#1
Kremlin.ru
October 22, 2015
Meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club. (transcript concluded)
Vladimir Putin took part in the final plenary session of the 12th annual meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club.
Vladimir Putin: How effective will our operations in Syria be?
How can I give a certain answer to such questions? The only thing that is certain is an insurance policy. We are acting in accordance with our convictions and with the norms of international law. We hope that coordinated action between our strike aircraft and the other military systems being used, coordinated with the Syrian army's offensive, will produce positive results. I believe and our military also think that results have already been achieved.
Is this enough to be able to say that we have defeated terrorism in Syria? No, big efforts are still needed before we will be able to make such an assertion. A lot of work is still needed, and let me stress that this must be joint work.
We do not want to start finger-pointing now, but let me say nonetheless that over the nearly 18 months that a US-led coalition has been carrying out airstrikes, with more than 11 countries taking part and more than 500 strikes against various targets, there is no result yet, and this is a clear fact. What result can we speak of if the terrorists have reinforced their presence in Syria and Iraq, dug in deeper in the territory they had already taken, and expanded their presence? In this sense, it seems to me that our colleagues have not achieved any effective results as yet.
The first operations between our armed forces and the Syrian armed forces have produced results, but this is not enough. It would be wonderful if we united forces, everyone who genuinely wants to fight terrorism, if all the region's countries and the outside powers, including the United States, came together on this. In essence, this is just what we proposed.
We proposed that a military delegation come to Moscow first, and then I said that we were ready to send a high-level political delegation headed by Russia's Prime Minister to discuss political questions. But our proposal was given a refusal. True, our American colleagues did then provide explanations at the ministerial level, saying that there had been some misunderstanding and that the road is open, that we can take this road and should think about how to unite our efforts.
Now, the foreign ministers of the USA, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey will meet. I think that other countries in the region should join this process too, countries whose involvement is essential if we want to settle this issue. I am thinking of Iran, primarily. We have already said this many times before. But it is a start at this stage to have the foreign ministers meet to discuss things. As for our Iranian partners, we are in close contact with them on this matter, and Iran makes its own significant contribution to a settlement.
On the question of Syria's partition, I think this would be the worst-case scenario. It is an unacceptable option because it would not help to resolve the conflict but would instead only serve to increase and prolong it. This would become a permanent conflict. If Syria were partitioned into separate territories, they would inevitably fight between themselves without end and nothing positive would come out of this.
On the matter of whether al-Assad should go or not, I have said many times already that I think it wrong to even ask this question. How can we ask and decide from outside whether this or that country's leader should stay or go. This is a matter for the Syrian people to decide. Let me add though that we must be certain that government is formed on the basis of transparent democratic procedures. We can talk of having some kind of international monitoring of these procedures, including election procedures, but this must be objective monitoring, and most importantly, it must not have a bias in favour of any one country or group of countries.
Finally, on how we see the political process, let me give a general outline now, but let me say at the same time that it is the Syrians themselves who must formulate this process, its principles and final goals, what they want and how they will achieve it. By the Syrians themselves, I am referring to the lawful government and the opposition forces. Of course, we take the view that the root causes of the conflict in Syria are not just the fight against terrorism and terrorist attacks, though terrorist aggression is clear and the terrorists are simply taking advantage of Syria's internal difficulties. We need to separate the terrorist threat from the internal political problems. Certainly, the Syrian government must establish working contact with those opposition forces that are ready for dialogue. I understood from my meeting with President al-Assad the day before that he is ready for such dialogue.
<...>
Vladimir Putin: I can tell you, I watch the video reports after the strike and they make an impression. Such a quantity of ammunition goes off there that it flies practically all the way up to the planes. You get the impression that they have collected arms and ammunition from throughout the entire Middle East. They have put together a colossal amount of arms. You can't help but wonder where they get the money from. It's really a tremendous amount of firepower they've accumulated. Now, of course, it is less than it was. The Syrian army really is making gains with our support. The results are modest for now, but they are there, and I am sure that there will be more.
<...>
Vladimir Putin: (responding to a question on possible Russian participation in an operation in Iraq) We have no such plans and cannot have them because the Iraqi government has not made any such request of us. We are providing assistance to Iraq in the form of arms supplies. This is something we were already doing, and we make our contribution to fighting terrorism in Iraq this way - by supplying weapons and ammunition. But the Iraqi government has not made any request for other aid, though we work together with them not just through supplies of arms and military equipment, but through information exchanges too.
As you know, it was in Baghdad that Iran, Syria, Russia and Iraq established an information centre, where we exchange information and set the main directions in the fight against terrorism, including against the Islamic State, but we have no plans to expand military operations involving Russia's Aerospace Forces.
<...>
Vladimir Putin: The aim of Russia's military operations and diplomatic efforts in this area is to fight terrorism and not to mediate between representatives of the different currents of Islam. We value equally our Shiite friends, our Sunni friends, and our Alawite friends. We do not make distinctions between them.
We have very good relations with many countries where the Sunni branch of Islam is dominant. We also have very good relations with majority Shiite countries, and we therefore make no distinction between them. Let me say again that our sole and primary aim is to fight terrorism.
At the same time, we are aware of the realities on the ground. Of the 34, I think (it's around that number, anyway), cabinet members in Syria, more than half are Sunnis, and Sunnis are just as broadly represented in the Syrian army as in the government. Syria was always primarily a secular state, after all.
But let me say again that we are aware of the real circumstances we are working in, and of course, if our actions could help to give discussion between the different religious groups a more civilised, good-neighbourly and friendly nature and help to settle various conflicts and unite efforts in the fight against terrorism, we would consider our mission fulfilled.
<...>
Vladimir Putin: I was wondering to myself just now whether to say this or not. Let me raise the curtain a little on our talks with President al-Assad. I asked him, "How would you react if we see that there is an armed opposition in Syria today that is ready to genuinely fight terrorism, fight the Islamic State, and we were to support their efforts in this fight against terrorism just as we are supporting the Syrian army?" He said, "I think it would be positive." We are reflecting on this now and will try, if it all works out, to translate these agreements into practical steps.
<...>
Vladimir Putin (responding to a question on Russia's role in the future world): The answer is simple: in the modern world, in the near future and, I think, in the more distant future, the role and significance of any state in the world will depend on the level of a particular nation's economic development. It will depend on how modern the economy is and how much it strives toward the future, the extent to which it is based on the newest technologies, and how quickly it adopts the new technological order.
And here, I am not talking about the territory, population, or military component - all that is very important, and without it, a nation cannot claim to hold one of the leading positions in the world. But in this respect, the economy and its development as well as the economic growth rates based on the new technological foundation lie at the heart of everything.
I feel that Russia has every chance of becoming one of the leaders, in the sense of having a high level of education among the population and a high level of fundamental science development. We have many problems here. We have always had them and will continue to have them - the same as other nations. But we are giving more and more attention not only to reviving fundamental and applied science, but also giving new momentum to developing these important areas. If we take into account these circumstances and absolutely natural competitive advantages, then Russia will certainly play a notable role.
I think it's very difficult to identify a specific ranking. This is not an athletic competition, however, it is entirely clear to me that Russia has good prospects and a strong future - but it will certainly involve developing relations with our neighbours. First and foremost, these are our closest neighbours, partners and allies within such organisations as the Eurasian Economic Union and the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO).
This includes developing relations with neighbours like China, the nation with which we have the highest turnover, at over $80 billion. And, of course, a great nation like India. And we certainly cannot imagine our development without developing relations with Europe.
Christian culture lies at the foundation of our unity, but we also have an advantage in that nearly 20% of our population is Muslim, and in this respect, we can be a link between many of our partners and the Islamic world. And, of course, we count on developing relations with the United States - if our partners will want it.
<...>
Vladimir Putin (responding to a question on the possibility of air defence missile systems in the hands of the Syrian opposition): This is an entirely valid question, I do not see anything here that could be translated into another category of wrong questions, and I will answer very pragmatically.
As far as we know - although it would be great if I am mistaken - the American military are already providing anti-tank and anti-armour weapons systems and are training gunners. I think this is a major mistake. I believe that this weaponry will certainly fall into the hands of terrorist organisations.
Moreover, as you know, our American colleagues simply chose to airdrop weapons and ammunition in certain areas. Who will receive this weaponry and ammunition? Who will use it? Against whom? There is no certainty; I simply know 100% that nobody can be certain of this, including those who do it. Even if it initially makes it into the right hands, tomorrow, it might and very likely will end up in the hands of ISIS or Jabhat al-Nusra or other similar organisations. I feel this is a big mistake.
Is it possible to transfer anti-aircraft weapons or MANPADs? I hope not, because American leaders, although we disagree on many positions, are nevertheless sensible people and realise that these weapons could end up in the hands of those who will aim them against the American pilots who also fly over Syria - granted, they're doing it unlawfully, but still do it. And I think at least this should stop them from transferring this kind of weaponry.
As for certain types of aircraft - I have flown on them, I know what they are. Overall, I'm surprised that pilots are doing this. With those G-forces you can hardly move your head. And they need to not only control the aircraft but also control the weapons. Because the strikes are primarily made visually. The G-forces you experience with the aircraft's sharp declines and rapid ascents are enormous; you can only move your fingers. This is the highest level of aerobatics, figuratively speaking. And these people certainly deserve our respect.
Our service members in Syria, of course, are fighting terrorism and in this respect, protect the interests of the Syrian people, but not only that. First and foremost, they protect the interests of Russia and the Russian people. They are striking the militants and militant groups that are a threat to our nation. Of course, they are risking their health and their lives. And in this regard, they are all heroes, but they chose this profession of their own free will. It was their choice. I am proud of them.
There is one more thing I want to say. Fifty years ago, I learnt one rule in the streets of Leningrad: if the fight is inevitable, be the first to strike. And I assure you, the treat of terrorist strikes against Russia has not become greater or less due to our actions in Syria. It was already there and it still is, unfortunately. We were not taking any action in Syria. What caused the terrorists to strike the railway station in Volgograd? Nothing. Simply their people-hating mentality, their attitude toward people's lives, the fight against Russia itself. And so it is better for us to fight them there, as I already said, rather than await them here.
<...>
Vladimir Putin: Regarding the Minsk Agreements. I believe (and I have already said this) that there is no other way if we want to achieve lasting peace in the southeast of Ukraine and restore the country's territorial integrity, there is no other way but to comply with the Minsk Agreements. Can Germany play a positive part here? It can.
I believe that the Federal Chancellor of Germany and the President of France are being sufficiently objective today, and though it is obvious that for political reasons they support the current Kiev authorities, in my opinion they have a sufficiently fair assessment of the situation. They already have the understanding that the problems that have accumulated there are not only black and white - it is much more complicated.
I spoke about this in New York at the meeting with my American colleague and partner - the President of the United States of America. I said that without the participation of Europe and the United States it would hardly be possible to resolve the situation. There is no point in accusing Russia of non-compliance or failure to motivate the authorities of the unrecognised republics in the southeast of Ukraine to some action to implement the Minsk Agreements, if the Kiev authorities fail to comply with the key terms of those agreements. And the Kiev authorities are not in compliance.
This is no secret, it is something we often speak about, but I will say again what I mean when I say that the Kiev authorities are not complying with the Minsk Agreements.
The first thing that needs to be done to achieve a political settlement is amending the Constitution of Ukraine, this is stated directly in the Minsk Agreements, it is important: upon agreement - as it says - with these territories, the unrecognised republics. The authorities in Kiev amended the Constitution without any agreement with these unrecognised republics, insisting that they have reached agreement with the Venice Commission. Fine, but the Minsk Agreements say nothing about the Venice Commission, they require agreement with Donbass - something that has not been reached.
Second. The amendments should be permanent. Actually, they are made in transitional provisions, and in our view this means that it is a temporary measure. Our opponents speak of the opposite. How exactly was the Constitution amended? In essence the law on special status for these territories has been added to it, which has already been passed. When I ask what law is that, the German Chancellor, the French President and the Ukrainian President all confirm this is the law that the Ukrainian Rada has already passed. I asked if this was permanent, and they said it was.
So then, I ask them if they know that the law was passed for only three years, and one year has already passed, and Mr Poroshenko confirmed this. My European partners expressed their view that if the law was added to the Constitution, it should be permanent, but then this should be fixed in the Constitution.
Next. There was an argument about elections in the unrecognised republics. The Minsk Agreements say the Rada should pass a law on elections and they should be held in accordance with Ukrainian law. However, this law should also be agreed upon with these unrecognised republics. They sent in their proposals three times, but received no reply.
Moreover, the law that was passed says clearly that it will not apply to elections on these territories. Then what should they do? That is why they declared they would hold the elections on their own. We have managed to convince both territories to postpone the elections. We agreed that the law should be drafted together with Kiev. But this has to be done.
Finally, the Minsk Agreements say clearly: within 30 days of their signing the Rada should pass a resolution to introduce a law on special status. As I have said, it was passed by the Rada earlier. What did our partners in Kiev do? They approved the resolution passed by the Rada and formally, they were in compliance with the Minsk Agreements.
At the same time, without agreement with Donbass they passed another article - article 10 of that law that says that it would only come into effect after the elections there, in other words they again put it off. These are simply manipulations. This is exactly what I said to my Ukrainian partner. These are nothing more but manipulations. Formally, they seem to have complied. As the classics of Marxism-Leninism used to say, correct in form but mockery in essence.
Finally, they should pass a law on amnesty. If everyone keeps telling us that the elections have to be conducted in line with OSCE standards, they should not forget that OSCE standards envisage one important condition of the election campaign: nobody can be criminally persecuted, while all the leaders of the Lugansk and Donetsk people's republics are under criminal persecution. However, this is something everyone agrees on - both our American and European partners: that the law on amnesty needs to be passed. It has not been passed.
The Minsk Agreements say this directly. The reference to the fact that it is covered in the law on special status does not work because the law is not in effect. A reference to having it covered in the law on future elections does not work either because there is no such law. There should be a separate amnesty law. I doubt that anyone here would say this is impossible. This is an international standard - you cannot have elections where people with active or passive voting rights are subject to criminal persecution.
There are a number of other issues, but they are not being resolved; the ball, so to speak, is on the side of the Kiev authorities. This needs to be done and it can only be done by the Kiev Government and the Kiev President together with their European and American partners, not with Moscow. I apologise for taking such a long time, but I had to make my position clear.
<...>
Vladimir Putin: The first question deals with the crisis, problems in the economy and its development.
As we all know from the forecasts of respectable international organisations, including economic and political ones, like the UN, the World Bank and the IMF, the global economy is not developing at the rate we all dreamed of. In this sense, the entire world economy is experiencing problems.
Russia's economy is experiencing several problems at once, going through a number of trials. These have to do not only with the limitations that are often mentioned, the politicised limitations on the economy, the so-called sanctions, which do play a certain part, though not a decisive one. The most important factor limiting growth, reducing economic growth rates is of course the fall in prices of our traditional exports. However all this does not apply to Russia alone - it concerns practically all developing markets. The Russian market is also affected, though possibly slightly less than some other developing markets are if we look at statistics.
What should we do? You have already said it yourself and mentioned that here in Russia we frequently and consistently speak of the need to diversify the economy, making it more diversified focusing on high technology sectors. True, progress here is slow. Is there anything positive happening here? There is. Here is an illustration. If, say, some 5-7 years ago the oil-and-gas sector accounted for 14 percent of the GDP, today its share in Russia's GDP, in the national economy is 9 percent.
For comparison, I would like to say that the oil-and-gas sector, say, in Saudi Arabia accounts for 45 percent, if I remember correctly, while in some states of the Gulf it reaches 50 percent, while in Venezuela it is 30 percent, and in this country it is 9 percent. As you see, the difference is great. For the first time, despite all the difficulties we encountered in the last quarter - unexpectedly for us, maybe, but such was the effect of our efforts, and I will explain about the efforts in a moment - we saw a growth in engineering product exports against the overall drop in production in this sector of the economy. However, exports of engineering products have grown.
What are the current problems? The thing is that our economy, having come across this situation on the external market, is not structurally ready to maintain the required growth rates. Certain industries were affected and we believe this requires special attention. I will tell you what we are doing here. Primarily, this is the industry. In some branches, the drop reaches 10 and more percent. This causes special concern, but we know what to do here as well. Finally, we need to focus on the national currency, something the Central Bank is doing quite confidently.
In this connection, I believe that those experts and Government members who say that we have passed the peak of the crisis are right. Now we need to focus on the factors I have just mentioned, on supporting the most affected sectors - this includes construction, engineering, car manufacturing and some high-tech construction branches. For this purpose the Government has allocated an additional 150 billion rubles, another 300 billion rubles have been allocated to agriculture; therefore, there is sufficient financial support.
We have to carry on with the work we have been doing over the past years. The Central Bank, as I said, is doing its part to stabilise the national currency - another factor that allows us to say we have achieved certain stability. The exchange rate of the national currency does fluctuate along with the changing oil prices, but overall it has stabilised. We are maintaining a positive trade balance despite all the difficulties.
The Central Bank has rather significant gold and currency reserves - over $370 billion. We have significant reserves in the Government funds - over $70 billion in one reserve fund and $74 billion in another one. True, the way we are structuring the tactics of our economic development, we will be cutting into those a little, but nevertheless, by the end of 2018 I am certain we will have sufficient Government reserves in addition to those of the Central Bank.
Over the previous period, the previous quarter, the budget deficit was only 1.5 percent. Inflation is going down: last month it was 0.5 percent, I believe, the end-of-year figure will be significant, around 11.9 or possibly 12 percent. However, we proceed from the assumption that in the following years there will be a downward trend. Actually, the trend has begun and we need to maintain it.
Generally, we will try to maintain the macroeconomic indices using a very conservative approach to budget spending, bearing in mind that salaries have gone down a little in real terms. I am certain they will grow along with economic growth. However, with this in view we need to switch over (we will be making appropriate legal decisions now) to a more targeted approach to social support. This is a rough set of instruments that we intend to use to ensure further diversification and economic growth rates that we clearly need.
Now about Syria. You said the goal of the USA is to get rid of al-Assad, while Russia's goal is to support al-Assad, right? It may be true that the USA have the goal to get rid of al-Assad. Our goal is to combat terrorism and to help President al-Assad gain victory over terrorism, which in turn would create conditions for the beginning and, hopefully, successful implementation of a political settlement. I believe this is the only right way out.
|
|
#2
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
October 23, 2015
Memo from Valdai: Treat Russia like a normal country with its own interests
At the 12th annual meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club, Russia Direct reached out to Timothy Colton of Harvard University to talk about the current dynamics in U.S.-Russia relations, including possible signs that the bullying rhetoric of the past year has been fading.
Ksenia Zubacheva
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov are scheduled to meet on Oct. 23 in Vienna to discuss the situation in Syria with the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Whether this discussion will prove productive is yet to be determined, but the development shows that leaders in Washington and Moscow are potentially ready to negotiate a solution to the crisis in the Middle East.
Discussion about the future of the U.S.-Russian relationship, of course, was one of the topics of conversation at the 12th annual meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club. At the event, Russia Direct reached out to Timothy Colton, chair of the Government department at Harvard University, to talk about the current dynamics in U.S.-Russia relations and the areas where U.S.-Russia cooperation could become stronger over the next year.
Russia Direct: What are your thoughts on the discussion at this year's Valdai meeting?
Timothy Colton: What this forum shows is how important it is to have people sit down and talk about things without requiring the other person to change his/her point of view immediately. So it's more of a back and forth process, like we do in everyday life. Unfortunately, governments don't always deal with one another that way.
Last year, when we met at Valdai the atmosphere was quite tense because the events in Ukraine were so recent and there was still heavy fighting in Donetsk and Luhansk. It wasn't necessarily personal antagonism or black and white views, but everybody was caught up in the fact that this crisis was really a big one and no one knew when it was going to end.
This year, despite the Syrian events, I think generally the atmosphere is calmer. We see the normal exchange of points of view that don't often break down along national lines. We come here as individuals and we are free to say what we think, there were never any restrictions or any controls of any kind. I think last year was a bit different because of the high level of agitation because of Ukraine, but this year it's back to more normal dialogue.
RD: What would you say about the diplomatic relations between Russia and the U.S.? Are they as agitated as they were when the crisis in Ukraine started?
T.C.: Speaking about the diplomats, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the U.S. State Department, I'm not sure that too much has changed. They both are tightly controlled by their political leaderships, they follow the policy made at the White House and the Kremlin. Russian diplomats are very professional, they perform really well in public and closed settings. The American diplomats are not fundamentally different. The bullying rhetoric that we saw a year ago has cooled down, we don't see so much of it now, which is good.
RD: How would you characterize the past year for U.S.-Russia relations? Were there any achievements that got lost in the background of tense geopolitical events?
T.C.: Obviously, government-to-government, state-to-state relations are very tense. This situation is hard to ignore, let's hope that it's temporary. Are there any positives? I would say there are a few.
Obama and Putin did meet just a few weeks ago so that's good. The diplomats seem to be talking to one another rather more than a year ago.
One of the examples, that some might be surprised by, is that American-Russian and EU-Russian cooperation in areas like science, education and technology actually remained pretty stable despite all of the trouble and in some ways even improved slightly. Of course there were voices on both sides saying we must stop cooperating with the other country's scientists. A high official in the Russian government, Mr. Rogozin, proposed that Russia pull out NASA from the International Space Station (ISS).
That has not happened actually, so there have been negotiations, somewhat amazingly actually, between Russian officials and American officials on not only extending the life of the current mission at the ISS - which will be given four more years of life and it depends very heavily on Russia - but actually now they are talking about building a new space station with Chinese participation. But again the lead countries will be Russia and the United States - two great space powers. They are also talking about joint exploration of the far side of the Moon, a mission to Venus, and even a joint mission to Mars.
So even though the government relations are pretty bad, there are some positive developments in other areas. We know from public opinion polls from both sides that popular perception of the other country has gone in a very negative direction. There has always been a fluctuation up and down, but this time the downward trend in both Russia and the U.S. was stronger than ever before.
At the same time, I think this is mostly individuals who have a negative opinion about the government of the other country. What I don't see, as someone who travels back and forth a lot, is a kind of personal antagonism or hatred. It's not like that - we don't hate one another. We just think that the other government's policies are wrong-headed. If the governments can find a way to move some of the things out, we can't exclude that sooner or later the relations will move in a more natural direction.
The U.S. has interests almost everywhere and it will be very unnatural to have no constructive relations with such a great country like Russia. On Russia's part, when Putin returned after Medvedev, Russia started to work on this very ambitious program of internationalization of higher education. The Russian universities are hiring Western academics, experts to write for English-language journals and Putin has made it a goal to bring five Russian universities into the top 100 in the world by 2020. They haven't backed away from these commitments. There are some inconsistencies with other branches of Russian policy, it's true, like the foreign agents law. But nonetheless, these plans have not been abandoned, which is good.
RD: From your perspective, how long will the sanctions regime persist? Are there any signs that it's going to be lifted any time soon?
T.C.: We know that in Europe, in particular, there are governments and business groups that would like to see the sanctions lifted as soon as possible or at least reduced. This has not happened yet, but I think that if the situation in Ukraine continues to stabilize there would be more and more pressure from countries like France, the Netherlands and Germany to move towards normalization. I think it's generally pretty clear that Crimea which was the focus of the first round of sanctions will not be the cause for the extension of sanctions to the indefinite future, at least, as far as the EU is concerned.
In the U.S. it might be somewhat different because the U.S. Congress has a big role in deciding the U.S. foreign policy. Even if President Obama or, more likely, his successor were to want to move away from sanctions past practice shows that Congress will not let him do this with entirely free hand. So I would expect U.S. sanctions to be withdrawn rather more slowly.
If the leadership of Russia changed tomorrow and Mr. Putin decided to retire, I think a lot of things would change as well. He has been in power for a long time and when leaders are in power for an extended period of time, 15 or 16 years, they accumulate as we say "baggage" and it becomes harder and harder for them to make a fresh start on any thing. So probably the change of governments will make a difference.
The U.S. will have one in January 2017. It was the arrival of Obama in 2009 that opened the door for the reset which was pretty successful, there was move in a good direction for several years before the trouble came.
RD: If you were to give an advice to the next president of the United States what would you recommend him to do when dealing with Russiia.
T.C.: Treat Russia like a normal country with its own interests. It's not just going to do what we say or want it to do - it's too big, too independent and proud. And you have to accept that you have to make compromises and think in a very long range terms. This country is too large to change overnight. It's in the interests of the U.S. for Russia to be a normal country. It's a modern country with, in my view, an arcane political system, but it's not something we can change. Eventually it will move in a more open direction. But if it doesn't, the U.S. can't really prevent that, it's not American responsibility, and only Russians can decide that.
I think one area that we never really made good things happen is trade. Looking at the next 10 years of U.S.-Russia relations, efforts should be made to create a strong economic basis. In certain markets we are actually rivals - we are both exporters of energy, we compete with one another on that market. But there are other areas where there it is a bit more complementary - in areas of science and technology, Russia is in many ways an unexplored frontier for U.S. multinational corporations, there should be more of their presence here. The Russian government has not done enough to make them feel welcome.
RD: Some experts at Valdai said that the world has been surprised by Russian foreign policy moves this year. Would you agree? What would you say has particularly changed in the perception of the Kremlin abroad and in the U.S.?
T.C.: I was definitely surprised by both the Crimea policy and the intervention in Syria, so there is no doubt about that. Of the two, the more disruptive was what happened in Ukraine. Changing state borders in that fashion in Europe - this kind of thing previously led to wars from which Russia has suffered as much as anybody else.
Syria is different - it's a terrible conflict in which no one really seems to have the answer. The U.S. was surprised tactically, although the American intelligence knew that Russia was moving its staff there. I don't think it was a shocking development - Russia was capable of doing this. If you look back at it, you might ask why Russia didn't do it sooner because it's getting a little late to save Assad now, after four years of civil war. Now that it's happened, what difference is it going to make? Is it doomed to fail? So President Obama insists that it cannot succeed, by definition it's going to fail. But if you look at American newspapers over the past week or so, the TV talk shows on Sunday, you might see a wide range of opinions.
Some condemn it as completely inappropriate, but the fact that Russia was invited there by the government of Syria, it's not like Russia overthrew that government. The U.S. doesn't have an ambassador in Damascus but it still recognizes the Assad government and they have an ambassador in Washington. So it's not really about the right to be there but more about making a bad situation worse.
There are some who say that it may potentially turn out to make things better. The premise here is that the Assad government was about to lose control completely, and then you would have had two or three years of utter massacres on all sides. So Russian intervention may have prevented all that, but stabilization of that kind can only be temporary. But if it works to create an opening for some kind of negotiation I don't think that we have any objective basis for saying we know that it's going to fail. If it succeeds and gets some kind of government national unity in which different communities of Syria are represented - the Sunnis, the Shias, the Kurds, the Christians - if that actually happened and the war was reduced, ISIS, I assume, would still remain in control of a large part of eastern Syria, then Putin will probably get a Nobel Peace Prize.
I myself am simply agnostic, I don't know what to expect. The timing does seem very late and the air power alone rarely really resolves a conflict. I don't think that a Russian air force of 40 or 50 airplanes can defeat all terrorist groups - they can slow down their advance, that's for sure, and it has.
RD: If the negotiation process does start, what might the U.S. role in it be? Will it work with Russia on resolving the crisis in Syria?
T.C.: The U.S. will surely want to be represented at the table. I don't know whether NATO per se will have a role but the U.S. will want to be there - it's still involved in Iraq, there is never-ending war there. Despite the angry words they say from time to time, that the United States would refuse to talk to Russia about Syria - that is not going to happen.
RD: What are your expectations for Russian foreign policy in 2016?
T.C.: One year of Russian politics is much like the other one: one group is in charge year after year. Russia has a parliamentary election in September 2016. The last election turned out to be quite difficult for the government - United Russia won 49 percent of the vote which was 15 points less than in 2007 and there were allegations of falsifications of votes. So the government will want to do a bit better this time around. They have Putin's massive popularity ratings, but they won't necessarily rub off on the United Russia party - most Russians have a high opinion of the party and it will probably be the most significant political event.
There is the issue whether Putin is going to dismiss the prime minister and install a new government - it doesn't look that way. It has already been announced that Medvedev will head the United Russia list.
The elections will be different in one other regard - the mixed electoral system which has districts as well as national party lists has been restored as of next year. There is a 5 percent threshold for admission to the Duma. It was 7 percent for a decade. This will make the election a more complex event with some degree of competition being restored. It's worth watching to see what the results will be. And then Putin will have to make a choice whether he wants to remain in power for another 6-year term.
RD: Are you mostly positive about the future of U.S.-Russia relations when a new American president is elected?
T.C.: Russia for a number of years was not a big issue in American election campaigns. In 2008, Russia had a five-day war with Georgia so this led to very heated rhetoric about American assistance to Georgia. A few months later, Obama is elected and one of the first things he does is to move towards a reset of relations with Russia. So I think there are powerful forces that would move the new American president at least to reassess the relationship with Russia. But a lot will depend on who the president is.
We have some candidates that have no foreign policy experience whatsoever, but we also have Hillary Clinton who is the most likely winner. She was Secretary of State during the reset years but she is well known to take generally harder line towards Russia, so it's not clear whether she will move towards more engagement with Russia or choose to do the opposite. It's very hard to predict for the reason that American policy itself is hard too predict because of its highly competitive nature. Russian politics since 2000 has been a little bit easier to predict.
|
|
#3
www.rt.com
October 26, 2015
Time to co-operate? Putin tries to build bridges with the West at Valdai
By Bryan MacDonald
Bryan MacDonald is a journalist. He began his career in journalism aged 15 in his home town of Carlow, Ireland, with the Nationalist & Leinster Times, while still a schoolboy. Later he studied journalism in Dublin and worked for the Weekender in Navan before joining the Irish Independent. Following a period in London, he joined Ireland On Sunday, later re-named the Irish Mail on Sunday. He was theater critic of the Daily Mail for a period and also worked in news, features and was a regular op-ed writer. He has also frequently appeared on RTE and Newstalk in Ireland as well as RT.
Vladimir Putin wants to be friends with the West. NATO leaders can either accept his olive branch or continue their disastrous policies. The choice is theirs.
The Moscow-Washington impasse is starting to resemble the plot of a screwball romantic comedy. One side wants to cooperate and mend fences, sincerely trying to kiss and make up. The problem is that the other is too stubborn to change its ways, but knows it will probably eventually have to. There are no prizes for guessing which is which.
Barack Obama has a problem. When he took office, almost seven years ago, the US was just about clinging onto the unipolar world it had created after the Cold War. However, a combination of China's rapid growth, Russia's re-birth from the ashes of the USSR and the fallout from costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has changed that reality. Vladimir Putin knows this. So does Obama. The latter cannot countenance being remembered as the President who "threw away" US supremacy.
Of course, this also explains why Obama limits his contacts with Russian officials. Last week, he refused to accept a delegation from Moscow, led by Dmitry Medvedev, whom he was formerly close to. Whenever Obama meets Russian government officials these days, American domestic media perceives it as a sign of weakness.
Instead of direct engagement, both sides have launched an information war. During the past two and a half years, at a time of chaos in Ukraine and the Middle East, they've had one short, late-night bilateral meeting. Instead they speak to each other through the media. Obama likes to spin that Russia is weak. Only two weeks ago CBS host, Steve Kroft, insisted that Putin was challenging his leadership. Obama answered: "If you think that running your economy into the ground and having to send troops in (to Syria), in order to prop up your only ally is leadership, then we've got a different definition of leadership."
In January, the US President alleged that Russia was isolated and its economy was "in tatters." Last year, he equated Russia to Ebola and ISIS. The problem for Obama is that especially in Europe, and increasingly in America itself, fewer and fewer people are buying his message.
Battle for hearts and minds
Naturally, there are options here. Instead of the media conflict, Putin and Obama could have a televised debate. Say, two hours long with no notes or Teleprompters. Why not let the public decide? Alas, that's a tad Simon Cowell. Instead, it'd be better if Obama swallowed his pride and engaged with Putin to hammer out a solution to their differences. This appears to be what Russia's leader wants.
Every time Vladimir Putin speaks to a foreign audience these days, he speaks of America. Often indirectly. His main concerns are the perceived unipolar world and US hegemony. He's also very upset about US meddling in sovereign states.
On Thursday, at the Valdai forum, near Sochi, Putin continued a theme he'd espoused at the United Nations General Assembly last month. Whereas in New York, he'd spoken broadly, this time he was far more direct. The President was asking Obama to climb down off his high horse and offering to work together to restore stability to the world.
While Russia has been clear on its Syrian objectives, to secure the Syrian state and fight terrorism, the US has conflicting desires. Putin insisted that Moscow isn't convinced that America's primary goal in the Middle East is to crush ISIS. Putin believes that Washington is playing both sides. He invoked the specter of Zbigniew Brzezinski's Cold War-era strategy to condemn US policy.
"It's always hard to play a double game - declare a fight against terrorists but at the same time try to use some of them to move the pieces on the Middle Eastern chessboard in your own favor. There's no need to play with words and split terrorists into moderate and not moderate. I would like to know what the difference is," the President said. "They behead gently?"
What next for the Middle East
The matter of America's lack of a strategy in the event of the collapse of the Syrian (or Iraqi) state also vexes Putin. "A terrorist organization, the so-called Islamic State, took huge territory under control. Just think about it: if they occupied Damascus or Baghdad, the terrorist gangs could achieve the status of a practically official power; they would create a stronghold for global expansion. Is anyone considering this?" He urged Washington to consider dealing with the problem now. He added: "Fifty years ago, the streets of Leningrad (now St Petersburg) taught me that if a fight is inevitable, you have to hit first."
The President also touched on an issue which greatly upsets Russians, especially state officials. That is American interference in their domestic affairs. This reached its height back in 2012, when the former US ambassador received fringe opposition figures, just days after his appointment. "The US has a law that concerns Ukraine, but it directly mentions Russia, and this law states that the goal is democratization of Russia. Just imagine if we were to write into Russian law that our goal is to democratize the US..." Putin said.
On the topic of American interference in Russia's borderlands, the President mused: "we are not worried about democracy coming to our borders, we are worried about military infrastructure (NATO) coming to our borders." Again, it's fair to say Putin has been consistent on this subject for a long time.
Back in 2008, he described the alliance's wooing of Georgia and Ukraine as a "direct threat." Other key Russian figures, like Mikhail Gorbachev, who is loved in the West, are fully behind Putin's position. Indeed, Gorbachev has alleged that NATO broke promises made to him in the 1990's when expanding to former Warsaw Pact states and the Baltic countries.
Amid all this acrimony, Putin then suggested that Moscow and Washington bury the hatchet. "We missed a chance to cooperate at the end of the Cold War, during terrorist attacks of the early 2000s (during George W Bush's first term), let's not miss it again." With that, Putin opened the door for detente in US-Russian relations. Does Obama have the courage to acquiesce?
|
|
#4
Irrussianality
https://irrussianality.wordpress.com
October 24, 2015
NIKOLAI STARIKOV AND THE PROBLEM OF HISTORY
The following is a guest post by Paul Grenier:
People who care about Russia - its culture, its history and traditions, and, most importantly, its people - have had reason to feel fearful and frustrated in recent years. Among other reasons because the media in the United States has gotten into one of its by-now all-too-familiar campaigns of simplification and demonization of a foreign country and its leader. Such campaigns (remember Nicaragua? Iraq? Libya?) usually signal that the US government is getting itself ready for the attack.
It was in such a context, about a year ago, that Russia Insider came on the scene. Initially it shared lots of tongue-in-cheek articles, often ridiculing simplistic caricatures of Russia in Western media. It also included thoughtful analyses - some of them reprints from other sources, others by its own regular writers. Reprints of my own work have appeared there on a few occasions.
Here's the thing, though. A recent article in Russia Insider, Nikolai Starikov's "Why Russia Should Not Repent for Her Past" (Russia Insider, October, 2015), has got me wondering about, first of all, whether Russia Insider isn't straying into dangerous territory; and secondly, whether we think clearly enough about what it is in Russia that deserves our respect.
Problems of History
We all know that 'history is written by the victors.' Readers of Russia Insider doubtless include many who accept this well-known saying and are therefore skeptical of official narratives. Indeed, I would include myself among the skeptical. And why not? After all, quite a bit that we have been told by 'reputable sources' in the United States over recent decades has turned out not to be true. And for some reason we tend to find out only after such knowledge is no longer of any practical use (Tonkin Gulf, Contra drug running, weapons of mass destruction, etc.).
Pervasive skepticism, however, raises its own difficulties, especially for those of us whose understanding of history boils down to being a matter of whom we can trust. How can the non-professional historian respond to the complex uncertainties of history? There is a temptation to conclude that the search for historical truth is altogether vain; that history is a game to be played for political gain, and nothing more. That what we need to do, instead, is accept whichever version of 'truth' is most advantageous to 'our side'.
This latter course is the one chosen by Nikolai Starikov. Let's take a quick look at his historical methodology - for example, as regards the once-controversial question about who was responsible for the Katyn massacre of Polish officers during WWII. Reputable historians in and outside of Russia have long been convinced that the evidence proves beyond reasonable doubt that it was Stalin's regime that carried out the massacres. Starikov calls this "a lie."
His reasoning (if the word 'reasoning' is warranted here) completely ignores the question of evidence. He is concerned only with political consequences. "Repentance" for Katyn, writes Starikov, "would bring nothing but problems." Accepting "the lie" that the Polish officers at Katyn were executed on Stalin's order rather than by the Nazis has had a bad influence on Russia's relations with Poland, Starikov writes. The "lie" and the disadvantage, for him, are one and the same.
Indeed, his methodology is blatantly consequentialist. If "de-Stalinization" is harmful, then the right approach is to accept an extreme historicism which dismisses Stalin's mass repressions as "triggered ... by the realities of the period" in which he lived. For a 'historian,' Starikov demonstrates remarkable indifference to history. "Politics, especially international politics," he writes, "is always a complicated matter. There is no objective morality here, just ourselves and our allies set against foreign and domestic enemies who wish to dominate and rob us [emphasis mine]." History is politics continued by other means, and an ugly politics at that.
It is true that Starikov is not the only one playing this game. Machiavellis in the U.S. are also quite capable of picking and choosing which aspects of history to focus on, which demons to demonize, and then using this selective history as a political tool.[1]
Political power does 'complicate' the quest for truth. Does this mean that we cannot know who actually was guilty of the Katyn massacres? Does it mean we cannot know the truth of any of the various other controversial incidents in history? To an extent, it depends on luck. Sometimes the right documents fall into the right hands at a propitious political moment, and we find out. Such was the case with Katyn. We know that this massacre was perpetrated by the USSR. But at other times, as the pessimist Simone Weil once wrote, " ... according to the nature of things, documents originate among the powerful ones, the conquerors. History, therefore, is nothing but a combination of the depositions made by assassins with respect to their victims and themselves."
The truth of history can only be known within an atmosphere that actually cares for the truth as the most important thing. It is only in such a milieu that the methods of professional historical inquiry can produce their results.
Without the Truth, Why Should We Care?
Is it possible that Starikov is right, then, after all? If all sides are playing political games, why shouldn't Russia as well - and beat the others at their own game?
Well, for one thing, it is not true that other countries are always so eager to tell lies about their own histories. But let's set all that aside. For the sake of argument, let's assume that the cynicism is just as rampant as Starikov and his supporters (including many on the comment thread of his article appearing in Russia Insider) suppose. What then? According to this logic, all we need ever say about the history of Russia, is what is to Russia's advantage. And all we need ever say, by extension, about the United States (or any other country) is what is to the advantage of those countries. The 'truth,' such as it is, in such a world, can only ever be determined by the victors, in other words, by the strongest. And as the passage from Simone Weil suggests, such is sometimes the only 'truth' we get our hands on: the 'truth' of the victors.
The question to ask at this point, however, is this: why should we care about such a 'truth'? Why should we care about a country concerned with nothing more than the extension of its own power? Is it possible to love such a country?
History, the truth of history, is not a game, after all; it is our only contact with reality. Starikov far too lightly discards the truth as a matter of any interest. (In this respect too, unfortunately, he is far from unique.) But as a consequence of this indifference, there remains no Russia left that a person can love. For as Simone Weil also pointed out, love and truth form a unity. It is impossible to love a Russia woven of a fabric of lies. "What one loves is something which exists," wrote Weil, and about which, therefore, one can know the truth. Starikov's project, by contrast, depends on building Russia's future on a foundation of lies and the praise of force.
Ironically, Starikov's brand of Russian exceptionalism flounders on this very logic. As I have argued elsewhere, to the extent that a culture is merely liberal, to that same extent it reduces the political idea precisely to self-interest and force. Starikov's Russia, far from presenting an alternative logic, serves up the same old same old, only this time with a collectivist tinge.
I can only speak for myself. What I find attractive in Russia is something very different. The Russia I respect is not merely and impractically anti-liberal (self-interest, after all, is not something to be simply rejected); it is a Russia that remains devoted to the best of its own traditions, which are more than merely liberal. Russia at its best is capable of admitting its past sins honestly, without rejecting its Christian and, if I may put it this way, its Platonic heritage.
Happily, such honesty can be found in the stance of the Russian government itself. To Starikov's great chagrin, it was the Russian government that recently declared that "Russia cannot fully become a state governed by the rule of law and occupy a leading role in the world community without immortalizing the memory of many millions of its citizens who were the victims of mass repressions."
It is worth noting, in this same connection, that Russian president Vladimir Putin has a well-known high regard for Ivan Ilyin, the Russian legal scholar and philosopher. At a recent conference held in Moscow and attended by Russian senators, one of the organizers quoted Ilyin on the subject of patriotism:
"There is no person, and there is no nation, who can be the unique locus of the spirit, for the spirit lives in all people and in all nations. To fail to see this is to be morally blind and therefore deprived of both patriotism and legal consciousness. Such a path of spiritual blindness is truly a non-ethical path, one having nothing in common with love for one's native land; because true patriotism is not a blind but a seeing form of love ... "
|
|
#5
Xenophobia, nationalism in Russia ease over years
By Lyudmila Alexandrova
MOSCOW, October 23. /TASS/. Human rights activists agree xenophobia and nationalism in Russia have shown a noticeable decline over the past two years, and this is not just an achievement of the law enforcement agencies, but a result of society's consolidation in the face of external challenges facing the country, experts say. They agree that with the emergence of the Islamic State the threat of Islamic radicalism has taken centre stage.
Aggressive xenophobia, racism and nationalism in Russia were steady on the decline in 2014 and 2015. However, it would be an exaggeration to say radical sentiment in the country has been reduced to nothing by now, because instead of the old threats new ones, such as the Islamic State, have cropped up. The risk of its ideas and practices spreading to Russian territory is very great. This is the gist of a report entitled Aggressive Xenophobia and Nationalism in Russia: Manifestations and the Authorities' Reaction, compiled by the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights. Human rights activists attribute the easing of xenophobia to the authorities' proactive measures in fighting extremism and successful operations by law enforcement agencies to neutralize underground militants in the North Caucasus. Another factor the report points to is a "split inside the group of Russian ethno-nationalists" over the events in Ukraine. "Their marches and rallies gather less than half of the former number of participants and there are far fewer nationalist raids in search for illegal migrants," the report says.
Opinion polls, too, indicate that aggressive xenophobia has been retreating. "The fact that Russia is a home to people of many nationalities is one of its strengths rather than a weakness," said nearly half of the audience polled by the Public Opinion Fund. Less than a quarter of respondents said that multi-ethnicity is rather harmful to the country, and 32% offered no answer. As many as 90% of the respondents said they had never been discriminated against for ethnic reasons and only sixteen percent acknowledged they feel dislike towards people of other ethnic groups.
"This trend will largely depend on progress in reforming the socio-economic sphere, because one cannot expect the people will go on living on patriotic feelings alone. If the changes in the economy and the social sphere that the president and government have proclaimed begin to materialize, if unemployment eases and a decent standard of living is maintained, then there will be less reasons for protest sentiment the nationalists may try to use for their purposes," the head of the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights, Aleksandr Brod, told the daily Izvestia.
"I believe that the report describes the real state of affairs," the deputy head of the general political science department at the Higher School of Economics, Leonid Polyakov, told TASS. "The main reason why the level of xenophobia has been down is this: after Crimea's reunification with Russia the country achieved great national consolidation. Confidence in the authorities and in the president in particular is very high. This has a cementing effect. In the face of external challenges to Russia inter-ethnic tensions have eased."
"We have left behind the peak of the political crisis of 2011-2012," Polyakov believes. "Radical nationalists were one of the basic components of the out-of-parliament opposition. After normalization their activity has died down somewhat. Besides, the presence of migrants from Central Asia in Russia has become normal. The people are getting used to it and aggressiveness towards them in society is dwindling.
The president of the National Strategy Institute, Mikhail Remizov, has told TASS "the human rights activists are quite right when they say that the threat of Islamic radicalism to national security is immeasurably higher than the threat of right-wing radicalism or any other kind of extremism." "The more so since Islamic radicalism is mostly linked with terrorist activities," Remizov said.
Among the factors for lower xenophobia, nationalism and racism Remizov mentioned first and foremost "rather strong pressures on the ultra-right radical groups from the law enforcement" and also "better quality of work by law enforcers on cases involving ethnicity-related crimes."
Remizov agrees that hostile attitudes towards migrants in society have eased: "At a certain point society has switched to emotions over Ukraine. The share of Ukrainians, who are mentally and culturally better compatible with Russians, has increased in the migration flow. In the meantime, migration from Central Asia eased as the rouble slumped. But the problem remains by and large, because migration is a long-term factor and a long-term source of tensions."
|
|
#6
Business New Europe
www.bne.eu
October 23, 2015
Putin's approval rating reaches all-time high of 90%
Russian President Vladimir Putin's approval rating has soared to a historical peak of 89.9% on the back of his proclaimed anti-terror campaign in Syria, according to a new poll.
The rating broke the last record of 89.1% registered in June 2015 as the Kremlin boss continues to defy Western opinion and sanctions over Ukraine and asserts Russia's position on the world stage.
The Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM), which conducted both surveys, said "such a high rating of approval of the Russian president is primarily connected with events in Syria, Russian airstrikes at terrorist positions".
The former KGB agent's rating has exceeded 80% for the last two years, driven largely by foreign policy that incurred EU and US sanctions and brought the level of relations with the West to their lowest ebb since the Cold War. Putin came to power in 2000 after Boris Yeltsin resigned as president.
"Putin's rating started growing in spring 2014 against the backdrop of Russia's reunification with Crimea and Sevastopol. In March 2014, the rating stood at 76.2% on average, in April - at 82.2%, and in May - at 86.2%," noted the sociologists, who conducted the poll on October 17-18 among 1,600 people from 130 Russian cities.
Putin's image is now so strong that he is regarded as a brand in his own right, surpassed in Russia only by Yandex, Europe's most valuable internet company.
In a survey conducted in Russia in July by the branding agency Landor, 100% of respondents assigned the following character traits to the 63-year-old president: "Distinctive, cutting edge, leader, energetic, estimable, reliable, straightforward, superior and trustworthy."
|
|
#7
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
October 26, 2015
New bankruptcy law may bring Russians relief from debt collectors
Debt collectors in Russia often exceed their authority and resort to bullying, intimidation and even physical violence in order to force individuals to pay. However, a new law on individual bankruptcy is designed to help borrowers avoid such unpleasant encounters, though critics fear it may be open to abuse.
OLEG YEGÓROV, SPECIAL TO RBTH
When Yevgenia Fainberg, a 75-year-old pensioner and child survivor of the Siege of Leningrad, was approached by debt collectors hired by a bank in the spring of 2015, she had no idea how far things would go.
First she began received threatening phone calls from strangers. They demanded that Fainberg and her family pay the bank 2.5 million rubles (about $40,000) in order to redeem a distant relative's debt.
The strangers then started insulting the elderly woman and eventually threatened her and her family with violence. Fainberg turned to the police and finally moved to another town permanently on the insistence of her children.
Illegal extortion
The incident with Evgenia Fainberg is a typical example of how debt collectors in Russia use illegal means to achieve their goal. The Law on Consumer Credit, which controls their activities, establishes clear rules for relations between collectors and defaulters: the acceptable number of calls and messages that collectors may make in one day and the permitted time at which they can be made. The law does not permit the use of pressure on relatives or friends or threats of physical violence. However, many collecting agencies disregard the rules.
According to the Russian Interior Ministry, in the first six months of 2015 there were almost 22,000 complaints concerning illegal activities by collectors. Citing the prosecutor's office, the Kommersant business daily reports that checks carried out on the activities of collecting agencies and credit organizations showed that there were more than 3,500 cases of violations of the law, that 967 notifications of a breach in the law were received, 33 warnings made and 654 lawsuits filed.
At the same time, with the Russian economy currently in crisis, there is a growing demand for debt collectors. With inflation high and salaries shrinking in real terms, people's solvency is declining while the number of consumer debtors is increasing. According to the Russian Central Bank, as of Sept. 1, 2015, the total volume of overdue bank debts owed by Russians is about 851.5 billion rubles (about $12.5 billion).
'Black' and 'white' collectors
There are many scandalous stories about creditors using any possible means to force the debtors to pay. Some collectors even go so far as to use physical force and beat up the debtors, but more often they use psychological pressure, as in the case of Moscow resident Nikolai Seliverstov. One day Seliverstov, who owed his bank money and had ignored threats by the collectors, realized that his neighborhood had been plastered with posters saying that he was a dangerous pedophile.
Meanwhile, collectors who act within the boundaries of the law harshly criticize those who use extortion and insist that they have nothing to do with the activities of their less reputable colleagues. On the other hand, the difference between "black" and "white" collectors is vague.
According to Vasily Solodkov, director of the Banking Institute at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, "no one admits to doing things illegally. Everyone blames their neighbor, saying, well, we would never do such a thing, but other collectors can."
Bankruptcy as a way out?
However, since Oct. 1, 2015 new legislation has been in effect, aimed at protecting citizens from predatory debt collectors who may be overstepping the boundaries.
The Law on Individual Bankruptcy intends to lighten the burden of those debtors who cannot pay back their loans by providing them with the opportunity to file for bankruptcy at an arbitration court.
If the court satisfies their claim, it appoints a financial manager, an intermediary between the credit institution and the debtor. He evaluates the debtor's income and property and creates a plan for restructuring the debt that the court later approves.
The restructured debt may be significantly less than the initial one and it will be easier for the debtor to pay it off. Additionally, creditors do not have the right to demand the payment of loans from individuals who file for personal bankruptcy while the case is still in progress.
At the same time, some experts are afraid that the bankruptcy procedure will become a cover for dishonest debtors who technically can pay off their debts but choose not to. In the opinion of Vasily Solodkov, the law "potentially opens opportunities for the dishonest debtor to avoid paying off a loan."
However, Sergei Gorbachev, executive partner at the Legis Group legal firm, believes that the law presupposes adequate measures for controlling debtors.
"If he possesses, for example, several apartments, cars and so on, he won't be able to keep it all. All his property will be reduced to the minimum," he said.
|
|
#8
Moscow Times
October 26, 2015
With Russia's Economy, Talk is Cheap
By Mark Adomanis
Mark Adomanis is an MA/MBA candidate at the University of Pennsylvania's Lauder Institute.
Most Russia watchers in the West spend enormous amounts of time poring over what the Russian government is saying. Possessing a sizable and well-funded network of media outlets, and leveraging social media tools to the hilt, the Russian government is capable of producing a large amount of content and getting that content in front of a large number of eyeballs very quickly.
Some of these communications border on the sensible. The Kremlin's scorn and contempt for the "moderate opposition" in Syria seems increasingly justified by events, such as mass defections to al-Qaida. Other communications by the Russian state - the majority unfortunately - border on the nonsensical.
But talk, as they say, is cheap. The Russian state can say whatever it wants. Reality, however, does not so easily oblige such self-serving fantasies. It's all too easy to get caught up in discussion of narratives and propaganda while losing sight of the actual underlying facts.
Some Russian analysts have spoken of the "war between the television and the refrigerator," a pithy way to describe an escalating clash between a politicized propaganda narrative in which Russia is "rising from its knees" and an increasingly bleak economic reality in which inflation, shortages, and recession loom ever larger.
In terms of what Western Russian analysts should pay attention to I would rephrase this slightly as the fight between Sputnik (a state-run news agency) and Rosstat (the state statistics service).
To examine what I'm talking about let's take a very clear example from the economic realm: import substitution.
Officially, Russia's program of import substitution is already bearing fruit. The West is supposedly "deeply concerned" over Russia's policy, with the implication that this concern is based on the program's overawing success. The official narrative spends a great deal of time highlighting the losses faced by Western firms locked out of Russia's market while, of course, totally eliding any mention of the much steeper costs faced by Russian consumers.
Other stories in Russian state-run media optimistically focus on import substitution's future successes. In terms that sound like they were plucked from an old five-year plan, official media parrot claims that "90 percent of pharmaceuticals will be home-made by 2018" or that Russia's defense industry will be "free of Western technology by 2020."
Essentially the official narrative is an exceedingly optimistic one full of dynamism and success. Russia is moving forward! The West is losing out on all of the Russian market's many opportunities!
The only problem with this narrative is that there is no data to support it. In fact, figures from Russia's own statistics agency show that, contrary to the Kremlin's numerous and cheery proclamations, the country's manufacturing sector is currently declining. Through the first nine months of the year, the output of Russian manufacturers shrank by about 3 percent, hardly a catastrophe but also clear evidence that there is no renaissance under way.
The reality, then, is of a Russian economy that is becoming even more dependent on natural resource extraction (where output continues to nudge upwards) and where virtually every other sector is struggling. The negative trajectory of Russia's manufacturing sector is not a Western conspiracy or a CIA-funded plot, it is the banal conclusion of downloading spreadsheets from Rosstat's website.
The easy availability of economic and demographic data is actually one of the chief ways in which Russia differs from its Soviet predecessor. The Soviets had a mania for secrecy that is hard to overstate, routinely classifying as "state secrets" all manner of mundane facts and figures. Piecing together even the most basic kinds of information (like the infant mortality rate) was a laborious, painstaking process that could take even the best researcher weeks or even months.
That is not the case today (for now, at least!). Information about Russia's state finances, the health of its population, or the output of its economy is readily available to anyone who wants to find it. The story told by this data is of vastly greater importance than whatever "narrative" is currently being pushed by the powers that be.
What is more, the story currently being told by official data is turning increasingly sour: mortality is creeping up, unemployment is growing, and real wages are decreasing. Russia's actual performance is deteriorating at the precise moment that its propaganda is soaring to ever-greater rhetorical heights. As always, reality has exceedingly little regard for abstract ideological notions.
Perhaps at some point in the future the Kremlin will tire of the bean counters at Rosstat and restrict public access to their data. Given the political climate that would unfortunately not be a terribly great shock. In the meantime, however, hard data remains by far the best antidote to the Kremlin's "information war."
|
|
#9
Sputnik
October 25, 2015
Resourceful Russians Learn to Make Own Home Products Amid Food Embargo
Many Russians have started to make their own food as foreign companies had to leave the Russian market due to restrictive measures, Austrian newspaper Die Presse wrote.
The boom especially concerns the cheese industry, with an increase in sales of special tools for making cheese and the growing popularity of cheese making courses.
Mozzarella and Ricotta cheese from Italy, Camembert from France, Feta from Greece - Russians have had to abandon these delicacies. Many European food companies left the Russian market due to trade restrictions imposed by Russia in response to the economic sanctions by the West.
However, many Russian sorts of cheese are not as tasty as the European ones. That is why some Russians prefer to make cheese at home and buy the so-called "cheese boxes" which include everything you need to prepare cheese, the article said.
"In one hour I can easily make a cheese that is fresher and better than the one I used to buy before the sanctions", Russian resident Tatiana Korshunova said, cited by the newspaper. Her husband, a financial consultant at a Moscow bank, said that many of his colleagues are making their own cheese as well.
Residents of big cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg feel mostly affected by the trade embargo as they had gotten used to buying everything they need at any time of the day. At the same time, such cities as Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Samara and Rostov-on-Don have also been affected by the lack of foreign delicacies.
Thus, Russian residents have started to buy special kits to make cheese.
Cheese making courses are also rapidly gaining popularity. Russians seem to have understood that they can count only on themselves and are attending the classes in order to learn this skill, head of "Cheese House" learning center Julia Lysikova said, cited by the newspaper.
|
|
#10
Moscow Times
October 23, 2015
European Union Prohibits Studies of Sanctioned Russian Banks
The European Union has prohibited its financial institutions from publishing analytical research of the Russian banks under EU sanctions, the European Commission said in a statement.
The European Commission, the EU's legislative body, prohibited publishing research on Russian banks because the analysis contained in the reports could help investors in Russia make decisions on buying or selling assets, according to the European Commission statement, published on its official website on Sep. 25.
"The provision of financial research should be seen as a form of investment service and is thus prohibited under the regulation," the statement said.
Last year the EU introduced restrictions against Russian credit organizations as part of the sanctions imposed on Russia by the EU over the country's involvement in the Ukraine conflict.
Russian banks that fall under restrictions include Russia's biggest lenders Sberbank, VTB and Gazprombank, as well as Vnesheconombank and Rosselkhozbank.
The sanctions ban top Russian lenders from taking long-term loans in the EU. Last October Sberbank, VTB and Vnesheconombank appealed to the EU's General Court of the Court of Justice, the highest court in the EU system, seeking the removal of the punitive measures.
In June, the EU extended economic sanctions against Russia until Jan. 31, 2016.
Commenting on the European Commission's decision, Vasily Titov, VTB's deputy chairman of the board, said he didn't understand the logics of the measure, the TASS news agency reported Thursday. He said the ban wouldn't prevent VTB from publishing its own reports, and that the bank would continue to work, according to TASS.
|
|
#11
Health minister: HIV epidemic in Russia may run out of control
MOSCOW, October 23. /TASS/. The HIV epidemic in Russia may run out of control from 2020 if the scope of infected people is not extended, Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova told a governmental healthcare conference on Friday.
"Current treatment funding allows us to provide with treatment some 200,000 of HIV-infected people, which is 23%," Skvortsova said. "Even if we manage to extend the number of those provided with treatment to 30%, in 2020 the number of HIV-infected will grow by 250%, so the epidemic will be out of control."
The minister said that the rate of those getting treatment must not be lower than 60-80%
"We may expect the reduction of HIV epidemic in two or three years if the scope is 80%," she said, adding that more active use of Russia-manufactured medicines and technologies is one of the ways to settle the situation.
|
|
#12
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
October 22, 2015
7 trends for Russian foreign policy you need to know
After the Ukraine crisis and military intervention in Syria, the key principles and ideas underpinning Russian foreign policy are becoming easier to understand.
By Ivan Timofeev
Ivan Timofeev, Ph.D. in Political Science, Program Director at Russian International Affairs Council
Against the backdrop of the Ukraine crisis and the military airstrikes in Syria, Russian foreign policy is often seen as unpredictable. Not only was Russian action in both cases swift and unexpected, the scope of the response appeared to be disproportionate to the risk posed to Russia's national interests.
Syria and especially Ukraine appear to be inflection points in the trajectory of Russian foreign policy, representing a shift towards a qualitatively new line of policy. The new configuration is already taking shape. With the shock of Ukraine and Syria now over, predictability is beginning to return to Russian policy, as evidenced by the seven trends below.
Trend #1
Russian policy on its western borders will be defensive, not offensive. Contrary to the fears and phobias of Eastern Europe, there will be no military steps against the new NATO members. Air, sea and cyber incidents will happen again. But the threat here is escalation resulting from an accidental collision, not a pre-planned operation. Defense spending in line with "Russian aggression" will no doubt please NATO's top leaders, but the chances of solving any real problems as a result will be close to zero.
We are likely to see a local arms race on both sides and periodic flare-ups in the Baltic-Black Sea region. Military activity on either side of the border will be seen as a provocation and an element of "hybrid warfare." The two sides will mirror each other in that respect.
Trend #2
Any attempt by the West to penetrate the post-Soviet space militarily or economically will be perceived in Russia as hostile and disproportionate.
Whereas such intrusion was once diluted by partnership, it is now viewed unequivocally as a zero-sum game.
The post-Soviet space is seen as an arena of geopolitics, not partnership. The problem is exacerbated by the inherent weakness of many post-Soviet states. Even without conspicuous outside interference, they could still fall into crisis. Such crisis could provoke yet more rivalry between Russia and the West, both of which will try to take advantage of its consequences.
Russia and the West are both hostage to the fragility of the post-Soviet space. Russia will try to solve the problem for itself by enhancing alliances with the more stable countries in the region and engaging with the weaker ones (for example, through institutions such as the Eurasian Economic Union).
Paradoxically the West can benefit from the success of these alliances. The other members (especially Kazakhstan and Belarus) are bound to play a major role in them. This will help to "average out" their respective positions in international affairs and create a new structure of relations based firmly on partnership.
Trend #3
The key doctrinal idea of Russian foreign policy will be to check the spread of anarchy, avert the collapse of statehood, and preserve government control. This idea will run counter to the theory of democratization as the guarantor of stable development.
Russia will build situational or even long-term alliances with other regional and global players around this idea, which might be successfully used for the domestic audience. Russia could assume the role of leader in the area of global conservative politics, pursuing cautious, pragmatic change as per the specifics of each particular state.
The concept of democracy in this vein can be swung in Russia's favor through gradual internal (instead of artificial and external) democratization and reference to local traditions. Russia will probably seek out China as a partner in the promotion of this doctrine.
Trend #4
Russia is becoming a more active military-political player outside its own territory. However, this activity will be selective and targeted due to limited resources.
Besides Syria, a possible point of Russian intervention could be the implementation of treaty obligations in Central Asia, especially in the event of a terrorist threat posed by militants not based in Afghanistan. Such an intervention would be carried out by highly mobile units with active air support.
Trend #5
Russia will take measures to develop new regional and international institutions such as the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). But the functionality and workability of these institutions remains an open question.
Russia will have to find optimal mechanisms of interaction with the major non-Western players even though none intends to sever ties with the West and form an overtly anti-Western coalition. Russia itself will maintain and develop economic relations with the West in the knowledge that business on both sides has already factored the risks of political crisis into its plans and projects.
Russia is not about to tumble out of the world economy and become an outcast. The country's relatively weak economic positions will be offset by political strength. In this context, attempts to strengthen the role of the United Nations and the country's own place in the organization will be another feature of Russian policy.
Trend #6
Institutions of European security and key treaties with Russia will be eroded, but Moscow is hardly likely to seek their dismantlement.
Russia is keen to maintain a dialogue with the United States in the field of strategic stability, But this dialogue is likely to go hand in hand with the development of strategic weapons on both sides. The Ukraine crisis has set an extremely negative precedent for the politicization of dialogue within the framework of such fundamental treaties as INF and START. This precedent will have a negative impact on future dialogue.
Trend #7
The economy and public expectations about economic modernization are set to become increasingly important elements of Russian foreign policy.
The "external threat card" cannot be played repeatedly, which means that government and business will be forced to take radical steps to improve the performance of the Russian economy in the eyes of society.
The crisis offers an opportunity to implement reforms that would be impossible in a climate of stability. Such changes are necessary for the new stage of Russia's relations with foreign partners. Even during the best of times, Russia's economic health is oftentimes an impediment to developing political ties. Economic reform should open up new resource niches for growth, although the process is fraught with major risks.
The ability of the state to guarantee the rule of law and breathing room for private initiative is one of the key conditions for successful reform.
Today, Russia and other players face processes beyond their control. Religious radicalism, migration and disintegration of statehood are only a small part of the picture. Sooner or later, everyone will be affected, and both Russia and the West will have to coordinate their policies and act together. The recent crisis provides an opportunity to reset the parameters of Russia's relations with its partners.
|
|
#13
Moscow Times
October 23, 2015
Facing Uncomfortable Truths About Terrorism
By Pyotr Romanov
Pyotr Romanov is a journalist and historian.
The statement "He's a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch" long ago entered political lore. And whether it was former U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt who said it regarding former Nicaraguan leader Anastasio Somoza, or, as some believe, the words referred to former Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo, the idea is the same: the statement clearly demonstrates the well-known phenomenon of double standards in politics.
It has always been that way, it remains so and, I am afraid, it will remain so for the foreseeable future.
And, of course, not only the United States had its various "sons of bitches." The Soviet Union, Britain, China, France, Germany and others all lent their support at one time or another to a variety of lowlife national leaders to achieve some purely temporary political goals.
I worked in Peru in the late 1980s and early 1990s and remember the war waged by Maoist terrorist organization Shining Path.
I well remember what horrors those favorites of Beijing committed: blowing up everything possible, using machetes to hack off their victims' hands, making a yellow liquid that smelled of excrement flow out of water pipes in place of water, and sometimes, as a joke, they would join those pipes with the regular water line.
In fact, many Maoist agitators of that time led comfortable lives as political refugees in the Netherlands where they worked actively to convince the Europeans of their democratic and civilized ways - in contrast to their behavior toward the Peruvian authorities. The Peruvian authorities of that time were not so great, but the country's Maoists were much worse.
However, Europeans did not understand that and many were very upset that the Soviet Union provided military equipment to the Peruvian army to fight the terrorist group.
Few remember that barbarous war: today other "sons of bitches" blow up other locales.
By the way, those terrorists often start off as "our sons of bitches" and wind up out of our control.
The boomerang often swings around and strikes the head of the one who threw it - that is, the state that secretly funded, armed and trained those terrorists in pursuit of short-term political interests.
And still, neither the West nor the East ever realize that there is no such thing as "good" or "bad" terrorists, no matter what slogans they hide behind or how they justify their actions. There is simply no such thing as a "good" or "moderate" terrorist.
The Eastern and Western powers cannot even agree on a unified list of international terrorist organizations.
One side is OK with Hamas, the other not.
One side sees no problem with Hezbollah while the other most certainly does.
And yet, it is clear that both groups use terrorist methods in their struggle.
In fact the world cannot even agree on a common definition of the word "terrorism," with the result that each state interprets it as best suits their interests at any given moment.
When the West speaks seriously of a "moderate opposition" in Syria, I cannot figure out who they mean when every group in that conflict is running around with automatic weapons, blowing things up and killing others.
In my understanding, "moderate" connotes exclusively political methods of struggle.
However, U.S. airplanes are simply dropping new weapons and ammunition on the ground for anyone who needs them.
And in Syria, everyone needs weapons these days. Syria's so-called "moderate opposition" is currently Washington's favorite "son of a bitch," and for political reasons almost nobody in Washington is thinking about what sort of beast that little "pup" will one day become.
By the way, former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski also gave little thought to the end result of giving U.S. aid to al-Qaida.
That support returned later as a deadly boomerang: bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, and finally the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York on Sept. 11, 2001.
But at the time, Washington believed al-Qaida militants were the good guys: they were "our sons of bitches."
Moscow's attitude toward the latest wave of terrorism in Israel is also a little strange, to put it mildly.
Although the Palestinians undoubtedly hold some legitimate claims against the Israeli leadership, that does not justify knife-wielding Palestinians attacking a 70-year-old Jewish woman recently outside a bus station in Jerusalem.
And yet, Russian state-controlled television coolly aired the speech by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in which he defended the "heroes" and actually incited the Palestinian people to further violence.
But Moscow remains silent, as does Washington, both playing the game of "big politics."
The problem is that "big politics" always requires big sacrifices from the little people.
I don't remember who originally said that, but it's true. And since I love the little people, I have never liked politicians.
|
|
#14
The Unz Review
www.unz.com
October 25, 2015
Week Three of the Russian Intervention in Syria
The return of diplomacy
By the Saker
The end of international law and diplomacy
The end of the Cold War was welcomed as a new era of peace and security in which swords would be transformed into plows, former enemies into friends, and the world would witness a new dawn of universal love, peace and happiness. Of course, none of that happened. What happened is that the AngloZionist Empire convinced itself that it had "won the Cold War" and that it now was in charge. Of the entire planet, no less. And why not? It had built anywhere between 700 to 1000 military bases (depending on your definition of "base") worldwide and it had split up the entire globe into several areas of exclusive responsibility named "commands". The last time any power had mustered the megalomania needed to distribute various parts of the planet to to different commands was the Papacy in 1494 with its (in)famous "Treaty of Tordesillas".
And to make that point abundantly clear, the Empire decided to make an example and unleashed its power against tiny Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia, a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement was viciously attacked and dismembered, creating an immense wave of refugees, mostly Serbs, which the democratic and civilized world chose to ignore. Furthermore, the Empire unleashed yet another war, this time in Russia, which pitched the semi-comatose Eltsin regime against what would later become a key part of al-Qaeda, ISIS and Daesh: the Wahabis in Chechnia. Again, many hundreds of thousands of "invisible refugees" resulted from that war too, but they were also largely ignored by the democratic and civilized world, especially the ethnic Russians. It took Russia a full decade to finally crush this Wahabi-Takfiri insurgency but, eventually, Russia prevailed. And by that time, the AngloZionists had turned their attention elsewhere: the US and Israeli "deep states" jointly planned and executed the 9/11 false flag operation which gave them the perfect excuse to declare a "global war on terror" which basically gave the AngloZionists a worldwide "license to kill" à la 007, except that in this case the target was not a person, but entire countries.
We all know what followed: Iraq, Afghanistan, Philippines, Somalia, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Mali, Pakistan, Syria, Libya, the Ukraine - everywhere the US was at war, whether officially or covertly. The spectrum ranged from an (attempted) complete invasion of a country (Afghanistan) to the support of various terrorist groups (Iran, Syria) to the full financing and management of a Nazi regime (the Ukraine). The US also gave full support to the Wahabis in their long crusade against the Shia (KSA, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, Iran). What all these wars had in common is that they were all completely illegal - the US and any ad hoc "coalition of the willing" became an acceptable substitute for the UN Security Council.
Here again it is important to remind everybody - especially those Muslims who rejoiced at the bombing of the Serbs - that this all began with the completely illegal destruction of Yugoslavia followed by an even more illegal bombing of Serbia.
Of course, the Empire also suffered from a few humiliating defeats: in 2006 Hezbollah inflicted on Israel what might well be one of the most humiliating military defeats in modern history while in 2008 a tiny force of truly heroic Ossetian fighters backed by a comparatively small Russian military contingent (only a small part of the Russian military was involved) made mincemeat of the the US-trained and US-funded Georgian military: the war was over in 4 days. Still, by and large, the first decade of the 21st century saw a triumph of the law of the jungle over international law and a full vindication of the age old principle of "might makes right".
Logically, these were also the years when the US diplomacy basically ceased to exist. The sole function of US diplomats remained the delivery of ultimatums "comply or else..." and the Empire simply stopped negotiating about anything. Seasoned and sophisticated diplomats like James Baker were replaced either by psychopaths like Madelaine Albright, Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, or by mediocre non-entities like John Kerry and Susan Rice. After all, how sophisticated must one be to threaten, bully and deliver ultimatums? Things got so bad that the Russians openly complained about the "lack of professionalism" of their US counterparts.
As for the poor Russians with their pathetic insistence that the norms of international law must be observed, they looked hopelessly passé. I won't even mention the European politicians here. They were best characterized by the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who called them "great supine protoplasmic invertebrate jellies'.
But then, something changed. Dramatically.
The failure of force
Suddenly everything went south. Every single US victory somehow turned into a defeat: from Afghanistan to Libya, every US 'success' had somehow morphed itself into a situation where the best option, if not the only one left, was to "declare victory and leave". This begs the obvious question "what happened?".
The first obvious conclusion is that the US forces and their so-called "allies" have very little staying power. While they are reasonably skilled at invading a country, they then rapidly lose control of most of it. It is one thing to invade a country, but quite another to administer it, nevermind rebuilt it. It turns out that US-led "coalitions of the willing" were unable to get anything done.
Second, it became obvious that the enemy which was supposedly defeated had really only gone into hiding and was waiting for a better time to come back with a vengeance. Iraq is the perfect example of that: far form being really "defeated", the Iraqi Army (wisely) chose to disband itself and come back in the shape of a formidable Sunni insurrection which itself gradually morphed into ISIS. But Iraq was not an isolated case. The same happened pretty much everywhere.
There are those who will object and that that the US does not care if it controls a country or if it destroys it, as long as the other guy does not get to "win". I disagree. Yes, the US will always prefer the destruction of a country to an outright victory of the other side, but this does not mean that the US does not prefer to control a country if possible. In other words, when a country sinks into chaos and violence this is not a US victory, but most definitely a US loss.
What the US missed is that diplomacy makes the use of force much more effective. First, careful diplomacy makes it possible to build a wide coalition of countries willing to support collective action. Second, diplomacy also makes it possible to reduce the number of countries which openly oppose collective action. Does anybody remember that Syria actually sent forces to support US troops against Saddam Hussein in Desert Storm? Sure, they did not make a big difference, but their presence gave the US the peace of mind that Syria would at least not overtly oppose the US policy. By getting the Syrians to support Desert Storm, James Backer made it very hard for the Iraqis to argue that this was an anti-Arab, anti-Muslim or even an anti-Baathist coalition and he made Saddam Hussein look completely isolated (even when the Iraqis began shooting missiles at Israel). Second, diplomacy makes it possible to reduce the overall amount of force used because "instant overkill" is not needed to show the enemy that you really mean business. Third, diplomacy is the necessary tool to achieve legitimacy and legitimacy is crucial when engaged in a long, protracted, conflict. Finally, the consensus which emerges from a successful diplomatic effort prevents the rapid erosion of the public support for a military effort. But all these factors were ignored by the USA in the GWOT (Global War on Terror) and the "Arab Spring" revolutions which now have come to a screeching halt.
A diplomatic triumph for Russia
This week saw a true diplomatic triumph for Russia culminating in Friday's multilateral negotiations in Vienna which brought together the foreign ministers of Russia, the US, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. The fact that this meeting took place right after Assad's visit to Moscow clearly indicates that the sponsors of Daesh and al-Qaeda are now forced to negotiate on Moscow's terms. How did that happen?
As I have been mantrically repeating it since the Russian operation in Syria began, the Russian military force actually sent to Syria is very small. Yes, it is a very effective one, but it is still very small. In fact, the members of the Russian Duma have announced that the costs of the entire operation will probably fit in the normal Russian Defense budget which has monies allocated for "training". However, what the Russian have achieved with this small intervention is rather amazing, not only in military terms, but especially in political terms.
Not only has the Empire (very reluctantly) had to accept that Assad would have to stay in power for the foreseeable future, but Russia is now gradually but inexorably building up a real regional coalition which is willing to fight Daesh on the same side as the Syrian government forces. Even before the Russian operation began, Russia had the support of Syria, Iran, Iraq and Hezbollah. There are also strong signs that the Kurds are basically also willing to work with Russia and Assad. On Friday it was announced that Jordan would also coordinate some as of yet unspecified military actions with Russia and that a special coordination center will be set up in Amman. There are also very strong rumors that Egypt will also join the Russian-lead coalition. There are also signs that Russia and Israel are also, if not working together, at least not working against each other: the Russian and Israelis have created a special line to directly talk to each other on a military level. The bottom line is this: regardless of the sincerity of the different parties, everybody in the region now feels a strong pressure to at least not look opposed to the Russian effort. That, by itself, is a huge triumph for Russian diplomacy.
Putin's secret weapon: the truth
The current situation is, of course, totally unacceptable for the Global Hegemon: not only has the US-lead coalition of 62 countries managed to conduct 22,000 strikes with nothing to show for it, but the comparatively smaller Russian coalition has managed to completely displace the Empire and negate all its plans. And the most formidable weapon used by Putin in his proxy war with the USA was not even a military one, but simply speaking the truth.
Both at his UN speech and, this week, at his speech at the Valdai Conference Putin has done what no other world leader before has ever dared doing: he openly call the US regime incompetent, irresponsible, lying, hypocritical and terminally arrogant. That kind of public "dissing" has had a huge impact worldwide because by the time Putin said these words more or less everybody knew that this was absolutely true.
The US does treat all its allies as "vassals" (see Valdai speech) and the US is the prime culprit for all the terrible crises the world now has to face (see UN speech). What Putin did is basically say "the Emperor is naked". In comparison, Obama's lame speech was comically pathetic. What we are witnessing now is an amazing turn around. After decades marked by the "might makes right" principle advocated by the USA, suddenly we are in a situation where no amount of military might is of any use to a beleaguered President Obama: what use are 12 aircraft carriers when you personally look like a clown?
After 1991 it appeared that the only superpower left was so powerful and unstoppable that it did not need to bother itself with such minor things like diplomacy or respect for international law. Uncle Sam felt like he was the sole ruler, the Planetary Hegemon. China was just a "big Walmart", Russia a "gas station" and Europe an obedient poodle (the latter is, alas, quite true). The myth of US invincibility was just that, of course, a myth: since WWII the USA has not won a single real war (Grenada or Panama do not qualify). In fact, the US military fared even much worse in Afghanistan that the under-trained, under-equipped, under-fed and under-financed Soviet 40th Army which, at least, kept all the major cities and main roads under Soviet control and which did some meaningful development of the civilian infrastructure of the country (which the US is still using in 2015). Nevertheless, the myth of US invincibility only really came crashing down when Russia put a stop to it in 2013 by preventing a US assault on Syria by a mix of diplomatic and military means. Uncle Sam was livid, but could do nothing about besides triggering a coup in Kiev and an economic war against Russia, neither of which have succeeded in their goals.
As for Putin, instead of being deterred by all the US efforts, he invited Assad to Moscow.
Assad's Moscow visit as yet another indicator of US impotence
This week's visit by Assad was nothing short of extraordinary. Not only did the Russian succeed in getting Assad out of Syria and to Moscow and then back without the bloated US intelligence community noticing anything, but unlike most heads of state, Assad spoke face to face to some of the most powerful men in Russia.
First, Assad met with Putin, Lavrov and Shoigu. They spoke for a total of three hours (which, by itself, is quite remarkable). They were later joined by Medvedev for a private dinner. Guess who else joined them? Mikhail Fradkov, Head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, and Nikolai Patrushev, Head of the Russian Security Council:
Normally, heads of state do not meet personally with men like Fradkov or Patrushev and, instead, they send their own experts. In this case, however, the topic discussed was important enough to 1) get Assad personally to the Kremlin and 2) get all the top players in the Kremlin around the same table for a personal discussion with Assad.
Obviously, not a word came out from this meeting, but there are two main theories circulating out there about what was discussed.
The first theory says that Assad was told in no unclear terms that his days were numbered and that he would have to leave.
The second one says the exact opposite: that Assad was brought in to signal to him, and the US, that he had the full support of Russia.
I don't believe that either one of these is correct, but the second one is, I think, probably closer to the truth. After all, if the goal was to tell Assad that he had to go, a simple phone call would have been enough, really. Maybe a visit by Lavrov. As for "backing Assad", that would go in direct contradiction with what the Russians have been saying all along: they are not backing "Assad" as a person, although they do recognize him as the sole legitimate President of Syria, but they are backing the right of the Syrian people to be the only ones to decide who should be in power in Syria. And that, by the way, is something that Assad himself has also agreed to (according to Putin). Likewise, Assad has also agreed to work with any non-Daesh opposition forces willing to fight against Daesh alongside the Syrian military (again, according to Putin).
No, while I believe that the meeting between Assad and Putin was, at least in part, a message to the USA and the others so-called "friends of Syria", indicating that their "Assad must go" plan had failed, I believe that the main purpose of the behind-closed-doors meeting with all the top leaders of Russia was something else: my guess is that what was discussed was a major and long term alliance between Russia and Syria which would formally revive the kind of alliance Syria had with the Soviet Union in the past. While I can only speculate about the exact terms of such an alliance, it is my guess that this plan, probably coordinated with Iran has two major aspects:
a) military component: Daesh must be crushed.
b) political component: Syria will not be allowed to fall under US control.
Considering that the Russian military operation is assumed by most Russian experts to be scheduled to last about 3 months, we are dealing here with separate, middle to long term, plan which will require the Syrian armed forces to be rebuilt while Russia, Iran and Iraq jointly coordinate the struggle against Daesh. And, indeed, it was announced on Friday that Iraq had authorized the Russian military to strike at Daesh inside the Iraqi territory. It sure looks like the Russian operation has acted as a catalyst for a region paralyzed by US hypocrisy and incompetence and that the days of Daesh are numbered
Too early to celebrate, but a watershed moment nonetheless
Still, it is way too early to celebrate. The Russians cannot do it all by themselves, and it will be incumbent upon the Syrians and their allies to fight Daesh, one small town at a time. Only boots on the ground will really liberate Syria from Daesh and only true Islam will be able to defeat the Takfiri ideology. This will take a time.
Furthermore, it would be irresponsible to underestimate the Empire's determination and ability to prevent Russia from looking like "the winner" - that is something which the US imperial ego, raised in centuries of imperial hubris and ignorance, will never be able to cope with. After all, how can the "indispensable nation" accept that the world does not need it at all and that others can even openly oppose and prevail? We can expect the US to use all its (still huge) power to try to thwart and sabotage every Russian or Syrian initiative.
Still, the recent events are the mark that the era of "might makes right" has come to an end and that the notion that the US is an "indispensable nation" or world hegemon has now lost any credibility. After decades in the dark, international diplomacy and the international law are finally becoming relevant again. It is my hope that this is the beginning of a process which will see the USA undergo the same evolution as so many other countries (including Russia) have undergone in the past: from being an empire to becoming a "normal country" again. Alas, when I look at the 2016 Presidential race I get the feeling that this will still be a very long process.
|
|
#15
Christian Science Monitor
October 22, 2015
If Kremlin doesn't fight Islamists in Syria, will it have to in Russia?
Radical Islamists are a legitimate threat to Russia's security, particularly via its post-Soviet neighbors to the south. But the risk of blowback is high too.
By Fred Weir, Correspondent
Moscow - Meeting with embattled Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in the Kremlin Tuesday, Vladimir Putin offered a rationale for Russian intervention in Syria that will be familiar to generations of Americans, whose leaders launched overseas wars from Vietnam to Iraq and, well, Syria: It's better to fight them over there today, than in our own cities tomorrow.
For Russia, with 12 percent, mostly Sunni, Muslim population - much of it concentrated in the already turbulent north Caucasus region - it's not a far-fetched fear.
Mr. Putin said about 4,000 Muslims from ex-Soviet countries are fighting alongside the Islamic State in Syria and "we cannot let these people gain combat experience and go through ideological indoctrination and then return to Russia."
Security experts say it may be even more important to deal a blow to the myth of IS by halting its winning streak in Syria. Otherwise, its ecumenical brand of extreme jihadism could catch on not only among young Russian Muslim males but, more crucially, in the teeming former Soviet Muslim republics of central Asia, mainly Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, which offer a direct geographical pipeline to the Russian heartland.
But like many US leaders in the past, Putin may be underestimating the dangers of long-term blowback - and that by intervening in Syria, Russia could realize the fears that it's trying to prevent.
Protecting the southern flank
Supporters of the intervention argue that there is an interconnected battle being fought against an ideological enemy that knows no borders. Russian security experts warn that Islamist extremism is again burgeoning, under the auspices of Al Qaeda and IS, in northern Afghanistan - and might find support from ethnic Uzbeks and Tajiks who previously had rejected the ethnically Pashtun Taliban.
"One of the key strategic goals of the Russian operation in Syria is to stop IS before it opens a second front in Tajikistan," says Vladimir Sotnikov, an expert with the official Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow.
"We see really dangerous signs that the situation in Afghanistan is unraveling. Stability in Tajikistan is very fragile right now. This nightmare scenario, where jihadists migrate across central Asia and on to Russia looks all too real. We need to take action, and that's what we are doing in Syria. We need to do a lot more."
Vladimir Yevseyev, an expert at the Institute for World Economy and International Relations, an official research center, says Russia doesn't face the most immediate danger. "It will be bad if IS fighters who are Russian should try to return here," he says. "But, frankly, we are ready for them and have the means to stop them."
"They are more likely to make for other places, including Europe, and they should be very worried about that in the West. As for us, our main concern is central Asia right now," and not so much the Russian homeland, he adds.
'Christian and Islamic leaders are unanimous'
Nobody knows how vulnerable Russia may be to internal discord between its mainly Christian majority and Muslim minorities. Two wars in Chechnya have left the entire north Caucasus region exhausted, but still seething with low-level Islamist insurgency. The populations of big Russian cities, including Moscow, now include millions of Muslim migrant workers from central Asia, and the accompanying social dislocations have led to more than one race riot.
Last month, Putin personally inaugurated "Europe's biggest mosque" in downtown Moscow, and pledged to do much more through the educational system and official outreach to counter the message of "extremist hatred" spread by groups like IS.
Russia's official Muslim leadership has issued several statements in favor of the intervention. This week Talgat Tadzhuddin, the country's chief mufti, warned that jihadi ideology was making inroads among young Russian Muslims.
"Youths are recruited via Internet, through underground camps, they are lured abroad and told that Islam is for those who have faith and should kill infidels. This is foolishness, absolute ignorance," Mr. Tadzhuddin said.
More importantly, the powerful Russian Orthodox Church, which considers itself to have an historic mission to protect the Christians of the Middle East, stands behind the efforts in Syria. In an emailed statement, church spokesman Archimandrite Philaret, said that Russia's official inter-religious council, which includes representatives of the country's Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist faiths, fully support the Russian military operation.
"The leaders of the traditional religions clearly realize that terrorists, even if they use Islamic slogans, cannot belong to this religion," he said. "Extremists are trying to present Russia's operation in Syria as a war between the Christian and the Islamic cultures. But in our country, Christian and Islamic leaders have proved to be unanimous in their desire to safeguard society against the threat of extremism."
'A real danger of angering Russia's Muslims'
Still, experts say, a lot depends on how long Russia's Syrian intervention goes on, and how it ends.
Moreover, the campaign, with its daily TV images of Russian warplanes hammering Syrian rebels, may be sending a different message to Muslims than to other Russians - and diverting resources better used to counter dangers closer to home.
"It's not only IS that has declared war on Russia due to its actions in Syria, but other Islamist groups as well," Mr. Sotnikov notes. "We need to be very careful to minimize any provocations toward Russian Muslims. Maybe it's not an immediate problem, but if this operation drags on longer than expected there is a real danger of angering Russia's Muslims. We cannot allow ourselves to underestimate the attractions of extreme jihadist ideology, especially among young Muslims. It's a very real, and ongoing threat."
"In a way, it's a continuation of our long war in the north Caucasus, which Putin has managed to pacify by pumping great sums of money into that region," says Alexander Golts, an independent security expert. "I fear that now, once again, Russia will become vulnerable to all the consequences of Islamist extremism, including terrorism in our own cities."
|
|
#16
Most Russians believe authorities can protect them from terrorism - poll
MOSCOW, October 23. /TASS/. Most Russians believe that Russia's authorities are able to protect them from terrorist threats, the state-run Russian Public Opinion Research Centre (VTsIOM) said on Friday.
A VTsIOM poll showed that 77% of respondents think the Russian authorities are able to protect them from terrorist attacks.
Meanwhile, 65% of those polled said they were afraid of falling a victim of a terrorist attack.
Some 23% of Russians said that the major terrorist threat in Russia is connected with the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group.
The poll was conducted in October 17-18 among 1,600 respondents in 46 Russian regions. The margin of error does not exceed 3.5%
|
|
#17
Moscow Times
October 26, 2015
Putin Is Angling for a Quick Exit From Syria
By Vladimir Frolov
Vladimir Frolov is president of LEFF Group, a government relations and PR company.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is pivoting to diplomacy on Syria to capitalize on the perception of Russia's military success after four weeks of air strikes. He is in a rush to switch gears before the Syrian army's offensive stalls and Russia's key ally is exposed as a spent force.
Having achieved his primary objective of positioning Russia as an indispensable global power on a par with the United States, Putin is angling for a quick exit before the going gets tough.
Putin's diplomatic plan, borrowing heavily from his Chechen template, centers on the need to split the anti-Assad opposition and co-opt those of its elements who would agree to hold the transition talks with Syrian President Bashar Assad and stop fighting the regime, while turning their arms against the Islamic State.
During Assad's clandestine visit to Moscow last week, he was told to agree to share power and Russia's military support with those moderate opposition groups that Russia would be able to incite and co-opt into a "counter-terrorist coalition" to fight the Islamic State. Those opposition groups who did not join the "coalition" would be labeled Islamic State and bombed into dust.
It's a cynically clever plan to create a new reality in Syria by turning its civil war into a counter-terrorist operation. Moscow, however, needs assistance from the United States, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, who back moderate opposition groups, to bring at least some of them to the negotiating table with Assad, while cutting off military support to those who refuse. The task is all the more difficult since Russia now bombs all those groups.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called upon the Free Syrian Army to accept Russian air support to fight the Islamic State and join talks with Assad to prepare for early presidential and parliamentary elections.
The presidential elections are a cover for transitioning Assad out. Putin would personally guarantee that Assad would not run, but someone from his family or clan might. The parliamentary elections would usher in the constitutional reform and elect a powerful prime minister with full executive powers. The prime minister would be a Sunni.
Russia would guarantee amnesty to every opposition member, while the opposition would not prosecute Assad for his crimes. Russia would keep a military presence in Syria to guarantee the implementation of the peace plan.
As always with Putin, it's a recklessly daring plan, but it may just work.
|
|
#18
Financial Times
October 25, 2015
Russia calls for fresh elections in Syria
Kathrin Hille in Moscow and Erika Solomon in Beirut
Russia is pushing for fresh elections in Syria next year and offering air support to the opposition Free Syrian Army in its fight with Isis, as Moscow seeks to use the momentum of its military campaign to move towards political stabilisation in the war-torn country.
Speaking on Saturday to state television, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said it was "necessary to prepare for elections, both presidential and parliamentary" in Syria.
Recent successes of the Syrian army achieved with backing from the Russian air force have allowed the government of president Bashar al-Assad to "consolidate its position and should make the state more interested in progress of the political process," he said.
Mr Lavrov added Russia was ready to "give air support to the so-called Free Syrian Army", but said that the US was refusing to share with Moscow its assessment about the respective location of terrorist groups and "patriotic" opposition forces.
"The most important thing for us is to reach out to the people who authoritatively represent different armed groups that fight terrorism," he said.
Russia's offer to back the FSA militarily sharply contrasts with its earlier denouncement of all armed opposition groups as "terrorists". It comes as Moscow seeks to stop its military support for Mr Assad's regime from undermining its credibility with the opposition.
Although Russia has said that its military intervention in Syria is aimed at destroying Isis, the radical jihadist group, the vast majority of its air strikes so far have hit other armed opposition forces.
Mikhail Bogdanov, president Vladimir Putin's special envoy for the Middle East, has held talks with a number of opposition representatives over the past three weeks. Three people familiar with Moscow's Syria diplomacy said he had met Manaf Tlas, a former officer in Mr Assad's armed forces who defected in 2012 and now lives in exile in Paris, and Salah Muslim of the Kurdish PYD party.
Two Russian officials said Mr Bogdanov met with former and current FSA members and had invited one FSA leader to Moscow. However, they did not provide any detail on who those people were. The government also admits that it still struggles to understand who its interlocutors are, whether certain opposition groups are moderate and what their allegiances are.
Opposition fighters in Syria quickly dismissed the possibility that they could work together with the Assad regime they have been fighting for years, or that they could trust Russia.
"I don't like this talk, the Russians are liars. I think they got themselves stuck and are trying to find a way out," said a rebel commander with the First Army in southern Deraa, an ideologically moderate group with ties to the west. "But we will never surrender, we will triumph or we will die."
A rebel commander from an FSA group on the front line area near Isis positions in Aleppo province, who claims to have come under Russian air strikes, said when asked about a Russian offer of air support: "Are you joking? That's funny."
Moscow has said very little publicly about what kind of political transition it wants in Syria, and Mr Lavrov did not specify when or how Moscow would like to see elections. But two people familiar with its diplomatic effort said the government aimed to get international support for elections next year.
Western governments and several Arab countries refused to recognise the last election through which Mr Assad extended his rule by another seven years in June 2014. "We need to put together a political process that all external powers agree to back this time," said a Russian foreign policy official.
He added that it was not up to any foreign government to decide whether or not Mr Assad could participate in this process or run in the next election. Moscow believes that pushing Mr Assad to allow the participation of a broader range of opposition forces will eventually convince western and regional powers to back such a process.
Mr Putin said this week that Mr Assad could be replaced only by the will of the Syrian people in transparent elections. Vitaly Naumkin, a Syria expert at the Russian Academy of Sciences who has advised the foreign ministry on its Syria policy, said Moscow was prepared to see Mr Assad step aside "but the Iranians are absolutely against this".
Moscow's appeal for elections and open offer for military support to the FSA cap a week of hectic diplomacy in which Moscow appeared to lean on Mr Assad to open up to dialogue with opposition groups and stepped up pressure on the US and its allies to accept a role for the Syrian president in a political transition.
Russian president Vladimir Putin summoned Mr Assad to Moscow for marathon discussions on Wednesday and subsequently claimed the Syrian leader was open to working with moderate opposition forces and viewed positively the idea of Russian support for armed opposition groups who fight Isis.
On Friday, Mr Lavrov discussed Syria with US secretary of state John Kerry as well as the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
|
|
#19
Wall Street Journal
October 26, 2015
U.S. Sees New Need to Engage Russia, Iran on Mideast
Washington and allies acknowledge efforts to stabilize region will be hard without Moscow, Tehran
By JAY SOLOMON
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia-Secretary of State John Kerry and his European allies, in their renewed drive to promote stability in the Middle East, are increasingly reliant on the two countries the U.S. has historically argued only undermine stability-Russia and Iran.
The engagement of Moscow and Tehran by the U.S. and Europe exemplifies the shifting balance of power in the region, as President Barack Obama has made clear his intent to minimize the U.S. military role there, according to U.S. and Arab officials.
But the West is taking risks by including the Russians and Iranians in diplomacy, said Emile Hokayem, a regional analyst at London's International Institute for Strategic Studies, expressing a view that is shared by many Arab officials.
Neither country has shown that it shares the same long-term interests as Washington or European capitals. In many cases, both still actively oppose those interests. In addition, the security and alliance structure the U.S. has created over the past five decades in the Middle East is at risk of fraying, as Arab countries look to the Kremlin as much as the White House for guidance.
"What happens in Syria will be key to the new Middle Eastern order," said Mr. Hokayem. "The immediate benefit may seem worth it. But over time, the U.S. will find it more difficult to rally its partners and convey determination on other regional security issues. The long-term costs of what are tactical arrangements with Moscow and Tehran will be high."
Mr. Kerry returned Sunday from an overseas trip in which he met in Vienna with counterparts from Russia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey to discuss Syria. They agreed to hold a broader international gathering, which will include many European and Arab countries, and possibly Iran.
In a sign of the diplomatic shift under way, Jordan, one of the staunchest U.S. allies in the Arab world, announced on Friday it was establishing an office in Amman to jointly coordinate military operations with Russia in Iraq and Syria. Jordan is a member of the U.S.-led coalition that is attacking Islamic State targets in those countries.
Russia and Iran's powerful military unit, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, have stepped up their operations in Syria in recent months. The two countries launched joint military operations in Syria last month to bolster President Bashar al-Assad.
They also are increasing coordination with the Iraqi government to support its fight against Islamic State, which has gained control of large swathes of northern and western Iraq over the past two years.
The U.S. and most of its European and Mideast allies have openly called for Mr. Assad's ouster as a necessary step to end more than four years of fighting in his country.
But Mr. Kerry and European officials have acknowledged in recent days that their efforts to stabilize Syria, as well as Iraq and Yemen, will likely be for naught without buy-in from Russia and Iran.
"It is clear that Russia and Iran are supportive of Assad....[while] a whole bunch of countries...understand that Assad creates an impossible dynamic for peace," Mr. Kerry said Friday in Vienna, following the meeting with the three foreign ministers. "But if we can get into a political process, sometimes these things have a way of resolving themselves."
Iran has been barred from participating in recent conferences on Syria because of its opposition to United Nations-backed guidelines for ending the conflict.
Tehran has particularly opposed a condition that calls for the removal of Mr. Assad as part of a future political transition in Damascus. Still, European countries aggressively lobbied over the past week for Iran's inclusion in the next meeting despite its positions on Syria.
European Union foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, and other European officials cited Iran's landmark nuclear agreement with global powers last July as proof Tehran was willing to work with the West. She also said her recent meetings with Iranian officials in Tehran and Brussels have opened up a "unique" channel for cooperation.
"Iran is one of the relevant actors, for the contacts it has with the [Syrian] regime and for the regional dimensions of the crisis," Ms. Mogherini said in Berlin. "If Russia can engage with the regime, as well as the Iranians...pushing them to be part of a political transition, this is only going to be positive."
Mr. Kerry, meanwhile, was sanguine over Russia's military agreement with Jordan's monarchy, arguing it could enhance the international fight against Islamic State. He played down concerns that the surprise deal indicated the Kremlin was seeking to encroach on the traditional U.S. sphere of influence in the Mideast.
"It's perfectly natural for Jordan to talk with them about what's happening on their border, on the south," Mr. Kerry said in Vienna following a string of meetings with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov. "It might even prove to be quite beneficial for everybody."
Still, many U.S. allies in the Mideast remain deeply skeptical about Iran's and Russia's intentions. Tehran has shown few signs that it was serious about engaging constructively with the U.S. since the nuclear accord was signed.
Iran test-fired a ballistic missile this month and convicted an Iranian-American journalist of espionage. Russia's and Iran's military operations in Syria, meanwhile, were planned behind the backs of the U.S. and EU, even as the nuclear negotiations were ongoing.
Mr. Kerry, meanwhile, even while touting thepotential for cooperation with Moscow and Tehran, acknowledged that their military operations in Syria so far seemed only focused on targeting Mr. Assad's opponents, some of whom are backed by the U.S. and its allies, rather than defeating Islamic State.
Arab officials said the perception of U.S. acquiescence to Russia and Iran is likely to create more hedging among some Mideast states and resistance among others. Few Arab governments will want to directly oppose Russia if they feel the U.S. is abdicating its traditional role as regional heavyweight.
"Putin has upped the ante and the U.S. has no Plan B other than to deal with him," said a senior Arab official working on Syria. "I doubt there is much common ground between the two sides. If there was, this issue would have been resolved a long time ago."
|
|
#20
Wall Street Journal
October 26, 2015
Afghanistan Looks to Russia for Military Hardware
Kremlin's more-assertive foreign policy raises potential for clash with U.S.
By MARGHERITA STANCATI in Kabul and NATHAN HODGE in Moscow
Afghanistan, battered by worsening security, is reaching out to an old ally and patron-Russia-just as the Kremlin is seeking to reassert its position as a heavyweight on the world stage.
President Ashraf Ghani has asked Moscow for artillery, small arms and Mi-35 helicopter gunships for his country's struggling military, Afghan and Russian officials say, after the U.S. and its allies pulled most of their troops from Afghanistan and reduced financial aid.
The outreach has created another opening for the Kremlin, stepping up the potential for confrontation with Washington. East-West relations are already strained over such issues as Ukraine and Middle Eastern policy.
"Russia is seizing the opportunity," a U.S. official said.
Beyond such rivalries, however, the move also reflects Russian concerns that the deterioration of security in Afghanistan could destabilize Central Asia-and bring Islamic extremism closer to its own border.
At an Oct. 16 summit in Kazakhstan, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the situation "was becoming close to critical," with militant groups looking to expand their reach across the region.
"It's important for us to be ready to react in concert to just such a scenario," he told other Central Asian leaders.
Russia launched an air war in Syria last month with the aim, it said, of combating the rise of Islamic State in the region by buttressing its ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. It also has forged a new alliance with Iran and Iraq with the same goals.
The Kremlin's muscular new foreign policy has raised hopes among Afghan politicians that Russia will come back to their country as a friendlier ally in the wake of the Western drawdown, which has seen the U.S. troop level drop to about 10,000 this year, from a peak of about 100,000 in 2010-11.
On Oct. 15, President Barack Obama announced he was shelving plans to withdraw most of the remaining U.S. forces by the end of his second term. Washington now anticipates keeping around 5,500 troops after January 2017, in an acknowledgment of the disintegrating security situation.
The last Red Army troops withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. That war was a national trauma on both sides, ending in defeat for Moscow and the eventual collapse of Afghanistan's communist government.
Because of that history, direct intervention in Afghanistan would be a very hard sell for the Russian public.
Alexander Mantytskiy, Russia's ambassador to Afghanistan, said his government is considering the Afghan requests for military assistance, which he said have increased this year following the withdrawal of most U.S. and allied North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces.
"We will provide some assistance, but it doesn't mean that any soldier from the Russian Federation will be here on Afghan soil," he said. "Why should we carry the burden of a problem that was not solved by the Americans and NATO countries?"
The Pentagon in the past purchased Russian-made Mi-17 transport helicopters, and Russia trained Afghan technicians to maintain them. But Moscow's military intervention in Ukraine in early 2014 prompted the U.S. to end that cooperation.
Abdul Rashid Dostum, Afghanistan's first vice president, has been at the forefront of efforts to reach out to Russia directly.
An ethnic Uzbek who rose to prominence as a military commander in Afghanistan's pro-Soviet government, Mr. Dostum met with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and other defense officials in Moscow this month to discuss possible assistance.
"Gen. Dostum wanted Russia to pay attention to the situation in Afghanistan," said his spokesman, Sultan Faizy, who described Russia's response to the request as positive. "Northern Afghanistan and countries allied to Russia are under threat-that is why Russia is willing to help."
The former warlord also met Ramzan Kadyrov, the pro-Kremlin leader of Russia's Chechen Republic. Mr. Kadyrov, who is a major presence on Russian social media, posted photos of the two of them together, enthusing about Mr. Dostum's military prowess.
"Kabul needs the support of Russia, just like Syria," Mr. Kadyrov said on his Vkontakte page. "We expressed assurance that the leadership of Russia will take the appropriate response to this question."
As Kabul seeks new sponsors following the withdrawal of most U.S. and allied troops, a renewed competition between Moscow and Washington is beginning to take shape.
In August, longtime U.S. ally Pakistan said it would buy four Mi-35 helicopters from Moscow in a sign of warming relations there.
The last batch of Mi-17s was delivered to Afghanistan a year ago, and U.S. lawmakers have prohibited contracting with Rosoboronexport, the Russian arms exporter, except to help maintain the Afghan fleet and supply spare parts.
Kabul now wants a separate deal with Rosoboronexport for Mi-35 helicopters.
Mr. Ghani's spokesman, Zafar Hashemi, said Kabul hopes Moscow will donate the equipment. "Should the Russians ask for payment, the Afghan government will purchase limited equipment, but pay for it from its own, domestically generated revenues," he said.
Afghanistan's tax collections amount to less than $5 billion a year. It depends mostly on international largess to pay the salaries of its army and police and provide fuel and ammunition to keep insurgents at bay.
The U.S. is still Afghanistan's biggest backer: Since the 2001 invasion that toppled the Taliban, Washington has committed more than $109 billion to the country's reconstruction. The other major donors are Japan and European Union countries.
The U.S. is currently looking for other providers to supply Afghanistan with helicopters, according to the U.S. official and others.
Afghan forces badly need air support to reverse gains by the Taliban and other insurgent groups, who have put the government on the defensive and encircled major cities.
Last month, Taliban fighters briefly captured the northern city of Kunduz, their biggest victory in 14 years of war. There has been heavy fighting elsewhere in the north, including in Faryab, Jowzjan and Badakhshan provinces.
Afghanistan's neighbors-Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan-have recently sent reinforcements to their southern borders in response to heavy fighting in bordering Afghan provinces, Afghan and Russian officials said. Military and diplomatic officials of all three countries declined to comment.
Mr. Mantytskiy, the Russian ambassador in Kabul, said Russia has sent additional military hardware to Tajikistan.
Some Afghan and foreign officials say Russia is cultivating Afghan power brokers in the north, such as warlords and local politicians, as part of their efforts to contain extremism along the border. Mr. Mantytskiy denied this.
During a trip to Russia earlier this month, Nazir Ahmadzai, an Afghan lawmaker, said he confronted Russian officials about their alleged support to individual power brokers.
"We consider it illegal," said Mr. Ahmadzai, who said any outreach should go through the central government. "They defended themselves. They said: 'We have no choice, because the rise of [Islamic State] in Afghanistan is a big threat to us."
The Russian president said recently that between 5,000 and 7,000 people from former Soviet republics had joined the ranks of Islamic State in the Middle East. Signs of its appearance in Afghanistan are of particular concern.
Other militant groups include the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, whose fighters were pushed into Afghanistan as a result of a Pakistani army operation on the other side of the border.
Afghanistan has long been of strategic interest to Russia even after the withdrawal of Soviet troops. Moscow backed the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in the 1990s, providing weapons and support to jihadist commanders who once fought them.
The Russian military maintains a ground force in Tajikistan centered on the 6,000-strong 201st Motorized Rifle Division, which previously served as Tajikistan's main border force along the frontier with Afghanistan.
Col. Yaroslav Roshchupkin, spokesman for that division, said the unit was being reinforced with an aviation element, primarily transport helicopters, at a base in Ayni, outside of Dushanbe. "It's a return of assets once stationed at the base," he said.
|
|
#21
Sputnik
October 26, 2015
Calm Down: Russian Subs Will 'Definitely Not Damage' Undersea Data Cables
Russia has no plans to cut underwater fiber-optic cables in the Atlantic Ocean that carry almost all global Internet communications despite recent rumors to the contrary, the head of the Russian State Duma's defense committee and former Black Sea Fleet commander told RIA Novosti.
"The United States increasingly resembles Sweden, often believing that Russian submarines are present in their territorial waters. Fear has many eyes. Although these data cables indeed exist, we will definitely not damage them," Vladimir Komoyedov said.
He added that Russian subs have a right to venture into the ocean to carry out patrolling missions and perform tasks in the interests of Moscow.
Komoyedov's comments came in response to a report published by the New York Times on Sunday. The newspaper stated that US military and intelligence officials were concerned with Russia's naval activities. They were allegedly especially wary of Russian submarines severing underwater data cables.
Former Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Viktor Kravchenko offered an explanation as to why US officials might be worried. Russian submariners could have been ordered to become more active, he told RIA Novosti.
Apart from that, "Soviet and then Russian submarines repeatedly placed transmitters on American cables located in the Atlantic to gather information. Americans carried out similar operations in our territorial waters. Since then not much has likely changed," Kravchenko added.
|
|
Forbes.com
October 23, 2015
The Baltics Are Still Depopulating At An Alarming Pace
By Mark Adomanis
[Charts here http://www.forbes.com/sites/markadomanis/2015/10/23/the-baltics-are-still-depopulating-at-an-alarming-pace/]
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are small, open economies on the Eastern edge of the European Union and NATO. For understandable reasons, these countries are not often talked about (they collectively have a population smaller than Massachusetts) but when they are talked about it is usually to highlight their dynamism, innovation, and impeccably capitalist credentials. Estonia, for example, attracted a lot of media attention with its e-citizenship initiative, while the Baltics have generally gotten high marks, at least from conservatives, for their embrace of austerity and extremely tight fiscal discipline.
Among Westerners, then, the Baltics, to the extent that anything is known about them, have generally become hallmarks for economic dynamism, open and competitive markets, and taxes that are both very flat as well as very low.
The central fact about the Baltics, though, is that they are the most rapidly depopulating countries in the world. Since 1990, the Baltics have collectively lost 22% of their total populations. On a proportional basis, no other country really comes to close to the Baltics' experience (the former East Germany is probably the closest analogue).
It is helpful and instructive to compare the Baltics to a country that has become a synonym for "death and recession," a "drunken nation" sitting on a " depopulation bomb," and a place where the population is "dying for lack of hope." I'm talking, of course, about Russia whose demographic crisis during the 1990's spawned a shockingly long list of eulogies for a country that had "lost the will to live." Numerous books have been written about how Russia's population crisis reflects its deep moral decay, or about how "the end of Russia" will impact American national security.
Here, based on information gathered from the relevant national statistical agencies, is what has actually happened since 1990. Please note that the Russian figures in the chart do not include Crimea, and have thus not been artificially inflated by the recent annexation of the peninsula.
Over the past decade Russia's population has broadly (albeit, in all likelihood, temporarily) stabilized. Russia's population in 2015 was about 500,000 more than it was in 2005. In the Baltics, meanwhile, the past decade saw the loss of roughly 730,000 people. That is to say that over the past decade the Baltics have been depopulating more quickly than Russia not just in relative terms but in absolute terms as well. For a handful of small countries with a collective population of a little more than 6 million, that is a shockingly rapid rate of decline.
Does any of this matter? Well, it obviously matters quite a lot for people living in the Baltics. Depopulation isn't necessarily a completely unsolvable problem (Germany has done some creative planning on how to manage shrinking cities) but it's pretty difficult to manage at the rate currently being experienced. From a long term perspective, it will be extraordinarily hard to keep pension systems solvent when the population is decreasing by upwards of 1% a year. Perhaps the Baltics will find a way to square that circle, but it won't be easy.
More interestingly for American taxpayers, the Baltics are NATO members. Various presidential candidates, including Jeb Bush, have spoken of the need to bolster our presence in the region, and there are indications that the British are also going to deploy troops in order to deter any Russian aggression. Since the Baltics are already in NATO this seems the only possible path forward (refusing to station any forces would imply that NATO's Article V guarantee had become moot) but given the Baltics' extreme demographic weakness it seems worth noting that these deployments aren't going to be temporary, but permanent. The Batics currently have extremely limited military capabilities, and, given their negative demographic trajectories, those capabilities are likely to further erode.
Despite all of the flack Russia gets as the "dying bear," the reality is that demographic decline in the former Soviet Union is far more of a problem for America's allies.
|
|
#23
The National Interest
October 25, 2015
Russia and China: Beware the Budding Eurasian Colossus?
Could these two great powers get even closer?
By Lyle J. Goldstein
Lyle J. Goldstein is Associate Professor in the China Maritime Studies Institute (CMSI) at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, RI. The opinions expressed in this analysis are his own and do not represent the official assessments of the U.S. Navy or any other agency of the U.S. Government.
As Russia's unexpected military intervention in Syria has dominated headlines across the globe in recent weeks, more than a few media outlets have speculated on whether Chinese forces could enter the fray. While that particular "twist" on the story remains extremely unlikely, the question is not entirely outlandish. After all, it was only a few months ago that a Chinese naval squadron was in the Black Sea exercising with the Russian fleet. Moreover, the Chinese Navy's profile has been steadily rising in the Middle East as it sent its first flotilla into the Persian Gulf in the fall of 2014, has also conducted competent evacuation operations in Yemen in 2014 and Libya in 2011, while the PLA Navy maintains its continuous anti-piracy patrols in the Gulf of Aden as well. Major foreign and defense policy dilemmas await Beijing as it continues to plot out the future of its "one road, one belt" - China's own strategic "pivot" to the west.
Nevertheless, Russian President Vladimir Putin's continued success at keeping the West off balance with his Syrian gambit also raises the urgency of understanding the trajectory of the China-Russia relationship. For years, Western analysts have suggested that the Moscow-Beijing tie could not amount to much because it is widely regarded as purely a relationship of convenience suffused with mutual suspicion. Over the last decade, moreover, this skepticism has seemed to prove itself repeatedly, for example in the various bilateral energy projects that have moved slowly at best or in the somewhat indolent policy initiatives of the jointly managed Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). But Western strategists are, nevertheless, right to watch this relationship closely since a major strengthening of Russia-China relations could develop into the Eurasian "colossus" (albeit with two capitals rather than one) that geopolitics gurus have long warned about.
Signs of a steadily enhancing Russia-China partnership are quite readily visible. Reciprocal visits by the two Presidents to observe one another's victory celebrations (and the conspicuous lack of Western leaders at either event) seemed to demonstrate a shared contemporary isolation as well as the common history of suffering catastrophic losses in the enormous conflagration of the Second World War. A recent article in the prestigious Chinese military journal, 中国军事科学 [China Military Science] highlights that shared history in exploring "China-Soviet Union Cooperation during the World Anti-Fascist War." In a chapter of WWII that is rarely discussed in the West, this article explains that Moscow did impressively provide China with almost 1,000 aircraft (and accompanying volunteer pilots) in the four years after the Nanjing Massacre in December 1937. There are numerous reasons why such extraordinary aid is not widely discussed. For Moscow, this lavish aid may appear as a significant strategic miscalculation in the years before the Nazi onslaught when the Red Army could no doubt have used those same aircraft as a vital reserve force. But in China, Soviet aid during WWII was not discussed thoroughly for many decades, because much of the aid flowed to the Nationalist Chinese rather than the Communists, and more particularly because of the legacy of the Soviet threat dating from the 1960s made such historical revelations a violation of prevailing Maoist, anti-Soviet orthodoxy.
While that history is indeed interesting and relevant, the focus of this edition of Dragon Eye is instead on the contemporary China-Russia relationship. For that "strategic triangle" made famous by Henry Kissinger's diplomatic pirouettes of the early 1970s, a fascinating view is offered in a mid-2015 edition of 俄罗斯东欧中亚研究 [Research on Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia], published by the China Academy of Social Sciences. That journal has an interesting survey of Western writings on the evolving China-Russia relationship. Such literature reviews are quite common in Chinese social science journals, and this one is admirably complete, citing as it does, some notably solid analyses published in this venerable forum on the subject of the China-Russia relationship. But this Chinese literature review suggests that most Western analyses are surficial in nature and also are rather pessimistic, "... 唱衰中俄关系 ..." [...crooning about the decline of China-Russia relations ...].
The survey develops an interesting time-line for the development of the Russia-China relationship in the post-Cold War world, starting with Moscow's clear statement back during the 1995-96 Taiwan Crisis that its "one China policy" would not change. While the wars in the Balkans did push Russia and China closer together, this Chinese analysis relates that Russia-China relations "confronted the challenge of the 9/11 events," because Russia appeared, for a time at least, to lean strongly toward the U.S. Interestingly, it is noted that Beijing did not explicitly support Moscow during the 2008 war with Georgia. This analysis also observes a seeming inclination of then-President Dmitry Medvedev to "亲美疏中" [kiss the U.S., while neglecting China]. According to this analysis, however, the tightening of the Moscow-Beijing link was well under way prior to the Ukraine Crisis. In particular, the author cites the West's 2011 intervention in Libya as a major turning point. Nor did either the Bear or the Dragon appreciate reverberations of the "Arab Spring" into their own respective regions. Indeed, their common perception was that the West was ever more eager to see regime change in both Russia and China. An imperative to halt these trends was suggested in Sino-Russian diplomatic coordination in mid-2012 to prevent UN sanctions against the Assad regime in Damascus. Additional evidence, of course, is that Putin's first trip abroad after assuming the Russian Presidency again in 2012 was China, while the opposite journey was made as Xi's inaugural journey abroad as Chinese President back in 2013. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that the Ukraine Crisis has also helped to usher in a "new normal" in Russia-China relations. This Chinese analysis demonstrates a keen awareness that Western analysts are now seriously concerned lest the relationship evolves into a full-up "军事政治联盟" [military-political alliance].
The Chinese survey dutifully records much skepticism in Western appraisals regarding the possibility of genuine Russia-China strategic coordination. For example, one well-known Western academic is quoted as suggesting that Russia-China relations "are full of weakness." It is recorded that other Western analysts emphasize both the limitations of the partnership, and also its "asymmetric" nature. On the latter point, it is suggested that there is a growing "实力差距" [capabilities gap] between the two powers and there is also a perception in the West that within the bilateral relationship that Beijing is increasingly in the driver's seat. Indeed, one reason such literature surveys are popular among Chinese specialists is they may allow Chinese specialists to actually articulate concerns that are not quite politically correct in either Beijing (or Moscow for that matter). There is some discussion of the legacy of hostility and mistrust that may still linger from the armed confrontation that occurred on the border back in the middle of the Cold War. Interestingly, the analysis observes that this mistrust may "加上文化上俄罗斯一直对西方的认同感" [reinforce the degree to which Russia always identifies with the West on a cultural level]. To give a relatively concrete example of the related difficulties, this study mentions, for example, how Chinese copying of Russian weapons systems has caused Russia to be increasingly wary of exporting armaments technology to China. Meanwhile, it is pointed out that Chinese brace against such arms technology limitations, since it seems Russia is just seeking to maintain its edge in military technology over China. For this and other reasons, the Chinese analysis concludes that Western specialists are generally dismissive of the so-called "专制主义轴心" [authoritarian axis] and view the relationship as a kind of "bargaining chip" for both Moscow and Beijing in their respective relations with the West. The piece concludes with the rather dark view that many Westerners concerned about Russia still view China (vice Russia) as the "真正的战略对手" [the real strategic opponent]. The Chinese author observes, moreover, that the West is always aiming to "use China to pin down Russia and to employ Russia to pin down China ..."
Watching Putin's Syrian strategy unfold, along with all the related Western perturbations, many Chinese diplomats are sure to advocate for that most classic of Chinese stratagem: "坐山观虎斗" [sit on the mountain and watch the tigers fight]. However, Western analysts may yet be too skeptical regarding the development of Russia-China relations. As suggested above, various periods in history have seen very high levels of China-Russian collaboration, to include - lest we forget - the very founding of the Chinese Communist Party. It is not at all clear, as is often suggested, that antagonism is the "natural state" of affairs in China-Russia relations. The dual combination of the "rebalance," in tandem with the West's still evolving strategic response to the Ukraine Crisis, may yet prove sufficient to solidify a geopolitically significant Eurasian counterpoise.
|
|
#24
UNIAN (Kyiv)
www.unian.info
October 23, 2015
Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko: Russians want war. My nation wants war
By Roman Tsymbaliuk
A renowned Russian journalist, creator of Journalism without Intermediaries project, branded as "national traitor" by Putin's regime, has told UNIAN about the reasons why the Russians crave for war, why they are so encouraged to come and fight in Donbas, why they don't like the Ukrainians, and how he met the Ukrainian citizens in Chechnya during the war.
Arkady Babchenko is a unique journalist. He mastered his profession after military service in the Russian army, where he took part in the first and second Chechen campaigns. As a reporter, he has visited many hot spots, including that in Ukraine. For his disagreement with the official position of the Russian authorities he was enrolled in the ranks of "national traitors." Creator of the Journalism without Intermediaries project, Arkady has thousands of Facebook followers, which makes his Facebook page a respected information platform.
UNIAN sat with Babchenko to discuss Ukraine and Russia, war and peace.
Q: Arkady, now that there is truce in Donbas, there is every chance that there will be no more large-scale hostilities. What is the outcome of the first Russian-Ukrainian war? Or is it too early to sum anything up?
My feeling is that the first episode of this war is over. In the near future it will be something like it is now. That is, provocations and attacks are possible. It should be understood that as long as Vladimir Putin is around, Russia will always be at war. He has no other tools left to hold things together and retain public influence but war. Now the war in shifted to Syria, so the military agenda is predetermined for the next couple of years. If something goes wrong, I don't rule out transfer of a war theater back to Donbas. It's quite possible.
I see absolute parallels between the Donbas conflict and the first Chechen war. Russia entered the conflict in 1994 in exactly the same condition as Ukraine did in the Donbas war: zero economy, almost completely destroyed state institutions, the lack of an efficient army. Of course, Ukraine is not Russia, but I still see the background for your country to develop a similar scenario. If we compare, there was a five-year break between the first and the second Chechen wars in Russia. I think that we'll have to wait for about the same period before the the second episode starts in Donbas. This will happen when the low price of oil hits Russian economy really hard, and Russia thinks of anything but Donbas as its internal problems come out to the surface.. Over this period, Ukraine will more or less solve its problems with the economy and the army, and will dare to defend its territory - it will reach the border [with Russia]. The war will only be over when the Ukrainian flag flutters at the border and at the checkpoints.
Q: Are you deliberately not saying anything about Crimea and leaving this part of Ukriane out of account?
The history of the Crimea is a separate conversation. It should be clearly understood that Russia will be fighting to the end for Crimea. The Kremlin does not intend to fight for Donbas (although this does not exclude the supply of arms and ammunition), as the Kremlin wants none of the new problems and new casualties.
Ukraine and the world community have neither opportunities, nor capabilities to return to pre-war status quo, because Russia remains a nuclear power and nothing can be done about it. The head of the nuclear power is a man who lives in his own world and enjoys the support of 86% of Russia's population on the issue of Crimea. Frankly speaking, most of the Crimeans also want Russia more. Let people enjoy their dream, don't touch Crimea today - leave it there for five years, let them comprehend what Russia is. Solving this problem now would mean entering the peninsula in tanks. Remember that Russian television has not gone anywhere, and the image of "fascist invasion" will be ready on a short notice, for sure. As a result, Ukraine will have a new war. Is it what you need? Before this, you blocked the supply of food, now you will cut electricity supply... Let [the Crimeans supporting the annexation] live in Russia for a while, I am for universal education, people need to be taught, let them learn.
Q: For the Ukrainians the participation of Russian troops in Donbass hostilities is an indisputable fact. Do the Russians understand it or is it enough for them to hear the official statements that "our soldiers are not there?"
Of course, everybody understands everything, but this is not the problem. Public opinion in Russia is what the TV airs. Yesterday, public opinion reflected the TV image of "jew-bandera crucify Russian boys," now it's "we need to fight in Syria." If the TV says tomorrow that the Ukrainians are our best brothers, and [Ukrainian President Petro] Poroshenko is our best friend, public opinoin will also reflect this new image. And the fact that we fought in Donbas and killed thousands of people will be forgotten. [Public]memory is just like that of a goldfish - it holds information for three hours.
In other words, the Russians know about Russian army taking part in the war in Donbas, but this is not the problem, and they think: "Right on! Smash those hohly [a colloquial term used in Russia to describe the Ukrainians; perceived as derogatory in Ukraine]! Our guys are there, what's the problem?!" There's no need to tell anything to anyone. Everybody knows everything.
Q: Why do the Russian TV channels portray Russia's participation in wars as an easy ride? The very possibility of death or injury of Russian soldiers is excluded. Is a life a citizen of this country not important for the media?
The answer is simple: a "zombie-TV-box," propaganda, brainwashing and mental debilitation of the population turned out to be surprisingly powerful. I couldn't have imagined this; I couldn't imagine that this could be done to the people - making eat their own brain, in all seriousness, turning them into real zombies. Five years ago the following joke would be nonsense: "Hey, our son was killed in Donbas! Shut up, you fool, we never had a son." Now it is a reality. Nothing surprises me in this country, but the thought of what they've done to the people is frightening. They sell the memory of their dead husbands and sons. The government gives them some money and the people are silent. They disown their relatives, burying them under the number plates. I don't understand how is it even possible, but they, but they managed to do it. In this the authorities did succeed, what else to be said here.
Q: Moscow's official position is well known: there are no military servicemen, but "we have never hidden the participation of Russian volunteers." Does someone count Russian casualties in this war, regardless of their legal status?
Here, no one has ever counted casualties. We still don't know, how many soldiers have been killed in Chechnya. And no one is going to count these [Russian citizens who died in Donbas]. The exact death toll will never be announced, even if we call them "volunteers." We can only speculate.
Q: What awaits the veterans of the conflict, from both sides?
This is a separate topic, a big one. I can speak for a long time on the topic of veterans. In this respect, it will be easier for Ukraine, but you will witness the post-combatant syndrome anyway. This syndrome has accompanied all of the wars so far. I was surprised that Ukraine was not that much drawn into this war, as I thought before. While all the TV channels scream that "Russia attacked us!" the army has hardly drafted 50,000 troops across the country with a forty-something-million population. This is weird. People returning from the war will be asked by their friends: "Where have you been?" The division of society is inevitable, and the state needs to start dealing with this problem now. In any case, it will be easier in Ukraine - this war is righteous for you, and you will win it. Victory in war always encourages you to gain victory in civilian life. Defeat in war always sets you up for a defeat in civilian life.
Citizens of Russia, we can call them "volunteers," returning from Donbas, will be in complete isolation. This will be the strongest post-combatant syndrome, no one will need them, society would quickly peter out and will not think about them, they will not think about Ukraine. These veterans will get no status, no benefits, no medals, and no money. Three years later, when public opinion shifts, they will be told: no one has sent you there, and look what you've done, you fools. 90% of this society layer will drown in a bottle, and this will be their end.
Q: Reveal us the mystery of Russian nature. Do the Russians want war?
They do. The Russians want war, and it's for sure. Now I can say that my nation wants war. Where does it come from? From the zombie-TV-box! Even the Soviet Union did do with the public what is being done now. Even back then, when proletariat was proclaimed a hegemony class, the emphasis was still on academics, cosmonauts, engineers, and physicists - the working intelligentsia. The modern regime regime bets on the lumpen, and also on "gopniks," [colloquial term for aggressive youngsters from shady neighborhoods], aggressive and armed. They have been brought up for decades. That what Dmitry Kiselyov [one of the Russian propaganda's talking heads] does, threatening to turn the United States into the nuclear ashes, is just the tip of the iceberg. Nation has been debilitated for the past twenty years. It started with Regina Dubovitskaya and Dom-2 [a comedy and a reality show, respectively, believed to be of a questionable quality]. Those who have brains and carry the gene of freethinking were squeezed out of the country, and only the most abominable features of character were left in the people. The TV has done this, there's no getting around it. People have changed drastically. Those who were my best friends five-ten years ago, are impossible to talk to.
Q: I still don't understand, even if it so. Russia is a huge country, and it is possible to find a job, rather than run around with a gun in the other states...
There is cognitive dissonance - everyone is well aware that the our country is not rich, it's not great and it's not a world leader. It's only the external picture. No one voices it, but they feel it subconsciously. You can't live in a country stuck in the middle of the XX century and seriously think that you are the leader of the XXI century. Reality will enter contradict with the imaginary world, anyway. By the way, only large cities enjoy a XX-century kind of life. If you go to Verkhniy Volochek - just 300 km from Moscow - it's the mid-XIX century there, the toilets are outside, and there is stove heating.
As a result, a person born in some Verkhniy Volochyok realizes that he has no prospects. They have two ways to die - in 40, of cirrhosis, or in 25, of tuberculosis, while in prison. That's the only life plan, no other choices. And then suddenly, the TV shows Ukraine where Bandera followers kill the Russians. Seeing this, a mediocre man takes a rifle and goes to defend the Russian people. It is in Donbas where someone begins to see [starting to understand the falsity of propaganda], and not all of them. The second point: there is a logic: "At least, I get to go shoot Ukrainians, see the world, get out of here somehow." I repeat, there are no prospects back at home. Do you think that they when traveling to Donbas they think that the war is terrifying, that it means death? Nothing like this. The war is the best adventure of their lives for them; they will never experience anything like it. They will go back to their province and still die of cirrhosis, but then again, at least they at least saw the world, did something. They had a goal, they were not just some junkie.
So this country living in the middle of the XIX century, and still screaming from TV screens that it is the leader of the XXI century, produces schizophrenia in the minds of its citizens. It's not going to end well for us.
Q: Why has Russia pulled the switch, and there is instantly way less anti-Ukrainian propaganda, and everybody forgot about Donbas?
Yes, they really pulled the switch. Now we have a new topic - Syria.
Q: So what is the reason? Is the Ukrainian issue no more interesting for the Russian authorities?
Putin needs to withdraw from there [Donbas], and the air time must be filled with something else. This is done with the help of Syria. Again, the mass memory of the viewer is just like that of a goldfish - it lasts for three hours. Russian viewers turn on their TVs not to learn some facts or watch the news. They perceive tone and hatred. They don't care what will be the target of that hatred: Ukraine, gays, nationals from the Caucasus states or the Asian part of the former Soviet Union, migrants, or Syrians. Over the last five years we've had a lot of different enemies. First, Russia was irritated by the Estonian and Latvian fascists, then Bandera followers [in Ukraine], the Chechens, the Wahhabis, terrorism in general. Then there were the immigrants, Georgians, Tajiks, gays, liberals, "jew-banderas" and so on. A peace of that hatred was every time attached to these targets, so that the viewers could consume it. The switch can be pulled in any direction and at any rate; everyone will engulf any information without thinking.
Q: So why is the Ukrainian issue no more attractive for the Kremlin?
We have no idea of the decision-making mechanisms. Had Putin not said that the decision to annex Crimea was taken by five people, we would have never known this. I don't know how they make decisions, but apparently the pressure has reached a stage when his entourage said: "Vladimir Vladimirovich, it didn't work out as we expected, it's all too expensive, and brings us problems, we are losing our palaces and our dough, let's cut it off and justget out of there." Probably it was something like that, but I can only guess.
Q: For the bulk of the Ukrainians Russia is the aggressor state. What is Ukraine for the Russians now?
The first opinion: Ukraine is "hohly," not in a hateful sense, but in the sense of "outskirts of our great empire" that is messing with us, not wanting to be friends, for which we will punish them. That's about the way Ukraine is perceived by Russia's mass consciousness.
Q: And how about the slogan about the fraternal nations?
We are not fraternal at all. Ukrainians were always like brothers to Russians, but at a level a little below. The Russians always knew that Russia is a metropolis, while Ukraine is a colony. And it infuriates them now that Ukrainians show character and want to become independent, want to be a metropolis themselves and and defy the status of a colony.
Q: But we are not interested in the status of the metropolis. We want independence, Ukrainians have no imperial ambitions. By the way, you are the author of a book called "War" about the events in Chechnya, the war branded by the Russian authorities as restoration of "constitutional order," while the Chechens believed it was the war for their liberation. What should the Ukrainians know about this tragic period in history?
Many things I shouldn't say not to be summoned to a prosecutor's office... I am sure that your soldiers know what to do when they encounter an enemy. I'd like to say that the problem of Ukraine is that you were not observing Chechnya. Had it not been the case, Ukraine would know more what Russia is and what the war is. There would be no such shocks, such gigantic mistakes. Had your General Staff studied the experience of urban warfare, there would be no Volnovakha, Debaltseve, and Ilovaysk. In this sense, Chechnya is an open textbook. Everything is written with blood. Take it and see it.
Regarding the fraternal peoples I'll tell you this story. When I came back from Chechnya, while the train was in transit through Ukraine, the Ukrainian border guards were all over me - I was carrying a knife - and they tried to push me for a bribe, as if I was crossing the border with a cold weapon. It's an average situation. I say to them: "I am coming from the war." The answer was: "We couldn't care less about your war, this is your war, not ours." So, this general attitude was a mistake. With such a neighbor like Russia, you must always stay alert. I would advise Ukraine to build some public and state institutions...
Q: However, during the Chechen wars Ukraine sympathized with the Russians. At the same time no one denied the participation in Chechen war of the fighters, for example, of the UNA-UNSO [Ukrainian radical organization]. While in Chechnya, have you heard of or maybe seen these fighters?
I've heard a lot about the Ukrainians, there was a lot of rumor. I believe, 99% of these stories are fiction. As I understand, there was no more than a 100 Ukrainians taking par in that war, or maybe less. I haven't personally seen them, haven't encountered them. I came across the other Ukrainians - in my platoon there were two Ukrainians and one Belarusian, who fought in Chechnya in the Russian army, they had passports of Ukraine and Belarus when they came to the draft board. They signed a contract and went to fight in Chechnya.
Q: So, you haven't seen our Prime Minister in Chechnya, either, have you?
Our so-called investigators can't do anything right. Having the information that on December 31, 1994, there was a war in Chechnya, and perhaps some Ukrainians could participate in hostilities in Grozny on the side of the militants, everything could be smooth. But the problem is that on December 31, 1994, the area of Minutka [market] was one of the few places where there was no active fighting. The events of the storm of Grozny [by the Russian army] on December 31, 1994, were reconstructed minute-by-minute. We know where each combat vehicle was hit, where there standoffs occurred. No one shot at Russian soldiers at Minutka, no one killed them, and no one tortured them! Investigators can't even fabricate a decent propaganda piece, even obtaining all necessary information...
Q: The last question: over the past year and a half, Russia has had various adversaries: Ukraine, now ISIL in Syria... Who's next?
There are no options: Americans will remain among the adversaries, as well as the Islamic radical terrorism. The internal enemies are national traitors. Who will be next, I don't know.
Roman Tsymbaliuk, Moscow
|
|
#25
New York Times
October 23, 2015
The Myth of Putin's Strategic Genius
By MICHAEL A. McFAUL
Michael A. McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, served in the Obama administration on the National Security Council and as ambassador to the Russian Federation.
PALO ALTO, Calif. - THE Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, continues to surprise. Russia's military intervention in Syria, followed by a face-to-face meeting in Moscow this week with that country's president, Bashar al-Assad, has startled the world.
As there was after Mr. Putin's action in Ukraine last year, there has been a chorus of commentary on his supposed strategic genius. He is acting decisively, seizing the initiative and creating facts on the ground - so the narrative goes, in contrast with the West's feckless pursuits in Syria.
The opposite is true.
Five years ago, Russia was in a much stronger position, both at home and in the world. Today, Mr. Putin is playing defense, doubling down on bad decisions guided by an outdated theory of international politics.
Recognition of Russia's mistakes, however, does not guarantee future failure. The United States and our allies cannot stand idly by and wait for Russia to fail. Instead, we must adopt a comprehensive strategy to minimize the negative consequences of Russia's actions and maximize the positive ones of ours.
Five years ago, Russia was on the move in the world. In 2010 in Ukraine, the Kremlin helped install its ally, Viktor F. Yanukovych. Elsewhere in the former Soviet space, Russia's leaders were making progress on what would become the Eurasian Economic Union, their answer to the European Union.
Moscow had also improved relations with Europe and the United States. President Dmitri A. Medvedev even attended NATO's Lisbon summit meeting in 2010 and spoke of developing "a strategic partnership" that would put "the difficult period in our relations behind us now." The main topic was cooperation on missile defense, not NATO expansion.
Both the American and Russian public noticed the progress. In 2010, about two-thirds of Russians had a positive view of the United States, while a similar proportion of Americans saw Russia as an ally or partner.
The Russian economy was returning to growth after the 2008 financial crisis. Trade with the United States was expanding, there were closer ties with European economies, and Russia was on track to join the World Trade Organization.
In 2010, Russia also played an essential role in securing new sanctions against Iran. In doing so, it demonstrated bold international leadership even at the price of straining relations with an important ally.
And then, in 2011, the people started getting in the way.
For different reasons, societies in the Arab world, Ukraine and Russia began to mobilize against their leaders. Initially, President Medvedev sided with the people in the Middle East, notably abstaining from, rather than vetoing, the Security Council resolution that authorized the use of force in Libya. Mr. Medvedev also engaged with opposition leaders in Russia and introduced some modest political reforms before exiting the Kremlin in May 2012.
Mr. Putin, however, had an opposite approach. He believed that behind these protesters was an American hand, and that the response to them - whether in Syria, Egypt, Russia or Ukraine - should be coercion and force.
After his inauguration as president, Mr. Putin pivoted hard against Russia's demonstrators, labeling them traitors. His tactics derailed the opposition's momentum.
But his short-term successes have produced long-term costs. Mr. Putin's paranoia about independent political actors nurtured a growing fear of business interests outside his oligarchical clique. Economic reform stalled, investment declined and state ownership grew.
Political stagnation also settled in. For the first two years of his third term as president, Mr. Putin's approval rating hovered around 60 percent, his lowest ever. Only his invasion of Ukraine eventually propelled his approval rating back up.
In Ukraine, though, the crackdown on protesters failed. By the time Mr. Yanukovych tried to clear the streets by force, as the Kremlin advocated, his halfhearted attempt at strongman tactics backfired, compelling him to flee.
Angered by what he saw as another C.I.A. operation to overthrow a Russian ally, Mr. Putin struck back: He annexed Crimea and attempted an even bigger land grab in eastern Ukraine, called Novorossiya by expansion enthusiasts.
Again, the costs of these brief gains piled up. As a result of sanctions and falling energy prices, the Russian economy has shrunk to $1.2 trillion from $2 trillion in 2014. And NATO, once an alliance in search of a mission, is now focused again on deterring Russia.
Mr. Putin has also been compelled to abandon the Novorossiya project: His proxies in eastern Ukraine neither enjoy popular support nor run an effective government. And his actions have guaranteed that Ukraine will never join his Eurasian Economic Union or line up with Russia again.
His policy toward another ally, Mr. Assad, has failed, too. Despite blocking Security Council resolutions against Mr. Assad's government, providing weapons to Damascus and encouraging Syria's allies to come to the regime's defense, Mr. Putin's efforts have done little to strengthen Mr. Assad's rule. After four years of civil war, Mr. Assad governs less territory and faces more formidable foes. That's why Mr. Putin had to intervene - to save his autocratic ally from defeat.
In the short term, Russia's Syrian bombing campaign has energized the Syrian Army and its allies to launch a counteroffensive against opposition rebels - that is, against everyone except the Islamic State. But in the long run, Russian airstrikes alone cannot restore Mr. Assad's authority over the whole country.
Mr. Putin is adept at short-term tactical responses to setbacks, but less talented at long-term strategy. Even with no response from the West, Mr. Putin's foreign adventures will finally fail, especially as domestic economic problems continue to fester.
But the United States and its allies should seek to shorten that time by pushing back against Russia on multiple fronts. As Mr. Putin goes all in to prop up his ally in Syria, we should do the same with our partners and allies - not only in Syria, but in Europe and around the world.
In Syria, the United States cannot allow Russia to eliminate all actors except Mr. Assad and the Islamic State. We must provide more arms and support to other rebel groups. We should warn Mr. Putin that further attacks against non-Islamic State rebels will compel us to protect them, either by enforcing a no-fly zone or by arming them with antiaircraft weapons.
The United States and Western allies should capitalize on Mr. Putin's attention being diverted to Syria to deepen support for Ukraine. In return for progress on economic reform, especially anti-corruption measures, we can offer greater financial aid for infrastructure and social service programs. And now is the moment to bolster the Ukrainian Army by providing more military training and defensive weapons.
Elsewhere in Europe, NATO should station ground forces on the territory of allies most threatened by Russia. Russia's annexation of Crimea and intervention in eastern Ukraine violated the NATO-Russia Founding Act and other treaties. In response, our NATO allies deserve credible new commitments from us.
Finally, we must continue to pursue long-term foreign policy objectives that demonstrate American leadership and underscore Russia's isolation. Ratifying the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, closing a multilateral climate deal by the end of the year, deepening ties with India and managing relations with China are all parts of America's grander strategy.
The United States clearly has an interest in the emergence of a strong, rich and democratic Russia, fully integrated into the international community of states. Eventually, new Russian leaders also may realize that Russia's path to greatness requires reform at home and responsible leadership abroad. Propping up failing dictators through the use of force is not grand strategy.
Right now, though, the only way to nudge Russia in a different direction is to contain and push back on Mr. Putin's current course, not only by our immediate response in Syria, but in a sustained, strategic manner around the world.
|
|
#26
The Washington Post
October 25, 2015
The West should take on the Putin P.R. machine
By David J. Kramer
David J. Kramer is senior director for human rights and democracy at the McCain Institute for International Leadership.
Even before Russian President Vladimir Putin deployed forces to Syria, U.S. military officials described his regime as an "existential threat" in light of his invasion of Ukraine. Putin, who oversees one of the most corrupt, kleptocratic regimes in the world, has been driving the international agenda of late - from Ukraine to Syria - while Western leaders, including President Obama, have been reactive and defensive. Wouldn't it be nice to go on the offensive, in a nonmilitary way, to knock Putin on his heels, while also shutting down his odious propaganda machine? Here's how it can be done:
Freeze the assets of Putin's state-funded RT cable network, not because of the odious things it spews but in compliance with two court rulings against the Russian government involving the multibillion-dollar Yukos oil company. Those rulings were issued last year by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) after they determined that the Russian government owed a combined $52 billion in damages to shareholders of the since-dissolved Yukos.
According to the courts, the Russian government inflicted undue harm on those shareholders through punitive tax claims and asset seizures in the aftermath of the 2003 arrest of Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky, previously Russia's richest man. Yukos's assets were distributed to front companies and later acquired by Rosneft, which became the largest oil company in Russia, and other state-owned and regime-friendly entities such as Gazprom. This wiped out the holdings of Yukos's shareholders, and they sued.
After years of deliberations and hearings, those shareholders prevailed in both The Hague and the ECHR. For the case to have been brought before The Hague, both parties - shareholders and the Russian government - had to consent to arbitration and agree to abide by the court's ruling. Moscow even nominated one of the three judges who heard the case; all three judges ruled against Russia. Moreover, under the New York Convention, to which Russia is a signatory, shareholders can ask other governments to enforce the court's rulings by seizing Russian state assets. As for the ECHR, Russia is a member of the Council of Europe and has been on the losing side of hundreds of ECHR verdicts, so it has no grounds to object to the court's jurisdiction in this case.
Russian authorities have appealed The Hague ruling, but their prospects for overturning it are slim because appeals are limited to "technical" issues. Meanwhile, more than a year after the decisions, Russia has shown no intent to comply with them, leaving it to other states that respect the rulings of The Hague court and ECHR to find ways to force compliance.
In July, British authorities froze RT's accounts to comply with the verdicts. Belgium and France also launched proceedings to take similar action against Russian state assets. The United States and other Western governments should follow suit in an organized effort, especially in light of a petition for the United States to do so by Yukos's former principals. (Khodorkovsky is not a party to the suit.)
RT is the key to Putin's propaganda effort to discredit the West and obfuscate the truth of Russian actions. It has a global reach through cable and the Internet and claims an audience, likely exaggerated, of 700 million people in 100 countries. It has a large studio in Washington and bureaus throughout the United States and Europe. Russian government financing for RT and similar propaganda outlets, including Sputnik news, is roughly half a billion dollars.
Seizing Russian Embassy and consulate property in Washington and elsewhere is not an option given the inviolability of diplomatic missions. That leaves few other possibilities for going after Russian properties - and makes RT an inviting target. Even for Russia, with more than $350 billion in hard currency reserves and the most natural-resources wealth of any country in the world, $52 billion is a lot of money, especially in the midst of an economic crisis, low oil prices and the squeeze of continued sanctions against the regime.
The Kremlin is nervous, as evidenced by its hiring of major Western law firms to challenge possible asset seizures. Over the summer, it warned the United States that it would snatch up U.S. assets in Russia in retaliation for any such steps taken by U.S. authorities, and legislation has been introduced in the Russian parliament allowing for confiscation of property of foreign states in response to Western measures. Standing up to such threats is best done by many Western countries acting in concert, and Russia can only go so far. Any Kremlin tit-for-tat games would drive international investors and corporations out of Russia in a hurry, an exodus that Russia's weak economy cannot afford.
Enforcing the Yukos verdicts advances rule of law and respect for private property, and having RT bear the initial brunt of these verdicts is a way to get started. It has the added advantage of doing serious damage to Putin's propaganda machine. It is time for the United States and its Western allies to teach the corrupt Putin regime that there are consequences for outrageous behavior. It is time for the democratic community of nations to go on the offensive.
|
|
#27
Kyiv Must Use Military Means to Recover Occupied Territories Now, Borovoy Says
Paul Goble
Staunton, October 25 - Now that Vladimir Putin is focused on Syria and clearly unlikely to stop there, the Ukrainian government should take advantage of the situation by moving militarily to reclaim Russian-occupied territories in the Donbas and Crimea, according to Konstantin Borovoy.
"The attention of the Russian president has been distracted" for the moment by Syria, the Russian commentator says. "But he needs instability in Ukraine, that is his only goal, [and] for Putin the situation now is ideal: no one is trying to change anything, people are negotiating with him as if he were a real politician, and he feels himself someone who is making the decisions."
No one else is particularly interested in helping Ukraine because "it doesn't require anything and doesn't want anything," Borovoy argues. From the point of view of the international community, everything can continue unchanged for some time to come (gordonua.com/news/politics/Borovoy-S-tochki-zreniya-mezhdunarodnogo-soobshchestva-okkupirovannye-Krym-i-Donbass-Ukrainu-vpolne-ustraivayut-103282.html).
And that means, he continues, that Crimea and the Donbas will remain under occupation." Indeed, "the situation will change only been Ukraine will begin to resist."
The refugee crisis has driven Ukraine down to a second or third level in Europe, and there can be "no doubt" that Putin has exploited and accelerated the refugee flow even if it did begin before his bombing. "This is one of the means of creating instability in Europe - the technology of provocation and the technology of the special services."
"I do not think," Borovoy says, "this is the last provocation."
Given that, one must "defend oneself" and not wait until something happens, he continues. "Inaction is very dangerous and even criminal" for European and Ukrainian politicians.
"Today, in spite of itself, Ukraine is fulfilling yet another indirect function: it is taking part in the defense of the international community against aggressive Russia. Putin will not stop at Syria. Provocations against Israel (and it is said this project is already working) and agains thte Baltic countries are possible."
In that situation, Ukraine has a responsibility not just to silently sit by and wait for the occupation to somehow end. Some in Ukraine understand that. Among them are the Crimean Tatars. It is reasonable for Kyiv to be cautious, but it is dangerous when caution "becomes cowardice" or even the appearance of cowardice.
Russian citizens and voters, Borovoy argues, "are already tired of the military operation in the Donbas and in Ukraine itself. This propaganda serial has ceased to be interesting to viewers. Therefore, according to all the laws of mass media, an interval has been declared, but this does not mean that the theme is closed for Putin."
Rather it means, Borovoy says, that Ukraine has an opportunity to being the liberation of the Donbas and Crimea by military means, military because there are no other realistic ones. If Ukraine doesn't do something, "no one, no Merkel and no Hollande will try for a solution;" and neither will Obama.
Doing nothing as new in fact works to Putin's benefit: it adds to instability and undermines the trust of Ukrainian citizens in their government. The decision of the Crimean Tatars to blockade Crimea shows that "citizens themselves are beginning to address government problems."
And that means, Borovoy says, that "the next question which they will ask themselves is this: why do we need such a set of powers if we have to solve state problems ourselves?"
At present, many Ukrainians are saying and some even believe that Russia will eventually give up the occupied territories, but that is a mistake, Borovoy says. When things deteriorate even more, Putin will be even more ready to use military action to deflect criticism from himself.
And there is one other factor and a terribly important one that people in Kyiv need to keep in mind: "in Crimea and in the east of Ukraine are citizens who believe their country and president will at some point liberate them." The longer time goes on, he implies, the fewer such people there will be.
|
|
#28
http://sports.ndtv.com
October 22, 2015
FIDE Hands Two Year Ban to Garry Kasparov
Ahead of last year's presidential poll, Garry Kasparov, bidding for the office, and then general secretary Ignatius Leong made a deal in which Kasparov paid Leong $500,000 so that Singapore voted for him.
The Ethics Commission of the World Chess Federation (FIDE) has banned world champion Garry Kasparov and former general secretary Ignatius Leong from holding any office or position in FIDE for two years.
"Kasparov and Leong are both banned for a period of two years from holding any office or position within FIDE, including its member federations, continental associations or any other affiliated international organisations, as well as participating in any FIDE meeting as delegate, proxy-holder or other representative of a FIDE member," read the statement published on the official site.
FIDE's Ethics Commission has found Kasparov and Leong guilty of violating the FIDE Moral Code. Ahead of last year's presidential poll, Kasparov, bidding for the office, and then General Secretary Ignatius Leong made a deal in which Kasparov paid Leong $500,000 so that Singapore voted for him. Kasparov lost the contest and Kirsan Ilyumzhinov was re-elected as FIDE president.
Leong promised Kasparov that he would get ten plus one votes of Asian chess federation for $500,000 in return.
Kasparov Chess Foundation and Leong's company Asian Chess Academy were also supposed to establish a new organization, Kasparov Chess Foundation Asia, which was supposed to transfer $1 million to Leong's firm in case of Kasparov's victory.
|
|
#29
The Kremlin Stooge
https://marknesop.wordpress.com
October 22, 2015
Institutional Incoherence: The Atlantic Council's Desperate Scaremongering
By Mark Chapman
Ooo, see the fire is sweeping
My very street today;
Burns like a red-coal carpet:
Mad bull, lost its way
Oh, children; it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away...
The Rolling Stones, from, "Gimme Shelter"
Let me ask you something: if you had only recently wrapped up 24 years at the U.S. Army War College, finishing as Professor of National Security Studies; if you held a B.A. in Russian History from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Russian History from the University of Chicago, and were a recognized expert in defense strategy, arms control and Russia and the post-Soviet space...wouldn't you think you could be expected to actually know something about Russia?
Dr. Stephen Blank of the Atlantic Council comes admirably credentialed, and doesn't look crazy in his picture. But his analysis of what Russia - which he at least does not refer to as "Putin", as if Russia's real name were "Putinland" or something - is really up to in Syria reads as if it were written by Masha Gessen on Psilocybin. The implication that we are all being hoodwinked - gadzooks! - by the devilishly-clever former KGB man from St Petersburg is so clear that Newsweek reprinted the article under the title, "The Real Reason Putin is Sending Troops to Syria".
Newsweek - typically, I have to say - got it wrong before they got past the title: "Putin" is, in fact, not "sending troops to Syria" at all, and indeed ruled it out just last week: you would think a publication which considers itself a "newsmagazine" could manage to go more than a week without forgetting everything that happened the week before. I'm afraid this attempt just looks like stupid laziness. But Dr. Blank himself does not get much further before jumping the rails, characterizing something as both "predictable" and "a surprise" in the first sentence. Unless he meant Russia's intervention in Syria was predictably a surprise to the west because it is so terminally dozy it is completely oblivious to everything going on around it, a sort of Buster Bluth nation. And if so, dash it all, that's just unpatriotic.
The west cannot wait, Mr. Blank tells us, to address Russia's larger strategy, even though the west does not know what it is. Just do something, damn it, and we'll figure out the details later. Can you think of a time or two in the past where an approach like that got the United States in trouble? So can I.
Putin, we learn, intends to sustain Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for as long as possible. What does that mean, exactly? Until he dies? Because that interval was looking like months, maybe, before Russia stepped in. However, you would think an educated man like Mr. Blank might have figured out that Russia's aim is merely to avert political transition achieved by a violent coup. I can kind of see how he missed that, since political transition by means of killing Assad or driving him out of the country so that a handpicked government could take over was exactly what the USA sought, and it was so close it could taste it. You could kind of guess, from the way the United States Air Force was energetically fighting Islamic State (IS) for almost a year, during which time IS gobbled up two-thirds of Syria and was scratching at the door in Damascus, while Russia sent them running with their hands over their ears in less than two weeks. Russia has been in Syria in force for less than a month, and the Syrian Army - according to Mr. Putin, the only force which can defeat IS on the ground - has gone from Last Stand At Maysaloun Street to an offensive to recapture territory lost to the Islamic militias. How stupid do you think people are?
As if to highlight how silly that analysis is, Assad was in Moscow just yesterday for a meeting with Putin, in which the Russian state offered to help with political transition - not to prop up Assad forever. Mind you, he is popular with his people and there is every chance it will be their will that he continue to lead and represent them. They call that "democracy" in countries in which the United States allows the people to elect their own leaders.
But our learning of new things about Russia is far from complete: Russia, apparently, has "long sought" naval bases in Cyprus and Montenegro. That so? News to me. Anybody? In fact, the only mention I could find of Russia pursuing naval bases in Cyprus and Montenegro was in an item from 2013, in which...Stephen Blank told us they were, at the stars-and-stripes-waving anti-Russian Washington think tank The Jamestown Foundation. His references were the same newspapers everyone else reads, but I didn't see anyone else make that connection. I guess that's what being a PHD brings to the party.
"Russia's military escalation in Syria confirms and extends the strategic significance for Moscow of owning virtually the entire Black Sea and using it as a base to project power, maintain strategic influence, and enforce gunboat diplomacy throughout the Balkans and the Levant through a combination of arms and amphibious operations abroad."
Ummm...what? Addled talk like this coming out of the War College explains a lot about why America hasn't won a war since Korea, unless you count the First Gulf War. This is just a bunch of unrelated homilies strung together plus a gratuitous mention of Blank's favourite phrase concerning Russia: "gunboat diplomacy". It reminds me strongly of the peyote adventure that Sarah Palin's senseless run-on sentences were. What does Russia's involvement in Syria - which owns a tiny segment of Mediterranean frontage; 120 miles, to be exact - have to do with Russia "owning virtually the entire Black Sea"? The Black Sea is 1000 miles from the Mediterranean (unless you go through Turkey), in a different region influenced by entirely different power players. The entrance to the Black Sea is still controlled by a NATO power which is studded with American and NATO military bases ; the same country, incidentally, has at least double the Black Sea frontage Russia has even if you include Crimea as Russian. In all its recent military actions in the region of the Black Sea, Russia has relied most heavily on the Army, which does not travel by gunboat. Amphibious operations played a very small part in the conflict with Georgia, none at all in Crimea and none in Syria. Who has a reputation for meddling in the Balkans, Pinocchio? The objective of Washington's Balkan policy is aptly described by Srdja Trifkovic as an ambition toward "a U.S.-dominated post-national world based on propositional abstractions", generously seasoned with pandering to the military-industrial complex and isolating Russia.
Did I say Blank did not look crazy? Perhaps I spoke too soon. He rants that Russia is trying to create a bloc of pro-Russian Shiite or anti-Sunni states with which to confront the United States and its allies.
Let me summarize what America knows about the Muslim faith in the Middle East; two months before launching the invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush did not know Islam was divided into two sects, and believed the people he intended to invade and subjugate (although he would doubtless have preferred "liberate") were simply "Muslims". If Putin is planning to create an anti-Sunni bloc using Syria as a chesspiece, he had better spit on his hands and bear down - more than 70% of the population is Sunni. Assad's Foreign Minister, Vice-President and the head of his National Security Bureau are all Sunnis. Sunnis among the rebels vowed to hunt down the Sunnis who support Assad - back when all the momentum was on the rebel side, thanks largely to the United States Air Force - wherever they fled. I am pretty confident that Syria would not be easily turned into a pro-Russian anti-Sunni bloc.
However, it matters less - from the standpoint of creating or reversing power blocs - what Russia does in the region when compared with what Washington has already done. It wrecked Iraq, causing hundreds of thousands of needless deaths through its invasion of the country, actions such as the "disciplining" of Fallujah, and the shoot-em-up attitudes of its mercenary civilian contractors. Its horrifying practices in Abu Ghraib prison have made the name of the United States a foulness in the Iraqi mouth that makes them want to spit on the ground when they hear it, until at least this generation is gone from the earth. American sanctions in Iraq caused the deaths of half a million children, and Madeleine Albright famously said it was worth it. The CIA overthrew democratically-elected Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, and imposed another 26 years of the hated Shah Reza Pahlavi upon the Iranians. The United States government propped up Hosni Mubarek for 30 years, although in that period his people tried six times to assassinate him. Technically Egypt is in Africa and not the Middle East, but it exercises significant regional influence. The USA has vetoed every UN resolution which sought to censure Israel for its construction of illegal Jews-only settlements in Palestinian territory. I think it's safe to say all Russia needs do in the Middle East to grow its influence is to not be the kind of neon strobe-light revolving exhibition of sheer assholery the United States has been in the region. More to the point, Washington's bumbling and thrashing about in the Middle East knocked over all the secular states in the region - Libya (yes, I know, Africa) and Iraq were both secular states which were tolerant of religion and in which religious denominations intermingled with little tension - and energetically applied itself to ruining the last one; Syria. It squawks without letup about the American obligation to bring democracy and freedom to the Middle East, even as its strongest regional allies are monarchies.
"The partnership that Moscow is cementing with Iran in the face of Washington's nuclear deal aims to extend the concept of a frozen conflict familiar to us from Eurasia to the Middle East." Only if you don't know what a frozen conflict is. A frozen conflict exists when a province or region of a state rebels against the central government, and declares autonomy and self-rule, resulting in an unresolved dispute over national borders. This constrains certain international partnerships and alliances. Russia has undeniably benefited from such conflicts in the past, notably in that such disputes prevented Georgia and Ukraine from being gobbled up by NATO; however, in what international meddler's toolbox does partition of target nations feature most prominently? Washington planned from the outset to partition Iraq into "semi-autonomous regions", and it still hasn't given up on that dream. It gloatingly planned the same fate for Syria. Washington has leaned on the Tatar minority in Crimea, hoping to stir up something there, and flatters the obsequious old fool Mustafa Jemilev that he is some sort of international pet in the hope the Crimean Tatars will "rise up" and cause problems which could spark an international intervention to "protect their rights" and perhaps restore the region to Ukrainian control. This although Kiev cared diddly for anything the Tatars said or did for a decade and would go right back to ignoring them - with Washington's blessing - just as soon as Kiev got Crimea back under its thumb. It should be pretty clear that the politics of divide and conquer are not a tried and true Washington regime-change template by coincidence.
"Russia's current policy of building bases and housing for thousands of troops represents the Kremlin's determination to keep Assad in power. But it's not really an operation against the Islamic State, since Putin has already said Russian troops won't fight ISIS; rather, they'll fight Assad's other enemies." Putin did not ever say that, not anywhere in any language. Mr. Blank would have been better off to just leave it at saying "Putin has already said Russian troops won't fight ISIS", because Putin has said he was not sending in ground troops to fight anyone, and the appropriate force to liberate Syria from terrorists is the Syrian Army. Putin, nor any other representative of the Russian state, has not ever said Russian troops would fight Assad's other enemies to the exclusion of ISIS, and the Russian Air Force is getting its targeting coordinates from the Syrian Army. And there is no evidence at all that Russia has constructed housing for "thousands of troops" - show me. It's bad enough when you have to twist the truth to sway opinion, but when you have to outright lie, you have failed in every way that matters.
"Putin's plan for a coalition is that essentially all the Sunni states fight Sunni extremists for the benefit of Iran and its terrorist allies, Assad and Hezbollah. Russian and Western sources have revealed that Moscow facilitates the movement of terrorists from the North Caucasus to Syria and Iraq so that they do not fight in Russia-hardly a sign of Putin's commitment to battle terrorism. In fact, Moscow continues to supply weapons through Syria and Iran to Hezbollah even as it trades with Israel and insists on helping bring Hamas into power in the West Bank-alongside the Palestinian Authority-and denies that Hamas is a terrorist organization."
Who benefits when states fight religious extremists? Everybody. How does Putin plan to rig it so that wiping out religious extremists - which as recently as 2007-ish, Washington didn't care much for, either, it's only in the last two years that official America has discovered just how cuddly and loveable Islamic extremists are (when they are progressing your agenda for you) - only benefits Iran and Assad? Blank's western source which "revealed" that Moscow facilitates the movement of terrorists from the North Cauasus is The Daily Beast. Seriously, this business of government officials and American academics citing gossip magazines and social media has got to stop. You fucking snoop on everybody, read their mail and listen in on their phone calls - if, after all that, you are still citing The Daily Beast and Twitter, you haven't got shit and you know it.
Is Hamas a terrorist organization? There can be no argument that it was democratically elected in an election western observers agreed was free and fair. A debate on that very subject took place in 2006, the same year Hamas assumed elected power in the Palestinian territories. The group agreed Hamas, although an elected government, was still a terrorist organization, according to the Canadian definition of "terrorist"; to wit, "...[A] man who murders indiscriminately, distinguishing neither between innocent and guilty nor soldier and civilian." We can stipulate here that the term "man" is not intended to convey a gender bias, and means "human".
Oh, dear - the Ukrainian government is a terrorist organization!! Who knew?? I'm being sarcastic, of course; a lot of people knew. Not only does the Kiev government murder indiscriminately in practice, without distinguishing between civilian and military, guilty and innocent, its Prime Minister publicly championed that practice and referred to the eastern Ukrainians as "subhumans". Who supports that? Her Majesty's government, the United States government, the Canadian government, the Australian government, the governments of Poland, France, Italy, Germany...I could go on, but I consider the point made. John O' Sullivan, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and the participant in the debate who advocated the application of that definition for "terrorist", argued that an organization which met those criteria should be treated as international pariahs. For those who don't know what that means, it means stop giving them money. And the semantics of who is a terrorist are less important to sanctimonious Washington than who is a useful terrorist - taking the Mujaheddin Khalq (MEK) off the terrorist list was as simple as asking them to confirm they have renounced violence, and will only agitate peacefully for the overthrow of the Iranian government. Those assurances were quickly accepted by the same government which is currently airdropping pallets of ammunition into the Syrian desert without any serious regard at all for who might pick it up, the only stipulation being that it is dropped in areas which are under rebel control. Voice Of America credits the sudden reversal of ISIS's fortunes in Syria to "tens of thousands of coalition-supported Syrian rebels", although ISIS was steadily advancing (under Washington's complacent and paternal gaze) until the intervention by the Russian Federation, and Washington has admitted it has only managed to train and equip "four or five" trustworthy rebels. Meanwhile, what once was labeled the "Free Syrian Army" collapsed last spring and its remnants merged with Jabbat al-Nusra, which is al Qaeda in Syria, and I be go to hell if they are not a terrorist organization which kills indiscriminately. They should be regarded as international pariahs, not running around the desert picking up ammunition pinatas from Uncle Sam.
"Turkey, a NATO ally, is also feeling the Russian squeeze. Once Russia finishes building its bases in Syria, its overwhelming dominance in the Black Sea and air and naval capabilities to the south will sandwich Turkey between them. Even as bilateral energy talks sputter and that relationship has soured, Moscow is now bringing into play new ways of pressuring Turkey. A look at Turkish defense procurements and plans for importing weapons suggests that Ankara has begun to grasp the threat. But no one wants to discuss this pressure on a fellow NATO member."
For the love of God, please stop speaking of Turkey as if it were some sort of raft adrift on a hostile ocean. As mentioned earlier, Turkey has more than twice the coastline on the Black Sea that Russia has, three times as much if you are from the camp which stubbornly refuses to acknowledge that Crimea is a part of Russia. It is stiff with NATO and American military facilities, and has the entire might of NATO behind it. If NATO is afraid of Russia, say so - but if you say that, then stop with the smirking jibes about its "rustbucket navy" and its dysfunctional conscript army. Turkey has been offered an opportunity to become a profitable energy hub for Europe, dispensing Russian oil and gas, and if the USA was able to do the same thing it would congratulate itself on a smart piece of brinksmanship. If Turkey accepts the overtures, it will be because it wants to make money, not because it is being "squeezed".
This entire ream of crybaby rubbish boils down to a petulant splutter-fit because the beautiful and surpassingly-clever Beltway plan to have Assad driven from power by Islamist militias - didn't really matter which one got there first - and then for American forces to swoop in just moments too late to save him, whereupon a hand-picked government of exiles would be brought to power by the usual kingmakers, was all spoiled by that horrible pipsqueak Vladimir Putin. It is no good to now pretend to lofty altruistic principles for the good of all mankind. As a pungent aphorism has it, don't piss in my pocket and tell me it's raining.
---
PaulR says:
October 22, 2015
Blank is one of the more reliably extreme commentators. Here he is on Russia's intentions in Ukraine: 'There is the clear intention ... to dismember Ukraine, reclaim as much of its territory as "Novorossiia" (new Russia) and create a contiguous state all the way to the Transdniestr region of Moldova. ... But Moscow wants more than simple territorial expansion. The ultimate strategic prize coveted by Mr. Putin and company is nothing less than the reorganization of European security along new lines. ... Essentially, Mr. Putin wants to return Europe to a Cold War-like bipolarity between Moscow and the United States, even as his government conducts subversion across Europe to hollow out and undo the twin processes of European integration and democratization.' That came in an article ambitiously entitled, 'Russia's Vladimir Putin Clearly Wants to Dominate All of Europe,' published by the Washington Times, 28 December 2014.
|
|
#30
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
October 23, 2015
U.S. professor unveils Russian 'Architecture at the End of the Earth' in DC
William Brumfield presents new book on cultural heritage of Russia's north.
ANNA SOROKINA, RBTH
William Brumfield presented highlights and stunning photos from his new book Architecture at the End of the Earth: Photographing the Russian North on Oct. 15 at the headquarters of the American Councils for International Education in Washington, DC.
During the presentation, Brumfield, Professor of Slavic Studies at Tulane University and Honorary Fellow of the Russian Academy of the Arts, showed his documentary work from the village of Oshevensk in the Arkhangelsk Region of the Russian north. He also discussed the fate of the Church of the Intercession in the nearby village of Lyadiny - a priceless treasure that was destroyed by a lightning strike in May 2013.
In the far northwest of Russia, the villages of the Arkhangelsk, Vologda and Murmansk regions are threaded by a root-like network of rivers that feed into the nearby White Sea. Dr. Brumfield is committed to documenting these and other cultural treasures of Russia's history.
The book Architecture at the End of the Earth approaches Russian architecture primarily on its own terms, as an anomaly that does not fit into the traditional narrative of Western art and architectural history.
"It's interesting because it's Russia," Brumfield said in an interview with RBTH on Sept. 25, adding that in his view, "architecture is as much an expression of Russia as its music or literature. Although it's rare to find any of the great novelists talking about the architecture of a church, for example, that ambiance is there."
The book presentation was introduced by Dr. Dan Davidson, president of American Councils, who noted not only Brumfield's scholarship, but also his dedication to the documentation and preservation of Russia's architectural heritage, particularly in the Russian north. Brumfield, in turn, expressed his gratitude to Russian and American colleagues who provided support for his many years of travel and research in the vast territory of the historic region.
"There are few inhabited places on earth that are at once as beautiful and as bleak as the northern latitudes of Russia", said John Beyrle, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, who attended the event. "No one, American or Russian, has done more to rediscover and record the architectural wealth of this unique, isolated region than William Brumfield. His lecture and book presentation offered a compelling rationale for expanding the artistic and cultural links between Russians and Americans that have always outlasted our political disagreements."
The book contains some 200 color photographs of legendary centuries-old structures and documents various aspects of Russian architecture, from log houses to grand cathedrals.
William Brumfield is a historian specializing in Russian architecture, a photographer, a tireless defender of monuments, and the author of 35 books and dozens of articles on the problems of preserving the architecture of Russia, primarily in the Russian north. For the past five years, Brumfield's special section on RBTH, Discovering Russia, has shown readers the most beautiful and remote corners of old Russia.
|
|
#31
Reuters
October 26, 2016
Russia's Bolshoi Theater appoints new ballet director after acid attack scandal
By Andrew Osborn
Russia's Bolshoi Theater presented a new director for its world-famous ballet troupe on Monday, a position it said it was creating after its outgoing artistic director was nearly blinded in an acid attack.
Vladimir Urin, the theater's director general, said Makhar Vaziev, currently director of ballet at Milan's La Scala opera house, would become the Bolshoi's new ballet director, part of a restructuring the renowned institution's fans hope will restore its scandal-tainted reputation.
The appointment follows a 2013 acid attack on Sergei Filin, the Bolshoi's artistic director, which lifted the lid on poisonous rivalries over roles, money and power at one of Russia's most prominent cultural institutions.
"Makhar Vaziev needs no introduction," said Urin, in a statement on the Bolshoi's web site after a news conference at which he presented Vaziev. "The theater world knows his name not only in Russia but also abroad."
Urin said Vaziev, 54, was a brilliant dancer in his time, before going on to lead the ballet troupe at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg for 13 years. Vaziev had been in charge of ballet at La Scala for the last seven years, he said, during which he had taken the troupe there "to a new level."
He will start his new role in March next year when Filin, who had acid splashed in his face as he returned to his Moscow apartment in January 2013, will step down.
A court in December that year convicted Pavel Dmitrichenko, a Bolshoi soloist, of organizing the attack; he is currently serving a five-and-a-half year jail term.
Yuri Zarutsky, who admitted being the masked attacker who threw acid in Filin's face, was sentenced to 10 years in prison, a term subsequently reduced to nine years.
Dmitrichenko, who made his name playing villains such as the murderous tsar in the ballet "Ivan the Terrible", acknowledged that he had wanted Filin roughed up, but said he had not expected acid to be used.
Prominent former dancer Nikolai Tsiskaridze told the court at the time that Filin had denied roles to both Dmitrichenko and his girlfriend, a ballerina, stoking resentment.
The case was one of the worst crises at the Bolshoi Theater since its foundation in 1776, and the Russian government dismissed the theater's director in an effort to turn the page.
Filin eventually returned to work after months of treatment in Germany, but his sight remains impaired. His contract expires in March when the position of artistic director will cease to exist. He has previously said he has no hard feelings about the Bolshoi's decision not to renew his contract.
|
|
#32
Moscow Times
October 26, 2015
Will 'Sunstroke' Make the Oscar List?
By Ali Sar
HOLLYWOOD - Nikita Mikhalkov's film "Sunstroke" will be the director's sixth submission to the Oscar competition and will give the renowned Russian moviemaker a chance to capture his second Academy Award.
Unlike last year's awards entry "Leviathan," the story about a corrupt mayor of a small seaside fishing village, "Sunstroke" has the blessing of Russian officialdom.
This big budget, three-hour epic love story focuses on the period just as the Russian revolution gains traction and the old imperial era is about to be destroyed.
More specifically, the plot revolves around a tsarist soldier, awaiting his fate in a Bolshevik prison camp, as he recalls an affair he had with a beautiful married woman before war and revolution.
"Sunstroke" is one of 81 foreign films vying for the best Oscar trophy. The foreign language film award is presented annually by the U.S. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, an industry backed non-profit organization.
As a rule, the academy refrains from commenting on the artistic merits of entries to avoid any appearance of favoritism.
Most of the entries, including "Sunstroke," have not yet been screened for academy voters. Creating buzz among the few early showings is Hungary's "Son of Saul."
Oscar and Nikita
After the breakup of the Soviet Union, films representing the Russian Federation have had six nominations, including one Oscar win for Mikhalkov for "Burnt by the Sun" in 1994.
The director has been chosen by his colleagues to represent Russia three other times, for "Close to Eden" (also called "Ugra - Territory of Love") in 1992, "12" in 1997, and "The Barber of Siberia" in 1998. But the last film was disqualified when the print did not arrive in Los Angeles on time for screening, an academy official told The Moscow Times.
The academy official also said that Russian movies were strongly represented during the Soviet era, with nine nominations and three Oscars from 1968 to 1991.
"Sunstroke" was adapted from a 1927 novel by Nobel Prize-winning Russian novelist Ivan Bunin while living in exile in Paris.
Although the plot itself has not been the subject of any controversy, the film's premieres in the Crimean cities of Sevastopol and Simferopol drew some unfavorable attention in the world press.
Politics and Art
Foreign film buffs in Hollywood are anxiously awaiting the reaction to "Sunstroke." The expectations are fueled by the reaction to last year's Oscar-nominated Russian film, director Andrei Zvyagintsev's "Leviathan," which was described by some movie critics as "a Russian masterpiece."
Both "Leviathan" and 2013's entry "Stalingrad" each grossed more than $1 million at U.S. art houses. "Stalingrad" was a huge box office hit both in Russia and China.
The academy will reduce the 81 contenders to a so-called "short list" of nine finalists in mid-December, with five nominated films to be announced on Jan. 14. The Oscars will be presented on Feb. 29.
Mikhalkov is not hopeful about his chances. He was quoted by RIA Novosti as saying, "I'm sure that we won't make the Oscar short list. I'm not talking about a question of taste, but about Ukraine's 'black list.' It's politics."
|
#33 Washington Post October 15, 2015 In 1983 'war scare,' Soviet leadership feared nuclear surprise attack by U.S. By David E. Hoffman A nuclear weapons command exercise by NATO in November 1983 prompted fear in the leadership of the Soviet Union that the maneuvers were a cover for a nuclear surprise attack by the United States, triggering a series of unparalleled Soviet military responses, according to a top-secret U.S. intelligence review that has just been declassified. "In 1983, we may have inadvertently placed our relations with the Soviet Union on a hair trigger," the review concluded. [Read the U.S. assessment on Soviet fears: http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/documents/world/read-the-us-assessment-that-concluded-the-soviet-leadership-feared-an-american-nuclear-strike-in-1983/1779/] That autumn has long been regarded as one of the most tense moments of the Cold War, coming after the Soviet Union shot down a South Korean civilian airliner in September and as the West was preparing to deploy Pershing II intermediate-range and ground-launched cruise missiles in Europe in November. But there has been a long-running debate about whether the period known as the "war scare" was a moment of genuine danger or a period of bluster for propaganda purposes. The review concluded that for Soviet leaders, the war scare was real, and that U.S. intelligence postmortems did not take it seriously enough. Soviet leaders were particularly alarmed about the NATO exercise, known as Able Archer, carried out in early November 1983 involving forces that stretched from Turkey to Britain. Conducted annually to practice the procedures involved in the run-up to a nuclear conflict, the exercise had some new wrinkles that year, including planes that taxied out of hangars carrying realistic-looking dummy warheads, the review said. The 109-page document, titled "The Soviet 'War Scare,' " was dated Feb. 15, 1990, and written for the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a White House unit that examined intelligence issues. The authors of the review scrutinized classified documents and conducted 75 interviews with U.S. and British officials. Originally stamped "Top Secret" and containing sensitive signals intelligence, the review was declassified this month in response to a request from the National Security Archive, a nongovernmental organization affiliated with George Washington University. The PFIAB review found that the Soviet Union took unusual military and intelligence precautions at the time of Able Archer that previously had been employed only in actual crises. This included placing air forces in East Germany and Poland on higher alert, conducting significantly more reconnaissance flights, and tasking Soviet KGB and military intelligence officers around the world to be on the lookout for signs of nuclear war preparations. The Soviet actions "strongly" suggest that "Soviet military leaders may have been seriously concerned that the US would use Able Archer 83 as a cover for launching a real attack," the review concluded. It added that the evidence "strongly indicates that the war scare was real, at least in the minds of some Soviet leaders." Some details of the Soviet paranoia about a nuclear attack had come to light earlier, including reports from Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB officer who was an agent for British intelligence. Gordievsky revealed to the British the existence of a KGB intelligence-collection effort to detect indications that the West was preparing for nuclear war. Gordievsky, who defected to Britain in 1985, later published the text of some KGB directives, part of a program known as RYAN or VRYAN, the acronyms in Russian for sudden nuclear missile attack. Andropov's worries Yuri Andropov, the KGB chief who later became Soviet leader, was a major source of the anxiety in Moscow about a surprise nuclear attack. In 1981, Andropov declared to a major KGB conference that the Reagan administration was actively preparing for war and that a nuclear first strike was possible. According to the review, Andropov put "strategic military intelligence" at the top of KGB collection priorities, and he hastily created a special "institute" within the KGB in 1981 to handle it. His worries about a surprise attack were amplified by "one peculiar mode of intelligence analysis," a KGB computer model to measure perceived changes in the "correlation of forces" between the superpowers, according to the review. The computer went online in 1979 to warn Soviet leaders when "deterioration of Soviet power might tempt a US first strike," the review says. The computer was at the heart of the VRYAN system, according to the review, and thousands of pieces of security and economic data were fed into the machine. The computer model assigned a fixed value of 100 to the United States, and Soviet leaders felt they would be safe from a nuclear first strike as long as they were at least at 60 percent of the United States, and ideally at 70 percent. Reports were sent to the ruling Politburo once a month. Soon, the computer model produced bad news. According to the review, it calculated that Soviet power had declined to 45 percent; it was felt that below 40, the Soviet Union would be "dangerously inferior." Although "it may seem absurd" to think the Soviet leaders would put stock in such a computer model, the review concluded, "this approach may have been especially appealing to top Soviet leaders at the time" because they craved some kind of scientific evidence of the strategic balance. By 1983, Andropov had become Soviet leader, succeeding Leonid Brezhnev, and superpower tensions were deepening. According to the review, in January 1983, the Soviet armed forces added a fifth level of readiness to the existing four: "Surprise Enemy Attack Using Weapons of Mass Destruction in Progress." This fifth condition "could be declared regardless of the readiness stage in effect at the time," the review said. On March 8, 1983, President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an "evil empire." By late that summer, the Soviet leadership "appeared to be bracing the population for the worst." Signs were posted everywhere showing the location of air raid shelters; broadcasts suggesting the possibility of a U.S. attack were on radio and television "several times a day," the review says. Soviet spokesmen accused Reagan and his advisers of "madness," "extremism" and "criminality." After the Korean airliner was downed, tensions grew over NATO plans to deploy the Pershing II and ground-launched cruise missiles in Europe. Near the end of 1983, the 4th Air Army, a Soviet air force unit in Poland, received orders to speed up the transfer of nuclear weapons from storage to the aircraft, with a maximum time of 25 minutes for one weapon, 40 minutes for two, according to the review. Meanwhile, Andropov, the Soviet leader, had become gravely ill. New procedures in 1983 Able Archer was conducted every year and "routinely monitored by Soviet intelligence." But the November 1983 version had new procedures "which we believe probably fueled Soviet anxieties," the review found. NATO tested new communications methods, with a more graduated escalation. The Able Archer exercise also used live mobilization exercises from U.S. military forces in Europe, the review said. All this may have looked more realistic to Soviet spies, who were watching. Both the KGB and Soviet military intelligence were ordered on Nov. 8 or 9 to report on increased alert at U.S. bases in Europe and to check for other indications of an impending nuclear attack. The Warsaw Pact, the Soviet-dominated defense alliance, also launched an "unprecedented" reconnaissance effort, including 36 intelligence flights, "significantly more than in previous" years. The review said these included flying over the Norwegian, North, Baltic and Barents seas "probably to determine whether US naval forces were deploying forward in support of Able Archer." Also, the Warsaw Pact imposed a suspension of all military flight operations between Nov. 4 and 10, except for the intelligence flights, "probably to have available as many aircraft as possible for combat." The review notes that Soviet doctrine had called for preempting a NATO attack by striking first - and that the Warsaw Pact forces had long assumed a NATO offensive would start under cover of an exercise. "There is little doubt in our minds," the review concluded, "that the Soviets were genuinely worried about Able Archer; however, the depth of that concern is difficult to gauge." Some Soviet units were probably preparing a preemptive counterattack, but at the same time, there was no overall, large-scale mobilization. This "mixed" approach reflected the deep uncertainty in the Kremlin over Western intentions, the review found. "This situation could have been extremely dangerous if during the exercise - perhaps through a series of ill-timed coincidences or because of faulty intelligence - the Soviets had misperceived US actions as preparations for a real attack," the review concluded. In the aftermath of Able Archer, the U.S. intelligence community commissioned two postmortems, in May and August 1984, looking back at the events. Both intelligence estimates declared: "We believe strongly that Soviet actions are not inspired by, and Soviet leaders do not perceive, a genuine danger of imminent conflict or confrontation with the United States." This conclusion was based on the fact that the West had not seen widespread Soviet mobilization for war. But the PFIAB review was sharply critical of both of these intelligence estimates for being "overconfident" and overly sanguine. The U.S. intelligence community, the board said, "did not at the time, and for several years afterwards, attach sufficient weight to the possibility that the war scare was real." This criticism goes to the heart of a long-running debate about the war scare. Intelligence officials who worked on the 1984 estimates say they were correct: The Soviet Union was making noisy gestures, not war preparations. The PFIAB review challenged that conclusion and said the estimates should not have been so categorical, that "strongly worded interpretations were defended by explaining away facts inconsistent with them." The PFIAB review repeatedly criticized U.S. intelligence on Soviet leaders, saying at the time of the 1984 postmortems that "the US knew very little about Kremlin decisionmaking." It added, "Our own leadership needs far better intelligence reporting on and assessments of the mindset of the Soviet leadership - its ideological/political instincts and perceptions." And the review said the 1984 estimates "were overconfident, particularly in the judgments pertaining to Soviet leadership intentions - since little intelligence, human or technical, existed to support them." Reagan: 'Really scary' events On a separate track from the two estimates, the director of central intelligence, William Casey, sent a more alarming message to Reagan in June 1984 about the war scare events. Casey's information came from the intelligence warning staff and showed "a rather stunning array of indicators" of an "increasing aggressiveness in Soviet policy and activities." Reagan "expressed surprise upon reading the Casey memorandum and described the events as 'really scary,' " former national security adviser Robert McFarlane was quoted in the review. The war scare marked a turning point for Reagan. He acknowledged that Soviet leaders may have harbored true fears of attack. He wrote in his diary on Nov. 18, 1983: "I feel the Soviets are so defense minded, so paranoid about being attacked that without being in any way soft on them, we ought to tell them no one here has any intention of doing anything like that. What the h--l have they got that anyone would want." Reagan later recalled in his memoir, "Three years had taught me something surprising about the Russians: Many people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were genuinely afraid of America and Americans. Perhaps this shouldn't have surprised me, but it did. In fact, I had difficulty accepting my own conclusion at first." He said he felt that "it must be clear to anyone" that Americans were a moral people who, since the founding of the nation, "had always used our power only as a force for good in the world." "During my first years in Washington," Reagan said, "I think many of us in the administration took it for granted that the Russians, like ourselves, considered it unthinkable that the United States would launch a first strike against them. But the more experience I had with the Soviet leaders and other heads of state who knew them, the more I began to realize that many Soviet officials feared us not only as adversaries but as potential aggressors who might hurl nuclear weapons at them in a first strike; because of this, and perhaps because of a sense of insecurity and paranoia with roots reaching back to the invasions of Russia by Napoleon and Hitler, they had aimed a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons at us." |
|
