Roxburgh is a writer and broadcaster. He was the BBC's correspondent in Moscow and Brussels, and also reported for the Guardian. His most recent book is The Strongman: Vladimir Putin and the Struggle for Russia. He served as an adviser to the Russian government from 2006 to 2009

It is notoriously difficult to understand Vladimir Putin. When he says: "We have no troops in Crimea", it turns out that he actually means: "I personally ordered the annexation of Crimea." When he says: "Russia is bombing Isis", he means: "Russia is bombing anyone who is trying to unseat President Assad."

The trouble is, we sometimes don't understand Russians even when they do say what they mean. The stereotype is of a sullen, unsmiling nation - gruff, rude, and a tad untrustworthy. After 40-odd years of studying them, I suspect that while some of that may be true, our perception of Russians as people is also skewed by their language, and the way they speak it.

It's not just vocabulary or odd constructions that can make Russian difficult for foreigners. I remember on early trips to Moscow as a student being taken aback by how brusque or peremptory they could sound when, for example, asking me to do something. That's because I was not yet attuned to the inflexions of their speech.

"Shut the door!" sounds incredibly rude in English, especially when written down and the intonation of the voice cannot be heard. We tend to couch our commands in a string of modal verbs and questions: "Could you shut the door, please?" "Would you mind ..." But to the Russian ear the direct imperative does not sound impolite.

Indeed, they have two different forms of the imperative to provide even greater subtlety. "Shut the door!" can be "Zakroy dver" or "Zakryvay dver". The latter apparently sounds more polite to a Russian - or more urgent, depending on how it's said.

Imagine how this can affect politics.

Many people will remember Hillary Clinton's faux pas in 2009, when she tried to break the ice in US-Russian relations by ceremoniously presenting Russia's foreign minister Sergei Lavrov with a gift - a button marked "reset". "We worked hard to get the right Russian word," boasted Clinton. Spoilsport Lavrov immediately retorted: "You got it wrong."

The Americans had written "peregruzka" instead of "perezagruzka".

But Lavrov's attempt to explain (in uncharacteristically poor English) only deepened the misunderstanding. He told Clinton: "That means 'overcharge'." To which Clinton laughed and said, "Well, we won't let you do that to us!"

Presumably she thought Lavrov meant "overcharge" in the sense of "charge too much money" - but in fact the word means "overload" and has nothing to do with money at all.

Sometimes misunderstandings - if the political will is there - make no difference, or can even help to dispel tensions.

For example, in 1995 after a summit with President Bill Clinton, Boris Yeltsin poked gentle fun at reporters who had poured cold water on hopes for a successful meeting. He said: "You predicted our meeting today would fail", which the interpreter translated (not knowing how Yeltsin was going to continue) as "You were writing that today's meeting was going to be a disaster." Yeltsin then went on: "I would say that it was you who failed." The interpreter foolishly decided to stick with the ill-chosen word "disaster" and translated Yeltsin's gentle rebuke as: "Well, now I can tell you that you're a disaster," - much stronger and more comical than Yeltsin had intended. Clinton was convulsed with laughter for a full minute, wiping tears from his eyes and hugging Yeltsin in appreciation of this witty joke - which in fact Yeltsin had not made. Yeltsin himself looked completely baffled, wondering why his wry comment had provoked such a wild reaction.

If the political will to understand isn't there - and that is the case with almost anything that Vladimir Putin utters - then it can be much more serious.

Last year, for example, there was an outcry as the world's press reported that Putin had called for talks on "statehood for the south-east regions of Ukraine". In fact he called for no such thing. Putin used the word "gosudarstvennost", which has two distinct meanings: "statehood" (meaning independence) and "the state system" (meaning the structures and organisation of a state). The clue to understanding which he meant came in the preposition that followed it: "in", not "for" or "of". Had he meant "statehood" in the sense of independence he could not have used the preposition "in". The full phrase he used, correctly translated, was "talks about the political organisation of society and state in south-east Ukraine", in other words he was talking about decentralisation, not statehood. (He also said he had just been discussing such reforms with Ukraine's President Poroshenko - and self-evidently Poroshenko had not been discussing the possibility of independence for south-east Ukraine with him.)

But why let grammar get in the way of a good story?

Sadly, the teaching of Russian is dwindling at British universities, fewer than 20 of which now offer it, and mostly only in conjunction with other subjects. One would have thought that in these days of rising tension with Russia, we need all the experts we can get.

 
#6
Business New Europe
www.bne.eu
October 22, 2015
Has Russia's economy turned the corner?
Ben Aris in Moscow

Things are pretty grim in the Russian economy, but some of the country's leading economists are wondering if Russia Inc has turned the corner some 10 months after the biggest devaluation of the ruble since the 1998 crash.

"September seems to have been the starting point of Russia's economic recovery. If these trends continue in 4Q15, 2016 could be a strong year, and we think GDP growth of 2.5% would be realistic. However, for this to be the case, the [central bank] would have to be neutral on the FX market, which would protect the economy against rapid ruble appreciation," Evgeny Gavrilenkov, chief economist at the state-owned banking giant Sberbank said in a note on October 21.

The trends he is referring to were better-than-expected industrial production and investment results published at the start of the same week by Rosstat, which "point to an upturn".

Several sectors saw growth after months of falls. Agriculture expanded 4% year on year (y/y) in September, putting the nine month tally at 0.4% y/y. Freight transportation (an excellent proxy for overall economic activity) increased 0.8% last month, but the nine-month growth was still negative (albeit improved) at -1.1%.

Formally, retail sales sank 10.4% y/y in September, in line with a 9.7% decline in real wages. High inflation (15.7% y/y) was the reason for the significant drop in both indicators. However, when adjusted for seasonality and calendar days, retail sales were flat month on month (m/m) in the second and third quarter, Sberbank reports.

"We think the official statistics may have exaggerated inflation in 3Q15. As we have noted previously, high m/m inflation in August was driven by the foreign tourism segment (thanks to ruble depreciation), though the tourism statistics indicate a drastic decline in demand for this service. This shift in demand does not seem to have been included in the CPI calculation, which elevated the inflation figure. If this is indeed the case, real wages and retail sales would have been undervalued in 3Q15," Gavrilenkov believes.

Alfa Bank's Natalia Orlova was in the middle of these positions. While she acknowledged the improvement in investment and the deterioration of retail, she believes that the economy remains "frozen", as it will have to cope with an austere budget in 2016 and state spending remains the major economic driver.

"The outlook [for Russia's economy] remains frozen due to the deterioration of lending activity in September, as well as the cabinet's decision to unveil a tight 2016 budget draft, likely pushing the real sector toward austerity," Orlova said in a strategy piece the same week as the data releases. "But the modest 3.7% y/y decline in September industrial output (3.2% y/y for 9M15) and surprisingly upbeat 5.6% y/y contraction in investment suggest that Russian producers are playing a key role in limiting the contraction in economic activity."

Banks stabilize

There was some good news elsewhere too. After being crushed by the emergency interest rate hike to 17% by the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) last December, the banking sector seems to have stabilized. Retail deposits started to rise again in the summer, providing banks with some desperately needed fresh capital.

More importantly, the CBR's assistance to the bank sector - the central bank is currently the only real source of capital thanks to sanctions - seems to have peaked in the summer. In the depths of the 2008-09 global crisis, the CBR share of bank funds rose to a maximum of 3% of total capital. At the start of last year the CBR already accounted for 11% of capital and this rose to a peak of 15% this summer. However, in the last three months the share has started to fall again, suggesting the worst is past. Both corporate and retail lending began to grow modestly over the summer for the first time in over year. "We expect the situation in the banking sector to remain stable next year, with banks gradually boosting lending as they're supporting the economic growth," CBR governor Elvira Nabiullina said on October 21.

Part of the reason for the improvement in the health of Russia's banking sector is that companies seem to be approaching the end of their deleveraging process. Cut off from the international capital markets, banks and companies have been forced to pay down debt rather than refinance it. Those obligations have been driving much of the capital flight in the last years, but over the first nine months of this year capital flight fell to $52.2bn, with $30bn of that going to pay off debt. That means Russia will probably see much less money leave than the $131bn the CBR was predicting would flee this year in January. The World Bank now expects capital outflow from Russia at $113bn in 2015, $82bn in 2016

The capital flight has been pushing down Russia's total debt. While the sovereign debt is now in single digits versus GDP, Russia's total debt (including commercial debt) dropped below 30% of GDP in October, according to Nabiullina. "Despite the challenging period and financial sanctions environment, our debt declined 30% from January 2014 to date," she said on October 21.

Investment growth

But the most encouraging signal of all is an improvement in the fixed investment numbers. Investment has been falling for 20 straight months and it doesn't matter what else the government does, without fresh investment Russia's economy is doomed to stagnation.

Fixed investment delivered a pleasant surprise in September by expanding by 4.4% m/m even if it still fell 5.6% y/y. However, even September's fall was a significant improvement over the falls in August (down 6.8%) and July (down 8.5%). "Investment has started growing in m/m terms even after adjusting for seasonal and calendar factors. We think this is linked to the decent results previously reported and greater macroeconomic stability," Gavrilenkov said.

Sberbank was not alone in feeling a bit more optimistic after chewing over the October 20 data release. Uralsib's chief economist, Olga Sterina, also ran through the numbers and concluded they were a lot rosier than the market had been expecting. However, Sterina highlighted that consumers are still very depressed, with retail trade contracting another 10.4% after a 9.1% fall in August and a 8.5% fall in July. Booming consumption is not going to be what lifts Russia out of this recession. "While one has to admit that the economic situation improved somewhat in September judging by the dynamics in investment, construction, industry and agriculture, but consumer demand is still very weak and unlikely to improve in the short term," said Sterina in a note on October 21.

The debate amongst economists is just how bad the contraction is going to be this year - and while everyone agrees there will be a contraction, there is little consensus on how severe it will be.

Uralsib estimates Russia's economy contracted 4.9% y/y in September versus 5.1% y/y in August. Russia's Economy Ministry is more optimistic, estimating that GDP dropped just 3.8% y/y in September after falling 4.6% y/y in August. And clearly this year is going to be tougher than most were thinking in January following a raft of downgrades in the last weeks.

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 #7
Forbes.com
October 22, 2015
Russian Inflation Has Mostly Leveled Off
By Mark Adomanis
[Chart here http://www.forbes.com/sites/markadomanis/2015/10/22/russian-inflation-has-mostly-leveled-off/]

Vladimir Putin's comments at a VTB-sponsored investment conference, where he optimistically suggested that the peak of the crisis was already past, have gotten a lot of people speculating about Russia's economic future. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard weighed in with a characteristically well-written (though perhaps overly bleak) assessment of Russia's retreat into fiscal profligacy and great power delusions.

Leonid Bershidsky, meanwhile, offered a convincing analysis of why a recent inflow of capital, after of leaking capital at near-record rates for most of the past year and a half Russia officially recorded a modest $5.3 billion inflow in the third quarter, wasn't actually anything to get excited about.

Both Bershidky and Pritchard are clearly right to be skeptical of Russia's long-term prospects: the past year and a half has seen some monumentally poor decision making on the part of the government, decisions which are virtually certain to have extremely large long-term costs.

Unfortunately, though, when looking at Russia's economy there has been a general tendency to conflate two very different questions. The first question concerns short-term performance, "Is the worst over? Has the crisis peaked?" The second is over Russia's long-term trajectory: "Where will Russia's economy be ten years from now?"

The answers to these questions don't necessarily have anything to do with one another. In fact, I don't only think it's possible to argue that the crisis has peaked and that Russia's long-term path is deteriorating I think it's pretty easy to do so.

Consider, for example, what's happened with inflation. During and after the oil shock, and the attendant collapse in the value of the ruble, Russian consumer prices started to skyrocket. From 2013-2014 consumer inflation jumped by a full 5%, from around 6.5% to 11.5%. Prices continued to soar through the early months of 2015.

A lot of people thought that the government had totally lost control of the situation and that a return to 1990's style hyperinflation was, if not imminent, then certainly possible.

But, since then, inflation appears to have leveled off. Since April, on average, price growth has been running slightly below where it was in 2014.

Inflation is something that Russians care a lot about, routinely ranking it in surveys as the country's single most serious problem. An out of control inflation rate would, obviously, be a source of popular discontent and, therefore, an enormous problem for the government.

But, as I hope the above chart makes clear, Russia's inflation rate isn't out of control, it's now back to about where it was before oil prices collapsed. That certainly doesn't suggest anything positive about Russia's long-term prospects, but it does suggest that the economy is not on the verge of a total implosion. Economically speaking, Russia appears to have put the worst behind it. Oil prices have stabilized, the (now freely-floating) ruble is no longer falling, and inflation is starting to come back down to trend.

But just because the worst is behind Russia doesn't mean that anything good is in front of it. "Stabilized" doesn't mean "dynamic and fast-growing." Even if the crisis is (mostly) over, there's no plausible narrative for how, absent a massive rally in energy prices, Russia's economy will start growing again. The government's been banging on a lot of rhetorical drums, but the reality is that the economy is now even more dependent on natural resource extraction and government spending than it was before the crisis.

If you're expecting Russia's economy to keel over sometime in the next few months you're going to be disappointed: as ugly and inefficient as it might look to us, Russia's economy does have sources of resilience. But, while Russia isn't imploding, nor is it making any headway in addressing its numerous and severe structural issues.

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 #8
Russian MinFin adjusts revenue for 2016 budget to 13.74 trln rubles, spending to 16.1 trln rubles

MOSCOW. Oct 22 (Interfax) - The Russian Finance Ministry has increased the parameters for the revenue and spending of the 2016 federal budget to 13.738 trillion rubles and 16.098 trillion rubles, respectively, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov told journalists.

"Revenue is 13.7385 trillion and spending is 16.0987 trillion rubles," he said.

Earlier the draft budget envisaged revenue of 13.57 trillion rubles and spending at 15.94 trillion rubles.

In other words, the deficit remains unchanged at 2.360 trillion rubles or 3% of GDP.

The increase in budget revenue is due to the decision to leave the oil export duty percentage unchanged at 42% throughout all of 2016, First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov said.

In many cases, additional revenue was assigned to spending items under some of the programs that had been cut previously.

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 #9
Moscow's Spending Cuts Undermining Russians' Health and Reducing Life Expectancy
Paul Goble

Staunton, October 21 - Guzel Ulumbekova, the head of the Russian Association of Professional Medical Societies, says that the health and life expectancy of Russians is directly related to the amount of government spending on health care and that as this amount is falling, their health is suffering and their life expectancies are falling.

Speaking to a conference yesterday on the state and prospects of Russian healthcare at the Committee of Civic Initiatives, Ulumbekova said that statistics prove that the widespread view that government spending and the health and wellbeing of the population have nothing to do with each other is wrong (polit.ru/article/2015/10/20/kgi_zdrav/).

She provided a graph which shows that up to the level of wealthy developed countries, "financing of health care exerts a direct influence on the general coefficient of mortality."  For Russia to achieve a life expectancy of 74 instead of the current 70, the government would have to increase spending on health 1.4 times and form five percent of GDP by 2020

Indeed, the medical specialist continued, "in order for the expected coefficient of mortality in Russia to remain at the level of 2013" when it was 71, "government expenditures" on health care would have to remain at the level of 2013" - or 4.3 percent of GDP. In fact, however, Moscow has cut spending so that it will spend only 3.4 percent of GDP on health.

Ulumbekova reminded her audience that it is not the case that the population is not spending enough out of pocket for medical care. Today, Russians pay for approximately 36 percent of their health care costs directly, while in the new EU countries, that figure is only 26 percent.

But even when Russia spends more on healthcare, it often "spends it ineffectively," she said, building para-natal centers rather than on facilities to cope with "one of the most important problems now - mortality among the working-age population which among men is at super high levels."

With regard to the next two years, she said that she sees three possible scenarios: stabilization, development and crisis. Stabilization would require increasing government spending on health care to the level of 2013. Development would require even more. But what is on offer constitutes a crisis in which mortality will rise and life expectancy fall.

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 #10
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
October 22, 2015
Russia's unemployment rate resilient to economic crisis
Even with the economic crisis, the unemployment level in Russia is still not as high as once predicted. However, the labor market faces a number of structural weaknesses, such as growing youth unemployment.
By Dmitry Dokuchaev
Dmitry Dokuchaev is a Russian journalist and columnist, who deals with economic issues. He has extensive experience in different Russian media, including Izvestia, Moscow News, The New Times, The Echo of Planet.

According to the Russian Ministry of Labor, as of the beginning of October, the number of officially registered unemployed workers in Russia stood at about 917,000 people - 1.3 percent less than during the previous month. By way of comparison, in the spring of 2015, this figure exceeded one million people.

At the same time, the unemployment rate, calculated according to the methodology used by the International Labor Organization (which takes into account all unemployed, not only those who have registered) stands at 5.4 percent of the economically active population of Russia - about 4.4 million people. However, this is far from the peaks reached during the previous financial crisis of 2008-2009, when the unemployment rate surpassed 8 percent.

The current economic crisis has not resulted in rising unemployment

The number of unemployed, registered in the employment offices of 74 Russian regions, has gone down. In addition, according to official statistics, today, for each registered unemployed person there are 1.5 job vacancies available. These figures are an eloquent testimony to the fact that a surge in the unemployment rate, which seriously worried some labor market experts last fall, never materialized.

The logic of the skeptics back then went something like this - the crisis in the Russian economy began with a sharp drop in oil prices, thus residents of large cities would be the most vulnerable, whose jobs in one way or another depended on oil money.

And this talk was not so much about the oil workers themselves, who still remain in demand, but about the service sectors (in the broad sense) in the major cities - where oil money has many secondary (and even tertiary) effects on total economic activity.

Of course, the Russian government has not been sitting idly by - in order to reduce tensions in the labor market, 52 billion rubles ($825 million at today's ruble-dollar exchange rate) of subsidies was allocated in 2015 for the "implementation of additional measures in the field of employment." Subsidies, in particular, were provided to the largest enterprises, including KAMAZ and AvtoVAZ, in order to keep up their levels of employment and not create social tensions.

And now, after more than a year has passed since these forecast were made, we can safely say that the skeptics have been humbled. In short, no dramatic rise in unemployment occurred. It will suffice to compare Russian figures with the situation worldwide. For example, in the U.S., at the height of the 2008-2009 crisis the unemployment rate, calculated using International Labor Organization (ILO) methodology, reached almost 10 percent, and now, when the U.S. economy growing, this rate is about at the same level as in Russia - 5.1 to 5.5 percent.

The average unemployment rate in the EU is currently just below 10 percent, and this is considered a success, because when the crisis hit, it exceeded 12 percent. The most affected by the crisis in Europe are countries such as Spain, Greece, and Italy, where this figure climbed up to 40 percent. Even now, in these countries, about one in four or one in five residents remain unemployed.

The Russian labor market has adapted to the impact of the economic crisis, however, this does not mean that no problems exist.
 
Hidden unemployment in the Russian labor market

One of the main problems of the Russian labor market is so-called "hidden unemployment," when people are sent on unpaid leave, or their working days, or shifts are reduced. According to Tatiana Maleva, director of the Institute of Social Analysis and Forecasting at RANEPA, it is this factor that makes the Russian labor market different from many in the West.

Whereas in most countries of the world, in times of economic turmoil, industries and companies downsize, first of all through staff reductions, in Russia, fearing the worsening of social tensions, all market actors behave differently. Employers prefer, instead of firing redundant workers, to lower people's wages, reduce their weekly working hours, send them on unpaid leave, and reduce the number of hours worked per day and lower production norms.

Employees, for their part, adapt themselves to this system, in view of the limited alternatives - the risks of not being able to find a new job for a long time scares people, even in large metropolitan areas. The state is also quite satisfied with this behavior of employers and workers, as it ensures the absence of a large influx of people seeking unemployment benefits, which could undermine the already depleting budget.

We should recall that at the moment, the minimum allowance of 850 rubles ($13.5 at the exchange rate of 63 rubles per dollar) is paid to citizens seeking employment for the first time or after a year's break after being fired for violation of labor discipline, and the maximum is 4,900 rubles ($77).

Yevgeny Gontmakher, deputy director of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of Russian Academy of Sciences, calls such unemployment - when people are not registered at employment centers, having non-permanent, casual work - as latent unemployment. "Now we have increased the number of nominally employed people, working part-time and receiving 10-15 thousand rubles ($158-$238) per month. That is, by external signs the people are working, but in fact they are superfluous in the labor market," the expert believes.

The problem of youth unemployment

Another serious problem of the domestic labor market lies in the fact that almost one quarter of all unemployed people in the country are to be found among young people. According to the information portal W-City.net, unemployed young people under the age of 24 in Russia are five times greater than the number of  unemployed 30-49 year olds.

Today, one in five young Russians under the age of 25 cannot find work, and problems with finding employment are noted by every third respondent from this category. Turnover among the youth, in general, is breaking all records - more than 45 percent of young people do not stay in their positions for even one year.

This trend in the Russian labor market is very similar to the situation in the EU countries, where the recession, which has stretched now for many years, has led to mass youth unemployment. At the beginning of the second quarter of this year, the unemployment rate among people under 25 years of age reached 20.9 percent in the EU, while in the Eurozone it was 22.7 percent. The largest number of unemployed youth has been recorded Greece (50.1 percent), Croatia (45.5 percent) and Italy (43.1 percent). The employment situation of young people remains the most important social and economic problem in the Old World.

Now, to a certain extent, it has come to Russia as well.

The experts we surveyed believe that this situation can be corrected by the state providing support to labor mobility. "Young people, by definition, are mobile, but without public support, young people can only rely on luck and their own entrepreneurial spirit," says Nikolai Ryzhkov, head of recruitment at the STS Group.

Nevertheless, life is forcing young people to become increasingly more active and mobile - each year, more than 100,000 young people from the regions come to Moscow in search of work and happiness. However, very few of them succeed in gaining a foothold in the city - in most cases the main problem they face is the lack of knowledge and skills.

"Today, we are noting that more young people from the Russian regions are discovering the rotational work system - they come to Moscow for a few months, earn the necessary funds, and go back home," says Ksenia Yurkova representative of a recruitment company working in the capital city. According to her, many businesses and companies in the retail and services sectors prefer to hire young people for such work, giving them jobs as cashiers, vendors, laborers and waiters.  

The rapid "rejuvenation" of the unemployed audience has also been noted by Natalia Shipilova, representative of the website portal 'There is Work for Everyone': "If just five years ago, the average age of job seekers was 34, now it is about 25-27."  

For his part, Nikolai Ryzhkov says there are three factors that can help overcome the growing unemployment among the young - these are professional "navigation" balanced with labor mobility, assistance in adapting to the workplace, and the acquisition of professional skills.

The mismatch in supply and demand

Experts say that in the Russian labor market there is a clear distortion - a mismatch in qualifications possessed by those people that have lost their jobs and the currently available vacancies. An analysis carried out of the federal bank of vacancies shows that today rapidly increasing is the demand for skilled workers and specialized personnel, while 70 percent of job seekers only have skills as office workers and specialists servicing business structures.

Thus, according to the data as of the beginning of October on the Rostrud website, there were listed only 450 vacancies for lawyers in the whole of Russia, while demand for millwrights was 100 times greater - 42,000 openings.

Thus, in the labor market, the mismatch keeps growing between the skills possessed by job seekers and the requirements for available positions. This situation is particularly difficult in the regions, where in thousands of settlements not a single vacancy is available. The Russian economy in recent years has demonstrated a growth in territorial disparities - in the Central District, unemployment is almost 50 percent lower than in the rest of Russia. For example, in the North Caucasus it is about 2.5 times higher than the average.

On the official labor market today, up to 60 percent of vacancies are seeking skilled workers. Wanted are crane operators, welders, and fitters. The regions are in dire need of doctors and educators, however, other than in the regional capitals, there are few vacancies offered in these areas.

Risks and prospects

Natalia Zubarevich, professor at Moscow State University and an expert at the Moscow office of the ILO, noted that, "At a time when onto the labor market is coming the not-so-numerous 1990s generation, and the 1950s generation is leaving, to allow an additional exit of the working population would be a big mistake." Therefore, to keep the labor market from going into a crisis, actively being discussed today is the possible raising of the retirement age in the country.

Of course, if such a decision is made, the natural question will arise: Will the competition not increase among new entrants of the younger generation and the older generation that remains at work? However, experts say that in fact, in our labor market, the different age groups seek work in different fields.

The older generation consists mostly of working hands, the lack of which employers are increasingly complaining about, While more and more young people are learning trades in the services and retail sectors. Therefore, in the near future, the market risks being faced with a paradox - a shortage of hands in certain industries with a relatively low level of average unemployment.

In general, despite the expected significant decline in the GDP, the level of unemployment in Russia in 2015 will increase by no more than 0.6 percent, and already by 2016, it will start to go down again. This is stated in the forecast of socio-economic development of the Russian Federation in 2016, which was published by the Ministry of Economic Development (MED).

According to experts at MED, a sharp rise in unemployment will prevent the working-age population from shrinking over the next few years, by nearly one million people annually.

In addition, during the crisis, labor costs for employers have decreased. The reduction in real wages just in the public sector in 2015 could reach, according to forecasts of Ministry of Economic Development, more than 12 percent, and in the economy as a whole - 10 percent. Because it is clear that during difficult times, companies will reduce the informal part of the salaries that they pay, and introduce shorter working weeks.

Tatiana Meleva believes that in the near future, even with a further decline of GDP, the unemployment rate, calculated using ILO methodology, will not exceed 6 percent - which is a very low figure by international standards.

"In fact, low unemployment rates is our tradition at all stages of the economic cycle, whether it is a period of growth, crisis, boom, or recession. During the quarter century in the market economy Russia never really knew what unemployment means," said the expert.

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 #11
www.rt.com
October 22, 2015
Analyze this: EU bans research & consulting on Russian companies

The EU is trying to tighten the screws on investment in Russia. It has now forbidden European banks from consulting investors and providing analysis of Russian firms under sanctions. This includes Sberbank, VTB and Rosneft, but excludes Gazprom and Aeroflot.

The document was issued by the European Commission a month ago, but proved to be so obscure that Russian media only managed to dig it up today.

"While the provision of research is formally different from the provision of advice, it constitutes by its nature a form of indirect advice. The analysis contained in the research document indeed helps a potential investor in taking his/her decisions," said a statement from the European Commission.

"This may concern, for example, the decision as to whether to 'hold', 'buy', or 'sell' a particular security. In sum, the provision of financial research should be seen as a form of investment service and is thus prohibited under the Regulation," the statement added.

In July and September 2014 the European Union imposed restrictions on a number of Russian banks. In particular, the sanctions affected state-owned Sberbank, VTB, Vnesheconombank, Gazprombank and Rosselkhozbank (Russian Agriculture Bank). The banks were cut off from long-term (over 30 days) international financing.

The restrictions also affected oil companies, including Rosneft, Lukoil, Gazprom Neft (Gazprom's oil subsidiary), and Transneft as well as the space and defense industry. In addition, the EU imposed restrictions against certain individuals.

However, the EU did not include other major Russian companies on the list.

The sanctions don't apply to Gazprom and its European partners - E.On, Shell, OMV and BASF/Wintershall - participating in the Nord Stream-2 project, providing Russian gas to Europe.

Russia's Aeroflot was also left off the sanctions list, after Moscow warned of retaliation by banning Western airlines from Russian airspace.

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 #12
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
October 21, 2015
How to get Russia's best technologies out of the lab and into the economy
As part of a nationwide innovation push, Russia is trying to create a favorable environment for commercializing cutting-edge academic research at universities. But that's easier said than done, say technology insiders.
By Pavel Koshkin
Pavel Koshkin is the Executive Editor of Russia Direct.

With a black 3D printer, desk-size milling machine, several models of human hands hanging on a rope and a pile of silicon swimming gloves for training, a classroom at innovationStudio Lab at the Faculty of Economics of Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU) doesn't look like a typical one. In reality, it resembles a creative laboratory, which brings together not only projects proposed by scholars but also helps them find a good balance between supply and demand, which is essential for commercializing their future products.

"The Factory of New Products," a caption reads at one of the doors of innovationStudio, which was launched by the MSU Faculty of Economics and Intel in 2007.

The innovationStudio Lab could be a necessary and effective model for Russian technology transfer centers (TTCs), which aim at establishing links between academics, industry and entrepreneurs. They also help scholars to commercialize their projects, get patents and licenses for their inventions.

In fact, innovationStudio is a sort of product realization laboratory, which helps create or find a demand of a product at an early stage of its development by testing its commercialization capability and business model, said Dr. Georgy Laptev, the head of the innovationStudio Lab.

In other words, it could be a moderator during the first stage of testing an innovative idea, product concept and business model development, a crucial first step (the so-called "fuzzy front end of innovation") for its further development and commercialization.

How technology transfer works in practice

Dr. Laptev himself knows all the ins and outs of how university technology transfer centers work, thanks to his experience at the University of Alberta, where he studied the Canadian experience.

"The idea of technology transfer centers came from the United States," he told Russia Direct. "And such centers have two major goals: first, releasing patents and licensing objects of intellectual property created by a university with government money; and, second, commercializing a new technology through licensing or creating a new company, a startup."

If the experienced managers of TTC find it more effective to commercialize through creating a company, a university can help the creators of the invention launch a startup and attract investors. Thus, TTCs could bring together three major innovation players into one chain: a university, an inventor (or scholar) and an entrepreneur.

"Finding investors who might be interested in the startup is also among the goals of technology transfer centers," Dr. Laptev clarified. "Afterward, a university releases a license for this startup and gives the green light to a new business."

Bringing together competencies, from management to logistics

However, the first stage of working of a transfer technology center is rather informal, says Dr. Laptev. When an inventor comes to a university's technology transfer center, he/she discloses the details of his/her invention and its commercialization potential. Then TTC managers, whom Dr. Laptev describes as all-round, "intellectual bigwigs" with several degrees in business and other fields, give a professional assessment of the offered invention depending on their specialization (biotech, IT, nanotechnology, etc.).

"These people are supposed to know all the ins and outs of their subject field, all the trends to give a qualified and rather informal assessments. They know what happens in their field and what scholars do," Dr. Laptev said. "In addition, they have links, direct contacts with business area to offer an inventor's idea to existing companies or launch new business (startup). In fact, they are like mediators between academics and entrepreneurs, but these mediators are high-profile, because they can translate the sophisticated ideas of academics into the language that business people understand."

Thus, TTCs deal with management and, most importantly, logistics, finding all necessary infrastructure, equipment and specialists.

Creating transfer technology centers in Russia

There have been numerous attempts to create technology transfer centers in Russian universities since 2000. By 2016, such centers are expected to appear in those universities participating in Russia's federal program "5-100," aiming at increasing the competitive capability of the nation's universities, which struggle to commercialize their ideas and establish close links with local and global businesses.

Currently, Ural Federal University cooperates with Siemens, the German multinational engineering company, and Boeing, an American multinational, one of the biggest aircraft producers. Likewise, Lobachevsky Nizhny Novgorod University has a partnership with other well-known multinationals, including Intel (the United States), Bosch (Germany) and LG (South Korea). St. Petersburg Polytechnic University's center for Industrial Engineering works with famous car manufacturers BMW (Germany) and Rolls Royce (the United Kingdom).

MSU created a company, Innopraktika (literally, "Innovation Practice"), whose mission is to establish links between the science and business, and support technology and knowledge transfer for Russian business. The partners of Innopraktika are the largest Russian companies such as Rosneft, Rosatom, Sibur, Transneft, Rostelecom and RVC.

Why technology transfer centers are vital for young innovators

Technology transfer centers could help to come up with a clear perception of the supply-and-demand requirements in a certain field and, most importantly, speed up the implementation of an idea. Here is an example, which clearly illustrates why technology transfer centers could be vital for young innovators.

A graduate of the master's degree program "Innovation Management" of the MSU Faculty of Economics, Lev Gorilovskiy, came up with an interesting solution that might be interesting for Russian energy companies like Gazprom, Mosgaz and other companies that deal with problems involving pipelines and underground telecommunications cables.

His invention is rather down-to-earth and specific. More specifically, it deals with identification of subterranean non-metal objects in the city (including special polymeric pipelines and cables) and deciphering their sophisticated underground networks.

He plans to do it through a special palm-sized detector with an individual identification number and a special device, attached to an underground object.  The detector is expected to transmit signals from underground to computers and helps to decipher subterranean networks.

According to Gorilovskiy, such efficient and fast object identification may increase efficiency and safety of energy companies and prevent them from unnecessary expenses (that result from wrong identification, a flaw that is common for regular metal detectors).

While Gorilovskiy presented his project before investors and attracted interest at some Russian energy companies, one of the major challenges he faced is the lack of necessary technological platforms and equipment within the university. This is exactly the problem, which an efficient technology transfer center could resolve. So, he had to find his own platforms at different companies to test his ideas.

"If MSU had such an on-campus technological platform and equipment, he could implement his ideas much faster and efficiently here," said Dr. Laptev.

Warnings against obsessive commercialization

Despite the fact that many Russian universities have established TTCs, there are a lot of challenges to master. Among them is the perennial lack of funding to maintain them and provide these centers with all necessary equipment and qualified personnel.

"Not only the lack of funding is the problem, but also qualified personnel as well as the perception of risk taking," adds Dr. Laptev.

In addition, in some cases Russian universities view the transfer technology centers, primarily, as the source of big profits through commercialization, according to Dr. Laptev.

"But if you look at the experience of the biggest American research universities - MIT, Stanford, Harvard, and University of California-Berkeley, you can find out that tech transfer brings relatively little money: maybe, a few percent of a university's R&D budget," Dr. Laptev said.

The other challenge is that Russian universities have problems in creating necessary innovative and inter-disciplinary infrastructure within the university, which would effectively bring together managerial, academic and technological platforms, including also a creative one.

"We do have working technology transfer centers, but I wouldn't dare to call them successful from the point of view of the global practice, and we should think globally, not locally, in this context."

And this is where the third problem of Russian universities comes from: Russian universities should be courageous enough to think and compete globally from the point of view of innovation and technologies.

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 #13
Moscow Times
October 22, 2015
Moscow State University Tops Emerging Countries Ranking Rating

Moscow State University (MSU) has topped a list of the 150 best universities of emerging countries in Europe and Central Asia by the Britain-based Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) education platform.

MSU was given an overall score of 100, achieving perfect scores in the academic reputation, employer reputation and faculty/student ratio categories, the online ranking published Wednesday shows.

The university performed less well in the international faculty category - which measures the institution's diversity level - with 53.4 points. The grade did not bring down the university's leading position because it accounted for only 2.5 percent of the overall score, according to the ranking's methodology.

Earlier rankings by QS placed MSU 108th worldwide and in third place on a ranking of universities in BRICS countries.

Another Russian educational institution - Novosibirsk State University - came in second place on Wednesday's list, with 93.7 points.

St. Petersburg State University came in fifth place.

Russia outperformed its competitors by a wide margin, with 48 Russian institutions making the top 150 universities list, QS said. Runner-up country Turkey had 16 universities included on the list.

QS said it had judged more than 500 universities in 20 emerging countries on a total of nine factors.

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 #14
Moscow Times
October 22, 2015
Russian Academia Divided Over FSB Vetting of Research Papers
By Daria Litvinova

A report this week of research papers and scientific articles becoming subject to vetting by the Federal Security Service (FSB) before publication rattled Russian academics, coming on the heels of several cases in which people have been accused of espionage and treason in connection with their professional activities.

The report published Tuesday by Nature, a respected international scientific journal, said that a biology institute at Russia's biggest university - the prestigious Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU) - had instructed its scientists to get all research manuscripts approved by the FSB before submitting them to conferences or journals.

Though the report cited a transcript of a recent meeting during which the instructions were given to professors, MSU officials denied Wednesday that FSB vetting was practiced in the university.

The denials did not convince everyone, with some academics expressing fear that the Soviet censorship system was creeping its way back into Russian science.

"Our generation remembers it too well from Soviet times, when everything went through the KGB," Vyacheslav Shuper, a professor at MSU's geography faculty that he said received similar instructions about two weeks ago, told The Moscow Times by phone Wednesday.

In the most recent case of a Russian academic or expert being accused of treason over their work, Vladimir Golubev, a scientist from the Russian Federal Nuclear Center, was arrested in February for publishing a paper about explosives after speaking on the same topic at a conference in Prague.

He was accused of treason and disclosing state secrets by the FSB, but both he and his lawyer insisted that all the information in the paper had been published numerous times before in scientific journals, and therefore couldn't be considered secret. Golubev was amnestied in May.

Official Denial

According to the transcript of a meeting held on Oct. 5 at MSU's Belozersky Institute of Physicochemical Biology and cited by Nature, scientists should seek permission to publish their work from the university's First Department - an entity that exists at all Russian universities and research institutes and that is closely associated with the FSB.

They were told to get approval "despite the obvious absurdity of the whole situation," the report said.

Andrei Fedyanin, a pro-rector at MSU, confirmed Wednesday that the meeting had taken place, but said no FSB vetting was discussed.

"The meeting ... was devoted to questions regarding improving the standard of the publications, their quality and citation rate," he told the Interfax news agency.

"Among other things, [scientists] were reminded about the regular protocol that has existed for decades at Moscow State University: Expert commissions [consisting of] our employees examine research papers to assess their scientific novelty and possibility of publication," Fedyanin said.

Neither the FSB nor the Education and Science Ministry responded to requests for comment sent by The Moscow Times on Wednesday.

Secret Instructions

Shuper from the geography faculty said that the department he works for held a meeting about two weeks ago where similar instructions were announced by the senior departmental staff.

"We were told that examination reports had been reinstated. They showed us the format for such reports and named the people on the expert commissions," he told The Moscow Times in a phone interview.

The expert commissions that examine research papers prior to their submission for publication or presentation at conferences consist of fellow scientists, said Shuper, but they are supposed to examine the manuscripts for certain elements described in secret documents.

"[They are] so secret that they can't disclose them or take them out of their office," he said. "Where do you think they get these instructions from? Who coordinates their work, who creates these standards?" the professor added.

A similar procedure existed during Soviet times, he said: Scientific works were inspected for content that could endanger the country's security. The practice was never repealed, people simply started ignoring it when the Soviet Union collapsed, he added.

More Than Paperwork

At MSU, the practice has been reinstated selectively, according to Shuper: For example, there is no such requirement in the mechanics and mathematics faculty, or at MSU's Institute of Geography, a research center where Shuper also works that is separate from the geography faculty.

"But mechanics and mathematics are also important in terms of the country's security and defense potential - no less than geography," he said. "And if geography is so important, why is the Institute of Geography excepted [from the procedure]?" Shuper added.

MSU is not the only center of higher education dealing with the examination reports. Shuper said he had received a letter from the Urals, from a person who asked for their name and the name of their institution to be withheld, fearing retribution.

"At his university, scientists were forced to translate manuscripts written in English back into Russian for examining. But the experts are their fellow professors, and they know English very well," so the Russian version was likely prepared for someone else, Shuper suggested.

According to him, the consequences of this practice could be grave.

"It is a way of blocking whatever information you don't want to get out from doing so," said Shuper.

People who remember Soviet times weren't enthusiastic about bringing back examination reports, he added, but the younger scientists weren't too afraid of it, considering it was just additional paperwork.

"In the beginning it will be just additional paperwork, but it's much more than that," Shuper told The Moscow Times.

FSB or Accounts?

Gennady Sardanashvili, a professor at the physics faculty of MSU, told The Moscow Times he hadn't heard anything about mandatory examination reports, either from his colleagues or the university administration.

"No one has talked about it to me personally. I've never heard about it from my colleagues or friends, or from the administration - just from that article [in Nature]," he told The Moscow Times on Wednesday.

Yevgeny Taranov, a Ph.D. student and researcher at the Vinogradsky Institute of Microbiology at the Russian Academy of Sciences, said his institute has always had a First Department, but it was unclear whether it was connected to the FSB.

"All I heard was our lab head saying that soon we would have to return to approving manuscripts before sending them off to international science journals, but that's it," he told The Moscow Times in written comments.

Oleg Gusev, a professor at Kazan Federal University (KFU) in Russia's republic of Tatarstan, told The Moscow Times that KFU scientists have to get approval for their manuscripts, but he didn't know the details of the procedure, and said it could be easily ignored.

Gusev echoed Taranov's doubts about the First Department being controlled by the FSB. "It might be some poor girl from the accounts department who checks the papers for information that could formally be considered secret, in order to save us from the FSB," by stopping scholars from unintentionally disclosing classified information, he said.
--
When the First Department Doesn't Help

In 2010, two St. Petersburg scientists - Svyatoslav Bobyshev and Yevgeny Afanasyev, both aged 57 at the time - were arrested on espionage charges.

They worked at the Baltic State Technical University and specialized in gas dynamics, the study of the motion of gases and its effects. They were accused of passing sensitive information that could damage Russia's national security to unidentified Chinese nationals.

Baltic State Technical University had a cooperation agreement with China's Harbin Engineering University, which Bobyshev and Afanasyev had visited at least six times to give lectures together.

Like every Russian university - in theory, at least - the Baltic University had staff who scrutinized articles written by professors and the texts of their lectures for foreign conferences before they were published or presented in public.

The university's former rector, Yury Savelyev, expressed doubt about the treason charges in an interview with Ogonyok newspaper at the time, saying that lectures undergo triple checks: first by the department chairman, then by the university's security department, and finally by a special commission on export controls.

"Moreover, every professor goes through a special instructions procedure before going abroad," Savelyev was cited as saying.

Yury Kruglov, the department chairman, told Ogonyok that the professors' research did not involve any information that justified their arrest.

Nevertheless, in 2012 the scientists were convicted to 12 years and 12 1/2 years, respectively, in maximum security prisons.

Afanasyev died of a heart attack in prison in April this year.

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 #15
www.opendemocracy.net
October 22, 2015
Russia's secret treason investigations
In Russia, the number of state treason cases is rising. Secret service tactics mean we know less and less about who is under investigation.
By Gleb Belichenko
Gleb Belichenko is a journalist and former member of the activist group Team 29, which works to further freedom of information in Russia.

Statistics for the past few years show that, in Russia, four to six people a year are put on trial for state treason. In 2014, this number rose sharply: 15 people were sent to prison colony. But by the end of 2014, this record might be broken again. The number of espionage cases seems to suggest that Russia is in the throes of 'spymania'. But given these cases are all being investigated and processed in secret, the information we have is limited.

In November 2012, Vladimir Putin signed a document introducing changes to three articles of the Criminal Code. Article 275 (Treason) was given an extended description, including the formula 'variously aiding another state in activities aimed against the security of the Russian Federation', which expanded the definition of treason. The new version of Article 283 (Revealing a state secret) makes it possible to initiate proceedings against an individual who does not have access to state secrets but who may-in one way or another-discover and reveal them.

A well-oiled scheme

Amidst recent cases of 'spymania', the story of Svetlana Davydova, the mother of seven from a town near Smolensk, stands apart. In January 2015, Davydova was arrested on charges of treason following a telephone call to the Ukrainian embassy in Moscow: she overheard an army officer discussing troop movements on the bus, and reported this information to the embassy.

The investigation and trial proceedings earlier this year proceeded according to clearly developed plan. The security services' 'misfire' in this case-the charges were dropped in March-revealed that a number of people charged with treason are in investigative detention, or are already serving time, without cause.

The details of Davydova's case are well-known, so we can move to the more revealing parts of this case. First, FSB officers needed almost a year to identify the grounds on which they could present charges to Davydova. Second, immediately after Davydova was arrested in January 2015, several media outlets reported that she had informed the Ukrainian consulate about the deployment of Russian soldiers not to the Donbas, but to a Russian region bordering Ukraine.

Nearly a year after that fatal telephone call, FSB officers arrived at Davydova's home. They detained her, and searched her house. Shortly after, Davydova, together with her state-appointed attorney, was interrogated for the first time by an investigator, and then she was placed under arrest for a further two months. Another interrogation follows, during which Davydova confessed to all the charges presented. Andrei Stebenev, the state attorney, later stated that he would not appeal against the two-month arrest order, as further press attention might affect the accused's children.

The cornerstone of this case, however, turned out to be the analysis of how 'sensitive' the information Davydova supposedly reported was.

'In the beginning, specialists studied the information for hints as to how troops were moving from one region of Russia to another [emphasis added],' says Ivan Pavlov, Davydova's attorney and leader of Team 29, an organisation that has researched state secrets in Russia for more than a decade. 'This information was recognised as a state secret. But then independent attorneys, who didn't distort the evidence, got involved. It turned out that the telephone conversation concerned the deployment of troops onto Ukrainian territory [emphasis added]. This information was declared unreliable.'

The Davydova case was not fated to reach the courts-public outrage over the case, legal work, and the shocking revelations concerning Davydova's living conditions inside the investigative detention facility made sure of this. A young mother of seven forced to express her breast milk in prison to avoid lactostasis-this is a certain existential limit that even the FSB can't cross. Forensic analysis showed the FSB's evidence to be unreliable. The investigator approved the attorneys' appeal to close the case, and Andrei Stebenev, Davydova's state attorney, was disbarred.

The investigators at the FSB spent nearly a year collecting evidence, analysing forensic reports and selecting testimony to make sure Davydova didn't have a chance. Somewhere, somehow, they made a mistake. Ivan Pavlov believes the fact that the charges were dropped is the result of a political decision. It remains unclear as to why Davydova's conversation with the Ukrainian consulate was tampered with. We can only assume that interference from higher up saved Svetlana from prison. As the following cases show, it is very difficult to help someone accused of treason in Russia without 'administrative interference'.

Best laid plans

According to Team 29, the security services usually work to a well-oiled plan when it comes to espionage cases. Aside from the role of the state attorney (who doesn't always fulfill his duties to the best of his or her ability), we also need to pay attention to the number of signatures that bind the defendant to certain obligations.

Neither the Interior Ministry, nor the Investigative Committee have developed the practice of binding signatures as the FSB. Given that public resonance plays such an important role here, a signature obliging the signatory to keep details of the case to themselves deprives the defence of much need publicity. Meanwhile, the investigation and trial take place behind closed doors. Without publicity, chances of a just outcome drop to zero.

The case of Sergei Minakov, a sailor from Crimea, took a different turn. In January 2015, Minakov was accused of espionage, charged and arrested. He spent several months in the FSB's Lefortovo investigation prison, and when Team 29 found out about the existence of this case, our legal personnel took the case on. They then informed the investigator of their involvement-by coincidence, the same investigator who had worked on the Davydova case.

Three days later, the Minakov case was closed, he'd left for his native Feodosiya on the Crimean coast, and didn't respond to our calls much after. We'll probably never know the real details of his case.

Why did this happen? Well, there's a few suggestions. First, independent legal counsel disturbed the FSB's usual scheme. Second, most espionage cases are ungrounded. There's at least three cases that spring to mind: Gennady Kravtsov, former military intelligence officer, Evgeny Petrin, ex-employee of the Russian Orthodox Church, and Yuri Soloshenko, a Ukrainian citizen and former director of an arms factory in Poltava.

The first two, Kravtsov and Petrin, were accused of treason, the last, Soloshenko - espionage. Interestingly enough, prior to Team 29 taking an interest, Andrei Stebenev represented Petrin and Kravtsov-the same Stebenev who didn't appeal against the arrest of Svetlana Davydova. It may just be a coincidence, but Kravtsov, just like Davydova, confessed immediately during his interrogation in the presence of Stebenev. Kravtsov, accused of committing state treachery by sending his CV to a Swiss company, later refuted this testimony.

Kravtsov worked as a radio engineer for 15 years in Russian military intelligence (GRU) before leaving in 2005. In 2010, he decided that his obligations to secrecy had finished, and went looking for employment in Switzerland. It's hard to call this intention a serious one, or even one properly thought through-it was an emotional decision. Kravtsov was under severe stress: he couldn't adapt to civilian life or civilian work. He wrote a short resume, translated it with Google and sent it off to Switzerland. Kravtsov was refused employment: the company only takes Swiss citizens.

This would hardly be grounds for a treason investigation, if not for another letter sent by the former radio engineer-this time to Belarus. Kravtsov found out that, at the Mozhaisky Military Space Academy in Saint Petersburg, there's quite a few Belarusian citizens studying radio engineering. And so, Kravtsov sent a letter to the Belarusian Ministry of Defence, expressing hope that his skills might be of use.

Kravtsov's case is a secret one, and all the information we have comes courtesy of Alla, Kravtsov's wife. We can assume that Kravtsov's letter to Belarus is what attracted the FSB. They didn't detain Kravtsov straight away, only taking his computer (illegally; there was no court order). The FSB investigated this laptop for roughly a year, and only then, following several analyses and selection of witness testimony, Kravtsov was arrested in 2014.

Team 29 became involved in this case in spring 2015, by which time Kravtsov had spent almost a year in Lefortovo. The defence made more than 20 appeals against this case, including independent forensic analysis. All of these were declined.

For Pavlov, it was easier to work these cases 10 or 15 years ago. 'The rights of the attorney have become very limited, as have the rights of the accused. My last case of state treason came to an end in 2003. Comparing then with now, it's like day and night.'

Pavlov recalls the case of Grigory Pasko, the journalist and former navy officer who was accused of state treason in the late 1990s after reporting that the Russian navy was dumping nuclear waste in the Sea of Japan. Thanks to expert testimony, the judge declared the majority of the charges against Pasko irrelevant. But in Kravtsov's case, expert testimony has not been permitted at the pre-trial investigation, nor at the actual trial itself. In September 2015, Kravtsov was sentenced to 14 years. The defence is now preparing its appeal.

'There's no punishment without crime'

The Petrin and Soloshenko cases are yet to get to trial, but, without going into details, there's a few revealing moments here. First, Petrin's legal team were denied access to the accused's case file for six months. Second, in both cases, Petrin and Soloshenko could not get access to their legal counsel for long period of time. Ivan Pavlov and Evgeny Smirnov are yet to gain access to Soloshenko. Investigator Mikryukov has written to Pavlov and Smirnov to inform them of Soloshenko's written refusal of their services-this is another violation of procedure by the investigators, as these documents should be completed in the presence of legal counsel.

Instead, Soloshenko is represented by state-appointed attorney Sergei Kisel. According to Ivan Pavlov, the practice of not allowing independent legal advisers access to cases where state secrets are involved goes back to the 1990s, but Russia's Constitutional Court later put an end to it. Now there is reason to believe that this practice is back.

Pavlov believes that the main reason behind the jump in state treason cases is the conflict in south-eastern Ukraine, the rise of militaristic views in Russia and the search for internal enemies. We can assume that, in connection with the current situation, the quota for spy cases has been quietly raised. 'The "stick system" [doctoring cases and statistics to fit department quotas] has always existed: everyone's career, from prison officers to judges, without even mentioning the investigators, depends on the number of cases investigated.'

It seems Russian citizens still follow the traditional moral of 'there's no punishment without a crime'. In March of this year, 48% of people surveyed by VTsIOM , a public survey organization, declared that there were grounds to send Svetlana Davydova to a prison colony. These same people probably believe that Russia should be living under wartime regulations.

Today, an accusation of espionage or state treason is practically a guilty sentence. Until society's attitudes to such cases become more cautious, finding justice in the courts will remain difficult.

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 #16
Sputnik
October 22, 2015
Putin Orders Changes in Russia's National Security Strategy

The amended version of Russia's National Security Strategy will prevent the country from being closed off from the rest of the world and envisages a proactive foreign policy.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has decided to make changes in the country's National Security Strategy, the Russian Security Council's press service announced Thursday.

"The Russian president has decided to make changes in the National Security Strategy to provide for the succession of state policy in regard to national security, as well as the system of national interests and strategic national priorities," the press service said.

The amended version of Russia's National Security Strategy will prevent the country from being closed off from the rest of the world and envisages a proactive foreign policy, the Security Council said.

Last May, Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev said the country's National Security Strategy and Information Security Doctrine would be modified to reflect recent trends in the geopolitical situation. "In order to bring the fundamental principles of Russia's national security up to date, we have started work on the revision of key documents on strategic planning - the national security strategy until 2020 and the doctrine on information security," he said.

The amended version of the National Security Strategy should be returned to Putin for review by the end of 2015.

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 #17
The Arab Source
www.almasdarnews.com
October 21, 2015
U.S. Accuses Russia of Bombing the Moderate Rebels in Homs While They Behead Syrian Soldiers
By Leith Fadel
[Photos here http://www.almasdarnews.com/article/u-s-accuses-russia-of-bombing-the-moderate-rebels-in-homs-while-they-behead-syrian-soldiers/]

Photos have surfaced from the Rastan and Al-Houla Plains of northern Homs that contain graphic footage of moderate rebels from the Free Syrian Army (FSA) hoisting the severed heads of several deceased soldiers from the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and civilian-led "National Defense Forces" (NDF).

The pictures show the U.S. backed moderate rebel fighters of the Free Syrian Army posing with severed heads that they mutilated after a firefight in the Homs Governorate's northern countryside; this area is the target of the Syrian Arab Army's latest large-scale offensive inside the country.

Two weeks ago, the Russian Federation was accused of specifically targeting the moderate rebel fighters supported by the United States Government and their allies from the United Kingdom, France, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar; however, the Russian Government asserted that these targeted militants were not "moderates" at all, but rather, Islamists affiliated with the notorious terrorist organization "Al-Qaeda."

The Russian Federation has maintained that they are specifically targeting terrorist groups inside Syria and that they have no intentions of attacking groups that are combatting the likes of Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS).

It appears that these moderate rebels inside the Homs Governorate are not "moderate" at all; especially, with their heinous crimes they videotape and post with sectarian commentary that is directed at the Syrian Alawi (minority sect of Islam) and Shia Muslims.

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 #18
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
October 21, 2015
Assad in Moscow: A sign of nearing talks on Syria's future
The sudden appearance of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad in Moscow is a likely sign that Russia is attempting to work out what a post-Assad Syria would look like.
By Yury Barmin
Yury Barmin is a strategic risk consultant based in Moscow. He holds an MPhil Degree in International Relations from the University of Cambridge. His interests include Russian foreign policy and the politics of the Gulf. Follow him on Twitter at @yurybarmin.

In a surprising turn of events, on Oct. 21 Russian media reported that Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad had visited Moscow just a day earlier. His trip to Moscow is significant in that it was his first foreign travel arrangement since 2011, when the Arab Spring protests broke out in Syria. The destination of the visit is also quite telling since the Syrian President chose to fly to Moscow rather than Tehran, arguably his major foreign backer.

The high-profile meeting attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu evokes two major questions: Why did Russia keep the visit in secret and what was discussed during the meeting?

The first question is relatively easy to answer. One of the reasons why Bashar Al Assad has not left Syria since 2011 is because there has been no guarantee that there would not be a coup during his absence. There has been a lot of speculation about a brewing coup in Damascus and how Assad's top military officials may abandon him. Four years into the civil war Assad's position as the president of Syria is holding by a thread not only as a result of rebel pressure but also due to instability within his own ranks as well.

Since the start of Russian military build-up in Syria, plane spotters have been reporting diligently on all flights to and from Syria, paying special attention to routes that connect this country with Russia. Yet even they did not notice any suspicious flights simply because the planes that belong to the Russian Ministry of Defense and the Russian Ministry of Emergencies land at Syrian airports almost daily. It was one of these planes that Assad used to sneak out of the country unnoticed.

One can only speculate what would have happened if rebel groups had known that the Syrian president was not in Damascus on Oct. 20, but it is almost certain that they would have tried to launch an offensive to take over the country's capital. In this regard it is probably not a coincidence that Assad's wife Asma was not in Damascus herself on that day. She was visiting the Syrian Arab Army's soldiers in Jableh, a town that is only a few miles away from the Russian air base in Latakia.

What the real purpose of the Syrian president's visit to Moscow was is a more complex and intriguing question. The Russian side was the one who initiated this meeting, which follows from the Kremlin's statements. Assad's secretive visit leaves no doubts that this was probably the most important of the hundreds of meetings that the two countries' officials of different levels have had in the last four years. The last time Assad came to Moscow was over ten years ago.

There are possibly two things that Putin and the Syrian president could have discussed in Moscow. First, it is the interim results of the Russian aerial campaign in Syria. So far these results have been modest and the visit may be an indication that Damascus wants a stronger Russian presence in the country and the deployment of additional jets as well as possibly ground troops.

Second, and this is more likely, the much discussed political transition period in Syria may have been the subject of talks.

In the eyes of the West and Gulf monarchies Assad's rule remains the main stumbling block that makes political negotiations on Syria impossible. This position has noticeably softened in Washington and in some European countries, yet Saudi Arabia is still adamant. Russian officials and the Syrian president himself have said on many occasions that Assad is ready to step down if that is the will of the Syrian people. Moscow is making attempts to secure a transitional period in Syria where Assad would still be part of the equation, albeit with limited powers.

Assad's risky trip to Moscow may indicate that a certain framework agreement on Syria has been reached and his personal consent is needed. This may be the case especially taking into account the fact that following the visit, Putin held talks on the phone with the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz al Saud, the two biggest enemies of the Syrian president, possibly laying out his Syria plan to them.

The question remains, however, why publicize the meeting with Assad at all, considering that the level of initial secrecy was akin to that of a special military operation. By truly breaking the news of Assad, who became a recluse a long time ago, being welcomed in Moscow by Putin sent a clear signal to the West and the Gulf that Syria's internationally recognized president cannot be gotten rid of in the same manner as in Libya.

The Russian president agrees in principle that Assad should leave the stage, yet Putin wants Assad to have guarantees and will not allow him to be mistreated by those who want him out of office.

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 #19
AP
October 21, 2015
Shift possible after Assad-Putin meeting
Diplomatic push may be under way to end 4-year strife

Moscow-Bashar Assad's surprise meeting with Vladimir Putin could signal that Russia ultimately seeks a political settlement after weeks of heavy airstrikes in Syria. But the terms of such an arrangement are uncertain, and questions remain about whether Moscow will seek the departure of its longtime ally or try for a power-sharing agreement.

In a further sign that a diplomatic push might be under way to end the crisis, Russia announced Wednesday that Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry had agreed to meet Friday in Vienna with their counterparts from Saudi Arabia and Turkey - both firm Assad critics.

The Syrian president's visit to Moscow, his first known trip abroad since war broke out in 2011, was announced on Wednesday, the morning after it happened, and raised intense speculation about the two leaders' motives - and a strong response from Washington.

"We view the red-carpet welcome for Assad, who has used chemical weapons against his own people, at odds with the stated goal by the Russians for a political transition in Syria," said White House spokesman Eric Schultz.

If nothing else, it underscored how emboldened the embattled Syrian leader has become in the wake of the Russian airstrikes that began Sept. 30 and Iran's deployment of hundreds of ground forces to fight alongside Syrian government troops.

Russia says it is targeting militants, especially those of the extremist Islamic State group. But critics, including the U.S., say Moscow's military intervention props up Assad and is likely to fan the violence.

The oblique references Wednesday by both leaders to their meeting did little to shed light on their ultimate strategy.

In a statement, Putin said that along with fighting militants, Moscow believes that "a long-term settlement can only be achieved as part of a political process with the participation of all political forces, ethnic and religious groups."

In separate comments posted on the Syrian presidency's official Facebook page, Assad said the Russian military operation in Syria had helped to halt the spread of terrorism and that a political solution could only come after that threat was addressed.

"Terrorism which we see spreading today could have been more widespread and more harmful if it weren't for your decisions and steps," Assad told Putin in the remarks carried by Arab media. The threat of terrorism, he said, obstructs any political solution to the crisis.

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 #20
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
October 22, 2015
Assad in Moscow and More Secure Than Ever Since Start of War
US insistence Assad must relinquish power before any negotiations can start has hardened Russian support for him
By Alexander Mercouris

President Assad's visit to Moscow is his first publicly announced foreign trip since the start of the Syrian crisis in 2011.

It is a sign of the extent to which Moscow's attitudes over the course of that crisis have changed.

Moscow has always opposed the US's regime change agenda in Syria.  However in 2011 Moscow was also publicly critical of President Assad, and put pressure on him to negotiate with his opponents.

To those who say that this stance reflected the fact that in 2011 Dmitry Medvedev was Russia's President, I would point out that it continued unchanged in 2012 after Putin's election.

Today Moscow still calls on President Assad to negotiate with his opponents - something he has always said he is prepared to do - but the criticism of him in Moscow has stopped. Today Moscow speaks of him instead as the "heroic leader" of his country, defending Syria from terrorism.

What this demonstrates is the extent to which due to their uncompromising - even fanatical - insistence that Assad must go before any negotiations can begin, the US and the Syrian opposition have simply ended up simply firming up Russian support for him.

The result is that where in 2012 the Russians would have supported a negotiated and managed transition to a post-Assad government, they are now straightforwardly backing Assad. Moreover they are doing so with bombs and aircraft.  

With the Iranians also backing Assad, it is now very difficult to see how he can be overthrown. The very fact that he was prepared to leave Damascus to go to Moscow is a sign of how secure he has now become.

US policy has therefore achieved the diametric opposite of its objective.  

This is a poor result by any standard, and shows how a game played for all or nothing runs the risk of ending up with nothing.

There continues to be much confusion about what Russia's objectives in Syria are.

This is strange because Putin has spelled them out quite clearly.  They are the destruction of the Islamic State and the uprooting of violent jihadism from Syria.  

Nothing has so far happened to make the Russians change that objective. As has been said by many, the Russian military operation in Syria is in Russian terms very small, even if in Syrian terms it is decisive.  The Russians can easily afford to keep it going indefinitely, until their objective is achieved, and nothing has so far happened that would cause them not to do so.

The Russians have ruled out sending a ground force. The fact that they have however committed themselves to achieving their objective with the force they have deployed shows that they think that the force is adequate and that their objective is achievable. Reports the Syrian army is successfully advancing around Aleppo - almost certainly with Iranian help - suggests they are right.

Recent steps by the Iraqi parliament to discuss a request to Russia for air support, may mean that the Russian air force will soon be action in Iraq as well. Should that happen then the Islamic State will be facing a Russian air campaign across the whole extent of its territory.

It should go without saying that the Russians can more than match any escalation the US and its allies engage in on the ground - for example by supplying the rebels with anti tank or anti aircraft missiles.

Given that this is so, the West needs to start preparing itself for the likely probability the rebel movement will be completely defeated leaving President Assad once more in full control of all of Syria's territory.

If that happens it will be, as I said, because of the US's refusal to negotiate with him when it had the chance.

Since the Russians are now directly engaged in Syria it is they who will now - together with the Iranians - be drawing up the military and diplomatic plans from now on.  

It is striking that the pictures of Putin's meeting with President Assad show both Foreign Minister Lavrov and Defence Minister Shoigu present, but no Syrian officials other than Assad himself present.

That explains the purpose of the meeting.

It shows the Russian leadership's collective support for President Assad.

It also gives the Russian leadership an opportunity to meet with - and assess - President Assad face-to-face.

Lastly, it enables the Russian leadership to tell Assad in person what they - and he - are going to do. The fact that both Lavrov and Shoigu are there confirms the Russians are explaining to Assad both the diplomatic and the military strategy.  

It is likely that some sort of peace initiative involving a further outreach to the US and the Syrian opposition - with a further offer of talks - is in the works and will be made over the next few days. If so it will be interesting to see what its terms are and how the US responds.

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 #21
The Real News Network
http://therealnews.com
October 21, 2015
Does Russia-U.S. Disagreement Over Assad Benefit ISIS?
Sergei M. Plekhanov, Associate Professor of Political Science at York University, says regional solutions are only possible if Russia and the United States stop pursuing their respective Middle East interests as a zero-sum game

SHARMINI PERIES, EXEC. PRODUCER, TRNN: Welcome to the Real News Network. I'm Sharmini Peries coming to you from Baltimore.

Russia and the U.S. have come to an agreement that they say will prevent incidents between one another during their respective bombing campaigns in Syria, an understanding which they are claiming does not amount to strategic coordination. Let's have a look at what Pentagon spokesperson Peter Cook had to say about the agreement and what it won't be doing.

PETER COOK: The MOU does not establish zones of cooperation, intelligence sharing, or any sharing of target information in Syria. The discussions through which this MOU was developed do not constitute U.S. cooperation or support for Russia's policy or actions in Syria. In fact, far from it, we continue to believe that Russia's strategy in Syria is counterproductive and their support for the Assad regime will only make Syria's civil war worse.

PERIES: The news comes on the same day that the U.S. joint chief of staff arrived in Iraq to assess the campaign and their fight against the IS there. And this is days after reports have come out that more U.S.-made weapons are flooding into Syria from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar to resupply rebels opposed to Assad.

Now joining me to discuss these developments is Sergei M Plekhanov. He's an associate professor of political science at York University and a former deputy director of the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies in Russia. Sergei, thank you so much for joining us today.

SERGEI PLEKHANOV: Thank you.

PERIES: So give us an assessment of why this particular memorandum was required and what you make of the agreement.

PLEKHANOV: Well, there was an acute, there is an acute practical need to avoid possibility of direct clashes between Russian air force and U.S. air force. It's a small place. They fighter planes fly very fast. And we've seen a number of incidences in recent weeks when there were dangerous situations. You know, alleged incursions by Russian planes into the Turkish airspace. A drone was downed a couple of days ago. It's not clear who it belongs to but it was definitely made in Russia. So both Russia and the United States operate their air forces in the air space above the battleground in Syria. And since both sides have an interest in defeating ISIS, even though they also have opposite goals in other respects, they need to have at least a minimum of coordination, at least communication, in order to be able to avoid inadvertent direct clashes.

So from the military standpoint it's a good thing, because it makes the situation somewhat less dangerous. I must say that it was the Russians who were actually advocating some forms of coordination and cooperation between the militaries of [the other] side. So finally some agreement has been reached, but it's interesting that the Pentagon is emphasizing how it is actually not cooperating with the Russians even though in fact [they're taking] first step to cooperate with them. I know if ISIS had [inaud.] they must be [bracing] and [inaud.], saying oh, we thought the Russians and the Americans were joining forces against us. Now it turns out they're not, they're just minimizing the possibilities of war between them.

PERIES: Now, you may have seen a Washington Post article last week that was alleging that these heavily equipped tanks that the United States was providing to the rebels on the ground in Syria was being taken out by the Russian bombs. What is that dispute all about, and why were the Russians taking out these tanks?

PLEKHANOV: First of all, what's really happening on the ground and what we read about it in the media may be two different realities. So it's very difficult to comment on reports about events on the ground, given the fact that there is a situation where information warfare is just as acute as the real warfare. But it seems that the Russians are on the one hand trying to defeat ISIS, and being rather effective. They've actually, their planes have flown something like 300 [sorties], maybe more, hitting area targets belonging to ISIS, but also targets belonging to other jihadist groups like Jabhat al-Nusra, which is competing with ISIS, which are primarily about overthrowing the Assad regime.

Now, the United States also has an interest, and in fact has been trying to accomplish the goal of removing Assad from power and replacing him, replace him with some other regime. And expected to be pro-American. But problem with that has been that every time the Americans tried to conjure up, invoke, or support some kind of so-called moderate opposition to ISIS--Assad, it turns out that the arms tend to get into the hands of another radical Islamist group.

And so the real fighting is done not by the shadowy moderate groups, but the jihadists, radical jihadists. That's how ISIS became as powerful as it was, and that's how it managed to gain so much territory, taking advantage of the United States's continued policy to overthrow the Assad regime.

So the Russians got involved because the Assad regime, in fact they have a kind of an alliance relationship, or at least a quiet relationship with the Assad regime. The Assad regime asked Russia for assistance. The Syrian government, [inaud.] outside regime, that's the Syrian government, which is recognized by other countries and which has a legitimate status in the country no matter what the nature of that regime is.

So Syria asked Russia for military assistance. The Russians have rendered that assistance by deploying the air force there. And they're doing that because their main goal is to prevent the formation of a [base] for radical Islamist, jihadist activity, which is now organized primarily under the rubric of ISIS, which would be threatening the southern areas of Russia as well as central Asian states. [Inaud.] Afghanistan, by the way, where ISIS now has a base, too.

So as far as fighting ISIS is concerned, Russia and the United States have a common interest. Problem is that because their interest with regard to the Assad regime are not the same. In fact, they are at odds with each other. They cannot cooperate effectively enough. So that creates a situation which only helps ISIS.

PERIES: Now, if the objective of the Russians is really to fight ISIS and other rebel forces on the ground that is threatening the geopolitical stability of the world at this moment, if that's the real objective here then why aren't they in greater cooperation, like even after signing this agreement, both sides issued statements on what it does not contain. Not, you know, addressing what is necessary at this point, a real collaboration in terms of bringing about a solution on the ground, a regional solution to the issue of Syria.

PLEKHANOV: Well, the main bone of contention is of course the fate of the Assad regime. Putin offered Americans a deal, let's have, let's construct an anti-ISIS coalition in the Middle East. So a broad-based coalition which includes both Russia's friends and America's friends in the Middle East, and let's defeat ISIS. And in the meantime let's work on the political transition in Syria. Russians are not beholden to the Assad regime, but currently that's the regime that is fighting the Islamists and ISIS [first place], and so helping the Assad regime is absolutely necessary in order to defeat [inaud.]. Military actions in Syria hitting both groups which the United States does not regard as bad guys. In fact, some of them might be pro-American good guys.

From the point of view of the Syrian government and the Russians they are bad guys. So there is a big disagreement as to who to hit and who not to hit.

PERIES: Now, if you were to take into consideration the real safety and security of the Syrian people, and you want to bring about a solution to the refugee and the migrant crisis in Syria, what's wrong with at least temporarily removing the Assad factor in order to bring about some common stability on the ground?

PLEKHANOV: You remove the only government that exists in order to provide the conditions for stability? We've seen it in Libya, we've seen it in other places. This government still has control of a large part of the country. By the way, when they show you on the map that half of the territory or even more is under the control of ISIS, shouldn't forget that 90 percent of that territory is desert. Whereas the majority of the populated areas of Syria are under the control of the government in Damascus. And it has an army, and that government also has recently been more successful in pushing back its opponents, and ISIS in the first place.

So it is totally unrealistic to expect that if we have a deal now where we tell [inaud.] have to go. That means [inaud.] will have to go, then security forces will have to go. ISIS will be applauding, because yeah, sure, yeah, give us the vacuum. We'll just move in. And then there'll be an even bigger flow of refugees now, from the remainder of Syria. And [inaud.] no, no, you need the proper government in its fight against the most dangerous force that has emerged out of the chaos of the Middle East over the past years. And for that, and that does not make you beholden to this regime, because it's obvious to anyone that there will have to be a lot of political change in Syria. Maybe some kind of federation will be created in order to accommodate various diverse groups over the Syrian population. Some kind of a regional [pact] will be concluded between the countries which are now at odds with each other.

But all that can only be done after this malignant tumor has been removed. The tumor is called ISIS, or ISIL.

PERIES: Now, some legitimate social movements and organizations in Syria are alleging that Assad is responsible for the death of over 200,000 people. Now, what is Russia doing with that information? Are they ignoring it?

PLEKHANOV: First of all this is an allegation, not information. Again, this is information warfare. It could be more, it could be less. This government has been--this is a dictatorship in Syria. Right. Does it mean that every dictatorship that exists, even though it is involved in this kind of a civil war, that it must be overthrown because it's a dictatorship? I don't think that this kind of blind approach to any kind of a civil war or domestic conflict that exists, especially in a country in the Middle East, should evoke automatic responses, let's go and overthrow them. We've seen the [inaud.] the West has done where it sends, 2003, with disastrous results. George Bush had not overthrown the Saddam Hussein regime. And that was a bad regime, which was using chemical weapons, terrorizing its opponents, and invading Iran, by the way, with an American backing.

So that was a bad regime, but--okay, we overthrew it. Do we have a flourishing democracy in Iraq? Northern Iraq has turned into a massive [place] for a new form and more dangerous form of radical jihadis. And we've seen the same in Libya. And we are now seeing the same in Syria. And we're not learning any lessons. I mean, are we pursuing human rights agenda in a situation which totally does not fit that agenda?

PERIES: And as, Sergei, your Russian colleagues, you have many over the years that you've been studying Russian foreign policy with, what are they saying about a potential solution for the conflict in Syria?

PLEKHANOV: The solution that there is, a sequence, it all depends on where one stands politically. And in Russia you have a political [inaud.]. And there are bitter opponents of the Putin regime who are now criticizing him for getting involved in Syria. There is a possibility of [inaud.]. The Russian public opinion is definitely not in favor of Russia's involvement in the Syrian conflict. They say, why should we be there? Why should we care? And so on.

So there are critics of the government. There are some think tank people who are warning against dangers of involvement in Syria. It is a risky game for the Russian government. But those who support the policy of the Russian government, what they are saying is the top priority is defeating ISIS. And in fact, there is a wide area of common interest in both, between Russia, the United States, Western Europe, [inaud.] state in the Middle East. Including Sunni state, the [inaud.] Sunni state. For instance, for Egypt--the Egyptians have not criticized Russia's actions in Syria because they share concern about the growth of a new form of radical Islamism in the region. They have been [battling] radical Islamists in their own country for quite a while. And they [immediately] [inaud.] some groups, ISIL-connected groups, which have been operating.

So the idea is, create some kind of a coalition, at least temporarily, in order to deal with this threat. Defeating it [inaud.]. there is no way. You cannot negotiate with them. You cannot have a truth and reconciliation commission between the opposing sides in the conflict. So in the meantime, one should prepare, start negotiations or continue negotiations and discussions about some kind of a political transition in Syria, which would help bring more sources of the conflict, of the civil conflict, that exploded the region because of the way the Syrian government responded to demonstrations against it.

So there has to be a sequence of priority. First you resolve the military problem, then you begin with political revolution. I think that some kind of a regional pact to stabilize Syria and make sure that--by the way, also Iraq. Because Iraq has been affected by this crisis in a big way. It's not just about Syria. We're looking at the wide territory in the Middle East which has been affected by this crisis. And so there have to be some regional solutions which are only possible if a major player, such as Russia and the United States, operate with a reasonable degree of cooperation. Not treating it as a zero-sum game where they pursue opposing goals. Because otherwise only ISIS will win.

PERIES: All right. Sergei, we would like to take that issue up of what a regional solution would look like in our next segment with you.

PLEKHANOV: Okay.

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

SHARMINI PERIES, EXEC. PRODUCER,T RNN: Welcome back to the Real News Network. I'm Sharmini Peries coming to you from Baltimore. I'm speaking with Sergei M Plekhanov. He is an associate professor of political science at York University and a former deputy director of the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies in Russia. In segment one we tried to address the current memorandum of agreement that's been signed between Russia and the U.S. over the airspace and potentially trying to address avoiding getting in each others' way.

But in this segment we're going to take up the issue of what a regional solution to Syria might look like. Sergei, so what does a regional solution to the conflict look like?

SERGEI PLEKHANOV: Regional solutions are notoriously hard to achieve, because usually in the region there are competing forces, competing interests. And we all know what that competition's all about in the Middle East. There are several axes of conflict in that part of the world. And apart from everything else, the capacity of the United States to maintain a balance of power as the dominant force in the region has drastically declined as a result of major strategic blunders made by the United States.

The United States is less capable of manipulating the big players in the Middle East. And that's a new situation, because since the Camp David accords of 1973 when Egypt and Israel normalized their relations, which was a drastic change in Middle Eastern politics, the United States was the main power there. And Russia was marginalized. Soviet Union at the time was marginalized, and it lost its position in Egypt. And then the Soviet Union in 1991, the Soviet Union was dissolved and Russia completely withdrew from any kind of active participation in the Middle East. So the United States as one hegemonic power was trying to manipulate the situation.

Remember what plans the United States had at the time. Greater Middle East, transforming the entire [inaud.] Muslim states from the Mediterranean all the way to Afghanistan. Transform those states into entities which would be formerly more democratic, pro-Western, and stable, and so on. Safe for Israel, and so on and so forth. And of course it was obvious that it was a pipe dream, that no such plan could be implemented. But they started boldly and confidently in Iraq. And they got stuck. Afghanistan was somewhat different because there there was a United Nations authorization for some kind of an action against the Taliban regime, for the [inaud.] regime. And besides, there were signs that the Taliban were directly responsible for enabling the attacks of 9/11.

But then this plan, this plan led to tremendous destabilization of the Middle East, on the one hand. On the other hand it enabled Iran to increase its regional inflow enormously. In fact, think of where Iran was before 2001, before 9/11. it had one enemy on the western front. There was Iraq. Bitter enemy.

And on the eastern front [inaud.] had Afghanistan, the Taliban regime, which was strongly anti-Iranian. And so thanks to the United States, both those enemies were slain. [Have] replaced the enemies with greater instability and chaos. But Iran was now capable of now spreading its wings and establishing itself as the most influential regional power.

And the Americans then said, okay, what do we do now? Let's invade Iran. That was the idea. And the mid-2000s, around 2005-2006, the Americans were trying to find ways of collecting Iran's [inaud.] whereas Iran was suggesting to Americans, hey, we seem to have common interests, so let's normalize relations. And even the question of relations with Israel was on the table. But the response from the United States was, we don't negotiate with evil. We destroy evil.

Okay. It's, you know, try. Go ahead and try. And of course nothing came out of it. So under the Obama administration they shifted to negotiations with Iran, trying to resolve the issues and take advantage of the fact that Iran is a rising nuclear power.

Now, to the credit of the Obama administration they managed to accomplish some kind of a resolution of the nuclear issue involved in the negotiations that gave us the deal with Iran. Really valuable. And they contributed to normalization of relations in the region.

PERIES: So Sergei, this current situation we have is actually even better in terms of coming up with a regional solution. At least the nuclear factor in relation to Iran has been removed. It's being negotiated. Which makes it a more of a possibility that you can bring Iran to the table, along with the other partners, in addressing a regional solution.

PLEKHANOV: [Offer] a comment on that because it's not up to the United States now to curtail all the players to kind of fall in line with the new policy.

Because the United States then, the moment the negotiations produced a deal, there was an upsurge of criticism and concern from the major Sunni provinces in the region, such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and so on. They said, what the hell is going on? You are now helping Iran extend its influence and increase its influence in the region. And you know there are bigger enemies. So the Shia-Sunni cleavage in the Middle East immediately came to the fore.

So then the United States began to reassure its Sunni allies--and those Sunni allies are actually actively trying to overthrow the Assad regime. In a way what the United States--the reason why the United States cannot stop trying to overthrow Assad is because they want to remain on the good side with the Saudis and others, the Turks, and so on, because they cannot control the players. The players have their own game, have their own interests.

So now the challenge is to try and create a political format within which the diverse players, and in the first place Iran, Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and so on and so forth, would be able to consult on stabilizing the region. Because all of it, all of the key players, are threatened by the new force that has been produced by the chaos, and that is ISIL. So is it possible or not, it is extremely difficult. That's the only solution that anyone can think of.

Because if we yield to the logic of the Shia-Sunni conflict, if we say okay, we agree with Saudi Arabia that it's extremely important to prevent Iran from further increasing its influence, okay. Then we will be helping the Sunni bloc to--in its conflict with Iran. Which could, by the way, lead to a war between Iran and the Sunni [inaud.], which then could start over conflict in Iraq, [and] Shia are in direct conflict, or in Syria.

Now, would that be in anybody's interest? Would that, the United States, be able to say okay, that's not a bad thing. But they've just been trying to normalize relations with Iran. How can you do it at the same time? You are trying to normalize relations with Iran. And at the same time you are trying to help overthrow a regime in Syria which is supported by Iran. You're trying to cooperate with Russia on fighting ISIS and at the same time you're trying to confront Russia over Syria.

I don't know. There are too many balls in the air that they are throwing. I don't think that they can very well play with that. So they keep dropping the balls here and there. And the result of the policies is more and more chaos. I would like to draw your attention a remarkable article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal by Henry Kissinger, who is suggesting that the United States should get serious about the failure of its policy in the Middle East about the deepening destabilization in the region, which is extremely dangerous, and accept the fact that Russia's interests are such that the United States can and should cooperate with it, in defeating ISIS and agreeing on a number of missions in the Middle East which could help stabilize the region. He thinks, and it's possible--his big concern is Iran, by the way. More than Russia. He's not particularly concerned about Russia.

He thinks that Russia's acting out of its own national interests, which are legitimate. Russia is not trying to dominate the Middle East. And so Russia is open to all kinds of regional arrangements. Iran is a different story. But then even on Iran he thinks that with proper diplomatic activity and a proper combination of various methods the United States can bring Iran to agreeing on such a resolution which would be acceptable to other [players]. It's easier said than done.

But what is required above all is clarity of vision. I think the United States has to decide what its goals in the region are. Because you have conflicting statements coming from different people, and priorities which are at odds with each other. And that's not a sign of a policy which is going to be successful.

PERIES: All right. Sergei Plekhanov, thank you so much for joining us today, and we look forward to having you back.

PLEKHANOV: Okay, thank you.

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

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#22
Politkom.ru
October 19, 2015
Russian expert looks at dangers of being drawn into "Syrian trap"
Tatyana Stanovaya, leader of Analytical Department of Centre for Political Technologies: Syria: In Search of Dialogue

Russia has not yet succeeded in making effective contact with the members of the antiterrorist coalition fighting ISIL. It has become known from Russian President Vladimir Putin's interview with Vladimir Solovyev that he had been intending to send Prime Minister Dmitriy Medvedev to talks in Washington. However, the United States refused to receive the Russian delegation. Meanwhile, an article has appeared in Novaya Gazeta that cited anonymous military people as saying that Russia may soon curtail the military operation in Syria. At the same time the Russian General Staff has officially declared that a military base will be created in Syria that will include maritime, air, and ground components: Damascus has already responded positively to this initiative.

Vladimir Putin is making attempts to galvanize communications with Turkey, Western Europe, and the United States over Syria. He is appealing to potential partners and suggesting a pooling of effort. One of the arguments in the appeal to Turkey was the terrorist act that occurred in Ankara on 10 October and claimed more than 100 lives. Putin voiced solidarity with the Turkish people and the Turkish authorities, condemning the crime. "We will only be effective in the struggle against this evil when we combat it together," Putin said.

Turkey is now in a political crisis: Preparations are being made for early parliamentary elections, in which Erdogan's party is running every risk of getting worse results. Voting is scheduled for 1 November, and Russia is waiting to see how events will develop, not harping upon disagreements with Ankara. However, the situation is extremely complex. The Kremlin has been forced to assist the Kurds in the north of Syria in one way or another, for the Kurds are regarded as the most organized resistance to the spread of ISIL. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has admitted that Russia is giving the Kurds assistance by agreement with Baghdad. Erdogan regards this as a big risk factor for himself and is warning not only Russia but also the United States against helping the Kurds. For the time being the efforts of both the Turkish and the Russian side are focused on avoiding a slide of relations towards confrontation. Moscow was visited on 15 October by Turkish Deputy Foreign Minister Ali Kemal Aydin, who met with Russian counterparts and discussed the Syrian issue. The Turkish diplomat declared that Russia and Turkey "are making every effort to guard bilateral relations against regional contradictions."

The Kremlin believes that Turkey's actions on the Syrian salient are worsening the conditions for combating ISIL. However, Turkey believes that Russia's actions are undermining the foundations of the country's national security. The situation appears very tense, with potential for serious degradation, to which both sides are trying for now to apply the brakes because of its potential. An unmanned air vehicle, which was downed by Turkish air defences on 16 October and which Turkey unofficially regards as a secret Russian apparatus, is becoming another problem. Russia refutes the very fact of a lost unmanned air vehicle.

In relations with the other member countries of the coalition Putin is trying to emphasize Russia's openness in every possible way, as well as the legitimacy of its action (Russian officials are constantly repeating that Russia is carrying out strikes against the country's territory at the Syrian Government's request). He declared in the interview with Solovyev that Moscow is proposing that the coalition member countries subscribe to Russia's mandate. For now, however, this proposal appears provocative, for in that case all the countries that are fighting ISIL would be forced to accept this legitimacy from the hands not only of Russia but also of Bashar al-Asad, who is regarded as a source of destabilization in the region. It is necessary to shift the emphasis to Russia's legitimacy when a political dialogue fails. But confrontational rhetoric inevitably follows on from this -accusations of unlawful actions and of violating international law, which looks, rather, like an attempt to pressure the West and a threat to increase support for the Al-Asad regime.

In such a situation the minimum task is to avoid dangerous incidents, when uncontrolled clashes between Russia's military forces and the coalition's military forces could result in clashes and casualties. Putin acknowledged that certain progress has been made here: "Prototypes of working groups have been set up with the Israelis and are now being set up with the Americans, and we are on this path with our Turkish partners too." Putin added that "at the first stage this is, at least, better than nothing at all."

Indeed, Reuters reported on 14 October, citing an unnamed American official, that the United States and Russia were at the final stage of agreeing a document on rules governing flight safety in Syria's skies. These rules are being agreed on within the framework of video conferences involving the two countries' military experts and are aimed at maintaining a safe distance between American and Russian aircraft and using common radio frequencies for distress signals. The Pentagon is greatly irritated by Russian aircraft flying up to American fighters -something that is perceived both as a very great risk factor and as direct pressure, as a show of strength.

The fate of Al-Asad -or, as this is portrayed, the question of a "political settlement" -is becoming a political "carrot" that Russia is formally offering to the West. Foreign Ministry official spokesperson Mariya Zakharova declared that Russia is not supporting Al-Asad but advocating the preservation of Syrian statehood. However, she at once pointed out that demanding Al-Asad's resignation means acting in [accordance with] the terrorists' logic. But Moscow is continuing to keep a certain distance, albeit a very transparent distance, from the leader of Syria. "Our task consists in stabilizing the legitimate regime and creating the conditions to seek a political compromise," Putin said. This is where one of the most profound disagreements lies: The West deems it dangerous to strengthen Al-Asad's positions, whereas Russia deems it compulsory for seeking a compromise. At the same time Putin categorically rejected the possibility of a Russian ground operation on Syrian territory. It should be pointed out that since the start of the military operation the Russian regime's rhetoric has, on the whole, become more pro-Al-Asad -which may be connected with disenchantment with the West's position and its reluctance to enter into contact with Russia with regard to joint antiterrorist work.

In this situation the United States is also adhering only to the line of avoiding mutual military incidents, while in other respects refusing cooperation with Russia and regarding its strategy as "mendacious" (Pentagon head Ashton Carter declared this on 15 October). It turns out that Putin had been intending to send a Russian delegation headed by Dmitriy Medvedev to Washington, but the United States refused to receive it. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest ascribed that decision to Moscow's reluctance to contribute to the struggle against ISIL. Earnest explained that Russia has its own agenda in Syria, which it is implementing independently. At the "Russia Calls" forum, however, Vladimir Putin declared that Russia had asked the United States to provide information as to which targets must not be hit, but this was not done.

It is not easy for Russia to convince the world of its love of peace. Probably, just this task may have been one of the reasons for the political advancement of Dmitriy Medvedev -the figure with whom the "reset" in relations with the United States in 2009-2011 is associated. In this context both the joint visit to a sports hall at the end of August and the conferment of the order "For Services to the Homeland, First Class" in mid-October become more understandable (given that Sergey Shoygu, for example, was awarded the order of Andrew the First-Called, a more prestigious award). Putin was also prepared to entrust the Syrian mission to Medvedev. However, the pumping of political resource into Medvedev is not yet having the proper effect. A weak premier in a technical government, Medvedev continues to experience an acute paucity of political authority both with the Russian elite and in the West. For Barack Obama Medvedev is not only a nonindependent political figure but also a reminder of the "reset's" sad ending and of the failed attempt to gamble politically on cooperation with him as a reforming alternative to Putin.

Citing its own sources, Novaya Gazeta wrote that the question of curtailing the operation is being considered, although at the present moment such a scenario seems unlikely. Without Russia's support the positions of the Syrian government troops may quickly weaken -which will return the situation to its state before the Russian intervention and render worthless the results that Russian aircraft have achieved. Therefore such a departure could come as a strong blow not only to Al-Asad but also to Putin: It is no coincidence that Russia announced the creation of its own military base on Syrian territory -something that runs counter to the departure scenario. The possibility cannot be ruled out that Novaya Gazeta's information was a leak on the part of that section of the Russian leadership that regards the risks of the Syrian operation as too high, although the siloviki are now playing the leading role in the matter of conducting the military operation.

At the same time Russia's intervention has altered the distribution of forces in Syria. Government forces have switched to the offensive in three provinces -Latakia, Aleppo, and Homs. At the same time the United States is continuing to arm members of the opposition with American antitank systems, Kommersant wrote when speaking about the risks of starting a proxy war between Russia and the United States. "This is a proxy war not through a conscious choice but through a combination of circumstances. These are such that the rebels have many antimissile systems, and the regime is attacking them with Russian help," Jeff White, an expert at the Washington-based Institute for Near East Policy, who is cited by The New York Times, believes. Mariya Zakharova in turn told Kommersant that "we say one thing to them: By arming the more moderate opposition you will never be able to give guarantees that the weapons, along with these people, will not end up on the side of terrorist organizations. There is no certainty that the portable antiaircraft missile systems of which the Western press writes will not get into the hands not of those they are intended for," she pointed out.

Russia may fall into a Syrian trap in which it is possible to make progress in resolving military tasks but it will not be possible to convert them into diplomatic successes. The more Russia gets drawn into the Syrian conflict, the harder it gets to emerge from it and the greater the dependence on Al-Asad and his interests becomes. As the government troops advance, the confrontation between Russia and the West over questions of the fate of the Syrian opposition will increase, and Moscow will have to defend the Syrian leader's regime more actively. In that case, even if it is possible to freeze the situation in Eastern Ukraine for a long time (it does not yet seem possible to resolve the Ukrainian crisis), it will not be easy to lend urgency to the question of lifting the sanctions, since Russia's chief problem remains its unpredictability from the viewpoint of its Western partners and the profound divergence in the understanding of international threats.

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 #23
The Independent (UK)
October 21, 2015
Isis in Iraq: Shia leaders want Russian air strikes for battle against militant threat
Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, under 'tremendous pressure' from his ruling National Alliance group to call for military help like that received by Syria
By Patrick Cockburn

Iraqi political and military leaders are demanding that the government follow Syria in requesting Russia to start air attacks on Isis fighters in Iraq.

Two members of parliament are quoted as saying that the Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, is under "tremendous pressure" from his ruling National Alliance group to call for Russian military help.

The intensity of Russian air strikes in Syria against al-Qaeda-type movements, including Isis, has impressed Shia militia officers in Iraq who command larger and more effective forces than the regular Iraqi army.

President Bashar al-Assad of Syria underlined the strength of his relationship with Russia on Tuesday by visiting President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, his first trip out of Syria since the start of the uprising in 2011, to thank him for his support. The Russian defence ministry said that Russian planes had made 46 sorties and hit 43 targets in the previous 24 hours.
 
Mr Abadi has argued that Iraq risked alienating the US by asking for Russian air support, but his political position is weak and his government has failed to win back territory lost to Isis over the last year. Shia leaders say that their military forces are hampered by the US refusal to carry out air strikes in support of the Shia militia forces. These are better motivated and disciplined than the Iraqi army, which has never recovered from its defeats by Isis last year.

Russia is increasingly acting in support of the Shia states in the Middle East and is a member of a Baghdad-based intelligence cell to which Iran, Iraq and Syria also belong. A  US-led coalition has carried out more than 7,000 air strikes in Iraq and Syria  against Isis and other Sunni jihadi groups since August 2014, but six months ago Isis was able to capture Palmyra in Syria and Ramadi in Iraq.

Mr Abadi may not wish to call for Russian air strikes, but he is coming under increasing criticism in Iraq for being indecisive and ineffective. The most powerful Shia paramilitary groups - the Badr Organisation, Ahrar al-Haq and Ketaib Hezbollah - frequently act independently of the government in Baghdad and are seen as being under Iranian influence.

A special report by Reuters describing how militias have come to outgun the state in Iraq says that they number 100,000 men and that most young Shia men avoid the army and "now prefer to join the paramilitary groups, which are seen as braver and less corrupt". Iraq's defence ministry has largely come under militia control, with 70 per cent of those working there giving their first loyalty to the paramilitaries. One army division, out of the five still functioning, is alleged to take its orders directly from militia commanders.  

The US is paying the price for refusing to give air support to the Syrian army and the Shia militias in Iraq on the grounds this would enable Mr Assad to stay in power and would alienate the Sunni minority in Iraq. But experience shows that, for air power to succeed, it needs a well-organised military partner on the ground able to give up-to-the minute intelligence and identify targets for attack by planes and drones. The US has been able to do this only in coordination with the Syrian Kurds, who have defeated Isis in a number of battles.

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 #24
Pando.com
October 19, 2015
The War Nerd: Bombed Stupid
By Gary Brecher, Pando.com [subscription]
Gary Brecher writes The War Nerd column for PandoDaily (Pando.com), and co-hosts the Radio War Nerd podcast show.

I stole that headline from an Ernest movie, Scared Stupid. Always loved that title. "Scared Straight"? I've never seen fear make anybody smarter. When people get scared, they get stupid.

And at the moment, the Anglo media is all scared about the Russian air strikes in Syria. So they've started a counter-bombardment of their own, dumping tons of stupid on us helpless civilians.

It's not even a consistent brand of stupid. It's all over the map: the Russian air strikes are bad because they're helping Islamic State, or because they're brutal, or because they've failed.

That last claim, that the Russian campaign has already failed, is the most ridiculous of all. Take this headline from the Daily Telegraph: "Russia Reducing Air Strikes against Syrian Rebels as Intervention Fails."

"Fails," huh? Already? After-well, lemme take my shoes off so I can count up the days since Russia started bombing Syria. Comes to 17 days, by my finger-and-toe reckoning. Who knew that an air bombardment campaign could be called a failure after slightly more than two weeks? Somebody should tell the USAF about this rule, because if memory serves, they've run a few bombing campaigns that went on a little longer than 17 days before getting their reckoning.

Buried deep in that story is the Russian command's actual statement:

"The intensity of our military aviation operations decreased slightly in the last 24 hours....a result of active offensive operations by the Syrian armed forces, the front line/front-line [sic] with the terrorists is changing."

That's a plausible account. The first rule of close air support is, "Don't bomb your own people." And that's a tricky job when Russian-speaking pilots and air controllers are working with what's left of the Syrian Arab Army, a disorganized lot at the best of times. So the Russian claim may be the simple truth. Or not; who knows? All you can say for sure is that claiming a dip in sorties on Day 17 means the air campaign has failed is laughable BS.

US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter joined the chorus, predicting "the Russian campaign in Syria is doomed to fail." Doomed, yet!

And why, Mr. Carter, are those Russkies so doomed? Carter explained,

"Fighting ISIL without pursuing a parallel political transition only risks escalating civil war in Syria... There is a logical contradiction in the Russian position and now its actions in Syria."

It just goes to show there's only one man named Ash you should listen to, and he's too busy chainsawing evil dead to talk nonsense like this. Actually, Russia's campaign is much more simple and logical than the USAF's messed-up mission in Syria. Russia is using its air force to try to blast out a viable territory for an Alawite/Shia state along the Syrian coastal hills. Assad's people are longtime Russian clients and allies, and the Russian air force is helping them maintain their key turf against a much more numerous enemy. It may fail, but at least that's a reasonable plan.

At the moment, Russia's planes are focusing on a triangle of Sunni-held territory north of Homs, trying to blast a path for Assad's weak infantry. If you look at these very good graphics put together (it pains me to admit) by the New York Times, you can see what a sensible, traditional military move that is. Scroll down to the two maps captioned "Many of the Initial Airstrikes Were Near the Boundaries Between Government and Rebel Zones" and go to the second map. You'll see a T-shaped yellow zone marking Sunni-held territory due north of Homs, along the key road to Hama and Aleppo.

That's where the Russian strikes have been hitting hardest lately, in Sunni-held crossroads towns like Ter Maela, right on the M5 highway that runs north to Hama and Aleppo, south to Damascus. That highway is the key to Syria, a kind of spinal cord like the big vein down a shrimp's back. If the Russians can obliterate Ter Maela's defenders thoroughly enough to let Assad's weak infantry (or maybe his much better Hezbollah or Iranian ringers) take and hold these villages, then the Alawites have the makings of a viable state.

Maybe our Secretary of Defense knows something I don't know-I mean beyond the best place for prime rib in Georgetown-but it seems to me that the Russian air campaign makes very straightforward military sense.

If there's an air force whose mission in Syria really does have "a logical contradiction at its core," it's a little group called the USAF. Not that it's the USAF's fault; they do their jobs very well. But what job, exactly, what mission, were they given?

If you were to sum it up, it'd go something like this: "Hit Sunni targets east of the coastal hills, but ignore everything to the west; help the Kurds in the north, but grudgingly, as little as possible, for fear you'll offend Turkey; and while you're attacking Assad's enemies, keep reassuring the Israelis that you're just as anti-Assad as you are anti-Islamic State."

Sound stupid? It is. It's a ridiculous compromise adopted to please the Israelis and Saudis, based on the dumb-ass notion that Sunni fighters in eastern Syria are evil sectarian bastards, but the Sunni fighters facing off against the SAA in the west are "moderates."

It's true that Islamic State is uncommonly vile, but let's not lie; the only faction in Syria that even tries to rise above sectarian hatred are the young Kurdish commies of YPG/J. Every other group is sectarian, and militias that start out sectarian only get meaner as they go, by the iron logic of primitive war, where massacre is the norm. And this sectarian taint isn't new. Syria's Sunni were chanting "Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the graveyard" long before the fighting started. For once, Robert Fisk got it right, in an article called "Syria's Moderates Have Disappeared, and There Are No Good Guys":

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

The crazy US policy of ignoring Sunni militias in the west made for some fat, soft targets. No wonder the Russian air force jumped at the chance to intervene. They must've spent months drooling over drone and satellite photos from the west, between Homs and Aleppo-targets totally untouched by the USAF.

Until the Russians jumped in, Sunni militias in the west only had to deal with the incompetents in Assad's rump of an air force. Those guys aren't good for anything but dropping barrel bombs on crowded tenement neighborhoods; any decently dug-in troops could laugh at their attacks.

Then the Russians decided it was time to show, Gulf War style, that they had some fancy shock-and-awe munitions of their own. These belated colonial wars are, among other things, great sales videos for arms exporters like the US and Russia.

To see a typical Russian sales video, check out this clip of a Russian attack on a defensive line, mixing bombers, CAS, and rocket launchers scattering cluster bombs. Watch it and see if it looks like a "failure." Because me, I personally would not want to be anywhere within five km of the target zone.

That MLRS barrage in the second half of the video is terrifying. Worst of all, not all of the missiles' cluster munitions will detonate. If you survive the barrage and try to run off, you're likely to set off one of the duds.

Notice how the guy filming it keeps saying, "Allahu Akbar"? That seemed odd to me. It's a Salafist battle cry as a rule. You never hear Alawites from the SAA shouting it in their battle videos. So I asked around, and apparently it marks the narrator as Sunni, a pretty slick, cinematic way of implying that the Russian/Iranian/Hezbollah/Alawite side has some Sunni allies.

So...failure? No. Any advance will probably be slow; the lines don't change much in Syria, because the level of combat power across the board is very low. These are forces who'd rather bombard each other than engage. Only Hezbollah has real combat power, and they're spending it thriftily.

But there are already signs the Russian air strikes are allowing some advances.

That doesn't mean the Russian campaign will succeed; like Gandalf used to say, "All courses may run ill."  But at least they have a sane, comprehensible, achievable goal, unlike the US in Syria.

Now for the next accusation, that the Russian strikes are brutal.

Well, yeah, they are. That's the general idea. I don't mean to be flippant here, but air strikes only look neat when you stay up there and watch from the pilot's angle. On the ground, even the supposedly "surgical" strikes are nightmarish. Which, again, is the whole idea. And if we're going to be honest about it, we can stop pretending there are any neat, clean surgical strikes. A new report just came out showing that nine out of ten people hit by those targeted drone assassinations are civilians who happen to be in the vicinity.

As a rule, you can tell when the media approve of air strikes by the angle. If it's all nice clean pilot's-view of distant explosions, it's a good strike. If they show you funerals, weeping relatives, blasted apartments, it's a bad strike. So you can tell, just from the headline-"This Is What the Russian Air Strikes in Syria Look Like from the Ground"-that it's a bad strike. For example, ground-angle stories on Israeli airstrikes only started hitting the US media in the past few years. Now they're fairly common but for most of my lifetime you just didn't see those weeping Palestinians. When the strike is done by our own airforce, you still don't see them unless you go to foreign or marginal leftist sites. But boy do they start popping up when it's the Russians playing their air-to-ground video games.

There are a total of 29 photographs here, and three-quarters of them are of the pity-inspiring variety. First photo, a ruined neighborhood; second, column of smoke; third, weeping old woman; fourth, civilian car covered with rubble; fifth, horrible scythe-shaped cluster munitions; sixth, a wounded civilian being carried to hospital...

It's not that there's anything false about these images. They're a pretty good montage of the horror of an air strike. These raids are bad, for Reuters and most Western media, because they're Russian raids, not because they're any more brutal than any others.

The Russians are bombing more or less the way all the other foreign air forces in Syria are bombing. They're having a more powerful effect because they're hitting targets that haven't been hit by first-world CAS til now. That's the only difference.

Now for the wildest accusation of all: Russia's air strikes are helping Islamic State, or as Michael Weiss of the Daily Beast said, "giving IS an air force."

One thing you need to keep in mind here: Michael Weiss is an idiot. No, I mean even by the standards of American punditry. Weiss has been writing Russia-baiting crap for years, stories with comic headlines like "Ireland Bows to Russia's Intimidation." When he's not bashing Russia, Weiss' job is gulping up some stinking, fishy gobs of CIA/Pentagon/Likud disinformation, then vomiting it back onto the pages of the Beast like a dutiful penguin dad. Weiss never sees anything, or even tries to; he hears things, always whispered in his ear by some quasi-spook shill whose motives he never questions. And what he hears about Syria is that the Russians are paving the way for Islamic State:

Last June, the U.S. embassy in Damascus accused Bashar al-Assad's air force of clearing a path for an ISIS advance on Syrian rebels in the Aleppo town of Azaz. "Reports indicate that the regime is making air strikes in support of [ISIS's] advance on Aleppo, aiding extremists against Syrian population," the embassy account tweeted, following up with a broader accusation: "We have long seen that the regime avoids [ISIS] lines, in complete contradiction to the regime's claims to be fighting [ISIS]."

Now Russia seems to have inherited Assad's role as the unacknowledged air force of ISIS.

It's for prose like this that the acronym "FFS" was invented. FFS, you're taking the US Embassy as your source of Syrian news? FFS, you quote their tweets-their tweets-like gospel? FFS, you talk about Russia "taking over" Assad's role as "the unacknowledged air force of ISIS" when your only source for that claim is the US defense establishment that's been trying to overthrow Assad for decades?

The only truth to this claim is that Islamic State is a ruthless, treacherous militia that has no qualms at all about jumping other Sunni militias that are weakened in combat. So if a rival militia gets hit hard by Assad's forces, or Russian planes, IS will move in and grab its turf, weapons, and fighters. This has happened over and over. It's one of IS's best moves, and there usually isn't much trouble doing it, because IS is generous with money, equipment, and sex slaves, and the men they coopt aren't friggin' moderates but plain old Sunni sectarian fighters who have no trouble signing on to IS's no-prisoners policies.

So when the Russian strikes blasted Ahrar-as-Sham positions near Aleppo from the West in the first week of October 2015, IS waited for the smoke to clear, then attacked from the East, mopping up before the other militia could regroup. Very simple, very ruthless, very IS.

But how exactly is that the Russians' fault (if "fault" is a word you can even use in a weasel-fight like this)? Ahrar-as-Sham is fighting Russia's client, Assad; Russian planes blast Ahrar-as-Sham; Islamic State betrays its fellow Sunni while they're dazed and hurt.

Truth is, Russia and Islamic State have different projects going in Syria, projects that don't even overlap much. Syria is more full of bad projects than the ninth-grade Metal Shop class where they set my jacket on fire with a soldering iron (while I was wearing it). That place was full of projects thought up by adolescent psychopaths, all designed to kill or maim, and mostly ineffective.

Which, come to think of it, is not a bad description of Syria at the moment. For a smallish country, Syria has more theaters of war going than a multiplex doing a Private Ryan marathon. The Kurds of YPG/PKK have their own project going in the north, along the Turkish border. The Alawites are trying to survive and carve a rump state for themselves in the coastal hills. The Christians have executed a simple plan: "get the Hell out of here while we can." Hezbollah's project could be summed up as, "Ugh, I guess we gotta help these weak-ass Alawites after all, damn it." Israel's project is "Attack Hezbollah nonstop, but never touch the Sunni militias because they're not a real threat." Jabhat-an-Nusra, Ahrar-as-Sham, and the other Sunni militias are competing for ownership of the inland Sunni state they hope will come out of this chaos.

But Islamic State? Their project isn't really about Syria at all. IS is an Iraqi outfit. Yeah, they have all these noisy foreign volunteers, the whole C-minus demographic of Birmingham, Dusseldorf, and Marseille, but that's not their real power. IS inherited Saddam's officer class, and their goal is to regain Baghdad. Syria is a side bet, one of the vacuums they're so good at occupying. Eastern Syria-a flat dry place with few people except along the Euphrates-was mostly abandoned by both the Alawites and the other Sunni militias, who focused on trying to win the more valuable real estate to the West. That's when Islamic State moved in from its Iraqi base and started a Syrian franchise.

So the war Russia has joined isn't even really the same war that Islamic State is fighting. IS wants to embiggen its Iraq-based "caliphate"; Russia wants to drive the other Sunni militias off that key highway, M5, so the Alawites can start a mini-state along the coast.

Meanwhile, the "moderate" Sunni militias are getting hit hard for the first time. As that happens, IS will push from the east, and the SAA/Hezbollah/Revolutionary Guards from the west. At some point, Russia's air power may meet IS head-on. But a lot of other dumb, bloodthirsty rival projects will have to get ground away in this multi-faction, multi-loon war before that happens.

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 #25
Wall Street Journal
October 22, 2015
Five Takeaways From Bashar al-Assad's Secret Visit to Moscow
By AARON DAVID MILLER
Aaron David Miller is a vice president at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars and most recently the author of "The End of Greatness: Why America Can't Have (and Doesn't Want) Another Great President." He is on Twitter: @AaronDMiller2.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad surprised the world on Tuesday with an unannounced meeting in Moscow.

Here are five takeaways:

1. That Mr. Assad was prepared to risk leaving Syria - apparently the first time since the rebellion against him began in 2011 - reflects both a renewed confidence in his own position at home and the importance of the Russian connection. Both Messrs. Putin and Assad are godfather types: Mr. Putin likely made an offer Mr. Assad couldn't and didn't want to refuse.

2. The contrast of a U.S. president trying to hammer home the message that Mr. Assad is finished and must go with a Russian president who says he must stay and be part of the solution to Syria is testament to the marginalization of the U.S. role and influence in the region.

3. While Syria carries great risks for Mr. Putin, including the possibility of Russian casualties, for now he has the will and the assets on the ground to exert major influence. Russia has three things America lacks: allies on the ground - Iran and Hezbollah; direct influence over Mr. Assad. Mr. Putin's strategy also has consistent goals: support Mr. Assad and counter Islamic State. Finally, Mr. Putin is in this for the long term and will playing in this arena long after Obama leaves office.

4. The Russia role in Syria reflects a new strategic reality that will affect American interests and its allies in the region. Along with a rising Iran, there's the new alignment between Russia, Mr. Assad, Iran and Hezbollah. U.S. allies, including Israel and Saudi Arabia, have reason to be concerned because they have no great-power patron to counter Mr. Putin's game.

5. U.S. strategy in the region - at least in Syria and perhaps in Iraq, too - may well be hostage to Mr. Putin's initiative. Russia and the U.S. do have a common objective in countering Islamic State. Should Mr. Putin ultimately decide on easing Mr. Assad out of office as part of a political transition, Washington might benefit. But if the Russian goal is a rump state controlled by Mr. Assad, the U.S. will find itself unable to defeat Islamic State or remove Mr. Assad, the jihadists' greatest enabler. Indeed, despite the extensive killing and refugee crisis created by the murderous Mr. Assad, would the U.S. want to see him if fall if meant the black flag of the Sunni jihadists flying in Damascus?

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 #26
Vedomosti
October 19, 2015
Pavel Aptekar, Afghanistan as new Syria. What does Russia's ostentatious activity in Central Asia signify?

Moscow can exploit the situation in Afghanistan in order to expand Russia's military presence in Central Asia and to demonstrate its foreign policy influence.

At the meeting of heads of CIS countries in Kazakhstan on 16 October, Vladimir Putin stated that the situation in Afghanistan is close to critical. "Terrorists of various hues are garnering ever greater influence and do not hide their plans for further expansion. One of their goals is to break through into the Central Asian region." The Russian Defence Ministry warns of the danger of the spread of the influence of the Islamic State group [ISIL] (which is banned in Russia) to Central Asia and is elaborating plans for the joint protection of the Tajik-Afghan border. The Russian Foreign Ministry has declared that the 14-year campaign of the United States and its allies in Afghanistan has ended in total failure.

Militants from various groups have stepped up their activities in northern Afghanistan, but the threat of Islamists to the neighbouring countries should not be exaggerated. Leonid Isayev from the Higher School of Economics National Research University has recently visited Afghanistan and believes that the government is capable of controlling the situation in the country, especially after the extension of the presence of the US and NATO contingents. By overdramatizing the position in the north, the Afghan leadership is attempting to secure the expansion of aid, including from Russia.

The mass penetration of ISIL militants into Afghanistan is hindered by Iran. The principal opponents of the Afghan government - the Taleban (which is banned in Russia) - represent a national Pashtun movement, a significant proportion of whose leaders are against an invasion by ISIL, whom they regard as foreigners. The Taleban's desire for foreign expansion and the destabilization of Central Asia is weaker than people are attempting to make out, Aleksey Malashenko from the Moscow Carnegie Centre notes. Individual field commanders of the Islamists are capable, however, of crossing the Panj river on the border for the sake of a show of strength or for the purpose of pillage. Well, and it is possible to demonstratively crush an attempted breakthrough by Islamists across the border with Tajikistan, not forgetting to present this attempt as the consequence of the ineffectiveness of US and NATO troops and the weakness of the Afghan government.

The aggravation of the situation around Afghanistan is to Russia's advantage. It receives thereby an opportunity to demonstrate - above all, to its own citizens - that it remains the guarantor of stability in Central Asia. At the same time, it is in fact important that the Americans should remain in Afghanistan and really control the situation.

As for us, we will send, for example, 30 planes and talk sanguinely about failure of the international coalition.

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 #27
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
October 21, 2015
Moscow not ready to accept South Ossetia, despite calls for unification
The president of the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia has announced plans to hold a referendum on the unification of the territory with Russia. However, sources close to the Kremlin say Moscow is currently ready for such developments.
Yekaterina Sinelschikova, RBTH

Leonid Tibilov, the president of the breakaway Georgian republic of South Ossetia, is planning to hold a referendum in the territory on joining Russia.
As reported by the South Ossetian presidential press service, he made the announcement at a meeting with Russian presidential aide Vladislav Surkov in Tskhinvali on Oct. 19.

"Today's political realities are such that we should make our historic choice," Tibilov said, adding that reunification with Russia is an age-old dream of the South Ossetian people.
 
Problematic issue

However, Moscow appears not to be taking the declaration seriously and currently has no intention of setting the referendum in motion.

"Moscow is satisfied with the current pace of integration processes. There is no need to give them new incentives," Alexei Chesnakov, a former deputy head of the Presidential Administration's Internal Policy Directorate and a political analyst close to the Kremlin, told RBTH.

South Ossetia is a partially recognized republic (its independence from Georgia is recognized by just five states - Russia, Nicaragua, Venezuela and the Pacific islands of Nauru and Tuvalu). Russia recognized the independence of the "republic" after Moscow's "five-day war" against Georgia in 2008.

In a referendum on entry into the Russian Federation held in 1992, 99.89 per cent of South Ossetian voters supported the motion, while in 2006, the republic held another referendum - for the status of an independent state.

According to Chesnakov, Tibilov's statement only registers the immutability of South Ossetia's strategic priorities, "but it does not mean the immediate commencement of the organizing of a referendum."

Leonid Slutsky, the chairman of the State Duma Committee for CIS Affairs, Eurasian Integration and Ties with Compatriots, also believes that the agreement on alliance and integration signed in March is enough.

The agreement, in particular, involves the merging of the South Ossetian and Russian border guard service, interior ministries and armies. In addition, he told RBTH, "Russia is investing the maximum in the economy of South Ossetia, in any case."

Russia currently subsidizes the South Ossetian budget to the tune of more than 90 percent.

"We will respect the will of the people, but because of the difficult geo-strategic situation, this issue [accession to the Russian Federation] is problematic. I would now refrain from expressing a positive or negative opinion on the matter," said Slutsky.

However, according to Konstantin Zatulin, the director of the Institute for CIS Countries, "it is difficult to assume that such an accomplished person as the president of South Ossetia does not know about it, and has not consulted on these matters with Russia."

Tibilov is not the only senior South Ossetian official to make such statements from time to time, and everyone there understands that stating a desire for reunification does not necessarily mean carrying out this plan, said Zatulin, pointing out that the idea is very popular with the electorate.

"It is difficult to judge why Tibilov decided to declare this now. But I definitely see the difference between South Ossetia, which is seeking to reunite with Russia, and [the other breakaway Georgian entity] Abkhazia, which hopes to build an independent state," he said.

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 #28
RFE/RL
October 21, 2015
Putin's Bipolar Disorder
By Brian Whitmore

Separatist leaders in Georgia's breakaway South Ossetia region announce they plan to hold a referendum on joining Russia.

Kremlin-backed parties lead the polls in Moldova with the pro-Western government in Chisinau mired in corruption allegations.

And Moscow appears to be getting its way on the implementation of the Minsk cease-fire in Ukraine.

Anybody who thinks Russia's military adventure in Syria means the Kremlin is scaling back its ambitions in its own backyard should probably think again.
The Syrian blockbuster may be the main show on Russian television screens, but the main theater of Vladimir Putin's confrontation with the West remains the Eurasian landmass -- and Moscow is making advances there on every front.

And while there may not be an Iron Curtain descending on the continent, there is an emerging bipolar order.

"What has emerged is not a renewal of blocs in the Cold War sense but two distinct normative systems," veteran Kremlin-watcher James Sherr of Chatham House said on last week's Power Vertical Podcast.

"The Western system based on rights, including property rights, the sanctity of contracts, and the rule of law. The other system is based on patron-client relationships, the merger of money and power, and the subordination of law to the state."

The Graft Zone

Moscow is determined to keep the former Soviet space as part of its normative system. The Putin regime is doing this formally through institutions like the fledgling Eurasian Union, but the main tool of Russian statecraft in this conflict is corruption.

By ensnaring post-Soviet elites in the web of shady deals emanating from Russia, the Kremlin is establishing a zone of control.

Putin is fond of calling for a Russian sphere of influence in the former Soviet space. But what he is creating in fact is a zone of graft.

And if the corruption tool fails, if a post-Soviet state attempts to break out of Putin's graft zone, then the Kremlin resorts to more aggressive and coercive measures.

This was the case with Georgia, which since the 2003 Rose Revolution has made strides in combatting corruption -- and by extension reducing Moscow's influence.

But Georgia has also had 20 percent of its territory -- Abkhazia and South Ossetia -- occupied by Russia. Following Russia's 2008 invasion of Georgia Moscow formally recognized these protectorates as independent states and continues to use them to pressure Tbilisi.

This summer, Russia redrew a section of Georgia's de facto border with breakaway South Ossetia, effectively seizing control of a portion of the Baku-Supsa oil pipeline.

South Ossetia's separatist leaders have also signed a pact with Moscow effectively merging their militaries and security services.

And this week's announcement about plans to hold a referendum on unification with Russia ratchets up the pressure on Tbilisi another notch.

A War Of Values

Using force after the graft tool failed was also the case with Ukraine.

In Viktor Yanukovych, Moscow had exactly the kind of leader it wanted in Kyiv: one that was completely tangled in the Kremlin's web of corrupt schemes.

When Yanukovych came under pressure from civil society and his own oligarchs to sign a free-trade and association pact with the European Union, Putin did what came naturally: he threatened him and then he bribed him with a $15 billion payoff.

And when that led to Yanukovych's overthrow in the Euromaidan revolution, Putin resorted to using force. But in doing so, he brought the true nature of the conflict in the former Soviet space into sharp focus.

"Starting with the Maidan, Ukraine has become more than it seems. It is no longer about language, nationality or citizenship - it has inconspicuously become a space for values," journalist and political analyst Pavel Kazarin wrote recently.  

"And the war today is waged not so much between Kyiv and Moscow as it is between the pro-Soviet and post-Soviet."

Russia is still hoping to have its way with Ukraine, despite the society's strong consensus to join the West.

The Kremlin is maneuvering to reintegrate the separatist-held areas of the Donbas back into the country with Moscow's proxies in control -- an outcome that would turn them into a virtual pro-Russian Trojan horse.

The failure of Ukraine's pro-Western leaders to sufficiently combat corruption also gives Moscow a window of opportunity.

Ukraine "is still hopelessly corrupt and gripped with infighting among oligarch clans, despite the government having created no fewer than five new anticorruption bodies," political commentator Leonid Bershidsky wrote recently.

"The war the Ukrainian government is losing now is against mismanagement, over-regulation and graft.That's just what Putin wants."

A Matter Of National Security

In Moldova, the Kremlin appears to be counting on corruption to do the job.

The former prime minister, Vlad Filat, who served from 2009-13 and led Moldova into an Association Agreement with the European Union, was detained earlier this month in connection with a $1 billion bank fraud.

The country's current pro-Western government is deeply unpopular and is under pressure from protesters demanding it step down.

And pro-Moscow parties who have vowed to undo the EU agreement and join the Russian-led Eurasian Union are leading in the polls.

"To understand how Russian President Vladimir Putin may get his way in Ukraine without having to continue the war there, watch its neighbor, Moldova," international-affairs columnist Marc Champion wrote recently in Bloomberg View.

Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova are stuck in the middle of Putin's bipolar order in Eurasia -- and that is a very dangerous place to be.

"The countries that wish to be part of the Western normative system but lack either the wherewithal or commitment to actually do it and bear the cost are the very countries that are the most vulnerable in Europe," Sherr said.

For these countries, fighting corruption isn't just a matter of good governance, it's a matter of national security.

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 #29
Subject: Announcement of new Russian-language journal Kontrapunkt
Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2015
From: Cory Welt <cwelt@gwu.edu>

New Russian-Language Journal of Politics & Society "Counterpoint"

George Washington University's Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES) is pleased to announce the first publication of Counterpoint (Kontrapunkt), a new open-access Russian-language journal of politics and society edited by Maria Lipman available at www.counter-point.org

 According to Lipman, "As a musical term, 'counterpoint' is a combination of several independent lines of melody that converge harmoniously. This is what we aim to achieve in each thematic issue of Counterpoint: independent authors, each investigating and analyzing his or her own aspect of the chosen subject, contributing their diverse voices to produce a multifaceted picture of Russian life."

The inaugural issue, devoted to the theme "Russia and Crimea. Eighteen Months Together," taps some of Russia's leading analysts to uncover the nature of the "Crimea syndrome" affecting Russian society (Kirill Rogov); recent shifts in the Kremlin's regional policy (Natalia Zubarevich); the transformation of the judicial system (Ella Paneyakh); the fate of the opposition (Vladimir Gel'man); and the government's crackdown on the Internet (Andrei Soldatov). The issue also examines how Russia is incorporating Crimea into its system of state management (Nikolay Petrov) and offers a research-based view of the Donbass insurgency (Serhiy Kudelia). It also reviews new books by Serhii Plokhy and Ann Applebaum.

Maria Lipman is an internationally recognized expert on Russian politics and media.  She was Editor-in-Chief of Pro et Contra, a policy journal published by the Carnegie Moscow Center, from 2003 to 2014. Before joining Carnegie Moscow Center, she was co-founder and Deputy Editor of two Russian weekly magazines: Itogi (Summing Up), published in association with Newsweek, and Ezhenedel'ny Zhurnal (Weekly Journal). From 2001 until 2011, Lipman wrote an op-ed column on Russian politics, media, and society for the Washington Post. She has contributed to a variety of Russian and U.S. publications, including a monthly blog for The New Yorker since 2012.

An interview (in Russian) with Lipman on the new journal can be found here: www.colta.ru/articles/media/8808

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 #30
Michael McFaul handles a hard question

Facebook
October 20, 2015
Michael McFaul

This event is tomorrow at Univeristy of Michigan. Come say hello and ask a hard question!

News | Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies | University of Michigan
The Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan will welcome Ambassador Michael McFaul to campus on October 21 to give a lecture...
II.UMICH.EDU

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Subject: My Encounter with Michael McFaul
Date: Wed, 21 Oct 2015
From: John Howard Wilhelm <jhwilhelm@gmail.com>

On October 21, 2015 as you can see from the text and link below our former ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul,.gave a lecture at the University of Michigan on "A New Cold War? Russia's New Confrontation with the West."

Speaking today 5:00 PM at Rackham:
http://events.umich.edu/event/24831

After the lecture during the question and answer session, I read for comments the following which I had posed at the US/Canada Institute in Moscow when Lynn Tracy, the Deputy Head of Mission at our Moscow Embassy spoke there on May 19, 2015.

"Based on his intensive study of the Maidan massacre, the Canadian political scientist Ivan Katchanovski concluded that much of the shooting on February 20, 2014 was carried out by opposition forces, not by the then government.  The intercepted exchange of the Estonian foreign minister with Catherine Ashton, a following German public television report and a later report by the BBC lend a lot of credence to Katchanovski's conclusion.  To what extent are the US Embassy in Moscow and the US Government aware of this?  If the US Government is aware of this, why is it ignoring it in its Ukraine policies?  If it is not aware of what seems to have really happened in the Maidan, why is that the case and what difference could such an awareness make in its policy towards Russia?"

When I finished the first sentence, McFaul tried to cut me off, but I continued on to the end although shortly after his attempt the Director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies tried to do the same.  Afterwards the man sitting next to me, a professor of history specializing in US wars, told me I did a good job.  But Michael McFaul's response shocked me a great deal.  He totally denied what I said about the Maidan, dismissing it as just Russian propaganda.  He stated that he, the US government and the Ukrainian government have studied the data carefully and found no evidence of Katchanovski's or anybody else's findings.  He also stated in his response that there was no evidence of US involvement in the shooting which my statement does not imply and a response that I regarded as a straw man. He also made it clear that he does not regard Katchanovski as competent and regards him as a lackey for Russian propaganda.

John Howard Wilhelm, Ph.D., received his doctorate in economics from the University of Michigan (1974) and is the author of Third Parties and Voting Reform: The American Dilemma, available as an e-book from www.nationalrenewal.org

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Facebook
October 21, 2015
Ivan Katchanovski
University of Ottawa

Replication by other scholars is the best way to check findings of existing studies. This specifically concerns the Maidan massacre and its analysis in my paper, which contains links to publically available data that make such replication easy to do. But there is still no other scholarly study of this crucial case of mass killing.

Papers in economics 'not reproducible'
Fears that discipline is particularly susceptible to statistical 'hacking' of data to gain a positive result
TIMESHIGHEREDUCATION.COM

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 #31
Human Rights in Ukraine
http://khpg.org
October 22, 2015
Ukraine's only trial over Maidan killings under threat
By Halya Coynash
 
The only trial so far underway of Berkut officers accused of gunning down Maidan protesters in February 2014 is in danger of ending in mistrial, while other investigations are being obstructed in part because the same people responsible for violations during Euromaidan are still now in positions of authority.

Two former Berkut special force officers - Serhiy Zinchenko and Pavlo Abroskin - are on trial, charged with direct involvement in the killing of 39 activists.  The men's lawyers say that their clients do not deny being on Institutska St, but they assert that there is no proof that they shot any of the victims.  Since they could face life imprisonment, their lawyers back in March this year applied for and were granted Ukraine's version of 'trial by jury'.  In such cases, the court is made up of two professional judges and three jurors.  The role of the jurors is fairly limited - even in a situation where the three jurors were in agreement, they could not override the position of the two judges.  They nonetheless serve as lay judges, and must be selected in the proper manner.

The trial is taking place at the Svyatoshynsky District Court in Kyiv, with two judges - presiding judge Serhiy Dyachuk and Marina Ozdoba, as well as one reserve judge - Andriy Skoryn.  The problem lies in the way that the three jury members, finally appointed in July, were selected.

A list of 13 'jury members' for that particular court was agreed at a meeting of the Kyiv City Council in April.  According to the Advocacy Advisory Panel, an initiative of lawyers representing Euromaidan victims and their families, the list was effectively put together using people already on the list for 'people's assessors', although the 2012 Criminal Procedure Code specifically prohibits the same people serving as people's assessors and as jurors.

There was absolutely no openness about the selection process, nor any announcement that jurors were being sought so that members of the public could put themselves forward.

At a press briefing on Oct 20, the members of the Advocacy Advisory Panel pointed out that the 'jurors' thus selected could in no way be considered representative of the population.  There can also be suspicion of a conflict of interests since many on the original list were themselves ex-police officers, wives of officers,   etc.  Three men from this list were finally selected on July 6 this year.

In fact, even without any reservations about individual jurors, the very process was so flawed that it is quite likely that any verdict, whether it found the men guilty or acquitted them, will be challenged.  This is acknowledged by the two defendants' lawyers, as well as the Advocacy Advisory Panel.  An appeal against the decision regarding jurors has now been lodged with the District Administrative Court in Kyiv.  Vitaly Tytych from the Advocacy Advisory Panel suggests that a new list of potential jurors should now be drawn up in full compliance with procedural requirements and with the opportunity for ordinary Ukrainians to put themselves forward as candidates.

Zinchenko and Abroskin have been in custody since April last year, however their commander Dmytro Sadovnyk is in hiding, after being released on 'house arrest' in September last year.  There was anger at the time, and the Prosecutor General's Office apparently initiated a criminal investigation against the judge - Svitlana Volkova - who had ordered Sadovnyk's release.  Nothing more has been heard of that criminal investigation.

There is no information either about Judge Yekaterina Sereda from the Pechersky District Court who in July this year released Tavakkul Ragimov from custody.  Ragimov was a current police officer who had not even been suspended from his job in the police force despite being charged with heading a group of 'titushki', or paid thugs involved in abductions; assaults; torture; robbery, etc. during Euromaidan.  He was, in fact, placed under house arrest because it was assumed that as a police officer, he would not abscond.  This is in marked contrast to cases involving much less serious crimes where people are taken into custody.

On Oct 16, Judge Larissa Tsokol from the Pechersky District Court ruled that another suspect Anatoly Logvinenko could have his electronic bracelet removed.  It remains to be seen whether he turns up at the next court hearing over serious charges relating to an ambush and violent attack on Automaidan activists on Jan 23, 2014.

It will soon be two years since unarmed Maidan protesters were gunned down in the centre of Kyiv, and despite all the promises, there has been pitiful progress in ensuring prosecutions of those suspected of even the gravest crimes.

Oleksandra Matviychuk, Head of the Centre for Civil Liberties, is clear where the problem lies.  In a recent interview she explained that "these crimes are being investigated and decisions taken by people who were themselves directly involved in committing them."  She says that this can result in anecdotal situations where Automaidan activists turn up to provide information for the investigators about how they were beaten up, etc. only to find the same people who beat them taking their evidence.

Matviychuk is convinced that if an international element is not introduced, they cannot hope for the results that the public expect.  Also, however, the special department set up within the Prosecutor General's Office needs to be given greater guarantees of independence and also better financial and technical assistance. That requires political will.  The legitimate means available for ensuring that judges do not abuse their position, under the guise of judicial independence, must also be applied.

As the second anniversary of Euromaidan approaches, they are planning, together with the lawyers representing Nebesna Sotnya [those killed during Euromaidan] and their families, to initiate an information campaign.  It is vital to ensure public demand for a proper investigation and answers to specific questions.  Why, for example, are 14 Berkut officers identified back in January 2014 still working and not even witnesses, let alone suspects, in the investigation into the Jan 23 attack on Automaidan activists?

Berkut and other police officers regularly appear at all court hearings, providing moral support for former colleagues.  Maidan supporters, those wanting justice for the victims seldom turn up, and here Matviychuk is blunt.  It is the public who must be active and show those under investigation, and the authorities, that they are monitoring the investigation and will do more to achieve justice than simply express indignation on social network pages.

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 #32
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
October 22, 2015
Bad News for Ukraine - Historic Cold Expected This Winter
By Paul Dunne

Well, that time of year is coming up, when the Anglophone press re-discovers all over again that it can get quite cold in Russia during the winter months.  But hold!  I have something a little more interesting to report.

According to TASS, Russian meteorologists think the coming winter will be a little special.  For a start, it is forecast to be much colder than usual.  Indeed, in some parts of the vast land of Russia, winter has already started - on the Yamal peninsula in north-western Siberia, temperatures fell to -18 degrees Celsius during some mid-October nights.  Nor will this be a once-off.  We all know about global warming (except in Florida), but according to Vladimir Melnikov, of the Russian Academy of Sciences, this hard winter may mark the beginning of a 60-year "cold cycle".

Since they are part of the same land mass, as in Russia, so in Ukraine. While the winter in Ukraine is milder than most parts of Russia, nevertheless, it is still cold.  And this one promises to be harder than normal.

How are Ukrainian building to be heated in such weather?  After all, the Russians have more than enough gas to keep them warm as toast throughout the cold months.  The Ukrainians have no gas of their own: they must buy gas - from Russia.

Gas supplies to Ukraine from Russia have been off and on throughout the year, simply because of Ukraine's unwillingness, or inability, to keep up with payments.  The tap was turned on again as recently as the twelfth of this month, when Russian Gazprom and Ukrainian Naftogaz managed to reach agreement.  Naftogaz paid $234 million in advance for October's supply, which will cost $500 million in total, and Gazprom reduced their price from $252 to $232 per 1,000 cubic metres.  With $500 million worth of help from the EU, Naftogas plans to store 2 billion cubic metres of gas for use in the coming winter.  However, Gazprom has warned that this will not be enough for the whole winter.  And if Melnikov's forecast proves accurate, Gazprom may well be proved right.

So what happens then?  A thorny question which doesn't appear to have occurred to Western commentators, who have indeed of late gone rather quiet on the subject of Ukraine.  Fair weather friends indeed.

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 #33
Kremlin chief of staff sees little progress in implementation of Minsk agreements on Ukraine

KRASNAYA POLYANA, Sochi. Oct 22 (Interfax) - Moscow is not inclined at the moment to make optimistic forecasts regarding the developments in settling the conflict in Ukraine, as the Minsk agreements have yet to be fulfilled, and Kyiv needs to arrange contacts with Donetsk and Luhansk representatives, Kremlin chief of staff Sergei Ivanov says.

"I would be cautious about making such optimistic forecasts. Surely, all parties involved in the conflict are declaring their commitment to the Minsk agreements in words. But as regards their implementation, I can't see much of progress so far," Ivanov told journalists on the sidelines of the Valdai International Discussion Club.

"I think there'll be no progress until the Ukrainian leadership realizes the obvious thing, that is, the need to arrange contacts with Donetsk and Luhansk. Because, without talking to a partner, no progress can be achieved, no matter how Germany, France, or Russia might want this. After all, we can't hold talks for them. But what is stipulated by the Minsk [agreements] needs to be fulfilled. We hope the Ukrainian leadership will follow the letter of the Minsk agreements," Ivanov said.

He said none of the forum's participants had asked him questions about Crimea this year, unlike a year ago.

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 #34
The Guardian
October 21, 2015
Ukraine elections: high stakes and dirty tricks in hotly contested vote
Local elections are both a referendum on Petro Poroshenko's rule and a jostle for power and influence among country's oligarchs
Shaun Walker in Kiev

On the side of the road to Kiev's main airport, Gennady Korban slipped out of his black Mercedes to unveil a new campaign poster for the Dill party. The billboard featured a hand dragging from the earth the head of Viktor Yanukovych, the former Ukrainian president who fled to Russia after the Maidan revolution last year.

"We need to create Mossad-style special operative groups to enter Russia and kidnap Yanukovych and his associates, and bring them back to face trial," said Korban, a businessman, who is barely 5ft and speaks in whispers, usually while puffing on a cigarette. The party has another campaign it wants to launch this week, promising to hang corrupt officials, though an aide admitted it "may not be legal".

Election fever is omnipresent in Ukraine this week as the country gears up for local polls on Sunday. Kiev and other cities are plastered with political billboards and engulfed in lively political debate. Korban is one of a field of candidates standing for mayor of the capital, where the incumbent, Vitaly Klitschko, the former heavyweight boxer, is expected to win.

There is no doubt that these elections are hotly contested, a year and a half after Maidan's demands for more inclusive politics triumphed. Look a bit closer though, and the outburst of healthy competitive democracy may not be all it seems. The stakes are high, but observers say much of the same dirty tricks and cynicism for which the country's political system has been known over the past two decades has not gone away.

These local elections, a year and a half after Petro Poroshenko won a presidential election, are being fought mainly on national issues rather than municipal fare such as potholes or nurseries. They are both a referendum on Poroshenko's rule and a jostle for power and influence among the oligarchic and business clans that still dominate Ukraine.

Korban said Poroshenko was "leading the country into the abyss", and the Dill party promises nationalisation and deoligarchisation in a future Ukraine. This is all well and good: critics of Poroshenko say he has indeed made too little progress on tackling the country's oligarchs and their influence over politics. The only problem is Korban's own biography. Forbes has estimated his fortune, which he admits he made from "raiding" companies in the 1990s, to be around $150m (£97m).

He is a long-time business associate of Igor Kolomoisky, a billionaire who was removed from his position as governor of Dnipropetrovsk this year and whom many see as the most troubling oligarch of all.

The Dill party got its name because ukrop, the Russian word for dill, was used as a derogatory term by pro-Russia separatists to refer to Ukrainian forces in the conflict in the east of the country, and now the term has been reclaimed by the Ukrainians themselves. "We are true patriots ... and we have earned a moral right to refer to ourselves as dill," said Korban.

Kolomoisky funded many of the volunteer battalions who led the fight against Russia-backed separatists last year, providing weapons and equipment and turning the tide in Dnipropetrovsk. Korban, who was Kolomoisky's deputy in the city, admits they used "non-traditional" methods to defeat the separatists.

Critics say their goals for the election are less than transparent. "Of course their main goal is to protect their business and financial interests," said Volodymyr Fesenko, a political analyst.

While there is no doubt that Kolomoisky played a role in combating separatism in the east, many are sceptical about his new party. "You can wrap it in patriotic wrapping paper but it's basically all about money," said Victoria Voytsitska, an MP with the Samopomich party.

Korban is unlikely to win in Kiev, but the Dill party has more chance in Dnipropetrovsk, Kolomoysky's power base. There it is fighting against a candidate from the Opposition Bloc, the remnants of Yanukovych's former party. The race is expected to go into a second round and to be extremely close - and not necessarily fair. "All the old tricks are in play there now, and we can expect it to be very strongly contested, with even a possibility of violence," said Fesenko.

In the complex and fractured Ukrainian political and business landscape, there are a number of different battles in different regions: allies in some areas can be bitterest enemies in others. Poroshenko's ally Klitschko is expected to win in Kiev, but elsewhere the governing coalition may struggle.

The former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who was jailed under Yanukovych and was widely seen as a spent force when released at the height of Maidan protests, has made a surprise recovery, running a campaign focused on gas tariffs, and is expected to do modestly well.

Elsewhere, all manner of dirty tricks have been employed. The Reform Movement has plastered Kiev in its advertisements, which inexplicably feature a rhinoceros wearing a blue T-shirt, but nobody really knows who they are, what they stand for, and who funds them.

Parties have been registered with names similar to established parties to confuse voters, while old tactics of voter buying are still being used in hotly contested areas. "Whereas before people simply handed out cash, now there have been instances of people giving out electronic cards which can be spent in certain shops - you get half the money first, and if the candidate wins they will put the other half on the card," Fesenko said.

The results of these elections will provide for a cabinet reshuffle and, some hope, maybe even early parliamentary elections. Whether the fight is mainly about political principles or power and influence remains an open question.

Korban gave a withering evaluation of Poroshenko and his time in charge: "The political elite has not really changed in Ukraine, this is just one part of the old elite, who got into power by jumping on the back of protesters. They are not capable of carrying out real reforms."

A high-ranking official gave an equally withering assessment of Korban and his partner Kolomoisky: "He wants to change the president, it's as simple as that. All of this political activity is about putting on pressure and trying to win back influence."

The real worry for Ukrainians is that both sides could be right.

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 #35
Kyiv Post
October 21, 2015
Poll: Most Ukrainians don't understand how to vote in Oct. 25 elections
By Olena Goncharova

With the campaign for Oct. 25 local elections in its final days, more voters know who they want to vote for than how to vote.

A poll shows that a third of voters have decided on candidates while the same poll shows only 20 percent of voters say they know how to vote.

But most -- at least 55 percent of respondents all over Ukraine -- say that the local elections will change nothing, while 4 percent believe the situation will be even worse. In the embattled Donbas Oblast, 70 percent think the election won't help.

These are some of the findings from a poll conducted by the respected Democratic Initiatives Foundation on Oct. 8-20.

It also found that only 12 percent of respondents say they understand the new election law, meaning the complex voting procedure will inevitably cause problems with vote counts and distribution of seats.

The complexities will also undermine people's trust in a "transparent election process," says Iryna Bekeshkina, who heads the Democratic Initiatives Foundation.

Ukrainians will get three or four ballots, depending on the city or town they live in.

Cities with more than 90,000 residents will choose the mayor, members of the city council and oblast council. Residents of cities with up to 90,000 residents will also vote for members of the councils in their city districts.

Experts say that even the local election commissions' workers often don't know all the details of voting procedure and so make mistakes.

OPORA elections watchdog counted more than 1,081 cases of violations in this election campaign thus far.

Only a third of respondents say they've already decided which candidates they are going to vote for and 49 percent of them are interested to find out more about the candidates and the parties' programs.

Based on the parties' lists, Nataliya Lynnyk, deputy head of the Committee of Voters of Ukraine, a nationwide election watchdog, says there won't be many new faces as 60 percent of the lists are dominated by the people from "old elites." Also, passing the 5 percent threshold would be a difficult task for many new parties.

Some 13.5 percent of respondents say they will vote for the candidate of the President Petro Poroshenko Bloc, while 8.4 percent consider voting for the candidate of Opposition Bloc - which is well-stocked with members of the former ruling Party of Regions.

Candidates of Batkivshyna and Samopomich pro-government parties have 6.8 and 7.8 percent of support respectively. However, there are 37.5 percent of undecided voters, according to the poll.

"This means that most of the voters won't make an informed decision," Olga Aivazovska head of OPORA says.

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 36
Buzzfeed.com
October 21, 2015
Washington's Man In Ukraine Can't Stop His Country's Corrupt Cronies
Ukraine's Western allies backed Arseniy Yatsenyuk when he became prime minister and vowed to "wage a war" on graft. But as the country's fight against corruption stalls, many in Kiev see his government as part of the problem.
By Max Seddon
BuzzFeed News World Correspondent

KIEV, Ukraine - When Ukraine's revolution swept him to power last spring, Arseniy Yatsenyuk vowed to become a "kamikaze politician" pushing unpopular reforms and "waging a war" on graft.

A year and a half later, Ukraine's prime minister is fighting for his political future after making slow progress on those reforms - and watching his allies become embroiled in corruption allegations themselves. Swiss prosecutors are investigating one of his top parliamentary leaders for paying bribes in a scheme to set up a nuclear power plant. The official in charge of repatriating ill-gotten foreign assets is facing criminal charges over luxury homes she somehow obtained in Britain and France. Investigative journalists revealed how a Yatsenyuk-linked billionaire used his political connections to win a government tender for duty-free space in Kiev's airport.

Frustration over Ukraine's sluggish reform process and anti-corruption efforts is fracturing its pro-Western governing coalition, creating rifts with the United States and European Union. Popular Front, Yatsenyuk's political party, is polling so badly that it decided not to run in local elections on Oct. 25, only a year after it won a surprise majority of the parliamentary vote. An IRI poll published in August found that only 3% of Ukrainians were satisfied with the pace of change in the country; an astonishing 51% said that the government of Viktor Yanukovych - which protesters overthrew last year in large part due to anger at his appropriation of untold billions in state funds - did a better job fighting corruption.

"Definitely, much more must be done," said Danylo Lubkivsky, an adviser to Yatsenyuk. Despite that, "if the government was corrupt, we would never receive any money from the international community," he added. "There is only one person who gets benefits - Putin."

Yatsenyuk's tenure has exposed the difficulties and contradictions Ukraine faces in escaping the crony clan politics plaguing it since independence more than 20 years ago. His cabinet is stacked with fresh-faced, English-speaking ministers pledging a move towards transparent, Western-style governance. Yet in Yatsenyuk and President Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine is led by politicians with deep roots in the very corrupt back-door clan politics they say they seek to destroy. The equal division of power between their offices has slowed the legal process and given rise to countless backroom spats. Several officials in the governing coalition speak of a powerful "shadow government" of informal allies with longstanding connections to the president and prime minister who wield vast influence over political decisions and state-owned companies that loom over Ukraine's economy.

"It's the same house of cards - they've just reshuffled the deck," said Viktoria Voytsitska, a coalition lawmaker and secretary of the parliamentary energy committee. "They're still defending the same business interests of the same oligarchs."

Publicly, the U.S. and EU have backed Ukraine's government to the hilt in its effort to reform while fighting Russian economic pressure and support for a war in its east. Privately, several Western diplomats express serious doubts about whether Yatsenyuk and Poroshenko have the wherewithal, or even the political will, to smash the system that raised them. "They know they have to change the system, but they are too much creatures of the system to do it," one said. "We are very disappointed" in Ukraine's progress on reform, the diplomat continued. "It gives ammunition to all the member states who were always skeptical."

At 41, the skinny, bespectacled Yatsenyuk is part of the first generation of Ukrainians to come of age after the Soviet Union's collapse offered them experiences of the West. His older sister Alina is married to an American and lives in Santa Barbara, California. Though Yatsenyuk never studied outside his hometown of Chernivtsi in western Ukraine, he speaks the fluent, rhetorical English of the Davos man, to great effect among Western interlocutors. In the pro-Western government brought to power in 2004's Orange Revolution, he served as economy minister, then the country's youngest-ever foreign minister.

Yatsenyuk's combination of English fluency and economic literacy were so rare among senior Ukrainian officials that they quickly made him a favorite in Western capitals. He and Poroshenko are the first Ukrainian leaders to speak English at all. Sergei Arbuzov, who negotiated for an International Monetary Fund bailout that collapsed during the revolt against Yanukovych, would show up to meetings in leather jackets. "Ukraine lost trust with the international community a long time ago - it takes a lot to win that back," a Western diplomat said. During the protests last year, that skill set saw Victoria Nuland, the U.S. diplomat in charge of Ukraine policy, turn to him as a potential compromise prime minister. "Yats is the guy who's got the economic experience, the governing experience," she said in an infamous leaked phone call.

Though U.S. officials say they were never under any illusions about the task facing Ukraine - the country even reaching Romania's progress by 1995 is considered a high benchmark for success - the lack of action on corruption has alarmed even many of Ukraine's biggest supporters in Washington. In July, Vice President Joe Biden directly warned Yatsenyuk at a Ukrainian business forum. "This is it, Mr. Prime Minister. The next couple years, the next couple months will go a long way to telling the tale," he said. "Now you have to put people in jail." After the forum, however, President Barack Obama dropped in on Yatsenyuk's meeting in Biden's office - a gesture Ukrainians interpreted as support in his turf war with Poroshenko.

"People in Washington ask me, 'Why do they have to steal so much?' And I tell them, 'Why not? You're letting them get away with it,'" said Balasz Jarabik, a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "That's how U.S. support is understood in Kiev."

Officials and diplomats say that Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk genuinely want to avoid the infighting that plagued the government that came to power in 2005 after Ukraine's pro-Western Orange Revolution, in which they both served. "Neither of them have suicidal inclinations," a senior adviser to Poroshenko said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Relations between president and prime minister are like "this joke about a turtle and the snake who go across a river," the adviser said. "They agree that the turtle would not [dive] because snakes can not swim, and the snake agrees not to bite, because they would drown." (In most versions of the story, the snake bites the turtle anyway, though the official did not comment on this.)

Yatsenyuk's own formative experiences came in the rough-and-tumble world of Ukrainian clan politics. Two college friends from Chernivtsi with whom he started a law firm, Andriy Pyshny and Andriy Ivanchuk, flanked Yatsenyuk as his political fortunes rose. "Pyshny is really a good one; he's relatively not corrupt. But Ivanchuk is a very bad guy," a former colleague of all three men said. "I think of them as the angel and the devil on his shoulder."

In 2009, as Yatsenyuk ran for president, Pyshny fell seriously ill, leaving Ivanchuk control over his campaign. Ivanchuk hired Timofei Sergeitsev and Dmitry Kulikov, vaguely KGB-linked Russian political consultants known as "Tima and Dima," who told Yatsenyuk to adopt a militaristic platform in an ill-guided attempt to win over Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine. They were occasionally joined by a third Russian, Alexei Sitnikov, whose business cards listed his occupation as "color revolutions and coups d'état." Their smoke-and-mirrors techniques were no match for Yatsenyuk's rivals, who ran a gritty smear campaign accusing Yatsenyuk of being Jewish. Despite public assurances from Ukraine's chief rabbi that Yatsenyuk was not Jewish at all, he never shook off the accusations, and finished a distant fourth.

Pyshny and Ivanchuk retain close ties to Yatsenyuk, who is said to run a tight inner circle and has never built a broader political support structure. "He missed the opportunity to build a grassroots party," said Orysia Lutseyvich, a fellow at Chatham House who set up Yatsenyuk's Open Ukraine foundation when Yatsenyuk was foreign minister. "He does not carry well among simple people - he's afraid of the babushka in Bessarabka," Kiev's central market. Pyshny now runs Oshchadbank, Ukraine's state bank; Ivanchuk chairs the economic committee in parliament.

According to some of Poroshenko's allies, they are joined by Nikolai Martynenko, a lawmaker in Yatsenyuk's party with influence over the energy sector. Igor Skosar, a former lawmaker in Tymoshenko's party, claimed last year that he paid Martynenko a $6 million bribe in 2012 so that Yatsenyuk, who then chaired it, would put him on the party list. Swiss prosecutors told BuzzFeed News they are investigating Martynenko over bribery and money laundering allegations which, according to Czech media, are related to contracts for a nuclear power plant with a Czech contractor. Martynenko has said that the allegations are a Russian plot to discredit him, and denies the case's very existence.

Corruption is so rife in Ukrainian bureaucracy that ministers say they essentially have to start anew. "When I hear the words 'institutional memory,' I get scared, because they mismanaged everything for 20 years," Economy Minister Aivaras Abramovicius told BuzzFeed News. Yatsenyuk's critics within the governing coalition say that he has not done enough to fight those vested interests. "We essentially have a shadow government, a parallel government," Mikheil Saakashvili, the former Georgian president and university friend of Poroshenko's who now governs Odessa province, recently said. "Ukraine is owned by the oligarchs like a joint stock company."

The problem is compounded by Ukraine's political system, which distributes power between Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk equally and where party finance is notoriously murky, requiring both men to cut deals with oligarchs, insiders say. Oligarchs, Poroshenko included, also control Ukraine's major TV stations, which gives them enormous influence over public opinion and leverage over officials. When Poroshenko fought the oligarch Igor Kolomoisky over Ukrnafta, the country's largest oil and gas producer, earlier this year, Ivanchuk, who is one of Kolomoisky's business partners, blocked a bill to return it to the state. Though Yatsenyuk eventually got the bill passed, Kolomoisky still retains untoward influence over Ukrnafta, according to Sergei Leshchenko, a lawmaker who spearheaded the push to take back the company.

"Kolomoisky's people are still there, and they've let him put off his payments [on the company's $425 million debt to the state] until the end of the year," Leshchenko, a former investigative journalist, told BuzzFeed News last month. "He isn't paying the dividends or the revenue. Yatsenyuk isn't suing or filing criminal charges. I am sure there's a conspiracy between Kolomoisky and Yatsenyuk."

Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine's richest man, also sees Yatsenyuk as a major ally in his attempt to retain his influence and wealth, according to two people who discussed the matter with him. Akhmetov's fortune, concentrated in industrial holdings in eastern Ukraine, has plummeted from $22 billion to $7 billion since war broke out there last year, according to Bloomberg. His closest political allies, a group of officials who ran their mutual hometown of Donetsk as their personal fiefdom, fled the country along with Yanukovych. "I've been knocked down, but not knocked out," Akhmetov said, according to one of the sources. DTEK, Akhmetov's sprawling energy monopoly, owns a number of assets it bought from the state at knockdown prices while Yanukovych was president. With he and his team gone, the famously soccer-mad Akhmetov is fond of saying that "Arseny Petrovich is the Lionel Messi of the Ukrainian government," using Yatsenyuk's patronymic, according to a Western diplomat who knows him.

Ukraine's Western partners say they are seriously concerned the country's leadership will not make good on its reform commitments. The country has passed the sweeping macroeconomic reforms under the terms of its $40 billion IMF bailout, but has made little progress elsewhere. Another diplomat recalled a meeting over bailout terms in 2014 where Yatsenyuk screamed at senior European officials, demanding they hand over the money immediately. "They can only be helped so much as they are willing to help themselves," the diplomat said. "This is the most money the EU has ever given to a third country, and we're not seeing the result."

Some former members of the government say that institutional resistance is so strong as to make reforms all but impossible. "I was never invited to do reforms," said Pavlo Sheremeta, who resigned as Yatsenyuk's economy minister last year. "The money came in and it got much tougher. There's no sense of urgency unless there's no money in the coffers."

Speaking at a conference in Kiev last month, Yatsenyuk said the struggle against corruption was ultimately not his concern. "I am not responsible for the prosecutor's office ... nor for judiciary. I am doing my jobs: to fix the economy, to be back on track in terms of reforms, to provide energy efficiency reform, to provide financial resources for the Ukrainian military, to improve corporate governance for state-owned enterprises, " he said. "Everyone is to make his own job."

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 #37
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
October 19, 2015
Ukraine Buys 40,000 Tons of Coal a Day from 'Russian Terrorists'
Very nice of those invading Russian terrorists to sell precious raw materials to the country they are supposedly trying to take over

Although this article uses the term "separatists," as does Western media, the Ukrainian government and media regularly and almost without exception refer to the armed forces of the Donbass republics (and often the population in general) as "terrorists" or even "Russian terrorists." This is the Kiev regime's way of portaying themselves as fighting a foreign enemy as well as dehumanizing the people they are persistantly shelling.

This article originally appeared at Sputnik

Ukraine is buying 40,000 tons of coal a day from the separatists, a Kiev-based newspaper wrote, citing a government report on the purchase of coal in territories of the Lugansk and Donetsk regions that remain out of control of the Kiev authorities.

"All our anthracite coal is coming from the uncontrolled territories... The mines are all there and we are still able to get it from there," Korrespondent newspaper quoted Energy and Coal Minister Oleksandr Svetelik as saying on Saturday.

Svetelik added that nearly as much coal was coming from Donbass areas, controlled by the government.

The minister said that buying coal abroad now made no sense as the price of imported coal was almost twice that of the domestically produced coal.

He also said that before November 1 Ukraine planned to store up 3.2 million tons of coal it needed for the winter season.

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 #38
Moscow Times
October 21, 2015
A Struggling Ukraine Is Bad News for Russians
By Vladislav Inozemtsev
Vladislav Inozemtsev is a fellow with the IWM in Vienna and non-resident senior associate with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

As a Muscovite, it seemed to me in 2004 that the events unfolding in Ukraine would determine the future of Russia. The more the Kremlin dismissed the chance that Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko could win the elections, the more it seemed he was destined for victory. And finally, despite enormous efforts by President Vladimir Putin and his Kremlin spin doctors, the Ukrainian people had their say. After days of sit-in demonstrations at Maidan, the democratic candidate won on the third round of voting. That spawned hope that Ukraine would join the European Union within a decade and provide Russia with a model of its own future.

Nothing of the sort happened. The Ukrainian economy, which had enjoyed average annual growth of 8.3 percent in 2000-04, grew by only 1.1 percent in 2005-09. Rather than develop a strategy for freeing the country from its dependence on Russia gas and Moscow's influence, the political elite in Kiev began squabbling over who would receive the right to conduct the gas negotiations with the Kremlin and get rich in the process. In return for that gas, in 2010 Moscow negotiated the right to station its military in Crimea in perpetuity - a move that set the stage for its later annexation.

Corruption has not declined in Ukraine since 2004. If anything, it has grown. Leaders declared their intention to integrate with Europe but did almost nothing to make that a reality. Instead, they focused primarily on domestic policy, on power moves between oligarchs and their special interests.

In practice, the call for freedom of the press became a cover for the struggle between the owners of private television channels and other media. Not surprisingly, the "democrats" lost parliamentary elections in 2006 and 2007, and the presidential election in 2010, with Yushchenko receiving just 5.5 percent of the vote.

Under his successor, former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine followed the so-called "Putin path" - at least in the sense of large-scale corruption and the privatization of state power. According to Western sources, the Yanukovych bureaucracy plundered and pocketed up to 10-12 percent of the country's gross domestic product. The lifestyles of the ruling elite became public knowledge after Yanukovych fled the country and the new leadership nationalized his personal residence and part of his property.

In 2014, the Ukrainian people once again demonstrated that they have self-respect, share European values and intend to build a better future. However, they have made very little progress along the European path in the 18 months since. Virtually nothing has been done to find the billions of dollars stolen under the previous government and even the widely advertised law on lustration has done little to push senior officials away from the "feeding trough" of government funds.

Functionaries who served under Yanukovych have begun returning to Kiev and many of the oligarchs who financed the separatists in the east have not paid in any way for their actions. It seems that the only "wildly committed" anti-corruption fighter left is former Georgian President turned Odessa region Governor Mikheil Saakashvili - who has not become too "Ukrainianized" to root out graft.

As the economy worsens, the government is busy restructuring its debt rather than recovering stolen funds, improving the investment climate or waging a real fight against bureaucracy and corruption.

Today the West is more concerned about the fate of Ukraine than it was in the mid-2000s, but only because it is the victim of a war that Russia provoked. However, that agenda has almost completely eclipsed any other. As a result, within a year or two Europe will stop hoping that Ukraine becomes a "normal" country. It will continue providing assistance out of simple inertia, but nothing more. The day is apparently not far off when "normalcy" in Ukraine will signify that corruption has become routine and the country experiences another exodus of its young and talented people.

Of course, now that Ukraine has embarked on the path of Westernization, it will doubtless continue in the same direction. The ideals expressed in 2004-05 have not faded and the victims of February 2014 will never be forgotten. More than one Maidan, more than one revolution and more than one period filled with new expectations await the country in the future. I do not worry about the future of the Ukrainian people: now that they have started throwing off their Soviet past, they will eventually step clear of it. There is no going back. If there were, the events of 2014 would not have followed those of 2004.

Of course, the more serious problem concerns Russia. Contrary to the hopes of my friends in Kiev, Russia will not fall apart as a result of internal tensions and the economy will not collapse under the burden of funding Crimea. To the contrary, every failure in Ukraine, every delay in the fight against corruption and the struggle to reform the economy, all foot-dragging in the process of European integration plays right into the hands of Russia's most reactionary forces. They like nothing more than watching a country with a democratic leadership and European aspirations degenerate into a failed state.

And the more the Russian people equate democracy and freedom in Ukraine with economic chaos and a new batch of corrupt elites, the greater the problem becomes for the Russian state, Ukraine, Europe and, most importantly, for the Russian people.

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 #39
http://newcoldwar.org
October 21, 2015
New survey of Ukrainians: More than half say country is headed in 'wrong direction'
[Graphics here http://newcoldwar.org/new-survey-of-ukrainians-more-than-half-say-country-is-headed-in-wrong-direction/]

IFIS survey Sept 2015 2The International Foundation for Electoral Systems has published a survey of 1,558 Ukrainians conducted in September 2015. The survey is titled 'Two years after Maidan: Ukrainians [are] committed to democracy, disappointed with unmet aspirations'. The 28-page survey was funded by USAID and can be read here.

The survey does not include residents of the people's republics of Donetsk and Lugansk.

Here are some results from the survey:

-Fifty six per cent of those surveyed said Ukraine was headed in the "wrong direction" while only 20 per cent said it is headed in the right direction.

-The biggest issues facing Ukraine are the following. By far, the largest concern is the conflict in Donbas. That is followed by concern (by order of importance) over high prices, corruption, poverty and unemployment and "general economic problems". Ranking low on the list are "problems with Russia" and "health care".

-The most frequent recourse to paying a bribe is in order to receive health care.

-Only two per cent of Ukrainians believe they live in a "full democracy". Sixty six per cent believe Ukraine is a "democracy but with major problems" or "not a democracy at all".

-In central and western Ukraine, a majority wants the country's primary foreign policy to be aligned with the European Union. But in the east and south, residents are divided on the subject.  In eastern Ukraine, 50 per cent of people want a foreign policy orientation that is aligned with Russia or with "both" Russia and the EU.

-On most of the important issues that the Euromaidan movement was supposed to tackle, most respondents believe there has been little progress or "none at all".

On confidence in political leaders, see image:

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 #40
Wall Street Journal
October 22, 2015
U.S. to Ship Modified Radar Systems to Ukraine
Modifications would prevent Ukraine from snooping on Russia
By JULIAN E. BARNES and  GORDON LUBOLD

Advanced radar systems being shipped to Ukraine to counter artillery strikes by pro-Russia separatists have been modified to prevent them from peering into Russia, according to U.S. officials.

The modifications drew fire from a leading Republican critic of the Obama administration, who called it a misguided attempt to mollify Russian President Vladimir Putin.
President Barack Obama signed an order on Sept. 29 to give Ukraine two radar systems worth $10 million each. U.S. officials said this week that the systems would arrive at Ukraine's Yavoriv training ground by mid-November.

U.S. Army officials said they hope the radar would provide Ukraine with a new capability for stopping artillery and rocket attacks launched by separatists. Other officials said the transfer also would send a message to Kiev that Washington's support for its security forces remains strong.

But with a cease-fire holding in eastern Ukraine and artillery attacks significantly reduced, the U.S. doesn't want the equipment to antagonize Russia. The modifications are supposed to ensure that Ukrainian forces don't escalate the current conflict by using the new systems to counter fire originating from Russian territory, officials said.

Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the modifications to weaken the radar were symptomatic of a "delusional view" by the Obama administration that Mr. Putin will modify his behavior in Ukraine.

"This is part of their continuing effort to appease Vladimir Putin," he said. "It sends a signal to Russia and Ukraine that we are not willing to seriously confront Vladimir Putin's aggression."

Republicans, and some Democrats, have been urging the Obama administration to provide more systems to Ukraine, including Javelin antitank missiles. The Obama administration has been unwilling to provide any equipment that could be construed as offensive weaponry.

Restrictions on the intelligence the U.S. has provided Ukraine have led to criticism in Congress and in Kiev. Satellite imagery provided by the U.S. typically only includes Ukrainian territory, obscuring activity and troop buildups on Russia's side of the border.

Russian officials didn't immediately reply to a request for comment. Moscow typically has been critical of American and allied support for Kiev.

The deliveries come as the U.S. steps up training for Ukrainian forces. The U.S. has been training Ukrainian National Guard units for some time, but those troops generally don't serve on the front lines. Beginning next month, the Pentagon will begin training regular Army units, defense officials said. The training will include six battalions, including five conventional and one special operations force battalion.

The systems, known as AN/TPQ-36 counter-artillery radar, will be given to front-line Ukrainian army troops to use.

U.S. forces plan to begin training on how to use them as soon as they arrive. U.S. Army officials said the systems will protect against both rocket and artillery attacks.

Army officials identified surplus radar that could be sent to Ukraine last summer. But the transfer had to be approved by the White House. Officials said giving Ukraine the systems was consistent with the current policy of providing nonlethal defensive material.

The U.S. has spent months vetting Ukrainian units that would use the new systems. Officials said the vetting took longer than expected but would be complete by the time the radar systems arrive next month.

The radar systems have a range of at least 15 miles, and represent a significant advance from the U.S.-provided Lightweight Counter Mortar Radar systems that Ukrainian forces have been using to pinpoint artillery fire. U.S. officials said Ukrainians have developed innovative tactics for the use of the lightweight systems, and hope they will do the same with the larger, longer range systems.

But U.S. officials said the new radar are likely to provide a tempting target for any Russian troops active in eastern Ukraine.

U.S. officials said they are worried that Russian forces will target the radar, either seeking to jam or destroy the equipment, and will train vetted Ukrainian forces on how to minimize chances it can be detected by Russian forces.

U.S. Army officials have identified six surplus Q-36 systems currently stored in a Pennsylvania depot.

If Congress approves additional money and the Ukrainians show that they can use the systems effectively, officials said, the transfer of the other four would be considered.

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 #41
Euromaidan Press
http://euromaidanpress.com
October 12, 2015
Ukraine at 'final stage of saying goodbye to Soviet past,' Kyiv expert says
By Paul Goble

Over the past six month, polls show that Ukrainian attitudes toward Russians have improved slightly but this does not mean that more of them want to be integrated in any entity dominated by Russia. Instead, it represents a sobering up from the earlier euphoria about Europe and a desire to become a normal independent country.

Aleksey Garan of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy says that these shifts represent "the concluding stage of saying goodbye to the Soviet past. In the future, [Ukraine and Russia] will each go along their separate paths."

"An enormous number of [Ukrainians] are for better relations with Russia... No one wants to fight with a neighbor, but no one wants to put up with his outbursts either," the Ukrainian scholar says. Instead, it has become finally clear that we will not be able to live in one apartment. We are neighbors, but from the point of view of Ukrainians we no longer can be called fraternal peoples or strategic partners."

Garan's conclusions are quoted by Tatyana Ivzhenko of Moscow's "Nezavisimaya gazeta" today in a report about new research that has been carried out by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology and the Kucherin Democratic Initiative Foundation concerning Ukrainian attitudes about Russians and Russia.

The two institutes found that despite a somewhat more positive view of Russians than six months ago, Ukrainians do not want to be part of any Russian-dominated entity let alone part of the Russian Federation. The share of Ukrainians favoring membership in the Russian-dominated Customs Union remains unchanged at 18.6 percent.

Half of all Ukrainians back developing closer relations with the European Union, but slightly more than a quarter of all Ukrainians - 27 percent - now oppose having their country join either the Customs Union or the EU, the former because of Russian dominance and the latter because of recent disappointments at the level of help Ukraine has received.

Until 2014, the researchers say, "Ukrainians always were more positively disposed to the Russian Federation than Russians, according to Levada Center polls, were to Ukraine. But now the attitudes of Ukrainians to Russia and Russians to Ukraine are almost equal in terms of positive and negative attitudes.

About a third of each nation has a positive attitude toward the other's country, and just under 60 percent in both has a negative one. Those global attitudes track as well on the views Ukrainians and Russians have about the implementation of a visa regime between the two countries and other such measures.

But the most striking and important change in Ukrainian attitudes toward the Russian Federation is this: In 2009, 23 percent of Ukrainians supported the idea of some combination of Ukraine and Russia into a single state. Now, fewer than ten percent do - a figure identical to the percentage of Russians who would like to see a common state.

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 #42
UAPOST.US
Ukrainian american media
www.uapost.us
October 17, 2015
New Film Exposes Russia's Mass Murder of Ukrainians, Aggression that Continues Today

Russia hid details about the mass starvation on an unimaginable scale by Stalin in the 1930s and afterward until archives were opened following Ukraine's independence in 1991.

Ukraine is a nation interrupted, its identity and promise stolen by invaders and predators for centuries.

Ukraine's principle oppressor has been, and remains, Russia where leaders like Vladimir Putin propagate the fiction that Ukraine is "little Russia". But the two are distinctive and the Ukrainian language is as different from Russian as is Spanish from French.

Putin's postulation is not only inaccurate, but deeply hurtful and insulting, given the historical and ongoing abuse by Moscow of Ukraine. In the 1930s, Joseph Stalin perpetrated one of the greatest crimes against humanity in history by purposely starving to death millions of Ukrainians for resisting his Five Year Plan to collectivize and industrialize agriculture.

Finally, a film will be released in the new year that portrays Stalin's monstrous policies and how they brought about The Great Famine of 1933, known in Ukrainian as the Holodomor (death by starvation).

A new movie is entitled Bitter Harvest and stars veteran actor Terence Stamp and new British sensation Max Irons, in his first leading man role. It is a love story set during one of history's darkest moments and portrays the history you don't know and cannot imagine.

Canadian Ian Ihnatowycz produced this film to set the record straight for the West about the suffering of Ukrainians at the hands of Russia, a reality that still continues. His parents and grandparents fled the country during the Second World War.

"Like all Ukrainians, my family suffered enormously over the years," he said. "There isn't a Ukrainian alive who doesn't know about the persecution, executions and starvation. Given the importance of what happened, and that few outside Ukraine knew about it because it had been covered up, the story of this genocide needed to be told. It's relevant today."

The scale of The Great Famine remained hidden by the Soviets, but in 1991 Ukraine declared independence and opened up the Soviet archives to the world. These revelations led to a 2003 United Nations Joint Statement, signed by Russia, that declared the Holodomor had taken 7 to 10 million innocent lives. Then on October 23, 2008, the European Parliament adopted a resolution recognizing the Holodomor as a crime against humanity.

The movie is a fitting backdrop to the current violence against Ukraine by Russia. In 1933, alarming reports about mass starvation were reported in the British press, but ignored in the U.S. That same year, the U.S. recognized the Soviet Union officially and in 1934, Stalin won membership into the League of Nations.

Today, concern about Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine has been muted considering that it is Europe's largest country, the size of Germany and Poland combined, with 45 million people and a toppling economy.

Several books about the Holodomor have been published since but the most comprehensive is Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, written in 2010 by Yale Professor Timothy Snyder. The slaughter he documents and details is, quite frankly, difficult to comprehend.

"More than five million people starved to death in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, most of them in Soviet Ukraine. The hunger was caused by collective agriculture, but the starvation was caused by politics," he wrote. "Then in the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938, the Soviet leadership identified peasants, the victims of collectivization, as the prime threat to Soviet power. Nearly 700,000 were executed, although the true number may be somewhat higher."

Another 300,000 were executed by Ukrainian government puppets of Moscow and hundreds of thousands more shipped off to Gulags and work camps.

Then the Second World War followed. In 1941, Hitler invaded Soviet Ukraine and Belarus. Between 1933 and 1945, Snyder estimates that a total of 14 million non-combatants were killed by Stalin and Hitler in the Bloodlands, principally Ukraine, Poland and Belarus.

The Holocaust, that took the lives of six million Jews across Europe, took place during this time and has been well documented and depicted. But Bitter Harvest represents the first feature film to expose the world to the catastrophic Holodomor mass murder.

Naturally, the film is disturbing. Stamp's performance is riveting, as the patriarch of a family facing extinction, as is Max Irons' poignant portrayal of Stamp's grandson, a young artist and that of Samantha Barks as his lover.

Irons and Barks are ranking members of the "Brit Pack", young and talented artists from Britain who are successful internationally. He is best known for his roles in The Riot Club in 2014, The White Queen and The Host in 2013, Barks for her performance in the movie version of Les Miserables and Stamp is an acclaimed veteran of stage and screen.

"Distribution plans are being negotiated and the film should be available to the public in the New Year," said Ihnatowycz.

The movie was filmed at Pinewood Studios and on location in Ukraine where final scenes were shot just days before Ukraine's corrupt former President opted in late 2013 to join Russia instead of the European Union. That decision sparked mass street protests throughout Ukraine and eventually his overthrow.

In spring 2014, Putin took advantage of the chaos and sent in operatives to destabilize and occupy Crimea and the Donbas. His objective was to invade and annex most, if not all, of Ukraine, but resistance has been heroic.

"It's ironic that before we even finished our film we had yet another example of Russia's aggression against Ukraine and history repeating itself," said Ihnatowycz.

This time, Ukraine is once more a victim of Russian predation and once again a casualty of Russian propaganda and tepid concern by world leaders.

For these and other reasons, Bitter Harvest is an important movie that everyone should see. Its relevance is undeniable and enlightening.

This is the real narrative of Ukraine, an unbowed but bruised nation with defiant resilience, still yearning to be free.

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 #43
From: director@cast.ru (Ruslan Pukhov)
Date: 20.10.2015
Subject: Brothers Armed: Military Aspects of the Crisis in Ukraine. Second edition.

Brothers Armed: Military Aspects of the Crisis in Ukraine offers an in-depth look at the state of the military in both Russia and Ukraine, as well as the history, political circumstances and events leading to the annexation of Crimea and outbreak of conflict in eastern Ukraine.

In this updated and expanded second edition, Brothers Armed builds on the critical analysis presented in the first, examining the military reform efforts of both Russia and Ukraine, the antecedents to Russian intervention in Crimea, the military and political mechanics of the intervention itself, and the nature of and grounds for the subsequent Russian annexation. New essays examine what has transpired in the region since the annexation of Crimea and assess the causes and possible consequences of the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.

With an updated foreword by David M. Glantz, chief editor of "The Journal of Slavic  Military Studies" and an afterword by Peter B. Zwack, former US
Senior Defense Official and Defense Attaché to the Russian Federation. Includes maps, photos, timeline of key events, and index.

Brothers Armed: Military Aspects of the Crisis in Ukraine (Second Edition)
Edited by Colby Howard and Ruslan Pukhov
ISBN 978-1-879944-65-7
Published by East View Press, 2015
paperback, 333 pages
$89.95

Ordering info:
email: books@eastview.com
phone: +1-952-252-1201
web: www.eastviewpress.com/Books/BrothersArmed2ndEd.aspx

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