#2
www.rt.com
October 29, 2015
No firsthand info on alleged Russian 'airstrike' on hospital in Syria - Red Cross top executive
[Graphics here https://www.rt.com/news/320046-stillhart-red-cross-hospital-russia/]

Red Cross personnel on the ground in Syria have not reported any 'airstrikes' allegedly delivered by Russian jets on civilian targets including hospitals, the medical charity's top executive told RT.

Since Moscow started its air campaign in Syria on September 30, Western media have been publishing reports that Russian jets are targeting civilians.

Last week, Russia was accused of bombing a number of hospitals in Syria, an allegation flatly denied by the Russian Defense Ministry.

Dominik Stillhart, director of operations at the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has people on the ground in Syria, told RT he is unaware of any such incidents.

"We've seen these reports as well, but in the absence of any firsthand information coming from our teams on the ground, I can neither confirm, nor deny these allegations," Stillhart said, stressing that international humanitarian law "fully applies to the airstrikes undertaken by [anyone] in Syria, including Russia.

"In addition to providing large scale humanitarian assistance, our teams on the ground are also monitoring the conduct of hostilities and use of force, and in case we have concerns, we will share them directly, in a bilateral and confidential dialogue with the relevant party," the Red Cross executive said.

Stillhart revealed his organization had two employees at the medical facility bombed by US forces in Kunduz, saying the Red Cross "is still shocked" by the tragic attack, "even more so, because hospitals, medical facilities and health staff are protected by international humanitarian law."

"There are investigations that [are] currently going on and we're anxious to see the results of these investigations," Stillhart said.

Despite security measures taken to protect health facilities and medical workers operating in zones of conflicts, "the only way to guarantee better protection [for] health facilities, health and humanitarian workers is to fully respect international humanitarian law," Dominik Stillhart said.

The smear campaign against Russian military operating in Syria began last week, with media outlets citing reports from the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS) foundation based in Canfield, Ohio.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that "Russian airstrikes hit nine hospitals in Syria this month."

A statement from Russia's Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, stressed that such reports show tremendous bias against Russia's military efforts in Syria.

On October 25, the Human Rights Watch organization alleged that two airstrikes "the local residents believed to be Russian" killed a total of 59 civilians, including 33 children, in northern Homs on October 15.

The Kremlin spokesperson denied the allegations, stressing that a large number of these reports are in fact "hoaxes and deliberate lies."

"Our military has reported on many occasions that the terrorists are taking cover in residential areas. In such cases Russian troops choose not to hit those targets," Dmitry Peskov said.

On Tuesday, the Russian Ministry of Defense summoned military attaches from NATO countries and Saudi Arabia, to clarify their countries' allegations that Russian airstrikes in Syria have hit civilian targets.

The ministry demanded the military officials "give official validation to their statements, or issue a rebuttal," Defense Ministry deputy head Anatoly Antonov said.

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 #3
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
http://www.abc.net.au
October 28, 2015
The real Vladimir Putin: More complex (and normal) than you think
By Matthew Dal Santo
Matthew Dal Santo is a Danish Research Council post-doctoral fellow at the Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen. Follow him on Twitter at @MatthewDalSant1.

In the Western imagination, Vladimir Putin is little more than a caricature - a reckless madman intervening in Syria to burnish his hawkish credentials back home. But there's something far more strategic in his actions, writes Matthew Dal Santo.

After 15 years at the head (one way or another) of Russia's government, a remarkable enigma still surrounds Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Who is he? What does he want - for Russia, in Ukraine and now in Syria?

Only historians working half a century or more from now will be able to answer those questions with anything like a sufficient account of the facts or the necessary objectivity. But for those unable to wait, Vladimir Putin's speech last Friday at the final session of the Valdai Discussion Club Meeting at Sochi probably serves as a useful guide.

Relaxed, reasonable, well-informed, the Vladimir Putin who took the stage there was far from the reckless madman or street thug of increasingly common Western caricature. In the popular imagination, Putin wields absolute power within Russia and spends much of the time he's not in the gym revising plans to reconstitute the Soviet Union by force.

In reality, Putin's position as president of Russia is more complex than that of a personal dictator. He's more often factional referee than autocrat. "There are many towers in the Kremlin" is a popular line among Russian political analysts.

And Russia, whatever its failures against the yardstick of liberal democracy, is misrepresented as a police state. Rather than ruling in spite of a liberal, Western-leaning population, the Kremlin derives much of its influence (and Putin his popularity) by ruling in broad accordance with the wishes of the conservative and patriotic majority of Russians.

"All the stories about Putin as a Russian Hitler are nonsense and nothing but a shortcut to the truth," said Alexei Miller, a leading historian of Russian nationalism I talked to in St Petersburg earlier this month. "Vladimir Putin isn't a dictator. He's a statesman. A good statesman or a bad statesman, that's a different question."

This focus on the state already makes Putin something of a throwback.

An influential body of thought in the West (not least in Europe) sees the nation-state as outmoded in an age dominated by multinational organisations and economic globalisation. But Putin is a state-centred realist when it comes to international relations.

He rejects the notion that history ended in 1989.

"All states have always had and will continue to have their own diverse interests, while the course of world history has always been accompanied by competition between nations and their alliances. In my view this is absolutely natural," he said at Sochi.

Peace is to be secured through an unsentimental balance of power.

The alternative premise has gained near-monopoly status in the public statements (if not the actual policies) of Western foreign ministries: the foundations of peace can only be laid through the evolution of all the world's states towards liberal democracy and the construction of encompassing supra-national organisations (NATO, EU, etc.) to protect it.

Putin, with most of the Russian establishment, considers this both historically utopian and politically disingenuous.

Putin's biggest bugbear is with the unipolar world system created by the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, with the United States at its centre: he sees it as a direct and present threat to the very concept of state sovereignty everywhere.

"Attempts to promote a model of unilateral domination," he said, "have led to an imbalance in the system of international law and global regulation, which means there is a threat, and political, economic and military competition may get out of control."

That's a jumbled way of saying that Russia doesn't want to live in a world where the United States calls all the shots - and that it will robustly defend its state interests, by arms if need be, and even at the risk of frosty relations with the world's de facto hegemon.

Which brings us to Russia's three-week old air campaign in Syria.

The predictable rush in some Western circles was to paint Russia's activities in Syria as a reckless and fundamentally cynical escapade designed to do nothing more than perpetuate Putin's image as a popular war leader and distract the public's attention from falling living standards.

This is excessively cynical.

Damascus is a longstanding ally and one that hosts Russia's only Mediterranean bases, however small and makeshift until recently. As Putin never tires of pointing out, Russia is a guest of Syria's legitimate government - the only one with a seat at the UN: Russian warplanes alone are on the right side of international law in Syria.

There is a genuine domestic consideration too. Many thousands of Russian-speaking Muslims from Russia and former Soviet Central Asia are fighting with Islamic State in Syria. Moscow would prefer to defeat them there than when they return home.

Chaos in Iraq and Libya has also convinced Putin of the conservative truth that (almost) any government is better than none - a healthy antidote to that strand of Western thinking that believes undesirable governments (or "regimes") can be removed at whim, without appreciable consequences for a population that may in fact be ready to trade notional liberties for the tangible benefits of security and public order.

Significantly, Assad retains the support of Syria's Christian bishops. Former US President Jimmy Carter has also praised the decent job the Syrian government has done in protecting Syria's religious and ethnic minorities.

But in modern Russia's re-assumption of the tsars' old mantle as defenders of Middle Eastern Christians, raison d'état is also to be found.

Structurally, what lies behind Putin's appeal for a grand coalition against terrorism is the shrewd insight that together the Syrian civil war, the rise of Islamic State there and in neighbouring Iraq, and the return of Iran ultimately signify the breakdown of both the Sykes-Picot state system in the Middle East and the US-centred network of regional alliances that has kept peace between Israel and Egypt since 1973 and contained Iran since 1979.

Syria is thus above all an opportunity for Russia to show the United States that its "unipolar moment" has ended - even in that jewel in the crown of the global American empire: the Middle East.

A regional concert of the United States, Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran must take its place.

"Syria," said Putin, "can become a model for partnership in the name of common interests, resolving problems that affect everyone, and developing an effective risk management system."

It's a testament to Russia's skilful combination of military strikes with diplomacy that this already seems to be emerging.

None of this ranges Putin on the side of the angels (there's much that's very unpleasant about the Kremlin's way of doing business) or makes him a "strategic genius" (though much semi-official Western semi-official Western puffing about Putin not having an ounce of strategic marrow seems motivated more by pique than logic).

But perhaps to our caricatures of Russia and its president we need to add the much duller image of a state with "normal" interests and a national leader focused more on Russia's state interests than the West's moral absolutes.

Whether he's a good statesman or a bad one - that's primarily for Russians now, and Western historians later, to decide.

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 #4
Fort Russ
http://fortruss.blogspot.com
October 28, 2015
Confessions of a recovering Russian liberal
Zakhar Prilepin, Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/zaharprilepin/posts/1032209303490057
Translated by Kristina Rus

Writer Denis Gutsko, with whom we used to argue a lot (Dennis used to be the absolute liberal forever) very calmly, in his friendly manner, with sadness - about the loss of illusions:

- For me what is happening in Ukraine, remains a source of pain, anxiety, fears and disappointments. I stopped writing about it, because I have nothing new to say. And everything that I said and wrote, boils down to outrage regarding the position of our liberal intelligentsia. It missed the opportunity to become the third force, taking a position based not on the choice of the side according to the principle "the enemy of my enemy", as it happened (the enemy of the liberal intelligentsia - clearly, is the Russian government, in any form, if not to take into account Yeltsin's feudalism), and based on immutable moral and ethical standards.

I don't understand why the same people who criticize the militia for what they do, are silent with regard to the Ukrainian punishers. Think it quite reasonable to use that word since they arrived to restore order. Our liberal community has quietly accepted the fact that the forces that restore order, were not only regular units, but battalions "Donbass" and "Azov", which consisted of people totally "deranged" on nationalistic grounds.

For some reason, when our skinheads come out on Manezhka in Moscow with their xenophobic program for Russia, it invokes - and rightly - outrage of the liberal community. And when in Kiev they are shouting "Hang the Moscovite" - this is just a childish expression. They mourn about the "heavenly hundred", but about the unarmed soldiers of "Berkut" who were beaten and burned - silence.

In Tbilisi, many years ago, during Gamsakhurdia, I've seen the same. Someone wrote me on Facebook that I am stuck in my childhood, constantly remembering Georgia. But for me, it's different - it's our liberal intellectuals who are stuck in their childish admiration of the West, the rejection of any Russian government in all its manifestations. Refusing to grow to understand that "any power is disgusting, as the hands of bradobrey".

I myself do not like much - corruption, oligarchy, and the concrete vertical of power, which stifles any initiative on the ground. But it's a different conversation.

In short, our liberal society ought to act according to the precepts of Batko Makhno - to beat the reds until they are white, and beat the whites until they are red.

And in the case of Donbass to reduce everything to the machinations of "bloody GB" [state security services] - is stupid, blind and unjust.

Yes, since the 1990s Russia has gained the ability to lead geopolitical games. Those cruel and cynical geopolitical games. But she only returned to the club which it once left. Why the silence about the USA who play the same, no less cynical and cruel?

Ukraine and the whole Ukrainian story was important to me because it is a complete cognitive dissonance. I've always considered myself a part of liberal environment. I'm from there. But when all this happened, I realized that there, among those who insisted that "my freedom begins where yours begins" - infantilism, double standards, irresponsibility, cultural Darwinism: if you're "European", you are a priori right.

It turned out that all these well-educated, well-read, well-rounded people, but with a terminally narrow perception of the world for me - are strangers. As for many in Russia. And it's a sad story. The story of how the liberal Russian intelligentsia exchanged a historic role for the rose-colored glasses and a lounge chair with views of the idealized West.

Kristina Rus: This is just an illustration of how the situation in Ukraine has consolidated Russian society and strengthened Russian resolve, marginalizing liberal opposition and bolstering Putin's standings.

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 #5
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
October 28, 2015
Ex-Soviet Dissident: Putin Offers a 'Win-Win' Strategy to the World
1980s consultant to the US Republican administrations believes that today Russia is on the move, while America is losing its grip on the world.

Dmitry Mikheev is a former Soviet dissident, imprisoned for 6 years in a Gulag in the 1970's for his 'anti-state activities'.

After emigrating to the United States in 1979, he soon joined the Hudson Institute, an influential neoconservative think tank, working there as a Senior Fellow from 1988 to 1996 . After the collapse of communism and the USSR, he came to the conclusion that for the US foreign policy and security establishment Russia had remained the arch-rival. He returned to Russia and became a vocal critic of neocon ideologies and policies.

This article was written exclusively for RI. A personal interview with Mr. Mikheev covering his life and experiences will be published on RI in the near future.
---

Several geopolitical tremors have occurred recently that may be signalling the approach of a major tectonic shift. Putin's speeches at the UN, Valdai and Russia's recent actions  in Syria might just represent the beginning of a new page in history, not quite yet understood for what it is. America's political elites should be paying very close attention because this shift might just mark the beginning of the end of their exceptionalism and leadership, even their very own raison d'etre.

The American establishment appears to live in a fantasy world believing that Putin's adventurism has damaged Russia's economy, now in supposed freefall and deteriorated his power necessitating a tightening of political screws making the country ripe for a "color revolution." This is a very naïve and blind sighted outlook indeed! The economic decline in Russia can be mostly attributed to low oil prices and to a lesser degree, western sanctions.

Putin's "little war" in Georgia, the dazzling Sochi Winter Olympics, the reunification with Crimea and support given to Donbas in resisting Kiev's murderous "anti-terrorist campaign"... all of this has resulted in an unprecedented increase in his popularity at home with approval ratings reaching 90%. Ironically, contrary to undermining it, American policy toward Russia and Putin has strengthened their position, pushing Russia to diversify and develop its domestic economy, reform its military and substantially elevate Russia's standing in the world.

The simple truth is that Russia is on the move, while the United States is losing it's grip on the world.

With such a distorted picture of reality, the American establishment thus produces equally distorted policies as regards to Russia; that NATO should station additional ground forces in Europe, that a no-fly zone should be established over Syria etc. America's policy of "regime change" has led to the destabilization of entire regions. Their actions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Egypt and Syria were brought about by supporting Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi sect, the root inspiration for the majority of Jihadist movements thus spawning powerful terrorist groups. For decades, the US has pursued a policy of eroding Russia's sphere of influence by funding color revolutions, systematically toppling the governments of all the countries within the geopolitical orbit of the former Soviet Union.

Putin is correct when he stated: "A model of unilateral domination has led to an imbalance in the system of international law and global regulation, which poses the threat, that political, economic or military competition may get out of control."

Putin is a rare statesman of a type we haven't seen in many decades - one with vision and the will to pursue that vision. He is a highly intelligent and strong leader who is not shackled by bureaucratic structures, a man who carefully calculates his moves and acts decisively when the moment arrives. He creates new realities on the ground before a less virile American political elite can catch up and compete. He also speaks his mind, is able to clearly articulate strategic concepts and has a proven record of success behind him.

It must be remembered that Putin first took office at a time when the country was virtually falling apart, an army of 3,500 mercenaries from one Russian region (Chechnya) had invaded another (Dagestan), while apartment blocks were being blown up in Moscow and other Russian cities. Today, Chechnya prospers in a Russia with a GDP 11 times greater than in the year 2000. Today, the Grozny of 2005, that resembled Stalingrad in 1943, is a beautiful city with spunky skyscrapers in a prospering republic.

This time round, the task that President Putin has taken on is quite enormous and unmistakably geopolitical in scope and significance. His goals are much broader than just to defeat ISIL, save Assad's government and restore Syria's territorial integrity or even to safeguard Russia from ISIL recruits. His ambition is to create an alliance of all righteous forces seeking to bring about peace, stability and order to the Eurasian region and thus inaugurate a new approach to relations.

As he stated,

"Our approach is different. In the course of creating the Eurasian Economic Union we have strived to develop relations with our partners, including those involved in the Chinese Silk Road Economic Belt initiative. We are actively working based on a principle of equality in BRICS, APEC and the G20..."
Putin's political and diplomatic efforts in the Middle East are clearly directed at forming a new alliance. Rallying those forces, eager to modernize and establish political and economic coherence and stability from both the EU and the Middle East. To work together "for the region's economic and social development, to restore basic infrastructure, housing, hospitals and schools."

The geopolitical strategy Putin is offering to the world represents a win-win strategy. It should resonate with all Middle East countries (Turkey, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria among others) tired and weary of decades-long wars and increasing chaos. It should also find appeal among Europeans, horrified by the likely prospect of an "invasion of millions of foreigners" posing an existential threat to their union. All these countries and many others, would unanimously embrace the prospect of being rid of the hegemon's preponderance.

Likewise, a significant portion of the American public itself, tired of their 'role' as "the world's policemen", would rather see America cooperating in a multi-polar structured world order and focus on its own domestic problems. This convergence of such diverse geopolitical interests comprises a force so broad and powerful as to convince me that the tectonic shift initiated by Putin does have a future.

 #6
Business New Europe
www.bne.eu
October 29, 2015
MOSCOW BLOG: The autumn of indifference
Julia Reed in Moscow

Earlier in October, Moscow was in the middle of an Indian summer. Autumn is the time to be in the city.

I was sitting in a one-room Lebanese cafe a seven-minute walk away from the Kremlin, customers coming in and out for a cigarette and then back again for a delicious plate of meze and a hookah. This well-known place with a shabby sign between a theatre and a museum competes with a series of newly opened trendy places that offer cuisines of the world, Georgian being the current favorite.

One wouldn't guess where this was - it could be anywhere in the world. Moscow has truly gone global.

With its still reasonably affluent and young population, this robust city seems to be unaffected by Western sanctions, collapsing oil prices, the fragile ruble and by the hidden wars with Ukraine and in Syria. So what are Muscovites busy with?

They work and study in parallel, go to free lectures on art, society and psychology after work. They do yoga, run marathons for charity and go to the gym on a regular basis. They go to St Petersburg and Sochi for the weekend. Instead of French, they now buy very expensive Swiss and Tunisian cheeses on the internet. They sit in newly opened tiny wine and tapas bars scattered around the centre, trim their beards every fortnight in trendy barber shops and browse new boutiques with young Russian designers. State-of-the-art shopping malls keep being built all around the city.

The Russian internet is now offering excellent service for next-day deliveries of a wide range of reasonably priced and domestically produced shoes, clothes, gifts, textile and leather accessories, home goods, and even organic and farmers food. There is a noticeable rise in small businesses offering local goods and services.

And I haven't even described the beautifully organized and renovated parks and variety and richness of Moscow's cultural scene...

One might think I'm silly or naïve for writing how good life in Moscow is amidst Russia's economic crisis and political dictatorship. And yes, the quality of life of the middle class in Moscow with their reasonable disposable incomes is a far cry from that of the rest of the Russian population.

Just recently the Moscow City Duma suggested the passing of a law to oblige Russians to look after their elderly family members. That way, the state would free itself from the obligation to pay decent pensions that would make senior citizens self-supporting. There is constant talk about raising the pension age, again, to relieve the burden from the state, so it is free to engage in world affairs and pursue its global ambitions.

There is nothing in common between what the state does and wants, and between how people, rich or poor, live their lives.

Little change on horizon

Not a lot in today's Russian political climate suggests any possibilities for change. The opposition remains fragile, scarce and fragmented. There does not seem to be a united opinion on any of the issues, especially when it comes to elections, local or national. The opposition fight between themselves and fail in elections - just like they did in the historic city of Kostroma in September. There is increasing talk that elections cannot be won in the current environment.

The population appears completely indifferent to global affairs and to the war in Syria. At least with Ukraine there is pain that it is a "brotherly nation" we are fighting, whereas Syria did not appear to touch any hearts. If anything, some people influenced by what they see on Russian TV are proud of the recent Russian air attacks on Syria. "It's a much better result than the Americans could ever produce," cheers Alexei Semenov, a 50-year-old taxi driver.

"When was the last time you had to visit your local hospital? Should you not be more concerned with the poor state of Moscow's hospitals, kindergartens or your mother's pension?" I ask. He goes quiet, probably searching for an appropriate line from a TV programme, but it doesn't come to him and he doesn't know what to say.

Removed from the possibility of making any decisions about their future, the future of the country and the cities where they live, their focus is drawn to stories of Russian exceptionalism and the bad state of affairs in other countries.

Even a topic as banal as paid parking that spreads out from the centre to the rest of Moscow, a policy widely unpopular with the masses, has gathered just 30 people in a recent protest.

And amidst the general apathy, two stories illustrate that little has changed behind the veneer. In one, a healthy five-month-old baby in St Petersburg was taken away by immigration services from a young Tajik family who did not have their papers in order and put into a social care where he died the same night while the parents awaited deportation. In the other, a man died in the tax office of a small regional town. While the corpse waited, covered, for an hour and half to be collected by the ambulance services, work continued with people queuing around it to make their payments. Yet as he struts the world stage, President Vladimir Putin's approval ratings keep climbing, now at an eye-popping 90%.

"I have got time but there is nothing to do", went a popular 1990s Russian song. It is no surprise that those who decided not to leave Russia to seek new opportunities resolved to spend this 'limbo' time educating, entertaining and relaxing in street cafes lit with the last rays of the Indian summer.

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#7
Russia's Soldiers' Mothers NGO excluded from foreign agents list

MOSCOW, October 29. /TASS/. Russia's Justice Ministry said on Thursday it has excluded the Soldiers' Mothers of St. Petersburg human rights organization from the register of "foreign agents."

The organization that defends the rights of conscripts, soldiers and their families, will no more wear the shameful label as it "has stopped fulfilling the functions of a foreign agent," the ministry said.

The decision formally came into effect on October 23.

Last week, the Soldiers' Mothers of St. Petersburg received a presidential grant of 2.7 million rubles ($42,200) for its projects on increasing "personal responsibility for ensuring human rights in Russia's army."

This was particularly done through raising people's awareness of the law and monitoring human rights violations in the army and providing high-quality judicial, psychological and social assistance to citizens free of charge.

Under the law passed in Russia in July 2012, non-profit organizations which engage in "political activity" and receive funding from abroad are required to register as "foreign agents." The term carries a strongly negative connotation in Russia.

A spokesman for the organization, Alexander Peredruk, told TASS on Thursday that the NGO has been excluded from the list only de jure, while de facto the "mark" on it remains.

The NGO learnt about the decision only late on Wednesday and this "came as a surprise," he said.

The spokesman played down the move, saying that "the register has achieved its goal: we are branded and will de facto remain foreign agents for many people."

"In legal terms, this decision simplifies the work in many ways, there will be less paperwork and more time for useful activity," he said.


 

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#8
Moscow Times
October 29, 2015
Russian Justice Ministry Proposes Further Checks to 'Foreign Agent' NGOs
By Anna Dolgov, Eva Hartog

The Justice Ministry has proposed legal amendments that would set a procedure for the government to shut down nongovernmental organizations deemed "foreign agents," state-run news agency TASS reported.

The bill would require NGOs designated as "foreign agents" to supply the Justice Ministry with thorough accounts of their projects or events, TASS reported Tuesday.

The groups should provide "programs and other documents that serve as grounds for holding events that are financed through [or] conducted with the involvement of foreign sources, and a comprehensive report about their use," an explanatory note to the bill read, TASS reported.

Groups that repeatedly fail to comply with the Justice Ministry's paperwork requirements could be shut down under the bill, the report said.

The "foreign agent" label is required by Russian law to be attached to all NGOs that receive funding from abroad and engage in vaguely defined political activity.

On Tuesday, the Rostov region's Don Women rights group became the latest addition to the list of NGOs deemed "foreign agents," the Justice Ministry said in an online statement.

Тhe organization had not reacted to the announcement on Wednesday but in an old post on its Facebook page, the organization asked people not to believe "the flood of lies and slander," stating it "is not, never was and never will be a foreign agent."

Many respected NGOs have chosen to close their Russian offices rather than carry the label, which carries connotations of Soviet-era espionage.

The bill, which the Justice Ministry presented for review to the presidential Human Rights Council, would also ban government officials from holding leadership positions within NGOs designated as "foreign agents," and from taking overseas trips funded by foreign governments, organizations or citizens, or by Russian groups that receive funding from abroad, TASS reported.

The presidential Human Rights Council discussed the bill at a Tuesday meeting, the report said, without providing any discussion details.

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 #9
Reuters
October 29, 2015
Russian media take climate cue from skeptical Putin
By Andrey Kuzmin

Wildfires crackled across Siberia this summer, turning skies ochre and sending up enough smoke from burning pines to blot out satellite views of the 400-mile-long Lake Baikal.

To many climate scientists, the worsening fires are a consequence of Siberia getting hotter, the carbon unleashed from its burning forests and tundra only adding to man-made fossil fuel emissions. Siberia's wildfire season has lengthened in recent years and the 2015 blazes were among the biggest yet, caking the lake, the "Pearl of Siberia", in ash and scorching the surrounding permafrost.

But the Russian public heard little mention of climate change, because media coverage across state-controlled television stations and print media all but ignored it. On national TV, the villains were locals who routinely but carelessly burn off tall grasses every year, and the sometimes incompetent crews struggling to put the fires out.

While Western media have examined the role of rising temperatures and drought in this year's record wildfires in North America, Russian media continue to pay little attention to an issue that animates so much of the world.

The indifference reflects widespread public doubt that human activities play a significant role in global warming, a tone set by President Vladimir Putin, who has offered only vague and modest pledges of emissions cuts ahead of December's U.N. climate summit in Paris.

Russia's official view appears to have changed little since 2003, when Putin told an international climate conference that warmer temperatures would mean Russians "spend less on fur coats" while "agricultural specialists say our grain production will increase, and thank God for that".

The president believes that "there is no global warming, that this is a fraud to restrain the industrial development of several countries including Russia," says Stanislav Belkovsky, a political analyst and critic of Putin. "That is why this subject is not topical for the majority of the Russian mass media and society in general."

And with Russian media focused on the economic squeeze at home and events in Ukraine and Syria abroad, the absence of a robust media conversation on climate change means his scepticism goes largely unchallenged.

"It is difficult to spend editorial resources on things that are now a low priority in the midst of the economic crisis," says Galina Timchenko, former editor-in-chief of the successful news site Lenta.ru. Timchenko now runs Meduza, a popular site that covers Russian news but devotes little space to climate issues.

"Unfortunately climate change is not very interesting to the public," she says.

"EXTENSIVE WORK"

Putin's scepticism dates from the early 2000s, when his staff "did very, very extensive work trying to understand all sides of the climate debate", said Andrey Illarionov, Putin's senior economic adviser at the time and now a senior fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington.

"We found that, while climate change does exist, it is cyclical, and the anthropogenic role is very limited," he said. "It became clear that the climate is a complicated system and that, so far, the evidence presented for the need to 'fight' global warming was rather unfounded."

That opinion endures. During a trip to the Arctic in 2010, Putin acknowledged that "the climate is changing", but restated his doubt that human activity was the cause.

His trip was to inspect the retreat of the polar ice cap, something that promises to make the Arctic ocean and northern Siberia more accessible to exploration and production of the oil that Russia, the world's leading producer, depends on for export earnings.

Marianna Poberezhskaya, author of the academic work "Communicating Climate Change in Russia", characterized media coverage in Russia as "climate silence", broken only by the airing of official doubts about any human impact on global temperatures.

"Russian mass media repeat the same mistake that Western journalists used to make: the false balance, where the idea of the human effect on climate change is presented along with skeptics' point of view," she said.

Russian school teaching also appears to lag behind the rapidly expanding science on climate change.

Randomly sampled geography textbooks make no mention of human impact on the climate, and one college-level text states that climate changes are caused mainly by solar activity, the movement of the planet's crust and volcanoes.

"I see what they have abroad on the problem of climate change," says Asya Korolkova, 15, who studies high school biology in Moscow. "People there talk about it a lot; you can feel it's a serious problem. We don't have that here."

DECREASE IS AN INCREASE

Environmentalists say that attitude is also reflected in Russia's pledge for December's global summit, one that received little media coverage at home.

In suggesting a reduction in its emissions to "70 to 75 percent" of 1990 levels by 2030, Moscow is actually proposing an increase from 2012 levels. Russian emissions are currently far below the levels produced by obsolescent ex-Soviet smokestack industries in 1990.

Even that offer is hedged. Russia has said reaching the target will require generous accounting for the role Russia's forests play in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Some observers do see signs of a slight softening in Moscow's position in the face of a series of weather disasters, from drought and searing summer fires in 2010 to raging floods in Sochi on the Black Sea last year.

Natural resources minister Sergei Donskoy has said extreme weather could cut Russia's economic output by 1-2 percent every year for the next 15 years, adding that "this has to be taken into account when determining the policy and measures in the field of adaptation to climate change".

The business newspaper Kommersant, owned by wealthy businessman Alisher Usmanov, is, like some other Russian media, taking some interest in those economic consequences, though it also did not discuss the possibility that climate change might have contributed to the Siberian fires.

"I write about what needs to be done to change production and consumption practices - the human effect on the climate is a given for us," said Kommersant journalist Alexey Shapovalov.

But for all that, there is no sign of public pressure on authorities to do more, let alone of Putin relaxing Russia's hard line ahead of the Paris talks.

"This subject has failed to become a priority," says Konstantin Simonov, the founder of a non-governmental oil and gas research fund who often appears on Russian media.

"Russia's attitude will most likely be something like this: Guys, you put economic pressure on us, introduced sanctions. Do you expect us to be holier than the Pope about the issue you're pushing through and take a load of responsibilities?"

The answer, he says, will be: "No."

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 #10
Russia to improve performance on doing business in 2016 - First Deputy PM

NOVO-OGARYOVO, October 28. /TASS/. Russia's First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov expressed hope that next year Russia will improve its performance on doing business indicators, reflected in World Bank's Doing Business rating.

"In general we're actively cooperating with the World Bank and if we execute our "road map" on entrepreneurial initiative and all plans we have for 2016 there is hope that we'll substantially improve those indicators," Shuvalov said to President Vladimir Putin at a government meeting on Wednesday.

First Deputy PM said that 2016 will be pivotal for execution of the entrepreneurial initiative defined by President as respective "road maps" will expire then. He added that the Russian government plans to pursue this policy as it considers it challenging.

"Yesterday (on October 27 - TASS) the World Bank published its rating where Russia had improved its performance and now takes the 51st place on the indicators you outlined for the government. In 2015, we were to be included in the top 50 states, which means we slightly fell short of the target," Shuvalov said to Putin. He also said that Russia was among 12 countries, which carried out over 4 reforms that had favorable impact on business environment in the country. Meanwhile, Shuvalov said despite certain progress in implementation of particular reforms Russia lagged behind other countries regarding some indicators like external turnover.

According to the new rating published annually by the World Bank, Russia's ranking has risen by 11 positions during the year. In 2015, Russia has climbed from the 62nd place to the 51st place. The country is only 0.02 points below the 50th position currently occupied by Peru. In 2013, Russia was ranked the 92nd.

Improvement of business environment is one of the strategic tasks of the state. In May 2012, President Putin signed the decree on the long-term government economic policy. The decree set the task of raising the country's position in the Doing Business ranking from the 120th in 2011 to the 50th in 2015 and the 20th in 2018.

According to the World Bank, during the current year Russia has carried out five economic reforms, which contributed significantly to the advancement of the country's rating. The greatest success was achieved for such indicators as "registration of property" (Russia has entered the top ten of the countries with the best performance) "power supply reliability" and "transparency of electricity tariffs".

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 #11
Reuters
October 29, 2015
Russian Economic Slump to Persist as Oil Price Languishes

MOSCOW - Russia's economy will slump by almost 4 percent this year and barely grow in 2016, a Reuters poll predicted on Thursday, with forecasters expecting the country's recession to persist as oil prices remain depressed.

The poll predicted that gross domestic product would end up shrinking 3.9 percent this and grow by 0.3 percent next year, only slightly better than a previous Reuters poll in September that predicted a 4 percent decline in 2015 and a 0.2 percent rise in 2016.

Russia's economy has been hit by falling global commodity prices and is coming under stress from sanctions imposed on it by mainly Western nations angry over what they see as Russia's aggressive policy towards Ukraine.

Recovery prospects have been dimmed by signs that a global glut of oil will continue for the foreseeable future, keeping the price of Russia's main export depressed at around $50 per barrel.

"This (recession) is probably going to last for a couple of quarters more than the government is saying officially," said Christopher Shiells, senior emerging markets analyst at Informa Global Markets. "And that is purely because the outlook for oil is remaining very soft for at least the next couple of years. I'm of the view that oil will remain roughly where it is now."

The poll predicted that quarterly GDP would turn positive in year-on-year terms only in the third quarter of next year, when 0.3 percent growth is expected compared with a 4 percent decline in the fourth quarter of 2015.

The outlook for inflation was more pessimistic than last month's poll. Forecasters now expect it to end 2015 at 13 percent, compared with 12.8 percent predicted in September, falling to 8 percent by the end of 2016.

The poll predicted that the central bank would leave its main lending rate on hold at 11 percent at a meeting on Friday, in line with a Reuters poll on Monday that also predicted no change this month.

A majority of analysts expected the central bank would cut the rate by the end of 2015, with the median forecast predicting a 0.75 percentage point cut. The rate is seen falling further to 8 percent by the end of 2016, bringing it into line with inflation.

Forecasts for the rouble have also become more bearish. Economists now see it at 65.75 in twelve months' time, compared with last month's 12-month forecast of 65.00 and today's value of around 64.4.

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 #12
Bloomberg
October 29, 2015
Russia Oil Production Poised for Record as Industry Defies Slump
ByStephen Bierman and Julian Lee

Russian oil output is poised to break a post-Soviet record for the fourth time this year as the nation's producers once again prove themselves resilient to a slump in crude prices.

Production of crude and a light oil called condensate is on track to reach 10.77 million barrels a day in October, topping the previous month's revised figure and setting a record for the second month running, according to Bloomberg estimates based on Energy Ministry data.

Russian production has withstood a collapse in oil prices amid a global supply glut, while output in the U.S. has fallen about 5 percent from its June peak. Oil-extraction and export tax rates shrink in Russia at lower prices, giving companies a buffer against the slump, while the weaker ruble has reduced costs.

"Russian oil companies are insulated from oil price corrections," said Artem Konchin, an oil and gas analyst at Otkritie Capital in Moscow. "Through the tax framework, the government took the brunt of the blow, just as it used to take most of the windfall profits. The rest of the story is in the ruble depreciation."

The production figure for October is derived from output data from the Energy Ministry's CDU-TEK unit for the first 28 days of the month. The remaining days were estimated using an average of the previous seven days.

Output from January to October averaged about 10.7 million barrels a day, a 1.3 percent increase over the same period in 2014, the data show. That's in line with the Russian Energy Ministry's full-year forecast for production of 533 million tons, or 10.7 million barrels a day.

The nation's government has proposed increasing the tax burden on energy companies after the collapse in the price of crude, which together with natural gas provides almost half of state revenue. Oil output will suffer without a predictable tax system, Rosneft OJSC Chief Executive Officer Igor Sechin said Oct. 13.

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 #13
Seeking Alpha
http://seekingalpha.com
October 24, 2015
Is The Russian Bear Out Of The Woods?
By Christiaan van der Meer

Summary

The Russian economy is still depressed, but may have found its bottom.

Valuations are reflecting a collapse, which is no longer realistic.

First signs of returning investor appetite and technical picture brightens.

For risk-prone investors, it may be the moment to add Russia in their portfolios through RSX and RSXJ.

Shortly after the publication of my previous article on the Russian market, we witnessed nothing less than a crash on August 24. The Russian stock market, the leading Market Vectors Russia ETF (NYSEARCA:RSX) and its small-cap family member the Market Vectors Russia Small-Cap ETF (NYSEARCA:RSXJ) saw a sharp drop during that day but failed to hit new lows compared to the previous ones in December 2014 (more on the charts later on). Since that day, the Russian market recovered, like most other stock markets, also helped by a recovery in commodity prices. So, did the August 24 turbulence mark the end of the bear market in Russia and thus for the above-mentioned ETFs? Let's take a look at the underlying fundamentals and the technical picture.

Economy in dire state

Compared to two months ago, the Russian economy did not change for the better. According to Russian Deputy Economy Minister Alexei Vedev, in September, Russia's gross domestic product (GDP) dropped 3.8% compared to last year. He added that preliminary data points to a 4.3% drop in GDP during the third quarter. Prospects for economic growth remain suppressed too. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) expects GDP to decline 3.8% this year. Next year will see a flat development at best. More likely is a small contraction before the economy can return to rates close to 1.5% in the next years. Compared to the previous recession, during the financial crisis, a sharp recovery is less likely since commodity prices are now low for an extended period of time. In the words of IMF's Russia representative Gabriel Di Bella (source Reuters):

"What we had in 2009 were shocks that were more temporary in nature and what seems to be the case right now is that the shocks are... not very short term," Di Bella said. "They're shocks that are more persistent."

Recent underlying numbers are close to miserable. For instance, retail sales dropped 10.4% YoY vs. -9.3% expected, and capital investment declined 5.6%, although this was better than the -6.9% expected. Also, real wages figures were slightly better than expected, but -9.7% is still poor. Compared to the nominal wage growth of 4.5% in September, it's clear where Russia's main problem lies.

Inflation still troubling

The biggest challenge for Russia is the current high inflation and expectations that are unanchored. Consumer price inflation (CPI) came in at 15.7% in September, far from the Central Bank of Russia's (CBR) long-term target of 4%. The CBR aims to return to a CPI rate of 4% by the end of 2017. But roughly 70% of the Russian population doubt the institution will succeed in bringing down inflation to that target and this group is growing in the recent months. On the other hand, the IMF's Di Bella and some analysts do see a slowdown in inflation in the coming months, partly due to a base effect. The problem is that the CBR's key policy rate stands at 11% and is too restrictive for the current shape of the economy. But with inflation rate this high, a cut in the next monetary policy meeting (October 30) is tricky. The IMF calls the CBR to hold rates during the next meeting, but analysts of ING expect cuts of 50 basis points during the next two meetings (source: Bloomberg). According to CBR Governor Elvira Nabiullina, cutting the level of capital requirements may be another option to spur additional lending to the economy. The banking sector is stable and Governor Nabiullina said the sector would see a profit of around RUB 100-200 billion (USD 1.5-3 billion) this year.

Companies show encouraging numbers

Sberbank (OTCPK:SBRCY), which is the 2nd largest holding of RSX, was able to show a 9M-2015 RAS net profit of RUB 144.4 billion (USD 2.2 billion), although this was 50% lower than last year. This was mainly due to a 16% drop in net interest income. Net fee and commission income rose 6%. For a better picture, we have to wait for the IFRS numbers. The retail sector shows numbers which seem in contrast to the dire state of the Russian economy. Despite the poor aforementioned retail sales, listed retail companies showed encouraging numbers. For instance, discounter Magnit, a top 5 holding of RSX, was able to increase its revenues 27.2% YoY to RUB 690.4 billion (USD 10.6 billion) during the first nine months of 2015. Net income rose 27.6% to RUB 43.2 billion (USD 0.7 billion) during the same period. Supermarket-chain X5 Retail Group, also included in RSX, reported that its Q3 revenues grew 28.6% YoY on the back of a 13.1% like-for-like revenue growth. But also net income showed a decent increase with a plus of 21% YoY. To remind ourselves, Russian companies are still heavily undervalued compared to peers from other emerging and developed markets. For instance, Magnit is trading at a price/earnings ratio of 12.7 (2015e) and X5 Retail trades at a P/E of 12.8 (2015e). The average P/E of RSX is 5.9 and lists at a price-to-book ratio of 0.8. Its smaller family member, RSXJ, quotes a P/E ratio of 7.5 and a P/B of slightly below 0.5!

First signs of a reversal

The low valuations accompanied by relatively healthy company fundamentals are luring a growing number of investors back to the Russian market. Earlier this week, retailer Lenta, known for its budget hypermarkets, successfully sold new shares and raised USD 150 million in capital. The company intends to use the proceeds from the share placement to speed up store openings and aims to open at least 40 new hypermarkets in 2016, a number upped from the previous planned 32. For 2017, the company seeks to open a similar number of stores, or even more.

Bond investors are returning to Russia as well and seek new or additional exposure. However, this is not because of the sound macro-environment surrounding Russia, but more so due to initial fears of a collapse accompanied by a wave of defaults did not materialize. Many investors who cut their exposure reenter due to attractive valuations. According to Reuters, USD returns on Russian bonds yielded 12% thus far in 2015 and corporate bonds even 20%. The country saw net capital inflows in the third quarter. What does the trick is that Russia and its companies have very low debt levels. Therefore, a number of asset managers are willing to rotate part of their funds back into the country. Though, it should be said that emerging peers, such as Brazil, have a much bleaker outlook which helps the move (back) to Russia.

Stock market may have found the bottom

Investors should realize that most of the gains are made when moving in front of the curve. Waiting for the economic turnaround may be too conservative and one could miss out on the big move. When looking at the charts of the main ETFs for the Russian market, one for the large caps and one for the mid and small caps, we notice that despite the crash of global markets on August 24, new lows stayed off. This is an encouraging sign from a technical point of view. Not hitting a new low on the selling pressure during August 24 may indicate that the remaining supply can easily be picked up by demand at current levels. RSXJ had a rougher day but set a double bottom pattern. In the field of technical analysis, double bottoms are regarded as the best chart patterns (see also Thomas Bulkowski thepatternsite.com). Both ETFs are close to their 200-day moving average but already crossed the 50-day moving average. However, a so-called 'Golden Cross' has yet to appear, although this mostly will occur after a strong rally. An investor waiting for that sign may miss a large chunk of the move.

When comparing RSX with the MSCI Russia Index, we see something interesting. The RSX is able to outperform the MSCI Index, despite the annual fees of 0.6% (see chart below). The outperformance amounts to 5% during the last four years. This highlights why RSX is a solid instrument to play the Russian market. Unfortunately, during the measured period, a loss of 37% was recorded.

Risks remain, but the brave may enter

The Russian economy continues to struggle. The government may be forced to finance its budget deficit by taking USD 35 billion from the International Reserves, managed by the CBR. But that's why these funds are created for, and with reserves totaling USD 377.3 billion (as at October 17), there's ample room. Next to that, Russia's debt-to-GDP is still at a very low 17%. Nonetheless, the government should proceed with reforms. Encouraging is that government officials acknowledge that the country cannot navigate on oil prices. Oil prices stabilizing at around USD 50 or even rising to USD 60-70 will not be enough for a full-scale recovery. Russia's budget is based on an oil price of USD 50. The government seems to realize that more taxes is not the solution. It is finally considering to raise the retirement age, although this may be a highly unpopular measure. The country is also strengthening its ties with China and overtook Saudi Arabia as China's main oil trading partner. Nevertheless, China is known to prefer balanced 'market shares' when looking at its oil imports, so the upper bound in China exports might be near.

Additional government initiative could be the last stage before an economic recovery can take off. The Russian financial market is now valued at distressed levels. So from that point of view, there's a lot needed to push valuations even lower. It may be time to (start to) add Russia in the portfolio. As described in my previous article on Russia, small- and mid-cap companies should be preferred in a recovery, which points to RSXJ. Investors should be advised that the order book of RSXJ can show large spreads and, therefore, investors should make sure to check the NAV on the site of the ETF provider to prevent paying too much when placing an order on the screen. In addition, shares of RSXJ have limited liquidity and total assets of RSXJ is only USD 40 million. RSX may, in that case, be a better option (1x spread and ample liquidity, assets of USD 2 billion). But either choice could show a lot of potential for the long term. If an investor is interested in the Russian market and comfortable with the country-specific risks, this might be the time to enter.

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 #14
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
October 29, 2015
Three ways Russian foreign policy could change international law
Moscow's recent bold foreign policy moves in Ukraine and Syria might have a significant impact on the future direction of international law.
By Nikolay Shevchenko
Nikolay Shevchenko holds degrees in international relations and international journalism. He is a contributing member of the Atlantic Community, a founding editor of The Gadfly, and a guest editor at the Global Ethics Network. You can tweet him at @nickolaysh

Russia is becoming more active in the conduct of its foreign policy. Suffice it to point out that support of the Crimea referendum and the peninsula's subsequent incorporation into Russia constituted an unprecedented foreign policy move.

Moscow also played an active role in negotiating the Minsk agreements aimed at finding a settlement for war-torn eastern Ukraine. Most recently, the Kremlin stepped up to take control of chaotic developments in the Middle East, sanctioning the country's air and naval forces to conduct strikes against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Greater Syria (ISIS), while simultaneously working on a political settlement for the country.

Observed cumulatively, Russian latest foreign policy moves signify a willingness of its political elites to play a more proactive role in shaping both the country's immediate surroundings and the international system. A period of a rather inactive foreign policy seems to be giving way to a transformed approach where initiative and assertiveness are its main characteristics.

If Moscow capitalizes on its recent proactive foreign policy moves and transforms them into a greater impact on the international system, it would inevitably exercise a broader influence over the theory and practice of international law since the origins of international law, based on custom and precedent, make it easily amendable to changes in international politics.

Moreover, if Moscow transforms the results of its foreign policy into greater influence at the United Nations, Russia may aim to impact the theory and practice of international law in ways worth anticipating. Below are three possible developments that might happen in the international law arena if Russia continues its current foreign policy trajectory.

#1: The authority of international law will be based on the will and power of states, not on moral principles

A principal question of jurisprudence is why must individuals - or states for that matter - abide by law. Scholars fall into two camps over the question. "Naturalists" seek the authority of law in external sources collectively known as "natural law."

An external source granting earthly law its authority was sought in morality by the ancient Greeks, divine religious authority by the Roman Empire, reason by Europe during the Enlightenment and Renaissance, and globally shared moral values in the modern world.

An alternative theory advocated by "positivists" ties the binding power of law to an existing authority that is willing and capable of enforcing it.

The difference between the two camps is a difference between utopians who see law as a guiding-star illuminating a way to a better society and realists who see it as a formal registration of existing power relations.

If Russia capitalizes on its expanding initiative on the global stage and drives the agenda in the realm of international law, the "positivist" attitude will prevail in theory and practice of international jurisprudence: International law will reflect existing power relations, moral incentives will cease to be a criteria for compliance, and, most significantly, enforcement mechanisms will receive much more scrupulous attention from lawmakers.

Although not entirely dismissive, Russian political elites are cautious of legalizing international norms and resolutions that contain no explicated implementation clauses. Russian envoys are reluctant to accept resolutions that set lofty moral standards for states but fail to design functional enforcement mechanisms.

For example, Moscow voted negatively on the U.N. Security Council resolution condemning genocide in Srebrenica during the Bosnian War, resolution condemning the government of Zimbabwe for human rights abuses and perennial violence, and numerous resolutions on Syria, all containing either no or insufficient provisions for their practical implementation.

Russia is notorious for its frequent vetoes in the U.N. Security Council - the sole international body that possesses legal authority to issue binding international legislation. However, when other ways of obstruction are exhausted, Russians resort to their veto power with no apparent hesitation. While Western diplomats portray Moscow's frequent resorts to veto as a cause for chronic stalemates in the Security Council, Russians stick to their guns when it comes to passing aspirational resolutions that lack roadmaps for practical enforcement.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov thus commented on the subject: "The veto was introduced, again, by the American insistence to make sure that decisions to be taken which have direct influence on international peace and security, that these decisions are viable and implementable. It was clearly understood by those who wrote the UN Charter that if one of the great powers objects, then the decision would not really be made because it wouldn't work."

In regard to international lawmaking, Russia does not see eye to eye with its Western partners because a majority of states on both sides of the Atlantic tacitly adopt the "naturalist" belief that countries must abide by international law merely because its authority rests on high moral standards shared by all representatives of humanity.

Political elites in Moscow understand that international law derived from the highest moral standards crumbles into pieces confronted with political reality, where brute power dictates its rules. In their judgment, an ability of states to create enforcement mechanisms and ensure those are being followed is why international law works.

This might not be the view shared by everyone, but Russia's political elites are convinced that the authority of international law must be based upon willingness and capability of states to enforce international legislation.

Practically, if Russia drives international legislation in the future, there will be less global norms and resolutions adopted. At the same time, those adopted will prove more feasible and hence will constitute a much more workable international regime.

One may also assume that Russia is likely to push for new regional law enforcement mechanisms that would be responsible for implementing decisions adopted at the level of the U.N. Security Council. The Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) with its rapid reaction force may constitute a template for other law enforcement structures spread throughout the globe but united at the level of the U.N. Security Council.

#2: Sovereign states, not individuals, will become the focal point of international law

In jurisprudence, much depends on who is recognized as possessing legal rights and duties under international law. An answer to the question developed first in Europe of the 17th century, when the political architecture of European states absorbed preceding religious conflicts and turned religious violence into an institutionalized practice of war between European belligerents. Recognition conferred upon European monarchs by their peers not only gave birth to the law of war as we know it today, but also moved the sovereign state to the center of international jurisprudence.

A major shift to this state of affairs occurred when the Minority Treaties entered into force as a result the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. A collection of the League's mandates, bilateral treaties, and unilateral declarations, the Minority Treaties pierced the untouchable institution of sovereignty and allowed issues related to minorities and human rights to be brought to an international authority represented by the League of Nations.

Soon thereafter the world witnessed the emergence of international humanitarian law, such principles as human security and the Responsibility to Protect, various human rights regimes, and the UN conventions against genocide and torture. Individuals challenged the monopoly of sovereign states in international law by acquiring a legal status of their own.

Today, a number of international norms blur the distinction between individuals and states as subjects of law, thus causing profound disagreements about what a certain norm actually prescribes.

The concept of Human Security provides a useful example. Introduced in 1994 in the United Nations Development Program's Human Development Report, the concept reconfigured classic categories of security thinking and introduced individuals into analysis of (in)security matters. The concept triggered a number of subsequent reports and norms issued at the UN level.

Collectively, this paperwork constitutes an attempt to transform the international system from a society of states to a society of individuals, according to Joseph Nye's Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History.

In case Russia is in a position to set the agenda in international law, it will try to restore sovereign states to the center of international jurisprudence and to halt the penetration of individuals into international legislation.

While Russia is not against acknowledging the importance of individuals per se, Moscow considers sovereign political institutions, not international norms shattering state sovereignty, as the only way to create a workable legal humanitarian regime.

On May 7, 2012, Vladimir Putin signed a demonstrative decree, "On measures for implementing foreign policy course." In fact, he ordered Russia's Foreign Ministry "to conduct active work in the sphere of human rights protection, [but also] to counter attempts to use human rights conceptions as an instrument of political pressure and interference into internal affairs of states."

Since eventual implementation is a major criteria Russia uses to evaluate usefulness of global norms, all provisions of international law initiated by Moscow are likely to be anchored to entities that are able to ensure their enforcement, i.e. sovereign governments. As a result, the global legal regime will focus on channeling rights to individuals solely via respective governments, while the practice of addressing individuals directly from the global stage while bypassing governmental institutions will cease.

#3: Unlawful actions by states justified on moral grounds alone will become less common

An ongoing debate in international jurisprudence is whether international lawyers should be dispassionate interpreters of existing body of rules that constitute international law or whether they should issue politically oriented verdicts that are based upon judges' vision of moral and political factors involved in a case at hand. The latter schools of thought envisions international lawyers as practical lawmakers, the former sees them as impartial interpreters of existing rules.

When moral concerns penetrate legal considerations, champions of the "policy-oriented jurisprudence" portray the end result as a creative contribution to international law. A foreign policy move previously unacceptable in existing international environment becomes an established legal practice of clear origins.

NATO's bombardment of Yugoslavia in 1999 is one of the most recent examples of such an approach: The military campaign executed without the sanction of the UN Security Council constituted a violation of international law; nonetheless, branded as a fight for justice against genocide, the campaign acquired a degree of moral justification in minds of its supporters and allowed them to overlook an apparent violation of the legal code.

Appealing to a number of loopholes, the International Court of Justice did not issue an injunction to the NATO states bombing Yugoslavia, thereby virtually permitting them to set a precedent in international law. After a number of reoccurrences, the practice of humanitarian intervention gained substantial ground in international jurisprudence and transformed into an elaborate "Responsibility to Protect" norm in 2005.

By now it's so thoroughly settled in international law that even Russia, a zealous adversary of the practice, appealed to it during its conflict with Georgia in 2008. What yet in 1999 constituted a crooked twist of international law gave an impetus to its "dynamic" development fully realized only several years later.

Russia remains suspicious of any dynamic development of international law that has not yet been formally registered with existing international legal institutions.

Speaking at the 67th Session of the U.N. General Assembly, Foreign Minister Lavrov thus commented on the Russian position towards the development of international law:

"No doubt, the legal norms in international affairs will be further adjusted as necessary. But these transformations should be treated with utmost responsibility and full realization of serious risks associated with them. Only consensus can be the criterion for their adoption. Violations of international law should not be portrayed as their 'creative development.'"

It's safe to assume that if Moscow gains more power on the international stage, it will not skimp on its efforts to suppress attempts of other states to add to the existing body of rules in a "creative" manner.

Most likely, the UN Security Council will remain the only institution responsible for global legislation in a static and rigid manner, while the number of instances where moral considerations trigger actions beyond the scope of international law will decrease.

International law is an ambiguous subject provoking debates among scholars and practitioners alike. Still there are no authoritative answers to such questions as: "Why must states abide by international law?" or "Who must be its primary subject?" or "Should legality be stripped of moral and political concerns?"

Nevertheless, discourse of Russian political elites and their moves on the international stage make it possible to grasp the Russian stance towards international jurisprudence.

Assuming that Russia is able to transform its recent foreign policy moves into a greater influence over both international law based on custom and law-making institutions, certain developments are likely to occur: There will be fewer international norms adopted; enforcement of existing global norms will be observed fervently; and structures enforcing mandates of the UN Security Council will spring forth in various regions.

In addition, legal rights granted to individuals will be channeled only via respective governments; development of international law will become more rigid due to removal of moral concerns from legal practices; and, finally, instances of unlawful but morally justified actions will almost certainly cease on the international stage.

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 #15
Irrussianality
https://irrussianality.wordpress.com
October 28, 2015
What Putin got wrong
By Paul Robinson
University of Ottawa

In his speech last Thursday to the Valdai Club, Vladimir Putin said the following:

"The use of the threat of a nuclear missile attack from Iran as an excuse, as we know, has destroyed the fundamental basis of modern international security - the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The United States has unilaterally seceded from the treaty. Incidentally, today we have resolved the Iranian issue and there is no threat from Iran and never has been, just as we said.

"The thing that seemed to have led our American partners to build an anti-missile defence system is gone. It would be reasonable to expect work to develop the US anti-missile defence system to come to an end as well. What is actually happening? Nothing of the kind, or actually the opposite - everything continues.

"Recently the United States conducted the first test of the anti-missile defence system in Europe. What does this mean? It means we were right when we argued with our American partners. They were simply trying yet again to mislead us and the whole world. To put it plainly, they were lying. It was not about the hypothetical Iranian threat, which never existed. It was about an attempt to destroy the strategic balance, to change the balance of forces in their favour not only to dominate, but to have the opportunity to dictate their will to all.'

This isn't the first time that Putin has denounced the proposed American missile shield in Europe, nor the first time that he has expressed his disbelief that the project is meant to protect Europe against Iran. See, for instance, this video in which he bursts out laughing when the idea is suggested to him.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ux3oiWELIQ]

I understand why Putin laughed, but he's mistaken to conclude that the Americans 'were lying'. I have said this before but, given Putin's Valdai speech, I think it is necessary to explain why in more detail, as Putin's error explains a lot about what has gone wrong in Russian-Western relations. At heart, the problem is probably that Putin is assuming a form of rationality which isn't a good model of how Western states actually make decisions.

Putin appears to think that Western defence policy is a product of what is termed 'threat-based planning.' In this model, states determine what strategies they require to defend themselves, and what military structures and equipment they need to enact those strategies, based on what threats they face. This is a very rational way of going about business - after all, if a threat doesn't exist, there is no point creating a strategy to counter it, let alone spending large sums of money building up military forces. For many years, the Russians have rejected the idea that Iran is building a nuclear weapon. I have agreed with them on this. After all, even the US National Intelligence Council declared in 2007 that, 'We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.' If you follow the logic of threat-based planning, then there is no need to build a missile shield to defend Europe against Iranian nuclear missiles. Those missiles don't exist, and aren't going to exist. That means that if you assume that the USA follows threat-based rationality, then the missile shield must be directed against an alternative missile threat, and since the only non-allied state capable of hitting Europe with nuclear weapons is Russia, then it makes sense that the shield must be designed with Russian in mind.

That is all completely logical, but it rests on a couple of false assumptions: first, that the Americans are rationally assessing threats; and second, that the missile shield is in reality designed to defend against a threat. Neither of these assumptions is true.

Threats are both objective - in the sense that either they exist or they don't - and subjective - in the sense that what you feel threatens you may not reflect what actually does threaten you. Just because the Iranian nuclear threat does not exist, one should not assume that people do not believe that it exists. American policymakers often don't assess threats very well, as seen by the hysteria about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Iran has for years been a bogeyman. The conviction that it is relentlessly hostile and extremely dangerous has become an established fact. Reality no longer has very much to do with it. Cognitive bias ensures that any evidence that the threat does not exist is simply ignored. The Iranian threat is a truth, which defeats any attempts to debunk it.

The threat, therefore, is a matter of belief. So too is missile defence. As I was once told, it is a 'religion'. According to the established narrative, it was Ronald Reagan's Star Wars program which brought down the Soviet Union. For the Republican right in particular, missile defence is thus unquestionably a 'good thing'. In the past 20 years, the USA has spent tens of billions of dollars developing a national missile defence system for continental America, despite the fact that the system has never worked and even if it did work, could only shoot down a handful of missiles at a time, which would be insufficient to protect the USA against any power capable of actually threatening it. It is a gigantic waste of money. But that hasn't stopped it.

The reason is not that national missile defence is directed against Russia - even its strongest proponents admit that the Russians could easily overwhelm it. Rather, the relentless progress of pointless policy is a product of the way a certain group among the American elites think, described by sociologist C. Wright Mills as 'crackpot realism'. Crackpot realists are technocrats and incrementalists; they work logically from one step to another, but do so in a bubble which is somewhat detached from reality. The result is a bit like an Impressionist painting, but in reverse - up close it makes perfect sense, but from far away it doesn't make sense at all. Psychologists differentiate between a 'deliberative' and an 'instrumental' mindset. With the former, people consider what to do and why; with the latter, they are only concerned with how to do it. Missile defence has long since moved beyond the deliberative stage; it's purely a question of implementation. You don't need to look for a threat to justify it; its justification isn't important any more.

Furthermore, missile defence is a multi-billion dollar industry. This has led to the creation of powerful lobbies in the military industrial complex who have a strong interest in promoting it. Committees have been formed, policy papers have been written, contracts have been signed. At this point, the policy has a momentum of its own which carries it forward no matter what.

Western states have blundered spectacularly and repeatedly in recent years - invading Iraq, bombing Libya, supporting the overthrow of the Ukrainian government. Viewing all this, Putin, along with a lot of Russians, seems to be telling himself, 'They can't be that dumb. They must have some sinister motive.' And that's where he makes his big mistake. We are that dumb. If only Russians could understand that, they would realize that they don't need to feel so threatened by us, and Russian-Western relations might become a whole lot better.

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 #16
Huffingtonpost.com
October 28, 2015
Why Russia Perceives Syria as Its Front Line
By Alastair Crooke
Fmr. MI-6 agent; Author, 'Resistance: The Essence of Islamic Revolution'

BEIRUT -- Russia believes that it sees the situation of the Middle East very plainly. Vladimir Putin sees nation-states across the region weakening and eroding: Iraq fractured, Syria in conflict, Lebanon without a state, Yemen in anarchy, Libya in chaos -- North Africa in general is vulnerable -- Saudi Arabia seized by multiple crises. Unless the Islamic State and its Wahhabi allies are stopped -- and stopped decisively -- the region is in danger of descending into even deeper chaos. Syria is Russia's veritable front line. Russia recalls how, after the Afghan war, radical Wahhabi-style Islam spread out from Afghanistan and reached up into Central Asia. Russia also recalls how the CIA and Saudi Arabia inflamed and used the Chechen insurgency to weaken Russia.

Why Syria? Is it because of Russia's interests there? No, it is because Syria has an effective leadership and an army that is already engaged in the war against Wahhabism. In effect, Syria is the pivot around which this "war" will turn.

But equally, President Putin shares the perception of many in the region that America and its allies are not serious about defeating ISIS. And sensing that the West was finally about to be lured by Turkey toward a no-fly zone -- which would only end, as it did in Libya, in chaos -- Putin played his surprise hand: he entered the war on "terrorism," blocked Turkey's project to "re-Ottomanize" northern Syria and challenged the West to join with him in the venture.

In so doing, he has very evidently kept the door open to the U.S. -- inviting it repeatedly to join him, though perhaps expecting that the U.S. initially would have to back off -- because of its ties to the Gulf.

Putin's strategy for Syria is essentially that a political settlement would not be forthcoming by simply herding sworn enemies into a room together in Geneva. The earlier U.S. precondition that Assad's ouster was mandatory before talks gave zero incentive for the opposition to seriously negotiate any sharing of power with the state: rather, they simply had to wait upon the U.S. and its allies to hand them a vacated state on a silver plate.

Putin, on the other hand, has calculated that a political settlement can only be effected by force of arms: the dominant, noxious influence of the jihadists has to be excised before "reconcilables" (in Rumsfeldian terminology) will have the confidence to offer themselves for participation. In short, whereas the West sees Russian force of arms as somehow inimical to a political settlement, Putin -- and Assad -- say that the jihadist dominance is what actually precludes the possibility of a political outcome.

Putin's recent invitation to President Assad to visit Moscow seems to have been designed to underline two things: that President Assad is indeed committed to political reform and to debunk any thought that Russia might see President Assad as somehow a discretionary, discardable component to a political solution.

It seems for now that the U.S. administration will leave the heavy lifting in Syria to Russia. It will wait and watch whilst corralling an international coalition to pressure Russia to respect its interests in any political outcome. What seems, at present, to be inadequately appreciated in some quarters in the West is how credible and effective use of airpower, combined with the large, combat-experienced ground force that presently is being amassed, will alter facts on the ground. These facts, in turn, will dramatically alter the political equation. Quietly, the U.S. will probably expand its cooperation with Russia. It seems probable that President Putin expects no more than this at this stage. But if Syria is a success, he may hope that a Western partnership will subsequently flower when it comes time to turn to Iraq.

But the risk in all this is that the West will turn against Putin -- that perceptions will become locked in terms of the binary "liberal/illiberal" Cold War meme.

Then the meaning of Putin's Syria initiative will be lost, and escalated hostilities will ensue. Putin is not just forcing the Syria issue for Western policymakers. He is trying to force the issue of Russia's place in the world today, to burst free from the paradigm of post-war thinking in which Russia has found itself trapped. It is a gamble, because the gesture itself -- if successful -- will shape the Middle East and global geopolitics much more widely.

If it fails, the prevalent American domestic dynamics are that the U.S. is inevitably heading toward confrontation with Russia -- and with China. Too much homework has been invested in this China-Russia rapprochement by the latter for it to be easily unpicked by reverting to the old Kissinger triangulation doctrine of keeping Russia and China at odds with each other.

Putin is forcing the Syria issue, but he is also offering America a way out from the inevitable escalation with both Russia and China in the event of a new U.S. president being elected on a "strongman" ticket. And his initiative has given a profound shock to the Western military establishment. Russia had been presumed to lag behind the West in terms of conventional weaponry and its air platforms; that its military was somehow second class. But what also has become apparent in Putin's Syria gesture is the revolution that he has wrought in terms of reorganizing Russia's armed forces and upgrading its weapons since the war in Georgia in 2008.

Missiles Change the Equation

As Pepe Escobar recently noted, Russia has shown that it has not just caught up, but has possibly overtaken the U.S. in terms of missile technology, and that it has the ability to jam NATO command and control and guidance systems -- again on display in Syria:

    "The New Great Game in Eurasia advanced in leaps and bounds last week after Russia fired 26 cruise missiles from the Caspian Sea against 11 ISIS/ISIL/Daesh targets across Syria, destroying all of them. These naval strikes were the first known operational use of state-of-the-art SSN-30A Kalibr cruise missiles.

    "All it took for the Pentagon was a backward look over the shoulder at the flight path of those Kalibr missiles [which fly at an altitude of less than 100 meters] -- capable of striking targets 1,500 km away. Talk about a crisp, clear, succinct message from Moscow to the Pentagon and NATO. Wanna mess with us, boy? With your big, bulging aircraft carriers, maybe? [...]

    "The Pentagon is apoplectic because this display of Russian technology revealed the end of the American monopoly over long-range cruise missiles. Pentagon analysts were still working under the assumption their range was around 300 kilometers."

If the 4+1 coalition -- Russia, Iran, Iraq and Syria, plus Hezbollah -- persists beyond Syria (with China hovering supportively behind), all those U.S. military bases and aircraft carriers surrounding Iran and planned for Eurasia become not only redundant -- they become vulnerable hostages. NATO can no longer even count on automatic air superiority. No wonder the U.S. has withdrawn its carrier from the Persian Gulf.

Putin's message on Syria therefore holds a centrality that goes well beyond the issue of whether some Syrian moderates were or were not killed whilst cooperating with Jabhat al-Nusra, Al Qaeda's Syrian branch, and the details of any transitional government in Syria. These are, as it were, the microcosm: Russia's military intervention intended to kick-start a political settlement. The macrocosm is Putin's repeated invitation to de-conflict with the West -- an offer underlined by surprising NATO with Russia showing its sizable new big stick.

This is the existential question being posed by President Putin: How may the U.S. manage the ending of its unipolar reign? Can Washington adjust to the insistence of the "non-West" to its right to be non-Western, in its manner of being? Can Wall Street adjust to the insistence of these states to "re-sovereignize" their economies from the reach of U.S. geo-financial hegemony?

The challenge to U.S. preeminence is as profound as that which faced Britain after World War II, when it was met with similar demands from its colonies on their right to aspire to their own place in the world. It was not well managed then, and resisted bitterly internally within Britain. Putin's outreach over Syria and Iraq should be understood -- beyond the issue of Syria itself -- as the offering of a path out from this confrontation with China and Russia that otherwise must ensue were America somehow not come to acknowledge new realities and differing visions of the future.

If this is not grasped, Mr. Putin understands that America, by default, will have set itself upon the road to confrontation with Russia and China. Perhaps we should take the news of Iran's possible inclusion -- an icon of the rights of the non-West to be non-Western -- in the Paris talks on the future of Syria as a positive signal that President Obama does indeed sense this need, and is proceeding cautiously (given the domestic constraints) to this end.

Thus the outcome in Syria will shape many, many things.

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 #17
Russia does not indulge in replacing governments in other countries - Foreign Ministry

MOSCOW, October 29. /TASS/. Russia does not indulge in replacing governments in other countries, including in Syria, the meeting in Vienna has different tasks, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said on Thursday commenting on statements by US Department of State spokesman John Kirby about the planned discussion of the composition of the interim Syrian government during the talks in Vienna.

"These are the plans of the United States. As a sovereign country, it may discuss whatever it wants," she said. "Discussing and shaping future governments is no business of ours."

"Our task is to promote the political process in Syria on the basis of the existing international legal documents," she said. "The meeting [in Vienna] is to focus on this. Only then it will be constructive."
Moscow open for cooperation with all countries in fight against Islamic State

According to the spokeswoman Moscow is open to cooperation with all countries in fighting against the Islamic State terrorist group.

"Politicians are entitled to making statements, and we should analyze them," Zakharova said commenting on the proposal made by former French President Nicolas Sarkozy "to unite two coalitions fighting against IS in Syria." "I do not see anything contradictory in Sarkozy's statements. We are open for cooperation with all countries in the fight against IS," she said.

Zakharova reminded that Russia has set up a coordination center in Baghdad precisely with this aim. "Is it closed? On the contrary, we invite everyone to join it. We maintain active contacts with all countries. We are ready and open for cooperation with them on fighting against IS," she said.

Talking about political settlement in Syria, she stressed that Moscow "has never stopped this work even for one month." "Our ambassadors, our representatives are maintaining contacts that should facilitate the search for common ground between the Syrian opposition and Damascus. If conditions emerge for an additional meeting in Moscow or not in Moscow, we will make all efforts for such constructive work," Zakharova said.

Russia launches airstrikes in Syria

Russian Aerospace Forces started a military operation against the Islamic State terrorist group (which is banned in Russia) in the Syrian territory at the request of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on September 30. The air group in Syria includes more than 50 warplanes, including Su-34 and Su-24M bombers; Su-25 assault aircraft; Su-30SM fighter jets as well as Mi-8 and Mi-24 helicopters. The Russian Navy is also involved in the military operation. The warships of the Russian Caspian flotilla delivered a massive cruise missile strike from the Kalibr-class sea-based missile system on the night to October 7.

The Russian authorities have totally excluded a possibility of any ground campaign in Syria.

Islamic State terrorist group

The Islamic State is an extremist organization banned in Russia. In 2013-2014, it called itself the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). In June 2014, IS announce the establishment of the "Islamic caliphate" on the territories seized in Iraq and Syria. According to US' Central Intelligence Agency, the extremist group includes around 30,000 people, while Iraqi authorities claim there are around 200,000 in IS. Among members of the group are citizens of 80 countries, including France, Great Britain, Germany, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, US, Canada, as well as Russia and other CIS countries. According to reports, militants now control around 40% of the Iraqi territory and 50% of the Syrian territory.

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#18
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
October 29, 2015
'We must face down the ISIS threat in Syria together'
Nobody wants to deploy ground forces in Syria, says Russian Ambassador to the UK
Alexander Yakovenko is Russian Ambassador to the United Kingdom. He was previously Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs.

ISIS has established a bridgehead in Syria and other countries of the Middle East. The terrorists do not conceal their far-reaching plans for further expansion, the destabilization of more countries in the region and beyond and recruiting more people from all over the world, including Russia and our neighbors, to fight for their cause.

To pre-empt this threat to national security, as a measure of self-defense, Russia launched its military operation in Syria. It was carried out in response to a request from the Syrian government and therefore is fully in line with international law.

There is a way for everybody to carry out air strikes against ISIS and other terrorists in Syria legitimately. It means a UN Security Council mandate. Besides establishing clear-cut objectives and the terms of such collective intervention, we could agree, in this resolution, the realistic and flexible modalities of a political settlement in Syria.

Political settlement was a key topic at recent talks between President Vladimir Putin and President Bashar al-Assad in Moscow. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and their Saudi and Turkish counterparts in Vienna for the same reason. I am sure that all the conditions will be in place for us to have a common view of the situation and make joint efforts on that basis. It would drastically change the terrorists' calculus while doing the same to our bilateral relationship with Britain.

We have asked our western partners to give us their intelligence on terrorist infrastructure in Syria, if they really think we are hitting the wrong targets. We have also requested contact numbers for the Free Syrian Army. The negative response shows the lack of clarity as to who's who on the ground and who is sponsoring various groups opposing Damascus.

The preservation of secular statehood in Syria and Egypt is absolutely key, because of their centrality to regional stability. Partitioning Syria would be the worst development. Regional crises require regional solutions with all the players participating. It is true for Syria, as it is true for Afghanistan.

It means that regional security is indivisible. Various regional players' attempts to play games of their own will bring about an implosion of the entire Middle East, very much to the satisfaction of terrorists, who recognise no borders. Hopefully, now that many things in the situation are clear enough, we'll see the last of the tactics of ensuring one's own security at somebody else's expense. Chickens do come home to roost.

Our partners didn't want to relieve the Syrian army by degrading the terrorists' capability. But now we know the outcome of this, to put it mildly, ambivalence. Politics and statecraft are always about making hard choices. Trying to avoid it equals abdication of responsibility. Initial results of our strikes prove that the terrorists took their impunity for granted. Things are changing now. The healthy competition between two coalitions is doing its bit.

Nobody wants to deploy ground forces in Syria. Then why not let the Syrian army play this role. If not them, then who? It is no time to engage in fantasies of regime change in Syria.

And, finally, Russia stepped into the line of fire. Those on the sidelines engage in ill-wishing, foretelling casualties and quagmire. It was not an easy decision for us to make but inaction was not an option. The broad public opinion seems to share this view.

Still, we are ready to discuss anything honestly and on the basis of facts with the capitals concerned. Neither "Great Games" nor Cold War geopolitics will help us deal with this threat to international security. It is a common threat and it must be addressed collectively. As President Putin emphasised, speaking at the recent Valdai meeting, we want to work together with everybody on Syria.

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 #19
Consortiumnews.com
October 28,
Seeing Syrian Crisis Through Russian Eyes
By Ray McGovern
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was a CIA analyst for 27 years, from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush. From 1981 to 1985, McGovern prepared the President's Daily Brief, which he briefed one-on-one to President Ronald Reagan's five most senior national security advisers.

Exclusive: While there is a glimmer of hope that international negotiations may finally find a way to resolve the Syrian war, there is also growing pressure on President Obama to escalate U.S. military involvement even if that risks a wider war with Russia, a danger that ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern assesses.

"To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war," as Sir Winston Churchill put it at a White House luncheon on June 1954. The aphorism applies in spades today as the U.S., Russia and other key countries involved in troubles in Syria decide whether to jaw or to war.

Russia's recent military intervention in Syria could open up new possibilities for those working for a negotiated solution - or not. There does seem to be considerable overlap in U.S. and Russian interests and objectives.
Amid the crisis over Syria, President Vladimir Putin of Russia welcomed President Barack Obama to the G20 Summit at Konstantinovsky Palace in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Sept. 5, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

For instance, both sides say they want to suppress terrorism, including the Islamic State (also known as ISIL, ISIS or Daesh) and Al Qaeda's affiliate, the Nusra Front, and both the U.S. the Russia talk about the need for political reconciliation among Syria's disparate religious and ethnic groups. The chief disagreement is over the future of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whether he "must go," as U.S. officials insist, or whether that issue should be left to the ballots of the Syrian people, the view favored by Russia.

Yet, what happens in the next week or so - whether it turns out to be a belated "jaw-jaw" or an escalated "war-war" - will have a significant effect on bilateral U.S.-Russian relations, as well as developments in Syria, Iraq and the whole neighborhood, which now includes Europe because of the destabilizing flow of refugees.

So, I think it makes sense for me to undertake what we did at some of the best moments inside the CIA's analytical branch: view a crisis from where the other side stood and thus project how an adversary (or a friend) might react to a U.S. initiative. A common trap in intelligence analysis is mirror-imaging - assuming that others, whether adversaries or friends, look at facts and intentions the same way we do.

It can be helpful to step into the other side's shoes and consider how its leaders are likely to see us. I make a stab at that below.

In what follows, I imagine myself working within Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (the SVR, Russia's CIA equivalent) in the analysis office responsible for preparing The President's Daily Brief for President Vladimir Putin. I further imagine that his daily brief resembles what the U.S. Intelligence Community prepares for the U.S. President. So, I pattern the item below after the (now declassified) PDB for President George W. Bush that - on Aug. 6, 2001 - famously warned him, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." (In my paper, intelligence assessments are presented in italics.)

The President's Daily Brief
Oct. 28, 2015
Re Syria: Obama Trying to Fend Off US Hawks

President Obama is under severe pressure from senior military and intelligence officials and Congress to raise the ante in Syria.

Yesterday's Washington Post lead story, sourced to unnamed U.S. officials, reported that Obama is considering Pentagon proposals to "put U.S. troops closer to front lines" in Iraq and Syria.

Diplomats at our embassy in Washington note that this kind of story often reflects decisions already made and about to be formally announced. In this particular case, however, the embassy thinks it at least equally likely that the Post is being used by officials who favor more aggressive military action, in order to put pressure on the President. During Obama's first year in office, senior military leaders used the media to make it extremely difficult for Obama to turn down leaked Pentagon proposals to "surge" troops into Afghanistan.

Yesterday, Sen. John McCain, the Republican chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, used a Senate hearing to ridicule administration policy on Syria and grill Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford on the policy's embarrassing failings. Carter said attacks against ISIL in Syria and Iraq would increase, including "direct action on the ground." But Dunford admitted, "The balance of forces now are in Assad's advantage."

Facing heavy criticism for indecisiveness, Obama still seems reluctant to put many more U.S. Army or "moderate rebel" boots into the "quagmire" that he warned us against when we began our airstrikes. He would also wish to avoid the kind of destructive attacks that would pour still more Syrian refugees into Europe.

We do not think occasional "direct action on the ground" will change much. Indeed, a White House spokesman reiterated yesterday that the administration has "no intention of long-term ground combat."

As for the "no-fly zone" advocated by McCain and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Secretary Carter said, "We have not made that recommendation to the President," adding the obligatory caveat, "He hasn't taken it off the table." Dunford added, "From a military perspective, we can impose a no-fly zone."

Diplomacy

We continue to believe that Obama prefers to regard this past month's events in Syria as an opportunity to bring the main players to the negotiating table rather than the battlefield.

Defense Secretary Carter called attention to talks later this week in Vienna, in which Secretary of State John Kerry will be engaged, that are "precisely aimed at the contours of [a] political settlement." The big news here is that Kerry has dropped the U.S. objection to having Iran, a supporter of the Assad regime, participate.

As for Kerry, unlike his behavior in late summer 2013 and in early 2014, he seems to be following the President's instructions to negotiate an end to the conflict and to the misery in Syria.

Emerging on Friday from contentious talks with the Saudi and Turkish foreign ministers, as well as Foreign Minister Lavrov, Kerry sounded a hopeful note: "Diplomacy has a way of working through very difficult issues that seem to be absolutely contradictory ... but if we can get into a political process, then sometimes these things have a way of resolving themselves."

At the Senate hearing, Defense Secretary Carter called for an early political transition in Syria, but was careful to add, "The structures of the Syrian state are going to be important to the future, and we don't want them to dissolve entirely. ... The U.S. approach to removing Assad has been mostly a political effort."

At which point, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, a close ally of Sen. McCain, complained bitterly, "Assad is as secure as the day is long," adding, "you have turned Syria over to Russia and Iran."

The vitriol of McCain and Graham is no surprise. We want to make sure you know something about a relatively new player, JCS Chairman Joseph Dunford, who chose at his confirmation hearing on July 9, 2015, to let the world know that he is an unreconstructed Cold Warrior:

"If you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential threat to the United States, I'd have to point to Russia," Dunford said. "If you look at their behavior, it's nothing short of alarming." Dunford added that he thought it reasonable to send heavy weapons to Ukraine.

Dunford took up his new duties at an inauspicious moment - the day after we began launching air strikes against terrorist targets in Syria. Suffice it to say that, for the U.S. military and CIA, October has been one of the most humiliating months since the inglorious U.S. departure from Vietnam. It is important to bear that in mind.

We think this serves to double the pressure on President Obama to let loose the military on Syria and Iraq, as pushed by most of the corporate media that are attacking Obama for weakness and indecision. You will recall that he faced the same challenge in August 2013, when he came very close to letting himself be mouse-trapped into a major attack on Syria with U.S. forces.

A Special Danger

This time there is a new, quite delicate element of which you need to be aware - the so-called "moderate" rebels whom the U.S. (primarily the CIA) trained, equipped, and inserted into Syria.  This issue came up at the Senate Armed Services Committee meeting yesterday, when Chairman McCain expressed particular concern for pro-U.S. Syrian rebels he said are now being bombed by Russia and Syria.

Defense Secretary Carter replied that "no rebel group directly supported by the Defense Department under the law had been attacked." Casting a look of incredulity, McCain replied, "I promise you they have."

This is a particularly sore spot for McCain and his CIA friends. Ten days into our air-strike campaign, another Washington Post lead story with the headline, "Early signs of Russian intent ... Strikes seemed to catch White House flat-footed," claimed that Russian aircraft "pounded" CIA-sponsored "moderate rebel groups ... who appeared to get no warning that they were in Russian jets' crosshairs."

"U.S. officials" told the Post, "CIA Director John Brennan has voiced frustration with U.S. inaction as fighters trained and armed by the agency at camps in Jordan over the past two years face a Russia assault."

CIA officials do not like to be seen as leaving their own in the lurch - whether in the mountains of Syria or on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. Many serious scholars who have investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy conclude that Allen Dulles, who was fired by Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, led a cabal that killed him - and then sat on the Warren Commission to cover it all up.

We doubt that John Brennan is up to playing that kind of role, or that Dunford, for example, could be persuaded to do what a Marine predecessor, Gen. Smedley Butler, refused to do, join a coup against the sitting U.S. President (in Butler's case he rejected a right-wing scheme to remove President Franklin Roosevelt from office).But there is reason to think that Obama believes he has more to fear than the fate of his policies. One report alleges that he privately told friends of his fear of ending up like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In sum, Obama has ample reason to be afraid that powerful people in Establishment Washington, convinced they know better than he how to protect the country, might succeed in pinning on his back a "too-soft-on-the-Russians" bulls-eye.

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 #20
Interfax
October 29, 2015
Diplomat: Buildup of NATO's presence near Russian borders has no prospects

By building up its military presence near Russia's borders, NATO seems to be trying "to put the limits of Russia's stamina to a test," but this road leads to nowhere, Russian Permanent Representative at NATO Alexander Grushko said in commenting on reports by some Western media outlets that the alliance is considering options for further expanding its military presence at Russia's doorstep.

"It seems like the idea behind the creeping increase in NATO's military presence on our frontiers is to put the limits of Russia's stamina to a test. Obviously, the attempt to project military power on our country under false pretext that there's a need to deter Russia's 'aggressive intentions' is a path to nowhere," Grushko said in a commentary circulated by the Russian mission to NATO.

"Our security will be safeguarded in any case, and we have a variety of choices to effectively do it," he said.

"Provocative is already the mere idea to further broaden NATO military activities on Russia's frontiers - irrespective of its forms and parameters," Grushko said.

"Moreover, as we are looking at the situation in a holistic way we note with concern not only the attempts to augment the so called continuous rotational (in fact - permanent) presence of NATO forces on the eastern flank, but also to push military infrastructure (including C2 network and BMD assets) closer to our borders," Grushko said.

"The plans to create pre-positioning sites for heavy military equipment in Eastern Europe is yet another alarming factor," he said.

"All these actions in aggregate lead to the corrosion of obligations to exercise military restraint in the region (as they are enshrined in Russia-NATO Founding Act of 1997)," he said.

"From political point of view these military activities are aimed at creating a new 'iron curtain' in Europe that contradicts the very idea of developing new security architecture conducive to indivisible security for all," the statement says.

"NATO military planning generates confrontational approaches to security issues that in our view should belong to the past," Grushko said.

"It is true that there is no agreed definition of Substantial Combat Forces (SCS). NATO rejected our proposals in this regard, and didn't show any sign of interest to engage in a meaningful expert consultation," he said.

"If and when NATO is ready to come back to pragmatic military dialogue that was frozen on April 1, 2014, the issue of SCS could become a part of the agenda," the diplomat said.

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#21
Wall Street Journal
October 29, 2015
NATO Looks at Stationing More Troops Along Eastern Flank
Alliance seeks to deter Russia in wake of aggression in Ukraine
By Julian E. Barnes

BRUSSELS-NATO countries are discussing increasing the number of troops stationed in members bordering Russia and putting them under formal alliance command, part of a new effort to deter aggression from Moscow, according to diplomats and military officers.

Under one plan, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would have a battalion in Poland and each of the three Baltic states-roughly 800 to 1,000 soldiers in each unit. A more modest version would have a single NATO battalion in the area.

While the U.S. and other allies are supportive, German officials in particular have expressed reservations, telling the allies in private discussions that they don't want to treat Moscow as a permanent enemy or lock it out of Europe, despite the frictions over Ukraine and other provocations.

NATO officials say Berlin is unlikely to back the biggest deployment, but could support the more modest increase.

East-West relations have plummeted to their lowest level since the Cold War in the wake of Russia's annexation last year of Crimea from neighboring Ukraine, which isn't a NATO member but shares a border with several.

The alliance has been deeply critical of Russian backing for separatists in eastern Ukraine and stepped-up Russian military exercises in the region, as well as what they have called provocative incursions into NATO airspace and threats to use nuclear weapons.

Moscow in turn has said repeatedly it views NATO as a security threat.

Even if the plan is approved, NATO would still have only a small force on its eastern flank-hardly enough to stop an invasion. Still, officials believe it would be enough of a multinational tripwire to show that Western allies remain committed to their mutual defense pledge.

Just as important, President Vladimir Putin of late has shown little appetite for direct invasions, instead using covert forces to foment instability in irksome neighbors like Ukraine. In such a scenario, a small force could provide a bulwark or early warning against attempts to undermine allied governments.

Still, some allies argue even a small buildup could have the unintended consequence of making a conflict with Russia more likely if mishaps or miscalculations by Mr. Putin accidentally trigger a wider clash. To avoid that, advocates say NATO should increase other deterrence efforts, such as demonstrating its ability to move even bigger numbers of troops quickly with exercises like one currently under way in Spain and Portugal.

Last year the alliance approved a "readiness action plan" aimed at reassuring its eastern members that NATO would come to their defense in the event of a conflict with Russia, including creating a rapid-reaction force and small command posts in six eastern countries.

NATO officials say the new plans are at an early stage. Nothing has been formally presented to its North Atlantic Council, which requires consensus to approve alliance actions, and no deployments are likely before the July summit of NATO leaders in Warsaw.

But senior allied officials say there is a growing agreement that more needs to be done to show Russia that NATO is committed to defend its territory. "There is a sense if we are going to have a long-term defense and deterrence strategy we need to discuss what more we need to do beyond our readiness action plan," said Alexander Vershbow, the NATO deputy secretary-general.

U.S. officials have said they are willing put the 150 U.S. soldiers currently in each of the Baltic states and in Poland under NATO command, and are open to rotating in additional troops from the U.S.

The plan would also require other countries that have deployed troops there to agree to a NATO command. The U.K. has about 150 troops there and Germany is deploying up to 200 soldiers.

Senior U.S. officials say that, in light of stepped-up exercises by Russia in the region, increasing the NATO presence could show Mr. Putin that the alliance is cohesive and Washington remains committed.

"We are not picking a fight; we aren't trying to provoke him," said a senior U.S. defense official. "But we are trying to make sure he understands we are engaged in Europe, we are militarily capable in Europe and we are going to defend NATO. That is the message."

Alexander Grushko, the Russian ambassador to NATO, said the alliance was already violating a 1994 agreement not to permanently station troops on Russia's border, and the idea of increasing the numbers was provocative.

"From political point of view these military activities are aimed at creating a new 'Iron Curtain' in Europe," Mr. Grushko said. "NATO military planning generates confrontational approaches to security issues that in our view should belong to the past." He said what he called the "creeping increase in NATO's military presence on our frontiers" was testing Russian patience.

NATO officials insist that because the troops would rotate in and out, and be smaller than a regular brigade, the new deployment wouldn't violate the 1994 agreement, under which NATO promised not to station substantial numbers of combat troops on Russia's border.

While the alliance accuses Russia of having repeatedly violated other aspects of the agreement, the U.S., Germany and other members have insisted on abiding by it.

NATO has never defined what a substantial force would be, however. In negotiations over the accord, Russian officials suggested defining substantial as a brigade-size force, usually between 3,000 and 5,000 troops. NATO officials in the early 1990s insisted on keeping the language vague.

Mr. Grushko said NATO should agree to a new dialogue aimed at defining what substantial combat forces are.

Senior NATO officials say they believe they will be able to get troop contributions from member nations now, as more come to the conclusion that they face a long-term strategic competition with Russia. "The prospects are good that allies will contribute their fair share," said a NATO official.

It isn't clear whether Germany would block such a move. NATO officials say Berlin is eager to avoid any public discussion of additional troops in the Baltic states at a moment when the cease-fire in the Ukrainian conflict is holding and relations with Russia are in flux.

By contrast, Poland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia have all requested that NATO increase its presence to deter Russian aggression. Poland's new governing party in particular has stated it would renew the push for a permanent allied base.

"The easterners are saying we need more presence to have more deterrence," said another alliance official. "They have a good logic, but it is a clash of two logics."

U.S. officials remain opposed to a permanent base, arguing they don't have the funding for an expensive new installation or long-term deployment.

Privately, Pentagon officials have also told Polish defense officials that building a permanent base would take far too long, requiring years of approvals and construction. But U.S. officials told Polish counterparts that boosting the rotational forces could be done quickly.

The senior U.S. official said there is "lot of room for creativity" in how the U.S. and its allies use rotating forces. U.S. and other officials are considering coordinating the deployments and have the U.S., U.K. and German companies begin training together as a NATO battalion.

"It is a very attractive idea to synchronize these forces," said the senior U.S. official.

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 #22
Stars and Stripes
www.stripes.com
October 28, 2015
Army chief: Russia threat demands review of Europe force posture
By John Vandiver

WIESBADEN, Germany - The U.S. Army is reviewing its force structure in Europe, measuring everything from crisis-response capabilities to its mix of armor and infantrymen, as the service adapts to counter a revanchist Russia, the Army chief of staff said.

Gen. Mark Milley, who was at U.S. Army Europe headquarters in Wiesbaden this week to confer with more than 30 European army generals, signaled that an era of steadily drawing down in Europe should be halted.

"We don't need Cold War-levels of forward-deployed forces or anything like that," Milley said in an interview on Tuesday. "But at the same time, you want to make sure you have sufficient capabilities to deter further aggression by Russia."

The Army review has no set deadline for completion, but recommendations will eventually be submitted to the Pentagon and subject to approval by the White House.

Since Russia's intervention in Ukraine last year, the U.S. military has worked to transform its presence in Europe - moving more ships, aircraft and troops into the region - even as it faces budget constraints.

In the case of the Army, more than two decades of drawing down has left the service with only about 28,000 soldiers, a sharp decline from Cold War numbers that neared 300,000. That has forced USAREUR to come up with novel ways to demonstrate force, such as high-profile road marches to show the Army's ability to move large numbers of forces around the Baltics and Poland. To bolster its presence in eastern Europe, USAREUR has relied on a steady stream of rotational forces from the States. Less than two years after all battle tanks were moved out of Europe, the Army brought back about 250 tanks and other heavy vehicles, which will eventually be positioned in NATO states along Russia's periphery.

Milley said he expects more forward-positioning of equipment as well as a larger rotational presence.

The U.S. approach to the security situation in Europe is one of "strength and balance," said Milley, adding the Army's piece "leans more toward the strength part of that equation."

The force-structure review will touch numerous other areas. These include the right blend of forces and the need for air defense assets and more logistical know-how on the Continent, such as bridging capabilities. The U.S. now relies entirely on allies to move ground troops across rivers because it lacks forward-deployed mobile bridging, a capability U.S. military officials in Europe have said they need.

"We'll look at that and try and figure out the right balance," Milley said.

Since last year, concern about Russian military operations has spread from eastern Europe to the Mediterranean and beyond. Moscow has been deploying more ships in the Mediterranean, and it has recently intervened forcefully in Syria, launching airstrikes since late September against Islamic State targets and opponents of the Bashar Assad regime.

During the conference of Army chiefs in Wiesbaden, Moscow's deployment of military forces in recent years was the focus of much of the talk, said Milley, who after a final round of discussions on Wednesday departed for Ukraine to meet with U.S. soldiers training alongside Ukrainian forces.

Milley, who took over as the Army's new chief in August, has called Russia the U.S.'s top military threat.

Russia's interventions in Ukraine and Syria reflect the sweeping reforms its military has undergone since a brief war with Georgia in 2008. While the U.S. and its European allies enjoy a decided military advantage over Moscow in the number of ground forces and naval and air-combat capabilities, Moscow has the upper hand in geography, experts say: In the short-term, it could quickly overwhelm NATO allies in the Baltics, which have very limited defenses and are isolated from NATO's major powers, where the bulk of the alliance's military power is based.

"A major military escalation on the European continent is not imminent, but it cannot be ruled out," the European Council on Foreign Relations said in an October report, which concluded that Europe and the U.S. have underestimated Russia's military reforms. "Russia is clearly preparing itself for offensive operations."

Milley, who previously commanded U.S. Army Forces Command before assuming the Army's top post, said it was hard to know Moscow's next move, but its improved capabilities and recent history of intervention in Ukraine raise questions.

"It is an indicator of potential future behavior that unless stopped and curbed could lead to bad things," Milley said. "I don't know what Russia is going to do in the future, no one does. But I do know what they have done since 2008, and I do know their capabilities. And that is cause for concern."

However, Moscow shouldn't underestimate the capabilities of the 28-nation NATO alliance and its collective advantage in firepower, Milley said.

"Russia doesn't have 28 allies," he said. "That should cause some pause if I was sitting over in Moscow."

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 #23
www.opendemocracy.net
October 26, 2015
Georgia's grotesque democracy
Neoliberal dogma has taken root and, ahead of parliamentary elections next year, our political elites have nothing else to offer us.
By Bakar Berekashvili
Bakar Berekashvili is Lecturer in Political Science at the Georgian-American University, Tbilisi.

Democracy in Georgia has taken a turn for the worst. While ordinary people still hope that it will work in the interests of the majority, democracy is often perceived as a political system that benefits only political, cultural and economic elites. Here, democracy has been misinterpreted and distorted, becoming cynical, absurd and irrelevant.

Postcommunist prophets

In the years since transition, Georgia's academic and political elites have been taught that democracy is possible only under a capitalist system-without a strong free market, there is no democracy. For them, the only constituent principle of democracy is individual rights; the market and individualism have become synonyms of democracy.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, in Georgia, we witnessed another catastrophe-the moral collapse of postcommunist political and academic elites. The attitudes of political parties, think-tanks and universities towards our transition to capitalism leave much to be desired.

These institutions claim that while transition has had a negative impact on 'future Georgia', it has also been useful. Their discourse tells us that, yes, there are specific cases when market and investor interests trump those of democracy, but only in order to save the future of democracy. They claim that, yes, nowadays we require extremely liberal legislation and a minimal state to save the Georgian people in the future.

An oligarchic tendency

Is democracy same as the free market, capitalism and individualism? Well, it depends on which form of democracy we're talking about. If we talk about 'market democracy', then of course. But market democracy isn't the only form of political and economic organisation.

Cornelius Castoriadis, a great 20th century supporter of democracy, considered market democracy (or democratic capitalism) a form of socio-economic and political organisation that inevitably produces an oligarchy, a system where individualism is perceived as true liberty, a system without social and political conflicts.

Castoriadis's critique of democratic capitalism is based on the argument that, under so-called liberal democratic regimes, power belongs to certain privileged political and economic groups-to a relatively small group of society that extracts resources from the country as much as possible. The people have no role in determining the agenda of political, economic and social life.

Instead, the people are viewed as spectators who take part in elections where, in the end, resources decide everything.

The only game in the town

The postcommunist model of democracy is definitely more harmful than the so-called western liberal or oligarchic democracies, so harshly criticised by Castoriadis. And Georgia is a good example of how democracy is used by political and economic elites in order to strengthen their dominant positions-in recent years, the interests of Georgia's political class have systematically merged with the interests of financial elites.

No government in Georgia since independence has been brave enough to resist the practice of using the idea of democracy in the interests of hegemonic financial elites. Sadly, Georgian academics have welcomed this approach too, with mainstream academic figures frequently advocating right wing concepts in the media.

This distortion of democracy in Georgia, grotesque in its magnitude, reached its peak under Mikheil Saakashvili, who ruled the country from 2004-2013, when the Georgian government systematically praised Singapore, Dubai and Hong Kong as the model of future Georgia. Those three countries have nothing to do with democracy; rather, they are models of authoritarian capitalism.

Unfortunately, Saakashvili's replacement, the Georgian Dream coalition, revealed itself unable to resist the same dogmas from the very start of its rule. When the coalition, bankrolled by businessman Bidzina Ivanishvili, celebrated its victory in the 2012 parliamentary elections, it quickly became clear that the new government would be unable to implement a new agenda for Georgia's political and socio-economic development.

For instance, take the spring 2013 debates over reforms to Georgia's labour code. Giorgi Margvelashvili, Vice-Prime Minister, Minister of Education and Sciences, and shortly to become president, criticised and attacked these alterations, stating arrogantly that 'In parliament, they have introduced a labour code which does not allow anybody to operate a business. This is Rosa Luxembourg's dream legislation. I didn't know we were here to make Rosa Luxembourg's dreams come true.'

Of course, the labour code that Margvelashvili resisted so fiercely hardly represented the fantasy of a dead revolutionary. Instead, the government has made only minor improvements to the legislation, and the labour code still needs to be developed further for it to become a moral and fair legislative act for Georgia's working class.

Instead, statements like Margvelashvili's are symptomatic of the continuing domination of liberal democratic dogma. It was clear in early 2013 that some members of government, such as Irakli Alasania (former defence minister, now in opposition), or Alexi Petriashvili (former minister for Euro-Atlantic Integration, now in opposition), would simply promote the interests of economic elites.

Margvelashvili, who frequently lobbies for radical liberal standpoints, merely pioneered this via his harsh opposition to the new labour code.

New elections, old discourses

In practical terms, the current ruling coalition is not ready to offer an alternative to the liberal democratic agenda ahead of the next parliamentary elections in autumn 2016. They cannot propose an agenda that goes beyond market democracy and neoliberal transformation: true postcommunist elites, they are imprisoned by the constraints of liberal dogma.

More worryingly, just like previous ruling elites, Georgian Dream has trivialised people's perceptions of democratisation. The current government in Georgia maintains the political traditions of postcommunist elites who inevitably link the country's democratisation to western messianism.

Thus, politicians in Georgia do not consider internal factors as crucial for democracy, they only look to external forces. When they speak publicly, they stress the role of the people. But in practical political life, politicians rarely cooperate with citizens, instead choosing our western partners, such as US and EU, to democratise our country.

Georgian Dream has nothing to say to the citizens of Georgia ahead of next year's parliamentary elections. They can only replicate trivial discourses about Georgia's aspirations for European integration, liberal transformation and empowering investors and business corporations. To ordinary people, this sounds just like vague and tattered rhetoric.

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 #24
Times Higher Education (UK)
www.timeshighereducation.com
On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics, by Sheila Fitzpatrick
Book of the week: Lara Cook lauds a study of the comrades who kept the Man of Steel company for 30 years
Lara Cook is lecturer in Russian history, University of York. She is completing a monograph on the practical functioning and internal culture of Lenin's government.

On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics
By Sheila Fitzpatrick
Princeton University Press, 384pp, £24.95
ISBN 9780691145334 and 9781400874217 (e-book)

What is friendship? Can it be quantified, and how useful is this intangible phenomenon in predicting human behaviour? For those interested in how personal relationships influence actions, particularly in the political realm, Sheila Fitzpatrick's impressive new study is a welcome addition to the debate.

Historians of Russia have recognised the informal and personalised nature of power in the tsarist and Soviet regimes and the weakness of formal institutional structures, but they have mainly considered utilitarian kinds of personal relationships, such as patronage networks or clientelism, the reciprocal bonds based on mutual advantage and ruled by quid pro quo. But these models have not proved entirely satisfactory, and it may be time to turn to the trickier matter of what Carl Schmitt called "existential" friendship: affectionate reciprocal bonds based on shared understanding, and consisting of perceived shared traits, virtues, opinions and experiences. But how far do such personal relationships shape political behaviour? Fitzpatrick foregrounds this question as she paints a colourful group portrait of Josef Stalin's "team", a circle of the Soviet leader's friends who were drawn together not only by shared ideological principles but by a common history, culture and personal tastes and traits.

A decade ago, in the journal Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Fitzpatrick declared that "Soviet political history has been under a cloud for the past 20 or 30 years" and issued a call for new work and approaches. In the 1970s, the focus of historical research on the Soviet Union shifted to social and then cultural approaches; when the post-1991 archival turn refocused scholarship towards provincial history, central politics remained sidelined. On Stalin's Team builds on important exceptions to this rule, including the work of John Archibald Getty, Oleg Khlevniuk, James Harris and Yoram Gorlizki. Fitzpatrick brings her methods as a social historian to bear on the murky world of Kremlin politics, focusing on everyday practices and looking at the "Stalin team" in terms of the implicit rules of the game.

In the mid-1920s, in the wake of the death of Vladimir Lenin, an embattled Stalin began to build his team as rival factions competed for leadership of the Soviet Union. His band of merry men, Fitzpatrick notes, were not the educated, upper-class, European-travelled intellectuals of the Communist Party in the mould of Lenin and Trotsky, but men with limited education, who were less cosmopolitan and more "proletarian". It was largely an ethnic Russian group, but with a strong contingent linked to the Caucasus, and the atmosphere was one of "conspiracy, companionship and crude masculine humour". The familiar form of address was often used even in official correspondence, in a break with the more formal and businesslike conventions of Lenin's team.

In Fitzpatrick's view, the Russian civil war of 1918-21 was a great formative experience and the wellspring of a new macho culture, with Stalin's team cemented by the fellowship of male veterans who had bonded through service at the front. They drank and smoked together and, even into the 1930s, continued to wear a version of military uniform in civilian life. For Stalin's elite, political and social life were heavily intertwined. He socialised with the team in their Kremlin apartments or at his country dacha, and they, along with their wives and children, comprised virtually his entire social life.

Studying political history in terms of official institutions and policy decisions has not always worked well for the Stalin era, as its formal structures could be so misleading. Thus Fitzpatrick's focus on this informal friendship group is particularly fruitful. Under Stalin, membership of the team and of the party's most important organ, the Politburo, were closely related, but not identical, as Stalin typically preferred to consult an informal inner circle outside official meetings.

While the names will be familiar to scholars, Fitzpatrick allows us to put faces to those names. We meet Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin's closest associate in these years, dull, uncharismatic, but with endless work capacity; Lavrenty Beria, smarmily deferential and maliciously witty; Lazar Kaganovich, the bully with an inferiority complex about intellectuals; Stalin's "peasant" protégé Nikita Khrushchev, who masked his sharp brain under a homespun exterior; and three friends who came to Moscow from the Caucasus in 1926 to join the team, the dashing young Anastas Mikoyan, the hot-tempered and charismatic Grigory Ordzhonikidze and the charming Sergei Kirov. Klim Voroshilov, Mikhail Kalinin, Jan Rudzutak, Valerian Kuibyshev, Georgy Malenkov and Andrei Andreev also feature as sharply drawn key players.

The team feared Stalin, their captain and player-coach, but they also admired and respected him, particularly for his boldness and cunning. For more than three dangerous decades, this group would survive as a remarkably stable core, and then form a ruling collective after his death in 1953. Unchallenged leader though he was, Stalin (unlike Hitler) chose to rule surrounded by powerful figures who were loyal to him personally, but also operating as a cohesive unit. As Fitzpatrick shows, these men were not competitors for leadership, but neither were they political nonentities. They ran important sectors such as the railways, military and heavy industry and were advocates in government for the institutions that they headed. But while institutional interest was acceptable, personal and ideological interest was not. Most important policy discussions were discussed as a group. While Stalin did not need their agreement, when he sensed that it was lacking he sometimes backed off or waited for them to come around. Fitzpatrick explains Stalin's famous use of "dosage" - slow, incremental destruction of political rivals - as a method informed by group dynamics, with Stalin backing off if members' discomfort became too severe.

Fitzpatrick could have been clearer on the importance of ideology. She argues that while shared principle was not the team's uniting factor, nevertheless core beliefs did matter to Stalin. "Why - except for ideological reasons - would Stalin and the team have embarked upon collectivization at the beginning of the 1930s?" she asks, suggesting that Stalin did not want power for its own sake. Other scholars might counter, however, that collectivisation was as much about establishing his power as about increasing production, as a move that would enable the party to extend its political dominance over the vast, under-administered Russian countryside. One may also ask if Fitzpatrick is reading history backwards to an extent, in focusing on comrades who made it through the tumultuous 1930s and thus exaggerating the team's stability.

Nevertheless, this is a rare and highly accomplished piece of scholarship, and an accessible volume that I would recommend to expert colleagues, students and non-historian friends alike. Although the book is impeccably researched using archival sources, as would be expected of a scholarly monograph, Fitzpatrick shows herself to be a master storyteller as well. Readers will laugh out loud at accounts of exchanges between squabbling Bolshevik leaders that bring their vivid personalities to life, and will be drawn into the simmering drama as lively characters leap from the pages.

Of course the question remains: do we really need another Stalin book? In the past six months alone, two substantial biographies by equally renowned scholars have been published. My answer, with respect to On Stalin's Team, is a resounding yes. Fitzpatrick's innovative approach situates Stalin firmly in his personal milieu for the first time, helps to elucidate how he actually exercised power through his team, and offers a compelling sense of the personalities and relationships at play in the Soviet elite that will prove invaluable in interpreting party and government records via their human context.
----

The author

Sheila Fitzpatrick, honorary professor of history at the University of Sydney, grew up in Melbourne, which "may have given me a slightly outsiderish or detached perspective, despite all my years in the US and the UK". Doctoral study at the University of Oxford, followed by many years as an academic in the US, took her away from Australia for 48 years.

Sydney, she says, "is great: sun, beaches, good quartets to play in. I am a violinist in my spare time; mainly classical, but I've been persuaded to play jazz with a colleague, Marco Duranti."

Of her early years, Fitzpatrick recalls being "an intellectual child, which I got from my family. I wasn't studious, as it wasn't necessary in my school, but I read a lot. I wasn't studious at university either, as I found the social life too interesting. I became a hard worker in graduate school at [the University of] Oxford, perhaps out of unhappiness. But I had also got hooked on research by my BA Hons thesis in [the University of] Melbourne."

Her undergraduate self was "shy but not solitary, and ambitious in the sense that I was determined to leave Australia as soon as possible, which meant getting a first and a scholarship". When she moved from Melbourne to Oxford, she found it "culturally familiar; we were all overprepared for England from reading. But academically it was a disappointment in my field. And I was not used to being an oddity because of being a woman, which I felt was the case in Oxford then."

In her 2013 book A Spy in the Archives: A Memoir of Cold War Russia, she recalls the kindness and help she received, as a young Western historian in Moscow, from a senior government figure, Igor Alexandrovich Sats. Was this unusual? Sats, she says, "had a tendency to collect waifs and strays. In general, there was residual fear in the Soviet Union in the late 1960s about making friends with foreigners, but many people were friendly."

Which of Stalin's associates would she most like to have spoken to as frankly as she did to Sats? "Lavrenty Beria. He is the one we have least reliable information on. After his fall, he was scapegoated, with nobody except his family willing to say anything except how evil he was, and there is no personal archive. I found him the hardest to pin down for this reason. Of course, anyone might want to talk frankly to Stalin, but it would have been dangerous to become someone in his line of vision."

Asked if there is a word or expression in Russian that tells us something interesting about the Russian personality, in Soviet times or more generally, she offers, "Well, there is 'seichas', meaning literally (I am coming) at once, which in normal speech means I am coming, but not at once. Russians have improved in this respect, but I used to be astonished at their attitude to time, which included an inability to make dates further than a day ahead - they always said, Ring me on Wednesday, or whatever, which could be really annoying if you didn't have easy access to a phone.

"One friend of mine who had a lot to do with Soviet Russians in the 1940s claimed there was an expression 'Chtoby ne bylo luchshe', meaning, Don't let things get better (implying a fear of promises of a radiant future). That would be nice if true, but I never heard any Russian say it."

What gives her hope? "I tend to focus on the possible bad rather than good outcomes. But meeting Misha [her late husband, the physicist Michael Danos] in 1989, an annus mirabilis anyway, gave me the sense that, who knows, good things may turn up unexpectedly. Which, in the case of my return to Australia in 2012, they did."

Karen Shook

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 #25
AP
October 28, 2015
As it cuts Russia ties, Ukraine can expect years of dependency on West before economy recovers
By JAMES ELLINGWORTH

VELYKI PRYTSKY, Ukraine (AP) - Looking on from her vegetable patch at the motorcade of U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, Ukrainian villager Olha Voloshchenko says she'd seen the lady on the TV news the night before, but "then the lights went off at our place."

The U.S. hopes agriculture in places like this dilapidated village will help rebuild Ukraine's shattered economy as it severs its centuries-old trade relations with Russia and tries to integrate with the West.

The economic reality, however, suggests that dream is a long way off. A lack of jobs often drives young people away from the rural areas that are meant to drive the agricultural renaissance. Outages are common as the electricity grid crumbles from a lack of investment and bribery is still rampant.

It is clear Ukraine will depend on U.S. and European financial support for years to come.

Pritzker's visit coincided with the U.S. announcement that it would give Ukraine another $1 billion in loan guarantees on condition the country makes a series of reforms. That comes on top of a $17.5 billion aid program from the International Monetary Fund.

The U.S. official was in Ukraine to help the government push through judicial and anti-corruption measures that would, hopefully, attract the investment needed to wean the country off Western aid.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Pritzker called the U.S. administration's decision to give the loan guarantee "a vote of confidence." She said the Ukrainian government's progress on reforms over the last six to nine months was "extraordinary."

For Pritzker, her visit mixed old-fashioned commercial diplomacy - bringing a group of U.S. business executives along - and the personal. Until the late 19th century, long before the family built the Hyatt brand into a global hotel chain, the Pritzkers lived south of Kiev and took their name from Voloshchenko's village of Velyki Prytsky.

During her stay in Ukraine she would have gotten a taste of the challenges facing Ukraine, whose economy is expected to shrink by about a tenth this year.

Though the conflict in the rebel-held east has quietened down in recent months, much of the country's industrial heartland is either in the hands of Russia-backed rebel or has seen its supply chains disrupted. An anti-corruption push has yet to claim any prominent scalps and Sunday's regional elections saw the resurgence of regional oligarchs that often challenge the government in Kiev.

Meanwhile, trade with Russia, which has long been the country's biggest commercial partner, is in freefall as political relations soured over the conflict.

Goods exports to Russia in January-August this year were less than half what they were a year earlier, and replacing that lost trade will be hard. Since Sunday, there are no longer any direct flights between the two countries.

Despite a frantic schedule of trade missions from the Ukrainian government, exports to the U.S. and EU are falling too, with increased Chinese investment in agriculture a rare bright spot.

Instead of restoring Russian trade to pre-conflict levels, the goal is an economy close to that of neighboring Poland, with greater European and global integration, says Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko.

"I don't think those levels of trade with Russia will ever come to be again," she says. "We are building our exports into Asia, into Europe and into the Middle East and North Africa."

Also on the horizon is the repayment of a $3 billion debt to Russia dating from the final days of the last pro-Russian Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych. Russia has refused to write off a part of the loan, as Ukraine's other bondholders agreed to do this year to help the country avoid default.

If Ukraine fails to pay the loan at the end of the year, Russia could try to obstruct future aid to Ukraine from the IMF, of which it is a member.

With a heavily devalued currency and the government making aggressive spending cuts, there is also the danger of public discontent. Outside the cabinet building in Kiev where Pritzker held talks Monday, is a small protest camp organized by the populist Radical Party under the same "Maidan" name as the protests which led to the ouster of Yanukovych in 2014.

While the camp shows little indication it could spark a mass movement, Jaresko admits that public discontent is a concern.

"I worry about it all the time but I think instead of worrying about it, what we need to do is to respond to it," she said, speaking with the AP in a room overlooking the camp. "We need to provide the population with not only austerity measures, which are critical for restoring the stability of the economy, but also a return of quality public services."

Jaresko argues that efforts to reduce government bureaucracy and fighting tax evasion have seen progress but flown under the radar in terms of public opinion.

An IRI poll conducted in July found 51 percent of Ukrainians thought corruption was worse than before Yanukovych's fall from power, with only 11 percent saying the situation had improved.

Reducing corruption is also a key factor in attracting foreign investment. Reforms and changes of personnel have broken down old hierarchies of bribery but corruption is still rampant across society, argues Balazs Jarabik, an analyst with the Carnegie Endowment.

"Corruption is much more decentralized," he says. "When you ask businesses ... everybody who is kind of directly engaged is very much dissatisfied."

Still, the international support for Ukraine is broadly welcome. In Velyky Prytsky, some locals saw Pritzker as a potential savior, her very presence a sign of jobs and investment to come.

"If people like this have come to us, then we're in seventh heaven," said Natalia Foyalo, who has worked in the village school for 33 years as cook, cleaner and general factotum and greeted Pritzker in Ukrainian national costume.

"We hope that we can be helped in some way and that we'll be worth something, so that we can bloom."

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#26
Mashable.com
October 28, 2015
Humanitarian crisis looms in eastern Ukraine as winter approaches
By Christopher Miller
[Photos here http://mashable.com/2015/10/29/humanitarian-crisis-in-eastern-ukraine/#yRKK95DwLiqI]

POPASNA, Ukraine - On a bench in the center of this war-wrecked town, Galina and Sergei, two elderly pensioners, soak up the warmth of the sun on an otherwise chilly autumn day as they tell stories of the hardships they've endured over the past 18 months.

Around them are buildings with shattered windows and blown-apart rooftops, painful reminders of the time not so long ago that rockets and artillery shells bombarded this town. Months later, they are yet to be replaced and patched.

What few businesses existed here before the war broke out in April 2014 have been shuttered. All that is left are a few tiny mini markets, and their shelves are mostly empty, save for essentials - eggs, flour, milk, pasta and rice - and vodka.

There is a farmers' market but it is pitiful. Earlier in the day, an elderly woman tried to sell 12 walnuts for 20 cents. Other stalls offered only a few dozen soft, over-ripened eggplants and tomatoes, along with some potatoes and some tiny, bruised green apples riddled with wormholes.

Galina and Sergei say the town is not prepared for winter.

"We have only enough to survive, and not a scrap more," says Galina.

Popasna, which has seen its population of 22,000 before the war dwindle to about 11,000, according to the mayor's office, is a microcosm of Ukraine's Donetsk and Luhansk regions that have been plagued by the conflict.

Like elsewhere, residents here welcomed the renewed ceasefire that came into effect Sept. 1 and the opportunity to return to their homes.

But faced with shortages in food, health services, medicine and adequate shelter - and with winter right around the corner - a potential humanitarian crisis looms. Compounding the situation for many, pro-Russian separatists have banned humanitarian organizations from working in areas under their control for alleged espionage activity and other crimes.

More than 8,000 people have been killed in Ukraine since the start of the war, and some two million Ukrainians from the country's east have been displaced. Many have fled with next to nothing in search of sanctuary, either from the violence, or for fear of being persecuted by the separatist authorities for their political and religious views.

Following each of the three agreed ceasefires, many people returned to their homes in the conflict zone. The fortunate ones found their houses still standing, albeit perhaps with the walls scarred by shrapnel or bored through by artillery shells. But some discovered theirs had been decimated, reduced to little more than rubble and dust.

While some have managed to repair the damages, others, like those in Popasna, lack the means or materials to do so.

The International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC), is scaling up its activities in eastern Ukraine, providing residents whose homes have been damaged with cement, bricks, timber, rubberoid and roofing sheets to repair them in time for the biting Ukrainian winter, Ahmad Mohanna, ICRC sub-delegation head, said in an interview in Sloviansk.

But many who have relied on such aid from international groups now are having to go without after separatist leaders in Donetsk and Luhansk ordered Western agencies out of the region and banned them from returning to work. Among the banned agencies are Doctors Without borders (MSF) and the United Nations Children's Fund, UNICEF. ICRC had been included in the ban, but has since ben allowed back in the territories.

"We are concerned about the lack of access to non-government controlled areas," said Giovanna Barberis, UNICEF head representative in Ukraine.

The ban also means UNICEF is unable to provide much-needed psycho-social support to some 30,000 children and mine risk education to some 200,000, which is all the more important now that the guns have gone quiet, allowing people more mobility, said Barberis.

Separatist leaders have long considered international agencies to be instruments of the West and looked at them with suspicion. They have accused them of espionage and have even abducted and interrogated some workers.

A few foreign aid groups are still able to operate in Donetsk, albeit in a limited capacity and only after an arduous vetting process.

Enrique Menendez, a Donetsk businessman and who helped found Responsible Citizens, a local volunteer initiative in Donetsk that has operated with less trouble, said a major issue facing people in separatist-held areas is access to essential drugs.

"From a legal point of view, some can't be delivered from Russia, and with the Ukrainian blockade, they can't get through from the government-controlled side," said Menendez.

Because drug-substitution therapy is illegal in Russia, drugs like buprenorphine or methadone have been absent from humanitarian aid sent by Moscow to the separatist enclaves, and Kiev has not allowed it through on its side.

Medications to treat people with other serious medical conditions, such as Hepatitis C, HIV and tuberculosis, also are in short supply.

"We are almost the only organization providing treatment for tuberculosis in prisons, insulin for diabetic patients and haemodialysis products to treat kidney failure," said Dr. Bart Janssens, MSF Director of Operations, after separatists in Donetsk forced out the charity group. "Thousands of patients suffering from chronic, potentially fatal diseases will now be left with little or no assistance."

The aid group of billionaire Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, who is from Donetsk, remains able to at least send food to the separatist-held regions.

Akhmetov's aid is helping the most vulnerable people, said Menendez. "But the economy is terrible, and there are a lot of jobless, middle-aged people in Donbas from 35-45 years old who aren't working, and they either can't or don't want to receive this aid," he said.

It is a desperate situation that appears unlikely to end soon, as peace talks between Kiev, Moscow and the separatists drag on. Rather, with another notoriously harsh Ukrainian winter approaching, it may worsen.

But at least the ceasefire is sticking and the shooting has stopped, said Menendez. "It's good that people may not need to live in bomb shelters this winter," he said

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 #27
Ukrainian opposition accuses authorities of trying to falsify election results

KIEV, October 29. /TASS/. The Ukrainian political opposition has said on Thursday the pro-government forces were trying to falsify the results of the local elections that took place on October 25. According to head of the Kiev branch of the Opposition Bloc party Alexander Puzanov, irregularities "were registered at many polling stations" and "vote count was not conducted in a proper way."

"I have documentary evidence proving that the number of ballot papers taken out of the ballot boxes proved far bigger than the number actually handed out," Puzanov said, referring specifically to the results of voting in Kiev. "In all districts there were people who wanted to score more votes in a fraudulent way. If the overall number of votes scored by a party is no more than 6 or 7% and exceeds 20 and even 50% at one polling station, that is strange, to say the least."

"As a whole, the Opposition Bloc has overcome the 5-percent barrier in Kiev and will be represented in the Kiev City Council by its own parliamentary faction," Puzanov said. In his opinion, such a result is not to the liking of the current authorities. "The authorities believe that there should be no Opposition Bloc in Kiev. We constantly register attempts to steal the votes of Kiev residents in support of our political force and significantly downgrade our rating," Puzanov said.

Meanwhile, the headquarters of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc (Solidarity) party admitted its failure at the local elections. According to some estimates, the pro-presidential party will secure 18% of votes on the average. The only region where Poroshenko will not need allies to form the majority is the Vinnytsia region in west-central Ukraine.

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 #28
www.opendemocracy.net
October 29, 2015
Why I didn't vote in the Ukrainian local elections
Anton Dmytriiev, a journalist based in Kyiv, believes the recent elections in his country were pointless.

Anton Dmytriiev is a Ukrainian journalist and communications specialist. He works with several Ukrainian media platforms, such as espreso.tv and iPress, as well as independent Russian talk radio station Echo Moscow. He is particularly interested in urban transformation and LGBT rights.

I belong to that rare category of people who try to do something for their neighbourhood or their street off their own bat, although I work with the local authority on other issues. That's why I didn't vote in the local elections - I just didn't see the point.

At the time of last year's parliamentary elections, a lot of people felt sorry for me - after all, a few years ago I worked for Oleh Lyashko, who is now a prominent politician (leader of Ukraine's Radical Party and former presidential candidate). And now that many of his assistants from back then are parliamentary deputies themselves, people were telling me I'd missed my chance.

But I believe it's better to be free and to do what you want, rather than carrying out someone else's orders, thinking only what you're supposed to think and pretending to be enthusiastic about things you don't agree with. So I decided to concentrate on journalism and start-ups, and leave politicking to others.

So what was the point of mentioning my time with Lyashko? The point is that I know many parliamentarians personally, know what they're like as people, but I don't want to vote, and won't vote for them because I know why they've followed that path. I respect many politicians as people, but I'm not giving them my vote because they are not the people who make policies. They are either a 'screen' or an 'entourage' for those who place their own corrupt interests higher than those of the state or the public.

I also know many of the candidates for the local elections, and however much the various 'alternative' parties are trumpeted these days, none of these new or rehashed projects offer the voter anything really new.

The recent elections have one thing going for them: there have been a lot fewer old members re-elected to local councils. However, that doesn't mean they have disappeared. It merely signals that the early parliamentary elections that are more and more likely will see an all out attempt by former president Yanukovych and his team to wrestle back the reins of power.

Low turnout

These elections had the lowest voter turnout of any since Ukraine gained independence with the collapse of the USSR. What can I say - I didn't vote, and neither did dozens of people I know. But that's no problem: it's only in dictatorships that turnout is higher than 70-80%. So Ukrainians' lack of interest in their local elections is, paradoxically, more a symptom of democracy than of apathy.

But why were we all so turned off by this year's elections? Thinking about myself and asking around my friends, I have come to three main conclusions.

Firstly, they didn't coincide with parliamentary or presidential elections; fewer people bothered to vote because they were less important.

Secondly, the parties' election campaigns were the least interesting for many years. Looking at many candidates, you felt like phoning the nearest psychiatric clinic to ask them to come and collect their patients. Most parties and candidates showed no creativity and had nothing new to say - even their publicity material was dull. The only emotion that any of them could awake in the electorate was disgust at their pathetic campaigns.

The third reason was that there was just nothing new - no new faces, no new policies and no vision for the future. Most party lists were full of people voters had already protested against, and whom they regarded as corrupt gangsters. But money triumphed, and so our local councils will be packed for the next four years with characters who should really be behind bars. And the big parties have totally failed to grasp a key trend - a demand for the renewal and public creation of engines of social mobility.

Words can't replace actions

I, for example, am involved in LGBT issues, local social problems and urban planning. Not one party or candidate in the elections had anything sensible to say on these issues. And if you ask mayoral candidates in the big cities about them, you probably won't get any answer. Ukrainian local government is incapable of solving local problems.

That is the trouble with the parties and politicians, even the young ones. We can all, of course, write clever comments, get worked up and discuss global issues on Facebook and Twitter, but let's face it, social networks are pretty much the diametrical opposite of reality.

It's one thing to produce memes, viral video clips and quirky ads, but it's quite another to have proper policies on replacing slums with new, comfortable housing, or how and where to create car parks or create an accessible environment for disabled people and so on. And most of the people who have acquired some political power have little more clue than your average armchair orator.

Also, a peculiarity of Ukrainian politics is the fact that all parties and groups are identified first and foremost with their leaders. So everyone knows the number one candidate on a party list, but few have any idea about candidates further down the list, even in the top twenty. And this creates an unnecessary mystique, conspiratorial feeling and suspicion of this corrupt circle.

Naturally, I will not vote for people and things that I don't trust, and nor will most of my friends.

I am, of course to open to criticism for ignoring the elections and then moaning about the bastards that rule us and why they don't listen to us. But I have known these 'bastards' for years and encountered them in enough situations to know that it makes no difference whether we elect them or somebody else. Power, alas, is an intoxicant that makes people forget their promises, vital concerns and future projects.

Ineptitude and indifference

You can also look at the pointlessness of the recent elections in terms of renewal of local elites. This hasn't happened and won't happen, because of both the voters' political immaturity and the politicians' love of buying votes, rigging results and doing shady deals.

I, for example, come from Zaporizhia, in south-eastern Ukraine. This is a city where chaos has always ruled, no matter who is in power, and this suits the populace fine. They are happy to vote for anyone who will buy them free dinners and promises of a bright future, or simply a day off work.

The choice there was between a stooge of Ukraine's richest citizen and an official who just mimics him in everything. Neither of them have any idea about how to fix the drains, campaign for clean air or get the trams and trolleybus services working properly. But everyone voted for them anyway.

Or take Lviv. It looks like the old cities of Western Europe and the tourists love it, but what's it like to live in? I, as someone who lives in Kyiv, don't like Lviv for its infrastructure problems, especially with transport and communications. None of the previous mayors have been able to sort this out, and nor has the current incumbent - but he still got re-elected.

The mayors of Kharkiv and Odesa will also probably keep their jobs. This is not because of what they have done for their cities: life has not improved there in the last few years; in fact the opposite is true - constant acts of terrorism in Odesa and an unstable situation in Kharkiv have done nothing to attract investment or positive attention to these cities, and their mayors have not made enough of an effort to resolve conflicts.

As for Kyiv, Mayor Vitaly Klitschko (and indeed the mayors of Ukraine's other large cities) had no fear of rivals. The feeling one gets is that the parliamentary parties agreed in advance who would head the country's key cities, so there was no real contest. In football, this kind of thing is known as 'match fixing' and is a serious infringement of the rules, and the perpetrators end up in court.

Most local parties and politicians have no strategies or agendas to offer, let alone mechanisms for solving problems, and they either concentrate on national issues which are outside the competence of local authorities or fall back on empty party slogans.

I was also struck by the fact that for the first time a widespread and active system of open voter bribery was in operation; parties and candidates didn't even bother to hide it, as they knew they could do it with impunity.

In other words Ukrainians, like most of the peoples of the post-Soviet space, have once again believed the populists and completely repudiated the values of the Euromaidan Revolution of 2013-4 and European principles of local government organisation. Most of our citizens, alas, have become no wiser and have not learned to see elections as a contest of ideas and real political programmes. People choose slogans, not concrete issues and visions.

To make matters worse, Ukraine, with the active support of Switzerland, Sweden and Germany, is now undergoing a process of decentralisation. The danger here is that having elected a crowd of corrupt and populist politicians onto local councils, the voters have now entrusted them with greater powers and greater control of their budgets. So in the next four years these lovers of populism will pay a high price, out of their own pockets, for this fraudulent election, and will no longer be able to blame Kyiv or neighbouring countries for it. The imminent return of feudalism and spread of corruption will not be the fault of the president or parliament, but of the voters themselves (or those that bothered to vote).

Anyone who voted for any party needs to be aware of what their council actually does. Local government is not responsible for legal reforms, the army or police, the rooting out of political corruption or other problems that the candidates swore to solve on their election posters. Local elections and local councils are basically responsible for solving the local problems of their local population - that is the main point of local government.

But ironically, this particular point is of no importance to Ukrainian politicians and voters.

This is why I don't vote: I don't want to have to choose between one populist or gangster and another; I don't see a single political agenda that focuses on local issues and I haven't seen any candidate putting any real effort into improving peoples' lives and the places where they live. And I am genuinely sorry for those who have yet again handed their villages, towns and districts over to kleptocrats, demagogues and dreamers.

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 #29
Ukraine is nostalgic about Yanukovych presidency - Azarov

MOSCOW. Oct 28 (Interfax) - The Committee for the Salvation of Ukraine is not ready to take Viktor Yanukovich as an active socio-political figure despite the widespread nostalgia among Ukrainians for his presidency.

"What should have changed in the attitude to Yanukovych? Maybe he took some actions. Maybe he did something? What should have changed to make us change our attitude to him?" Mykola Azarov, former prime minister of Ukraine and chairman of the Committee for the Salvation of Ukraine, told a press conference in Moscow on Wednesday.

He admitted that some people in Ukraine are becoming nostalgic about the period of Yanukovych's presidency.

"It's nostalgia for the regime when, to put in it crude terms, potatoes cost 1.5 hryvnia, and now it costs some ten hryvnia. People are getting nostalgic, saying the situation under that regime was more stable and confident and the tariffs were lower," Azarov said.

"If he [Yanukovych] now took an active position, one could think about changing approaches. But I have not seen such facts, I don't see then and I think we will not get to see them," Azarov said.

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 #30
Ukrainian command in Donbas does not control 2,000 volunteer battalion fighters - DPR

MOSCOW, October 28. /TASS/. Some 2,000 fighters of the Azov, Dnipro and Lviv volunteer battalions, deployed near the disengagement line between Kiev-led forces and militias in Donbas, have gotten out of control of the Ukrainian military command, Eduard Basurin, spokesman for the Defense Ministry of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR), said at a briefing Wednesday.

"According to our intelligence data, a grouping of the enemy consisting of the Azov, Dnipro and Lviv units has been revealed between the inhabited localities of Novgorodskoye and Troitskoye. The grouping, which completely got out of control of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, has up to 2,000 people," Basurin said.

He added that in violation of the Minsk Agreements, 50 items of hardware, including tanks, infantry combat vehicles, armored personnel carriers and field artillery, have been concentrated in the same area.

"The leadership of the Ukrainian Armed Forces is unable to control units of nationalistic battalions that only formally became subordinate to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry," the Donetsk News Agency quoted Basurin as saying.

Earlier, the DPR Defense Ministry spokesman said the fighters of another Ukrainian nationalistic battalion, Aidar, opened fire on DPR positions near Gorlovka on Tuesday.

"Yesterday around 9:30pm, units of the Aidar nationalist battalion opened fire from small arms at our positions near the Shirokaya Balka settlement," Donetsk News Agency quoted Basurin as saying.

He stressed that this is a provocation aimed at forcing DPR to open response fire and then accuse self-defense forces of violating the Minsk Agreements. Basurin said that such incidents happen because Ukrainian leadership is unable to control extremist units "that have formally become subject to Ukraine's defense ministry."

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#31
DPR ombudsperson says 1,354 people held prisoner by Ukraine

MOSCOW, October 29. /TASS/. The self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) human rights ombudsperson Daria Morozova has said that at least 1,354 people are held as prisoners by Ukraine.

The real number may be much higher, Morozova said. "For now, a total of 1,354 people are officialy registered as prisoners in Ukraine. There are separate lists of people who went missing. We don't know anything about these people, there are 480 of them," Donetsk News Agency quoted the ombudsperson as saying.

Earlier today the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics exchanged prisoners with Kiev in the "9 for 11" format.

Morozova said she talked to the exchanged prisoners. They said that "there are thousands of people in SBU [Ukrainian State Service] basements whom Ukrainian side does not register as prisoners."

According to Kiev, self-defense forces hold 148 Ukrainian servicemen prisoner. The number was confirmed on October 16 by advisor to SBU head Yury Tandit.

Minsk agreements on Ukraine

The Minsk accords were signed on February 12, after negotiations in the so-called "Normandy format" in the Belarusian capital Minsk, bringing together Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Francois Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.

The Minsk accords envisage ceasefire, weaponry withdrawal, prisoner exchange, local election in Donbass, constitutional reform in Ukraine and establishing working sub-groups on security, political, economy and humanitarian components of the Minsk accords.

The Ukrainian forces and the self-defense forces of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics have repeatedly accused each other of violating ceasefire and other points of the Minsk agreements.
 

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 #32
DPR, LPR obstructing verification of withdrawn armaments - OSCE mission

KYIV. Oct 29 (Interfax) - Representatives of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics are obstructing the access of OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine (SMM) monitors to weapon storage sites, Deputy Chief Monitor Alexander Hug said.

The OSCE SMM continues to monitor the withdrawal of artillery pieces with calibers under 100mm and mortars with calibers under 120mm and to visit weapon storage sites, he said at a press conference in Kyiv on Thursday, regretting that the mission was not allowed to visit weapon storage sites on lands uncontrolled by the Ukrainian authorities.

This is a violation of the supplementary protocol to the Minsk agreements, Hug said, adding that the republics were denying access to weapon storage sites and the monitors were unable to do the verification.

The self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic is constantly failing to assist in the verification of the heavy arms withdrawal on its territory and is not allowing the verification of the serial numbers of weapons, the deputy chief monitor said.

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#33
Ukraine may consider a complete ban on transit flights of Russian airlines - ministry

KIEV, October 29. /TASS/. Ukraine may consider imposing a complete ban on transit flights of Russian airlines across its territory, Irina Kustovskaya, a spokesperson with the country's Infrastructure Ministry said on Thursday.

"We do not rule out such a possibility, but any active steps have not been taken on this matter yet," she said.

Earlier on Thursday, the Deputy Infrastructure Minister Vladimir Omelyan told reporters that Kiev may completely ban air transit for Russia.

"We will definitely consider this issue. Now Ukrainian airlines flights over the Russian territory are banned. Accordingly, there will be steps from the Ukrainian side," he said.

Since August 2014, there has been a special regime of transit through Ukraine for two Russian airlines - Aeroflot and Transaero. It stipulates that for every planned flight through Ukraine to Bulgaria, Turkey, Egypt, Greece, and Israel the airlines must apply for permission to the Ukrainian State Aviation Service. The transit of live military forces and goods of dual and military use through Ukraine is banned.

In September, Aeroflot, along with 20 more Russian air companies were blacklisted by the Ukrainian authorities. These companies were banned, partially or completely, to make flight to destinations in Ukraine or via Ukraine. The sanction list includes Aeroflot subsidiaries Rossiya, Donavia, Orenburg Airlines and Transaero, as well as S7 (Sibir, Russia's third air carrier in terms of passenger traffic) and Urals Airlines (ranked fifth). These airlines appeared in the list of 105 legal entities, to which the Ukrainian party has applied restrictions. The sanctions came into effect on October 25.

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 #34
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
October 28, 2015
The Russia-Ukraine sanctions war takes to the skies
With Russia and Ukraine now having imposed mutual sanctions on each other's airlines, the implications could affect the struggling economies of both countries and lead to similar types of tit-for-tat measures.
By Yulia Karabkina
Yulia Karabkina is an expert from the Kiev-based Center for Operational Strategic Analysis (COSA), an independent analytical center that offers the expertise of both local and international analysts. Graduated from the National University of "Kyiv-Mohyla Academy" and got a major in Political Science (European Studies). Julia worked as an intern at the Kyiv-based think tank "Institute of World Policy".

The Ukrainian government recently announced a ban on certain Russian airlines flying into the country. The government's decision was based on several key reasons, in particular the current state of Ukraine-Russia relations and changes occurring inside the aviation sector at the national level.

What is the key reason for closing the airspace between the two neighboring countries? The Ukrainian ban's measures were introduced within the framework of the extended personal economic restrictions imposed against Russian officials for backing separatists in eastern Ukraine and against business enterprises in specific sectors considered "materially or financially supporting actions undermining or threatening Ukraine's sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence." The personal sanctions list currently includes nearly four hundred individuals and about one hundred legal entities.

What is important, Ukraine banned only direct flights by Russian airlines to punish them for flying to Crimea, a peninsula annexed by Moscow in March 2014, as well as Russian planes carrying military hardware or troops from flying over Ukrainian territory.

The Oct. 25 decision came from the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine after Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko signed the Oct. 16 decree, which sanctioned many of Russia's leading airlines, including Aeroflot, Red Wings, Transaero, S7 (Sibir) and others. Yet Ukraine left the right to fly for several Russian airlines - in particular, Utair, which did not fly to and from Crimea.

Shortly after, Russia's aviation agency announced its intentions to close its airspace to all Ukrainian airlines, which launched another round of the sanction wars, this time, in the sky.

Russia's position: "Mirror sanctions"

Taking into account the experience of Russia's responses against sanctions imposed by the West, the most predictable decision Moscow could make in this situation was to introduce "mirror sanctions" against the Ukrainian airlines. The Russian authorities blacklisted a number of Ukraine-based airlines, including Ukrainian International, Dniproavia, Motorsich and others.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin called the Ukrainian sanctions on Russian flights "another act of madness."

The cost of the Russia-Ukraine "air wars" is currently estimated by financial analysts in the tens of millions dollars. Furthermore, most experts in the field of aviation come to the conclusion that the ban will hurt Russia more than Ukraine as the country's losses are expected to be three or even four times more. According to preliminary estimates, Ukraine could lose $15 million.

Ukraine's position: Punishing a lawbreaker

The Ukrainian authorities made it clear that the ban affects all Russian airlines and intends to counter the measures imposed by Russia's aviation authorities on Ukrainian airlines. According to Ukraine's Infrastructure Minister Andrey Pivovarsky, Kiev has documentary evidence of multiple international norms violations on the side of Russian airlines flying to Crimea, which, Kiev and the West argue, is occupied by Russia.

In addition, Ukrainian sanctions on flights are seen by Kiev as a response to Moscow's policy in Donbas and its negligence in following Ukraine's national legislation.

In fact, the general extended list of sanctions adopted by the Ukrainian authorities followed the prolongation of sanctions on the Kremlin by the EU and U.S. in early September.

However, sectoral sanctions on the Russian airlines are unexpected measures from the Ukrainian side. To be precise, lawyers clarify that Ukraine had to impose such bans on Russian flights a year and a half ago to prevent them from flying over Crimea. Kiev estimates the Russian penalties for carrying out flights over the peninsula should be approximately $646 million.

In reality, Ukrainian sanctions against Russian airlines can be regarded as a steadfast state's position aiming to defend its national interests. "Ukraine is punishing a lawbreaker, and not building an 'iron curtain,'" said Pivovarsky.

Collateral damage from the mutual ban

Nevertheless, the ban on flights against Russia will influence not only the relations between the countries, but also the development of the national aviation sector as well. After all, Ukraine is currently moving towards signing the EU-Ukraine open skies agreement and is expecting the arrival of new European airlines to its market, especially low-cost companies.

In this respect, the reestablishment of air traffic between Russia and Ukraine could even hasten the reformation process in this field. Moreover, the leading Ukraine airlines are also looking for new ways of doing business and proposing ambitious solutions. The competitiveness in the Ukrainian aviation market might significantly increase in the nearest future.

At the same time, the top Ukrainian airlines reacted immediately to the flight bans and claimed that they would lose $46 million each year after the introduction of restrictions. After all, the air passenger traffic between the two countries stood at 657,000 in the first half of 2015. The flagship airlines of Ukraine and Russia, Ukrainian International Airlines and Aeroflot, carried out most of these flights.

Is there any chance in the short-term for cancelling the mutual ban?

What is the scope of mutual sanctions on flights? The bans have the potential to hit both countries' already struggling economies and lead to further economic disentanglement between Ukraine and Russia.

Taking into consideration the current financial losses in the aviation field due to the continual war in the eastern Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea, the last thing that Ukrainian and Russian airline companies need is flight bans. They are already suffering from economic contraction in their respective countries and weak consumer spending.

However, Ukraine demands the payment of penalties from Russia; otherwise the sanctions on flights will not be cancelled.

Nevertheless, Russia's position should be considered in the context of its interest in maintaining flights between the country and Crimea. Moscow's geopolitical interest in Crimea prevails over its national economic interests. So, the Kremlin is hardly likely to yield and pay any penalties to Ukraine for returning to the status quo in the Russia-Ukraine "air war" in the short-term.

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 #35
Wall Street Journal
October 29, 2015
IMF Plans to Alter Lending Policies to Keep Ukraine Bailout on Track
Proposed IMF lending changes sidestep concerns about $3 billion in debt Ukraine owes Russia
By Ian Talley

WASHINGTON-Ukraine's Western allies are preparing to accelerate planned changes to the International Monetary Fund's lending policies to prevent Russia from stymieing a $25 billion rescue package for the war-torn nation.

Current IMF policy prohibits the IMF from lending to countries that are in arrears to other governments. The Kremlin has rejected Ukraine's invitation to participate in a restructuring of the country's debts and Kiev has said it won't pay all of the $3 billion due to Moscow by the end of the year. That means the IMF's lending policy potentially jeopardizes its $17 billion bailout and the other Western aid that is contingent on the fund's program.

But the U.S. and other Western shareholders are preparing next month to change the fund's lending policy so the IMF can move ahead with its Ukraine loan program even if Kiev defaults on its loans to Russia, according to people familiar with the matter.

Ukraine Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko told The Wall Street Journal that Russia's participation in the debt restructuring is an opportunity to "depoliticize the issue, as it offers the same treatment as our other bondholders." But in comments after meetings with top international officials, the minister signaled the IMF likely wouldn't let the Russian bond "interfere with the program."

The IMF's board is tentatively set to consider the change in late November after leaders from the Group of 20 largest economies meet in Turkey.

Douglas Rediker, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and former U.S. representative to the IMF's board, said changing the arrears policy would allow the IMF "to avoid an outcome where Russia could hold the fund program hostage." Mr. Rediker said the fund could create a new exemption to the existing sovereign-arrears policy that sidestepped official creditors deemed by IMF shareholders as acting in bad faith with a member country.

Moscow bought the $3 billion bond issued in the last days of the Viktor Yanukovych government, just a few short weeks before the president was ousted by pro-democracy protesters in early 2014. The bond was an effort by the Kremlin to prop up an administration friendly with Russia as it fought against the rising tide of Western-friendly voters who sought greater integration with the European Union.

The IMF for years has been considering revising its lending-into-arrears policy, so the current move isn't exclusively targeted to the Ukrainian circumstances. In an April 2013 paper on debt-restructuring polices, for example, IMF staff said the evolving role of major emerging markets in the global economy required the fund to reconsider its policy.

Anders Åslund, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said the fund was originally thinking about ensuring China wouldn't be able to foil IMF lending to member countries seeking bailouts as Beijing ramped up loans to Africa and other nations.

As with many potential policy overhauls at the IMF, such a revision was on course for a slow trajectory through the fund's dense bureaucratic and political machinery. In March, however, the IMF approved a new, larger loan program for Ukraine that assumed Kiev would seal a $15 billion debt restructuring, a bond operation that outside economists said couldn't be completed without including the Russian-held debt. Three months later, IMF managing director Christine Lagarde announced as part of the board's work program the fund would consider in March 2016 a review of the lending-into-arrears policy, with an informal discussion planned for November.

"The reform of the IMF's lending framework, including its policy of non-toleration of arrears to official bilateral creditors, has been part of the fund's work program for some time," an IMF spokeswoman said. "Our work in this area continues."

But Russian recalcitrance on Ukraine's debt prompted IMF officials to accelerate the more formal review of the policy, the people familiar with the matter said.

Clay Berry, the top Europe economist at the Institute of International Finance and the U.S. Treasury's former attaché in Moscow, sees sufficient support for a policy change.

"There's enough of a majority on the IMF board that does not want to see the Ukraine IMF program off track," she said.

Because tweaking its lending rules doesn't require fiddling with the IMF's constitution, the supermajority needed for major IMF overhauls isn't required in this case. In May 2010, for example, the board changed its policy on how much money member countries could tap in an emergency to allow approval of the historic Greek program. It is now considering retracting that change.

Given that Ukraine hopes to secure the next tranche of IMF bailout cash before the end of the year and the Russian-held bonds are due by the end of December, a November decision by the board would pave the way for the fund to give the green light on more aid despite a looming default by Kiev.

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 #36
Kyiv Post
October 28, 2015
West sets more anti-graft, reform conditions for Kyiv to further unlock dollar loans
By Mark Rachkevych

Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko is on track to win Ukraine an additional $3.8 billion in international aid by the end of the year.

This week, during her second trip to Kyiv since July, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker promised a third $1 billion guaranteed bond for Kyiv if Ukraine makes further progress in fighting corruption, carrying out austerity measures under the International Monetary Fund's program and overhauling the economy.

Ukraine also expects $1.7 billion from the IMF next month, $700 million of macro-financial assistance from the European Union and smaller financing with only about $800 million in foreign currency debt to be repaid by year-end, according to Kyiv-based Dragon Capital. This should leave the central bank with about $15.5 billion in foreign reserves once the New Year arrives, good for almost four months of imports.

Speaking of her talks with President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk accompanied by executives from DuPont, Citibank, Westinghouse, NCH Capital, Honeywell, and Cargill, the commerce secretary said: "Our dialogue focused on measures Ukraine can take to more effectively fight corruption; to make its infrastructure more efficient and attractive for investors, to reduce excessive regulations; to raise the professionalism of its judiciary; to better protect intellectual property; and to improve its tax administration."

She said the details of America's conditional loan guarantee would be "finalized...over the coming weeks."

While touting the government's implementation of an electronic value-added tax system for businesses, Pritzker cited there being "more work to be done with respect to paying arrears."

Ukraine had about Hr 24 billion ($1 billion) in VAT arrears last month, according to State Fiscal Service head Roman Nasirov.

The U.S. backed a $1 billion Ukrainian Eurobond earlier in the spring and the second one is scheduled for issuance at the end of the year. The third U.S.-backed Eurobond will be issued in December "after debt restructuring is finalized and Ukraine is in accordance with the IMF program," Kyiv-based Investment Capital Ukraine said in an emailed note.

Conditional Western loans-for-gas

Ukraine's most important company, state-owned oil and gas giant Naftogaz, will have to drastically improve corporate governance to get a conditional $300 million loan from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development to purchase gas from European suppliers.

Signed in Berlin on Oct. 23, the loan agreement stipulates the "creation of a supervisory board of independent and qualified directors, the introduction of internal audit, compliance, anti-corruption and risk management functions and an ownership and governance structure in line with best international practice," according to an EBRD news release.

The Cabinet of Ministers formally gave the go-ahead to meet the requirements on Oct. 16, which includes the appointment of independent directors to the supervisory board. Based on the government decision, shares of Naftogaz would be transferred from the Energy Ministry to the Cabinet for management.

A conflict of interest existed under the previous arraignment, according to Sevki Acuner, head of EBRD in Ukraine, because, as the shareholder, the Energy Ministry was also the policy maker.

"You cannot be...the referee and play in one of the teams in what should be a competitive match," Acuner told the Kyiv Post in his office on Oct. 26. "The referee is the Energy Minister, which it should be, but it should not be playing and touching the ball determining the policies."

Measures to appoint an independent board ensures Naftogaz would be insulated from political interference and influence.

Thus, "no political authority will be able to, going forward, say 'do this, buy that, deliver here versus here, buy from Mr. X'...the company will be managed to maximize the value for its shareholders which are the people of Ukraine," the banker said.

However, the measures stop short of "unbundling" the state-owned behemoth, particularly in separating gas transmission activities from production, storage and the supply of gas in line with Ukraine's commitments to international treaties that it signed with the European Union.

Although parliament passed an unbundling plan on April 9 with the adoption of new gas market bill, it has moved slowly because what "everybody wants is the government to have a very informed and thorough decision," Acuner said.

Other provisions of the reform is to introduce non-discriminatory access to Ukraine's gas infrastructure and to allow all customers to choose their gas supplier freely.

Combined with a $500 million loan that Naftogaz is discussing with the World Bank, Kyiv should have enough to buy 3.5 billion cubic meters of gas, according to Dragon Capital. Ukraine will have more than 17.2 billion cubic meters of gas in storage by the end of October, Energy Minister Volodymyr Demchyshyn said at a briefing in Kyiv on Oct. 27.

In particular, the three-year EBRD loan is a revolving credit, meaning Ukraine can borrow again once it pays down the loan during its cash-flow cycle. Under the loan provisions, Kyiv will have to apply EBRD's rigid tender procedures when communicating with European suppliers, and once a bidder is chosen, the London-based bank will pay the supplier directly, bypassing Ukraine.

An additional $200 million is also being sought from other international financial institutions to purchase gas, Naftogaz spokeswoman Aliona Osmolovska told the Kyiv Post, declining to name the potential lenders.

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 #37
UNIAN (Kyiv)
October 28, 2015
Ukrainian police say investigating 400 offences against Maydan protesters

Ukraine has informed the International Criminal Court that an ad hoc group set up by the Interior Ministry and the Prosecutor-General's Office is investigating about 400 offences by law enforcers against the activists of the pro-EU, anti-government protests known as Maydan in late 2013-early 2014, the UNIAN news agency quoted the ministry's press service as saying on 28 October.

Several criminal cases have already been sent to court, it added.

Former Prosecutor-General Valentyn Nalyvaychenko said that he would present the evidence of Russian involvement in the Maydan violence on 29 October, UNIAN said in a different report on 28 October.

"These documents contain clear evidence of Russian involvement in the developments on Maydan and the shooting of the Heavenly Hundred [protesters killed in the clashes]. They contain facts, the names of 27 FSB [Russian Security Service] generals who came here, documents, everything that should be handed over to an open trial or, even better, to a tribunal investigating the Russian aggression," he said.

Earlier, Ukrainian Prosecutor-General Viktor Shokin said that his office had no evidence of Russian involvement in the Maydan killings, but Nalyvaychenko denied this.

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 #38
http://usforeignpolicy.blogs.lalibre.be
October 28, 2015
Dupes of Putin
By Gilbert Doctorow
G. Doctorow is the European Coordinator, American Committee for East West Accord, Ltd. His latest book Does Russia Have a Future?  (August 2015) is available in paperback and e-book from Amazon.com and affiliated websites.
 
A refreshing new interpretation of Russia's Information War by a Lieutenant Colonel with responsibility for 'Info Ops' in the Belgian Army holds open the possibility that we all have been 'dupes of Putin,'  both those of us who have sought to explain the Russian position to the world and those in the anti-Putin, anti-Russian camp. [article below]

As a card-carrying member of the think tank circles in Brussels dealing with security issues, I attend a growing number of colloquia and other gatherings hosted by military authorities, to the point where I am becoming accustomed to registration questionnaires which ask only what is your rank in the service and leave no possibility for listing your highest academic degree.

These events are, by and large, even less inspiring or controversial than seminars hosted by academics for academics, because military officers, at least in public, tend to remain well within the square and avoid exposing their flanks to possible slings and arrows from superiors, junior officers or peers.

However, to every rule there is an exception and yesterday, at the Royal Military Academy, just after getting my name badge at reception, I picked up a copy of the December 2014 issue of the Belgian Military Review, hoping to find something to fill the time before the opening of our session. I got far more than a time-filler. One article by an intelligence officer in the Belgian Army entitled "The conquest of the Crimea by Russia, an example of non-kinetic conquest" is penetrating and, given both the expertise of its author and the authority of the journal, compels us to rethink entirely what had seemed to be an open and shut case, whether we stood on the side of those trying to explain Russian positions to the world or on the side of the anti-Putin, anti-Russian camp.  Indeed it holds open the possibility that we all have been duped by the Kremlin, and also by our own political and military leaders, I might add.

The author shows undisguised professional respect, no I should say admiration for the rare achievement of the Russians in taking control of the Crimea without bloodshed, likening their game plan and execution to texts in Clausewitz or Sun Tzu. However, the most remarkable section comes close to the end of his analysis, when he speaks about how the Russians implemented a series of actions, namely electronic warfare events in the Baltics, so as to provide NATO leadership with a separate issue where they could appear 'to do something' about Russian threats without disturbing the Russian hold on Crimea. This was a face-saving gesture to avoid humiliating NATO, with whom, the author believes, Russia hopes still to have some cooperative relations.

The implications of this analysis, which grants enormous vision and strategic as well as tactical brilliance to the Russian side, perhaps more than is justified, take us in wholly new directions of understanding the Russian confrontation with the US and EU, starting with NATO expansion to Georgia and Ukraine, and ending in what we see today in Syria.

This reading implies that until the February 2014 coup in Kiev the Russians never took NATO expansion as an existential threat and their ire ever since 2008 was contrived to serve other political purposes.  It makes comprehensible the German, and more generally the EU, shock that Russia behaved so brutally, shattering their illusions that European soft power carries weight, and defended their national interests with hard power.  It explains the whining I heard at the Schlangenbad Dialogue near Frankfurt this spring, to the effect that the EU and even NATO posed no military threat to Russia given the draw-down of all equipment and personnel over the past decade and a half.

It is beyond good to find that a Belgian military professional understands that the Russians would like to be in a cooperative relationship with NATO and the West if they could be treated fairly and seriously.

The article also shows that NATO saw a critical threat to its infrastructure from Russian electronic warfare materiel and know-how as early as February 2014, and not just in the past few weeks when the Russians blacked out territory in a radius of 300 km over northern Syria to deny the US-led alliance the possibility of establishing a no-flight zone.

My remark that the author calls into question the Russian perception of threat coming from NATO may very well prompt gloating among the great majority of US and EU foreign relations experts who insist that Putin has created a Western enemy to strengthen his domestic position and vanquish the liberal opposition with their pro-Western sympathies. This falls into line with the postulates of their secular religion, namely that authoritarian regimes are fragile and necessarily aggressive in international relations because hostility to the outside world tightens their control over their polity.

However, I will respond that nothing of the sort is needed to justify Russia's exaggeration of a Western threat while its leaders are busy luring US and European civilian and military leaders into cul-de-sacs like defense of the Baltics or of Poland from Russian assault.  In effect, if such a frame of mind exists in the Kremlin and it is indeed confident of its ability to counter anything that NATO or the US could throw its way, then exaggeration of the threat in the public arena serves the same functions in Russia as exaggeration of an alleged Soviet missile gap and of the numerical superiority of Soviet ground forces did for the Pentagon - and for candidates for the US presidency - during much of the Cold War: this is how you get approval of your military budget and modernization of the armed forces. In addition it also has served the purpose of building Russian patriotism from an abysmally low starting point in the 1990s to something formidable today, if still short of flying the national flag on every building and pinning it to every lapel that we have long seen in the USA.  And it may be leading to a much-needed re-industrialization of the country and diversification away from hydrocarbon extraction.

I can appreciate that the foregoing conclusions may seem a step too far for some readers, and I intend to expand on my argumentation as necessary to persuade doubters in forthcoming essays on this portal.

Although the article does not deal with respective strength of Russian and Western forces, there is no need to posit Russians with an ability to show considerable strength and military skill, deserving NATO's grudging respect, on a budget that is 10 times less than the US military budget and greatly below the collective military budgets of EU Member States.  The Russian investment has been and remains heavily skewed to defense as opposed to offense, and as Vladimir Putin has said repeatedly his country would respond to US innovations that put the strategic balance in jeopardy asymetrically, finding methods to counter whatever the US invents for its offensive arsenal on the Earth and in space.

The vulnerable point in Lt Colonel Vermer's analysis is the very argument that is most striking - his notion that the Russians have stage managed the confrontation with NATO to suit their own purposes.  It is difficult to accept that the Kremlin has been so brilliant and that we have a preponderance of dullards on our side.  Time will tell.
----

"The conquest of the Crimea by Russia, an example of non-kinetic conquest" by Lieutenant-Colonel Patrick Vermer,  Revue Militaire Belge [Belgian Military Review], December 2014
Translated from the French by Gilbert Doctorow

Lieutenant-Colonel Patrick Vermer has served in the operational branch of the Ground Forces. He has been sent to operations in Kosovo, Somalia, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, as well as serving in the US Central Command. Since 2012, he heads up the Information Operations Group in Heverlee (Belgium).

On 21 March 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law creating two new Russian administrative entities: Crimea and the port city of Sevastopol. By this act, Russia annexed a foreign territory of great strategic value, thereby guaranteeing it access to warm seas, a stake in its geostrategic policy.

This conquest was achieved without combat or bloodshed.  The 'cost-benefit' ratio of this operation is thus highly advantageous. History knows few examples of such a campaign and such a success.

Campaign? This will astonish some. Without combat, how can one speak of a military campaign? How can you qualify as military a campaign which in the end amounted to deployment of troops and some administrative movements?

However, that is precisely what it was: the implementation of military assets for the purpose of meeting political objectives.  An approach which meets the definition of war according to Clausewitz.  Because without deploying troops, there is no visibility of conquest and of possession of the territory.  The deployment of forces did not give rise to unleashing of violence but led to a perfect victory as defined by Sun Tzu: "The art of war is to subjugate the enemy without combat."

This 'combat' was one of perception and influence. It was played out not on the physical terrain but on the 'information' platform in the broad sense of the term using information operations (or Info Ops).

Following the example of the Red Army, whose heir it is, the Russian Army has a solid doctrine of Info Ops. Without a doubt the procedures of propaganda and subversion (Agit Prop) of the enemy of the past have been preserved, even if they have been readjusted and modified to the present age. Compared to the NATO doctrine, there are not many divergences. The objective of Info Ops today, like that of yesterday's propaganda being to alter the determination (Will), the perception of the situation (Understand) and the ability (Capacities) of the adversary by carrying out actions on the information (data) and its transport resources (Information Systems).

Info Ops is not a capability on its own, but the expression of a coordination of assets that may or may not be kinetic for the purpose of impacting on the Will, Understand, Capabilities (WUC) of the adversary.

In order to illustrate via several examples how the conquest of the Crimea was rendered possible by applying Info Ops, I propose to identify the procedures used, the objectives pursued, the effects expected and the audience on whom they were applied. In Western terms, we shall find these elements in Appendix O of a plan of operations.

First example: the large scale maneuvers carried out by the Russian Army in February in the Center and West of Russia.  Although this concerns activities relating to branches 3 and 7 (operations and training), these activities were certainly coordinated by Info Ops. Their objective was to dissuade any Western intervention in the Ukrainian theater. The expected effect was to reduce Western reaction to a minimum without violating the borders.  The target audience of these maneuvers, even if they were broadly featured  in the media, was Western military decision-makers.  By means of a selective demonstration of the capabilities of the Russian Army, it anticipated that the military decision-makers who advise politicians will automatically exclude any military intervention.  By addressing a target audience of specialists capable of evaluating the level reached by the Russian forces, the Kremlin hoped that the advice of experts would be taken into account by the political leaders of NATO. By this action, the Russians acted on the Will and Capacities of the Alliance.

Locally, the deployment of paramilitary troops, hooded, without distinctive insignia but equipped with modern arms also participated in the effort.  The presence of these troops met two distinct objectives:  on the one hand, to demonstrate the determination of Russia to support the pro-annexation aspirations of the local population and, on the other hand, to maintain for Russian authorities an image of no direct intervention by counting on the uncertain origin of these troops. Thus, there were dual effects.  Looking inward, to reassure the Russian-speaking population of the Crimea, for whom the origin of these paramilitary forces reflected without doubt Russia's will to establish itself as the sole legitimate authority versus the Ukrainian forces.  And looking outward, to present this 'spontaneous appearance' of militia as an expression of the local popular will to rejoin Russia.  Vis-à-vis the new Ukrainian authorities, these militias also presented the advantage of complicating the choice of resolving the conflict by force.  The presence of militias was therefore the local counterpart of the military maneuvers in the North, intended to influence the Ukrainian decision-makers. The target audiences of these actions were therefore both the Russian-speaking population, to reassure them, and the military and civilian authorities of the Ukraine, to dissuade them.  Playing skillfully on the uncertain origin of these militias, and thereby weaving a 'fog of war,' the Russians thereby disrupted the perception of the local situation (Understand).

Independently of its own action, the presence and attitude of troops, as well as the determination that it showed, also provided information.  This may be broken down following the acronym PPP (Presence, Posture, Profile) according to the vocabulary used by NATO.  Looking at the unknown paramilitary forces, they showed in all circumstances a professional demeanor, solid discipline and strong conviction.  And this impacted on the 'revolutionaries' of the Maidan Square in KIEV, who had driven from power the pro-Russian Ukrainian president.  The possible objective was thus to demonstrate the return to order, to respect for authority, in opposition to the Ukrainian chaos.  The expected effect was firstly to reduce to a minimum extremist reactions including those from pro-Russians, to cool down the political conflict and to visibly display the presence of an 'authority,' even if its origin remained uncertain (see above). This information was transmitted via the PPP of the paramilitary forces and was probably oriented towards the pro-Russian groups so as to nip in the bud any assembling of local bands, which are always quick to develop in case of disturbances, and which might profit from a vacuum of power.  Their Will and Capacity were thus targeted.

The use of electronic measures and counter-measures (Electronic Warfare - EW) was also one of the assets that could be coordinated by the Info Ops. In the given case, the electromagnetic activity of Russian radars in the nearby regions of the Baltic States increased significantly.  The evident objective was to demonstrate once again the determination of Russia to implement its military resources as need be and to dissuade any incursion into Russian air space by NATO.  The effect sought was clearly to keep the planes of the Alliance away from the borders and avoid provoking an escalation.  The apparent target audience was thus the military leadership and in particular the commanders of the air forces.  The capability of the Alliance and its will were targeted by these EW actions. But behind these objectives, effects and obvious target audiences was likely hidden another, more nuanced intention.  It is useless to humiliate a potential adversary who remains a partner in the future.  Thus, the Russian authorities knew that NATO must react, at the risk of losing its credibility. By 'attracting' the attention of NATO decision-makers to the Baltic States, by raising a threat to these States, the recent Members of the Alliance, the Russians offered to NATO an opportunity to act by deploying its troops (a battalion!!) in Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, as well as some additional vehicles and planes.  Their honor was preserved, the political pressure 'to do something' was removed from the shoulders of the NATO Secretary General and these gestures did not threaten Russia's immediate interests in Crimea.

Finally, the action in the domain of Information also targeted international audiences.  The primary vector was shaped by the online site 'Voice of Russia,' the modern avatar of Radio Moscow since 1993.

Presenting the situation in a manner oriented towards Russian interests, in 38 different languages, ach on a site suitably tailor-made, this media sought clearly to weaken Western popular support for a military response by NATO. The expected effect was to set up a counter-discourse to the Western pro-Ukrainian argumentation. The question of knowing if this action was part of Info Ops or of public relations is posed by the near-sighted limitation of NATO, where the doctrine differentiates between these two domains.  It is difficult to know if the Russian approach in this matter is identical. In any case, the conjunction of the efforts between the actions in the media and those coordinated by Info Ops was greatly facilitated by a basic message that was clear and unequivocal (a 'narrative' in the vocabulary of NATO):  "The Crimea is Russian."  The existence of a 'narrative' is the keystone for using information as a weapon.  The more limpid and simple this is, the more precise and effective the 'weapon' will be.  And the easier its use will be to coordinate.

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 #39
PONARS
www.ponarseurasia.org
October 2015
The Origins of Separatism: Popular Grievances in Donetsk and Luhansk
By Elise Giuliano
Elise Giuliano is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University and Academic Advisor of the MA Program in Russia, Eurasia and Eastern Europe at Columbia's Harriman Institute.
[Text with charts here http://www.ponarseurasia.org/memo/origins-separatism-popular-grievances-donetsk-and-luhansk]

(PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo) What were the origins of separatism in the Donbas? When the Luhansk People's Republic (LNR) and the Donetsk People's Republic (DNR) were first proclaimed in early April 2014, their provenance was unclear, to put it mildly. Their self-appointed leaders were not well known. The organizations they represented before 2014 could generously be described as politically marginal. And yet, support for separatism in the Donbas began to grow. By the time armed militants began taking over regional government buildings in Donetsk in early April, large crowds accompanied them.

To be sure, only a minority of the general population-18 percent in Donetsk and 24 percent in Luhansk-supported the building seizures. But a more sizeable minority backed separatist goals: 27.4 percent of respondents in Donetsk and 30.3 percent in Luhansk reported that their region should secede from Ukraine and join Russia; while another 17.3 percent and 12.4 percent prevaricated, answering, "difficult to say, partly yes, partly no." By spring and early summer, popular support for the DNR and LNR reached approximately one-third of the population. Of course, fear of the brutal violence visited on putative political enemies by DNR and LNR thugs could explain why some people said that they supported the republics. Yet well-attended separatist demonstrations, in combination with statements made by participants at these events, provide additional evidence of local support for separatism in the DNR and LNR.

Why did a significant, albeit minority, portion of the Donbas population back separatism? Why did the Euromaidan revolution generate a relatively sudden and deep sense of alienation among many residents in Donetsk and Luhansk? Understanding the sources of popular alienation not only sheds light on the general phenomenon of separatism; it is of critical importance to Ukraine if it hopes to eventually reintegrate the Donbas.

I identify a range of reasons why ordinary people began to support separatism by examining grievances in Donetsk and Luhansk in late 2013 and early 2014. The analysis goes beyond a one-dimensional understanding of separatists as pro-Russian, motivated solely by an enduring orientation to Russia that has not changed over time, whether due to ethnic or linguistic identity, or political loyalty.

Political loyalty to Russia can account for a portion of the support for separatism, especially among those in the older generations who never accepted the USSR's collapse and exhibited a strong sense of nostalgia for the Soviet Union. They identify present-day Russia with the USSR, and deepened their allegiance to Russia as the Maidan demonstrations in Kyiv embraced the European Union. As Boris Litvinov, one of the leaders of the DNR and a self-described "committed communist" declared:

    "Over the past 23 years Ukraine created a negative image of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was not about famine and repression. [It] was mines, factories, victory in the Great Patriotic War and in space. It was science and education and confidence in the future."

Yet for others in the Donbas, support for separatism was not primarily about joining Russia but was motivated by various forms of material interest, or by a sense of betrayal by Kyiv and the rest of the country inspired by the Euromaidan events. In terms of material interest, I examine two kinds of grievances:

1) claims of discriminatory redistribution within Ukraine; and
2) perceptions of the negative effect of potential EU membership on economic welfare, due to austerity policies or the foregoing of trade with Russia and the Eurasian Customs Union (ECU).

In terms of a sense of betrayal by Kyiv, I discuss specific developments related to the Euromaidan, including:

1) Kyiv's condemnation of Berkut special police, many of whom came from the Donbas;
2) the government's failure to repudiate the Ukrainian nationalist far right which, as political scientist Serhiy Kudelia[1] has argued, generated resentment and fear; and
3) the new Ukrainian parliament's attempt to annul the law on Russian language.

I provide evidence in support of these arguments based on an analysis of an original database of demonstrations held in the Donbas-the so-called anti-Maidan and pro-Russian rallies. The database was created using a combination of Western and local (Russian and Ukrainian) media reports and videos. Themes articulated by participants at the demonstrations are reported in Figures 1 and 2.

Discriminatory Redistribution

Like the striking miners in 1993 who complained that the Donbas subsidized Ukraine's poorer regions and received little investment in return, some residents in 2014 believed that, as the industrial heart of Ukraine, their region contributed more than its fair share to the federal budget. As Figures 1 and 2 indicate, claims of discriminatory redistribution (and related themes, such as: "Kiev maidanaet, Donbas rabotaet" ["Kyiv protests (literally "maidans") while the Donbas works"]) were raised at rallies both before and after President Viktor Yanukovych's removal. For example, a young worker at an April demonstration told an interviewer:

    "The Donbas has always been an industrial region. I work at a factory. People are being suspended without pay. People aren't receiving salary or benefits....They told us we didn't produce enough, but really all our money was sent to the Army."

A middle-aged woman speaking at a rally in February 2014 made a similar complaint: "People who were standing on the Maidan are getting pensions. We are working for them!" By 2014, the Donbas was no longer contributing as much to the federal budget as it had earlier and instead received significant subsidies from Kyiv. In separatist movements, however, perceptions of economic conditions rather than actual conditions are what matter in motivating people. In the Donbas, many people perceived their region as a victim of unfair redistribution, giving rise to a sense of estrangement from the rest of the country.

The Customs Union versus the European Union

Support for the Eurasian Customs Union and opposition to the EU-the issue that sparked the Euromaidan protests-were frequently heard at demonstrations. Large majorities in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions (72.5 percent and 64.3 percent respectively) favored joining the Customs Union over the EU. These percentages were considerably higher (from 26 to 42 percent) than in neighboring regions in eastern and southern Ukraine. Opposition to the EU could indicate a general geopolitical orientation toward Russia, but it also indicated beliefs about how EU membership would damage Ukraine's economy and peoples' livelihoods. Some residents, especially those on fixed incomes, opposed the austerity measures that the EU would impose on Ukraine. Others, such as industrial workers, understood that joining the Customs Union would maintain trade ties with Russia and other post-Soviet states and therefore preserve jobs and the status quo. This was a crucial goal since the Donbas is dominated by Soviet-era mining, metallurgy, and machine building industries that are less competitive on European markets. The choice in favor of the Customs Union mimicked one of the enormously popular goals of the 1994 autonomy movement in the Donbas: full integration with the CIS economic union, for which 89 percent of the population in Donetsk and 91 percent in Luhansk voted in a popular referendum. When Pavel Gubarev, a founder of the DNR, was asked directly about why people support separatism, he shifted from discussing the Russian ethnic and historical elements of Novorossiya to the calculations of workers. Elites have their own reasons for supporting separatism, he explained, but for working people:

    "in the manufacturing sector...everyone very clearly understands, for example, why the factory "Motor Sich" [an airplane engine manufacturer] stopped working....[It] stopped because Russia is not buying....Of course people understand that if Zaporizhia [a city in southeast Ukraine] is not pro-Russian then they will be out of jobs and that's thousands of employees. And it's the same thing with other enterprises in the former southeast of Ukraine-Novorossiya."

The Berkut

One of the ways that the Euromaidan gave rise to a sense of betrayal and alienation among residents in the Donbas concerns the Berkut special police. Founded in 1990 as an elite force to manage crowd control and fight organized crime, Yanukovych used it to violently subdue the Euromaidan protesters in Kyiv. As a result, the Berkut were labeled violent criminals. In the Donbas, however, they were perceived to be loyally executing their duties. The Berkut's reputation in the country held special significance for the Donbas since many of its troops came from Donetsk. At demonstrations in April 2014, mothers stood at the front of the crowd holding pictures of sons who had been killed or wounded during violent episodes at the Euromaidan, while crowds chanted "Berkut, Berkut." After Yanukovych's ousting, the Ukrainian government disbanded the force. According to a Berkut veteran in Donetsk,

    "It's simple betrayal. How else can you describe it if in its 25 years of existence, the Berkut carried out all its orders? Now they want to get rid of it because someone has decided that they didn't act correctly? And....if it wasn't correct to act like that in Kyiv, but if it happens here then it is correct?"

The statement of another Berkut sympathizer who supported autonomy for the Donbas expressed a sudden sense of loss and betrayal by not only Kyiv but the rest of Ukraine:

    "We had a country and now we don't. The whole of Ukraine couldn't care less about the east. Are we citizens or not? They insult our compatriots. They are heroes, and we're cattle-working cattle who contribute to the budget."

Ukrainian Ultra-nationalism

Another important way in which events of the Euromaidan generated alienation among Donbas residents concerned the new government's perceived embrace of Ukrainian ultra-nationalism. The ethnically exclusivist view of Ukrainian nationhood that characterized one strand of political discourse in Ukraine for years was perceived by many in the east to have its moment during the Euromaidan. Following the critical role played by Svoboda and Right Sector, Ukraine's new government failed to criticize xenophobic discourses that scapegoated ethnic Russians for Ukraine's problems. Instead, the government appointed a former leader of a neo-fascist party, Andriy Parubiy, to lead the national security and defense council. Anxiety about Ukrainian ultranationalism is evident in many statements made by demonstrators, such as one woman who spoke at an anti-Maidan demonstration:

    "We heard on the Maidan....men, elderly women, children shout: Seig heil!, SS!, Hitler youth SS!....What is happening in our country? Neofascism is spreading..."

As Kudelia argues, fear radicalized residents of the Donbas who witnessed nationalist paramilitary groups violently seizing buildings and battling police at protests throughout Ukraine. In the words of one young man, speaking at a rally in Donetsk in February:

    "Right Sector is just a bunch of fascists who trained for 10 years and didn't have anywhere to direct their rage. We're just pieces of meat to them....Right Sector said that they want to destroy all of eastern Ukraine and make us their slaves."

Russian Language: Do Ukrainophones and Russophones Form Political Blocs?

Finally, the status of the Russian language became a popular subject at separatist rallies following Yanukovych's departure. Russian is the dominant language in the Donbas, and many of the protests included the demand that Russian be made an official state language. Some protesters believed that the post-Maidan authorities in Kyiv would ban Russian, most likely because the new Ukrainian parliament as one of its first acts in office voted to annul a 2012 language law granting Russian official regional language status. The vote-though quickly reversed-seems to have signaled to some protesters that discriminatory acts against Russians and Russian-speakers would follow. As a speaker at a communist rally in Donetsk stated:

    "Now the authorities who have won in Kyiv declare that Russian is the language of occupiers. It's not right....If somebody thinks that it's their right to fight Russification, I think it's our right to fight Ukrainianization because it's more enjoyable and convenient to speak in our native language."

Another man defending the Russian language at a rally in Luhansk ascribed more hostile intentions to Kyiv: "Having crushed our culture, they will crush us...."

Interestingly, however, polling data suggests that a grievance about Russian language was not shared by the majority of Russian-speakers in the Donbas: only 9.4 percent of respondents in Donetsk and 12.7 percent of respondents in Luhansk, when asked "What makes you anxious most of all at the present moment?", answered "the imposition of one language" Likewise, in an International Republican Institute (IRI) poll, 74 percent of respondents in eastern Ukraine (Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, and Luhansk) answered "definitely no" or "not really" when asked: "Do you feel that Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine are under pressure or threat because of their language?"

This disconnect between poll results and the discourse of some demonstrators concerning Russian suggests that Kyiv's bungled attempt to ban the regional language law was perceived in various ways by the Russophone population in the Donbas: some shrugged it off while others felt threatened. Linguistic identity apparently did not automatically translate into a grievance over language.

Moreover, the implosion of the Novorossiya project, in which the DNR and LNR announced a Federal State of New Russia (Novorossiya) that would incorporate eight regions of Ukraine, also suggests that cultural and ethnic issues failed to resonate with Donbas residents. The Novorossiya doctrine most closely resembles standard nationalist ideology in its historical claim to a defined territory and assertion of indigenousness (i.e., that inhabitants of Novorossiya settled the territory prior to Ukrainians). The idea of Novorossiya can be traced to an early-1990s fringe intellectual movement led by Professor Oleksiy Surylov of Odessa State University. Surylov championed the establishment of Novorossiya as an ethnic state, arguing that the residents of southern Ukraine formed a separate ethnos-the Novorossy. The movement demanded autonomy within a federal Ukraine but attracted virtually no popular support. In 2005, when the opposition group "Donetsk Republic," whose leaders would later found the DNR, again tried to advocate the creation of a republic spanning southeast Ukraine, it failed miserably. In the current incarnation of Novorossiya, other cities and regions of Ukraine's south and east refused to participate. By May 2015, one year after its official birth, the leaders of the Novorossiya officially declared the project defunct. Thus, during the period of intense political upheaval following the Euromaidan and the conflict in eastern Ukraine, it appears that ethnic Russians did not unite behind a program of nation-building.

Conclusion

There is a good deal of diversity among people commonly labeled pro-Russian separatists. Analysis of grievances articulated at demonstrations in late 2013 and early 2014 indicates that while some supporters of separatism maintained a pro-Russian stance based on Soviet-era political loyalties, others were motivated by more recent considerations of material interest, such as perceptions of discriminatory redistribution within Ukraine or concerns about the economic effects of joining the EU as opposed to the Eurasian Customs Union. Other collective grievances developed in response to specific developments surrounding the Euromaidan, including the criticism of the Berkut special police, Kyiv's perceived support of the nationalist far right, and Kyiv's attempt to annul the language law that gave Russian regional status.

However, polling data indicating that a majority of Russophones in the Donbas were unconcerned with the status of Russian, as well as a lack of support for the Novorossiya project, indicates that politicians within the Donbas faced obstacles in their attempts to draw boundaries between ethnic Russians and Ukrainians, and between Russophone and Ukrainophone populations. This suggests that ethnocultural differences among the Donbas population did not spontaneously translate into political grievances. While this subject deserves more research, we may be cautiously optimistic that the grievances that did develop in the Donbas are more amenable to dialogue and policy intervention than is generally thought

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 #40
Academia.edu
October 24, 2015
Interview with Jyllands-Posten (Denmark) Concerning Investigation of Svoboda Involvement in the Maidan Massacre in Ukraine (Full-Text English Version)
Ivan Katchanovski, Ph.D. School of Political Studies University of Ottawa
[https://www.academia.edu/17421410/Interview_with_Jyllands-Posten_Denmark_Concerning_Investigation_of_Svoboda_Involvement_in_the_Maidan_Massacre_in_Ukraine_Full-Text_English_Version_]

Q: We have spoken in the past about the investigation into the Maidan shootings in February 2014. I'm working on an update, and I was wondering, what you are making of the recent announcement that Kiev is investigating Svoboda-activists in this connection?

Investigations of three leading members of Svoboda in connection with the Maidan massacre on February 20, 2014 represent a real bombshell in Ukraine and in the West. This investigation for the first time de facto links Svoboda to the mass killing of the protesters and reveals that snipers shot from the Hotel Ukraina, specifically from a room in which one of these Svoboda members lived on the 11th floor and other Svoboda leaders lived in neighboring hotel rooms. Previously, the government and, with some notable exceptions, the mainstream media in Ukraine and the West dismissed out of hand any involvement of Svoboda and other far right organizations in the Maidan massacre.
 
Q: More broadly speaking - do you see any positive developments in the Ukrainian attempts to get to the bottom of these cases?

The investistigation of Svoboda is a long delayed and limited step, which brings attention to the involvement of far right organizations and their concealed units of shooters in the crucial mass killing. The Maidan massacre not only constituted one of the gravest cases of mass killings and major human right violations in independent Ukraine and contemporary Europe, but it also resulted in the violent overthrow of the Ukrainian government and ultimately led to a civil war in Donbas, Russian military intervention, the annexation of Crimea, and a major conflict between the West and Russia.

But this investigation of members of Svoboda leadership mainly represents a politically motivated and selective response by the Ukrainian government to violent attacks by Svoboda and other far right organizations against the parliament and the police and a potential threat of a coup d'état by the far right. In addition, the online database of  court decisions shows that a former member of Vikings, a neo-Nazi unit of the Right Sector, is investigated in connections with killings of policemen during the Maidan massacre and in two previous days. This investigation follows a  public admission  by this neo-Nazi that he and a deputy commander of the Vikings unit killed four policemen on February 18, 2014.

It is unlikely that the government investigation would attempt to get to the bottom of the cases  because it would expose the involvement of other Maidan organizations and severely undermine the legitimacy of the current government, which came to power ultimately as a result of this mass killing. The evidence pointing to involvement in the Maidan massacre of Svoboda along with the Right Sector and oligarchic parties, such as Fatherland, and presence of snipers at the Hotel Ukraina and other Maidan-controlled buildings were long ignored by the investigation.

Various evidence of such involvement was contained in my study of the Maidan massacre. I  presented an updated and expanded version of this study at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in the beginning of September 2015. This paper for the first time revealed that deputies of the parliament from Svoboda witnessed and accompanied a group of Maidan shooters in the Hotel Ukraina and guarded the entrance to the hotel stairways and elevators during the massacre of the protesters. It cited a statement by a Kyiv leader of the Patriot of Ukraine, a neo-Nazi organization in the Right Sector, that Svoboda deputies reserved hotel rooms on the upper floors of the Hotel Ukraina during the massacre and that he took part in capturing one of snipers who was shooting from one of such rooms. He and several other Maidan  protesters also publicly stated that soon afterwards some leading members of the Maidan took away this and other captured snipers in the Hotel Ukraina and other Maidan-controlled buildings along with captured members of Internal Troops. Videos show that some Svoboda deputies and the Right Sector leader took part in this purported evacuation, which a large group of Maidan  protesters attempted to stop. Svoboda deputies did not publicly acknowledge presence of shooters at the Hotel Ukraina, including on the 11th floor, and they showed no apparent concern about been targeted themselves by these and other snipers during the massacre.

My study referred to videos, eyewitnesses among protesters, and announcements from the Maidan stage about snipers shooting, killing and wounding protesters from the 11th floor of the Hotel Ukraina, including the same room which was revealed to be occupied by a Svoboda member of the parliament. A BBC video, which showed shooting at their TV crew and Maidan  protesters from that hotel window and identified this shooter as wearing a Maidan-style helmet was publicly available soon after the massacre. Moreover, an ICTV video, which was broadcast  by this national Ukrainian TV channel on the day of the Maidan massacre and publicly available since, showed in the same window a concealed sniper, who fired at the Maidan protesters. A  protester  stated
that he saw a few other protesters shot by "a sniper" from the same hotel window.

The Prosecutor General of Ukraine stated that the three Svoboda deputies are treated as witnesses and claimed that the investigation of the Maidan massacre was basically completed. Berkut members are charged with killings of 39 out of 49 Maidan protesters on February 20, and their trial continues with long intermissions. But this trial has already revealed various information, such as results of ballistic and forensic medical reports and testimonies of Maidan eyewitnesses and relatives of some of the killed protesters, which indicate that at least half of these 39 protesters were killed from the Hotel Ukraina.

Q: Are there any signs that public criticism of the authorities effort is increasing?

The public criticism of the authorities in the media and various NGOs has become more  prominent following the investigation of Svoboda. However, the authorities are criticized for their failure to find and prosecute Berkut policemen and members of the former government, who are still widely believed as being responsible for the Maidan massacre. A special UN representative recently stated that most of evidence in the Maidan massacre was destroyed and that the Ukrainian government drags out its investigation. But he still referred to the police as the only suspects in the Maidan massacre even though the failed investigations and destruction of evidence benefit the Maidan far right and oligarchic organizations and provide another evidence of their involvement in this massacre. There is no public criticism by the Western governments of the Maidan massacre investigation. In particular, this includes the US government, which has a say in appointments and dismissals of some of the top Ukrainian officials and which recently started criticizing the Ukrainian government and the Prosecutor General Office for their failures to stem corruption.

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